This letter, number 19, describes the morning after the letter, number 18, that I posted last week about the powerhouse Oakland A's -- my team! -- improbably dropping the 1988 World Series in five games to the weak-hitting Los Angeles Dodgers. At this point, as a young man in my early 20s, I had yet to accept that the office is a place where one must always practice subterfuge and exhibit blandness. I was still under the impression that one can now and then be oneself.
I worked, out of necessity, through college. But this was work grading papers for professors or in the library with other students or on summer construction jobs that I knew would end soon. I was unprepared for the insanity -- the total war -- of full-time office work in a metropolis; in particular, the large number of enormously unhappy, dangerously toxic menopausal women and neutered men who seemed eager to pounce and fuck a guy up. This missive, I believe but cannot be sure, was written to my girlfriend Stacey (who I had broken up with that summer right before getting married en route to New York City).
Autumn 1988
I'm sorry. It seems like a million years since I talked to you last, or at least a gap of time significant enough to constitute a void in my small head. I tried calling last Friday, the 15th, but you weren't there -- in Berkeley the person said. I don't know what to say. The days get smaller and smaller. I dream on the subway, and that's it. But now that the A's blew it and baseball is over with for another six months, maybe I can get back to some serious thinking in the evenings. The other thing is that I'm working another smaller job on the side; doing some freelance copy editing for Terri's dad (Colum's girlfriend's dad). I was still drunk (same old story, huh?) when I went into the office this morning at 8:30, the Dodgers had won the series eight hours earlier, and I was burning bright, the high-quality wordshit rolling off my tongue. And here I was having to waste my poetry on these stiffs. One particular dullard unknowingly approached me so as to mutter one of those saccharine insincere howdoyado's. I honestly greeted her, embraced her full in the face with eyes that told her of my suffering. I described to her the pain involved in living for a team for a long stretch of time, in going to the games and reading the newspaper and listening to the radio, and then having that team suffer defeat. -- To lose; and this after I had proclaimed, before the Series began, that the fate of the A's would be my fate. She stood there looking seasick, or like she was trying to take a big shit. And then she said, "Okay," and walked off to the coat room. I said softly, "'Okay'? What the fuck does that mean?" I had spoken to her from a place of music and bliss and direction. All wasted, like shouting into a plastic garbage bag. The day dragged on. The alcohol finally burned out of my chest. And I wished it hadn't. When I went outside for a lunch break the sky was wet and it look like it was seven o'clock in the evening. I was beat, burnt, alone, feeling shitty about not talking to you. I walked around looking for this one particular deli where a coworker wanted me to get him a sandwich. I found it after fifteen minutes.
What are you doing now? It's been so fucking long it's almost a foreign language. I know you're probably getting tired of these letters. I probably would be. But they're all I have. Very pitiful indeed. I'm no longer the California sunshine hardcore Berkeley book boy. I'm gray and subway and defeated; a money-earner, and subsequently a toadie. But at the same time I'm more real. I'm ready for the next cosmological shift. I could tell my old self a few things. And right now I'm ready for more: for more fatigue and hardship and death, all those anti-Berkeley things. I'm quitting my job in December, and then I'm going to ride the stallion out West. It needs front-end work bad.
Eric was a buddy of mine at Berkeley who went on to become a professor at a university in the Midwest. I think I saw him briefly only one time after I wrote this letter, number 18 from a collection of letters written during my first two years in New York City. Eric was competitive, and he was often critical. And believe me, I merited criticism. But I was also a loyal friend. In addition to being a full-time student, Eric was a house painter who did his own contracting on the side. When he got in a pinch he would often give me a call; and though I hated painting and didn't have a knack for it, I would always lend a hand. And when Eric needed a place to stay after graduating but before he left town for graduate school, I put him up in my apartment.
My girlfriend-soon-to-be-wife had moved out. And when that happened the dudes moved in. There was always baseball or football on the television and plenty of beer and food. We were passionate about the Bay Area teams -- the Oakland A's, San Francisco Giants and the 49ers.
The missive below was written during the painful game-five elimination of the Oakland A's by the despised Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1988 World Series, which would make it the night of October 20, 1988. There is also a description of a pre-gentrified Times Square. The brawl with the bartender alluded to briefly at the end of the letter is not the one described in letters nine and ten (which took place a year later when the A's were making their successful World Series run); this brawl took place at a hipster bar in the East Village, and I believe it is chronicled in a letter still to come. By the time the game is over and I am signing off I am thoroughly plastered.
It's ironic that at letter's end I apologize to Eric. Later on, when I was well clear of my wife, I came to the conclusion that there was a high probability that she and Eric had carried on a secret romance. Eric had always liked her, and there were small hints of intimacy. Toward the end of his days at Berkeley he started dating a woman whose appearance was glaringly similar to my wife's (mousy, Winona Ryder-ish). Her name, Emily (if my memory serves me), was even similar to Ashley's. It was all too weird to be a coincidence.
Autumn 1988
Well God damn it, I can't take it anymore. Game five and the A's are down by two already, and it's not even the bottom of the first. It's the 49ers syndrome all over. Look great! And then lose the big one. So the TV is on in the bedroom and I'm out here in the living room. I went to the refrigerator first, got the thirsty-two ouncer of Adolph, poured it out into a jar, and now I'm here waiting for some kind of appeasement. Needless to say, I was glad to hear from you. Just about to track you down via the proper channels and what you know? I got an honest-to-goodness epistle, complete with poetic waxing over the ontological chasm between the sexes. Good deal! Worklife in the big fat gray Apple is nothing to write about. There's no poetic ambrosia to feed on here, no heroism, no excitement, no candor; just a bunch of middle-aged women and degraded Yuppies riding the subway downtown to a numberless shithole office; they're as cold as vampires with the same grape-blue skin and purple lips and brown-bag eyes. -- A's scored one. I wonder what happened. I think Lansford did it. . . . . It's over, Mike Davis just hit a two-run homer off "Shit" Davis. I work in a place called the Foundation Center, which is a foundation set up by other foundations to record and publish relevant data, such as grants awarded, charitable programs, etc. My official title is Editorial Assistant, but what I am is a drone, a fucking Kafka bug/clerk that stares into a microfiche reader. The reader beams back tax forms in blue light, and I take cockroach hoofs and scratch pertinent digits in felt-tip on green-and-white-striped computer paper. The women are forgettable at best. All common and droopy and sullen, their sex organs so dried and withered from the lack of an earthly showering, from the dearth of a rough physical acquaintance, they're like January's fruit basket left out to be eaten the following June. The dudes don't qualify as such, just a bunch of gumpy, easy-come bastards ready to pretend they're not where they really are (that, or outright bitch queens, fat faggots, pert dandies; or, jaundiced, over-the-hill Jonathan-Demme-wanna-be Yuppies). Any way you look at it I don't win. I feel best about the city when I walk around by myself. I freelanced at Scholastic Magazines (a magazine for kids) when we first got to New York. I did research. So I got to go down to New York Public Library several times. The trip involved a sizeable stroll across 42nd St. The porno theaters are shining and the bloods are smoking crack on the sidewalk, and you're right up against some monkey-suited like it was Sunday-&-roses asshole, walking over to the eastside. City geography is a big deal here; I noticed that immediately. Everybody knows their NYC geography. Manhattan first, and then the other boroughs. You catch on as quick as you can.
Tony Phillips is up now, and I have an idea that it's quite late in the game. How could the A's lose? I said in the beginning that this Series was going to be diagnostic of my life because I had followed the A's so fervently before we left Berkeley. Every morning I would march down to the porch and pick up the Tribune (subscribed to only because I liked Kit Stier, who covered the A's). I would drag it back up the stairs and devour it over a couple cups of coffee. The A's began my day for three years, even before LaRussa; for three years I did this; sometimes in the morning, and sometimes I would save it for a turkey-sandwich lunch. I can remember like it was now when they got Henderson, Hassey, Welch, Hubbard, Parker, and Bailor. -- Parker just struck out in the bottom of the eighth. My heart feels like it is beating for the last time. I can remember McGwire's 49 home runs. I listened to a lot of games on the radio, and I know you did too. -- Plunk has been pulled. Well, I'm plenty drunk now. I'm on my fourth thirsty-two ouncer.
Eric, I'm so fucking drunk. I just want to apologize for that last portion of Berkeley. I was always fucking around. I would lie and say that I had to work on my paper. I should have been straight with you from the beginning. -- Hershiser struck out Phillips with a man on. Thee game is finally over. So if the A's are my destiny, I'm not doing so well. But women will always push you one way, and it's usually not the way that you're tending to go. But I do love Maura, believe it or not, and I certainly love Stacey. But most of all, I love Ashley. And I could never leave her, not for dynamite, or blood, or groceries, or beer. Do you remember that time at Kathy's? Smooching that Coors on her porch, fast. You stroking-out the shelves; me, rolling that dingy bedroom.
I've got a lot New York stories to tell, a fight with a bouncer, an evening of too much coke, etc. -- mostly due to Colum's girlfriend Terri -- but I will recapitulate later. I'm quitting my job in December.
I got to go to work tomorrow. But before that, do you remember that time we spent the night at your sister's house in Santa Cruz? The preseason game on the TV: we were eating Doritos; the 49ers were losing. I read e.e. cummings sitting on the toilet the next morning. The house was quiet with everyone still slumbering and outside the fog hung close to the ground. -- It was beautiful.
