The Colt 45 Chronicle #56

This letter provides what is probably a fairly representative snapshot of a college-educated man in his early twenties -- alcoholic, addicted to watching professional sports on television, drunk with buddy love and spouting on about Plato. 

Well, maybe it is not fairly representative.

In any event, it is who I was when I was newly disgorged from the Groves of Academe, now approaching thirty-years yore.

The opening paragraph elliptically recounts some of my escapades in Los Angeles, where I stayed for a few days at my friend Shale's house after driving across the North American continent during a cold December. This is briefly recounted in "The Colt 45 Chronicle #14." I was on my way north up I-5 to see my girlfriend, Stacy; and then after that on up into Oregon to spend the Christmas holiday with my wife and her family.

My life used to be much more action-packed and complex than it is now.

Spring 1989

Man, those were two solid pages of chicken-scratched magic. Thank you. Yeah, and you're right, that last letter was kinda of forlorn; but it wasn't meant to be. I wrote it around 2:30 AM one night (Neil Young on the turntable) after about ten beers. It was supposed to be about 19, nineteen-years old, as plain and pure as I could remember it; about what it was -- for us; about what it must have been like to feel what we felt then. I gave it a shot; and I guess it's that -- my need to take the shot -- that gives it its forlornness. I never intended making a comparison of that "nineteen time" to my last visit to LA. Man, my last visit to you -- two days or not -- was fucking fantastic. I repeat the stories of our pounding the pot on the white circular kitchen table, and me puking in the spaghetti strainer in the sink after the hefty gulp of JD, and you putting your fist through my makeshift wooden sidedoor VW bus window. I repeat these stories (including the ping pong game in your new and waiting-to-be-painted rental unit, the trip to Oki-Dog in the sister's Capri and the shitdrip geek who came over the morning I left for SF and looked at the new place and acted like he was Marcus Aurelius), I repeat them all the time to myself, in my mind's eye (you see, they were holy experiences).

Listen, man, fuck everything else: WE ARE BLOOD BROTHERS. we're gonna be there at the end together, just like in the "Myth of Er" at the end of Plato's REPUBLIC. We're gonna be waiting for our just desserts together; we might end up as mockingbirds or elephants or turd pebbles or men, but we'll be there together.

LA's playing Detroit; I got it going on the TV in the bedroom; but for some reason I'm not into it. After the third game of the Chicago-Detroit series I lost all interest; I turned it off before the end of the third quarter, only to find out later that Jordan & Co. had made a spectacular fourth quarter comeback to go up two games to one. Everybody said they were going to pull off an upset, beat the Pistons in seven, but I had seen something in that game three to make me think otherwise, something to make me turn it off: Michael Jordan had lost his luster. It was the first Bulls game were the guy didn't have that amazing energy dribble, the one that makes it appear as if he is swimming in the interstices of reality. I had been following the playoffs passionately, watching every game televised by the networks, reading the paper every day, even jotting down lineups and scoring averages during my slow and private moments at work (which made me feel like I was back in 6th grade memorizing NFL running backs: Greg Pruitt, Cleveland Browns; Lawrence McCutcheon, LA Rams; Otis Armstrong, Denver Bronco ). But right then and there my passion died; I could watch no more. Michael Jordan was the only interesting thing in the playoffs (after it was apparent that Phoenix would be eliminated by the Lakers). When he lost the luster, so did I. And sure enough, my lost passion turned out to be pretty damn prescient. Detroit won three in a row after that and put Chicago away in six, shutting Jordan down emphatically. As for LA and Detroit, their act is old, Rough and stingy versus glittery and smooth. Not as old as LA and Boston, sure, but old enough.

I'm still a freelance temporary proofreader, working off and on and reading in the interim; drinking Coors and Colt, and, subsequently, having a prolific girth of shock-white lard to show for it. I do an occasional set of push-ups, run about once a week, read very little philosophy but a lot of Mark Twain. I am basically a pale shadow of my formerness (the person you knew and associated with). But in a lot of ways I'm better off -- you know, being out of Berkeley and academia and being in the big shit-hole city, at least for a while.

I can really appreciate New York sometimes. Like when I finish work and walk west along 42nd to the 8th Avenue subway. Forty-second is always packed and moving upstream. I treat the whole thing like a football drill. I weave and pop and high step in and out of all junkies smoking their crack and the career-track cadavers toting their briefcases. One morning (in the morning I'm more mellow; I just scoot straight along -- no promise of soon-to-be-smoked cigars and soon-to-be-gulped beers means less gridiron prowess is called for) this junkie black woman rushed right up and started beating me with her fists. But I was moving too fast and she was far too weak. So I tossed her a sweet smile . . . . It did indeed trouble though all the finely clothed office-bound employees to my rear.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #49

When I lived in Manhattan I always lived on the West Side and never more than a couple blocks from the tracks of the 'A' train. When I first arrived in New York City, my wife and I lived in married student housing on the campus of Columbia Presbyterian. After an aborted initial foray at a career-track position with the Foundation Center I made do with a series of temporary assignments secured by an employment agency. The agency's office was on 42nd Street and Madison Avenue. I would take the 'A' train from 168th Street, the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital stop, down to the Port Authority Bus Terminal stop at 42nd Street and 8th Avenue. Then I would head east by foot on 42nd Street through Times Square until I got to Madison Avenue.

At that time, the late 1980s, 42nd Street, from the bus terminal until you got to the theater ticket kiosk near the corner of  6th Avenue, was filled with street hustlers, peep show pornography shops, junkies and old steak houses. The strip of 42nd Street on either side of Times Square was the quintessence of urban blight. Like the last post of The Colt 45 Chronicle, this epistle narrates an episode having to do with criminal violence that I witnessed on 42nd Street.

Summer 1989

New York -- she is a big woman made out of subway track. She has a lot of pop, a lot of voltage, but it's only now and then. Most of the time she's just grating -- breaking you down, busting you up -- like Cracker Jacks spilled on concrete steps. She is especially mean in the morning; she makes you wear a noose around your neck. She makes you shave and paste and brush your teeth and comb and shower and ingest coffee. Oh, She is nasty alright. I was walking down 42nd Street the other day. I had got off the subway and was heading east to drop off a time slip at my employment agency on Madison Avenue when I sensed some of her electricity bristling the air.

I looked over to the other side of the street, and I saw a skinny black guy run up behind a fat black guy in an Adidas sweat suit. The skinny guy had a Coke can in his hand, and he poured it on top of the fat guy's head; except Coca-Cola didn't come out, fire did. -- The skinny guy had gasoline in the Coke can, gasoline he lit with a lighter, and he was pouring it down on top of the fat guy. The fat guy was all fire head to tail; he looked like a lion in the desert. He took off running -- sprinting -- due east. He shook off his sweat top. Lucky for him, that polyester really burns; it sat there like a cow pie on the sidewalk and burned and burned, and he just kept on running. He made a quick right into a 25-cent peep show house. He disappeared and everything became quiet.

After not too long a bunch of guys came jumping and elbowing out of the doorway. They stopped and looked back inside when they were out on the street. A black guy came up to me and asked, "Did you see that?" He had seen it too; he was just looking for someone to exchange comments with. I told him, "Yeah. That was cold."

Later, continuing my walk, I thought to myself, "Bad choice of terms. That was actually very hot." Everybody on the street was a-tingle. A real feeling of upness and openness and aliveness shot through everything. I felt it, but I could tell that the junkies and homeless and loveless and depraved on that block felt it much more because that stretch on 42nd Street between 7th Avenue and 8th Avenue is their living room; it was a feeling that what happened to the fat guy in the Adidas sweat suit could have happened to anybody on the block at anytime.

I waited and looked around, and sure enough out of the 25-cent peep house walked the fat guy. The fire was out and he looked okay. People gathered around, running from all directions. The Coke can was still burning, but you couldn't tell it was a Coke can any more; it might as well have been a generic beer can: it was all black and gray and white, burned to the color of a cinder (but it was still a cylinder). A junkie walked up and tapped it with his foot. That made him feel good. I started walking east again.

I'm shifting away from the Coors and moving to the Colt 45. I buy quart bottles here in New York (that's the best value). Colt 45 is brewed in Wisconsin. So I don't feel so bad about refusing Golden, CO. Sunday and Monday nights are my sobriety nights, and from there on out I try to keep it going. It's tough. When I get home from work I say to yourself, "There's no way I'm drinking tonight." But then I watch the last half of the 6 o'clock news and give myself a little time to think, dinner resting under belt, and I manage somehow. By the time 9 o'clock has rolled around I've already been down to the deli and three or four quarts are cooling in the fridge. I tell you, it's the only thing good and interesting in my life. Ashley doesn't think so. As for work, that's a big joke. You can proofread better hungover than well slept. 

Greg, needless to say, I miss you. You know now, if you're ever out on the East Coast here you really got to pay us a visit. We'd put you up majestically. You'd get your own futon, and for as long as you wanted. All the above goes for Tresca too. Ashley and I are carrying on very nicely these days, and I know the city satisfactorily.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #48

What I remember about working at construction consultants Merritt & Harris, Inc. is that I sat at a desk across from a man nearing retirement wearing a 20-year-old suit -- a nice guy, a fellow proofreader -- who asked my advice about a home roof repair project he was struggling with. I had told him that I had worked on some roofing jobs, which I had, but as a laborer clearing off the old composition tile and humping the new tile up a ladder. He had questions about flashing, about how to attach it. I pretended like I knew what I was talking about when I had not a clue. It must have been apparent. But as I said, he was a nice guy; he didn't let on that I was full of bullshit. Why do young people pretend to know more than they do?

The description of the gunshot victim on 42nd Street is from a time when crack-related violent crime was on the rise in the city; it would continue to grow. I'll have plenty of crack stories in the forthcoming Shit Stinks, a spontaneous prose document composed during the early '90s Upper Manhattan crack infestation.

Spring 1989 

Wow! You did it man. And it wasn't so bad, was it? In fact, whip out another, another one with some more of that hippie funerals in Bolinas shit, and Stacey running in Golden Gate Park, and brick-tossing riots on Berkeley's Bancroft.

I'm working as a copy editor/proofreader at an engineering firm located across the street from Grand Central Station and down the road from the Chrysler Building. Mercury sits atop Grand Central (something which I never noticed until today) and he's wearing his old familiar winged WWI doughboy helmet; he's in between two bearded Greek gents with pillowcases fluttering about their loins. Yeah, well, the job is plenty boring. My fellow proofreaders are old, the youngest being somewhere around 50. But I keep the nose to the page and dutifully do the work until it's done. The problem with this is that they're very slow -- my co-workers -- and always telling me to "take it easy." I'm not trying to show them up or anything, it's just that there's nothing else to do. The desks are out in the open under long florescent lights. You can't sneak a quick read or snooze; shit, you can't even scratch a few notes or talk for any stretch of time longer than 30 seconds. To make matters worse, the word-processing/secretary/proofreader supervisor is one of those manic, thyroid types. Subsequently, I have but one option -- besides beating around the bush and dogging it to the coffee maker and the shitter -- and that is to read and correct the awkward and jargon-filled writing of wealthy engineers and to do it seven and one half hours a day.

The one bright spot in the day is my lunchtime walk to New York Public Library for a cup of coffee with steamed milk and a teaspoon of sugar (at an artsy-fartsy gazebo-type cafe that sits to one side of the library's grand marble steps).

Strolling westward on 42nd Street, past Park, past Madison, I look at as many women as I can sink my eyes into. A lot of women work in offices in the 5th Avenue and 42nd Street area. And while they're not breathtaking, they're enough, just enough -- assuming that a cup of java is coming -- to take you away from the complete ignobility of being a temporary proofreader in a midtown office building. But when they're stinky (droopy, pockmarked, bulbous), my eyes ricochet off and search for finer game. At times they'll bounce along for half a block before they rest on some tasty maid fresh from Lexington Avenue shuffles. She might not be pretty, but she's attractive; her brow is knit in inner dialogue -- "What should I have for lunch -- McDonald's? Pizza Hut?" Her breasts are spilling and dancing as she clacks down the sidewalk cement. All of a sudden she stops in front of a big storefront window. It's a deli. Sitting on the sill burning in the sun are 2-gallon glass jars of kosher pickles and sweet red peppers. They looked tired and beaten.

She doesn't know whether she should go in . . . . I walk by, and I say to myself, "Yeah!"

Today, after I finished work and was on my way to the subway station, I saw a guy belly shot and bleeding -- dying -- right there on the sidewalk. He was a black, a junkie, lying on his back on 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, the dirtiest, sleaziest and most crack-ridden block of 42nd Street. On his face was this expression, an expression like he had slipped, fallen backwards and all of a sudden didn't care, like in a dream when you fall off a building and then realize it's no big deal and so get comfortable with it and finally almost learn to enjoy it.

Two big white policemen stand a foot away, putting on airs of coolness and disinterestedness, like two big macho watchdogs of death, all the while this poor lost soul is trying to dam the hole in his belly with a balled-up t-shirt; blood runs down the curve of his belly and disappears into his bluejeans, giving them the look of wet red clay in a dry creek bottom . . . . The white tourist with a brightly colored clean shirt and well-groomed beard points his head and twists his mouth dramatically, as if for cameras and Klieg lights . . . . Junkie whores running from Eighth Avenue smokes to the sepulchral position beneath the faded marquee, running with the serious eager anticipatory faces of children who hear mom shouting that dinner is ready and come trotting home in the dust of dusk . . . . A gyrating prankster junkie, shirt off and hands fumbling down sweatpants, is moving in and out of the crowd; he's high as a fucking kite and bitching about something to himself until the police ask ask him who pulled the trigger; so he stands still, but proffers no reply; they yell at him, tell him to take his hands out of his pants . . . . And I'm seeing all of this ten yards ahead and knowing exactly what it is I cut right through the half moon that has formed around the dying junkie. I have an old polyester sports coat in my hand, and I look at his face. And he, with the very equanimity in strength of purpose that made man who made God who made man, he looks right back. I walk past and hit the subway, bruising my leg on the turnstile because I forget to put deposit a token.

So I'm drinking a little wine this evening, a little ROBERT MONDAVI WHITE, and getting ready to get on the 'A' train pretty soon, and tumble down to 42nd Street and see all the smoking junkies waddling crashed and horrified and happy on the corner of Eighth Avenue. As I always preach and have actually done at many a week night drunken gathering: "Better to drink now and go to bed drunk and wake up feeling poisoned than give your employer anything approaching staid energetic and sober productivity." Amen.