The Colt 45 Chronicle #82

The Gray Lady did a curtsy to The Replacements this past September in the form of a loving review ("Indie-Rock Antiheroes Get a Stadium Singing Along: The Replacements Play at Forest Hills Stadium") by longtime rock critic Jon Pareles; a bit of synchronicity because a month earlier this page had recited a brief prayer to The Replacements.

The letter below, written to my friend and musical mentor Oliver over 25 years ago, was a regretful sniffing-the-coffee-grounds assessment of Paul Westerberg's growing corporate soullessness.

It is hard for those who did not live as young adults through the 1980s heavily influenced by their liberal university education to understand just how enormous an influence The Replacements were. They were the sonic, existential bedrock of the generation. 

Early synthesizers of Punk and Classic Rock that the record labels would later cash in with during the early 1990s heyday of Grunge, The Replacements were never a huge commercial success. They personified the Bukowski ethos that dominated the vanguard during my young-man youth: Don't try -- the vanguard as the rearguard; the artist as day laborer and malt-liquor drinker; the hipster not as Hippie or Punk -- no, sir; zero ostentation, please -- but as a woeful, drunken, puking plebeian.

The letter provides some interesting, honest testimony of when I saw The Replacements in their prime, 1985. It ends with some young-man thoughts about the passing of time.

Spring 1989

Shit, I know; it's a Yuppie concern. But I keep getting older every year, and every year I move a digit away from what I had hoped would be a wonderfully productive and fulfilling year. Yeah, you're right, that Replacements album is pretty damn frightening. Ben called me this last Tuesday and we ended up going for a long Manhattan walk, and along the way he told me that you didn't really like DON'T TELL A SOUL. When I talked to Ben I told him that I kind of liked it, side two excepted. But after listening to side one a couple times this evening, I think you're darn-tooting correct. The only song I continue to look forward to is "Talent Show." Everything else is a soulless haze. And that's exactly what's so fucking scary. The songs are fully and totally and completely soulless (except for "Talent Show" and, partially, one or two others). I say scary because what The Replacements always did have was Westerberg's disfigured honest alcoholic soul. Ben caught it pretty damn perfect once a long time ago when he said something to the effect that what made Westerberg Westerberg was how he sung those silly sappy corny songs so serious straight and strong. I can proudly measure my young adult life by those songs:

1) "Customer"; "I Hate Music"; "I'm In Trouble"

2) "Color Me Impressed"; "You Lose"; "Treatment Bound"

3) "Kids Don't Follow"; "Go"

4) "I Will Dare"; "We're Comin' Out"; "Unsatisfied"

5) "Hold of My Life"; "Left Of The Dial"; "Here Comes a           Regular"

6) "A1ex Chilton"

PLEASE TO MEET ME was easy listening, but it dropped off faster than any of the other albums. I stopped playing it after three weeks. The only song I really fell for was "Alex Chilton." So I guess the handwriting was on the wall. It took me a long time before I shelled out the new one. I had read an article in SPIN on The Replacements, and it really rekindled my old love and appreciation for Westerberg, mainly because the writer, who you could tell was a young guy. Or at least that's what I imagined, that's what my imagination was telling me on one sunny March Saturday afternoon while I flipped the pages in bed -- I had bought the magazine the day before at the supermarket. The writer talked about driving up to Houston from Austin in 1985 to see the Replacements; he talked about eating SpaghettiOs cold out of the can and swigging Jack Daniels, about showing up at the show a  little dizzy and seeing Tommy Stinson splashing in one of those inflatable kiddie pools while he gulped from a bottle of bourbon, about grabbing the fifth from one of his buddies and taking several prodigious mouthfuls and then promptly jetting a gash of puke right out in front of the stage, about how this was greeted with jubilation and sincere approbation, like, and these are his words (in effect), "Like someone spitting fire at a Kiss concert."

Remember, we -- you, me and Colin and Lyn -- also saw The Replacements in 1985. That was a show at the Berkeley Square, a show where Tommy Stinson kept peeking into the ladies restroom from his elevated position on stage. The band would be right in the middle of a tune, and he'd turn his head, walk over to the west side of the stage and take a long bucking cherubic giggle and stare. This was also the show, or one of the shows during that period, where Westerberg couldn't finish a single song and kept calling for a vodka on the rocks. This was also the show where I saw Bob Stinson drinking a beer before the show; he was pulling his head back to catch a Mitch Easter video that was on the monitor above the bar, and he was doing it in obvious disrespect for a slightly overweight  nightclub hipster harlot who was trying her damnedest to curry the tiniest bit of his favor. And this was also the show were I wondered aloud to myself, ""Wow! Westerberg is really fucking ugly." He looked very, very bad: skinny yet bloated; stringy and piggish; anemic and seasick.

This guy, this writer, also printed a few lines from some of Westerberg's old songs; and, boy, did they sound fine. I can't remember the ones he quoted, but a few flutter in the old head right here and now, like "Pretty girl keep growing up/Playing makeup wearing guitar"; and "Yesterday's trash too bored to thrash"; and "Well, a person can work up a mean mean thirst after a hard day of nothing much at all"; and "I hate my father/Someday I won't." Man, they all register down underneath someplace beneath the pillow I sleep my head on at night, a feeling so unintentionally felt that I don't know if I'll ever be able to sort out the oomph and girth of it.

I wish I still had that article, but I lent it to the newlywed couple I've spoken of before. I lent it to them because the groom is from Minnesota and likes, mildly, The Replacements. The bride tossed it in the trash.

So after reading€ the SPIN article  I was convinced, even though in my mind's eye I knew otherwise, that I should trundle down to the Village and pick myself up a copy. Anyway, getting back to the original point, it took me until just the other week to buy the sucker. And when I played it for the first time I really liked it (side one that is; I never got into side two). But you know after only a few listens it started to wear thin. And all I can attribute this to is a loss of soul which is probably more a sign of why they gave up on alcohol than why their stuff sounds so lifeless after they sobered up. They started taking a little time off, started giving themselves a little space to breathe, started respecting their ideas, started thinking of themselves as bigger than the greatness that made them great in the first place. The Replacements became what's cool, not the tunes -- just like the fucking turd-burgling Stipe boys. Poor Bob Stinson. How could he have been any more of a fuck-up than Westerberg?

Enough. This is all just so much shit in my pants because the past is gone.

That's what's truly sad. The past is gone. Flipping through my albums, fingers getting smeared with dust, a few homemade screwdrivers lighting my brow, I was stung by the incredible sadness of the whole thing. My heart began to break. So much life lived now forgotten. Life, dead and dusty, sunburned and domestically captured. The funniest thing about feeling so old among all those The dBs and The Fleshtones and Gang of Four albums is that you don't immediately die and disappear; that you're still young and you go on living.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #70

The letter below is one of those that I began with the intention of sending it off to my good buddies Mark and Niall out in San Franciso, but I don't believe I ever did. The clue that this was a "letter never sent" was how it trails off into gibberish about Kerouac's aching heart and a vital distinction between the King of the Beats and Bukowski which is left unsaid. At this point, I would not have mailed a letter off like this. Maybe a few years later I would have, when I went from inebriated compositions on a word processor to banging out drunken missives on a portable manual Brother typewriter.

I start off the letter with a paean to Coors beer, the beverage of choice during my university days and whenever I would get together with the boys. (Niall didn't cotton to the sweet syrupy kick of malt liquor.) It speaks to the power of corporate branding that three progressive young men, educated at the citadel of American liberalism and multiculturalism, U.C. Berkeley, could bond so completely with a product manufactured by a leading light of movement conservatism.

Coors scion Joseph ran the company during the period when I guzzled the brew. Joe Coors was a member of Reagan's kitchen cabinet, a co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, and an early sponsor of the John Birch Society and later the terrorist war on Nicaragua. Coors had broken the union at the Golden brewery, making it at the time the only brewer of the big three -- Budweiser, Miller and Coors -- that was non-union. The AFL-CIO boycotted Coors for most of the 1980s. I remember my wife, who was my live-in girlfriend at the time, brought home a flyer she had been handed. It had an illustration of a Coors Banquet Beer can draped in a Ku Klux Klan sheet burning a cross on the lawn in front of the Golden brewery, which is reported to have happened in the 1920s when the KKK was riding high. I attached it to the refrigerator with a magnet.

The reason we loved the beer had nothing to do with politics of course. It was the only widely available beer that was not pasteurized. To me pasteurized beer like Budweiser or Stroh's had a formaldehyde flavor. Plus, if you drank a lot of it, and I drank a lot of beer at this time of my life, it left you with a nasty hangover. Coors never did. It was a clean beer that did not have that formaldehyde aftertaste. I could drink six to eight beers a night and wake up the next morning without a hangover. -- This was the basis of my love affair with Coors.

After getting married in Reno my wife and I, newlyweds that we were, made a special pilgrimage to Golden, Colorado to visit the holy city that produced the elixir at the largest brewery in the nation. It is not a convenient jump off the Interstate either; it took us a considerable distance out of our way in blistering summer heat. When we pulled into town on a Saturday evening we parked the VW bus at a bowling alley and went inside and bellied up to the bar and requested a Coors draft. We were served in plastic cups the freshest, most delicious beer I have ever had the privilege to consume.

That evening in Golden was the highlight of my honeymoon trip across the North American continent: drinking a Coors draft in a plastic cup at a bowling alley; listening to a mix tape, on which there was a mournful version of "Motel Blues" sung by Alex Chilton, that my friend Oliver made for our transcontinental drive to New York City; watching a story on the local evening news about a washed-up Tony Dorsett trying to make it through training camp with the Broncos; and then ending the day reading in the motel bathroom a copy of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets that my father had given us as a wedding present.

The rest of the letter is a description of a still-drunk-from-the-night-before morning when Mark and I gang up on Niall and give a brother shit about being pussy-whipped by his new girlfriend, Eve. What I remember about Eve is that she was mousy like my wife, but much more dour and controlling; therefore, as Mark and I saw it, she was a fair target for ribbing. Niall had a track record of getting hooked up with controlling women. His girlfriend before Eve, Leslie, led him about as if she had a string tied to his genitalia.

Winter 1989

Cantilever days out in San Francisco filming the best unfilmed beer commercial in the world: Coors can coronation; better yet, the day after coronation of King Coors (cooronation . . . coors-o-nation . . . Coors Nation). You would wake up in the morning and slap your feet on the dusty wooden floor. Going down the hall and into the living room, you would find all the dead little golden angel cylinders from the night before.

I was chanting on the living-room sofa: "Oh, Eve! Oh, Beav! Oh, Bee-eee-eeav! Oh, Beaver! Oh, Bee-Va! Oh, Bee-Vaah! Oh, Bee-Vaa-a-aah! . . . Oh, Viva! Oh, Vee-Va! Oh, Vee-Vaah! Oh, Vee-Vaa-a-aah! . . ."

Mark was lying on the floor looking up at his ceiling which hung white and cracked 11 feet from his face as he let out a big booming belly laugh. In the adjoining hallway Niall bit his bottom lip, squinted his eyes and furrowed his brow, or I should say that I figured -- divined -- that he was doing all this. I couldn't see him. All I could do was hear him rustling in the hall. But he was definitely sending out waves of anger and hostility as he he stood there in the shadows listening to his two powerful and self-loving pals poke fun of his girlfriend of five months, Eve.

Niall wished -- he wished he had the courage to stride into the living room and smite us with such a blow as to leave the flies buzzing around two wobbly, spinning cross-eyed faces. But he did not. He took the ribbing, radiating prickly silence.

Niall kept a picture of himself, a small picture attached to a rectangular piece of paper, as a bookmark which he tucked in his copy of THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES. The picture was of him running a 10K road race. He laid in bed reading this book (which seems to be so popular today) covered by the baby-pink comforter that Ashley and I had lent him.

****

Kerouac's aching heart dripping these burning holes in the nighttime tar highway; holes the size of large lemons or cat hearts.

Like every word you are too lazy to look up in the dictionary; like the difference between Kerouac and Bukowski

The Colt 45 Chronicle #69

The holiday weekend draws to a close. It was a good one: quiet, relaxing and modestly productive in that I was able to clean out a closet for the landlord so that he can enter the studio tomorrow or the next day and access a connection to the kitchen drain in the apartment next door. I have enjoyed listening to Stereolab all day. If you have never taken the time to listen to the group, their music is superb. A number of full-length recordings are available on YouTube. Such as Dots and Loops (1997). All Stereolab records are high quality, and Dots and Loops is no exception.

The letter below, written to my college buddies Mark and Niall, who lived across the street from the Panhandle in Haight-Ashbury, is an homage to buddy love. I had spent the end of December and most of January with them while I worked a construction job in the East Bay in order to get the money together for a plane ticket back to New York City and the wife.

The letter covers two topics. The first paragraph describes a moment of voyeurism when I briefly see Mark's gorgeous blond girlfriend, disrobed but towel-covered, scooting into the bathroom for a morning shower. I accurately predict a future for myself where I am "much more alone" (though I hasten to add that I am never lonely, because of the exigencies of employment, and I rarely, thank goodness, occupy myself with carnal fantasies).

In the second and final paragraph I impart the secret wisdom of the martial artist. To quote Bukowski's motto, "Don't try." In my twenties I was a street fighter. During my stay in San Francisco that January, Niall and I got into a brawl with two Latino guys on Haight Street. It was late. They were driving in their car. They said something; we said something back. And the next thing we knew the fists were flying. We ended up running them off, not because of any superior prowess, but because we were bigger. What I remember about that fight is that the guy I was locked in combat with, realizing that he was getting beat, sort of snapped and started clawing at my eyes with his fingers. I recall my eyeball being scooped and then thankfully sliding free of one of his claws. The next day I had scratches all around my eyes. Anyhow, this is the incident that I have in mind when I say, "I want to talk about the stupidity of it all . . . ."

Winter 1989 

Just a short note of deep thanks to the BOYS ON OAK STREET. Man, I miss you two. Like blood brothers we are: I can sleep with one and swipe the underwear of the other, and that's as damn near close to a spiritual paradise as I think I've ever been. Whether it was $2 burrito, Coors, a shit dropped in your green crapper, I was there, I was home, hand in glove and all the rest . . . catching a glint of Gail wrapped in a white towel, Saturday morning, skimming down the hall and into the bathroom, over home plate and into the catcher's mitt; bit I knew she was no spitter; no way, too clean, straight fastball, no funny rotation. She looked a lot like the Virgin Mother, but of the U.S.A. 80s; you know, Michelob, television on TV, beautiful, perfect, sex organs never ever belching Joseph's fish sauce. And I stood there, protected by some angle of some doorway (I think the kitchen's), soaking it in for the millisecond that it lasted, imaging myself older and much more alone, licking greasy fingers and slicing bloated lips on long sharp nails. It was silent and oh so good. 

But I want to say something about fighting and all that shit. I want to talk about the stupidity of it all, and this in face of the fact that it does seem to be valorized when I'm around, and this largely due to my efforts. It's what Bukowski himself calls the "Bukowski myth." It's bullshit, and it's a comedy, a big fucking macho idiot belly laugh. I remember when I first cracked the shell on the big mystery. I was down on the street in the East Village, a fist of some big fucker pummeling the back of my head and neck. And then all of sudden everything got real quiet, in my brain that is, and the wet concrete, from which I was trying to push myself up, became as soft as a set of freshly washed flannel sheets. I had a big smile on my face. Shit, I thought, what a joke. I might as well be making a cup of coffee, cleaning the cat box, writing a letter, etc. And that was the key, very mundane, to victory.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #45

Like the chronicle posted last week this appears to be another example of a letter written to myself or possibly my friend Mark who was living in Madrid teaching English. 

I was a believer and practitioner of spontaneous prose or automatic writing. I was always looking for the "palm at the end of the mind." Once I had retreated from the university I threw myself headlong into the literature of Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowksi and John Fante as an emetic for all the classical learning I had ingested in the previous six years. Mostly I liked to drink. But I also liked to watch sports on television. At the end of the Reagan '80s right when the Berlin Wall was coming down there was still a little bit of the great state social cohesion around, but not for too much longer.

Autumn 1989 

keep fighting the good fight and don't stop and wait until next year to do it 

because the mind lies fallow a good many days as it is
and the key is to do that which pops into your head spontaneously, to do it spontaneously: symmetry between brain and heart/will

that probably adds up to soul, probably why alcoholics drink in the first place: to get put in touch with that place of minimal viscosity

boils down to a commercial, "NIKE: JUST DO IT!" (a sad holy statement of our age, that it should boil down to a commercial)

Uptown Liquor mart 4033 Broadway N.Y. near 170th Street

you see, at work we deal a lot with our imagination; one of our imagination pieces deals with the punishing of proofreaders -- that's who we are, the proofreaders; the person who checks and corrects and is in charge of the proofreaders' work will strap on a dildo, what we dubbed the "master dildo" (and she's a big women and she's a black woman), and me and my Jamaican buddy Richard imagine her screaming out as she's lancing one of us poor motherfuckers right in the arse, "KEEP YOUR HEAD DOWN, GOD DAMN IT!" and we laugh like hell

and my mug is shoved in some trench coat ass as I ascend the steps of subway station Wall Street full of fear in expectation of the moil of the workday where people administrators discourse with serious jaws about color tabs, the question of color tabs: how many should be sent? one color for each group of employees? (the coders, the proofers, the file clerks)

oh me oh my, I'll take a sand dollar instead

but God I was gonna tell you how my hometown football team won the state championship this fall, and this despite being one of the smallest AAA high schools in Oregon (AAA high schools are the largest in the state: they have to have a student body of at least 750, or something like that; AA schools are at least 400; and A schools are 250 and under); anyway, it's kinda like Miami of Ohio winning the Orange Bowl and being declared National Champions. Ashlanders have never won a state championship before in their hundred-plus years, and whatdayaknow? they do it in 1989, just when I'm feeling my 25 years more than ever -- ouch! kick me into the charnel house, whydontcha? and don't spare the Neil Young and ham sandwiches while you're at it

The Colt 45 Chronicle #24

Twenty-five years is a long time. Today I am a "Nothing Man," someone who goes to work and assumes a office-professional persona but who is not really known by his coworkers. Back in 1988, I had a large group of good friends, a wife and aspirations of a big life.

The letter below, number 24 from a collection written upon arriving to New York City, gives vent, at the end, to my displeasure with life lived in the company of others. It is addressed to my wife's cousin, who was the same age, and with whom we spent a long, snow-bound, stoned Christmas holiday the year prior. She and I carried on a heavy-duty but unconsummated flirtation. For a brief spell, at the end of my Berkeley days, I was a Lothario.

At one point during the aforementioned Christmas holiday, cousin and I were going to travel back to Boston alone together. Luckily, it didn't turn out that way; another infidelity was averted.

Autumn 1988

I work in a honeycomb full of shitheads and assholes, Newcomb. We got married under the big skies of Nevada, except it was under a roof and around midnight, one of those commercial chapels -- piped-in wedding bells and a mumbling minister. We were plenty afraid (too much like a funeral parlor). Ashley kept giggling and fuckin' up her lines. His sermon -- the minister's sermon (what came before the uttering of vows) -- caught me off guard. He said something about love and how it didn't know deceit and selfishness, smallness and cruelty; that love was plain and simple and pure and beautiful. And all this was said outright without dressing or word play, and I fell for it.

I keep celebrating the mystery of life with my old buddy Adolph Coors. Crack it open, pour it in, and what you know? It's a holiday. Whether it's a weakness, a pathology, an addiction, it's just beer, and so the fuck what? After we got back from Boston/Vermont that Christmas, and all the spanking of ourselves we did over consumption, I took refuge in Bukowski. I remember sometime around February saying to someone that the worst I could do would be to end up like Bukowski. But shit, you read the guy's poetry, which from that time on I proceeded to do, and he's no self-aggrandizing boho wimp; he tells it like it is. Anyway, I could identify with the poems about the pilgrimage to the liquor store, and the poems about hiding from the phone and the door bell, and the poems about making a meal at 11:30 at night, and the poems about being inside, in your apartment, lying on your back in the afternoon sun, which you're trying to shut out like a guilty motherfucker, while the world, which for you is what you can see of the avenue through a cut in your blind, stays as normal and as hostile and as ever-moving as you've always imagined it. But fuck, what I want to say, and one of the things that this letter was meant to do, was that I had a great Christmas with you, and with Ashley, and the whole deal. Those red floors and the windows and the rocking chair -- and the windows -- and the back bedroom and the refrigerator (beers and tequila shots, though we never drank the vodka) I will never ever forget. As Prince would say, "You got the look." I don't know why I never wrote you while I was in Berkeley, God knows I had the fuckin' time. But there was something tricky about living in Berkeley that I could never quite get a handle on. Too much accessibility to other people and the feeling that you never had a moment of your own (which is I guess what happens when you live in one place too long).

The Colt 45 Chronicle #12

On this St. Patrick's Day, why not letter number 12? This one like the others from a string-tie folder of epistles typed, using WordPerfect on a desktop IBM clone, the first year-and-a-half I lived in Gotham. It's a story about drinking Protestant Irish whiskey during lunch break working on Wall Street. Another yarn of  "drinking to win" (and in this case a tale of drinking at work to circumvent my wife's prohibition at home). The Jeffrey in this story is a guy I worked with (a good guy in spite of the few pejorative comments below) at Davis Polk & Wardwell and not the college buddy addressed in letter number ten. This missive, like the majority so far, is to my best friend from Berkeley, Mark, who at the time was teaching English in Spain and writing me "drinking to win" letters of his own.

The one thing I will say about the guys who I worked with at Davis Polk & Wardwell -- a Jamaican who lived in Queens; young men from the Bronx and Manhattan (black, Puerto Rican, Greek); a nerd from UVA who was trying to make it in the Big Apple like I was -- is that I considered them my brothers, brother factotums. And another thing I'll say: lunch has never been as fun as it was on Wall Street in those days at the end of the 1980's.

The letter's coda is one of only two things that I remember about these NYC letters, the other being the letter(s) describing the fight at the Old Town Bar. It's clear that my fantasy of the future was shaped by growing up in the 1970's watching a lot of situation comedy on television.

Summer 1989 

Mark, I'm writing right now, but it's just a little thank you epistle; the big one is coming a touch later. I wanted to write and thank you for both of your letters: for the mom's Honda on cruise control at 70 mph from SF excesses and the Madrid gin Russian John Travolta skinning nose and rushing the last call. Thank you, man. Who knows what my brain and soul would be like without you? I mean, I want to tell you that my eyes can't see fast enough to read the stories you write -- they're that satisfying.

I was thinking as I read your 18-page masterwork that if what you were going through with Marilou's letter and Michele's body had to be assigned a Bukowski equivalent it would most definitely be WOMEN, whereas my own state of affairs, if it had to be Bukowski-ized, would probably turn out to be POST OFFICE (I'll take yours any day). Every morning I wake up at 7:15; every morning I brew coffee and iron a pair of pants and a clean shirt; every morning I shower, shit, shave, and shine my teeth; -- every goddamn morning, the same miserable routine: the Eternal Return. The subway follows. I read and start to feel halfway decent, but then it's the Wall Street station and I have to get out and walk up to the street, my face shoved in some fat secretary's ass. I arrive at the office in a small gold-colored elevator; I sign in at the front desk. It's then that they take my soul from me and put it in a clear glass jar (size: half gallon) and place it on a long shelf next to all the other jarred souls of people who are already at work.

The monotony is terrific, stupendous. I sit with a red ball-point pen and delete unwanted letters and numerals. On my left is a handwritten draft; on my right, is a computer printout. The task is to correct any mistakes that the word processors make when they input the handwritten draft. All there is to do is to glance from the handwritten draft to the printout -- glance from left to right, make the occasional deletion of a typo, and flip the pages. This goes on for hours. Occasionally I'll get up and go to the pisser.

Fortunately I work with about half-a-dozen other proofreaders, most of whom are male, black and hispanic; there are two women, but they're both white and pretty and they're both cunts (I tell all the boys they're what's called "pretty va-cunt"). Between deleting digits and listening for the supervisor's footsteps we toss around the shit quite a bit: a lot of fag-bashing and skylarking and speechifying about the feminine structure. One of the guys is a big drinker. He's a black guy from the Bronx who used to deal blow but then got caught and tossed in jail; now he's got a wife and two kids and just got off parole two months ago and he's dealing a little again (though I haven't sampled any, and, for some reason, have no desire to, but, it should be said, he's never offered me any; he's okay, but a power hitter he's not; in fact, he's sort of a chiseler). Jeffrey is his name.

Jeff is my age, 25, and he likes Jack Daniels; he likes to drink it at lunch. The first few times I went out with him he used to get Jack and Coke,which is a healthy shot's worth of bourbon and about 5 ounces of Coke. That didn't look too good to me, so I'd drink pints of Budweiser. At one point or another he asked me if I wanted to go to lunch with him at this place called McAnn's. I said sure. We got cheeseburgers and draft beers. By the time we finished the meal we had had about three steins each. I hadn't been drinking that murch because it was just a week after that bar fight I'd been in and I was still hobbling around on a bad leg and Ashley was fresh into her zealousness over banning me from booze and beer; so anyway, those three steins gave me such a high that I was about ready to levitate off the sawdust floor and fuck every woman in the room all at once. We went up to the cash register to pay the bill, but the funny thing was that even though I was flying high I couldn't help feeling that something wasn't right. We paid the bill and Jeff went back to the table to leave a tip and I still felt like something was wrong.

Jeff came walking back towards me and I said to him, "I think I'm gonna have a shot." -- It came out of my brain and onto my tongue and out of my mouth from nowhere. I hadn't even thought of taking a shot before the second that I had said it. He said, "Go for it." So I stepped up to the bar, nudged my way into the barkeep's eyeshot, and barked, "Shot of Bushmills!"

"Shot of Bushmills?"

"Shot of Bushmills!"

He grabbed a bottle from behind the bar and slammed a thick glass down on hardwood. He took a long look at me, a big red-nosed curly-headed Irishman he was; he took a long look and poured and smiled and kept on pouring; he poured and poured until the glass was almost full. He liked my looks, I guess. Goddamnit, there I was -- giddy after only three beers and faced with at least three shots of Irish whiskey and Jeffrey standing eager-eyed grinning in anticipation of calamity. I grabbed the glass and cleared my mind of any foul thoughts and started drinking; but instead of shooting the whiskey down without tasting it, I drank it nice and steady and slow and all at once; -- I wanted to show Jeffrey what was what and who was who: so I gulped it gently and thoroughly, to the very last drop, like chilled water in a paper cone. Jeffrey was impressed to the point of being jealous. But being no slouch, the first thing he did was to say, "That looked good; I think I'm gonna get me one. -- Shot of Jack!"

The barkeep arrived and poured him up. It was a good shot, not quite as large as mine, but close (and, in all fairness, Jack Daniels is a thicker whiskey than Bushmills); and goddamnitall, Jeff hooched and gurgled that glass of bourbon just as if he were a brown-faced bear and it was honey from the hive; -- he'd followed the leader and made it even more spectacular. We looked at each, eyes sparkling success and beaming pride, and we turned in tandem and marched out into the rain and back to the office.

That was just the beginning of what turned out to be a beer and bourbon shot ritual. I stuck to Bushmills just one more time before capitulating to the superiority of Jack Daniels. We kept going to McAnn's because the beers are just $1 a stein and the shots are only $2.25, but we shifted locations to a different McAnn's, one that's west of Broadway instead of the one on John Street which is to the east of Broadway. I enjoyed these afternoon celebrations. They were a spitting in the face of Ashley's sobriety standards. They were an escape from the suffocation of razor-burn mornings and subway cars and log sheets and gold-colored elevators and red ball-point pens; they were an unruffling of wax wings while my work buddies and I danced a button hook jig on the sheet metal roof of the sun.

One day we got a little out of hand though. It was a Wednesday, a payday, and four of us went to McAnn's for lunch. I had told everyone before we left that I wasn't going to drink.

"Yeah, right."

"No, I mean it."

"Okay. Okay. No problem. Don't worry about it."

I knew they knew, at least Jeff knew, that I was full of shit, and that as soon as the beer was passed out and I'd got a good whiff of it I'd be flagging the waitress for a stein. Once we got there and were seated the first thing they did was order up a couple of pitchers of McSorley's cream ale, a local brew with plenty of flavor. They were definitely fucking with me: I was the one who turned them on to McSorley's in the first place. The mugs were filled and the food was ordered. They drank and I sat and watched . . . and smelled. Oh, man. The smell was unbelievable, fantastic. They gulped and giggled and helped each other to fresh steins, flame filling their cheeks. And I had to watch the whole fucking thing; I had to smell those two pitchers disappear.

Our food came. I'd ordered a bacon and swiss cheeseburger with a combo of onion rings and french fries; it looked damn good. The boys waved for the waitress to get some more beer; and while they were fretting over that I dove right in. The burger was perfect: well done, but juicy, with a perfect amount of bacon lettuce tomato swiss cheese and pickle. I squirted some ketchup on my french fries and onion rings -- mmmm! nice and salty and tangy. Everything was perfect; everything except that I didn't have anything to drink. And it was right at that moment that the waitress appeared on the scene with two fresh pitchers of McSorley's.

I took that as a providential sign and broke down and begged the waitress for a mug of my own. There was some jeering from the boys, of course, but fuck them. -- There's nothing like a good burger and a glass of beer. The waitress quickly returned with a mug. I poured a tall one. -- I finished that stein and went for another; I finished that one and went to the next; I finished that one and my burger at the same time; but then someone promptly filled up my mug, so I did that and helped myself to another; did that, and poured another.

After all was said and done, I pretty much hogged the two pitchers for myself, which was fine and dandy as far as the boys were concerned because they'd stopped drinking after the the fresh pitchers came: they were afraid of going back to work too drunk. Shit, fine by me.

Jeff was the only one who kept going. And while he had slackened his pace when the food arrived, he kept an eagle eye on the number of steins I downed and when I got ahead in the tally he'd gulp down his glass and refill it.

****

The sun closes and the doors are open. Back somewhere in my mind is the future and it's bright and happy and full of strength and all taking place in a big house and you're there on a visit and kids are all around like crickets in tall grass. I'm 35 years old but not yet dead so my brain is still alive and buzzing like a horse fly. Oh shit, the coffee is brewing and the flapjacks are puffing and sizzling and showers are clouding up medicine cabinet mirrors and everybody is thinking private thoughts of a type suitable for 8:30 AM; and out of some nameless, soundless corner of a bedroom closet a mouse trickles . . . .

The Colt 45 Chronicle #8

I was unbroken at this point. Newly arrived to the metropolis, putting in my first week at my first career-track job at the pseudo-prestigious Foundation Center on Fifth Avenue, I still imagined myself free, autonomous, a gentleman capable of a wide range of actions. So when my friend arrived from Central America where he was working as a stringer, I got very drunk, stayed out late, and no-called/no-showed at work the next day. I had no idea that I was committing the ultimate worklife transgression. I would soon learn otherwise. This letter, number eight taken from a collection of letters composed from late 1988 to early 1990, chronicles that educable moment.

Several years later I got to be a witness of what a no-call/no-show looks like from the inside. A young accountant, really a decent guy, Simon was his name, didn't show up for work one day at the insurance company where I was toiling at the time. It was the day after the Fourth of July. The holiday had fallen on a Monday, which meant that if you were a drinker who wanted to stay up and celebrate with fireworks you were going to pay a price come Tuesday morn. Well, Tuesday morn turned into Tuesday afternoon and there was no word from Simon. He was AWOL. And it sent the monkeys in the office cage chattering. It was as if one of the monkeys had escaped from the zoo and the monkeys who remained behind were freaked out. It was something to behold. There was electricity in the air. One of us had made a break for it. When a wary and hushed Simon returned to the cage on Wednesday it turned out that he had, like I describe my own situation in the epistle below, got drunk and decided to say, "Fuck it." -- For a young man, proof of life.

Autumn 1988

-- My first week at work was punctuated by a Thursday no-show, which I was amply admonished for (much to my surprise). I had been drinking the night before, and feeling particularly Bukowskian I had decided to fuck waking up. I had read the poem about leaving the bar for a job, on the bus, getting out and finding a warehouse with dirt floors and moving containers of molten steel (probably a foundry). It was the  East Village once again, and subways on the way home, already feeling crummy. I woke up at 1 o'clock PM and there was a message on the machine from this asshole who called himself my boss; his voice was dripping with the kind of petty candy-ass croquet shit that could coat a beehive. I pick up the receiver and dial him up. He answers and inmediately shoots into the bitch of 4th-of-July routine. I blurt out baldly that an old friend (Colum in from Guatemala) had put in to port and I had spent the night guzzling brews. His effete dick jaw drops right through the line. He gives me the KGB inquisition, asking me if I've ever had a "full-time" job before, if I've read my employee manual, if I've sniffed his bunghole. I respond too candidly, too Californian (too calm), too assertively, too much -- as I would fancy -- like a Minutemen album. He is taken aback, confused, which prolongs his attempt to be powerful. Finally, I say, "Stan, listen: 'Mea culpa, mea culpa.' Okay? That's it; that's all there is." He says, I'll see you tomorrow; I say, very good. What a fucking asshole; how easy for him to be cool in that situation, and say, okay Mike, you fucked up, but no big deal, next time just make sure you call me up -- 'nuff said. But he had to have his moment on the silver screen, he had to try to stick his dick in my mouth. Needless to say I was a chicken sandwich away from calling him up and saying goodbye; saying, fuck off, asshole. But the chicken sandwich peacefully filled my belly and intervened. So I turned the other cheek, became Christ, picked out the best cross on Calvary, and went back to work the following day.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #5

Drinking to win is a large concern of young men, as revealed in the letter below, the fifth taken from a collection of missives written in New York City between the summer of 1988 and spring of 1990.

Barbet Schroeder's Barfly was a big deal to me and a lot of other young guys making their way in the world in the late 1980's/early 1990's. The story of a young down-and-out drunken poet and brawler taps into the Romantic-hero archetype that I fancied myself emulating -- to the point of megalomania and delusion, as you will witness below.

Evan is the friend I visited in the Brooklyn hospital in the last letter posted. The job I quit was as a temporary proofreader for the corporate law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP. All I can recall of the eve before Christmas eve night out on the town described below is that it was so cold that everything looked different -- blue-black, sharp, shiny and amber lit; that, and the pavement of Broadway crunched underfoot like the frozen plank road of a frontier town.

Winter 1990

I went to lunch with a friend the other day. He broke his back three months ago falling down a flight of stairs; he'd been drinking beer and gin for nine-hours straight; he ended up spending three weeks in the hospital and another two months recuperating at home. He hasn't touched a drop since. Anyway, we were sitting at the table with two other guys (this was in the cafeteria at work) and Evan says (Evan's his name), because the topic of alcohol has been broached and I've just said, "Yep, there's definitely something to the point though that going completely without alcohol and actively avoiding it leaves you a little dull and monological," and Evan says, "Aw, Bukowski is so egotistical and full of shit. He doesn't know anything." and I respond, "Yep, yep, you're right, it's true." (Evan's read Bukowski (he'd only read the BARFLY screenplay, because of his love of the movie, and then I lent him HOT WATER MUSIC, and after that he started buying the poetry, like THE DAYS RUN AWAY LIKE WILD HORSES OVER THE HILLS)); Evan can't out drink me (though Evan, it must be said, did drink a bit more frequently than I did (though, mostly, because he's single and I'm married)); and Evan did break his back just a week and a half after I fucked up my ankle in that bar squabble (which brings up an interesting point, the point being that up until that time, the time of our mutual accidents, the two of us were on a drinking self-mutilation binge; we used to go out together and spend whatever was in our collective wallets on beer pints and Johnny Walker's; -- we were on the same wavelength, the same path, which was go and go and don't worry about tomorrow because it'll always be there, and if it isn't, so what?) Anyway, tomorrow came a lot closer to disappearing for Evan than it ever did for me -- he broke his back and I just roughed up my leg, so I can understand why he's wholeheartedly convinced that nothing but evil can come from the booze bottle and why now he radiates fear and suspicion when the conversation drifts anywhere close to the topic of drinking. But still, it broke my back to have to acquiesce like that in shitting on Bukowski, even though Evan was half right. Heroes are hard to come by and you hate to have to turn the other cheek when one of yours is being profaned, especially in public, but I figured that if anyone had the right to do it it was Evan, breaking his back and all while trying honestly to act out his own interpretation of the big Bukowski screenplay. Oh well.

Good news! I quit my job! I was accused of using "language" unsuitable for the workplace. I was given the option to "improve" it or to go someplace else. I sat for a moment, flabbergasted, my brain blank, but then the blond beast in me stood up and I fired back to the bitch, the one who called herself my boss -- why is it that they are always women? wilted, tormented, insincere, middle-aged women -- I fired back, "Well then, I quit." That was it. I walked out of her office, packed up my stuff, had her sign my time slip, and the next thing I knew I was out the door and on the street, Wall Street -- free after six months of pointless, shit-picking toil (the kind of toil you think of when you see a chicken pecking at lint). It felt good to be out of there: 4:30 in the afternoon and riding on an empty uptown subway back home. My cheeks burned a little from the humiliation of being accused of excessive profanity, but I comforted myself with the thought that "Yep, it happened to D.H. Lawrence too!"

I've been out of work a week, and I've been looking now, lackadaisically, for about three days. I promised myself that I'll never work in an office again. That leaves factory work, construction, and other assorted sordid low-level positions, all of which, in my mind, have to be superior to the fluorescently-lit, pseudo-white-collar drudgery I've been suffering through since July. As I always tell Ashley, the worse thing about office work is that nothing is above board, nobody ever tells anybody what they really think; it's all obsequiousness and delays and subterfuge. A person suffers incalculably in such an environment; there's no nourishment -- no happiness, no valor, nothing but the people who you never knew in junior high, the small people, the truly inconsequential. So I swear I can't go back.

My Christmas, with Ashley gone to Oregon, was full of drink and cigar smoke. The windows froze up at night and I'd sit down and plug away at the Colt and the Cuban, writing stupid little holiday greetings to Ashley's glrandmother and one or two long-forgotten friends. Saturday, the day before Christmas Eve, I hit the town with Antony. We ended up at that place where we'd ditched you (that was a night I know you'll never forget, the night I bolted out the door pressing hand to mouth in an attempt to restrain the upchuck from bursting through my lips).... We met a couple of Antony's friends there, friends who I'd never met before; I felt very different: they were very clean and seemed quite young (it turned out that they were my age, 25); I drove myself to the Jack, ordering glass after glass after glass, "with just a little ice." The youngsters looked on mortified, speechless, bedazzled. Antony smiled. I guess he didn't like his friends either because as soon as he got drunk (he had started in on the whiskey too) he began insulting them, telling them what a bunch of fools they really were. But through it all I felt like a pop star, a magnet: pure steel as brilliant as a blow torch. God how good I looked, seeing myself as Antony's friends saw me: big, brash, but without saying hardly a word, a true star....

The next morning the star woke up with a hangover so bad that the first thing he thought of was how stupid he had been for not puking before he went to bed.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #3

Married student housing was, and probably still is, located at 60 Haven Avenue, a part of Manhattan that is the island at its narrowest, just south of the George Washington Bridge. The building was, and probably still is, far taller than anything else in the Washington Heights neighborhood. My wife and I lived on the 22nd floor with excellent views to the south, east and west. From the living room one could see all the way past the verdant shire of Central Park to the twin towers of the World Trade Center, where I would be working not too long after writing the letter below, the third installment of letters from a string-tie folder of letters labeled "summer of 1988 to the spring of 1990." This letter like the last is addressed to a friend who was living in Madrid teaching English. 

During the holidays the medical complex cleared out. My wife, as she always did during Christmas and summer, traveled, while I, as always, stayed home with the cat. Downstairs and up Haven Avenue half a block was an excellent small deli; one could always get a good chicken cutlet sandwich on a hoagie roll as well as quart bottles of Budweiser, Miller, Coors and Colt 45.

Beware. There's plenty of preening below from a schoolboy who is chock full of Bukowski and suffering from cabin fever. I don't think I fully grasped what Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is about on the most basic level and concomitantly what it means to be chivalrous -- be true to your word. My confusion in this regard presaged decades of woe.

Christmas 1989

Green corduroy topcoat -- that's what Gary was wearing when I ran into him on the street of 168th on my up to Broadway and the subway and another workday and another Friday crossed off the calendar. I shivered in my 49ers hat and Harris Tweed and looked on at Gary's quarter-inch-length beard growth and all his high tide and good cheer, he, with just one more exam to go and then off to history-making Berlin for eight days, a solitary life-exuding hipster outfitted in a pretty Arabian cap and handsome green corduroy topcoat (not new cardboard-like corduroy but corduroy that has been sweated on and loved in and cleaned and toiled over and sweated on and loved in and then cleaned again). He looked like Mendoza -- bubbling, effervescent, giddy, boundless Mendoza back from Morocco and Spain and habitats of sand and rail -- but with one exception: he was clean. He was clean, and therefore, not too much real. Where Mendoza was jock itch, hair grease and dirty Levi's, Gary was spotless, colorfully immaculate and snifter scented -- he was the Bloomingdale's, the Macy's version of the world beat globe trottin' get funky middle-twenties young man boho. But that was enough, especially seeing that green corduroy topcoat: it was the nail in the coffin, a symbol for my distraughtness, a searchlight of trust and hope and joyfulness cutting through the fog that was me. Oh my. There I was slinking off to my office job in the below-freezing morning looking like a vampire at daybreak and out of the pale blue I'm intercepted by a happy-as-happy-can-be green corduroy elf. What a slap in the face! What a stake to the heart! All I could do was simper and shuffle my feet and think about the time when I used to be full of life, when I giggled and bubbled with the best of 'em, when happiness and hope were part of my day and distraughtness was beat by two aspirin and a catnap. Finally he left, telling me that he'll be back on the 23rd and that we ought t'get together for Christmas dinner. I say sure, I'll be around. He says we'll have to smoke some weed. I say sure, and tell 'im that I hope he spanks the monkey while I sit grinning in his living room. Then I'm off again, slinking to the subway, worried that I might be ten minutes late for work.

Oh what a grievous ungreen unreal mess worklife is. 

This Saturday morning while puttering around the bedroom I found some of Ashley's discarded yarn. One fragment was ruby red, a prodigious clump, the other was emerald green, a smaller share. I gathered 'em up in my palm and clutched tight. What should I do with 'em? I thought about throwing 'em away. But that seemed anal and unromantic. What could I do with 'em? Bookmarks? Desk ornaments? Ashley would just tell me to toss 'em out. So I marched into the bathroom and popped 'em into the toilet. The yarn floated nicely, resting on top of the water and executing little lazy pirouettes -- red on green, my own Christmas decoration. I didn't get to appreciate it for long though because Ashley called me out into the living room to sweep the floor. In about fifteen minutes I had finished sweeping and had to take a piss (I'd been drinking a lot of coffee); I walked into bathroom, lifted up the toilet seat, and let 'er rip. Mid piss I looked down and realized that my yuletide achievement was groaning and boiling in urine -- I had forgotten that the yarn was in there. No problem; it felt good, like this was the way it was meant to be. I sharpened my aim and really shot the fragments to hell; I submerged 'em completely: red and green crawling down to the mouth of the cave. I flushed and they disappeared, violently. Totality, yessiree. 

I wanted to tell you that I've recently finished reading SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT. It's nothing special; it's pretty good though and it does seem to be consistent in theme with the rest of this doggerel. Recapitulation is a heavy burden though and one that's made considerably heavier when drinking quarts of Miller (because they had no Coors at the deli) that keep foaming up and shooting out of the glass and onto books that rest innocently on the table; that and the fact that work looms large and unhappy and eight hours away (it's close to midnight); but Ashley has left for Oregon and I'm alone and Snuz is asleep and I'm working on one of the last Cubans and as Miller says in THE AIRCONDITIONED NIGHTMARE, "God is Love"; so put all that together and here goes. Well, come to think of it, it does seem like too much to do right now. But I was going to say something along the lines of this: THE GREEN KNIGHT is exactly about what I was beer-dribbling on in that last letter I sent to you: time and sin. Time is sin, the possibility to sin. But where I was convinced that there was no way around this, Gawain shows that there is, and that's by being timeless -- he doesn't sin (he does fuck up once though by accepting a girdle from a devilish queen in the hope that it'll protect him from a deathblow of the Green Knight's ax; so he isn't truly timeless; anyway, it's all ideal, it's all written -- that's the best we can hope for). You know the tale? The Green Knight comes stomping into Camelot on New Year's Day and offers anybody that wants it the first punch. Everybody who's anybody is there in Arthur's big feast hall slugging down wine and exchanging gifts when the Green Knight bursts in and makes his challenge. The catch is that a punch is not a punch but an ax blow to the neck. Gawain, a nephew of the King, jumps up and accepts. The Green Knight has just one condition: that in one year's time -- next New Year's Day -- the knight who accepts the challenge will travel to the Green Chapel (nobody in Camelot has ever heard of the Green Chapel) and receive a return blow. Gawain agrees, thinking that the guy is a shithead; that he'll chop of his head and that'll be that. The Green Knight hands Gawain the ax and Gawain swings with mighty force and the Green Knight's head falls to the floor and bounces underneath a table. The Green Knight steps forward (a giant man all garbed in green) and picks up his head. People can't believe their eyes. Gawain is shitting his pants. Nobody makes a sound. The Green Knight, his head in the nook of his left arm, jumps on his horse and clatters out the door hooves sparking. That's where the story begins. And Gawain has to spend the next three-hundred-and-however-so-many days shitting his pants and getting ready to die. 

We turned our backs on academia. Thank God and let's make it count because you can't go back home.