As this old letter project draws to a close, I promised some sort of assessment of who I was and what I thought I was doing back then as a young man in his twenties recently eructed from the university.
Today's letter below provides a decent snapshot. I was an alcoholic, working or avoiding employment at low-wage jobs in New York City and finding a little solace in drinking malt liquor and typing an epistle, usually little word pictures like the one below, to friends, usually young men like myself, back on the West Coast.
I just wanted to read and write. And my time in New York City -- first, pursuing "career-track" employment, which was quickly abandoned, and then as a temporary worker dispatched by various agencies located near 42nd Street and 5th Avenue -- made me understand how difficult this was going to be. I concluded that if scratching out a living while trying to find time to do one's "own thing" was as hard as it was in the nation's commercial mecca, I was going to have to try something different. Meaning, I was going to have to get the hell out of Dodge.
Summer 1989
An electric fan shoved between the legs of a fat woman with corn-rowed hair who was operating a packed elevator as it pulled all of us upward eight stories to a place that was a place that would let us off just one-floor shy of the last gasps of Broadway-&-168th air and late summer daylight. Oh, man, that's a slice of pie that would bow the back of the best donkey. That fan was pushing smells at me that you could catch like a football. Smells tactile and hairy. Smells exactly like a yeasty pussy. Smells I could taste with the tongue. Smells that dripped down the back of my throat.
The elevator doors parted and all us passengers shot out like water through a broken glass jar. I popped up the last flight of cement steps and was greeted by the pummel and rustle of Broadway at 168th Street.
I cruised west towards Haven Avenue and home, passing the flower peddler who works in front of the emergency room at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.
Right when I passed Fort Washington Avenue and was crossing onto Haven, I noticed a jogger who was busy stretching. It was pretty obvious that he had just finished a run. He was stretching against a three-foot brick wall. He had his left leg thrust up on top of the wall, and he was resting the side of his head against his knee. And what made the whole thing so special for me was that he was stroking the underneath of his thigh very slowly with measured strokes which were obviously causing him pleasure just as if he were petting the waist-down green-scaled luminescent portion of a mermaid.
He made me sick. Did he think his legs were as beautiful a mermaid's tail?
Niall, why don't you ever write me? Have I done something wrong?
Until I read the letter below, number 16, I had forgotten the extent to which, for a brief time (well, maybe not so brief -- from the summer 1989 until the beginning of winter 1990), my wife, who was enrolled at Columbia Medical School, was a household pot farmer. We were living on campus in a married-student apartment on the twenty-second floor of a residential tower. She had taken the seeds from dime bags that we or friends had purchased in Tompkins Square Park and planted them in potting soil which she had packed in sawed-off 1-gallon plastic milk jugs. On the twenty-second floor we had good light from windows lining the eastern and southern walls of the living room. During the peak, the wife had over a half-dozen large plants. I didn't really approve, but after a while I became a willing accomplice. She kept her medical school class well supplied that semester. I definitely didn't approve of her selling her produce. Giving it away was fine, but selling seemed wrong to me. I thought it represented a greater danger both in terms of the law and getting found out by the university. But at this point my wife had basically stopped paying attention to anything I said. She was a free agent who did what she wanted. She expected certain things of me: I needed to hold down a job; I had to cook dinner and perform other chores as designated. But for the most part she left me to myself. In a couple more months, at the beginning of May, we would separate.
Jeff called the other week. It was after midnight and I was asleep. The call came in and the answering machine picked it up. I had the volume on. He said that he had heard that I was thinking of starting a family with our mutual college friend Shale and he had some valuable information that he needed to share with me. These facetious early-morning calls were a staple of Jeff's from the past. I didn't pick up. I was exhausted. I've been running myself ragged at work. Then I found that I couldn't fall back asleep. I need to call him back.
Winter 1990
Well, Jeff, right off the bat I've got to apologize for not sending along any of things I said I was gonna send to you. I feel like a real louse, a real bum -- no excuses either. I told Ashley I'd talked to you on the phone and got the place of birth (Oakland), but I didn't keep reminding her enough to print the thing out. As to the pot, we're just waiting on that bushy skunk-weed plant; it stinks something awful and is budding quite nicely. Now as soon as Ashley decides to chop it down I'm gonna be sure to send some along (our existing store was suddenly obliterated when Ashley made a dramatic two-ounce sale, her first). Every morning I get up and march to the hall closet and pull that skunk out and pick it up and carry it to the living room window in the southeast corner (the one with the most sun); every evening when I get home from work I move it back into the closet (I do the same thing with the one other plant that we have left; Ashley has started up three or four seedlings). I'm taking care of the plants because Ashley is in Oregon for Christmas. This is the first holiday season of solitariness I think I've ever had. So far so good. I am drinker again, but that's okay.
But Ashley's been gone for a full five days now and I'm starting to have diabolical dreams (because the bottom line is that sleeping alone is a much more eerie and anxious affair than sleeping with the one you love): dreams about driving a stolen green early-60s Chevy pickup and running it through stoplights, and dreams about a tiger escaped from the zoo and chasing Ashley down the sidewalk until I come on the scene and yell at it to get away and it "oh, shit" comes running after me but I scurry up a tree in a yard and hop onto a roof and slip in an open window, the tiger lapping at my heels, and just when it's about to slam through the flimsy glass and eat me lip-licking alive a pack of neighborhood dogs comes ballyhooing and charging down the street like a troop of angels and draws the tiger away, risking life and paws. I've always thought dogs were the best, deep down and otherwise, and this tends to corroborate my suspicions; Diogenes the Cynic, the father of Cynicism, was known as kyon: the dog. "Cynic" comes from the Greek word kynikoi which means dog-like. I've had dreams like that, and dreams of friends telling me about fights they've just been in, bruising fights, all while we shop for Sunday breakfast in an empty supermarket, the women waiting outside in an idling station wagon -- eerie shit, the whole of it.
And tonight, fully awake and on my way to the deli to get some quarts of malt liquor (the deli where you bought that liverwurst sandwich that made you ill), I pass a sweet little blond in shorts and cotton sweatshirt fresh from a workout in the building's gym. We pass in the hall that leads to the elevator. Everything is golden and quiet and deserted in the light-bulb light and I, 49er-capped and fully wrapped bound for the nine-degree ice night, pass her by. She's nervous about being alone with me in a deserted hall. I recognize her. She's a classmate of Ashley's -- I've met her before (once, briefly, and I think I cut a fart, silently, accidentally). But from her there's no indication that she knows me; she just keeps on moving, skirting along as fast as her naked legs can carry her.
So like I say she passes me by, but I turn and look after her, and boy does she have a nice backdoor. I could pray to it. And then my brain gets to thinking, "Here we are, all alone, nobody around, everybody -- all the medschoolers -- gone to his or her own special point on the map, and it's just the two of us here alone for some unknown reason. So why don't you invite me up to your home and let me love you? We'll have some beers and I'll give you a good ride, 20 minutes of foreplay and 15 minutes of tha-wacketing. -- Shit, I'll even tuck you in and kiss ya good night." But people are too full of fear, myself included, and she disappeared around the bend. At least I have my Colt 45. What does she have?
Amen.
Remember, you're only as good as your heroes. And I know you know this Jeff because you're the only one who has selflessly said how you take from people; most people ruthlessly rip off others and hope that no one notices. Shit, I'm more guilty of this anyone, more guilty than even Shale, though I hope I'm not. But we're only as good as our heroes. . . . I remember this time when I was drunk at a medschool party, and I started waxing ecstatic, crazy and jubilant, about Colt 45's label art: the red buckin' bronc snappin' his hind legs in the beer can backdrop air. Oh my, everyone looked at me like I was from Mars, looked at me like I was a dead dog drunk; oh boy, even Ashley stared at me, as if to say, "Shut up, you stupid ditty drunk. Don't embarrass me in front of all these normal people." I walked off to the fridge and grabbed two bottles of beer. No more Colt left, just some imported beer. So I grabbed two of those. -- I'll never be able to get drunk enough when it comes to spending time with these people.
Letter number 13, from a collection of letters in a string-tie folder with "autumn 1988 to spring 1990" written on the front in pencil, records a Saturday night in the married student housing tower at Columbia Presbyterian Medical School. It's written to my friends Oliver and Lyn back in Berkeley. I am, as usual, drunk. And I'm reminiscing here about the first time I met them. We all worked at a book delivery service called Baker that was and is still located in Doe Library. The T-buildings (temporary buildings from World War II still standing in the 1980's) referred to below used to be right across University Drive from the main library where Memorial Glade is now located.
What I recall about this evening, but fail to mention in the letter, is that I had noticed that my wife displayed a level of familiarity with and affection for one of her male fellow classmate skit performers. This indicated to me that she had likely shared some sort of physical intimacy with him. During the eight years we spent together she was a serial cheater. Eventually she moved out of the apartment we rented together in Berkeley so that she might pursue her sundry romances in an unrestricted fashion. But when it appeared likely she would be relocating East to attend medical school, she moved back in. I think she knew that she would need a reliable caretaker to get her to the Big Apple; and then once there to cook her meals and maintain the household while she studied. So I was reeled back in.
Drinking and typing letters to friends on the West Coast was my summum bonum.
Autumn 1988
I almost got scared right out of my skin a few hours ago. I went down, twenty-two floors in the elevator, to a congregation hall where Ashley and some of her fellow first-years were putting on a "skit." Much to my surprise the fucking thing was not just for first-years, it was medical-school wide.
I peek my head in the door and it looks like somebody has spilled the Cheerios box: all this simpering student conservative power, muscle money and clean clean, like some grand divine academic senate. A second-year group is on stage doing a rap skit, a fucking rap skit; what else did I expect? I'm getting sick, really scared. The first thing I think of is getting out of there fast: I know my wallet is in my pocket; I know I have enough for a six pack. But what I'm thinking the whole time is this: My God, I forgot, students still exist; and fuck! they look so Godawful powerful -- pretty, beautiful, strong, comfortable -- that is, like they've always looked; I just forgot. I B-lined it for the exit, shot out of the building and up to the Columbia Deli (where we bought our ice cream), and asked the price of a six of talls. $5.50. Great! I walked back home and got into the elevator.
When I get off at the twenty-second floor, the woman right next to us in apartment B is out in the hall. She had just sold this stationary bike to some nameless son of Israel who is conscientiously wrapping it all over with large stretches of tape. I say to her, "Congratulations!" She says, "It's finally sold! " (You see, it had been sitting out in the hall for a long time with a sign on it -- "$20.") I say, "Wonderful," and then make it inside the door. I imagine that she has seen the paper bag in my arms and has guessed its contents; I imagine that she knows loud music is to follow; and I imagine that she is reaching for prayer beads and television set to wash my callow bullshit from her heart and ears. But she's cool and has never knocked on the door or wall. So I crack my first tall boy and spin some SOFT BOYS.
I've finished the six of talls and am now on the tequila, and thinking is very hard. But please, let me try. It's like thinking through several grade-school chalkboards, but let me try; I'll get something eventually.... I had this thought this morning about the first time I went to work at Baker, that is my first day at Baker, and I met you guys for the first time. And when I woke up this morning I was trying to remember those images, of you guys, as they appeared to me then and not as they appear to me now in my memory after all these damn years. First I remember Lyn because I think she came into the office first (but maybe it was because she was a girl -- no, I distinctly have in mind a scene at the fiche readers, which at that time where over by the side of the office that had the windows looking out at the T-buildings, where Lyn came in first and then Oliver followed). Anyway, Lyn came into the office through the only door there was, and I remember before anything I guess that the light in the office that afternoon, like a lot of afternoons that first summer that I worked there, that the light was this deep languid phosphorescent green-blue, like the sun was fighting its way through a dense tropical canopy of foliage while people swung in hammocks sipping mint juleps, you know, like fish in a very nice aquarium. Anyway, Lyn comes into the office and she's wearing, as my memory tells me, this green and blue sweater, which isn't a turtleneck, but a V-neck with one of those mountain high floppy weird collars. And I'm thinking, Wow! Now that's an angular face. I thought she might be a boy -- very vertical, hair short in that big floppy sweater, very up and down. But then I quickly clued in to the fact that she was like my girlfriend -- who you guys hadn't met yet, who was Ashley -- a women-boy, one of those peculiar hybrids. So I'm introduced to her and she's very nice and demure and polite, and I'm watching all of this from a roughly perpendicular angle, sitting in front of that mound of gray metal shit which is Ben's old desk with all the rapidly yellowing Frank Robinson Giants Chronicle cutouts Scotch-taped to the filing cabinet which housed the old Baker requests, and then Oliver walks in with Laurie and sits down in the empty seat in front of the fiche reader next to Lyn. He's got this monk straight haircut and a pair of wonderful glasses -- "A real scholastic," I say to myself; he's kinda tall and pretty damn skinny. And I know right off the bat that he was older than I was. (It was probably your living with a girlfriend, and all those shots and $3.00 club beers.) But there was love -- this real intense energy -- between the two of you right then, and I think I was the only one there just then, or at least the only one paying any attention to it, in that green-blue light. I felt like I was perched on top of a hundred-foot willow tree looking down between these sharp pencils of praying mantis green at two beautiful urchins, one blond and one brunette.
My friend Jeff, who is now a family practice doctor in Southern California, is an interesting guy. Sensitive and intelligent, but, like many of us who hail from family backgrounds punctuated by intermittent insanity, capable of violence. The first time I met Jeff he threw a Peanut M&M from a second-story landing that hit me right between the eyes. It felt like a rock. He did it on purpose.
Jeff went to school at U.C. Davis. He was a friend of a friend who I got to know. He would come down to the Bay Area on the weekends and we -- Jeff, other friends and I -- would get drunk and go out to parties. What young men at the university do.
Jeff was a football player. I believe he played for the Aggies briefly. He boxed, too. And he had a serious, steady girlfriend. We had that in common. But Jeff was distinguished by a compulsive sadism that was out of place with his otherwise sweet, low-key demeanor. To give an example, besides the Peanut M&M pelting, one evening when a bunch of us were passing around the beer bong on a Saturday night prior to going out to the parties, Jeff, when it was my turn, purposely filled the funnel with almost pure foam, the result of which is that I ended up puking. Going out on the town with Jeff often meant being maneuvered into some sort of physical altercation with an innocent third party.
Letter number ten, from the oft- and aforementioned collection of letters from the end of the 1980's when I first came in contact with the Big Apple, is a re-telling in greater detail of the events (it must have been a big deal to me) described in letter number nine, the fight at Old Town Bar. In addressing the letter to Jeff I'm writing to a fellow bar brawler who could appreciate the pathos and buffoonery of the situation.
The musical accompaniment is from an album I purchased for Jeff's visit (referred to in the letter's first line); it was a favorite of mine at the time, the eponymous Raging Slab(1989); the song is"San Loco":
Autumn 1989
Jeff
After all that fight talking we did during your stay here I had to go out and get my tail kicked. It was a month or so ago. I was drinking in a bar and watching the A's-Jays game. I guess I had been there three hours. I was drinking irish whiskies and tossing back Rolling Rocks. I had put away three or four Bushmills and four or five beers when the bartender refused to serve me. He said I had had enough. I told him he was a fucking asshole. God damn, I had been talking peaceably with other patrons; I had never raised my voice to a rude level; I had always been courteous when he brought me my drinks; I wasn't even slurring my speech; sure I was drunk, but what the fuck is a bar for?
So I tell him that he's a fucking asshole and then this blond guy starts screaming at me from behind the counter at other end of the bar, screaming at me about how he's going to kick my ass real bad because nobody talks to his bartender the way he just heard me do.
So he's rushing at me from the other side of the room and making a big show of it -- waving his arms and spitting foam -- making a show of it because there're all these fine-looking young woman sitting on bar stools smoking cigarettes. I tell him to come on with it. And then I wait patiently, lost somewhere in whisky daydreams of beaches and land mines.
Next thing I know he's bouncing into me; he's trying to bowl me off my feet and knock me out the door; I think to myself that he's doing his damnedest to knock me down so he can have the satisfaction of kicking me right square in the ass -- a boot to the ass just like in the movies so all the customers can ooh and aah at his masculine saloon sweeping prowess.
I manage to weather the first exchange. (He's strong, but just up top; he's got those curl muscles that've been manicured in front of a big mirror for an imaginary music video; he's got no drive in his legs and he's not throwing any punches. For his part, he thinks he's got himself a genuine lightweight, a nice little cup of coffee and cheese danish. You see, I'm wearing a tweed sportcoat, a tie and work shoes. I probably looked like a substitute teacher to him.) He pops me a few feet back, but in the process I get hold of him and yank him towards me, spinning him so he ends up being the one that's going backwards.
With ball in my court, I decide to drop my shoulder and kick in a little overdrive. I'm moving him back fast and he's picking up momentum. We hit the front door, the center of which is glass, and the glass shatters. I look up and it's raining diamonds, little diamonds; all these beads of broken glass are dancing on my hands and giggling in my hair; they're bouncing off the sidewalk as high as SuperBalls; I tell you, it was like being in what the middle of Antarctica must be like.
We end up outside in front of the bar. My fingers are bleeding, but not that bad. And from what I can tell the blond guy seems okay too, minus a scratch here and there. I take a good look at his eyes and they're full up with black. He's scared. I don't know if it was because of the broken glass or the fact that he all of a sudden had a real scuffle on his hands; whatever it was, he had the biggest pair of dilated pupils I can ever recall having seen.
And right then I knew that I had him. I knew he couldn't take a punch -- he didn't have the soul for it; he was just another pretender making macho. I started talking to him; I told him that I was better, that I was stronger than he was. His eyes got even bigger. Shit, I thought to myself, might as well chalk up another "W."
Then something happened out of the blue. He rocked me a little to one side -- meekly, weakly-- and I slipped. Just like that -- Bam! -- my feet went right out from under me and he flopped down smack dab on top. He had me. I tried to get back up but it was no good; I couldn't push off my left foot; it wasn't there; it felt like it was dangling by a strip of bacon. Shit.
I told the guy to give me the best that he had. I told him my face was better than any shot he could muster up. At that point people starting to pour out of the bar and tangle and intervene, giving me time to lurch to me feet. I started moving towards him again but some cunt got in the way. She took her little sparrow fists and started pounding on my chest. (I figure she must have been a waitress at the bar and a girlfriend of the blond bartender/bouncer.) I gave her a meager little push and she went flying out of the picture. (I felt kind of bad about that, but I hardly even touched her.) So I'm in the guy's face again, but I'm hopping on one foot. I can't plant on my left leg; it feels like I have a waterbed in my ankle.
Then I realize what's happened: I've slipped because of my bullshit work shoes, a pair of wing tips that I'd bought for $2 at a Goodwill in Ashland, OR. They were really old; they had these old-fashioned steel heel guards instead of the plastic or rubber replaceable jobs you see today; a steel guard will protect the leather on your shoe a lot better than plastic or rubber; the only problem is that a chunk of metal on your heel is a pretty slippery affair. I used to think how funny it was that they were so slippery. I used to run down smooth-tiled halls and slide twenty feet, laughing like Shale.(Every morning I'd get off the subway in those shoes and walk my way through the lobby of 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza, skating along on the slick shiny floors all the way to the elevator that'd take me up to my office. I never figured that their slipperiness would fuck me up so bad.)
So anyway, I figure out that I've slipped and fallen because of my goddamn wing tips. I also figure out that there isn't much use in me trying to keep it going because I wouldn't be able to do anything besides embarrass myself. A ton of people are out on the sidewalk; everybody wooshing and whirring, all serious and excited, like fresh arrivals to an amusement park. I let 'em know that they're getting off easy this time; that it's my goddamn shoes that're to blame. "A simple twist of fate." I call them pussies; tell 'em to hit me in the face; tell 'em I can't say how good they are until they pop me one. There're no takers. I can't even see the blond guy any more; there are so many people. I turn and start walking away. I'm feeling shitty, unrequited, like a shaven lion with bird shit all over his back. My ankle is clicking like a cricket. I lurch off in search of the subway.
(The bar this happened at was the bar we went to where the bartender told us it was "Closed guys." It's right around where we found the Shale greeting cards. If you ever want to see it, it's the bar that appears in the opening to the David Letterman Show (which probably explains why it's such an asshole place). It's called the OLD TOWN BAR And the only reason I know about it is because I used to work right around the corner; I used to go there for lunch and have a hamburger and a couple of beers. I didn't even know that it was known for its status on the Letterman Show, my boss happened to tell me after he found out that I went there for an occasional burger and four-beer buzz. That was last year, when Ashley and I had first moved to New York. I went back there this year for the first time since then (rather I should say, the night we went there was the first time I had been there since last year). Anyway, the only reason I went back there was because of the A's. Last year I watched all the afternoon ALCS games there. The A's took apart the Bosox without any problem. I thought it'd be good karma for the A's if I did the same thing. So I went back to the OLD TOWN to watch the ALCS. I went there for hometown Oakland (I use to subscribe to the OAKLAND TRIBUNE solely because the A's beat writer, Kit Stier, Was head and shoulders above the CHRONICLE's; even though the CHRONICLE had a much better overall sports page. I guess my sacrifice paid off: no humiliating loss to a piece-of-shit NL team this year.)
The next morning I woke up and my ankle was the size of a football. Fuck work. Ashley demanded that I go to the emergency room. I told her it wasn't any big deal, that it just needed a little time to heal, but she was adamant and disgusted. So I hopped and hobbled my way up to Broadway to Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital. The first person I saw took one look at it and pronounced it broken: "No question," she said -- too much swelling. She was an internist; she told me to go to radiology and get an X-ray. I got the X-ray. After a two hour wait the verdict was in. -- No break. They gave me a pair of crutches and told me to go home and stay off of it. That was it -- no medication, no nothing. I crutched my way down the cold street.
Anyway, the whole reason I went into this was because I wanted to tell you that I now know what it feels like to walk around with a leg that's 68%. It's been over a month now and I still can't come anywhere close to running; -- it aches in the cold; it hurts like a bitch if I keep it in one position for too long; it wakes me up in the middle of the night. (I've fucked up my knees a couple of times, but never anything like this. I think I really tore a ligament bad, and the worse thing is that I'm not young and all-healing anymore. Oh well.)
Thanks for your letter, and I want to thank you for taking me out to dinner and bringing all the liquor that you did when you visited. (I have enjoyed the vodka.) Ashley has harvested a number of her plants. The stuff is quite good and there is plenty of it. Do you really want me to send it to Shale or should I send it to you? Get back in touch with me as to the answer to this question. -- We've got plenty and it's waiting here for you.
