The Colt 45 Chronicle #63

We are approaching that time in the Pacific Northwest when one goes to bed with sunlight and wakes up with sunlight. I have windows that face north. Around the time of the NBA playoffs the earth has rotated far enough on its axis that I'm getting a shaft of direct sunlight into my cluttered studio at sunrise and at sunset. It is a strange time of year.

The letter below is another one of those beer-tear retrospectives that I sent off to my beloved friends back in the Bay Area telling them how much I missed them and how I had loved working in the library at U.C. Berkeley. To this day I still consider it the best job of my life. Often we would begin each morning, the students who staffed the special book search and retrieval department within the university's august Doe Library, at an espresso cafe that bordered the northside of campus. There we would drink cappuccino and eat pain au chocolat and decide who would tackle which branch libraries, some of us, usually Paul, reeking of tobacco smoke and alcohol from the previous night; others, of last night's sexual climax.

I could go on for a long time about various stories associated with my tenure at the library -- the people I worked with were family: we partied together, went on outings together; we basically lived together -- but I want to get out on a long run this morning while I still have the mojo to do it. So I am going to cut it short and mention only the time that Paul and I went out together -- we were usually paired up -- on a book retrieval run that hit the branch libraries on the westside of campus and the little golf-cart-sized delivery truck we traveled the campus in tipped over. It tipped over because Paul and I entertained ourselves during the completion of our route by looking for "jumps" we could careen over in the old, "county-orange"-colored golf-cart-sized delivery vehicle. (Imagine an old steel golf cart with a metal canopy soldered on the back.) The best jumps -- high curbs or small embankments or other opportunities offered by paved hilly terrain -- were found on the eastside of campus.

But on this particular day we were on the far west end, near Edwards Track and Field Stadium. Paul, who always drove, took us as fast as the vehicle could motor up the drive that led beneath the stadium seats and then he cranked the wheel sharply and drove us off the edge. The vehicle couldn't taken the sharp turn and tipped over. The cab of the vehicle was open -- no doors. So I slid out immediately as soon as the vehicle tipped, Paul sliding right behind me. But like something out of the Iliad, I landed on my feet and caught hold of a bar on the cab and held up the vehicle and walked it upright again.

Paul slammed back in the driver's seat looking a little shaken. I was sort of surprised. The vehicle was at least 500 lbs. I think we got lucky; I think I caught it right when it was at the zenith of going all the way over, and by propping it up for those several steps I bought us some time for gravity to come to our aid.

Autumn 1988

You got to love them A's. By the the time you guys get this little missile it'll already be game four, and the Dodgers'll be fighting for their stinking Tim Leary lives. Wow! How about that review of the Praise Jockeys in the VILLAGE VOICE? I tacked it up on our wall for good luck and good measure. This week there is an article by Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon; it's kinda nice; it made me feel how much I've been passed by by life. But hope springs with a cup of coffee in the morning, and the daydreams shoot out of my head. Unfortunately they evaporate as soon as I step into the office, refusing to return until the next morning. I think about California, about going back to school, about slaughtering everyone at work with a shotgun, about what I got to read, about Kim Gordon meeting me and falling in love, and on and on.

Ashley is studying hard for midterms, going to the library, staying up late and waking up the same. I watch TV, the Olympics, the news, the Championship Series, football (I've pretty much given up on the 49ers), and I drink beer. I read on the weekends. I do actually have a small but nonetheless wonderful storehouse of stories to relate -- drunkenness, a brawl with a big asshole bouncer, etc. -- but I feel either too self-conscious or overwrought to relate them. Suffice it to say that in all the cryptically mentioned above I upheld East Bay honor and integrity.

In the mind's eye I am always comparing every work scenario with the Baker scene, and, well, you know, beer tears and all, nothing ever stacks up. That long old library table that we all sat up at, jawing away, like a commercial, like accident was a necessity (there's a Derrideanism); the two-hour coffee breaks; the golf carts, running them into the side of a building or a metal pillar; Sue Gallup, who you wanted to pistol whip with a machete; Greg Olin, and his insight into the Transcendentalists; me, leaving freshly-purchased vinyl albums in the sun; Dan Tirtawatanata; Jefferson and the MEMBERS ONLY jacket. it all adds up -- and that was only one generation, one layer. The real big hitters were you guys, and Ben, and Sloper, and Clanon and Pomerantz. But as you can tell, this is jaundiced, beer jaundice, and I hope you guys don't mind it.  We all need a golden age, and we need it over and over again, and this was one of mine, and we shared it. And I never stop telling people that you guys changed my life, and that that time charged my life (Oh, boy, does this sound maudlin, and I hope by calling attention to it, I am not somehow ruining it.) But I'm a firm believer in delivering credit where credit is due. So I sit here, my weenie a sow's tail for the brew's release, puffing on the last bit of a Te Amo cigar before Ashley comes home to reprove me, and all I can think is that I really love you, Oliver and Lyn.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #13

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.

Selectric II Style

At my local union's political action committee meeting last night not one person there knew what I was talking about when I said that the look I was going for in our new newsletter was an IBM Selectric II look -- a dark Courier font in 12-point type with only underscoring for emphasis; a pre-digital look, like an old Kiplinger Letter (see below). People looked back at me with empty stares. Granted almost everyone at the table was in his or her twenties or thirties. But there was an organizer who is older than I am and she had no idea what a Selectric II was. How could that be? And in an office workers union! The IBM Selectric and Selectric II were the defining tools of the secretarial trade for a long time. It was the electric typewriter I used at my first paying job, a book retrieval service located on the third floor of U.C. Berkeley's fort-like Doe Library. I was surprised, really, that no one knew what an IBM Selectric II was.