Like Chronicle #58, the letter below is to addressed my wife's grandmother who lived in Joplin, Missouri. Though I didn't slather on the Tom Sawyer persona quite as thick in this one, it is still annoyingly present. What is worthwhile about the communique is its fairly disinterested description of my first career-track position, an entry-level position at the pseudo-prestigious Foundation Center.
The Foundation Center was a truly miserable place. Nothing in my six years at the university prepared me for the horror -- the pettiness, the hatred and bitterness -- of everyday workaday life in an office. Imagine Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944) and you get the idea of what I felt about the place. But none of that makes it into the letter to the grand dame. I obviously tried hard to keep an "Aw, shucks!" upbeat tone, right down to playing up the generosity of the poverty wages I earned.
Autumn 1988
Dear Esther,
I want to thank you for the nice letter you sent us. It arrived on election day as we marched off to vote. Thank you for the entertainment funds. They'll come in handy. Ashley has harvested a bushel of friends, quite nice people, in fact, and there always seems to be something astir on the weekends.
So how is life around Joplin these days? For my part, New York is always getting a little more like home. I've already developed a routine. Up at a quarter to seven, make my lunch, and out the door by a quarter to eight. I hit the subway and ride 150 blocks downtown. I arrive at work by 8:30 AM. Work is fine. I'm what they call an assistant editor at a place called the Foundation Center, which is a foundation set up by a lot of other foundations, like Ford and McCarthy and Mobil, to record and monitor how much money they donate and what kind of programs they fund. I work with IRS tax forms and computers, and I do a bit of proofreading. The office is on Fifth Avenue, but it's too far downtown, 15th Street, to be part of Midtown's glitz and luxury.
Manhattan is a big place, even though it really is small; it is only about fifteen miles long, and, at its fattest, five-miles wide (probably less total area than Ashland). I like it fine though, and I particularly like our neck of the woods, Washington Heights. It's almost all Hispanic, except for the hospital, medical and nursing Schools, psychiatric and neurological institutes. And even though there are a lot of drug dealers and nobody speaks English and a cop recently got killed up here, it has a peace and vitality and homeyness that is preferable to the "nicer" parts of the city.
The one big drawback about living in New York City is how expensive it is; but even in this, Ashley and I are doing okay. I bring home a pretty good entry-level salary, enough to keep food coming in and rent paid, and with what Ashley gets, we can pay the bills and live lean but with comfort.
I've got to thank you again for what you did for us this summer. You really did help us out. We had been on the road a long time and with a big load. Then we pulled into your driveway. You fed us, great coffeecake and eggs and bacon, and we got a good night's sleep, and everything was great. I'll never forget it.
Eric was a buddy of mine at Berkeley who went on to become a professor at a university in the Midwest. I think I saw him briefly only one time after I wrote this letter, number 18 from a collection of letters written during my first two years in New York City. Eric was competitive, and he was often critical. And believe me, I merited criticism. But I was also a loyal friend. In addition to being a full-time student, Eric was a house painter who did his own contracting on the side. When he got in a pinch he would often give me a call; and though I hated painting and didn't have a knack for it, I would always lend a hand. And when Eric needed a place to stay after graduating but before he left town for graduate school, I put him up in my apartment.
My girlfriend-soon-to-be-wife had moved out. And when that happened the dudes moved in. There was always baseball or football on the television and plenty of beer and food. We were passionate about the Bay Area teams -- the Oakland A's, San Francisco Giants and the 49ers.
The missive below was written during the painful game-five elimination of the Oakland A's by the despised Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1988 World Series, which would make it the night of October 20, 1988. There is also a description of a pre-gentrified Times Square. The brawl with the bartender alluded to briefly at the end of the letter is not the one described in letters nine and ten (which took place a year later when the A's were making their successful World Series run); this brawl took place at a hipster bar in the East Village, and I believe it is chronicled in a letter still to come. By the time the game is over and I am signing off I am thoroughly plastered.
It's ironic that at letter's end I apologize to Eric. Later on, when I was well clear of my wife, I came to the conclusion that there was a high probability that she and Eric had carried on a secret romance. Eric had always liked her, and there were small hints of intimacy. Toward the end of his days at Berkeley he started dating a woman whose appearance was glaringly similar to my wife's (mousy, Winona Ryder-ish). Her name, Emily (if my memory serves me), was even similar to Ashley's. It was all too weird to be a coincidence.
Autumn 1988
Well God damn it, I can't take it anymore. Game five and the A's are down by two already, and it's not even the bottom of the first. It's the 49ers syndrome all over. Look great! And then lose the big one. So the TV is on in the bedroom and I'm out here in the living room. I went to the refrigerator first, got the thirsty-two ouncer of Adolph, poured it out into a jar, and now I'm here waiting for some kind of appeasement. Needless to say, I was glad to hear from you. Just about to track you down via the proper channels and what you know? I got an honest-to-goodness epistle, complete with poetic waxing over the ontological chasm between the sexes. Good deal! Worklife in the big fat gray Apple is nothing to write about. There's no poetic ambrosia to feed on here, no heroism, no excitement, no candor; just a bunch of middle-aged women and degraded Yuppies riding the subway downtown to a numberless shithole office; they're as cold as vampires with the same grape-blue skin and purple lips and brown-bag eyes. -- A's scored one. I wonder what happened. I think Lansford did it. . . . . It's over, Mike Davis just hit a two-run homer off "Shit" Davis. I work in a place called the Foundation Center, which is a foundation set up by other foundations to record and publish relevant data, such as grants awarded, charitable programs, etc. My official title is Editorial Assistant, but what I am is a drone, a fucking Kafka bug/clerk that stares into a microfiche reader. The reader beams back tax forms in blue light, and I take cockroach hoofs and scratch pertinent digits in felt-tip on green-and-white-striped computer paper. The women are forgettable at best. All common and droopy and sullen, their sex organs so dried and withered from the lack of an earthly showering, from the dearth of a rough physical acquaintance, they're like January's fruit basket left out to be eaten the following June. The dudes don't qualify as such, just a bunch of gumpy, easy-come bastards ready to pretend they're not where they really are (that, or outright bitch queens, fat faggots, pert dandies; or, jaundiced, over-the-hill Jonathan-Demme-wanna-be Yuppies). Any way you look at it I don't win. I feel best about the city when I walk around by myself. I freelanced at Scholastic Magazines (a magazine for kids) when we first got to New York. I did research. So I got to go down to New York Public Library several times. The trip involved a sizeable stroll across 42nd St. The porno theaters are shining and the bloods are smoking crack on the sidewalk, and you're right up against some monkey-suited like it was Sunday-&-roses asshole, walking over to the eastside. City geography is a big deal here; I noticed that immediately. Everybody knows their NYC geography. Manhattan first, and then the other boroughs. You catch on as quick as you can.
Tony Phillips is up now, and I have an idea that it's quite late in the game. How could the A's lose? I said in the beginning that this Series was going to be diagnostic of my life because I had followed the A's so fervently before we left Berkeley. Every morning I would march down to the porch and pick up the Tribune (subscribed to only because I liked Kit Stier, who covered the A's). I would drag it back up the stairs and devour it over a couple cups of coffee. The A's began my day for three years, even before LaRussa; for three years I did this; sometimes in the morning, and sometimes I would save it for a turkey-sandwich lunch. I can remember like it was now when they got Henderson, Hassey, Welch, Hubbard, Parker, and Bailor. -- Parker just struck out in the bottom of the eighth. My heart feels like it is beating for the last time. I can remember McGwire's 49 home runs. I listened to a lot of games on the radio, and I know you did too. -- Plunk has been pulled. Well, I'm plenty drunk now. I'm on my fourth thirsty-two ouncer.
Eric, I'm so fucking drunk. I just want to apologize for that last portion of Berkeley. I was always fucking around. I would lie and say that I had to work on my paper. I should have been straight with you from the beginning. -- Hershiser struck out Phillips with a man on. Thee game is finally over. So if the A's are my destiny, I'm not doing so well. But women will always push you one way, and it's usually not the way that you're tending to go. But I do love Maura, believe it or not, and I certainly love Stacey. But most of all, I love Ashley. And I could never leave her, not for dynamite, or blood, or groceries, or beer. Do you remember that time at Kathy's? Smooching that Coors on her porch, fast. You stroking-out the shelves; me, rolling that dingy bedroom.
I've got a lot New York stories to tell, a fight with a bouncer, an evening of too much coke, etc. -- mostly due to Colum's girlfriend Terri -- but I will recapitulate later. I'm quitting my job in December.
I got to go to work tomorrow. But before that, do you remember that time we spent the night at your sister's house in Santa Cruz? The preseason game on the TV: we were eating Doritos; the 49ers were losing. I read e.e. cummings sitting on the toilet the next morning. The house was quiet with everyone still slumbering and outside the fog hung close to the ground. -- It was beautiful.
A cloud of woe. Returning on a Monday from Thanksgiving holiday this is what one finds at the office. People are unhappy. I am reminded of the Bukowski poem: "youth fenced in,/stabbed and shaven,/taught words/propped up/to die." Except that in my work situation (a union local) most are not young; a majority are over 50. In this environment there is a sense of being not only trapped but exhausted.
When extruded from the university and placed by a headhunter, who liked my blue suit of light wool, in a career track rat race job (at the Foundation Center on Fifth Avenue and 16th Street) I quickly realized this is where theological concepts of rebirth are hatched. My co-workers were miserable -- obsessed with eating, consumed by petty grievances, managed hierarchically, filled with regret. How else to digest this bilious daily fare other than by concocting an afterlife? The next life would have to be better.
