The Colt 45 Chronicle #72

A strange Sunday so far. Very quiet for a summer weekend. I woke early to do two loads of laundry and then returned to bed once the clothes were folded and put away. It is approaching 10:30 AM and the sun is shining but the neighborhood still slumbers. Maybe, like me, people had difficulty sleeping last night.

Friday on the train home after work Seahawks fans were on their way to the preseason home opener. Spirits were high and I was able to engage in some decent football talk with educated students of the game. There is a great deal of expectation of a Super Bowl repeat.

The letter below, what I recall of it, is that I actually spent some time putting it together. Usually I would knock out a letter in one sitting with the help of three quarts of beer, two of which were malt liquor. Now and then a letter would take two sittings, if I was working on relating a big event, like a bar brawl.

This one, addressed to my friend Mark, was a "Goodbye to all that," a declaration that it was time to put schoolboy ways behind us and get down to business. The text in caps was taken from letters Mark had written to me. I wanted to incorporate his words as a way to communicate that these letters were collaborative. We both wanted to write. But we were both struggling to figure out how that could be done outside the confines of academia.

The letter relates an experience of being stoned on mushrooms in a men's room of a bar on the Upper Westside of Manhattan and trying to remember to remember. What I remember now 25 years later is that the bouncer did not appreciate that my friend Antony and I were smoking cigars. When he walked by our table he truculently, with a plastic pub menu, scrapped the ash off our tabletop onto the floor. He was hoping, I think, that one of us, in our drunken and tripping state, would say something to him, which would then allow him to escort us outside, possibly with a beating included. I did not take the bait. That night I displayed a lot of self-control. Maybe it was the mushrooms.

If you have sampled any of these letters you know that there are certain repetitions, obligatory passages that each new letter must revisit. Foremost, is a golden-hued recollection of the Berkeley high life, followed close behind by a hosanna to Jack Kerouac.

Winter 1989

Here it is, the Mendoza oeuvre.

Six-months old (the space between a cricket's legs, which still feels pretty damn wide and pretty damn deep from where I sit -- oceanic, I guess). Oh, well. Half a year of waxin' and pissin' waiting for something wonderful to happen -- to us -- to transform us. The grand transformation: that's what the letters, our letters, are all about: waiting for it, all the time, palms under thighs on bus bench, head cocked to the left looking down Oak Street, or Haight Street, or 14th Street, or 42nd Street for bus or subway train to come and take us out over the Bay or East River (not over to Oakland or Queens, mind you; just over, over, over a body of water, like the Genesis image of God moving upon the face of the deep before the earth's creation). But the problem here is that heroic Cassady is not behind the wheel/controls of bus/subway. No, nobody's there. In fact, plastered on bus/subway's broad front is huge contoured plastic replica of a leering simpering Henry Duke face . . . WOULDN'T IT BE LOVELY THOUGH IF THE MAN MOST WONDERFUL WERE TO FLY SPREAD-EAGLE ACROSS THE BATTLEFIELD OF THE NATION, BRAVING CERTAIN DEATH FOR THE PRIZE THAT IS YOUR WARM CAVERNOUS MOUTH.

REGRETTING IN THE FROST OF TOMORROW . . . our fate.

Right before Ashley and I left California for New York I gave you my copy of Conrad's The Shadow-Line, jotting down on a blank page something about how I thought the mystery of manhood was in learning to give up dreams. I knew when I wrote it that I was right. You were there. You had stopped by with a six of Coors and a pint of tequila. The place was full of boxes. I was patching holes in the walls left by bookcases we had taken down. I've wondered a lot since then about the truth of that statement. Most of the time -- after I got to New York and during my worklife here -- I thought that it was full of shit; I thought everything came down to dreams, that the only way to change a stinking life was to dream out of it. But in too many ways dreams really boil down to this:  . . . HE SMILES TO HIMSELF IN THE MIRROR. Fortunately, now I know, again, what I meant about giving up dreams. Giving up dreams doesn't necessarily mean stoicism, a broken and self-abnegating capitulation to dolorous moils and toils . . . IT'S UGLY BEING SINGLE, YOU HAVE TO PUT UP WITH SHIT LIKE THIS; it isn't the same as coming home after a work day, yanking the TV on, and then settling for bed-- in one big sumptuous and ill-defined motion . . . WHERE THE SUN NEVER SHINES, THE SUN IS NEVER MISSED. Giving up dreams is going forward, the power of a line of flight: Al Davis' "Just win, baby"; manliness, without all the parochial mindedness of macho squalor. Energy, being up, taking it all on, "Out of idolatry and into action," -- Captain A . . . READY TO ROLL UP YOUR SLEEVES AND BITE THE DAY'S DUST IN RINGSIDE AMERICA. -- Power, a constant, ever-present revolution: "The question of the revolution's future is a bad one, because, as long as it is posed there are going to be those who will not become revolutionaries. This is precisely why it is done: to prevent the becoming-revolutionary of people everywhere and at every level."

A month ago, Terri, Antony and I went out into the inky blue New York night, very cold, and ate mushrooms which taste peculiarly like store-bought produce. We drank a lot of beer during the course of the evening. At one point, standing mushroom bedazzled in the bathroom of a 100th Street bar, everything aglow in grapefruit pink, I found myself caught in the effort of memory: of trying to mentally inscribe the event as I was experiencing it just then so I could recall it in the future. But when I did this, when I tried to force myself to remember what it was I was doing exactly at that moment, I forgot what I was trying to remember because in engaging myself in the act of purposeful remembrance I was no longer doing what it was that I wanted to remember. -- All of which distracted me from what I was thinking about before I headed into the pisser -- which was: How can we write after Kerouac? A guy who thought about everything in terms of writing, in terms of being written down, to be writ: anything, everything, like the glop glop of mundane memories silent inside heads, my head, like the memory of Saturday afternoon suns in Berkeley kitchens baking lasagna . . . A SLOW-PACED AFTERNOON OF EXTENDED STAYS ON THE SHITTER, STINKY , WELL-CRAFTED FARTS AND TRIPS TO THE MIRROR TO CHECK OUT MY SHINER; that is as good and as beautiful and as ennobling as any story that life has to offer. Kerouac upped the ante so fucking high he cleared the table, of Lawrence and Hardy, and anyone else esteemed in my mind's eye. So anyway, that's what got me involved in he befuddled memorizing careening latrine confusion: the importance of memory, the godliness of the rememberer.

What the fuck gives then? What are we waiting for? Let's give up our dreams! Let's remember! -- About the gray Berkeley Friday when we drank coffee at Sufficient Grounds (like all our Friday mornings began: 11 o'clock AM, downing mugs and ready for the luminescent impending debauchery stardom of a promise-ridden Friday night in collegetown (which to us at the time was not collegetown, but the world (like Homer's world: open, bold, exciting, new, enchanting -- to be conquered, to be fought for and won, like Helen or the grace of Athena). Coffee buzzing in our heads, the first thing we'd think of was beer, a few drinks to put us in touch with the place that we wanted to be. But we were learned -- a little, a very little -- in the art of self-control; so we'd keep each other in check while we studied (read, which now is a luxury) for approximately forty minutes . . . . . . . . 

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 #65

I skimmed this letter several times and was unable to identify to whom it is addressed. Then I started re-typing it, and in the fourth paragraph I notice that I name the addressee. 

Jesse was my wife's cousin, a gentle, intelligent young man a few years my senior. He was an electrical engineer, I believe; either that, or an architect (I can't remember). He grew up in Boston and went to university on the East Coast. He then secured employment in the Bay Area. So by the time his cousin and I were relocating to New York City, he was trading places with us on the West Coast.

Jesse was what you would call a nerd, but a nerd who enjoyed loud Punk music, hot food, and European sports cars. And Jesse was a nerd who liked to drink. We shared several male-bonding experiences, one of which was getting his turbocharged Audi stuck on a snowdrift driving in the mountains of Southern Oregon. As the December light began to fade and we were apprehensively mulling over a nighttime hike of many miles and many hours, a Ford Bronco barreled around the bend and saved the day.

I assume a tone here of masculine truculence, something I affected regularly, fancying myself as I did a street fighter and Lothario. It is a bore. Let me apologize up front.

But these old letters, snatched as they were out of storage during a time of great emotional need -- halftime of the Seahawks 2012 season playoff elimination in Atlanta -- are a testament to a young man's youth, and part of their bounty is the realization that I have never really transcended that level of maturation. For all his bravado and victim complex, that youth is who I remain at the age of 50.

A couple housekeeping items: At the writing of this letter, my first fall out of class since I was old enough to walk, I still had not read any Jack Kerouac. Soon I would ingest On the Road, followed over the next several years by the rest of Kerouac's writings, leaving me something of a Kerouac aficionado. And the last line of this epistle -- "[New York City is] not a place for young people." -- I get all wrong. New York City is the perfect place for a young person. It provides a newly-minted adult the chance to experience the Divine Comedy while his liver is still fresh, his limbs strong and his heart pure.

Autumn 1988 

What the fuck are you doing in the South Bay? Shit, man, you might as well be in L.A., sucking up McDonald's and Wendy's, staring at big lawns and stultified faces. "Go for the Gold" -- get some of that triple-hot chili pepper sauce, swig down a few shots of it, and then march north, either 101 or 880, it don't make any difference. Anyway, I don't know what I'm talking about.

Your primary motivation has got to be hooking up with Ms. Right. Finding that Aphrodite freshly from Olympus dropped, ambrosia on her lips, the one who is going to wash away all worry. She could be right around the next suburban corner, but I doubt it. Collegetown honey is what you're looking for. The 'Furds on the Palo Alto farm are after Average Joe (blank stare and bare horizons) and that you ain't, man. You need something better, something up north, something bright like the star. You gotta remember cigar smoking Sigmund's message about how important Mom and Sis are in mapping your feminine course. And you got some high-class, anti-average geography there, my friend. So shoot for the fucking stars. In the meantime, of course, you could eat a little junk food, take Suzie for a few Coronas and lime slices at the local Carlos Murphy's. The problem here is that you're not like that. You're a noble beast of the old world. Monogamy is the name of your game; so you just might get strapped to some donkey. Up north you'll find that bike-riding, salsa-pounding, shirt-sewing lady you're looking for. Berkeley is an incredible place, like no other; but you know that.

Anyway, sorry for the homesick onslaught. New York is everything you said it'd be -- basically pretty fucking miserable. Subways are great but stink to high heaven and are plenty crowded. I'm working as an assistant editor at a place called the Foundation Center, a foundation set up by other foundations to record and make available all relevant data to the general public. This is strictly a no-growth, no-exit nightmare. Women old enough to be my mother, women who dream about the salads at McDonald's -- they stink up the place. The upper echelon men are genderless boobs -- near-faggot fops -- who also stink up the place. And among all this stench I don't even have the consolation of a healthy income. I'm taking home a pauper's 1.1K a month, which, needless to say, makes toiling 9-to-5 just about a stupidity. New York does have energy though. I like 42nd Street, with all the porno theaters and crack smokers. You walk five blocks checking that out, and boom! You're at New York Public Library (on Fifth Avenue), with the lions and a thousand people eating lunch on its steps. The East Village is something, like Rome two centuries late(r); a lot of drug-taking and crest-fallen youth trying so hard to discover that pasture in the sun it's like going in and partying with a bunch of corpses at a morgue. You get a real drunken edge. Our immediate neighborhood is more like Mexico City than any place in the United States. Great fried food but you get the distinct feeling that you're not on Manhattan (which I like).

I dream about the West, about getting back home. I hate to say it, but people are generally nicer out there. Koch is a fucking homo and everybody knows it. After city and state sales tax, not to mention the general inflatedness of all consumer products here, you're talking about a dollar worth 89 cents. Buying a six pack of talls is like getting the cash together to make a down payment on a house. Shit, California is Eden, and I'm Adam, after the apple and the suit of clothes, sent off somewhere to the east. You made the right call, Jesse, the future is where the sun sets. I'm just hoping that this retrograde motion will be worth something in the future. I just want to be like Janet Evans and say, "There's no substitute for hard work." And then win the gold. But it seems like there's always an excuse. At Berkeley, it was all my friends; here, it's my bullshit job. But in the next place it'll be a new thing. When does the myth of total freedom ever get realized? Kerouac has always, secretly, been my hero without ever having read a single word he's written. Hitting the road, getting gone, doing what you've always felt you should do. Everybody wants to be famous, to have their breath or image recorded for posterity, to be seen on screen, like Mickey Rourke or Madonna, but I don't ever admit it. Coming here, seeing all the secretaries dying on the subway -- women who were once young and beautiful and expectant of life, but who now, beige and blue, are filled with hate and fatigue -- made me cash in the big NYC chip. This is not the place to be. There's something about the West, I don't know what, that excuses it from the kind of fatigue and misery and hopelessness that is trademark here. Here, you have to pay the piper. It's not a place for young people.

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

Hippies vs. Punks: Fly Like an Eagle 1976

The sunshine patriots of 1976 celebrated the United States Bicentennial by slathering themselves in light California rock. One of These Nights (1975) by the Eagles, Frampton Comes Alive! (1976), Fleetwood Mac (1975), Steve Miller Band's Fly Like an Eagle (1976) all were recorded in California and all charted on the Billboard's Year-End Hot 100 singles for 1976.

Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future
Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future

I want to fly like an eagle
To the sea
Fly like an eagle
Let my spirit carry me
I want to fly like an eagle
Till I'm free
Oh, Lord, through the revolution

Feed the babies
Who don't have enough to eat
Shoe the children
With no shoes on their feet
House the people
Livin' in the street
Oh, oh, there's a solution

I want to fly like an eagle
To the sea
Fly like an eagle
Let my spirit carry me
I want to fly like an eagle
Till I'm free
Fly through the revolution

Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future
Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future
Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future
Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future

I want to fly like an eagle
To the sea
Fly like an eagle
Let my spirit carry me
I want to fly like an eagle
Till I'm free
Fly through the revolution

Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future
Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future

The image of a bird flying to the sea is likely lifted from the powerful ending to Visions of Cody, Kerouac's source book for On the Road (1957). If there is a Book of Genesis for the counter culture it is On the Road. And if there is a film version of this Hippie Book of Genesis it is Easy Rider (1969).

And what is the philosophical underpinning of both On the Road and Easy Rider? Man understands -- Man has the ability to know -- time. As the Neal Cassady character Dean Moriarty says in On the Road, "Everything is fine, God exists, we know time. Everything since the Greeks has been predicated wrong. You can't make it with geometry and geometrical systems of thinking. It's all this!"

What's On the Road about? It's about becoming free, pursuing one's path aimlessly -- time unmarked and unbound from work and family and study and all expectations other than the adventure at hand. In other words, a trip to Mexico. What's Easy Rider about? Making one big cocaine score in Mexico, selling it to Phil Spector, and then heading out on the road to Mardi Gras.

Before Wyatt (a.k.a., Captain America) and Billy take off on their motorcycles, Captain America pulls off his wristwatch and tosses it on the ground. Heroes don't do clocks. Then at the end, right before Captain America and Billy are shotgunned by the rednecks, Wyatt says, "We blew it!" What does Captain American mean? He's responding to Billy's gleeful prattle about being rich and retiring to Florida; Captain America realizes that their entire enterprise was merely a reaffirmation of the rat race and the equation of time and money. Make a pile of loot and retire to Florida. Easy Rider as a film version of the Hippie Book of Genesis is a refutation of Founding Father Ben Franklin's "Time is money."

Fly Like an Eagle had three top ten hits: "Take the Money and Run," "Rock'n Me" and "Fly Like an Eagle" (which though released as a single at the end of 1976, didn't chart until March of the following year). Go into any hardware store or walk onto any construction site in North America on any given day and chances are that you'll hear Tea Party politics and classic rock radio; and on that radio "Fly Like an Eagle" will be playing. Like the hackneyed insect trapped in prehistoric amber, Time keeps on slippin', slippin' slippin' into the past.

The past is 1976. Gerald Ford is on his way out, having successfully managed the aftermath of the Watergate crisis with his controversial presidential pardon of Richard Nixon as well as having shrewdly got out front of the Church Committee and Nedzi/Pike Committee with his Rockefeller Commission and thereby arguably lessening some of the public outrage over revelations of the nefarious aspects of American Empire.

This was a moment of structural weakness for the Leviathan, known in Iran as Great Satan. But the Hippies were no longer in any mood to confront "The Man." They elected an evangelizing peanut farmer from Plains, GA who promised them clean government but who ended up bequeathing us our current corrupt and exhausted neoliberal paradigm, hallmarks of which are rule by and for the 1%, government gridlock and permanent military occupation of the Persian Gulf (Carter Doctrine).

So much promise evaporated between 1975 and 1980. We went from Empire exposed and on the defensive to Empire reborn. The Hippies could have done something. But they didn't; they were tired. They were content listening to their sun-drenched California rock, safe in suburbs and exurbs with their good dope and coke. The horizon was clear. The mists of the Aquarian Age had finally, after more than a decade, burned off. In 1976 things seemed, for the moment at least, peaceful, hopeful, new. Almost perfect. It's no wonder that the Hippies decided to kick back, enjoy the clear weather and "fly like an eagle to the sea" (and it's no coincidence that this is also a critical year for the Punks).

Today, more than 35 years later, we have lost touch with the message of "Fly Like an Eagle," even as it is pooped anew endlessly out of countless speakers across our broad continent. It is a radical message. Homo sapiens sapiens is a creature capable of knowing time -- a ghost trapped in the present, ruled by force, but somehow forever slippin' into the future.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #1

Prior to the Internet communication at a distance was for most either telephonic or epistolary. Since coast-to-coast calls were pricey, and because I liked to drink and type, I preferred writing letters.

My ex-wife and I moved to New York City in the summer of 1988 so she could attend medical school. We drove across the continent in a 1971 VW bus, leaving Berkeley at the end of July and stopping off in Reno to get married in a commercial wedding chapel; we did this in order to qualify for the married student housing provided by Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.

While she was in class during the day I worked a series of dead-end clerical jobs downtown. In the evenings she would hit the textbooks sitting at her big metal desk in one corner of the living room and I would sit not too far away in front of an AT&T personal computer and drink beer and type letters (using WordPerfect word-processing software) to friends on the West Coast.

It was an interesting time politically and socially in the city. Mayor Koch held shrill, haranguing press conferences that seemed to be on the TV local news every night. I had never seen anything like it. Crack cocaine, which had started on the West Coast, was beginning to flourish in Upper Manhattan.

The complex of buildings which made up the medical school spread west from Broadway down to Riverside Drive and the Henry Hudson Parkway; it was a relatively safe area compared to other parts of Washington Heights.

There was a large men's shelter on 168th Street across from the Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital emergency room. One evening our first summer in Manhattan when we were returning from downtown with some good friends who were visiting from Berkeley we came upon a guy stretched out flat on his back on the sidewalk in front of the men's shelter a big knot the size of large egg growing out of the top of his forehead just like you see in old Warner Brothers cartoons. His pants pockets were turned inside out and he was moaning. I remember thinking, "Oh, this is what is normal here." I guess it was a Friday, a payday, and this guy, an older black man, had been rolled. Someone ran across the street to the ER to get help.

By the time I typed the epistle below to my friend back in Oakland I had been a year and a half in New York City. I was an old salty dog compared to the newlywed who had arrived with his bride in a beat-up Volkswagen with a "The Strength of the Brave is the Tribe" bumper sticker. Koch was gone, dethroned by David Dinkins in a bitter campaign.

Why post old letters? What's the point? I think there is a historical value, not only to provide social insight into what life was like before the advent of the World Wide Web but also as a project of personal illumination; it was a prime motivator to start a blog in the first place, knowing I had all these heartfelt missives of a young man's first contact with the megalopolis. So bear with me.

I had a bad habit of not dating my letters. When my wife and I split and she got the computer I had the good sense to print hard copies of all my correspondence; I scribbled in pencil on top of each letter the approximate time that it was written. The one below reads "Winter 1990." If my memory serves me it was late January, the week leading up to the Super Bowl in New Orleans. How fitting. As you can see I was enamored, as are most schoolboys and hipsters, with Jack Kerouac.

Winter 1990

Ben,

Thanks for the parcel! I just polished it off tonight -- plenty good. As it turns out, Ginsberg's introduction to my McGraw-Hill paperback edition of VISIONS OF CODY, entitled "The Great Remember," is a cleaned up cut down and commercialized rendering of THE VISIONS OF THE GREAT REMEMBERER.

I liked the introduction a lot, rereading it twice; but, needless to say, it doesn't come close to doing the things that the Denver-set (early 70s Ginsberg going back to old haunts of the late 40s, all torn down) ampersand-ridden plaintively analytic prosepoesy original does; -- in particular, the last two pages: a discription of the 1967 meeting between Kerouac Cassady Kesey and the Merry Pranksters "all together at last under unofficial mock but real Klieg Lights with microphone reverb feedback wires snaking all over the electrified household living room floor 86th St. upper east side -- An American Flag draped over the couch, on which shocked Jack refused to sit -- Kesey respectful welcoming & silent, fatherly timid host, myself marveling and sad, it was all out of my hands now, History was even out of Jack's hands now, he'd already written it 15 years before, he could only watch hopelessly one of his more magically colored prophecy shows, the Hope Show of Ghost Wisdoms made Modern Chemical & Mechanic, in this Kali Yuga, he knew the worser death gloom to come, already on him in his alcohol ridden trembling no longer sexually tender looking corpus" wow! that says it all. But Ginsberg doesn't stop there; he goes on to talk about the last words of VISIONS OF CODY -- "Adios, King." -- (the ending of VISIONS OF CODY is probably the greatest ending of any book I've ever read; if you'd permit me the last three sentences: "Goodbye Cody -- your lips in your moments of self-possessed thought and new found responsible goodness are as silent, make as least a noise, and mystify with sense in nature like the light of an automobile reflecting from the shiny silverpaint of a sidewalk tank this very instant, as silent and all this, as a bird crossing the dawn in search of the mountain cross and the sea beyond the city at the end of the land. Adios,  you who watched the sun go down, at the rail, by my side, smiling -- Adios, King." Ouch, it makes me cry; it makes me feel proud for having chosen such a true hero to be my hero). And, once again, Ginsberg is right on top of it(he really must've loved him) and says exactly what should be said, namely, "'Adios King!' . . . a nameless highest Perfect wisdom, a humility in the face of 'the necessary blankness of men' in hopeless America or hopeless World, or Hopeless Time Heaven  . . . a compassionate farewell to Love & the Companion" -- yep, that's it. Thanks again Ben.

The letters included in THE VISIONS OF THE GREAT REMEMBERER are pretty good too. Ginsberg's wordy intellectual bitchy 1947 ultimatum love letter to heterosexually-prone Cassady is something else (embarrassing) . Cassady's letters, a total of four, are better -- more informative; a lot of 'em are about
the difficulty he has with writing and about his mind becoming empty from smoking too much weed; in the last letter, written in 1952, he waxes about the sane staid masculine beauty of Kerouac, something I'm not used to, seeing it's usually Kerouac who's saying it about Cassady.

Well, let's see, what's new to report. -- I quit my job two weeks ago, and Colum, who has been around for most of January, left for Guatemala on Monday, and shit I guess the 49ers are buying beers on Bourbon Street. (I wouldn't mind buying a beer for Terry Bradshaw; he's absolutely right -- fuck Elway, he's a fucking shit-assed brat sequestered and protected in Ginsberg's aptly perceived sterile and commercial war-machine Denver (it's true, I've driven through Denver, right through, and you know where I ended up? at the gates of a big military base -- big cyclone barbwire fence -- that borders the suburbs, in fact the suburbs blend into the military base, very scary; I was promptly told by a fatigued and helmeted pimple-faced corporal to turn my Volks around and go back whence I came); and I was thinking last night while watching the 11 o'clock news that if you had to characterize Bradshaw's heart/soul it'd be a football field, while if you had to do the same for Elway it'd be an egg carton -- really, I mean come on, at least Bradshaw, a four-rin€ged hall of famer who has nothing to gain and everything to lose (i.e., his CBS job) by shooting off his mouth, has the juevos to get drunk and speak his honest mind, giving the reporters something real to talk about: that there's no comparison between a Montana and an Elway, that it's all a con job, that Elway is not fit to lace Montana's cleats. 'Nuff said. It'll all be old news by the time you get this anyway. (Niners over Denver 37-12, my prediction; and I'm mailing this tomorrow, the 26th, so it's on the up and up.)

The night of the day after I quit my job I got on the A train at West 4th Street. Colum and I had been at a boring bar on Bleecker Street. Colum had had two beers -- a Molson and a Becks -- I had had a Guinness Stout and a Jack Daniels. I got on the uptown A and Colum was over on the other side of the track getting on the downtown A. At 14th street a guy got on, a kid, probably about 20 years of age, blood spots on his dirty warm-up pants and grease under his fingernails. I thought I recognized him from somewhere before, maybe a long lost cousin: thick brown-blond hair complete with sprinkles of dirt pebbles and crums from the hot dog bun. He sat down next to me, right next to me -- on purpose, I thoug€ht. The train shook uptown. He was right next to me; I felt him there --a young tough, a white hispanic cousin; I loved him.
At 81st street he asked for the time. I told him, coldly. He was warm, but I was cold.

At 125th Street he pulled a thick gold chain out of his parka pocket, a gold pendant was attached to it; he turned and asked me if I thought the pendant was gold. I told him, "I don't know. Is it heavy?"

"Why, is gold supposed to be heavy?"

"Yeah."

He moved the necklace up and down in his upturned palm.

"I thought gold was soft and light."

He handed it over to me; it was an ugly barbaric fucking butter yellow rope; I took it and said, "No, soft and
heavy."

I lifted it a few times and then told him, "The chain's probably gold, but I doubt this is," pointing to the pendant.

"Really? I thought gold was supposed to be light," he repeated.

"I don't think so. But I guess I can't really say for sure."

At that point he dropped his handsome young urban elf jaw down to my left hand and the wedding band thereon. All of sudden I started to worry that he was going to roll me for my ring (ugh, small petty refractory city-dwelling paranoia rearing its knobby head), that the necklace chat was just a set up to get me comfortable so that he could bonk me on the skull and run off with the goods. But I decided that I'd rather do battle with a long lost cousin (I was bigger and feeling surly with bourbon on breath and under brow, though weapons hidden in his parka weren't out of the question) than cower to my own inner illnesses.

So I took off my wedding ring and said, "I don't know; this is gold, but it's too small for me to tell whether it feels heavy for its size."

"How much did it cost you?" 

"Sixty I think."

"Something like that must have a lot of personal value though."

"Sure."

And that was it; we were already at 168th street. Both of us got out. He gave me a respectful "Take care," and I returned him a dutiful "You too."

I loved him because he was me. All that fear and for what? Nothing; it was just me. At least I had given him/myself some hardheart advice though when I admitted that I just didn't know (which is the hardest thing to admit to anyone, anytime, anywhere).

I left the subway station and walked home down deserted inky streets, rats whispering in shadows.

Earlier that evening I had heard a fat woman mumble over a platter of chicken tandoori that "It's not a question of craving, it's a question of time." At first I'd thought that she was discoursing on artistic production or philosophical ontology but then I figured out that what she was really talking about was dieting. Oh my gosh, it's all the same.