The Colt 45 Chronicle #43

This letter, number 43 from a collection that I retrieved from a storage space during halftime of last January's Seattle Seahawks playoff elimination in Atlanta, was written to a professor of mine for whom I had worked as a reader in a philosophy of history course. 

Arthur Quinn was the top professor in my department. He was there to write books, of which he published many, and do research. But he was also a standout lecturer, a winner of the university's Distinguished Teaching Award. My buddies and I looked up to him. The rumor was that he had played professional baseball in the Minnesota Twins farm system. Often you could find him playing an aggressive game of tennis on the courts near Edwards Stadium. He was a catholic and a family man with a attractive wife and handsome children. He was smart of course, but he was also kind and lively and he didn't tolerate bullshitters. I remember him just blowing up some guy who was reading a newspaper in class one morning. Art Quinn was the guy who every aspiring academic, like myself, wanted to be.

I think I wrote him a total of three letters -- I had to be careful: I didn't want to set off a volatile reaction to bullshit -- and the short one below was the first. I was suffering from the unexpected loss of the powerhouse Oakland A's to the weak-hitting Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1988 World Series; that, and I was quickly understanding what a wasteland the rat race offered.

Autumn 1988

You've got to die for your team. And I did. I sat there in NYC and spat blood back at the TV screen, blood that came from the heart. To see Canseco and Lansford and Henderson and McGwire whiff one after the other after the next was enough to ring my soul with a thousand LA tattoos. My only wish would be that big tragedies really do shoot off on the vault of heaven, that there's something that makes the big tragedy big, that separates it from every day, from all that quotidian waking-up-while-it's-still-too-dark-to-go-to-work suffering. But I suspect, as every young man must come to suspect, that there is no difference.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #19

This letter, number 19, describes the morning after the letter, number 18, that I posted last week about the powerhouse Oakland A's -- my team! -- improbably dropping the 1988 World Series in five games to the weak-hitting Los Angeles Dodgers. At this point, as a young man in my early 20s, I had yet to accept that the office is a place where one must always practice subterfuge and exhibit blandness. I was still under the impression that one can now and then be oneself.

I worked, out of necessity, through college. But this was work grading papers for professors or in the library with other students or on summer construction jobs that I knew would end soon. I was unprepared for the insanity -- the total war -- of full-time office work in a metropolis; in particular, the large number of enormously unhappy, dangerously toxic menopausal women and neutered men who seemed eager to pounce and fuck a guy up. This missive, I believe but cannot be sure, was written to my girlfriend Stacey (who I had broken up with that summer right before getting married en route to New York City).

Autumn 1988

I'm sorry. It seems like a million years since I talked to you last, or at least a gap of time significant enough to constitute a void in my small head. I tried calling last Friday, the 15th, but you weren't there -- in Berkeley the person said. I don't know what to say. The days get smaller and smaller. I dream on the subway, and that's it. But now that the A's blew it and baseball is over with for another six months, maybe I can get back to some serious thinking in the evenings. The other thing is that I'm working another smaller job on the side; doing some freelance copy editing for Terri's dad (Colum's girlfriend's dad). I was still drunk (same old story, huh?) when I went into the office this morning at 8:30, the Dodgers had won the series eight hours earlier, and I was burning bright, the high-quality wordshit rolling off my tongue. And here I was having to waste my poetry on these stiffs. One particular dullard unknowingly approached me so as to mutter one of those saccharine insincere howdoyado's. I honestly greeted her, embraced her full in the face with eyes that told her of my suffering. I described to her the pain involved in living for a team for a long stretch of time, in going to the games and reading the newspaper and listening to the radio, and then having that team suffer defeat. -- To lose; and this after I had proclaimed, before the Series began, that the fate of the A's would be my fate. She stood there looking seasick, or like she was trying to take a big shit. And then she said, "Okay," and walked off to the coat room. I said softly, "'Okay'? What the fuck does that mean?" I had spoken to her from a place of music and bliss and direction. All wasted, like shouting into a plastic garbage bag. The day dragged on. The alcohol finally burned out of my chest. And I wished it hadn't. When I went outside for a lunch break the sky was wet and it look like it was seven o'clock in the evening. I was beat, burnt, alone, feeling shitty about not talking to you. I walked around looking for this one particular deli where a coworker wanted me to get him a sandwich. I found it after fifteen minutes.

What are you doing now? It's been so fucking long it's almost a foreign language. I know you're probably getting tired of these letters. I probably would be. But they're all I have. Very pitiful indeed. I'm no longer the California sunshine hardcore Berkeley book boy. I'm gray and subway and defeated; a money-earner, and subsequently a toadie. But at the same time I'm more real. I'm ready for the next cosmological shift. I could tell my old self a few things. And right now I'm ready for more: for more fatigue and hardship and death, all those anti-Berkeley things. I'm quitting my job in December, and then I'm going to ride the stallion out West. It needs front-end work bad.