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 #54

I lived with my girlfriend almost my entire time as an undergraduate. 

I was a year ahead of her. My freshman year I spent living by myself off campus in the Elmwood neighborhood. As soon as she completed her senior year of high school, she pretty much arrived on my doorstep. Her application had been rejected by the university, and she had been offered admission to U.C. Santa Cruz instead. But she appealed the decision and won.

We quickly started looking for apartments. I was working at the Doe Library as well as the Bancroft Library. She managed to get work as a babysitter. We found a small one-bedroom, railroad apartment on Durant Avenue across from Edwards Stadium where my father had flamed out at the state high school championship track-and-field meet 25 years earlier.

And there we would stay for the next five years; or, I should say, I would live there for the next five years because my girlfriend, who would become my wife the following year, moved out the summer of 1987. This is what the little drunken germ of a letter that was never sent (and can be found below) refers to.

For me it was a wonderful time (see photo). It was as if a gigantic boulder that had been crushing the life out of me had been blasted free. The San Francisco Giants were winning and so too were the Oakland A's. I had lots of buddies to drink and eat with. We listened to music and guzzled beer and watched baseball. I worked as a laborer at a construction site in downtown Oakland close to the public library. I read what I wanted. That summer I read Robinson Crusoe (1719), Homer's Odyssey, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), Heidegger's Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929) and Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, edited by Peter Geach and Max Black (1952, 1960).

It is hard to top that experience.

Autumn 1988

Old-time philosophy and construction and being young and the Odyssey and the girlfriend having moved out. Too much too perfect forever.

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.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #18

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.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #10

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.