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.

 

The Colt 45 Chronicle #9

I remember two things from the collection of letters that chronicle my life in New York City after my wife and I first arrived there at the end of the 1980's. One is contained in the letter below, number nine from the aforementioned collection, a description of a fight I had at Old Town Bar (if you Google it you can see the glass doors through which my adversary and I crashed).

Old Town Bar was part of the video montage that opened the old Late Night with David Letterman show on NBC after Carson. This was a pre-Internet America where most people watched the same television shows, at least at 11:30 PM, and that was The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Letterman, airing after midnight, attracted a younger, more male audience. I remember being out and about midweek late at night drunk in my university days and wherever I stopped off, whatever buddy's apartment, Late Night with David Letterman would be on the TV; it was part of the collective collegiate consciousness.

If truth be told, I think the bartender took a disliking to me, as described below, because he could read my mind. I was bouncing around in my head the idea of walking out on my bill, something which I don't recall ever having done before or since. I must have been feeling surly. I had stayed on too long. It turned out that I didn't have to pay for any of my drinks anyway. Because of the fight.

In college I became a street fighter and barroom brawler, and it was not entirely owing to alcohol. The first real street fight I was in I was attacked by some guy coming out of Larry Blake's on Telegraph. He was drunk and grabbed me by the hair and tried to force me to my knees. I was a freshman; I didn't even drink then; I wasn't doing anything but walking down the street with some friends minding my own business. I saw red and knocked him to the ground and was contemplating my next move -- slamming his head on the pavement or throwing punches to his face -- when a passerby intervened.

A proclivity for brawling followed me to New York City. I kept track of my won-loss record like a young Sugar Ray on his way up the rankings. At this point I had nothing but what I considered wins under my belt. But eventually one loses one's edge. The explosiveness and rage wane. I started to lose. (Later, I developed a taste for losing.) Beggars Banquet was on my turntable a lot at this time:

Autumn 1989 

Shit, we're neglecting each other. It's been almost two months since September 11th (the date of the mistakenly conceived party, black Monday). What's up? I figure you're busy generating class plans and grading papers. For my part I'm pretty much doing the sane old thing. I have cut back on my drinking though. Ashley served me with an ultimatum: either I stop drinking or I leave. She wasn't foolin'. So I cut a deal. I agreed to eliminate all my social drinking and in return I will be able drink at home twice a week, with an option every third week to add an extra day of libation. The reason she came down so hard on me was because of this fight I got in at a bar. I really fucked up my ankle, to the point that I was hobbling around on crutches for five days. It wasn't busted, just ligament damage. As for the fight, it was a real joke. I was watching game 2 of the American League Championship Series and I had had three or four irish whiskies and four or five beers when the bartender refused to serve me. He ordered me out of his bar. I told him to fuck off. I told him to fuck off because he was a malevolent sonofabitch and I wasn't doing anything disorderly; shit, my speech wasn't even slurred. Once I told him to fuck off this young tough came swirling from behind the counter at the other end of the bar (I don't know if he was a bouncer or another bartender). He was yelling at me about how he was going to kick my ass. I told him to step forth and get on with it. So we blasted through a glass door. Little diamonds giggled on the sidewalk cement. Now at some point during the fracas I slipped completely off my feet. When I got back up I couldn't plant off my left leg; it felt like I had a water bed in there. It didn't take me long to figure out what had happened: my goddamn shoes had let me down. You see game 2 was a day game so I had taken a late lunch from work and gone to a bar. I was in work clothes, in a tweed coat, tie, and wingtips; -- those same goddamn wingtips that we had had a discussion about the last time you were here. I remember the discussion quite well. We were in the bedroom sitting on the bed and I asked you why my shoes had a small metal triangle on the bottom of the heel. You said it was a heel guard; that most shoes had rubber or plastic heel guards but that older shoes (or some such explanation like that) came with a steel heel guard. I asked you what a heel guard was for. "Protects the leather, " you said. "Otherwise the leather will wear down and you'll have to get it replaced." You expressed admiration for them because the heel appeared to be solid leather. I told you that I had got them at a Goodwill in Ashland for $2. I also said that the steel heel guard made it very slippery whenever I walked on a smooth surface. Anyway, imagine that; imagine the prescience of that moment -- it was that heel guard, it was that goddamn metal tap that yanked my feet up to the clouds and left me lying flat on my ass, my legs splayed like a centerfold cutie. The young tough plopped right down on top of me, and he had me. I asked him to give me the best that he had, to give it to me in the face. But the crowd elbowed through the broken glass doorway and gave me time to get to my feet. But like I said, when I got to my feet I realized that I was operating with only one leg. I gave it another go, but nothing was there. All of which was a real shame because I knew I was better than him. You see, I knew that I had him. It was when we had first swung out onto the street during the rain of glass. -- I got a good look at his eyes and he was scared, and I wasn't. -- I'd been around before, or somewhere close by, and I knew what I was doing. And right then I knew that I had him, and I told him as much. I told him that I was better than he was, and then his eyes dilated and filled up with so much fear that all I could see was black.

It was exactly at that moment that I slipped, exactly at the moment that I knew in my heart of hearts that I had fought a good fight and was just a beer commercial away from chalking up another victory in the war against banality and insensitivity and the idea that somebody can beat up on somebody else whenever they want. But I slipped. I slipped like it had all been planned by a Greek god or a Greek playwright or a Hollywood screenwriter, like I wasn't really there duking it out but Andrew McCarthy -- Andrew McCarthy up on the screen in an afternoon cineplex, Phoenix, AZ: a seventeen year-old Jewish girl grinding her ass into a foam-cushioned seat and scrunching up her neck, biting bottom lip and clutching fat chest, which just goes to show you that passion is felt everywhere, and that a barroom brawl is just as meaningful and as meaningless as little girls and money spent.

Like I said, after that fall my left leg was no good.. And even though I had the heart to keep it going and I wanted to keep it going, I was beat. The guy definitely could have dusted me at that point. And that's what I think I wanted. Right then I knew I could've taken good punches and laughed 'em off. And that's what would've given me the victory: I could've shown then what lightweights they all were -- all of them -- all those middle-aged debilitating bar cronies, all those bullshit pretty girls in red lipstick; I could've taken their best shots -- all 'em put together -- and not been fazed one bit. As it turned out, I had to walk away from the  hubbub, but not without informing everybody on the sidewalk that it was my goddamn wingtips that were to blame.I kept pointing down at them. I felt like a big shaven lion, gray and bristly. Before leaving I reiterated that my face was better than any blow that could be delivered. There were no takers. So I hobbled off the wrong way to the subway.

My first loss ever. And in such a fashion. Oh man, it hurt. When I woke up the next day my ankle was the size of a football. I hopped my way up to the emergency room on Broadway. I went to radiology and got an X-ray. Good news -- no break.

One month later, it's not quite back to new. I can't run on it, but it's good enough. Anyway, getting back to the original story, that's why Ashley demanded that I stop drinking: because she was scared (deeply I guess) by the whole brawl incident, even though, really, the whole thing, like I said, was nothing -- Cracker Jacks and M&M's.

Before I sign off here I want to say a few things. First, there's nothing that smells better than the smell of drinking a beer. Second, there's nothing that'll break your heart faster than meeting a guy who's your age and who's a nerd, but at the same time a good guy -- a guy who is completely out of step and missing the point but at the same time a guy who is completely honest with his energy and goddamn energetic to boot. Am I making sense? It's probably what the Philistines thought about Jesus -- too much energy and too goofy and he doesn't know how to keep his voice down on the subway so all the people going home from work don't have to be disturbed. I can't help but think that there's something essential and right about a person like that. Third, this morning on the subway platform a homeless junkie black man tried to stand up from his slumbers on the subway bench. He teetered, pitched forward, and then landed on all fours, skinning his hands on the smelly pavement.