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.
