The Colt 45 Chronicle #59

It is appropriate that this installment of "The Colt 45 Chronicle" should be the selection this week, which comes to a close today. It was a rough one at work, the reason for which might have something to do with the return of Daylight Savings, along with some mild, sunny weather. It was as if a bright light was turned on to reveal a life of decomposition, squalor and exhaustion. 

Yesterday I was reminded of a feeling of anxiety that I had experienced on the job toward the end of my residency in the Big Apple, three years after the letter below was written. The feeling was in the form of a visualization that the rest of my life would be spent doing office work; the dreadful, nauseating, vertiginous visualization was one of mirrors looking into mirrors. That is what I thought of -- pointing a mirror, as a kid, into a mirror, and catching an imperfect glimpse of infinity, imperfect because the glass of the mirror was bowed. In any event, that's what I had thought about more than twenty-years ago standing in a computer room looking uptown at the Empire State Building, "I can't do this for decades."

Well, here I am decades later, and I am still doing it. Yesterday brought back that mirror-on-mirror image, that feeling of exhaustion and "No Exit," what Kierkegaard and others call "taedium vitae." 

The letter below captures an early version of this on-the-job ennui ("unhappiness fluorescently lit"). Written to a coworker who had recently liberated himself from our job as proofreaders for a large corporate law firm located in Manhattan's financial district, Craig was older than the rest of us. Craig was probably in his mid-thirties; he was low-key, quiet, kind, and rode a motorcycle. I think he was originally from Utah.

We proofreaders were a tight bunch, even though we were divided into camps of girls vs. boys. Nancy was a Jewish American Princess gone bohemian who was married to a French artist named Norbert. She was a little older than the rest of us, though younger than Craig. Nancy was either 29 or had just turned 30.

Susan was a beautiful, curvy young woman in her early twenties who was trying to make it as a model. 

Richard was a Jamaican guy my age, middle twenties, who loved to play the ponies. He was my buddy. We used to go the OTB (Off Track Betting) parlors together, as well as the bars and cheap restaurants for lunch. I loved that guy. Richard was tough, but he had a heart of gold. He was like a Jamaican leprechaun. It felt to me like he was kin. 

Jeff was a streetwise bantam rooster from the Bronx. A black guy who carried a lot of Native American in his face, Jeff was the same age as Richard and I, but he was the leader of the pack, both officially (he had seniority at the law firm and acted as a lead or router for the proofreaders) and informally (he called the shots on where we went to lunch).

Winter 1990

Craig!

I miss you man. New York is getting colder and colder, and you're out sunning yourself on the Gold Coast. Oh, well, it just goes to show you that some are smart and some aren't. What I mean to say by this is that you had the smarts to know exactly when to break camp and head out across the country. Right after you left things fell to hell. Judy Lauer scooted us over to maximum security Wall Street; and while that was bad, where she has us now is even worse. We're still at 14 Wall but where in this tiny, narrow, classroom-like studio sideroom with about a dozen coders. Judy sits in the front of the room next to the only door and makes sure nobody is talking or moving or happy. -- She's crazy, plain and simple -- very paranoid and nervous. Nancy continues to "fuck the dog" like there's no tomorrow, and for some reason Judy hasn't fired her yet. I guess Nancy doesn't care either way since she and Norbert are heading out for the South Seas come January. Susan is still around and she and Nancy are very tight. They speak French to each other all the time. Needless to say, it's plenty annoying. Richard is still Richard and Jeff is still Jeff, except that he has a larger audience now, and I'm still me, though I keep a helluva lot more to myself. Anyway, the long and short of it is that it's all moil and toil, unhappiness fluorescently lit, and I'm quitting in January.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #39

This letter speaks for itself. It's my diatribe against the legal profession. I worked mostly as a proofreader during my first two years in New York City. A lengthy assignment I had, one that lasted half a year, was at a corporate Wall Street law firm. A lot of these letters were written while I was employed there.

Niall was a good friend who was attending UC Hastings law school when I sent him this dire warning to get out before it was too late. He of course ignored me.

Niall would go on to be a corporate lawyer and an attorney for the Department of Justice. His brother, who was also a good college friend and who has appeared in these letters, is now a prominent foreign policy reporter for one of the remaining august daily newspapers.

Summer 1989

I work in a big Wall Street law office now. -- Niall, don't do it. It's not worth it. Drop out, apply to graduate school, take to the road, work in a laundromat. Do anything -- but don't become a lawyer.

The name of the firm is DAVIS POLK & WARDWELL. They specialize in litigation and corporate law. I'm a proofreader. Everyone looks at me like I'm a shit smear on the toilet seat. I don't have fancy clothes and my shoes are old need a shine.

There are two offices, one on Wall Street and one half a block up in Chase Manhattan Plaza. I'm at the Chase building. The one good thing is that there's a company subsidized cafeteria on the floor I work on. I can get good hot meals for really cheap. Most of the lawyers don't eat there, just the secretaries and clerks and pages and paralegals, which is fine by me.

What a bunch of scared snotty assholes lawyers are. They walk around like they're the best thing ever, like their piss is sitting in the Pope's refrigerator. They think they know everything and they treat people poorly. If you ask me I'd say that they're just a bunch of pussies and numbskulls. I don't think they've ever ironed out their masculinity. All they're doing is acting tough on carpeted floors. They need a good paddling.

I'm sure the reason this law office is so bad is because of the type of law that's practiced and the huge amount of money that's made. But even the paralegals are assholes, and they're not even necessarily going into corporate law (they're in law school or applying to law school and are at DAVIS POLK because it's prestigious) which leads me to believe that there's something about being a lawyer, about studying law, that bespeaks a vanity, an insecurity, that creates a desire for dominance. But the deal is that it's artificial dominance. It's the nerd behind the controls of the killer robot. It's the twenty-foot giant made out of papier-mache and the radio of clay and the dog with three legs. So much desire and need being absorbed into nothing. But maybe they're doing it all for justice? Maybe they're doing it for right, for rightness, for equity, for humility before the law and maintenance of society? Bullshit. They're in it for the smell of their own soiled underpants. I don't think that this is your case. And that's why a career as an attorney is probably going to be plenty horrible for you because you're better than it, because you're going to be surrounded by all these fucked up assholes.

Consensus: Cyprus Crisis Won't Spread

A consensus seems to be forming that the debt crisis underway in Cyprus will not spread to vulnerable, big eurozone countries like Italy and Spain. The reason? Cyprus is unique because of the outsize role played by money-laundering Russians. Here's how Andrew Ross Sorkin, a reliable Wall Street mouthpiece, puts it in his DealBook column today:

Cyprus is unique. Besides being tiny, its banking system looks different from those in most other countries. Much of the big money deposited in its banks is from foreign investors, including Russians who have long been suspected of money laundering. Those investors had fair warning that Cypriot banks were troubled. The issue has been simmering for six months. But those investors left their money in the bank, in part because they were gambling that the banks would be bailed out at no cost to them. If the current plan is approved, depositors will have lost that bet. 

Worse, the strategy employed in the bailout of Greece — in which bondholders of its sovereign debt were paid less than face value — will not work in Cyprus. Cyprus’s banks own much of the country’s debt, so any effort to reduce that debt by forcing debt holders to accept less would only make the banks more troubled. 

Given the brutal history between Russia and so much of Europe — and speculation that so much of the money is ill gotten — it is clear why it would be so politically unpalatable to countries in the euro zone, Germany in particular, to bail out Russian depositors. And even if the move were to create a run on the banks in Cyprus, the contagion would be limited. 

There is very little chance that politicians would ever choose to use the model they developed in Cyprus in a country like Italy or Spain, where a run on the banks would have such profound implications. By the way, if you’re wondering why investors left so much money in troubled Cypriot banks, here’s a trivia question: Would you have been better off leaving your money in a bank in the United States or in Cyprus over the last five years? 

The answer: You would have been better off in Cyprus, even after the bailout, when your money was “confiscated.” If you had 100,000 euros in a Cypriot bank account over the last five years, where the interest rate has averaged about 5 percent, you would have about 127,600 euros today. Even after the bailout, which would require you to give up 10 percent of your deposit — 12,760 euros — you would be left with 114,840 euros. The American bank? The $100,000 you deposited at Bank of America five years ago is about $105,100, at the going rate of about 1 percent interest a year.

Dismissing the bank run in Cyprus as a one-off because nearly a quarter of its deposits are held by Russians seems too convenient to me, too redolent of the old cold war. The issue isn't the Russians. The issue is getting a bailout through parliament, whether in Cyprus or in other eurozone countries.

Jeroen Dijsselbloem, Labour Party member and Dutch Minister of Finance who is the current head of the Euro Group, nationalized SNS Reaal in February, wiping out its shareholders. If he can take a hard line in the Netherlands why can't he do the same to a tiny country like Cyprus? The push back came from Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades -- as documented in today's frontpage story by James Kanter, Nicholas Kulish and Andrew Higgins -- who fought to keep confiscation on deposits of more than 100,000 euros below ten percent. This meant the small fry have to fork over more, which is the recipe for a bank run.

Contrary to Sorkin's dismissal of concern over Cyprus, it's unclear at this point that the contagion won't spread. This from today's story, "Second Thoughts in Europe as Anxiety Rises in Cyprus," by Liz Alderman and Landon Thomas Jr.:

While it is too early to tell if Italian, Spanish and Greek savers will pull out their deposits in response to the Cyprus tax, investors holding the bonds of banks in Spain and especially Italy are already taking action. 

In Italy, ravaged by a stagnating economy, banks are experiencing a steep increase in nonperforming loans — one of the highest rates in the euro zone — that worries regulators and has made an investment fad of betting against Italian bank bonds. 

For now, no one is predicting a European bailout of Italian banks. But just as problems with Spain’s smaller savings banks last year quickly escalated into a crisis requiring a European bank rescue, a growing number of analysts are warning that Italy’s most troubled banks could lead to a broader systemic threat to Italian banking.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #12

On this St. Patrick's Day, why not letter number 12? This one like the others from a string-tie folder of epistles typed, using WordPerfect on a desktop IBM clone, the first year-and-a-half I lived in Gotham. It's a story about drinking Protestant Irish whiskey during lunch break working on Wall Street. Another yarn of  "drinking to win" (and in this case a tale of drinking at work to circumvent my wife's prohibition at home). The Jeffrey in this story is a guy I worked with (a good guy in spite of the few pejorative comments below) at Davis Polk & Wardwell and not the college buddy addressed in letter number ten. This missive, like the majority so far, is to my best friend from Berkeley, Mark, who at the time was teaching English in Spain and writing me "drinking to win" letters of his own.

The one thing I will say about the guys who I worked with at Davis Polk & Wardwell -- a Jamaican who lived in Queens; young men from the Bronx and Manhattan (black, Puerto Rican, Greek); a nerd from UVA who was trying to make it in the Big Apple like I was -- is that I considered them my brothers, brother factotums. And another thing I'll say: lunch has never been as fun as it was on Wall Street in those days at the end of the 1980's.

The letter's coda is one of only two things that I remember about these NYC letters, the other being the letter(s) describing the fight at the Old Town Bar. It's clear that my fantasy of the future was shaped by growing up in the 1970's watching a lot of situation comedy on television.

Summer 1989 

Mark, I'm writing right now, but it's just a little thank you epistle; the big one is coming a touch later. I wanted to write and thank you for both of your letters: for the mom's Honda on cruise control at 70 mph from SF excesses and the Madrid gin Russian John Travolta skinning nose and rushing the last call. Thank you, man. Who knows what my brain and soul would be like without you? I mean, I want to tell you that my eyes can't see fast enough to read the stories you write -- they're that satisfying.

I was thinking as I read your 18-page masterwork that if what you were going through with Marilou's letter and Michele's body had to be assigned a Bukowski equivalent it would most definitely be WOMEN, whereas my own state of affairs, if it had to be Bukowski-ized, would probably turn out to be POST OFFICE (I'll take yours any day). Every morning I wake up at 7:15; every morning I brew coffee and iron a pair of pants and a clean shirt; every morning I shower, shit, shave, and shine my teeth; -- every goddamn morning, the same miserable routine: the Eternal Return. The subway follows. I read and start to feel halfway decent, but then it's the Wall Street station and I have to get out and walk up to the street, my face shoved in some fat secretary's ass. I arrive at the office in a small gold-colored elevator; I sign in at the front desk. It's then that they take my soul from me and put it in a clear glass jar (size: half gallon) and place it on a long shelf next to all the other jarred souls of people who are already at work.

The monotony is terrific, stupendous. I sit with a red ball-point pen and delete unwanted letters and numerals. On my left is a handwritten draft; on my right, is a computer printout. The task is to correct any mistakes that the word processors make when they input the handwritten draft. All there is to do is to glance from the handwritten draft to the printout -- glance from left to right, make the occasional deletion of a typo, and flip the pages. This goes on for hours. Occasionally I'll get up and go to the pisser.

Fortunately I work with about half-a-dozen other proofreaders, most of whom are male, black and hispanic; there are two women, but they're both white and pretty and they're both cunts (I tell all the boys they're what's called "pretty va-cunt"). Between deleting digits and listening for the supervisor's footsteps we toss around the shit quite a bit: a lot of fag-bashing and skylarking and speechifying about the feminine structure. One of the guys is a big drinker. He's a black guy from the Bronx who used to deal blow but then got caught and tossed in jail; now he's got a wife and two kids and just got off parole two months ago and he's dealing a little again (though I haven't sampled any, and, for some reason, have no desire to, but, it should be said, he's never offered me any; he's okay, but a power hitter he's not; in fact, he's sort of a chiseler). Jeffrey is his name.

Jeff is my age, 25, and he likes Jack Daniels; he likes to drink it at lunch. The first few times I went out with him he used to get Jack and Coke,which is a healthy shot's worth of bourbon and about 5 ounces of Coke. That didn't look too good to me, so I'd drink pints of Budweiser. At one point or another he asked me if I wanted to go to lunch with him at this place called McAnn's. I said sure. We got cheeseburgers and draft beers. By the time we finished the meal we had had about three steins each. I hadn't been drinking that murch because it was just a week after that bar fight I'd been in and I was still hobbling around on a bad leg and Ashley was fresh into her zealousness over banning me from booze and beer; so anyway, those three steins gave me such a high that I was about ready to levitate off the sawdust floor and fuck every woman in the room all at once. We went up to the cash register to pay the bill, but the funny thing was that even though I was flying high I couldn't help feeling that something wasn't right. We paid the bill and Jeff went back to the table to leave a tip and I still felt like something was wrong.

Jeff came walking back towards me and I said to him, "I think I'm gonna have a shot." -- It came out of my brain and onto my tongue and out of my mouth from nowhere. I hadn't even thought of taking a shot before the second that I had said it. He said, "Go for it." So I stepped up to the bar, nudged my way into the barkeep's eyeshot, and barked, "Shot of Bushmills!"

"Shot of Bushmills?"

"Shot of Bushmills!"

He grabbed a bottle from behind the bar and slammed a thick glass down on hardwood. He took a long look at me, a big red-nosed curly-headed Irishman he was; he took a long look and poured and smiled and kept on pouring; he poured and poured until the glass was almost full. He liked my looks, I guess. Goddamnit, there I was -- giddy after only three beers and faced with at least three shots of Irish whiskey and Jeffrey standing eager-eyed grinning in anticipation of calamity. I grabbed the glass and cleared my mind of any foul thoughts and started drinking; but instead of shooting the whiskey down without tasting it, I drank it nice and steady and slow and all at once; -- I wanted to show Jeffrey what was what and who was who: so I gulped it gently and thoroughly, to the very last drop, like chilled water in a paper cone. Jeffrey was impressed to the point of being jealous. But being no slouch, the first thing he did was to say, "That looked good; I think I'm gonna get me one. -- Shot of Jack!"

The barkeep arrived and poured him up. It was a good shot, not quite as large as mine, but close (and, in all fairness, Jack Daniels is a thicker whiskey than Bushmills); and goddamnitall, Jeff hooched and gurgled that glass of bourbon just as if he were a brown-faced bear and it was honey from the hive; -- he'd followed the leader and made it even more spectacular. We looked at each, eyes sparkling success and beaming pride, and we turned in tandem and marched out into the rain and back to the office.

That was just the beginning of what turned out to be a beer and bourbon shot ritual. I stuck to Bushmills just one more time before capitulating to the superiority of Jack Daniels. We kept going to McAnn's because the beers are just $1 a stein and the shots are only $2.25, but we shifted locations to a different McAnn's, one that's west of Broadway instead of the one on John Street which is to the east of Broadway. I enjoyed these afternoon celebrations. They were a spitting in the face of Ashley's sobriety standards. They were an escape from the suffocation of razor-burn mornings and subway cars and log sheets and gold-colored elevators and red ball-point pens; they were an unruffling of wax wings while my work buddies and I danced a button hook jig on the sheet metal roof of the sun.

One day we got a little out of hand though. It was a Wednesday, a payday, and four of us went to McAnn's for lunch. I had told everyone before we left that I wasn't going to drink.

"Yeah, right."

"No, I mean it."

"Okay. Okay. No problem. Don't worry about it."

I knew they knew, at least Jeff knew, that I was full of shit, and that as soon as the beer was passed out and I'd got a good whiff of it I'd be flagging the waitress for a stein. Once we got there and were seated the first thing they did was order up a couple of pitchers of McSorley's cream ale, a local brew with plenty of flavor. They were definitely fucking with me: I was the one who turned them on to McSorley's in the first place. The mugs were filled and the food was ordered. They drank and I sat and watched . . . and smelled. Oh, man. The smell was unbelievable, fantastic. They gulped and giggled and helped each other to fresh steins, flame filling their cheeks. And I had to watch the whole fucking thing; I had to smell those two pitchers disappear.

Our food came. I'd ordered a bacon and swiss cheeseburger with a combo of onion rings and french fries; it looked damn good. The boys waved for the waitress to get some more beer; and while they were fretting over that I dove right in. The burger was perfect: well done, but juicy, with a perfect amount of bacon lettuce tomato swiss cheese and pickle. I squirted some ketchup on my french fries and onion rings -- mmmm! nice and salty and tangy. Everything was perfect; everything except that I didn't have anything to drink. And it was right at that moment that the waitress appeared on the scene with two fresh pitchers of McSorley's.

I took that as a providential sign and broke down and begged the waitress for a mug of my own. There was some jeering from the boys, of course, but fuck them. -- There's nothing like a good burger and a glass of beer. The waitress quickly returned with a mug. I poured a tall one. -- I finished that stein and went for another; I finished that one and went to the next; I finished that one and my burger at the same time; but then someone promptly filled up my mug, so I did that and helped myself to another; did that, and poured another.

After all was said and done, I pretty much hogged the two pitchers for myself, which was fine and dandy as far as the boys were concerned because they'd stopped drinking after the the fresh pitchers came: they were afraid of going back to work too drunk. Shit, fine by me.

Jeff was the only one who kept going. And while he had slackened his pace when the food arrived, he kept an eagle eye on the number of steins I downed and when I got ahead in the tally he'd gulp down his glass and refill it.

****

The sun closes and the doors are open. Back somewhere in my mind is the future and it's bright and happy and full of strength and all taking place in a big house and you're there on a visit and kids are all around like crickets in tall grass. I'm 35 years old but not yet dead so my brain is still alive and buzzing like a horse fly. Oh shit, the coffee is brewing and the flapjacks are puffing and sizzling and showers are clouding up medicine cabinet mirrors and everybody is thinking private thoughts of a type suitable for 8:30 AM; and out of some nameless, soundless corner of a bedroom closet a mouse trickles . . . .