Last week I intended to post briefly on the Ted Hawkins version of the Webb Pierce hit "There Stands the Glass." During my last great romance with alcohol, which took place around the millennium (2000 to 2002), I enjoyed listening to The Next Hundred Years (1994).
I thought about "There Stands the Glass" towards the end of last week because I was empty, spent, adrift (I've been grimacing a lot lately) and a nice cold drink sounded refreshing. The desert of life spent as an office worker is immense and desolate.
I righted myself without recourse to alcohol thanks to the tried and true power of the will. I dutifully executed the chores on my punch list for the weekend -- grocery shopping, laundry, march for $15/hr., road race -- and I was redeemed.
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.
Puerile. That would be the term to describe the letter below, the second installment from a string-tie folder of letters labeled "summer of 1988 to the spring of 1990." I pulled the folder out of storage, along with another string-tie folder that contained a spontaneous prose document called Shit Stinks thatI wrote in 1991, during the second half of the Seahawks loss to the Falcons the weekend before last. Puerile and drunkenly sentimental, the letter is addressed to my friend Mark who was living and teaching English in Madrid. Mark was Bucky to my Captain America in the cruel story of post-university young men trying to actualize a Beat happening in a world based on wage labor. The gist of this epistle is that I am providing Mark comfort by criticizing a woman with whom he had a brief, aborted romance.
Summer 1989
Mark those letters you wrote were great. Oh man, that condom that you ripped off your pecker after you gave Meredith a little of old what for, oh man, I was there. I was there in the room. Oh man, it was so good. That rubber was besmirched with your sea foam, and you yanked it off, and the floor greeted it -- it was like seeing a white glove tossed out of a car window. I was there. And I think that that's what writing is all about: namely, being put in a place where you're not and where you weren't and where probably won't ever be.
Your other letter, the one about traveling with your two dude friends, the one about getting drunk and stoned and then getting the ham crispy early in the morning while the others went back to the hotel room to sleep it off, well shit, that letter was like eating chocolate and forking into a bacon omelette and drinking a can of beer and sipping a cup of coffee and smoking a $3 cigar, all at the same time, all while standing on a Wall Street subway platform waiting for the 2 train to come and take me uptown. I really enjoyed them. You're my best friend.
I would've fired one off to you sooner except I thought you might be out here in New York in the first few weeks of August. So I didn't write, thinking that if I wrote you wouldn't get it by the time you left Spain. But I wanted to write you the whole time. Many times I checked myself. Oh well.
I look forward to your arrival. Jessica has moved out of her place in the East Village. She's up somewhere in the West 80s now. She came over the other day. It was a Saturday and I was getting back from work (I had gone in because we needed the overtime to pay August's rent). I got out of the elevator, walked to our door, opened it, strolled into the living room -- and there she was: sitting on the futon with two hands clasped around a water glass, knees pressed together. And right then it hit me -- something I had felt deep down all along but had never bothered to pump up to the ol' thinking machine -- SHE'S REALLY DAG NASTY. What I mean to say is that she's gross; she's banal and course and portly and cloddish and numb, like a mound of dirt in an orchard of walnut trees. -- It hit me right then and there, that flower that had taken so long to bloom bloomed right then and there and it shot colored petals straight through my brow. What a relief. I had always wondered why it was so difficult to talk to her, to get past all the bullshit and say what it is that had to be said (talking to her is like trying to claw through a plate glass window with your fingernails), and now I know -- she's infantile (if you had to choose one word to do the trick). I don't know where all this coming from. Jessica hasn't done anything to us, never has; in fact, we haven't really seen her in a while. Maybe that was it -- a new perspective after a bit of an absence. Anyway, the realization was spontaneous and benign. This doesn't make her an unworthy person mind you, it just puts things in perspective. Plus, I can now see clearly why she wasn't worth a second night's mounting. She's got very little in the way of sex appeal.
I've been alcohol free for four days now (that's a record, in my recent memory), but tonight it's four quarts and a loud stereo. The reason for this abstinence is that my sister and niece have been visiting for the last week. My sister is very anti-alcohol because of my Dad. But now she is gone.
The first few days they were here. I'd come back home from work with a couple of quarts of malt liquor. I'd slug 'em down pretty fast while she and Ashley were cooking dinner. I'd be talking with her, Shea's her name, swigging the Colt '45 and feeling it crawl and dance in my empty-stomach brain, and I'd have to make sure not to be too enthusiastic for fear that she'd classify me under the heading of demon breathing foolish Maloney drunk. I had to play it very straight, very sweet and understated. Children were about (my niece had brought her girlfriend along on her New York trip; they were playing with the computer in the other room) and my sister kept looking at me, searching my eyes for that telltale craziness, but I kept up the battle, kept pushing the juice down out of my head. -- There was no way I was going to show her what she wanted to see; I was fighting for team alcohol; I was fighting for all that is noble and true about every alcoholic that has ever lived. So I mastered myself -- no trip down to the deli for extra quarts. No way.
Dinner was made and we ate and I put on an album nice and low, and we talked ard I polished off the remnants of the second quart, and then, after about an hour, I walked into the bedrom and flopped down on top of the quilt and fell asleep. -- Drinking without showing that you're drunk, chalk one up for team alcohol.
A couple of weeks ago Ashley went out to Oregon for a vacation. She was gone for eight days. I was left alone in New York for the first time. The only person I had to care for was Snuz the cat. Every night I got fucked up. No hope, no future -- that's what it meant. Rambling around with fat flopping off my gut, sucking down pints of Harp and shots of Johnny Walker, I was a dog kicked in the side and told to get lost. I was looking for any comfort, any home. And the whole time I refused to eat. One night I drank from 5 o'clock to 2 o'clock, and all the time I refused food. I was Christ with a pint glass. What a buffoon.
During the first half of the Broncos-Ravens game I read Lewis Lapham's piece on drugs and the national security state that appeared last Sunday on www.TomDispatch.com. He makes the argument that the war on drugs is a war against human nature; that the quest for intoxication has been with us from the beginning.
If what was at issue was a concern for people trapped in the jail cells of addiction, the keepers of the nation’s conscience would be better advised to address the conditions -- poverty, lack of opportunity and education, racial discrimination -- from which drugs provide an illusory means of escape. That they are not so advised stands as proven by their fond endorsement of the more expensive ventures into the realms of virtual reality. Our pharmaceutical industries produce a cornucopia of prescription drugs -- eye-opening, stupefying, mood-swinging, game-changing, anxiety-alleviating, performance-enhancing -- currently at a global market-value of more than $300 billion.
Add the time-honored demand for alcohol, the modernist taste for cocaine, and the uses, as both stimulant and narcotic, of tobacco, coffee, sugar, and pornography, and the annual mustering of consummations devoutly to be wished comes to the cost of more than $1.5 trillion. The taking arms against a sea of troubles is an expenditure that dwarfs the appropriation for the military budget.
Given the American antecedents both metaphysical and commercial -- Thomas Paine drank, “and right freely”; in 1910, the federal government received 71% of its internal revenue from taxes paid on the sale and manufacture of alcohol -- it is little wonder that the sons of liberty now lead the world in the consumption of better living through chemistry. The new and improved forms of self-invention fit the question -- to be, or not to be -- to any and all occasions.
For the aging Wall Street speculator stepping out for an evening to squander his investment in Viagra. For the damsel in distress shopping around for a nose like the one seen advertised in a painting by Botticelli. For the distracted child depending on a therapeutic jolt of Adderall to learn to read the Constitution. For the stationary herds of industrial-strength cows so heavily doped with bovine growth hormone that they require massive infusions of antibiotic to survive the otherwise lethal atmospheres of their breeding pens. Visionary risk-takers, one and all, willing to chance what dreams may come on the way West to an all-night pharmacy.
The war against human nature strengthens the fear of one’s fellow man. The red, white, and blue pills sell the hope of heaven made with artificial sweeteners.
My twenties were devoted to heavy drinking, a habit developed at the university (see the poetry of William Cartwright). I stopped when I hit thirty. Then I started again in my late thirties due to the shock of returning to office work after being away from it for the better part of 1990s. I stopped again and rode the water wagon for several years before toppling off because of the stress brought on by a new girlfriend. I quit for the final time after seeing that alcohol actually made everything worse. Exercise is a far superior way to handle stress whether it's from a job and/or interpersonal relationships. Exercise is the true intoxicant.
