The Colt 45 Chronicle #93

The end is in sight. I have scanned and counted the last installments of this project, which end with #98. Below is the last letter that has a seasonal date scrawled at the top in pencil; the remainder, numbers 94 through 98, are miscellany, undated and unsent, though one, the next installment, #94, is a birthday note to my buddy Mark that I do believe was delivered.

The letter below is a another fine example of the steep price of the high life, the trapdoor of Romanticism. Young people like a good party. Much of their lives are spent in pursuit of the bacchanal. But often the bacchanal goes awry, as I describe below.

The epistle concludes with a description of spousal abuse, a verbal lashing I gave my wife for a lapse in her memory -- probably from too much alcohol, pot brownies and too many medical-school textbooks -- that led to the aborted bacchanal. No wonder the marriage would disintegrate in a little more than half a year. Also, the final paragraph provides a convenient transition to the forthcoming miscellany. I explain to my friend Mark my inability to write unless I am drunk; subsequently, as I explain, there is much that has gone unsaid and unmailed.  

Autumn 1989

Well, Mark, it's Saturday night here and around 52 degrees. This morning the temperature was in the mid-80s. Around 12 o'clock PM the thermostat started to drop. Two hours later it was 58 degrees. That's almost 30 degrees in 120 minutes. I think the television  was saying that it was record of some sort for the month of September. But anyway, 52 degrees feels pretty damn cold.

Shit, I'm sorry I missed you on Thursday. Ashley and I had gone out to grab a bite to eat, and when we got back Colin told us that you had called from JFK. I feel shitty about not getting in touch with you before you left. I think you called twice from California: once when I had puked and passed out after a couple quarts of Colt 45 and half a fifth of Jim Beam charcoal-filtered -- or some such filtered -- bourbon whiskey; and the other time I was out post-work $3-a-bottle beering with the boys.

As to the first call you made, get this -- Ashley never even told me that you had called; rather, I should say, that she did tell me, but not until I had got a bunch of people and quart bottles together for your eagerly anticipated Monday-night arrival. Gary and Eleni were over; Antony was going to make his way up on the 1 train as soon as I gave the signal; Ashley, yes, that's right, all-forgetting Ashley, was busy preparing pot chocolate chip cookies (she had chopped down one of her plants that night, one of the males that was about to go to seed); the stereo was chirping loud and happy; and we were all in that great good stride of a real goddamn shindig.

But the clock ticked right on up to 11 and you were nowhere to be seen or heard. The cookies had long ago been made. Antony had called and cancelled because of the late hour. Eleni was beginning to whine about work in the morning. Gary was looking star-dusty after gnawing through a few of the freshly-baked treats; and I was getting real sore, busting into new quarts and cursing the day that you had been born because -- goddamnitall! -- you hadn't phoned to inform us about what was what. I was totally amazed at your disregard, especially since you had made a point of having me write down your September 11 flight information.

During this whole drama you mus'n't forget little rosebud and petunia Peterson. The whole time that we're expecting you to come striding in the door, she's just as giddy and enthusiastic as the rest of us; but as soon as the festivities began to sour, she was the first to pile on and start complaining about what a inconsiderate dick-sucker you were.

By 11:45 PM the lights were out and Gary and Eleni were gone. Ashley and I were in bed. The beer massaged me and I was rapidly scooting off to dreamland when all of a sudden Ashley blurted out into the dark bedroom, "Oh Mike! I forgot to tell you! Mark called Friday. It was that night; you got really drunk. And . . . well, um . . . oh . . . I had been drinking too, and, oh . . . I'm sorry, but he called that night to tell you that he wouldn't be coming to New York, something about not being to get a flight, or something."

I couldn't believe my ears. There was no way she could be saying this; it was far too cruel to be dismissed as inconsequential, a benign loss of memory. So I let out a good roar and started tearing right in: I called her disgusting and selfish; I told her that she was dripping with the shit from her own bloated ass; I told her that she was vain and disrespectful, that she was a worthless ninny with an acute case Alzheimer's disease at the ripe old age of 24. I concluded the oration with a flourish: an elaborate, breathtaking construction of an onto-psychological schema which put forth in no uncertain terms that little petunia Peterson was deeply and mortally flawed. There was absolutely no hope for her; and that as soon as she woke up in the morning she should get right on the phone and make all the necessary arrangements to have herself institutionalized.

Ah, yes, with that said, I turned my face to the wall and nestled my head into a fluffy pillow. A smile creased my cheeks. I was soothed in the knowledge that Ashley was feeling bad, and that I, subsequently, was feeling better.
Man, you know what? I've written a lot of stuff to you that I've never sent. It's usually written when sober, tossed down on subways, on palms and napkins. But I can't double-write; I can't copy down from notes, whether crude or immaculate. I can't copy them down and put them into a letter. I am suffering from the myth of self-presence (as Derrida would say). Sure, sometimes I cheat. But when I cheat it's usually just a humble and malnourished subway idea, never whole stories, never whole lines. 

Fuck sobriety. It has to be done from the gut, or the heart, or the beer-buzzing brain, but never ever otherwise. It has to be done all at once, in a streak, like Roger Craig hurtling and cleating for pay dirt over a team full of linebackers; like Mendoza slapping high fives with Asian drunks in Irish bars after the 49ers trounced the Chicago Bears in 1987. I was there to see the majesty of Mendoza, and I'll always been there, a gape-eye appreciator. Hopefully we'll make it to heaven together.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #90

Here is a letter, written obviously after the end of an evening of too much to drink, to my friend Niall. You can almost see the yellow lamplight in the darkened apartment and taste the sour mash and the malt liquor.

I had a dream last night. My father and I were dressed in matching adidas track suits, making pick-ups and drop-offs driving a black Mercedes 4-door coupe. We could have have been Albanian traffickers. It all had a disreputable, surreptitious vibe. At one point we exited through a vestigial kitchen door that opened onto the hallway of an old apartment building to avoid men as they entered through the front door of the apartment.

I have an unused kitchen door like that (it bolts to the floor) in my apartment -- the building I live in is 105 years old -- and I had a kitchen door like that in the apartment I lived in for the five out of six years I attended U.C. Berkeley; that apartment building, or so the story went as told by the landlord, survived the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.

My father and I in the dream went from exiting through the vestigial kitchen door to driving the Mercedes through an apple orchard at night under a bright moon. The ground was moist with fallen leaves. The dream seemed to last all night long. At one point we were in Manhattan.

Some truth was being revealed about the chaotic, rambling, underground destiny of the men of my family.

The drunken epistle below recapitulates my favorite fantasy of the time, a frequent coda to these sauced buddy letters, the one of the big house and the loving family who reside there in angelic perfection. A dream of youth that never came true.

Autumn 1989 

I don't get drunk enough to get as full in touch with the past as I used to. The beer is getting weaker and weaker and so is the malt liquor. So I've been moving on to the Jack, the Jack Daniels. That bourbon whiskey, well, shit, it's something that's far bigger and more incredible than I am. But who knows? Maybe I'm just chasing a skunk up a tree. Maybe it's all wrong. Maybe I'm just bored.

Hell, everybody is bored. 

That's the point, to find a way around it. The point is to find a way to always be satisfied with yourself. Of course this calls for a little self-torture. Kant tagged it "autonomy."

I hope you and Eve are treating each other well. It's a long hard lesson, but nothing satisfies like a spouse who is a best friend. There's nothing better -- no way, no doubt. 

Maybe someday we'll all have big houses and picnics with rosy-cheeked children tumbling down grassy hills. God. We're so young. But at the same time we have so completely passed up any chance at real openness and selflessness that whatever we do now will automatically be riven by forlornness and insincerity.

Aw, shit. Cat paws in the wind and a red dog spitting into a brown bag. -- The shit I want to say to you isn't even as good as a dusty glass jar of pennies hidden and lost in the hall closet of some dead Jesuit priest. But you're my buddy, and all the back slapping tearful giggling hokum that that entails . . . .

The Colt 45 Chronicle #88

As this old letter project draws to a close, I promised some sort of assessment of who I was and what I thought I was doing back then as a young man in his twenties recently eructed from the university.

Today's letter below provides a decent snapshot. I was an alcoholic, working or avoiding employment at low-wage jobs in New York City and finding a little solace in drinking malt liquor and typing an epistle, usually little word pictures like the one below, to friends, usually young men like myself, back on the West Coast.

I just wanted to read and write. And my time in New York City -- first, pursuing "career-track" employment, which was quickly abandoned, and then as a temporary worker dispatched by various agencies located near 42nd Street and 5th Avenue -- made me understand how difficult this was going to be. I concluded that if scratching out a living while trying to find time to do one's "own thing" was as hard as it was in the nation's commercial mecca, I was going to have to try something different. Meaning, I was going to have to get the hell out of Dodge.

Summer 1989

An electric fan shoved between the legs of a fat woman with corn-rowed hair who was operating a packed elevator as it pulled all of us upward eight stories to a place that was a place that would let us off just one-floor shy of the last gasps of Broadway-&-168th air and late summer daylight. Oh, man, that's a slice of pie that would bow the back of the best donkey. That fan was pushing smells at me that you could catch like a football. Smells tactile and hairy. Smells exactly like a yeasty pussy. Smells I could taste with the tongue. Smells that dripped down the back of my throat.

The elevator doors parted and all us passengers shot out like water through a broken glass jar. I popped up the last flight of cement steps and was greeted by the pummel and rustle of Broadway at 168th Street.

I cruised west towards Haven Avenue and home, passing the flower peddler who works in front of the emergency room at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.

Right when I passed Fort Washington Avenue and was crossing onto Haven, I noticed a jogger who was busy stretching. It was pretty obvious that he had just finished a run. He was stretching against a three-foot brick wall. He had his left leg thrust up on top of the wall, and he was resting the side of his head against his knee. And what made the whole thing so special for me was that he was stroking the underneath of his thigh very slowly with  measured strokes which were obviously causing him pleasure just as if he were petting the waist-down green-scaled luminescent portion of a mermaid.

He made me sick. Did he think his legs were as beautiful a mermaid's tail?

Niall, why don't you ever write me? Have I done something wrong?

The Colt 45 Chronicle #86

There is frost on the rooftops this morning. It might be the first time we have had frost in 2015. It has been a bizarre year so far weatherwise. Warm and relatively dry.

The frost is keeping me indoors when normally I would be out on the road by now. I'll wait until the sun warms things up before heading out for a run.

In the meantime, here is the follow-up letter to the one posted last week that described the drinking bout between me, my friend Erik, my wife and Erik's temporary girlfriend; it is just a little thank you note.

These old letters are almost finished. I should be doing a better job of summing up what I think now looking back on them over 25 years later they all mean.

Certainly, one might say, "primarily," these letters reveal a young man in the thrall of alcohol. Hence, the title of these posts, an homage to the malt liquor I drank while I typed.

Summer 1989

Thanks for the card. They were cheetahs, right? I guess that's why CHEETOS CHEESE PUFFS uses a cartoon cheetah in its TV advertisements (because of the "chee-" similarity). Anyway, I'm popping off this tiny epistle to say that we should stay in touch, that I had a good tine when you guys were up, and that I look forward to touching base in the future.

The truth probably boils down to the fact that the Earth rotates and we die, or, in different words, we're always already getting a touch closer to the tomb. That's why memory is so important. It gives you a nice spot of lawn to rest on while you journey to the big spanking. That's why I liked your visit so goddamn much -- because it was memorable. I don't know if it was the malt liquor or the wet boots or my lack of work. Whatever it was, it was good.

Hope to see you again and pretty soon.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #85

Below is a drinking yarn (remember, this is "The Colt 45 Chronicle") written to a friend, Mark, who, just back from a sojourn in Morocco, was teaching English in Madrid. It recounts an evening of malt liquor imbibing with another friend, Erik, who I am still friends with to this day. He too is a bachelor who has seen through the "battle-of-the-sexes" veil of tears.

What I remember about the lady he was traveling with when they visited us, me and my wife, in New York City that summer is that she was pretty and sexually attractive in a demure way (despite my disdainful comments below). Erik always had a facility for appealing to the ladies.

Summer 1989

Another day spent alone in 22A. No calls from the agency. And this after I thought it certain that I'd get work for Thursday and Friday, and, here it is, well nigh Friday morn. Ashley is doing some part-time secretarial work because I'm too much the dunce to find steady employment. 

The saddest part about the whole thing is that I just shuffle around the apartment consoled by the excuse that I have to wait by the phone in case a call comes in when I could be downtown exploring the Bowery or taking the slow 'B' out to Coney Island with a copy of Lucretius in my coat pocket, or sitting in the grand reading room of New York Public Library reconstructing my lost magnum opus on Kant and Frege and Derrida. 

Get this, Ashley walked in the door this very instant and handed me a fat letter, and whatdaya know, it's from you! I didn't pick up the mail today, and here it is 9:00 PM and Ashley's carrying your letter, and it's about Morocco. -- Oh, man, that's quite a tale, a real study in vulnerability: hashed and cheap scotch drunk and in northern Africa among unfamiliar questionable company -- it's enough to make you never want to get out of bed and the USA.

I think of you often and welcome the opportunity to sit down with coffee and beer and cigar and pop off an epistle to Madrid. I should probably write more about city social activities, but they're all drink oriented, and without much splendor -- no fights or romances or extreme embarrassments; in fact, all they're good for is the knowledge that they're not worth mentioning. Another thing I have learned from these dull escapades is that Ashley and I should never follow Jessica to a party because the only people who are gonna be there are homosexuals or ugly women or sad-sack poltroons.

Well, it's now 9:29 PM, but a day later. I had to discontinue last night's effort when our house guests returned from their city sightseeing. An old friend of Ashley's from high school; I knew him too back then, but he was a class below me, and we were never very friendly; a really very nice guy though with some interesting stories to tell about a young man's life on the road alone on a motorcycle in Mexico, working for minimum wage at a Seattle bakery, going to graduate school at the University of Virginia trying to get an English MA. He and his lady friend traveled the whole distance from Charlottesville, VA on his bike (a 650cc BMW), going as far up as Vermont just to camp and tool around.

So anyway, they return and Erik, that's the guy's name, promptly puts forth that he has two beers left and is going down to get more. Yes! A man after my own heart. I offer to go down with him, and off we go, leaving the women to chat over topics unknown. We arrive at the deli, and I suggest malt liquor. He agrees and we get four quarts of Colt 45 and two of Coors. I feel slightly guilty, as I always do when it comes time -- buddy by your side in front of the dew-dropped sliding glass cooler door -- to gather together the evening's beer repast for fear that I am too zealous and snatch out too many bottles. But Erik says nothing, and, in fact, on the elevator ride up he goes into a narrative about how he was drinking beers, quart bottles, with two Mexicans on the Guatemalan border, and how these guys kept going for more bottles until each drinker had consumed five quarts a piece; at which point, said Erik, he could barely stand and had to excuse himself and go puke in the sand somewhere. And I'm thinking to myself, Good. A good beer drinker, a la you, Mark; not any of this Gary halfway-there shit. 

We walk in the door, plunk down the bottles on the living room floor, fetch some glasses, and the evening begins.

Erik and I each have our quart of Colt. For the ladies, we pour out a couple of glasses of the Coors. I'm a little saddened when Erik's friend calls out "Thank you" after I've filled her glass to only the halfway point (and this after Erik had told me at the deli that she was good for at least a quart). Worse than sad, it makes me a little paranoid, starts me thinking that here's a girl that normally drinks 32 oz. of beer all by herself but now for some reason doesn't feel obliged to; so it's either that she's tired, which isn't good because I had hoped we were on our way to a real roarer, or she doesn't like our company -- thinks we're strange and up to no good. She is from Irvine, CA -- yes, yes -- and has just finished her MA and it is has to do with medieval English literature. Eee gad. 

This plays on my mind a bit, but I attempt to counteract it's effect by picking up my swill pace, and sure enough, after not too long, I start to feel better and the conversation takes off.  

We start talking about high school, dropping names comparing notes exchanging anecdotes laughing rubarbing, all of which is very well and good for the three of us Ashlanders, but, casting a glance over to the futon, I see that it doesn't interest in the slightest the Beowulf-reading teetotaler. And there's no reason it should. High school memorabilia is very personal and private, like family gossip or soiled underpants, and, if the truth be told, I'm glad that wasn't me sitting there having to listen to three strangers (as it turns out, Ashley told me after they left today, they'd been going out for just a short time, and that she'd basically got to know Erik on the trip) gabbing about a bunch of people who have absolutely no meaning or importance to my life. 

So anyway, the paranoia creeps back and I start throwing in little howdayado's like, "And where did you go to high school? And what year were you? 1982? Yeow, so was I!" You know, all that painful sacrificial trying-to-be-a-good-host shit, which in the end isn't going to do anything but make everyone uncomfortable because it so obvious that you don't give one farthing of a flying fuck where the person went to school or what year they graduated or what period they took their PE.  

So I stopped trying to incorporate her into the conversation and settled for stepping up my picked-up swill pace. The end result of which is that one hour later I'm moving on to my fourth quart and Eric's still rapping away on his second. (Lucky for me, I had a quart of Miller left over from a previous bout, ice-cold hiding in the back of the fridge). I've managed pretty much to put Beowulf out of mind; I'm spinning records, slapping backs, waxing ecstatic on the shortcomings of university pedagogy, giggling and sweating and shouting and cussing and striding out of the room for long pisses. But when I crack that fourth quart I look over at her and she's up to her old tricks -- horrible tired disdain yawning out of her cow mouth and peering out of her pig eyes. Bam! I'm right back to my old paranoid brain ache. Fortunately, I'm drunk now, and all I can think of is blurting out to Erik that we should swap wives -- not out of any loin-born lust for Beowulf or any sense of dissatisfaction with Ashley -- but rather out of calculated need to fuck Beowulf so deeply and painstakingly, and after the fashion of a dog, that my paranoia would somehow be wonderfully exorcised.

Instead, I cruise through quart four, put on Neil Young's ZUMA, and on my way back from doing that steal the last of Ashley's Coors. It's decided that we need to go to bed. I say okay.

Oh, God, big beer drinker Mike, and it's time for sleep and he's not ready and Erik kicks over two beers on his way to the toilet and we all shuffle off to our private unconsciousnesses and the head rests on the pillow and lights go out and the air conditioner breathes low, and that's it.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #74

I made an error in posting the last installment of these 25-year-old letters. The header identified it as #74 when it was actually #73. I have corrected it, making today's post the true seventy-fourth epistle.

The letter below was written to friends Phil and Maura who were living in D.C.

Maura and I had carried on a brief affair (she informed me, when she visited this past spring, that the tryst lasted no longer than a month; it seemed longer to me). I was writing to them on a Sunday evening because I felt the need to deconstruct our identities as post-collegiate career-track young adults.

I include the YouTube of The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (1968) because though ostensibly a concept album celebrating English rural life, I have found, listening to it recently, that it actually captures the good cheer and rich tribalism that young adults enjoy in cultivating their extensive social networks. As one ages, the big investment in friends becomes too costly. Work wears a person down. What free time you have left after work, chores and exercise is minuscule. Friends cannot be actively maintained.

Winter 1989

It's Sunday night, and Ashley and I are sitting around, and I am having a few beers. And this in spite of the fact -- in fact, in direct contradiction to the fact -- that it is Sunday, and a Sunday evening: 10:01 PM. Sunday, and Sunday evenings in particular, taste too much like puke and reek too much like death -- dead dogs and fish and cats. I just feel too full of shit and worry to drink. So I usually don't drink, or listen to music or do anything life avowing. But my general mood these days is very morose and downtrodden, basically one deserving of a little indulgence.

I was in an upper West Side bar (105th and Amsterdam, I think) on Friday night, much too high and drunk, and there was this mirror behind the bar, a real big one, and the deal is, I couldn't stop looking at myself, and this even though I was really embarrassed about it, and this even though people were carrying on -- or trying to carry on -- a conversation with me; but the reason why I couldn't stop looking in the mirror (and I know Maura has seen me drunk do this before) was because I appeared totally different to myself; I looked like a young man, a young€ dude, for the first time. I had on an old throw-away brown corduroy sports coat, underneath which was one of Ashley's grandma's hand-knitted acrylic sweaters, green with different colors on the arms, a lot of gold buttons. My hair was short and spread this way and that according to how I slept the night before; I had cigar in mouth and stubble on face. So anyway, all this didn't add up to an appearance that I thought was especially cool or bitchin' or whatever; it was just different: embarrassing, macho, alienating. And that honest to goodness what struck me first and foremost: "Who the fuck do I think I am? Some fuckin' young tough I guess, and one who is unconsciously gravitating to a poor and punk Mickey Rourke-esque thing."

Oh, well, that's the diagnosis, which is probably not very promising, but at least in my own eyes I have made it to young man-ness, something I hadn't done before. What I can say or feel is something close to the neighborhood of this (collecting all my collegeboy philosophical twaddle to succinct and falsely axiomatic fruition): I, myself, am my own biggest myth -- that's the bottom line; and it's because of this, this realization, that I am morose. But the problem is that this mythologizing is the truth of the world.

How do you keep your soul from dying? Now's the time for guys like us to cash ours in. Give up the soul for work -- work/marriage, work/kids -- buried, dead and blue beneath a haystack of car, insurance, home, supermarket, cocktail parties, slaps on the ass and soft buddy hugs around the shoulders. All that Thirtysomething crap is just one big brilliant and beautiful butt-fucked rationalization for all our hog-washed, dead before the tombstone lily livers. I watched last Tuesday's episode, Where Elliot and Michael deal with the dissolution of their small but heartfelt business between flashbacks to the not-so-distant past ( -- the Yupp scene is young, parvenu; it doesn't start later than the early 1980s). And shit, I'm not an asshole, I'll admit it was good. I enjoyed it, even through the overtly material and shallow and mechanistic romanticism of people who aren't really people: people who don't leave skid marks on their underwear; people who don't have heated, relationship-rocking arguments about who has done the most dishes recently; basically, people who can't be petty (even Elliot's sometime pettiness is cast in an overblown Shakespearean robust foolhardiness which pays lip service to the everyday jack-off human spirit but does not do it justice). And Phil, you might say that such exacting truthfulness can't be expected of a primetime TV show, and I would wholeheartedly agree with you; the problem is that the attraction of a Thirtysomething, at least for me, is the frankness displayed, is a faithfulness to the quotidian muck which is us (like the argument between Michael and Elliot at the end of that episode when Michael is spitting all over his upper lip and there is a little bit of violence between the two of them). It's just that the writers and directors give you just enough -- which is very little -- to identify with and then they fuck you with this 1980s Ozzie and Harriet preciousness and pseudo-soul, that, in the end, is designed only to peddle wine and tampons and automobiles to such stupid un-selfed cocksucking poltroons like the three of us.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #47

Oh, to have the liver I had when I wrote the letter below, a chronicle of a drunken non-wedding reception at the leafy suburban Long Island family home of one of my wife's medical school classmates. Everyone was wasted drunk because of the strange circumstances. The wedding had been called off at the last minute but a decision was made to go ahead with the reception anyway. Guests who attended fortified themselves with alcohol. 

I remember there was a Fleshtonesesque band that played in the non-bride's family sitting room. It was a nice old big house with high ceilings and fireplace mantel mirrors. Things started to get a little crazy. People were dancing and screaming. I was shouting "Go! Go!" as the baritone sax player climbed atop the fireplace mantel, playing all the while. The non-bride's mother freaked out and the music was halted. That was the end of the fun.

Summer 1989 

Money is very scarce nowadays. We blew a lot on a wedding that was called off two days before it was supposed to take place -- one of Ashley's fellow first-years. She was scheduled to marry a full-blooded Mick fresh from Ireland. But he got cold feet and then she got cold feet and then the wedding was called off. Meanwhile, we were spending full days scouring Manhattan for appropriate gifts and garbs. Gary and Eleni went along one afternoon. We started down at Fifth Avenue & 13th Street and ended up on Eighth & 41st seven hours later. We were shopping for summer suits for me and Gary, and all we ended up with were three ties apiece. All-linen suits at the hip downtown clothing store were too expensive for me and too risky for Gary. There was this one pumpkin orange sweetheart that tickled my fancy but it would have run around $160; plus, they didn't have it in my size. Uptown in the garment district prices were more palatable but the styles were too conservative -- painfully boring you know; also, the linen was a cotton blend. So we headed home on the 'A' with nothing to show for our suffering.

That was a Monday. Later on in the week I went down and bought a shirt and a sports coat and a pair of pants. All told, including the ties, I spent around $70. Not bad, huh? But that $70, along with the money we spent on a gift we didn't even give 'em, plus the money it took to get to Islip, L.I., took us pretty deep into the red. Yeah, now get this: we had to make the stinking 2 hour train journey to Long Island anyway because, and this is the tricky part, even though they weren't getting married, they were going ahead with the reception portion of the ceremony. I think they did this because all the relatives had already been flown in from Ireland by the time they decided not to exchange vows. I also openly hypothesized that since they had called off the wedding on such short notice (36 hours before it was to take place) they were probably stuck with an irate caterer and a bunch of cases of champagne. Anyway, no matter how you slice it, I still think it's pretty fucking weird to get everybody out there to suburban Long Island, to get everybody dressed to kill, to have a band playing dance tunes and people getting shitfaced, with children running around, and family elders red cheeked on sunny lawns while they drooped into thin-stemmed wine glasses, to do all this -- this whole ambitious celebration -- to do all this with absolutely no heart, no love. Now that's fucking shitty, unholy, weird -- whatever you want to name it -- and it leaves you with a bad taste. And it did.

Indeed, the best part of the whole experience was the train ride out on the LIRR (Long Island Railroad). We took the 4:25 from Penn Station, departing on Track 17. Gary and I had decided earlier on that we'd get toasty before we arrived arrived at Islip. I had suggested something hard, possibly whiskey, to really do the trick, but Gary abjured. Gary doesn't like the hard stuff . So when we got to the station, pleasantly pretty in our festive clothes, we went to a convenience store and bought some beer. I had told Gary that we should. buy our beers in Washington Heights because they'd be substantially cheaper there as opposed to any place we could purchase them at Penn Station; but, once again, he abjured, citing the increase in beer temperature resulting from a subway ride of 168th to 34th as reason enough to pay the extra price. (I guess I had never taken that into consideration.) And sure enough, the extra price was grandiose. You see, they only sell singles in Penn Station. We went to a couple of stores until we found a promising nasty-looking one. We went in and were surprised to see that they sold one brand of beer for as little as 40 cents a bottle. Now this means that a six would only run you $2.40, which in New York City is tantamount to winning the lottery or finding water in the desert. The brand  was TIGER, from Singapore. An import no less! I was overjoyed. An imported beer in a bottle not a can and for only 40 cents. But I smelled a fish. The next cheapest beer was some shit like BUD or SCHAEFFER or BUCKHORN, and that was a dollar. This TIGER was too good to be true. So I asked a big guy with a black handle-bar mustache who was just then pulling open the clear glass cooler door and grabbing two cans of SCHAEFFER himself if he had ever had TIGER.

"Yeah."

"Is it any good?"

"Yeah, it's okay."

Well that wasn't very encouraging coming from a guy who would pay 60 cents more per 12 ounces for a beer that tastes like seltzer water spiced with upchuck. But Ashley was supportive and Eleni was intrigued, so I grabbed myself a six and made my way up to the cashier. Gary on the other hand couldn't take the risk, too many variables; he wanted something from the fatherland. He got Eleni and four or five BECKS for $1.15 a pop. When we got up to the register the catch to the TIGER all of a sudden dawned on me. It wasn't a twist off. You needed a bottle opener. Shit! Right then and there I wished I had one of those handy Swiss Army knives. I asked the cashier if they sold cheap bottle openers. He said, "Yeah. Sixty cents."

"Excellent! Toss one in."
But this cashier was a little indian-colored demon of some sort. As he rang up our total, he grinned, "I hope you can drink all that. Not too many people like the stuff."

I said, "What are you saying? Is this stuff really shitty?" 

He didn't proffer a reply. Running through my head was this fear that the shit had gone bad; that it had been left to rot on some drifting oceanic steamer and then purchased in bulk for cheap at a Cost Guard auction; that it would have that sour stomach acid smell of dead eels and soggy beer hall sawdust floors. So just to confront the motherfucker, I demanded the opener from Ashley and cracked open a bottle right then and there in front of the counter and took a long pull. God damn, it was good! Tasty, fruity and smooth -- really good. I told him as much; told him I thought that it was "Very fine!" What I should have told him though was that, "Dreams are for free motherfucker!"

But I was too demure, overcome by the surprise of the TIGER actually being tasty. As I walked out the door he called me back and handed me a small paper bag, saying, "Here€. You better put your beer in this. You don't want a $150 ticket."

We walked down to Track 17 and found some seats on the train. I passed the bottle to Ashley. She liked the TIGER too. The train left the station. Gary and Eleni cracked open their BECKS. We ate pretzels and potato chips. The scenery changed to green after we moved past Jamaica, Queens. The beer started to work its magic and the conversation sparked up. We talked about Gary and Eleni's travels in Pakistan. From Pakistan we moved to Eleni's family in Greece and her father's relationship with his brothers; and from there we moved on to Eleni's womanizing older brother and how this womanizing led to the brother's wife's attempted suicide. We chatted peacefully as we cracked open more beer and the train sped along in the Long Island summertime green. The sun filtered through the window, and we conversed about man and woman in Greece and the beer folded us to a motherly breast.

When we got off at Islip station the magic was still there. I was buzzing but not drunk. I would have needed more than a six for that. I would have needed. the bourbon I suggested. No one was there to pick us up. Gary had brought along some hooter and wanted to smoke it. I told him I wasn't good socially on the shit --that I was better with beer and booze -- that that I would certainly accompany him to the rear of  the parking lot where the bushes breezed to watch him perform his ritual. So off we went, and Gary smoked a big bowl in his pipe and got plenty glazed. Ashley made us all necklaces and. headbands out of clover and weeds.

After a call was placed, we got picked up by the non-bride's gay brother's lover in a latrine-shaded station wagon and anything that was good immediately died.

There will always be bills to pay. As long as you are alive there will be gas bills and telephone bills and bank statements. I'm truly sad when I think what that means, what that entails. Right now the beer tastes like MY MOTHER'S VOICE, THE VOICE FROM THE BREAST THAT FED ME LOVE AND SUPPLENESS, and I gulp it happily at 1 o'clock AM when I think of the work day tomorrow. The shittiness of tomorrow is only improved by a hangover, and I mean this. We are all fated to SLEEP SWEETLY UNDER THE FEATHERS OF SLAUGHTERED BIRDS, and maybe even a PUDDLE OF SWEAT.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #34

This is a letter written when newly arrived to the megalopolis. The voice is that of a young man long gone. Brash, profane, combative (I am now brash on only the rarest of occasions, just mildly profane and thoroughly pacific) I didn't have a high opinion -- as you can see in the second paragraph -- of the native New Yorker. The missive ends with a flying of the Berkeley flag. This university boy missed his college town.

Autumn 1988 

Got a view of the famous Chelsea today on my latest crusade for full employment. There I was, fully clad in a very pretty subtly striped black and white suit cruising down 23rd Street, and bam! here it is -- the Chelsea Hotel. The same as in SID AND NANCY; the home of Bob Dylan, who got his name from another guy who had lived there, Dylan Thomas; the same place that put up Arthur Miller, who wrote the big father play (the one with Biff). The red brick looked just as off, just as Amityville Horror-esque, as the movie; I looked up at it and thought about that scene in the movie where Sid gets up out of bed, just after the Sex Pistols had split apart at Winterland in San Francisco, and looks out over good old gray New York City; and there I was, just below Sid, and off to Springer-Verlag, publisher of science manuals. It was hot and I was definitely breaking a sweat. I kept looking at my watch, which kept telling me that I had a half-hour until my interview. I had to pee pretty bad, but before I went pee I wanted to find 175 5th Avenue, the place where I had to be at three o'clock. Anyway, fuck this story for a second. How the hell are you? -- So after I got out of the interview I went for the nearest bar, took that pee, got myself a tanker of Coors from the tap and gulped it down fast, and then I headed back onto the street and into the five o'clock sun. After popping into a yuppie bar to place a few calls to my various employment agencies (oh, wow!) I headed to 8th Avenue and another bar. This time I struck a Mick joint; got myself some Bass, a pint in fact; pounded it, as I contemplated talking to a fellow monkey-suited asshole (fuck him). The next thing I knew I was out the door and on my way to a livelier watering hole. I asked the barkeep there what-the-fuck a buck-fifty would buy me; he told me a pint of Budweiser. -- Yes! Heaven does exist. So while I sat on the stool, drinking€ Bud, looking at all the bottles of juice behind the bar, the blankets came wrapping around me one after another; one word., one phrase, one sentence, floating in. Guys, freshly out of work (5:15 PM) ordering shots of Absolute, of Johnny Walker Red Label, with beer chasers, telling stories about wives who bitched over spilled milk ( . . . giving the boys big belly laughs). Surrounded by this I found myself sitting sheepish and rosily demur, a glazed simper smeared on my lips, inhaling this old black guy's cigar smoke while I tried to look haggard and uninterested. I did think, more than once, about trying to swap my watch (a Swiss-built model from an uncle) for ten bucks. But I realized that fantasies don't grow limbs in one sitting. So I slid of my stool, put my hands back into my pockets, and settled for sobriety and 34th Street, Penn Station.

When I got home, I flared up my own cigar, cracked open a quart of Coors that had been judiciously omitted from the previous evening's repertoire, and sat down to write you this. But now it's almost a week later. New York is great. There's no denying it. But one thing's for sure: it's also really fucking overrated -- way inflated with its own pomposity and self-aggrandizement, coldness and sham heritage; too much nose-in-the-air crap. These assholes, when you get down to it, are the biggest whining, pampered, paranoid pussies in the U.S. of A. Where else could they live? Could they live in Madison? In Tulsa? In Fort Worth? In Ashland-fucking-Oregon? No way. These fuckers can't stray far; they're pampered, and they're damn stupid. Damn stupid. They can live right here, and they can drink their Heineken wrapped in a paper bag. But as for going someplace else and seeing something different, there's no way. I'm working now. Scholastic Magazines, Inc. Pretty much a shit hole, but I think most of the publishing world is. After my first day and all of its unbearable stupidity and circumlocution, I was ready to get back into school. But it's livable now, which is the frightening part. The one thing New York has going for it, which is a really incredible thing, is that you can walk down a street, like 42nd Street, and cop a total buzz. That's a rare thing in S.F. I got off more in Oakland, San Pablo between 27th and 22nd . . . Oakland is way more real/happening/etc. in a lot of ways. I say I'm from Oakland/Berkeley, and people say, "Oh, I know where that is." Berkeley, after having been treated to this, becomes more and more amazing. It's incredible, the pasture where the Sun grazes his cattle. And these aren't backward looking wet dreams on my part because it's not necessarily loss or longing that I feel for the place, just, like I say, astonishment that such a -- in many ways -- perfect place should exist.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #28

As far as I know I didn't try my hand (thankfully) at much poetry. Below you'll find a poem I sent to some poor friend. Or maybe I didn't send it all, although I think I did. Probably to an ex-girlfriend. The summer of '89 I was doing a lot of drinking.

Summer 1989 

I stamp my heart out
A dish rag on fire
Gossamer and guilty.

So what?

Right.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #27

At the beginning of the month, Google Blogger started requiring a header for each post. I took the opportunity to name these letters -- which I have been posting, usually late afternoon Sunday, every week -- "The Colt 45 Chronicle." An advantage to this is that it will allow me to dispense with the formality of recapitulation -- how I pulled these letters out of storage during halftime of the Seahawks playoff elimination in Atlanta last January. I was in excruciating psychic pain at the time. For some reason I made the effort to find these letters. Actually, I was in search of the spontaneous prose document that I had completed at the end of summer 1991 and titled Shit Stinks. The letters were in a heavy-duty cardboard string-tied folder identical to the one that held Shit Stinks. So I pulled both out.

The National Football League season starts in two months. And I'm still working through these letters.

Colt 45 malt liquor was my favored lubricant for epistolizing during the period chronicled here -- the summer of 1988 to the spring of 1990. I appreciate your patience. The idea is that The Colt 45 Chronicle paves the way for the spontaneous prose document yet to come. And that's what I want to get to. Because even though I have not looked at Shit Stinks since I read some of its pages while living in San Antonio 20 years ago, I know it was written during a time when I was a newly-minted bachelor -- drinking heavily, fighting regularly, loving ladies of the street, pogoing at CBGBs, typing on a manual Brother -- and it should make for worthwhile entertainment.

My cousin Colin -- the main topic of the missive below, number 27 -- stayed with me and my wife in our married-student apartment on the 22nd floor. He slept on the futon we had in the living room until Ashley mandated that he had to go. She told me to give him a week's notice. And I did as I was told. The week came and went and Colin was still there. My wife requested that I deliver an absolute demand this time. He had to be gone in 48 hours. (It might have been 72 hours; my memory here is not exact.) Once again, I complied with her request.

I felt horrible. I sound nonchalant, almost brutal, in the letter, but it really bothered me. He was family. We grew up together as children, and he had lived with me for a spell during college. But it was this time as roommates at Berkeley -- during a summer when Ashley, who was still just my girlfriend, had moved out to pursue her trysts -- that had poisoned the wife's mind to my cousin. She thought he was mooch, always hanging around the periphery and never kicking into the kitty.

But everything turned out fine. Colin had work. So it wasn't like we shoved him out into the street. He got a room in a boarding house -- I vaguely recall that the Hell's Kitchen apartment mentioned in the first paragraph ended up not panning out -- and the worst thing that came of it for him was that he had to use a bathroom shared  by other lodgers. Soon he would migrate out to Brooklyn, which at that point was just becoming hipster holy land.

Other highlights of this letter -- which, like Chronicle #25, is addressed to my buddy Niall back in San Francisco -- include my friend and supervisor at the corporate law firm where I proofread breaking his back, something covered in Chronicle #4, and the Loma Prieta earthquake.

The picture below, taken by my wife while Colin was living with us, captures what she called "little dog, big dog" -- Colin on his Mac Classic and me on an AT&T IBM-clone word-processing our megalopolitan exploits. You'll notice, if you look closely, that I'm drinking a 32-ouncer of Coors -- not Colt. Usually, I'd start off with two quarts of malt liquor and close up shop with a quart of the light lager from Golden, CO.

Autumn 1989

I got the letter! Is #3 in the works? I hope so. I'll take anything, any old story -- anything, like a law-school party or a morning bus ride. Colin is staying with us and has been doing so for the last two weeks. He found an apartment on 46th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, what they call Hell's Kitchen. The unfortunate part of it is that he can't move in until October 15. According to Colin, the place is small but fundamentally okay and that the guy who he's gonna live with is nice enough (a grad student at NYU). Ashley and I have been putting up guests since August 1. And I'm not talking a guest now and then; I'm talking two solid months of nothing but people. There was a weekend when we were visitor-free, and then we went up to Ashley's aunt's house in Vermont. But minus that one weekend, and maybe three days in early September, there's been nothing but a packed calendar of family and friends, and dang-it-all I'm tired of it. Even though it's good karma and all that to open your home and be hospitable, two months is two months. I'm tired, plain and simple.

I was coming home from work the other day. I was on the subway and it was already dark outside. I had a seat, which is something. You see, there was only a handful of people in my car, and that's the only time that I allow myself to sit down. When there's absolutely no doubt that nobody else needs a seat -- whether child or high-heeled woman or hard-working man in construction boots. If I do sit down and then see a woman who is standing, I immediately feel sullen and dirty. I feel guilty of a horrible softness. But at the same time I don't want to make a show; I don't want to rise with a grand air and tip my hat and extend my arm, pointing to my vacated seat and grinning like a small man with spotted teeth and greasy hair and bowed back. -- It's all too self-congratulatory and public and diseased for me. So what I usually do is get up, and get up quickly as if I were planning to get off at the next stop, and walk to the other side of the car (so that the woman can't see that I'm abandoning my seat for her). But anyway, this night I had a seat.

Aw shit, it was ages ago that I wrote the above. I think it was the night I called you about Evan. Colin was still staying with us then. Now he's living at a rooming house down around 110th and Columbus. Ashley couldn't get any studying done with him always hanging around playing music and gabbing on the phone with his girl. So I gave him the boot. It's better for him anyway; he's closer to where he works, and he's wiping his own ass.

Evan got back the other day. He told me that he ended up staying with you for a whole week. I hope he wasn't a sore-thumb inconvenience for you. I had no idea that he was going to milk your hospitality to the point of chaffing the udder. It was awfully nice of you to do what you did. I appreciate it.

Well, Niall, it's been another two weeks or so since I wrote those two preceding paragraphs. I've been trying to cut back on my drinking and subsequently I'm not writing as much. But fuck all that. -- You guys had yourself a real honest-to-goodness natural catastrophe! How the fuck can the Bay Bridge buckle like that? As for that section of 880, I always had a feeling of imminent danger when I drove it; it was very old. How did Oak Street hold up? Where were you? What did you do? I left a message on your machine today, and I've been calling back but the circuits are overloaded.

Evan fell down a flight of stairs last Friday and spent the night in the hospital. He was skunk drunk and an ambulance was called and a paramedic got out and administered CPR to him. I haven't talked to him yet because he's been away from work all week and I figured that if I called him up it'd probably be painful for him to have to recapitulate for the thirty-fifth time the story of his unlucky excess. Sometimes it's best just to leave someone be. Solitude's gotta be the best cure.

Anyway, I hope you and Eve are okay and hanging tough. I'd tell you about a fight I got into recently, a fight where I really fucked up my ankle and was on crutches for a few days, but I don't have the guts to do it right now. It really wasn't a big deal. Get in touch with me as soon as you're able.

I was thinking about the trip I made last year to California. I'd cruise into these Stop 'n' Shop gas stations, fill up the tank, and buy some ash-flavored coffee and 50-cent-a-pack cherry-sweetened cigars. The whole time I wasn't really eating, except for a sandwich around noon. I had the sandwiches wrapped in aluminum foil, and I'd eat one sandwich per day. I'd get the sandwiches out of a cooler. The cooler was sitting between me and the passenger's seat. But the deal was that I didn't even have to put the sandwich in the cooler because the whole car, my VW bus, was so fucking cold that anything in the car, unless it had a pulse and was wrapped in wool was well below freezing.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #26

This letter, number 26 from a collection of letters written the first two years I lived in New York City, tells the story of the evening before Thanksgiving 1989 (the holiday described in number 23).  After posting these letters I've come to think that an appropriate label for them might be "The Colt 45 Chronicle," since the malt liquor is usually what I ended up writing about.

This epistle is to my friends Greg and Tresca back in the Bay Area. I must say the final paragraph -- coming home at night after work to an empty apartment and seeing my wife's red comb on the counter next to a sink full of dirty dishes -- is a perfect image of my marriage at the time.

Autumn 1989

Just stuck my head out the 30-degree window and took a few good puffs on a Cuban which was old and crumbling but once I got it lit and slobbered on a bit the crumbliness disappeared. The weather has been very cold the last two weeks; shit, we were even treated to several inches of snow on the eve of Thanksgiving; the papers said it was the first white Thanksgiving in 51 years, which was all right by me. Ashley and my buddy's wife were baking pies in the kitchen, and my buddy and I were in the living room drinking beers and smoking a joint and listening to a Leadbelly album. We, my Buddy and I, had gone down to Harlem earlier in the evening, had taken the 1 train down, to a wholesale beer warehouse and purchased a case of Harp specifically for the Thursday holiday. It turned out to be not such a great deal. We paid $23, which breaks down to a little under $6 a six pack. For New York, this is not bad, but no great bargain. Anyway, it was all worthwhile because it felt good hauling that case over my shoulder back home on the subway. When we got home and for the ladies already at work with flour sprinkles and melting butter we couldn't help but bust into the Harp, even if it was only Thanksgiving eve. The problem came at 10 o'clock when we realized that the case was already half gone. The wives told us that this wouldn't do, and that we must trudge back out and get some more beers and possibly a bottle of wine or two for tomorrow's turkey feast. We protested. We were happy and warm and stoned and it was damn cold out there. But they persisted. We resisted some more but then acquiesced and slung on coats.

When we got outside it was cold -- very cold -- but the air was moist, not dry and cutting. On the top of the hood of a Ford Ltd something stood thin, white and dirty. Right then something landed on the bridge of my nose. And just like that I figured out what was happening. -- Nothing hits your nose like that, not rain, not hail, not beer foam or pigeon feathers. -- It was snow!

It was snowing, and the snow was sticking. The black top of Haven Avenue was turning gray as the flakes stacked on each other. Gary and I were tickled pink. It was the first snow of the year -- the first snow after another grievous summer of subway sweat and air-conditioned beermares -- and we were out in it. We giggled up to a bodega on Broadway and bought two six-packs of Colt 45 talls and a bag of potato chips. The problem here was that at this bodega they didn't put price tags on anything; sometimes you'd go in and get it cheap, other times they'd tack on a dollar here and a dollar there. This time they added a few dollars. I gave the guy $20 and he gave me back $6 and change. I  knew something was up. I asked him about it. He had a shitty look on his face, a combination of fear, hate and boredom. He repeated the total. I asked how much for the Colt. He said a buck a can. Bullshit, I thought; but fuck it, it's only money, which must've been more important to him since he was taking the time to fuck me in the ass. I had known what I was getting myself into; it had happened to me before at this bodega; in fact, it had happened to me there one too many times. So I had stopped shopping there. But I'd started going again, after work, because it was close to where the subway spit me out, and I could get quarts of Colt for $1.50 -- a good price in Manhattan. Gary and I turned the other cheek and stepped out the doorway. We turned the corner and a group of Puerto Rican kids stood huddled on the sidewalk. As we passed, they radiated powerful prickles of hatred. And I radiated 'em right back.

I guess nobody likes whitey, even if the snow is falling for the first time. Even more troublesome than that realization was the realization that both times Gary and I had gone to get beer we'd ended up with less than what we could feel truly thankful for. I thought about that for a second or two as we walked home, and about stuff like whether the pilgrims drank beer with the Indians, or whether it was supposed to have snowed on that original Thursday, but nothing amounted to much. I went back to appreciating the fact that it was the first snow of the year. I tilted my head back and took a good pull at the snow flakes; they were falling through a street lamp's yellow light.

Anyway, enough of that. How's everything going folks? Tresca, thanks for writing; and Greg, I could feel your presence. I hope to see you guys in the not-too-distant future, maybe late spring. I've got to save some money, and I haven't been very good at that. I wanna fly out to Oregon and buy a car for cheap and spend some tine in Portland and Seattle. Anyway, it's pretty much a pipe dream at this point. I might be stuck here for several 49er seasons to come, which would be a crying shame. I'm working at a law firm on Wall Street; I'm a proofreader; they take my soul from me bit by bit; I hope I can make it. But the money's not bad, and I can work a lot of overtime. The subways are a bitch, but that goes without saying. Ashley said I had to reduce my drinking or she'd take a hike. I've cut back quite a bit; no more late night gin shots or Jack Daniels lunches. Physically, I feel a helluva lot better; but mentally, I think I'm operating at half capacity. The problem with most people is that they're so full of fear that they don't ever want to leave the cave. Taking a couple shots of whiskey is too risky for them. They don't know what they'll do once they're drunk or how they'll feel. So they stay in their crab cave huddled next to a small fire and they roast marshmallows on rabbit ears and whistle out into the dark. Fear. It eats people up from the inside and makes 'em go home and eat a lot and watch TV. Everybody thinks they're going to live forever -- that's the problem. And I think it's TV's fault. Nobody pukes and dies and is willing to leave it at that. There's always a tomorrow and a new music video to take a picture of a Lean Cuisine body. There's always that. I don't know if I'm making myself clear -- about television and fear I mean -- but it seems to me that it is an important and primal issue, namely, desire getting put out of the body, out of the trunk, and stuffed into the eyes (and brain), with no way of getting back into trunk. All we can do is think about it and watch some more, watch some more and eat some more.

I came home tonight. I walked in the door and turned left. The light was on in the kitchen, but Ashley wasn't home. I saw was her red comb sitting on the counter next to a sink full of dirty dishes. It hit me hard. I don't know why. A comb shouldn't be there -- in the same picture with a sink full of dirty dishes.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #24

Twenty-five years is a long time. Today I am a "Nothing Man," someone who goes to work and assumes a office-professional persona but who is not really known by his coworkers. Back in 1988, I had a large group of good friends, a wife and aspirations of a big life.

The letter below, number 24 from a collection written upon arriving to New York City, gives vent, at the end, to my displeasure with life lived in the company of others. It is addressed to my wife's cousin, who was the same age, and with whom we spent a long, snow-bound, stoned Christmas holiday the year prior. She and I carried on a heavy-duty but unconsummated flirtation. For a brief spell, at the end of my Berkeley days, I was a Lothario.

At one point during the aforementioned Christmas holiday, cousin and I were going to travel back to Boston alone together. Luckily, it didn't turn out that way; another infidelity was averted.

Autumn 1988

I work in a honeycomb full of shitheads and assholes, Newcomb. We got married under the big skies of Nevada, except it was under a roof and around midnight, one of those commercial chapels -- piped-in wedding bells and a mumbling minister. We were plenty afraid (too much like a funeral parlor). Ashley kept giggling and fuckin' up her lines. His sermon -- the minister's sermon (what came before the uttering of vows) -- caught me off guard. He said something about love and how it didn't know deceit and selfishness, smallness and cruelty; that love was plain and simple and pure and beautiful. And all this was said outright without dressing or word play, and I fell for it.

I keep celebrating the mystery of life with my old buddy Adolph Coors. Crack it open, pour it in, and what you know? It's a holiday. Whether it's a weakness, a pathology, an addiction, it's just beer, and so the fuck what? After we got back from Boston/Vermont that Christmas, and all the spanking of ourselves we did over consumption, I took refuge in Bukowski. I remember sometime around February saying to someone that the worst I could do would be to end up like Bukowski. But shit, you read the guy's poetry, which from that time on I proceeded to do, and he's no self-aggrandizing boho wimp; he tells it like it is. Anyway, I could identify with the poems about the pilgrimage to the liquor store, and the poems about hiding from the phone and the door bell, and the poems about making a meal at 11:30 at night, and the poems about being inside, in your apartment, lying on your back in the afternoon sun, which you're trying to shut out like a guilty motherfucker, while the world, which for you is what you can see of the avenue through a cut in your blind, stays as normal and as hostile and as ever-moving as you've always imagined it. But fuck, what I want to say, and one of the things that this letter was meant to do, was that I had a great Christmas with you, and with Ashley, and the whole deal. Those red floors and the windows and the rocking chair -- and the windows -- and the back bedroom and the refrigerator (beers and tequila shots, though we never drank the vodka) I will never ever forget. As Prince would say, "You got the look." I don't know why I never wrote you while I was in Berkeley, God knows I had the fuckin' time. But there was something tricky about living in Berkeley that I could never quite get a handle on. Too much accessibility to other people and the feeling that you never had a moment of your own (which is I guess what happens when you live in one place too long).

The Colt 45 Chronicle #23

It has been a quiet, mostly overcast Sunday here in the Emerald City. Below you'll find letter number 23. During the Seahawks playoff elimination back in January I pulled out and dusted off a collection of letters that I had written while married and living in a residential tower on Columbia's health-sciences complex. The time period is the late 1980s.

What I remember about Thanksgiving 1989 is that it was so much work -- the planning, the shopping, the cooking, the entertaining and finally the clean-up -- that I never again hosted for family and friends another traditional Thanksgiving meal -- appetizers, turkey, mash potatoes, stuffing, dessert. In addition to me and my wife, there was my cousin, my wife's cousin, and our friends Gary and Eleni. Not a large group but an ordeal nonetheless.

I also remember that I made a special trip down to 125th Street and picked up a good case of beer, which I hauled back on the 1 Train. Gary and I ended up drinking most of it the night before Thanksgiving, the night it unexpectedly snowed. This necessitated a trip out to get more beer. We purchased some six-packs of 16-ounce cans of Colt 45 malt liquor.

On Thanksgiving everyone got drunk drinking the malt liquor and got stoned smoking the wife's homegrown. We sat at the dinner table. We didn't clear any of the dishes. We just sat there. I had had a lot to drink the evening before, and I had started drinking before 9 AM on Thanksgiving. I was sort of getting way out there. I had a testy exchange with the wife's cousin, who I recall had extraordinarily large hands, and she ended up crying. (Pictures from that evening of the wife and cousin can be found below.)

One last thing that I remember from that evening is how we were so drunk and stoned that all four of us jostled each other to take turns watching through the peephole in the front door little children from the adjoining apartment run around and play on the landing in front of the elevator on the 22nd floor.

The letter ends similarly to the one posted on St. Patrick's Day, which leads me to believe that I didn't actually use the ending in that letter since both letters went to my friend Mark. I think the "sun closes and the doors are open" line only ended up in this letter.

Autumn 1989

Mark, I'm writing now, but this isn't the letter I've been writing to you; I've been dabbling at that one for a long time, maybe even three weeks. And the funny thing about it is that that letter was supposed to be just a quick little beer-fume epistle that announced a bigger and better communication to come. Somewhere along the line I got bogged down. One of the reasons could have been that Ashley, Gary, Eleni and I did up a Thanksgiving together. It turned out to be a helluva lot more work than I expected, and it was made worse by the fact that Ashley and Gary were in the middle of exams. So I did all the menu-planning and grocery-listing; Eleni helped with the shopping. Another reason probably had to do with the sudden puritanicalness of my job. It has gone from a commodious situation to a concentration camp: several people have been fired (some of the livelier conversationalists) and we -- the proofreaders -- have been moved from a private room into a large auditorium with about fifty idiots and an insane supervisor who roams the smooth floors on clacking high heels. I work my eight-and-half hours a day and come home and go to bed (it's been below freezing for two-weeks straight). But anyway, tonight's the night: Ashley's spending the night out in New Jersey with some friends and I have a few quarts, and it's Thursday night, just a little bit before 11 o'clock.

Well, I just worked on one of your Cubans. There're old and crumbly now, but once you get 'em lit up and spit on they still do the trick. Snuz keeps jumping up on the table and trying to sit on my lap; she doesn't like the loud music, and she didn't like it when I opened the cold window to let the cigar smoke out (she's just like Ashley). I tell ya, writing is something to be done alone; it's synonymous with solitude, plain and simple.

Yeah, it's been cold here. The other night I caught myself warming my hands over the naked light bulb of our floor lamp. We have a down comforter and two quilts on the bed -- and that barely cuts the mustard. There's heat in the apartment but it often shuts off inexplicably. I don't have a topcoat. I'm going to see if I can go another winter with just my good old Harris Tweeds. We got snow on Thanksgiving eve. The New York Times said it was the first white turkey day in 51 years, which of course made the holiday feel more like a holiday. (All pretty boring stuff.)

Oh, well. I'm drunk now. And 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 visiting and children are all around like crickets in tal grass. I'm 35 years old but not yet dead so my brain is still alive and buzzin' like a horse fly. Oh man, the coffee is brewing and the flapjacks are puffing and the sausage is sizzling and showers are clouding up medicine cabinet mirrors and everyone is thinking private thoughts of a type suitable for galloping down staircases at 8:30 AM.

The saddest thing is that the past has already happened.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #21

My friend Shale -- to whom this epistle, number 21 taken from a string-tied folder dating back to the end of the '80s, is addressed -- was and is a prodigious reader. We used to scour the used-book stores together in Berkeley. Other than that our time in college was spent drinking coffee and reading in one of the city's many cafes; either that, or drinking beer at night and talking about books. Hence my description in the fourth paragraph of my current reading projects.

I had stopped exercising the summer of 1989, probably the only summer in my adult life I didn't run at least on the weekends; and, with the regular malt liquor habit I had developed, it was beginning to have an impact on my health. The complaint -- the time crunch -- of the rat race remains just as true today, twenty-five years later, as it was then.

The final paragraph picks up the story of the apartment pot farmer described in letter number 16.

Summer 1989 

I've just finished a couple of cups of coffee and am now heading on to the beers. A cold quart sits waiting and watching just off to the left. The day at work is four hours long gone and HUSKER DU sings to me from the turntable; the ever-present girth of blubber is battering and lapping against my belt buckle.

It was good to hear from you the other day. What was that, a couple Sundays ago? I had just polished off my ritualistic two quarts of Coors and one quart of Colt 45. I was glad you tried me again because three days earlier I had called using your old number and got some boring cunt's answering machine; and of course since I have the gene porcine somewhere in my morphology, I was too lazy to promptly dial information. So anyway, I had just finished my three quarts and the phone rang and I was too bemused in malt liquor reverie to pick it up, and what you know? It's the good old berating flabbergasting voice of my soul buddy Shale.

The little anecdote that I'm trying to work up to is the one that I'm going to tell ya right now. You know how we had been jawing for so long into our respective receivers? Well, my bladder eventually came down with a considerable ache, but the deal is I didn't want to excuse myself to the pisser and waste your time and money. So I grabbed the pitcher that Ashley uses to water the plants and I worked my cow's udder out through the fly, and I let her rip. The only reason I mention this is that I got a call at work from Ashley. It was a Tuesday. You had called on Sunday I think. She calls me up and asks, "Did you pee in anything of mine?" I drew an absolute blank. The question meant nothing. What the fuck was she talking about? It was like a meat cleaver swooshed down out of an enamel blue sky while I played solitaire on a picnic blanket in a green cow pasture. Shit. I had absolutely no idea. And then she said, "Because today I went to water the plants and the water in the bucket looked really yellow. I thought it was just old, but then I smelled it, and it smelled like piss!" Okay. Sure. Now I remember.

I'm still doing my reading. The only problem is that I don't have enough time to get any of it done. With eight hours spent at work and an hour commute tossed in each way, you aren't left with a lot of time for intellectual pursuits, especially after you include the obligatory shower, shit and shave in the morning, and dinner preparations at night. Same old sob story. The titles I'm working on right now are ON THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE by Lucretius, and PHILOSPHICAL LOGIC, a compilation edited by P.F. Strawson. There's a bunch of stuff I need to finish, like Ryle's essay, "Systematically Misleading Expressions" and that Leibniz collection put out by Scribner's Sons, and Baudrillard's SIMULATIONS. What a fucking pessimist (in the most malevolent sense) that guy is; in fact, of all those poststructuralists (it should be said that Baudrillard considers himself a post-poststructuralist) I like him the least, if at all; he seems (now remember, I haven't read that much, only a hundred pages or so, so take this with a grain of salt) to be lathering himself up a pretty good self-satisfied sweat by sneaking into a hall closet and whipping Rousseau's skeleton-dead pony with a fat leather belt studded with paperback copies of McLuhan books in French translation. SIMULATIONS boils down to a banal, seltzer-water-and-lemon aping of the ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPTS OF 1844, with a few fashionable points about the epistemology of the electronic media tacked on for a nice blow-job effect.

Fifteen minutes earlier a thought occurred to me, something that was certainly plenty true, and I was going to share it with you. But the sad thing is that I've already forgotten it. Blame it on the beer. I'm working on it though. As I write this very sentence, I'm trying to get it back. Dag nabbit, I can't do it just yet. It goes to show ya that that story about Hobbes is one true tale. Apparently Hobbes never went anywhere without pen or paper; this because he knew that no matter how powerful the idea, no matter how clear his construction, and no matter how hard he tried to remember what it was that he wanted to remember, there was no guaranty that he'd be able to keep it -- unless, of course, he wrote it down. Hobbes thought he did his best thinking on his long afternoon walks. So in the top of his walking staff he had a compartment that housed a tablet of paper and a little quill. Why the fucker didn't just carry them in his coat pocket, I don't know. But the overall idea is exactly right there and quite mature if you ask me, namely -- don't ever think you can beat or ignore the arbitrary crackle of the synapse, or, in better, more ethical words -- respect first, always, and ask questions later.

Jeff came up for the weekend a little while back. We ate a lot of pot. You see, Ashley is growing a bunch of plants in the living room and everyday they shed a substantial amount of leaf. So in the morning, Saturday morning, Jeff got up and circled the room with a Tupperware container and harvested the shake. Then he went into the kitchen, put a skillet on the stove, plopped in a touch of butter, added the leaves, cooked them for about ten minutes, and then served them up by forking them on top of a piece of rye toast covered with strawberry jam. After about a half hour we were completely wacked -- and we stayed that way for pretty much the rest of the day. We managed to stumble out of the apartment and make it down to a couple of hot dogs and Central Park. It was a good time. But going into work on Monday, on Tuesday, shit, all the way to Wednesday, I felt like my brain was a fat rump burbling on the back of an old Harley, like I was a black monkey fingering its turds in the pet shop window on Main Street.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #20

An update. -- This is letter number 20 taken from a collection of letters written from the end of summer 1988 to the spring of 1990, my first two years in New York City. The idea going in was that by posting these letters something might be revealed about pre-Internet communication (all the letters were keypunched on an AT&T PC using WordPerfect, printed on an Epson dot-matrix, stuffed in a legal-size envelope and then mailed via the United States Postal Service) and how my marriage came to an end (this blog is after all "Burdens of a Bachelor"). So far there's been a lot of repetition: tales of intoxication and the agony of being a sports fan alongside the horror of work punctuated by an occasional bar brawl. The common and cruel story of youth.

But onward we go. I'm taking letters off the top as they come. They're not in any chronological order, and they don't appear to be organized by theme. I've only skipped two so far, both purely perfunctory: a "thank you" note to my wife's aunt for allowing us to stay with her for a brief vacation at her home in Vermont; and some sort of inscrutable, brief "sorry I missed you" missive to my friend Jeff. Otherwise, the letters are exactly as found when I yanked them out of storage during halftime of January's Seahawks playoff loss to the Falcons.

In the letter below, addressed to my friend Mark, I engage in some drunken holiday The Sorrows of Young Werther-grade pessimism regarding our perception of time.

Christmas 1989

I want to say Merry Christmas now and send it off right away for fear that if I waited any longer there'd be no way that it'd get to you on time. I don't know what your plans are, whether you're coming back to the U.S. or not, but I figure you're gonna stay in Spain for the holiday season. If it's any consolation, I'm spending Christmas alone as well. Ashley is going to her mom's in Ashland, and I'm staying here in New York to work and take care of the cat, and also because there's really nothing for me in Ashland, nothing to jeopardize my job over (you see, steady work since July and I'm already thinking like a stiff). I'll sure miss Ashley, but I'm hoping I'll be able to get a few things done, like writing my mom a letter and finishing that story that I started for you.

Colum's back from Guatemala. I saw him today and the first thing he said to me was that I looked like a long-haired school girl. I knocked on the door, and he opened it up, and that's what he said -- that I looked like a long-haired school girl. I chuckled; shit, he was definitely on to something. I didn't trouble myself with it for much longer because he invited me in and we started talking about something else.

I don't know, I don't if it's the New York winter (it makes everything seem miles away, like you're in a forest) or if it's the dread whip of going to work every subway morning; but whatever it is, it's changing me. The heart of things isn't golden and holy; it's tear stained and bow backed; that's what I've come to expect. Time is the only certainty. And don't get me wrong. Time is a great thing; I think time is the most powerful thing in the world. My complaint with it is an entirely selfish one, namely, there's always something to look back on and feel bad about: you can look back on something and feel proud about it -- something like how good looking you once were -- but then you'll just feel bad about it because it's past, past tense, and that's not what you look like now (same thing with writing -- I'll read something I wrote years ago, say when I was 21, and I'll say to myself, "There's no way I can touch that now"). And let's not forget that there's always something to look back on with guilty pain, like how you fucked up: how you cheated someone, how you were covetous and cowardly, how you whined like a bitch and tortured your fellow man who in the end is just another starving dog like yourself. So time is the world, and time is sadness. So the world is sadness. Everybody knows it anyway; that's the sad thing: everybody knows the heart of the world; we just blind ourselves with illusions of satiety, which are just nickel-&-dime gags: whoopee cushions and featherless chickens made of rubber.

Bah! I'm drunk on malt liquor and full of gloom. Toss this out with the bath water. I'll write you soon.