The Colt 45 Chronicle #60

Last Saturday I participated in a march and rally for the $15/hr. minimum wage in Seattle. It was a pleasure, probably the most fun I have had a political event in a decade. There is energy in this movement, thanks to Kshama Sawant's leadership. Her victory against an odious placeholder on the city council was the springboard. But to her credit, Sawant didn't hunker down and try to find her place within the council structure; she immediately set to work keeping her supporters mobilized and growing the movement to achieve a $15/hr. minimum wage in Seattle.

One of the things that was such a pleasure about last weekend's march was seeing the faces of union activists with whom I was friendly and familiar over a decade ago. Some appeared not to have aged at all. They were in the minority. Most had grayed and carried crimson in their countenances. I imagine aging has a lot to do with diet. A meat-based diet combined with alcohol will zap a person, and good. Best to cut down on meat intake and eliminate alcohol altogether once we get into our 40s. Couple these dietary changes with an exercise regimen of some sort -- movement! -- and one should be able to age with a degree of dignity.

The letter below, like #50 (which, based on the number of hits, is for some reason the all-time most popular post of this blog), is addressed to my father-in-law. I wrote it after about six months in the Big Apple. It is a fairly accurate description of Manhattan from the perspective of young man forced to work in its skyscraper canyons -- "Sequestered away in a fluorescently lit office twenty-five stories up with no windows, you begin to feel your masculinity drip away. But not just masculinity, life."

There is of course the backward-glancing reverie about life at the university, which, if you have read any of these "Colt 45 Chronicles," you know that beer-induced nostalgia for campus life is to be expected. I do get off a decent riff about respect being the true foundation of a happy relationship.

Spring 1989

How's the ballgame going Pete? It's been a year since we've seen you. Seems more like two or three. At night you can see the Yankee Stadium lights from our living room window. They reflect off the windows of this big ass concrete government building sitting over there to the east of Harlem. The stadium is just across the river in the Bronx. We walked there last summer; took St. Nicholas Avenue down. Harlem looked good, people had nice faces; it had a comfortableness to it, like a sofa on the porch. I haven't made that walk since then. I was gonna go today (I wasn't working), but the weather was bad and the game was supposed to be televised. So I took a rain check.

I got a new job today. The bad part about it being that it's down in the Wall Street area, which is a very long subway ride from where we live, about thirty minutes longer than the ride I made to my other job. The good part about it is that the work is much steadier, a solid 40 hours a week, with an opportunity to earn some overtime. My other job was only a couple days a week, and sometimes not at all; it depended on the amount of proofreading that had to be done. Yep, that's right.  I'm a proofreader. And I'll tell you, it's hard to accept at times. Sequestered away in a fluorescently lit office twenty-five stories up with no windows, you begin to feel your masculinity drip away. But not just masculinity, life. The women who make these high-rise offices run are the deadest-looking people you have ever seen -- sullen, gray, tortured, tired. Hell, I used to be a teaching assistant, with strawberry blonds in every class; I used to walk the sunny campus greens and stop and chat with friends and drink coffee as the birds whistled songs overhead in trees; I used to haul sheetrock, sucking in the bay fog at 8 AM, skipping lunch and working straight through to the can of beer at the end of the day. Well, that's all over with now. But it's all part of the picture, and it's good because you got give something up sometime. You just have to keep telling yourself that everything is okay and that God is Love and all the rest of that hogwash that only makes sense after you've put your nose to the grindstone.

New York City, like everything else that is truly great, is a well-crafted illusion. The people who make the big money and run the city don't even live here; they're out in Long Island or Connecticut or New Jersey. Greenwich Village can be okay. The West Village is mostly commercial and expensive; the East Village is solid, good places to eat for cheap but not that many good bars. Nothing jumps out and grabs you and says, "We're here!"

I've worked pretty much all over the city, except for post-Uptown, which is where we live. Uptown stops, or people stop talking about Manhattan, around the 90s; and, to give you some indication, we live between 169th and 170th. After the 90s the neighborhoods start to get poor. From 100th to Columbia University (not the medical school, which is where we live, but the actual campus -- 116th) the neighborhoods are black and Hispanic, with a student population tossed in for good measure. After Columbia, Harlem starts. After Harlem, around 150th, Washington Heights starts. That's where we live, or that's what it's called. It has a reputation for being the best place to buy crack in Manhattan; all the big boys sell there. We live a little ways up, smack dab against the Hudson. We have nice safe university housing in a family-oriented Hispanic community. It starts getting exciting about five blocks down. I've been down there a few times very late at night to get some fried chicken, down around 161st, and sure enough you get some royal treatment. People can't imagine what you're doing there at that hour except to buy what they have to sell. The only thing I took exception to was how aggressive they were. I had to fix 'em square in the eye and brush chests just to assure then that I all I wanted to do was get something to eat down the road. But once they perceived my drunken sincerity, they were decent and good-natured and nodded me a goodbye and I was off on my way towards, like I said, the best fried chicken and french fries I've had, and I think Ashley might agree.

I'm still drinking the Coors, but more and more I find myself moving to Colt 45. Ashley and I have a few friends, though nothing like Berkeley -- they're not that close. Ashley and I spend a lot of time together, probably more than since we were first living together, back then in the dark golden ages of the early 80s. We still respect each other, which, if you ask me, is the only thing in any relationship -- the only thing to keep a relationship a relationship and not a servilityship or tortureship.

So what I want to say is that you should come visit us. Anytime you want. We'll be here for the next three-and-a-half years. Another year from now I'll have this city down pat, even better than I do now, of course, because time is time. But I'm doing my research; I'm learning this beast. So when you have the money to pay for a ticket and say $100 spending money, you should make the trip; I'll pay for beers we drink at home. But then again, you wouldn't be missing much; you'd only be shifting your frame of reference, which, I guess, isn't so bad; in fact, it's probably the only thing that's noble, truly selfless, in this life.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #35

This letter, written to a good friend with whom I went to college and who at the time was working as an English teacher in Madrid, captures the spirit of the last few months I spent as a married man. My wife had already given up on the sacred bonds of matrimony and was planning a new, swinging lifestyle around Morningside Heights. I was working as many hours as I could get as a proofreader in the reports department of Deloitte Touche located near the top of the north tower of the World Trade Center. I worked evenings. Every night the company provided a livery cab home. I didn't drink during the week, probably for the first time in five years, and then would binge on the weekends (an example of which you'll find below). I saved a good deal of money in a short amount of time, around four months. This provided me the nest egg I needed to escape from New York and relocate for half a year in the Emerald City before returning in the fall to try to salvage a marriage that had foundered.

Reading the letter just now I get some satisfaction in realizing that I hit all the points in the timeline laid out in the second-to-last paragraph. Also, I wish I could say after almost 25 years that I had it wrong, that I was just suffering from a depression brought about by an impending separation from my wife. But when I read the last line I think my assessment of adult life, as bleak as it is, is right on the money.

Spring 1990

Mark,

Got your letter Saturday night, the 24th, as I was on my way out and downtown for what would turn out to be an evening of too much drink -- bourbon, malt liquor, cognac -- and smoke that left me stumbling€ around between Broadway and Amsterdam in the vicinity of 110th Street unable to find the subway, unable to see the concrete mole's burrow that signals the presence of the subway in the inebriate's brain. Finally, after seriously considering grabbing a few winks in an abandoned doorway, I realized that I wasn't that far away from Gary and Eleni's apartment. After another 20 minutes of woeful stumbling, I located their place and amazingly remembered the apartment number, 1W. I rang the buzzer a few times and no one answered. So I turned back down the street, forlorn and truly tired, hoping that I'd find the mole's hole this time around; but half way down 109th towards Broadway I realized that there was no way I was going to make it. I went back and rang the buzzer one or two more times; Eleni pulled back the drapes -- they have an apartment on the ground level that faces the street -- saw that it was me and let me in. I apologized, said that I was too drunk to find my way home; explained that I was so drunk because I didn't really drink anymore but that when I did drink I drank quantity-wise as much as I used to when I drank 5 nights out of 7 days; all of this was muttered slurred crazy and earnest through a heavy jaw and rubbery lips. Eleni was slightly frightened because she'd been jolted out of bed at 3 in the morning and Gary wasn't home. He was down in Washington D.C. on his spring break visiting an old college buddy and attending some kind of physician's conference. (Ashley was in Guatemala with an old high school girlfriend staying with Colum and Terri.) The street that Gary and Eleni live on in is an honest to goodness drug dealing death zone.Gary called last night, Sunday night, the night after the Saturday evening I'm describing, and told me -- he's fresh back from Penn Station and Washington -- that two guys had just been shot outside his front door. Anyway, I apologized to Eleni and told her I could leave if she didn't feel comfortable with me being there. She said no, of course not, and unfurled a blanket on the couch. I climbed in; -- that was it, snores and lights out. In the morning Eleni got up at 8 o'clock because she had to go to work. She's working part-time at Macy's now and taking training courses to teach Berlitz, or something like that. I felt like death, breathing that heavy mournful sigh that drives all the way up from the center of the earth and shoots into your body through the soles of your feet, nestling in the belly, clawing into the lungs, and from there passing through the voice box and out of your mouth into the morning light of Sunday -- a new work week begins, ugh.

Anyway, first things first. The reason why I've been such a mute so & so is that I've been working like a dog since the first week of February. I'm doing 40-plus-hour weeks every week working as a proofreader for a huge accounting firm conglomerate in the World Trade Center. And while working long hours hasn't stopped me from writing before, what fucks me up in this case is the shift -- a 2nd shift, from 5 PM to 1 AM, which is usually more like 2 AM. When I get home its 2:30ish and Ashley is asleep and I can't make noise; either that or Ashley is waiting up for me with a nice little meal prepared and expects me to go to bed with her as soon as I've finished eating. Although I realize now since Ashley's been in Guatemala this last week that I'm too hungry and burned out when I get home to do anything more than rustle up some grub and switch on the TV for a few looks. This means that all my letter writing has to be done in the bright light of high noon and, more important than that, fully sober, something I haven't had a lot of practice at. Which brings up another substantial shift this job has created in my personal existential diddledeedoo -- I hardly drink anymore, at the most, twice a week on the weekends. When you're working nights, you just don't have the opportunities to get fucked up. And anyway, like I said, they've got me working like a dog at this place. It's crunch time, tax season, and they've got to get their annual reports off to their multi-million dollar clients. I decided not to be wasting what little energy I do have pissing in the toilet.

The reason why I'm working this job (after having vowed. never to return to office work) is so that I can save money for the big Seattle plan. The plan is that I'll be out in California by May, moving my way up I-5 to Oregon by middle to late May, and settling in Seattle by June. We're going to sublet the place here and Ashley is going to move down to the Morningside Heights-Columbia campus area. This is all being done with a strict sense of gloom and skepticism: more gloom -- but an optimistic gloom, a hopeful sorrow -- on my part, and more skepticism -- a joyful skepticism, a gleeful denigration -- on Ashley's part. Ashley's ready to throw in the towel on the relationship while I'm forever an adherent to the philosophy that everything'll get worked out in time. Oh, well. We'll see how it fares. I sure love her though, and always will.

Well, enough of that. New Orleans, huh? When would you do that? When the fuck are you coming home? Write and tell me precisely what your time frame is. I'm sorry I haven't been writing, and I'm sorry this letter is so harried and lifeless. I'm rushing it before going down to midtown to expedite errands prior to work. It's all so lonely and sad -- the horror of adult life; the ubiquity of the grave; and on top of it all, stronger than anything, bigger and more present than anything else, is the aloneness, the blankness and loneliness that is everything, everybody. Ouch.