I'm still debating whether sunday night was the most fun night my life or whether it was just the best dream I've ever had. I talked my small L.A.-based music magazine into assigning me to go to a party in NYC. They're really willing to do almost anything. Annie had to work at a club nearby, so I took a friend of mine from high school.
The M0therfucker Party happens on the sunday of every three-day weekend in New York. I would spell it right, but I already can see that every other lame-ass kid in New York City has already posted about who they made out with that night.
Also, it's possible that I'm willing to do almost anything if it means bypassing a long line and getting in for free. Fucking velvet ropes.
Three hours later I'm smoking outside with some new friends, standing next to a girl who is only wearing white underpants and a series of cocktail umbrellas glued to her body. Part of the reason this party goes so well is that even if you're not gay, you're assumed to be. People want to talk to everyone about their outfits and their makeup. It's not like when you go to clubs and see that one guy with no-game trying to grind up against all the girls until one of them accidentally has sex with him.
If anything there are alot of straight girls in the room who would be flattered to turn one of the boys to her team.
My female friend confesses two things 1) She no longer feels like she's wearing a short skirt--even though her asscheeks are fairly visible and 2) She would love to make out with someone. I scan the crowd and decide to be her pimp. "Excuse me," I tap a girl on the shoulder. "Are you dating that guy, or can my friend make out with him?"
"Ohmygod, no! But he's a great guy. He's a ROCKET SCIENTIST! I mean he really is! He works for the government, but he's SUPERCOOL" Job or internship? "Job." Does he have an apartment or a location? "He's in Williamsburg." Where in Williamsburg? "[She tells me.] "Okay, I will escort them home if necessary."
They make out and I turn back to my new friend. "I started with Elmers glue," she says to the hundredth person. "But then I had to switch to nail-glue because umbrellas kept falling off." I might add that I was chain smoking Fantasias (they're colored, like in Tank Girl) and tarted up in velvet and ruffles like Voltaire.
This would be a great place to go if you had a problem with self-esteem. Everyone there would like to dance with you, talk to you, and remind you of how beautiful you are at any given moment. On the back steps in the smoking section, there kept being a bottleneck as the people hanging out on the steps would stop people coming down just to tell them how much they like their shoes.
The sun starts to come up around five and two thousand people--who look like the circus does in little kids nightmares--funnel out into the street and file in among people going to the early shift. I find my friend and she's going to go home with the guy. Somehow--and this still baffles me--his friends end up with two full bottles of Jack Daniels. One makes it all the way home.
I wake up the next morning because Annie is calling me. I'm already an hour and a half late for work and I can't get my goddam eyemakeup off.
I gave my girlfriend half the manuscript to start reading so that I could get some perspective. And it's terrifying. I hate my main character sometimes. Also, editting makes me a really cruel critic. I've spent the last nine months writing and not editting and I think I liked life alot more that way. I listened to pop music, watched films with obvious plot twists, and read the kind of books that you find in airports. And I loved it.
Tomorrow I will spend the entire day being a professional writer. I have to review a short story collection and cover the M.I.A. show for a magazine. My editor says the short story collection is dynamite and it could lead to more work if he likes my review. But everytime I read it, all I can hear is that cloying whine of my main character, as if he's the annoying friend who shows up, uninvited, when you least expect.
The manuscript has problems, but it doesn't have the problems I thought it did. I remember thinking that cutting it down would be easy because I just had to lop out a long story that one character tells in the beginning. Not happening.
I did get to edit the band section today, which I will not only keep but I'm going to try and make it more central.
This morning I got up at 6 to get back to writing. For the past few days I've been letting the snooze go so that by the time I get all the way up I won't have enough time to get started.
I feel maybe 25% better. I'm trying to be less critical right now and just read it as a whole, then go back and make the changes (Annie's idea). My favorite part about writing is when I can look forward to it. Tomorrow I begin to edit the first section where The Plural Nouns play. I wrote the original draft of this almost three years ago when I saw The Rapture in England. I sat on the top floor of a double-decker bus and scribbled out most of the scene onto receipts and papers in my pockets.
Last nights Shakespeare helped. I read The Tempest in bed and thought about how the whole beginning scene is important, but it doesn't feature any of the characters that drive the story, nor does it have to. It was also great to read because I had to read it in England, then at two classes at Kenyon, and all three times I don't think I comprehended a single word.
Seriously, where did the emotion go? Words that I write--even in emails and the like--are becoming more meaningless, but the words everyone else uses seem to scream at me. What the fuck?
I'm going read Shakespeare in bed now and hope that in my dreams I'm off to a magical place where the freshest verbs grow on every tree and adverbs are unheard of.
My girlfriend works with kids at a public school in Queens. And today I went down there to watch the kids perform monologues about their history. One of them--the hit of the night--involved eleven years olds who were break dancing. At the end they had an interview booth where an eleven year
Where are you from?
Connecticut.
How do you spell that?
C-o-n-n-e-c...a'right, that's close enough.
Are you married? You have a girlfriend?
I have a girlfriend. She lives up the street from me in Brooklyn.
When was the last time you went home?
Last week to see my neice. My brother just had a baby.
What do you like about home? What does home make you think of?
Driving around on windy roads.
Do you have any brothers or sisters?
Yes, I have a brother.
Where does he live?
In Connecticut.
Do you have a girlfriend?
Yes.
Do you live with her?
No, she lives up the street.
Next door? Sure. What was the last dream you had that made you happy? Or, what do you dream about?
Writing novels. I'm working on one now and it's alot harder than I thought. It's long. [She writes "HARD AND LONG" in big letters and she and her girlfriend giggle.]
Okay, do you live with your parents?
I mean, the thing is that I knew it should be this hard, I just didn't know it actually would, you know? It's really just alot of work and I'm worried. Now it's real.
Do you have any brothers or sisters?
The girls finish up with me and write down four or five times that I am 23. I excuse myself and walk into the bathroom. This was an important moment for me because I went into the teachers bathroom. The one marked MEN. I hadn't been inside the teachers bathroom since they held a failed locking campaign to curb smoking in my high school. (One great day a teacher pulled me out of Latin and I had my smartass comment ready. "Goddammit. Did I just see you come out of the teacher's bathroom? I have a problem and I need to use that bathroom." And I said, "Yeah? Well now you know how we feel." And since then I've never had a single comeback holstered in time.)
I locked the door and started my second freak out of the day. What if I really don't do anything with this? What if this never goes anywhere and I never write another novel again? Or worse: what if it flies so low that everything works out, but no one ever finds it on a bookshelf?
Yesterday I had this thought five separate times: "What if I just give up altogether?"
What if I just don't do it? What if I scrap this entire project? Will I start another? Probably. But then three years later I'll be right back here. Kafka gave up his first novel, Hunter S. Thompson and Joyce too.**
Nothing is going right. I honestly feel like I can't hear the characters--to the point where I wish the manuscript has a volume control. I admitted yesterday to myself that I need help, but there are paragraphs I'm reading now that I'm too embarassed to even show anyone.
I should known he'd say no. But I forgot to factor in this physics of this household. For every action I thought of that was intended to incur freedom or experience, there was an equal and opposite reaction from Dad.
There are alot of one-liners in the project. I couldn't read very well when I was younger but I really wanted to. So I would always quote things to make me feel like I had read it. I could tell you all the t-shirt-maximes from Walden, but I still have no idea what it's about. When I started writing I would always keep in mind how someone like me could read it, which makes some paragraphs look like they're covered in bumperstickers***.
**I only know this because they were later published anyway and I've read them (they're all not that great).
***See? Worthless simile for my own amusement. You know what I'm talking about, so I don't have to compare it to something to prove that, do I?
1) My posts are all going to be about writing for a while, but I'll make sure to get black out drunk every night just to spice things up. For example:
Where I DJ the booth is six inches higher than the dance floor. You feel like a pharmacist up there, looking down on the people. A girl came up to me and requested Chuck Berry, which never happens and I told her so. She came back every few songs and asked about other great works of modern music. Nancy Sinatra, Elvis, The Coral, etc.
Towards the end she threw a napkin in the booth and walked away. I shouted: "Do I look like a fucken trashcan to you?" I felt like an ass right away because her number was written on it (which also never, ever happens). When I finished up I completely erased her face from my memory. I mean, I couldn't even remember what color hair she had.
The basis for the main character in my writing project is in town and I told him this.
I didn't want to pursue this in any way, but a big part of me never wants to shoot anyone down. I was planning on saying kindly that I'm glad she likes MC5 and that she should come again next week. So I kept looking. I don't know why I care about the self-esteem of complete strangers, but I do. So now, because I have no memory, I feel the need to call her just so she doesn't wonder why I don't call.
2) Yesterday I started editting, four weeks behind schedule. I stopped writing on March 9th and had planned on starting again on April 23. There are some things missing, it feels. The characters don't have voices in the way I thought they did. I have to work on that. The narrative in my head is gone and all I have is what's on the page, which means no one has an accent unless I give it to them.
It's also really hard to make the backgroudn characters seem important enough. Months ago it seemed to me that a father figure should be important just because he has a child, but that's clearly not happeneing. I think I need to read more novels.
But the fun part is cutting. I'm trying to be grown up about this, which is hard because some of the scenes that I think are hilarious are the ones that just won't work. Part of me wonders if some books are too long just because the authors couldn't part with their words.
3) Buying the new translation of Don Quixote really wasn't a good idea. It's hilarious and will become my favorite book with two weeks. But it's nothing to learn from. There's a thousand adventures that follow no arc and right now I'm trying to take the thousand adventures I've written and turn then into a single, believable, heartbreaking arc.
You can pretty much count on my forthcoming year-in-review post about my first twelve months after college. But right now I have pressing company. On Tuesday I have a friend coming into town. What this friend doesn't know is that he's one of the main characters in my novel. I haven't told him because I haven't really seen him in a long time.
The last time we hung out, I was abroad in England. He was in London for a few days and I was in the middle of formulating a novel-length project about two eighteen year old boys. So after about a year of trying to capture his voice and psyche, there we were, playing pool together in London. Two twenty-one year old blokes.
The New York Times ran a story yesterday about a popular reading series where everyone brings novels by like Ethan Hawk and reads them straight faced in a bar while everyone laughs at how bad they are. I have a sick feeling that my manuscript is going to hop a cab while I'm in Boston this weekend, show up to the reading and read its unpolished paragraphs aloud.
"A dim green glow burns off the radio. I’m going to hide you in this song, she says. [Long pause for the giggling and gagging to stop.] We can keep it on repeat from now on. But when you leave I won’t ever listen to it again. Not on purpose."
"Ooo, look at me, I'm the worlds longest weblog entry!" He'll scream as he puts out a cigarette on the microphone, taking a casual sip from a martini the size of a bird bath.
Annie looks around the treehouse bar where we're having snacks and drinks in Vieques. "I think my friend is going to be here tonight," she says. For the past two days she's been working out in the hotel gym and having her ear talked off by some guys who knows everything about the island.
We sit down to dinner and I meet the guy. He's in his forties with that middle-aged gut, john lennon glasses and a "wacky" hawaiian shirt. His wife is a big bird character, almost six feet tall, but hunched from 25 years of kissing a short man. I don't know how this happened but they sit at the table next to us and we don't have a private discussion all night.
It starts off the way I assume all middle aged people talk to the much-younger. He tells us about vacations and bargains and where to go to get a cheap rental car. Before long he's giving us advice (save 10% of your earnings no matter what; bring your own lunch to work). This turns into relationship advice. He tells us that every year they get to pick one thing to change about the other. "Last year it was, 'Wipe down the shower when you're done.' No, Brendan, I wouldn't think of this myself, but she wants it. I want her to be happy. And now I don't even have to think about it. I just do it. The next year it was, 'No clutter on the dining room table.' No problem!"
They're nice enough, but after a few glasses of Sangria, they keep talking to us. This is my fault since I am, at all times, secretly harvesting peoples lives and thoughts for my own use later.
Somehow--in a discussion about Annie's internship--he mentions that he knows a senior member of her office. Because they met in a nudist colony.
"We're not really nudists. But one year I couldn't think of anything to change about her, so I decided to ask for that. This is the nice thing about the once-a-year deal, Brendan. Because the things you want are not going to be clean showers." Even though I'm in the middle of eating dinner, I can't help wondering what else these saggy old people are asking of eachother. "This year it was: no underwear on vacation. That's an extension of last year because--well, maybe this is different for your generation since you people probably...well...we don't really shave like you probably--I mean like you might do. But that's what I wanted last year."
I don't think Annie or I said a thing for the next half hour, but he kept talking. It felt like a Monty Python sketch, because there was just no way to end it. Later the wife puts her hands in her face after his fourth unrequited "Don't we, dear?"
"Just stop it," she mumbles.
"That's the thing about her," he continues. "She crashes out. One minute we're fine, dancing. But then she gets tired. You gotta look out for that, Brendan, if you want to make Annie happy. You need to realize how to read her."
"Please just shut UP," she meekly shouts and then throws up over the railing or a tree-house restaurant.
1) I semi-promised myself when I took this new job that I would stop writing about working. Waiting tables is nothing close to want I want to be doing in life. It just happens to be a huge distraction. Wherever you work, you'll find your coworkers talking about how much everyone makes at other restaurants. But I'm done. At least, for now. I'll gladly accept a weak job that I can zombie through from 4-10 rather than sweat through another goddam place that keeps me from 3-midnight.
But if I were given to talking about my job, I would mention how many times in a row I listened to the new Hot Hot Heat records. Specifically, one verse.
Hollywood waiter with a chip on his shoulder Only break has been his back and yet he's just getting older He's washing his clothes in a sink of self-pity
.
2) I'm terrified of my manuscript. I keep picking it up and trying to start editting. Nine weeks ago I said I'd take a six week break. What if it turns out to be terrible? I think. What if I cut something that would have sold the project? What if I can't stand the characters anymore?
Moments ago I finished reading The Coast of Akron and one of the characters complains about how her ex-boyfriend always wants her to edit his stories. All of which are based on that one summer he drove cross country with his brother.
No! No! I scream at a story in a ficticious setting. The goddam trip is secondary for the inner-yearnings of the main character, who is both repelled and trapped by his home environment. His mother left when he was young. Have you no pity? And then I look at the manuscript, which I mentioned, terrifies me, and I wonder if the narrative may have melted in the last nine weeks.
Maybe I typed out a compelling text. But maybe since then it's dripped away, leaving only lengthy narrations about the nature of car travel.
I dip my hand over the side of the kayak and an electric blue glow fills the underwater darkness.
The tour guide--like most white people on the island--is an over educated guy in ragged cargo shorts and flip flops. He explains that dynoflaggelates exist in all salt water, but the highest concentration in the world is in the water we're sitting in. It's 75-80 degrees year round, untouched by the ocean currents and fed by the decomposing leaves of the surrounding mangroves.
"You might see a spark of them in the ocean where they are 500 per cubic gallon. Last year National Geographic came here after the hurricane and found the concentration to be closer to 1 million per cubic gallon, which is still twice the concentration of any other bioluminescent bay in the world." I'm not really used to being #1. So this is exciting enough already.
Annie stays in the boat as I hop out. My body plunges into the water causing a blue glow to surround me and the current of bubbles I create. I feel like the birth-of-the-hero scene in every comic book. It's pitch black now and all you can see are the glowing paddle strokes of the rest of the tour and the odd fish, darting underwater and leaving a blue trail like a comet. Annie picks up fistsful of water and watches as it spreads an electric splash.
"We can pretty much stay our here as long as you guys want. Or until everyone gets stung by jellyfish." I pick up some water and as it washes down my arm small electric beads in the water seem to roll out of my hand.
I can't help thinking that this should have been in a movie by now, which is I think the best and worst compliment an American can give something. But I also accept that pretty much everything I've seen--Old Faithful, El Capitan, etc--except the Grand Canyon--was kind of disappointing because it was viewed without the benefit of camera work.
A Japanese man flew in a week before with five grand in camera equipment, but he couldn't capture the phenomenon. It's a high speed production in low-light. To put this in a movie would mean you had to manufacture it and to do so you would have to overmanufacture it. So by the time you saw it in person, it wouldn't be unfuckingamazing.
I curls my fists out and feel like Ursula from The Little Mermaid. With each spread of my fingers, an underwater smoke cloud of blue lights spreads out. "This is the coolest thing I've ever seen," I tell Annie.
"I feel like I'm at a rave or something," she says. I tread water, building up a cloud of light underneath me. It's bright enough now that I can see her face.
"Can you feel them on you?" She says, No. "Really? Cause I think I can. They roll down and--OWWW, fuck, fuckfuck." My arm presses into a jellyfish. Stung, numb and burned, I hop back in the kayak.
On the way back to the van, lonely fish criss-cross in front of us, darting around and leaving their comet trails. Some of them show off by jumping out of the water, leaving a blue footprint in the darkness and starting another one a second later.
One time Julia and Ben and I were walking to the movies at 42nd street and Julia said that the only reason any New Yorker should go to 42nd street is to see a movies.
"I can't wait to move to New York next year," Ben said. "Then I can make huge sweeping generalizations about it like everyone else."
So here's mine: I think one of the biggest things that people miss out on by not living in New York is the enjoyment of motel rooms. Annie and I spent about an hour on our first day marveling at the spacious room we got. Oh my god, there's two sides of the bed!
1) Whenever Annie and I go anywhere, we usually end up telling them that it's our Honeymoon. We did it as a joke at first, but last night we really wanted some champagne glasses sent up to our room. They brought them up and then ten minutes later another woman came to our door with a bottle of merlot, two more glasses, a cheese plate and a card signed by the entire staff. "Dear Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan, HAPPY HONEYMOON!"
2) Annie grew up just a few blocks from a pair of thirty-foot-tall, cast-iron Puerto Rican flags in Chicago. I had one Puerto Rican friend in high school and she may have been the only Latina in my hometown. This means that one of us can converse fluently and with a pitch-perfect accent that can convey mood, temperment and humor, and the other one of us spends most of his time going, "Que?"
3) One of us is also what you might call attractive. She's also a redhead so even in Ireland she is exotic. It's really conventient. Last night we wanted a cigarette at the bar. She mentioned it to one guy--who immediately produced a pack of menthols--and before she could ask for a light, four more packs came out from the various muchachos in the area, and we had our choice.
1) Fuck. I'm leaving for Vieques in ten minute and I didn't even come up with a good travel persona yet. Some of the most fun I've ever had was screwing around in Paris, pretending the be a travel writer. I stopped making up lies of jobs I wished I had because I am superstitious. And now, a year after graduating college, I'm still picking up and putting down other peoples plates.
As I further procrastinate my return to writing full-time, I busy myself with creating my own life drama. Part of me enjoys the memories that I create, but mostly I just wish that I spent more time making up problems for people I've made up rather than spending my days wondering if I'm going to get paid that week or have an apartment.
There was an interview with Kurt Loder, of all people, in an old issue of Might Magazine where says "I enjoy writing, but I think mostly I just enjoy having written." I'd like to think that I like writing, but what I really love is that afterglow of typing that last period and thinking, "Well, shit. Look what I just did."
In the project which I will return to after I get back from Puerto Rico there is a band called The Plural Nouns. The two main characters see them a number of times and their songs ring in their heads for three hundred pages. One of the most fun things I've ever done is make up fake songs for a fake, second-rate band. I wrote this one day sitting in Ben's kitchen.:
Airplane to Heaven
On the airplane to heaven you can stand up when they land. And you never have to wait until the captain says you can. You don’t have to wait in line, although you wouldn’t really care. Because when you get to heaven you are already there.
And everyone gets to everything they meant to do. The bands you used to listen to come and say howdy-you do. You always bought our records and we want to say thank you. We couldntna gone without ya, and sorry it took so long to say so.
And all the stars in the movies, they buy popcorn for the crew. They don’t roll the credits, but they sit and tell you who is who. The director always wants you to stand up, bow, and so you do. Cause at the movies in Heaven everyone’s glad to finally meet you.
The Jews all go to Heaven, though they never knew they would. Everyone goes to heaven because everyone meant to be good. But some never got around to it as much as they could But when they get to heaven they already agree that they should
And all of your exes come out and say hello And they talk and they never pretend they have to go. But when they do you can tell that they aren’t lyin’ That they’re happy you found someone, though they weren’t at the time.
Everyone in heaven wants to meet you just because. They think of life like camp or high school or maybe drivers’ ed. That it was fun while it lasted, but they’d never do it again. Cause when you get to heaven everyone remembers how bad life was.
St. Peter doesn’t work there, even if you think he should. He doesn’t keep your scorecard or even know if you’ve been good. Everyone’s said something stupid, and no one seems to care. Because when you get to heaven you are al-rea-dy there.
After an otherwise uneventful night I ended up in the backroom of a club. I think the designers of the place built this room for this purpose:
The owner was sitting there pretending to listen to why the two gallery owners in the room beleived in the genius of eachother while everyone kept one eye on a friend of mine. He was everyones new friend because he was mustering four lines of blow on the back of a CD case.
This is fucking great, I thought as I lit another cigarette. I'm smoking in a bar!
