Why I will probably never write a convincing novel about people in their twenties.

It's midnight on a Friday and I'm in my pajamas. My day begun at 9:04 when I awoke and realized that I was half an hour late for leaving the house for my job. There are as many as two days a week where I must be awake and shaven and in pants with pockets before dinnertime. And I always manage to screw it up.

This also has to do with that my job is the complete opposite of my literary aspirations. When I know that I will be writing in the morning, I go to bed with Proust and Joyce, thinking of the great iceburg of the American unconscious. When I know that I will be at work in the morning, I go to bed trying not to spill whatever it is that I am still drinking.

My job is completely brainless. A monkey trained with the correct proper nouns could do what I do each day. When I am to arrive in the early morning, I cut fruit and fill bottles for two hours. For the rest of my six-hour day I put these same things into glasses of ice.

It satisfied me in the beginning because it provided me with the poor-self image, low-status, and the general working class feeling of personal satisfaction one gets in completing a task for someone else. The money? Oh, well there's some of that. This is my twenty-third job since graduating college and never before was I able to assume I had any money coming my way. I never before was able to plan out the money I had for rent and food. Last year I had foodstamps in two cities. This year I'm going to Puerto Rico for the second time.

What makes me the least happy is that I know I'm losing something and it's happening in a boring way. At first I may have thought that it was funny--me with holes in my socks that showed through the holes in my shoes*, blowing my last few dollars on a supremely nice bottle of whiskey. For a while I was buying supremely nice things because I understood more than anything else that money was fleeting.

1) The first night I worked again after finishing this draft was march of last year. I made about a hundred and twenty dollars waiting tables in a club that had to serve food in order to keep its liquor license. Pete and I met up with a friend and went out to the lower east side to celebrate the fact that I could afford to celebrate. The next morning I woke up in a blind terror, thinking I had vomited my glasses into a public trashcan as my final memory of the night may have suggested. 2) When I got my next job I bought my first pair of pants since I had gotten my first job out of college. I bought shoes. I bought Annie and I a trip to Puerto Rico, which I was able to enjoy without thinking about work since I was fired from that job only days before we left.

I could destroy this guilt immediately in two simple ways: 1) each month I could save the same amount that I spend on rent and give it away to the poor. 2) I could work half as much (only one morning to get up per week!) and make the same as anyone else my age.

But I know that timeline has changed. It's now no longer "that night when I had a job." Soon these will become my twenties--a blur of ill-fitting uniforms, brainless jobs and really, really great nights. Someday I won't remember where I was working when. I will forget that Road-runner/Coyote feeling I had so many times when the bottom fell out of a job that was supposed to pay the rent. And I will probably somehow remember how I was feeling on all of those nights that end with me wondering how I got home.

What I fear is that--just the same was that Truman Capote lampooned the rich and the Beastie Boys made a fake frat-rock song only to become their respective mascot--I will somehow turn into something I despise. There are sport coats in my closet now**, and shoes for several occasions where one tattered pair stood for two years***.

My only solace is that if I ever sell this manuscript it will be the shittiest wage I made in three years.

* "If you grew up with holes in your zapatos / you celebrate the minute you be havin' dough."
** Albeit really gay looking ones.
***Last week I passed a pair of cape-cod looking Topsiders in the window of a store and thought, Won't those be nice for Spring!

How's this for a first line?

"I don't remember thinking my mom was crazy--I just thought she really liked pancakes."

Three competent people have been fired from where I work this week. I bartend in a fancy restaurant inside of a criminally expensive art museum. You can imagine that this is a fantastic job. I agree. Which is why I'm nervous. Tonight I was trying to get out early to spend time with the love of my life. During the time I was trying to leave, I forgot to put in an order for a gentleman at the bar.

After waiting for half an hour for a bowl of soup that would never come, he stormed out. On his way to the exit he turned to my boss's boss's boss and told her what a terrible time he had in the restaurant.

I spent the rest of the night shitting my pants in fear that I would lose the job that has brought me happiness and security. Luckily another patron of mine got so drunk that he ended up pulling his cock out and pissing on the bar.

No one said a single thing to me for the rest of the night unless they were smiling. "Thanks for getting the mop."

The last time I went to Philadelphia I was a member of a non-profit that turned out to be a front group for the Revolutionary Communist Party. I was poor, walking around the ghetto streets in a basketball jersey that matched my tattoos and I told black people about a certain, fashionable black political prisoner.

On the most "college" night of my entire life some friends of mine and I got caught in a rain storm during a sixty-thousand people march through the city in support of said black man. Freezing, sopping, we snuck into an empty laundry mat, took off our clothes and sat around as men and mildly-attractive women in their underwear--smoking and talking politics while our clothes dried.

I presented this image to people so frequently over the years and it ended up happening to the main character in my novel

A Laundromat’s bright lights call us to the next block. We sit inside and Hampshire makes up an ashtray outta people’s trash. We fill it with our change and decide to put our socks in the dryer just so we have the excuse. We buy a few hours. Then Hampshire starts another machine for everyone’s shoes. We sit around the folding table shivering, dripping onto their upturned laundry carts. And then—fuck it. Hampshire takes off his shorts and tosses them in with the socks. I find someone’s flowered sheets. My shorts go in. The girls take off their t-shirts and sit there for a minute in those girl-tank-top things. Everyone giggles. Because naked is still funny. We’re not old enough for naked to mean labor, surgery, cancer. The blanket falls off her shoulders and she stretches out the elastic waist of her underwear to show me the butterfly she hid back there. I don’t want to tell her what a lame tattoo that is. Mostly because the muscles in her back shape her body with better curves than the Pacific Coast Highway. She lets go of the elastic and grabs hold of me, breathing in hard and sharp. It’s freezing in here, she says. And a shiver starts in her head, shaking the cargo of her wiring...Her teeth stopped chattering and when I look at her again, she’s glancing up from my jaw and she catches me looking at hers. A hand from under the sheet touches my left leg, overheating my whole body as the dryer kicks up to the next cycle bobbing us up and down.

Last year Annie and I broke up for about three days while she was halfway through the manuscript. We fought over the remaining pages like indifferent parents using their offspring against eachother. When she agreed to keep reading, she got to the extended love scene in the laundry mat and we were back together within the week.

After dinner last night in Philadelphia where we had drinks and courses and where I did not wear a basketball jersey, I tried to walk our drunk asses down the street to the original laundry mat--thinking this was about the most goddam romantic thing in the world. And it was closed.