After making a few phone calls we found our way to a little freak show kind of party in San Francisco. My travelmates and I decided it was approximately how Gilligan's Island would throw a Motherfucker party. I know that sounds like a really crass thing to say, but if I said it politely you wouldn't glean the truth.
Another way to put it would be to say that I walked into a club that felt precisely as if Myspace became The Matrix. All the people you've maybe run into and thought had cute angles or funky lighting or a nice outfit are all the sudden in your face, under an unforgiving blacklight wearing what appears to be stage make up.
They played only mash ups. Especially ones with rock riffs and worn hip-hop lyrics that the kids could sing to themselves.
So of course who should I run into at the weirdest place on earth butBrandon Flowers?. Earlier that day I was thinking about him because I was in a thrift store and found a cute shirt that Nikki had designed eight years earlier. It was more than one of a kind and I know if he ever saw it he would "borrow" it immediately and "lose it" on tour just like everything else. After I went through that week with Ray Bradbury I did my best to avoid him. I want to be respected as an artist, not as somebody with nearly unlimited access to Melville's brick.
He snuck up behind me as I was trying to find the beat on some song that mashed up Justin and Siouxsie and the Banshees. I was unfortunately in the bathroom line. He started to make me feel really uncomfortable. "Long line, huh?" It's not too uncommon for a one stall bathroom in a party like this to get jammed with five blow-holes all passing around one bag. "Cute shirt, by the way. Is that from Barking Irons?"
"No. Target."
"Hey," he sounded upset so I turned around to him. And it was so embarassing we were wearing the same shirt! "I was kidding, man. I stole this from my sister in, like, 10th grade. I love the detail on the flowers."
I felt like such an ass. "I'm sorry man. I thought--"
"I know what you thought. I'm not Melville, okay? Plus this is San Francisco. Last call is at 1:30. Who would even need it? And who would want the shit they have? Do you know why this bathroom line is so long?"
I shrugged.
"Some hilarious chap crushed up children's laxative into little baggies and sold them to anyone who asked. Half this fucken club has diarrhea worse than second grade." I watched as one by one people filed out of the bathroom, clutching their stomachs. It occurred to be then that this was one of the funniest things I ever heard.
Just as in the Matrix where sign and signifier don't intersect, there are hundreds of kids partying way after 2:30 AM and waking up the next day with bloody noses and diarrhea, thinking they're rockstars like Brandon Flowers or something.
The main lesson of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No-good, Very-bad Day for me has always been that--as much as we'd like to escape our problems by running away to Australia--they'll be waiting for us to get back or they'll catch up with us there.
I just came back from a fantastic, relaxing, life-affirming vacation and while I was there I did the smartest fucking thing you can do when you are filled with happiness and truly satisfied. I called into work.
Almost a year ago I witnessed an incident at work that involved a senior staff member grabbing a Puerto Rican host's arm, yelling at him, squeezing him until he went black and blue. "Why can't you do anything right you fucking Spanish piece of shit." Last week I was called in as a witness and this week they won't give me my schedule until I meet with the general manager. Total coincidence, right? So now after this amazing trip and great time I'm probably going to get fired.
Can't wait to get fucking evicted, grow a beard, get weird and disappear. You'll run into me when you have children and I'll be in their elementary schools, preaching about why you should always do the right thing so you can fucking end up like me.
I called my brother about it today. I don't know what I'd do if I had some domineering elder figure in my life with a business degree and a mortgage in the suburbs. It's just really fantastic to have a brother like in that Johnny Cash song where you can call him up anytime and tell him that you're going to be a fucken loser again. Somehow that's way more comforting.
The whole reason I've had a regular DJ slot for the past two years in New York is that when I was last in San Francisco I told them that I was a visiting DJ from New York. They set me up with a happy hour time slot that by some extreme chance turned into an entire thursday night when the other DJ didn't show up.
I returned to New York and told the bar there that I was a DJ from the San Francisco bar. Two weeks from now we're celebrating our 2 year anniversary.
I basically did that again this time. The only time they had open was Friday night from 8-9:15. I took it because why not play records on vacation?
The bar manager called me half an hour later and asked me a big favor. Could I do the early spot, take a break and then go and do the entire friday night?
Just to create an air of youthful exhuberance in the story and to remind us all that people in other cities live each day and enjoy their lives, the record store across the street from my hotel went out of business in honor of my two hour timeslot. Big sale. All rare 45s for $1. I doubled my record collection and headed to the bar.
Going out in other cities is strange. In New York it wouldn't be out of the question for me to show up somewhere at six PM and not making it home until after four. This bar had four DJs on from 8-2AM.
The second I threw on a Nancy Sinatra Record half the bar stood up and started dancing. It was bright out, most of them hadn't even had dinner. It was just beautiful.
Between sets I was just so happy. The manager paid me more than I usually make in New York just for that one hour. I smiled down the mission to get a pack of cigarettes. Placing one of them delicately in my mouth, I straightened the lapels of my Edwardian sport coart, flipped my scarf behind my back and swaggered back to the full bar where I was to play records for the remainder of a friday night.
Apparently my limp wrists got the better of me because I swished by a pack of Hot Topic punks who thought I was the funniest things they've ever seen. "Well, we-heh-hell, aren't you a FANCY lad!"
Ray Bradbury showed up at my door in another one of his raging, Fahrenheit-level tizzies. I've been kind of timid around my writing pals lately, since they're all turning into total blow-holes. The other night I gave Herman Melville my new manuscript and just to say thanks for reading it, I also gave him a kilo of blow. He sat up in my kitchen all night and didn't touch the manuscript, except for when he tore out the first page and rolled it up since he didn't have a dollar bill. He spent the rest of the night sniffing the inside of his nostrils and licking his skeleton keys.
So here's Ray Bradbury, standing at my door with yesterday's wool tie dangling, half undone. "Sullivan! Sullivan I finished your birthday present! Don't tell Melville I gave you this...you know who we get along..." (Bradbury adapted Moby Dick for a Hollywood movie in the 5o's--Melville Hates the thing. It makes it really hard to schedule a party.)
"My birthday was ten fucking months ago and you were in a K-hole for the week." I heard my landlords stirring, so I pulled him inside. "What? What is so fucking special that you had to pull me out of bed."
"Are you with that lingerie designer? Tell her I'm totally going to her next fashion show."
"You're a fucking letch sometimes, you know that?"
"I made you something. I made you something and I know you're going to love it." He hands me the handwritten manuscript for a book called Green Shadows, White Whale about his experience of adapting Moby Dick in Ireland. I open it up.
"Your reason for being in Ireland?" the customs inspector licked his pencil.
"Reason has nothing to do with it," I said. "Madness more like it. Literary and psychological. I am here to flense and render down the White Whale."
"Flence." He scribbled. "Render down. White Whale. That would be Moby Dick, then?"
"You read! Did you make it all the way through?"
"The whale has not docked here, no. So much for literature. What's the psychological thing you said? Are you here to observe the Catholics lying and the Unitarians baring their breasts?"
"No, no. Between lowerings of the Whale, I will study the Irish."
"God has gone blind at that. Can you outlast Him? Why try?"
"I've come to see the Irish."
"No! Hear us, yes. But our tongue's not connected to our brain!"
"This is brilliant stuff!" I told him.
"It's all yours, my boy. My first draft!" He sniffed his nostrils again. "Brandon Flowers didn't leave a bag of White Whale around here, did he?..."
One day at work the beer taps exploded. Rivers of lager poured down the thick rubber mats that we keep behind the bar so that we don't slip if the beers taps explode or something. I got it under control eventually. But for the rest of the night whenever you stepped the mats would stick to your shoes.
One of the girls stepped entirely out of her shoe. "Goddammit," she said just in case anyone hadn't noticed. "The rugs are sticky!"
Howie--a man my father's age but with my job and Michael Bolton's ponytail--cracked his 53 year old Boston accent. "You're right, it's like walking around in a porno theater back here."
I threw up into the ice bin.
"What? Aww, you're probably too young to even know what those are. You're part of that VCR generation."
Anyway, for some reason I told that story to Annie's parents on Christmas morning last year. And they didn't throw up into the ice bin. They smiled and nodded as if I had just told them about winning in traffic court. And that's what I like about people in the midwest.
One of my favorite Ramones songs is called "It's Not My Place (In the 9 to 5 world)" and I've thought about it often. Sometimes I will wake up in my sleep crying, convinced that in the morning I will have to wake up and, and alphabetize something for someone else. I had a job like that for maybe three weeks and I gained fifteen pounds.
Anyway, I showed up to DJ on wednesday at 8:30 (so that I could have more awkwardness with My Only Fan--who never showed) and I left at almost 6 am. But it's not like in the time I took a break or had lunch or anything. I thought, Could I actually have no problem working a 9 to 5? What would it take?
As I was thinking of this a girl left the booth and took an armload of my empty glasses. Alcohol! That would do the tr--
CRR-ash!
She dropped all of them as she slipped coming out, falling on her ass in broken glass. It was already the funniest thing I would see all night, but those were just the whiskey glasses.
Half an hour later another girl who wanted to be helpful took 7 beer bottles out that I'd finished and--
CRR-ash!
God! It was so funny it was as if the joke was on me!
1) Last week Jackie and I stepped out for a smoke atTrash right when the cops came to raid them for not having a caberet license. It was a ridiculous reason to break up a perfectly good friday night party. But it was cute to see half the east village casually toss a contraband "pack of matches" out their back pockets.
I immediately recalled my high school graduation party where my band was playing as the cops came to break it up. We were one guitar note into "You Gotta Fight (For Your Right To Party)" and the tenets of Rock & Roll demanded that my 18 year old self go through with it. "Kick it!" I shouted into my parents garage in my New England accent, manfully trying for a Brooklyn drawl.
Anyway, somehow I wished that some night when I was DJ'ing that the cops in New York City would break up the party for something as ridiculous as playing dance-y music without a license because I would blare that song. I don't even care if I broke all five speakers again.
Of course, not matter how hard I screamed along everyone would be too concerned with flushing whatever they had on them to enjoy it with me.
The point is that our new Wednesday party is in danger of being permanently cancelled. Not because your pops caught you smoking and he said no way. Not because your mom busted in and said, What's that noise? Not because we destroyed the entire soundsystem or because Conrad has been pouring the inventory down our throats--pro-bono--but because of a complex partnership that involves a woman who has been on vacation because her dog has cancer.
Tonight has to be the biggest night in VHS history. We will dance and drink and screw if only because there's nothing else to do.
2) Jackie also missed her first Tuesday at Beauty Bar since we met. It was like old school night with Pete and Ben and I, which really helped me plan what to do for our two-year anniversary in two weeks. I played some records that I haven't had out in a year and Pete started dancing around with the people in the bar. Old school.
After I got paid and had another pint and rediscovered my drinking technique from college I stepped out for a smoke. That's how all these stories begin anyway.
A very nice girl from Boston named Leila introduced herself to me. "I don't wanna make this awkward," she said--even though we both knew that meant that it could only be awkward-er. "But I just moved to New York and I've been reading your website for a long time and I wanted to meet you."
It was great! It was soooo awkward! And we both knew it! My first real live fan!
You would think this kind of confession would make you fast friends. But I had this weird feeling and I started wondering if I was really different in real life or if I was exactly like I've always said I'd be. Minutes earlier I performed a transition that I've blogged about before ("Satisfaction"--"Pretty Woman"--"House of Jealous Lovers"--"House of Jealous Lovers" (original In Sound tour support version)--"Express").
If I could take one drunken impression away it would be that I remember saying, "Wait, you didn't find the website through Ben? You didn't go to Bard?"
I mean, I have a standing confessional relationship with the Nice Girl From Texas. But this is the first time that I've actually met anyone based purely on our collective love of music and literature. Specifically, my music and literature.
I was going to omit that last sentence but it can't. Because I love awkward!
If she doesn't come to St. Jeromes tonight at 9 at 155 Rivington, I'm deleting this post. I'm going to show up early just because I know she has to be at work early the next day.
3) For some reason Pete and I walked away to get some pizza and had a hardest-punch-in-the-arm contest. He definately won. But I only remembered that this morning when my arm was incapable of answering Jackie's wake-up call.
1) My brother's latest child may be born this very evening. If it happens while I'm DJ'ing I'm buying the entire bar a shot of Conor Jameson Sullivan whiskey.
But if we lose El Presidente he has to name the kid Fidel Castro Sullivan.
Oh and if I get shot on my way home and he doesn't fucking name it Brendan: then he's dead to me.
2) If I could redesign one thing this week I would make it so that you could save the majority of your laptop battery by switching to black and white mode.
Colin Farrel came out to see me DJ last month like he always does. We met somewhat awkwardly in a waiting room one time because we have the same therapist. I stopped going when Annie left, but he kept up with it. Secretly I think he only hangs out with me so much because he wants me to introduce him to Herman Melville so they can co-produce something together.
Anyway, so I got outside for a smoke and he says, "Tanks. But no tanks. 'M offa now."
I can never understand fucking a word he says. "You're what?"
" 'M offa now."
"You're off what now?"
"Hollowvit." (All of it.) "Read me chart." He hands me a piece of paper where I can see that our therapist had him write down his weekly intake. 20 ecstasy tablets, four grams of coke, six grams of speed, half an ounce of hash, three bottles of Jack Daniels, 12 bottles of red wine, 60 pints and 280 cigarettes.
I was totally shocked. "You do ecstasy?" Honestly? "What are you a raver now? Can you see me okay or do you want me to get a glow stick? What is this--1993? You partying like Raeanne Graff on My So Called Life? Is Ricky there too?"
I had about ten more of these one-liners to go but he interrupted. "You should try it. Just keep track."
When he uses his American accent with me, I know he's serious.
From Thanksgiving until New Years I drank: 161 pints, 132 whiskeys, while smoking 214 cigarettes. In that same time I had seven bottles of champagne, one bottle of red wine, 2 glasses of white, six shots of tequilla and one, accidental shot of what I thought was whiskey but turned out to be Jager. I wanted to include everythings that goes along with the party life including tips, cab rides and drinks that I buy for the hordes of gorgeous women that magically appear each night. But I got too wasted to remember.
(Holyfuckingshit while editing this post I decided to estimate how much I spent. At $5 a pint--which is low but there were PBRs--and $5 a whiskey plus $77 for cigarettes that means I could have spent $1542. I'm just going to tell myself that many of these drinks were at work or at home while DJ'ing or at my friends bars for free. But that doesn't make up for the estimated $300 in tips and cabs.)
I also saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the lower east side at dawn looking for an angry fix. Most mornings I am at home writing a thousand words an hour and thinking of poignant imagery to describe the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.
I should have never kept track in the first place because there have been nights when I've been home and thought, It's almost 2 am and I still don't have anything to put in the book today. Not once was I even hungover or missed work or forgot to pick up my child in daycare. I assume that I could take it or leave it and if I had a career I wouldn't do so much. Or if I didn't work in three bars. But these are probably habits that stick with you only because you don't see them as a problem.
Last night was off the record but, for example, I drank an estimated 7 whiskeys (2 Jim Beam, 4 Jameson and a Wild Turkey), 11 Budweisers and a Brooklyn Lager while DJ'ing from 8pm-5am. But I only smoked 4 cigarettes. Everyone who came up to the booth to tell me that they were too wasted to stay any longer had the shaming task of taking an armload of my empty glasses to the bar and bringing me another round. I maybe would have stayed longer but we blew out all five speakers until the very end when the last speaker, clinging to its own basenotes for dear life, blew into a crackly puff of smoke.
Just out of curiosity I had my liver, lungs and kidneys tested. The doctor said that given the fact that I've never really taken any medicines and my pseudo-vegetarian diet that he cannot see any noticable health problem. I should have never asked. I told him that I do smoke, but that I don't smoke pot. He said it wouldn't hurt me to stay home once in a while and smoke weed. We high-fived and on the way out I saw Colin Farell in the waiting room reading last August's issue ofParenting Magazine.
"Is your kid in with the pediatrician?"
"Aye, pooor fella done caught himself pnemonia."
"That's gonna take forever. You, uh, you got time for a quick one?"
My first DJ gig in New York City happened to become a regular thing on Sunday nights at Williamsburg's only club. The bartender liked that I played 60"s garage and I liked that I was DJ'ing in New York City. My first night DJ'ing in Chicago was also my last. That bar still owes me $40 and the worst part is that I came back six months after I abandoned the city and asked if they still had it. They didn't.
Embarassing.
Pete came to the first night and every night after that. He would begin his ninetofive week after getting on the fucken L train at 3:40 AM.
They used to pay me 10%, which is great because some places only give you on a percentage of the people you bring.
Anyway, every sunday night at 5am the bartender/manager/owner would give me $10 and since I was fucken wasted I would hand it right back to her.
The point is that I'm doing another Sunday night on the Lower East Side tonight and the bar is half full. It's for a friend's birthday and he's here--convinced that because at 9:15 only ten of his friends are here that he's a thirty year old loser now. Personally, I would be happy with the ten bucks.
Today a lawyer--technically my lawyer--came into work and handed me a big fat check. He said, Conrgratulations. We won that lawsuit.
I opened the settlement check and almost walked out the door behind him. I'm so excited! I think I'll buy the rights to the new Nora Jones record and keep it all to myself. That or blow it on vacations and booze.
Perhaps one of the more important nights of my young life was sober, make-out free and had nothing to do with literature. I was in college at a party. I've said this before, but the thing you need to know about going to a literature school is that everyone is more interested in modern music than modern literature. My friends and I endlessly discussed the value of music that to the untuned ear would sound like sound effects for a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.
But one night when we went to see a friend's experimental, art-noise band take the stage another group came up first. Rattlesnake Suitcase. I still remember the name. They played "Summer of '69" and "Smells like Teen Spirit" and "(I Wanna) Rock and Roll All Nite." It was the greatest show I saw in college.
Later when I was thinking about it more I remember feeling like I shouldn't have liked that. But I did. And maybe because no one else was willing to play pop music. I knew every word to all those songs, even though I hadn't heard them in years. But I will always remember that feeling, that tugging two ways and how I always used to go the other way.
My first novel is basically just like art school. I was telling myself over and over what a novel should have in it. I was telling myself how to write and what a character should say and what a scene should look like and I was telling myself what not to write about. And it was boring like experimental noise rock because it had no heart. Behind the joy of listening to "'69" is a dozen layers of nostalgia for the hundreds of times I heard in in a hundred car radios. With my new novel I find myself searching for the things that I should not write about. Things I've maybe trained myself not to write about. War, guilt, coffee chains, families, hate, sex, and Metallica. For some reason feeling like I shouldn't be writing about them makes me feel like I'm writing something that no one else can.
Like the bars of New York City I refuse to get ashtrays for my home because I refuse to admit that we allow smoking indoors. Instead I find myself ashing into the soymilk in the bottom of this morning's Cracklin' Oat Bran bowl, perching the cigarette precariously on the side so that I can type.
It's really adorable that all the people who got into myspace last year and did all the hilarious myspace jokes of the age are now listed as "101 Years Old."
For a long time I've been looking for a new DJ thing with new music and I want to name it after a classic, underground song. Death Disco, Trash, MisShapes are already taken. For a while I wanted to call it "Pretty Vacant" but I can't stand the blogo-jokes that would follow after that first semi-empty night.
In 1977 the Sex Pistols had to cancel their gig on Saturday Night Live. Through some kind of deal they told Lorne Michaels that they should get this guy Elvis Costello from England to go on. He was "punk" and all. Elvis' label had just started to release his previous albums in the United States and asked him to play one of his old songs so he could build a following.
Coincidentally, he had just released a song in England about corporate control of media and artistry. On live American TV his band started to play "Less Than Zero" and he stopped them in the first verse.
Lorne Michaels was furious. He then banned all "punk" acts from Saturday Night.
Almost twenty years later when the Beastie Boys had a #1 hit with "Sabotage"--a stripped down punk-themed song--they were invited to play it on Saturday Night Live. Halfway into the first verse, Elvis Costello comes on stage.
And, I would have posted these videos any one of the othe nine times I've discussed them, but goddam Lorne Michaels keeps coming over and taking them off youtube.
Having your groceries delivered is another one of those New York things that sounds quaint or friendly at first. But then you find yourself in your livingroom, arguing with some dethroned Nigerian prince and trying not to accuse him of stealing.
"Do you have another bag in the car? I'm missing the lettuce?"
"No car. Lettuce! Lettuce 1 here! 1 Lettuce HERE!"
And then the worst thing I do is try and develope a common language. "1 Lettuce okay. 2 on receipt! 2 lettuce there--no 2 lettuce here?"
"I a prince."
"No, it was the same price."
"No price. Prince! You give me bank account number--I transfer the royal money in 2 business days."
(Thank you Juan for giving us Blind Melon's Change to listen to while we read this)
A long time ago I gave up on having New Year's Resolutions because I don't like disappointing myself. When I got to college I wanted to be somebody, when I graduated and moved to Chicago I wanted to be somebody else. This year was weird for me because I spent exactly six months of it struggling to be someone that somebody else what me to be and six months being exactly whom I wanted to be.
As a novelist I can make up an exact moment when this happened: one day Ben and I were at my DJ gig and a very nice girl came up and made a perfect song request. But I didn't have the record. I encouraged her to come back with another. She took a while. But then somewhere in the night she came back and made another request. Then another.
She came back the next week right on time and I decided right then that Jackie and I would be actual friends and maybe someday hang out in a place that wasn't a bar.
At the time Annie was working for a notorious poon-hound whose marriage was on the rocks. She was gone from friday to monday. Sometimes even going up thursdays and whooshing into my DJ gig on Tuesdays with her luggage and expect time from me right then. It's a painful but natural thing when people change. But expecting two people to change equally and willfully at the same is a disservice to both.
Jackie and I immediately merged our friends into one group. And these new friends never once asked me when we could move back to chicago or what the hell I was thinking about when I dressed myself like Jim Morrison, PhD that morning. They didn't hassle me about grad school or ask me just what the hell I'm going to do for a career when I finally write that new novel.
And you know what happened then? I started writing again. And I didn't--couldn't--stop. Free from the burden of pretending to be someone else, I could spend to rest of my time creating an honest character.
Annie eventually got fired by the insane poon-hound's crazy wife. Were this a year before I would have gone completely crazy, staying up at nights imagining that she had something to do with it, that maybe Jude Law wasn't the only one with a Mary Poppin's complex. But I didn't.
I spend all of my time creating stories where people who have never changed somehow find the will to do so on their own. That is what every single story in the entire world is about. The Annie that broke up with me in an accidentally hilarious way was not the same Annie I fell madly in love with and moved in with 3 weeks after meeting. It's sad that it had to end. But everything does.
A good friend of mine from high school moved in with me. He had just broken up with his girlfriend in Rome and was living with his parents, saving up to move to New York. Sometimes things happen in life that just feel so perfect at the time. I spent January-July living life like an Elvis Costello song, full of responsibility and honesty. I spent July-September living like an Elvis Presley song--full of emotion but somehow disingenuous, penned by someone else. Nick moved in October 1st and since then we have lived everyday like a Johnny Cash song--full of spirit, whiskey, honesty and trouble.
This has been the greatest year of my life and I wouldn't bother changing a minute of it, because I already have another year starting now.
