1) Listening to music on computer speakers. My ears have aged. I can't even enjoy a band on speakers that small. It's like trying to rock out to your alarm clock. All I want to do is swat at your spacebar and go back to sleep.
2) Although I've learned about great bands from this, that goes double for your myspace page song. And triple if that song comes through my little laptop speakers.
3) Taking the subway home drunk. The New York City Subway is the cleanest, second-fastest and most cost effective transportation service in the world. But I'm too old to wake up in Coney Island, unshaven and late for work anymore.
4) Being late for work. Although I work in three to five different bars a week, I'm way to old to run in fifteen minutes late and pretend that there's a mass-failure in the transit system. You get to a certain age where you can't exactly skip paying rent just because you're incapable of getting off the goddam internet in time to make it in.
5) Checking myspace in other peoples houses. I've said this before but Myspace is to our generation in America what Minitel is to Parisians. It's the shitty, obsolete system that no one likes but only works because everyone uses it. I know that all of our messenging systems and texts, etc give everyone a small amount of seratonin joy when they read them. It's an ego boost that is a small fraction of an orgasm in your brain. So when my conversation with you gets interrupted by a desperately important text or when you come into my apartment and check your myspace, you mind as well just jerk off right in my pocket.
6) Dating girls who are still in college. But sometimes it feels like no one else enjoys a good, dorky Ginsberg reference. And instead I'm left alone in the machinery of another night.
7) Buying any appliance from a chain store only because it is all the way on the left of the shelf and therefore the smallest and cheapest.
8) Using the word "dude" more than once in a sentence.
9) Making crass generalizations about "everything" "nothing" and things that happen "all the time." But then again everybody does this.
10) Decorating my apartment with found-art. With this I include street-furniture (some of my best), broken mirrors, posters from concerts I may or may not have attended, anything that came in a magazine--even if it were a centerfold, and anything that wasn't technically found but may have been stolen from an iHOP or a church.
Even though rent could not possibly have turned up overdue two days before the end of the month, my landlord called me twice while DJ'ing tonight. i tend to stray away from landlord-superintendent troubles because I live in Brooklyn's second smallest brownstown. A brownstone that came out of a once proud Brooklyn mansion thanks to Bill, the otherwise retarded Dutcho-Rican handy man who helped turn this place from ghetto to post-ghetto in a less-than-meta-timeframe.
Tonight Bill--who at 55 still lives with his mother--is outside my apartment in Brooklyn, yelling to be let in, pressing on my buzzer and pleading for my support. My landlords gave me a new set of keys tonight because earlier tonigh Bill shot and killed his own brother, and fled for my apartment in refuge. "C'mon, yo? Lemme in???" he says whenever I press "listen" on my buzzer.
The problem is that Tolstoy came home tonight after watching me DJ and he is at the bars of my front door gate right now, screaming "Why? Why didst you kill thine own brother? Wast is for the love of thine mother? Wouldst a greater translation improved thine venues of communication?"
The alleged murderer stands outside and all I can say is: "Leon! Get your verbose ass back inside! The fuck you care about crime in Brooklyn? Dammit, boy. This is my problem! Leave it up to me and Nick and Laia!"
Eventhough I needed to get back to Dj'ing, I left Tolstoy out on the dark Brooklyn streets. If he wants to learn about Brooklyn New York City where they paint murals of Biggie....fucken let him...
A friend referred me to you when I told her about an article I’m working on for [unnamed high-brow New York newspaper]. We’re interested in people’s stories about the book-writing process: how it can take over your life and become such a painful process. The book can ruin relationships, your mental and physical health, finances, etc. It’s a fun story.
Let me know if you’d be willing to talk to me, even on background for now.
Either because I feel the pain of humanity or because I'm not a very good person this happened.
Tonight on my way to DJ I went into the restaurant I always go to. I've literally eaten over a hundred meals there. The normal girl stood at the counter. It's a small shop that always tries to make sandwhiches into Happy Hour sangria and always fails. Instead of your typical refugees from Queens they always have young, impressionable NYU girls. In college, when I worked at the only coffee shop for forty miles, I might have been her.
Tonight, as always I stood on the brink of late and called in my order as I got off the subway. I arrived Five or ten minutes later. I've known the counter girl long enough that she's come to my New Years Party, but never once stopped by the bar next store to hang out while I DJ'd for the shift I've worked for almost three years.
Tonight she wore her hair down low, in bangs that she never planned on. She dodged any variety of human contact, including refills and advances from the denizens who only came up to ask the password for that shop's wireless internet.
She took my money and I said, "Is everything okay?"
The small amount of money came from my hand and I asked again about her person well-being as her red eyes fled from the world.
"You got dumped, didn't you? It's okay. I did too this week, but you just have to hold on because the rest of your life will begin again as soon as you--"
She rang in my money, picked up her phone, and ran off into the laddered office above the small shop. Before she left, she gave me a pathetic, but appropriate smile of one who is your co-conspirator and yet somehow your enemy.
Two minutes later a bell ran in the kitchen and she stayed above, texting her ex in loneliness.
She left me down there, picking up my own order. Saying my own name as a claim and hoping she would end up okay.
This is a novel excerpt. But it is also a part of my real life. When I wrote it I probably used it to entertain myself in a difficult stretch of writing and it ended up becoming an integral part of my new novel. I would like to give the real life human being a ficticious name. But his name is Ray. Ray the Barber. And he cut my hair for most of my life and his history saw even more.
True story: Martin Luther King Jr. came to Simsbury, Connecticut as a boy on an exchange program from his home church. He spent his summer working beneath the hot nets of our then still thriving tobacco farms. Culbro Tobacco. Just a child then. With a mind full of girls and prayers and duffle bag full of clothes that wouldn’t fit at the end of the summer. A growing man. He worked the fields just a few miles from Dad’s house, back when this neighborhood was the only game around. Where a Barbershop on the edge of the world marked the end of civilization as they knew it, and saw the beginning of cornfields, tobacco fields, and a series of deep wood forests where the latest in bomb technology went to pieces. Martin Luther King Jr. awoke before dawn to ride into town with the other boys on Sundays and pray inside a big white church while the big white eyes in town finally saw them blackfolks they keep reading about. Martin Luther King Jr. liked Simsbury, Ct. He liked working the fields and singing with his friends from home. He liked getting his hair cut at Ray’s Barber shop. He liked the smiles they got on the way through town. He even liked the way white people sing in church. The program took Martin Luther King to Hartford, where he ate wherever he wanted and sat in any seat at any restaurant in the city. The story I got always said exchange program, but I wonder which bomb factory boys elected to leave the hot summer in Connecticut and work in someone else’s field down in Alabama.
That summer, Martin Luther King Jr. says, that summer was a dream. He returned home, but something inside of him never let go of the tobacco nets. Every time he passed a restaurant or a church he remembered the time and the town where ten o’clock Sunday morning wasn’t the most segregated hour in the country.
The Barbershop still sits there. About a half-mile from the coffeeshop.
Growing up we had our hair treated by the half blind owner/operator of Ray’s Barbershop, itself once the only game in town. The ghosts of Ray’s old war buddies squinted into the sunlight from the old, super-sepia photos on the walls. The one story barbershop that time and The Archie and Jughead comic subscription forgot. You could go there before school and wait in line, reading up on what Jughead and the gang did thirty years ago, while the next old man in line tallied up the bodies on the wall for the old man in the chair. “That one there, number 27. He’s dead. So’s he. And he. The umpire never made it through the season.” Ray the Barber, always Ray. Stuck in that neighborhood like Barbershop itself, no matter how many public schools and swimming pools they put in. Ray The Barber—the fullest name God could give him or us teetered in there at six every morning from his house a block and a half down. First by foot, but by the time I stopped using the booster seat, by moped. The last I heard he still came in at six, parked his pickup in the closest spot and closed for a long lunch. A lunch that might just last until the morning.
In the eighties—when the picture quality of televisions increased and the quality pictures decreased, Ray would brush your neck with powder, wrap a paper bib around you and cinch the apron around it. In the middle of asking you about how many girlfriends you have and how many homeruns you’ve hammered out—same answer, whether the truth or the lie—Ray would glance at the jittery, color-separated images of the world tearing itself apart. The guns and the drugs and the ketchup-as-vegetable in school lunches; those angry young men with the pink hair and those angry young men who should be in chain a gang, not in gold chains and gangs. Ray could cut your hair blindfolded, and he might as well because even with the TV off he couldn’t get it even. But with the TV on Ray watched the walls come down and the others go up. He watched as these funny little men in funny little hats fought each other in deserts for funny little reasons. (“Maybe you could cool off them A-rabs with Ray’s shave. Looks too hot in the desert for them thick beards. Think the Navy might call you up, Ray? Get you back in action?”) The wars. Ah, the wars we had back then. Cold Wars, gang wars, media wars, drug wars, cola wars. Not a single Simsbury bomb went off. Not a bunker-buster, nor a Patriot. With the end of mining, and no more major highways to blast on through with, the hypothetical wars kept the industries going on TV and in the factory. The war had come home now as the refugees from the cities huddled inside of giant, three story houses and waited for the news to come in on the TV as the popcorn came out of the microwave. The news of muggings and car jackings and that, that disease (“…nothing gay about it.”). Ray would look at you in the mirror and clink-dry his straight razor and shears and comb, clinking them free of the blue, debugging power of Barbasol. Typical Navy man, that Ray. With the instant cure for crabs, and only the thinnest hope that it might kill whatever else you picked up.
“It all started right here,” he would say to all of us and none of us. “It coulda ended here too. All I had to say was, Sorry, we don’t serve your kind here.” Before I even knew what he meant, Ray would sidle up to his ancient cash register and squint at the buttons as if they tended to move around on him. Poor Ray, with his touch tone phone and his press-button cash register. Why did they have to flip the numbers on these damn things? Hard enough as it is. Ray would punch in the numbers—with the timid caution that anyone of his Archie readers might use when putting a needle to a record— take your four dollars and send you home with a dried, hardened piece of Bazooka Joe.
It took me long enough to get over this. Long enough to learn the difference between old-people jigaboo-style racism and actual, honest, hate-you-and-your grandchildren kind. There is no line between fear and hate. They exist right alongside eachother, like Ray the Barber and the kid from Alabama who was in charge of his local youth group. I have nothing against Ray. Not even the most precise haircut could have offset my awkward, seven-year, on-again-off-again bought with puberty. But you know what he meant. One day in your life you go against your better judgment and it turns out that was the one day that counted.
A tale in which the author halts his writing career to give an unnecessarily detailed and personal account of the ecstacy and failures of his last year. This may later be republished under the title "Too Much Information." I thought about maybe not posting it, knowing that it's very personal and upsetting.
On wednesday September 20 I was bartending at a special event (here's a picture of me pouring a drink if you don't believe me). It was two days after I had discovered that Annie would be moving out in two days. I don't know why I did this or why I'm telling anyone this but I got Annie on the list to get into the event where all of the top chefs in the country were making their dishes for a crowd of rich people (I hate the term "foodies" but that's what these people are). It was $200/ticket.
I'm not exaggerating or love-blind or self congratulatory when I say this but right then I saw the most gorgeous woman I'd ever seen. She had long flowing blond hair and a tattoo of a heart on her chest and full red lips. I must have been staring. Not only had Annie not even moved out yet, but here she was right next to a girl that I may or may not have stared at to the point of drooling, inadvertantly as one might while indulging in an extended yawn.
This was back when I thought of bartending as a craft and was being awarded as the foremost Assistant Head Bartender in the whole world. I had to train a dozen dip-shit club bartenders how to make the drinks and they spent most of their time doing drugs and flipping shakers around until they inevitably shattered on the high shelf, spilling sugar and alcohol on everyone. It was at this point that a very large, bald, tattooed guy came up to me and said, "I think you and me have a problem."
I turned around and when I was certain that the club's security was available, even if they were idly texting their girlfriends in Queens. "What's that?"
"My date says she has a crush on you." He motioned to the gorgeous tattooed blond behind him. The one covered in my drool.
"Yes. I think we definately have a problem."
Although I love both Woody Allen and Mike Meyers, there comes a point in all of their movies where you know they wrote down in the script "Falling in love scene. Will come up with it day of shooting. Charming, witty, thoughtful flirting. Keep female audience. Make men envy abilities." So I'd rather not to do that here because it would cheapen the--
"Guys let me know if this doesn't work out, okay?" I said to them no less than five times as I walked around the room at the afterparty. Smooth. I know. Through a haze of free promotional Champagne and the sweat of a three piece suit I ran into a chef friend of mine. "Do you know the big dude with the tattoos?"
"Yeah he's--"
"Whatever, distract him. Ask him how he sharpens his knives or something."
I'm twenty-five years old. Then I was twenty-four. In that entire time I have never, ever, not even in college, not even in Chicago, not once in my entire history of DJ'ing done what I was about to do. I asked for her number.
The next day at work I got a text from her. I couldn't believe she didn't throw away my number, let alone her own phone for letting a sleezebag like me into it. We went back and forth for three months. In that time Nick moved in, I started DJ'ing more as a career than as anything fun. I went out almost every single night and I tried, fitfully, to write my new novel.
I am not a very good person. And frankly, Nikki might not be one either. One saturday night in November I had a bad day at work and my phone had died, so I couldn't meet up with my friends. I came home on the scooter and plugged my phone in and got a message from "Nikki ala Starchefs." She was at a party in Brooklyn. She said I might finally get my wish. By the time I called her she was already in a cab on the way home to Manhattan. Did I want to meet up?
I got back on the scooter and in my own excitement I must have passed her cab on the bridge because I beat her there. She looked even more beautiful than I remembered and I'm not trying to put myself down or surreptitiously high-five myself, but she was just too gorgeous for me. Her long blonde hair came down like a mermaid's. I felt like a fraud for sitting there. The only thing I could come up with was that this girl was probably not very bright and that I could still have the drink and we could make out, but that would be it. She's probably some floozy cocktail waitress. So as our drinks arrived I served her a trick question. So Nikki, what are your hopes and dreams?
"In the spring I'm launching a lingerie line with my business partner." She went on to explain, briefly, the difficult and failure-prone world of independent fashion, the marketing behind it, and the fact that you can do all the work possible and still never even make it into stores.
I felt screwed. How could I possibly ever run away from this girl? This girl was clearly bright, intelligent, hard-working, and savvy. I hadn't even seen her brilliant designs yet, but if I had I would have left. I immediately pictured myself calling her at all hours of the night, tracking her down at work. How could she possibly show me where her apartment is? I'm a complete lunatic and I'm likely to sit on her stoop, rolling cigarette butts from off the sidewalk, waiting for her to return home.
We talked for hours. I looked up at one point and saw stools going on the counter. On the walk back to her house I realized that I had forgotten to slip out the bathroom window and run away. And just as I had never actually gotten a woman's number before, I then realized I had never walked one to the door. I mean I've seen movies. I know what happens on The Wonder Years. But I didn't know what to do. So I said a polite goodbye and ran away with my helmet, swearing that I had a nice time.
She called me back over. We stayed up most of the night talking. And one night turned into two. Two nights turned into more. It turned into seeing Ben's show in San Francisco together. It turned into Chicago, to meeting my parents in Connecticut where they both begged me to marry her as soon as I possibly could. It turned into going to her sister's wedding in North Dakota. There were fun parties and I met all of her great friends and we had dinner dates and dance parties and movie nights and fucking foot massages.
And if I return to Simsbury this week to kill myself and Taylor's mom has to pick me up in her ambulance I wonder what my regret would have been. I'm sure I'd mutter something about the novel not being finished. I guess I would have wished that I spent less time on the internet, less time texting. But I don't regret much of anything, except the end.
Now that I'm a little bit older I realize that I'm not going to get any more sane. It's really up to me to control myself. This is the reason that I don't drink unless I've had a good dinner. This is the reason that I wanted to run away from her apartment that first night before I got in too deep. This is the reason that I know now that I can never see Nikki again because if I do I will latch on to her. And I'll never let go again.
Last night at work the vampire from the Killers' afterparty came in to my bar with scrapes on his knuckles. For some reason he wanted to shake my hand and when I did he started crying out in pain. "Careful, careful man I just got hit by a cab out front. Twice in the same day."
My characters will suffer break ups following a few basic rules:
1) Every relationship will end the way it began. I don't know if it's because I think in patterns and look for them or whether life actual does work in horrible cycles. Amanda: we were friends for two years and had mild crushes on eachother one day we were together all of the sudden and then one day two years later we were all of the sudden not. Taya: when we met she went on medication and turned to me one day and said, "I don't think I've ever been in love with anyone as much as I am with you right now. But it might just be my new medicine." She stopped taking it one day and broke up with me. Annie: we met and three weeks later we moved to NYC together with only 5 days notice. She moved out two years later giving me five days notice.
2) The week before the break up is worse than actually breaking up. When you see it coming you fear it, avoid it, you get angry at it for being there. Amanda went home one time when we lived in Deleware and said when she returned we could decide whether we wanted to be together anymore. I couldn't sleep. I was miserable and I figured out that if I just drank a whole bunch I would pass out. I threw up in my sleep. In the morning I awoke, perplexed as to how exactly I managed to spill my dinner on the rug since I remembered eating it all. But afterwards:
3) There is a slight, guilty relief, followed by the realization that you have a little more freedom and you can indulge yourself for a while. For no apparent reason I always look forward to staying in my own bed and watching movies and treating myself to things. Amanda is going to be horrified that I'm writing about her, but I remember that the aforementioned dinner was from the only Thai place in Deleware. I took myself out there and rented movies and watched the sunrise on my oceanfront apartment, feeling awful. The question remains: how many relationships could have been salvaged if once in a while we just got Thai food and watched movies in bed together?
4) The break up fight has nothing to do with the break up. It's just an excuse. Nikki and I broke up today over a minor dispute about why one of us was sleeping in when we agreed we would get pizza in the morning. Amanda and I broke up following an unrecoverable discussion about parallel parking technique. Annie started looking for her own apartment twenty minutes after we got back from an argument about whether or not we would go back to our old bar and do photobooth. My prom date broke up with me after I inadvertantly said her father had a dumb face. Yes everyone breaks up with me because I'm five years old. But I'm old enough now that I won't spend the rest of the week curled up on the floor of the tub with a cold shower spraying over me, wondering why I couldn't just fucking wake up for pizza.
5) Sadly the best thing to do is never see the person again, ever. This is impossible in college and most towns with less than five bars, and may still be impossible in NYC. Of course these people have all been a big part of my life but going to parties with Amanda and installing Annie's lighting in her new apartment and still going to senior prom with my ex weren't exactly soul-healthy endeavors. I'm not a very good person and while I seem incapable of breaking up with anyone because I don't want to hurt them, I will torture them for months, even years. Nikki and I met, exchanged info and texted back and forth for three months before we finally got together and we've been together ever since. I'm pretty sure that I'll never see her again, but that we'll keep texting for three more months. Her absence, however, will become a minor obsession of mine and I'm sure I'll look for her little face in fashion magazines.
6) Even if you don't want to, you're also breaking up with her friends. I couldn't even tell you what one single ex's friends are up to now. All of the sudden my base of people I can have real conversations with is halved. This is probably a good thing because otherwise you end up looking like an ass, saying things specifically so they'll get back to the girl and giving away drinks thinking that it will change her mind.
In the next year or so I wonder if I will move from first person narrative to first person apostolic fiction. The difficulty in the first, of course, is that I need to tell an outrageous story from the perspective of an outrageous person. But the fact is that most people are not outrageous and while they may wish to be more so, they grow tired of it faster than the drunk girl at the party.
Apostolic fiction is something like Fight Club or pretty much anything by Phillip Roth where the story centers on the weird, strange main character but gets filtered and explained through the intermediary of a calmer, more rational individual.
And right now the hardest thing for me to realize is that not everyone is a sick evil fuck like myself. How many people--I wondered tonight--have seen footage of the Kent State Massacre and wondered if any of those souls faded away screaming, "Aggh! And Kent was my fucking safety school!"
On the way out of some club on saturday night the head promoter stopped to wish me a happy birthday and asked if I wanted to DJ the following week and call it my birthday party. I thanked him very much and as I walked away I slipped on a million dollar bill, landed on an original Renoir that someone threw away and when I stood up, Scarlett Johanson grabbed my ass, winked at me and slipped her number into my shirt pocket.
She was the first person to hit on me all night who didn't think I was an ass-open homosexual, so while it was all very flattering I still had to decline. "Your Vogue cover is gorgeous but I'm dating the designer on page 208."
"Nikki?? Oh my god, I got to see her photos before they airbrushed out her tattoos. Way to go! I totally understand. If she needs modelling done I'm a 34c."
"Thanks," I said and probably shouldn't've added: "I know it is."
We couldn't get a cab on the way home but a limosine rolled up and me, Laia, and Nick haggled with Hogan, the party-loving limo driver from Queens. He agreed to take us home in a stretch limo for just slightly more than it would cost for a yellow cab.
"I can't believe you act like nothing good ever happens to you," Laia said as I passed the limo driver a smoke and he turned up his CD of semi-antique party jams that was probably once titled 'Kenyon Graduation 2K4!' "Look at us! We're in a fucking limo! I was going to just take the goddam subway!"
"I didn't say nothing happens to me. I said the stories aren't coming to me. The characters are all wrong, there's no development. It's just people using each other and disguising it as glamour."
"But it's fun!"
"Here's how this story sounds: Look at me I'm GREEEAT!" I held up the genuine renoir in its original frame.
"Then why are you even telling it now."
"Because I screwed up. My favorite stories are the ones where I screw up. I told Scarlett Johanson that I know her bra size. That's real purvy. I mind as well say, 'Sorry, you seem nice and all but if I actually date you who who am I going to think about when I can't finish?'"
"You're disgusting!"
"Be careful! I know I'm disgusting but If I end this scene with a smirk of self-satisfaction it'll ruin the whole Brendan's-an-asshole-who-had-it-coming thing."
For the Killer's afterparty last week I accidentally hired the world's second most annoying person to DJ for half an hour. I told him beforehand that if he really wanted to do it he was welcome to--since we DJ at the same bar otherwise--but I could only pay him in drinks. For throwing a party in a popular Lower East Side bar for an even more popular band the whole goddam thing was so fucken stressful. I felt in a way like I was planning my own wedding and that instead of getting to enjoy it I was there, in my white dress, doing my own hair and fielding innane phone calls about who had tables reserved and who would be taking pictures and who could be the goddam ring bearer.
Lately I've been reading alot about the Irish mafia and hearing stories from an older friend of mine who was made an "honorary citizen" after his return from prison in the eighties. I think on one level it has helped me to learn how to be a better business man with these DJ'ing affairs. Mostly I've learned how to make money by making money for other people.
Being Irish, however, I have a very big mouth. Sometimes it speaks, sometimes my tongue gets inflamed with alcohol and won't stop moving. And this time my big mouth only ironed out a pay rate based on breaking the all time sales record of a fifteen year old bar. Hence bringing the annoying-ass vampire in early.
I've said this before I I firmly believe that the people who annoy us the most have qualities in themselves that we do not like in ourselves. Freud called in "the narcisism of minor difference." So here this annoying dweeb shows up, redesigns the flyer with his name on it, and dresses pretty much exactly like, including the glasses and ruffled shirt.
He kept playing songs that I was saving for later on, thus blowing my spot. And to make it worse he would stand back there the whole time screaming like he's at Lollapalooza, "Yeeaaah! Don't you love this song, Brendan? I love this song. WHOOOOO!"
He's one of those guys who is so into his drugs that all he wants to do is tell you how good his dealer is and how good it is. He offered and I declined because I'm not a fucking idiot. He turned to the guy next to him and said, "You wanna try the best blow you've ever had? Yeah? Here. Go ahead. Enjoy it, girl. Yeah? You like that? Keep it. No really. Yeah! That'll be $50." the girl incredulously declined and he continued, "Serious? Dude, it's so good I just had some and rubbed it on my gums and I almost can't talk!"
I wished that were really true.
Like a vampire, I invited him in, however, and like a vampire he wouldn't leave and it was my own goddam fault.
As of getting there I didn't know if any Killers would even show up. They're mostly married mormons. By chance I DJ'd their first afterparty in NYC years ago, and it was only because their label made them do it. Conrad told me at midnight that three of the four killers had confirmed and I knew right away that one Mr. Brandon Flowers would not be there. As you know, we have a contentious relationship.
And I said, "It's probably better that way."
The vampire didn't leave until five AM. And even then he was all hyped up, cranking and talking like the fifth killer. "Yo, I know a space we can go after hours, man. You wanna work out an after party for this?"
No, Diddy. I can barely handle this. I'm not interested in an after-after party.
The stories haven't been happening to me lately. I hope it's because I've been writing so much, but it's not. For some reason I haven't had my typical experiences lately. They all go like this:
Did you know about this thing that happens sometimes? Weird, huh? Obscure fact about history. Interesting? Yesterday I was DJ'ing/talking to a stranger about this and I ran into Someone Specific. Anyway much later I met up with Ben to film him shitting in a condom for Japanese TV and we walked through a common place in New York City. Then out of no where we ran into Someone Specific again! And that thing that happens sometimes happened to all three of us! Small cast! Quick story!
But Ben's going to be out of town and I haven't been torturing my ex girlfriends lately with random phone calls.
Because I am not a very good person I keep calling Conrad for details on his horrible week. Conrad is home in Vegas dealing with a personal tragedy. First of all he is a wonderful friend and I probably care very much how he is doing. But another first-of-all might be that his week so closely follows the structure of my new novel.
The sudden phone call. The news of the tragedy. The first time returning home. They mystery behind it. Was it an accident? Was it planned?
In fact it's a much more intriguing story and something my agent would like better because my agent is a scumsucking piece of shit who deserves to have a messy tragedy befall her parents when she gets manslaughtered in a bizarre vespa accident. My agent would love that It's set in Vegas from the perspective of a native who now has an outsider's viewpoint. Vegas is sexy and I could lace it with historical facts that people like to read because they learn by accident. Las Vegas is also the town with the highest incidence of this tragedy, which would mean that writing about it would be a sort of claim on a cultural trend.
I would really like it if Conrad could reconnect with his high school sweetheart, sleep with her, get screwed over by her for the rest of the novel and fall in love with a who other girl. But Conrad's dating my best friend so even if this happened he probably wouldn't tell me. I wish he would because it would save me alot of research and Conrad has a powerful command of the language and he'd be able to describe better sex scenes.
The other day Conrad, Jackie and I were crouched down on our knees at a show, sneaking an illicit cigarette. Conrad and I were talking about my next novel idea, the life and times of Mercutio. I then mentioned that in some ways Conrad does resemble a modern day Mercutio. "I think it'd be pretty funny if one day you based a character on me."
I told him that in order to be a good character you have to show your many faults, and be willing to look like an asshole. Long ago I based a character on a close friend of mine and when he read the story he stopped talking to me. To this day whenever I run into him I accidentally call him by his character's name.
Conrad and Nick Hornby are both fantastic critics of culture because they are willing to be both well informed and pissed off. In Fever Pitch Hornby attributes this to his countless days spent screaming at soccer players during the game, a trait he carried with him to his critical career. ("The Booker Prize? THE BOOKER PRIZE?? They should give it to ME for reading YOU!")
About halfway through the show, Conrad decided that he didn't like the band on stage. I didn't know any of their songs, but it was the first all ages show I'd seen since I was all ages. I found it hilarious and interesting to see what teenagers are like these days.
We left the theater early and went to get our coats. Conrad starts rolling a cigarette. A three hundred pound bouncer sitting in a folding chair on the other end of the building shouts, "Time to go! Get your coats and keep moving!" We ignore him. He's probably ignoring himself.
Conrad is visibly angry about the band not being good enough for him. He's mad. Conrad is mad that this theater has not paid HIM for watching THEM.
"Get your coats and keep moving!" the bouncer shouts again through the near-empty room.
"Jesus Christ I'm just rolling a fucking cigarette. Chill out."
"Time to go. Get your coats and meet your friends outside!"
Conrad shouts something back at him and the bouncer just sits on his folding chair in a room the size of a city block.
When we start up the stairs I notice that Conrad isn't behind us. I run down the stairs, knowing what happened to Mercutio. Conrad stands in front of the bouncer and says, "Look man I just wanted to say good job. You did a fantastic job tonight. Fantastic. Really great." He's pissed the bouncer's pissed. Jackie and I stare somewhat in disbelief because here Conrad, who is a bouncer on friday nights, is yelling at this 300 pounder. "And I was just trying to roll a fucking cigarette!"
They go chest-to-chest and I can't believe that skinny-ass me is now in a position to break up a fight between two bouncers. I pretend as if I have any control over him while they scream at eachother and back him away. "Let me take him out of here," I say to the bouncer, who is now radioing ahead to his friends at the door. And then I say to my friend, "Conrad, I think you'll make a fantastic character someday."
"Why? 'Cause I'm willing to look like an asshole?"
To my surprise, Conrad showed up to see me DJ last night while in the middle of his own personal tragedy. A close friend of his died that day. Pete's out of town, I'm dead from all these paries, and I thought a few others weren't coming. I almost cancelled.
Conrad came back from the bar with two drinks. "You're going to have to drink at Captain Morgans and Coke in honor of my friend."
I'd like to think that I'm a good person. There isn't anything in this world that I wouldn't do to help Conrad with his situation right now. If he needed a plane ticket, a ride to the airport, a set of sturdy luggage--I would take care of it for him. But I couldn't help mentioning:
"Just so you know, this exact scene already happens in my new novel. The main character drinks some shit liquor and beer in honor of his missing brother. So if you read it, don't even think that I stole the idea from you."
