When I begin my career as a cause-celeb I will travel all around the country giving lectures on the cruel and exploitative practice that is legal in all 50 states. Strip clubs. This industry is awful and ruins lives. And I can't believe that we--as human beings--can stand this kind of sexist, terrible exploitation of men.
Male exploitation is really quite heartbreaking and many of my own friends have lost entire paychecks to a dance that lasted through the course of a single Kid Rock song.
My closest friends are currently planning a cross country road trip that will include a tour of many strip clubs. This sounds about as thrilling to me as a cross country road trip from Disney World to Disney Land.
Strip clubs are the saddest kind of male exploitation. The sadsack bartenders, the fatfuck owners, the door guys, the customers. All senselessly robbed of their dignity. These men throw their lives away for the kind of variety and satisfaction that comes from being open minded in your marriage.
Part of why I've never been into strip clubs is probably because I work in nightlife. If I wanted to look at breasts, watch girls dance and then maybe get a blow job in back I could do this for about two shots of chilled patron and a twenty-sack. Since most drug dealers are essentially grown up teenagers who live with their moms I could probably get that sack for free if I let them watch.
Part of my cause-celeb career would not doubt involve group therapy. In this group therapy I would teach these men how respecting women, being interested in what they have to say, and misdemeanor possession are equally as effective--and much, much cheaper.
Lap dances cost somewhere between $15 (on a highway-exit joint) to $300+. Some of these places charge you a room fee which means the girls tell you they need a hundred dollars and they lead you to a room where--after they've taken your money--they refuse to titty-slap you with anything until you pay for the dance. Your hundred dollars just paid for the privilege of walking into a room the size of a cubicle, complete with the not-quite-tall-enough walls.
The worst part is that it is computerized, taxed and accounted for. Dancers pay taxes. They have a touch-screen like at the grocery store that beeps "ONE LAP DANCE" and "EXTRA SONG EXTENSION."
These poor guys (literally, now) leave feeling emotionally wrecked and with the sensation of having just had a wet-dream in public. Human semen is one of those magical things like toast or bodega coffee that comes out warm and then immediately becomes cold and gross.
Every time I pass a strip club I want to burst in the doors, "You don't have to live your life like this! Follow me to freedom!" But I can't get anyone's attention.
What's truly amazing is that these men have no idea how much they're being taken advantage of. Most, in fact, seem to think this is something they are the puppetmaster of. Every time money changes hands in a strip club both parties are snickering to themselves, "Idiots."
A good friend of mine was once promised that if he paid $300 she would "make sure you come, baby." This turned out to be her giving him a lap dance while he bullied his own cock to exhaustion. She even, thoughtfully, asked him if he were right handed and so she danced on his left leg. Three minutes of "oh baby I love your cock--do not come on me--oh it's so big!" and that girl made her car payment that April.
If I ever find the urge to jerk off in a place that has a food-inspection license I think I'll save the money and just make sure the table-cloth covers me.
In college I had an entire sociology class wrapped with attention and disgust when I explained strippernomics. It's usually twenty dollars to get in and there's a two-drink minimum. In most states you cannot have tits and alcohol together so you are cajoled into buying two eight dollar Big Gulps of Sierra mist. The dancers in turn have to pay the club to work there--this part brought the greatest amount of self-important feminazi disgust*. I then asked them all to come up with a better way to pay the rent on what is essentially a movie-theater concession stand.
In most of New England these places can only stay open if they have a liquor license. The only way to have a liquor license is to serve food. So, hilariously, they have to market themselves as having a "free buffet!" which is usually twinkies and sandwiches. Connecticut has a lot of trouble keeping money in the state. Most of the roads are less than a single fillup on the truck route from Boston to New York. Equally hilarious is that my glorious, glorious hometown of Hartford has one book store and eleven "book stores." They all have awful, awful phonebook travesty names like "Bookends" and "Aircraft Books and News" which too many of us have parked in front of and quickly discovered that they probably didn't have the Cliffnotes for Wuthering Heights.
In Rhode Island it is pretty much legal to turn tricks as long as you don't advertise. These poor, exploited men are taken into the back rooms and--as if they're at Jean Jeorge--given a list of the days specials. (In case you're wondering it's $140 for a blow job and $350 for a rubber and a quick fuck, which--in case you've googled this for helpful hints--is just $50 more than jerking yourself off in Arizona.)
Men, if you ever accidentally find yourself in a bar with plush couches and poles that don't look like they are for building support: stick together. It's Vietnam in there and you can never leave a man behind. Whenever friends come back from Vegas they all have a story that begins like this, "I got separated from my friend and a stripper came up to me--"
"And she said, 'Your friend wants you to have a dance.'"
"Yes! Did I already tell you this story?"
"No. But then you assumed for no apparent reason that your friend bought you a lap dance and you went with her to a back room."
"Yes."
"And then they did the same thing to him while you were gone."
"Yes. And--"
"Then you got two drinks and they gave you a bill for $400."
Male exploitation.
Boys: it's called THE HUSTLER CLUB for a reason.
Men in strip clubs behave like hypothermia victims. They get disoriented. They lose track of time and reason. They get drunk on the atmosphere and convince themselves that they should take their clothes off. Only it's the pathetic kind of naked like a guy in a three-piece suit with no pants on.
I feel really bad for you, boys. I'm like the red-cross for pathetic guys. I want to helicopter in with blankets and coffee and whisk you away. Follow me to freedom!
There is a whole, bright, wonderful world of nudity and sex to be had without feeling like you've been had. Get a girlfriend and a boombox. Sit in the kitchen and throw on some White Snake and say, "Baby, I need a lap dance. Here's $400 to put in a jar and we can get airfare to Fort Lauderdale sometime." And she'll be like, "Two-drink minimum, buster."
(I keep getting interrupted while writing this because I'm at work. Every time I stop writing I get angry and upset. This is how passionately I feel about ending male exploitation!)
(N.B. It should be stressed here that it is only the exploitation I am writing against. I think a healthy sex life and a healthy sexual appetite is more important for your well-being than having a healthy diet or exercise routine. I am also a huge, huge fan of breasts: big ones, bug bites, flopping black-girl Hotentot titties, ones that could be twins, ones that have a varying degrees of asymmetry . I am also not speaking against burlesque, gogo dancers or achieving orgasm in public. Above is one of Igor's pictures of my professional, non-exploitative work environment. I also must confess that when I was on tour in San Francisco I was caught not-exploiting someone in a back booth. And y'know what's weird? I didn't get thrown out. The bartender said, "Hey aren't you Brendan? I heard you were in town.")
The original Kinsey research team unearthed a man they called "Mr. X" and "Rex King" but who later turned out to be a short, ugly, gimpy man named Kenneth S. Braun. X had sex with hundreds and hundreds of men, women, children and grandmothers. He could go from flaccid to erect and orgasm in fifteen seconds. He was bus-driver creepy and gross but do you know how he could be so productive? He didn't discriminate. Fat girls, ugly girls, girls whose eyes are so close together you get eyestrain talking to them.
I would like to help my therapy groups by introducing them to the great big fuckable world out there. Do you have any idea how loud fatgirls are in the sack? Single moms who wanna hurry back home to the babysitter? 30sish ladylawyers who had to get reading glasses their sophomore year and have had lunch at their desk since the nineties?
Fantastic in the sack. Accent on the "fan" part. They'll be whistle and chanting "ENCORE!" holding up lighters and shit. I want you men to stop wasting your pathetic time in strip clubs so you can finally feel the joy that comes from watching a breathless, happy, satisfied fatgirl hold up a big foam finger with your name on it.
*I have a degree in Women's Studies, so when I say feminazi I mean the bullying, braless mustached kind of feminism that seems to think that there would be a way to market lipstick without putting it on pretty women in glossy magazines or that, say, my old band is not suitable for their children to see on TV. This is the most unhelpful kind of criticism in the world. These people complain about things female singers do or do not wear, even though they would never give a shit what male singers (or, like, say her DJ) wear. Moron thoughts like these delegitimise important discourse. It would be like Henry Louis Gates Jr. complaining that black history month is only 29-days every four years.
Something I think is really pathetic is how lazy I get when it comes time to Google something. I'll write a thousand words of a story and then wonder, "Has anyone ever written an article about DJ'ing with a midi controller and Serato in tandem." And instead of googling that complete, helpful thought I'll type in "midi serato" as if I can't possibly be bothered to add another word.
Last night I was at my favorite library in the entire world to see a great lecture with Shepherd Fairey. Leigh and I were somewhat the guests of honor for one because a friend of hers put the lecture together and for another: she has a tattoo on her back of Fairey's Obama poster--which was the thing we were there to talk about.
They had told Fairey about this tattoo and he wanted to meet her after the show. The NYPL is well funded and they are constantly doing things to remain relevant, which is wonderful.
Somewhat hilariously the Associated Press had spent the entire day trying to shut down the event. After more than a year of Shepherd Fairey acknowledging that he stole their image, they have begun to complain. First he agreed to a licensing fee (the same fee every single newspaper had to pay them to compare his image with the original photograph) but they wanted to sue for damages.
Our friend at the library told us that they were calling all day, "We're going to shut this event down!" It turns out the AP are a really dorky version of the Teamsters.
Leigh had on a sport coat and tank top, so when the library people came out--all smiles--to meet this girl who gives Shepherd Fairey the Aerosmith treatment. This was extra fun for me because whenever we are out, tourists ask to take a photo of her tattoo. And the village voice called it "The Most Ghetto Ink Job of 2009."
She pulled off her jacket before the program started and all the photographers behind her started snapping pictures of it. The event photographer took a picture of it and he was very happy about it, "Here come with me to some better lighting."
They walked off and I sat with her coat. Just then the two dorks behind me started snickering, "Aww, they're taking the girl away."
"Baby don't go."
"Why don't you come with ME to some better lighting."
"Yeah...IN MY BEDROOM!"
I turned around to these dweebs (they both looked like the comic-book store guy from the Simpsons) and I said, "Gentlemen, please. We are in the most beautiful library in the world to celebrate an evening with our generation's Andy Warhol. Obama is president. Please don't spoil it with your puerile obiter dictum. This is a house of knowledge."
After we met Shepherd (he signed her tattoo) we went to Motor City to meet up with Theo (he was on a date!)
I was telling the story and Leigh said, "Hold on. I've never heard you talk to anyone like that before."
"Especially not strangers," Theo added.
Then I remembered. I'm pretty bad at coming up with Latin derivations on the spot. I mispronounced "obiter dictum" and it came out as: "Why don't you two watch your fucking mouths?"
They cowered and offered quick explanations, "No! We--we were saying that's what he was saying."
"I've seen Mystery Science Theater too, jackass. Now watch your fucking mouths."
A glass of water when you're hungover is like your paycheck after you've paid rent. Sure it would've solved all your problems yesterday, but since you're a day late there will be penalties.
When I came home this afternoon the door to my house was wide-open. I peered in and checked for the mail when I noticed that the door to my apartment was also wide-open.
My landlords weren't home upstairs and my roommates were both gone for the day. It was just me. "Hello?" I called into my apartment. "HELLO?"
I heard a crash. Fuck! Someone is downstairs in my apartment. Maybe a couple of people. I heard booming, Jurassic-Park-portentous footsteps on the spiral staircase. I quickly skirted away from the window and pretended to walk down the street.
From across the street I pretended to read through a magazine. I was then interrupted and had to step away because I completely shat my pants when the door opened. I hid behind an SUV and out of my apartment walked a lone bald head. A black guy maybe 40 years old. Tall and very big.
The guy walks out of my apartment and I pretend to be heading up the street. I turn around and see him leave the house without carrying anything. Maybe I stopped him? Maybe someone left the door open and he saw it and walked over there? And then he heard me coming and I scared the shit out of him too and he tried to run away?
I'm terrifying, right?
A ladycop walks by me on the street and I can't tell if she's breaking mutherfuckers fingers or giving mutherfuckers parking tickets. She is short and Jamaican and looks like her second choice would be working at the DMV. So I just ask, "Can I ask you a favor? My apartment door was open when I got home. Could you just stand there while I go in? I hate to be paranoid but you never know, right?" Half smile. Humor the whiteboy?
"Your door was open or someone's in there?"
"Actually it was open. Then I heard someone. Then I ran away. Then someone came out."
"You saw someone in your house?"
"No, I saw him come out to of the house."
It then occurs to me that something else might be going on. I don't want to cause a big police scene but I don't want to be completely stupid about this. I walk up to the house (the door is closed now) and ring the buzzer for upstairs.
Rosa, the new nanny from upstairs comes to the window, but he won't come to the door. I then realize why she won't come to the door. There's a badmutherfucker in a leather jacket waiting for her. "Rosa! Rosa, it's Brendan. Come down? Hello?"
It takes her a while but she comes down with the little girl who lives above me and who loves nothing more than stomping from one end of the house to the other, knowing--deep down inside--that when she does all the lights flicker in my apartment. "Rosa, did the electrician come today? Did you let anybody into my apartment?"
Rosa shakes her head. Then the little four-year-old pushes past her with the enthusiasm that only four-year-olds-with-big-news can have. "Brendan!"
"Hello, sweetie, that's a cute little pink shirt you have on today. Everything okay at home?"
"Brendan guess what?"
"What, honey?"
"Uh, your cat, uhm, your cat got out of your house today! And he came into mine! He's very soft!"
"He is, isn't he!" I turn to Rosa and ask her to bring her back upstairs.
The cops are behind me now in a mix of plain clothes and cruisers. Eight in total. "Somebody was definitely in there."
I'm about to walk in with them when I see they are in a line with their guns drawn. Eight of them storm in looking for a black male, 40s, bald.
As the original ladycop pulls me aside to ask me more questions than I care to answer right now, something terrible occurs to me. I live with two stoners.
I just let 8 police officers into my house and I haven't been home for days. Who knows what kinda shit is in there? One of my roommates saves all his empty weed jars and the other one gets it wholesale from a growhouse upstate. Fuck.
What the fuck am I going to say? "Did you get him?"
"No one was in there but we found his drugs."
"Good, thank god, officer!"
"He musta been there a while."
"I haven't been home in a few days."
"That would explain it."
"Explain what?"
"Why, of course, he had so much time to hide weed in everyone's sock drawers and hang up all these Bob Marley posters."
"Jeez, these guys work fast."
"Not too fast. They must have settled in long enough to do a load of bongs in the dishwasher."
"Man, that thing takes forever."
The eight cops come back after holstering their weapons. "We didn't find anyone."
"No one?"
"We swept the whole house. Under the beds, in the boiler room and we spread out in the back yard. Nobody."
Did you check the dishwasher? Sockdrawers?
"What's that?"
"I said, 'And nobody was in there?'"
"No. Come inside."
"That's okay. I'm not going in there. I'm going to the library."
"You've got to come in here, sir."
The officer walks me into the house and then says, "Come on down here." I'm all set to act surprised to find weed everywhere when he says, "Your house is secure. We checked everywhere. Whoever was here is gone and we locked the backdoor to make sure. You're safe. Do you want to file a complaint?"
"No, no. It's fine. Thank you. Thank you everyone." I walk everyone outside.
The officer gives me a little smile, "You gave us a little excitement in our day."
"Anything I can do to help."
Everyone leaves and I walk back into the house quietly. Nothing is missing. Nothing is wrong. Nothing is askew.
The only thing different is that two days ago there were holes every 32" in my wall. Now these holes were patched. Sealed. They even matched the paint.
I look down on the floor and find a discarded broom. A dustpan. And then I figure out what happened.
The electrician came back to clean up, let himself in, and then left the door open so that if the nanny came home she wouldn't be startled by a big, black, 40s bald guy.
Only instead I came home, unexpected, yelled down the stairs in my badmutherfucker voice and he ran away when he didn't find anyone he knew. And on his way out he locked the door.
For those of you who now have a big boner for that goddam girl, listen to her story from NPR about how she blossomed into something fuckable. If for some reason you can't find a way to hate her: keep in mind she has a huge, envious book deal that she finished with her Mormon ingenuity and with a little help from her huge Yaddo retreat scholarship.
She also does that obnoxious Manhattan thing of wearing glasses on stage* and the last time I saw her we all went out to McManus. I went up to her to tell her that I liked her delivery (I do, she's funny) and she acted like I was breaking a rule by talking to her as a comedian when she's not wearing her glasses.
*I get it. You're in costume now. Next time I'm on stage I'm going to wear your grandmother's hearing aids. I'm in fucking costume.
It's hard for me to put into words how much I fucking hate this fucking girl. She's a comedian who I see around and the premise of every story she tells is this: "I'm so fucking hot that famous people want to fuck me. But, gee-whiz, I don't because I'm mormon. Sometimes I like to go out and scoff at people who have fun and drink alcohol."
One of her stories is about Jaoquin Pheonix calling on behalf of his personal chef as to why she won't call him back. Another is, we're pretty sure (she hid the names) about Steve Martin groping her somewhere. More than once I have discussed the idea of having an entire comedy act of me going on after her and making fun of her stupid, ignorant, insular, moron face. She has worked for This American Life and he has a fucking book deal too, which tell the story of how a natural blonde lost 80 pounds, kept the tits and tried to stay Mormon in the city.
If you've ever found someone's wallet and thought, "I'd better return this to its rightful owner before they go through all the trouble of canceling their credit cards." That wasn't you. That was her voice, whispering into your ear all dressed in white. I was wearing red and I would have shouted into your other ear "Fuck it! Let's go shopping and run a huge bartab somewhere! Have you ever had a Champagne from 1990?" but I was probably lighting a cigarette or staring at some vagina-intacta mormon girls' ass.
She's gotta be the only woman in the world who has wet dreams.
When it rains on your day off, stay in, order Thaifood, watch The Real World and Demetri Martin. And read Yeats.
What Then?
His chosen comrades thought at school He must grow a famous man; He thought the same and lived by rule, All his twenties crammed with toil; `What then?' sang Plato's ghost. `What then?'
Everything he wrote was read, After certain years he won Sufficient money for his need, Friends that have been friends indeed; `What then?' sang Plato's ghost. `What then?'
All his happier dreams came true - A small old house, wife, daughter, son, Grounds where plum and cabbage grew, Poets and Wits about him drew; `What then?' sang Plato's ghost. `What then?'
`The work is done,' grown old he thought, `According to my boyish plan; Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught, Something to perfection brought'; But louder sang that ghost, `What then?'
If MTV hired me to make a video game I would want it to combined the thrill of car-chase arcade games and the fun of Guitar Hero. I would called it "Grand Theft Autotune."
When we were kids my Gramma used to take care of my brother and me. Gramma had an old lady house out near the family place in West Hartford. She lived on the main floor and upstairs was the temporary quarters of grand children and any grandkids that slept over. In the closet she kept old clothes, mostly the ones owned by our Grampa, who went down in a plane crash like JFK Jr. (same spot, too. He was semi-retired and owned a plane with a bunch of friends and on his weekend he decided to fly up to Cape Cod to go to this place with really great coffee. Ridiculousness is fatally genetic.)
Our favorite thing to wear when we played dress up was Grampa's leather jacket. It was part Fonzie with a taste of James Dean. We liked it because it made you look like Murdock from the A-Team.
Gramma was a brilliant soul and whenever our mother let slip what we were into over the phone, Gramma would show up with gems from the Church Rummage sale. Christmas presents were often just a big box of shit she knew you would love. Jay got into rollerblading one year and she bought up all the rollerblade equipment donated by the mothers of college freshmen in St. John's.
Since our grandfather died while my brother was in utero we only knew about him through these things. He had leather jackets, a million books and a shoebox full of hidden James Bond novels (couldn't have the other parishioners knowing that he read such pornographic materials.) We begged Gramma to let us take the leather jacket home, just as we brought all his books and possibly his medals from WWII.
Gramma was the one who outfitted all of her children with VCRs the year VCRs became cool or that crazy microwave technology that everyone was talking about. All of my cousins still own a twice-used Breadman.
As we got older I think we became harder to shop for, mostly because we were too old to fall for clothing as a present to us and not our distressed parents. And one year, as my Gramma got older, my brother opened a box at Christmas. Inside it was Grampa's gorgeous leather jacket with the note, "Hope it still fits."
A couple of years ago I went searching for a leather jacket. When you're a skinny boy it's hard not to wear a leather jacket that makes you look like a skinny guy who's trying to look tough. I wanted one like Hugh Jackman wore in the first X-Men. I wanted to be Joe Strummer, crawling through a festival way out west--thinking about love and the acid test.
As you may have noticed: boys in leather jackets are way too cool to have their hearts broken. They have thick skin--wicked thick skin with buckles. Nothing bothers these guys.
What changed most in this leather jacket search were my expectations. I tried on a leather jacket one day in a thrift store and it looked like the leather jacket I would pick for myself--kinda gay looking, finicky and detailed. I turned to another girl in the store and said, "Does this leather jacket make me look like a skinny guy trying to wear a leather jacket or does it look like this jacket is my leather jacket?"
She giggled and told me it looked great on me. Fucking women. Can't answer a simple question.
Conrad actually had two great leather jackets, but those are heirlooms from his parents. They are already worn in and fit his DNA. They look great.
I went back to the rack and I picked our another. It fit perfectly and had the shiny black finish and shoulder epaulets that I wanted. I walked right up to the counter, pulled the pricetag off, handed it to the clerk and left wearing it.
It did actually require a bit of trouble. I had to restitch the shoulders and add my own cuffs. But for some reason when you wear a leather jacket out: people get out of your way. When someone steps infront of me in the street I keep walking at my same pace and look them in the eye. They move!
One day (I think it was someone from Olde English's Birthday) I took the jacket out for a night on the town. We went to a new beer hall in Williamsburg that used to be the Bodega Supply shop. I know this because in the Olde Days when I had a live-in girlfriend we used to buy condoms there from the Gas-Station-Style Variety Pack.*
I remember turning to Ben and saying, "If you ever want a drastic change in your life: get a leather jacket."
Anyway the summer came and the time to wear coats faded. I also really enjoy those few months where you don't need a jacket at all. Sometimes I needed to wear something while riding the Vespa and I stuffed it under the seat. When I started working for Obama I decided--ahead of time--that some jackets got more undecided votes than others.
In the fall I tore the lining and I also did not have the money to get a new lining. I have other jackets. I wore them.
Last week I went home for me Auntie's funeral. My family has always concerned to 9 brothers and sisters that my Grampa had. They all lived together in a Kennedy-esque house on Park Road in Hartford. All of his brothers and sisters broke off. One of them--a Deming--was the wife of my Great Uncle Archie (Arthur Bland). Auntie Pat was from another great Hartford Family** But her family had their homestead in Wolfe Island, Ontario.
I loved getting to meet my estranged Canadian family. I met my new cousin Amelia, who is a few months older than me but from Ontario. She and her four sisters not live in Vancouver. It's strange, but my immediate cousins are all younger and so the seven of us sort of grew up as a family trying to separate ourselves from each other. But I loved meeting cousins my own age.
They took a picture of all the cousins. All of the Deming-Sullivans who were the grandchildren of my Auntie Pat's*** seven children. Thirty people sat for the picture. None of my immediate cousins sat for it. We are not Demingses.
The wake was so much fun and I loved meeting all of these cousins. So much fun that I called out of work and stayed an extra day to go to the funeral. Godbless the Irish.
Who else takes family photo-ops at funerals?
At communion time I was sitting next to my Uncle and he said, "Sorry, Pal, true blue Catholics only." But then the priest invited all attendees to receive communion. I hadn't had real-deal Catholic communion in years and I wanted to make my uncle look like an asshole. So I went up. It turns out they only serve the Body of Christ at Catholic funerals?
This is annoying. I have a good Irish Catholic friend who once mused to me: "You know you're a good Irish Catholic when you consider the Blood-of-Christ the Hair-of-the-Dog."
I love the blood of Christ. One time I made Mercutio lust after it:
There is nothing like a church wine brung freshly from a barrel chilled in the cellar beneath the crypt and kept fresh by the cold dead bodies that surround it. What sweetness does death bring to life! And by taking life out of death we are left with only the sweetest parts and we are able to hold it gladly like a de-clawed rose. I lick my blushing lips and swallow my dry throat in anticipation of this perfect joy, this one-night-stand with a stranger I’ve loved for years. For a sinner like me, an instantaneous and guilt-free satisfaction such as this borders on the pornographic.
Anyway, after much family time I went back to my parent's apartment. I'm trying to write a young adult novel right now and I wanted to find my old journals from high school. So far my greatest problem with teenagers is that I hate them. All of them. I hate them and their stupid problems. It used to be that teenagers were regionalized and they had their own quirks. Now teenagers look up to the same morons and they say the same moron things.
Currently I hate anyone who overemphasizes the protologism "fail" as a noun. I know it must be difficult to live in a world where people all around you are working hard to do things and they are (GASP!) not doing these things--which you will never attempt--perfectly.
While I was rummaging through my parents attic I found my Grampa's leather jacket. I pulled it over my shoulders just to have something to wear in the cold, New England chill of my parents' attic. It felt nice. Wonderful, actually.
It didn't fit like a jacket I would wear. It fit like a jacket my fifteen uncles wished they could wear. I saw myself in the mirror and I realized that this is the jacket I will want to wear when I become the person that I someday will be.
This is the jacket I will wear to community college department meetings. This is the jacket I would wear to teach creative writing classes to ESL students when I'm 40. This is the jacket I would wear in the future.
And so I brought it home with me.
* This was later followed by her father helping us move one time and him finding the empty cardboard packet under her bed. It had 40 empty spots and 10 full, red Trojan Unlubricated Condoms+.
**Sullivan, Bland, Deming, McCarthy. If you're not one of them in Hartford you're (gasp!) Italian or Puerto Rican or--if possible--Protestant.
***This might be a numbers game but she is actually my other Auntie Pat. My grandfather's sister was already Patricia Sullivan. She died childless after eighty years of never being married. It is very common in Irish families for 1 of the 9 children to have no interest in having a dozen people to cook dinner for. Namewise: I'm the only Brendan in the family but I have 3 cousins named Madeline, even more Arthurs, 5 Barts, 2 Toms, etc.
A couple of months ago I was having a bad day at work. My job is essentially brainless, however, nothing irritates me more than being told how to do my brainless job. I have to play good music just slightly louder than people's voices. Easy. Right? Tell that to a once-cool again club owner.
I left and met up with a singer I was working with. We lamented how some people are just assholes and don't make any sense. And I wrote this nonsense couplet:
Valentine's Day Just Doesn't work for me. How about next week?
2009- Because I work in nightlife I pretty much never get the right nights off for things. This year I thought might be the exception but instead I have to go home because the pipes, the pipes are calling for one of me aunties*. This is made worse because I have a huge, huge multigenerational family.
2008- I had a show to do in Manhattan, which was quite fun. We went shopping for outfits and drove around on my Vespa. It was a nice day and about halfway through it Madonna's old manager called saying he wanted to take over. None of this mattered to my date, who came to the show and looked through my camera to discover ("Burlesque Costume Shopping" looks a lot like "My boyfriend is underwear shopping with another woman.")
2007- Nikki had her first lingerie show and I spent most of the night with her. There was a terrible snowstorm and most people couldn't make it including some of the models (I told them that if they can't catch a cab that we should have the city build some kind of underground train system.) When everything went to shit I walked down the street and bought a ring in Chinatown. I came back and said, "If the show is going to shit but all the Champagne is paid for and our friends are here maybe we could just get married?" Her parents were not impressed when we went to her sister's wedding.
2006- still hoped "not to make a big deal" because I was DJ'ing that night. Earlier in the year her birthday had also fallen on one of my DJ'ing nights, which I skirted by throwing her birthday party there. "So now what?" she said after everyone else yelled surprise! and ate cupcakes. I understand it can be a let down to spend your birthday with your boyfriend while he's technically at work. So on V-day Pete, took over. We went out to dinner. And when we came back I saw Pete's first kiss with the girl dated for that year. It was very romantic.
2005- I worked part time for Cambridge University and had no money. I'm sure whatever I did do it was not good enough for Annie.
*"The Aunties" are a group of women in my family who were all divorced/widowed/spinstered from WWII-the 70s. They enjoy tea from reused tea bags, reading about their friends in the obituaries, and smoking GPCs. The ones who are with it call me Jay ("Jay's my older brother, I'm Brendan.") The others call me Peter ("Peter's my father's name. Right, I know it's confusing. We're both tall). Perplexingly they are all less than five feet tall and it is understood that back in Ireland their families all lived in trees and made cookies.
In the unutterably vibrant CT Hardcore scene there was one girl you had to deal with if you wanted be "down" in the scene. I was 13 when I got into the scene and I was already down with this girl because we went to the same high school.
Actually, in our high school she wasn't known as Maria. Everyone just called her "Fat Maria" to her face and pretended like they were dragging "phat" into the 90s.
Before Hatebreed was filling out the soundtrack to Vin Disel movies they were at a place that everyone knew as Bristol Skate Park, which was apparently called "CT Bike Exchange." It was a filthy, cavernous space in the industrial shit-hole of Bristol, CT* In order to heat the place they would plug in something called a Reddy-Heat-R. For most shows they relied on the heat of the bands and the kids.
You can imagine what a shock it was to me in my professional life to discover that people came to shows expecting to be let in on the guest list when they were the only fans of a band.
In those days the single best way to skip the $6 cover change was to be in a band. I remember Hardcore bands coming and going (they all had hilarious hardcore names like "Rising Intent" or "Set Adrift" (which my brother was once the singer). I once agreed to front the group "Vegan Storm" which was basically a cross between the protest chants I heard and the band Earth Crisis. Last week I was DJ'ing and my weakness for Earth Crisis gave in and Igor dropped in and said:
Also, Brendan was playing Earth Crisis when I walked in the door which was pretty hilarious.
There was nothing more fun than being in a the hardcore scene. I have since lamented this fact with so many friends (all of which I made in this scene). If Zadie Smith had fans like the Hardcore kids I grew up with they would show up to every reading in "White Teeth" (NO!----McSweeney's issue #2!!!) shirts to support her. Only they wouldn't listen to the words. They would scream them along to her.
Bands were known to skip shows in New York (impossible to have an all-ages show) and avoid Boston (douchebags) to play in the CT scene. On one legendary night I went to a Murphy's Law show** with my closest friends and the show got called off after the band got there. 8 other bands were slated to play and none of them showed. (Singer) Jimmy Gestapo walked in to the show, grabbed the microphone and said, "I'm here at a Murphy's Law show and we need an opening band. Is there another Hardcore band in this skatepark?"
We played--to our extreme delight--a show with our favorite band and he asked us for a record, which he would take back to his shop in NYC.
Jimmy owned New York Hardcore Tattoos on Stanton Street in the Lower East Side. That was ten years ago. To this day I run into him and we smile.
I just finished readingOutliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, which is a book that says that if you're not somebody now you never were or were meant to be. It was great. But what I take away from it is that you owe everything to where you came from and you are--and will never be--a prisoner to your environments.
Every time I got a ride to a show it was because Fat Maria took me there. She insisted being the matron of your hardcore life. Fat Maria would make you a tape of the record you couldn't afford. Fat Maria was kind of a bitch about things (she would wave at you when you walked into the show and then make everyone look at her talking to all the boys and then once you settled in she would yell at you, "Don't fucken stand in front of me!" in a way that made you embarassed to have ever stood in front of anything.)
But my favorite thing about Fat Maria is what I've always wished I could find in another music scene. It was a completely affected tick (Jamie from Hatebreed made her do it) but if you ever admired her records she would say, "Do you want to borrow anything? Daryl from Groundzero always tells me that we won't have a scene in the future if we don't help the kids out. You want me to tape anything?"
Keep in mind, this is a girl who attended the shittiest community college in New England just so she could "stay in the scene." I have no idea where she is to this day. But I love her for what she taught me. There is nothing to gain in elitism and the enjoyment of near-professional fandom is enough.
Around this same time my high school girlfriend (who got married last month) wanted to break up with me because I spent my weekend at hardcore shows. (Back then you could get into a show and get two records for $20.) She said my whole music scene was based on hate. She said that I didn't make any time for her and her needs. She said my music was turning me into a terrible person.
I said she just didn't understand the roots of my music. I took out the tape that Fat Maria made me and I played this song out of my Walkman Headphones and into my parent's landline:
*Sarah Palin explained to Esquire that she named her daughter Bristol because she once wanted to be a Sportscaster and learned that in order to work for ESPN she would have to move to Bristol, CT where they had their headquarters.
**Murphy's Law was--in 1983--essentially the same band as The Beastie Boys. The only difference being that The Beastie Boys liked Buddha.
Too much is being made of Drew Barrymore's solo in "He's Just Not That Into You". It goes like this "I had this guy leave me a voicemail at work, so I called him at home, and then he emailed me to my blackberry, and so I texted his cell..."
This is the perfect Hollywood sentence. If you identify too much with it you're probably also a middleaged person trying to date a middleaged man (if you roll your eyes thinking "He calls you at work and you call him at home?? Text and ask when he's free!!" her character is well enough defined).
Middleaged (single or cheating) men are the worst men in the world. They're like what I would be like if I had enough money to last more than a week at a time. Middleaged single men sit in their apartments reading Mens Journal on the toilet until their legs fall asleep.
If there were a small fee I could pay to read Gawker without everyone's moronic comments I would. It's one of those awakenings like eating inside at McDonalds or smoking outside at a hospital where you see the deformities it causes, "Shit, I guess it really is bad for me.."
So yesterday I woke up at six AM (my usual bedtime). I was thirsty and I wondered if I would sleep more or if I would get up and start writing.
And then the first line of chapter two came into my head. I went into the living room and sat on the couch in the dark. And I wrote. It was nice.
At 8:30 I was at Grand Central to catch a train home to Connecticut to go to a wake. My friend's mother died kind of unexpectedly while she was brushing her teeth one day (aneurism). I hadn't been back to my hometown in many years. For a while everything seemed to be changing so fast (we got a movie theater and the haunted restaurant changed its name again. But now everything had stayed the same.
I met up with the idiots I grew up with at Brookside Bagels which, I had to be reminded, is where we sat in the summers and wrote song lyrics to songs we would never record (our hit at the time was "Steak, Cake and Pussy" and other was called simply "Your Mother/My Scrotum" but I always felt it was too derivative of our baille funk group (opening lyrics "Math is hard and so am I...")
There were probably 8 of us sitting in the bagel shop across from the factory, maybe half a block from the house I was born in. This is an awkward age to be dressed up for a funeral and staring at the hotmoms (who are our age) and the barely legals who should be in school at 11 AM. Meanwhile we were sitting there in a large, loud group arguing over song lyrics, "Nononono, you've got it all wrong it went 'Mash potatoes, sweet potatoes hummus and your mother.'"
"All of which I'd like to dip my balls in. Like. No. Other."
I hadn't been to the funeral home since Lucy died in high school. It was a very somber occasion with lots of beautiful photos on poster board of the young couple in those great colors that photographs ended up with in the 70s. They looked really happy when they were young and we loved trying to guess which one she was pregnant with in each of the belly-about-to-pop shots.
At about two we were supposed to get back to the train and get back to the city but we couldn't get a ride. Everyone ended up ordering pizza and drinking all afternoon at the pizza place. I called my brother to see if he could drive me back to the train and he couldn't. I told him to drop by and he said he'd pick me up but that he couldn't stop. This is when I realized that he was driving the garbage truck.
So there I am at the pizza place and a garbage truck pulls up, I hop in and bullshit with my brother for an hour when I realize that it's two in the afternoon and kids are getting out of the schools I went to. And I'm kinda buzzed in a garbage truck.
Finally Kyle's cousin picks us up and that turns into riding back with her to work, which turns into having beers in the conference room of their office. This turns into having beers and playing pool back at her parents house. She has a job interview the next day in the city so she agrees to drive us back to the train.... after she goes to another uncle's house to feed their cats.
We all had big plans to go the premier of the Demetri Martin show and with an hour before showtime we're still stuck somewhere in Connecticut. Funerals ruin everything.
"Gee y'know since there's 4 of us it doesn't really make sense to park your car in New Haven and then take the train. Why don't we all chip in a drive. Drive directly to the thing."
"What thing?"
"Oh it's nothing..."
Kyle's cousin is a sweetheart, but she is also that well-meaning suburban girl who is maybe a little too old to be living with her parents (she'll be thirty) and is maybe a little bit slow on the ways of the world. Since she was bored with the car trip and a little nervous about driving in the city she chain smoked and had a "road soda" which is hickesque practice of drinking while driving. This was probably fomented by the fact that passengers can drink in Connecticut. And we did.
We missed the premier but we met up with Pete and Theo and Elyse. She was, however, somehow thrilled at the idea of being in the big city at a semi-private event. I was glad for this.
However, some people watch too much Sex & the City. She sits alone by herself at the bar and just waits to see which guys will come up and talk to her. The first loser charms her and by the time it comes to leave she is too drunk to drive and she informs us that she wants to go home with this guy.
"No." I said. "You're coming home with us. I hate you. My laptop is in your car."
Then she turns into a mean drunk on the side of the street. I can't stand a mean drunk because it speaks to some inner evil that beats inside of a barely clasped mason jar. "Fuhck yew. I'm going home with him."
"What's his name."
"I ferget. It's in my phone." She goes to pull out her phone and he purse spills all over Allen Street. I turn around and see that the guy is hailing a cab.
"If you have his number then why don't you call him tomorrow and you can meet up?"
"I hate you."
"I hate you too. Now let's go we're all in the car." I turn around and not only has this guy hailed a cab, but he's gotten into it and sped away without saying goodbye. Awesome person. Now I have to deal with this creature on my couch for the weekend.
1) Last night I went to bed very upset. A number of things were bothering me and I let them all pile up. I worked way too much this week. But then on the way home I went to get beer and noodles at the deli. It somehow came out to almost fifteen dollars. I handed the guy $25 for some reason (I think I like giving people math problems) and he handed me back the change for $15.
"I gave you twenty-five."
"No you didn't."
"Yes I did. I know for a fact I did not have a ten dollar bill in my pocket."
The guy looked at me and said, "You crazy." (He was hispanic.)
"Either I'm crazy or you're crazy, which one do you think it is?"
"You crazy."
"Fine. Me crazy. But I gave you twenty-five."
"Why you give me twenty five?" This wasn't the time to be like, Sir, in my profession I always end up with tons of ones and fives in my pocket and sometimes it nice to just have a normal sized wad and not run around looking like I play the ponies, verdad?
Girlfriend (who has to deal with me in all of my fights with strangers) says, "Let's go. You're holding up the line."
"I'm not holding up the line. He's ringing in the next fucking guy with my money." She pulled me out of there and I became more upset on the way home. Me crazy? Me fucking cheap! Me went home and angrily at my $5 noodles and $10 six pack of Budweiser.
2) This morning I awoke at 4 AM from the sequel to a nightmare I had the night before. In both dreams I was on a beach resort which for some reason I believe was on the gulf coast of Florida.
The first night was a really gross nightmare. I walked down the street in this resort town and I saw a redhead through the doorway. "Margaret?" I said. And she recognized me. It was Annie's sister. I peeked into the room and the entire clan was in there. Her mother and father, cousins and her sister. They were all inside celebrating the birth of Margaret's first baby. It was a cute little thing at first but it was very dirty and evil. As I was holding it it disappeared and I was left with (I'm not going to bother reading into this) the bits of salad and babyfood sludge it was eating. Eventually I found the baby and left them.
The next night I was at the same resort and I walked around. Everyone seemed happy. Leigh and I were coming off the beach for the day. It had the bustle of a non-New York City where the restaurants are delighted to have customers while they're open and the bookshop is glad you came in to browse. I asked the proprietor if there were a good place to eat. He was said, "Go to Seven. Seven is the place to eat on Monday nights."
"Okay, thank you."
"Seven is also how many years I've had my business. Lucky, huh?"
And then I woke up. I had only been asleep maybe two hours but I felt fantastic. I mulled over the number seven. In seven months I'll maybe be done writing this new novel? In seven days it'll be my day off again?
I was reading way too much into it in all the wrong ways. And then I remembered:
Seven years ago I was in college and I took a creative writing class and wrote a short story about a trip to Vegas I once had and I titled that story, "Breakfast Anytime."
Something had broken through and I just felt fantastic I couldn't sleep so I got up and read the paper. I went down to Second Stop Cafe and read my book and made little notes in my new moleskin.
On the trainride back I put on my glorious headphones and "Howl" by Allen Ginsburg came on via shuffle. It reminded me of a scene I once wrote for a novel that will never get published.
Set adrift into the too-bright morning with a lake of sleep and dreams surrounding my leaky skull, I float through the neighborhood. When Finn turns left I go right, knowing that I am on my own for the rest of the day. I feel a little bit like Conor used to in the mornings, pissed to be awake. He went through every morning as if his alarm clock set itself and went off just to annoy him. Conor and Dad are both creatures who swim out of the sleep lake without drying off. They just shiver in anger as they air-dry through their mornings. Finn’s neighborhood has a problem that Trout never had. Some of the big buildings have been pulled away to make room for parking lots, exposing the cinderblock sides that were never meant to be seen. And in some of these craters they’ve delivered entire one-story buildings like the ones that seem to fall off of trucks along every highway in this country. Gas stations, burger places, motels. They have one of those yuppie Brazilian coffee chains, which I would love to make fun of some more, but I would much rather have another cup of their delicious, fresh-brewed coffee. Here, in the shadow of Mark Twain’s opulent cuckoo-clock of a house, I try to imagine myself living in Hartford as we have since the Famine. But all I can think I would do is sit in this one chain coffee shop and wish I didn’t live here. Hartford has one movie theater, one almost-worthless art museum, an empty firearms factory, few—if any—neighborhood bars. But is that all I look for in a city? Drinks and movies? Could I be happy anywhere if I had a package store that rented movies? As I pass a tenement building a large man with thick corn-rolled hair stands up from his stoop to yell: “Daaamn, boyee! Did they have any tighter pants at the store?” Oh, how I wish I could call Her up right now and tell Her that I am actually starving hysterical, ?dragging myself through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix. She probably wouldn’t get it or wouldn’t think it’s funny. Or would be mad that I said negro. Then she and the rest of her ?angelheaded hipsters friends would roll their eyes in the machinery of another late California night.
For a long time now my momentum has been low. I've barely done laundry or gone grocery shopping and it's not because I've been writing. But then I got right to work and it made me want to keep up my speed by doing laundry and cleaning the house. It felt terrific and I remembered why I wanted to do this. It was because seven years ago I started and I loved it.
Maybe in seven months you'll see me when I'm done. I'll be in a small pack of happy, gleeful authors. We'll be the ones on the G train cheering and, as Ginsberg says, the ones:
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
The phone book came today and I hate the phonebook. I can't think of a single reason to own one, other than if I had a small, curious monkey named George and he needed to sit on one to reach the table.
The worst part about the phonebook is that in order to use it for anything you have to sit there and think about what your grandmother would call it. "I need a lawyer...no I guess I need an attorney." "I need a new CD, let me look up and see which sad bastard places in Queens sell Records and Tapes."
Oh, Trevor! The Reality TV Show pipes, the Reality Tv Show Pipes are calling! I bartended with this kid on of the times that I hit rock bottom. I can't believe he got voted off!
The third most played song in my iTunes is "Deceptaconflirt" by Jesse Novak. It's a remix of two songs wherein he reimagines Le Tigre with an R. Kelly song. When I got started in music I called him, in a panic, from a layover in D.C. asking him for help since I had magically found myself working for a major record label despite a great history of not having any musical talent.
He said this on his website:
I made this for my friend Brendan Sullivan who is a DJ and also a writer.
Even since I met Jesse I've daydreamed about starting a new band with him. Not only would it be kind of theme-based (we look a little too much alike in glasses) but he has amazing ears and a great sense of humor about pop music. (My fifth most played song is the instrumental of this song, which I begged him to send me so I could work on something with it and in the mean time I synthesized it just so I could enjoy it more.) I have an iTunes smart playlist of every song I've ever played more than 10 times. That is only 23 songs. Jesse has 3 of them and, by comparison, Amy has just as many and so does that pop group I used to be in.
This year Jesse and I are both up for an award that would be called "Least Appreciated Member of a Grammy Nominated Pop Act" but we can't seem to get invited to any of the parties.
I love music, but some songs hit me in ways that others do not. I actually didn't like the faux-piano induced track when R. Kelly first put it out. At the time I was in a synth-heavey faux piano band and didn't like R. Kelly fucking up my territory. But I love Jesse's version
But the more I played the track the more I liked it. Frequently I would sing the song, hammered, on the L train to parties after Beauty Bar. At this point in my life when a close friend asks if I'm drunk they just say, "Are you a flirt?"
A friend of mine just got cast in a horror film and I couldn't think of a single good thing to say. I only like horror films that are psychological or inadvertently funny. But those horror films where you're just supposed to sit in your chair for two hours while bad actors attack each other in makeup? Can't hack it.
I was happy for my friend for getting work. But seriously. The porn industry had a better retention rate. What happens to horror movie stars? Where do they wait tables next? I secretly think that these studios in Vancouver actually kill the actors in the movies just so they don't have to deal with their lives post-production.
Last night I DJ'd in the single shittiest bar in Williamsburg. And it was so much fun! I have had friends walk into that bar before and walk directly out because the entire place smells, at times, as if it is made entirely out of bathroom. They hired cuter female bartenders and someone had the ingenious idea to build a Radio Shack patch in for Serato.
Which, by the way, I'd like to add this to My Favorite Things:
12. Serato. I was not convinced when I heard about this at first, but this was in my Hollywood phase and someone gave me this $600 gem just to be awesome with it. Thanks, guy-I-forgot! The reason it is so expensive is that it comes with a USB box that you plug the turntables into and then you plug RCA cables back into your mixer and control everything with two digital records. It has a lot of features I just don't use like the very end of the record can scroll through your playlist (so can my keyboard). And if you flip the record it goes to the next song on your playlist, however, that is completely worthless because once you can flip turntable 1 turntable 2 is already playing the next song. Then you're left with two decks playing the same song for no reason (theoretically this would be good if you were going to loop the break, but there's way better features on there to do that). I also fully endorse another program called Accubeatmix, which is a plug in for iTunes that matches beats on the crossfade. It's wicked fun and helpful for putting together your setlist (for Serato later) or if you're having a party and you want music in your house. Accubeatmix was wonderful to use back in the days where I would DJ for six hours at Beauty Bar and then do another six downtown with Conrad. (Because by the time I got to midnight I was usually found passed out on my coat in the booth and when it's time to go you only have to unplug one wire.) Serato also makes you laugh at people who swear that one song is just like another (currently fashionable is "Sk8r Boi" and "Prom Queen") because rarely do these songs mix well. If you DJ alot it helps because you can organize all your music by tempo and that will keep you from playing the same boring setlist every week. I also, in general, like that more applications are going fullscreen. Frankly I do not need to know the weather or my inbox status when I'm writing or playing. Here is what New Years looked like:
About halfway through the night Leila showed up, which is always a joy. We have a very, very strange premise for a friendship and so it's always nice to see each other in real life (wow, it's been two years!). But then that girl that I hate that shows up to things showed up and I introduced them, half-hoping she would turn to Leila and say, "We used to be friends but I can't stand him because it offends me when people drop double-t's with a glottal stop. I know. It's nit-picky but my parents are from Britain not 'Bri| |ain' and my cat does not have 'Ki| |ens' and his name is not 'Mi| |ens.'"
But she didn't. She stayed. There are plenty of fantastic reasons to hate me, but seriously: either tell me one of them or stop hanging around and rolling your eyes at me everywhere.
Also Igor showed up, mostly because I still owed him money from New Years. I still haven't gotten paid from New Years but I pride myself on not being shady so I fronted him the money to keep up my end of the deal. The guys I worked for on New Years vacillate between telling me that the club already paid me or that I put too many people on the guest list (I can't stand charging cover) and that it would cost me. Igor stayed with me in Miami last year and we had fun. He is a good friend to have around because for no reason when he comes to your party girls ask him if they can take their clothes off. He had this to say:
Then I went over to The Charleston on Bedford and N. 7th primarily to pick up some money that I was owed for the SPW event I covered on New Years, but also to hang out with my friend Brendan and to flirt with his girlfriend who gave me the free pizza she got when she bought a beer. I had not eaten in 22 hours, so it was pretty damn amazing. I also got a Shirley Temple which was pretty fucking awesome too. Also, Brendan was playing Earth Crisis when I walked in the door which was pretty hilarious. I love those kids.
You have to understand that this is perplexing to me because between being a nightlife photographer and a DJ I think we both have spent the same amount of money on the tools of our trades. However, I was positive that if I started DJ'ing that I would see girls naked all the time. Instead I'm stuck in a booth while Igor is in the bathroom with a variety of women saying, "Wow, this is definitely gonna me NSFW."
I had lots of fun and there was a fantastic crowd and Jackie and I switched off every half hour or so. The other nice thing about Serato is you can have a guest DJ switch in really easily and they don't really need to know how all they need is to bring their computer.
Some of the old waitresses from my summer job showed up. There's a certain way you get really close to waitresses in slow bars. Sometimes I'll be walking and see a waitress I knew from 5 years ago and it is like being reunited with a close friend from high school You know all about their boyfriends and weird parents, etc from the wasted hours you spend dicking around before and after your shift. One of the waitresses told me that she was back with her boyfriend (they lived together last summer but she moved out). When she went to the bathroom the other girl told me how much she dislikes this guy. "He's really mean and one time Jake posted something on her facebook wall and he started harassing him being all, like, 'Who do you think you are talking to my girlfriend?'"
The Boyfriend called four times while we were in the bar. (The back of this bar is actually quite nice and it has a pool table and a seating area where the music isn't too loud: this is because I blew that speaker my first night there and they never fixed it.) I grab her her phone for a second and it was open to a screen full of messages from him, all hounding her at various parts of her night. He also calls every night at 11:30 just to make sure she's home and not out.
So today I called her up and said, "Listen, if this guy makes you happy that's good enough for me, but if you have any doubts about him I want you to know that I think you're a beautiful person and you deserve someone special."
Only instead of doing that I wrote on her facebook wall, "You were terrific last night. I can't wait to do it again!"
If I could have one wish but it had to be a really crappy wish I would get Gmail to stop asking inane questions. "Send this message without a subject?" Sometimes office-based computer technology is like having an annoying girlfriend who second guess you all the time.
