Even though tailoring is part of my persona, I still hate going to busy, messy tailorshops with buttons and loose thread everywhere. They make me feel like I've shrunk and been taken captive in gramma's purse.
When I'm running around all day, stressed out and worried about the future, I sometimes walk by St.F's place on Stanton and remember the fun times we had, drinking red wine out of mismatched pint glasses and planning to take over the world. It always makes me smile.
She unfriends you on facebook. This doesn't occur to us. There is no end to how many pictures--no matter how hurtful--we would like to see of you. This includes pictures from before we were dating (before ever thing got fucked up).
It should just be called a "fuck up." For the next three months you will both agree that it was avoidable.
This doesn't make any sense: one person breaks up with another person. The breaker-upper would like to speak to the person they've dumped as soon as possible. How are you feeling today? Does life suck without me? Would you mind not sucking so much so that you can be with me? The broken person is so hurt and repulsed that they would never like to see that person again. This makes things difficult. Then, in turn, the BU starts to become really hurt that the other person can move on like that. Did I mean nothing to you? Meanwhile the dumped person is dealing with all the natural feelings associated with someone who has been told that they have no value in the life of the person they've given their life to. This means that if you get dumped on a Monday you are supposed to call that person on Tuesday, even though you're not even friends anymore on facebook.
Your phone charger becomes a sexual object. Who, of course, needs a spare phone charger in a world where they are not sleeping around? Communicating with the ex in order to get your phone charger back is like calling to go pick up your diaphragm.
Your single friends become your best friends and you go out twice as much. This is fun, right guys? I love going out to all the places that I went last time I was single! The ideal location to be twice as much is somewhere dangerously close to where you might run into your ex.
Music is fucking awesome. Because they totally get it! About six years ago I was going through a rough time and I wrote about how amazing it was because of music. Good music, bad music. Your life is torn to shit and then suddenly a woman walks out of the subway and her shoes pound out the beat to "Pretty Woman." And her smile is the bass line. I don't think I have any close friends who weren't given the Neutral Milk Hotel album "In the Aeroplane over the Sea" during an especially emotional part of their lives. In high school I delivered pizza to all the boarding schools, saving up for my cross country trip while mending my broken heart to "I Want You Back."
I want you back. Michael Jackson said it all. Yesterday I was psyched you'd be late coming home from work. I was so excited you had to go away on business (free time!!). I dropped you off on our last date and thought, "Sure the Vespa's built for two but ain't it nice to have it all to myself? So luxurious!" I think even the last time we went out I really wanted you to bring a friend so you could leave me the fuck alone for once. Then you broke up with me and all I want to do is be with you and do shit I normally can't stand. Call me up. Tell me about work. I want you back.
iPhoto should be renamed iFuck Up Your Day. Ingeniously a million years ago I made an iPhoto album called "Last 12 Months" and synced it up to my iPhone. This means that whenever anyone asks me about a thing I've done I stupidly whip out my phone and say, "Sure, I have a picture of it in here somewhere...it's...uhm, it's somewhere on the other side of these tears. Hang on."
You lose the boyfriend weight. If you ever see a dude you know and he looks like he's gained a few pounds: be happy for him. Boys are way too stupid to do this on our own. Even at our bachelor best we can only remember to order all the pizza and beer five nights a week. The other two nights we go to bed with a stomach ache because we don't know that we're supposed to eat every day. When you break up you lose two of the food groups: snacks and brunch. There's also those egg dishes and take out that you order on TV night. Those add up.
You lose the one person in life that you could tell anything to. There's pretty much nobody better to talk to than the BU, but you have to hide everything from them. This begins a cycle of hiding things from someone you loved. You go inward like a hermit crab and it becomes harder and harder to unfurl.
Dear Brendan, Always hold a girl's hand when you walk her through a subway station after midnight. It's wonderful for everyone. Especially if she's wearing a pretty dress. -Yourself.
Thoughts that kept me awake when I was trying to listen to Moby Dick on tape (I somehow thought this would be relaxing before bed).
Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? - Moby Dick, page 1.
Rockaway Beach is worth it if the taco shack is there and there are girls in bathing suits.
Herman Melville on getting free shit (surprise: he blames Adam and Eve equally):
...there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid,- what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!
On being into weird shit:
I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it- would they let me- since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.
On the "fuck it" nature of travel:
So, wherever you go, Ishmael, said I to myself, as I stood in the middle of a dreary street shouldering my bag, and comparing the darkness towards the north with the darkness towards the south- wherever in your wisdom you may conclude to lodge for the night, my dear Ishmael, be sure to inquire the price, and don't be too particular.
As much as I like seeing my name in CAPITAL LETTERS, I pretty much hate every story I've ever published because they neuter my words. So here is my Cuban article, with all my smartass comments included:
4 Hour Havana.
Hotel Telegrafo sits right on the edge of Parque Centrale in the Havana Vieja. It has a cybercafé, a restaurant, bar, a tourism information desk and even a car rental agent. It was beautifully restored in 2001 and the before and after pictures of this grace the cover of the Cuban book “Lest We Forget” about the restoration of old Havana.
When you get to Habana, get a coffee. Take a stroll from Parque Centrale down the pedestrian-only street Obispo and stop off at La Luz Café where for a single peso ($0.02USD) you can get a great dark cup of espresso made with fresh ground Cuban coffee.
Capitolio is a relic from the dictator Gerardo Machado built in 1929 as an imitation of the Capitol Building in D.C. It now houses the Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment and tours still run through the empty, unused Chamber of Deputies, which looks like the empty version of something you’d see on C-Span. The 40 ton, 56 foot high golden Statue of the Republic dominates the grand entrance.
If you head straight to the water from Capitolio go past the daunting Museo del la Revolucion. If you’re pressed for time and you do not have an interest in seeing the shoes and typewriters worn out by Che and Co, then at least walk by it. The museum is built in the palace of the former dictator Batista. Just behind the museum is a car, plane and boat museum. This is truly the Graceland of Havana. Of special interest is a retrofitted farm tractor made into a tank and a fishing boat called Granma which Che and Castro used to launch the revolution. It looks like a ski boat you might find off Cape Cod.
Cigars. You’ve probably heard that Cuban cigars are the best in the world, but what does that mean to a non-cigar lover? If you want to get a taste of what a good Cuban is like head over to La Casa del Habano. If you only try one cigar: think of how you like your coffee. If you like to have dark, oily, glistening, fresh ground coffee beans heaped into a strong brew then pick yourself out a fat, dark, glistening Cohiba. If you like dark French Roast coffee, but you brew it on the lighter side then try anything made by the factory Romeo Y Julieta.
Take that cigar and enjoy it down at Hemingway’s favorite spot El Floridita known as “The Cradle of the Daiquiri” (it’s motto is written in English on the original red latch refrigerators). Here is the gateway to some of the best lobster you’ll ever eat. The bar staff is courteous, seasoned and very helpful. They open early for lunch and feature live, raucous music all day and proudly feature air conditioning. Cigars are one of those magical things about Havana that you should enjoy right there in Havana. Some tour books have criminally complex schemes on how to get Cuban cigars back into the US (“…bring an empty box of Dominican cigars and cigar labels, switch them out in your hotel…”) Just enjoy it right there in Old Havana. And remember this moment in the future every time you pass on an inferior cigar.
Hop in a cab to check out Ernest Hemingway’s house in San Francisco de Paula just on the edge of Havana. Papa H. lived here between trips for over twenty years. Everything is just as he left it when he committed suicide in 1962. His library of 8,000 books lines the walls below hunting trophies from African safaris. Curiously enough a sizeable cat-cemetery fills the back yard (Hem had over 60 cats in his lifetime.)
In Havana it gets dark early and streetlights are rare. But you can follow your ears through any street in Havana to see great live music. However, the greatest nightclub in Cuba—some say the world—is the 1939 classic The Tropicana. Take a cab to this little gem in the Mariano district. Dancers entertain in the most exquisite costumes. Book your table ahead through the local tourist office and you can get prime seating, a snack, a bottle of rum, mixers, a cigar and a souvenir picture of yourself with the dancers for under $100.
A couple of weeks ago I was out with Leila and I told her this story.
At work my manager came up to me because I was yelling at the waitresses again. He said, "Let me ask you something, I remember you being quite a nice guy. But this year you're really hard on the waitresses. You're always calling them sluts, cunts and bitches."
"Only when they are being those things."
"You wanna know my theory?"
"No."
"I think you're not over your ex girlfriend and you're taking it out on them."
Leila said right away, "Have you read A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius?"
"Of course."
"Because this sounds like--"
"Right. No I didn't make up this story just so someone else could tell me what my problem is. This really happened."
After that night I decided to be nicer to the girls and after work we made plans to go to Coyote Ugly together. They finished earlier than I did and we agreed to meet there.
When I walked in the doorguy asked if I were meeting people. I described them. The doorguy was a big black dude so of course he only noticed the one big nasty white girl in the group. "Oh yeah, they met some guys here and they all left about ten minutes ago."
I texted my manager, "I'm ten minutes later to COYOTE UGLY and the girls all leave with dudes they met at COYOTE UGLY and I'M not supposed to call them names?"
He responded, "Hahaha, sluts."
The recent advent of sexism in my life had come to alarm me. I'm actually pretty much only interested in sexist thoughts that are funny, but I guess some of them are demeaning. On July 7th Leila and I were at "Adult Education" and comedian David Angelo was doing a slide show of evil advertisements from women's magazines. One was for Fresh Mint Gum and it said, "Wherever your mouth ends up tonight--make sure it's Fresh!"
"They're talking about blowjobs, folks. You don't have to be an English major to get the double entendre there." We all laughed. Blow jobs! "This ad is awful. It's terrible. This ad offends me and I hate women."
What a sweet release that was! I couldn't control my laughter. I was doubled over in the front row and David Angelo took an extra pause to let me cough it out.
The truth is that at the time I loved this little phrase because it gave me comfort. And yet now I am slightly uncomfortable writing this because I don't want to be misread.
This week I took myself on a date to Coney Island to read and relax. I'm reading the Fitzgerald verse translation of the Odyssey, because there aren't enough pretentious people in Brooklyn as it is.
I'm reading Book X "The Grace of the Witch," which is where ????? (Kirke, aka Circe) turns Odysseus men into swine. They act like pigs, they sleep in the dirt and it pains Odysseus to see them so. Circe has a big boner for Odysseus and she invites him to dinner, but he cannot eat.
'A decent man
would see his company before him first.
Put heart in me to eat and drink--you may,
by freeing my companions. I must see them.'
But Kirke had already turned away.
Her long staff in her hand, she left the hall
and opened up the sty. I saw her enter,
driving those men turned swine to stand before me.
She stroked them, each in turn, with some new chrism;
When I was a kid I worked on a farm and on hot summer days like this we had to be at work an hour early. The heat would destroy you in the field as you walked around spreading fertilizer by hand with a gardening glove. This farm was powered by the opposite of migrant labor: indigenous teenage boys.
There were not water fountains out there so if you got thirsty you'd pull an ear of corn right off the stalk, shuck it on the ground and bit into that sweet eat, still cool from the morning dew.
While the rest of my friends snoozed their summers away (assholes) we were up and in the fields by six. Four boys, eight rows every morning of the week. You picked the bag until your little hands couldn't hold it anymore. And the whole time out there we were talking about girls, girls, girls.
The possibility of girls is what kept us going at that hour, perhaps even the whiff of working next to someone who had had sex with one of them. This was the summer where American Pie came out, which was the movie that unwrapped a thousand condoms. At least in my high school. It sparked the conversation and gave us the vocabulary.
Conveniently all the girls I had crushes on worked the farm stand. We'd come in from the fields just as they were arriving to work for the day. My eternal teenage-girl taste in television was the only thing that could get me a date then and I would invite them over after work to watch television.
One girl, I remember, was Italian and so I tricked her into hanging out with me by promising to showcase my pasta making abilities. To sweeten the deal I offered my beloved pool table and Dawson's Creek. I still remember the delightful flicker of her dad's headlights as he dropped her off there and waved from the driveway.
The next day my mother was picking on me at dinner, "Brendan and Sarah did the old knock-the-balls-around-on-the-pool-table-so-mom-thinks-we're-really-playing-pool-down-here." My mother always believed that I was a lot more successful than I was in that department. In reality I was casually chasing her around the pool table, essentially pretending to position myself at the best angle for my upcoming turn.
Dozens of games would go down like this, where we took a casual attitude towards accidentally sinking the eight ball. I played again and again hoping that as I went for my next shot she would plant the rubber heel of her cue and stop me from circling the table to kiss her.
That never happened and eventually her dad returned, "Because I have to work in the morning." The next day on the farm I started at six and we passed each other somewhere around her arrival at noon.
After work we boys would all ride our bikes to the river in our muddy farm clothes and rope-swing in fully dressed. Occasionally there would be some kind of other group of boys there--chiefly the guys who worked at the car wash who were a whole 'nother kind of degenerate. We field boys were trouble but the car was kids were somewhat shadier, always on the make, always lurking for that dollar tip, always scouting out new connections from their co-detailers for ways to get beer.
One of the senior members of the car wash's faculty was this guy named Russ who only wore cut off jean shorts and sleeveless band t-shirts. Russ was the king of the swing, launching himself into the river from the highest branch, making the twenty-foot rope and its wooden seat parallel before taking off. He left off the seat in one graceful, olympic backflip just as the swing could go no higher.
"You go to Simsbury High?" he asked as he busied himself with a ziplock of rolling papers. I told him I did. "Me too, bro! Class Partier of '89--still rollin' joints!" He smiled with his teeth, which were the color of resin and licked his latest.
The other kids reminded Russ that they had to get back to the car wash and then Russ said what they all say, what the girls in the stand would say to us as we left at noon--what our friends who worked retail or bussed tables all night, "You guys are lucky--you get the afternoon off."
So here I am, it's twenty years since Russ was crowned and I wonder--only just slightly--what he is doing with himself. Today is my day off. I awoke this morning fully dressed sometime after six. Yesterday I took myself to Coney Island and sat on the beach reading The Odyssey, drinking freshly delivered paper-bag Coronas* and eating mango on a stick. When I ran out of money I went home and met with with Leila at a nerd event for librarians and people in children's publishing.
I met Leila's publishing friends. "How do you two know each other?"
"We've been friends for years," I said. Which is true. I am vaguely uncomfortable around publishing industry types because I know they spend a third of their emailing time fending off people who are begging them to read their work. I don't want them to think that I'm there trying to bag an agent.
Coincidentally Leila's agent was at the event and it was their first meeting. "How do you two know each other?"
"I read Brendan's website for years and tracked him down one night when he was DJ'ing because, and I've said this before, I think he is the voice of our generation." What a great introduction! My New England shyness kicked in and I had to demure with a smile just to make sure everyone knew that I was not planning on being the voice of a generation at this party.
Isn't that weird? I would probably be more comfortable not discussing the one thing in life I've been working on non-stop since the corn farm (being at least a person who continues to write).
We drank frozen margaritas and rode the subway home with Emily.
When we got out of the station I hollered down the entrance, "Where the fuck have you been?" to my homeless girl.
"Heeeeeey, Branden!"
I went to introduce Leila and she smiled right away and said, "Are you Jackie?" It's nice to know, sometimes, that even though no one will ever read the novels I write every day at least I have a friend like Leila who pays attention to things like what my homeless girl's name is.
I still have Emily's air mattress from my recent plague of house guests, so Leila and I dropped by my house to bring it over to her before we went to another party. My Vespa is marooned in Midtown until I get a new battery for it so we had to deliver this cumbersome sleeping device on my one-seat bicycle in the dark.
"We can't die tonight," Leila said as she held my hips and sat on the seat. "I'm an only child."
"I wonder if George Plimpton and Truman Capote ever rode tandem on a one-seater before."
We dropped off the mattress and rode on to the party. "Do you want to walk?" I asked.
"I want to not die. But I am told: you do only live once."
We took off from Emily's and circled Grand Army Plaza on the bike. From the top of Park Slope it was all down hill to the party. We coasted beautifully through the tree-lined streets, dipping in and out of leafy streetlight shadows. The sweat we had earned hauling that air mattress now wicked off of our clothes as we sailed around the neighborhood, looking for the next party.
By some miracle today I awoke sometime after 6. I was fully dress (yeah, it was that kind of party) and struck with the vague feeling that I could sleep all day if I wanted to.
But then I heard the old farmer in me. There corn doesn't stop growing just because you don't feel like picking it. And I got up and got back on my bike and rode to the coffee shop because I have a protagonist to feed.
The work was done in no time. This blog post is writing itself. And for the rest of the day I'll be at the beach or the pool reading a book and somewhere the class partyer of '89 thinks I'm lucky because I have the afternoon off.
*Coney Island is like a very shitty version of Miami. Instead of spending the $20 to rent a chair and towel at the beach club and drink $8 Coronas (plus gratuity) you can just buy a chair and towel for that much. And Mexican dudes with cooler bags stroll around selling $3 Coronas. There's also this one awesome lady who sells peeled mangos cut like pine cones.
The other day I was at work and I asked one of the waitresses when we would be friends again. She and I had been buddies for years, but she mysteriously turned on me about a month ago. For years we were sneaky little comrades together, sneaking shots of Jameson and cigarettes. And then one day, poof. She's gone and now work is even worse for both of us.
I take my attitude towards people who hate me from a cross between Joyce and Proust. James Joyce tells me to think of them as dead to me. Proust says, "the dead exist only in us, and it is ourselves we beat without ceasing when we insist on reminding ourselves of the wrongs we have done them."
All of this hate is quite a lot of work. And, to quote myself (if only to encourage it amongst others), "Once I learned to let go it became easier to hang on."
Certainly no one is guiltier of holding onto things worse than me (hence the need to quote myself to myself.). But, when asked when we'd be buddies again, the girl responded, "I don't know, B. You wrote something seriously mean about me on your website."
I of course had no idea that she read my website. People rarely mention it to me, although my sitemeter has informed me that a large number of office buildings in the world are abuzz with my terrible spelling. I would also like to give a huge shout out to whoever it is in Louth, Ireland who checks in with me frequently. Is your name the same as mine in Irish? Does it cause you as much grief as it does me?
This website gets me in quite a bit of trouble, and I could honestly care less. Andrea asked me the other day if I were writing my memoirs, "No," I responded emphatically. Memoirs require time and distance. And, frankly, the amount of shit I don't include on my website could spawn an entire contrapuntal existence.
Why don't I name names more? Why don't I just link to peoples facebook so they know when I talk shit about them?
It's because none of what I write has anything to do with anyone but me. I don't really bother explaining my writing, mostly because it makes even less sense to me. The only thing I can do is practice a certain kind of honesty, which is not revered in our society--and least of which in downtown nightlife society.
Some people ask me if I think of this website as my sketchbook. I guess it is if you think I made shitty portraits of people. Others ask if writing is a certain kind of therapy. Maybe it is. I don't say anything here that I wouldn't say to a friend, and indeed my biggest readers are my busy friends who care about me and like my stories but don't always have time to hear me out on things.
Furthermore, no one knows what's going on inside my head than I do. Freud had a big boner for Hamlet because Hamlet was the first person in literature to ever learn something about himself just by talking out loud about it.
Sometimes I just think that there's a story going on and I don't want it to end. Why did I insist on High Fidelity lunch with Nikki? Wasn't it kind of funny when Leigh called to tell me my goddam cousin was moving in with the guy I wanted to kill in April?
I don't even know what upset this waitress so much. I can only assume that people take things personally, but I can't possibly know what it is. She may think I mentioned her in one of my "UNSENT EMAILS" posts. But these emails were never sent, and were written for reasons sufficient enough for the author. I also said something very nice about her by name a week later.
I decided a long time ago that I was going to do this writing thing no matter what it takes. I was promised that I would lose every friend I ever fictionalized (a recurring character in my stories, Scott Hampshire--who is British in my recent novel--is referred to as having taken a road trip with Liam after high school--the American human being I actually took a road trip with after high school is furious with me every time this character makes an error in judgement or sleeps with the wrong girl.) So, if an American can be upset with my portrayal of British Scott Hampshire, then fuck it: no one is spared.
All of my characters are me in that I've never been anyone else. I can't speak for their experience. The only thing I can do is imitate the way they might seem sometimes. And I think imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Or, as my man John Updike writes:
Imitation is praise. Description expresses love. I early arrived at these self-justifying inklings. Having accepted that old Shillington blessing, I have felt free to describe life as accurately as I could, with especial attention to human erosions and betrayals.
I would go further and say that I love thinking of my horrible, painful, failure of a life as keeping you company on your own misfortunes. Frequently I get emails from people, often strangers, telling me that the way I put things together makes them feel less alone. Maybe we're all insane or evil. I think we just maybe don't have it all figured out.
John Updike has the life any writer would want. He lives on the coast in Massachusetts and writes regularly for great magazines, puts out wonderful novels and gets to travel. He also managed to raise four children and marry his college sweetheart. But even John Updike, the most aware person in history, wasn't able to thwart a divorce after his four children were grown.
Shouldn't he have? Shouldn't we brilliant people have a gift that lets us organize our thoughts? Shouldn't Mr. Updike have taken a second and thought, "What would I do if I had a character like me stuck in a loveless marriage? Why, they'd pull out old photos and take a vacation to the restaurant where we had our first date. We'd buy an old Vespa like we always wanted to when we were poor. Maybe my next novel could be a praise song to her over the years. Then we could enter our next stage of life together, forestalling the grave as long as possible so that we didn't hurt the other by leaving first."
But no. There really is no hope. The closest thing to hope is that we can forgive ourselves, admit to our shortcomings and then laugh about them with the people we love.
And I have lots of short comings. Currently I'm in a coffeeshop a half mile from my house because three days ago I rode my bicycle here, somehow forgot it, and walked home, cursing myself for letting me be so late for work.
Today I woke up thinking my bike was stolen. It was. By my stupidity.
Luckily it was safe in Park Slope.
I'm deaf in one ear from Coney Island swimmer's ear. I'm so poor that I can't afford to get my glasses fixed right now, instead I keep going back to the eye doctor so we can "try out" different kinds of contacts. This leaves me blind at night and practically illiterate by day.
I'm stupid, I'm forgetful. I'm constantly trying to be nice to people by saying, "Great meeting you!" And they smile politely and say, "Yes, great to see you. Again."
My writing, and especially my website, is no justification for anything other than words on a page. More Updike:
My own chosen career--its dispersal and multiplication of the self through publication, its daily excretion of yet more words, the eventual reifying of these words into books--certainly is a practical consolation, a kind of bicycle which, if I were ever to stop pedaling, would certainly dump me flat on my side.
But certainly my bullshit sketches about people say almost nothing about who they are. And you should never allow another person the injustice of telling you who you are. It's like trying to find the position and velocity of an electron.
That we age and leave behind a litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable and the commonest thing in the world--it happens to everybody.
John Updike is by far the worlds most boring person ever and yet he is probably the greatest writer of his generation because he paints so honestly with the same boring colors you'd see in the weekly Seers catalogue. If Updike can make the suburbs into such a wild place just by telling a few secrets, then there is certainly plenty of work for the rest of us to get going on.
For example, after dozens of novels about troublesome marriages in small towns and 128 boring-ass pages about being John Updike, he writes about skiiing in Vermont with other couples (in an essay about why he supports the war in Viet Nam, of all things):
We would become a pack, welded together by the day's fatigue and bruises and beer. I seem to remember, on one endless drive back home in the dark down Route 93, while my wife sat in the front seat and her hair was rhythmically irradiated with the light from opposing headlights, patiently masturbating my back-seat neighbor through her ski pants, beneath our blanketing parkas, and taking a comradely pride in her shudder of orgasm just as we hit the Ipswitch turn-off.
I can't imagine any benefit to any reading. It doesn't make us a better person or immune from divorce (my goal) or incapable of heart break. My bullshit website does nothing but take up my time. I don't even have google ads to justify the yearly fee to keep it afloat.
But sometimes it keeps me company on a long flight or helps me find my way into a one-liner that makes me feel less like a twenty-seven-year-old failure who's never had a real job or a car loan. I'm currently blind, half-deaf and I've been smoking long enough that I have almost no sense of smell. Every payday I run to the bank at 3 in the morning so that my check will go through before my bills come out. I haven't been to the dentist in 4 years or the doctor in 3. Between the tightening credit markets and my own personal financial-crisis: I'm pretty sure I'll never get a mortgage.
So maybe if I just try and be as detailed as possible: none of you will ever have children that grow up to be like me.
Like the inkwells of New England school houses, I have run dry for the summer. Perhaps the mischievous little boy inside of me willed it so, dipping the long braids of the girl in front of him (whom he secretly likes and outwardly tortures) into the cool blue ink to speed its evaporation.
My forebearers' quills would scratch at the bottom of the well, tipping the desk ever so, hoping for one last little blob to finish what they wanted to say. They would scape the dried ink from under their fingernails and walk home, cursing the tattooed sailors on their way home for wasting all that ink.
My dear John Updike might find himself on a beach with the family in tow, sneaking away to lean against a sand dune and write on a pad with a pencil only to have it snap in mid sentence. He finds himself there on the beach with nothing to sharpen the pencil. He cannot write and the beaches in New England are never rocky enough to invent tools. And yet he is on the beach. Are there worse things in the world?
Vonnegut would have shaken his pen until it came down with SIDS.
Hemmingway would be out at sea, anchored, only to discover that the sun had scorched his last typewriter ribbon.
Instead I am like the industrious young loser who drunkenly sat up all night watching I Dream of Jeanie on his laptop. When he pridefully took his literary self to the coffeeshop that day he sat down, turned off his phone (okay, first checking the email for the first non-out-of-office-reply of the summer) and then getting down to work--only to discover that his battery had drained. He instead carries around a heavy, expensive machine that can do nothing at all--it certainly can't write.
For the benefit of people who only read facebook: Yes, I am saying that summer had rendered me nothing but an expensive, dysfunctional piece of machinery.
Yesterday I was enjoying my day off and working on Sandflower's record. My unending thirst for another platinum plaque means that I can always find reasons to work on it. But I was ashamed of myself for tweedling out two hundred words a day on the YA novel, let alone Mercutio, whom I have abandoned like a friend with a drug problem.
My cousin just finished building the stairs in my backyard and it occurred to me that a worthless lazy fuck like me ought to have a hammock suspended in the trees on my new back deck.
So I called the laziest fuck I know and luckily he was out taking a walk for no apparent reason.
Mark Twain let himself in while I was smoking out back (I had forgotten he managed to abscond with my keys one day when we were still chasing the white whale). He came straight to the backyard and marveled at the new deck, which is more of a tree house. "Would you look at this? Times must be turning around when a worthless piece like you can afford to renovate. Ha!" He still has the stilted, Rip-Taylorish laugh that always gets me. Even when it comes out in a cough as he helps himself to my pack of cigarettes. "Quite the poor man's gazebo you got here."*
"I think it needs a hammock."
"Get a hammock. Rent out your room. Live in the hammock. Start the smallest hotel in New York City. They'll be all over it in the New York Herald."
"The Herald stopped publishing in 1924. Maybe you're thinking of Time Out New York?"
"That's a stupid name for a newspaper."
"Magazine."
"Whatsoever."
My new roommate came home just then and her lab/pit/Marmaduke mix dog pounded through the outside door. "Sorry," I said. "He's not supposed to--"
"I just have one question, Sullivan. And I'm not leaving until I find the answer."
"What is it?"
"Who's a good boy?"
"What?"
He grabbed the big brown eyed dog by the jaw, "WHO'S A GOODBOY? HUH? WHO'SAGOODBOY?? Yess you are. YOU ARE." The dog was smiley and rapturous as he rolled around on the ground in all of the things that he would soon carry onto my furniture. Thanks, Mark.
"What's your problem, today, Sullivan? Boy trouble?"
"Fuck off."
"I shall, momentarily." He helped himself to another one of my cigarettes (my last) and stuck it behind his ear.
"I'm just a little out of ideas. I keep writing everyday, but it's just not coming to me like it used to. I don't know what to do."
"Getahammock."
"What?"
"There's nothing else you can do. Why not enjoy the time when all the women your age still look good in bikinis?"
"But what about my writing?"
"When the tank runs dry you've only to leave it alone and it will fill up again in time, while you are asleep--also while you are at work at other things and are quite unaware that this unconscious and profitable cerebration is going on. You will find new material now and the book goes on and finishes itself without any trouble."
"Really? But we're not hacks writing short stories or dipshits who write romance. We're journalists. We know how to produce copy. When did this earthly piece come over you? You been smoking weed with Tom Wolfe?"
He let out a smirk, "Ever since then, when I have been writing a book I have pigeon-holed it without misgivings when its tank ran dry, well knowing that it would fill up again without any of my help within the next two or three years, and that then the work of completing it would be simple and easy. The Prince and the Pauper struck work in the middle because the tank was dry, and I did not touch it again for two years. A dry interval of two years had occurred in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court."
Just then my roommate came out to get the dog.
She saw me at the top of the stairs and paused for a second, wondering if she had interrupted something. She can be quite awkward.
"I think we're going to get a hammock," I said and held up my cigarette. "After this."
She held the dogs collar, nodded and walked back inside.
*My fellow Hartfordian (along with Kerouac, Jay MacInerny, Harriet Beecher Stowe) made Hartford famous for the literary types by almost never writing a word in Hartford. The majority of the things we think of as Mark Twain stories and books were written in the Gazebo of his sister's upstate farmhouse while the children were put to work.
