This somewhat awful thing happens when you're young and cash-strapped and grocery shopping. Personally I do my best to go to the bank after every gig (instead of waiting two weeks for payday I have 4-5 smaller paydays a week mixed with work I'll do today that won't pay me until next month). And the worst part is that when I'm a good boy and I put my money in the bank it means I have to buy things on my bank card.
For two unrelated reason this is impossible in Brooklyn.
Everywhere worth shopping in Brooklyn is cash-only. If I want coffee on the day after a gig I have to get it at Starbucks.
All the ATMs in New York City have a running joke between them about how stupid people must be to pay their $4 fee. Also, Chase Bank ("Most ATMs in the city!") has an iPhone app that intentionally lists non existent ATMs.
I also have a very strict diet of Coffee, bagels, potatos, butter, kale, sour cream, avocados, beer, whiskey and whatever's on sale at Trader Joe's that week. Today I was cooking potatoes and decided to run out for a can of baked beans. The problem was this $1.99 can was inaccessible without other purchases. Then I found myself stocking up on things I don't need for a hypothetical future.
I bought an eight-dollar jar of rice and then I thought I mind as well prevent future baked-bean problems by getting more beans. Then that reminded me that I could get soup.
Anyway, somehow I got home with $35 in groceries as a cost-cutting measure against paying an ATM fee in order to get my $2 baked beans.
Of course I would like to write the great, young, New York novel. However
Holded Caulfield was a native who got lost on the Subway.
The Great Gatsby has absolutely nothing to do with the business that brought the narrator his stature (the bond business, which isn't even cursorily explained--not even in a condescending way) and only exists because of it.
The Bell Jar is the closest one and it basically deals with a contest winner(read: reality show contestant)'s dissatisfaction with the way the city was presented to her.
My options are to create a new lie or explain life exactly the way it is.
One thing I can't stand is when I lend someone a jacket or a sweatshirt or even a sport coat and they put their damn hands in my pocket and hand me whatever's in there. This is the ungrateful equivalent of when you were a kid and you gave your friend a peace of candy and they, in return, handed you the empty wrapper.
Pocket merch is one of my favorite things. I want the receipts from bars and record stores I don't go to anymore. It's like a scrapbook you can wear. Last week I put on a sport coat I hadn't worn since my first tour and in it I found a sticker from my first tour with Gaga. What fun! I was instantly back to a time when we were exhausted and rehearsing and not sure if our crazy ideas would work.
If my ungrateful friends had their way this sticker would be shuttled to whatever jacket I wore when they borrowed it.
I think I have the habit of holding on to these things because I always need a good bookmark. The ideal here is that someday I reread the book and I'm also transported back by a magazine clipping or a flyer.
Also, there is the distinct possibility of discovering a long lost lovenote. These have the ability to make your day shiny and new.
Here's the thing about books that people talk about for eons: most of them are not very good. I remember reading the shit out of this when I was a kid. This time I stopped on page 38. I guess I forgot that it wasn't told first person, but from a sort of grown up perspective watching the kid. This book reads like a story told from husband to wife with the sole intent of inducing a miscarriage. View all my reviews >>
My new residency is going so well. I miss the LES and the filth and the drug dealers moonlighting as doormen, but I love making Meatpacking skanks shake their old-asses.
This club has a retractable roof, so when it heats up in there the bus boys heave open the dome with these long black ropes. Then it's technically an outdoor venue and people can smoke. But even cooler than that is when the bartenders like a song you play they jump on the bar, light a roman candle, and dance.
A bunch of my old gang from 230 Fifth came over. It was nice that instead of cajoling my friends to meet me somewhere downtown and depending on getting 15% of what they drank, I just had people come visit me and get me drinks. One gaggle of girls kept asking me to play "Party in the USA" by Miley Cyrus.
The thing about requests is I don't need them whatsoever. I am a professional DJ, which means I've managed to turn being a record-nerd into a career. I've been inciting ass-shaking since Miley Cyrus was nothing more than a bad idea (that I should have thought of).
Furthermore, people only seem to make obscenely stupid requests. Also, they look really, really stupid doing it because they come up to the booth and just shout, "BEYONCE." Drunk people spit when they talk.
But making requests is one of those things like dancing on the bar/table or sneaking into the wrong gendered bathroom: girls can and should do it. Men should never. Dudes are constantly coming up to me shouting dude requests which are the equivalent of asking if I can "Put the game on."
One dude last night slipped me a twenty and asked me to play, "NEW YORK BY JAY-Z" which is a song that does not exist. But I figured that since it was an amazing song and he was probably from out of town he was probably not the only person in the Meatpacking on a friday who wanted to be reminded of this trip whenever they hear that song. I didn't even have it, but I iPhoned it just to be nice.
Drunk Girl Requests from last night:
"JUSTIN!" which was a request she formulated one minute before when I had just played "Sexyback."
"PARTY IN THE USA" these girls would not leave me alone. At one point their other friends came over and said, "My friend wants to hear 'Party in the USA.'" I am trying to be a nicer person lately so I resisted the temptation to inform her that if she wanted to hear "Party in the USA" then she should get back in her car and go back to Jersey and listen to it. I have never heard this song, but I assume that if it had any guilty-pleasure value I would have tapped it as a resource already. Instead they started hounding me for
"WOMANIZER" and the thing about this girl that really, really drove me crazy was she was a close-talker who was clearly chewing some eight year old's gum (even though she was 35). Her breath smelled like a Girl Scouts meeting. Please get away from me. Then she hopped in the booth and started staring at my equipment, as if she might spot a record that she wanted to hear. ("The difference between me and a Jukebox is that I am taller and make more money."<--successfully stifled sentence.) But the thing about "Womanizer" is you can only play it at the absolute height of dancing because it's in 139 (most "dance" music is in 120 and even techno barely goes above 130). The only songs close enough are Roy Orbison's "I Drove All Night" and "Beat It." So you should get your ass out of my DJ booth and try and coerce your stupid friends into dancing it up because you can't just throw it on. Trust me. I'm a professional
But then afterwards a bunch of nightlife losers were meeting up at an afterhours place. There are only two kinds of afterhours parties:
Megaclubs like Mansion and Pacha are full of Euro house-nuts on ecstasy, dancing around in their weird denim, drinking redbull and water.
Sad bars that have shady owners stay open because their other option is to give up and let the bank take the bar back. The exception is when Beauty Bar would host afterhours after a particularly fun Motherfucker party. Then it was fun because they'd shut off all the lights and all the DJs and promoters and everyone would hide in the back room.
This was just a nothing bar in the financial district right on the water. We were the only people in there and the kitchen was still open. There was one small group of Asian dudes in a booth in back but mostly it was bartenders and managers and waitresses. Sue was there which was nice because she had also quit 230. A long time ago she had read one of my "Unsent Emails" here and hated me for it for a month. That's over now.
I know I could go work for an insurance company or get a job at a website or something like that, but I don't really mind my life right now.
And then through this sea of single people and young couples (no one ever seems to get more than one basket at Trader Joe's) I spotted a miracle. "Emily?"
This little blonde creature from my sociology class in college turns away from the organic cheeses, "Ohmygod, Brandon?" Emily graduated the year before I did in college and she was just about the sweetest thing on the planet. She was even nice to the lonely kid from Connecticut who had no idea what he was doing in Ohio. She has the cutest little nose and a smile like a candy counter.
"What are you doing in Brooklyn?"
"I just moved here, like just a few weeks ago. I was in grad school in Montana and I applied for a job out here and I got it. I love it."
"Grad school for sociology or psychology?" I really hope it's not creepy that I haven't seen her since 2003 but I do remember her double major.
"Actually I got my MSW," Masters of Social Work. Sexiest degree on the planet. "What are you up to now?"
I can't believe I'm in a grocery store with the sweetest girl from college. I can't believe she recognized me without my glasses on. I tell her about my new life in Brooklyn.
"So you're a rockstar," she smiles.
"I was. I might be again," I smile back. We exchange numbers.
A couple of days later she decides to come down to Fort Greene so we can go to Havana Outpost before it closes for the year. She's on her way to meet me in the subway. Havana Outpost is a solar powered restaurant in my neighborhood that I love. Heather and I went there on my birthday. But it has that annoying Brooklyn habit of being cash-only. So I have to go to the ATM and despite what they say online, there's really only one Chase ATM in my neighborhood. It's far away. Like I could take the Q there if I needed.
But I walk it. It's raining out and bitter awful cold. It was one of those days where you promise never to romanticize life at sea again. Even with a wool sweater on and the leather jacket I was shivering, clutching my umbrella.
As I walk by the subway stop I hear "Breaaahhhdan," which is what Homeless Jackie hollers as I go by. I feel bad for her. Not for the usual reasons, but because I've really let her down this summer. I wasn't making the money I used to. This recession hit her too because I've been ignoring her. I've honestly been avoiding her.
"Hey baby!" I'm in a great mood and I give her a big hug. This always terrifies the people coming on and off the subway. "What's shakin'?"
"I need help, Brendan."
"Asthma pump?"
"I need it real bad. Weather like this gonn' make me sick."
"It's $21?"
"I only need $12."
"I won't have it until after I DJ tonight."
She frowns, "I might just go to the emergency room again." Medicaid, in case you're following, covers ER visits, some doctors but not prescriptions. Instead of helping her pay for a simple $21 medication, they just bill the government for all these ER visits.
When I get to the ATM I make a decision. I'm going to help out my friend Jackie because I love her and she looks out for me and it's the right thing to do. I walk back and I got to the ticket office at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and get change.
Back at the subway entrance there's another homeless dude there. He's there everyday and I don't know how a homeless man can be so flawlessly clean shaven. "Where's Jackie?" he motions with his head.
Jackie is sleeping on four milk crates with cardboard at the bottom of the stairs. I don't want to wake her. Then I think I'll just tuck the money in her shirt. But then I look down the stairs and her sleepy eyes open. She looks up at me, dimly. She smiles. "I got your money baby." I give her $15 so she can get the pump and still eat.
"Where you goin'?"
"I'm meeting a girl for dinner."
"With yo' hair like that. C'mon let me comb it."
"No that's fine."
"Hang on," she sits up and pulls out her purse. The strange thing is that it's a perfectly normal purse. She has ID, a metrocard, toothbrush, deodorant, hairspray, etc. Basically the things that a normal city girl might keep around in case she ends up at her boyfriend's. She pulls out a comb.
"No, Jackie that's fine."
"I ever show you my pictures?"
"No. Show me." She pulls out some shots of her doing normal things. One of them she's holding a trophy from graduating from her rehab program. All of the women in the pictures are her "best friend."
I go to check my phone and I realize that there isn't service down here. I excuse myself and right when I get up the stairs I see that I have a voicemail from Emily. Great. I drag the girl out here and she's in the rain. I didn't even tell her where to find me. I track her down at Target where she's under the awning. "This weather is awful."
"I know," I say. "Here." I open up my big umbrella. It eclipses her little purse-sized number. "Let's get out of the rain and eat."
We walk by the subway and Jackie screams out, "Thank you, Brendan!"
"Did you get it already?"
"No, I'mma get it though. Then I'mma get me some Chinese food!"
"This is Emily."
"Hi, Emily," we walk away.
Now here's the thing about getting dinner with someone from Kenyon: you don't have to explain anything and you get to be as ridiculous as you want. "So, you and Bruce broke up, huh?"
She laughs, "Yep, about 7 years ago now."
Emily brings me up to speed about her dating life, which included moving to San Francisco with her senior year sweetheart, then leading at-risk youth on backpacking trips in Colorado and dating her co-counselor and the two of them moving to Montana for grad school. And then they broke up, "It was scary. He was my first non-Kenyon boyfriend."
"Man! That's awful. You mean you had to date someone you hadn't seen every single day for two years? Dating at Kenyon was so weird. Wanna get dinner tonight? And you're like, We've had dinner every night together since freshman year."
"I know!" We both end up getting the catfish burrito and a margarita. I also got the corn on a stick with mayonaise and cheese. If this were a date I would take her someplace that had waitresses or maybe not order messy corn on a stick. But this is a Kenyon girl. I've heard this is changing, but when we were at Kenyon no one wore make up or dressed cool. We all ate giant trays of food and drank too much and had to be cajoled out of the library on days when it closed at 2. We had marathon readings of Ulysses in Ohio. In sweats.
"Have you been back? I went to my reunion."
"I went back about two years after for a Creeks Concert. But that's it. You would have been gone."
"I probably shouldn't tell you this."
"What?"
"I went to my reunion, but I never went back on campus because of Bruce. I remember my senior year he came back and I was like, Really? Life doesn't get awesomer than Boat Races of Natty Light in the woods in Ohio?" She laughed out of embarrassment for herself as much as him. "But I went to my reunion and it was amazing. And you know what? Everyone there is still there and they're still sweet. I went to the bookstore to say hi because my first day in Mount Vernon my parents and I stayed at a Super 8 and the desk girl was like, You look nervous. And I was like, IamIdon'tknowwhatI'mdoingandIdon'tdeservetogotothisschoolandIhavenoideawhatI'mdoinginOhio
And she says, If you ever get lonely go see my mom. She works in the bookstore and she's an excellent mom. Her name is Denise. So I go to the bookstore looking for this woman and I say, 'Scuse me are you Denise? And she goes, You must be Brendan. So at the reunion I walk in to say hi to everyone and the first person I see is Denise and she just goes, Brendan? My daughter keeps asking about you. Isn't that crazy? Mary from the cafeteria remembered me. Joel at the coffee shop was like, We haven't been able to sell a bagel and hummus since you left."
"That's probably a you thing, though," Emily says. "Because you're so nice to everyone."
I smile. Right. Because Brendan Sullivan doesn't pick fights, yell at strangers in Target or tell his exes how he really, really feels about them.
Emily disappeared out of my life in the summer of 2003. I moved to Delaware with Amanda that summer and we broke up after that and I guess everything from there has been the downward spiral of anger, loss, alcohol and pain. And yet here I am.
I guess I wear a certain persona sometimes. It probably came with the leather jacket. But am I completely incapable of being a nice person anymore? Or am I just protecting that skinny kid from Connecticut who was scared and lost and confessing himself to hotel clerks?
It was just so fantastic to forget all that. I'm having dinner with an old friend from college. We were never close and but I've never once gotten anything but a smile from her when passing. She was also the first person to tell me that I had cute shoes.
Before I know it we're trading family stories. I'm telling her about how my grandma held on for one extra day so that she wouldn't die on the day of my brother's wedding. I told her about Hallie's wedding in Kentucky where they did the "Call to Post" on the bugle and everyone laughed and then during "Here comes the bride" she leaned down to kiss her grandfather and everyone who was still laughing started crying. I told her about the sea turtle at Ben's wedding.
"Crying at weddings is my new favorite thing. It's like throwing up when you feel sick. You just take how you feel on the inside and prove it."
"And then right away you feel better!"
We stayed for another margarita. Life was quite marvelous and she turned me back into the boy that I was when we met. And I was happier then with no mind-set.
A detail I'll probably forget to use: "The band in this bar is being ignored to this degree: everytime they cut out of a song you can hear one person shouting the end of their conversation. They covered 'Get Up (I Feel Like a Sex Machine' and at the finale the guy at the bar was shouting, "--, BUT I USED TO WORK IN MIDTOWN."
After Alicia's birthday dinner I told her I'd give her a ride to Manitoba's where she was bartending her own birthday party. That was when I discovered that I had somehow parked on St. Mark's and lost my key.
I'm stupid. I do this. But not in a neighborhood full of dipshit miscreants. I ran. I ran to the corner of 2nd Ave and found it.
Open. Someone had seen the key in the seat compartment and opened it. But some miracle of the downtown panopticon scared that dipshit away.
My mother just moved to the diocese of New York which means every few weeks she has to come to the city. Yay! My mother is a priest, but she is still my mother and she openly refers to herself as The Dalai Mama. Like, with her collar on.
We met up for lunch at the Time Warner Center and caught up about things (Mom's high school sweetheart facebooked her and she reacted exactly how any of us would!)
So we went to the Borders and I remembered that she had given me a gift certificate to there for my birthday, which was fun because I don't think I've gone "birthday shopping" in years. I'm finishing this YA novel this week and I really want to make the female characters just as interesting as the male characters. This might be easier for me if
I had ever been a teenage girl.
If I had ever read books when I was a teenager.
Books Bought:
Hatchet- When I told Ben I was writing about teenagers on a backpacking trip he said to me: "You should just turn in Hatchet." And I was like, "You're right, that book will always be awesome.
Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist- Leila recommended it to me and it is written by a guy and girl author duo. That would be a fun thing for us to do someday.
Manhood for Amateurs- Okay, this is just Michael Chabon's new book and I had a gift certificate BUT sometimes Michael Chabon books quote a review I did once of a book of short stories of his. It makes me look official.
Wuthering Heights- In high school I was in the retard classes for everything except English. We "read" Wuthering Heights but I wasn't too bright then. I'm going to reread it now if only because it has a charming new Penguin Classics Deluxe cover and Heathcliff looks like me. Also, now that I'm an awful person I might like it more than I did when I was in Young Life and volunteered as a peer counselor.
The Bell Jar- I used to hate dated books, but now I really love reading about how young people once were in New York City. The neighborhoods change and everyone is still complaining about the rent.
My Horizontal Life- by the author of Are You There Vodka? It's me, Chelsea. This book seems to be written by my female counterpart. Although if it turns out it is too good or better than anything I could write: I will destroy her. She will end up just like Sloane Crosley (mwahhhaaha!)
Starting a new gig, for me, can be just as exciting as finding a new lover. That first week is so exciting, even though it's basically the same. They have nothing to hold against you and all your quirks are still cute. I just got a new gig at a Scottish place and on my way out of a meeting today the Glasgowegan hollered, "Brendan?"
"Yes?"
"If anyone asks--yer parents are Scottish."
It put such a glorious smile on my face. I hope I can wipe it off by Friday night.
When I was staying at the Chelsea my second favorite part was that they would slip a copy of Interview Magazine under your door. I was editing Mercutio and feeling rough and feeling raw and in the prime of my life. I was also about four hours away from meeting Adrianne for the first time and on a break-up high where anything is possible.
"I'm going to write for Interview magazine some day."
I finagled an editor's email (I pulled the LG card) and created my first assignments! I would interview my friend Justin because we're friend and his band is awesome. And then, just to be awesome, I would email a hero of mine Legs McNeil the author of Please Kill Me: The Oral History of Punk.
Legs was in the process of putting together a website of all of his archives. Photos, interviews, merch. I always in the back of my head told myself that I was like the Legs McNeil of my generation. I would just sit here and notate. I would be around all the cool bands and be their friends and tour with them and then write about it.
I know he can be a troublesome type. One time I called him for a quote when I was doing a piece for NY Press and he simply wrote back:
Reply
LegsMcN@ahol.com
to me
show details7/1/05
Fuck the New York Press! Legs
Reply
Forward
Then a couple of weeks ago it was announced that the book he was working on was optioned to become the new Joey Ramone biopic! I had already slated the interview with next years most famous dude. I facebooked him about it:
In person, what day this week? I'll come into the city.... Let me know ASAP.....
In person! I'm gonna interview a famous music historian and he wants to do it in person? Just for me? I was so psyched all week.
I'm gonna meet Legs McNeil!
I was walking around downtown going about my business. We'll piss on the door of the John Varvatos store that replaced CBGBs. I DJ'd on Saturday and played "People Who Died" by Jim Carroll. We'll wear matching leather jackets by accident and laugh about it. Then I wondered what we would do. Is there a cliche punk interview? Fuck it, I'll take him to The Modern and we'll walk around MoMA burping foie gras and sneering at people when they ask us to put out our cigarettes.
We will talk about being from Connecticut and how we moved to New York because the package stores close at 8 back home. I'll ask him about when and why he quit drinking. He's left downtown for a place out in rural PA, which is something I would like to do someday.
Then, of course, he'll impart some kind of secret journalism thing on me and I'll be blessed forever. Afterwards he'll comment about how I'm slightly taller in person than he expected. This is gonna be great!
hey, sorry. I was away for the day. I am serious. Is it too late to call now?
I called him up two seconds after I sent that.
BS: Hello, this is Brendan Sullivan from Interview Magazine. Is this Legs? [His name is actually Legs.]
LM: Yeah, right I know I said this before. But you just don't seem into it.
BS: I am.
LM: I'm on the other line right now.
BS: Do you want me to call you back later? Maybe we could meet up tomorrow.
LM: into another phone (Carol? Let me call you back, okay? I've got to take this call.) Why didn't you call me?
BS: I am. I'm calling you right now, but I didn't get your message until just now. It was the weekend.
LM: The weekend? Who doesn't check facebook on the weekend?
BS: I've been away, sorry. I am really interested in the story and it is a piece I still want to do.
LM: Well, if you were interested in this then you should have called me when I asked you to.
BS: I mean, I got your number yesterday and I'm calling you today. How does that not sound like I'm interested?
LM: You couldn't even get my email address? I mean, fuck.
BS: You understand. I turned off all my facebook notifications, so it's not like I got an email about this. I just checked in now. But I am still interested in doing this.
LM: Yeah, well I'm not. Fuck off.
Then he unfriended me on facebook. Seriously, is this guy in Junior High?
Having just finished reading the new draft of Leila's first novel I can tell I am actually excited about it. I am looking forward to my dear friend developing a whole series of Wayward Girls novels.
Her female characters are so well defined that it's actually helping me write. The wayward girls are alternatingly awful and mean and sad. Leila helps make sense of that.
She has this one character that I love named Katherine Cabot Putnam who is that perfect girl in high school. Only the she's perfect girl explained and she's not any happier about her being perfect than any of us were about her.
“I don’t know how to explain this to you, Violet, but I’m going to try: I have parents with all the money I could want. I’m able to ace tests without really working. I’m naturally skinny and pretty. I was born lucky.”
“Uh, if you’re trying to make me feel sympathy for you,” I said, “You’re doing a really shitty job of it.”
“I was born lucky,” Katie repeated, “but I don’t deserve any of it. I don’t deserve money or intelligence or beauty or anything. I don’t deserve to be at Westfield any more than Pearl does. And I’m just trying to get what I deserve.”
I didn’t understand what Katie was saying. Or, if I understood it, I didn’t like it.
The whole story is told by a likeable narrator named Violet Tunis who is a keen wit and she has just the most indelible voice. Her friendship with perfect, sweet Katie is the center of the book, but even when she narrates a scene without Katie it's as if she's rehearsing it so she can run right home and call her best friend and tell her all the funny details.
Leila emailed it to me and I put it on my phone, meaning that on the subway I would open the little app I made for it and read it. Being in portable form meant that I ended up walking to jobs I hate while reading it. I can only think of a few books that have made me do that since I was fifteen.
I've pretty much always hated young adult books, including Catcher in the Rye because they are always about wealthy people who go to private schools. I grew up in New England, where the rest of the world sends their children to be schooled. I delivered pizza to these brats and cheered against them in hockey games. They always looked so sullen and angry and I was like, "How can you be pissed off about anything? Your cafeteria is free and they have SunChips!"
But reading Leila's novel made these disgusting, revolting prep school kids whom I've anonymously hated my entire life (for NO reason) seem human. One of my favorite scenes is when Katie goes to (duhn-duhn-duuuuhn!) public school:
“It’s weird,” she said when I asked what her new school was like.
“Like, we’re not allowed into the school building until the first bell rings.”
“Why not?” I asked, baffled.
“I don’t know! And also you have to get a pass to go to the bathroom during class. And there’s only one pass.”
“I’ve seen that on television before,” I said. “But what if you have to use the bathroom while someone else in your class already has the pass?”
“Then you just have to wait for them to come back,” Katie explained.
“So weird!”
When I was a kid my favorite show was 3rd Rock from the Sun because I loved growing up and watching aliens try and explain human culture. But really girls were more alien to me than aliens. At least aliens appreciated how weird it was. In Leila's novel there is an alternate universe called Harper Woodbane All Boys School. There everything is different:
“Yeah,” Scott said. “If something like that had happened at Harper, everyone would have been like, ‘Boo-hoo, so someone was mean to you. Get over it.’”
I grinned as I tried to picture how Ms. Breck would have reacted if I’d said that to Pearl or to Mischa. I legitimately think that boys must be a different species from girls.
It's going to be awesome to walk into bookstores and see my friend's books on the tables and shelved. I have a feeling that it will become one of those things that I do whenever I go to bookstores. I'll stroll in and look for it, pull it out and smile.
I also think that Katie Goes to Public School could be a whole novel in itself.
In winter 2007 I had a good job at a fancy place. I had health insurance and a doctor and a dental plan. I worked very hard as a bartender there and one day I came to work and just as we were about to get going a repair man showed up to fix the dishwasher behind the bar that had been broken since we opened.
It is the nature of these things that of course he comes two seconds before we're about to open, but whatever. The dude takes the dishwasher with him for repairs and sloshes a bunch of water on the tile floor and he forgets to put the slip mat back down. So of course I slip on it within minutes.
The company gave me cab fare to get the emergency room and like an idiot I think, "Since I have the damn day off now I mind as well just go to the ER near my house." Without thinking that maybe there are better hospitals in Brooklyn than the one at the edge of Bed Stuy. I waited in triage for six hours behind gunshot victims and homeless people. I still didn't get anyone to even look at me.
Eventually I got fed up of being in pain and yelling at fat black women through bullet proof glass. So I walked my injured ass home. I paged my doctor who informed me, "I don't do trauma."
"Trauma nothing. I just want you to fix my shoulder. It's killing me and my spine keeps cracking."
But he doesn't "do" trauma. I told him I would need a referal to see someone about this. He finally surrendered to the unbillable attrocity of being a doctor and recommending a doctor so that your health plan will cover it.
Workers comp at that time was something like $130/day but it only kicked in after you'd been out for two weeks. Bartenders don't get sick says so this just meant that from the moment I got injured I was out about $300. I had a good job at the time but the way to make it really good was to work a busy double which meant on Fridays I would get there at 9:30 in the morning, work lunch, take my half hour break at 4:30 and then work until midnight. That way I had the time off I needed to DJ. However, workers comp (if it ever arrived) counted my doubles as a single day.
They sent me to a great physician at a sports medicine clinic where they had a chiropractor. This guy was a magician. He took x rays and then he felt around in my chest, moved my arms and basically acted all transcendental in front of me.
"Does it hurt when you lift your right arm?"
"Everything hurts. It hurts to walk. I can't get on the subway. It hurts when I cough."
"Are you sick?"
"No. I think it's just my allergies."
"Do you take anything for it?"
"Whiskey?"
"Here." He wrote me a prescription for Allegra D. "This will help with your congestion and coughing. If we can get you to stop coughing then we can prevent it from getting any worse."
It helped but my shoulder still ached. I had to take cabs to work because I couldn't get on the subway with it hurting so much. One day the cab got stuck in a snowstorm. I was late for work and so they suspended my worthless, injured ass for a week. Great. Now I had all the time in the world to make it to my doctors appointments.
I went back next week feeling better and he tried a few more things out on me.
"You my friend have a rib out of joint."
"What?"
"If you think of your ribs as knuckles your ring finger is out of joint. It's pressing against your shoulder and pushing your spine out of alignment."
"That sounds terrible."
He hooked me up to heating pads and some kind of electrodes that were supposed to heat the inner part of my ribs. "Cross your arms over your chest and I'm just going to sit you back on the table."
Crunch.
And humpty dumpty was back together again.
The doctor kept me on the Allegra D.
A month ago I got a letter in the mail from a company called Third Party Solutions saying that they had gone through their claims and that they were not covering my medication from two fucking years ago. I called the phone number listed, "I'm sorry. There's some mistake. This is a worker's comp case and it was for my back injury."
"It says here that you had a shoulder injury."
"Sure."
"And Allegra is for allergies."
"Are you a doctor?" I said to the woman on the phone.
"No."
"Well neither am I. But I did go to a doctor and he prescribed me this for my injury."
"I understand. But it is not covered by your insurance."
"Excuse me. I'm an insured individual and I had a rib out of joint. This is what the doctor prescribed."
"It says here you had a shoulder injury."
"Well," I can't believe I'm going to say this. "The shoulderbone is connected to the rib bone."
They called back a week later to tell me that they wanted $785 for the Allegra D that my doctor prescribed. This country blows.
Thanks so much for your patience—I know I’ve had this forever. Unfortunately, I’ve decided to pass on representation, and I wish I had better news after making you wait for so long.
I didn’t connect enough to the narrative voice to want to champion the book in this tough publishing climate, and since it’s such a voice-driven book, I don’t think I’d be the best agent for it. You need and deserve an agent who feels as passionately about your work as you do. First novels are so tough right now that I really feel like I have to call an editor freaking out about how much I like it in order to get them to pay attention, so that’s where I have to be with a new writer.
This is just my very subjective reaction to a creative work, and another agent could easily disagree and prove wrong. Thanks for the chance to read your work—I wish you the best with it.
Some Dipshit You Emailed Nine Fucking Months Ago.
It occurs to me today that I have also not read Mercutio in about nine months. It was a joy to write and I remember loving it once upon a time at the Chelsea Hotel. But that might be the end of it for this little writer.
I just started a new DJ gig. All of the bartenders love me and treat me like Elvis because ever since I started doing Saturdays they've all double their incomes. It's nice, I guess, to be good at your profession and to achieve results. When I come in every week they all kiss me on the cheek and give me a big, big smile and offer to carry my synth. The waiters come over for high fives and all the waitresses have new clothes and purses now.
I have no idea how it is possible to be bad at DJ'ing in the Meatpacking on weekends, but apparently the guy before me was wicked bad. Whatever. So they love me at this new place and bumped me up to two nights a week which is more money than a person my age with no children or student loans could ever need.
It means I don't have to bartend any more because I'm making a decent income with the fashion magazine.
So there. I have all the free time in the world and I'm technically doing what I love.
"Amanda smiles at you as if you were an acquaintance whose name she is eager to remember."- Bright lights Big City
Periodically, I call up my ex girlfriend Amanda just to say hi. And periodically she never picks up or returns my call. Periodically I leave a message which is charming because until very recently when she got an iPhone her voice mail message was the same one from that summer when were were in college and she got her first cell phone. Her greeting is "You Have Reached ____" only the cute part is that in the background you can hear her mother calling for her brother ("...Aaron?").
I have set her in my phone by her last name so that I don't do one of those really classy things and call her when I'm wasted. Emotionally and alphabetically her name is too much to look at.
She wasn't at the Kenyon reunion and neither were a lot of her friends because they were all meeting up the following weekend. Because she was marrying the guy she started dating after me.
They had moved down to Atlanta so he could go to law school.
I wanted to hear about the wedding and the married life and try to have a conversation with us being two adults that at one time knew each other very well. The worst part of a break up is you basically lose someone who was once your best friend.
But since she never calls back that's fine.
Then last week something went wrong with my phone. She called. "Hello?"
"I'm in Park Slope waiting to meet [former mutual friend]."
"What are you doing in Brooklyn?"
"I got a new job that's starting next week and I'm on a whirlwind east coast tour right now. It's very adult. I rented a car."
Amanda. She has a voice after all. And when I say after all I mean it. After all these years. After I crash-landed at some strange fancy school in the midwest. After we became friends. After I became hopelessly in love with her. After we lived together in Delaware. After she apologized for what she "put" me through in college.
"I wish I were in Brooklyn. I would come pick you up."
"No worries. I'm not expecting you to drop everything you're doing just because I'm in town."
"I would. I would love to see you. Always. But I have a uh..." a shitty job to go to. "...a meeting at 5. " She was leaving the next day so we agreed to get lunch. I asked her who she keeps up with. She mentioned a friend of hers who is now a book editor and I said she should invite him.
"I would but tomorrow is friday and real people have jobs and can't meet for lunch."
"Right." Of course. Real people. It's been many years since Amanda and I have dated and even though I have better clothes now and stories about famous people, I'm still not much further along in life than when we lived in her parents beach house and I wrote novels and waited tables.
When I went to work that night they didn't know I was coming in and so they didn't need me. I'd like to work, of course, but I hate that gig anyway. I texted Amanda that I was done and mentioned that I had the evening free. She ended up going out with [former mutual friend]. I probably could have pushed to tag along, but I kind of have a policy about not going places where I'm not invited. They went to a bar down the street from me.
I had her meet me at 'Snice, which is a cute vegetarian place in Park Slope. It's a good place to go eat a sandwich that almost tastes good and pretend to write novels. We ordered at the counter and that's when I discovered two things. 1) They discontinued the barbecued seitan sandwich (the whole reason I wanted to come here) 2) They were cash only. 3) I don't have enough cash on me.
I had planned on big-shot'ing her lunch since I'm so fucking famous and wonderful all the time now. Instead she got it for me and I had enough money to leave them a tip.
"I think we're wearing the same outfit," I said. We both looked down and it was true. We both wore a black sweater, a black leather jacket, jeans and a white shirt.
"That's gross."
"How's married life?"
"Everyone always asks that. And I used to just say, 'It's the same.' but that seems to make people disappointed. So now I just smile and say, 'It's great!' We have a dog."
We sat down and I said, "You know that Shins record we used to listen to nonstop on our 12 hour car rides home on break?"
"Of course."
"Where he goes, 'Turn me back into the boy that I was when we met / I was happier then with no mind-set?' Do you think you could do that for me?"
"No."
"Could you try?"
"No, Brendan. That's not going to happen."
"I kind of miss being like that. I was nicer."
"The girls always said that I destroyed you."
"You did. You're kind of everything. I was nicer, I never wanted to live in a city then. You know I became a DJ just to fill the huge void that was left when you broke up with me?"
"I figured that."
"I used to stay up all night in college with my headphones on, peeling through my records thinking, 'If I played this at a party it would be awesome and everybody would love me.'"
"And now they do. You play records and everybody loves you. Wouldn't you rather have that?"
"I don't know. I remember that I really wanted us to get married. I thought we would get married."
"I did too. But it would have been very different. We would have gotten married younger. Like when we were 22/23."
"Right."
"And you'd be more serious now. We'd probably live somewhere else and you'd have a real job."
"So?"
"Are you still writing?"
"Of course."
"You're pretty much the only one from college who is still doing what they set out to do. Peter is in law school now at NYU, John's in law school down south. Georgia is a nurse." I have no idea what these people are doing because a great many of them are not interested in facebookdom. I think a few of them are under the impression that I'm kind of crazy, which is sad because these were people that I marched for Mumia with and spent long car rides. I've had these people over for Thanksgiving and taken them to Kentucky.
"I'm in too deep to give up now. My back up plan was to go back to being a reporter but there aren't any newspapers anymore."
"I think it is good that you are still writing."
"I'm on my fourth. It's a young adult novel. I haven't sold the others." I say this as though I've been busy. But really my other three novels have no future and no hope. Maybe that's why I love them so much. "I had trouble with the Mercutio one."
"Is that the Romeo & Juliet one?"
"Yeah. At the time I thought it was the biggest sell-out move ever. I thought it was such a commercial fiction thing. It turns out that most people weren't English Majors from small private liberal arts colleges. I'm surprised at how few people give a shit about a novel where Dante and Giotto are characters."
"That's a trend that sort of had its moment. Like when Wicked was big." There is one thing I have always counted on Amanda for and that's honesty. I don't have a lot of people like that in my life.
"Yes. But I still love them. I just need to find someone in publishing who believes in me and I do. She's a good friend to me too."
"That's nice."
Since I have put in my time downtown I have become very aware of when I might be talking too much about myself. This is something you pick up on when everyone you know is either a diva or a cokehead. I asked her more about her life and whatnot. Amanda is a more private person that I am. The first story I ever wrote for this website was about our adventure to the coal mining town in Pennsylvania where the coal under the town caught fire. She was really upset that I wrote about her in it without permission.
She told me that she had a thyroid condition that flared up last year, "I actually got fat if you can believe it."
"I got fat last year too!" I will take any reason for me to share anything with Amanda again. And this was it. "But it was mostly what I call 'Boyfriend Weight.' You see when guys--"
I was about to live-blog. "Right I get it. From eating normally and going out less, drinking less and maybe not doing so many drugs."
"I don't do drugs."
"Hm."
"Anymore."
"That's good."
"But when I got back from Havana I came with Havana Flu and lost all the weight I had gained."
"Did you go with one of those pretty little girls you're always with on Facebook?"
I laughed. One of the delights of Facebook is knowing that it is possible for your ex to see a good picture of you with someone good looking. Being seen with attractive women in part of my profession. Win.
But in writing this I had this thought: what the fuck did I expect to get out of this? Is she going to take one look at me and gasp, "God, how SEXY you've become! Holy shit did you manage to find a leather jacket in the six years since we broke up? Wow, and you've had a job? Fuck me in the bathroom and then help me figure out how I ever let you out of my sight?"
"You look well," she said.
"So do you."
"I think that's about a nice a thing you can say to someone you haven't seen in years."
"Did I get old? I feel like I've changed in the last couple of years. I'm not a baby anymore."
"You look fine. You have all your hair," and then she did a nice thing. She vaguely insulted her husband. How thoughtful! "[Husband] is starting to get a deep forehead. So are most people from our class. Not you, though."
"So what should I do now? I was in a band. That was fun. I was a bartender. That was alright. I was a reporter. That was okay."
"Judging by Facebook you should start a modeling agency." I'm not making this up this is exactly how she talks as though she were this empirical voice that only speaks the truth in fully constructed sentences. She's like Jeanie's mother in I Dream of Jeanie.
I walked her to her rental car and I won't at all be surprised if I never see or hear from her again.
Gabe pulls a set of van keys out of his pocket. It looks like we are going to survive this one, somehow.
Everyone fills the back with their discarded packs. Being apart from them for the first time all trip mixes everyone with a mix of anxiety and abandonment. I can’t wait to edit this novel and delete that sentence.
So I left Sweet Paradise at 3:30 on Wednesday night. Tuesday I quit my job and left doing the Nixon-Waves-from-the-Helicopter Wave (drunk). I'd had my last week at a job that I was at one really into (my post about my first day is titled "I Feel Fantastic Today"). I went from being a crew member in a maybe-gonna-work-out or maybe-just-a-passing-trend band and then I was left for dead in Los Angeles. I didn't know what to do so I went to Kentucky. I came home from Kentucky and I was on the Vespa, trolling around with my resume. I thought briefly I might work in a bookstore, and then I failed the matching quiz ("...Okay, Native Son that's the black guy...fuck they only have last names. I know it's not Joyce. Wright? or is that a trick?")
I walked into this place. The next day I went to train. Training was too hectic so they just hired me. I left my first night and made $415. I liked my new job.
But slowly it started to piss me off. The thing about the job I get is that you basically do the same thing every single day. Any time you screw up it's not like, Well, that's what he screwed up in the beginning. It's like, Screw that guy.
Eventually I'd had enough. I don't want to go into when that was because I don't give a shit. But there are sometimes in your adult life when you have the chance to let things go. And I love it when I really learn to let things go (but I never do).
I saved up to buy the Jet Blue pass for October and they wouldn't give me the days off I needed. So I quit! Wooo!!! Damn the man!!!
And fuck me.
So we left Sweet Paradise and had a delicious two hours of sleep and then went straight to JFK. Andrea gave me a Xanax to take on the plane, which was ridiculous because I don't really do drugs and air travel doesn't bother me in the slightest. I lost an engine over the Atlantic once on a discount flight to an airline that doesn't exist anymore and I definitely did not think, "Jeez, I really wish I felt kinda sleepy and more open-minded right now."
So I just fell asleep, curled up in my leather jacket with the air conditioning on way too high. I felt fine. It reminded me of being on tour.
Day 01.
We landed soon and I stumbled (twenty drinks, Xanax, SPW, giant Budlights) into a volcanic island about a thousand miles off the coast of North Carolina. I was so unbelievably tired.
We got picked up from the airport by Candice, who is the glorious and patient new webmaster of mydjwebsite'srealURL.com. She took us to her adorable cottage, which was the ideal apartment that does not exist in New York. I was exeedingly jealous of her home office. She noticed that I forgot sunglasses and so she lent me a sharp pair of Ray Bans. These were fantastic because I in pieces and hadn't slept well since the Bush Administration.
We all went out to lunch and I kept the sunglasses on so as not to look like I was too sleepy and open-minded.
I then crashed into the most glorious nap inside of her Bermuda ranch with the white-bleached roof that everyone in Bermuda has to collect rainwater for their plumbing. She pulled down the blue shutters and I felt peace for the first time since the Bush Administration.
We woke up and went to her boyfriend's house. This was exciting to me because Mike live in his family's pool house. He had done all the work inside and we got along immediately and permanently (fine, yes, I miss him) and talked about Dude things. Mike cooked us this amazing fish pasta thing with fish he had caught from his boat. We drank wine and told stories and all around us there were tree frogs singing my new favorite song.
Day 02.
In the morning we caught a ride into the town of Hamilton, which is the kind of town where everyone refers to as "in town." Andrea and I were in this to win it and we went to the grocery store and I made sandwiches with hummus and Bermuda cucumbers and packed tuna with lemon pepper and other delights.
We had gone to the grocery store and any time you leave New York and things are more expensive you start to furrow your brow. At first it's like something's wrong. Wrong with the people you know there. "You guys get it that these things that cost $5 are just cucumbers, right? They grow in the ground."
In Hamilton I took a walk around, which is my favorite thing to do in a new place. Bermuda has (to the gun-slingin' American mind) an excessive amount of laws. They have to get their cars checked every year for rust and then either dispatch with the rust or the cars. They also have those funny British toaster-oven cars. One of these laws in Bermuda is a law that limits foreign ownership. Here is a very wealthy island where most people work in finance or insurance and all the landscapers have blackberries. And they don't have a Starbucks. Somehow (and this confounds the locals) they have one KFC "in town."
The town was gorgeous and independent in spirit. They still had just as many corporate looking buildings. It was in many ways the way that the vendor who runs the coffee shop in a large office building is technically and independent company. The closest thing I saw to a chain was they had the glorious British department store Marks & Spencer. Even the HSBC was known as the Bank of Bermuda.
I found my way to the bus depot (mastering another nation's public transit is one of the many stupid things I revel in doing abroad) and figured out how to get to the beach. There is a very simple bus system on the island that can take you almost anywhere you could possibly want to go. Here's my ignorant New Yorker way of explaining it: even if you lived way out in the boonies you could still walk to a bus as easily as someone who lives in the East Village can walk to the 6, or like someone on the East river in the 70s can fin the Subway. You can buy tickets for $2.50 for 3 zones or I think it was $4 for all 14 zones.
We took the #7 Bus to Elbow Beach.
One thing I never got used to, even when I was in school in England, is driving on the left side. I still brace for right hand turns and brace harder for willy-nilly left hand turns (which turn out not to be problematic). But getting off on the left side of the street is wonderful. If that bus stop goes to Hamilton it has a pink pole. Elsewhere: blue.
Bermuda coats itself in an extra layer of pink, to bring out the gorgeous pink that it has in the sand. The coral that dies on nearby reefs washes ashore and mixes with the local white volcanic ash, leaving your with gorgeous pink sand to play with. It's marvelous.
Also, Bermuda is one of those places like Canada that was technically a colony, but also technically uncontested. The only people who lived on the island were survivors of a shipwreck in 1609. Those survivors were obviously going to Bermuda anywhere to start planning the 400th anniversary of waiting for us to come to Bermuda--which began today!
It's one of my dumb, ignorant, Irish-American things that makes me go to a new land and say, "So when did you get rid of the British, huh? Oh...sorry..." The Queen of England is on their dollar bill. Their dollar bill is worth whatever an American dollar is worth.
Another one of my dumb American thing is I've only been to a few islands and both Cuba (the most anti- US nation ever) and Puerto Rico (a territory) do this in some way. I keep expecting more of these places to have more in common with each other than they do with us, but that's just stupid.
So we hop off the bus at Elbow Beach and worm our way through the forest to a gorgeous hotel. Because of my satanic writing schedule and Andrea pretending to be at her job all week: I'm carrying a bag with two laptops. The hotel is somehow related to the Mandarin Oriental, which means they are awesome to you at the front desk and dicks about every single thing else.
The guy checked my laptop bag no problem but then as soon as we got down to the beach we were hassled and shunned away to the non-private part of the beach. Whatever. I had dealt with enough difficulties in leaving my job and heading down here. I just wanted to lay on a town and eat my sandwiches and read A Farewell to Arms for the first time.
I played in the water and Ben had given me his underwater camera for the week in exchange for lending him the Kaosillator he had given me as a Best Man gift.
Underwater photography is so much more fun.
So then Andrea fell asleep and I rolled around in the sand. The water in Bermuda is wonderful and warm. It was a beautiful day and I loved every minute of it.
We took a walk, but Andrea wanted to get out of the sun. I went to a private beach club and schmoozed with a bartender who was very nice. He told me if I wanted a drink at the normal level he would just say I "forgot" my membership card but that he "remembered" me. Wherever I go I meet bartenders who are awesome. But he didn't have any umbrella tables so it would've been like staying on the beach only buying expensive drinks.
We went back to the bar at the hotel where they were total dicks. This time they didn't care whether we were staying the hotel or what.
We went back home to Candice's and everyone wanted to talk about dinner, where to go, etc. Candice was tired from work, Andrea was wicked sunburnt and I was trying to practice making mature financial decisions. I started making eggs for everyone out of the supplies we had. I also had just about lost my shit in the super market when I realized they have all the terrible British foods that I loved in college. (Heinz Baked Beans--for breakfast!) Everyone there was very lucky that I did not purchase a can of Spotted Dick for lunch.
And just then Andrea made a comment to her friends that we were eating like bachelors that night.
I didn't want our hosts to be fed bachelor chow so I regrouped for a second.
I rummaged around the kitchen and made a fritatta for the whole crew.
8 Eggs
a Tsp of butter
mashed up slices of cheese that we meant for the beach.
chopped mushrooms
sour cream
The sour cream was me taking a chance because I remember that once at a fancy restaurant where I had bartended they had a dish where the secret ingredient was creme fraiche, which was explained to me as being "like sour cream." I didn't want it to burn so I put it in a pastry dish and cooked it on the stove for a minute like you would an egg, then I put it in the preheated oven. After it started to rise I switched the over to broil.
I don't really cook ever in New York, so this was fun for me.
On my parents' dining room table is a tile that says "Being Irish he had an impending sense of tragedy that sustained him through temporary periods of joy. W. B. Yeats."
I have the inverse.
Sometimes I'm sad and upset about something (or nothing) and I look forward to being glad to be done with it later.
Othertimes I remember that my best writing days ever have always come on mornings when I could not possibly fathom saying anything interesting. Someday I'm so depressed at writing-time that I can't even bother to write something.
But then it comes out.
I describe someone in a way that tickles (me, and only) me. And that's good enough.
Every time I think about my ex girlfriend: my fingers start to sweat. This is really only helpful if I'm reading a book with very dry pages or trying to count a lot of money.
