Adventures in living with a girl you're not dating.

Has anyone seen the saran wrap and the scotch tape?  Oh, here it is.  In the bathroom.

You know that scene in  Adaptation where Nic Cage is on the floor of a party with Amelia and it's a hollywood glitz thing and everyone he's supposed to talk to is there?  And he goes, "Why do we come to these things?"  That's usually me.

Last night I had a perfectly decent night at home.  Emily and I met up to see the utterly amazing Tolstoy movie The Last Station at BAM and then went across the street to my house because I had made pistachio pecorino pesto and cashew-ricotta lazagna.  We had a bottle of Sancerre Rose and talked about life and shit.  I walked her home to her house at a decent hour and on my way home I heard the call of the wild.

Emily lives across from the only Chase bank in the goddam neighborhood and halfway between our houses is Freddy's, which is the greatest bar on the planet.  So I turn around and walk back to the Chase, but when I get to the door I think to myself, What are you doing?  How many more nights of your life are you going to spend alone in these shithole bars of yours?  That's $20 you're going to spend just for the privilege of standing there?  Will that make you go home and read something brilliant?  Will it shoot you out of bed in the morning, ready to write?  Save the $20 and you're halfway to a bottle of decent whiskey.

I stood at the door to the bank.  And then I walked home.

About an hour later I'm in a cab on the West Side Highway on my way to Juliet.  A dude I used to bartend with is having his birthday party there.  The cab alone costs me $18.  There's a hassle to get in the door but right when I pull up I realize that a group of eight people have just walked over from the subway.

Who are you here to see?  Who?  And you?  Everybody's here for this dude's birthday?

"I'm not with them," I say.  "I'm alone."

"I'll take the girl and the guy."  That's me.  Later kids.

I walk in and I don't have money for coat check.  In addition to being dicks about the door they're also not letting you in the door with your coat on.  I hate night clubs.  Coatcheck girl says not to worry about it.

Juliet's actually a nice looking spot.  I would spin there.  The ceiling pulses with LED lights and there are no barstools or chairs, just those big, LA-style round-booths.  I really hate it when I go someplace, even my beloved Beauty Bar and you can't get through to the back because some loaf is sitting on a barstool in the middle of the room acting like people are bumping into him.


I can't find the party, although it is fun to walk around.  I've pretty much not taken off my sunglasses since I got back from Puerto Rico, so I'm walking around the room in a tuxedo shirt, red paisley bow-tie and a vest with white Raybans on.  The fun part about wearing sunglasses at night is it's all the good parts of having big tits.  People look at them, look at you, wonder--aloud--who you are.  Also, black dudes love you.

Fiore's supposed to have a table somewhere, which is bullshit anyway.  He manages Greenhouse and probably got a comped bottle of Belvedere Silver.  I don't drink vodka.  Actually I straight-up hate it and when I do I feel like it won't rinse out of my saliva ducts the next day.

I go to the bar, thinking I'll get a drink and say hello and maybe just take the subway home.  "It's a $50 minimum on credit cards."

And for some reason I was like, No big deal.  And I threw down.

Eventually I find the crew and I realize that the only person I know is the birthday boy.  That can be kind of annoying.  Here we are now, entertain us.  I thought I'd see a bunch of people I used to work with.  At the table they have a bottle of Belvedere Intense (I was wrong about the model, but not the make).

I go back to the bar for another corona and ask the bartender how much a neat Milagro Anejo is.  It's $40.  Fuck that.  I ask for a Herradura neat and she basically cuts the top off the bottle and hands it to me.  So I have a quart of tequilla and a bottle in the other hand.  Once the tequilla evaporates a bunch of the skanks I used to work with show up.  One of them, this precious little Puerto Rican princess who still lives with her mom, hollers out "White Gold!!" which was my rap-name at work.

We're talking and in about a minute I realize that she is kinda wasted.  "I heard you don't bartend any more?"

"Nope.  Retired"

I walk through the booth and sit on the top part like I'm in the back seat of a convertible in some 60's beach movie.  Then I hear "Go for Charlie?"  Charlie was the manager who hired me at that club.  I walked in the door on the right day where they needed someone fast and I had books in my bike and had to carry my helmet in with me.  I have never had a chance to regret wearing a leather jacket in public.  Charlie got fired on his birthday that summer because the owner came in and discovered that he had set up the back room with Cafe Patron and a birthday cake and we were going to party all night.  Sucks getting fired when you're drunk.

"Go go!" (We all worked in this massive club where you had to talk on the radio to get anything and use radio-lingo).  The DJ finally starts playing actual music and not just the sound track to some club that's a hassle to get into.

Princess walks over to me in the booth and straddles my knee.  This would be fun, except I hate waitresses.  I especially hate them because they're like those girls in high school who couldn't be bothered to talk to me then and are now all over my nuts on facebook.  Actually this girl is literally all over my nuts.  She's wearing a dress, but she wears it like an old lady would.  She has on these body-redefining tights, a padded strapless bra and a other constructive garments.  I think it's wicked gross when skinny young girls dress like this.

I look over and Sidney has her Patron eyes on.  Sid used to get this way at work when we'd drink too much and she'd get all squinty and smiley and then she's fuck whatever bouncer worked at the after hours bar.  Only this time Sid's looking at me.  Now I hate both of these girls because they fucked all the other guy bartenders.

Although it is that magical time of year where you see a woman's bare legs for the first time in months and you have this reaction like, "What was that?"  In a few minutes I'm dancing with Sidney.  Geno, my old manager, gives me this great look.  He wants me to start DJ'ing at this new place.  "I really like your music," he says."

"Thanks."

"It's a good thing you can DJ.  Because you were a terrible bartender."

"I know!"  Actually, I'm a wicked good bartender but there are limits to how much you can give a shit.

"You don't know how many times Greenburg wanted to fire you and we had to play your youtube videos and say that we just couldn't fire you."

"Ha."

"No.  I'm serious."

Somebody absconded with the birthday boy but Charlie has his Cadillac parked out front.  Somehow in the club I started talking to this girl he was with and I said something Emily Post-y and she flipped on me.  "You are the man I am going to marry."

What?

Now she's in the front of Charlie's Cadillac and won't shut the fuck up. (Oh, and gratuity was included so I blew $60 at the goddam club on four beers and a birdbath of tequilla).  At Greenhouse Charlie knows one of the bartenders.  She gets him a beer and I was like, "Can you hook me up with one?"

About twice this week I've had to straight-up ask people to get me drinks and not once have they been cool about it.  Or as cool as I'd be.  When people ask me for drinks I act like I was being rude by not offering.

"Probably not."

"How do you know her?"

"She was one of my bartenders at Webster Hall."

So I turn to the bartender, all incredulous and go "Didn't you used to work at Webster Hall?"

"Ohmygod I did!  Good memory.  That was, god, that was 4 years ago."

"No I remember.  What's your name?"

Me and my free beer go downstairs.  I'm still cash-less so the whole night I had to borrow a dollar to tip the coatcheck girl, and didn't wash my hands in the bathrooms because I felt bad for stiffing the attendants.  I had her start me a tab for another birdbath of Tequilla.

Once the place closes we all crowd around the downstairs bar while they kick everyone else out.  By now I'm actually meeting nice people and we're talking about art and shit like that.  I don't know a single person in the place, other than the birthday boy, but every few minutes they light sparklers, do a round of shots and open a bottle of Perrier Jouet Rose Champagne.  I like drinking.

So my night of not-going out ended on the Subway this morning at a normal commuting time.

Last weekend I had to borrow a tertiary laptop because the brunch a-hole stole Theo's power cord.  Luckily one of the bartenders lent me his.  So on my way to the Lit Anniversary Party tonight I had to bring the double-borrowed laptop to Soho.  Conveniently I got marooned on the bridge before my train go sent back to Brooklyn.  When it arrived back at Dekalb (another train tripped its emergency brake) another D train waited in the station... and then left as soon as we arrived.  I do not feel bad about filing my claim for personal injury.


Lit is the bar between Beauty Bar and the LES where Conrad and I met for the first time.  Jackie introduced us as two writer who should, like, totally meet!  It took about 30 seconds of what Conrad called "butt sniffing" before we delineated the two hemispheres of writing.  Conrad owned poetry, I would deal with fiction.  We may overlap in the ven diagram between.


When I finally get in there the cab I'm in says my credit card is declined.  Not to be a dick about it but I am so fucking rich now that that cannot happen.  On Saturday night I DJ'd a private party straight-cash and deposited the entire amount.  I showed my cab driver my bank balance on my phone (after a failed trip to the ATM) and he decided that the number in front of him proved I was a decent human being.


I like Lit, but I pretty much never go there. 


Last week I went to Beauty Bar to return Mike's laptop cable and he wanted me to go to Lit.  I like Mike and we had just worked together at a wicked fun party on the three-day Sunday of Valentine's day at Happy Ending.  So I went to Lit.  And, of all people, I ran into Nikki there.


The thing about this is: I can't really say anything sympathetic toward myself here.  If I ran into Nikki at my own funeral I'd be like, "WHHY???"  You know?  "LEAVE ME ALONE, YOU BITCH!!  I MISS YOUR SMELL."


Only we had talked that week.  I needed some background on a story I did for a life-long-writing-goal of a magazine.  So I did the mature thing.


Mike walks in and he recognizes a DJ we both know, "Hey there's F--"


"HolyshitisthatNikki?"  I hide behind Mike.


"Oh wow.  That is her," Mike stares.  "She looks goooooood."


Mike asks if I want to go downstairs and I probably leaped the flight of stairs.  A few hours later I'm ready to go and I think the coast is clear.  The bar closed a long time ago and I'm in the basement talking to friends and gogo dancers that I've known or worked with for a long time.  These nights can be fun.  George Carlin once said of "The Aristocrats Joke" that it's like "We're different, we're in here, the headmaster went home, we've got the dormitory to ourselves, now let's get real."  That's what it can be like at a certain time.


On my way upstairs, much later, the bouncer stops me.  I try not to pull rank ever so I just say I was going to say goodbye to someone.  The bar is empty.  Nikki is there.


Hey, I just want to thank you for helping me with my story.  It's always good to see you.


"I don't feel like I helped you at all."


Well you did.  So thanks for talking to me the other day.  Really appreciate it.


"I literally didn't help you at all.   I didn't even known the answers for your questions."


Every journalist needs someone to call for deep background.  Someone you can call and say, Hey, I don't even know which end the egg comes out of the chicken--little help over here?


"I guess."


But it's good to see you.  After all I must have Jet-lag to be this important, international man of letters who would deign spend any time in a place like this.  But thank you. I really have to go.


"Goodnight."


That's when I walked away and realized what the bouncers had stopped me for last time.  They didn't care that I went upstairs.  They had shuttered the front exit and wanted me to go out the back door.


Instead I--Mr. Imporant--excused myself to walk over and shake the front door against the iron shutters.  Fucking hell.  I turned around and had to walk past her to the door.


All this just for a fucking power cord.


So tonight I bring the borrowed laptop back.  I got into Lit and my nemesis greets me at the top of the stairs.  "Wet out there?" he says with a hand on my dewy leather jacket.  Part of the magic of this not being his party or my party was that we were honestly glad to see each other.


I go downstairs looking for Katie.  Caroline is drunk.  Being at a big filthy party is no fun this sober.  Caroline already wants to go out for a smoke.  I say I want a drink first.  "Have mine," she hands me a glass with some liquid and pieces of a lime.  She tells me it's white wine, but I can't hear her or believe her.  When we're outside I ask her if she can buy me a drink because my bank account has ED.


We go back to the girls and she pulls out a water bottle and pours it back into her glass.  "I have really good white wine."  You want some?  


I look around and I see some faces.  There's Alex, the girl I hate who pretends that we've never met.  There's a few miscellaneous make outs here and in back.  When I first started going out I felt both invisible and conspicuous.  What's he doing here?  But now, standing above the kids with my hair and my cowboyboots propping me up, I don't feel like that any more.  At all.  I kept catching eyes.


Caroline agrees to get me a beer.  We walk over to the bar and I see Fancy, which means that Nikki may be around.  Caroline is holding my hand as we wade through the unmanageable crowd of people.  I run into Igor on the way there and we're both, like, This fucking place.  Even though we both are here of our own free will.  "I think if there were an epic blaze right here right now it would be a generation-defining fire."


"Like the Lit lounge fire with a whole generation of party kids would be the Great White of our days?"


"The Post headline writes itself."  I'm holding tiny Caroline's hand and she's telling me about how she didn't get the part on Gossip Girl because she accidentally insulted Josh Schwartz, but how she is filming a thing for 30 Rock next week.  And then I do something kind of dickish for a person who's drunk, lost, and buying me a beer--I toss her hand away. "Fuck is that Nikki?"


Nikki has this really annoying habit of always looking better everytime I see her.  One of the greatest things about being a guy is that all your girlfriends break up with you for being immature and then the next time you see each other--you are mature.  Little by little.  And better looking.  Girls break up with this babyfaced goober with student loans and then they don't see you until you've developed the perfect shoulder muscles for carrying a child one-handed.  And they're just older.  In the face.


But Nikki's there in a black tank top, her new tattoo and her perfect skin.


I can't escape this little room.  Not only am I way taller than everyone else, but if I burst into flames right here I'd still have to run through coatcheck to get out the door and I don't think these kids would leave this place without their leather jackets.


So I do the most mature thing a sober person could do.  I turn around and just keep my anonymous back to her.  Mike is DJ'ing right then and I have good timing for once.  I look over at Caroline like it's too crowded at the bar, but I'll wait for her and we can go back to the otherside together.


Right then someone pushes through the crowd (there is no passageway, just the crowd) and the cold wet back of my rainy leather jacket presses against Nikki's bare back.  Way to play it cool, Sullivan.  I actually can't think of a worse thing.  Actually, I'm going to write that down as the worst feeling you can have on a winter night at a party.


I keep looking straight ahead but I know she's seen me.  I turn around the other way (the way that makes the least sense, which makes me look like a cartoon drunk) and find Caroline.  She's just standing there at the crowded-as-hell bar, looking at me like she forgot what we were doing there.  Jesus Christ.


I grab her and we go back to the otherside of the room where the bands play.  I take my jacket off since I'm apparently walking through the room wearing the equivalent of used-Kleenex.


And who (I'm not making this up) is sitting next to me?  Ron Jeremy.  There in the seedy basement of Lit with all the off-duty party kids where everyone is surrounded by all the people they've hooked up with at Lit (I went to the ATM next door and found one of my own right away) and we're all feeling kind of gross.  Our collective psyche looked like Ron Jeremy right then, fat, unshaven, slightly bored.


Katie leaves to go upstairs and I go with, but somehow lose her.  When I get to the bar I see this strange blonde Navajo creature waving at me.  It's Misty.  She looks great too.  It's actually awesome to see her and not just because she looks like half a million dollars.


There is a certain kind of person who has been in your life long enough, but at a distance, that you can always enjoy running into them.  Misty is actually the reason I got fired from The Modern.  Instead of doing 3 minutes of sidework, I waited upstairs for her to come in and parade her around to the bartending dweebs.  I lost my health insurance for this girl.


I've had a good week.  I'm writing for every single magazine I've ever wanted to.  I have meetings!  Mist is partnering up with a plastic surgeon and some other high-end types to start their own face-boutique (by profession, Mist is in charge of Manhattan's wealthiest eyebrows).


And then we get around to it.  "Still dating the same guy?"


"Yes."


"The video game guy?  Out on the Q in Brooklyn?"


"No, that's my ex.  But, yeah, I still live with him."  Misty is unbelievable.  "What?  I'm still friends with all my exes.  It doesn't bother me."


"I know," I nod.


"Are you my ex?  No.  You weren't."


"But we dated."


"But you were never my boyfriend."


That's true.  Misty was the second girl I met at Pianos when I was going through a very mature and responsible phase.  Perhaps I should leave this next part out, but the first girl was Leigh.  "True."


"But you could have been," she says in a really adorable way.


"Oh?" that's funny.  I remember going home with Misty after meeting her at maybe 1 or 2 in the morning day-of.  Halfway through the night she got a call from a friend who was in a cab on the Manhattan bridge and she had her pick her up at my house.  I figured that would be it and then she tracked me down on Myspace.  I didn't really want anything to do with her, but then I heard her sing this one great song.  I'm lame like that.  Then we sort of kept up with each other.


"You were too obsessed with your exes.  I couldn't deal with it."


"When you met me I had been someone's boyfriend since the nineties.  I'm over that now.  I was just very young and I didn't know how to act or where I was in life.  It happens.  But I had a great time with you and we get along."


"It's always good to see you," she smiles.  Misty has two friends flanking her, trying to talk through us to each other.  I'm feeling grown up and problem-solvy (this being more of a reunion than an anniversary) so I grab one girl and tell her to switch places with me so I can talk to Misty.  "If you ever need someone to read your writing you should send it to me."


"We should, fuckkkkk--"


Her perfect eyebrows knit together, "What?"


"Fuck there she is."  By moving positions in the room I ended up catching Fancy out of the corner of my eye and I realize that Nikki is next to him.  They're both looking my way.  I feel that obnxious need to pretend someone around me just said the funniest thing on the planet.  But really I just want to run.


I addressed this in my top secret novel The Heiress, and I guess this is as good a time as any to sample it.  The main character has to write about a band so he goes out with them and immediately runs into his ex girlfriend.

“I have to go,” I tell Candy.  “I’m going to be sick.”

“No you’re not.”

“Yes.”

“What about the story?”

“I’ll Google them.  I have the set list.”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know.  In the bathroom or something.”

The band comes up the stairs.  Each of them has an extra entourage of fans, friends and girlfriends.  I can sense some overlap.  No one will notice if I slip out.  Tomorrow they will start their day without me just like they did today.  No one will care.

“Liam’s trying to leave,” Candy says to the singer.

His/her jaw drops, “Noooo, honey where are you going?  We didn’t even get to have our interview.”

“His ex girlfriend is here and he’s trying to run away,” Candy says.  I can’t believe this.  I met her yesterday and she’s already my first frenemy.

“Which bitch is this one?” s/he asks.

“Red head, over there,” Candy turns and points to her.  

“You know what we’re going to have to do?” s/he smiles.

“Laugh-a-thon?”

“Precise.”

“What’s Laugh-a-thon?” I ask.

“Haha!” they both giggle and look over my shoulder.

“Hooohoo! Oh you are too much, sweetheart.  Come have a seat,” he laughs and brings me over to a table with a u-shaped couch.  When we sit a waitress brings over a bottle of vodka, a silver bucket of ice and a bunch of juices in those glass beakers you see in science class.

Candy lays an arm on the couch behind me, “Laugh-a-thon is where every time she looks over at us—”  She slaps! her hand on my knee, “We grab your leg like you just said the funniest thing!”

“HAHA!” s/he hoots along.

I look up.  Like servants of the king, the entourage smiles along when they see the band is happy.

The drummer, whose name turns out to be Dan, looks over, smiling “What’s so damn funny?”

Candy whispers something to him.

“The redhead?” Dan asks.  Candy nods her head.

The waitress comes over, “Can I get you anything else?”

“I want three things,” s/he shouts.  “Water, Whiskey and Women!!”

This gets a huge response from the crew.  Some of the girls cheer.

“And show me some titties!” Justin shouts.  “I need inspiration for my operation and these guys just wanna see ‘em!”

The girls oblige.  I have seen more breasts in the last thirty-six hours than I have in twice that many years.

I hadn’t talked to the drummer before, but when Justin gets up he says.  “So what’s your name?”

“Uh, it’s Liam.”

“Ha-HA!!” he grabs my leg, “This guy!!”

Only earlier in this day I had come up with something pretty annoying.  Whatever I had with this girl doesn't exist anymore.  In her world I'm just some guy she dated for six or so months.  She's been married before, the guy she left me for and he dated for two years.


I was actually writing about this the other day for another project.

2007

...In the morning I got a Moby Dick tattoo on my arm based on the following line. 

If I linger a bit too long on my time with the goddess, so what?  For a goddess to love a mortal is to accept the consequences.  She loved me for exactly who I was as a bartender catering an event and dreaming of one day maybe taking a plane to Iowa and giving a reading to eleven creative writing students.  By virtue of having that dream I couldn’t stay so innocent forever.  But the goddess would stay just as she always looked.  She never aged, although she swore she had five years on me, she never changed habits or desires.  She loved me and one day I woke up and found myself one step closer to being the person I wanted to be.  And she didn’t love him.

Like those vampire TV shows she loved so dearly, I needed to find immortality if I wanted to be with her forever.

Ron Jeremy's downstairs, vaguely annoyed at the people.  Igor, who's met him a thousand times, gives him a promo card for free porn time (for Ron Jeremy's own company--and he still doesn't know what the card is for or from).  All the guys want a picture with Ron Jeremy and all the girls think Ron Jeremy is the only thing grosser than the basement of Lit.


And yet everyone else feels kind of disgusted with themselves for being here.  Every conversation I sampled involve at least on in-house run-in with someone.  And I just realized I'm just one of those to Nikki and when I duck away from her it's not because I don't want to talk to her, it's because I don't want to have her see me and think about me that way.


It's probably weird for her that I bother to call any more or that I feel entitled to a hello or a lunch once a year.


I know little more about her, nor does anyone else, he says.  Let her go. 


Only that doesn't work.

Not to do two secret-projects in a row but I am writing another personal narrative (novel-length manuscript number 6 BITCHES!!) and it's actually very difficult.  Because I am the main character and the author is not, as we would say at Kenyon, sympathetic to the protagonist.

This fucking guy thinks he's so great.  But them sometimes people, mostly girls, come around and maybe alert him to the fact that he's really not that great.  He loves this because that's how he's felt his whole life.

Total loser can't keep a job.  I'm trying to remember some of the better stories that need to go into this, but frankly you just feel so embarrassed for him that you wouldn't want to remember it anyway.  It's like watching your uncle tell an off-color joke at Easter.  You just hope your phone rings and you can excuse yourself.

Texts, drugs, & rocknroll!

Something I think about is what my high school science teacher taught me about how karate dudes break boards. You don't imagine hitting a target, you imagine you on the other side if it.

Of course, I know from ALF that "There's only pain if you don't break the board."

That's how I feel about my millions of writing projects. I see through them but when I don't get to the other side it really hurts.

Does my age, lack of career trajectory, midnight-updates just say to facebook, "This manchild probably has one of these."

Because I don't remember telling them I have a Vespa.

In college I had a roommate from Texas who worked very hard on his degree.  But one day I hadn't seen him in a while and I was like, "Working hard?"

Adventures in Having Me as a Client


So a couple of people have been sitting on a manuscript of mine this week.  It's very exciting!  It's like that wonderful moment between the first time a girl laughs at one of your jokes and whatever happens next.

These are people I've met and we agree that we want to work together and now we have work to do.  Yay!

This one agent said she was reading it and I (since I'm so fucking professional and shit) posted on her facebook:

Careful walking around with my MS on your Kindle.  It's not the Giulliani years anymore but you might get busted for possession with intent to sell!

She emailed me on my way to Soho House that day and said,

I love your wall post but had to delete it. Sorry! I make a point of not talking about submissions in public particularly when I'm reading friends' material.  I haven't cracked it yet, but I promise it's coming up really fast.

love ya,

me

And I wrote her back saying, y'know, no biggety.  I'm working on so many projects right now (memoir, novel, and also I'm starting a knitting business with Homeless Jackie) that I haven't even titled this MS.

But then I started in on the memoir and I came to a place I didn't want to be anymore.  I needed to recall the details of some very difficult things in my life.  But I didn't want to.  Aimlessly searching for distraction (facebook failed me) I found myself on my phone.  I got up to go to the bathroom and I accidentally bumped the wrong thing on the screen and sent this instead:

No problem. I thought you would enjoy the wordplay. Also, forgive me if I've misread your syntax and ignore the following message if that is the case. Okay?

WE ARE NOT FRIENDS. 

Hope you have a great snow-day. I'm having dinner with Emily (you recall our last business-meeting when I mentioned the adorable li'l bug from college?) Today I watched the snow fall from Soho House and worked on the memoir, which I think you will really enjoy. 

Your all-time favorite,

About two days go by and I got an email from another agent say she wants to meet with me.  I hadn't heard a word from my "not-friend" and it occurred to me that I had done something kinda dickish.  That was straight up mean.  A very nice member of the bar association--who has written legal documents for me as a favor--is reading my shit and I waste her time being an ass?

I emailed her back

Ssssssooo, I'm sure you are busy being a brilliant member of the bar association and proving why they call you "the chosen people" but I just wanted to drop you a line and say "Hi! Hope you know I was kidding about last week's email."

I read it over and without me telling it in person it sounds like I was trying to be mean.  But I love you.

Friends?

:)

-B

I really had that freak out where I was like, "Holy shit.  It took five years to get agents to write me back.  Am I going to have to start all over?  Fuuuuuuuck.  I'M TOO OLD TO WAIT TABLES."

She emails me in about five seconds

Wait, you know what the funniest part is? I never got it. Seriously. I would have understood that you were joking but never received it. Bizarre.

Actually, still busy with the stomach flu. Am MIZ.  Yes, friends.

I love this girl.

Things people didn't used to say to me when I'd write book review for them.


I heard someone needed a book review so I emailed the editor, who'd never heard of me.

Editor writes back, "It needs to be very readable for this audience.  Can you send me some clips before I give you the assignment?"

I send him one.

His reply:

Dear Conrad,


Does this offer still stand in its original form?

Today I was on facebook, going through old photos and updating my life and then I got this message (copied here for you assessment):Oops

Oops

Something went wrong. We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can. You may be able to try again.

I am not a success story by any measure, but one thing I've realized is that I'm never going to ask someone to tell me if I'm good enough.  I feel like even wavering on the memoir project is just me waiting for people to tell me how to be myself.  That doesn't work really well.

I'm just going to keep being Brendan Sullivan and not asking people if I'm doing it the right way.

After all, it's the only thing I'm good at.

When Lucy Elliot died in high school she was the first pretty girl who ever spoke to me on my first day in Junior High.

Literally, my first day of Junior High School the prettiest girl in school came up to the punk with long purple hair and said, "You must be Jay''s little brother.  Do you have someone to eat lunch with?"  The first time I ever had a name to drop was when the girls from my church-group asked how Junior High was going.  Did I have first lunch?

Yes, I said.  I have first-lunch and I am slated to sit with Lucy--who was known among the girls on the back of the bus as the only woman in the world who had ever given a blow job to a man in Connecticut.  Lucy Elliot would always look out for me and I loved her as my inverse.  I was a loser that no one cared about; she a winner that everyone wanted to love.

My sophomore year she died in a car accident.  I hitched a ride with her guidance counselor to visit the driver in the hospital.  She was the survivor of an awful, unnecessary accident on a dark road with a couple of prep school boys from Avon Old Farms.  I remember feeling like I was not cool enough to visit this girl, but then I saw her in the hospital where my Dad worked.  She wore the degrading hospital gown and I could see from the flower and cards that the only people who came to visit her thusfar were teachers and her parents' friends.  Killing the most notorious girl in school wasn't cool.  And dropping by her killer and telling her that we were glad she still existed was even less cool.

I went to Lucy's funeral at The Barn, which was a church run by a guy named Brad who my dad worked with as a consultant for Arthur Anderson in the 80s.  Brad was a pastor that I looked up to in Junior High.  His head-pastor's daughter was the first girl I ever dated.  She broke up with me--our relationship was based on a dare--and that hurt just as much as any relationship would ever hurt again.

Lucy's funeral happened too early.  I went to the overcrowded barn where her last rites were held in my best clothes, which included the suit the Navy gave me for being a Sea Cadet in the Clinton years.  I wish that I had other thoughts in my head.  I already wish that I were a better person than I was at 14 when I came to the internment of the first girl that ever spoke to me with regard.

But I remember looking around that packed funeral service and thinking, I wish there were three hundred people gathered in a church and talking about how great I once was.

The reason that I do not write short-stories is that I do not feel that I ever need to ask permission from a small band of believers to accept me as a person who had just said something out loud.

My scant publications do not speak for any body of work than anyone might be sitting on.

Fuck any ex-English major who runs a journal.

You know whom you are.

Chapter 26

If you see me on Facebook, just pretend that we're at a party and smile and nod at whatever I post. If you see me at Freddy's tonight: ask me who hung up on me today.

Gold teeth and a curse for this town were all in my mouth.