My favorite part about DJ'ing is the connections you can create in people's minds. The other day we had a little dance party in the Chicago apartment we stayed in. It wasn't my iPod, which made it more fun. Two married couples, me and Nikki. Everyone starts dancing with everyone. Great time. I throw on--if memory serves--Ace of Base and the two couples go on about how it reminds them of freshman year in college. I say it reminds me of fifth grade.
Everyone stares at me and then Nikki tells them how old I am. "What's it like dating a 24 year old?"
"Everyone always asks that," Nikki says. "I don't ever notice."
Next day, same married couples, all waiting for a limosine to come take us to see Justin Timberlake. The couple we stayed with entrust me with the tickets and with them ar the receipts. We have front row VIP seats in this roped-off area with its own bar and close enough for your cameraphone. Then I find the receipt. $1350 for the six tickets.
Nikki and I wear what we basically do everyday. The other couple admits that they felt a little foolish walking to the car past their children's playpals in mini-denim skirts and hairspray.
Great show. Really. He is a fantastic pop performer. In the car on the way home the my host and I finish a bottle of Woodford Reserve Bourbon. Delicious shit. And for some reason I throw it from the side of the limo on the highway. Who knows why.
But it sounds so great to shatter glass like that. The limo has a crystal decanter in back filled with some kind of whiskey. The financial guys have me smell it to tell them what it is. It's Dewars. Disgusting, corn-tasting, cheap-ass Dewars. It would have been fine enough to put the decanter back, but I still had my window open.
And I don't know why--other than the love of the sound of shattering glass--but I tossed it out the window.
A few things that may have made this okay: 1. Had this been my own bottle of whiskey. 2. Had this been my limo. 3. Had we been on the highway--as I thought--and not in stopped traffic in a neighborhood... 4. ...in front of a cop car.
They didn't even pull us over. They just hit the lights and the driver got out. Chicago cop says--in that great accent that only Chicago cops seem to have--"Ahhh, sew you think you can leave New York City and come trash our town?"
The next morning we get a call from the limo company. There was another limo behind us that got two flat tires from broken glass in the street. They wrote down the giant phone number on the back of the limo and called the driver at home, screaming at him.
On the way to the airport home, Nikki says: "You know how people are always asking me what it's like dating a twenty-four year old?"
Back in Chicago! I made it! I've already been to Bongo room for brunch and The Hideout for a show! Whenever Ben or I go back to Chicago something vaguely magical or terrible happens. I can't wait to see which one I get!
1) When you have a completed draft you must put it away for six weeks.
2) When you put it away you may do whatever you want during your writing mornings. Ideally this should lead you to improve the draft you have or help you on your next draft. For example, this week I have spent time researching "sleeping it off" in the mornings and "acting like a 24 year old" so that when my characters get drunk they will have convincing mornings-after.
3) To keep youself from getting worried that you're actually just a twenty-four-year-old loser with a dead end job you may research your next novel, plan it out and begin the book shopping trip, which might just be the most fun part. Yesterday I went to the strand and bought all the books about Hawthorn and Melville that I could. My next novel will likely be about the six week writing vacation that Hawthorne had and Melville interrupted when they were neighbors.
4) Order take out I never get to do this and I love take out.
5) Travel without your laptop next week I'm going to Chicago and in my final week I'll be in North Dakota. If I could squeeze in a weekend in Kentucky I would be so happy.
6) Get a new job. Not writing frees up your time for pounding the pavement, training for free, and writing your next manifesto on the job application.
7) Cut your hair. At least once in six weeks.
8) Consider maybe, possibly throwing out your Christmas tree. At least by April.
9) Begin writing again promptly at the end of six weeks. Or you will wake up three weeks later on your 25th birthday and have some kind of life-crisis.
10) Mail out seven copies of the unchecked draft to seven different people who have different interests in literature. If you think you maybe want to read the draft, I insist that you give it back to me within one week (it's only 250 pages or so) with comments and analysis about what works and what needs clarity. I would just email it to everyone I know, but I can't stand when people send me their screenplays and movie treatments because I pretty much just open them and decide on the third page that they're terrible and never wonder about them again. Send me your address and I'll mail you one this week.
In the first pocket notebook I ever had I wrote this as maybe the third entry
There are two kinds of jobs in the world. The ones you have to shower for before and the ones you have to shower from after. If you find one that requires neither, stick with it.
My current job: Get there: Get up at 7:30 AM, shower. Leave the house at 8:30AM, stand on subway, emerge in midtown by 9:30 AM, cut four pounds of fruit, set up bar, clean glasses, open a thousand bottles of wine. Be real polite. Lots to do, that's why you have to train for six shifts. Break for half hour to herd into a cold room and eat college-like food on plastic plates while everyone calls their baby-mommas/mamis. Sometimes we sneak in a shot or a glass of champagne in a coffee mug. Leave somewhere around 5:00 PM, or maybe stay until midnight when I have to take down the whole bar and restock it for two hours.
My first night at my new sunday night gig Hang with roommate after work, make dinner, smoke, watch movie. Take my subway one stop. Get there: 9:00 P!M! Say hi, order something delicious off the menu and hang out for an hour. Bar is set up by barback, all fruit is cut. Shift starts at ten and they've already taught me the computer. Manager wants to speak with me. Manager wants to do a shot with me. Owner comes in. The owner wants to do a shot with the new guy. Nikki comes in. The five of us have to do a shot with Nikki, according to the manager. Managing partner comes in. Five bands comes in to play in the back room. Managing partner wants the new guy to go upstairs and sing kareoke in the middle of his shift. Managing partner says I should maybe do a shot with him first. Bartender training me choses "Milkshake Song." When I return, triumphant and securely brought all the boys to the yard, we do a shot. Everyone else is drunk and so I close down the bar in stages. At 4:05 AM we've counted the money, cleaned the place, done another shot together and walk out the front door, pulling down the gates. This is probably really boring to read if you're not a bartender, but exciting to me because sometimes I can't stand my other job.
After almost three years in New York I finally have the job I got on my first day in Chicago. And I still haven't showered.
My first DJ gig in New York City happened to become a regular thing on Sunday nights at Williamsburg's only club. The bartender liked that I played 60"s garage and I liked that I was DJ'ing in New York City. My first night DJ'ing in Chicago was also my last. That bar still owes me $40 and the worst part is that I came back six months after I abandoned the city and asked if they still had it. They didn't.
Embarassing.
Pete came to the first night and every night after that. He would begin his ninetofive week after getting on the fucken L train at 3:40 AM.
They used to pay me 10%, which is great because some places only give you on a percentage of the people you bring.
Anyway, every sunday night at 5am the bartender/manager/owner would give me $10 and since I was fucken wasted I would hand it right back to her.
The point is that I'm doing another Sunday night on the Lower East Side tonight and the bar is half full. It's for a friend's birthday and he's here--convinced that because at 9:15 only ten of his friends are here that he's a thirty year old loser now. Personally, I would be happy with the ten bucks.
(Thank you Juan for giving us Blind Melon's Change to listen to while we read this)
A long time ago I gave up on having New Year's Resolutions because I don't like disappointing myself. When I got to college I wanted to be somebody, when I graduated and moved to Chicago I wanted to be somebody else. This year was weird for me because I spent exactly six months of it struggling to be someone that somebody else what me to be and six months being exactly whom I wanted to be.
As a novelist I can make up an exact moment when this happened: one day Ben and I were at my DJ gig and a very nice girl came up and made a perfect song request. But I didn't have the record. I encouraged her to come back with another. She took a while. But then somewhere in the night she came back and made another request. Then another.
She came back the next week right on time and I decided right then that Jackie and I would be actual friends and maybe someday hang out in a place that wasn't a bar.
At the time Annie was working for a notorious poon-hound whose marriage was on the rocks. She was gone from friday to monday. Sometimes even going up thursdays and whooshing into my DJ gig on Tuesdays with her luggage and expect time from me right then. It's a painful but natural thing when people change. But expecting two people to change equally and willfully at the same is a disservice to both.
Jackie and I immediately merged our friends into one group. And these new friends never once asked me when we could move back to chicago or what the hell I was thinking about when I dressed myself like Jim Morrison, PhD that morning. They didn't hassle me about grad school or ask me just what the hell I'm going to do for a career when I finally write that new novel.
And you know what happened then? I started writing again. And I didn't--couldn't--stop. Free from the burden of pretending to be someone else, I could spend to rest of my time creating an honest character.
Annie eventually got fired by the insane poon-hound's crazy wife. Were this a year before I would have gone completely crazy, staying up at nights imagining that she had something to do with it, that maybe Jude Law wasn't the only one with a Mary Poppin's complex. But I didn't.
I spend all of my time creating stories where people who have never changed somehow find the will to do so on their own. That is what every single story in the entire world is about. The Annie that broke up with me in an accidentally hilarious way was not the same Annie I fell madly in love with and moved in with 3 weeks after meeting. It's sad that it had to end. But everything does.
A good friend of mine from high school moved in with me. He had just broken up with his girlfriend in Rome and was living with his parents, saving up to move to New York. Sometimes things happen in life that just feel so perfect at the time. I spent January-July living life like an Elvis Costello song, full of responsibility and honesty. I spent July-September living like an Elvis Presley song--full of emotion but somehow disingenuous, penned by someone else. Nick moved in October 1st and since then we have lived everyday like a Johnny Cash song--full of spirit, whiskey, honesty and trouble.
This has been the greatest year of my life and I wouldn't bother changing a minute of it, because I already have another year starting now.
House music once a-fucking-gain made my stupid jerk list.
We all know that there are various great exceptions and one amazing Chicago musician excused from the Buddy Holly-caust I so often feel like having for the genre. Is this some kind of joke?
If so that's hilarious. Does writing techno just give you license to let you write a mediocre dance track without any of the lyrical genius of the original track? Take out the music and the vocals and keep the name? Great. Is the point to change the time signature just enough so that no DJ can even use them together? Great. You should hear my new remix of The Rolling Stone's Satisfaction.
I'd like to say that I'm kidding about being mad. But I'm going to be 20 mins late for work just because I had to get that out.
Today I made a deal with myself that I could sleep in a little if I promised that writing would be the first thing I do all day. This slightly goes against the promise I made with myself earlier, when I set the alarm for 8:30. It goes even further against the deal I made with a friend to call me every morning at 7:30 when she wakes up so that I won't forget to write.
Years ago in Chicago I had this nice girl from Texas call me everymorning and tell me to get writing. What ever happened to her?
Long story short I got up at almost three in the afternoon and I have little more than an hour and a half before the sun sets, at which time I will be drinking and DJ'ing.
Right now Liam (main character) is stuck in the same Doctor's office that I put him in almost three weeks ago. The only way I think that I can wrap up this scene and get him to progress with the other characters is if Liam has a seizure right now. But Ben isn't picking up his phone and when we were in high school, Ben almost had a stroke at a blood drive.
That's what it's like being my friend. I'll remind you about all the terrible things that happened to you, and then I'll bother you at work for the details.
I walked into my old local in Chicago to take photobooth pictures. As I walked in some guy I've never seen before swore that we went to college together. He seemed legit. As I was in the photobooth some guy handed me the cigarette that I didn't even know I wanted. As I waited for the photos I smoked the cigarette and college guy decided not to leave and walked over with two beers. One for me.
This may have happened in a dream I would likely have, but when I woke up this morning I had photobooth pictures on my nightstand.
Maybe someday I'll grow up to be a big strong man who never gets chilly and always remembers a sweater. New York will not be hearty enough for me and I will force Annie to move back to Chicago in the dead of winter so that I can relate better to Herman Melville's stories as we come to port in the frosty winds of January. I'll also be such a big strong man that I can force Annie to move here. I love Chicago so much, but I love it more from April-October. And I'm too young to spend my summers in Florida.
This Weekend I am going to Chicago. If, for example, you are an ex-roommate of mine and I owe you a large amount of money, this would be the time to collect it. To make sure that we can work something out, why don't you just pick me up from the airport?
When I was sixteen I went to a weeklong program in Ohio for young writers. It was named after someone we were told was a very important writer, but who turned out to be the author of Kindergarten Cop. I flew in as a troublesome kid with a small ability to make jokes and tell stories whose ends referred directly back to the beginning.
It was the first time I went to an art museum, first time I read a poem that didn't rhyme, first time I took a photo that wasn't a portrait. It was where I first heard about how much depends upon a little red wheelbarrow, glistening with rain water beside the white chickens.
One of the professors in the program told me that she liked how I wrote / hated what I wrote, but that beneath everything I had to say was a strong undercurrent that she could only pin to the sing-song black humor of Irish writing, which she attributed to my last name. It is the reason that I didn't join the navy.
While I was there I met a girl who may as well have been Thai or Ethiopian, but in fact she was a cornfed-cowfed girl from a horse farm in Kentucky. Her voice, her diction, her expressions and her poetry were like nothing I ever heard. I couldn't believe it was considered English.
We kept in touch over the years and shared our writing. I was then too embarassed to show anyone what I had done, but she would call me long distance, laughing out loud at the things I had said. I came to see her on my way back from Graceland after I graduated high school. We spent twelve hours together on the farm in the cabin before my travel partner told me we had to get home for financial reasons.
I came back the next summer and she wasn't there. I came back the one after that and she still wasn't here. One time in college I called her at nine o'clock on a saturday night from a toyota full of six students on the Kentucky boarder. She called her sister and had us stay there. I met up with her family once at a horserace and took her sister out for wine in Italy just last year.
When I moved to Chicago I got a note from her cousin saying, "My cousin seems to think we should be friends. I can't imagine that I would ever be friends with someone my cousin would be longtime friends with. So I have to meet you." The cousin and I were inseparable until I met Annie.
We have missed eachother by mere days so many times over the years. And I have spent infinitely more hours with her sister and parents than with she. It had been too long. I booked a flight knowing full well that she was maybe one big horserace away from getting engaged to some banker. Her cousin told me all about him and his Italian loafers and his showtunes.
You get to a certain age and your friends start to become the husbands and wives of someone you don't know. And sometimes it takes alcohol and long walks and cigarette breaks while they better half is passed out to find your old friend again.
Even if I could see her for one day and chat I knew I could be at home in the cabin and get some great writing done (more on that to follow).
At one in the morning on the night before I had to get on my flight to Lexington I got a text from her. "My boyfriend just broke up with me. So you're stuck with me for the weekend."
According to the professor, my bleak, sustaining heritage of black humor is all that could support us at that moment. That moment where I couldn't have been happier to hear it.
As you may recall, two summers ago you gave yourself the motivation to publish more weblog posts by staging a contest. This was before any of us were smart enough to change the dates on posts. I lost horribly, but I did one day get to meet the actual winner when I ran out on our lease in Chicago and went to visit you at Bard.
It was a fun way to spend the summer as we watched our relationships fade away and tried, semi-unsuccessfully, to have a meaningful summer fling with the Slovakian waitress whose visa would run out before I could.
It would be a real joy to invite everyone who still has a blog, and even people like Adam who never fucking update theirs, to try and write one meaningful thought/story per day.
I can't remember whose idea it was to resurrect the Yo La Tengo Summer Weblog Contest, because your fucking comment system is broken again.
We, the undersigned, would love to see this happen.
Two years ago I packed up all the furniture that people through out at the end of college, boxed up my three hundred books and bought a futon for eleven dollars so that I could move to Chicago with Ben, Dave, Farsheed, and Drew.
Holy shit! My laptop battery just exploded in my crotch! The PAIN IS UNBEARABLE! AGHH! God, it hurts so bad! I knew I should have done the recall! The plastic battery pack exploded through the metal casing and the shrapnel is sticking into my legs, melting inside of me! Please! Someone IM 911!
Also, I'm about to send this new beginning (I call it the Hardy Boys beginning) and first ten pages to a new agent. Help! *Tell me if anything is unclear, misspelled, wrong or hard to believe/understand.* I want whoever reads this to come directly to my house with a burlap bag of money.
Idaho. We almost burned down the drive-in last night. Not like anyone cared. No one in Idaho had been there since a movie called “SOUL CR_SH” lit up the marquee years ago. It was a good enough campsite for the night, even if the screen stayed blank. First time this whole trip where we could find any firewood--all thanks to some asshole in a truck who came long before us and mowed down fifty speaker posts. Probably trying to spell his name in a cursive of tire ruts and fallen timber on the mossy gravel lot. The remaining few stood with mouths gaping where there should have been woofers blaring something about the hard life of a Soul Cr_sh.
I left Scott Hampshire back there to sleep. Actually, I left him there forever but he doesn’t know that yet. We’re supposed to be on our way to a summer job at his older sister’s camp in Oregon. But I’m so fed up with him by now that I can’t handle working with him all summer and then driving him back home to Connecticut. My Dad and brother are going to be mad when they find out I didn’t show up for the job. These two think about work the way Mom used to think about church. Before she left us we went every Sunday morning and Wednesday night. Don’t get me started. Christian Science church services are about as much fun as nursing home parties, only there’s no break to take your medicines. Lonely old people go on and on about their intestines and lungs and kidneys. My brother called it the “organ recital.”
I should tell Dad and Conor that I’m not going to this job. They’re both at work right now, so if I leave a message then I won’t have to sit on the phone and get yelled at from someone three years older than me on the other side of the country. I stop at the first gas station I find.
Pluhoooo— “Hello?” Conor answers our home phone at ten o’clock on a Thursday morning. “Conor? Why aren’t you at work? It’s—” “No. My brother is not here right now.” Conor talks right over me and then whispers the word “Reporter.” “What? No, Conor. Can you hear me a’right?” Conor keeps talking right into the phone but he’s not saying anything to me. “My brother is in Oregon right now. Or he’s on his way. And I’ll tell you what I told everyone else. I haven’t heard from him since Missouri, and he’s probably camping somewhere out in the Rockies. Obviously I can’t get in touch with him there.” “Conor? Hello? Anybody home?” “He is scheduled to be there today. I would love to answer any of your questions, but the police are here and they have a few of their own for me. I’m real sorry.” “Police? What police?” “I just want you to know—Sorry, what newspaper did you say you work for?” “What? Conor. It’s me, Liam. What the f—” “I just want you to know. There’s. No. Way. My brother. Had anything. To do. With the death. Of Stanley Trout. Okay?” “Who thinks I killed Trout?” “One second, officer.” His rough hand scrapes over the holes in the mouthpart. “And there is no way he could have left that message at Trout’s office. My brother is not the type to make Death Threats. Like I said, he’s on a camping trip. To Oregon. I’m sorry, but I have to go right now. And I would appreciate it if you would not call us back today. You can imagine this is hard on all of us.” My organs finish their recital. Bladder, intestines, kidneys, liver, stomach, lungs, throat, tongue. I land back on Earth. “Are you fucking with me?” “No. No, I don’t know when Trout’s funeral is planned for. And I think that the best way for my family to respect the memory of that great man would be to let his family have their ceremonies and not worry about us. Okay? Thank you very much, but I will have to—” Another voice hops on the line. An authority voice. A real one. “Who is this?” “This is, uh…” “Speak up! Dammit. Where are you, Liam?” The sound of my own name hits me in the chest and stalls my heart. I hold the phone with my hand and try to fake like I’m an old man. But with a stalled heart it just comes out all high and girly. I go with it anyway. “Sir. Where I come from a lady is not spoken to in such a may-nor.” “Who is this?” “Who is this?” I give it a breathy, phone sex lilt. “This is Officer Fitzpatrick.” “This is,” I check the papers on the rack by the phone. “This is Marsha McKinley cawlin’ from The…Spokesman Review.” “The what?” "Our sources tell us that death threats w’made to Mistah Trout from a neahby county in Eye-daho.” “What sources? How do you know that?” “Now now, Mistah Fitzpatrick. A lady never tells.” “Look, Ma’am, I’m sorry. I cannot reveal any information at this time.” “Well, do you have a motive? It’s the fifth dubya you know? Whh-eye, Mistah Fitzpatrick, why?” “We dunno. Something about soup.” “Soup?” “Ma’am. I’m sorry. We may know more when we find the Jew—the other boy. He’s off with his band somewhere. And he can’t be reached at all. It’s part of their—look, ma’am. We’re very busy. I’m sorry I—” “No, I undahstand. Kindly catch that killah for me, will ya? Then maybe I’ll have a story to write. About you.” As my heart sputters back into gear I start to lose my phone sex voice. “I’ll do my best, ma’am. Thank you.” “No, no, thank you.” I slam the phone down and hide across the street at a donut shop, sweating. Did anyone see me? Can they trace calls? I run into the bathroom and wash my hands for ten minutes.
Connecticut Chapter 2. You might as well know that I never had any reason to talk to Scott Hampshire until nine months ago, when I overheard him trying to talk my friend Carl into working with him at some summer camp out in Oregon. We sat at the counter of a diner near the bomb factory in town while Hampshire scooted around the whole place getting the second shift workers their ten PM lunch break. Carl’s parents had bought him a brand new car for his birthday or for what seemed to be a second bar mitzvah for some of the new kids in town. He was used to getting indescent ride proposals. I had a car too but you wouldn’t want a ride. My brother brought it back from the dead for me as a birthday present. And like my brother the car was three years older than me, greasy, and unreliable. Hampshire didn’t like the other factory kids very much. And we sure didn’t like him. His Dad moved up and up at the factory over the years and now he’s designing some kind of bomb that can explode without fire or something. His mom works for this creepy guy named Stanley Trout. She’s one of his real estate sluts, always smiling into the phone and being really, really enthusiastic. They put Hampshire’s two sisters through college out west and they never came back. Wonder why. Carl’s parents bought one of these palaces from Hampshire’s mom on the other side of town. It didn’t used to be the other side of town. It used to be woods and fields out there, but now behind the old barns the farmers have learned to grow houses where corn and cattle once bloomed. The developers hurry to clear the trees got in the way of the bigger hurry to grow them again. And the trunks of pines stand chopped on one side, exhausted from the hope of growing back their arms. Now young maple trees stand awkward, shivering alone in the middle of acre-wide lawns with their branches chained to the ground as if they might otherwise escape. Stanley Trout’s company put up the new houses and the new super market and a newer super store with super savings. And I can’t be the first one to notice how super our lives had become out here without getting any better. Hampshire is one of those kids with a third eye inside his mouth. Whenever he had to think hard or listen to someone you could almost see it. Slowly his jaw goes slack so that his third eye could peek out, take it all in, and explain it to the rest of him. To focus all three eyes he has to keep his mouth and eyelids half open. He worked the counter over at the only diner in town. People always thought he must be stupid to stare at you like his jaw needed a tune up. Until right then I don’t think I had ever thought of Oregon. Washington yes; California of course. But never the middle child. I knew where it was, what it was and how to find it. And most importantly I knew that getting there would take long enough for me to stop in on some of Mom’s relatives. Dad and Conor—but mostly Conor—never let me go very far from home since Mom left us. “So here’s what I’m thinking, Carl” Hampshire finished drawing an outline of the country on a placemat. “I could get you a job at my sister’s summer camp and we could take your car, right? We can leave from my house at four in the morning.” “Strawberry-Rhubarb?” Carl squinted at the short menu and ignored Hampshire’s lame lame attempt to catch a ride to the Pacific. “That can’t be good. Is that good? Tell me it’s not good.” “You want a piece of pie? I can give you a piece of pie,” Hampshire said. “I got a lot of pie here.” “If we can grow strawberries all year in California, we can grow rhubarb all year in California. So if I’ve never heard of it, it can’t be that great.” “Not to interrupt,” I said. “But hat’s what you said about Maple Sugar Candy and Chocolate Chip Pancakes when you moved here.” “That’s what I was trying to think of,” he turns to the counter. “Forget the pie. Gimme those pancakes I got last time.” “If I hear one word about your sugar hangover tomorrow, I’m cutting you off for good. Fucken pancakoholic,” I said to Carl. “Right, cause I’m addicted to pancakohol?” Carl smirked into his glass of water and looked down at some papers. “What are you working on?” I asked. “School Newspaper.” “I thought you wanted to be a doctor,” I said. “I do. But I want to get into a good college. So I’m on the paper. You should come sometime,” Carl put down his water glass. “Everyone else on staff is really boring.” “Weleavefrommyhouseatfourinthemorning,” Hampshire slammed the crude map over Carl’s placemat. “We pack the car that day and drive to Rhode Island. Find a boat launch where there aren’t any fisherman and back the car in so that the rear tires soak up some of the Atlantic before we blast off. Straight for highway eighty, straight to California.” He makes everything sound so organized and important. I like the idea of the early hours and the urgency. Back the tires in—Dip! Dip!—and take off—Zoom! Zoom! “We pull all nighters for two days,” he said. “We live on coke and crackers and sleep in shifts like…like truckers carrying really important medicine,” my eyes widened. “And we’ll get to Cali around sunset on the second day.” California, deargodyes, California. I’ll sit on the beach. Maybe get a peach and take a nap in the cool sand. I didn’t want to see movie stars. I didn’t want to see LA. I don’t want to see cars and driveways. I just wanted to face west and know that I couldn’t get farther away from here unless I had a passport and a warm jacket. I just want to swim with dolphins and camp on the beach. “Find another boat launch and dip the tires in, Carl.” Dip! Dip! “Then we could visit your old friends for a few days. We don’t have to get to the camp until the fourth of July. Maybe you could introduce me to a few California girls and we’ll…y’know…chill.” “California,” I just liked saying it. Californnnnia. Califfffffornia. Who named that? The Spanish? Dios Mio. I love those names. In New England they stole the names from the people they stole the land from. Awkward, unspellable syllables taken from bad translations. But out west. Sannn Diego. Pal-o Alt-o. Sannn Franciiiisgo. Portland. Hampshire ran over to a table of second shift workers on their ten o’clock lunchbreak. The fuse guys always fill about an ashtray a piece. You can imagine they have a zero-tolerance policy for smoking in the fuse wing. He came back with our plates. “This always happens,” Carl sneered at his plate so that he didn’t have to tell Hampshire no. Carl’s parents could probably buy him this diner if he wanted it. But like any seventeen year old, he would love to get the food for free. “Now I wish I got pie.” “You want pie?” Hampshire smiled. “I can get you pie.” “They got dolphins in California?” I asked Carl. “Not anymore,” Carl drowned his stack in syrup. “Unless you get some shitty tuna.” “What’s your problem? I’m giving you one instant fantastic summer here. I’ll get you a job and set it all up and you can even see your friends. I’ll even get you a piece of pie if you want it.” “First of all, maybe I know a few things you do not,” Carl said. “Do you know how long it takes to fly to California? Nine hours. And that’s just from New York. The moving van took a week to get here.” Hampshire strapped on his mother’s face of fake concern. “I sure hope you family wasn’t over charged, Carl.” “A plane travels at three hundred miles per hour,” Carl grabbed the ketchup bottle and squirted a line from one corner to the other on Hampshire’s map. “So even if you do sixty, all the way, averaging in all of your stops for gas, pissing, and doing whatever it’ll take you…” his eyes danced around the top of his head, checking the math on an imaginary blackboard. “Forty-five hours, which means…you’ll get there at three in the morning in your perfect schedule, which is eleven at night in California.” “Okay, so say we get there at eleven and wake up the next morning at one of your friends’ houses and finish out the trip. Won’t that be fun? You see your friends, I see my sister. We make some money and come back in time to go to college.” “That’s assuming we somehow build a highway that is a perfectly straight line from New York to San Francisco, and that we can get on to it somewhere in Rhode Island.” Carl went back to his pancakes. Hampshire put the pie away. “I can drive you,” I said. “Us.” “You have a car?” Hampshire said. “I have a great car. And my brother’s a mechanic so we don’t have to worry about breaking down or getting stuck anywhere. He taught me tons of ways to fix it. Plus I got cousins we can stay with along the way if you want. Chicago, Seattle, Missouri. Maybe we can go to California on the way home if you want.” I said. I didn’t care about this camp whatsoever. But my Mom’s waiting out there for me somewhere. I really have no idea where, but she’s got family all over. Family we don’t talk to much. Family that has a fold out couch and photo albums just waiting for me. Hampshire’s sister’s camp is somewhere near Portland in Oregon, which means I can call Mom’s brother in Missouri on the way and her cousins all over the west. And my gay Uncle in Seattle. He got disowned, but I bet he still gets her Christmas cards. Hampshire’s third eye stared at no one in particular as the wheels in his head cranked out the stops he could make along the way. All the places we could go. “I never been much of anywhere,” I added. “So I don’t mind if we stop a bunch on the way out there.” “I don’t know,” Hampshire squeezed his third eye shut. “It sounds like fun, but that’s a lot for one summer.” Scott Hampshire may be the one guy my age whose eyes didn’t sparkle when you talk about highways and no rules and girls and timezones. Just then Chuck Micks hooted out for Hampshire from a table down by the fuse guys. “Hampster!” Micks smiled in perfect proportion to the growing frown on Hampshire’s face as he said that dreaded nickname. “Hey Hampster, yer a smart guy—help me out here. My girlfriend sent away and got a star named after us. Do you know how I can find it? I mean, like you know where the stars are?” “There is an infinite amount,” Hampshire said. “But we can only see a few thousand of them from here. In fact, the one she got you may only be the light from a star that burned out millions of years ago. And it’s just now getting to us.” “You mean they just burn out?” Micks asked. “A few do. But most of them just go into a supernova and explode.” Everyones eyes got wider over at Micks’ table. “So if AlphaJennyLovesMicks exploded right now would we be able to hear it even if we couldn’t see it?” “Actually, no.” Hampshire said. “For many reasons, no. But no matter what we wouldn’t be able to hear it because there is no sound in space. Space is a vacuum.” Hampshire went back to working on Carl. “Think about it, okay?” “A vacuum?” Micks shouted. “Like a vacuum cleaner? But isn’t that loud?” Hampshire couldn’t even start to finish his sentence again. We just sat there, before he turned to me and said, for the first time, something we both realized at birth. “If you have a car, I have a job and that’s good enough. We gotta get out of this place.”
1) During the transit strike yesterday I rode my scooter from downtown Brooklyn to 53rd st in some of the densest traffic ever. the highway department loves scooters because of a technicality they invented that makes it possible for you to ride around cars. Everytime two miles of traffic backed up, I could skip to the front of the line. It was awesome. And that's the only word for it because I didn't feel like a competent adult who would be one of the few to make it into my place of business that day.
I felt like I was playing some secret level of Grand Theft Auto. Halfway to work I stopped a cop thinking that she would probably automatically come over and blow me.
On the final block before work I jammed on the brakes as some pedestrian stepped out in front of me and I started to slide. I couldn't stop. Ice? No. It turns out as I narrowly avoided him. I was skidding on the intestines of a dead rat.
2) Annie and I have a rat problem upstairs. This is the polite way that we refer to the angelic, blond, early-risining three-year-old girl above us who has just learned to gallop. Like children in a divorce, she is a mere pawn, an extension of her embattled parents (our landlords).
I would like to say something to them, especially since my occupation requires that I stay up late, but I don't want to scar the child. When I had smaller feet my parents were always complaining about me clomping around. It gave me such a complex about it that I moved to Chicago when I graduated. Even now when people discuss loose floorboards or nazi duck walking, someone in my immediate family always adds: "Oh don't get me started, when Brendan was six he..."
Even when confronted with the dents my heals made in the soft pinewood floors of our first home I remember thinking, "Gaawwd leave men alonnne, okay? I've only had these ankles for five years I'm still getting used to them."
Most of parenting scares me if only because it exists in a world without logic and is usually best served by old fashioned shame.
This is something I wrote for one of my freelance jobs. I never know if it will come out so I am including it here.
Back Handed Book Reviews By Brendan Sullivan When you’re an English major, you spend your whole life searching for meaning. What is the author trying to say? What is this pop song actually about? What does this eviction notice really mean?
The holidays are no different. Your loved ones get you some well-meaning gift and your there, pondering it like a Richard Kelly film. What is my dear mother trying to say with this copy of “Land That Job!”?
What you end up saying with most gifts is, of course, “To my family member, I’ve known you my entire life but I still have no clue who you are.” Books are an excellent gift to give, if only because they can be easily exchanged for DVDs now at most chain bookstores. But if you’re looking to maybe impress your cousins this year with books that are new and new in paperback, then check out the list below and see if you’re reminded of anyone.
NON FICTION “Everything Bad is Good for You” by Stephen Johnson (Riverhead, 234 pp.) Remember when the bad guy was just the bad guy? Johnson makes a very convincing argument that today’s pop culture—from video games to films to TV shows like 24, The Sopranos and The Simpsons—are much more complex than we give them credit for and may be making us smarter and safer. Good gift for: your father who wouldn’t let you watch “Full House” because the children were sassy, but who now can’t tear his ass away from his “Sopranos” boxset long enough to carve the ham.
“Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody and the Wild West Show” Get it if you think John Wayne is a pussy. Cody rode the pony express, fought in the civil war, fought Indians, and was a dime store novel hero all by the age of 23. At 26 he starred as himself in a traveling road show about the his life which, it turns out, may not have been so exciting. Good gift for: Your cousin in Maine who wear cowboy boots and quotes Cool Hand Luke to excess.
“Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare” by Stephen Greenblatt (390 pp.) How did a glovemaker’s son from the boondocks, who already had children of his own managed to change the London theater world forever? This book talks in depth about Shakespeare the social climber, the wannabe gentleman, who did things like pay off the College of Heralds to pretend that they had “discovered” the age old Shakespeare coat of arms with the motto that translates to “Not without right.” His rival, Ben Johnson, lampooned this in a satire of a rustic buffoon who who pays 30 pounds for a coat of arms. A friend mockingly proposes the motto “Not without mustard.” Get it for: your drama queen cousin who unironically wears black turtlenecks.
“The Secret Man” by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster, $23). Remember a time, long, long ago when we had a thuggishly inept republican president at war who spent his second term dodging a scandal that mired everyone around him? Remember when we had half as many reporters on the ground, but twice as many who were doing their job? Me neither, that’s why I loved reading the true story behind Watergate, Deep Throat, and Mark Felt. Also, according to Woodward The Hartford Courant was the newspaper that actually outed Mark Felt as Deep Throat. Get it for: anyone you know who votes or watches “West Wing.”
“Devil in the White City” by Erik Larson (Vintage, $14.95). This is the story of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, a story of rebuilding a great city that had just burned down, the story of the thousands who flocked to the city to see the show. It is the story of Buffalo Bill, Houdini, Edison and a young Princeton professor named Woodrow Wilson. And some guy named Mark Twain who came all the way to Chicago and spent 11 days sick in his hotel room. It is also about H. H. Holmes, an American Jack the Ripper who lured untold numbers of office girls into his home, tortured, murdered, and often sold their corpses to science for money or filed to claim their life insurance. Get it for: anyone who would rather be watching “24.”
“Are Men Necessary?” by Maureen Dowd. Two opposing things: 1) Give this book to someone for the surprise on their face and the jokes that will ensue. But don’t expect to change their life. In every chapter, Dowd produces choppy, sloganeering paragraphs. She quotes Oscar Wilde so much that you might think she is searching hippie stores of the world for a bumper sticker quoting her. (“These days, the scarlet letter morphs into the dollar sign.”)2) Dowd never pretends to have all the answers. This is the first book to seriously catalogue the shift in gender culture of the past five years where we now find both men and women with careers and mortgages shopping for shoes while at work and gossiping about their dating failures. Get it for: any former bra-burner who now needs a girdle or anyone who misses "Ally McBeal."
FICTION “On Beauty” by Zadie Smith (Penguin, $25.95). There is no real reason to read Zadie Smith books--but you still should. Even the bad ones. In this, her third--and possibly her best, London-born Smith follows the lives of two suburban Boston university families whose lives are tangled together by chance. Get it for: empty nesters who have children in college.
“The Fortress of Solitude” by Jonathan Lethem (Vintage, $15.28). If Jake Glylenhal’s “Brokeback Mountain”--a non-gay romance between two cowboys--is any indicator, we are in for a serious pop-appraisal of man-love. In “Fortress” we follow young Dylan, the only white kid for miles in his Brooklyn neighborhood as he grows up in an era of funk music, the birth of hip-hop and the abortion of punk. Dylan has a strong bond with his neighbor, Mingus Rude. Get it for: anyone.
“Indecision” by Benjamin Kunkel (Random House, $21.95). Like far too many novels of this era, it should be titled “The Day I Banged that Girl, Finally.” It has received glowing reviews in every paper for its clever premise (a pill that supposedly cures indecisiveness) and its main character (a 28-year-old dullard who, by virtue of his Manhattan address, privileged background, education and lack of direction in his life, garners unfair comparisons to Holden Caulfield). The story is funny at times (after getting canned, the narrator tells his girlfriend: “I was just now fired. From Pfizer. Wow. Pfired! So I’m pfucked!") and not too taxing on the brain. Fantastic gift for: Your sister who finally dumped that New York nancy boy who should have proposed three years ago.
“Mission to America” by Walter Kirn (Doubleday, $23.95). Somewhere in the hills of Montana a semi-new age cult is in trouble. After years of insular life the Aboriginal Fulfilled Apostles’ gene pool has gotten a little shallow. When one of their own makes it big in something called a “reality TV show,” he sends young Mason Laverne out in the world to find a wife with money to help the group survive. Laverne all at once confronts the world of television, fast-food, and teeth whitening with a naif’s eye. This hilarious tale is spun by the author of “Thumbsucker.” Get it for: your brother, the reality-TV addict.
Do you know someone who actually reads literature for pleasure? Some of the most important titles to come out lately are works that debuted decades ago. Gone is the age of stilted, Victorian renderings of masterworks. In each of the following, a present day scholar has set the original story to a fluid, readable modern tongue. In every case it helped bring out the original joy and humor of the works. “Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes, translated by Edith Grossman (Harper Perennial, $16.95; “In Search of Lost Time” by Marcel Proust, ed. by Lydia Davis (Penguin, $20), and “The Odyssey” by Homer, translated by R. L. Eickhoff. Get it for: anyone in your family who does not own a TV.
Annie's iPod was stolen from our apartment the other day. She had put it by the door so that she would remember to take it to Italy and when the building guy and his partner finished installing some smoke detectors it was gone.
You may also know that my hard drive committed suicide a few weeks ago and I lost all of my music, songs, pictures and the short stories that I thought might go somewhere. The only songs left were the twenty playlists I made for Annie starting with our first date. We are both very fickle about music and we got through phases which means that for a month we listened only to The Thrills and Bright Eyes and Kinds of Convenience. I labelled that list "5- First night in Brooklyville" for when I ran out on my life in Chicago and moved in with her in New York. "14- Puerto Rico!", "20- Moving to Fort Green."
I bet I haven't heard any Bright Eyes song once since last winter. When I play them I remember being a cold, unemployed loser on hold with the credit card company and staring at the screen of my potentially repossed laptop--hoping that a novel would fall out of it. I hide almost all of my memories in music.
Annie did what any normal person would do and she looked around the house to see if anything else had been stolen. She found a big shit in the toilet and a missing bag of croissants*. She called me at work and I relayed her her that I had taken the breaded treat to work, but that her iPod was still stolen.
When I say landlords, I mean the people whose basement we live in. They pay an unlicensed, untrained, unskilled man (who lives with his mother) $500 a week to stick around and fix things. He's a great guy whom I trust and respect because he installs dishwashers, does drywall, turns on our heat, hooked up our washer, and he also thinks our landlord is an asshole. When we moved in, he brought in a twenty foot ladder so we could hang our vintage "Submarine Voyage--of Tomorrowland!" poster.
It's his assistant that we're concerned about. What this man will ever do with a pink iPod mini full of Le Tigre and our other hollaback girls, I will never know. The landlords said nothing for two weeks until I left a note on the door with my phone number. They called while I was Dj'ing.
"I don't know what to tell you, Brendan. We called him when it happened and he searched his assistant and I find it hard to believe that he got out of there with your iPod and ate a whole bag of croissants."
"Annie told you two weeks ago that the croissants were not stolen. I took those to work," (I also will freely admit that I have problems with authority which is why I added:) "I mean, I don't know if your wife has ever been robbed while you weren't at home, but I bet the second thing she'd do is find out what else is missing.**"
"You, uh..." I should also add that both of our landlords are librarians, which I originally thought was going to be fantastic. In their apartment they have one book: The Book of Mormon. Turns out they are Law Librarians.
"Look, I'm at work right now. I don't mind if you call me at work tomorrow. Will that be okay?"
"Sure." He hangs up with me and calls Annie immediately. He brings up the goddam croissants again. He speaks condescendingly about the missing mixes. And he agrees to pay for half the iPod. ("We can't be responsible for everything that goes on in that apartment.")
David Sedaris hasa great essay about cleaning peoples apartments. He always said that they got paid fifteen an hour but that his company kept five of it, which he was more than happy to do just incase there was a problem with anything being stolen.
If my landlords were using a licensed company of some kind I could just go to them. And I would because damn the man.
They said they will only pay half because we can't prove anything. I can't stand it when people make statements on flawed logic: If we could prove that he stole it, we could get it back and then they wouldn't have to pay anything.
Moments ago I took a break from writing this to close a window in the living room. When I did the glass plate fell out of the poorly installed, unlicensed window and cracked me on the forehead. I'm bleeding now. And it's six times colder than it was before. If you see me tomorrow: I don't want to hear about how flat my fucking man bangs are.
I want to keep fighting because I've worked up all of these great lines. (Emotional: "If he had stolen a picture frame do you think I would care more about the frame or the picture in it?" Mind trap: "Are you paying half out of principle or are you just being cheap? If he stole our newspaper would you insist on only paying us a quarter?" Pure personal satisfaction "Yeah he took her iPod. He also took a shit in our toilet: you want in on half of that too?")
Do I:
1) Continue arguing until I get him to cave into buying a new iPod (even if this means making things tense with them?)
2) Tell him he has to pay half of a new nano, plus $990 to buy 1000 songs on the iTunes music store that will possibly replace the ones that are gone?
3) Forget about the iPod and just go after them about the blood coming out of my forehead?
*I wish that the object in question had been Wonderbread. It's just as hard to get sympathy about your missing croissants as it would be about you missing your manicure appointment. **If you ever need to be a condescending dick: use phrases like "the second thing you should do.." because people always make the first thing they do personal and embarassing. Or better yet they get distracted by wondering.
Some Thoughts on Receiving "suggested edits" from an Agent
1) My novel needs to go to fat camp. Kurt Vonnegut once told an actual fisherman the "Old Man and the Sea" story (which I now realize I have never read*). The old man in question catches a giant marlin, lashes it to his boat and heads home. But since the fish is so big and bloody it attracts sharks who eat away at it. When he gets back to port he has only a skeleton left. Vonnegut's fisherman replied "Why didn't he just hack off the big parts and leave the rest out there?"
That's where I am with this 409 page project. The meat of the novel I want to sell is in there, but I will never get it to market if I can't carry it.**
There are dozens of scenes that I will have to feed to the sharks. So it goes.
2) Writing novels is still like dating. Right now I would love to call up one of these agents and find out what they're actually thinking. But I can't. It would scare them away.
On the night that I got my first good news in the agent world I threw myself a party. Literally. I emailed everyone I knew and I got very, very intoxicated at the bar where I DJ. But I didn't say anything to the agent. I haven't even told her that I like what she has to say. Here's my reply:
Thank you for your email. I don't have the time it deserves right now, but I will tell you what I have been thinking about for the past few weeks:
On the night I went all over trying to steal the goddam bible, I went into the Parker Meridian, which is a hotel that tries to be too "New York." The signs on the doorknobs don't say, "Do Not Disturb" they say "Fuggetaboutit."
I winced, because I know they are trying to say a word that sounds like that. It sound exactly like that. But it comes off sounding so fake.
Thank you for reading. -B
Annie really disagrees with me here. She thinks that you have to be more up front with people. We met while I was at waiting on her table. I was a loser in Chicago with a dude apartment, no dress pants and a novel that looked like a creative writing project***. But I couldn't let her know that.
I didn't ask for her number. I didn't ask her out because I really, really liked her and I wanted her to like me. How was she supposed to be able to remember me from all the other slobbering guys who talked to her for three minutes and then ask for her number? I knew that then, as now, that my desperation would stink like a rotting marlin.
Fishing is a sport now that it's on ESPN. And I hate sports metaphors. However: Hemingway's old man caught the giant fish but it pulled him out to sea. He knew that if he tied the line to the boat that the taught string would snap. So he had to hold on--give a little--reel it in--let it out, wait.
I'm not very good at playing it cool, so instead I just have to wait for the fish to get tired.
3) The Agent Who Gets Me also missed a giant part of the story. It may be that she gets me so much that by the third chapter she already knew that she wanted to be a part of this project. The notes I'm reading may be born of exuberance after being snagged by one of the tasty lures I've left out there****.
The Agent Who Gets Me may be under the impression that this is a novel about upper-middle-class vs. lower-middle-class. But really it is more about what Freud calls "the narcissism of minor difference." The upper characters are weary of the lowers, of course. But the real tension in here is in between. Liam's girlfriend's parents don't hate him because they own too many diamonds. They hate him because they were once young and poor like him and they don't want that for their daughter.
It's my fault that this didnt' come across. But I worry--slightly--that if I tell this to The Agent Who Gets Me that she will spit out the bait and lose interest.
DISCLOSURES *"TOMATS" is Saddam Husein's favorite story. No joke. **Hemingway's fishing boat/office is on display in a giant rods and lures store in Florida. You can tour it and then buy a mug in the shape of a fish head. His writing desk and typewriter are below decks. I went there once but I was too afraid and superstitious to sit in his chair. I feared that if I sat down I would never be able to finish a novel and I would spend the rest of my life towing rotting marlins. I know this is silly. But just in case I asked my nemesis to sit in the chair so I could take her picture. She also dreamed of writing novels and I sincerely hope she gets eaten by actual sharks in the near future. This is what I mean when I say I'm not such a nice guy anymore. ***With good and obvious reasons. ****It may be that the real reason I hate dating and sports metaphors is just because I'm really, really bad at both.
This intro really requires Terry Gross' voice speaking to closely to the microphoneSomehow--please don't ask--I did not bring Hemingway's A Moveable Feast with me to start my new life in Chicago. And thus it was never stolen along with the others. I found it at my parents house last week. When I opened it last night, I experienced a forgotten joy of being a book-whore.
In the title page I had scrawled, "Seattle Barnes and Noble 7-11-2000." I had bought it while on an aimless, cross country road trip for the summer before I went off to college. In those days it took me a really, really long time to read an entire book. I was in San Diego, sitting on a beach, hungry out of my mind, almost broke, and sad about having to go back home when I did finish.
When I opened the pages last night, a receipt fluttered out from a Taco Bell in Coos Bay, OR. (In those days I considered a full meal to be "7LAYER---NO SOUR-NO CHZ.") When I reached the end, the hidden sand of San Diego had fallen out of its hiding places in the pages and collected in my sheets.
All I really remembered was the chapter where Hemingway tells F. Scott Fitzgeral that if Zelda thinks he has a small penis, then he should check out the statue at Louvre. I thought that someday maybe I would go to Paris and have something to write a novel about. Hemingway's story about giving up the lucrative and promising field of journalism to try writing fiction meant nothing to me. Nor did I shutter--or even remember it--when he talked about how his wife wanted to surpise him on vacation by bringing every copy of his short stories with her in a suitcase that was later stolen.
Instead I became haunted by the thoughts of an seventeen year old boy who takes a trip cross-country in the summer before he goes off to college only to find himself in San Diego hungry and almost out of money.
1) One time when I was twenty-two I had a job and an apartment and a life in a major American city. Then I met a girl and I followed her to another major American city several thousand miles away.
When it happened, I remember feeling like I was in the middle of a grand romantic gesture. But underneath that I felt like if I heard of someone else doing this, I might find it somewhat pathetic. What? You'll never be able to meet another girl in Chicago?
Last night I went to a going away party for a friend in Connecticut. He met a girl in Rome and is moving into her parents house until he can get trained to teach English and find a job doing so. And--for reasons I don't want to spell out--I am very relieved to see how great of an idea everyon thinks this is.
2) At the going away party I had this warm feeling. Not just from being with friends. But I felt like I was getting alot or work done. I later realized that this was because the people at the party were the people I wrote a novel about. I didn't mean it to turn out this way, but people would say things and I woudl feel like they were quoting the story. Turns out it was the other way around.
1) James Joyce. My eyesight is failing. I thought for a few weeks that my glasses might just be dirty. But I am having trouble reading printed words. I can't afford new glasses and the ones I have are broken anyway. I wore them taped for three weeks before I could get the money together to buy some super glue. Joyce's eyesight went south in his later years because he drank too much. It is never known how much of Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake he was actually able to read.
If you are one of the fabulous people who have agreed to read my manuscript this week, keep this in mind. When you see that the entire premise of my novel is full of holes, remember that everytime I pick up the manuscript I think to myself, Ah shit, someone smeared grey ink all over that reem of paper I just bought.
2) Murphy Brown. Remember Elton, the painter? My roommate doesn't work outside of the house much. At first I didn't notice, but every day since I moved in he's been building something, cutting holes in the walls, or looking around his huge mess for a missing drillbit. He can afford to do this because he has three roommates who pay the rent for him. It would bother me if I had never seen what kind of closet-like, windowless shitholes everyone else lives in in this neighborhood.
New York City real estate is a disgusting phenomenon that captivates almost everyone. I know fry-cooks who wish they had bought their house in Bed-Stuy when they had the chance in the eighties because they could sell it today for two million. My roommate has lived in Williamsburg for ten years--when Pavement was still recording in their loft and before TV on the Radio was evicted for doing the same thing. He has us locked into a rent that is half what the rest of the building pays. He is worth it.
Having that said, tomorrow he can't hang out with me because the land lord is coming in to brick over the windows so that a building can be added on next door.
3) Mark Twain In 1893, Twain travelled from Hartford to Chicago to see the World's Fair. He got sick and spent eleven days in his hotel room before returning back without ever stepping inside. This is a fair--I've learned after finally finishing Devil in the White City--where the inventor of the Braille typewriter was hugged by Hellen Keller. Where a Princeton professor named Woodrow Wilson took his wife, where Susan B. Anthony watched Wild Bill ride and Thomas Edison showed Houdini his lightbulb.
The magic of the fair was felt by everyone for miles around and on the dedication of the final day they pursuaded congress to commemorate the American event by having all the children in all of the school in the country say a pledge of allegiance
Moments ago I stepped out of a cab I couldn't afford and ran into the Knitting Factory where I was supposed to meet Peter to see Gravy Train. The room was filled with the tepid humdity of dancing bodies and the legions of girls in vintage t-shirts glowed from their collective euphoria. Something wonderful had just happened to everyone in the room.
The woman at the desk looked at me through a pair of sad eyes behind a pair of cats-eyes as she told me the show just ended.
I really, really, really wish I had a job that would let me enjoy rock music on occassion.
*This is a regular installment of posts wherein I compare my minor troubles to the minor troubles of greater people in order to make myself believe, by transitive property, that my minor troubles make me a greater person.
1) Whenever Annie and I go anywhere, we usually end up telling them that it's our Honeymoon. We did it as a joke at first, but last night we really wanted some champagne glasses sent up to our room. They brought them up and then ten minutes later another woman came to our door with a bottle of merlot, two more glasses, a cheese plate and a card signed by the entire staff. "Dear Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan, HAPPY HONEYMOON!"
2) Annie grew up just a few blocks from a pair of thirty-foot-tall, cast-iron Puerto Rican flags in Chicago. I had one Puerto Rican friend in high school and she may have been the only Latina in my hometown. This means that one of us can converse fluently and with a pitch-perfect accent that can convey mood, temperment and humor, and the other one of us spends most of his time going, "Que?"
3) One of us is also what you might call attractive. She's also a redhead so even in Ireland she is exotic. It's really conventient. Last night we wanted a cigarette at the bar. She mentioned it to one guy--who immediately produced a pack of menthols--and before she could ask for a light, four more packs came out from the various muchachos in the area, and we had our choice.
Here's what got me chain smoking on the way to work on friday:
I was somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half late to a job I love. But we had no customers. I keep my head down and want to cry at my good fortune. I got a job an hour before. A new job. A real serving job for a respectable outfit on the corner of central park. I am months away from health insurance, paid metro cards and vacations. But when the fuck did I ever want that?
My manager asks me how the job hunt went. I told him I would work for him forever if I could make $600/week.
During my break I work out a budget. A living budget that will include pretty much everything but alcohol, beautiful clothing, and extravagent vacations. Rent, bills, phone, internet, groceries, metro card, etc. No insurance, no loan payments, no train tickets to visit my niece. It adds up to something like $60/day. I flip back in my notebook where I went over my expenses in Chicago. I had great foodstamps, a cheap aparment, no travel cost, and I wasn't in debt. It was $14/day.
My manager sits me down after the shift and buys me alot of drinks. I tell him that I am leaving because I'm a money-grubbing loser, even though I ended up making $600 that week. He says if I could stick around for a few weeks it might bet better when they open the sidewalk cafe. Then he says that--since he is the coolest guy in the world--that he's leaving New York to go traveling for a year through every paradise from Bali to the Mediterranean, and that he wants me to manage the place when he leaves.
I write this from a coffee shop in Brooklyn that was once staffed entirely by the band TV on the Radio. They lived off the shitty tips that people like me give them. And then they wrote one of the best records that came out last year. I would know because now I call myself a rock-critic.
But there's one thing I have to be realistic about: just because I can do something, doesn't mean I will. In Chicago I spent my nights tanning my liver and blew my days in search of the best french toast. I editted a manuscript while taking the train to one of my shitty jobs. Somedays I would fall asleep while dicking around on the job--just to let you know how much time I had on my hands.
When I started my last new job I made so much money that I was uncomfortable hiding it. Next week I'm flying to Puerto Rico, for example. Last week I took some friends to a club openning in a cab. They wanted to walk and I think I used the phrase, "Made of money" to explain why they shouldn't worry. And when we got to the wrong address, we got in another cab.*
*In defense of my credibility: this was a free open bar party and we had to get there fast.
Message One: Hey this is your manager calling from work. We're actually slow today at lunch so you don't have to come in. Just come back early and meet with the manager...uh...before your shift." I was at the front door of the restaurant when I got the job, but I wanted to just go home and swim around in the pile of money I'd already made. So I left.
Message Two: Good news. He moved out this morning. You can finally move into your room. I'll help you clean it out when I get home."
Interlude:There was one day last winter when I was imagining myself as an adult. And when I say an adult, I mean someone who has his own apartmnt. I thought of how I would be surrounded by books. So many books that I wouldn't even bother painting the walls.
This was winter while on the long drive back to Kenyon. I was sleepy and trying to listen to the most jarring music to keep me awake. It was then that I realized that most of my heros were losers. You always read about how ill-tempered Hemingway and Jimi Hendrix and Elvis and Hunter S. Thompson were.
Okay, I'll admit that I was probably listening to each Eminem album in sequence. And I thought, Man, I may never make it as any kind of artist because I run on such an even keel. I've never been fired from a job. Never been in much trouble. I rarely leave a room screaming--unless there's a band playing. I have good credit, low cholesterhol and zero cavities.
When I get to work they make me wait forever. First while they fire someone else. Then while the manager "puts in his contacts." At this point I will do anything they want. I hate this job. But I love ever second of my life when I'm not there.
The manager reads alloud from a letter sent into the home office. Remind me never to write about this otherwise. Again, I brought the wrong bottle of wine to a table (you may remember this as the excuse I used to move out of Chicago). This time our menu said 2000 and all we had was a 2001. The man I served it to was rude to me, loud, and red faced. I told the manager I was uncomfortable serving him any more liquor. He writes a letter to the home office detailing how he's never been more embarassed.
And for the twenty-third time since graduation: I'm looking for a job. I call up a place I quit weeks ago. They need me that night. I worked there last night as well and still made less in two nights than in one "shitty night" at the steakhouse.
I turn off my phone. I mop the floor in my new apartment. I fall asleep on the mattress left behind and try to be happy that I'm not back on the boxspring. For thirty five seconds I wallow. I promise myself that as soon as I get out of bed I'm going to forget about feeling sorry for myself and get going on the rest of my life.
1) I'm still sleeping on a boxspring total stranger's living room. I would like to thank my subletters who sold all of my books and clothes and DVDs in Chicago: it took me about twenty minutes to move.
2) Next week I'll begin writing again after my six-week break. This page will probably then be filled with my general despair, depression, and a series of posts where I will probably be laughing at my own jokes.
If I could write a music column for a respected magazine, I would call it "Records We Should Have Reviewed." Because here's what happens in music: a great band comes out of no where. They put out a record and all of their friends buy it. Their friends play it in their cars on the way to the mall and then eventually one of the right people hears it. Maybe someone planning a tour, maybe someone at a magazine on the internet. But they make no mark when it comes out. Journalism is only concerned with dates, which is worthless in music.
By the time this band's second album comes out, there's a buzz about them, Bright Eyes has their first record on the floor of his Honda, they've mailed free copies to all the college radio station, and maybe they have a song on The O.C.* I spend more time reading music magazines than a grown man should, but every fucking one of them gave a huge shout out of the new Hot Hot Heat.
If they had my column in there six months before, they could do that obnoxious music-nerd pose and note that they knew the band before they put out their disappointing sophomore release and how they have always beleived in the band and they look forward to the next single.
I remember when The Killers came out last summer in Chicago. My friends and I were all very excited, but mostly because I think everyone at that point had some friends in a band called "The Killers." They barely sold enough records to keep it together for the summer but then things picked up and music magazines had to invent reasons to stop ignoring them. They appeared on everyones "Best of 2004" list, complete non-events of the band became music magazine cover stories. This is, in my opinion, the reason that most bands still put out singles. Hey, remember when you didn't cover this song from our last CD? Well here's a whole CD of just this song!
*On last week's episode there's a house party scene that opens with Daft Punk's "Technologic" but then the next song melts into "Daft Punk is Playing at My House" a Soulwax remix of LCD Soundsystem. I don't know why it upset me to hear two songs I like on television. But it did.
1) I got a job at the steak house across from the largest fiction publisher in New York!
My interviewer was very enthusiastic about my experience and also my tie. "That's another nice tie you have on there. Where did you get it?"
"My girlfriend got it for me in Chicago."
"Oh, do you remember where?"
"I think it's uh..." Shit. What's the name of a designer? What good is watching The OC every week if you cannot remember any designers? "Marc Jacobs."
"Really?" he says, flipping through my police record. "I didn't know Marc Jacobs made ties."
Fuck.
"I think he's starting to. You know. Just in Chicago for now."
2) My scooter started!
3) I interviewed someone mildly famous! This was convenient because I was already wearing my tie. But when I got there to interview him, I was sat at my table by the manager who interviewed as a server there. Thank god I made no impression before.
I had nine dollars. Four of which I spent on a single cup of coffee at the bar. Mr. Mildly Famous ordered a sandwich. My rent check went through that morning and left my bank account empty. So I realized that--while we were wrapped up in a discussion of the role of the audience in the theater and what is in his netflix cue--that I would have to skip out on the check.
He kept diving for his sandwich whenever I would speak, so when I got to the end of my questions I said. "Here, I'll shut this off," (I recorded the interview with the internal mic of my laptop. I cannot believe that worked.) "Give you a chance to eat."
We talked about bands and records we liked. He also has four moles on his face which I always thought were make up. I'm pretty sure I kept staring at them.
"So how long have you been writing for this paper?"
"Gee...maybe five years. On and off. I've worked for the same editor since then."
"That's great that you can do that. I was temping for ten years until my first movie came out."
"Great. Well. This is coming out in next thursdays section. I've got to get back and file this now. Thank you very much." I put five dollars on the table even though I already paid for my coffee. As I walk to the subway feeling like a broke loser, I realize the futility of my last five dollars. When the check comes, it's going to be for eight dollars. Maybe ten. And he's going to pick it up and say, "Great, well that oughta cover the tip. What an ass. And what is he thinking with that tie?" When you're a reviewer everyone tries to buy you, but when you're an interviewer you're expected to buy them things.
4) I just listened to that recording of the interview. Do I really have a lisp?
We were awesome at blowing off entire days in Chicago. It's really something I just don't do anymore. When I got up this morning, I tried to figure out how best to avoid writing the ending--the actual ending--of my novel project.
Long ago I had told Annie that I would be done by December. She doesn't know whether to believe anything I say anymore. I keep repeating to myself, Truman Capote took three months off before writing the ending to In Cold Blood. Which has proven nothing to me except that Truman Capote wasn't dating my girlfriend.
Today I learned that I could get a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts just by applying for it. So I spent most of my morning filling out application and lovingly gutting scenes from my project. Then they want proof of publication. Most people should say something like, Come on. Who would lie about that? But I definately paused for a few seconds thinking, Okay, even a big magazine like Tin House only has 10,000 subscribers. Maybe they wouldn't check...
The problem is, and I promise to stop talking about this eventually, the only other publication I have to my credit is in an anthology of mine that was sold out of spike. The editor lives in New York, so I checked the bookstores. Nothing. I even went to Manhattan. No Chance. Which is kind of a new low. Most people apply for these no-name anthologies so they can check Yes, I have been published. But now even that's not good enough.
So anyway, having 'worked' all morning, I sat in the back of an internet cafe, pretending to be one of the many designers and filmmakers twidling away on their laptops. Only I was watching The Manchurian Candidate so I could return it on time. Then I started reading Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk which is the first rock history book I've ever read that wasn't written for morons who can't pay attention to liner notes.
I just want to get this all down on paper so I'll remember what life was like when I start a new job this week.
This hasn't been editted at all. In fact, before I even re-typed it, I knew I was going to cut it from the final draft. There's probably alot of characters that come out of no where and probably go no where. And in about six weeks I'm going to have to start editting again--maybe I'll even get a big red marker--and I'll hack out all the parts like this. But they're fun. They entertain me when I get bored of writing or when I think I should quit.
I wrote this in Chicago and probably threw away a week of my life working on it. If I weren't writing this, I would have been asleep, dreaming of a job with actual customers.
The First Church of the Little Wave, San Diego meets at Rutherford B. Hayes Junior High School every Sunday at one o’clock. It looks like Noah brought surfers on the Ark, two by two. Everyone sits around in shorts and surfing company shirts. Even the pastor. Everyone files in, some with their waists girded in the damp towels of righteousness. A brick walk led up to the part where the busses must pull in. Some of Ellen’s friends waved, some surfing types stood in little circles. A couple of first timers tried to lose themselves in the crowd and pretend to be too busy searching through their purses to talk to anyone. Weird. Just like junior high. Some one important walk over to a picnic bench and stands up. “I still don’t get it,” I whisper to Hampshire. “What does post-modern mean?”
“Shh…no one knows, and I think that’s the point.” The pastor starts talking. He’s got a few years on Ellen, but he acts just as laid-back as everyone. Something about him, though. He seems tanner, his hair more sun bleached, his face more muscular.
“Good morning.”
“Goo..m..nring…” we echo.
“I said, GOOOOD MORNING!”
“GOOD MORNING!” we reply.
“Man, it was hard to get outta bed this morning. Am I right?” Chuckles and soft high-fives travel through the crowd. “Plenty of new faces here at the Church of the Little Wave. Recognize some of y’all from the beach this morning. Some of y’all from the bar last night. I’m glad that this guy’s decided to pray to more than just the porceline god this weekend,” some guy in the front row melts into a red-faced giggle. “In case we haven’t met, I’m Pastor P. And I’m glad y’all came out this morning. Before the house band starts, I invite you to grab a cup of coffee in the lobby, maybe get yourself a bagel and come right back.”
Everyone herds into the lobby. Again I feel like Junior High. I wonder if anyone would notice if I pack a few bagels into my pockets. I think that my stomach shrank, though. Ellen keeps taking us out to get these big meals and I always have to take half of them home. After my second glass of grape juice, I go back for another and almost break the goddam plastic knife tryna put cream cheese on my second bagel. “Oh, man,” I hold my cup and rub my belly. “I love San Diego.”
“See, what I tell ya?”
“Oh fuck off—” Jesus’ pained eyes glare at me from the cross. He’s hanging on a poster that says, And you think your parents expect a lot of you. “I mean, forget it.”
“Forget what?”
“All right everybody!” Pastor P. takes the stage. The band goes into a tune up/drum roll. “Now let’s get ready to hummmmbllllle ourselves to the Lord! All God’s people get on your feet and give a big Little Wave welcome to Jacob and The Sheperd’s Herd!” The band starts up with some Kareoke version of a song my parents prolly danced to when they met.
“Thank you, thank you for that warm welcome. I’m Jacob and you know, I went to this here junior high school fifteen years ago and they could never get this many people in the auditorium.” Everyone cheers. “Maybe it’s the bagels. But here at the Church of the Little Wave, we know how to surf. Yesterday Pastor P. caught one of the biggest waves I’ve ever seen. Eight, ten-footer. It was totally outta this world. But you know something” That wave started out as just a ripple in the pacific, but what starts as just a little wave, becomes something totally awesome by the time it hits California.”
“WOO!”
“Come on everybody, sing with me now.” The lyrics come up on the screen. It keeps everyone’s eyes out of hymnals, I guess. They sing up to each other. Pastor P. hops up on the bongos for a drum solo. Everyone started to get so loud that you couldn’t hear who couldn’t sing or who you wouldn’t want to. Like gospel for white people.
“Can I get a Little Wave?” He points to the left side of the crowd. Everyone raises up their coffee cups and bagel napkins. Splashes of coffee and white hands spurt outta the crowd and then when it hits the right side it goes back and everyone puts up two hands. White cups reach higher. Jacob starts running across the stage to follow it. When it hits the left wall again everyone puts breakfast down and throws their tan hands up higher, higher. The Shepherd’s Herd goes into this big finale and everyone starts cheering and clapping again.
“Thank you, thank you to The Herd. And thank you to all of you who decided to get outta bed this afternoon and come down here. Today we need to talk about something important to all of us. And if it’s not important to you now, well get ready. Because it will be. It’s something we all could learn to work on. And that is:”
“EGAIRRAM,” the screen says.
“I know some of you are probably thinking you are too young to think about…” he keeps the microphone to his face and looks up at the screen. “Sorry, that’s not supposed to be a word puzzle. Jacob? Could you…thank you. Okay. Much better. Where was I? Right, now I know that some of you are probably thinking you are too young to think about marriage. But when you get to be my age, you’ll wish you had thought about it a lot more. And it’s important to God too. That’s why God mad two of the ten commandments about marriage. Don’t commit adultery. Don’t covet your neighbor’s wife. Two out of ten. That’s two out of ten. Now, back when I was just a poor divinity school dropout waiting tables in Big Sur, I thought twenty percent was a good tip.” Yuk, yuk, chuckle McChuckles. “And the way I see it, God is giving us all a good time by telling us how important marriage is. Because marriage prepares you for a relationship with God.” He takes a big swig off water from an expensive bottle. “And I can tell who’s married in the audience because your eyes just bugged out. What? Heaven is harder than marriage?” He doesn’t use the authority voice, or really anything in particular. He sounds like someone who’s tryna impersonate their dog.
“Before I left fifth Methodist of Newport Beach, I wanted my whole congragation to know something, but they weren’t ready to hear it in church. There people go to church so that their neighbors can take attendence. They don’t want to lead a better life. They want everyone to see what they put in the college plate, multiply it by ten, and know how much money they made that week. Now. I do not want to knock our brother’s and sister’s in Christ. But I will tell you one thing. Attendence is always higher on Christmas and Easter, but the only two Sundays that could top them in Newport beach are the ones that follow memorial day and labor day.” He sits there on a stool like my ole history teachers, knowing he has a secret to tell us.
A pocket secret. One we can hold on to. One he’ll give us if we promise to pay attention. “And do you know why they all flock to church right after Christmas, Easter, Memorial Day and Labor Day?”
A big question mark pops up on the screen. Then Jacob adds the holidays.
“Actually, let me see if you can guess. Is it A) Because they don’t want to go to hell?” A picture of a building burning hops up on the screen. “B) Because they still get to sleep in one more day that week?” The flames come off and there’s a cartoon of someone snoring in an armchair with the newspaper on this stomach. “C) Because they love our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ extra on those weeks?” The man gets replaced by that Jesus poster they had up in the lobby.
“Now please hold on a second. Let me finish. Let me finish. You have four choices. A) B) C) or…” Jesus goes away and Jacob puts up a picture of a woman in four panels, each in a different season, each in a different dress. “D) To show off their new outfits.”
“If you said C)” one corner of the crowd cheers. “You’re just trying to suck up. No! Just kidding! I had you there for a second, though…” Pastor P. looks down at Jacob and he puts up a faded Xerox of a newspaper article. “This chart comes from the fall Fashion preview of USA Tomorrow. As you can see in the first part, most of the high end designers already have two seasons of designs ready. They just crank them out at the proper time. But according to this graph,” he tries to point to it with his shadow. Little stacks of shopping bags represent some big number of dollars spent on clothes. “The four biggest shopping weeks are right before we have the most people hearing the Lord’s word.”
Shock and outrage team up and bounce through the crowd.
“And I don’t know if that blows you away like it blows me away. But that says something about the people who follow our Lord and Savior. The big J.C. But everytime I see my friends out, and they see I’ve got on a new shirt, or notice someone not wearing sandals anymore or white or when I see my wife has a new purse, I know I am going to get a call from my brothers in Christ at Fifth Methodist of Newport Beach. And they say, Hey Pastor Pablo, I’ve been praying for you.” He puts on this real peach-pie voice, all sweet and fruity. “They always say that, like I owe them something. Like, Hey Pastor Pablo, I prayed for you when your brother lost his job and how he’s got one. I wanna say, Look, thanks, just send me the bill. But they call me, and they try and butter me up. Well, Easter is just around the corner.” He’s prolly one of those guys who watches the late comedy shows and then wakes his wife up to repeat the jokes. He loves this moment, standing there while the whole crowd waits for him to finish a goddam sentence. “Like I don’t know that.” Guts burst. “Like I don’t have a calendar or—or five dishes of jelly beans my house. Like I don’t know when Easter is. But I know. I can feel it coming like I can feel Memorial Day coming. I just know I’m going to get this call, Well, Easter is just around the corner. And we always have a few extra souls in the pews. So I was wondering if maybe you could find someone to fill in for you at…at uh..The First Church of Junior High… And we would love it if you could come down and help with communion.” Outrage and shock continue their game of Marco Polo.
Ellen pulls out her checkbook and scrawls something out, then she hands her brother fifty buck and gives me twenty. We talk in church eyes: Are you sure? She widens her soft eyes back at me, Of course. “But they do not understand why I left. I have told them dozens of times. I have shown them these graphs. And they do not believe me when I say that Pastor P. will always stick with the Church of the Little Wave, where we seeks to glorify Jesus Christ, not Thom Marcus!” The cheers built up while he spoke. By the end he had to yell louder and louder as the cheers stirred guts of the auditorium. Even me, a little bit. And I never heard a sermon before. Mom’s church doesn’t have pastors. People just get up toward the end of the service and talk about time they got sick and what Bible passages they read until they felt better. Mostly old people stand up. The feeble kind who look like they could use an extra cane. My son made me go to the doctor and they said the cancer would take over my entire stomach in six months. Dad used to call it an Organ Recital.
“And that is a roundabout way of telling you something that the people at Fifth Methodist may never be ready to hear,” he signals to someone in the back with a head nod. “Sorry. Before we go any further. This is a friendly reminder that DJ Adam Acolyte will be spinnin’ the collection plate in a few minutes. So get your checks ready. Please make them out to Cash.” Someone changes the slide to a big picture of a piggy bank. “And what they may never be ready to hear in church is this—getting back to marriage now. My wife and I have seriously great sex.”
Hampshire’s eyes widen. I don’t know if I believe what I just heard.
“Isn’t that right honey?”
“Oh yes, baby,” she hollers from the front row.
“That’s right,” his face lights up with another one of his joke farts that he can’t hold in. “That’s what she was screaming last night.” He walks back over to the water bottle and takes a sip, waiting for everyone to stop laughing. The puritan museum in our town has an old stick with one metal end and one end with a feather poking out. If girls fell asleep in church, they tickle them awake. If men snored they knocked ‘em upside the head. Pastor P. does both instead.
“I mean it. Every day, pretty much. Sometimes we hold what she like to call the Midnight Mass, which is a killer if we’re gonna have a little Sunrise Service. If we could get this auditorium space later in the day I would. Because the only place I would rather be on Sunday mornings is in bed with that woman right there. We have been married for five years and it is still getting better. I hope I did not make anyone uncomfortable. In fact, I know I did. But I think sex is like prayer. Most of us do it in private and we need it to keep our lives happy. But we never talk about the joy if it.” Two rows up I see five surfer guys writing down everything he says, checking with each other for exact quotes. “The more we love each other, the more we love loving each other. But you know how it is not always going to be perfect. In fact, at our wedding, my uncle pulled me aside and said, Enjoy it while it lasts, kid. He’s been married three times, so he thinks he’s some kind of expert. But he said, Enjoy it while it lasts before you start fighting about every little thing. And I did not know what he meant by that. But then we were about half way to Monterey for our honeymoon and we had our first fight. I am sure it was about something stupid, but I just wanted to turn around right there and drive back to Fifth Methodist before they filed out papers. I did. I really did. But before we got to our bed and breakfast, she pulled over and said to me, Baby, we need to start off right. If we’re going to lay together, we have to pray together. And we asked God for guidance. And we talked about our problems. In the end it was a misunderstanding. They always are, and we made up. And that’s how God works. Sometimes I find myself with all of these bills to pay and a junior high to fill and I wonder, My God, my God. Why have you forsaken me? Why didn’t you send me to Law School? Why didn’t you give me rich parents so I could give my kids a good home? Send them to nice schools? But learning to understand each other is essential to your marriage and vital to your relationship to God. I see a lot of you with notepads our right now, and if you take away one thing from today, go ahead and write this down.”
The screen interrupts him and says, “PASTOR P.’S GUIDE TO GREAT SEX AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD.”
“Thank you, Jacob. Number one.”
“1) Pray”
“When you pray you ask for God’s forgiveness, you unload your concerns, and you affirm for both of you, how deep and profound your love is. If you did this with your spouse every morning and night, you will have a hard time staying out of your bedroom when you get home. Put it this way, if you listen to me today, you’ll be spending a lot of time on your knees. Number two!”
“2) Remain Faithful.”
“If you think you can pray to God and Lucifer without hurting anyone, including yourself, then by all means stare at everyone else’s butts on the beach and fool around with whomever you want. But if you desire to wise up, you will devote yourself entirely. Number three!”
“3) Reconcile”
“Admit when you’re wrong, and be ready to give out forgiveness. Our Shepherd would leave his flock of ninety-nine if only to save one of us. And if you have got ninety-nine problems in a day and you drop them all to make up and come together again, both God and your spouse will understand, acknowledge, and appreciate it. Remember this: making up almost makes the fight worth it. Almost. Number four!”
“4) Take care of each other.”
“Jesus said that whatsoever you do unto the least of my bretheren you do unto me also. You need to make sure that both of you have your basic needs and that you know you can count on each other. God needs your dollars to power the churches and buy Bibles and pay for lowly pastors so their kids can go to Cabo. Everybody got their money ready?” The crowd, knowing what to do, somehow, holds their checks and bills in the air. “Now give me a double wave!” He holds his arms out to each side of the auditorium and everyone raises their money, one row after another from each end. The two waves crash in the middle.
“Wipe out!” he beams down on his flock. “Okay, now that we all know you can afford this, I want you to put your checks in your pockets. And by the time I see you on the beach today, I want to hear what you did with it. Give it to a homeless guy. Mail it to a charity. I don’t care. But don’t tell me about the great new outfit you bought and how happy it makes you to strut around in it.” The reverb of the microphone rings through the room. He finishes his bottle of expensive water, crushes the plastic and puts the wad on top of a stack of his papers. “Now. Please join me in welcoming back The Shepherd’s Herd.”
To recap: At the start of my last semester of college I was working at the oldest restaurant in the county. It folded and I got a job as a research assistant. The local coffee shop felt bad for the restaurant closing and hired me. Then I graduated and worked as a bartender in Chicago. For two days I was that annoying guy handing out flyers on the street because bartending was only three days a week. Then I picked up another job handing out chapstick for American Express, but by the time I got hired at American Express and started bartending I got a waitering job (which was what I wanted in the first place). Then I kept all the jobs except American Express (insert hand motion of male masturbation) when I started DJ'ing at a bar down the street. Two months out of college and I already made more money than most of my professors and was buying organic groceries with foodstamps.
A month later--on one long friday morning--I quit bartending, got fired from my waitering job an hour later and had a DJ friend take over for me.
I moved to New York and picked up freelance work at my old newspaper job. I poured champaigne for a gallery openning, started as the midnight bartender at a glorified diner, and then guarded precious sixteeth-century artifacts from a folding chair in a gallery three days a week. During the election I wrote for a newspaper in Liverpool, UK. Annie got a job as a server at a bed-themed restaurant and they hired me as a host. I took the job hoping it would lead to bartending. But, turns out, it has only lead to headaches, annoyances, and six-am rides home on the subway, wishing that I--like anyone sane person who spends hours and hours in a club with colored lighting--was on drugs so I'd have the excuse.
And yesterday I got hired at a British university, doing organizing and office bullshit. It pays better than any job I have right now, but that's still two dollars an hour less than my job with American Express (which was by far my least favorite).
That's fifteen jobs in the last year. Do you have any idea how long it's going to take me to do my taxes?
I've owned four cellphones in four years. They always die of some lame reason that should not make them obsolete. My first one lost the battery. A replacement cost ninety dollars. I bought another on ebay for half that. It in turn left me behind. My brother then switched to a Nextel and gave me a brand new, full-color, whiz-bang cellphone. At the time I felt like a dick because I lived in Ohio and only ever used my phone to see how many messages Ben left me. I didn't know that I would spend the rest of my year in Chicago and New York where I would witness phone technology in the streets before it could even be advertized to me.
My telephone--which can show my photographs, movie times, stock reports, my work schedule, and the phone numbers of all the people I never call even though I went to college with them--died friday somehow because a small brass pin that connects my charger to my phone snapped. Anyway, this is why I got this message three days late.
"Hi, Brendan, this is Shana, I'm the executive producer of Judge Joe Brown in Los Angeles. I'm calling in reguards to you books. If you have time please call me..."
David Sedaris on love, Chicago, and matching luggage. "...We were together for six years, and when we finally broke up I felt like a failure, a divorced person. I now had what the self-help books called relationship baggage, which I would carry around for the rest of my life. The trick was to meet someone with similar baggage, and form a matching set, but how would one go about finding such a person? Bars were out; I knew that much. I’d met my first boyfriend at a place called the Man Hole—not the sort of name that suggests fidelity. It was like meeting someone at Fisticuffs and then complaining when he turned out to be violent." From "Old Faithful" in this month's New Yorker.
These are all the books that I care to remember right now. The rest were sold to someone in Chicago, probably Oprah, and will remain as unappreciated by them as they were by me.
I can easily remember author phases: Zadie Smith, Nick Hornby, Dave Eggers, Ahrudati Roy and recall three titles or so by each of them, but it's hard to remember which books I should have read for class and didn't, or which books I finished but wasn't wowed by. Also, I could only get a few images from powells.com out of the hundred I tried for. As such, the above graphic makes my reading tastes indicate that I am almost always on spring break from Radcliffe.
"Hi, can I ask you a complex question? Actually, I guess it's a short monologue with a follow-up question, which isn't really a question, but more of a favor."
"What?"
"I just found out my subletters sold about two hundred of my books and--"
"Jesus Christ." Our love of possessions binds us.
"Right, and I've decided to accept that. But I was just calling to see if maybe you had my copy of Ulysses. It's generic, grey, the title is written in blue boldface with a red square background." Same with most things, I had no idea I actually gave a shit about these--in fact, I've scoffed as book-trophy collectors before--until they were gone. Who knew I could picture one book in such detail.
"I'll check right now..." She goes and I think warmly of the months I spent in class not comprehending that text. I thought about James Joyce going through his different drafts. It took me all summer to admit the mistakes I needed to correct in my draft. And it took my class--at an incredible nerdy and surprisingly popular event--28 straight hours to read the entire text. But imagine writing like he did and working with a copy editor. [..no, goddamit, the newspaper will be called The Freeman's Urinal when people SAY it, not when it's written in conversation. And by chapter three Mr. Bloom is not wearing at 'hat' anymore, now it's just a 'ha'. You see? Not a ha--, not a ha_. Got it?...] "...No, I'm really sorry. You could try and check back later. We're always pulling stuff out from the back. Do you know when the books were sold?"
"I don't even know that. But is there any way you could tell me how many were bought?"
"Even if you knew the date, quantity, and price paid, that's all I could ever tell you."
Last night I decided I should consider accepting that I'll never see four years of literature again. Annie and I had a big day at our new job and I was in the middle of a great, great novel. The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, which is a beautiful movie, is actually not that wonderful of a book. The author died when he got to the end, and I spent alot of time yesterday thinking about how my life would be right now if I had mailed out my project when I thought it was done two drafts ago.
The text reads like an adult pretending to be a kid. I think one more draft would have rearranged things and maybe come out with a better structure like the movie. The part that really keeps me going is that it's set in Savannah, GA, which is where I'd spend the rest of my life if they ever teach the population there how to read.
Then we watched O Brother, Where Art Though?, which I hadn't seen since freshman year of college. Everyone I knew back then recommended it to me, but I was not yet capable of understanding how fucking fantastic that movie is. And I probably wasn't until I took a class on Ulysses. I went to bed happy, thinking about all I had done in Southern literature for the day between the Coen brothers and the altar boys. Excuse the Bukowski impersonation: but it made me feel good like when I drink nice whiskey and cheap beer together.
But then as soon as I got in bed I imagined my copy of Ulysses, coated in my own personal notes, marginalia, and interpretations, wasting away on the floor of someone's studio apartment in Chicago, after they bought it for three dollars at the used book store. And if they don't get it--and why should they, no one does--they could go back there and buy it's companion: The Gifford Guide to Ulysses, which is covered with coordinating notes.
Prologue More than once, as an English Major, I listened politely as someone told stories of lost books. Fires, floods, emigration. "...and the only thing left was a copy of Tolstoy in the basement."
Chapter 1. "Have you seen my books?" I say for the twentieth time while I'm cleaning out my old apartment. Remember the time I left Chicago for a week and ended up moving out instead? I went back to get a few things the other day, but I couldn't find anything.
"Try the basement." We had sublet our apartment to some people and I was supposed to move anyway, so it wasn't a big deal. When we struck the deal with them it was just to take over the remaining nine months of the lease. We all thought at that time that we would move back in next may. I left some books on my shelves and clothes in the closet. Hardly the ideal situation for the subletters, and I appologized whenever possible. I heard everyone had a bitch of a time moving my stuff around, so I saved up some money, thinking I would buy them all pizza for safeguarding my belongings.
"That's what everyone says. But I can't find them. I only found one book." I only found one book down there. Great Expectations of all things. It's under Dave's old molding futon, covered in basement dirt. Some of my books turn up around the house. Just the bullshit ones that people like to keep on their shelves: David Sedaris, Sherman Alexie, Woody Allen. My friend and formet roommate Drew
(What I don't bother mentionting is that I've been checking everyone's rooms for my stuff. I found a few books. Some of the girls are wearing my sweaters--now is that necessary?)
Chapter 2.
Another girl comes home to my old apartment, her home now. "Would my books be in another place in the house? A closet?" I don't want them right now. I want to have them eventually. I'm a judgemental person and a recovering dumbfuck. I need to keep books around me in alphabetical order so that I'll remember that I went to college. I mean, what if a literary agent blows a tire while I've lost my voice and my printer's down? I could invite them in and allow them to marvel at my shelves. Behold! My impeccable taste! Clearly I'm in the works of something great! "And my DVDs? And come to think of it. My CDs?" Even now that I'm broke, I buy a used book at least once a week for three dollars up the street.
It's pretty much all I've ever blown my money on.
"Alright, I mind as well tell you. We sold your books when we moved in. We didn't think you wanted them any more. Some of your DVDs too."
"What?" I think of all the traveling I've done in my life. There's always a point at the end where I've read books, where I've bought travel books, and where I lug them home. I can remember moments like this. I bought A Heartbreaking Work at school in England. I bought The Great Gatsby at an English used bookstore in Prague. Vernon God Little for the ride to Florida on Spring Break. I think of how many times I've read High Fidelity while ignoring relationship trouble. I know this is nerdy. That's why I do it in private. "Where?"
"I don't really know, I didn't do it."
Chapte 3. I must look like I'm about to cry because she offers me sixty dollars. "We got it for dogsitting, but you could have it." The bills in her hand would cover maybe one book, one DVD, and one CD. Then I think of the text books, the hours I spent in summers saving up to buy books for school. And then I get upset because when I lived there, they never paid us for dogsitting. "I don't know how much money he got. I'm sorry. We didn't know you wanted them."
Indulge me, the devil of self-righteousness is taking over:
a- Okay, let's say you move into a house for a temporary period. The house has bad furtniture, cheap kitchenware, and the walls aren't even fully painted. But there's one hundred and fifty books in alphabetical order. Place these possessions in relative importance to the person involved.
b- Nevermind. Maybe you honestly beleive that someone would be OCD enough to alphabetize their books and CDs that they didn't care about. Okay, but you already pulled his clothes out of a basement closet. We can put those in another dirty part of the basement. Now, wait. I'm confused. "It was confusing." She keeps saying. Poor girl. She's clearly not the one to blame. But seriously. If you were confused, maybe would you kinda, possibly, send an email or make a phone call to figure out the situation?
c- Okay, forget about that. Forget about. that. In the basement is trashbags full of other things: clothes. Suits. Would you take what clothing you wanted and just dump the rest in the basement? I mean. A guy could make a few more dollars selling used clothing in Wicker Park.
"But my...have you seen my suit? I bought a grey suit in England. It was in a closet in the basement."
"I don't know what to tell you," she says. "We put everything in the basement and people took what they wanted."
1) In order to keep my news-whoreness to a minimum, I started another page just for politics. It's called fair fight. The name comes from a non profit group I invtented one day while bored at work in Chicago, back when I thought I would be in Florida for the fall, registering people to vote. Go there every day. All day. I'm working on it with a conservative whom I find intelligent.
2) My new bartending job is terrible. If I could figure out words to explain why it's terrible I would, especially if I could think of one funny story.
3) My favorite part of October is the annual revivification of the song "The Monster Mash."
4) Pete, employed and frequent reader of this site, told me about how he works for The Brooklyn Superher@ Supply Co and now I volunteer there two days a week. It's a genius creation of McSweeney's, 826 NYC, and the mind of one graphic designer. To raise money for our drop in tutoring program for kids we sell masks, truth serum, anti-matter, helium-gum, x-ray glasses, invisibility potion, and capes (which you can test on the superfan). It's the only job I can imagine where I can have this conversation:
me: Okay, the thing about the fog machine is that you're always going to have to keep it full or else it will clog up. You know how a carburator works? It's like that, the weakest part will go first so it's hard to ruin it.
boss: How long will it take to fill the room? 'Cause we have that One-Day Villians-Only sale on Halloween. Do you know where we can get a lot of frozen brussel sprouts for the villains to give away? Also, do you have a good villain costume?
me: I'm gonna have to work on that for now.
boss Good.
My hometown is half beautiful New England farmtown and half ugly-ass, Tim-Burton-inspiring, suburban parking lot land. And living in rural Ohio, Delaware, Chicago, and Brooklyn makes me wonder which half I miss most.
What if I just didn't work again until after I finished editting? I've done sixty pages since I left Chicago. Sixty brand-new page. I didn't even do one in Chicago.
Normally when I find something I wrote when I was seventeen I want to burn it so no one, including me, will know how hard I worked at being a complete loser. It could be worse. I could be almost twenty-three and have a personalized license plate that says HENDRX.
Even so, I wrote this letter to Toyota when I was seventeen, hoping that instead of taking my piece of shit car across the country, that a large multi-national corporation would just give me a car and then have me tell them how it rides.
The weird part is that now, five years later, I'm editting the final few hundred pages of a fiction project based on the trip. And, without knowing it or without having ever left Connecticut (except for Massachussetts, noted below) I summed up the whole thing in this letter, which, to my own embarassment, is unaltered:
Dear Toyota,
I have read with great interest over the past year the upcoming release of the first mass-produced hybrid engine. I have been a lifelong Toyota fan and I currently drive a 1989 Corolla. After graduation this spring, I am taking my blue machine from coast to coast to coast with a friend of mine.
We are going to start by dipping the back tires into the Long Island sound via boat launch, and we are heading West from there, with the intentions of dipping our front tires into the Pacific ocean. On the way we will stop in New York, Ohio, Michigan, Chicago, the Mississippi River, Kansas, Colorado, Utah, possibly Montana, Washington, Oregon and California. On the way home we want to see Las Vegas, parts of the south, and Graceland. A large focus of our trip will be the different rock climbing spots, including all of the major national parks. This will include Yosemite, Yellowstone, Garden of the Gods, the Grand Canyon, and countless others.
Our major goal of this trip is economy. We would like to spend as little as possible on food and gas. In fact, to ensure this, we bought stoves for the trip that can run on unleaded gasoline. Any routine car maintenance such as oil, lights, plugs, and minor parts will be taken care of by the two of us. Our diet will consist of the basics, Ramen noodles, Spaghetti-Os, peanut butter, and Oatmeal. Every couple of stops we will lay back in a restaurant and talk with the locals, and see what we can learn from each other. On our last trip, we made a new friend at the campsite next to us. His name is Sean and together we talked about the strangest things: The Beat Generation, the Ex-patriots of the 1920's, Salvador Dali, Thoreau, Emerson, Niche, and what he calls the "Rainbow Colonies" which we would call "hippie communes". There are a lot of truly interesting people out there whom you would never meet if your did not leave Connecticut, and we are setting out to meet all of them.
On our way home from that last trip we saw a hybrid car in front of us in the toll booth line on the Mass Pike near I-84. People in the lines next to her were rolling down the windows with questions and she was glad to answer them. It got me wondering: could Toyota be interested in a lengthy test drive of her newest brainchild? Wouldn't she be interested to know how it handles in the Salt flats of Utah after the hilly terrain of Colorado? What would the people of Montana have to say about the new car in town? What kind of questions would they have for us in Mississippi? What would other earth conscious young people like myself think of the car when it pulled up to Yosemite?
And so my question for you is: would you be interested in being the featured car of our trip and finding out how it does is all different parts of our great country?
It took me forever to get foodstamps this time. Unlike last time. Part of me feels bad, not for the government beause, well, damn the man, but for getting foodstamps in the first place. I have resources, I have a college degree, I have a laptop. I just don't have any money. Now that I'm in New York, I could probably get some sell-out office job filing or typing or whatever. It would just mean giving up every dream I've ever had.
"What's this?" After five hours waiting in line, finishing Fight Club they give me an interview.
"It's my Chicago ID."
"Ain'tchew got a New York license?"
"No, I just moved here. Friday. I lost my job and I was on my way here for a visit and I was supposed to move out of my apartment..." In the staged version of my life, this would be the awkward openning scene exposition to explain why I'm in Brooklyn.
"Do you have a lease to prove this is your address?"
"No, I don't have an apartment."
"Pay stub?"
"I don't have a job."
"What are you living off of? Savings? Do you have proof of savings?" Finally, something I've brought with me. I hand her the receipt from the ATM this morning. "Three hundred and seventy-nine dollars? Honey, you can't move anywhere with just three hundred and seventy-nine dollars." When an agent from the welfare office in downtown Brooklyn tells you you're in trouble, you're in trouble. She gets up from the desk and signs all of my forms. An hour later I'm in line at a different office with different screaming kids waiting to get on Emergency Releif.
The single reason that the American sociopath can fester from city to city is states rights. Every state has the right to organize themselves however they wish. So when you have a suspended license at the Department of Motor Vehicles in Connecticut, you're free to apply for a new one at the Secretary of State in Illinois. You have to do something really really bad to get caught in another state.
Right now I'm getting foodstamps in Chicago and New York City, only because Health and Human Services Illinois has nothing to do with Housing and Foodstamps of Brooklyn.
Message one, from The Job I Just Quit "Look, Brendan, you know what? If you haven't left yet, don't even bother coming in, okay? Just forget it." I was on my way to New York to see Ben and Dave's show at Bard and to help Annie move in to Brooklyn. I've also been horribly depressed trying to imagine my winter without the three of them. TJIJQ had me scheduled until 8 PM, after which I thought I'd go to New York (asixteen hour drive).
I got my car fixed: new oil, new gas, new air filter. I even bought iPod speakers so I'd have something to listen to on my way.
At two, I drove to The Job I Still Thought I Had to see when I would have to come back from my trip. I was hoping Saturday (today) at least Friday. If I didn't have to work until at least friday then I could see Ben, Dave, and Annie.
Everyone acts like I should wait around for the manager to come in. "Nah, it's alright. I'll just call in later."
"No, no, he'll be busy then. Just wait."
When he arrives, I'm getting great tips on how to be a bigger asshole from Vice Magazine. "Why don't we go downstairs?" He points to the guy cleaning the floors. "Let Jorge get his work done." It seems kind of dramatic to me, so I assume I've done something wrong. I assume that it's another stupid mistake so I can pretend to be sorry and come back and still be everyone's favorite.
"Do you remember the annoying old people who sat in 205 two weeks ago?"
"Yeah, they weren't annoying. They were just old."
"Well, one of them called in yesterday saying that he checked his receipt and thought his bottle of wine was too expensive. And so we looked it up and he was right. The bottle on the check was the San Fluer and you brought them the Triennes Fluer. And you in effect charged them $48 for a $34 bottle of wine. We've refunded them the money. And..."
"I'm really sorry," I said. I'm really good at appologizing and making you think it was your fault in the end. It comes from being a little brother. "Here." I pulled out the cash left in my pocket. I didn't have exact change.
"No, keep it." He said.
"No, look, I made a mistake, I embarassed the restaurant, and I cost you money," you would have no idea--if you could only judge by my delivery--that I don't give a shit about any of that.
"It's not that, Brendan. I can't keep you here anymore. I mean, I know you just quit your other job to be here, but this is your second mistake and we can't keep you on like this anymore."
There's no reason to make this easy on someone who's singlehandedly ruining your life. "Well, yeah, except all my roommates moved out, my girlfriend moved out, and now I have to find a new apartment with no job. Plus, I mean, you guys are my fucking family."
What actually Happened: Five people in line behind me to punch in their orders at the computer. Busy night. I have a table of five sixty year olds from the suburbs. Cruely, someone awarded them a $250 gift certificate. They didn't want to eat anything raw, two of them said they didn't like fish.
"Christine, the computer's all yours if you can tell me which button is for the Triennes. Is it the SAN FLUER or the FLUER FLUER." Our computer was state of the art in 1995.
"SAN FLUER!" She points to it with her finger, I punch the button. The barback runs upstairs to get the bottle for me, when he comes back he has something else entirely. I run upstairs with the bottle and exchange it at the bar for the Triennes Fluer.
"Look, you're not losing anything but your job, okay?" He gets on a real soft voice, like he's worried I'm gonna freak out in a second. I have brief vignettes in my head of the entire restaurant staff walking into the bar where I DJ, fanning themselves with cash. Cut to me in the corner, pouring abandoned drinks and cough syrup into a pint glass looking for a buzz. "I'd be happy to write you a fantastic recommendation."
"Yeah, except the only place hiring is Small Bar," that's not even a made-up, weblog-redacted name, it's the bar openning up across the street. It's owned by the owner's boyfriend.
"I know a guy who's gonna bartend there., he'll put in a good word for you." He didn't get he joke.
I'll probably wonder about this for a couple of years, but so far I can't see a big difference. If I had to go home and pack my shit would I still have left Chicago? If I didn't already have the heavy stuff--turntables, computer, etc--in the trunk anyway, would I have left? If I hadn't gotten an oil change that day, I would have made it to TJIJQ and today I would arrive back in Chicago a week later and find out that I have no job, an apartment I can't afford.
The West End of Hartford really really wants to be Wicker Park sometimes. They have farmers markets, Thai food, and, you know, a coffee shop. Former Ghetto, movin' on up and all that. But sometimes when you walk through it, you get the feeling that maybe y--
"Eh!" Six gentlemen look of from their 40s as we pass their stoop. "Eh! Boy, what the matter? They didn't have any tighter pants at the store?" I look down at pants I'm wearing and remember thinking that they weren't actually tight enough, but no, they did not have any tighter pants in the store, nor did they have a tighter shirt like the one I had on--grey polo with a rainbow strip on the chest, if anyone cares.
They high-five to celebrate the genius of his statement. Tight pants! But could they have gotten tighter? No! (chuckle chuckle chuckle). We laugh too because, come on, white people love to be persecuted now and then. It's funny, and strange because you think that if--
"Jesus, fuck, man," an unrelated guy walks up to me and the stops to ridicule me as Robb and I pass. "Walkin' with your rainbow-ass shit on, faggot."
This is the letter I handed to my manager tonight at the end of my shift at my shitty bar.
Why I’m
Quitting the Cr@codile Lounge By Brendan
I just want everyone to know that I tried. Not very hard, but I tried. Everyday that I came to this place, I wanted everyone to feel like they could count on me. The first day I met Erik was my first lunch shift ever and he had eaten something that made him constipated, so I stayed on and worked sixteen hours straight. When you all the managers needed to work to open up the new restaurant, I wanted to give you the impression that I could take care of business while you were gone.
Montgomery told me about this place, about how they were hiring, when I went in to get my job interview haircut the first week I moved to Chicago. If I’d had more money on me, I would have gone to a place three blocks down and never met any of you, but Montgomery only charged twenty. You seem to always have one white guy on for few months at a time and I wanted you to feel like I was somehow different. White people love the possibility of getting discriminated against, so I found the opportunity oddly thrilling.
You all adopted me into your little family and I needed that, especially since I needed you all to hang out together at night so that I could make some money on occasion. When I got the job at the Sushi restaurant, I didn’t get paid for my first month and Erik came in early for me all the time so that I could leave and make no money in Wicker Park. But everyday I left here with some cash in my pocket and that kept me fed, it paid for my pain-killers, and eventually I got a work uniform.
Then on July forth everyone just started fucking up. The place began to loose its luster when I covered a whole week of days and everyone in downtown went to their lake houses and no one came in. Ernie and I sat around with our thumbs up eachothers asses all week watching TV. Everyday at about 2:30 I would fall asleep at table thirty-one and hope to wake up when we had customers. They started coming back the next week and that’s when the kitchen began to fuck up. Usually every order. Some table of nine would order five pizzas and I’d get them in categories as if the three people who ordered the Classic would rather have a slice of the two Goat Cheese pizzas that just came out while they wait fifteen more minutes to get theirs. Then there was the three weeks where every time someone ordered a Guiness Steak Sandwhich they’d get a Steak Salad and vice-versa.
Downtown is a city of morons who have nothing better to do that stand at the coffee machine and talk about where they went for lunch and how shitty the food was. They can only compare our restaurant to the relative speed of Applebees or whatever other bullshit place they think serves real food. For the first week I worked here everyone pretended to care about lunch. Autumn even had her street team hand out lunch menus. But then we opened a new restaurant.
Weeks ago I wanted to have a sit down with Corey and tell him some of the things I was thinking about and he couldn’t make it, and then we didn’t see eachother for a few weeks. I’m not quitting because Corey was too busy to give a shit about his least valuable player. If it was important, I would have called him. But I soon realized that you needed me to be the daily front man. Someone has to payout liquor and count how many frozen pizza crusts we got and someone has to answer the phone every time someone buys a new outfit and wants to know if it’s good enough for our dresscode. I told this to Kevin and he agreed that business was not good enough to expect me to work for free anymore and we worked out a provisional agreement. Ernie pretty much pays for himself by mixing cheap liquor into the good stuff, and I save the place money by being courteous, well dressed, and reliable when Kevin can’t be.
Am I late every single day? Yes. I learned quickly that I could come in at ten and remove Saran wrap and Windex the chicken grease off menus and then sit around for two hours before we did anything, or I could come in at ten fifteen or ten thirty and do the same, only get a bagel on the way in. No one every gave a shit or every told me they gave a shit.
I showed up fifteen minutes early when Kevin said I could probably have a raise. Knowing that you cared about me for the half hour I’m needed everyday meant a lot to me. Autumn keeps saying that she knows this place isn’t my “bread and butter” but seriously, I made more money at the Sushi place in the week I didn’t work here two days and I didn’t even pick up any extra shifts over there.
It’s not the money that keeps me here. I like joking around with Ernie and John. I like that they call me Waldo. I like Fridays best because I don’t have to rush off somewhere and do something else and instead I can sit on the coolers and dish with Erik and Justyna. I would have quit a long time ago, but I knew that the people I would screw over would be Justyna—who works too hard all year in school and here, and Erik—but more importantly Erik’s kids. The biggest reason I never left is because you guys gave me a job when I couldn’t even afford a haircut and you took care of me all summer. You pretended to care about me and Taya and Autumn even found jobs for my broke ass roommates. I actually thought for a while that Autumn and I would be really good friends. She was so much for to work for when I got here and she even got me another job with he marketing thing. But she has never really liked me ever since I stopped handing out chapsticks for her and American Express.
I love this job when I’m on a busy night and Erik and Justyna and I can just float by one another and go from domestic to imported beers. I love on Fridays at four o’clock when Ernie wonders where the Mexican boys are because he always says, “Yo, where da Amigos at?” My favorite Monday every was when it got slow enough to Mark to close the kitchen and him, me, and that loud guy who writes for the defender watched the democratic convention together. Every time Bill Clinton said something good, that guy bought me and Mark and shot saying, Now that’s my mutherfucker!
I’ve never quit a job before or gotten fired. I got suspended once at a coffee shop, but that’s because I closed the store three hours early so that I could see Hank Williams III perform. I still don’t regret that.
I’ve never broken up with anyone either, for that matter. Usually I wait until I have to leave for another job or move or got back to school. But I can’t stay in this dysfunctional family forever. We’ve got Corey and Kevin for parents and none of us want to piss either of them off and everything would be fine if they could just agree on some goddam rules or if they could agree to whom they should defer. Every time I’ve gotten in trouble, I haven’t been slyly doing something wrong, I’ve been doing something that someone told me was okay, or that we had a meeting about and then gotten shit for it. Then there’s Alan, the ineffective step-father who doesn’t like to tell you what to do to the point that it’s weird and annoying when he tries to. Then there’s Autumn and she’s just the bossy older sister who thinks she should be the parent.
So please find someone new. Find someone new soon. Find someone so that Erik doesn’t have to be away from his kids and Justyna doesn’t have be there all day when she should be in school.
Brendan
And after all of that the manager sat with me for an hour while I got to tell him every single way they fuck up every day, and he promised that no one would see the letter other than the owner. Goddamit.
So the answer is maybe. Tonight, if you're not doing anything, you can come to Inn J@y in Wicker Park and come see my DJ tryout. If you come and you drink and you tell everyone how my you like my music, I'll buy you something sometime. Swear to god.
This pretty much sums up my life. Talking to a woman today who had done alot of work in film, alot of movies you've seen and documentaries you've heard of being on Discovery.
"Wow, that's what's cool about living in Chicago," I said. "You can do that stuff. My only claim is that my hometown is where they made The Patriot Missile."
Sometimes when I'm bored or when I've had a bad day or a bad week, I like to pretend I'm on vacation. Today after work, I didn't have exact change for the bus, so I decided to walk to get my iPod fixed on Michigan Avenue. On the way I walked by the new Millenium Park, which, although I should think it is lame and a waste of money considering how impossible it is to travel on noncontiguous busses and trains, is really something great. It's a digital waterfall for kids to play in and a giant silver jelly bean.
It made me happy to see the kids play in the water. When we were kids, my mother used to bring my brother and I to Boston with her for Christian Scientist events, and I remember watching all the other kids play in a big fountain in downtown. I don't remember ever playing in it myself, but then again, I was a complete pussy when I was a kid.
Then I saw a sign: "Take The Shopping Trolley!" I sat on a planter in one of those antisceptic/nature-bandaid sidewalk spots in downtown and read White Noise by Don Delillo. I sat with other tourists and waited for a crappy bus to approach. The Shopping Trolley has different rules than the bus. You can talk to people. You can ask them where they're from, what they're doing. I learned, for example, that for $8/person a person can bring their whole family to Chicago from Grand Rapids Michigan and ride the Amtrak.
I'm going to say that it's gas prices or something else that will make me sound in touch, but every day the busses and trains and trolleys and bikelanes and scooter seats in my city get fuller. And everyday the transit comes less frequently.
If you call in the next ten minutes you'll be my hero. (I have no idea what this timestamp will be, but it's about seven minutes til eight in Chicago, according to my computer).
Today at the DMV, I realized while I was in line that I didn't have enough money to pay for my license. Two dollars short. I called my roommate who was nearby and we eventually worked out that he would go to the ATM and I would pay him back $21.25 (with service fee). Cautiously--for lack of auto insurance--I drove home, coughing from a lung infection that will be there until my white blood cells take care of it. Not only do I not have health insurance, but no one who looks like me that I know has health insurance, so I can't even scam my way out of this infection. On the way to work my train pass ran out and I had to buy a $2 card for a $1.75 trip, which was the last two dollars I had. Chicago is on vacation, so I only made $8 tonight, plus $20 in wages. Meaning that I only have enough to pay my roommate back and take the train to work in the morning.
I'm sick of being broke, but I would never want any other job and I don't want to have to move to Canada just so I can afford to have a lung infection and go back to work. Also, a sick-day would be fucking awesome.
There's a lot of things I've been meaning to tell you, but I lost my notebook and now I can't remember how to spell any of those things. If you're in the Chicago area, be on the lookout for a small black notebook. Then start your own website where you just keep posting the things I've written down in my notebook. Then give me the address. Seriously, it'll save me alot of time.
The mysteries of life have been slowly unfolding to me in the past few weeks. Among them:
Why have children when you could have furniture?
Why do people get married and why to people think they get married.
I have long imagined myself aging childless and with alternating company. If you asked me about it I would probably say something about the world being overpopulated or about my inability to discipline or of how I really "just married to my work."
If you asked my brother about it he would probably tell you that a kitchen mishap had rendered me both infertile and impotent. And I can't decide which I'd rather have members of my consider me: a selfish asshole with great furniture or a eunuch.
My new life in Chicago is full of surprisingly (for me) compassion moments. The bar was packed on sunday night. I didn't stop making drinks, even for a second, from 12:30 to 4:00 in the morning. It's a hip hop club, I don't know if we've been through this. And it's too-loud at all times. You have to order by yelling directly into my ear canal.
"How much is a bottle of water?" a bouncer asks me.
"You can just have it, you work here."
"It's not for me. It's for an ole lady."
I look over to the crowd of dudes waving their hands in the air, as if they don't care, and see an eighty year old man. He's the only other white person in the bar and his silver hair makes him stand out even more. I gave him the bottle for free because it's easy to be nice with somone elses money. And I thought about him all night. ABout how when he was my age, he met a girl, probably this girl, and decided that he really wanted to sleep with her. But somewhere in the back of his mind he knew that someday she's get old. And he'd get tired. And one of them would get sick, and the other would have to do things for the other.
He probably fought in a war somewhere, but I know that the scariest thing he did that week was teeter into my bar and recon a bottle of water for the girl he met when he was my age.
Posts like this are mostly meant for me to read when I'm old and can't remember how I ended up that way.
It's Two Dollar Tuesdays. Two-dollar appetizers. Tonight J. Fox from Def Jam and New Edition from Badboy were supposed to perform. That should impress you if you are as cool as I think I am. My bar is essentially the bar from Ludacris videos. Fancy drinks, handshakes, mixtapes.
Last week on tuesday we had to close it down because there was too much weed-smoking and far too much dice rolling. This week some guy, in search of wings after the kitchen closed, tried to get them from a waitress's chest. Security throws people out for spilling drinks. But they didn't do anything. There's certain people they never touch (read: gang hot-shots).
They compromised by throwin just the one guy out. And when he went to get his friend, the man who did end up getting some wings, he pretended not to know him so that his night could continue. Then the fisticuffs began. First in the bar, then on the street. The offending gentleman walked home alone with a bruises that made him look like the elephant man. And he must have to retire a heretofore perfectly fine Rocawear shirt.
Before everyone even got out the door, security began fighting with the managers. "Look, mutherfucker, you can't tell me what I should have done or shouldn't have done when you don't have to go home to it."
The elders in the club started to sound like the third act of a Wayans brothers movie. "Mmm hmm, our own worst enemy. Did the white dude start shit? No. We too busy fighting ourselves."
But what matters most is that I worked from 10 this morning til 2 AM and I made the money that will make my first official Chicago-wages rent payment. Brendan wins.
Walking out of the Fahrenheit 9/11 I got a sensation somewhere between liberal-guilt and anger that reminded me that I'm really not doing shit for anyone right now. There was a time when I worked for a Human right's group in Chinatown, Manhatten. For several months I corresponded with Mumia's wife. We even called eachother on 9/11 just to check in.
But then again, Michael Moore is doing more than I ever could, and this country's still going to hell.
If you don't worship Michael Moore on some minor scale, then atleast worship me and Ben. When we were in high school and in trouble, he wrote about us on his website and then later for the underground newspaper we ran. I said the previous statement just to make myself sound cool. This next part is just to be an asshole:
from:MMFlint@aol.com
To:sullivanb Subject:
RE: ABOUT SPEAKING AT KENYON COLLEGE NEXT SPRING
Urgent New
brendan - would love to come, just dont know schedule yet...
hey can i write about your getting kicked off school paper for my next book? send details!!
mike
If you own Stupid White Men he interviewed me for the section on student media (p. 117). And it ended up being a bunch of unattributed advice on how to gain crebility by being funny, how to do a professional job, and basically how not to include drawings of unfavorable teachers with needles in their veins and skulls and crossbones for faces.
The best part about his movies is that people talk. The ill-informed become better informed and then later inform the underinformed when talking to them. I'm not sure if it can turn a hard core conservative into a vague centrist. But if you're a republican living in the Chicago area, I would love to watch that movie with you and hear what you think. I won't even make jokes about the poverty line which you've created and which I live below. I won't mention foodstamps or minimum wage or anything.
But I will be honest in telling you that I'm forwarding my subscription to VIBE Magazine to Florida so that it may be used as proof of address when I go there to vote in November.
Lately I've come to realize that everyone I know has been mugged and I'm statistically on my way. Today at work I freestyled an entire mugging story to a woman who was relating a story to me about getting her jewlery stolen.
"See, when I got mugged--"
"You got mugged too?"
"Yeah, but I said, Look, you can have my wallet and all my cash. I'll even give you my cellphone. But there's a notebook in my bag and some edits that I can't write again, both of which are worthless to you and I need them."
"And they let you get away with that? Was this at gunpoint? See, cause I was robbed and they hit me in the face with a pistol and stole the charm bracelet that my gramma gave me a week before she died. When I came to I found my boyfriend on the lawn in his underwear. They stole his Adidas tear-away pants."
Cut to me getting off at the wrong bus stop and therefore walking to the wrong liquor store. We live on the line between former-ghetto and ghetto-ghetto. The two liquor stores are owned by the same family. One has bullet-proof glass, which is where I was.
On the way out a gentleman with receeding gum lines started talking to me. People in Chicago, at least in the summer, speak to one another more than they do in New York, especially if it may garner them any spare change or a cigarette. He's about fifty:
"Yo, welcome to the neighborhood, man. You walking home?"
"Yeah...I mean no, I'm, uh..." I have most of my shift pay on me, which is intended to buy me turntables.
"Brah, you got a square for me?" (square=cigarette in Chicago)
"Yeah." Somehow smoke-inhalers' solidarity wins me friends.
"You got any money on you?" I look down the street and it just so happens that when I imagined the story from part one (above) it happened in a place like this. Dark, semi-residential, semi-abandoned. He looks me up and down and looks in my man purse which contains little more than a sushi menu and flashcards with names of fish scrawled in Sharpie.
A guy I don't know walks up the street towards us. "Yo, man, how you been? Haven't seen you in a while." We do this alot in our house. It's an improv thing which we call "Yeah, and..." He starts walking me away from the man whose drug habits have taken money owed from his gumline. "Got an empty crib this weekend. Hopin' to get some shorties up in here tonight, boy. You heard about my party right?"
"Yeah, I got some beer for it and all. You headed over there right now?"
"Yo, yo, hey man," the crackhead interjects. "You know my son?" He points to the my savior in the cornbraids. The great part here is that he thinks that he's doing to me what we're doing to him. He's in the middle of pretending that he knows the man who's pretending to know me.
"Whatever grampa," Savior says. "Yo, Hank" that's me "walk me to the store, man." Grampa follows us in and we eventually lose him. Cornbraids walks me out. "Fuckin' crackhead."
"Thanks for running interference."
"No doubt," he says. I'm also aware of the fact that if I were a criminal--and I'd be a really great criminal--I would find other people's victims and turn them into my own with the same technique. "Yo, lemme get a square?" We speak for a moment and I end up giving him one of the beers I've just purchased from a store I'm never going to on purpose again.
Also from yesterday's New York Times, in an article about Chicago, which refers to our neighborhood as "hip Wicker Park." It refers to a large aerial photo of the city on the wall in a boutique.
"So many people walk in here and ask, `Oh, is that New York?' " said Lance Lawson, who opened Jake in this gentrifying neighborhood. "I tell them, `No, it's your city,' " Mr. Lawson said.
That all-too-familiar query, he knows, carries with it a whiff of the self-doubt that has plagued Chicagoans for generations. Never mind the city's rich cultural climate that has spawned David Mamet, pop sensations like the Smashing Pumpkins and Liz Phair, and high-profile fashion designers like Cynthia Rowley, a local girl who moved to Manhattan and made good. The feeling persists that Chicago has a way to go before it overcomes its image as a fashion backwater, its citizenry swaddled in ugly track suits and lumpy Fair Isle sweaters.
"So many people outside Chicago still think we're all eating deep-dish pizza and wearing sweat pants," Mr. Lawson said
If it weren't for sweatpants and deepdish pizza, my roomates would not have the energy or decency to ever leave the house.
Walking home tonight from some strange ass neighborhood in Chicago I got the feeling of having done this before. Check the timestamp. I just walked in the door from my Saturday night. Long walk from who-knows-where. Hanging out with people who didn't know me, but felt like they should talk to me enough that conversation was noncompulsary. Oh, right, it's like that that time I was in Paris. I expect that to be the last time I compare Chicago to Paris.
Brad and I went to a party in Pilsen tonight, which involved round-trips in a cab ($13) and the promise that--once we stopped referring to Chicago as the place we had just moved and rather the place were we live--we would never do this again. We met up with some ex-Kenyonite later and she took us to a bar on the other side of town with her friends. We left while the house band was doing a cover of "Little Sister" an Elvis song which I've always entertained. And we headed home. I called Ben to see if he was up and interested in picking me up twenty or so blocks from home.
After walking down the same street for an hour--at this point people are starting to commute and I've been awake so long after getting hammered that I'm conscious of my body growing hungover--Ben calls saying he went up and down the street, drove past any landmarks and still didn't find us and was going to bed. The shit part is that Ben has already done all of the work that would make him our hero for the next week. A favor that would garner him any small thing--bus fare, a burrito, a drink in a bar--that he could want. And we would be grateful and worship him. It's like this: My high-paying job as bartender is about seven-times easier than working in the coffeeshop because still all I'm doing is turning arround and puting together three ingredients at a time, but the customers tip so much more for alcohol.
But since Ben went to bed, I have this strange feeling that I know that he should be entitled to any small thing he should want--since he did exactly the same legwork--but since I received nothing for his labors I am less inclined.
I got off the bus on my street. It was the first bus that came since we left. It was the bus we would have waited for even if Ben didn't say he would pick us up. He calls while I'm moments away from our door to tell me that he felt bad, got in the car, and is right where we last said we were. Then I told him about the bus and the almost home part.
Which means that he put in the labor for two really amazing favors, twice he left home at five in the morning to pick me up. But still I had to walk and bus forever. I need to write Dear Abbey about this.
Somehow, although I own very little, I lost my battery charger and there I haven't taken many pictures of Chicago, a city I love and a city that I love to look at. Maybe Ben will post more pictures from his new camera.
Of all my bad jobs I think this is the crappiest. I'm at the Chicago Blues Festival supposedly working for American Express. My task is to get people who already have the card to sign up for a free extra something or other. It's bullshit. 1) because this is a blues festival, everyone has bad credit. 2) because I have to wear a moronic hawaiian print shit.
However, they do have cellular laptops so we can sign people up.
The job takes forever, so I was hiding behind a tent idly enjoying a cigarette, wondering if it was okay to smoke so close to a food tent. Some asshole guy in Diesel jeans comes right up to me with a cell phone pressed to his ear and gets indignant as hell: "Look, you can't smoke."
"Okay," I stub it out. "No problem. I mean, I don't need to..."
"Where are you flyers? If you're gonna work you're going to have to work." Okay, okay, back off assface. Jesus. I walk around handing out more chapsticks, wondering why this guy gives a shit about what I do.
Moments later I get a call on my cell phone from my manwhore agent. "Look, Brendan, I understand if you need to have a cigarette."
"What? I don't need one at all, I was just bored and...how did you hear about that?"
"And I really wish you wouldn't speak like that to the CEO." So while I was lamenting the loss of half a cigarette, I was in effect copping an attitude to the man signing my checks. Of course I didn't mean to, and of course he's a five foot four asshole with two hundred dollar blue jeans, so insubordination is not okay with him.
I try and look busy and hand out chapsticks. It's my job, apparently. He comes runs up to me as I walk down the street--and since he's a napoleon character, everything is running to him--and puts on a management tone: "I wanna be able to see you at all times, stay right in front of the booth for the rest of the shift." And since I'm getting to write about this on a company computer and since I'm getting $160 for less than seven hours of work on my day off: that's fine with me.
"Can you make a 'Pink Lady?' Do you know what that is?" No, I don't, but what if she doesn't know either?
"Pink lady? Do you mean a 'Pink Elephant?'" I think I just made that name up. "What's in it?"
"I'm not sure. A friend told me to order it. What's in a pink elephant?"
"Stoli Raspberry, grenadine, and seven-up."
"Yeah, that might be it. That sounds good. I'll have that."
2) Tonight the great swindle continues with my first night at the Sushi Restaurant. I should add that all though I understand sushi and have had it one many occassions, I've only had the vegetarian kinds. Plus they have a Sake list as long as their wine list. Let the pretending begin.
3) Making conversation with a table at the bar yesterday:
"Hey so you like my new shirt?" Yes, I talk to everyone the same. We're talking about the aforementioned shirt.
She says point blank: "It's not very original. Stripes. I mean, everyone's doing stripes now. But you know... it's alright and all..."
4) I realized yesterday that I will probably never change Chicago, but there's no way to avoid Chicago changing me. I don't know exactly what happened to me last summer in Delaware, but I know I changed somehow. It may be in the way I talk. Maybe I'll get an accent (doubtful), maybe my manners/mannerisms will change. Maybe I'll developed a catch phrase ("Alright, so that was two Stoli Martinis: comin' back 'atcha right away.")
5) Yesterday we were all up at 5 AM and decided to go out and find the first open bakery. Then we went to the beach at 7:30 AM on a Monday just because we could.
6) If I do have a catchphrase, it would be "that's what I went to college for." For instance, the woman at the bakery was some kind of student in African & African-American Diaspora (Ben: "I hate people who do African-American studies.") She was, in essence, everything The Chapelle Show thinks an African-American History student should be. I of course began asking her what she was reading (it was basics) and then I asked if she had any others like bell hooks, Paul Gilroy or Edward Said.
My roommates later made fun of me for speaking with the lamest girl available at 5:50 in the morning. But that's what I went to college for: to meet people and to tell them what books I've read.
1) My keyboard works again. This only means that somewhere I have a $90 come uppance waiting for me.
2) It's not even that I was treated poorly at the store or anything justifiable. I walked around for an hour looking for a way to spend a long overdue gift-return from a gramma sweater of Christmases past. Amanda and I had bought house shit with it long ago, back when we were a plural. Part of me gets irate at malls because I'm surrounded by many people and all I can tell about them is that I hate them. Which is unfair. Of course. But here's what's happened in fashion in the past three years (cue rant):
a) as soon as I left public high school, it became cool to pay alot of money to dress as though you are underpriveleged.
b) this includes faux-vintage t-shirts, jeans with the ass/crotch/thighs worn out, and hats that appear to be provided as the uniform for a company that is too cheap to buy fabric for the entire hat and will instead use plastic mesh.
c) there's a new style emerging that seems to be an extrapolation of common ways my clothing looked wrong when my mother dressed me. There was a Perry Ellis shirt there for $140 which has bleach spattered all over the collar. There was a French Connection jacket that had the seams visible like the factory mistakes at TJ Maxx.
Of course I couldn't steal any of these products because I would never get any wear out of them because I would walk by my reflection in car doors and hate myself.
3) If I read such narcissistic, judgemental crap on someone elses website, I would think they were just as shallow as the people they hate whom they run into while shopping. I encourage you to do the same.
5) Speaking of my come uppance, it needs an appraisal: on the way home from dinner Ben and Dave found an open door in downtown Chicago. It was inside a long abandoned fire house. They explored upstairs, stole two chairs and came home. Ben and I went back half an hour later and came back with four leather brass-tacked dining chairs, a leather recliner, and a cupboard with shelves that is now my underwear and socks holder. A girl they know gave us a couch as well, which means that in our gigantic living room (recall if you will that this apartment is bigger than my parents house) we now have
a) The dining room table that Spragens and Anders found in the woods.
b) A leather chair from a fancy restaurant for everyone in the house.
c) The couch we found in the alley way by the scrapyard.
d) The end table I found in the trash at Kenyon.
e) A stereocabinet and bookshelf that our landlord gave us.
f)The lamp for check-out aisle seven, which we took from the ex Quality Farm & Feed store.
g) An antique radio which we are currently wiring to a pair of trunk speakers which I found at Kenyon. Farsheed has a sauldering gun to it as we speak.
h) A coffee table with a copy of The Onion Ad Nauseum. I meantion this because I would appreciate it is everyone in Chicago, or in the surrounding area, would drop by some day and flip to the title page where the entire staff has left me notes that refer to office jokes we had when I worked there for a week that one time. I just have to mention that from time to time.
i) A couch given to us by a friend of a friend's friend. I only know her as "couch girl." It folds out into a really nice bed. No bars, just a mattress on the floor.
6) Tomorrow I am going to get up early and go to the same street where I took the other shirt and actually pay quite alot for a plain black shirt for my new job. Then I'm bartending until 2 AM. Then I'm openning the bar at 10:30 AM the next morning. Then I'm getting trained at the new restaurant at 4 PM. I'm just writing that down becaus I know that invariably I will get to an age where I steal less and sleep more, and I'm going to wish I could remember these days well enough, and I'm going to wonder if they actually were as great as I remember them.
Three More Things
1) This happened at Home Depot. Every place has to have a place they can agree on hating. Unfortunately that was my hometown back in CT. Luckily there's a yuppie shithole in Chicago called Lincoln Park where every attrocity of convenience occurs. It's where the home depot is, it's where the best buy and the circuit city are next to eachother and it's where I went today when I:
2) went grocery shopping at Whole Foods on food stamps. As I may have mentioned, foodstamps doesn't pay for prepared foods, cleaning products, or hygeine materials. So don't tell my roommates that I've been showering with their dishsoap. So in order to eat a delicious Jamaican Seitan sandwhich with avocado, I had to order it, smile, and then eat it like a barbarian while browsing the dried beans. But Uncle Sam bought me some seriously great food. I'm currently his favorite nephew.
3) Had my first alumni-ish night. I met up with a good friend of mine who graduate the year before. We both just got jobs so we had a real discussion at his local bar about alumni, work, commuting, and bands. It was nice. And I'd like to thank Ben for lending me ten dollars even though he thinks he only lent me five. Without his help, I would not have had so many great two-dollar PBR's.
So tomorrow morning I have to wake up at eight so that I can get a train to downtown Chicago to start my new job. It's at the bar serves/possibly hates black people. The great part is going to be getting on the train tomorrow with my man-purse and a travel mug; pulling out reams of paper to edit, and getting off at the stock exchange so that I can cut limes and pull pints.
Also, I know damn well that in training I'll maybe make $40. I owe Ben $31 for Beer, pizza (x2), three separate cash advances ($5/ea), and--jesusfuckingchrist--for the night we went to a hookah bar. And pretty much right after work I'm probably going to get two grand in debt on a new laptop.
So to recap:
Ben: made $100+ two nights in a row/is generally rolling in it.
Brendan: is up to $2031 in debt and works the morning shift in a bar.
The setting is a downtown Chicago bar. Conveneint to banks, offices, and wherever else people work when they wear suits. I'm applying for the position of daytime bartender, which is basically a beer/wine wench for would-be wall-streeters.
"Ok, I'm going to put this delicately. Most nights we have an urban crowd."
"Alright, that's no problem."
"I mean, like a really, really urban crowd."
"Like bankers?" This place is in the most Hartford part of Chicago, and I still think he wants me for lunch.
"No, I mean, like we have a really, really urban crowd."
"Like...lawyers? I don't..." Wait a second. "...oh! You mean black people come in here."
"Yes, and I need to know that you're okay...working for...working in that environment." We go back to interviewing and I start making up some bullshit about all the drinks I can make Martini's, Margaritas, etc. He gets on the phone and I realize he's setting something up. "Babs...yeah...what time does all the, uh, the hooplah start tonight?...Alright, I think we're gonna do a little trial by fire...I don't wanna have to go out to my car and get an insulin shot..." Insulin? What the--"...great." He hangs up the phone.
"I like your style," I say, attempting to speak like him.
"Well, I'm not sure if I like you." Okay.
"So you want me to come in tonight and make drinks?" Shit, I need to go home and make a cheat-sheet. "I can do that."
"No, you're not going to do that. You're going to come in tonight and have three drinks on the house, on me, as it were. Tonight we have $2 appetizers. It's the biggest ghetto-night you'll ever see. You call me when you get here. Get your drinks. Then call me later and tell me if you still wanna work for me."
On the way out I talk to the smoking-hot bartender and tell her my situation. "Basically my interview is to drink."
"Well, the last bartender we hired was this little blond thing. Two hours into her first shift she told me she had to go to her car and get a shot of insulin. She left a note in the register saying, 'I'm really sorry, but I just can't handle this.'" So the question now is: What the fuck am I getting into? And furthermore: What if I hate the music there or don't like the food but end up taking the job just to prove a point? Will I go to such extreme lengths just to make someone else look bad? You're damn right I will.
Scene opens to the main protagonist in my current fiction project fighting with his parents about a trip he's planned. The trip is what makes up all 300 pages, so this scene kind of matters. “But I showed you the map.”
“A US map with thumbtacks in Las Vegas and Memphis doesn’t count, ok?” My mother put her hands on her hips.
“You forgot Chicago,” I said.
They made further stipulations to the effect that we needed to make set dates, we had to call them regularly, and we couldn’t take The Box.
“Talk your father into lending you his car.”
"Wait," my father, having heard his job title, turned away from the television. "What?"
This put us in a position. It didn’t violate any goals, per se, rather it too away from the anti goals of our trip. We intended to be modern cowboys. To ramble from town to town and sleep in the dirt. To wake up and fire up a camping stove on the hood of the box and fry potatoes. To shave rarely, but to use the rearview mirror for it when necessary. To search out the rough and tumble of our society in out of the way diners and to cook baked bean in the can, goddamit.
And, well, how can I put this? My father’s car was beige.
There’s just nothing cowboy about beige. When sending Tonto into town to do errands and, presumably, laundry, the Lone Ranger never once said, “And can we do a beige load this week? I don’t want my new bandana to get bleached with the whites.”
1) My neighborhood is all I've ever wanted. It's like Brighton, UK only cheap and American. Just by walking out my front door I can get a bagel, a used couch, exact replicas of thrift-store clothing I own. With a little work I can find any CD I could possibly want. I can eat Thai, Indian, Creole, and all brands of fushion.
2) My street in particular is, from what I've seen, the cool place to go to raise your biracial children.
3) I want to be a DJ here, if only to speak of it for the rest of my life in the past tense.
4) Condoms are free everywhere, but pregnancy tests are always kept locked in jewel cases.
5) I've applied for twelve jobs. Each one involved lying, mostly about experience, and in every instance I've made up a restaurant or a position for myself. However, when I applied for foodstamps it was the most honest application I've ever filled out: No, I don't have a job. Yes, I do have an apartment. No, I do not have enough money to pay my rent. No, I don't have any savings. No, I have never been on food stamps before. Yes, I have a bank account. It has seventeen dollars in it.
Today was one of my most favorite days to have. Nothing of importance to do, other than show someone nice things I know. I drove to Columbus with a friend and we saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind at a strang Ohio place called Easton Town Center. It's somewhere between a mall and a functioning authoritarian society. For example, there are rules against unauthorized singing or dancing.
After the film we had Pad Thai at The North Market, which is one of the things I think of ever year when I dread returning to central Ohio. It makes me happy. In the 1800s it was a farmer's market and now it is a yuppie grocery store operated by about 40 independent vendors. Then I went to the record store, but they didn't have the new Laptop album, so we left.
I realized later how much I love going to the movies, getting Thai food and going to the record store. And it's going to be weird living in my excellent neighborhood in Chicago next week. Because I can do all three of these things just by walking to them.
Drop by sometime. Rob us blind. We have some seriously great shit. You have no idea how much I love looking at my new address. For my entire life I've felt landless when travelling. Where are you from? Connecticut. (immediately they think of Who's The Boss? and a thousand other representations of suburban NYC, all of which starred children with better shoes than I. So I tried to say Hartford for a while. But I'm not really even in Suburban Hartford. Which is to say that my parents never worked there. I did. When I worked there I said I was from Hartford. But now what? Where are you from? A small town in the middle of no where special where some people had farms, but some people had parents who worked in Hartford. A lot of them had a lot of money. But not all of them. When I worked at my last restaurant I told my tables I was from New England. That worked, mostly because people don't particularly care where I'm from. But now. Where you live? Chicago. I just like saying it.
2) Best bank moment of my life. I need to get together a shit load of money for this house, but the bank teller lady asked me out last week and I've been avoiding her ever since. I'm not a bad person, but she has a kid who is about five years younger than me (true story). I went in anyway to deposit the $100 I got for DJ'ing a party for Hillel (someone more qualified can make jokes here concerning the references to money and jews in the same sentence). She wrote my balence down and I asked if my loan payment went through. It had, which made the numbers seem off. Then she told me my tax refund came in, which was sad but great: I got the full refund but my total balence seemed off by a couple hundred dollars, but I cheated on my taxes anyway so that was fine. Then I said. "I don't know why it's still at $400." "No, Brendan, that's not a four it's a seven." I was so happy, I agreed to come to her house on monday.
3) So to recap:
a-all the bad shit happened to Brendan last week. For now, it's over.
b-I have--and without a job mind you--successfully: paid off my iPod/ made the firstandlastmonths rent for my new, sweet-ass apartment in Chicago Mutherfucking, IL/ acheived a salience of location/identity
c-All just because I: overcharge people for something I love doing and would do for free--DJ'ing/should be thrown in jail with Ken Lay/even saw the lights of the goodyear blimp/and it said 'Ice Cube's a Pimp.'
d-In the above rubrik (points b and c) I would be happy just to select one option from each and be really, really happy about it all day. But, for today, I get to have it all. Therefore:
e-Brendan wins.
4) Black British Cultural Studies was excellent today. I came in so late that the professor had already unlocked the door for the other students who came in late, but who came in before me. There's little else you can do to give your professor a subtle Fuck You than to show up late to a class with a steaming hot cup of coffee that you obviously waited in line for somewhere. We discussed, among other things, "the revivication of the term pimp" and I realized that the only way I would ever go to grad school is so that I could go to conferences with prominent intellectuals like Cornell West and Paul Gilroy and discuss pimpdom.
Until I lost my job I had this really great plan. Wanna hear it?
May 22 Move to a beautiful apartment in Chicago with three others. Live cheap for four months. Make a lot of money and lie to people in all the ways I love to. Finally get going on my next novel project, one third of which will take place in Monterey, CA. Try and get DJ jobs so that for the rest of my life I can look for other DJ jobs and say, Yeah, I'm a DJ from Chicago. Work in a concept restaurant, like the one near my future home in Chicago that was highlighted in Esquire where the food is a fushion of Indian and Latin American. Samosas and fried plaintains.
Oct 8 Come home for the month of my brother's wedding. Be an all around family guy. Sleep on the piles of money I've saved up.
Nov 1 As it gets cold and dark and ugly in New England, I will pack up the new VW Cabrio I've bought and drive it out to California to do research for my next project. I will still live in a shitty apartment, however, I will not be living in the $500/month Poets House which is subsidized by the Monterey City Council, because they do not accept novelists.
The world owes me $747 dollars for DJ'ing, Taxes, and the best job I've ever had, which was driving and Indian Students Group to Columbus to eat South Indian Vegetarian food. Yesterday I got paid $7 for each of the four hours that I drove a big van and ate delicious food.
Beth, I know that just last week I had a story for you and your husband and you asked something about how I end up getting into these situations. And I just want you to know that I still have no idea:
Part I: So I get on the plane from Hartford on my way back to Ohio, waiting in line while everyone assures their belongings are secure. I'm inches away from my seat and an older guy, already with his buckle on, slaps the bag in my hands and gives me a "the fuck is that?" look.
I pulled out one of my headphones to answer. "Rum." I said. " Dark rum?" Perplexed as to what the hell this guy needs to know about my belongings.
When seated, I begin chatting with the elderly women next to me. It's my general rule to limit the number of people who hate me when travelling. Especially if we have to smell eachother. When they're done, I pull out my book of restaurants in Chicago (job hunting) and settle into the basics for my next remix on my headphones (The Neptunes "Lapdance" beat, then probably some Snoop, Dre, and Common, but I'm tempted to make a Year-in-rock of all the bullshit that's come out: Milkshake, etc). Then some asshole from the row ahead of me, same guy, slaps me on the knee. "You're going to turn those off for take-off, aren't you?"
I hate this situation, because moments after giving him a right-whatever look, I thought of about a hundred great comebacks. This is infuriating for most. But I hate to waste good material, which is pretty much how I always end up starting shit.
The flight attendent begins her spiel and me and The Neptunes learn more about Bucktown/Wicker Park Chicago. He slaps the kid across the aisle from him and starts to get stern. His scarred brow furrows, and the points of his mustache accentuate his frown. He's the kind of guy who watched COPS for fashion tips. He shuts the kids magazine, "Oh, I see, you know this all already? Eh? You don't need to listen to these important safety announcements. Since you know it all so well, why don't you go up there right now and take over for her."
My first thought was that I would be writing letters to the Menendez bros. in prison if this were my father. I'm doing all I can to piss him off at this point. Legs crossed, reading a book, headphones on. I'm about two minutes away from reclining my seatback and putting my feet up on the traytable while we take off.
Finally: "Those better not be turned on," he points at my headphones. I lean in and ask him if he's our own private fucking US Marshall. "Yeah," he said. "That's right." Never lie to a career liar. That's a rule.
"Let's see that badge, man."
"I can't show you my badge."
"Well, you're a crack agent if you just blew your cover to me, but you can't show your badge to anyone. I don't beleive you." He shrugged. "You got a gun on you?" He gives me that dude-smile and leans forward to show me the small of his back. Nods his head. "Let's see it." Can't, he says, can't pull it out on the plane. "Just show me some holster, then." He leans forward again and shows me, again, the back of his Reebok jacket and his beltless, stonewashed jeans. "Riiight. Whatever."
He gets up for a moment, and I turn to the kid who I think is his son and try to get the real story. "I've never met him before in my life," he said. "I just want to get my seat changed." His walk turns out to be a security check, which gains the notice of the flight attendents who get on the PA: "We'd like to remind all passengers to stay in their seats with their seatbelts fastended until the captain..." he comes back.
I return to my book and write him off, which is the least I can do. Then the drink cart comes down. I see it. It's right there, but he slaps me again. Now I cannot fathom a reason he could have to keep me away from my headphones. "Drink cart," he says.
"Thanks, I can see it myself." Asshole. "You gonna buy me a beer or something?" Sure, he says, sure he is. Flight attendent says they have Bud, Miller-lite, and Heinekin. "I'll have a Heinekin."
"Alot of people don't like me," he says. "Like this guy," he turns to the hippie kid. "I saw him in the airport and he was singing something to himself like a nutcase. So I just asked him, are you chanting the Qu'ran?" My white, liberal eyes popped out of their fucking sockets.
"So if he's reciting the Qu'ran, then he's obviously a security risk, eh?" He doesn't answer my question, but turns around and stares down the aisle.
"What language is the newspaper that guy's reading?"
I turn, "It's German."
"You sure?" He just failed his Field Aptitude Test.
"Not going to Pittsburgh," which is true. I'm getting a connection to Columbus, but damned if I'm going to tell him anything real about me. "I'm headed for Chicago. Moving there." When I work out a good lie like this, I try and become what the other person wishes they could be or likes to think they are. He's an asshole whose party days are over.
"You got an apartment?"
"Nope."
"Staying with friends?"
"No, I don't know anyone there."
"Where're you gonna stay then?"
"Well, I'm packing light. I've just got the one bag. Tonight I'm going to go out to a club. Meet a girl. Go home with her. See how long that lasts."
"Come on. You're fucking with me." True, but you'll never know.
"Nah, man, that's the plan. I mean, what would you do if you were my age and you had two hundred dollars to your name?"
"I dunno, save for a car, or an apartment somewhere."
"I'll just find a girl who's got both." Tonight I'll be playing the part of the World's Biggest Asshol. Which, apparently, is this guy's hero.
"What if you don't meet anyone there?" I realize now that I have gaping holes in this plan, so I fill them.
"Well," I look at my watch. "It's Sunday night. On Saturdays people go out with their friends and they're just looking for a good time. But Sundays. Man, Sundays are the night that can last all week."
"Damn," he says. This is mind-boggling to him. He can't beleive that he let himself get to his present age without trying it. I can't fucking beleive that another liar could be so fucking gullible. It's written all over his ceiling. "Where'd you get balls like that, man?"
"Connecticut."
For the rest of the plane ride he keeps turning around to me and holding a pair of invisible oranges in his lap and mouthing, "Balls of steel, man. Balls of fucking steel."
He turns around and says it one last time. "Dude, if that's your plan, man, more power to you." He offers me his fist, which I punch in the way that dudes are want to do. "But if you're banking on that you better be good at this--" imagine for a moment, your own father making the Verizon Wireless/Cunnilingus signal by licking a peace sign in public. "Or if that fails, there's always--" he mimes the motions of inserting a stalk of celery into his mouth, which protrudes into his cheeks.
When the plan is about to land, I'm in the middle pages of White Teeth, by Zadie Smith (this time for class) and he tossed a five-dollar bill into the pages. I look up. Big smile on that mustache, he once again gropes the invisible oranges. "Good luck, brah."
F. Scott Fitzgerald would like to summarize the biggest conflict one has when they guiltily attend a fancy college:
"The very rich...are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and crynical where we are trustful...Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are"
Sidenote, I promise, Ben: I found a shitload of apartments that we could afford on waiters sallaries and I'm probably gonna head up to Chicago in a while and feel them out. Ask around about neighborhoods. My only requirement is that our doors and windows lock as my only possession that matters is my computer. One of these places has a garage space, which would be excellent for those of us who own a scooter.
There's about seven or eight things I'm going to try and tell you this week and I hope I get to all of them. First of all, I'm moving to Savannah, GA as soon as possible. Maybe not in May, but if Chicago isn't fun when Ben leaves this fall I'm flying south for their non-existent winter.
It is important to keep in mind that I still harbor all the horrible feelings that everyone should have for white people in the south. The confederate flag stills strikes me as moronic, peanuts should never be boiled, fuck state's rights, and blah blah blah. But we drove in through Savannah on our way to Spring Break Spring Break last week and we did so in an accidental way that turned out to be how I will enter every strange city from now on. We took essentially the first exit that talked about the city, which put us into the outer ghetto. You've maybe never seen it, but if you've seen the movie Big Fish, it's the town of Spectre somewhere between the mythic beginings and sad ending. Every house has a different color that wouldn't always seem like a good housepaint: mustard, fuscia, lilly, etc. The greenery is out of control. Trees that line the streets touch in the middle and have intertwining spanish moss and kudzu.
It was a great place to be lost because all of the toothless residents couldn't wait to give us directions. A shirtless man at the lotto desk in a gas station even got in a fight with another local about which street would be better to have us take into downtown, if we had never been there before. ("You gon take em down Bull? Aw hell naw, baby, I'm sending them down Abercorn so they can see some shit.")
Abercorn would be a terrible road to have to take to work every morning. That's because it's beautiful. Every other block has a square park in the middle of the street with more big trees, more benches, more people. The buildings surrounding it look like what I imagine Spain to look like. Tallish--five to eight stories--, brick, ornate, god-fearing.
Also, and I realizes that this taints the sample we got there on St. Patrick's Day (Observed). The sunday before. The streets were filled with all residents, not just pasty-assed drunks. Somehow, St. Pat's is huge in a former Spanish city. I had very little money, but I bought sushi and rice at a little place up the street and sat in one of the square parks to eat it with my travelling companions.
My camera ran out of battery then, and I feel like a big-foot photographer right now. I'm scared no one will ever beleive me.
Whenever I go home, I end up getting dinner with Tori, who graduated with my older brother and may have not known that she was my best friend until she graduated after my sophomore year of high school. That is to say that I had a huge crush on her and we hung out every day every summer and when she was the cool, busy, older girl, we would sit in her house and make vegan cookies together on weekends.
We always made food a big part of our relationship, oftentimes travelling for hours to a vegan oasis somewhere in CT or Mass, but now I feel that we are slipping into that middle-aged, housewife-ish, track of meeting for a meal to catch up once a year and then checking out. But next year she's moving to Iowa City to go to law school, which is three hours from Chicago. I didn't realize this at first, but it will be immensely comforting to know that we can both run away to eachother's cities if necessary.
This review pretty much details my restaurant, the confines of its culture, and why I look forward to finding a new one in Chicago.
The servers are friendly and the food is delivered hot. The server also supplies diners with hot French rolls when they are first seated, giving the customers something to munch on as they wait for their meals.
The meals are so spectacularly displayed that your mouth waters when the plate is set before you. For instance, the mozzarella sticks are served with carrots, celery, and both marinara and ranch dipping sauces.
The servings are also very satisfying. All entrees are served with some sort of potato — mashed, baked, or french-fried. Salads, however, are a la carte.
I had the filet mignon, as did my guest. It was so tender and juicy my mouth was salivating before I even tasted it.
When my car wasn't where I parked it when I came out of work, I hope for the best, no I prayed, I prayed that someone stole it. After graduation I'm trying to move to Chicago and I know damn well that my $600 toyota is worth more to the insurance company than it is to me right now. Just to be safe, though, I walked up the street in case I mis-parked.
Me: Hi, um, I don't know exactly whom to talk to about this, but, well when I went into work tonight I parked my car and it isn't there anymore.
Police Officer on The Phone: Blue toyota? Rusted rear?
shit.
Me: Yes, actually, that's...Do you have my car?
POOTP No, actually...well, it's hard to explain on the phone but your car was towed.
Me: For two parking tickets?
POOTP Nah, (laughing in background among officers) well.. the thing is. Your car was in an accident?
Me: Someone hit my parked car?
POOTP The way I heard it, your parked car hit another car.
My fucking e-brake didn't hold and my car rolled through an intersection, cracking the front end of a Jeep--the occupants of which have my full sympathy, as I can't imagine what they did when they went to exchange insurance with a car that did not have a driver. By the time I arrived at the station, it became quite apparent that I was something of an office-joke, which was fine until..
POOTP (in person)Ok, now we'll set you up with a release form right now, I'll call the tow truck company and they'll release your car tonight and you can...huh...ok, forget all of that. Did you know your license is suspended?
Do you remember how much more reasonable things always seemed in highschool?
Here is me on the phone with a magazine editor, trying to convince him that what his magazine needs for the summer is an 18 year old sending in emails about the progress of his cross country trip:
"I could bring a computer with me and write something about each place I visited." Swivel chairs squeaked in an office on the other end of the line.
"Please deposit twenty-five cents for the next five minutes," the lobby phone in my high school demanded.
With the next quarter, I explained that I had every intention of seeing many major art museums, national parks, and various large balls of twine, but the editor I talked to seemed unconvinced.
"I mean, like, the whole beat generation is in their fifties now, they’re too old to do these things anyway."
That was a much better selling point when I practiced it on my friends at lunch.
Imagine with me how this essay would have turned out.
"The Art Institute of Chicago occupies in a very impressive building and parking on the street is always free after 6 PM. The museum’s friendly and courteous staff are always available, even after hours, to answer many questions…"
Somehow I imagined that I must be the only high school kid to call up a week before graduation and offer a newspaper the chance to fund an On the Road rip-off.
"You know, Brendan, the thing is that we are already locked into another story like yours. There is a woman travelling through all of the cities in Europe looking for love."
We said polite goodbyes and hung up on one another.
Man, that guy totally treated me like I was fourteen, I said as I crumpled my bathroom pass and walked back to Algebra.
He had made-for-TV hair and a royal blue shirt, which he referenced, twice.
'Wow, so you're the writer for tomorrow's US Army video game?'
This was not going good places.
'Well, I am the TV guy here and ...' reporters from the department crept by trying to make eyes with me and help. 'We've been reading your story about this new army video game and we want to use it.'
I am doing the addition in my head. My usual rate plus some sort of commission here, right?
'You're going to have your newscasters read it?'
'No,' he said, 'you are.'
'I'm going to have your newscasters read it?'
He slowly explained that tomorrow I would be on New England News Network (read: Fox news) chatting it up Happy News with anchors from Boston.
He looked at my white button down with the dirty look I may be most familiar with, 'Oh, yeah.' He wouldn't look me in the eye, but instead from side to side on my shirt as if assessing and rear-ended bumper. 'Yeah, do you have another shirt? Maybe something in blue?' He held out the sleeve to his royal plaid shirt.
Thanks, I didn't know what blue looked like.
'Yeah, white will make fuzz. Oh and don't wear anything with lines.'
Again to the shirt. Thanks, so those are lines?
He left, the department stormed. 'You are under no obligation to do anything for that goddam news station.' No one here likes that Fox broadcasts from the newsroom. It's another thing thrown onto us when we were bought out by the Chicago Tribune. 'At other newspapers where they have good unions you would get $100 for your time.'
They told me to yell obsceneties and subversive comments about the military.
Here's the thing: I hate TV news more than most things. They are going to straighten my shirt and put makeup on my face. I wanna say, 'Fuck that' but I also want to work here.
I'll be sitting there, waiting for my voice to crack, listening into my goddam earpiece.
'Well Brendan, this is quite a game the army has come out with.'
'Quite a game the army has come out with indeed, Bob, but the fact of the matter is that I just plain don't like black people.'
Dear Ben,
