Ray Bradbury knocked on my door today and I pretended I wasn't home. His drug problem is beginning to become my drug problem and the last thing I need is someone else's drug problem. "Brendan it's important. Open up. It's not about that."

"Fuck off. I fell for that last time."

Herman Melville started walking up the sidewalk from the other direction in a tearful rage, tipping off people's hats in the rain. And just on the otherside I noticed Mark Twain stepping out of a cab in a black suit for the first time. They all had solemn looks on their faces and I was worried they were gonna pitch an intervention on me again.

"Looks, guys. I know I drink alot. But I haven't had a drop since I DJ'd the other day. I swear."

Melville wiped the tears from his beard, "It's not always about you, you ass!"

Twain put his cane across Melville's chest to stop him. "Boys. He doesn't know. Lay off. Look, Brendan...it's Vonnegut..."

I've had a lot of great times with Vonnegut over the years. Drinking and drawing pictures of assholes and talking about writing and fish. He was always a fantastic inspiration to me and if one single novel I write makes a difference to any person the way his did to me, I won't feel like a fucken loser. I'm going to miss him.

Labels: Vonnegut

The boys all came over on Sunday for our usual business. Mark Twain was visiting from Hartford and he hadn't met Kurt Vonnegut before, but we all knew Herman Melville was coming too. Usually we make dinner and then I line up my collection of bourbons and taste all twenty of them and talk about writing and pussy.

Guy stuff.

The problem was the Brandon Flowers came over to borrow some of my clothes for his show at the Garden. Brandon and I have a tough relationship in general, what with me being a really successful, famous novelist and able to use to word "pussy" in mixed company.

I kind of wanted to shuffle him out the door as soon as I could, since he doesn't really drink or smoke anymore. But Brandon Flowers insisted on meeting Vonnegut. "It's a real honor, you know. I love your work and I'm amazed at your output. I mean, it had taken me so many years just to put out two records and I wonder if there'll be a third."

"That's simple, my boy," Vonneget said. "I'm what you call a fucking genius. Ha!" he let out this real Rip-Taylor kind of hoot and coughed until he could light up a pall mall.

"It helps to be a little crazy," said Mark Twain as he slipped some weed into his pipe of vanilla tobacco.

"Crazy doesn't enter into it," Herman Melville said from his lonely perch in the corner. "There's nothing crazy about hard work and determination. That's all you need."

Mark Twain did the "jerk off" hand motion while Melville was busy making sure that all the whiskey glasses were evenly spaced. "I disagree," Twain said. "I've always felt like we should consider that we are all partially insane. It will explain us to each other; it will unriddle many riddles; it will make clear and simple many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and obscurities now."

I felt kind of weird for a second, because I realized I was the only one without a mustache. No one really wanted to say anything after that, but Vonnegut started searching through his pockets in silence. Everyone's eyes lit up because this is New York City. When you're at a boring party someone usually turns it around with a bag of something.

Vonnegut catches onto this immediately. "You fucken blow-heads. I'm just trying to find where I put my goddam phone."

Brandon Flowers smooths down his mustache and says, "If you guys want I could, uhm...well, I think I have enough."

In about five seconds I'm doing a bump off of Herman Melville's skeleton keys. I don't know how he fits the damn things in his pockets, but this isn't the time to ask. We all hit enough of the white whale to be content sniffing the insides of our nostrils for a few minutes.

"This is good shit, Brendan," Mark Twain says.

"It's actually pronounced Brandon for me."

"Oh whatever," Herman Melville says. "It took us forever to learn to call him Brendan. I'm not switching back."

"You know what, Melville? That's your problem right there. And you should have known it for years. You wrote a cautionary tale about why no one should ever end up like you. Like Ahab you are too focussed on your goal that you don't care if it destroys you," Mark Twain says. "Here Brendan brings his nice gay friend in here from Vegas with some killer snow and you can't even get his name right?"

"(This has nothing to do with you)," I whisper to Brandon Flowers. "(This is a long time coming. I'm sorry you had to be there. You wanna leave?)" He says everythings cool, but you know he just wants to run with the bull whales for a while.

Vonnegut, with his smooth Pall Mall twang, interrupts: "You know the predominant theory of extra terrestrial intelligence is that any society that could develop radio and satellite technology would destroy itself before it ever reached us."

"That's what I'm tryna tell him!" Mark Twain shouts. "The poor boy's burned himself out before he could reach anyone else. Melville, you will never get anywhere in the world if you can't learn to be your biggest fan. I mean, you worked for what, ten years? What are you gonna do with the rest of your life? Are you gonna work like we did or just give up, like you say the elder male whales do?"

Melville licks the blow off of his mustache and sniffs twice. He looks like he's gonna cry and instead he just screams, "I'm Herman Fucking Melville, okay? I wrote Moby Dick in one year, okay? People didn't even know there were cannibals until I wrote Typee. What've you done, you fucken one-hit-wonder?"

"I had 'Somebody Told Me' and 'Mr. Brightside' going at the same time. How is that one hit?"

"Fuck off Brendan," Melville shouted. "I'm talking about Huck Fucking Finn over here."

"There you go again, hurting the people you care about because you really want to destroy yourself." Mark Twain says.

"Actually it's Brandon. He meant Brandon could fuck off," I said. "But I still agree."

It's a real shame to see your close friends so fucked up sometimes. I think they have some deep seated emotional issues that just won't go away. Next week we'll skip the coke and whiskey and just, like, drink green tea and go on bike rides. I think Hawthorne will be in town.

Labels: Brandon Flowers, Vonnegut

A couple of weeks ago I was mixing drinks and smoking pall malls with Kurt Vonnegut on a pier in working-class cape cod. We were laughing and drinking and using words like "vortex" and "vagina" in the same sentence. (Von has a very infectious personality, not unlike Snoop Dogg.) I told him I could make a daiqueri just like Hemingway liked his (half grapefruit half lime juice plus marichino liqueuer). And that got him going about The Old Man and the Sea.

Just then an actual old man came in from the sea and thought we were talking about him. "Fuck you, you New York nancy boys. Try not to get your penises stuck in eachother on your way to NAMBLA this week."

Kurt Vonnegut then skillfully and slowly brought this man back in time with his words so that the fisherman understood that we were discussing vaginas and cigarettes because we preferred them.

I poured the man a strong grog and put the shaker back into the cooler.

Kurt Vonnegut then told the fisherman that we were discussing a story by Ernest Hemingway about an old fisherman who caught a giant Marlin in Cuba. The fisherman was old and poor and hungry and needed the fish to survive. It was too big to fit into his boat so he lashed it to the side. But the blood attracted a shark who ate away at the fish. When the old man got to Havana he was left with only a skeleton.

"Bullshit," the pirate eyed sailor crumbled his empty plastic cup and spit out the brandied cherry from inside. "Any good fisherman would know to carve off as much of the good meat he could and ditch the rest or else he would come home with neither."

What he said shook me deep. I left the cooler on the dock next to Kurt Vonnegut. We had been almost to the end of our nightly drinking contest, but I felt sobered at the seamans words. I walked home to Brooklyn and got a text from Vonnegut. "WHR RU? EVRTHING OK? 2 WASTED 2 GO 4 BURRITOS?"

"HAD 2 GO. I KNOW HOW 2 SAVE MY MANUSCRIPT NOW," I texted Kurt Vonnegut back. "PS. DJ'ING AT BEAUTY BAR TOMORROW. U THERE?"

Labels: Vonnegut