We’re Just A Product of These Times Thursday, Dec 25 2008

There’s no need to rehash the tired truth that Christmas is nothing but a marketing ploy. But I find myself walking in a sea of agitated zombies facing off against each other in purchase wars meant to express affection towards loved ones. Everyone looks like they’d rather be elsewhere, doing other things with their time and money. The only people who are friendly are the ones trying to sell me something. In the window of an art store I see a picture of Christ on the cross, head bent and slumping, his face a combination of pain and sorrow.

This isn’t just a Linus Van Pelt rant about what Christmas should be. To marginalize all of what we see in front of us as the product of an overhyped, fairy tale-inspired holiday is to wipe our hands of the rest of it. People aren’t honking their horns and gritting their teeth and fighting over pieces of plastic made in Korea because they’ve forgotten the reason for the season. They’re doing it because we’re self-centered animals who live in a deranged society based on personal gratification and are entirely susceptible to manipulation by numbers.

We talk so much of peace and love, but the truth is we can’t even make it twenty-four hours. To suggest that we observe an arbitrary date where all hatchets are buried – guns cease firing, bitter ex-lovers call to wish well, humanity restrains themselves from their natural instinct to please the crowd and the id – is a ludicrously improbable fantasy, despite it’s pathetically low aim. The result is the material-driven attempt to atone for our crimes we call Christmas.

Our hearts are warmed when see small, misleading samplings of our Scrooge-like world becoming a model for generosity and kindness – people giving up spots in line to the elderly or helping others dig their cars out of snow – but in all honestly what is so touching? Someone stopped being a self-centered dick for five minutes? Sting and Bono gave ten percent off the back-end to a corporate-run charity? Shaq served turkey for twenty minutes in a league mandated photo-op? Is this what we’ve set ourselves up for – being falsely inspired by annually bucking the trend of being piggish?

This sort of cop-out is evident in the rest of our days – our government, our lovers, our careers, our conversations, our lives. We scramble to embrace any form of humanity or wonder, and finding ourselves too far gone to actually get to where we’re told we can be,  so we settle on narrowed instances to distract from our failures. The photo of a flower being shoved in a rifle muzzle makes us forget the civilian casualties of the day. A streetlight kiss is remembered to distract from the minutia. The images of a waving flag and a soaring eagle erase our nation’s litany of transgressions. Bi-annual charity checks and Hands Across America cures the guilt of excess. The attention of the opposite sex substitutes for a lack of love. On some level, we all know better, but we indulge in it all anyway, because if we didn’t we’d be slowly driven insane by the collective faces in the mirror.

Walking towards the exit, a fast-talking twenty-something in a tie asks me who my cellphone provider is and I shed his shark-like pitch with “je ne parle pas votre langue”.

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I’ll Save My Breath and Take It With Me Monday, Dec 22 2008

The maniacal energy that lights the streets of last call passes before me in a slow-motion sway, and watching it all I can’t decide who I want to be. The giants, Polo shirted and short skirted, laughing and kissing and crying and shouting, entirely oblivious to anything but the immediate sensation before them, pinballing to wherever they can find another drink or a hand to hold, or the dwarves, contemplative and weary-eyed, walking home with backpacks and hands in pockets and slouched shoulders, taking notice of all the thoughtless smiles and catcalls, standing behind the ice cream counter fielding the boisterous and muddled orders of the drunken giants. I don’t think I want to be either.

Devin is out of town for the weekend, so I am invited back to the girls’ house where everyone has gathered on the porch, doling out cans and chain smoking and retelling Captain’s lore of semesters passed. Shivering in a black dress, Becky and I slip into the house so I can give her the Browns t-shirt underneath my button up. We haven’t spoken much in the last few months, but earlier in the evening chaos had led us to conversation over pitchers and eventually back here. She is leaving in the morning for Alabama, and I’m fairly certain that she’s never coming back.

“Y’know,” she says with a laugh as I peel it off and toss it to her. “If you put half as much into your life as you do your football team…”

“So why did we stop talking?” I ask abruptly, buttoning up.

“Because you don’t do anything to better yourself.” Her answer comes quicker than I’d have liked it to, sharp and void of any contemplation. “Do you know how many people would kill for your talent? And you piss it away…I mean, you’re wasting away here, Dan. These people don’t matter, and you know that. You’re better than all of this.”

I don’t think she’s wrong, but I think when she says ‘all of this’ she means a bar full of confused and fraudulent twenty-one year olds. And the way I see it, the world is mostly compromised of confused and fraudulent twenty-one year olds; as age and careers and families progress, we never shed the fears of confusion and alienation or the desire of freedom and possibility. We merely grow old and seek ways to keep preoccupied, narrowing in on arbitrary successes that distract from the failures of dreams and past.

Becky is beautiful, honest, and has a soul – a young, murky, unpredictable soul, the kind Kerouac talks about. Somewhere down the line I imagine she’ll stifle it for stability and the finer things in life, and I think I would do that if I could. But I can’t seem to find the temperament to believe in this world. If I heeded her advice and made an attempt at a future, it would likely end on a sour note. Pessimism is often confused with realism, and while I may be able to bang out a few pages of eloquent words every now and again, none of it is anything that would be profitable. And even if it was, and I’m just being self-defeating, a Pulitzer is as meaningless as a million dollars – neither would do much in the way of my view that we are all lost in search of something that doesn’t exist.

“It drives me crazy to watch you throw your life away. I mean, I had to stop talking to you because it just…you remind me of my mother. She just gets eaten up in this vicious cycle of depression and apathy…and it’s just too hard to watch.”

Her voice has taken on that of an impassioned plea, as her mother is one of the larger demons in her days, and I just want to hug her. Hug her for caring so much and for being honest and for having to deal with her mother or me or the rest of the animals. I want to hug her because we’re alive and we don’t know what to do.

Someone stumbles into the room looking for ping-pong balls, and we help to find them, sliding out to join the rest of them, the conversation hanging on agitating ellipses. I make the transition from confrontational honesty to casual beer talk, and as I listen to Joe slur the notable stories from the previous night’s bar shift for the third time, I think to myself that while she may be right that I’m too pessimistic to better myself, she’s casting too much doubt on these people.

She’s always been distrustful of the people around us, and finds solace in the thought of leaving this cesspool, though she doesn’t know that the whole fucking planet is a cesspool and the people who inhabit it, as sick and lost as they seem, are timid and kind at heart, no different than we are, merely swept up in the machine that whirs fluidly whether we fight or submit. We seek out the world when it is right in front of us.

But I see no difference in trying to ascend or toiling here, in finding a wife or taking home a stranger, in exercising regularly or letting my teeth fall out. I see neither path as righteous and both as futile. And that’s a terrible burden to bear when you see the earnest faces of those who care. The last conversation Becky and I had took place months ago, during a break from painting her room. She remarked at one point that when I spoke about life I talked as if I was dying, and in a way I think I am, because the way I feel is like a black cancer that spreads fiercely and rapidly, rotting away my soul. And every day that I wake up and walk through this world is another cigarette, a little too much time in the sun, a worsening of the situation. I see no difference in telling this to a shrink or drinking it off or surrendering. The people around me – the Beckys of the world – are the only thing that seem to make those thoughts particularly troubling to me.

As the beers dwindle, a few of us plot a trip out to an Indiana diner, and Becky is not in the fold as she must catch an early flight. Her ride starts the car parked out front as mine awaits out back. We exchange a knowing, brimming glance for awhile, as it’s one of those goodbyes in which both party is painfully aware that it’s a goodbye.

“Take care of yourself out there.”

“You, too,” she says, hugging me tightly and giving me one last soft look. “I believe in you.”

As I watch her dash off to the car, I wish I did, too.

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Burnin’ Out His Fuse Up Here Alone Friday, Dec 19 2008

Perched on two stools that feel like thrones, we shed the meloncholy frailty that comes with too much thought and become boisterous and carefree kings/jesters. Seth is (usually) Amber’s boyfriend, my roommate and one of the sharper employees of Captain’s. Held back only by the dim crowd around him, he doesn’t have a bad bone in his body, but he’s smart enough not to get it exploited. I can’t imagine anyone not liking him, but most seem to take enjoyment in his witty, charming, and at times obnoxious banter. Aside from the occasional late night drunken window of honesty, they aren’t really given a look into the more complex side, as he has mastered the art of inane college bar banter, and keeps himself on cruise control until he sense someone worthy.

It is somewhat disheartening to see how many road blocks have been set by a debilitating enviornment – when it comes from an unwitting source, a misogynistic joke or acting through the motions doesn’t so much bother me as when it’s coming from someone who knows better, who is just swimming with swine because it’s easier that way. And it’s hard to fault Seth or anyone for that, so I blame the world, and release the anger by mocking it over beers with him.

We mock them, and yet we pander to them.

Today/tonight we find ourselves at Mac’s, sliding from stools to a booth that becomes a revolving door of friends, acquaintances, potential bedmates, our condition and wit deteriorating with each new arrival. Bartenders are greeted or said goodbye to during shift change, and we learn that the sun has gone down during a cigarette break. We play the right songs on the jukebox and our one-liners are well-timed. We refer to the women as ‘girl’ and discourage others from leaving the bar in order to get on with life. Nachos and pitchers and shots are ordered. It’s always a party, and we’re always the life of it, and no one but us has any idea how bleak that existence really is.

He wants to be with her. He would – and has – abandon(ed) this in a heartbeat just to hear her take out life’s frustrations on him. When life presents me with a girl like that to pour my pent-up affections into, I often feel the same way as he does, and I think that’s why we’re here, sinking singles into the jukebox and ordering doubles for women we’ve just met and don’t particularly care for. Perhaps somewhere in the back of our minds we’re hoping our Ambers will walk through the door and see us in this pain/festivity, regardless of how unlikely geography or the fact that it’s lunch hour makes the prospect. Maybe we just don’t want to think or remember.

We’d both rather be somewhere else, but a fairly specific somewhere else, and without that prospect, this seems like the next best thing. We sing our songs of sorrow in respective bedrooms where no one can hear them, and check it all at the door. Here we are safe, easy, happy, free. The women are rarely challenging outside of sexual conquest, the regulars give us hugs and buy us rounds, spirits are lifted with shot specials or a Prince song, and no one will find it very troubling if we don’t return their phone calls the next week (or at least they won’t admit to it). The self-destruction seems more acceptable within these walls.

Afternoons turn to evenings, weekend into months, and we hurdle onwards, changing venues, filling up ashtrays, laughing in alleyways, frequenting strange living rooms, arriving at diners when they open. It’s not so much about the women or alcohol, but rather a dogged pursuit of something just out of reach – the returns on our emotional investments we’ve waited on for so long haven’t come, so we burn out our souls here in a frenzied last-ditch effort to recoup what we thought we had coming to us. Anything seems possible over a round.

The tragedy is not in our actions, but in the fact that we’re keenly aware of them. We know what we are doing and foregoing. We can see ourselves in each other, forcing lines and dispositions, pining over the unworthy, and while I think we love what we see at the core, we certainly see what’s gone wrong. Neither one of us has the insight, courage or hope to rectify any of it, so we let it pass and entertain the mundane details of two cute strangers’ trip to Kroger.

Everything I’m looking for in humanity sits across the booth from me, delivering soft-spoken and light-hearted quips to the girl next him. We aren’t yet aware how truly comforting and enriching the other’s presence is, as we’re too busy lamenting the inability to chase down the unattainable. But I’m rooting for him. I won’t make the first move without him, but I want to ditch these girls and make ill-advised proclaimations of embarrassing adoration for the women we’re drinking away. When they reject us, I want to pack up and move somewhere foreign. Arizona. Japan. Scranton. Anywhere but here.

I’m certain we’d find ourselves in similar bars, talking to similar girls, but to bolt in the night would be the endless possibility that we’re searching for. It’s not a solution, but for our ilk there are no solutions, there are only actions and consequences. I don’t know that it would make us any happier, but I doubt it would be half as disappointing than if we were to realize whatever unattained desires we’re drinking off right now.

We can examine each other’s desires and see the myriad of faults and overcomplications, but I doubt if given a magic wand either one of us would deprive the other of their mistake. He would like to be with Amber, and I don’t think it would do him any good, but it has to be better than watching him angle for a bottle blonde without an original impulse in her body. I don’t necessarily want him to be a better person; he’s fine as he is. I just want him to pursue what honestly matters to him, regardless of how chaotic and constructed it may be. But perhaps that’s just because I’ve decided to walk that lonely road myself.

I don’t find it so sad that we’re here. I’m more troubled by the thought that we’re really not missing all that much out there.

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How Was I To Know She Was With The Russians Too? Wednesday, Dec 17 2008

Years ago, a kid bearing a striking resemblance to myself would awake from a hangover-avoiding mid-afternoon nap, layer himself up beyond the ability to look cool, and plod for about ten or fifteen minutes down Brown Street, where he’d meet a girl waiting for him at her apartment. Together they would walk back up the hill, passing his dorm and continuing on towards the opposite end of campus, their breath uneven from the trudging and talking.

“So I think I’m going to bring legwarmers back,” she says with a sniffle, her face painted red by the cold, which really brings out her eyes.

“Yeah?” he asks with a melt to his voice, the kind that only comes out with her. ”You should attach it to some sort of cause…causes are trendy these days.”

“Save the Manatee legwarmers? They could be teal.”

“Very nice.”

“Or grey…for the wolves.”

The walk happened every Tuesday and Thursday and usually took about a half hour, maybe forty-five minutes if they had to waddle like penguins in the high snow. It was his favorite time of the week, although he didn’t think much of it, having plenty of other distractions to bide his time, other avenues for dispersing affection, a future to pursue. He wouldn’t know that it would be his last feeling of innocence, nor was he aware that it was the last time he wouldn’t have to fight himself to be hopeful. Hope, he would come to learn, was a bad thing.

“So let’s make a pact,” she says, stomping off her feet as they come to a more manageable strip of sidewalk, only thin wisps of snow dancing and curling across the concrete. “If neither one of us is married when we’re fifty, we’ll marry each other.”

“I’m not sure I’ll be alive at fifty,” he answers, slipping a cigarette into his mouth.

“Forty-five then.”

“Forty.”

“At forty you’re still going be a hip and famous writer with tons of groupies,” she says, grabbing his outstretched arm in order to leap across the puddle of slush nestled near the curb. “Don’t you want to enjoy that for awhile?”

“Writers don’t have groupies.”

“Sure they do…I know plenty of girls who would fuck Dan Brown.”

“Would you fuck Dan Brown?”

“Absolutely not,” she quips, the breath from her laugh exploding into the grey sky.

The kid thought to himself that he might take that deal, although would be frightened to learn that this opinion wouldn’t change much in the coming years. Two weeks after this conversation takes place, the companions would separate – her spending the break in Key West, and him snowed in with Nick-at-Nite reruns. On a Friday night she will call him from her hotel room, and in the course of inebriated dialogue he will admit that he never learned to multiply numbers of two digits. He had been sick with the flu the week they taught it and never caught up, instead relying on calculators or multiplying by ten and doing the rest of the math in his head. She will guide him through the process over the phone, the lack of sobriety and paper causing the lesson to take some time, and the memory of this event will remain to this day a candidate for a slide in the mental flash reel that has been promised to him before his death.

Before that moment takes place, while he’s still here in the freezing cold, strolling past the student union while she explains why vegans can’t eat Skittles, he doesn’t know. Years after it all happens he still won’t know, but at this point he still believes. He can still enjoy himself in a moment, and not have it spoiled by the ills of the world around him. He still juggles potential sexual partners for the thrill of it and looks into the Peace Corps and thinks there’s something more. When he’s sees himself dancing in their eyes, it’s a pleasant view. He still writes stories with plots, because he still believes life has one. He still votes Democrat, because he believes it can be different. He still thinks he himself might be capable of becoming content or, even loftier, changing the world. He still doesn’t believe they can knock the earnest idealism out of him.

And perhaps this isn’t all destroyed by a drunken multiplication lesson, but in the long run it helps him to see that perhaps that’s as good as it’s going to get. There might not be more. They might all be leading you along to a dead end. He doesn’t know yet that it doesn’t matter whether you use proper turn signals or take your hands off the wheel…you never really seem to be going anywhere. He doesn’t see that the only thing he wouldn’t do for her or the world is save himself. He doesn’t know that this is about as happy as it gets.

“Do you have plans with South Main Girl tonight?” she asks, winded as they climb the steps of the building.

“No, I don’t.” He does. “Have you talked to Boy From the Gym?”

“Not recently.” They’ve texted back and forth all morning. “Maybe we could drink wine and watch Conan?”

“I’d love to.”

They enter the building, stomping and brushing themselves off before kissing quickly and hugging for an extended period of time. She heads off for class while he sits in the lobby, his ears burning as he awaits the bus that will take him back to his dorm in four minutes. On the ride home, she will text him with ‘What color best represents lupus?’, and he will beam to himself.

I really miss those kids.

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Van Gogh Had Theo to Keep Him Alive Saturday, Dec 13 2008

My tenure at Captain’s was not one of my most virile, optimistic or desireable periods; my heyday had passed. But I was at my happiest. That’s a wonderful sentiment when you’re fifty and reflecting on your family. It’s a frightening one when you’re twenty-five and reflecting on those who won’t remember you in a decade. But I don’t feel twenty-five. I’ve had so many diluted drunks tell me that I have an ‘old soul’, and while I’m not buying their misery-deflecting rants, something is definitely up. I have way more tread on my tires than I should.

My time there was disparaged by some as reliving a lost past with people younger than me at a job beneath my qualifications. I don’t know that I can argue that assertion with a straight-face, but I’ve never been happier in my life, even during the past that I was allegedly attempting to recapture. At no period in my life have I ever felt more aware of my assets, faults, curses, and blessings. For an all-too-brief period I somehow managed to find myself able to accept all past/present/future shortcomings, and fall in love with the dizzying hope of the people around me. Perhaps I wasn’t always the most optimistic or joyous, but to be content despite those circumstances, to be able to smile warmly at the thought of the people around me, to get excited by banal exercise science majors and frat-minded doormen and prickly bosses…to be satisfied is what counts. Satiation over acquisition.

For whatever reason, I fell deeply in love with these people, some close friends, some barely acquaintances, some but a frame in the film my existence, but nonetheless, people I fell not madly and passionately in love with, but the people I fell comfortably and thoughtfully in love with. When one can fall in love with every roleplayer they chat with for thirty minutes every other day, something is going well.

I’ve thought it over far too much for my or anyone’s own good, and I’m afraid I can’t come to any other conclusion than that for the most part, the world is a very sick and disappointing place. And I’m not even talking about the heavy stuff. The triple homicides, genocides, ski-mask rapes, child abductions, slave labor, civilian bombings, guerilla combat, unnoticed starvation…to be quite honest my brain has been conditioned to be far too self-absorbed to meddle with any of that. I think mostly of the quiet desperation we all possess, the stifling of our souls, the mindless jobs and hobbies, the lies and manipulations we carry out in the name of things we don’t believe in. What percentage of our daily actions do you think magnify the average person’s ills as opposed to bettering them?

And there is no hope for any of this. It has always been this way and I fear it will always be that way as long as you can access these words. The best of us will succumb to it all in some form or another. The only thing one can do is find the courage to let it all go, to search for something you love, regardless of where it places you in relation to society. Be keenly aware that this is all chaos, and the object of your affection is apt to swiftly change. Just ride the wave. Do not fight it. You may find yourself swept away to somewhere desolate. Set up camp there. 

An old two story brick building with a red iron fenced patio populated by confused but unshackled souls yet to be bludgeoned, where I earned just enough to keep the lights on and the nights late – this, for a time, was all I ever needed. I can recall more affluent or attractive times, but even then I always wanted what was beyond. At Captain’s, a post-shift reuben over trivial conversation with a sorority girl co-worker was something that truly caused me to walk home with a little more spring in my step, and not because I thought I had the chance to bang her. My bubbling affections were in the moment, not a product of reminiscing or scheming. These comments may sound green and self-excusing, but I’m beginning to think we can only find true happiness in moments of cockeyed, gut-induced foolishness (hence the careers of Journey, Lionel Richie, Phil Collins, etc.).

None of it was perfect. I was a non-reactionary, slowly decaying shell of what I could’ve been. The boss I adored was a womanizer distracted by the bottom line of the profit sheet. The friends, lovers and co-workers I held great faith in were often attention-starved and lost without an emotional compass, and were apt to disown one over the ever-changing-machinations of gossip. It was nowhere near the family that my head and heart made it out to be. But I was always aware of that. Never did I lack the clarity to see what they were. And I loved them anyway.

I don’t want to ever find myself somewhere I couldn’t burst out of at a moment’s notice. The thought of the debilitations I would impose coupled with the aforementioned troubling world makes the thought of offspring absolutely terrifying. I have no desire to ever or own a home or have to use the word ’equity’ in conversation. Fidelity appears illogical to me and merely a way to avoid the solitude that occurs when our bodies pass attraction capabilities. Maturity always seemed to be nothing more than a sophistication of complications.

It doesn’t matter if they want to sleep with you. Nor does it matter whether or not they want to give you a job. You won’t be happier if they approve. Being better looking wouldn’t make life easier. He/She cannot complete you on their own. Constructed pretenses will always collapse into ruin. Success does not equal winning. True love exists not in duration or compatibility or notions of romance but in outlook. The former is a result of the latter.

I never wanted to fall in love with Captain’s or Oxford. I never wanted to throw in the towel and give up on a lucrative career or happy oblivion. I never wanted to appreciate the music of Lionel Richie in a non-ironic fashion. And I never wanted to leave. It just sort of happened.

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Caught Up in Endless Solutions Friday, Dec 12 2008

Cannon’s Pub (est. 1934) sat on the corner of W. 108th and Broadway in Morningside. The exterior of the bar looked just as you might imagine a place with such a name would – green and white wood paneling with a bright red door wedged between symmetrically shaped windows, neon signs humming through the panes. Around the corner from our apartment, it was the first and last place my roommate and I visited in a pre-determined scouting trip for a regular hangout, settling quickly on their two dollar beers that came in little glasses.

Within ten minutes or so of that first night we were joined at our warped, sticky, chipped table by two French girls, two Mexican dishwashers, and a German Columbia student, all of whom rolled their own cigarettes and none of whose names I can remember. The girls dragged us to a few bars in the area and before the evening concluded one of them had written the number of her grass dealer on a slip of paper and slid it across the table.

“Tell him Frenchy sent you,” she said with a wink. We never saw her again. I remember her being rather pretty, although I can’t recall a single feature of her face. There is photo documentation of our spontaneous grouping - Mark and I took pictures often our first month in town; new friends, bums, bartenders, those Samurai black guys who don’t like having their photos taken – but in it Frenchy’s face is buried in her arm, a squealing, tipsy, head-burying laugh. I was spoiled in these early times into thinking that every night in Manhattan would be this strange and exotic.

It wasn’t long before we frequented enough to have our own usual seats, right between Mitch, the quintessential struggling playwright, and Willie, the broken-toothed construction worker no one could ever understand, due in part to what many guessed was an Irish accent, but mostly because of the Jack he had been inhaling since noon. We usually arrived a little after ten, and it wasn’t long before my cigarettes hit the scratched oak that Robbie would be tossing down napkins next to them and popping a pint glass under the tap. Stout, bearded, and covered in tattoos, he often greeted us with a profanity-laced grumbling about whatever hockey teams he’d bet on that night, and would occasionally pull me into the back room to smoke some hash. Every night when it came to close out, he would scratch his beard and throw out an arbitrary number far below our actual tab.

Linda always sat at the far end of the bar, with her giant hoop earrings and nauseating perfume. Clutching a martini in one hand and a Newport 100 in the other, Linda dressed like a queen and swore like a sailor. Wearing the same bright purple blazer, she constantly played Marvin Gaye on the jukebox and would always throw out some line about how lonely or tired or broke she was, referring to herself in the third-person and laughing heartily. The words ‘oh, honey’ and a wave of her hand usually accompanied any statement she made.

At the other end of the room one could usually find Julio, who sweated profusely and always wore a shirt and tie. He played chess with anyone who would take up the offer on the old flimsy and worn board from under the bar (a checker represented a white rook). Our relationship consisted of my pretending not to notice the constant sniffs coming from the bathroom stall. I never understood how one could spend their evenings taking bumps and playing chess without going mad.

J.R. was the boisterous, cowboy-hat and skull jewelery wearing six-foot-four black man with sass that every low-brow party movie dreams of. Most of his bills were paid by high-stakes dart game or hustles, and Cannon’s seemed to be a break area for him.  I can only recall him playing a handful of money games in my time there. He came in at odd hours and often played friendly rounds with novices like us, handing out pointers and giving us chances to compete by imposing ridiculously debilitating handicaps on himself.

If a Chivas game was on the Mexicans could be found hollering at the round table, and on the rarest of occasions Carson Daly would drop by to visit Robbie (a friendship he often boasted of and I mistakenly doubted), but aside from a few strays this was the nightly crowd Sunday through Wednesday. The other three nights often saw the place overrun with rowdy and obnoxious Columbia students with upended collars.

Whenever I think of Cannon’s, I’m often drawn to a cold and sludgy Thursday in March. Mark and I slip in a little early to avoid the crowd before heading downtown. The room is oddly silent and the napkins do not hit the oak as we slide in between Mitch and Willie. Robbie’s neck is craned towards the screen above the bar, as is everyone else’s (save an apparently sleeping Willie). The jukebox is off, and all of the channels are tuned to the graying man in the suit declaring war for the safety of his people. Some of the televisions seem to be out-of-sync, causing the sound to echo throughout the room.

“Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly, yet our purpose is sure,” the solemn voice drones, the reverberation making it sound like an aged recording, like the men who were wrong before him. “The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder.”

 This awed hush around the television had taken place quite frequently in recent weeks, although normally I’d found myself in a Rockefeller Center hallway, watching an NBC feed amidst people who were quick to shake their heads and ridicule the words spoken. A certain workplace restraint was present, but to be incredulous and doubting was almost a given amongst anyone not wearing a suit.

“My fellow citizens, the dangers to our country and the world will be overcome. We will pass through this time of peril and carry on the work of peace. We will defend our freedom. We will bring freedom to others. And we will prevail. May God bless our country and all who defend her.”

The televisions fizzle into a brief silence and everyone, even the talking head the screens quickly cut to, remains in place for a second or two before shaking it off as if they were hypnotized. The talking head begins to tell us what we’ve just seen, Robbie fires the jukebox back up and general chatter begins to emerge.

“This is very sad, man,” Julio mutters to me, adjusting his glasses with one last look at the television before returning to his chessboard.

“Where’s my Conan tickets?” Robbie asks with a grin, throwing down napkins.

“You gotta tell me when you want to go…at least two weeks in advance.”

“He don’t know what he’s doin’ tommarrah,” Linda calls out from across the bar with a hand wave and a hearty laugh.

“Robbie, what do you think of this?” Mark asks before his jacket is even off, eager to rekindle an ongoing debate he and I have had in the apartment.

“Fuckin’ A-right,” he says, placing our beers in front of us. “Towelhead fucked with the wrong country…kill ‘em all.”

 ”That motherfucker’s gettin’ what coming to him,” J.R. calls out as he yanks darts from the board. “Y’know, I fought in the first Gulf War.” None of us have ever believed this.

“Dan doesn’t think it’s right.” Mark shoots me a grin. “He dragged me to that protest this weekend.”

“Yeah?” Robbie says with a laugh. “How was that?”

“Bunch of nutjobs, man. Cops did get a little rough with some of ‘em.”

“Eh, that’s New York…Danny, you’re quiet over there. You a bleeding heart?”

“I think it’s a bunch of bullshit, yeah.”

“What’s bullshit?” Robbie asks, his smile drooping.

“This war…we’re not in any danger.”

Despite finding myself among the likeminded a great deal, this opinion is not one that was very prevalent at this time, even in Manhattan. Or at least it felt that way. The room quickly explodes into a McLaughlin Group swirl of overriding near-shouts. ‘It’s the right thing to do, man!’, ‘The guy’s got tons and tons of mustard gas!’, ‘They would kill you and every one of us!’, ‘Turn the whole fucking place into glass!’  

“Were you here that day?” Robbie asks with a never-before-seen scowl.

“I don’t see what that has to -”

“Were you here that day?” Robbie’s voice booms so loud that the whole bar takes notice.

“C’mon, Robbie,” Mitch pleads.

“Hussein had nothing to do with-”

“Were? You? Here?”

“You know I wasn’t,” I whisper.

“Then you shut your mouth. 3,000 people and you don’t think there’s a problem? You don’t know what danger is.”

“So your answer is to kill all of their civilians?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. Conversation over.”

“Ain’t got nothin’ to do with me,” Linda says, sipping her martini and shaking her head solemnly. “Ain’t helpin’ me, ain’t hurtin’ me. That’s how Linda does things…too old, baby. Too old.”

I turn to Julio in the corner, who glances at me for a second before returning to his game. Linda throws on some Marvin as Robbie silently places an upside down shot glass in front of me and wanders off towards the Islanders game. Mark and Mitch throw darts with J.R. while I sit in silence next to the occasionally grumbling Willie, concealing the warm moisture that wells up under my eyes as I think of small children having their limbs blown off. In my head, they’re looking at me and their hair is matted to their torn scalps with blood and there’s nothing I can do about it, so despite their burning, innocent stares, I knock back a cheap domestic and get ready to chase SoHo tail. There’s too many of them, kid. There’s nothing I can do.

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It Went The Dull and Wicked Ordinary Way Friday, Dec 12 2008

My first activity as a New York resident was finding a suitable coffeehouse to frequent – the requirements merely being the presence of big, comfortable couches like on Friends. That, apparently, was what living in Manhattan was all about, and I set out in search a little after nine. My roommate and I split a bagel gorging with pink cream cheese outside the shop below our apartment, chunks of strawberry sliding off the sides and plopping onto the pavement. When he headed off for his first day of work, I claimed I was just going to wander.

As it turns out, every coffeehouse in Manhattan has big, comfortable couches like on Friends. Only they’re not patronized by people like Chandler, but rather by face-lifted women with tight buns of blond hair who give you cold stares from over the tops of their New Yorker. I meandered around town weaving a trail similar to the little lines left behind by the Family Circus kids, each one leading to a coffeehouse full of people ignoring each other.

Around noon I came across a red front with long, slender slits of window, and a garishly large sign hanging from a fire escape, showing the hands, feet and hair of a cartoon holding a coffee cup, with the words ‘Big Cup’ printed in every color of the rainbow. This would have been everyone’s first hint, but I just shrugged and walked in, oblivious to the square rainbow sticker on the door.

The brick wall of one side was painted a pastel shade of purple, and its adjoining side a smooth-walled bird egg blue. Hanging on the back wall was a cartoonish painting of an evil clown with brown, jagged teeth. The place reminded me of the Partridge Family bus. I found a cushy, lime green velvet couch and listened to The Crabs, the first time I’d ever heard them outside of solitude.

Big Cup was known for its music selection – it housed about 400 CD’s, including compilations made by employees and regulars. On warmer days the doors were opened for whatever happened to be playing – they ranged from indie to techno to classical, shifting with the chameleon-like clientele, the volume raising as the hours progressed. If you lived near Big Cup, you could probably get away without having a watch. I recall them once playing nothing but Morrisey for a week straight. And so I can safely rely on The Crabs when explaining the next bit of Big Cup’s reputation.

It was known as one of the area’s premiere pick-up spots for gays. The best Chelsea had to offer checked each other out there, from the jaded, lit-savvy morning paper crowd, to the well-built afternoon gym crowd, to the stylish underage boys in the evening.  Personifying the stereotype of the clueless Midwesterner I’d resented, I never noticed any it, not even the cruising it was known for in the later hours, merely thinking that the place always had long lines for the bathroom.

The crowd was sparse when I first arrived, and I ended up talking with Louis, the bald-headed manager who wore a black turtleneck. We discussed The Crabs and Cleveland and my internship and he welcomed me to Big Cup with a free coffee, which I drank in solitude until approached by Todd, who had designedly ruffled brown hair and blue eyes with meticulously trimmed stubble over a square jaw. He looked fit and wore a thin brown sweater. Compared to the garish, effeminate camp the rest of the place radiated, Todd seemed, well, straight. I found it entirely plausible that he was a fellow hetero who had wandered in and recognized me as kin.

He commented on the book I was reading (why was I reading Woolf in a place once described as “the deepest pit in gay hell”?), and talked about Cleveland, specifically a predominately gay suburb he had a friend in, and about the music playing before it hit me that we were, for a lack of a better term, flirting.

“So…why are you here?” he asked with an incredulous laugh after I came clean.

“Dunno…like the music…and the couches.”

He thought it over for a second, shrugged and laughed, and my first New York friendship was born. Todd was a twenty-six year old drama student who bartended weekends at a bar on Christopher Street. He introduced me to his friends: Craig, who wore a pointy-collared lavender shirt and remarked that my shell necklace was very ‘Ashton’, followed by a shrill squeal; David, who wore a brown suit without a tie or a job and horn-rimmed glasses; and Hank, a slender, slightly balding, sarcastic and wry painter who wore slacks and a turtleneck. It wasn’t Chandler and Joey, but it would do.

One similarity between them and their sitcom counterparts is that none of them ever seemed to have any responsibilities to take care of. All of them seemed to be free of money trouble, despite their share of menial jobs. We often started the night in a high-ceiling apartment filled with African art and expensive looking furniture, where Hank, the gallery receptionist, lived. Apparently the place was owned by a friend (they all lived in posh apartments ‘owned by a friend’).

Like a group of sheltered college girls might adopt the flaming Craig as some sort of novelty friend/mascot , I took on the role of the straight college boy, the outsider whose customs and practices were absurdly foreign. I was confused by girls, I watched football, I liked Journey (‘He likes Journey!’ Craig shrieked, as if I was a newly-bought stereo with special features). Many of their female hangers-on were thrown my way, as not only was I often the only straight male in the place, but coupled with an appealing job I had gained the approval of the male gay community, which goes a long way with the female in-search-of-an-intriguing-guy community.

Most mornings David brought up every instance of gay discrimination that had occurred across the country the previous day, and everyone ranted about Bush, and they nodded in agreement and sipped their drinks and at first I thought I’d finally found the intellectual paradise I had been searching for, until they went on to talk about how fat people had gotten and how terrible they dressed and how tacky bums were and which people they didn’t like on The Real World. Everyone operated on gossip – Lizzie, Janet, Marcus, a thousand people I’d never met and would later meet only after hearing mercilessly about what whores or cokeheads they were. In many ways it was like I’d never left the Midwest, only here my Abercrombie polo and jeans were the subject of ridicule rather than the normal requirements for conformity.

As time went on, I tried my best to hang out with Todd and Craig and the others on a more individual basis, away from the bars and the loud music and the pretension. I still stopped in at Big Cup from time to time on weekends, and occasionally I’d accompany them to the trendy bars where everyone seemed to know each other, but after awhile the scene began to wear thin on me.

See, all of them were incredibly charming and witty and intelligent, and on a one-on-one level they were everything Oxford lacked intellectually. But when they’re all together, packed in the meat market of Big Cup or a club, complimenting everyone on their appearance, talking shit about everyone’s appearance, backstabbing, fucking each other, lying as a result of it, living in this almost unaware elitist bubble in which money is spent freely, and worries are reduced to sweater vests and abs, they can appear quite obnoxious to the keen eye.

Once the place began to swell with Chelsea boys or NYU fag hags, Todd and the others began to change for the worst. It’s something that I’ve always been faced with, and maybe I’d never realized it until viewing it through the confines of an arena where I wasn’t clouded with lust, but suddenly none of it seemed any different. Seeing how thoughtful and well-read they were, and then to watch them dumbed and watered down inside the fray of gorgeous and expensive mingling, I began to loathe it all. We always chalked it up to Oxford, to the closed-minded, but perhaps the mindset we’d been so bitter about is everywhere.

These people had the right political views, they could quote Donne, they introduced me to all sorts of interesting girls, they possessed a knowledge of what many would call ‘culture’, they stroked checks to charity…and they always picked up my tab without making me admit I needed them to. But yet when the sun went down and the crowd came out, they were no less closed-minded and piggish than the frat guys drinking towers at Captain’s or the homophobic groups that David constantly ranted about.

From gay coffeehouses in Chelsea to college bars in Oxford to redneck dives in Lexington, it all feels the same. The defense mechanisms just seem to manifest themselves differently.

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It Ended Bad, But I Love What We Started Tuesday, Dec 9 2008

It seems anytime I find myself in deeply emotional relationships that it either ends up in one of two events– at some point I find myself sitting across from them thinking ‘what the fuck happened to you?’ or find myself on the opposite end of that very question. This is most likely the last time Devin and I ever sit down together in a civil manner. Our mutual friends have warned against this, being well informed by the gossip circle of our plans, but we have scheduled an eight o’clock mutual disappointment.

She has chosen to wear a hooded Coronado sweatshirt and jeans, and, given that her make-up is detailed and glowing, I imagine she did so as a display of flippancy. There is no actual flippancy in her appearance – every bit of it is calculated, and lately it seems the time spent calculating grows by the day. This, however, is exactly what I want. I wish they always wore a sweatshirt and jeans. Life might be simpler for all of us.

 ”You should just get laid,” she offers up from across the booth, so out of character that one would suspect she was being paid for by a corporation. Devin has slept with no more than a handful of men, most of them in a dizzying swift period of weeks.

“That’s going to make me feel better?”

“I feel better about myself every time I have sex,” she says, her voice as rehearsed and wooden as a high school play.

“I know you’re just trying to get a rise out of me, but I can assure you that if you use it as a device for ego gratification, you’ll end up resenting it.” I always seem compelled to hand down supposed wisdom to Devin, a habit she resents. This time it feels like parting advice.

“What do you want?” she asks flatly.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Look,” she says with a puffed out eye roll and bang swipe. “I know that I’ve been sort of crazy lately…but this is exactly what happened with Andrew. We started arguing and he turned all of our friends against me…and I’m not letting that happen again. My friends are too important to me.” Andrew is a mythic figure from her past she talks about with wide-eyed reverence/scorn.

“So you’re going to do what he did to you?” I know I mean to imply the senselessness of the thought, but the truth is in the place we live in, that plan makes all the sense in the world. “Please just stop…I don’t want to move.”

“No one’s making you do anything. You don’t have to move.”

 ”No, I don’t. I could stay here at get glassware thrown at my head or have my friends berated anytime they want to hang out with me. I could be discluded from every function that’s important to me because you’ll throw a fit. Is that what you want? Because that’s what you’re doing…to be honest, I didn’t think you could pull it off. For once I had a little too much faith in the world.”

“Well, if you left, maybe people would stop wondering why you’re still here. I wouldn’t get Christmas gifts thrown at my porch or have to wonder whether or not you’ll let me in or how many more drinks it’s going to take before you start belitting me.” She pauses, as if she’s leveling her scope. “Y’know, I don’t care about you as much as you think I do.”

The fact that someone who used to care so innocently and freshly for me is now using pitifully veiled indifference to mask the pain of however I’ve disappointed them makes the next gulp of beer a bit larger. Both of our actions in recent weeks have merited a slot on a VH-1 reality series, but that doesn’t mean at one point there wasn’t something honest and warm there. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the duds from the decayed.

We started out with witty innuendo, Oscar Wilde, lingering hugs and long talks about love/hate dichotomies. We ended with gossip, drama, insults and objects thrown. We all have a myriad of tired stories like that, and most of the time I don’t think we’re always lamenting the loss of that specific person. It’s more related to the idea of something innocent, something pure. When it’s all over, deep down inside we fear that everything will someday end like this. And generally it does. The innocent either grow to become evil or mourn its existence.

“I don’t want to do this…can I walk you home?”

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

I’ve sat through so many of these – souls lost to addiction, lovers gone cold, friends gone mad – and they feel worse than a funeral. You’re not sure if you died or they did but something that isn’t tangible, something that can’t be put on display or buried in the dirt, has passed away and is probably never going to come back. It’s the probably that makes it harder than a funeral. Impropable uncertainty does far more to the mind than cold, hard reality.

We end up on her porch, and she bums cigarettes off of me, a habit she knows I hypocritically think she’s better than. She makes a point to keep us at a distance, despite the fact that I’ve been far too terrified to move closer. In order to keep my side of the street clean, I must attempt to absorb these arrows and keep moving forward, despite the fact that I’ve been conditioned to fight back. We sit and talk in a solemn, stunted fashion for about three cigarettes apiece, the spring moon being filmed by thin clouds.

“I don’t love you.”

“Well, I love you…and not in the big ‘L’ kind of way…more like…Proust says that being so dizzyingly in love with someone isn’t absurd…that what’s absurd is that we don’t feel that way about everyone. I really care about you, and I’m not a fan of any of this.”

“You remind me of Andrew.”

“The Andrew? I take it that’s an insult?”

“Yes.”

“Alright,” I say, flicking my cigarette into the bushes, a practice she abhorred when we lived there together. “Take it easy, Devin.”

The end will be nowhere near as falsely casual and smooth. But this is where it died. Another one in the books. Not the most remarkable, but certainly not to be dismissed as whimsy. People come, people go, and the point is to not acknowledge how much our souls have deteriorated and comprimised along the way, how much we let ourselves get here.

 I wander over to Mac’s, the place where Rebecca and I had a similar version of the same conversation over three years ago, to find Seth pitching easy and witty remarks about the bull riding on television to distract from his pain.

“What’s happenin’, brother?”

“A fine television program from the 1970’s.” He already knows what’s happened and the bartender’s already pouring my drink. We bet rounds of shots on three-pointers taken in a Western Athletic Conference game and forget that this is where we live.

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