I Was Never Satisfied With Casual Encounters Wednesday, Jan 28 2009

“I just…I don’t know anymore.” She grunts and rolls her eyes, her jawline tensing. “Where is this going, anyway?” She’s still wearing her page uniform. This meeting was arranged coldly and with little words in the halls of Studio 6A during lunch break, the leftovers from the previous night’s alarming bedside exchange. I twist my face as if I’m pondering the question, but I merely focus on the gay pride-colored peacock logo pinned to her lapel while I debate whether or not to be honest. I’m paying twenty dollars for two drinks so we can break-up.

“Nowhere,” I mutter with contrived conviction, staring at my fuzzy and warped reflection in the patterned steel bar top. “Fast.”

I always feel like I’ve delivered some sweeping, brooding Patrick Swayze-in-Road House line, until their lip begins to quiver, and they make an animated mad dash for the door. The bartender always gives a stare that could be interpreted as either understanding or disapproving. I usually realize about ten seconds too late that I’ve let the thrill of the world’s stage turn me into a complete prick, replaying the words in my mind and disagreeing with every syllable. I finish both of our drinks and head for the train home, ears muffed with headphones. I always try to carry a copy of Blood On The Tracks for just such an occasion.

“She’s a really nice girl, man,” John mutters from a Cannon’s barstool, shaking his head and curling his face. John is always quick to voice his mind, and I admire that about him. It’s the most admirable trait you can ask for in a man. Portly, bespectacled, and meek, John’s advice is the sort that pseudo-Christian businessmen often laugh off with a sarcastic ‘OK, Jesus’. It’s a nice thought, but it’s entirely unrealistic in this world. “And she really liked you.”

“I know…but I’m not really in love with the girl…I was just fucking her…for a few weeks…what do you want me to do?”

“There’s more to relationships than just fucking, you know.”

“I know that,” I groan, running my hands over my face. “Believe me, I’d fall in love with her if I could. That’s kind of the purpose of a prop, man…something to stand it for what you would like to be there.”

“You use women, man,” he explodes with a fed-up boom, throwing up his arms and drawing the attention of the lulled regulars. “And I don’t get it! Because you’re generally such a good person.” He thrusts his hands against the bar to push himself from his seat and stalks off to the bathroom. Robbie strolls over with interest, as if my glass were empty. I swear that I have one of the island’s best bartenders. He begins pouring me a fresh draft, even though mine is still about a quarter full.

“It’s a fuckin’ broad, kid,” he mumbles, raising his eyebrows and nodding. “Don’t listen to him.” He plants the brimming drink next to the evaporating one, winks and walks back to crane his neck at whatever hockey game he has the evening’s tips riding on.

In the end, I know that both men are right. And while John takes the moral and logical high road, I don’t think we should crown him as the more level-head just yet. I think that John is so angry not so much because he thinks she’s a nice girl and I’m making a mistake, but because he’s watching me squander everything he’s ever desperately pined for. In my misguided head, I want her to be someone and something else, and in his misguided head, he thinks that she’s everything he could ever ask for.

“What’s up with Johnny?” Mark asks, lured away from the dart board by the commotion.

“Nothing…anyone got next?”

“You do,” he says, pointing the tail end of a dart at me and ordering another draft.

I try to assemble the proper words to express to John that I’m not a heartless human being, just someone who needs believe in the idea that he needs to be rescued by a singular entity. And this one was not the singular entity that could rescue me. She was merely driftwood to cling to when my arms grew tired of treading water. I fail to find a good way to say it, the idea instead dissolving into inane jokes and television commentary. He’s quick to gather his jacket and head back to Astoria. Tomorrow, sometime around rehearsal, he will apologize, but I will know that he meant it and that he was right.

This is only a test.

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Your Silence Is My Greatest Fear Tuesday, Jan 27 2009

“This town will turn you and burn you if you don’t look out for yourself.” Those were my father’s words to me during my first night in Manhattan, awaiting an interview to confirm my future there. I wish he would’ve told me that when I moved to Oxford. I wish a doctor would’ve whispered it into my newborn ear instead of smacking my pruned ass. It would’ve been a ruder and more necessary awakening. Just replace the word ‘town’ with ‘world’ and it makes universal sense.

We were at Tavern On The Green, where he had booked reservations under the title of ‘Doctor’ in order to obtain a seat. I think this was an outdated trick he had picked up from his time here in the eighties, when the place was in the midst of it’s heyday. That or the student has surpassed the teacher, because three months later I would slip Mark and myself in there with ease during the National Board of Review Awards, where we would eat for free and chat with Steve Buscemi and bum cigarettes to Queen Latifah.

My father and I share this trait, this ability to fall ass-backwards into positions our brains – but not our actions or status - merit. I fuck women out of my league, and throw back shots with Hunter S. Thompson, and exchange tired elevator hellos with the NBA-sized red-haired Late Night idol I grew up laughing at. My father once told the Rev. Jesse Jackson to go fuck himself, and had a member of The Beastie Boys spit in his face. These weren’t idols that he grew up with, but I can’t help but think that, like me, he probably spent a great deal of that time wondering ‘how the fuck did I get here?’

He burdened me with a number of his less desirable traits – his hairline and stubbornness, his drinking problem and tendency to resort to knowingly cutting remarks in order to distract from guilt. But he also instilled in me so much of what makes him great – his ever-swelling heart, his admirable musical tastes, his eye for the honest man’s bottom line, his dogged persistence and his cunning ability to work a crowd. I possess double the talent and ability he does, a result of him pumping me full of the knowledge he possesses, and the knowledge his father possessed, and etc, etc., etc. Each birth is another chance to get it right.

“What’s John doing now?” I asked him this once on a car-ride home when I was around seven or eight. He had meticulously briefed me on all of the Beatles’ current whereabouts — George played on the Traveling Wilburys cassette we always listened to, Ringo was a near-microscopic conductor on PBS, and I already saw Paul everyday. Paul hung above the desk in my father’s office, a gigantic framed promotion from one of his lamentable 80’s post-Wings solo projects. He’s strumming his guitar with a large, open mouth, as if surprised to hear the sound he’s just made. His hair is starting to gray a little, and the wrinkles have set into his face. But for some reason, he never talked about John.

“He died,” he answered, eyes darting, stroking his mustache with apprehension.

“How?”

“Some idiot shot him.”

“Why?”

“Because he was an asshole…he didn’t care about anyone but himself and now no one likes him.”

Historically, Beatles-related discussion, coupled with sports, always seemed like the easiest method of filling up the silence with words, as well as bringing out some of his more memorable simple-yet-brilliant observations. About a half decade after that exchange, we were on a similar car-ride home, when I inquired about something else curious and burning.

“Why do you like Paul more than John?” It was a question that had bothered me for quite some time, but it had never occurred to ask. It finally came out one happy hour in downtown Cleveland. I was eighteen, and we had been having one of those occasional bonding moments where he, without explanation, yet somehow ceremoniously, ordered me a beer along with his. A light buzz had set in, and it just sort of slipped out. He took a swig from his beer and curled his lips in contemplation, the little bristles of his mustache grazing his nose.

“Wait until you fall in love with a girl,” he started, lowering his chin in thought before finally settling on an answer. “Then you’ll like Paul more.” He gave no further explanation, and I never asked for one.

He’s no great sage, but he’s no run-of-the-mill simpleton, either. He’s sharp, and if it weren’t for his own self-destruction, the sky would be the limit. Like father, like son. I want to be everything he is, and everything he isn’t, all at once. Despite our glaring differences, I see myself in him, and that’s all we want from the world around us in the end, isn’t it?

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Spent Most Of His Days Out Of His Head Friday, Jan 23 2009

I think everyone should spend twenty-four hours experiencing homelessness in a February Manhattan, stripped of their wallets, dressed in tatters and dirtied up enough to arouse suspicion. They should have to see what we all look like, leering at you when you tell us you’re starving. Ignored and shouted down like a whining, hungry dog while Cheers is on. Some of them will take their swipes at you even if you don’t say anything.

They won’t even let you take a piss in McDonald’s. No matter how polite or articulate you seem, they’ll take one look at your get-up and shoo you out the door like you didn’t even exist. You’re not human because you don’t have any money. Like you were the Honduran a universe away that stitched their tennis shoes for eight cents a week, only right in front of their eyes. You could curl up into the fetal position and bawl in terror on a sewer grate, and they will step right over you. I’ve seen it, and I don’t know how none of them feel it, even a little. But like them, I let the thought fade away two blocks down the street, because I need this money for cigarettes.

You’re not human because you don’t have any money. If you don’t have money, something must be wrong with you, something must be different, off-kilter. If you gather enough change to get some soup, you have to hold it out to them with your cupped hands as you walk in, showing that you are deserving of a warm booth by the window, closest to the heat vent. Sometimes that won’t even be enough. Two dollars in loose change isn’t enough to put up with vermin crawling around the place. 

When they see the desperation in your eyes, they will turn in fear. The desperate have no place in this world. The desperate remind them of their own hunger. Your plea for spare change is the dreadful feeling they get while they’re crunching numbers somewhere in the hemisphere on a sunny day. They see that look in your eyes, the one that’s screaming at the lunacy of everything we’re doing, and they have to shake it off, because otherwise they might skip work and end up with a paper-wrapped can under a tree in the park, just like you. 

Everyone should know the decadent flavor of a buttered piece of white bread when you’ve spent the last eighteen hours being shuffled along to anywhere but where you are, the eye-widening joy of a stranger looking away as he tosses you a nickel. We should all know the pain of bracing ourselves against a slimy alley wall, wobbling in a crouch, our pants wrapped around our ankles and our eyes darting frantically. We should all know what it’s like to be avoided like a foaming junkyard mutt by the people we call our brothers. Just for one night.

How long would it take you before you sifted through the trash to pull out a crescent-moon crust of a Junior Bacon, twenty pairs of eyes watching you do it and curling their faces with disgust? How long would it take you before you bought a couple twenty-four ouncers with the crumpled dollars and change you’ve collected, deciding that the rumbling of your mind needed addressed before the rumbling of your stomach? Would you snatch a quarter-smoked, lipstick stained cigarette butt from the sand when you were jonesing? How long before you broke down and cried, going mad at the cruelty of the world around you? 

Back in Oxford, once a year when the weather got warm, a student advocacy group would spend the night at the edge of campus in a constructed cardboard hut in order to raise awareness about poverty. Huddled with Northface jackets and hot cocoa, they would sit around a talk amongst each other about their Humanities professor or how it’s going with the new boyfriend. I would always make it a point to pass them by on the way home from the bar and condescendingly berate them without the slightest hint of playfulness. 

“You know that’s not funny,” she’d say. “I have class with some of those people.”

“Hey, if they want to know what it’s like…it’s not so much about the temperature being cold…it’s about the world being cold.”

“It’s still childish.” We’d walk home in silence, and I’d wonder if she’d find it very trifling if they weren’t wearing designer clothing or sat across from her in class or let the world see them squirm in agony at the burning of their souls.

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All The Dope In New York Couldn’t Kill This Pain Wednesday, Jan 14 2009

I ride the elevator with Kurt Russell or Crispin Glover or whoever the flavor-of-the-month is. I give a familiar hello to Jimmy Fallon in the hallway. I down a warm shot of top-shelf vodka with Matthew McConaghey. None of it really means much after awhile. Satiation is a part of everything. You can meet too many stars. You can have too many fans. And you’ve probably already peaked. If you’re not lamenting that fact, you’re either in the middle of the ride, or you need to brace yourself - it’s barrelling at you like a yard-focused fullback.

Here I am, in the middle of it, and like most of the world, I don’t even know it. I write and call home with photos and stories of how mind-blowing it all is. I see my adolescent idol on a daily basis. I’m hit on by exotic women in dim red lighting. Celebrity has become mundane. But I don’t know that this is it. I keep convincing myself there is more. And maybe if I wasn’t so stubborn, there could’ve been, but how long would it have taken me to grow weary of that alternate reality?

The richest man in the world will eventually lose his passion for accumulating money. Wilt Chamberlin undoubtedly got sick of pussy. Sooner or later the thrill of your song on the radio begins to fade. At a certain point it becomes about chasing what was, and very few of us cut the route at the right time.

If I could go back and ride that wave, there are a million grimace-inducing things that I’d like to take back. I’d apologize and keep my mouth shut and speak up. But what I’d find most important would be to make sure that I’m jarringly aware of how much the time in-between the dream meant, the things I didn’t write home about. I’d relish watching Cops in Astoria with John and his unsettling, glass-eyed Spaniard roommate. I’d savor the sushi I couldn’t afford at the all-wooden place on Columbus with the old-school Coke bottles. I’d never stop playing Home Run Derby in Central Park, the sun be damned. I’d hug Mr. William until he felt uncomfortable. I’d laugh as hard as I could at Kenny’s mediocre stand-up. I would put up with whatever hangover was necessary to catch Four-Dollar Breakfast with Mark. I’d shiver with glee at the opportunity to buy smokes at Duane Reade. The freakish and elegant architecture would inspire even more awe than it did the first time around.

Realize how wonderful bacon tastes. Air your grievances. Tell them that you love them. Punch them as hard as you can. Forgive them. Fuck them until you inadvertently pass out from exhaustion. Hug them until they let go. Listen to the birds. Chat with the person who rings up your gas. Is this something I need to expound on? Shouldn’t we have all gotten this down around the end of high school? You don’t need to hear these things from me, you can learn this lesson in Hallmark cards or Burger King placemats or Hugh Grant films. And yet you still don’t get it, do you?

It’s alright. Neither do I.

I attach this observation to my past, but I don’t let it seep into the conscious of my present.  Despite my ever-increasing awareness, I continue to feel dissatisfaction. I continue to let people down, and hurt them, and say and do the wrong things. I continue to swan dive into the fire of my flaws and doubts. The meaning is still lost until the issue has passed. Yesterday is certain to be painted with shades of regret. Today is a mulligan. Tomorrow I will write while sober. And then I will move on to something better.

This is my last drink, I swear.

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Until I Realize That You’ve Realized Monday, Jan 12 2009

“A little birdie told me you went out with Jill,” she says, the line’s casual tone betrayed by the tense fury of her retinas, checking down the situation like a quarterback on third-and-long.

“I did.” I sip my beer with a casual smirk, buying into the whole farce because in this scenario I can use it to boost my ego and idea of self-worth. “I think I’m going to see her play next week.”

“I heard she’s kind of a whore,” she says sourly, scrunching up her face.

“I’m not really up to snuff on her sexual promiscuity, but I’d like to point out that a ‘whore’ is someone who has sex in exchange for money. You find pretty people to be in toothpaste commercials for money. Both of those occupations eat away at you one way or the other…there’s no need to sully the name of prostitution to insult people you don’t like.”

I’m barely twenty, a little cub, in the far away land of streets named by letter, The Lower East Side, where I court beautiful aspiring actresses with little talent and mug for plain casting assistants in their late twenties. In Midtown I am just a lowly intern, and in Morningside I’m just another face in the sullen crowd. But down here I’m everything I’ve ever wanted to be. The entire thing is a house of cards that’s going to topple at any moment, but that’s what’s so wonderful and empty about this city and this life – when that happens you just go build another one somewhere else.

“How old does she think you are?” Emily has a jaded and raspy Jersey accent that always puts me in my place. That and the fact that’s she’s almost a decade my senior, fully aware of my age and the fact that I’m entirely unable to do anything to help the careers of the aspiring art crowd that flock to me because they think I can.

“Twenty-six,” I say, barely unable to contain the smirk at the thought of my Costanza-like genius. Jill is going on twenty-five.

I could be so deep into left field that I’m at the warning track, but I’m fairly certain that while I’m thinking ‘if I were older and more desperate, I’d fuck her’ , she is thinking ‘if I were younger and less wise, I’d fuck him’. I’m ridiculously out of my league down here, but I’m making them laugh, and my opinions draw nods, and sometimes they take me back to their apartment at the end of the night. So I’m doing something extraordinary for my age…right?

“Has she asked you to get her on the show yet?” she asks with a certain cunning, a veiled upperhand question that a knowing wife would ask a cheating husband.

“Somewhere around hour two of pillow talk,” I say with a snort and a head shake. “It was more of a not-so-subtle hint.”

“I know exactly how it went,” she says, sipping at her drink. Most of the time she seems older, wiser, more weary and cracked. When she leans down to sip at that little straw with her Tar Heel blue eyes on me, she seems like she could be a girl I picked up back at school. “You don’t think I’ve bagged my fair share of actors?”

I know she has, and I know that she doesn’t like Jill because of her ability to do it better. I think she’s resentful at watching a youth like me waste his gifts on the insignificant like she did. I think she sees Jill as all of the women (i.e. rivals) in her past who beat her out. But she does what we all do, which is to ignore the pain, boil it all down into inane gossip, laugh it off and grab another round.

“And for the record,” she mumbles, her eyes focused on lighting the cigarette clamped between her lips, “That play is disgusting. Some observational, ‘gotcha’ critique on coffeehouses and emoticons. You may as well watch Nickelodeon.”

“Nickelodeon doesn’t put my dick in its mouth.”

We can all provide reasons as to why we don’t want people we care about to sleep with or fawn over others. But none of us ever stop to grasp the simple idea that, for the majority of us, and virtually all twenty-year olds, all that really matters is that someone you don’t feel you deserve wants to take you to bed. Her face loosens, as if she realizes that I don’t know any better, and gives me a cutting, patronizing smile, unloading the age-granted, dismissive words that makes every defiant youth kick and scream in tortured thought of the very idea –

“Someday you’ll learn.”

Almost six years later, I still wonder if I ever truly will.

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I Can’t Stand It But I Can’t Do Anything Wednesday, Jan 7 2009

The office ordered in dinner every night, often from upscale restaurants that normally serve their ridiculously small cubed portions on large, square designer plates, a thick sauce meticulously dribbled over it and pooled under it. Petty cash covered the mid-to-high four figure tab, and there really wasn’t a limit as to how much one could order. If I wanted a thirty-dollar roast duck with raspberry sauce, a second would be ordered and given to the first homeless man who asked me for money on my back to the apartment. After awhile, they all caught onto the system, and I soon found myself awaited by a line of fawning admirers, each one grasping for my attention, for the bag in my right hand. You can never do enough for the world.

I began to take a slightly different route home, up Amsterdam, informing only Mr. William, one of the kinder homeless men who milled around the area. He always wore his Army jacket and a knit Yankees cap, the logo slightly off and most likely peddled by a Nigerian. He had been stationed in Germany for a few years, and something took a nasty turn when he got back to the States; I don’t even think he really knows what happened. If I ran into him in the winter without having anywhere to go or having used my subway pass in the last twenty minutes, I’d swipe him through so he could catch a warm nap. The booth-trapped attendants always gave me stares but never said anything.

I never got out of 30 Rock until around seven-thirty or eight, sparing me from the mish-mash of the subway traffic, from having to stand crammed between a suit whose whiskey breath has soured and a young, pretty couple talking about their weekend in Vermont. Times Square was always very quelled and peaceful in that early evening. I loved that tired walk through the steam of the last few remaining peanut vendors, sitting in those plastic orange seats, half-heartedly attempting to wrap up the crossword under the deadening flourescents while glancing over at the weary faces across from me. I loved having that routine. That steady, monotonous and deliciously safe routine.

“Why hullo they-ah, Mistah Dan,” he calls out, huddled on the quiet stoop he always parks himself on to wait for me. ”A pleasant evenin’ to ya.”

“Alright, Mr. William, we got some eggplant parmesan with some garlic bread.” He’s already sifting through the small grocery bag, unsheathing the fork from it’s plastic wrapping. “I threw some of my wasabi peas from lunch in there…they’re spicy, though.”

“Thank you much, Mistah Dan.”

Much like these interactions are used in cinema, we all need to craft them for ourselves, these situations of kindness. We learn that Tom Cruise’s character is kind and hip because he raps with the old newspaper booth salesman every night before cracking down on his high-priced work. Our charitable donations are our proof of humanity. Flowers and diamonds prove our love. We convince ourselves that these small, premeditated acts of selflessness somehow atone for our lives of never-ending consumption.

In about a half-hour, when Mark and I parked ourselves at Cannon’s to drink the night away, or Monday morning as I’m grabbing coffee for the writers’ meeting, Mr. William is still going to be out here freezing his ass off, being leered at with contempt. Maybe it’s his own damn fault, and maybe it isn’t – the point is, this nightmare still continues for him, and me bringing him dinner five nights a week isn’t going to do much but dull some of the pain. But I sit perched at the bar, smiling smugly, puffing up my ego and thinking I’ve done something great for the world.

“I’ll see ya tommorrah?” he says with wide and liquid eyes, offering up his calloused and swollen hand.

“It’s Friday, buddy…I’ll see you on Monday.”

“Aw,” he says, his shoulders slumping and his eyes gazing off to Monday. “Well Monday then, sir. Thank you and God bless.” His outstretched hand feels like sandpaper.

I wonder what the suits at General Electric would’ve thought if they somehow figured out that a sliver of their multi-billion dollar monster went towards feeding a homeless vet five nights a week? The thought always brought a concilatory smile to the contemplative walk up Amsterdam and away from Mr. William’s world of pain.

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Easy To Do And Hard To Leave Tuesday, Jan 6 2009

I want to be back in Manhattan, drinking with Mark at Cannon’s, snorting lines off of tourists from Georgia, drinking not-on-my-tab $13 vodkas while making small talk with celebrities, grabbing cheap weekend dinners with the rest of the interns before hitting the town in what could end in love or an after-hours karaoke bar in Little Korea. It’s such a vain and tired desire, but I’m not so sure that it’s my youth and status I want back. I just want the possibility and freedom. And the wide-eyed belief.

I want the idea that I could love this one or continue to ride this rocket of acension. I want to believe that I can sell my words or impress Jim Carrey. I want to think that material goods or manipulated affection can make me happy. I never really minded the failures all that much. I was more interested in the chase. I want the chase back. I don’t care what happens from there.

And, of course, I want those moments back. I want to kiss Ellen on Christopher St. again. I’d do anything to make a run to Pump for Conan’s lunch. The NBC commissary has never tasted as wonderful as it does, right now, in my head. As boring, empty and quiet as it seemed at the time, I’d love to try and catch all of the barely perceptible lines from the one a.m. X-Files, the volume gradually reduced by an agitated and trying-to-sleep Mark. I watch them now and it just doesn’t seem the same.

I want to wake up with hope, and not dread. I think that pretty much summarizes what most of us are wishing for when we long for our past. Even millionaires long for the days they struggled to make ends meet. Status and achievement have nothing to do with it. It’s all about wonderment, hope, innocence.

I want to be back there because it gives me the opportunity to correct the future. And I still want to make the same mistakes down the line…I just want to treat certain people better. I want Rebecca and Jackie and Valerie and Devin to know that the manic and trainwrecked person I turned out to be should in no way tarnish my endorsement of them as wonderful people. Just because I failed doesn’t mean I didn’t know better.

I want to be able to think that while sitting here, in a Kentucky dive bar, listening to a Vietnam vet tell his lonely and tired story, I did everything morally correct to lead myself here. The destination is unimportant. The glamour won’t last. All that really matters is how you handled things. I want to go back and handle them better.

I could’ve played ball and found myself in a vastly more desireable position in which the bank account had more digits and I could fall asleep without a twelve-pack. I could’ve paid more attention and affection to the people who really cared about me. I also could’ve had my bones abruptly shattered by an on-time speeding bus. I could’ve done a million things, and the way it worked out was beyond my control. The only thing I had control of was my attitude and actions.

I’m not so interested in rectifying my mistakes as I am making amends. Going down in a blaze of self-loathing, alcohol-fueled flames doesn’t seem so bad as long as you have given the people who showed affection that proper recognition. The people in our lives who we adore and who we give ourselves to are so rarely those who adore and give themselves to us.

I want to be back in Manhattan. I want to be back in Oxford. I want to play darts with J.R. I want listen to Rebecca ramble about Milton. I want to talk Giants with Pat The Doorman. I want to feel the warming, freezing cold of Devin’s ear on my temple. I want to run to get LL Cool J’s cough medicine. I want to ring up Wayne’s Asian Sesame salad and Diet Coke. I want to be eleven again. Five years from now, I will probably want to relive this nightmare. I want it all and I want none of it. I want to die and I want to live forever. I want to relive every memory and burn every page from existence.

I want to apologize to everyone for everything.

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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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All We Are is All Alone Monday, May 19 2008

We went from bar to bar – rickety service elevators in meat-packing districts opening to purple velvet, fish tanks, designated make-out rooms, red lighting, drinks by the bottle. They paid for everything and introduced me to their ‘fag hags’, one of whom was Ellen. She had black hair that looked red in certain light, marble blue eyes and wore a black cocktail dress with a long coat that looked like something a businessman would wear. She had a fierce intellect, a wealthy family and a studio apartment on Bedford. Why she held my hand in the dead of winter outside the Christopher St. station, looked into my eyes longingly and kissed me, I’ll never know.

She ran five miles and threw up her lunch and spent fifteen minutes fidgeting under an incubator and read glossy magazines with models on the cover and put on glittery, sparkling war-paint and bunched her brightly colored toes over thin, curved planks and bit her lip as she stared into the funhouse mirror of her mind. And she most certainly didn’t do it for a guy like me.

These slip-ups were apt to happen back in school, but this wasn’t just any girl, it was a Manhattan girl, who was taking a semester off from Brown, who traveled with her sister to London and Greece at seventeen, who lived in a brownstone, who fucked lawyers for clothes and vacations. Girls from my hometown keep pens from hotels in Toronto to remind them of weekend trips. But when I looked into her eyes I noticed that Manhattan girls are the same as Ohio girls; they only have fancier costumes and better opportunity.

She pointed out the apartment they used for all the exterior shots on Friends, which was on her street, and I looked up at it as we walked by, flakes of snow breezing through the glow of the streetlight. It was that moment, the Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album cover, that solidified my status as an adult, as truly existing in the world. Here I was, walking through the Village (was I? I was pretty sure I was) with a beautiful woman, having spent the night stumbling around lower Manhattan with wealthy trendsetters, a week away from starting work on a nationally televised late night show and what’s more adult, more cool than that? And yet on another level, it seemed nothing had changed.

I had always thought that when I got to this level of adulthood, of ‘someday’, that things would somehow be different. But everything was all too familiar. Her breath was stale and beer soaked and she had cocaine-sprinkled mucus caked around the rims of her nostrils and our lips mashed together as we tried to kiss-and-walk and it was just as sweaty and smelly and confusing and nerve-racking as it’s always been. I didn’t feel what I’d expected cool and adult to feel like, which was in control, or in love, or assured of purpose. I still felt like nothing more than a scared shitless kid lying awake in the apartment of a girl who was mysterious and flitting and went to an Ivy League school and was bi-coastal, and who despite all that seemed like nothing more than an equally scared shitless kid with a more desirable lifestyle. It felt like nothing new.

Whenever one is gazing around at the living quarters of a stranger they plan to or have gone to bed with, there is always a moment – sometimes as brief as a millisecond – where the little David Byrne voice pops into their head and says ‘How did I get here?’, and I hear it as I am looking at a picture on her nightstand of her and her brother?/boyfriend?/friend? at the bottom of a ski slope. She is wearing a puffy North Carolina blue coat and she has an orange tan that match the lens of her goggles. I hear a car honk in the distance.

We are adversaries, I thought to myself, watching her sleep. That’s all we know, people like us, isn’t it? Adversarial romance. Pushing you against a wall and going into make-out rooms and batting eyelashes and carefully selecting words packed with meaning set to incite their receiver and trading stares that are anything but honest. We are afraid of each other, and we have to be. Because if I hang around with you strange, new people long enough, I will become just another guy and my Midwestern mystique will become Midwestern simplicity and you will become another girl and your sultry mystique will appear to be nothing more than a pathetic need for attention, and only then will we be able to give each other honest looks and words, and there’s no quicker way to kill romance for people like us than to have that kind of honesty. I could love you, I thought, as she smiled in her sleep, but you’re only looking for those who want you. Or perhaps that’s what we were all looking for. I determine that the skier is a boyfriend and drift off to sleep.

I slip out a little after nine with an excuse that is met with sleepy murmurs and head on foot to Big Cup, the only place I know to go, my head buzzing in the gray Manhattan morning. Back at school, this is known as the ‘walk of shame’, where you are leered at by the walking seniors and visiting parents as you burp up beer from the night before and trip over your shoelaces. Here, nobody gives a fuck. I stop on my way there and puke in a garbage can, and I don’t think anyone notices.

“Welcome to New York!” Louis says with a wink, eyeing my previous day’s wrinkled clothes and unintentionally tousled hair. The thought occurs to me that he’s still not aware that I’m straight. He just laughs when I ask if Todd or any of the others have been by. A skinny black guy with pirate earrings and stoplight red pants says with a hand wave that none of them will be up for at least another two hours. On the train home a homeless man recites bad poetry. I give him four dollars.

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