……………………………,………………,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,Duh da da da duh da da, duh da da like you, duh da like you do, duh da da duh da. Duh da da da duh da da–NAME THIS TUNE–duh da da your name, duh da so ashamed, duh da wasn’t you, wasn’t you, and then the chorus, YOU ARE, well it can’t be anything but: “You Are Everything” by the Stylistics. You are everything and EVERYTHING IS YOU. I used to sit and weep over that one, weep at the chord changes, weep at the sentiment, weep in goddam awe at the concept of YOU as essential principle, as the essential principle, every bit as basic as Thales’ water, Anaximenes’ air, Pythagoras’s number. I never bought the record or heard it on radio, only way, only time I ever caught it was off jukes in bars. I’d be hunched over a drink as it played, ruminating only occasionally over a specific you past or present, an actual second-person other, and depending on how much I’d already had, by song’s end I’d be either a blubbering, maudlin mess or sublime maudlin … you had to be there to see it.
…………………………………………………………….,,,,,,,,,,A case of camaraderie. Mike Tonk and I, who for years had been scribbling sentences for the same .small handful of youth throwaways, finally met at a luncheon for the British band Grudge. Second thing he said to me, bourbon in hand, was “Let’s go somewhere and drink.” It was one-deep at the bar, the wait couldn’t have exceeded a minute, everything was free but okay, let’s. We found some place on 10th Street where the average age was 80, drank shots and beers till they closed at four, and became great friends, continuing to drink together, greatly. Never drinking buddies in the normal sense, more like colleagues on a fervid inquiry into drink as means and content of revelation, we each encouraged/provoked the other to be perpetually drunk (and sometimes write about it). Though the Village Voice‘s response to a proposed “In Whiskey, Veritas” column was decidedly cold, we contributed essays on liquor by brand (Harper’s, Dickel’s, Old Crow) to the New York Squeak and Boston Subgum.
……………………..“What is scotch?”–we’d talk like that, get real theoretic. The answer, we decided, was Scotch is an odd experiment in nu-drink, roughly equivalent to dropping a cigarette in Irish whiskey, as close (in its way) to Drambuie as it is to pure intoxicant. Purists, we abhorred admixture. Other options open, mixed drinks never passed our lips. Piped Mike when offered one: “Bottled booze is already mixed–mixed with water.” Tough guys, we were tough. So tough that one night, for the fuck of it, we hit an East Side biker bar with mixed drinks our goal. Beginning with Carstairs & tonics, we moved on to sidecars and bourbon Manhattans, then ordered a single Zeus (vodka, Campari) and a blood & sand (gin, sloe gin, crushed ice). “How’s that again?” asked the tortured barman. (Luckily, that day, we’d torn pages from a mix guide at the Strand.) Lacking both esentials, he couldn’t make us a 252 ( 151 rum, Wild Turkey 101), so we improvised a 240 (Seagram’s V.O., Christian Brothers brandy, Juan Valdez tequila, 80 each). We didn’t even ask for a Rasputin (vodka, clam juice, anchovy-stuffed black olive) but were on a collision course for applejack highballs when, at pool, I lost our last fiver to a guy with one eye sewn shut. Hangovers: no worse than usual.
………………………………………………………..,,,,,,,,,,Four Tuesdays at Lynch’s. We’re invited, me and Mike, to this taproom in the West 50s, Lynch’s Cafe. “You’ll love it,” says Jim Sibley, an earnest urban fellow, “it’s an Irish bar.” (Ooooh, hey…not many of those in New York.) Venue for a conclave of “some nice, terrific writers,” Jim included, a weekly “literary lunch.” Invited, we go: a middle-middleclass bar. You couldn’t be more middle. Sanitized, polished, service too genteel, cardboard food. We meet the regulars: hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi. From Esquire, Women’s Wear Daily, Newsday, Cue. A freelancer named Jane who’s just interviewed Buckminster Fuller for Vogue. Jim covers fires for the Post. White collar jackjills whose collars really are WHITE. A round of martinis? Mike and I will have beers. As gents who when we write (dine) (play) get at least something on our collars, faces, souls, we rise to the chore of showing ’em how it is done. “This porkchop is shit.” “Did you ask Bucky if he can still get it up?” “Garcon!–TWO MORE.” (Cold stares from Jimbo, from the rest.) Next week, attendance down, we bring a pint of Soul Brothers blended whiskey. Jim, who any stiffer would be uncooked vermicelli, begs us: “Please don’t let old man Lynch see that.” Agreeable to a fault, we keep it bagged, pass it under our seats. Under the table we empty water glasses, piss in them–why interrupt dialogue in pursuit of a pot? Third week (more no-shows) we bring meatball heros. Fourth week we’re the only ones there.
………………………………,,,,,,,,,Solo fright. I used to be SHY with the women. Alcohol has played a role in two-thirds (three?) of my first-date intromissions. Alc. in me, probably them too, though you’d have to ask them about them. Even minor doses have made my fool’s twaddle smoother, my pawings less awkward, my idiot heart-thump less conspicuously LOUD…granted my auto-meatpilot license to extemporize, to dare, handed my undiapered hormones the. keys to the bank…rendered my rawest, crudest o.k.-let’s-fuck palatable (even “charming”), painted my bottomless hunger wholesome and “natural,” helped reveal me as an oft-tender fun guy with a joyous predilection for the BOY-GIRL PLAYPEN—playground–play house. The gift of play: nothing to sneeze at. Play at some point declined, howev (and intake continued), what exactly do you do with all the rocket-fueled idiot momentum, idiot frustration, idiot id.
…………………………………,,,,,,,,,She slammed and locked the bedroom door behind her, permitting me free reign over the balance of her flat. Crooning “Some Enchanted Evening,” I found and uncorked her last remaining liter of Sauvignon. With a blue felttipped marker I scrawled “KIKE KUNT IS GOOD KUNT” on the inside rear of the fridge, pausing to wack off in a widemouth ketchup, and the underside of a faded Eastern rug. Switching to red, I drew swastikas on select pages of Jonathan Livingston Seagull and the inner sleeves of Bette Midler, Al Kooper and Carole King LPs. Before departing I slipped a clump of pubic hair in a jar of skin cream and–be my Valentine?–dropped the last roll of Charmin in the bowl. Love and wine. Wine, love, truth. Truth and love.
………………………………………,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ……..“There are things drunks do that alkies don’t,” Mike would sometimes, while still lucid, claim. He’d go up and down one of those checklists of alcoholism, “25 warning signs” or some such, taking exquisite care to distinguish the alcoholic from the drunk. “Alkies don’t,” said this man who was both, “they usually don’t fugga your mom. But honestly, man, who gives a fuck if you ‘drink before six’ or ‘one beer is never enough’? ‘Has a cocktail while reading the stocks.’ What it all comes down to is either you are or are not someone who drinks all the time. If you’re not drunk every day, why bother? You’re wasting your alcoholism, which is something no real drunk would ever do.”
…………………………………………………………………………47…48…where’s my drink? 49th floor, overlooking the U.N. Something on the rocks. Where’d … then I realize it slipped off the window, the ledge, I remember having pushed it with the heel of my hand. Nobody saw me. I believe no one saw. But nothing in its line of descent could still be breathing. A headline overwhelms me: “Party Reveler Beheads Diplomat”–though the impact would also (I hazily surmise) have shattered the glass into fragments too small for i.d. At sunset I’d spit over the edge and watched my saliva break up and scatter… could ice cubes just now ‘ve done likewise, slaying half the Finnish delegation? I look down–too dark to detect signs of life and/or death …but definitely no ambulance.
………………………………………………………….Another night, another trance. Closing time plus 15 minutes. Tired of ripping wipers off taxis, bending antennas, stuffing dead sparrows in gas tanks–normal vandalism–we’re strolling down 14th St., me and Mike, when whuddo we see but this huge potted shrub. Some kind of budding, flowering object–not a fern, not a rosebush (no thorns)–daisies? A rose in Spanish Harlem, a tulip–petunia?–begonia?—on scummy 14th. Freshly installed, healthy, it don’t belong here nohow: what to do? “Kill it!” shouts Michael, “KILL IT!” Good idea. With my full weight I dive at the thing, tackle it–no resistance, snap, take that. Funny funny. Next thing we know these cops’re after us, running up stairwells, a door?, locked, nowhere to hide, gotcha. One cop holds us and I’m panting, thinking what sentence, what is the music you face for shrub abuse; ten months in Sing Sing, a year? For parole you buy a new shrub, two shrubs, they force you at gunpoint to plant them? Then his partner comes back with the drunk who turned us in–too drunk to recog our faces or clothes. “N… no. N… no”—lucky us, lucky me. BUT I DON’T EVEN MIND GREEN THINGS THAT BUD. (I didn’t drink again for a week.)