I had a vague plan back in 2004 to move to Scotland. It came to me while sitting in a mostly empty Upper West Side sublet on West 86th in New York City. I liked the place and added some tall red curtains to cover the large street-facing windows. I also bought a few dishes to go with the non-stick cooking set my mother shipped from California. I had an air mattress and an old, blocky living room chair that the landlord helped me carry up from the basement. He was a dude in his 30s who bought the building with two investor buddies. They hoped to sell it to developers looking to demolish and construct luxury apartments matching the height of the taller installments on either side. Not sure how that worked out. For me it worked out for about two months, which was as far ahead as my planning extended. I have just one video, accidentally recorded on my pre-smartphone, from that period of time. It’s a shot of the sun coming through the windows and red curtains, which are partially drawn. And my voice can be heard uttering “Fuck you and all of your bullshit ..”
This video could’ve been just before or just after the Scottish idea was conceived, but I’m betting on the former. There was some loose logic to the plan; I’d taken bartending lessons in New York and sat in for a few guest stints in Manhattan. I’d also been offered a full-time gig at a bar in Red Hook, Brooklyn, but chickened out after exiting the interview and spotting a dead dog near the bus stop. Anything can be granted omen status when you really don’t want to do something. Scotland had a more romantic flair that paired nicely with my delusional thinking: I would return to my mother’s homeland in glorious novelty, having conquered Gotham. But in short order the whole idea, like me, collapsed. This is the other moment I recall vividly from that time, despite (thankfully) having no video documentation: Me, slumped to the floor of a shitty Scottish kitchen where I was storing my clothes in pantry drawers, and sobbing “I’m sorry .. I’m sorry.”
It was a pointedly modest and somewhat run-down flat on the High Street in Perth that my parents had purchased for my mom’s folks back in the 80’s. In recent times there had been a number of tenants and the previous lot had removed all of the light bulbs from the ceiling fixtures, twelve feet up. If thrift can be measured in the effort one goes to in order to sustain cheapness, these folks were plenty thrifty. The place, like my Upper West Side digs, had no furniture. I installed a rubber shower head in the tub that offered little more than a trickle. And once again I purchased an air mattress with sheets and a duvet. But unlike New York City, something about Scotland wasn’t clicking for me in that particular time and space. I knew I wasn’t in Kansas anymore when I strolled by a small, indoor shopping space with street-facing sign boasting “Now Open Late Night Thursdays Til 7pm.” My diet was confined mostly to dining at the local chippy once a night and washing it down with a few cans of Tennent’s lager. There may have been some other drinking involved at the local pubs where the regulars may or may not have welcomed me as an affable outsider. Then back to the kitchen floor for more sobbing. Pathetic yes, but this routine along with morning runs around the South Inch perimeter had me looking rather trim. There’s a reason the Desperation Diet polls consistently second to the Atkins. It’s a wonder I didn’t get fat sucking all the romanticism out of Scotland.
The thing about coming in from the cold is it doesn’t necessarily need to be cold out. Nor does one need to be without options. Nor is one guaranteed any “lessons” from such experience — that’s just bullshit that old people lay on you with the heat blasting. It’s more than twenty years since those New York red curtain / Scottish kitchen floor days and I’m only slightly wiser. I know more dead people now, which, to quote Paul Simon, is “not unusual.” And most of them seem to speak to me in some form, some combination of me and them. But even this is absent anything you might call ‘wisdom.’ It doesn’t matter if you shimmy against the fading light or take the wife/kids/white-picket-whatever route. To quote Steve Buscemi from ‘Trees Lounge’ : “Everybody’s fucked up, but nobody wants anybody else to think they are, but everybody knows they are anyway.” It doesn’t get put any more accurately than that. Woody Allen also had something as Cliff Stern in ‘Crimes and Misdemeanors’ when he tells his niece: “Don’t listen to what your teachers tell you. Just look at them and see what they look like, and that’s how you’ll know what life is really gonna be like.”
One other small bit of garnered wisdom is that it’s time to wrap up when I start quoting film lines or song lyrics. “Oh good — this is the part of the evening where Rick quotes song lyrics.” This to quote my good-naturedly acerbic pal, Dave Glass. Not exactly imparted wisdom, but still words worth remembering.
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