Who Asked Me?

It snowed Monday night following St Patrick’s Day, beginning in the afternoon as a fine, gritty sleet peppering my face as I tried to run. By evening it transformed in to large, fluffy flakes that stuck together and accumulated on the street a few inches thick.  I decided to find a bar, an infrequent instinct for me these days limited to nights like this. All the elements – Monday, snow, day after an amateur drinker’s holiday – were in place. Nobody in their right mind would be out on a night like this, and they weren’t. Mine were the only tracks on the dimly-lit white sidewalk as I crossed the BQE overpass and joined one other patron in the tavern. It’s more curiosity than business, this small  joint four blocks from my house, and has topped out with maybe eight customers on the handful of random weeknights I’ve been inside. The owners are a female couple who hire only women bartenders .. not the typical midtown, twenty-something shot-girl types pushing rounds by virtue of their cleavage, but more mature and substantial tap handlers. Both bartender and lone drinker announced their ages within five minutes of my occupying a stool – she’s 53 and he turns 60 this weekend.

“Id never guess you were sixty,” she tells him because she’s supposed to. I don’t suppose he looks it either but withhold this opinion because I don’t want to encourage him. I’m struck by how hammered he is at eight-thirty on a Monday night, pounding his legs furiously with the music and making a point to note in between songs that he’s a drummer. It’s not an occupation suited for a sixty year-old unless it’s Max Roach in his prime, sitting behind the kit. He mentions it again discussing roommate issues. ‘It’s MY name on the lease so I put my fuckin’ foot down,” he slurs. “I’m a drummer. I take enough shit from people already ..” He’s pleased with this and gives an awkward laugh – “huh-huh, huh-huh.” She’s professionally polite, wanting neither to discourage a rare weeknight regular nor give him too much of an opening. She mentions her own roommate and I reflect on being the only one there having the run of my own place when I get home. The music stops and she returns to the jukebox to play something else. “Roxy Music – fuck YEAH!” he exclaims and then launches in to an awkward knee-slapping intro to “Avalon.”

I talk with her a while about London, the tube, Bryan Ferry, New York, Brooklyn, and apartments. She tops my shot and goes outside to shovel the entrance. He’s working on a burger from the joint next door. I get ready to leave. “Enjoy your birthday” I tell him. “You play football?” he asks. Not on a night like this I say. “I was a backup in high school,” he tells me. “Got to play one game when the starter was out. The guy who was covering me kept kicking me in the balls every chance he got. I finally took a wild swing and popped him on the chin under his helmet. Knocked him out.” He segues seamlessly in to the fact his old man thought he was gay. “That changed when I got my girlfriend pregnant .. huh-huh, huh-huh.” I put a generous tip on the bar, give him a grin and head for the door. Outside she’s shoveled most of the snow from in front. She asks if I’m leaving already and I say that I am before heading back to my warm, empty apartment.

I get off the train at East Broadway and cut past Seward Park on to Canal, through Chinatown and toward the restaurant. It’s cold in New York, maybe twenty-five degrees, and I haven’t been in the city for months. By ‘the city‘ I mean Manhattan. That’s what they call it here as simple distinction from the other boroughs, the same designation reserved by some San Franciscans for their city but without the pretentious need for capitalization. That always bothered me about San Francisco, the unnecessarily sanctimonious attitude taken by some toward what is already a great town. Just let it stand on its own .. no need to capitalize or bristle when someone says ‘Frisco. She’s a big girl and has been through worse. Earthquakes, for one. But I complain too much.

I’m headed for The Great NY Noodle Town, a Chinese joint for those unable to read between the lines, first introduced to me by Sean O’Toole in 2001. Sean’s a career chef whose résumé spans continents and five-star establishments. He’s worked in Vegas, Paris and New York but only after crashing at my San Francisco apartment way back when and getting his start in the kitchen at the Ritz-Carlton. It’s the kind of career ambition that eludes me but that’s a story for another time. Suffice to say I was there, remember it, and tend to remember most things better than others. So there’s that too. On that particular night I was with my girlfriend, a vegetarian but never one to fuss excessively about food. Sean ordered up about ten dishes, roast pork, vegetables, noodles, etc. It was all simple and fresh and the three of us sat in the crowded, noisy, exceptionally unpretentious surroundings and enjoyed a great meal. He’d been introduced to the place by the head chef from where he worked on the Upper East Side. It was a few months after 9-11 and we weren’t far from a large, cordoned-off area of downtown littered with concrete ruins. Something about the city felt real and immediate to me. It still feels that way and although the sense itself is ephemeral and unsustainable, I believe that when you give up chasing it you die.

Noodle Town is closed on this cold February night more than eleven years later. I notice the pulled-down metal doors and sign in both English and hanzi from across the street while standing near the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge. “Close For Chinese New Year Party To-Night,” it says, upon further inspection. I do some quick translating, surmising that they aren’t in fact suggesting that the restaurant is conveniently located nearby for all my Chinese New Year needs. It’s spelled this way, ‘close‘, on signs posted on several other restaurants in the area, emphasizing the first rule of China: power in numbers. Those same numbers allow for another joint – Big Wong King – to be open just a few blocks away on Mott. It’s OK but certainly no Noodle Town despite over five hundred Yelp reviews by what I’m guessing are largely young, white girls who have never met Sean O’Toole.

I look for a bar after but meet my match in the cold and retreat to a warm cab. The city seems simple on this winter night; uncrowded by New York standards and low-key functional. A guy huddles in his overcoat, walking briskly and eating an ice cream despite the weather. Two twenty-something girls in the cab next to me burn with elusive Monday night enthusiasm. On the other side of the Manhattan Bridge my apartment awaits, a fortunately warm if impermanent destination.

I’m expressing with my full capabilities
And now I’m living in correctional facilities – Dr Dre /NWA “Express Yourself”

Been a while since I’ve written anything. I was in California for a long stay necessitated by a family situation .. but this probably overloaded the thought process as opposed to leaving no time to riff. I’m sure I’ll have something to add in the near future, but meanwhile here’s something from five and half years back that I probably liked a lot more than anybody else did, poorly-written or not:

Riff-Raff

I just finished reading Cormack McCarthy’s Suttree, a novel he wrote over a span of thirty years and that is so rich in vocabulary and description it occasionally makes the reader want to shower. It’s been compared to Joyce’s Ulysses, a book I’ve personally avoided because my friend Paul, who makes a point to finish every book he starts, never finished it. Suttree reminded me vaguely of Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude and most of what I’ve read by Charles Bukowski. I read ‘Solitude‘ toward the end of my first stint in Manhattan, shacked up with the flu in a tiny West 81st Street apartment. Perhaps the flu link brought Lethem’s book to mind while reading Suttree, whose protagonist of the same name is gripped by hallucinatory typhoid fever at the end of the novel. Both books are also possessed of a particular sprawling ambition that made me think the author set out to write his magnum opus and resigned to not finishing until he got all this shit out of him. That said I’d recommend either, though The Great Gatsby or a Raymond Carver short they are not.

Cornelius Suttree foresakes a life of privilege to live on a dilapidated houseboat and fish catfish on the polluted Tennessee River. He drinks, screws, goes to jail, keeps company with assorted marginal outcasts and survives dime to dime on his wits. It’s the sort of existence that begs the question “why live this way?” – particularly if one has options. I suspect it isn’t an entirely unseen phenomenon, persons of potential means choosing to cut strings and exist on the fringes. I’ve known a few who have tried then eventually come in from the cold. No man is an island, after all, and the romanticism of turning up one’s proverbial collar and walking headlong in to the bitter wind loses some of its punch when you realize nobody gives a shit. Old bitterness is replaced with new and the cycle continues. Suttree himself isn’t bitter though and the novel survives on this premise. Why live this way? Why live any way?

I did some quick math and determined McCarthy was sixteen years old when he started writing Suttree and well in to his forties by the time he finished. This may account for the difficulty I had in pinpointing the protagonist’s age, which I took to be somewhere between thirty and fifty. Perhaps it’s in there if I went back and read it again but it’s the kind of book you have to forge ahead with if you have any intention of finishing. The other McCarthy book I’ve read, The Road, was published twenty-seven years after this one and contains some of the same rich, descriptive writing. But the narrative is linear and easily comprehended; almost as if he learned from his early work that less is more. I for one can’t fathom sticking with something thirty years to completion let alone finishing another nine novels. In the Wikipedia article on McCarthy it’s noted that his Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter, a machine he’d bought for $50 in a Knoxville pawn shop, kept for forty-six years and typed some five million words on, was auctioned in 2009 at Christie’s. They figured it would fetch as much as $20,000 and it sold for $254,500. I’m guessing that it wasn’t some Cornelius Suttree type who bought it but he may have gotten his money’s worth anyway.

When you ain’t got nothin, you got nothin’ to lose – Dylan

The San Francisco Giants are going to the World Series for the second time in three seasons and I’m reminded of a lunch my father had a long time ago with his banker Chad Ertola and a story Mel Brooks told on The Tonight Show about meeting Cary Grant. To quote Chad: “I was having lunch with Rich,” (as those from the old neighborhood call my father) “and he was particularly anxious .. even by his standards. Being a close friend I knew that all was well with his family and being his banker I knew that his financial situation was equally secure. So I asked him what was wrong and he told me … ‘Everything’s going too good.’ ” The Mel Brooks story (available via the link I’ve provided) is similar but with a twist. Brooks is a young writer who’s come to Hollywood to write a movie and is bowled over upon seeing Cary Grant at the Universal Studios commissary. He’s further awed when the screen legend invites him to lunch not once but repeatedly over the following weeks where they run the gamut of polite conversation from favorite sports to party games. The next Friday when Grant calls Brooks’ office to ask him to lunch Brooks emphatically instructs “I’m not in! ..”

While I’m in for the Giants games and have anxiously followed their tortuously successful progression to this point, this embarrassment of recent riches has me feeling a bit like one of those twenty-six year-old frat boy Yankees fans I’ve run in to on this coast. They go around bragging on twenty-seven world titles even though they’ve only been alive for five of them. The difference here is that the Giants have only won one World Series in their fifty-three seasons in San Francisco and I saw it happen. Now they have another shot with Season 54. Some faces from 2010 remain but the narrative has shifted. Shut-down ace Tim Lincecum isn’t quite so shut-down this season and bearded closer and Beach Boy namesake Brian Wilson hasn’t closed anything since early April. Marina Triangle area bars are devoid of now retired legendary swordsman Pat Burrell. His buddy Aubrey Huff is still on the roster but prone to disability with every ground ball legged or panic attack suffered. New story lines have emerged including that of a thirty-six year-old Venezuelan second baseman acquired late-season from the Colorado Rockies. Marco Scutaro is the latest in a string of normal-sized sensations including Lincecum and Sergio Romo who remind us that in baseball you don’t need a head the size of Barry Bonds’ to do spectacular things. (With deference of course to Bruce Bochy, whose natural-grown bean makes even Bonds look like a pinhead.) Center fielder Angel Pagan, taken from the Mets, has (as my buddy Tom Myers points out) one of the great “duality-of-man” names of all time and even looks like a Satan worshiper. Shortstop Brandon Crawford’s facial hair is reminiscent of Michael J Fox mid-transition in Teen Wolf. And crazy-eyed right fielder Hunter Pence, while capable of making the play, possesses a fluidity of motion that makes Jerry Lewis look like Usain Bolt running the hundred meter dash.

But as they say in baseball, just get there and anything can happen. The Giants have a single day of rest to recover from the six elimination games they encountered in the playoffs and get ready for the latest Greatest Pitcher of All-Time, Detroit’s Justin Verlander. The Tigers clinched early enough playing the Yankees to take a cruise, get their Christmas shopping done, and play a half-dozen inter-squad practice games. It’s looking like Barry Zito will be taking the hill for San Francisco after the Giants used their two strongest bets in Vogelsong and Cain to close out the St Louis series. Zito signed a $126 million contract in December of 2006 that has become synonymous with poorly-conceived executive decisions and that led to managing partner Peter MacGowan stepping down from his post. He redeemed himself somewhat in 2012 but lasted only a few innings in his first playoff start against the Reds. Then something peculiar happened last Friday with the Giants down three games to one in St Louis. The handsome but often beleaguered Zito, looking slightly fuller-faced and older, got out of an impossibly tight jam with no outs and runners on second and third in the second inning. He then proceeded to pitch in to the eighth, painting the corners with a masterful selection of balls varying in both speed and movement. He won the game and, with Vogelsong, set the stage for last night and the Giants celebrating their second pennant since 2010 in a joyous late-October San Francisco downpour. It would seem enough to instill one with that rarest and most elusive of perspectives, hope. Or you could conclude that things are going too good and stop taking phone calls from Cary Grant. Regardless of chosen outlooks two facts remain: there’s more baseball to be played and it’s a welcome distraction from the ongoing and off-putting political circus. Go Giants.