What'd I miss? Back @ work for first time since March 16 2020. And what the fuck am I missing?
I lost everything, the most soul destroying being my partner, ____. Lost my job. apartment the same day I lost my wife, July 15 2020. Lost care & control of Moon. Won: A different life.
I am back @ Oliver & Bonacini as of last week, working in the catering division. I much prefer working 2 or 3 venues, you grow loyal towards each one. Each one like a sister you need to protect.
SO last Friday, guest count was 130. Two bartenders. If these people were thirsty, we were gonna have a helluva time keeping up.
My mischievous manager Brooke threw me to the sharks last Friday, having me bartend a party of 130 guests with just one other bartender. Woulda been fine if the Bride & Groom didn’t haven’t signature cocktails named after them. Cocktails with a lot of prep time. It’s doesn’t sound like much, but it leads to a serious bottleneck backlog.
Usually the signature cocktail is only available during the hour-long reception, and for the post-dinner party-dance thing, we revert to simple drinks. But this couple wanted their cocktails available all night. It took 45 second to a minute to make each one. People were yelling at us. Welcome back, Danny.
So the Bride’s drink was 0.5 OZ of lemon juice, 0.5 OZ of blueberry syrup, 0.5 OZ of Elderberry Flower Liqueur, 1 OZ of gin, topped with ice, club soda, and loose edible flowers that we had to put on using tweezers because we bartenders have COVID, not the guests who will NOT STOP LEANING OVER THE BAR not wearing masks yelling their order & driving me…it’s fine. It’s fine Danny. You have a job again. What’s a little COVID once in a while? Gotta have shelter. Getting evicted Dec 1 after all.
I found myself wishing I was Vishnu. I needed more arms, more hands, to make more drinks. Guests were NOT complying with the mask rule, so I doubled up, maskwise, and hoped for the best. Being at work has helped a lot mentally but I also got legit therapy. Maybe one day I’ll be happy. Or at least happier.
The band played this Placebo song at the wedding, which I thought was an odd choice. Don’t you?
This is my favourite Placebo song, especially ascending part starting at 0:53.
Useless Timbit of Trivia: The Bitter End is the name of the bar in Ethan Hawke’s debut novel The Hottest State. He directed a film version a few years later but I could have sworn that one of the paperback editions of his novel shows pouty faced Ethan through venetian blinds. He must have gotten a call from the publishers. “Nobody is buying the fucking book Ethan! Al Gore outselling you this week! Get yourself photographed doing the pouty lip thing! That should push us over 500 000 copies.”
Unsuccessful paperbacks don’t get many different versions. They usually have one for the HC, one for paperback.
So Hawke’s pout must have pushed The Hottest State into the realm of respectable sales. Otherwise, why would there be so many different versions? Unsuccessful novels do NOT get re-shoots of their front & back covers. A quick glance @ Google and I can see like, ten different ones:
^ THIS is the version I saw @ Seeker’s in Toronto. I couldn’t get over Hawke’s pouty lips on the back cover, so I didn’t buy it. I didn’t even hate Hawke. Nothing against him. He was doing the same shit I was, leaving bars in various states of dishevelment.1And he was rich and famous.
I can't figure out why I haven't been able to get over A___, at least not yet. What was it about her, that made me want to be with her?
I'm trying to analyze this myself:
1. Mental match?
We were intellectually close, more so than anyone I've been with since Jessica (altho, cards on the table, Jessica was FAR smarter, both as a polymath…she knew a great deal about remote & arcane subjects as well as ones that had actually real life application). But ____ admitted herself, I was a bit ahead of her in ONE field: reading & writing. I'm not bragging. I've just read a hell of a lot more books than she has. And SHE told ME that my novel was better than her own writing, which I did not dispute, because it is better. That doesn’t mean she’s not a great writer…she is. I just think I have a slight edge there. Slight. Edge. Does that make me sound like a fucking fuck? It’s the only single solitary thing I’m better than her at, so it shouldn’t.
2. Stability?
Hah. Stability, to me, is not a prerequisite for a successful relationship. I'd sleep on a pizza box if the girl I loved was in that room too.
The actual PRESENCE of her? The THISNESS of it? I don’t think so. After her nightly bath she’d start to wind down slower and slower until she was nearly monosyllabic. Clearly moments like weren’t time to bust out the Poetry 101 textbook, but seeing as we were we both writers, I thought maybe a small exercise each morning, one reading aloud to the other for two minutes. Or we try, together, side-by-side, to decipher the coded language of the sonnet in the industrial era.
All I am talking about is words. That’s it. I didn’t have a creative job. And in the early days, when I loaned her Angels and she loaned me Something to Declare (2002, Julian Barnes) we got back to each other with a swiftness suggesting a certain amount of devotion to the reading, meaning we enjoyed reading what we were reading.
I thought we’d have more chats like that. About books and shit.
We did not.
Not a single one.
Life got in the way.
Her routine, the contours of which she kept a careful eye on. She did certain things in the night, in a particular order. I didn’t fit into that. I supposed my meek attempts to get the ball rolling on something like the Angels-Something to Declare thing.
There is a magic to reading aloud and I wish I could have heard _____ do it more. We sit on a bed, heads touching, bodies parallel but going into different directions.
I also thought there would be a greater exchange of reading material. As far as I can tell, I had her beat 5 to 1. For every 5 books I read that SHE had loaned me, she would read ONE that I had loaned her.
Now, I appreciated her reading both Angels & Train Dreams (2 separate books by Denis Johnson, not exactly a man who wrote with women in mind as a target audience especially) And I REALLY appreciated her reading On the Road. I understand that the man in the novel are typically American, typically irresponsible, (the scene where they gave the slow moving blonde girl "the slip" in a lobby of a hotel is heartbreaking. Like...what the fuck was she gonna do now?) but overall it is a book about an outsider trying to either get invited inside (which NO writer REALLY wants. ALL writers, as Carraway in The Great Gatsby, want both.
Carraway puts it best “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life” in The Great Gatsby, he means that the fashionable lifestyle of Tom, Myrtle, and their party guests is both alluring and repulsive to him. He wants to be a fly on the wall and to be involved in the very debauchery that so shocks and draws him him. It is Tom’s loud slap across Daisy’s face to snap Nick out his “this is the place” reverie. And as for Tom, he’s an inmate in his own life:
I had no sight into Daisy's heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game. ... Tom had great success as a football player at Yale, but he now tends to focus on that accomplishment instead of moving forward in life…
Shed the racism, and I’m a bit of a mix between Tom and Gatsby. I am the Tom who is afraid I might “drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence if some irrecoverable [hockey] game.” I am the Jay Gatsby whose future “seems so close that [I] could hardly fail to grasp it”, only to realize, too late, that it’s already behind me, “somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”
Sad, shaking, wondering why I made the choices I did. But they didn’t feel like choices at the time. There was no “Would you like to betray your wife and go buy some heroin?” screen before me, and I, holding the controller, clicked on “YES.” It wasn’t like that at all. Someone else was driving the car, it felt like.
How long will it be like this? It took me 3 years to get over Diana. We’d dated for exactly half less time than that. With Jessica, it took 2 years. But we’d dated 3 years. So there’s no formula. I’ll simply yearn for A___ until I don’t anymore.
But honestly…what the fuck am I mourning? A set of qualities? Her qualities? A wink from those impossibly bluegreen eyes, achingly bluegreen eyes, or the upturn on both sides of her lips when she’s about to break into a smile and there’s no telling it it’ll be a chuckle or a full-fledged belly laugh.
You know, I never could make her laugh.
WHAT THE FUCK WAS SHE DOING WITH ME IN THE FIRST PLACE?
I couldn’t make her laugh. Never. Wait, once. I made her laugh one time. Early days. We were in the kitchen. We were making dinner together. I remember saying “my methadone just hit me” & she goes “what’s it feel like?” and I gave her a knowing look that made her double over & laugh. Yay for me. Made my wife laugh one time.
Couldn’t make her come cuz she wouldn’t tell me how she liked it or wanted it. If you need a vibrator to come, fucking just tell me and we’ll use one. I’m not against incorporating sex toys into sex. A profile of Hugh Hefner ten years ago went over what sex night was like at the Playboy Mansion. Hefner prefers Tuesday nights, for some fucked up reason. I can only guess the man has weekend engagements. Monday is to recover from hangovers. But Tuesday? Time to fuck! Apparently Hefner cannot orgasm unless there is porn playing on the widescreen TV. Four (!) identical blonde girlfriends catering to his every whim and he’s jerking off to some porno made in 1988?
Life is weird.
But you already knew that
I know that, at first, she thought there was some cultural cache, a coolness factor, to dating a heroin addict. Of course, at that time, I was clean & sober. But I’d swear to God she got sick of things, or we just fell into a banal routine, before I fell back into drugs. It was her disinterest that made me feel free to go get high again. Or go out and rob somebody for heroin money. All I wanna do is *BANG BANG BANG BANG* and uh….take yer money.
Another Timbit of trivia? Did you know that MI.A. and Justine Frischmann, front-woman for Elastica were once roommates and that M.I.A. directed Elastica’s final music video while Frischmann co-wrote the song “Galang” on M.I.A.’s debut album Arular. M.I.A.’s trashy Tumblr aesthetic (before there was a Tumblr) fits the Elastica song perfectly. They should have done more together. Alas, seems like everyone breaks up.
I always loved that line “I got more records than the KGB” line. It’s brilliant. Not that it ever mattered when or if I did score. Why, you ask?
I’ll let Renton say it…
The beginning of Trainspotting depicts Renton running (literally trying to outrun his addiction.) Which never works. Which is why he gets hit by a car. And then laughs fatalistically. He’ll never outrun it. No one ever does or can.
Anyway for a while there, I chose life.
Me and ____ didn’t do a whole lot but, at the start, we’d hang out in bed and hold each other and it felt really good. After a while we’d sit on the couch, not touching, watch a movie, smoke a cigarette each on the steps, then go to bed. It became so regimented. Like Hefner’s sex life. Or Hefner’s life in general.
Like it or not, Hefner and Hustler (which is Larry Flynt’s) are America.
America. Dickens hated it the first time, thought it rife with self-promoting hucksters…not like now, eh? He loved it his second visit.
There are endless variations on this theme, all of them as quintessentially American as ice cold beer in the Nevada night, a poolhall of the main drag with a man who doesn’t look confused when you ask for a set of Boston balls (that’s the regular type, solid 1-8, striped are 9-15. If you get a guy who looks confused, he’s either new at the job, or he’s never been east of the Nevada-Utah border, turned around at a placed named Mesquite, Arizona.)
And yet. And yet, I could actually talk to her and she would know what I was saying and retort w/ her own considered opinions. This is no small thing, in a marriage. It’s no small thing in this world. Then I lost her. Lost my cats. Moon.
This is the last time I ever saw her, summer 2021:
Church. Day 1
Church. Day 58 or something.
Gained a new cat though. Cookie:
And a new sense of independence and self-sufficiency:
Still, I miss ____ but the pain lessens each day. The sting is healing. I’ll never get totally over her, but I’m starting to think about other things now, instead of just her all the fucking time.
More to come, when I’m not feeling crushed by a loss that will not hide itself from me.
More to come when there’s nothing left to do. Every me and every you.
Did you know that Donna Matthews, formerly a guitarist in Elastica, is now a missionary helping the homeless, not a modern harm reduction in the sense that she does not give a fuck about her soul. Matthews is a born-again devout Christian and is happy to speak at length about her conversion.
Everybody ends up somewhere. I’ll see you at the bitter end.
Btw, I still think Trainspotting 2 is one of the best sequels in the entire history of cinema. Spud’s suicide is one of the most poignant things I’ve ever seen. My poor friend Scott died in that very same manner. Reputation ruined, alone in his heroin hovel. The chair kick off the building gets me every time.
“Save my life? You ruined my life Mark! Now you’re ruining my death too!” (That’s a great line, srsly)
“I did all I could for you! I gave you four thousand pounds!”
“And what did you think I was gonna do…with four…thousand…pounds, Mark? I was a fucking junkie!”
Spud has a point. Maybe Mark thought Spud would use the money for something…else. But that’s the problem. When you’re a junkie, there is no “something else.”
I want to have to need to recognize that this passage “in various states of dishevelment” is not my own, I read it in a rather good article about the rise (& so-called “fall”…I fucking hate that rise and fall is the 2-step metric we use. It’s SO LAZY.) of Elastica in Which Donna Mathews was seen leaving “cool” London bars “in various states of dishevelment.” She eventually picked up a dope habit, but kicked it, & is now working as a missionary and point of contact for people looking to access a rehab centre in London. She can help detox them (non-medical, just like here, you like here & die).