Epigraph
Brawl
Last Saturday, ten minutes before the fists started flying, I was sitting in the back booth of Panache, being interrogated by a blonde about the merits of red wine. I was trying to explain that a good zinfandel could be calibrated to any number of dishes; she was talking about how she normally never drank anything that cost less than $150 a bottle. “Well, okay, but I’m discussing your everyday table wines here,” I said, wanting this conversation over with, even if it meant being impolitic. “If you’re paying that much for something to go with a plate of pasta, you’re just an idiot.”
She heard only bits and fragments of this, like a static-heavy transmission from Mars, because at that moment the turntable-jockey decided to throw on Gwen Stefani, the air molecules trembling and dissolving under the heavy base-thump. D., who had pulled us here to celebrate her birthday, came over and grabbed my hand, as the darkened room began to thrash with the beat. I was up and moving, the two drinks in my system almost but not quite overriding my normally acute case of White Boy Syndrome, my feet going left-right-left, my hands going up-down-sideways. “What am I doing here?” I asked D.
She smiled: silly boy. “You’re dancing.”
“That’s a matter of opinion.”
We danced. The song ended. I plopped into a convenient chair and the blonde plopped down beside me, limbs now loose as a doll’s on a toy store shelf. Her head lolled back. She gave a point beyond the far wall a beatific smile. One look at her dilated pupils told the story: Her brain had officially departed the last rocket from Earth. “Long line in the bathroom, huh?” I asked her. Your normal semi-cognizant cokehead will usually respond to such insinuations with a lopsided grin or else haughty indignation; but the woman’s blank china-doll smile never wavered. “You’ve just spun right off the surface of the planet,” I said, leaning in until our noses were an inch apart. “Do you even understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?”
Houston, we’ve lost contact. She was still facing straight ahead, totally oblivious, as a table a few feet behind us went over with a crash loud enough to be heard above the sound system, with an accompanying tinkle as its freight of glasses hit the floor. A pile of people, dark forms, rolling and punching. Bouncers leaping left and right into the fray. A woman’s voice, high and strident, yelling with feral intensity. The front door crashed open and the winter wind swept in, blowing shards of glass and napkins across the floor, as the bouncers heaved and dragged the combatants outside.
My company holiday party tomorrow night, I’m betting, won’t have near the same level of fisticuffs. But you never know.
Groan
Two-and-a-half years back, when I was still at Chicago, Terrance Malik gave me a piece of writing advice that I’ve always remembered but never followed. “You just have to write,” he told me. “Don’t look back, just get it all out at once.”
Every late night, I sit at the Spartan wooden table in my living room, usually with a cup of tea or a bottle of water depending on how late it is, the quiet only occasionally interrupted by the sounds of a car honking outside or a police chopper overhead, tapping away at the laptop. Tapping away at a book that constantly mutates, absorbs past fragments, slips away on new and occasionally ludicrous tangents. And the whole time, it’s the Battle of the Somme. I type a sentence, and then delete it. Type. Delete. Repeat. If I smoked, the ashtray would be a forest of crushed filters and ashy mounds. It reminds me of that time over a decade ago I was lost in the Appalachians in December, while hiking, and ended up picking my way for what felt like miles down a rocky, icy and wooded slope, unmoored in an alien world. Where are you going with this?
While we're striding down memory lane, let's jump back in space-time to an interview I was doing, a few months ago, for a bar magazine I freelance for in exchange for free concert tickets and the princely sum of five cents a word. I was talking to someone who had once been a talent agent, mostly for rock bands. Not top-tier; he hadn't been one of those million-a-year Universal execs forcing their gold-plated 9mm against a manager's forehead while informing them that the phrase "Kanye West won't be able to play your son's bar mitzvah" simply did not compute. But he handled some major-in-a-minor-way name acts. He asked me how much I made annually, and I gave him a ballpark figure. He told me to get into another line of work. "Back when I was doing what I was doing," he said, loosing a chilly laugh. "I knew most of the ladies only by the top of their heads."
Such gruesome invitations aside, this is what I do - writing, that is. Other than watching movies, pontificating on arcane and slightly pretentious theories at parties, taking punches from strange and attractive women, and occasionally picking the right stock, it's one of the only things I've ever been good at.
Last Saturday, ten minutes before the fists started flying, I was sitting in the back booth of Panache, being interrogated by a blonde about the merits of red wine. I was trying to explain that a good zinfandel could be calibrated to any number of dishes; she was talking about how she normally never drank anything that cost less than $150 a bottle. “Well, okay, but I’m discussing your everyday table wines here,” I said, wanting this conversation over with, even if it meant being impolitic. “If you’re paying that much for something to go with a plate of pasta, you’re just an idiot.”
She heard only bits and fragments of this, like a static-heavy transmission from Mars, because at that moment the turntable-jockey decided to throw on Gwen Stefani, the air molecules trembling and dissolving under the heavy base-thump. D., who had pulled us here to celebrate her birthday, came over and grabbed my hand, as the darkened room began to thrash with the beat. I was up and moving, the two drinks in my system almost but not quite overriding my normally acute case of White Boy Syndrome, my feet going left-right-left, my hands going up-down-sideways. “What am I doing here?” I asked D.
She smiled: silly boy. “You’re dancing.”
“That’s a matter of opinion.”
We danced. The song ended. I plopped into a convenient chair and the blonde plopped down beside me, limbs now loose as a doll’s on a toy store shelf. Her head lolled back. She gave a point beyond the far wall a beatific smile. One look at her dilated pupils told the story: Her brain had officially departed the last rocket from Earth. “Long line in the bathroom, huh?” I asked her. Your normal semi-cognizant cokehead will usually respond to such insinuations with a lopsided grin or else haughty indignation; but the woman’s blank china-doll smile never wavered. “You’ve just spun right off the surface of the planet,” I said, leaning in until our noses were an inch apart. “Do you even understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?”
Houston, we’ve lost contact. She was still facing straight ahead, totally oblivious, as a table a few feet behind us went over with a crash loud enough to be heard above the sound system, with an accompanying tinkle as its freight of glasses hit the floor. A pile of people, dark forms, rolling and punching. Bouncers leaping left and right into the fray. A woman’s voice, high and strident, yelling with feral intensity. The front door crashed open and the winter wind swept in, blowing shards of glass and napkins across the floor, as the bouncers heaved and dragged the combatants outside.
My company holiday party tomorrow night, I’m betting, won’t have near the same level of fisticuffs. But you never know.
Groan
Two-and-a-half years back, when I was still at Chicago, Terrance Malik gave me a piece of writing advice that I’ve always remembered but never followed. “You just have to write,” he told me. “Don’t look back, just get it all out at once.”
Every late night, I sit at the Spartan wooden table in my living room, usually with a cup of tea or a bottle of water depending on how late it is, the quiet only occasionally interrupted by the sounds of a car honking outside or a police chopper overhead, tapping away at the laptop. Tapping away at a book that constantly mutates, absorbs past fragments, slips away on new and occasionally ludicrous tangents. And the whole time, it’s the Battle of the Somme. I type a sentence, and then delete it. Type. Delete. Repeat. If I smoked, the ashtray would be a forest of crushed filters and ashy mounds. It reminds me of that time over a decade ago I was lost in the Appalachians in December, while hiking, and ended up picking my way for what felt like miles down a rocky, icy and wooded slope, unmoored in an alien world. Where are you going with this?
While we're striding down memory lane, let's jump back in space-time to an interview I was doing, a few months ago, for a bar magazine I freelance for in exchange for free concert tickets and the princely sum of five cents a word. I was talking to someone who had once been a talent agent, mostly for rock bands. Not top-tier; he hadn't been one of those million-a-year Universal execs forcing their gold-plated 9mm against a manager's forehead while informing them that the phrase "Kanye West won't be able to play your son's bar mitzvah" simply did not compute. But he handled some major-in-a-minor-way name acts. He asked me how much I made annually, and I gave him a ballpark figure. He told me to get into another line of work. "Back when I was doing what I was doing," he said, loosing a chilly laugh. "I knew most of the ladies only by the top of their heads."
Such gruesome invitations aside, this is what I do - writing, that is. Other than watching movies, pontificating on arcane and slightly pretentious theories at parties, taking punches from strange and attractive women, and occasionally picking the right stock, it's one of the only things I've ever been good at.
posted by NiK @ 5:01 PM
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