Ringtown

This past weekend, I had a nice fall visit back to Pennsylvania, part of which involved running into an old friend I haven’t seen in roughly 10 years. Robin’s from Ringtown. Our friend Tony, who I see just about every time I go back, is also from Ringtown. Robin lives down past Reading now, far enough way and busy enough with work that he rarely gets back to our home area. Tony lives in Shenandoah, just over the hill from Ringtown.

When we were kids, we used to harass kids from Ringtown by taking the melody for Glenn Campbell’s hit song “Rhinestone Cowboy” and instead sing, “Like a Ringtown farmer …” There are a lot of farming communities in Pennsylvania. Within our school district, there were other farming-based towns: Gordon and Lavelle. You drive between Gordon and Lavelle, and you can catch the overwhelming aroma of cow manure in summer time.

While it would be lost on outsiders and city slickers, all these little rural towns have their own vibe, which you’ll often see unexpurgated in the kids of the town. With farm towns like Gordon and Lavelle, the kids were always physical, probably due to their proximity to farm animals and the need to interact with them. I know that sounds weird – I don’t mean to imply bovine bestiality – but when you work on a farm, you’re herding and feeding goats, pigs, cows, etc. You get into it with them sometimes, holding them down for shots or brands – rare farms would even have horses.

As a result, a lot of these kids were physical. Our high-school championship wrestling teams of the 70s and 80s were stocked with Ringtown kids: big, physical kids who liked to grapple. Even now, farming high schools like Tri-Valley, despite being very small population wise, will often field state-finalist caliber wrestling teams. It’s a weird thing with farm kids.

I don’t think Robin and Tony come from farming families, but both probably did enough work on farms as kids, and lived around plenty of other farmers, that they had the same rollicking, physical vibe. They were always administering “titty twisters” on guys in their peer group: grabbing a guys chest as hard as possible, pinching down and twisting. I’d imagine this would be much more painful for a full-breasted woman, but it hurt like hell, too, when done on a guy. Robin was strong as an ox – if he caught you in a titty twister, the pain could be excruciating. Followed by him braying out his horse-like laugh.

Another odd thing we did in that Butthead phase of life. Any time we disagreed with what one of us was saying, provided no teachers were around, rather than say something witty like "you're full of shit," we'd ball up one of our hands into a fist, place it directly underneath the chin of the kid making the questionable statement, and then make a "pwt-pwt-pwt" sound with our lips to imitate the sound of an oil can squirting oil. What we were really doing was pretending our outstretched arm and fist was a penis, and we were ejacualting on the offending party's face as a sign of disrespect. I'm not sure why ejaculting on someone's face would represent the epitome of humiliation, but there it was. And that oil-can sound ... I've never heard my penis make a sound in any state of being. But I guess when you're 14 years old and learning how to use the thing in different ways, the first time you see it in action in that fashion, you imagine it making that oil-can sound.

Those Ringtown kids were always grabbing each other: headlocks, full nelsons, hammerlocks. When I say they seemed gay, I don’t mean “effeminate” gay, I mean “prison shower sex” gay – guys who were always grabbing each other in deeply physical ways that were rude. Granted, most boys did this – rough-housing – in varying degrees, but with Ringtown kids, it was an art form and a constant. It was nothing to pass by a study hall or gym class in repose and see two Ringtown guys, red-faced and gasping, locked up with each other in some physical challenge. Arm wrestling was big, too. Girls would be sitting at the surrounding desks doing homework, while two Ringtown guys would be busting neck veins and sweating profusely in an arm-wrestling death match. (I kept waiting for one of them to lean over and gently kiss the other on the cheek.)

You’d think I wouldn’t get along with guys like this, but one other thing about Ringtown kids, a lot of them were pretty good-natured and friendly. Sure, as time went along, I got tired of the endless arm wrestling matches and silly physical crap that seemed like a misguided mating ritual. But the kids I knew from Ringtown tended to be friendly, regardless of social status.

I should mention social status, because that was the strange (but good) thing about Robin. This is a guy who spent the first two decades of his life doing everything possible to go off the rails (drugs, dropping out, rampant teen sex, going AWOL in the Navy and eventually getting discharged, etc.), yet is now a plant manager (not sure what kind of plant), making great money and living in a quiet rural/suburban town with a few kids from two marriages. You can take issue with the marriages, but by all rites, I had figured this guy to be a corpse long before 30.

How did he get there? A reversal of fortune? I don’t know. I gather from what he told me that he’s just as perplexed that he’s made it this far and is, in fact, somehow excelling in life. When I implied that something must have happened to make him shift gears, he said, no, I’ve always known I was a good worker, I just didn’t like school and had more of a wild side when I was a kid.

Which was an understatement! He had Tony and me in tears with some of his stories. The time he and Tony watched a notoriously gamey kid in our school take a dump in the locker-room shower after gym class. Or when he screwed a girl in the vestibule of the auditorium during a presentation. (I vaguely remember this as I was in the auditorium that day and the rumor had spread like wild fire … thought it was a joke at the time … but he verified that they actually did this.) Or routinely driving his motorcycle at over 100 mph down a long pot-holed hill leading into Ringtown. Or having one of his naval officers hit on him in a hotel room while on R&R in Connecticut (basically hopping naked into bed with Robin, throwing his bare leg over his waist and whispering “roll over” into Robin’s ear … which he did, punching the officer square in the face, then taking off with nothing but his pants on and catching a taxi back to base … no wonder the guy went AWOL twice.)

The guy’s a repository of these sort of wild stories, his favorites being all the times he’s been caught having sex with various girlfriends and then wives in public or while visiting relatives. It’s as if he planned these events, but I gather he delighted in taking these calculated risks – yanking up his wife’s dress while her parents were on the porch and trying to bang out a quick one on the living-room sofa. He detailed getting caught once, bare-assed and pumping full-gun in a guest room, and his mother-in-law, opening the door without knocking, letting out a shriek that made him lose his erection instantly. I can only imagine the parents’ horror to witness this red-haired monster romping porn-star style on their little princess, who was probably moaning like an alley cat. The following breakfast or dinner must have been quite an ordeal for everyone.

Robin used to wear leather pants, sometimes with a matching vest, which had to be the gayest thing I recall anyone in our high-school wearing. Understand that he was a Judas Priest fan, and like millions of other Judas Priest fans, Robin had no idea Rob Halford was gay and into hard-core S&M, thus the leather outfit he wore into metal’s rough legend, with all these aggressively heterosexual kids none the wiser. There was little worry about mistaking Robin for being gay – the guy was like a modern-day centaur galloping through the countryside in a permanent rutting season, leaving hoof marks and stains on many family-car seat covers.

Just before he joined the navy, after dropping out of high school in the ninth grade (he may have flunked a grade or two), he worked with brother J at a gas station on night shift, which apparently only gave him more time to rut, as he outlined a few instances of comely customers taking up his offers to come back at his break time and get the van rocking. Pumping gas on night shift is a rough job – shady characters, drunken kids and adults, a lot of down time as the night wears on, and the gas freezes on your hands when it gets colder. J recalled the weird conversations he and Robin would have early in the morning, reminiscent of a perverted Waiting for Godot:

Robin: What would happen if you crazy-glued your dick to someone’s forehead?

J: I imagine you’d have your dick crazy-glued to someone’s forehead.

Robin: I know, I know. But, what would you do?

J: You’d probably stand there thinking, “I have my dick crazy-glued to this person’s forehead.” And that person would think, “This guy’s dick is crazy-glued to my forehead.”

Robin: I know, I know. But how would you get out of it?

J: I think a better question might be how did you get into it.

With Robin, the possibility of crazy-gluing his dick to a woman’s forehead was very real. Just to see what would happen. I couldn’t help but think when I heard him recount these many bizarre stories what an odd life he had leading into his adulthood – which is why I was so pleasantly surprised to find out how stable and successful he is now. The last time I saw him in our youth, I didn’t know it, but he was AWOL from the Navy for the first time, riding around on his motorcycle, and with what would be come his first wife (not sure if she was pregnant at the time or shortly thereafter). When I heard he’d gone AWOL and then been caught and thrown in the brig for 90 days, I thought, here we go. Apparently, he did the same thing again a year later, only this time, the Navy threw him out after this stint in the brig. All this transpired before he was 21 years old.

What I’m not seeing with him is all those years in between, much like no one knows what happened to Jesus between the ages of 12 and 33. I know the basic story line: drummed out of the service, feeling low, gets a job driving trucks with one of his brothers, which grows into these various managerial spots resulting in plant manager years along, all the while married and having kids, so he has these things to anchor him. As opposed to the footloose and fancy-free kid I knew who nearly blew out his candle before legally becoming an adult. I still remember the time he and our friend John, while out driving drunk, sheared off a telephone pole in Pottsville and somehow got out of the situation with Robin’s mother blaming John for the incident (although he was not driving and nearly got his head caved in when the pole crashed down on the car).

Robin said he hardly even drinks anymore, much less do drugs, so I’m sure that’s also another huge factor in his turnaround. He asked me if I knew the whereabouts of many of the infamous, fellow drug-addled kids from our class, the ones who got high in the wooded area on the north side of the school before lumbering back to doze in meaningless classes. And I told him they were all living on Mars with Jesus Christ. Because I have no idea what happened to a lot of the kids, save I suspect they’ve probably had a rough time unless they, like him, somehow snapped out of that teenage drug lethargy and allowed themselves to grow up.

All I know I was literally laughing myself to tears over his stories, part nostalgia, and part getting caught up in that wild energy that sometimes erupts when you get old friends together who haven’t seen each other in awhile, and vivid memories of embarrassing and odd situations come flooding out, like some bizarre form of group therapy. Haven't laughed that hard in a long time.

That Song: “Like a Friend” by Pulp

One of the odd things about music and emotions is that they don’t seem to connect as strongly as you get older. It’s harder for me as an adult to point at certain songs as milestones or markers in life, indicative of a person or situation from that time. There are many songs like that from my childhood and teenage years. I don’t know why that is. I’m listening to far more music now than when I was a kid – music of all kinds, my breadth and understanding of it having grown in ways I’d never have anticipated. Maybe it’s too much music? Because I can recall being a kid and getting stuck on 45 singles, and doing nothing but sitting there and listening, through my Radio Shack Nova 40 headphones, staring at the turntable, for hours on end. I can’t focus like that anymore on one song.

But every now and then … a song or band will break through and nail it. One of the strongest instances of that came in the late 90s, coincidentally tied into my trip to Scotland detailed in the previous post. When I was over there, I was buying CDs like crazy – every time we’d hit a store, I’d walk out with a handful. I recall Castle had just reissued the first eight of those long-deleted Kinks albums from the 60s, but only in the UK – I came back with all of them, and then some. The people in customs must have thought I was a CD merchant by all the stuff I had packed in my huge suitcase.

One thing I had noticed while in all those Scottish music stores: a poster for a new album by a band called Pulp – This Is Hardcore. A striking poster, of a beautiful, naked blonde haired woman who looked ghastly, like a corpse, face down, on a sofa. She almost looked like a mannequin. I new vaguely of Pulp – they were nowhere near as big in the U.S. as they were in the U.K. “Common People” had made the rounds of few mix tapes among my friends – I liked it. (After my Pulp transformation, I would recognize it as one of the best songs of the 90s, and one of the best working-class songs ever.)

I didn’t think much of it, but when I got back to America, a few weeks later, I was in my favorite used CD haunt in Manhattan, Sounds on St. Marks Place. The mid-to-late 90s were a boom-time in the used CD trade – I could find just about any release, generally for $4.00 to $8.00, in those bins. (This was just before Napster exploded and changed everything.) I haven’t been to Sounds in eons but assume it’s still there. From about 1993 through 2000, I was there at least once a week and buying great used CDs by the handful. As fate would have it, I saw that same Pulp album in their used bin for $3.99, and figured what the hell.

Little did I know I had just bought my favorite album of the 90s. When I got home and put it on, from the first listen, I was floored. Jarvis Cocker, the lead singer and lyricist, just nailed it on that album – he has since mentioned that was the most depressing, haggard time of his life, that he was blown out by the major step-up in fame brought by their previous album, Different Class, and was either high or emotionally numb most of the time. You can hear that in some of the songs of the album, but you can also hear a deeply-talented songwriter working through his condition and leaving traces of humility, grace and that quiet, British working-class sense of just trying to get by.

“Help the Aged” is the signature song from the album for me – a bit of a put-on, but in it, the recognition that we all get old, and that old person you’re watching shuffle down the street, once upon a time, was just like any young person struggling with life. When Cocker sings help the aged, he’s really singing, “Help me.” My favorite line, simply stated: “You can’t run away from yourself.” He senses he’s going off the rails and feeling just as defenseless and forgotten as anyone in a retirement home.

“Glory Days’ is another great one, in which Cocker recognizes the glory days everyone fawns over nostalgically are really a lot of down time and bullshit, that must seem like heaven when life gets more hectic and responsible. He recognizes the laziness of youth (“I could be a genius/If I just put my mind to it/And I could do anything/If only I could get around to it.”) and accepts it on its own terms. The strength of both songs, and the whole album, is the heroic production – each sounds like an anthem – dramatic build-ups to big choruses, walls of electric guitar, soaring solos, banks of keyboards and big melodies … all backing up a guy who’s singing about how befuddled he is with himself and the world.

At that time in my life, early 30s, I really needed to hear that message, because I was feeling much the same way. About to pack in a job that was wearing me out with the stress level. Not the sleek, untroubled youth who landed in New York a decade earlier. I was feeling at wit’s end and not seeing any way out, save to stop and gather my wits for a few months (which I did, at great financial expense!). I gather Jarvis Cocker was roughly the same age as me and had similar mixed emotions towards his life at the time, albeit his involved going through the meat grinder of fame and nearly losing his mind. Well, you rarely get famous working in an office, but you do get pushed hard for big bucks sometimes, so the scenarios aren’t all that disparate. You feel like you're living someone else's life, not your own, and that life sort of blows.

But the last song on the album was the one that got me. I should note that the American version of the album was different from the British, which ended rightfully on the big close-out ballad, “The Day after the Revolution.” The American version tacked on a soundtrack song called “Like a Friend” from the movie Great Expectations starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Ethan Hawke. (I still haven’t seen it and don’t intend to.) I’m sure Cocker and the band couldn’t have been pleased with this as it disrupted the flow of the album …

… But what a song! For me, "Like a Friend" was THE Pulp song, a song I played repeatedly the first few weeks and can still play now repeatedly. Like the other songs on the album, it starts innocently enough, a slow ballad with Cocker pining over a woman who doesn’t seem to give a shit about him, recognizes she has no feelings for him or sees him as “just a friend” but ultimately doesn’t care and pledges to go on hanging in there, even though he knows she’s Ms. Wrong.

But 1:42 into the song, things kick into dramatic overdrive, a churning rhythm guitar hooks up with a pounding snare drum, lead guitar weaves circles around each, the drums pick up the pace, hitting harder, and then Cocker lays it all out:

You are the last drink I never should drunk.
You are the body hidden in the trunk.
You are the habit I can't seem to kick.
You are my secrets on the front page every week.
You are the car I never should have bought.
You are the train I never should have caught.
You are the cut that makes me hide my face.
You are the party that makes me feel my age.
Like a car crash I can see but I just can't avoid.
Like a plane I've been told I never should board.
Like a film that's so bad but I've gotta stay til the end.
Let me tell you now, it's lucky for you that we're friends.

If you’ve downloaded the track, you can hear how exciting the song grows when the pace picks up and Cocker launches into his litany of hard truths. Of course, the strength of the song is it’s a love song – a demented, skewed one, much in the same vein as “Every Breath You Take” by The Police.

And I think we’ve all been there, unfortunately! Probably more than once. The song made me recall S, a beautiful Asian girl I fell hard for in my 20s, and spent the next 2-3 years falling in and out of touch with, usually predicated upon whichever boyfriend was falling out of favor with her, and her desire to have a sane man in her life. The most dramatic turn came the night the U.S. launched Desert Storm against Iraq (January 17, 1991 ... thank you, Wikipedia), with her phoning me about two in the morning and choosing that odd time to get back into it with me, whatever “it” was, and I recall those few months after being pretty good times with her, a nice connection, but as time wore on, the usual “where is this thing going/most likely nowhere” vibe rolled around, only this time, I made a very hard call and ended it, much to her surprise. And mine – I don’t think I grew a set of balls until that moment.

But she was “that girl” in a sense of someone who drove you nuts, whom you know was bad for you, but, christ, you just couldn’t stop being drawn towards her. The siren calling your ship through the fog to the rocky coast! The thing was, we got along swimmingly, she really got my sense of humor, I could make her laugh just by looking at her a certain way, and I had a sense of her artistic inclinations and encouraged her every step of the way, which I gather was something not many people were doing in her life. I remember after I called everything off with her, months later, I wrote her a letter really laying into her, but I think the greater reality is I should have had the previously-noted testicular growth moment 2-3 years earlier the first time I let her know my feelings were more than “friendly” and that first gray area rolled in like a years-long bank of fog. I should have been smarter, but I just wasn't.

In essence, you never stop loving certain people, you just get older and wiser, and recognize when it’s time to cut and run, or when it’s time to hang around. Of course, my issue since then has been developing the “hang around” trait which tends to get burned out of you after a few situations like that. That sort of balance, or more accurately tug of war, between cynicism and allowing yourself to feel genuine emotion, is the heart of Jarvis Cocker’s work, and the song “Like a Friend.” I’ll link to another song, maybe even a better song, that I’m sure Jarvis Cocker would acknowledge as being such: “Just Another High” by Roxy Music. If we could all pull such gems from the rubble of doomed relationships, the world would be a better place.

Lisa Swims with Dolphins

In the spring of 1998, I visited Scotland for a week, staying with my internet friend Ian and his family in Arbroath, on the east coast near Dundee. At the time, I thought I'd be visiting routinely, but I haven't been back since, much to my regret. I really liked Scotland, despite the weather: the people, the lay of the land, just about everything. I remember the odd, floating shade of green you'd see on the hills on a misty day, which was just about every one. I'd love to get back to that place. But in the meantime, here's a story I wrote about my trip at the time which must have got shot down by the NYPress. It's not a bad read at all -- I've done some minor editing of details that ring false 10 years on (mainly instances where I mimicked how Scottish people talk, a bad affectation of my early 30s). But most of it is "as is" -- as are the events described. (I have a "Lisa Swims with Dolphins" photo, but unfortunately no scanner right now to drop a picture into the article -- take my word for it, graffiti looks the same everywhere.)

**

“Where’s a hyme?”

The old woman had asked me a question I couldn’t quite fathom. I had just gotten off a 7-1/2 hour red-eye flight from JFK, filled with crying babies and assorted asshole American tourists, and rushed to my reserved room at a bed-and-breakfast on Glasgow’s west side. After greeting me at the door of the beautiful old house and discovering I was an American, she asked that odd question.

Hyme? Hymen? I knew where a hymen was, but didn’t think it would make for appropriate conversation.

“Excuse me?”

“Where’s a hyme, laddie?”

“A hyme?”

“Aye. Where’s a hyme?”

“I don’t know.”

She stared at me as if I was insane.

And so began my week in Scotland, although I was to spend only my first and last days in Glasgow, a city with the best cab drivers in the world (as they’ll humbly inform you) and an insane accent guaranteed to drive Rex Harrison into a foaming-at-the-mouth frenzy. I can picture him running down Sauchiehall Street -- wild-eyed, beating strangers with his cane and screaming, “What the fuck are you trying to say?”

Most of my week was spent on the rainy, windswept east coast of Scotland -- County Angus, Arbroath, in particular, a small town north of Dundee which was once a fishing village and still has a few lonely boats moored on the docks. I was visiting my friend Ian, a newspaper editor, and his wife and four sons.

On the long drive in from Glasgow, stopping to see Rob Roy's humble grave on the edge of the Highlands (with the ass-kicking inscription: "MacGREGOR DESPITE THEM"), Ian explained to me that having been to the States, he figured I'd find life in general to be much the same, but there would still be plenty to tickle my American sensibilities.

No sooner had he said that then while driving past what was among the worst neighborhoods in Dundee (looked like Forest Hills after the streetsweepers had been through), I glanced at a wall which had this graffiti: LISA SWIMS WITH DOLPHINS.

"What in the hell is that supposed to mean? Lisa swims with dolphins?" I asked.

"I don't know," Ian responded, "there aren't any dolphins to speak of in the North Sea. Richie, is that a new band in town?"

Richie, Ian's 17-year-old who had been sitting quietly in the back seat, mumbled, "I don't think so. If they are, they must be terrible with a naff name like that."

I pictured a girl from those barren-looking council estates, in her cheap Adidas track suit, frolicking in the warm Gulf Sea waters with Flipper, far from a troubled life in her rainy, crime-ridden part of town.

Thankfully, Arbroath wasn't as hard a town. I don't think I started getting a true feeling for Scotland until I went running through the fields around town on my first full day there. Ian laid out a five-mile route for me, and I found myself on country lanes and open fields so much like the rolling hills of my home in Pennsylvania that I expected my brother to drive by in his pick-up and offer me a lift.

It was a strange feeling I never quite shook -- that I had been there before, although it was a foreign land. That first day it was clear, the last time I saw the sun until I came back to America a week later. From then on, it was rain. Sometimes drizzle. Sometimes a downpour. On colder days, mixed with snow. And the worst, falling sideways with that wicked North Sea wind.
After the rain, the next thing I noticed was the faces. It didn't seem to matter whether it was hard-faced, working-class kids in track suits or elderly mums with strollers, but there seemed to be a certain kindness that shone through, or at least an acceptance of life that I don't see much of in New York. I knew it was bullshit, as some of those hard-faced kids would no doubt be just as nasty as their American counterparts. But I often caught myself looking at people a beat too long, feeling like I was looking at childhood pictures, something I felt I had lost, rather than actual people.

Ian's youngest, Ian Jr., had that look. He reminded me of Tiny Tim -- the Dickens character, not the singer. One rainy morning we sat in the TV room and watched Full Metal Jacket on video, with me explaining what I knew about Vietnam and certain Americanisms that came up in speech. He would giggle in delight at the way I could predict lines and state them in an over-bearing American accent ("Is that you John Wayne -- is this me?").

While sitting there, I had remembered a small present in my suitcase, an American flag pin I bought from a deaf person in the airport (with the attached card stating "thank you for supporting the deaf"), so I went to my room and brought it over, explaining how I had purchased it.

Ian's eyes lit up for a moment, and then he looked glum and said, "There's a great bit of sadness in this, isn't there, Bill?" To which I replied, "Yes, Ian, there is. There's a great bit of sadness in New York." He seemed heartbroken for a moment -- hardly what I had expected from a child over-joyed with anything American. His response brought back those vague memories of the hundreds of homeless people I'd stepped over or simply avoided in New York in the 80s. There was no easy way to explain something like this to a boy who'd never seen anything remotely like a subway car late on a winter's night filled with sleeping, tattered forms. I think he saw this in my face and told me how glad he was to have something so "cool."

Earlier he had told me that he thought Courtney Cox was "hot," as I had inquired about her poster in his room, and I could imagine him having tea and biscuits with her in that bullshit café on Friends, over-joyed and excited to be next to a beautiful American girl he only ever saw on TV.

That seemed to be the running theme of the week -- Ian and his sons' fascination with all things American. Simon, his oldest at 23, and Richie, the 17-year-old in Chuck E. Taylor hi-tops, were both in punk bands emulating the sounds of The Ramones and The Beach Boys. (A few years later, I would get Joey Ramone's autograph for them, at a Kinks tribute show in New York, asking Joey to sign it to Simon and Richie in Scotland. He asked me how to spell "Richie" in that thick Queens accent of his. I told him, and he spelled it wrong anyway.)

Ian's wife Alice and his 21-year-old, Andrew, were about the only ones who didn't fawn over American pop culture, despite Ian's fanatic, near-lifelong devotion to Bob Dylan. It was strange to drive through all those remote, Local Hero style fishing villages along the North Sea coast with Dylan whining about Pretty Boy Floyd or Hattie Carroll on the tape deck. (Ian plans on taking the boys to Glasgow in June to see Dylan and Van Morrison play at the SECC, a big day for him as Dylan is one of the few musical reference points he shares with them. When I asked Simon how he felt about the upcoming show, he answered, "Dylan's all roit. But, ach, I cannae fookin' stand tha' fat paddy!")

Simon and I hit it off, as I was one of the few people in the country to point out what goat's urine Budweiser is. Unbelievably, in a land filled with aged malt whisky and fantastic microbrews (my favorite being the perversely-named Bishop's Finger), all the kids swear allegiance to the King of Beers and Miller Lite. I know it's because of the American allure, and I hope for their sake Pabst Blue Ribbon and Schaeffers don't find their rancid ways to their shores.

In the previous paragraph I wrote "aged malt whisky" as opposed to "fine malt whisky." And here's why.

I've never been much of a whisky drinker. Every time I try, it makes me feel like I have hazardous fumes in the back of my throat. Frankly, I can see myself becoming as much a connoisseur of gasoline as whisky.

All week long I'd been sampling Scottish delicacies. Haggis: not bad at all, even if it contains the stomach lining of lambs, I quite enjoyed it. Real fish and chips, with lots of salt and vinegar, wrapped in old newspapers, gruffly served up by some guy who makes Bob Hoskins look and sound feminine: fantastic. Irn-bru, Scotland's premiere soft drink: tasted a bit like Mountain Dew. I missed out on deep-fried Mars Bars (dipped in batter and fried in the chips bin you'll find at any fish-and-chip shop) and Arbroath's famous smokies (simply smoked haddock -- at night, the town smelled faintly of burning hickory from all the smokie shops).

Every night found Ian trying to break me in on whisky, generally after a few glasses of wine with dinner, and before a trip to the pub for a few pints of anything from Guinness, to Tennants 70/80 Schilling, to McKuens. We'd sit at his dining room table with the bottles in front of us, both with our glasses half full, a small kettle of water next to mine to cut the whisky if I found it too strong.

"Ah, life is good, isn't it Bill?" Ian would ask rhetorically while taking a healthy sip from his glass. I'd give a sputtering response that sounded like Lou Costello seeing a ghost.

I wouldn't say it was a futile effort, but by the time Coronation Street came on the TV at 7:30, I was more than glad to beat ass out of that dining room and fret with the rest of the nation over the show's most-beloved character, Dierdre, who had been wrongly imprisoned and ended up front-page news on real newspapers all over Great Britain.

Well, that last night, we had to do it up right. All week long we got tipsy, but I could sense a big one coming on, as we had to somehow mark my time there with a staggering night out. Simon came in from Dundee especially for the event, bringing his girlfriend Dawn along. The plan of action was to walk down to the highly-esteemed Foundry Bar, an Arbroath pub famous for its Friday night celtic jam sessions.

Ian and I had been down to the Foundry two nights earlier. Along with the bartender and two old men, who turned out to be the pianist and one of the fiddlers who would turn up on Friday, we were the only ones there. Some Bob Villa-style BBC show was on the TV over the bar, and that was about all that was happening.

Friday night wasn't much different, except there were a few more locals gathered around the bar.

"I don't understand it, Bill," Ian apologized, "this place used to be so crowded on a Friday that you sometimes had to stand in the street to hear the band play."

It didn't matter to me, as when we entered the back room of the bar, there they were, the award-winning Scottish National Ceiliedgh Band. Either that, or a bunch of senior citizens got lost on their way to a shuffleboard tournament. The average age of the players must have been 65. A pianist, a banjo player, a few accordionists and fiddlers. All gathered in a small circle in the back of the bar, by themselves, chatting and taking the piss out of each other.

I think when any celtic music fan dies and goes to heaven, after his well-earned time in limbo, he will go to a place much like The Foundry Bar in Arbroath on a Friday night. The gaggle of locals all seemed to think it was either a bit of a joke or dull. But for me, it was incredible. No cover charge. Pints galore. After a few moments of idle banter, the main fiddler would strike up a note, the pianist would roll a melody, and everyone fell in behind, like tired old greyhounds chasing a rabbit. They sawed away all night, quite beautifully. Every piece ended with a thud on the piano, and the process would be repeated again and again, with the chat sessions growing slightly longer and more animated with the passing pints and hours.

I told the banjo player that he'd do well in America doing what he was doing there for free. He winked and said, "Don't go telling the owner that, otherwise he'll charge admission, and not even the bartender will show up!"

Ian later told me that the banjo player had been a folk singer in the early 60s, and that Dylan had heard him playing an old Scottish folk song while he was playing a coffee house in Glasgow and "borrowed" the melody to write "Bob Dylan's Dream." He also told me that if I asked him about it, the man would deny it to his grave, as he was a major Dylan fan and didn't want to cast any aspersions on the man's great name.

It hit me afterwards how discussing the song in that setting was incredibly appropriate. "Bob Dylan's Dream" is about a grown man looking back on the camaraderie and friendships of his childhood and yearning for that sense of belonging. In one line, he recalls sitting in a circle with his friends, and that simple feeling being the one that haunted him the most.

Here was a circle of musicians, most well over 50, sitting in the back of a bar, no one paying them any mind, finding immense pleasure in each other's company, and playing together for no profit, surely as they must have been doing so every Friday night for years gone by. A refutation of Bob Dylan's dream, if ever there was one.

At 11:00, we bid the band a good night, a wave of thank yiz for clappin' and raised bows followed, and went off to find Simon and Dawn, who had gone off to another bar to shoot pool. This is where I lost count of my drinks, as I was already going on a few glasses of dinner wine, the after-dinner whisky, some Belgian beer Ian had sitting around in pony bottles, Strongbow Cider, and Tennents 70/80 Schilling. I decided at the pool table that it was time to drop the hammer with my black friend from Ireland, Guinness Stout, which has a funny way of turning me into Lon Chaney, Jr.

I spent the rest of the evening growing exponentially drunker and getting my ass kicked all over the pool table. Scottish balls are smaller, in more ways than one, as were the pool tables, and I was out of my element. Much light was made of my excuse of bigger American balls as the impetus behind my shoddy performance. At night's end, I was in a tense game of eight-ball with Dawn, who should have been pounding me into submission, when I made this miraculous shot on the eight ball, banking it off a cushion and running it down the length of the table into a corner pocket.

"Kiss my American ass!" I cried out, brandishing my pool cue like Braveheart his sword.

Everyone laughed at me and had another round, at my expense.

Oh, if the night had ended there, it would have been a fine memory. We somehow made it back to Ian's place, passing a small pond in the middle of town on which two swans were silently gliding, and after a few drunken minutes of trying to watch TV and chat, decided to hit the sack.

Alone in my room, thoughts ran through my head. Of America. It had been a humbling experience to come here, and I found myself thinking of home. I heard Chuck Berry's "Back in the USA" and imagined pictures of returning POWs kissing the airport tarmac in San Diego. The Beach Boys, Charles Manson, Billy Graham, Bill Clinton, Charlie's Angels, Pee-Wee Herman, Clint Eastwood, John Wayne-- I saw them all in my room. Drive-ins, Jesus bumperstickers, boxing gloves, steel guitars, fuzzy dice, graffiti, baseball hats and thigh masters. New York City, Mount Rushmore, New Jersey Turnpike in the wee-wee hours, Key West at sundown, Vegas at night, Graceland, the Grand Canyon and Route 66. It was getting mighty crowded in that room.
I thought of Martin Luther King and his dream. And Neil Armstrong planting old glory on the surface of the moon.

So I took one giant leap for mankind and vomited all over the bedroom floor. I was on my knees, as if I were in a Baptist revival down South, or giving head at the Chicken Ranch in Reno. I was testifying for all of America, letting these wiley Scotts know exactly where I was coming from, and what to expect from this great nation. It all came out. Red, white, blue -- and a few colors I couldn't quite classify. The original thirteen colonies, and bits of the meatballs I had earlier that night, which weren't quite as appealing going the other way.

I caught a good bit of it in my hands and dumped it into the wastecan by the door, but I certainly didn't get it all and gazed in horror at the mess I had made on my friend's immaculate carpet. Christ, I thought, what kind of sick animal am I? (An American.) Who would do such a thing as this? (An American.) Who's going to clean up this foul mess? (A Scottsma -- no, an American.)
I felt like I should have been stumbling around with a god damn bell around my neck. It was early in the morning, and I must admit, as always, after a good blow like that, I felt fantastic, as if I had a new lease on life. The next morning, I made sure I was the first one up. Luckily, Ian was the second, and rather than dance around it, I confronted him with the ugly truth, to which he laughed and replied, "Ach, it's not the end of the world, I'll get you a bucket from the shed. No need to worry, Bill, happens to the best of us."

And that is why I love Scotland. Had he done the same to me in America, I would have thrown a bale of hay in the backyard and invited him to graze on it, after setting a torch to the pulled-up carpet and bed sheets. Ian and Alice handled it as if I had simply spilled a glass of water on the floor, as opposed to my guts.

"It's all your fault anyway, Ian, for trying to break Bill in on whisky!" Alice chided.

"Ach, I guess I'm responsible for Watergate, too?" he replied.

"No," I said, like a politician who had been caught with his pants down and beat the rap, "it's all my fault My grasp exceeded my reach. Or whatever that's supposed to mean."

We got on the road to Glasgow later in the morning, after bidding goodbye to the boys on that rainy, windy morning, standing in the doorway with Dawn and Alice.

Driving past the North Sea for the last time, I noticed a tree on the horizon. The kind of tree I had seen all week long in that part of Scotland -- bare-branched, from what Ian told me, year round, and bent over at a peculiar angle. He said the wind was so strong and constant by the sea that the tree had simply grown into that shape, hunched over and gnarled, to survive. It looked as if one terrible wind had blown it halfway over, and it simply stuck itself in that position for an eternity.

I think I saw all of Scotland in that tree. A stark, beautiful sight, however cruelly twisted it may have appeared on the horizon.

By the way, the old lady in Glasgow was asking me, "Where's your home," and Lisa Swims with Dolphins is an acronym for LSD.

Cellphone Assholery

Like many people, I’ve been railing against wayward cellphone users for a few years now. (For the record, I have one. I don’t even have a landline. I use it sparingly, rarely in public, and if I do, wherever I’m at, I pull over to avoid hindering/bothering people around me and try to create some small space of privacy. If I’m in conversation with someone, I will not answer a cellphone, unless it’s my Mom calling.) My issue? Simply that much like drugs or big money, cellphones amplify assholery. If you’re normally an asshole, these things will make you an even bigger asshole.

Two recent experiences, both in my neighborhood, have me believing this now more than ever. Don’t get me wrong – I deal with assholes on cellphones every day. Embarrassing personal conversations at top volume in public. Total lack of concern for anyone else in the immediate vicinity. Inability to grasp spatial relations in tight quarters. It’s an all-day, every-day thing in New York, the Valhalla of arrogant assholes. But it’s reaching a point with me now where the level of arrogance is at fever pitch – or maybe it’s just me getting tired of this nonsense.

The first situation was very brief, took place outside a bagel store in the neighborhood just after work one day. Usually later in the week, I pick up a few bagels for breakfast the next two mornings. The bagel store that opened up on the main drag is great, one of the few stores that caters to all social strata, with good prices and kosher bagels. In the mornings, it’s filled with Con Ed and construction workers packing on carbs for their work day, and on weekends is overflowing with the younger, more-moneyed gentry trying to get over hangovers and such.

As I was heading towards the bagel store, I noticed something odd: a rotund white woman standing in the doorway, on the sidewalk. On the younger side. Just standing there with her hands cupped in front of her. As I got nearer, I could see that she was texting a message on a cellphone. Directly in the doorway so that no one could leave or enter without encountering her.

Now, if I have to explain why this is offensive, stop reading now, we’re living in two different worlds. I don’t know how some cellphone users have gotten it into their heads that wherever they are is perfectly acceptable to stop and do their thing, even if they are blocking passage in a public place. I see this ALL THE TIME in Manhattan on crowded sidewalks, but not so much in Astoria. When I do see this kind of arrogance in Astoria, a vast majority of the time, the perpetrator has the look of those annoying white folks who have moved here in the past few years that everyone who already lives here, save real estate brokers, wishes would move straight out again. Hipster, yuppie, whatever – a certain breed of pampered white folks should strongly reconsider living in 718 neighborhoods, because their self-absorbed lack of concern is the exact antithesis of street smarts.

Understand that from the moment I saw this woman until I got to the door of the bagel store, we’re talking a good 30 seconds – a long time to stand still in front of a door. Ask yourself: have you ever positioned yourself in front of the door of a store (so that no one could enter or leave) during business hours and stood there for more than five seconds? Probably not, unless you were holding it open for someone in a wheelchair. This woman was clearly standing there for an indefinite period of time, much like a homeless person begging for change who wants you to deal with him.

I walked by her and opened the door to the bagel store, just enough to squeeze in, and as I did, the door brushed against this woman’s calf. And I mean brushed – I purposely didn’t open the door all the way because I decided, foolishly, that I didn’t want to disturb her. And there was no way I was going to say “excuse me” to someone camped out like this. Bitch, you’re standing in the doorway. You know you’re standing in the doorway. Frankly, if I grabbed her by the arm and yanked her out of the doorway, while this would have been rude, it would have been no more or less rude than what she had been doing.

As the door brushes her calf, she barks out, in a froggy voice, “You know, you could have just said ‘excuse me’ and I would have moved!”

Any number of nasty, tactless retorts entered my mind. Involving weight. And physical beauty, or lack thereof. But her response had me thinking, “Was she waiting for someone to do this just so someone would talk to her?”

I mean, honestly, you’re in the middle of a fucking doorway. You’re blocking people from entering or leaving. You want a confrontation. You demand one. I thought, should I say nothing? “Go fuck yourself” would be too harsh under the circumstances. Granted, she had earned it, but her response had me thinking, this person wants attention, positive or negative, and I don’t even want to acknowledge her presence, wish she’d disappear like someone being beamed up on Star Trek, hopefully to another planet.

“And you could have just moved,” I responded in a tired tone of voice.

Good enough, I thought. I ordered my bagels, came back out. This time, she had moved to the side of the door, so I guess, mission accomplished. She started saying, “Excuse me, excuse me …” in that croaky, weird voice, and I thought, you know, we’ve had enough contact, I’m just going to keep walking here. Which is exactly what I did, without turning around once. She didn’t make the effort to follow me – seeing as how she couldn’t make the effort to get out of the doorway, this was no surprise. Haven’t seen her since – hope to never see her again.

The second situation happened the other night on the subway train. A rainy evening after work. The rush-hour train wasn’t bad – not too crowded, an average trip, still a lot of people. We reach our stop in Astoria, everyone piles out. The problem with my station is it was built years before the influx of subway-using Manhattan office workers, thus even when an average-size crowd of passengers gets off the train, there is always a bottleneck at the steps. It gets uncomfortable sometimes, and even dangerous when people aren’t paying attention, which is often. I haven’t seen anyone plummet down the stairs yet, but there have been a few close calls and a lot of bad manners.

As the crowd is jostling down the stairs, I notice a good-sized guy in front of me moving a little too slowly. By that, I mean people are passing him on the left, and he seems to be shuffling down the stairs as if injured, with his head down. I know that gait, as I’ve seen it countless times before: it’s the walk of someone checking his cellphone on a crowded public staircase.

Do I have to underline how stupid it is to do something like this on an empty staircase, much less one bustling with dozens of people in a hurry to get the hell out of the station and home?

There’s a space of at least three people in front of the guy as others stream around him on the left. I’m right behind him and can’t move due to the stream of people going around him – naturally, I’m peeved. I figure, just keep moving, this horse’s ass will be out of my life momentarily. I can see over his shoulder that he has an iPhone and is checking email messages on it. Again, why it doesn’t occur to people like this that a crowded staircase in a subway station during rush hour is not the time or place to do this is a mystery to me – the same, ever-present mystery that constantly presents itself with arrogant pricks.

I will swear on a stack of bibles that I didn’t try to do this, but somehow, when I was putting my right foot forward, it clicked against the back of this guy’s heel. An innocent action, not a mistake, not anyone’s fault. Frankly, if the guy had been moving at a normal rate of speed, nothing would have happened. I did nothing wrong. He did nothing wrong. As an experienced city dweller, I know this intuitively. No blood, no foul. You move on. I’ve been in his shoes many times – it’s a non-issue.

Unfortunately, this guy didn’t see things that way. He glanced over his shoulder and said, “You could at least say you’re sorry.”

No, I couldn’t. Granted, if I was being a nice guy, if this person wasn’t such an ass, I normally would have mumbled “sorry” just to acknowledge something odd had happened, even though, again, I had done nothing wrong, committed no harm to this person. At this point, I’d pretty much had it and barked out: “Problem is I’m not sorry when you’re checking your fucking email on a crowded staircase.”

Which is the situation in a nutshell. Again, pointing out wrong-doing to people this far gone is a waste of time. In their minds, they are never wrong.

We keep moving, and I can see this guy is stewing. He has an accent – European. Couldn’t place it as French or Dutch. We get out into the station, and I see him glancing over his shoulder every now and then and cursing. Whatever. We’re both exiting through the same stair case to the street (there are four), and I can see as we head down the staircase – amazing how his pace picked up once he put his iPhone away – he keeps turning to look at me, and I’m thinking, buddy, you are doing this all wrong.

We get to the bottom of the stairs, and Van Damme starts in: “You are a piece of shit. You are a disgrace to humanity, fuck you. Fuck you and all ugly, sick people like you.”

Or something like that. Like an over-reacting little child who just got spanked for crayoning wallpaper. I could see if I had pushed him down the stairs, or called his mother a whore, to warrant this type of bitterness, but no. The toe of one of my feet accidentally clipped the heel of one his. And I wouldn’t apologize for this, and in fact let him know why this had happened, that he was so slow and dangerously inattentive in a crowded public place.

“Dude, I’m not sorry. Get over it.”

He couldn’t get over it.

“I should stomp your ass, how about that?” Van Damme countered.

I’m looking at this guy – in a nice sweater, carrying an iPhone – and thinking, boy, you are really fucking stupid. You should never pick a fight when you’re carrying an iPhone. Lose consciousness, and chances are that expensive little toy, and other things, will be leaving your possession. Besides which, within 10 seconds of this guy taking a swing at me, store owners right by the train station and probably more than few people on the crowded rush hour street, would have their cellphones out calling 911. Let’s not even get into the fact that I’ve been boxing for about 15 years and win, lose or draw, I’m going to hit this guy in ways he will feel weeks later.

On top of which, the cardinal rule of ass kicking: if you’re going to fight someone, don’t announce it, just do it. I’ve never seen anyone say “I’m going to kick your ass” and then actually kick someone’s ass. I’ve seen guys say that and engage in silly posturing for a few tense minutes, usually before walking away, muttering recriminations. The real fights I’ve seen just happen, as the guy starting it knows, like a cop pulling his gun to shoot someone, if you’re going to get in a physical confrontation, you want to get a jump on your opponent and do some damage before he has a chance to respond. You don’t announce your intention to do physical harm if you truly mean to do physical harm.

So, Van Damme has just told me he’s afraid to hit me, which is fine, but thinks he can intimidate me with his heavily-accented trash-talking. He sounds like Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau. I don’t know what to tell a pouty little child like this. Verbal humiliation? This is the stuff of 15-year-olds. I’m a grown-ass man. If you want a physical confrontation, hit me. I’ll give you one.

So I said, “Go ahead and try. I’ll fight back.”

“Fuck you, asshole, pricks like you are ruining the world.”

“That’s right. Please hit me. What are you waiting for?”

If I was an asshole, I’d push him or slap him on the head at this point. But, again, if I was going to (foolishly) fight this guy, I would have hit him square in the face the first time he turned around to look at me and kept wailing on him from there. And I’m thinking, with all the witnesses here, I’d want it on record that this guy took a swing at me, and I defended myself.

“I should kick your ass.”

At this point, I’d had enough. Understand, this whole time, I’m walking, he’s walking with me. I have no intention of stopping. Generally, when I’m near an asshole, my immediate thought is, “let me get away from this asshole.” This was no different. But I had to end this, without getting physical over something so asinine, so I pulled my trump card.

“I’m an off-duty cop, asshole. Take a swing at me, and let’s see where this goes.”

For some reason, this bold-faced lie stopped him in his tracks. We had been both heading north, and he stopped walking, still muttering curses and such, to which I replied, “Blah, blah, blah.”

And that’s where Van Damme finally came to his senses. Realized he was about to get himself in real bad trouble, one way or another. I think when I repeatedly encouraged him to hit me and he didn’t, he grasped that I wasn’t afraid of him, and give the guy credit, he did a little more testosteronally required belly-aching, then wisely let it go. Something he should have done in the first place before acting like victim of the century.

While crass, infantile bastards like this aren’t par for the course in my experience, every now and then … Again, the way this guy was carrying on, you’d have thought I dragged him down the stairs in a headlock. No, I just told him the truth, a truth I’ve experienced many times before, but kept to myself: only the flamingest of assholes would pull out a blackberry style device and check his email messages on a crowded public staircase. There is no debate and no defense of stupidity on this level.

Think this message of sanity will register with Van Damme? I know it won’t. That’s the axis of the self-absorbed assholes’ funhouse world: the rest of the world will always be wrong, and they will always be right. Think I’m getting tired of dealing with people like this? You better believe it. But I don’t see any end in sight. And I know they’re everywhere, not just here!

I’m starting to think it might just be a better idea to leave them alone and learn how to relax, because as I’ve noted a few times, the cardinal rule of city life: avoid meaningless confrontation. I’d like to think there is some meaning here, some lesson learned, but I think I answered my question repeatedly, and it’s a resounding “No!”. Ultimately, it’s more my fault for letting cellphone assholery bother me so when there are plenty of other kinds floating around the streets on any given day. I’d rather not be rude to anyone for any reason – more a karma thing than a physical health one. But people like these two make it real hard.

101 Things to Do before You Die

Last week, there was one of those “go figure” stories in the papers. “Globe-trotting author” David Freeman, known for co-authoring the book 100 Things to Do Before You Die, died unexpectedly at the age of 47 after falling in his home and suffering a head injury. I haven’t read the book (“things to do before you die” books aren’t my bag), but I’d imagine it’s stock-full of travel tips to exotic places, running with the bulls in Pamplona, shit like that. Obviously, he missed an important one, not quite as exotic, and much more mundane: watch your step.

The story I saw in the New York Daily News has a picture of him: a burly fortysomething guy wearing shades, obviously in the desert with joshua trees visible behind him. It’s an odd picture: he looks like John Elway gone to seed, a strange half smile/grimace on his face. What really floored me was one line in the article: “David Freeman was born in California but moved to New York in 1986 to work for Grey Advertising.”

When I moved to New York in the fall of 1987, I landed a very short-lived stint with Grey Advertising that saw me getting laid off just after Christmas of the same year, which was a blessing in disguise as I hated the place. If I’m not mistaken, I worked for David Freeman for a few weeks. I might be mistaken. In my mind, I’m thinking “David Friedman” … but the above-noted newspaper fact is pretty close to my time frame. (Another obituary I found in an advertising trade publication confirms that he worked in advertising all the way up to his passing … it’s probably him.)


The picture in the paper looks nothing like the guy I remember: I remember a fastidious, well-dressed little guy who was the embodiment of yuppie ambition that ran rampant in the 1980s. James Spader could have nailed him in a movie. (I understand Spader’s a good bit beefier today, too.) The one similarity is blonde hair: it could be him, 20 years on. It looks like Freeman went to the desert on a vacation, had a wild peyote experience, saw things in a different light, and came out a new man: that sort of transformation.

If it is, hats off to him. While I don’t read books like that, I do respect the ability of any writer to come up with a concept like that, and not just sell it to an editor, but sell it to an audience who will pay money and time to scour the list and gather new and interesting vacation ideas. I wouldn’t have imagined the David Freeman I worked for one day authoring a travel book – then again, I didn’t know him that well. Seemed like a nice enough guy, was friendly. I think running into him was my first exposure to that sort of corporate ambition I’m now a lot more comfortable around, simply by attrition. I’m sure at the time I thought that quality was horrible, dishonest and shallow. I was fresh out of college, an English major, and really had no idea what working in an office implied or required. I was the one out of place -- not him.

What I remember more than David was our department head, a woman I’ll call Edna. Didn’t know it at the time, but one of those real scumbags you run into routinely in offices. I recall her pitching a fit because she couldn’t find the right color of carpet to have installed in her office, which filled her with existential angst that she’d take out on her underlings and coworkers by being bitchy and sarcastic. Came from a wealthy suburb in Westchester County, had a smarmy lawyer boyfriend, just someone launched into that way of life I want no part of. The kind of person who would push hard to ensure her wedding made it into the Sunday New York Times and take some perverse pride in that. You run into these people all the time in New York – they think they run New York, and, you know, they don’t run shit. But give them a title, an office and a background of privilege, and they sometimes start thinking weird, grandiose lies about themselves. No one liked her, which is the way of the world with people so transparent. This was Edna.

I’ve since learned that there are easy rules to follow in terms of getting along with people in an office. Simply stated, if you can talk to a person like he or she’s a human being, and not engage in some form of insincere role playing with the person, that’s someone you can obviously deal with and count on. Sounds easy enough? Man, if I had a dollar for every time I’ve dealt with some megalomaniac who makes that common humanity virtually impossible, who will wrap himself in a cloak of self importance and literally turn himself into a villain from a Charles Dickens novel, all for a few dollars more in his pocket … it happens a lot, especially the higher you travel on the corporate food chain.

On that first job fresh out of college, encountering people like this was a pretty sobering proposition. I really didn’t like it: thought I had left high school in the rear-view mirror. But have since learned that Corporate America is one big high school, complete with bullies and cliques and senseless rules. That, if you want the money, you have to figure out how to deal with, or spend a lot of time being miserable and unhappy with your lot in life. Just aint worth it. Granted, for decades now I’ve felt like I’ve been hanging onto this way of life by my fingertips – because I’m sane – but another reality is I’ve also learned how to deal with people even more fucked-up than Edna, which is to play along so long as you’re not under their direct control, and if that ever does transpire, simply figure a way out of the situation, which becomes obvious after awhile and vastly preferable to putting up with such nonsense. In that case, lady luck did it for me and sent me and a few dozen other people packing into the January snow. (I remember the HR woman weeping as she told me the news. Shit, I felt pretty good. I gave her some tissues and told her the truth, that this was perfectly OK with me! I gather she had to break the same news to other employees who had more to lose.) But I’ve since realized, you can just bide your time and find another job: it happens all the time, at least in New York. I shudder to think being stuck in such a situation, like a rural area or a job that pays so well it would be very hard to leave. But haven’t had that problem just yet.

Grey was a pretty stuffy place for an ad agency. Again, didn’t know this at that time, but would later find out working in a few other agencies. Since it was so large, it had all those byzantine rules and forms to fill out for everything, and I’ve found that any place that isolates upper management is generally a poorly run place. By that, I mean the guys who run the place will generally be on a certain floor, by themselves with their annoying executive assistants, and visiting them is like entering a gilded palace where one must bow and kneel, preferably avoiding eye contact, unless you, a mere mortal, want to burst into flames. I’ve worked in a few places where the guy or girl who ran the joint was right down the hall, and you could easily stop in and say hello if you had a problem: these places may have had other issues, but that sort of welcome informality wasn’t one of them.

Grey was one of those little fiefdoms in terms of power structures. The creative people would huddle in their offices on their floor, grumbling about the business-side people and such. In the past I’ve laid out my take on “creative” people in corporate environments: generally, a bad mix, unless the individual grasps he’s working in a business and not viewing the job as an unfortunate imposition on his wonderful talents and time spent as a sentient being on this planet. The business people were what they were, which I’d eventually find refreshing and honest, but, man, what a shock to a kid straight out of college! Many people went to college to learn how to be business people, but all I could think after that first experience was, nothing prepares you for the politics, personalities and bullshit of doing business, you can’t teach that, and you can only learn it by experiencing it. So, if you’re going to college, feel free to major in something creative that actually gives you pleasure and purpose in life, because you’ll have plenty of time later to be more rational and responsible. Unless you’re very lucky, or very rich, life will demand you be that way, or pay the price in prescription meds and such.

I’m going to embarrass myself here, but even more than that idiot department head, and the late David, and many other things about Grey (including more than a few very hot women … don’t know what it is about advertising and women, but there’s something in the water there …), I remember one thing very clearly. That makes me feel like a flaming asshole now, even though it was an innocent thing at the time. I may have done this two or three times. Can’t recall. But I dressed up like Kevin Rowland, the lead singer from Dexy’s Midnight Runners, as portrayed in their video “Come on Eileen.”

I feel like a fucking idiot now remembering this! But I thought that was a cool look (no one else did). I had a floppy old military hat that could be worn like a beret. And a pair of bib overalls. A t-shirt. A flannel shirt I wore over the whole thing. And brogans (work boots). Hey, it was an ad agency: people were supposed to dress flamboyantly (although most people rarely did, especially in a mortuary like Grey). I would never in a million years dress like that again in an office, or anywhere for that matter, but for some reason, at that time, I felt that need to do so. I remember one of the security guards in the cafeteria getting red-faced and telling me to go home and change, and I told him to make me. Security guard? Now, if they had a fashion guard, I’d have listened. Most people just took one look at me, grinned, and thought, “Ah, youth … glad I’m older now.” But, man, for obvious reasons, the memory of me being naïve and dumb enough to dress like that at work … I don’t know what I was thinking. But it happened, and, boy, do I remember it, like a rash on my penis or a broken heart.

I don’t want to leave you with that song in your head. So, in honor of David, and probably because he may have missed this city in his book, a song from the late Warren Zevon, "Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead." Really, sorry to hear of David’s passing, and no disrespect meant. If anything, I’m glad to see the guy did something cool in his life beyond the world of advertising. It's a good message to leave behind.

Westerberg High

I recall when seeing the movie Heathers in a Manhattan theater in 1989, aside from an odd incident with one audience member getting harangued and booted for smoking, the nod-and-wink “in” joke of naming the school in the movie Westerberg High. This was a not-so-subtle salute by screenwriter Daniel Walters to the legendarily under-performing 80s band, The Replacements, and lead singer Paul Westerberg.

You have to understand, The Replacements were my band in the 80s. Have never felt so closely aligned with a band, agreed with Westerberg completely in terms of his talent and style, loved their ambivalence towards success. Westerberg and The Replacements took the place of The Kinks in terms of that one band I could relate to on every level, and even better, they were happening while I was in my late teens/early 20s, a time when most people start fading out on music. It was perfect timing for me, the only time I’ve felt so in-step with a band.

When the band broke up a few years later, it didn’t bother me that much, because I knew Westerberg was the driving force, and that he would go on recording. What I didn’t know was that each album he put out would present a mildly troubling listening experience: his albums never lived up to his promise. I shouldn’t have been too shocked – looking back, I felt the same way towards his Replacements albums, save that the classic songs from those albums (like “Bastards of Young,” “I Will Dare” and “Never Mind”) were him hitting home runs, setting milestones for which he'll always be remembered. The good songs on his solo albums were doubles or triples for the most part. And there was just as much filler as ever. The high’s didn’t feel anywhere near as high.

I felt myself backing away from that previously tight bond with his band and their legacy. I wouldn’t call it shame – I’d call it growing up and recognizing that was one band indelibly tied into that late teen/early 20s sense of dislocation – the easy cynicism, the disdain at even the faintest hints of ambition or normalcy. I did an earlier post on that awkward time when I realized I no longer fit into thrift-store clothes, literally or figuratively, signified by the hard truth that there’s a broad gulf between ironically wearing a work shirt for an air-conditioner company with the name “Gus” stenciled on the left breast … and wearing the same shirt 10 years on, and people assuming your name is Gus, and that’s where you work. It’s the hammer of adulthood that comes down in one’s late 20s/early 30s, if not sooner.

The Replacements didn’t “fit” me anymore, surely not in that same, intense, passionate way I felt about them when we were in perfect lock-step circa 1986. And Westerberg solo albums did little to bridge that gap. I should note that I have all of them, and still buy everything the man does. He’s still good. I sat down a few months ago and put together a compilation of his solo material, which made me realize, sure, you cherry pick songs from each album, and he’s still got it. Just not in the same way. He grew up, too. Stopped drinking. Got married. Had a kid. A lot of his songs followed him along the path. One of my favorite songs of his is “It’s a Wonderful Lie,” a basic acoustic number in which he admits that he still gets by on those things, wonderful lies, and that he still feels as dislocated as ever from the music business, just something he does because he doesn’t know what else to do. Feeling that way at 40 is a lot different than feeling that way at 20. When you’re 40, you tap into feelings of failure and some sense of lost direction that you can’t possibly have at 20. The thing is, obviously, you’re not a failure – you’re doing what you should be doing. But when what you’re should be doing finds you in the same place you were in circa your 20s – still struggling – you sometimes feel like an asshole. In moments of clarity, you recognize that you should still keep moving, because that’s what you do. And other times … you just feel like a horse’s ass who never grew up properly.

I note all this, because I’m starting to have problems with Westerberg as a recording artist. Not necessarily him alone – his fan base is grating on me, too. As all fan bases do for recording artists. I can rarely stand to be around hard-core fans of anyone – these people tend to be nuts, and clearly never in any mental state to grasp or understand any sort of valid criticism of their favorite artist. Everything the guy does is gold, the best thing he’s ever done, so that his artistic life is a glowing yellow brick road of success, one gold brick after another, he never “lost it” or sold out in any sense. If the rest of the world hasn't recognized this, it only underlines their superior sense of taste that transcends all the dreck the masses eat like enormous shit sandwiches.

I’d bet Westerberg doesn’t see himself this way, but his fans sure do. They’re fanatics. I don’t like them. These weren’t the same people I’d attended numerous Replacements shows with in the 80s, where the object was drunken revelry and fun, a real wild night out. Not the fucking bizarre form of church his shows have turned into, where the assembled gather and shout every lyric to every song and gaze reverently at Westerberg, who always seems to play alone these days, whether it’s because money’s grown that tight, or he simply can’t stand playing with other musicians, I don’t know.

Part of the problem I have with him is his recordings, since abandoning the major-label system at the turn of the century, just seem to grow worse with every album in terms of production … because he records the whole album by himself in his basement. Sometimes this works to great effect on his more rocking songs, but his vocals almost always sound like shit, and I can’t help but think he’d be better served working with a solid producer and musicians he can get along with. As ever, each album has a few good-to-great songs – this never changes – but it feels like he’s losing the thread in terms of progressing in any sense as a recording artist. Whether he’s playing to himself in his basement, or this asshole breed of cult fanatics who worship his every move, I have no idea. But every time I hear another claustrophobic sounding album coming over the speakers, I can’t help but think something's off.

He just put out an album a few weeks ago called 49:00. You can’t buy it. For awhile, you could buy it – as one huge MP3 file from Amazon.com. But about two weeks after its release, in which it was selling like hotcakes probably due to good buzz and the cheap price (49 cents for the whole thing), the file was yanked from the site with no explanation, and still none from Westerberg. Although he has released a coda to the album, a song called “5:05” that represents the missing amount of time that would make the actual album 49 minutes long, and the song is a “fuck you” of sorts that fans have come to take as an explanation of why the 49:00 album was removed from Amazon. (One of the songs towards the end is a medley of various cover versions of 60s and 70s pop hits – the assumption being that he never got permission to use them, and was thus legally required to stop selling the file.)

Fucking whatever. Even before it was yanked … the album is a collection of demos. Some showing real promise, others the usual so-so material. You would not know this to judge by the fan reaction. Paul Westerberg just put out Exile on Main Street to judge by their estimation. He always puts out Exile on Main Street. That’s probably the main difference between me and current Westerberg fans. I realize, rightly, that he’s continually putting out Goat’s Head Soup: a much-maligned Rolling Stones album that actually has a few good songs, but isn’t one of their best offerings. Westerberg is like a baseball player who bats .260 and has a good glove on the field. He does all right … but he’s capable of doing a lot better. And rarely does.

None of which would bother me, save for a few things. Westerberg is closing in on 50. (“49” also represents his age.) These sort of bizarre head games he’s playing recently only serve to obscure and bury his career even more than it’s buried now. How buried is it? Four legendary Replacements albums were reissued earlier this year on the Rhino label with the full treatment: remastered and bonus tracks, nice packaging, a huge press push. (The final four are set to be reissued in September.) I don’t have the exact sales figures for those albums, but I’ve read in a few places that the total sales for all four albums is well under 30,000.

That’s what you call a radical failure – it was shocking for me to read that. And if The Replacements, i.e., Westerberg in his prime, can only generate sales like that now, it makes me wonder just how many albums Westerberg has been selling over the past few releases on indie labels. I’d wager it’s a case of diminishing returns all along the way. It doesn’t help that he created an alter-ego, Grandpaboy, under which he sometimes puts out material. The guy seems to be barely getting by using his own name … a side project isn’t such a good idea in that circumstance. (Besides which, the Grandpaboy material is not recognizably different from the material he releases under his own name.)

I gather no one is guiding his career at this point in his life. If Westerberg has a manager, he’s obviously telling the guy what to do, as opposed to the manager trying to guide him in a direction that will get the word out and make him more visible and relevant as a solo artist. The exact opposite seems to be happening. Westerberg, and The Replacements’ legacy by extension, is shrinking into cult status. An entire album of material disappears. Hey, whatever, fuck it. I’ve been hoping all along that Westerberg put out the album as a preview of songs he’s going to actually record and release properly, but I suspect this may not be the case, and that these tracks on 49:00 may just sink without a trace, now that they’re no longer commercially available, and whatever heat was generated by two weeks kicking ass on Amazon.com will surely dissipate in a hurry – it feels like it already has. There's been no hue-and-cry over the disappearing Westerberg album: no one gives a fuck.

In short, I don’t know what the guy is doing with his life. Again, at 20, this is some real cool shit to pull. Pushing 50? It just seems incredibly stupid to me. I don’t get it. I guess The Replacements’ original ethos, to be a bunch of fuck-ups at any and all costs, is something he might still believe in. Again, this shit just seems old, trite and wrong at this point in his life (and mine), especially when all along with his solo material, you could hear the wheels clicking in Westerberg’s head as he aged, the understanding of who he was, that he was good, and that life was moving along, and he was moving with it. The antics of the past month or two have me thinking he’s going through some bizarre mid-life crisis which will only serve to bury his name even deeper in the recording industry, the one place where he has fans all over the place willing to give him a chance that he rarely takes.

What especially grates on me is his fans seems to view this regrettable scenario as “cool.” Fucking A. When I see people my age and older fucking up in life, I don’t pat them on the back and tell them they’re cool. I tell them they’re fucking up. Sorry to be so coarse, but I’ve seen enough people throw their lives away over stupid teenage obsessions they never grow out of that I no longer humor that sort of bullshit. If there’s one ugly, bizarre form of cancer I see flourishing in our society, it’s the inability and/or refusal of people to grow up. I see it in myself in small ways – believe me, nowhere near as badly as I see it in millions of other people. Who never learned how to save or spend money. Or be responsible in any sense. Or stop getting stoned and drunk so much. Or take care of themselves. Or just basically give a shit about other people.

I get the feeling a lot of Westerberg’s fans are locked-in emotionally at 19, that same place I was when I was a huge fan of the band, and this sort of senseless, self-destructive stuff Westerberg pulls occasionally in his solo career is, again, still somehow “cool” to them. I give up. Not on Westerberg himself – I’ll never give up on him, and I’ll never forget how much the guy’s work has touched me. But I give up on trying to figure out what in the hell he’s trying to do with his life, and why so many people who supposedly enjoy his work seem to have their heads implanted so firmly in their own asses.

The truth isn’t that he’s some legendary recording artist routinely tossing off masterpieces that the rest of the world, sadly, seems immune to, poor lost souls. The truth is he’s a deeply talented artist who must be surrounded by yes-men and assholes who can’t tell him the truth, that he’s slowly burying himself in irrelevancy by making wrong choices in his career, putting out too much sub-standard material and isolating himself as a recording artist. Again, I can see the roots of that, way back in the 80s, when that attitude was cool, and served a recognizable purpose. Those days are gone, for all of us past a certain age, and I can only hope the guys snaps out of this stage he’s in, whatever it is, wherever it’s going. Purposely burying an entire album seems like commercial suicide to me – then again, putting out demos in the first place and calling it an album – if that’s what he’s doing (no one seems to know, and he’s apparently not talking) - didn't seem like such a bright idea either.

As a coda, and an example of why Westerberg is grating on me, here’s my favorite track from 49:00, “Goodnight Sweet Prince” – an astonishing song about the passing of his father. Which sounds like a rough demo, and has another song cut into it towards the end, like an eight-track tape bleeding into another track. Cool? If you think that sort of forced sloppiness is cool, I think you’re an asshole. Westerberg, wake up! Record great songs like this the way they should be. Stop playing games. We're not the fuck-ups we pretended to be way back when.

The Flop House

My near-decade in the Bronx, spanning the fall of 1987 through the spring of 1997, was spent in a boarding house. I recall while working in advertising in the early 90s, one of the guys in the office who knew my set-up, asking me about my life up there, with the introductory question: “So, how are things going back at the flop house?”

I’m not even sure how much boarding houses even exist now, but that was the image of many of them: big old mansions that had seen better days, an elderly owner who rented out rooms to drunks, traveling workmen, shady characters who paid in cash and lurked in shadows. The guys at work could have thought whatever they wanted. My rent, at first was $180/month. By the time I left, after living about three years in the largest room, was $320/month. I was saving money there hand over fist. My last two years there, I was making over $50K a year … do the math on how much money I was banking.

(Of course, I’d burn through nearly all of it a few years later when I ditched the ragged corporate job I was at and took an entire summer off to get my head on straight. Money flies out the door when your rent goes from $320 to $640/month plus utilities. It’s just now that I’m starting to surpass the amount of money I had saved up by the spring of 1997, which is a good feeling.)

That boarding house was hardly a flop house by traditional standards. It was run by Eddie, a Puerto Rican guy in his mid-30s at the time who had lived in one of the rooms himself and bought the house from the old Irish woman who had owned it before him. He lived there on the ground floor with his sister and son, gather he was divorced although I never saw his ex-wife. He had two floors of rooms above him he rented out, four on the second floor, two on the top, bathroom on each floor, a kitchen on the top.

You’d be surprised how little a kitchen and bathroom mean to you when you live in a situation like that. I’m sure a kid in a dorm room or sharing with roommates could tell you the same. That seemed to be the sticking point with people when I told them how I was living: but you don’t have your own bathroom and kitchen. Well, you take a few minute to shit every day, a few to shower, and probably no more than half an hour in a kitchen, unless you’re into cooking. It wasn’t that big a deal.

The house was high on a hill overlooking the Harlem River and northern tip of Manhattan, of which there was a great view from the kitchen window. Eddie also had a backyard, although we never used it as it had fallen into a sort of storage area for various tools Eddie used for his job working for the parks. That part of the Bronx, the northern part of Sedgwick Avenue, was once a ritzy Jewish neighborhood in the 20s and 30s, mansions and apartment buildings, that had fallen into disrepair over the years, particularly after the white flight from the Bronx of the 60s and 70s. Physically speaking, the lay of the land in that area was beautiful: rolling hills, wide streets, a lot of vegetation. It grated on me to see it covered in graffiti and junk, just a real negative sign of what was allowed to go on there. Broken glass and dogshit was the norm, and through the early 90s, crack vials were all over the sidewalks. They were harder to see, but you’d often hear them crunch under your feet as you walked.

Despite not being a flop house, the boarding house had its fair share of characters. There was Mikey, who lived in the big room upstairs, a Dominican cab driver with puffy eyes and a butterfly tattooed on his chest. You could see the tattoo because he’d often walk around in a red silk bathrobe opened just enough to show it off. I was never quite sure what Mikey’s story was, but he seemed reasonably responsible and had a slew of girlfriends he worked his way through before moving out.

Next door to him was Manny, who I wrote about years ago in this Leisuresuit.net piece. Manny Upstairs. Old Irish guy working for decades in various subway token booths. (For those who can’t recall, this used to be a very dangerous job, with a very bad spate of incidents of token-booth workers either being set on fire or shot in various robbery attempts. This sort of brazen crap hasn’t happened in a very long time in NYC, or at least I haven’t been aware.) As the story referenced notes, Manny was prone to drinking too much and becoming an oddly-annoying drunk as opposed to abusive and weird. A gentle, old soul who valued his privacy and seemed, to me at least, to be pretty happy with his life despite any number of negative readings one might be tempted to apply to him. I learned a lot from Manny about personal happiness: that it’s yours to define, not anyone else’s. And if someone’s trying to define yours for you … that’s someone who needs a new hobby. I’ll always remember him striding down the sidewalk early in the morning as the sun rose, coming off his graveyard shift in some godforsaken subway station in the Bronx, smiling, whistling, carrying a copy of The Daily News and tipping his cap, an old white guy walking alone without fear in a place where no one would have expected it.

Annie lived across the hall from me for a long time, a woman from Trinidad who was milking her student VISA for as long as possible, doing nanny work, and hoping to find a real job that would allow her to stay (she eventually did) and bring her son over. We had a minor fling – she looked a bit like the singer Sade – but probably thought better of it since her situation was up in the air. A good person – kind-hearted, friendly, from what I’ve gathered a very Caribbean vibe about her in a good way.

The room next to me at first was a young white guy who smoked a few packs a day: I had to have Eddie put on an extra wood barrier through a boarded-up space between our apartments that cigarette smoke would sometimes creep through. Not a bad guy, save for the incessant cancer haze around him. Thankfully, he simply disappeared one day. His girlfriend somehow got my phone number and called me a few weeks later, asking if I knew what had happened to him, and I surely didn’t. Either he met with a bad fate, which should have produced a body, or he just skipped out on his life, maybe the one guy in the place who had the true boarding house spirit.

He was replaced by an old guy who wandered everywhere during daylight hours. Another salty old Irishman like Manny, save he never drank and was living on some sort of military pension. I’d occasionally see him walking miles from the house in places like Inwood and parts of Harlem, where I’d be riding my bike. Like most old people, and the sane, he avoided sundown in the Bronx like a Transylvanian villager, making sure he was safe at home by this time. I generally found it a good idea to get home before 10 or 11 at night. At which time, the Bronx became populated with kids who were either up to no good or simply should have had better parents. The sundown rule wasn’t a bad one to follow.

A few strays passed through the house, too. Like the Indian cab driver who seemed like a nice enough guy, but when Eddie kicked him out due to his inability to make rent for a few months, he found three pots filled with rotting/decaying rice under his bed that were just about to enter “where’s the corpse” levels of odor emission.

The oddest by far was a white guy from Boston in his 20s who hit New York to make it big as a comedian. He looked and acted a lot like Keith Moon, a basically friendly person, but he seemed desperately irresponsible. Much like a real rock star, he had a staggeringly beautiful, ethereal girlfriend who visited him every other week, generally to fight tempestuously and make-up via long-distance phone calls. When I say fight, I mean to the point of him bolting off an exiting subway train and leaving his Snow White-style girlfriend to fend for herself in terms of finding her way back to the house, which was a cruel, stupid thing to do. Don’t think this guy realized how foul the Bronx can get circa two in the morning for someone lost, especially a white girl who looked like she just walked off the screen of an animated Disney flick. I recall him being despondent one night as he listened to Al Green’s version of “Unchained Melody” on the radio. Like most comedians, the guy was morose when not engaged in the act of being funny. He ended up living in the back cab of his pick-up truck for a few weeks on the lonely, crack-whore stretch of highway behind the house, which was another dumb/dangerous thing to do. I was grateful when I was saw his pick-up finally gone a few weeks later.

I look back on those years as one big learning experience. I learned a lot about race relations, the kind of things you can’t learn until you’ve lived as a minority in a given place. Most white people won’t ever forfeit their unspoken/unacknowledged "safety in numbers" vibe and do that – I did it simply by chance. Bragged about it at the time, but I can see now that you peel away the layers, and it’s mostly learning how to read people and situations and respond accordingly, whatever the racial set-up, often with race used as a mask to inspire or hide fear. And living smartly, i.e., recognizing opportunities for stupidity and avoiding them. (And recognizing street trash, who are legion and every color of the rainbow in the 718s of New York, and avoiding them as well.) Call it “street smarts” – you can’t live that long in a place like the Bronx without developing them. (I see white folks new to Astoria all the time who don't have an ounce of street sense and make me cringe with their stupidity, despite the college degrees.) After awhile the “cool” factor of being a solitary white face in a rough inner-city neighborhood wore thin. I’d say that was by about year 5. At which time, I was still saving money hand over fist. It took another five years or so to finally unhinge myself from the desperately cheap rent and realize I wasn' t learning anything worthwhile and had to go.

But I never tired of the boarding house, just the draggy neighborhood around it. I tell myself all the time, yeah, let’s go back, some weekend morning early, before everyone gets up, like it was for my morning runs when I’d do a few miles around the neighboring reservoir and hardly see anybody along the way. But I’ve only been back once since then, and that was within the first year of leaving. I just have no urge to go back there. Which is odd, because much like my college years, there are certain large chunks of my life that are growing increasingly vague in memory because I no longer have a physical connection to the place. With the Bronx, we’re talking almost a decade, most of my 20s, into my 30s.

But I can tell you something about New York, at least for expatriate rural Americans: you rarely get that nostalgic sense of home for neighborhoods you’ve lived in, probably because they’re always such a mixed bag of positives and negatives. I also can’t stand being given the redneck vibe from the locals when I come from a place that blows their moronic faux redneck vibes out of the water in terms of bullshit territoriality. Tom Waits has a song called “Anywhere I Lay My Head” that pretty much sums up the feeling of calling New York “home.” In a lot of ways, it just will never be. Not a bad thing, just different, and takes some getting used to, if you ever do.