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dedicated to the task of keeping me from falling
Wednesday, October 10 2001
For the second day in a row, I went to work in Manhattan, found there wasn't even any internet access, and immediately returned home to spend the day working, to the extent I could, at home. On the way back to the subway, I bought a cup of coffee from a coffee and bagel cart at the corner of 18th Street and 7th Avenue. The cup was so hot that I had to juggle it between my hands, which wasn't easy on the subway. All the seats were taken and one of my arms had to be dedicated to the task of keeping me from falling. The little brown puddles I spilled on the floor vaguely resembled a botched chemical attack.
Meanwhile a couple of fellow riders were engaged in an impassioned though amiable theological debate concerning the collapse of the World Trade Center. One of these was a wiry black man equipped with a grimy old copy of the Bible. In loose allegory that was difficult for my secular mind to follow, he compared the suffering of the World Trade Center victims to the Old Testament account of Job. With quasi-poetic language, he said "The first time they struck the World Trade at its foot and it did not fall. This time they struck its head and it did fall." The other end of the dialogue belonged to a white man with long wavy locks of brown hair hanging nearly to his waist. His speech had a northern regional American accent that rendered most of what he said unintelligible. But I did understand his wife when she asked me if this was Chamber's Street. It was.
Later in the ride, a guy with an American flag bandanna spontaneously began shouting "Hail Mary!" when our train emerged from its tunnel beneath the East River into the Clark Street Station. I don't know if he was expressing gratitude that he'd survived passage through a potential terrorist target. Others on the train looked over at him curiously and he shouted back antagonistically, "What are you lookin' at?"
On the way back to home from the Grand Army Plaza subway station, the air had the smell that vanilla icecream would have if I actually liked vanilla icecream. I liked it. I breathed in deeply and the smell of vanilla filled my body. It was a warm, beautiful sunny day, another increasingly rare one amid the ever-widening spells of chill. I wanted to reach out and hug everyone I saw. Someone handed me a corny religious tract illustrated with a Technicolor multi-racial depiction of Heaven on Earth and I accepted it with glee. Something in that one dollar cup of Pakistani bagel cart coffee had all the Hiroshima-leveling atomic power of MDMA.
After spending all day fixing my own computers (since I was unable to do any real work on my employer's computers), I hopped a subway downtown to meet up with my old housemate John. I carried an insulated coffee mug containing vodkatea, which I sipped now and then.
One of my correspondents had told me about a bar he frequents in the East Village called Varsac's Horseshoe Bar at the corner of 7th Street and Avenue B (across from Tompkins Square Park). I'd heard great things about how gritty and hip the place was, but from the inside it looked like your typical Irish-influenced sportsbar (no CNN playing here!). I was already feeling a good buzz from the vodkatea and the joy of walking through the East Village, and decided to continue it with a glass of Jack Daniels. After John arrived, I moved on to bottles of Budweiser. I don't know why I bother; by the time the effects of my drinking affect my stock value, I will have dumped those BUD stocks long before. It's just playing the game to play the game, perilously close to the sort of meaningless ritual that fills the lives of most Americans. At least I don't mow grass.
John and I played a couple games of pinball and I yet again demonstrated how horrible I am at such feats of hand-eye coordination. Of course, while I was drinking booze and beer, John was drinking soda water. He'd had a bad experience with booze the night before last.
Tonight I actually had two rendezvous(es?) planned, the first with John and the second with seminal online journalateur Jay. Reflecting on what I remember about Jay, it seems he enjoyed eating sushi, appreciated scatological humor more than most, and, like most seminal online journal gents, had once dated Jen Wade. While John and I were waiting around a half hour past the appointed time for Jay, I was wondering if perhaps he was the one Asian guy in the room. If that was the case, either he'd put on some serious weight or else he'd mastered the art of flattering photography. But then he arrived, along with what seemed to be his girlfriend (Lisa of Incommunicado.net whose name, as always, I immediately forgot). Not to cast aspersions on other online journal people, but Jay is unusually photogenic in this particular oeuvre. Perhaps that's why he is no longer is a part thereof.
Perhaps it's just my own system of cultural stereotypes, but Jay really impressed me with his decadence. Not just the beers he could put away, but things he talked about.
Eventually we all left the Horseshoe Bar and wandered off to Mona's, a seemingly seedier place nearby. As we were walking there, John suddenly hailed a cab and vanished. Typical John.
After we were done drinking in Mona's, Jay and the girlfriend took me on a cab ride into the Village to see another online journal person named Elaine. Security was tight at her apartment and we had to check in our IDs at the door. Elaine, who is only 22 years old, came down to meet us, and on seeing me, shrugged and said "I thought you were taller." The one thing she remembered about my online persona was the times I'd uploaded photographs of my penis.
Elaine lived in a stark little cinder block room on the seventh floor, paying as much rent each month as John used to pay for use of half my condo in Los Angeles. Unlike John, however, Elaine had to share her room with a young woman who always seemed to be sitting on her bed, talking on the phone in incomprehensible Korean. We all treated her as if she wasn't there while we talked mainly about the sorts of foods we were craving. It's a strong current in Jay's conversations. Cold Kentucky Fried Chicken sounded like a good idea, but that's all it was. Elaine's computer ran at 120 MHz and Jay and I teased her about it. But nothing seemed to faze her.
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