I'll start this post by admitting that I am a snob. I cannot get into a show like girls. I think of Vicari who coin termed the rash of Alfred Hitchcock lookalikes that are ruining my sex life in Bushwick. Why do these girls roam on footpaths between cracked stoops and rows of vegetation? Vicari's telling me about an ex-lover, and a story she's currently outlining, holding a cigarette, explaining how her insecurities (surprise surprise) led to their romantic fall out. I'm being extremely chauvinistic, but here's a summary:
Mark has a type.
OK, it's not exactly a type.
OK maybe.
They're all pretty. OK, not just pretty, hot. And not just hot or pretty, but sexy. I guess I'm sexy. Am I a...ugh. Julia is the last one before me. Julia is so much sexier than me. Did Julia think Kristen was prettier than her, and in turn, me? Was Kristen self-conscious about the fact that Alex is a fucking bombshell?
Idk. Salad is not a meal, it's a lifestyle. You're a fucking moron. I don't understand why I have to like the show girls to prove that I'm not a snob, in the same way that I won't read a children's book to prove that I'm an adult. Because I'm not.
I sit and think of my re-encounter with an old friend, a friend whom I've never come close to knowing personally, but who's been in my personal life none the less, more so than most. After all, I would not play the guitar today if I hadn't watched him shred on end for countless nocturnal and hazy hours. Since our last meeting in Miami we've grown disparate in four distinct directions. He turned to a plant and plastic. I snobbed myself to intellectual liberty. I'll always remember him as the taco bell loving girlfriend of his best friend and bandmate's rapist, vodka ingesting sidewalk passed out discovered by his girlfriend deviant, which he was, but only for one week. Now he doesn't drink or eat things that are alive, as if anything could be unliving. I think about him on my lunch break and I write:
If you've never had one and a half liters of pilsner urquell from the draft in the early afternoon
It's a wednesday, slight weariness from the night's before messages/memories, it's the second week into September but it's already breezy outside and the trucks and cars clatter past and from the window you see the pedestrians, slight bias fixed on polyester black pencil or the skinny legged legs of long haired models
then I suggest you try walking into café prague on nineteenth with a book of narratively prosed poems and another of alt lit writing and try to order an espresso
At the time reading Orange Juice and other stories by Timothy Willis Sanders. Sick writing, stories about breaking up and thanksgiving phone calls to your mother (before or after the turkey) and R. Kelly employed at a movie theater. I invite Lauren out for pizza. Since the old former friend of mine's show is in the city, and it is at eight o'clock, I figured I'd stick around the hood and what better way than to share a few slices with the apple eyes of my ball sockets? She writes me a rain check, and it's a dubious one / not sure if I'll be able to cash this thing. So whatever, I invite out my number two cup of coffee in NYC Fabião, meu grande amigão.
Although I speak fluent Portuguese (my first language after all) and am culturally influenced by Brasil it is surprising to both Fabio and myself when I reveal to him that he's my first Brazilian friend, and not just in the states, but in my lifetime. Talk about sex, split two or three beers of DPA on tap at four dollars each and this is what they call happy hour in the city, though Fabio protests and claims and assumes that not only is this reasonable but it is within a similar price range in Miami as well, but I do not conceit since in Miami I rarely ever payed for a fucking drink give me a break.
V&T are coming into the city. I ask them if they would like to come to the show with me and they laugh and say no way. Not really surprised. When I get to the show turns out I missed the set and my friend has barely a thing to say so I leave when I receive a text message from T to meet him and V at the coal yard for drinks with this guy they are meeting up. The next day, when I call my old friend to meet up with me, he agrees to and proceeds to blow me off, so this is probably one of the last times we will speak to each other.
I reach the bar and there they are the six of them around two circular tables and the guy they are there to meet is sitting against a corner in a booth-styled bench. The conversation quickly progresses from the low quality of blow available in NY to the plentiful high quality of brown H-town, which I suppose Mr. http://www.tonyoneill.net/ is well acquainted with. There's a blonde Bulgarian going hard at it with T. Time passes without much of an exchange of words. V is entertaining the other woman. I go into the bathroom and when I come out the man they are meeting with and his three friends (one of them Mr. ONeill's wife) are on their way out and Bulgaria makes sure she gets T's number so that they may exchange. He messages her inquiring about what she wishes to exchange, and three drunken texts later it is clear that T will have a date in the upcoming week.
We move to the next bar, personal haunt fourteenth street, beauty bar. V&T lose their shit. They bring me up to speed on the previous meeting: They sit and listen to the man they meet at the bar read from a book to an audience, they share glances with the man, they tell the man they have no copies of books to sign but they would like to meet him for a drink, man states he will try but he does not have a car and where is the bar again, they reach the bar and to their surprise the man is already sitting there with his three friends (blonde Bulgaria, O'Neill and his wife), they purchase a well whiskey drink for the man (which he scoffs at in a condescending refined whiskey tongue tone), purchase two more whiskeys which do not please the man, and that's about it.
I leave for home before V&T. T provokes a scuffle with strangers and comes home with a bruised face and cuts and scrapes on his left wrist and elbow. V feels a bruise on his face.
What's strange about this old friend of mine who came to town to play a show is that when we were in a band together we shared a great friendship through an unspoken connection with music. Two of the greatest years of my life for learning. When we moved on from the band we separated quickly, he started spamming me about his new solo projects, and then the press release emails came in, and I think the straw that broke the camel's friendship was the constant pleas to "back his kickstarter project" which was essentially just a plea for people to give him and his band four thousand dollars to play twelve shows along the east coast. Which is fucking ludicrous.
I guess the interesting part about this story is that the guy they meet at the bar is Irvine Welsh.
