I love Irish women. They are charmingly sure of themselves. The young ones are bright, set in their ways, extremely American-fashion-conscious, musically heavy, and yet fresh-air-like beautiful in body and looks. Able to handle Irishmen OK, but are truly foreign around Americans, even Irish-Americans.. I gave this Irish woman I know some graphic arts software and to show her appreciation she gave me a fifth of 12-year-old Jameson’s Irish Whiskey, one of the best whiskeys in the world—especially for sipping and conversing and sipping some more and pontificating and sipping some more until it’s 3 in the morning and the logs have burned down to smoldering cinders in the bottom of the grate—Damn, I’m beginning to imagine myself Irish—and woe to me if my mother’s mother heard me saying I was Irish. “Your blood be Scottish, boy; the Irish are-ah not fit to be anything but Irish.” I don’t even know if my grandmother knew the Scotch and the Irish are the same people—she did, however, know the difference between their whiskies.
Last night, I gave a party in the living room of my friend the cat’s trailer house. thedailygrowlerhousepianist came over bringing sandwiches, chips, tall Heinekens, and then, out of the blues, in drifted one of my girlfriends, actually a character from one of my novels—the big novel about the year in the life of a writer who is having to live with a woman who hates him—though I know this woman doesn’t hate me but loves me down deep and admires me down deep—I catch her admiring me all the time.
Soon the joint was jumpin’, sandwiches being eaten, Heinekens being popped and thirstily guzzled—the chatter rolling out pleasant, then ascending in tempo and tonality, growing louder and louder, loud, like the music, too, was getting louder as the three-way conversation got louder. First, the music was Curtis Mayfield (I prefer Percy Mayfield, but I’m a contrarian), and later, an hour or so later, after my girlfriend had gone—she had to go open a dance studio so some dancers could rehearse, thehousepianist and I began reading together the score of Igor Stravinsky’s Pulcinella ballet, the version done by Robert Kraft right after Stravinsky died-- a long score. We had just gotten a wee bit past the opening of the Scherzo section—early in the piece, when there was a knock at the trailer door followed by a whiff of good perfume and lo and behold another of my damas favoritas came aboard, this one not a character in any of my novels, just my Mississippi River queen, seeking some Dr.-Phil-type advice due to an office situation that had happened that afternoon. Poor baby, and it just so happened thehousepianist and this wolfman are several-times better talk-talk-healers than old Dr. Phil—what a gaudy life he lives—he’s a psychologist, by the bye, and not a psychiatrist; he can’t write scripts for Zoloft or Oxy. He gives pretty dumb advice; but then, most of his teevee clients are pretty dumbass, too. Picked out of Central Casting, I would cynically assume. Typical Amurican Yahoos.
Yesterday morning I went out to get coffee from the Bangladeshi that has his coffee cart on one of my Broadway corners and coming back to my building with my coffee I noticed two dudes standing on the sidewalk talking; and as I passed them, one of the dudes took a paper bag from inside his coat, obviously a bag containing a half pint bottle of somethin’, and he took the top off, tilted his head back and the bottle up to his lips, took a swig, wiped off the top, and passed it to his buddy who was starting his swig just as I passed them by. I thought as I passed them, my god what’s it like to be able to drink straight from the bottle at 7 o’clock in the morning? a pleasurable experience? a necessary experience? except of that I’m sure—and from the looks of these two dudes they’d been drinking probably before they went to sleep the night before and had probably dreamed about drinking while stupored out. They looked like workingclass—coveralls, work boots—so I assumed they were having a belt or two before hitting the boring hardwork job. Then to a Blarney Stone for lunch and more booze when the boss blows the whistle at noon..
I’ve been reading a biography of stone drunk Malcolm Lowry, Pursued by Furies, by Gordon Bowker, and this writer concluded from his immense research, it’s like this guy was with Lowry his whole life, that poor ole Malcolm couldn’t function in reality unless he was drunk. He couldn’t write well unless he was drunk. Sober, Malcolm was lost, helpless, like a child; only when he was drunk was he charming, funny, brilliant, though, of course, later a pain in the ass after he passed a certain no return point in his drunkenness.
My best friend in NYC for over 20 years was a photographer at Time Inc. He was a beautiful man, and I say that with male respect. Women threw themselves at him; flocked around him everywhere he went; he dated his models who were all glamour babes and he was just coming out of a bad marriage when I met him, still young, getting successful, though sadly to me now that he’s gone, so internally bitter at life he had to be drinking to be charming. When he was sober he was paranoid as hell, like a little scared kid; but give him a drink and he was suddenly once again a beautiful, charming, confident and powerful man…until…yep, he would eventually pass out of the charming tipsy character and into the pure drunk Dr. Hyde-type, mean and accusing and threatening, and he was a very strong man, becoming an explicitly insulting son of a bitching bastard. It’s interesting for me to note that both my friend and Malcolm Lowry worked out with weights and had strong upper bodies, which also meant they had vicious grips and could punch viciously hard.
Meanwhile Back at the Trailer House
It wasn’t long, deeper in the evening, after one girlfriend had left and another one had taken her place, just missing each other, that thedailygrowlerhousepianist forced the Dr. Phil need out in the open and we started our consultation with the river queen, who had as consultation fee payment brought beer and some great brownies, which, given the wolf I am, I gulped down like a 3-day-starved dog before anyone else could even have a taste—I was like the dogs that they used to use on dogfood commercials on teevee—where they would hold old Rover back by his starving neck while putting down two doggie bowls of steamy meat-byproducts-corrupt dogfood. Then they would loose Rover and he would immediately go for the brand being sold. I once worked on one of those dogfood commercials; in fact, an Ed McMahon commercial for Alpo—it’s been so long since I’ve kept up with the dogfood industry I have no idea if they still make Alpo—well, we know they still make "Alpo" but maybe it has a new hipper name—like the brand “Alpo” probably was an ad guy’s acronymic expression of a product containing A-animal assholes; L-animal lips; P-animal priapi; O-animal organs—doesn’t that make you hungry?—damn right it does; even a wolfman like myself would chow down hungrily over a bowl of that tasty mixture of animal parts. Now, back to my working on an Alpo commercial. The dog handler, a cute little Asian babe, told me her Irish Setter, Big Boy, the star of this particular commercial, hadn’t had anything to eat but glycerin water for the past two days and that he was so hungry he was eating bugs and shit backstage. The trick to getting him to go for the Alpo—only one bowl had real Alpo in it; the other bowl had an artist's conception of a pile of dogshit…er ah, I mean dogfood, which looks like dogshit to me anyway, and in a way, I suppose it is shit before it’s turned to dogshit—God—“piss and shit machines”—that’s what my friend the cat who owns the trailer house I’m hiding out in calls pets. He has a pet but it’s imaginary. He says those are the best kind of pets. An imaginary canary, the catman has—or it could be an imaginary canard. [The hope of the commercial was that the dog, Big Boy, would first go to the phony bowl of plastic dogfood and sniff at it and then angrily turn away and smell the real stuff, hit it with his snout and then begin gulping down the stuff in the Alpo bowl. I don’t remember if Big Boy followed the script. By then I was busy trying to charm Big Boy’s handler who was making a dog out of the wolfman.]
From the biography of Malcolm Lowry—an introductory quote:
I am not much unlike to some sick man
That long desired hurtful drink; at last
Swills in and drinks his last, ending at once
Both life and thirst. O, would I ne’er had known
My own dishonour! Good God, that men should
Desire to search out that which, being found, kills all
Their joy of life! to taste the tree of knowledge,
And then be driven from out Paradise!
Canst give me some comfort?
John Marston, The Malcontent, Act III Sc 1
A now, here’s a poem Malcolm wrote on the back of a menu while he was getting sotted:
Some years ago he started to escape;
…has been … escaping ever since
Not knowing his pursuers gave up hope
Of seeing him (dance) at the end of a rope
Hounded by eyes and thronged terrors now the lens
Of a glaring world that shunned even his defence
Reading him strictly in the preterite tense
Spent no … thinking him not worth
(Even) … the price of a cold cell.
There would have been a scandal at his death
Perhaps. No more than this. Some tell
Strange hellish tales of this poor foundered soul
Who once fled north …
This poem ends up in Under the Volcano one of the greatest novels ever written—and certainly one of the greatest novels ever written by a stone drunk. This novel was Malcolm’s moment. He ended up getting a 3 thousand dollar advance for it, but then the publisher took half back from because Under the Volcano didn’t sell that well and Malcolm couldn’t come through with another book in time according to the terms of the contract. Publishers are the cruelest bastards in the world of writing. Most acquisitions editors are failed writers; terribly jealous of good books, and in cynical ways, favored toward schlock or academically proper novels like William Gass writes. [I mentioned the Sot Weed Factor during my party last night and no one there, including thedailygrowlerhousepianist, had ever heard of it or John Barth. Amazing how fast books burn away out of our collective literary memories.]
Little Bill Faulkner, a truly great American treasure, was said to always have a bottle of bourbon with him when he started a new novel. They said by the time he finished working at the end of the day, he was solid stone drunk. One novel, old Bill sketched out on the walls of his workroom—cool—there’s a cool photo of that room somewhere out in the ether.
One of the best stories I ever wrote—and it was published on first submission, I wrote one afternoon in Santa Fe after I had consumed a half a case of Cruz Blanca beer—a great beer a friend of mine had discovered when he lived out in the deserts of western Mexico before coming to Santa Fe. He went down to Juarez every weekend and brought back multicases of it--beer dreams were built on. The story was one I had taken notes on while I lived in Mexico City and was about a group of guys who go to a roof party in the Zona Rosa and during the party they find out one of them is gay and they start teasing him, getting drunker and drunker, all of them, with the story finally ending with them killing their gay friend…blah, blah, blah, I won’t give the ending away in case someone in another realm hasn’t read the story yet. It appeared in a 1968 issue of Alt fur Men, a Danish men’s magazine.
Soon the catman’s trailer house was rockin’. We put on some old Lionel Hampton quartet and quintet stuff from early Verve (these were first on the Clef label, Norman Granz original name for what he later called Verve) recordings, with the Oscar Peterson trio and Buddy Rich joining Lionel in some of the best small group jazz ever made—I mean, this has to be, you can't deny it when you hear it, one of the swingingest god-damn rocking and rollingest albums ever made. Yes, jazz rocks and rolls; it comes from the same roots as rock and roll, the blues, the fountainhead, the roots of the tree of the jazzman’s knowledge. And while Lionel and Oscar were strengthening our ears and thedailygrowlerhousepianist and I were boiling hot with our Dr. Phil-type elixir-flowing advice to the Mississippi River queen, who was by then tilting back a small bottle of vodka she'd brought with her-- and it was while in the middle of making a big Dr. Phil point, thedailygrowlerhousepianist casually opened the 12-year-old bottle of Jameson’s Irish whiskey and quickly lifted the bottle to his greedy lips and took a long swig.
I didn’t notice his move at first. I was already tipsy from the tall-boy Heinekens. I got tipsy quick. I like that; I like the pleasure of getting tipsy quick. It's really the time to stop drinking and enjoy the high, which of course is never the timely course taken; one looks forward always to another drink, always, thinking, yep, another drink will make the time even more fun, more pleasurable, more charming, more intelligent….
I took a swig of the Irish. Whooooo. Smooth as a baby’s ass—or “Smooth as my baby’s ass,” as Cookie of Cookie and the Cupcakes used to say as he passed around his personal bottle of 25-year-old Ambassador scotch to share with his cadre of hangerson—what we called our “posses” in the early days of American music—down there in good ole Lake Charles, Louisiana, back when “Matilda” was at the top of the charts.
That first swig scared me. I haven’t been enjoying hangovers in many a year now. The last time I got smashed with thedailygrowlerhousepianist the next day was ruined for me. Depression was the problem. I avoid depression like a dog avoids a fireplug that is on fire (or a bowl of phony dogfood). Getting drunk is fun, but waking up the next morning is either OK or horrifying. Like the last time I got drunk with thedailygrowlerhousepianist, down at my local Irish pub, too, after drinking several tumblers of Jameson’s down there, and while passing out after stumbling home and as I was drifting off I heard a thump somewhere down under me in my recording studio—I paid it no mind and soon was off on a journey into an Irish-whiskey dream, which fortunately I don’t remember—I was probably doing a step dance with the Irish woman who gave me the 12-year-old, a fine Donegal maiden, if I say so my old-enough-to-be-her-Swengali self. When I woke up the next morning---hooo-boy, I was solid headwrecked and my solar plexus was nailed to a cross of depression—not a woe-is-me depression but a forced one, the brain being too drunk to be cognizant of any sober reality—I climbed down out of my loft bed, whipped around the corner to turn on my air-conditioner (a window fan) and damn there lay my Toshiba laptop smashed to smithereens on the floor. That drunk had not only cost me a day of depression but also the price of a new laptop, $450, what it took to replace the smashed laptop; which I did, with another Toshiba laptop, this one a Tecra 8000—and I love it, with XP Pro so that I have Microsoft Word now and can write my ass off twenty-four hours a day. Except this damn thing really runs hot. I wouldn’t dare put it in my lap—not unless I wanted to sacrifice my genitals to the god of cyberspace.
I let everybody else pig out on the Irish whiskey, that great whiskey; I faked it; I stayed pretty high but I didn’t sock down the Irish. This morning when I woke up, hell, I thought I was god—or Albert Einstein—but not Malcolm Lowry.
I can’t imagine tipping up the bottle at 7 o’clock in the morning—every morning. I do wish I could write wonderful novels of a drunken mind.
thegrowlingwolffor The Daily Growler
Here's Some Good News for a Change
An MSNBC online poll shows that the overwhelming majority of its participating voters believe President Bush should be impeached.
from MSNBC.com.
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