I was thinking of eating and drinking and all, how you might as well you know, life is short. The image of my old schoolmate crossed my mind, the one who was once a slim and manic boy in braces and is now a portly Bob Vacant, autocorrected from bon vivant. At our high school reunion he spoke at length of his travels in Asia and his fondness for smoky Islay scotch. Anyway life is short and we all die. I lingered on that thought a moment, wanting it to sink deep into my psyche. Maybe there could be a sign. And just then a glitch in the broadcast of the Tour de France I was watching warped the image of bikes on a country road into garish psychedelic blurs and streaks: red, green, turquoise, white.

Getting to the bottom of this beer I thought of Kris Kristofferson and his having one for dessert. There’s something wonderful about the smell of a cigarette carried by a cool spring breeze. Waiting for a late-game goal.

The Entreprise - 60

At night more than ever I sought oblivion. At the time I would have called it freedom. 

Pam had a late-summer roof party and I got wasted and went to McDonald’s and got on the bus back uptown, drifted off and woke up at 120th and Adam Clayton Boulevard. Walking back down in the streetlights and the moonlight was like a dream of old New York. Beautiful buildings seemingly intact, preserved not by renovation but by some benign force. Walls bathed in yellow glow. Street life here and there, people on stoops, on the sidewalk in little groups.

Before long the steam pipes hissed and gurgled to signal the changing of the seasons. Alan said he got a deal on a new office space downtown by the river. We assumed this really meant the end. A skeleton crew to guide the enterprise into a quiet, thrifty failure in a cramped space in a bad part of town. Except it wasn’t a bad part of town when you think about it. The top of Tribeca, on the corner of Greenwich and Canal. In any other city the blocks and blocks of warehouses and secondhand shops would mean you got lost on the wrong side of the tracks. Here it was where movie stars renovated industrial spaces into massive homes. The kind of real estate that rich people buy even though it’s in a weird old building that was configured for button sewing or shoe manufacture. They pay whatever for it, they put up with the raw walls and haphazardly situated columns. The hideously high ceilings. The rich have the alchemical ability to transform these very drawbacks and inconveniences into symbols of status and privilege. Look at my gigantic loft with the renovated period flooring. The floor above us was the home of a jeweler. I recognized the name of my ophthalmologist on the buzzer in the lobby. He occupied the floor below us with his young family. Our space too was vast. Everyone got a desk by a window. There was a kitchen and a separate room with a mattress on the floor should anyone have a need for one reason or another. Andre set to work repairing ethernet cables and setting up the modem. Almost like we had a purpose.

Each morning I walked west down Canal from the station. Through Chinatown, past the watercolor calligraphers, the shops of knockoffs. The street was intimate; a distinct, self-sustaining community. A woman swept dust out of her store and returned the dustpan and broom to a store a few doors down. Businesses on top of each other and you don’t know what to buy or who to buy it from but hang around a while and someone’ll sell you something. Shops with “electronics” and “audio” in their names appeared to have nothing but fake shoes and bags.

Mostly we hung out and went out for long, drinky lunches, the Argentine place down Greenwich or the Ear Bar most of the time, somewhere else if we got bored. If Alan wasn’t around we’d play guitar and sing. Erupt in mad fits of cursing. But it probably wouldn’t have mattered if he was around. One day I made a point to remember this time forever, to realize life would never be the same again, so weird and wonderful. It was hard, maybe impossible, to grasp it in the moment. But there’d come a day I’d look back and know.

Day 3

I should avoid all news while here, let it be an intriguing, unpleasant surprise upon our return, the aftermath of a brutal invasion depicted on the array of CNN screens at JFK immigration. But instead I’ve been compulsively checking the Times and the Post.

We went to the mini mart this morning and there were stacks of Red Stripe cases, so now there will be two eras of this vacation: the bottle and the can.

An older guy on the beach came up to me pulling a baggie out of his pocket. What do you need mon, that rap, and I said yeah but I don’t want to spend much, what can I get for ten. He wanted to sell me two for thirty, two for twenty-five. I said twenty, he said fine. A light rain began to fall and he led me to a covered space nearby. He ground a bud into a paper and made small talk, where you from, who you with. At the mention of the word wife he said it’ll make you real hard mon and I said you don’t need to tell me that and he laughed but what I really meant was, you don’t need to tell me that. You don’t have to sell this shit. It’s fucking marijuana. It sells itself.

I rejoined my family buying trinkets from a woman displaying her wares from a scarf in the sand.

Day 2

In one of my last dreams of the night I had a strong feeling it was 1:07 in the afternoon and I felt the requisite guilt of oversleeping, wasting half the day. When I awoke and asked Sara the time it was seven something. I lay in bed awhile trying to remember. 

A jogger ran past on the beach, winding up and delivering in a cricket bowler’s motion every ten paces or so.

Supply chain disruptions have made odd things scarce. At the supermarket there was no beer in cans. No plain Red Stripe, only apple, melon. Someone told us we’re lucky, they couldn’t find chlorine for the pool until a couple days ago. I lie back under the sun drinking Guinness Foreign Extra, twice the usual ABV. I guess the Irish can’t handle it.

I got up out of the hammock to watch the sunset and caught the three seconds when it goes from a sliver to nothing. 

I finished my short book about the end of the world. 

I peered at a young couple at the swim-up bar from my position on the side. They were waiting to order, engaging in small talk with another couple beside them. The woman idly splashed a little poolwater onto the bar. Moments later he took the menu card and methodically raked the water back into the pool. She didn’t seem to object or even notice.

It’s the sort of night when I want to fall into the imbecility of watching Worls Cup downhill skiing, a scotch in my hand, mouth a little bit agape.

I forgot my phone upstairs, a bit drunkenly, and of course I immediately saw beautiful pictures to take: a view up the blocked-off street, children playing under a silvery dusky sky; grownups on the sidewalk drinking; pink-purple chalk hopscotch and Black Lives Matter. But of course if I could have taken the pictures I wouldn’t have written the words.

I was watching a classic French movie late at night, drunk, after the fireworks and after the guests had gone home, actually the fireworks were still going on and they still go on now. I’d watch a scene and descend into a psychedelic interpretation of the events—is that what really happened? Did he think she said he said she thought? I fumbled for the slender Apple TV remote and swiped back 20 seconds, whatever the device is set to do. And 20 seconds more. Turns out nothing of the sort took place.

It took me all day to remember what I’d watched drunkenly before bed last night, a documentary about Sam Cooke. Smokey Robinson appeared to me, his fine features and processed hair, and I realized he’d been on it had to be about music, but what? R&B, Motown? Sam Cooke. 

We sat at the bar with money in dwindling piles, like gamblers with their chips. The team was losing, losing, losing and then it was winning, and then it won. We talked about music and restroom hand-drying technology.

We joined our families outside. The sun moved slowly. Maybe sometimes not at all. Finally we said goodbye to our friends who are moving and then we left.

Blink

I don’t know whose idea it was. Maybe mine. But one night we got drunk like we did a lot of nights and drove the back roads home. At a fork there was an orange-and-white striped barrel with an orange light on top, blinking stupidly into the dark, guarding nothing, warning of nothing.

We stopped and I got out. No cars around, no houses. I grabbed the thing—could it even be lifted? Was it weighted with cement or somehow affixed in place, per some regulation? No. I had it in my arms like it was waiting to be taken. I carried it back, hurriedly, conscious now of the illicitness of my deed.

I placed it in the trunk and we drove off, happy, laughing. Satisfied. A fuck you to the Man under cover of the night.

At home we displayed it in the kitchen for a while. We formed a circle around it and watched it blink at us. We laughed. We stopped laughing. We drank. We laughed again.

Finally we dispersed and I took it upstairs to my room. I examined it in the quiet and the solitude. It blinked relentlessly. If I focused on the light everything else around it disappeared. I could almost hear it. Feel it. I put it in the closet and went to bed.

I awoke fitfully before dawn, disturbed by an alien presence, menacing and nameless. The light was pulsing through the gaps around the closet door, filling the darkened room with orange bursts. It seemed to have grown brighter in the night. Stronger. I pulled the covers over my head.

In the morning I opened the closet, hoping somehow it’d be gone. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. I opened the window and leaned out. There was a basement window well below, maybe five feet deep. I dragged the thing over and heaved it out. I watched it fall heavy through the air, wobbling a little. It landed softly, quietly, in a bed of copper-colored leaves. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. I went down and buried it good under the leaves and dirt. Soon winter would come with ice and snow. We’d all move out eventually. Get married, have kids. Careers.

But the infernal blinking would go on and on.

Summer is the time for sickly drinks: white beer that tastes a bit like puke; thin, acidy rosé. These aren’t my favorite drinks but they must be drunk abundantly in summer.

We took the bus back down to the beach after dinner, to go to Funny Land. A big family got on, grandmother, mother, kids. A loud, misbehaving girl; a quiet, sweet one. Another with a wooden leg. I wondered what their lives are like.

 I got a magical bit of time after my crazy dentist screwed my implant in again and before I had to go play with the guys at the Navy Yard so I went to our old haunt Nancy Whiskey, unchanged from the early 21st century, tin ceiling, Irish flag, full of people who don’t belong in TriBeCa but are there anyway: old black guys, young black women, construction workers playing shuffle board and shouting curses. And me. “Gone Daddy Gone” by the Violent Femmes is playing and maybe that’s the only song everybody can agree on.

One of the construction workers spies a local crossing the square outside, a pretty young thing with a halter top, and proclaims, “Number 10 with a bullet right there!” A guy at the bar says, “But they never come in do they?” I guess you can see why.

Actually no one gives a fuck about the music most of the time. Except when something suspect for its softness and obscurity plays. You can be soft and universal, like “Maybe I’m Amazed.” But otherwise someone’s gonna shout a profane complaint.

I awoke in the middle of the night with a hangovery headache and asked myself: did I really drink a lot? And I remembered the big drink and the next one while I waited and the big glass of wine and thought, maybe yes. Then I fell back asleep and felt almost fine when the jazz station rang at 6:15.

I made myself a martini and when I felt the buzz come on I said out loud, “Now this is a familiar feeling.” And right away I opened the freezer instead of the fridge.

Unlikely memories keep coming back to me. Like when I was on a plane out of Vegas, maybe ten years ago, maybe twenty. That sad flight when you’ve probably lost more money than you should, and there’s a part of you that wishes you could stay longer and lose some more. In that state of mind I was struck by a conversation in the row behind me. Two young men were talking—friends or maybe cousins who’d been in Vegas together for a family reunion or bachelor party or something. One was cheerily talking about his dad, how they’d left him at the bar sipping Johnny Walker Blue, and that he knew he’d be perfectly happy there while everyone younger went gambling and clubbing. He sounded proud of his dad—proud that he was there, proud of what he drank, proud of what he did and didn’t do. The happy family scene he depicted, of the patriarch indulging his brood, maybe living vicariously through them, was annoying and poignant in equal measure, somehow.

It's a library-themed bar but no one here has ever read a book.

It does have its drunk at the corner of the bar though. I ordered from the empty space beside him and as he got up to get out his smokes he said excuse me unnecessarily and a little too loud, the way drinkers do. Never hurts to get a jump on Step 8 I guess. As I took my beer away he seemed to be complaining to the bartender that he wanted merlot; she gave him pinot noir. That's the type of drunk and that's the type of bar.

Everyone’s gotta make it home from the office party. That means people who hooked up and find themselves in weird apartments in Astoria, just unlucky drunks who have to wait for the PATH, the numbers or the alphabet, Uber, Lyft. Everyone’s gotta make their sad way home.

When I stepped onto the platform at South Ferry I smelled that deep underground New York summer subway smell and I knew I was on the right way home.

We stood in wonder at 20-something people singing the lyrics to 30-something tunes. It never goes the other way. Old people don't sing young songs.

I imagined the music of Stereolab, the High Llamas and the Clientele, all mixed up together. What is it about that music? It makes you feel like you're high on drugs.

There was a young couple sitting cross-legged on Carmine Street this morning, with their dog and their cup. They reminded me of those mangy kids on Haight Street, trying to make a buck off some long-dead idea of beautiful, eternal youth. Except these two were alone among the oblivious passersby like me, trudging to our jobs. There was no scene for them. As I walked by I noticed the boy was drinking a tall Bud Light Lime Straw-Ber-Rita. Who knows, maybe life was good.