A Night in the Life

Pabst created the 6-pack because they judged it was the weight most easily carried home by a housewife from the store. I consider this fact and smile as I grab a half case of PBR from the back fridge of the 7-11 and head up to the counter. It’s only four blocks home and I won’t even need to switch hands. The Indian man behind the counter eyes me lecherously, but not unpleasantly, with a smile as I deposit the change back in my bra and head on my way at 4am.
The air is finally cool, Hurricane Earl heading his way up the coast, and I’m happy to have the walk. The neighborhood, which is new to me, smells of trash and heat escaping pavement.
I walk past empty Corona bottles and burnt offerings to the god of summer dwindling. My head is filled with my bartending shift and the fact that I’ve been in New York a year.
In that year I’ve refocused my personality. I’m not necessarily different, but New York is a scalpel to Philadelphia’s baseball bat when it comes to matters of growth. I’m more comfortable in my skin and expect less for twice the amount of work. To some that might sound like a bad thing, I think to people who make it here, it just sounds right.
I pass by the Dunkin’ Donuts around the corner from my place and the smell of sugar and dough rises in the breeze. I’ve never wished more for a deck overlooking a body of water to sit out on and watch the sun shift slowly into Saturday. I sigh and think for the fortieth time this week that I’m so glad to be here.
My neighborhood is either South Slope or Gowanus depending on who you ask. It’s a balanced mix of hispanics and auto-body repair shops with a growing percentage of people like me who moved here for the great bars and the safe streets.
Every person has their own New York. No really. There are no two New Yorks, and there is no right or wrong. I found mine on a deserted one way street with only four or five ramshackle houses and a large number of warehouses. Sometimes it smells like exhaust, sometimes donuts. The tacos are cheap and plentiful, and the nights are quieter than anything in my head. If I’m capable of happiness by any standards, I’m happy here.
I climb the flight of stairs to my apartment and plant myself on my kitchen floor. I have a bourbon and a can of beer to alternate drinking from. I sit by the window so I can smoke without moving. I think about my day, how my back hurts, why I’m dissatisfied with graduate school and my job, and why I love and hate the place where night slides wordlessly into morning.
Did I mention I’m in grad school? I’m 9 credits and a thesis away from a master’s in nothing useful. If you are considering going to grad school because you think think it’ll improve your life, I’d like to offer some advice: don’t. No really, an M.A. is a bill of goods, and you’d be better off putting that money into a time share in Reno than on most graduate programs in the humanities. If however you are like me and love learning without reward and have no idea what else to do, by all means, please sign up and enjoy the most expensive soul searching a person can undergo.
My program funds the more high level M.F.A. students, so they can go on to teach composition poorly at state run universities and prisons. All of the great things I’ve learned have been accidental and in that regards depressing. Still, I love reading and learning and thinking, so I persist.
There’s a one sentence email waiting for me when I get home. I’m ecstatic to read it:
Are you still looking for a bartending job?
It’s from a resume I sent out a week earlier to a place I was really interested in. I know it will likely lead to nothing, but I smile still the same. You learn here that the little victories are enough. The reply on one resume out of ten is amazing and boosts my spirit enough to redouble my efforts.
Oh, why am I looking for work? I have a full time bartending job already. Except it’s kind of like bartending in prison. It’s the sort of place where people give you $2 on a $40 check and look at you like your an ass if you don’t proceed to wash their feet with your hair. Believe it or not, that wasn’t even what did me in there. I can live with cheap morons.I can even deal with the bar fights and the occasional human feces found on the floor. But I recently got a new bar manager who’s idea of managing me is to talk to me like I’m an absolute moron. I can handle it from the customers, but I can’t take it from my boss. It’s time to go. It might take me a while to get out, but I’m fine with working hard. The rewards are sweeter that way anyhow.
On my dirty kitchen floor I try to write. This has been the albatross of New York. No lack of ideas, but a lack of cogent sentences. My form has gone all wavy and my verbs have gone all limp. I have the writing equivalent of whiskey dick, so desperate to do the deed, so incapable of satisfying myself or anyone else.
I’m working out the whys and the hows. It’s a process because even though writer’s block is a bit of a myth, writer’s tennis elbow is a very real thing. I want to write and I do write, but I’ve lost the narrative, the signal, the drive. It’s somewhere in the pathways, but it isn’t here. Still I fight for it.
I’m out of touch most days. It isn’t anything about New York per se. So much of this life is wrapped up in talking, being, and doing, that when I get five minutes to myself I often just need to sit and stare. I don’t know when it happened, but at some point I became great at working in restaurants. And while I love that, it takes up 100% of my personality in 35 hours a week. Then I try to find another 20% to give to my school life, and another 50% to give to the man I love, and another 30% to give to friends, and the next thing I know I’m flat on my back in my kitchen with a beer and some bourbon and wondering why I’m so drained. I dont’ regret a single percent, but I am always two steps behind and totally brain dead.
The man in my life? Yeah, I know, it’s crazy. But he and I have been together over a year and we’re still as gross as we were the day we met. I don’t talk about him much because I’m terrified of jinxing things. Still, he is the best part of every day.
The sky is not lightening yet, and I leave burnt effigies of late summer in the form of cigarettes as I pour myself a second round.
My thoughts turn to the prophecies of Zevon and the small kindness here in New York. Both weigh heavily in my brain lately.
They are the alternatives to the early morning meanderings of things long lost. Though I suppose Warren would understand those too.
There is an aspect of forgetfulness that New York promises. With each new dawn, the chance to start over. I put on something bittersweet on iTunes and decide it’s time to turn to poetry that will never see the light of day. The time for narrative is lightening into the time for Ginsberg’s golden rule, no ideas but in things.
I no longer care if my story is sympathetic. I no longer need to be the hero of this life. Tomorrow is occurring and I will wake lather, rinse, repeat and try only to do it better.

Comment

  1. (:

    — kirkesque · Sep 4, 11:20 AM · #

Commenting is closed for this article.