The Fool Back East

Picasso Master Works at MOMA SAT SEPT 26 1998

I sit on a rickety bar stool in an Irish dive next to my hotel, and all the thoughts that seemed so meaningful while I was wandering the expressways lost in Queens’ rush hour traffic have disappeared with the sun. Across the street is an old cemetery where stone angels peer down on gray granite crypts from atop pillars of marble. The locals have started talking ball. Mac hit two in Wrigley earlier today, and now he’s on his way to Shea. I’ll be there tomorrow, too. “Jump on the Flushing line,” one of the locals tells me in brogue, and the bartender says the same. The talk turns to bombs. Omagh. Dar es Salaam. Nairobi. The “towelheads.” Then a silence. Jose Garcia and Eddie Briody. Jose bought me a beer. Eddie left. “Everyone’s a separatist,” Eddie said. His daughter is going to Harvard, he said. He was painting a pretty picture of his wife and daughters. I was impressed until I noticed, three beers later that he wore no wedding ring. The barmaid just gave me a beer. “That one’s on me,” she said.

8-20-98 Th 10:22 AM EST

I’m in my room on the top floor of the City View Hotel. Here in New York City, you might thin this an impressive penthouse, but it’s only five floors in Queens. I didn’t get in ‘til three this morning. I was out enjoying the fact that the bars stay open ‘til four AM. After the Cork Pub, I went next store to Scandals for the titty show and an eight-dollar scotch. The stage was behind the bar which went all the way around it. I like titties, but there were only four there. I didn’t stay long. I came back to my room and called Idaho. I thought I was tired, but after I got off the phone, I was hungry and went out to look for a bite. Like and idiot, I went to McDonald’s. I passed a few pubs, so I stopped in one. An obnoxious drunk old bastard talked politics and looked for a fight.  His hypocrisy was topped only by his stupidity. He was calling me a prick and an asshole because he thought for some reason that I was defending Reaganomics and union-busting. I decided to ignore him. A Paki guy down the bar sent me a beer, I guess as a reward for my forbearance. Everyone was buying me beer all night. The Paki talked about chess. Friendly chap. Cab driver. Invited me to see him play chess on 42^nd. After my beer, I stopped at another bar and ordered another pint, but I walked out without touching it. I drove back to the hotel and went to sleep. This morning, I walked to the graveyard across the street and took some pictures. Then I did 30 minutes on the treadmill in the room. I’m going to chill a couple hours before I take the train to Shea.

Sept 7, 1998 Monday 5:37 PM

It's Labor Day.  I'm in my house writing in front of Monday night football.  Shirelle and I have just come from hopping the fence at my school where we made a half-assed attempt at preparing my school for the first day tomorrow. 
I LOST MY LAST JOURNAL IN BALTIMORE.  Everything from NYC and the Mets game and visiting Philly and DC and the Smithsonian and all the monuments and bars is gone.  I'm not going to write it again.   I took the journal with me to a place I had heard of called Fell's Point.  I had been at the Oriole game earlier that day.  It was great.  I bought a scalp to the club level.  Drank up some beers alongside a trio of horny Virginia rednecks; a woman and her husband AND her boyfriend.  They all had a proposition for me which I wanted no part of.  The woman kept moving the legs of her shorts aside to show me a bunny she had tattooed next to her pussy.  I guess Virginia really is for lovers.  Ripkin golfed one up off the ground and over the left-field fence to help defeat Bartolo Colon and the Cleveland Indians despite a homerun  by Manny Ramirez.  Camden Yards is surrounded by bars.  After the game I stopped in one for another beer and some Chesapeake crab cakes and read the Baltimore Sun and spanked their little crossword.  The waiter got to talking and asked him where the fun was and he said Fell's Point.  So I decided to stay the night in Baltimore.  I found the hostel and showered there.  It looked like a great place to get stabbed.  I walked across town on my sore, blistered feet with a crotch-rot friction rash burning away at my asshole and balls that made me walk like I had cerebral palsy.  I walked and walked like I had in Philly and DC and NY and finally I found street after street of bar after bar along the water front of Fell's Point.  Wow.  I stopped at a saloon called "The Horse You Came In On" and wrote three pages in the now-lost journal about the day before and the girl I met in Philadelphia and how we walked all over Philly together, miles and miles,  from one end to the other and back, Independence Hall to the Museum of Art and we sprinted up the steps Rocky-style, and from there back to South Street and its miles of bars and thousands of drunks.  And everyone was friendly, it really was the City of Brotherly Love, outside the stadiums anyway.  There was no room at the hostel the girl was staying at, the first hostel I'd ever been in, but they let me stay on the couch for free.  I like this hostel situation.  When I had finished those three pages, I folded my journal and put it in my back pocket.  I went to a few more bars and had a few more beers.  In one of the bars they sell a shirt for $15 that has logos of twenty bars within walking distance of each other, and if you buy the shirt, you get one free beer in each of those bars!  I did the math and bought the shirt.  So I walked from bar to bar, getting my free beer and a little check mark on my shirt checked off.  I had been drinking all day though, all week really, and I was getting zonked.  Around the ninth bar, I feared I would go down and wake up in the gutter, so I hailed a cab and got a ride back to the hostel.  When I came to the next morning, I discovered my journal was no longer among my possessions--a devastating blow.