Coffee, Booze, Coffee, Booze
R. Kitchen in Charleston, SC.
Hangovers…
There was a man, hungover or drunk, on his bike on King Street in Charleston this morning that looked at me with recognition. He had those inebriated eyes, simultaneously swollen and set back in his head with dark bags and glowing red eyelids. A minute or two earlier, I had caught a glimpse of myself in a store window: under-slept and over-caffeinated. That’s been the new look and certainly not a good one. He nodded at me and I took it to mean that he spotted one of his own, another hungover loser crawling the streets too early in the day.
There was nothing to see this morning. Just the two of us. Maybe he was on his way to a national bike summit, or to contemplate the construction of Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island, or maybe even to take in the pastel rowhouses of Rainbow Row at sunrise. Although the sun had already risen and most likely, he was on his way for more booze. What a life.
American Splendor by Harvey Pekar.
Last night, I was talking to the bartender for quite a while (and sure, entirely too long about the Brad Pitt canon but whatever) about everything and anything: rivers to fly fish in/at, psychedelics, cocktails, steakhouses in town…more Brad Pitt. I got a handful of recommendations for bars and the rest is history.
My old boss had a term to describe the occasional euphoria that comes with a hangover. I don’t remember what she called it (it was certainly better than some lame portmanteau like hang-oria) but I know what she means. There is sometimes a sense of contentment with the hangover along with the ability to focus and forget everything else. It’s as though the mind, in its still inebriated state, lets go of all the small and seemingly insurmountable anxieties of the day and gathers itself for a much larger matter—that of the hangover. I’ll do anything to get over the hangover (except for not drink apparently). Most people tell me they’ll remain in bed, watching TV, scrolling through Twitter, or some other, what they would consider, innocuous activity. But I say that that’s far worse. I’d rather force myself to move around, sweat it out, activate the mind and the body, force feed it…anything really, than to sit and scroll—that awful activity that destroys the soul and all possibilities of engagement in life.
Years ago, probably about eighteen years now, I went to a nearby coffee shop in Brooklyn on an unbearably humid day. I was hungover as I was on most days. At the time, I was living on Scholes Street in Bushwick in a miserable, crooked apartment that smelled of asbestos. My bedroom had a built in drawer in the wall that, when removed, opened to the guts of the building, a building with a rat infestation. It was an absolutely terrifying place. I don’t know what was worse, that apartment or the one on Bedford Ave where I’d wake to dozens of cockroaches on my cutting board each morning. How I ever cooked a meal there is beyond me. Anyhow, the coffee shop.
According to Google maps, the coffee shop is no longer there. Good riddance. The coffee was no good and the service worse. I only went there to write and drink coffee. After what was probably only a matter of days of concerted effort, the aggravation was settling in once again that I’d never be a writer. I had little dedication to anything in those days (not much has changed).
I decided that morning that if I couldn’t sit and write a story, that I didn’t have it in me. I was staring off into nothingness when a teenager came in to, presumably, order a coffee. The barista, a young tattooed girl with bleached hair and anemia, was foaming a latte and paying little attention to her tip jar, which the teenager dipped into, nabbed a fistful of single bills, turned around and walked back out. I said nothing.
I went back to my story which went nowhere. It was not a story of a teenager swiping tips from a coffee shop while a nonparticipating observer sat miserably trying to write a story. But it could have been. I missed my chance to engage somehow. At the very least, I could have informed the barista.
The puzzling thing is, I didn’t even have the distractions that I have, that we all have, now. I had an iPod with probably a hundred songs I’d listen to on the subway. There were no distractions other than self-loathing, doubt, and hangovers. Now, I’ve got all of that and a job. I don’t know how I get anything done. Mostly, the ideas occur while I’m in the gym and they begin writing themselves. Of course, the issue is that when I sit to write, the ideas no longer want to come. They’ve retreated and lodged themselves in the recesses of my mind, no longer accessible and the, as Steinbeck said, “vague terror of addressing the large and faceless audience” returns. His recommendation is to write a friend. I always write to the same person. Had I known that trick early on, perhaps I could have gotten something done. Instead, I’ve got entirely too many stories of hangovers and missed chances.
