Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Groton Street, 1993
Those were the days of Nirvana and Lou Reed and Dinosaur Jr. and The Ben Stiller Show and GG Allen on Springer and In Living Color and William S. Burroughs and Dharma Bums and Paul's Brutarian mags in the bathroom and Jimmy's drunken, happy grin and the time I tried to convince Jen that not making your bed was more in tune with the entropy of the universe and therefore wiser, and she scoffed and that pizza shop across the street (Hollywood?), where I called Jim "disheveled and fidgety," and that later burned to the ground and Jack Danielson's, where you got free food on Friday's as long as you were drinking and Murphy's, with it's great Jukebox and the occasional party at the apartment with occasional girls and the scent of weed and Paul's macaroni-and-cheese-and-ground-beef and the Spin Magazine written by the cast of SNL, when the cast of SNL was cool, and Report to Hell and scraps of poetry covering an entire wall and that horrible kitchen that we all tiptoed through and that massive snowstorm that buried cars up to their antennas and gave us another reason to drink and those nights I drank too much and forgot how I got home and watching Jim smash his microphone stand on the raw, stained carpet and exclaiming that I want to try heroin and accusing Mike of dying his hair blonde and talking about Ginsberg in a bar full of meatheads and wrestling with Michelle on my bed in the afternoon and all the insanity of a long, rambling, breathless sentence that was coming to an end, but that we delayed a while so we could be the people we wanted to be just a little longer.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
(Preface: Appropriately enough, I'm drunk.)
Yes, Hollywood was across Groton (and the day it burned the fire trucks in our street kept me from my job at Kmart, thank christ) but the pizza place where you insulted (that is, accurately assessed) Jim was another place entirely. You once left a pitcher of beer in the doorway there, and when we went back to get it later it was gone, and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
And yes, I remember Murphy's... didn't something really crazy happen there once? GG Allin had nothing on me, that poser pussy!
And I put broccoli and garlic in the mac n' cheese n' beef, wasn't that good? And as far as music, I remember a lot of Rutles for me (c-h-e-e-s-e-a-n-d-o-n-i-o-n-s oh no), and reading and rereading Groucho Marx' biography.
...funny, anything after 1983 is really hard to recall, much less '93... I have some Cortland memories on my site which is linked from my other site, memories of Basil's and such...
Ironically, my word verification is "gawpsrod," a word which I solemnly intoned into the toilet many a Groton street night while barely comprehending those Brutarians and Doug Borrelli's foot fetish mags and the poster of that magnificent tease Tiffani Amber Thiessen... and if you wanna talk Charles Street (now there was a street!), there was the night I punched out all the bathroom windows, and you tried to tell me that soaking my shredded hand in the toilet was not the best idea, bacterially speaking...
And well done referencing the fiery, icy Michelle. If I so much as mention a woman from my past, my wifey Donna gets a look in her eyes recalling Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion.
Merry Christmas, old chum!
Q'ner, this is probably your best post yet, for a moment I was taken back 93, when hip-hop celebrated its golden era; I watched waco burn, the world trade center smoke and got lost in the sounds of Nirvana, Alice in Chains and the rise of alternative or mainstream-alternative, read On the Road for the first time and thought I could write endless lines of thoughts that would somehow translate into deepest emotions and inner ideas of my consciousness.
cortland, the drunkest year of my life. an that's saying something.
i remember you hanging from the kitchen window (2nd floor) on one of the first nights we met. i remember paul pouring us a shot of industrial cleaner and then having to convince us not to drink it. i remember screaming at some college dj that dinosaur jr. would go down as one of the great bands in history. the jury is still out on that. monkey mick in a rage. plastic cups thrown at homey the clown smashing through the living room window on sub zero winter nights. drunk drunk drunk. so drunk i got along famously with doug. and somehow meeting the girl i would marry.
i can't help but look on it all fondly. i'm so glad you guys were there.
and i still use that "making your bed" theory.
And I'm still scoffing.
I too was so drunk that I was the only female that could get along with Doug. Even after he creepily pursued my teenage sister at a party at my apartment.
I remember your place as being an escape from my own, which was too often popluated with members of the Drama Club and, for a time, a dog with very poor toilet habits. It's hard to say which was more offensive, but at least the dog couldn't sing the entire score to Godspell.
Paul, the world awaits your take on the crazy Murphy's incident.
Alas, I was just an occasional visitor to the wild degenerate upstate outback. I used to feel like a cross between Tim Daly's character in "Diner" and Sean Penn's in "U-Turn."
Cortland is where my career as a writer began, where I decided there's nothing worth doing but doing nothing or writing. I find myself doing a lot of both lately. And gladly.
You were the wildest, most creative generation of all. The Lost Generation were incessantly boring. And the Beat Generation never knew when to shut up.
P.S. Mad Dog 20/20 was our absinthe.
Post a Comment