Sunday, August 25, 2013

It was a Facebook thing, an event invite I misinterpreted as a gathering of people I'd worked with years ago, up at a pizza restaurant next to where we all used to work.  We had all hit Austin Grill at a certain time in life.  The original management team were artists, who loved what they did.  And then it had gone to different management, weird, number crunchers, menu changes.  One morning we were shouted at, as if by Mussolini, on sexual harassment by its worst perpetrator.  I should have gotten out then.

I walked up Mass Ave past all the trees like I used to do, and crossed by the Vice President's house, entering the old neighborhood, Glover Park, on an August Saturday night, crossing Wisconsin at the light at Calvert, walking down from the gas station, past the dry cleaners, past Pearson's Liquor and Old Europe, past what used to be The Grog and Tankard back when, and then, not looking in through the window at the old bar I stood at for years, but for a shuddering moment, down the steps.  I was expecting a small crowd of familiar faces, of people who've been through loss.  I walk in, silent, unrecognized, to the end of the bar, and I know the manager, a good guy I also worked with back at old Austin Grill.  There is a crowd at the bar, just like there always was, the attitudes unchanged, the manners, just different faces, as if DNA were at work, recreating the same in the different, as I've seen even in restaurant staff.


Polite, thinking of escape, I had a glass of wine, a Langhe Rosso, beautiful easy going nebbiolo.  I had a good conversation with the woman next to me, a graduate of Swarthmore, about Joyce and being Irish.  And then another glass, and then I fell into talk with the restaurant guy I know who is sits next to me, who gives me the skinny on who's staying and who's going as far as the restaurant business on the block, a diatribe he thinks I'm interested in at the moment as TVs show endless sport loops.  I hear a good arson story.  And all the while, no Spike, no Jennifer, no old gang.  I see, looking out, up at the street, an old friend, I guess you'd call him, intoxicated, trying to persuade a stripper to get in a cab with him as he sways.  It takes me a moment to recognize him, in a gesture, the way he hunches when he talks to people when in his cups.

I found it semi-nightmarish to be back on the strip.  I asked myself, how could I have ended up there for so many years in such a subservient position, bartender?  What good did I do for humanity?  What an impossible shame.  Trapped there, by the drink, by the companionship in it, by the illusion that by working there and by writing I was building some kind of a career.  We worked, thought we were artists of some sort, liked the soundtrack, the food, the buzz, the friends.  And I had felt that the writing I did was somehow involved with the great academic background I had come from.  And the bosses never really talked to us much, until they turned it over and walked away.  One day, the music box which had played as we worked, one day it stopped playing the tune.

I do get caught up on the doings of old friends, thanks to Joe.  I find out about Keith, and Kevin. Tom has moved to Florida.  I express condolences to my friend over the loss of father.  Other than that, it's a lonely night.  The bartender knocks over a row of stacked pint glasses which fall to the floor with a crash.  I don't like bars anymore, a waste of time.  And then, four glasses in, I start my exit.  I walk up the steps to the sidewalk, to check out Bourbon, then Townhall, conscious of the sleeping unconscious sadness of the crowd passing on the street.  I enter a place I wouldn't,  the in-people who know how to dress, belonging far more than I ever will, in a uniform of shorts and summery light tee shirts without much care, but confidence in the belonging to the scene, a privileged confident entitled crowd of blasé attitudes all seeming to know each other.  I'm an outsider.  I ask the bartender for the wine list, don't bother having another glass, get rid of a two dollar bill the people at Kramer's gave me as change months ago.  I don't know, it seems like we served a fair cross section of humanity at the old Grill, journalists, a playwright, musicians, the neighborhood, young and old, funky and not, mainstream and non-mainstream.  It wasn't all bad.

I go and stand at the street corner at the light again.  I walk home, rather than hail a cab, to punish myself, wishing I had just stayed in, had no wine, read something useful.  Is it that there's always an excuse, always the illusion.

Rattled, and tired, defeated, and wanting no part of it anymore, I went to work, only because I had to, Sunday evening my Monday morning, and the door opened at the good people showed up, and I fell into the groove again, for better or worse.  Toward the end of the evening, joined by a regular, a good conversation with a person who has just moved from San Fran feeling a little sad, talk of Suffi poetry, talk of the Muslim world, Shi'a, Sunni conflicts.  And once again, I am a glimmer of a lost scholar of a vaguely religious kind, as I may have always been, but up close and personal with the existential sufferings of humanity and the sorrows of pleasure. What's the line of Buddha's?  Was it that he found himself 'ripe,' or, the perfect candidate for such an enlightened change, ready, perfectly prepared...

I come home and read a sad NY Times story of a generous Brooklyn restaurateur's suicide, and wonder, where do you go after you give your generosity and realize that everyone is suffering?  Do you renounce, and go on the road, like Jesus did;  do you go as Merton did, join a Trappist monastery;  do you become a moralizing writer (if you had the money) like Tolstoy;  do you recognize a moment with all prophets;  do you embrace Buddhism close and closer?  Do you write self-help books, like Tolle, and try not to act hypocritically, or rather, understandingly?  Or do you become a cultural historian, positing about how Christianity was a big hit in wine friendly Europe?

I have a glass of wine and go play some Pogues songs out in the backyard under the moon, liberated by a good run of Sun Sessions, James Super Chicken Johnson, and Austin City Limits, Roseanne Cash doing 'the list' followed by Brandi Carlile, on good old PBS.

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