Back to Fitzgerald, "show me a hero and I'll show you a tragedy."  Which is one way to put it.

"First thought, best thought," Kerouac, contrary to what you'll get at in a so-called creative writing workshop...


Back, off the road, the thunderstorms had held off, and sadness in my heart I rolled in on the last leg, east into DC on Canal Road, then the little left just past Fletcher's Cove up to MacArthur, dropping my bags off at the new unsettled apartment, getting through to mom, both of us heavy from parting after a week together, then taking the car back in the bright heat, feeling the narrowness of DC streets, the tightness, up Wisconsin, Observatory Circle, 34th, down into the woods under Woodlawn Terrace's mansions, then into the hotel parking garage on Calvert, then walking my old walk through the Dumbarton woods up to work, arriving at 4:40..


A man with barely a job, hardly a career, and a night of being a clown, entertaining the diners from bar to back room, a ten-top back in the wine room I'll get to deal with on my own...  Keeps me busy enough, no late night hi-jinx chaos...

An Uber home finally, my driver from Kabul, also with an elderly mother.  He took his family to see the fireworks from the Old Town side, obscured by smoke.

Then Sunday night, Mom on the edge of tears as we speak over the phone, as she deserves to be.  They'll be paving tomorrow in her apartment townhouse complex.  Is the car in the right place?  Where are her car keys...  "I'll just kill myself."  She hangs up.  I call her back.  And soothe things over, even if I'm feeling like hell, the spot I'm in, feeling pointless about work.

Aware already of one birthday gathering back in the dreaded Wine Room, there will be another, and both of these parties will be familiar to me, and I'll have to put on the personal rube/clown act again, personable enough, as happens when you know people and know what to interject and when to just leave it and keep pouring the wine meticulously...

I'm putting in the order for the six top, the tall bearded lawyer regular guy who comes with friendly wife, they like Pinot Blanc, when a many human forms comes up the stairs.  I'm looking into the glowing screen, putting in escargot for seats one, three, four, mushroom fricassee for birthday man at six, onion tart for five, then highlighting these as the appetizer course, I'm about to put in the entrees, but turn to see who it is, probably a regular.  Ah-hah, it is, cool.

It's my lawyer friend.   A connection to Amherst established one night.  I pulled out a copy of my book from the liquor closet another night.  Well, if you're familiar with the place, it's the main setting of my great Hamlet meets Catcher in the Rye famous novel...  Handed it to him.

"I have an announcement to make," he says, as I prepare his Tito's martini.

Earlier, V., whose parents came to New York from Russia, pipes up.  There was a study once where they had a robots feed baby chicks.  The most anthropomorphized of the robots, dressed-up, had the greatest success keeping the chicks alive.  The well-off couple, shrewd, who won't come in unless checking to make sure that I'm there because everyone else just turns away and speaks Spanish, not giving a shit, are on their way out, paying their check, except I've fucked up the last payment tender and have to re-ring their check in...  The other birthday party has arrived...  Arghh.   "I told 64 the specials," my coworker tells me, in the blur.  A drink order would have been helpful.  Pour them some bubbly, just to keep them happy...

"I finished your book."

"Oh," I say.  "Well, you've been on a roll this year, things to announce, grandson, upcoming wedding..."

"I really liked your book, I really did.  The writing... the whole thing."

Later, he asks me, "but I have a question."  He doesn't get how the whole harsh Princess's "I'll go the Dean's office and charge you with sexual harassment if you say one more word to me..." came about.

I shrug.  Yeah, I don't either.  I explain a bit of the back ground, how, when I'm visiting my mom, all these scenes come back to me, damn, why didn't I do that at the football game...

Women are... mercurial, sometimes, he says.  But...  her actions were hard to get...  I liked the boy character more than she...



My legs are tired after all the running back and forth that night, coming around the slate top bar to pour wine and entertain familiar faces way back in the Wine Room's narrows.  True, I had help from Mr. Busboy who rolls through like a freight train, assembling great piles of plates cleared from the table straight to run right back downstairs and to the kitchen.  Again, with the special relationship between waiter barman and regular customers.  The six top, after we deliver the special chocolate tart, when I sort of think they might be done with the wine, the wife comes up to the bar, and oh yes, how could I forget, they like dessert wine.  Okay, fine.  I let her taste the Sauterne, and I let her taste the Jurancon...  The Sauterne, she says, okay, I'll open a fresh bottle and pour out six glasses...  They start talking about what they're getting, the notes, rutabaga, the older man says, and the wife requests my professional wine nose opinion about the wine...  Oh, mandarin orange peel...  candied lemon drop style fruit...  After years, you can pretty much make stuff up and it's true.  But as the good wine professor, I feel obliged to pour these very regular and good customers each a sip of the Jurancon.  Here, to cut to the chase, we have orchard, as opposed to the confiture of the Sauternes...  I pull a riff on the older man's rutabaga note to Carl Sandberg's Rutabaga Tales, and how he also was a great biographer of Lincoln, as if this was all meant to coincide with the birthday of the tall bearded lawyer sitting at position six, closest to the bar, his seat...  Several chuckle at my fool connections, puckish puns sort of...

Then there will be the further entertainment of the table further back...  The retired Amherst professor, a politically conservative political science expert mind...  The three are happy after their beefeaters, sancerre, gazpacho, three glasses of champagne to toast...   A. comes up from downstairs to give them the special chocolate tart with Happy Birthday scribed in chocolate powder dust.  Oh me oh my...

Finally I sit down, after a Beaujolais on the rocks, to eat my dinner, poulet fermier au curry, kept warm in the oven behind the bar in the narrow back, where now there is some rodent squeal going on...  I taste a few wines with it.  The Sancerre seems to work best as far as the whites, bypassing the Pinot Blanc for no good reason.  The Chinon doesn't seem to work so well, as far the reds...  The Rhone brings out the pepper, sure, but I prefer the Beaujolais...



Music night, Ken the guitar player of the most popular act here comes to  chat with the young guitar player whose giving us some great classical style all night.  It ends up being a late night.  And today, I wake up sad again.   The regulars M and E brought by their well-bred son who's back from Kenya for a quick visit,  and again, I was commanded to offer some form of a wine tasting to entertain and keep up the old lines of chat that bind us together all these years, many, from how they wrote their wedding vows under my care, back when you could smoke cigarettes on summer nights, and I tell them tales of the Old Dying Gaul and the chefs who come when Bruno is in town, doing my little impersonation of them.  One more taste, M commands, at the end, something I will share with him...  Okay, what the hell...    They too know I've written a book.  "How's your next book coming along," Elizabeth asks me.

The guitar player, I bring mine out from the office, here, the house guitar...so they jam together in the corner after 9:30 as old Gene with his ragged Popeye gravel voice goes on at the bar...  He'll go to the hospital for surgery on the spots on his old head...  His voice...

There was something on Facebook about how the best restaurant experiences come from restaurants who love their customers, and I explain to this last table, as A. is in her denim short street clothes, bye bye, how, looking out the back window that there is my own personal Via Dolorosa, as I come to work, dragging my cross, then in through the basement, and up the stairs, to give love to my customers when it is time...

But I wish, I wish I just had had a normal job, all these years, to ensure and protect, provide myself and my old mom with material comfort rather than sadness...  "I am a big loser," I think to myself, just a thought, and I go for a walk, to get out of the apartment to walk under the pines I do yoga with, I say with because they help me, my matt laid out on the soft pine needle earth.

I am forgetting the Finnish family who came in Monday Jazz Night, just as the door opened, as we were still getting organized and feeling weary.  The guitarist comes in, and later on he lets me play his, and I strum a bit, and the Finns tell me I was pretty good, this after I got them their drinks, a Sancerre, a Pigoudet Rose, two sodas for the boys.  I like Finns.  I get to chatting with them.

I am forgetting my impressions being back in the cityscape, how the roads make me feel cramped and nervous.  Driving in on 270 to the Beltway, I am reminded how, subtly, we are at war in this age.  The Nazism of real estate...  men driving their BMW sedans grimly behind their sunglasses, not striking me as messengers of any peace.  I walk with my yoga matt in my WETA bag, slowly, stopping by the little Korean market here in the Palisades for tuna salad and Boars Head sliced roast beef.

It is the Buddhist who most needs Buddhism, it occurs to me, as I shower, and get ready for work, the sticky bugginess of outdoor yoga washed free from my body.

Peter, his Christian name, the lawyer who's read my book, here and there, on airplanes back and forth, who has finished it, will be out of town for a month or so.  Before he leaves, he tells me, keep writing.

Thank you.


Front of the House.