What helped was that both jobs were a continuation of the other.  If you were to take the job as a whole, properly, as one job, then you saw it.  It almost deserved a title.  But you did not see that looking at either of the particular jobs, the neighborhood bartender, the quiet writer trying to get as close as he could to nature while living near a city, such as fate had allowed, not until you saw them together, as one.

The job had something to do with being a moral being.  Part of it was, indeed, The Gospels, or a vague version of them, or perhaps of other lessons, sutras and so forth, a kind of monkish waiting on people, literally, first hand, a pouring of wine, an offer of bread, a wit over what exactly to eat, then scraping the plates clean at the end.   The writing part, which in many ways had gone bust, belly-up, was a facet of the same spiritual inspirations, and such is not odd, if one takes in the basic drives of literature and those who write it, from Kerouac to Tolkien, Twain, the ancients, the bards, the commercial bards...  And they too had to mix the physical, the grunt work, the beating of the pavement, or whatever it is that becomes one's own personal situation, the talk, the deposit of paychecks and the writing of checks, in order to get to that magic quiet time that always offered itself up for them as something alluring, gentle, and good, and kind and somehow, one knew, quite useful, and quite honorable, even though it was just a quiet unseen thing, a thing familiar with the gush of car tires along a rainy street at night, or a dark tree trunk wet with rain while walking out free at night before going all back to it...

(One would hope that such a definition would apply;  perhaps to make it applicable would be one of those acts we perform when reading fiction, an actual acceptance in the imagination's true depths of the belief of, say, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Tralfamadorans, the space aliens of higher spiritual realms in Slaughterhouse Five...)

It was a job.  Some job.  Just as all of us and them, self-appointed, self-appointed, just as Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Ernest Hemingway...  Jack Kerouac... the true free writers of America, in search of escaping the fake, the overly bright light...

And there should be a title for it, a job title, a description, something like a governing term, taxman, publican, judge, state attorney general, sheriff, soldier, officer...

And as any of those, you delegated.  You delegated, but you also did a lot yourself, seizing upon the possibilities latent in the job with your own two hands. to make something of it, a community, people able to talk to each other, to share the town they were in.  You delegated to the French guys, because they ran a great tight ship...  It was not that you delegated, it was that you participated in what they did.  They were in the institution.  You needed to be part of something.  Once there, you did as best you could.  And I closed the bar, every night I worked, I made it a bar.

There was, of course, a great humor, to tying to the two apparently completely different tasks together...  There was a great leap of the imagination to do that.

But what do you do?  You stand.  You stand where you are.  You've burned enough bridges, or rather, abstract possibilities possible, no longer now possible, so they, also imaginary, say...  There's no going back to the idle times of being a good happy student fulfilling all his professor's directions to a T.


And so.  And so on.

I was never a good writer, not good enough to be a stand alone one.  But what I did, it had certain underpinnings, and they were not revealed, without some embarrassment, without some fear of getting too personal with a customer, such as to share the book you wrote, about going through what really seems to the male mind as the biggest worst most complete failure there can ever be, meeting a great person, a woman, and somehow turning it into a disaster.


As such, with dual duties, with other duties, it is the pursuit of trying to make a living.  There is not much time for writing.


But there is time for honest writing.  For unadorned, maybe pointless sometimes, prose of some sort, some admission, some sort of spiritual journal one was occasionally allowed the energy to add to, not being a person of perfect energy....


Why did I chose Washington, DC...  It seemed there was a role here...  Was that available in New York?  I'm nor sure.  For then you'd fall, lost, as James Dean was lost, into a commercial kind of a role...  Actor.

The honest truth is, there are no roles that aren't just acts, not necessarily bearing upon the total reality at all.  So do the greatest rise above, as long as how they effect the world, a JFK, an Ellington...