Labor Day.  It's a sunny day, but I can't go outside with the ragweed pollen.  I go to get wine across the street.  Bill Giraldi, my new friend, an accomplished novelist who happens to live close-by--and I've just met him, dumb luck--is having a small dinner party over at his cool art and book filled apartment.  There's good gin, and cheese balls and peanuts to start, a few people to meet.

The host gives me a quick tour.  His girlfriend from a while ago used to hang out at the place where I was a bartender.  And she knew a woman I was friendly with, from that time.  We have a little man talk, as we look over the shelves.  Salter, he tells me.  I'll check him out.

There are books everywhere.  There are paintings everywhere.  My kind of a place.  Cool chairs, furniture.  Music.  A Bengal cat male kitten, beautiful bright stripes.  Friendly, rolling around, play attacking the party's guests, two men, two women, and then Mike, the blues harp player, joins us, as a beer, we all sit in the small living room.

The host is enjoying a Haydan Navy Strength gin and tonic with lemon and lime and a dash of Rose's.  Sure, I'll have one too.  Delicious.  We go sit down.  He's one of those people, as you knew him before, from a previous life.  You look in another person's eyes.  He brings out a vintage stereoscope with diorama two sides pictures of turn of the century scenes, one of Dancing Dervishes, in remarkable sepia three dimensions.  Amazing.  Also, a Chinese cemetery.  Classical ruins from the classical world.  I look at them.  As the cocktail patter goes round.  I touch base when I can.  The bald guy was a bouncer at The Raven.  Cool.  Ann, my chef friend, used to go there.

All these objects of art, all this great stuff, I wonder, as the party talks music and where we're from, where did it come from...  I ask him later.  "Estate sales," he tells me.  Oh.  Well, it makes sense.  There's a white leather Corbusier chair.  All this stuff is awesome.  My friend is a conservative, he's never smoked pot, his dad worked for the Company, and rather than get shipped off to Saigon during the war, he had the gumption to refuse, and ended up stationed in Paris.

I like art.  I want to ask him about all this stuff.

Squid ink pasta, after garlic bread, and salad, and I've brought a Chardonnay from Pays D'Oc, a Provence Rose, and my usual Pinot Noir.  The host doesn't drink wine, but the guests will.  Gin and beer, and scotch.  Fair enough.  Mike, my harmonica blues harp friend likes the beer Bill served him.  The crowd is very happy eating off of sturdy oval paper plates, while the cat roams and makes his light brigade attacks on his large friends.  And something, just the best I ever ate, I gotta say.

Up on the wall, in the kitchen, a picture of Padre Pio, and I say, ahh, yes, there was a man who could handle a pandemic, and me and my new old friend, we get each other.  I half remember later, our Padre Pio conversation, about the journalist who went to go check on him, and while pessimistic, came back fully convinced.  That's where I'm at too, these days.  Faith.  It will get you through, through a lot.

I mean, you might like good people, or bad people, but there's a lesson, in each and everyone of them, painful as indeed it often is, longterm suffering, believe me, which is that you become attuned to friendship, to its nature, its essence.  You have many many experiences, many experiments in friendship, even wearing your heart on your sleeve, but each one is a lesson, sometimes terrible, sometimes good.  And it can be quite painful to look into people's eyes with your own.  Yes, it can.  But in the end, it leaves you sensitive, sensitive to the tune of a mountain air, a melody, a long forgotten song.

I can't think of a great book that isn't telling that basic story.  How the hell does Ishmael become friends with this noble savage Queequeg, indeed, sleeping with him on the first night in that cold room in New Bedford where it all starts.  How does Kerouac get along with Ginsburg, or Cassady?  It's beyond all odds.  They weren't just the peers you would have found down at the local firm, Joe, Mike, people you might play softball with on weekends...  Something crazier, more human, deeper, a relationship from a thousand years ago, resuscitated from a peat bog, as all things are recycled by nature.   Friendships don't always go so great.  Then again, sometimes they do, if you're realistic, and have realistic Sangha expectations.  Sometimes best kept privately, to yourself.

And the window nature of the eye, as when you look someone in the eye, and what you see.

Later, looking out for me, he tells me he doesn't drink during the week.  Six pages every day, is his writer's rule.  And it helps to get out of the house, yes, as a professional, I know.  That used to be my rule of thumb, before I retreated to my little home monastery.

Watch yourself, be careful, he tells me, about the wine.  (Save the drinking for the weekends, discipline...)  He told me earlier I looked a bit depressed when we first met, in front of his beautiful '64 TR-4.  But I was lonesome, and needed a friend, and tired of dealing with mom over the phone so many times, trying to help, but not able to, beyond those extraordinary visits...  burdened down by not being able to help her, but then, you know...  to have to hear her with her mantra, when I tell her to look into the fridge for food, for wine, and hear her talking to herself, "help, help, help..." and often crying, boo hoo boo hoo, sob sob sob, "I can't take it anymore, help, HELP, boo hoo,..."  that's a lot to take.

But that's how it goes for all of us.  And we all live alone, at the end of the day.  The horror of it.  That's how it goes.   What did Vonnegut say?  And so on.  Was that it?  Melville said it in other ways. In All Quiet on the Western Front, they are eating flageolet beans on the front, to start, as the shelling starts.  Feed well, energy for the slaughter they will soon endure.  Himmelstoss and his leg, his beautiful boots under the bed.

One has an uncanny memory for dates.  I come up with them, sometimes, often, from I don't know where or when or how.


I get back to my apartment.  I spent much of Labor Day earlier picking up a bit, doing laundry, and it shows.  Guitars safe back home.  I wake later, feeling reasonably sober, and read the first chapters of Desolation Angels, before going back to bed, then waking later, tired, hungover, feeling like crap, why, why.

It's the day after now.  After the party.  The world is back to work, I guess, I gather.

And for the first time, I begin to think, I don't need mom calling with her crap.  I'm trying to save myself, and my things, and my life.  The apartment is clean now, something that took me getting out of the restaurant work, to tell you the truth, and then not falling into the next round of obeisance.

After the wine, to keep calm, beer, even Budweiser, from a tall can, is better over ice.

Jack Kerouac liked to sleep outdoors in a sleeping bag, when he lived in Orlando, or in Rocky Mount.  It was his thing.  It's a good lesson, one would gather.

I don't want to like Desolations Angels any more than I have to, dammit, but just a paragraph in I'm pulled into its beauty, words higher than nature the supreme, even.  Transcendent.  Even in the sobriety before the drunken sleep and awful waking, I know I've found something absolutely sublime.  An answer to that brutal world I saw down in Georgetown, hungry, tired, ragweed-ed, trying to fit in. Five hundred beautiful women of all ages all around my eyeballs, and then on M Street, black guys in open window Lexus playing some rap kind of music about "She's sucking my dick, sucking my dick," and there are children out amongst us, college girls, and that's sad, I'm sorry.

How can the world not be offering something better than that, all the baseness...

Mom calling me, jealous, putting it all out on the line, it's either her or me, and you are abandoning me...

Retreat to the Dharma, Kerouac on his fire watch mountain... the Celtic rhythm prose..