So now I am fat, like 'Ti Jean Kerouac.   

You better lose that watermelon, says my old mom, from Lynn.

Paunchy, old middle aged, just like Jack.

Life's passed you by.

On the Road, all of it was good.  Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues, still celebrated by poets of by-gone days.  Desolation Angel, Big Sur.  

Just that you won't really write anymore.  Fame, or something poisonous, has sucked up upon you, stifling you, chasing you.  No more innocence, anyway, can barely spell it anymore.

Give some interviews, drunken.  Bloated.  You've paid the price.  Might as well, let them see it, still have some things to say anyway.  Just that they might be different from the other earlier less bitter days.  Wake Up, a biography of the Buddha you wrote, just as good as Hesse's Siddartha.  

I've seen the cruelty of the restaurant business, enacted on the innocent, when I was not the barman, a busboy bystander.  Get Jamie drunk.  He kneads his thighs like a cat.  His Jimi Hendrix looks get enough attention from the chicks.  He comes in and out, again like a cat.  So now the skinny old guy, a librarian at Georgetown University, or he worked there, pulls up in front of 2404 Wisconsin Ave.  With his white helmet on.  Lawrence is bartending.  Lawrence pours him out a shot of Jack, once Jamie has been primed.  The laughter, enough, okay, eggs him on, sure.  And then Jamie can not stand too well.  He tries to take the bike, getting onto it, maybe, I don't remember, this is thirty years ago at least.  Guy might weigh 140, 150.  Has a son.  Kadeem.  Smokes Marlboros, has the same laugh every day, kind of dry.  Finally, he realizes, he's too wasted to walk the bike, straddling it, backward, so he can pull away to the south, and get home on his Norton okay...

It was a shitty thing to do.

Lawrence did that to me once, when I came in for a decent lunch, Ann Cashion's brisket barbecue sandwich, before heading down, wearing my suit from Jos. A. Banks down to see the History Department a summer day, when their offices were open and back when you could walk in.

It's the old, have one shot, one shot of Herradura.  I know how to make his engine fire.

And then it goes on to ending up out in Arlington, so I can feed Lawrence's social life, out at the new Faccia Luna pizzeria the guys have taken next door out to Clarendon where more gold is.

I never became a history professor.  I never learned an adult professional skill.  But how to be mean, how to be cruel, if not to others, at least toward yourself, taking you your own along for a ride.  Won't it be fun.

So now I am fat, middle aged old, and paunchy, like 'Ti Jean Kerouac.  No longer in control of myself nor my fate.  Swollen in the belly, from what I don't know.  Not a thing to say.

A yoga book, a yoga practice, that's the way out.  No more self cruelty, the restaurant business, sucking it up, stale my skills, burnt out am I, from all the cruelty. 

The cruelty, for jack.

Jack watches The Seven Samurai wherever he is now.  Better than The Raiders of the Lost Ark, much as you might want to be Harrison Ford.  Just a better movie, a better franchise.  Gary Cooper, High Noon, that was enough, but they make Magnificent Seven, because they could and there were good looking manly men around to put sweat on faces and give the viewing audience a kind of buzz, a kind of forgetful high, whereas The Seven Samurai, you bathe in, you don't forget.  Shot in black and white, blends in the the dream life you have left still, or left behind.  Rain.  Each shot like a tea ceremony, carefully crafted.  An art to soothe you over and again.  Nothing, for the moment, anyway, left out.  Rice looks pretty good, at the end of a meager day.

Don't spoil it.  Don't write anymore.

But there's one more thing, before calling it a day.

The time Sietsma came.  It was a jazz night.  Jay had come back from his World Cup grand adventure to Brazil and beyond, as there had been a magnificent going away party for him up the wine bar.  Everyone coming out to see Jay, and to drink with him.  I had a cold.  I felt pretty sick, but this was a long one, and that's how it goes.  At some point, pour yourself some Ventoux, or some Beaujolais.  Everyone's here.  All the old regulars who know the ant trail way to the bar and how to hive on it.

Jazz Night.  We'd just been through a meeting, you know, take the red covers of the seat cushions off, and take them down to wash, Maria will wash them, and then we'll take them out of the dryer and put them back on.  But now you'll have to stretch them back around the cushions, and the zippers, all of this manufactured in Bali, Indonesia anyway, don't want to work anymore.

And Hod O'Brien has come to play.  Hunched over.  A legend of the be-bop keyboard.  Played with Chet Baker.  Impeccable.  The marathons he ran.  But now there's a cancer, somewhere, lungs I think.

His wife, she is, who sings.  What can  I, a mortal, say.  They are very good.  She takes care of him, and we all try our best too.

Jay says Vanessa will work upstairs with you.  We barely get ready before the door opens.  Sietsma has come in at least twice over the week before, a four-top over the weekend, at the front window, best table, very happy, and I saw him last week at a two-top, 21, with a friend, and he said hi to George the chef, who'd he given a good review to before.

Harried.  Table 56, there's one guy, and he orders a Manhattan, or, no, a Last Word cocktail, something like that, irritating, early for me.  Then Tom Sietsma himself is there.  Vanessa takes the order.  "Do your thing," she says.  She gets it.  

When his salmon arrives, he orders a glass of pinot noir.  In addition to a healthy taste of that, the Pinot, I think it was from the Loire, or the Pays D'Oc, but good, I bring him a taste of the Chinon, and also, I hope I did, of the Beaujolais, from Ed Addiss, Wine Traditions.  I don't talk him up with my usual friendliness toward restaurant people and professionals, and other people who get it, like the wine that matches...  The friendliness I get is to awkwardly tell them about old Hod O'Brien.  "Do you want to move over to a closer table so you can see better?"  No, no.  We're fine there.  There's a photographer here from the Post too.  

But I never open this night, to be myself, easily, engaged, happy, with Mr. Washington Post food critic, when we have lots on the line.  I feel a strained pressure.  I don't deliver my usual lines, "the wine gets lonely if no one is trying them out... paying any attention to them."  Ha ha ha.  It's probably true.