Just sitting around eating pretzels.
Think I'll go see a movie.
Listening to Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli playing the Brahms/Paganini Rhapsody. Fabulous. His take of the Bach/Busoni Chaconne is also marvelous. I might also add that I spelled the pianist's name right on the first try!
If anyone ever needed proof that being depressed can be incapacitating, I think I can provide proof of that today.
9:04:52 PM
It's later. Didn't make it to any movies, just wandered around outside, went to the cd store (where they're actually selling records for once, no 8-tracks though), tried to find an open bookstore but with no luck.
At the CD store I was looking through the Schwann catalogue. Testing my knowledge of composers by opening to a page and scanning a list of compositions to see if I can figure out who the composer is just from the list of their works. I usually get the major composers, but tonight I got stuck on Koechlin. It's not a real difficult kind of challenge, I don't guess. I mean you can approximate where you are in the alphabet by where you are in the book. And of course you could always just look at the composer name. But you do what you can when you need to keep your mind occupied, lest you lose it.
Trying to remember what I thought I had to say tonight. This is worse than I thought. Being alone like this. Nowhere to go. Everyone's away. Why did Christmas Eve have to land on a Sunday? Great God. This is an awful place. I hope people everywhere are happy. And I hope that Marek Kami�ski made it to the South Pole. Last I looked he was about 125 km from his goal.
They just mentioned Overlook Terrace on the WCBS traffic report. I used to live up near there. On Cabrini Boulevard, right at the George Washington Bridge. Fuckin' hell-hole, but mostly because of the roommate situation, not just the accommodations, which were also misery.
I wonder if sitting here with the clock-radio on my lap will make me sterile. The guy in the radio is saying that 20,000,000 people have been infected with AIDS, and that 4,500,000 have it right now. It's not slowing down. It will soon be the greatest epidemic of the 20th century.
I used to sit at home and transcribe the Larry King Show. This was when I lived on Cabrini Boulevard, before I had a typewriter or anything else to do. I did it by hand, in one of my blank books. I don't know what I was thinking, except that I had a stupid idea that Larry King was on the pulsepoint of the American mind. I think Johnny Carson was closer, and Larry is off on some other planet.
Now the radio's talking about the still unsolved mystery of the assassination of the president of Sweden 10 years ago. I didn't do it. And Tanya Harding may have gotten married, according to rumored reports. Or are they reported rumors? But now it's a commercial for Nobody Beats the Wiz. I really hate that store, it's so damn noisy and messy. Ah, Tanya does appear to have gotten married to someone named Smith. I wonder if she'll chop off his penis. Or was that another news story?
9:50 PM, according to WCBS.
It's strange to think about the things you keep doing in your life. The things you find yourself doing, the situations in which you find yourself, and the people you find yourself with time after time. I ask myself almost every day, How did I get here? What do I look like? I this happening to me? Did I ever think I would be here?
I remember asking myself those questions for the first time in 1991, while walking along Central Park South toward the Columbus Circle Subway Station. I was on the north side of the street, and my shoes were extremely uncomfortable. I still have those shoes, too. I think I may have had them since the 8th or 9th grade. At this moment I am wearing socks that I know I wore in high school, possibly earlier.
So this is what I look like tonight. I look as if I've had an especially rough year, and that I'm sitting here at home wallowing in my own self-perpetuated misery, but that's only half true.
Now they're doing a lumber commercial. Now it's 9:55:17. Keeping track of the time like this reminds me of the movie "High Noon," the duration of which can be measured by keeping an eye on the clocks shown throughout the movie.
Actually, this web site is starting to remind me of Krapp's Last Tape.
I like listening to news radio for long periods of time. The news summaries usually repeat, more or less on the half-hour. A lot of times they just replay the tape from the last news segment or the last traffic and weather reports. But if you listen long enough you'll hear someone screw up, as just happened a second ago. While the guy on the first tape was doing the Wall Street Journal Report, the tape of the sports summary from a few minutes earlier started playing, causing an ugly, meaningless counterpoint. But neither announcer flinched. Both tapes just kept playing, each maintaining their Happy News cadence, while some poor guy in the back madly adjusted the volume trying to silence the sports update.
I used to laugh myself sick over Kermit Schaffer's collections of celebrity Bloopers. Any time I pass "Jackson Hole, Wyoming" restaurant on 2nd Avenue I think of this one blooper that happened on a game show. The host was going around asking all the contestants where they were from, and one of them said "I'm from Ass Hole, Woodsachusetts."
Because of that blooper, I can not think of "Jackson Hole, Wyoming," without first thinking "Ass Hole, Wyoming." No offense taken, I hope, by anyone from Ass, I mean Jackson Hole.
Now I know that a lot of those "uncensored" outtakes were completely apocryphal (like the Johnny Carson/Zsa Zsa Gabor pussy-petting exchange, and quite possibly the one I just mentioned).
WCBS: An Egyptian woman arrives in New York with the gift of life for her dying brother.
10:16:18 PM
Now they're talking about prostates. Brief hospitalizations. Impotence. Radical surgery. Radioactive seed implantation.
In the traffic report which they repeat every seveal minutes, they keep mentioning Overlook Terrace, that there's a watermain break at 187th Street. I used to live at 178th. Noisy. Man, I drank a lot of beer when I lived up there, and I would hang my head out the window and offer a toast to the passengers in all the cars stuck in late-night traffic jams exiting the George Washington Bridge. I got a lot of smiles that way, and they all looked a lot more comfortable in their cars than I felt in my astonishingly cheap apartment. It was so stupid of me, I could easily have just fallen right out the window, another drunk just-outta-college wants-a-job-real-bad and might-die-waiting-for-it not ready for the big city bites the dust.
I spent a lot of time in those days wondering if I could ever get any of the things that I wanted, and why can't I ever have any of them. Now, I spend time wondering what it is that I want.
When I was unemployed for a few months in 1992 I sat around in that apartment on Cabrini Boulevard drinking constantly. There was simply nothing else to do, or so it seemed. I watched a lot of astrologers on the public access channels. One of them did her show live, and she took calls from the viewing audience. One night she kept complaining about the silence of her phones, and she kept encouraging people to call, and repeating her number, although it was clearly and always visible right there on the screen.
That was when I called. Drunk as the night was long. As soon as I heard my voice come over the TV I started rambling, and felt the thrill of contact to see her outgoing, if nervous manner suddenly withdraw into a deer-in-the-headlights panic. She was in my TV, but somehow the veil of celebrity that would normally cloud my perspective of anyone in my TV did not affect me with this particular person. She seemed like a poorly scripted boob, and somewhere in all that Genesee Cream Ale I thought that a verbal joust between a depressed drunk guy (who spent his unemployment checks on cheap beer) and a phony 3 AM public access psychic would create a class of dialogue that could thrill the ruling class, become an instant underground obsession, and in a century the conversation would surface in between the lines of the next generation of Theosophical tracts.
She announced my call with a question: "This is Mark from Manhattan?"
"Yeah," I said.
At that moment, the mis-typed words "Marn from Manhattan" appeared on the screen. After first asking if this was Mark, for the remainder of the call she addressed me only as "Manhattan."
"I'm just wondering if there's a heaven," I started, "and if I wanna go there." That's when the frenzied composure overtook her eyes. Her mouth opened slightly, and her eyeballs semeed to sink back into her head. The ghastly flourescent lighting at her studio highlighted the ugliness of her veins, and made it feel like she was right there in my room, no tv screen, no glass, no picture tubes.
I can't remember much of what I said next. It was terrible, though. I told her and everyone in the audience my real name, and I said something about running up to Indian Road and into Fort Tryon Park so I could shoot the stars out of the sky and have room to lie down and watch them land in the Hudson River. Her composure changed somewhat, and became more generically congenial as she let me talk and talk and talk, or possibly she was waiting for another call to come in.
After about a minute of this I asked her if I was going to get this job I'd applied for at a radio station in Alaska. She said "Go, Manhattan! Go to Alaska!"
I asked again "Am I gonna get the job?"
She started wobbling about and said "Yes, my son, you will get this job, I can feel it, Manhattan, I can feel that things are looking up for you."
The TV was on the floor, and so was the mattress on which I sat cross-legged. I found myself rocking back and forth in response to her wobbling. I screwed up my brow and looked into her eyes, which darted about in their sockets like some kind of jell-o.
"What about this woman I met today?"
She pointed her index fingers at her temples and said "Wait. Wait. You're overweight, aren't you?"
"No."
"Why not?" she asked.
I don't know what I said next, or what she could have meant by the previous question, but she suddenly smiled, I mean she was positively beaming, and said "You're gonna marry this woman, I can feel it, Manhattan. You should hang up the phone and call her right now and ask her to marry you!"
"When will I know about the job?" I asked. I think she was trying to get me off the phone.
"You will know soon."
I can't remember how the call ended. I know that when she hung up I was in the middle of asking another question. When I sensed that she was still talking on the TV, but no longer talking to me, nor I to her, I flung the receiver and fell back onto the mattress, dizzily looking up through the open window which faced the George Washington Bridge. Nothing but dark sky, wind and noisy cars. I may have laughed out loud to myself; later I regretted having told about my plan to shoot the stars out of the sky. Having revealed my plan, I no longer felt I could ever follow through with it.
That was neither the first nor the last time I had an encounter like that with someone on TV. Most of them I can remember a little more clearly.
There have been many times when I wanted to call the Larry King show, but could not get through the busy signals. It's always amazed me how celebrities and politicians are able to call in to that show at just the right moment so they can respond to something someone else is saying about them. I remember O.J. Simpson, Cher, and Ron Brown among others, seeming to have every fleck of luck on their side as they miraculously got put right through to Larry, seemingly at the very moment someone was finishing their comments. I find it hard to believe it's that simple. I wouldn't be surprised if Larry gave out confidential celebrity-only "emergency" numbers for his show. He's just the sort of person who would do that. God, I sound like a paranoid asshole.
Now I'm listening to the radio again. WCBS AM. They're talking in the news summary about some kind of memo, councilman Weiner, fires in stairwells and fire-retardant paint. 11:08:34 PM.
Cool, WCBS is offering $1,000 if their weather report is incorrect by five degrees or more. Something like that could have me listening intently for days, checking their reports against the internet weather data, which always seems to be 3 or 4 days old.
Now it's 11:11:11. Had to pace my typing for a moment to be sure the last 1 was typed right on the one-fullest second.
I might go outside in a few minutes.
What do you look like tonight?
