May 26, 1978 East Village - Journal Entry

Tonight is the big Gemini party. The four of us invited everyone we knew in New York. Not everyone likes everyone and Kim is scared there will be fights. I tell her not to worry. I'll be the birthday bouncer. I think she was worried about me fighting. My guests are Bruce, Lewis, who couldn't get into CBGBs last night, Ro, Alice, William Lively, RR, Pud, Klaus Sperber, Anthony with Cookie, Willem, Clare Hartnett, Michael Stumm, Fred and George from the SRO, I invited more men than women, but not everyone is 100% straight. Should be fun,

LATER

I was momentarily saved from temporary destituition by Mark's timely letter saying that an unemployment check arrived from the Boston School Committee. James Spicer had lied to me and Mark Amitin said, "He stole several checks, so it looks like you don't owe him any back rent for that place on Park Slope, but he asked if you still have his typewriter."

"Fuck him. He stole over $250 and lied every inch of the way. Plus I repaired the typewriter.

Mark took my side, at least to my face and said, "Then it's yours."

"We both got what we wanted."

"Not really, James wanted to sleep with you.

"Not a chance." James was still attractive. In the 50s he had fucked James Dean. All he got from me was to drunkily oil my feet like Mary Magdalene did at the Last Supper for Jesus according the the New Testament."

James has gone from moderately heavy drinking to serious drinking and Mark said, "He's headed to drunk's grave. He's looking like shit. The curse of the Irish."

We Irish do drink to exces, although I don't know, if it's a genetic curse or how we dealt with the British oppression. My drinking worries me, but I'll stop worrying, when I stop drinking.

My first drink was with Paul Keenan. Dry Vermouth samplers from his father's liquor stash in their basement. In sixth grade he and I raised our desks to take a slug under the noses of the nuns. I never really got drunk until freshman year at Xaverian. Dave Quann drove his family station wagon down to Horseneck Beach. It was packed with us two, my brother, my next door neighbor Carl, Phil Milan, Kenny Doyle, and Charlie Carr. At the beach we mixed Bourbon with pepto-bismol. I got so drunk that they had to secrertly carry me up my stairs to my bedroom like I was a wounded soldier fleeing the victors. Inatead of bleeding I puked pink for three days. My father knew what ailed me and patted my stomach. More puke.

After that adventure I drank in moderation until I left high school. Those last three years were so pure. CYO and Surf Nantasket dances, school, never any homework, track, no friends, Janet Stetson as my girlfriend, the Smith-Menconi feud over Ava Gardener, church every Sunday to hide my atheism, dry humping Janet, we never went all the way, I lost my scholarship failing German and religion, but my mother wanted me to go to a Catholic school. I hated it.

But I didn't drink.

Recently I wrote my mother a letter. When I went up to Boston we sat at the kitchen table and she said, "I read your letter. "I'm so sorry. I didn't realie how unhappy you were. I feel like I was a bad mother to not have seen it."

"You weren't a bad mother and I hide my pain from everyone. I never told anyone about it. The one place I felt safe from here. With my family. Outside was very different. I was never safe there except for with Sister Mary Osmond, Brother Karl, and Janet. Everything else dangerous."

But I had books as my refuge.

With them I could go anywhere other than here.

LATER

Today is the first summery day; high cloudless blue skies and a warm wind from the south carrying the scent of the sea deep into Manhattan. I am tempted to hitchhike up to Cape Cod and crash in the dunes south of Provincetown. Take the subway to Pelham Park in the Bronx and stick out my thumb on I-95. I could be in Truro before sundown. I haven't been there in two years. I ask Alice if she wants to go.

Her reply, "You must be crazy."

No, I'm not crazy nor beserk nor mentally challenged. Most of the Cape is very white. Very unfunky. I doubt if there are any punks there. BC students off-seasoning as a summer cops. BU coeds serving fish to old tourists. Mashpee Indians, the Silent Minority, glowing in the sun like martini drunk lobsters, Points of interest tourists on holiday for two-week holidays away from the rut of the work cycle, hackneyed scenery artists selling seagull paintings, homos and dykes in P-town, hippies and the really rich on Martha's Vinyard and Nantucket. Miles and miles of beaches covered by teenage sunworshippers happy tobe where they were at this stage of their life as long as it wasn't raining,

Cape Cod was not Times Square. No hustlers, whores, runaways, pimps, narco pigs, and thieves, or junkies. I feel comfortable in either place. I can't go anywhere. The Gemini party is tomorrow. I am a new me in New York, still a New Englander, my accent is unmistakable and my thirst for violence comes from teenage battles with everyone from Southie and beyond. My friends here regard me as an anomaly. Rough trade James Spicer once said.

Who cares? .

General Tso's Blizzard - 2010

Christmas is a time for family. Mine was on the other side of the world in Thailand. I had a ticket reserved for a January 10 departure. My sister insisted on my spending the holiday with her in Boston. She was worried about my head, since our beloved father had passed away in November. I boarded a Chinatown bus northbound to South Station. Christmas Eve was with friends and family. Christmas was strictly family. My sister missed my father and so did the rest of us. Our parents had been good people.    My plans for the weekend were fluid, until I discovered my nephew Matt on the telephone. He was calling his airline for confirmation of his flight to DC. All departures on the East Coast had been canceled for that Sunday. The US Weather Service was forecasting a major storm. 24-36 inches. Amtrak was sold out. The only out from Boston was the Chinatown bus. Matt and I packed within minutes and my sister drove us to South Station. We caught the 11AM bus. The snow was light, but the traffic was heavy. People were trying to get home before the worse. Upon our arrival in Chinatown I offered Matt a place to stay in Brooklyn.    

"I got to be in work tomorrow."    

He worked for an internet company. It was not affiliated with the CIA. At least that was his cover and I had been brought up to not ask questions about jobs in Washington. I put him on a DC-bound bus and took the F train over to Brooklyn. It was only 4PM, so I stopped in Frank's Lounge for a beer.    

Several of the regulars were in their Sunday seats at the bar. We drank several rounds before looking out the window onto a terrifying scenario. The snowstorm had been upgraded to the wintery tornado. The accumulation was already ten inches and there was no sign of let-up. None of us had anywhere to go tomorrow. The radio had announced the trains were being taken out of service.    

"We where we are and nowhere else." Homer announced in his thick Mississippi accent. He was happy to be in Frank's. It was our favorite bar, but we were hungry. He made several phone calls for take-out.     

The only response was from a Chinese restaurant up the block. I ordered the General Tso's Chicken extra chili. Homer followed suit.    

"You know General Tso's Chicken doesn't exist in China." It supposedly was invented by the Hunan-born chef T. T. Wang in 1972.     

"How the hell am I supposed to know that. I ain't ever been to no damned China." Homer traveled mostly on a straight line. Brooklyn to Philadelphia, Mississippi, his hometown. He certainly hadn't seen any snow in his youth, but plenty since he left the Delta over fifty years ago fleeing a lynch mob. He liked it back there now. Family and "The crack has gone out of some of the crackers, especially since my shotgun ain't never out of reach."    

"Well, I have." Only one time to Yunnan, Sichuan, and Tibet in 1996. "And there was no General Tso Chicken."

"I don't care about no China. I'm here in Brooklyn."    

The traffic on Fulton was extinctized by the snow. There were no pedestrians. The drifts were over a foot. We started to fear that our food wasn't going to come and we would have to survive on the stale packets of chips from behind the bar, but after a half-hour the door banged open for a delivery man covered by snow. He held two bags of food. We cheered his arrival and Homer gave him a $5 tip.    

"That's because Tipping ain't no city in China and a Chinaman will deliver your food even when the US Mail can't get through. Here's to the Chinaman."

We raised our glasses and ate like this was the last meal on Earth.    

Looking out the window that's just the way it felt.

February 20, 2026

A wet afternoon with the meteorologists forecasting a nor'easter bearing down on the East Coast for the weekend. Nothing like the Holiday blizzard of 2010, but this has been a hard winter and it ain't over yet.

Champagne At High Noon

In 1970 Xaverian-Westwood High School was all-boy. Still is. I was a math major. My foreign languages were Latin and German. Typing 101 was for football players. Our team was Massachusetts State Champs. 9-0 in the Catholic Conference. I ran track.

Typing 101 class was taught by a woman, instead of a black robed brother. The only female in the school. Mrs. Pepper. A zaftig thirty yeear-old divorcee from the suburbs beyond 128. Every student was male. Many of her class were on the football team. I took Creative Writing instead of Typing 101. I never fathomed the effect of this teacher not taking this class. I wrote by hand. My mother typed out my poems.

In 1976 I moved to New York. I showed up at 55 Remsen Street in Brooklyn bag in hand, expecting a warm greeting from Ro. The soft-skinned artist from the Hillbilly coalfields was the reason that I left Boston in a stolen car. We had been having sex every weekend for a month.

"You look like an angel under candlelight, she had said the night we met at David's Potbelly on Christopher

Lyrical. Love. Sex. New York. A magic formula.

A month later I knocked on the door. Her ex-boyfriend answered the knock.

"Ro's not here."

"Where is she?"

"She left to study art in Paris.

I recognized this scene from PETRIFIED FOREST. Bette Davis' character leaves the desert after a failed writer sacrificed himself, so his insurance paid her studies at the Sorbonne. I had no car and returning to Boston was not in the cards, so I moved into an apartment with a gay impresario from the Riviera Cafe. James Spicer had an extra bedroom in Park Slope. He had a typewriter. I wrote a screenplay about a hang glider thief.

D....Descending.

My typing was shit.No help from Creative Writing. My grammar was even worse. I should have paid attention in English 101 or taken Typing 101 with Mrs. Pepper. She wore mini-skirts. The football team went 9-0 three seasons in a row.

Back in Park Slope my fingers sought letters on the keyboard like an elephant attempting to play Chopin. I typed with beauty without precision. My instrument was an Olivetti A series. I wrote the Detective Poems on this machine.

In 1982 I deserted Reagan America for France. Ro had returned to the States. We had another affair. She never kissed me. Another woman broke my heart. She was in Europe. Where. No idea, My job in Paris - physionomiste at the Rex Club on the Grand Boulevard. The boite du nuit had been financed by Actuel, a counter-culture magazine backed by an aristocrat ne'er-do-well. His New York writer Bernard Zekri liked my detective poetry. My broken meter was very very punk five years after the ANARCHY IN THE UK. Violent Femmes, Toure Kunda, the Slits, the Bush Tetras and numerous other bands performed at the Rex.

At the door and inside the club I met the underbelly of Paris. Models, drug dealers, artists, undercover flics, writers, poets, dancers et al. They came from everywhere. Paris was the center of the world outside of the USA and London.

A German from Hamburg asked, if I could transcribe his girlfriend's interview of Bryan Ferry for Vogue. Vivaca was a top model from Georgia. A girl that beautiful never had to take Typing 101. Jurgen was a handsome tall playboy. Three years older than me. He offered 1000 French Francs for the job. Almost $200US. I said yes and took the Metro from the Marais to 16th Arrondisement. I arrived at noon. Jurgen lived in a small house on Rue de la Tour.

Stark modern decor. He sat me in the white-walled living room with my typewriter. A tape recorder lay on the table.

"Do you need anything?"

No one knew what he did for money, but he drove a 1967 T-Bird and flew around Europe. His clothing caeme from the best designer's in PAris, Milan , and London. A jet-setter of questionable means. Same as Dennis Hopper in Wim Wenders' AMERICAN FRIEND. One of my favorite Wim Wenders' movies. Jurgen knew him of course. He knew everyone.

"Some champagne and a glass. Crystal, if possible."

Jurgen smiled and left the room. He returned with a bottle of Cristal-Louis Roederer and a single crystal flute. He thought that I was cool. I thought the same of him and we became friends to the end, despite my shitty typing and today I opened a bottle of Prosecco with my good friend, Andy Pollock in Fort Greene. It was before noon. I drank my fill before 2pm.

Here's to you, Jurgen and Mrs. Pepper and all the bad typists in the world.

It's Post Time.

ps I don't drink anymore.

86ed from the Buffalo Bar - 2012

From 2012

I first walked into the Buffalo Bar in 1997. The bar on Sai 3 became my local in Pattaya after I moved to Soi Bong Koch in 2002. The beer was cold, the open-air atmosphere was a welcome change from the go-go bars' tobacco-reek, beer lout falangs, and more than a few of the hostesses were desirable. My ex-wife understandably hated the place and didn't buy my excuse for frequenting the bar.

 "I only go there because it's not far from home."

It was less than two minutes away by motorcycle.

Telling a lie would have sounded better, but the truth was much easier to remember.

My constant companion was my little dog Champoo. She sat on the bar and lap at a small bowl of Heineken. The girls loved my Szhi-Tzu. They knew her name, but not mine, but nothing nice lasts forever.

Eddy, the fortyish owner took up with a young Belgium thug. She relinquished the daily running of the bar to Sandy, an old crow from Isaan, Thailand's poorest province. The mama-san's constant cawing grated on the ears and she insulted the best girls like Cinderella's stepmother realizing her beauty had faded for good. They left in droves.

Only Tuk remained, which was enough for me.

She had plenty of salacious stories from her past and present.

One night I sat with Tuk and Champoo. My dog was having her usual. Champoo didn't like Chang. It was either too strong or bitter. She's been doing this over three years. Everyone loves her, but this night Sandy tells me to get Champoo off the bar.

"Dog dirty. Dog smell. Dog not come to bar."

I thought about it a little. I had been coming there for years. Buying drinks for everyone. Never complained when they added a little chisel onto the bar bill.

I wasn't having anyone speak to Champoo like that.

"Just give me the bill. I'm leaving. You know what. I'm never coming back here as long as you work here."

"Good." Sandy didn't own the place. She only worked there.

"Good for me too. Save money. And I tired of hearing you speak."

"Good you go too." Sandy screeched with her eyes wide. She was angry at me and Champoo. "You not special. You same all farang. Come and go. Come and go. One day die.

"And you're the same as all women. You get old same."

The tone of the conversation descended down a slope slippery with expletives in Thai and American. The bouncers rushed into the bar, ready to throw out an unruly foreigner. Seeing me they stopped in their track. I bought them pizza. Sandy gave them shit.

"Don't worry boys, I'm leaving."

"And don't come back." Sandy shouted from behind a phlanx of bar girls.

"No problem."

Outside the bouncers begged me to incite Sandy to a fight.

"You slap her no problem." Dao the head of security winked at me. She was no one's friend, but my mother didn't raise me to hit women and to be honest Champoo was a little dirty, although no more than most of the old farangs haunting the Buffalo or me. At least she never sweats. Not even when she's drunk.

So there ends a beautiful relationship between me and a bar. Funny, not sad at all. Then again there are 3000 other bars in Pattaya. One of them has to be right for me, but in the end I knew Champoo and I would come back to the Buffalo.

After all it was right down the street and neither Champoo nor I liked driving home drunk.

ps THe BUffalo Bar was still there in 2022.

46/30 Mu 9, Pattaya Sai 3 Road, Bang Lamung, Chonburi, Pattaya

A Quiet Place To Drink

Luis Bunuel wrote in LAST GASP "I also remember a bar at the Plaza Hotel in New York, a busy meeting place which at the time was off limits to women. Any friend of mine passing through New York knew that if he wanted to find me, he had only to go to the Plaza bar at noon."

Like Luis Bunuel I long shared the Spanish director's perchance for drinking in the early afternoons. With no one, but the bartender and the handy man. Quiet solitude, a double gin-tonic, half the ice, twice the gin. My locals in this century the 169 Bar on East Broadway and Frank's Lounge in Fort Greene. The solitude sheltered from the day by stygian shadows served by Dakota at the 169 and Tim at Frank's. The music guiding the way through the afternoon. Paradise.

Dives of Pattaya - Entry Date - Aug 3, 2007

Aug 3, 2007

Wikpedia defines a 'dive' as a rundown drinking establishment offering the cheap drinks of a high alcohol content to a questionable clientele frequenting the bar for the sole purpose of drinking and not petty drinking either.

New York City had been loaded with such dubious haunts on the Bowery ot the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. 50 cents a beer and $1 a shot and no red-faced stockbrokers lusting after big-haired secretariesb on a Friday night. Only busted-down drunks with a couple of front teeth like Pattaya during low season.

Wendy Mitchell who wrote NYC's BEST DIVE BARS considered a good jukebox, a seat at the bar, an affable bartender, and not-too-bright lighting as essentials for accreditation as a dive. Gotham Books' staff prided itself on having drank in most of them. My favorite was the beach bar in the Rockaways. Drunken Indians and transients at a end of a subway line. Everyone knew this was nowhere.

Pattaya is reputed to have 1400 bars

No one can claim to have drank at all of them, although some Englishmen have sacrificed their livers in the attempt.

For Queen and Country.

None really qualify as a dive, but a few come close.

I've never seen a juke box in my 20 years in Thailand. Not a pin ball machine either, although many have condom dispensers in the bathroom. The music tends to be HOTEL CALIFORNIA or pop music for the girls. Lights too bright with bar stool stressed by overweight drinkers and bartenders with moods rivaling the Wicked Witch of the West. Drinks might be cheap but the measures are more a whisper for hard-drinkers.

There are few exceptions.

The Welkom Inn on Soi 3 with its dim lighting comes close. You can usually get a seat and the old ladies behind the bar are good-tempered despite having to listen to the drivel of drunken farangs day after day after day.

Soi 6 bars are sleazy and dark, however no one goes to a short-time bar to drink. 90 baht for a thimble of vodka and tonic. The Bus Stop isn't bad because the music is almost punk. Viking Bar is awful, but Mint used to work there. maybe she will again once her boyfriend's money runs out.

The only actual dive is Maggie May's on Soi Chaiyapoon.

It only features drinking.

No girls.

Stale peanuts.

Sports on the TV.

The dregs of society on the bar stools.

"Drinks for me and my drink," Mickey Rourke called out in the movie BAR FLY about the poet Charles Bukowski's drinking life. People are shouting out the same in Maggie May's. The music sometimes sucks, but the beer is cold and during happy hours as cheap as it gets in Pattaya.

The other day I saw Dave from the old Dang Bar. We had fought on Soi 6 last winter. He had called me a spineless cunt too many times. Something about not liking that I didn't drink in his bar. 50 year-old men fighting on Soi 6. My mother should be crying in heaven over that sad spectacle.

At least I won, Ma.

I hadn't seen Dave since the fight and said, "Hello."

The bald Aussie nodded and drank his beer.

Maggie May's.

You wear it well.

#1 Dive of Pattaya

Still open in 2023

Maggie Mays, 383, 21 Soi Chalermphrakiat 25, Pattaya City, Bang Lamung District, Chon Buri 20150, Thailand

ANGUS

I had a Scottie in Paris
1980s
Angus
Not really mine.
Bridget's,
But the Vogue model was rarely home.
Angus and I were alone
A lot
We went drinking together
Angus liked Kronenburg

He lapped the beer from a dish
On the bar
Not much
He wasn't a serious drinker
Preferred to be on the floor.

Angus was always on a leash.
He loved to roam around the Brassierie d'Ile.
A few snouts of beer too
But once he had had enough
Angus pulled the leash.
The tiny Scottie had strength.

Once he wanted to go
We went
I drowned my drink
We set off for home
On Ile St Louis
Along the quai
The Seine running to the sea
Angus sniffing dog pee
All the way back to Rue des Deux Ponts.
How I loved that dog.
Dirty
Shaggy
Dear Angus

Drinking Yourself To Death

Every week the Pattaya Media highlights another farang leaving this mortal coil from suicide. Favorite methods of self-demise tend to be jumping from a condo, poison, or hanging yourself with a plastic bag around your head, but few people ever comment on the most popular technique ie drinking yourself to the grave, since the process takes too long to be considered suicide. Still you do hear friends saying about the decreased, "He drank himself to death."

While drinking yourself to death might not be pretty, it's certainly not as ugly as hitting the pavement from a 7th floor balcony plus you're in good company.

Oliver Reed for one and the church can't ban you from a churchyard burial at which your friends will say, "At leat he went doing what he did best."

So for those desperate souls seeking solace in a final solution.

Get yourself a beer.

Maybe twelve.

A bottle of vodka and one of gin too.

At worst the near-death experience will scare you back from the edge as long as you don't get on a motorcycle during this binge, then you'll have people saying, "What was he thinking trying to dirve in that condition?"

And we can't have people speaking of the dead like that.

THE BEST FORM OF FLATTERY by Peter Nolan Smith

Several years ago midtown traffic was snarled by the security measures protecting foreign dignitaries from any harm during the annual UN General Assembly. Crosstown streets were closed east of 5th Avenue and a beeping tentacle of the congestion packed Madison Avenue. My bus took 20 minutes to cover ten blocks. I was late for a gallery opening on 78th Street and abandoned public transportation. My walking pace was accelerated by two panicked calls from my landlord AP and Billy O.

Our dinner guest, an Irish hedge fund banker, was on a 'craic'.

"This is polite society up here." Billy O was looking for clients. He was a real estate broker in the East End. Most people living above 72nd Street had money, especially in between Park and 5th Avenues. "I'm afraid that he's going to shag an old heiress."

"Would be the worst thing to happen to her? When I was living down in Palm Beach, I dreamed about seducing a wealthy octogenarian with three weeks to live."

"You would have given her the best two weeks of her life." Billy O and I went back to the 80s.

"At least." I was never stingy with love or lust given the right circumstances, however my time on Palm Beach had been off-season. Secondly those crones with money knew the game. Men fought over them at the Leopard Lounge. I was too much of an outsider to brake inside the circle.

Except for once.

"Hurry up." Billy O sounded desperate. "He's offering the owner a line of blow."

"Ten minutes."

I made it in 15.

The police had blockaded 72nd Street for the passage of POTUS. Obama was in town to speak at the UN. High-level conversations were scheduled between the Israelis, Palestinians, and our leader. Peace initiative # 257. The presidential cavalcade passed at 65 mph. A fast-moving target. I waved to what I guess was his car. My support for change remained strong.

I crossed 72nd Street and hurried the final six blocks to the gallery, which was located in a small townhouse. The crowd was gentile. The artist hailed from the Hamptons. Some of his paintings had crows in them.

Two women were complaining about the crows on their property.

"They're bad eating and worse as pets." A tall man in a Versace suit slurred from his slouch. It was Irish Johnny. His accent was pure Hollyfield drenched by the slobber of art wine.

The two middle-aged women in matching Chanel summer drag glanced over their sloped shoulders at the intruders. Their noses wrinkled with disdain. They had the expression down pat and clattered away from Irish Johnny in spiky stilettos.

Irish Johnny staggered to the bar and grabbed two glasses of Chablis. The first one lasted a second. The second balanced his careen through the gallery. His trousers were rolled to mid-calf and his sneakers were unlaced.

Thankfully he was drunk enough not to recognize me from drinking at an Eastdhampton bar a year ago. I didn't say hello, but nodded to Billy O and my landlord. They signaled to keep an eye on Irish Johnny. The banker was difficult work after closing time on the NYSE. I engaged him in a long conversation on John Kelly, Ireland's premier DJ, and drinking at the Shelbourne Hotel Bar. Irish Johnny couldn't have been happy and neither could the gallery owner.

The dead drunk was a member of the living drunk.

Billie O and AP schmoozzed the rich. They were a hard crowd to work, but the two had been laboring in the Hamptons for years.

AP spoke to a prospective new client. He owned a football team. His girlfriend was an old friend of mine. The connections were snaking together. It was time to leave. Irish Johnny was hitting on a painting.

"How much you want for one night?"

Billy O took charge. Irish Johnny was his boy. They proposed dinner at Danielle's. A posey place. I begged off that future. Billy O and AP said, "Come."

"Veni, vidi, ibam."

"I came, I saw, I went." Johnny Irish was a Latin scholar too.

I waved my goodbyes and walked to the 77th Street Subway. Lex Line to Bleecker Street. D train to Atlantic Avenue. Key in the front door at 8:23. I climbed the stairs to my apartment and wrote about Hoegaarten Beer. My wine-weakened fingers were slow on the keyboard.

A knock on my door.

AP.

He wanted to smoke some pot.

"Dinner was fantastic, but you were so right to go. He never broke open the bag of cocaine."

"Better to have a $20 bag with a friend than an 8-ball with a fiend."

AP and I smoke some weed. We drank some wine. We listened to garage rock, our favorite genre of music, although he loved the Beatles and I hated them as pop poseurs. At least we agreed that WORKING CLASS HERO by John Lennon was brilliant.

"You know I really love having you live here." AP considered me a NY legend as long as I paid my rent on time.

"Thanks." I loved living here too.

"No one in New York is like you now and no one writes like you, but I have to say one thing and that's you have been plundering old writing and putting it on your website as if it was new."

"So you noticed?"

"I'm one of your most faithful readers."

I had been adding stories to gain girth on treads of interest." It wasn't much of a defense for AP.

"You should be writing all the time."

"Agreed." I love writing on the 4th floor of his brownstone. My view of the Brooklyn skyline. The changes of the sunset. His kids sleeping on the lower floor. Their falling asleep to the MC5. "I'll try to be more original."

"No one is more original than you in these days." AP truly was a fan. "All I want to see is more new."

"Oof." More work.

A sign of the times.

"I promise to not rob the grave, unless it makes a nice flow."

We smoked more weed and drank the rest of his Hoegaartens.

They were good.

EVERYDAY DRINKING by Kingsley Amis

Not everyone is cut out to be a drinker. It's an exacting devotion. Appreciation and dedication are not to to be found at TGIFs or mall beer joints, unless the serious drinker has no other choice, since everyone knows that drinking alone is a serious indication of alcoholism. As long as there's one other living person in the bar ie the bartender, then you're spared any accusations of being a drunk.

What's the difference between drunks and alcoholics?

Drunks don't go to meeting and neither did Kingsley Amis, who posthumously published EVERYDAY DRINKING in which the author decalred about his morning after, "I have a hang-over bad enough to think I'm sprouting antlers."

Mr. Amis was not a wine sipper.

In fact he resented anyone drinking wine other than at dinner as a lightweight.

I'm sure he would have forgiven a Danish sailor/friend on the Isle of Wight for drinking rose wine, since his doctor had warned Kurt that vodka was destroying his liver.

Wine would have been kinder, except the Dane drank 16 bottles of rose per day. Five before breakfast. I'm sure that consumption level would pass Mr. Amis' demands.

Mr. Amis favored cocktails, preferably a gin tonic. He would go to the cinema with all the appropriate mixers in his pockets; lemon, ice, tonic, glasses, and gin. A man for the ages who never let his unconsciousness be his guide only his companion as do most men in Pattaya, drinking capitol of the Orient.

EVERYDAY DRINKING has an extensive list of drinks, but like most drunks we like to keep things simple.

Faster to get it down.

I have perused this Amis collection several times at the bookstore. I doubt it will make it to the lending library, but if it does it won't be staying there long, because I have fast hands.

Too Much Beermas

Neil Nepola, my doctor, has advised that I curtail my drinking until Xmas.

"You're getting heavy and I don't like the readings from your kidneys."

"I only drink a little."

"Yeah, right." Doctor Nepola knows me since college. "Stop and desist."

I will try, if only to regain my girlish figure.