Trials of a Local Artifact

Before I begin: Did anyone else happen to notice the cover of this week's Barron's? The headline was "Booze Is Back." Is it? I wasn't aware it had gone. Where did it go? Wherever it was, it apparently took me along. So I'm back, too, I guess, and glad to be.

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I want to explain what I mean when I say I don’t like most people. It isn’t that I’m a misanthrope. Not liking and disliking are two different things. (I'm using gerunds! I have Christy to thank for knowing that.) Not liking is an absence of affection; I’ve got nothing against these people, I just have no fondness for them and don’t really want to spend time talking to them. It’s a negative, passive activity. If I don’t like you, I’ll still laugh at your jokes if they’re funny. I’ll feel bad for you if I hear you’ve been in a car crash. I’ll buy you a drink on your birthday (if you promise to drink it with someone else, and yes, I do stipulate that when I offer).

Dislike, on the other hand, is active. It is a positive activity. It’s the feeling that makes your skin crawl when certain people come around, that makes you rude and bitchy to them right off the bat. I’m not saying I hope terrible things will happen to these people, or that I take joy in their suffering; on the other hand, their suffering doesn’t cause me to lose sleep, either. If I dislike you, I will make sure that your unfinished drink is the first one I take at last call. I will warn my friends to avoid you and beg your potential lovers to rethink the huge mistake they’re about to make. And behavior that would usually be met with a contemptuous glare and vicious sarcasm will get you bitch-slapped. See the difference?

When I do like someone, though, I'm pretty devoted. Also, I almost always like someone immediately if I'm ever going to like him at all. It’s very rare that someone I’ve known for a long time becomes a close friend; I tend to form my friendships very quickly. Gerlach was almost instantly one of my best friends; two hours after we met I already loved him. He was so much like me, it was weird; we felt the same way about things, saw the world the same way. I’m used to the way that people who’ve known me for years can sometimes finish my sentences; it’s a bit unnerving when someone you’ve known since...oh, late afternoon can do the same thing. Gerlach and I were doing that to each other. It doesn't make sense, but sometimes you just connect with people.

Christy and I were kinda like that, too, only not as fast. The first time I met Christy was back in late January. She happened to be sitting with a few friends of mine at Hank's when I walked in. I sat with them and we started trading stories. We sort of rotated picking topics, and when it was my turn, I suggested we should each tell the story of the worst insult we’ve ever received. I won’t tell everyone else’s (unless someone wants to give permission…), but I’ll tell you mine:

Rhonda, back when we first moved in together, had a friend who was a pornographic film-maker. Denny was his name; he was about seventy, and was the textbook definition of a dirty old man. He was actually so creepy that Rhonda wouldn’t let me leave her alone with him (I always wondered how she maintained this friendship before she met me).

Anyway, he really wanted Rhonda to do a film for him. Just a short piece, masturbating in the bathtub or some such thing, that would have ended up edited into a larger collection. He offered her $500. When she asked me if I thought she should do it, I said, “It’s your body, it’s up to you. If you want to, go ahead; if you don’t feel comfortable with it, we don’t need the money that bad.”

The next time Denny came ‘round, Rhonda told him that she did not, in fact, feel comfortable with it. He suggested I be present if she was nervous; she stressed that I would have been coming along anyway, with or without his invitation or permission. Then he said, “Well, would you feel better about it if it was both of you in the film?”

This was an intriguing idea, and she and I talked about it, right there in front of him. I thought, well, it might be kinda neat having an actual movie of us, taken by a professional (as opposed to just propping a camcorder on the edge of the bed á la Tonya Harding). Something to show the grandkids, you know? “See, Gramma and Grampa weren’t always old and hideous!” It didn’t make much difference to me that someone would be watching us do what we did all the time anyway (it wouldn’t have been the first time, which is a story for another evening); and frankly, the prospect of the film being distributed seemed pretty cool. I had visions of people coming up to me in the bar, saying, “Hey, didn’t I see you in Trollops of the Midwest?” or whatever he was gonna call it. And, as I told her at the time, “You know, we just moved into a new place, and we’re a little short of cash; we could really use $1,000.”

“No, not $1,000,” Denny corrected me. “The same $500.”

So basically, I was just gonna be a prop. I wasn’t even getting paid. My friends, that is an insult. “Get the hell outta my house, you dirty old bastard!” If he’d been twenty years younger I would’ve kicked him in the ass on the way out, too.

Christy loved my story, and we just started exchanging stories rapid-fire, and have been ever since. She and I started hanging out more and more, and now I see her pretty much every day. I have provided her with a passport into bar culture, and she’s thinking about applying for citizenship. She’s becoming one of us. Christy even got to come and hang out over at Mary’s after closing time. That’s when you know you’re in; unlike Beth Anne, Mary is not in the habit of having people over after work.

Gerlach, on the other hand, has pretty much dropped out of bar culture. He was out a couple of weeks ago, but it was the first time I’d seen him since…well, since before I met Christy, at least. He’s married now, and trying to do the responsible adult thing. He even got a grown-up job (sorta; he works days, anyway). And, as you can tell if you read his comment to the post "Drunks & Alcoholics" (since deleted at his request), for him drinking can sometimes be a bit of a problem. To most of us, alcohol is a friend (though sometimes a friend that doesn't have our best interests at heart), but to Gerlach, alcohol can be a demon. On balance, though we miss him, maybe his immersion in married life, in respectability, is better for him than we were.

So people come and people go in our insulated little society, and I suppose that’s the way of things. I myself have never really been into the responsible adult thing, so I guess I’ll stay here in the culture, and watch folks fall in, and other folks crawl out; maybe I’ll eventually be a sort of landmark, and people will see me and say, “Ha-a-a-a-ang on a minute…this far and no farther.” I'll be the marker at the point of no return.

Not terribly flattering, is it? Given a choice, I think I’d rather not be seen as a signpost, but instead as an artifact: A local artifact of bar culture. You can pray over me and touch the past (or at least buy me a scotch and hear about it).

Hell, maybe I already am an artifact. I am sort of unusual, by nature but also by appearance; the great fuck-off beard, the ragged coat and homemade hat, the torn and mismatched sneakers, the colorful flannel pants and endless array of offensive political T-shirts and zombie shirts—folks that meet me once usually remember me, and in my regular haunts, I become (as Andi said the other night) part of the furniture.

To illustrate: of all my haunts, the most precious was Calamity Café. It was a bar/restaurant, with a big sign behind the bar that said, “Saloon and Salvation.” It’s gone now; the Nazis at the public health passed an ordinance against smoking in restaurants, and Calamity (along with several other joints that, like the Café, had been around for years and are sorely missed) went under. The night they closed the place for good, there was a huge party, which I actually lost my job cooking at the Union for attending. I told my boss that I absolutely could not work, but he had a big ski weekend or something to do, so he told me I had to come in. I did come in briefly (only because I knew that if I got fired it would hurt the other guy who worked there; I’d made it plain that Calamity mattered more to me than my job), but no one was at the Union, of course; everyone was at Calamity. After four hours I’d made three dollars’ worth of food. There was no business to be done, so I left early. When the boss found out, he fired me. I told everyone at the party, “Yeah, we’re all gonna miss the place, but I’m the only one that got fired to be here!”

I’ll eulogize Calamity some other time. The important thing here is that the night of the party the place got trashed by souvenir seekers, and one of the souvenirs they took was the big, garish, rainbow-colored fleece pullover I always wore. It was genuinely one-of-a-kind, because Rhonda had made it for me by hand…she was brokenhearted when I told her it was gone. I was pretty pissed off about it, of course, and in fact still am. But in a way, I’m sort of honored, as well. That place was the heart of the campus area, this whole neighborhood. I thought, I’ve been so much a part of this place that stealing something of mine counted as stealing a part of Calamity...I must be an artifact, after all.