Bullshit

Misadventures in Drinking: The Depth Charge

Author: March 21, 2021 2 Comments

Note: This little essay is about alcohol, which means a more competent person would have a) written it in time to post on St. Patrick’s Day instead of (checks notes) x days later, and would have somehow arranged to partner with a liquor company that’s been sending him emails about trading free booze for promotion. Instead, here I am drinking on my own dime like a sucker and making terrible decisions like a … well, like a Somers. It’s kind of our brand.

FRIENDOS, we all know that Jeff likes a drink. I went to my doctor recently for my annual checkup, and the standard screening questions took a turn when we came to the part about how many alcoholic drinks do you consume. There was, not gonna lie, an awkward silence that lasted some time. The only saving grace came a day later when my blood test results came back and it was determined that I have the bodily functions of a much younger man. I have the liver function of a robust teenager, in fact. But it was a tense moment.

Now, my love for booze has been part of my personal brand for most of my adult life. It’s a bit hackneyed, sure, and a little Basic. But I believe we all have the right to be a little Basic. Just because a middle-aged man slurping whiskey isn’t exactly hip is no reason not to enjoy it as a persona, dammit, and I will die on that hill.

That being said, The Drink has not always been my friend. In fact, it has occasionally been a humiliating enemy.

THE DEPTH CHARGE

I am an incredibly simple person. I don’t like complexity, and I don’t like actually spending times on things. If lunch can’t be made in under a minute, I don’t want lunch. That’s what you’re dealing with. So it shouldn’t be surprising that I have never trucked with cocktails. If a drink requires preparation beyond a pull tab or a pour, I am not interested.

But! I was once young and foolish, just like you. So there was a brief period when I attempted to be classy and sophisticated and continental, which meant trying out cocktails of different sorts. The idea was to order something with a recipe so I could be very picky about the ingredients and preparation, implying all sorts of life experience I did not, and still do not, have.

There were failed experiments as I resisted my fate as a shot-and-a-beer type. I threw a Martini Party and downloaded several Martini recipes from the Internet, including a Chocolate Martini that yielded … regrettable results. I volunteered one New Year’s Eve to mix up a bunch of different specialty shots, including a Bubblegum Shot that resulted in one of my friends wandering the remnants of the party with a pie-eyed look on his face, draining the dregs of everyone’s drinks until he literally fell over.

But my most humiliating (and therefore best) attempt at cocktails involves something called the Depth Charge, which is not even really a cocktail, adding a nice layer of ridiculousness to this story that is very on-brand.

A Depth Charge is, in theory, a shot of whiskey dropped into a pint of beer. The idea, as it was explained to me, is that you drop in the shot and the chug the beer. Why? I have no idea. I had no idea then, and I have no idea now. Was I trying to impress a girl? Possibly. Does that make this even more humiliating? Definitely.

We were in a dive bar in Manhattan, the sort of place where you avoid going to the bathroom because you’re worried about contracting the Andromeda Strain. I don’t recall how the Depth Charge made its way to my table (which may explain my thought process, or lack thereof), but once it appeared in front of me, it was Challenge: Accepted! time.

I knew I was in trouble within the first few seconds. I dropped the shot glass into the pint glass and everyone looked at me like I was insane, which made me suddenly wonder if I’d fundamentally misunderstood the entire process. I am a man who never admits error, however, so I just lifted the roiling drink and tipped it back to the growing horror of my friends.

Chugging beer has never been a skill set for me, and things went south quickly. Whiskey-infused beer began dripping down my chin, all over me, the table, literally everywhere. I kept going (see above re: Never admitting error) offering a cheery thumb’s up to let everyone know that this was all part of the expected procedure. When I finished there was more beer on the floor than inside me, making the Depth Charge the least-efficient drink ever devised. There was a lengthy period of awkward silence.

I was later banned from that particular bar, for totally related reasons.

The moral of this story? Keep your drinks simple, or your Inner Idiot will seize the opportunity to make you look foolish. Ever since then, I drink my beer and whiskey quite separately, thank you. The results are just as humiliating, usually, but there’s much less mess.

Bullshit, Whiskey

The Most Polite of All Muggings

Author: September 10, 2020 0 Comments

Camouflage Velcro wallet

I GREW up in Jersey City, New Jersey in the 1970s and 1980s. It’s funny; people who have never been to Jersey City in their lives will often assume that it must be a crime-ridden shithole — and especially so during the 1970s — simply because they hear the word ‘Jersey’ in there (twice, even!). Or because they’re racist asshats and Jersey City is very diverse, that is also a possibility, yes.

I am here to tell you that Jersey City was a great place to grow up. I was a pretty free-range kid, and roamed the streets at all hours and never once got abducted or knifed or forced to kill innocent tourists as part of an elaborate gang initiation rite.

Of course, I was a very soft, eyeglass-wearing child. It’s possible the gangs simply didn’t want me.

Anyways, none of this is to say that Jersey City was a paradise. It had (has) it’s bad areas, and I did have several brushes with crime during my formative years. I once got a brand new Huffy dirtbike for my birthday, and about three days later while I struggled to ride it ON TRAINING WHEELS two teenagers came over, casually pushed me off, and stole it. Once, when my friends and I were hanging out in a park about one block from my house, we were accosted by a group of older kids who made off with my one friend’s leather jacket. Shit happened. It’s a city, after all.

But I’m not here to talk about those minor brushes with crime. I’m here to talk about the most polite mugging ever.

Road to Nowhere

When I was maybe 12 or 13, my friend and I went to the 440 Mall, probably to see a movie and/or play video games at the huge arcade that once resided there. It’s weird to Present Day Jeff (aka Very Very Aged Jeff) how important malls were to Young Jeff; much energy and time was spent scheming on how to get to a mall and how to fund those excursions.

Coming home, my friend and I got on the wrong bus. By the time we realized we were going away from home, we were in an unfamiliar and kind of scary-looking section of town. We got off in a panic, got ourselves oriented, and began walking back to the bus depot through some pretty sketchy neighborhoods. This is when I experienced the most polite mugging of my life.

A group of older kids surrounded us and began walking with us and chatting us up. They offered us cigarettes, inquired after our health, and then calmly threw us up against a wall and began searching our pockets. To say I was petrified would be an understatement. I’d watched television. I knew how these muggings ended. I prepared for death.

I remember I had a Velcro wallet with a camouflage design, because I was 13 and Velcro wallets were cool.

The kids, upon discovering that we had nothing but pocket lint and dreams between us, helped us up, dusted us off, returned our Velcro wallets and told us, cheerfully, that we were lucky because we had nothing worth stealing. Then they happily offered us directions and waved as they walked off.

I’m not making any of that up. They almost made me feel cheerful about being robbed. What’s interesting to me is that my brushes with criminals have always been kind of weirdly polite, while my interactions with police have always been negative and stressful. Weird, that.

Bullshit

The Avery Cates Series in Order

Author: August 12, 2020 10 Comments

Since I started writing new Avery Cates stories a few years ago, things have gotten out of hand in terms of keeping track of the order of the stories. With novellas that combine into novels like Voltron, it gets even messier. So here’s the master list of Cates stories, in series order.

AVERY IN ORDER

Short Story: The Kendish Hit

Original Book Series:

  1. The Electric Church
  2. The Digital Plague
  3. The Eternal Prison
  4. The Terminal State
  5. The Final Evolution

New Book Series:

  1. The Shattered Gears:
  2. The Burning City
  3. The Machines of War

Hope that clarifies!

Bullshit

All Creatures Great and Small

Author: July 30, 2020 1 Comment

I want to tell you about the summer I spent reading James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small in the galley of a tugboat.

A writing career doesn’t just happen. You come to writing in your own way, along your own path. By the time I was sitting in that tugboat’s galley, I’d already been writing stories for a few years. Sci-fi and fantasy, mainly, with some weirdo crime stories thrown in for spice. In high school I wrote some stories that threw wild Twilight Zone twists into careworn plots because everything seemed new to me, and I wrote some stories about high school kids who committed terrible crimes, disappeared for a decade, and suddenly showed up at their high school reunion to reveal what really happened while their former classmates gasped and sighed and schemed to seduce them. You know, typical stuff. Pretty bad stuff.

My parents, god rest their souls, insisted that my brother and I get paying jobs once we turned 14. Of course, my brother and I were generally loafing incompetents, so the actual finding of said jobs was kept out of our hands. My father worked at a local bank (this was back when there were such things as local banks), so he got us jobs in the mailroom. I spent a summer walking around an office building delivering mail and listening to music on my Walkman1. Then I would go home and my mother would confiscate my earnings and tell me I was lucky. I didn’t feel lucky, but you couldn’t argue with my mother.

The next year, however, that job wasn’t available, so we had to get creative2. My father had an acquaintance who ran a drilling company, and he finagled a job for me3. The job wasn’t very closely defined, so one Monday morning my Mom drove me to the asscrack of Jersey City4, and a bunch of befuddled and slightly hungover men pondered what in hell to do with me.

The Tug Boat, Exciting and New5

After spending some eye-opening days with the functioning alcoholics who worked for the drilling company, I was eventually assigned to help spruce up an old tug boat. The company kept a few tugs in order to tow their drilling platforms around, and this one looked and smelled like it had been bought at auction around 1870 and left to rot for a while.

My ‘supervisor’ for the tug reclamation project was an older gentleman who was also living on the tugboat6. This disturbed me, because I would show up every morning and he’d emerge from the cabin, coughing and scratching himself, which made me feel like I was visiting some distant cousin, because all of my cousins emerged from their own bedrooms coughing and scratching in exactly the same way7.

I don’t remember the guy’s name. Let’s call him Earl.

Earl never assigned me any work. He made a few vague suggestions here and there, usually without any sort of context or explanation, and I quickly figured out that I could ignore these suggestions with impunity. Earl would then go off to do mysterious things in the engine area, emerging frequently to smoke cigarettes. I kept waiting for Earl to burst into flames after spending an hour shoulder deep in gasoline and engine oil and lighting up. As the summer dragged on, this became an increasingly attractive possibility.

I was borrowing my parents’ car to get to work every day, which was a perk. Once, leaving the yard, Earl asked if I would give him a ride to a local bar. About six other guys piled in, and I remember being impressed with how fast Earl could move when properly motivated. He made it from the car to the bar within seconds. I was too young to appreciate the value of this skill.

Anyway, since I had no actual work to do, I spent a lot of time in the tug’s filthy galley, where I found a single book: All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot (a pseudonym). These stories are about a veterinary surgeon who lives and works in a small English town. This is not exactly what 16-year old Jeff would have chosen to read, but I didn’t feel comfortable bringing activities to the job. It’s one thing to sit on your ass all day for minimum wage, it’s something else entirely to flash about how little work you’re doing. So I had nothing else to do but read that book.

And I read the hell out of that book.

It’s delightful! And charming. And completely different from what I’d been reading my whole life, and in that sense, transformative. I’d never imagined I could be so enthralled with these stories of animals and quiet country life. Sure, boredom was a factor. Possibly also fumes of some sort. But it taught me that I needed to be a little more wide in my reading, that perhaps stories that had survive for years or decades or centuries did so because they were awesome in their own way.

Eventually, it was discovered that I was basically doing nothing on that tug. I didn’t get fired, because technically no one had told me to do anything. I was not and am not a lawyer, but I lawyered that situation. And basically managed to get paid to read a book, which makes me a genius under international law.

Bullshit, Writing

Sweat Equity. Sweat the Small Stuff. Sweat Everything. Sweat.

Author: July 23, 2020 0 Comments

Photo by Hans Reniers, Unsplash

FRIENDOS, I am a sweaty man.

I inherited this from my father, who was a deeply unhealthy man who could often be found eating entire jars of peanut butter at the kitchen table at 3AM. Seriously, we had to hide the peanut butter from him, but he always found it. When my father did chores around the house, he would tie a bandanna around his forehead to keep the sweat out of his eyes, because that man was one enormous sweat gland.

And so am I, despite the fact that I don’t eat entire jars of peanut butter. I can only conclude that this general air of sweatiness is inherited. The Somers genes are certainly miraculous. I try to imagine what possible evolutionary advantage this level of sweat could possibly afford, and the best I can come up with is that it lubricates us in terrifying situations so we can squeeze through extremely narrow spaces. This makes sense, as we Somers’ are clearly a prey species.

In the modern world, however, where we Somers’ are allowed to burrow deep within the comforting fluff of civilization and are thus spared from most forms of predation, this full-body dampness serves little purpose except to make me appear consistently nervous or consistently on the verge of a heart attack.

IN WHICH I MAKE MY WIFE UNCOMFORTABLE

There are people in this world who enjoy eating outside, al fresco, no matter the temperature or the sunlight situation. God love these people, these happy idiots. I am not one of them. I sweat under arctic conditions, and sitting in the sun while eating hot food (or cold food, or ice cubes, or just breathing in a steady and unalarming manner) causes me to perspire wildly.

My brother, Yan, is someone who can sit in full sunlight when it’s 105 degrees out and eat a piping hot bowl of pasta without complaint. Just thinking about that makes me sweat through my shirt. How this genetic disparity happened, I don’t know, though it supports my long, deep suspicion that my brother and I are not actually related.

The other day my wife, The Duchess, and I were sitting outside in the sun, for some reason, having lunch. This was not my choice, as I am well aware of my dislike for sweating, or being outside, or eating my own lunch like a sucker instead of having it fed to me like the emperor I was born to be. This was, in other words, a triumph of The Duchess’ will. Meaning she insisted.

It was extremely hot, and so my body did what it always done when I eat in the heat: It assumed I was being force-fed by Imperial Torturers and began to shut down in self-defense. This is also, apparently, part of my genetic code, and the reason that the Somers family has survived into 2020 where so many other famous families have not. There are no more Caesars or Plantagenets, friends, but the world is lousy with Somers’.

My wife soon realized the true cost of her victory. Staring at me in horror, she declared in a terrified voice that we would never dine outside again, nor speak of the incident. I went home and toweled off.

The Doom of Jeff

Being a Sweat Person doesn’t weigh very heavily on me, normally. This is because I am also a Recluse Person who hardly ever leaves the house. Under normal circumstances I can sweat my ass off in private and never have to explain to people that no, I am not having a heart attack, this is just how I am.

Someday, of course, I’ll have my brain transferred to a cyborg chassis (like in a certain book) and sweat will no longer be a problem. Existential dread? Possibly, but not sweat.

Bullshit

The Hair Situation

Author: April 29, 2020 0 Comments

FRIENDOS, after years of casual use in both my writing and my conversation I was recently forced to look up the meaning of the word hirsute. This is because the hair situation is getting dire. I’m not speaking solely of the haircut situation during our current emergency; as regular readers of this blog know, haircuts are one of my great obsessions owing to the social awkwardness of having someone touch your head and make small talk with you while wielding a sharp object. I regard the haircut as a huge waste of my time, but insecurity stops me from simply shaving my head or letting everything grow out to monstrous proportions, leaving me to simply complain weakly. Which I do on a regular basis.

No, while the haircut situation is, of course, dire, I am also an old man at this point, which means my body is in full revolt, which for some evolutionary reason beyond my understanding involves hair exploding out of unexpected places, in unexpected and unwanted volumes. Ears? Check. Nose? I pulled a nose hair out of myself a few days ago that was easily seven feet long. Back? Sweet lord. My DNA is apparently loaded with Gorilla bits. And I never really put much thought into my eyebrows until a year or so ago when my regular barber suddenly frowned mid-cut, retrieved some clippers, and carefully shaved what felt like a sweater’s worth of eyebrow hair away.

This is disturbing on the one hand due to mundane, common anxiety: It’s all evidence of advancing age, after all. It’s enraging for other reasons: I was promised (it might have been implicit) by the universe that adolescence was the last time I would have to sit by and watch helplessly as my own body humiliated me on a daily basis.

Full Body Sculpting

A big part of this horror is Reverse Vanity; I’ve always told myself that I am that particular brand of Cool Dude who doesn’t care about things like his hair or general presentation. This results in shaggy hair, sloppy clothes, and a generally dubious attitude towards Hair Product or Tools; when I let my so-called beard grow, I never trim it or groom it. I just let it grow wild until I look like an insane person and then shave it off, setting off a fresh cycle of shame.

But this is just a different kind of vanity, tied into the image of Laissez-Faire Jeff who is too cool to worry about meaningless stuff like whether he looks like Grizzly Adams after a rough weekend. So caring about the tufts of hair my body is now producing is off-brand, in a way, and doing anything about it would be seriously off-brand. So I just sit here, slowly being consumed by my own hair, which makes it sound like my body hair is some sort of parasite feeding off me, growing longer and more lustrous as I shrink and shrivel. Which is kind of what’s going on, actually, and now I am totally freaked out and regret writing this essay.

Of course, I have a complex relationship with my hair. First of all, the Blonde Betrayal. When I was tyke, I looked like this:

So I can be forgiven for assuming I would remain a fair-haired, adorable little moppet for life. Instead, by my teen years all my adorable moppetness had evaporated, leaving me the wreck you know and love. When I allowed my hair to grow in college, I didn’t do any sort of grooming (branding!) so it quickly became a pile of crap on my head, which made me feel less cool than I assumed long hair was supposed to. When I went to my old barber on Winter Break for a ‘trim,’ he sadistically ruined my hair to teach me a lesson.

I still bear all these hair-related scars. So all this weird new hair is just a cosmic insult.

Here at Somers Rules Ltd, however, we believe in science! to solve all problems, so I have embarked on an experiment to discover whether excessive alcohol consumption can cure the Hair Problem. I’ll keep y’all posted, though I suspect one look is all it will take to determine if it’s working.

Bullshit

Modern Problems Require Modern Solutions

Author: January 19, 2020 0 Comments

Photo by Scott Umstattd on Unsplash

SO, this is going to be a post about the dishwasher. Fair warning.

I grew up without a dishwasher. As a kid, washing dishes was one of the chores our parents assigned to my brother and I in exchange for our allowance. It was also one of the chores that they more or less had to re-do after we were finished because we were trash at it. As an adult, Present Day Jeff is disgusted by Past Jeff’s willingness to run a dish under lukewarm water and call it clean. But hey, I was, like, 10 years old.

In college, I was kind of a dick roommate. I was that guy who literally took all the dirty dishes out of the sink and put them in my roommate’s bed, to make a point. Which was not made. I can remember making tiny fists of rage every time one of my roommates took a dish out of the sink, washed it, cooked something, and then put it back in the sink and walked away.

It wasn’t until many years later that I realized I was kind of the dick in that situation, trying to force people to live according to my rules. I now embrace the fact that I am pretty much always the dick in every situation; this attitude has clarified many things for me.

Flash forward to today: I have complex feelings about dirty dishes and dishwashers. They’re triggering.

Is It Weird That We Only Own One Cutting Board?

The Duchess is a firm believer in the power of convenient modern appliances, and she has resolved to never wash a dish by hand, ever. I can respect this, actually, I really can. The problem is that we only have a finite number of dishes, utensils, and cookware pieces. And we’re only two people. When you do the math on that, it means that if you use the one and only example of a certain item — say, a cutting board — on Monday, and then put it in the dishwasher, it sits there until you accumulate enough other dirty dishes1 to justify running the dishwasher.

Which is madness. I need that cutting board every day.

Maturity — adulthood — is often more or less the humiliation of your younger self. Where once I saw myself as a rebel who refused to do the dishes well in order to spite my parents, now I am a man who does the dishes constantly in an effort to always have a cutting board available. I am, in other words, a small man shaking tiny fists of rage at my own dishes. No wonder I drink so damn much. You would too.

I wind up washing many, many dishes by hand every day in order to ensure I have them when I want them, but I admit this also contributes to the problem: Because I hand-wash so many dishes, the dishwasher never fills up enough to justify running it. Which in turn means I hand-wash more dishes, onward and downward until we’re all pants-shittingly drunk on the kitchen floor, laughing uproariously at our own incredible stupidity and meaninglessness. I mean, a star exploded billions of years ago in order to supply the atoms that I currently use as a flesh shell, and here I am getting pants-shittingly drunk while washing dishes.

Why We Write

This is why I write, I think2. In my fiction, I control the universe, and thus even if it never makes it to the page I can rest assured that the people in my fictional universe handle the dishwasher properly, at least according to my weird Universal Weak Theory of Dishwasher Protocol.

The urge to impose your will on the universe shouldn’t be discounted as inspiration; we love to talk about ‘storytelling’ and ‘world-building,’ but sometimes it boils down to a desire to create a sandbox where you can impose what you think is the right way to do things and then use a sequence of thought experiments to see how it might actually play out. At the end, having a marketable manuscript is just a bonus.

I also only have one vintage Playboy shot glass left to me by my father, and that baby gets a lot of use, so it gets hand-washed constantly. Just sayin’.

Bullshit, Writing

Goodbye, Year

Author: December 25, 2019 2 Comments

WE’RE in the end game, now.

Normally, I live my life like one of those only-in-movies characters who has some sort of specialized amnesia that makes them wake up every day like Frosty the Snowman, without any memory of their lives before. I live in the moment, not because I’m living like I’m dying as Tim McGraw instructed us, but because my brain is weird and crumpled and I am almost incapable of remembering anything that didn’t happen within the last few hours.

Oh, I remember things, kind of. They’re vague impressions. Let it drift. I’ll never remember your name, don’t be insulted. I often confuse my many, many Catholic cousins named Mary and John. Let it drift

Around this time every year I like to look back in anger on the year in writing I just had. It’s fun. And depressing. I am a man obsessed with statistics pertaining to his own existence, as if the number of things I accomplish will somehow protect me from being completely forgotten within a few decades of my death, unless I am lucky enough to die embracing another man under a mountain of hot ash and am discovered centuries later by fascinated scientists wondering about our relationship. So in these sorts of posts I like to tabulate stuff and somehow equate it with accomplishment, to stir up the illusion of forward motion. I am that guy who measures his life in coffee spoons.

MY YEAR IN WRITIN’

So this is Xmas, and what have I done? On the freelance side of things, I had a good year with a sad ending; I picked up a few new jobs (most notably over at BookBub, which has been a blast) but of course the Barnes & Noble blogs shut down, which was a total bummer. I’ve been writing for the B&N blogs since 2014, and it was an incredible experience. Not only did they pay well, the editors were uniformly smart, fun, and excited about books. It’s been a few weeks since the news, and I still can’t get used to not pitching every idea I have about books to them. (Seriously, I pitched a lot to my B&N eds. They must have braced themselves every time one of my pitch-bomb emails arrived).

Still, freelance-wise this was a good year. Anyone who pays their bills by writing words knows that every day is a fresh opportunity to starve to death, so making it to December without having done so is a triumph.

Fiction-wise, also not bad. I finished 11 of my monthly short stories, so far (and trust that I will finish #12 in a few days even if I have to kill all the characters in a plane crash). I also finished 4 other stories outside of that monthly exercise. I didn’t complete any novels this year, but I’m 50k words into one and 40k words into a short-story cycle, so I wasn’t napping. I also finished and completed 50k words worth of novella-length parts of the new Avery Cates novel The Burning City and published them, so there’s that. And my agent has two novels in hand that we think have legs, and that’s never a bad position to be in as an author.

I submitted a ton of stories (74, to be exact; note this doesn’t mean 74 separate stories, but 74 submissions of a few stories I currently think are great), as usual, and sold three of them, of which two have published: The Company I Keep in Life is Short and Then You Die, edited by Kelley Armstrong, and Zilla, 2015 in The Lascaux Review. My system for submitting stories is sloppy and disorganized and probably favors volume more than it should, but it is my way.

And I started a podcast, like everyone else in this sadly imitative world. The No Pants Cocktail Hour actually launched in December of 2018, but I produced 16 solipsistic episodes this year and had a blast talking about myself, as usual.

So, the stats say I had a good year. Active, creative, somewhat lucrative. I hope your own writing year was a good one. Tell me about it in the comments, or on Twitter, or by tracking me down in a bar and leaning in too close and putting your hand uncomfortably on my thigh as you tell me the tale with far too much detail.

Happy 2020, folks. It’s coming whether you’re ready or not.

Bullshit, career, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Short Stories, Writing

Thoughts On Going to Music Venues as a Young Man and a Not Quite So Young Man

Author: November 26, 2019 2 Comments

I chose an outfit like dressing up for Halloween, trying to attain a level of cool and threat that I could not actually pull off. Torn jeans, camou jacket, old Chucks, tattered old Mets cap. It is vaguely ridiculous how long it took me to dress for the show, but I am comforted by the fact that everyone else is just as concerned. We have visions of the sort of people who turn up in music clubs in New York City to see punk-funk metal bands and we imagine them to be terrifying.

I don’t change clothes, I just pull on a hoodie and go downstairs to wait for my friend Ken. I’ve been wearing the same pants for three days in a row.

The New York City subway system is a mystery, a sordid, dirty series of tubes and hot, humid stations where people glare at us. In the confused dash for one transfer, two of us are left on the platform, staring through the grimy windows in abject horror as the rest of us are carried deeper into the city. They are never seen again, and may still be there.

Ken drives. We linger for a moment in the kitchen, slightly awkward in that way old friends who haven’t seen each other in a while can be. We chat while I compose myself, making sure I have keys, cards, phone. I lock up and we stroll around the corner to his car, new-ish and comfortable. He asks where we should grab some dinner before the show, then suggests a gourmet burger place he likes.

We pregame by pouring cheap vodka into soda cans, drinking as we walk to the club. The neighborhood is dirty and dark, the streets empty. The people we pass scare the shit out of us but we pretend they don’t, that this is a normal Friday evening for us, prowling Manhattan’s dank corners.

Ken and I stroll through Jersey City to the venue, chatting. People are hurrying home from work, carrying take-out orders, talking on their phones. We’re talking about video games, and how I lack the basic skills of survival to play them.

The club is crusty and dark, the music playing over the PA incredibly loud. None of us had believable IDs so we have been stamped as underage, which allows us to enter the club but does not allow us to drink. I get a soda just to go through the motions and am shocked when it costs me $8, which is one-third of the cash I have on me.

The club is largely empty. We’re frisked pretty thoroughly as we enter, but I’ve wised up over the years and when I enter public spaces these days I bring nothing but the absolute essentials. No bags, no extra layers, no totems in my pockets. I’ve sweated through too many shows and know it’s better to be slightly cold outside than boiling inside. There are two bright, welcoming bars and I buy us drinks, local beers from local breweries that cost me $14. I don’t carry cash any more, and am informed there’s a $20 minimum for credit cards, so I leave it open.

The opening band fires up and the club is quickly divided between people who just want to dance (and people who actually like the band) and the rest of us. The rest of us hang around the margins, nodding our heads while the mosh pit instantly spins up. It’s too loud to talk, so you just stand there and nod. I can feel the bass line through my sneakers. My ears are already overloaded.

The opening band takes the stage and a small crowd gathers. Ken and I stay at the bar and watch politely. They’re not bad, and have a few true fans in attendance. I keep trying to hear the name of the band but I keep missing it.

In the bathroom, a fight breaks out and I am shoved into the urinal I’m urinating into, which leaves me soaked in pisswater. I am momentarily angry, but then figure this augments my image as a bad motherfucker and decide to roll with it.

In the bathroom, there’s just one other guy. It smells like violets. We nod at each other.

The headliners takes the stage and I fight my way closer. A mosh pit opens up around me, and I’m thrown violently against the wall of people around us. I push off and dive back in; it’s not so much dancing as just crashing into people over and over again. My glasses get knocked off my face, and are swallowed in the maelstrom, never to be seen again.

The headliner takes the stage and we meander closer in. Everyone stands, swaying slightly. Some people lift their phones to film and take pictures.

Heading home, I’m soaked in sweat and exhausted, half-blind and half-deaf. It takes something like forever to navigate the subways and trains back home.

The show ends with a fake-out encore, and I ask Ken why bands still do this ridiculous thing. He has no answers. On the drive home we discuss our holiday plans, and when I get home The Duchess is waiting and is amazed that I am home so early.

Bullshit