Bullshit

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.

Having just read Supermarket by Bobby Lee, I’m thinking about all the time I spend in my local supermarket, which is a lot of time. A lot of time. Because I work from home the supermarket is directly across the street from my house. Which translates to dashing over there every time I am missing even the most unnecessary condiments or ingredients—like, literally, if there’s no mustard, even if I’m having a meal that I would not normally use mustard with, I am across the street buying mustard within seconds. Because I can.

This is what being comfortable with your middle aged-ness looks like, BTW. Buying mustard because you can.

Anyway, I literally am in the supermarket at least once a day, sometimes twice, sometimes, in a cascade of incompetence, three or four times. Due to its convenience I imagine you can buy a long list of unlikely things at the supermarket, simply because somewhere deep in my lazy lizard brain I want the supermarket to sell whatever it is I need, from socks to furniture to deck screws. And when you spend as much time in a supermarket as I do, you become aware of just how crazy a place it is. On the one hand you have the food abstraction, as everything is presented in a plastic-wrapped, nutrition-labeled unit. And on the other hand you have the people, who are kind of nuts. And on the third hand you have the company behind it all, which is probably run by alien lizard people.

Nutrition Units

Sometimes I think supermarkets are part of an insidious psychological experiment. On the one hand, I am so divorced from my wild, hunter-gatherer-farmer roots that if the supermarkets were all sucked into a temporal anomaly, I’d starve almost immediately, withering away in a matter of minutes as my DNA simply assessed the situation as impossible and gave up.

On the other hand, their stocking practices are clearly designed to test us all. The supermarket is probably the only business in the world where being sold out of something indicates a lack of interest advising towards a lengthy think before reordering. Based on how often I will discover some product or foodstuff that I really enjoy, only to never see it again, I sometimes picture the manager sitting in his tiny office pondering the empty shelves in his store as some sort of insoluble mystery, a puzzle beyond human comprehension.

Insane People of The Supermarket

Shopping for food is a gauntlet of microaggressions and minor humiliations. Just the other day I ran across the street to purchase a single item, which anyone will tell you is a rookie move: Buying a single item is basically inviting the universe to enrage you, because the difficulty in paying and leaving the store is the inverse of the difficulty involved in acquiring your groceries.

I got behind a woman who was finishing her check out; all her items had been bagged and rung up. All she had to do was pay and exit the store. Which took a phenomenally long amount of time, as she proceeded to treat the check out line as if she were alone in the world. She checked her phone, fished for her sunglasses, unscrewed the cap on her water bottle and took a sip, went through her pockets, and performed a dozen other small organizational moves while I stood there, my one item rung up, the point-of-sale just past her. Finally, after enduring thirty seconds of this, I reached past her to pay, at which point, naturally, she became offended. The checkout guy, for his part, was clearly three hours into a four-hour shift and wanted nothing more than for all of us to dissolve into Thanos Snap Dust at our earliest opportunities.

The Lizard People

The fact that the company that operates this grocery store imagines that anyone enters it for any reason other than it is the closest and most convenient place to purchase Doritos and other necessities of life proves their alien origin. The other thing that proves their alien origin are there insane promotions, which generally involve complex ?games’ that require their customers to collect inane pieces of paper in the vague hope of winning money or groceries. The rules are labyrinthine, and the end result is that you’re handed a stack of paper about an inch thick every time you check out of the store.

I get that I’m supposed to hurry home and tear open my … I don’t know, tokens? tickets? and do … something with them. But I don’t, because my life does not revolve around jumping through the hoops my corporate masters put in place for me. I throw those tokens away, because I am a normal person. If the grocery store truly wants my affection and loyalty, they could hand me a crisp $5 bill once a week when I check out. That would do it. But this game token business? Lizard people thought that up.

Also, the grocery store stopped selling alcohol a few years ago, which angered me unreasonably as I now have to walk two blocks, like a sucker.

You might be surprised to read this, friend, but I was not always friends with alcohol. Oh, I always wanted to be friends with alcohol, but it took me a long time to find my way in. Much of my wasted youth was spent fighting with alcohol, because I hadn’t yet found my true calling within it (whiskey). There were many evenings wasted drinking lite beer and other, worser things. Worser than lite beer? It’s possible. You just have to dig down into the Jagermeister-level stuff.

The Golden Road

Today I stand before you a disciple in the Church of Whiskey. Sure, I’ll drink anything, especially if it’s free, but whiskey is my first and dearest love. When I was a callow young man, though, I hadn’t yet figured this out, so I experimented, and almost killed all of my friends (and myself) in the process.

See, I knew there was a whole universe of booze out there I hadn’t yet figured out, and I craved that knowledge. I wanted to be that guy who walks into a swanky bar and just orders something very sophisticated and cool, but I was stuck ordering Coors Lite. Once when I was twenty-three and feeling saucy I ordered a Depth Charge without really understanding what is was, and things went … poorly. So I decided I would have to do some research, and I further decided I would do that research via parties that I threw.

This was a mistake.

Party the First: Ti Many Martoonis. My first foray into cocktails was a Martini party. Martinis seem inherently cool. First, the James Bond thing. Second, the sleekness of the drink: Two ingredients, unless you count the olive and possibly the olive juice for a Dirty Martini. It just screamed the sort of drink that grown-ups swilled while discussing, I don’t know, escrow and the Cold War. So I invited everyone over for a Martini party and grabbed some recipes for Martinis from the Internet. I think I had a Dirty Martini, a Chocolate Martini, a classic, and I had some gin on the side just in case some communists showed up and didn’t want vodka.

I woke up on party day sick as a dog. Like, seriously ill. I should have canceled the party and focused on making a last will and testament, but in what may be the worst example of trying an attempted mind over matter, I decided not to cancel. So a couple dozen people showed up, and I mixed up Martinis while on the verge of throwing up for several hours. At one point I actually retired to another room to lie down, because I thought I was about to die.

To this day I can’t abide Martinis or vodka. Or, ironically since it’s a mainstay of the Avery Cates universe, gin.

To say that the Martini experiment was a disaster is being kind to disasters. Although the bitter taste of humiliation saved me, I think, from being lured into a life of vodka-swilling, and thank god. Did my friends all wisely ghost me and refuse all future invitations? They did not. At least, not then. Since then? Sure, I haven’t seen anyone in ages.

The New Year’s Eve Shots Massacree. My next stab at alcohol sophistication came a while later, when I decided to hijack a friend’s NYE party in order to mix up a variety of fanciful shots. Shots are only acceptable when you’re young, in my opinion; the combination of Challenge Accepted! Syndrome and the obvious goal of not actually enjoying what you’re consuming is very on-brand for being young and stupid. And I was very young and very stupid.

My shot menu was disgusting. There was a Bubblegum Shot, which I can tell you right now was both extraordinarily accurate in terms of taste and extraordinarily horrifying in terms of basic human decency. There was also that time-honored Basic Bitch of shots, the Kamikaze. After that things get hazy, because even when you’re young and stupid shots are never meant to be the focus. For god’s sake, they’re designed to get you quickly inebriated so you can then slow down and enjoy yourself.

We … did not do that. The end of the evening looked like a zombie apocalypse movie. To this day I can still taste that Bubblegum shot, and my stomach flips when I think about it.

Did all these terrifying experiences drive me to the homely, Deadwood-esque simplicity of whiskey? Damn right it did. It also serves as the figurative slave leaning in behind me and whispering ‘remember, you are mortal’ every time I walk into a bar and decide that tonight is the night I give Dylan Thomas a run for his money. Because every time I think about drinking a bit too much, I taste bubblegum.

In the wake of this ridiculous and infuriating scandal concerning rich, famous people spending huge amounts of money to get their shiftless, dead-eyed children into top schools via an array of Benny Hill-level ruses, I am of course moved to ponder my own college experience. Which was largely uneventful; I wasn’t particularly interested in college, certain as I was that I would soon be a famous cult writer raking in millions from devoted fans, but I went because my parents made it clear that my alternatives all involved uniforms and asking people if they wanted fries with that.

I diligently did the applications, essays, and interviews, and got into some pretty decent schools, but wound up going to Rutgers for the in-state tuition and relative nearness of home, because I am lazy and timid. I also arranged to room with a kid from my high school, which meant my entire Freshman Year was essentially a waste of time, because all we did was delve into an ever-deeper simulated universe of our own making. We stayed in our room, made hilarious recordings to send home to our friends, and had deep conversations. We did not really attend many classes.

Yes, I was an asshole.

I don’t want to talk about grades or the socioeconomics of higher education or the fact that bachelor’s degrees in non-STEM fields are pretty much just coupons for entry-level jobs because they demonstrate you can wake up, hold to a schedule, and perform soul-killing tasks with aplomb.

No, I want to talk about Manhunt.

The Least Dangerous Game

You know: Manhunt. That slightly more mature version of Hide and Seek that adds an element of fascism and mob mentality to keep things exciting: One person starts off as ?it,’ the others hide. When It finds you, you also become ?It’ until it’s everyone hunting for the last person.

Old friends from high school visited one day in the fall, and since we were on an isolated campus with no alcohol or anything to do (and this was before Internet, people. Before. Internet.) we decided to go to the golf course on campus at night and play a game of Manhunt. In theory, this was a madcap, kooky thing to do—we had to register for the draft, and here we are playing a kids’ game! WE’RE HILARIOUS—and in practice it was, you know, kind of fun. Until we lost someone.

We kicked the game off: Someone started off as ?It’ and the rest of us scattered while they closed their eyes and counted. Some of us had clever ideas, like climbing trees, and some just relied on the shadows and terrain. One by one we were all caught … except one guy. Let’s call him Hanzo.

Hanzo was nowhere to be found. For a while this was exciting—Hanzo had found the greatest hiding spot of all time! Then it became boring. Then it became worrying. We gave up on the game and started shouting Hanzo! MANHUNT is OVER!

But Hanzo would not emerge from his hiding place. We began to hate Hanzo. He was ruining our night—possibly, if he was found facedown in a pond or something, our entire lives. Despite this reasonable fear we put in about an hour of searching and then returned to the dorms … where Hanzo was hanging out with another friend of ours, eating chips and watching TV. He’d gotten bored because of his hiding skilz, and simply wandered home.

We collectively chose to not speak to Hanzo for the rest of the evening. He now claims not to remember the incident.

What’s the point? Just that I was both an asshole and an idiot when I was in college. All I can say is, thank goodness Instagram didn’t exist.

I’ve worn glasses since I was a wee lad. When I first got glasses, my father, bless his heart, was convinced I was going to suddenly become Babe Ruth on the Little League field, where up until that point I was a bit more Mario Mendoza. His childlike faith that glasses were going to transform me into a star athlete still warms me today. Ah, Dad, you fool.

So I’ve been wearing glasses for most of my life—in fact, I really can’t recall a time in my life when I could see clearly without them, a time when I didn’t wear glasses. I don’t recognize myself in mirrors without them, frankly. Contacts? Jebus, the thought of jamming something into my eye is terrifying. Plus also I am incompetent and there is absolutely zero doubt that I would wind up with contact lenses embedded in my brain.

Trust me.

The Price of Incompetence

I was initially told I needed glasses to see the board in class, and so I didn’t have to wear them all the time. Now these first glasses—let’s call them Lenses Mark One—were huge. I mean, huge. Like, they were twice the size of my face, and the lenses seemed thick enough to offer views of the future, or possibly to protect my eyes from laser attacks. Like, they were big.

And expensive, relatively speaking. By this point in my existence I think it’s fair to say I’d become much more expensive than either of my parents had ever imagined possible, and the glasses were just one more insult. I mean, I was nine years old and already breaking down physically. Where would it end? Very likely in an iron lung, or perhaps a plastic bubble costing millions of dollars.

Anyway, the glasses were huge and so I only wore them when necessary, furtively slipping them on when I absolutely had to glean some information from the blackboard. Otherwise they went into my shirt pocket, and it took me about six days to lose them.

I thought my mother was going to have a stroke. Another pair of glasses was procured, and my parents sat me down and offered a rundown of my relative value when compared to the glasses, which was not in my favor. So I started wearing my glasses all the time, in terror.

True Grit

This did solve the problem of my general incompetence as it intersected my glasses, and I did manage to never lose a pair of glasses again, because, as noted above, I can’t even imagine living without a pair on my face. However, true incompetence, such as the kind I enjoy, is never defeated. It is only temporarily stymied, and although it took twenty years I did manage to cost myself another pair.

I took it upon my self to do some repair work in my mother’s basement, working with some concrete and such. I’d just gotten new glasses, and twenty years of wearing them had burned in some behaviors. Friends used to mimic my patented three-part nervous habit of cleaning my glasses, off my baseball cap, and running a hand through my hair. I did this about five times an hour, so while I was working with cement and sweat and dust in my mother’s basement, wearing my new glasses, I cleaned them regularly … using my concrete-encrusted shirt. By the end of the day I couldn’t understand why my vision was so blurry.

As I forked over the money for a new pair, I thought I could hear my dear departed father chuckling somewhere, toasting his son, the idiot.

Sometimes it’s weird to think I’ll be wearing glasses for the rest of my life … but no one who comes across my bones will know. The good news is that since I’m convinced the rest of you are figments of my imagination who only exist to amuse me, all I need to do to make you all go away is take off my glasses. Problem solved.