Jeffs Ongoing Fugue of Pain

A History of My Life

By Jeff Somers

PART ONE: in which I eat dogs and become acquainted with Jesuit cruelty.

Where to start? I was born in Jersey City, New Jersey to an Irish-German family of thirteen: six brothers, five sisters, two parents. Only four survived the great bratwurst famine of 1974, two of them being my parents, who mourned the deaths of my siblings by dumping the surviving kids in private school and taking a cruise around the world. In private school my brother Yan and I learned to sing songs from The Sound of Music and tap dance, skills which have saved my life on more than one occasion. After the cruise, my parents went on an extended tour of Europe, from which they have yet to return.

As a result, Yan and I returned from the 1981 semester at school to find the house abandoned. A pack of wild, rabid dogs had broken through the screen door on the back porch and made it their home, and my poor brother Yan was mauled quite badly before I could Tap the dogs to death. I set about nursing Yan and scavenging our ancestral home for foodstuffs and potable water. It was, after all, a long summer. We survived it by eating carefully salted dog meat and drinking rainwater which had so much lead in it I went temporarily color blind in August. When Yan had regained enough of his strength, we set about repairing our ancestral home and plundering my father’s abandoned stocks of pornography. The summer passed quickly, then.

In the fall we matriculated into high school. Our parents maintained a long arm and enrolled us in St. Peter’s There But For the Grace of God Academy, which was a pseudo-religious-slash-military establishment stressing Latin and self-mutililation. We awoke one fine September day to find the ancestral home surrounded by Jesuit Commandos, who piled us into an armored truck along with several other frightened boys. Yan and I cheered our fellow kidnap victims by singing The Sound of Music (Yan’s voice indistinguishable from Julie Andrews’) and we plotted a brisk escape from the truck; but once the rear doors were thrown open Yan and I were inexplicably ratted out by our fellows. My brother and I entered St. Peter’s as prisoners, and spent our first weeks there being beaten on a daily basis by a burly priest named Father Hump, until we could speak perfect Latin, although we could no longer remember our own names.

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Quite frankly, I’m boring as hell.

People like me should not have blogs. I have few opinions. I let my life wash over me like an incomprehensible existential nightmare. I aspire to make shit up for a living. I’m a comfortable white guy living an easy life, and there is very little about me that is controversial or thought-provoking. Unless a fleshy mid-thirties guy drinking whiskey and reading a lot of books is your idea of thought-provoking, which it shouldn’t be, especially since I forget about 95% of what I read in those books. I’m like the guy from that movie Memento, except without the angst. And the dead wife.

Good blogs, blogs that I actually heave myself off of my digital ass to read, have one of two things going for them, I think: Either they have a central point, a subject to focus on in which the blogger is at least a self-styled expert, or they have an attitude–you know, blogs that exist just to stir shit up. Either way once you get some Technorati traction you start getting traffic, and then fights break out in your comments section, and all is good in the world. Then, one glorious day, one of your posts is greeted with a comment that reads, in full, “first!” and you know you have arrived.

Sadly, I am none of these things. I am an expert in nothing–I am your classic, classic Jack of All Trades and Master of None. My bizarre attention span has led me to become vaguely acquainted with any number of skills–baseball, French, chess, computer programming, guitar–before wandering off to do something else, usually involving whiskey. I can write authoritatively about nothing that does not personally involve me, so I don’t do it, for fear of being mocked. Your mockery wounds me.

I’m also not much of a shit-stirrer, largely for the same reason. When you recognize your vast ignorance and lack of life-mastery, it undermines the confidence, which makes it difficult to flatly call other people morons. It’s too bad; angering thousands of people would do wonders for my traffic.  If anyone out there wants to be my personal shit-stirrer, posting terrible things under my name in order to drum up attention, please contact me. The pay is terrible, but I’ll buy you beers.

*Name that reference and I will send you a cookie.**

**No cookies will actually be sent.

I suspect the hotel may be on fire. At any rate, room service doesn’t respond and I’ve been reduced to collecting rainwater outside the one window I can pry open–the gap is too narrow for me to make an escape through, though.

My whole life revolves around beverages. I’m not sure how this happened, or if this is a writer thing, since writers have been stereotyped as hopeless alcoholics whose talents run proportional to their liquor intake. All I know is that my days are loose chunks of time defined by what I’m drinking at the moment. The fact that many of these beverages are alcoholic in nature is just coincidence, don’t you think? Right? Hello?

In the morning, it’s Our God Coffee. I’d like to be one of those mysterious, intellectual writer types who drinks obscure Moroccan drinks whilst sitting on their veranda, thinking deeply, but the fact is I have the palate of a junkyard dog. Just about everything in the food and beverage world pleases me, and the subtle differences of quality people talk about elude me. I’ve never met a bottle of wine I didn’t like, and the while I can’t quite say the same thing about coffee–there is bad coffee in the world, Virginia, and I’ve had it–I am still pretty easy about coffee. The only real rule is, no Starbucks. I have nothing particularly against Starbucks as an evil corporation sucking the life out of the world, they can oppress the workers and rip off the consumer all they want. No, it’s their terrible, over-roasted coffee that offends me. That shit could be used to remove paint.

So where do I get my coffee? I live near and work in Manhattan, fans, which means one thing: Coffee Carts run by Arab Men. Used to be $1 a cup for a large, now the evil of inflation has raised it to $1.25. It’s the best damn coffee in the universe, bar none.

The cart has been run by a series of Arabic men for years. They tend to work there for a few years and then disappear, without explanation. I assume there is a steady stream of family and friends coming into this country, getting jobs in the coffee cart empire, and then moving on when they’re established, but maybe it’s just the sort of job you can only take for so long before you go mad.

After coffee, nothing much happens for a very long time, and then there’s lunch. At lunch, I start working on a huge bottle of water. Now, I feel like a chump buying bottled water, I do. Water is water–at home I drink it from the tap, without any filters, and generally speaking I’m easy about the water. But any time I’ve tried to avoid buying the bottles, I’ve been frustrated, most probably by my weak brain and spineless tendencies. The water out of the tap at my office is deadly–when I did drink it for a week or so, I got sick every single day. Not sick enough to go home and call for lawyers in order to make my will, but nauseous nonetheless, and nothing makes a shitty day spent at work worse than nausea. Unless it’s suddenly realizing all that snickering talk around the water cooler is about you. So I’ve been stuck with bottled water, like a sucker.

After work, there is a beer when I get home–nothing heals like an ice cold beer, my beautiful babies. Whenever there is no beer in the icebox because of my incompetence, there are tears and recriminations, breast-beating and despair. Because I am an American, I’ve been drinking Yuengling. I completely agree with Homer Simpson, who once said of beer (well, he was actually talking about women, but he was using beer as a metaphor) “They smell good, they look good, you’d step over your own mother just to get one! But you can’t stop at one.”

Ahem. I must stop here before my wife or agent has me forcibly committed to a 12-step program.

After dinner, there’s more water. Hoboken water! Best water in the world. Of course, I’ve never been anywhere, so Hoboken water might suck for all I know. I mean, no one is pumping water out of Hoboken and bottling it, are they? Then again, from what I hear about bottled water, maybe they are.

Later, before bed, it’s a glass of good whiskey. I’d like to say that I sit and think deeply on the world’s problems while sipping some good 40-year old Scotch, but there’s only one thing true about that statement: I am sitting. The Scotch is  usually a little younger, and my thoughts generally focus on baseball scores and whatever is itching me that evening. Now you know, and you are no better for it. Maybe I should maintain a little more mystery on this site.

I don’t remember what my point was going to be. So I will simply stop typing, before making things worse. Bon soir, people!

When we first moved into this house, a neighbor said “These houses have been here for 120 years, I think they’ll handle anything.”

Yesterday was pretty nasty, but we survived the storm here in the NYC area, although this morning we do have a foot of water in the crawlspace and a new slow leak from the roof. But at least nothing caved in, slid away, or otherwise disintegrated. Our cats are also all dry, which is the most important consideration. If you don’t have cats, you may not understand that. If you do have cats, or have experienced the joy that is a wet, unhappy cat, you may have a glimmer of the horror we just avoided.

I’m at home today, forbidden to leave my house by the governor of this great state. Well, of course I could leave the house, but when the governor gets on the horn and begs everyone to stay home, why not take a work-at-home day, stay in your jammies, and drink beer all day while answering work email? And writing a bit in-between.

I’m working on something that might be of interest to anyone interested in The Electric Church, but that’s all I can say right now. Soon the world will know the truth! SOON, MY PRETTIES.

And that’s it for today. Read a few more posts to see some of the Ultra Cool People who have occasionally been nice to Senor Jefe over the years. They all deserve your attention and Amazon purchases.

This morning there was room service, a crust of bread and some warm milk. This is the first food I’ve seen in days. Living on cigarettes and Whiskey always seems romantic in the movies or in books, but it. . .ain’t. I’m yellowed and frail.

I don’t know where you live. The town I live in–when I’m not held prisoner in a hotel room and forced to Blog–is a nice small city, about a mile across, forty thousand people or so. The roads are in bad shape, the sewage is a constant worrying concern (in the sense that one day it’s going to rain really hard and we’ll all be swept away because of the 19th-century drainage) and the city government is your typical old-fashioned political machine. It’s glorious!

The main reason I live here: The bars. There’s a bar on every corner, almost literally, and most have decent whiskey.

We’re supposed to be getting the Mother of All Storms there tomorrow, and considering the drainage situation, I have little doubt my house will be swept away in the deluge. Pray for it, and my cats, who live there.

Like most small cities, we have a free alternative weekly paper that tries to cover the gap between local happenings and the larger New York City area stuff that the bigger newspapers concentrate on, and the Editor in Chief over there is also a writer–Caren Lissner. Caren’s had two novels (Carrie Pilby and Starting from Square Two) and a few smaller works published so far, and this on top of overseeing a journalism empire. She’s really talented.

And she’s very into her community–or perhaps pathetic writers desperate for attention–so a few years ago when my obscure first novel came out (the one you can now buy for a SINGLE THIN PENNY–a coin that is worth more when melted down and sold on the black market as raw metals–on Amazon.com) she sent over a poor suffering reporter to do a little interview with me (you can read it here if you want) and has always taken an interest in my writing.

The main thing to remember, though, is that she’s a kick-ass writer. Her work has often been classified as “chick lit”, but I don’t think that’s entirely accurate, unless you think any story about young women that involves some romantic angle should be classified such. They’re just good stories, well told, with interesting characters. What more do you want? Well, if you want a peek inside Caren’s brain, you can check out her own Blog.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to trying to unbolt the legs of this bed so I’ll have an ersatz club. My fingers are bloody, but I think I might be getting close.