Jay Elias | You can take it with you

"I have wasted Time, and now doth
Time waste me"
- Richard II

2002-01-06- 2:26 a.m.

Nightclubbing Along the Via Veneto

Saturday night, and I’m back watching the fights at the house of mirth. Back over there, amidst the pot smoke and white Jewish boys from the Midwest yelling “Yo!”, as if the last six months haven’t happened; as if I haven’t gone broke and then back to some money while Gab headed of to Madison and law school. I haven’t been to the house of mirth in six months, and here I am again, turning down tubes and talking about good middleweights.
Almost two years of coming here to watch the fights, and I still don’t care for boxing. I still don’t know much about it either. It’s odd, for all my love of baseball and college basketball and so forth, I can’t seem to get into it. I’m not put off by the violence of it, I suppose I just can’t grasp its poetry. I caught a glimpse of it in a tape of the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ once, but this just looks like a couple of tattooed clowns pounding on each other. This is less interesting than a Pirates-Padres spring training game.
Pitchers and catchers report on February 14th by the way. Oh, yeah, like you’re not counting too.
I’m tired and my throat hurts (I’m coming down with something) and I’ve got a list as long as my arm of things that absolutely must be done tomorrow, but even so, when the fights end, I’m headed out with Gab and the mirth crew to the bars. Why? Because it is Saturday night, and this is my whole weekend, this is it, this is the one chance to be social and outgoing and part of this sweet life. 60 hours worked in the last four days and it is back in at 6:45 Monday morn, so better run wild while we can.
It is a pile into a cab and slide downtown kind of night. I swallow a handful of non-drowsiness Sudafed to try and make sure the virus building in my throat doesn’t totally revolt when I subject it to the thick cloud of smoke that will greet me. Of course, I plan to be responsible for at least half of that cloud, so in fact the only good the Sudafed does me is to make sure that I’m only half-exhausted. The other half will be completely jumpy from the ephedrine, which should combine with my constant sniffling to convince any potential woman I meet tonight that I am a fully wacked-out cokehead.
And my $3000 a week coke habit is really the sort of information I like to save for a third date.
Bass jumps up from the floor, some sort of heavy Biggie Smalls type thing. Damn, when did the Lower East Side turn into South Beach? Gab and I amble on over to the bar, ‘cause we’re not the ‘get down and grind with the honeys’ type. I shouldn’t drink. My throat really hurts, and it’s bad enough that I’m still smoking, and I’m really going to hate it if I have to work all week next week sick, but…. that damn Bombay Sapphire is calling my name.
Two hours later and I’m talking to a girl.
Her: “What was the last movie you saw?”
Me: “’The Fast and the Furious’. It was amusing. But mostly because I know that they’re going to make a sequel, and you can keep coming up with good titles for it. ‘The Fast and the Highly Irritable’. ‘The Fast and the Annoyed’. ‘The Fast As Hell and We’re Not Gonna Take It Anymore’.”
“Like the Twisted Sister song, right?”
“What?”
“You know, that song… (starts to sing) We’re not gonna take it… no, we ain’t gonna…”
(interrupting fast) “Yeah, no, I know it. But I meant like the movie though.”
“The movie?”
“Yeah. ‘Network’.”
“Huh?”
“Forget it.”
“How about ‘The Fast and the Irate?’”
I have a firm belief that lots of nice people meet other nice people in bars. Which leads me to the conclusion that there’s a trick to it that I haven’t learned, or that I’m not a nice person.
Later on my Sudafed have worn off and I’m sitting in one of those freaky deep couches that are all the rage now for the ‘lounge’ part of the bar. I fear that one day I will sit in one of those couches and sink in completely, never to be seen by my friends again. I’m not too broken up about it; I’m sure I’ll be able to make friends with all the other poor suckers who are trapped inside the couch with me.
All the girls here tonight are wearing the knee-high black leather boots that are almost de rigueur in the city in the wintertime. I’m not that broken up over the conformity, because I’m a sucker, and I think that they’re sexy. I wish that there was a style of men’s shoe that was an instant turn-on. I hear my female friends bitching about the price of those boots, but I think they must be worth it. I’m in my same scuffed-up Timberlands that I wore to work today. If it is true that the first thing women check out are your shoes and your fingernails, boy am I in trouble. And the Tims were over one hundred bucks; if I could get all the sex appeal of the girlboot for double that, I’d call it a bargain. It isn’t that I don’t have any nice shoes, it is more that I just really like my Timberlands.
Honestly. I once polished them and wore them with a suit.
In my cab home, I catalogue in my head the things that absolutely must be accomplished tomorrow (I must get a haircut. I must do laundry. I must pay the rent.). I get frustrated with myself over the time and the state of my lungs and my liver and my poor poor head. The nights like this begin to bleed into one another, and I lie awake some nights wondering what day or perhaps even what year it is. I remember Rome when I was fifteen, and the most exciting thing about Italy was that I could buy beer. I met a girl from New Jersey who was 19 and in college and I fell for her hard. She was nice to me, in the way I suppose college girls are to fifteen year-old boys who crush on older women and think that they are punk rock. She got married this past spring. Time is a funny thing, huh?

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Doesn't Take Much and That's Messed Up - 2004-03-15
Like Water Under Bridges - 2003-09-08
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An Administrative Announcement - 2003-08-11
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