Monthly Archives: April 2006

Check Please

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We walked over the Gowanus Canal and it shown in the setting sun like a mirror reflecting the odd shaped draw bridge and the piers and the trash and the writings on the wall. Jimmy wanted to take me to a place on Smith Street and he seems to know all the best places so what the hell? I’ve never eaten poorly with Jimmy… The chef sends out things that waiters call “an amuse” and Jimmy knows wine and sometimes the chef even sends out wine. It’s a a pretty good time.

The only problem with Jimmy is that he’s not like everybody else. Most people drink wine and become stupid and silly and happy, but not Jimmy. I’m not saying he’s a bad drunk. He’s not one of those guys who drinks a little and suddenly wants to start a fight… No it’s the exact opposite. The more wine he has the more earnest and thoughtful he becomes and so after the plates of anti pasta and pasta pasta and meat and sweet treats and the bottle of primitivo and the bottle of Amarone he gets onto Rumsfeld and the war and how war is a thing that forces you to change philosophy and to adapt.
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“No war comes off like anyone ever expected it to… that’s just the basic historical fact. That’s rule one of war. The art of war is to adjust to these changes swiftly, like a gymnast adjusts his balance. Sun Tzu says…”

And frankly I stopped listening. I have strict policy of drifting off whenever anyone quotes Sun Tzu, but Jimmy went on and on and ordered more booze and I’m more or less sure he cleared up the whole mess over there in Iraq all by himself. I sure as shit hope so… I was loopy and trying to catch the waiter’s eye. I think the only thing I said the last half hour of the meal was: “Check please.”
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Raint

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April said she needed a gun. She said she didn’t feel safe in her studio at night anymore and I knew she’d been mugged (if you can call it that) only a few weeks ago. It was more what you’d call a drive by, only the guy drove by on a bicycle and grabbed her purse and peddaled into the park. As usual there was no money in the bag, but it was a Fendi… a gift from her mother and one of the few gifts she hadn’t returned for the cash.

“It had a juanty style,” she’d told me… ” And beautiful leather.”

A gun would have been no help in her scenario, but she promissed to buy me lunch at Joe’s Ginger and it had been a while since I’d had soup dumplings. We went to a gun shop in Little Italy and the whole thing took on a cinematic quality. There was a guy behind the counter right out of central casting and April kept taking the revolvers in her hand and then snapping open the cylinder and counting the chambers.

“Don’t you have anything that shoots five bullets?” She asked the man.

“Lady, they’re called six shooters for a reason.”

“Yeah, but six is a terrible number. I’d feel much safer with five. It’s my lucky number.”

“I got an automatic that shoots eleven,” he said.

“That’s better, but I need a revolver,” she said. “My uncle had one with five holes.”

“Must have been an antique,” he said.

“He was a collector,” she offered.

“He have any interest in selling them?”

This was going nowhere, so I started whining about being hungry and why don’t we eat and think about it some more over lunch and April actually smiled and agreed and the man behind the counter gave her a card in case the uncle wanted to sell his five shooter and we walked up Mott street past the fish stalls and vegetable stands and the whole street smelled of that particular Chinese brand of fecund death.

“Forget about it Nick. It’s Chinatown,” I said.

“Huh?” April said distracted.

“Forget about it April. It’s a movie.”

“What is?”

“Chinatown.”

“That’s where we are now.”

At the restaurant we sat quietly and didn’t talk about the gun store. The dumplings came and they have a small amount of warm soup inside the wrapper. You eat them by placing them in a spoon and biting a small hole in the dumpling skin and sucking out the warm liquid. When the dumpling is drained of juice, you can take a bite, or swallow it whole.

“There’s something about eating these,” She finaly said. “That makes me understand the thrill of being a vampire. I don’t think I want a gun after all.”

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Sakura SANd

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I had a dream in which all the women I met were pregnant and they would appear at social functions thin and grinning and announce to the world that they were “due any minute”, or “expecting soon” which was quite normal, but for the fact that they didn’t appear pregnant at all.

Later, You would see the women on the street suddenly shiver and swell up and go into labor – instead of producing babies – they would burst forth great billows of pink taffeta and silk. It was like a little improvised explosion of bright fabric and all around the city you would see more and more women so adorned, as if in ball gowns and prom dresses.

OBOLLS

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It was another miserable party with Roger running around the room complaining about the caterers and how they only spoke Spanish and Irish.

I said, “You have Gaelic speaking waiters?”

”I don’t know what they’re speaking, but I can’t understand a word of it and where’s the petit fours?”
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Pair Is Pear

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It was another miserable night in Paris. The Muslim and the Jew had stolen my Chinese Swiss watch and hidden under a deux Chevaux while the flicks pretended to look for them. I was drunk on miserable wine and my foot was nothing but a blister, so as I limped with a sort of Frankenstein gate back to the bar and Fuad laughed at me, because the two of them were well known thieves.

“Why do you go with them Monsieur? I could have told you they are thieves.”

“They seemed nice and they talked about Jim Morrison and they had beer and hashish.”

“We have beer here, Monsieur… and I love the Jim Morrison… he is burried here in Paris…”

“Yes Pierre La Chaise… the rock of the chair… or whatever… I have no money.”

“I make you a wine is good?”

“Very.”

And then the sun started coming up over the city and I could look out the window at the changing color of light and think about history and art history and those bastards under the car with my fake watch that cost less than the wine and know that Fuad would see me till breakfast and the cheap hotel and sleep and then I noticed that with the cominng light, the sillouhettes of countless t.v. anteannnas poking up all over the city below Montmartre and I thought that these wire sculptures were the only thing that made Paris look new, or different from the old pictures of Paris and then I thought about computers and satellites and I realized… soon it would look brand old again… like a picuture of itself.

“D’accord?” asked Fuad.

“Do you have pistachios?,” I asked him.

“But of course,” he said, in the perfect imitation of a Frenchman.