When the Poet Buys the Beer

In Weeds the other night it felt like being inside a Robert Stone novel or a Robert Bingham novel set in the sixties or the early seventies but not the eighties or the nineties - forget the present or the future - it felt like that other time. That crazy time. That time lousy with good drugs and mostly bad poetry and bars that felt like Saigon or Bangkok or some other place where the end felt like a beginning and where the beginning never came.

In Weeds the other night it felt like that. There were four of us and a band that was very loud and mostly bad and a poet who stood in front of the band in his thread-bare red sweater and very thick glasses and eastern European accent who smoked up a storm and read what needs to be described as the most god-awful verse ever shared in a public space.

But, and this is important. The poet felt bad. Maybe this poet always feels bad, but that night he felt especially bad and in an attempt to make things right with the two remaining patrons (read: us) he bought us a beer. Together, in the finally quiet room we drank it.

Happy Birthday to Blank

I met Sherman for lunch the other day - we both went with the pastrami the pickle the chips. We both were living large. I had wanted to tell him about the conversation I'd had with my mother and how Reagan had changed her and how she never changed back. How I had wanted to ask her how her nearly-socialist father her union-democrat brothers would view this abandonment of principles. Instead I mentioned birthday cards at the office and how they've ruined birthdays. If you triangulate it just right it's the same conversation.

"You mean to tell me you pay for your own birthday card?" Sherman asked.

"Yep, we all do. Boss lady collects the money - runs to the dollar store and buys half-dollar cards and we all get one on our birthday."

"Happy f%#@ing (occasionally I need to censor Sherman) birthday," he said. "That's just messed up."

"I guess it's the thought that counts," I said.

"You mean the thought you paid for."

"Well, if you put it that way."

"Man, you've gotta find another place to work. Somewhere normal."

I didn't have the heart to tell him that every day when I enter the building there are larger than life photographs of the president and the vice president. Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney smiling down on us as we walk in to say thank you for the birthday cards we bought for ourselves. He might not want to eat lunch with me anymore.