Shitty Christmas with a Cookie Pirate.
Blech, the wretched holidays. Surviving that horseshit as a single person is on par with the solitary dude hanging in a sleeping bag swinging in the freezing wind via a carabiner bolted to a vertical cliff face, some thousands of feet above where yaks dont bother to climb. After all these years, I spent my first Christmas, well sort of, in NYC, alone. Odd to say the least, all in all not so bad, delighted not to be a suicide statistic, thankful its fucking over.
My shitty Christmas Eve started out in the vestibule of my apartment building. My neighborhood is one of the only in the world that I have traveled where a company can spend tens of thousands of dollars renovating a building and have it turn out looking worse than what it did with 35 years of wear on it prior to restoration. White marble and shitty gold colored plated fixtures spells LES Chic. And you can blame the Chinese, these are the materials that are often on sale cheap in Chinatown. Underbidding, bottom feeding contractors, lower manhattan residents all salute you and your fabulously american business practices, for if it wasnt for your high code of ethics we actually might feel like we are getting something for the absurd amount of money we pay to live here every month. Alas, gold colored plated shit metal and the quarry’s reject blem shit rock cut with out of square miters will have to do for our top dollar payment this month. When people dig up the bones of this place a thousand years after I am Legend, they’ll never figure out the true miserly origins for the worst interior design the wold has ever known.
My neighborhood on a Friday or Saturday night is packed to the brim: bumper to bumper traffic, not an available parking spot in sight, double parked cars battling it out with cabs collecting fares and a constant flow of bicycles, both the usual onslaught of delivery bikes and then the weekend influx of fixed, skinny jean, not ironic just old at this point facial hair twenty somethings, and thats just the street. Sidewalks filled to the brim with perfectly backlit homeless scamming kids, the clack of cheap high heels, catalog shoes and trash and vaudville boots all worn by the drunk, the young and the impressionable. Yes, thats my hood, still one of the few consistent destinations for bridge and tunnel idiots, both from the east and west. Its also the location of a University that, like all evil plans disguised as good, has been buying up every single piece of real estate it can with mom and dad’s hard earned tuition money.
And all of the fuckers who contribute to this scene, every one of them, were home with their family, away on vacation, hanging from a rope after carving brooks was here in a rafter somewhere, anywhere but on this block where they usually are on a Friday night.
So, with Christmas Eve on a Friday, it was nothing short of surreal to see empty lanes of traffic at midnight, where there is always gridlock and wide open sidewalks with not even the occasional drunk to be spotted. Surreal.
Our priority quickly shifted from finding some place cool to go to simply finding some place open to go…
My only hope was to find a spot that had something absurd on a television. Because God forbid you have a bar in this no attention span, entertainment obsessed culture without a fucking worthless television on.
Dreams of the usually scheduled Nakatomi Plaza adventure (how did that become my generation’s Its a Wonderful Life?) gave way when I saw whatever this horseshit is through the window and knew we had found the right place.
The kitchen was closed, but we settled in, beneath a proper old school NYC fixture
for at least one drink in this cozy little bar.
When the bar had emptied out after about ten minutes and we were the last customers, after midnight on a shitty Christmas eve, the bar tender brought us popcorn. Things were looking up. It was Christmas, I was out with an old friend I hadnt seen in seven or eight months, a terrible movie was on a television that has no off switch and Bowie was playing on the stereo. Until.
Some sick fuck cleaning dishes in the kitchen made the executive decision that it wouldnt be Christmas without that joyless Christmas music, turned off our Hunky Dory Christmas in exchange for that knife turning last dose of holiday cheer and they didnt even have the conceptual continuity to seg with that terrible bing and bowie little drummer boy. No. Straight to carols. Heartless motherfuckers.
Head hung low in desperation, I rallied to think of some way to take over this bar. I was not about to have my shitty Christmas sabotaged by oh the weather outside is frightful.
Without pause, I announced to the bar, which was now us, the question of the evening: In 40 years, how many women has Bowie bedded. Tour bus bunks, backstage tile locker room shower stalls, airplane lavatories, Chateau Marmont garden walkways and Max’s Kansas City coat check rooms all count. So do boys. I put in my first bid at 10,000 people.
Annnnnnnd, we’re back. In the past many months, having found something better to do, I havent been drinking much at all. There are far more constructive paths to self destruction and Ive lately chosen working myself to death over alcohol. I havent seen Ash in a million years, but as is usually the case, old drinking buddies can pick up where they left off and so we were, in the Next Position, face down on the bar, fully amused with our obnoxious opulence.
Almost on cue, this guy got involved.
Probably 30 minutes into the discussion it was determined that we both had a good amount of time on the road and our Bowie conversation went from the absurd to the realistic. Let it Snow was now playing for a second time and I readjusted my estimate to a much more reasonable 8,000 people figuring averaging 200 people a year was far more doable for Bowie, especially when you offset for the Ziggy Stardust and Thin White Duke years. Yeah, Im sticking with eight thousand. And it still feels low. Thoughts on Bowie vs. Jagger vs. Hetfield lingered, Tom Jones not even in the race for Bwana Dick with that kind of competition.
Soon enough, even or especially so for a Shitty Christmas, we wore out our welcome, and with conquest inconclusive,
In a blur,
were back on the street again, in search of the next place.
Infected by the wretchedness of two rounds of Let it Snow, priorities shifted from shitty television to a fireplace, which we were lucky to find. If you are going to spend Christmas self destructing in a bar, might as well do it by a fireplace. Leaves you the option, when you dont need the pain, to be properly shot down in flames.
A Bon Scott Shitty Christmas did not last long beyond singing one chorus next to a fire as I took my coat off when somehow the bartender announced that she was knitting something for her boyfriend.
I suppose the only word for it, all things being equal, is obsession. A healthy fixation, certainly not the first or last person to fall victim to it, but powerless to resist the guitar tone that Jimmy Page was slinging around in 1969 and 1970 both on both European and American Led Zeppelin tours. Its probably the original impetus for what caused me to plug in my first soldering iron when I was in college, foolishly thinking it was two transistors making that sound.
Built just about every fuzz box design commercially distributed in the late 60’s for years searching for it, until coming across the schematic for the completely one off (well, they made two) Hiwatt Amplifier that Page played on that tour, all the way through to 1971 actually, when he switched to a Marshall and everything went down hill. After building that amp, quest for the ultimate tone satisfied, a literally life long quest finally put to bed, I had to find something else to focus on.
I had been trying to find a white shirt that would properly blouse at the sleeves for years, but thats too easy. That cardigan he wore on that 1969 tour, most notably photographed at the rock argument ender of all time: Royal Albert Hall, 9 January 1970. Where to get such an absurd article of clothing. Anyone with the balls to play what was performed that night wearing what he wore while doing it would forever be, in the oddest form of salacious mystery, my hero.
I had built the amp, piece by piece, by hand. I now needed the wool, and Im not learning how to knit. My phone hit the bar with a slap, check this out, can you knit one of these? Some day, I will have one. Then and only then, will I be the most absurd geek out there. For now, I’ll be happy with the fact that a photo I took is currently the number one (and twenty ninth) hit in google pictures for “Jimmy Page Cardigan”. Don’t say I never accomplished anything with my life.
This was the jist of our delightful, fireside, shitty christmas eve conversation, and it lasted until they put the fire out, we closed the bar and headed home for the evening wondering how many men and women bowie actually did manage to fuck in a lifetime of consistent celebrity, a bulk of it through an American sexual revolution and where Im ever going to get a proper cardigan ’cause you cant play that ascending part to how many more times without one, which is actually the core explanation to why that ascending part of the riff was only ever played live: the wool.
Christmas eve down, 22 hours of Shitty Christmas, Im single and hate the world torture left to go.
Somewhere in the middle of rock and roll wool and where have you been for eight months things got a tinge ugly, as they sometimes do with enough alcohol after youve already been face down on the bar and that’s probably when we made plans to have christmas dinner together. Cajun anti christmas dinner was out of the cards, because like all respectable business owners, the spot we wanted to go was closed because I dont know, someone is happily married and just wanted to spend the holiday holding someone’s hand and feeling loved for a day. Pssh. Not us.
We decided the next best anti christmas dinner would be Indian and a brisk walk through the ghost town of my Saturday night neighborhood brought us to little india and the scene of such desperate begging for customers we almost ditched the whole idea. Rabid, starving fucking dogs, foaming over a bone except they were people and well, so we were. Take the wrong culture, put it in the hearltess competition of NYC and sometimes what is bred is not the ugliness itself, but the drool that the ugly salivates. This city can rip your soul out if you arent careful. It can also motivate you to do the most ludicrous things to make your rabid dog meaner than all the others and as such, a thing of beauty was born onto the streets of manhattan: Psychedelic Indian Restaurant.
Yeah, well, the food’s not the best, the management are a bunch of fucking animals, having *harassed* the bulk of customers into their business, but they DO have exactly one trillion lights inside the place which predictably makes it a hundred degrees, but it was cold out and shitty christmas demanded the rude absurdity of chicken tikka masala served under the illumination of a thousand christmas trees.
The best part is that it’s like this all year round. Certainly nothing festive for christmas, shitty or otherwise.
BYOB. Woops. 8 degrees outside. Fuck. Pack of rabid, foaming, questionably tempered dogs at the door. Double fuck. We’ll drink after dinner tonight…
After some ado, some distraction, and commenting that every single person that got suckered into the restaurant came through the door with the same look of fear and excitement on their face, having survived a pack of rabid dogs only to be led into the psychedelic indian food den, we ordered.
If you are gonna fall off, might as well hit the ground hard… Dont wake up for a 15 mile ride, definitely dont lift anything heavy for lunch and whatever you do, dont run nine miles before dinner, just take the day off and dont do anything on Shitty Christmas except hate the world and eat this mess of fried goodness:
yum. It’s ok to cheat one day a year.
On the walk over, we simultaneously commented on how cozy this one empty (among all the empty) spots looked, and after dinner rolled around the corner to what would be the most unsuspecting surprise of the year.
Walking into this empty bar, I was amazed to find a french bar tender serving only czech beer and maybe 12 taps worth. This is not normal or usual by any stretch of the imagination for NYC, or America for that matter. The best we can normally do are underpowered co2 taps serving flat, thick, hoppy beers or flat, thin, watery beers. A bar chock full o’ real pils was a delight.
Thrown in there, would be the biggest surprise and absolutely the most out of place tap in the universe. The whole universe to be exact. Among a bar of czech pils was my favorite ale of all time, Australian Coopers. Up until that moment I had just assumed that kegs werent even imported into the US. Amazing.
I had found my christmas miracle. For the first time in maybe ten years I sat back behind an american bar with the same enthusiasm that I do sitting behind a Dutch bar, excited to enjoy a beer I really love, instead of just drinking whatever some bar is serving because often self destruction wins over good taste in too many instances.
Sadly for Ash, her phone blew up right as we sat down,
Her shitty christmas miracle would not involve finding her favorite, never to be seen in America beer, but instead getting called into work. On christmas. Shitty Christmas.
And just as she left, I ran out of film.
I can not recall the last time that has happened to me. In a way, its kinda freeing, as this camera is as much compulsion as it is fun.
Stories about a Parisian bartender in NYC, a long and uninteresting tirade about European Beer and the lack of it in the United States and my pure snobbery about it, the two Canadian girls who showed up later and an equally uninteresting lament over the interstate highway system in Colorado and why its unique in the US will have to wait for some other time, when I fall off the wagon again and bring enough film for the journey straight to the ground.
So concludes my shitty christmas. Like I said, thankful its over. Could have been so much worse and was real special to spend it with an old friend, rowing the same boat upstream, just like we always used to do. Perhaps next year, this hopeless romantic won’t be so hopeless. If someone with a life so full of luck is allowed one wish, that would be mine. Only eleven months to go. blech.