Happy New Year

[Chuck Grimes]

You might wonder at New Year's in San Francisco.

To stare down the length of the BART car on New Year's at two AM is to
look into the depth of the Matrix. Everyone is dressed in black, they
all have ear rings, and tatoos, and green skin, and ruby or cyano
green lipstick, and leather pants, glistening a metalic silver in the
neon light, against the ice tiles from hell. And I, a tourist, drunk
on Chivas Regal and other things, staggering and still centered on
some imaginary nothing that doesn't exist, talking about Machiavelli
and Erasmus to a rightwing guy on the train between San Francisco
Embarcadero Center and Oakland MacAuthur Station---he is my age in
nylon running sweats, looking through those eye glasses from Breaking
Down. Is there really a Tech Nine in his shorts? Meanwhile, I am
crusing and swimming drunk on the idea that the Japanese sales girls
from Tokyo are my comrades because my step mother knows their district
of Tokyo, and my leering stepfather, older than God, has seen the
light glisten off those magic fur triangles they all carry, while I
pretend he really wants to talk about Guadalajara, Los Tres Grandes,
and the infinitude of oil paint and wine, and memory. Orozco is as
clear as my circumcision while I stumble from one plateform to another
waving my transit pass like a badge of courage and hoping that nobody,
but nobody is looking or cares. Luckily they don't.

Sure, whatever, the guard says.

The return to Berkeley, on Bart is something of a mystery. And you
think I am making it up. I write more when drunk, and lucky Lbo, that
I am rarely this drunk. This is the state that every writer wants to
live while writing. Believe me, I come from a long list of writers and
drinkers and they all agree on this one and only this one point.

Chuck Grimes