starsailor – Page 25 – ☆ STARSAILOR ☆

Monty and I awoke around noon today . . . we’ve been staying up late every night watching Steven Seagal movies and an embarrassing TV show that I dare not name. We made coffee and I sort of meandered around looking at Monty’s growing Bilbo shrine until it was time to go to Manhattan. We took the J into the city and got off in Bowery. I knew my friend Cera was also in town, and staying in the city itself, so I checked the scanner to see where she was:

My God! I thought, seeing that she too was in the Bowery. Monty and her boyfriend John and I were going to meet up with some people at a place called the Ripple Room, but being we were so close to Cera, I told them to go on ahead and I’d walk over and freak out Cera at the Thai restaurant where she was apparently dining.

I surveyed the outside of the building to see if she was at one of the outdoor tables . . . it was such a nice day out that I figured she’d be there, but I did not find her. Just before I pushed through the crowd to go inside to look around, I saw her through the window. I had to get uncomfortably close to a confused family seated nearby, and once I got about six inches away from the window pane where she was seated, I gave her The Shining Stare:

Somehow she noticed me immediately and smiled and ran out of the restaurant and jumped me on the street. I reckon she had forgotten I had her location, so she was shocked to see me. I told her we were at the Ripple Room nearby and she said she’d come over afterwards with Some Dude she was with. So saying, I strutted the two blocks back in the direction I had come from and entered the Ripple Room, which was as cold as a meat locker. Coming from the balminess of the outside, I felt a sort of bodily shock.

The downstairs was red and gloomy. It was a classy place with a red pool table. I told the bartender I was looking for my friends, and he said they were probably upstairs. I climbed the stairs to the second floor, which was painted yellow with yellow furniture and brightly lit by the sun. On the walls were velvet paintings, including a velvet Elvis, which I was deeply envious of. (I’ve got to get one for my apartment when I get back to Berlin . . .) Monty and John were seated at the far end of the bar near the yellow pool table and so I went over to them. I told the bartender I’m a stoner and not a drinker, but I wanted something anyway, and he made me some sort of fizzy cherry thing. Let’s face it: it was probably just a glorified Shirley Temple. It was also $14.

Speaking of Elvis: the dichotomous nature of the Ripple Room reminded me of the Elvis Room in Portland, which has since gone under, just like every other restaurant and bar and coffeeshop I liked in Portland. The place was cool as hell . . . upstairs was heaven and downstairs was hell. I’d gone there many times with Monty and Molly and the last time I ever saw it was July 2019, just before civilization ended, when beauty and love were still possible, and when I went to visit The Pink-Haired Girl. I remember holding her hand there on one of the best days of my whole life. Ahhh man . . .

(I always sat in the same booth when I went to Elvis Room, always in the velvet red downstairs section. Here is Monty in Pallas’ seat . . .)

ANYWAY . . .

Back in the final days of Western Civilization, in The Dark World, we headed downstairs to The Hell Room on account of the upstairs pool table being baby-sized and having baby-sized cue sticks. In Hell, it seems, the pool tables and cue sticks are at least mercifully normal-sized.

Eventually Cera showed up with Some Dude, who ended up being Brock, and who was a righteous dude. I asked him to document Cera and I once again occupying the same physical space, albeit now on the other side of the continent:

Meanwhile, nearby, Monty and our friend Marguerite had conquered John and his friend. So of course I took a picture of their victory glow for posterity:

I had not seen Marg since November 2019, just before I left for Berlin the first time. She had recently moved to Oakland and decided she hated it. Weirdly, she had moved into a house in West Oakland I had looked at with my friends Hali and Danielle. She was in the room that would have been mine. On that day, we ate at the Butcher’s Son in Berkeley and then drove up to Grizzly Peak in her Izuzu (which, as I recall, was later bought by a girl who intentionally drove it off a cliff . . .)

I like Marg. I think she’s one of the coolest people I’ve ever met in my life. I had met her a year before at the shittiest bar in Portland, which was a place called Chopsticks. Matt and I had driven 10 hours straight north from Oakland in a rented Cadillac someone else had paid for, and had taken some random-ass multicolored pills given to him by his coworker. In retrospect, I cannot believe we did that. What made it worse was that after we left Chopsticks at last call and went back to the parking lot, Matt turned sheet white and collapsed onto the pavement. I caught his head just before it hit. He came to about a minute later and was completely fine. Later that night we slept in the Cadillac outside Lone Fir Cemetery in SE Portland a few blocks from where we used to live on Hawthorne. I slept in the spacious trunk in a military sleeping bag. Have I somehow ever written about this??

Anyway, here’s Marg and me wearing each other’s jackets at Chopsticks a few minutes before Matt briefly died:

. . . and Monty too:

Though yeah: Cera has promised me I will see her at least one more time before I leave for Montreal next Monday. Worst case scenario, I’ll see her in LA after I cut through the desert from Albuquerque and into Southern California at the beginning of October.

I want to have some sort of Last Supper before then too . . . Cecelia just moved back here and Helen just moved here for the first time, and for some reason Molly is in town as well, so I’ve got to assemble all these fine people. It seems fated, as if by some celestial design. Monty and Cera meeting is a Big Deal on account of they are a kind of pillar of my existence. It’s like someone meeting Laura or Tracey or Leila or Amissa or McCune. Everyone already knows who they are before they even meet them on account of I talk about them all the time. Imagining even half of these titans of humanity in the same room together . . . it would break reality clean in half.

Oh, my God! And this week I get to meet Tracey’s newborn baby daughter and my niece little Rooney! Behold:

She’s so cute I want to bash my head into a brick wall until I die.

FINALLY . . .

We left the Ripple Room and walked to Katz’s Delicatessen, which boasts that it is the oldest deli in New York City. It opened in 1888, which is exactly a hundred years before I was born. It was insane in there . . . I’ve never been to a restaurant that had bouncers before. I looked around at all the crammed-full tables and people waiting in line and deduced that this place has got to make at least a million dollars a month. The tables alone seat 144 souls, to say nothing of all the takeout and delivery orders. I got the only vegetarian things on the menu, which ended up being a grilled cheese and potato salad. Bummer. Paying for a grilled cheese at a restaurant always stings because for the price of one of them, you could literally make 20 at home. Such is life.

Back on the street and $25 later, we walked to the closest subway station by literally crossing Delancey:

Monty gave me her house keys and she and John took the J back to his neighborhood, and I took the M to Monty’s. Back inside, I hugged Bilbo and gave him and Elliot and Emmi treats, and then retreated to Monty’s room to watch a not-good movie called WATCHING THE DETECTIVES, synced up with Laura on the other side of the country. It’s about a dude (Cillian Murphy) who owns an independent video store in New York, and who meets a mysterious sort of femme fatale (Lucy Liu) . . . whom of course he falls in love with because he’s obsessed with noir detective stories. This is absolutely some shit that would happen to me. Except she doesn’t like movies! That’s a dealbreaker . . . Though yeah: while it certainly weren’t Shakespeare, it was harmless and innocent in that 2007 way, when you could make a movie for $10 million dollars . . . and at least Cillian Murphy and Lucy Liu were cute . . .

It is 4:30 EST here in Ridgewood and I can already see that the sun has begun to lighten the sky above New York City in the distance . . . so I am going to sleep. I of course lead a mostly meaningless existence of aimless wandering and have very few adult responsibilities, which means I have nowhere in particular to be tomorrow, and thus no reason to wake up before noon. Even still, I need my beauty rest, and Lord knows the last thing I want to see right now is the sun. Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy . . .

Hopefully when I open my eyes tomorrow afternoon, dear Bilbo will be curled up in a little caterpillar ball on the pillow next to me, as is his wont, the two of us at peace with our own consciences and all the world.

☆彡