ending chapters

Where have I been and what have I been doing? I’ve been to the States and Scotland and East Sussex since last here. And to Somerset and Stonehenge. I’ve run a lot, but maybe not enough. I’ve not written anything, but I’ve thought of and planned the writing of things. There are schedules now, and preliminary dates for my next book’s release. I’ve met a new editor and journeyed to Oxford to plan things with them. I’ve lost old friends and met new ones. I’ve watched the seasons slowly change and listened to the rain on my skylight whenever I could. 

So all that.

The Red Sox season is killing me, which is just as well as life’s proper portions of heartache and heartbreak are fresh and raw and searing and if I seem down, it’s just the baseball, honest.

The sun’s out and all things are flowering - scents of the season drift along the riverside. There seem to be more honeybees about this year. It’s all good if you just let it be.

happened

So some stuff has happened in the meantime. In that gap created between times I’ve written here. I’ve been back to Scotland, and sat in the sun on Islay sipping whisky and beer and eating something fresh from the sea. When the breeze died the midges appeared and fed on us, but it was breezy on the beach when we popped the Champagne and drank it even though our legs hurt. The sky so blue it pierced. And Loch Indaal sapphire, but for the odd white horse. The hills and fields an undulating green banner between them with the white buildings of Bowmore dotted against it all, tall black letters spelling the name of the distillery and town all at once.

I went to France and made wine. The Vermentino bubbled in its ferment like a bath with too much Imperial Leather poured in. It tasted of lemon barley and oats. The mist rolled in the from the sea and crept up the hills and mountains. I drank old Armagnac and stumbled in attempts to speak the language. Loose schist and pebbles fell beneath my feet as I stooped to pick bunches of grapes high up in the hills behind Banyuls. Thibault and I drank beer in a bar by the beach and we talked about wine and women. Andy and Julien and I drank strong Belgian beer next to the sailboats in Argeles after work and I don’t remember what we talked about, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the pretty Italian girl on the picking team came up once or twice. Her name was Luna. Everyone fancied her. I fancied the other one. I don’t remember her name. One night we decanted a couple of wines, Andy and I, and stayed up late in the gallery drinking and listening to music. The wines opened and we talked about them and the world around them. We drank all the whisky I brought and more. I returned to London but wasn’t quite sure why.

Summer turned and the leaves fell and now autumn is almost gone as well.

The Red Sox won. I stayed up late to see.

Mezcal, Old Fashioneds and Sazeracs stood lined on the bar, with shooters of sangrita to chase. We drank them, too many of them, and stumbled out into the Soho night. My bus never came, so I grabbed another. 

Wine sipped, glugged and sometimes spat. Old friends caught up with over beers and burgers. Plus ça change. 

I wrote and edited and amended and did it all again. I checked proofs and drafts and covers. I submitted and re-submitted. I drank pints and chatted with my publisher about costs and dates and rates and boards and dust jackets. I waited and then corrected again. I got it right, I think. It got sent to press, that book of mine, and soon it will be real. 

And now it’s now, and there’s a journey soon. 

grey sunday

Just a wee blog to waste some time before getting stretched and going for a run. 

The sky's low at the moment, but higher than it's been for much of the week. Between March and June, we've had maybe two weeks of acceptable weather. I've been thinking a lot of the South of France, and making wine in the bright sun. 

The new book is coming along. It's hard to describe at the moment, as it's all still a bit of a secret, but it's great to be writing again and doing all the things that come along with it, like scribbling notes out of context because something has popped into your head while waiting to get served in the pub. The more you pound the words out, the more lightbulbs pop when you're not, and you've got to be ready. I'm keeping a notebook and pen next to my bed again. 

When not working on the book, I've been writing about India. It's been four years and it was a short trip, but for some reason it's never far from my mind or the end of my pen.

When not working on the book or writing about India, I've been applying for jobs. If anyone knows of anything for an insufferable wine dork with great research skills and a mild baseball obsession, let me know. Will travel.

It's not been a weekend for Boston sports. Hoping the Red Sox can pull out a win, avoid the sweep and get back to .500 today. Very sad to see the Celtics knocked out by the Heat in Game 7. What a team. Seemed always just one or two less injuries and you have three rings instead of one for those guys. 

There's a lot unfinished on my plate right now. Things that need some waiting on before talking or writing about them. I'm thinking of doing crosswords in the meantime.

on hangovers and railroads

I've spent a lot of time hungover on trains. Once I had such an awful hangover I jumped on a train in hopes of escaping it.

It didn't work.

I used to be the last to leave the party, the last to bed, sometimes wincing at the morning sun as I lay down my head. I'd make or buy breakfast, pour a bloody mary or a beer for myself and anyone else dumb enough to be welcoming the dawn with me. On more than one occasion it was a bottle of red wine. My favourite wee hours red is Amarone, usually Allegrini or Alighieri. You need something robust for those times.

This morning my alarm was unwelcome. I hit snooze. I thought about making coffee and breakfast. Then I hit snooze again. I erased a little morning luxury with every tap of the snooze button. No time for breakfast, no time for coffee, I shaved and ironed a shirt and showered and closed my eyes as the warm water cleansed. No time to pack, I stumbled workwards.

The restaurant was locked. A kitchen porter waited outside, texting. Stacks of produce sat outside the door. The yellow van full of booze waited as well. I opened up and the phone was ringing. Some kids had chucked rotten eggs at the entry way and thrown our patio furniture into the sea. Our first table was merely an hour away, and there were no chefs to be seen. While the kp fished the furniture from the surf I wondered idly if he could cook.

Last-minute Christmas shoppers kept phoning and popping by the restaurant, demanding vouchers as gifts. Plates and cutlery went unpolished. I wasn't in my suit yet. My brain wasn't on yet. A single chef appeared, then another. Someone could cook something. The diners wouldn't starve.

I rubbed my eyes and face, scratched the back of my head, massaged my temples and drank water. Anything to remind me that my body and head were still attached. The chefs and I compared notes on the evening. When did we get home? Why were all the girls crying? Was X really trying to pull Y? If so, why? Did I go to the after party?

I didn't go to the after party. I don't remember what time I left, but it was late. All the fast food dives in town had shut their doors for the night. I looked everywhere. I wandered the cold night, drunk and hungry, and everywhere was bolted tight. Somehow I forgot the all-night garage. I walked the long way home and ate leftover apple and pear crumble. I passed out in my boxers and woke up and hit snooze on the alarm.

The head chef arrived and looked like death. Some of the afterparty goers trickled in with bruises on their faces. Drunken weight-lifting. The restaurant manager walked in, slowly, with an egg in the middle of his forehead, turning slowly purple during the course of service. A dumbell accident.

Dumbell accident? Drunken weight-lifting? The afterparty host arrived with a cut on his eye. Another dumbell accident.

The head chef and one of the sous drank whisky & soda and smoked cigarettes outside while I changed. Not my preferred hair of the dog and from the look of them, it didn't do them any good. Customers arrived early, wanting lunch. We served them with a smile. I starved, having slept through breakfast. Every pause and every face drooped with the weight of the night before. We drank water and coffee. A chef passed some spare risotto my way. Redemption.

Diners left happy.

I changed out of my suit and went home to pack. I remembered the presents and my train tickets and running shoes. I made the slow voyage from hungover to tired.

I missed the afterparty and wasn't drinking expensive Italian red while watching the sun rise. I'm sure it will happen again. But not this morning. And now I sit on the final stretch of the train journey to London and can smile that I've no bruises from drunken dumbell juggling or whatever the fuck they were doing. I eat a tasteless sandwich and sip some better-than-average white Burgundy. I read Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I wonder if the Yankees really have signed Teixeira. I didn't miss out on anything last night, except perhaps a meal.

Drunken weight-lifting... what the fuck were they thinking?

newspapers

Sometimes it was Charles St, sometimes it was Park St. It depended on what walk I felt like. It depended on whether I'd lost my 'T' pass yet. It usually took a week to lose the pass. Taxpayers' money to waste. The guy at Charles St knew me. He kindly let me through, knowing I wasn't selling my pass on the black market for drug money or tricks. We got them for each month. Multi-coloured plastic, kind of like a credit card, the month in bold Helvetica, or some sans serif clone thereof, and the 'T' symbol in the top-left corner. Some people put a hole punch in it and slid it on to their keychain. I think I tried that a couple of times. I still lost it. I'm not entirely sure how I made it to thirteen with all my limbs to be honest.

I liked Park St best. I had to walk through the Common to get there, and that took me close to the little league fields. It would be fitting and nostalgic to recall taking a minute to wander over to the diamonds and think of Spring, but I never did. And as much as I liked the walk, I liked Dunkin' Donuts better (back when coffee was only an afterthought - an accompaniment to their doughnuts). With whatever quarters I had, plus the odd dollar, I'd buy a honey -glazed, a copy of The Globe and a copy of The Herald.

The Green Line's a tram, really, not a train. I trudged up the steps and found a seat and read the funnies. That's why I bought the papers. If there were no seats, I'd stuff them in my backpack and wait until a quiet moment at school. Garfield had moved to The Herald. It was huge news at the time. That's why I bought The Herald. My parents bought The Times. And for some reason I didn't want them to know I bought newspapers. My secrecy made sense at the time. I was just that age. Pretty dorky form of rebellion, really.

As an aside, that was also the age where I realised Garfield wasn't really funny and Calvin and Hobbes was. And is. And probably always will be. Maybe that's why I still love that memory so much. Because it's fairly Calvin-like.

Aside aside, as it were, I wound up reading the papers. It's a lot of newsprint to carry around, just to read the funnies. So I read some of the rest.

I only remember one story from that year. It ran through the week, whatever the week that was. It was about Carl Yastrzemski, or Yaz, and his road to Cooperstown, to the Baseball Hall of Fame. I read it meticulously, though I don't remember who wrote it. I remember reading it and wondering whether someday Wade Boggs would make the same trip. I remember reading it and looking forward to going to school the next morning just to pick up the next part of the story.

I never looked foward to going to school. Not that year. It was the wrong school, I was the wrong student. But I liked the commute. At the age of 12, I liked the commute. I liked the honey-glazed doughnut and losing myself in the papers.

I remember one of my teachers commenting on them. As bitter and cynical as could be, there was no joy but the smart arse comment, the bitterness itself, his delight in the sarcasm with which he rejected every excuse. His name was Mr Donovan. White hair with a bald patch, short cut, not too tall and an almost perpetual sneer. No one misbehaved. Well, they did, and he enjoyed it. He smiled at misfortune and punishment. He laughed at the troublemakers. He mocked my newspapers.

'The school doesn't want you to have those.'

'Scared you'll read what the press writes about them.'

He never confiscated them though. A snort of derision, a shake of the head and a mutter under the breath, but never a confiscation.

I didn't misbehave at that school. Well, twice. Once smart arse and once stupid, but never the siren-wailing lunacy of the years before. I fought in the school yard, during gym, but teachers didn't get involved in things like that. But I had to see the vice-principal every day. Every day she checked my bag, checked my homework. There were 1200 kids in 7th grade that year, and every day she checked to see if I'd done my work. She worried about me, encouraged me, helped me. I wasn't going to be there the next year. I was moving to London and she wrote exceptional recommendations to schools throughout Britain, overwhelming the blight that was my transcript.

I hadn't done my work. She would shout and swear at me, send me class, telling me to come back the next day, same time, with my homework finished.

I was getting D's and F's. I was at constant war with my parents. I had three friends, only one whose name I still remember.

I remember one day at home, during a quiet time, my mother asking me when I started reading the papers. My dad was in the room. I said I didn't know. I just started reading them for the funnies. She told me Mrs. Edwards noticed. Noticed that I read The Herald and The Globe. She noticed and it gave her some sort of hope. Ever-combative, I muttered again that I bought them just for the funnies, refusing to admit that I read anything else. I went to my room. The one with the red curtains.

Mr Donovan sneered at my papers and I shrugged. He supervised, and never taught. A prison warden.

I remember going home on the Green Line. A thousand school kids, fighting for standing room, the gossip and excited chat at the end of the day, filling in slam books, eyeing each other with curiosity and confusion. I took the papers out again until I got to Park St. Sometimes I'd walk home, sometimes I'd switch to the Red Line and head to Charles St. Sometimes I'd grab a doughnut. I never understood why the trip home was so much more crowded.

There's a lot there. But as a reflex, all I remember is the morning papers on the morning train. Commuting to school, reading about the baseball and eating a doughnut.

Honey-glazed.

a partial history of personal hangovers

I used to think the guy who owned the baseball card store was Chinese. Only now do I second-guess it. Now I wonder if maybe he was Korean.

I never asked him.

He was tall, hair slicked in a side-parting with thick glasses. He wore pale blue or white button down shirtsleeves. Around his considerable girth stretched a gun belt, and attached hung a holster of pale leather. The gun was always polished, shining. Not foreboding gun-metal, but instead almost silver; nickel-plated perhaps. He had two guns: an automatic, possibly a .45, and a short-barreled .357 Magnum revolver. He only wore one at a time. I don't know how he decided, each morning, which to wear. Which to arm himself with for the day.

I remember asking if they were real. His answer was curt, impatient.

'Yes, they're real.'

And then he went back to whatever he was doing.

I would stand in fear and fascination, curious as to the hidden violence within the collector trade. I remember his most expensive card at the time was Babe Ruth, valued at $5000. I can't remember what year it was. I wondered if he'd shoot someone over a $5000 baseball card.

It never occurred to me that the cards had nothing to do with the guns.

I wore stonewashed jeans and a denim jacket, high-tops (pre-Jordan) and my 'Sweet Sixteen for the Green Machine' 1986 NBA Championship t-shirt. I fought my first pimples. I tried in vain to make my hair 80's, though it curled too naturally and refused attempts to tame it. I would go on my first date that Spring.

I was young and jumped off the 'T' a stop early to go look for cards to add to my collection. Canseco, Boggs, Clemens, Bonds, Jackson, they were prizes to be hoarded. Sometimes I even chewed the gum. That was a mistake. I pestered the poor guy for hours, and when I got a choice card out of a pack he'd look up and, for a split-second, seem less than bored.

I don't even know if he liked baseball.

I loved baseball. Wade Boggs was my hero at the time: my generation's great Red Sox hitter. I had his rookie card - a 1983 Topps. I probably still have it somewhere. The guy gave me one of those less-than-bored looks when I pulled it out of a six-year-old pack I'd just bought from him.

After the card shop, trying in vain to chew the awful gum, I'd cross the street to Jack's Joke Shop. The baseball card shop was just the baseball card shop, but the joke shop was Jack's. I don't know if there really was a Jack, but there were guys behind the counter whose boredom lessened with the knowledge that whatever my friends and I bought in there would get us into trouble.

Sometimes lots of trouble.

I bought cigarette loads.

My mother smoked and I loathed it. Loathed the smell, loathed the notes she gave me to show the guy at the drug store, telling him to give me two packs of her brand (Merit Ultra Light 100s), even though I was only 10, 11 or 12. Loathed how angry she got if I complained about it.

I used to hide them. Sometimes I'd simply destroy a pack or two. It enraged her. She probably smoked more because of it. In the constant wars between a parent and a child on the verge of their teens, my mother's cigarettes played the role of hostage, battlefield and ammunition all at once.

Cigarette loads were my form of escalation. They were about quarter the length of a matchstick and half the width, sharpened at both ends. With great care, you inserted them deep into the tobacco of the target. When it caught light, it would explode. With a loud fucking bang. It would echo through the apartment followed immediately by my mother shrieking my name and a litany of profanities. I would hide in my room, laughing and petrified, hoping that when it all blew over I could see the tattered remains of the booby-trapped cig. They split from the end in all directions, just like a cartoon. Sometimes I was in the room when it happened.

I had to run fast those times.

My mother got very good at spotting tampered cigarettes.

I got even better at tampering with them, leaving no trace.

The loads came in five-packs. I would only use two or three per pack of Merits. I tried to space them, make sure there weren't two together. Occasionally it would be the very first and very last cigarettes in the pack. Those were the best, the most unexpected, the most likely to enrage. Especially if the last blew after the drug store closed for the night.

The explosions petrified my mother's pet lovebird. This was an added bonus. The cat didn't like them either, but then the cat didn't like much.

I never apologised. I never capitulated. I knew, in a strange way, that what I was doing was right. I still believe that. My mother knew it too. Aside from ruining the enjoyment of her vice, that's what pissed her off so much. That what I was doing was, in a gleefully mischievous way, the right thing to do.

It never made her quit. That came later, and without explosives.

And I started. Four or five years later, I started smoking. Marlboro Lights. I don't really analyse it too much, but to note the chasm between me at 12 and me at 16. It coincided with starting to drink on a regular basis. I preferred drinking to smoking. The latter always left a twist of pitted guilt in my stomach. Moments and mornings of reflection, waking in a stinging haze and not wanting to taste my mouth. Feeling my lungs and wanting new ones. Hangovers felt like life had been temporarily removed, dripping in both physical pain and some manner of spiritual remorse. Showers and clean clothes didn't help, the miasma clung and lingered and before long I sparked my first of the day.

I'm pretty sure I'd started smoking when I found out Wade Boggs was playing for the Yankees.

I don't think I was meant to smoke. I think those memories of delicately sabotaging my mother's cigarettes lay too deep in my mind to shake. The echoes of our shouting matches shuddered too long in my head.

So I quit. I run and keep in decent shape. I feel healthier. The hangovers aren't quite as painful.

And I don't really care too much anymore that Boggs went to the Yankees for a few years.

I miss sabotaging the cigarettes. I miss the joke shop. I still wonder about those guns, and whether he'd shoot me over a $5,000 baseball card.

I kind of think he would.