July 13, 2009

Sitting on my bed, in this spaceship cubicle in the Paramount, before dawn, as is my wont after a return from Ireland, where is now one o’clock in the afternoon. Compactness has reached an extreme here so that it is not possible to sit down straight on the toilet, for its far lip touches the bathroom register. I don’t mind the angle, but I wonder what they were thinking when they were cobbling around the old specs and contours. I wonder how it ever passed inspection. Oddly, though, I would return here, as I have done this time, for the little rooms and the lobby are, as I say, Sci-Fi modern, and a better location could scarcely be imagined.

Stopped at the enticingly named Playwrights pub on the corner, where the energetic barkeep sounded forth on sports, and where eventually there was a group discussion of the lives and foibles of the Jackson family. I wouldn’t have believed civilians would have cause to know, or be interest in knowing, so much about that. Left the Playwright lit and ready for action. Tried to sleaze out on 8th Avenue. I went to a peep show, where I hadn’t been since they were on Times Square. It was. . . not interesting. I did get just short of staggering drunk, remembering, then, the excitement, the unexpected comfort, of passing semi-conscious (but also hyper-conscious) through the press and sound and the beautiful faces. Ended at the I-forget-what-it’s-called little bar at the Edison, where I sat beside the bar’s pianist/singer (whom Steve and Adam and I met in May, and who was off that night, but in the bar anyway), and amid the cast of Italian-American Reconciliation, which had closed that night. I wanted to talk with them, but they were too excited about the show (and disappointed, too, I think, in a way they never elucidated) and brimming with common anecdotes ro be re-shared.