Maybe it was Eugene Mc Oregan...

Posted 4:46 PM by sean
I have a funny story. At first glance it would appear to be a story about me, or about me and a girl, but I think it is actually a story about Los Angeles.

There was a group of us sitting around drinking back at the old Beachwood House, debating the magazine headlines that were coming out in early 1999. People were compiling lists back then, lists that would suggest some kind of cosmic significance to the end of the decade, the century, the millenium. And we were talking about how right or wrong they all were.

The first part of the conversation contains a pretty infamous comment. You have to understand that this was the skankiest group of humans I have ever had the misfortune to spend time with. This is a group of people so completely dumb that one of the girls dropped out of school three weeks before graduation to move there, and so completely without scruples that you couldn’t set down a slice of pizza to take your turn at the pool table without the knowledge that your housemate would eat it.

I mean, we can laugh about it now, but at the time it was terrible.

My wife had just left me to shtump a busboy she had met at the Olive Pizza Kitchen Italian Garden of Eatin’ or some-such thing, and I was broke and depressed. As we sat around drinking, the guys were mostly good natured awesome guys that I am still friends with, but the girls were these horrible grizzled, old old old young things, preternaturally skinny from see-through liquor and stolen crushed up Ritalin. Girls who were underweight despite being about 30% body fat, girls whose tiny waists slid right down to tiny hips and flat asses, whose hollow cheeks and cavernous clavicles slid into breasts like small, wet, rolled up sweatsocks full of mud, willing to fuck, not snuggle or make love to, but fuck anything that had thirty extra dollars or a thirty inch waistband.

As I was broke and full figured, I was generally safe from these depressing vacuums of degredation.

On this night, as we discussed the most influential women of the last one hundred years, the girls in attendance were really off the chart. We tossed out Oprah and Eleanor Roosevelt and Indira Ghandi, and one of the girls, who was the embodiment of drunk and braless, burst forth with her vote. Stumbling she said, ‘No. No. Nono. Listen. No. Listen. It’s not… whoever. You have to say the first… you know… Eugene McGorigan, the first woman on the moon.’

The silence after that would have been filled by my friend Mac saying, ‘Oh, right right. I mean, I think you mean the woman on the shuttle who died. But yeah, totally. Except her name wasn’t Eugene, but I’m sure you knew that…’ except that Mac wasn’t there. I can’t describe it as a stunned silence, because we lost our ability to be stunned when we started finding girls O.D.ed on heroin in our yard.

That isn’t my favorite part of the story though. Twenty minutes later, that same girl, let’s call her ‘Idget’, was looking for more liquor and I told her we had already drunk everything in the house except the bottle of champagne left over from my wedding. I remember looking down at my hand, wondering when I would stop wearing the ring, and Idget looked at me with a real sadness in her eyes, a thirst to help me.

"Come with me," she said, and led me into the kitchen. There was a brief silence from my pals, because I simply wasn’t the type to get a blowjob from a girl like this, but it seemed rude to refuse. Plus, I had a feeling that Idget knew exactly what to do as far as my genitals were concerned. "You need to forget her," she said as she reached into the cabinet.

She pulled out the last bottle of Champagne and asked me to open it. I did, and she put the bottle right to her mouth and drank like a marathon runner about to collapse. Champagne spilled out of her mouth and covered the sliver thin tee shirt over her right breast. I honestly was about to put a stop to the whole thing when she lowered the bottle and offered it to me. I demured. She shrugged and before raising the bottle to her mouth said, ‘Seriously, you need to forget her,’ and left the kitchen.

Everyone I know knows the Eugene McGorrigan story. It’s the half hour afterwards that made me move to New York.

Some Numbers

Posted 11:26 AM by sean
My life has always been a numbers game. Ever since I first learned the properties of numbers, I have been obsessed with their relationships to one another, and to the rest of the world. There is a way that numbers make me feel, each one has a different flavor or set of flavors that change and shift depending on my mood. 3s are sometimes comforting, sometimes annoying. 7s are majestic one day, clumsy and falling short the next. I can’t explain why I do this, I just do, and I can’t really make any sense of it.

Of course, numbers are assignations of other thing’s worth as well. If you want to know how good something is, there is generally a sliding scale that will tell you, in dollars, in days, in karats, in something. Sometimes 80 is better than 60, sometimes 60 is better than 80, but we get used to the scales we use.

My friend Steve thinks the number 227 appears more than most numbers. It isn’t true, of course, and he knows that, but he likes pointing it out. 227 is the heaviest I have ever been, in pounds. 227 pounds on my five foot ten frame was enough weight to make my knees buckle and walk with a cane.

I chose a number, 1,1,2003 to make a promise to myself that when I reached another number 5,11,2003, I would have had a few things accomplished. I chose 10,000 as a dollar figure and I chose 200 in pounds as a goal. 10,000 dollars in half a year would still put me right around poverty level, and 199 pounds would still be 25 pounds overweight, so these weren’t unreasonable goals. I set these goals because without the setting of them I was achieving nothing.

It’s hard to describe the length and breadth of my failure on both fronts. I was down to 210 at one point, as of this morning I am back to 218. I have made so little money this year I have twice had to ask Jordana to pay our cellphone bill, ostensibly my gift to her. More numbers have shifted, my waist size going from 34 to 36 and now finally to 38. My jacket size from a 42 to a 46. I feel like I am going to the gym every morning and every drop of sweat that rolls down my fatty sides is matched by two drops that I am retaining, swelling to the point where my chest and stomach hair will begin to look sparse and stick straight out from my skin under the pressure.

And the numbers on the clock keep shifting. The going to sleep number, sometimes as early as 11:30, has been creeping back down to single digits again while I keep watch over the clock like a paranoid delusional afraid that time won’t move without my willing it. And my alarm, set at 7:05, keeps getting turned off at 6:50 or 6:40 after I wake up just after six and wait expectantly for time to catch up to me. I usually can grab a half hour or so in the afternoon so I don’t feel sleep deprived, but I feel out of control when my body and mind won’t obey.

I’m sure I will get a concerned email from my mom, one of maybe five people who read this blog, so let me just say it’s been a tough week and a tough morning, but I am always happy when I am either cooking, being with Jordana, seeing my friends or seeing my family. So don’t put me on suicide watch. I just weighed myself this morning, and the sense of disappointment was not something I can ignore.