Holy Hangover, Batman

So the Worst Writer Ever excerpts are coming to an end. I’m going to do one more and then probably move onto stuff I need to focus on. I’m going to keep working on it, I’m just not going to post it anymore. I don’t know, I’ve liked sharing it and the response has been pretty great, but I’m not really good at gauging that kind of thing. What have you all thought? 

[This is the thirteenth excerpt from the memoir I began in June 2021 titled The Worst Writer Ever. Here are the previous installments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12].

My first apartment was on the West Side—a studio behind Lincoln Center for twelve hundred dollars a month. I slept on my couch that opens up to a bed. I had to walk six blocks to find a bar and through a project to get to my apartment building on West End avenue. The West Side of Manhattan sucks. There is no reason to ever have to walk that far to find a bar. I worked the graveyard shift, so I would walk through the park at ten o’clock at night, getting eyes from the guys hanging outside their respective housing project, and through the tunnel that runs beneath Lincoln Center to the subway line. Depending on if I had the time I would either take the subway or the bus, which stopped right on West End Avenue, but no one ever leaves the house early to get to work—especially when they have to work until eight the following morning.

One time a guy who was locked out of his apartment down the hallway from me hung out in my apartment until his roommate came home. He went to use my bathroom for a moment and turned on the shower so I wouldn’t hear him snort something.

I stayed there for six months and moved to a place on eighty-sixth street on the East Side where all my friends lived and stayed until June 2010. That was a wonderful place and was painted highway cone orange. The guy I initially lived with was a great guy but he left in September 2006 to move in with his girlfriend.

This is when the Intellectual Terrorist [IT from here on] moved in. I’ve never been good with the roommate situation and this was just the start of it. The guy was a former jock who correctly realized early on that he couldn’t get anywhere with his soccer skills and after an injury decided to go back to school for economics and this somehow prepared him to know it all when it comes to not just quantifiable human analysis but also being a terrorist in that he berated people with his quote-unquote intellect for understanding finance and how that can act as a value to understanding the human spirit. In fact it’s just crunching people into numbers, valuing people with their checkbook; making people numbers rather than people, essentially. He always started off with the eye-rolling phrase: “Listen I’m an Economist, so I know…” Which really just means, I’m about to tell you something and I know because I’m an expert and now whenever I hear the title a deep shiver courses through my body saying, “Prepare for some bullllssshhhitttt.” 

The IT was fat, a lush, would cook this fucking vat of chopped up animal bits, potatoes, and marinated it in some kind of sauce that smelled like the devil’s ass which stunk up the place late at night. In one drunken tirade I “accidentally” shived his air mattress with a butter knife, and told him to get out when I said my cousin was moving in with me who in reality turned out to be my close friend Annette from Lake Placid. She was a whole other story.

[This is the twelfth excerpt from the memoir I began in June 2021 titled The Worst Writer Ever. Here are the previous installments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11].

Of course it was a clichéd reason. The same reason every wannabe writer kid comes to New York City. I was born there and spent most of my years in the area surrounding it, but I never actually lived in the city, and there is a discernible difference. My parents pushed this point: that when you get to a certain age, usually in your early twenties, you should live in a city so you can gain a further appreciation of everything.

It was the DWI that did it. During the Limbo Year, it was an actual miracle that I managed to get away with just one, but when I did get the one in August 2004 I immediately resigned myself to getting the hell out of town. Slippery slope, blah, blah, and all of that, but if there is any better signifier to show that you are in fact becoming a Townie it’s getting a DWI. Very simply, I knew I was better than that and spent the next two months focusing on Marist’s college alumni program and found a job as a graveyard shift copy editor at PR Newswire.

I have always behaved like a child and I have always been a pretender, behaving in such a way to give off the illusion that I am whatever bullshit my mouth is spouting and leaving home and heading to the city became about actually making the bullshit a reality. That’s all the Limbo Year was: pretending to follow a formula that others had followed before me. Which mostly consisted of partying constantly, going from one shitty job to another, and writing under the influence. I thought that was all a part of the “life education of the writer” the path that all wannabes and a few professionals inevitably follow and have to go through to reach the promised land. It actually makes me physically upset realizing these words now, knowing that I actually thought this concept was true. What a fucking waste. The remaining six years after moving was all about this as well. Everything I did was meant as life education to be used as fodder for writing. And I used it. Clearly. If it sounds like a betrayal of the soul, it’s because it is and there is no denying it. I was pretending the whole time, but it was not until after my thirtieth birthday did I come to realize that.

I had some time to kill in my first week in the city, so I visited my friend Patrick who ran the HMV in Times Square, which was closing down. It was the last HMV in New York City and UK-based company was shutting them all down across America in what would just be the start of the long and slow death of the mega media stores of the HMV variety. Eventually the iconic Union Square Virgin Megastore would be taken over by Gotham staples: a Citibank and a Duane Reade. How depressing, but still a nice return to form for the local music peddlers that you can find clinging to life near Bleecker Street or worse—Williamsburg.

Anyway, it was the HMV in November 2004 that I met Pat and everything in the store was seventy-five percent off, so I grabbed the remaining Beatles albums I needed (Hard Day’s Night and the Let It Be remasters) and the first two (and only good) seasons of Family Guy. (This was before the show came back on the air). Afterwards we all went out to the bar, and this was my very first bar experience in my new life in New York. The place: Deacon Brodie’s in Hell’s Kitchen. I found the neighborhood to not be hellish at all, but actually really Yuppie.

I felt like I arrived and I was talking about writing and how difficult it must be to write with all of this distraction when a guy in a khaki blazer, black dress pants, and black shirt leans over to me at the bar and says: “It could just be fuel, you know.”

The guy had intense eyes and saucer shaped furrows beneath his hazel irises. In front of him was a Guinness and a scotch and some loose pages he was doodling on depicting fairly sexy ladies on stripper poles. He looks rightatme, very intensely, and says it again: “Or you could use the city as fuel. Take down something you see everyday. That’s the beauty of this place, it guarantees you will see something that you wouldn’t see in any other city. So take some time to take it down.”

I was semi-drunk, so I was primed to listen to this kind of philosophical discussion, I was so mesmerized I told him he’s right: “Earlier today, I saw a cop car driving into oncoming traffic in Times Square.”

“See?” he asked. “Exactly. Now get yourself a notebook to carry around with you and take a moment for yourself to take down what you saw because eventually you’ll get used to the truly amazing everyday shit that goes down in front of a New Yorker’s eyes everyday, and if you don’t train yourself to notice them—eventually you won’t and you’ll be loosing great material.

“Yeah,” I nod at him. “I’m Dave,” extending my hand.

“Frank.”

[This is the eleventh excerpt from the memoir I began in June 2021 titled The Worst Writer Ever. Here are the previous installments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10].

I just turned in my final edit on the fourth and final Worthy book. The working title I have right now is “A Worthy End” but I fucking cringe every time I think about actually calling it that, so I’ve been spending most of my day trying to come up with anything better than that. To everyone else, I’ve just been calling it Worthy Four in which Evan comes to a Charles Foster Kane-like end.

When I started these books, I was twenty-six, the first draft of Worthy’s Cause was built out of an eighty-page novella I wrote when I was here during my Limbo Year. The entire output I had during that year was that novella and a couple of drink infused rants brought on by some kind of allergic reaction to Warren Miller documentaries.

My output was never good in my twenties. I spent those years developing the novella into a novel and I can’t tell you how many times I rewrote it, refusing to give up on it. When I started outlining the first book, I was twenty-six and took that shitty job at the ad-buying agency. To keep myself from falling into a white-hot depression, I’d write during my lunch break. Eventually, by the time I was fired I had enough of a draft to apply to graduate schools with. When my peers at NYU rejected the first book, I abandoned it but always knew I’d go back to it. I was energized by it, I liked creating a thriller that commented on celebrity culture but when I was writing it I could not get the characters right. Which is when I realized something: I had not lived enough, not gained the experience to actually portray that life accurately. The characters just served as stock pieces to serve the plot which is why it was rejected, rightfully so. I let it sit for a couple of years, finally going back to it after My Town and Holy Hangover, because after those books I did know something about that kind of life and being a part of the public figure lifestyle.

I had to know the market: the behaviors, the buzz, and the structure of that society that I had to nail down before I could convincingly write about it from a character standpoint. I’ve always been intrigued with celebrity culture. What creates it? What does one do to become a part of it? For my senior thesis at St. Bonaventure (undergrad) I wrote about celebrity journalists through the years and how they got to where they are. I profiled Ernest Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Katharine Graham, Bob Woodward, and Tom Brokaw. The purpose was to see how they did it.

The series purpose was to shed light on the entire celebrity machine, raising questions as to the absurdity of the culture, and especially how these people are capable of getting away with their public crimes with little more than a slap on the wrist. For example, Lindsay Lohan hasn’t worked in years but yet she gets sentences for breaking parole, shoplifting, and ends up serving about 30 seconds of the time she’s sentenced. That old saying about having money means no conviction is literally true with these people, but I built on this idea in Worthy’s world. What if this concept was actually true? What if you had the right income and a high profile and you were invited to become a part of a group—a privatized PR group with militant sensibilities—that protects your image by any means necessary. This group protects you from your adoring public who would noticeably frown upon your private interests. To maintain a private life when you are a public figure. The idea was: what if there was a group of people who shed light on this Blackwater-ish PR Agency? What kind of fire would they be under? Evan Worthy is a part of this group as he navigates this seedy celebrity underbelly. People have described it as if WikiLeaks was an action thriller with a side of Entourage. Which is, y’know, not exactly a good thing to be labeled. Originally, it was pitched as a Gossip Girl type work with spies. I cringe at these kinds of labels that try to give a work some pop reference but that is the market.

My plan with the series is to shed light on this incredibly fucked up culture with a whole industry built around it. People look up to this lifestyle, want to become a part of it, and spend countless hours around programs covering these people. The heyday of Reality Television on Bravo and other places proves this. What they’re wearing, the cars they drive, it’s an entire machine built around living vicariously. There are more hours on basic cable dedicated to celebrity coverage like Access Hollywood than are spent on your evening world news. How utterly fucked is it that we’re more interested in these exceptionally sick individuals than what is happening in our world today?

I’d rather not give away the entire thing, but let’s just say Evan’s battle to destroy this society ends up turning him on his head.