Clinton Street Books

The Anger of the Monogamous Male

2009-06-03T14:26:00.000-07:00

www.hardboiledmen.com

An older woman wore a pink shirt at the entrance to the place. She held on to a very small dog. It was the type of a dog that was typically owned by women half her age. It was the kind of a dog that young women enjoyed decorating with absurd flowery bowties and preposterous sweaters. But not this one, this tiny dog came as it was.
The woman was waiting for her gentleman friend who ordered up a morning’s coffee. She appeared peaceful. Maybe it had something to do with the dog. Perhaps she was simply a mellow type. With age came perspective and nothing in life was really worth worrying about.
She did not even seem too anxious when the confused heroine addict bumped into her leash as he stumble out to the street with a half used cigarette in his hand. She remained at ease throughout the passing minutes and was more than gracious when the young junky asked her for a light.
“I am sorry but I do not smoke, smoking is bad for your skin tone” she affably replied.
The young man was neither appreciative nor disappointed. He was more concerned with sustaining gravity.
Despite the collective displays of serenity, I felt uneasy. Natalia was more than twenty five minutes late. I was never one for tardy characters. Thankfully, the irritating ambulance sirens rang through Powell Street and validated my status as the only non-enlightened individual in the coffee shop. This New Yorker never truly molded into that granola flavored San Francisco consciousness.
I walked up to the large counter and ordered myself another medium cup of flavored coffee. The radio played a song by the Beatles. I believe it was I ‘m Looking Through You off of the Rubber Soul album.
“Guy? Hey, what’s going on dude?”
Vivek smiled from behind his small table. In between us stood a homeless woman that leaned on her rusty blue cart. In it, she housed all of her worldly belongings. She stood there like an out garden figurine. Off the tip of her outer lip dripped discontent.
“Come join me,” he cordially invited me.
I did.
“What’s new in the life and times of Mr. university professor?” he wanted to know.
“Nothing too important,” I admitted, “life is life.”
“Working on any interesting research projects?”
“Nothing at the moment.”
“Oh really? Nothing? Any exciting academic projects?”
“Nothing to report, but forget about me, my life is boring, what about you? What are you reading these days?”
He did not mind the change in focus.
“I just finished a six hundred page book about North Korea called Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader by Bradley Martin. It was an amazing book about the inner working of the North Korean regime. What are you reading these days?”
“I started reading three different books,” I said “two of them are novels, one Auster and one Russo but I abandoned both around page sixty. I can never keep focus these days. The third book is my own academic manuscript that is almost too boring for anyone to stay awake. I put a copy of it in my bathroom and catch a quick page read every time I take a shit.”
“Well, I guess that can be a productive place to work.”
“Not me, I am blessed with super quick bowl movements.”
Vivek, as always, was all smiles. The guy did not have a bad bone in his entire Indian body. Maybe it had to do with that Asian karma business. Maybe it had to do with good family DNA. The most impressive thing about this guy was the fact that he was the best read person that I have ever run into. Try to catch him unprepared and he was ten steps ahead of you.
“Every read Crazy Cock by Henry Miller?”
“Of course, it is a classic.”
“How about Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky?”
“A Cloud in Trousers is one of my all time favorites.”
“Goethe?”
“Who hasn’t?”
“Me you son of a bitch.”
He must have noticed just how irritated I grew as I continuously looked at my watch. Natalia, you fucking bitch, how do you keep a man waiting for so long? What ever happened to mutual respect? If there is no respect, there is no love.
“You seem angry.”
“I am not angry, I am mad.”
“What a fine distinction.” he smiled. “But do not feel too bad, all monogamous men are angry by default, it is not entirely your fault, it is a genetic condition. It is a pain inflicted upon all men by the very construct of the modern times and the very institution of monogamous relationships.”
Vivek was about to present another one of his world famous theses, I was not about to get in his way.
“The male specie is biologically programmed for polygamy. Evolutionary forces require the male to spread his seed to as many female vaginas as possible. It is an evolutionary must. It is a basic biological premise that ensures the survival of the human specie across time.”
I have heard these types of theories before. Vivek was stating the obvious in the world of men but such logic failed in the world of women. I presented my counterargument.
“You are correct in stating the obvious. There are mixed evidence in regards to females and monogamy. On the one hand, female promiscuity does improve the genetic pool. On the other hand, female monogamy does present certain advantages in the wild in regards to the survival of its offspring. In other words, females are programmed for monogamy while the male for polygamy.”
“So what are you saying?” I scratched my nose across its surface.
“I am arguing that all monogamous males are intrinsically frustrated at their core level by the institution of monogamy. We could have all been swinging our dicks freely if it wasn’t for women and the bloody sword of organized religion.”
Vivek excused himself for a moment. His enthusiastic talk along with the large herbal tea led to a abrupt urge to take a piss. While he was gone, I inspected Powell Street through the window with the hope of finding my Natalia. She was nowhere to be seen.
Near the window, I saw a couple holding hands. I could only see the man’s back. I had no idea why he was scratching his leg in a repeated motion. The woman reminded me of my ex-girlfriend Maria. She had dark Mexican hair and had a tear in her eye.
Vivek may have been correct about the inert anger of the monogamous male but her knew very little about the pain of being a woman.
We sat around the coffee shop for thirty more minutes. Vivek introduced chemical composition into his former argument.
I ordered a large chocolate brownie that was full of nuts. Natalia always argued that I need to drastically cut down my intake of junk food if I ever planned on loosing that gut. But she was not there to give me that famous worried look. I devoured the chocolaty pile of sugar within a quick minute.
An hour later, Vivek and I decided to head out Chinatown where we hoped to find some cheap imitation watches. I lost my old silver watch down on Royal Street last month on a trip to New Orleans.
Natalia did not show up on that morning. She later explained that she woke up angry for no apparent reason.

LA No Longer

2009-04-21T15:47:00.000-07:00

www.hardboiledmen.com

L.A. No Longer

Jack felt the shiver running throughout his body as he walked past those familiar doors that seemed to know more about him than most of his friends did. More than three years have gone by and yet, the place still felt like fresh made bread. Excitement was not the right adjective to describe what he felt at the moment, neither was exhilaration. To Jack it seemed like a strange breed between an old high school reunion and compulsion.

Despite his past success, Jack once again found himself dead broke and amongst the unemployed. Now that he was down on his luck, there was no room for foolish male pride. Now a day, it was all about simply getting by. After he lost his high paying income, foreclosed on his ocean front condo and crashed his once impressive silver automobile, Jack was back to square one.

South Florida was no place for a man to live life. It was all fluff within and throughout. Between the long impressive blue canals and the sweet summer breeze, all that was now left for the locals was disappointment.

What was once supposed to be the Rodeo Drive of the east coast soon turned back to water down beer and grouper sandwiches. But even after losing his cash, his car and his unbelievable high-rise apartment (known to most women as the panty dropper, no explanation needed), Jack still felt like he had a fighting chance in this world.

The old wooden bar still smelled the same way it did before the good real estate days, before any jerk with twenty grand could become an over night millioner, before Jack hit it big and told the owner of this fantastic old bar to take this job and shove it up his ass.

Jack felt strange for a moment as he sat on the wrong side of the bar. Once a bartender, always a bartender, he thought or at least that is how he felt at the moment.

Three years and nothing much had changed. Billy still had those same ridiculous pictures up on the wall, sporting him and Dan Marino smiling like two morons over a pitcher of amber stout. Billy could never get over the fact that he almost made it, that he was offered a football scholarship down at the University of Miami. Billy was well on his way to made it into the big times until that career ending torn ACL injury. Sidelined by misfortune, he decided to give up on football all together.

Instead he opened up this friendly little bar down on A1A. One man’s watering hole may once again give Jack a reason to wake up in the morning. At least, that was what Jack was hoping for.

“What are you having sweetie?” she asked.

The jaded blond behind the bar knew nothing of Jack or of his connection to the place. Back in the day he used to lay them left and right. The blonder the faster, the redder the better, the browner the funner. Jack liked the taste of it all. To him, regardless of color or shape, women tasted like freedom.

“Ill take a Sam Adams.”
“Sorry sweetie, we only carry domestics.”
“Sam Adams is a domestic,” he lackadaisically smiled.
“Whatever you say hon, but we only have the basics, Bud, Bud Light, Miller, Miller Light, Coors and Coors Lights, you know, American beers.”
He smiled. “I see that Billy is still just as cheap and as patriotic as he has always been. I’ll have a Miller Light. “
“Are you a friend of Billy’s?” she asked.
He hesitated, “Well, let’s just say that we go way back. Where is the old bastard anyways? Is he around? Most likely he is not. He is probably down at the gym flexing his muscles across some stretched out mirror, am I right?”
“No hon. He ain’t at the gym and he never gets in here before eight O’clock these days. He went down to Dolphins training camp out in Plantation, preseason football, you know what Billy’s like.”

Unfortunately he did.

“Two seventy five please, do you want to close you out or open a tab?”
He threw a five on the bar and told her to keep the change. Billy’s was still one of the cheapest places for beers around the area. Billy never bought into that whole William and Sonoma bullshit like the rest of them did. Billy detested the Aventura Mall and those luxury foreign cars that everyone bought during the recent real estate boom. If it was up to Billy he would kick all of those New Yorkers back to where they came from and turn Fort Lauderdale back into Jimmy Buffett land. He never liked the corporate facelift that everyone else fell for. Billy was a good ole boy and wanted his life to be as simple as the beers he served, nothing too complicated.

Jack only wished that he could take Billy’s worldview but he was not made of the same basic elements. He fell in love with the money, the monetary excess, the large homes and those grade A titties that seemed to literary pop everywhere with every plastic surgery center that mushroomed across Yamato Road up in Boca Raton.

While Cheri handled some of the other customers that were lining up at the other end of the room, Jake took his time to reflect about those old bartender days. Despite the mediocre pay and occasional degradation, the bartender gig at times made one feel like a celebrity. When you worked the bar, everyone wanted to your attention. When standing tall behind that bar, every man wanted your advice and way too many women offer a lick of their cupcakes. Why he ever left? He thought about it for a while.

Cheri returned for a moment only to leave again. The banker at the other end did not like way her Appltini tasted. Cheri did not make a fuss, instead she just smiled and made her a new one with an extra shot. Such was the vibe of the place. Billy always preached his philosophy about keeping his costumers satisfied. “A happy costumer,” he would say “is a returning costumer.”

Jack took a careful look at that group of bankers on the other side. They were dressed in the cloths of success and were drinking like young fraternity boys. Hard days for the banking world, hard days for the real estate industry, hard days all around. When times were bad out in the world, business was good at Billy’s old bar. The recently disenfranchised, unemployed and bankrupt were more than happy to drown their sorrows in Billy’s cheap drinks and fried finger foods.

“So Cheri, how long have you been working here?”
“I don’t know, close to a year now.”
“Do you like it?”
“You know, it pays the bills. I have had better jobs as well as worst ones. You know what it is like.”
“Oh yea? What was the best job you ever had?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Actually, I do, I really do.”
She hesitated for a while, “Back when I was younger, I worked as a cocktail waitress down at the Crazy Horse.”
Jack knew that place all too well, “you mean that tity bar in north Lauderdale? I use to love that place. Billy and I used to go drinking there after work back when things were good between us. But I don’t think that I ever seen you over there.”
“Yea, like you would notice anyone with all of those naked women running around.”
“Well, a pretty face like yours I would never forget.”
“Get over yourself Jack; working at the tity bar, I must have heard that line more than a hundred times. But thanks for the compliment,” she smiled.

Thinking back to those days at the Crazy Horse brought a smile to Jack’s tired face. A couple of the waitresses who worked at Billy’s were either strippers or former strippers. After work, they would all hang out at the joint, get free lap dances, buy shots all around and often bring back a couple of girls back to Jack’s place where they all snorted cocaine and fucked like a bunch of Cajun horndogs.

There was one particular stripper who caught Jack’s eye. She went by the name of Coco but her real name was Stacia Martinez. She was a half black, half Dominican dancer with natural 36C and a pear shaped ass. Coco loved money as much as she liked the attention. Jack was more than happy to deposit his weekly tips into Stacia’s carefully comforting Caribbean clitoris.

Year, those were the days, back before everything turned around, before Jack gave it all up in favor of the rich real estate life, before he climbs up the mount of high society only to crash all the way down to its underside. Now he had nothing.
While Cheri dealt with the crowd of secretaries who came in for happy hour, Jack went outside for a cigarette. The ocean breeze sailed lightly across his unshaved face. He did not mind the solitude of the parking lot.

Ten minutes later, Billy pulled up in his red Mustang. “If it aint American, it aint something I drive,” was the way Billy looked at things. There were not too many locals who so proudly displayed their patriotism, most were more interested in displaying their consumerism.

But not Billy, he rejected the Prada, Lexus and Armani logos in favor of the old red white and blue that was proudly displayed on every corner of his bar, his car and even tattooed on his left shoulder.

“Well shit if my eyes don’t fool me. Is that old son of a bitch Jack Douglas I see?”
“Yea Billy, it sure is, been a long time, how are you partner?” they hesitantly shake hands.
Billy took a long careful look. Years have gone by and Jack seemed like a different man.
“So what’s the deal Mr. big shot millionaire, you looking to tear me down and build another one of those monstrous high rise condos on my remains? You sure as shit aint coming in for a drink, I best assume.”
Jack took a deep modest breath, “You sure as shit are wrong there Billy, I am no longer in the world of real estate development, it is all gone I tell you, every single dime I ever made in real estate went down the shits and under the water. I am just as flat broke as you first met me. Down and down by the rain.”

Billy digested Jack’s words as if they were some strange concoction of eel soup or some exotic appetizer they served down at those fancy sushi restaurants. “And you came here for what reason?”

“Are you going to made me beg for it Billy? I want my old job back.”
“Well hell shit if that don’t beat nothing, are you telling me that Mr. high-rise wants to go back to service Miller Lights to a bunch of redneck fisherman and local alcoholics, are you really that desperate Jack? Whatever happened to all of those socialite friends you recently been hanging around with?”

“I told you Billy, it is all gone, the money, the women, the cars and all of those highbrow types, all went missing. I am no long Jack T. Douglas the second, I am just plain old broke ass Jack the bartender.”

Billy needed some time to think about it. Like most people out there, he enjoyed watching his friends thrash about with the many discomfort offered by life. Other peoples' misery make our worries taste like key lime pie.

Jack returned a week later to take over the early shift. Cheri was schedule to join him around 7pm. Her body used and her eyes tender, Jack took a careful look at Cheri and wondered why he never noticed her back in those days when life made much sense down at the Crazy Horse Saloon.

www.hardboiledmen.com

Apathy is my new religion

2009-02-08T16:16:00.000-08:00

“Are you ready to go Rocco?” she asked while tossing an uncomfortable plastic bag into the garbage bin. It was difficult for a woman of her social standing to bend down and clean up after him. Yet, public humiliation was more tolerable to her than paying the $150 fine. The dog did not answer her question; instead, he repositioned his legs and wiggled his tail in delight. The northeast corner of 33rd Street and 8th Avenue was a sight for sore canine eyes. Of particular interest was that old Jewish woman dressed in flowery fabrics was of particular interest to him. She inspected the flashy outdoors menu of the Stage Deli and wondered out loud why the place charged “$3.45 for a bowl of Matsaball soup, were these goyim crazy or something?” Rocco was drawn to the grandmotherly scent that came from her direction. The smell of mothballs and old body odor inspired him to urinate beneath the woman’s legs. “Oh my God,” screamed out the old woman in panic. “Lady, your dog almost peed all over my shoes.” The younger woman seemed unimpressed, she jerked the dog towards the opposite corner of Eighth Avenue.
“Mommy is just going to make a short phone call, don’t worry, it won’t take too long.”
Rocco did mind. He had nothing scheduled for the day. As she exercised her dialing fingers upon the slick panel of her cell phone, Rocco urinated all over the walls of Madison Square Garden.
Nestled between the majestic Empire State Building and the Corinthian-decorated United States Post Office across the street, Madison Square Garden would barely win the “Best in Show” award in the Mississippi county fair. The Empire State Building peaked to the sky while the historical post office building told ancient tales of Roman glory. By contrast, Madison Square Garden was nothing to look at. It was a simple round block of concrete decorated with cheap advertisements and that old blue and white sign that read “Pennsylvania Station.”
With his territory clearly marked for all to see, Rocco felt an unusual sense of ownership over Manhattan real estate. Now all that was left was to piss all over City Hall, the Whitney Museum and the Trump Tower International. Soon the entire city would belong to him. Intoxicated by his own delusions of grandeur, this canine real estate entrepreneur refocused his attention towards his master. While she dialed the different number combinations, he stared at her deep brown eyes and tried to gage her sense of loneliness.
“I can’t get a hold of Gina. Let’s give her a few more minutes. Hopefully, she will show up
He wiggled his tail served in affirmation. She adjusted her wide underwear strap and led her obedient friend towards the busy sidewalk. A filthy homeless woman approached the two.
“Can you spare some change?”
Rocco watched his master reach into her pocket and hand the old woman a small shiny dime. The woman murmured a few irate words in her direction and walked away.
“This city is full of crazy people,” said the woman to her dog. “I swear to God, people here are just crazy.”
Fully aware of the irony, he crossed the street and once again found himself standing in front of the deli. Spotting a medium-sized piece of sesame bagel on the outer rim of a green garbage bin, Rocco indulged the tasty snack. The woman waited impatiently for her friend to arrive. But Gina never showed up.
Around 11:30am I walked out of the C train stairways and walked out to the filthy concrete of 8th Avenue. At the entrance to the Stage Deli, I spotted a semi-attractive Indian woman who held on to an awkward dog.
“How are you today?” I asked, but she ignored me.
“O.K Rocco, it is time to go home, Mommy had enough.” she disappeared into the crowded streets.
Frank showed up a few minutes later. He was recently laid off from the bank but did not seem too concerned about his new situations.
“What can I tell you Guy, sometimes things just happen. You have to go with the flow, take life’s punches and keep a smile on your face.”
We both ordered the ham and cheese omelets. For a moment, I was pissed at the size of the so-called small orange juice but Frank reassured me that life was too short for such concern.
“Think about what stress can do to people. heart attacks, strokes, cancer, high blood pressure, those are the main causes of death. You have to ask yourself, is it really worth it? I tell you Guy, ever since I lost my job, I decided not to give a shit. Apathy is my new religion.”
We talked about it for a while and then I headed home for an early noon nap. When I woke up around three, I found Jenny lying there naked right besides me. She must have skipped her one o’clock philosophy seminar on account of her nasty hangover.
Jenny and I hung out with the wrong type of people. They were much younger than we were in terms of state of mind despite our reversed chronology. Why we ever agreed to head all the way down to the Bowery just to see Nick showcase his lame-ass poetry had something to do with Jenny and the fact that Nick was her best male friend ever since high school. Nick was a nobody. just another of the many sheep that herded around this urban campus. Poetry night was Jenny’s fault but the hangover was mine. While we waited for the poets to do their thing, I took full advantage of the $3 shots of cheap tequila that were on special. The busty waitress was more than glad to bring more shots around and I was more than happy to see her smile. The golden drink eased my boredom at times. Yet, it only made things only that much more tolerable. To start with, I never could stand Nick. He just waited for me to stumble. He wanted Jenny all to himself despite the fact that he was a flaming homo. True, I could have been a better boyfriend to Jenny. I was a complete bastard at times. But outside interference in a relationship, that went against the basic protocols of the Geneva Convention.
“I am leaving you Guy.” That was the first thing she said after she woke up from her nap. I still nursed a hangover; Jenny added another layer to it.
“You want some coffee?” I asked but she seemed rather disinterested.
“Did you hear what I said?” she asked, “I am leaving your ass and this time it is really over.”
Just most other people around our age group, we kept on breaking up only to hook up a few weeks later. By now I was used to this predictable exercise.
“I don’t really care Jenny, you can go ahead and walked out the door.”
“You don’t care? What the fuck do you mean, you don’t care?” She threw her jacket on and slammed the door as she walked away.
But I really did not care. Life was too short for drama and apathy after all was my new religion.
www.hardboiledmen.com

ci

Feeling alive for a moment

2009-01-30T10:53:00.000-08:00

www.hardboiledmen.com

Larisa sat alone at the Vbar coffee shop down on Sullivan Street. She drank her skinny latte and chewed on the pumpkin flavored granola that she packed away in a small Ziploc bag before she left her apartment.

The place was sort of empty for a Thursday morning. Typically, just finding a chair was a challenge. But on that day, there were enough empty seats to make one wonder.

Maybe it had something to do with the relatively warm weather. Forty degrees may have seemed like arctic temperatures in places like Boca Raton or Palm Springs but when it came to the city in January, it seemed rather temperate.
Larisa wore her lucky turtleneck shirt. The fabric pressed hard against her small love handles but she liked the way that her large breasts burst through the thin lilac cotton.

Across her left finger she wore the antique brass ring that she received from her aunt Rebecca only a few months before she passed away from stage three Leukemia. The two of them were never that close but for some strange manner, Larisa felt safe when wearing that ring. It almost felt like someone was watching over her from above.
The radio was playing soft classical music. She always preferred the piano to the violin.
Around 11:30am, Jake walked into the place.

“Hey, what’s going on?” He asked in his typical Jake shyness.
She pretended as if she did not notice, but she did notice, she noticed just as soon as the door opened, just as soon as he walked in. Her heart beat like an African drum to the sound of her enthusiasm. She did her best to seem aloof.
“Not to much, what are you doing here?” What a stupid reply, she thought. She only wished she could take it back and start off with something more meaningful.

“Oh, you know, just getting some coffee. Hanging out. Trying to avoid work, the usual, you know.” Hey smiled and then turned towards the book that Larisa was reading. He could not make it out. “What are you reading there? Is this fun reading or something for school?”

“Oh trust me, this is definitely not for fun, this is for Schiller’s class. The book is called Journey to the End of the Night. Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote it. He was a French writer from back in the day. Schiller is making us read it for his seminar. The book is kind of heavy reading if you ask me. I am only on page 58 and I have to write a paper on this stupid book by Monday afternoon.”

“Oh I love that book,” he smiled, “I read it over the summer. It’s a classic. I am sure that you will eventually change your mind. Celine was a freaking genius. He is definitely one of my favorite authors along with Bukowski and Philip Roth.
Once again, she felt inadequate. Jack was a deep guy. He must have thought that she was boring. There were not many people like him around campus. While all the other boys were always busy with getting drunk and trying to fuck anything and anyone that walked, Jake read books, played the guitar and always had something smart to say.

Larisa and Jake were not good friends. They weren’t really friends at all. They sort of knew each other from some of the classes that everyone took during freshman and sophomore years at New York University. The two of them never really hung out. Yea, there was that one time when Professor Falica took them all out for beers to celebrate the end of the semester but they sat on the opposite corners of the long rectangular table. Jake sat next to the professor and argued with him about something that seemed rather intellectual. She on the other end and on the other side of the table sat with Jenny Crugerman and Stephanie Sigel and engaged in the same old discussion about where to go out that weekend and how cute this boy was over the next. She recalled just how much she hated life on that particular night. Everyone around her seemed so similar to one another. No one ever had anything interesting or original to say and neither did she.

But on that rather warm Thursdays like that Thursday, things would be different. Sometimes life intervened in one’s favor. At least that was the way she felt as Jake slid his tall chair along her outer thigh.

The sat around for a while and talked about the kind of things that people around their age spoke about. While Jake had much to say about everything, she focused on her smile. A guy like Jake was full of theories about life. He had read important books. He had already managed to backpack all across Europe and the Yucatan Peninsula. Larisa has never been anywhere. She did not read any important books nor did she have anything smart to add to Jake’s many worldly observations.
She smiled and nodded her head. She pretended to keep up with the conversation but what she was actually attempting to do more than anything else was to seem much smarter than she actually felt.

Jake was a nice guy. He lit with enthusiasm. He treated her to a cup of herbal tea and later they split a double chocolate brownie that made her feel that much better.
When they walked into his apartment, she was overly impressed by the paintings that were displayed all across the studio apartment’s walls. Jake had painted these during the summer he spent out in Florence Italy. She could only hope for such adventures or such talent.

Jake took out a painted glass pipe from the drawer of his desk. Thick green marijuana spilled out of a round plastic container into a pure piece of notebook paper. Jake broke the plant into small pieces and placed them into the pipe as he lit it up.
Larisa observed the slow moving dials of the living room clock that indicated that noon was just around the corner. A bit early in the day for pot smoking she suspected. She has only smoked pot a few times before and could never really get high. But Jake offered and so she accepted. For him, she would climb a tall white mountain only if to see him at the top.
As the smoke made its way through her system, Jake inserted his intellectual tongue into her ordinary mouth. It tasted like knowledge. It carried an older texture along its cress. His kiss was more mature than that of most boys who had kissed her before.

As he slowly massaged her breasts and licked the tips of her nipples, Larisa could feel her back twist and twirl like a drunken ally cat. Panic settled in all across her inner thighs. Things were moving way too quickly. But she knew that she would never get a second chance. She knew that Jake was different than most of the other boys she came across. And besides, she was in New York City. Her parents lived more than two hours away. No one would ever find out, she suspected.
Despite several attempts to keep her underwear on, Larisa had no real chance. Jake’s persistence that he attributed to them Marijuana and to the fact that he absolutely loved her body and must have had a taste of her inner salty flesh, that was all way too much. Despite the mastery of his tongue, she could not help but to worry about just how bad it must have tasted. She did not want to loose Jake as a result of his body’s saltiness.

Jake asked her if she preferred for him to be on top or at the bottom. She did not know what was the right answer and so she told him to simply have his way. He took a condom out of his bedroom drawer and asked Larisa to place it across her larger than usual cock.

While he moaned in pleasure, she just closed her eyes and thought about what life would be like if Jake decided to make her his girlfriend and the two of them would be known amongst her girlfriends as a leading couple of the overall popularity scale.
While Jake took his time, soaping up in the shower, Larisa fixed her makeup and dried her long brown hair.
Low cumulous clouds came down on the streets of New York City; the sun was slowly disappearing despite the early hour of the day. As the temperatures plummeted down back to the ordinary low thirties, Larisa walked towards her university dorm room and wondered if Jake would ever call her up again for a second date.

Regardless of anything that he may do or would have done, nothing really mattered for during that brief moment that for the first time in her life, Larisa felt like she was alive.

www.hardboiledmen.com

Are you drinking

2009-01-26T18:48:00.000-08:00

By: Charles Bukowski

washed-up, on shore, the old yellow notebook
out again
I write from the bed
as I did last
year.
will see the doctor,
Monday.
"yes, doctor, weak legs, vertigo, head-
aches and my back
hurts."
"are you drinking?" he will ask.
"are you getting your
exercise, your
vitamins?"
I think that I am just ill
with life, the same stale yet
fluctuating
factors.
even at the track
I watch the horses run by
and it seems
meaningless.
I leave early after buying tickets on the
remaining races.
"taking off?" asks the motel
clerk.
"yes, it's boring,"
I tell him.
"If you think it's boring
out there," he tells me, "you oughta be
back here."
so here I am
propped up against my pillows
again
just an old guy
just an old writer
with a yellow
notebook.
something is
walking across the
floor
toward
me.
oh, it's just
my cat
this
time.

The Grey Dog Coffee Company

2009-01-03T01:05:00.000-08:00

For More Go TO

I was not all that excited about the idea of becoming the newest employee of the Grey Dog Coffee Company. Sure, I would get all the coffee that I wanted for free and I would mostly be working along with good looking hippie college students who could surely teach me a few tricks in the sack. But still, I was a graduate of the prestigious MFA program in creative writing of the University of Michigan. It simply seemed illogical that I would find myself sitting here in this small village coffee shop awaiting an interview.
But what is a brother to do? These are hard days and somehow I had to pay rent. Susan and Irena, my two lesbian roommates would not likely grant me an extension. Somehow I knew deep down in my bones, that if given the chance, Irena would be more than happy to jump my bones. She went both ways. But Susan was strictly butch. She never experienced the joy of a man and would likely argue that there were no such joys. Clearly, I could not fuck my way out of this one. There were less than seven hundred dollars left in my checking account and time was running out.

Her name was Ski and she was the assistant manager of the coffee shop and an undergraduate student at New York University. Before we sat down beneath those yellow chandelier lights all the way in the back of the coffee shop, she wanted to know if I would like anything to drink and of course, it would be on the house.
“Sure, I will take a cup of coffee, black, two sugars.”
“Give me a moment,” and then she returned with two cups of coffee and a friendly smile. She took out my application from a tall stack of papers and quickly glanced over my credentials.

“So tell me Greg, I see that you worked in a bunch of coffee shops back in Ann Harbor, Common Cup, Caribou Coffee and Foggy Bottom Coffee House. I also see that you have an undergraduate degree in American literature and an MA in creative writing. So I take it that you are a writer.”

“Well, that all depends on who you ask. I published a few short stories in The Believer and the Chelsea Literary Journal but I doubt that you ever ran across my works.”
“That sounds really cool, I would love to read one of your stories.”
“Why, are you the reading type Ski?”

“Are you kidding me, I love books. You will always find a good book at my bedside. Without books, what is the point, right?”
“Hell yea. But you and I are in the minority on this one, most people prefer reality television.”
“’Hey, forget most people,” she smiled “most people suck.”
“I could not agree more Ski. Tell me, who is your favorite author?”
“Oh, that’s a good one, I could not say, I am torn between Hemingway and Truman Capote, how about you?”
“Hard one, I would be torn between Henry Miller and Philip Roth.” We went back and forth for a while. Suddenly, one of the employees yelled Ski’s name out. She excused herself for a moment and left me with a sweet taste in my mouth.

I looked around at the people who were quickly filling up the place. It was eleven O’clock in the morning on Tuesday in December and none of these people were at work. Were these people independently wealthy? Were they tourists? Students? Or were they as unemployed as I? It did not really matter, the place had a good vibe to it and no one seemed to differentiate between a Sunday and a Tuesday. Everyone just seemed more than content to be here in New York City and away from the cold winds that were running around the tall city buildings.

“Sorry about that,” she apologized when she returned “there was a bit of a mix up with a customer but now it is all taken care of. So where were we?” She smiled.
“You were about to tell me whether you were single or had a boyfriend.”
“I don’t recall that conversation.” She laughed. “I recall something about Hemingway.”
“So what is the answer?” I insisted.
“Do you always ask such questions during a job interview?”
“Only when the person who interviews me is a good looking woman who likes books.”
“You realize of course that now things are too awkward for me to offer you the position.” She apologized.
“Yes, I know, I fully realize that. But I will take your phone number any day over a job. There are many places were I can earn a buck but not too many women in New York City who can put a smile on my face.”
“So I put a smile on your face?” She bashfully laughed.
“You did and you do. So what do you say Ski, do you have a man in your life?”
“Not at the moment. But I am not sure that I am taking applications at the moment.”
“I think you should reconsider, just look at my resume, I am more than qualified.”
“Oh yea? And what exactly do you think qualifies you for the position?”
“Well Ski, I am a very hard worker, I take my job seriously and promise to show up for work on time, every time and to stay late at work when ever is required. I tell you Ski, a man with strong work ethics is hard to find around these parts.”
“Trust me Greg, I already know that by now.“ She smiled.

She would not acquiesce and instead of her telephone number she instructed me to add her on Facebook which I did just an hour after I came back home.
Irena walked in on me just as began to jerk off under my sheets. She did not seem embarrassed at all, rather, she seemed aroused. The idea went through her head for a quick moment but instead of jumping into my bed with that tiny Russian body of hers’, she demanded the long overdue rent. I told her that I needed another few days before
I would have the money.

“Yea, well, I heard that one before. Maybe you should consider getting yourself a job instead of sitting around here and jerking off all day like some damn teenager.”
A few days later I emailed Ski a PDF copy of “Red Wine Wonders”, a story that I published in Literal Latte, a local publication off of 10th street down around the corner. From her reply, I could tell that she really liked it.

We agreed to meet up for a drink a few days later in the Vig Bar, a trendy little join off of Elizabeth Street. When thinking about it, I was not in any position to pay for all of the martinis that she ordered that night. Ski had enough dirty martinis in her to piss out olive oil and I was the one who laid out more than a hundred bucks at the end of the night.

A single man of limited means living here in New York City was an exercise in idiocy. I could have opened the gym.

Maybe it was time for me to listen to my brother’s advice and to move back home to Nebraska where the beer was cheap and the spare bedroom available. But let’s be honest now. Great writers don’t come from the wheat fields of the Midwest; they did not thrive in silence.

Women like Ski, long literary streets and a constant headache are the hallmarks of New York City, a city that will always offer a man a good kick in the ass.
Ski could not come despite my many attempts. More than thirty-five minutes down between her thighs and my tongue was growing numb. Maybe it had to do with a lack of technique, maybe it was the vodka. I never got a second chance.

Standing out on that cold empty road that connected Sioux City and Omaha, I held on to my backpack and a copy of Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums and wondered just how long he would have stuck around the streets of New York before he would give up on his literary dreams.

www.hardboiledmen.com

Feeding the Cat

2008-12-25T11:35:00.000-08:00

For More Go To

On cold days like today, I try to avoid the world. It is simply too damn cold for me. A southern boy living in NYC is like a bullfrog in a Chinese market. Nothing good can ever come out of it.

When Jennifer will return from her late shift around six in the morning, I will let her have it. This time, I will hold nothing back. We have been dating for nearly three months now and we both knew it would end from the first day it all began. In New York City, there was no real reason to stick around with anyone. You were almost guaranteed to meet someone better on the following week. The only thing that held Jenn and myself for this long was the sex, but after a while they all taste like taffy anyways

It was time for this boy to move on to greener pastures, to find a better woman. In my bones, I knew that I deserved much better than this Jennifer character. She was no good from her core. Hopefully, the next one would not mistake my generosity for foolhardiness or my wallet for a bathtub. I always preferred the sweet ones but never really ended up with any of them.

Ever since Jennifer and I got together, it has been shopping hell. What she could not achieve at home with my cock (or her vibrator), she could easily get when she tried on a $300 pair of designer jeans. Like Siamese lace they dripped around her thighs in anticipation of ownership. I should have refused her outrageous requests but Jennifer had a body on her and I was a man.

Worse than Jennifer’s bad habits was her cat “Mr. Jingles”. This one seemed to be just as spoiled as its female owner, they both deserved a quick in the ass. I was somehow in charge of feeding the cat in the evenings while she was working. I could not stand that little feline bastard; he had it in for me from the very first day. Once during sex, he jumped me from the back and left claw marks across my body. Jenn explained that he can get possessive at times but that did not do much in terms of reassurance.
I could not decide whether I should poison the little son of a bitch or simply dump his at some back alley of a Thai restaurant. To the people of Thailand, cat was like chicken or a descent steak. I sounds cruel, I know, but how is killing sheep or cows any different when you think about it?

If I could only drop Jennifer off on some back alley of any Thai restaurant and be done with this entire relationship, life would have been that much simpler. But they don’t serve high maintenance women on the Thai menus and therefore I was stuck.
I went down to Joe’s Pub for a drink. They were serving pints of Yuengling for three dollars. I sat on the long wooden bar and looked around at the regular faces. Joes was our neighborhood bar. They never tried to be anything else besides a regular place for regular people.

Hank Grande was a forty two year old retiree. What he retired from? Now one really knew. Hank never drank beer. He was a Jamieson man. I once asked him about that whole Jamieson business but he was not one for too many words.
“Irish whiskey helps me keep my erection going.” He explained and that was pretty much all I ever found out.

A few pints later, I went out for a cigarette. I don’t really smoke nor do I like smoking. But the alcohol made a difference and I was jonesing for some tobacco in my lungs. Now all I needed was a cigarette and a light, I had neither.
I stood around for a few minutes until she showed up.

“Hey” I poetically remarked.
“Hey.” She replied.
“Got a cigarette?”
“Yea. I do.”
“Can I borrow one?”
“Borrow? Do you promise to give it back once you are done with it?” she smiled.
She handed me a menthol cigarette.
“Is it true that menthol cigarettes actually make your breath smell more fresh?” I replied.
She just smiled as she exhaled.
“My name is Jake.”
“Hey Jake.” She grinned.
“And you are?”
“I am what?”
“What is your name?”
“Stephanie”
“Nice to meet you Stephanie.”
“Nice to meet you Jake.”
We stood there in silence for a few minutes. Stephanie was smoking and I was trying to avoid chocking on the tobacco smoke.
“You are not much of a smoker are you Jake?”
“Who me? What are you talking about? I am a professional.”
“A professional what? You don’t seem to professional at either smoking or lying.” She smiled.
“Are you here with anyone special?” I asked her in an attempt to figure out whether she was single or not.
“I am here with friends. How about you?”
“I am here alone.”
“Do you always drink alone Jake?”
“Only when none of my friends want to drink with me. So what do you say Steph, can I buy you a drink?”
“I don’t know Jake, can you?”
“Well I can certainly afford to.”
“Then you might as well.”

We sat back on the long wooden bar where Stephanie introduced me to her two portly friends. They were both beautiful. I ended up buying them all a round of martinis, one dirty, one peach and one Cosmo. Stephanie instructed the bartender to make hers extra dirty.

I do not know why, but somehow I found solace amongst these three women. Stephanie was my favorite by far but the other two also seemed great despite the extra weight that they carried around.

Once again, Stephanie and I went outside for a cigarette. She seemed fairly normal for a New York City woman. She was the kind that read books and avoided television. Such were hard to find these days.

“So tell me there Mr. Jake, are you a single guy?”
“Yes, yes I am. Well, mostly, you know, it is complicated. And how about you?”
“Well, you know Jake, in my life those things are always complicated.”
“Aren’t they always in NYC?”
“Yea, I guess that is always the case around these parts.”
“The key question now Stephanie is do you have any cats back in your place?”
“No I don’t, I only have Rambo.”
“Rambo?”
“My Labrador. He is the biggest sweetheart in the world. How about you Jake, do you have any pets?”
“None that I can recall.”

Unlike Mr. Jingles, Rambo was the kind of an animal that I could relate to. Labradors had better personalities than most people that I have encountered.
While Stephanie and I were screwing on the carpet, he simply sat on the side and watched in wonder, occasionally scratching one part of his body or another. Somehow I felt as if Rambo was pulling for me, as if he was one of my old buddies from back in the day when I was an Undergraduate student at the University of Tennessee.
After a few brief moments of pleasure, we were both done. One more satisfied than the other. But hey, what could I do, it takes time for a woman to find all of the right buttons on a woman. They all had them in different places and none came with a manual.

Stephanie went into the kitchen where she poured some vodka into a tall glass mixer filled with a substantial amount of ice and some cranberry juice. It was getting late and I had to hurry back home before Jennifer would return home.
Before I left, she wrote her telephone number down on a pink piece of scrap paper and placed a smiley face next to her name. We both knew that it would not take too long before I would phone her up. We had magic in our air.

When Jennifer returned from the late night shift she found a simple note on the refrigerator that was written on a white piece of scrap paper:

Sorry Jenn,
But I do not think it is going to work between the two of us.
It is time for this southern boy to move on.
What was missing from the beginning cannot be found.
What was lacking from the start cannot be substituted.
A good-looking girl like you will have no trouble forgetting about
a guy like me, go on and find yourself someone better (it wont take too long)
Thanks for all the good times, I do not regret anything.
PS. Please feed Mr. Jingles, I much prefer dogs to cats.

And then, relieved, I walked home smiling in the early morning cold

For More Go To

Instant Coffee

2008-11-07T13:08:00.001-08:00

Instant Coffee By: Guy Jacobs (www.hardboiledmen.com)

After we made love early on that cold Saturday morning, I went into the well decorated kitchen and made her a cup of instant coffee. Juliet did not own a regular drip coffee percolator. It was not about her inability to afford a fifteen dollar Mr. Coffee machine. It had something to do with those two semesters that she spent out on the western coast of Portugal. There, she came to view American coffee as dull and absent of flavor and where she came to appreciate the elation of instant coffee.

Such was Juliet. From head to toe, her skin shined of irony. It took me a while to find the sugar. Juliet took her coffee with two tall teaspoons of unprocessed organic brown sugar. Juliet took her coffee without milk. She was trying to avoid those unnecessary calories.

Finally, I found it hidden behind the tall bottle of Kosher salt. Juliet’s cabinet was full of food and yet, I could find nothing to eat for breakfast. I made myself a cup of instant as well and came back to bedroom holding on to two green ceramic mugs that displayed foreign letters on their sides.

“You are such a sweetheart,” She said, “You really did not have to bother. I would have eventually gotten out of bed and made you some coffee.”

But she did not and therefore I did.

“Did you put two sugars in my coffee?” she asked.

“Yes, I did.”

“Did you find the organic brown sugar?”

“Yes, I did.”

“David, you are such a sweetie, I can just eat you up alive.” She smiled. The magnificence of her olive oiled skinned unfolded from within her sheets as she warmly readjusted her body in my direction.

How I ever finagled my way into the heaven of her thighs must have somehow involved some sort of divine intervention since I was in no way worthy of such fortune.

“Tell me David, do you agree with David Hume’s assessment that the very supposition that the future resembles the past, is not founded on arguments of any kind, but rather, is derived entirely from habit?” Juliet was the worst kind of a woman for someone like me. She was truly gorgeous and at the same time genuinely intellectual. What she found in a philistine such as myself was beyond me.

I tried to hide my ignorant shame and resorted to a long mindless sip from her green mug. The sweetness of the brown sugar provided me with childish reassurance. I took to adolescent strategies. “I don’t know, what do you think?” I replied.

While she presented her well developed analysis of the multidimensional correlation between reality and one’s own assertion of what reality is, I thought about the last thing that Juliet whispered in my ears seconds before she shivered in climax.

While I was not familiar with David Hume, Emmanuelle Kant and many other of the names that Juliet liked to discuss, I was quit familiar with the female cliterous and with Juliet’s in particular. A man had to choose his area of expertise. I chose the physical over the cerebral.

I picked myself up from the bed and headed towards the balcony where I lit a morning’s cigarette. A cold winter air roamed threw the side streets of my city and warmed me up with its sense of familiarity. From the other room, I could hear Juliet as she was singing along with the radio.

Minutes later she announced that she wanted me to take her out for brunch. She was in the mood for poached eggs and bacon. I had thirteen dollars and sixty eight cents in my pocket and thus argued that I was not particularly in the mood for eggs. We ended up at that same bagel place where one could get a full ledged breakfast for under five dollars.

When we walked into the place, Juliet was thrilled to run into her friend Denis from her interpretive acting seminar. While the two of them engaged in thespian dialogue, I excused myself towards the city street where I would purchase another pack of smokes.

Surveying those fashion magazine covers, I noticed dozens of beautiful women who were smiling at me in synchronization.

All of the women looked way too perfect to be walking amongst us all.

They all carried that cold persona of careful consideration and financial ambition.

And no man of my low status was worthy of their company and no man of my low status was worthy of their flesh.

And yet, earlier on that Saturday morning, she wrapped her teeth around the tender lobe of my ear and in pure ecstasy she whispered, “promise me that you will not finish until I am completely done.”

And so, I did not.

In every large ocean, one small wave rides my name.

In every sky there is a star that shines in my direction.

In every forest there is a single tree that knows my story.

In this small and lonely world, I found my Juliet. David Hume may have been right about the past and he may have been wrong when it came to the future. But such matters were of no consequence to me. The present was all I knew and it essence was captured in her smile.

Get an autographed copy of Hard Boiled Men with Free Shipping for only $9.99 (Holiday Special)

Female Bosses Part I

2008-10-29T18:00:00.000-07:00

When I opened the newspaper on Tuesday, I turned to page A13. There was no particular reason for the selection of that page. I never considered the number 13 to be either lucky or unlucky. I never got that whole 13 thing. How again was it supposed to be a sign of bad luck? Why did most elevators omit the thirteen button? Did it have anything to do with Friday the 13th? Was it a Christian thing? From what I recall Jews considered 13 to be a lucky number than an unlucky one. But Jews were luckier than most, Jewish men that was. At the age of 13 all Jewish boys turned into a men. That was when they celebrated their Bar Mitzvah and got a shitload of gifts, if I correctly recall.

My Jewish friend Jason Gad told me that back in the days fathers would take their thirteen year old boys to the local brothel where they made sure they became men. My father was never as generous. Maybe it had to do with the fact that I grew up in an Atheist family. My atheism never got me anywhere. If I were Jewish and lived back in the day I, then maybe, just maybe, I would not have to wait until the age of nineteen to pop my cherry, but hey, what can I say? One cannot change his past. One cannot turn back the clock and improve his record. And so, when it came to women, I just accepted the way things turned out and never bothered to think about the past too much.

On page A13, the newspaper ran a story about interoffice dynamics and the modern work environment. According to a recent poll conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Public Opinion Research, the majority of people preferred to have a male as their boss then they did a female. The numbers got even more interesting when one considered the actual breakdown.

According to the survey, 34% of males preferred to have a male boss, 10% of them preferred a female boss, while the rest of them (56%) did not care either way. As for the women, they were much more adamant about the subject at hand. According to the survey 40% of female survey participants preferred a male boss, 26% of them preferred a female boss, while 32% of them did not care. Clearly women “did not care” less than did males which to me signified that they clearly did care and it was not in the favor of their fellow females.

This of course brought me to the obvious conclusion, one that I have intrinsically known for many years and did not need any newspaper or academic public opinion survey to confirm – Women were never big fans of other women, they never really trusted one another, they never really liked each other.

Yea, yea, I know what women will say, “most of my best friends are female, I have had the same female friends ever since I grew up and they would stand with me through thick and thin.”
That is what they would tell you, but I never believed this propaganda, I know better than that. I have seen enough in my short life and have tasted enough cheeseburgers to know better than to believe anything that they printed in the newspapers, especially when it comes to the New York Times.

Women to women were and always would be snakes; they were the thorn at the side of one another. But forget the analogies and all of those fancy metaphors, that junk is for writers. I am no writer nor am I a scholar of any sorts. I am a waiter. I work at a local TGI Friday’s restaurant. I wear the red and white stripes with much pride. I serve overpriced prepackaged junk food to a bunch of drunk customers who very much like me frequent the place just to catch a quick glance at our overzealous blond waitress whose fake smiles perfectly compliment their tightly packed anatomies.

This brings me to the whole point of the conversation and to that whole page A13 issue. It brings me to the unlikely topic of Jennifer Martin, my 6pm shift manager who recently altered the course of my once peaceful life.
Jennifer was a complete bitch on wheels. Jennifer was the kind of a boss that would make 99 out of a hundred males and females vote in opposition to any female boss regardless of their income level, age or education. Jennifer was the worst woman of all. She was menstruated 31 days out of the month. She housed the devil between her ears. She houses everyone else between her legs (with the exception of yours truly).

Jennifer was not a misunderstood person. She is clearly understood and the understanding pointed to her malevolence. There were not many good things that one could say about Jennifer even if they tried really hard. That of course was with the exception of her lovely tits. They were huge and they are real. They were the kind that would make any heterosexual male and every bicurious woman take a careful look and painfully yearn for nothing but a quick taste of God’s great creation.
Did I mention that I preferred the fake ones? I never understood why anyone preferred naturals. Fake tits never dropped. Real ones eventually did. Of course there were exceptions. But with fake ones, you never had to deal with physics. They always stood up right no matter if the woman was twenty five or fifty two years of age. I was always a big fan of huge tits. There was no particular reason for that. Like most men, I had no real utility for them, I sometimes just felt like sticking my face in between that cushioned valley and tossing my nose from side to side. Talk about exercise. Look at all of those things that men would do to burn off calories. So ladies, any volunteers out there? Leave a message on my answering machine. I usually checked my voicemail late on Wednesdays; sometimes I checked them early on Thursday mornings. Ladies, do you want to show off your true nature? Send a few photos to my PO Box and wait for a reply.

But Jennifer, she never called, she never left a message nor did she ever send any revealing photos in the mail. She must have been too busy fucking our restaurant manager, Mark Epstein (The Second). That guy was falsely assembled at the factory. Someone accidently misplaced his ass in the same location where his face should have been positioned. After all, what else would account for the large amounts of bullshit that came out of his mouth on the daily?
To someone who did not know any better, it may seem that I was simply jealous of Mark, jealous of another man’s ability to go to places where I have never ventured before. But such was not the case. Such would simply be a misinterpretation of my true nature. I was not the jealous type. However, I could be described as the covetous type.
But this whole Jennifer story had nothing to do with Mark Epstein (The Second); it had nothing to do with Jennifer’s perfect pair of tits or with the fact that I had not had sexual relations with any woman in twelve days, three hours and seventeen long minutes.

Everything that had to do with Page A13 only reminded me of Jennifer Martin. But I tend to misrepresent. Jennifer was never anything but nice to me in the year and a half that she served as my boss. She was a fair boss, she never busted my balls and she was always good for a late night drink. Everything between the two of us was always good until that day that she introduced me to Lisa Nguyen, her best friend and old college roommate from Colorado State University.
At closing time, a few days ago, we all gathered around the bar, counted tips and told stories about the idiotic customers that we encountered on that night. Everything was pretty much as ordinary, good times and free drinks. Jody was working the bar that night. After all the customers left, she let the drinks flow like butter on a ham. Free drinks always tasted better than those you had to pay for. It was one of the key perks of wearing the old red and white suspenders.

Jody and Jennifer were laughing with Bruce, our assistant manager. I just smiled and enjoyed the moment, thinking what it would be like to see naked at my side. Around 1am, Jennifer’s cell phone rang. I suspected that we would soon encounter Mr. Mark Epstein (The Second) but was soon happy to head Jenn announce that Lisa visiting from out of town.
Lisa and I met a few times before. She recently moved out to Delaware where she worked as an admission’s counselor at some small private university. Apparently, there was not much to do around Newark, DE (pronounced Ne-Wark as opposed to Ne-Work, NJ) and so she would hop in her car on weekends and find her way to our TGIF.

The last time we all met was a few weeks ago. Jenn and Lisa got all drunk and dragged me back to Jenn’s apartment were we all played Karaoke on her Sony Playstation. They must have gone through an entire rendition of songs from the 80s and 90s that almost drove me nuts. Jennifer loved Brittney Spears and I had no choice but to play along. The worst was when they made me join them in a drunk version of the Spice Girls song, If You Want To Be My Lover.
One that night, after all the singing and boozing, Lisa and I made out while Jenn passed out on the couch. I tried my best to stick my busy fingers under Lisa’s tiny Asian bra but she would have none of it.
And now, here she was, once again, she was all smiles.

Jody made Lisa her favorite cocktail, a Gray Goose dirty martini with an extra shot of olive juice and two extra shots of vodka. Soon enough, Lisa was ready to go. But it was getting late and Jennifer was too tired to party on that night. And besides, Mark was waiting for her to show up at his place. They planned a big trip to Upstate on the following morning and she really needed to catch some sleep.

To my surprise, Jennifer suggested that I would be the one to take Lisa out and show her a good time. This brings me back to page A13 of the New York Times. When the survey participants had to answer whether they preferred a male to a female boss, no one ever mentioned to them just how gorgeous their female boss would be, how amazingly hot their old college roommates would be and how the rest of the night turned out.

www.hardboiledmen.com

Bukowski and Books

2008-10-19T07:58:00.001-07:00

Question: Who is your favorite author?

Answer: Hold on, don’t answer just yet; think about it for a moment.

According to a recent survey, more than 89 million Americans DID NOT read a book in 2007 (US National Endowment for the Arts). Meantime, those who do read tend to focus on non fiction and how to books:

How to lose 50 pounds in 50 days?
How to become a millionaire in three months?
How to make a man commit?
How to make a woman orgasm?
How to win friends and influence people?
How to tell if a man is marriage material?
How to know who is going to win an election simply by looking at candidates’ height and age?

And then there is fiction. You know, those books that are not written in bullets. Then can not be summarized by Top 10 lists. When it comes to fiction, most Americans seek advice from the grand marshal herself Mrs. Oprah Winfrey, if you make it to her list, you are pretty much guaranteed a spot on the best seller list and there is nothing wrong with that. One occasion, she gets it absolutely right (and at times she did not).

So what do most Americans read? Well, there are those author giants such as J. K. Rowling, James Patterson, John Grisham, Danielle Steel, Dean Koontz and Josephine Cox. Much like any local Wal-Mart store, these authors each dominate sales in their own genre. There is nothing particularly wrong with any of these authors. Most of them found the formula to America’s taste in literature (and pocketbooks) and have thus dominated top seller lists for years.

What scares me more than anything, however, are the millions of readers who never heard of the classics and by classics, I am not referring to Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe or Jules Verne.

I am referring to more contemporary authors; those authors who dared to piss off the corporate establishment and thus ended, at times, with the short end of the literary stick.

Take Charles Bukowski as an example. Charles Whom? You ask?

Henry Charles Bukowski was a German-American poet slash author who managed to publish dozens of books of poetry, short stories and fiction in his short seventy four years on this earth (mostly spent in LA bars). Thanks to the vision of John Martin and his Black Sparrow publication, Hank dedicated himself to sitting down and writing books (in addition to his love for the poem as he described it). The marriage between Black Sparrow and Bukowski proved magical and resulted in such great works of literature as Ham on Rye, Post Office, Women and Factotum. Bukowski whose work was largely inspired by such authors as John Fante, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Anton Chekhov has inspired a new generation of contemporary authors such as Guy Jacobs, Dan Fante and Tom Paine.

You would think that an author like Bukowski who wrote about getting laid, drinking heavily and under-advantaged fist fighting would attract the attention of those younger male readers who themselves are trying to accomplish much of what Hank Bukowski worked towards and yet, that is not the case.

I recently searched through Charles Bukowski groups on both Facebook and Myspace. There, I discovered that the majority of Bukowski fans came from such corners of the world as Turkey, Slovenia, France and Belgium. Most of them were women as well. This is not a big surprise. Women tend to read more than males, especially those under the age of twenty five (the guys are too busy with looking at online pornography, playing video games and jerking off).

There is much more to be written about the topic of literature and books. Although, most of us authors do somewhere, somehow acknowledge that writing and reading is a dying art (thank you media convergence). Still we do it because this is who we are and this is what we do.

For those of you who are wondering which books you should pick up next, here is a list of recommendations:

1. Sexus by Henry Miller
2. The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski
3. Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski
4. Ask the Dust by John Fante
5. Hard Boiled Men by Guy Jacobs
6. Straight Man by Richard Russo
7. Portnoy’s complaint by Philip Roth
8. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
9. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
10. A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley

That is all for today, get off of your computer and go read a book

What Men Don't Know About the Female Orgasm

2008-10-09T20:29:00.001-07:00

www.hardboiledmen.com

John May woke up early that morning for no apparent reason. He brewed up a pot of coffee on that old Mr. Coffee machine that he held on to ever since his graduate school days. If it ain’t broke, why bother to buy a new one, he thought. The cold wind that ran through the streets of Pittsburg did not provide enough incentive for John to put a pair of sweatpants on. In his underwear, he greeted the morning.

John May was the kind of a guy who enjoyed his morning routine and nothing was more central to that routine than the old cup of cup and reading the morning newspaper. John did not have much interest in the news sections, the financials or even the sports. He was the kind of a man who read between the lines searching for a clue. Of course, one could theoretically argue that John was a bit of a conspiracy theory but that was not the case at all (or maybe it was). John knew the ways of the media. He had an undergraduate degree in journalism and knew all about newsroom routines, gatekeeping and media framing. In between the lines was the way that those in charge communicated with one another. In between the advertorials, editorials and daily columns, in the fine print, that was where the truth was hidden from the reading masses.

On page A5 John came across a clue. The headline could not be more convincing.

52% OF WOMEN NEVER EXPERIENCED AN ORGASM, the headline read.

This was exactly the kind of a thing that made you wonder. And if it did not make you wonder, thought John, well at least it should.

Back in the old days, he ran across old Herb Schiller his journalism professor back at the University of California at San Diego. Schiller told the class that they should never believe anything they read in the newspaper.

“Everything that you read in the newspaper, hear on the radio or watch on television is nothing short of a corporate conspiracy to turn you into a better consumer. Those people want you to equate your happiness with the art of shopping. Had a bad day at work, buy some shoes. Your boyfriend cheated on you, take his credit card and get some shopping therapy. Don’t believe anything that they say.” That was the kind of a lecture that would often be heard in Schiller’s seminars. John May loved every part of it. It made sense when you really thought about it.

The coffee tasted a bit rusty that morning. Maybe Pam was right after all. Maybe it was time to buy a new coffee maker and throw away the old dusty machine that he bought at Target for ten dollars more than three years ago.

But what about the headline, he thought could this really be true? Fifty two percent seemed a bit excessive to John. And what those other forty eight percent, he thought. Was it a function of psychology or was it all the guy’s fault as he heard many of his female friends argue. Thinking back to those five women that he somehow managed to lay so far in his short twenty five year career, he could not remember if 2.6 of those women actually did or did not reach sexual climax.

The first time he did it was sometime back in high school. He was a frightened pimple faced junior and she, an overweight twenty four year old woman who seemed more bored than anything on her overextended semester break. Thinking back of that night, he felt nothing but shame when he recalled just how quickly he came just as soon as he felt that incredible touch of the female flesh for the very first time in his life.

Her name was Lucy and she did not protest. She was more of a resourceful type than a complainer. She simply walked into the shower, cleaned herself up and then forced him to eat her out until should reached satisfaction.

Then there was that girl that he met during freshman orientation back at UCSD . She was a stacked woman with enough meat on her to feed a small village in Bangladesh. John did not remember her name. When he thought about it, he never did know it in the first place. They somehow stumbled into bed after a freshman party back in the dorms. John did not have any condoms on him but she insisted on penetration. Twenty seconds later, her sizeable stomach was painted in the colors of white apprehension. She gave him a dirty look and then proceeded to transfer into the bed of his roommate who pretended to be sleeping. John stared at the dorm ceiling as he listened to his roommate Dave give the girl a proper fuck. Ten minutes passed and then he heard a woman come for the first time. Was she faking it out of spite for his non-proficient performance or did Dave really supply the goods. 48% says that it was spite over Dave.

Then there was Patty, the girl he briefly dated during senior year. Patty came from a small town in Alabama. He could not remember if it was Tuscaloosa or someplace right in the area. Patty was a nice girl. She was always kind to John and was the one who taught him how to manage his erections and hold on to them for just a bit longer. She showed him how at a simple push of the external vein, right at the base of the cock, he could buy himself a few more seconds inside.

When it came to Patty Valentine, John had no doubts. If anyone had an orgasm it was her. How did he know? Well she always made a point to announce. Clinching on to his skin, grinding her teeth and pulling his hair she rotated her hips all around, closed her eyes, scratch her nails until she finally shout out that old slogan of the Alabama football team: GOOOOOOOO TIIIIIEEEEDDDD.

Patty loved the University of Alabama football team. This she made clear every Saturday when she watched SEC football. This she made clear on those rare occasions when he managed to hold on long enough to validate the newspaper’s statistics.

John managed to fall in love with Patty Valentine and things were going pretty well until graduation. They talked about moving in together. They talked about graduate school out in Iowa State were John was admitted into a Master’s degree with a guaranteed research stipend for his first three semesters. Things were moving along on track until Patty flew down to Alabama to visit her family a few weeks after graduation. There she met up with her old high school sweetheart Dale Gary who not only played high school football for the champion Cougars but was also a walk on defensive end for the University of Louisiana Raging Cajun football team.

John was crushed when he heard the news. Patty never bothered to fly back to deliver the news face to face. It all happened so quickly over the phone. John tried to reason with her, to win her sympathy, to appeal to her love, but none was left for him. He had no choice but to move on.

After Patty, John took a break from women. They were creatures of betrayal, he thought. Their only loyalty was to their own interests. They knew nothing of a man’s heart.

It was two years later that Pamela came into his world. Pam was not an attractive woman but at least she was nice. At first she refused anything beyond friendship. Why ruin a good thing with all of those complications? She often told him when he tried to come close and kiss her.

Pam introduced John to her girlfriends as her heterosexual gay friend. John never really connected with any of those types. But on one particular Friday night they were playing drinking games and John had way too much to drink. The only thing that he recalled was waking up naked next to Pam’s most horrendous looking friend, Michelle. Nothing was to ever be spoken of that night, he pledged. The shame was beyond him. Number four would be kept secret for as long as possible. He only hoped that Pam would never find out about the events that took place on that night. Despite his best hopes, Michelle told her all but Pam did not seem to mind.

About a year later, to his surprise, Pam turned into number five. He could not be any happier.

John stared at the newspaper headline and scratched his head. There was so much that he did not know about women. Unfortunately, he did not too many male friends to give him any advice.

Later one, when Pam woke up, she poured herself some Hazelnut creamer into her rusty cup of coffee.

“Don’t believe everything that you read in the newspaper John. That statistic could only be written by a man and obviously, a relatively ignorant one. The real numbers are much lower than you would think. I even doubt that 33% of women ever experienced a multiple orgasm and numbers may actually be lower.

John was never that good when it came down to statistics. Back when he was an undergraduate student, he barely passed the Introduction to Business Statistics course with a below average grade of C-. As for women, newspaper headlines and the rest of the world, John all but understood that he will never truly understand.

“Did you ever have a real orgasm with me?” he asked of Pam.

She in turn simply smiled and said, “Well of course I did sweaty, you gave me many.”

John felt better for a moment until he recalled that university lecture back in his undergraduate days at UCSD where he learned not to trust anything that was printed in the newspaper, heard on the radio or seen on TV but more than anything else he learned never to trust the smile of a more experienced woman.

www.hardboiledmen.com

Men Who Cheat, Or Do They?

2008-09-24T14:58:00.000-07:00

What She Knows, She Knows
www.hardboiledmen.com

It was not such a big surprise to hear her complain so bluntly about how she thought that New York City was totally overrated and that she did not see what the big deal was all about. Anyone who follows the typical tourist routine, sleeps at a Theater District hotel, eats a $14 pastrami sandwich down at the Carnegie Deli and goes shopping in those mega stores that stole the city's very soul away might very likely confuse New York for something it is not, tourist hell on crack.

The last time Antonia and I met, things were very different. She was a young college student at the University of Sienna, and I, a traveling journalist who was working on a new book that dealt with the historical sexual curiosities of the Tuscan people. The city of Sienna is nothing like New York City. The city of Sienna is like no other city in the world. With its small roads, car free street, Renaissance architecture and old stone buildings, it was hardly similar to where we found ourselves so many years later.

By now, Antonia was a relatively successful art saleswoman who worked in a fashionable gallery situated along Porta Volta Avenue in Milan. By now, I have published one more book, this one, an academic account of the basic conflict within the American psyche in regards to sexuality and Puritanism.

Antonia was a bit heavier than I remembered her to be. She of course must have thought the same.

But that was not the main area of contention on this unexpected reunion. The main issue was Jenny, my girlfriend of two years.

When I first heard her voice on the phone, I froze if only for a moment. Nothing that I could Jenny could reassure her in regards to my old Italian flame. Antonia was the stuff of legend. Her sexuality well documented as well as inspiration to my works and writings (using pseudo-names of course).

Things would not be nearly as bad if it wasn't for all the difficulties Jenny and I are having these days. To be perfectly honest, things are not going that well between the two of us these days. In the sack we are strangers, in the living room just as bad.

And now Antonia came back into my life even if only for a short visit. She is no longer a woman in my eyes. She has no faults nor bad memories attached. She was and will always be the highlight, the one I left behind, the one that got away and now she came back into my sphere and things are about to get messy in my life.

I agreed to meet her down by Pennsylvania Station. She took the train from Philadelphia and would arrive on time. We checked her carry on into the Pennsylvania Hotel across the street. Her room would not be ready until around 3pm.

Jenny would not be back from work until 6pm. I had some time to steal.

We walked around and looked around the buildings. Antonia immediately disliked the city. She did not like the large quantity of people, the bums who asked for change, the noise of traffic and ambulance sirens that rang across the ears.

In Sienna, I remembered, we used to walk around the tiny streets every evening around 7:30pm. We were not the only ones. Everyone took a walk around this magical town when the sun began to yield. The great square beneath the church was filled with friends and neighbors who strolled along the Old Italian tradition.

This sucks she said, NYC is nothing but a huge shopping mall for fat American tourists. I held her by the hand and walked her down the subway station. Heading down towards the lower east side, I would show her the real New York, the Old New York, my New York.

Like the monthly cycles of a woman, this city had many faces and not all were easy for us men to digest.

A bottle of red wine down on Grand Street was not the true catalyst for the tension that was about us.

Antonia knew that I was no longer her man. She herself was not entirely available as Marco was waiting for her back in Milano.

But time cannot fix what time cannot mend. Once there, it is never gone. Once felt, it is always there.

Two people who were once in love sat across the table. One glows with wonder and youth, the other beaten by the years. Neither one is the cheating type, not the man nor the woman.

They talk about it out load, think of it internally.

When I saw Jenny that night, I held her hand and kissed her fingers. What she knows is what she knows and what I know is mine.

www.hardboiledmen.com

Life is Life

2008-09-12T09:48:00.000-07:00

It has been more than four months since I last smoked a joint. Four months but who is counting? I am.

Marijuana is not addictive, at least, physically it is not.

But life, life always gets in the way of sanity. With nothing to smoke and a general lack of tolerance for alcohol, there is not much to do besides go insane.

The worst part of it all is that the majority of people that I hang out with in this city do not smoke. How they manage life is beyond me. Most of them live on a supplementary diet of Lexapro, Effexor, Cymbalta, Zoloft or Prozac. Most of them mix a bunch. But not me, I was never one for pharmaceuticals.

The most annoying thing is that these people see no irony in their condescending ways.

Take Josh for instance, he may just be the perfect example.

We met up in the coffee shop like we always do. He and his bullshit stories about the movie business, his auditions and all of the women he is screwing on a regular. I could easily sniff through people’s lies, and this guy was not exception. Josh was more likely to take one up the ass than he is to eat a piece of pussy pie.

“So what’s new Mr. Hollywood?” I asked.
“Oh my God, you would never believe the week I had. I am so close to getting an agent I tell you. I can just feel it. Last Tuesday, I had a second call for an audition. It is for an off Broadway but this is something big I tell you. This could be the break I was looking for.”

He went on and on but I was not really listening. By now, I just learned how to shut people off. I was too old for their bullshit. So why did I keep people around? Well, it beat the hell out of staring at the walls of my apartment.

After he told me about the blond with the huge tits that begged him for more. After he further went into details about the casting agent and the producers that he met at the grand opening of the Itch Gallery down in Soho. After he went on and on. I could stand it no more.

“You know Josh, if I don’t score some Marijuana soon, I may just go insane. Can’t you score me a dime bag from one of your homo friends down in Chelsea? Can’t you hook a brother up?”

“Oh grow up already, will you? What kind of a forty year old still smokes pot anyways? Gosh, don’t you think it is kind of pathetic to smoke weed at your age? And you, a university professor and all, what will become of you? What if somebody found out?”

What will become of me? What will become of any of us? I do not know.

Life is life and life is hard enough. Somehow, someway, we all find a way to get by.

Read More From Guy Jacobs

Hollywood by Charles Bukowski

2008-09-01T13:21:00.000-07:00

I am not quit sure why it took me so long to pick up Hollywood by Charles Bukowski. The book was just sitting around the shelf for years. Like most others, I read Ham on Rye, Women and Post Office on several occasions. Any of us Bukowski fans recognize Hank for the genius that he was.

No, this old drunk is nothing like the great authors of the 20th Century. His writing style is flat compared to the great ones that they make you read in your Introduction to the American Classic course at collgate university, Dartmouth or Amherst College. But New England universities never hired the kind of professors who had the balls (or tenure) to teach old Hank Bukowski to their students.

By I digress.

So let’s go back to Hollywood. The novel not the city.

As always Hank provides us readers with thoughts about the breakdown of society, the colorful characters that he encountered and just how lame he thinks the world can be.

And he may be correct at times.

As always he is drinking. Beer, wine, vodka. As long as it is cheap. As long as it is free. As long as it is there. Henry Chinaski never asked twice.

Hank never tries to be anything that he is not. And that is exactly why his fiction works. Honesty above style.

The entire book tells the tale of the screenplay that he had to write for Hollywood producers. For what may have been the movie Barfly staring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway.

Of course, he did not use their names.

Hollywood works. Bukowski’s work usually did ever when he did not.

For the early Bukowski readers, do not start here.

Women or Post Office is the place to begin.

For those of you who read all that Hank could write (which I doubt), pick up Ask The Dust or Wait Until Spring, Bandini. Arturo Bandini was Hank’s influnence. That is, John Fante.

I am too tired to run spell check. If I messed up, please don’t call the cops.

As long as you are reading you are living. What you read does not matter just as much.

Guy

*Guy Jacobs is the Author of Hard Boiled Men

New York University Tales

2008-08-28T13:26:00.001-07:00

Calling Ms. Jamaica, Part 1

2008-08-26T13:34:00.000-07:00

For More From Guy Jacobs

I looked at my watch. It was 5:16pm. There was no need to rush. There were still ten minutes or so until the train was scheduled to arrive. I walked up the station’s platform careful not to spill any of the coffee on my shoes. There were only a dozen or so people waiting there. Most undergraduates tended to wait until the last minute before they showed up for the train or did anything else. I parked myself on a wooden bench where a blind woman sat. She held on to a painted stick and hummed a familiar song.

“How are you today?” I politely asked.

“I am doing just fine, thank you very much. Now, tell me Mr. do you happen to know when the next train into the city will be arriving?”

“It should be arriving here in about ten minutes or so, but you know how late these trains tend to run. The train schedule is not all that dependable.”

“Nothing in this world ever is.” She said and kept on humming that same familiar tune. Somehow it put me at ease.

I turned to Chapter five of the book that I was reading and lost myself with in its pages. Wrapped in stillness and a fluid breeze that flowed through the rain station’s corridor, I somehow managed to forget all about everything that bothered me, if only for a comfortable moment.

This peaceful moment was crushed just as soon as she arrived

“Hey, do any of you happen to have a bottle opener?” she asked.

I studied her with a slide of the head. Holding on to the bottle and a mischievous smile uncommon to a woman her age, she was the ruin of all men.

I pretended not to be interested but she knew better. She was a seasoned warrior. It would take much more than my pretty blue eyes to withstand her resolve. Before I said a single word, she was fully cognisant of just how lonely I have become.

I reached back into my deep pocket and pulled out my keychain. On its outer edge was a cheap plastic beer bottle opener.

“Here you go,” I offered, “but first, you must tell me where that gorgeous accent is from.”

“Well, why don’t you try and take a guess.” She offered.

“Well, I am no expert, but I would guess that you are from United Kingdom, England, I would say. Somewhere in London, but then again, it could be anywhere.”

She repositioned her body as she leaned in my direction, “Well, you are not entirely wrong. I do live in London at the moment but I was actually born and raised in the beautiful island of Jamaica.”
“Jamaica, no shit?”

“No shit,”

Her pale white skin seemed as Jamaican as a piece of Gefilte fish. But then again, I did once hear about the fact that Jamaica was home to many ethnicities such as Indians, Chinese, Arabs and whites.

“And where in London do you live?” I asked as if I knew anything about London. True, I did visit the place on many occasions but that was mostly for academic conferences and such. I was not that familiar with the place.

“I live in Shepherd's Bush, do you know where that is?” she asked.
“No, not really.” I smiled. In an attempt to disguise my overall ignorance of London’s geography, I tried to impress using an alternative approach.
“And so, what is your soccer team?”
“My soccer team? I can only assume that you are referring to football?”
“English football. Here we call it soccer.”
“Sorry, but it was football in the rest of the world way before you guys came around.”
“Whatever you say,” I smiled, “so what is your team? Arsenal? Manchester United? Liverpool?”
“None of the above. I am not all that into sports but if I had to choose, I would say Tottenham Hotspur, have you ever heard of that team?”
I did not. Strike Two.
“So what brings you to this little Podunk town?”
“Podunk?” she asked.
“You know, small, tiny, insignificant little town.
“Oh yea? It did not look all that bad.”
“It is not that bad, it is just small, really small. Don’t get me wrong, I like this place. It must pale in comparison to London. Am I right?”
She nodded her head in agreement. “I actually came out here for a fashion shoot.”
“A fashion shoot? You must be shitting me. Where would you possibly go for a fashion shoot around these parts?”
“We shot out by the creek early this morning and then again in the afternoon. God, I almost froze my tits out there.” She smiled.

Once again, I carefully surveyed her body, trying not to look too obvious. She was pretty enough all right but did not seem like the model type. She had a bit more meat on her than the average model that one may see in a magazine. Nevertheless, there was something about the way in which she carried herself. She seemed comfortable within her skin. She exploded with the milk of life.

I tried to make her out but my attempts at physical assessment were hindered by the overcoat that she wore. I could not tell what kind of a body she was hiding under it.

“So tell me more about this fashion shoot that you were involved in. What are you, the photographer?”
“No, I am a model. Why? Do I look like a photographer?” she asked.
“Well, I am not sure, what does a photographer look like anyways?”
“Well, they don’t look like anything but they don’t look like models now do they?”
“I don’t know, I can only guess that some do.” I tried to dig myself out of the hole that I dug.

But this one did not care, she was just busting my balls. She had a good sense to her this woman. She almost seemed as casual as an old friend.
“So what do you do around these parts?” She asked.
“Me? I teach at the university. I am an American literature professor.”
“Not bad,” she smiled, “I love to read. Not necessary American literature, I most prefer the Europeans, but you guys had some descent writers.”
“Oh yea, which American readers do you like?”
“You know, all of the basics, Mark Twain, Hemingway, Thoreau, Henry James, Jack London.”
Stunned, I turned in her direction. This woman must have been just as young as any of my students and seemed to have a better grasp of any of them combined.
“Are you kidding me?” I asked, “are you a model or are you a student of literature. How the hell do you know about all of these writers?”
“Why are you so surprised? I mean doesn’t everyone know these writers here in America?”
“No one under the age of thirty is any. Not anyone who was born after 1981.”
Her sarcastic smile soon appeared, “Well, I was actually born in 1984, if you must know.”
“Well dear girl, I am impressed. Most of my undergraduate students are about your age and most of them never ever heard of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Most of them think that This Side of Paradise is a daytime soap opera.”
“Well, I never read that one.” She slid her tongue across her healthy lip. “And how about you professor, who do you like to read?”
“That all depends,” I smiled, “Are we talking American, European, world authors? What?”
“Let’s start with Americans.”
“Well, I wrote my dissertation about Henry Miller. Have you ever heard of him?”
“Of course I have,” she protested.
“Not Arthur Miller,” I clarified, “We are not talking about the guy who wrote The Death of A Salesman.”
“Yea, I know, Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer Henry Miller, Henry and June Henry Miller.”
“Well, you know. Henry and June is actually based on the writings of Anais Nin, Henry’s lover.”
“Yea, I know. I love Anais Nin, you know A Spy in the House of Love is one of my favorites.”
Where has this woman come from and how could it be? I wondered. So many years have gone by. So many students have come and gone fro my writing workshops and seminars and none seemed as bright as this white skinned, Aryan Jamaican girl who claimed to have lived in London and be a fashion model. Life was always so much stranger than fiction. I tried to hide my enthusiasm. By now the very thought of a quick one night stand with her was replaced with thoughts about three children, a large house in the Hamptons and a dog. But I had to be careful. This one was as clever as she was young. She was as sophisticated as she was tender. I pondered my next move as the train slowly made its way into the station. We both knew that this conversation is to be continued on the train although there was no reason for such assumptions other than the fact that we were both still smiling at one another.

Get the Amazon Reviews

Those Blond Girls

2008-08-05T08:10:00.001-07:00

For more go to: www.hardboiledmen.com

After seminar, I headed over to Human Resources. Those fuckers called me down to their office for the God knows how many time. Apparently, I once again failed to properly fill out the direct deposit application. If I knew just how much trouble it would cause, I would have never have switched banks. The service at my old bank was more than satisfactory and they never overcharged for any transaction. Really, there was no reason to switch banks.. Well, that is, there was a reason, but it was no a good one.

Her name was Julie and we met at a happy hour down at Jimmy’s Tavern down on Thompson Street. She was just sitting there looking all blond and official with the smell of corporate America lingering around her stuffy black business suite. She looked good. These kind of women don’t find their way to these kind of joints. We usually recruit from the bottom of the barrel.

“So excuse the cliché, but what is a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”
“Why, what is wrong with this place?” she asked.
“What’s wrong? What can I tell you? Nothing and everything. It is just that we usually don’t get such pretty girls around here.”
“A friend of mine from the bank told me about this place. He said they have good cheap drinks, a good atmosphere and old time rock and roll. He did however warn me about the kind of characters that hang out around this place. Would you happen to be one of those characters”
“Well, I am not sure if I am one of those characters. But like most people, I am a character. Know what I mean?”
“Not really, but whatever.” She smiled.
She was a descent type for such an attractive woman. I never really had the chance to associate with one of these types. That of course was with the exception of those busty blond sorority girls that I always encountered in my introduction to American literature class. After I bought her a couple of drinks I tried to hit her up for her home telephone number or her cellular but she played hard to get.
“Sorry John, but I don’t give my number away to men that I meet in bars, especially not a bar like this one.”
“Hey, what’s wrong with this bar?” I asked.
“Nothing and everything, you know.” She laughed.
Eventually, she gave me her business card and walked out of the place. I watched her ass wiggle across that tight business skirt along that arousing foxtrot that took place at the edge of those shiny long legs. I was not the only one.

I slowly read the fine print that read:

Julie A. Smith
Senior Loan Officer
Downtown Branch

The next day, I opened a bank account at the downtown branch. Julie was no where in sight. I found several excuses to return to the bank. I came in for a debit card. I made a few deposits. I made a few withdrawals. Julie was nowhere in sight.
A few days later, I discovered that Julie had a boyfriend named Steve. He was the assistant bank manager.

By this point it was too late to go back to my old bank and that dusty old lady that served as my personal account representative.

So there I stood in the Human Resources office, reapplying once again for a direct deposit of my university salary. This time, I asked the lady at the counter to guide me through the process.

This whole bank account story was just another example of bad judgment. But what could a man do? None of us could resist. As I said before, I never really had the chance to associate with this kind of a woman.

That of course, with the exception of those busy blond sorority girls that always managed to get a B+ better in my Introduction to American Literature courses.

Free Cheddar Nation

2008-06-30T15:54:00.000-07:00

The thing I hate most about supermarkets are those free sample displays that are scattered all over those random corners of the store. They usually throw the samples into plastic containers where tiny bits of cheddar cheese are divided into dozens of even tinnier pieces of crud. Don’t get me wrong, those things taste pretty good and they are free, but what about that very fundamental issue of personal hygiene?

When you charge people for things, they show no shame in displaying just how truly anal they are. Did any of you pay any sort of attention to how people order their coffee drinks in any of those chain coffee shops? Maybe it is just a New York City thing. Maybe it just has to do with those characters who live on the upper east side. But I mean, come on, where do these people come from? Only this morning I saw one of those socialites order a cup of coffee. Actually it was not coffee the way she ordered it. It was more like a advanced placement science project.

I’ll have a skinny latte macchiato, half caf, half decaf with soy foam and please, make sure it is at 125 degrees, I don’t like it when my coffee is lukewarm, she explained.

That’s how she drinks her coffee this woman does. How the poor Puerto Rican kid behind the counter even figured that one out? God bless his soul.

So apparently, when we pay for things, we all allow ourselves to become complete pains in the ass, but when it comes to the free stuff, the rules adjust.

Just before I reached over for some of that old yellow fermented stuff, I noticed a corpulent woman who stuffed her overburdening fingers into the plastic container and took not one nor two but about six tiny squares and just scooped them out of the sample tray and straight into her hungry blowhole.

She was a foul one that woman was but not nearly as disgusting as that skinny awkward Minnesota type who stood over six feat tall and was wearing his torn Twins T-Shirts that he likely bought during their last playoff run more than two decades ago.

To say that this guy abused the very concept of a sampling display would be the understatement of the year. This guy was out for the kill. He seemed to believe with all of his Midwestern heart that there was such a thing as a free lunch and it took place right here on aisle 12 of the Megamart.

The guy had a system. He pretended to be sampling, not eating. Or at least, that was his apparent rational. But his system was as foolish as that red and yellow Gophers cap that he sported on his head. He took three pieces every time and then he would take a break and let the next person in line sample a piece for himself.

Pretty good cheese, he would say and then reach over for another sample. The way he saw it I suppose was not that he was a free cheese hog but rather a good neighbor and ambassador for the Cheddar cheese nation.

The sizeable woman and the tall Norwegian held conversation for several minutes while stuffing themselves on free yellow cheddar.

You realize of course, he told her, that not all cheese is actually made from cow’s milk. You have such varieties as Acapella and Humboldt Fog that are made out of goat milk. There is buffalo cheese, cheese made from the milk of camels, mare, yak and even lamas.

I never really knew that, she seemed to be embarrassed. To be perfectly honest, she confessed that she was somewhat lactose intolerant and was not a huge fan of the yellow stuff.

So why are you eating from this display of Cheddar? He was curious to know.

Well, you know, it is free so I just figured what the heck.

They continued to talk about cheese and milk and cows and camels and then walked over together to the meat department where they served free sampled of Bavarian sausages.

If those only knew, those people, I thought to myself that right before they came around, I stuck my hands into those piles of cheddar.

If they only realized how I stood there so compact and sweaty inside that downtown Nine train holding on to those very hand rails that so many thousands of other perspiring New Yorkers held on to every day in search of balance.

Ten minutes earlier I walked into the super store where I noticed free sample trays of Cheddar cheese. After throwing my hands all around the piles of food, I realized that I was likely carrying thousands of miniature colonies of Staphylococcus who were forming their troops in preparation of an imminent invasion of some poor man or woman’s large intestine.

So filthy were my hands that I decided to wash them both before and after urination. As I returned to the sample tray I noticed a large woman who stood besides a tall man. The two were devouring the free samples of cheese that were by now as polluted as the toxic waters of the Hudson river.

This is the main problem with people, I thought to myself, they could never resist anything if it was given to them for free.

Next time you walk into the whole food store, think about personal hygiene, think about tall Norwegian men and fat woman who chew away the free fat of life without knowledge of what came before.

The young woman who stood at the cash register had long streams of brunette hairs that were flowing down the path of her shoulder.

It has been more than a month since Sylvia and I last spoke on the phone.

God I miss that woman.

Hard Boiled Men

Podcast NYU Tales

2008-06-15T06:53:00.000-07:00

LA comedian and actress Anna Becker reads a chapter from the award winning novel, Hard-Boiled Men.
This chapter deals with a young graduate student at NYU that is forced to choose between attending a class led by the great Herbert Schiller or making it with a young Asian girl, which will he choose?

http://digg.com/comedy/NYU_Tales_Podcast

God Just Laughs

2008-06-06T15:56:00.001-07:00

There are people around this town who walk around wearing three-piece business suites. If we lived in New York City, it would all make sense. Maybe it would make some sense in Chicago or the nicer parts of Hollywood. But around this tiny town? I mean, come on man.

The August sun feels no remorse towards people who walk around in pinstripe Giorgio Armani suites. No business deal can be worth withstanding this crazy heat.

But some people around these parts do not mind and I am always one to say, “Live and let live”.

The August sun feels no remorse towards my shaved head. I had lost the majority of my hair back when I was in my mid thirties. Those were some rough days back then for this cowboy.

As my old kindergarten teacher always told us studs : “You can not take back stupid.”

Her name was Shelly and she was the woman that I loved.

Her name is still Shelly but now she is loved by another man.

Shelly and I met back in those days when my hair was full and I was still the smiling kind of a man. I was the kind of a man that was going places. I was the kind of a man who inspired other men to be the kind of men that they hoped to one day become.

But the years have gone by and nothing is the same any longer.

The last I heard, she was living with some rich Baptist banker in some stylish new-money suburb right on the outskirt of Austin, Texas.

Shelly had a clear agenda since she was a teenage girl. She wanted nothing to do with our parts. I could not really ever blame her for it.

Her Daddy was a drunk and her mother was not one to say no to any man who paid her any fraction of attention.

Shelly always knew that she would get out of town just as soon as she would meet the right man. She wanted to live the kind of life she always read about in those shiny magazines.

Shelly once thought that I was that kind of a right man. She hoped that I would be the one to get her out of this life that she was living. She did not enjoy working as a waitress down at Bill’s diner down on Irwin Street. A lady’s hands, she always said, should be gentle and soft.

Back in those days, I worked as the senior consultant to our district’s congressman. When I woke up in the mornings, I would put on my pressed kaki slacks and that old crimson tie. While I brewed up that fresh pot of coffee, she would carefully iron my white button down shirt with that old Suzy Home Maker smile.

Back in those days, people mistook me for an honorable man, the kind of a man that was going places. My hair was thick and well brushed to the side. I never missed Sunday service at the local Methodist church.

Walking out hand in hand, looking as clean cut as American bacon, we looked the part and for a while even fell for it ourselves.

Shelly had big plans for our future. For my future is what she really had in mind. I was to work hard and climb up the ladder. I was to keep a smile on my face and my mouth shut.

Just as soon as old man Johnson would finish out his fourth consecutive term, would serve as the perfect timing for us to take that next step, where she would be the perfect little wife for the honorable congressman from Odessa, Texas.

God Bless that woman’s heart.

But Shelly soon found out the hard way that that old eastern saying holds truth regardless of geography:

“God laughs while man makes plans”

Or at least that’s what Father Swanson told me on that Sunday afternoon after that whole fiasco blew up in my face.

The first thing that Shelly did when she found out was slap me across the face.

The second thing that Shelly did when she found out was to once again slap me across the face but only this time, in the opposite direction.

I did not even try to explain. The only thing she ever cared about was that long term agenda. She never really bothered to ask about my dreams. To her they served no utility. And were not, as she said “Something an adult should ever think about…”

The last I heard, Shelly was living in a large estate that was fully paid for in cash. She has two ladies from Honduras who chased after her rotten children whole she would waste her hours down at the old hair salon.

But was I really someone who could judge another?

When Congressman Johnson first found out about his eighteen year old daughter and I, he kicked me right in the ass with the promise that I would never find work around these parts just as long as he had a single breath in his lungs.

My political career over and my hair mostly gone, I found my happiness within the comforts of this small bar.

Serving bottles of Shiner beer to the locals and fancy Scotch over ice to men in three piece suites, I came to accept the way things turned out without wondering what could have been.

Once in a while, someone may recognize me and say “Hey, aren’t you that guy who I used to know back in the day….”

When that happens, I just smile and nod my head. After all, you know what they say:

“Man makes plans and God just laughs” Aint that always the way that things turn out in life?

Get Your Own Copy of Hard-Boiled Men

The Trouble with Gemini men

2008-05-30T09:04:00.001-07:00

Every year, regardless of what city I may find myself in or the guy who lays next to me, it always appears to be the same story. Men are at their worst when it comes to their birthdays.

How often do they misconstrue this insignificant date to make it appear as if it was their crowing moment? For that one special date, they feel as if they ought to take their place amongst the ancient Greek gods, while their women at their feet.

As a general rule, men are mere children. They do not know what they want and more than often they simply change their minds depending on the time of the day. Most men do not know how to communicate how they feel. They do not understand what it is that can drive a woman insane. Men are the exact reason why women develop wrinkles and have to inject themselves with poisonous Botox.

Men are generally bad, but none are worst than a Gemini.

I am not one to believe in Astrology, zodiac charts, moon and sun signs. I was never one to believe in any of this bullshit. That is, until I met my Gemini man.

If you do not believe me, you can simply open up any book in the store. You do not even have to buy it. Just pick yourself a corner, somewhere comfortable in the store and read all about this complicated air sign.

“Beware of the charming Gemini man,” It will read “He will bring wind into the desert and life into the grave yard. And then, just as soon as the party has begun and you once again find your long lost enthusiasm and hope for a better day, he will walk out of your life in search of the next best thing.”

“The Gemini man,” It will read “loves nothing more than his freedom. As the great communicator he will trap you within his web of charm only to thief your heart and ransack your body.” Ain’t that the truth?

“The Gemini man is not as interested in sex as in conquest. His friendly mannerism and childish smile may fool you into giving up your defenses, but do not be so quick to do so. For beneath his allure hides a cold hearted conquest to control earth’s winds regardless of their direction.”

“The Gemini man,” It will read “Says not what he means and does not mean what he says. He simply says for the sake of his own entertainment. In his world all is temporary and on to the next conquest”

At the bottom of the page, you may just find, compatibility chats. The Gemini man goes well with the Aquarius woman, the balanced Libra may balance him, the Gemini woman can run with him and without him just as well.

And if you are a Virgo woman, he will break your heart. He never was deep enough to understand the secret of your heart.

Today is the birthday of my Gemini man. There he sleeps in the warm bed smiling peacefully in anticipation of another day. Just as soon as he will wake up, his birthday will begin and I will do my best to make it a memorable one.

But the problem with these God damn Geminis is that they will not let you out due them regardless of the feat. Give him head and he will out due you by staying down there until you get the most amazing multiple orgasm that you ever experienced. Cook his a five-course meal and he will surprise you with a chocolate fudge brownie that he bought all the way from that specialty store in the upper east side.

Last year after I did my best to make it the most special night of his life he simply smiled and then gently whispered “I love you” into my ear.

God Damn those Gemini men.

A week has gone by and with it so did my Gemini man.

“It has nothing to do with you” that’s what they would likely write in that book of Zodiac “He simply is not designed for a long term relationship,. For the Gemini man freedom is the ultimate goal. He mistakes commitment for a spiritual prison cell.”

Every year, regardless of what city I may find myself in or the guy who lays next to me, it always appears to be the same story. The early days of September are the most lonely days of them all. As the years go by, I try and forget about them at all.

When my birthday will come around in September, I will not open up my email account. I will not check the post office box or answer my telephone.

“Somebody has a birthday this morning” He would likely say and I would slowly wake out of my tired bed with a frown.

“I made you something special for your special day.” He would say and I would pretend that I am love with him despite the truth in my heart.

God damn these Aries man. They never take no for an answer.

www.hardboiledmen.com

Barbara The Bar Keeper: a Milf’s diet for happy living.

2008-05-26T17:45:00.000-07:00

Barbara stuck around the bar area later than usual. She had no intentions other than to help Lou close up after a long day. There was nothing special about that night. Just another simple night in another simple town in the middle of a boring state whose corn fields stretched for miles around. Barbara was born in the same delivery room where both her daughter and newest grandchild came into the world. Around these parts, people knew one another not only by their first names but also by their heartbreaks.

Big Louis’ has become a staple of the town over the years. Generation after generation of local drunks and bitter divorcees would often congregate around the oak wood counter that had more stories to tell than any modern day dramatist.

Time was getting late as the night matured. The cold wind of darkness signaled that winter was approaching sooner than expected. By now, her only daughter must have fallen asleep across from the old television set where she and her accidental son would spend their nights watching old cartoon shows to pass the time.

While Lou went into the back office to finish up the paperwork from another plentiful night, Barbara was doing her best to serve the last remaining drinkers while cleaning up for the night. There were a few customers hanging around the place despite the late hour. Those same old faces that Barbara has seen for so many years. By now they all appeared exactly the same to her, beaten in their loneliness.

Jack sat all by himself at the edge of the bar. Neither the cowboy hat nor the cigarette smoke that surrounded him could disguise his tender age. While most regulars sat around and engaged in the typical conversation about college football, getting laid or whatever it was that men chose to speak about, Jack would typically keep to himself. He seemed like the quiet type.

Twenty minutes after last call and Lou was getting ready to leave. By now most customers have gone home, all with the exception of an elderly couple, a businessman who was driving through town and Jack who was writing down notes in his journal as he often did. Doing his best to avoid his empty hotel room, the stranger kept the conversation going.

“So what does a man do around this town at such a late hour? You’ll have any other bars that stay up later? God darn it darling, do you mind getting me one last drink?”

“Sorry hon., I am way past last call. Time for this little ole lady to call it a night, it is time for me to go home to my baby girl.”

“Well, than, can this southern gent offer the little ole lady a ride home?” He offered.

“No need sweaty, I got my own set of wheels.”

“Well in that case, there ain’t no good reason for this good ole boy to stick around this dump. Why don’t I just leave you here to be with little author boy sitting there all pretty in the corner taking notes down in his faggy journal and thinking he is better than the rest of us drunks.”

Jack let out a careful smile and in his silent way used his fingers to let Billy Bob know that he best take a flying fuck before getting his redneck ass beaten by youth.

But Barbie had it all under control. “You take it easy now Mister, aint no need to get to fighting”.

Now it was just the two of them. How many times did she imagine this scenario during those bracing winter nights when she would lay in bed all by herself with her fingers so soft upon her skin?

“You want a drink Jack?”

“No thank Barbara, I am good.”

“You can call me Barbie sweaty, that is what all of my friends call me.” She smiled.

Jack slowly and unapologetically surveyed her body from the other side of the bar. Her, in her early fifties and him a mere pup. His body chiseled and foolish, hers saggy and experienced. That of course with the exception of those two large sized cups that no men regardless of age could ever keep his eyes from. True, she had to go to the doctors several times for maintenance. Most men simply have clue of how much work these babies demand from a lady, but hey, they were totally worth it, best $2,000 her ex-husband ever spent on her.

After they made love on the bar counter, Jack went out for a cigarette while she laid there blissful in her state of undress. Gosh, she thought to herself, no one screwed me like that in years.

As she invasively read through the secret pages of his journal, she came upon short passages of ordinary tales, lines of poetry and random thoughts.

How surprised was she as she came across that poem that was dated with today’s date and entitled Barbara The Bar Keeper: a Milf’s diet for happy living.

How curious it was, she thought to herself that one moment of living can even for a moment erase the heavy burden of past years.

www.hardboiledmen.com

A Man With A Tattoo Of A Man

2008-05-13T11:07:00.001-07:00

The thing that I like most about the bar is the fact that it is my bar. I am in no way an owner, a proprietor or a manager of any sorts. Rather, I just feel a sense of belonging on account of the amount of weekly dollars that I spend in the joint. I have been drinking in this place for way too long but hard habits are hard to break.

There is nothing special about this bar, I must acknowledge. Its floors are sticky, its chairs are not comfortable and its bathrooms are beneath all imaginable standards as aged urine serves as a never changing highly uninspired potpourri that would drive any Virgo woman to absolute psychosis.

I first came across this bar when I was a bit younger. It must have been back in my twenties. Back then my hair was longer, my mind still optimistic. Those days are long gone and so is the majority of my hair. This may have something to do with Maria and the years that followed but guilt is the subject of another day.

But this bar, it is still here and I am still in it. Drinking from those same old glasses that are scarcely washed in that unsanitary pool of rusty waters and inexpensive liquid soap. I have grown accustomed to sitting around with those same old people whose familiar bitter faces have grown into familiar furniture. I pass the time by listening to those same old stories that they often tell. I could not ask for anything more.

The women who come in to this place are perfectly loose and their morals largely absent. Any of them will roll around with any stranger who paid modest attentions to their exhausted tales or opened up his wallet for watered-down vodka disguised as something that healthier women would drink in a better place

Chicago Charlie always works the afternoon shift on Wednesdays. He is a descent bar tender who usually throws in an extra shot for us old timers who have been coming around this place for way too many years. Unlike Pam who typically works during the weekend, Charlie substitutes words with non-verbal communication. Great bar keeps realize that most of us all timers are not there to listen to their troubles but rather forget our own.

Since it was Wednesday and since Lizzy was not around, I ordered myself a double down bourbon on the rocks. I am not the kind of a guy who has a favorite drink. For me, it is all about a schedule.

On the odd days, I drink beers. On the even days I liquor it up. On the weekends it is purely random. I usually order whatever they have on special. I order a double bourbon on the rocks.

Then she approached me as if she did not remember who I was.

“Heya guy, want to buy a lady a drink?”

I offered her some water.

She told me to go fuck myself and walked on over to the other side of the bar where she found a properly dressed college kid with an open tab who was more than happy to oblige.

Jamie is a regular just like the rest of us. She has a gorgeous set of tits and a face that was clearly devastate by her extreme alcoholism and the heartbreak of a plan that did not pan out like it was suppose to.

Just like the rest of us, she could have been something completely different if she only made better decisions, if she surrounded herself with better company, if she only stayed away from the bar.

But like the rest of us, she didn’t and that was exactly why she is here with all of us old- timers.

The dilapidated jukebox is playing those familiar songs of Robert Johnson as it helps pass the time. Kind Hearted Woman Blues reminds me of the time I once spent out in Mississippi.

And now comes a man and sits right next to me. He is much younger than I. He has long hair and a Charles Bukowski tattoo on his left arm. The guy orders a double bourbon on the rocks.

“Great minds….” I tell him.

“Great mind what?” He asks.

“Great minds drink a double bourbon on the rocks. Great minds read books by Charles Bukowski minus his poetry.”

He smiles and waves his dismissing hand in my direction. “Hank Bukowski is the greatest motherfucking poet of all times. What do you know about it?”

I know nothing about it nor do I care. I once read Ham on Rye. It was not half bad. A woman bought me the book many years and told me that I just had to read it. And so I did.

“So what makes a man tattoo the name of another man on his hand?” I inquire.

“Call it appreciation of a far more talented individual than you can ever hope to become.”

I order another round and just smile while I am enjoying my time. From 4 Until Late is playing in the background and it all makes perfect sense to me, to the people have been coming here for years and to the old walls of this small bar that we all love so much.

It likely makes none to any of my readers but that was never the point of the story. I just want them all take a look around this place.

The guy next to me asks me to watch his drink while he takes a piss. For a moment I think about sipping it all down but he is all right despite it all.

Still, I would never consider tattooing a man’s name or image on any part of my body.
It is hard enough to commit to a woman so why bother with a man.

Jamie is all liquored up on the other side of the bar and it looks like she is ready to go. I know that I can do much better if I only made an effort but she is the best that is around.

She smiles in my direction and we head out towards Vernon’s Bar. I grab the drink of the guy while he takes a piss and walk out to the cold wind of the familiar parking lot.

www.hardboiledmen.com

Books For The Beach

2008-05-04T06:06:00.000-07:00

ATLANTIC CITY (May 3, 2008) 2008 BEACH BOOK FESTIVAL WINNERS announced. Hard-Boiled Men by Guy Jacobs wins the second place prize in the general fiction category. Jacobs’ hilarious account of single life in New York City won praise from readers and critics alike.

Smart, raw and tight"
-Page One Reviews

Hard-Boiled Men is fun and thought-provoking, It reminded me of a modern day Portnoy’s Complaint"
- The Compulsive Reader

'Powerful, inspiring and heartfelt. Hard-Boiled Men is The Catcher in the Rye all grown up"
-Dr. Paul S. Lieber, Emerson College

"This novel will leave you completely entertained and satisfied"
-Sherri A. Marchese

Other recent awards won by Guy Jacobs include:
2007 New York Book Festival Award
2007 Hollywood Book Festival Award

So what are you waiting for? Get your copy of Guy Jacobs’ novel Hard-Boiled Men on Amazon, BN.com or get an autographed copy at:

www.hardboiledmen.com

Cleanup on AIsle 10

2008-04-28T12:01:00.000-07:00

For Herald, things seemed rather ordinary for a Wednesday afternoon. Walking through the supermarket aisles, he noticed the perfectly stacked containers of breakfast treats and one hundred calorie snack packs.

But these were not simple rows of consumerism and daily specials highlighted in large print. The super market was his gateway to discovery. It was his suburban version of the kind of life that he always read about in those adventure magazines. It was the kind of life that he never dared to pursue in the name of being pragmatic and those Gods of socially acceptable norms.

His worthy vehicle was no four by four jeep that could break through rough terrains and climb over steep topography, rather, it was a shiny super market cart whose front left wheel was tilted in the wrong direction.

Herald did not mind the daily task of grocery shopping. There was so much to be discovered as he passed through the familiar rows. On aisle Nine there was a special on frozen hamburger meat, only $4.99 per lbs. The old lady in aisle four offered free samples of micro waved pizza that tasted like ketchup dough topped off by gummy imitation Mozzarella cheese. Herald waited in line with the rest of them and when the pizza was finally ready he received a perfectly squared piece that fitted well into the tiny plastic cup.

Herald swallowed the pizza bite without chewing, one could say that he drank the pizza or rather inhaled it. When he asked the old lady for another piece she declined on account of the store policy that every costumer only gets one sample.

Herald was not the kind of a man who knew how to handle adversity. Like so many others, he chose to walk away in silence with that lingering feeling of being mistreated by the world. Life is not always fair, he reminded himself as he walked towards the fruit section where he noticed her standing there in between the ripe cherry tomatoes and those mountains of yellow and green bananas that were on store special, only two dollars per pound.

Her name was Dee. Doris if you wanted to get technical. Doris M. Pupnik if you wanted to be precise. Doris worked at the local video rental store. She had long brown hair that curled at its bottoms. Her skin was fair and her smile was reassuring.

Herald frequented the shop where she worked. He loved the old classic movies from the 1950’s, that time in America when things were more simple and people could be trusted.

In the 1950’s he always told her, people could depend on their friends and neighbors. Back in those days, people left their doors unlocked at night and allowed their children to run free through the neighborhood streets. Doris was not the kind of a woman to engage in those kinds of philosophical discussions. Maybe it had to do with the fact that she was born in September, Damn Virgos are always so practical, he thought to himself.

Dee was a southerner who held on to that southern charm. She always listened in an attentive manner and wished Herald a great day as he walked out of store.

Herald grew hesitant as he approached her. This was the very first time that they ran into each other on neutral grounds. This was the first time that he saw he legs. Come to think about it, he never even knew she had legs before. She always stood behind that rental store counter.

But there she was, in all of her flesh and glory. Herald smiled, approached and then ran scared. He simply freaked, he changed his mind, he could not handle the opportunity, he knew not what to say.

But it was too late. she already spotted him as he turned around.

“Herald, is that you?” she smiled.
“Yea, it is me, how are you Dee?”
“I am ok, how are you?”
“Pretty much the same”

Following some meaningless small talk about the rising price of vegetables, the merits of organic foods and some exotic recipes that she offered him for cooking tofu, Herald and Dee walked slowly together towards aisle ten. That was the place where the supermarket proudly displayed their DVD collection. From oldies to new releases, from such classics as Gone With the Wind to the latest Disney animation flick, this place had it all.

Herald felt the need to prove his sense of loyalty to Dee. He positively reassured her that he would never switch over to the supermarket rentals despite the attractive prices that they offered and their flexible return schedule.

“What about you Dee?” He wanted to know. “What kind of movies do you like to watch?”

“I actually don’t watch too much television or waste my time with movies” she confessed. “I find most of it to be beneath me. If you really want to know what I think, then I can tell you that most people who spend their lives in front of the television ultimately become mindless bores who have no true concept of the world. I would much rather read a novel, go hiking or have an occasional roll in the sack with a good looking man.”

Herald was the kind of a man who wore his feelings on his sleeve. In the case of Dee, he wore disappointment. How he ever mistook her for someone who could understood his heart, he would never know. Running away like a frightened child, he knocked over a couple of Coca-Cola bottles that went on special, only $3.99 for a six pack.

Leaving her, his groceries and his shiny metal cart behind, Herald stormed out of the supermarket and into that same blue Chevrolet that he has been driving for the past seven years.

She just stood there in silence. What the hell was the problem with these men? she thought. This of course was not the first time she tackled this ageless question to no avail.

The voice of a young Hispanic female rang “Cleanup on aisle ten” across the loud sound system.

Dee saw a woman around her age waking hand and hand with her three year old son. The boy smiled at the woman and simply said "I love you Mama"

It was getting late already. Dee would turn 36 in just a few months and had nothing to show for it.

A teenage boy holding on to a mop cornered off the area with those bright yellow cones that simply read “Caution slippery when wet.”

Dee had no place to go. She did not feel like eating another one of those frozen single serving meals.

After a supersized hamburger, French fries and a diet coke, she walked over to her new Toyota that she got on lease. The scent of new leather was still in the air but that did not make things any better for her.

It was getting late already, she thought, time for her to go home.

www.hardboiledmen.com

The American Writer by Bukowski

2008-04-24T12:17:00.000-07:00

gone abroad
I sit under the tv lights
and am interviewed again
I am asked questions
I give answers
I make no attempt to be
brilliant.
to be truthful
I feel bored
and I almost never feel
bored.
"do you?..." they ask.
"oh, yeah, well I..."
"and what do you think of..."
"I don't think of it much. I
don't think too much..."
somehow it ends.

that evening somebody tells me
I'm on the news
we turn the set on.
there I am. I look pissed.
I wave people off.
I am bored.

how marvelous to be me without
trying.
it looks on tv
as if I knew exactly what I
was doing.

fooled them
again.

from Dangling In The Tournefortia - 1981
Charles Bukowski

www.hardboiledmen

A special place in hell for women

2008-04-20T08:13:00.000-07:00

That morning, like most others, was just another ordinary day that offered limited consequence laced with the morning fragrance of routine. She watched the dials of the old wooden clock shift slowly towards west with the partial enthusiasm of another day to come
.
Her hair was long and brown. It required a level of attention that she could not commit to.

Thank God, she thought to herself, that she never adopted that cat that Marcie offered her. Mr. buttercup may have helped cope with loneliness but he would more likely drive her insane. She did not want to turn into one of those single women who lived with cats. She always thought that letting a cat move in was the last step before accepting life’s lonely trail. But at least, cats did not demand as much work as did people.

Men were the most difficult to deal with, she always thought.

Thank God she never agreed to let John move in with her. He would have likely required even more work than would Mr. Buttercup. John was a stale male. As soon as she had her taste of his limited companionship and that five-inched tickle, she felt just as lonely as she did before he came into her life.

She thought about her birthday. June was only two months away. She will turn 38. She felt like 27. Time was always missing. It was a rare commodity in her life. She decided not to think about it. Repression proved to be a useful technique as the years went by.

The long line of people who were standing in line for a morning cup of coffee did not make things any better for her. She stood behind a homeless man who smelled of misery and collective apathy. His kaki jacket was torn at the shoulder. His hair seemed as confused as the rest of it all.

He walked up to the young lady at the counter and asked her for a cup of coffee and for a cup filled with iced water. When she refused to accept his money on account of her being a born again Christian and all, he dropped two single dollar bills into her tip jar.

God bless you and the rest of America, he whispered as he walked away with his distinct pride.

Now it was her turn. Sabrina stood in front of the young Christian girl where she found herself empty of speech.

What can I get you today? She asked.

Sabrina stayed silent.

The Christian girl tried once again, Good morning, Mam, what can I get for you today?

Sabrina remained silent.

Two Wall Street secretaries were standing impatient in the back of the line. They both wore similar cloths, similar shoes and similar hairstyles. Beneath their socially acceptable appearances, they both held on to those same fears that drove so many people into the world of banking-.the fear of being alone in the world.

Hey lady, one of them bolstered, some of us have jobs to get to this morning, can you please hurry it up already?

Sabrina said nothing. She ignored their rudeness as she placed her eyes on the shiny crucifix that hung from the coffee shop employee’s necklace.

Following a third attempt, the young Christian girl just smiled and turned towards the large coffee percolator. She returned with a warm cup of coffee and a reassuring smile.

Here you go honey, no charge.

Sabrina dropped a twenty-dollar bill into the tip jar and walked away feeling better about the world.

There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women, said the homeless man who was standing outside. I could be wrong, but I think that the quote came from former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

Sabrina smiled and nodded her head in agreement. She took the old black book out of her crowded purse and disappeared into the hopeful streets of the East Village.

www.hardboiledmen.com

Barnes & Noble

You can go on Amazon

You can even go on Books A Million

Hard-Boiled Men

The Truth About Jeremy Klein

2008-04-15T17:39:00.000-07:00

“Yesterday, some guy came in here and told me that he loved me”
“He did what?”
“Yea, I am totally serious. At first, I just thought that he was joking. But he wasn’t. Even after I told him to get lost, he stuck around. He must have lingered around that table for at least another hour if not longer.” She pointed towards the corner.
“That’s kind of creepy.”
“But that is not the half of it. Just as he was about to leave, he once again turned my way and told me that he was a friend of Jason’s.”
“Your Jason? The Jason?”
“The one and only?”
“Ok, this is really strange. How does he know him? Did he say?”
“He did not say much. He just stood there smiling. As he was walking out, he gave me his business card and said that he would be back later on today. What time do you have?”
“It is almost 8pm. This guy better hurry up and get here before Louis closes down.”
The two of them sat around the bar area and waited. Smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee always helped time go by that much quicker. Richmond Virginia was the last place that smokers were considered human beings. Maybe it had something to do with that giant conglomerate that was situated downtown.
Sam thought about Jason. Four years have gone by since they last met. There was not a day that went by when she did not think about him, about them, about the way he used to make her feel alive. Some things in life could not be repaired by time. A broken heart was one of them.
A few more customers walked into the joint while others left. Every doorbell ring made her lift her eyes up in anticipation. A large plate of French fries and a grilled cheese sandwich did not make her feel any better. When 10 pm came around, she greeted Louis goodbye and asked Remy if she would not mind sticking around for just a while.
The two of them, like a tall pine standing beneath the horizon made little sense in the settings of the old neighborhood. So many years have gone by and nothing has changed for either one of them.
They both still worked at that same restaurant where they first became waitresses more than a decade ago. They hung out with those same people who held the same conversations, watched the same television shows and smoked the same menthol smokes that chiseled away at the larynxes of everyone around their side of the street.
Remy did not mind the daily routine. Some people just preferred to live their lives in that fashion. But Mel wanted more, much more.
Jason was the one who opened her eyes. He was the one told her about the word outside of Hull Street. He told her about far away nations, about Laos, Azerbaijan and Bolivia. He told her about those strange kinds of food that people ate, cobra snake stews, lizard pies and hog fat soup. He has traveled the world and has seen it all. His two years down in Highland Springs was always meant to be temporary. Guys like Jason never put down their roots in suburban America. He always viewed corporate malls and gated communities as agents of spiritual devastation.
It was getting late now, nearly 10:45pm. Remy said that it was time to go.
Mel dipped her extended fingernails deep into her warm suede pocket. On the expensive business card, his name was spelled Jeremy A. Klein, Attorney at Law. She did not recognize his name nor could she remember Jason ever mentioning this guy’s name.
Jeremy A. Klein did not show up that night nor did he show up any other time in subsequent days.
Two weeks later, she broke down and called him up. The fine print beneath his name identified his place of employment as the Weinstein and Gad Law Firm (In Manhattan’s financial district is what she gathered). The vigorous secretary transferred her call after a few moments.
“Hello”
“Yes, this is Jeremy Klein, how can I help you?”
“Hello. Yes, hi, this is Mel from the restaurant. You know, you gave me your card.”
“Is that what you best remember me by Mel? Or was there something else?”
“Well,” she laughed “You did tell me that you loved me”
“And?”
“And that you will come back.”
“Yes, I did, I did say that and I meant every word of it too.”
“Which did you mean, the part about coming back or the part about you loving me?”
“I meant both”
“Well, it does not appear like you meant either. You never showed up.”
“So you were waiting?”
“Well, yes, I guess I was, but only out of curiosity.”
“Curiosity killed the cat, did anyone ever tell you that one?”
“Hey Jeremy, you have to admit that this is all so strange. Do you always just show up at places and tell strange women that you love them? That you know their ex-boyfriends? Is that what you always do?”
“Actually, it is not.”
“So what gives?” she demanded to know.
“I will tell you, but not over the phone.”
Six months went by and Mel moved her things into his apartment. When faced with boredom, with a lack of hope and with the feeling that there is no way out, any woman can fall in love with any guy as long as he pays her the right kind of attention. Strange was the nature of human beings.
One the other side of the continent, Jason was working around his garden when the phone rang. The rain around Seattle seemed to be like the wind that came in for a visit every day or so. Sometimes it just said hello, other times it stayed around for coffee. The mention of her name made him pause. He did not hear the name Mel in several years.
Despite numerous girlfriends, he never really did stop loving her even after all of those years and all of the pain involved.
So just imagine how he reacted when he found out that some random guy that he once met on an airplane ride asked his former love to marry him. He almost went insane.
Weeks and weeks of heavy drinking could not take away the pain and compunction.
If he only closed his eyes and went to sleep like he always did on long flights. If he had only watched that movie that they were showing for the twentieth time . If he had only not had the urge to tell everyone that he ever met about that one woman that he left behind, to show them the many pictures of Mel with her gorgeous eyes and perfect figure. If he had only kept the long conversation to small talk like most people did instead of telling that shady lawyer about the small town where he met her and that great restaurant where she worked.
If only life was that much different, he would not have to face the fact that Mel will soon be known as Mrs. Melissa A. Klein. To face the fact that a random stranger had the guts to take Mel to that place where he was always afraid to go.

Barnes & Noble

You can go on Amazon

You can even go on Books A Million

Of if you prefer get your own

Hard-Boiled Men

www.hardboiledmen.com

A Beer To Match

2008-04-07T10:31:00.000-07:00

Not every kind of a woman could get a way with it. But then again, Nancy was not just another woman. She was Nancy. She ignored the television dictated hegemony of socially acceptable bar behavior and ordered herself an ordinary brown bottle of Budweiser beer.

Nancy was no dummy. She had a complete sense of the potential reprocautions that her selections may have on visual representation of her entourage. Like an ugly sore, her beer bottle took away from the magnificence of her girlfriends’ Cosmo martinis and sour apple vodka drinks.

Ever since she was a little girl back in Odessa Texas, Nancy did not quit fit in with the rest of the group. She was the kind of a girl that always sat alone in that back corner of the classroom.

Nancy did not have blond hair and her breasts did not come out until it was just a bit too late. Her cousin Annie had nice supple ones as early as fourteen. Annie’s mom always dressed her up in those tiny summer dresses that made her look like a California princess. Annie’s mom was born out in LA.

Annie was great. That was what everyone in Odessa always said. As for Nancy, of her no one spoke that often. The one was blond and the other brunette. The one a woman, the other was a girl.

It was cold Friday night back when they were younger when Uncle Jim and Aunt Marilyn went out to the dance in the grand ballroom that the two girls stayed back at home.

Nancy never kissed a boy but Annie did much more. Out of the fridge, they snuck a bottle of Budweiser. Nancy was amazed at what Annie showed her. She never even thought that anyone would ever think of doing such a thing to a boy. When Annie told her that everyone already did, she felt inadequate just like she always did with everything else.

At first she placed her lips on the bottle’s tip and then slowly worked her way down.

“Make sure to breath through your nose”, Annie explain “otherwise you may just end up chocking on that thing, and that would be so embarrassing, don’t you think?”

Nancy took her time. It was more than two years later when she met Lyndon Andrews, the only boy to ever have her heart. Lyndon was an unusual boy. He played the guitar.

Nancy thought that he was much bigger than that bottle of Budweiser that Annie used to teach her about those fact of life. She breathed slowly through her nose but that did not always help.

Lyndon was a sweet boy. That was what she always thought when thinking back. She has not seen him ever since he flew out west to play football in Colorado State.

How she ended up in North Carolina, Nancy never figured. She just assumed that life had its own way of working things out.

Holding on to her bottle of Budweiser, Nancy smiled and pretended to care about what her friends were saying and what the others were talking about. The bar was crowded but hundreds of men but none of them appeared to have a good heart.

When she opened up her mailbox that very morning, there she found that Christmas card from Odessa Texas. Bob, Annie, daughter Melissa and their six year old son wished her a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Annie’s breasts seemed larger than ever. Her ass grew double in size.

It has been more than three years since Nancy flew back to Texas. There was not much left there for her these days. Nothing left besides those cold brown bottles of cold Budweiser and a smile to match.

Autographed Copy

Never Judge a Book

2008-04-01T11:22:00.000-07:00

"You know Jim, there are two types of Cambodian girls" that’s what he said as we stepped off from the platform of the long wooden boat. It has been a long trip from the island of Koh Phangan. The sun was out in full force and the Singha Beers did not help any. My dehydration did not discourage Martin’s enthusiasm as we walked into the territorial grounds of Cambodia.
"As I said," he picked up his backpack from the floor, readjusted its straps and walked on "there are two types of Cambodian girls, there are those who charge twenty five per night and then there is the other type." Then he paused as if he was waiting for me to play straight man.

"Ok, I give in, what is the other type?"

"Those who charge more." You should have seen the smile on his face, he stood there like some kind of a perverted peacock who mistook his record of Asian whore mongering to be a worthy accomplishment for all loyal subjects of the great British Commonwealth.
Martin and I met on a scuba diving trip out in Koh Pi Pi. For any and all of us who scuba as a way of life, there are no better waters that those of the Thai islands.
Martin stood over six feet tall. He was the perfect antithesis to the two American travelers who joined us back in Bangkok. They were young and foul, while he was the quintessential English gentleman.

Martin always said "Thank You" and "No need". Every sentence that came out of his mouth was preceded or followed by an " I beg your pardon". Martin used the right fork with the right hand, he never spilled his beer nor did he ever interrupt a conversation. Even after a long day of diving, he showed up properly for dinner. His pressed white button down shirt was something out of the ordinary around their T-shirt circles.

Martin seemed like the kind of a man that was so proper and straight that he could himself poor the purest Earl Gray tea into Queen Elizabeth’s own tea cup.

But you should never judge a book by his cover that is what they always told me.

Later on, in that small village, right outside of Sihanoukville, we walked into the Smoking Bandit brothel. At least, that was the sign that they posted for the tourists. This was my first time in an official brothel. The prostitutes along the small outside bars on the main drag of the island of phuket do not count.

A short woman around the age of forty welcomed us into a well decorated room that was furnished with bamboo and red cloth.

Her name was Jorani and she explained in broken English that it meant beautiful jewel. Lady Jewel did not speak much. The only words she knew referred to drinks, women and money to be collected.

A couple of Angkor beers did the trick and we were ready to go.

Jorani walked us into the other room were we had to choose. Each girl went for about Cambodian Riel, the equivalent of ten American dollars.

Miki and John took their time and then selected their woman. Miki liked them taller. John was looking for a bustier woman, which as we all know, is a rare commodity around these parts.

Then it was Martin’s turn. We all waited to see who the great English gentleman was going to select. I suspected that he would take that one girl from the left who seemed to be just a little more classy than did the rest of the prostitutes.

But Martin was full of surprises just like the many other characters that I met along my travels.
First he chose Lin and then Min and then Ling. But he could not stop. Six women walked into the bedroom with the great English gentleman, Queen Elizabeth’s tea steward, the great emblem, satisfaction and delight of the United Kingdom of St. George and the rose.

There were three women left but I selected none. I went outside and smoked another cigarette as I waited for the boys to complete their task.

Twenty minutes later, I grew bored and paid Jorani fifteen American dollars for a massage. Her hands were experienced and worth every penny I spent. At the end, she gave me a short hand job, just to make things right.

Two cigarettes later and Miki reemerged.

"So what do you say about his Martin character?" He laughed as he inquired.

"What do I think about this Martin character? What do I think about all of us? Well Miki", I inhaled another breath of cigarette smoke and then smiled "I guess that you can never judge a book buy its cover."

Hard-Boiled Men

william s burroughs on TV

2008-03-31T13:40:00.001-07:00

william s burroughs on TV

2008-03-31T13:40:00.000-07:00

Kappa Kappa Gamma

2008-03-22T07:28:00.002-07:00

Most people, I imagine, do not have too much to say about Postmodern architecture before 8:30 in the morning. Nothing could be of less interest to most people than I came across than to discuss Classical Antiquity before they even had a chance to unpeel that thin yellow layers from the external films of their outer eyelids. What kind of a man would engage thirty some semi-strangers with his critical analysis of the Materialist philosophers and of Pythagoras of Samos whose perception of numbers and early math somehow helped explain the underlying structure of the universe? Such thoughtless engagement could only be perceived as cruel and unusual punishment for these poor university undergrads who were doing their best to keep awake after last night’s floor of cheap alcohol and menthol cigarettes.

But what was I suppose to do. I was not the one who scheduled this 8am seminar. Just like my students, I had to go through the motions. I had to pretend that I had no better place to be at such an hour.

While I was talking away and drawing logical diagrams on the blackboard, the majority of them were sipping away at their Starbucks lattes and their caramel frappuccinos. Most of them looked alike to me. They were mostly female, mostly blond, mostly young and mostly southern. I know for a fact that non of these girls have ever backpacked through the jungles of Brazil, non of them ever climbed mount Kilimanjaro nor did any of them ever experience the city of Barcelona.

These small towns outside of Norman did not offer people too much in terms of worldly imagination. People around these parts just lived their lives in the most descent ways that they could. There was no need for far away mountaintops, there was no need for all of those false adjectives and nouns that were offered by New York based television stations.

In the third seat behind that fairly large student sat Jenna Parker. Just like the rest of them, she had hair of gold. Just like the rest of them, she came some small town right outside of Wichita Falls or Oklahoma City. She was always surrounded Stacey and Madison. Neither of them could I stand for more than a minute. But Jenna was ok. The three of them were best friends for ever (or at least so they thought). They always played with one another’s hair. They wore pink shirts and sweaters that Kappa Kappa Gamma.

Last week, after we made love for the second time that night, Jenna explained to me that Kappa Kappa Gamma was amongst the oldest sororities in America. Founded on some university campus right around Illinois sometime around 1870, the Kappa sorority was amongst the oldest and largest sororities in the world.

I did not care much for her history lesson. I simply flipped her around.

She rolled me a joint and I promised to give them all an A for the semester. That is, I agreed to give Jenna and Stacey an A. Madison would have to settled for a B-, I could not stand anything and everything that she stood for.

After the semester was over, Jenna went back to Justin, her old high school sweetheart. Justin was an All American and I was not. Justin was one of them and I was foreign.

Jenna did not care about mount Kilimanjaro nor did she care about Pythagoras of Samos. Jenna was young and her breasts stood firm and substantial.

As the summer session came around, she and Justin went back to Wichita Falls. I flew back to New York City to meet up with the guys.

It was there on the bar down at Harry’s on Sullivan Street that Katie came around.

Can I buy you a drink?

But she did not need one. She was keeping away from the yellow stuff for a few weeks just to clean out her system, at least that was what the doctor told her to do.

I bought myself another round.

Katie did not like for me to be on top, she wanted to be in charge. As she climbed up and down , from side to side and all around, I ignored her grunts and closed my eyes. As she pulled her nails across my flesh, I thought about that first time that we met, down at the Blue Bonnet Bar on Norman’s Main Street. It was a cold Saturday night in Oklahoma and Jenna was wearing a pink jacket that wore ΚΚΓ across it side.

So what do you do Mr? She asked.

A few weeks later, Jenna and her friends registered for my class.

Hard-Boiled Men on Amazon

The Joy of Youth

2008-03-17T16:27:00.000-07:00

The Upstairs Neighbor

It all started with a dog named Cujo. He was named after that one dog no doubt, that scary dog that everyone saw in that old creepy movie. But this Cujo was nothing to run away from. He was more rabbit than a dog. He had the looks of a genetic error and the personality of a brainless adolescent. Directly and perhaps biology related to him was the his owner, a vociferous nineteen year old student from the local community college. This guy was no Danny Pintauro. At best, he was less than average in every category.

I never caught this guy’s name nor did he throw it in my direction. Ever since that incident the other night, we have done our best to avoid one another. Ever since that one party they threw, ever since I called the cops, ever since they cited him for violation of the city’s noise ordinances, ever since they cited him for underage drinking, every since they found that dime bag on. He somehow and for some reason blamed the entire thing on me, his downstairs neighbor.

I thought about it for a while and still failed short of a conclusion. Was I becoming a spiteful old man like the ones you always saw around the deli or the public library? Was I simply jealous of youth? Back when I was twenty years old, I started my weekends on Wednesdays only to end them at the conclusion of Monday night football. When I was younger, I could drink like any man, with pride. I had no preferences back in those days, the cheaper the beer the better we all were about it.

Now this witless, senseless, idiotic grown child was killing my nights. That 8am public relations class that I had to teach was killing my mornings and in the middle of it all I became a bitter insomniac.

Ever since the incident, war has been declared and the upstairs kids are taking no prisoners. Their television grew loader with every hour that pasted by. Like a bunch of drunk incestuous Sumatran rhinoceros, they run around the apartment jumping up and down in an attempt to tear away at the barrier concrete and at the edges of my sanity’s external membrane.

But that was not the worst of it.

I have not yet mentioned Jenny Sue.

How that son of a bitch ever got himself such a woman was beyond my comprehension. The fact that guys like these got to sample such high quality ass was the ultimate evidence of the abundant lack in universal justice. If indeed there was a God, why would he bestow this upstairs heathen a unswerving residence in God kingdom, in between her lovely thighs?

Jenny Sue always ran around the apartment complex in a skimpy tank top and those tiny tiny pink shorts that read JUICY across the backside. Her voice was made of butter and her lips were the serving spoons. At the tender age of eighteen women still had that adolescent wholesomeness sprinkled across the windows of their charm. Ten years later most women would replace that allure with the subtle bitterness that typically resulted from a broken heart or a cheating boyfriend.

My mind was filled with friendless envy and my nights were disturbed and limited. I thought about it for a while. I thought about calling the cops. I thought about letting the air out of their tires. I thought about poisoning their dog. I thought about it and thought about it but in the end I simply gave up like most men around my age typically do.

At night when Mr. dumbfuck made love to Jenny Sue, her voice trickled through the frail hairs on my arm, through the thin walls of this old apartment complex.

Six months later and the U-Haul truck drove away with Jenny Sues’ possessions. An older couple moved into the upstairs apartment and replaced my jealousy with the trite taste of routine.

Another summer ended in this small city and then another came around. With every winter that passed and every woman that I left behind, I came to appreciate the undemanding pleasure of youth, the one thing in this world that you could never replace.

Hard-Boiled Men

Beer by Charles Bukowski

2008-03-15T17:22:00.000-07:00

BEER
from: Love is A Mad Dog From Hell
I don't know how many bottles of beer
I have consumed while waiting for things
to get better
I dont know how much wine and whisky
and beer
mostly beer
I have consumed after
splits with women-
waiting for the phone to ring
waiting for the sound of footsteps,
and the phone to ring
waiting for the sounds of footsteps,
and the phone never rings
until much later
and the footsteps never arrive
until much later
when my stomach is coming up
out of my mouth
they arrive as fresh as spring flowers:
"what the hell have you done to yourself?
it will be 3 days before you can fuck me!"

the female is durable
she lives seven and one half years longer
than the male, and she drinks very little beer
because she knows its bad for the figure.

while we are going mad
they are out
dancing and laughing
with horney cowboys.

well, there's beer
sacks and sacks of empty beer bottles
and when you pick one up
the bottle fall through the wet bottom
of the paper sack
rolling
clanking
spilling gray wet ash
and stale beer,
or the sacks fall over at 4 a.m.
in the morning
making the only sound in your life.

beer
rivers and seas of beer
the radio singing love songs
as the phone remains silent
and the walls stand
straight up and down
and beer is all there is.

Cake for Breakfast

2008-02-21T11:22:00.000-08:00

Eating cake for breakfast, she thought, made as much sense as eating cake for lunch or for dinner. It made no sense what so ever. And yet, more people ordered a lemon glazed pound cake or a cranberry muffin along with their morning coffee than did with their afternoon espresso.

Ann was always a sucker for life’s simple pleasures. No pleasure was more of a guilty one than the double fudge espresso brownie that they sold at Starbucks. And this is where it all became ironic. As she placed her order for the brownie along with a tall vanilla late with skim milk she was scorned by the eyes of two overweight women. They were appearantly shocked by the idea of any woman who dared to order anything chocolaty for breakfast.

The main problem with today’s society, Ann thought, was the lack of education and pluralistic ignorance. People were so quick to make assumptions regardless of concrete facts. Take these two women for example, she thought. One of them was holding on to a frozen syrupy coffee drink headed by piles of faty whipped cream. The other was munching on a blueberry muffin that was coated with so much sugar that her teeth could have fallen out of her mouth on the spot.

If they could only all sit down around a table to compare a case by case calorie count.

Ann thought about it but decided to let it all go. It was always easier for people to judge others than it was for them to judge themselves. And besides, she had more important things on her mind.

But what was the deal with these women, Ann wondered. Why were they always so unkind towards one another? Ever since she was a middle school girl back in West Virginia, they always found a way to make her feel self- conscious. It was not always what they said but typically the way in which they said it. Madison Harris was the worst of all with that striking blond hair and ruthless teenage tounge of hers. So many years have pasted and Ann could still feel the fesh scars that were associated with Madison’s memory.

What was it about these women? She wondered. Why could they not all unit behind a common cause, behind the ideal of global sisterhood? Instead they chose to tear each other at the flesh.

To Ann, women were even worst than were men. Those guys only wanted to have their way with you only to later lose your number. Ann has been there more than once. But still, the worst that a man could do was to break your heart. But these women, they tore other women down slowly and maliciously just like the waters tear down the edges of an ocean side cliff.

Ann walked out of the coffee shop and headed towards her SUV. When she bought this thing three years ago gas was only $2.14 per gallon, now it was all the way up to $3.21.
Where once enthralled by its power and size, Ann was sick and tired of her giant green machine. Well at least the lease would be up in a few months.

She got in the car and started to drive. She was not sure of where she was heading and how long it would take to get there. The music was load and the wind in her hair. She picked out the forbidden brownie from its thin paper envelope and placed it in her mouth.

The chocolate’s vast flavor erupted through the walls of her mouth with all of its chemical glory. The sun was out and her song was playing. It was Thursday morning in Louisiana and for the first time in weeks, she felt comparatively contented.

Book Club Books

What Men Think?

2008-02-14T15:47:00.000-08:00

A man walks down the street. Later he stops. He sees something sparkling on the gray paved floors of the city. He can not tell whether it is a nickel or a quarter. For the first he would not bother to kneel, for the second, perhaps. He thinks about it for a while and then walks away without bother. Neither one would really make a difference. Neither one would ease his financial shortcomings.

A man walks into a bar. It is only 4:41pm and there are not too many people around. Happy Hour will start at five o’clock sharp. He thinks about it for a while. How will he look just sitting there on the bar for a whole 19 minutes? But then again, what kind of a fool would pay $6 for a beer when they will go on special in a matter of a short time? He walks out of the bar and heads down towards the 9 train station without paying it another thought.

A man meets a woman for their first date. They met online. They both ran into one another in one of those romance forums. They chatted for more than three hours. What did they not talk about? Everything from the presidential elections to the size of her breasts. She claims that they are real but who ever knew these days. At first, he did not want to meet but she reassured him with several pics of herself. She had a great smile.

When she finally walked in he realized that the pictures that she had sent him were as representative as any other lie that a woman can tell. At the late age of thirty one he should have known better than to trust a stranger.

It wasn’t her weight in particular that bothered him. Sure, she was about fifty pounds heavier than she claimed to have been. Somehow she just expected him to ignore that small misrepresentation under the veil of not being shallow. He thought about it for a while.

He bought her a dirty martini and then another and another. Sure he was short hundred bucks but with every drink that he took in, he became more forgiving of her gross physical falsification. He thought about it for a while.

She gave him head on a wooden bench late night in Washington Square Park. Her lips grasped him like the rim of an uncorked bath. He shot it straight in her mouth. While she placed the purple lipstick across her swelled lips she wondered if he would be interested in spending the night.

He had to wake up early for work but promised to call her sometime.

Will you really call? She guardedly inquired.

He thought about it for a while and walked away in silence.

Single Man Thoughts

Guy Jacobs Hard Boiled Men Media Kit

2008-02-13T13:02:00.000-08:00

Media Fact Sheet
Hard-Boiled Men
By: Guy Jacobs
IUniverse (2006)

Major Themes:

• Single life in NYC
• Interfaith Dating
• Sexuality
• Breakups/Divorce
• Academic Life

Awards:

• 2007 New York Book Festival Award
• 2007 Hollywood Book Festival Award
• 2006 DIY Book Festival Award

Guy Jacobs and Gilda Carle on CNBC:

Synopsis:

Follow under-sexed, over-analytical university professor Dr. Benjamin Wise, fresh off a horrific break-up, on a journey to reawaken his libido. Set against the backdrop of Asian massage parlors, University hallways and West Village anarchy, Hard-Boiled Men provides an honest and hilarious account of single life in New York City. The book exposes men’s secret thoughts on the nature of love, marriage, and sexuality.

Although Hard-Boiled Men is as likely to infuriate as entertain, Guy Jacobs’ account of promiscuity and debauchery on the road to love speaks to our eternal quest for intimacy, home and finding out just who we are.

Reviews:

“There's nothing soft about the new novel "Hard-Boiled Men". Guy Jacobs is a fresh, real and talented new author who has written a solid, humorous tale of a fictional university professor on a journey of single-life in a Big City.”
-PageOne Reviews

"Powerful, inspiring and heartfelt. Hard-Boiled Men is The Catcher in the Rye all grown up; there’s a little bit of Ben Wise in every one of us."
-Dr. Paul S. Lieber, Emerson College

“I would highly recommend this novel to anyone who ever dealt with a divorce or a breakup form a person they loved. In his own unique way, Jacobs successfully takes his readers into a funny and sometimes surprising tour of that enigmatic mind of the single man. Hard-Boiled Men reminded me of a modern day Portnoy’s Complaint or a sober Jewish version of Charles Bukowski.”
-The Compulsive Reader

Guy Jacob's character Ben Wise is completely intoxicating, seductive, confused, true to life, addictive, and a character to be identified with. Jacobs is truly a talented writer effortlessly able to keep you riveted and enthralled from cover to cover. This novel is a breath of fresh air to the usual single/dating life account cleverly laced with a healthy dose of humor. Nothing about this novel is ordinary from the characters to the racy love scenes. You will put it down feeling completely entertained and satisfied.
-Sherri A. Marchese

Author Bio:
Guy Jacobs is a professor in a midsized state university. He has published dozens of academic journal articles and has been featured on national television as an expert in the media field.

Jacobs is an alumnus of New York University where he conducted his graduate studies and is well known for his true to life depiction of Manhattan’s fast pace nature. While Hard-Boiled Men has been argued by some to be somewhat explicit, the novel has won praise for its literary contribution to the new journalism movement.
Jacobs' writing style has been widely influenced by the writings of such authors as Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller, Philip Roth and Jerzy Kosinski.

Media Appearances:

StyleWiz on CNN February 2007
StyleWiz on CNBC February 2007

Website:
www.hardboiledmen.com

Contact for Media Inquiries:
Sivan Media Group
PO Box 800018
Aventura, FL 33280
hardboiledmen@yahoo.com

Crossing Nation by Ginsberg

2008-02-04T14:37:00.001-08:00

Crossing Nation

Under silver wing
San Francisco's towers sprouting
thru thin gas clouds,
Tamalpais black-breasted above Pacific azure
Berkeley hills pine-covered below--
Dr Leary in his brown house scribing Independence
Declaration
typewriter at window
silver panorama in natural eyeball--

Sacramento valley rivercourse's Chinese
dragonflames licking green flats north-hazed
State Capitol metallic rubble, dry checkered fields
to Sierras- past Reno, Pyramid Lake's
blue Altar, pure water in Nevada sands'
brown wasteland scratched by tires

Jerry Rubin arrested! Beaten, jailed,
coccyx broken--
Leary out of action--"a public menace...
persons of tender years...immature
judgement...pyschiatric examination..."
i.e. Shut up or Else Loonybin or Slam

Leroi on bum gun rap, $7,000
lawyer fees, years' negotiations--
SPOCK GUILTY headlined temporary, Joan Baez'
paramour husband Dave Harris to Gaol
Dylan silent on politics, & safe--
having a baby, a man--
Cleaver shot at, jail'd, maddened, parole revoked,

Vietnam War flesh-heap grows higher,
blood splashing down the mountains of bodies
on to Cholon's sidewalks--
Blond boys in airplane seats fed technicolor
Murderers advance w/ Death-chords
Earplugs in, steak on plastic
served--Eyes up to the Image--

What do I have to lose if America falls?
my body? my neck? my personality?

Allen Ginsberg

The Problem With Brazilian Girls

2008-02-02T10:29:00.000-08:00

The problem with Brazilian girls, he said, is that they smile at everyone with that special smile that many men want to reserve for themselves. He went out for a pack of smokes and later came back. He quit smoking cigarettes more than six months ago but on occasion, he broke his own promise. Nothing made him feel more manly than a pack of Reds in his pocket. You know, in Europe, he said, women will think less of you if you are one of those non-smoking guys. The American equivalency, he argued, would be a guy who doesn’t drink whiskey or only drinks light beers because of the carbs.

I waited for him to return and in the meantime brewed another round of coffee. We were all addicted to different things. His teeth were yellow from the cigarettes, mine from too much caffeine. Everyone one had their own thing going.

When he came back, he did not say to much. At least, that was the case for the first few minutes. He tapped the bottom of the pack on his left palm. Smokers had strange tendencies. As if the cigarettes were asleep and needed a good kick in the ass before they could be smoked. He asked me for a light and as usual I could not find one. So many people came and went from my apartment and by some strange miracle this traffic resulted in a constant fluctuation in the numbers of available lighters.

Some guy whom I did not know left a silver lighter on my bathroom sink a few weeks ago. I had it in my pocket for a couple of days but it later disappeared after everyone came over for the semi finals. I should have never had bought that large screen TV.

I found some old matches in the kitchen drawer. They had a name of some Boston restaurant on their cover. He lit up his cigarette and later another. We were all addicted to our own devices.

Do you remember that girl I told you about, the one from the coffee shop? He inquired. Before I could answer he hit me up for a coffee with two sugars. I never put any of those sweeteners in my coffee, some regular milk did just fine with me.

It appeared that the girl from the coffee shop was now single again. She broke up with that guitar player after all of these months. Sam took a small note from his back pocket and proudly displayed his telephone number scribbled in red.

Coffee, cigarettes, sugar and dating, we are all addicted to different things.

Book Club Books

Be Kind by Charles Bukowski

2008-01-16T03:16:00.001-08:00

Be Kind

we are always asked
to understand the other person's
viewpoint
no matter how
out-dated
foolish or
obnoxious.

one is asked
to view
their total error
their life-waste
with
kindliness,
especially if they are
aged.

but age is the total of
our doing.
they have aged
badly
because they have
lived
out of focus,
they have refused to
see.

not their fault?

whose fault?
mine?

I am asked to hide
my viewpoint
from them
for fear of their
fear.

age is no crime

but the shame
of a deliberately
wasted
life

among so many
deliberately
wasted
lives

is.

Charles Bukowski

Review of Hard-Boiled Men

2008-01-15T10:12:00.000-08:00

Book Review
Hard-Boiled Men
Guy Jacobs
From: www.compulsivereader.com

Direct link: http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1828

Hard-Boiled Men
By: Guy Jacobs
IUniverse, 2006
ISBN-10: 0595382444

When I first picked up my borrowed copy of Hard-Boiled Men, I took a long and careful look at those eggs that seemed to roll out of the bright red cover and in to my fingers. There is no doubt that this book is unlike most contemporary novels. First time author, Guy Jacobs does not bother to go into deep character development, foreshadowing, Situational Irony or any other commonly used literary devices. What the author does provide is an extremely straightforward and forthcoming account of the heartache and loneliness that often compliment single life in NYC. But do not mistake this book for a somber one. Hard-Boiled Men is an hilarious read. I could not stop laughing throughout it at.

The first chapter of the book takes place in a midtown Asian massage parlor where Jacobs leaves little to the imagination. Jacobs’ style of writing can be explicit, at times bordering on pornography. But there is so much more. Beyond those few chapters that made me blush, I found Hard-Boiled Men to be a thought provoking novel. Some of the main issues that the novel deals with are intercultural and interfaith relationships, fear of commitment as well as lots of sexuality. But no issue stands more clearly in this book than is Benjamin Wise’s quest to regain his faith in the concept of finding true love and his attempt to let go of his past.

I would highly recommend this novel to anyone who ever dealt with a divorce or a breakup form a person they loved. In his own unique way, Jacobs successfully takes his readers into a funny and sometimes surprising tour of that enigmatic mind of the single man. Hard-Boiled Men reminded me of a modern day Portnoy’s Complaint or a sober Jewish version of Charles Bukowski. I highly recommend this fun and thought-provoking novel.

Hard-Boiled Men
By: Guy Jacobs
IUniverse, 2006
ISBN-10: 0595382444

When I first picked up my borrowed copy of Hard-Boiled Men, I took a long and careful look at those eggs that seemed to roll out of the bright red cover and in to my fingers. There is no doubt that this book is unlike most contemporary novels. First time author, Guy Jacobs does not bother to go into deep character development, foreshadowing, Situational Irony or any other commonly used literary devices. What the author does provide is an extremely straightforward and forthcoming account of the heartache and loneliness that often compliment single life in NYC. But do not mistake this book for a somber one. Hard-Boiled Men is an hilarious read. I could not stop laughing throughout it at.

The first chapter of the book takes place in a midtown Asian massage parlor where Jacobs leaves little to the imagination. Jacobs’ style of writing can be explicit, at times bordering on pornography. But there is so much more. Beyond those few chapters that made me blush, I found Hard-Boiled Men to be a thought provoking novel. Some of the main issues that the novel deals with are intercultural and interfaith relationships, fear of commitment as well as lots of sexuality. But no issue stands more clearly in this book than is Benjamin Wise’s quest to regain his faith in the concept of finding true love and his attempt to let go of his past.

I would highly recommend this novel to anyone who ever dealt with a divorce or a breakup form a person they loved. In his own unique way, Jacobs successfully takes his readers into a funny and sometimes surprising tour of that enigmatic mind of the single man. Hard-Boiled Men reminded me of a modern day Portnoy’s Complaint or a sober Jewish version of Charles Bukowski. I highly recommend this fun and thought-provoking novel.

Two Women Within One

2008-01-06T12:04:00.001-08:00

Jimmy let that piece of paper lay around his desk for a couple of weeks. Surrounded by overdue bills from the local utility company, the television and cable company and numerous credit card, this small indifferent white envelope had nothing that distinguished it from the rest, besides her familiar handwriting.

Jimmy woke up kind of early on that Sunday morning. Some people who walked by his building were making load noises. It almost sounded like a fight and Jimmy when never one to miss out on such things. By the time he got out of bed and threw on a pair of his red holiday boxers that she gave him as a gift, the people on the street were gone. Disappointed, he walked out into his kitchen and was surprised to learn that it was 5:10am. An hour later the sun would come up on another morning in Arizona.

He brewed up some of that expensive flavored coffee that she made him buy online and then turned on Sportcenter in the other room. He did not want to wake her up. Things were going well between them, or at least that was the way he felt about her. Three and a half months was not enough time to tell where it would wall lead.

On his way out to the balcony where he planned to smoke a cigarette, he picked up the envelope from the pile and carefully opened it without a tear. It took Jimmy half a cigarette to withdraw the letter form the envelope. Good news or bad news, any news from Maria could only spell trouble for him, now that he moved on.

Later on, in the bar, when they held hands, he told her about what she said. Lizzie tried to be the good girlfriend, the kind that was understanding and not too jealous. But he could see it on her face. Later on that not when they made love he closed his eyes and held her close, as if he had not seen her in a while.

Holding on to two women in the arms of the one, he thought about it all and wondered how much time will pass until he will forget about Maria and move on with his life.

NYC Novels

Another Day

2008-01-05T06:15:00.000-08:00

A Poem by the great Los Angeles Poet Charles (Hank) Bukowski

having the low down blues and going
into a restraunt to eat.
you sit at a table.
the waitress smiles at you.
she's dumpy. her ass is too big.
she radiates kindess and symphaty.
live with her 3 months and a man would no real agony.
o.k., you'll tip her 15 percent.
you order a turkey sandwich and a
beer.
the man at the table across from you
has watery blue eyes and
a head like an elephant.
at a table further down are 3 men
with very tiny heads
and long necks
like ostiches.
they talk loudly of land development.
why, you think, did I ever come
in here when I have the low-down
blues?
then the the waitress comes back eith the sandwich
and she asks you if there will be anything
else?
snd you tell her, no no, this will be
fine.
then somebody behind you laughs.
it's a cork laugh filled with sand and
broken glass.

you begin eating the sandwhich.

it's something.
it's a minor, difficult,
sensible action
like composing a popular song
to make a 14-year old
weep.
you order another beer.
jesus,look at that guy
his hands hang down almost to his knees and he's
whistling.
well, time to get out.
pivk up the bill.
tip.
go to the register.
pay.
pick up a toothpick.
go out the door.
your car is still there.
and there are 3 men with heads
and necks
like ostriches all getting into one
car.
they each have a toothpick and now
they are talking about women.
they drive away first
they drive away fast.
they're best i guess.
it's an unberably hot day.
there's a first-stage smog alert.
all the birds and plants are dead
or dying.

you start the engine.

Christmas in the Waffle House

2007-12-25T07:59:00.001-08:00

While the rest of America was sitting around the dinner table, stuffing their faces with honey glazed hams, roasted potatoes and comforting pumpkin pie that tasted very much like home, Charlie drove around this little town in his 1988 Honda Civic that was somehow still held together by superglue and the will of God. How lonely it all felt, the night of Christmas Eve. All of the stores were closed around this tiny college town. The students all left more than a week ago, just a day after their final examinations. And Charlie, he had nowhere to go. This year, his sister joined her in laws and he could not afford the plane ticket to head up north to his family farm in Indiana. How he ever ended up in this Southern town is a tale for another day. But as he looked at his watch, he realized that it was almost 8:36pm and he has still not had anything to eat since that morning breakfast bar.

Troubled days were all Charlie knew during that past year. Ever since Nancy took off back in late February, just a couple of days after he gave her that special gift that he bought her for Valentine’s Day. Where she was now? Charlie did not have the faintest clue. Maybe she went back to that old boyfriend of hers whom she always spoke about. The guy who could last much longer than the typical three and a half minutes that Charlie could offer on the average night. Nancy was long go and with her so were Charlie’s hope for a better year to come. Now, all that he cared about was getting something to eat, something to ease his pain if only for a few moments.

Thank God for the Waffle House, Charlie thought to himself as he parked his old car next to a pickup truck. The place seemed busier than it should have been on Christmas eve, but then again, it was the only place open and the town was full of lonesome people much like himself. He parked himself on the booth right by the cash register. Christmas eve 2007 and there he was. There was not much to say after all.

So what will you have honey? She asked.

I am not really sure, I have never really eaten here before. I guess I will have some waffles, that only makes sense after all, does that sound like a good choice?

You want them plain or do you want chocolate chip waffles or maybe some pecan ones?

I’ll take them plain and also, can I get a cup of coffee.

You got it sugar, and then she walked away.

Looking around at the crowd that surrounded him, Charlie felt more at ease than one may have suspected. You can say what you want about people who eat at the Waffle House on any given day but now one could ever claim that these kind of folks were uninteresting.

There was that lonely old fat man who could barely fit into his booth, the two younger college students who wore black band T-shirts and were covered in tattoos, there were the regulars who knew the names of the waitresses and that of the guy who operated the grill. Charlie looked around at the wait staff and wondered to himself why they all referred to that bustier older woman as Mama.

An old black lady sat around with her three grandchildren around the corner booth. They kept on laughing with great fervor, displaying a sense of family that Charlie hoped to one day capture if only for a couple of holidays. Of course that all depended on him meeting the right girl.

But good girls were hard to find and Charlie was still licking his Nancy’s wounds.

The waffles came with a warm smile and a side of butter. Can I get you something else baby? Maybe a little more coffee?

Christmas music played and the warmth was not limited to sweet dough that was slowly moving down his stomach. With New Years Eve promising to be just as lonely as tonight. Charlie looked through the address book of his cellular phone in hopes of coming up with any possible name that may help him avoid this painful solitude.

Janet was out of town and Jessica flew back to Los Angeles. He thought about giving Rachel a call but than again that was not such a great idea.

Living life with this sense of loneliness never made any sense neither did the mercilessness of the holiday season. Whether he would find a woman to kiss on New Years Eve was still a mystery to Charlie. But at least he knew where he would go in case he would remain alone. Thank God for the Waffle House he thought as he drove out of the parking lot.

Hard-Boiled Men

New Jersey and the death penalty

2007-12-17T15:18:00.000-08:00

Jersey was sick and tired of her old leather jacket. She got it as a gift a few years back from John her old college boyfriend. Three years have pasted since graduation and she was no were near to where she thought she would be back when she was younger. She could still recall those days at the University of Pittsburg, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes in the area outside of the so called Cathedral of Learning. Only three years have pasted and already all hope was washed away. Jersey planned on becoming the great American novelist. That was always what her father hoped for. He loved literature only slightly less than he loved his own daughter. When she was born, her mother thought about naming her Emily after her mother but he her father somehow managed to convince her to name the young girl Jersey after his favorite author Jerzy Kosinski. Jersey never liked her name. Like all children she wanted to fit in.

That all changed after the fall of the Soviet backed government. That’s when her father quit his university position in the Hungarian University of Fine Arts where he taught world literature and moved his family to the United States. Jersey could still remember that flight to New York. She never set foot in an airplane before. She was simply petrified as the plane flew into the atmosphere. She recalled how her father held her hand while reading to her. Till this day, she could feel that ease that came to her as her father read from the short stories of Anton Chekhov. He always knew how to encourage her no mater how sad or alone she felt in this world.
Three years have past since she graduated from her undergraduate studies. Four painful years since her father past away. And what did she have to show for it all? An old jacket given to her by another disappointing man and a handle of short stories. That was pretty much it.
Jersey walked into that old Salvation Army store where she traded her old jacket for one that seemed even older. Never minded how much she paid for that old rag, at least she was rid of that old memory. She walked into the connivance store for a pack of cigarettes, there she ran into Dylan. He was also a student in professor Kinder’s American literature class. He too was named after a famous writer. Most people always assumed that he was named after the famous Bob Dylan. Few ever knew that his mother wrote her dissertation on the hidden Catholic themes in Dylan Thomas’ famous work Under Milk Wood.

Dylan was all smiles as usual. She never saw the guy sporting a frown. At first she thought of him as a fake. Nobody can ever be all that happy. That all changed after professor Kinder read his short story “Being There” about Dylan’s days growing up in the heartland of Indiana. Her words rang with genuine humility. He clearly was a good guy.

And then, on that day, after he asked her out for coffee, as he held on to that box of Malbero lights, she felt so alive if only for a moment. She carefully smiled in his direction, turned back and slowly walked away.
A newspaper on the coffee shop counter must have been left behind by someone who had no use for it. Jersey picked it up and smiled. The headline on the front page read the following “New Jersey Abolishes the Death Penalty”.

Jersey smiled for a moment with a sense of irony. Thinking back to Dylan’s smile, she could if just for a moment once again feel somewhat alive.

NYC Novels

Jews and Christmas

2007-12-13T09:16:00.000-08:00

Around the corner of 68th and Columbus there was a Christmas tree stand that offered a variety of trees of all shapes and sizes to the people of New York. The many who live alone settle for one of those shorter trees that are easier to carry. Those usually went for $30. They cost $25 to those who knew how to bargain down. Those with families, especially the ones who had children had to go for the large ones. Those were much more expensive. But nothing made Christian people feel more blissfully festive that those glittering lights that shun within the realm of that fresh winter pine. Or at least that was what they always told me.

Regardless of what anyone may say or think, there was something special about the Christmas season for any of us regardless of religion. These days, no one is allowed to refer to it as the Christmas season any longer. You were supposed to say the Holiday season. No one wanted to offend anyone else these days. We were all tipping toeing around one another’s hypocritical toes.

Even though the snowstorm was getting worst with every passing minute, she continued to stand out there in the cruelty of the snow. On the other side of the window, people sat gathered within the confines of that corporate warmth. Sipping on hot chocolates and soy lattes, they had no sympathy for the poor Christmas tree girl who was freezing her tits off for $6.75 an hour. To those who actually took the time to notice her, she appeared like an anomaly, like a white polar bear who ran around the Central Park zoo, like the kind of a person whose disposition made us all feel that much better about our own lives.

It was rather atypical for me to find myself around these parts of the city. I never really understood what the big deal was about the upper west side.

An hour later, as the wind bashed across my face, I thought about it all and smiled away. Holding on to a small Christmas tree under left armpit and her number scribbled on a small note within my right pocket, I felt so alive and thought about just how great it was to be a Jew in Manhattan around this time of the year.

Hard-Boiled Men

The World Of Navine

2007-12-07T17:57:00.001-08:00

Check out this great new blog from my friend and great scholar Navine Karim:

http://www.vinrim.wordpress.com

Sleeping with celebs

2007-12-06T07:02:00.001-08:00

You know, I told him, dating a woman who is more than ten years younger than yourself is not as easy as it sounds. Take my Samantha, just for a minute, as an example.
Sam is 24 years old, she downloads music, she doesn’t read books. When she finally picks up the printed word, it is usually Glamour or Cosmo Magazine. Sure, those great magazines taught her how to give descent head, but it also filled her head with way too much shit. Sam watches television for hours. She loves that TMZ.

Last night, after we made love, Sam turned around and told me about that Teri Hatcher lawsuit that is being pursued by some skin care company. She told me all about the ruckus that Eva Mendes dealt with when she got out of Manhattan's Gramercy Park hotel. Sam was concerned about the reported tension between Brittney Spears and Paris Hilton, God, she claimed, will they ever really be true friends? Sam told me all about another breakup between Lindsay Lohan and Riley Giles, Hulk and Linda, Solange Knowles and her man.

I walked out of the bedroom and rolled a joint. A long and meaningful inhale made my life that much more bearable. A man in his thirties could only take that much. When I returned back to my bedroom, I watched Sam polishing her perfectly manicured nails.

I never heard of Eva Mendes, I did not know who Solange was or why I should care. I put on that old Tom Waits album to listened to his cigarette worn voice breezing through my ear drum. Sam has never heard of old Tom, nor did she know who Henry Miller was or Bukowski, or Leonard Cohen, or Kosinski, or……..

Samantha’s skin glowed in the essence of its youth. Her breasts seemed firm and vivacious popping out of her extra small sized Victoria Secrets nighty. Oh such beauty within her thighs.

A man as smart or obtuse will always lay within the bed that he made for himself. Such was mine, picturesque and forlorn. Samantha fell asleep to those cheerleader dreams that sweetened her night. I diminished within my own. Years went by and memories remained.

Not even time itself could put away those memories of a woman that I left behind.

NYC Novels

Harry Potter and the Death of Reading

2007-11-28T17:21:00.001-08:00

Harry Potter and the Death of Reading
Ron Charles
Op-Ed – Washington Post
Sunday, July 15, 2007; B01
It happened on a dark night, somewhere in the middle of Book IV. For three years, I had dutifully read the "Harry Potter" series to my daughter, my voice growing raspy with the effort, page after page. But lately, whole paragraphs of "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" had started to slip by without my hearing a word. I'd snap back to attention and realize the action had moved from Harry's room to Hagrid's house, and I had no idea what was happening.
And that's when my daughter broke the spell: "Do we have to keep reading this?"
O, the shame of it: a 10-year-old girl and a book critic who had had enough of "Harry Potter." We were both a little sad, but also a little relieved. Although we'd had some good times at Hogwarts, deep down we weren't wild about Harry, and the freedom of finally confessing this secret to each other made us feel like co-conspirators.
Along with changing diapers and supervising geometry homework, reading "Harry Potter" was one of those chores of parenthood that I was happy to do -- and then happy to stop. But all around me, I see adults reading J.K. Rowling's books to themselves: perfectly intelligent, mature people, poring over "Harry Potter" with nary a child in sight. Waterstone's, a British book chain, predicts that the seventh and (supposedly) final volume, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," may be read by more adults than children. Rowling's U.K. publisher has even been releasing "adult editions." That has an alarmingly illicit sound to it, but don't worry. They're the same books dressed up with more sophisticated dust jackets -- Cap'n Crunch in a Gucci bag.
I'd like to think that this is a romantic return to youth, but it looks like a bad case of cultural infantilism. And when we're not horning in on our kids' favorite books, most of us aren't reading anything at all. More than half the adults in this country won't pick up a novel this year, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. Not one. And the rate of decline has almost tripled in the past decade.
That statistic startles me, even though I hear it again and again. Whenever I confess to people who work for a living that I'm a book critic, I inevitably get the same response: "Imagine being able to sit around all day just reading novels!" Then they turn to each other and shake their heads, amazed that anything so effete should pass for a profession. (I can see it in their eyes: the little tufted pillow, the box of bonbons nearby.) "I don't read fiction," they say, suddenly serious. "I have so little time nowadays that when I read, I like to learn something." But before I can suggest what one might learn from reading a good novel, they pop the question about The Boy Who Lived: "How do you like 'Harry Potter'?"
Of course, it's not really a question anymore, is it? In the current state of Potter mania, it's an invitation to recite the loyalty oath. And you'd better answer correctly. Start carrying on like Moaning Myrtle about the repetitive plots, the static characters, the pedestrian prose, the wit-free tone, the derivative themes, and you'll wish you had your invisibility cloak handy. Besides, from anyone who hasn't sold the 325 million copies that Rowling has, such complaints smack of Bertie Bott's beans, sour-grapes flavor.
Shouldn't we just enjoy the $4 billion party? Millions of adults and children are reading! We keep hearing that "Harry Potter" is the gateway drug that's luring a reluctant populace back into bookstores and libraries. Even teenage boys -- Wii-addicted, MySpace-enslaved boys! -- are reading again, and if that's not magic, what is?
Unfortunately, the evidence doesn't encourage much optimism. Data from the NEA point to a dramatic and accelerating decline in the number of young people reading fiction. Despite their enthusiasm for books in grade school, by high school, most kids are not reading for pleasure at all. My friends who teach English tell me that summaries and critical commentary are now so readily available on the Internet that more and more students are coming to class having read about the books they're studying without having read the books.
And when their parents do pick up a novel, it's often one that leaves a lot to be desired. True, Oprah Winfrey can turn serious works of fiction such as Jeffrey Eugenides's "Middlesex" or Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" into megasellers. But among the top 20 best-selling books on Amazon.com this week, only six are novels -- and that includes the upcoming seventh volume of He Who Must Not Be Outsold, James Patterson's "The Quickie," the 13th volume of Janet Evanovich's comic mystery series and a vampire love saga.
How could the ever-expanding popularity of Harry Potter take place during such an unprecedented decline in the number of Americans reading fiction?
Perhaps submerging the world in an orgy of marketing hysteria doesn't encourage the kind of contemplation, independence and solitude that real engagement with books demands -- and rewards. Consider that, with the release of each new volume, Rowling's readers have been driven not only into greater fits of enthusiasm but into more precise synchronization with one another. Through a marvel of modern publishing, advertising and distribution, millions of people will receive or buy "The Deathly Hallows" on a single day. There's something thrilling about that sort of unity, except that it has almost nothing to do with the unique pleasures of reading a novel: that increasingly rare opportunity to step out of sync with the world, to experience something intimate and private, the sense that you and an author are conspiring for a few hours to experience a place by yourselves -- without a movie version or a set of action figures. Through no fault of Rowling's, Potter mania nonetheless trains children and adults to expect the roar of the coliseum, a mass-media experience that no other novel can possibly provide.
The schools often don't help, either. As I look back on my dozen years of teaching English, I wish I'd spent less time dragging my students through the classics and more time showing them how to strike out on their own and track down new books they might enjoy. Without some sense of where to look and how to look, is it any wonder that most people who want to read fiction glom onto a few bestsellers that everybody's talking about?
In "The Long Tail," Wired editor Chris Anderson suggested that new methods of distribution would shatter the grip of blockbusters. Niche markets would evolve and thrive as never before, creating a long, vital line of products from small producers who never could have profited in the past. It's a cheering notion, but alas, the big head still pretty much overrules the long tail. Like the basilisk that terrorized students at Hogwarts in Book II, "Harry Potter" and a few other much-hyped books devour everyone's attention, leaving most readers paralyzed in praise, apparently incapable of reading much else.
According to a study by Alan Sorensen at Stanford University, "In 1994, over 70 percent of total fiction sales were accounted for by a mere five authors." There's not much reason to think that things have changed. As Albert Greco of the Institute for Publishing Research puts it: "People who read fiction want to read hits written by known authors who are there year after year."
So we're experiencing the literary equivalent of a loss of biodiversity. All those people carrying around an 800-page novel looks like a great thing for American literacy, but it's as ominous as a Forbidden Forest with only one species of tree. Since Harry Potter first Apparated into our lives a decade ago, the number of stand-alone book sections in major metropolitan newspapers has decreased by half -- silencing critical voices that once helped a wide variety of authors around the country get noticed.
The vast majority of adults who tell me they love "Harry Potter" never move on to Susanna Clarke's enchanting "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell," with its haunting exploration of history and sexual longing, or Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials," a dazzling fantasy series that explores philosophical themes (including a scathing assault on organized religion) that make Rowling's little world of good vs. evil look, well, childish. And what about the dozens of other brilliant fantasy authors who could take them places that little Harry never dreamed of? Or the wider world of Muggle literary fiction beyond?
According to Amazon, the best-selling book of 2006 was "Cesar's Way: The Natural, Everyday Guide to Understanding and Correcting Common Dog Problems," by Cesar Millan. My favorite was "The Law of Dreams," a first novel by a 56-year-old writer named Peter Behrens. It's the story of an orphaned boy who doesn't know why he survived the evil force that killed his parents -- and left him scarred. Set during the Irish potato famine of 1847, it's not a fantasy, and it's not for children, but there are plenty of monsters here, and Behrens writes in a style that's pure magic. As of this writing, it has sold 8,367 copies in the United States. It's enough to make a book critic snap his broom in two.
charlesr@washpost.com
Ron Charles is a senior editor of The Post's Book World section.

Cafe Risque

2007-11-28T11:13:00.000-08:00

I have been driving for more than seven hours straight when I saw that billboard sign that read “WE BARE IT ALL”. Early morning traffic can drive a man insane. That may have been the reason why I chose to pull over and stop in for a beer. What a place to end up in on a Tuesday morning, I thought to myself. About ten minutes south of the serene college town of Gainesville Florida, Café Risqué is a peculiar blend somewhere in between a local Denny’s restaurant and a sullied southern strip join. Stale white bread toast and worn down lettuce perfectly complimented those worn out bodies of beaten down women who were embracing those silver stage polls like the children of a neglectful mother. Small town America was always told the very same stories that most of us would rather ignore.

I ordered a light beer and a black coffee with no sugar. Despite Layla’s offer, I passed up on the all you can eat breakfast buffet that was situated not too far from those purple sofas were a man could get a lap dance for twenty dollars. Twenty dollars seemed excessive for this hole in the wall nudy bar diner but Sunshine later reassured me of the fact that anytime before six am and noon, the dances went for a mere ten.

I pulled a chair next to Randy.

Alloy wheel is what I sell. He told me. I get paid seventy-five dollars every time I fix one of them sons of bitches. But that is the price I charge the dealerships. If the man off the street hires my services, I charge that son of a bitch a cool hundred. The guy was on his fourth beer and already took Channel for two lap dances in the past twenty five minutes alone. That son of a bitch has a great pair of tits I tell you, I don’t mind that they are silicones, that makes the bounce that much more immediate. He lit up a cigarette and offered me one. I had to decline. I gave up smoking more than a month ago. Well, thirty-three days to be exact. Thirty three days and counting.

Men who hung out in titty bars before lunch time were always a unique bunch. I was just surprised to find my way in their midst These men shared a camaraderie that was not that much different from those of men who went off to war together, men who lost it all in the stock market or men who rooted for the New York Jets football team. We all shared a common sense of desperation that brought us closer together.

Randy had a thick southern accent. He drove his truck all the way from the Florida-Georgia state line. I was a Jew and did my best to blend in. There were not too many of us around these parts. None that I knew off in this resturant/bar. Jewish tradition failed to recognize the unique splendor of these cheap dives that were filled with cheap beer and genuine folks who lived their lives from one day to the next. When he asked me where I was from, I tried to change the subject. There was no way to rationalize how a university professor from New York city ended up in a southern truck stop nudy bar on such a strange Tuesday morning.

Let me guess, you are originally from Europe, am I right or am I right? You are right I told him. What are you Czechoslovakian? Russian? Italian? German? I nodded my head and looked for a way out. Luckily Naomi came around with those pointy nipples that one could sharpen an orange peel on. They extended beyond her white tank top as they offered me refuge. I pulled a ten dollar bill out of my pocket and gazed into the eyes of our nation’s first secretary of the treasury. Would Mr. Hamilton approve of Naomi’s profession? Would he approve of these bad choices that I kept on pursuing on a consistent basis?

She extended her reassuring hand and I collapsed my foolish fingers into her comfort. Her touch reminded me of Joanna’s familiar console in those days before she changed her mind. Don’t worry honey, Naomi told me, I promise not to bite, that is unless you want me to. She must have been about nineteen years of age. Poor white trash that wore a rich friendly smile.

What would ever posses a woman to bounce her breasts in the slippery mouths of perverted truck drivers, alloy wheel salesmen and university professors for a mere ten dollars a pop? She had the kind of a body that any man could only dream about knowing. A woman of her caliber could have had her choice of top sirloin cuts instead of picking from the bottom.

If she really wanted my opinion, if she seeked my advice, I would suggest that Naomi would drive up to the University of Florida’s law library were enterprising future tax attorneys and court room litigators spent lonely hours at the time. Any of these men would provide a brighter future than did Café Risque’s regular clients. Naomi must have not known about the lonely schmucks up at the university. She must have not realized just how difficult it was for many of them to find a woman, any woman and most of all a good looking woman with a tight young body and pointy nipples to go along.

How else would you explain her choice of careers?

When I came back to the table, Randy was all smiles. OOOOWEEEEEE he proclaimed. That fine little thing must have flossed your gums and in between your teeth with them pointy things.

I shook my head and ordered us both another round of drinks.

It was getting late, almost Eight o’clock when I finally walked into the Beth Israel synagogue. There was not a seat to be found. With my formal black suite on and my hair combed to the left, I placed an unsoiled yamaka on my head and located one of the few prayer books that were left on the wooden display.

I looked about the faces of my people who were celebrating the Rosh Hashanah holidy. Families sat together in an embrace of the high holidays. There was a real sense of spirituality in the air. When the Rabi told us to rise, I lowered my eyes towards the ancient Hebrew texts and said a silent prayor for my newly found friends Randy and Naomi. In their loneliness, I affirmed my own.

NYC Novels

A Review of Exit Ghost by Philip Roth

2007-11-26T16:45:00.000-08:00

October 7, 2007
From the New York Times
By CLIVE JAMES
EXIT GHOST By Philip Roth.

In a Mobius striptease, the disrobing stripper is always on the point of getting dressed again, and there is no resolution to the revelation.

A Mobius striptease in written form, Philip Roth’s new novel, “Exit Ghost,” is purportedly his long-running character Nathan Zuckerman’s new novel, narrated in the first person. During the course of Nathan Zuckerman’s new novel, Zuckerman raises the question of whether an author’s personal biography should ever be drawn into any discussion about his works of art. The answer seems to be that any reader who might want to do so must be a bit of a klutz.

But we get that answer only if we decide that Zuckerman is speaking for Roth when he, Zuckerman, seems to endorse the opinion of Amy Bellette, now old, gray and diseased but once the young mistress, helpmeet and nurse of Zuckerman’s mentor and hero E. I. Lonoff, that there is something crassly illiterate about any attempt even by scholars, let alone journalists, to trace the inspiration of her erstwhile lover’s works to his actual life. And what if Zuckerman doesn’t endorse her opinion? He quotes her at length, but without explicitly agreeing, even though the long letter in which she expresses her objections to biographical reductionism suggests that she can write an essay nearly as well as, say, Philip Roth.

Maybe Zuckerman is withholding judgment. He may well have reason to do so, because in Roth’s early Zuckerman works, notably “The Ghost Writer” (first published in 1979, and hey, there’s the ghost already), Zuckerman was probing the secrets about the connection between Lonoff’s work and his real life even as a character in this new book, Richard Kliman, is hoping, by revealing the facts about Lonoff’s real life, to win for the neglected Lonoff the fame he has always lacked, and thereby get his works republished in the Library of America (the same distinguished imprint, we alert readers will note, that is currently republishing the complete works of none other than Philip Roth — no victim of neglect he). Hoping to? Insisting. There is no getting rid of Kliman. He just keeps on coming back.

As portrayed by Zuckerman, Kliman is irredeemably obnoxious. But room is left for the possibility that the young Zuckerman might once have been a bit less altruistic — a bit more ruthlessly ambitious all round — than he once reported himself as being in the first person, or was reported to be by Roth in the third person. (If you want to go back and check this out, the early sequence of Zuckerman novels are now published as “Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue, 1979-1985” in a single, typically sumptuous volume from, you guessed it, the Library of America, $35: but a warning — the name Zuckerman has the word “sugar” loosely buried within it, and once you give that old hunger a chance to burn again, you may not be able to stop.) What if the decaying Zuckerman, by heaping imprecations on the repellent Kliman, is simply refusing to recognize his pristine young self reborn? Complicated enough for you yet? We’re just getting started.

If Zuckerman ever decides that he was once, under his show of Chekhov-loving sensitivity, crassly illiterate to stalk Lonoff, then we might decide that we are crassly illiterate to ask whether Zuckerman’s state of health in this new novel has any connection to Roth’s in real life. In “Exit Ghost,” Zuckerman, whom we have known since he was young and potent, has had prostate surgery that has left him impotent, not to mention incontinent. (We may not mention it now, but we’re going to have to soon.) There is a beautiful young woman in the novel, Jamie Logan, who is willing to be made love to by the avowedly decrepit Zuckerman, but he deliberately fails to keep the appointment, or seems to. (By then he is talking about himself as if he were a character in a play. Maybe he nailed her, but rigged the dialogue to suggest he didn’t. See my forthcoming paper “How Unreal Was Thereal McCoy? Strategic Female Fantasy Figures in the Disguised Biography of Philip Roth.”)

Is Roth saying, through Zuckerman, that the only reason he, Roth, might fail to show up for such a date is that he is no longer capable of going through with the consequences? Are we allowed to ask whether the real-life Roth, who once had to stave off accusations of providing the model for his character Alexander Portnoy, is no longer in thrall to his virile member, if he ever was? (After all, he never actually said he was. He said Portnoy was.) In the last rumor I heard on the subject, one of the most luxuriantly beautiful young Australian female film stars had thrown herself at Roth’s feet lightly clad — I mean she was lightly clad, not Roth’s feet — and demanded satisfaction.

This rumor might have had no more substance than the one about the famous actor and the gerbil, but it traveled at the same speed, and for the same reason: it fitted the legend. Roth has been catnip for upmarket women all his life, and never not renowned for it. In London, when he lived there, Roth would enter a fashionable drawing room with Claire Bloom on his arm and you would wonder how he had got into the house without a band striking up “Hail to the Chief.”

Roth might never have been Alexander Portnoy, but the inventor of Alexander Portnoy, unless he was a studious lizard from outer space with limitless powers of telepathic imagination, was a male human being well schooled in carnal relationships with women. It is true that Zuckerman, even when all the books of his saga are taken together, falls short of being a full case of Portnovian satyriasis. Zuckerman lusts after many women, but he does not get to make them all. He gets to make notes on them all. He is a writer. In just such a way, Jay McInerney might have invented an alter ego who was a dietitian, and who lured all those fashion models up to his apartment in order to weigh them. How can we fail to ask whether or not Roth still has what it takes, if he presents us with a central character based on himself who has it no longer? But is the character really based on himself? Let’s go back to the beginning.

Before we do, we should note that there is no question of abandoning the quest for clarification. “Exit Ghost” is just too fascinating to leave alone. It was designed that way, like the Tar Baby. Actually — leaving aside all questions about authorial identity for the moment — this book is latter-day Roth at his intricately thoughtful best, and a vivid reminder of why a dystopian satirical fantasy like “The Plot Against America” was comparatively weak. Roth has no business making up the world. His business is making up his mind, in the sense that his true material for inventing a pattern is self-exploration, not social satire.

Tom Lehrer once said that when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize it was time to give up on satire. But for Roth it was always time to give up on satire. The world is too obviously out of whack for a writer of his quality to give it the best of his attention. He should reserve that for his own psyche, which is only subtly out of whack, but still would be if he were living in paradise. Unlike the world, his mentality can’t be fixed, so a self-assertive rage is inappropriate. Only self-analysis will serve, and to pursue that without solipsism is the continuing challenge. Roth gets as close as anyone ever has to being clinically detached about spreading his own brains all over the operating table. But hold it there. We were going to start again.

And we have to start with the absorbent pads stuffed down the shorts. Zuckerman is leaking yellow water. Doing so, he has run for harbor. To change the metaphor, he has run for cover. He is somewhere up in the Berkshires near Tanglewood, not far from where none other than E. I. Lonoff once holed up to keep the inquisitive literary world at bay. When Zuckerman comes to New York to see the doctor, he avoids ground zero. He no longer wants to keep up with the news, even that news. (“I’ve served my tour.”) But he’s still not done with Lonoff.

At the Strand bookstore, Zuckerman puts together, for under $100, a complete spare set of Lonoff’s first editions. (There was my chance to meet Zuckerman. I could well have been in the Strand at the same time, adding to my row of Philip Roth hardbacks. If they had been first editions, they would have cost me thousands. Was that Zuckerman, the tall, grizzled patriarch in the rare-book section on the fourth floor who was going through that stack of New Yorkers with the original Roger Angell baseball articles? But wait a second: Zuckerman is a ghost.)

In Saul Bellow’s first post-Nobel novel, “The Dean’s December,” mortal fear centered on the colon. (“It’s serious enough for me to be wearing the bag.”) In Roth’s “Exit Ghost,” it centers on the prostate, or anyway on where the prostate used to be. The bearer of the wound can reach no accommodation with his loss. If I can speak for the outside world, which is where I come from, this is the area where the current generation of magisterial American male writers who are now making the last preparations for their immortality — Roth, Vidal, Mailer, Updike — come closest to evincing a common national characteristic.

This glittering crew, a Team America that not even Henry James and Edith Wharton put together could possibly have foreseen, is the most commanding bunch of representatives American literary culture has yet had, but there is something about American culture that doesn’t want to accept death as a fitting end to life. They are so incorrigibly energetic that the white light of their expectations bleaches even their pessimism. In that respect, they could all take a tip from, say, Joan Didion, who at least has never imagined that the Grim Reaper gets into the tournament only on a wild card.

But this isn’t even a quibble. It’s just an observation from someone standing awed and stunned on the sidelines. In my own country, Australia, “Portnoy’s Complaint,” first published in 1969, was a banned book for the first five years of its career. Having exiled myself to London, I was able to read it, but even in London there was no mistaking that the Americans were leaving the old British Empire looking not just superseded but mealy-mouthed.

American English had become the dominant language of modern reality. There was still a lot to be said for a version of English that wasn’t dominant (the British and ex-colonial writers would go on to prove that postimperial confusion was at least as fruitful as imperial success had ever been), but you couldn’t mistake the shift of cultural power. Even today, decades later, a British professor of American studies at a provincial university is in the position of someone with the free run of the PX at the local United States Air Force base: he has access to goods whose quality is hard to match locally. As for the homegrown literati, listen to Martin Amis talking about Bellow, and Ian McEwan talking about Updike. Try to imagine the same relationship in reverse. It might happen one day, but not quite yet. For my own part, I can only say this much: Of the two funniest books I have ever read in my life, “Lucky Jim” made me laugh loudest, but “Portnoy’s Complaint” set me free.

But in culture as in military strength, preponderance has its drawbacks. The big guns get a sense of mission, and their very confidence invites questions about their vision, even about their ability to gaze within. Just as Bellow, in his factual writings, never asked himself the awkward question about divisions within Israel, so in his fictional writings he stifled a question that would have multiplied his range: he never made a subject out of his succession of discarded wives, when you would have thought — must have thought — that for a writer otherwise so brilliantly introspective, there lay the essence of his subject. Similarly, Mailer, unceasingly writing advertisements for himself, never delved far enough into his own psyche to make a subject out of his complicity in the death of Jack Abbott’s victim: the great writer could face every embarrassment except the one that pierced to the center of his responsibility as a public writer.

Vidal has never admitted, let alone explored, the question of whether his criticisms of the American power elite might not be compromised by his membership in it. Does he really think, when he argues that F.D.R. tricked Japan into World War II, that the Japanese right wing, currently making a comeback, will not take this as an endorsement of its views? And does Updike think we will never ask how his basketballing Rabbit can have the sensibility of Proust, or whether Bech, the character he created to embody his fame as a writer, was not calculated to increase it?

Finally it is only Roth who takes himself entirely to pieces. Has he been cruel to leave recognizable the outlines of discarded loved ones? Yes. Has he made a subject of that? Yes again. That’s why his father keeps on coming back. Even less inclined to be shaken off than the awful Kliman, the fathers of Roth’s leading men walk the platform by dead of night. But does even Roth complete the peeling of the artichoke? To look for the answer, we must go back again to the beginning of this new novel and try, this time, to finish up somewhere beyond the start. For Zuckerman, if not for Roth, potency is gone. Has desire gone with it? You bet your life it hasn’t. Listen to this:

“And so I set out to minimize the loss by struggling to pretend that desire had naturally abated, until I came in contact for barely an hour with a beautiful, privileged, intelligent, self-possessed, languid-looking 30-year-old made enticingly vulnerable by her fears and I experienced the bitter helplessness of a taunted old man dying to be whole again.”

But she’s been there since “Goodbye, Columbus,” and as long as he can imagine her, he is whole again. The wholeness is in the style, which even now, as he (wait a second: as Zuckerman) prays for the collagen injection to take effect on his slack urethra, proceeds with the delicious complexity of dream baseball. “I write a sentence and then I turn it around,” Lonoff once said. “Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch.” Roth can still do that. It’s still all there. Only the big jokes are gone. He doesn’t laugh that way much anymore. The style that sprang from sexual energy has moved up too far into the head to permit any more gut-busting inventions like Thereal McCoy. She’s still lurking in the bathroom in “Portnoy’s Complaint,” waiting to blow the minds of the next generation of horny male adolescents, but the man who thought of her has moved on. A long way from the entrance now, he is near the exit: or he says he is.

When the Ghost exits, he leaves us asking whether he is real. But he is real as long as Macbeth thinks so. Lonoff was the ghost of Zuckerman’s father the way that Portnoy’s father was the ghost of Roth’s father, who, we may deduce, was pained by the way his brilliant son won fame. But we deduce it from one of the son’s novels. In “Zuckerman Unbound,” Zuckerman emerged as the author of “Carnovsky,” a book as scandalous to the older generation of Jews as “Portnoy’s Complaint.” Zuckerman went on to become further established as a writer with a career path very much like Roth’s, except of course, it isn’t. Or what if “isn’t” isn’t the word? Only the stage directions confirm that the speaker was ever there.

“Exit Ghost.” Great title. The book of a great writer. A great book? Maybe it’s just another piece of a puzzle. A great puzzle, and true to life in being so. In these strange and wonderful books that he writes under or about another name than his, Roth has been mapping the geography in an area of life where only his literary heroes — Kafka, of course, is one of them — have ever gone. The labyrinth of consciousness is actually constructed from the only means by which we can find a way out of it. It’s a web that Ariadne spins from her own thread. You don’t get to figure it out. You only get to watch it being spun. And if you are Nathan Dedalus (it was Zuckerman’s name for himself in the running heads to the second chapter of “The Ghost Writer”), you are in love with her for life, even if it kills you.

Norman Mailer

2007-11-26T16:37:00.000-08:00

A Review of Auster's New York trilogy

2007-11-26T16:31:00.000-08:00

By: Patrick McGrath
Saturday July 29, 2006
The Guardian

My reasons for moving to New York at the beginning of the 1980s were twofold. One was love. The other was the desire to become a writer. The city was then in a period of stagnation and decay. The middle classes were in flight to the suburbs, the tax base was eroding, there was racial tension, rioting, strikes, crime: the history is familiar. But that said, it was hard not to be aware of a certain electricity in the air, also a certain brazen hubris. You felt that this city didn't merely believe its own myth, it was actually better than its myth. I came to consider it a privilege to live here. So when I was invited to write a short book about the place, I accepted with alacrity. To pay homage to New York in 50,000 words struck me as a very attractive proposition, so much so it would barely feel like work.

I ran into difficulties almost at once. I discovered how very hard it is to say anything about New York that has not been said before. Everybody knows about the peerless architecture, the cosmopolitan elegance, the constant raucous din - "like the unbandaging of great giants in agony", Malcolm Lowry wrote about the city - and of course its extraordinary human density. Everyone has seen the old gravestones quietly crumbling among the downtown skyscrapers, and the ruins of the fever hospital in the middle of the East River. They know Bellevue, where Lowry was in detox for a while, they know the Tombs, they have been up to the Cloisters. They have heard the story of how the Fulton Street fish market, when the day's waste was tossed in the river, would attract dozens of sharks.
What, then, to say about New York? I abandoned the idea of the extended essay and considered instead the memoir. To my considerable distress I soon realised that my own story was no different from those of millions of others drawn here since the city began life as a Dutch trading colony. You arrive penniless, equipped only with your ambition and your talent, such as it is. You work hard, you compete ferociously, and you make it or you don't. If you do, you get to move from the Lower East Side to the Upper East Side. Or, if you prefer, to the lower west side, ie Tribeca. That is, if you can first get a toehold on the island at all, which these days requires serious bucks.

I had only one string left to my fiddle. There was a remote chance, I thought, that if I wrote fiction about New York then I might find something original to say. The idea came to me of a book made up of three novellas, each one set at a different moment in New York's history. I would start with the revolutionary war of 1775-83.

From 1776 to the end of the war, the British army was in occupation and trashed Manhattan. Does any army in occupation of a foreign city behave otherwise? The soldiers turned it from a thriving seaport into a military garrison. Foreign trade was closed down. The wharves and docks began to rot. Redcoats and their officers caroused outrageously. They raped the local women and murdered their men. They rode their horses into private homes to get them out of the rain, they commandeered property, hanged suspected patriots in broad daylight, and also in secrecy by night. Those who weren't hanged were shackled on prison ships in the East River, where they died of hunger and disease and were then tossed overboard stitched up in shrouds of old sailcloth.

In such a town the situation of a rebel, an American patriot, say, spying on the enemy forces occupying the city and carrying intelligence across the Hudson to General Washington in New Jersey, where he was encamped with his ragged citizen army, might provide good drama. If that patriot spy was a woman, the stakes would be higher still, and if she were then betrayed, say, by her son - and so it began.

The 19th century saw New York ascendant. It was Whitman's "mettlesome, mad, extravagant city", the city of Cornelius Vanderbilt and Stanford White. Powerful merchants, vast fortunes, immense volumes of trade. The city expanding rapidly. Immigrants flooding in. Take a prosperous merchant, give him a son - but one son only - have him groom the boy to take over the business. But the boy has no head for business. The boy wants to be, of all things, an artist. What's worse, he has fallen in love with an artist's model! And she's Irish!

And so the second story took shape.

The last would be written not out of historical research, but from my own experience of the weeks after 9/11. A shattered New York, reeling from the shock of the attacks, the smoke still rising, and a sense of horror and unreality almost overwhelming the traumatised populace as the sun shone from obscenely clear skies in the September and October of 2001. A man takes up with a prostitute, an instance of the "catastrophe sex" not uncommon in devastated cities, and reports to his therapist that he has fallen in love. The therapist, no less disturbed than her client by the attacks, reacts unwisely.

And so the third story began. As I was finishing it I noticed that in each story a ghost, or the idea of ghosts, was present. This was quite unintentional, but it did give me a title: Ghost Town, an unlikely sobriquet for this most animated of cities. It was also clear that in each of the three periods I had chosen, devastation on a grand scale had been inflicted on New York, specifically in the same few square blocks of lower Manhattan. In fact, New York has suffered serial catastrophe ever since the Dutch arrived in the early 17th century and built a wall across the island to keep the native Americans out. Fires, massacres, epidemics, riots, lynchings, bombings - New York's record is perhaps no worse than that of any other great city. But the insight does offer a deeper historical perspective from which to view 9/11: to regard it, I mean, as only the most recent of the multitude of assaults suffered by this glorious, resilient, unquenchable city.

Tropic of Cancer, a Review by Dan Schneider

2007-11-26T16:26:00.000-08:00

There is truth to the claim that sometimes a bad writer can be closer to greatness than a good writer, because the bad writer may just be slightly off in all the areas he or she needs to be great in, while the good writer is merely solid in all areas, but never comes close to greatness in any area. This, however, is not the case with Henry Miller. He is a bad writer because he is virtually void of any writing talent. Let’s go down the checklist: Imagery - no. Narrative ability- no. Characterization - no. Depth - no. Insight - no. Dialogue - no. Poesy - no. Wit - no. I could go on, but you get the general drift. Instead, Miller was one of the earliest examples of a talentless badass who made a name for himself on reputation alone. Yes, he may have been well read, but he couldn’t write worth a lick. In this regard he was a prosaic Ezra Pound, save the talent, or an early Beatnik, sans the bongos. One might say he was America’s Parisian Rimbaud, except that there were glimmers of talent in that overhyped scatologist. Miller has nothing but books larded with banality, dullness, and the overuse of curse words. And, no, he does not use them creatively in the way, say, 1999’s ‘South Park’ feature film did.
I read both books on back-to-back days, and there really is not much to either. Imagine Pound writing fiction on a bad day at the asylum. Of course, I recall once having a conversation at a pizzeria with a drunken bisexual wannabe writer about the books, which I’d only glanced at at the time, and he raved over their brilliance. Why? Because talentless wannabe writers love to promote and ejaculate over material that any other talentless hack could have written. I don’t doubt that hack I knew could have equalled Miller’s garbage. But, the fact is that neither should have been published. Even the banal and lazy ravings of Postmodernists have more to offer than mere bilge. Not much more, but some. The out that defenders of such garbage - the forebear of execrable pissings like James Frey’s Oprah-endorsed ‘A Million Little Pieces’ - never rely on the actual work to defend it. No one ever points to gorgeous prose, wonderful moments, talk stolen from reality, for the obvious reason that there are no such things to recommend in the work. Instead, they haul out canards about ‘truth’, ‘honesty’, ‘pain’, and the like. And, being banned never helps create demand. As overrated as I think the later works of Joyce are – ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Finnegans Wake’ - both are more deserving of study than this bilge. Even Jack Kerouac’s droning ‘On The Road’ is a masterpiece by comparison to these two utter pieces of nothingness.

‘Tropic Of Cancer’ was written in 1934, and ‘Tropic Of Capricorn’ in 1938. They are his two most famous works - rivaled only by his ‘Sexus’, ‘Plexus’, and ‘Nexus’ trilogy. Had only Miller spent more time working on writing than his own most obvious talent, public relations, he may have been a greeting card writer in the offing. Here is his most famous quote from Cancer: “This is not a book. This is a libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty.’ Great, eh? Both books are basically the autobiographies of Miller, with the usual dash of braggadocio and bullshit thrown in. Of course, nothing much really happens in either book. Miller fucks, sucks, drinks and stinks. Yet, the work is not pornographic, as its detractors over the years have claimed. Porn actually induces a visceral reaction. This is just dull as sin. Miller was over forty when he wrote it, yet I have read the diaries of fourteen year olds that were more interesting. Boredom, not profanity, is Miller’s greatest sin.

Cancer goes on for 318 pages, while Capricorn drones on an even longer 30 pages more. There are no formal chapters in either book, but this makes sense. Does one consider the act of pinching off a log of shit an act of finality? Of course not. The French often rejoice in the fact that they can see talent where Americans cannot. While there is legitimate debate over the merits of Jerry Lewis films there really is none over Miller. Even the French don’t pretend any longer. Yes, the Germans still defend Bukowski, but give them another twenty years. The truth is that the pre-War Paris of the 30s was the epicentre of indulgent expatriate American prose writing. Hemingway and Fitzgerald, at least, had talent to begin with, despite their flaws. Miller needed to set himself apart. If he couldn’t do it with words, why not shit?

Miller’s writing is so puerile it makes D.H. Lawrence look senescent. Miller’s descriptions of sex are so absurd, unintendedly, that they one might actually believe the man never was conscious during the act. He both degrades and hypes it, rather than looking at it with dispassion and examining what may lay inside - figuratively and literally. He has not any idea what to do with narrative, nor even what it is, or can do. Of course, many defenders state that this sex obsession is a sign of Miller’s politicality, when really it is a sign of his dementia and stunted personal growth. Yes, Hank, women can be bitches and cunts, but coming from a dick like you, where’s the pejorative? Miller tries to make suffering seem chic, yet the lie is not only that it’s not, but those who are born poor know it’s not, and only a pansy bourgeois elitist who goes slumming would think it is. Every ten pages there’s a rare sentence or two that shows a glimmer of poetry, but the dull and unrealistic conversations, obsession with shit, vermin, drink, sex, and disease then reassert themselves, like a boner that needs an encounter with Lorena Bobbitt.

Let’s see, what else might you need to know? Oh, one book is set mainly in Paris, the other in New York. If I have not yet let slip which book is set in which it does not matter. There is no plot. Am I going in circles? This technique is known as recapitulation. Imagine me stating, There is no plot. Am I going in circles? This technique is known as recapitulation, over and again for three hundred plus pages, with a few fucks and cunts tossed in. There - now you need not even buy the Cliff’s Notes. Let me see - can one identify with the lead characters in either book? No, they are all repugnant, and, again, even more damningly - DULL! Yes, they’re racists, liars, anti-Semites, perverts, drama queens, misogynists, misandrists, wannabe artistes- in short, the perfect fodder for talentless hacks, for most of them share the same qualities.

The truth is that Henry Miller was the worst example of a writer who really needed an editor. Yes, David Foster Wallace had an editor prune three thousand pages of his ‘Infinite Jest’ down to a mere thousand, and still couldn’t find anything worthwhile, but here there was obviously not even an attempt. Perhaps the only thing that will stick in my memory about these books is that, in a weird way, they remind me of some of the sleazy and bigoted writings of the worst bloggers online. And, like the talentless hacks who like to praise talentless writing, those online hacks show that even their putrescent complaints are old, really old and formulaic. Miller even makes his famously narcissistic lover, Anäis Nin, seem deep, by comparison, with his stream-of-dullness writing. Of the two books, were I two choose which one would be the greater torture to reread, I would choose Cancer, for Capricorn is slightly more coherent, and a bit more mature. It’s relative, of course, and still mostly dull as….oh, hell, I deserve it, SHIT!, but it at least attempts to give you context for its garbage. Some critics have said that Miller was a man of attitudes, not ideas. Wrong again. Miller was a cipher as a writer, but a marvelous promoter - the P.T. Barnum of early 20th Century literature. And this should be acknowledged, for it was his only talent. Yet, to even attempt a deep analysis of what is clearly one of the premier put-ons in literature is waste of time and effort. And I’m hardly a prude. I simply demand quality. Henry Miller simply says less with more words than just about any writer that has ever been published.

If other critics did he’d be forgotten now. Let’s see….oh, a quote from the book. No, got that. Gotta end? Ah, shit! No, that didn’t work. Now I know how that talentless drunken bisexual hack at the pizzeria felt. I’m doomed.

Reviewed by: Dan Schneider (www.cosmoetica.com)

The Henry Miller Library

2007-11-26T14:24:00.000-08:00

Some things in life never made sense to anyone. For example:
Who would ever believe that Clara would be the kind of a woman who would spend her Sunday afternoons hanging around the Henry Miller section of the Miami-Dade County library? I mean, maybe, just maybe, if she lived in Fort Jackson, Arkansas or Muncie, Indiana, things would be more clear, would make more sense, but here she was, living in downtown Miami, less than 10 minutes away from the world famous South Beach district and Ocean drive. She could have spent her Sundays sitting around the News Cafe or Mangos. She could have had tall Latin men running around and buying her chocolate Martinis. A woman who looked so good always heard the same lines. They would promise her a free trip to the islands, a fancy dinner and drinks in the VIP section of the latest and newest club on Washington Ave. I meant those kind of VIP tables cost at least $1,000. That did not include tip. But instead she just hung around the library, picking up an old copy of Black Spring and slowly reading through Chapter 14 over and over and over.

Maybe it had something to do with that guy. Not that guy but rather that Guy. He told her he was a writer. He told her that Philip Roth or that drunken Bukowski character inspired him. But most of all he told her (right before they kissed), that Henry Miller was by far his favorite writer. That she would never be able to understand him unless she read through Henry's pages.
The Tropic series was good stuff, he told her, but if you really want to get a taste of it, you had to read the Rosy Crucifixion.That is what he told her right before he took her for a walk on the beach only a few miles from where he lived.

On a Sunday afternoon, Clara sat around and wondered why he disappeared on her. Everything was going so smoothly for the past few months and suddenly he disappeared. She read over Chapter 14 once again and then closed her eyes.

NYC Novels