EVEREST

I just finished watching a television program about a group of men attempting to climb 29,000 foot Mount Everest. I am staying a week at my cousin Jeffery’s on the upper west side to take care of his bulldog, Louis. Louis is a freak of a dog. He lacks either the cuteness of a French bulldog or the droopy charm of an English. He makes enough noise for eight dogs, and speaks in a tongue that sounds human. He snores through the night. I pick him up and put him down off the bed when he sees it fit for me to do so. He is unhealthy and old and can no longer jump up to the bed, or at least has learned a paid helper will do it for him. I can only imagine how much money Jeffery has spent on surgeries for Louis who suffers from ear problems, stomach problems and a number of mental ones. Jeffery is gay and single and has somehow rerouted toward Louis any heterosexual parental instinct he may have to pass down his own neurosis.
Jeffery’s apartment is much nicer than my own. He has two flat screen televisions for viewing programs like the one I just watched. I do not even have one television, flat or any other shape. His apartment building was once a hotel for artists and still bears the name, “Hotel Des Artiste”, outside the restaurant on the first floor. The apartment is two floors and there are huge windows to let in the natural light a painter needs. The ABC studio is across the street. There is a staff of doormen and elevator men working all hours. I have never liked the feeling of being served and cannot get used to them. Jeffery is quite promiscuous so they are used to shuffling men about my age up and down the elevator and I can only imagine who they think I am. When I ordered food last night a doorman came to get my money, came back with the food, and took a third trip to give me my change. It only makes things harder. But, I always look forward to my time at Jeffery’s and have promised myself to take it easy for a few days, watch some TV, and get some writing done.
“Take care of”, is actually misleading. A dog walker, Diane, comes three times a day to feed and walk Louis. My only instructions are to sleep here and keep Louis company. Sometimes I struggle to follow these simple orders and don’t make it home for the night.
Diane is very good at her job. She leaves a note after each walk telling me if Louis peed or pooped, she feeds him and gives him water and his medication. She even leaves the TV on for him, Animal Planet. Diane and I have an interesting relationship. She has an intimate knowledge of me because she sees me sprawled across the bed three-quarters naked in some of my most revealing sleeping positions every morning when she arrives to take Louis out for his 7 am walk. She comes strait into the bedroom and begins prodding Louis, calmly begging him to wake up as she helps him down off the bed. I am always impressed with her lack of self-consciousness during these morning intrusions. I pretend to sleep. Diane knows me well, or at least knows how I look when I sleep, pretend to sleep, but I do not know even what she looks like or how old she is. I only know her from notes left on stationary bearing the name, Jeffery Wolf, in the upper corner, and by her voice. If she was suspected for murder and I was called in to ID her, they would have to do a voice ID like in The Usual Suspects. But I’m not sure if I could pick her even then, that seems to me an impossible system for identifying a person. Our uniquely one-sided relationship led to an uncomfortable occurrence a month ago when I was staying here over the holidays.
Outside Jeffery’s building one evening I held the door for a woman like I would hold a door for any woman, or any man for that. As she entered she looked longingly at me like she knew me, because she did. I looked at her blankly as if I didn’t know who she was, because I didn’t. I started down the street wondering to myself why that woman was looking at me so strangely. I herd my name. I turned and saw the woman there. I walked towards her with my face feeling paralyzed by confusion. I slowly started forming words with my mouth to break the awkward silence and bide a moment. “Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii…Diane”, it came to me at the last moment. This was Diane. She was not nearly as attractive as I had fantasized her to be, and I was glad I never snuck a peak any morning. She thanked me again for holding the door. I said, “You’re welcome.” She smiled, and we parted ways. Come to think of it, even if I had known her before, it still would have been kind of creepy. Why the hell was she thanking me profusely for holding the door for her? Maybe she loves me.




As I watched the program about men climbing Everest I could only think that they must live amazingly boring lives. They must be married, employed, and financially comfortable, so they seek adventure to escape there painfully boring everyday lives. Contrarily, I live a very exciting life and have no desire to climb anything, or jump out of anything, or drive anything exceedingly fast. I know I am not the first to come up with this theory of the bored explorer, and I do not give myself any credit for it, but it is at least part true. These men put themselves in harms way occasionally to feel alive, I simply just exist always on the brink of disaster. Every break I receive, good or bad, feels divinely delivered because the consequences always carry dire importance to my life. As I arrived last night at Jeffery’s, I had zero dollars to my name. I hoped he was going to leave me some money, but we had no confirmed arrangement. He left me money last time, but it was the holidays, and my birthday. I also had to pee really badly. The two factors left me running down the street, praying for money. There was an envelope with two hundred dollars with my name on it. I get to eat today. My own life is not as television worthy as dramatic assents up Everest, or more accurately, my own highlights would be inadmissible until released straight to DVD and labeled banned from television.
Two nights ago I attended a party in Brooklyn. I was dressed sort of conservatively because I was stoned when I left the house, but as the weed wore off and the alcohol kicked in I wanted to wear something more wild. I grabbed a t-shirt from my friend Gregg’s closet and took out a set of stencils of the alphabet I carry with me, and wrote, “I AM NOT HERE TO PARTY”, across the front of the shirt.
We got to the club around ten, took a reserved booth in the back, hid the “reserved” sign, and began drinking. It was an open bar from ten to eleven so we were going to the bar in turns and getting four drinks at a time. There were probably eight of us. Representatives from Coke Zero were walking around getting photos because they had sponsored the open bar. They wanted to photograph us. We permitted them to, but made sure at least one of us had our middle finger up in the picture so they couldn’t use it for an ad. We were good and sauced by the time the band went on.
We were side stage. We sort of knew one of the girls performing. She wasn’t actually in the band, but she is wild and beautiful so they had her up there pretending to sing and dance. The other people on stage were the drummer, the synth player, and the more talented, less attractive, lead singer. I got Angel’s (The pretty girl) attention during the set and she made her way over to touch me. Then the lead singer started motioning to me to come around the front of the stage. I wasn’t sure if she wanted me to come onto the stage or just go into the crowd. They played two more songs. I stood and told my friends, “I’m gonna go out there.” I finally got the nerve up, moved the chain curtain we were behind, and entered the stage. The first thing I did was take my pants off. A week earlier I was at a club and decided to take off my pants on the dance floor. Dancing is already fun, it can only be made more fun by doing something outrageous. This got a fantastic response from the girls I was dancing with at the club until my friend ran up to me pulled my underpants down and took a picture of my naked lower half on the crowded dance floor. I made him erase the photos.
I went to Angel and started dancing with her. She looked happy to see me. I think she had been nervous for the performance and was looking for a familiar face to take some of the heat off. She said to me, “Dance with Sylvia”, the lead singer. I made my way over to Sylvia. She was a much bigger woman then Angel and the hugeness that gave her talent as a performer was apparent up close. She was also happy to see me, but was just using me for the show, pulling me close and then pushing me away. I played along. I stayed on stage for two songs, dancing back and forth between the two women and getting the crowd going. At one point I looked out and saw a group of four blond girls screaming and motioning for me to come down to them. Then some dude ran across stage and tried to pull my underpants down. I had learned my lesson the week before and somehow the practice paid off, I grabbed a hold of my blue boxer briefs before I was revealed to the crowd of a thousand.
After the set was done we exited the stage, I put my clothes back on, and walked around a bit. I could feel the extra attention on me. I bumped into a few periphery characters in my life, they just sort of stared at me, but I didn’t feel bad, I had climbed Everest, what the hell had they done.
I saw Angel in the crowd and went up to her to celebrate our rocking performance. She looked lost and had obviously taken a drug that was preventing her from sharing in the excitement of the party. This is what they call the thousand yard stare in old soldiers who are distant from all the gun fire and chaos. Angel had a slight variation of this, the thousand drink stare, so I moved on. The original group was congregated on the dance floor laughing hysterically because of a stench creating an actual gap where no one would dance. “What could it be?”, we shouted to one another. “It smells like dirty giants with huge asses and pussies and dicks that have been fucking for hours”. The general haze of happiness continued till about three when we decided to leave.
I ended up passing out on the couch after eggs and strawberry crepes. I awoke at 10:45 a.m. in my typical wake up panic. I felt like I screamed as I took my waking breathe though I am not sure if I actually made a noise. I immediately phoned my sister to jokingly tell her to call our parents, that my face was stuck to a pleather couch and I needed money. I told her about my heroics from the night before and prepared myself to stand. My friend Verne, whose couch it was I was sleeping on, kicked the door open and said something like, “I love New York”. We were both clearly still drunk so we decided to go to Gegg’s where everyone else was likely sleeping. Gregg was in bed with a girl he had spent the night with. I jumped in with them.
I do not want to mislead you, I usually do not drink during the day, and before this had literally never woke up and began drinking immediately, but we sat around and polished three forty ounces of beer bought in haste the night before. From there we set out looking for brunch but got side tracked and wound up in a booth at a bar. As we frantically went over highlights of the night before we talked about the smell. While at Gregg’s we had identified something looking like dog shit on my shoe. In the small confines of a bar booth we realized we smelled the same smell from the night before, and everyone made me take my shoe off so they could smell it. I pride myself on not smelling bad so I was getting defensive as everyone tried to blame me for the bad smell in the club. “Do not pin this shit on me”, I said over and over. “Pin shit on me”, they mocked. I drunkenly headed to the bathroom to clean my shoe, I could take no more abuse from the table. The logistical issues of cleaning a dog shitted shoe in a bathroom of a bar dawned on me as I began wiping the shoe with a wet towel. That was too slow and the smell was making me gag so I turned the faucet, hot and cold, on full blast and simply held the shoe under the raging stream. This caused a literal shit storm in the tiny bathroom. It was as if it were raining shit water. As perfect temperature water and pieces of shit flew around the bathroom I pulled paper towels from the dispenser to wipe my eyes with. It was glorious. I came out of the bathroom soaked and everyone laughed at me some more.
It was getting ugly at the bar. By the time the real alcoholics were arriving for there first low-key drink of the day, we were eating cheeseburgers, screaming, and had recruited a street performer to join us, he could sing almost any song we requested and was drinking straight vodka from a coffee cup. He said he had just moved to the neighborhood and was still developing his cult following. We left, went back to Gregg’s. The girl, who was still with us, had accused me of not knowing her name about halfway through our time at the bar. I knew her name was Melissa, but pretended not to know just to piss her off. She was beginning to shift her affection to me because Gregg was too drunk. Back at Gregg’s I could hear her cell phone going off in her bag while she stood across the room playing records. I didn’t tell her that her phone was ringing, I figured anyone spending a Monday drinking with a group of strangers was looking to “get away” a little and wouldn’t want to be bothered with whatever average character was calling.
I left Gregg’s at 7:30, took the train up to Jeffery’s, got the key from a doorman, was taken up in the elevator by another doorman, and opened the door. There was Louis waiting for me, grunting and trying to speak. His snoring didn’t even keep me awake that night as we lay on the bed together. I think I might just be doing all this shit so I can write about it. Either way, it’s fun.