From Bad To Worse

The story so far….

Dan has lost his shit over his room mate having no respect for personal property. Neither party able to deal with the situation sensibly, he flees into the chill Manhattan streets….


I run all the way to the subway, three blocks. No one follows, and I don’t even feel the cold, but by this point I’m so pumped with adrenalin it’s an effort NOT to run….
On the subway, I’m mad as hell. I’m like: I’m gonna call the cops on that fucking dude! Fortunately, I don’t have my phone in my pocket (I’d been playing music off it in the café bar).
I get off the subway at Columbus circle, with a vague idea of getting something to eat at Wholefoods[1] but who am I kidding, I’m too angry to eat. And it’s too cold to walk in central park. So I walk down broadway instead, trying to walk off the rage.
I walk, I walk, I walk
I see a Bum Wishing Well[2], put $5 in and feel a bit better.
I walk some more, all the way to Grand Central Station, which is no small walk (Columbus is on 59th and 8th, GCS on 42nd and Park)
I find trains quite soothing anyway, and the high ceilings and chandeliers of the main concourse bring me down some more.
Then I walk up to the ultimate centre of calm –NYPL[3]
On the way I pick up a copy of the guardian, international edition (which seems to be photocopied) and flick through it in one of the reading rooms. At first I’m not taking anything in, but by the time I reach the sports it’s getting through. Some cocksucker of a columnist actually argues AGAINST Mourinho becoming England manager! And Ronaldo scores twice to beat fulham in the EPL[4]
I’m calm(er) when I walk out the library.
I take the subway to meet my dogwalking boss, Kathi, to tell her what happened and apologize that I can’t dogwalk today, because I’ll have to go back to the hostel to face the music (and also because I don’t want the dogs to pick up on my anger)
By this time my rage has cooled –but so have I. I’ve only got jim-jams for pants[5]! (I can’t feel anything from my waist to the top of my boots).
So finally I go back to the hostel. It’s now about 1.30. I’ve been AWOL for about 2 hours, so I walk in expecting to get my ass canned.
But Elsie is not there. Neither, fortunately, is Jayson.
So I go back to work.
I feel calm now, but I can feel the anger just beneath the surface, like a submerged monster.
I end having a text argument with Kim –I want to see her to talk about what’s happened but she says she can’t see me because she has to go to the dentist.[6]
Elsie comes in and I ask if she’s heard what happened. She says she heard there was an argument, that’s all. I tell her I’ll work the rest of my shift and then we’ll talk.
So I work and I work hard. I’m buzzing round that café bar! This isn’t just to try and save my hide. I’m trying to work off the adrenalin coursing through my body.
I work the extra hours I missed too, so I don’t finish till half five[7] and I started at 7.30am. Then I explain what happened to elsie, pretty much word-for-word how I described it in the previous post.
She was very sympathetic, said I did the right thing to walk away.
I’m not fired!
So now I can relax. The sensible thing to do would be to hit the hay for a little while. But when have I ever done the sensible thing? As soon as I’m finished with elsie, I’m like:
“Coco! Hey Coco! Go get me some beer muthafuck!”
Let’s fast forward a little bit to what happened next.
I’m drinking in the café bar with my friends, it’s evening. I still haven’t moved my stuff out of my old room and into my new one. The reason is, I don’t want to run into Jayson. He’s come back to the hostel, hanging around. I think someone has had a word with him because he has not attempted to talk to me. This is just as well because I haven’t really slept, haven’t really ate and I’m running on a mixture of caffine, nicotine, alcohol and adrenalin. That’s a powderkeg mix, right there.
At some point I need something from my room and I think, fuck it, I gotta move sooner or later. And Jayson is right there in the café bar.
So I go to my room to get my shit together.
Just in case, I lock the door behind me. It’s hot in there so I open the window too.
Surprise surprise, 5 minutes later someone is trying to use their key to get into the room. There’s a knock at the door:
“Who is it?” (I know damn well who it is)
“Jayson. Let me in the room, man.”
“I’m just getting my shit together to move Jayson, give me 10 minutes and it’s all yours.”
“I’m going out, I need to get something.”
“Well that’s a coincidence that you need to get something from the room the exact same time that I’m in here. Can you wait 10 minutes, please.” (I can feel the monster rising)
[pause] “Can I talk to you?”
“Jayson, I’ve spent all day calming myself down, don’t wind me up again! I don’t want to talk to you right now.”
Then, somehow, don’t ask me how, he’s got the door open! I start to lose it again, pull a suitcase in front of the door. That isn’t going to buy me much time.
So I jump out the window.[8]
Back in the café bar, my friends can see I’m agitated again, but they’re my friends, they calm me down. I wait until I see jayson leave the hostel. Then I go move my stuff.
Let’s fast forward a little bit again.
OK, now it’s nighttime. About 11, 11.30. We (by which I mean me and my friends and a lot of the other staff and a bunch of guests) are watching Dave Chappelle[9] on DVD in the café bar. We’re all pretty drunk; some are drunker than others. I’m still wearing my work clothes, and some joker wants me to get them something because they think I’m still on duty.
I’ve got kim’s headphones round my neck, so I take them off, take off my t-shirt (I have another underneath, put the phones on the table in front of me. Continue to watch Chappelle.
After a bit someone invites me out for a cigarette. Smoke one, have a few conversations, smoke another.
Go back to my table –the headphones are gone.
I’m tired, I’m drunk –I’m stunned.
After everything that’s happened today, that everyone knows about, someone else has taken kim’s headphones? Yougottabekiddinmeright?
I’m too stunned to speak. I walk, very slowly, out of the café bar and up to my new room.
Now I make a mistake –but I’m drunk and shocked and thinking some person down there is a hater[10]. I tell kim what’s happened. She is understandably extremely pissed off that her precious headphones have been mislaid again after all that’s gone on. But, oddly, she doesn’t seem to care that I’m upset that one of my friends doesn’t respect that this is a big deal to me, because I made and broke a promise. That should have set alarm bells ringing, but I was too fucked off.
After I speak to kim -which like I said was a bad idea, because now I’m even more upset because I’ve let her down- I decide I need to get out of the hostel. I get all my warm clothes on and go downstairs. Before I leave, I pop into the café bar, go to the table I was sitting at and say:
“Hey, kim’s headphones have gone walkies again. I can scarcely believe it after all the shit that’s happened today. If those phones don’t magically appear by tomorrow morning, I’m through with jazz”[11]
Then I walk out of there, light a cigarette, head up the street, no idea where I’m gonna go.
Within 5 minutes, I get a text message: Chris, one of my closest friends -one of the guests but he’s practically staff (we joke that he’s the only jazz staff that has to pay rent)- lent the headphones to another member of staff. He was very drunk, and he didn’t think there would be a problem because “they’re only headphones dude.”
And he’s right, they are only headphones. If they were mine, I wouldn’t give a fuck who used em. But it was important to kim they weren’t used, and that made it important to me.
No one in the hostel seemed to be able grasp what I think is a quite simple concept.
So I send back a narky text, then ring kim to give her the good news.
I had no inkling of what I was going to get from the other end
She wasn’t happy her headphones had been found
She totally chewed me out because they had gone missing –for approximately half an hour.
I was like, “Kim what’s the problem, they’ve been found.”
And she’s like “Do you have them? On your person”
“No I’m not in the hostel, I had to get out of there but don’t worry-“
“Nonononono –you get my headphones, put them in a locker right fucking now.”
“Kim, they’re with my friends they’re putting them behind the café bar-
“No you listen to me dan, go and get my fucking headphones-
“Hey I trust my friends they know better now-
“Well I don’t trust them! You know what, why don’t you stick those headphones up your ass!”
And she hangs up on me!
I’m speechless again. All this shit… over a set of headphones? WTF? The alarm bells should have turned into air-raid sirens by now. Anyone who knows me knows how I feel about people who are obsessed with material goods.
I try and call back but she won’t answer. So I text her:

That’s it? You’re going to shitcan me over 70 bucks[12]? I’m sorry I trust people. It hurts me when I get let down, believe me

So now I’m feeling really low; what do I do? Go to the pub of course!
My local is called dingdongs[13] so I go there and drink a Guinness at the bar.
I manage to persuade kim, by text, into seeing me the following day, at her apartment in Brooklyn, 10am.
I’m trying to work out how things, in the space of 24 hours, have come to this.
The next thing I remember is being woken up by the barman. I’d fallen asleep at the bar like some total loser.
I finished my drink, I guess (I always finish my drinks).

I don’t remember getting home at all.

TO BE CONTINUED….

(all sounds pretty dark don’t it? [dark in the sense of “evil”] Wait till you hear what happens next. All this shit is just the tip of the iceburg….)

[1] Wholefoods is an American organic food supermarket chain. The Columbus circle branch is the flagship store. Celebs can regularly be seen shopping and eating there (Robert De Niro was spotted in there the other day). The food in there has to be seen (and smelled) to be believed; it makes me hungry just to write about it!

[2] This is [a homeless charity]; usually a guy with a table and an upturned water cooler on top for money. I’ll talk about my Bum Wishing Well theory another time.

[3] New York Public Library (on 42nd st and 5th Av). C’mon where else would a library loser like me go? I even have a library card with my little face on! Looooooosssssseeeeeeeerrrr!

[4] I know I’ll get blazed for this, but I’ve thrown in my lot with the reds. Americans CAN NOT understand how you can be into a sport and not support your hometown team. So in the end I got bored and had to make a choice between city and united. And seeing as how every European, south American, and asian says “Ah! Manchester United!” pretty much as soon as you mention you come from Manchester, the choice wasn’t hard to make. Traveling has really opened my eyes as to how huge globally the MU brand is. And I haven’t forgiven you for the world cup svennis! And my dad was born in Salford, under the shadow of the theatre of dreams…. (blergh!)

[5] By which I mean trousers, of course.

[6] To be fair to kim, this was my bad (I swore I would never, ever say “my bad”. The grammar! But I do. What the hell.). When she said dentist, I thought she meant a filling or something. She was talking about dental surgery. So I apologized and we straightened things out on the phone later.

[7] 5.30, for the benefit of American readers. Americans don’t do “half past”. I said “half five” to an American girl once and she thought I meant 4.30!

[8] Sorry, I can’t resist being needlessly dramatic. The room is on the ground floor.

[9] My American friends couldn’t believe I hadn’t ever heard of Dave Chappelle, and that we don’t get Chappelle’s Show on TV in Britain. After they showed me some, I couldn’t believe it either. I went out and bought the DVD boxed set. Dave Chappelle is the funniest person on the planet. He’s one of those rare comedians you start to laugh at before they even open their mouth, like Tommy Cooper and, I don’t know, Eddie Izzard or Harry Hill. It’s black humor (in both senses of the word), but his concepts and observations are so spot on, the humor becomes universal. Like: what would happen if a crackhead was a contestant on Fear Factor? Or if a blind black orphan grows up to become a white supremacist, and no one has the heart to tell him he’s black? I urge you to look at his R Kelly piss take on YouTube, “I wanna pee on you” (y’know, after that video got out of R Kelly pissing on a 15yr old girl). Sample lyric: “Girl my life with you won’t be complete/until I turn your face into a toilet seat”). Speaking of R Kelly, has anyone seen his “R&B opera” Trapped In The Closet? I’ve watched that three times now and I still can’t believe my eyes (and ears)! YouTube it!

[10] Incidentally, I did not suspect jayson took them again. We were keeping our distance.

[11] I told you I can’t resist being needlessly dramatic.

[12] Actually, she owed me $50 (I’d lent her so she didn’t starve to death), so $20 net. This text is verbatim BTW; I still got it on my phone.

[13] Dingdongs is actually not as dodgy as it sounds. Or rather it is, but not in that way. It’s a dive bar, rough around the edges, good djs playing alternative American and British rock, guitar fenders on the beer taps. It’s dingy though. A bit too dingy. A bit so-dingy-I-can’t-actually-see-the-person-I’m-talking-to. You know it’s hip to say “dark” meaning “cool”? Well dingdongs is dark in both the trendy and original sense.