Notes from the Upper West Side. A novel by Dan Wrench. Chapter 7. Wake Up Call I was on my way home that night right after coining the term blowathon in a public place, thinking about what humorless prudes, curd, and constants were, while the idea slowly soaked through my skull that the real problem was with me, not them.
When it, the idea, finally touched my brain it made all of my spit dry up. I was on Kelso Street which was this street filled with little shops and food places like the main street of a Christmas village. It was the middle of winter and I had on these stupid leather mittens. Fuck these!
I said pretty loud and threw the mittens in this wire trash bin conveniently only a couple of feet away from me. Right then I figured I'd rather let my hands freeze than see myself in public for one more second with leather mittens on my hands. A red-haired guy and one of those padded windbreakers, heard me and laughed and kept walking past. It wasn't a shocked or surprised laugh or a laugh that asked the question.
It was like he knew I hated those fucking mittens. It was like he could see I was a preposterous character, a buffoon. Back in those days I was renting a big house off campus with two guys and three girls. We all thought we were both unions.
But right when I ripped off my leather mittens I had this epiphany where I knew we were only pretending and we sucked at it. We were nothing but big posers. We whimpered like six-year-olds if our parents' checks got delivered a day late. We couldn't write poetry for shit but we thought gang hangovers gave us some sort of kinship with Dylan Thomas.
We put a big poster of Che Guevara over the bookcase in the living room for a whole semester before any of us knew who he was. And we went out in public wearing stupid fucking leather mittens. I sat down on a green bench on the sidewalk. It was twilight.
Lights were coming on. People were walking past. I just thought about the scene in Pizza Meets with Kurt and Constance. I thought about it over and over.
Obviously I could not let anyone else have tail without resenting them for it. I looked back over my life, the part of it with hard-ons in it at least, and realized that this was a distinct pattern and it was getting worse. I never actually blurted out my thoughts like that before the way I did that night. It still didn't get Kurt off the hook for thinking he was now some sort of consoment or consents for inflating his ego or both of them for acting all in dignity and put upon but...
The Kurt and Constance episode was a wake-up call. So I called up my mom who said I should talk to a shrink and that's how I ended up with Ritz Koch. Talking about it and figuring stuff out about it and being able to laugh about it, but I never really did get all the way rid of it. Meanwhile, I found out a buttload of other crap that was wrong with me that felt good to talk about.
A buttload of other crap. So remember when I said Christine the Hot Blonde 40-year-old from that night at Cleopatra's needle called up Corinne Jr. to tell her that Park was dislocating her jaw with his cock? I resented Park for getting to fuck a hot blonde.
And what made it even worse was I was being loyal to my wife at that point in time, and at that point in time I think it was going on a year since I got a blowjob from her that could be described as verve having. And several months since I'd had any mouth-ular contact at all with the wife. Notes from the Upper West Side is a work of fiction. The people depicted in this work do not exist.
Notes from the Upper West Side copyright 2013 to 2014 by Dan Rench.