Can't Beer The Reaper (..New Years, Part Two)

Further down Elm Street the wind picks up, and I'm cold. Really cold. I nearly slip a few times on ice. My car is of course several blocks in the opposite direction, but what makes me less eager to turn back now is the thought that this night is in many ways not just a real downer, but a bust all in all. I have come away with nothing, and feel more perplexed than when I started my walk.

Faintly then, I hear her.

"The moon's awake now/With eyes wide open..."

A beacon in any storm, Shakira's tantalizingly absurd vocals pulsate from inside Rudy's, a favorite bar of mine.

Normally I don't drink alone. No real moral objections, I just always saw drinking as a social thing and feel a bit self-conscious and generally uncomfortable with no one there to join me.

"Sitting across a bar/staring right at her prey..."

I pace for a few seconds with my phone out pretending to send text messages. My fingers start to lose their dexterity in the cold.

"It's going well so far/She's gonna get her way..."

A couple of burly door guys with lots of facial hair and piercings are chatting it up, and they vaguely notice me.

(Hey fellas!-A douche-bag? No, no I just might be meeting someone here. But they may not show. That's why I'm CONTACTING them. Ya know, with THIS phone? FRIENDS. YOU know how it is. What a hassle. Need the light over here because the screen on my cell phone is the kind that. doesn't. light up.)

...

"Nocturnal creatures/are not so prudent…"

Damn you Shakira. Damn you and the float you belly-danced in on.

I grab an Advocate from one of the free vendors and practically dive through the front door.

Once in, I can smell the frites sizzling in the back, behind the bar.

Rudy's is a Belgian owned establishment, an off the beaten' kind of joint where neighborhood regulars and Yale students go to chill out, mingle, catch live bands, sing karaoke on the right (or wrong) night, and write/carve something poignantly random or perverse in the bathroom or on the walls in the back.

Despite it's hip, alterno-simplistic vibe, the bar serves, among a few domestics, expensive dark reddish, or "blonde" beers with complex Flemish names, brought to you each in their own intricate glass. Adorned with calligraphy and images of things like leaping fish and medieval angels on the sides, these are far more than just glasses. They possess all the regalia of a mini chalice or goblet.

Eat a basket of thrice dipped fries covered in MAYONNAISE to wash down your grail-beer!

It's a Belgian thing. If you don't know anything about the Belgians, well, that’s just how those 'Wa-loonies' roll, and I certainly wouldn't change it

I grab a small table, order an $8 beer the name of which sounds like "Grimreaper", and take to my newspaper, my back to the door.

Occasionally I bring my head up for sip of beer, and I scan the room. It's generally quiet, like the glow of a fireplace at midday. Pockets of people are seated throughout at the old, oaken booths while few patrons lean at the bar.

In the middle of an article about a man's successful bionic sphincter implant (THE FIRST REAL medical breakthrough of the new decade, mind you) Cold grips my back and neck and I shudder. A group of about six or so walks in. All friends. All cheerful. All holding the door open for one another in an irritatingly slow, chilly cadence.

I pop the collar of my jacket, and when I turn back around, on a wall otherwise littered with rusty staples and thumbtacks a single flier with two words on it glares at me.

"Fuck Resolutions."

Yes, strange paper, I agree. Resolutions are destined to fall by the wayside. It's a Lifestyle that truly endures. Points for Rudy's.

Again, and for about the fifth time by now, the cold lashes my back and I shiver. I turn again, and this time rather scornfully. These people clearly don't realize they have no right to leave, nor do others to enter: Not while I am seated in the wake of the front door.

I notice the place has really picked up since my last sip. The dull peat-fire from before has become a kind of bonfire now, with a steady roar of lively conversation.

On the final swig o' the 'Reaper', the feeling from outside on the street returns.

Everything seems to mesh together and, alone at my small table I am becoming increasingly self-conscious and all the more annoyed at myself for it.

I'm hit with a feeling difficult to describe except for incorporeal-I have somehow popped my head through "behind the scenes", the curtains unguarded because no one on the outside had been watching.

It all sort of weirdly comes into focus then.

I wasn't actually a person in the room, but felt more like a presence haunting it--an undercurrent barely acknowledged, like a draft creeping in from somewhere, considered with a mild disdain, or apprehensive indecision.

A GHOST…

On the street I had been the live one, chilling out with the specters condemned to the boundaries of Temple and Wall; Chapel and Crown. In here it is the opposite dynamic: that, though within an arm's reach they all feel impossibly far; younger, older, male, female, each separated from me by some other existential plane.

This upsets me. It's one of my worst fears.

It was time I disappeared from there. I know I'll return. But not tonight, not for a while. I put the fancy glass back on the counter and make my way out. The man in front of me obviously doesn't hear my footsteps in back of him and lets the door nearly slam in my face.

....
.......

New Years is a bizarre time...

If You Ever Go To New Haven Town... (New Years, Part One)

New Years Day is bizarre: Advertised universally on the menu as a Friday, only containing all the taste of Sunday, with Wednesday preparation and brought to your table with a garnish of Monday.

Perhaps it's because it marks the transition away from Christmas and into that cold, grayish gulag that precedes Spring here in the Northeast. No longer the brightly lit, multi-colored gulag that inspires giving and peace on Earth, it is rather characterized by another set of grim sense experiences: blistering cold, a deadened landscape (at least in southern CT), eight hours of maximum sunlight, the abrasive screech of a rusted timing belt quiet enough to ignore in the warmer weather, and subsequent daydreams of the west coast.

It's the period our intrepid leaders in government tried to render a bit warmer by forming the uneasy pact with greeting card companies that resulted in the flop we know as Valentines Day. With little else to do, they took the only remaining logical measure, and turned seasonal authority over to more capable hands; thus scapegoating a little earth-dwelling rodent.

This past Friday night I spent my January 1st, like I often spend many nights, walking around downtown New Haven, Connecticut.

It's nothing new, as I said, I do this often: ditching the car on any one of the city's many streets, following eyes, nose and ears returning again having found whatever it was I was looking for that day.

I weave through block after block, down one-way streets and around corners, tracing the squares in the city's grid like a wayward pencil across graph paper.

There's Chapel Street, the Yale Rep to my left, York Street to the right. Edging past the Yale dormitories I'm occasionally warmed by the steamy, sweet-smelling run-off from the laundry rooms.

Out onto Broadway where students, and other pedestrians, homeless and non-homeless alike congregate in front of the lit thoroughfare where I spend my workday. Here one can, among other things, shop American, urban, organic or eat a smart hamburger. Farther down York I listen in on the drum-beats, baselines and solos echoing from Toad's Place, and beyond...

Friday, New Years, was of course dead; a blanket of black silence speckled with the iodized glow of street lights was all that greeted me on my circuit. Cafes and restaurants were naturally closed, the storefronts dark, and the Yale students and faculty that typically litter the streets were now gone, many having left in a dusty trail of completed exams, coffee cups, and old textbooks; the wake of an old semester.

I turn down High Street and make my way towards Chapel. A lone Starbucks on the corner provides the only light in a row of darkened buildings. It's moderately full inside and as I peer in, I catch a few vacant stares.

Ah. Forgive me. Monkey had to use the john, and the Organ grinder's in the shop, ya see...

I shuffle past a quiet Payne-Whitney Gym, deserted and dark save for a single orange light by the big, old wooden doors.

(Not the actual way in, which is like a long cave entrance off to the side, currently sheathed in blue construction tarp and scaffolding-an industrial alternative to Lewis Carroll)

Vertically plastered along the building's old bricks are pictures of various Yale athletes, male and female frozen forever in mid lay-up; slapshot; forehand; volley. Each has its own torch-like spotlight underneath it, and for a minute, as corny as it sounds I'm reminded of Greek ruins. A pantheon empty, save for the echoes of rubber sole's screech on parquet, the violent crash of torsos on hardened mats and the thud of racket balls, overpowered then by a ravenous Yale crowd, blood-drunk for Harvard red.

The windows of Audubon Street, the arts district of New Haven and daily a defiant fist-pump in the direction of anything under the Yale fine arts umbrella, are a dark void.

Standing at the end of Grove Street I listen to the steady thrush of traffic, peering out onto State at the broken line of bright headlights. I guess in some weird way it reminds me a river. A river slowly but surely murdering the ozone, but still, a river.

Wall Street is especially lonely. A kind of Sleepy Hollow that cuts under a stone archway and into part of the Yale campus at one end that is accessible only on foot, and with a student ID. The President of Yale parks his vehicle in a private garage down here. It's awfully small to accommodate anything I imagine him driving though, like a hover car powered by Dark-Matter, or at the very least an M1 Tank with a rabid bull-dog stamped on the side.

It's here that a strange feeling overtakes me. It's as though wind, the sand it blows down the cracked concrete, the dull honk of cars in the distance, and the dim electrical buzzing of the streetlights mingles with the steady beat of my own footsteps to produce some weird night time score.

I stop.

Old words written by Patrick Kavanaugh ebb and flow through my mind:

"On Pembroke Road,
Look out for my ghost-
Disheveled, with shoes untied..
Playing
Through the railings
With little children-
Whose children have long since
Died..."

Everything becomes so acute and internal then, the way it gets, I think, while under water. Time becomes fluid and for whatever space of that moment, I actually wonder if I'm still capable of speaking.

I take to walking more briskly now on Elm Street, around the perimeter of the New Haven Green, the blue fiber optics of the city's Christmas tree softly glowing toward its center.

I come eventually to the Quad-section out in front of Broadway that's divided by a commuter lot and am given the option to continue my current course, or take one of three new ones:

DIXWELL? WHALLEY? GOFFE?

The first three were Puritan judges. Elm, last I checked, was of course, a type of tree...

Choose your destiny...