In the summer before 9/11, my ex-roommate’s all-American classmate was on a cable show, one of the early prestige dramedies. In a promo, his character ejected spastic yelling while standing by a buffet. To his friends this summarized him hilariously.
CAT-BUKS had turned over, repeatedly, to a chain of roommates: one guy left to move in with his girlfriend; another guy, moving to New York, took his room; the first guy left; a friend of his came in. It may still be occupied by kids just out of college—our distant descendants.
The handsome all-American actor and my former roommate went to CAT-BUKS to buy mushrooms, with me in tow.
The guy selling mushrooms had replaced a guy with a drinking problem. His mushrooms were baked into chocolate kept in ice trays in the freezer: He cracked the tray’s contents onto the counter while speaking sadly of the guy. A drug dealer pitying a drunk.
I wasn’t buying mushrooms. I’d been sober for a little more than a year. I was going to shepherd my friends to a concert in Central Park and make sure they didn’t wander into anything stressful.
I’d been hanging out with people who were getting high. I told myself this made them fun to go dancing with. I asked to look at the drugs when they bought them: tulip bulbs of purplish weed, suspended in clear boxes. I sat in their circle, taking the joint between my fingers and passing it.
We met a friend of theirs at a Starbucks on the Upper East Side. They went into the bathroom one after the other and ate the mushrooms.
We talked about the twelve-step meetings I was going to. My sobriety was pretty wobbly, as it would be for a while. Do I go, what, like every week?
No, like, every day, if I can.
It shocked them.
Colin Farrell walked past the Starbucks window. Their friend burst into tears.
“He’s even more beautiful in real life,” she sobbed.
So they were starting to be high.
We walked into Central Park. Every once in a while, somebody would start yelling something from a distance. I recognized it immediately:
“HBO! HBO! HBO! HBO! HBO! HBO! HBO! HBO!”
Soul Coughing had been on an HBO concert series in the mid-1990s, when I’d been living in Pensacola, crashing with a guy who refused to get cable or a phone. I rode my bike daily from his house to Sluggo’s—the punk bar in Pensacola—and I’d hear somebody shouting from across the street, “HBO! HBO! HBO! HBO! HBO! HBO! HBO! HBO!”
The opening act in Central Park was a funk band, all of whose songs had the same template. Baby! I want to give you love! I want to take you home!
Or: Girl! I want to see you dance! I want to make you happy!
Or: Woman! Your love’s so good! I can’t live without you!
My friends got antsy, so we split before the opener finished. As we left the park, more random people in the distance shouted: “HBO! HBO! HBO! HBO! HBO! HBO! HBO! HBO!”
The name that the actor used for screen credits was peculiarly formal—along the lines of a Washington Post byline. He told me there had been another actor with the same name; union rules were that there could be only one.
There’d been an iconic 1980s teen star with the same name who’d also had to go with a formal-sounding variation.
He said he was having a perceptual crisis: the world was stuck in the opening act’s rhythm:
Pretzels! They’re a buck ninety-eight! Would you like a napkin!
And: Hey! Can I borrow two bucks! I need to take the train!
And: Mom! I’m glad you called! Are you in Westchester!
So we traded riffs:
Pants! You put them on your legs! Sometimes they’re brown!
And: Banks! They’ve got a bunch of bills! In the ATMs!
And: Coffee! It makes you awake! I find it delicious!
From the next block: “HBO! HBO! HBO! HBO! HBO! HBO! HBO! HBO!!”
We went into Big Nick’s Pizza and Burger Joint, on West Seventy-Seventh. Even then—a dozen years before it was replaced by a Bank of America—it was a dingy anachronism. It had always been.
A teen girl’s eyes ballooned when we entered. When we sat down, her entire family, seven of them, shuffled up to us and wanted a picture. They were tourists from Missouri. I don’t think they were fans of his show; this was the first person from television they’d ever seen.
If I sound snobby, let me make it clear that I asked for autographs from the first dozen famous people I ever met, whether I knew and liked their work or not. I still feel bad about the copious “Hang on to your dreams!” note that Eric Bogosian wrote me.
The actor grinned for the pictures—it was 2001, so these were Sony Cyber-Shots, not iPhones—but he hadn’t quite learned how. He gritted his teeth. Also, he was—clearly, to me at least—living in a world of shifting color blobs.
We sat back down. The waiter said, “Drinks! Would you like to order some! Let me tell you the specials!”