Next day. Woke up to film-maker Jason Tallon bonafide hustlin’, makin’ his name, editing his film. Head ache, jet lag. Showered, dressed. Found food and coffee, steak and eggs. Return to Tallon’s place. Leave him to his devices, head to Manhattan. L Train, ugh, then 6 Train uptown. Find Kaia Wong of Mixel Pixel and other assorted Academites. Talk in the rain for 20 minutes. Kaia plays Virgil, leads me through the homogeneous hell of the East Village. We go to DCP? BCP? (Memo to affluent bar owners: call it something I can remember.)
Laughs and fun with Kaia. She’s well. She gives Thai massages and makes lip balm. Isn’t carrying any. Lame. We walk to Odessa. End up in an occult bookstore buying crap neither of us needs, talking about Aleister Crowley and Book Four. Found volumes published by the late, lamented Magickal Childe. Cheap. Got one on the Tarot. Got Tallon The Book of Light. Each $5. At Odessa, eat. Forget what. Return to Brooklyn. L Train, ugh. Back to Tallon’s. Problems getting his film projected. Hours are spent squaring this circle, intermittently playing GOD OF WAR 2 and getting phone calls from my father. Don’t see the film until 4am. It’s amazing. Genuinely amazing.
Bed at 5am, wake at 11. Dress, talk to Tallon, watch him pack. Phone call from Sam Tregar, plans for lunch. L Train, one last time. Ugh. Fare-thee-well to Tallon– the boy’s to Vermont. He’s a whisperer in the darkness, a morning star of mourning. Good times. Back in Manhattan. Kim’s Mondo Video, dropping off Tallon’s late DVD rentals. “Do you want to pay the fees?” “That jerk can pay his own damned bills!”
Tregar in front. The man’s grown meaty enough to muscle for the ADL. We eat Moroccan food. Lamb kabob. Tregar is well. Tell him a story about the first time I drove a stick shift. Laughs. Rumors from his old college of Deep Springs: his class has become a thing of legend. They believe that Sam, the world’s only genuine teetotaler, had a week-long heroin binge in the basement. Bigger laughs. Tregar takes me to his cubicle farm in Astor Place. Amazing bathroom. We part.
Amble about the alma mater, talk on phone to elly, head to Cafe Reggio. Iced espresso, ham & swiss. Same prices since 19–. I call Andrew “Freaktard” Harrison. Communication breakdown. Me in Cafe Reggio half an hour too long. The man arrives, strutting in his perfumed fineries. What to do? Only as we can: MacDougal Ale House, the quietest sports bar on the world’s most annoying street. Cute blonde bartender with unusually good taste in music.
Screaming about whatever Andrew and I always scream about: jackanapes and braying jackasses, Native American necromancers, awful psychedelic music, dead junkies, how Andrew’s stupid Pantera joke got me literally thrown out of a girlfriend’s apartment, and the profit margins of video games. We leave. On Thompson Street, my old block, we attempt to cut the Gordian Knot of teaching 4 Jersey Desi-American girls how to smoke cigars while not oozing innuendo. Only one gets hers lit. We part. “Tomorrow, tomorrow,” says Freaktard, “we shall see each other again.”
A Train to 177th.
