(This is the third episode of Good Luck, thanks for reading. Good Luck is a novel that will continue in serialization, every Thursday, throughout 2024. This was supposed to pop into your emails at 7AM but I forgot to click the final button. But here it is now.)
I’m a turkey baby. That’s what mom says. I’m her turkey baby. I was her turkey baby and I still am her turkey baby.
It was snowing. We stopped welding on the million pound bomb. I left work. The turnpike was all jammed up. I battled my way to the spur, and past the tollbooth, onto Christopher Columbus Blvd.
Now I was almost home, but dead stopped in snowy gridlock traffic and saw no end in sight so I parked on the side of the road, and walked half a mile to a bar with a fireplace raging and the lights otherwise off.
I had a happy hour whiskey. And then another. The fire felt really good. The car was illegally parked. Every minute was illegal. Every sip was illegal. I texted a friend in Ireland, he messaged that my night sounded like a John Cheever story. I knew one John Cheever story, a drunken man stops and swims in every neighborhood pool on his way home. Except no, I was not swimming home at all.
I was born on November 25th, 1981. My mom always told me how I was born on Thanksgiving. They gave her Thanksgiving dinner in the hospital, she said. It was pretty good, miraculously.
I paid the bill and walked back out. Newark Avenue was usually painted green, and no cars drive down it. Tonight Newark Avenue was painted white and still no cars drive down it. I walked to Grove Street and had to make a decision—go right and descend the hill to Ibby’s Falafal, the best falafel in the world, or go left and up the hill to Dullboy to get the best chicken sandwich in the world. They put kimchee on the sandwich, honey, bacon, and they got spicy curly fries. I went to the left.
Dullboy is a little embarrassing. It’s inspired by The Shining. Decorated like the Overlook Hotel. Dullboy. As in, ‘All work and no play make Jack a very dull boy.’ There are typewriters screwed to the walls, and paperback books glued to the wall. They’ll glue any book to the wall. Any book at all. They had Ulysses glued to the wall and they had Jackie Collins glued to the wall.
The man smoking a cigarette at the door asked to see my ID. I showed him. He looked at it and said, “Happy almost birthday.” When I walked in, he walked in, and he sat down at a table and started playing with his phone. The host brought me to a mirrored table not too far from the man who’d checked my ID. As other people walked in the bar and the ID checker just sat there playing on his phone, I realized the ID checker had just been playing around with me. He didn’t work at the bar. He was a taxi driver, also stranded. He’d just checked my ID as a gag but then didn’t laugh to let anyone but him know it was just a gag.
Like all things, it didn’t matter, and there was no need to get any further into it. I let it be. Life got weirder when you were alone because you had to protect yourself from floating away, you had to tether yourself to the ground or you’d slip through the ground and fall down into the center of the earth, maybe even tumble out the other side of the earth where you’d still have to solve your same old problems, only they’d be upside down. I tried not to think about that.
What I thought about instead, as the snow fell even harder, was how I’d misplaced my driver’s license when I was freshly 21, dropped it, left it somewhere. For nearly a year, I carried my birth certificate on me to show to bouncers to get into bars, because the DMV had given me a duplicate driver’s license and the bouncers didn’t believe I was really 21. Everywhere I went, to kill myself with that poison, I’d had to prove again and again that I had been born. The birth certificate even had my little infant handprints and footprints on the back. The bouncers in Seaside Heights had said, Aw how cute, baby’s first bar crawl. The bouncers in Philadelphia had said, Aw how cute, baby’s first bar crawl. The bouncers in Toms River, and Hoboken, and Hells Kitchen, and in actual Heaven, and in actual Hell had said, Aw how cute, baby’s first bar crawl. And then they opened the door and let me in.
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