Well I went to buy this new chair. For a decade or so I’d been sitting in a metal folding chair like the kind the pro wrestlers smash over someone’s head. My back hurt a bunch from the metal chair and my ass hurt from the metal chair. All those thousands of hours sitting there and typing. I’d come into a little bit of money selling some of my writing which seemed so insane to me that I decided I should go and buy a good chair with the money so that I could invest in myself and my future sitting. I thought if I made a wise choice I could have a good chair for the rest of my life and when I died this same chair could be taken out of the apartment and some other writer could have it until they were dead too and so on. I know this guy named Lars who probably had a chair I’d want to buy. I thought I’d go see him. Rae called and made sure he was there and we said we’d be by and we set off in my car to go see him. It was raining very hard. It was Veteran’s Day. Lars’ whole deal is that once a year he goes over to Denmark and drives around and asks people on the street if they have any old rosewood or teak furniture he can buy from them and he knocks on people’s doors and asks for this stuff, he goes to bars and just asks the Dutch what is up furniturewise and as time goes on he fills up an entire shipping container with this faded furniture and then off it goes across the ocean to America and off he goes to America on his airplane and little by little it all gets refurbished in a warehouse space tucked in one of the crumbling corners of my city. I pulled into the lot and saw one of the doors was open and the lot was ambiguous and so was the warehouse and my memory was fuzzy but I thought this was the right place. But a big truck was being unloaded and it was full of stage props or something and as I walked up one of the men unloading the truck told me I couldn’t come inside the door because they were welding in there and soldering and they were stage hands or something. I didn’t quite know. I said I was there for the furniture store. I was there for Lars. He said, “Nobody named Lars is here.” I shrugged and got back in my car and figured Lars had moved his whole operation somewhere more practical. That place was a real shit hole. But that bummed me out because the furniture used to be pretty cheap because the place was a shit hole. If he had a real store front somewhere that would be no good, the things would be double the price and I wasn’t going to get involved in that. A few months before Rae and me had been walking around a town in upstate NY and a store was selling a bed for ten thousand dollars. You could do things like that and rich people would just go for it. I’ve had the same mattress for twenty years. You know what I mean. So we pulled away and then Rae’s phone rang and it was Lars asking if we really were going to come by, he didn’t have all day. She asked if they had moved locations and he said no they hadn’t. He texted her a photograph of the same door we had tried to go in and then I did a U-turn in the rain and drove back into the lot and the men were still unloading the truck and they looked at me like I was a total twerp and it didn’t help that I was dressed all in black and was wearing these fashionable boots I wear now because I figured I was too old for sneakers, ya know. I just looked like one of the shitty rich people from Beetlejuice. And Rae was wearing a big chunky sweater and had a blonde streak in her hair and here we were being insistent about mystery furniture. I never feel more like an entitled prick than when I am buying furniture. Buddhists just sit around on the ground and smile, but apparently I needed things. I was attached. The diamond sutra meant nothing to me. Something is what it is only because of what it is not, sure whatever pal. I could’t be here now because the metal folding chair hurt my spine. The man stopped me in the doorway and I said, “Lars is in there.” I said it like Lars was being held captive and I was here to liberate Lars. I wouldn’t let these men hold my Dutch friend hostage any longer. The man looked surprised at my conviction. He said, “I’ve only worked here two days, maybe he is.” We passed through the doorway and the inside of the warehouse was huge and in the distance I could see a white curtained in area and remembered back all those years when I had been there the first time and how hard it was to find the place then and how lose I’d felt. The man who was wrong said, “It’s not like I go walking all around in here. Two days I worked here.” Rae and me walked through the curtain and there were plenty of bookcases and desks and dinner tables just like before. And chairs. Most of it stuff from the 50s. You could run it over with a tiger tank and it would still be fine, just smear some mineral oil on it and it would be nice again. I said hello to Lars’ assistant and I sat down in one of the chairs and it was so comfortable and so nice, I figured yes, it was the one I would sit in until I was 120 years old. I asked how much it was, he said it was $695. Which is a lot of money for me. But there were other things I could just not buy and that would make up for the chair being expensive. I don’t mind paying for high quality functional things every once in a while. I bought the chair and carried it out of the warehouse and put it in the passenger side of the car and Rae climbed in the back seat behind me like I was her Uber driver and she said, “Now take me to the grocery store.” I turned the key and the engine sputtered and the car rolled backwards twenty feet and died in the middle of the parking lot. I turned the key again and the car sputtered again and wouldn’t hold. I tried again and again and the man who had been wrong walked down from the loading dock and said, “Your car sounds bad.” I nodded through the fogged glass. “Did you hear me?” I wiped the fog from the window and nodded again. The chair sitting next to me on the passenger seat probably cost exactly what the repair bill would be. The universe liked to do that. I turned the key and everything sounded even worse. The man who was wrong said, “Sounds like your fuel filter.” I got out of the car and tried to pop the hood but all a sudden the latch would not work and the hood would not open and the man said, “You don’t know how to?” I’d driven that car 188,000 miles and had had the hood open about a thousand times (the engine burned a quart of oil every five hundred miles or so) but for some reason this day there in the rain the latch would not give, the hood would not open. “I don’t know.” I figured I’d have to call the auto garage where I had work done sometimes and get the car towed there and I’d have to call a taxi or something and have Rae sent home with my stupid new Dutch chair. But the men at the garage were not answering the phone because it was Veteran’s Day. Now that I thought about it, those guys all probably had been to Iraq and Afghanistan and yeah they shouldn’t have to work today. “Fuel filter,” the man who was wrong said, “‘cause if it was the fuel pump you wouldn’t have even gotten anything. Not anything. No sir. Somethings clogged.” I told Rae that if I put it in neutral she could get in the driver’s seat and steer and I could push and probably have the man who was wrong help me push the car out of the middle of the lot and then it would be fine for the night. But the man had walked off out of the rain and was standing under the overhang pointing at me in my broken down car and one of his friends had come out of the warehouse to see. Rae said, “It’ll be all right.” “It’s not going to be all right.” “All right,” she said. I told her that I shouldn’t have bought the fucking fancy yuppy chair. She didn’t say anything. I turned the key and gave it one last ditch effort. I pushed down the gas pedal to the floor and the engine sputtered but then caught and the needle went up to 5000 rpms and then into the red but when I took my foot off the gas the engine was still going and hadn’t stalled out and I put the car into drive and rolled up into the spot against the trashstrewn chainlink fence and still the engine was holding so I put the car in reverse and backed out of the spot and drove in a loop around the parking lot and the men on the loading dock were whistling and clapping. I waved out the window. “Got it!” I drove out of the lot and onto the road and got stuck at a red light immediately but the engine held. Whatever the problem was I had burned it off. I started driving home. Rae said, “Fuckin’ A. I thought you were going to have to kill those guys.” I said, “They’re just dumbasses. I’m no better.” We headed through town. We parted the rain. We had won some small victory. We were weary and headed uphill. Then we were rolling downhill and could see where the stupid developers had painted Ziggy Stardust down the face of an entire building. Ziggy Stardust had never been to this town. “Wait, that’s Aladdin Sane.” And here I am now sitting in the chair, talking to you. The sun has gone down and the rain is falling harder yet. I got a phone call from Mike, that I am headed into the gasoline plant tomorrow and the day after to weld something. I got an email that I will be getting edits on my novel after Thanksgiving. It’s called Teenager and it’s coming out from Vintage in the spring of ‘22. I figure I may get another couple months out of that car and then I will have to buy a new-to-me used one. When I get to 200,000 miles the timing belt would have to be changed and the water pump too. I have a six CD changer in that car because the iPhone connector doesn’t work in cold weather. The disks are broken down like this: 1) Peel Slowly and See, 2) Rumours, 3) Exile on Main Street, 4) Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, 5) Psychocandy, 6) Nilsson Schmilsson.
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How's the chair?
Such usual New York Problems! I love it! Having a good chair is most essential. What kind of car is it? I just traded my aging Audi for a 17 Subaru.