Gin Friday Quotes

There is always a man eager to explain my mental illness to me. They all do it so confidently, motioning to their Hemingway and Bukowski bookshelf as they compare my depression to their late-night loneliness. There is always someone that rejected them that they equate their sadness to and a bottle of gin (or a song playing, or a movie) close by that they refer to as their cure. Somehow, every soft confession of my Crazy that I hand to them turns into them pulling out pieces of themselves to prove how it really is in my head. So many dudes I’ve dated have faces like doctors ready to institutionalize and love my crazy (but only on Friday nights.) They tell their friends about my impulsive decision making and how I “get them” more than anyone they’ve ever met but leave out my staring off in silence for hours and the self-inflicted bruises on my cheeks. None of them want to acknowledge a crazy they can’t cure. They want a crazy that fits well into a trope and gives them a chance to play Hero. And they always love a Crazy that provides them material to write about. Truth is they love me best as a cigarette cloud of impossibility, with my lipstick applied perfectly and my Crazy only being pulled out when their life needs a little spice. They don’t want me dirty, having not left my bed for days. Not diseased. Not real. So they invite me over when they’re going through writer’s block but don’t answer my calls during breakdowns. They tell me I look beautiful when I’m crying then stick their hands in-between my thighs. They mistake my silence for listening to them attentively and say my quiet mouth understands them like no one else has. These men love my good dead hollowness. Because it means less of a fighting personality for them to force out. And is so much easier to fill someone who has already given up with themselves.

There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before. Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York--every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb. At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby's enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another. By seven o'clock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing up-stairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors, and hair shorn in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names. The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light. Suddenly one of the gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray's understudy from the FOLLIES. The party has begun.

Stormy, tell me about where you were when John F. Kennedy died.” “It was a Friday. I was baking a pineapple upside-down cake for my bridge club. I put it in the oven and then I saw the news and forgot all about the cake and nearly burned the house down. We had to have the kitchen repainted because of all the soot.” She fusses with her hair. “He was a saint, that man. A prince. If I’d met him in my heyday, we really could’ve had some fun. You know, I flirted with a Kennedy once at an airport. He sidled up to me at the bar and bought me a very dry gin martini. Airports used to be so very much more glamorous. People got dressed up to travel. Young people on airplanes these days, they wear those horrible sheepskin boots and pajama pants and it’s an eyesore. I wouldn’t go out for the mail dressed like that.” “Which Kennedy?” I ask. “Hmm? Oh, I don’t know. He had the Kennedy chin, anyway.” I bite my lip to keep from smiling. Stormy and her escapades.

Of the Poet’s Youth" When the man behind the counter said, “You pay by the orifice,” what could we do but purchase them all? Ah, Sandy, vou were clearly the deluxe doll, modish and pert in your plastic nurse whites, official hostess to our halcyon days, where you bobbed in the doorway of our dishabille apartment, a block downwind from the stockyards. Holding court on the corroded balcony, K. and I passed hash brownies, collecting change for the building’s monthly pool to predict which balcony would fall off next. That’s when K. was fucking M. and M. was fucking J., and even B. and I threw down once on the glass-speckled lawn, adrift in the headlights of his El Camino. Those were immortal times, Sandy! Coke wasn’t addictive yet, condoms prevented herpes and men were only a form of practice for the Russian novel we foolishly hoped our lives would become. Now it’s a Friday night, sixteen years from there. Don’t the best characters know better than to live too long? My estranged husband house-sits for a spoiled cockatoo while saving to buy his own place. My lover’s gone back to his gin and the farm-team fiancée he keeps in New York. What else to do but read Frank O’Hara to my tired three-year-old? When I put him to bed, he mutters “more sorry” as he turns into sleep. Tonight, I find you in a box I once marked “The Past.” Well, therapy’s good for some things, Sandy, but who’d want to forgive a girl like that? Frank says Destroy yourself if you don’t know! Deflated, you’re simply the smile that surrounds a hole. I don’t know anything.

I get off at Witney. I'm part of the Friday-evening commuter throng, just another wage slave amongst the hot, tired masses, looking forward to getting home and sitting outside with a cold beer, dinner with the kids, an early night. It might just be the gin, but it feels indescribably good to be swept along with the crowd, everyone phone-checking, fishing in pockets for rail passes. I'm taken back, way back to the first summer we lived on Blenheim Road, when I used to rush home from work every night, desperate to get down the steps and out of the station, half running down the street. Tom would be working from home and I'd barely be through the door before he was taking my clothes off. I find myself smiling about it even now, the anticipation of it: heat rising to my cheeks as I skipped down the road, biting my lip to stop myself from grinning, my breath quickening, thinking of him and knowing he'd be counting the minutes until I got home, too.

Clarence Pontoon, th' military expert iv th' London Mornin' Dhram, reviewin' Gin'ral Buller's position on th' Tugela, says: 'It is manifest fr'm th' dispatches tellin' that Gin'ral Buller has crost th' Tugela River that Gin'ral Buller has crost th' Tugela River. This we r-read in spite iv th' cinsor. Th' question is which side he has crost to. On Friday he was on th' north side in th' mornin' an' on th' south side at night, an' in th' river at noon. We heerd nawthin' Sathurdah mornin'. Th' presumption is that they was nawthin' to hear. Therefore it is aisy to imagine Gin'ral Buller, findin' his position on th' north side ontenable an' his position on th' south side onbearable, is thransportin' his troops up th' river on rafts an' is now engagin' th' inimy between Spitzozone an' Rottenfontein, two imminsely sthrong points. All this dimonsthrates th' footility an' foolishness iv attimptin' to carry a frontal position agains' large, well-fed Dutchmen with mud in th' fr-ront iv thim.