Asshole

I do not like myself today. I don’t want to be in my skin. I feel like an asshole because I guess I actually am an asshole. Apparently two people from  my building called the owner to complain about noise coming from my place at midnight. I am not sure when, exactly, if it was two calls in one night or two calls at different times. But I don’t like feeling like an asshole neighbor. I do not remember any loud music any time time except for the other night, when a friend was over for our semi-regular Degenerate Night. Well, it’s an easy problem to address. But why go straight to the building owner? He is not going to stomp over late at night. He does not even live in the building. Leave a note at the offender’s door.

My neck hurts. It might be from hauling this heavy bag more than I should.

Oh crap, the horrible woman I can’t stand just got here. Not going to talk to her, not ever. She comes in here like she is Mrs. Astoria, then starts talking shit about her mother and everyone else.

Speaking of Astoria I re-watched some of “Queens Logic”, the 1991 start-studded dud film made mostly in Astoria. For all that star power the movie just doesn’t quite do the trick of telling a meaningful story. Some of it looks good. Lots of interiors of Astoria apartments, which somehow you can tell just from looking at them that they really are Astoria apartments. There is one scene at a  bar I could not identify, with a curved and bottom-lit counter. It might be one of those Albanian or Greek members only places, if it is in Astoria at all. The movie is a bit of a dud but not as embarrassing as “Hercules In New York,” which redeems itself only on account of a couple of choice phone booths seen in the middle. Apparently Arnold Schwarzenegger said that his only regret from his film career was being in that movie.

Swick2 has opened. Maybe it just happened or maybe it opened a while ago but I saw it today. Juan had been talking about taking over that space since he bought Sunswick 9 or 10 years ago.

Tony used to work there. I think he was Manager, or else he just acted like he was. He had said they were going to tear out the wall between that space and Sunswick and expand the bar into the other place. That didn’t happen. The new place is a teeny-tiny snack shop, replacing a candy shop (I think) and before that a barber shop named “WHO CUTS YOUR HAIR”.

I see Tony on TV once in a while. Like a lot of actors he moved to Hollywood to make it big. Unlike most actors he actually did that, if being in numerous commercials for Geico, Fios, and other big name companies is the sign of success it appears to be. Commercial jobs tend to beget more commercial jobs. That’s the rap against that kind of work. My guess is he will be in a new commercial during the Super Bowl. A bunch of his commercials first aired during Super Bowls.

Tony and I were friendly enough that I contacted him once or twice over the years, either just to say hi or to ask something specific. He never replied. Maybe his mail goes through handlers now, or maybe he just doesn’t care. I and the rest of the Sunswick entourage went to the premiere of a movie he starred in. It wasn’t bad, as I recall; and I thought Tony was quite good.

There was a woman at RaR who was featured in a bunch of nationally-broadcast commercials for a while. I don’t know what she does now but holy shit, this woman had been in one fucking commercial when I first knew her and she carried on like she was Bette Fucking Davis, surrounding herself with preening sycophants. I never knew her much, though, so maybe she was not as wretched a specimen as she seemed.

This is making me wonder what is up with some of the old Sunswick crew. Troy, the former beer distributor who was made manager even though he had never worked in a bar, is gone and no one seems to know why.

I remembered the story about a guy who worked at an investment bank on Wall Street. I wish I could remember who told me this story because it invokes a great, great word. This person made himself sound like a big shot at the investment bank. He talked about it like he hired and fired people and was a fearsome presence upon entering the room. So someone from Sunswick went to meet him at the office. The dude was a total lickspittle (that’s the great word). People were bossing him around such that they only stopped short of making him shine their shoes.

So this character got a couple of women from Sunswick to share a 3-bedroom with him. I think it was on 34th Street near 35th Avenue, which I think because I once walked past that building and through a window saw this person and one of these roommates. It turned out this lickspittle guy was not paying any rent, but charging the other two a combined amount that in excess of the monthly rent. I don’t know how long he got away with it but after they busted him he just vanished.

It’s true what they say: You meet classy dudes in bars.

I also was remembering the strange episode of the dude who was an accountant and got busted for embezzling something like $80,000. He knew they were coming to get him. That fact seemed just slightly spooky to me when I realized that we had spent many hours hanging out at Sunswick just 2 or 3 days before he was arrested. I was with him on what may have been his last night of freedom. I did not know anything about his situation until I heard that the FBI came and took him away. Somehow he coaxed another Swickster into taking responsibility for his expensive suits, of which he had maybe a dozen. These suits cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars each. This very gracious Swickster somehow talked Veronica into letting him put them in the basement of her bar on 36th Avenue. She genuinely wanted no part of this but I guess she would have felt bad just throwing out the guy’s expensive threads, and evidently other options were limited. I don’t know if she ever got some kind of compensation from him for that storage but she would have been well within reason to demand it.

The dude was sentenced to three years but got out after 8 or 9 months. He was in a minimal security place in Manhattan, where apparently he stayed drunk all day every day. He said the place was a lot of fun, at least for him.

It is not the place I was reading about yesterday, at 150 Park Place. That’s where El Chapo is now. I actually never knew of a maximum security prison in Manhattan. I thought those were all in remote areas… not that I would know much about prisons. But I thought the prisons on Manhattan were all low-security, like the one my embezzling friend was at.

If he got away with $80,000 then it probably cost triple that to incarcerate him for those 8 or 9 months.

I saw him at Michael’s on Broadway. I had heard he was getting his life back together, which was good to know. I don’t know if he did drugs but he drank like a fucking sponge, but was said to have quit that after getting out of the saloon/jail. I did hang out with him that one night, and on plenty of other nights before that. But we were never really friends, I don’t think. Just drinking buddies.