It’s fun waking up to website postings of which I have no memory. Some day I’ll post something regrettable, if I haven’t done so already. Gotta stop with those 7am gimlets, though I do remember feeling very happy in The Chair, as I used to call it. That’s the mission recliner I bought at Macy’s sometime around 1999 or 2000, a purchase I considered triumphal at the time and which resonates as such even today. It’s still a damn fine chair, but for a long time I had no real access to it because it was surrounded and buried by all kinds of junk. I purged mounds and mounds of things over the last couple of months and one bonus for all that is easy access to The Chair.

My mother took one look at The Chair and said “You’re going to use those arm rests for beer cans.” She was correct, but she was not being humorful or even sarcastic. She meant it in a caustic spirit, the sort of attitude I got good at deflecting or simply ignoring.

I have documented the triumph of The Chair but hey, why not do it again. My first crystal-clear memory of arriving in New York in 1990 was emerging from Penn Station and seeing the Macy’s store across the street. We didn’t have Macy’s in Florida and I, unaware it was a chain, thought the glooming store in its stately structure was unique to New York City. I guess you could still say the Thanksgiving Day Parade and the 4th of July fireworks are all NYC but the store itself is no stranger to the tri-state area.

But in those early months and years of living here I took to Macy’s like it was a prize for living here. I marveled that the store had its own post office, and God there seemed to be the most beautiful women on earth roaming the first floor perfume department. I wandered the furniture department, which I think was on the 8th floor, and saw all the expensive and (to me) lavish trappings of home reserved for those who had made it, who had the money and the space for couches, dinner tables, and chairs. I would later get the leather couch still in my life but of particular interest to me was a mission recliner. I sat in that chair at the store and did not ever want to stand up from it. It was perfect as a piece of furniture but ambitious dreams of mine were pinned on its price tag: $1000. For so many years I simply could not imagine having that kind of money to spend on something like a chair.

It must have been 10 years later when I finally bought the thing, and even then it still felt like I did not have that kind of money to blow on a piece of furniture. But I had the money because I had a bucket. I still have that bucket, but it is empty now. Over time I had thrown quarters and dimes into a red bucket, although I seem to remember this starting in 1997 when I lived in Atlanta and filled a kitchen drawer with quarters. I brought those quarters back to New York and resumed amassing them a the red bucket, which was in my bedroom closet. It took surprisingly little time for the bucket to become so full of quarters that it was impossible for me to even lift it. I got change sorters and bags full of coin rolls and commenced the job I had in mind all along. Over many days I deposited buttloads of quarters into my checking account, stopping when I reached the magic number of $1000. With that I went to Macy’s, feeling like a conqueror. I still remember how it felt taking the elevator up to the 8th floor, knowing that The Chair would soon be mine.

For all that I don’t remember much else. I don’t remember the actual purchase, The Chair’s delivery, the speeches and parades that would obviously have taken place in honor of this monumental purchase. But I remember the quarters. They were endless, grubby, and utterly lacking in humor or compassion.

Funny, I seem to remember posting about The Chair to the old “What Are You Doing?” board. If I did I can’t find it now but I did find this posting of mine from 2004:

7/30/2004, 5:31 AM
Unidentified Person at 68.28.123.109 is:
sitting on a chair at 5:30am on 34th street.
chair is on a sidewalk and smells like piss and shit.
it’s between some garbage bags.
if I sit here long enough i’ll get
thrown into the garbage truck with the rest of it.
really I just came out to see the sun rise.