Brian and Erick

May 1, 2006

Brian has been in Connecticut for the past couple of weeks, restarting the landscaping business he began last year, but he was in New York City over the weekend to pick up some extra work at one of the neon shops where he occasionally freelances. Since he wasn't in town very long, he tried to fit in as much catching up with friends as possible. He had dinner plans with a few people in the East Village on Friday night and arranged to meet up with me afterward.

At about nine o'clock, he called. "Where are you?" he said.

I glanced up at the street sign as I walked. "Third and A."

"Third and A. Okay, cool. I'm not far from you. Start walking up A and I'll meet you halfway."

"East side of the street."

"Got it."

The neighborhood was busy with a typical East Village Saturday night crowd, and I was a little worried we might pass each other without noticing. It was a silly concern. I've known Brian for 20 years now, and I spotted his unmistakable gait from a block away.

"Hey man, good to see you, how've you been?" he said as we shook hands.

"Good, good, how about you?"

"Good. I could use a cup of coffee, though. How about you?"

"Honestly? I need to take a shit."

"No problem. I have to go to my truck and get a warmer jacket. I'm parked in front of the neon shop. You can take a dump there. It's kind of nasty, but it beats going to a restaurant. I hate taking a shit in public."

The neon shop is in the basement of a decrepit old building off Avenue C. Brian unlocked the front door and led me down the narrow, crooked hallway, covered in dingy carpet scraps, to the basement door. He unlocked that door, flipped the light switch on the wall next to it, and stepped aside. "After you, my friend."

The staircase was steep and narrow, too old to even creak anymore. The treads looked as thin and brittle as graham crackers. "You're not going to kill me, are you?" I said, stepping lightly and ducking my head.

"Believe me, if I were going to kill you, I would've done it a long time ago."

He led me down another hallway to a back room filled with neon tubing, transformers, drafting supplies, tools, and an old gray computer. The toilet was further back, up a step, behind a swinging saloon-style door made of thin plywood. Brian tugged on a few hanging light switches. "I'm not sure which of these is for the bathroom," he said, then followed an extension cord that snaked over some pipes and decided, "This should be the one." He clicked it several times, but the bathroom remained dark. "Oh well, there's enough light in there for you, isn't there?"

The bathroom walls were made from scraps of plywood that didn't reach the low ceiling or the cement floor, and the fluorescent light that hung in the middle of the room cast just enough light for me to see where to sit. "It's fine," I said.

I left the door open a crack to maximize the light and took a seat.

"Did you talk to Erick?" Brian asked. Erick is an old friend of ours that neither of us had seen in a while. Brian was hoping we could meet up with him later in the night.

"Yeah. He said he'd be home around nine, and for us to call him when we knew where we were going."

When I finished in the bathroom, Brian heard me try to flush the toilet. "No, man. You gotta dump that bucket of water in the bowl. But don't dump it all, I gotta go, too."

Next to the toilet bowl was a red plastic bucket filled with water. I poured half of it into the bowl. "It's all yours," I said.

As I waited for Brian, I poked around the neon shop. There were all sorts of things hanging on the walls: signs, photos, notes, floor plans, measurements. Among them was a child's pencil drawing of a man and a woman. The man, on the left, had several bags of money at his feet, dollar signs floating over his head, and a big smile on his face. The woman stood on the right, in a floor-length dress, crying. A bag of money floated just beyond her reach. Above the two of them were the words: "Money will come some day."

"What’s with this drawing?" I said when Brian was done in the bathroom.

"I know. Isn't that excellent?" he said. "The shop owner's daughter did that."

"It's kinda sad," I said, pulling out my camera and hoping to revive its recently depleted battery for a single shot. No luck.

After our bathroom break, we called Erick and told him to meet us at a coffee shop on Ludlow Street. Or rather, what used to be a coffee shop. Brian and I remembered it as a hole-in-the-wall and didn't realize it had been expanded and converted into a full-blown restaurant. Surrounded by the smell of garlic, we walked through and looked around. "What the fuck?" Brian said. "Am I crazy? This is the right place, isn't it?"

"Yeah," I said."

"Didn't it used to be smaller? Just a regular—you know—like a place—you could sit and have a coffee?"

"Yeah," I said. "Slackers reading magazines."

"Exactly, that's what I want. Relax, have a coffee and, hopefully, look at pretty girls."

We decided on another place, one of Brian's more regular spots, and he called Erick with the change of plans.

With our coffees in hand, we went outside to find a table. "You want to sit at the dirty table? Or the wet table?" Brian asked. We chose the wet one, sipped our coffees, and commented on the people that passed along the sidewalk. Brian spotted Erick trotting toward us from across the street, sporting a shaved head and a windbreaker. "Dude," Brain called out, "You look like an English soccer hooligan."

Erick laughed and pulled up a chair. "Hey, dudes," he said. "What's up?"

We made the general sort of chitchat that people make when they haven't seen each other for a while. I told him that I'd been thinking of him and that I'd tried to invite him to a dinner party a few weeks ago, but his number had been disconnected. "I wasn't sure if you were still in New York or not."

"Yeah, just have a new number, that's all. You have it now, right?"

"Yeah."

"I was thinking of you, too," he said. "I stopped by your website a couple of days ago. No offense, but I don't have the patience to read that shit. I mean, I love you and everything, but seriously—"

"Noted."

Last time I'd seen Erick, he was playing in a band with a couple of kids half his age and had complained that they weren't taking it very seriously. It struck me as funny because Erick had never been the kind of guy to take anything very seriously himself. "What's going on with your band?" I asked. "You guys still together?"

"I didn't tell you?" he said. "Yeah, I guess I haven't spoken to you in a while. I went on tour as the guitar player for Murphy's Law."

For those who might not know, Murphy's Law is a hardcore band that's been around since the early eighties, fronted by the punk icon Jimmy Gestapo.

"You're kidding me," said Brian. "That's hilarious,"

"Yeah, I almost went with them to Europe, but I bailed. I toured around the states for about three months. I only got laid from it once, though."

"How much did you get paid? Like 200 a gig?"

Erick nearly spit out his coffee. "Dude, not even I started out getting like 100, but then the van kept breaking down and I was only getting around 20. That's why I had to come home. It would've been cool to go to Europe and everything, but I just couldn't take it anymore. Besides, I missed my daughter and shit."

He told us a story about performing at a straightedge festival in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

"We can have fun on stage without alcohol," Jimmy Gestapo said to the sober crowd. "It's a lot more fun with alcohol, but we can have fun." And then the band kicked into one of their classics, a song called Beer:

“Why don't you drink fucking beer? What's the matter, are you queer?"

And then he told us about playing in a huge former wool mill in Providence, Rhode Island, that had been converted into a biker's clubhouse. "The guy hired all these topless chicks to bartend. A bunch of them came on stage with us and danced around. It was awesome. Oh shit, and down in North Carolina, these three girls were hanging around outside our motel, just hanging out in this dark area under an awning, smoking cigarettes and getting high. They couldn't have been any older than fifteen, dressed all slutty. We were walking into the motel, and one of them says in this slow, southern drawl, 'We know who you are. Y'all are Murphy's Law. Why don't you come out an' get high with us?' They wanted to hang out in our motel room. We all just looked at each other and were like, No way."

"One of 'em was probably the sheriff's daughter," said Brian.

"No kidding. We would've gotten arrested, and there would've been a big Free Jimmy Gestapo movement with benefit concerts and everything while the rest of us sat in jail thinking, what about us?"

Okay, this post has gone on long enough. Erick’s lack of patience in reading my nonsense has made me suddenly self-conscious. I mean, writing about taking a shit has got to be a new low..