A few stories from BIMs past
High Desert
A letter from
And my light reading while Ohm-ing in WY has lately been Yoel Hoffman’s
‘Japanese Death Poems’ written by Zen monks and haiku poets on the verge of
death. My 7th Day Adventist friends used the word verge to describe food from
their restaurant that was ‘on the verge of’ having to be thrown out – thus –
‘vergy’. So, in addition to my usual adventuring I like to think of myself as being
ever vergy. LOL I wrote the 2 below and remain - to my knowledge - well.
On an autumn morning
The yak’s breath
Blows to the west
The empty cicada
Flies to
The western moon.
As Hoffman allows himself some commentary so will I. The west implies the pure
land of nirvana to Buddhists. Haiku-ish poetry is supposed to be structured so
that the season is mentioned – even if obliquely. And I have always liked the
time after the full moon when it is sets in the morning.
I was once perusing a book on famous bombers – airplanes - and came across
the following I have seen nowhere else.
Dear Mother,
I am an empty dream. Like snow left on a mountain in summer. I feel my warm
blood moving inside of me and I am reminded that I am living. My Soul will have
its home in the rising of the Sun. If you feel sad look at the dawn with all of it’s
beauty. You will find me there. The last letter home of a Japanese Kamikaze pilot
And my personal favorite bomber has always been George Metesky.
More haiku
The hoop of my life
chases the rising Sun
Rolling to the western Moon
Daymares fleet before me
Hooves flashing
Hot desert sand sticks in my eyes
I took a trip to a remote badlands desert in
called the
running from far to the right of me directly across in front of my truck. I was
mesmerized and could only concentrate on the flashing hooves stirring the sand.
When they had passed all that remained vivid in my memory was the hooves and
flashing sand.
In the late 1980’s the Sweetwater County, WY sheriff’s department deduced that
terrorism would be an unanticipated threat to law enforcement agencies in the
future and put on a seminar about the subject. No one signed up to participate so
the Sheriff decided that if they could get an Israeli general to be the keynote
speaker they could get more participation. A general was secured and as the
American-Israeli who invited him was driving him the hundreds of miles from
the area of the
General asked in amazement what they were. “Wild horses.” “Who owns them?”
“No one.” Can I have one?” “No.”
Again the Israeli General speaks.”My God, this is like Sinai. This is the type of
land that produces Gods and prophets.”
Incidentally,
When one happens to see a beautiful sunset or lovely flower, for instance, one is
often so delighted that one merely stands still. This state of mind might be called
“ah-ness,” for the beholder can only give one breath-long exclamation of delight:
“Ah!” The object has seized him and he is aware only of the shapes, the colors,
the shadows…There is no time or place explicitly for reflection for judgments, or
for the observer’s feelings…To render such a moment is the intent of all haiku
and the discipline of the form. Hoffman, pg 24, from The Japanese Haiku,
Kenneth Yasuda, Charles E. Tuttle (
Had I not known that I was dead already
I would have mourned my loss of life.
Ota Dokan, 1432-86, written after being stabbed while bathing. He expired after
writing.
The Gold Star
I was always real partial to Gold Stars, the special 500 cc single cylinder motorcycles made by BSA of England and once owned 3 of them at one time. The best of them was the black 1963 Clubman I bought from a friend in 1965. It would do an honest 120 miles per hour and I got it up there several times while drunk out of my mind in the middle of the night. Always a solitary drinker, I took to leaving the bars in the
I loved the no name because they served Ballantine Ale on tap and I was a Ballantine Ale man for all of my formative drinking years. It was the best. I especially liked those big green glass quart bottles. There was a nickel deposit on these bottles and once a week or so when I would clean them out of the back of my old Chevy I would have enough deposit money for a couple more quarts which would be the start of my next toot. I knew no one at the no name and simply reveled in the ale and the excitement of the ride down and the adventures of the night.
Closing up the no name I would head down to the tip of Manhattan and ride the Staten Island ferry for 5 cents across lower New York harbor and back and then go get something to eat at Katz’s Delicatessen on Houston St. or a small terrible diner on the west side or go over into Chinatown and have some wor sew op, duck, or some such. Then I would head down to Wall Street, deserted on Saturday and Sunday mornings at 6 or 7, and run up and down the streets listening to the crescendo of the full racing exhaust of the Gold Star bouncing off the buildings. I still have fond memories of stopping in the middle of Wall Street astride the Gold Star opposite the courthouse steps where George Washington was inaugurated.
Prospero Ends the Revels
Our revels now are ended, these our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits
And are melted into air, thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
as dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Shakespeare
And so, at last, around 7 or 8, exhausted, shall we say, from a night of carousing that had begun some 12 hours before, I would head the Gold Star homeward up the West Side highway, back across 10 cent bridge, through the Bronx, and then up the Saw Mill River Parkway to upper middle class suburbia. And the next night I might cool it a little, staying around home and simply closing the bars at home at 3 then heading to one of the local diners to eat.
I had the Gold Star up at Dartmouth for a while and made one fantastic trip on it from Hanover, New Hampshire down to the Central Bar and Grille, about 250 miles, in 3 and ½ hours. I cruised upper Route 22 in New York State for mile after mile at well over 100 mph on a memorable bright sunny June afternoon slowing slightly going through the little towns and reaching back and covering the full open racing exhaust megaphone with my right foot to quiet it a little. The English call it riding at over a ton.
Wanderlust
I taste a liquor never brewed,
From tankards scooped of pearl;
Not all the vats upon the
Yield such an alcohol
Inebriate of air am I,
And debauchee of dew,
Reeling, through endless summer days,
From inns of molten blue.
When landlords turn the drunken bee
Out of the foxglove’s door,
When butterflies renounce their drams,
I shall but drink the more!
Till seraphs swing their snowy hats,
And saints to windows run,
To see the little tippler
Leaning against the sun!
Emily Dickinson
this poem was last seen in the long suppressed BIM1
56 Lu / The Wanderer
_________ above LI The Clinging, Fire
___ ___
_________
_________ below Keeping Still, Mountain
___ ___
___ ___
The mountain, Ken, stands still; above it fire, Li, flames up and does not tarry. Therefore the two trigrams do not stay together. Strange lands and separation are the wanderer's lot.
The Judgment
The wanderer. Success through smallness. Perseverance brings good fortune to the wanderer.
When a man is a wanderer and stranger; he should not be gruff nor overbearing. He has no large circle of acquaintances, therefore he should not give himself airs. He must be cautious and reserved; in this way he protects himself from evil. If he is obliging toward others, he wins success.
A wanderer has no fixed abode; his home is the road. Therefore he must take care to remain upright and steadfast, so that he sojourns only in the proper places, associating only with good people. Then he has good fortune and can go his way unmolested.
The Image
Fire in the mountain:
The image of the wanderer.
Thus the superior man is clear-minded and cautious
In imposing penalties,
And protracts no lawsuits.
When grass on a mountain takes fire, there is bright light. However, the fire does not linger in one place, but travels on to new fuel. It is a phenomenon of short duration. This is what penalties and lawsuits should be like. They should be a quickly passing matter, and must not be dragged out indefinitely. Prisons ought to be places where people are lodged only temporarily, as guests are. They must not become dwelling places. From ‘The I Ching -- the Book of Changes’, Translated by Richard Wilhelm, foreword by C.G. Jung, Bolligen Series, Princeton University Press, 3rd edition 1967
It is admirable to have an undisturbed mind, praiseworthy to be without worldly talent and knowledge. The same can be said of a homeless wanderer, but leading a life so liberated requires an iron will. Basho
“The deeper we penetrated into the
Like the desire for drink or drugs, the craving for mountains is not easily overcome, but a mountaineering debauch, such as six months in the Himalaya, is followed by no remorse….Having once tasted the pleasure of living in high, solitary places with few spirits, European or Sherpa, I could not give it up. The prospect of what is euphemistically termed “settling down,” like mud to the bottom of a pond, might perhaps be faced when it became inevitable, but not yet awhile. H. W. Tilman, ‘When Men and Mountains Meet’
I felt like I could go on like this forever, that life had little better to offer than to march day after day in unknown country to an unattainable goal.
H. W. Tilman, ‘When Men and Mountains Meet’
It would be futile to describe the region, for in exclusively mountainous countries every beauty is too extreme to be conveyed by any words that I might choose. None of the books or photographs studied before leaving home had even slightly prepared me for such majesty. Truly, this is something that does have to be seen to be believed, and that once seen must be continually yearned for when left behind, becoming as incurable a fever of the spirit as malaria is to the body. Dervla Murphy, ‘The
Leaving Tatopani, Prakash and I traveled for several days through some of the most beautiful mountain scenery on earth. Steadily climbing all the while we spent the next night in a lovely inn in the
Whence this creation arose, whether it created itself or whether it did not? He who looks upon it from the highest space, he surely knows. Or maybe He knows not. Rig Veda X.129 (the Hindu scriptures)
No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place. Zen saying
“Expect nothing,” Eido Roshi had warned me on the day I left. And I had meant to go lightly into the light and silence of the
Nothing seems too exciting to me much anymore. I have been living from day to day reasonably happily with my major solace in life being the frequent rigorous hiking trips I take up the local 5000’ peak in the area, Saddleback. I especially like going up there in the winter when I can climb up into the clouds and walk for miles alone only able to see fifty feet in front of me. It reminds me of the
“Do you know why a Sheikh breathes in the ear of a newly born child? Of course you do not! You put it down to magic, primitive symbols representing life, but the practical reason, the deadly serious business of nourishing the inner consciousness, passes you by.” A Sufi sheikh, from ‘The Snow Leopard’
“Happiness depends on the taste, and not on the thing, and it is by having what we like, that we are made happy and not by having what others consider likable.” La Rochefoucauld from Dervla Murphy
“The springs of enchantment lie within ourselves: they arise from our sense of wonder, that most precious of gifts, the birthright of every child.” Eric Shipton, one of the great mountaineers and adventurers of the last century.
Shipton’s
`…all of a sudden the fog rolled away from us and we found ourselves looking down into the immense depths of a cloud-filled valley at our feet. The glacier descended in a steep icefall for about a thousand feet, then flattened out into a fairly level stretch of ice before it heeled over for its final colossal plunge into the gloom of the gorge six thousand feet below us. ‘Eric Shipton (
Ever since my first reading 15 years ago I had been enthralled by Shipton’s account of his crossing of the Badrinath-Kedarnath [in the Indian Himalaya] watershed with Bill Tilman and three Sherpas in 1934. Their lightweight attempt to prove a direct link between these two great Hindu shrines over the mountains of the Chaukhamba range captured all I had ever regarded as romantic and daring in mountain exploration. The commitment to cross an unknown and heavily glaciated 18,000 ft pass in rank monsoon weather had an epic denouement when they became trapped without food in dense bamboo forest on the far side. Their ensuing battle for survival, fording dangerously swollen torrents and competing with black bears for the supply of edible bamboo shoots was, to me, a model of courage and endeavor against the odds. Moran’s Amazon.com review of Shipton’s book
The closest I actually came to flying through the air was in ’89 on my first trek to the Everest region of the Himalayas in
‘First the word, then the plant, lastly the knife.’ Aesculapius of Thassaly, c. 1200 B.C., considered to be the first surgeon. I think word should probably be capitalized, as in Word, probably from the Greek logos, as in, ‘In the beginning was the Word.’
Polio
I had polio once. Not many people know that. Even I have forgotten pretty much about it but I’ve had to really dredge around for stories for Jane. Surprisingly, I keep finding them, all buried beneath a muck of later happenings. Anyway, it all started because I got pissed off. Pissed off at my parents for sending me to Boy Scout camp in the Adirondacks instead of the lovely and expensive summer camp I had gone to in
I got to be the best camper because I was so all around competent, especially at canoeing, camping and shooting. I was the only one who didn’t have a counselor in my canoe with me on canoe trips, as I was such a strong paddler even though I had never been in a canoe before my first time at camp. I recall when I was eleven we all took a big trip along the
So here I am thirteen years old and bored stiff out of my mind and my parents figure they can’t afford to send me to
Soon though I began talking like Donald Duck. My mother made an appointment with our family doctor who immediately sent me over to an ear, eye, nose and throat specialist. This guy said I had polio. Ah, polio, schmolio. A big stupid ambulance came to the house a few days later and carted me away to the huge Westchester County (NY) hospital, called Grasslands, where a special polio ward was set up in what had been the solarium. The place was filled with kids. I loved it and I loved being out of the house. My condition deteriorated. I had bulbar polio, the kind that paralyzes your throat and goes down into your lungs and eventually your diaphragm, which when paralyzed puts you in an iron lung. My paralysis progressed down my throat so that I had to use a suction tube to remove saliva from my mouth and eventually I wasn’t able to eat at all. Thank God nothing was forced upon me. Well, that’s not quite true. I was given a spinal tap so they could check my spinal fluids. The problem was they let a student nurse give me the tap and she played around with a needle in my back for at least fifteen minutes not getting any fluid while I was held forcibly in the fetal position by about 4 big nurses. Finally, the head nurse grabbed the needle and swiftly tapped my spine but I had nerve damage to my spine and a bad back that lasted for almost 30 years until I applied some very intense non-traditional healing remedies to my back, healing it totally. So totally, for a lark, and somewhat by chance, I spent one summer in the moving business when I was 50 years old. I moved 6 apartments and houses full of furniture and belongings with a Mexican guy I found. I was the one who lifted up the ends of the piano while they rolled the dolly underneath. My guy’s 10 year old son, Carlos, always came with us. They jokingly called him Carlos and called me Carlitos, the diminutive. What a panic. That was the name I had been called at home until I was about 6 or 7 and by some of my parent’s South American friends until I was well into my 20’s.
This was the very end of the non-heroic period of medicine, right before doctors began to intervene severely in the progress of illnesses, killing many patients like me who needed to be sick and get well on our own.
‘First, do no harm.’ Hippocrates, precepts
I was not able to eat for about three weeks and my weight went from 175 down to 113 lb. I spent my 14th birthday in the hospital. The new and radical treatment for polio was hot compresses. I was wrapped twice a day in what seemed to be pieces of Army blankets that had been steamed and heated. The nurses and this one doctor on crutches who had had polio himself would wrap me totally in these horrible scratchy woolens and then wrap all that in more blankets greatly raising my body temperature. I think what really worked though was the congregation at our local church praying for me. I was the only kid in the congregation with polio and one of only 2 kids in town who had polio so the prayers were pretty concentrated. I had been an altar boy and crucifer at the church and the rest of the family was pretty involved too. I could feel everyone’s prayer, that’s how strong the energy was.
After two weeks of treatment I began to get better. I had come in with one of the worst cases in the ward and here I was the first, and really only, one to respond well to treatment. I have a theory that the enforced fasting was crucial in my recovery. Back then prisoners from the county jail managed an extensive orchard and garden on the hospital grounds and I began to be able to down fresh peach milkshakes. I began participating in the surreptitious wheelchair races we kids began having. It was great as visitors, including, or maybe especially, parents, could only come a couple of times a week. I was the first one to go home. I cried when they told me I had to go; I wanted to stay in the hospital. I could never figure why everyone was so upset about this polio thing anyway. I had told everyone all along that I would be ice skating by wintertime. I simply ignored all of their patronizing glances and I could see that they had convinced themselves and my parents I had a long recovery ahead of me. I got back to school a month or so late for the 6th grade. I was a minor celebrity for only about 2 days; you know how 14 year olds are. After a month or so I began to hate taking the school bus every morning with all those nerds so I began walking and hitchhiking to school, about 4 miles. I did it for the whole school year and the next year too. Of course, I was skating that winter; I ice skated the whole winter. No one ever messed around with me when I wanted something or wanted to go somewhere. They discovered the polio vaccine about six months later. I vowed to myself to never again get sick like this and to stop being sickly, as I had been all my life and also to not be sick to get back at my parents.
“But above all things my brethren, swear not, neither by heaven, neither by the earth, neither by any other oath: but let your yea be yea; and your nay, nay; lest ye fall into condemnation.” James 5:12
Having recovered, I stopped going to church and proceeded to my next illness, alcoholism, which lasted a lot longer than the polio. No hot compress cure there!
Unless I tell them, no one who knows me now notices the slight paralysis I have in my face; it shows when I’m tired sometimes. I’ve wondered in later years if perhaps I have residual effects from the polio. My psychic advisor always thought so, especially when I contracted Lyme’s disease at 45, some 30 years after having polio. It’s one of the dualities I live with, hyperactivity and paralysis. Everybody has them, dualities that is. It’s always much easier to see other people’s dualities than our own. Much.
Desert Dogs
or
A phantasmagoric confluence of Jeeped souls in the summer desert
I once took a surreal Jeep trip to a remote desert hot spring in the middle of the summer. I traveled for 60 miles or so on dirt roads into an immense valley with a salt lake. The tremendous heat made it scary. I knew I couldn’t last long if anything happened. It was 118 degrees that day. I had good directions but was alone and had never been here before. My drinking water was hot. This is the type of heat you wear long pant and shirts in like the Arabs. I understood the meaning of being saved when I first spotted the large palm that marked the spring in the middle of this immense dry country. It was a true oasis. There was another old Jeep parked at the spring! Richard and his girlfriend had come cross country from the semi ghost town where they lived in
The Song of the Nightingale
Could I love you again
In a different time in place
Where hearts merge to hope
and yield one face
In a land so strange
A dream can be
Where waterfall mist
Floats to an inland sea
Where flowers don’t end
And the sky bend low
Where nightingales give birth
To a song we know
Richard Watkins
From my newsletter Ballantyne’s Inspired Musings, 4 May 1993. This is an unembellished true adventure from my life as are all the stories in BIM.
I visited Richard a couple of times in Goldpoint, NV and then he married a girl from Oregon who he met through the Rural Electric Coop magazine personals using a picture of himself I took. A couple of years ago I headed for Goldfield on a whim to see Richard and was stuck for miles behind a pickup carrying plumbing supplies. The pickup pulled into Goldfield and I flagged them down and asked where Richard’s house was as I couldn’t remember. They pointed it out and told me they lived there now having bought the house a few years before from Richards’s widow who had gone back to
Mystics such as Richard have a hard time being here in the world, the dross of civilization much alleviated, even in the middle of the summer, by trips to ‘The Soaks’.
Drunk Stories
Cocktails With Newk
Newk came down from
My last name was the Mustard Man and the incidents surrounding the acquisition of that one gave rise to the scene in the movie where John Belushi pours mustard on himself. I thought it a clever disguise at the time.
Anyway, Newk and I began drinking at the Willow Inn, the bar I first started at when a few friends had taken me out on my 14th birthday. I don’t remember how it started but one thing led to another and by 4 AM Newk and I were in
Newk made the mistake of eating while we were out drinking and had barfed out the window of my car painting the whole door with flecks of a Stewart electric roast beef sandwich. You know, one of these things they would heat in those small ovens in back of the bar before microwave ovens. I thought nothing of it and just left it on the car. My parents spotted it two days later when they drove by my favorite bar, the Central Bar and Grille, in downtown Chappaqua. This place was a classic. It even had a discreet gold leaf letter sign in the window ‘Ladies Invited’. Yeah, right. My mother was so angry she my made my father stop and come in the bar and take me outside and show me the barf and they demanded I clean it off. I DID …. a couple of days later. Nobody’s going to tell me what to do! I was about 20 at this time.
Apollo
In 1967 I was working on the Apollo project at the
I totally adored the once elegant nightclub that was now nothing more than a whorehouse and bar. The sinister seamyness and rawness of life at the club enticed me night after night. I drank and became friendly with pimps with real six-shooters on their hips, met wild, outrageous customers, listened to story after story of the ‘working girls’, and in the wee hours of the morning after closing the club would frequently go out with Joyce, the owner, and her assistant Bobbie drinking until 8 or 9 AM. I mean I’m talking drinking 40 or 50 or 60 drinks sometimes! I could tell because my drinks were $1 a piece and I would only put $1 or $2 in the jukebox and I always started out with $50 or $60. I began drinking Hennessey brandy and soda at the club because I read in the New York Times Book Review that’s what Winston Churchill’s father drank. I thought buying the Sunday New York Times while in
Joyce was beautiful and truly wild. Half Cherokee Indian and half Mexican, she once got a load on at the club before it closed and Bobbie took a long scarf and tied her in her barstool so she wouldn’t fall off. One time I was just warming up, drinking my usual quick 4 or 5 drinks so I could begin to talk to everyone and Joyce looked at me across the bar and asked me how old I was. When I told her 24 her eyes welled up with tears and she blurted out, “Oh, you are just a baby. You look much older than that.” It was true and it was to be 15 long years before I entered my early adulthood and now in later years my childhood. About 4 years ago I was working as a baker in a girlfriend’s coffee shop and was talking in sketches about my life to one of the college students working there while we were on a break. He quickly grasped the drift and said, “You are living your life backwards.”
I would drive, completely drunk, from
I once came out of a blackout driving my Corvette on a desolate flat back country road in the early morning hours. It was like a surreal movie about someone else as I saw myself driving with one hand with a drink in the other. I looked down at the speedometer to see how fast I was going but couldn’t see the needle. I glanced again and finally saw that I had nearly pegged the needle near 120 or so and hadn’t noticed it. It took all my willpower to mentally force myself to slow down as I had no concept of danger or excess. When I finally got back to the hotel I turned the ignition off and passed out, frozen, with a drink in one hand and the keys in the other and stayed there for about 5 hours despite all the attempts of my co-workers to awaken me and get me out of the locked car. Although the hotel staff became increasingly used to my ‘schedule’, shall we say, I totally shocked the desk clerk one day when I called up and asked him what day it was. He told me and then I asked what time it was. He handled it all real well until I asked whether it was morning or evening.
I also hung out in George’s, a small bar in a little town about 20 minutes south. I frequently ate dinner here and would go off to
“Oh come on!”
“Yeah. You just come with me and I’ll show you.”
“Okay.”
Off we went in his Pontiac Safari station wagon. His wife icily greeted us and my friend escorted me into his den to wait while he and his wife went off to argue about where he had been all night. Every wall of the den was covered with machine guns and automatic weapons of all kinds, maybe forty or more. My friend returned and we went out back to a large cage where the lion was. I quietly got into the station wagon, the only safe place I could think of. The lion leapt up into the back of the wagon from the tailgate and we headed back to George’s. I wasn’t saying a word, obviously my bluff had been totally called. A few minutes down the road the lion was breathing heavily over my shoulder and was about to put her paw on me. I slunk down in my seat as much as possible and mumbled unintelligibly. My friend stopped, yelled at the lion and then went to the back of the wagon and tied her chain to the tailgate somehow so she stayed in back. We reentered George’s, lion first, my friend holding the chain second, and me a distant third. The three black girls who worked as barmaids and waitresses took one look at this procession and split out through the kitchen. Two of them never returned to work at all, ever. The last I saw, a drunk at the bar went to pet the lion on the head and the lion bit his hand. I slunk out the door and went ‘home’. It wasn’t until months later I ever recalled the incident as being unusual or out of the ordinary. What the hell, I was literally flying to the moon at work every day so my nocturnal activities didn’t seem at all out of the ordinary and I never spoke of my work when I was out carousing or of my carousing at work.
Bingo
Escaping the dullness of my division’s
After surviving these adventures I began working for a large telecommunications company in northern
The few times my boss called asking for Carlos the Puerto Rican kitchen help would get on the phone and they would go round and round until Bob finally got through to them that I was in the room with the old green Porsche out front of it. They would come out from the kitchen, bang on my door until I went from comatose to my normal waking delirium, and I would go off to the kitchen and talk with my boss who was always worried about me especially when I still hadn’t shown up at work by mid afternoon. The ceiling in the room was falling down, there was an abandoned satchel of kitchen knives in the corner, and it smelled so terrible I didn’t come ‘home’ until late at night and had drunk so much I would pass out right away. After a few months my boss sent me to
I spent my entire trip sampling all the clever bars and restaurants in town. I went everywhere. Settling into my preferred schedule of arising around noon or later, I would amble into the office, look at the nationwide mayhem, eat lunch, go sightseeing and then hit happy hour, wherever. Many hours later after all the legal places closed I went over to the Blackhawk, once a famous jazz place and now simply an illegal all night bar. My first night there bar girls came over and asked me to buy them drinks. They got paid by how many drinks they could get the customers to buy them and the bartenders made them non-alcoholic drinks. I quickly caught on to this and forced the bartenders to serve real drinks. This caused 2 girls to get either carried or helped away from me, as they got too drunk. When the Blackhawk closed at 5 or 6 AM I would either go drinking with the bartenders and waitresses for a few more hours along with morning people having a few bloody Mary’s on their way to work or I would go eat breakfast and walk back to my hotel, arriving anywhere from 6 to 10 AM. One morning at around 10 AM I was reeling back to my hotel on
My first trip was so successful my boss sent me back a month or so later for two more weeks along with a colleague. I kept my usual schedule and would meet up with Malcolm when he left work meticulously at 5 every day. He lasted with me until about 11 or 12 every night and brought back to
