A Craic in the pavement

The Craic is an institution in Frisco, much like Bellevue is an institution in New York, and is what is known locally as a dive bar hole-in-the-wall bar dump bar, but it has a raffish charm if you look at it in a certain way, that certain way being with your eyes squinted and scrunched up, preferably through a couple of sheets of gauze and ideally after a few pitchers, altho they don’t serve pitchers or indeed tap beers, taps being far too much of a hassle to keep clean and one of the many things they don’t cotton to around them parts. It has even been reviewed in a popular Frisco guide for assholes who don’t know where to go for a good time out and are too dumb to realise that any place written up therein is automatically poop verboten and to be avoided, but this is what they had to say about it in any case:

Strolling through the pleasant groves of lower Nob Hill, one could easily forget that the Tenderloin is a mere block or two to the south. Drop into The Craic on Bush Street, however, and you won’t be long in remembering. With the beat-up look of a bar that’s been around the block a few times, and regulars to match, The Craic won’t be destination number one for your next hot date. But if you feel like a relaxed after-work drink, where nobody will be talking shop, you could do worse than drop into this friendly little spot with the flashing Christmas lights and observe the comings and goings of those who conduct their daily affairs from the top of a bar stool. For something more hectic, give it a whirl on the weekends when the Tenderloiners let their hair down, the pace quickens, and literally anything could happen. Or not.

Which is all very nice. Or not.

Unfortunately not many of the Craic regulars can or do read popular guides to being an asshole in Frisco or the reviewer would soon have learnt via a personal visit phone call or horse’s head in bed that those friendly regulars are actually evil criminals of the worst type - drug dealers, bank robbers, pedophiles, perverts, racketeers, bird smugglers, hobos, nun fuckers, check bouncers, gun toters, blasphemers, mass murderers, loss adjusters, sodomites, child torturers, litterers, drink drivers, hopheads, satanists and smokers - and they don’t especially want stickybeakers viewing the affairs they conduct from their bar stools, many of which come with an implied invite to San Quentin.

Naturally Clyde and I felt right at home the moment we crossed the threshold and admired the moose-head above the bar.
“That’s one ugly moose,” Clyde said.
We stumbled on the Craic when we first arrived in Frisco, not by perusing a popular assholes guide to Frisco barflying, but by the simple expedient of it being directly across the road from the tiny hovel we were sharing. O we’d tried the more famous literary haunts down in North Beach, so celebrated in prose verse and film, but we soon realised those haunts are full of people like ourselves except more productive talented and better looking, and that just wouldn’t do. Besides, the trek down to North Beach and then back up to the Tendernob is all too much when heads are light and bladders full, especially when compared to the child’s-play trek and fun adventure of walking out our front door and avoiding being hit by a car, bus, cabriolet or ox-cart carooming down Bush as we scamper across the road before reaching the front door of the Craic.
As is his wont, Clyde poked his head inside first and pronounced it unsafe and unsavoury, and even better it had no signs of any other resident writers or artists, which is difficult in Frisco at the best of times due to a combination of the scarcity of decent dives and the preponderance of writers and artists who breed there in increasingly unhealthy numbers, in spite of considerable culling efforts by the authorities.

So we figured we could have it to ourselves, and bask in the respect nay adulation that Frisco bestows on its literary sons and daughters, allowing us great latitude for forgiveness of occasional vomiting groping collapsing incidents, and the expectation of generous bar tabs and cash advances to be paid for with future royalties (my) or hurriedly scribbled’n’signed sketches (his), not to mention the dumb worship of the crack-addicted slack-jawed locals who would not only supply stories for us to pass off as our own, but would fetch pens, papers, beers, ciggies, powder and other needed writing supplies at the drop of a whim and/or a few pennies, grateful merely for our presence and demanding only discretion, a lack of obvious condescension, and the occasional clue to a particularly difficult crossword puzzle.

Unusually, it worked out pretty much exactly like we planned.

In spite of the fact that I am usually taciturn to an extreme amount, especially with those I know, and further that even Frisco’s habitually lax licensing laws don’t normally extend to allowing a horse to drink at a bar except in old-time jokes, we became regulars ourselves with our own spots at the bar and our own special drinks. It is our own place where everybody knows our names, altho should Cheers relocate to the Craic the scripts would have to be slightly altered:

WE OPEN INSIDE THE BAR. WE SEE FEET COMING DOWN THE STAIRS, BUT DON’T KNOW YET WHOSE THEY ARE.
CUT TO A MEDIUM CLOSEUP OF CARLA AND CLIFF, IMPATIENT.
CLIFF:
Motherfucker. I tell you Carla, and it is a little known fact, if someone was this late in the Middle Ages they would be placed on a trebeuchet, which as we all know is the most efficient way to extract someone’s balls from their ass.
SFX: LAUGHTER
CARLA:
Fuck you Claven.
SFX: LAUGHTER
WE GO WIDER TO REVEAL IT IS NORM’S FEET THAT WE HAVE SEEN. HE IS DISHEVELLED.
ALL:
Norm!
SFX: LAUGHTER
NORM:
Yeah yeah, I got it. An 8-ball.
SFX: WHOOPS AND HOLLERS
SAM:
Is it primo?
NORM:
Primissimo
SFX: LAUGHTER
DIANE:
Ah, the use of the Latin for extreme quality, how quaint.
SAM:
If you weren’t so tight, I’d smack you.
DIANE (FLICKING HER HAIR):
Oh Sam.
SFX: LAUGHTER AND LOUD APPLAUSE
COACH:
Sam, can you take over? I need to go the powder room.
CLIFF:
We’ll be right behind you.
SFX: ENORMOUS APPLAUSE AND LAUGHTER
CLIFF, NORM, SAM, CARLA AND THE FAT GUY WITH THE BEARD WHO IS ALWAYS A FEATURED EXTRA BUT NEVER NAMED LAUGH KNOWINGLY. DIANE AND COACH LOOK CONFUSED.
FADE TO INTRO THEME AND COMMERCIAL BREAK.

Up and at them at last.

It's time to do something.

Clyde and I go over some hills and down under some hills and up over some more hills and down under another until there are finally no more fucking hills and we are on the flat strip of land that is our Frisco, where so many others have left their hearts, the flat reclaimed strip the gods will send back into the sea when they lose their sense of humour or get sick of watching things beginning with ‘B’.

We are after something starting with a ‘C’ so we walk a little bit further ‘til we get to Columbus Street, cos Clyde thinks maybe Chiron that fat but funny fuck might still be up and, whether it is the loud banging on his door or the rock through his window, he is, o goody goody goody, looking like he always does in the mornings, which is like his face has fallen off somewhere during the night and he’s just picked it back up off the street and stuck it back on with spit (or something worse and we never ask) so every bit of it just doesn’t quite fit.

We are happy to see him again and even happier when he pours out a slug and fucking ecstatic when he chases the slug with some powder, which chases away my morning gloom boom bang kapow and sets Clyde on his ass for a while as we talk shit with Chiron about the story thing we are going to do for him. We need an excuse for visiting that isn’t pure greed so we use the same story thing we’ve been pretending to do for him for ages and natch haven’t. But we spin a tale for him... you know how it is, Mr Chiron sir, you’re ready then you’re not quite ready cos you see some bum in the street and get his story and want to add it your story so that’s a whole new story you gotta work out, and by then days weeks months have gone by so you decide to save it for the next time but you just know you’re gonna see another bum and get another story and your life will just start repeating itself even more than it does, not that we mind repetition, not that we mind repetition, not that we mind repetition.

Chiron doesn’t seem to mind the procrastination or the repetition and probably doesn’t want the story anyhow but he likes to be a patron of the arts cos it makes him feel better about what he does for bread and blow.

That’s another thing we never ask.

We are now too restless to shoot the shit or anything else with Chiron for too long and Clyde leaps up like a lobster or at least a pissed-off soft shell Frisco crab has bit the ass he’d just been set on and says he wants to go to the Craic even though he hates it, just like we all hate it, but it is there and it is just right now this instant don’t miss one second open. We are suddenly sick of Chiron’s fallen tar-streaked face anyway cos it’s been all of ten minutes we’ve been looking at it and that is more than enough, so off we go with a smile and a wave and a thank you for the slug and the powder, sucker, may Buddha cast his blessings upon you, that last from Clyde cos he still calls himself a Buddhist from the time he met an animal-rights girl called Mabel over on Jones Street who wanted to save him and they did it under the fat-belly Buddha statue she hung over her bed that he thought was going to fall on him, and as it turned out did.

He thought that it is karma to take the good with the bad, even when it leaves a scar like the Mahatma’s belly button on your forehead.

Outside it is a typical Frisco morning with abandoned fog still playing hide and seek in the drains and the cow moans of the tugs in the distance. The sun is up but, like always, it is not anywhere near as hot as it looks from inside, so you’re never sure what to wear. That’s why I just say the hell with it and wear the same thing every day, namely sandals that let my toes breathe, shorts that let my knees breathe, and my favorite grey with yellow palm trees Hawaiian shirt that lets my chest breathe and never wrinkles.

Man o man, you could surf sail slalom or slap bellies in that shirt and it never shows a mark. Not that I ever do those things cos I wear the same things every day just as I do the same things every day

I take a certain amount of satisfaction from knowing I could surf sail slalom or slap bellies in my shirt with nary a wrinkle if I wanted to. It is my magic shirt like the ghost shirts the Indians used to wear that could stop bullets if you believed, and I believe this ghost shirt of lost alohas can stop wrinkles so it does.

As we walk up Bush Street on this day that is already different cos I am moving - but sometimes you just have to adapt - I am a picture of synthetic splendor, ravishing in rayon, nodding at the bums whose stories we’ve already stolen and made into our own, and keeping an eye out for interesting new bums with tales still to be stolen, but it must have been a bum holy day cos there aren’t many around, and I theorize that they are all up at Grace Cathedral having a bum mass doing croak-frog versions of The Messiah while they eye the sacramental wine and scheme how they can Handel it. This is quite mild as far as my theories go but it is early yet and I can feel some doozies coming up with the sun that can’t make up its mind, followed shortly after by the entrance to the Craic.

New Year's Resolutions

Clyde and I think we need some order in our lives. Since arriving back in Frisco we have been just going with flow, like the devil-may-care bohemian artists we are, but this has been affecting our creative output. The only story I've written lately was about a guy who can only speak in puns, so no-one takes him seriously until he ends it all by diving into a vat of ochre and dyeing .

So we sat down today and drew up a daily schedule which will allow us to be a bit more productive:

11AM: WAKE UP. ENJOY TINGES OF REGRET.
12PM: WATCH SPORTSCENTER.
1PM: WAKE UP CLYDE.
2PM: WATCH ‘HOGAN’S HEROES’.
3PM: WAKE UP CLYDE.
3.30PM: WRITE.
4PM: PRE-BEERTHIRTY. HEAD FOR BAR.
4.30PM BEERTHIRTY BEGINS.
5PM: READ PAPER.
6PM: CLYDE ARRIVES. CROSSWORD.
7PM: GIANTS GAME. POWDER NOSE.
10PM: DISCUSS GAME WITH CLYDE.
11PM: POWDER NOSE. FEEL INVINCIBLE.
2AM: HOME.
11AM: WAKE UP. ENJOY TINGES OF REGRET

I hope this works.

A white Christmas

It was Christmas yesterday and Clyde was in one of his moods. We both got really drunk at the pub the night before, had some powder and so were up most of Christmas Eve trying to think of a way to trap Santa. We wandered over lower Nob Hill listening for sleigh bells, but the damn clanging of the cable cars confused us and we missed the hairy old bastard. Clyde kept insisting he could smell reindeer poo but it smelled like the same old crap to me.

When we finally woke up on Christmas afternoon he was really pissed that I didn't get him a present. I told him that cos he is an imaginary horse I got him an imaginary present, but when he asked what it was I couldn't think of anything cos my brain was still filled with fur from the previous night's beer and powder.

Just to make me feel worse, he gave me a copy of 'Ficciones' by Jorge Luis Borges. I checked and it was a real copy too. I like Borges but it made me feel guilty as well as hungover, altho that was the point I guess.

Raindrops aren't falling on my head.

Clyde wanted to go to the pub today, but it was raining.

"It's raining," I said.

“Shit,” said my horse.

Clyde doesn't mind rain, but he knows I'm not too fond of it. I have a theory that the impact of rain drops suiciding from the sky can cause dents on my skull, much like the beat of a butterfy's wings can cause hurricanes on the other side of the globe, and that even the smallest dent might affect my writing. I'm pretty sure I was rained upon a lot as a child, when I was most vulnerable, and that is why things are the way they often are.

"OK, we'll take a cab," said Clyde, after trying that batting of the eyelids routine he tries sometimes to get his way. He has long, almost prehensile eyelashes which I suspect he spends hours training.

Clyde doesn’t like taxis very much but he is very fond of beer. I’m not too keen on them myself due to issues with the people who drive them. They are all too often inveterate natterers, usually in inverse proportion to how much I feel like being nattered to. My silence is no barrier, my hints are too subtle, and all too often I’ve had to just tell them to shut up, producing a ride that is as uncomfortable as my last visit to my mother.

Clyde’s problem is a purely physical one. He is a very large imaginary horse and taxis are generally designed for moderately sized real humans. So getting him into the back of one is quite an effort. Our usual method is for him to go in the back door facing laterally, with his front legs curled up on the seat. He shuffles along and tucks his hindquarters underneath him, whereupon I give him an extra push and squeeze the door behind him. His head sticks out the window on one side of the cab and his ass and tail bulge out of the other. The more bloody minded drivers, peeved by these equine protuberances but obliged by Frisco law to carry him, have in the past attached little colored flags to his tail and forelock as a warning to traffic. The indignity of this is one of the reasons we moved to Frisco in the first place, cos one of the sweetest things about Frisco is how close and walkable everything is, at least in the couple of blocks that are our usual turf.

The driver today is not the bloody minded type - altho his driving seems likely to cause bloodiness in anyone rash enough to get in his way - and Clyde is blessedly flag free. This is good cos now I don’t have to listen to him cussing under his breath about being treated like mere goods. It’s not bad enough that his breed is made to pull cargo but now he is treated like cargo himself. He has his pride after all.

"Mmm, beer." said Clyde when we arrived outside the Craic. He likes the Simspons too.

The devil is in the details

I guess it is natural to wonder what I did to deserve Clyde. And I mean that in an entirely non-judgmental way. The jury is still out whether his presence is a blessing or a curse.

I'm told many or even most people have an imaginary friend as a child, and that the worse their childhood the longer that friend stays with them. Or if you are believer in Phillip Pullman's theocracy, we all have our own daemon, visible or not.

But, to the best of my recollection, I didn't have an imaginary childhood friend or daemon. Instead Clyde popped forth fully formed shortly after my fortieth birthday. So rather than the give and take and evolution that would happen with a life long imaginary friend, we have to take each other as we are - grown and set in our ways.

Clyde's way appears be that of a drug-crazed, sex-addicted imaginary sociopath. Assuming in the Freudian or even Jungian sense that he is the black to my white, the yin to my yang, the impression to my footprint, and that between us, averaged out, we make a normal person,I'm a little concerned what this says about me.

I shared my fears with Clyde and he laughed at me.

Don't call it Frisco

“Anything more practical in mind?" I finally asked him.

Clyde thought, and as is his habit when thinking shuffled from foot to foot to foot to foot.

“I’d like to go back to Frisco. We should never have left, although when I say ‘we’ I mean ‘you’ cos where you go I have to go. We need to get back to our Frisco roots – and that is meant to be a play on words.”

“You know we’re not supposed to call it Frisco. That exposes us as out of town hicks of the worst type, vermin fit only for squishing and ridiculing, losers to be placed in the stocks as targets for abuse and slightly rotten vegetables, and then quite possibly sterilized before our tainted seed can spread and infect the rest of the city. It’s San Francisco. San Fran. Or SF. If you’re really pretentious even ‘the City’. No-one’s called it Frisco in decades, not since the Beats, not since a beret was considered an essential badge of hipness. To call San Francisco ‘Frisco’ is both infra dig and very uncool.”

Stupid horse.

“Yes yes yes I know I know I know. I don’t want to go back to those places. San Francisco is too clean and shiny, too pale, too pretty. I want to go to back to Frisco! With an exclamation mark. With the full point of that exclamation mark being a beer puddle or an acid drop or the pupil of a dreamy hippy chick’s eye. Or whatever. That’s where I want to go, where we need to go, where you have to go. Where I can fuck and where you can get fucked up. Where you can pretend to be a writer cos that’s much funnier than when you pretend to be a person. Frisco, daddio!”

Here we go.

“Bohemians, booze, babes, beatnicks, blow, bebop, banging, blowjobs, babes, bennies, bonking, brawling, belching, balladeering, bullshitting, broke, boners, busted, beauty, babes, borrowing, bashing, belting, boffing, bereavement, balls, basking, babes, brassieres, brass-knuckles, big-noting, bragging, boasting, breathing, bastards, bitches, bums, bellyaching, bravery, brightness, bottoms, boobs, breasts, brillcream, bosoms, bazookas, baps, boxes, bongos. Did I mention the babes?”

That’s an impressive list of vices my hoss is planning. All from just one letter of the alphabet, albeit a particularly evocative one. But I am weary and tired.

“I’m weary and tired.”

“You’re a pussy.”

“A pussy who just wants to curl up around the fire and lick his fur.”

The shake of his head - given the pendulum action of the long nose - almost knocked over my beer.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Let’s Paper Scissors Rock for it.”

“What?”

“Paper Scissors Rock. I win we go back to Frisco. You win we do your thing, boring and lifeless and pathetic and miserable though that thing may be.”

This was plain stupid, altho good for me. Clyde always loses at Paper Scissors Rock.

It’s not, in spite of popular perception about his breed, that he is slow and dimwitted. Or even that he is especially unlucky. Indeed Clyde is very intelligent and a great gambler, especially when he gets the tips straight from the horse’s mouth.

No, the problem lies in basic anatomy. More specifically in the differences between human anatomy and horse anatomy. Most specifically, the human hand can create various shapes, such as doggies, duckies and of course rocks, paper and scissors. Altho I always have trouble with duckies. Whereas a horse hoof can really only create a rock. Ergo, if you want to beat a horse at Paper Scissors Rock all you need to do is create Paper. Quod erat demonstrandum. Laydown misere. Piece of cake. Game over.

I decided to go through the motions, just to reassert the dominance of man over beast, real over imaginary and blonde over dirty chestnut.

On the count of three we displayed our respective hand and hoof. In my case with a certain world-weary nonchalance, a soupçon of insouciance and no doubt a look of unbearable smugness.

All three were wiped from my face by the sound of Clyde snorting with contempt. I turned my insufferably arrogant neck around to see that Clyde countered my Paper - which he of course knew I would do for the reasons outlined above - by the simple expedient of crossing his front legs into the distinctive shape of an open Scissors.

“Crap.”

“Never dismiss the power of the equine mind. Come, let us hie ourselves back to good old Frisco.”

“Just what great things do you expect to happen there?”

“You’re the writer, use your fucking imagination.”

A horse walks into a bar.

So the horse walked into the bar and sat down next to me.

“Hello,” he said. His voice is pretty much how you would expect it to be, altho I detect a bit of Boston brahmin in there somewhere. That leaning on the vowels like his tongue is having a snooze.

“Hey Clyde,” I said back and stopped. I don’t like to talk much and I especially was not too keen on talking to this horse in this bar at this time. We were having a tiff.
He put his foreleg around me and kissed me on the cheek. His lips were large, fluffy and wet. Like my pillow after a long, restless night when the temperature is up, only warmer.
“How are you feeling?”
“I’ve been waiting for you,” I said.
“You knew I’d be here.”
I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure, but yes I guess I did.

He ordered a beer and I had a beer already and we stared at the two beers and we were not sure what to say next so we didn’t say anything. I looked at him out of the corner of my eye and he looked at me directly cos his eyes are at the side of his head so he doesn’t have to move them anywhere. He blinked, which is unusual.

Normally things aren’t this awkward.

“Well, what do you want to do now?” I asked Clyde, figuring that there was a silence that needs breaking. Then immediately wishing I had left it whole.

“I want to stand astride the globe like a colossus, a behemoth, a giant. All mankind shall tremble at my words and pay obeisance to me with tributes of precious jewels, rare amulets and the finest food and drink. I shall live in a palace of Brobdingraggian proportions but Houyhnhnm philosophies and solve the world’s problems with the force of my personality and the strength of my will. All-powerful, I will nevertheless rule with compassion, altho let those who piss me off beware, because I will be terrible in my wrath when aroused. Under my rein the world will know peace at last. My subjects will spend their time writing, painting and becoming better lovers, and by a process of careful breeding selection - much as has been done with my equine brothers - the misshapen small-minded twits who now populate the globe will be replaced by a race of well-formed creatively-inclined uber-humans who will live lives of fulfillment and contentment, each contributing a thread to the rich tapestry of existence. Everyone will be happy because all their physical needs will be taken care of and they will be bred to be naturally horny so their fucking needs are catered for too. You, my friend, will be the only example of the old race to survive and I will put you in a museum as a warning to others to show the horrors of the past and the dangers of the old ways, altho you will be provided with everything you desire except freedom, because you are my buddy after all, the buddy of Clyde the Great, Clyde the Proud, Clyde the Magnificent - on your knees all who come before me.”

You can’t fault him for lack of ambition.

In the beginning there was Clyde

I first met Clyde not long after my wife and I split up.

Perhaps I should mention here that Clyde isn’t what passes for real in the neck of most woods. He’s actually my imaginary buddy and is of course a horse to boot. He’s also my best friend. It is a long story how I came to have a best friend who while very together is not all there, and is of the equine rather than philistine persuasion, altho there is a saying that you can choose your family but not your friends. Or is that the other way around?

Suffice it to say that Clyde appeared when needed, introducing himself politely and buying us both a beer. He proceeded to chat about our mutual interests quite amiably and indeed rather eloquently. Normally I can’t abide strangers, but before long I couldn’t imagine having a finer or of course furrier friend.

We have been together ever since.

Those who have an imaginary horse of their own will know the pleasure one can bring. For those who do not I can only express my deepest condolences sorrow sympathy and regret.
Oh yes, for those pedigree Nazis - or if you are simply curious - Clyde is a registered Clydesdale stallion, so he can breed. Boy does he take advantage. Ho ho ho. His full name is Clyde S. Dale but he has never told me what the ‘S’ stands for in spite of some fairly torrid interrogation. When I’m being intellectual I think it stands for symbiote. When I’m drunk I think it stands for Stan.

His sire is Grim Shandy and his dam Sunliner. He measures 18 hands and is officially a bay, altho as I said he thinks of himself as a dirty chestnut. He has a white blaze down his snout, and what is cutely called a white sock above his left front hoof. That hoof is fluffy as are his others.
He prefers to call it his mark of Cain.

Oh again, for those into such things, he is indeed hung.