Barry's Life in Napa Blog

January 28, 2011 On the train from London to Dover Neal called him a Lithuanian git as we wandered drunkenly down the street in Soho. The Lithuanian was a massive man working the door at a bar with a band playing upstairs, and he turned Neal and me away, telling us we'd had too much to drink. The rest of our impromptu party had already run up the stairs as we listened to his scolding. Go down to the KFC and eat some food, the Lithuanian said. I was at about a five on a ten-point scale of boozing but there was no denying I had bounced off the door frame as I tried to walk into the place, and that caught the Lithuanian's attention, and I had been in town too long to blame jet lag. The Lithuanian had a huge head under a fur cap. His eyes were childlike and he had that weary look that bouncers usually have. Above all, he was enormous, and I decided not to argue with him. Neal and I shuffled into a cheap Chinese diner and disinterestedly ordered something sweet and sour. I was think...

At The Crown & Anchor, Covent Garden, London January 25, 2011 My unerring sense of direction, which I always mention just before becoming deeply lost, is failing me on the streets on London. In a normal world I can parse out north-south-east-west from the position and angle of the sun. A normal world, however, does not have a pewter sky that gives no clue as to the position and angle of the sun, and, in fact, makes one suspect that the sun has, at last, burned out. And so I wander through curving cobbled streets, cheerfully baffled, and stop to puzzle over every streetside map. Thankfully, The Magic Beer will make it all better. What's that? You don't know of The Magic Beer? Draw nigh, child, and let me fill you up - fill you in, I mean. The Magic Beer is an event that can only occur when one is on vacation - or 'on holiday' as they say here (and as you can see I am quickly learning this foreign tongue.) The Magic Beer always happens around 2:00 pm local time, at th...

New York: January 21, 2011 He sat down beside me at the oval bar on the balcony at Grand Central. He was a young, handsome Latino in a skin-tight T-shirt. His Manhattan arrived and he turned to me and told me his name was Manolo and I settled in to wait for him to put the moves on me. His accent was thick and I picked up every third word as Manolo emptied his mind of every current thought, in the unrestrained way of someone who is drunk. His family owns three restaurants in New York, he says. They make the best margarita in the city. I should come there to 59th and 9th and he will give me a free one. He lived in Miami but he hated it. Too much non-stop partying. He likes to box, He is 30 and he is in love and his lady is only 20 and she is over there on the other side of the bar with another man. He stood on the rail and propped his elbows on the bar and learned around the bartender and said Yes, she still there. His lady is beautiful, he says, and she is bi-polar. She ran off to the ...

To paraphrase some comedian I once heard: "There comes an age when a person should stop making a big deal about their birthday, and that age is 12." It came as some surprise, then, to have a couple of Facebook friends suggest I should blog about my birthday, because out of all the topics I might think to write about, my birthday would rank about 1,327. I had a birthday. Whoop-dee-frickin-doo. Slap me silly and call me morose, but it's just a reminder that I'm a year closer to being dead than I was a year ago. "I have seen the eternal footman hold my coat and snicker" and it's not pretty. Simultaneously, since I'm really good at holding completely contradictory thoughts in my head side-by-side and seeing them both as honest and true because, after all, they are MY thoughts and all my thoughts are honest and true and even admirable (ahem) I still secretly wish for someone to surprise me, make a big deal of my birthday, and make me feel loved. (This hap...