Nicollet Avenue

   Forty years ago, I lived on and then near the location where Alex Pretti was shot to death January 24.

    That intersection, 26th and Nicollet Avenue, was, and probably still is, a nice area. I haven't been there since, and it'd be a 1,150-mile drive from where I live now, so I probably won't go there again.

   My three years in that neighborhood were happy ones, though, in what proved to be a preview for my life, I had far more failures there than successes. But I was young then and full of hope for an interesting and fun future.

   There were decent restaurants there. At that time of my life, just after college, I didn't care about how food tasted. (I still don't. The idea of spending more than twenty-five dollars to eat out makes little sense to me.)

   One restaurant that's still there was the Black Forest Inn, a German-style place. It was a little upscale for my budget, but it had an adjoining yard you could sit in on warm days. In Minneapolis, that's a waste of real estate, but it was nice to have. There was also a croissant place near the northwest corner. (It was the eighties; croissants were everywhere for a few years.) I'd go there with something to read and get my favorite order; an almond croissant and a cup of coffee. Also, there was a drugstore on that corner. It was big, and not like they are now. It had a restaurant section, diner style. A counter, booths, and I think they only served breakfast and lunch. It was open fairly late. The owner was known to hire men who'd been through rough times and for giving free meals to people down on their luck. The Sunday newspapers would arrive on Saturday night. I have warm memories of walking the few blocks there on hard snow with single digit temperatures, buying the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and the Sunday New York Times, and maybe a bag of peanut M&Ms, then trudging back to my warm apartment to read the papers and maybe something on my little black and white television.

   The neighborhood was safe but, for Minneapolis at that time, a little downscale. One warm summer day I saw a teenage girl wearing shorts and a halter top walking up and down the sidewalk across the street from me. I was watching her because she was wearing high-heeled shoes clearly for the first time. I had no idea what she was doing until an older and wiser neighbor pointed out that she was a fledgling prostitute. But that was about as bad as it got.

   When significant events happen far from you, they do—or should—have impact on you. It's only natural that when they happen in a place you know the impact is greater. Pretti was born five years after I left Minneapolis, but knowing that a decent guy was murdered by barely trained government thugs wounds me.

Minneapolis, winter, 1982

I'd been walking after a late winter snow storm so heavy it kept even most native Minnesotans indoors. It was my second year there and though I was from a place where it snowed it was nothing like this and the adventure of it still appealed to me. So did the ways Minnesotans coped. In my Mid-Atlantic state snow was plowed to the sides of the road. Here, there was so much of it they'd load it into dump trucks and dump it in the Mississippi River. High-end hotels and some businesses in downtown Minneapolis had heated sidewalks that melted the snow as it fell. Within a day after a heavy snowfall you could go downtown and see no evidence of it.

A Depression-era man.

On this afternoon I walked to a part of the city I'd never been to before. It wasn't near a lake or anything interesting. A working class area, about as bad as the city got then, which wasn't very bad. There were muggings in Minneapolis, but not many compared to New York or Philadelphia. 

My way of dressing was still the rebellious way I'd adopted in college. I'd wear three or four sweaters and a sport coat over them rather than a winter coat. Layering was not a concept as widely understood then as it is now and the typical Minnesotan wore a thick down jacket. 

I'd been out walking for a few hours and I was headed back to my apartment building. It was a weekday and I was unemployed at the time. When I was less than a mile from my building, two men were walking toward me. It had just gotten dark. One of them looked a me for a moment, then spoke. 

"If you hurry," he said, "I think there's some spaghetti left."  There was a church down the block.

Most would have taken this sincere bit of advice as a cue to step up their fashion game. Not me. I stayed dense about such things until I wasn't anymore but by then time had ravaged my body enough that no one cared how I dressed. I would love to go back in time and learn a little more about how to dress. Nothing fancy, but something.

A cool guy the Loser met once

After working overseas for four years, the Complete and Total Loser decided to travel for awhile before returning to America and taking up the rest of his loser life. He'd been working in Asia (China, Japan) so seeing more of it and places in that part of the world seemed like the logical thing to do.
The Loser went to Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Australia, and India over the thirteen months he traveled, which were from February of 1989 to April of 1990. The only part of Indonesia he visited was the island of Sumatra. 
It's an interesting place, Sumatra. Orangutans, mysterious tribes, risky trips on fraying ferries and tightly packed Mercedes buses. During his stay there he visited a place called Lake Toba, which is an inactive volcano the crater of which has filled with water over the course of about 70,000 years. (The lake is now about 60 miles long, 19 miles wide and up to 1,657 feet deep.) The guest house the Loser stayed in while there was run by a German woman and her Indonesian husband. The people who stayed there were mostly Europeans, with a few Canadians and Americans. The guest house had two major attractions. One was its pier, which was better than those at the other guest houses. Another was the food. The German woman was a good cook, giving her Western spin to native dishes. 
The Loser was a younger man then, duh, of thirty-one. He swam when he could while traveling to keep fit, and the swimming in Lake Toba was good. Although the sanitation being what it was in Indonesia at the time meant that whatever waste most had went straight into the lake, the lake was large enough and the population small enough that the water remained pure, though you wouldn't dip a glass in it and swig it down. The Loser liked long distance swimming in open water, which he didn't know was a trend until years later. He'd swim out from the pier for nearly a mile, float and bob in the water for some time, then swim back and lie in the sun on the pier with the others. Once after he returned one of his pier mates told the Loser that he was so far out no one could see him and they wondered if he'd gone under.
The food and room were inexpensive, the Loser had lots of money at the time, and the European women took their tops off while sunbathing on the pier. They were young and pretty and had lovely accents. The Loser could have stayed there forever.
After he'd been there for several days another American came. Americans, having the short vacation times they do, don't travel as much as others, nor do they travel the same way. This man had time and money and interest so he traveled like a European, or like the Loser, who was putting off real life.
The man's name was Tim Carr. 

Tim Carr.

The Loser and Tim met soon—there were never more than ten to fifteen people at the guest house—and found they had some things in common. Tim was about two years older than the Loser and from Minneapolis, where the Loser, who is from the Philadelphia suburbs, had lived in the early 1980s, before leaving to work overseas. He was warm, funny and bright but not in an intimidating way. He saw life as a simple gift meant to be enjoyed and not taken too seriously.
For work, he was in the music business and had worked with top names in the industry as a recording engineer for Capital Records since leaving Minneapolis for New York. David Bryne, Laurie Anderson, The Beastie Boys, Paul Shaffer. Near the beginning of his career in music, he told the Loser, he had worked as a music critic for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the dominant newspaper at that time, reviewing classic music performances. He had no schooling in classical music, he told the Loser, and did the reviews by attending the concerts and looking up previous reviews from over the years by experienced critics and cribbing from them extensively. In other words, he wrote his reviews the way many of his and the Loser's generation wrote most papers while in high school, which was by rewording entries they found in

Guest houses on Lake Toba.

Encyclopedia Britannica. Ethical? No, but who cares? It wasn't vital investigative reporting, they were review of concerts. Tim had done this well enough that he got much praise for his reviews, but he hungered to do more in the music world, hence his move to New York. He also told the Loser that he disappeared for awhile, went underground. He didn't offer the whole story and the Loser didn't ask, but he guessed that it had something to do with drugs.
Every few years since meeting Tim, the Loser has looked up his name online to see what he was up to. He hadn't done so for years until early today, which is December 16, 2017.
What he found was this, from an April, 2013, edition of the paper in Minneapolis he'd worked for:

Timothy Joseph Carr
Carr, Timothy Joseph, 57, died unexpectedly last week in his home in Thailand. Preceded in death by father, Tom Carr and survived by mother, Joan Carr, his brothers and sisters: Bridget (Pirsch), Tom Jr., Terry (Amy), Chris (Aimee), Michael (Ann), Dan (Kathy Glover), Molly, and Colleen (Tim Evon) and 20 loving nieces and nephews, who loved their Uncle Tim and his amazing stories and wonderful gifts.
Tim was whip smart, refreshingly funny and engaging, and his passing brings memories of incredible adventures to all who knew him across the globe. At various times, Tim lived in Bangkok, London, New York City, Los Angeles and Minneapolis. Tim grew up in Hopkins, attended the University of Minnesota, worked as the music critic for the Star Tribune, and was a freelance writer for Rolling Stone and other publications. He also served as Performing Arts Curator at the Walker Art Center (where he orchestrated the punk music festival Marathon-80).
Tim moved to New York in his early 20’s where he was Performing Arts Director at the Walker-like Kitchen Center of Performing Arts and was responsible for the first two seasons of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. He also worked in artist management with Laurie Anderson, Eric Bogosian, Arto Lindsay and more before embarking on 15 years working in Artists & Repertoire (A&R) for Capitol Records, Warner Brothers Records and Dreamworks Records where he worked with artists such as David Byrne, The Beastie Boys, Squeeze, Ash, Megadeth, Lush, Joan Jett, Paul Shaffer and more.
Tim moved to his beloved Thailand in 2002 where he became a writer, a promoter, an A&R guy for Asian bands, and even a TV and motion picture executive of sorts. Tim had unique perspectives, incomparable wit, a great smile and a joi de vivre that led to a robust career and life most of us had trouble even imagining. He’ll be missed. Memorials and a memorial service in Minneapolis will be announced as details are finalized.

Some sources described his death as being of a stab would to his chest and said he was found in his apartment alone with drugs, both prescription and otherwise, around him. Friends of Tim's said this wasn't true and pointed out that tabloids in Thailand were known for bad reporting and making things up, especially when writing about foreigners.
The Loser knew Tim Carr for just a few days but they got along well enough that Carr gave him his phone number and told him to give him a call if he were in New York.

Shopping, remembering

When no one loves you and you don't really have any good friends, getting ready to be housebound for months is hard. 
Although his surgery is a week away, the Complete and Total Loser has stockpiled prodigious amounts of stuff. Over one hundred and twenty bottles of water, lots of butter, bagels he's halved and frozen, six jars of peanut butter to put on those bagels, two dozen rolls of toilet paper, bath soap, aspirin, microwaveable meals, a variety of meats he's wrapped in foil and frozen, two cases of beer. He has much more to buy. Nuts, pickles, tofu, instant coffee, eggs, chicken sausage, juice. Some of this he's waiting until closer to the date so the food won't expire. Fortunately, the Loser is smart enough to know that most foods last well beyond their assigned expiration dates.

A gorilla hoarding food.

But no matter how much he buys the Loser knows that he'll miss something essential. Something dumb like salt. Paper towels. Toothpaste. 
Meanwhile, the knee that will be replaced seems to know it and is hurting as much as it can. In a way, this is good. It will keep the Loser from coming up with an excuse to avoid the operation. It's also making him think of a woman he knew over thirty years ago named Marlys. 
Marlys lived in the same house in Minneapolis the Loser lived in after college. The house had been divided into efficiency apartments and was inhabited by five people, all well under thirty except for Marlys, who was in, probably, her late fifties, the age the Loser is now. Life had been neither kind nor unkind to Marlys. It just ignored her completely. She'd never married. She made the Loser uncomfortable because she was clearly one of those people who simply never got it, something he at that age hoped wouldn't apply to him forever.
The Loser could hear her snoring through the thin drywall between their apartments in the otherwise solidly constructed house, which had been built to withstand harsh Minnesota winters. (The sound depressed him; he moved his bed away from the wall.) Of the few conversations they had, the one the Loser remembers now is of Marlys having trouble one day getting a taxi to take her back from the supermarket. "I certainly can't walk that far," she told the Loser, her expression one of stupid wonder that anyone could. It was her knee. The Loser, an unwrinkled 23-year-old, listened politely, concealing mild contempt. That store's just five blocks from her. It's a ten minute walk, if even that. 
With age and decrepitude comes understanding.

Prince and the Loser

Prince Rogers Nelson, June 7, 1958–April 21, 2016.

The Complete and Total Loser is less than three weeks older than Prince Rogers Nelson, who died today, April 21, 2016. 
The Loser was a senior in college when he first heard of Prince. It was 1981, and the Loser lived next door to his college radio station's program director, a man who had many milk cartons of albums and knew about all music, new and old. The Loser liked "Dirty Mind" very much. Liberating, sexy, funky dance music. The energy!
After college, the Loser moved to Minneapolis, Prince's home city, not because of Prince but it said good things about the city to the Loser. It turned out that Prince was a niche musician there and the people his age the Loser met, white like himself, were more interested in pale, blond music like—not kidding—the soundtrack to "Grease."
The Loser misses Prince already. 

In other news, Joanie Laurer, who was better known as Chyna, a female wrestler, was found dead on the same day. She was 46.
 

The Loser's history of physical love

Later, these two may fuck.

The Complete and Total Loser was a late bloomer. He was fourteen before he found out what it would feel like to fuck. It felt great. When you’re a kid a lot of life is discovering new sensations. There’s being tickled, tasting sugar, sneezing, but this was like discovering that he could fly. He remembers looking at his math teacher during class the next day and thinking this is a married man who could do what he had done last night with a woman all the time, if his wife was OK with it. It seemed crazy to him that life was structured around anything but fucking. Why weren’t people working harder to make robot farmers, doctors and laborers to take care of our basic needs so everybody could just fuck all day?
The Loser went to an all boys school and he didn’t know any girls until he went to college. By then, of course, he didn’t think everyone should just fuck all day but he still wanted to do it, of course. He was good at being friends with women but it stopped at that and it wasn’t until he was a junior in college that he even kissed a woman. She was also the first one he fucked. Everyone had told him that fucking was easy, that instinct would tell you what to do. It wasn’t true. There were angles inside women that you had to consider when getting started but you couldn’t see them because they were internal. And you couldn’t really see things well from where you were. It was like playing the harmonica.
He liked fucking, though. For the first time what the Loser had been doing alone for seven years was giving pleasure to someone else. He didn’t love her but he wanted to and he told himself that since you fuck people you love maybe you’d love people you fuck but that didn’t work so they only fucked a couple of times but the friendship remained. He fucked again during graduation week, again, someone who’d been a very good friend, and again, just a couple times. They lived far apart. After college the Loser lived in Minneapolis for awhile and a woman who lived in the house next door liked him and he liked her and they fucked sometimes. She’d go away and then come back and they’d fuck. They didn’t really have a lot in common but he learned that he did feel an intimacy with her that was beyond friendship so he can say he’s never had meaningless sex. There’s always an exchange of primal trust and that means something. She went away and joined the Army and he never saw her again.
He thought his adult life would have lots of fucking in it but the Loser was, as usual, wrong. He was still good at being friends with women, but still not good at anything beyond that so after the woman in Minneapolis he didn’t fuck anyone for fifteen years. For five of those years he was living overseas, was often in countries where it was legal and condoned to pay women to fuck, but he never did that, even though it was inexpensive and the women were pretty. It wasn’t a moral thing, he just never saw the point to it. To the Loser, fucking means that someone likes you and fucking someone you don’t even know who’s fucking you because she needs money might hate you for all you know so why bother? It felt just as good doing it himself. He fell in love during that time, but they didn’t fuck and she married someone else. The woman he fucked after those fifteen years was again more of a friend and again they just fucked a few times and again that ended. That was in 1997 and he hasn’t fucked anyone since. He’s gone out with a few women over the years but one of us, them, never likes the other as more than a friend so we end up not fucking.
He hasn’t kept count but the Loser doesn’t think he’s fucked more than twenty times in his life. He wasn’t so bad at fucking that anyone complained, but he wasn’t so great at it that a woman ever said what every man dreams of hearing, which is, “I’m gonna tell my girlfriends about you!” Now that he’s older the drive to fuck isn’t what it was and he’s pretty sure that he’ll never fuck again, which is OK with him. The Loser does have a profile on a dating site but the women there don’t like him any more than the ones in real life and honestly, he’s usually not crazy about them. He hasn’t met any of them for years. He looks at their profiles, thinks about writing to them but ends up saying, fuck it.

I Saved My Friend from Bill Cosby

The title of this post is the same as the title of a Daily Beast article published today and written by Lloyd Grove. It's about how Tony Hogue saved a friend from being sexually abused by Bill Cosby in 1984.
The Complete and Total Loser also saved a friend from being abused by Bill Cosby. 
Here's how he did it:

1. Instead of pursuing work in the glamorous, high-paying world of show business after graduating from college with the lowest GPA allowed by law, the Loser got a job in a liquor factory through a temp agency in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the early 1980s. 
2. The Loser futzed around over the years in similar low-paying jobs until in the 90s, when he put himself through graduate school in journalism.
3. Five years later, after making a living but going no place in that field, the Loser quit his job at a wire service where he was mocked and disliked. He got a job in retail.
4. After a dozen years of being treated poorly by his customers and superiors, the Loser lost that job due to "restructuring." 
5. The Loser, now well into middle age and without any marketable skills, is living on unemployment compensation. He wants to start his own business, but whether or not he has the self discipline to do so remains to be verified. So far, it doesn't look good, and the Loser may soon be operating a cash register near you.
6. The Loser has never had attractive friends, precluding having any who would have access to Bill Cosby.

Comedian and alleged rapist, Bill Cosby.

Sex and the Single Loser

Last night, near midnight. The Complete and Total Loser is in his bed, reading Henry James's "The Portrait of a Lady." He's surprised that he's able to read this book. A dull student with a short attention span, reading until just the past few years made him sleepy. Even now, as he reads this book, his eyes have to rewind back over sentences and paragraphs to understand what he's been reading.
He hears a sound. High, rhythmic. It's coming from under the iron steam heat radiator under one of the two windows in the main room of his tiny apartment. The sound is of a woman having sex.
The Loser is surprised for a moment. Not that he can hear this sound, which drifts up from the apartment below like a light smell; the building he lives in is a rowhouse converted cheaply years ago into six small apartments. He's surprised because he forgets that among a huge swath of humankind there are people who regularly, enthusiastically, have sex with each other.
He has had sex. With four women. The first time was in college, during his junior year, September, 1979. The girl was also the first one he kissed. She had pale, soft skin. She was 19, he 21. The relationship did not last past Halloween. The next was in 1981, in Minneapolis. The woman was 22, had a daughter age five who lived with her parents several miles away. The woman wore tube tops, smoked, drank, accepted money for sex from some people and had never finished high school. It was a tawdry affair which lasted from late August until sometime early October. Two years later she called the Loser from Fort Dix, New Jersey and told him she had joined the Army and was in basic training. He was overjoyed for her.
Then there was a gap. Of fifteen years.
In 1997 a woman who'd been a platonic friend since the mid 1980s contacted the Loser from her small house in Cardiff, Wales. There were phone calls, a visit was arranged, she flew to America for a week's stay. He was freelancing and work was light. They drank gin, watched television, talked for hours, went to Washington, had sex. She was a lovely woman, bright, kind, funny and had a musical laugh. But the Loser felt no spark and after months of expensive phone calls after her return what was left of their relationship died. In 2002 they resumed talking by phone and, a new thing for the woman, emailing. Another visit was on the verge of being arranged. Then the woman died. A systemic infection of some kind. He never got a clear reason. He flew to Wales for her funeral. He spent a week there—the way to get an inexpensive flight—walking the streets of Cardiff, going to museums. At night he slept in the tiny bed of one of her friend's.
She remains his most recent liaison.
He's had a few close calls since then. No, one. A woman at work a year ago. He thought the world of her but the passion needed to sustain anything beyond two months eluded him. In bed his lack of ability to sustain an erection came as a new disappointment to him. Age and anxiety. The woman was a recovering alcoholic and he didn't drink when he was with her despite her permission. Some wine, he thought, would help him forget his issues with his body (the deformity) and succeed. Before long she told him he didn't know what he wanted and that she'd been no more than an experiment to him. She cried. A lot. As if her head was full of water. They made a clean break over the course of a week and she found someone new. The new guy takes her places (Paris, Las Vegas) and out to dinner often, something the Loser hated and couldn't afford.
At 15, the Loser would hitchhike home from school often. Once a man in a big car gave him a lift and, as they were driving through a town the region's main suburban drag that hosted a women's college on a warm spring day, the man said, "What is it about a woman's jugs? I'm 64 years old and I'm still looking."
The Loser, now 50, gets that now. The feelings he once had—the orgasms that sent semen whizzing past his head—faded in his 40s and the moment now is an echo. And yet still he looks, and wonders, and hopes.