With cancer, there’s always something. Some gleaming chamber in which to be inserted, some noxious compound with befuddling or bizarre collateral damage to ingest in a variety of ways, or great periods of mental vacancy wherein you drift around the edges of mortality as you thought you knew it.
But for some reason, life must go on, so I shuffled off some procedure and enlisted my friend Connery to join me in an afternoon at The Press Room on Ortega in answer to a summons from my Pedant Stalker, the Erstwhile Blimp Repairman and Hat Fool, written on the back of an unpaid bill for two Long Island iced teas from the Cliff Room on the Mesa with its bad music, silent barman, and worn pool table. I asked Connery to come along because he is both smarter and younger than I am, and that seemed like a good résumé for a meeting with the painstakingly mysterious happy-hour ghost who had somehow identified me as interesting during one languid after-lunch glass of wine on ice at Joe’s Café not far over on State.
The Press Club cocktail lounge is a British carryover from what they cheekily call the English Channel. The men’s loo boasts portraits of Queen Victoria over the toilet, Elizabeth I by the paper-towel rack, and a Warhol portrait of the current monarch — another incomparable Tudor like the first Elizabeth who allowed us Shakespeare and the hysterical romp past the medieval world into what became the English Renaissance, or an era that bears her name. The new queen, now some 65 years into her reign, watched history dismember Victoria’s empire, the Blitz, the rebuilding, and then Thatcher and then Brexit and now May and Trump — and, well, God Bless Her Graciousness. Victoria scowls down and on.