99 Beers Off The Wall
Tuesday, July 28, 2009 at 1:34PM 
Most people never think about writing a book and they are the lucky ones. You have to be some sort of serious lunatic to entertain this notion. I mean think about it, you think that you can string a bunch of words together to hold someone’s interest for 200 to 300 pages? You have to be one egotistical asshole to think you can pull some shit like that off. And that’s exactly what I am. My name is Marty, and I am an author. Of not one book, but two books. And today I’m writing about my book “99 Beers Off The Wall.”
They got respect, oh yeah,
He wants the same, oh yeah,
And its a certain kind of fool who
Like to hear the sound of his own name.
A poster on a storefront, the picture of a wanted man,
He had a reputation spreading like fire throughout the land,
It wasn’t for the money, at least it didn’t start that way,
It wasn't for the runnin’, but now he’s runnin’ everyday.
Those lyrics above are from an Eagles song entitled, “A Certain Kind Of Fool,” it was written by Randy Meisner, Don Henley and Glen Frey and for me it describes a writer to a “T.”
It’s a rarity for a writer to make an honest living typing out words. For every successful one, there’s a thousand more trying to make it and thinking in vain that they will. And it’s not about the money, in the end it’s all about the byline. Writers will act like they’re in it for some grand illusion, but in the long run, it’s the thrill of seeing the words: “By Marty Wombacher.” The first time you see your name in a byline in a newspaper or magazine, it’s the equivalent of shooting up pure heroin while smoking crystal meth and having an army of whores facilitating your every whim and fancy. And it takes a certain kind of fool to chase something like that. And I’ve done it and luckily I’ve lived to tell about it. And it’s not for the running, but soon, if you’re a serious writer, you’re on a treadmill looking for the next deadline, the next story, the next BIG THING. You’re running every fucking day and it never ends. And you’re always scared that you will run out of ideas. You’re constantly running and thinking and you’re always scared. It’s not a normal way to live, believe me I know. I’ve been doing this shit for over 20 fucking years. So why do it? For the byline, baby, for the byline.
Writing is weird. I think deep inside every writer is a voice screaming, “They’re going to find out you’re a fake, asshole!” over and over on an unending loop. Because what is a writer? It’s someone taking words we all have access to and assembling them in a certain fashion and then having the balls to put their name on it and expecting everyone to read it. It’s like being a fucking circus clown. Everytime someone says to me, “I just read that article you wrote,” I think, “Fuck, don’t you have anything better to do?” But yet, I continue to write and expect people to read the latest formation of words I’ve putten together. Crazy when you think about it, and I obsess over it every fucking day of my life. It takes a certain kind of fool to surrender his life to this shit.
And articles are one thing, but committing to a book is nuts. I’ve done some joke books and things, but I’ve only written two books that I consider “real books.” The first one is titled, “99 Beers Off The Wall,” and that’s what I’m writing about today, and expecting people to read this shit.
I got the idea for “99 Beers Off The Wall,” after reading a Zagat’s guide book and checking out a bar that they reviewed as a first class dive bar. I went there and it was nothing like the review said it was. Then I learned that anything in a Zagat’s review that’s in quotes, is something that’s sent in and isn’t fact checked. And I realized what a fucking scam the Zagat’s guides are. Basically, if you have a bar, you can send in phony reviews, Zagat’s reprints them, the bars put the reviews up in the window, it’s free advertising for Zagat’s and everyone wins except the poor schmuckola who believes the fake review.
This really pissed me off and I decided to write my own guidebook. I’ve written bar reviews for Time Out New York and citysearch.com, so I considered myself a seasoned bar reviewer and writer. I took seven days off from work and went to 99 bars and drank 99 beers and took notes to write reviews of the bars. And in between I took notes on travelling around New York City, drunk as a skunk, reviewing bar after bar. The seven day research part of the book wasn’t tough, I knew that if you drank one beer an hour, you wouldn’t get drunk, so from noon to six, I would pace myself. Then from six on, things got a little hairier, but that made for good copy in the notes. I did this in the third week of August, 2001. I went back to work, rested up a bit and then in the first week of September, I started writing my book.
Starting a book is always scary. It’s really daunting and weird thinking that you can fill up 200 pages or more with words that people are going to continue reading. But a true writer needs to have confidence that borders on stupidity and I have that in abundance. So I started on the introduction and soon I had banged out that and the first chapter in little over a week. And I was working with an independent copy editor who was howling at my results and telling me it was really funny and decent writing, and outside of the usual grammar and punctuation corrections, didn’t have a lot of notes for me to try and correct. Hallelujah! Maybe I was on to something! And then I found out I was on to something and that something was something we now know as September 11th. Fuck!
I was working a 7 at night to 7 in the morning shift on September 11th, 2001 and was dog tired that morning. I came home chugged a few beers and went to bed. When I woke up it was a different world and I was in shock. I didn’t even think about the book for about a week and when I did I tried to write and nothing happened. This wasn’t good. I remember one Saturday sitting at my computer for about seven hours with my fingers on the home row and nothing happening. The brain pistons weren’t firing and I was afraid that through all the shit I had seen and lived through that it had taken away my ability to write. And for about a week, every day I would sit at my computer with my hands on the home row and nothing would move. And then I remembered something I had read about Hunter S. Thompson. As a young writer he would type the entire novel of “The Great Gatsby” to get a feel of the sensation of writing words that ended up being that novel. One of my favorite books has always been “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” by Mark Twain, so I went to my bookshelf and typed a chapter of that in. Minutes later my notes were out and I was banging out the second chapter of “99 Beers Off The Wall.”
My friend Joe Freedman published and designed the book and we got some publicity in the Peoria Journal Star, The New York Press and some websites, but I almost hit the motherlode with this one. About a week after it came out I got a call from ABC news. It was a producer wanting to know if they could film a segment for their overnight newscast. Well, gee, I guess so!
It turns out, someone I had comped the book to at People magazine knew a producer at ABC, gave them the book and the producer thought it would make a funny segment for their overnight news program. So we went out and went to three bars I had reviewed with an ABC film crew and for eight hours filmed segments with one of their on air people and myself talking to people in the bars about the book. It was really funny because since there was an ABC film crew, people thought I was a known author and wanted to buy an autographed copy of the book. Luckily I thought this might happen so I brought along a bag of books and sold them for ten bucks apiece.
After we were done, the producer said she would call me when the piece would air. We filmed this in May and by the end of June I had not heard from her. So I called her and she said they were waiting for a slow news night. By July they were still waiting. September came and she said they were busy getting ready for the one year anniversary of September 11th and the piece had been spiked. She said she was sorry.
Fuck, I got hit by September 11th twice. In the end, we sold about 800 copies and I was depressed about this, till Joe said to me, “When you were a kid, did you ever think you would write a book and that 800 people would buy it?” And he was right, that made me feel okay and proud of what I had done. It also caused a question to form in my mind, “Didn’t those 800 people have anything better to do?”
Below is an excerpt from the first chapter of “99 Beers Off The Wall.” Enjoy and thanks for reading!
Sunday
Sunday Bloody Sunday
11:30 a.m. Jesus God, it’s hotter than Satan’s ass out here. I’m walking eastbound on 19th St. heading towards 3rd Ave. It’s already in the 90’s and the weather (on the ones) on NY1 said we could break heat records all week long. I’m sweating like a lunatic.
12:05 p.m. I made it to the first bar on my schedule (Paddy Maguire’s, I decided to go to Irish bars all day) but the stout Irish woman behind the bar told me to come back at 1:00 when they open. I called the night before and some Irish hooligan told me they opened at noon on Sunday. I’ve got to stop being so trustful of people. This asshole single-handedly fucked with my schedule and now I’m paying the price for it. He’s somewhere in this city having a good old “Irish chuckle” at my expense right at this stinking moment. Oh well, fuck it, I’ll walk around and find a diner to get something to eat.
12:10 p.m. I’ve walked three blocks and can’t believe what I’m looking at on the corner of 22nd and 3rd: The Lyric Diner. The fucking Lyric Diner...hah! Hah, hah, hah! No, I haven’t started drinking yet, it’s just that one of my favorite New York stories took place right here in the Lyric Diner.
And here it is: In ’97 or ’98 a guy we’ll call Alvin (I swore to him I’d never tell this story, so the least I can do is change his name) had moved here to Manhattan. He was a writer I had known for a while and we decided to have lunch. He was going to tell me his plans for the future in this city some call the Big Apple. I never do...call it the Big Apple that is. I meet him and he suggests we go to his neighborhood diner, The Lyric Diner. So we walk to the diner, it’s Sunday around 1:30 p.m., and it’s jam-packed with patrons all hungering for a patty melt and fries with gravy and other daily diner specials.
We get a table towards the back in the middle of the rectangular, brightly lit diner. I usually don’t eat much in the daytime, so I have a diet Coke and a glass of water. But Alvin really packs it in. Eggs, sausage, toast, bacon, potatoes, jelly, butter, coffee and I think cheese was involved somewhere in the course of the meal. It was the brunch special and it was more food than I’d ever seen someone eat for breakfast in my entire life of watching other people eat breakfast. And he was really shoveling it down fast and furious, Fatty Arbuckle style.
He had just jammed the last forkful of the gargantuan feast in his mouth and started to say something, but then he gags. His eyes cross for the briefest of moments, and then he starts choking. I ask him if he’s alright and he puts his hand to his mouth. Only one second of normalcy remained for the rest of our stay in The Lyric Diner. For it was then that puke started to stream between his fingers and he stood up over the table and let out an ear-piercing BARRRRRFFFF!! sound and puked all over the table. And then he did it again. And then, just for good measure, he did it once more with feeling.
By now I’ve jumped back from the table which is literally dripping with puke. And we’re talking really gross throw up here folks, big grey chunks and sickening looking multi-colored runny matter all over our table and dripping down to the floor. By now Alvin has stopped puking and is standing there kind of in a daze. His face is red and his eyes are watering. I look around the diner and it’s like someone has shot an Uzi off in the joint. No one is talking, no one is eating, no one is moving. In one instant it went from the typical noisy, clinkity-clank-silverware-hitting-plates diner noise to complete and utter silence.
Everybody is staring at us and the puke-riddled table. It’s like time was frozen. And it’s at this moment that I see something that I’ll never forget. I look a couple of tables ahead of me and off to the left in a booth is a typical Manhattan yuppie power couple with their two boys who look to be roughly five and seven years old. Dad and the boys have on navy blue suits, white shirts and ties and mom is decked out in a summery white dress and wearing jewelry that maybe I’ll be able to afford after three lifetimes of working hard labor. The entire family is shiny, clean and polished ten times from Tuesday. And the whole stinking lot of them are staring wide-eyed, open mouthed at our table which has been turned into a vomitorium. And they all have full plates of food in front of them, they had just been served. I instinctively know that their cherished after-church weekly brunch has been ruined, maybe for the remainder of the summer, perhaps for the rest of their lives. The children would be scarred, that much was certain. But I couldn’t waste valuable time worrying about them, I just had to get out of that place and away from the puke.
By this time Alvin cleans himself up by fouling every napkin at our table. We walk up to our wide-eyed, frozen waitress in the corner and she nervously scribbles out our check. All eyes are glued to us as Alvin places a twenty on her tray and apologizes for the mess she’s going to have to clean up. She just stares ice at us. We pay the bill up front to the sickened cashier and as we leave there is still entire silence in the diner. Right at that moment I felt as if I were a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army holding up that bank with Patty Hearst back in the ’70s. I hadn’t been back to this place since.
And now, four years later, here I am. I have a weird feeling that as I walk in, someone will say, “There he is, one of the throw up guys, lynch him!”
1:00 p.m. I made it safely through breakfast (diet Coke, order of toast, hold the puke) and walked around the neighborhood to kill 17 minutes. It’s finally time to duck into the first bar before the sidewalks and street people spontaneously combust into flames from this godawful and terrible heat. I’ve worked up a powerful thirst. Luckily I’ve scheduled myself for 17 bars today. Like I always say, “If you can’t stand the heat in the kitchen, well...you know, just start drinking.”
Reader Comments (9)
see, this is why i never eat jelly.
Another great story and I loved the excerpt from the book! Wish I would've been at that lunch!
It seems that explosive dinner is quit common...
OK
Very good introduction and excerpt ! I enjoyed again! so much truth about the writer's feelings and why he write, hmm... I really enjoyed to hear that I eventually get "normals" thought, but "that it's not a normal way to live" LOL ! :D
What is fabulous with your title "99 beers of the wall" is that to our (me and grompf) HQ Bar "L'ancienne Belgique", there are exactly 99 different belgian beers !!!! We go there almost...every day! lol but I just to realize that for 3 years, I never tasted all!
“Because what is a writer? It’s someone taking words we all have access to and assembling them in a certain fashion and then having the balls to put their name on it and expecting everyone to read it." = WoOh! fucking true! fuck.. I'm going to masturbate my brain now... and Grompf is thinking about me "fuck! she will get her psychotic mood because she never had the balls to put her name on her writting! and I will be (again!) obliged to play the psychiatrist tomorrow! Argh!" LOL MOUHAHAHA! ;) ziiiioum !
But a writer is also someone who always want to be at the "right heur" for start to write but who wait 6 hours in front of his computer that something happens!" ;) Yo! V8 insane brain mood actived! tudu du dudu! ziiioum! haha :D
TO VOMITORIUM !
TO VOMITORIUM!
TO THROW UP GUYS!
TO THROW UP GUYS!
Two very fine books indeed! I have one copy that is signed and the other one has some sort of problem with the pages sticking together.........i wonder what that could be?