Tough Guy - Myrtle Avenue

One walking back From buying a Newport loosie On Myrtle across from the park Smoking slow Walking slower A bald man muscular His fit dog dropped to his belly__ "I know how you feel." I say to dog His man "Shut the fuck up, honky." "I ain't the type to shut up, Plus I wasn't talking to you. Have a good day, dog." Dog don't pay me any mind. Master says "I should break your head " "Damn, someone steal your Barbie doll." "Cracker motherfucker." "I ain't no Dixie son of a bitch. My people marched South from Maine to free the slaves . A honky yes. A cracker, hell, no. I hope you find your Barbie doll. See you dog " Bald man throws a traffic cone. Ten feet I'm fifteen feet away I pick up the cone and chuck it. Sixteen feet. Not at him. He is just angry. I know angry. "Damn, guess I won the traffic cone throwing contest. You and dog have a good day." Dog got up and walked West. Man followed, shouting over his shoulder. "Have a nice day "

Resistance # 2

Steal time When speaking with corporations. Act confused. Ask the same questions. Keep them on the phone Address all suspect MAGA males as hump__ Not non - binary All second sex MAGA as fump Drive 10 mph slower when ahead of the police and big SUVs Stop paying your taxes. Put a stash into the bank. Remember the banks takes your money for the government and do not pay you the interest on that money Call up your credit card companies and ask if they can lower your debt. Stop social media Carry cash Stop using plastic NANA Emile Zola

EC Member

Tired from the train back and forth. Three days of Winick Diamonds. Otherwise good. On my way to the Explorer Club to view some jewelry. This weekend Montaukees were talking about upscale clubs in the city. The EC put them in their place One man asked what had done. "What kinda and of exploring?" "Many members have been to Space, Climbed Everest. Spelunkers. scientists. Dangerous stuff. Just last year two members died in that Titanic dive." "So what have you done?" "I've hitchhiking from Lhasa to Kathmandu. Surfed Bali. Drove across the Andes. Many things, but I've also crossed to the other side. One more than one occasion. And each time back I had been reincarnated to this body. One more thing there is nothing on that side, so enjoy life and be a good person." It's the truth and I tell it as the truth. All there was? White light. The wives loved me The hobo poet. ps I paid my dues yesterday.

Writing THE END

Yesterday I typed THE END to ALMOST A DEAD MAN.

348 pages.

Then spell check.

Only seven typos

Then I hit search for God. Only seventeen times. No bad for an atheist.

I first wrote it in Ireland in 1997. I showed it to Shannon who read it in a single night. I sent the manuscript to a few publishers and then left the USA for Thailand where I wrote three more novels sending them overseas to the US. Nothing, but I kept writing.

I rewrote ALMOST A DEAD MAN in 2016, but was too broke to send it anywhere.

When my diamond job ended in Christmas I decided to clean up THE 2016 version. Two and a half months

348 pages

Now the hard part

Finding and agent or publisher

Next a synopsis and outline and talk about it all the time

Along with everything else

I'm hoping to fly to Bangkok and Hong Kong next month.

I start selling jewelry in Montauk this weekend.

It was a long wintah.

Mary Heaton Vorse reportedly said, "The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Today

Recovering from post partem THE END. I woke this morning, thinking, "Are you mad?"

A novel about pimps and whores with XXX sex scenes, BDSM, and violence and love and redemption and a woman's revenge against man, and fairy tales.

Off the food stamps to see if I can get more.

I had told them months ago that I was homeless, because I feel homeless. Insecure. Adrift. Apart. Like always do I'm comfortable that way.

Wish me luck.

Since the jewelry store in Montauk closed for the winter I've been revising a novel I wrote in 1997

Opening paragraphs of ALMOST A DEAD MAN

Hamburg 192

The scurry of claws across the filthy floor startled the woman on the battered chair and she lifted her black stiletto heels in horror. Rats were the least of her problems. Over the phone her lover had suggested a nocturnal rendezvous on Kaiserkai. No one came to Hamburg’s harbor at night. The woman had driven down to the warehouse district alone for rough sex with her Willi. Instead two men had been waiting on the unlit dock and dragged her into an abandoned warehouse. Now in a damp basement she pleaded, “Please let me go, I haven’t done anything wrong?”

"Nothing wrong?” The black man in the spotless jogging suit circled the chair. Aviator sunglasses hid his eyes. He swatted the dusty 40-watt bulb dangling from the rafter, then tapped the woman’s gaunt face.

“Are you a saint?”

“No, I am far from a saint.” The expensive wig flopped onto a folded lap.

"Saints are only saints, because they are dead. You on the other hand are alive, because you are a sinner."

Cali is still with us.

Trump Shock Syndrome

It just doesn't stop. Every morning I open the news websites to discovered the MAGA leader has come up with another scheme to set the world on fire. Deportations of illegals to El Salvador, Elon Musk slicing jobs from the federal government with his DOGE mandate. Nothing is sacred. Jobs are cut in social services by AI. His minions are so proud of his work against the woke radicals. Applications are only male/female. His world-wide tarriffs has fractured the global economy.

We are at war.

I am in shock.

Tomorrow I'm going to a demonstration in Bryant Park against the fool.

Hundreds of said demos around the country.

I am sure Trump has sent out orders to PDs around the nation to not tolerate any dissent.

There is no waking up from this.

A Man Of Clay

I'm starting the hunt for publishers and agents. Writing is the easy part.

Woody Allen said, "Those that write write, those who don't write teach writing and those that can't write teach physical education."

As a vagabond poet I've had very little truck with either. They travel in different circles or see me and recognize trouble.

I rewrote ALMOST A DEAD MAN from a 2016 version. Yesterday I found a very clean copy from 2017. In 2016 I was working in a metal shop. Bronze, copper, and steel in my blood. Those elements and more affected my brain along with my heroic drinking.

I've been doing nude modeling for Jock Ireland a clay sculpture teacher at the the New York Studio School.

An attendee asked, ""Are you still sculpting"

"No."

"Because I suck "

Jock graduated from university the same year as me

1974.

I wanted to say, "Everyone sucks, but the effort to not suck, however illusive opens our eyes to the opinion that sucking doesn't matter "

As a nude model I held my sand. We are simply humans on a dais. To be rendered by hands from slabs the clay to how the sculptor envisions us.

I end up looking Jabba the Hut's cousin.

That does suck.

Guess there's no Greece hero left in me.

I'm awaiting the B54 bus to Clinton Hill.

Cheers.

April 1, 1980 Journal Entry East Village

April 1

My brother Frank's Birthday

April Fool's Day 1979

Yesterday Michael Selbach and I felt the urge for a short trip up the Hudson on his Kawasaki 650cc motorcycle. The day was sunny and I dressed in white denims; jacket and jeans, then rode the subway up to Times Square. The David's Pot Belly's cook waited on the corner of 42nd and Eighth. He handed me a Bell helmet and I climbed on the back.

"I never thought you'd be my bike bitch."

"Hey, this is only platonic."

He headed over to the semi-destructed West Side Highway and we cruised north along the Hudson.

"Shall we go to the Cloisters?" he shouted with his head slightly turned away from the wind.

"I went there two weeks ago. Have you ever been to West Point?" The famed military academy was about fifty miles away.

"No, I haven't."

"It's worth the ride, plus there's the Storm King Highway overlooking the Hudson. A must see." I had been there once with my family. Like me my father loved the road.

"Sounds good to me."

We crossed the Fiord on the GW Bridge to New Jersey and sped along the Palisades Parkway.

Far back in the Ice Age this falaise had guarded an extinct continent against the rising ocean, as the melt-off from the mile-high glacier carved through the tectonic plate to form the Hudson hundreds of feet below us. A fierce wind along the parkway buffered us from lane to lane. Thankfully traffic was light after the 9W exit and we soon sheltered by the bare branched trees.

The towns along the western bank were situated out of sight from the roadway. THe surrounding towns had outlived their original purpose to become suburbs for men and women commuting into Manhattan for work. We passed by the exit signs dentoing their existence without seeing their centers. After Nyack the land ruralized with farms spreading over the hills, until we reached a massive quarry shipping gravel to reconstruct New York City recovering slowly from the dereliction of the 1970s.

Michael topspeeded on the highway. 86 mph. Helmets restricted any conversation and I spoke within my mind to my minds.

After Haversack we entered the suburban sprawl of malls and little league fields. The station wagons were filled with young boys in baseball uniforms driven by well-coiffed mothers. The young boys studied our passage with a a sense of yearning. Some of them had to want to be us.

Michael and I had grown up in similar surroundings on the West and East Coasts. A life as a bum was preferable to their parents' enslavement to the 9 to 5. I had left behind the suburbs in 1974 and I harbored no urge of returning to the sprawl of my birth.

Lately Michael had been talking about moving to Hoboken, as if he was abandoning the city. I was bound to the East Village. I wasn't leaving until it was time to leave and today that felt like never.

Haverstack gave way to West Haversack without a struggle. George Washington might have retreated through these lands after the military debacle in New York over two centuries ago. The towns were replaced by farmland and then tenth-growth woodlands. Michael hit 80W for a few miles before we exited for West Point.

US 6 spanned the Hudson River on the Bear Mountain Bridge. In 1948 Jack Kerouac started his trip across America here. That trip inspired ON THE ROAD. I wanted Michael to stop, so I could stand where the Beat writer had stood thirty-two years ago. The bridge dated back to the 1930s. America really began here. I had last hitchhiked across the continent in the winter of 1975. I stood wishing I was on my way to the Coast, instead I sat back on the bike.

We descended into marshes. Railroad tracks were strapped to the western bank. A sign WEST POINT 10 MILES stood at attention by the roadside. My father had driven here on our Ford Station Wagon in 1966. I had been almost fourteen. My mother had wanted me to be a priest or a cadet.

Michael and I entered the academy by Thayer Gate. The graduates of the the 1960s and 1970s had served in Vietnam. The power of the world's strongest army. Defeated by rice farmers. Now five years after the Fall of Saigon the cadets of the 1980s in their dress uniforms showed no defeat. Their stiff posture marked their dreams of America's future glory. Vietnam wasn't their defeat, but it was our victory. Michael and I were both anti-war leather punks.

A sign announced NO PARADE TODAY.

"It's a good show." Back in my youth I had wanted to be a cadet. Anything to get out of my hometown on the South Shore of Boston. I would have looked good in the uniform.

We stopped at the military graveyard. Home eternal for thousands of officers. We stood at George Custer's grave.

"He's no hero."

"And neither are we."

We saddled up and the Kawasaki climbed the steep two-laner to the top of the Storm King Highway, 420 feet over the Hudson. We stopped at the precipitous vista point. The Hudson ran north between the Berkshires and Catskills. Both mountain ranges had been shorn of their height by the glaciers.

"You know I might have fallen in love with Vickie." Michael had been seeing the redheaded fashion student for a few months. I was still recovering from Lisa's desertion. My blonde girlfriend had disappeared into Europe to be a fashion model. I had seen her in a German lingerie ad. Michael had been a good friend. His wife had left him last summer.

That's a good thing for you."

"But not you?"

"It's was bound to happen. I'm happy you're in love. I know how to drink alone."

"Really?"

No, but better you than neither of us."

"What about you and Elizabeth?"

I had been seeing the lanky Virginian for a few months too. We had even met each other's parents.

"We're going nowhere."

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah I'm too haunted. I don't felt anything for anyone. Not even myself. It's better that I break up with her before I really hurt her."

"Or yourself." Michael straddled the Kawasaki. "Too bad, she's a great girl. By the way you should look at your jacket."

"Why?"

"Look."

I took off the Levi jacket. The back tire had thrown up a oily rooster tail to splatter the back of the white jacket.

"Damn. That ain't gonna come off."

"Your jeans match."

"Double damnit."

I got on the bike behind Michael. If I had a motorcycle, I wished we were bound for the West Coast and a sore ass, but we crossed the Hudson at Newburgh and drove south to New York and our lives.