# 17 by Peter Nolan Smith

In April of 1976 I drove a stolen car from Boston to New York. The Olds 88 wasn’t really stolen, since a Back Bay lawyer paid $300 for the disappearance of gas-guzzler.

Several hours later I abandoned the Detroit clunker by the Christopher Street pier after midnight. I threw the plates into the Hudson and left the keys in the ignition, hoping for joy riders to drive off with the vehicle. On my three previous trips to vanish a car, I went up to the 42nd Street Bus terminal and caught a bus back to Boston. This time was different.

I was in love with an artist from North Carolina. Ro said I looked like a fallen angel on her candle-lit bed. She had to be in love too. I walked to the restaurant at which she worked on Christopher Street. The owner said she had quit. I rode the subway to Brooklyn Heights and walked to 55 remsen street. She wasn’t there and her roommate explained that earlier in the day the painter had caught a flight to Paris. She had accepted a grant to study art at the Sorbonne. Ro had not left a forwarding address. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t going back to my teaching job at South Boston High School.

I slept at a friend’s apartment on Park Slope. The next day I got a job at Serendipity 3 as a busboy. I moved out of Brooklyn after discovering James Spicer was stealing my tip money. I rented a SRO room on West 10th Street and 5th Avenue. A bed and four walls cost $44/week. I was making about $200 at the restaurant.

After work I took the subway from 60th and Lex to the Astor Place. Usually too wound up to fall asleep I killed a few hours drinking a dive bars before heading back to my miserable room. I wasn’t making any friends fast.

One wintry night in 1977 I stumbled home from a derelict bar at the corner of the Bowery and Houston. The icy wind slashed through my thin clothing and I was about to hail a taxi to my SRO tenement on 11th Street, when the thump of a frantic bass emanated from a white stucco building. The accompanying music was rock and roll at its purest and I pushed open the bar’s heavy wooden door.

The leather-jacketed quartet on the stage covered the 45rpm version of The Rivieras’ CALIFORNIA SUN. The audience heave up and down, as if the floor pulsated in time to the 3-chord progression. I stepped forward to join the frenzy.

A huge hand blocked my way.

“$5.” The monstrous bouncer wore a yellow construction hat.

“Who are they?” I handed over the fiver.

“The Ramones. They play punk,” answered the big man.

Everyone in the bar wore leather jackets and the girls had colored hair.

CALIFORNIA SUN was replaced by a fast-moving song with a chorus of I WANNA BE SEDATED. I rushed up to the front of the crowd. By the end of the band’s set I was hooked to the music and like that I became a punk.

The next day I bought a black velvet jacket on St. Mark’s Place from Trash n Vaudeville and later had my cut my hair at Manic Panic. Those girls were punk from the points of their stilettos to the tops of their teased black hair.

Every night I hung out at CBGBs. None of the stars of the scene were my friends. They played music and my one talent was pinball, so I was a nobody, which was okay, since being a punk was all about not caring about being nobody.

Not everyone felt the same way.

Blondie got noticed by major record labels, the Talking Heads toured coast to coast to bigger and bigger crowds, and almost every girl loved Richard Hell for his song BLANK GENERATION and his nihilistic good looks. None of us knew how to be different, but we had a good idea about how not to be ‘me’ anymore thanks to Richard.

Our devotion to this faith failed to translate into record sales and the Voidoids’ forays into the Top 40 were mocked by an unknown power-pop trio’s song RICHARD IS A FORKHEAD. My own personal lack of success gained me nothing and in 1982 I left New York to work as a bouncer at a Paris nightclub on the Grand Boulevard.

One night a New Wave girl band from the East Village appeared as the Rex’s headliner. The lead singer had a crooked nose and bedraggled hair, but once the ugly duckling hit the stage, Claudia shone with a savaged beauty meant for a dark room and her lanky body encircled the mike stand like a boa crushing a stick. In some ways she was a female version of Richard.

After the show I introduced myself and offered her a drink. We spoke about CBGBs. New York was as close as her body. Claudia’s husband played with Richard Hell. She laughed upon hearing about the song RICHARD IS A FORKHEAD. After closing the club, we ate at an African restaurant in Les Halles.

“What do you miss about New York?”

“Nothing really. I come from Boston.” My reasons for leaving New York were too many to tell.

I spoke about my hometown. I was a big Bruins fan, although I admitted, “I can’t play hockey for shit.”

“Really?”

“My father was teaching me how to skate backwards and fell, cracking his skull on the pond ice. There was blood everywhere. II never learned how to skate backwards.”

Claudia laughed and said, “Richard is a good tennis player.”

“I’m not good at that either.”

“Are you good at anything?”

“Some things.”

“I’m sure.” She touched my hands.

At dawn I walked Claudia to her hotel in La Marais. The rest of the band was waiting by a van and, she said, “I have to go to Lille.”

“Like Cinderella?”

“I don’t think Cinderella ever went to Lille.”

“I guess not, but the fairy tale never mentioned the name of Cinderella’s hometown.”

“No, but it wasn’t Lille.” She kissed me on the cheek and entered the van. No glass slipper marked her departure, then again I wasn’t Prince Charming.

That summer I visited Perpignan with a friend. Roland Garros was on the TV. His father asked if I was interested in tennis. My father had taught me tennis. I had him by thirty years. I couldn’t ever beat him, but my friend convinced the doctor that I had one time been the 17th ranked tennis player in the USA. I protested the obvious lie, but sometimes people prefer to believe something less than the truth.

Upon my return to Paris a music industry friend introduced me to a tousled-hair French singer. Lizzie was promoting her new record and the African influenced single was climbing the charts.

“I know you.” Her eyes swam with recognition. “I lived in New York and you once threw me out of an after-hours club on 14th Street.”

“I don’t really remember that,” I answered, although a crazy French girl tumbling down the stairs of the Jefferson Theater wandered in the shadows of my memory. The infamous after-hours club was renown

“You didn’t ask. I was having a fight with my boyfriend. You tried to break it up. My boyfriend punched you. You tossed him down the stairs. I fell with him.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. It was our fault.”

“It was?”

“Ouais.” Lizzie didn’t hold the forceful eviction against me and later that evening in bed at my hotel in La Marais the wild-haired Medusa told me about her affair with a spike-haired singer in the East Village.

“Richard?” Forkhead had a long reach.

“Yes, Richard.” She lit a cigarette and the tobacco turned her kisses into ashtrays. “Don’t be jealous. Richard and I were never boyfriend and girlfriend.”

“And what about us?”

“Nous sommes un stand de nuit or one-night stand.”

“Those are the best kind of affairs.”

In the morning I watched her leave like another Cinderella, thinking she was gone for good, but the next evening she showed up at the Rex with her Fender Jazzmaster guitar.

“TV?”

“Yes, I am famous in France.”

French stars fared better without the other people in their life and I kept our affair a secret. We had a good time throughout the fall, although our affair ended on a Christmas vacation on the Isle of Wight. My good friend Vonelli was in love with her. Lizzie was in love with him. My saying ‘bonne chance’ was my Christmas present to them and on Boxing Day I took the ferry to France from Southhampton to Dieppe. It was a stormy passage and I was glad to stand on dry land. Three hours later I was back at the hotel in La Marais.

I remained in Paris another two years before returning to the USA to write screenplays for porno films in North Hollywood. Within a month the quasi-mafia producer fired me for being too intellectual. I never thought that I was that smart.

Back in New York I rode motorcycles and worked at the Milk Bar. I watched the Bruins on TV. They went nowhere, but everyone came to the Milk Bar. It was the place to be from 1am to 4am.

One night Richard came to the door. I had never spoken to him before, but he said, “I think we have a mutual friend.”

“Who?” I knew exactly who.

“Lizzie in Paris says hello.”

“She’s a great girl.”

“She is at that.” I offered him a drink and was surprised by how friendly he was. After the second drink he said, “Lizzie told me about some American in Paris calling me Forkhead.”

“I said it, but the first person to call you that was Marky, the lead guitarist of the Ghosts.”

“I know their song too.” Richard no longer sported spikes. “By the way she called you ‘suedehead’, which is funny coming from someone with a hair like a crow’s nest.”

“More a bird’s nest.”

“Depends on your perspective.” Richard was taller than me. He tipped the bartender $5 before leaving the bar. She smiled at him in recognition of his legend. Punk wouldn’t be punk without him.

“I’ll see you around.”

We both lived in the East Village and ran into each other on the street. He invited me to poetry readings at the St. Mark’s Church. Someone said that he edited several alternative magazines. I submitted short stories to each one. He never mentioned them afterwards. I didn’t blame him. My typing, grammar, and spelling were atrocious.

I returned to France in 1989.

Lizzie was dating an art dealer. Vonelli was going out with a top model, whom I had lived on the Ile St. Louis. Paris was a small world. The singer and I played squash in Les Halles. She beat me without mercy, despite wheezing after every shot. I spoke about Richard during a break.

“Richard is so funny. I think he was jealous of you.”

“Jealous for you being with me?”

“You told him about that?” Our affair remained a secret on my end.

“Maybe, it isn’t important anymore.”

“No.” I had been in love several times in the interim. None of my romances had been a success.

“Then let’s not worry about the past.” Lizzie served the ball against the wall for an ace. After her victory we had dinner in the Marais and she said, “Loser pays.”

“That wasn’t much of a game, considering I heard you once were
the 17th-ranked tennis player in the USA.”

“I never was, but a friend of mine from Perpignan lied to his father about my ranking. He believed his son.”

“Do I look like I could have ever been the 17th ranked tennis player in America,” I said it, so she wouldn’t believe me and added, “Plus I let you win fair and square.”

“I’m not sure.”

“Up to you.”

We said good-bye in Les Halles. Neither of us suggested a nightcap. We had become just friends.

Nothing more, but friendship lasted longer than love in our world.

In the 90s I began taking around-the-world trips.

ONce back in the city I ran into Richard at a gallery opening. He was fascinated by my tales of opium dens on the Burmese border. I thought about writing a down-and-out travel book. I gave several chapters to a literary agent. He hated my typing and I worked selling diamonds on 47th Street. It was a 9-6 job. I wore a suit and tie. The money was good. I went out at night, but not late.

One autumn night at a reading of Richard’s poetry at the St. Mark’s Church I spotted Claudia at the bar. I hadn’t seen the singer since Paris. Richard kept looking at Claudia and I asked, “Are you two a thing?”

“Richard’s no one’s thing. You have a girlfriend?”

“I was living with a Spanish girlfriend last summer, but she more than a little unfaithful, so I threw her out. The problem was that Elena was a good friend with the old Puerto Rican woman living next to me. A bruja.”

Claudia didn’t understand the Spanish term for sorceress.

“A witch.”

“Witch?”

“Yes, Santeria.” The magic was practiced by the Caribs throughout the Lower East Side.” Senora loved her and the old woman cursed me by saying I would never love again and I haven’t since Elena.”

“Really?”

“100%.” There was no other explanation for my celibacy.

“Maybe I can help you change that.”

We left for my place. Her divorced husband was taking care of their son. We spent the night together and she left before dawn and she spent the night.

“Like Cinderella?” I joked with a towel around my waist.

“Cinderella didn’t have a kid.”

In the morning Claudia kissed my lips and walked down the hallway to the stairs. Mrs. Adorno opened the door. The old bruja had witnessed more than a few women come and go in and out of my life. Senora Adorno's one good eye squinted in my direction and spat something in Spanish before mumbling, “Sex not love. Siempre.”

“Not always,” I said, because I wanted more from a woman than sex.

Claudia and I went to the movies, made love twice a week, hiked on holidays with her son. She fellated me during the NHL playoffs. I wore my Bruins shirt. They went nowhere, but I wasn’t prepared for her saying after they were ousted from the playoffs, “This isn’t working out.”

“What isn’t?”

“You and me. I want something more from a relationship than this and someone wants to give it to me.”

“Who?” I had to ask.

“Richard.”

“Forkhead.”

“Oh.” I had grown to accustomed to finishing in second place.

“He called to say he really wanted to be with me. I have to give it a chance.”

“I understand.” I stood no chance against a rock god, especially since Mrs. Adorno’s curse was stronger than me.

I gave Claudia my blessing and started a course of hard drinking. Drunkenness wouldn’t lift the curse, but I stopped my thinking of Claudia. Of course an affair with Richard wasn’t destined to last forever and a month later Claudia phoned to say it was over.

“Can I come over?”

“The answer is yes, but I’m leaving for Thailand within a week.” I had sold a 5-carat diamond and bought a round-the-world ticket with my commission.

“All you men are alike. You all leave when the going gets tough.”

Claudia hung up before I could defend myself. She never came over to my apartment. Mrs. Adorno was triumphant.

Six months later I returned from Asia to sell diamonds on West 47th Street during the Christmas season and bumped into Richard on East 11th Street. Neither of us spoke about Claudia, but he said, “We should play tennis sometime.”

“Tennis?”

“Lizzie said you were good at squash. You must be able to play tennis. I belong to the club over on the East River. We can play whenever you want.”

“I haven’t been on a tennis court since 1982.”

“The cold scare you?” This was a challenge.

“Not in the least.” I was from Maine. We had two seasons. Winter and preparing for winter. “Name the day.”

“Tomorrow is supposed to be sunny in the high 40s. Say noon.”

“Noon it is.”

The next morning I called in sick to the Diamond Exchange. My boss Manny let his employees have ‘drunk days’ and I slept for another hour.

By noon the temperature warmed up to almost 50. A sunny day too. Richard waited by the riverside court. He had brought an extra racket.

“Your choice.”

I selected the one more tightly strung without knowing if that was better or not. I was no Arthur Ashe and lost two sets in record time.

“You don’t play often, do you?” Richard smashed an ace to my left.

“Not for years.”

“Lizzie said you were once the 17th-ranked tennis player in America.”

“That was a joke. I was once down in the South of France during the Roland-Garros tournament in Paris. I was watching Yannick Noah’s set and my friend told his father that I was the 17th-ranked tennis player. I denied the claim, but his father thought I was being humble and scheduled an exhibition at the local tennis club. I was presented to the town’s mayor and the club president. My friend whispered that they expected me to play the provincial champion.”

“And did you?”

“No way. I said that I was under contract and couldn’t play anywhere without signed agreements. A little later his father found out the truth. He didn’t think it was funny at first, but everyone else in Perpignan got a good laugh. I didn’t think it was funny either. You never do when you're the punchline of a joke.”

“Now, I feel the same way. I really thought you a good player.” The way he said that revealed that this was not about Claudia, but Lizzie.

“Maybe I am. Maybe I was taking it easy on you.” I knew the truth.

“What about another match?” He wanted to know it too.

“Sorry, I’m under contract.” I handed back the racket and walked away from the court with a smile on my lips.

After that day Richard and I didn’t see each other for several years. I was either working or away in Asia writing novels no one wanted to publish. At least my typing was getting better. Finally I left the States to live in Thailand. I had a baby with my wife In Pattaya.

In April 2004 I returned to New York. My Israeli subleasee had squealed to my landlord in hopes of getting my apartment. An eviction notice had been issued in both our names. I threw my tenant out on the street.

Mrs. Adorno said nothing this time. My landlord paid $20000 to speed up my departure from the flat. I was 50 and New York was a tough city for the old. The day before my flight to Bangkok, I spotted Richard on 1st Avenue.

He smiled upon seeing me, and then frowned, “I got bad news. Lizzie died this week.”

“No.”

“It was the cigarettes.”

“Shit.” I really liked Lizzie.

“They had the memorial in the South of France. Corsica I think. Her ashes drifted out to sea with the flowers.” He shuffled several folders of manuscripts between hands. “That leaves only you and me.”

“And Claudia.”

We had nothing else in common than these two women, but his words burned like a fire left unwatched.

I told him that I was leaving the city for good.

“No one leaves the city for good.” He had been living there for over 30 years.

“I just got rid of my apartment.”

“That doesn’t mean anything. You’ll be back, if only to prove you’re the 17th ranked tennis player in the USA.”

“Yeah, in 1982, there’s always that. See you around, Forkhead.”

“You too, Suedehead.”

I waved good-bye.

Richard was right.

I did come back to New York.

We still see each other another time, because none of us were leaving New York. Not even our ghosts, for the dead lived forever in the past for those stuck in the present.

THE END

Lizzie I think of you always.

30,000 Feet over Burma - May 5, 1990 - Journal Entry

Previously published May 24, 2023

I have a flight to Kathmandu. I wish I could stay in Bangkok, but my money is getting low. I called New York from the Malaysia Hotel lobby. A collect call to Rickie Boy, who complained, “I haven’t had anyone to drink with since you left. The city sucks. The clubs suck. The drug sucks.”

“At least here in the Orient there are life”

“Where are you now?”

“Bangkok, the City of the Angels. A paradise for the wicked,” I recounted visits to Patpong the notorious red-light district. Go-go bars and more go-go bars. “I’ve never seen anything like it anywhere else in the world.”

I didn’t mention my head-on crash with a pick-up north of Chiang Mai. I had been killed instantly and just as instantly reincarnated back with this body. Only difference. A broken wrist.

“It does sound like paradise.”

“Yes, but it’s very poor. And they have lepers in the streets. Hiding from the sunlight. Stumps of hands and feet. Gnarled faces.” I tapped my cast. My wrist itched. The plaster cast prevented any scratching.

“Not a pretty picture.”

“No, it is not.” But New York had over 50,000 beggars and madman freed from the closed upstate mental hospitals. The refuse of a nation after decades of wars, poverty, greed, and neglect. There was no saving them nor will Buddha save the desperate souls of Bangkok nor me.

“When are you coming back?”

“I’ll spend time in Paris and London.”

I had no reason to be in America yet. The Knicks had knocked out the Celtics. I had friends in Paris and London. I had worked in both. I could get a job at a nightclub on my fake carte de sejour.

“But I seriously thinking about moving out here. If you want to join me next year, then start saving your pennies. Departure date. Jan. 2, 1991. Although I don’t know, if I can last that long in the USA. I’d love to leave forever.”

Not that America was heaven on earth, however I knew its evils too well.

“Good luck in the Himalayas.” Richie laughed, “I’m stuck with my father and so are you. Your job will waiting here.”

“Thanks.” I kept it short having covered the reason for the call. Back in New York I still had a motorcycle, an apartment, and a job waiting in New York.

I hung up and joined Dawn on a lobby couch. The diminutive go-go girl had been a good companion over the last week. She actually looked sad to see me go. She caressed my cast. I couldn’t feel her touch. I slipped her another 1000 baht. She wai-ed me and said, “You come back. See me. Love you long time.”

I wai-ed her back, wishing she was coming with me. I am a fool.

The ride to the airport through the traffic took an hour. I had another hour and a half until my flight’s departure. I grabbed a Bangkok Post and a Singha beer in the lounge area. The itch was worsening. I couldn’t reach it and downed another Dilaudid. Men were saying good-bye to girlfriends. Some are sad. Other men are greeting their friends. They are happy. This must be the Hello-Goodby Lounge.

The terminal loudspeaker called for all Kathmandu passengers. I finished my beer and proceeded through customs and passport control. None of the officials paid me any mind. I was just another farang or foreigner leaving the Land of Smiles. The Thai Air flight plane took off on time and I left Thailand for the first time. I would be coming back soon.

LATER

Ten klicks below are the arid rice fields of Burma, burnt brown and begged for the monsoons. The rumors of the military’s corruption, forced migrations, massacres, and starvation are not rumors. I had been on the northern Thai-Burma border. Drug lords and Karin rebels fight the junta. No one wins these wars, but there is too much is at stake to surrender. Neither Thailand nor the USA have cut off ties with Myammar. Heroin was why the French and America fought long wars to control the drug trade. They never stood a chance. These countries are not France or America.

I saw one temple in Bangkok.

Wat Patpong. No Buddhas. Only near naked girls dancing above a bar.

Why did I leave?

An hour later I sight the Himalayas to the north. Snow capped peaks stretching for hundreds of miles. I had seen them in National Geographic. Never this close. I had enough money to trek into them and I was dying to see the Himalayas closer than at eight miles high.

LATER

A golf course is next to Kathmandu airport. Soldiers are everywhere. The pro-democracy wave has washed over Asia. Students are calling for the abolishment of the monarchy.

This evening I met Lance. A New York architect. We have hired a trekking team through the hotel. Te most popular trek is the Annapurna circuit. I don’t have enough money for that sixteen hike. We chose Langtang Glacier. Only ten days. I purchase two Kingfisher beers and sit on the roof, watching the sun light up the Himalayas.

Dorge the guide, has arranged trekking permits in less than an hour. He points out the peaks. We have a Nepali cook and Sherpa porters for an early morning departure in two days, which is a good thing, because I hear gunfire. The army is shooting students.

“We were stupid, “says Todd, another trekker from Hawaii. I had told him about Bangkok.

“How so?”

“You should have brought go-go dancers from Pat-Pong.”

“So they can ask, “Where Tee-vee?” No thanks.”

I am here for the mountains.

The highest in the world.

May 9 1990 - Kathmandu - Nepal - Journal Entry

Published on May 25, 2023

Kathmandu is a magical city filled with pilgrims traveling to the city's holy shrines and temples of the pantheon of Asian religions. I haven't seen a single church and with good reason. Jesus might have traveled to Kashmir after his crucifixition, but no one here worships him here. Certainly not this atheist, but I am in wonderment, when I stumbled on a procession for the Kumari, the living goddess, in Thamel. These young girls are chosen from the Newari tribe to serve as living vessel for the Hindu goddess Durga until menstruation. The word Kumari means 'virgin' in Nepali. They are revered for their purity, but soldiers disrupted the holy ritual as the government has outlawed the gathering of people, as the citizens clamor for democracy. The TV announcers are accusing the demonstrators of communism and godlessness. So far there is no bloodshed.

I walked to the Thai Air office on the main boulevard shaded by trees harboring thousands of sleeping bat. The ground is splattered with bat dung. I'm glad to be wearing my sneakers.

Last night after drinks at the Yeti Hotel Lance and I walked through dark streets. He was wearing flip-flops and stepped waist deep into an open-air sewer. Up to his waist. I pull him out. Cursing. I help him back to the hotel at a distance. He smells strongly of shit. I hope he doesn't get a disease from this dip in the city's waste waters.

This afternoon Thai Air wasn't able to confirm my flight from Delhi to Paris.

I might have to fly to Munich. It's been over eight years since I was in Germany. I left in December 1982 on an overnight train to Gare du Nord, having ended my working with the pimps at the BSirs nightclub. I wonder what would have happened, if I had stayed in Hamburg.

I would have continued my affair with Stephanie De Leng.

That year I decided after Christmas in America to return to Paris and work at the Bains-Douches. Stephanie wanted me to meet her in Amsterdam. I was too broke to buy a ticket. I crashed at Julie Cole's apartment with the photographer Arthur Gordon and his Doberman. A shabby apartment behind the Gare De L'Est. Stephanie and I later met in New York. The lingerie model had gained weight due to a chronic illness. I thought she was faking the sickness and brutally said so one night. She wrote me a scathing letter and my friend Andy read it.

"What did you do to this woman?"

"I guess I said the wrong thing." I had no sympathy for her and I remember my older lover Linda Imhoff in 1970, as we were laying naked in bed in my Shannon Street apartment, "You're dangerous, because you don't know what you are doing."

I was eighteen at the time.

I'm now thirty-eight. Stephanie could have been the one, but the only way I could get it up was to pretend she was a nun. I had no trouble with the one Patpong go-go girl I took to the Malaysia Hotel a couple of times. I haven't talked to any females in Kathmandu.

And certainly not the Living Goddess or a nun.

Nacht Und Nebel 2011

In the summer of 1982 Count-No-Count phoned my East Village apartment. Kurt was calling from Hamburg with an offer of a job as ‘tursteher’ at his nightclub BSIR. The pay for a doorman was $150 a night, free accommodations, and all I could drink. Being dead-broke and wanted for questioning by the NYPD Internal Affairs for payment to the 20th Precinct at our after-hours club on West 25th Street I answered, “Ja.”

My stay in Hamburg had been pleasant throughout the warm season. I spoke bad German with a Boston accent thanks to an ancient Bavarian teacher Bruder Karl at my high school south of Boston, but the clientele of young students on holiday spoke good English and loved to dance to the DJ imported from Paris. Certainly better than my German. The weather was delightful and this far north the sun stayed up late into the night. I drove an orange VW and lived in a studio penthouse on chic Mittelweg. I was thirty and no one was after me.

Autumn brought the cold rain, gray fog, and darker days. The sun’s daily traverse across the sky descended like a frisbee weakening in flight with the approach of the winter solstice. Even worse was how the increasing bad weather allowed arrogant Nazis in their fifties and sixties to creep out of their hiding places. Maybe it was my imagination playing tricks with the shadows during my strolls through Jungfernstieg, but I regularly spotted well-dressed ex-Waffen SS striding proudly down the streets and their eyes didn’t lie about what they had seen or done in Russia, Poland, France, or Germany. They were not extras in a Hollywood movie. These men had not only obeyed orders and they had carried them out to the letter with pride. I was not scared by these old men nor of the young neo-Nazis. I was under the protection of the toughest gang in Hamburg.

Of course the young Germans were not obsessed by the ghosts of the past.

“We are the Porsche Reich, not the Fourth Reich,” Count-No-Count had told me on many occasions in Paris. The Telex millionaire’s best friend was a Reeperbahn pimp, Kalle, the son of a Harlem American sergeant and a local woman from Hafenstrasse on the harbor of Hamburg.

A black Zuhalter was an anomaly in a German gang. His blonde right-hand man was SS Tommy, a notorious killer. The two of them along with their gang, the GmBH, controlled the ErosCenter, the huge brothel on the Reeperbahn, and also thousands of Huren or whores there and elsewhere in Hamburg. Kalle was always good to me. In truth he was my boss and not Count-No-Count.

His associate SS Tommy believed in the Second Coming of the Third Reich. The original Thousand Year Reich had lasted twelve years, but the weightlifter was not a real Nazi. Not like those old men who had done things no one liked to speak about at parties or even behind their backs. Still when SS Tommy presented me a large bill for having sex with Astrid, who frequented BSIR. The Rechtung for my time with the blonde dacner came to 20,000 DMs or $12,000. Everything had been itemized on his list. Everything. Every sex act in five words or less. He had even charged twenty DMs for holding hands. Nothing was left off the list.

That evening I handed the pimp the keys to my VW and left Hamburg without saying an ‘auf weidersehen’ to anyone. Especially not Astrid. SS Tommy was scary and I was defensively scared of him.

The midnight train pulled into Hamburg’s Hauptbahnhof a little on time. During the wait I scanned the platform like a refugee fromthe Gestapo. I didn't free safe, until the train entered Belgium. I reached Paris at dawn and I knew I was as lucky to be in France. Everyone does after they escape someplace else in the middle of the night.

Count-no-Count came down to Paris. He said Kalle was alright with me. Count-no-Count had paid my debt and advised me to stay away from Hamburg. I had no intentions of going north or west to America. New York wasn’t an option as the investigation into police corruption was still in well swing. I worked at various nightclubs in the City of Light. Life was good for me. Less so for Count no Count. He ODed in 1985 in his Pigalle apartment. He was only 38. I was 33.

I moved back to New York in 1986. The precinct cops knew I was there. They also knew that I had held my sand. I was left alone. A friend gave me a job in the Diamond District and I traveled the world on my savings. I heard from friends that Kalle was still a big man in the GmBH and SS Tommy had fled the Bundes-Republik after a failed bank robbery. The years moved on.

In 2004 I was living in Pattaya, Thailand, running a fake F1 sports gear website. Thai wife and child. A car and a house with a mango tree in the front yard. F1-shopping.net was # 1 on Google search for Ferrari shirts. With the baht 50 to $1 a little counterfeiting was worth the risk. It wasn't like I was dealing drugs.

A Belgium marine geologist, Fabo, and I hung out at the Welkom Inn on Soi 3. Usually in the afternoon after I had shipped the day's shirt, caps, and jackets. One day he seemed very shook up and told me over a few Heinekens how his girlfriend's ex- had shown up from South Africa. A German. Name of Tommy. I added the SS to complete the picture.

"He wants Poo to work for him in Germany."

"As a pute in Hamburg."

"Yes? Do you know him?

"Maybe."

"He wants to meet me at my house. Poo is frightened and so am I."

"I understand. Call me when he's coming and I'll bring Bruno."

"Bruno."

"He's ex-legionaire. He can never return to France. Good people." I had never spoken to Bruno about the reasons for his exile.

I finished my beer and returned home. I said nothing to my wife about Fabo's woes. She probably knew. The Thais gossip more than anyone else in the world and know what is what and why before the news has reached a farang. When Bruno pulled up on his motorcycle, I kissed her and my daguhter. Nu said, "Lawang."

"I'll be careful."

She watched us drive away. I had informed Bruno of the situation. He only had to be told once. We crossed Sukhumvit rode up Khao Talo to a short-time bar in a Thai neighborhood. Both of us checked the soi. The German was friends with a Thai motorcycle gang. Both of us and Fabo were on good terms with them. There was no sign of them or him. We walked inside the dimly-lit bar. The girls didn't didn't lift from their chairs to greet us. Neither of us had ever gone upstairs with one of them. Bruno and I were faithful to our girlfriends. We cheated with our drinking.

Fabo was not sitting alone

He was with SS Tommy. Each had a Heineken beer

I hadn't seen him in over twenty years. He hadn't changed at all. Same stack of muscles. Same bleached blonde shag hair. Just more slash scars on his left forearm from countless knife fights. People had tried to kill him. They had all failed. He squinted and eyeballed us.

I sat down. SS Tommy didn’t recognized me.

He had accused me on being the police.

"I know you. You don't know me. Leave Fabo alone."

"Why?" He most certainly wasn't scared of me.

Bruno had heard enough. He attacked the killer with the fury of an ex-legionnaire. Fabo, the girls, and I watched a short effective beating that are never filmed in the movies. It was over in fifteen seconds. Bruno dragged out SS Tommy and threw his unconscious body into the street. The bikers rolled up to the bar. SS Tommy must have called them for back up. Bruno nodded to them and they drove away. This wasn't any of their business. SS Tommy fled Thailand. Legionaires had even more scary than pimp, if you are on their wrong side. A fugitive German conman late said at the Welkom Inn that SS Tommy had been arrested for a solo bank robbery in Jo-Burg. Good riddance. I was 52.

In the autumn of 2011 I was appointed writer-in-residence at the British Embassy in Luxembourg. The old fortress city was centrally located in Europe and I visited to Paris, Brussels, and Charleroi in the first month. Triers on the Moselle River was very close and I planned a trip to the ancient Roman city of 70,000, only a forty-five minute ride way by train.

Telling the Ambassador my plans, I caught the morning express to the Moselle and ferried across the river to Konz for a short train ride to Trier. On my arrival I half-expected SS Tommy to be waiting on the train platform. Not a sign of him there on in the streets.

Germany had changed in the last thirty years.

The old Nazis had died off and, while the young Nazis had become very active in the East, they weren’t in Triers, but I kept my eyes open. Walking through the old Roman ruins I studied the faces of the young and old. I didn’t spot a single Nazi. It was, as if their genes had been erased from the Germanic race.

In Triers the only broken glass were from broken bottles and not the windows of Jewish homes and synagogues as was on the morning after Kristelnacht. I ate a bratwurst from an Imbiss stand and drank a Kloster beer. I visited Karl Marx Haus. The creator of Communism had been born in the old city. The street was in the heart of the sex zone. Nothing was happening in the afternoon. As I stood outside the house and old man passed and muttered under his breath, “Juden.”

“And fuck you, you old Nazi.”

My comment turned his head. His skin was withered by age, but he still stood erect. He had never asked for forgiveness.

“Ja, du alte arseloch.”

I rushed him and he prepared to take a blow. I so wanted to hit him, but he wasn’t SS Tommy.

“Gehst heim,” I said with a Boston accent and he stood his ground with Nazi arrogance.

He was about 91. I was 59. 1945 was well back in the 20th Century. I stepped closer to the old man. He did not back away. He still stood for his beliefs and so did I. One blow would have put him in the hospital and me to jail. He was still a Nazi and I was me. Some things never change. I shoved him and said, “Go home.”

Our eyes said everything else. I was a Goy like him, but I wasn't anything like him and neither asre the millions and millions of Germans in this world. Some of my best friends are German. I love them. Ehrlich, but not Nazis. This old man and I will always be enemies and I would’t have it any other way.

Montauk # 32

Atop Montauk bluff
No weekend walkers on the trail yet
Sit on a wooden rail
Sun on my face
The wind buffeting my ears
Also the sound of waves___
Overhead
An eastbound jet
Destination
Europe
345 passengers
A crew of 23
I alone
With the wind, the sun, and my fingers
Slightly chilled by the cold
Winter more than a month away
On a sunny November morn___
With no humans in sight

Montauk # 31

Ditch Plains

montauk 9:33 No cars in the parking lot no flag on the pole low tide autun cool Offshore NW breeze no waves no surfers A slight calf-high swell A lone man walks the beach___ Me I'm walking over the Shadmoor Bluffs Above the Atlantic Stretching South To the curved horizon___ The world Not Flat Never was Ocean, wind, sand, Everwas___

TO THE DOOR by Peter Nolan Smith

Published on: Jan 6, 2012

I-5 ran south out of Sacramento. The day was getting hot in the Central Valley and AK cranked up the Torino's AC. I turned around several times to be disappointed that Carol wasn't in the backseat. A whisper of her rose attar fragrance clung to the car. She and her Joni Mitchell tape were on a bus to Mendocino, but the nursing student was not gone.

"Think it will work out with her boyfriend?" AK had liked Carol from the start. She smelled good.

"He's a doctor. The dream husband for every mothers' daughter." I was playing hardball with his hopes. Her girlfriend had left me for someone else a year ago.

Carol was no Jackie.

The blonde was easy to like, even if she thought me a fool after my fiasco in Reno. I rubbed my shoulder, trying to remember, if I had fallen down last night. "I met him once. Sorry to say, but he was cool. Besides you already have a girlfriend."

"On the other side of the country." They had been lovers since college. Annie wanted kids. Jake was pursuing a musical career in funk. The New Yorker wasn't close to being black, except when he played the electric piano.

"Meaning?" With my eyes closed I heard a young Herbie Hancock.

"That three thousand miles is a long way from home." He was driving the station wagon a little over 55. The California Highway Patrol had a long history of busting anyone not fitting their notion of a good American whether they be an Okie, a Mexican, a hobo or a hippie like Jake and me. He started singing BORN TO BE WILD by Steppenwolf.

"Looking for adventure and whatever comes our way." I joined him on the chorus. The song was an anthem for the road ever since it was featured in EASY RIDER. Jake laughed at my effort.

"What's wrong?" I had a good idea what was so funny.

"Just that you sounded like Tony Bennett."

The comparison was almost a compliment and I segued to I LEFT MY HEART IN SAN FRANCISCO, substituting Carol for heart. Now it was my time to laugh.

"Feeling more human?" AK exited the interstate at Route 12. The fields were rowed with fertile vines weighty with the grapes of 1974. Lodi was wine country.

"Better than this morning." I had woken up along the bank of the Truckee River with no money in my wallet, thinking that I had blown my vacation at a blackjack table in Reno. "You know not telling me that my money wasn't gone was mean."

"Like I said in Sacramento. It was for your own good." Lodi was laid out in a grid with the railroad determining which side of the tracks was the better part of town. Jake held the owner's direction in his left hand.

“Was I that bad?” My hangover answered my question, but Jake could fill in the blanks.

“I didn't want to say anything in front of Carol in case she said anything to your old girlfriend. After you lost the day's winning, I gave you another $300 and stashed the rest. You threatened to punch me, if I didn’t. Carole lent you $20 once you blew the three hundred. I paid her back from your money." AK was my good friend. We had lived next to each other in Boston. He didn't have to pull any punches. "After she crashed in the car, but you got ugly."

"How ugly?"

"Make a train take a dirt road ugly." AK flicked up the left turn signal. East Oak Street lay a few blocks to the north. "The security guards tossed you out around midnight and you tried to storm the front door. The bouncers were nice enough not to punch you out, but they did rough you up."

"That explains my shoulder." I hadn't fallen, but been thrown to the ground.

"One more thing." AK looked in the mirror, then turned right. The neighborhood was neat and tidy.We had all been brought up in the suburbs. The American Dream in California was just like it was on the South Shore of Boston, only warmer. " You were yelling that you wanted the police to arrest the casino owners for stealing your birthday.

“Funny?” Humor was a question of delivery.

"More pathetic than funny at the time, but more funny today." Jake braked by the curb.

Jake was watering the lawn in pressed khaki trousers and an immaculate white tee-shirt. The white one-story bungalow was topped by a brick-red tiled roof contrasting the soft blue shutters. Two orange trees provided shade and fruit. Everyone else in the neighborhood had cut down theirs.

A buxom blonde in a garden dress was tending to the flowers. His wife was a good-looking woman and Lodi looked like a fine place for an ex-Marine to live.

Jake turned off the hose and waved to us with a smile. Californians loved their automobiles.

"All good things must come to an end." AK shut off the engine and opened the door. The air was thick with warmth. I got out of the car too. It had been a good ride. I got out too. We had been in the station wagon a long time. It had been a good home for vagabonds.

"Wasn't expecting you for another day." He walked around the Torino searching for dents or scratches. "Where's Carol?"

"She caught a bus for Mendocino in Sacramento. She wanted us to tell you thanks." Few men forgot Carol.

"If it wasn't for her, I would have never let you two take the car." We existed on other sides of the Generation Gap, even though Jake was ten years younger than my father.

"Nothing personal, but I don't have much use for hippies. What's that lump in your pocket?"

"Quarters."

"From Reno?" There was only one pass over the Sierras. "Have any luck?"

"A little bit of good and the same in bad."

"Ha." The owner of the Torino was pleased by my acceptance of the loss.

I hadn't figured him for mean in Jamaica Plain, but was the suburbs and people tended to dislike anyone white not buying into them.

"Jake, leave those two boys alone," his wife snapped with scissors in hand. Her eyes were green and the blonde hair a gift from her genes. "They drove your car all the way cross country. Is it okay?"

He leaned his head into the car. The station wagon smelled brand-new after the deluxe treatment at the car wash.

"Sorry, old habits are hard to kick." The apology was more for his wife's ears than ours. "You made good time."

"I drove 55 most of the way." Jake pulled the drive-away company's contract from his wallet. He had rarely pushed the V8 over 70. Carol and I had been the speed demons

"And you?" The forty year-old kicked the tires. My father had examined the tires of his Olds 88 with a shoe after our driving the car. It was something men their age learned from their fathers. I grabbed my bags from the back of the station wagon.

"I opened it up once in Utah. On the Bonneville Salt Flats."

AK winched at my having ratted out this, but I tried never to lie. I was successful about 90% of the time. I was hoping ot get better.

"How fast?" Men from out West understood driving fast. It was Big Country territory.

"121. It might have had ten more miles per hour in it."

"Good man. My personal best was 126," AK stated with pride. "That 428 pulls its weight."

"I grabbed my bag"

If we had driven 55, I think we'd still be in Colorado." 55 was top speed for a car at the turn of the century.

"It's a stupid law." Jake pulled a pen from his shirt pocket and signed his name on the contract. "Looks like you didn’t hit nothing, so we're good."

"Have any problem from the police?" Jake had better things to do than chase us for a $25 speeding ticker from Iowa.

"None, we were good citizens." I doubted if he smelled the weed on AK. "One small thing."

"How small?" He braced for the bad news.

"A couple of times when we stopped for gas, people thought Carol was Patti Hearst."

"Are they blind? Patti Hearst can't hold a torch to Carol." Jake was in agreement the opinion of every man of our trip. Carol was special.

"You boys care for something to eat?" His wife had forced a truce.

"We're hippies. We love free food." A sandwich would be good. As long as it didn't come from the Hari Krishnas or Salvation Army. Even long-hairs had their limits.

His wife returned to caring for her flowers and Jake took inside the house. The layout of the furniture was sparse and the simple decor was particular to white suburbs throughout America. AK and I felt right at home, if we were living with our parents.

Family photos, medals, and basketball awards were arranged by decades within a tall glass display case. Jake was a handsome groom in his dress whites. His wife was a blonde double for Marilyn Monroe. A young man with short hair held a basketball in his hands.

"Who's the hoopster?" AK asked in earnest. He had been the starting point guard for his high school team on Long Island. Smoking pot had increased his dislike of the authoritarian coach at the cost of playing minutes. On the playgrounds of Boston he drove to the basket with two points on his mind. "My son, Mark. He was the star forward for the Lodi Flames. 13 points a game and 5 rebounds. I dreamed about him going to college, but he enlisted in the Marines after graduation. I pulled strings to keep him in-country. He wanted to see the Show." Jake's weakening voice forecasted the climax to this story.

"Sorry." I had graduated a year before his son. College students in New England didn't go to the Show.

"I blamed you protestors for his death. That damned Richard Nixon said he was going to bring our troops home in 1968. You didn't protest enough and you cared more about the Vietnamese than your own." Jake touched the glass panel before his son's photo, as if his hand could touch the dead

"We did our best." I had been against the War since 1969. I met Jackie at a demonstration condemning the bombing of Hanoi. We made love the same night. Jake was right. Our chants of 'Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh Ho Chi Minh is going to win' outnumbered our shouts for 'Bring the troops home'.

"I was in the Marines for twenty years. Every marine said that they did their best. I was what was expected." Jake inhaled a deep breath. His exhale whistled a single sibilant note. He was counting to ten. "I was a Marine. My son was a Marine. My grandson will say 'Semper Fi' in his turn."

"He had a son?" Mark was my age. I had never impregnated a woman. He had a life.

"A boy named Jake." The ex-marine shivered with the last silver lining. "Be three this weekend. I was pissed at him for knocking up his girlfriend back then. I'm of a different mind about that now."

"Times change." Jake understood that epitaphs are best said during a chorus of reflection.

"That they do." Jake grit his teeth and turned to us. The moment was dammed behind a wall of "Semper Fi. He was a grandfather. I put his hand on my bad shoulder and fought off a grimace. "I hope you hippie boys aren't vegetarians. I cook a mean burger."

"I am an omnivore. As a kid in Maine I ate whale." A clam shack on Portland Harbor sold whale from time to time. "It tasted great."

"Then you're in for a treat."

When I was a boy in Maine, once a week during the short summer my parents packed us into their Ford Station Wagon for a trip to Benson's Grove. The burgers were served with a special relish unknown to the rest of America.

Jake's sauce came close. He opened a bottle of Zinfandel. AK had a glass. I had two. At 22 recovery from a hangover depended on solutions. The burger had saved my life. Jake's wife joined us for the second bottle. AK played his African thumb piano. They were delighted by the magical plinking of flesh on metal resonating in the wooden box.

His wife packed us cold-cut sandwiches and kissed us on the cheek.

Jake's wife must have driven the postman crazy.

"You really going to hitchhike now?" Jake had offered to drive us to I-5.

"I'm going to San Diego." AK had given me his friend's telephone number in Encinitas. I had a pocket filled with quarters.

"I-5 will take you there. What about you?" Jake started the car and gave it the gas. The last tank had been premium.

"I'm thinking about heading over to the coast to take the Pacific Coast Highway south." It felt good to be in the Torino again.

"No way to hitchhike there from here, unless you like the hiking part of hitchhiking." Jake waved to his wife and she blew him a kiss. He wouldn't be gone long. "Better you take a bus into the City. The PCH is right down the end of Golden Gate Park."

Jake gave each of us $20 and another $20 to AK.

"Give that to Carol when you see her. You did a good job."

Jake drove AK to the highway. He got out of the Torino for the last time. I-5 had a lot of traffic heading south. It was a little past noon.

"See you in San Diego." AK took up position a few feet in front of the sign forbidding pedestrian or hitchhikers on the highway.

We waited for him to get a ride. A Cadillac stopped within five minutes. AK threw a power fist in the air and jumped in the big car.

"A good friend?" Jake headed back into town. My bus was in twenty minutes. Town wasn't that far away.

"The best." I would be broke without him. Now I was on my own for the next few days. It was a good thing Nevada was in the opposite direction. I knew no one in San Francisco. This was a new world.