Wednesday, February 11, 2026
The Words Fail Me
Road Trip - To Sihanoukville 2007
2007 road trip with Nik Reiter from Pattaya to Sihanoukville, Cambodia. A ferry crossing over the Preat River powered by a dragon boat car engine. No one stays in the cars during the trip. Up river a jungle to the sea a bridge under construction spelling the wooden ferry's demise in the future. On the southern bank an old German sells frikadelle, fried German meat balls, from a wooden shack. He recounted a story about having flown out of Stalingrad. How he had been a Luftwaffe corpman on one of the last planes out of the beseiged city. The wounded were stacked inside the fuselage. One atop of the other. Triage with the more seriously wounded atop the potential survivors to keep them warm. Tears rolled from his eyes. Over fifty years later now on a tropical river far from the Russian winter. He was that old.
A Dutch tourist smelled so bad, the van passengers voted to leave him behind. Old Stinky.
I loved ferry crossings. Bridges aren't that interesting.
Bats Aflight At Night
In my youth
Long ago
I lived in the Blue Hills
South of Boston
In the summer evening
I stood
A boy of single years
In a tee shirt and khaki shorts
Overhead
Bats fluttered through the velvet night
Seeking prey__
Mosquitoes who preyed on me
Hundreds
Nay
Thousands seeking my blood__
Last summer in Montauk the bats
Only a few
I wonder where they have gone
Maybe they just don't want an old man's blood
They do seek young blood
My young friends say so
As they had once sought mine
So long ago in the backyard
Of my family's house
Windows aglow blue from TV
Me watching the bats
Hunting the mosquitoes
Hunting me
Under the darkening sky
But I liked blood running down my arm
Under the wings of bats
Flutter little bats flutter__
versus BATS by DH Lawrence BY D. H. LAWRENCE
At evening, sitting on this terrace,
When the sun from the west, beyond Pisa, beyond the mountains of Carrara
Departs, and the world is taken by surprise ...
When the tired flower of Florence is in gloom beneath the glowing
Brown hills surrounding ...
When under the arches of the Ponte Vecchio
A green light enters against stream, flush from the west,
Against the current of obscure Arno ...
Look up, and you see things flying
Between the day and the night;
Swallows with spools of dark thread sewing the shadows together.
A circle swoop, and a quick parabola under the bridge arches
Where light pushes through;
A sudden turning upon itself of a thing in the air.
A dip to the water.
And you think:
"The swallows are flying so late!"
Swallows?
Dark air-life looping
Yet missing the pure loop ...
A twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in flight
And serrated wings against the sky,
Like a glove, a black glove thrown up at the light,
And falling back.
Never swallows!
Bats!
The swallows are gone.
At a wavering instant the swallows gave way to bats
By the Ponte Vecchio ...
Changing guard.
Bats, and an uneasy creeping in one's scalp
As the bats swoop overhead!
Flying madly.
Pipistrello!
Black piper on an infinitesimal pipe.
Little lumps that fly in air and have voices indefinite, wildly vindictive;
Wings like bits of umbrella.
Bats!
Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep;
And disgustingly upside down.
Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags
And grinning in their sleep.
Bats!
In China the bat is symbol for happiness.
Not for me!
Tuesday, February 10, 2026
Joyous Lake 1975
The Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace; Music on Max Yasgur's 600-acre dairy farm near the hamlet of White Lake in the town of Bethel, New York has impacted American music culture for over fifty years. Richie Havens opened the festival and Jimi Hendrix closed the concert with a fiery psychedelic finesse. A half million freaks, heads, and hippies attended the outdoor show. Millions more had been there in spirit.
I was one of them, because that August weekend I was washing dishes and walloping pots in the kitchen of the Tara Hotel in Braintree, Mass. Seventeen years old and trapped in a meaningless job listening to the newscasts of Woodstock over a radio, thinking that I must have done something horribly bad in a previous lifetime to have been punished so severely in the present. Few of us knew that that Summer after the Summer of Love was history. More teens grew their hair longer. We smoked more pot. I dropped LSD. The anti-war movement expanded into the middle-class, while Black Power was crushed by the FBI. Woodstock was our two-syllable nirvana. Everyone wanted a piece.
In August 1975 AK stupied keyboards at Berkeley School of Music and I was driving taxi, but I had been hired to be a substitute by the Boston School Committee. As a substitute at South Boston High School. The epicenter of the Anti-Bussing Movement. Two weeks before Labor Day AK received a phone call from Rockford, whom we had met the previous summer north of San Diego. The three of us had shared several acid trips on Moonlight Beach. The Pacific roared with motorcycle waves and a seal had spoken to us in a trance. There has been a girl with blonde hair. She had big breasts. It was a nude beach. None of us wore a thing. After we came down, Alan announced that the blonde and he were heading north to San Francisco. I would have joined him, if AK hadn't talked me into returning to Boston.
"We have no money." It was a good argument for a recent college graduate, although no bank had hired me upon graduation.
Rockford had hit the road with $10, the blonde, and a guitar. He stayed a year. I worked driving taxi in Boston.
During his recent phone conversation with AK, Rockford had explained that the Haight had been overrun by junkies, speed freaks, and scammers.
"A very uncool place, but Nona said that Woodstock was cool. She's from New Jersey." Nona had replaced the blonde.
AK said we should go there and the next weekend AK and I drove west from Boston in his Firebird.
Four hours to Woodstock across the Mass Pike and then down the Hudson and into the Catskills to Woodstock under Overlook Mountain. Summer. Still a hippie summer in Woodstock.
Rockford's house was a renovated chicken coop by Tannery Brook. Nona was Euro-Asian exotic with long black hair and a Balinese legong dancer's body. Her beauty refused to be trumped by her nasal New Jersey accent. He made his money as a stret musician. Nona played tambourine. A good tambourine. That night Joe Cocker was playing at the Joyous Lake, a small bar on the main road. We smoked hash and then walked down the wooded side street to the small club, crowded with hippie die-hards and free spirited women.
Cocker had just emerged from a long de-tox clinic. His friends refused him the right to drink, while they guzzled beer. The Sheffield singer's voice had retained its gritty tone and the audience hit the floor to THE LETTER. AK, Rockford, and Nona menage-a-troised. When he sang A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS, I was transported to Max Yasgur's farm six years ago. I danced with a full-breasted brunette from the town. I looked down the valley of her cleavage Her breasts were huge. She ground her hips into my groin. I got hard and and at song's end she asked, "You want to come to my place and smoke some weed?".
"Love to." Hippie girl, pot, sex. It might have been six years after Woodstock, but this was my Aquarius moment, because the Season of Lust was in full swing winter, spring, summer, and fall. We had sex three times that night. I was at the height of my power. Only 25. She told me that she had come her from Ohio after Woodstock. She had yet to leave the town. The following morning she shook me awake.
"You gotta go."
Her body was a little bigger than I remembered. And she was a little older. I didn't care. I wanted more.
"Why?" I was ready to move into her small apartment overlooking Main Street.
"Because my old man is coming back this afternoon." She threw my jeans and tee-shirt on the bed. "He's a biker adn runs with the Outlaws."
"I'm going." I had never heard of the Outlaws, but bikers were trouble and angry bikers even more trouble. I dressed as fast as Clark Kent changing into Superman.
Ten minutes later I was back at Rockford's place. AK and he were playing African thumb piano. Nona swayed to the rhythmic plinking. Her long black hair sashaying across her spine. They laughed at my story. I didn't think that it was that funny and later that day we spotted Dora on the back of a Harley. Her old man was a tattooed bear biker. 240 and 6-3. I kept my distance after that.
That summer I visited Woodstock a couple more times.
Dora was always with her old man. I returned her gaze with a secret smile.
AK and I dropped acid in July. We rocked out in the chicken shack. I played kazoo, Rockford strummed his guitar, and AK plunked out notes on his kalimba. Nona our muse was the dancing tambourine girl. He and I wanted her, as did every man in Woodstock. Nona was Rockford's for the moment. AK and I hated him for that possession. Neither of us were proud of that envy.
That autumn Rockford and Nona moved back to the coast. Neither AK nor I returned to Woodstock in the following years.
I ran into Nona in Bali in 1993. She still had a New Jersey accent, but as beautiful as ever. Rockford lived in Iowa. I saw him in 2009. AK taught school in Jupiter Beach, Fla. We meet each other at least once a year. The three of us remained good friends.
This past Labor Weekend I drove through Woodstock on the way to the deep Catskills. The Joyous Lake was now the Not Fade Away. The hippies were in their 60s. I walked over to Dora's old apartment and knocked on the door. No one answered and I went downstairs to the Garden Cafe.
"Does a Dora live upstairs?"
"No." The long-hair chubby teenager answered, while smearing organic butter on a bagel. It was morning. "But a lot of guys ask the same question. She must have been something."
"She was."
And so were the rest of us from that Woodstock generation and the Age of Aquarius keeps on shining with the Earth pointing at that constellation for the next 2000 years.
Rock on, Dora.
The name means golden and my memory of that night glows like stolen treasure.
Foto of Dora's apartment in the main square of Woodstock.
THE CURSE OF A NE'ER-DO-WELL by Peter Nolan Smith
Back in the winter of 1974 I was driving taxi for the Checker Cab company at night and attending college during the day. I had never wanted to further my education, but I had a low draft number and the government was still drafting young men. I had no intention of going to Vietnam.
One night I picked up a fare outside of outside the Other Side, Boston’s premiere drag bar. A young blonde in a fake fur, red satin tube and hot pants, plus hgih stacked platform shoes. I guessed her to be a teenager. She wanted to go to Brookline. A nice neighborhood. She wasn’t a transvestite. She just like dancing and felt safe with the queens. Her laugh was almost a cough. Her name was Helene. She had just turned eighteen.
We smoked a joint on the way up Beacon Street and told each other’s history. I was living in the suburbs. Helene’s house was a family commune. Her stepfather was a VP at Bose and her mother was divorced from a Boston Globe editor. They were both hippies into alternative consciousness trips.
We started seeing each other. I stayed he night. Her stepfather and mother were cool with that. So were the rest of the family. Eight children between them. It was a lot of handle for Ann and her laugh sounded mad to me.
Ann was a loving mother of six was troubled by demons, but capable of living a normal existence most of the time.
Her new husband believed in New Age cures, but one winter night Ann got hold of a bottle of vodka. The drink reincarnated her devils and she ran naked out of the house into blizzard, shouting, "I'm the queen of the snowflakes."
Spindrifts of snow swallowed her from sight.the street. The temperature was near zero.
"Get her," Helene pleaded with urgency.
"I will.”
Helene and I ran after her. Snow clotted on my face. I followed Ann’s footsteps. We found the older woman hugging a tree in the neighbor's backyard. She wasn’t even shivering. Her drunken madness kept her warm.
"Ann, you have to come back to the house." I took off my jacket and covered her shivering nakedness.
"Leave me alone."
"You'll die out here. Come with me." My bones were rattling. Helene was crying. This was all bad.
"You dare tell me what to do?" Her mad eyes grasped my face.
"I'm not telling you what to do, but Helene is worried about you."
"My daughter is eighteen and you're twenty-two.” Ann threw her head back. Her hair wrestled with the wind.
"Twenty-one.”
“Your age doesn’t matter. You’re just a taxi driver," Ann spoke with MacBeth's three witches voices. All together and added, "You are the ne'er-do well. You'll never amount anything."
"Probably not." I ripped her off the tree and dragged her through the snow to the house.
"Ne'er-do-well." She repeated the phrase all the way to her house. Each time with weakening force, but the words bit into me like snake fangs. By the time we entered the house Ann was silent. Her husband was smoking a joint. He was used to her madness.She said nothing to anyone and her husband brought her upstairs to warm her in a hot bath.
Upon reaching the second floor Ann turned and mouthed 'ne'er-do-well'.
Later Helene and I sat by the fire.
"Don't listen to her."
"About what?"
"About being a ne'er-do-well. No one is a ne'er-do-well anymore."
"I suppose you're right."
Down in the kitchen we smoked a joint and her sister made us a cup of tea. Her sister was working in the Combat Zone. Strippers didn't have snow days.
Helene and I broke up that Spring. She left me for a car thief from Hyde Park. I graduated ‘sin laude’ in the Spring. I moved back into the commune in Brookline the next year. Helene and I were just friends. Her mother slipped inland out of mental institutions. There was no cure for her madness. in 1976 I left Boston for New York.
Ann's curse had been on money. Over the years I never could hold onto anything of valuable, then again possession is 9/10ths of meaninglessness and while I might be ne'er-do-well, I'm the best of the ne'er-do wells and in these days, when life has little meaning being a ne'er-do-well is a blessing, because we know how to live with nothing.
ps Helene and I are still friends and she married a rich man. Me, I am what I am. A happy ne'er-do-well with a large family. A kucky man indeed.
Monday, February 9, 2026
To Wordsworth By Shelley - 1816
Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know
That things depart which never may return:
Childhood and youth, friendship and love’s first glow,
Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.
These common woes I feel. One loss is mine
Which thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore.
Thou wert as a lone star whose light did shine
On some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar:
Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood
Above the blind and battling multitude:
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty, —
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou should cease to be___
Mike Tyson 1990
The large island dominated the north of Irian Jaya. The slate blue bay of Cendrawasih mirrored the equatorial sky. Males went naked except for a gourd on their penis. They played religious song on guitars. One afternoon I watched the Buster Douglas-Mike Tyson fight in a grass hut on the beach. I bought the natives beer to celebrate the upset. We danced around a bonfire that evening.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)