September 3, 1978 - Journal

CBGBs was packed for the Dead Boys recording a live LP. At the bar Alice had drank bourbon with Kim like a cowhand off the range. The two werevmore than a little drunk and fought off anybattempt stop their drinking. Various girls flirt with me at the pinball machine. I refused them. Neither Kim nor Alice were safe. Mostly from their selves.

After the end of the show we accompanied Guadacanal from the Geeks and his frail from DC to his place on 3rd Street. Alice was legless and lurched across the sidewalk. I shoukd havevtaken her home tomour place, but she wasn't done with the night. We went up to his apartment and sat at the kitchen table in his apartment. Alice slips onto the floor. Everyone laughs, as she says her bones have melted to butter. I lay her on a sofa and Guadacanal breaks out an ounce of blow. We huff thick rails, almost like we have a death wish. His girlfriend joins Alice. We stay at it, then he huffs a finger thick line, coughs and flops on the floor. Not breathing. I thump on his chest. He coughs and vomits on himself. I slap his face. Nothing. Two comatose kittens on the sofa. A dying man on the floor. I lift the phone. No dial tone. Guadacanal's breathing is shallow and getting ready for a flatline. I toss him over my shoulder, grab the keys, and hurry to 1st Avenue to hail a taxi.

"Bellevue."

I throw the driver a twenty.

"Fast."

It's almost five. Traffic is light. Still dark. No pedestrians. Five mintues later we're in the ER. Doctors ask questions. I tell the truth. They know it before I say it. My friend is swept into a recovery bed IVs sprouting from his arms. The doctors and nurses see ODs all the time. Hevhas regained consciousess and wants to leave. interns restrain him Guadacanal will be fine. I return to his apartment. The DC girl is gone. Ske took the blow. The dawn is rising. i huff thedregs on thebtable and I wrestle Alice home to East 10th Street and tuck her into bed.

I can't sleep.

At noon Alice wakes, surprised to find herself in the apartment.

"I had a dream I was in Morgantown with my brother. I want to go to some open spaces. I need the country."

It's a sunny day. I still haven't slept.

I had visited her grandmother's haunted house outside Charleston. Two days of rain. Water dripping inside the house. A cold damp in the middle of the summer. I had felt trapped by the weather and the mountains and hollows. Almost as if there was no where to run, but Alice had been inspired by a photo of the glammed-out New York Dolls before Gem Spa and run away from her hometown like some many of us in the East Village.

"New York has gotten to me."

I said nothing about Guadacanal's OD. I could have been him. I doubt he had been in any condition to carry me down the street.

"I want to go somewhere."

"It's Labor Day weekend." Everyone in New York has left the city, but us and everyone we know, except Guadacanal. All I want is a hot dog from a BBQ. Instead outside the streets are steamy and garbage line the sidewalks, mostly because there are not enough trashmen, since the President told the city to go fuck itself two years ago and the sanitation workers went on strike to protest the layoffs. It was either money for the police or trash. The police won out. Tourist remark on the swirling trash. The cops raid drug dens. None of the middle class feel safe. I'm not scared and Alice is brave. This is our city. Nothing is going to get better soon. But swe aren't asking for better.

September 2, 1978 - Journal

Alice and I are stuck in the East Village. No one has invited us anywhere. No picnics. No barbeques. Nothing. The telephone has not hung with any invitations. At noon Alice checked it to make sure it was on.

There was a dial tone.

I turn on the fan and the black and white TV in the living room. It's warm, but not hot. I ask Alice, if she wants to go to Coney Island. She shakes her head and sits next to me. I want to ask, if she wants to have sex, but she's still recovering from her bourbon bash two nights ago, spending all yesterday puking. I give her ginger ale.

"I don't like ginger ale."

"No one does, but puke taste better, when it's part ginger ale."

The TV reports no fatalities at the Speedway bombing during the Indianapolis 500, but hundreds of people are crashing across America. Over two hundred deeda already. I have survived two totals. One in a VW at 17 and another in a Boston Checker Cab in 1976. But more than a few sideswipes and fender benders. Driving drunk was my sin and a good reason to move to New York. I haven't touched a wheel since our trip to West Virginia. I was a careless driver in the city, but an ace on the highway, although in June 1974 driving cross-counttry with Andy Korfeld, I fell asleep at the wheel of a For Torino stationwagon in the dead of the night. Iowa. Skating across the meridian strip. I righted the car back onto the Interstate and relingquished the driver position, but I wish I was on the highway somewhere out west. Alone or with Alice with her hard on my lap.

I years before I succumbed to the call of the road and hitchhiked far from where I started. East West, north, rarely south.

Today I'm trapped here and pulled Alice closer. She knows what that means and rubs my cock. I know she hopes fucking will clear her head. I aim to serve and we fuck until she cums twice. I fake mine.

Photo by Peter Bennett.

Here Comes The US Navy - Pattaya

Back in its glory years in which I lived in Pattaya the city was called the Last Babylon by its farang population of bank robbers, mail workers from the UK, football thugs on the run, and Interpol officers hunting the men with whom they drank with every night, instead of its present manifestation as a refuge for mindless remote hi-tech workers as well as Russian and Zionist draft dodgers. Total loser scum.

This week the long lost USS Abraham Lincoln an its three destroyer escorts finally left the Arab Gulf after a ten month deployment on Operation Project Freedom. I'm glad that the ships have crossed the Indian Ocean in peace and are no longer bombing civilians in Iran for our ally Israel.

Over the past months sailors have sent desperate emails to family and friends complaining the opposite; cut rations, bad water, overflowing toilets ad nauseum. I saw a photo of a rust belt wrapped around the hull. Donald Trump refuted 'fake news' reports of a ship in distress and said on TV, “The Lincoln has been out there for a period of time – a good period of time – but over the years, we’ve had them out there much longer and it hasn't been out there long enough.”

Late August knowing they were leaving for home, Capt. Daniel Keeler, the commanding officer, allowed a steel beach picnic complete with beer and there's more to come for the thirsty swabbies after 286 days at sea Yesterday the Navy convoy passed through the Malacca Straits and proceeded north up the Gulf of Siam to berth off Laem Chabang, Thailand's major trade port north of Pattaya on the Gulf of Siam.

While the sailors are eager to reach the ship's home base at Naval Air Station North Island in San Diego, California, the ships have to be resupplied before crossing the Pacific for the next more days. No place better for R & R than Pattaya just thirty kilometers south down Sukhumvit. Bars, discos, go-go bars, beer beer beer. Thailand has generously offered free business service to convey the sailors to Walking Street. The Thai police announced a crackdown on Walking Street prostitution.

Yesterday the twenty boys in brown uniforms harassed women along the Beach Road in a training exercise for a mass of 5000 sailor cut loose for a holiday. No marijuana smoking or para-sailing allowed according to Peter Hesgeth, head of the War Department. The go-go bars, short time bars, and rent boy clubs have been declared all off-limits with a Christian warning from the Bible warning about the loss of their immortal souls. Fat chance. They came to see the elephants.

Back in 1999 the City Police Captain answered a reporter's query about prostitution, "All I see are young people having fun."

Read your Bible, swabbies or have fun. This is a once in a lifetime chance to drink toast the living. Not one sailor died in combat. Only one jumped overboard. Drink to peace. Imagine/

My fear is that The Pentagon will send the Abraham Lincoln back to the Gulf. I wouldn't put it past the Orange Messiah.

Pattaya isn't home, but it more fun than Psalms.

ps The Marine disco as the Boss Club is still open__ain't nothing it in the USA__

ps 4Q 47__

A Bleecker Balcony - a haiku

Back on Bleecker Street
No luxury condos in sight
Only old New York__

Tht view is from a 9th floor balcony overlooking Bleecker Street on Mercer is the John C Paulson Center, a multi-storyed glass and steel mongrossity with classrooms, study Space, athletics, housing, dining, and a community space none of which is accessible to the community. According to the website Public Open Spaces: The adjacent outdoor pedestrian pathways and ground-level outdoor areas (like the Greene Street Walk) remain accessible to the neighborhood, but indoor facility wandering by non-affiliates is restricted by security. NYU has also refused union organzing.

The billionaire dream epitomizes the lack of taste from the wealthy and I know that Paulson has good taste in art, having visited his office with its spleni Calder mobiles. The Center shows nothing, but an eye sore unlike the view from the 9th balcony__

SEPTEMBER 1, 1978 - JOURNAL ENTRY - EAST VILLAGE

Fall flowers exploded across the East Village community gardens. Dahlias, ghrysanthemums, asters, goldenrods, sunflowers androses. Today's noon temperature is in the 90s according to the radio. The air in our apartment has no oxygen. The streets have a little more. Alice and I have lived together for the last month. I haven't worked a day. Alice is heading home to West Virginia for Labor Day, the traditional end of America's summer, although astrologically the equinox is three weeks away.

I wander downtown. The Jones Diner is packed with blue-collar workers. The staff is third world. Two secretaries shriek in New york accents. Their boyfriends remain silent and eat their lunch. I order a bagel and coffee. After the lunch rush the diner clears out. Everyone has gone back to work. Two Greek children draw in books at a corner table. Strangely they speak Spanish together. I write them into my journal.

Has anyone ever changed their sex to become a hermaphrodite?

A BEACH DREAM
I was at a seaside resort with Alice
Our cottage was a wreck.
My Uncle Jack visits with kids
All of them six years-old
He complains, "This place is a mess."

I recall his first beach house on the Cape
It was so big
Sand deep on the wood floors
My Aunt never cleaned anyplace
Later we are at the beach
I rescue a child from drowning
I drag him onto the pier
I lose my balance and fall into the water
Ropes entangle my limbs
I wake up before dying
Gasping for breath__

<

September 1, 2021 - Clinton Hill

A hard rain all day. I haven't left the top floor of 387 Myrtle Avenue. I wrote from the 1979 journal, napped, and ate several small meals. I only spoke with Jake and Brigette, my upstairs neighbors, and then only briefly. I have really talked with anyone on the phone or texted someone about nothing. A man apart.

Brigette painted me as a hermaphrodite. They had heard my myth of the Hermaphrodite statue at the Louvre. How touching it with someone you want to love will seal that love forever. Their friend Stove has a tattoo of l'Heramphrodite on her arm. I would love to see her ink one more time, except it's raining buckets in Brooklyn and I'm not going anywhere, until after my procedure at NYU hospital. I am stricken with Cancer. No chance of survival. Trapped like a laboratory rat seeking reincarnation as a marble statue tattoed on a friend's arm.

Thanks for your support. In order to avoid ads, please donate to blogger.com.mangozeen through Venmo. Any amount will help us. I do have a large family. My Venmo account is @Peter.Smith.18

Much more to come.

Muhammad Walking New York

Back in late September 1978 I was walking down 5th Avenue across from Central Park. A large crowd approached from downtown on the east side sidewalk. Hundreds of people. Traffic was stopped dead. A tangible electricity emanated from that direction and several seconds later I saw why.

Muhammad Ali. He had just regained the heavyweight belt from Leon Spinks, twenty-four year-old Olympic gold medalist, at the Louisiana Superdome

I stopped in my tracks and Ali crossed the street.

"Ali, you're the greatest."

"We all are," said the heavyweight champ, who extended his hand.

We shook and he proceeded uptown.

A great man.

Them, today, and forever.

Ali / Frasier I THE FIGHT OF THE CENTURY

Muhammad Ali faced the champion Joe Frasier in the Fight of the Century on March 8, 1971 at Madison Square Garden in New York City, New York.

Ringside seats cost $150 and each boxer was guaranteed $2.5 million.

Big money in 1971.

Big money still many places in the world.

The bettors favored Ali over Frasier. Ali was taller with a longer reach. Ali was the epitome of revolution and his camp portrayed Frasier as a member of the establishment.

I was a hippie. I wanted Ali to regain his title.

His resistance to the draft was a key factor in his popularity the anti-war movement, but Frasier was no lackey to the Boss. He supported Ali throughout his exile from the ring. The heavyweight never said anything about this charity, probably to prevent joining Ali on the unemployment line.

Everyone watched his fight. I was sitting at El Phoenix bar on Commonwealth Avenue. Everyone in the bar was backing Ali. Dave the bartender was all-Frasier. He took all bets at all odds.

"Ali likes to predict the rounds of his KOs. 50 says Frasier puts Ali on his ass and this has nothing to do with politics." Boston was severely divided on race and war. We didn't talk that shit in bars. Someone on the wrong side could get hurt too fast. Dave didn't have to worry. He was the bartender. We needed him more than a winning a point about a war 8000 miles away from LA.

I placed $10 on Ali.

The fight started out with the challenger scoring points in the first three rounds.

Frasier resisted Ali's defense and brought the fight to the Louisville native.

In the 11th round Frasier blasted Ali with a deadly left.

A wicked left.

Frasier was no joke.

Ali knew that too late.

Me too.

$10 was a lot of money in 1971.

Dave the bartender won $2050 that evening.

He bought a used GTO the next day and named it ' Smokin' Joe'.

We all did.

Joe was the champ that night and more__

To view THE FIGHT OF THE CENTURY, please go to his URL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctKAGKVpCUU

This is history.