Saturday, March 31, 2018
Wednesday, March 28, 2018
315 The Bowery Pre-CBGBs
CBGBs existed from 1973 to the summer of 2008 as a mecca for punks.
Prior to Hilly Kristal's leasing the ground-floor and basement of 315 The Bowery, the location had served as a The Palace Hotel Bar for the flophouse above it, housing as many as 600 men every night.
There was life at 315 before CBGBs and there is life after as a clothing boutique, but the Palace Hotel remains the same.
A SRO home for the forgotten men on the boulevard of broken dreams.
But not Hilly.
Photo by David Godlis
Sunday, March 25, 2018
March For Never Again
Yesterday hundreds of thousands marched in cities across the USA and world to call for an end to the senseless mass killings. The demonstrations were organized by survivors of the Parkland School shooting.
The 19 year-old killer had attended Stoneman Douglas High School and the police had been alerted to his erratic behavior throughout 2016 and 2017 without being able to discover his true identity.
On February 14, 2018 Victor Cruz murdered seventeen students and wounded another seventeen with an AR-15.
An armed guard hid under cover.
More police arrived on the scene.
They remained 500 feet from the school.
The shooting went on for six minutes
Then he dropped the weapon and walked out of the school with the rest of the student body.
Cruz walked to a Walmart and drank a soda.
Police finally arrested him after a visit to McDonalds.
Seventeen dead.
Seventeen wounded.
Cruz was taken to the hospital.
The students of Stoneman Douglas High School had had enough.
At a rally in Tampa on February 17 Junior Emma Gonzalez criticized the 'thoughts and prayers' offerings of politicians supporting the NRA. Her fellow schoolmates formed the NEVER AGAIN movement.
They showed up at the Women's rally in Washington.
The right-wing and NRA accused the students of being tools of the left wing.
"They are too young to have organized this."
The gun culture of America was gearing up for a fight.
Old folks were instructed in use of a pointed finger.
Donald Trump greeted the survivors and suggested arming teachers with weapons to deter deadly attacks.
Fat white men got out of their chairs.
The head of the NRA called the students thugs.
The kids weren't scared of these people who prefer automatic weapons to safety in schools.
On March 24 they gathered in the hundreds of thousands around America.
They marched in the streets, despite the federal government refusing them the right to assemble on the Mall. A talent show had the date reserved. They used no violence.
They joined with others.
Others joined them.
The police kept their distance.
Emma Gonzalez led the crowd in Washington in a six-minute long Moment of Silence.
The length of the shooting by Victor Cruz.
A blow against the gun culture.
"Since the time that I came out here, it has been 6 minutes and 20 seconds, The shooter has ceased shooting, and will soon abandon his rifle, blend in with the students as they escape, and walk free for an hour before arrest. Fight for your lives before it's someone else's job." - Emma Gonzalez.
Guns kill people.
Never again one day soon.
Thursday, March 22, 2018
TO RUSSIA FOR US by Peter Nolan Smith
In May of 2009 Johnnie Z asked if I wanted to go to Russia.
It wasn't for a tour of l'Hermitage Palace.
The Palm Beach millionaire financed cell phone towers in other countries. His off-shore partners were stiffing him.
"They owe me $500,000."
It was a lot of money. I had $10 in my pocket.
"Why me?" The previous summer I had taken care of his crazy Airedale. Pom Pom was a refugee from a Riviera Beach crack house. The local police force said she was a danger to the community. They weren't wrong, but that summer thunderstorms cured her madness.
"I send my people." His company was filled with young go-getters. "And they came up with nothing."
"Russia?" My voice was filled with hesitation.
"You worked with them at nightclubs."
"That was a long time ago."
1980.
"$5000 and expenses."
"Count me in." I rented easy.
My New York friends thought that I would get killed by the zeks.
"No one is killing me."
"How can you be sure?" AP, my good friend and landlord drove me to JFK.
"Because I have a plan." I had a family in Thailand, They needed the money.
I flew to Kiev. No one was there.
I left for Petersburg and was met by a friend.
Sev had played in AQUARIUM. They were huge in 80s. I loved THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIRROR GLASS.
We showed up at the internet companies.
The bodyguards had Uzis. The owner asked, "Where your bodyguards?"
"Him?"
"Yes, him." I pointed to Sev. He had a long white beard.
"Who's he?"
I told him.
"Sev?" His bodyguards repeated the question. I shrugged, because a nod would have given them too much information.
Sev wasn't the leader of the band.
But he was part of its soul.
"Vodka." The owner called out to his staff.
He led Sev into the garden. He was purer than me. I drank a lot. The owner wired Johnnie Z his money.
"How you do it?"
"Friends know friends." I didn't bother to explain. >p> Sev and I went back to his place in then old city. He played cello for me. One song from MUSIC OF PUBLIC TOILETS.
It was worth the entire trip.
I didn't tell Johnnie Z that.
Like all rich people he was only after money.
Wednesday, March 21, 2018
Quote of the Day
The aging process has you firmly in its grasp if you never get the urge to throw a snowball. ~Doug Larson
I threw snowballs during each snowstorm in New York this year.
My age is only a date.
In my head I'm 15.
Sunday, March 11, 2018
Homo Scan
In April of 2009 Johnny Zombie from Palm Beach sent me to Russia to speak with his customers about their non-payment for merchandise. My friends in New York thought that these Russki 'businessmen' would kill me, but I had a band member from Aquarium for my companion. Everyone loved that band.
Seve dropped at the airport and I gave him $100 for his efforts.
"Hope to see you soon."
The cellist was good people.
After passing through immigration I approached the security check and was surprised to see a large machine for screening my body.
HOMO SCAN
Russia was notoriously homophobic and I had many gay friends. Some of them had to rub off on me, however I passed the examination without a hitch.
A customs officer later said that HOMO SCAN detected bombs.
I had none of those.
Only a slight lisp whenever I had a few drinks. It goes nicely with my stutter and Boston accent.
And the beer at the Petersburg Aeroport was dirt cheap.
"One more beer, pleasssse."
I could lisp all I wanted.
I had passed the HOMO SCAN.
In the eyes of Russia I was straight.
Hello It’s Me
The train tracks from Boston to New York were laid through the western pine barrens of Rhode Island in the 19th Century. The pine forests grow on deep sand deposits left over from the glacial melting of the Ice Age.
This desolate region has resisted civilization, however on a winter afternoon in 1979 I was sitting on the left side of a Amtrak carriage heading south. Trees after trees after trees formed a long curtain of green. The monotony lulled me into a nod. I spotted a red sports car parked at a rural crossing. The train rattled past the car at 80 mph. A young blonde woman lay on the ground. Her body was naked and she spread her legs for a show. My head whipped back to watch her until she disappeared from sight. I stood up in my seat and examined the faces of the window-side passengers. None of them showed any sign of having seen the naked woman, but she was no mirage.
She was the real thing.
An exhibitionist in the Pine Barrens.
Saturday, March 10, 2018
Ice Cream In Winter
From Dave Henderson
The most coherent explanation for global warming I have ever heard. Courtesy of Mr Peter Nolan Smith
"People have abandoned the Bible and now are going to hell in record numbers. Most American sinners are fat. Fat people burn hotter. Hell is hotter. The earth is hotter. Pure science."
Even ice cream melts in hell.
Still Winter In March
Last week I braved a Nor-easter snowstorm and crossed Brooklyn to lunch with Dave Henderson in Williamsburg. I had thought winter was over. I was wrong.
My clothes were soaked by the slushy rain and the vortex sculptor asked opening his studio door. "How is it out there?"
"Wet, heavy, and white like a check-out girl at the IGA in Fort Kent."
"It must be wicked up there on the Allagash."
"If anyone knows is would be you." Dave had dated two women from Fort Kent.
The northern terminus of US 1 was no stranger to winter.
"I've summered there and wintered there. Bugs in the warm weather and snow in the cold, but this is just plain ugly." Dave had attended a Swiss boarding school.
The Alps had good snow for skiing.
Fort Kent's Lonesome Pine offered snow and ice, which was better than rock and ice.
"I haven't been up there since the winter of 1992." I had traveled north with a friend to see snow.
Fort Kent hadn't disappointed us.
"I once played up there with my band." Dave had been the drummer for the noise band, Spongehead.
Led Zeppelin stole several of their songs.
They hadn't received a single penny in royalties.
"Connie loved us."
"That was your first girlfriend from Fort Kent."
"Yes. It hadn't ended well, but it never dos when you break up to go out with the younger sister."
"And now you're with a third woman from Maine.
Kate was a great artist. They had been married for years. She was a wicked good woman.
"I thought she was English. She spoke like a Brit. How was I to know she was from Maine?"
"You're a regular magnet for Maine girls."
"Kate's the last."
"I know." I was faithful to my wife for years.
Dave and I were to lazy to cheat on a woman we love.
"Come on. Let's get lunch. I'm starving."
We walked out into the snowstorm.
Acqua Santa up the street served a lovely calamari and a filling
The snow was falling hard, but certainly not as hard as in Fort Kent.
Saturday, March 3, 2018
JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF NEW YORK by Peter Nolan Smit
The myth of albino alligators slithering through the sewers of New York originated in the 1920s when New Yorkers returned from a Florida holiday with baby alligators. The tiny saurians grew into fierce creatures and the owners flushed the little monsters down the toilet. While this urban legend has been broadly dismissed as hooey, a sewer worker had reported an alligator sighting in 1935. A hunt was organized by the commissioner, who announced that the alligator problem had been solved by the hunters.
Thomas Pynchon wrote about this myth in his novel V.
The myth still reverberates through the marrow of the city.
In October 1978 my good friend Mike S and I wandered through the abandoned rail yards west of Hell's Kitchen. Freights trains ran along the tracks at a slow speed. Several hobo encampments occupied the space under the concrete bridges. One settlement seemed to be laundering cast-off clothing.
Mike's fearless dog acted as point on this expedition. Merlin barked at a doorway in the abutment.
Mike opened it. The stairs led down to an unlit tunnel.
"You want to see where it goes?" Mike came from California. He was a sculptor. His wife had left him for another man.
"Can't see why not." My girlfriend had disappeared in Europe. She had written me a good-bye letter. It had broken my heart. We had nothing to lose.
Mike and I returned to his loft on West 45th Street for a compass, flashlights, batteries, baseball bats, and his .22 revolver. Mike stuffed his pocket with shells. There was no telling what lived underneath the surface of New York.
"Let's go." Both of us were wearing heavy engineer boots and leather jackets.
We almost left Merlin, however the valiant dog was as curious as us and we walked over to the mysterious door talking about alligators and lost colonies of mole people. The afternoon had another few hours to run until night and Mike pointed to his watch.
"Two hours and that's all."
"We have extra batteries for the flashlights, so two hours is more than enough." I had been in a few caverns in the White Mountains. They snaked into the granite shield for several hundred feet before narrowing into impassable crevices. "We run into anything dangerous. We turn back."
"Of course." Mike was broken-hearted, not suicidal.
"This might be like the entry to Hell." "Or the subterranean world like in JUles Verne's JOURNEY TO THE CENTER ON THE EARTH."
"Or a forgotten world like in ATTACK OF THE MOLE PEOPLE."
"I love that movie." It had presented on a semi-annual basis on the old UHF TV horror stations.
We descended the stairs. Merlin heeled at Mike's thigh. The walls of the Stygian passage reeked of urine and stench of shit rotored into our noses. Wrapping bandannas over our mouths and noses filtered the foul odor. As we walked farther from the stairs the smell of excrement was replaced by the aroma of damp dust. Puddles of rainwater gathered on the concrete floor. We came to a split in the tunnels. Savaged rat skeletons were piled in the center.
They looked as if something had bitten them in half.
Something big.
"Which way?" Our flashlights revealed nothing ahead but more darkness.
"Merlin?" Mike asked his dog and Merlin barked to go straight.
The core of Manhattan.
We continued in that direction without speaking. It was, almost as if the city overhead had been bombed into oblivion and we were the last three creatures on Earth, but we weren't alone. An ominous scratching was coming our way. Merlin barked with terror. Mike pulled out his revolver. I lifted the baseball bat, expecting an albino alligator. Our twin beams caught a beast with a hundred eyes.
Rats.
Thousands of them.
Mike's pistol barked out several times without stopping the gray mass of gnarled teeth and fattened bodies.
A bar hung from the ceiling.
"Mike, grab the bar." I dropped the flashlight and baseball bat. My hands grasped the rusted metal. Mike joined me. The railing creaked under our weight, as we lifted our feet to escape the scrabbling horde of rats.
Merlin was caught in action by the two flashlights. He snapped at dozens of the sewer squirrels, his teeth flashing with blood. The rodent deluge was over in seconds and the rats disappeared down the tunnel. Mike and I dropped to the ground. He checked Merlin.
Not a scratch.
"Let's get out of here."
“How?” The rats were headed toward their headquarters. Any direction other than that was good with me.
Merlin barked twice and trotted down the swamped corridor.
"Follow Merlin. "
Merlin reached a steel door. It looked like no one had touched it in this century. Mike and I manhandled open the rusted steel plate and we climbed the stairway to a sub-basement of a building.
It was a fall-out shelter. Dust lay decades deep. The entrance was not locked from the outside. We emerged from the underground on 8th Avenue. The pedestrians stared at us in horror. Michael held the pistol in his hand and I carried a bloody baseball bat.
"Four blocks in an hour." Mike checked his watch. The sun was setting over New Jersey.
"I don't think we have to do that again."
"No, what you think, Merlin?"
Merlin barked out his agreement and Mike bought him a bone from a 10th Avenue bodega. He was a good dog against rats and probably alligators too, for something had to be living on rats down there and I was happy to never discover whether it was big or small.
Friday, March 2, 2018
THE MOLE PEOPLE
Ten year ago I resided in Pattaya, the last Babylon. My house was on a cul-de-sac. The garden hosted orchids and flowers and a mango tree. Butterflies fluttered before my window. Birds haunted the tree. I drove a motorcycle to the beach and spent my night with the demimonde of the Buffalo Bar.
I was arrested for copyright infringement and moved back the the USA.
I lived with my good friend, Walter.
A basement room.
I walked three blocks to the L Train, which I took to Union Square and transfere to the R train for a seven stop ride to 5th Avenue. This station has its own entrance to the Plaza Hotel. I worke at the Retail Collection. It was downstairs from Eloise's playground, the Palm Court. In the evening I reverseed the transportation process and fall asleep before 10pm most nights.
My total time above-ground per diem runs approx. 45 minutes.
I have become a subterranean like the denizens of the classic 50s horror film THE MOLE PEOPLE.
I loved that movie as a kid, especially the pearly white princess who couldn't live in the light of day.
And I was her in 2009.
Maybe not her, but the vizier of her father, the king of the Mole People.
Not a bad job for such a time of dismay.
ps there's also a video game by the title THE MOLE PEOPLE.
So there is life after the 50s for B-movies.
Hotel Sòk-gà-bpròk
My friends in the finance sector travel 4-star. I once stayed at the Hotel Imperial in Biarritz with a French movie actress. The King Farouk suite was 5-star. I know the height of luxury. My travels around the world have been on a budget. Luckily my resources allow the minimum of comfort, however sometimes the best room in town is worst than a Bowery flophouse.
My good friend Dice and I exited the Langtang Glacier in Nepal dreaming of a good meal and a hot bath. Our Sherpa guide, Porterhouse, had been extolling the merits of the Yeti Lodge at the trail head. We trudged to the entrance, our eyes squinting in the Himalayan sunshine. I couldn't see through the dining room windows.
"It's moving." Dice whispered in disbelief.
"Not it. They." The interior of the glass was covered by a billion flies. I turned to our guide and said, "You said this place was clean. It's filthy. Not Yeti. Metoh Hotel."
"Before Metoh. Very Dirty." Porterhouse laughed at our sensitivity. "Now clean. Metoh too. But more clean than before."
Dice, Porterhouse, our porters, and I boarded the next bus to Kathmandu. An eight-hour ride on treacherous road. That evening we drank whiskey in a bar overlooking the parade of hippies. Porterhouse regarded them as metoh. Kathmandu was dirty too. Only the mountains were clean, whereas the Nepalese call the Sherpas 'thulo' or dirty. t Our two-week trek that the high mountain people struggle to keep clean in a very hostile environment more than an Englishman on holiday, so I remember the Yeti Lodge fondly, although dirty hotels abound all over the world and two resorts in Thailand top the 2010 edition of TripAdvisor's list of the dirtiest hotels in Asia; Phi Phi Don Chukit Resort and First Hotel Bangkok,
"Cockroaches...smelly.......yuk! Never ever stay here unless...well no...never ever stay here!!!" One disgruntled holiday-maker wrote of the former and another added, "Ruined our holidays, Disgusting place, terrible service".
First Hotel Bangkok was 2009's dirtiest hotel in Asia, but has dropped to # 8 on the strength of seven other hotel dropping below even their low standards of hospitality.
Better luck next year.
ps the Thai word for dirty is sòk-gà-bpròk.
And one more thing I doubt the staff of www.tripadvisor.com a branch of Expedia have ever stayed at the Grace Hotel.
That's gracious living at its worst.
And then there was Dirty Den's on Soi 6 in Pattaya.
Filthy and sordid.
I loved it.
More Is Not Necessarily More
A friend recently castigated my writing with the criticism that I was a sloppy writer. He was speaking the truth and I said, "My father always thought that I was sloppy too."
"You end up writing too much."
Dannett was editor for a famed newspaper's obit section.
"Sometimes more is more."
"I wish that you had learned less was more by this point. It would make my job a lot easier." Dannett placed my stories in various literary journals after redacting them. "At least your spelling and grammar has improved."
"If I had of known that I was going to dedicate this much time to writing, I would have taken Typing 101 in high school and college." My typing was atrocious thanks to my dyslexic fingers.
So I have a tendency to rewrite stories.
They need the extra work.
Here's an example from IRISH TWINS
First paragraphs from 2010
Last year my older brother was my # 2 friend. My best friend was my father. The native of Maine was 89. His address was an Alzheimer hospice south of Boston. Once a month I rode the Fung Wah bus from New York to South Station and then took the commuter train to Norwood. It was a ten-minute walk to his rest home.
Throughout the summer his condition deteriorated to the point where my father couldn’t remember where he was or what he was doing there. He was better off without an explanation.
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First paragraphs revised 2012
In the summer of 2010 my father’s mental condition had deteriorated to the point where he endangered the public safety. My old man had driven into the town cemetery to visit my mother’s grave and local police had found his Mercedes parked amidst the gravestones. No one could figure how he had gotten that far without hitting anything.
“I never get in accidents,” he explained from inside the patrol car. There were no charges.
A tow truck pulled his car from the graveyard and the next month we moved him from his assisted-living apartment to an Alzheimer hospice south of Boston.
Once a month I rode the Fung Wah bus from New York to South Station and then took the commuter train to Norwood. It was a ten-minute walk to his rest home. Each visit there was less and less of him there and by Labor Day my father couldn’t remember where he was or what he was doing there. He was better off without an explanation.
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There is a difference.
“Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.”
John Updike quote
And the author of RUN RABBIT RUN knows of what he speaks.
Shit My Dad Said
Some 29 year-old was living with his old man.
73 if not more.
His son was recording his father's salty sayings for fucking Facebook.
It deserved a better forum.
Old man - "If at first you don't succeed, quit. Because you probably suck."
"Universe is 14 Billion years old. Seems silly to celebrate one year. Be like having a fucking parade every time I take a piss."
"I just want silence. Jesus, it doesn't mean I don't like you. It just means right now, I like silence more."
"Son, people will always try and fuck you. Don't waste your life planning for a fucking, just be alert when your pants are down."
Smart old man, eh?
http://www.mangozeen.com/2010/01/09/travel/trains-from-hell.htm
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