AUGUST 21, 1978 - JOURNAL ENTRY - EAST VILLAGE

Society in America has hit the skids. The corruption of the Two-Party System has reduces the working classes to the edge of poverty with 55% of earnings taxed by the IRS, while the rich pay nothing. Socialist Sweden, camel-roping Kuwait, and the frozen snowbacks of Canada have higher per capita incomes. Most Americans blame President Carter for our impoverishment without ever accusing Israel for the devastation of the 1974 Oil Embargo and demanding for cuts in the Pentagon's budget. the only other recognizable politician is Richard Nixon and he's persona non grata to the GOP.

The country is further defined my the faces of our cinematic gun-toting heroes; John Wayne, Charles Bronson, and Clint Eastwood. The Bad are usually foreigners or drug dealers. The Good like Elvis and Marilyn are assassinated by the fatal drug overdoses by the FBI and CIA. The media blame their deaths on Fame and Fortune. Olympians burned by the sun, but they were gods and neither are the rest of us. We are humans with all our faults; Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, El Salvador et al.

We are fast approaching the 1980s with a destiny of apathy. The USSR aren't in much better shape, as their scientists attempt to compete with SAC's $40,000 B-52 toilet seats. It's not easy to spent that much money on a toilet seat, unless it's made of gold. The crops fail in the Ukraine. the Comintern buys wheat from the USA and Canada to feed the starving labor force and distill the wheat into vodka, the fuel of revolution.

Tonight at CBGBs Alice is puking in the ladies room. She ate roasted chicken leg at the Kiev. Her retching sounds like an air bubble exploding from a lake.

"Ei-rup. I ate too much. Ei-rup."

These purges are Alice's only method of handling her excesses; eating, drinking, and nerves. A tool to achieve temperance, but I never think she's fat.

"It has nothing to do with fat. My stomach is small and sometimes it feels as if food is crammed in my esophagus. Ei-rup. Eir-rup. Ei-ru."

"What's up?" Guadalcanal asked from the men's room door. His sidekick, pockmarked Bobby stood in the shadows invisibly attached to Guadalcanal.

"Nothing. Alice is sick."

"Too much to drink."

"Her drinking is not enough to get me a buzz, but it doesn't agree with her stomach."

"You'd think a hillbilly girl could down a jog of moonshine."

"I'm not a hillbilly!!!"shouted Alice from behind the closed doors. Women had serious hearing skills. "Ei-rup. Eir-rup. Ei-ru."

"More for us." Guadalcanal swiftly shoveled cocaine into my nostrils. Bobby and he went into the men's room for a one-on-one. The blow hit hard and I continued to listen to Alice getting sick. Crazy Juliette pushed by me.

"You look like you've had enough." She studied me and heard Alice by the porcelain god and said, "Your girl has had way more."

"I've done no drugs. I ate something funny at Kiev."

"The death diner. I saw you and Alice earlier. She looked so cool, unlike her Neanderthal boyfriend."

"I'm not trying to look cool." I was wearing the same jacket and jeans from two years ago. Bobby and Guadalcanal exited from the toilet and I took their place. I shit fast and hard. I can't talk to anyone about shitting, but I consider it the Sixth Sense; the urge to shit.

Alice has gone up stairs and I find her talking to Richard Hell. Neither of them pay any mind to me. I like the curve of her stomach. It's a soft pillow of comfort. I say nothing about it. Sometimes it's best to say nothing about what you love about someone.

Richard Hell was the Elvis of Punk in 1979. Alice had seen the King in Charleston, West Virginia. She said she had cried when he left the stage. I never saw him, but Richard Hell and the Voidoids often played CBGBs. He was renown as a singer, a poet, a junkie, and a genius, although never at the same time. His teeth were as rotten as Johnny Lydon from the Sex Pistols. No one had a worst grill than Shane McGowan from the Pogues.

We start our adulthood with thirty-two teeth. I've lost all four wisdom teeth and two others were yanked before they rotted out of my jaw.

I don't recall Alice puking so much or her being fat.

I liked her just fine, but everyone looks in the mirror the wrong way, especially those who can't believe in love.

ps. I lasted thirty minutes in the 169 Bar.

It isn't the same without drink.

Nothing is.

Not even me.