AUGUST 17, 1978 - JOURNAL ENTRY - EAST VILLAGE

The coke deal falls apart. What else is new?

Mark was too greedy and put another $300 atop the $2200. His friend Arthur, rightfully balked at paying so much, even though I hadn't stepped on the blow. The entire venture reminded me of why I never got into dealing.

Friends are fools and their thinking is dominated by greed.

My previous attempts were a sale of 300 hit of LSD, Five pounds of reefer, and a thousand Reds, which I sold too cheaply. Better to deal with stranger than friends.

I'm at the Central park Zoo. Pattycake, the six-year old gorilla, ceaselessly prowls his cell. The bar prevent his escape, but not abuses from the public, who throw food and worst at the captive Great Ape. At one point the zoo had imprisoned Pattycake next to the lions' den. The savage felines eyed her with with desire and not a single New Yorker was Tarzan coming to her rescue.

Pattycake has stopped her sad pacing. She gawks at her senseless audience. Eyes misty with tears and her face displaying a noble dignity despite her solitary confinement. None of the humans recognize that Pattycake's fate is shared by hundreds of thousands of their own race incarcerated behind bars. Many of them also serve time alone, never to touch another living creature. Man is so cruel.

Man is most cruel to his own.

General Haig ordered thousands of British soldiers to their death of the first days of the Battle of the Somme in 1916. 60,000 dead and wounded in 16 minutes earned Haig the nickname 'Butcher'. That is the brutality of Man versus the beauty of the beast and the beast has never killed on our level.

Pattycake was released from the Central Park Zoo in 1982.

She joined a small troop of silverbacks at the Bronx Zoo, which provided a large space for the Apes. Her children were taken from her and sent various zoos across the USA. She died in 2013, a year after her mother, Lulu. Wildlife Conservation Society claimed Pattycake exceeded the median life span of 37 years for female zoo gorillas.

Gorillas in Africa can live to fifty. All of it free.