Den's Rice Fields

No one works the paddies anymore. The old gave up the game. Enough Work like slaves. Good season, Bad season. Always the last baht in the pocket. Never the first. Work sunrise. Sunset. Breaking back Breaking feet Come home at night The radio on Playing Luk Thong. A good day Today. Children's bellies full Wife smiling Happy And a bottle of lao khao To celebrate The end of the day Happy Chai yo!!!a

BET ON CRAZY - 1ST DAYS by Peter Nolan Smith

Richie was more forgiving. They had made the move to a diamond exchange on 47th Street. No more Italian subs, but the pastrami sandwich from the Bergers Deli was built for two. Richie and I shared one.

“So what are you going to do?” Richie positioned napkins on his lap and chest to avoid any greases dripping onto his Armani suit. He had bought it ‘hot’ from Frankie Fingers, the street’s haberdasher.

“Work in a club, I guess.” Fifteen publishers had rejected my stories.

“Any ideas?”

“None at all.” I stalled getting a job for several months, while I rewrote my short stories. The amount of typos was astounding, almost as if my fingers suffering from dyslexia.

The New Year brought an eviction notice. I didn’t panic. My landlord couldn’t take me to court for another three months. The refrigerator went empty and the heating was augmented by the gas range, as I typed away at my kitchen table, imagining fame and fortune would save me two minutes after I wrote THE END, then the springs of my typewriter broke with a off-note twang.

I walked to the repair shop through a snowstorm. The man at the counter said fixing the Olivetti portable would cost $50. My “I popped both my knees skiing. I’ll be off my legs for six months. You working?”

“No.” I could see what was coming and realized THE END would have to wait until summer.

“I need someone to schlep around goods.”

“Goods?” I knew ‘schlep’ meant to carry.

“Diamonds, jewelry to repair, money. Someone I can trust. Manny, what you think?”

“Why not?” Manny glanced up from a small pile of iridescent stones. “As long as you show up on time and don’t break my balls, you’ll do fine. $100 a day.”

“Cash?” I hadn’t paid taxes in ten years.

“I’m not the IRS.” Manny dropped a necklace into a small manila envelope and wrote an address. “Take this to the setter. Have him call me, then come back here fast. I got more for you to do.”

“Okay.” I had become a worker in less than a minute.

“Don’t? lose anything.”

“Sure.” I stuffed the envelope inside my damp jacket. “What time is lunch?”

“Hasn’t been working for more than a minute and already worried about lunch. I’ll order you a sandwich for when you get back.” Manny resumed sorting the diamonds.

“Thanks,” Richie said from his desk.

“Thank you.” I would be able to pay off my back rent within the month.

“Can you two stop the love story and let the goy get going?” Manny sighed with annoyance.

“You know, Manny, I know nothing about diamonds.”

“Whatever y

There would be much more than one or two, because I had survived day one as a goyim on 47th Street and my life wasn’t going anywhere fast. At least not in 1990.

Cafe De Paris - 1984

1984 London Leicester Square The Cafe de Paris Music DJed by Albert de Paname Dancing The young The place to be Black Jack and I At the door A ten-thick crowd Other side of the ropes. We control the destiny of the night. In or out. Ingrid arrives with Alice Svelte Blonde English Jacques and I part the crowd Like Moses and Aaron Kisses on the cheeks Happy to be there Happy they are here. Friends forever Day or night.

Neo-Haiku 3

Haiku by Matsuo Bashō "Quietly, quietly, / yellow mountain roses fall – / sound of the rapids

A haiku traditionally consists on sixteen syllables. Three lines of five / seven / four syllables according to Japanese poetry.

I have been satisfied with a contrary configuration without the guidance of Zen calligraphy. The nuns at St. Mary's of the Hills had been hard pressed to instill in their grammar school students the importance of legible pensmanship ie the Palmer cursor method. I still some of the grace from their instruction, which had been backed by a ruler to the back of the hand for any uncrossed ts and undotted is.

I shall practice my handwriting on clean white sheets of paper in honor of Sister Mary Osmond. My ancient Egyption teacher from 6th Grade. 1964. Sixty years ago. my hand remains true, although originally I had been left-handed. A sign of the Devil. Sister Mother Superior beat the devil out of me. Not completely. I still deal cards left-handed.

A mirror
An image
My Image
Not me
Just how
A Mirror sees me

Moi

4/2024

Brevity
Three syllables
One word
Lasting
An eternity

Poetry
On the subway
To avoid
limbo
On the phone

Bangkok 1928

Back in 2009 www.2bangkok.com put this 1928 French map of Bangkok online. The city has certainly changed considerably in the last century. No more klongs or trolleys or trees, but then the old are always saying, "You should have been here before."

As a young man I thought they were full of cow paddy, but now I'm not so young anymore I know they were right.

"You should have been in Bangkok 1990."

It was really something.

TROLLEYS AND BARS - A POEM BY PETER NOLAN SMITH

Oh, the trolleys of Boston.
The screech
Of steel on twin seams of rail,
The Boston College trolley lurching into Park Station.

I don't know if I will ever return
To Boston.
Like Charley
The man never to return on the MTA.

Orange and white trolleys
Me and my older brother
With my Nana on the tram to Forest Hills.
Then the train to Washington Street
Confession at St. Anthony's
Grilled hot dogs at WT Grants.
A movie at the Paramount
Once THUNDER ROAD
Robert Mitchum as a hillbilly bootlegger.
Nana brewed beer during Prohibition.
She said with a County Mayo accent, "Don't tell your mother about the movie."
We held our sand.

My grandfather drove trolleys out of Forest Hills.
I never met the son of the Aran Isles.
Never heard tales of him
I only saw photos
Never in a trolleyman's uniform.
He died in the yard.
A trolleyman union rep
No money in his pocket.
Damned Boston cops robbed his dead body.

Still I dream the trolleys
Squeaking sliding from under the shadows of the elevated subway to Dudley.

Irish drinkers at the Concancannon and Sennet Bar
Listening to the trains overhead
Watching the trolleys leave the yards for Mission Hill.
Never saying a word.
A Gaelic nod said another beer,
Trolleys rolling all night long.
Yardbirds on the juke box
TRAIN KEPT A ROLLIN'.

Not such thing as late in the bar,
If your beer glass was full. We there were us.

The steel rails ran in our Jamaica Plains bones.
From Forest Hills to Park Street to Boston College.
To the other Concannon and Sennett's on Comm. Ave.

There.

My girl Hilde,
Quarter beers,
A juke box
BU co-eds,
Brighton townies,
A HOT HAND pinball machine,
A naked woman atop a pink elephant painted over the bar
Up three steps
To the Phoenix Room.
Mexican food.
The only enchiladas in Boston.
A long-haired woman from Chiapas.
She had one-hand.
No one knew why.
Her enchiladas better than good.

Last trolley thirty minutes after midnight.
Last call 1AM.
The Flannery brothers waging a going home fight
On the sidewalk.
Interference was taboo.
Everyone's business was their own.

Drunken blood slushed through my veins. Listening to the last song. Aerosmith on the juke box. DREAM ON 1973

The band lived down Comm Ave.
By the Hi-Hat Lounge
I sold them mescaline in caps.
Laced with strychnine
Stronger hallucinations
$5 a cap.
We all saw the night.

At 1AM the music went dead
The bartender threw us out.
The doors shut.

I walked across the tracks.
With Hilde.
Making sure the teenage got home.
Hand in hand.
Safe
Sound
Her with me
And me with her.

Comm. Ave. quiet.
No more trolleys
Only the night

Foto Hilde and me 1974

Earth Day 2009

This evening I drank organic vodka in celebration of Earth Day. The mixer was organic ginger ale. Glass bottles. A glass glass. No plastic. It went well with my Happy Meal #3.

Supposedly civilization started when hunter-gatherers discovered fermented fruits. One of them drank it. He survived and explained his out-of-the-body experience. The primitives understood that to achieve this euphoria with regularity they had to grow crops.

Thus the birth of agriculture.

Unless you believe in alien abduction.

Passing Judgment Over Passover

Passover is the most important religious holiday on the Jewish Calendar, celebrating the Angel of Death passing over the first-borns of the Hebrew as Yahweh's Holy Annihilator murder the first-born of the Egyptians. This last plague of Moses freed the bonded Hebrews from the Land of the Pharaohs. The actual date is lost to time as is the name of the Pharaoh. Some religious historians date the Biblical tale to the rule of Rhamses II, although no historian from that time recorded the plagues and the story of Moses sounds a lot like the Neo-Assyrian version of the birth of the king Sargon of Akkad in the 24th century BC.

But if Passover is not plagiarism, how to explain the last plague.

The massacre of the first-born.

Possibly the first-born were first given food in the morning and the bread could have been poisoned by a toxin or else died from sleeping too close to the ground as was their privilege and breathed a toxic gas or more plausibly the children were poisoned by the slaves.

Every slave-owners feared that fate,except the Hebrews were never slaves, just workers trying to flee their debts.

Serves you right, but all part of the ruthless God of Israel.

"I'll fuck your eyes out." Exodus 12:11

And people ask why I'm an atheist.

Many reasons.

Happy Earth Day Plus 1 - 2012

Lately I've been arguing that the age of the car is coming to an end.

Supporters of the meshing of fire, steel, and wheel guffaw at my prediction.

"Cars will always be with us." Older adults are adamant about our addiction to cars without recognizing the generational shift in progress.

"There are no cars in Star Trek, but there are trains," I counter without reservation. I am a firm believer in 'Live long and prosper', plus more young people are abandoning the car in favor of alternative transportation. According to a report in the New Republic "In 1976, three-quarters of all 17-year-olds had drivers' licenses. By 2008, that was down to 49 percent."

Once trolleys connected America.

The auto industry bought them and sold us cars.

Everything good comes to an end when it isn't good anymore.

Poor lil GTO.

Boston Trolley Map - deep into the last century

THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL OF PASSAICH - BET ON CRAZY by Peter Nolan Smith

When Cecil B. DeMille released THE TEN COMMANDMENTS in 1956 and it was an immediate box office success, earning the cinematic retelling of Exodus over $180 million dollars. In 1962 Paramount Pictures re-released the film for screenings at drive-ins across the nation and my father loaded my five brothers and sisters into our Ford station wagon to view the epic with a cast of thousands at the South Shore Drive-In in Braintree, Massachusetts.

After paying for our entry my father cruised the left-handed lane looking for a good vantage spot. He was an ace at parking. My mother spotted an open slot, but before my father turned and a rock struck our car.

My father's head spun to the left and he spotted a teenager scrambling up the grassy slope. He jammed the column shift into P and jumped out of the car. He had played football in college and caught the young man within seconds. The hillside was too dark to see if he had punched the stone-thrower, although my father returned to the station wagon rubbing his knuckles.

"Damned kids today."

"Watch that language." My mother considered swearing a sign of moral decay and had never used a bad word in her life.

"Sorry." My father loved my mother almost as much as he loved his six children.

After parking in the perfect spot, he gave my older brother and me money to buy popcorn from the concession stand. Frunk was eleven and I was ten. This was the first time that we hadn't worn wear pajamas to the drive-in and we walked over to the refreshment stand. Teens loitered under the neon lights. They looked so cool.

Returning to the station wagon my older brother and I handed the popcorn and soft drinks to our parents to divvie out to our siblings. We set up lawn chair before the family car and watched the movie in the warm summer air.

Moses heroically faced down the Pharaoh's magicians, yet the bald Yul Brenner refused to let the Hebrews leave his land.

Moses warned of plagues.

His childhood friend laughed in his face, then the Nile turned into blood, frogs overran the land, gnats infested the dead frogs, wild beasts were driven crazy by the gnats, livestock died from the diseased wild beasts, a pestilence of boils spread on the skin of the Egyptians, a hailstorm destroyed the remaining crops and locust clouded the sky.

The worst was saved for last.

A darkness fell over Egypt and the first-born of every Egyptian died with the passage of the Angel of Death.

Azrael or 'Help from God' was merciless in his mission. I had been a non-believer since the age of eight and this depiction of God's ruthlessness rehardened my heart against the faith of America.

"Why would God kill innocent babies?"

"God acts in strange ways." My older brother had possession of the popcorn. This wasn't the place for an argument about God. Charlton Heston was awed by the burning bush under the starry skies of the South Shore. Hundreds of tiny speakers echoed his voice across the drive-in and at the movie's end the Hebrews reached the Promised Land, although without Moses who doubted God's promise or insisted Philistine wasn't the Promised Land.

"God doesn't act in strange ways. He acts like a creep." My best friend Chaney had drowned in Lake Sebago and he had been a first born.

"Sssh, you want Mom to hear you?"

I shut up, since my youthful atheism would have deeply hurt my mother, but over the following years I questioned my Jewish friends about celebrating Passover's ancient decimation of the Egyptian young.

One year Passaich I wandered into 47th Street to pick up a diamond before everyone rushed home for the high holiday.

Richie Boy greeted me with a shrug.

"When are you leaving?"

Everyone else in the exchange was closing shop.

“Ask the old man.” Richie Boy pointed to my former boss.

I knew the answer.

His father planned on staying to the bitter end of the day and I said, “Manny, it’s Passover. Go home already.”

“And what’s that to you? You're a goy.” Manny shared my anti-religious beliefs. “When you pay my rent, then you can tell me what time I close my business.”

Manny’s desk was cluttered with the usual piles of paperwork. In all the years I had worked for their firm, the pyramid of papers rose and fell without ever disappearing in entirety.

“Close now and I’ll buy you a martini.”

“I’m busy.” This office was the octogenarian's home away from home.

“Manny thinks he might make a sale,” Hlove commented under his breath. The junkie had replaced me when I left for Thailand two years ago. He hadn't a good word for me. I had none for the snitch, who's main skill was brownnosing Richie.

"No one is buying nothing today That’s it. We’re going home." His son signaled his two employee to pack up the merchandise. Hlove and Deisy didn't have to be told twice.

This decision ignited a fight between father and son.

I went outside to wait for Richie Boy.

“Damien, you have something to give for Passiach?” Lenny the Bum shambled up to the window. His bloated face shined with sweat and strands of hair were plastered across his balding skull. He was dressed in his usual attire of a filthy tee shirt and shabby trousers.

“For you, I always have something.” I dug into my pocket for a dollar. “Where are you celebrating Passaich?”

“I’m working the street.” Lenny was a workaholic like Manny. “I have to get money to take care of my sister.”

“You’re a good brother, Lenny.”

“Plus I don’t really celebrate Passaich.” Lenny didn’t look healthy, but he had disproven many rumors of his demise.

“Why not?” Lenny was no atheist.

“What does Passaich celebrate?” Lenny leaned over to whisper what he had to say, as if it were a secret.

“Passover commemorates the Angel of God passing over the Jewish houses in Egypt, but I agree with you. How can anyone in their right mind celebrate the death of innocents?"

"Damian, I didn't kill any Egyptians and I didn't kill Jesus either. I'm just a harmless Jew," Lenny whined with a shrug. "But the Pharaoh was a bad man."

"Or so the Bible says."

"Please." Lenny lifted both his hands in defense. He was a religious bum. His head was always covered by a yarmulke. "Don't think bad of us. We have had a hard time over the centuries. You know that there was no angel of death. The young probably died from infected food, since the first-born always got the food first. Who knows, but it was a sad scene when Yul Brenner carried his dead son in his palace."

"You know the Hebrews weren't slaves. No one working on the pyramids was a slave. They got paid for their labor."

"The Bible says different."

His Yahweh and the Father of the Nailed God of my rejected religion were cruel gods. Jehovah let his son die on a cross. As a father I could never sacrifice my son, but then I'm human and gods are divine. They get away with everything.

"You know I saw THE TEN COMMANDMENTS at the South Shore Drive-In."

“It was a good movie, but Charlton Heston was no Jew.” Lenny rocked back and forth on the heels of his busted shoes. "Plus there was nothing good about the Ten Plagues as you say. Especially the death of the first-born of all Egyptian humans and animals. Yahweh instructed the Hebrews to sprinkle lamb’s blood on this doors, so his spirit would skip their houses in his search for the first-born males of the Egyptians.”

“I was taught that God was all-knowing and all-seeing, so why couldn’t He see which houses were Jewish?”

“Damien, Yahweh moves in strange ways.”

“Most people think the killer of the male first-borns was an angel, but it was actually Yahweh blundering through the night killing young boys. Do you think there was any collateral damage like how smart bombs hit schools in Afghanistan and Iraq and Palestine?”

“How should I know? I wasn’t there, but enough of this narishkait, because Passaich is a celebration of death. Death of the guilty, but also the innocent. This I can not celebrate. Freedom, yes. Extermination, no.”

Several people had gathered around our discussion and a religious diamond dealer angrily demanded of Lenny, “You really think Yahweh was a murderer?”

“It wasn’t the first time.” Lenny depended on the kindness of this street to support his sister and didn't need this attention.

“Actually I think that the second-sons of Egypt plotted to kill all the first-borns to destroy the rules of primogeniture and then blamed the Hebrews.” I was talking nonsense to deflect the flak aimed at Lenny.

“Primogeniture?” The diamond dealer had a yeshiva education.

“Primogeniture is where the first born inherits everything from the father. Like Cain and Abel.”

“Cain killed Abel.” Lenny nodded in agreement.

“The second son plot."

“Es iz nit geshtoygen un nit gefloygen," the diamond dealer muttered in Yiddish.

“What’s that mean?”

“It never rose and it never flew.” Lenny smiled with the pleasure of hearing Yiddish, which had been abandoned by the Hassidim in favor of Hebrew. “In plain speaking ‘bullshit’.”

“It’s not foolishness,” I protested with the fervor of a devotee to the untruth. “Worshipping murder is an abomination."

“God does not murder. He takes revenge.” The diamond dealer spoke with words with conviction. “And in this case it was his Killing Angel doing the killing.”

“Isn’t that the same name used by Josef Mengele?”

"Feh." The diamond dealer was feed up with us.

“That fucking Nazi was called the Angel of Death.” Lenny soured on the mention of his name. He had lost family in the camps. “Passaich was over 3000 years ago and the apotropaic rite actually predates Exodus."

"Apotropaic?" I had never heard the word.

"Something to ward off evil."

"Magic, feh." The diamond dealer spat the two words."

"Not magic, just a ritual of daubing the door lintel with a blood-soaked hyssop to prevent demonic forces from entering the house."

"Hyssop?"

"Yes, a mountain flower."

"Magic. Devils. Double feh." The diamond dealer looked at his Rolex watch and stormed down the sidewalk.

"I shouldn't be so smart. People don't like smart, especially when you challenge their religious beliefs and my people love a good book."

"The Torah?"

"It's the only book to them and they would be even more disapproving, if I told them that Passaich was a combination of a Canaanite and Mesopotamian rituals. The Exodus connection came later, but what do I know?"

"More than me."

"I'm still a bum."

"A smart one."

"That and $3 dollars and I can get a little bottle of brandy. You have something to give?"

"I already gave you, but what the hell." I handed him another two dollars.

“I love you Damian and pray you see your children soon.”

“And a Happy Bunny Day to you, Lenny.

The slumpy bum wandered off pestering another diamond dealer for a dollar. He was a hard worker.

“What was that all about?” Richie Boy exited from the exchange.

“The origins of Passaich.”

“Passover?” He looked into the exchange. His father was still at his papers. “You hungry?”

“Yeah.”

“Me too. What about getting something to eat at the Oyster Bar?”

Shellfish were very tref, but Richie Boy was a bacon Jew, “Sounds delightful.”

Richie Boy and I headed for Grand Central Terminal, passing Lenny.

“Happy Easter.” He offered us.

"I only celebrate the bunnies."

"And chocolate."

"I love chocolate."

I gave him another dollar.

"Enjoy." As a sinner I was willing to forgive almost everyone for everything, since to err is human, but to forgive is a divine trait.

Only forgetting is more human.

Just ask Lenny.

Until then I wish everyone had a good sedah.

Hag kasher vesame`ah, for the only exterminating angels I ever see are the bartenders at the 169 Lounge in Chinatown.

Dakota and Johnny know how to murder the next day, but I lived through this Passover.

After all I'm just a goy.

COVID Plus 4

COVID Plus 4

Four years ago
April 21, 2020
No planes
In the sky
No people
On Vanderbilt Avenue
Alone.

Same today
2024
Afternoon
April cold
Gray clouds
A pale silver sun
Over a bankrupt luxury condo.

Now a few people
On the sidewalk.

Four years ago
None
Me
Alone
Today
Out for a walk
Alone
Same
As four years ago.

We survived that crisis
And others
Fifteen thousand years ago
The Ice Age
A wall of ice
A mile high
Over Clinton Hill
10,000 of us left.
Homo erectus

We will survive
We have been here before.
World population
2050
500 million
I will be one of us
97 years old
In Thailand
With my children
Grandchildren
Great-grandchildren
My wives
Rice paddies
Green
Running west to Burma
And the setting sun.
No planes in the sky
Only the stars.

420 - 2009

My introduction to marijuana came on a drive from Nantasket Beach in the summer of 1969. Frank E Smith (not my brother), Thommie Jordan, and John Gilmour were friends from the Surf, a dance club on the beach. We had just seen the Rockin' Ramrods, the South Shore's #1. They wanted to smoke marijuana on the way home. I was the hold-out.

"I don't want to get a contact high." My drug of choice was beer, wine, and any other form of alcohol. I turned the radio in my VW Beetle to WMEX. They played hippie music this late at night.

"Smoke it." John lit up a reefer. He attended Catholic Memorial. It was my school's archrival. "You'll feel good."

"Smoke it." Thommie Jordan played hockey for Archbishop Williams. He had long hair. His sister was cute. "It won't hurt you."

"Smoke it." Frank E Smith was heading into the Marines. He wanted to see the world. "Girls like it, especially that hippie girl from Weymouth you like. Susan Finn."

"She does?" I had spent the entire night trying to get her out to the beach.

"Yes, she does." A match flared before John's face. He inhaled off the joint and then passed it to the front. I took it from him and inhaled, ending my days as a straight person. Two minutes later we were stopped at a green light in Hingham. Time had reversed direction. I was ruined for society and glad of it.

FTW

And especially on 4/20, National Smoke Day.

420 wasn't the original choice for this holiday, however 4:20 was the mythical time that these pothead from San Rafael High School in California would meet at Louis Pasteur Statue to get high.

Hence 420.

Not much else to say other than I'm going out to break the law.

ps I haven't smoke in over two years. Health reason, but I condoned breaking this federal law.

Defund the DEA.

It's time to free the weed.

if you got it, smoke it.

The Goodness Of Ganga

Ganga is legal in eight states and twenty states have allowed its use for medical purposes. Last year more money was spent on reefer than liquor in Aspen, Colorado. According to the Aspen Times legal distributors of cannabis in Aspen earned $11.3 million in revenue in 2017 compared with $10.5 million for liquor stores. Crime is down as are drunk driving arrests. The herb is a good thing, although that does keep buzzkills from judging our happiness as an rt.com commenter wrote, "We are a intoxicant obsessed species. If your life is so bad that you have to intoxicate yourself on some type of substance to enjoy it. you are pathetic."

This losers can accept defeat and even worse the US AG wants to pursue a hardline against the Weed, calling for stricter enforcement against the happier people. Of course his edict has nothing to do with the fact that Jeffery Sessions has invested millions in for-profit prisons.

Less arrests.

Less profit.

This 4/20 lets show them our numbers.

Free the Weed. Disband the DEA and free the POWs.

Victory is at hand.

Good and Bad 4/20

4/20 is considered a good day by millions of free marijuana smokers around the world, but not every April 20th has been perfect. On the morning of 4/20/2022 I phoned Dakota Pollock for his birthday and he explained, "Hitler was born on April 20th, the Columbine High School Massacre happened on this day, and the DEEPWATER HORIZON exploded in the Gulf of Mexico."

"Some good things must had happened on that date," I countered, hoping for the best.

"Name one."

"I woke up today and it's your birthday."

I sang HAPPY BIRTHDAY as I had since I met Dakota over ten years ago.

"That's one thing I love about my birthday. Your singing that song."

"Count of my singing it next year."

"And for years to come."

"Word that."

I hung up and returned for another bout with sleep.

A good thing any day of the year.

ps Dakota is the one standing.

420 - 2010

2010

California's Secretary of State has certified the voting ballot for the legalization of marijuana. 420. The forces of ganga are asking reefer smokers around the nation to support this measure with a donation of $4.20 in recognition of the legendary Point Reyes high school students who would met at the statue of Louis Pasteur to smoke reefer. Millions of potheads gather on 4/20 every year to promote a change in the United States' failed prohibition against the weed.

While other states have decriminalized possession or sanctioned medical use, California's initiative would permit growth, possession, sale, and ingestion of marijuana for casual smokers. Progressive legislators are seeking to free up billions of tax dollars wasted on the war against marijuana as well as the potential state revenues gained from the sales tax on marijuana. The police are divided on the issue, although a majority of Californians are in favor of the measure.

If the law passes through the voting process, California would be in conflict with the federal laws against the herb and also New York City's anti-marijuana jihad led by the ayatollah of uncool, Mayor Bloomberg. Arrests for weed in the 90s hovered around 1000. In 2008 the NYPD rounded up over 40,000 people per annum, mostly young males of color. Andy, the ex-cop at the diamond exchange, said of his years on the force, "You can tell when someone's high on pot. The stupid smile. An easy arrest and most of the time non-violent too."

"So you don't smoke weed?" I knew better.

"Don't ask, don't tell." Andy was a straight Vietnam vet, but was smart enough to recognize when to follow the Pentagon's policy on homosexuals in the military.

California would be wise if it copied the Netherlands' lead on marijuana.

1. To prevent drug use and to treat and rehabilitate drug users.

2. To reduce harm to users.

3. To diminish public nuisance by drug users (the disturbance of public order and safety in the neighborhood).

4. To combat the production and trafficking of drugs.

(from Wikpedia)

In other words no naked hot tub parties after midnight playing the Grateful Dead at 10 on the volume knob unless you invite the neighbors too.

420

Send in your contribution of $4.20 to NORML

It's time to end the madness.

END THE WAR ON DRUGS

DEFUND THE DEA.

FREE THE POWS

One more thing.

Fuck Bloomberg.

4:20 4/20 2021

WRITTEN 2008

Police and parents demonized Marijuana during my youth. Reefer smokers were condemned by the courts. John Sinclair, the MC5 radical, was sentenced to ten years of prison for the crime of ‘giving’ an undercover agent two joints. The severity of his punishment did not deter the millions of marijuana smokers of the 60s from becoming disciples after the Summer of Love.

I remained straight.

Drugs were for someone else.

I liked beer. It was almost legal, if the police ignored the drinking age. My friends drank beer too, but they were also converts to marijuana. We had met two years ago at the Surf Nantasket, a dance club on the beach. That evening we had just seen the Rockin’ Ramrods, the South Shore’s #1 band. My three friends wanted to smoke marijuana on the way home. I told them no.

“I don’t want to get a contact high.” My drugs of choice was beer, wine, and any other form of alcohol. Marijuana was against the laws of the state. No one in my family had ever gone to jail.

"Pot is better than alcohol and safer than cigarettes." John was a head. He smoked every day. His grade average at high school was a straight D.

"You smoke both." The radio in my VW Beetle was tuned to WMEX. The DJ was playing the Zombies SEASON OF THE WITCH. It was a groovy song.

"Girls like smoking weed." Frank E had been in the Marines for six months. A broken leg had earned him an honorable discharge. He brandished a joint between his fingers. "It makes them horny."

My girlfriend was straight. Kyla was a cheerleader with a divorced mom. We had come close more than a dozen times that summer.

“Smoke it.” John lit up a reefer. He attended Catholic Memorial. It was my school’s arch rival. “You’ll feel good.”

“Smoke it.” Thommie Gordon played hockey for Archbishop Williams. He had long hair. His sister was cute. “It won’t hurt you.”

I opened the sunroof of the VW. My window too.

“Smoke it.” Frank E sucked on the joint. “Girls like it, especially that hippie girl from Weymouth you like. Susan Finn.”

“She does?” I had spent the entire afternoon trying to get the petite brunette out to the beach. She had a reputation for being 'easy'. I was frustrated from Kyla's refusals. She wanted me to wait until after college. Four more years was an eternity for a teenage boy.

"Yes, she does.” A match flared before John’s face. He inhaled off the joint and then passed it to the front. I grabbed the joint from John. I inhaled like a cigarette. I had smoked one of those in 1964. I suspected the same result from the joint. Harsh fumes and coughing.

I was wrong.

I was a long-distance runner. My lungs sucked in a big hit of smoke. I didn’t exhale for 30 seconds. The plume exiting my mouth filled the VW with a cloud. At first I didn’t feel anything. The light turned green. I watched the color. It was so beautiful. I said the same to John. He agreed. Frank did too. The Misunderstood played CHILDREN OF THE SUN. We didn’t move for the entire song. A horn finally broke the trance. We were holding up traffic. I shifted into first and we drove to John’s house in Wollaston to smoke another joint. I was no longer straight. My life was different from before.

My friends laughed hysterically.

I joined them.

I was ruined for society and have remained FTW, especially on 4/20, National Smoke Day.

420 wasn’t the original choice for this holiday, however 4:20 was the mythical time that these pothead from San Rafael High School in California would meet at Louis Pasteur Statue to get high.

Hence 420.

Not much else to say other than I’m going out to break the law.

It’s time to free the weed.

If you got it, smoke it. I will.

GIRLS LIKE GIRLS by Peter Nolan Smith

WRITTEN Sep 19, 2010

The political situation in Bangkok had gotten out of control. The red shirts controlled the city. The police did nothing. People called them daeng moh or watermelon. They were red on the inside. Thaksin was a fellow cop. The Army was in the hands of the old elite or phuu laak maak dee. Bloodshed was a daily occurrence. The government planned a nationwide curfew.

Shut down everything.

Even in Pattaya.

Sam Royalle called me from his house on the other side of Sukhumvit.

"You want to go out tonight. After tonight all the bars and go-gos will be shut." Sam was recovering from a nasty lung infection. His doctor had advised rest. There was only so much staying at home for Sam. "We haven't gone out in ages."

"I know." I had spent my holiday with Mam and our son Fenway. "Let me ask Mam."

Mam trusted me as far as she could see, however Sam had helped me on many occasions.

"It's holiday. Go out with friend. Don't come back until you mao kah."

Basically meaning get legless.

Mam knew that I like drinking. We made love before I left the house. My libido belonged to her. I was late to meet Sam.

By an hour.

Mam had made sure that I had no desire.

Sam and his friends waited at What's Up a Go-Go. The go-go was packed with farangs looking for a girl to barfine for the duration of the upcoming curfew. Sam ordered a round of tequilas. I winced after my shot.

"What wrong?" the manager asked tossing back her tequila.

"Tequila very good."

"Strong." Oi was a tomboy and she only hired girls who liked girls..

Few of the male customers noticed the dancers' sexual preference, because near-naked girls dancing to techno appeared straight to a drunken farang, however several girls glared at a bald-headed German with jealousy, as he barfined a pretty girl in her late teens.

At first I thought it was envy, but realized the vicious looks directed at the male was that of a lover and I recalled the Jefferson Airplane once singing, "Saddest thing in the whole wide world, see your baby with another girl."Same goes for a girl going with a man.

I asked Oi, the manager, if her girlfriend got it-sah or jealous.

"My girlfriend thinks I have sex with every girl here." She rolled her eyes mentioning the real Thai word for jealous. "But not true. I only love her."

"So you don't look at any other girls?"

"Looking not same as making love."

"So when you look, you don't think about making love with the girl."

"I not say that." Oi ordered a round of kamikazes to shut me up.

My eyes roamed the club. Sam's girlfriend cuddled with tall dancer from Isaan on the banquette and I sat with her. The dancer went to the ladies room and I asked her, "I know you like girls. Why you not go with your friend?"

"He has good heart." Dtum looked across the bar to where Sam was buying a dancer a drink. She raised a thumb to approve of his choice. They would share the performer for a menage-a-trois later. "But if I not have him, then I stay with lady. Better than man. Lady love you. Man only want to_____you know. You not think girl love girl bad?"

Bad?

North Hollywood sold several billion dollars worth of DVDs dedicated to lesbianism. I wrote a novel about it. NORTH NORTH HOLLYWOOD. Men fantasize about a love triangle incessantly, only this solipsical equation doesn't run true to the dream. Girls who like girls like boys only because they really like girls. At best you're a man-slave. At worst you're a spectator.

In 1975 I had been hitch-hiking in Big Sur. A hippie. It was getting dark in the forest on US 1. Cars were few. The trees were huge. Camping solo seemed my only option, until a pick-up truck stopped on the shoulder. Two men scurried from the flatbed and ran into the forest like they were wanted fugitives. Two women were in the front. Both cute in a Rubenesque fashion.

"Where you going?"

"LA."

"We're going to San Diego. What you think about getting some wine and camping with us tonight?" The cuter one asked from the passenger seat.

"Cool." And I jumped in the back.

1975. Over thirty years ago. Long hair. Hippie girls. Longer hair. Big Sur. We bought a jug of wine and drove off the road to a grove of redwoods stretching into a cobalt blue sky. Stars glowed above the treetops. We exchanged names. Theirs were Flower and Sammy. I gave mine as James.

"James Bond?" Flower was older and had long brown hair.

"James reefer Bond."

Both of them laughed and Flower tolled a joint. She wore overalls without a bra. Her breasts were big. Sammy's were small. We started a fire and ate fruit, smoked pot, and drank wine. Within 30 minutes we were naked on a scratchy blanket. They called my cock 007, even though it wasn't that long. We had sex throughout the night. Flower took everything I gave her, but the second I entered Sammy my pleasure reached a climax like a storm wave.

One in-and-out.

Flower didn't like this. I was supposed to be a tool. As the dawn broke over the redwoods they began a long sumo wrestling match into a 69 Death Grip excluding any male touch. Flower sneered at me, as if her groans were merely a subterfuge to entice Sammy into this embrace. They finally stopped the orgy. Sleep.

They had pulverized my libido and I understood why the other two men had fled the truck. I crawled from the redwood grove and caught a ride south, knowing that girls like girls and that was it.

Same in Pattaya.

My friends think these girls are experimenting. Most are 'tom-dee' or lesbians and like Gore Vidal said, "Once is experimentation. Twice is perversity."

I left my friends that night and returned home. My wife and daughter were asleep. I lay on the bed and read a little. Ezra Pound. Within a few minutes I was asleep, because these two girls are the only menage a trois in my world.

SOMEONE TO LOVE The Great Society

In 1965 Grace Slick and her husband formed the Great Society in San Francisco. They released 'SOMEONE TO LOVE' as a live single on Autumn Records with Sly Stone as the producer. Sadly Grace left the band to join the Jefferson Airplane, which scored a huge hit with their version of SOMEONE TO LOVE.

To hear the Great Society SOMEONE TO LOVE, please go to the following URL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsS9NJ36tnQ

After Bathing At Baxter's - The Jefferson Airplane

The Milton town library added another angle to my education. The head librarian recognized my thirst for knowledge and allowed my taking out adult books at the age of ten. I read Nicholas Kakanzakis' THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHIRST, Balzac's A HARLOT HIGH AND LOW, Prescott's CONQUEST OF MEXICO, OM BURKE's TRAVEL AMONGST THE DERVISHES. If a book of interest had never previously been checked out, it perked my transgessional interest. My parents never questioned my choices. They had forced my attendance at a parochial hgih school. My grades were better than good, but not as good as my older brother, who always speedread my take-outs for pornography, although after never finding any titillation I went back to his comic books. Thankfully he never skimmed through HUbert Selby's LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN or LE HISTOIRE D'O.

Sadly the musical selection was devoted to Pat Boone and Perry Como, until the appearance of After Bathing At Baxter's by The Jefferson Airplane in 1968. I had purchased their monster hit album SURREALISTIC PILLOW the previous summer, which was more folk than rock except for the epic SOMEONE TO LOVE. The elderly desk librarian was surprised by the rock album.

"I didn't know this was here. I loved COMING BACK TO ME in their last album."

"Me too." I pushed the long hair over my ears. LIFE magazine had featured the Flower Revolution in the Spring and I was in. Ready to go up country or hitchhike across the country to San Francisco and drop ACID.

"Let me know how it is."

The old in my town were cooler than our parents and upon my return to our teaberry split-level ranch house in a suburban development lost in the Blue Hills, I went downstairs and cued up the "The Ballad of You & Me & Pooneil" on side one. Jorma's searing opening touched my soul and I turned up the volume to 10. I wished the top was 100. Marty and Grace. Her voice launched a million trips. Marty says "Armadillo." and I was cool with it meaning nothing. Skip's drums. Jack Cassady's thunder bass. I listened to the LP three times in a row, until my father came down into the basement and shouted, "Turn down that noise."

Nothing said how great this LP was better than his rejection. I was no longer trapped in the suburbs.

ps I reached the Haight in 1971.

Long past the Summer of Love.

I dropped Orange Sunshine and traveled to the where forever there.

I'm still a hippie. Where's the LSD?

To listen to After Bathing at Baxter's please go to the following URL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INUHhW_w-ws

Woodstock Plus 55 Years

On the weekend of August 15-18 in 1969 I was 17 years-old. My hair was a little long.

Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of young people were heading to the Woodstock Music and Art Festival. I had to work washing dishes.

There was nothing cool about that.

I dropped out for permanent that autumn.

In the end I'm an old hippie.

Here's the Jefferson Airplane LIVE AT WOODSTOCK

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUxMxwaLqg0

Monterey Pop Festival 1967

Fifty years ago the Monterey Pop Festival was held south of San Francisco.

"Three days of understanding. Even the cops grooved with us," sang Eric Burdon of the Animals later.

Many regarded the gathering of 60,000 counter-culture music fans to be the opening act of the famed Summer of Love.

Check out the line-up.

Friday Night

The Association The Paupers Lou Rawls Beverley Johnny Rivers Eric Burdon and The Animals Simon & Garfunkel

Saturday

Canned Heat Big Brother and the Holding Company Country Joe and the Fish Al Kooper The Butterfield Blues Band The Electric Flag Quicksilver Messenger Service Steve Miller Band Moby Grape Hugh Masekela The Byrds Laura Nyro Jefferson Airplane Booker T. & the M.G.'s Otis Redding

Sunday

Ravi Shankar The Blues Project Big Brother and the Holding Company The Group With No Name Buffalo Springfield (played w/ David Crosby) The Who Grateful Dead The Jimi Hendrix Experience Scott McKenzie The Mamas & the Papas The Mar-Keys

Only Ravi Shankar played longer than the allotted forty-minute set.

I was 15.

I loved the Airplane.

I traveled in the summer of 1971 to the Haight.

Four years too late.

But a hippie to the core.

Then and now.

To view THE MONTEREY POP FESTIVAL pease go to the following URL on Youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXqbcrKeHs0

FLOP HOUSE Charles Bukowski

you haven't lived until you've been in a flophouse,
with nothing but one light bulb and 56 men
squeezed together on cots with everybody snoring at once

and some of those snores so deep and gross and unbelievable—
dark
snotty gross subhuman wheezings from hell itself.
your mind almost breaks under those death-like sounds
and the intermingling odors: hard unwashed socks pissed and shitted underwear
and over it all slowly circulating air
much like that emanating from uncovered garbage cans.
and those bodies in the dark
fat and thin and bent
some legless armless
some mindless
and worst of all:
the total absence of hope
it shrouds them
covers them totally.
it's not bearable.
you get up
go out
walk the streets
up and down sidewalks
past buildings
around the corner
and back up the same street
thinking:
those men were all children
once
what has happened to them?
and what has happened to me?
it's dark and cold
out here.

~ Charles Bukowski

RED TATE - BAD POETRY by Peter Nolan Smith

Red Tate lies on the pavement Helpless flat on his back If his mother saw this sight Tears would fill her eyes

Red Tate drinks Ripple. Sometimes Thunderbird Red wine dulls his nerves. A bum A tramp. His mother’s second son.

1978

The Bowery 1962

In April 1962 my father attended a business meeting in Manhattan for Ma Bell. While my father was at his appointment, my older brother and I accompanied my mother to Battery Park to see the Statue of Liberty and rode a taxi north through the Bowery heading to the Enpire State Building. As we passed along the Bowery, I asked my mother, if the men sprawled on the sidewalks were dead.

"No, they're drunk like Red Tate."

Red was our town drunk. He has served with the Marines in Korea. He drank wine at the gas station and slept in a concrete bunker in the abandoned army base in the Blue Hills.

"You don't want to end up here "

My mother took us the Empire State Building. From the top the metropolis stretched to the horizons and into the Atlantic.

My father met us at Tad's Steak House. We asked about the men on the Bowery.

My father told us that some soldiers came back from the war damaged and drink helped quiet demons.

"Like the devil?" Asked my brother.

"No, something much worse."

During WWII my father had tested radar-directed 20mm cannons on B-26s In Kentucky. Thousands of miles away from the front line the fatality rates were 15%. My father never said what was worse adn I have no idea either. foto by Meryl Meisler

Lost In Lille Again 2011

After the Chunnel
Night
Luxembourg bound
Porsche Boxer
The Ambassador behind the wheel
Moi
Un passenger
Through the North of France
Flat
Same as Belgium
Jacques Brel's
Le plat pays qui est a mienne.
Eyes shut
Still seeing the flatness
Safe on the Autoroute
The ambassador behind the wheel
Luxembourg three hours away
Sleep
Wake
Past midnight
On a bleak urban street
Not a soul in sight
Nothing says where we are
But I know.
Lille
I've been here before
With the ambassador
Behind the wheel
A wrong turn on the Autoroute.
Lost before
Lost now.
The ambassador says one word
"Lille."
I nod without a word.
We have been here before.
Luxembourg bound
Lost in Lille Again

Johnny Romero PR Parisian

In 1985 Johnny Romero owned les Nuages, a St. Germain nightclub frequented by James Baldwin and James Jones. I was living with his daughter, Candida. She was 17 and I was was 32. He said nothing about our age difference, but after hearing that I lived on the Lower East Side, Johnny asked, "Are there still Puerto Ricans in New York?"

"Plenty, but the Dominicans are taking over?"

"Everyone gets their time in the sun, even chocha Dominicans."

Johnny had a temper, but was tough.

He had survived a fall from an airplane.

His parachute had failed to open.

He hit the ground from 2500 feet.

One night he told me, "Landing felt like I got hit by King Kong."

Johnny had run a New York club on Minetta Lane catering to white women hanging out with colored men. He left the city because of the Mafia.

"They were tougher than a fall from an airplane."

Johnny was rough around the edges of cool, mais 'un vrai mec' and they don't make them like that anymore.

Or Candida

THE WRONG SIZE SHOES by Peter Nolan Smith

Twenty-five minutes after the stroke of Twelve New Year's Eve 1982 a masked assassin shot dead the main investor a block away from the Continental Club on West 25th Street. The FBI and NYPD Internal Affairs investigating Viktor Malenski's murder and quickly drew lines between the dots. My ex-girlfriend was living with the dead man’s partner. My boss had been wearing a wire. I had paid bribes to cops in patrol cars. The scandal hit the papers. My name had been mentioned twice. Everyone thought I knew something. They were more right than wrong.

I avoided turning state's witness thanks to a phone call from Paris saved me from turning state's witness. A nightclub owner was offering a position of 'physionomiste'. My inability to speak French was considered a plus. A ticket waited at the airport and the next day I left New York without leaving a forwarding address.

Paris was a relief. The nightclub on the Grand Boulevard was popular. I was cuffed free food, drinks, and the right to treat the French as badly as necessary. They loved me for this rude behavior. It was the perfect job for an American in Paris.

Any time I had thought about returning to New York, I had called my friends. They had warned that the Internal Affairs investigation was in full swing. The FBI had asked several people my whereabouts. For the conceivable future Paris was home and I made the best of it.

Young models from foreign lands and svelte dancers from the Folies Bergeres dragged me to flats throughout the various arrondissements. My troubles seemed 3000 miles away and I had no intention on closing that Trans-Atlantic distance. 1982 became 1983 and 1984 arrived without any commitment to a conventional life.

All that changed when a mischievous teenager with a froth of golden brown hair accompanied me to my hotel room in the Marais.

I attributed our having sex five times in one night to her half-Puerto Rican/half Jewish blood. Candia didn't leave the next morning and two days later the long-legged model/actress asked me to live with her in La Ruche, an artist commune.

Staking my heart on the whims of a girl fifteen years my junior was dangerous, however the atelier in the distant 15th arrondissement overlooking the Lost and Found bureau of the Paris Taxi Commission was a welcome change from the Marais Hotel. Famous artists had lived ant La Ruche. I started writing a novel about pornography in LA.

My friends, Albert and Serge, opened a dance club in the Bastille. I was the doorman. Black Jacques worked as the bouncer. We were a good team.

The Nouvelle Eve was popular with the young rich. Candia modeled in Germany, Italy, and Paris. We laughed, fought, made up, and went on vacations. Life was bliss. The summer was spent in love. Our lust tapered off in the fall. After an October trip to Milano, the phone rang at odd hours. If I answered, the caller hung up.

Candia slept far from my touch.

The art dealer Vonelli said that the happiness of a relationship was measured by the distance between a man and woman in bed.

Ours was a meter. There was someone else. I said nothing. She would have resented my accusations. The well-bred girls frequenting La Reve offered solace, yet I remained true to Candia, hoping one day for a response to my faithful dedication.

Two days into 1985 Candia left Paris for a photo shoot in the Alps.

Three days later she phoned to say her boss had invited the fashion team for a ski trip to Isola 2000. Having heard her opinion that skiers were too poor to vacation in the tropics, I bit my tongue and spent the weekend drinking heavier than normal. Candia called on Sunday to say she was staying an extra day. I envisioned her naked in bed with another man.An Italian.

She hung up and I told myself this was just a fling. Candia would come back and everything would be like it was before, otherwise she would have never bothered with the call. On the day of her return I cleaned the apartment, bought flowers, chilled a bottle of champagne, and sprayed a perfume on the bed for a night of coaxing her heart into my arms.

She arrived late.

The shimmering silver fur coat accented cinnamon skin untouched by the alpine sun. It was new and my heart crumpled like a cheap beer can. The telephone rang and she snatched the receiver out of my hand. After several whispers Candia announced, "I have to meet a client at the Hotel Crillion for dinner."

Stopping her was impossible.

"Go ahead."

She left without mentioning the time of her return. I went to the nightclub. By 3AM I had drunk myself partially deaf and dumb. My partner stopped my dancing on a stool to Chic's LE FREAK.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing another whiskey-coke wouldn't cure," I shouted for a refill and Serge annulled my order. "Why don't you go home and sleep this off?"

"Because a house is not a home." I staggered to the entrance. A runway model from Baltimore accosted me with an obscene proposition. The redhead was beautiful. My girlfriend was probably making love to another man. The hotel across the street charged 200 francs for a room. I opted for the high moral ground.

"Another night."

"Another night?"

She blinked in disbelief. No male in their right mind had ever refused her favors.

Leaving the club I weaved through the errant snowflakes to the Seine. The water lay like between the two banks like an oil spill. Candia's betrayal shielded me from the cold. Nearing the 15th arrondisement, I realized while I might not forget this trespass, I could forgive her sin. I just needed a chance.

On the Impasse Dantzig I lifted my eyes. The lights in the atelier were off. I prayed she was asleep in bed. She had chosen another course. Inside the door lay a pair of shiny Gucci loafers. They were not my size or style. A man's moaning answered any question about their ownership. I charged into the bedroom with a wounded roar. A balding man lifted his arms too late to deflect my fist. He tumbled unconscious off the mattress.

The venom geysering through my veins transported me 300,000 years to a fire-lit cave. I seized Candia by the hair and threw her on the floor. The girl nursing my cold, the lover cuddling me after sex, the dinner companion laughing at my jokes were gone.

"Why?"

"If you have to ask why, then you will never know the answer," she spat with an unrecognizable hostility.

I envisioned a deadly blow, police, and trial. Her infidelity wasn't worth a life sentence in the La Sante prison. I chucked her Mickey Mouse telephone through the window into the street and I scourged the naked couple from the apartment with the frayed wire.

Once alone I packed my clothes, journals, tape deck, camera, and photos. The man’s suit and shoes went out the broken window. The pettiness of the act felt good. I imagined police sirens in the distance and hurried from the apartment.

On the nearest boulevard I hailed a passing taxi. The hour and my bag explained the story. The unshaven driver shrugged knowingly, "Un hotel?"

"Ouais, le Hotel Louisiana." Stuttering images of my girlfriend's infidelity accelerated my breathing and the driver asked, "Mssr., vous etes okay?"

"Ouais." It was the one word I could managed between the gasps for air.

I lowered the window. The cold air failed to pluck the splintered razors from my lungs. A bottle of sleeping pills was lumpy in my coat. Overhead the sky glowered with a miserly gray dawn. The driver stopped at Rue Du Seine. I paid with a 100-franc note and said to keep the change. He drove away without a merci.

Waking the old woman at the hotel desk was almost a sin, except I had almost broken the 5th Commandment. I rang the bell. She blinked several times before recognizing my face from a previous stay. "Ah, Mssr., je imagine que vous voulez une chambre."

"Une chambre pour un nuit." A room with a bed and bath fulfilled my physical needs.

"Chambre 312." She passed over a brass key and pointed to the elevator.

The room was clean. The bed was soft. I dropped two sleeping pills and saved the rest for a more desperate occasion. Sleep collapsed on me as heavily as a tombstone. Five hours later I woke more from a coma than sleep. My first thoughts reflected on the previous evening.

She had brought back her lover on purpose. My hands mimicked the act of strangulation. Thin air was no replacement for a seventeen year-old's neck. French court had never convicted a man of a crime de passion, but I was only a murderer in my most grievous thoughts.

I tore up the photos of Candia naked in the changing cabinets of the Piscine Deligny, singing in Clermont-Fernand, and visiting her grandmother in Vichy. The shreds built a pyre of dead love in the hotel ashtray. I set them on fire. The flames wrinkled her face and body. An acrid fume corkscrewed into my nose. Fearing Candia's soul had invaded my body, I flushed the flaming photos down the toilet and left the hotel.

An icy wind hurried me down the Blvd. St. Germain to the Cafe le Flore. No one was braving the sidewalk tables. I sat on a chair behind a glass wall. The waiter took my order of a cafe au lait, croissant, and a single shot of Calvados and disappeared inside.

Waiting for my breakfast, I viewed each passing couple with a jealousy bordering on hatred. Three Calvados numbed my disapproval, the wet wind, and my girlfriend's betrayal.

After the fifth Calva I barely noticed my partner sit beside me.

Serge looked like he had just woke up. "I've been looking for you."

"Why?" Rubbing my face was an ineffective method of erasing the effects of the alcohol.

"I called your house this morning and spoke with Candia." Serge lit a cigarette and signaled to the waiter to bring us another round.

"More like my girlfiend." Dropping an 'r' from friend was lost on the Frenchman. "What the bitch say for herself?"

"She is very worried about you." My partner’s eyes pursued two schoolgirls.

I blew into my hands. "If she cared about me, why she bring home that man?"

"You Americans treat women as men. They are not. They are women and we have to protect the double standard, otherwise the battle between man and woman will be lost." Serge waved to a model on her way to a casting call. "You allowed her to have affairs and she concluded you did not care about her."

"Not care? I almost killed her." My fists clenched white.

"C'est vrai, and now she appreciates you care about her. A woman is a horse. You hold the reins tight and the horse will throw you. Too loose and she will run away." His eyes beamed with macho pride. "You showed her that you are a real man."

"That's insane." My parents had reared me to not hit a woman.

Serge inhaled deeply on his cigarette.

"The caveman drags a woman by the hair to the cave. They have a little corps-a-corps. She stays with him. Not the man who lets her have an affair with another caveman."

The only examples of a caveman dragging a woman by her hair had not painted in Neolithic caves, but drawn in TV cartoons, however man's dominance over woman needed no historical anchor for its machismo in France. "This is the almost the 21st Century."

"Eh, alors, even more reason you must establish a 'rapport de force'." Serge stubbed out his cigarette. "Yell at her, hit her, and make love. She expects you to act like a man, not a mouse. If you let this wound bleed, you will be no good for the next woman you meet and believe me you will always have another woman. A plus tard."

To prove his point Serge stalked a fashionably attired woman in her thirties. Within a few paces she rewarded his boldness with a smile.

I shambled to the boulevard, foreseeing my kicking in the door, only every taxi was occupied by other couples. The chances of winning back Candia smoldered in the icy drizzle and I returned to the hotel room.

I sat on the bed. Twenty sleeping pills would provide an eternal blanket. My head fell into my hands and I spotted a photo on the floor. It had been taken almost twenty years ago.

My grandmother sat on the porch of her house in Westbrook, Maine. A simple string of pearl circled her neck. A cameo was pinned to her black dress. The stacks of the SD Warren paper mill rose over the neighbor's roof. I could smell the sulfurous stench from the mill with my eyes closed.

Maine called. People there spoke with my accent. My grandmother made the world’s best beef stew. I'd sleep in a four-poster bed under warm covers. My bank account was full of francs. I'd skate on Watchic Pond and sled down Blackstrap Hill.

I called the nightclub and told Serge I was leaving town for a few days, then bought a one-way ticket to America from a travel agency on the Boulevard St. Germain. A taxi got me to Charles de Gaulle Aeroport with an hour to spare. The change in my pocket weighed a ton and I fought the urge to phone Candia. We had nothing to say. Finally the ground staff called for the passengers to board and I left Paris, knowing I was headed for the USA.

The 747 fought the winter headwinds across the Atlantic and made landfall over the coastline of Maine. I peered through the plane's porthole. Watchic Pond was an icy white dot beneath the wing and I followed the white snake of the Presumpscot River to the SD Warren Mill in Westbrook. I took out the picture of my grandmother and turned over the yellowing photo to check the date.

The picture had been taken on the 4th of July of 1965.

I remembered the day minute for minute.

My brother and I were vacationing with my grandmother. We went to the lake for the weekend and came back to Westbrook on the 4th. I went into the drugstore to buy a comic book. The counter girl asked me to walk her home. I almost lost my virginity along the Presumpscot River. The girl laughed at my fear and I ran back to my grandmother's house. She had explained the birds and bees as she might to a grown man?and we watched THE SEVEN SAMURAI that night. Neither of us said anything to my older brother.

I landed at JFK and stepped out of the terminal. People wore snow parkas, hats, and scarves for survival. I hadn't crossed the Atlantic to appreciate the Tri-State weather and boarded the A-train to Penn Station, where I rode the Northeast Unlimited to Boston, arriving at Route 128 near Eleven O'clock. A taxi drove to my parents' house. They both asked if everything was all right. I lied about Candia and said I wanted to see my grandmother. They exchanged a secretive glance and my father announced, "Your grandmother is in a nursing home on the North Shore near your aunt."

"Why didn't anyone tell me?"

"Your grandmother didn't want you to worry being so far away." My father was clearly worried about his mother. This was more than a cold or flu.

"Can I visit her?" I planned to free her from this old age prison.

"We'll go tomorrow. She's weak, so we can only stay for a short time."

"That's all right. I still want to see her."

I spoke with my parents for a few minutes. We were tired and bid each other goodnight. I went upstairs to my bedroom. The airplane models, books, pictures, and trophies belonged to a stranger. I slept in the musty cellar. In the morning my father and I went to breakfast. He had divined the state of affairs in Paris.

"You should come back to Boston and settle down with a nice Catholic girl."

It was easy for him to say. My father had married the woman he loved, raised six children, and worked for the same company thirty years.

"I'll keep that in mind."

"How many more years you intend on messing around?"

"I don't know." I verged closer to tears.

"I'd expect 'I don't know' from a kid, not a thirty-two year-old man. Life goes fast. I'd hate for you to find yourself ten years from now, thinking it was a waste." My father wasn't the type of man to witness his son's breakdown and paid the bill at the cash register. As we walked to his car, I asked, "How's grandmother?"

"She has cancer."

"How bad?"

"Terminal. She had a lump and let it go."

"She must have known it would kill her." My grandmother had been a nurse.

"Probably." He didn't understand her neglect either.

The full extent of my grandmother's condition had to wait until the nursing home. She rested on a bed facing a window. Her breathing was pained. A morphine tube was attached to her vein. While she had lost weight, her face was a mirror of the woman in the photo sitting on the porch. She smiled with a drugged gentleness.

"There's a sight for sore eyes."

My father bent to kiss his mother and I held her frail hand. They spoke for several minutes and he said, "I have to speak with the nurses."

Once he left the room, my grandmother patted my face. "How's Paris?"

Her time was measured in days, not months. "Paris is Paris."

"You forget I met your grandfather in Paris during the Great War. We were young and in love, so don't tell me Paris is Paris." Her opiated eyes delved deeper into me.

"You can tell me your problem. It might be one of your last chances for my help."

"Don't say that."

"It's the truth, of course the doctors say I'll live to ninety.”

"They do?" I remembered my mother lying the night of her mother's death. She had said it was to soothe my Irish grandmother and Nana had accepted the lie to alleviate my mother’s sorrow.

"They lied to me. The end is closer than anyone says." She brushed her hand against my face, the skin smelling of lavender. "Let me guess. Your romance in Paris has ended."

"Romeo has no Juliette." I blurted out the entire story. At the end my grandmother said, "Hitting a woman is wrong no matter if she did something wrong."

"I didn't hit her."

"You came close."

"It's not the same thing." The madness in my blood was only defensible in a French court and my grandmother frowned through a mask of pain.

"What did you expect from such a young girl anyway?"

"She said she loved me."

"Maybe she did in her own way." My grandmother coughed and I stood to fetch the nurse. She said, "Not yet. Please give me a glass of water."

I gave her a few sips and she closed her eyes. I worried she might not wake up, but after several seconds the agate green orbs flashed with life. "It's been thirty years, since your grandfather passed away, but I can remember the first years together as man and wife."

"Maybe I'll never have that." I feared a life alone.

"Let me tell you a story. You remember my friend, Marie."

"She's still alive?" Marie chain-smoked and drank two bottle of rose wine daily. She was hard to forget.

"Marie will outlive me. Guess her drinking was her fountain of youth."

"You're not gone yet." I wished my caresses might cure her.

"It's only a matter of time, anyway Marie had been a beautiful woman. She married young, acceding to her father's choice. Her husband wasn't capable of giving her romantic love, but people stayed together those days because it was the thing to do. After the Great War Marie accompanied her husband to Germany. One trip she met a sea captain and fell in love. This time for real. Of course it was unrealistic. She was married and the war came. He served as a U-boat commander. When Marie heard he was missing in the Atlantic, she went to pieces and began drinking. Her husband tolerated her behavior. Guess he loved her in his own way. Anyway he passed away a year ago, making Marie a free woman."

Fearing she was ranting from the drugs, I fidgeted on the chair and she admonished me, "That is the problem with you young people. Always in a hurry for the ending, so you miss the good parts."

"Sorry, grandmother."

"You should be. Anyway Marie was sitting in her house and the doorbell rang. She opened the door to this old gentleman. Marie mistook him for a friend of her husband. He had a German accent. Only one man in her life did. It was her sea captain. He hadn't died during the war. He had married his childhood sweetheart. After her death he sought out Marie to tell her that his only desire was to spend the rest of his life with her. And they are living happily ever after. So as sad as you are, one day you?ll love again. Now give me a kiss and fetch that nurse."

I kissed her forehead and brought a nurse to the room. My father said it was time to go and in the parking lot he read the sadness piled atop whatever had happened in Paris. He had to say something. "Your grandmother wouldn't like you hurt."

"I know."

"She loves you very much."

Marblehead Harbor was mirror flat. I had sailed it with my grandmother in my uncle's little Sunfish. Soon she would only exist in memories of Maine.

"She loved you too."

"How about a plate of fried clams?" He opened his door.

"Sounds good to me." Winter wasn't the best season for fried clams and my father's offer wasn't a soothing hand on my brow, however fried clams were a good remedy to the sight of another man?s shoes, especially if the Barnacle in Marblehead was open for lunch.

My grandmother was right.

One day I was going to love again and until that day I would have to live like that moment might be the next or else it would pass me by and I was too young to wait as long as Marie to find love again. When was only a question of time. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing another whiskey-coke wouldn't cure," I shouted for a refill and Serge annulled my order. "Why don't you go home and sleep this off?"

"Because a house is not a home." I staggered to the entrance. A runway model from Baltimore accosted me with an obscene proposition. The redhead was beautiful. My girlfriend was probably making love to another man. The hotel across the street charged 200 francs for a room. I opted for the high moral ground.

"Another night."

"Another night?"

She blinked in disbelief. No male in their right mind had ever refused her favors.

Leaving the club I weaved through the errant snowflakes to the Seine. The water lay like between the two banks like an oil spill. Candia's betrayal shielded me from the cold. Nearing the 15th arrondisement, I realized while I might not forget this trespass, I could forgive her sin. I just needed a chance.

On the Impasse Dantzig I lifted my eyes. The lights in the atelier were off. She might have stayed at the hotel. I prayed she was asleep in bed. She had chosen another course. Inside the door lay a pair of shiny Gucci loafers. They were not my size or style. A man's moaning answered any question about their ownership. I charged into the bedroom with a wounded roar. A balding man lifted his arms too late to deflect my fist. He tumbled unconscious off the mattress.

The venom geysering through my veins transported me 300,000 years to a fire-lit cave. I seized Candia by the hair and threw her on the floor. The girl nursing my cold, the lover cuddling me after sex, the dinner companion laughing at my jokes were gone.

"Why?"

"If you have to ask why, then you will never know the answer," she spat with an unrecognizable hostility.

I envisioned a deadly blow, police, and trial. Her infidelity wasn't worth a life sentence in the La Sante prison. I chucked her Mickey Mouse telephone through the window into the street and I scourged the naked couple from the apartment with the frayed wire.

Once alone I packed my clothes, journals, tape deck, camera, and photos. The man?s suit and shoes went out the broken window. The pettiness of the act felt good. I imagined police sirens in the distance and hurried from the apartment.

On the nearest boulevard I hailed a passing taxi. The hour and my bag explained the story. The unshaven driver shrugged knowingly, "Un hotel?"

"Ouais, le Hotel Louisiana." Stuttering images of my girlfriend's infidelity accelerated my breathing and the driver asked, "Mssr., vous etes okay?"

"Ouais." It was the one word I could managed between the gasps for air.

I lowered the window. The cold air failed to pluck the splintered razors from my lungs. A bottle of sleeping pills was lumpy in my coat. Overhead the sky glowered with a miserly gray dawn. The driver stopped at Rue Du Seine. I paid with a 100-franc note and said to keep the change. He drove away without a merci.

Waking the old woman at the hotel desk was almost a sin, except I had almost broken the 5th Commandment. I rang the bell. She blinked several times before recognizing my face from a previous stay. "Ah, Mssr., je imagine que vous voulez une chambre."

"Une chambre pour un nuit." A room with a bed and bath fulfilled my physical needs.

"Chambre 312." She passed over a brass key and pointed to the elevator.

The room was clean. The bed was soft. I dropped two sleeping pills and saved the rest for a more desperate occasion. Sleep collapsed on me as heavily as a tombstone. Five hours later I woke more from a coma than sleep. My first thoughts reflected on the previous evening.

She had brought back her lover on purpose. My hands mimicked the act of strangulation. Thin air was no replacement for a seventeen year-old's neck. French court had never convicted a man of a crime de passion, but I was only a murderer in my most grievous thoughts.

I tore up the photos of Candia naked in the changing cabinets of the Piscine Deligny, singing in Clermont-Fernand, and visiting her grandmother in Vichy. The shreds built a pyre of dead love in the hotel ashtray. I set them on fire. The flames wrinkled her face and body. An acrid fume corkscrewed into my nose. Fearing Candia's soul had invaded my body, I flushed the flaming photos down the toilet and left the hotel.

An icy wind hurried me down the Blvd. St. Germain to the Cafe le Flore. No one was braving the sidewalk tables. I sat on a chair behind a glass wall. The waiter took my order of a cafe au lait, croissant, and a single shot of Calvados and disappeared inside.

Waiting for my breakfast, I viewed each passing couple with a jealousy bordering on hatred. Three Calvados numbed my disapproval, the wet wind, and my girlfriend's betrayal.

After the fifth Calva I barely noticed my partner sit beside me.

Serge looked like he had just woke up. "I've been looking for you."

"Why?" Rubbing my face was an ineffective method of erasing the effects of the alcohol.

"I called your house this morning and spoke with Candia." Serge lit a cigarette and signaled to the waiter to bring us another round.

"More like my girlfiend." Dropping an 'r' from friend was lost on the Frenchman. "What the bitch say for herself?"

"She is very worried about you." My partner?s eyes pursued two schoolgirls.

I blew into my hands. "If she cared about me, why she bring home that man?"

"You Americans treat women as men. They are not. They are women and we have to protect the double standard, otherwise the battle between man and woman will be lost." Serge waved to a model on her way to a casting call. "You allowed her to have affairs and she concluded you did not care about her."

"Not care? I almost killed her." My fists clenched white.

"C'est vrai, and now she appreciates you care about her. A woman is a horse. You hold the reins tight and the horse will throw you. Too loose and she will runaway." His eyes beamed with macho pride. "You showed her that you are a real man."

"That's insane." My parents had reared me to not hit a woman.

Serge inhaled deeply on his cigarette.

"The caveman drags a woman by the hair to the cave. They have a little corps-a-corps. She stays with him. Not the man who lets her have an affair with another caveman."

The only examples of a caveman dragging a woman by her hair had not painted in Neolithic caves, but drawn in TV cartoons, however man's dominance over woman needed no historical anchor for its machismo in France. "This is the almost the 21st Century.?" "Eh, alors, even more reason you must establish a 'rapport de force?'." Serge stubbed out his cigarette. "Yell at her, hit her, and make love. She expects you to act like a man, not a mouse. If you let this wound bleed, you will be no good for the next woman you meet and believe me you will always have another woman. A plus tard."

To prove his point Serge stalked a fashionably attired woman in her thirties. Within a few paces she rewarded his boldness with a smile.

He was right and I shambled to the boulevard, foreseeing my kicking in the door, only every taxi was occupied by other couples. The chances of winning back Candia smoldered in the icy drizzle and I returned to the hotel room.

I sat on the bed. Twenty sleeping pills would provide an eternal blanket. My head fell into my hands and I spotted a photo on the floor. It had been taken almost twenty years ago.

My grandmother sat on the porch of her house in Westbrook, Maine. A simple string of pearl circled her neck. A cameo was pinned to her black dress. The stacks of the SD Warren paper mill rose over the neighbor's roof. I could smell the sulfurous stench from the mill with my eyes closed.

Maine was calling. People there spoke with my accent. My grandmother made the world?s best beef stew. I?d sleep in a four-poster bed under warm covers. My bank account was full of francs. I?d skate on Watchic Pond and sled down Blackstrap Hill.

I called the nightclub and told Serge I was leaving town for a few days, then bought a one-way ticket to America from a travel agency on the Boulevard St. Germain. A taxi got me to Charles de Gaulle Aeroport with an hour to spare. The change in my pocket weighed a ton and I fought the urge to phone Candia. We had nothing to say. Finally the ground staff called for the passengers to board and I left Paris, knowing I was headed for the USA.

The 747 fought the winter headwinds across the Atlantic and made landfall over the coastline of Maine. I peered through the plane's porthole. Watchic Pond was an icy white dot beneath the wing and I followed the white snake of the Presumpscot River to the SD Warren Mill in Westbrook. I took out the picture of my grandmother and turned over the yellowing photo to check the date.

The picture had been taken on the 4th of July of 1965.

I remembered the day minute for minute.

My brother and I were vacationing with my grandmother. We went to the lake for the weekend and came back to Westbrook on the 4th. I went into the drugstore to buy a comic book. The counter girl asked me to walk her home. I almost lost my virginity along the Presumpscot River. The girl laughed at my fear and i ran back to my grandmother's house. She had explained the birds and bees as she might to a grown man?and we watched THE SEVEN SAMURAI that night. Neither of us said anything to my older brother.

I landed at JFK and stepped out of the terminal. People wore snow parkas, hats, and scarves for survival. I hadn't crossed the Atlantic to appreciate the Tri-State weather and boarded the A-train to Penn Station, where I rode the Northeast Unlimited to Boston, arriving at Route 128 near Eleven O'clock. A taxi drove to my parents' house. They both asked if everything was all right. I lied about Candia and said I wanted to see my grandmother. They exchanged a secretive glance and my father announced, "Your grandmother is in a nursing home on the North Shore near your aunt."

"Why didn't anyone tell me?"

?Your grandmother didn't want you to worry being so far away." My father was clearly worried about his mother. This was more than a cold or flu.

"Can I visit her?" I planned to free her from this old age prison.

"We'll go tomorrow. She's weak, so we can only stay for a short time."

"That's all right. I still want to see her." I spoke with my parents for a few minutes. We were tired and bid each other goodnight. I went upstairs to my bedroom. The airplane models, books, pictures, and trophies belonged to a stranger. I slept in the musty cellar. In the morning my father and I went to breakfast. He had divined the state of affairs in Paris. "You should come back to Boston and settle down with a nice Catholic girl."

It was easy for him to say. My father had married the woman he loved, raised six children, and worked for the same company thirty years. "I'll keep that in mind."

"How many more years you intend on messing around?"

"I don't know." I verged closer to tears.

"I'd expect 'I don't know' from a kid, not a thirty-two year-old man. Life goes fast. I?d hate for you to find yourself ten years from now, thinking it was a waste." My father wasn't the type of man to witness his son?s breakdown and paid the bill at the cash register. As we walked to his car, I asked, "How's grandmother?"

"She has cancer."

"How bad?" "Terminal.

She had a lump and let it go."

"She must have known it would kill her." My grandmother had been a nurse.

"Probably." He didn't understand her neglect either.

The full extent of my grandmother's condition had to wait until the nursing home. She was resting on a bed facing a window. Her breathing was pained. A morphine tube was attached to her vein. While she had lost weight, her face was a mirror of the woman in the photo sitting on the porch. She smiled with a drugged gentleness. "There's a sight for sore eyes."

My father bent to kiss his mother and I held her frail hand. They spoke for several minutes and he said, "I have to speak with the nurses."

Once he left the room, my grandmother patted my face. "How's Paris?"

Her time was measured in days, not months. "Paris is Paris."

"You forget I met your grandfather in Paris during the Great War. We were young and in love, so don?t tell me Paris is Paris." Her opiated eyes delved deeper into me. "You can tell me your problem. It might be one of your last chances for my help."

"Don't say that."

"It's the truth, of course the doctors say I'll live to ninety.?

"They do?" I remembered my mother lying the night of her mother's death. She had said it was to soothe my Irish grandmother and Nana had accepted the lie to alleviate my mother?s sorrow.

"They lied to me. The end is closer than anyone says." She brushed her hand against my face, the skin smelling of lavender. "Let me guess. Your romance in Paris has ended."

"Romeo has no Juliette." I blurted out the entire story. At the end my grandmother said, "Hitting a woman is wrong no matter if she did something wrong."

"I didn't hit her."

"You came close."

"It?'s not the same thing." The madness in my blood was only defensible in a French court and my grandmother frowned through a mask of pain.

"What did you expect from such a young girl anyway?"

"She said she loved me."

"Maybe she did in her own way." My grandmother coughed and I stood to fetch the nurse. She said, "Not yet. Please give me a glass of water."

I gave her a few sips and she closed her eyes. I worried she might not wake up, but after several seconds the agate green orbs flashed with life. "It's been thirty years, since your grandfather passed away, but I can remember the first years together as man and wife."

"Maybe I'll never have that."

"Let me tell you a story. You remember my friend, Marie." "She's still alive?" Marie chain-smoked and drank two bottle of rose wine daily. She was hard to forget. "Marie will outlive me. Guess her drinking was her fountain of youth." "You're not gone yet." I wished my caresses might cure her. "It's only a matter of time, anyway Marie had been a beautiful woman. She married young, acceding to her father's choice. Her husband wasn't capable of giving her romantic love, but people stayed together those days because it was the thing to do. After the Great War Marie accompanied her husband to Germany. One trip she met a sea captain and fell in love. This time for real. Of course it was unrealistic. She was married and the war came. He served as a U-boat commander. When Marie heard he was missing in the Atlantic, she went to pieces and began drinking. Her husband tolerated her behavior. Guess he loved her in his own way. Anyway he passed away a year ago, making Marie a free woman."

Fearing she was ranting from the drugs, I fidgeted on the chair and she admonished me, "That is the problem with you young people. Always in a hurry for the ending, so you miss the good parts."

"Sorry, grandmother."

"You should be. Anyway Marie was sitting in her house and the doorbell rang. She opened the door to this old gentleman. Marie mistook him for a friend of her husband. He had a German accent. Only one man in her life did. It was her sea captain. He hadn't died during the war. He had married his childhood sweetheart. After her death he sought out Marie to tell her that his only desire was to spend the rest of his life with her. And they are living happily ever after. So as sad as you are, one day you?ll love again. Now give me a kiss and fetch that nurse."

I kissed her forehead and brought a nurse to the room. My father said it was time to go and in the parking lot he read the sadness piled atop whatever had happened in Paris. He had to say something. "Your grandmother wouldn't like you hurt."

"I know."

"She loves you very much."

Marblehead Harbor was mirror flat. I had sailed it with my grandmother in my uncle's little Sunfish. Soon she would only exist in memories of Maine.

"She loved you too."

"How about a plate of fried clams?" He opened his door.

"Sounds good to me." Winter wasn't the best season for fried clams and my father's offer wasn't a soothing hand on my brow, however fried clams were a good remedy to the sight of another man?s shoes, especially if the Barnacle in Marblehead was open for lunch.

My grandmother was right.

One day I was going to love again and until that day I would have to live like that moment might be the next or else it would pass me by and I was too young to wait as long as Marie to find love again. When was only a question of time.