Beyond The Border

Over the years my friends' sons and daughters suspected that my travels were connected to the CIA or some criminal enterprise. My denials only confirmed their opinions, mostly because none of them wanted to become their parents, unless they were rich.

Recently young man contacted me on Facebook and asked if I was in Thailand to transport drugs. Thai police are very strict on traffickers and I have never entertained any business enterprise involved the shipment of drugs within or outside Thailand, however back in 1994 I was motorcycling north of Chiang Mai with two Italian friends. We reached the northernmost point of Thailand, Mai Sai, and stayed at the idyllic Mai Sai Guesthouse. Butterflies floated over the tropical flowers and young Burmese children swam in the river. I was content to drink a Singha beer, but they wanted more.

"More?"

"Prego, opium." They chorused this mutual desire.

"Don't say that too loud." Undercover Thai police specialized in entrapping westerners. I tried to deter their obsession, but they were relentless and I said, "I'll see what I can do."

I set out for the western mountain crest marking the frontier on a 250cc ATX. No police patrolled the road. No passport control either.

I spotted an old man from the Yao tribe. I asked him if he knew where to find 'fin' or opium. He nodded with a toothless grin and pointed into Burma. I thumbed behind me and he jumped on the back of the trail bike. We drove several kilometers on an unpaved road to a small village of thatched huts and runny-nosed kids. He spoke with several men and came back with five fingers up.

"$50?" I asked and he smiled once more.

The money was the Italians, so I wasn't losing anything, if he disappeared into Burma. I handed over the dollars. He and another man drove off in a pick-up . I sat in the village watched by everyone like I was a TV showing an American sit-com without subtitles. After twenty minutes I started getting nervous. I was in Burma without a visa looking for drugs. Potentially big trouble. A truck was coming up the hill. I got on the bike and started it in case the truck belong to the Burmese police.

It was the old man. He got out of the truck with a garbage bag of pot. Five pounds at least. I shook my head.

"Not ganga. Fin. Opium. Horse. Ma."

None of this filtered through our language barrier, but he lifted a finger for me to wait. He went into a hut and returned with a bag of white powder. It looked familiar and tasted familiar too. Chinese # 4 Heroin.

I thanked the old man and stuffed the cellophane bag into my boot. Thais are very wary of people's feet. They consider them dirty and my boots were caked with dust. I drove back to Mai Sai through several Thai police checkpoints without any incident. In my room I showed the bag to the Italian.

"This is not opium." They were disappointed until we chased the dragon.

This was the real gear and I explained that opium was tough to find now that the DEA waged its war on drugs along the border. The growers refined the opium into heroin for easier shipment. The Italians could have cared less. They were in oblivion and by the end of the week they were hooked to the gear. They wanted more, but I wasn't pushing my luck. I gave them directions and headed back to Chiang Mai.

I never saw them again.

I explained this my friend's son.

"Right." He preferred to believe his own story and I was guilty as charged by a teenage mind. Better than the real thing, because I like my freedom and I know better than to do something that stupid now I'm a grown man. At least anyplace other than the Golden Triangle.

December 12, 1978 - East Village - Journal

Poor Alice bears the financial brunt of our relationship. Beyond that she is my love and a good woman to my heart. We still haven't had sex and she hasn't had her period. Three weeks and she sleeeps in the other room. I hear her crying and try to comfort her, but I haven't the money for an abortion. Not that I want one. I want a little us, but she doesn't want to hear that destiny. Despite the success of her shows, she beats herself up and I have no way to advise her about the future.

My mother and father came to town and we dined at our regular spot, McBells on Sixth Avenues. No one calls it Avenue of the Americas. I ordered a cheeseburger and Tommy deMastri offered us a bottle of wine from the congenial owner. Francis likes my younger brother. All my gay friends do. We enjoyed ourselves and returned to the apartment. I fronted to my parents, that the apartment was mine, instead of ours. Alice was embarrased at our living situation. Upon her departure, my mother slipped me $20 and said, "This place is fine for now, but I don't want to see it as part of your life in two years."

"Neither would I." I can't explain to them my lifestyle of hangin out at CBGBs every night. I can't explain it to myself other than I love it.

I walked them to the corner. They are obviously out of place on East 10th Street with the pack of sinse dealers on the corner, who respectfully wished us a good evening. Criminals to the police, but they always watch Alice's back.

I put them in a yellow taxi and Frankie, one of the Puerto Ricans with whom I played basketball, came over and asked, "They your mother and father?"

"Yes."

"Your old man is good looking for his age and still has some of his hair. A lot more than most white men. You'll look like him in thirty years. And te madre, very beautiful."

"Thanks." After thirty years of frosting her hair blonde my mother has decided to go natural. No more hair spray. BACk when we were young my older brother and I stole her aerosol cans and taped them together to exploded in a hidden bonfire in a nearby sandpit. Our attempts to convert them into multi-stage missiles failed without failure.

I love my parents, strange since I hear so many friends badmouth their parents. My father always told me the truth and my mother has always wanted what was best. Easy since my father never said anything and my my mother wated what shethought best. They must worry for me; no job, no career, but they had politely listenedto my poetry during dinner. I just don't want to end up like my Aunt Mary's beau. Peter Willen was an old communist, heavy smoker, and had horrible teeth, but he loved my aunt to the end. So my fear is only being loyal to someone I love.

Vernon fishes Casco Bay Small Point to Two Lights Nets full of cod and blues His dory was known Islanders saying, "There goes Vernon." Until in November A savage gale struck A Nor'easter Arctic seas A cold heavy sea. Not relgious Vernon curses God A mean philistine Sending such storms "Bastard." Two days later Coast Guard finds his dory Smashed On the rocks of Small Point Not far from ashore. Vernon never comes to land He died at sea A fisherman's way.

A TASTE FOR THE EAST 1990

My first trip to the Orient was in 1990. A round-the-world ticket. One destination was Singapore. The Straits city was already undergoing its metamorphosis from a colonial port to a gleaming metropolis of skyscrapers. Raffles had been closed for renovations. I stayed at a cheap Chinese hotel in a decrepit godown. The walls climbed toward the ceiling without reaching their destination. A yard of wire covered the gap. The bedding had been soiled by a thousand weary bodies and the fan spun with lazy fatigue. That night I left the room and wandered toward the harbor, looking to drink beer. A Punjabi rickshaw driver stopped by me.

“You want ma.” His clothing had been shredded by a decade of useless washes. His body had been dessicated to bones wrapped in parchment. His eyes shone with a dull want.

“Ma?” Horse in Chinese. The word had one meaning in New York City. “Where?”

“I know place.” His claw of a hand beckoned to accompany him. Drugs were contraband in Singapore. The penalty for possession was death in the most grievous cases. A long prison sentence for anyone else foolish enough to challenge the system. Most arrests came from informers such as this rickshaw driver, who said, “I not police.”

“I know.” Snitch maybe, but the appeal of opium was an old friend. I climbed into his vehicle and we traveled into the night far from the new towers of glass and steel. The streetlights were dim in this neighborhood. Several doorways were populated by Indonesian transvestites. Others by Chinese whores. Men drank openly on the sidewalk in rebellion against the Singapore leader’s draconian measures for public behavior. The rickshaw driver braked with a whining screech.

“Here.” He looked over his shoulder to check for anything out of place. “My name Rami. This place good. Give $10.”

I handed over the money. We entered the battered house. The smell of opium greeted us. I tapped Rami and gave him another $10. “One for you. One for me.”

“You good man.” Rami smiled with two front teeth. The rest had been rotted as brown as cigar butts.

An old woman of indistinguishable racial origins led us into a tiny cubicle. The furnishing were two wooden benches and a wax-covered stool. Sweat shadows marked the proper position for lying on them. Money passed hands and she shut the door. Rami produced tin foil, which he tore into two separate pieces.

“Sorry, no have pipe.”

“I know how to chase the dragon.” I opened my packet and dropped the black ball on the aluminum foil. Rami rolled two paper tubes. A lit candle illuminated the room. Rami was an expert and I followed his lead.

“Good horse.”

Within minutes we were transported to another century before planes, telephones, and movies. Back to when Opium was king and I was its slave. Years later I went back to find the opium den. A shopping mall stood in its place, selling nothing I wanted. Only fancy perfumes and expensive shirts. It was better that way for the rest of the world and I went to Raffles for a Gin Sling, looking for Rami every step of the way.

He had to be in the shadows somewhere.

Men like him never die.

Not if they know what is good for them.

A STORY OF O by Peter Nolan Smith - 1994

In 1994 Crazy Santa possessed a special guest card to the Russian Baths on East 10th Street. The steam room crew began to heat the river boulders at 6am. The two-ton stones glowed red by 7:20. The Schvitz opened at 8 AM, but Crazy Santa was in the dry steam room at 7:21. He was a rich junkie, who was the last family member of an 18th century fortune. Heroin had not ruined his sense of entitlement.

As a permanent member I could have entered the Baths at that bastardly hour, except my alarm clock was set for the opening. At 8:10 I exited from my apartment two doors down from the entrance with a towel over my shoulder and strolled east rain, sleet, snow, or sunshine.

Every morning day on my short walk I witnessed autumn's surrender to Winter, the snow on the sidewalk, the ornamental pears blooming in Spring and the return of the hot sticky Summer.

I liked the look on the day workers' faces headed to the subway. Their eyes questioned my destination. The Baths weren’t for everyone. It was a temple to cleanliness and rejuvenation, in which the weight of a night’s hard drink evaporated after thirty minutes in the 180F heat.

One Spring morning I entered and spotted Crazy Santa on the top tier of the heat room. His white beard remained fluffy, despite the Venusian temperature, then again his body fat was less than zero.

I knew the Jersey heir to a deodorant fortune through my Uncle Carmine, a Sicilian plumber married to a Aunt Jane, a distant aunt from Maine's Cumberland County, which she called 'the last place on earth created by God'. We weren't really blood, but Carmine and I conducted business on various projects hidden from the rest of the family. Crazy Santa had a small room in Uncle Carmine’s basement. The walls were covered with torn hippie posters. He paid no rent.

Crazy Santa’s real name was John Lyon. His other alias for the addicts of the Lower East Side was Junkie John. He was a sucker. His family had had big money. THe sole heir Crazy Santa inherited the remains, which had mostly been invested in his veins.

The previous Christmas I helped him turn $80,000 of stock into gold coins, which wasn't an easy thing in 1993, since the Feds were after drug dealers laundering money. Collecting the coins on West 47th Street took a little time. Returning to his bullding between B and C Avenues, I asked Uncle Carmine, if I should fuck him.

“He’s going to get $2 million at 50.” Uncle Carmine was patient. “We’ll get him then. He promised to take care of me.”

Trusting junkies was a losing proposition. I said nothing. Carmine also knew the risk.

Crazy Santa lost the gold coins to his crackhead girlfriends within a month. We hadn’t spoken since the sale.

The near-albino nodded, as I sat opposite him in the gaseous vapors hovering under the ceiling ceiling. Crazy Santas’ skin was parched dry as a Death Valley corpse. Junkies like vampires don’t sweat, unless they are jonesing.

“Hot, huh?”

“Always hot this hour.”

He spat on the floor.

"Do me a favor. Don't spit on the floor."

"You don't own this place. You don't make the rules."

I grabbed him by the hair and shoved him.

"You're right. Just don't do it again."

“Sorry, you wanna smoke some O?” Somewhere in his head he suspected that I had ripped him off on the coin deal. I had only taken a 5% commission, but the only truth junkies believe are the lies they tell themselves He wasn’t man enough to blame himself and stood up with a towel around his waist.

“It’s a little early.” I wore a fluffy towel and my own flip-flops. The ones at the Baths were cheap. Like wearing paper towels and cardboard sandals.

“No one’s here and anyone who is here lets me do what I want. Money buys freedom.”

I remembered how he talked about his money. I should have left, but followed him to the front of the Baths. I hadn’t smoked opium for years.

"You know I know you and Carmine are waiting to rip me off. You think you're so smart, but I went to Harvard."

"Did you finish?"

"No, but I know your type. A loser from the lower classes just likeCarmine. You'll both get nothing in the end."

We entered the bathroom and he pulled out a glass stem. We lit up a small ball of black tar. The Tongs had run thousands of opium dens in New York. Chinese rocks had killed off most of their clientele, but this morning Crazy Santa had opened one on East 10th Street. The aroma was Golden Triangle, although the country of origin was Mexico.

Tijuana black tar.

Heroin.

I faked my inhale. John like most junkies only cared about his high. The heroin flitted through his blood and he sagged against the wall in a nod. I took off the key wrapped around his wrist and went upstairs to his locker, quickly rifling through his clothes. I left the dope and pilfered half the money. I returned to the bathroom. He was still breathing and I slipped the key back onto his wrist. Upstairs I showered, dressed and said my good-byes to the owner.

“Where is Crazy John?” The owner had another name for Crazy Santa Claus.

“In the bathroom?”

I nodded, wiping the sweat from my face. A little of the D ranin my arteries. Work would be tough for the first hour.

“High?” asked David.

“Yes.”

“I will make sure that he doesn’t die.” Dead people were never good for business.

“I could care less.” That was the drugs talking and a little bit me too. David and I spoke the same language. Always apathetic to junkies. They were their own worst enemy and ours as well, but he was right, given the chance I would take him for it all, then again losers are never that lucky.

JUNKIE

Back in the 1980s on several occasions I espyed Burrough’s walking corpse crossing Grand Central, his unpolished shoes slithering over the marble floor with an effortless gait. No hello. We knew not each other. I sometimes a drunk. He high and listlessly heading to score dope, his once elegant suit hanging off a scarecrow frame, awaiting a breath of wind to show that he was alive. Just. A rich man’s son. I loved JUNKIE. Glad not to be him. A murdering junkie. No one’s hero, except as a slave to heroin. William Burroughs.

A counter-culture icon. When the filthy rich proposed to build the Andy Warhol Museum on the Lower East Side, I thought better to have the Museum of Junkies with twin statues of Burroughs at the entrance.

“The old junky has found a vein... blood blossoms in the dropper like a Chinese flower... he push home the heroin and the boy who jacked off fifty years ago shine immaculate through the ravaged flesh, fill the outhouse with the sweet nutty smell of young male lust.” NAKED LUNCH

SKATING ON THIN ICE by peter nolan smith 2011

Thailand's monsoons arrived at the end of the Pattaya's low season in April 2022, but none had ever been lower than this Covid season. Hotels offered special rates and the few working girls at the even fewer bars and go-gos called everyone 'sexy', but the global travel chaos due to the deadly pandemic has forced the Thai Tourist Board to revise their typically optimistic projection for arrivals to the Land of Smiles, especially after monumental rains flooded the center of the country.

Cities and villages were underwater. Transport was impossible on the inundated highways. Food grew scarce to find and the monsoons weren't expected to ease until October.

My family and I lived up the coast from Pattaya and news of the empty bars filtered north.

"Thailand not have farang," said Mam, as we drank Leo Beer at our small house in the hills.

"You have me and so does Fenway." And the rest of our clan.

My son was happy. Fenway had his father to drive him around SriRacha.

"Many girl go back home."

"To Isaan?" The impoverished plateau had supplied Bangkok, Pattaya, and Phuket with a steady crop of bar girls for decades.

"Better now live on rice farm. Pattaya not have old men. Not have young men. No men. No money. No rice. Everyone get skinny.

"But never as beautiful as you." We had been together for years, although most of those year I worked in Europe or the USA. I had two families to feed.

"Barg wan."

"Yes, I have a sweet mouth. More beer?" I regarded the sky. Dark clouds approached from the Gulf of Siam. Black lined the bottoms. Lightning crackled through the air and Mam ran inside to unplug the TV and fridge. I shut off my cell phone. Electrical storms were a force to fear in Thailand.

A minute later the rain fell hard, then harder, and even harder. I lit a kerosene lamp. Fenway didn't like the dark and I held him close. Thirty minutes later the storm passed over SriRacha heading inland.

The sun came out and the street steamed with a rising mist. I turned on my phone and it rang immediately. Sam Royalle was on the other end.

"Did it rain by you."

"Not a drop." Sam resided in Pattaya.

Twenty miles to the south.

"Bucketed down here." I hadn't seen Sam in a while. He had been working on a new website.

Sixteen hours a day, so I was surprised when he asked, "Feel like coming out for a beer tonight?"

Sam Royalle liked go-gos. We normally drank shots of tequila. He conversed with people despite 110 dB levels. His Bedford accent worked well in loudness.

"If it isn't raining."

"No excuses. I'll take you out for a steak."

Sam had been living in Thailand over ten years, but remained a boy from Bedford.

"You ever think about changing your diet?"

"What you expect me to eat? Thai food?"

"It's good enough for sixty million Thais." Few of them were overweight.

"I'm British. We eat British food. Only British." The Brit did like a good plate of curry and pad Thai, which I never ate. It had no kick.

"So see you around 7." He gave the address of a new steakhouse. "It's very classy."

"I remember classy. Seven, then." Classy for farangs in Pattaya meant no wife-beater t-shirts.

Back in the last century only the Dusit Thani was the only classy resort in Pattaya, but times had change.

"You go out with friend?" asked Mem.

Fenway was eating chocolate ice cream.

"Sam wants to have a drink."

"Go-Go bar."

"I guess so, but I only think of you."

"Hah, all men lie. Think of me with naked lady. You very funny."

"It's the truth." My thinking only of her was the truth, but no women will believe that.

"True not true. Same same. I know you. One drink look lady. Two drink talk with lady. Three drink only think drink. That truth."

"Yes, it is." I liked holding hands with a glass of gin-tonic.

A little later Mam, Fenway, and I ate at KFC. She dropped me at the bus stop at Tuk Com on Sukhumvit. Traffic was heavy and the sun was going down. I kissed her and hugged Fenway.

"Mai mao, papa."

"No, I won't get too drunk."

Mam gave her blessing.

"Sam take care you. You take care Sam." Her spies covered Walking Street. Their network posted agents on every soi. I was a good boy and good boys never get caught doing bad.

"Chan lak ter."

And I did love her, as I jumped on the bus.

Thirty minutes later I got off at Pattaya Klang and hopped on a motorsai, telling the taxi driver, "Walking Street."

The ride to Pattaya's Second Road took less than ten minutes. I walked over to Walking Street. Farangs were a rarity on that gauntlet of lust. The desperation on the go-go girls' faces was a cruel mirror of hard times. Every girl sang the same chorus "Take me home."

"Bang thi teelang."

"Maybe later. Maybe never. All farang kee-nok."

Sam and I ate a great ribeye steak at the classy restaurant.

He looked healthy for the first time in years. His new business venture was off the ground. Sam was looking at a million dollars in two years time. It all sounded good in a go-go bar.

Sam suggested hitting Heaven A Go-Go. The upstairs bar was the best in Pattaya. I hadn't been there in months, but several girls knew my name. They were friends of Mam. We drank beer. Two bottles. The owner of Heaven bought several rounds of tequila. Paddy had run a pimp bar in East St. Louis. He was most men's hero.

Sixty-five and running a go-go bar. He was my hero too. East St. Louis was tougher than Pattaya back in the early 1970s.

"Any girl you want. No bar fine." I thanked Paddy for his generosity, but refused about twenty nubile dancers before midnight. I told them the same story.

"Mai mii keng leng."

"I can give you power." Their bare bodies smelled of youth and a promise of a trip to heaven or hell. I wasn't interested in either destination after ten beers and deserted my bar stool at Heaven Above a Go Go, telling Sam Royalle that I was going to the bathroom. Three naked girls were on his lap. He wouldn't notice my departure.

The night air on Soi Diamond was strangely cool. The moist wind carried the threat of rain and I walked to 2nd Road rather than be tempted by another drink on Walking Street.

Two transvestites grabbed my arms at the top of the alley. The pair were armored in black shiny leather. They towered over me in their spiked heels. Masochists would have paid to lick the their feet. A hand slithered into my pocket. Her fingernails raked my thigh for plunder. The Shim found my wallet. It only had 2000 baht, but all my ATM and credit cards. My struggle to break free was futile, until the pickpocket yelped with pain.

"Pai loi." The voice belonged to Jamie Parker, a friend from the Lower East Side. "Get fucking lost."

"We go. Come back too." The taller TV sneered with a helium alto. Her manhood throbbed in a leather bikini. I felt inadequate.

"Good luck then." Jamie stood his ground. Almost sixty he carried the menace of the killer paroled after eleven years hard time.

"Yet mun." The she-boys strode off to find easier prey.

"I had things under control."

"Didn't look it to me." He handed back my wallet and coughed like a backfire from an out-of-tune Harley, although I suspected his hack hadn't come from smoking cigarettes.

"You're right. Those ka-toeys are tough." I count on bruises on the tomorrow. The indentation from their nails would fade faster. Mam's suspicious mind wouldn't clear for months. I asked Jamie, "What happened to you?"

Jamie's body had been perennially thin. Drugs and diet, but his face was gaunt and Panda black circles masked his eyes.

"I look that bad?" He stared at his reflection in the 7/11 window. He wasn't the type to lie to himself about his looks.

"Yes, you look that bad." Ja-bah was bad. The cheap speed was addictive. "You need some money?"

"A thousand wouldn't hurt, but it isn't for what you think."

"Jamie, you can do what you want with it." I was no angel.

After dark any money you give a friend had to be consider a gift. I pulled out a purple note.

"I don't feel like it, but then I'm not the boss." He stuck the bill securely in his jeans pocket. "Mind if I walk with you a bit?"

"I'm just going to get a taxi."

The eyes of a passing policeman convicted Jamie of several crimes. He could never go back to New York. His sin against the state had a long statute of limitation.

"Let me give you a ride somewhere."

"Yeah, there's too much light here." He lowered his head like someone might be following him. I fought the temptation to look over my shoulder. A taxi took us to 3rd Road for 200 baht. It was safer than a motorsai taxi.

At the Buffalo Bar I ordered him a beer and waved for the girls to leave us alone.

"Man, it's been a hard month." He sat on the stool as if he had been on his feet for days. "But you don't want to hear about it."

My mother had prayed for her second son to accept an avocation to join the Cloth. I refused the priesthood after hearing Led Zeppelin's first LP in 1969, but she had been right. I would have made a good priest or at least a confessor. Everyone liked to tell me their secrets.

Jamie drank his Chang beer in less than a minute.

"I'm all ears." I downed my first in sixty-five seconds.

"You ever hear of Ice?" he whispered the word with guilt-ridden worship.

"Crystal Meth." The drug had hit the fly-over of America hard. The cops had cracked down on traditional drugs and the dealers synthesized a smokeable speed from ephedrine, the basic ingredient for over-the-counter cough medicines. The substance was equally available in Thailand. Big Pharma was behind it all.

"That's the one. The Nazis used to give chocolate bars laced with the stuff to Luftwaffe pilots." Jamie was a vast abyss of useless knowledge. "Kept them flying for days."

"And you started smoking it here?" Drugs are readily available in Thailand, although opium, heroin, grass have been supplanted by ja bah and ice thanks to the repressive interdiction of the Thai Police and DEA.

"With Ort." He shrugged to indicate his complete surrender.

"Ort?" I knew Ort from Soi 6. I hadn't seen her since her boyfriend left her for a transvestite five years ago. The little vixen wanted to be my geek. I had refused with deep regret. Ort was very sexy. 23 and looked 16. She was every man's vice.

"How you run into Ort?" She was a girl around town. I stayed out of her path. Even her saying the words 'I have' got me hard with the thought of the pipe.

"She was dancing at Paris A Go-Go. Told me to meet her after work. We went back to her place. A little furnished studio. Bed, TV, AC. She asked if I minded if she smoked some ice. You know me. Anyone can do what they want as long as it doesn't hurt someone else." Jamie's heroin addiction had stolen his youth. Cocaine took away his edge as a comedian. His taking up with speed in his fifites could be a show-stopper. "Don't look at me like you were a Parole Officer, who discovered a bad blood test. You're no angel."

"You're right." I had disappointed Nancy Reagan too many times by saying 'yes', instead of 'no' to throw any rocks without breaking windows in my own house of glass, but I tried my best to avoid drugs in Thailand. Prison here was worse than any of Jamie's stateside time.

"And you're right too. I knew it was dangerous, but did it anyway."

"And how was it?" Jamie didn’t need a lecture and I was curious about ice and Ort.

"Ice is nothing. No rush. Shooting speedballs is a thousand times better for a high."

"So what the attraction?"

"Sex." Jamie spoke low, which was a little strange in a bar, where every girl was looking for a date. "I thought she wanted me only to buy some ice. 1000 baht. But once we had a few pipes, she said she was hot and asked if I minded if she took off her clothes. Another bowl and mine was off. A day later and we were still at it."

A binge. "How many days?"

"3-4. I took Cialis to keep up my strength." Speed and Cialis were tough on the heart, however Jamie was hardy enough to survive hardcore XXX games. "And then another four days and we had sex the entire time. I had to stop because the skin on my penis wore off. Ort wasn't happy and started screaming for it. It was like being with a nymphomaniac. A tyranny of sex. I told her I was going to the ATM. I didn't come back."

"How much money you spend?"

"About 15000 baht and I lost about 5 kilos."

"Cheaper than Jenny Craig's or Weight-Watchers."

"I don't have the weight to lose like you."

A loss of five kilos would put me close to the fighting weight of my early 40s.

"And you didn't go back?"

"Don't trust myself. It's not the Ice. It's the sex, the ice, the lying in bed with nowhere to go." He drank his beer with a thirst to quench another demon. "Sawan."

"Heaven." I was impressed Jamie knew the Thai word for paradise. Nah-Lok meant 'hell'.

"A little hell too, which we both like."

"Without sin, there is no pleasure," I loosely quoted Luis Bunuel, the Spanish surrealistic film director. "So now what?"

"I changed my SIM card # and started clean again." He ordered another beer. They were going down smooth. "Not 100%, but close enough. Another few days and I'll be back on top of the world."

"More like top of the slag heap in this town."

"As long as it's a foot higher than anyone else, you can see the stars." Jamie had a way with words, which slurred after our fifth beer.

I invited him up to Sri Racha. He made Mam laugh. Fenway liked playing with him. On the third day he left for Pattaya. I drove him to the bus stop on Sukhumvit.

"Take care."

"I know how to do that."

"And how not to too."

"Something else we have in common."

At the end of the week I was packing my bags for New York. I had to go back to work at the Dimaond Exchange. My flight left in the morning. Mam hated being alone. Fenway is a very busy boy.

The phone rang in my pocket. It was Jamie.

"Are you okay?"

"Excellent." He was running promo events for bars and restaurants during the low season. The next is an erotic hot dog eating contest at TiggleBitties Tavern.

"What about Ort?" I whispered the name. Mam has good ears and a jealous soul. Some people question her love. I know better.

"Haven't seen her or been to anywhere she goes."

"Smart move." Ort was a girl to avoid, which is why I no longer answered her calls anymore. "I'll see you next time around."

"Send my love to Mam and little Fenway."

"They will like that."

I went into the living room. Fenway was trying to load two discs at the same time into the DVD player. I told him, "No."

He didn't like hearing that word in either Thai or English, but just saying 'no' can save your time these days, especially when you're skating on thin ice.

Florida Postcard 2/28/78

This is a postcard from Florida dated Feb 28,1978. Hilde was on a road trip with her extended family; four of her younger siblings, two step siblings, two dogs, her mother Kate and Joe All in a van. My friend Andy was living at the family's Brookline compound with Hilde's older sister, Therese. He can't recollect that trip, which took place after the great Northern Blizzard of 1978, which buried the Northeast from Buffalo to Boston in over three feet of snow. I lived through that winter in a West Village SRO. 27 WEST 11TH STREET. A single room with linoleum floors warped by too many bare feet. Oh Florida.

Hilde - Dear Peter, I just tramped through the Everglades with sighting a single reptile. Palm Springs is very quaint. Florida is --- Dirty, ugly ( like New Jersey ), boring, and rainy. Cold and rainy. THe Hartnett girls are having a fashionable vacation. Luxury all the way. The van unbearably smells of dogs. Winnie and Damion are restless. Mother and Joe are ____we should have known better. Pray for us. Hilde.

NO ONE WANTS TO HEAR THE BLUES

No one wants to hear the Blues.
Leadbelly or Buddy Guy
Easy to figure out why
It had to do with the weather.
A long winter
Not too cold and too littel snow
Long and it wasn't over yet.

Spring a month away
Everyone ready for the Easter Break
The Bahamas, Florida, Mexico
Anywhere but here with the Easter Bunny.

I want to see flowers
The Easter Parade.
Not today,

No one to listen to the Blues
Robert Johnson scratching his guitar
Moaning MILKCOW'S CALF BLUES

"It just ran down my leg."

Those hard times Down South.
Ain't worth one fake dime
Up here in the North.
People wishing for The end of winter and the flowers in the trees.

Can't you see the night
Can't you feel the cold
Rain keep fallin'
Not spring yet.

And I followed her to the station
with my suitcase in my hand
It's hard to tell
when all my love is in vain.

MILKCOW'S CALF BLUES

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qPA2tZ2gk8

A Man is A Man 2009

The American ideal for a man has been based more on movie characters than reality. Bravery has been defined by cinematic shoot-outs and wisdom quoted from famous films. Politicians have long recognized this weakness in the voters' psyche and their press attaches strive for photo-ops mirroring Hollywood moments.

On May 1, 2003 President GW Bush flew in on a hailed for his MISSION ACCOMPLISHED appearance on the US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. Uniform, jets, a sea of sailors spoke victory to the masses watching the staged scene on TV.

"Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed and the regime is no more". Although Bush added, "Our mission continues" and "We have difficult work to do in Iraq.". The Eternal War on Terror still reigns over the world withthe Pentagon repeatedly failed to admit that the USA has yet again lost another war.

The foolowing President Barack Obama also has a perchance for playing to the camera, although his bow the the Japanese emperor during his tour of the Far East was regarded as a sign of defeat by the talking heads of Fox News.

"General MacArthur must be turning in his grave."

The American Caesar never bowed to any man or god-king.

He had his movie moment before Congress.

"Old soldiers never die, they simply fade away."

MacArthur was pushed out of his position of Far East Caudillo by a KKK president from Missouri for disobeying a direct order. Truman wasn't abut bowing to the military, however Barack Obama's bow to the Japanese emperor was not a sing of submission as much as one of respect. It was only a limo dance in reverse because the emperor is almost a midget.

Respect accomplished.

Next stop.

Washington and Obama has no intention of bowing to the GOP over health care.

At least we hope not.

Maybe If I Was More Barry Than Barack May 2008

In 1860 three weeks before the presidential election an eleven year old girl wrote this letter to the Republican candidate from Illinois.

Honorable Abraham Lincoln

Oct. 15, 1860

Dear Sir

My father has just home from the fair and brought home your picture and Mr. Hamlin's. I am a little girl only eleven years old, but want you should be President of the United States very much so I hope you wont think me very bold to write to such a great man as you are. Have you any little girls about as large as I am if so give them my love and tell her to write to me if you cannot answer this letter. I have got 4 brother's and part of them will vote for you any way and if you let your whiskers grow I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husband's to vote for you and then you would be President. My father is a going to vote for you and if I was a man I would vote for you to but I will try and get every one to vote for you that I can I think that rail fence around your picture makes it look very pretty I have got a little baby sister she is nine weeks old and is just as cunning as can be. When you direct your letter direct to Grace Bedell Westfield Chatauque County New York

I must not write any more answer this letter right off Good bye

Grace Bedell

Abraham Lincoln granted the young girl's wishes and grew a chin curtain beard also known a Donegal.

He won the election and Became the first American president with a beard.

Barack Obama must get thousands of similar letters every year, but judging from how divided the country is on Race, many political pundits must been wondering why our first black president has taken measures to whitify himself a la Michael Jackson.

That would catch the KKK by surprise, because this election might be about jobs, but the real issue as always is equality and no growing a beard will free us.

Once you go black, you never come back.

ps even racists have to have a sense of humor.

Q. What would you get if you crossed Albert Einstein with Barack Obama? A. E = MC Hammer

Abe And Marilyn and Blackula

Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclaimation in 1863. Slaves were freed throughout the South. Their liberation awaited the arrival on the Union Army.

"Free at last, hallelujah."

The unchained darkies' paradise last a few years, as the South instituted Jim Crow laws aimed at their subjugation to sharecropper lands. The police and mobs below the Mason-Dixon Line punished any loose-tongued niggers with the noose. Lynchings occurred with frightening regularity and Africans fled the South throughout the 20th Century in hopes of better days, only to have Northern factory owners conspire to break the spirit of blacks by underpaying their worth. The 1919 Tulsa Massacre taught spades that no place safe existed for a black man, woman, or child in White America.

I taught high school in South Boston during the Bussing battles of the 1970s.

A Massachusetts state judge ordered the Boston School Committee to rectify the racial imbalances within the city without including the lily-white suburbs. Poor Irish teenagers were transported to the poorer neighborhoods of Roxbury.

Divide and conquer amongst the old slaves, for the Irish were transported to the Americas as slave as well as the Africans of the West Coast.

And nowadays the battle lines are drawn by color.

Black and their supporters versus an aging White America threatened by the rising number of Latinos and Chinese flocking to the fifty states. Riches and safety await them, because White America is only interested in keeping down the blacks.

A nigger has to know his place and that is why Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson.

He mouthed off to a white cop.

Treyvon was murdered, because he was a black boy in a hoodie.

Akai Gurley had it coming, because he was black.

Tamir Rice was shot dead by cops.

At least one a day in these United States.

And white people say these killings are no racist.

No, they are almost right. Cops kill people, because they are poor and dead men can't tell their side of the story.

Whites prefer the nice lies by the people they have entrusted to protect them from the blacks.

Murder is just another price to pay for sleeping safe and sound at night.

ZZZZZZZZZ.

In your sleep.

Blackula will come to get you, whitey.

Me too, but I'm eating tons of garlic just in case.

He looks more like Abe Lincoln than Marilyn Monroe and there is nothing I want more than Marilynula sucking my blood in bed.

I'm a sucked for a stone-cold dead blonde.

Washington's Birthday - 2015

Today America celebrates President's Day to honor past presidents, but especially George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. New York only recognizes George Washington on his birthday of February 22, 1732 almost three hundred years ago. Gilbert Stuart painted the Father of the Nation as a white man as had countless other artists, however historically many English male colonists sired children with female Africans, because white women couldn't survive the climate or the summer fevers. Not all of the forefathers were white. They were only painted white. Was George Washington white?

The Virginian owned 123 slaves.

His views on slavery changed through the years.

"Here is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for this abolition of slavery but there is only one proper and effectual mode by which it can be accomplished, and that is by Legislative authority."

-GEORGE WASHINGTON, 1786

According to mountvernon.com Washington also explored ways to reduce the number of enslaved people at Mount Vernon without selling them. Most ideas involved renting or selling land to finance an emancipation. He was unable to execute any of these plans during his lifetime.

Were it not then, that I am principled against selling negroes, as you would do cattle in the market, I would not, in twelve months from this date, be possessed of one, as a slave.

-GEORGE WASHINGTON, 1794

Only the year before he had a slave woman whipped for refusing to work.

Her name was Charlotte.

There was no good in slavery.

No good in owning slaves.

Washington freed them all at his death in 1799.

Slavery remained the GM of the South until 1865 and thereafter with the Jim Crow laws subjected Africans to enslavement of another kid.

Father of a Nation.

No slave owner can claim that title.

Us against them.

The Oldest Tree in Washington Square Park

The Hanging Elm has been there over three hundred years dating it back to at least the early 1700s. No one had been executed at the tree and the only recorded hanging in the neighborhood was that of a black slave Rose Butler for the crime of arson in 1819. She has been convicted of attempting to burn down the family house. There was minor damage, but she was sentenced to death. Her execution attracted a crowd of 10,000 to the potter's field on the Minetta Creek. She was nineteen years old.

OLD BILL NEXT TO ME 2008

New York's Plaza Hotel has been a world-famous destination for decades and its 2008 reinvention as a condo-palace and demi-hotel failed to tarnish the reputation of Grand Lady on 5th Avenue.

While the newly opened Retail Plaza in the basement had been an abject failure, the Oak Bar continued to attract power brokers, celebrities, and faces from the front covers of the newspapers and magazines.

Susan Lucci, the soap opera queen from ALL OF MY CHILDREN, entered our subterranean jewelry store and my young 'work wife' asked the diminutive TV actress, "Does anyone tell you that you look like Susan Lucci?"

"All the time." Her mouth expressed a sweet smirk at my blonde work-wife's innocence.

"Are you Susan Lucci?" Vanessa gasped like she had been tossed out of the Space Shuttle into zero atmosphere.

"Most of the time." Susan Lucci exuded the internal beauty beneath her botoxed skin.

"Congratulations." My work-wife stammered out her best wishes to Lucci being Lucci with her face was a nice color red.

"Thank you." Susan wheeled a turn on spike heels without which she would have been less than five feet tall.

We later related this encounter with the star of ALL MY CHILDREN to the other salespeople trapped in the doomed Plaza Collection. Only boilers and bars worked well in basements.

They laughed at my work-wife's offering 'congratulations'.

"I didn't know what else to say." Vanessa had worshipped Susan Lucci for years.

Several days later David Beckham and his wife Posh visited the hotel. The paparazzi rioted outside the entrance. Fans screamed out his name. The madhouse lasted for hours. They went straightbto their suite. No basement tour.

Celebrity has its perks, but power demanded different security accommodations and one February evening the Secret Service locked down the hotel for the arrival of Bill Clinton, the former president of the USA, who had a table reserved in the Oak Room.

Agents in black suits roamed the hotel. They surveilled guests and workers with suspicion. Bill had been a popular president, but men in high places retain enemies after retirement.

The secret service agents ignored me, judging a fifty-five year old diamond salesman to be harmless. They were right. I was no assassin.

I almost visited the Oak Room to gawk at Clinton, but customers kept me busy and at the closing hour I went to washroom at the rear of the Retail Collection. The owner of Leather Spa said that the ex-president stopped for a shoeshine.

"He tipped Segundo $10. He wore handmade loafer from England." Segundo knew his shoes.

"A good tipper." A shine cost $4 at their stand. "Is he still in the Oak Room?"

"Far as I know."

"Maybe I'll stop up there for a drink after work."

I tipped Segundo $2 for the info and headed into the men's room.

There wasn't an attendant on duty, but the facilities were clean.

I stood at a stall and unzipped my fly.

Two seconds later a taller man joined me. His shoulders were higher than mine.

Male toilet manners require strangers neither touch nor talk to another man while standing before the porcelain god, so I dropped my eyes to the floor, only to notice that my neighbor's shoes were highly buffed loafers with tassels.

I lifted my gaze.

The ex-president was peeing next to me. There were no Secret Service agents in sight. Some things a man has to do on his own.

The former president smiled at me and I involuntarily peeked into his urinal.

Bill frowned and lowered his broad shoulder to block my view. He shook his member and then strode out of the men's room after washing his hands.

"Weirdo."

Exiting from the men's room I expected to be accosted by his security detail, except the only people in the hallway were Segundo and his boss. They pointed upstairs to indicate the direction of Bill's departure. I nodded and returned to my shop.

Vanessa was ready to go.

"What took you so long?"

"I ran into Bill Clinton in the bathroom."

"Hillary's husband?" Women looked at men different from men.

"I peed next to him."

"And did you look at him?"

"What do you mean?"

"You know look at his schwanze?" Vanessa was a nice girl from Moscow, but she wanted to know. "My husband says all types of men check out him in the bathroom. Did you look at his penis?"

She was my work-wife, not my real wife, so I told her what I would have told anyone.

"No."

"Oh." She was disappointed. "Were you scared about being gay?"

"With the president of the United States?"

"Ex-president." Women were experts at putting men in their place.

"I don't look at men's penises."

"Liar. All men look at porno. Don't tell me there aren't any penis there?" She eyed my groin.

"That's different."

"Right." Vanessa huffed and picked up her cell. She spoke in Russian. I heard the name Clinton, then pietska. It meant penis in her language. My co-worker smiled at me. She knew the truth.

I had looked at Bill's crank.

And checking another man's schlong wasn't a gay thing.

It was just something you do.

Of course my gay friends think that all men were gay.

Given the right circumstances.

Bathroom, ex-president, New York?

Not a chance.

Then again Bill was not my type and I was certainly not his, because he never bothered to look at mine.

Out of the Limelight / GW Bush

GW Bush landed on US Abraham Lincoln on 10/30/2003. The banner 'mission accomplished' hung from the control tower. That claim proved premature and the president underwent five years of slogging through negative press, sentiment, and politics before leaving the White House in a helicopter. His successor waved from the ground and since that day the ex-president has avoided most contact with the public, almost as if he knows that someone where out there someone wants to kill him or even worse arrest him for crimes against humanity.

Several years ago breakfast with former staffers Mr. Bush admitted that he was content to fade back into the shadows.

"I have no desire to see myself on television. I don't want to be on a panel of formers instructing the currents on what to do. I'm trying to regain a sense of anonymity."

I understand his sentiment entirely. The ex-model from Paris phoned the other day. A long-time admirer had contacted her with unrequited love in his heart. She mentioned my name and her suitor warned that I was a dangerous drug addict capable of harm both financially and physically.

"Me?" We had lived together two years on the Ile St. Louis. I never so much as stole a centimes. Maybe a few long-distance phone calls, which had been paid by her husband. He thought I was gay. At least that was what she had told him. Guy and I weren't friends, but I enjoyed the ex-legionaire's company.

"It's not like you're harmless."

"I never said that. I'm no saint."

"I was just defending your reputation."

A reputation, which will follow me to the grave.

So I understand GW Bush's desire to stay in the , but better than forgotten.hadows. He's gone but not forgotten at least for now, for you never lose the taste for fame.

"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." - Napoleon Bonaparte

Chance Encounters of a Presidential Kind

Presidents run in high circles with world leaders, government officials, senators, financiers.

Most Americans will never meet their President. The layers of security are supposedly impenetrable with a phalanx of Secret Service agents preventing any unauthorized encounters, but the screen around Barack Obama failed at a state dinner in 2009, when two party-crashers gained access to the White House and once inside poised with the President and several VIP. The woman intruder got close enough to Joe Biden to play with his nipple.

This breech of security would have never occurred under GW Bush.

The White House was under a lock-down. Staff understood the nation was at war. The President was safe.

Bill Clinton never had his safety compromised during his two terms.

Unwillingly.

George Bush Senior was not so lucky in 1990.

The president had visited New York for a find-raising dinner at the Sheraton on 6th Avenue. Police blocked off the area from protesters and I explained my rendezvous with an old friend to an Irish police commander at the barrier.

"I need a drink."

The fellow Hibernian allowed me to pass. I was wearing a tie and looked in need.

Phillip Brooks sat at our rendezvous point. We watched executives and GOP supporters arrive for the event. After several drink we decided to go over to Times Square. It still offered sin back then.

The front entrance was packed with arriving guests, so I suggested that we exit through the parking garage.

The first line of police ignored us.

We were in suits.

The second phalanx was more alert, but we stepped through the Sheraton's revolving doors just as the presidential limousine pulled up to the curb. Secret Service surveyed the entrance. George Bush emerged from the back. He was in a tux. I had never been this close to a presidential and called out softly, "Mr. President."

Everyone's head turned my way.

"My sister-in-law says hello." I said her name. She had worked for the CIA.

"Oh, really." George recognized her name. She had been his secretary, while serving as director, as had her sister. "She's a good lady."

"I know. She married my brother."

"Well, you wish Patty and Frank my bests." George Bush shook my hand. His flesh was warm.

"I will, sir." I smiled that he could remember my brother's name. "Have a good night, sir."

"You too." The president proceeded into the hotel and a Secret Service man approached to ask who we were.

"Just private citizens that's all."

Philip and I left into the night without a backward glance, which is always best when the Secret Service are looking your way.

They know guilty and neither Philip nor I were close to innocence. as always.

Nancy BJ RIP 2016

Nancy Reagan supposedly gave the best head in Hollywood during the 1940s.

Old Dutch the President never got any, but she wasn't beyond fellating Frank Sinatra in the White House bathroom.

And more than once.

The ole Cocksuckette died on March 6, 2016.

The Right sang her praises.

We remember her not allowing her friend Rock Hudson get treatment for AIDS and her horrendous JUST SAY NO anti-drug campaign.

May she burn in the Hell of her choosing.

Giving head to Satan ad infinitum.

Oral History Of Presidential Fellatio - 2011

On January 17, 1998 Matt Drudge broke the news that President Clinton had asked Newsweek to kill a story about his affair with an intern. Her name was Monica Lewinsky. The Big Press ignored the scoop from an Internet free-lancers, however the story featuring President-pizza-intern-cigars-sex created its own audience.

“Mr. President, if there is a semen stain belonging to you on a dress of Ms Lewinsky’s, how would you explain that?”

Clinto responded as most men caught after their pants had been down in the wrong place and time and lied, saying, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky."

No other president had been asked the same question for the simple reason that none of the recent White House residents have had sex while in office.

GW BUSH had been too coked out to maintain an erection. His father kept his tete-a-tetes clandestine. Ronald Reagan allowed Nancy to have sex with Frank Sinatra, but the Great Communicator never got head from his second wife, infamously renowned in Hollywood for her fellatio. Jimmy Carter merely entertained impure thoughts and Gerald Ford’s wife suffered from a wasting disease. Richard Nixon only masturbated to nude photos of Jackie O and LBJ scheduled his peccadillos to this Texas ranch.

JFK had scores of women in the White House. He once confided to British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan that he suffered migraines, if he went three days without sex. At state dinners the president would disappear with women into the recesses of the White House. His paramours included Pamela Turnure, Jackie's press secretary; Mary Pinchot Meyer, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee's sister-in-law; two secretaries nicknamed Fiddle and Faddle, and mob moll Judith Campbell Exner. Marilyn Monroe was a beard for his conquests. Despite all the trysts, JFK was too cool to get caught.

Despite being called America's first black president, Bill Clinton was not so cool, however he survived the interrogation and impeachment proceedings to serve out his term, because he had committed no crime.

Examine the facts.

On Feb. 1995 a GOP-controlled Congress shut down the Federal government by balking at passing a spending bill. A storm storm further isolated the President in the White House. he ordered a pizza and a buxom twenty-one year-old intern delivered the pizza to the Oral Office.

As I have said many time the worst thing that happened to America when there was no government was that the President got head and a pizza.

Clinton denied having sex with Monica more than once.

The American public asked, “Isn’t oral sex ‘sex?”

Not according to the President, who admitted, "I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate", but he denied committing perjury because, according to Clinton, the legal definition of oral sex was not encompassed by "sex" per se according to Wikipedia.

Their presidential affair lasted eighteen months, but you can sure that some women saw Hillary’s post-Iowa tears as residue from that awful period in her life. The pain. The betrayal. The humiliation.

“Let’s vote for the crying game.”

And American voter again elected a President human enough to shed tears shed before the TV cameras.

Clinton was now a elder statesman for the USA. His betrayed wife has been Secretary of State. The other women weaved into the sex scandal have not been so fortunate.

Paula Jones posed nude and lost a boxing match with Olympic skating terror Tonya Harding. Most of the $850,000 from that bout went to her lawyers.

Kathleen Willey had a sexual encounter with Clinton. A grope and the forced touch of an erect penis. The former White House volunteer aide who didn't talk about it, except whenever the media pays her, which is not every often these days. Clinton's favorite Pizza Girl debunked Willey’s accusation by saying, “Willey’s tits were too small.”

>Monica Lewinsky survived the maelstrom of Press abuse. The former intern graduated in December 2006 with a Masters in social psychology and has been studying at the London School of Economics. Hopefully she is faring well.

In a time of crisis she helped a president in need, following the words of the immortal JFK.

“Ask not what your country can give, but what you can give to your country.”

Tar In The Blood

My father’s side of the family traveled to the New World on the the Mayflower.

My antecedents were Howlands.

A young indentured servant, John Howland, had been washed overboard mid-Atlantic and somehow had grabbed a trailing lanyard to haul himself to the safety of the Mayflower.

Centuries later my Irish Nana had sailed on a ship a deck above steerage in the Year of the Crow. She was 14.

In 1966 my parents had enrolled my name in the lists of The Sons of Colonial Wars and Mayflower Descendants. I attended a single gathering of both association. The walls glorified the wars against the First People. As an anti-status quo hippie never went back.

Family legend had that we were also akin to Hannibal Hamlin, Abraham Lincoln’s first vice president.

My grandmother’s last name was Hamlin. I recalled her saying that she was related to the great man and I have mentioned this to a few of my friends over the years.

Back in the 1990s my father compiled a family genealogy. The Vice President was mentioedn in the family tree, so I researched Hannibal Hamlin on the Internet.

Wikipedia accused my supposed ancestor of having been a mulatto, citing his dark complexion.

“Hamlin is what we call a Mulatto…they design to place over the South a man who has Negro blood in his veins.”

His Vice-Presidency added another incendiary flame to the secessionists and his political opponents in Maine further scandalized by untruths as to his heritage.

“That black Penobscot Indian.”

Of course no one was really white back then. Artists painted presidents as white when in truth they were men of color, because white women died in droves during childbirth. Faced with extinction white males impregnated black women to save the race, plus sex with white women was an obligation instead of a pleasure, however the darkest of the dark were thrown out of the big house same as Abraham banished his concubine Hagar and his son Ishmael into the desert.

As for me, I walked like the Mothers of Invention sang on FREAK OUT, “I’m not black,but there’s a lot of times I don’t feel white.”

It’s in my blood.

And everyone else’s too.

Abe And Marilyn and Blackula

Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclaimation in 1863, freeing slaves throughout the South, however their liberation awaited the arrival on the Union Army at which point they sang, "Free at last, hallelujah."

The unchained darkies' paradise lasted a few years, as the South instituted Jim Crow laws aimed at their subjugation to sharecropper lands. The police and mobs below the Mason-Dixon Line punished any loose-tongued blacks with the noose. Lynchings occurred with frightening regularity and Africans fled the South throughout the 20th Century in hopes of better days, only to have Northern factory owners conspire to break the spirit of blacks by underpaying their worth and the 1919 Tulsa Massacre taught spades that no place safe existed for a black man, woman, or child in White America.

In 1974 Judge Garrity ordered the Boston School Committee to rectify the racial imbalances within the city without including the lily-white suburbs. Poor Irish teenagers were transported to the poorer neighborhoods of Roxbury and vice versa.

Divide and conquer amongst the old slaves, for the Irish had also been transported to the Americas in chains slave as well as the Africans of the West Coast.

And nowadays the battle lines are drawn by color.

Black and their first place minority status are threatened by the rising number of Latinos and Chinese flocking to the fifty states to once more prove that a brother has to know his place and that is why Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson.

His crime.

He mouthed off to a white cop.

Treyvon was murdered, because he was a black boy in a hoodie.

Akai Gurley had it coming, because he was black.

Tamir Rice was shot dead by cops. Crime. Blackness.

At least one a day are shot in these United States.

And white people say these killings are not racist.

No, they are almost right. Cops kill people, because they are poor and dead men can't tell their side of the story.

Whites prefer the nice lies by the people they have entrusted to protect them from the blacks.

Murder is just another price to pay for sleeping safe and sound at night.

ZZZZZZZZZ.

In your sleep.

Blackula will come to get you, whitey. Not Nat Turner.

Dracula looked more like Abe Lincoln than Marilyn Monroe and there is nothing I want more than Marilynula sucking my blood in bed, because I'm a sucker for a stone-cold dead blonde.

WE ARE US 2023

No silent night
No peace on Earth
Like Lennon said
Imagine Imagine Imagine
Imagine no more them
Imagine no more us
Imagine only we are the world
We are us. We are us.
From the mountains
And the valleys
To the Oceans
All around the world.
No more prayers
No more thoughts
Only the silence of guns
And Peace on Earth
From the Jordan River
To the Ukraine
An End To the wars
Everywhere
Nothing but peace
For the children of now
For the children of the future
For we who were once children

Peace around the world.
Imagine
It's easy if you try
Lennon sang that then
Let's sing it together now.
All together now
All tomorrows
All together now
We areus
All of us
Like it or not.

Myrtle Street Sunset Haiku

4:03
The sun drops behind a building
Not sunset yet.
Soon

Johnny Utah - 2014 - Yee Hah

Ten years ago Austin Kilmer, Latt, his brother, and I left the diamond exchange on West 47th and went to Johnny Utah, a hoorah drinking bar with a robo bronco off Rockefeller Center. Packed with marketing junior execs. Having a good time, forgetting they hate their bosses. Same as me, a 61 year old diamond salesman A couple of tequilas later I was in the saddle ready to rock. Yeehah. Maybe four seconds. No broken bones.

December 9, 1978 - East Village - Journal

I haven't seen Alice all day. My honey has been deluged by problems. The previous show's Emcee, David McDermott, bailed on presiding over METRO NOVELTIES. A day before the opening. His resignation might have occurred, because Klaus Nomi garnered all the praise, ignoring his hilarious haute fey frontman performance. Alice said nothing about the whys, then again we haven't been speaking or anything since her the news of her possible pregnancy.

I joked about McDermott's desertion, paraphrasing Admiral Farragut's famous quote at the Civil War Battle of Mobile Bay, "Damn, the faggots, full speed ahead."

No laugh.

It wasn't funny. Nothing has been these days.

Tom Scully, Susan, and Alice might have folded tents on the show. The rest of the participants have been down. Alice's visible mood has been one of perseverance and that afternoon I went to see a final rehearsal at Irving Plaza .

I stood with Klaus, as she addressed the cast with a pre-show, "Listen, we will succeed, because all I'm interested in is having fun. We're not in this for the money or the fame. Fun, and we're going to have fun.

I beleived her, but Klaus turned to me and said, "She may be in it for fun. I am too, but I like the idea of fame and fortune."

"You are a star."

"I was born to be a star and everyone sees that now."

It hadn't been easy for Klaus as a fatherless son in Essen.

Different and no one anywhere likes different, but we are all different in the East Village and if you can make it here, you can make it here.

Later

LOST AT SEA
As was will be
360 degrees of darkness
The Pacific Ocean
The ship
The sea
The sky
Blackness
Where is the captain?

The sea slows,
The ship speeds at 18 knots
Stars blink on and off, on and off
Never true blackness
Only the dark.
Where is the first mate?

Engines slow to half-speed
Our heading - Singapore
Due west
Two thousand plus miles
Five days away at a faster pace Where are the crew?

A glow to the east
Not the sun
Far from land
Asea
Maybe another ship
After a half-hour
The light drowns beneath the horizon
Leaving
Only me on the late night Pacific Watch
Where am I?

That evening the air was warm. December hasn't yet been seasonably cold. Grant and I walked over to the show. A shoulder-to-shoulder crowd filed into the ancient music hall. David's absence hadn't affected the draw. People had come for the show and it was the only show in down tonight. We entered through the Polish bar on 15th Street, had a drink with Alex and the old drunks. Then another. The three of us climbed the back stairs and arrived for the opening. David is back as the emcee. A lot to do about nothing.

During the show about the over-due rent. I have no money. Alice hsa none either and has asked, "Can you pay December's rent?"

I could have, if her whore girlfriend hadn't kicked me off security after the fight with Blondie, but I have no one to blame, but me for being a pauper. I feel like going beserker. My madness has gotten me this far. An arrest and jail time for assault and battery was a solution for everything. FTW.

I stood with Kim Davis, watching the show. It has been as good as always. My pseudo-sister, Pip,held my hand and said, "I hope you and Alice can get over this."

"Over what?" I played stupid.

"Her you know what. I talked to her about getting an abortion. I said that you had taken me to Planned Parenthood. You were so good then."

"Except everyone there thought I was the father."

"You would have been a good father, if only you didn't like John Wayne so much."

"Not so much."

At the last meeting of The NRP I had mentioned that to most Americans John Waybe epitomized a true American.

"You said that we believe we are always right, even when we're wrong."

"Like most people."

"You're not always right."

"I'd be lucky to be right ten percent of the time, but people can't stand the truth."

"True, but I love you." Kim has been a good friend, ever since we met at CBGBs. I don't have many, but one is better thn none.

December 8, 1978 - East Village - Journal

Last night I stayed out late on the streets, sleazing from Max's to CBGBs and then to the Crow's Nest on Avenue A to shove quarters into the illegal slot machine. A loser. No one wins on that thief. I ended up at a go-go dancer's apartment. Carol Smith and I snorted coke, but I restrained from fucking her, worried about a soft dick and coming back to Alice smelling of someone else, then remembered that Alice was staying at her friend, Susan's loft. Carol gave me $20 to suck my dick.

"I don't care you're not hard. I just feel like it."

After I came in her mouth, she gave me $20.

I thanked her and left wanting more. Sex not money.

Bodega workers were opening various businesses on First Avenue in the soft gray before the dawn. Darkness was surrendering to a rainy dawn. THe streetlights had yet to shut off. Feet slapping on the concrete behind me. Too close and I looked over my shoulder. A white boy. Brad, Clover's pseudo-brother/hustler and I asked, "Have you heard from Clover."

"Not since she left for Germany." I had received two postcards. From Berlin and Poland. "How's it going?"

"It sucks. I had to walk here from 53rd and 3rd?"

"No action." The Loop on 53rd and 3rd supported boys with money for sex from older men. Brad was near-sighted, a blessing for hustlers when shadows don't hide the ugliness of tricks. "I stood untaken by the few creeps like no one wanted to get fucked or sucked or fuck me."

"Tragic."

We walked together to for a few blocks, taking the turn on East 10th Street. Even the sinse dealers on the corner had retired for the night.

Brad asked for money. I wasn't giving him anything.

"Sorry, I don't have."

"Can I suck you off?"

"No, I'm not into that anymore."

"Too bad, I'm really good."

"I'm sure you are."

I left him on the stairs and climbed three flights to my empty apartment. No Alice. Not even her scent on the pillows. She was really leaving me.

Later

I phoned my baby brother Michael in Amherst to wish him a belated Happy Birthday. He answered with a groggy night. After my evening I must have sounded the same, because he was unable to recognize my voice at first.I warned him about Mark Amitin.

"He said you two had spoken. He's not to be trusted."

"We spoke about the theater a little, because he talked at length about sex. He never mentioned you, but he was creepy about my staying with him and I wondered, if you had sold me into sex slavery."

"Not a chance. If you come to New York, stay with me." I was pissed at Amitin, but I was surprised at his backstabbing intrigue. Other than theater his only love is sex.

"Don't worry, I can take care of myself."

"I know."

As a young man I had wondered about Michael sexual orientation, which was confirmed by coming home to my parents' house and discovering him dragged out as much younger version of my mother.

"Happy birthday. See you at Christmas."

"With Alice?"

"Who knows."

I hung up remembering holding him as a baby in my arms and thought about Alice and I having a child on the way. Anything was possible

December 6 1978 - East Village - Journal

This afternoon I ran into Alice and her shrewish girlfiend on St. Mark's. I coldly greeted my love. I tried to kiss me and she turned the cheek. I'm pissed she stayed in Chinatown with Tom and the Bitch, but I know Tom wouldn't try anything. We are real friends. I could see she was hurt and I know that she doesn't deserve such treatment. We walked back to 256 with the bitch tailing us. I didn't invite her up and neither did Alice. Upstairs Alice sat on the sofa and started crying. I thought it was about the fight at Irving Plaza, but she whimpered, "I'm late for my period."

"How long?"

"A week."

"Is that long?" I was ignorant of pregnancy. When my father announced in 1960 that my mother had given birth to a baby boy, I wasn't flabbergasted, since I hadn't even noticed she was carrying a child.

"No, but I've never missed my period."

"What do you want to do?" Everything was up to her, but I liked the idea of having a baby with her, but I didn't tell her that I faked many orgasms, because I couldn't cum. That truth didn't seem righ to say now.

"Nothing right now?"

"Does your friend Susan know?"

"No."

I knew that was a lie.

"Please don't tell anyone."

"Not a soul."

I tried to touch her in comfort. She retched away from me, as if I were a monster who had devoured her dreams. She was only 22 and her whole life and all her dreams were on fire. I sat on the sofa and picked up TROPIC OF CANCER. I needed to escape the now and wished I was in Paris then or now. The novel is an excellent guide to float in a world of heavy winds.

Later.

That evening Anthony asked, "Do you think Alice and that bitch are pussy bumping?"

I thought it was over and said, "No." Disappointing Anthony's pornographic fantasy. He was seeing Alice's college friend, Alexa, but they were just friends.

"I was just wondering."

Alice would tell me , if she was. She's like that."

Alice tells me, because she's scared of me. Except for the few times with the Bitch, she has remained faithful, although a few times when I touched her she felt as if she had been with someone else. Paranoia. I wish I could say I had been as faithful.

Later.

Sean called to say that there was work for the next two days.

"I wish there was more."

"So do I." It's okay, I might get enough to pay my share of the rent.

Pearl Harbor Day approaches, but the day of infamy has never forgotten by most people and most Americans like in 1941 don't know where it is.

My ribs ache from the beating at Irving Plaza. Alice and I fought over that fight. She thought it was my fault. I shook my head and said, "Fuck off, why would I fight five people at once."

Her silent answer was that I was crazy and she started crying.

"I can't wait for this show to be over." She is so worried about a possible pregnancy.

I'm so happy I'm not an actor. I'm nothing and happy to be in the shadows out of the limelight.

Psycho-Loss Amnesia let down Words morals gone Arson in the brain Acid running across my synapses Fighting off the memories Psychic loss - First degree and getting hotter.

Tomorrow we're having the first NRP CONGRESS to discuss goals and beliefs.

Possible members Alice, Anthony, To Scully, the Bitch, Kim David, her sister Kyle,Patrick, Joseph Curtin, Michael Selbach, Dana Krystol, BeeGee, Grant Stiit, Guadalcanal, and Lang.I suspect we will go nowhere.

Foto from EV Grieve