MAYBE TOMORROW - A novel by Peter Nolan Smith Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

The November sun flashed off a West Village window and the wavering reflection stalked the Christopher Street pier to a lone youth tuning a battered guitar. The bleached blonde twenty year-old broke into a sly smile and the sapphire shimmer transformed the leather boy into a fallen angel regaining his halo. Nearly every mother and father in America would have ordered their children to avoid him as the complete opposite of America's Bicentennial Spirit. His skin pallor rivaled the paleness of the rising moon and no suburban mall stocked his black leather jacket, torn T-shirt, or heavy engineer boots. Most teenagers would have obeyed their parents' command, but not all of them.

The heavenly mirage disappeared with a windmill slash against the steel strings of the Les Paul. Johnny Darling shut his eyes and envisioned a small stage. Overhead lighting enveloped a drummer, bassist, and keyboard player. A teenage Lolita rasped words of love and no tomorrows in imitation of the Velvet Underground's Nico. The imagined feedback of Marshall Amps buzzed in his ears. The audience might have materialized within his eyelids, if a young boy's voice hadn't shattered Johnny's trance.

"Hey, man."

This time of night only gay bashers and leather freaks frequented the derelict Christoper Street piers and the guitarist waited for the last chords to fade beneath the subsonic range before turning to address the intruder. The Puerto Rican teenager in a distressed leather jacket was two inches shorter than Johnny and his slanted eyes hinted at a drop of Han blood in his Taino veins. Times Square johns found Frankie Domingo pretty, despite the scars crisscrossing his seventeen year- old body. Johnny thought the same.

"Thanks for letting me finish?"

"I been waiting thirty minutes." A gust blew a shank of greased hair across

Frankie's olive eyes. "That a new song?"

"Just three chords strung together." Johnny's thumb rubbed his calloused fingertips.

"Doesn't get more basic than that." Frankie rattled off a drum roll with frayed sticks.

"Got these from Jerry Nolan at Max's Kansas City last night."

"How were the Heartbreakers?" Johnny had skipped the last night's show to entertain a customer.

"Straight and the crowd loved them." Frankie hunched his shoulders with a shiver. "They got paid a $100 each. When we gonna get a band together?"

"Now I have my guitar back, we can audition for the other members."

"Great." Frankie stepped from side to side to relieve the damp seeping through his sneakers' paper-thin soles and stammered, "Johnny, you got ten dollars?"

"The pawnshop took my last fifty." Johnny slapped his guitar.

"Damn, I wish we could get out of here." Frankie moaned like a runaway in need of a dime to phone Mom for a bus ticket home. He blew on his fingers. He hated the cold.

"To go where?"

"What about Florida?" Frankie pointed to the cars on the Westside Highway overhead and glanced south, as if the Sunshine State lay beyond the New Jersey docks. "How far away is it? Five hours?"

"More like twenty-four, if you drive straight through the night."

"What about by plane?" The young Puerto Rican's teeth chattered at a 10/10 beat.

"Where we getting the money for two plane tickets?"

"We hijack a plane. Tell them to give us a million dollars like in DOG DAY AFTERNOON?" Frankie had seen that bank robbery movie five times on 42nd Street and pumped his fist in the air. "Attica, Attica."

"Aren't you forgetting how the cops shoot Pacino's friend in the head?" "Movies aren't real." Frankie had seen enough of films on 42nd Street. "DOG DAY AFTERNOON was based on a real bank robbery."

"It was?"

"Yeah, but it ended the same way. With his friend dead." The guitarist grabbed the young boy's thin arm.

"Your parents live in Florida. That sounds like a ‘happy ever' after to me. If you called them, would they wire you money to come home?"

"Yes, and tomorrow night we'll be eating my Mom's homemade apple pie." "I love apple pie." Frankie licked his lips.

"Only one problem." Johnny gestured toward Manhattan.

"Don't say what I think you're going to say."

"I'm not leaving this behind."

"Fuck this city?" Frankie spun on his heels and chucked the battered drumsticks into the river. "All I got here are hustles, an empty stomach and the smell of old man's hands on my skin, and you don't have it much better."

Johnny slipped the guitar into its case and walked toward the elevated highway. "I left Florida for the same reason you want to run away from New York."

"I hope this isn't an intro to the gypsy lady story."

"Why not? The first day I arrived here, this fortune teller in the Village read my palms. LEft for the past. Right for the future. She said my name was destined to be up in lights." Johnny stopped on the curb of West Street and turned to Frankie. "Me and you are going to make it here as rock stars."

"But not tonight." Frankie kicked an empty beer can into the gutter.

"No, not tonight." Johnny couldn't lie to his protege. "Tomorrow Max's will put on a turkey feast for us orphans."

"So tonight?" Frankie could handle anything as long as he was with Johnny.

"Tonight we go to work." The uptown light on West Street changed to green and suburb-bound cars accelerated to catch up with the synchronized signals.

"53rd and 3rd?" Frankie had had his fill of the sissies at those piano bars.

Across the street men prowled the sidewalks in search of nameless sex. There was success for all in the shadows. A few lurked between the trucks parked underneath the elevated highway. How they were celebrating the night before Thanksgiving was no mystery.

"No, tonight we're competing with midnight cowboy crowd."

"Times Square?" Frankie sighed with resignation.

"Times Square is about luck."

"Heads I win, tails you lose and never give a sucker a break."

"Exactly."

"How I look?" Johnny slung the case's strap over his shoulder and pulled up the collar of his torn leather jacket.

"Like a prince." Frankie once more blew on his numb hands. He was cold. "Where anyone from Jerome Avenue meet a prince?"

"My grandmother read fairy tales. They really have princes and princesses?"

"Real as you and me, except they were born in a palace. Not a Barrio in the Bronx or Queens." The chilled air scrapped over Johnny's right lung like a boat striking a reef and he touched his chest. His cough wasn't a cold.

"You meet one?" Frankie was oblivious to his friend's discomfort.

"Not this side of the silver screen." Johnny fought off the shakes, feeling his ‘jones' knocking on the door. "Princes and princesses are like any suckers. We meet one and what we do?"

"We take them for everything." Frankie snapped his fingers.

"And leave them begging for more." The ache faded from Johnny's chest and he draped his arm over the younger boy. "Just one more thing."

"I know what you're going to say." Their conversation tended to be scripted rituals on these occasions.

"You're going to tell me not to trust anyone."

"Trust no one is survival rule # 1 in New York." Times Square killed lots of people who broke that rule. "That means me too."

"I'm a big boy." Frankie accepted the warning, since his childhood had revealed the worst New York had to offer the young.

"Then let's head to Times Square." Johnny dashed onto West Street.

"Watch out, Johnny."

Two taxis swerved to avoid the guitarist.

"For what? I'm going to live forever," Johnny shouted from the other side of the street. Believing in anything other than his immortality was a sacrilege, at least until he reached twenty-one and that birthday was more than a year away and a year was an eternity when you were twenty.

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Train Travel By Night - July 27, 1983 - Paris - Journal

Night time
Someplace in America
Friday night
Travel by night
Nop fun
Nothing to see, but Darkness
Sometimes passing through small towns
The semi-blue TV glow
In the living room windows
Marking the passing houses
Upstairs
All the children asleep___
Mom and Dad have gone out
For dinner, for drinks, with their friends
In the suburbs
Leaving Young Janie to babysit
Mom and Dad's Little Johnny___
Does Jenny make phone calls?
Or text??
Does Jenny have plans to have boys come over
To have no panty sex heavy breathing no panting___
Even Little Johnny's dad wants her
Janie on Mom's bed
Naked
Safe for the panties on her ankles___
But Janie's not giving it up.
Not tonight
But one night soon.
Yes, that is what the night hides from the train traveler
Suburban sins of a Friday night.
And the train keeps a-rolling
Across America.

I always on the south window heading back from Boston to New York on a Amtrak train.

Once passing through the pine barrens beyond Providence, I spotted a young teen girl standing alone on a dirt road crossing naked. She danced to something and was gone. I've never forgotten her. In the barrens. The pines are never bare.

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Edwige Belmore RIP

Edwige Belmore arrived on the Paris scene in 1978 to become the doorperson at La Palace.

Blonde, punky, and lesbian her haughty demeanor put the Parisiennes in their place and served as Jean-Paul Gaultier's muse in that age of chaos. I met her in 1982 when I worked the door at the Rex for Actuel Magazine. Her friends; Paquita, Krootchey, Fharida, Claude, Tristan et al were my friends. Our worlds intertwined in New York. Sadly she passed from this world on Septerber 15, 2015.

That moment comes to us all.

But never yesterday.

To hear HISTORY OF A DISAPPEARANCE by Edwige and Hayley Moss

Tappez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjtF9e4_DUE

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At one with everything

The depth of summer
The end of July
A scorching heat dome rides over the West
Temperatures in the 100s
Same in Spain, France, Portugal and even London
Fire clouds over two continent
No relief in sight
No rain
Only more blistering heat__
I lie on a damp shelf of sand
Ditch Plains Beach
The cold North Atlantic laps at my toes
Temp high 60s
Waves break on the beach
Vacationers swarming from the parking lot
Loaded with chairs unbrellas, food, blankets kids
Everyone happy with a sunny day on the beach
Not a worry of fires or drought
Temperature rising into the 70s
Dog owners call to their dogs
A small dog licks my face
My first snuzzle in months
An apology from the owner
I smile
I haven't spoken since the dawn
Not a single word
Not even in my head__
I shut my eyes
I roll on my stomach
Onto the damp sand
Open my eyes
Millions of grains of sand beneath me Not one with a name
I pick one
Clyde
Close my eyes
Open
Clyde once more millions of grains of nameless sand__
Same as me
A Neanderthal
One of the last
But
Also one of billions of living creatures
On Terra
More one with the sand than my own kind__
Time for my morning plunge
Into the North Atlantic
A mother to us all
Me
The sand
All one__

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Across Ireland To The Sea

Fly to Shannon

Up to Galway and cross the breadth of Eire
And cross the the Irish Sea
Across England
A train to London
To see friends and comrades
To speak of then, now, and always
And to hear Alice's laugh
Once again__

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Alice Walpole and Ingrid Esprit 1991 Eros Statute

The Wall At Keogh's Pub

In Autumn 1995 Ty Spaulding and I traveled to the Far West of Ireland.

Our rented house in Ballyconneely had a view of the sea, moors, bogs, and the Seven Pins of the Connemarra. The internet had yet to become an instrument of communication and we wrote letters to friends around the world.

Most recently the writer/artist Jocko Weyland emailed a later epistle telling a tale of those times.

Mikey lived in a stone croft outside the village.

He had few good words for anyone.

Here's the long needed edit of said letter.

Enjoy.

Jocko, it was a little strange in Ballyconneely. The first day in town I walked to Keogh's pub, expecting pipe whistles and cheery men singing around a peat fire. Instead a brooding huddle of EU-subsidized cow farmers greeted my entrance with a squinty glare. I offered a round and settled into getting drunk, thinking, "This is the birthplace of the grandparents."

A shove interrupted my sentimental reverie and a bandy-legged gnome with a tam covering a Brillo pad sweep-over aggressively demanded, "What yee lookin' at?"

I answered honestly, "The wall."

"I'll be troublin' yee to not look at that piece of wall. It's mine. Mikey Malone."

The barkeep ordered him to shut his hole, but from that day onward the locals avoided me.

The shunning was extended to Todd, who had a bad back from tree-cutting in Hawaii.

I roamed the boglands in Wellingtons alone.

The weather in September was fine, October was slightly grim, and the rains struck with a sodden ferocity in November.

Everyday Todd's love interest called from sunny Los Angeles.

"Why are we here, instead of there or Thailand?"

My mother's final wish was for me to go the Emerald Isle and meet someone like my sisters, cousins, or aunts. I acceded to her incestuous command, however the only women within ten miles were pregnant fifteen year-old, forty year-old matrons, and two lesbians in Clifden, although one night I was drinking at Keogh's and an attractive twenty-year old redhead tended the Guinness stick. Mikey noticed my gaze and shouted out, "Does the American stand a chance with yee?"

She took one look and answered, "Not a chance."

"None at all."

Mikey was quick with his advice. "Right then, back to yer beer and don't look at me wall."

Todd later married Malibu Stacy. She was good people.

After a few margaritas we swam in the East River on my birthday. The lovely blonde wore a table cloth as a sarong. Todd and she are still happily married and I know well enough when not to stare at someone else's wall.

Milla Slainte.

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Washington Square Park 7/23/2026

Peaceful in the Park

A sunny summer early evening
The murmur of voices
In conversation
An electric piano
Conga
A guitar
A singer's voice
Over the rumble of the Village
Te voices in the park
The wind through the trees
A city alive
And
Light jazz
Peaceful
If only the world was so
Maybe one day
Same as the park
With everyone at peace__

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Connemara Whispers

My mother's last wish on a bed at Mass General was for her second unmarried son to go to Ireland.

"You've roamed the workd and never returned to your native land. I want you to go out there and meet a woman like your sisters, cousins, or aunts. I'll leave you money for that trip."

And like that I was obliged to heed my mother's wish, even though its incestuous nature scared the bejus out of me. She passed in January of 1997 and left me $6000. Andrew Camp, an English friend, arranged an autumn rental of a cottage west of Galway from Lord Robert Guinness. My cousin from Hawaii Ty Spaulding planned on joining me. Late August I landed in Dublin and spent an evening with my aristocratice English-Irish landlord at the Shelburne Hotel bar. The next morning a train ride from Euston Station to Galway. A night of the craic in the lively college town. On the dawn a bus to Cliften and a taxi to a cow town between the Seven Pins and the Atlantic Ocean. A small town. Not a woman in Ballyconeeley. Just cows and sheep roamed the boglands. Ty Spaulding, my Hawaiian brother, and I drank Guinness at Keough's with a handful of sad cow farmers and teenage bartenders. One night Mickie, an old fisherman living in a stone house shaped like a capsized carrack noticed my attention to a young bartender. Sheillah. Eighteen and ready to leave town for good.

"Whatcha lookin' at?"

"THe wall."

"Liar. Sheilaah. This American thinks he might have a shot at you. Whatcha think?"

Sheilaah studied me for a heartbeat with a laugh.

"Not a chance."

"There you go. Back to your beer."

Mikie was right. The old gnome was a first son. First sons in the West of Ireland inherited the family farm, the tie-dyed sheep and cows, and a bacholer's life, because every woman in left the Connemarra by eighteen, unless they had been knocked up by a teenage boyfriend. Just the way it was. A green county of rain with the whispers of Ireland are blown across the bigs into the ocean. Days I wrote ALMOST A DEAD MAN and wandered the bogs to end uo at Keoghs with Ty to drink my drink and sleep in a haunted schoolhouse.

Aah, true Ireland, the Connemarra. 1997___

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Dreaming of Dave Van Ronk 2008

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I woke up this morning to Tom Russell singing his elegy to Dave Van Ronk.

Tom Russell's paean to this mythic village icon stirred my soul to tears and I sat looking out my window remembering times when the world was not filled by plastic, cars, and a dearth of dreams. The link to VAN RONK is for a live song.

His lyrics reanimated the late Pope of MacDougal Street. His songs, his friends, his apartment, the times. Tom Russell sings that Van Ronk's best quotes came while passed out on his sofa. He would force Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, and Tom Rush.

His cover of BOTH SIDES NOW sounds like thundering of a demi-god.

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I Shall Be Released - Bob Dylan at Forest Hills Stadium 6/21/2026

Last Tuesday Bob Dylan was scheduled to perform a concert with Lucinda Williams and Jimmie Vaughan & The Tilt-A-Whirl Band at Forest Hills Stadium. I had called a connected music friend in LA to see if he could get me VIP tickets. Michael said thathe would see what he could do. I knew the routine. A request. Call him the day of the show. Michael is a busy man.

Tuesday evening's forecast was for thunderstorms. The Yabkees and Dave Matthews had cancelled their evening. Not Bob, but I called Michael to inform him that I didn't want to risk getting caught in a bibical deluge. Queens had been flooded waist-high the previous week. My decision was more determined by Dylan's strange playlist of recent songs and a few ancient gems and covers with Bob featured on harmonica.

The full setlist:
To Be Alone With You
Man in the Long Black Coat
It Ain't Me, Babe
False Prophet
I Can Tell (Bo Diddley cover)
Black Rider
Share Your Love With Me (Bobby “Blue” Bland cover)
When I Paint My Masterpiece
I'll Make It All Up to You (Jerry Lee Lewis cover)
Crossing the Rubicon
Soon After Midnight
Under the Red Sky
I've Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You
Goodbye Jimmy Reed
I Shall Be Released

A strange a playlist

Guess he wanted to be a 21 st Century Man

His first LPs ended hootenany fast. Woodie Gurthie's This Land Is my Land remains my national anthem

I saw him in 1969 the Boston Garden. Favorite Bob song

It Ain't Me Babe

In 1998 the Sony execs gave my friend Sara Silver tixs for an MSG show with Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison. I loved Joni. Bob's voice was shot. I stayed to song # 6. It ain't you babe. That was enough for me. The execs were freaked that I left. If I gone last night, song # 3 was It Ain't Me Babe

Google AI REPORT

Bob Dylan played at the Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, NY. Despite severe storm warnings in the area, the show went on as scheduled, featuring an 85-minute set with openers Lucinda Williams and Jimmie Vaughan.

DOWNTOWN

Renewing my license. Battery Park. I'll catch the Staten Island Ferry.

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Much more to come__ Listen to some Bob__

The Birds of Fort Greene Park

I've had a tough time. Moving from Brooklyn has been disruptive in that I have no one on Manhattan. A lost sense of community, also my daughter Angie's mom in Thailand has been very sick. Everything seemed to be going sideways. Almost like my soul is nothing, but today in Fort Greene Park I laid on the grass and let the earth, wind, and trees heal me. Still nothing but the right nothing. Especially the birds__

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Plastic Plastic Everywhere 2011

Over forty years ago Jomtien Beach was a hidden paradise. The drive from Bangkok took 4-6 hours depending on the tides. The Sukhumvit road was flooded twice daily by the coming and going of the sea. The Old Roué of the Orient tells on swimming at dawn with a lovely Thai girl.

"Fish leapt from the water. It was clear as gin."

Thirty years of tourist expansion have not been kind to the Gulf of Siam.

Two days ago I had arrived in Thailand and taxied south from Bangkok to Jomtien, where my wife lived with my son, Fenway. I sat with my friends on the narrow strand of beach. The beer was cold and the islands on the horizon hovered over the sea like UFOs from Eden. The wind was gentle and holiday makers from Ban Nok frolicked in the shallow water. For many it was their first time seeing the sea. None of them noticed the thousands of plastic bags floating on the surface like desiccated jellyfish. The shoreline was a solid bunker of plastic trash.

I spent five minutes picking up flotsam. Mostly plastics bags. Within ten minutes the beach was clean.

"I don't know why you bother. Everyday. Next high tide and the trash is back." An overweight British lager lout had witnessed my Sisyphean efforts on the beach before.

"I don't care about then. I care about now," I took off my glasses. My myopia Xed out the plastic in the water, but the Brit was right. The next high tide deposited another harvest of trash. 

Once more mostly plastic bags.

Thais blame the sea-borne garbage on fishermen. They are mostly Cambodian. No one likes to blame themselves, since the real source of the plastics are 7/11s and food stalls shops along the beach. The person leave their trash on the beach, as if they city of Pattaya is paying someone to haul it to a landfill on the Moon.

The city depended on the sea.

"Remember in THE GRADUATE," said my friend Richard, who was teaching in Saudi Arabia. No bars. No booze. No women. No porno. The South African's sole form of entertainment was watching old movies. "The man saying the future was plastics."

"He was a prophet." Mark an Aussie mate, detested my crusade against plastic as demeaning for a foreigner. He also hated the plastic. "Some Swede invented plastic bags in the early 60s. They didn't hit the UK until the 80s."

"Fish was wrapped in newspaper. Sometimes the skin would bear the headlines."

"Teenage packers at the supermarket check-out specialized in sorting the right shaped food into the bags." Mark was almost as old as me. The 60s were a different time from today.

"The Thais used banana leaves."

I recalled buying khao or steamed rice surrounded by a leaf. The cook had added spices. The rice was delicious unlike anything in the West.

"Now the stores give plastic bags for everything." Mark pointed to a passing Thai beach vendor carrying a plastic bag of fried bananas.

"A pack of gum or cigarettes." Richard loved his cigarettes.

"The Chinese pharmacist on Pattaya Tai says her customers think she is being kee-neo or cheap, if she doesn't give them a plastic bag. Food candy or chips. They want them no matter the size of the purchase."

"It's free." Mark traveled from free food bar to free for bar. His UK pension shrank with every crisis back home.

"Whenever I refuse them, the clerk regards me as if I were pian or weird."

The Thais are no different from farangs. They regard my trash discipline as that of a crazy man.

"Young people think that is choice or old-fashioned."

"Young people regard us as dinosaurs. "

"And they're not wrong." Fifty-nine years old, however my aversion to plastic bags was spreading across the globe. Bhutan was the first nation to ban the eyesores. Ireland and France placed a surcharge on the bags. 90% reduction of bags entering the garbage centers in those countries. The petro-chemical companies have lost 25% of their global reach due to bans and restrictions. The USA has been slow to buck the plastic mania as Big Oil rules the nation.

"Africa is covered in plastic bags filled with shit. It's called the poor man's toilet." Richard from Jomtien had recently visited his family in SA. He considers nowhere his home.

"Nice image. Shit and plastic. The future is plastic shit." Mark ordered three beers for the beach boy. "Mai oow tung plastic."

The Thai beach boy brought the beers in a plastic bag, saying he only had two hands.

They were ice cold.

Later that evening I mentioned the ban of plastic to Fenway's mom. She thought that I was crazy.

"Not have plastic bag. Have what? Banana? You choice."

Thais throw plastic out the window and expect the trash to blow away with the wind.

Breaking this addiction to ease will take years.

Hawaii is in the middle of the Pacific. Remote and idyllic, yet millions of plastic bags wash up on the tropical beaches every day.

I don't mean to lecture.

I hated sermons.

And I don't mind picking up plastic bags.

Keeps me limber.

But one day I' hope to see none of the beach.

No, actually I'd like to see them never.

Cause that's the way of the new modern world to come, no matter what the wants of the Filthy Rich.

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Blows Against the Empire 2001

Early in April 2001 a task force supporting the aircraft carrier US Kitty Hawk anchored off Pattaya. Its 12,000 soldiers and sailors invaded the go-go bars of Beach Road and I avoided the chaos without taking into account my Thai girlfriend's displeasure at having to stay home night after night.

"I not leave farm to sit in house watch TV. I want to see friends."

I agreed to visit Walking Street, hoping the twenty-four year old would recognize the wisdom of my decision. Of course a had witnessed plenty of shore leaves during her two years at the Tahitian a Go-Go and enjoyed the attention of young sailors.

She sexied herself up in a pink halter-top and hot pants, then wound her long hair into a snaking braid.

"Not worry. I only love you. Not other Americans."

"What about other countries?"

"I only have you." She straddled my motorcycle with her thin arms around my chest.

"And I believe you." I drove through the diesel-belching traffic to Soi BJ.

On Walking Street teenage touts hawked sex shows to naive Chinese tourists. Toughs offered bootleg cigarettes with a keen eye for more profitable action from drunken Yanks. Legless beggars dragged broken bodies along the pavement. Cambodian illegals brandished mammoth snakes for farangs to photograph and a baby elephant competed in a chug-a-lug contest with a beer-bellied Swede to a Babel of pop songs blaring from over-sized amps. Pattaya's fun had been outlawed in every American town, which was another reason for its popularity with the US military.

Walking Street's main attraction were the go-go bars manned by bikinied dancers from the Isaan Plateau and discotheques filled with smiling girls in tight jeans and skimpy shirts.

The Thai government had benignly declared that nightlife was an example of young people having a good time, although even a blind man would have recognized the playfulness between Thai dok thongs and falangs bah as a facade for mercenary flesh transactions.

Ae and I were no different. She provided sex. I gave her money.

After her pretend orgasms she sometimes said, "Rak khun."

Love sounded good coming off her lips, but Ae had an Italian boyfriend coming in June.

He would save me from my 21st Century version of THE WORLD OF SUZIE WONG, so for now we strolled arm in arm through the Last Babylon's bedlam. When a trio of navy boys stumbled noisily from a go-go bar, Ae asked, "Why you not same sailor?"

"I'm old and they're young." Two months shy of 49, I felt 25 and acted 15.

"You not old." It was a nice thing to say, even if the mirror stopped lying years ago.

"You still not same other Americans." She tugged me to a line-up of bootleg Prada shoes on the sidewalk. "You work computer. Not drink too much. Take care of me. Other Americans cheap. One time I go to hotel to sailor. He have sex with me. Not pay. He cheap Charlie."

"Maybe he thought you were in love and wanted to do it for free." I hated these stories.

"No woman do for free. Not Thai. Not western." She tried on black platforms. With the extra four inches she could look me in the chin. "Maybe some time I make love to you for free."

I handed the salesgirl the equivalent of $8 to disprove her claim about American Cheap Charlies. We stopped at Hot Tuna, my friend's bar. Ae listened to the bargirls' gossip of who loved whom, who had left whom, and who had a broken heart, knowing one day that my name was destined to fill a slot in their conversation. Their talk accelerated into rapid-fire Thai and I listened to a young swabbie's boast about kicking Chinese butt.

"We'll knock their planes out of the sky in less than an hour and sink their ships in two."

The Chinese had bought down a Navy spy plane. The President was threatening action. It was all politics and I said, "It won't come to war."

"The gooks been begging for a whooping," A blonde sailor with a Panhandle drawled belligerently into his beer.

"We won't have a war, if our president exerts a little diplomacy."

The Commander-n-Chief's predilection for straight talk excluded soft power. "If it does come to a fight, you'll splash them, but they'll nuke the fleet."

"Then we blast 'em into the Stone Age." The Texan spilled his beer.

"And they'll wax San Francisco and LA to save face." Face was as essential to an Asian as driving a big car was to an American.

"Screw their face, we'll bomb 'em until their fortune cookies glow in the dark!" another sailor exclaimed, earning the scowls of more pacific farangs. My young countrymen were beyond caring about the opinion of Italian perverts in soccer shorts. I tried to lighten the mood. "A couple of H-bombs will start the nuclear winter, solving the global warming problem."

"None of those missiles would hit America, if we had NMD," The Texan referred to the President's grandiose Star Wars shield against North Korean, Chinese, Iranians, or Israeli missiles.

"The Commie rockets have a range of 1200 miles. They might reach the Aleutian Islands. A war with North Korea would cost about $200 billion. "About $6,000 per peasant family." This same sum would provide each American with a week's vacation at DisneyWorld. "We give them an out and they won't fight us."

"That's blackmail," the Texan snapped with a corded neck. "You serve in Vietnam?"

"No, I protested against the war."

"How? By wearing beads and smoking pot?" His friend chuckled sarcastically and the Texan added, "And he didn't inhale either."

"And we don't too." They play-acted puffing on a joint and then shunned me to watch the Muay Thai boxing in a nearby ring, but my participation in the peace movement had involved crimes against the State dating back to a warm spring day in 1965, which was a long time ago in the suburbs outside Boston.

Having returned to my split-level house from Our Lady of the Foothills, I tore off my Catholic school uniform and dressed in a tee-shirt and jeans. My mother was in the laundry room. My brothers and sisters were watching WHERE THE ACTION IS on the TV.

It was too nice a day for the lip-synching of Paul Revere and the Raiders and I went outside to chuck a hardball against the wooden backstop at the end of our driveway.

My pitches struck the splintered strike zone with a thud. I called the strikes and balls. I was pitching a no-hitter in Fenway, until Addy Manzi crossed the lawn. My teenage neighbor was sexier than a Playboy centerfold in her white shirt, blue tie, plaid skirt and white knee sox. To show off I was more than twelve year-old boy I wound up in imitation of the Red Sox's Dick Raditz, and hurled a speedball over the backstop into the yard.

"Have to work on that control," she commented and I jealously imagined her flirting with the local high school ace. As I started toward the ball, she said, "Wait a second."

Wearing a baseball glove, I couldn't stick both hands in my pockets to hide my embarrassment. "For what?"

"How about a drive?" Addy asked with a mesmerizing lilt.

My toes twisted in my Keds.

"W-w-where you want to go?"

Nowhere special? She brushed back an auburn strand with practiced poise. Just around to feel the wind through my hair.

At sixteen she existed in a perpetually cool world of teenagers, while thirteen year-old boys barely had hair on their chins. I swallowed hard. "I don't have a car."

"We can drive my mother's Tempest. She's gone out with friends. My brother is at the dentist. No one needs to know." She dangled car keys from an index finger. "Can you drive?"

My grandmother had taught me to drive in her VW Bug. It had a shift and the Tempest had a push-button transmission. It couldn't be that hard. "I guess so."

"C'mon, it'll be fun." Addy cocked her head in the direction of the car in her driveway. She had babysat for my family and taught me the Twist. I couldn't refuse her anything. "Okay."

She clapped with more enthusiasm than a teenage girl should exhibit to a grammar school boy. I was scared.

"You mind if we go someplace no one will see us?"

"Fresh." She slapped my arm and I sputtered, "I didn't mean it that way."

"I was joking."

"Oh." I threw my baseball glove into a bush and followed her across the lawn to the car.

She slipped into the Tempest and turned on the radio. WBZ was playing 98.6 by Keith. I put the car in reverse and drove to the STOP sign on Rte. 28, where Addy said, "Now turn left to Chickatawbut."

"Chickatawbut?" The road through the Blue Hills was an infamous make-out spot.

"You said quiet." She raised an eyebrow.

I stepped on the gas. The convertible sped to forty.

At Chickatawbut Road I fishtailed through the intersection.

"Sorry about that."

"Drive like you belong in the car." Addy leaned closer to the open window. The breeze bore her perfume to me. My mother also wore Lanvin. Addy lifted her eyes to the canopy of trees overhead and said, "Stop at old CCC Tower. We?re taking a little walk to the next hill."

"A missile base's on top." My hands were damp on the steering wheel.

"Not anymore. LBJ pulled out the missiles to please the Russians."

?That means Boston is unprotected from nuclear attack.? During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis the nuns had drilled us to duck under our desks in case of nuclear attack. We pray for peace and our eternal souls. The bombs had never come, reinforcing the sisters? faith in miracles.

"Don't worry, it's too nice a day to die." Addy's words calmed my fear and I parked the car. The other cars were empty. No couples parked here this time of day. They went into the woods and that was where Addy led me too.

We scrambled along a muddy trail. The sunlight dappled through the new leaves onto her golden skin. I grew breathless with anticipation. We mounted a hillock. Two teenagers in leather jackets waited by a chain link fence. I recognized the taller one.

Two months ago Addy had come home near dawn. Her mother had grounded her for a month and banned the car mechanic from seeing her daughter.

Little can render a teenage boy more attractive to a girl than her mother's disapproval, if you throw in a tattoo, oil-slick hair, black engineer boots, and a silvery SS-SuperSport.

"What's Dennis Halley doing here?" Half the boys in town wanted to be like him.

"Silly boy." She ran to kiss Dennis, who asked, "Who's the kid?"

"He's cool." Addy vouched for my presence. "He gave me a ride."

"Way to go, kid." Dennis patted my back.

I had done him a favor.

He pulled out a pair of wire cutters and opened a hole in the fence.

His squat friend crawled through the breach and ran over an embankment with a whoop. Addy was the next to go. She climbed to the top of the hill and Dennis turned to me. "What about it, kid?"

I had smashed pumpkins on Halloween and set fire to the woods on Easter Sunday, but was paralyzed by my mother's warning to walk the other way, if I saw trouble coming. "The sign on that fence says they punished trespassers."

Dennis lifted a rock.

"Who this belong to?"

"No one."

"And that sign?"

"The government." Running hard, my yard was only ten minutes away.

"And the government belongs to you and me and the people in Boston." He threw the rock at the sign. "So?"

"This place belongs to us." The FBI parents wouldn't appreciate his logic.

"Damn right, it does. I spent last year fighting in Nam. Shooting at strangers. Possibly killed them. There are people, who think shooting strangers is wrong and they might be right." Dennis' treasonous statement contradicted the nuns? prayers for the fall of communism. "You know any Vietnamese?"

The only Orientals on the South Shore were Chinese waiters serving Pu-Pu platters and we never spoke to them, except to make fun of their accents.

"No, I don't."

"Those VC were peasants. Same as my grandfather from Ireland. Same as you and me. So you gonna run home or come with me?"

Leaving meant leaving Addy. I hunched through the opening and raced Dennis to where his friend and Addy stood beneath a tall flagpole. The South Shore spread beneath us like a map slipping over the edge of the world into the sea. The thug with the chin beard pointed out his house near the Quarries.

"Where you live, kid?"

I focused below the hill.

"The tan house next to the greenish one."

"That's my houser the green one," declared Addy.

"That's not tan. Don't tell me you live in a pink house?"

"Shut up, Bush." Kevin Halley warned and his friend replied grumpily, "Nothing wrong with living in a pink house, kid."

"Where are the missile silos?" Addy suggestively raised an eyebrow.

Kevin took her hand.

"I'll show you."

They disappeared behind a half-buried building. Bush wandered off to explore the concrete bunker. The wind died to a whisper and the hill became an end-of-the-world movie. I was the last man on Earth and twelve years-old was nothing to a teenage girl. I threw a rock at the nearest Quonset hut. It broke a window. I smashed pane after pane.

Bush ran up to me.

"Kid, you pitch a baseball that hard, you can start for a Little League team."

"Thanks," I panted and Bush motioned with his hand. "I need your help. C'mon."

Hundreds of fire extinguishers had been stacked inside a garage. We lugged out twenty and pulled the levers. Jets of CO2 gas shrouded the hilltop and Bush declared, "It's like the planet Venus and we're two astronauts looking for space girls in bikinis."

"I like that movie." I stretched my hands into the fog without touching an extraterrestrial go-go girl. Hearing a whistle, Bush grabbed my arm. ?Kev must have found some loot."

We jogged out of the mist. Kevin and Addy stood staring down a concrete shaft. The sunlight only penetrated a couple of feet. Kevin dropped a rock into the silo. I flinched in expectation of an explosion. The stone clanged on metal.

"Missile silos. C'mon, I'll show you something fucked up."

We followed him inside a damp bunker. He stopped at a wrecked console. The electronics had been wrenched out of their brackets. "This is where the buttons were."

"The buttons to shoot the missiles," Addy whispered secretively.

"Or order more coffee." Bush joked, but Kevin directed our attention to a floor-to-ceiling glass map of the world. His finger traced a line over the red circles dotting LA, Detroit, New York, Chicago, Boston.

"Targeting cities in the USA isn't funny."

"Why would they bomb them?" A-bombs were for the commies.

"To squash any revolution out of control of the National Guard."

"That's crazy talk."Bush disagreed with a voice shadowed by doubt, for Watts had burned to the ground the previous summer.

"Crazy talk, I'll tell you crazy. I get caught for joyriding. The Quincy judge said either two years in the Marines or three years in Billerica Correctional. I was in Vietnam to fight commies. I never saw one. I shot at trees, burned villages. It ain't like the movies. Not clean. Things I saw made me sick and I got this for my troubles." Kevin lifted his shirt. A long scar had been etched across his abdomen. "Fucking war."

Kevin chucked a swivel chair through the map. I had believed in stopping communism until the heavy shards of glass continents cascaded onto the concrete floor. The transparent seas splintered into a thousand pieces.

Kevin didn't lie and we took his revenge through an orgy of vandalism. We rammed doors through walls and smashed furniture with clubs fashioned from chair legs.

After ten minutes our rampage of senseless violence was waning, so I climbed a nearby slope with the flagpole's lanyard. Addy looked at me with puzzlement, until I ran forward to let the rope carry me into space.

She shrieked with delight.

I had made her happy.

It was at this moment a police car crashed through the missile base?s front gate.

I released the rope and fell to Earth. My legs buckled and I keeled over in pain. The other three fled to the fence. Addy stopped at the hole. Her eyes swore me to silence. My wave signaled her name would die within my lips and she disappeared into the woods.

Two policemen manhandled me to the MDC cruiser. The older was Sgt. Tully. Everyone in my hometown had heard how he hated kids. He twisted my arm.

"Who were your friends?"

"They were from Southie."

"We have ways of making tough kids talk."

He shoved me into the rear seat.

His partner sat behind the wheel.

"You?ll have to pay for the broken windows."

Last week I had batted a baseball into the Manzi?s dining room. One pane cost about $1. Hundreds had been smashed on the hill.

"I only broke a few."

"Kid, you tell us names and I might go easy on you." The young driver offered with a kind voice.

Sgt. Tully shook his crew-cut head. ?No deals. Why were you destroying government property? You a commie?"

I wasn't giving up Addy.

"It was a protest against the War in Vietnam."

The driver stomped on the brakes. The cruiser came to a rubber-burning halt a hundred yards short of the Route 28 lights.

"Get out of the car."

I was dead meat and his partner smirked, "Now you'll get it, you commie faggot."

The young cop hauled me into the woods.

"Were you really protesting the War?"

"Not at first, but that's the way it turned out."

The billy club dropped at his side.

"Kid, I'm gonna let you go."

I blinked in disbelief.

"Why?"

"My brother went to serve his country and they had him driving a beer truck. A fucking beer truck. It ran over a mine and he died for 3.2 Budweiser beers. It was fucked and it's only gonna get worse. I can't say nothing about it or else___"

"Or else people think you're a commie faggot."

He slammed his billy club into a tree.

"Kid, get home before I forget you?re a kid."

I ran away to the dull thuds echoing through the woods. Kevin was right. Viet-Nam was not a John Wayne western. People died bloody deaths and if my not wanting to be any part of it made me a commie, then I was willing to join the KGB. I just didn't have to tell anyone about it.

Arriving on my street I spotted Mrs. Manzi's Tempest in the driveway. Addy's brother bicycled out to meet me. Chuckie's lower lip was numb from Novocain, as he said, "Man, my sister took the car without my mother's permission and met Kevin Hally. Man, did she catch it.?"

"She say anything about me?"

"Why would she say anything about you?" Chuckie gave me odds of one-in-a-million of ever kissing his sister. After today I stacked another bunch of zeros on top that number. "You weren't with her, were you?"

"No, I was throwing rocks at the Canyon." The less anyone knew about this afternoon the better. "I'll see you later."

Crossing the merger of our two lawns, I glanced at their house.

Addy stood at the window, a teenage Rapunzel with a ponytail. She raised a finger to her lips to indicate she hadn?t mentioned my name. She blew me a kiss. I walked on pillows to my house.

Entering the kitchen, my mother hung up the phone.

"You have anything to tell me?"

Mothers have a strange way of finding out everything, but only if you tell them. "No."

Her Medusa eyes studied me before softening to display the love deepest in her heart. She still believed whatever I said. "Then wash your hands and face before your father comes home."

I went upstairs, convinced that not telling the truth can set you free.

The next day Mother Superior called me into her office and asked me if I believed in God. I tried quelling her fear for my immortal soul by falling to the knees and saying the 'Our Father' in Latin. When I finished, the old crone blessed herself with her Rosary. "Stalin was an altar boy too. I have my eye on you."

She wasn't the only one. My classmates shunned me during recess. Chuckie and Kyla Rolla, who had been my sweetheart for the past two years, defied this silent treatment and I loved them for saying it didn't matter what anyone thought.

My protest against the War severed the ties holding me to this suburb. I accepted a scholarship to an all-boys high school ten miles away from my hometown. We attacked a nearby CIA lab during a rocket club exhibition. They had banned by cross-country team from using their fields. Only my father's intercession prevent the perpetrators? expulsion. I lost my free ride.

Chuckie knocked up Susan Fox in junior year. He married her before Christmas 1969. Kyla and I broke up before the senior prom. I still wonder why.

In May 1970 I hooked school to demonstrate against the invasion of Cambodia in Boston Commons. The government has rejected my pension claims for the years of protest. The money was unimportant, for my only goal had been peace. Now all America and the world gets is war.

After my fifth beer on Walking Street I gave Ae the keys to my motorbike. She helped me from my stool.

"Why Americans talk loud?"

"They think it makes people understand them better."

"Tam see-ahn-dang magh." Thais rarely complained about noise.

"No farangs are half as loud as your father and brother after they get a bottle of Mekong in them ___," My criticism was interrupted by the Texan sailor's bump. I clenched my fists and he raised his palms, "You weren't kidding about the war, were you?"

Informing him that a coke-addicted president concocted this conflict with China to get votes sounded like bitter grapes about the GOP stealing the election in Florida, after all Mayor Daley had robbed Nixon in 1960. I decided to play it straight.

"No, kid, it'll blow over by the end of the month."

"Thanks, sir, you had me worried. I didn't want the rest of them to know I didn't want to fight. I only joined the Navy to see the world."

"I understand completely." I had left Boston for the same reason. "And this is part of that world. Enjoy your leave."

"You have a good night, sir." He ran between two fat Germans, lifting his two fingers as a vee to the night sky. "Peace."

"Peace."

Before Ae sat on the Yamaha, I kissed her. She regarded me suspiciously, "What's that for?"

I straddled the bike, not explaining my affection.

Thais don't care much about the rest of the world and a go-go girl from the TQ bar with three kids even less, however a teenaged soldier flashing the peace sign in this century gave me hope for the future, since one peacenik will become two.

The many that follow will give us strength in numbers and in the end the balance will swing away from war. It always does in the end, because everyone is a better lover than fighter.

Man or woman.

Adam and Eve.

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Much more to come__

AUGUST 20, 1978 - JOURNAL ENTRY - EAST VILLAGE

Alice is down in Chinatown, plotting the dramatic take-over of the East Village with Tom Scully and his scrawny girlfriend. I don't like the way Susan looks at Alice and she doesn't like the way Alice loves me. To her I'm a thug. The coke deal is back on and I'm waiting on Guadalcanal's call and he's waiting on his dealer's call. His dealer is a friend on Johnny Thunders. A junkie and like the Velvet Underground sang, "I'm just waiting for my man."

A common plaint in the East Village.

Once Guadalcanal calls I was planning on cooling off at the St. Mark's Cinema, but the temperance has fallen into the high 70s and I don't like the double-bill of two Robert Alda films; MASH and FOUR SEASONS.

My older brother Frank and his bride are down in New York for a wedding. Patty is shocked by the squalor of East Village. I've become blind to the burnt-out buildings,, the junkies, the bums, lack of trees, and the obvious atmosphere of moral depravations. Frank feels the same way as his wife having only lived in the suburbs.

"What are you going to do if Mom and Dad come to visit?" ask Frank inside my tenement apartment.

My father regularly travels to Basking Ridge NJ to meet with Bell Telephone engineers as an executive to New England Telephone.

"I'll save them from worry by meeting them in a better neighborhood."

"New York has them?" asked Patty, shutting the car window to avoid any contact with the urban blight of the Lower East Side.

Not many, but a few with good restaurants too."

Frank parked the car.

"Are we going inside?" Patty was scared.

"Yes, how bad could it be?"

"You'll see."

We climb three flights to 3E. The Lower East Side was a slum. This apartment was a wreck. Alice kept it clean, but not clean enough for suburbanites.

"Mom wouldn't like it here," interjected Frank.

"I know Nana used to say better a dump on a good street than a palace on a bad one." My Irish grandmother had only lived in Ireland as a child and Jamaica Plains. This apartment was no palace.

"Mom probably wouldn't like my living with Alice."

"I lived in sin with Patty."

"It wasn't sin."

I restrained from saying that Frank and Patty had been seeing each other when she was still married to someone in Washington.

"You have any protection?" Frank had a .38 at home.

I reached under the table.

""Just this." I held up a stiletto.

"You need something more than that."

I didn't mention Hakkim the Junkie. He was more dangerous than anyone on the South Shore.

"Alice wants a .25. She's from West Virginia. She grew up with guns."

"Always good to have something that can make a hole in someone. I don't really need my .38. You want it?"

"Want what?" Alice entered the apartment in her waitress drag. She had met Frank and Patty up in Boston. My brother had joked how she didn't shave under her arms or her legs. I hadn't like that comment and never mentioned it to Alice.

"A gun," answered Frank.

He has a .38. I told him it was too big."

"I could handle a .38 just fine." Alice sat next to me. She smelled of yogurt from the yogurt shop.

"Most weapons are used against someone you know. What if you shot Peter in a squabble?"

Just because I'm from West Virginia doesn't mean that we go around killing lovers. Heck, your home town Pittsburg is tougher than any Appalachian hollow." Alice was proud of her mountains and people there.

"Alice doesn't have much of a temper."

"Well, if you want it, it's yours. Just come up and get it."

"Okay."

We ended that subject, but the main reason I didn't want a gun was that I might actually use it and in the East Village I would run out of bullets before reaching the end of the hit list. Better I had an AK-47 and a pile of banana clips. A machine gun might make a difference on the Lower East Side. It certainly would take care of Hakkim.

AUGUST 20, 2021 - BROOKLYN

I still speak with Alice in LA, although I have bothered to tell her about my cancer. If fact I haven't told that many people to avoid my condition being the only topic on the menu. I just left NYU Hospital after a Co-vids Test prior to next week's procedure. It's a long walk to the Lex Avenue and I decided to travel over to Brooklyn via the East River Ferry under gray skies. I spoke with a Hassidic father of many. Like me all that mattered in life were his children and the Torah. I don't tell him about my plans to write the TORAH II. It's on the back burner. After getting off the ferry I sat under the Brooklyn Bridge. My body has run out of energy. I haven't had a drink in three weeks. Dakota told me if takes about two month to shake the withdrawal symptoms. Thankfully I don't have DTs or sweats or any desire to drink. Not yet and hopefully never.

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June 21, 1990 - Paris - Journal Entry

July 20, 1978 - Provincetown - Journal Entry

Provincetown is packed with cruising homos and hippies retired from the world. P-Town is the end of the world. Thankfully beyond the end of US6 and a ferry ride away from Boston. Ann suffers from motion sickness after a morning session of sit-ups and yoga. I feel for her, but we are free; fresh sea air, a morning fuck, some money in our pockets, New York and its problems hundreds of miles away. I almost feel like getting a job on Commercial Street. We both love of tge town is so fey. I used to come here in the early 70s with my friends from the 1270 disco and have orgies in cheap hotel rooms. We were so free. Some queer restaurants must need a butch dishwasher. Ann could work in a sea taffy shop. Certainly a better holiday than the stifling heat of West Virginia, the smog canyons of New York, and the overbearing familiarity of Boston. We head out to Race Point, where Ann rants a wicked version of Pattie Smith's GLORIA. She is so very very funny and cute.

Did Jesus have a younger brother?

Or was he the Only Holy Child. Mark 6:3 of the New Testament refers to his brother James. Nothing of anotger Immaculate Conception. I tell Alice my theory that Christ was thr red-headed bastard of the Celtic legionaire. No mention of this soldier in the Bible, but when Ann and I had sex the first time, she cried out, "Oh God."

Blasphemy is considered a deadly sin by the Catholic Church, but at death I fear not the lightning of a Myth. I shall not ask for the Last Rites. I shall not shake with fear for the loss of my immortal soul. I shall be dead.

Jimmy Jesus lived past his thirties
The sole son of Mary Magdalene
His father had survived the Crucifixion
To seek refuge in the Himalayas
Where he had spent in youth.

Kashmiris said, "You look like your father."
Jesus, Mary and Joseph had fled there
After the disgrace in the Temple___
Kashmir
A holy child
The son of Yuz Asaf
Wandering Jews begged for forgiveness from the only son of the Holy One.
But Jimmy was gifted with visions.
A stutter
A stammer
A lisp
No one could understand him
Not god-struck
Just a little gob-struck__

Mary took him every day
To his father's grave.
Screaming, "Why Jesus? Why Jimmy? He has no sins."
The Heavens remained silent to all.
Except Mary Magdalene heard a voice.
"I told you not to call me here."
Jimmy Jesus calls out, "Jesus, Da-da."
A bolt of lightning struck him.
Dead for want of a father's love.

Minor Blasphemy.

Still at the beach. The water cold as ice. Windblown sand whispers against our naked bodies. Creepy men saunter along the strand. White bodies hidden by white shirts, black shorts, high white sox, loafers, binoculars hanging from the neck. More unneeded feet on these secluded beaches, crushing the fragile ecology, although the Park Service allow dune buggies to furrow across the sand. I stand up naked. My swimming suit dry. I would so like Alice to suck my dick now.

Dunes everywhere I look. Angles of sand topped by sea grass and more voyeurs. Damn them, but then so what. They have their own pervy lives to live. Honest citizens hiding their wicked ways fifty weeks a year to being themselves for a two-week vacation in P-Town. Next Saturday they will return home to be replaced by others of them. The beach calming the homo-erotic cravings they can't feel at home.

I saw Jeff Berger, one of my old lover's at a bar. A go-go boy cutie fighting off early old age. Alice and I made love twice tonight. She asked, "What was it like fucking a man?"

"Different from you."

"How?"

"Savage versus vicious."

I show her how,and then what it was to be fucked in the ass. Not queer. A sexual adventurer.

Damn, my wisdom tooth is fucked.

Foto by Monroe Wheeler, Provincetown, 1947

July 20, 1994 - Penang - Journal

Knocking the door by the Chinese desk clerk of the Swiss Hotel. Danny tells me that I have a phone call. It's 8:21 a.m. I had difficulty getting to sleep last night. For some reason garlic keeps me awake. I got out of bed wrapped the towel around my waist and walk down the corridor to the front desk. I picked up the phone. My father's voice came from watch it pond and distant Maine. The signal bouncing off a satellite to low outer space to reach the other side of the world in Malaysia. I'm happy to hear him call.

later afternoon

Howard and I were speaking in the breakfast room. Howard is a Canadian Jew, researching The Tribe's history in Malaysia. the first recorded presence dated back to the 17th Century and the population peaked at the tutn of the century. Jalan Zainal Abidin was once known as Jehudi Jalan or Jew Street. Never many, post-war the Jewish community shurnk to under the minyan for the now-definct temple. I've nicknamed him Study Kravitz. Walter, a Guyana Hindu, lives down the hotel's first-floor hallway. Howard and I both know about Walter's increasingly difficult romantic relationship with a high-caste. He and his beloved met at university in Toronto. Love in Canada. Last night he met his girlfriend's wealthy Eurasian father. Walter is a dark-skinned Dalit from the untouchable caste.

"Not good."

His response was so soft as to be almost inaudible . Having no friends in Penang he had no choice but to tell us what had happened the previous evening. Two strangers. Older strangers were like confession to ghosts. His story was as sad as Romeo and Juliet.

Walter had gone to University in Toronto where he met and fell in love with Bridget, a Malay national of Sino/Hindu descent. White skin. Walter is very black. They were very much in love and had been living together for five years in Canada.

Family pressure forced Bridget to return to Penang, where her father had arranged a marriage to a man of the Brahman caste. Walter had followed her and have been attempted to see Bridget without any success he had gone to their family compound on Leith Street. Howard and I had both advised against it. But the decision was Walter's and last night he walked away with stooped shoulders with very little hope of success.

"Bridget had told me to wait a year before coming over. I waited and then the phone calls and letters stopped. A month ago her father told me to never call again. My parents said to forget about her. I couldn't. I came despite everyone. Last night her father wouldn't even let me in the house. I couldn't even see Bridget. He said until she was married she was locked in her room. She is 27. How can she let this be done to her? I know she loves me. Last year in New York we spent a week together. Her father thought she was in Mumbai."

Walter and I exchanged a glance. Canada and the USA have basically left marrying out of your race color or creed behind, although Jews pretty much marry amongst themselves. My mother wanted me to marry a good Irish Catholic girl. I only found one and Hilde was too young. We are still friends.

"To come here I sold off all my things. I stopped my PhD studies. My mother cried and my father said I was no son of his. I gave up everything. Bridget has accepted the marriage offer of A 42-year-old man with two kids. Her father arranged a meeting and she flew to Geneva to meet him . They are getting married next month, but I contacted her suitor and told him that she was in love with me and that we had lived together for 5 years, so now Bridget has no one her only choice is me. Why can't her father see that?"

Walter and I remain silent.

We understood her father feared her daughter getting sullied by a forbidden caste. Not agreeing with that reality. Walter can't see his girlfriend's duplicity in this racist outcome. Living with Walter was fine in Canada, but she could never love him here.

"What can I do?"

"You go to see the Buddhist monks and ask them to intercede but I don't see any success in that. Talking to the Hindu priests is no good, as they believe in caste society." The separation of caste has been going on for thousands of years. "The monks can ask her does she really love you."

"I no she loves me. She said so so many times. I want to free her from her father."

"This isn't Romeo and Juliet. You will be killed, if you trying to escape with her," said Howard.

"Well, I am only left with killing him or killing me." His unhappiness was overwhelming," and I said, "Killing yourself is giving a victory to the father and you must think of yourself you're young. Your girlfriend doesn't want you to be Romeo and she doesn't want to be Juliet, You will meet somebody. Trust me I've had many girlfriends. And each time I thought it was over and I would never love again. I have loved again. No matter what happens, you have loved, and no one can take that love away from you."

Tears swelled in his eyes, as he recognized his defeat and I felt the scars of all the failed loves in my heart, and I still love all those that I have loved. Their names are many. And I remember them all as will Walter the name Bridget.

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Much more to come__ His voice

July 17, 1994 - Penang - Journal

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