Journal Entry August 2, 1978 - East Village

Today Alice and I moved out of my West 11th Street SRO room. The temperature was rising into the 90s and I sweated bullets, loading a taxi with our possessions. Jumping in the back seat, I shut the door and we crossed 10th Street to 1st Avenue, where the driver stopped at the curb and said, "I don't go any farther than this. Alphabet City is too dangerous and this corner ain't no bargain." He pointed out the sinse dealers on the corner and spat out the window. "They're hippies in comparison to the junkies. You're not really going to live here?" "Yes, but we found a cheap one-bedroom apartment for $180 a month." I unpacked the taxi, putting our boxes on the corner." "Let me guess. Bathtub in kitchen. Water closet in back. Very 19th Century." He was visibly nervous about having stayed on the corner this long. "Very quaint. Good luck." The Checker burned rubber up 1st Avenue. My twenty-two year old girlfriend shrugged, "We're home one way or the other." 256 was only three stoeps from the avenue. Two scrawny kids ran up to us and asked excitedly, "Mister, you need help?" "$1 each to carry a box to our new apartment." I pointed to the third stoop on the south side of the street. "Can we trust them?" whispered Alice. Her eyes were two different colors; green with tints of red. The latter was the color of fire.

"It's not like we have anything to steal. We let them help and no one will think we're stuck-up white people trying to take over their neighborhood?"

Carrying the boxes the kids joked about us being Mr. And Mrs. Opie, then fell silent at our new address.

A pockmarked junkie sprawled before the door and the taller kid said, "That's George."

"Is he dead?" asked Alice.

"No, he ain't dead, just fucked up," said the shorter of the two boys.

"Let me see, if I can wake him."

I called his name several times and then climbed the stairs to lightly nudge the comatose junkie with my foot. As he slumped from the doorway, an enraged voice shouted from behind me, "Who the fuck are you to kick George?"

"Oh shit."

The two kids dropped the boxes and sped toward Avenue A. The kids in the spray of the fire hydrant scurried to their parents. A bare-chested black man wearing jean too tight for his muscular build approached us with yellowed eyes bellowing with fury.

My girlfriend stepped behind me.

"I'm not goin' to ask you again. You kick George?"

"I didn't kick him. I touched him with my foot."

"You callin’ me a liar, you white piece of shit?" the junkie snarled from the sidewalk.

"I’m sorry." I couldn’t look him the eyes.

"Too late for sorrys. You're fucked." The veins on his neck pulsed with thick throbs of blood and put a foot on the steps. "I’m gonna to kick your ass."

Countless scraps with Southie gangs had taught me the value of not fighting fair and I threw the boxes at his chest. Their weight knocked him off balance and his body slammed onto the sidewalk. The crack of his skull on the pavement echoed off the opposite building. A trickle of blood seeped from under his head.

The street was very quiet. Everyone had been surprised by effect of my attack.

George rose from his slumber and stared at his friend and then me.

"What you done to Hakkim? You fucked yourself good. My man gonna come for you and your little girlfriend. Take your clothes, TV, jewelry and fuck her."

Anyone stupid enough to threaten you deserved a beating and I kicked him in the head. My girlfriend stopped me and said, “We better leave before the police come.”

”Ain’t no police coming here.” I opened the door and carried the boxes to our third-floor flat. We tore the previous tenant's artwork from the walls, twice washed the floors, toilet and tub. The air in the tenement flat was breathlessly still. We soaked naked in the lukewarm bath and my cock began to get hard. I asked the ingenue actress from West Virginia, "You want to make love?"

"Not in this heat," she laughed in this heat. She was right. My body was sapped on all libido, but I was at Alice mercy coming to money and she liked my acting as a hustler. Luckily we had one fan and after drying off laid in the futon naked, awaiting for Hakkim's revenge.

A little past 11AM Alice said, "Nothing is going to happen tonight."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing bad," the lithe brunette said, as if she had been born on the Lower East Side instead of the good end of an Appalachian hollow. She slipped across the futon into the arms.

We were home, far from our suburban roots. The first time I walked these streets was in 1970. Wayne Shepherd and I hitchhiked from Boston to New York City. His sister lived on St. Mark's, two blocks west from 256 East 10th Street. Alice was asleep and I thought about everywhere I had lived in my twenty-seven; first breath - Boston Lying -in, Hingham until 1954, Falmouth Foresides before moving to the South Shore of Boston in 1960, I left that suburb in 1971 and rented an unheated apartment in Brighton's Bug Village, a Brookline basement with a sixteen year-old lude dealer, Park Slope with the jazz impresario James Spicer and now here.

With Alice.

From here into forever.

AUGUST 2, 2021 - CLINTON HILL, BROOKLYN

Yesterday afternoon I rose from bed at the Myrtle Avenue Punishment Cells and walked into the kitchen. A wet belch burbled from my lips and I wiped away the bright red wet with the back of my hand and a second later blood spewed from my mouth into a metal bucket. Another four heaves covered the pots' bottom and the color darkened to near-black. I repeated this several times.

There was no pain, but I instinctively understood that my stomach was fucked.

The retching stopped throughout the night and this morning I packed a night bag with a 1979 journal, Cookie Mueller's book, A Bernie Gunther novel, two changes of clothes, chargers et al and crossed the East River on the Manhattan Bridge heading for NYU hospital. I wasn't feeling too good, but felt no urge to vomit.

At the Emergency Ward check-in the nurses immediately led me to the holding pen and I laid in bed.

"We need you to stay overnight. This blood thing is dangerous," said a young doctor and two hours later I was brought upstairs to Room 2205 hooked up to three feeders. a number of failing vital signs threatened my existence.

I wasn't scared.

I've died before.

I picked up my journal and saw the first page was from August 2, 1979.

Forty-years ago.

I vividly remember the heat.

Alice.

Hakkim.

The one fan.

The crackling of thunder raising the ghost of Rip Van Winkle.

I'm 69.

A man my age don't remember everything.

No one can.

JOURNAL EXCERPT - JANUARY 1, 1979 - EAST VILLAGE

We saw in New Year's Eve at Hurrah and then took a taxi downtown. Traffic congested before Madison Square Garden. A skinny blonde man with orange-blonde hair stood bare-chested the the traffic. Cheetah Cheetah Chrome of the Dead Boys and we shouted the lead guitarist's name in passing.

Alice, Anthony, Alexa, and I got out of the cab on the 3rd Avenue. The driver didn't want to go any farther into the Lower East Side. Alice and I stood on the sidewalk. Chest-high Suburban disco drones muttered about our punk attire. I stepped fowards and asked, "What are you looking at creeps."

"Why do you have to always be so violent?" Alice came me from a city where the tarred roads led to dirt tracks into the Hollows. She know all about violence.

"I wish I knew."

Ship's fog horns from the southern harbor searched the night. I was familiar with the docks. Only a few ships moored on the Westside and none on the swift-moving East River.

A gang of teenage Puerto Ricans whooped drunken shouts. They weren't looking for trouble. They were poor, the neighborhood school were bad, and their only futures were as janitors, city workers, and manual labor other than dealing drugs. All of them dreamed not so much as escaping the East Village as making the neighborhood a better place for 'la familia'.

We wandered over to Eve's Lounge. We ordered drinks. They were weak. I was still straight and hoped to be sober the first morning of 1979.

"I want to go." I said to Alice.

"Then let's go."

Yesterday I had met Alice at La Guardia. She wore a white pleather coat, black striped skirt, a purple sweater and knee-high white boot. She was the prettiest girl in the air terminal and every man and woman watched her walk to me. I was a lucky man and tried to kiss her. She turned her face to offer her cheek.

We hadn't slept together in more than a month. New Wave Vaudeville at her soul and Susan the scrawny closet lesbian co-producer was a shrew poisoning my love.

"He's a loser," she said to my face.

I felt like a loser too. same way, but needed even this small money, plus anything I could glom from Hurrah.

"Me too," Alice replied, confessing to trouble sleeping at home in Charleston. "How was your holidays?"

"Good." One visit to family in Boston and a few drunken fetes at the East Village bar. She suspected me of fooling around, except once I've had two drinks I'm only interested in the third, fourth and fifth.

All I could see was a dark black future, but I restrained from revealing that vision to Alice that

She has the whole world in front of her.

MAN OF THE YEAR

My teachers at Xaverian Brothers High School told their students, "Never vote for yourself."

I'm only one vote, so I am can be Man of the Year in my own mind.

Carter's out for his adherent to Rockefeller's Capitalism and not admonishing Taiwan about their treatment of the people of that Island Nation. Anita Bryant's anti-gay stance ended her Sunkist Orange Juice reign as spokeswitch, despite her backing from the Silent Majority and the Shah of Iran is endangered of being ousted by the Persian populace, because of SAVAK, his torture squad, and their destruction of moderate dissidents. Reza Mohammad Pahlavi's murderous attempts to modernize his country had been met with outcries from liberals and western TV journalists, but dragging peasants into the future has failed for hundreds of rulers. The people like their lives and are threatened by any change, especially when you include religion and the mullahs despise him for supposedly distribute their ancient holdings to the farmers, although the lands go to the friends of the Shah in payment for their support.

Long live the Shah.

I bet the house on his not seeing out the 70s.

Times appointed Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese Mainland Premier as Man of the Year.

All hail the Revolution and the end to the Gang of Four.

DISASTER OF THE YEAR

Floods and earthquakes devastated the earth over the twelve months of 1978.

The Jonestown Massacre In Guyana set the massive suicide pact in the jungle from every other catastrophe and hopefully the bloated bodies will not be seen in the future.

CHOKE OF THE YEAR

The AL MVP Jim Rice and the Red Sox' team Captain Yaz popped out for outs in the ninth inning with two men on base to lose to the dreaded Yankees in Fenway in the 163rd game of 1978 and the Yanks won the World Series.

JANUARY 1, 2021 - BROOKLYN

I went nowhere last night. I drank nothing. I did no lines of cocaine. I called my families in Thailand. They had enjoyed their evening eating their favorite foods. I can't even remember what I ate.

2021 was a nothing year.

But I'm lucky to be alive and that's not a small thing.

MEETING ARTHUR by Peter Nolan Smith

In the summer of 1979 I was lviing with a petite blonde model from Buffalo. One night Lisa came back to my apartment on East 10th Street late. Her hair looked tousled by a hurricane and hre shirt was missing a button. I checked the clock on the wall. Lisa pretended that 3am was early and stripped naked before getting into bed.

"What's wrong?" Lisa lay under a sheet. It was warm in the back bedroom.

"Nothing." I positioned the fan to blow on her and we lay on the bed close. She had been with someone wearing Halston Z-14. It was a men's cologne. "Where were you?"

"At Studio." Her agency liked her to be seen at the famous disco. She was shorter than most models. Any edge could further her career. "I was with this nightclub guy, Arthur."

"I know him." Arthur had opened Hurrah on West 62nd Street. Its success had turned to failure the night Studio opened for business. He had sold out to the present owner who turned the disco into a punk dance club, where I worked the door.

"He knows everyone." Lisa sidled over to me. She had been with another man and not just at Studio. Any possible accusation was deflected by our making love. The feel was not right and I went to sleep wanting to correct what was wrong.

Two days later I spotted Arthur coming out of the 2nd Avenue Deli. The good-looking nightclub impresario was with shorter man, whom I recognized as a bartender at Studio 54.

"You," I called out from the corner.

"Me?" Arthur pulled off his sunglasses.

"Yeah, you." I was hot. Lisa had left in the morning for castings. She had said that she wouldn't be coming back until after midnight. A world-ranked tennis player was taking her out for dinner.

"And you are?" Arthur wasn't fazed by my approach.

"You were with my girlfriend two nights ago." My fists were knotted bones and corded sinew.

"Who is?" Arthur held the take-out bag at his side. His friend stood to the left. Neither were eager for a fight, but then they weren't me.

"Lisa," I said the name, as if the blonde was the only Lisa in the world.

"The blonde from Buffalo. I saw her at Studio." The lean six-footer admitted his guilt, but spoke from the side of his mouth like he didn't want anyone else to hear his words.

"Yeah, she said you were." The admission convicted him of adultery, even though my girlfriend and I weren't married.

"And you think something happened?"

The expression on my face was easier to read than a cartoon's dialogue balloon.

"What woman's going to tell her boyfriend who she just slept with someone. None. Not one. Your girlfriend and I drank. That's all. You can believe me or not. It's up to you." He put back on his sunglasses to accent the flawlessness of his logic.

"So you didn't go anywhere else with her?"

"If I did, you think we'd still be talking here?"

"No." There was someone else and I had a feeling that there was more than one someone else. "Sorry about this."

"Nothing to be sorry about. None of us have a bloody nose. You smoke pot?"

I nodded yes and invited Arthur and his friend Scottie back to my apartment to smoke a joint. I played records for them. We had the same taste for rock and roll.

"Where's Lisa?"

"Out with a tennis player." I envisioned how out was out.

"Do yourself a favor. Don't ask so many questions," Arthur instructed me, picking out the Rolling Stones BETWEEN THE BUTTONS. "This is New York. None of us are angels."

Lisa had been my angel. I had another name for her now. I never said it out loud. In September she left for Europe to pursue modeling. Within a month the phone calls ceased to ring on my phone.

Arthur and I became friends. He was good at telling whatever the truth without saying too much. Scottie, Arthur, and I worked together at the Jefferson and the Continental. Those after-hour clubs were the best of an era of errors.

None of us were saints, but Arthur came close if you didn't look too hard and that was easy for me, since my eyesight is terrible.

And every man is almost blind when it comes to love.

October 31, 1979 - Journal Entry -East Village

Halloween, the pagan holy night after a warm autumn day with the sun streaming through the alley windows to mock my darkness.

New York City.

Rural devil-worshipping cults celebrate Satan and covens must exist on the island of Manhatten, but once the juvenile trick-or-treaters have scored their candy, the night belongs to the young punks, gays, queens,and addicts. I'll be working the night at Hurrah and dropped two dexedrine pills to elevated my mood, which had me verging to the edge of homicide. A thin stiletto was in my leather coat, although I feel more like hurting myself than someone else.

Ro showed up at Hurrah to see the Revlons. No costume. Just her usual ingenue artist look. When she entered, we talked for a long time at the entrance. The band wasn't going on stage until midnight. Half the crowd was in costume. The rest of us wore our punk attire.

"I'm glad to see you. I had hoped you would be here."

"The feeling is mutual." I hadn't seen her since Bix starved himself to death in a cave under the Cloisters last winter.

"I still can't believe Bix is gone. I'm really..." her voice drifted off in a daze, then again she always had trouble finishing sentences. "Bix's death made me feel so strange. Did you feel that way when James died?"

I had live with James Spicer, the elegantbjazz impressario, in Park Slope, until I woke one night to his anointing my feet ala Mary Magdalene.

"His death made me realize how precious life is. His last night I had sat with him at the hospital for hours. The only two people in a ward. The nurses and doctors were scared of him. He was dying from something they had never seen. Lots a gays were dying of the same thin. His parents showed up from Florida at dawn. He hadn't spoken to them for a long time. I went down to the cafeteria and ate a bagel chased down by chocolate milk. I thought nothing could ever taste so good. When I got back to the ward, James was dead."

She spoke about her committment to a series on fish paintings.

"The color of my paintings are getting better, but I look at them and there's no spark oflife. like they were floating dead on the surface of the ocean. I need something to make them come alive." Ro complimented my not trying to being anything than what I was and predicted, "You're not going to be trapped at this job or even this city. You only are doing what you do to make money, but one day you'll understand your desire to be nothing is something everyone wishes they could achieve."

"A fateful decision, if I remember correctly you have a long life line."

"I just feel so guilty about Bix."

"He loved you."

And I couldn't love him back. I didn't even let him kiss me, when we were making love. I'm to blame for his starving to death."

"I tried to help Bix. He was lost in numbers and he chose his death.." A cold cave on a rainy night. I needed another dexxie. Your show is about to begin. Enjoy." I dropped another pill and drank a vodka-tonic, then three more.

Ro left with Nells, the Revlon's bass player. I slouched against the wall. Our affair had been weekend flings. I'd steal a car in Boston on Friday and drive here in four hours, meeting at the end of her shift at David's Pot Belly.

I thought someone who said, "You look like an angel under candlelight." had to be in love.

I was wrong then and now especially on Halloween.

FRENCH AIR STEWARDESSES by Peter Nolan Smith

Air stewardesses of the 1970s were sex symbols of travel. These elegant airborne beauties flew from city to city and country to country with a smile. The uniforms were designed by fashion houses. Air travel was cool and the stewardesses were sexy in a good way.

The sexiest air hostesses were from foreign countries with Air France girls exuding an availability at high altitudes and they overnighted in an apartment high rise next to Hurrah on West 62nd Street, where I worked as the doorman.

The punk disco offered live shows of the Damned, Ramones, and Dead Boys. Between sets our New Wave DJs such as the British Sean Cassette spun the B52s, Specials, and Blondie for dancing. Each night a new crew of Air France drop their bags at the airline apartments and then stripped out of their uniforms to slip into leather and chains for a night at Hurrah.

As doorman I held the power of entry and waved in the Air France stewardesses for free. They were young, international, and beautiful. Pan-Am, BOAC, Lufthansa, Air Italia were also welcomed guests. My co-worker, Anthony, and I bedded many of these travelers and these glamorous Valkyries transported us to Valhalla without ever asking for a home phone number.

Anthony and I reveled in these anonymous encounters and we gained a well-deserved reputation for free love in the stairways and bathrooms of Hurrah. Jhoury the gay bartender announced the arrival of these high-flying angels in a shrill voice.

"Now landing at Hurrah Air France Flight # 201 from Paris."

It was good fun, until a goddess fully aware of her deification sauntered up to the entrance in a sleek black leather body suit straight out of the flight school of Pussy Galore, 007's love interest from GOLDFINGER. She was arm and arm with a handsome air steward wearing matching black leather. I didn't even really see him.

Her platinum blonde hair hung straight as a bullet's trajectory complimented her powdery white skin. The click of her crow black boa stiletto heels on the concrete sidewalk accented her haughtiness. She paid no mind to my opening the ropes or my waving her in for free or my trailing her scent of Chanel # 5 up the stairs to the dance floor.

My adoration was in competition with every straight man in Hurrah. She danced with anyone who asked her for dance. My eyes studied her sinuous body to the music of the Bush Tetras like a XXX film producer casting his leading lady. Jhoury plied Claudine with drinks at my request. Her male steward friend was his type; handsome as a Greek statue and dumber than a bucket of mud.

I introduced myself.

"I know you. Dance with me," she spoke like Marlene Dietrich and I obeyed her command.

I danced with her during the headliner's show, my hands on her hipbones. The flesh over her skeleton was thinner than a crepe. Claudine shrugged off my grope.

"Pas ici."

"What about______" I knew very little French and understood less.

"I have heard about you from the other stewardesses. You fuck like a dog. Toilet, roof, stairway. I am not a dog."

"Oh."

She swirled away with a shimmering curtain of hair pirouetting across her shoulders. Her refusal scoured the rust from my lazy pride. I had never said that she was a dog and I had never thought about having her doggie style until her mention of 'dog'. She was right. I was a dog.

Jhoury laughed at my expense. He was expecting to tour Le Toilet bar in the West Village with Claudine's male roommate. He was into the rough stuff. I gave Jhoury the finger, as Claudine and her friend, Martin, left the club.

I had failed for once.

Fifteen minutes later Martin climbed the stairs to Hurrah. A boa stiletto in his hand. He pointed to a lighted terrace on the 24th floor.

"Claudine is expecting you. She is flying to Paris in five hours. Go now. Enjoy." He shone a big smile for Jhoury.

I told Anthony that I was taking a break. It was 2:14am. I wasn't coming back here until the following night. Anthony glanced at my hand. The shoe said everything.

"Bon appetit."

The doorman at the high-rise was expecting me and said, "24F."

The apartment door was open. Claudine lay on a chocolate brown couch. Her vanilla skin looked like ice cream atop cake. A dog collar clasped around her aristocratic neck in imitation of Marie Antoinette on the leash. Cocaine rails zigzagged across the glass table. Claudine had seer-soothed my sins. I was Johnny Thunder's cousin from the John Holmes' side of the family. A thin Cartier watch was on the table. Claudine glanced at the face.

"Four hours to take-off."

Claudine had a swimmers's muscles and bones. After a few minutes her skin bore the tang of chlorine. Within twenty minutes she only smelled of my sweat. The view out the window was New York from a magic carpet, but the magic spell was draining out of the hourglass of opportunity. We had no time to waste figuring who was master or slave.

The reversals of domination contested our stamina. I was in good shape. She was in better condition. In the end I was Claudine's dog, while she was a lioness wanting more of heaven and hell. I was looking for eternity, but as the sun bleached the black rim of the night with a sliver of red, Claudine reached out for her watch.

It was 5:43am

Claudine snapped off the cuff. The fall of the chain was muffled by the carpet. Brown. It was a company apartment. No one really lived there. I had been there before. New York was a stopover for all the Air France hostesses. Paris was home. She threw my clothes across the room.

"I must go."

"Five more minutes." I begged for more, knowing once she was gone she was gone.

She shook her head with a smile of conquest on her lips.

"Au revoir, le chien."

Claudine pushed me out of the apartment with a kiss on each cheek and the scent of her skin gently weeping in my soul. The Beatles should have written a song about her. The door shut and I was a naked man in the hallway of a high-rise. I had been here before.

Same apartment.

Same hallway. Only then Claudine had been Brigitte.

I didn't bathe her off my flesh for three days.

Several weeks later I met the Blonde Model from Buffalo. She became the only woman in my life. The stewardesses heard the news and fewer came to the club. Anthony was angered at my blowing a good thing.

"French stewardesses," he muttered, saying the two words like a prayer three times.

This prayer acted as a curse.

I've haven't had a stewardess since.

Neither in Space nor on Earth.

SCUM - QUADRAPHENIA 1978

Totterham Court Cinema. In November 1979 I saw Quadrophenia and Scum. A double billing. Quadrophina first. After the showing the Mods left the theater and the seats were occuped by Teddies on the way to becoming skins. The two groups still hated each other. Divide sand and conquer by the upper classes. My grilfriend and I sat through both screenings. She a goddess in white leather. Me in black leather. We belong to neither mods or skins. Punks. Neither tribe said anything. Lisa was from Buffalo. Both films born from Stanley Kubrick's CLOCKWORK ORANGE. Chaos. A brilliant cinematic coupling.

Seeing Past the Hudson - Poetry 1978

Soft, the West Wind
Blowing visions
Of a continent
From beyond the Hudson River
Jersey to the Delaware Water Gap
The Midwest corn fields
360 flat horizens
The Mississippi
Corn giving way to cattle
The Missouri
High prarie rising from the Midwest
Sighting of the Rockies
Desert
Nevada
More desert
The Sierras
Oh California
Oh, the Pacific.
Stretching west to Asia.
I see it all
All America
From sea to shining sea
Standing on a Hudson River pier
The evening tide slipping to the sea
Holding you in my arms
Your boyish body
Your woman's mind
Tender
Our embrace
I crave us naked
I don't want California
All I want is you.

January 3, 1979 - Journal - East Village

Alice and I get drunk at CBGBs with Bill Yusk. At CBGBs. Where else? Alice was mad at me, because she had to wait at the door. Lisa Krystal wouldn't let her in for free without me. Kim wasn't waitressing either.

"I don't understand why they treat you like they do." Alice thinks I'm nothing. "It's not like you're a star. You just drink for free."

"It's a talent. If I drink for free, then you drink for free. I never ask why." I don't understand either. It's not like I do anything special other than play pinball.

I woke this morning feeling, as if I had sliced my right eye. The eye itself. Alice was asleep on the mattress, trembling in a nightmare, speaking in tongues. Comforting a terrified sleeper seemed dangerous and I muttered, "Shut up." I left the bedroom for the futon in the living room. Bright sunlight. The light burns my eye. I need to get curtains. I touch my eyeball and discover that I had left in my contact. I take it out. Relief. I rejoin Alice and hush her terror, then slip into dreamland.

In this building 256 East 10th Street, six floors of well-lived-in tenement apartments with the bathtub in the kitchen children's' voices are rarely heard. Ms. Adorno next door cackles madly at all hours and speaks to spirits. I figure her for a witch. Upstairs someone every morning turns on the bath and then occasionally makes love, loud love, for a half an hour with different women. I think it's the actor on the fourth floor. Outside hispanic kids from the pre-school scream every morning in the alley, freed from parental discipline. This neighborhood, the Lower East Side was depopulated during the early 70s by arson and crime and drugs. 160,000 inhabitants to 90,000. Several years ago Paul Ehrlich predicted the world population will be six billion in the year 2000.

That might be turn in the rest of the world, but in the East Village no one wants to live here, except for the punks, junkies, hippies, hispanics, and the old. Demographics shifted with white flight. The Jews and Italians fled to Brooklyn or Long Island. No one wanted to go to New Jersey. Maybe the numbers of whites are growing outside the city. My high school and college friends are fathers. Not me. Alice and I aren't using contraception and I haven't impregnated her at all. The Smith family are without a twelfth generation in this country. None of us siblings are married. This neighborhood is packed with white refugees from America. No children.

Later.

The Shah of Iran must be thinking of taking a vacation from Tehran. HIs White Revolution has failed. The students and mullahs are calling for his blood and his SS, SAVAK, are overwhelmed by the popular rising. What is the Shah to do with the decline of the white people in America.

The Oil Crisis of 1973 thanks to Israel hiked the oil prices to render families more and more expensive; no more twenty cent gallons of gas, races across the states at 110 mph, the end of American decadence, but not really. People are driving just as much as before. They live in the suburbs. No one walks there. There's nowhere to go and they drive cars there

LATER

Alice is worried about her destiny. She wants to be an actress. She is very talented, but New York is not a city in which actors can become famous. She needs to move to LA. I don't need to move to LA. I have bought into Mad Magazine's Alfred E Newman's quote, "What me worry?"

I'm broke, but have Alice, an apartment, and write shitty poetry and get free drinks at CBGBs, play pinball in Times Square, and basketball at West 4th Street. Not a success at any, but a damned good failure. I really don't understand how to proceed to success while content with not so much failure. I am very good at pinball, play outstanding defense at the Cage, and drink for free at CBGBs.

My Aunt Mary had a boyfriend. Peter Willin. He was a communist, smoke cigarettes, and was invited to our holiday dinners. After his departure from out home in the suburbs, my mother always said, "You don't want to end up like him."

He loved my Aunt Mary, but I feel cursed my my mother's words to be broke all my life, rotting teeth, rundown heels, and shiny trousers. I'm only 26 and just the other day, Alice said, "Great things are coming to us both. Somehow I see myself on a golf course, hitting the ball straight to the green, and sinking a hole-in-one. Perfect. Somehow I shall seize destiny.

One does not pursue fame, fame pursue one," I told Ralphie from Come On. He's from Deutschland and driven like Alice to be famous, but who wants fame like Peter Frampton, Cheryll Tiegs or John Travolta. I know no one famous. Only those that want to be. In a hundred years no one will remember them or me just as no one now remembers the toilet paper they used in the morning.

So you want to be famous
So you want to be known
Signing autographs
Posing for photos
Awaiting the flash.
The president knows who you are
So does the Pope
You know other famous people
By their first name
They kiss you on the cheeks
Twice.
Everyone know who you are
A VIP
No longer a regular person
Someone famous
Famous to the famous
Forever famous until you are forgotten
But always famous now.

This poem sucks. Why do I write such crap.

An abhorence of words. I wish my stutter prevented my fingers from writing and typing...I am no longer devoted to writing, but life. To experience life, the good, the bad, and the in-betweens. The pleasure of cumming on a young woman's leg, watching the semen melt on the warmth of her flesh, handing her a towel to wipe away my DNA semen, her not caring if the towel is clean, its use is all she needs from me.

World AIDS Awareness Day

In the Fall of 1978 I was hired as security at an uptown punk disco uptown. The job paid $100 a night and free drinks from the gay bartenders. I came home from Hurrah smelling of cigarettes, beer, and perfume. Alice slept on the bed. I crashed on the couch.

Late one night a doctor from NYU Hospital called our apartment and reported that James Spicer was dying from pneumonia. Alice had never met Jim and she was angry that I was leaving her alone. I couldn’t blame her, mostly because I had been seeing a blonde model from Buffalo. My promise to come back soon sounded phony even to my ears.

Arriving at NYU, I discovered an empty hospital ward and that the nurses were reluctant to enter Jim’s room. An Italian doctor explained in the corridor, “Gay men have been dying of pneumonia. We can’t say why. The nurses call it ‘gay men’s disease’.”

"It's the first I've heard of it."

"You want to wear a mask?"

"No, I want him to see my face." I sat by James' bed without any fear, as he coughed like he was giving birth to a lung.

He opened his eyes at midnight and said, “You?”

“Who were you expecting? Cecil Taylor?”

"No, he’'s scared of what I have and I don't even know what it is.” ” His skin was drawn tight to his bones.

“Well, I’m here.”

“Yes, you’re here. Old what’s his name?” He drifted back to sleep and I whistled jazz lullabies during

the long night. As the eastern horizon offered a dark silhouette of Brooklyn, Jim asked with a startled horror, “Where am I?”

“In the hospital.”

"Am I dying?" His eyes asked for the truth.

“Not right now.” It was as much the lie as it was the truth. “I’m just here to keep you company.”

“You weren’t much of a writer, but you were a good story teller. Tell me one now. Something with a happy ending.”

I recounted breaking up with Kyla, trying to make it funny. Jim laughed at the right and wrong places, his lungs hacking out bloody phlegm.

“What about the happy ending?” he asked with a rasping breath.

“Pal and Kyla had kids. They’re still married.”

“And you have me.”

“We have each other.” I patted his hand and upped his morphine drip.

At dawn his mother and father arrived from Florida. His parents were good people with a loving son unable to live in a small town. Jim nodded for me to leave them alone. He had things to tell them.

I descended to the basement cafeteria for chocolate milk and a bagel. Nothing had ever tasted so good and when I got back to the ward, Jim’s parents sat crying on plastic chairs. I was sure that he had passed at my moment of delight from my breakfast. I touched his cold skin and left the hospital.

It was good to be alive.

“Where have you been,” Alice asked, as I entered the apartment. She had been up for a long time.

“I told you at the hospital.” The smell of dying was on my flesh.

“James.”

"Yes."

Three days later I attended Jim’s funeral memorial on Washington Square. Merce Cunningham eulogized him. Cecil Taylor played a dirge. Hundreds of people showed up. No one knew the real cause of his death.

It was 1979.

The next night I stayed over with Lisa. I didn’t call Alice. She was gone by the time I returned to our apartment.

James Spicer was my first AIDS death. Many others followed through the years. Funerals were regular reunions for the living and we wondered who was next to fall.

The disease took my baby brother in 1995.

Michael Charles Smith lives in my head and sometimes in my dreams as do my friends.

Mistaken Hemingways

Back in 1979 I ran into Margaux Hemingway at a disco. I introduced myself and complimented her on her role in MANHATTAN.

"That was my sister."

We had a good laugh and a few drinks.

Life is a laugh.

January 5, 1979 - East Village Journal

The Kinks are on the radio. YOU REALLY GOT ME. A British Invasion festival from 1963 to 1966 marking an unexpected musical explosion from Great Britain. Many of the bands had been condemned by the Pat Boone loving conservatives. Few of those groups survived the Sixties. THe Beatles are dead, but the Rolling Stones survive.

The Kampuchea of the Khmer Rouge has been invaded by Vietnam backing up the Cambodian rebels to overthrow the genocidal madness through Pol Pot's attempt to create a classless agrarian society. Vietnam succeeded in defeating the RVN in South Vietnam after the USA betrayed their allies. The Pathet Lao, a communist coalition backed by Hanoi, rules Laos after the failure of the CIA to secure the landlocked country. The Nixon Administration had illegally bombed once-neutral Cambodia into the Stone Age and after the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh, the cadres forced the population out of the city into the country. Despite the defeat the Khmer Rouge have retreated to the Parrot's Beak, once an NVA stronghold, to continue the struggle, after Hanoi decided to kick out the ethnic Chinese, Red China, the main supporter of Kampuchea.

The Khmer Rouge number 90,000 against Vietnam's army of over one million with Soviet Russia's backing. Southeast Asia appears ready for a massive regional war. Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia versus Thailand, but no one was to fight them, so the Domino Theory stops at the Thai border. The Soviets, while dedicated to world revolution, want to bide their time for capitalism to collapse. The USA will never go red. We are fiercely in love with potato chips. The eucharist of patriotism from east to west.

Foto of the Khmer Rouge evacuating the cities.

SEPTEMBER 3, 1978 - JOURNAL ENTRY - EAST VILLAGE

Last night offered eager high school girls from Dalton, they acted sexy as if they had rehearsed the wanton kisses and yearning smiles before the bathroom mirror at home. The music at the clubs was tolerable, but I wished I had been alone. Not to cheat, just to be free.

After CBGBs closed at 4am, Guadalcanal, his frail girlfriend from DC, Alice and I went to his place to snort cocaine. He had a pile of it, since he was dealing to Johnny Thunders, the Heartbreakers, their groupies, and entourage. It was a good business and Guadalcanal didn't have to cut his blow. The yellow Columbia flake was the purest in the Lower East Side.

Alice and I left a 6:30 AM and she said walking up 1st Avenue in the early dawn light, "I want open spaces. I'd like to see my brother, Bobbie, in Morgantown."

"Even after you fled your grandmother's house there?"

"I was spooked by the rain falling on that old place

"I want a holiday too. Maybe Boston."

I had family there. My mother and father woulld take me to eat at Tony's Clam Shack on Wollaston Beach. I might even get a little money from them.

"I have had enough of New York City."

That was the cocaine speaking, but I admitted, "I"ve gotten my fill too."

My heart was in this city. My heart also wanted to be in Boston or even better Maine.. Not here with all the garbage on the sidewalks. I kicked a sack and said, "Why isn't this city clean?"

"Because the city can't afford the sanitation workers," answered Alice and added, "The city can't afford anything. It's bankrupt. It's falling apart."

"Right into our hands." The city belonged to the people. "Tourists complained about the garbage. We just live with it."

"Until they take it back, it is ours."

Not forever. The banks love being in one place. Wall Street. A couple of billion and the city is good as new, at leastd on the surface. The 80s are less than a year away and 1984 closer than ever.

The radio announced the number of car crash deaths for the Labor Day Weekend.

We sounds like we will top last year.

I've survived two major car collisions and one pedestrian-car crash.

Drink was involved in none of them and nothing bad happened on a highway. The interstates are my paradise of speed and skill with smooth roads late at night. 'Hit The Road, Jack' is my modus operandi.

By thumb or car I headed West, but now I am anchored to New York by commitments to nothinglessness. Everyone here says I have drifted too long and it's true, but also a lie. I love the road.

I used to sleep in desert motels Cheap ones to spend the night Crashing in a field When the towns were too far apart.

I've huddled in city alleys I knew no one. No one knew me. Golf courses had soft grass. Little League fields too The towns had no name. I forget some of the places. I remember most.

Meeting you ended my shifting A woman to whom I owe it all We settled in the big city A drifter quit running to the sun A hillbilly woman never going back home. The bad times are still bad, but you stop my shouting.

Your love steered me away from a bad ending The one drifters dream about without ever wanting to live. Now I can tell you, I ain't going nowhere.

Believe me, baby, I'm telling the truth And I'm not leaving, because every day I keep drifting to you. A surprise to you, a happy ending for me, A drifter at the end of the road.

For Labor Day Weekend I rode the Lucky Star bus from Chinatown to Boston's South Station. BBQ traffic was tough on I-95. There were no accidents. My sister-in-law picked me up in Harvard Square. We drove back to their home on the Watertown line. Nothing was open around them and now that I'm not drinking, I settled for a hummus vegetable wrap and a glass of water.

No cocaine either.

Guadalcanal is in Kansas City.

Alice is in LA.

She hates that I refer to her as a hillbilly. Her father was a lawyer, her separate other was a teacher or something like that, and the family home in Charleston was located in a suburban development.

The streets of New York especially Manhattan resemble the bankrupt city in the 1970s; encampment of homeless, drug addicts openly dealing and shooting in the streets, and young thugs getting mouthy with their elders. Once Old Bill from Frank's Lounge said to me, "The worst thing about getting old is that no one thinks you're dangerous."

He unbuttoned his elegant suit coat to reveal a holstered .38.

This changes the young punks' mind real quick, because they can also see in my eyes that I will pull the trigger."

Damn straight, Old Bill.

I'm lying on a bed at 8PM. It is quiet outside. Too quiet to be life.

I'm reading a book.

Philip Kerr's METROPOLIS

Berlin 1928.

Paradise.

George Grosz to Bernie Gunther

"I draw drunkards, men puking out their guts, prostitutes, military men with blood on their hands, women pissing in your beer, suicides, men who are horribly crippled, women who have been murdered by men playing cards. My chief subject is this Hell's metropolis, Berlin. With all its wild excess and decadence the city to me seems the very essence of humanity."

Not so New York.

I sense the threads of society to humanity fraying to the breaking point.

Then nothing and I know nothing well.

Excerpt From FAMOUS FOR NEVER by Peter Nolan Smith

Late in the summer of 1978 an Upper East Side photographer asked me to write a photo-roman about a sadistic kidnapping. I cast my co-worker Klaus Sperber as the black leather villain. The Gothic singer was the daytime pastry chef at Serendipity 3. I was a busboy there and Anthony lived above the swishy ice cream shop of East 60th Street. Upon meeting Klaus at the Kiev Coffee Shop, the photographer was smitten by his ghostly face.

"You were made for film." Anthony started snapping pictures. We were waiting for our female lead. I didn't know her.

"My voice was made for the opera." The gaunt German loved to perform forgotten castrati role. "But I don't believe in movies. Too many frames showing the same thing when only one needs to show the true emotion."

"Like Gloria Swanson at the end of SUNSET BOULEVARD." I loved Billy Wilder films.

"I can always pretend to be her." Klaus grimaced with a stolen toothy smile and pursed his black-painted lips. He was a natural mimic. "Who is the leading man?"

"No one yet." Anthony's eye hadn't left the viewfinder.

"What about him?" Klaus pointed my direction.

"He’s a little brutish." Anthony swung the camera and focused the lens on my face.

"Like a caveman." Klaus snidely commented about my hard-boned features. "You know his name at Serendipity 3 was Bam Bam after some stupid American TV show THE FLINTSTONES."

"I'm not an actor." I trembled like LA in an earthquake.

"You don't have to act. All you have to do is pose." Anthony shifted his camera to the entrance, as the second coming of Veronica Lake entered the diner. Every man at the counter followed the click of the blonde's stiletto heels. Her knee-length black skirt was slit to a vee revealing her white upper thigh and her black polka-dot shirt was unbuttoned to a vanilla navel.

"This is Clover." Anthony invited her to sit down. "We met at Club 82.”

"I like dancing with transvestites. They don't hassle me like straight men." Clover pushed a sheet of blonde hair from her face. She wasn't wearing a bra. Anthony lifted his Leica. Clover dropped her head for the curtain of hair to cover half an eye. "Are you the hero?"

"Yes." There was no saying no.

"Good. I like my men rough." Her voice slurred this preference for sultry surrender. "My sponsor like it rough too."

"He's also the writer." Klaus said with a keen interest in his acting partner. He was into straight men.

"So what's the story?" The 19 year-old arched an eyebrow. "Something sexy I hope."

"It's about the three of us."

"And?"

"I haven't written a word," I confessed with a shrug.

"The story will write itself with you three in it." Anthony pressed the shutter button. The camera swiveled from Klaus to Clover to me. Its aperture clicked open and shut like a robot attempting to wake from a long recharge. "We can make it up as we go."

"Like life. Like Art." Klaus believed in keeping it simple and I built a story around his kidnapping Clover's character to finance an opera about the last castrati on Earth.

We huffed poppers for one scene. Clover stripped near-naked in another. Klaus cut my eyes blind in another. Bandages transformed me into a blind mummy. She lay on my bare flesh wearing nothing but a scent of another man.

"My sponsor had me when I was a little girl. He thinks I'm too old now. Nineteen isn't old, is it?"

"No." I was twenty-five. When I was fourteen, Clover had been eight. “You were lucky to get out of Texas."

"I never looked back." Clover could make it to the bright lights of Hollywood. Nothing was pretend with her.

Our shoots ran late, as we shoot scenes over the city. Tenement fires were our lighting. Sirens backed our sound. My girlfriend accused me of having an affair.

I wished that Alice were right, except Clover slept with men for money.

"I don't tell the oilman about them. He thinks he's the only one, but his friends pay me $1000 a night and I'm worth every penny."

A grand a night was out of my price range and I had to be satisfied with pretending that I was sleeping with her. Alice was not pleased with the illusion and neither was I.

Our last shoot was on 42nd Street.

After midnight Times Square was awash with wickedness. We posed on 42nd Street with the pimps, whores, and drug dealers. Clover looked the part of a rich man's mistress and I could pass for a detective in my pinstriped suit. The final scene was set in a XXX shop. The clerk would allow anything for $20. Anthony set up his tripod before the open doors of a porno booth. The voyeurs watched us for free. Clover wanted their quarters. Behind us the booth's 8mm loop repeated the ravishing of a young blonde by an older man.

When I imitated the on-screen action, Clover whispered, "On my fourteenth birthday the oilman raped me. He bought my parents a new house. He's been taking care of me ever since. You ever rape anyone?"

"No." Soldiers of the Sexual Revolution raped no one.

"Do you think you could? If it was me?" Five years as the oilman's mistress had introduced a special game to Clover and she teasingly shut the booth door. "If it was a game?"

"No." I snatched at her arm.

"Too bad. You'll never know what you're missing." She pushed open the door and the camera strobe caught our struggle.

AUGUST 21, 1978 - JOURNAL ENTRY - EAST VILLAGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Nothing. Alice is sick."

"Too much to drink."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ps. I lasted thirty minutes in the 169 Bar.

It isn't the same without drink.

Nothing is.

Not even me.

The Damned Live 1979

Hurrah was a walk-up nightclub on 32 West 62nd Street. The second-floor had been a disco in its previous reincarnation. Studio 54 stole that clientele and the owners brought downtown uptown by having Jim Fouratt book punk bands.

The live music was the main attraction to Hurrah. The bookers loaded the stage with New York bands such as Klaus Nomi, ESG, Polyrock, and Ballistic Kisses to opened for headliners like the B-52s, Gang of Four, the Dead Boys, and the Ramones.

Between sets video monitors played music and strobed a kaleidoscope of images. My friends and I worked the punk disco as barmen, DJs, bookers, management, security, cashiers, and me employed as the doorman.

Our crowd were cute high school girls, long-legged models, generous drug dealers, wild movie stars, aspiring musicians, though teenagers from the outer boroughs, off-duty cops, druggy diplomats, doctors, and ne'er-do-well artists as well as a diverse collection of undesirables.

$10 bought entry for anyone other than a rat pack of bridge-and-tunnel boys. They were trouble.

In June of 1979 The Damned from the UK hit Hurrah for a one-night stand with the Dead Boys. I was familiar with the band from their newly-released LP MACHINEGUN ETIQUETTE. The Jefferson Airplane?s WHITE RABBIT was a cover from the album. I had the single. RABID was on the B-side.

Aside from letting in underage girls from Fieldston Academy and cuffing twenties for extra wages, one of my tasks as doorman was to lead the top billing bands from the dressing room in the rear corridor through the crowd onto the low stage.

A distance of 150 feet through a crowd crammed past capacity, since a cashier and I had racketed the door and resold tickets to SRO shows.

The night of The Damned's concert I probably had packed another hundred fans into the club. The Dead Boys had torn up the 700+ boys and girls. They wanted more and the more that they were going to get was The Damned. Hundreds chanted for the band. Their boots stomped hard on the wooden floor. The booker signaled me that it was time to get the band onstage. I went to the dressing room. The five bandmembers sat on its asses, surrounded by the usual punk groupies. Cheetah Chrome of the Dead Boys sulked in the corner. The lead guitarist was not used to being ignored by his faithful sluts.

"What's the problem?" It was obvious that the Damned weren't going anywhere.

"No Vodka. Our contact stipulated four bottles of Vodka. We ain't got none." Captain Sensible, the lead guitarist was wearing a gorilla suit. Pink top. Yellow bottom. It was a warm June night and sweat rivuleted down his face. Hot pants and a tube tops would have been a better choice.

"No vodka. No show." The black-haired singer announced with folded arms. His skin was covered by a film of white. He so wanted to look like a vampire.

"Gimme a minute." I reckoned that the owners had refused the vodka fearing the band would hit the stage drunk, but if they wanted vodka, I was going to get them some. Jhoury was the head bartender. Long thin and gay, he had a thing for the lead singer. I told him the problem and his hands elegantly seized five bottles of bar-well quality.

Old Cossack.

"Lead the way." The bottles, glasses, and mixers appeared on a tray, as if Jhoury had anticipated this call all evening. He had a thing for straight boys with English accents and reveled in his glory, when he entered the dressing room with their request the band sprang to their feet at the sight of the vodka.

“Good man." The redheaded drummer, Rat Scabies, grabbed the bottles and distributed to his fellow band members. He waved away the glasses and mixers. "We'll be drinking it neat."

The Damned screwed off the tops and lifted the open bottles to pour the vodka down their gullets like baby birds swallowing their mother's spew. Some of it made it down their throats. The rest spilled onto their clothes and floor. Jhoury was in wide-eyed awe. He like his drink too. The bottles were half-empty within a minute. Cheetah Chrome drank most of one. The drummer Rat Scabies smirked at him and said, "It's showtime. Get us on the stage and keep any lit cigarettes away from us. We're combustible."

"Jhoury, you're coming with me." I eyed his tray. Jhoury smiled with thanks. He never got out from behind the bar and now he was leading rough boys through a thick crowd. He didn't have to be told twice and we wedged out way through the phalanx of fans. The band picked up their instruments and opened the set with NEW ROSE.

It was a great show.

They performed WHITE RABBIT as an encore.

By 3am Hurrah was empty and the band ready to hit the road on their bus.

The Dead Boys with them. They were a double bill for the tour.

Destination Cleveland.

No one could find Cheetah Chrome and the bus pulled out without him. It wasn't until Buffalo that someone opened the storage area under the bus and found Cheetah passed out on the speakers. He didn't wake up until Cleveland.

The lead guitarist knew the smell of his hometown.

I never saw the Damned again, but Jhoury and I spoke often about their glugging the vodka. They were our heroes, then again so were so many of the bands that appeared at Hurrah.

It was the best of times.

ps Cheetah Chrome called me a phony for writing him into the story, but I recall him under the bus.

Plus this is semi-fiction and I love the Dead Boys.

Check out NEW ROSE by the Damned

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTfyUqVqX-0

NEW ROSE - The Damned 1979

The Damned played Hurrah in September 1979. New York's Misfits opened the show. The 62nd Street club was packed with punks. I was working security and my job was to lead the band up to the stage. Several minutes before the show I asked them if they needed anything and one of them said, "4 Bottles of Vodka."

I went to the bar and returned with the requested 4 bottles. They twisted off the caps and poured the vodka straight into their mouths like hungry baby birds feeding on their mother's spew. Most of it ended up on the floor.

The show was classic. Fast and Loud.

Punk rock at its best and I love NEW ROSE

Go to this URL

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaOraUh1AyM&feature=PlayList&p=81EF7096C0EE514C&index=1

Hello It’s Me

The train tracks from Boston to New York were laid through the western pine barrens of Rhode Island in the 19th Century. The pine forests grow on deep sand deposits left over from the glacial melting of the Ice Age.

This desolate region has resisted civilization, however on a winter afternoon in 1979 I was sitting on the left side of a Amtrak carriage heading south. Trees after trees after trees formed a long curtain of green. The monotony lulled me into a nod. I spotted a red sports car parked at a rural crossing. The train rattled past the car at 80 mph. A young blonde woman lay on the ground. Her body was naked and she spread her legs for a show. My head whipped back to watch her until she disappeared from sight. I stood up in my seat and examined the faces of the window-side passengers. None of them showed any sign of having seen the naked woman, but she was no mirage.

She was the real thing.

An exhibitionist in the Pine Barrens.

A LOSS OF MEMORY by Peter Nolan Smith

The Catholic Church and other derivatives of the Judaeo-Christian faith extol monogamy as the true state of man and woman, then explain sex through the mysteries of the birds and bees. Actually my parents never lectured their children on that subject, although they said that the stork had delivered each of my new brothers or sisters from the hospital.
“A stork?” The long-winged bird was not native to New England.
“Yes, a stork,” my parents said the word with reverence and they remained faithful as mating pigeons to each other. Bees never entered into the conversation about babies, because the queen bee had so many lovers.

Just like me. I can’t count the number of my paramours on one hand and while I don’t remember all their names, I do recollect their faces, smiles, and smell, yet very little of the sex.

Woman on the other hand pride themselves on their acute memories and quote a man’s utterance twenty years after the words left his lips, so I imagined that all females would be equally recollective about the act of love, but not all of them.

Several years ago I ran into Valda at a Lower Manhattan studio opening. The ex-La Rocka model was still a beauty. Not a surprise, since the Polish emigre had been Jean-Michel's muse as had many women in the artist's short life. We sat on a gallery's window sill recounting our past and a younger women with a younger male asked, “Are you a couple?”

“Not really.” I smiled at the tenderness in her voice. I had once been that young.

“You seemed so comfortable together.” Her beau beamed with the glow of two hearts beating as one and he held his girlfriend’s hand with tenderness. They had a lot to learn, but I wasn’t in the mood to educate them about the hills and canyons of love, so I said, “No, we were never a couple, but we once were lovers.”

“No, we weren’t.” Valda harshly answered with darkening eyes.

“We weren’t?” I remembered certain spending hours together on a hot August night in 1979.

“Not at all.” Her adamant denial bristled with certitude.

“Are you sure?” Her kiss was etched on my mind.

“100%.”

That encounter couldn’t have been a phantasm of my fantasies. She had scratched my back to shreds.

“Really?’

“Yes.” A fury settled in her eyes.

The young couple fled from the charred ashes of my displaced memory.

“Sorry, guess I was thinking about someone else.” I waved the white flag of surrender.

“And there were plenty of someone elses.” Valda sway from the window. I remained seated, thinking that she was right, because a woman is never wrong about a man, but I had slept with one of her best friends.

Lucille and I had lasted a weekend.

My imaginary tryst with Valda went on for a month.

1979 wasn’t a time for monogamy.

I stood up. Valda stood by the bar. I was exiled from her thoughts and I wondered what other men else dwelled in her gulags. It really didn't matter, because 1979 was a long time ago and even worse maybe I wasn’t so memorable in the affairs of the birds and bees, then again I had slept with one of her best friends.

Lucille wouldn’t know if I was right, but I was gracious enough to allow Valda her victory, for as the philosopher Pascha Ray paraphrased, “As you get old you forget. As you get older you are forgotten by everyone but yourself.”

Sad, but sometimes true.

Especially in the mind of a woman.

Other photos of Valda and Mary Beth and Lucille.

In 1979 we were friends and I never forget friends.

Hurrah Punk Nightclub

Hurrah disco on West 62nd Street died after the opening of Studio 54. The owners experimented with a dance club featuring mainstream rock with video monitors hanging from the ceiling. When this scheme didn't work, the owners called on Jim Fouratt to animate the ex-dance studio and the impish impresario booked punk and new wave bands, then hired his friends to work the door and DJ booth since they were all into this music.

I was put out front as the doorman, my security was an old black boxer Jack Flood and a moonlighting cop named Bobbie Gardiner. Haoui Montauk and Aleph Ashline sat at the desk dispensing tickets and free passes to the VIPs, and upstairs George Wrage took the tickets, Carlos Rodriquez was the lightman, Sean Cassette spun reggae, punk, and new wave, Randy the bartender was so handsome and Jhourry his partner was so very wicked, Barney and the Odinesque Ron Jaggar paid our salaries every Saturday night. We all made good money, however the owners fought with Jim about paying the bands so much money.

It was the height of the cocaine era.

One night they told Jim that he had been terminated. "Because we're tired of you."

Jim was rightfully pissed at them.

The one-eyed manager ordered me to toss out Jim.

I asked him nice.

If I had been more honorable, I would have left with him, instead he told me to fuck myself and I was a hothead back then. Still am a little bit, but that night I escorted him out of the club.

I owe Jim Fouratt a big apology.

He was a true radical and visionary.

And not only with music.

But then this is about Hurrah and it was simply sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

To view the entrance of Hurrah circa 1981, please go to Merrill Aldighieri VDO

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TrP7L62awM&feature=youtu.be

Eyes In The Sky

The FAA announced plans to allow Alaska, Nevada, New York, North Dakota, Texas and Virginia to test drones for commercial use starting in 2015.

The BBC reported that the head of the FAA, Michael Huerta, said safety would be the priority as it considers approval for unleashing the unmanned aircraft into US skies to provide luxury realtors to show off multi-million properties with aerial views, deliver beer to music festival-goers, and make movies such as the recent SMURFS PART 2.

I like the idea of beer delivery, however my Chinese take-out delivery man will stop at the bodega en route with my moo she pork.

Truthfully drones will be used to spray poisonous pesticide over farmlands and aid police surveilling the public.

Hundreds of thousands of young men have already been trained as drone pilots thanks to AR PURSUIT and their kill counts number in the billions each day.

Drones, stay-at-home video geeks, Diet-Pepsi, and fast food are a perfect formula for the new fascist state.

"We see all, we hear all, and we are all."

Jeff Bezos of Amazon loves the idea of drones.

Drones will cut out Fed Ex and UPS.

Less humans = more profit.

The ACLU complained that, "Giving drones access to US skies would only ensure "our every move is monitored, tracked, recorded and scrutinized by the authorities."

Not that anyone listens to the ACLU.

"We are Devo."

To hear MONGOLOID, please go to the following URL

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2tZqXWa7no