Journal Entry - May 29, 1983 - Paris

A journal entry from 1983

My 31st birthday party at Jurgen's house on Rue de la Tour with Bridget, Tony, Tracy, Alfredo, Karine, Diana, Olivier, T, Rufus,David, Philip Brook, everyone absolutely smacked out on Persian brown. Julie Cole was the only straight person. The less about this evening the better.

Tony later said, "Anyone who can survive a birthday like yours deserves to be at the next one."

The next entry is about hanging with Willie DeVille and Countess Gudmilla von Bismarck morning Jurgen, Willie, and I retreated to Willie's room on the Grand Boulevard. Willie shot up in the bathroom not wanting to show the damage to his arms. I had seen them the previous night. Bad. Real bad.

Jurgen nodded out and we spoke about East Village junkies, his feud with the Rolling Stones, the betting odds on Johnny Thunders OD, vomiting on stage, my battles in the night, and his many attempts to stop heroin. We crashed without a care for nothing but more.

Thankfully Jurgen had more.

Jurgen, a German telex criminal, was a good friend with Kalle Swensen. The Black King ruling the biggest brothel in Hamburg. The Eros Center.

I worked for them at BSir's.

Good money until in December SS Tommy presented a bill of 20K Deustchmarks for sleeping with a blonde lingerie American model.

Stephanie.

"I didn't know she was working. She had been Jurgen's girlfriend.

"Everyone in Hamburg is working for someone."

SS Tommy was a murderer and I gave the keys to my orange VW which two weeks before I had driven into the forest with Philippe Kroechey, a Paris DJ screaming we were being chased by zombies.

The car was still in the forest. Prisoner of a tree trunk. I handed over the keys to the VW, promising to settle the rest of the debt in the morning. I went to my apartment in Mittelweg, and called Stephanie.

No answer.

I packed a single bag with books, clothes, a world band radio and taxied to the Hamburg Bahnhof to flee on the midnight train to Paris like an anarchist escaping from the Nazis.

I didn't breathe easy until we crossed the Belgian border at dawn.

A month later I met with Stephanie for a weekend at the Hotel Lutece in Paris. Neither of us mentioned Hamburg.

It was better that way.

Clean sheets, soft skin, a woman's breath on my skin and dreaming this could last forever.

Nothing like rewriting.

Chai-yo

May 9 1990 - Kathmandu - Nepal - Journal Entry

Published on May 25, 2023

Kathmandu is a magical city filled with pilgrims traveling to the city's holy shrines and temples of the pantheon of Asian religions. I haven't seen a single church and with good reason. Jesus might have traveled to Kashmir after his crucifixion, but no one here worships him here. Certainly not this atheist, but I am in wonderment, when I stumbled on a procession for the Kumari, the living goddess, in Thamel. These young girls are chosen from the Newari tribe to serve as living vessel for the Hindu goddess Durga until menstruation. The word Kumari means 'virgin' in Nepali. They are revered for their purity, but soldiers disrupted the holy ritual as the government has outlawed the gathering of people, as the citizens clamor for democracy. The TV announcers are accusing the demonstrators of communism and godlessness. So far there is no bloodshed.

I walked to the Thai Air office on the main boulevard shaded by trees harboring thousands of sleeping bat. The ground is splattered with bat dung. I'm glad to be wearing my sneakers.

Last night after drinks at the Yeti Hotel Lance and I walked through dark streets. He was wearing flip-flops and stepped waist deep into an open-air sewer. Up to his waist. I pull him out. Cursing. I help him back to the hotel at a distance. He smells strongly of shit. I hope he doesn't get a disease from this dip in the city's waste waters.

This afternoon Thai Air wasn't able to confirm my flight from Delhi to Paris.

I might have to fly to Munich. It's been over eight years since I was in Germany. I left in December 1982 on an overnight train to Gare du Nord, having ended my working with the pimps at the BSirs nightclub. I wonder what would have happened, if I had stayed in Hamburg.

I would have continued my affair with Stephanie De Leng.

That year I decided after Christmas in America to return to Paris and work at the Bains-Douches. Stephanie wanted me to meet her in Amsterdam. I was too broke to buy a ticket. I crashed at Julie Cole's apartment with the photographer Arthur Gordon and his Doberman. A shabby apartment behind the Gare De L'Est. Stephanie and I later met in New York. The lingerie model had gained weight due to a chronic illness. I thought she was faking the sickness and brutally said so one night. She wrote me a scathing letter and my friend Andy read it.

"What did you do to this woman?"

"I guess I said the wrong thing." I had no sympathy for her and I remember my older lover Linda Imhoff in 1970, as we were laying naked in bed in my Shannon Street apartment, "You're dangerous, because you don't know what you are doing."

I was eighteen at the time.

I'm now thirty-eight. Stephanie could have been the one, but the only way I could get it up was to pretend she was a nun. I had no trouble with the one Patpong go-go girl I took to the Malaysia Hotel a couple of times. I haven't talked to any females in Kathmandu.

And certainly not the Living Goddess or a nun.

HANG ON SLOOPY by David Porter 2016

In my younger years of my life I knew girls known Sandie, Samantha, Suzanne, Sara, but never a Sloopy.

Doctor Nick and I went to college with a girl whose name sounded by Sloopy, until I went to university.

A slight brunette from Roxbury majored in nursing. On the weekends she danced weekends at the Two o'Clock Lounge in the Combat Zone to pay her tuition. Sloopy was the first person in her family to attend university. Nick and I drove taxi at night. We sometimes picked up Sloopy at closing time. Neither of us received more than the fare at the end of the ride. We never said how we felt about her. To have said anything was bad luck.

At a party one Friday night I told our college friends from New York and New Jersey about the idyllic Rockport quarries. Everyone wanted to swim in the spring-fed granite pits. The next day we left Boston in a car caravan headed to Rockport. Sloopy accompanied Nick. He had a red MG convertible.

We smoked weed on the cliffs. Nick and Sloopy leaped off the cliff together.  I decided to dive to impress her. I misjudged the drop and hit the water at the wrong angle. Bones crackled along my spine. I swan to the shore and slowly hauled myself from the quarry waters.

Sloopy hadn't seen my dive. She had been kissing Nick. As I pulled myself from the water, Nick reached out a hand and asked if I was all right. He was pre-med at BC.

"I'm okay."

Barely and I recovered from the dive, but ever since then I've avoided girls with names sounding like Sloopy, I love David Porter's cover of the McCoy's hit song. Henri Flash introduced me to the HANG ON SLOOPY at BSIR's, a Hamburg nightclub, in 1982. The French disc jockey would play Porter's long version at the end of the night.

The last lingerers slow-danced for about two minutes and then lost the groove. Henri called the lengthy recording the best music for emptying a nightclub nearing dawn. David Porter's HANG ON SLOOPY was a long song. Henri would leave the DJ booth and I would join the Frenchman at the bar.

"A last drink."

"To HANG ON SLOOPY."

We never lost the groove.

And neither does this song.

"C'mon Sloopy."

From the Stax hit man.

Sam & Dave's "Soul Man" (1968 Grammy Winner)
Mariah Carey "Dreamlover" (1993 Grammy Winner)
Will Smith's "Get Jiggy Wit It" (1999 Grammy Winner)
Sam and Dave's "Hold On, I'm Comin'"
Biggie Smalls "Who Shot Ya?"

Berlin October 1982

Berlin
October
1982
A morning Pan-Am flight from Hamburg
A Geldstadt
Money City
To Tempelhof
West Berlin
Behind the Iron Curtain

Henri Flesh et moi
DJ und Tursteher
Nachtclub Leute
Working Bsirs for the Reeperbahn pimps.

Templehof Gray morning Taxi
Zum der VierZeitenJahren Hotel
Each carrying a small bag
Only have
Two grams of Persian brown
We're remaking Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F
A novel about teenage hookers
Without the writer
We left her in Hamburg
She's safer there__ I look out the window For a familiar face Amongst the unfamiliar faces 1978 Clover The blonde runaway fled New York And a Texas oil baron Fled New York for Berlin East Berlin The orher half of here West Berlin After her departure Two postcards Both from the other side of the Iron Curtain Her new master A KGB colonel "Looks like you only more scars." I have a few more than four years ago Nothing one here looks like Clover Viele Blonded Kein Clover later__

Check into the hotel
Concierge looks like Dirk Bogarde
From THE NIGHT PORTER
A Nazi hiding in plain view
Forty years after the Fall of Berlin
Maybe sixty
A young man in 1945
Not a stray hair out of place
No click of his heels
Still everything about him Nazi__

We unpack
Huff some Persian brown
I wish it were China White.
Change into bathing trunks.
Both of us
Greyhound slim
White as Johnny Thunders
We swim in the tiled pool
It dates back to before the war
The Great War.
1914-1918
Our grandfathers served in France.
Long long ago__

Two couples exit from the sauna.
Speedos for the men
Bikinis for the women
Older
The men
Former Nazis
Proud___

They never lost the war
Henri is French.
He sees them too.
For what they were and are
"Salauds."

They see us for us
Auslanders
I stare at them
Mutter
"Nazis."

The word crosses the pool
They hear it
They know who they were
And who they are
I get up
Get my towel
We leave
Turn
Spit on the floor
"Nie weider."
Never again

On Kurdammstrasse
Wealth
The West
Zoo Station in the afternoon
No whores
No action
Eat Eisbein
Pig foot
Drink Berlin Weisse Bier
At night
Go to Der Dschungel Disco
Dance with TVs
Share Persian brown.
At least this isn't Berlin 1945___

In the AM we go to the East
The Berlin Wall stretching north south out of sight
This side graffiti
The other side
A Death Zone
Ladnmines, dogs, and snipers
Through Checkpoint Charlie
To
East Berlin
Passports bitte
A squat female border guard
We are of interest
For thirty seconds
Willkommen zu
Democratic Deutschland Republik
The DDR
The Workers Paradise Alles ist in Ordernung___

A walk through the ruins
Bullet holes in the buildings
From April 1945
All scars of battle in West Berlin
A Trabant scuttles by
Like an out-of-control lawnmower
No people on the streets.
Very few in Karl Marx Platz
Parking anywhere.
On a back street
Nothing to buy in the shops
The sound of boots
A Soviet patrol
Goose-stepping
Like Nazis
Never again__
Later
A German cellar bar
Order Berliner Pilsner
For the twelve people at the tables
No one drinks them
They are all Stazi Henri says
Secret police
Like the Gestapo___
We leave East Berlin
Without even a postcard.

Back in the West
Capitalism on the K-Damm
We have Persian smack
We
Free
Both of wish Christine F was with us.
Henri more than me
They are something.
At now for now
In both West and East Berlin
Fur Immer and always__

Opening paragraphs of ALMOST A DEAD MAN

Hamburg 1982

The scurry of claws across the filthy floor startled the woman on the battered chair and she lifted her black stiletto heels in horror. Rats were the least of her problems. Over the phone her lover had suggested a nocturnal rendezvous on Kaiserkai. No one came to Hamburg’s harbor at night. The woman had driven down to the warehouse district alone for rough sex with her Willi. Instead two men had been waiting on the unlit dock and dragged her into an abandoned warehouse. Now in a damp basement she pleaded, “Please let me go, I haven’t done anything wrong?”

"Nothing wrong?” The black man in the spotless jogging suit circled the chair. Aviator sunglasses hid his eyes. He swatted the dusty 40-watt bulb dangling from the rafter, then tapped the woman’s gaunt face.

“Are you a saint?”

“No, I am far from a saint.” The expensive wig flopped onto a folded lap.

"Saints are only saints, because they are dead. You on the other hand are alive, because you are a sinner."

Hamburg
>Howaldtswerke Deutsche Werft (HDW) Hamburg,
1972

I wrote this novel in the autumn of 1997 while living several months in Ballyconeeley under the Connemara Mountains or the Seven Pins. I returned to New York and only showed the finished work to Shannon Greer. He read it in one night. I never showed it to anyone else, although in 2016 I revised it another time.

Last Christmas Winick Diamonds, the jewelry sore in Montauk, closed for the season. With no job I went on the hustle for money and filled my spare time writing a new version of ALMOST A DEAD MAN. I'm nearly finished. First destination. Shannon Greer. He's a great photographer and has a better than good eye.

ps Calle Schwensen survived the Gross Freiheit of the Reeperbahn.

If you find him there, give him my regards.

Hamburg 1982

The scurry of claws across the filthy floor startled the woman on the battered chair and she lifted her black stiletto heels in horror. Rats were the least of her problems. Over the phone her lover had suggested a nocturnal rendezvous on Kaiserkai. No one came to Hamburg’s harbor at night. The woman had driven down to the warehouse district alone for rough sex with her Willi. Instead two men had been waiting on the unlit dock and dragged her into an abandoned warehouse. Now in a damp basement she pleaded, “Please let me go, I haven’t done anything wrong?”

"Nothing wrong?” The black man in the spotless jogging suit circled the chair. Aviator sunglasses hid his eyes. He swatted the dusty 40-watt bulb dangling from the rafter, then tapped the woman’s gaunt face.

“Are you a saint?”

“No, I am far from a saint.” The expensive wig flopped onto a folded lap.

"Saints are only saints, because they are dead. You on the other hand are alive, because you are a sinner."

Hamburg
>Howaldtswerke Deutsche Werft (HDW) Hamburg,
1972

I wrote this novel in the autumn of 1997 while living several months in Ballyconeeley under the Connemara Mountains or the Seven Pins. I returned to New York and only showed the finished work to Shannon Greer. He read it in one night. I never showed it to anyone else, although in 2016 I revised it another time.

Last Christmas Winick Diamonds, the jewelry sore in Montauk, closed for the season. With no job I went on the hustle for money and filled my spare time writing a new version of ALMOST A DEAD MAN. I'm nearly finished. First destination. Shannon Greer. He's a great photographer and has a better than good eye.

ps Calle Schwensen survived the Gross Freiheit of the Reeperbahn.

If you find him there, give him my regards.

As for Kurt he never left Paris.

Henri Flesh RIP

My good friend Henri Flesh passed from this earth.

We met in Paris.

The two of us worked at Bsir's in Hamburg.

Henri on the turntable.

Me at the door.

Back when we were young.

THE BOUQUET OF RUINS by Peter Nolan Smith

In the autumn of 1982 I was working at a nightclub in Hamburg. The sleek nightclub had been designed by the playboy front man to mimic CLOCKWORK ORANGE’s Milk Bar and Jurgen’s fashionable crowd loved it throughout the summer, however the club’s actual owner was Cali, the black leader of the GMbH, a ruthless gang of pimps. The season changed early this far north and every day the night conquered a few more minutes of light and our once-popular club on Eppendoffer Weg was deserted by the attractive youth, the esoteric intelligentsia, and the wicked rich, who sought comfort in their homes.

Pimps and off-duty prostitutes from the Reeperbahn replaced the high-class and they were lorded over by Cali's righthand man, SS Tommy, who resembled a pit bull on steroids. This enforcer was rumored to have buried several men alive for non-payment of debts. A bitter rival had been bathed in acid. SS Tommy had his own table in BSIRs. I smiled every night, as he ordered bottles of sekt. He never paid the bill.

“We’ll get the money one way or another.” Jurgen was a native to Hamburg. He knew how things were done.

“As you like.” My percentage of the profits was 5%. SS Tommy’s rechtung was over 20,000 DMs. I figured that he owed me 1000 DMs and joked about it with the girl I took home twice a week.

Astrid was a beautiful lingerie model. The blonde twenty year-old was studying fashion at the University. Her dramatic overbite and an aquiline nose stole any chance at being called beautiful. I lived by the harbor and the sea air mixed with the smell of oranges on her flesh.

She laughed at the idea of SS Tommy in my debt.

“But never say this to him.” She frowned stripping off her dress.

“Never.”

"Nie?" She wanted to make sure.

"What do I have to say to that animal?"

Nichts, if you know what's good for you."

I knew my place in the feeding chain and managed to keep my distance from the monster at the club.

As an early winter transformed to the city into a dark industrial wasteland, Henri, the DJ from Paris, and I were counting the days until we called it quits, only I wasn’t telling management about my departure in case I wanted to come back after the holidays. Good-paying jobs for foreigners without the proper papers were difficult to find in Europe.

Henri left for Paris. He had no intentions of coming back. The French don't belong in Germany and neither did I. I planned my departure.

Only one person deserved an ‘auf wiedersehen’.

“I may be leaving,” I told Astrid after a lengthy session nearing dawn.

“Are you going for good?” She dressed conservatively for school and stuffed her nightclothes in a large leather bag.

“Yes.” I lay in bed thinking that I’d miss her in Paris.

“And you are not coming back?”

“Not a chance.” I had had enough of Germany for this year.

“When?”

“Soon.”

Astrid kissed me on the lips and I returned to sleep.

That night SS Tommy showed up at the bar early. BSIR had few customers and all of them avoided the six-foot enforcer for the GMbH. Astrid stood at the door dressed in a fur with very little else underneath. She normally never showed until after midnight.

Tommy waved me over to the bar and slapped a bill on the bar.

It was written in German.

“What’s this?”

“Die Rechtung.” His scarred finger jabbed the top of the bill.

The total came to almost 10,000 DMs or $6500 US, which was $2000 more than my bank account.

“I can see that.” I had learned German in high school. The list consisted of charges for sex. “What’s it have to do with me?”

“This is what you owe for the nights with Astrid.” Tommy smiled, as if he had told the punchline of a long joke.

“Astrid? I didn’t know she worked for you.”

She smiled at me with a crooked grin.

“Not all our girls work the Eros Center.”

The GMbH ran a string of 200 women on the Reeperbahn. Each one was expected to have sex five times a night. 200 DMs times five times two hundred women came to $100,000 a night. The take wasn't all his, but SS Tommy owned three Ferraris.

“Is everything in order?”

"Alles is klar."

I looked over to Astrid. Her eyes said that she could do nothing.

“I didn’t know a 69 cost 200 DMs.”

“And that is cheap.” SS Tommy pointed out several more costly sexual feats. “I deducted 20% since you work for Nigger Cali.

“Thanks.” 20% extra was a bargain, if you had the money for the full amount.

“And the bill is not negotiable.” SS Tommy folded with muscled arms

“She never said anything about working for you,” I said in rough German.

“Everyone in Hamburg works for someone.” Zuhalters were well-known for their violence and SS Tommy had a well-earned reputation for a short fuse.

I had to offer him a gesture.... TO CONTINUE READING THE BOUQUET OF RUINS ON KINDLE FOR $0.99, PLEASE PURCHASE GERMANY AND OTHER PLACES ON KINDLE BY GOING TO THE FOLLOWING URL http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KDN63Y6