A Long Walk Into Year 66 - 2017

Last year Chef Dave from 169 cooked a Memorial Day BBQ on his roof deck in Bushwick.

I brought a bottle of Chardonnay.

I ate hamburgers, hot dogs, and drank wine, Jagermeister, and tequila.

Someone gave me a magic mushroom.

It had a red cap.

Another handed me a marijuana gummie.

I did them all and left the soiree at 1pm.

It was the first hour of my 66th birthday.

I saw in my 64th birthday at the Little Neck along the Gowanus.

Paige and Steve were with me.

Fried clams and 'gansetts.

They're in Uganda now.

I do miss them, but Africa was 7000 miles from Bushwick.

High.

I caught a bus up Gates Avenue and got off thinking I was close to Clinton Hill.

I discovered my error on the street.

I was nowhere near Clinton Hill.

I shouted for the bus to stop.

It disappeared into the darkness.

Bushwick burned during the 1977 Blackout.

Crack and a 9mm were royalty in the 1980s.

Then the shit stopped and life returned to Bushwick.

But not tonight.

No one was on the streets.

No cars.

No taxis.

I didn't have enough money in my account for an Uber and calculated that my crash pad was an hour's walk away.

I hadn't included getting off on the mushrooms in my thought process and slammed against a chainlink fence. A dog barked from a nearby yard. I wished the pit bull could have walked me home. I was in need of help.

The streetlights were bright.

Too bright.

Only the trees offered protection from their glare and I stumbled along the sidewalk.

Not knowing where was the where I was was.

I listened to Sly and the Family Stone.

Getting ever higher.

A ghost bike haunted a corner.

Someone had died here.

I prayed for their soul and the phantom remained asleep.

I was so jealous.

My feet went left.

My feet went right.

I had lost control again.

The darkness was all powerful this late at night.

Another chainlink fence saved me from collapsing like the World Trade Towers.

My fingers clung to it.

Concrete consciousness was poured into my spine. My legs regained movement and I resumed my trek.

I checked the bus schedule.

They ran once an hour.

I was fucked and only my feet could unfuck me from sleeping on the street.

Even as much as I wanted to crawl into the bushes.

West.

There was too much light.

I sang along to Blue Cheer and tried to dance.

I swirl into a twirling tornado.

My body faceplanted horizontally into a bush sprouting the leaves of summer.

I was getting off again.

Lights shifting colors. Music orbiting celestial.

"Where am I."

I wished I lived here.

I didn't and continued west without any familiar landmark in sight.

Bushes whispered my name.

"Sleep."

"No." I didn't dare look at the time on my cellphone.

It was playing CHELSEA by the Stiffs INC

I pogoed and almost tumbled into the vegetation for the hundredth time.

My arms stretched out like a highwire artist and I regained my balance.

The Great 66.

My birthday and Route 66.

I had hitchhiked the Mother Road in 1972.

At night it was darker than here.

On a nameless street I took off my glasses.

I didn't need them to see shadows reaching for my soul.

I leaned against a fence.

More leaves touched my face.

I thought they were the same from before.

I was wrong.

But right too.

A flower called my name.

A rose.

A fragrance.

I walked again.

West.

The ebony outline of a church tower.

The world bleeding into a blur.

Then again the rose.

More powerful than before and I sang the Jaynettes SALLY DANCES AROUND THE ROSES.

I knew where I was.

Not far from my bed.

Same as the flowers of a Bushwick night.

Resting in peace.

Like the living asleep for my 66th birthday.

I smiled recollecting my 40th in Bangkok.

With cousin Ty Spaulding.

I had made a fool of myself at a comedy club.

Ty said, "Everyone laughed at your escaping the hook."

I was a million laughs back in the last century.

I turned the key in the lock.

The door opened and I was back in 1992.

It was easy to travel time on mushrooms.

46 years from a hop skip and a jump from now.

And then I tripped on a shadow.

I hit the bed like a vampire reaching the grave just before the dawn.

TKO.

Only I was not home.

Just at the 169 and Chef Dave shook his head.

"Old people."

Just like vampires old people hear voices in their sleep and I heard Chef Dave.

I would show him how old I was tomorrow, because then I would be 66 and one day.

I was much younger than that yesterday.

Atomic Bloom

Back in the summer of 2014 I bicycled from Fort Greene to Bushwick Avenue. Jane Dickson was displaying a sparse mirrored mural of mythical rock bands at the Silent Barn Gallery. The neighborhood was hard-core without any signs of encroachment from the art phenomena farther to the north. I locked my bike to a gate and hoped for the best. Jane's work hung on a brick wall. My favorite faux-band was THE DUH. Jane greeted friends and admirers. Her work on Times Square, Las Vegas, carnivals and commercial strip malls are well-loved by a large segment of New York and the world. Jane introduced me to people as a great writer. She is planning on using text from my unpublished punk novel MAYBE TOMORROW to add flavor to an upcoming show about Times Square. I had drank heavily the previous night and on Monday hard work was scheduled for the metal shop in Greenpoint. As I said my good-bye, Kenny Scharf showed up at the gallery. I introduced myself and he reacted as if I had been revived from the dead. I said nothing. Some people think I've died, while others are surprised by my appearance. I'm not the man I used to be. Kenny was railing against the radiation plume spreading from the damaged Fukushima reactor in Japan. "The radiation is entering the food chain of the West Coast. My daughter was told to eat sea kelp for iodine, but the seaweed comes from the Pacific. They're doomed out there." "I went through Japan after the quake. No one was traveling there." Narita had been empty. "The Japanese are safer than us, because the wind is blowing the radiation across the ocean." He was right and I thought about the gigantic plastic trash ball floating in the Northern Pacific. It was the perfect breeding ground for a Godzilla-type monster. Kenny invited Jane and me to a disco near his studio. "It starts at 12 and goes till 4." "Sounds like fun." Ten years ago I might have gone, but those hours are deep in my bedtime. I departed from the gallery and unlocked my bike. There was no sign of tampering. My ride back to Fort Greene took thirty minutes. The sky glowed with a pale blue. The color had nothing to do with radiation. At least not yet.

First Line Of Defense

Over a hundred days have passed since the first Covid 19 case struck these shores. 50,000 deaths and a million infection have overwhelmed the American Health System and millions of workers have been released from their jobs without any sign of a return to normalization. We are fucked by a complete lack of leadership by the government. I go to the grocery to discover the depletion of necessary staples i.e. rice, beans, tuna, pasta, bread.

Two days ago I walked through Bushwick. Hordes of homeless, junkies, drunks, and mad people congregated at Myrtle and Broadway. These blocks belonged to them and I retreated back to Clinton Hill, noting the one-story buildings and thought back to the 1977 Blackout. They had once been three-story buildings. Fire had reduced them to ashes.

Most New Yorkers don't remember the chaos.

1977 was in the last century.

A long time ago.

Back this crisis has resurrected the past.

When the food runs out, it's time for burning and looting.

A mob running wild in the street.

I am prepared for this certainty.

A ten-inch Bowie Knife running cold Sheffield Steel from the 1800s.

A 32-oz baseball bat.

A steel pipe lined with nails.

A hammer and a screwdriver.

No gun, but I will wield a more fearful weapons.

A carrot and a cucumber, because nothing scares a potato-chip-eating American more than a real vegetable.

Peanut Butter and Jelly by the painter Frank Holliday

Peanut Butter and Jelly by the painter Frank Holliday.

Out at his Bushwick studio.

Throwing Back Fish

Last weekend Bushwick heaved with artists, hipsters, dealers, and tourists enjoying a day of open studios in the rejuvenated industrial wasteland. Stuck in the city I bicycled over to Grattan Street to view a friend's paintings. Frank Holiday greeted me with surprise.

"I thought you'd be in the Hamptons."

"My old friends out East don't like my snoring."

"Well, I'm so happy you showed up."

"As am I." I quickly examined his new paintings. His bold strokes had been muted underneath a patois of color without any loss of dynamic force and we discussed the positive metamorphosis of his work.

Several other friends showed up to his studio and we sat drinking water, while recounting stories of the old wickedness in New York to young men questioning the city's status as America's Babylon.

"New York was dangerous back then. Every borough was scary," Steve Turtell explained to the twenty year-olds. "And the nightlife was small. The punk scene was maybe 500 people. The gay population was in the thousands. We were hidden from the mainstream, not like today. We had the Mineshaft, Toilet, the Anvil, places that can't exist now."

"A friend of mine and I were at the Anvil and the DJ announced that the first person to piss into some guy's mouth would win a six pack of beer." Frank wasn't mentioning the name, but I had a good idea who he meant, especially after he said, "And my friend came back a minute later with a big smile, screaming, "I won, I won."

We laughed hard at the remembrance of those lost times and friends. A handsome actor from Chicago asked what I was writing.

"A book about hitchhiking across the USA in 1974."

"I used to hitchhike all the time," Steve cooed with fond memory. "One time I was coming back from a folk festival in West Virginia. I was stuck out on the highway in Maryland and this guy stopped for me. He was looking for action, but I wasn't interested in him, so he got off the road and drove me all the way back to where he picked me up like he was throwing back a fish. Talk about a scary ride."

"I know what you mean." I had hitchhiked hundreds of times in the 60s and 70s. Strange people were looking for strange people. They were different times indeed, for as Charlie Manson said, "I was strange when strange meant something."

Ain't nothing like that now.

Frank Holliday - Painter

A big painting of Frank Holliday. I called it BIG PAINTING # 1 Frank Holliday and I go back to 1978. He never gave up on his friends or art. His friends love his paintings. He sold ten small ones to a gallery owner. Another two big ones to privates. I love their layers of light and color. Frank is getting into symbolism. He's reading Rimbaud. The man is forever young.

Peanut Butter and Jelly by the painter Frank Holliday

Peanut Butter and Jelly by the painter Frank Holliday 2012 Out at his Bushwick studio.