September 4, 1978 - Journal - Labor Day

Nothing happening today. No invitations to BBQs, but it's still early and Alice and I are still recovering from our cocaine night with Guadacanal. Yesterday afternoon I went over to his apartment and knocked on his door. His frail from DC answered the door in underwear. Only the bottom. She said nothing and returned to the bedroom. My friend was at the table packing palstic bags with grams. He was wearing a mask and motioned for me to sit.

" Thanks for the other night. I woke up in the emergency room without any idea how I got there. Still don't, but I figured you got me there."

"I threw you over my shoulder and carried you to 1st Avenue to get us a taxi, then brought you to Bellevue. I left after seeing you were in good hands,"

"Was I close?"

"You were beyond dead, but you got back in one piece."

"A miracle thanks to you."

"How you feeling?"

"Hard to tell. You want a line?"

I shook my head. He cuffed me a gram. I took it to sell later. I needed the money more then the blow. Walking home I stop at Gem Spa to buy the Times and ordered a chocolate egg cream. The Red Sox had lost to the Yankees 15-3 last night. I had watched the first innings at Grassroots. My home team looked dreadful. Yaz is hurt. They all look banged up and the Yanks keep winning.

On St. Mark's a runaway poodle begs food. I have none. Only the egg cream and cocaine, I give it neither. It 's cooler than Sunday with gray skies promising rain and an early autumn. It had been a hot August in the East Village. I only have a levi jacket. Three sweaters. Same as last winter and sneakers for footgear. Rent is over due. I called my landlord, Jerome Golding, to say we'd have the $183 this week. I'm sure I can get $100 for the gram, covering my half, plus my landlord wants me to paint his Upper East Side penthouse's bedroom and boudoir. I said yes, but worry about screwing up. I'll have to put down a lot of drop clothes. I don't need any mistakes. Another probelm is that I should be looking for real work instead of spening my nights at CBGBs. A day job. Steady income. Winter isn't far away.

Back at the apartment, I told Alice that Guadacanal had survived his near death experience.

"He wouldn't have survived, if you hadn't taken half that line. I'm off that shit." She lay on the bedroom futon. The fan did little to clear the air.

"Me too." I hoped it wasn't a lie.

I went to living room and turned on the TV. Nothing on. No old movies or sporting events. Eight channels of nothing. Not even wrestling or the Three Stooges on The UHF channels. I get up and shut it off. I have no money. $10. More once I sell the blow. It keeps calling my name. I don't answer its call.

That evening I went to CBGBs only to find it closed for tax reasons. Hillary hadn't paid his debt to society. I sold the gram to Anthony Scibelli, who was in Phebe's with Frank Holiday. I hadn't even touched the stuff until now. The two huffed lines at the bar. I left them befoer I joined them.

I walked across the Village to Alice's restaurant. She wasn't getting off until 1.

"I'll see you later, hon."

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A Man in a Panama on the Bowery

Last week I spotted a man wearing a stiff panama on the corner of Bleecker and the Bowery waiting for the change of lights. I couldn't recall ever seeing a man in a Panana on the Bowery. I knew the Boulevard 9f was wearing a straw Italian fedora. I approached the man and complimented his hat. We traversed the avenue together and walked with him to Bowery Market

I asked his name and he said, "Charlie, I do the sound here." walked with him to Bowery Market

Charlie Sound the Bowery. walked with him to Bowery Market

"Are Charlie from CBGBs?" walked with him to Bowery Market

"Yes."

And with that I was transported to another time__

In December 1976 I was walking down the Bowery to my SRO room on West 11th Street. A thin fall of snow covered the sidewalk. I heard a band playing a breakneck cover of the Rivieras' CALIFORNIA SUN from inside a white-stuccoed bar with a white stucco front. I walked inside the wooden door, paid my admission, and walked to the stage, mesmerized by the leather-jacketed quartet. In less than a minute I was hooked by the Ramones and still am to punk to this day.

Charlie's sound was a big part of it. The Dead Boys, Ramones, Richard Hell, Guadalcanal,Brenda in the lady's room,Alice funny as hell, Xcessive, Kim,my cousin, the Revelons, a softball game against the Angels, The Johnny Blitz benefit et al

Charlie Martin. Long-haired genius. mono sound with ad four inputs with rotary knobs, bass and treble, and a master with mono. CBGBs sound supreme. Charlie's now working at the Country Western bar next to Bowery Market. It's good to be back in the City, where ghosts come alive__

The Ramones - California Sun 1976

Thank you, Charlie__

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AUGUST 11, 1978 - JOURNAL ENTRY - EAST VILLAGE II

This morning I woke with twenty-one cents in my jean pocket. My head hurt from too much alcohol. I thought I had a couple of dollars more. There was nothing. Te fidge luckily has eggs, bread, and butter in the refrigerator. Alice cries about our poverty.

"I don't know what I am doing here."

You're working and going to acting classes. I don't work enough and have no ambition." "You have your poetry." Alice pointed to my journal. She never reads it. She is weak some times and I am dedicated to holding her up. She is a thousand times more talented than me and only a bud of a flower.

"Yes, there is always that." My poetry sucks and no one makes money from poetry, unless they teach it to college kids seeking truth in words. I want magic.

Now that Alice and I are living together I have decided to be monogamous. I tell her, "I love you."

It's true, but the words sounds so bland, because faithfulness is a challenge doomed to failure. A month ago I had rooftop sex with soft skinned Nan, a photographer from Boston. She was into drag queens. I was still straight that way and had also given up on sex with men. I couldn't find anyone without a lisp in New York.

Like in my poem most of the people around me are faggots, chronic maniacs, sexually political women, strippers, junkies, college girls, drug dealers, musicians, and rich slummers. We are all broke. No one has an income, except for the rich. A phone call home will rescue us. I don't have enough change to make the call, so I will endure the poverty. It is freedom, a freedom I share with Alice. She is a great fuck. I never have to fake it.

THE NEWS

The Red Sox are in 1st place and the Yankee catcher Thurman Munson has died in a Cessna crash nine days ago. Pope Pius XII is sanctified for burial. Before his death he predicted the date of Armaggedon as that declared at Fatima. Newspaper strike in New York City.

Last night I drank till CBGBs' closing.Alice had stayed home and women came up offering sex in the bathroom, blowjobs in the alley, standing fucks between cars, cocaine, and qualludes. I accepted all, but the sex, thinking I have to save my energy to apply for a real job with a bank or government and saying fuck the punk life.

Foto by David Godlis

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MAYBE TOMORROW - A novel by Peter Nolan Smith Chapter 2

Chapter 2

The clouded horizon buried the autumn sun and the moonless gloom smothered the Connecticut Hills. Only the headlights of holiday traffic on the Interstate challenged the darkness. Few travelers noticed the rundown motel hidden in the woods off exit 74. Its neon sign had been out of order since the summer. A red GTO with Maine plates was parked before Room # 21. Its door was locked. Inside a kaleidoscope of TV reds, greens, and blue cascaded over the queen-sized bed. A young man and a teenage girl on the mattress watched THE BIONIC WOMAN with opposing levels of interest. Mike Valle tossed the empty beer can into the corner and the skinny brunette in the red dress asked, "When we leaving?"

"After I'm done with my beers." The tattooed mechanic lifted a can of Narragansett from the cooler. "You want one?"

She had barely sipped hers.

"One's my limit." Tammi West grabbed a cigarette from the pack on the night table. She had never been a drinker, although the thirst ran hard in her family. Both sides.

"All the more for me." Mike cracked the can with a beer key and fantasized about a night with Lindsey Wagner. The female lead of the TV show was almost as beautiful as Farah Fawcett, THE BIONIC MAN's real-life wife and # 1 on every males wish list. The girl on the bed offered no competition to either star.

Tammy's shoulder-length hair was a nonspecific brown in contrast the blonde tresses of THE BIONIC MAN's goddess. Her tomboy body was not destined for the centerfold of Playboy. None of this mattered to Mike. Her reputation as his hometown's slut trumped beauty, fame, and fortune. Mike chugged his beer. He was happy to be here and not Kittery, Maine. Away from family and friends with Tammi.

Semi-trailers on the highway sang ‘let's go'. The rising scree of empties signaled this room as their destination for the night. Tammi sat up in the bed.

"You said we were driving straight to New York."

"New York's a hellhole. What's the rush?"

"The more miles between me and Maine the better." The tobacco rasped into her lungs and harvested a cough. Smoking was a new habit. One day old. She hd found the pack in her sister's leather jacket.

"Are you scared of New York?"

"I'm not scared of anything." He had a .38 under his seat of his GTO.

"What about you?" Mike's hand slipped up Tammi's dress. "You afraid of the cops?"

"Yes, and you should be too. You crossed three state lines with a sixteen year-old girl. Somewhere in this country that's against the law." She squirmed out of his grasp and hoped that the danger of transporting a minor might register in his brain.

"Being an outlaw don't scare me." None of his fellow workers at the Kittery Navy had ever accused him of being a deep thinker and he bragged, "I've been to reform school for breaking and entering. Robbing summer cottages was an easy way to get liquor in the winter."

"I'm not looking to break any laws." Her face didn't match the one on the driver's license, which she had stolen from her stepsister. Any stop by the police meant a direct ride back to Kittery, Maine.

"Wild thing, no one's breaking any laws."

The re-run of THE BIONIC MAN paused for a commercial break. Mike hooked a finger into her strands and lowered his face to her hair. The mixture of Breck shampoo and cigarettes was a turn-on and he shut his eyes.

"We're a team. Anyone ever say you're a dead ringer for Faye Dunaway?"

"All the time."

Tammi fought from laughing out loud. The Hollywood actress dated movie stars and she was an underage runaway stuck with a loser.

"That's us. Bonnie and Clyde on the run." Mike unzipped his jeans. "I saw that movie three times. I really liked the scene of them in bed."

"I like the getaway scenes better." Tammi squirmed to the edge of the mattress,.Mike hauled her closer to him. She wasn't getting away.

"I think the hotel scene came first." His left hand flicked open her bra strap. "Bonnie didn't give Clyde a struggle."

She let him fondle her breasts. She wanted out of here. The faster this was over the better.

"You know I could drive your car, while you drink those beers."

"No teenybopper's drivin' my Goat." Mike had worked a winter of double- shifts at the Navy Yard and paid cash for the muscle machine.

"I learned to shift gears from my older sister. She has her license."

Tammi had taken to driving her stepmother's banged-up Cutlass, while the old lady had been asleep. Solo. It had been an automatic. She always brought it back unscratched, but a neighbor had snitched out joy-riding and her stepmother had tanned Tammi's backside with a belt. "You learn anything else?"

The pipe fitter toyed with her nipples.

"Yeah, never take a ride with a stranger."

"That's real funny, because we're not strangers."

"I never met you before." Kittery wasn't a big town.

"That's right, but I know you. Everyone in town does." His right hand mauled her thigh.

"What you hear?" Tammi stiffened with shame.

"Some stories about this and that."

Mike yanked down his pants without getting them farther than mid-thigh. His cock was a flaccid worm. He had drunk too many beers and two Seconals. He rose to his knees and wavered on the mattress.

"They're not true."

"Maybe not, but this afternoon I saw you walking on Tenney Hill Road in that red dress, black leather jacket, and high heel shoes. I told myself, "That's Tammi West." I stopped and asked where you were going and you said, "New York or the highway."

"I don't remember you saying anything about a motel room in the boondocks."

"This was a pit stop for beer and something else. You know what I mean?"

"Men only want one thing from a girl."

"Same thing you gave up to the football team after the Saco High game." Mike tugged off Tammi's bra.

"That story is a lie." She pushed him away with a strength born from a long- held anger. "I went to the Fort McClury with the quarterback, Brad. His friends showed up. Luckily a police cruiser entered the parking lot. The football players drove off. I walked home. Nothing happened."

"Really, well, I heard you did them all and same as this summer at that rich kid's party in York. That a lie too? You make friendly like that and we'll be leaving soon."

"So you want to meet up with that girl from the party?" Tammi couldn't deny the truth, but no one ever listened to her side of the story. She wished he shut up. He didn't.

"Yes, I do."

"We do it, you think you can get back in the car and drive like the devil to New York?"

"You put it that way and I'm Satan's chauffeur." Mike pried apart her legs.

"Then I'm yours." Tammi shut her eyes expecting a rough entry, except the pipe-fitter passed out onto the bed with a snort. She tapped his face lightly twice and once hard before slithering from under him to whisper, "Sorry Clyde, but Bonnie's moving on to better things."

Cars were on the highway. Half of them in the direction of New York. Neither the police nor her stepmother stood a chance of finding her there and come the summer a Greyhound bus would take her to California, Florida, or New Orleans, where Tammi West disappeared forever.

The teenager crept into the bathroom and gently shut the door. She put on her bra and panties, then pulled down the hem of stepsister's red dress. At least Mike hadn't ripped anything.

Tammi stood before the mirror. A quick smear of lipstick and rouge added a couple of years to her face, not that many drivers cared about the age of a teenage hitchhiker. She slinked into the bedroom and grabbed her stepsister's black leather jacket off the floor. The young girl picked up her high heels, plucked $80 from Mike's wallet, then tiptoed to the front door.

The click of the lock was too loud.

"Where you goin'?" The pipefitter demanded through a firefight of blinks.

"Out for some air." Tammi yanked at the door.

"I didn't blow off my mom's turkey for you to split on me." Mike leapt out of the bed and seized her wrist.

"I'm not splitting. I'm just going out for a smoke."

"Then why was your hand in my pants?" Mike kicked his jeans against the wall.

"I'm looking for cigarettes."

"Bullshit. The cigarettes are on the night table." Mike's fingernails painfully pierced her skin. "You're a little thief."

"No, I'm not." She tried to twist free, but Mike wasn't that drunk. "Let me go." "Not until you give me back what you took."

The naked pipe-fitter slapped Tammi's face. The back of her head slammed against the wall and the teenager shook off the stars swimming in her eyes.

"You bitch. I'm gonna teach you."

"You're not teaching me nothing."

Tammi West was no man's punching bag and she swung her high heels with all her might. The stilettos cracked into Mike's skull and his eyes fluttered like a slot machine twirling round and round to skip the cherries. A second shot dropped him to the floor. She grabbed her bag and cigarettes, then darted out of the room across the parking lot into the woods. The underbrush snatched at her legs and she lost her balance in the cold damp grass. The teenager tumbled down the embankment to the Interstate and lost a shoe in the tumble.

Tammi scrambled to her feet on the breakdown lane. The oncoming headlights overwhelmed her vision. Her stepmother had cut out scores of newspaper articles about runaway girls mutilated by highway weirdos. The local police had conducted yearly seminars warning the girls in her high school the dangers of hitchhiking. Never to the boys. She had no choice. She stuck out her thumb.

A supercharged V-8 engine roared in the motel parking lot. Someone had to stop for her and she didn't care, if her ride was a homicidal maniac as long as she was gone before the GTO got here.

A big white Olds lumbered past by a hundred feet to stop in the breakdown lane. Tammi hobbled on one shoe to the passenger door and jumped inside.

"Go, mister, go."

"Go where?" The long-haired driver examined her, as if she were a danger to herself and him.

"Anywhere, but here." Tammi slammed shut the door.

"You want me take you home?"

"Not home. Anywhere, but there too. Go." Tammi prayed that the driver in the suede jacket wasn't a stoner like most of the heads in her high school. She needed a car jockey like in THE DUKES OF HAZZARD. Someone not afraid of fast.

"Okay, I'm going already." The hippie pulled into traffic at a less than urgent speed. "A girl your age shouldn't be out here this time of night."

"I'm 18." The young driver didn't look like a pervert, but Tammi moved closer to the door.

"More like 17."

"17 or 18, I'm old enough to be here or anywhere else as long as it isn't where I was." Tammi rubbed the bruise on her face. "Where you headed, Mister?"

"New York."

"Same as me?" She couldn't believe her luck.

"You have family there?"

"I have no family there, which is why I'm going there." Tammi bit her lower lip and glanced over her shoulder. A hundred headlights filled the highway. Only one of them mattered to her.

"Shit."

The red GTO roared up to the Olds with the horn blowing.

"Who's that?"

"Mistah, I swear to God this guy will kill me, if you stop." Tammi clasped her hands together in a frantic plea. "Go faster."

"You think this piece of shit can outrun a Goat?" The driver looked over at GTO. The Olds 88 had a Rocket V-8. The GTO had a turbocharged 455. The Olds wasn't as fast as the GTO, but it outweighed the muscle car by at least five- hundred pounds. Screams through the passenger window contorted the slick-haired motörhead's face. His words lost on the wind.

"I can't read lips, but your boyfriend doesn't seem too happy about you skipping out on Thanksgiving dinner."

"He's not my boyfriend."

"He's no stranger either."

"Watch out," Tammi shrieked a warning.

The GTO's veered within an inch of driver's side and the hippie steered the Olds 88 clear of a sideswipe.

"This will knock the fight out of that asshole." The hippie reached under the seat to come up with a tire iron.

"Mister, don't stop. I'm serious about him killing me." Tammi begged the driver.

"No one's killing anyone tonight." The hippie juked the steering wheel to the left and the GTO avoided sideswiping the Olds 88. "My father always says a car is the most dangerous weapon in America, especially when the driver doesn't give a shit about his car."

"Mister, he has a gun."

The pistol pointed straight at them.

The long-haired driver slammed on the brakes and the GTO nosed ahead of the Olds. A flash of fire spurted inside the muscle car. No bullet cracked the windows and the hippie dropped the tire iron on the floor.

"You're right. We're not stopping." He clenched the steering wheel with both hands.

"What are you going to do?" She locked her fingers together not to God, but to the driver of the 88.

"Not give him a second chance to kill us." The hippie checked the road ahead and behind of the two cars. The Interstate was strangely empty. "Hold on."

The Olds swung behind the GTO and the driver stepped on the accelerator. The solid steel bumper rear-ended the muscle car and the GTO fishtailed off the highway into a copse of saplings. Tammi clapped her hands with delight. The driver pushed the Olds over 100 mph.

"Keep an eye out for the GTO." The hippie didn't break a smile.

"I don't see it." Tammi's heart beat a long drum roll in her chest.

"Good."

A road sign announced an exit a half-mile ahead. The Olds reached the off-ramp in twenty seconds and swept up the exit onto a country road.

"This isn't the highway to New York."

"We're taking the back roads to avoid your friend. It'll add an hour or more, but better than having someone shoot at us again. That okay by you, Cinderella?"

"Whatcha mean, Cinderella?"

"You're wearing a party dress with one shoe, so I think___"

"Mister, this ain't no pumpkin truck and I'm no Cinderella, but I do have a drunk stepmother and a wicked stepsister at home," Tammi snapped, and then apologized, "Sorry, mister. It's been one of those nights."

"I hope they don't happen all the time." He slowed the Olds down to a safe speed.

"Enough." She rubbed her face, nearly on the verge of tears. "You have matches, mister?"

"There might be a pack by your feet. They're not mine, so I have no idea how long they've been there."

"Old is better than none." Tammi lit a cigarette and smoked in silence, waiting for the hippie to say something. It didn't take him long.

"When I was your age, I never hit a woman." He studied the rising bruise on her cheek.

"Guys hit girls and worse all the time."

"This isn't just about the guy with the GTO. Care to tell me about it?"

"No." she sighed a cloud of smoke, then shrugged with adolescent apathy.

The driver shook his head.

"Jack Kerouac in ON THE ROAD wrote that the worst thing about hitchhiking was having to prove to the driver that it wasn't a mistake."

"You want a story, I'll tell you a story. At the Turkey Day pep rally this football jock bragged about how he and his team fucked me and cheerleaders called me a ‘slut'. I fought with the head cheerleader and won. The dean of discipline sided with the goody-two-shoes and I got suspended for two weeks. At home my stepmother and I got into a shouting match. I ran away. That guy in the GTO gave me a ride. He was wrong about my enjoying a cheap weekend in a dirty hotel and I fought him off and ran to the highway. You stopped and off we went. End of story."

Tammi's cigarette trembled in her fingers

"Fucked up Thanksgiving Day."

"You got that right, mister, one more thing. A favor."

"Such as?" The hippie cracked his window to vent the smoke. The cold air felt cold.

"No more questions." Tammi tugged the miniskirt over her knees.

"Sure, if you do me one." The driver shrugged his answer. He had heard enough.

"What?" She expected the worse. "Stop calling me mister."

"You have a problem with ‘mister'? What's wrong with that?" Tammi called every ‘mister' over twenty-one that to prevent their thinking that they were her age, because juvenile fantasies died long deaths in men.

"Mister makes me feel a thousand years old. I'm only twenty-four. You're not Cinderella and I'm not Mister. The name's Sean."

"Mine's Tammi. Now if you don't mind, I'd like to catch some sleep, Sean?"

Tammi laid her head against the cold glass. Maybe the hippie was a killer, but at this point dead sounded better than alive.

"I'll wake you in New York."

"Thanks, Sean." Tammi shut her eyes.

A few minutes later she fell asleep and the Olds 88 cruised along the dark country back roads at the legal limit of 55 MPH.

The hippie turned the radio dial without finding a station. He shut off the staticand glanced over to the girl on the front seat. She should have been home in bed, but her business was none of his and he stepped on the gas.

Ten seconds later the Olds disappeared into the shadowless night. A dog barked at its passing and then the hound went back to sleep. New York was less than a hundred miles away.

MAYBE TOMORROW - A novel by Peter Nolan Smith Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

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

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

"Hey, man."

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

"Thanks for letting me finish?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"To go where?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It was?"

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

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

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

"Only one problem." Johnny gestured toward Manhattan.

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

"I'm not leaving this behind."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Times Square?" Frankie sighed with resignation.

"Times Square is about luck."

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

"Exactly."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Watch out, Johnny."

Two taxis swerved to avoid the guitarist.

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

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July 13th 1978 - Journal

Hung over from a night drinking at CBGBs. The English band Wire headline the the show. Another great set with their hit, I AM THE FLY IN THE OINTMENT. The front row loaded with young teenage girls in love with Richard Hell, who was in the audience. He gets all the girls. Bill Yusk offer me some grass. I turned him down. I haven't smoked anything in in the last two weeks when I was in West Virginia. I've never really liked marijuana and while many of my high school and townie friends in their 60s huff weed. I didn't smoke until I graduated from high school. My friends and I were my 1967 VW Beetle. The sunroof open. Coming back from Nantasket Beach. A beautiful day in the Atlantic. Tommy Jordan hit up a joint, and I said, "Let me have some of that."

After a few pops the world changed, slowed down, the clock stopped ticking. The Chambers Brothers TIME was on the radio. We stopped at the red light on Beale Street n Hingham, where Route 3A turns from the harbor. A horn honked from behind us. The light had changed. Maybe once maybe twice maybe three times. The song was over. I shifted into first and we drove away. For the next year I smoked almost every day trying to relive that high.

LATER

I lie in the bed of my SRO room on 11th Street. It's a small bed. Too small for two people. Alice is dead asleep. At CBGBs she had been drinking Jack Daniels. Three glasses knocked her out. Her feelings were hurt because no one flirted with her. I flirted with no one. Klaus was with his girlfriend, Claudia. A starkly beautiful dominatrix. She wants nothing to do with me. Klaus is the opposite. We talked to a leather bound redhead, who was passing from consciousness to Oblivion. I make out with her. Alice is too drunk to see. Klaus was caressing me, very friendly after our last tirade at Kiev when I called out Samo, for recording me with a tape recorder. He was very angry about that.

Afterwards I ignored everyone. Only interested in drinking and playing pinball.

LATER

Last night after CBs Alice wanted to make sex. She had a hard time taking her clothes and I let her fall asleep unmolested. My hangover is brutal an this my head feels as if I have two barbell stuck in my skull.

I get up and shower in the hallway bath room. It is relatively clean for once . And everyone has gone to work. I take my time and come back to bed extremely clean. Alice is still in a shambles with her plastic skirt down to her knees and your bra around her neck. We've been together for the last two weeks twenty-four hours a day. I love to get a real place soon so that we can escape from one another to another room instead of this one room.

She looks over her bare shoulder, "Please fuck me. Maybe cumming will help my hangover."

I do

LATER

Jimmy Carter's in Berlin. I hear it on the radio. A Berliner asks, "When will Berlin be united?"

"Ah wish ah knew, but ah don't." It was an honest answer, but the American people can't stand him. They blame him for the week of economics and are defeat in Vietnam can we have a 12% inflation rate it shows no signs of stopping.

LATER

CBGBs as I said was fun. Kyle serve me plenty of vodka tonics. She has a vicious crush on Richard Lloyd from Television, who her sister Kim says is crazy. Kim loves Greg from the Revlons. Serena is pissed at Sean, who inherited $300,000. At the bar he gave Serena and me shit about not having any money.

"We don't need money. We get drinks for free."

But Serena is hurt about the money, because he never told her. She found out from his father at Film House when she was taking care of the wife, old money bags. I don't care. if he has money. And no one really bothers me, but I do like Sean he's smart and he's funny you're probably smarter than me fro money. I certainly aren't no smart after as much as I drink last night .

LATER

My hangover is gone. And I'm drinking a beer at Dojos. The bartender loves me. The owner always waves for her to give me one. I don't know why, but I sort of vaguely remember saving him from some thugs trying to rob the place. I spent the afternoon wandering through the village and Soho. Allison with Kim did you see the Three Stooges Festival. Three hours of Mo, Larry, cheese. I had enough when I was a kid. They are still Our Heroes.

Drinking is destroying my libido. This morning and I was fucking and I couldn't come. Faked an orgasm again with Alice on top of me. Afterwards we have each other. Your body naked feels like flesh tailored from me alone.

PHOTO BY EUGENE MERINOV

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Much more to come__

BLOOD AND MUSCLES @ CBGBs - 1978

1978
The Hell’s Angels frequented CBGBs.
A rough Bowery bar.
No one challenged their claim
To the punk rock venue.
The Angels scared off other asshole bikers
Although not every night.
The Cramps first played to a packed house
Garage rock fans and some Jersey bikers.
The Cramps
Rocking,
As if the world was diving into the sun tomorrow.
I Was a Teenage Werewolf, Strychnine, The Way I Walk.
My hillbilly girlfriend hip-shimmying
Head banging
Dear Alice
A hillbilly Alice she was
Baptized by moonshine
At a West Virginia home
Not far from the coal-mining hollows.
She as hillbilly
As it gets in New York
She loved the Cramps.
During the encore
two Jersey biker chicks jumped the stage
Obviously go-go dancers
Tramps in the best sense of the word.
James Chance, a man of danger
Joined them biker sluts
Fondling their stripper breasts.
Their boyfriends in the front row.
The saxist stuck out his tongue.
The girls thought him funny.
Not so the bikers.
They jumped onto the stage.
Chance's skin and bones versus the bikers’ motorcycle muscle.
A solid right cracked Chance's nose.
Blood spurt onto a dirty white shirt
A b-movie actor scrambled on the stage
To rescue his skinny friend.
Eric Mitchell.
The half-Cherokee stepped between the biker and Chance.
The band played another chorus of Surfing Bird.
This was CBGBs.
Alice grabbed my arm.
"Not your fight."
The biker looped a slow overhead right.
His fist loudly impacted on the actor’s nose.
A crack louder than the Surfing Bird
Blood splattered everywhere.
Merv the bouncer threw out the bikers.
They left without a struggle.
The 6-6 doorman
A punk version of the Addams Family’s Lurch.
Even the Angels feared Merv.
The next night Eric entered the bar
A black eye.
Chance sported a double badge of honor.
That night the two
Everyone’s darlings,
Because at CBGBS
There was never any shame in losing.

Foto by Andrey Armyagov

First Night At CBGBs

Punk Rock Thailand - 2008

Back in the last decade when i was living in Thailand I received an email from Willem Dafoe mentioning his having read Legs McNeil's punk opus PLEASE KILL ME.

"Just finished kind of fun- kind of junky- no pun intended PLEASE KILL ME- An Uncensored History of Punk. All interview excerpts-a lot of bragging about drugs and who fucks who. Some people and places I knew- most I didn't."

I reported to my old friend that I was always surprised by the number of Sid Vicious tee-shirts worn by young Thai kids and that they actually know Sid was the Sex Pistols' bass player, who killed his girlfriend.

"Bhang-tee."

Maybe, right?

GOD SAVE THE QUEEN.

Punk rock is one of few phrases in Thai that is the same in English.

Thailand has the right combination of negative aspects to instill a small segment of the youth with the feeling of 'no future'.

Punk 101 BOWLING FOR DOLLARS, COBC's ULTIMATE PUNK LOVE SONG and Nicole Theriault's MAI CHAI MAI CHAI are more natural heirs to the Ramones than Big Ass who were originally pop rock fame and fortune seekers like ex-Mouseketeer Avril Lavigne.

My delinquent niece living outside of Boston said of Avril, "She's a poseur."

I threw her CD into the trash.

I love punk rock, having spent 1976-78 at CBGBs and Max's Kansas City. Of the nearly 3000 bands the best show was by the Whorelords.

A one-night wonder with Bobby Steele on guitar who wrote the following; "My first experience at CBGB's was a Patti Smith concert, probably late 1976/early 1977, but it was my second time there, to see The Ramones and Cramps, when I began to meet new friends - like Deb O'Naire, who went on to greatness with the Fuzztones, and Bobby Ebs, who went on to... well, we don't like to talk about those things."

"It was also the night that I first met the members of the Cramps, who, onstage, bore the most intimidating personas I'd ever seen; but offstage turned out to be the nicest people. On my third or fourth time there, for the DICKIES/B52s, I met Xcessive and we ended getting booted out of CBGBs for smoking weed in the Ladies Room by Karen Krystal, Hilly's wife. Once we were outside, Hilly came out, told us to lay low for awhile and then we could sneak back in as long as Karen didn't see us. Hilly was cool.

My first 'gig' at CB's was when I was playing guitar in the Whorelords. Someone had stashed beers in one of the drum cases, and got caught, and our set was cancelled. We tried to argue, and plead to be allowed to play, but once the Hells Angels arrived - we knew it was time to leave.

Then, I joined The Misfits - a Max's Kansas City band - and I had a new home, at least for awhile, as I weathered my exile from CBGB's. Over time, I was exiled from almost every established NYC club that was worth going to, and that was it until I re-emerged with The Undead and, out of necessity, started a new scene a few blocks east of CBGB's in the no-man's land then known as Alphabet City. Once The Undead's name had been established, and while the booking people at CBGBs were still unaware of my new band, I had a friend put us into both of these clubs. I returned to CBGB's and played for my very first time - in November 1981. From then on my relationship with CBGB's...and especially Hilly, was solid.

I'd heard the constant rumors that Hilly ripped off bands, and all the other cliches of disgruntled bands, so I devised a method of keeping track at the door myself...either by handing the doorman 300 Undead pins to hand out to paying customers, and then counting how many were left at the end of the night; or by having a rotating "counter" watch the door, and click a button on the pocket counter. Each time, we were paid for more people than we counted; and the one time we played to a packed room and walked away with a mere $150, I returned the next day and confronted Hilly. He politely pulled out a book, showed me the numbers for the night, and a list of all the "comped guests" - musicians that always get in free. It was a huge list, but I could recall seeing each person the night before... There was no discrepancy, nor dishonesty, and I've defended Hilly on that count, religiously, ever since. This incident was what solidified a mutual relationship between Hilly and myself for the last 25 years.

To me, Hilly was that 'cool uncle' everyone wishes they had. He's owned the coolest dive in the world for how long? When I was hospitalized, he took the time to cross town and visit me. When someone he entrusted to handle the booking got nasty with me - and I stopped playing CBGB’s, Hilly finally asked me why, and I told him. He instructed me to meet him that very next Tuesday at CBGB's, and when I got there he made it clear that I was to get a Friday or Saturday headline slot. No other club owner would ever do that.

When I learned that CBGB's was being evicted - after being the catalyst that led to the improvement of the Lower East Side - I was no less than broken-hearted. When I sought out an apartment, I wanted it to be within walking distance of CBGB's. Now, with my 'home away from home' closing its doors for good - and seeing how the East Village has become Ethnically Cleansed by a lily-white, Liberal populace that would rather not have to look at such unsightly reminders of days past as CBGB's, Bowery bums, homeless - and any darker-skinned races - I can't be more pissed. For all CBGBs has done for NYC, the Lower East Side, the East Village - and for the world of rock and roll... none of the newcomers give a rat's ass. I'm sure that, by this time next year, a new club will have opened at 315 Bowery, and it'll be just one more snooty Jazz establishment, frequented by people who will insist that 'Republicans will eradicate all rock and roll music', as their Liberal Democrat friends continue to rape a once vital and ethnically diverse neighborhood.

Bobby Steele was thrown out of the Misfits and formed the Undead with my friend Patrick Blanck on drums.

Patrick died an early death.

Lots of punks followed the old line, "Live fast, die young."

I luckily survived through no fault of my own to tell about the Whorelords' legendary show at CBGBs with 15 year-old runaways as go-go dancers in torn dresses. Their lead singer attracted that type of crowd, unfortunately the band lead a Johnny Thundersesque existence.

Band History

Bobby Snotz formed this band in 1978 with Tarik Schapli. Because Tarik hadn't been playing guitar for long, Barry (and later Bobby Steele) joined the band as second guitarist. The Whorelords performed live several times while Bobby Steele was in the band; he left when he was asked to join The Misfits. Along with The Whorelords came a group of Whorettes (Charlotte Harlotte, Diedre, Carry Hamilton, and Rachel Rage) who did background vocals. Some members of The Whorelords went on to form Hell Sent, who opened for The Misfits in September 1979. A Whorelords reunion show took place that weekend when Bobby Snotz showed up and replaced Hell Sent's singer Kate K-Mart to perform a set of Whorelords songs. After spending a few years in jail, Snotz reformed the band in 1982. At some point during this time, they recorded a demo tape (with Pete Marshall on guitar) that has never been released. Bobby Snotz and Tarik also recorded as The Fiends on the New York Thrash compilation. Snotz was beaten to death in 1992.

Beaten to death?

Punk rock lives in Thailand and everywhere in the world.

June 13, 1978 - Journal

This morning a knock on my SRO door.It was Ernie the porter for 27 11th Street. An eviction notice in his hand. He was about fifty. I had never saw him outside the building. No one had, almost as if he were in hiding, but he always said hello. Friendly.

"I have nothing to do with this. If you pay right away. There's no problem. This is an SRO. The owners are used to people having no money."

"Will they change the locks?" I owed three weeks. $45 per week. $135. I had $63 in my pocket. I already had borrowed from everyone I knew. Alice had given $60. She only earned $120 a week. No one at CBGBs was rich.

"Can I pay one week."

"Yes, that will buy you a few days."

"That's all I need." I shut the door and sat on the sagging bed. This SRO was bad, but not the bottom. Flophouses like the Palace Hotel over CBGBs were worst. Drunks and junkies crashed there. Here the residents had jobs. Not in banking. Not union. Just jobs like mine. A waiter in an executive dining room on Wall Street. Worse was the street.

I sat with my nerves jangling, wondering where I was going to get $75 more. I had my last unemployment check from my teaching job in Boston for $110 coming. Not tomorrow and probably next week. I could ask my boss at Ebasco for an advance. Until then I'll have to avoid the manager. Arthur hates all of us. Like we were to blame for his having a crappy job. George, who worked as a dishwasher at a hotel, said the manager had been fired fom the Plaza for stealing. No jail, just sentencing to sit in the office at the door. Like Ernie. He never left the building.

S*** this does wonders for my nerves. My boss at work get in advance on money. He doesn't know, it said to ask Arthur this afternoon. I avoided him yesterday, cuz I thought this wouldn't be a problem. I was wrong it is a problem

Work isn't going to answer this problem. Hustling 53rd and 3rd to get some money. $20 is my soul worth up there. I have to get a new job

Later standing at the windows the dining room 27 floors above Wall Street. Jersey across the river behind that the monster continent of America stretches in some 3,000 miles. For the last month I've been confined to this island. 2 miles by 15 Mi is all I know. I have no idea. Concrete sidewalks asphalt streets and steel skyscrapers cover Manhattan except for 4th Central Park. I crave real nature

Later

The end of the road in Seattle I-90 Hobos under the bridge This is Skid Row Nowhere else to go Alaska to the north No roads go there Only ferries No money Stay in Seattle On the continent's edge.

CBGBs was really boring last night I need a break from that place hang out at a bar without having to inhale one the smoke from other people's cigarettes. I couldn't hear what anybody says the light is poor your senses deprived by the punk rock drunk. I should just give it all up and headed west. America's first step from here is New Jersey. And that thought is enough to make me go nowhere.

Later

I get my check early from Ebasco.

Hopefully Ernie will let me back into 11 West 11th Street very sweaty. There are tramps camping kind of Bleeker Street. One has a Barcalounger. A lamp plug into nothing. He so comfortable I wish I could be as comfortable. He needs no money. I have no money. I should just hit the road. The bum is cultivating a rock garden. He doesn't take his boots off. Many bums do and put them under their heads don't get stolen sleep drunk. This one is different his name is Jim. He comes from Kansas. He hasn't been back there in over twenty years.

The highway is lonely play tonight. Strangers driving westward. Maybe leaving their wives, homes, jobs. I have nothing. Last Chance on the Interstate bar girls beer booze all you want open all night to all the lights nowhere Nevada. Sounds like paradise. Free.

Later

And over the phone at the SRO dropping quarters $3 for three minutes. We both express our love and she told me," "It was a mistake to come back to West Virginia. Maybe you should come back and teach school again in Boston."

It was a solid plan. I was going nowhere, but friends live there anymore. Alice isn't coming nack. I have nothing here, but so does everyone else.

Journal Entry - January 4, 1978

I've slept with Fran several times this week. The Park Slope artist and I met at the Gslight Pub on 7th Avenue. She broke up with her boyfriend, who used to knock on the door, while we were making love. She shushed me and continued to a silent orgasm. Any time I exited from her President Street ground-floor apartment, I checked out the sidealk for him. I had no idea what he looked like. Fran wants to nail down my freedom. I don't know why.

Last night at One-Fifth Bert, Cecile, and I discussed romance. Bert is a homosexual portrait painter with a receding hairline and Cecile an older woman with a very avant-grade view of innocence. She loves make-up and dressing like a fag hag. Given my freedom I would love to seduce her or be seduce by her.

"Romance? Isn't that what we all want?"

Cecile wore diamonds on her finger and around her delicate neck. Cecile came from wealth and I wondered whether if having too much money killed any approach to sexual adventure with the unrich like myself.

"Romance is a perfect ideal, but..."

"But what..." Burt asked with his eyes on my crotch.

"I deal more with freedom. Sexual freedom is threatened by romance or love. Carson McCullers wrote in THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFE "Most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover, because being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.”

Cecile's eyes widened and she said, "I had been married for twenty-five years. On New Year's Eve my husband finally admitted he was gay. Everyone was shocked. I had known all along. We divorced, so he could be with his lover or lovers and for the first time in my life I was free."

"You didn't have to divorce..." Burt started to say, but Cecile lifted her hand, "Yes, but my husband loves no one more than a bottle of vodka and I could always deal with Hal being queer, but when he's drunk, he's only with drink. This New Year's Eve he drank so much."

"It's too bad he does." Burt looked at me, as if I might be able to cure Cecile's loneliness. "You should go to CBGBs with your young friend."

"How did you spend New Year's Eve? I was alone," she confessed a confidence and his eyes showed the hurt.

I was with friends and strangers at Cisco Disco. I can't remember a thing, but my ass does." Burt was in his fifties, but still very handsome. He loved the back rooms, as did anyone wanting to fuck.

"I got tight."

"Tight?"

"Drunk.

"With everyone and no one. I wanted no one."

"Neither did I, but I had the best time, because I was free."

"One night of freedom is only one night."

"Better one night than none and I love the freedom." Cecile signaled the bartender for another round for us and I lowered my head, thinking about how lonely loneliness was, as the hours of a New Year slipped away without anyone to help pass the time.

I know alone too well.

Later

I entertained Ro and her friend, Sally at Broadway Charlies. I drank hard and missed a rendezvous with Fran. I called and said I couldn't make it to Brooklyn.

"Why can't you meet me?"

"I have errands to run." I hoped she wouldn't ask any questions about why and she didn't. We made plans to meet tomorrow. I warned that I wouldn't wake up before noon. She said, "Why do you treat me like I'm nothing?"

"I don't know."

And that was the truth.

Even later

Racism. White people against anyone of color. African or Asian and let's not forget the extermination of the Native Americans. Slavery of them all is how White people stay ahead. Since 1621.

Journal Entry - January 1, 1978

Death to 1977

Onto a year of 78 RPM.

It's snowing and I'm watching the Broncos beat the Raiders. 20-17.

Last night at 27th Street was weird. I hit on Alta. We made up and dry-humped in a dark corner. She begged off fucking. I accepted her no, got drunk, puked outside, and sobered up enough to last the rest of the night. Death to disco.

I've always said, "All I need is food and shelter."

Here in New York I eat foreign foods, mostly pizza and falafel sandwiches and live at a SRO hotel on West 11th Street off 5th Avenue. My 10' by 10' by 8' room has linoleum floors, a small bed, a sink, and white walls. $40/week. An imperfect cube located in a good neighborhood. What else can I do, except work as a busboy and rock out at CBGBs, where youth is eternal, the nights run long, and "Do anything you want to do."

My job at Serendipity sucks, but I love my fellow queer waiters and busboys. It also provide constant cash for a punk lifestyle in a blown-out city. The 60s were a time of no limits, while the 70s have borders on people like us, who fled the rest of America, and I foresee the 80s as a time of increasing corporate fascism with fear stealing people of their identity as humans. Most Americans think, "Who cares as long as I can eat potato chips?" "But there are two more years left in the 70s. Romantically I deal with illusions and hope for fantasies to become real, but Ro left to Paris the day I came here in May, although I recently overheard Andy Reese say to his fellow hustler Frank Holiday, "Ro is in Greensboro. I really like her." "Are she and Kirk going to get married," Frank asked, while I shivered silently with shock.

"They are pretty heavy." Andy answered, looking for a reaction from me.

I showed none, but earlier I called Andy Kornfeld, who had read my unmailed letters to her and laughed, "You can throw away those letters. She probably has thousands from other failed lovers. You just have to understand she hates men, because of an ex-lover, who wasn't you. She was like that when I met her long ago."

Our affair meant nothing to her and left me with scar tissue on my heart. I was nothing to her other than a body in a bed, and my hopes were an exaggeration of my desires.

On other fronts Fran Malin remains in Brooklyn. I haven't been avoiding her, but she lives across the East River and she is a little insane. She might have feelings for me, but can't leave her boyfriend for good. Once when we were having sex, he knocked on the door.

"Fran, I know you're in there."

"Say nothing and don't stop fucking me," she whispered locking her legs around my knees.

I stayed hard as she moaned breathlessly, humping in synch with her boyfriend's knocking.

Libby has disappeared into New York. I wonder where she is.

Two days ago Tim Dunleavy told me, "Ann gave me a present for you. and it looks like a good one."

What could it be?

Will Alice come to New York again after finishing her college in Ohio?

We met at a birthday party for Janet Stephenson, who I was seeing at the time. I left with Ann and her friend and had sex with both of them in a Upper East Side townhouse's unheated pool. I think of her more as a companion than a consort and when she left to go back to college, "I always feel physically responsibly to anyone who spends money on me."

I had only paid the taxi.

Was that the sole reason for fucking me?

A LITTLE LATER

Today I went to Jimmy Day's, Blimpie's, Solo's on 52nd Street, Cowwboy's on 53rd, The Plaza Cafe, Dazzel on the West Side, back to Jimmy Days, to a closed Max's Kansas City, over to Broadway Charlies, CBGBs, and One-Fifth and finally to crash at my SRO room

A wasted evening.

No women or friends.

I even called Ann long distance from a phone booth.

No answer.

Alice's gift was a sarcastic note and William Goldman's MAGIC, which has too much dialogue to be a novel, but not a movie script.

1977 is over for good.

It's 1978 minus one.

Journal Entry - December 31 1977

The last day of 1977.

365 days.

The most important; moving from Boston, Libbie's rejecting me, Ro's leaving for hours before I arrived in New York in a semi-stolen car, and staying her no matter what. I was never going back to the Selma of the North.

On the 7th Avenue Line

I hit bed in the SRO early. The radio was on. The announcer said it was twenty to five. I had missed the stroke of twelve. New Year's at CBGBs. Five vodkas fucked me up....I lay on my whirling bed, wishing the mattress had handles.

TORA TORA TORA 2011

published 2011 Like JFK's assassination everyone of a certain age remembered where they were during the announcement of the Japanese attack on the US Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor. Many had to ask, "Where's Pearl Harbor?"

This morning to commemorate their ignorance I posed the same question to younger people on the streets of Manhattan. Few of them had a clue other than two Japanese punks who said it was a group from the 1970s.

"As we get old, we forget. As we get older, we are forgotten."

TORA TORA TORA

ps Pearl Harbor and The Explosions released 'Drivin' in November of 1979. I saw them perform their debut single somewhere. I think it was at CBGBs.

NOVEMBER 11, 1978 - JOURNAL ENTRY - EAST VILLAGE

Kenya, the River Platte, Flanders
Vienna, Istanbul, Berlin
Versus
Moscow, London, and Paris
1914 to 1918
An assassination in Sarajevo to the Treaty of Versailles
World War I
Machine guns, trenches, blood
Airplanes, Zeppelins, blood
Gas, barbed wire, blood
Death in a thousand fields
Verdun
Gallipoli
Tannenburg
Emperors' armies
Nations' will
Men's blood
Victory and defeat
The kaiser in exile,
The sultan deposed,
The Tsar eliminated by the New Men
Yanks, Krauts, Limeys, Frogs, Aussies
Ivans, Turks, Pollacks
Greeks, Serbs, Slavs,
Japs, I-ties, and Scots
Dead by the millions and at the eleventh minute
Of the Eleventh hour
Of the Eleventh day
Of the Eleventh Month
In the year of 1918
A ceasefire for the War to End All Wars.
For a few years.

I'm alone in bed, reading John Toland's 1918 THE LAST YEAR. Alice rose early and went to Club 57. Her true home. I have classic music from a Philadelphia radio station, a bottle of 1972 Bordeaux, and a joint. No naked body. Alice still thinks she's too fat to have sex. I think the opposite, but the mirror tells the truth to everyone with their own reflection.

My evening plans are to go to a party and then hit CBGBs. I avoid Club 57. Susan and my old friends, the boys from East 6th Street; Frank Holiday, Andy Reese, and William Lively make me uncomfortable IN that club. Someone spread a rumor that I had robbed Tim Dunleavey. I suspect Andy Reese and Frank Holiday. They are junkies, plus I prefer CBGBs. The bartenders like me. I flirt with girls. Guadalcanal and I snort coke. Not everyone is so friendly. A drunk from New Jersey wanted to fight me. Guadalcanal grabbed the thug and chucked him out with Merv, the Gentle Giant, at the door.

"That was nothing," says Guadalcanal.

Yeah, that's all everything is."

"I meant that guy."

Alice and her crowd show up. I wave to Lisa Crystal, Holly's daughter, let in my girlfriend and tell the others to pay. They've come to see Pere Ubu, an art band from Cleveland. Sort of a punk Meat Loaf. Alice comes to the bar.

"Can't you get Susan in for free?"

"It's not my bar."

"I'll pay for her."

"Why can't she pay for herself?"

Alice makes a face. I figure the two area couple. We haven't made love this week. Maybe not last week either.

The Club 57 set come in without saying 'hello'.

I leave with Guadalcanal.

"Before I came here, I thought Boston was small, but everyplace is small, if you only go to the same places every night."

"You could always broaden your horizons by joining the real world. Get a 9 to 5. Wear a tie."

"Yeah, I could always do that." I have a fear of ending up like Peter Willen, my Aunt Mary's beau. A socialist with smoke-stained teeth. My mother is scared of that fate for me too.

The GOP scored massive gains in the 1978 mid-term elections. White men hated President Jimmy Carter, They want a strong America to face the USSR.

Prior to the vote the GOP controlled twelve states, now they have eighteen thanks to the media's portrayal of America losing its way; i.e. the grip of white people over the rest of Americans; Black, Spanish, Asian, and under-paid working classes.

Massachusetts was served by Republicans Senator Edward Brooke and Governor Frank Sargent. My father hated Sargent for not financing I-95 across the North Shore wetlands. I like them the way they are.

No one says a word about World War I. It ended sixty years ago.

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.

Pinball CBGBs 1978

Throughout the late 1970s I stood at the front of CBGBs for the Contortions, Damned, and the Voidoids. Afterwards I drank beer and play pinball at the back of the club. I was never friends with the big names. The bartenders were my friends, the doorman with the yellow construction helmet let me in for free, college co-eds thought I looked like David Johansson from the New York Dolls and by the time they discovered I was simply a poet, it was too late to try for someone else. I was lucky and CBGBs became my home away from home.

Foto by Bob Gruen

Anarchy in the UK - CBGBs

In November 1976 the Sex Pistols released ANARCHY IN THE UK on the UK. The revolutionary punk song was immediately banned by the BBC. The British authorities were worried about the sensibility of the royalists. Within the week ANARCHY IN THE UK was # 1 on the charts without getting any airplay.

Describing the social context in which the band formed, John Lydon said that mid-seventies Britain was "a very depressing place ... completely run-down, there was trash on the streets, total unemployment, just about everybody was on strike ... if you came from the wrong side of the tracks ... then you had no hope in hell and no career prospects at all." America was no better post-Vietnam after eight years under the rule of the Silent Majority. I fled the racism of Boston to New York, working at gay restaurants. Naturally I somehow found CBGBs and instantly became a punk.

Hilly Krystal, the owner, stocked the great jukebox with the Ramones, New York Dolls, Blondie as well as JOLEEN by Dolly Parton. We thought we were the only punks in the world and gloried on striking out against everything, but we were wrong and one night in late 1976 someone played ANARCHY IN THE UK and we were not alone. The Sex Pistols changed the scene. Punk was everywhere. LA, Boston, Germany, everywhere.

And still is.

Forty-eight years ago everything changed.

Forever

At least for us.

May 15, 1978 - CBGBS - JOURNAL

I spoke to Alice before she took off from Charleston. I offered to meet her at LaGuardia. Arrival time was late at night. She said she was just going to her apartment. Only seven more days or so to her college performance at The Ensemble Studio Theater. THE GENTLEMEN FROM VERONA. Shakespeare. I have only seen a hippie troupe performing MIDSUMMER NIGHT DREAM in the Boston Common and AS YOU LIKE IT after the blackout a year ago. The city had been so quiet.

I said I would see you tomorrow I went to cbgb's. Strangely playing pinball my shoelaces broke a strange omen.

Alice has become so distant. She loves in the theater. I have a life in the theater too. But only as a spectator. On the outside looking in.

Excessive man from CBGBs. I don't know for what. Maybe cuz he's only 15. He's been banned before. his father came down and told Hilly not to let him in. This won't last same as the others. X is a die-hard punk.

I will miss him, since the 15 year old guitarist is the only other player in CBGBs.

Pinball is my relief from frustration in anger. When I play I think it's nothing more escaping the gravity of the death hole touching the flippers to prevent the ball disappearing.

I rarely tilt.

Mayor LaGuardia in the thirties send the police to smash all the pinball machines. He explained this action, by saying " pinball machines steal money."

He was right, but not for people like me who basically play for free games.

I started playing at the amusement centers of Washington Street up from the Combat Zone, then the Phoenix bar on Commonwealth Avenue, the Bright Spot in Allston, 15 Lansdowne, days of Buchanan's underneath the Lenox Hotel, blue Ranch by the Greyhound bus stop, The Gaslight Pub in Park Slope, The Ocean Club on Chambers Street, and now cbgb's.

I played all over America and only found several players of my caliber; Xcessive, Micel the French bartender from The Gaslight Pub, and Fran Malin, not that she was as good as me, but she humped the pinball machine savagely he's thrust pushing the ball back into space. I asked if she f*** the same way.

She said yes.

It was the truth.

BLOOD AND MUSCLES @ CBGBs – 1978

1978
CBGBs.
A rough Bowery bar.
The Hell's Angels home
Away from the clubhouse
No one challenged their claim
To the punk rock venue.
The Angels scared off other asshole bikers
Although not every night.
The Cramps
From Memphis
First show in NYC
A packed house
Garage rock fans and some Jersey bikers.
Rocking,
As if the world was diving
Into the sun tomorrow.
Rocking
I Was a Teenage Werewolf, Strychnine, The Way I Walk.
My hillbilly girlfriend hip-shimmying
Like a drunk cheerleader.
I so loved her.
A hillbilly Alice was
Baptized by moonshine
In West Virginia
Her home
Not far from the coal-mining hollows.
She was as hillbilly
As hillbilly gets in New York
She loved the Cramps.
During the encore
Two Jersey biker chicks jumped the stage
Obviously go-go dancers
James Chance, a man of danger,
Joined the two tramps
Fondling their stripper breasts.
Their boyfriends in the front row.
The saxist stuck out his tongue.
The girls thought him funny.
Not so the bikers.
They jumped onto the stage.
Chance was skin and bones
Versus
The bikers’ motrocycle muscle.
A solid right on Chance's nose.
Blood spurt onto his dirty white shirt
A B-movie actor
The star of BLANK GENERATION
Eric Mitchell.
Onto the stage
The half-Pawnee stepped between the bikers and Chance.
The band played another chorus of Surfing Bird.
Alice grabbed my arm.
"Not your fight."
The biker looped a slow overhead right.
His fist impacted on the actor’s nose.
Bone on bone.
A crack louder than Surfing Bird
Blood splattered everywhere.
Eric somehow did not go down
After all he was half-Pawnee
They left without a struggle.
The 6-6 doorman
A punk version of the Addams Family’s Lurch.
Even the Angels feared Merv.
The next night Eric entered the bar with a black eye.
Chance sported a double badge of honor.
That night the two
Everyone’s darlings,
Because at CBGBS
There was never any shame in losing.