JOURNAL ENTRY - AUGUST 5, 1978 - EAST VILLAGE

AUGUST 5, 1979 - EAST VILLAGE

No sign of Hakkim on East 10th Street, but the two young boys, Flacco and Manny, warned, "He ain't done with you. Hakkim a stone cold junkie, but he's stone cold baddd too."

"Fuck him. I fucked him up once. Next time will be worst," I boasted,but walked around the ower East Side looking over my shoulder, especailly in the morning taking Alice to work at the yogurt shop.

Last night Rick Guadacanal, the Heartbreakers' roadie, turned me onto cocaine. We snorted blow in CBGBs toilet. Cocaine is everywhere in New York City and the USA. Last month I dealt a little. It's easy money, if you keep your nose out of stash, a feat for men stronger than me.

Living on East 10th Street means cooking at home instead of eating at Greek diners, although there's nothing like bacon, eggs, and toast at the Kiev after a night of punk music.

This morning I woke up in a hospital. The only time I stayed overnight was at birth.

May 29, 1952.

Sixty-nine years ago.

It's forty-two years upstream from my first days at that apartment at 256 East 10th Street. Alice is living in LA with her husband. I haven't told her that I ave been hospitalize at NYU; my blood count in low after the surgeon stoped the bleeding from my cancerous liver, my blood sugar count was 450, and the doctors have scheduled an ultra-sound for tomorrow.

With all the tubes in me, I can't move around too much. Just to the toilet. I called Guadacanal to keep him the loop. I had visited the punk guitarist in Jersey City during his COVID quarantine. He was now home with his wife in Kansas City. Rick listened to the news and said, "Don't worry, you'll be fine. I got what you probably have ten years ago. No cancer, but my liver was shot. Medicine has advanced since then."

"Yeah, right," I said with the enthusiasm of a hypochondriac. My belief in eternal life had been challenged by the fact that I was wore a shameful 'johnny' with my asss hanging out on my truips to the toilet.

"You'll be out soon enough, but no more drinking."

"No more, unless the doctors tell me to get my affairs in order, then it's back to the 169 to imitate Dylan Thomas body and soul. THe poet had drunk himself to death at the Whitehorse Tavern.

Oh, the glory.I researched on the internet for John Thunders.

ZOMBIE DREAMS by Peter Nolan Smith

Four springs ago Brock Dundee hired my driving services for a road trip across the Midwest. The Scottish filmmaker was seeking out the statues of a dying Irish sculptor in Middle America. His plan was to video the works and then film the the artist seeing his works for the last time.

My boss at the diamond exchange wasn’t happy with my taking off two weeks.

“He’s paying me $1000 a week.” I had been asking for a raise for the last year.

“Have a good trip.” Manny had a good head for numbers. He was saving my salary and fought off another attempt for an increase in my salary.

“Sei Gesund.” I wished the eighty year-old well in Yiddish. His only other language was almost dead.

A week later Brock and I flew to Chicago and hired a car at O’Hare. The Scot didn’t know how to drive, but he unfolded a map to plot out a route on the Interstates.

“No fucking interstates.” I ripped the map off his lap and threw it in the backseat.

“Aren’t the interstates faster?” Brock wanted to visit five statues in St. Louis, Kansas City, Des Moines, and Minneapolis and we had eight days to cover six big states.

“Only if you’re heading to shopping mall.” I-80 was rammed with SUVs and long-haul trucks. I pointed out a state trooper cruising in the opposite direction. “We want to stay far away from them.”

“Aren’t there speed traps on the back roads?” Brock’s vision of rural America had been formed by the movies DELIVERANCE and EASY RIDER.

“The cops go where the money is and that’s the interstates.” I turned off I-80 at exit for Peoria and turned to Brock. “Welcome to The Fly-Over.”

“Fly-Over?” The Scot was unfamiliar with the American term.

“This is the land you fly over from New York to LA.” The square states of the Midwest are mostly flat corn fields. They offer little for New Yorkers, Californians, and Europeans.

“I get it.” Brock relaxed in his seat. He had chosen me for my ability to take the least obvious course of action for the next week we avoided the Interstates like a plague.

Our path wandered along a flooded Illinois River down the broad Mississippi across the spring farmland of Missouri into the terra incognita of Iowa.
Sometimes my Scottish friend and I didn’t have any human contact for hours. The straight roads were devoid of cars. Everyone was on the Interstate heading to a WalMart.

South of Des Moines I remarked to Brock, “Not many people living out here.”
“No reason for anyone to live out here.” The small towns were empty and the big cities looked, as if they had been hit by a neutron bomb.

“Young people move out as soon as they finish high school.” The farmboys treated their boredom with crystal meth. They hid well of of sight.

“Leaving only the dead and the dying.”

“Like we were in a zombie movie.” It was almost as if the real world had been replaced by scenes from MAD MAX II and I accelerated to 100 mph. We hadn’t seen any police cars in days.

“I haven’t seen any zombies.” Brock scanned the bare expanse of fields on either side of the road.

“They would starve out here.” Zombies liked cities, because fat people were slower than them. “I once had a horrible dream about zombies.”

“Really?” Brock took out his camera and shot a minute of the passing void. This trip was as much about us as the sculptor.

“It was 1975. I was 23 at the time. I had caught a Trois Estellas bus from Monterrey, Mexico to Texas.” I hadn’t thought about that bus in ages. driving the car must have resurrected that memory from the grave. “It was a long ride and I was reading a book by HP Lovecraft. THE TERROR AT INNSMOUTH. The bus stopped in a small town. I ate a taco. It tasted a little funny and that night I fell sick with food poisoning. I checked into a small hotel at the border. The Mexican side was cheaper. I lay on the bed with a fever. I read my book and fell asleep. Sometime in the night I dreamed I was being chased through a garden by slow-moving zombies.”

“I hate the way zombies moved fast in RESIDENT EVIL.” My Scottish friend was a horror film buff and he turned to camera to me. A nod was the signal to start my monologue.

“Slow zombies are classic, but there were too many of turtle dead in my dream.” I had told his story a thousand times. It was like reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. “They cut off my escape and I ran to a gazebo. Old screens to keep out mosquitoes covered the windows. I locked the flimsy door. The zombies huddled around the gazebo. Their breath smelled of rotting flesh. They scrapped at the screen with long yellow fingernails. Their teeth ground in anticipation of sinking into my flesh, then a voice deeper than a six-foot grave said, “Tell us the secret of human life.”

“The secret of human life?” Brock like interrupting my spiel. He felt the breaks gave me time to collect my thoughts.

“I didn’t know what the secret of human life was and there was no stalling the zombies either. When they’re hungry, they’re hungry. They broke through the screens. I shut my eyes expecting the worse.” I usually stopped here to check, if I hadn’t lost my audience.

“You’re not supposed to die in dreams.” Brock was listening to every word. He picked up the map. We were coming to a turning.

"Freud said everything was driven by pleasure or death. Death in dreams was a way of understanding your personal sexual repression levels or you hated yourself, which wasn’t the case, since I was 23.” I put on the left-turn signal. The intersection didn't even have a name.

“Freud’s full of Oepidal shit. I’ve seen photos of his mother. She wasn’t worth killing his father for, of course Jung had a different take on death in a dream.

“Screw both of them.” My story had no place for dead psychiatrists. That territory was reserved for Woody Allen. “I tried to wake up, but couldn’t and I heard the voice say, “Tell us the secret of human life and I’ll let you live for another minute.”

“So what happened?” Brock was expecting a horrible demise.

“I realized the secret of human life was that no matter how bad the 61st second would be I still wanted the next 60. The urge to live.”

“And did you tell them to secret?”

“No, I woke up and foiled their attempt to destroy Mankind."

"A hero."

"It's not everyone who saves humanity in their sleep." It had seemed so real, but my flesh bore no teeth marks. " So I’m not really scared of zombies.”

“No?” Brock said that word, as if he wasn’t convinced about their status as myth.

“Zombies exist only in movies and video games. Not all of them bad. You ever see SHAUN OF THE DEAD?”

“That’s not a real zombie movie.” Brock was a traditionalist as was to be expected from a Scot.

I agreed that the British flick wasn't scary, but it was funny and after my dream I like funny zombies better than scary ones. We drove west toward Kansas City. They supposedly had some pretty women their according to Wilbur Harrison’s hit song from 1959.

A pretty girl had to be more fun than a zombie.

Everything Versus Nothing - Lazurus II

Everything I thought about life disappeared with my first death.
On a hospital operating table
I was Michael Jackson on profopol.
Feeling
Nothing but nothing
And the promise of more nothing throughout eternity.

The hereafter was exactly as I had expected.
A wasteland.
White.
Formless.
Nothing.
No God.
No gods.
No Satan.
No heaven or hell.
No purgatory.
No fear.
No pleasure.
No pain.

Then
I sensed something else.
More nothing.
My math education taught
That nothing times something equal nothing.
Nothing was more powerful than everything
And I was okay with eternity with nothing.

Year ago in Thailand
My father had once appeared in a dream.
In his fifties. Strong. Not old. Not young.
I complained about my problems.
He stopped me.
He knew something I didn’t know and said clearly, “Don’t worry. When you’re dead none of those problems will mean nothing.”
I believed him without question.
He had never lied to me.
I wish I could have claimed the same.

I had lied to me all the time.
In this white nothingness that didn’t matter.
The nothingness absolved me of everything.
I searched for something in the nothingness and found nothing.
My humanness argued there had to be something.
Not true.
I had no eyes, nose nose, no ears, no skin, no tongue,
Yet I could feel the nothingness,
Even though it was nothing.
I couldn’t shut off the nothingness.
It felt like forever, then I segued to a dream.
I was on a cutting block. In London
The Smithfield Market.
Butcher's chopping my body.
My guts scattered across the wood table.
No pain.
No terror.
Simply a vacation from the nothingness,
Except it was something worse.

I emerged from death.

Snap.

My eyes opened.
My body on an operating table.
Profopol fading.
My abdomen opened to transplant a liver.
There were no guts to be seen.
No butchers either.
Nurses surrounded the OR table..
“Are you okay?”
The voice from behind me.
I croaked out yes.

Life.
Not death.
Not nothing.
Breathe.
Feel drugs.
Morphine.
Maybe Dilaudid.
I recall saying no Oxys.

This was not a new life.
I had not died.
I had lied to myself.
The nothing was not real.

A doctor
“Everything went well.”
Everything?
But what about the nothing?
Both were simple answers on morphine

Ban Ohio SB-33

On October 27, 1948 a deadly toxic fog of Hydrogen fluoride and sulfur dioxide emissions from U.S. Steel's Donora Zinc Works and its American Steel & Wire plant blanketed the Monongahela River Valley and killed fifty people and infected thousands of people with longlasting respiratory problems.

According to Wikipedia two of the heroes to emerge during the four-day smog were Chief John Volk of the Donora Fire Department and his assistant Russell Davis. Volk and Davis responded to calls from Friday night, the 29th until Sunday night, the 31st, depleting their supply of 800 cubic feet (23 m3) of oxygen, borrowing more from all nearby municipalities, including McKeesport, Monessen, and Charleroi. "I didn’t take any myself. What I did every time I came back to the station was have a little shot of whiskey."

Another murderous coal smog struck London hard in 1952. Thousands died without any repercussions to the coal industry.

Coal killed and no one said how many.

In the autumn of 1995 I lived in the Far West of Ireland. The beaches were glorious and the westbound wind drifted over the primodial bogs carring the whispers of every conversation of Europe. The waves from the North Atlantic blessed my surfer skin with purity.

Ty Spaulding and I had rented a house from Lord Robert Guinnness. His coastal haunt was perfect, however we were exiled to a haunted schoolhouse.

Thick walls emanated the damp and cold of the Connemara Peninsula.

Ty and I burned everything after seeing the rapidly spinning electric heat meter drained our wallets dry.

Neolithic peat heated a three-foot circle around the fireplace.

We bought a fifty-pound bag of Texas Coal # 4.

The embers generated heat

The wandering horses loved to stand by the open door.

I entered the cottage after a long walk through the bogs and found Ty in a near-coma from breathing coal fumes.

Coal was not safe.

Sweaters helped, but one night was so cold that my computer screen screen frozen into the Ice Age.

!995.

The advent of the Internet.

The web helped neither of us get warm, but electric blankets accomplished confort.

Forward tenty-five years and Ohio State Senate Frank Hoagland had forwarded a Senate Bill condemning any and all protests against the fossil fuel industry. Ohio SB-33 languished like a zombie awaiting darness and lastd wek Ohio's GOP house passed the law to beneifit the remaining three thousand coal workers and the coal elite living in Palm Beach.

Frank Hoagland, the GOP sponsor of the bill, had been a US Navy Seal. The man's history seemed much more honorable than this sneak attack on the lungs of a nation.He was betraying his people for the wealth of others i hopes that one day he mght be rich in my eyes. He seemed a better man that that, but my wckedness alllows me vision.

Once more according to Wikipedia under Ohio’s legislation, anyone convicted of stepping foot on critical infrastructure property and “causing another person to believe that the offender will cause physical harm” would be guilty of a first-degree misdemeanor, a class of crime that includes domestic violence and drunk driving and is punishable with up to six months in jail and $1,000 in fines. Those who trespass “with purpose to destroy or tamper with the facility” face third-degree felony charges, which in Ohio can result in up to five years in jail and $10,000 in fines.

Last week I wrote Ohio Senator Hoagland an appeal to his sense of justice, especially as Ohio SB-33 is an affront to the First Amendment.Ohio SB-33. The Freedom of Speech is the Ace in the Hole. It overrules the Right the Bear Arms

Not for the Deplorables.

As A New Englander I believe in a world other than this.

Drinking Yourself To Death

Every week the Pattaya Media highlights another farang leaving this mortal coil from suicide. Favorite methods of self-demise tend to be jumping from a condo, poison, or hanging yourself with a plastic bag around your head, but few people ever comment on the most popular technique ie drinking yourself to the grave, since the process takes too long to be considered suicide. Still you do hear friends saying about the decreased, "He drank himself to death."

While drinking yourself to death might not be pretty, it's certainly not as ugly as hitting the pavement from a 7th floor balcony plus you're in good company. Oliver Reed for one and the church can't ban you from a churchyard burial at which your friends will say, "At leat he went doing what he did best."

So for those desperate souls seeking solace in a final solution. Get yourself a beer. Maybe twelve. A bottle of vodka and one of gin too. At worst the near-death experience will scare you back from the edge as long as you don't get on a motorcycle during this binge, then you'll have people saying, "What was he thinking trying to dirve in that condition?"

And we can't have people speaking of the dead like that.