SEPTEMBER 11, 1978 - JOURNAL ENTRY - EAST VILLAGE

The Red Sox lost to the Yankees 15-3 and they looked bad in defeat. Butch Hobson's elbow needs rest. Yaz's hand in swollen, the Bosox team should have sat for a rest after 3rd inning last night to rest up for the final weeks of the season, although the Red Sox have no chance of make the Playoffs, unless they sweep the six games of the seven-game series.

A dog, a white poodle puppy to be exact, in begging for food on East 10th Street. He has no collar and matted fur. Someone has abandoned him. I wish I could help, but I just finished my bagel and have no money. The Palestinian corner bodega gives nothing on credit. Not even for abandoned dogs.

It is getting colder. I am unprepared for the weather. I have a denim jacket and sweaters. Thankfully my landlord has heard about my painting Alice's house in West Virginia and asked me to painting his hallway and bedroom of their East 65th Street penthouse. I've yet to give him an answer, since I'm scared of fucking up> It's not like I'd ask anyone from CBGBs to help me other than Guadalcanal, who is on tour as a roadie for Johnny Thunders. I have to have more confidence in my myself. If I'm careful I should be able to accomplish the task.

I figure a week's work is worth $500, but hope that thereafter I get regular work.

CBGBs has been closed for tax reasons. Hilly hasn't paid any. I head cross town to Alice's job. She gets out at 1am.

"I'll come back for you later."

She and I are close, but could be closer if I had a steady income.

I ran into Grant Stitt on Christopher Street and spent two hours touring the queer bars.

"Don't they mind a straight man here?" I asked at the Eagle.

Mind straight men. They love straight men and whoever said you're straight. Nothing is happening here. Let's go someplace else." Grant led the way to the International Stud, which prides itself in the blacklessness of its back room for anonymous sex.

"I'm down for a gum job from a toothless man or else a hard cock in my ass."

"When I was a teenager I worked at a suburban hotel. The bearded pot washer was a French Canadian without any teeth. He said it was just like fucking pussy, but nothing smelled as bad as he did. The second cook loved him and swore it was just like a woman only better."

"Enough talk. back room."

I accompanied the New Zealander to the entrance of the back hole.

"C'mon in. No one you know will know." I obeyed his command and inside the windowless abyss shadows pulled down my jeans. Someone sucked my asshole, while another stranger blew me. It didn't feel right and I left Grant to a pigpile of sex adventurers. I ordered a beer and played pinball to avoid any conversation which might lead me back into the inferno of sex.

"Do I look any different?" asked Grant, wiping cum off his shirt and face. He handed me $5. " Got paid."

"How much?"

"Same as always. Did you do it?"

"And then some." He appeared more relaxed than before and leaned against the pinball machine like a hustler on the prowl. He touched my penis and I said, "I have to go meet Alice. She's expecting me," Grant shouted, as I exited from the Stay and added, "Go ahead. be straight. You know what happens to them in the end. They all go queer."

But not that night. I walked Alice home. We held each other for a few minutes. She fell asleep and I read Proust, lasting only a paragraph before deciding to that I was hungry and got dressed to go outside to the Chinese restaurant on 1st Avenue. On the way back from China Star I gave the poodle puppy a chicken breast. The rest I saved for Alice. She liked food cold.

I haven't seen Hakkim in a couple of days and hope the junkie ODed or moved to a warmer climate like Wall Street. ​

I haven't had a dog since Champoo and Whitey in Thailand.

In 2008 I took care of Pom Pom in Pam Beach.

Cats are New Yorkers.

They are stuck in apartments.

Their owners ignore them throughout the day and feed their pets dried food

I haven't had queer sex since 1977.

Forty-four years ago.

I don't know why I quit, but loving Alice was a big reason and I did love her.

"Not just for sex either."

Whenever I tell young people about the sexual adventurism, they are astounded by the lack of guilt and the appectance of lust in the 1970s as a virtue. of the 1970s, but are less pleased when I say that the main reason for the last two decades of sexual atrophy is that most people have never been taught the basics of lust and the Baptists crusade for abstinence has corrupted the freedom of their bodies.

Oh, sex, where have you gone?

Today everyone was talking about 9/11.

The day that changed America forever.

"This country will never be the same," said many of my countrymen, but the old normal had only been replaced by the new normal. The USA fought two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite neither nation having participated in the attacks twenty years ago. I Commented to everyone that Osama Bin Ladin had been living in a cave in fear of American drone missiles and undercover assassins without a phone. His fatwahs were carried to the Tribal borders of Pakistan to be transmitted to his followers. Not one order to the hijackers.

Of course in 1979 America was listening MY SHARONA by The Knack and no one paid any attention to Afghanistan, whose Communist leader Nur Muhammad Taraki had traveled to a summit in Cuba and returned to Kabul, where he was deposed by Soviet favorite, Hafizullah Amin. Two years later Amin was murdered by the Russian KGD, who had crossed the Amu Darya, thus beginning the Endless War.

SEPTEMBER 4, 1978 - JOURNAL ENTRY - EAST VILLAGE

Labor Day 1979

A holiday without pay. No business as usual. Alice working at the Yogurt Shop. Neither of us got out of the city. I beg breakfast from Nora at Dojos. She gives it to me and lends me $5. I almost kiss her, but Alice's friends are watching me.

I'm living an illusion thinking that money is coming my way. Work is the only solution to my present destitution. I go back to 256 and watch TV. Eight station showing nothing of interest.No movie. No sporting event. Nothing is getting too much of a hold on my life.

SEPTEMBER 4, 2021

I get up early to catch the Chinatown bus. I miss the first one and go for the second at 2pm. I almost felt like blowing off the trip, except I haven't seen my family members for over a year.

Last summer I showed up at a Haymarket restaurant with signs of not having made it to the toilet in time. My younger sister was aghast at my condition. I was too, but her hectoring me on the phone for being late had delayed my zipping down my fly. "I should have recognized that as a sign of alcoholism."

"So should I have."

I changed my jeans and headed north to meet Quinton and the fishing crew of Peak's Island for a road trip across Maine. A week like those five days would kill be now, but back then I claimed to be indestructible and I felt alive. I feel alive now just more vulnerable than before.

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SEPTEMBER 1, 1978 - JOURNAL ENTRY - EAST VILLAGE

Fall flowers exploded across the East Village community gardens. Dahlias, ghrysanthemums, asters, goldenrods, sunflowers androses. Today's noon temperature is in the 90s according to the radio. The air in our apartment has no oxygen. The streets have a little more. Alice and I have lived together for the last month. I haven't worked a day. Alice is heading home to West Virginia for Labor Day, the traditional end of America's summer, although astrologically the equinox is three weeks away.

I wander downtown. The Jones Diner is packed with blue-collar workers. The staff is third world. Two secretaries shriek in New york accents. Their boyfriends remain silent and eat their lunch. I order a bagel and coffee. After the lunch rush the diner clears out. Everyone has gone back to work. Two Greek children draw in books at a corner table. Strangely they speak Spanish together. I write them into my journal.

Has anyone ever changed their sex to become a hermaphrodite?

A BEACH DREAM
I was at a seaside resort with Alice
Our cottage was a wreck.
My Uncle Jack visits with kids
All of them six years-old
He complains, "This place is a mess."

I recall his first beach house on the Cape
It was so big
Sand deep on the wood floors
My Aunt never cleaned anyplace
Later we are at the beach
I rescue a child from drowning
I drag him onto the pier
I lose my balance and fall into the water
Ropes entangle my limbs
I wake up before dying
Gasping for breath__

<

September 1, 2021 - Clinton Hill

A hard rain all day. I haven't left the top floor of 387 Myrtle Avenue. I wrote from the 1979 journal, napped, and ate several small meals. I only spoke with Jake and Brigette, my upstairs neighbors, and then only briefly. I have really talked with anyone on the phone or texted someone about nothing. A man apart.

Brigette painted me as a hermaphrodite. They had heard my myth of the Hermaphrodite statue at the Louvre. How touching it with someone you want to love will seal that love forever. Their friend Stove has a tattoo of l'Heramphrodite on her arm. I would love to see her ink one more time, except it's raining buckets in Brooklyn and I'm not going anywhere, until after my procedure at NYU hospital. I am stricken with Cancer. No chance of survival. Trapped like a laboratory rat seeking reincarnation as a marble statue tattoed on a friend's arm.

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B AND H DAIRY - EAST VILLAGE

Two years ago a friend from the Yucatan and I had pirogis at the B&H Dairy, the historic counter restaurant on 2nd Avenue serving customers since 1938. The pirogis and matzo ball soup were the same as they ever were. Afterwards we walked down 2nd Avenue and I was struck by the many vacant retail spaces. Tweren't that way in the 70s. There was the Stage Deli, Gem Spa, Kiev, the Orchida, and the St. Mark's Theater. The Filimore East and Club 82. Plenty of other establishments enlivened the avenue. Covid killed many, but nothing like the greed of the realtors. The first people to go in a revolution are landlords.

The B&H also serves the only Chocolate Egg Cream on Second Avenue.

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AUGUST 15, 1978 - JOURNAL ENTRY

I spotted Alice in a Greek dinner on 2nd Avenue. I sneaked inside and snatched her pocketbook. Her arm was hooked in the strap and she turned to confront a thief. My dear little hillbilly was more city than I had imagined and she swore, "You asshole."

I rubbed my hand. I had hurt my fingers on my attempted joke and sat at the table.

"I guess I wasn't cut out to be a purse-snatcher."

"It wasn't funny."

"I was just testing."

I hate tesst. You know I do."

"I wasn't testing you. I was testing me to see, if I was any good."

"You sucked, but sit down and have some coffee. It's all that I ccan afford."

THE PENULTIMATE SOCIETY

New York City became a metropolis in the 1880s. The gentile class robbed all the money from the immigrant masses happy to have fled persecution in the Old World. They even imagined themselves free.

Nowadays the rbber barons have destroyed the city and are cashing in their century-old chips.

The neglected parks have detiorated to crime wildernesses, the sidewalks are buried in uncollected trash, dog shit paves the streets, and the burst water mains flood the gutters. Squat new condos rise over the detriorating tenements, which had houses the construction workers of the lastd century. Not a single ship is moored to the waterfront docks on the Hudson, populated at night by rats and queers seeking sex. There is no middle-class in the East Village and the creme de le creme elite's quarters of the Upper East Side are protected by the NYPD who act if they had 'shoot to kill' orders from the mayor.

The Soviet Empire and the Red Chinese restlessly await the collpase of Capitalism like the Huns on the Roman Empires borders adn the Turks before Constantinople, although the Russians have been financely bled dry by the Arms Race trying to figure out how to build $10,000 trench shovels and $40,000 toilet seats for strategic bombers. There are none to be found in the Amry-Navy Surplus stores on 42 Street. The Chicom Army hasn't enough mechanizations to transport their troops farther than the frontier and are still licking their wounds after a border was with Vietnam.

There is no threat of revolution from within. Our wage slaves have been infected with addictive drugs and their bodies poisoned by cheap junk food. The White Race has total control of the police and governemtn and army as well as schools and churches, but lacks any urge for equality.

I reject everything. I have no followers, No believers. Bible-Belt Christians pray for the Second Coming of Christ to achieve spiritual rapture and escape the sins of the 1970s; homosexuality, atheism, hedonism, and race mixing. They are too lazy to protect their values and I told my CBGBs sister Kim about my fears for our freedom.

"They will try and change us back to who we were."

"Most people accept the status quo, because it doesn't chanllnge their way of life; hot dogs, baseball, and White Power. The failure of the struggle is like rolling the perfect bowling ball and only achieving a 7-10 split. Getting a spare is almost impossible."

"What about a Civil War?"

"One Civil War was enough." The north barely remembers the battles, even though the impact of those five year has determined our history for over a hundred years. The South refuses to believe in defeat and worships the dead and fallen of Petersburg and Gettysburg as saints.

After ten years of the Vietnam War our country's unity is very fragile. The Right has battered the Working Man with the anti-communistic rants of Joe McCarthy, the corruption of Nixon, the betrayal of democracy with Watergate, the voter repression, and political assassinations of anyone calling for peace or liberty or the pursuit of happiness. Southerners want to secede and many northerners have been brain-wahed into the same mind-set. A national dissolvement fueld by internal dissent and external threats transform America into a giant stature fallen into the sea. The first thousand feet don't hurt, but like the USS Thresher the pressure will collapse steel or stone.

A time for national resurgence is in order, although without the purge of commies, faggots, drug dealers, and poets. THe purge is mandated for the Rich, who have everything to lose. This call for National Unity appeals to my friends; Ro was an immediate recruit to the crusade, but wants it now. It can't be now, becasue none of us have lost everything and no oen will risse until they realize everything they love is gone.

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AUGUST 12, 1978 - JOURNAL ENTRY - EAST VILLAGE

ON WHITE VERSUS BLACK:

Walking down 8th Avenue under a light rain I ignore the passers-by other than to step aside for old women and children. The rest of the people on the sidewalks have had their humanity stolen by the TV, ads, schools, churches, and work.

A pocketbook smashes into me, as I enter a Chelsea bookstore to escape the afternoon drizzle. The glass door shuts and then opens with a man shouting, "Hey, white boy, don't you know when to say you're sorry."

A small black man stands before a taller white woman, obviously embarrassed by her beau's outburst. He can't leave the imagined slight alone and gives me the finger. I shrug and all five-foot of him strides aggressively down the aisle three inches taller in his red platform shoes. The top of his Panama hat reached my eyes and I wonder if I'm going to have to duke it out with a midget. His lady shadows him, a lime green valise-sized pocketbook over her shoulder. He points his left hand in my face.

"Who you think you are white boy to not have to say you're sorry?

"I didn't bump into your friend. She swung her purse into me. I didn't think nothing of it."

I know you didn't. You said nothing and went your way." His right hand slowly slid toward his back. He could have a knife or a gun. The first was bad. The second option was worst.

I wasn't taking any chances and pushed away his wagging finger.

"Get your finger out of my face and your hand back from behind your back."

"Come outside." The short man spun on his heels, but his girlfriend grabbed his arm.

"I'm not fighting anyone right now, especially in the rain."

"So what you gonna do, call 911. I'll beat your ass and be gone before they come."

"Why you so uptight? Someone steal your Barbie Doll?" I say this knowing the Barbie remark will light a fuse an that a fight will ruin both out days.

"Barbie Doll?

"Or is it Ken?" I have never fought a black man. Scores of whites yes. Never a brother."

I don't want to fight this man, but I'm not scare of him. I not scared of anything other than lawnmovers.

"You sayin' I love white people?"

"You're with a white girl."

"Donna's different from white people like you. She grew up with us. You never did." "You got that right. There were no black people in my part of Maine and my next hometown is the Selma of the North."

"Boston."

"You got that right. I played inner-city street ball. I taught at South Boston High School. I went to see Sly Stone at Franklin Park. One of the three white boys in the crowd, but that don't make me black."

"Not at all. Fuck you. You lucky today, cracker. C'mon Donna, let's go." The small black man hustled from the bookstore. Donna in tow.

True, I have never fought a black, but damn I have fought whites. From Childhood to now.

"I ain't black, but there's sometimes I don't want to be white." Frank Zappa.

There are over 25 million people of African descent in America. Black are outnumbered by white ten to one, except in the urban communities such as Harlem or Roxbury. Chocolate City. Any attempt to rebel against the repression has been met with armed force by federal government. Bullets flying will bring any insurrection to ground. Movies like THE SPOOK WHO WAITS BY THE DOOR and SIEGE OF HARLEM are fiction, because the White Race has drugged, drunkenized, impoverished, and exploited an entire race much as the English have done to the Irish for centuries.

The Black Panthers tried to raise consciousness through the cities and country, but the FBI and local police cold-bloodedly assassinated the revolutionaries to the relief of the Silent Majority. There is no standing up against the Pigs and some Black Panthers have fled to Cuba or Algeria. Eldridge Cleaver has sent missives from Algiers, proclaiming BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL, but support of the cause has cost blacks economically and physically. Now is the time for a fight, but it is a fight Newark, Harlem, or Watts can win against the KKK and Nazis of White America, who have resurrected themselves under the guise of 'new ideals and intelligence' and David Duke, Grand Klan Dragon, has admitted, "We have all made mistakes."

White Supremacy was written into the Constitution with the inclusion of the Electoral College and no mention of voting rights other than the rich. My main philosophy comes from the Declaration.

Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

All men are created equal sounds good as long as it applies only to wealthy landowners.

Murder, prison, and addiction decimate the black male population of America.

I hate the upper classes for their attempted genocide and the apathetic masses accepting the death penalty for African-Americans. The Civil War was fought to free the slaves.

Not for every Union soldiers, but more than enough to burn Dixie down.

I avoided a war in Vietnam.

Like Muhammad Ali proclaimed, “I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong”

I didn't either. The only reason I wanted to be a Marine was to get out of my town.

LATER

The rain has stopped on 6th Avenue. I drank two glasses a vino blanco at McBells. I searched all morning for a job. Mark Amitin is producing ALBEE DIRECTS ALBEE. Mark is crazy and only after sex from me. I have lots of faggot friends; Taylor, Albee, James Spicer, Holt, Lynde, and Reed along with the boys from Serendipity Three and CBGBs. We know who we are and we are safe in the West Village, Chelsea, and East 53rd Street. I fight any gay-bashers. My friends call me 'rough trade'. I wish I had a leather jacket. Andy Reese says I'd be so hot in one.

LATER

If the world ends there are groups of saveables.

Actually only one.

Children, especially the three Latino kids across the street. Dez, Marika, and Yvonne.

LATER

Grant comes over and admits, "You were right about Joe Breeze."

"He's an asshole's asshole."

Ugly as a acne-scarred bulldog too.

I left the suburbs in 1975 to live in Boston, the northernmost of the East Coast's racist hotbeds. My black friends belonged to JUMP STREET, in which Andy Kornstein played, so the Roxbury band could get white gigs. On July 7, 1974 AK and I drove from Brookline to Franklin Park to see the Hues corporation, Donald Byrd and the Blackbirds, and Richard Pryor, who introduced Sly and the Family Stone by saying, "Sly will be here as soon as he robs all the drug dealers on Blue Hills Ave. like Lil Joe and Jamaal Hookah."

Several groups in the audience laughed loyally at the comedian's shout-out to their dealers. Pryor was no angel. Nobody said nothing about my skin. We had a good time.

Now live in Clinton Hill.

The Brooklyn Navy Yard dominated the East River from 1801 to 1966. Its closing stranded 10,000 industrial workers without jobs and coupled with the construction of housing project created the perfect atmosphere for getting a ghetto. In the 70s I lived on the Lower East Side; junkies, burned-out buildings, and thieves abounded in that wrecked 'hood, but we never came over to Brooklyn. It was too dangerous.

Coming from Boston I had fought more than often against gangs from Southie, Fields, Corner, Quincy, Savin Hill, and my own hometown. Anyone with Irish blood likes a fight. I liked them fine. I never fought a black man. This short guy was protecting his girl. I might have been able to knock him out, then again he might have been a boxer or a gunman. I could eat a little crow to be safe.

Last year young people marched in the streets after the murder of George Floyd. I haven't been to a protest in months almost all the youth evolved to another cerebral stage without telling the Old Man.

Prior to my hospital stay I had been proclaiming that I was going to outlive my great-grand-aunt, who passed in 1961 at the age of 103.

Bertha Hamblin Boyce wrote this in her 96th Year.

“Maria, it is almost time for my ship to sail. Are you going with me this time?”

That was my father, Capt. John C. Hamblin, speaking to my mother. She had been with him on two voyages, and he hoped she was going with him this time. My sister Alice was born in Australia, and my brother Harry was born in Norfolk Island, in the South Seas.

"Like her and my grand-aunt Marion I have circumnavigated the globe.

About ten times from East to West and West-to-East. I rarely get in trouble with the townies from Bangkok, Phnom Penh, Hamburg, Paris, Nairobi, or Moscow.

Nothing serious, because I see trouble I obey my mother's precautionary adage, "If you see trouble, go the other way."

Sadly I have not walked away enough and no one wins all his fights.

Up in Hudson, New York I attended a boxing session by the river. My lungs were good for 69 and my fist impact had some bite, but my back foot wandered out of balance robbing my stance. Not that I'm looking for fights and my violent behavior hails back to repressed memories of being a juvenile bully victim. 69 and still haunted by Joe Scanlon and Mark Tully. My younger sister wants me to see a shrink. ""Since I can't drink or do drugs anymore, these ghosts are the only high I have and I get rid of them I'll have no soul."

Since when did you start believing in a soul."

"I believe in a soul. Just not God." I have sworn an oath to never plead for his help. Not when faced by ten street thugs. Not when I've been sick. Not even when my daughter stopped breathing. Maybe a little about money, but they are vague request for financial help without putting a number of what I might receive, but nothing has come in years, so there isn't any God for me, although I do believe in Frosty the Snowman, which isn't easy when the North Pole is melting into the Arctic Ocean.

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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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AUGUST 9, 1978 JOURNAL ENTRY - EAST VILLAGE

AUGUST 9, 1979

Over a week ago my hillbilly girlfriend and I watched television at our friend's Kim, duplex. We returned to my SRO room of East 11th Street around midnight. The SRO's manager knocked on the door, asking, "Mr. Smith, are you moving tomorrow? Check-out is 11."

"Yes, I'm leaving, but now so leave me alone."

"11 on the nose or it's another week and you lose your security."

"Like you're going to give it to me."

He walked away and I laid my head on the pillow.

"You think you'll get that money," asked Alice. We had little cash left after paying two month's rent for our new East Village apartment.

"I doubt it." I hadn't read the renal contract's's fine print.

"Damn."

I didn't really care. I wanted out of there."

AUGUST 9, 2021

On Friday NYU Hospital announced my departure before noon. I had been wearing the 'johnny' four days and hadn't bathed in that time either. The pervious year's Covid had stripped away my senses of smell and taste. The hospital had me on a bland broth and plain yogurt diet, not really testing my tongue's taste receptors, but my body didn't smell filthy and I recalled Van Halen's line in too hot for teacher," Funny, I don't smell dirty."

The SRO was on West 11th Street across from the building blown up by the Weathermen in 1970 killing two of the revolutionaries. I have always blamed the FBI for supplying the bomb-makers with a hot explosive, wrapping up a loose end for Richard Nixon's Silent Majority.

The SRO had a shared bathroom in the hallway. The tiles were grimy with human dirt. I always wore flip-flops in the shower and tried not to touch any other surfaces. Alice and I were moving to a tenement apartment with a bathtub in the kitchen. A luxury in comparison to the SRO.

I went into hospital bathroom and washed my face and privates with a cloth. The 'johnny' fell to the floor and I changed into clean clothes. I had no idea how hot it was outside and checked with my phone.

84F was livable.

At 11:45 the attending doctor signed me out and I rode the elevator to the ground floor, got some medicine from the Rx, and hit the street. Every face belonged to a stranger. Millions of them in this city and only a few hundred people you know as best as you can know anyone in a city this large. I called Dave Henderson and he invited me to lunch. I was feeling fit after my hospital stay and agreed to meet at an Italian restaurant in Williamsburg.

Montesacro.

There wasn't much on the menu to appease my hunger according to the harsh strictures of my diet, but it was good to speak to Dave, who will be leaving for Kaiserlauten, Germany to put up a sculpture show with his brother, Doug.

I wish I could have gone with him, except I'm hooked to New York for at least months for treatment. At least I have plenty of room at 387 and it's not the SRO room.

Life is life.

THE SEA IS A BIG GREEN LENS by David and Doug Henderson

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.

AUGUST 4, 1978 JOURNAL ENTRY - EAST VILLAGE

The Red Sox break out of their slump adn take two games from the Yankees. Jim Rice looks slow, but they are playing in 95F weather. The weather is no better in the East Village. August air hsa been exhausted by summer. I've only been to the beach once. Riis Park. Naked with the wueers and trannies. In comparison to my beach bum days of 1975 in Miami Beach and on the West Coast; Encinitas-Torrey Pines-Matzatlan-Esquinapa-Puerto Vallarta-Gloucester-Provincetown.

I don't have the money to go anywhere now.

LATER

Alice and I wake to birds singing in the alley and make love on a dusty futon. The two of us shared a bath in the kitchen tub. Alice washes me and I shampooed her hair with the sun streaming through the willows in the alley.

After I go to buy groceries at the bodega and on the way back and the domino players across the street greet me with a wave.

Hakkim sits on a stoep farther down the street, sporting a bloody head bandage. George has a black eye and a swollen cheek. Their eyes follow me, but neither man tries to attack me. I enter the apartment. Alice has cleaned everything for the tenth time.

"Do you want to wake up at 9 tomorrow morning and take me to school?" she asks, touching my hand.

"I don't know." Her acting classes are on the Upper West Side. The other side of the world from the East Village. Some of the streets were as bad as these, but Alice was worried about Hakkim.

"You don't have to be so mean."

"I know, but you get up at 6 to be someplace at 9."

"I don't expect that from you."

"Then I'll be your bodyguard." I came from the South Shore. We fought everyone no matter what the odds. "And I'll do it in the winter, when the city is dark."

"My hero."

I looked at the collapsible steel guard gates.

She only wanted one thing.

To be safe.

We put up the gates on the fire escape window and painted the walls. After one coat I thought we were done. Alice held up another can.

Ivory white.

I've have had lovers before, but never lived with any women than my mother and sisters. This was just about sex and one month ago Harriet the thin nurse from Boston said, "Fuck me anytime you want."

We lasted a month then Alice came back to town.

After leading the American League East most of the summer the Red Sox have collapsed into a slump and surrendered First Place to the Tampa Bay Rays. I hate every team from the Gulf Coast city. The Rays win too much.

I watch nothing on the TV. I look at my journal a little. Mostly I surf the internet for my condition.

This morning the surgeons sealed my stomach lesions. The anesthesiologist gassed me with propofol. I said, "Tell me go and I'll see if I can count backward from ten."

"Okay. 1-2-3 go."

My consciousness disappeared along with reality and I woke in a blinding whiteness. I have been an atheist since age 8, but I am a true devotee to nothingness and that coma was nirvana. was it.

As for sex.

I've been faithful to Mem.

I know she loves me.

Journal Entry August 3, 1978 - East Village

Last night I dreamed of a submerged Soviet nuclear missile sub silently gliding towards Norway and NATO has any defense against such a threat. The siloes open and H-Bombs torpedoed to the surface. MAD. Atomic winter. The end of Mankind.

I woke in a sweat on the futon of our East 10th Street apartment. It was day. Alice lies within arm's reach. She murmurs with an educated hillbilly accent and spreads her legs.

"Now would be nice."

And I obeyed her sleepy command.

AUGUST 3, 2021 - NYU HOSPITAL - MANHATTAN

On May 29, 1952 my mother gave birth to her second son.

I was named after her father.

The next day we left for home.

I hadn't spent a night in the hospital since my birth.

Yesterday the attending doctor told me, "We have to operate on the lesions in your stomach to stop the bleeding."

The nurses are readying me for the trip down to the operating room.

I remember this dream and making love to Alice.

I never cummed in her. She was frightened of birth.

Even coitus interruptus can be nice.

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AUGUST 20, 1978 - JOURNAL ENTRY - EAST VILLAGE

Alice is down in Chinatown, plotting the dramatic take-over of the East Village with Tom Scully and his scrawny girlfriend. I don't like the way Susan looks at Alice and she doesn't like the way Alice loves me. To her I'm a thug. The coke deal is back on and I'm waiting on Guadalcanal's call and he's waiting on his dealer's call. His dealer is a friend on Johnny Thunders. A junkie and like the Velvet Underground sang, "I'm just waiting for my man."

A common plaint in the East Village.

Once Guadalcanal calls I was planning on cooling off at the St. Mark's Cinema, but the temperance has fallen into the high 70s and I don't like the double-bill of two Robert Alda films; MASH and FOUR SEASONS.

My older brother Frank and his bride are down in New York for a wedding. Patty is shocked by the squalor of East Village. I've become blind to the burnt-out buildings,, the junkies, the bums, lack of trees, and the obvious atmosphere of moral depravations. Frank feels the same way as his wife having only lived in the suburbs.

"What are you going to do if Mom and Dad come to visit?" ask Frank inside my tenement apartment.

My father regularly travels to Basking Ridge NJ to meet with Bell Telephone engineers as an executive to New England Telephone.

"I'll save them from worry by meeting them in a better neighborhood."

"New York has them?" asked Patty, shutting the car window to avoid any contact with the urban blight of the Lower East Side.

Not many, but a few with good restaurants too."

Frank parked the car.

"Are we going inside?" Patty was scared.

"Yes, how bad could it be?"

"You'll see."

We climb three flights to 3E. The Lower East Side was a slum. This apartment was a wreck. Alice kept it clean, but not clean enough for suburbanites.

"Mom wouldn't like it here," interjected Frank.

"I know Nana used to say better a dump on a good street than a palace on a bad one." My Irish grandmother had only lived in Ireland as a child and Jamaica Plains. This apartment was no palace.

"Mom probably wouldn't like my living with Alice."

"I lived in sin with Patty."

"It wasn't sin."

I restrained from saying that Frank and Patty had been seeing each other when she was still married to someone in Washington.

"You have any protection?" Frank had a .38 at home.

I reached under the table.

""Just this." I held up a stiletto.

"You need something more than that."

I didn't mention Hakkim the Junkie. He was more dangerous than anyone on the South Shore.

"Alice wants a .25. She's from West Virginia. She grew up with guns."

"Always good to have something that can make a hole in someone. I don't really need my .38. You want it?"

"Want what?" Alice entered the apartment in her waitress drag. She had met Frank and Patty up in Boston. My brother had joked how she didn't shave under her arms or her legs. I hadn't like that comment and never mentioned it to Alice.

"A gun," answered Frank.

He has a .38. I told him it was too big."

"I could handle a .38 just fine." Alice sat next to me. She smelled of yogurt from the yogurt shop.

"Most weapons are used against someone you know. What if you shot Peter in a squabble?"

Just because I'm from West Virginia doesn't mean that we go around killing lovers. Heck, your home town Pittsburg is tougher than any Appalachian hollow." Alice was proud of her mountains and people there.

"Alice doesn't have much of a temper."

"Well, if you want it, it's yours. Just come up and get it."

"Okay."

We ended that subject, but the main reason I didn't want a gun was that I might actually use it and in the East Village I would run out of bullets before reaching the end of the hit list. Better I had an AK-47 and a pile of banana clips. A machine gun might make a difference on the Lower East Side. It certainly would take care of Hakkim.

AUGUST 20, 2021 - BROOKLYN

I still speak with Alice in LA, although I have bothered to tell her about my cancer. If fact I haven't told that many people to avoid my condition being the only topic on the menu. I just left NYU Hospital after a Co-vids Test prior to next week's procedure. It's a long walk to the Lex Avenue and I decided to travel over to Brooklyn via the East River Ferry under gray skies. I spoke with a Hassidic father of many. Like me all that mattered in life were his children and the Torah. I don't tell him about my plans to write the TORAH II. It's on the back burner. After getting off the ferry I sat under the Brooklyn Bridge. My body has run out of energy. I haven't had a drink in three weeks. Dakota told me if takes about two month to shake the withdrawal symptoms. Thankfully I don't have DTs or sweats or any desire to drink. Not yet and hopefully never.

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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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JUNE 30, 1978 JOURNAL ENTRY

THe first half of 1978 ends today. It's 10:30 and I'm ready for the new half-year. Tomorrow morning I depart my departure to Charleston, West Virginia, where I will paint Alice's father's house. As a teenager I painted two houses in my neighborhood in the Blue Hills. Ten years ago. My parents' and a neighor's split-level. All the houses on my street with split-level. My older brother and I were a team. The job took us two weeks. My hand hasn't touched a brush since. So many of my friends here are artists. I asked Ro for advice.

"Put down a drop cloth. Start at the top and paint with up and down strokes. Wear a hat and long sleeve shirt to protect yourself from splatter. And don't do it by yourself."

Alice says she will help.

A ticket on Piedmont is waiting for me at JFK. I have $70 in my wallet. Her father will pay me $500 for the job. At present I'm lucky to earn $100 a week. I hope to finish in two weeks. Alice says it is not a big house. Her father is a lawyer. It has to be as big as my parent's house, but it is not a split-level. At least it isn't a hillbilly shack up some hollow with moonshine running down the creek. Chareleston is the Capitol of the Mountaineer State. I know nothing about it, but I suspect her home is in the suburbs up a creek.

This afternoon I asked Ro what I should buy for a gift.

"Perfume. Opium by Yves St. Laurent. It's a natural scene with mandarin, jasmine, patchouli, and vanilla. Very sensual."

We made love at my place and then I went up to Bloomingdale's. Matthew worked in the perfume department. He wants me badly enough to give it to me. I trade a kiss for the perfume.

Alice doesn't wear any. She is a hippie. She smells good without any I sniff the perfume. Patchouli. She will like that hint. She's a hippie. I open the box and spray on a little. The attar warms on my skin. It reminds me of smoking opium and I wish I had some.

I pack a bag. Jeans, tee-shirts, and an old seersucker jacket. Alice says it's hot in the mountains. I'll bring a bathing suit. Maybe I'll swim in a moonshine creek. I haven't flown since Chuck and Jackie's Philadelphia wedding in 1975. I was in the wedding party. They moved to Cinncinati. It's not far from West Virgina. Maybe I can find their phone number by dialing infomation at 555-1212.

The New York Post featured a report about a Miami voodoo priest who creates Baron Samedi dolls of victims by gathering his victims' nail clippings and hair with water and a little rum and then puts them into a Waring blender after which the finished product is poured into a small doll. Supposedly the victim wakes thinking he is a doll.

La Guardia-Charleston flight departs at 1:30. I'll get there two hours before take-off. An hour flight to DC. A three-hour layover. Then an hour to Charleston. 7-8 hours with the subway the first stage of the trip. A distance of 500 miles. Ten hours by car. Longer by hitchhiking. West Virginia is the original hillbilly country. They hated hippies. They must hate punks even more. I'll soon find out.

Later

The musicians at CBGBs only talk about music, drugs, or other musicians. My world has fallen into a world of drum, guitars, and bass. Their only goal in life. Hit the Top 10. Even Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. Hard-driving noise band with Lydia Lunch singing. My fav song EVERYTHING. It is so radically un Top 10 with James Chance on sax, but in their eyes I see the collective dream of opening for the Rolling Stones. All the girls on the scene think Richard Hell is cute. No one thinks that of Teenage Jesus. They sound like they're covering Lour Reed's Metal Music Machine, whihc is almost unlistenable. Cecil Taylor loves them.

OPIUM
Black tar
On tin foil
Stuck into a pipe
A match
Fire
Smoke furls in the air
Suck
Suck
Suck
My mind stalls
Into a dream
Of nothing
A land of Nod
So sweet nothing
So nothing at all
In a sleep smooth as glass

Teenage Jesus and the Jerks

I woke up dreaming

Rain on East 77 Street - June 5 1978

Midnight
June 5 1978
East 77 Street
Outside
Rain
Thunder
Inside the foyer
My finger
On the buzzer
No reply____
Last winter
Lisa left
To be a model
In Europe
No letters
Since April___
Her face
Never on French Vogue
Nor Italian Vogue
Nor inside any fashion magazine.
Gone___
Inside the hallway
My finger on the buzzer
A last time___
Past midnight
She not here
The last words
In the last letter
Love
Lisa___
Where did the love go?
All I see are ghosts
Of her
All I have
Ghosts and the rain__
I walk away
Into midnight
Into the rain
With
Only one destination
Away from here
To someplace else
And out of the rain

Guns On Avenue C - 1986

In the 1970s I always said that the East Village looked like Rome three days after the sack of the Visigoths 410 CE. Buildings burned day and night. The overstretched 9th precinct triaged the streets beyond 1st Avenue. No patrols ventured farther than Tompkins Square Park. Shooting galleries outnumbered bodegas and hordes of thieves fearlessly prowled their newly-won turf for victims. Nobody honest could survive in a neighborhood more burnt-out than a junkie’s vein and families of all races, colors, and creeds fled the outlaw DMZ for the suburbs.

256 East 10th Street was my home. Sinse dealers ruled the 1st Avenue corner. We got all well. They showed respect for how my friends and I had scammed the 9th Precinct at our after-hour club on 14th Street. East of Avenue A life was tricky. Gunfire was heard day and night. My neighborhood was rough. His was dangerous. Very dangerous.

My friend Uncle Carmine lived on East 11th Street between Avenues B and C. The first time I visited the Sicilian plumber at his ground-floor office. We discussed military history, while Carmine sucked on an unlit cigar. He ate them more than smoke them. We had a good laugh. Our conversations were between two men with convictions about truth and justice. We discussed some schemes only involving us. We were sworn to secrecy. Not Omerta. Carmine was connected, just not that way.

As I got up to leave, he said, "Wait a second."

He reached into his desk and pulled out a 38. He slid it over to me.

"For your protection, this neighborhood is fucked."

I laughed and asked, "Where are all the bullets? I'd emptied this before I reached B. I don't need a gun. I need money."

"Don't we all." He stashed away the piece. "I'll see what I can do for us."

"Thanks." I walked onto East 11th Street. Hakkim was across the street, scoring dope. The junkie thief glared at me. He had a death wish. I was glad not to have a gun. At heart I was a hippie sometimes. Thou shalt not kill.

Journal Entry August 2, 1978 - East Village

Today Alice and I moved out of my West 11th Street SRO room. The temperature was rising into the 90s and I sweated bullets, loading a taxi with our possessions. Jumping in the back seat, I shut the door and we crossed 10th Street to 1st Avenue, where the driver stopped at the curb and said, "I don't go any farther than this. Alphabet City is too dangerous and this corner ain't no bargain."

He pointed out the sinse dealers on the corner and spat out the window.

"They're hippies in comparison to the junkies. You're not really going to live here?"

"Yes, but we found a cheap one-bedroom apartment for $180 a month." I unpacked the taxi, putting our boxes on the corner."

"Let me guess. Bathtub in kitchen. Water closet in back. Very 19th Century." He was visibly nervous about having stayed on the corner this long. "Very quaint. Good luck."

The Checker burned rubber up 1st Avenue. My twenty-two year old girlfriend shrugged, "We're home one way or the other."

256 was only three stoeps from the avenue. Two scrawny kids ran up to us and asked excitedly, "Mister, you need help?"

"$1 each to carry a box to our new apartment." I pointed to the third stoop on the south side of the street.

"Can we trust them?" whispered Alice. Her eyes were two different colors; green with tints of red. The latter was the color of fire.

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

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

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

"Is he dead?" asked Alice.

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

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

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

"Oh shit."

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

My girlfriend stepped behind me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Nothing?"

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

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

With Alice.

From here into forever.

AUGUST 2, 2021 - CLINTON HILL, BROOKLYN

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

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

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

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

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

I wasn't scared.

I've died before.

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

Forty-years ago.

I vividly remember the heat.

Alice.

Hakkim.

The one fan.

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

I'm 69.

A man my age don't remember everything.

No one can.

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May 26, 1978 East Village - Journal Entry

Tonight is the big Gemini party. The four of us invited everyone we knew in New York. Not everyone likes everyone and Kim is scared there will be fights. I tell her not to worry. I'll be the birthday bouncer. I think she was worried about me fighting. My guests are Bruce, Lewis, who couldn't get into CBGBs last night, Ro, Alice, William Lively, RR, Pud, Klaus Sperber, Anthony with Cookie, Willem, Clare Hartnett, Michael Stumm, Fred and George from the SRO, I invited more men than women, but not everyone is 100% straight. Should be fun,

LATER

I was momentarily saved from temporary destituition by Mark's timely letter saying that an unemployment check arrived from the Boston School Committee. James Spicer had lied to me and Mark Amitin said, "He stole several checks, so it looks like you don't owe him any back rent for that place on Park Slope, but he asked if you still have his typewriter."

"Fuck him. He stole over $250 and lied every inch of the way. Plus I repaired the typewriter.

Mark took my side, at least to my face and said, "Then it's yours."

"We both got what we wanted."

"Not really, James wanted to sleep with you.

"Not a chance." James was still attractive. In the 50s he had fucked James Dean. All he got from me was to drunkily oil my feet like Mary Magdalene did at the Last Supper for Jesus according the the New Testament."

James has gone from moderately heavy drinking to serious drinking and Mark said, "He's headed to drunk's grave. He's looking like shit. The curse of the Irish."

We Irish do drink to exces, although I don't know, if it's a genetic curse or how we dealt with the British oppression. My drinking worries me, but I'll stop worrying, when I stop drinking.

My first drink was with Paul Keenan. Dry Vermouth samplers from his father's liquor stash in their basement. In sixth grade he and I raised our desks to take a slug under the noses of the nuns. I never really got drunk until freshman year at Xaverian. Dave Quann drove his family station wagon down to Horseneck Beach. It was packed with us two, my brother, my next door neighbor Carl, Phil Milan, Kenny Doyle, and Charlie Carr. At the beach we mixed Bourbon with pepto-bismol. I got so drunk that they had to secrertly carry me up my stairs to my bedroom like I was a wounded soldier fleeing the victors. Inatead of bleeding I puked pink for three days. My father knew what ailed me and patted my stomach. More puke.

After that adventure I drank in moderation until I left high school. Those last three years were so pure. CYO and Surf Nantasket dances, school, never any homework, track, no friends, Janet Stetson as my girlfriend, the Smith-Menconi feud over Ava Gardener, church every Sunday to hide my atheism, dry humping Janet, we never went all the way, I lost my scholarship failing German and religion, but my mother wanted me to go to a Catholic school. I hated it.

But I didn't drink.

Recently I wrote my mother a letter. When I went up to Boston we sat at the kitchen table and she said, "I read your letter. "I'm so sorry. I didn't realie how unhappy you were. I feel like I was a bad mother to not have seen it."

"You weren't a bad mother and I hide my pain from everyone. I never told anyone about it. The one place I felt safe from here. With my family. Outside was very different. I was never safe there except for with Sister Mary Osmond, Brother Karl, and Janet. Everything else dangerous."

But I had books as my refuge.

With them I could go anywhere other than here.

LATER

Today is the first summery day; high cloudless blue skies and a warm wind from the south carrying the scent of the sea deep into Manhattan. I am tempted to hitchhike up to Cape Cod and crash in the dunes south of Provincetown. Take the subway to Pelham Park in the Bronx and stick out my thumb on I-95. I could be in Truro before sundown. I haven't been there in two years. I ask Alice if she wants to go.

Her reply, "You must be crazy."

No, I'm not crazy nor beserk nor mentally challenged. Most of the Cape is very white. Very unfunky. I doubt if there are any punks there. BC students off-seasoning as a summer cops. BU coeds serving fish to old tourists. Mashpee Indians, the Silent Minority, glowing in the sun like martini drunk lobsters, Points of interest tourists on holiday for two-week holidays away from the rut of the work cycle, hackneyed scenery artists selling seagull paintings, homos and dykes in P-town, hippies and the really rich on Martha's Vinyard and Nantucket. Miles and miles of beaches covered by teenage sunworshippers happy tobe where they were at this stage of their life as long as it wasn't raining,

Cape Cod was not Times Square. No hustlers, whores, runaways, pimps, narco pigs, and thieves, or junkies. I feel comfortable in either place. I can't go anywhere. The Gemini party is tomorrow. I am a new me in New York, still a New Englander, my accent is unmistakable and my thirst for violence comes from teenage battles with everyone from Southie and beyond. My friends here regard me as an anomaly. Rough trade James Spicer once said.

Who cares? .