AUGUST 21, 1978 - JOURNAL ENTRY - EAST VILLAGE

Society in America has hit the skids. The corruption of the Two-Party System has reduced the working classes to the edge of poverty with 55% of earnings taxed by the IRS, while the rich pay nothing. Socialist Sweden, Kuwait, and the frozen snowbacks of Canada have higher per capita incomes. Most Americans had blamed President Carter for our impoverishment without ever accusing Israel for the devastation of the 1974 Oil Embargo and demanding for cuts in the Pentagon's budget. The only other recognizable politician has been Richard Nixon and he's persona non grata to the GOP.

The country is further defined my the faces of our cinematic gun-toting heroes; John Wayne, Charles Bronson, and Clint Eastwood. The Bad are usually foreigners or black drug dealers. The Good like Elvis and Marilyn are assassinated by the fatal drug overdoses by the FBI and CIA. The media blame their deaths on Fame and Fortune. Olympians burned by the sun, but they were gods and neither are the rest of us. We are humans with all our faults; Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, El Salvador et al.

We are fast approaching the 1980s with a destiny of apathy. The USSR aren't in much better shape, as their scientists attempt to compete with SAC's $40,000 B-52 toilet seats. It's not easy to spent that much money on a toilet seat, unless it's made of gold. The crops fail in the Ukraine. the Comintern buys wheat from the USA and Canada to feed the starving labor force and distill the wheat into vodka, the fuel of revolution.

Tonight at CBGBs Alice is puking in the ladies room. She ate roasted chicken leg at the Kiev. Her retching sounds like an air bubble exploding from a lake.

"Ei-rup. I ate too much. Ei-rup."

These purges are Alice's only method of handling her excesses; eating, drinking, and nerves. A tool to achieve temperance, but I never think she's fat.

"It has nothing to do with fat. My stomach is small and sometimes it feels, as if food is crammed in my esophagus. Ei-rup. Eir-rup. Ei-ru."

"What's up?" Guadalcanal asked from the men's room door. His sidekick, pockmarked Bobby, stood in the shadows invisibly attached to Guadalcanal.

"Nothing. Alice is sick."

"Too much to drink."

"Her drinking is not enough to get me a buzz, but it doesn't agree with her stomach."

"You'd think a hillbilly girl could down a jug of moonshine."

"I'm not a hillbilly!!!", shouted Alice from behind the closed doors. Women had serious hearing skills. "Ei-rup. Eir-rup. Ei-ru."

"More for us." Guadalcanal swiftly shoveled cocaine into my nostrils. Bobby and he went into the men's room for a one-on-one. The blow hit hard and I continued to listen to Alice getting sick. Crazy Juliette pushed by me.

"You look like you've had enough." She studied me and heard Alice by the porcelain god and said, "Your girl has had way more."

"I've done no drugs. I ate something funny at Kiev."

"The death diner. I saw you and Alice earlier. She looked so cool, unlike her Neanderthal boyfriend."

"I'm not trying to look cool." I was wearing the same jacket and jeans from two years ago. Bobby and Guadalcanal exited from the toilet and I took their place. I shit fast and hard. I can't talk to anyone about shitting, but I consider it the Sixth Sense; the urge to shit.

Alice has gone up stairs and I find her talking to Richard Hell. Neither of them pay any mind to me. I like the curve of her stomach. It's a soft pillow of comfort. I say nothing about it. Sometimes it's best to say nothing about what you love about someone.

Richard Hell was the Elvis of Punk in 1979. Alice had seen the King in Charleston, West Virginia. She said she had cried when he left the stage. I never saw him, but I had seen Richard Hell and the Voidoids often played CBGBs. They were a favorite of mine and everyone else. He was renown as a singer, a poet, a junkie, and a genius, although never at the same time. His teeth were as rotten as Johnny Lydon from the Sex Pistols. No one had a worst grill than Shane McGowan from the Pogues.

We start our adulthood with thirty-two teeth. I've lost all four wisdom teeth yanked before they rotted out of my jaw.

I don't recall Alice puking so much or her being fat.

I liked her just fine, but everyone looks in the mirror the wrong way, especially those who can't believe in love.

ps. I lasted thirty minutes in the 169 Bar.

It isn't the same without drink.

Nothing is.

Not even me.

THE SMELL OF MOONSHINE by Peter Nolan Smith

Back in the summer of 1960 my mother left my older brother and me with our Irish grandmother for a monthly visit to downtown Boston. We left her house in Jamaica Plains and rode the trolley into Boylston Street. The El from Forest Hills to Washington Street was quicker, but Nana preferred the trolley. My late grandfather and namesake had driven the orange and white trams out of Forest Hills. Once on Washington Street she headed to St. Anthony's Shrine for a ritual of lighting candles and a confession to The priest on duty. Her penance was regularly five Hail Mary's and one Our Father. I always wondered what were her sins. Nana asked if we had been good boys. We nodded yes. At six and seven Frunka and I were too young to have broken any of the serious Commandments, especially, since my childhood atheism was a secret to my family and friends.

Next stop was WT Grant for grilled hot dogs and then we went over to the Orpheum Theater. On the marquee THUNDER ROAD.

Nana liked handsome movie stars and she was particularly partial to Robert Mitchum. THUNDER ROAD had been a hit in May 1958. The actor played a Korea war veteran running moonshine through the hills of Kentucky. A hot-rodded 1951 Ford, illegal whiskey, hillbilly gangsters, and a rocking title song.

"Don't tell your mother about us seeing this movie." Her accent was pure County Mayo.

"No, Nana."

Neither of us were brought up to be rat finks.

We sat in the darkened theater and heard the rocking title song.

BALLAD OF THUNDER ROAD

And there was thunder, thunder over Thunder Road
Thunder was his engine, and white lightning was his load
There was moonshine, moonshine to quench the Devil’s thirst
The law they swore they’d get him, but the Devil got him first.

We left the theater singing the chorus. Nana warned us not to sing it in front of my mother.

“She doesn’t like whiskey.”

Years later I heard from my aunt that Nana had brewed whiskey and beer during Prohibition. Our Irish blood was true to our devotion to spirits. My juvenile encounters with alcohol were restricted to beer bought by the town bum, Red Tate, and hard liquor siphoned from our parents’ bottles. My next door neighbor and I rationalized this abasement of vodka saved the adults from drunken misbehavior.

Moonshine remained beyond our reach.

Only white trash drank ‘busthead’.

In 1970 I was attending BC. My college friends from the South extolled the virtues of ‘popskull’. Al Wincent and Hank Watson drove taxi together for Checker Cab in Boston. We were hippies, but finished the night’s work waiting for rides from the Combat Zone's go-go dancers.

One night a southern blonde from The Two O'Clock Lounge invited us to her apartment in the South End. We drank distilled alcohol from a jug. Its strength content was near-lethal, but Al slurred, “It might kick you in the head, but it doesn’t have the light of Moonshine. I can’t explain something you can’t touch, unless it’s in your hands. Once you taste it, nothing else will taste like it."

I accepted his explanation and in the summer of 1971 I hitchhiked to Virginia from Boston. The trip to visit a college friend took seven hours from Mass. Ave. to the Tap o Keg in Georgetown. Al was waiting for me. It was almost 1am, but the bars along Wisconsin Avenue stayed open until 4. The southern girls were friendly to long-hairs. A drawling red-headed coed from the Hill Country knew where to get some ‘shine. Her name was Billy.

Al made the call from the payphone and twenty minutes later we met a thick-tongued grit in a alley. He stood next to a rusted Ford pick-up.

“You ain’t no revenuer?” His accent was Appalachian. He smelled like his burly body had been dipped in medicine. A .38 was in his waist.

“Jimbo, put away that gun. He ain’t no police.” Billy laughed at his accusation, but I understood his concern. The federal government frowned on the sale of untaxed alcohol.

“$15 for three.” Jimbo pulled a tarp off a crate in the flatbed loaded with clear glass jars. Al cracked one open.

“Smells like good shine. Watch.” Al lit a match to the liquid. A blue flame. “Good color. Won’t make you go blind.”

“That’s right.” Jimbo finished the transaction with the speed of a snake needing to take a piss. He drove away with a rumble. The V-8 under the hood was not stock.

“Here’s to ‘shine.” Al chugged a sip. His face went sour and then his body shuddered with spasms to every muscle. “Now that’s ‘shine.”

He handed me the open jar. I offered some to Billy. She waved it away.

“Ladies don’t drink ‘shine. It makes them crazy. You go right ahead.”

I brought the jar to my lips. Mountain Dew wasn’t made for sipping. I pour a good swallow down my gullet. White lightning seared my gullet and cauterized my spine.

“Now I understand.”

“I thought you would.” Al toasted my conversion to ‘shine.

Billy accompanied us through the night. She felt responsible for the two of us. The last thing I remembered was singing the chorus to THUNDER ROAD over and over until it faded to a mumbled lullaby. Morning came ten hours too early. I was in a strange bed in a woman’s room.

Al lay on the floor.

“How you feeling?” Billy lay next to me. She was older than us by a few years. 22 to our 19.

“Okay.” My hangover was survivable and I sat up in bed. There were no spins. “Did we drink it all?”

“Every last drop.” She pointed to the empty jars by Al. He looked comfortable in that position. “Your friend made sure of that. You feel like some breakfast.”

“Yeah, that sounds good.”

"How about some bacon, fried eggs, and grits."

A southern wake-up dish.

"Sounds even better."

I was south of the Mason-Dixon line. My breath tasted of ‘shine. Billy’s accent was a drawl. Moonshine was good, then again I always knew it was, because like my Nana I liked Robert Mitchum too and he was a good ole boy.

To hear THUNDER ROAD by Robert Mitchum, please go to this URL;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdwUpxkfSJw

Killer Shine

A flatlander was driving down a road back in the hills when a hillbilly stepped out into the road and leveled his rifle at him.

The flatlander stopped and the hillbilly motioned him out of the car. Then he handed the rube a jug and said, "Drink it." The man tried to refuse but the hillbilly aimed his gun at him and said, "Drink it!"

The flatlander took a swallow and collasped on the gound choking. When he finally rose to his feet the hillbilly handed him the gun and said, "Now you hold the gun on me while I drink it."

A Shotgun and Two Jugs of Moonshine

On my 64th birthday I bought a shotgun with enough rounds to clear the streets of New York. Things were getting bad. If I didn't get out of the city now, I was never getting out of here. Thankfully I have two plastic jugs on moonshine. They would help get me close to the Mississippi. After that I was on my own."

The draw of the brokehead on the other side of the Hudson was enough to confirm, "If I can make it to here, I can make it to anywhere."

There will be no cars.

There will be no planes.

My feet will get to the Pacific.

From there I'll get home somehow.

To Siam my family and lao-khao.

In moonshine, more truth.

The opening to my new novel

NO SCREAMS AT THE END

THE CALL OF WILD by Peter Nolan Smith

My life was once ruled by the night. I haunted concerts, bars, clubs, and parties from dusk to dawn from the 60s into the 90s. My retirement from the late life occurred around the turn of the century and the birth of my children completed the process in fear of Chris Rock's curse of being the oldest man in the club.

Last evening I came home from work. My plans for the evening were dinner, a little writing, a glass or two of wine, and then hit my to bed read THE SAVAGE FURY, a non-fiction book about racism, dirty cops, and injustice in New York of the 60s and 70s.

This destiny was disrupted by a phone call from the 347 area code.

A New York City cell phone.

I answered the call and a gravelly voice spoke several indecipherable words.

"Who's this?" Only my wife called at his hour and I was a little annoyed, until I deciphered the thick Delta slang. "Homer, that you?"

"Course it's me. Who you think it was?" Homer was a regular from Frank's Lounge. The rest of the crew loved to rib him about his Deep South drawl, but he was the real thing from Philadelphia, Mississippi.

The wrong side of the tracks part of town.

"Had no idea." Homer and I had a bar stool relationship. 660 Fulton was our universe. He drank Beck's. I drank Stella. Our conversation were face-to-face and this was our first conversation on a phone.

"What's up?"

"I got that thing." His voice dropped to a whisper, as if his cellphone was taped by the NSA seeking 'Ssippi separatists.

"Thing?" I was confounded by 'thing'.

"You know, the shine."

"Shine." The syllable referred to the elixir of the South, Moonshine otherwise known as Mountain Dew or Ole Brokehead.

"What else you think I'm talking 'bout?"

Several months ago the bartender's husband brought up several jars from NC. The 'shine was favored with peaches. We drank the demon liquor with reverence and I remarked that I was in the market for some 'shine. Homer had finally answered my need.

"How much?"

"A gallon for $35."

"I'm in." A liter of Scotch cost the same and I was stashing this 'shine for an emergency and judging from the state of the world and the rising cost of everything under the sun a gallon of distilled corn liquor was a good investment.

"I'll be at the bar in an hour." Homer was good to his word and upon my arrival at Frank's he put the gallon of shine in my hands.

"It's plastic." I had been expecting a hillbilly ceramic jug

"Damn, boy, of course it's plastic. Glass breaks." He shook the bottle. "See them bubbles vanish quick. That means the 'shine is strong."

"And if you take a match to it and it burns blue, then it's clean." LA said from his computer. The forty year-old worked around the corner. His second office was the window table at Frank's, which was our living room.

"Don't you be lighting no matches around 'shine in my bar." Tyrone was in charge of the joint. 'Shine was highly flammable and the health departments of the Deep South condemned the safety of drinking 'white lightning'.

"Shine ain't dangerous is you don't mistreat it."

"I seen friends drink themselfs blind, but that was a bad batch. This is a good 'un."

Homer lifted his finger. The Mississippian had earned his respect. He was seventy-five without a gray hair on his head. He leaned over to me and said, "Put that under the bar stool. You can only drink in a bar what the bar serves, unless Tyrone ain't here and then we do what we want."

"What proof is it?"

"I ain't no chemist, but it's probably 95% alcohol."

"95%."

"Maybe more. It ain't no toy. Now do what I say and put it away before we start sippin'."

I planted the jug between my feet. I had intended to go to sleep at a decent hour. I watched basketball until midnight and bid good-night to Homer, Tyrone, and LA.

"You be careful with that 'shine." Homer wagged a finger. "You got work tomorrow."

"I'll just take it out for a test-drive."

"If it burns your throat it's no good, but if it only burns in your stomach than it's the real thing." LA was a Lakers fan. I was die-hard Celtic Green. He was only worried about me, so he'd have someone to ride during the NBA finals.

"Thanks for the warning." My place was a long two blocks away. Four beers ran through my system like liquid Drano, but the cops were patrolling my street for public urinators. At home I relieved myself in the bathroom and then cracked the cap of the 'shine.

The fumes cleared my head.

A single sip quenched my curiosity, but I resisted the siren call of its magic.

The Call of Wild was for the weekend and then it was time to howl at the moon.

Yee-hah.

Moonshine, Masturbation, and Eclipses By Peter Nolan Smith

Children are cruel by nature. Young boys and girls instinctively bully the weak and ridicule the infirm. There was nothing funnier than a cheap trick at the cost of a poor unfortunate in keeping with the ageless adage, "Comedy is when a beggar falls down the stairs. Tragedy is when a duchess does."

In the early 60s our teachers and parents offered the blind/deaf/mute idol Helen Keller as an icon of individual triumph. Anne Bancroft won the Academy Award for her portrayal of the teacher who brings light to a young Alabaman girl without the power to speak, hear, or see in THE MIRACLE WORKER .

It didn't take long for Helen Keller jokes to hit the grade school circuit.

How did Helen Keller's parents punish her?

They moved the furniture.

Her triple affliction gave healthy children comfort that they were normal, however our parents and teachers swiftly instilled a new fear in callous youth unafraid of the Devil.

At age ten my sins were small; mostly disobeying my parents and telling lies. The priest in the confessional announced my penance in a hushed voice, "Ten Hail Marys and two Our Fathers."

These prayers cleansed the black spots from my soul, however my innocence was soon challenged by a deadly scourge signaled by waking in the middle of the night with pajamas soaked by a sticky substance. This oddity was a terrible embarrassment for a 12 year-old.

Bed-wetting was for babies.

I hid my shameful affliction by washing my PJs the next morning.

My father was dumbfounded by my obsession with clean bedwear.

"You're pissing in his bed," my older brother kidded me about a regression to infantilism.

"No, I'm not." I threatened him with a beating. I was taller by two inches.

"I've seen the wet spot."

I didn't know how to handle my shame, until my best friend Chuckie Manzi solved the mystery by opening the Boy Scout Handbook to a small section entitled NOCTURNAL EMISSIONS.

"It's when your balls are too loaded with semen and you shot a load without even knowing it."

"That's not what they say in the Handbook." I showed him the text.

"At times the glands discharge part of their secretions through the sex organ during sleep. This process is called a nocturnal emission or a “wet dream”. It is perfectly natural and healthy and a sign that nature has taken care of the situation in its own manner.

"There you have it, even the Boy Scouts say it's normal."

Normal was important to us. No one wanted to be weird.

I read more from the Handbook, which stated that there are boys who do not let nature have its own way with them but cause emissions themselves. This may do no physical harm, but may cause them to worry.

Any real boy knows that anything that causes him to worry should be avoided or overcome. If anything like this worries you, this is not unusual – just about all boys have the same problem. Seek the correct answer to any question which bothers you about your development from boy to man. But be sure to get your information from reliable sources – your parents, your physician, your spiritual adviser.

"I'm not talking to the priest or my parents about this."

Chuckie shook his head.

"Keep your confession to the normal and never tell the priest about that."

"Why not?"

"Because some of them are not right."

By 'not right' Chuckie meant that they liked to touch boys. None of our parish priests were that way, but I limited my confession to swearing and disobeying my parents, even after I osmotically learned how to effect nocturnal emissions.

No boys told the priests about touching themselves after dark, for masturbation was a mortal sin threatening the immortal soul.

For the Church sex was strictly for procreation. Pleasure in the act disrupted the natural order of life and the priests warned their young male parishioners that wasting the holy seed of life endangered the sense of sight.

"You could go blind or suffer from effeminacy."

The man across the street from my parents' house was queer. Arthur flew jets for Eastern Airlines. His boyfriend, Joe, coached football. Chuckie and I suspected them of masturbating each other.

"It's what queers do, isn't it?"

"How should I know."

That spring the mystery of men with men was solved by the discovery of rotting stroke books in the woods of the Blue Hills. Queers did everything married couples did in bed and more according to the moldy paperbacks titled 'JOCKS ON FIRE' or 'COCK-MAD COACHES'. I whacked off to pages 75-78 of THE ITCH about seven hundred times without losing my eyesight, although my sight worsened throughout the end of grammar school.

My seat was moved to the front of the class. I got good grades. Bullies didn't like smart kids with glasses. The beatings were painful, but at least I hadn't had my eyes plucked from their sockets like Tyrone Power in PRINCE OF FOXES. Orson Welles played Cesare Borgia.

Blind teenagers were sent to a special school for the blind, deaf, and dumb. The nuns taught them how to live in the normal world. People said those school were more special for other reasons and none of them good.

In high school the brothers were hip to drugs. The vice-principal held an assembly to inform us of the danger of looking into the sun. The guest speaker was an acid head who had stared into the sun during a total eclipse.

"All I can see is the sun. Nothing but the sun."

I used my savings to buy prescribed sunglasses. Eclipses were rarely announced on teenage TV. Being an ex-Boy Scout I had been trained to 'be prepared', plus Ray-Bans were the height of style in the 1960s.

Girls thought that they were cool. The bullies stopped hurting me. They liked the girls who liked my glasses. The nuns tried to stop me from wearing them in classes. My optometrist said I had sensitive eyes.

Doctor Shaw wasn't scared of the nuns. He was Jewish.

The last threat to my eyes was moonshine.

Two year ago I bought a gallon from a Mississippian hanging around Frank's Lounge in Fort Greene. I tried a few sips of Homer's concoction and the corn mash burned a light in my stomach. A match to a spoon filled with the illegal alcohol ignited a blue blaze. This meant the 'shine was clean.

A yellow fire was cause for caution, for rotgut moonshine can blind or kill the unsuspecting, mostly if the manufacturer isn't too tidy with his contraptions such as a car radiator, which offers a deadly concoction of lead and anti-freeze.

A high-minded distiller will 86 the 'foreshot' of the batch i.e. the first offering from the still. After that it's white-line fever and I see the light.

And I still suffer from nocturnal emissions.

It's only natural.

A Shotgun and Two Jugs of Moonshine

On my 61th birthday I bought a shotgun with enough rounds to clear the streets of New York. Things were getting bad. If I didn't get out of the city now, I was never getting out of here. Thankfully I have two plastic jugs on moonshine. They would help get me close to the Mississippi. After that I was on my own." The draw of the brokehead on the other side of the Hudson was enough to confirm, "If I can make it to here, I can make it to anywhere." There are no cars. There are no planes. My feet will get to the Pacific. From there I'll get home somehow. In moonshine, more truth.