Style Yes. Class Yes. Speed. Not a chance.
The UNITY barely topped Mach 3 and all the fingers in the world could not calculate how long Branson's flying machine would take to reach Andromeda, so until humans invent space warp vessels, I will lie in my friends' backyards awaiting the elevating light to attain one with the universe. I could only be so lucky. THey'll get me to Andromeda.
One way or the other.
In the winter of 1990 I bought a round-the-world ticket from Pan Express in New York. The total cost was $1500 as was advertised in the NY Times. The boss of Pan Express helped plan the path of my circumnavigation of the globe.
"Sir, you are going West." John had a quaint Indian accent. He was about my age. "You leave from New York, then LA to Biak and then Bali. From there you overland to Java and Sumatra before flying from Medan to Penang in Malaysia. Is that good for you?"
"I think so." The route was popular with the backpackers and I had six months to circle our planet.
Two weeks later I took off from JFK, stopping for two weeks in Biak before heading to Bali, where I began writing a novel about a conman from New York forced into a Vegas hit only to fake the murder and escape into Death Valley with two feminist filming a movie about the last man on Earth. Hippie travelers in Ubud wondered why I wasn't writing the novel in California.
"You need a car in LA and I stopped there on the way out to take photos." These pictures of Hollywood and Death Valley were pinned against the wall of my bungalow along with a score of postcards from Southern California as well as photos of my cousin Sherri and her lover Tige. They were big names in the adult entertainment industry I gazed at the nudes often, while writing on a Brother word processor, which was lighter than a typewriter. I was a man between worlds, sometimes in the West and sometimes in the East.
During the day I wrote alone, listening to music on my Sony WorldBand radio.
In the afternoon I rode a 125cc motorcycle around the island. Volcanoes towered over terraced rice paddies, Temples abounded throughout the villages, and wild surf rose from the ocean to pound black sand beaches.
At night I drank beer with Balinese musicians and female travelers.
They were all in their twenties. I was at the end of my thirties. They made me feel young.
During the day I wrote about North Hollywood. My dyslexic fingers produced chains of typos and my syntax wandered through tenses like a drunken time machine, but each day I completed 4-5 pages and I counted about thirty pages at each week's end. After two months I had two hundred pages covered with corrections. The local copy shop printed out a thick sheaf of paper, which I posted to my apartment in the East Village.
On my last night in Ubud I held a Selamat Jalan party at the Cafe Bali. Arak and beer flowed down our throats. The Balinese boys had me swear to return next year.
"Saya jah kembali." It was easy to say 'I'll be back' in Bahasa and I dreamed those words would come true.
The next day I traveled by taxi to the port of Gilimanuk. The ferry left on time. A young girl threw a chicken over the side. The bird flapped its wings on the descent to the waters of the narrow strait. It seemed like a cruel thing to do, but I remembered reading many small stories in the NY Times about sunken Indonesian ferries and thanked the chicken for its sacrifice.
Ketapang, Java had a different feel than Bali.
The people were Muslims.
It was Ramadan.
Eating or drinking during daylight hours was considered bad form.
I traveled with other westerners to Mount Bromo, an active volcano looming over the fertile landscape.
Next stop was the magical city of Yogajakarta. I toured the palace, bought batik, and waited till sunset to break the Ramadan fast.
Outside that royal city was the sprawling stone monument of Borobudur, a reminder of Buddhism's epic era pre-dating Java's conversion to Islam. I rented a motorcycle and rode with an Aussie couple to the blackened pyramid surrounded by a low escarpment dominated by Mount Merapa. At the top of the ruins I started to put a stick of gum in my mouth. Several Indonesian men frowned at this and I returned it to my pocket.
"I'm starving." The Aussie couple didn't care about local customs.
"None of the warungs are open." Every food stand was shuttered for the day.
"There has to be someplace to eat." Jim was a good fella.
We were planning to climb the mountains to the Dieng Plateau.
"There's a bigger town on the way." I checked the map. "Megalang probably has a Chinese warung there. We can get noodles."
"And maybe beer." Jim liked beer.
"That's right." I liked beer too.
We set out on the 115cc bikes. The road climbed to the small town. A Chinese restaurant served food. The owner peeked out the door to make sure the Indonesians weren't spying on him.
"They very angry. Eat food now."
He served us cold noodles.
"Can not cook. They smell food. They go amok." The word for mad with uncontrollable rage originated from Java. "They think tiger come in them. Tidak bagus."
"Same as the Vikings." Jim's eyes widened with expectation of a show.
"I have no interest in witnessing a crazed berserker attack here." Jim and his wife were on holiday.
"Some people think that men go amok, because they can't commit suicide and hope for someone to kill them." I had read that in my tour book ROUGH GUIDE. "If no one does, then they claim amnesia."
"I bet no women go amok." Jim's wife had no time for machoism.
"No, it's a man thing."
"Stupid wankers," said Jim's wife, meaning all men.
Jim and I exchanged a glance and dropped the subject. We ate the cold food and drank warm beer, tipping the warung owner generously before continuing on our way to the plateau known in ancient times as the abode of the gods.
Pine trees graced the slopes and the air grew cooler, as we skirted the surrounding volcanoes. The sun scorched my skin and I put on a long shirt. Prescription sunglasses shielded my eyes from the glare. We were almost 6000 feet above sea level at the equator. The Dieng Plateau was as high as Mount Washington, the tallest peak in my native New England.
We traversed the pass between the steep cones of Gunungs Suming and Sindoro.
To the south lay thousands of miles of the Indian Ocean and the sharper blue of the Java Sea marked the northern horizon. Vertigo assailed my senses, as if I were traipsing the tightrope of an equatorial faultline.
Jim and his wife were also swarmed by the massive loss of perspective.
We stopped at a small Hindu temple. The shrine to Shiva wasn't impressive, but dated back to the time of the Maya kingdoms in the Yucatan.
"Once hundreds of these complex were here." I had read that in ROUGH GUIDE as well as how the monuments were cosmic mountains. Sulphur seeped from the ground. My feet felt the warmth from the volcanoe underneath us.
"Locals probably used them to build their houses."
"Same as how Rome had disappeared after the Fall."
We drove around the plateau, stopping to take photos. There were no restaurants and the only village was shut for Ramadan. Jim checked his watch.
"It's almost five. We should start heading back."
"You're right." Sunsets came fast along the equator. One minute it was day and the next it was night. I looked into my bag for my regular glasses. I had left them back in Yogja. I looked at the map. We were a good ninety minutes from our hotel. "I'll follow you."
The three of us set out down from the Dieng Plateau. The Koran said nothing about feeding our motorcycles and we filled the gas tanks. Jim rode faster than I liked, but I kept up with him through Bulu, Termanggung, Secang, and Magelang. The sun dropped in the west on the outskirts of Tempei. I followed Jim's taillight for miles and didn't think anything, when he turned onto a smaller road. I got concerned, as the road, became a trail. I beeped my horn. Jim didn't stop. I couldn't see anything through my sunglasses. Darkness was complete without any moon in the night sky.
The path ended in a tiny village and I braked behind what I thought was Jim's bike.
The driver got off the motorcycle and confronted me with a kris. The wicked curved knife waved inches from my face. The wielder was Javanese. He shouted with wild eyes glowing with the light of the nearest kerosene. I was facing a man amok. Other men gathered around him. They gaped at me. I was the first westerner to come to their village since the departure of the Dutch in 1949.
"Pelan-pelan." I wanted him to calm down. A kris was a deadly weapon.
"Kenapa tua disini?"
I couldn't think of the word for lost, but somewhere on the road I had followed him, instead of Jim. I pulled out my map and showed it to him.
"Dimana disini?"
"Donokerto."
It wasn't on my Nelles map.
"Saya jalan ke Yogja."
He laughed upon hearing that I was lost. The knife was returned to his waist.
"Yogja jauh." In his mind Yogja was a thousand miles away. "Mau makan?"
I smelled frying chicken. I was hungry and nodded my head. "Saya lapar."
"Sama sama saya." Everyone was hungry this time of day during Ramadan.
Especially if you were lost and I bowed gracefully and joined the farmer for their breaking of the Ramadan fast.
I wasn't driving any farther with sunglasses at night and join them.
The iftar was good eating and I slept outside with a million stars swirling in the deep darkness of eternity.
The next morning I showed up at the hotel.
"Where were you?"
"I got lost, but it was cool."
"And now you're found." His wife poured me some beer. Our hotel was a sanctuary of infidels.
"For now." The beer tasted good cold.
Then again cold beer always tasted good during Ramadan.
In 1978 I moved into a one-bedroom apartment on east 10th Street.
The rent was $180.
The bathtub was in the kitchen.
By the time I left it was $450.
The realty company paid me $10,000 to leave.
The fucking lawyer took a third.
The realty company now charges $2000/month for an apartment with no character.
Which is perfect to the tenants of 2016.
They will never have a naked blonde taking a bath in their kitchen.
Two weeks after Labor Day the Continental opened its door without a liquor license. Limos lined West 25th Street well past dawn, as models, actresses, and strippers danced with abandon to the city's best DJs. Movie stars snorted coke with two-bit dealers and national politicians seduced Amazonian TVs on pop-art sofas.
Few revelers cared about the illegality of an after-hours club. The precinct police were on the take. Sanitation inspectors glommed drinks with big-hair wives, plainclothes cops strong-armed bribes, and Jimmie Fats siphoned the cash cow for the firemen. Greed blinded the bagmen to Arthur's wearing a wire for Internal Affairs and the FBI investigating our Russian investor for counterfeit twenties. I was counting the days until it all went bad and hoped to not be there then, but $100 tips pushed my day of departure back weekend by weekend.
By Halloween I had $5000. By mid November that amount reached $6000.
A week before Thanksgiving Arthur sold half his share in the Continental to three men in black suits.
"You been talking about leaving. It's a good time for you to leave."
Arthur paid me $500 for the week.
"I don't know where to go." My pockets were crammed with cash. It was getting cold, but I still hadn't spoken to Lisa."
"Anyplace, but here." Arthur nodded at his new partners.
Their shoes were FBI issue.
"I'll leave after Christmas." Another month was worth $3000.
"Don't wait too long." He was trying to tell me something only I wasn't listening as long as Lisa's Nordic profile, blonde hair and sculptured shoulders dogged my peripheral vision.
She was a siren and to other men as well.
Vadim’s bodyguards exercised Slavic etiquette to these suitors in the alley. My obsession rejected fear and I cornered Lisa once, when Vadim was out of town.
"All I want is explanation." It was almost Thanksgiving. The anniversary of her leaving.
"Of what?" She had embraced the comfort of amnesia.
"Why you left and never came back." I had thousands of answers. None of them added up to one plus one equaling two.
"If I explained that, then I would have to tell you everything." She looked through me as if I were glass and wearily walked away, saying "Sometimes you don't get answers."
Refused an answer, I slipped my hand into my pocket for a quarter.
Flipping a coin was another way to see the future.
Heads meant yes. Tails no.
"Does she love me?"
It came up tails.
A spike jabbed my heart like a junkie's hotshot.
"Will she come back to me?"
Tails.
I was plunged into darkness.
"Will we have sex again?"
Heads.
My limitless obsession accepted these 50/50 replies as the truth, especially since Lisa's neglect was a game and she chose to exploit a pawn in December.
The winter dawn broke on the club's fire escape. Danny was playing the Members' SOUNDS OF THE SUBURBS. I stood on the rusting steel, watching the stars fade from the night. High heels clicked onto the steel grating. Lisa wore a black sable fur coat. It was open and her silk shirt was unbuttoned to her waist.
"I needed some air."
Her flawless skin was the color of the first snow.
"It's cold this time of year." I started for the door.
"I'm from Buffalo and it's not that cold in this coat." She leaned against the door. "Don't worry. Vadim is too high to care what I do."
"What about his bodyguards?"
"They're drunk too. Russians like their drink." She reached out for me. "Hold me."
I melted into her like a nuclear core going China Syndrome through the Earth.
After a breathless kiss the ashen blonde claimed, "I haven't stopped loving you."
"Me neither." I wished our bodies were wrapped in silk sheets instead of buffeted by an alley wind.
"I can't give you any answers." Her hands spoke with desire and she looked over her shoulder as if her eyes could see through the steel door.
"I don't want words." It was a well-rehearsed line.
"Good." She pulled me closer and we embraced like lovers in a silent movie for a half-minute. Her heart was bare to my hand and her heart beat like a clock ready to sound its alarm.
"I have to go."
"I understand."
"I wish I didn't have to go."
"Then leave with me. I have $6000. We can go anywhere. Europe, LA, Florida. Anywhere."
"$6000 goes fast." The narrowing of her eyes revealed that she was adding up the pros and cons of my proposition.
"We can rent a house in Key West. I'll work at a bar. We'll watch the sunsets from the pier." I loved the sea. It was only one of a million possibilities, if she said 'yes'.
"Vadim says poets go nowhere." She was weighing my worth.
"Only because I've been waiting for you."
Applause from NYU co-eds had rewarded my poems about two days stranded in Garrison Junction, Montana, yet a drifter's code wasn't tattooed on my skin. "I could get a real job. Move into a nice apartment."
A nine-to-five held little glamour to someone who has travelled first-class through Europe and her icy stare announced her final appraisal. Her hand withdrew from mine.
"Sean, it's a nice dream, but life's too short to live a dream."
My one minute of overtime ran to zero.
"Why you never call?" Asking questions was not part of my daydreams.
"Your phone got shut off." An unpaid bill was only partially the truth.
"You could have sent a postcard." This plea cut the scene short.
"The last thing I need in life is someone who lives for breaking the score of CBGB's pinball machine." Pity was not her forte.
"I'm good at pinball." I owned the record for the SLASH machine at CBGBs.
"But your name isn't Tommy." Lisa fled inside the club and joined Vadim and his partner, Viktor Malenski, in the VIP lounge.
Before I broached the velvet ropes, his two Ukrainian bodyguards created an immovable barrier. I possessed other means of touching Lisa and went to the DJ booth with two beers.
"Nice entrance." Danny sported a broken nose and two black eyes. His hailing from Old New York money more than compensated for a crooked beak with the girls at the Continental. They loved him all the more.
"I wasn't trying to be discreet." "I can see you're treading on razors." Danny touched his nose. "I'm not worried about Vadim's thugs." "Really? The big one punched me for speaking with Lisa. I learned my lesson One punch had taught Danny to keep his distance from Lisa. I think you'd get hit a little harder than me." "I've been hit before." I pushed him away from the turntables and picked out an LP. Danny grimaced at my choice of the Romantics' WHAT I LIKE ABOUT YOU. "That song only has an audience of one." "Two. You're forgetting me." Two years ago the Romantics had played Hurrah. Hundreds of young women packed the uptown rock club to see the Detroit band. I took a break from the door to check out the show. A blonde stood before the speakers. Her beauty belonged in a fashion magazine and I leaned forward to smell hair fragrant as peaches dipped in burnt tar. Mere mortals didn't stand a chance with her, but she backed into me, as the group played their hit song. Her intent was more than flirtation and I should have retreated to the club's entrance.
My hillbilly girlfriend waited at our East Village apartment. She said she loved me. I ignore her declaration of devotion and grabbed the blonde's hand. The encore of their hit accompanied our sex in the stairwell.
Now Lisa laughed, as if the song was for someone else. The dance floor emptied quickly. Arthur frowned at the DJ booth and slashed his hand in the air to cut the song short.
"Sorry, but I get paid to make people dance." Danny didn't need another broken nose.
"Put something else on." I accepted its failure.
Danny segued to Chic's LE FREAK and ransacked the EPs for a floor-filler to his next tracks.
"There are other women out there."
"And I've been with more than a few." Vixens lounged on the club's over-stuffed sofas in a languid mockery of foreplay and braless teenagers danced like they had graduated from stripper training school. I had slept with several. None of the one-nighters succeeded in erasing the ruins in my head. There had to be a magic word. A gesture. Something to change the present into another now.
"You ever hold something in your hands and know it belongs nowhere else?"
"My Little League baseball bat." Danny grasped an imaginary slugger. "Women are mist on the water and no man can hold onto a ghost."
"Lisa's flesh and blood."
"A zombie is the one ghost you can never raise from the dead."
"She told me she loved me." I watched, as she led Vadim onto the dance floor.
"No phone calls, no letters, and a Russian boyfriend don't spell love in any language."
"Not if you're only reading the subtitles." Lisa swayed to the music without looking my way and Vadim moped like a trained bear. I danced better than him and I had read her TS Eliot in the bed of a Niagara Falls Hotel. Poetry under the sheets had to count for something, but cutting in was not an option. The bodyguards glared at me.
"She never said she was going away forever."
"Never can change to forever in a heartbeat. You were a poet a year ago. Your shit was funny. Why you stop?"
"I walked into a bookstore. Thousands of books were on the shelves. At least five hundred said what I felt."
Self-pity delivered a coup de grace to my muse.
"So now you're a thug."
"And Vadim is a gangster." Vadim and Lisa stopped dancing and went to the coat check. They were leaving for the night. My quitting time was dawn.
"If a woman has to choose between the lesser of two evils then she'll always go for the money."
"Love's not about money." Not at the moment of orgasm.
"That coat is worth more than you earned last year." Danny focused a light on Vadim covering her shoulders with a sable fur.
"So?" My memories of Lisa rotted like a Playboy pictorial left in the rain.
"So no matter how much a woman loves you, she'll always seek the safest harbor."
"And my life's too messy to offer a woman shelter." My apartment was in a ghetto, my bank account languished in double figures, and my plans for the future extended no further than breakfast.
"You're a storm at sea." Danny spun TAINTED LOVE and revelers thronged onto the dance floor.
Arthur waved for me to return to the door, as a flat-chested brunette in a slick black leather dominatrix outfit slinked into the DJ booth. Several men on the dance floor recognized Sherri. My cousin had starred in scores of XXX movies. Her most famous role was as a teenage runaway. I had seen the film twice. We had met in a Times Square bar after she tilted my pinball machine. Our mutual affinity for self-destruction determined that we were better off friends than lovers.
"Hi, cous." Sherri greeted me with a kiss on the cheek.
Sherri was more than a hellbound succubus. The porn star was smart and very funny. We had good times together. Claiming a family tie avoided any explanation of our relationship.
"You've really have to give her up. No woman will cross a bridge she’s burned." Sherri followed my eyes to the couple exiting the club.
"What if I walked across water?"
"We're sinners and sinners can only perform sin, not miracles." Sherri's failures in love rivaled my debacles.
"I can change my ways like St. Paul."
"St. Paul was chasing redemption, not another man's woman."
"Your cousin thinks Lisa's and his bodies were created for one another." Danny almost played James Brown's IT'S A MAN'S WORLD and then switched to Sly Stone's TAKE ME HIGHER. "Like Adam and Eve."
"I don't care what is written in the Bible, God created the first woman for himself. Adam had to make do with the animals until God got tired with Eve." Sherri's opinion of men hovered below the ground.
"I'm not saying Lisa was created for me."
"No woman is created for any man." Sherri preferred girls. Her fans felt the same way.
"And worst you think there are only two kinds of women other than your mother."
"Only two." I had thought there were at least five.
"Marlon Brando has his way Blanche in STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE and two minutes later is calling out, "Stella." Your ex-girlfriend looks like a virgin, except she’s sleeping with another man. Men can't choose between the virgin and the whore. You have one. You want the other. No woman can be both. Not the Virgin Mary. Not even me."
"Okay, most men are suckers, but all I want is someone to love." I was hoping that she possessed a secret potion, instead Sherri said, "Your first night with Lisa you supposedly 'made love' five times. At least that's what you told me." Danny's eyes widened in admiration.
"My heart was on fire."
"Yes, and that 'five times' has been a yardstick for involvement with a woman. Lust is not love. Lust is lust. See the girl in the boa feathers."
A scantily-clad redhead teased a circle of leering worshippers. Che Chasta was the leading lady in Sherri's films.
"I told her you were good in bed."
"How would you know?" Danny turned up the volume.
"If I'm great, then my cousin has to be at least good." Sherri tapped my cheek.
"Are you two really cousins?" Danny had a thing for Sherri. "You don't look alike." "That's, because I was adopted, but our blood is still thicker than thieves." She dragged me from the DJ booth. The hopes of the redhead's admirers were dashed by Che's kissing my cousin like a boa swallowing its prey.
"Che, I think you should go home with my cousin." The two women were more than on-screen lovers, but Sherri wanted to keep her distance. "He needs some TFC."
"And I'm an expert at 'tender fucking care'." Che's feathery caress scintillated my marrow. "Anything stopping you?"
Lisa had left with another man. The sexual revolution was burning the moral tenets of America. Everything was 'go' and not 'no'.
"Just a second." I went up to Arthur. "I need to go home."
"I can see why." The wily owner glanced over my shoulder at the waiting redhead. "Good luck."
Envy accompanied my departure. The bouncers flicked thumbs up, as we got in the taxi. Che gave the driver a show on the way to a Tribeca loft. In the elevator she stripped naked, singing Rick James' SUPER FREAK, "I'm a Super Freak, Super Freak."
"You're really sexy." Her lingerie smelled of cigarette and Estee Lauder perfume.
"I hear that all the time."
"You have anything else you want to tell me?"
I spoke dirty. She cooed with a little girl voice and caressed herself with a shiver. The elevator door opened and she danced into the loft. Cameras and lights were arranged around a large bed.
"Tomorrow Sherri and I are shooting two sex scenes." She unzipped her boots. "Tonight I need to rehearse."
Che lay on the sheets. Her breasts flattened on her chest. I peeled off my clothes. I knelt between her thighs. Her tongue licked at her lips and hands guided me inside. I shut my eyes. Men across America would have killed for this moment of heaven, except my erection withered under a phantom's stranglehold and I faked a premature ejaculation. "Don't feel so bad, softies happen to a lot of men with me," Che consoled me with an expertise forged by cinematic sex. "Let me fluff you for seconds." Che expertly tried to arouse me, but something was broken. After three minutes she stopped and asked, "You're not gay, are you?" "No, I'm sorry." I didn't want to discuss about my futile fixation and deserted the sex icon, for my East Village apartment, where I scissored women from glossy stroke books to construct a Frankenstein collage of Lisa. Our reunion was the one lie I believed, as December collapsed towards Christmas.
I lived off cocaine bribes from customers and sold the excess to customers. My $6000 rose to $8000, but I wasn't leaving, despite things going downhill fast.
Sherri was arrested by the precinct police for possession. My threat of snitching to Internal Affairs prevented her being the station house’s party favor. Vadim ODed on heroin. My reviving him earned scant thanks from Lisa, although the Russian stopped cease to consider me his enemy. Danny's parents threw him out of the apartment after he stole a family heirloom. He crashed on my couch. We were our own worst enemies. Inexplicably outsiders viewed our lifestyle as glamorous.
A French magazine front-paged my photo and their journalist wrote that I was a legend at 29. Bernard based this title on my urban exploits without any knowledge of my stalking Lisa from her apartment on East 73rd Street to Vadim' Central Park penthouse or tailing the couple's ricochets around Manhattan.
Vadim never spotted my gaze, as he met with Odessa diamond traffickers and his thugs visited gulag violence on complete strangers. Lisa endured the beatings with heartless sighs, but I wasn't the pair's only shadow.
Right before Christmas Vadim's partner was arrested by the FBI. Viktor refused to talk. The precinct police were hauled before Internal Affairs. They maintained a silent wall of blue. These harbingers of the approaching end failed to pierce my narco-ambulation. My wake-up call came on New Year's Eve, when Viktor Malenski was shot dead in front of the club.
This execution bared the Continental to a public frenzy fed by the city's newspapers. I had only heard the shots, yet my name skirted the periphery of the widening scandal of drugs, fame, and beauty with NYPD's Internal Affairs drawing lines between the dots.
Lisa came to my apartment. We stayed in bed for an entire day. She swore that she hadn't pulled the trigger. I believed her every word and pleaded ignorance nothing during a police interrogation.
"Don't leave town." The Internal Affairs sergeant wasn't buying my version.
Nineteen cops were suspended from the force. I knew half their names. Arthur knew them all. A phone call from Paris averted my appointment as state's witness.
Bernard told me that the magazine Actuel wanted for an American to work a nightclub in Paris. Bad French was a prerequisite for the position of physionomiste. A round-trip ticket was waiting at Air France. My passport was up-to-date and I asked Lisa what I should do.
"You have to go. We won't be safe here. Not from the police. Not from Vadim's gang." She lay in my arms naked. Her skin smelled of tar. "I'll meet you in Paris five days from now."
"Notre-Dame." It had to be easy to find.
"At noon." She sealed the pact with a long kiss.
The morning of the flight I felt like Ingrid Bergman's leaving Rick in CASABLANCA.
Lisa walked away from East 10th Street, saying. "Twelve noon."
"In five days." I tried to trap her scent in my lungs, but exhaled as her taxi merged with the traffic on 1st Avenue.
Sherri drove me to the airport. Che was in the front seat. They were heading cross-country to set up a life in LA. I sat on the rear seat with Sherri's parrot, Boo.
"Best thing about this trip is your leaving that blonde bitch." Sherri dodged a truck. She was colorblind and couldn't see brake lights.
"She's meeting me in Paris."
Both women groaned and Boo cackled, "Ha-ha."
"You really think she's going to meet you?" Sherri glanced in the rear-view mirror.
"She says she loves me." That shifted the odds to 50/50.
"You buy her a ticket?" Che swung her head to the back.
"No, she said she would get it from her agency."
"Make that 9 to 1."
"Which are better odds than I had before." Slush on the Grand Central Parkway slowed traffic. I leaned back in the seat. Paris would be our refuge. I would write a book. Lisa would grace the cover of ELLE. We'd practice French in bed, drink espresso in small cafes, and wander along the Seine in the rain.
"Everything will be fine." Sherri turned on the wipers.
"Whenever I'm in her, I feel like she is a glove." Lisa's scent simmered on my skin as burnt fruit. "She has to feel the same way too."
"I’ve been hundreds of men and I've never found one who fits me. On the other hand women are another story." Sherri reached over to Che. Boo screeched her support.
"This will work out."
"Cous, don't bet your heart on a long shot," Sherri was glad to say it about someone else other than herself.
"I promise I won't."
Sherri braked before the Air France terminal. We hugged good-bye. I said she should visit Paris. She told me the same thing about LA and then drove away into a flurry of snow.
I half-expected the police to stop my boarding the Air France flight, but I got on the plane and within in an hour the 747 was banking north over the northern tip on Long Island.
That night I stopped at a disco on Rue Montmartre, intending to wait out Brigitte's early morning departure. Philippe's previous girlfriend danced with a natural wantonness to WARM LEATHERETTE. Her partner was a famous French singer. My eyes x-ed him from the club.
Honey-hued skin covered the teenager's long lean limbs. Lisa had possessed the same boyish body. Candia noticed my staring and I turned to the bar. The cold beer in my hand was empty and I would have left, if Candia hadn't accosted me.
"Your friend Che says you're good in bed."
"She was exaggerating." Lying was more like it.
"She didn't seem the type to joke about sex." A finger toyed with a froth of golden hair. "And I saw the way you looked at me."
"My cousin says you can tell how someone fucks by the way they dance." I was trying to scare the half-Puerto Rican/Jewish teenager from any entanglement with someone almost twice her age, but Candia simply smiled and said, "Long and hard."
"Shouldn't you be home?"
"Girls like me aren't expect to be Cinderella." A kiss led to my hotel, where she stripped off my clothes with teenage hunger. She emerged the victor. On sweat-damp sheets Candia said, "You weren't half-bad."
"Not the best?" My flesh was scrapped raw.
"My ex was huge." She stroked me to a painful hardness and lay on her stomach with her ass in the air. "I like it from behind. It makes you seem bigger."
I attributed the marathon to her half-Puerto Rican/half Jewish blood. As she got dressed, I thought that was it, instead she said, "You have no one and I have no one. Everyone else does. Winter is coming on. I don't like sleeping in a cold bed. You want to live with me?"
"What about love?" Staking my heart on a teenager's whim was a risky proposal. My other choice was more of the same of the months before last night. I played the long odds.
"I think you know the difference." She kissed my cheek once and went to the door. "Most men do by your age. So what will it be? Me or a long cold winter?"
"Warm in bed sounds good."
Candia went home to inform her mother, while I crossed the river to Brigitte's apartment. She considered my moving as a betrayal of her dog's love. As a friend she should have wished me good luck, stead she said,
"What does a man want from a woman? To be his bride? The mother of his children? What can that little bitch know about love?"
"About as much as anyone." No formula predicted the paths of the heart.
"You think sex will help you forget that girl from Buffalo?" Brigitte's jealousy was more deep-rooted. "Fucking is not the answer."
"Neither is sleeping alone." I packed my bags in five minutes. Angus whined his good-bye and Brigitte asked for the keys. One word would have saved my long train ride to the 15th arrondisement, except the door shut and I heard the TV telling the news. I walked out of the building and caught a taxi on the bridge.
The driver knew the address. Candia's atelier at the artist refuge La Ruche was located across from Paris' Lost and Found Bureau. Her airy 1930s artist loft contrasted with the quartier's dreary buildings. My house-warming gifts were a stereo tape deck and an unspoken vow of fidelity. Candia slept in my arms surrounded by Mickey Mouse dolls. My French improved in bed, although the honeymoon period had a short shelf-life.
I stole books about love and sex. The millions of words failed to answer any question about love. Candia sensed my malaise and suggested a psychiatrist, who prescribed pills. The downers offered more emptiness and I threw them into the gutter.
We ate boudin with her mother on Sundays and dined at cous-cous restaurants on Monday. We vacationed twice in Normandy. Our reflection in the store windows mirrored those of content couples as long as I didn't look in our eyes.
Bernard opened a dance club near Opera. Le Reve's plush decor harkened back to the 50s. The young rich loved the mix of soul and classic French hits stitched together by Bernard's world hits. We hired a young black bouncer to handle the voyous. Jacques had run with several gangs from the outer suburbs. A two-year stint in prison had not soured his smile. The young girls from the good neighborhoods thought the muscular Martiniquean handsome and came in droves to try their luck.
These beauties in turn attracted men who brought them drinks. A glass of champagne cost $20 and Le Reve coined money.
A week after the opening an older man entered with two dowdy women in fluffy coats. His nose was splayed across his upper lip like a wet sox. An argument ensued with the cashier about the cover charge.
"Give one reason you don't have to pay and you can come in for free." I could tell he had been someone once. "All you have to say is you're friends with Moses and you're in."
"We never pay," the ex-fighter rasped in a punished voice. "Not to un putain Amerlot."
"Fucking American." The insult was rewarded with an immediate response. "Jacques, escort these frogs out of the club."
Puzzlement mired on Jacques' face and the fiftyish blonde woman glared with disbelief. She looked very familiar and I ran out to say they could come in, except they had already reached the boulevard.
"So can you explain why you threw out Brigitte Bardot?" Bernard asked at the door.
"Brigitte Bardot?" The boxer's companion re-assembled into the legendary sex symbol of AND GOD CREATED WOMEN as would anyone who was Brigitte Bardot.
The story of her rejection hit the morning papers and I expected the Paris Police to begin deportation proceedings, instead the passage of time had rendered the animal lover's beauty passe to today's youth and our business doubled with their appreciation of my indiscretion, though Bernard suggested that I be more tact in the future.
"We will be old one day too."
At home the story between Candia and me was fraying at the edges, for the happiness of a relationship can be measured by the distance between a man and woman in bed and my arrivals near dawn earned Candia's back. Our lovemaking diminished to a monastic stalemate and her silence indicted every man as a potential threat.
We needed time apart and Candia spent the summer modeling in Japan. I called Tokyo every night. Her rare pick-ups mimicked Lisa's vanishing act in Europe and my imagination painted of a pantheon of Japanese men eating sushi off her body. Sherri came to perform a series of lesbian films in Versailles. This time she was alone. Che had run off with a man.
"Why are we unlucky in love?" I asked at La Coupole Brasserie.
"We are lucky in love. It's relationships we suck at," Sherri eyed a fresh-faced Sorbonne student, then her lids drifted across her irises. She was treating her pain with drugs. "At least long relationships."
"Any time I've been faithful to a woman, it's ended badly." Most of my romances had ended like a 747 cartwheeling into an Iowa cornfield.
"Any time you have been unfaithful you've achieved the same result." Her remedy for a broken heart was an orgy of women topped by heroin.
"Meaning?" My remedy was more wine.
"Meaning you shouldn't worry so much about love." Sherri autographed a waiter's bill. She had fans everywhere. "You can't do anything about the things you can't do anything about."
"So nothingness is easier to achieve than somethingness." I envisoned sitting in bed alone with the clock ticking out the seconds at the speed of a 45 spinning at 16 RPMs.
"No, some things you can't change, because they're beyond your power."
"So I should do nothing."
"Something will happen when you least expect it."
"And if it doesn't?"
"Then I'll push your wheelchair down the stairs when you're 80."
"That a promise?" Earlier would be better.
"We're family. Remember?" At least Sherri had Boo although parrots usually outlive their owners.
"Cousin and cousin."
"Forever."
Sherri huffed some Persian Brown and nodded into the brasserie banquet.
I ordered another bottle of Sancerre. I leaned against Sherri after the second. I don't receall how I got back to Impasse Dantzig. I slipped into bed and thought about my life.
At thirty-two I should have had a wife, a car, and kids plus a dog and bills.
I probably should have drunk another bottle of wine.
I reached over for Candia. The bed was empty. She was still in Japan. I dressed quietly and went to the phone booth in front of the Bureau Des Choses Trouves et Perdus. I dropped several 10-Francs cons and the slot and came home. My father answered and asked, "When are you going to settle down?"
"You mean move to Boston and live like everyone else?"
"It worked for your mother and me."
"I'll give some thought."
"You're only thirty-two. Don't throw the rest of your life away."
"I won't." I didn't have the heart to tell him that living with a teenager in Paris was as settled as I could manage in 1984. He was a 9-to-5 guy and loved my mother at first sight.
Candia returned in late August. We didn't have much time left. The phone rang at odd hours. If I answered, the caller hung up.
Suspicions bred accusations bound by resentment and we would have probably broken up, except Middle East terrorists bombed Paris to gain freedom for three imprisoned comrades.
A Sunday night explosion on Rue Faux barely scratched its target and no one had been injured, however the rest of the street got off less fortunate than the Israeli bank. The blast shattered every window on the block, charred a dozen cars, and shoved our nightclub's ornate entrance onto the dance floor.
"On a la chance." Bernard gingerly ran his finger over the blistered woodwork.
"Yes, we were damn lucky." If Le Reve had been open, the casualty list would have topped a hundred. The possibility of a thirty-two year-old American heading the 'dead' list didn't deter a police inspector from interrogating un estranger as the primary suspect.
"Merely a formality."
"Do I need a lawyer?" I asked the policeman and he shook his head with a laugh. "Not unless you are guilty."
Bernard agreed with this assessment and advised to do nothing until charged or arrested. As a French citizen he was familiar with the Napoleonic legal aberration of guilty until proven innocent. His nonchalance demeanor evaporated with the contractor's estimate that the repairs would take at least a month.
"This is impossible." He ranted against the sloth of French workers. A few glasses of cognac redirected his rancor to the real culprits. "C'est le guerre."
And the war killed and maimed innocent people throughout the French capitol in revenge for the victims of a murderous foreign war. Thesocialist government played tough guy. Having escaped one bombing I imagined lightning wouldn't strike twice and resumed my normal walks around the city.
Two days later I had a coffee at the Cafe Tartine in St. Paul. I visited the Eglise St. Gervais and lit a few candles for peace. I might ahve been an atheist, but childhood habits died hard. I walked across the courtyard of the Hotel de Ville, enjoying the spring sun on my skin.
A powerful detonation knocked me off my feet. The ringing in my ears was replaced by the cries and I ran to the post office to extract the wounded from the debris. At home I washed off the dust and decided to not give the terrorists a third shot and bunkered for the siege's duration at Candia's apartment.
Two days later the modeling agency cancelled her bookings. The seventeen year-old was more bored than scared by this enforced confinement. Her phone conversations were conducted in whispers.
"We should go to America." Only one hope existed for us.
"You think I can work in New York?" Candia's career was in a state of stagnation, since the better-paying commercials and editorial work in France were reserved for girls with Caucasian roots.
"They love girls like you there." A mulatto stood a slightly better chance in America, plus a friend was the photo editor for Details and another comrade shot photos for Elle.
"New York has to be safer than Paris."
"Fantastique. I want to visit Disneyworld." She squealed with teenage delight.
"Yes, we can go see Mickey." I didn't explain Orlando was over 1200 miles from New York and reaped the benefits of that deceit in bed.
In the morning I opened the atelier windows. A soft breeze carried the traces of Africa. I listened for anything else and heard no explosions. At noon Radio Nova announced Mitterand's government had freed the Lebanese prisoners. Hearing the news, Candia hugged a Mickey Mouse doll.
"What about Disneyworld?"
"We can go after the summer." I had a business to run.
"You promise we see Mickey." Her feet stamped on the floor.
"I have to check on the nightclub." I dressed quickly. Dishes flying at my head completed her rage.
"You can sleep at the club tonight, if you love that place so much."
Her suggestion was an order to be disobeyed. Flowers and a nice dinner would earn a reprieve, but she wouldn't forget my promise to visit Disneyworld until passing through the turnstiles of the Magic Kingdom. Women have an unforgiving memory and I had learned to regard that a blessing as much as a curse.
In May 1984 I ran into Johnny Thunders in Paris. He was playing at the Gibus club outside Republique. His manager was a German drug dealer. I owed Chris $200 for an 8-ball I had bought in 1982. It hadn't been half-bad.
"You have to pay me." The German thought he was a tough guy. "Or else."
"Fuck off." Paris was my city.
"You think I'm joking."
"No, but fuck off anyway." I had a black gang backing me. The Buffaloes came from the concrete suburbs. Johnny liked that I had told his manager to piss off. "Fucking kraut."
"That's right, you don't owe nothing in Paris for dope you bought in New York." We went to a cafe on the Canal St. Martin. A dealer gave us a couple of bags. The powder was brown. China White was impossible to find in Paris.
I was never friends with Johnny, but I loved YOU CAN'T PUT YOUR ARMS AROUND A MELODY. At dawn we bid each other farewell with a nod. He went his way and I went mine.
Several years later I was saddened to hear of his death in New Orleans. I suspected foul play. Johnny was a cold stone junkie. Nothing could kill him.
Certainly not drugs.
Two years ago I found this posting on Facebook from Patricia Jarozynski.
"Many rumors surround Thunders' death at the St. Peter House in New Orleans, Louisiana in April 1991. He apparently died of drug-related causes, but it has been speculated that it was the result of foul play.
According to the autobiography Lobotomy: Surviving the Ramones, Dee Dee Ramone took a call in New York the next day from Stevie Klasson, Johnny's rhythm guitar player. "They told me that Johnny had gotten mixed up with some bastards... who ripped him off for his methadone supply. They had given him LSD and then murdered him. He had gotten a pretty large supply of methadone in England, so he could travel and stay away from those creeps - the drug dealers, Thunders imitators, and losers like that."
What is known for certain is that Johnny's room (no. 37) was ransacked and most of his possessions were missing (passport, makeup, clothes). Rigor mortis had set in with his body positioned in an unnatural state, described by eyewitnesses as "like a pretzel", underneath a coffee table. Friends and acquaintances acknowledge he had not been using heroin for some time, relying on his methadone prescriptions. The police did not open a criminal investigation.
Singer Willy DeVille, who lived next door to the hotel in which Thunders died, described his death this way:
"I don't know how the word got out that I lived next door, but all of a sudden the phone started ringing and ringing. Rolling Stone was calling, the Village Voice called, his family called, and then his guitar player called. I felt bad for all of them. It was a tragic end, and I mean, he went out in a blaze of glory, ha ha ha, so I thought I might as well make it look real good, you know, out of respect, so I just told everybody that when Johnny died he was laying down on the floor with his guitar in his hands. I made that up. When he came out of the St. Peter's Guest House, rigor mortis had set in to such an extent that his body was in a U shape. When you're laying on the floor in a fetal position, doubled over - well, when the body bag came out, it was in a U. It was pretty awful."
An autopsy was conducted by the New Orleans coroner, but served only to compound the mysteries. According to Thunders' biographer Nina Antonia as posted on the Jungle Records web site, the level of drugs found in his system was not fatal. And according to the book "Rock Bottom: Dark Moments in Music Babylon" by Pamela Des Barres who interviewed Thunders' sister Marion, the autopsy confirmed evidence of advanced leukemia, which would explain the decline in Thunders' appearance in the final year of his life. This also sheds light on the interview in Lech Kowalski's documentary "Born To Lose: The Last Rock and Roll Movie", where Thunders' sister Mary-Ann's husband says, "Only Johnny knew how sick he really was."
In a 1994 Melody Maker interview Thunders' manager Mick Webster described the efforts of his family, "We keep asking the New Orleans police to re-investigate, but they haven't been particularly friendly. They seemed to think that this was just another junkie who had wandered into town and died. They simply weren?t interested." Marion claims that the original police report is largely missing and Webster further explains that the Coroner who conducted the autopsy was fired for falsifying a report in another case.
Thunders was survived by his ex-wife Julie and four children, sons John Genzale, Vito Genzale, Dino Genzale, and daughter Jamie Genzale. His oldest son Vito is serving a prison sentence in the Southport Correctional Facility in New York for drug dealing, having completed a previous sentence in Attica.
Like father like son.
Only these times ain't like the 70s.
Johnny Johnny we miss you now.
To hear YOU CAN'T PUT YOUR ARMS AROUND A MEMORY, please go to the following URL
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBAujZTTV3o&feature=related
What would Johnny Thunders do in these times?
Sable Starr and a bag of Chinese Rocks.
To hear CHINESE ROCKS by Johnny Thunders and Heartbreakers, please go this URL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-M9Ymvgd0A
