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.

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

August 11, 1978 - Journal Entry - East Village Content Alert

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Late Fame and Radio Man

A bearded older man lay on the sidewalk. Heap of humanity. The screening crowd ignored him deceived by their blather. I had no idea who he was. A human in distress. His attempts to stand feeble. I bent over to help him. He begged off my aid. I lifted him to his feet and he stood a crooked man. I recognized him. He had been inside the theater. Soiled, Willem worked the autograph line. He had been here thousands of times in hundreds of places. A car was waiting for him. We were. Going to his apartment thereafter for tea. "Stay close. When I go. I go." I nodded and asked the old man, if he was alright. "Fine." I went to the big black SUV. The black driver asked if I wanted inside. I waved off the offer. This was Willem's ride. The risen fallen man was speaking with Willem. He listened with intent. Willem despite his fame has retained his humanity, as have I from time to time. "Let's go." "First a photo with the old man." Willem stood close. The two seemed to know each other. One shot was enough. Willem jumped in the car. I got in. The doors shut. The SUV was supersized for comfort. Willem was relieved to be out of the limelight. Our friendship went back into the last century. Both of us lucky to be us now. "Do you know Radio Man?" "Who?" "The old man. He's famous. Radio Man comes to all the first screenings. He's been in lots of movies. Here take a look." Willem found Radio Man on Google and handed me his iPhone. The bearded old man had been in many films. Even a documentary. He had been discoveredvshouting at celebrities fro A newsstand. He never had to pretend to be real. He was real. He had no other choice. Still I had never heard him. Radio Man had confided to Willem that Late Fame will be the one to earn him an Oscar. I think so too. Once more he was playing real and nobody was better than that than himself___

Dark Chocolate City - 2012

The funk group Parliament released CHOCOLATE CITY in 1975 to celebrate the racial minority becoming the majority in major cities across America such as Washington, D.C., Newark, New Jersey, Gary, Indiana, Los Angeles, California, Atlanta, Georgia, and New York, New York. In recent years their majority has been challenged not a whites will rise again movement, but the influx of Asian and Latinos into major urban areas, since DC inner city percentage strongly favored a black presence, which must have frightened the whites during the electrical outages over the weekend.

Drudge Report fearmongered millions Without Power, cell Phone Service Crashes in DC Area, train Passengers Stranded 20 Hours, gas stations run dry, while the City of Washington reported that DC will conduct business as usual on Monday morning.

Who are the millions without power and gas?

The white-flight folks in the suburbs of Virginia.

Fallen trees have cut power lines and days may pass before the power line crews can repair the damage.

May the fear be with you.

Labor Day Travel

Written Sep 1, 2022

In early September 2008 my good friend Alan Vaughan called from Gary, Indiana. The art dealer from Bruxelles was driving to his old hometown, Sarasota, Florida from Onekama, Michigan, where his family had maintained a cottage on Lake Michigan. He had just visited the Jacckson 5 home on 2300 Jackson Street. A little out of the way, but we all loved ABC. We hadn’t seen each other in a good six or seven years. He knew that I had returned from Thailand with dogsit in Palm Beach. That job was over and it was time to vacate the mansion off Worth Avenue. I informed him that I was heading north to New England.

“How you getting north?”

“I’m hitchhiking on I-95. I figure it will take 3-4 days.” I actually had a airline ticket from West Palm Beach to Boston, but preferred to mythize a drifter's northbound voyage. “I’m broke so that’s the only way I can get there.”

“You’re kidding?” He was incredulous. “I haven’t seen a hitchhiker on the entire trip from the Upper Peninsula.”

“Not one?"

“Not one.”

“Well, I’ll be a blast from the past.”

I hung up and then called Alan the next day from the Palm Beach airport saying I was in Jacksonville. He was in Memphis. He had stopped there to see Graceland.

The next day from Brooklyn I said I was in Dillon South Carolina. On Labor Day Roanoke, Virginia.

"I’m making real good time."

By the way I was already drinking voka screwdrivers made by my brother-in-law, David Rutter, on Watchic Pond in Standish, Maine. My family cottage with my sister and her family and my Aunt Sally and Uncle Russ. . Twice the vodka. Half the ice.

The trip from West Palm Beach to Boston wasn't fun, but it was fast on the trains.

And there's nothing like Maine at the end of summer and a cold water lobster. Aan of course heavy-handed Vodka-tonics from David Rutter.

WILD BEAR by Peter Nolan Smith

Written 2011

The flatness of the Midwest dominated travel across Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and the stunted panhandle of Pennsylvania. The great industrial cities of Gary, Toledo, Cleveland, and Erie were connected by I-90. Summer was at its height, as my good friend, AK, and I hitchhiked east from San Diego. We had experienced 117 degrees Fahrenheit heat in Needles, California. Wind devils had chased our trail across New Mexico. The sky across Nebraska had been the color of an over-boiled potato.

It was late-August 1974.

Every day seemed hotter than the previous one. Rides were hard to find. We were longhairs. Our last bath had been in Tulsa. The previous night we had slept in a cornfield off Route 66. I was so drunk from drinking moonshine with three Okie ex-cons f that I had crashed on the cold earth. My stained jeans looked like I had been picking cotton for weeks and a thin sheen of dust and diesel fumes lay on my face. Motorists slowed down to pick us up, then sped up upon seeing my scarecrow apparition. We were stuck on the wrong side of Buffalo with four hours left of daylight.

“Stand behind me or else we’ll never get a ride.” AK had saved a clean change of clothing for the last leg and washed his face at an Erie truck stop, while I slept in the back of a pick-up truck.

“We could always stop at Jackie’s place.” My ex-girlfriend lived in Buffalo. She had dropped me for a high school sweetheart. I hadn’t spoken with her for a half year.

“She’s probably back at school and I doubt her parents want two smelly hippies knocking on their door.” The New Yorker was only interested in getting to Boston. His girlfriend was waiting for him on the South Shore. He had a music teaching gig starting in a week.

“No, I doubt they would want that.” The Summer of Love had been over for years. Richard Nixon was president. The Silent Majority was in power. I stepped behind AK and stuck out my thumb.

Twenty minutes later a semi-trailer pulled over to the shoulder. The driver was deadheading to Gloucester after dropping a load of frozen fish in Gary, Indiana. He explained that he had been driving this route ten times a month for five years.

“I can drive it with my eyes closed.”

“Me too.”

I crawled into the back to sleep. AK played his Kalimba for the forty-one year-old trucker. He played a surreal LIGHT MY FIRE on the or African thumb piano and I didn’t wake until twenty miles west of Albany.

“Be in Beantown within two-three hours. Not Boston, but 128.” The driver drawled with a mouth filled with chaw. He spat out the wad and wiped the spittle with the back of his hand. The Kenworth hummed over the Berkshires at 75.

“Three hours.” I had graduated from college in May. My only job prospect was driving a cab. No banks wanted an economics major with a sin laude diploma. I had celebrated my twenty-seconnd birthday in Reno. A big winner at blackjack, until I had my first glass of bourbon. Now I had $20 in my wallet and three cans of beans. I pulled out a map of Northern New England. My eyes plotted out an alternative route to the Interstate. Everything became very clear.

The humid air blew through the open window. The temperature had dropped under 90. I tapped AK on the shoulder. We had been together most of the month.

“You mind if I get out at Troy?”

“No one gets out at Troy.” The driver regarded the lingering light of the day. The sun was fifty minutes shy of the western horizon. Darkness was no man’s friend in a crime-ridden city like Troy. "Albany is the asshole of the world and Troy is ten miles up its ass."

“I’m not staying in Troy. I’m heading into the mountains.” The higher altitude of US 2 over the Berkshires Mountains were cooler than that on I-90 an I intened to head north into Vermont after Williamstown.

“At this time of night?” AK had someplace to go. Someone was waiting for him. His girlfriend on 2 Shannon Road in Brighton. We had met there as neighbors a year ago.

“I’ll find someplace to sleep.” I had nowhere to go other than my parents’ house south of the Neponset River, but they would be just as happy to see me in five days as tonight. “Drop me at the Troy exit.”

“It’s your life.” The driver shook his head and AK paralleled the side to side movement.

“You sure about this?” AK was a good musician. His fingers magic on the keyboards. I iffered nothing to the world, but I wasn't feeling sorry for myself. I was still on the road.

“I’ll see you in a few days.” Our cross-country trip had its share of highs and a small percentage of lows. LSD on Black’s Beach. Lust-hungry lesbians in Big Sur. Driving across the Rockies. Beer at the Id Lounge in Roosevelt, Utah. Drinks with the Spear sisters in Tulsa. Losing $2000 in Reno. Bourbon and cards don’t mix even on your birthday.

The driver put on the radio. POPCORN, the summer's inescapeable hit. The Kenworth downshifted to the exit. I climbed down from the cab. The driver tooted his horn and AK waved from the passenger side. I walked off the highway and stuck out my thumb. No one stopped for me and I picked up my bag to hike the short distance to Route 4. A SS Chevelle stopped within three minutes. The long-haired driver was heading into Vermont over the Mohawk Trail Scenic Byway. A lovely ride.

We smoked weed and listened to the Allman Brothers LIVE AT THE FILMORE on his 8-track. He loved hearing about my orgy with the lesbians in Big Sur. The driver's name was Earl. I recounted a few more tales of the road without mentioning the menage a trois in LA with a straight man and his wife or a tryst with a trans-woman outside Monterrey. The passenger seat of his muscle car was not a confessional. The sun set adn the sky was getting late early, as summer came to an end.

“Sky’s looking funny.” Earl pointed west. The clouds darkened the dusk. “Looks like rain. You want to come north to Burlington.”

“No, I’ll jump out at Route 4.” At Williamstown the Vermont road led into the Green Mountains. “I’m not worried about a little rain.”

“Suit yourself.” Earl handed over two joints of Acapulco Gold at my departure spot. There was no light left in the west and the sky overhead was starless. A few drops of rain struck my face. A farmer stopped in a pick-up heading to Mendon. It wasn’t on my map. Within five minutes his windshield wipers were swishing back and forth at top speed. The rain was hard. The air cold.

“I’d invite you home, but my wife don’t like strangers. Sorry.”

The farmer dropped me atop the pass. The rain was torrential and lightning scorched the black night. No cars were out in this weather. A flash revealed a house in the woods. I ran for cover. The two-story house was dark. I shined my flashlight inside. I tried the door. It was locked from the inside.

Lightning struck the treetops. Sulphur filled my nose. I wrapped a towel around my fist and smashed the window pane of the door. I shouted out ‘hello’. The word died in the kitchen. No one had lived in this house for years. The smell of mildew was strong and the roof leaked slightly. The downstaris bedroom had a lumpy mattress on the floor. I spread my sleeping bag and then stripped off my clothes to shower outisde in the rain and within seconds washed most of the dirt off my body. I entered the house shivering and toweled myself dry adn clean.

I found several candles and lit them in the bedroom. I opened a can of beans with my Swiss Army knife. They tasted okay cold. Anything does to a hungry man. I smoked a little grass and pondered my universe. I was twenty-two years-old. My economics sine laude degree guaranteed no future. I was good-looking in a Neanderthal way. I inhaled a last puff of weed and slipped into my sleeping bag. The rain pounded the roof with a relentless rattle. The lightning shook the walls. I fell asleep several seconds after blowing out the candles. I was not scared of the dark and not even of tomorrow.

Something awoke me several hours later. The rain was less than before. I heard a noise. Loud and almost animal. A grunting timbered by a growl. I reached for my Swiss Army knife. A bear was in the house. I had left the door open. The beast had smelled my beans.

The growl grew louder from the hallway. The bestial slavering increased in rapidity almost as if the bear was hyperventilating on nitrous-oxide. My right hand tightened on the knife, as I escaped from the warm cocoon of the sleeping bag. A rabid snarl echoed from the hallway. The bear was not alone either. A smaller creature was at its mercy. A mewing deer. Murder was murder even in the animal kingdom and I encircled my left arm with a towel. Bears had claws. I breathed deeply three times and pulled open the door.

The flashlight revealed nothing in the hallway.

The snorting terror was two doors down beind an ajar door The runting fever pace accelerated in chorus with the alto panting. I pushed the door open and the flashlight beam fell on a naked couple in coitus. The young girl was a hippie. The man too. She looked like a runaway. The man my age. They saw me at the same time.

A man with a knife.

The girl screamed with her eyes closed.

“No, no, no, no.”

I dropped the knife on the floor and quickly explained how I thought they were two animals hunting me. I told them that I had pot. The man had a bottle of cheap wine. We sat up for an hour telling stories of the road. The young girl was atypical of the women traveling with communes. Long straight hair, skinny body, piercing gaze. She had seen her share of promises wandering across America for the two years. I figured her for nineteen. She said her name was Shane. Her tales traveled from Woodstock, Berkeley, Sedona, and Austin. The hippie road was her home. The man was from Kansas. Ray was heading for Maine to fish the Grand Banks. He had a bad left eye. A scar bisected his face. He was no hippie, only a long-hair.

“Never seen the ocean before, but I work hard.”

I wished them good-night and returned to my bedroom and braced the mattress against the door. The Manson Family had its imitators. I slept uneasily through the short hours until dawn. The sun came streaming through the pines and the air was fresh and clean. A good time of day to start on the road. I creeped down the hallway with my bag in hand.

“Is that you?” Shane’s timid voice called from the room off the hallway.

"Yes."

"Where you going?"

“Yes, I’m heading into the White Mountains.”

“Could you help me?”

“Help you how?” I pushed the door inward. Shane was lying on the floor wrapped in a sheet. Ray was nowhere in sight.

“Ray took everything, but my sandals.” No explanation. “You have something for me to wear?”

“Nothing that would fit.”

She wasn’t the type of girl to cry. Her body was too young to be sorry about a bad decision. This must have happened to her more than once before. Hippie girls were everyone’s victim. I had met more than a few on my travels.

“Better than a birthday suit.”

I rummaged through my bag. She swam in a blue oxford shirt. I had only worn it twice. Rockford had given me a sari. They fit everyone. We shared a can of beans. She touched my hand as thanks.

“We better go. We don’t want the police to find us here.”

“You mind, if I join you. I'm heading to my boyfriend's commune near White River Junction.”

"Sure, I'm going to camp in New Hampshire." We exc]pecting nothing from each other than a helping hand.

"Great." Shane pushed a strand of blonde hair from her face. She knew where she was going and she knew where I was going too. The White Mountains were fine this time of year and $20 could last a week, if I hid from the bears.

They ate everything, but not us. Humans smell bad and taste worst.