HUNG 1979

“They always told me it was the greatest life if you don’t weaken... and I never did, fans. I never did”. - Marc Stevens

The Village in New York had always attracted a kaleidoscope of radical, deviant, and various other characters considered abhorrent by mainstream America. Homosexuals, lesbians, trans-people congregate in the West Village. Reds of the 40s gave way to the beatniks of the 50s, who evolved into the hippies of the 60s before surrendering the shattered counterculture ghetto to the junkies, artists, punks and sexual revolutionaries of the 1970s.

In 1978 I lived in a three-room railroad flat on East 10th Street with Alice, my hillbilly girlfriend. My faux-sister Pip and her sister, Pud, had an apartment off Bleecker Street over the jazz club, the Village Gate. She called me Pud. We had met at CBGBs, which was punk's version of the uptown Lincoln Center. Hilly, the owner, couldn’t figure out how the four of us got so drunk on one drink. It wasn’t magic. Pip and I smuggled bottles of vodka past Merv, the giant bouncer, at the door. No one seemed to care. Not even Hilly’s vigilant wife. Karen was more worried about marijuana, since the 9th Precinct always were on the take for bribes.

One Spring evening the Ghosts opened for the Dictators. My girlfriend didn’t like either band, so I went alone. Pip sat at a table near the stage. Our chairs leaned against the wall. Pip reached under the table to fill our glasses from a vodka bottle. We drank it neat without ice.

The Ghosts played a blistering set and closed out the show with RICHARD IS A FORKHEAD,. Richard Hell was our idol. The song was a low blow at Richard’s ragged coif. I tried to imitate his. Mine was a suedehead. The lead singer of the Voidoids was loved by every woman on the scene and then some. There was no encore for the Ghosts and the band’s juvenile guitarist came over to our table before heading to the dressing room.

“You mind.” Xcessive pointed to Pip’s glass. He had spotted our trick from the stage.

“Not at all.” My ‘sister’ was sweet on young punk rockers.

Xcessive drained the glass and coughed a little before wiping the sweat from his face.

“Thanks.”

“Good show.”

“We tried.”

The sixteen year-old guitarist threaded through his admirers by the stage and I said to Pip, “Isn’t he a little young for you?”

“He’s just a friend. Same as you.”

The cheery NYU coed wasn't a good liar. She had a crush on most of the musicians on the scene and many of the women and girls at CBGBs suffered the same affliction. This was the late 1970s and not the 50s. None of us were going steady, and I struggled to be faithful to my girlfriend, Alice.

“Besides, I have my eye on my new neighbor. He’s really cute. His name’s Marc Stevens,” cooed Pip.

“Marc Stevens?”

“You know him?”

“I don’t know him personally, but he’s the famous porno Mr. 10 and a Half.”

The well-hung actor was John Holmes’ rival in the XXX film industry. Both had thick cranks, although Marc was renowned for his gay sex performances

“Mr. 10 and a Half?”

“Yes, 10 and a Half inches.” I had seen him dancing naked other than silver body paint at Studio 54. His penis had appeared a normal size that evening.

“Oh, that’s big.”

“He was the star of THE DEVIL AND MRS. JONES.” The John Damiano XXX film had been shot in a Pennsylvania apple-packing factory and was considered chic porno.

“I don’t know that film.” Pip majored in English literature at NYU. For exotica, her professors expected their students to read MADAME BOVARY and Camus’ THE PLAGUE. The Francophile intellectuals had no use for pornography other than THE STORY OF O. Having haunted XXX theaters in Boston and New York, I gave Pip a 10-minute course in XXX films from DEEP THROAT to BEHIND THE GREEN DOOR. Her eyes shone with joy. She loved celebrities, especially since Mr. 10 and a Half lived right next door.

“He’s living with this girl, Jill Monro.”

“Jill’s is a trans-woman. She had an operation to turn her penis into a vagina. She’s the first trans movie star.” I had see none of here films. I wasn't really into porno movies.

“No, I can’t believe I didn't see that she is a transvestite.”

“Transsexual.”

Transvestites and Transexuals were two different creatures. I had heard from friends in the XXX industry that Jill had gone past a smooth bum. All the way. The operation was the best big step for someone trapped in a body not of their choosing. I didn't explain the difference to Kim. She kissed my cheek for explaining the birds and bees of a hidden sect.

“I love you, Pud.”

Not everyone held porno actors in esteem, but since my youth I had haunted XXX bookstores in Boston's Combat Zone and since my arrival in New York the Times Square peep shows in search of arcane films. My hillbilly girlfriend had no idea about my research. It was a secret I held close to my heart.

Later that spring, Pip announced she was throwing a party for a quartet of Geminis. She one. Me one too. Her best friend Cyrena and a heartthrob, Amos. Sean, an underground designer of nightclubs, decorated her apartment. She invited a two hundred people. That night over a hundred crammed into the duplex. I knew many of them.

“I heard Mr. 10 and a Half is coming,” Klaus whispered in my ear. The German opera singer was a fiend for size and he shivered saying, “10 and a half. Divine.”

Klaus critiqued gay porno films, as if he was voting for the XXX Oscars. He love going to the Adonis THeater on Eighth Avenue. Never missed a new movie and cooed, "I loved Michael, Angelo and David."

My hillbilly girlfriend wandered off to CBGBs to see the Mumps. Alice didn’t like drinking and liked me drunk less. A minute later, a curly-haired man came up to me. He was Marc Stevens and he said, “I thought she would never leave. My name is Marc.”

“Pip mentioned you.” I looked through the crowd. His better half wasn’t in the room. “She mentioned you too. Her brother.” Marc wore a white jumpsuit. He was the thinnest person in the room. His hand touched my ass. “You want to do some blow?” “Yes.” I was as used to gay guys hitting on me as they were accustomed to seducing straight guys. To them, they considered everyone potentially gay. No one was 100% straight. “Not here. There are too many coke vultures.” His soft brown eyes darted over the crowd, as if he were looking for someone special. “Let’s go to my place.” Two men leaving a party together was no scandal. Pip leaned over to Klaus and pointed out my departure. The singer gave me the green light with a wink and shouted, “Gluck.” “I don’t need good luck.” I was straight or at least that’s what I told myself, but everyone in the Village was a little bent in one way or another.

“Your friend is cute in a strange way.”

“Klaus likes you.”

“All size queens desire Mr. 10 and a Half.”

“I bet they do.” I had seen nudes of him in Swedish Erotica, the best straight magazine in Times Square’s porno shops. He was big. Not John Holmes big, but big.

Marc tiptoed down the hall.

“I don’t want any of the neighbors seeing us. They are busybodies. Always peeking through the peepholes. Like this hallway was in a porno movie. My wife is very jealous.” He opened the door and pushed me inside.

“My girlfriend is never jealous.” She didn't have a jealous bone in her body, as if our together was just killing time, until she met David Bowie.

“Everyone is jealous. I don’t believe she isn’t. Not about you. Sex is just sex. Nothing more.”

Marc shut the door. The one-bedroom apartment was decorated with dark brown furniture favored by gays for hiding stains from intercourse. The XXX actor went into the kitchen to fetch a Pond’s cream jar from the cabinet. I thought this was going too fast, but he opened the jar filled a white powder with a pinkish glow.

“Bolivian flake from one of my admirers.”

"I've never tried it." I had only heard of it

"You'll love it."

We sat on the soft module sofa. The cushions wrapped around me like a Venus Fly Trap. The music from Pip’s party thumped the wall. I recognized the song as X-Ray Spex’s UP BONDAGE UP YOURS.

“You like that music?” Marc spilled out a mound of blow. Lines thick as rope.

“I’m a punk.” I had been since seeing the Ramones play CALIFORNIA SUN in the winter of 1976. Their speedy version of the Rivieras’ hit opened my eyes to a new world and CBGBs became my second home.

“I like leather, but not that music. I’m more into disco.”

He unzipped his jumpsuit to his belly button and handed me a straw. “Enjoy.”

I huffed the first rail. This was not street gear, and the coke burst into my nasal capillaries with the intensity of an Incan sunrise, then scorched through my veins with an avalanche of euphoria. I fell back into the sofa with my bones sizzling on Andes Barbeque.

“Good, huh,” Marc whispered in my ear. His lips were tender on my earlobe. He spooned a small pile into my other nostril. “Breathe.”

I obeyed his command. The coca sizzled my senses. I heard motorcycles running on my blood and the universe shimmered out of focus. I was in no condition to resist Marc’s advances. He undid his zipper. Out flopped his cock.

He was a veteran of porno movies. Millions of XXX viewers had seen him in MICHAEL, ANGELO, AND DAVID.Klaus one of them. Hundreds of thousands wanted him. I gripped his thick member with the tenderness of a butcher preparing to cut a steak. The photographer Robert Mapplethorpe had immortalized this penis in a black- and-white shirt titled MARC STEVENS MR. 10 and a Half, 1976. I gave it a squeeze.

“It’s not hard.”

“Rough trade gets me erect.”

Marc’s admission was not a confession, but a request. I pinched his nipple and his cock stiffened with a throb.

“I like being the queen,” murmured Marc. “You wanna be king?”

He undid my jeans. My cock was semi-hard. His hand smoothed my staff.

"I think we did too much blow.”

“Or not enough.”

Keys turned the lock of the front door. The actor sat up straight and zipped his jumpsuit.

“It’s my wife. Do some more blow.”

I snapped out of my trance and zipped my jeans. A statuesque brunette entering the apartment had a couple inches on us in her stiletto heels. She regarded the coke and then the two of us. Her smile held none of the unease of seeing her man with another man. Marc introduced us.

“Jill, please to meet you.” His wife held out her hand with a tilted wrist.

I offered mine, expecting a limp handshake. Jill crunched my knuckles in a vise. Marc was her man. I winced with a pained grin and ripped my fingers loose.

“I met him at the party next door. It was fun.”

“I can see that.” Jill sat down with the surrender of accepting Marc for what he was.

“Nice meeting you too. Time for me to rejoin the party.”

“Leaving so soon?” Marc was in no position to pursue his desire.

“It’s getting late.”

“Thanks for coming.” Jill smirked with the pleasure of re-establishing her dominance over my host.

“Sure, just one more thing.”

“What?” Jill straightened her posture, as if she was ready for a fight.

“A good-bye gift.” I bent over and snorted the other two lines within two seconds.

“Thanks," Marc laughed and Jill joined him.

“Sure you want to leave?” She spread her legs to invite a touch. She was a sexual adventurer like all of us in the Sexual Revolution.

“I already have a lover.”

“Lucky girl.” Jill kissed Marc on the cheek. “Same as me.”

He spilled out more blow. She delicately bowed her head to inhale her first line. They looked like such a nice couple. I returned to the party. Pip grabbed me.

“What happened?”

“His wife came home.”

I poured myself a vodka. There was no ice left. The party was losing steam. It was time to go.

“And what were you doing?”

“Talking that’s all. I have a girlfriend.” Pip was a spy for my hillbilly girlfriend. They were good friends. All men were the enemy.

“And I’m not gay.”

“And you’re not straight either.” Pip shrugged with disappointment. She had been all ears for some good dirt, but left me to flirt with the Ghosts' young guitarist. I stayed for another hour. The coke ran its course. Klaus lived in the East Village. We shared a taxi to St. Mark’s Place.

“So how big was it?” The German was all ears. “Have you seen his movies?”

I could tell Klaus anything. He loved hearing secrets.

“Yes.” His eyes widened with delight.

“It was that big and thick.” I didn’t comment on the softness of his penis. “Wunderbar.”

“He said you were cute.”

“Really?”

“Maybe you’ll get lucky one night.”

“I can only wished and hope.”

“Klaus dropped me on St. Mark’s. I walked to 10th Street.

My hillbilly girlfriend was asleep in our bed. I took off my clothes and slid next to her.

“How was it?”

“What?”

“Mr. 10 and a Half.” The phone was by the bed. Pip must have called her. “Big and thick.”

“Too big for me?”

Yes.”

“And you?”

“I went strictly there for a look-see. I came, I touched, I went.”

“You’re a good boy.” Alice cuddled up to me with a childish tenderness.

She was a good actress to pretend that she believed me and I didn’t mention the temptation. She was strictly GP-13 and I fell into a wired maze of dreams. None of them were XXX and that was probably better for Alice. Better for me too, because 10 inches was as a big penis in dreams as it was in real life and Mr. Ten and a half even more so.

Klaus and me at the party.

Foto by Kim Davis.

THE RULES OF KLAUS photos by Anthony Scibelli / Story by Peter Nolan Smith

In 1978 Anthony Scibelli and I created a foto-roman of his photos and my story

The story was one of my detective poems and the cast featured the Eighth Wonder of the world, Klaus Nomi, Jon Waters Starlette, Cookie Mueller, Club 57 Impresario Andy Reese, A texas runaway, Clover Nolan, and me along with several other people whose names are locked in the past.

Scibelli's eternal black-and-white photos appeared at MoMA's CLUB 57 show 2017-2018.

MoMA's photo experts had digitally improved each image, which are classic reminders of a time when New York belonged to us and not them. We all know who them are.

18"X14" prints are available as are larger and smaller versions

To purchase the 18"X14" prints, please go to this URL

https://www.ebay.com/itm/THE-RULES-OF-KLAUS-featuring-fotos-of-Klaus-Nomi-and-Cookie-Mueller/164117217701

Thank You

Peter Nolan Smith

Emily D and Snow - A Homage

The storm's snow sweeps
Through the bare branches
Of the evergreen trees
Shivering outside my bedroom window
Wind-blown white flurries
Blight out not only the pine green,
But the gray, brown, black, white
Of the somber landscape
Of winter in New England

EVerything white and cold__
Swarms of snowflakes
Swirl
Before my window glaze with ice
A hand on the cold glass
A palm cold
On the cold glass
The touch of winter___
In a room
Warmed by a wood fire
Press my lips to the glass
Not your kiss

You far away
The cold kiss of winter

Here
With the warmth of summer
Months away
From my bedroom window__

ps winter is months away from this suny day. The last of September__

Expulsion from the Explorers Club

The last week of August was a rough week. I was expelled from the EC. Due to inadvertently showing three nude fotos from when I was rescuing horseshoe crabs under the Broad Channel Bridge. Truthfully I was surprised I lasted that mostly white male club as l9ng as I had. Sure, I had circumnavigated the world, lived in foreign lands, and fathered children in Thailand. The Ethics Committee listened to my statement accepting that no one should be shown naked photos, especially of an old traveler. That wasn't all. My work days in Montauk days have been reduced from three to two. Jewish holidays and a Nor'Easter. With five days off I've been writing more and cheating by using grammarly to correct my typos. I rewrote Fear of Heights about my urge to jump off condo balconies and mountain cliffs. the urge never goes completely away. Back in the 1980s Vonelli, my friend, had rented a small house behind Harrods in Kensington, London from a woman with a beautiful daughter, Carey Carey, who was going out with the oldest Bin Laden brother. Good fellow. Always showed up with champagne. Always vintage Anyway one evening the couple was accompanied by a crooked young man. Eric calmy explained that a year agobhe had thrown himself off Harrod's roof. But obviously hadn't died. His later second attempt was more successful. Writing this dragged me down, but the story had a happy ending__ Off to Montauk So back on June 2. I had A Train to the Broad Channel to view the annual arrival of the horseshoe crabs to breed with my friend Raoul. I had missed high tide. Plenty of the shelled creatures had been stranded high on the sand. There wasn't a soul in sight. Just Raoul and I and the horseshoe crabs. I rescued a number. It was a warm sunny day. The first good weather after a cold and soggy spring. No one was around, so I shucked my clothing to wash off the horseshoe crabs' effluvia from their breeding orgy. Spring had been very wet and cold. That day was warm and sunny. No one was underneath the bridge. I hauled several females back into the water. A messy task. Done, I decided to take a swim and stripped off my shorts and shirt. Naked. A plunge. I asked my friend to take a photo. Did so and we returned to the city. Showed the photos of my afternoon to the young male door forgetting the nude photos. I flitted through the three and apologized for this error. I thought nothing of it, but they reported that I have shown sexual content and a week later I was informed that the ethics board was investigating the matter. Until then I was banned from the cluboard. I explained it was a mistake and there was nothing pruriant about the photos. They thanked for the meeting and later that week reported that the ethics board had expelled me from the club. So there it is No recourse but to accept their determination. I wasn't surprised. More amazed that I had lasted that long A disappointment to s As you can see from the photo its hardly sexual but these days ay the least My list: Not invited to Kathy Burns birthday party in 1959. Falmouth Foresides Maine Next - lost my scholarship to catholic all boys school in 1969. Atheism__ Persona non grata at Club 57 - 1979 - unfaithful to Ann Magnuson Rejected from the CIA - 1980q,

FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL KILL / Tura Santana - 2011

Back in the 1960s, Braintree’s South Shore Drive-In was a popular cinema experience off 128 outside of Boston over the Blue Hills from my suburban development of split-level houses. No one went to the twin screens in the daytime, but on summer nights my father drove my mother and their six children to the open-air theater, where we had watched THE TEN COMMANDMENTS and Doris Day-Rock Hudson movies from the back seat of our station wagon.

We loved the concession popcorn. Teenage girls and boys hung out on the benches. They were not interested in the movies. My brother and I ,once home from the parochial school, changed into tee-shirts and Levis. My mother didn't let us wear them to the movies. She insisted that all her children wear pajamas. I understood for the younger kids, but we helped my father carry in our younger siblings.. Neither my older brother nor I left the station wagon during movies. My mother didn't see the problem.

“I want you ready for bed when we get home and what’s the problem with wearing pajamas?” She thought of us as her babies, even though we were almost teenagers.

“They can’t go to the concession stand dressed like that. They’re almost teenagers.” My father interceded for us. “Other teenagers say things.”

“They shouldn’t care what those hooligans say.” My mother had heard about the wickedness of ‘submarine races’ from the parish priest. His sermons warned girls of boys' wandering hands. My mother had two daughters. Neither was over ten. “The drive-in is for movies. Not sin.”

My mother was never more right than when her opinion was backed up by the Holy Roman Church, but the South Shore Drive-In was more like a Midnight Mass in comparison to the Neponset Drive-In off Route 3.

The single-screen on the Neponset River regularly featured adult fare. Biker and zombie films and were popular as the first show. The second movie sometimes offered soft core bare skin. All an affront to the good citizens of the South Shore.

“These films are filth born from the loins of Satan.” Our pastor, a seventy-year-old Irishman, regularly condemned B-movies in his Sunday sermon. His brogue rang with his devotion to a decades-old celibacy and he sought to enlist altar boys into the ranks of black cloth. None of the boys on the cusp of teenagerism sought to suffer the curse of lifelong virginity, especially not in 1965, which was a good year for go-go girls and outlaw bikers.

My older brother was in 8th Grade. I was thirteen. No more Drive-Ins with my parents. We were too old for that. Across the Neponset River from my hometown was Mattapan with the trolley terminal, several barber shops, a clothes store for teenagers, record shops, restaurants, and a cinema decorated as a Far Eastern temple. Teens from everywhere flocked to Mattapan after school and especially on Saturdays. We were young and young lasted forever in the Sixties.

Nearing the end of the school year, Frunk had kissed a girl at the matinee of the Mattapan Oriental, The upper balcony. Shari had let his hands roam to second base in the pitch-black balcony. My next-door neighbor, Chuckie Manzi, and I had found stroke books in the woods below Chickatawbut Hill. Our hands belonged to the Devil and our souls were lost to God, especially since my atheism had been a work in progress since my best friend in Maine drowned at age eight.

In late-May of 1965 sex movies promoted wickedness. No Hollywood release preached sin more fervently than Russ Meyer’s FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL KILL. Torrid ads for Russ Meyer’s B-movie about avenging women in fast cars were splashed across the local newspaper entertainment sections and lurid posters promoted the no-holds barred cinematic experience were plastered on brick walls throughout the South Shore.

The star of the movie was Tura Santana. The buxom lead actress was a mélange of Japanese/Sioux/Irish blood. My hometown was a white suburb, mostly Italians, Irish, and a few Jews. No one in our white suburb was as exotic as Russ Meyer’s star.

The first night showing at the Neponset Drive-In was scheduled for the upcoming Friday. Our parish priest pleaded with Sunday worshipers to tear down these offensive placards and our parents obeyed his edict. Their devout fingers bled from the effort to save their young sons from filth.

One evening my older brother and I salvaged two tattered black-and-white posters of three buxom Amazons proudly standing before a foreign sports car. A Porsche 383. Our next-door neighbor Chuckie reckoned that the sports car was the same model in which the teen idol James Dean had died in 1955. I kept my tattered poster under my bed. My brother stashed his in the attic. My mother would have killed us, if she found one, but we worshipped them as unholy relics of our increasingly rebellious youth.

On Monday morning the boys from 7th and 8th Grades discussed the upcoming Russ Meyer film on the bus en route to Our Lady of the Foothills.

“What do you think they do in the film?” I whispered to our friends.

“No sex, but a lot of flesh and big breasts.” Chuckie’s answer was a good guess. We had seen more than that in the dirty books we had found in the woods.

“There’s only one way to find out for sure.” My brother looked at us and we instinctively knew what we had to do and that week we plotted an expedition to the Neponset Drive-In .

Our plan was simple. DOCTOR ZHIVAGO was playing at the local movie house by the Expressway. David Lean’s epic film starring Julie Christie and Omar Sharif had won almost every Oscar at the previous month’s Academy Award. 197 minutes long. On Friday evening I asked my father for permission to see it with Chuckie and my older brother. My mother objected to my request.

“It’s a love story about godless communists.” She remained a fervent McCarthyite a decade after Tailgunner Joe’s death.

“Pasternak was a great poet, but this is only a love story.” My father had attended college in Maine. He spoke French and overruled her politics. She stormed upstairs and slammed shut the bedroom door.

“Boys, remember when you’re teenagers that your father stood up for your rights.”

“Yes, sir.”

On the cusp of forty, he belonged to another generation, but he was a good father and drove us in the station wagon to the local theater. The early show coincided with the sunset. He would pick us up later. Where he went, we never asked.

FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL KILL screened twenty minutes later.

Scene time for DOCTOR ZHIVAGO ran over three hours. The theater was a mile from the drive-in, A twenty-minute walking distance or a ten-minute trot. Our scheme was planned to the last detail. Chuckie had even hidden his father’s binoculars under his coat, because we would watch the FAST PUSSYCAT KILL KILL for free from the other side of the river.

Upon arriving at our town theater, a long queue of young boys snaked around the corner. They weren't the type to come to a love story alone. Something was up an we said nothiing. We waved good-bye to my father. He was heading someplace. We never asked where.

“Certainly a long line for a love story,” commented my father.

“Julie Christie is beautiful.” My brother had her magazine photos under his mattress, far from the posters of FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL KILL. He was a die-hard romantic and dreamed one day that he would end up with Julie, but it wouldn’t be tonight.

“Yes, she is.” My father liked her too. “I’ll pick you up in three hours.”

We bought tickets and waited out front for several minutes. There was no sign of my father or his car. Several clusters of other pre-teen boys also lingered on the sidewalk. None of us had any intention of seeing DOCTOR ZHIVAGO. Darkness drenched the eastern sky and stars clustered across the overhead sky. Chuckie nudged my ribs.

“Let’s go.”

The three of us walked down the side street and around the corner we broke into an easy jog. Within minutes we were running over the hilly golf course overlooking the Neponset River.

“There it is,” Chuckie declared from the summit.

The drive-in was packed with cars. The big screen showed ‘Coming Attractions’. Inbound traffic on the Expressway was snarled for the free show. The other boys behind us whooped upon seeing our goal within reach. As we pelted downhill to the river, I recounted the plot of DOCTOR ZHIVAGO to my brother and Chuckie, in case our fathers and mothers quizzed us later. They weren’t fools. We reached the river’s ed

ge to discover that the drive-in was not visible from this vantage point. “We could swim to the other side.” Chuckie suggested and unbuttoned his shirt.

“And how are we going to explain our wet clothes?” My older brother was determined to attend law school and his concern for his permanent record deterred his detours from the straight and narrow.

“We’re not.” I pointed to the highway to where boys filed across the expressway’s bridge. It was a good way to get killed and cars beeped their horns, yet we joined their procession to the opposite bank.

Our next obstacle was a dump rank with the stench of trash burning in the glowing incinerator. We spotted the top of the screen and ran like hounds hunting a fox to the twenty-foot chain-link fence preventing any unpaid entrance to the drive-in. None of us needed to go any farther and we sat on the ash heaps of the garbage dump. Forty-feet high big-breasted women in skimpy clothes filled the screen.

“Tura Satana, Haji, and Lori Williams,” Chuckie spoke the actresses’ names, which he had memorized the poster.

Nothing had prepared us for the female mayhem and violence. No man was safe from the Pussycats’ terror and for the first time in my life I realized that women were not the weaker sex.

Ninety minutes later we walked away from THE END in a state of erotic exhaustion. Amazons drove fast cars in the desert. Rock and roll. Black leather. Big hair. Free. A world unlike our suburb or Boston existed out there, and I was destined to find it.

“Why did they treat men like that?” asked Chuckie.

“Because men treat women worst. Remember last winter when those boys took the girls under the Mattapan Bridge. They slapped them around and made them take off their shirts. Worse things happened to girls and women too.”

“The men in the movie got what they deserved,” said my older brother. We had two sisters and would kill anyone, who messed with them.

Back at the theater showing DOCTOR ZHIVAGO we gave the usher our tickets and sat with the audience. The film had another hour to go. We exited after THE END. My father asked about the movie. We said it was good. As we approached our neighborhood, Chuckie whispered in my ear, “I’m in love with Tura Santana.”

“Me too.” She looked a little like his raven-haired sister, Addy, had been my babysitter. Her breast size was a 36-B. Chuckie had once shown me her bra. It smelled of baby powder.

My older brother and I never met Tura Santana, although years later my good friend, Randy, from tthe pagazine Passion, and I interviewed the director Russ Meyer at the 1984 Deauville film festival. The French loved him and called Russ ‘le Walt Disney of Porno’. Randy and I met him in the elegant Hotel Normandie after an interview with Rock Hudson and told him how much I loved FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL KILL. The aging director looked very soft porn with a fancy Hollywood suit and a silk scarf. The three of us had a couple of drinks at the Hotel Atlantique with the Atlantic in view. Our expenses were covered by Actuel, a counter-culture French magazine. Not drinks. I paid for a bottle of Sancerre wine out of pocket. Almost $30. The big man spoke about his service in the Army’s 166th Signal Photo Company.

“I was 15 and somehow was assigned to a combat film crew. I shot a camera across France, but when I got back to LA I couldn’t find any work, although I did some of the camera work on GIANT.” That George Stevens film was being honored by the Deauville Film Festival. Russ Meyer was promoting his. None had ever received an Oscar nomination.

“Can you remember which scenes?”

“I’m lucky to remember my name, but enough of my blowing wind. You’re here as a journalist. You have to have some questions for me?”

“Only one. What ever happened to Tura Santana?”

“Why do you want to know?”

I explained about my older brother, and countless other boys going to see FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL KILL at a rive-in in 1965.

“Ha, you’re not the first kid to tell me a story like that. I was just trying to make some money. Damn, 1965 was twenty-one years ago. I was in my forties. Up until I shot MOTORPSYCHO, I was a nobody, but I sold the producers that I’d make a film like MOTORPSYCHO with three women. The audience would meet three women unlike any three women on Earth, except for women like Tura Santana. She was real. Now you can find porno everywhere. I still don’t know why they let me make that movie.”

“Me neither, but we were glad they did. Why was Tura so angry?”

“It wasn’t any act. She told me that when she was ten years old, some teenage boys raped her. They got away with it. Tura trained in martial arts and over the next fifteen years anyone trying something on her got paid revenge in full.”

“How?”

“How do you think? She was no act. She was the real thing.”

“What happened to her?”

“I saw her a couple of years ago and you know what the worst thing about my movies. Not that feminists think that I was sexist, because they’re wrong. All my women beat up on men. They even kill them, so I can live with that label. The worst thing about my films is seeing all those beautiful women lose their beauty. Not that I look in the mirror. It makes me feel like crying. Same with Tura, but she hung onto it longer than most, and if I close my eyes I can still see her on the set in the Mojave. I'm old too. But like me, Tura had a good life. Still does. What a woman.”

And she still is.

FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL 1965

Tura Santana passed away in 2011. She will always be that big beautiful woman on the drive-in screen killing men and will always be a young boy worshipping at her boots. It’s a love thing.

FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL KILL forever.

VOW OF SILENCE by Peter Nolan Smith

Almost everyone in the world has a phone. Cellular service connects New York with Antarctica or Greenland. Every day I call my son Fenway's mom and Mam will pick up in Thailand. Every minute, millions of cellular calls and SMS messages crisscross the globe, searching billions of destinations. People. We are so close, yet so far away from each other.

Back in the last decade, AP and I moved a set of headboards from the 3rd Floor to the penthouse landing. They were heavy, and luckily neither of us injured our backs. I had lived there from 2008 to 2016. Not anymore, but I was always willing to offer AP a helping hand. He had always had my back over the last decade.

"Thanks," my landlord/friend/architect said, walking down to the 2nd floor.

"No worries."

Those three syllables ended my verbal communications for Saturday. I walked over to my apartment on Myrtle Avenue in Clinton Hill.

Three beers sang a lullaby. I was in bed by 9. I pulled John Rechy's 1963 CITY OF THE NIGHT from my night table. Within two hundred words of hustlers in New York sleep wrapped my body in bliss.

The next morning I rose slowly from my slumber. Rain splashed against my window. I grabbed my watch on the bedside table

7:30am. Sunday morning. Another drop into dreams. Thirty minutes later, church bells rang in Brooklyn. I pulled the cover over my shoulders and continued reading more of John Rechy's novel about backroom sex on the West Side Highway. I had hoped to get an erection. It wasn't porno. Ten minutes later the book fell on my chest, and I napped for another half-hour.

I awoke to a heavy rain. Outside the window, a deluge bucketed from ominous clouds crawling across a charcoal-gray sky. I pitied churchgoers and checked my cellphone.

No one had called me. Not my wife in Thailand. Not my family in Boston. Not my friends around the world or even a Chinese scam caller.

I got out of bed and looked out the window. Not a soul was visible in the alleys or the back windows behind the Myrtle brownstone. The dark sky was devoid of airplanes. Within these four walls I was the Last Man on Earth, but I am not Mada, Adam’s dead end.

Hungry, I cooked myself breakfast. Two slices of toast and milky tea with one sugar. I sat by the window. A rear window like in Hitchcock's famous suspense movie. Across the backyard alley, no sign of life from the neighbors.

Five million people lived in the borough of Brooklyn. None were visible today. I wondered if zombies had risen from the dead and eaten the entire population of Brooklyn, but no zombies were terrorizing the streets. I would have heard zictims’ screams. Zictims or Zombie victims, instead my ears registered the BBQ's eternal traffic two blocks to the north. Humanity lived unmolested by the dead.

Families ate brunch at the restaurants in Fort Greene. Kids were on playdates with their friends. Lovers lay in bed late. None of them thought about me. Me neither. I ran a hot bath and put on some Graham Parsons. OH, LAS VEGAS. I had yet to speak a word.

After a good twenty-minute soak, I dedicated my day to a monastic vow of silence, assured that, if I didn't leave my top-floor apartment.

Silent Sunday had been a tradition dating back to my old apartment on East 10th Street in the East Village.

During the 70s and 80s I regularly sequestered myself from the rest of the world. I worked at nightclubs. Four nights a week dealing with a clientele of hundreds of drunk and high people, and I was a little insane too. Sunday mornings were reserved to be in bed with a book. Apart, alone, but not lonely or so I thought. Believeing it was not so sure.

Far from the maddening crowd. I had a late breakfast at home, followed by a long afternoon bath, with my evenings devoted to finishing the book and drinking a bottle or two of wine. I had no women in my life.

Once or twice on these silent Sundays I checked for the phone. There was a dial tone. No one had called me on Sunday for months.

This vow of silence lasted, until 1991, when I started dating Ms. Carolina. The former blone beauty queen liked talking and I couldn't blame her. She lived in a redneck community below the Mason-Dixon Line. Every Sunday Ms. Carolina attended extraordinarily long church services, and her Baptist congregation was very advanced for North Carolina. The faithful believed that blacks possessed a soul. One Saturday she called late at night.

"Sometimes I need to speak to someone sane.”

Despite being born in the Adirondacks, her accent was pure Tarheel.

"I'm not really sane." I warned her about my Sunday tradition.

"You don't speak to anyone on Sunday. Why the silence?"

"Seneca said, “As often as I have been amongst men, I have returned less a man."

"Which means?"

"That I don't like speaking on Sundays. I want to empty my head or humanity. Empty it of me too.”

“And do you succeed?”

“Not really. I can never shut up the voice in me, although it doesn’t really speak, so much as constructs images from my past; people, places, things, and I speak with them all.”

"You are crazy, but when we first met I wrote down a list of the ten things I didn’t like about you. Being crazy was one of the ones I loved. Don't worry. I respect your vow." The blonde southerner was a true gentlewoman. "But what if you just pick up the phone and listen to me? That's not really breaking your vow of silence."

"Let me reflect on this."

One Trappist sect was very strict on silence, but many aspects of my life rejected the Cistercian dictates, and I told Ms. Carolina, "As long as the phone calls don't last longer than twenty minutes, I'll pick up the phone and listen."

"Thank you." Her gratitude was sincere, and I said, "You know I love you in my own way."

"I can't ask for anything more."

The next day my phone rang at 11:15. I was soaking in the kitchen bathtub. My apartment was very East Village. I answered the phone without saying a word.

Ms. Carolina recounted the morning preacher's ranting sermon. I thought I could talk, but this woman was a champ and she complained, "This Bible-Thumper believes that all homosexuals will be damned to Hell. I told him after the service that I knew that he frequented some Richmond bars where men danced with men and gave him a check for $25. It's going to fix the roof."

Seventeen minutes later she said, "Good luck with your vow of silence. Are you there?”

“In my bath.” Three words, The vow of silence was not sacred.

“Thank you. I love to hear your voice.”

She was in love. I wished I could be the same. I said nothing.

Click.

I had merely listened to a woman on a phone.

Words had never left my lips and I forgot the conversation, while watching BONANZA on TV. The telephone did not ring during the show.

Two weeks passed and Ms. Carolina drove north to visit me in the East Village. Saturday night we dined at a good restaurant in Soho. I drank more than I should, but I was a sucker for a good Saturday night drunk.

Sunday morning I woke up before Ms. Carolina. Light filtered through the shades. My eyeballs scrapped my sandpaper sockets. My guest lay on her side facing me. She liked to watch me sleep before she fell asleep. I picked up a book, Peter Freuchen's BOOK OF THE ESKIMOS, and read to escape the nails of a hangover pounded into my skull.

A little before 11 Ms. Carolina opened her eyes and said, "Sometimes I think you're dead when you're reading. You barely breathe."

The blonde heiress accepted my shrug as an answer. We had one week a month together. She deserved more, but I could only give what I had to give.

"You know the Trappist monks never really practiced a 'vow of silence?"

“My mother loved the quietude of their monastery outside of Boston in Spencer, Massachusetts.” I always imagined their conversations once the faithful left the grounds.

"St. Benedict, their founder, had three tenets; stability, fidelity to monastic life, and obedience. Benedict preferred the monks to exist in silence, because speech was disruptive to contemplation." Ms. Carolina was as good as a nun and only wicked with the lights out.

Like my Irish mother, I have the gift of gab, although dampened by my Yankee father's preference for silence. The Maine native had held his piece for years under the blitzkrieg of my mother's monologues, but today Ms. Carolina wanted to hear my voice and I surrendered to her need.

"I've been to the Trappists monasteries in Belgium. They made good beer. Actually not good, excellent. Did I ever tell you why I began my vow of silence?"

"No." Ms. Carolina was a repository of my vocal history. She had heard many of my stories on our road trips through Guatemala, Peru, and the Far West. Listening was one of her better traits.

"Back in 1979 the phone in my 10th Street apartment was shut off."

"Let me guess. Non-payment."

"Yes." I had racked up a $700 bill tracking down the whereabouts of my blonde model from Buffalo. Paris, London, Milano, Hamburg, and points in between. I finally contacted her in Madrid. She told me that she was going out with a dealer in Russian icons. I wouldn't meet him, until Vadim helped finance our after-hours club, The Continental in 1981. My broken heart remained broken all that time.

"My service was cut for a year. I never could get together the money to pay the bill. The phone gathered dust under the sofa. One Sunday I was watching a BONANZA re-run and a telephone rang. I thought to myself, "That's funny, I didn't think they had phones on the Ponderosa."

"And they didn't." Ms. Carolina laughed at the image. She was my best audience.

"No, it was the phone. I reached under the sofa and brushed off six months of dust, but didn't pick up the receiver. The phone rang for a minute and then stopped. I picked up the phone. There was a dial tone. I tried a number. My parents. I hadn't spoke to them in ages. It worked, and not only that I could call anywhere in the world."

"Strange."

"Even stranger was that the phone would ring every Sunday at the same time."

"During BONANZA?"

"Correct." I liked the chemistry between Little Joe and Hoss.

"Did you ever pick it up to find out who was calling?"

"No. The phone stayed in service for two months, then went dead again. After that, I never spoke on Sundays. At least until I met you."

"All that remains is a vow of silence." Still quiet on Sundays.”

"I try my best." I nodded and led Ms. Carolina by the hand into my bedroom. There was no need for words in the darkness, as our bodies spoke without words.

That Sunday was over thirty years ago. Ms. Carolina has been dead for over ten of them. If she called today from the Beyond, I would answer. It would make her feel good in the Afterlife. This rainy Sunday rain splashed against the windows on Myrtle Avenue. I grabbed a beer from the refrigerator.

The beer poured into my mug with a pleasant glut glug glug. I raised my glass to Ms. Carolina. She had been a good friend and tomorrow was Monday.

A day to call my wife Mam and speak with my son on the phone. Fenway will tell me to come home soon.

"I will."

Until then, my vow of silence rules Sundays, but before the Day of Rest is over, I will watch some Bonanza. Hoss has to be speaking somewhere in the Here-Before on an eternity cellphone, and I promise I will answer the phone from anyone in the after-life.

Rockaway 116th Street 2016

The Sand Bar on 116th Street in the Rockaways was a great place to pass the dusk at the end of a beach day. An open-air bar on the boardwalk. A crowd of happy drunks. Cheap drinks.

"We are not affordable housing developers," said Mark Caller, the principal partner, to a reporter.

A friend of mine extolled the project.

"It will bring new life to that area."

I hate the condo plague. The Rockaways have always been working-class and I like it that way. But just like the East Village, Chelsea, Harlem, Chinatown and many lower-income neighborhoods throughout NYC, the city prefers luxury condos to middle- or lower-class housing.

Why?

Not because of taxes. Because these condos will suck the life of the city. Economic and ethnic cleansing. Which is why landlords are the first on the list to be executed in a revolution.

In the words of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, "All property is theft."

And Chairman Mao believed the same thing. Except he also believed that all property belonged to the state. There has to be a middle ground, but the Marcal Group's plans are only for the rich.

So up against the wall, mother-fuckers or mā le ge bā zi in Mandarin.

Bring back the Sand Bar___