Death to 1977
Onto a year of 78 RPM.
It’s snowing and I’m watching the Broncos beat the Raiders. 20-17.
Last night at 27th Street was weird. I hit on Alta. We made up and dry-humped in a dark corner. She begged off fucking. I accepted her no, got drunk, puked outside, and sobered up enough to last the rest of the night. Death to disco.
I’ve always said, “All I need is food and shelter.”
Here in New York I eat foreign foods, mostly pizza and falafel sandwiches and live at a SRO hotel on West 11th Street off 5th Avenue. My 10′ by 10′ by 8′ room has linoleum floors, a small bed, a sink, and white walls. $40/week. An imperfect cube located in a good neighborhood. What else can I do, except work as a busboy and rock out at CBGBs, where youth is eternal, the nights run long, and “Do anything you want to do.”
My job at Serendipity sucks, but I love my fellow queer waiters and busboys. It also provide constant cash for a punk lifestyle in a blown-out city. The 60s were a time of no limits, while the 70s have borders on people like us, who fled the rest of America, and I foresee the 80s as a time of increasing corporate fascism with fear stealing people of their identity as humans. Most Americans think, “Who cares as long as I can eat potato chips?”
“But there are two more years left in the 70s. Romantically I deal with illusions and hope for fantasies to become real, but Ro left to Paris the day I came here in May, although I recently overheard Andy Reese say to Frank Holiday, “Ro is in Greensboro. I really like her.”
“Are she and Kirk going to get married,” Frank asked, while I shivered silently with shock.
“They are pretty heavy.” Andy answered, looking for a reaction from me.
I showed none, but earlier I called Andy Kornfeld, who had read my unmailed letters to her and laughed, “You can throw away those letters. She probably has thousands from other failed lovers. You just have to understand she hates men, because of an ex-lover, who wasn’t you. She was like that when I met her long ago.”
Our affair meant nothing to her and left me with scar tissue on my heart. I was nothing to her other than a body in a bed, and my hopes were an exaggeration of my desires.
On other fronts Fran Malin remains in Brooklyn. I haven’t been avoiding her, but she lives across the East River and she is a little insane. She might have feelings for me, but can’t leave her boyfriend for good. Once when we were having sex, he knocked on the door.
“Fran, I know you’re in there.”
“Say nothing and don’t stop fucking me,” she whispered locking her legs around my knees.
I stayed hard as she moaned breathlessly, humping in synch with her boyfriend’s knocking.
Libby has disappeared into New York. I wonder where she is.
Two days ago Tim Dunleavy told me, “Ann gave me a present for you. and it looks like a good one.”
What could it be?
Will Ann come to New York again?
We met at a birthday party for Janet Stephenson, who I was seeing at the time. I left with Ann and her friend and had sex with both of them in a Upper East Side townhouse’s unheated pool. I think of her more as a companion than a consort and when she left to go back to college, “I always feel physically responsibly to anyone who spends money on me.”
I had only paid the taxi.
Was that the sole reason for fucking me?
A LITTLE LATER
Today I went to Jimmy Day’s, Blimpie’s, Solo’s on 52nd Street, Cowwboy’s on 53rd, The Plaza Cafe, Dazzel on the West Side, back to Jimmy Days, to a closed Max’s Kansas City, over to Broadway Charlies, CBGBs, and One-Fifth and finally to crash at my SRO room
A wasted evening.
No women or friends.
I even called Ann long distance from a phone booth.
No answer.
Ann’s gift was a sarcastic Note and William Goldman’s MAGIC, which has too much dialogue to be a novel, but not a movie script.
1977 is over for good.
It’s 1978 minus one.