We saw in New Year’s Eve at Hurrah and then took a taxi downtown. Traffic congested before Madison Square Garden. A skinny blonde man with orange-blonde hair stood bare-chested the the traffic. Cheetah Cheetah Chrome of the Dead Boys and we shouted the lead guitarist’s name in passing.
Alice, Anthony, Alexa, and I got out of the cab on the 3rd Avenue. The driver didn’t want to go any farther into the Lower East Side. Alice and I stood on the sidewalk. Chest-high Suburban disco drones muttered about our punk attire. I stepped fowards and asked, “What are you looking at creeps.”
“Why do you have to always be so violent?” Alice came me from a city where the tarred roads led to dirt tracks into the Hollows. She know all about violence.
“I wish I knew.”
Ship’s fog horns from the southern harbor searched the night. I was familiar with the docks. Only a few ships moored on the Westside and none on the swift-moving East River.
A gang of teenage Puerto Ricans whooped drunken shouts. They weren’t looking for trouble. They were poor, the neighborhood school were bad, and their only futures were as janitors, city workers, and manual labor other than dealing drugs. All of them dreamed not so much as escaping the East Village as making the neighborhoood a better place for ‘la familia’.
We wandered over to Eve’s Lounge. We ordered drinks. They were weak. I was still straight and hoped to be sober the first morning of 1979.
“I want to go.” I said to Alice.
“Then let’s go.”
Yesterday I had met Alice at La Guardia. She wore a white pleather coat, black striped skirt, a purple sweater and knee-high white boot. She was the prettiest girl in the air terminal and every man and woman watched her walk to me. I was a lucky man and tried to kiss her. She turned her face to offer her cheek.
We hadn’t slept together in more than a month. New Wave Vaudeville at her soul and Susan the scrawny closet lesbian co-producer was a shrew poisoning my love.
He’s a loser,” she said to my face.
I felt like a loser too. same way, but needed even this small money, plus anything I could glom from Hurrah.
“Me too,” Alice replied, confessing to trouble sleeping at home in Charleston. “How was your holidays?”
“Good.” One visit to family in Boston and a few drunken fetes at the East Village bar. She suspected me of fooling around, except once I’ve had two drinks I’m only interested in the third, fourth and fifth.
All I could see was a dark black future, but I restrained from revealing that vision to Alice that
She has the whole world in front of her.
MAN OF THE YEAR
