A crazed full moon night at CBGBs with the Misfits on stage.
Ann drank herself senseless.
My memory was missing holes, but I recalled her flirting with several punk rockers.
I didn’t care, since I fucked the redhead from NEON WOMEN in the ladies bathroom.
Even her pubic hairs were red.
Someone kept knocking on the door.
I finally finished and opened the door.
A rocker was outside and said, “That’s my girlfriend.”
“Then I guess you’re next.”
Upstairs he confronted me and I told him, “Fuck off.”
He started to strangle me. I throttled him back. Neither of us could breath, but we stopped upon catching the redhead going downstairs with another man. Our grips loosened and he asked, “You want a drink?”
“Yes,” I coughed and we were great friends for the night.
Ann left with Kim and Anthony.
I went home to my SRO room alone.
The next morning Ann called to say, “I don’t remember anything from last night. What happened?”
“I don’t remember either.”
I still had $3 of the $4 from the other day.
I never pay for drinks at CBs.
LATER
Anthony called and said, “I’m glad you called. There’s $30 missing from my stash. Did you take it?”
“I wasn’t at your house last night.” He lived on East 60th Street.
“I remember you being there.”
“You remember wrong.” I never black-out.
“Are you sure you didn’t take it?”
“I checked my pockets. All I have is $3.”
It took me a half-hour to convince Anthony I didn’t take his money and even longer to persuade him that I hadn’t been at his apartment, but I discovered that Tim Dunleavey who lived with Anthony had been saying that I had been taking money from them for months.
“I never thought you would steal from me.”
“Fuck you.”
“Okay, I believe you, but it’s probably better that you don’t come around here for a while.
Fuck you all.” These people think I’m a petty thief.
A car thief on several occasions when I got rid of gas-guzzlers for friends in Boston, but that’s Grand Theft Auto.
At least Ann stuck by me or said nothing about it.
Fuck Anthony, Tim, and Alla.
I hope they all fall into a garbage dumpster.
LATER
I was hired to work as a waiter in an executive dining room on Wall Street.
$80 a week plus meals.
My room is $40/week.
I drink for nothing at CBGBs
Pizza is only a dollar.
It won’t be easy, but I can live.
After my lunch shift I sat by the harbor.
I don’t know anyone down here, but it felt good to be by the sea.
My family came from the coast of New England and the ocean calls me the way the ocean called Joseph Conrad. I would love to ship out from here and be surrounded by 360 degrees of blue horizon, but I’ve only been out of sight of land once on a ferry ride to Nantucket.
Whales and dolphins following the wake.
LATER
In Soho A blind man curbed his dog and I wondered if seeing-eye dogs shit in Braille.
I had never seen one shit before.
During a drunken stupor I concluded that seeing-eye dogs were robot-dogs designed by a Pentagon scientist guilty about his developing death rays, but that also that the dog shit was plutonium waste dropped to kill the people of the inner city.
Dog shit is between every parked car in Manhattan.
No one can read the smears on the pavement.
Not even the blind.
I call it the ‘Dog-Shit Epidemic’.
LATER
I knew a girl who was an asshole
Her brother was an asshole too.
Their father was a millionaire.
His money came from artificial limbs.
Vietnam made them very wealthy
But even with all their money, cars, and fancy apartments
They remained assholes,
Because there is no cure for being an asshole.
My mother used to take us into Boston on shopping trips.
We parked behind Jordan Marsh.
On the side street as a shop selling prosthetic limbs.
A sign hung over the door ARTIFICIAL LIMBS.
The place scared the shit out of me, since at the age of four I had read a Maryknoll missionary magazine about the Church donating artificial limbs to children in the Orient. I still dream about a white doctor strapping tin legs onto a young boy.
The horror.