Alice and I get drunk at CBGBs with Bill Yusk. At CBGBs. Where else? Alice was mad at me, because she had to wait at the door. Lisa Krystal wouldn’t let her in for free without me. Kim wasn’t waitressing either.

“I don’t understand why they treat you like they do.” Alice thinks I’m nothing. “It’s not like you’re a star. You just drink for free.”

“It’s a talent. If I drink for free, then you drink for free. I never ask why.” I don’t understand either. It’s not like I do anything special other than play pinball.

I woke this morning feeling, as if I had sliced my right eye. The eye itself. Alice was asleep on the mattress, trembling in a nightmare, speaking in tongues. Comforting a terrified sleeper seemed dangerous and I muttered, “Shut up.” I left the bedroom for the futon in the living room. Bright sunlight. The light burns my eye. I need to get curtains. I touch my eyeball and discover that I had left in my contact. I take it out. Relief. I rejoin Alice and hush her terror, then slip into dreamland.

In this building 256 East 10th Street, six floors of well-lived-in tenement apartments with the bathtub in the kitchen children’s’ voices are rarely heard. Ms. Adorno next door cackles madly at all hours and speaks to spirits. I figure her for a witch. Upstairs someone every morning turns on the bath and then occasionally makes love, loud love, for a half an hour with different women. I think it’s the actor on the fourth floor. Outside hispanic kids from the pre-school scream every morning in the alley, freed from parental discipline. This neighborhood, the Lower East Side was depopulated during the early 70s by arson and crime and drugs. 160,000 inhabitants to 90,000. Several years ago Paul Ehrlich predicted the world population will be six billion in the year 2000.

That might be turn in the rest of the world, but in the East Village no one wants to live here, except for the punks, junkies, hippies, hispanics, and the old. Demographics shifted with white flight. The Jews and Italians fled to Brooklyn or Long Island. No one wanted to go to New Jersey. Maybe the numbers of whites are growing outside the city. My high school and college friends are fathers. Not me. Alice and I aren’t using contraception and I haven’t impregnated her at all. The Smith family are without a twelfth generation in this country. None of us siblings are married. This neighborhood is packed with white refugees from America. No children.

Later.

The Shah of Iran must be thinking of taking a vacation from Tehran. HIs White Revolution has failed. The students and mullahs are calling for his blood and his SS, SAVAK, are overwhelmed by the popular rising. What is the Shah to do with the decline of the white people in America.

The Oil Crisis of 1973 thanks to Israel hiked the oil prices to render families more and more expensive; no more twenty cent gallons of gas, races across the states at 110 mph, the end of American decadence, but not really. People are driving just as much as before. They live in the suburbs. No one walks there. There’s nowhere to go and they drive cars there

LATER

Alice is worried about her destiny. She wants to be an actress. She is very talented, but New York is not a city in which actors can become famous. She needs to move to LA. I don’t need to move to LA. I have bought into Mad Magazine’s Alfred E Newman’s quote, “What me worry?”

I’m broke, but have Alice, an apartment, and write shitty poetry and get free drinks at CBGBs, play pinball in Times Square, and basketball at West 4th Street. Not a success at any, but a damned good failure. I really don’t understand how to proceed to success while content with not so much failure. I am very good at pinball, play outstanding defense at the Cage, and drink for free at CBGBs.

My Aunt Mary had a boyfriend. Peter Willin. He was a communist, smoke cigarettes, and was invited to our holiday dinners. After his departure from out home in the suburbs, my mother always said, “You don’t want to end up like him.”

He loved my Aunt Mary, but I feel cursed my my mother’s words to be broke all my life, rotting teeth, rundown heels, and shiny trousers. I’m only 26 and just the other day, Alice said, “Great things are coming to us both. Somehow I see myself on a golf course, hitting the ball straight to the green, and sinking a hole-in-one. Perfect. Somehow I shall seize destiny.

One does not pursue fame, fame pursue one,” I told Ralphie from Come On. He’s from Deutschland and driven like Alice to be famous, but who wants fame like Peter Frampton, Cheryll Tiegs or John Travolta. I know no one famous. Only those that want to be. In a hundred years no one will remember them or me just as no one now remembers the toilet paper they used in the morning.

So you want to be famous
So you want to be known
Signing autographs
Posing for photos
Awaiting the flash.

The president knows who you are
So does the Pope
You know other famous people
By their first name
They kiss you on the cheeks
Twice.

Everyone know who you are
A VIP
No longer a regular person
Someone famous
Famous to the famous
Forever famous until you are forgotten
But always famous now.

This poem sucks. Why do I write such crap.
An abhorence of words. I wish my stutter prevented my fingers from writing and typing…I am no longer devoted to writing, but life. To experience life, the good, the bad, and the in-betweens. The pleasure of cumming on a young woman’s leg, watching the semen melt on the warmth of her flesh, handing her a towel to wipe away my DNA semen, her not caring if the towel is clean, its use is all she needs from me.