I’ve lost track of time. Alice keeps nagging me about money. I have none. I’m living on a bagel and pizza a day whenever I’m not a lunch waiter at EBASCO CORP. downtown on Vestry Street. Guadalcanal asked, “How bad can it be? Are you still sleeping together?”

“No, I’m on the couch in the living room without a fan.”

“Damn, you can always tell how good is your relationship by how close you sleep with your lover. You’re in Siberia. You better get a real job.”

This morning I woke up and started masturbating. Alice entered the room and sat on a chair to watch. She was wearing a thin cotton robe and her nipples were hard underneath the cotton. Once I finished, she asked, “Was it good?”

“I took off a little pressure and I had some pleasure.”

I have never cum inside Alice. She is scared of getting pregnant. We practice coitus interruptus birth control and I spurt on mostly her belly or ass with my hand pumping my cock.

The first time I masturbated was 1964. My family was vacationing off Ocean Road in Harwich on Cape Cod. I was 12 and woke to a nocturnal emission at dawn. Ten minutes later I reached under my mattress for THE ITCH by Stephen Hammer and strangely CATCH-22. My older brother was asleep on the other bed. I had found the dirty paperback in the Blue Hills near the queer hill. I turned to pages 67-68, got hard over a gangbang scene, and finished in less than a minute mentally fucking the novel’s blonde heroine in the belly button. A warm flow gushed a stick white spurt onto my groin. I must have jerked off a hundred times on that two-week vacation.

Now I use it as a substitute for sex whenever Alice isn’t in the mood.

I could have other women in the East Village, except Alice is my woman and means more than any one-night stand or succubus from the fathoms of my libido.

I’ve become monogamous after three years of fucking anyone in New York or Boston.

Alice rises from the chair and picks up a towel. She kneels by my side and gently wipes the semen from my skin.

I do love this girl.

This afternoon I thought about traveling south to Rockaway Beach. This summer my beach excursions numbered three to that broad strip of sand on the Atlantic. None of us went to the beach in 1979, despite The Ramones’ success with ROCKAWAY BEACH on the New York jukeboxes and college radio stations. Few punks on the Lower East Side even saw the rivers. We were happily marooned on a concrete island. We wanted nothing to do with the rest of the city or the USA.

Guadalcanal knows about my illness. He has gone through the same thing albeit over ten years ago. I haven’t told Alice about my ailments. Her life and cats and LA are her life. I was just 1979 in a shitty East Village apartment, but I still do masturbate to website porno insteasd of THE ITCH and I have considered the desire for sex a good thing. I don’t see lust in the eyes of many people in New York. Not want for another person or the urge to fuck namelessly without connecting on Instantgram after the act of sex. The streets are filled by young people reading the phones in their right hand and I wonder whether these featureless males have learned how to jerk off left-handed.

THE ITCH is for sale online. $25.

This is the accompanying pitchline for THE ITCH.

The second title by Hammer (John Coleman, Olympia’s leading inspiration and top blurb-writer). The Itch, a tale that predates Indecent Proposal by decades, presents Viney, the husband, Martha, his wife, their many desires, and a millionaire who wanders along and offers them seven figures if they act out those desires in interesting ways. But their benefactor is hardly pleased when erotic pursuits occasioned by the pair (like running off to Japan), seem less than novel. So additional steps are taken to spice things up.

Classic stroke book come-on.

His first book INDECENT PROPOSAL has no footprint on the internet, but it must be hiding somewhere to hit the light of day again as well as the Glory that was Olympia Press.