Drunken Angel (9781936740062) (22 page)

In her best stentorian stage voice—a bad mix of hyperbolic Dylan Thomas inflection and vaudeville tragedian—she snarled: “Yes, I DO believe that you HAVE turned my DAUGH-TER against her own MO-THER!!!!”

One could almost hear the sheet-metal lightning rumble offstage.

During all this, the subject in question snoozed in her crib, in the dark, little breaths puffing her lips, a self-contained cherub wanting when awake only to laugh and get around as much and as far as possible, with a pair of doting parents close by. No one wants to crawl alone in the dark.

ONE NIGHT, RETURNING FROM WORK, AFTER almost two months off the hard stuff, as I passed a high-end local tavern, I thought: I have done so well. Have a beautiful daughter. I've published a book. Though I found myself married to a madwoman, I managed to provide my kid with a decent home. I've been off the hooch for some time. Surely, just one…

Seated myself at the bar on a plush stool, took in the amber-colored luxuriance, and said to the clean-shaved well-mannered molelike bartender in a red waistcoat and black bow tie: “Give me a Chivas Regal,” and as he turned, in a flush of expansive mood: “Make that a double!”

Held up the tumbler of caramel-colored whiskey against the warm, rosy light of an encased candle, inhaled its strong, virile aroma, knocked it back.

Warm, dilating my knots, imbuing me with an untrammeled sense of fresh starts, possibility, and power, it shuddered through me.

Another? Why not?

Which he brought, and I downed and ordered one more, and then another…

 

Heard thrashing, felt sharp stabs and scratches—balled up in hedges in a housing project in far western Chelsea, and with a post-nuclear apocalyptic aftermath hangover. Came to my feet at roughly four o'clock in the morning. Should have known exactly when, but my Rolex was gone from my wrist, and so guessed by the feel of night, color of darkness, a world in which every last inhabitant seemed to have died, except me, shivering, sick, head split by white-light frenetic high-pitched screaming headache, nose swollen and mouth puffed, as if pounded on by mobs of fists and baseball bats, stomach struggling not to heave out both my lungs and liver.

“God almighty,” I groaned, standing up. Where was I? Realized. “How the hell…?” Looked around wildly for my leather satchel containing my wallet, valuables, take-home work. There it was, unmolested. Blood stained my shirt. Smelled vomit from my trousers, saw it caked on my shoes.

I staggered across town, pausing to lean against walls privately, out of sight, closed eyes, stabilizing, and trudged on, nauseated, desperate to reach my Fifth Avenue office near the Flatiron Building, where I let myself in, found the bottle of unopened scotch that we kept for special visitors, dignitaries and such, poured myself a tall glass, hands shaking. I downed it so fast the liquor splashed my chin and shirt. Luckily, I always kept a fresh suit in my closet. I cleaned myself up so well that when the secretary came at her usual hour, 8:00 a.m., she found only Mr. Kaufman, quietly poring over some files, looking up with a cordial business smile, bidding her good morning.

Another night, soon after. Went out for sushi with Rick, a friend. Ordered warm sake with our food, several cups. At meal's end, I
proposed that we adjourn across the street to a place I'd spotted called “Downtown Beirut 2.”

“I can see why,” said my friend, “with your Israeli Army background, you might have an interest in such a dump. But I happen to know that place. It's a skinhead dive. I'd pass on it if I were you.”

I grinned. “I'm going in.”

“You and Arik Sharon. Well, good luck with that.”

It was packed five deep with warlike skinheads wearing white-laced boots—Nazi supremacists. There must have been fifty in there tightly packed. And me. Jewish fund-raiser in a sports jacket. But inside, coiled for violence, triggered to explode. Had noted of late when I drank the frequent appearance of a grenadelike blasting rage in my midriff, strapped-on emotional plastique that boiled through my musculature, ached for detonation. The bar sold only warm beers, buck apiece. Put away about thirty. Looked at my new replacement watch, a cheap Rolex knockoff bought off a Jamaican street vendor on West Broadway. Two a.m. The barmaid, a bottle brunette with Bettie Page hair, dressed in low-cut sweater, tiny pleated scotch-plaid skirt, and high-laced Warlock boots, locked the doors, dumped coins into the jukebox, and as Mick and the Stones played “Street Fighting Man” climbed onto the bar, pulled her blouse over her head, tossed it, undid her bra, tossed that, and with proud breasts jutting did a strutting street-fighting go-go war dance down the bar, kicking beer cans aside with her boots, arms raised above her head.

The skinheads shouted and started body-slamming. Fists flew. Blood spurted. Something struck my head, and as I turned to swing hands from all sides laid hold. Went down in a volcano of kicking, stomping boots. Though blind drunk, knew this was “Crackin',” as they called it, could result in homicide. Came to my feet somehow, swung, connected. But too many fists replied.
And down I went, too booze-numbed even to feel my own body.

Was dragged out by my feet, dumped on the sidewalk. Heard distant enraged voices, felt the thud of more boots to ribs and back. Then someone said: “Kill him!” and something hard-edged smashed my forehead. Insensate, yet I felt this was no ordinary blow. Bystanders screamed: He needs an ambulance. Hurry! Please, help. Someone call! A woman's voice leaned close, out of the pandemonium. “Hello! Sir. Can you hear me? We've called for help. You're safe now. Can you hear me?”

This bounced off consciousness, weightless.

“No,” I muttered. “No ambulance…”

“What? Sir? What's that?”

Another voice: “Did you hear what he said?”

Crawling on hands and knees, I reached a lamppost and used it to find my feet.

Concerned voices urged me to stop. Mentioned vast amounts of blood loss. Begged me to stay put. I could hear sirens in the distance and staggered away in escape, down a street, to a doorway, then another. Glancing back, wiping sticky blood from my face, I could see red and orange lights pulsing nearby. In the doorway, I slumped to the ground. Huddled there. Darkness-enshrouded. Collar turned up. Face hidden. Hiding white skin. Just make me a shadow. Oh, please, make me invisible now. And after a time, night buzzing and anonymous again, and gone the pulsing lights, the crowds closed over my near murder, I shuffled hurriedly to the nearest subway station, the one on Astor Place, at the intersection of the East and West Village, and purchased admission from a token booth vendor who studied me with sleepy-lidded interest. I pushed through the turnstile just as, thank God, a near-empty Brooklyn-bound local pulled up.

I boarded a car with a single passenger aboard, a middle-aged
lady, who shrieked as if in a poorly made, badly acted horror flick. Catching my reflection in the tunnel-blackened window: my face completely masked with blood, and shirtfront and trousers black with it.

“Itttsssuright ma'am.” I smiled reassuringly. Figure of grinning madness. Took a seat. Passed out.

ESTHER GAVE UP. I SIMPLY STOPPED COMING HOME. To me, the world was new. A fresh graveyard. I showed up only to put money into a kitchen measuring cup, mostly for Isadora and something for the witch.

I took a mistress, an art student named Eileen, who, one night, in the Ludlow Street bar Max Fish, sidled up to me and said that more than anything on earth she wanted to punch a hole in my earlobe with a safety pin and stick a ring through it. “Go ahead,” I said indifferently, belting back a shot. Straddling my leg, she dipped her finger in my booze, rubbed it on my earlobe, and with sweater-molded nipples brushing my arm, punched the pin through the lobe and inserted one of her own earrings through the bleeding hole. I was too drunk to feel any of it.

That night we went to her place, an East Village dump, and made art school love, hungry, clawing sex paused by long monologues about Keith Haring and David Wojnarowicz.

She had a slight, waiflike body, fed on ramen noodle cups, cigarettes,
and Diet Coke. Thrusting into her was like ravishing a Third World famine refugee. I took her to eat in oppressive low-lit overpriced steakhouses where you sat at a white tablecloth, drowning in dense mahogany, dull brass fixtures, and stifling chandeliers. They brought racks of lamb as big as butchered horses, big bowls of mint jelly, and small roast potatoes greasy with garlic butter. Her large, hungry urchin eyes devoured everything, but she only nibbled like a bird. I ate myself sick and washed it down with tall whiskeys and took her home and had her.

Sometimes I drank too much to be any fun and she kicked me out. Began to sleep at the office on an inflatable Boy Scout air mattress from a nearby sporting goods store. My employer was sympathetic. I could sleep suspended upside down from the ceiling like a bat, so long as I kept up my end of work and the money rolled in.

Greenwich Village points south became my roaming territory. At the invite of a poet acquaintance, I attended a reading where about a hundred bohos sat on the floor of a performance loft called the UpFront Muse, run by Tom Weiss. A succession of desperadoes who were loath even to refer to themselves as “poets”—the poetry world, said one of them, is corrupt, the term
poet
become one of dishonor—read impassioned and I thought ingenious texts that sounded suspiciously like poetry, though they went beyond anything I'd ever heard or read in the
Norton Anthology of Modern Verse
: more raw, naked, personal, outraged, and streetwise than anything I'd encountered, including the Beats, who, by contrast, seemed almost self-consciously literary.

This new nonpoetic poetry was cement given voice, the revealed thoughts of alleys and gutters, the inner life of tumors.

“What do you think?” my friend asked.

“That's the greatest stuff I've ever heard from a contemporary,” I said. And meant it. Was introduced, met everyone. These were just
some of the beginnings of the Spoken Word scene in New York. R. Cephas Jones. Dave Hudson. B. Betterlife. David Huberman. Gail Schilke. Mike Tyler. One night, I joined a group of them to attend the opening of the Nuyorican Poets Café, the first slam night ever held in New York, and we all signed up for the open mike after. It went on until 4:00 a.m., poet after poet, and our poems burned the house down. That night met Bob Holman, Miguel Algarin. Returned Friday nights like it was religion and in time got to know Paul Beatty, Ron Kolm, Carol Wierzbicki, David Huberman, Jim Feast, Hal Sirowitz, Danny Shot, Kathy Acker, Eileen Myles, Pedro Pietri, Steve Cannon—amazing poets, editors, writers, novelists. Where had they all come from? Yet they kept pouring in from everywhere. Carl Watson and Tommy DiVinti from Baltimore, Bruce Isaacson and David West from San Francisco, Ken Dimaggio from Connecticut—poets from Boston, Chicago, LA, Ann Arbor, Detroit, London, even Johannesburg.

The Unbearables were a group of veteran downtown avant-gardists who crossed intelligent, urbane punk satire with serious poetry, fiction, and lit crit. Every so often they put out the call for an “assembly magazine” and the whole scene converged on the Pyramid Club or anywhere that had a pool table, each of us bearing fifty xeroxed copies of a poem, sketch, cartoon, or essay, and with Ron Kolm's huge industrial stapler we'd assemble them into magazines and have a reading.

Wednesday nights, Jennifer Blowdryer and Bruce Craven hauled a game show wheel into whichever performance space would have them and held “Wheel of Poets.” You got a number as you came through the door and Blowdryer, renamed “Vanna” for the occasion, strutted about on high heels, tossing tiny rubber lobsters at your face. Craven spun the wheel as we chanted “Wheel of Poets,” and if your number turned up, you jumped onstage, read a poem,
and got a dime-store prize and a sexy hug from “Vanna.”

At Max Fish, B. Betterlife, a lesbian Gertrude Stein look-alike with a gravel voice and a tender heart, hosted a reading so raucous that poets had to perform behind a chain link net to deflect beer bottles thrown by the art students. It was here that I saw David Huberman, dressed in a Wolfman mask, perform an astonishing rant as he backpedaled around the floor on his back screaming, “I'm afraid!”

But the focal point of it all was the Nuyorican Poets Café. On Friday nights, after you handed three bucks to Julio, the big Puerto Rican bouncer, you entered a brick-walled space hung with street art and saw at the end of the bar a black man in dark jazz sunglasses. This was Steve Cannon, the blind editor of
Tribes
magazine. About a hundred people led by Rome Neal salsaed to Latin music. “This is the shit,” my poet friends laughed. We danced with beautiful women and drank ourselves into oblivion. The music quit and out slid Holman on one leg, hat in hand, vaudevillian, which in many ways he was, a W.C. Fields of slam, and said: “Welcome to the Nuyorican Poets Café! And this round of the New York City Poetry Slam Championship, where poets compete to be crowned Slam King of New York and win book publication by Nuyorican Poets Café Press! After the slam, we'll have open mike! And more dancing! And then more open mike! And more dancing!”

Audience judges were appointed. Holman went around to tables, handed out scorecards, asked us to score poems on a scale of zero to ten, zero being, he said, a poem that earned boos from the mouths of normally introspective and polite people, and ten a poem that caused the very stage to levitate.

It was a competition for money, prizes, glory, with poets throwing poems instead of punches, and it was more fun than anything I'd ever seen.

There were readings every night—I attended them all, night after night. I began to write in earnest, drunken stabs at nonpoetic poems, and noticed that I seemed to take well to this nameless new art form. We regulars encouraged each other, urged each other on and listened to each other carefully, to learn, acquire, steal, emulate, experiment. We were in the laboratory of language, trying to unlearn and so reclaim poetry; determined to rid ourselves, our very voices, of affectation, to write poems that could be read with the ears and heard with the eyes.