In the Shadow of the American Dream (7 page)

October 8, 1977

Went out to New Jersey and did the suburban trip for the day. It was pretty nice. First time I mowed the lawn in thirteen years or more I guess. Then we toppled the big weed tree in the front yard as it was dwarfing the huge red oak tree Dad had planted. I shaped the hedges square 'cause every other neighbor on the block had square hedges and I figured the house shouldn't look so conspicuous. Ha ha. So then me and Peter [David's younger half brother] got ripped on our asses. I toked some gold smoke in a homemade apple pipe Peter fashioned—real good idea. We got together with Billy Wayne and about six other kids and played nighttime basketball on an illuminated court in the woods with no lights around other than those of occasional car goin' on or off or by. Fuckin' stoned and played our asses off with great fun and glee. My perceptions were so strange—I'd be dribbling like a madman with quasi-fancy steps and think I see the basket a couple of feet behind me over my left shoulder so I'd spin around to shoot and blam! The basket would be twelve yards or more away. Then I'd go in for a layup shot and ZIP ZIP ZIP run like a drunken arrow towards the basket and do a layup and jump and sail and look up and there's the basket sailing by thirty-five miles an hour past and twist through (wangle) I'd pump a greasy shot in crazy and usually miss. Once in a while plip! It'd go in.

Before goin' to sleep Marion [David's stepmother] was complainin' about the work she's gotta do and how the kids don't seem to understand it all and she rambled on and on for about an hour and it was like she was realizin' how much she really loves the kids and how they try in certain ways and she ended with, They're pretty good kids, ya know? And I said, Well you're a pretty good mother, and she brightened up. It was a good moment for the two of us.

Before I went to sleep, I used the upstairs bathroom and in the floor were three bullet holes from where Dad shot a gun one night drunk. Made me feel strange and cold seein' it.

*
A chapbook of these monologues,
Sounds in the Distance,
was published in 1982 by Aloes Books, London, with a foreword by William S. Burroughs. In 1996, a more comprehensive volume of the monologues,
The Waterfront Journals,
was published posthumously by Grove Press.

April 1978

Human Head III

April 22, 1978

Dirk has a photograph that I wanna use for the cover of my monologues if they're accepted by any publishing group. He wants to do the layout for it (cover). The photo is a black-and-white of me with glasses off and hair slicked back. Linda and [Jan?] are in background fading away. It's a sharp high-contrast photo where I look (if nothing else) real striking slightly bizarre—not enough to distort what I feel about myself, and there's enough space for the title.

Harold is gonna lend me this typewriter next week to use for a week or two. I'm gonna type out all the monologues and send them off to Ferlinghetti at City Lights. Am thinking that that collection plus a couple of stories would be good as a book. Maybe photos by Dirk and Arthur Tress. Maybe no photos at all. Anyway it's all a major step as far as suddenly seeing enough good work by myself to send out to publishers—ain't worried about it being rejected as I'll put it out myself under the Redd Herring Press if no response from elsewhere. “Nevada Green,” my story on the shotgun-wielding kids who picked me up outside of Reno for the twenty-seven-hour ride through cold mountains and dazzling heat, is shaping up slow but sure. Got lots of work in store for me there. Maybe send it to
Playboy
if I finish it and think there's a chance. Could use the money badly as Dennis says I'm all caught up in bills except the month's rent. And Red M/Zone party is coming up in two weeks. I need new fuckin' glasses, clothes, etc. Louis Cartwright's book needs $$ to be printed. It all brings a vast headache up to the shoulders. Phenas[?] wrote me from Crete and also Oxford, England. Things are going fine with him. I have to sit down and write him soon.

April 25, 1978

Met Syd tonight after work. We sat in a burger house and talked for an hour. I feel stilted in seeing him—seeing him means money for sex. I realize that when I met him one summer afternoon, I was fourteen and it was a sultry day—very little luck in hustling—the deaf-mute wasn't into going through fuck-fuck motions with his limp cock, and all the other people that had approached me wanted either film shots for ridiculous fees or heavy out-of-the-way (Far Rockaway or New Jersey) sex for five dollars. I was getting depressed not being in the money—John was with me and he had one fling which netted ten dollars and we both saw this guy checking us out and smiling from behind a newsstand, but the guy said he was interested in me. That was a bit of a rush. I was so used to men wanting John over me. We went up to the hotel on 44th Street or 45th up the rank rickety swaying leaning staircase paid seven dollars for a room and opened the windows to let the musty smell out. He was about thirty-seven and had a hard swimmer's body—very handsome—and I slowly undressed conscious of my white body, slim and angular against the dark colored walls. Set my clothes on the peeling hanger and we climbed into the cool sheets, the 8th Avenue wind from the river blowing the dirty curtains out over the Avenue—street sounds and prostitute clatter of heels mixed with traffic flowing in—a smooth and slow sex—laying back afterwards with thumping chests and sweat lining my neck and body warm breeze drying it all off—sheets moist and we talked slowly I had no idea of what price it all cost and he gave me twenty dollars. He was really nice, considerate, witty, and laid a calm hand to my chest for a while as he talked of sections of his life. We parted and saw each other regularly. At times his family was away at the shore and we would go to his huge mansionlike house in some rich section of New Jersey and in the backyard under the trees and stars lay out a blanket and made a wild love with fucking mosquitoes sending huge welts up my legs and sides and neck.

Seeing him tonight—years after all this was over—he had grown so much older—tight lines around his forehead and eyes—body kinda shrunken and bony. He talked about how his life was going (one of the monologues is his). I tried to explain to him what I was doing with my writing and art but realized that what I wanted to tell him was that I was successful—being published by this company and that company. But it wasn't possible because my writing is still being formed and there is no demand for it. The reason I wanted to tell him I was successful was to ease the concern on his part—to ease some kind of parental fears that I picked up from him. I told him this is what I was feeling. I told him that I didn't know what I wanted to do in my life other than paint and write. He suggested getting involved in some kind of company to pursue an interest and climb the ladder. I found it difficult to explain that I wasn't really at all concerned with notions of success in that sense—sure, I want to be recognized for what I do, but I couldn't get into the whole notion of competition, that if the by-product of my art acted as its own competition on the outside—on the street or wherever—fine, I have nothing to do with that. I could not, would not enter into the pushing of my work for competition's sake. I could not willingly get behind something I did and get into the dogfight of it all.

When we left the restaurant he stopped on the street and asked me how I was doing for money. I said I was desperate. He said How much do you need? and I couldn't say. Money from him, I haven't wanted money from him since I was eighteen. Never wanted to get paid for sex ever and yet I was broke, in debt for forty or fifty dollars plus rent and so he said how much? twenty dollars? forty dollars? I still shook my head, caught in the fucking nerve wires of resistance and need—opposites of the whole mess of what my life pointed to at that second. He said, One hundred dollars? Look, ya gotta give me some idea. Ya need rent money? What do you need? Tell me. I shook my head, I was stunned. He shoved one hundred dollars into my hand and I started trembling, crying, and shaking, the release of everything, relief of money needs, I stammered, said, Man … I don't know what to say, all these years I've wanted to tell you things but didn't know how. I mean, at this point I'm happy with what I'm doing in my life but when I was hustling, when I was in the Square at a certain point in my life, I really needed to connect with someone and you were really important then. You helped me through so many things, in ways you might not even be aware of.

He said, Well, that makes me feel really happy. And I shook his hand and we said good night simultaneously and he turned and split and I turned before he turned and I stood at the corner waiting for the light to change to get across to the subway and was overtaken again and started crying.

May 2, 1978

Been working regularly on my monologues, still thinking out ideas for Artists Postcards series. The monologues are coming along fine—there's some beautiful movement in them, genuine revelatory progression where character is revealing through conversation in an unusual way, where the thought starts out in coffee shop banter and in progression parts the gray range letting slip out some bleak or warm wing of the heart, the mirror behind the eye slowly revolving. What excites me most is the potential of friends' stories for monologues, got a beautiful one from Syd that came from my meeting with him recently. It shows a tenderness mixed with ambiguity that is revealed within the words—a sad sort of ambiguity/struggle with the spirit in between social demands and physical/mental demands. Most of the monologues are people once met and then left suddenly such as in car rides cross-country, early-morning rail encounters, overheard coffee shop conversations, etc. They are diverse enough to allow a continual transformation in the mind/eye. The experience of them gradually broadens and hopefully in the end one will be transformed in consciousness and in experience. Private personal glimpses into the makeup of character, of America symbolized/represented by a handful of characters. There's still an enormous amount of typing/editing in store for monologues that were written down in loose form, editing of the sections that slow down the emitting heart, the unnecessary sections of speech that hinder the sections that contain the
glimpse
—the aperture of the dream.

May 25, 1978

Arthur called me this morning to say good-bye. He will be splitting soon to go to California. He said Artists Postcards will contact me personally in a month with the answer in regards to my postcard—the possible acceptance of it for the show. He said he wrote me a letter and is mailing it today to me. I can't think of what it will contain—faint ideas that it may be in regards to our relationship. If I go to Europe in three months I won't see him and I don't know how I feel about that. I mean that I will miss him greatly, but I don't know if living in Europe will be difficult because of my loss of contact with him and all my friends. I'll be leaving so many people—my whole life behind me at that point as Europe represents total and uncommitted freedom—a drastic change in lifestyle and surroundings. I'll have no choice but to go ahead further into my life and explore possibilities as there will be no retreat into comfort of friends and lovers. I wonder if sex is possible with language barriers and secludedness of Normandy or offensive Parisians who won't speak to Americans, etc. It will be a confrontation of the senses.

August–September 1978

New York–France

August 27, 1978

Met a fella Friday night. Went into the Village after work and there was this character standing in front of B&S (Boots & Saddles) Bar and as I passed by him I realized that it was someone I had seen a number of times in Julius's but never spoke to—a fella who struck me as familiar in some nonspoken sense—like I knew him from somewhere but wasn't sure if he was just familiar from passing a number of times on the street or if he was from some place or gathering in the past. As I passed him it suddenly struck me that he was a man I went home with at age thirteen or fourteen and that was up on 58th Street near the park. The fella back then had had a swimmer's body—the first very handsome guy I'd ever gone to bed with. That time I was into going downtown to Times Square a lot. We had met in front of the theaters on 42nd. He took me for a soda in the seafood place on 43rd Street, and we ended up going to a friend of his house and makin' it. I didn't ask for money at that time—the second time I ran into him I went with him and he and I made it again in the same apartment and then as I was getting dressed I mentioned to him that I usually asked for money and that I didn't want to in his case but did he think it was possible to give me a few bucks because I was hungry. He said he never picked up hustling kids but sure and threw me a couple of bucks—never saw him again but thought about him as I was growing up—those savage déjà-vu strikes in the center of the heart when there's that odd recall of a man you have lain down with—where has he gone to?—what changes in the visual sense. Here I am ten years later completely away from that whole intense neon scene of the square—