The Vulture (22 page)

that
bottle in
your
pocket.

Hello! to a junky in the next block

standing on the corner scratching the corners

of his mouth and imitating the leaning tower of Pisa.

Hello! to 400,000 New Yorkers who loved

reality so much that they never want to see it again.

Runaways, hideaways, and getaways from one hell to another.

. . . climb the stairs and listen:

to the joyful noises your neighbors are making and

say hello to the rats that have so long been a part of your

life that they all have names.

. . . climb the stairs to:

soul music and soul food and lost souls in Harlem --

no longer even singing about heaven.

. . . get a good night's sleep because

you're on the air again tomorrow morning

at six a.m.

June 28, 1968 / The Party

‘All the world's a stage.’ William Shakespeare.

‘May you live all the days of your life.’ Jonathan Swift.

John's party was a typical thing. You dance, you smoke, you drink, and you take advantage of everything that is happening in your favor. If the chick you're with is drunk, try to get between her legs. If she's not drunk, try to talk your way between her legs.

I realized what was actually happening after I had come in and sat down for a while, merely watching the things that were going on in the room. White people
and
black people are really psychological disaster areas. The whites, because they have never had any feeling for warmth and rhythm and are basically, sexually, frigid. Black people are becoming lost because they strive to imitate the white man's symbols of coolness and by so doing lose contact with their own emotions.

The truly interesting aspect of the set was Afro and the discussion that came up about riots and their causes and effects. I felt, for some reason, that Afro had convictions and was truly doing what he wanted to and living life for what it really stood for in his mind. I knew that I hung out, not because it was intellectually satisfying, but because I was searching, looking for something to relate to. After I heard Afro talk, I decided that perhaps through helping others to gain perspective about the things around us and the nature of the society we live in, I might gain new insight to what I really wanted to do.

Afro told me how I could become a member of the volunteer
faculty that he would be needing when BAMBU opened a center in our area.

Being as objective as I possibly could, Afro was real. He didn't seem to be trying to impress anybody with the amount of knowledge he had about the movement and the topics that we covered concerning it. I was almost a bit thrown off balance when he asked me whether or not all I did was quote people. There was an undercurrent of the question ‘Where are
you?
’ in the middle of his inquiry.

I felt even more unreal and false when later in the evening I made a play for this chick from down south and caught myself pretending to be drunk and filling my mouth with all the hip phrases and colloquialisms that I knew of. She was impressed right away with the whole setting, the New York thing, and the city slicker who had fallen head over heels for her.

‘Look here, baby,’ I said. ‘You ain’ rilly gon’ git into no “Goin'-back-down-South-thing” only a few days after I have discovered you, are you?’

‘Well, that's where I live. I have to go back home.’

‘But, you don’ seem to be relating to how well we could do if you were here an’ I could be with you.’

‘I understand what you're saying, but you know what is.’

‘Iz that really the way the world is? Give a man a taste of a good thing and then snatch it from him. How cruel are you?’

She turned to me in the dim light and placed the palms of her hands on my cheeks. The look in her eyes was all concern and apparent sympathy for the pain she was bringing me.

‘I'm sorry,’ she said.

‘Then let's be together for tonight. Let me take you out an’ show you New York. Jus’ to have you with me for as long as I can.’

‘All right,’ she said after a brief hesitation.

I rambled all through our trip down the elevator about how many things I would show her and how many things I would like to show her if only we had more time.

‘I have always dug women from the South. Square bizness!’ I told her.

‘Why?’

‘I don’ know. I guess I always thought that they knew more about taking care of a man an’ tryin’ to understand him . . . Women up here cain’ cook, cain’ sew, an’ the only reason I can fin’ for callin’ ‘um women is because they have the babies.’

She laughed. ‘You probably just haven't met the right one,’ she said.

‘I met you.’

We walked down through the Village. It was a Friday night, and all of the hippies and other weirdos were out there doing their thing. Ruth Ann was amazed by all of the wild clothes and the ramshackle buildings that decorated Bleecker Street and West 4th Street. I could only imagine that her idea of what the Village would be like had been closer to the Taj Mahal. She filled the air with a million questions that always related to the semipuritanical curtain that black women are veiled with in the South.

‘How can people live like that?’ she kept asking.

We saw all the long hair and serapes and sunglasses that she would need to see for years to come. I showed her a reefer, and I thought she might literally die. There was no chance of her putting it to her lips and becoming a junky. We ate at one of the many corner hot-dog stands and simply watched the people go by, mainly young whiteys out for a night of excitement.

When it was time to take her home, for some reason I was very sad that the evening was over. I had enjoyed being with
her. The thoughts that I had had earlier in the evening about getting in bed with her inside some Bleecker Street flophouse had somehow disappeared when I first saw her in the light. I felt even more like a fool, because she had her reality, but I was still a long away from mine. I kissed her good night passionately. It was passionate, for me, because I hoped to continue the masquerade she had become attached to. I believed at that time that the thoughts of what had been on my mind were revealed to her. She took my spending an evening with her without a hint of sex as a sign of true love. I told her that I would call her the next day and take her somewhere, but I didn't.

July 27, 1968

I finally received my letter from BAMBU. It rejected my application for a position as teacher.

Dear Mr Quinn,

We received your letter of application for position on the faculty at our Chelsea branch. Unfortunately, we are unable to grant you a position at this time. Please feel free, however, to apply again at a later date. Also enclosed are free pamphlets about the program of BAMBU in the greater New York area.

Thank you,

Brother Domingo

I had never expected anything at all like that, but my little affair with Margie Davidson had taught me that I wasn't really ready to dedicate myself entirely to blackness. I felt it necessary that I talk with Afro though and tell him that I had really tried to join, but that things hadn't worked out.
In the back of my mind was a glimmer of possibility that he might want to hire me anyway. I caught up with him after a speech that he made at the Chelsea center and showed him my rejection notice. He said in so many words that it was too bad, but that there was nothing he intended to do about it. I simply left it at that.

July 15, 1968

On the Monday following my trip with Margie to the motel, she had told me to be sure and call her. She told me that we would be able to get a lot straight at that time. I stayed up late the night before and watched television. It was amazing how much you could see about the lives people led and about the truth that they seemed to be attempting to escape from in their everyday lives. Television was the current that turned America on, because the whole country is strangled by routine and tight schedules and the anonymity that comes along with becoming a number and relating to the life of an automaton, programmed only to exist.

I had had the pleasure or discomfort of seeing an adventure flick with spies and bombs and gadgets that brought me back to the view I had been taking of the existence the country has succumbed to. Black people with sunglasses on at three a.m. in the subway. White people by relating to the lives of Ozzie and Harriet. Black people by aspiring to the level of Ozzie and Harriet, when the whole situation was really ten steps backwards. For a minute I wanted to look outside in the middle of the flick and see if I could catch a glimpse of Judy Garland and L. Frank Baum skipping down a yellow-brick replica of Ninth Avenue with singing junkies instead of Munchkins.

It was at that time that I decided that black people were
never going to get together with enough authority to cause a major revolution in America. Their whole thought pattern in terms of what the revolt would consist of was hazy and vague. They didn't know if freedom meant working alongside a white man with the same pay, therefore necessitating a ‘white’ education, or if they wanted a separate state of all black people, such as Texas or Mississippi. They didn't know if they wanted integration or separation, war or peace, life or death. They didn't know if they wanted to kill the whiteys or save a few. There was not even a clear definition of liberal. Malcolm said that there was no such thing as a liberal, but the Black Panthers worked hand in hand with the white SDS. There were too many goddamn groups doing too little.

I wished at that point for a return to the humanity and the reality that black people must have once represented.

Perhaps I was wasting my time even worrying about the movement. What was I into? In the movement or out of the movement, or out of the question, I didn't know.

I dialed Margie's number.

‘Hello.’

‘Excuse me, I'd like to speak to Miss Margie Davidson, please.’

‘I'm sorry. Miss Davidson isn't in.’

‘Do you know when she'll be back?’ I asked.

‘She'll be back on August 11,’ came the reply. ‘She's gone for her vacation in Paris.’

‘Thank you.’

And I'll just be a monkey's uncle or an ass's ass! I almost laughed about the whole situation. I should start some sort of interracial Hertz Rent-A-Dick, giving privileges for any strung out ofay bitches to get their ashes hauled anytime of the day or night. No wonder she had said we would get things straight!

December 10, 1968

Of all the months that there are, December is the worst one to be alone, out on the corner with the Hawk, drinking wine and thinking prose. The people in the city are frozen under ordinary circumstances. Too busy to pay much attention to a faggot strutting down 42nd Street dressed in a G-string. Too preoccupied to feel sorry for a wino or lush strewn in the gutter on the Lower East Side. Much too dead inside to see the pain around them and inside them.

Life whistles by us. We sit in iron castles and scream an occasional ‘Slow down!’ realizing only that before we are alive there is someone standing over us whispering in Latin. We know that there should be some way to bring existence under our command, so that we might savor the good things and speed the intolerable sadnesses that blanket us far too often on their way to memory banks without keys. The only true disaster is that the thought of death has become so frightening that the reality of life escapes us.

December came, and many of the things that I had seen as life rafts on a stormy sea had gone hurtling by me. Margie was gone, and though she had played only a small role in relation to my total existence, a big part of my mind had been dedicated to the enigma of her presence. I had severed my position with her from the rest of my mind, and set thoughts of her aside as though my head contained volumes and volumes, each covering a separate subject. My attempt at joining BAMBU had been liquidated, and now only came up when I saw Afro or the Swahili teacher they had employed from Colgate.

There was still one person left in the neighborhood that I felt at ease with, however. His name was Ricky Manning. Ricky was almost two years younger than I, but we stayed
with each other much the way wallflowers cluster at a party. Neither of us quite fit in anywhere. The only real problem with Ricky was his overwhelming preoccupation with death and the purposelessness of life.

‘What are we going to do when we can't get high anymore?’ he asked one night.

I looked down at the empty capsule packets between my feet: Darvon Compound-65/ propoxyphene hydrochloride, aspirin, phenacetin, and caffeine. xs3751 amx.

‘The human capacity for being bored, rather than man's social or natural needs, lies at the root of man's cultural advances. Ralph Linton.
The Study of Man
,‘ I quoted.

‘And we will advance when we get bored again? To what?’

‘To nirvana.’ I laughed.

‘Will nirvana get us down there?’ Ricky pointed at the street below us. We were standing in the loft of the warehouse E. W. Cook abandoned on Eleventh Avenue when the rats moved in.

‘That's really the problem, isn't it? Whether or not we want to be down there? What's stopping us from going down there or going into the Cobra or anywhere else?’

‘Are we free down there?’ Ricky asked.

‘Man is free anywhere his mind is free,’ I quoted.

Ricky sighed disgustedly. His breath was making steam in the darkness. The steam bumped the windows like stray clouds and blurred my view of the streetlight that illuminated our position.

‘Eastern philosophy?’ he asked.

I looked at him severely. This is the problem with the whole world. A boy, seventeen, mentally superior to his playmates, and lost. Not lost because his parents didn't love him or for any other trite sociological reason, but lost because a world full of people still make up an empty world.

‘It may be the answer,’ I said.

‘Will you stop it?’

I was acting again, and I could feel it. I thought for a second that Ricky could sense it too. He was always so critical of everything that I got into, trying to save myself. Maybe that was why I always found myself hanging out in places like this, talking about things with more enthusiasm than I really felt.