A GENTLE SLIDE INTO A CONCRETE MIXER

For Jack M.

Scuffeed-up
with the blood
of the ones
who slid before us,
we bled into the eighth grade
on those endless summer days
of Brooklyn's Coney Island
playing punch ball
with those pink Spaldings
tight & hard
while wads of Bazooka Joe
splashed over our lips.
Our knees & shins bloodied
from pebbles embedded from a slide into second base--
an imaginary basepath
--in a gutter from Mermaid to Neptune
while The Drifters drifted
and those marvelous girls
with Cadillac bumber tits
& teased hair so high
you could see through it
waited for their man
to get his ass off second base
& home.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2020

TOMMY

had a white '65
Chevy SuperSport
with 4 on the floor
& red leather buckets
we'd tool around in
when we were seniors
in Lincoln High School
outside Coney Island.
Even the hawk eyes
of my mother
couldn't see
when I passed the bend
of our block. I ducked
into Tommy's house
a few blocks away.
He was rich
& lived in a big home
directly on the beach.
His father, Horseshit Harry,
owned steamships. Tommy had
two younger sisters
& a knockout mother, Josaphina,
who knew she drove his friends wild,
wearing diaphonous negligees
as she descended from above.
If the light
caught her right
the hair on the back of my neck
would prickle.
There'd usually be two or three
more friends who showed, but I
was always the first.
Our routine was almost automatic:
we'd say goodbye to Josaphina,
who always knowsingly eyed us,
& tumble into his ride, me
riding shotgun and began
by cutting our first few classes
at The House of Pancakes
in Brooklyn, off The Belt Parkway.
I'd bum Marlboros off Tommy
(and he never gave me that tired bullshit
about when I was gonna begin buying my own),
while he drove. He always had one of his own
clentched between his front teeth
beneath a black mole
the size of a small pumpkin.
Usually, The Heart--born with a murmur
--& The Count--looked like Bela Lugosi
were in the backseat
puffing away.
We'd talk shit
about everyone we knew--
who was fucking who,
who wanted to fuck who,
who bullshitted about fucking who--
as we drove & smoked & ate pancakes
and counted the minutes
until Dukes, the poolroom,
or Surf Lanes, the alley,
would open & another decision
needed to be made:
school or no school?
It was the easiest vote
ever cast, & legislated
without dissent.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2020

THE ALAMO

is now on 11th Street
& University Place,
in Greenwich Village.
I'm hunkered down
fending off
the onslaught.
Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna
can go and fuck himself
before I surrendeer.
I've got a sure as shit
straight-shooting musket
and my friend, Jim,
a Bowie knife. And balls,
I got them.
And so does enough coon-skin hats
to shoot the gold
from the capped-teeth of every Mexican
with bad breath and worse hygiene.
I played worse odds;
I grew-up in Brooklyn,
Coney Isand; the arcade
had the faces of mom & dad
plastered like wanted signs
down an illegitimate birth canal.
I could use a shot
of red-eye and a priest
to make fun of.
Because nobody will be left
to tell the tale
and history might think
we were fearless
instead of the foul-breathed
interlopers we are.
Uncle Walt
fucked us all.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

RAVENESQUE

Dark & dreary
bleak & black
chilled & drizzly,
we humped along Park
downtown & across
the bridge to score
some tea & time
& heat & eats
& maybe,
just maybe, a little sex
on our kid's break
from whatever smacked
of responsibility.
Any day, really, was a good day
for pot. But especially days
like this as the ice rain ticked
along the windows
& pinged & ponged on the roof
while a young friend,
but old lover leaned
past my shadow & into the folds
of our laughter as the bridge
& her cables rose before us &
the fog seeping into the ground.

Some days
are made for pot,
& some days for dope.
Rare are the days
that give coke a good name,
but anyday, everyday,
is an alcohol delight
if the saloon is dark
& those who bottom there
know you well enough
to leave you be.

We got out
into the mist
& Amy paid him.
There was a skinny Rican
we knew selling
Panamanian Red
by Hoyt & Bergen:
good count for the price,
& rich sweet earth tasting
pot. But we still needed
to throw a few sevens: he
had to be there; the reefer
had to be there; & a cab
or car service needed to drift by
or be found. Everything in this life
is a matter of timing. Edgar's was piss-poor
and he paid dearly; that day
ours was better. How was yours today?
How has your life gone?

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2018

JUST SO MUCH GOD YOU CAN GET NEXT TO

Maria was
a Seven Day Adventist
and gorgeous.
A priest
would have eaten
a stained glass window
to get next to her.
I, on the other hand,
was right next to her.
We sat asshole to elbow
in a teeny-tiny office
in a drug rehab joint
in Williamsburg Brooklyn
over forty years ago.
There were three of us
in there, all ex-junkies; the other chick
helped Carlos, the boss reformed junkie
do everything
he couldn't
or didn't want to do.
Williamsburg was still a slum
before the hipsters
destroyed it. Roosters
cock-a-doodle-do'd
in the early morning
waiting to fight
or be cooked.
And everybody
wanted me to fuck Maria,
except Maria.
She wanted me to pray,
eat better
and read
The Watchtower.
Oh yeah, and repent.
I could do every one of those things
except eat better--a man
has his limits.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

CONEY ISLAND BABY

This poem is A's...

"If they had no madness in them, they were useless; genius doesn't speak with the limited tongue of sense."
--C.E. Morgan

A nitrous oxide summer.
Slick & honeyed mouths
of cotton candy, girl pink
& fushcia, yellows/blues/reds,
candy apples caramel thick
on gooey sticks; pavement
suction cupping sneakers;
a hiss of franks
charring & popping juices;
sweet salt twisting
nipples & noses.
Rats, in the moist sand,
sticking their whiskers
into bags of Nathan's fries.

I was traveling
into a dark wood,
around the arms
of sailors
& their girls,
crisscrossing a huckster's moan
inviting bravery born
in a man's bone
& the pitch of nickels & quarters--
an alchemist's delight
in life's chances
& chances taken--
hyped-up & erect
against the steely teeth
of zippers.

Night is not dark,
but forgiving.
Boardwalks are lenient.
Songs are simple
laments of longing.
Each wave,
a sensation
brokered
by a semicolon.
I was lost
& still am.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

SAM

http://bit.ly/28Trzb6

You were three
and I was nearly sixteen.
You had yet to find
misery, and I had found
too much of it.
You would, shortly, catch-up.

Then, in Bed-Stuy,
I saw Sam
live. My old man
took me. Lucky,
for me, he was
a black Jew
for his time.
Sam defined
my pain; he helped
get to my bones.

I've tried
to get to
yours.

I'm still
trying.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

THE GOOD & THE BAD

Miss Susie,
as she was called,
or Susannah Mushatt Jones
her birth name as she was known,
died yesterday
at 116 years of age
in Brooklyn; the last
of those born in the eighteen hundreds
in Lowndes County, Alabama.
Goddamn!
I've got
another 50 years (at least) to go
of watching Law & Order reruns
to beat her.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

SITTING AT THE COUNTER

with a cupacoffee
and a cigarette
was a magnificent thing:
watching wisps
of smoke blue
in the afternoon light
drifting up into your eyes
not wanting to go home
or go to school
or go to a job;
wondering how to tell
a woman
you don't love her
or love her too much;
thinking and thinking
and thinking how
to get it right,
how to get it out,
practicing the words
turning them over
twisting them in your mouth
around your tongue
seeing their expression
expressed in the other,
backing up, rehearsing
the rehearsal,
ordering another cup,
shaking loose another
cigarette, lighting a match,
blowing on your hand,
finding a landing place
and drifting drifting drifting
on a reed, a thin reed,
trying to find a self
that felt right,
knowing eventually
a price will be paid,
for not
doing your homework,
not using protection,
not telling the truth,
you stumble through
the inconvenient lies
born of convenience,

and then she's there
and you'll retreat
into a booth
where you'll share
another cupacoffee
and another cigarette
and you'll tell each other
confidences and secrets
and offer your hand
to hold her hand
and nurse each other
on an exquisite
afternoon into
early evening.

All this
for a half a buck
and a tip.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

MRS. ORMOND

my fourth grade teacher
scared the shit outta me.
She was a tall, Irish
#2 pencil, dressed
in black, from her tight
neck button to her black
buffed leather shoes
showing heel wear. Her hair
was as severe as she was,
tied tight
in a bun streaked with gray.
Her lips thin, mirthless.
She'd stand in front of us
with a ruler,
not to measure anything,
but to whack
the scared wooden desks
as she drove home
warnings:
Multiplication Table tomorrow
she'd spit into the first row.
We knew
she meant it.
Nothing short
of a nuclear war drill
would prevent her
from marching to each desk,
to stand in front of each asshole
wet with fear and demand: 3x7,
9x6, 1x0, and wait for our eyes
to stop like a deranged slot machine
as we arrived at the numbers.

The year was 1955,
and I was in PS 222.
The Brooklyn Dodgers won The World Series,
Sugar Ray Robinson still ruled,
factories and jobs and families were healthy,
Chinese food was consumed by Jewish clans
on Sunday, Johnny-On-the-Pony & Ringolevio
were games of choice, girls weren't discussed,
but Mrs. Ormond had us
by the balls.

It wasn't easy
back then,
it was never easy,
back then
or now
but
it sure was
simple.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

THE SCREWS LOOSEN--FROM CHAPTER VI--CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

That December, after having gotten some poetry readings at Brooklyn College, I was invited down to Hollins College to read my stuff. When I returned from a weekend of debauchery and minor mayhem, I tried to once again turn off the spigot. One snowy day, I was reading The Village Voice and saw a job advertisement for a program manager for an FM listener supported station in Seattle, Washington. I had been very much involved with certain aspects of radio through my years at New York City Community College and somewhat at WBAI in New York. I wrote a letter to the box number as if I were writing a letter to a friend, accompanied by my resume. A few weeks later I received a very warm response from a woman, Nancy Keith. It turned out that this station was also part of the Pacifica Foundation which controlled WBAI. We corresponded for a few more weeks exchanging a series of letters. We then spoke on the phone a few times before she set up an interview with some people in the East Village. I met twice with those people, exchanging ideas about radio, community, and philosophy. We seemed to be talking the same language, give or take a few syllables. A week later, in the beginning of April, I was invited out to meet the players at the station and take a look at Seattle itself. I felt the gig was mine from the conversations and interviews I’d had.
My parents, without saying it, felt I was fleeing something. I thought it was them, but it was me. I thought I could just pick up and start over with a clean slate. Nothing wipes clean. We leave a stain whatever we do, wherever we are, whoever we’re with. I called Nancy and told her I’d arrive after visiting some friends in Louisiana. I buzzed Brasz and told him my plans and he called Harry, a friend of his who lived in New Orleans and who would pick me up at the airport. I took some of the insurance money and bought some methadone biscuits. (In those days some doctors combated heroin addiction with methadone, a synthetic opiods blocker. The methadone came in the form of “biscuits,” an orange-colored biscuit divided into four distinct parts in order to break easily should you need just that much not to get dope sick). I also bought some strong reefer and hashish.
I rode to the airport full of apprehension and fear. Instead of feeling adventurous, I felt dread at the prospect of eventually going to Seattle, a place where I knew nobody. I knew I would eventually be judged and found lacking.

Harry picked me up. I got in the car and lit a joint. He grinned. “Wanna get a tattoo?” he asked. I just stared.
“If we’re really Dadaists, Savage, we’d get a fuckin’ tattoo, tonight now.”
I continued to stare. He started the car and pulled into traffic.
He was married to a chick named Robin, and they had one kid, a 2-year-old girl named Molloy, named after Beckett’s novel and character. I have nightmares imagining the shape she’s in today. Harry was a good-natured, brilliant Southern boy who worked the tugs on the Mississippi. They had a home on General Haig Street, a little ways from The French Quarter in New Orleans, and that’s where I set up camp. I was on the couch in the living room. I turned them on to a little pot, ate some peach ice cream while laughing with them and went to bed just before sunrise.
I woke up and watched a bug, as big as a Buick, walk across the floor. I lit another joint, smoked it, and got out of bed.
That night, Harry took me to The Quarter. We wound up in Masparo’s, once a slave exchange and now a saloon serving pretty good pastrami and melted Swiss cheese sandwiches and cold beer. After eying this waitress Barbara, I told Harry I’d take my chances and hang out with her. Barbara took me to another saloon where we drank and talked and finally we ended going back to her place on Bourbon Street. I know this sounds contrived, but she really was generous with her home and her body and her opium, which was black and gummy and we smoked it in a glass stem.
We were awakened the next morning by a phalanx of her friends. I took her car, and went back to Harry’s to get my insulin and a few more things to take over to her place. When I returned, there were more people, sleeping, eating, and copulating. It was a poor imitation of Sweeney Among the Nightingales, too hectic for me. I turned around, thanked her, and started back to Harry’s. She didn’t seem to mind.
I stopped at this beautiful old hotel in The Quarter and had the most delicious glass of orange juice. The waiter, knowing I was a tourist, touted me on to the Cafe du Monde where I enjoyed a wonderful cup of French chicory coffee and hot baguettes. I watched The Quarter wake up, sipping coffee and nibbling at donuts. I thought about nothing.

It cost a nickel to make a call from The Quarter, and so for a nickel, I called my dyke connection in New York City and had her send me, in a Special Delivery birthday card, a hundred dollars worth of junk.
Brasz and Yarber drifted in that weekend. After catching up with each other, we hit the streets, where he and Yarber showed me around New Orleans and The Quarter. We visited the garden district and graveyards on the roofs of buildings. We ate a couple of dozen oysters for a few bucks and drank cold beers and laughed like I hadn’t laughed in ages. He wanted me to come back to his place in Bucktown. The week after, we were to go to the first Jazz Fest that New Orleans would have, listened to Sun Ra and his Intergalactic Arkestra, eat some hot Louisiana crawfish, and drink some cold beer. The Jazz Fest would become a part of the landscape thereafter.
Harry had a sick grandmother that he needed to visit. He told me she was dying of cancer and was sure to have some powerful pain medication. She lived on Lake Pontchatrain, and we went across the bridge, stopping in a shack on the side of the road for some of the best fried chicken I’d ever eaten, before going the rest of the way.
Inside the dying woman’s bedroom, Harry pointed to the vials of morphine and demerol that sat on her dresser. I palmed the bottle of morphine and went into the bathroom where I filled up three syringes that I’d brought with me. I reasoned that the nurse who was taking care of her would simply replace the missing morphine at the appropriate time. I’m not proud of what I did.
Very often I had no concern for anyone’s pain or pleasure, except my own. I would do what was necessary to feed my demon, stopping short of what I considered extreme cruelty. I had no way of knowing if that old woman suffered needlessly because of my theft. I do not want to hide behind that cliché of our time, It was my disease, not me. I believe it was me. Stealing her medications implies volition and will.

I drove the truck back from Baton Rouge with Brasz to his place in Bucktown. Carlotta was his next door neighbor. She was an ancient withered lady, who wore black lace and black skirts that trailed in the dust of her yard where a hundred cats sauntered in and out of her home. After a few days, Brasz had enough. There’s nothing worse than being around someone who was once alive and witness their disintegration. Beckett nailed it in Godot: “Ah, but habit is the great deadner.” It’s not only tiring and trying, it’s boring as well. He’d try to get me to sample some other New Orleans’ favorites, food and women. I tried a little of both, but I really had had enough. Too mentally depressed to go on to Seattle, I returned to New York, but not before using a lot of nickels.
Joey, a merchant seaman who I knew from my forays into the nether world, met me at the airport with a few bags of dope; I paid him handsomely for the service. You get to a point where little is done in the dope world for nothing. Welcome home.

FALLING IN LOVE WITH EVERYTHING I WAS...& WASN'T--FROM CHAPTER 4: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

Back to school I was again under the auspices of my parents, teachers and school officials, but now I had acquired wants, lusts, behaviors...and friends. They supplied me with relief, temporary though it might be, and I wasn’t about to give them up.
Abraham Lincoln High School was so huge with so many kids that it needed two shifts to educate us. Being an incoming sophomore I had the late one; my day started at 11 and went to 5. I’d get up, take my shot, eat breakfast, look at yesterday’s homework assignment, do what I wanted to do of it, steal some of my parent’s Chesterfield regulars, and leave for school. Getting off the bus at The Gate I’d walk into the Seagate Center, into the locker room, where I’d smoke two or three cigarettes in rapid succession, walk through my nicotine haze, say hello to the big-titted secretary, and board the Surf Avenue bus to Lincoln. I’d hook up with some friends, have a few laughs, go to classes, lunch, a few more classes, and home for supper. After that, I’d go back to The Center or bowling alley. It depended on whether I had some extra cash to roll a few lines, felt like playing basketball or, if my parents were really on the warpath, in which case I had to be cool, stay at home.

I didn’t know the state of my diabetes...and I didn’t care. I wasn’t testing my piss at all, although now we know that urine tests for glucose don’t mean that much anyway. A test tape can read negative and blood glucose could be up around 350 before it spills into the urine. (80-150 is a normal reading.) My bladder was able to hold a lot of fluid because I wasn’t going to the bathroom much, but looking back, I must to have been running high to low glucose counts because my mood swings were monstrous. I went from elation to depression, from acting rationally to crazed. At the time my parents and I didn’t know that insulin has a harder job of being effective during adolescence because of the surge of other hormones. I was nervous, irritable, and constantly on guard. I attributed all this to my family. I’d take shots at different times, ate what I wanted, usually when I wanted, and avoided, as best I could, seeing Dr. Z. And when I couldn’t avoid it, I’d lie my ass off. The one I began lying to mostly was myself and that created quite a problem. I didn’t want to be self-disciplined and manage the disease. Fuck, I didn’t want to have a disease. Discipline, or the lack thereof, spilled over into most other areas of my life. “If the going gets tough, the tough get going.” I “got going” all right; I got the fuck outa there.

I didn’t make the basketball team but I did, with The Heart and Tommy, make the bowling team. I got to wear Lincoln leather: a blue and white team jacket with a bowling ball scattering pins on the back and my name written in script on the front. My dad was not impressed. Bowling, what the hell kind of sport is that? I’m sure he wanted to say it, though instead communicated it non verbally. But I continued, in fact, I got more involved. I was so good that in my junior and senior years of high school and up until my 20th birthday, I’d bowl on weekends for big money. The day that President Kennedy was assassinated I know where I was: in Tommy’s mother’s Cadillac parked across the street from Nathan’s, eating some franks, waiting to be driven to a bowling match. Kennedy was dead and we hoped, being only sophomores, we’d get into a game; the match was not called off.
One lazy day, Tommy, Mike, The Heart, and I decided to cut our fifth period class that day and meet up. We couldn’t go out for a smoke so we went looking for alternatives. We went to the back of the auditorium, behind the curtains, and found ourselves at a door at the back of the stage. We opened the door and saw it led to stairs, which we climbed. They led us to one of the back rooms which stored some of the school’s musical instruments. We all lit smokes and proceeded to play with any of the instruments that caught our fancy: we tinkled the piano keys, brushed the cymbals, kicked the drums, blew into a sax. We had a few laughs and kept smoking. We didn’t know it, but the room we were in was directly behind the huge metal sculptures of the Greek gods that adorned both sides of the auditorium. It wasn’t more than a half hour when we heard the fire alarm.
“Fuck it,” we said in unison, “probably another goddamn drill.” Drill my ass. In five minutes we heard feet pounding up the stairs. Our collective hearts stopped. The door burst open, and the first fireman rushed into the room followed by four or five more. They looked at our stupefied faces. Our cigarette smoke filled the room and had filtered through the metal gods in the auditorium. The firemen escorted us out of the cumulus nimbus cloud we were in, and downstairs where some school officials and more firemen waited. The school officials wore those faces of scorn, derision, and doom while a few of the firemen were smiling.
Each of us caught a two week suspension--hell, it was the beginning of spring--and our parents had to come up. The only one of us who wasn’t the least fazed was The Heart because his parents were deaf and dumb; he could have told them he was getting an award for all I know.
“Bowling alley bum! Gangster! Bastard! My luck I should have a son like you, you bastard, you, you,” my mom crooned. There was no stopping her when she got lathered up. I knew that and just let her run it. “Some friends you have. You call them friends? When, oh God when, are you going to learn? When? Water seeks its own level, remember,” she concluded.
“Yeah, O.K. mom, I’ll remember.” I knew what to say, and not to say.
My father was less verbose, though no less lethal: “You’re going to go to work with me every Saturday, you sonofabitch.”
Quickly, knowing that my summer might be at stake, I thought a mediator might help me.
We sat opposite the school’s guidance counselor, a pleasant faced, blond haired, blue-eyed woman in her 50’s. She looked like a Norman Rockwell painting while we resembled Goya’s Neptune eating his kids: “It was you!”
“No, it was you!”
“No you!”
“No you!”
Before any real conversation could take place, my father, a shrewdie if there ever was one, in a calm and pleasant voice, as if he was trying to sell her one of his melons, related incident after incident; going far back to when I was in that closet with the little girl at the age of five; of how much of a fuck-up I had been, and how I’d resisted any advice to better myself. My mom interrupted constantly to add how great each of them were as parents, how much they’d done for me and how they couldn’t understand why I’d acted the way I had. I was put on the defensive. When I’d try to explain how I felt I was met with, “that’s ridiculous,” “not so, no sorry, not so,” “Norman, I’m surprised at you; that’s an out and out lie.” It was hopeless. The counselor was quiet; she should have paid admission for the entertainment. I felt like asking if she wanted a bag of popcorn. I got real still, but was inwardly steaming, furious, and did what I normally did: burrowed deeper into my shell.
Home was not safe. Sometimes I’d come home and be afraid to turn the key to let myself in. I would explore any avenue that opened and if none existed, would dynamite to create one.

In the summer of my junior year I had my feet firmly planted in Seagate’s normalcy, Coney Island’s carnival, and my father’s world of business and friendships. I was securely tri-polar.
My friends from Seagate now included Donny, Steve, and Warren. They were all a year ahead of me in school. We met playing ball at the Seagate Center, and I joined their circle. They were intelligent, athletic and as sane as humanly possible. They had their own quirks, flaws and eccentricities, but they were on the path to a mainstream and middle class life: marriage, kids and professions out of college. I still maintained my bowling alley and pool room buddies, Tommy and The Heart. My friends from Coney Island, on the other hand, were insane and would embrace a life of crime, addiction, murder, mayhem, and death. My father’s store bridged those worlds.
Even as a little boy I was more lost than amazed inside his store. You could restock shelves, clean, build displays, take down displays, take the cardboard that lay underneath items and once those items were nearly gone take the cardboard, fold down the edges and stack them in the back for when they got bundled. Ten thousand items in grocery, cigarettes, then the milk and diary and frozen foods, and vegetables and fruit, meats and poultry. My one memory of being young and standing in his store was his telling me, “Never stand with your hands in your pockets, do something; break down the cardboard, shakedown the shelves just don’t stand there like that.” The only place I was not lost was ringing the register. It was a function I got real good at. In a matter of weeks, I had almost memorized the price of every item in the store, and, like a good typist, did not have to look at the register to hit the proper keys. I was fast, very fast. I worked next to Ziggy and Selma, survivors of the concentration camps, Jack, a nice soul from Brighton Beach, and Simon, a wonderful old man whose demeanor today reminds me of a Jewish Sir John Gielgud. Now I was allowed to smoke. And smoke I did. Lucky Strike. A cup of coffee and a cigarette burned near my register. The other task I did was unload the trailers that pulled up on some Saturdays with dry groceries; a thousand to two thousand pieces at a time placed on steel rollers inside the truck came to me on the outside where I turned and dumped them down the shoot. I sweated my ass off and popped salt tablets every half hour, but loved it.
What began as misery and penance for my transgressions turned into something else. It turned into the unexpected. There was Rufus, built like Darryl Strawberry, and Carl, built like a Doberman Pincher, who had the fastest hands of anyone I had ever seen, both of whom had worked for my father years before I came on the scene. And they were the ones he had likened me to when he would tell me, “you spend money just like a nigger; you’re nigger rich,” either humorously when I’d ask him for some extra cash or seriously after he’d just given me some. They liked me well enough. They let me see the hidden bottles of liquor they carried and nipped on during the day, and, on occasion, they gave me a nip as well. I heard their patter about women, and clothes and singers and clubs. I heard, “Ah, man you don’t be wantin’ to do this shit, do you?” “Nah, not you man; get the fuck outta here man, go on get.”
And then there was Arnie Beck. A kid about ten years my senior but young when compared to the others who worked there. He’d eye me and I him. We laughed over the silliness of customers, and the other help who were old and set in their ways and were, well, square. One day going into the bathroom, I opened the door to find Arnie about to shoot junk into his vein.
“Close the door, will ya?”
I did. I looked at a syringe much like my own. But it was not like mine. Mine was “clean,” clinical, unemotional except in the demands it made on my life, like needing it to continue it. His syringe, his needle, had mystery, warmth, more than warmth, heat, and in a flash I was drawn to it. This was instantaneous. I had fallen in love.
He had a belt wrapped around his arm and was looking for a vein. “It’s junk, man, schmeck, scag,...her-o-in.” He laughed nearly dislodging the cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. “Yer not goin’ ta tell your ol’ man are you?”
“Nah.”
“Thanks...now beat it...and don’t do this. It fucks with ya too much.”
I closed the door to the bathroom and tried to figure out what I felt, but couldn’t; at the time it defied what language I had.

“We’re going out tonight after we eat, so get dressed,” my father announced on the car ride back home one Saturday at the start of the summer.
“We are? Where we goin’?”
“A joint in Bed Stuy on Eastern Parkway called The Towne Hill. You’re gonna hear Sam Cooke.”
“No kiddin’?”
“I’m not kiddin’. We’re going. Just don’t say nothin’ ta ya mother. I’m tellin’ her we’re goin’ to a ball game.”
I laughed, leaned into the plush Cadillac leather, and wanted to light a cigarette but didn’t. Instead, I thought about all the Sam Cooke songs I knew by heart and that beautifully soulful sweet high voice of his.
The Towne Hill at 8 o’clock was jammed. A circular bar near the entrance was already two-deep. Three bartenders were behind the stick working up a sweat. It was loud with talk, with laughter, and with booze, plenty of booze. Sid, my dad’s friend who had invited us, was easy to find. He was the only white guy sitting on a stool. My father put his arm on his shoulder. He broke out in a smile. “Hey Mickey, Norman; I got the others a table inside, right next to the stage; whatareyadrinkin?”
“Lemme have a J&B.”
“Hey Blackie, a J&B over here and I’ll have another.”
My eyes must have been wide as saucers. I looked and looked and looked some more. Sid turned to me. “You excited?”
“Yeah, I’m excited. Never saw nothin’ like this.”
“Wait, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Wait til Sam comes on. Man, they go crazy. I saw him before. He loves playin’ here, just loves it. You like Sam?”
“Yeah, a lot.”
“You’ll meet him between shows. We’ll go into his dressing room...if he’s not fucking somebody.”
The men, some alone and some together, were dressed in “high vines.” Some of the women were alone and sitting languidly on stools delicately sipping cocktails, and there were those who had men watching from the corners of their eyes. They all looked dangerous and beautiful. The music, rhythm & blues, surrounded us. And it was hot. There was a sexuality coming from the floor and through my shoes and under my slacks and into my under shorts and around my chest and into my heart and shoulders and neck and eyes and ears and brain that just moved me along, made me move without moving, without my having to do a goddamn thing on my own and I could tell others felt it too.
“He’ll be on soon. Take your drink, Mickey,” Sid said, sliding off the stool. We followed him past the bar and into the adjacent room that was mostly dark, except for the stage bathed in colored lights and candles lighting the tables which surrounded the stage that ran the width of the room and down to the middle where I saw some people from the store, including Arnie Beck, Rufus, Carl, and other friends of my father who I knew to be, according to him, “wise guys.” The noise level became muted, people started to hush each other, almost like in a church when the preacher is about to take the stage.
I was sitting next to Arnie who nudged me in the side. I looked over and he motioned me to look under the table. My father was engaged in conversation with his friends and wasn’t aware of Arnie and me. I ducked my head under the table, where Arnie snuck for me a glass filled with ice...and scotch. I bent down, drank what I could and Arnie lowered his hand which held a Marlboro; I greedily sucked some smoke and emerged lightheaded, but cool. Just as the room darkened, everyone grew quiet, and a voice from the heavens said, “Ladies and gentlemen, The Towne Hill is very proud to present Mr. Soul, Sam Cooke.” A spot hit the curtain and there he was in front of me. He was, what can I say, beautiful. Handsome, sexy, he stood there gleaming at us, moving toward the mike stand, taking the mike, curtain rising, his band beginning to hit, and his lips pressing into the mike, “How ya’all feelin’ tanight?” Women and men began to scream to him, talk to him, and he was laughing and laughing and saying, “I can’t hear ya, what ya’all sayin’? speak up.” Then the first chords of “Havin’ A Party” and the place went wild and handkerchiefs came out and the lights spun and he’s singing and moving, hands thrust to the stage and women screaming and crying and trying to get closer and he moving closer and it seems like this night will never end. I poked Arnie in the side and slid underneath the table for another sip and another drag and everything was cool, fluid, everything was fine and I have never felt quite that way again in my entire life.
The set ended and Sid motioned to me to follow him and with my legs a bit unsteady and my heart beating rapidly I did. We entered Sam’s dressing room to see him with his band and five or six men and women drinking and talking. Sam, sweating profusely, got up and embraced Sid who introduced me to him. He asked me whether I liked the show and I could hardly speak. He looked at Sid and laughed, “I guess you did, huh, well that’s fine; how old are ya?”
“I’ll be 17 in October.”
“Old enough, man,” and he laughed again. “Have somethin’ to drink or eat, Hey Cliff--that there is Cliff Norman, and Cliff, this here is Norman--take care of em.”
“No thanks, Sam,” Sid said, “ I gotta get back out there. I’m with his ol’ man and a few other people, but I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“That’s cool; seeya tomorrow,” and to me, “Come back man, anytime.”
Walking back to the table I asked Sid if I could go with him tomorrow. “It’s O.K. with me if it’s O.K. with your ol’ man.” And with some struggle I convinced my father to let me go. I remember one of my father’s friends saying to him, “This joint is the biggest moneymaker next to the Copa.”
I met Sid every night for the next few weeks, and he took me to see and hear Sam. One night in his dressing room, he must have noticed me staring at the women who were lounging around. Sid was drinking and talking with one of them. He came and sat down next to me. “You get any pussy yet, Norm?” I looked at him a bit incredulously and I must have blushed. “Nah, take it easy man, I’m serious man.” But I could see the twinkle in his eye.
“Yeah, I got some.”
“You bullshittin’ me man; you don’t have to do that.” And he smiled.
“No, man, I ain’t bullshittin’ you, I got some, I did; it was no big thing though. I was like thirteen; didn’t know what the fuck I was doin’.”
“Well, I can tell you gonna get a lot of pussy an you gotta watch it man. That pussy like a drug, man. It’s good, man, but shit, it can killyatoo, ya better watch out. Right Sid?” And then he laughed that beautiful high sweet laugh he had.
I usually was able to sit at the bar, sip a club soda and just observe. With no real parameters I could look, though not stare, at what was around me: faces, old and young, gradations of brown, a few white, mostly blond women always accompanied by men, black men, who took their time strolling to the stool or table that was waiting for them; men with scars, some thin as razors, others keloid, a deep brown; some mouths open to grin showing one or two gold teeth. On the women I saw frosted hair, permed over golden brown faces with blue or violet eye shadow and red, orange and pink lips glistening and tongues pink and pointed rounding the lips of glasses. They wore suits and dresses, some gowns and hats and knotted ties bright with colors. At times I saw conversations turn rotten. She’d fling a pocketbook over her shoulder and go out the door and into the night without looking back. He’d turn to the bartender, and they’d exchange looks. Years later, they would close The Towne Hill, claiming prostitution. The word was that they just didn’t pay the cops enough. The owners had said, ”Fuckem” and just put a lock on the door.
A year later we were invited to hear Sam at his opening night at the Copacabana in New York City. We went into his dressing room before and after the show. He was as great as the first time, though a little more toned down, probably because of the place and crowd he was playing to. The other thing that stood out that night was a side order of tomatoes cost ninety cents. Tomatoes regularly sold for 10 cents a pound, shit. The year was 1964. Six months later, he was shot dead by what the authorities said was a woman who owned the motel they found him in. It was rumored that he checked in with an Eurasian woman that he was with that night who was never found, neither were his clothes, any clothes. He was known for carrying a thousand dollar bill pinned to the inside of his sport jacket pocket. The money was never found either. I still have, in my wallet, his signature on a cover charge card from The Towne Hill. It became part of me.

That summer, approaching my senior year, there was work at my father’s store, The Towne Hill, softball, basketball, swimming, sunshine, days with nothing to do but read the works of writers that mattered to me or that I stumbled upon, lazy days, days fat and useless and rich. And then there was gambling and sex.
She lived in those run-down motel-like apartments across from Surf Lanes. Her window faced the street, and the first few times I saw her she was leaning out the window impassively looking at the action below. She saw me looking at her. I knew that her building was filled with hookers. Hell, me and my friends laughed, and fantasized about them. I looked for her every time I passed, which I did often. Maybe, it was the way the sun hit her face and arms, turning them a honey-molasses color; maybe it was Sam Cooke’s laughter; or maybe it was nothin’ except the chemicals I was made of, but I was drawn to her and knew, sooner or later, I’d be going across the street to get closer.
“How old are you, baby?”
“Old enough,” I said and sheepishly smiled.
She looked for a beat and grinned, “I suppose you are,” she replied. She had come out of her apartment to throw away some garbage and had watched me come down the street. It was near dusk, and she was made up for the night: a thin silky dress, with red spaghetti straps that were almost off her shoulders, high heeled shoes and black fishnets. She was tall. Her legs stretched to heaven. “You lookin’ for some company?”
“Yeah, I think I am.”
“Well be sure honey. I don’t want no crazy man changing his mind just before he ready to come,” she laughed.
“No, I’m sure. How much?” The heat inside me, rising.
“Well, I get five for a blowjob, and ten for a fuck. Half and half we can do too.”
“I gotta meet some people, but I’ll be back later,” I nervously said.
“Well, looka here. You see that window up there. That’s mine. If the lights on I’m free, if the lights off don’t be bothering me. Just wait ‘til I’m free, it ain’t usually but a few minutes and then come up. I’m in number 5. It’ll be real nice, baby.” She turned, and then turned back to me. “Hey sugar, what’s your name?”
I was tempted to lie, but said, “Norman.”
“Well, Norman, I’m Eunice.” I watched her legs and round ass walk away and up the stairs and knew I had to come back later.
At ten, I made my way out of the bowling alley and peered across the street at her window. Her light was off. I repeated this at 10:05, 10:10 and 10:15. The darkness burned brighter it seemed. “What the fuck is this?” I said to myself. “If that light ain’t on the next time, fuck it, I’m going home.” It was off and I didn’t go home. At nearly eleven, I climbed her stairs. It was dark inside that front door leading to the stairs, and it smelled of mildew and salt and piss. The stairs sagged, the wood banisters were chipped, splintered and, in some places, completely detached. I looked for #5 and knocked. She opened the door, and she was more beautiful than before. Immediately I could feel myself get hard. She looked quizzically at me. “What you want?” she asked.
“I think I’ll have a roast beef sandwich.”
She looked at me for a moment longer before she broke out laughing. “That’s good, baby, that’s good. Come in, make yourself comfortable.”
I sat on the edge of her bed, beside a chair that was the only other piece of furniture in the room. “You know Sam Cooke?” I asked her, not at all sure what to say but feeling I had to say something.
“Sure I know Sam Cooke, well I don’t “know” Sam Cooke, but I love Sam Cooke.”
“Look at this,” I said and reached for my wallet where his autograph was. She looked at the card as I proceeded to tell her of my adventures at The Towne Hill, making myself a bit more important in the telling than I actually was.
“You think you a colored person, baby?” she asked.
I never thought about that.
“Or just maybe you like colored people? Don’t answer that now, baby, we can talk later. Let me take care of you real good; what is it you want?”
And I told her. And she did.
After getting over the sound of mice scurrying around Eunice’ place, I felt pretty comfortable there. The times I saw her were few and far between, but the imprint she left on me has stayed. Her little transistor would play the only jazz station that New York City had at the time and she would tell me about some of her loves: Bird, Miles, Monk, Lady Day, and Dinah Washington. I began hearing pain and a freedom of expression in the form of improvisation that is so much a part of jazz, something like a gunslinger who lives on the edge.
“Why don’t you move outa here?” I’d ask her sometimes.
“And be away from you, baby?” she’d ask back. And although I knew it was a lie it sounded wonderfully sweet to my ears. I was a young impressionable white boy, and she, she was a black provocateur and educator.
One day, while I was smoking a cigarette after having sex with her, she asked, “Is that the only thing you smoke?” I didn’t know what she meant and my expression must have told her that. “You ever smoke boo?” No response. “Boo, reefer, pot, tea, maryjane...marijuana, baby.”
“No,” I laughed but was scared at what I knew was coming. “I don’t know about that, Eunice. It ain’t that I’m not old enough...”
“Forget about old enough. This ain’t gonna grow you up baby. This here’s gonna keep you young.”
I watched as she went to a corner of the bed, reached underneath it, took out a plain brown paper bag, stuck her hand in and pulled out a little clump of what looked like grass, out of the bag, placed it on a newspaper. She bounced this clump on the paper until whatever seeds were in there loosed and rolled out and over the edge of the paper. Then she separated this grass-like substance from the twigs that held it. Eunice went back inside the bag and got out some rolling papers and rolled, in a matter of seconds, a skinny cigarette. She explained how it was smoked. I followed her instructions and got high for the first time. It got me scared at first, but she told me to concentrate on the music, and then the sex. She told me how to move and when. She told me how to be slow, something I’ve always had a difficult time in mastering. And then she told me, that anything you’re good at, really good at, is just like good fucking, anything.
One afternoon, going to meet some friends at Dukes, I passed by her place. I figured I’d just say hello and bullshit for awhile. I went upstairs and found her door open but there was nothing in the apartment. The bed was gone, her dresses gone, no chests of drawers; there was nothing that told me she had existed at all. All I heard were the mice running around. I left and looked up to her window for the next few months but the light never did go on again.

I couldn’t wait for the light of day to get out of the way and make room for the night. The night was a dangerous time. Occasionally, it was Eunice. But more often, and more importantly, it was time to bowl and bet. I’d walk into Surf Lanes, and I’d be greeted with, “Hi Norm, who is it tonight; whoya ya gonna bowl? I got 50 for ya; howya feel?”
“Good, I feel good.” And I usually did.
Sylvia would be behind the lunch counter to the left of where you entered. A pretty good looking woman in her late thirties, early forties, who I always wanted to get closer to. She, on the other hand, tried to steer me to her sister who wasn’t a bad looker, in her twenties, but who had a kid about three or four. I went over to her place a few times but could never get beyond the kid crying in the other room.
Lulu, a short dumpy Italian, was always behind the cash register. He had a permanent DeNapoli cigar implanted in his lip, a pencil mustache, and a heart as big as God’s eye. He knew I liked lanes 3&4 and 7&8 and tried to keep either pair empty for me as long as he could. I’d argue with him about warming up. “Don’t put the meter on yet, Lu, I’m just gettin’ loose.”
“My balls are loose. Ya already thrown 3 lines; I ain’t gonna let ya roll no more.” And on it went.
The action didn’t really start until 9 or 10 on the weekends. Crowds who knew my right arm took out their “case” fives and tens trying to parlay them and end the night rich. I enjoyed being watched, applauded, and backed for hundreds of dollars a game on any given night. Hell, I was seventeen. I felt powerful, unbeatable. There wasn’t a feeling that duplicated crushing an opponent. There were nights when the ball was an extension of my right arm. I imagined the pins quivering in the rack. It was heady. I began to understand who would perform better with none of their money wagered and those whose legs would shimmy if a buck of theirs was on the line. A place of gambling is as good a place as there is to get readings on people, and more importantly, on yourself. For example, I liked to feel that putting up my own money was part of the deal. If I didn’t have money, I would steal it from my father’s store, not to cover losses, but to insure I had enough cash to begin the evening. I could make a case for stealing. I could make a case for anything. Consequently, when I laid down in bed at night, I did not think of myself as a bad person.
There was one night I remember vividly. I arrived at Surf Lanes about ten, a Saturday, after working until seven in my old man’s store. Saturday’s were always good for that. I met a few friends, drank a few beers, smoked and talked about nothing in particular and on lanes 3&4 I began throwing games. I could tell by the first few frames how I was “on”. But when some guys I knew came over and asked me to spot them pins, which I did sometimes, I declined. I didn’t want to waste what I believed was a good rhythm on “nowhere action.” It must have been around eleven or eleven thirty when the phone rang, asking if anyone felt like some action in a half hour or so. It was Richie Grossman, a bowler from Shell Lanes, who was pretty good. Lulu put me on the phone. We spoke for a few minutes and agreed to meet at Surf Lanes. I quickly talked to some of my friends in order to get a group of people who would back me for what was big money back then.
By the time Grossman got there I had gathered fifteen to twenty friends and other people who had liked to see me bowl, waiting. He brought about ten of his people with him as well. I shook his hand, asked him what was up, he said that’s what he was about to find out, we smiled and agreed to begin bowling for three hundred a game. It was protocol to have the visitor choose the lanes. He chose lanes 3&4.
I had a hundred on me, took out fifty, and gave it to George. George was “respected” in almost every Brooklyn neighborhood. He gathered the bets and held the money.
Warming up, I felt as loose as I did when I was rolling before. I took the first two games easily. Grossman asked to double the bet. I looked at George. George, never one to back down from any challenge, saw the way I was bowling, and nodded his head. We were up to six hundred. I won the next game 223 to 205. Grossman was bowling well, but I was better. I turned around and saw that the crowd had increased, as had the cigarette smoke and banter; I had not seen or heard any of that while I threw. It was now about one thirty in the morning and no one was going home. George was saying how indestructible I was and how I could not be beat. I lit a cigarette, exhaled for what seemed like the first time that night, and I sat down on the bench behind the scorer’s table.
Grossman went over to the people he had come with and spoke with them for a few minutes. He then came over to where I was talking to Donny and George and asked if I wanted to bowl for three thousand: one game. I looked at George and Donny who looked at Grossman. George pulled out a wad of money from his pocket as did Donny, as did anyone in earshot. I knew in my heart this was wrong. You never let anyone double, or in this instance, multiply by five, his bet, especially if he was losing. You never want to gamble with anything other than other people’s money if you were lucky or good enough to have other people’s money. But I was hot. I reached in my pocket, took out the three hundred I had, and went back to work.
We threw strike for strike through the first five frames. Grossman looked over at me, muttered a few, “I can’t believe this fuckin’ shit,” and continued. I tried not to look at him, much less distract myself by speaking to him.
He threw the next three strikes, but so did I. That made it eight frames, nothing but X’s. The ninth frame is probably the most important in bowling. If successful, by striking, you put yourself in a very good position to gather all the extra pins you can in the tenth and last frame. I struck. But so did he.
I took the ball, made sure my fingers were dry, and placed my feet, as I always did, to the right of the middle approach on the first two dots. My legs were nervous, my thighs buzzed. I approached the line and threw what I thought was a good ball. It had good lift and hit the mark that I had been hitting all night. It hit the one-three pocket nicely, but left the ten pin standing. For the first time that night, I heard the crowd groan. I finished the spare and struck in the last box for a 279 score, enough to win on most any night. But not tonight. Grossman didn’t miss. Not once. He finished with a perfect game, a 300. George gave him the three thousand and they left. He put his arm around my shoulder, gave me a playful hug, and took me out for bacon and eggs at an all night diner. The score of my game with Grossman hung behind Lulu’s register for many months. A few years later, they found Richie Grossman. They found him in the trunk of a Buick with three bullet holes in the back of his head. Too bad, I always wanted to bowl him again.

pgs 34-42: From Chapter 4: JUNK SICK: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

DIABETES, 1958

Poetry is not an expression of personality.
It is an escape from personality. It is not an outpouring
of emotion. It is a suppression of emotion--
but, of course, only those who have personality
and emotions can ever know what it means
to want to get away from those things.

-The Sacred Wood
T.S. Eliot

~~~

After the womb,
We’re all tourists.
--Dutch



CHAPTER I

WHEN I WAS YOUNG, WHO KNEW SHIT...ABOUT DYING?

If I could only live at the pitch that is near madness
When everything is as it was in my childhood
Violent,vivid, and of infinite possibility:
That the sun and the moon broke over my head.

--Richard Eberhart

I was eleven, lucky eleven. And I was “husky.” You didn’t say “fat” in 1958, not if you were fat and Jewish. At least grandmothers and clothing store owners never called it that, not if they were smart that is. Faye, my grandmother, would say, “I’m the one who’s fat, I’m like a house, but not him; if he were fat then I’d worry.”
My father was a big-boned Cadillac man, a disappointed gangster at heart. He breathed heavy and fought fat most of his life, usually losing in the caloric wars. He inherited his mother’s dominant gene, food...both selling it and eating it. Kafka knocks, enter the madman.
Annie, my mom, always teetering toward fat, remained on the border. Perhaps her particular masochism and guilt commingled in such a way they channeled misery into a narcissistic and dangerous love that shed inner weight which always threatened to drip from her put-upon flesh. Quick to laugh and quick to yell, she hawked her kids with equal parts of love, suspicion, and abandon.
The last member in our emotional quartet was my brother, Bobby, born puny and sick; a stomach disorder put him in a hospital shortly after birth. The fat gene saved him. He survived to grow as tall as the other males, thin at first, then fat, again thin, and the last I saw him, fat; six and a half years separated us chronologically and an ocean of history carves our distance now.
Born in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the first real memory I have is sitting on a wooden bloodstained butcher block table that held I don’t know how many tons of meat and poultry. I’d eat fresh “chop” meat that came from the innards of a steel hand-ground strainer; the red meat sliding like strands of spaghetti into the thick wax paper held in the fleshy hands of a mustached butcher. The meat was cold, rich, thick and delicious. The narrow “Mom & Pop” deli was our 21 Club... our steak tartare was without the egg, the Worchester sauce, money, pretense, cachet, sophistication, and boundaries.
Faye’s son, Mickey, my father, was the inheritor of food, both ingesting (inhaling it actually), and selling it. Coming from a small town in Pennsylvania, Faye owned a bar with Becky, her sister, catering to the truck drivers who drove through. Tough ballsy women them. Each was funny in an unabashedly lewd way. They looked like one another: obese Jewish fireplugs, the first to dance, laugh, fight and curse--the world and each other. Owing nothing to anyone, they fiercely guarded the family and did whatever the hell they pleased, whenever they pleased. They fought, they laughed, and they cooked for their families and customers. Each of them took turns throwing out some tough sonsofbitches, and I’m sure, loved a few of them as well. When they moved to Brooklyn, Faye opened a little delicatessen that my father worked in. After he married my mom, she begrudgingly loosened her hold, but only a little. My mom was able, after becoming pregnant and giving birth to yours truly, to move him further away from his mom and into a life more their own, or so she thought. He probably thought he now was supposed to side with his wife, as men eventually were supposed to do, but, in reality, he never really did “throw in the towel.” Because, in fact, he never had to. The helix of fate sealed with genetic glue grows like mold in the dark; it is moist, responds to secrets or silences, and needs no nourishment, except fear.
My father finally bought (with a partner he didn’t trust for almost 40 years), a supermarket on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. I can’t separate the bullshit from the poetry that is Brooklyn, at least from my memory of Brooklyn. Memory is maddening; it provides sperm to the impotent, eggs for the infertile, and offers hope where there was none. Yet, it’s still a kind of accomplishment. I walked by a sewer today in New York City. I remembered sticking my head in a similar one looking for a “Spaldeen” ball that we played stick ball with as kids, and because of the water and waste, the urban flotsam and jetsam, the smell like a skin above the water, I remembered a young kid in short sleeves, thin golden tanned arms, sure, strong fingers who fashioned a coat hanger into a “lift” to get under that pink ball to cradle it and bring it back to the surface so we could play some more without spending what we didn’t have to buy a new one. That smell is lovely today.
I remember the fifties more by the Cadillacs that my father owned than by the inner workings of those years: the slight difference between the ‘54 and ‘55 mobster Cadillac bumpers, like Marilyn’s breasts, the gas cap under the back taillight; the fin inversion of the ‘57 and ‘58 Caddy, and the beautiful radicalism of the ‘59, predicting the space travel of the next decade. Most of the country was like Eisenhower’s smile, vanishing into the green golf carpet; the smug infancy of a nation emerging from wars won, sold to us with a starched white crewcut regularity. But Brooklyn, my lunch bucket borough had an identity: a hooker with a heart of gold; a striving failure; a William Bendix sentimentality. Wonder Bread and beer factories belched stability, the beautiful bums of Brooklyn flashed World Series spikes good enough to last a thousand years. The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports brought boxing into our homes every Friday night. My pop, who seconded for a short time Sugar Ray Robinson when he fought in the Golden Gloves, showed me how an old man was able to turn back the clock, how Sugar Ray flicked his showy jab, quick, and danced well enough and long enough to enfeeble the young Turks like Fullmer and Basilio once or twice before fading into a California Smalls’ Paradise of palms and sunshine. My father sat, like his father before him, and fought the fight, scored it, and was usually right about who won. His father, a gentle soul, loved his whiskey and boxing. I would see him sometimes watching the old black-and-white TV fights; he’d bob and weave, jab and hook to the air, lean back weary, breathing hard...and wait for a decision.
My mom did what most of her Jewish and Italian friends did: She cooked and cleaned...and waited for her husband to get home late at night to feed him and tell him what he’d sooner not know, the day’s tedium. The failures, frustrations, betrayals, trivia, disappointments, aspirations, and news--some shocking, most pedestrian--were balled up and hurled at him in the first minute of his arrival. Sometimes the words were launched before he actually appeared, just the opening of the garage door was enough to trigger the verbal onslaught. Who could blame her? Her work went not only unnoticed, but unappreciated--even hated. My father, no less a narcissist, but male, was smarter, had more guile, and was overtly much more manipulative than my mother, and his anger, bordering on the physical, scared her. That came, my mother would lament, “from his side of the family.” Her side, he would heatedly counter, were “cold,” “remote,” “stupid sonsofbitches.” And every woman, at least of Jewish/Italian persuasion, of those times, should only know how to cook, clean, wipe asses, cater to the male cock, take temperatures, heal, help, launder, starch, dress, solve problems (domestic only, please)...and laugh. Then I came along and provided her a new kind of guilt-edged mirror and a paradigm of impossibilities. She thought that she shouldn’t, couldn’t fail...and that followed her like a vicious rumor which she secretly thought was true.

“Absence” not only “makes the heart grow fonder,” it also can scare the shit out of us. I’ve been told that for my first few years of my life I was inexorably attached to my mom, not “leaving go of her skirt”; so much so, that when my grandmother would walk up the stairs to our apartment above the superette to baby-sit me she would have to wear a towel over her head so that I would not recognize that it wasn’t my mother when I got up or rocking me to sleep. If I uncovered the ruse, which was often the case apparently, there were no stopping my screams until Mom returned or became so fatigued that I fell asleep.
“Hmm,” I must have said, “where the fuck is she? This doesn’t feel right; I’m hungry, wet, shit in my diapers, a little off. Hmm, not back yet? I think I’ll cry. Huh, maybe she didn’t hear me. I’ll try screaming. All right, fuck this, it’s time to panic.”
The “fight or flight” instinct is cool--if you have a choice. But where the fuck was I going to go? God, or whatever gods sit on high, thought of this. In order to keep us alive they endowed us with instant unalienable secretions: First the big guns to “fight”: Adrenaline, Cortisol, Dopamine, and the like: Boom, boom, boom boom boom. But then...
If that response failed, and my needs still weren’t met, I couldn’t maintain that fever pitch of expression and took “flight” internally. “Fuck this, I’ll rely on myself for comfort.” My endogenous opiods were tapped to soothe and balance an out of whack system.
At first, that’s all I was doing, trying to stay alive; a time worn and tested survival mechanism kicked into gear, and it was quick and repetitive. Sixteen years later I’d have to go outside to satiate my insides, but then I didn’t have to go out to “cop”--my brain brought it to me. Hell, anything living can fuck, but to do so without getting caught and killed is no easy task.
Without a scalpel, I began performing my own bypass operations. Like the branches and roots of a tree, my psychic forces curled around or broke through any and all obstacles; my internal limbs, not able to fully coordinate my natural progression detoured, and produced branches, deformed as they might be, but were to me as limbs to a tree, as natural as breathing.
My mom for many different reasons (which were never examined and so remained unconsciously dangerous), was a doting, and indeed suffocating, mother. Her parents were ignorant Jewish immigrants who expected my mom to take care of her two younger sisters, work, and navigate all their worlds in a new culture. She had married a man who charmed her but never cared to know her, and thought he was doing her the biggest favor in the world by taking her away from her “impoverished” upbringing and so expected my mom to cater to his every need. Becoming pregnant must have seemed like a vacation to her.
And what a couple we made! I was her perfect baby, and she a perfect mom. She didn’t know just how twisted I was becoming. And me? After finding my way around whatever roadblocks presented themselves, I took a breath, and went on, staring as it were in my own tragicomedy--a preverbal Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot: “I can’t go on like this.” “That’s what you think.”
But what was I going to do at that age, read a book, go to the movies, go to the beach, talk to a social worker, go on Oprah, buy a gun? Barring those options I made a decision, unconscious at first: rather than live in a world of dissonance, I’d live in one of fantasy, one where all my needs were met, my desires fulfilled, my dreams realized, and discordant voices stilled. It would be twenty years before I would read, From that spring whence comfort come, discomfort swells.
Then something happened at age four when I could talk, that terrorized me and that, to this very day, makes any recollection of that time--and up to the age of eleven or twelve--appear like sporadic undated snapshots.
One day my mother was gone; she simply vanished. Nothing was explained to me. For weeks I was handed from relatives to neighbors. It turned out that her cancer was misdiagnosed. However, I developed a stutter, which made it impossible to get out a word, let alone a sentence, without turning beet red and feeling I was going to die. I remember standing in front of my father, this incredibly large and monstrous figure, when this stutter first announced itself. He looked tortured watching his son blush. And I, trying to pronounce a word, could not catch my breath. Even after my mother returned home, the stutter remained. When special classes in elementary school failed to “cure” my speech impediment, my parents chose to ignore it, thinking it would go away on its own; and for the most part it did...for the most part. When I was under pressure of any sort, it sprang--and springs--full blown. Remember in class, when you knew you had to read a sentence aloud and you counted the kids until it was your turn? I began panicking as soon as I figured out the countdown sequence. Life, became a countdown.

At home I was quiet, perhaps introverted. My folks were loud and volatile. It was a time of Dr. Spock and Bishop Fulton Sheen; it was confusing. I was curious, though. There was a little girl across the hall from us. Our folks were close friends. We played together. One day, a rainy afternoon I believe, we crept into a closet, and discovered our differences. It looked so innocent, so smooth, so internal. She was a bit older than I and probably had developed a greater capacity for guilt; in short, she copped-out and told. Our parents treated it like The Nuremberg Tribunals. Standing over us, they demanded “The Truth! Goddamnit, Tell us the Truth! How could you do such a thing?” I felt my cheeks blush; hot blood rose that branched into every part of my body. Embarrassed, we said we’d never ever never do that again. We avoided each other, for the rest of our lives.

For a traditional middle-class Jewish family living in Brooklyn, our yearly cycle was pretty normal: my pop worked for fifty weeks out of the year and made enough money to support us; my mom took care of the rest for fifty-two, and we all took a summer respite in a bungalow colony in Far Rockaway called Finkelsteins. Two large wooden framed buildings built in the 1940s housed most of the guests, and a few adjacent bungalows sheltered the rest. The wraparound wood porches with chairs and benches overlooked lawns, trees, a row of hedges to the north, a ball field behind that, and a small distance away, the beach and Atlantic Ocean. I can see the ancient soda chest in the main lobby...a steel box of ice water and old steel rails, slightly corroded. In one corner was the soda, Mission, and it was a mission to get one out of there. The bottles bobbed to one part of the chest. After inserting the dime I’d tried to find my favorite flavor. Sticking my hand, up to the wrist, in that chest was a testament to youth...and thirst...but trying to maneuver and manipulate that soda through the maze, usually catching fingers in the process, was innocence and perseverance combined.
Families came back year after year, with few exceptions. And so, I made friends with those kids that were near my age. When there wasn’t much to do, a few of us would hide underneath the steps leading up to the main house and look for change--pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters--and the colors of the panties that women wore walking up those same steps. Seeing a glimpse of that was almost as good as finding money. When we went to the beach, me and my best friend, Morty, who was a few years older, would sometime, between swimming and swimming and eating and swimming, sneak off to peek through wooden slats that bordered the women’s solarium to view unadorned female flesh hanging off. They seemingly all had tits like my mother’s: huge, pendulous, giving. Sometimes they’d see us and scream, “Get outa here you crazy kids,” and we’d dart away, afraid we’d be caught and thrown off the beach. The flesh, but mostly the private parts, of women clearly fascinated and excited me. It was forbidden, but it beckoned me at the same time. The whole package: pussy, tits, make-up, perfume, hips that swung and invited, intoxicated me so. I also liked being seen and chased away by those with a smile on their faces--which told me something--although what, I haven’t figured out.
That summer, as I went from my eleventh to twelfth year, I played lots of softball (becoming a better pitcher, copying my father’s unusual delivery, a pronounced wind-up by holding my knee up in the air, belt high, while my arm hesitated a beat, throwing the batter off). I swam like a fish, and had a crush on a tall thirteen-year-old Texas gal nicknamed, what else? Dallas, who had the body of a 30 year old. One night late in the communal T.V. room I put my husky, though rapidly thinning arm, around her broad shoulder, twisted my neck and planted a kiss on her soft and rounded lips. Oh, that was nice. I think my little dick jumped a bit. All I could hum for the next few weeks was “Volare” in Italian. The only low point for me came when I fell off the cot one night during sleep (maybe I was trying to get closer to Dallas’ secrets) and cut open a gash above my eye that required a butterfly stitch to close. A difficult circumstance to explain was when I pissed on a boy who wasn’t my friend for doing I don’t remember what. My folks made me apologize to him. They couldn’t believe their son would ever do something like that. But the kid had his piss-stained, piss-smelling pants for evidence. I hope he still has them.

Labor Day came and went. Jerry Lewis was just beginning to help “his kids.” Vacation was just about over. Time to go back to Brooklyn; I wasn’t sorry. I was looking forward to it. I was about to begin the seventh grade in a brand new junior high in Marine Park on a huge playground and ball fields, see my neighborhood buddies, and begin my last year in Hebrew School before being Bar Mitzvah’d. Hebrew School, damn. I detested the first two years and showed it by either disrupting class or cutting it. I was suspended so often that I had to invent things to tell my mother we were studying during the times she thought I was there. My belief, even then, was that my God was a punishing one. I even began using my brother, Bobby, as a foil. I’d offer to baby-sit him by taking him to a movie which was a leap for me. Even at that young age I could detect in him a “wildness” that I was unable to express but had noticed I lacked. At this point, however, early in September of 1958, everything was rollin' right along...except I was losing weight.

I can’t say with any certainty whether I was prodigious, suicidal or saintly as an eleven year old; I was husky--smart and husky. I began reading at the age of one and a half, a little rebellious in school but so what? I read The Hardy Boys for “Christsakes.” And now I was growing, shedding baby-fat, a lot of pounds at an alarming rate. As I said before, my family could eat, pack it in, especially sweets: ice cream, cake, sodas, candies. Sugar city. Our world didn’t revolve around the sun; it revolved around a Lazy Susan. My mantra was: “What’s for breakfast, lunch and dinner, Ma?” My mother’s response was, “You’ll know when I put it in front of you.” The kitchen was our battlefield for love, control, retribution... and brisket.

Physically, I didn’t feel right when I got back to Brooklyn. I was pissing more, drinking more, eating more, and losing weight. My mother, insanely unsure and overprotective, was growing suspicious and I was in denial. I had the idea that if something was going wrong, it was my fault and so I tried to hide it. What I failed to understand was that whatever the problem was had found me.
Something else found me too at just about the same time, conveyed in two separate incidents. Just after the summer ended and we were home settling back in, a phone call came late one night. My mother answered, listened for a second, let out a “OH NO,” and dropped the receiver. My father grabbed the cord, jerked the phone up to his hand and spoke into it. I could see the color drain from his face. My parents’ closest friends from the summer, Jerry and Selma and their two children, Maxine and Warren, had experienced tragedy. Jerry had met death literally head on. He’d been driving home late that night and had kissed a stanchion doing about 70. Splat. Finito. I was pretty shaken. I liked him, and I liked his daughter even more who was my age. My first girlfriend at seven. The first girl I ever bought anything for, an ice cream frappe (sundae as we say today) and we held hands. I went, out of curiosity, to the funeral over my mother’s objections.
We stood in the back and looked at the open coffin. A pink wax-like glow emanated from Jerry’s face with its familiar mustache. My mother kept saying how it didn’t look like him, but I thought it did. I imagined what a hard job somebody must have had trying to reconstruct his face. I stared, waiting for him to get up, laugh, say it was a joke, one way to get his friends and enemies together in one spot, but he was no Lazarus.
The second incident occurred on an Indian summer day at the tail end of September while I was walking home from Hebrew School. I was about to cross the street, which was one of those complicated three way intersections, when an old woman who must have been in her late seventies or early eighties, pulling a shopping cart, started to do the same from the other side of the street. She walked slowly off the curb and inched her way onto the roadway. A car came screeching around the corner and blind-sided her, lifting her at least 25 feet in the air. She landed with a dull thud. Half her skull opened, creating a flap that allowed you to see her brain while her thick blood formed a pool around her head. Wisps of silver hair tinged with maroon liquid lay on a soft and steaming black asphalt bed. The driver got out, went to his trunk and removed a blanket as pedestrians ran toward her. Shouts of “Call an ambulance” broke the stunned silence--as if all the world stopped to honor a death. I inched closer to get a better look. Through the picket fences of elbows and legs I managed to see how life drains out of someone. As I made my way home, I kept sneaking back glances at her lifeless body. Death had left me alone until I was eleven. It seemed God was making up for lost time.
When I got home, I said nothing to my parents. I didn’t know how to say what I was feeling. I do know I was scared, fascinated, and repulsed by the image that had embedded itself in my memory forever.

The body always asserts itself. Your mind can be cloudy or clear, weak or strong, confused, assertive or procrastinating. But the body is animal. It doesn’t know how to wait.
I never had to close my zipper, I was pissing so much. Pissing and drinking. Drinking and pissing. I would devour pints and quarts of ice cream. Run around the corner after dinner to the candy store and buy Breyer’s vanilla from bulk containers, vanilla beans almost as large as coffee beans, the taste so wonderfully vanilla and creamy. Cold ice cream, and sodas, anything cold or freezing, especially water. I’d go to the bathroom, where the water was the coldest and open the tap and let it run for awhile, put my mouth to the faucet and just guzzle. Back and forth from bed to bathroom at night. My mother, a notoriously light sleeper, would call, “Norman, what’s the matter?”
“Nothin'’ Ma, nothing.”
“Why are you up so much?”
The drinking, pissing, eating and losing weight continued with a vengeance. I was feeling fatigued like I went 15 rounds with the heavyweight champ and just about could get back to my corner--arms weak, legs leaden, body weary, mind distraught. I felt like shit passing through a fly papered tube.
The stomach pains came next, serious and severe. It was like they were saying, “Hey asshole, if you don’t believe what’s going on now, try some of this.” It made a believer out of me.
“Ma, I can’t go to school today, stomach hurts too much.” That’s all I had to say and she had to hear.
“Get dressed. We’re going to the doctor.”
I got dressed as quickly as I could, took a leak, and we left.
The urine test wasn’t scary. The pink tip of the dipstick turned purple in a second. The blood test was more frightening and painful. I’ve always had thin “rolling” veins so it took the nurse awhile to find one. It seemed like she was playing darts. She jabbed and missed until she finally succeeded. The syringe was fat and made of glass. The needle was thick steel and a bit dull compared to what we know today. She drew my blood up into the syringe and then transferred it into a test tube. I tried humor, “It looks like good blood.” My mom tried to smile. She was visibly shaken, asking the doctor a million questions as he hurried from examining room to examining room, treating three, four patients at a time. All he’d say to her was, “We have to wait, try not to worry; go home, take him home; I’ll call later when I get the results.”
“But doctor...”
“Don’t worry. Go home, I’ll call you later.” Much later.

We came home and did what we were told. We waited. My father soon joined us, and waited. Nervously, we looked at the phone. When it rang my mom was the quickest to answer. She’d usually say, “We’re waiting for a call from the doctor,” and got off. With each teasing ring, our collective hearts would hold a beat. Finally, he called. My mother’s part went like: “Yes...yes...what?... what’s that?...yes...now, right now?..Immediately?...Yes. All right, right now?...Yes...Thank you, doctor.”
She cradled the receiver and turned to my father trying to control her tears. “He has keto...keto something. He has to go the hospital.”
“When?”
“Right now, right away, now. The doctor said he got him a bed right here, across the street in The Kings Highway Hospital.”
My head bounced like a ping-pong ball from my mom to my dad, “the ping-pong of the abyss” as Ginsberg would write.
“Tonight, Ma? I gotta go tonight?”
“Tonight. He said right away. Don’t worry, everything will be all right,” they both said. The first lie that I spent a quarter of a century proving wrong. “I’ll put some things together for you. Maybe take a book.”
A book! How long was I going to be there?, I thought. “Yeah, OK.” I went to my room to find something, hearing my parent’s voices whispering feverishly behind me.
I chose a biography of Jack Dempsey that was overdue at the library; hell, they couldn’t find me now.
We were rigid and silent going to the hospital. I was determined to be “strong,” take it “like a soldier” all that shit, even though I didn’t have any idea what I was about to “take.” I knew though, there was something my parents weren’t telling me--like my pancreas was missing.

pgs 4-10 from JUNK SICK: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC
Published by Norman Savage at Smashwords
Copyright Norman Savage 2010

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015