STEAM HEAT

A serpent's hiss
in the pipes
of my old brownstone
in Greenwich Village
on a freezing February--
only it's November
& we are caught
with our pants down
around the ankles,
& our balls,
made of brass,
clangs against a stiff cold radiator.

But the sound is enough
to alert the blood
that soon
very soon
it will morph
into a St. Bernard
carrying a keg of brandy
around its big furry neck,
as the steel warms.

And that hiss
is enough to settle you,
locate you,
like a bag of dope in your pocket
right after you cop,
the sickness at bay,
& you lean back into it
knowing it won't take long
to be enveloped
in that cocoon of warmth,
made well,
flushing the zero
from your bones--
not as lovely
as opium vapors
perhaps,
but a drift
by any other means
is still
a drift
into the
ease. You light
a cigarette,
put on some Monk,
and wait.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

ZOMBIES ALL

For George Romero

It was 1968 and
I was early in my junky run:
I'd just fallen in love
and had gotten married,
honeymooning with myself
at The Waverly theater
watching Night Of the Living Dead
at the midnight show.
I wasn't really "watching"
as much as I was nodding,
my upper body bent over
like a question mark
searching
for an easy transition
between here
and there.
I had yet to digest
pleasures
& make sense of "love"
& "food," & "need,"
& "desire." "Escape"
had me
in her talons.

Before I knew it
I had killed
another night.
I went back
to Coney Island
& stopped at Nathan's
for a frank.
I thought I'd cheated
death and felt proud
that I'd found
the place that fitted
almost like a cunt
without the dialogue.

The dead have grown
and are insatiable.
There is never enough
pleasure to go around.
Pass the salt.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

SOMEBODY

has to be love starved
and somebody has to inject
formaldehyde into the veins
of corpses. Somebody
has to be in Alberta
looking for a dried twig
while somebody is looking
for a drink
in an SRO in LA.
Somebody has to have dialysis
tomorrow morning and somebody
is pissing honey tonight.
Somebody will wake up in Paris
and think it's Greenwich Village
and somebody will wake
in Greenwich Village and think
it's hell.
Somebody will be defeated soon
and somebody will be lucky rich
and somebody will turn dance
into defeat while somebody hunts
little girls in Bushwick.

We fill-up our space
with what is given. I've worked
the apple cart. My horse huffed
and shat on Houston Street. I've
held a muffler to my throat
against the East River winds.
I've seen streets cobbled
against the hooves. I am
somebody when I'm inside
someone, but someone, a somebody,
when not knowing who that somebody
is. The fracture
is love.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

A BAD LUCK WOMAN

"Many a good man has been put under a bridge by a woman."
--Henry Chinaski

and she's all mine.
She was sick & suicidal
when she found me.
Just the kind I like.
I got her well
& she thanked me
by twisting the knife
into my innards
like she was twirling spaghetti.
She was Faye
& I was Jack
and this was Chinatown.

I couldn't quit her.
I couldn't quit her
before it cost me my job,
my money, my sanity and
nearly my pad--eviction notices
blanketed my door. Her absence
bothered me more than anything real could.
But I fought
the good fight
until her boil
became a pimple
that I sometimes,
even to this day,
absentmindedly rub.
My poems
as my life
doesn't concern her;
she cares
only if I still care
about her; only
in that regard
she's like
the rest of us.
I do not say
this is good
or bad but is...
until yesterday...

I saw that someone
from Canada peeked into my blog.
I had that feeling
that we all have
from time to time: anxious,
troubling and worse still,
curious.
I contacted the three readers
I have up there.
No, they said, not them.

Later in the a.m. I was woken
by a stiff white light
shining into my eyes & the outline
of a monster with a peaked hat.
There's a fire, the voice said,
sorry to wake you like this, but you have to get up and out; too much smoke in here.
I reached for my sweats and sweatshirt and slippers.
I walked out into my hall where six or seven other firemen were doing their thing.
I noticed my lock was busted, its entrails hanging by a thread.
Everything's OK now, one said, sorry about the lock, but we had to get in.
Yeah, I said, it's OK.

I was saving money to buy a comfortable chair and light stand so I could read and watch whatever.
That's all gone: 400 for a lock and house call; New York's a stick-up without a gun.
She probably knew that. I don't know how but
I know she knew
that.
Chop Suey anyone?

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

NOTHING MUCH HAS CHANGED...

except the gray hairs
around my balls &
the wrinkled spigot
that serves
as my dick.
But my brain
still gets as hard
as Chinese algebra.
And so I'm taken
by surprise
when folks my age
smile & say hello
as they pass me
reading or smoking
a cigarette or both
while I sit
on a stoop
in the shade
on a beautiful brownstone perch
in Greenwich Village.

The young ones
without a crease
or a care pass
as if I didn't exist...
& I don't...
for them.
Sometimes a "father thing"
glides by and I get a look
but little more.
But the old ones & I
exchange a smile, even banter
a bit--how's the book; it's hot;
nice weather; live here long--
small talk that connects us.
They think they have nothing to fear
and I don't try to dissuade them.
They are not in a rush,
but I am...I've always been
in a rush and more times
than not
have blown past the money.
Most feel no danger
coming off of me...I hope
they're wrong.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

WAITING FOR THE EIGHTH AVENUE BUS

I had some ideas
for a few poems--
The Pope coming
to NYC, a heart
mad with love, cheap
Chinese food--
you know,
the usual.
I ogled fifteen
or twenty
young, old,
& older women,
watched the traffic
on Hudson Street
inch forward, noticed
the unloading of cases
of Coke & Bud & Americana,
clocked the maniacal owners
of dogs & cats & parakeets
& one lizard
as they went
into the vets
with worried expressions
talking to their better companions,
while sweet green saplings
held the hands of parents
taking them to the river
or dentists or ballet classes.

There was heat
but the city's air
had lightened
slightly. I stood
in the shade & waited
& waited & waited.
I had to get to work,
and the train presented problems.
For some reason
the Eighth Ave. bus
knew no schedule
ever; it paid no attention to
the poor or crippled or deranged
who had to ride her.
By the time she showed,
forty minutes from when I arrived,
I had worked out the few poems
in my head &
had written this one.
I'll never get back
that forty minutes &
wouldn't want to.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

FINDING THE FOUNDATION OF CHAOS--CHAPTER 5: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

It was overcast and cold that September day I went into Greenwich Village to register at my sixth, and last, college, The New School for Social Research. I remember Coltrane’s Blue Train riding with me into the city. The Brooklyn Battery Tunnel cost half a buck, a pack of Lucky Strike’s was about the same, the decayed West Side Highway, a deathtrap, was overhead, and parking spaces, especially in The Village, were worth their weight in gold. The New School was housed in buildings spanning a small space between 11th & 12th Streets, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Finally, I parked at a meter at the corner of 12th & Sixth and went into the coffee shop on the corner. I spoke to one of the counter guys, gave him five bucks and a buck’s worth of dimes to feed the meter, bought a cup of coffee, walked up the block and into The New School. Registration was in the auditorium. I picked up a packet with my name on it and then climbed the stairs to near the top where I could perch and get a good view of my fellow students as they entered. You can tell a lot just by the way someone comes into a new situation. Me, I liked to either sit by myself and observe, or sit near a quick and easy exit. Mostly every person that I saw who entered the auditorium and took a packet looked absorbed in ways that hinted at intelligence and differences and eccentricities that ran deep. I certainly had not been around these types of students ever in any of the educational institutions I had been in and wondered if I could step up to the plate and hit this type of pitching. I was waiting for the festivities (orientation) to begin when I noticed someone come in looking to be about my age, 5’11" or so, disheveled, squinting, wearing a beaten raincoat, hair that can best be described as a random collision of cuts, carrying an open container of coffee that splashed on his hands as he climbed up to where I was sitting. I got up and grabbed the container from his hands. “Thanks,” he muttered.
“Yeah man, sit down before you kill yourself,” I said laughing.
He looked at me for a second, smiled, “Suicide by scalding is not the way I want to go out,” he said as he took the container from my hand.
“Savage, Norman,” I said and stuck out my hand.
“Marc Brasz.”
“Brasz?”
“Yeah, Brasz with a z; some weird Jewish working. Where ya from?”
“Coney Island.”
“Yeah, that’s cool, Coney Island; I meant what school you from?”
“Oh, that; been in six of em, which one ya want?”
“Six? Shit, more than me; I came from Northwestern, first Princeton. You?”
I rattled off the six, finishing with New York City Community. “I’m a mutt; no pedigree here.”
“There ain’t a Jew with a pedigree; Jews ain’t white.” I would learn later that the jazz great, Cecil Taylor, told him that. Brasz was full of surprises. He spoke 3 or 4 languages, a philosophy genius, a painter, a baseball-pitching prodigy who, despite being half blind (I could imagine how the batters felt who saw him squinting in from 60’6” away), found the plate with a fastball, his only pitch. He lived with Theresa, a beautiful country girl from a small Louisiana town, on East 3rd Street in the East Village in a sixth floor walkup for sixty-five or seventy-five bucks a month with the bathtub in the kitchen.
We watched the others file in commenting on them with the kind of sarcastic irreverence of people who are carving out an area of their own. We simply struck a chord in each other. I told him that I was a writer. It was the first time I had ever said that to anyone that I met. It felt a little weird saying that, but Brasz did not bat an eye, did not blink. He seemed to say, “Sure, why not, of course, yeah.” Later, after I plugged into him like someone would to an electrical outlet, he would validate me. We became fast and close friends and would remain close for twenty odd years later until something I did, or something I didn’t do, changed that.
Being part of The Humanities Program at The New School required that you take two courses in your junior year and one course in your senior year. We were allowed to sit in on every class The New School offered, both day and evening, for free and, in our senior year, we had to do two additional things: turn in a tutorial project that was acceptable to the faculty (almost everything was acceptable in those days) and teach a course. Being that I was already writing poetry, and never wanted to do anything that would require more work, I decided to work on a poetic manuscript for my tutorial. I would hinge the work around a major poem, The Nuremberg Egg, which I began writing in November of that year. The New School arranged a meeting between Paul Blackburn, a well-known and well-respected New York City poet, soon to become my mentor, and myself. After meeting with Paul a few times and showing him my work, he easily saw how influenced I was by Ginsberg. He asked me if I wanted to meet him and arranged this. Both Blackburn and Ginsberg would act as mentors for me during the year and a half that I was at the school by editing, challenging, and finally critiquing my work. The Nuremberg Egg would be thirty-two pages in length and the manuscript itself would be one hundred and twenty pages.
The course I would teach was, The Literary, Musical and Artistic Achievements of the 1950’s. Using Kerouac On the Road as the text, substituting the road for Twain’s river, listening to Ornette Coleman’s free jazz, do-wop groups, viewing the abstract expressionists of the time, we gave the Eisenhower years an alternative meaning. We tried looking beneath the smile and the green golf carpet to the last radical stew in American culture before the explosion into America’s living rooms a few years later, televised and in living color.
The New School was infused with an eclectic bunch of outcasts, iconoclasts, and outlaws in those days. Transfers from the Ivy League were common. Less traditional academic venues such as Reed, Goddard, and Bennington were well represented. This was quite the contrast with the students I’d been around in the community colleges I went to and, much different than those I still had as friends in Seagate and Coney Island. While greatly enlarging and adding to my world it also confused the hell out of me and, in no small measure, frightened the shit out of me. They represented a kind of independence that I was drawn to without being able to articulate it, much less achieve it, could not fathom the unconscious battle this initiated and was very willing to be singed, sometimes scorched, by the heat it generated.
Sam, living above a surgical supply store on Delancey, wanted to build a cabin in the wilds of New Jersey. Charles, a collector of thousands of classical albums, was trying to synthesize those longhairs with jazz in an electrical configuration. Susan, who I was crazy about, drank a fifth of Hennessy a day, wrote prose poems that haunt me to this day, could not pay her tuition and left for Denmark where, she told me, she would get old men drunk and roll them in alleys behind the bars she picked them up in. Some things I don’t know how to explain sensibly, they are simply the truth.
Brasz’s wife, Theresa, had a propensity to take off her clothes on the New York City subways. We would be sitting in his apartment, high as kites, and the phone would ring: “Yes, this is Mr. Brasz...yes,..hmm...yes, oh, Theresa, yes...be right down.” He’d turn to me. “Hey Savage, gotta go to Bellevue, be right back.”
“Want me to go with ya?”
“Nah, nah, it’s cool, thanks but nah; be better for you if you weren’t here when I get back.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah man, I’m sure.”
Theresa was this beautiful, milk and honey skinned farm girl, whose nerves picked up electrical stimuli from the world she inhabited. The medication that would relieve some of the behavior associated with bi-polar illness would also relieve the mania that Theresa loved. There was never really a choice for either one of them. She had a mom who would call her every month or so from the little town she was from in Louisiana to tell her of disasters of every kind, from floods to sickness to accidents to: “Theresa, do you all remember uncle Earl who had that cousin MaryAnn who was from Mississippi and had that farm with her husband Harry who had them twin boys Billy and Barry who married them sisters from Juno, Emily and Charlene, then had them kids, well the second of the two had this terrible accident on interstate 101 with a tractor trailer and his head nearly torn from his body and he dead.”
Theresa would think for a second and say, “No, mama I don’t.”
“Oh, that’s funny, I was sure you would.”
“No, mama,” she’d repeat, barely able to suppress the laughter in her throat, “I gotta go.”
“Oh go ahead dear, I gotta go myself.”

The NY State Department of Vocational Rehabilitation was picking up the tab for tuition, books, and supplies because I was diabetic. It was money wisely spent, because Brasz gave me an education that worked outside the confines of the classroom yet augmented everything that I was doing inside of one. More importantly, he helped me fill in my gaps of ignorance. He’d go with me to Barnes & Nobles on Fifth and 18th Street and walk with me through the aisles, piling books on top of each other. “You gotta read him; you haveta read that; he’s an asshole but an important asshole; you hip to this? that? No, you haven’t read him yet, ya gotta read that, he’s comin’ right from where you’re comin’ from.” And so on.
I’d read and we’d talk. I’d write, and he’d read. Brasz and I were able to talk about anything, sex included. When two men start to share a sexual candor, their friendship becomes complete. Most of the time that doesn’t happen. I’m not talking about a physical intimacy. I’m talking about two men talking about their sexual lives apart from the friendship. When two men start talking about sex, they are talking about the friendship as well. With Brasz I was not afraid of being shamed, judged, criticized or betrayed.
And we were hot. It was a time for ideas and music and poetry and painting. We went to The Lions Head, a writer’s bar, where Joel Oppenheimer would show me how to write religious sonnets to toughen up my line. I’d go to Ginsberg’s pad on 10th Street to learn how to breathe life into my line and imagery into my words. At night, we’d smoke some reefer and after going to Katz’s Delicatessen on Houston Street for a pastrami and turkey sandwich on club with mustard and a diet Dr. Brown’s cream, Brasz and I would hit Slugs, a jazz joint on East 3rd between avenues C&D in the East Village. Slugs, In the Far East, would become one of my reference points for the next two years. Slugs was practically the only club left in New York City that would allow musicians to play for more than a week at a time. The Half Note and Five Spot were no more, and Fat Tuesdays had yet to be born. For a couple of bucks, you could hang there for a night, hear three sets and go across the street to The Old Reliable, a saloon, for a nightcap, or up the block to The Chicken Shack for some fried chicken, shrimp, and ribs before heading home. After awhile, you’d become friendly with the bartender and the bouncer. If they knew you knew some of the musicians who played there, who Brasz did and, in turn, so did I, they were even friendlier. I can remember listening to Miles at the bar talking not about music but about boxing, his passion, specifically Joe Louis, his love, one night while listening to Tony Williams and waiting for him to sit in for a set, which he never did do.
I was introduced to and finally heard Brasz’ friend, Cecil Taylor, the avant-garde pianist and his Unit, Andrew Cyril, Jimmy Lyons, Alan Silva and Sam Rivers. How to explain the energy and beauty contained in the music is a problem for me. I have sat here and have tried and nothing that I have written, ever, begins to communicate those feelings in words. James Baldwin comes close in Sonny’s Blues and LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka in his poetry. I marvel at their ability to turn language into jazz riffs and will not try to emulate them, for it would diminish the experience for those who might be reading these words. Rather than talk like another academic asshole about what they are trying to do, or have done, and why it works or doesn’t, let it just be said that being in the presence of this music was pure transcendence. Suicide, an on-again off-again companion of mine, is made mundane, even boring.
And then there was the bathroom at Slugs. I learned as much about life from that toilet as I did from most any other thing I can think of. It was a small, thin, rectangular room, with a shitter in the corner and a sink at the entrance. A bare yellow bulb hung, like a dead man, above the toilet. Even taking a piss in there fucked with your imagination. It reeked of sex, quinine, morphine, reefer, body odors, and wastes. There was only one bathroom for both sexes, and there was usually a line waiting to get in there, especially between sets, comprised of individuals, and sometimes couples of the same or different sexes. You learned patience and courtesy. Sometimes you fumbled rolling or smoking a joint. Sometimes it took longer to get hard, or sometimes it was harder finding a vein. The one’s with priority were the musicians, of course. They had to take care of business and get back up on the stage, sometimes easier said then done.
One night I was at Slugs drinking at the bar and listening to Lee Morgan, a terrific trumpet player. A woman came in and sat down at the elbow of the bar, near the door. When he had finished the set, he walked from the stage to where she was sitting and I got up to go to the bathroom. I stood behind a few people who were waiting to get in, when we heard the shot. We turned around and the first thing I remember thinking is that it was as quiet as a library. Apparently she had taken out a pistol and shot him dead, then put the gun on the bar and finished her drink. I later learned she was Lee’s common law wife. Lee, a junkie, was cheating on her. It was bad enough giving Lee money to support his habit but sleeping with another chick, and feeding her habit as well, just didn’t cut it. I could see her point. I stored that information away. They closed Slugs not too long after the shooting.

As much as I thought I was burning with ideas, I had no direction. I had no thought of the future. There was nothing that I wanted to do that I wasn’t doing, and so when the desire to use junk intermingled and sometimes stood outside my daily comings and goings, I was somewhat confused. Ever since that first taste I’d had with Suzanne it stayed with me as my secret that sent shivers, sometimes shudders, up my spine at unexpected times. It was not a decision that one day I woke up and made. I did not do it to make me more attractive to chicks, though there were some who found heroin, or those who did heroin, mythological heroic, romantically tragic, and for those reasons, seductive, and, as I’ve said before, it did prolong orgasm. But in fact, heroin gradually made being with a woman beside the point. No, it was fear based. Although I would not have been able to see, much less admit that at the time, fear was, beside the other hundred personality traits that comprise heroin addicts, the foundation from which desire sprang. I did not go very often, at first. I thought I used junk judiciously and, though I had enough syringes at my disposal, did not shoot the drug, but snorted it. I thought that I was rather fearless in going after the fix. I went alone, even though I had to go into some pretty bad areas to obtain anything of quality; and I was white. Hence, my myth of myself was intact, powerful and deadly.
My Porsche and I were running to and from Brooklyn, the East Village, Coney Island, and parts unknown. I was editing The Nuremberg Egg with Blackburn and Ginsberg, (when he was available) and Brasz. I was taking evening courses at The New School, a course on Dostoyevsky with this old Russian professor, Tartak, and a poetry course with Diane Wakoski. It was at the poetry course where I met Fran Lebowitz. We became fast friends and would remain friends for many years to come. She had just begun living in New York City and had hopes of becoming a writer herself. She had begun reading her poetry at The Village Vanguard on Sunday mornings and invited me down to hear some. After reading her other writings, both Brasz and I told her we thought her poetry “sparse” and to this day take credit for her career as one of the finest writers of biting satirical prose of our time.
Fran was friendly with Susan Graham Mingus who was married to the brilliant bassist and musician, Charles Mingus, and also the publisher of Changes, a magazine that competed for a time with The Village Voice. Fran was instrumental in helping get me published for the first time. She introduced me to Susan who in turn took four of my poems for publication. They were placed on a separate page next to photos that Warhol took and provided for the issue. Fran remains, in many ways, one of those people who were part of my life and continues to be, although many years go by where we don’t have much, if any, contact with one another.
One night, riding to New York City from Coney Island, where we just had dinner at my parents’ home, I was talking to her about the fact that I was drawn to a life that was the antithesis of my parents’ ideas of what and who I should be. She looked at me and, in her own inimical way, said, “Norman, if you fucked a hooker, you’d be concerned with whether or not she came. Get over what you’re going through, and get on with it. Besides, if you’re writing for or because of your parents, you’re playing to the wrong audience.”
It was also at this time that my work started to develop an edge, a hardness that had been lacking before. I was finding my own voice. It was a voice that was coming out of all the voices I had read and heard, an amalgam of voices, and an alchemy of spirits. It was becoming fluid and second nature, like pissing.
Who among us is prescient enough to see their own death clearly? After King was assassinated, Rosen came into our class and read, Turning and turning in a widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer. After Bobby Kennedy bought it in L.A., I turned off the TV and for the 100th time read the poem from where the above lines came, Yeats’, The Second Coming. I watched the DNC from Chicago and grew silent. I listened transfixed, to WBAI and the play by play of cops forcibly removing SDS, (Students for a Democratic Society) demonstrators from the administration buildings at Columbia. The aftermath was BAI playing Dylan’s Desolation Row for 24 hours nonstop. Yet, it was also a time when, for 10 bucks, I heard the solo performances of Cecil, Ornette Coleman, and Sonny Rollins at The Whitney Museum, discovered Pynchon’s V and Bukowski’s Erections, Ejaculations, Emissions and Other Tales of Ordinary Madness. I watched in a saloon across the street from The New School, The Mets winning the ‘69 World Series. I heard Miles at the Fillmore East and his electric/jazz fusion, and I wrote.
As long as I had these avenues to travel down, my demons were satiated. They ate and drank from the same trough that this crazy fascistic masochistic impulse of creation comes from, and were cooled out. And, even though I could hear them rushing to close off all these avenues of impulse and desire, I was, if not safe, not eating myself up, which is what true alcoholism and drug addiction are: The host eating itself up. If an artist does not practice his or her craft, that craft will eventually turn against them. I’d take bets on that.

Brasz also didn’t know. The New School had offered him a Carnegie grant to continue his studies in philosophy. He wasn’t sure he wanted to do that. What he was sure about was that he and Theresa would be hitting Europe that summer. Brasz had a friend, Bob Yarber, who was a painter studying at Cooper Union. The three of us, each with some kind of physical disability, wedded to whatever humor and creativity we had, became friends. Yarber wasn’t sure about much either, except that he knew he’d be going to Europe that summer and meet Brasz at a certain point and then to Tulane to teach art that Fall. I felt a bit jealous that I wasn’t going with them and in fact, never really addressed my own feelings of not being of their caliber both intellectually and artistically. I felt he and Yarber were closer and sometimes felt like an interloper. I’d harbored these insecurities all my life among certain personages who I wanted to be like or emulate and now they manifested themselves in these two bohemians. I wanted them to ask me to go with them but they never did.
My other friends from Seagate and Coney Island, Donny, Steve and Tony were tame by comparison but they still held for me the link to my father’s world. We still played ball together, went out together and went to my home, as we had done hundreds of times in the past, and shared with my folks as much of our lives as we could. But they had gigs. Steve and Tony were teachers in the public school system and Donny was looking for a job as an accountant. In this world it was me who they looked to for their kicks and worldly stimulations. I had turned them all on to powerful types of marijuana in the last few years and in Tony’s case some amphetamine, coke, and a little smack as well. I had encouraged Steve to write and had taken him to Slugs where he’d really begun digging jazz. The four of us began talking about going to Europe that summer, too. I was still trying to negotiate both worlds, but irregardless of which I inhabited at any one time, thought myself less of a man by not being able to say what I felt without fear of rejection or alienation. I carved my way in these worlds carrying the weight of an arthritic man trying to do slight-of-hand tricks.
A panel of professors read my manuscript, and a few had sat in on my class at The New School. If they understood or liked my stuff, or didn’t understand it or like it, they didn’t let on. They asked questions that seemed designed to make them appear hipper than they really were. It has always been very difficult for me to hear, accept and, most importantly, believe, words of praise, no matter who they’ve come from. I had tremendous respect, even love, for Brasz, Yarber, Ginsberg and Blackburn. They had all, to a greater or lesser extent, worked on, encouraged, edited and pushed me in directions I never suspected I had it in me to go. They helped me combat the inner voices that screamed, “You ain’t shit, and you’re never gonna be shit. Who’re ya kiddin? Not me, you ain’t kiddin’ me. I know who the fuck you are, and you ain’t shit.” Recently, I’ve gone over that manuscript and have found that a few of the poems have held up quite well these thirty years, and The Nuremberg Egg, the centerpiece, commands attention even now.
Graham Greene has stated that “the artist is doomed to live in an atmosphere of perpetual failure.” That “atmosphere,” has crippled me for periods of indeterminate but considerable duration. The world gets you quickly enough, but you get you quicker. If you’re not ready to hit that hard slider that paints the outside corner after brushing you back with one high, hard, and tight, you better stand back from the plate and give someone else a chance. Life really doesn’t give a shit who it pitches to and, like Michael Jordan, doesn’t know what move it’s gonna put on you next, so how are you supposed to know?
We graduated, but none of us went to our graduation. If you put a gun to my head and asked where it was held, I’d be a dead man. I was not interested in seeing where I’d been. I was too strung out on my future (or lack of it) to sit down and reminisce. What’s next, what’s next, what’s next? That’s what I heard. I met with Brasz and Yarber at Brasz’ pad, smoked some reefer and talked. Talked about the summer, about chicks, about Europe, and about September. Nothing was resolved except we decided to see one another before they left for New Orleans/Baton Rouge at the end of August. Donny, Steve, Tony and I also decided to kid around in Europe that summer. My folks, as a graduation gift, made it possible for me to do that. I was the first person in my family, on both sides, to graduate from a college or university. I didn’t think too much about it, and neither did they.

I stashed a half ounce of Acapulco Gold (a particular potent blend of reefer that a chick brought me back from Texas), in my suitcase with assorted dexedrine spansules, a few highly prized hashish cubes, insulin, syringes, writing tablets, pens, Eliot’s Four Quartets and LeRoi Jones’ Preface To a Twenty Volume Suicide Note and The Dead Lecturer, and off I went. First stop, Paris. The night we landed and got to our hotel room, my travel companions were too tired to go out. I couldn’t spend my first night there sleeping. They looked on in astonishment as I showered, got dressed, rolled a few joints, and went out into the night.
I spoke to this cab driver the best I could and found, to my delight, that the word “jazz” was completely understood and was a different form of passport. He took me to this cave like dwelling. I walked down a passage where there was carved stone on both sides opening into an intimate room where I heard the familiar sound of a tenor saxophone lamenting. I went to the bar, ordered a drink and listened to a pretty good quartet.
Between sets, I went upstairs and outside to smoke a joint and was soon joined by a couple of people who must have heard me ordering drinks in English. Needless to say, I got them whacked in a few minutes. The night unfolded. Being native Parisians, they showed me around after the next set. We walked around the Left Bank, got some espresso at an all night cafe, smoked the second joint, and walked some more, not saying much. They were hip and just let me look at and admire their beautiful city. I got back to my hotel as the sun was coming up.
We left Paris the next day. We cavorted all through Europe, hitting the Italian and French Riviera, Switzerland, Spain, London, and Monaco. There were times we got whole towns drunk and other times where the people from these places welcomed us into their homes.
In Lerici, a small port on the tip of the Italian Riviera, a place where the poet, Shelley, committed suicide, I fell in love with Anna-Maria. She was an incredibly beautiful Cuban with skin like a Brandy Alexander, eyes dark, like Godiva chocolate, a mouth made to kiss and Oh so smart. She lived in Madrid teaching English as a second language. Originally, she was born and raised in Georgetown in our nation’s capital. She was ready to take some risks, and I was ready to have some risks taken. I left my friends midway through the trip to live with her in Madrid but not before my friends and I went to Monte Carlo.
There, I persuaded my friends to let me hold four hundred dollars and play roulette. Our money was slowly getting exhausted. Either we’d win and live large for the last few weeks or go home early. The first bet was the 400 on rouge. The next bet was 800 hundred on noir. We now had 1200 to divide and spend. We threw the croupier a chip that was worth a hundred dollars in American money and walked out like gentlemen after a day of sport.
In Madrid, Anna took me to The Prado, and I got so close to the Goya paintings I could have smeared my face in them. She took me to see a bullfight and later to eat a meal for seventy-five cents that was delicious. Working men and families were sitting at these long communal tables eating from large trays that passed filled to the brim with steaming meat and potatoes and rice and vegetables and salad, and pitchers of wine were being passed. You could see some with eyes filled with hard work and fatigue and others with work yet humor and still others with sadness and merriment. I was determined to have her come to New York. She said she was planning a Christmas visit to her parents. It was not soon enough for me.

Little did I know that I had graduated into oblivion. I was free-falling through clouds of teflon-coated razor blades.

pgs 60-66--From Chapter 5: JUNK SICK: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

TRYING TO KILL THE FATHER WITHOUT LEAVING HOME--FROM CHAPTER 4, CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

Everything took second place to bowling: diabetes, school, other sports, even women. But shit, I had women, too, and I don’t mean those high school cheer leading, sorority-minded, mindless idiots that other mindless idiots courted, spending far too much time trying to find the key to unlock their panties. Those girls wouldn’t spit on my shadow. I was not on the football team, the basketball team, and I was not Ivy League born-and-bred or bound. I had women who knew how to wait, knew what I wanted, knew how to give it to me and didn’t have to be home for dinner. And they never expected, let alone asked, me to pick them up and meet their families. Being Jewish and growing up in a Jewish community exposed me to homes with Jewish daughters. I heard the rap and detected their hidden agendas: WASP beauty pageants, nose-jobs, silverware patterns, early marriages, and husbands planted early as well. The girls I were attracted to were not driven to higher education, so they could become teachers or social workers uplifting the poor or championing some ghetto youth while complaining to their husbands that the “nigger” maid was stealing again. No, Jewish girls of a certain type, I thought, simply did not interest me. The truth, however, was much more complicated than that. I was years away from Harry Crews’ The Gypsy’s Curse: “Find a cunt that fits you and you’ll never be the same.”

Amy, Cookie, Sharon and Corinne. All Jewish. All beautiful. All fuckin’ crazy. All were in love with Italians, except Corinne who was in love with a Jewish dropout. It was Corinne who I lusted after, who I tried to stay close to, who I said to myself, “If this fuckin’ loser of hers ever drops her, or winds up dead, I’ll make my move.”
Anyway, we had more laughs over who was in jail, who was going to jail, who was getting out of jail, whose cum stains were on whose dress and whose parents were apoplectic over their choice of mate rather than go to ethics class. And when Tommy got his first car, a new Chevy 357 Super Sport, white with red leather bucket seats, four on the floor, school was history. We would breakfast at some pancake house out by the JFK airport and bet on how many stacks The Count (he looked like Dracula) could eat; fifty-six was his record. Then we’d drive around awhile, smoke, and hit Nathan’s in Coney Island (where else?) for lunch. The Count’s frankfurter high was twenty and change. The next stop was Dukes to see whether or not he’d tap dance on one of his tables, or watch, if somebody good was shooting or just to play rotation awhile, smoke some more, go the alley to bowl a few lines...or just drift. How I loved to drift! Everyday, it was fifty-fifty if we’d wind up in school. But by this time, being seniors, we had friends in the main office or in our classes who would cover for us, pull our attendance cards, give us our homework assignments or steal the test beforehand. I think we spent more energy cutting classes and scheming than going to them. I’d still make it to the classes I enjoyed, but that was it. And when push came to shove I had the ability to buckle down and study for a test or write a paper at the last minute.

I discovered something else while drifting in Tommy’s car, the Eighth St. Bookstore. One day, being bored with our usual routine, I said to Tommy, “Let’s drive into the City.” New York City was never referred to by name. It was just, “the City.” It did seem a world away, not just across a bridge or through a tunnel. We decided upon Greenwich Village, and drove there. Soon we discovered the street of commerce, Eighth Street. Today it’s simply crass commercialism with each store looking alike and selling nearly the same merchandise. We parked and began to walk a block with more pedestrian traffic than I had ever seen. Each store looked different and unique. The Bigelow Pharmacy, which looked like an old movie theater with antique floors and balustrades, served food. There were clothing stores that were just at the vanguard of what would become the psychedelic era. A store sold beautifully carved pipes of different woods and ivory, pipe tobacco, cigars, cigarettes, and there in the case, rolling papers like Eunice had had. There was The Bon Soir, a nightclub that was situated in the basement, and where Streisand got her start. Also on the block was the Art Students League, Orange Julius, and, in a recess, was a window filled with books. Just books. Those working on a raised platform looked like the kind of people who read and talked about books. I can’t explain it any better than that. After some protest from my friends, I walked in and explored.
The shelves downstairs and upstairs was stacked with books. And there, on racks, were these little books called, “the Pocket Poets Series.” Facing me on this rack was Ginsberg’s Howl. I opened it and read a few sentences and, though I had never thought much about poetry, this grabbed me. I bought it for 50 cents, new. Also, I saw a copy on a table of Selby’s, Last Exit to Brooklyn. I bought that as well. I was never the same again. There are certain monsters of literature that have altered me in profound ways: Ginsberg, Selby, Celine, Pound, Pynchon, Crews, Roth, Morrison, Bukowski, and more who keep you going, restore your faith, patch-up your pockmarked soul. They made me feel not as alone; they made me “think” instead of “feel.” Reading made it easier at home as well, not any more pleasant, just easier.

Bobby, my brother, was fast becoming a “basketball legend” in Seagate and so there was a discernible shift in my parental landscape. My father naturally gravitated toward him. Bobby was also a good student. My brother would go on to play ball in junior high and high school and, before dropping-out, a semester in college. He, too, had begun to experiment with drugs while in high school and was unable to escape their hold and so, by the time he entered college he could not adjust to the rigor of both academia and independence. When he announced that he wanted to dropout one night at the dinner table my father, without missing a beat, said he had to come to work with him the next morning in his supermarket. I voiced no dissent. I was old enough and smart enough, and had been through enough already at that time to know what the deal was. I still remained silent. In fact, I was more than a bit envious of their newly formed bond, even though I knew it was wrong--for both of them--and spelled eventual disaster. After such knowledge, what forgiveness. But at that time, he kept his act undercover while mine was doing a St. Vitus dance before my parents’ eyes and I thought I had enough to do keeping my own “act” together.
My folks handled their fear well: “Bowling alley bum!” “Gangster!” “Bastard!” “You’re going to put me in an early grave,” my mother said.
“You’re no fuckin’ good,” my father chimed in. They both watched my friends, a year ahead of me, go off to college to “make something of themselves.” They conceded that “there was something wrong with me” but they just didn’t know what that “something” was. New York University conducted a battery of psychological tests, providing a printout of the results: the subject’s goals, tendencies, strong and weak suits, and areas of interest. It cost a hundred bucks. They sent me. I took them.
The tests proved conclusively: “I have the potential if...” My study habits were too low to be graded. I was suited to anything from an English teacher to a minister, which my parents would have settled for, anything but a “bowling alley bum.” The next step, the interpreter of the tests said, was to find the right shrink for “the cure.” A bad case of “the clap” would have been easier to treat and less painful.

My first shrink was located across the street from Prospect Park in Brooklyn. We stared at each other for the first forty-five minutes. He then asked, “What are you thinking about?” I didn’t want to tell the prick. “Well, Norman?”
“Well, what?” I replied.
He smiled that little tight smile that showed no teeth, no mirth, no delight, no edge. “What are you...?”
“That you’re a fuckin’ idiot.”
He paused. “Good, good, very good. Well, it seems that’s all the time we have today, but I think we made a good start. See you next week, same time,” he smiled.
Next week was a carbon copy. I couldn’t see myself there the following week and told him so. “Well, if that’s your decision, Norman.” I got up and left, with 30 minutes still on his meter.
My second shrink was located a few blocks from the first one, but resembled him not at all. We got along fine. He was into sailboats and Jaguar cars and we spoke and laughed about that and more. I confided in him. I blamed my mother for just about everything that had gone wrong in my life. He called me an “idiot.” I began to understand. We tried to put things in some kind of perspective. My life, nonsensical to me up until then, began to take shape. I developed a degree of insight into my behavior and assumed responsibility for my actions, but after a few months, when my parents couldn’t see any “visible” proof of my recovery, they terminated treatment. I still bowled, smoked Lucky’s, and seemingly drifted without any clear purpose in life. My folks, being very literal people, wanted to see something they could, well, see.
Their money wasn’t totally wasted. College loomed on the horizon for me. What else was there to do? I knew that neither the American Diabetes Association nor my folks were going to sponsor me for ten grand in the Professional Bowlers Association. However, the New York State Department of Vocational Rehabilitation would pay for college costs since I was diabetic, which made my father very happy. However, with a seventy-seven average there wasn’t any Ivy League schools I could get into. Before applying to schools, there was one thing I had to do, get out of high school.
I failed chemistry and had to go to summer school in order to graduate. Needless to say, I did not go to my high school graduation. My father had just bought another supermarket, this one in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn on Union Street. It was directly across from Crazy Joey Gallo’s social club. My pop used to have espresso with him and I, with Carl, would go into a bar on Fifth Avenue, listen to The Drifters on the juke, and have a few belts of rye whiskey. I dreamt I got a sixty-seven on the chemistry Regents, and I did. I’ve been looking to dream magic numbers ever since.
That summer, I fell in love with Corinne. As I said, I watched her in high school. She lived a few blocks from me in Seagate. She was tall, and her eyes were a cat’s green. She had long chestnut hair, high cheekbones, long graceful fingers, a body that would have made a priest kick in a stained glass window, and she was smart, very smart. She had been accepted to Brooklyn College at a time when you had to have excellent grades to get into a city school. She wanted to major in Russian. But try as I might, I couldn’t pry her away from Marty, this Jewish dropout who happened to be handsome, athletic, and stupid. She was on the cusp of cutting him loose and I, being as manipulative as I was, encouraged that, for her betterment, of course. I wanted to stay close to her, wanted to protect and nurture the possibility of what might happen next. Usually, when I met with rejection of any kind I was quick to say, “Fuck it,” and be gone. But not this time. This time, I waited; I waited like an animal would wait. It didn’t happen between us for almost another year. But when it did...
Toward the latter part of the summer, I finally got off my ass and started applying to the colleges within my immediate area. Kingsborough Community College, which had just been built out of what looked like cheap corrugated tin and resembled a trailer park at the end of Manhattan Beach in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn, accepted me. Their admission requirements: a pulse beat and blood.

pgs 42-45: Chapter 4: JUNK SICK CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

THE GIRL

has lived on my block
as long as I have--over
forty years. I watched her
grow into
a woman
creased
around the edges--
not necessarily
a bad thing.
At first
I was drawn
to her stately
gait; she moved
much like a Lipizzaner;
she had a black-haired mane
that flouted and a knowing
irreverence that hinted
and announced. I would not
have been surprised
if trumpeters marched
in front of or behind
her, yet
she was alone
in all her comings
& goings.

I saw her today
as I sat & smoked
& thought about death
in the most kindly of ways:
How it's been good
to keep itself close
but not too close; how
at one time it screamed
& now just hums
a familiar tune.
She pranced
down the block
toward me, her legs
moving like well-timed
Weber carburetors
and bounced
on the balls
of her feet.

I lowered
my sunglasses
and nodded
to her.
She did the same.
How long,
I asked,
have you lived here?
Almost forty-two years,
she answered, slowing
to a stop.
Me, too,
I said.
She smiled. I know,
she said.
I smiled.
March '74.
You're older,
she teased,--May '74.
Norman, I said.
Alice, she replied.

Two lovers,
plotting.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

CAFE REGGIO

has welcomed
the souls of the lost
and found
for a hundred years.
On MacDougal
in the West Village
it looks the same
as when I chanced upon
it in the early sixties:
Italian European, small,
serving coffee, black
or brown & little pastries,
to radicals, tourists,
reds, writers, philosophers,
ex-anything, poor, rich,
confused, without question,
intrusion or concern.
You can still sneak
a smoke
every once in awhile
and they will pretend
they haven't noticed.

On this Sunday,
full of laziness,
I walked through Washington Square
and over; thankfully
it was not too busy.
I ordered espresso
& a piece of Italian cheesecake,
and took out
my Celine--
and thought of Roi
reading his Heidegger
sixty years ago.
I've got plenty
of pretensions
to last a lifetime
but that
is not
one of them.

Pretty single ladies
sat at tables,
turning the pages
of paper books;
sugar cubes
on the tables.
There was a time
I'd get invited
into their one room flats
& later into their well appointed
bodies. This time,
however, the snack
worked better
with my life
than they would; I still have time
to find their soft spots
if it ever comes
to that.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014

THE BLIND MAN

walks with a pretty
yellow Labrador.
The street sizzles
in the July heat.
Late seventies,
I make him out to be,
but neither he
nor the Lab
are fazed by the weather.
He's tall, rather handsome,
thin, wearing a white T,
cargo shorts & sandals;
the Lab wears a jacket:
"Please don't pet me,
I'm working." Her nose
sniffs the ground, her eyes
works the crowd and traffic.
I'm pretty sure
he's not Homer,
or Charles,
or Wonder,
or Milton,
but he might be.
But the kids who jostle past,
or look up just in time
to avoid him do not imagine
anything. The stare into some screen,
screens that tell them where they are
and who they are. For all they know
they might be studying one of his books
or compositions or paintings or theories
in class. He might be able to tell them
the history of their steps and who
they're stepping on.

But they need not stop.
They, too, are only trying
to find a little love,
a little knowledge,
in their time. One
never knows when either one
is going to leap up
and grab them around the throat.
What part imagination
and what part technology
plays in that strange brew
is something for Tiresias
to sort out.
As for me
I'll neither follow
the blind man
or the students--
I've got enough
blind spots
of my own.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014

MORE BIG FEET & BIGFOOT

Fats Waller, Pops,
guitars, Dylan, Dave
Van Ronk, Washington Square,
the Village, reefer madness,
and young kids still
curious, still a beautiful
inversion of what
is to come.

The thirst
for passion
endless.

To submit
is to die
slowly
& lose
the best parts
of yourself.
Those who do
welcome
to hell.
Those who don't,
welcome--you don't
have to knock, just
come in.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/124523698@N04/sets/72157645039270746/

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014