I'VE BEEN ON A TRANE RUN

For sensual junkies of all stripes...

for about a week now.
Things like this seem to happen to me--
have a taste of Haagan Dazs tonight
& a week later my mug is still buried
in a gallon; read a Bukowski poem
& a month later you can find me
nailed & waving to him
from the next cross.
From birth
I've been a heat-seeking guided missle
of pleasure; tickle a part of my brain
& I climb aboard
without thinking
of schedule or
destination. Let the driver
or conductor worry
about that. Besides,
I reason, they're getting paid
to get me where I'm going; I'm
just along for the ride.

Sure,
sometimes the trip
has been bumpy--
unscheduled stops
for hospitals
& rehabs, a love affair
or two that had me
missing my stop or
missing an organ,
but how are you going to tell a cannibal
that the flesh he's hungered for
might be necrotic?
He'll just laugh
& eat around the edges.

Sixty-one years ago
some tasty black spoonfuls
conjured a be-bop magic
in the alchemy of a white chef's
basement in Hackensack, New Jersey.
Today, April 12, 2019,
I'm feasting
on their labors
of love.
The Trane
endures & tastes
wonderful.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

For all junkies of the senses...

EVERYDAY YOU PASS BY

everything you need
to know

about everything
there is.

II

Residues.
Kick ball
then doorways.
A darkness
is at the top
of the stairs,
but money too.
Need
is your gravity
today.

III

Dreams
in a book
bag.

IV

I gave you
a hundred,
I know
I gave you
a hundred,
I only had
a hundred
and now,
I don't
have it
anymore.

V

I fell
in love
when I
was little
and now love
sucks the life
out of me
as I grow
impatient.

VI

One should look
harder
at what
one knows.

VII

Her dress
has its first stain
of journeys
to come.
His lips
hang
over his teeth
like shadows.

VIII

Slugs sun
in the summer
slime;
they have
no job
yet.

IX

Vespers
from a Harmon
mute; a jazz
musician
fingers
the hem
of a garment
whose mother
doesn't know
where she is:
this circle,
this time,
now.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

FIRSTS:

Asking Maxine out
for a hot fudge ice-cream sundae
when I was six and summoning up
the courage to take her hand
on our secret path back home;
swimming without my father's arms
underneath me & feeling the waters pull;
surfing on asphalt on a tar spun Brooklyn street,
the training wheels off
with only my own power & balance to guide me;
a hardball sliding into my Rawlings oiled glove
and hitting a liquid smart drive on the fat of the bat;
having courage in the darkness
& the high spun arc of magisterial wide screen technicolor
coming on at once like LSD kid style; melted popcorn
oozing between my fingers licking the tips;
the first time my dick moved straight up
all by itself;
the first time I mastered making a bridge
so the pool cue slid easily between my fingers;
the first time the ball touched nothing
but twine and the swoosh it made;
the first touch of silk;
or the smell of my dog wet
from the spring rains;
the first time I saw Corinne
and moved toward her without
knowing why; the first smell
from a mimeograph machine or
gasoline pump, paper solvent
or horse manure or man sweat
after a summer's football game
on the beach; the first pull
on a stick of reefer or opium pipe
and the snake that slithered up
my spine and around my shoulders
and up into my brain;
the first time I realized Coltrane
or Monk or Miles or Billie or Nina;
the first time I knew I really existed
and found the keys into Joyce's pocket;
sighting Diane behind a glove counter & knew
how love can come from behind and mug you.
It has been a long slow kiss
to the fates and it has been
sublime.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

EVERY NIGHT IS DOPE NIGHT

Edgar waits
pen in hand
for his little girls
to visit
bringing
China White.
He sits
next to
a raven colored
sax player
who's trying
not to vomit.

He scribbles
between the cramps.
They hope
they trickle in
before the second set.
Everything's green
in this bucket
of blood
saloon.

Outside
it's snowing.
A white carpet
lays between
uptown &
downtown
on the south side
of heaven,
one stop
from Hell.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

CHRISTMAS EVE, 1954

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHKnvwoGg0Y

Five niggers
gathered
to play
nigger music
in a non-nigger house
in New Jersey.
They were cool
with that.
The rest of the world
was still white:
Brown Vs. Board
was a colored victory;
Jackie & Willie
were great colored ballplayers,
a credit to their race,
but were harbingers
(and still "colored.")
Cigarettes were twenty-five cents a pack.
A drink a buck.
Cap of heroin was fifty cents.
Brown band leaders
sick from a night
of no pay
& bad food
in a cheap
Chinese fish shack,
leaned into blondes
with bad skin.
Crew-cuts & skinny ties
told the tale
of a country heated
by recent wealth
and power. Ike smiled.
Yet underneath
the green golf carpet
mischief brewed.

In this Van Gelder home
St. Nick
had to,
if he had a mind,
jimmy his way in;
crazy voodoo artists,
brought their own gift,
were at work
while their drunken painter friends
lapped at the bowls in the bowels
of The Cedar Bar & San Remo's.

Percy plucked & walked rhythm's spine;
Cluck brushed a high hat;
Miles, precise & dark, played with blackness;
Bags danced;
and Monk, beautifully unhinged, splashed color through his fingers.

These times
are terribly light.
And still white.
Crazy art
is bought & paid for
before it can do anything
like breathe.

I was seven then,
almost seventy now.
I celebrate the birth
of something.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

ONE FOR MOSE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzTYOJQsw-Q

It was a time,
and it was an attitude.
It was New Orleans
raw & dangerous, when evenings
were leaned in to
& junk was still a black thing
& young white boys wanted
to be in the know
thought they knew
how to be black.
Dive clubs & hip kitties.
Poses & jazz
& simple lives
turned impossibly
complicated.
It was a time
when musicians could play
for a week & work ideas
into riffs & people listened
& nodded
their heads
in sympathy
& agreement.
Men knew
the impossibility
of women
& women knew
the impossibility
of men
ever hoping
to come out
of childhood.

We were young
& beat-up;
seeing too much
before we were able
to see our place.
Oysters were a quarter;
a beer and a shot
was seventy-five cents;
and last call
was never.
We'd thought
we'd gotten beyond the haze
into the meaning; we'd thought
that we could escape
our lives
by pissing on them.
The only thing we caught
was our own hair
in the zipper...& boy
did that smart.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

TASTES & TEXTURES

Courvoisier & coffee, black,
she said to the waiter.
I'll have the same,
I said without looking at him.
She was older than me
& more schooled
in all the ways
of the night.

We were waiting,
as all new lovers do,
for our molecules
of passion to run
head long into
each other.

The Vanguard
was low lit,
& lazy,
allowing people
to pray
to a god
of their own
choosing; I choose
touch
& placed my hand
inside her skirt's fold:
Nylon shivered
against my fingers.

She poured her cognac
into her coffee & took
my cigarette from me.
Smoke swirled into the lights.

Sonny stood before us, alone,
his huge gold tenor hanging
from his neck.
"Where or When" braced
the room
and I,
& everyone else,
stopped
breathing.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

MY TWIN

had he lived
would be 96
today. But
he was crazy:
he drank,
he smoked,
he ran around
with chicks
all night
in places
like The It Club
playing piano
eating ribs
hanging with addicts
and owners and madmen
into the early morning hours.
He never got enough sleep,
he never got enough anything
except messages
from the gods:
Bluemonk, Bemsha Swing, Ruby,
My Dear, Straight, No Chaser,
Well You Needn't, Round Midnight.
He wore heavy woolen coats
in Texas heat, bamboo shades,
and skimmers, hats, hundreds
and hundreds of hats.

I was always jealous
of him: we share a date,
we hear voices, make of them
what we can, but he talked back.
I'm more or less mute.
Tickling my typer keys
is about as much
as I can do.
Let me get on
with my day
listening
while a NYC radio station
celebrates
his birth...and my
continuation.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

MEDITATIONS

In the sometime
sentient evening,
tentacles weave
themselves from urns;
while Trane blows
a Latin Mass
through golden horns,
and my love
of gods
is second
to the blue smoke
trailing
from his horn.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

SIMPLE MATH--THE LESS YOU GOT, THE MORE YOU WORK TO GET IT

LIQUID HANDCUFFS


Winsome was boppin along, listening to some Miles on his iPod. It was Friday, and he was dressed casually: cut off dungaree shorts, huge spattered Hawaiian shirt, baggy, double layered socks tucked inside red Converse high top canvas sneakers. For effect, he wore a multicolored boating skimmer on top of his head and shades. If one didn’t know better, they’d think he was going for a sail instead of being on the C train, coming from 145th Street and Convent, and getting off at 34th and Eighth Avenue.
Bags Groove segued into Simone’s, Love Me Or Leave Me. Her Bach like playing and Julliard education played well against the previous piece fronted by Miles. He, too, went to Julliard. Damn, I’m bad, he said to himself, sometimes I don’t even know what I’m doin, but I just feel this shit, you feel me? An older black bald-headed dope fiend once told him in the joint that feelings predicted intelligence and don’t let nobody tell ya no different.
He parted the doors and exited into Hades; the heat and smell, let alone the density of pressed rush hour bodies, almost made him retch. This is not the kind of thing for me to be doin, you feel me? he mumbled, and gripped the handrail as he made his way up into the early blaze and fray.
It seemed the summer had no brackets; it was just one sweltering ninety-five degree day after another; the only thing that changed was his underwear. Soon, city workers would be walking around with shovels so that they could throw the bloated and dead bodies into carting boxes. Nothing was as bad as a New York City summer where the air conditioners, if anything, made the city even hotter or, the constant, artificial Arctic, cold seeped into your bone marrow and froze any thought that could be birthed.
It was a good thing that Winsome was motivationally lazy. Only two things did he minimally work at: one was making it to fifty; the other was being cool while he did it. Of the latter he knew some people who came easily by it, while others...well, lets just say that they had to be in the know to know just how stupid it would be not to think about what really should be thought about: being cool always, of course, was one of them. Style, brother, was the answer to just about everything. In fact, he preferred these days to do a tedious mind-numbing thing with style, than doing a dangerous thing without it. Most people he knew were just mad stupid and there was nothin to be done about that. Besides, he wasn’t going anywhere; the state and the Feds, science, and himself took care of that a long time ago.
He even gave up shooting dope when that scene became too hard; he was about thirty-five at the time, almost fifteen years ago. It was a young man’s game. And if yous wasn’t rich by thirty-five it just ain’t happenin. And, sheeet, talk about, “mad tedious,” and “mind-numbing,” you ain’t seen nothin til ya have to go to a mothfuckin MMTP, a methadone maintenance treatment program or be in the joint or be dead. Ain’t no other ways to go for niggers.
Even the good ones were mad crippled. I might be a nigger, but I ain’t like these niggers here, fuck no, Winsome would say every time he got on the block that the clinic was on and began the slow, grim, Bataan death march. He passed the human lampposts, some bent over, their heads below their knees, sucking their own dicks, oblivious to the sweat dripping from their foreheads to their necks to the sidewalk; he passed the ones who were still conscious but trying to get bent, bartering or buying one medication for another; passed the cigarette hawkers selling Loosies; and then opened the door to the clinic and climbed those industrial bleach smellin stairs to the emphysematous elevator. Pearls before swine, my brothers, pearls before swine--and that goes doubly for some of the niggers that run this program, too.
The fourth floor waiting room looked like a cattle car; all kinds of cows and heifers kickin up against the stall. Old and young, mostly black and Latino flavored, but some white asses standin and sittin. All of them were waiting. The black, front of the line, staff, had a wall, a door, and a glass window, separating them from the diseased. They used it to the max. If you pestered, or got cross with them, treated them with any kind of disrespect you were fucked. They would simply forget about you. It was, to an addict, the DMV, only ratcheted up to the nth degree. Your dose, that you should have gotten ten minutes before you got there, was a good thirty to sixty minutes away from your hungry cells. Shout, stamp your feet, curse, only made it worse. If you put up too much of fight, you got escorted out, and then you were really screwed. Junkies were neutered a long time ago, though most didn’t know it. Most just talked, but didn’t do a fuckin thing--except when desperate, and that wasn’t very often.
But complainin, that was another story; they were tacitly encouraged to bitch all they wanted. Besides, it’s an addict’s God given right to punch holes, even in heaven. Once again, the smell of bleach and ammonia were wafting around the cramped space, making everyone surly.
On his way over, Winsome was greeted by a few nods of the head or desultory halfhearted waves, but inside the waiting room he was known by many. Not only had he been there for fifteen years, but nearly everyone liked him. He had an easy way, but told the truth as he saw it, without trying to shade much.
Because of the heat and a pissy air-conditioner, folks were mopping their brow or their cleavage. Sometimes both. Sweat could be seen glistening from the tops of plump breasts. But most weren’t interested in that kind of sex now. The only sexy thing was inside the bottles they were waiting for.
How you makin it, man, Earl asked him.
I don’t know how, but I’m makin it, Winsome replied.
I hear you, man; I hear you.
You?
Same here, brother. I’m tryin to get these motherfuckers to put me on a goddamn three day week.
And?
And nothin. They hearin, but they ain’t listenin. I’m tired of this motherfuckin ride six motherfuckin days a week, man.
They got liquid handcuffs on your ass. Even me with three days still is chained to the motherfuckin city man; even if I had a place to go wouldn’t make no kind of difference, my ass belongs to this bullshit, man. I thought it would take the pressure off, but instead its made me more aware just how much of a motherfuckin slave I am. I gotta get off this motherfuckin juice.
Ain’t that the motherfuckin truth.
I gotta.
But Win, man, you been sayin that for the ten years I know ya.

Win, you goin to the bereavement group.
Not it I don’t haveta.
Everybody has ta.
Sheeet, I ain’t “everybody.”
You just a crazy niggah, that’s all you is.
Crazy, not a nigger.
My niggah.
Yeah, well, maybe your niggah.
The bereavement group was put together to have those who picked up their dose on Fridays, and who were a little--or a lot--further up the food chain than someone who came into the program yesterday, needed to go to in order to get their take home dose--at least for Saturday and Sunday.
It sounded like variations of Monk’s, Epistrophy, and looked like Mondrian’s, Boogie-Woogie, only going in the same direction; a static, herky jerky, movement. Each conversation, to Winsome’s ears, sounded alike, but different; a blur, washed of rhythm and color, yet each, if one paid attention, hit different notes, yet sang the same tune. A tune of a sainted victim. Even the isolated ones, (maybe especially them). The stick figures who hoofed over here singularly were sitting, with one leg going up and down, or fingers drumming a knee, or trying to stare vacantly into some distant past, or future. Each, alone or with people, contained, fixed in place, squirming into themselves.
The heat’s a motherfucker, man.
A motherfucker.
A real motherfucker. It’s mad hot.
Yeah, it’s a real one all right.
You stayin or splittin.
I just hope I ain’t gotta stay. You feel me? You might think after comin to this motherfucker for as long as me I woulda built up some motherfuckin trust--you might think that, but you be wrong. Wrong as a motherfucker. Damn. One goddamn time in almost fifteen years I get a dirty urine--which I keep tellin em was a false positive--and they make me feel like a left back retard. One time. Besides, hell, that’s what I’m supposed to do--get high, but here I am, all this time, and I get high--which I’m tellin ya was motherfuckin bullshit--but once. And goin to this bereavement thing. Bereavement my ass. I’m sorry I haveta come to this motherfucker. Ain’t that bereavement enough. You feel me? Sheeet.

They stood and talked, stood and talked; talked about the weather; talked about welfare; talked about getting fucked by landlords, the phone company, bosses; talked about the amount of how many milligrams they’re on or up to and how many more they’d like to be on to feel nice; talked about babies and jobs and picnics and deaths and drugs and stickups and beatings and school and lies and schemes and anything to not talk about this, this exactly, nothing more, nothing less, just this and what, if anything, they’d planned to do about it. Somehow, this was worse than their apartments without air-conditioning; worse than an infant with no milk; worse than a red light in your rear view mirror; this, somehow, went to the truth of the lie that, try as they might, to jettison, was all the more powerful because of it. It showed their ugliness to the world, or really just to the people on the train or bus, or those they jostled with on the sidewalk. A gangrenous soul, a cyst, a malignant tumor, a pus pimple that, if shown the light would not go away, but would spread or burst on themselves or worse, those around them. Almost the same rap and the same feeling week after week after week.

Hey, Win, what’s up bro.
Chillin, just chillin.
Back in this silly ass motherfucker again.
Word-up, Willie. I heard youz was in the joint, man.
Nah, that was a bullshit bust, man. They busted my ass cause they can do it, you hear what I’m sayin?
I heard somebody snitched on your ass.
I was out the same motherfuckin night, man. Tried to snitch me for not payin my ol lady, but that’s some bullshit, man. Really. Tried to tie me up for some ridiculous shit just so he can bone her, you know what I’m talkin bout. Sheeet, she wants to ball his ass, too. I ain’t got no kinda luck, man. Fuckin cops check and they see I’m given her as much bread as the courts call for. If I could, I’d get the fuck outta here, if I could get outta here. Just go, man, find another motherfucker to live, you know where I’m comin from man, like a new start, you dig, But I’m tied to this fuck. Stupid to go somewheres else and do the same motherfuckin shit.
Get on the Bupe, man. They say that shit will free your ass up.
Yeah, I heard about that shit. But I don’t trust these motherfuckers. Must be some kinda angle they be playin to get some niggers on some other kind of shit than this orange shit we be drinkin forever, man.
Nah, man, I don’t think it’s like that; it was designed for white people.
Why ain’t you on it?
I’m gonna be. Get my dose down to thirty milligrams, then I can switch over.
Down to thirty, huh? Shit, that would take me...sheeet, I be dead by the time I get that low. But maybe I should try and do the same shit cause this shit is killin me.
I’m tellin ya, brother, in a short time we all just come in once a month, get a script andaseeyalater. And anywhere in the world we could go and just hook ourselves up with the shit and that’s it, man. And people don’t look at you stupid on this shit; I mean this stuff was made for the rich people, you know what I’m talkin bout? They go to a private fuckin doctor, man, and get a prescription for the shit. You feel me? This shit be designed for white people with bread, but once you on it, man, you just get yourself a clinic anywhere and a doctor to give it to you. Shit, they can even give you refills. But even if we only gots a thirty day supply; give me enough for thirty motherfuckin days and I could be king. You feel me?
Shit, I’m gonna do the same motherfuckin thing.

They kept drifting in, one by one and couples. There were no more seats or benches so they stood; horizontally, they’d look like detritus on the beach after a fierce winter.
Ari, the facilitator of the group, stopped at the receptionist’s area, behind the glass, and said something to them. They all laughed. It seemed like he stopped at their desk every Friday. None of them looked at the faces that pressed against the window like Rwandan refugees looking at a food shipment that was just dropped, but guarded by soldiers.
When he opened the door, the crowd filed passed him as if he didn’t exist. It was their only form of protest. If that in any way bothered him, he gave no sign. Some would quickly whisper to him that they needed more medication, or reimbursement for the subway, or a letter for Medicaid, or something that they needed yesterday. Go Go Go, he would say to each of them in turn, lightly patting them on their backs, (but pushing them, too), toward the room that the group was held in.
Motherfucker is crazy.
He ain’t crazy that way, Winsome replied, and don’t you think he is. He counts on that shit; but he’s a crazy sly smart motherfucker; always lookin for information and then he French fries your ass. Don’t sleep on him. You feel me?
But Winsome needed Ari, badly.
And Ari knew it.
The welfare folks were threatening to throw Winsome out of his section eight housing on his ass. If they did that he might as well look for another pad on the moon; shelters were out of the question and there was no one who he could hole up with that he wanted to hole up with. The woman he was seeing did what Winsome suggested she do a few weeks ago: she took it “on the arches.” Winsome missed her less than a beat. However, he did miss the bread that she generated from two places: a scam she had going with Medicaid, and the half ass job she was doing slinging a little crack to people outa the apartment. And there lied the trouble. The welfare folks got wind of what she was doing and had the right to throw his ass out with her, if not send his ass to jail--with her, too. It was a law that you can’t sling rocks in government housing. Period. End.
Winsome had told her over and over that he couldn’t risk losing the place, and she kept him at arms length, but her pussy was right up against his dick. He needed Ari, (not his dick), to stand up for him; needed him to write letters and go up in front of the welfare board and testify about him being oblivious to what the woman was doing and about him turning his life around, good character...blah, blah, blah. Winsome didn’t care if he told them that he took a dump on the head of the mayor as long as he was able to stay where he was. It was the only pad that Winsome ever had that he thought he was more than a transient in; he kept it spotless, and had nothing personally to do with anything bad from his past. Even when he was growing up, his mom could never stay in one place for too long. It took her a year or so to get most of the people she knew to like and trust her, and another year to take as much of their money as she could.
There were only two things that Winsome took with him wherever he went: the first was his father telling him before he finally split, he really wanted a daughter for his first born and how he didn’t want to change the name he choose so that’s how he came to be called Winsome, (now he dug the name, but it was a bitch growing up with it); the second thing was an indelible photo of his mom being a living breathing “ho.” She brought home man after man after man. When he got older, still a teenager, and still in some hell hole with her, he saw most of the men she spread her legs for in the next room, the living room. He saw her sometimes widen them for anyone with a goddamn pencil for a dick. Not even smart enough to be a pro, (she was certainly beautiful enough), he’d think over and over again. She couldn’t help but to laugh at some, and then they’d slap her good. Fucking embarrassing.
Now Ari was trying to make him bend over. For the last few weeks he was making demands upon him that were sickening to Winsome’s way of life for a long time now. He wanted Winsome to do two things for him: score some good reefer and introduce him chicks he could fuck. He told Winsome that on both matters there’s nothing like a colored man to obtain good weed and snapping pussy. Instead of grinning in this half-assed male conspiracy, he grimaced. Ari took offense and told him so; he accused him of lying and told him that as far as he was concerned he’d let him kick in jail before he said word one to the welfare board--let alone write him character reference letters. Winsome slipped and slid around him for a couple of weeks, but the noose was tightening.

Well, sheeet, when are you gonna get some teeth, man. Enough bereaven already, sheeet. You been gummin your food too long now. Get yourself some choppers.
Winsome tried to hide his laugh by ducking his head down. His skimmer nearly fell off; he caught it with his hand. Damn, my tribe is funny, he thought. Pain and laughter, how else can you make it, he asked himself. I’m a shallow guy, a laugh has got me by, he said to himself.
Mr. Butler, Ari said, to Winsome, what have you been grieving about lately.
That the last woman I was in was The Statue of Liberty.
Seriously....
I am serious.
The laughter rose in the room and Winsome knew there’d be some kind of hell to pay. Better back up; better be cool. Yeah, Mr. Ari, serious, I be serious. Here it is: I’m grievin that I’m still, near fifty, tied down to this motherfucker, but I’m sicka grievin. I wanna go on that Bupe program, man, that, whatdayacallit, Buprenorphine shit. Then, after I do good for a time they let me come once a month and shit, and then I could be a little more freer to do what I want, you know what I mean.
There are certain protocols that have to followed, first of all my name is Mr. Rabinowitz, you realize that don’t you.
Yeah, I do. And I’ll do whatever it takes, man. Whatever them protocols be I be doin em; I’m serious, man. Let’s start first thing next week.
We have an agenda to follow, Mr. Butler. We can’t just do anything anytime you want to.
Yeah, I know, I know, but I’m ready now. What’s the big fuckin deal?
To you it might be nothing, but we have an agenda that we have to follow.
Yeah, I heard that already. When we meet next week you tell me exactly what agenda that is.
You see, there you go again, Mr. Butler. Always your schedule. It just so happens I’m all booked up next week. It’ll have to wait another week, maybe two.
You’re too much, man.
What do you mean by that.
Just what I said, too fuckin much.
Too much what.
Too much bullshit, man.
I could take this conversation as a threat.
A threat. What the fuck you be talkin bout? Ain’t no one threatenin you or nobody else. So don’t even play that shit.
Sure sounds like a threat to me.
Rabinowitz got up and went out of the room. All eyes turned toward Winsome. Winsome’s blood started to freeze.
People in the room leaned over to one another or just talked into the air: he ain’t done nothin; he tryin to bait the motherfucker, we saw it, we all saw it; that’s some bullshit, that is; why he bein so motherfuckin tough with you, what you done to him. Winsome made no comment. He rested his chin in his two cupped hands and looked toward the door. I don’t know Win, you best be outta here.
Where I’m gonna go, huh? I need to get medicated, man.
He know that that motherfucker.
Sure he know that.
Two man-eating security guards came into the room followed by the counselor. Mr. Butler, get up please and come with us.
Listen, man, I gotta get medicated. You can’t throw me outa this motherfucker without medicating my ass.
You should have thought about that before you threatened me.
There were some grumbles in the group, but as soon as Rabinowitz fixed his attention on each of them in turn, their heads lowered and the grumbles stopped.
I didn’t threaten your ass. You just sayin that because I wouldn’t get you no weed or get you laid. Yeah, that’s right, y'all heard right. That’s what he wanted me to do. I should sue your white ass, motherfucker. Sue it. Winsome's eyes were bright, and his face was lit up red. And yeah, he continued, you can take what I asked you to do--that Welfare letter--and shove the whole thing right up your motherfucking ass. You feel me?
The guards came closer, as Winsome took a step toward the counselor.
I’m sick and motherfuckin tired of enslavein my own motherfuckin ass. Won’t have to listen to assholes like this no more. Holdin out that orange motherfuckin juice like it was holy water. Motherfucker. Should make you take a bath in it.
Get him out, please, Rabinowitz said.
The two guards came up to Winsome, each put a ham like hand through the crook of his arm and gently led him to the door.
And yeah, you Crisco lookin motherfucker, my name is Mr. Butler.

Winsome knew he was good for another ten twelve hours before the sickness came on. He thought about a great many things, revenge being on top of the list. But first things first.
He remembered that the doctor, Dr. Horowitz, who owned the clinic, was a religious man. Many times in the fifteen years that he’d been coming to the clinic they had had conversations about a great many things, faith just being one of them. He was one of the doctor’s first patients and had the time to even get to know a few of them. They’d gotten into some deep discussions. Even one where the doctor let slip about God creating the poppy so that hopeless men could dream and the trouble he got into when he wrote an article about that for a journal. The doctor got so involved in telling Winsome about those early years of his he knew when he noticed how much time had passed he’d have to hurry to make Friday’s services. He offered Winsome to ride in the cab with him on his way to the synagogue just so he could finish the conversation.
The sun was setting while Winsome waited by the ornately carved door that he had walked the doctor to the last time and that led into the main sanctuary. The beautiful light from the sunset, made his face seem younger, like an elementary school student. Other worshippers noticed him and soon a guard was at his side asking his business. After telling him who he was waiting for the guard begrudgingly moved off.
When the doctor arrived and noticed Winsome he reached for his elbow and gently guided him off. They stood far after the time for services began, and talked.

***

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2006-2015

UNTIL THE MUSIC STOPS--CHAPTER X--CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

CHAPTER X

KISS THE FATES

..."that the only way clear of the cool/crazy
flipflop was obviously slow, frustrating and hard work.
Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your
ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care. He might
have known, if he’d used any common sense. It didn’t
come as a revelation, only something he’d as soon
not’ve admitted."

"V"
--THOMAS PYNCHON


Katsuho came back to our apartment twice over the next few weeks. Once, to pick up her computer and more clothes, and the other to copy all of her favorite music into her iPod. Each time she did so she asked if I could not be there when she returned. I wasn’t. She told me that she would leave my keys at The Cedar Tavern. What she’d done was move into a Y on the Upper West Side and began to start piecing her life back together bit by bit. I was still managing to go to “taxi school” and waiting for her to come back to me. I had no idea just how badly she needed to get away from me and felt she’d eventually return. I would have promised her anything.
A few more days went by and I called her on her cell phone. Reluctantly, she agreed to meet me in Central Park. I’d gotten there early and was sitting on a bench waiting for her, thinking of all the things that she might say and my counter. Many conversations took place in my head before she showed up. I don’t remember if we kissed hello or not. What I do remember is that she told me that she needed time away; that she felt that her being was being taken from her; that she no longer knew what she was doing or who she was. I tried to listen attentively, all the while thinking of what to say to make her, force her, to come back and relieve this terrible “aloneness” that I was feeling. I thought that by not saying anything--and I really didn’t know what the hell to say to all that she told me--would in some way show her that I knew how she felt and would persuade her eventually to give our marriage another try. I did ask her if she was contemplating leaving or divorcing me, and she said she didn’t know. She needed time. I told her, in the most gracious, but still manipulative, way I could, to take it.
Katsuho did not come back to me. She couldn’t. I’ve only recently come to realize that. However, while we were still married and living together, she was introduced to a man, Carl Jacobs, a psychoanalyst, who needed one of his case studies typed. Katsuho took the job. Sometime later, when I knew and she knew I needed help she told me (and impressed by what she’d read in his case study), to call him. He was located down the block from where we lived. I’d always imagined myself in analysis with a doctor schooled in Freudian analysis who had an office in Greenwich Village. It suited the image I had of myself.
I began going to see him, while Katsuho and I were still together. I felt attuned to him the first time we met and his insights into my personality and behavior made a tremendous impression on me. But as I had done so many times before, I used some of our sessions together as a way of manipulating Katsuho into believing that these new and wonderful insights were sure to bring about the changes she and I wanted in our life together. Not that I knew I was manipulating her; I was really bullshitting myself. I’ve come to learn that there is no magic word, or sentence, or paragraph, or session, or drug, or woman, or anything that borders on the realm of fantasy and wishful thinking. Work, therapy, relationships, gratification, health, rent, writing, art, bricklaying, construction, everything, is hard fuckin work. All of the great insights mean shit if you don’t marry them to action. I was still an infant, thinking that by sucking on a tit, any tit, I’d get what I needed to get me through an hour, let alone a day.

I began driving a cab. It sucked. It was hard work, much different than when I drove in 1972. Three months after I started driving, I had the excuse I needed: my mom was sick and my father, who was never good in those situations, needed my help.
For the next few months I flew back and forth from New York City to Miami as if I was going to the corner store for smokes. During this period I helped my father find a nursing home for my mother, contact a lawyer who made it easy to get her on Medicaid--for a hefty fee--and watch as she went from nursing home to hospital and back again. He, while he and I met with the lawyer, had him give me power of attorney over her. It was easy for me to think he made the wise decision. I purposely spent a lot of time with her knowing that my father had always been emotionally unavailable to her and I was trying in my own guilt-stricken ways, to wash away our sins. One day, one of her more lucid days in the hospital, as I was ready to leave, I walked to the head of her hospital bed and leaned down to kiss her on her forehead. As I was picking my head up she said to me, “Have no fear.” I looked curiously at her. She had helped put the fear of God in me, certainly after I became diabetic. I didn’t know how to react. I said to her, “I won’t,” and left.
My father, too, was not doing very well, physically. He’d been very overweight most of his life, and now he was obese, and diabetic. I felt needed. And had no problem taking all the money I needed to help see him through this crisis.
Shortly upon returning to New York, and resuming my therapy, I got a call from my father telling me that my mom had took a turn for the worse. It seemed I’d just unpacked when I was aboard a plane heading south. I looked forward to getting back together with my father, going out to eat in some fashionable restaurants in Bal Harbour, and now drinking with him. Previously, I’d turned him onto high-end vodka and he took to it immediately.
My mother had developed dementia, aside from the multiple medical conditions she already suffered from. When I walked into her hospital room she didn’t recognize me at first and confused me with my brother’s wife, who she called out for repeatedly. Every time she struggled to find a word or sentence she began reciting the alphabet or multiplication table. During the next few days her condition worsened. One day, as I walked from her room, the doctor called out to me. He told me that my mother needed a feeding tube put into her. I thought for a second and told him no. He said that her heart was still strong and she had to have this tube in her to prolong her life. I refused. I didn’t return to her bedside either.
An hour later I was having an espresso and Sambuca at a corner bistro near my father’s apartment when my cell phone rang. It was a call from the doctor’s wife, a friend of my mother and father for the past twenty years. She told me that my mother had died. I asked how. Cardiac arrest I was told. I went back to my father’s apartment. He was not visibly upset, didn’t cry, and neither did I. We went to a local funeral home and made arrangements for her cremation. We came home and an hour later we were sitting at the same fashionable restaurant in Bal Harbour contemplating what we were going to have for dinner.
There were feelings I had that went unarticulated and even now I’m hard pressed to describe just what was going through me, let alone him, at the time. But the truth is the truth. My father and I did not really ever go into any of that stuff you might imagine family might when their mother or father or wife dies. In fact, that night, over dinner, my father began to tell me for the first time of his adulterous affair with a woman I knew in my teenage years who was a customer in his supermarket. She, he said, was what he’d always wanted in a woman, but because of us, his kids, he never left my mother. What to make of his disclosure hours after the death of my mother is hard to discern. It would not be unlike him to blame me for his inability to find happiness while projecting to me what a great, self-sacrificing, dad he was.
I stayed with him for the next few weeks during which we went to see my mother’s body before she was cremated. We were alone in this big chapel when they wheeled her out in a cardboard box in the clothes we picked out for her--one of her favorite Miami Beach blouses that had these sparkly fish--and placed her on this platform on eye level. The first thing I noticed was her expression: fierce. It was the anger and rigidity that she had carried with her throughout her life. I knew that lying inside this woman was “love,” though it couldn’t be seen. I went up to her body, leaned down and kissed her on her forehead. It was freezing. I wondered if they’d packed the inside of her with ice.
My father and I stood shoulder to shoulder, and I looked over at him to see what he was thinking and feeling. I couldn’t tell, nor did he tell me. I assumed he was cataloguing the sixty plus years they’d been married, like a dying person would.
We stayed about a half-hour. I guess we both felt that was sufficient. We really didn’t talk about her again for the rest of my stay. Reluctantly, a few days after, I flew back to New York City.
For a time I entertained the idea about going down to Miami to live with my father and find some kind of job. During the first few weeks I’d been back, my father began falling. I went back down there and found him a nurse’s aide that my father’s insurance policy would pay for. He liked her, and quickly developed a dependency on her similar to the one he had with my mother. And since she lived down the block from him, he quickly enlisted her services--for a few extra bucks--to be at his beckon call. He wanted me to set up Medicaid for him as we did for my mother. I contacted the same lawyer and put the wheels in motion. In regard to money, my father was a secretive and manipulative man. In fact, in regard to everything he was secretive and manipulative; but money to him meant power, and he was not about to fuck with that. To insure that I was not more of a burden to him then necessary, he strongly advised me to get government disability. Once back in New York I did exactly that.
Given what medical conditions I had it was not terribly difficult to get on Social Security Disability. I believed that in a short period of time, once I got my bearings, I’d be able to get another kind of job, get off the government tit, and make a life for myself. But actually my world had gotten smaller: Katsuho was obviously gone and who knew when she’d return. I began to drink more heavily and had stopped going to AA meetings long ago and so I couldn’t call the people I became friendly with there because I had no intentions of giving up drinking.
For quite a bit of time I emailed Katsuho, hoping my writing would seduce her into returning. I’d tell her about my recent experiences in Miami, my sessions with Carl, how my life had changed, were changing, and how, given the chance, we could make this work. She was careful to respond, but when she did, Katsuho made it apparent to me that that was not in the cards. I read, but couldn’t let myself absorb.
The Cedar Tavern had become my world. Joey had been to me the brother I’d always wanted and now he came even more to the fore. I never really had to pay for anything at his bar. I had endless conversations with him about both our lives, and we shared an intimacy, as those who are friends over the course of many decades would. The people who worked there liked me, and I also was friendly with many of the other patrons. And so, from the afternoon to the early evening, I’d be there, reading, writing, socializing, and drinking.
Jacobs was not a strict Freudian analyst. He was vocal, certainly with me. He knew the depth of my illness and used whatever tools he had to break me out of my lethargy. But by the time I left the session and got back to my pad, which was up the block from his office, my inspiration had waned and all my fears returned. I’d go into The Cedar and be sucked up by the darkness.
Very soon that no longer did the trick. One New Years Eve, I had a few drinks at The Cedar and became terribly anxious, almost panicky. My world began closing in on me even further than it had. I bolted from The Cedar and headed straight for Washington Square Park. I knew that drug dealers had hung out there since Broadway was a prairie, and quickly made the acquaintance of one. I told him that I was looking for heroin and he told me to wait for him on 8th Street. In fifteen minutes he was back and pressed a tin foil package into my hand and I gave him some money. I walked as quickly as possible back to my place, but when I opened the foil I knew I’d been “beat.” Just as quickly I walked back to the park, not to find and confront him, but to find someone else and try to be smarter. I did, and was.
We exchanged cell phone numbers and he told me he’d call me within an hour. When he called, I met him in the vestibule of my apartment, opened a bag, tasted it, handed him the money and went upstairs to make the internal pressures abate. Most of my veins had collapsed, but I managed to find a few near my wrist that were more painful to penetrate but carried the blessed liquid.
Jacobs was on vacation and I had no intention of calling him on the number he left. Because I was alone, and because I was alone, I shot drugs with impunity. I now had the cell phone number of a dealer who, even though he charged me a fee on top of what the junk cost, was reliable. In fact, when I didn’t call him, he called me and I almost made myself believe he was a friend.
When Jacobs returned I told him. It took me three months, probably because he took his customary break in February, but I stopped by “checking in” to a hospital, going through Lenox Hill’s emergency room. I’d been living on a diet of dope, sweets, and booze. I began to resent my having to eat any “real” food because of my ingrained attachment to life. My pallor was as gray as the last sight of a battleship sinking. I knew it was time to abandon ship.

A few years after having becoming president of the American Diabetes Association, Jerry Bernstein decided to retire from private practice. I had an impossible time finding a replacement. The doctor I was now seeing had provided me with an ample supply of pain medication, which he wasn’t able to wean me off. He consulted a psychiatrist who specialized in addiction who suggested because of my long history of opiod addiction, I go on a methadone maintenance program. I balked at that. I’d read about a new drug that had proved successful in treating “motivated” addicts: Buphenorphine. When I asked the psychiatrist he told me that it was quite expensive and he didn’t think Medicaid would cover it. I didn’t believe him.
I checked myself into a hospital to get detoxed. The addiction specialist I met with there told me the same thing about Buphenorphine: it’s a good tool, but expensive.
Two days after I got out of Lenox Hill I was shooting dope again. Two weeks later I was back in the same emergency room at Lenox Hill, but this time I landed in the psych ward. It was humiliating. They took away my sneaker laces, belt, cell phone and the rest of my possessions, except for my sweat pants and shirt. I saw one of the same psychiatrists who was assigned to me my previous stay and asked him if he could help me find a Buphenorphine program that would accept Medicare/Medicaid.
The psychiatrist found a program for me on the west side and gave me the information and contact number. The day I was released from the psych ward I made the phone call, but I could not keep myself away from junk. When I arrived to be interviewed and screened by two doctors, one who would be monitoring me and the other who owned the clinic, they told me I’d have to remain clean for at least 72 hours and be in withdrawal before I could be administered the first dose of Buphenorphine. It took another two weeks before I could manage that.
Buphenorphine/Suboxone is a pill that is taken sublingual--under the tongue--until it dissolves. The opiate attaches to the opiate receptors--the same mu receptors that our endogenous opiods attach to from birth--but block the “high feeling” effects of ingested opiods. Like methadone, it can be lethal, if the dosage is overridden. It could cause respiratory distress and failure. But unlike methadone it promotes energy and enthusiasm and reduces cravings. Once finding a stable dosage, I was able to take home a month’s supply, and had to adhere to the rules of the clinic: come once a week to see the doctor, once a week for counseling, and once a week for group. The psychiatrist there had me on hefty doses of a combination of anti-depression medication and my mood lifted. I felt more positive than I had in quite a few years.
My sessions with Jacobs were becoming more intense. The way I would pronounce certain words, put together phrases or the syntax of my sentences were subject to his dissection. My perceptions and assumptions were scrutinized. Sometimes I was afraid to go into sessions knowing he’d have me see the way “the other” might. Gradually, I began to develop a growing intolerance to my subterfuges, both internally and externally. What he was helping me do, which of course I’d never been able to do before, was integrate the disparate and contradicting nature of being alive. The “black” and “white” which had been my bedrock was being dismantled, rearranged, and glued together with a new kind of ambiguity. This is not to say that therapy with Jacobs did not obviate the anger, frustration, and wish for fantasy all at once. Many times I said to him: “fuck you.” And my worst fear was that he’d say, “You’re no longer my patient.” But he’d say, “Fuck you,” back, in those words. And he’d stick with me.

My father decided to go into a nursing home, the same one that my mother had been in. In a way, I breathed a sigh of relief knowing that his care would be looked after by someone other than me, and that whatever money he had left would go to me, or so he said. My brother had been on “the outs” with him and my mother for years--he’d not come down for her funeral/cremation--and I did nothing to encourage my father to try and repair their bond. In fact, I secretly felt pleased that this had happened. My brother and I, especially in regard to my father, was in and out of his grace, translated into “largess.” We alternated years of speaking and not to speaking to him or them. Now, I felt that I’d “won.” How fortunate I felt at times knowing that I was the favored son. Then the outcast, then the favored. Finally, I was ready to pick up all the marbles.
I must have “lost my fucking marbles” believing my father, but I did.
A few days before Christmas, my father called me to let me know that a strange rash had developed on parts of his body and that he’d be going to a mini-hospital unit in the nursing home. A day later I got a call from his doctor that my father had died from congestive heart failure in his sleep.
I thought for a couple of minutes before calling Jacobs, who was on his Christmas break. Quickly, he called me back and I told him what had happened. I said that I didn’t want to go down to Miami to arrange for the cremation, but could do that from up here. He advised against me doing that. Anthropologically, he said, we need to see our dead so that the grieving process can begin.
I made arrangements for a first class round trip ticket. Hell, I deserve this, I said to myself, even though Jacobs had often repeated the line from the Clint Eastwood movie, Unforgiven, Deserve has nothin ta do with it.
I’d hadn’t spoken with my brother for the better part of five or six years, but I called him and left a message that something had happened and to call me back. When he did, I told him that our father was dead. He asked if I was going to Florida and I told him I was. He told me that he wasn’t, which was all right with me. It made me feel superior.
I’d called up the same funeral home that my mother was cremated in and made arrangements for my father to be picked up. I flew in and out of Miami in a matter of a few hours. The only other person inside the chapel was my father’s nurse’s aide. They’d taken a liking to each other, based on mutual need. I was happy she was there. Unlike my mother, my father looked pretty peaceful lying there dead. He was still wearing his hospital pajamas. His aide and I stood over his cardboard resting place and she said softly to him, much like a wife, “I told you that he’d come.” I wasn’t too surprised by her statement. My father, to my knowledge, never trusted anybody, except strangers and then, only until he got to know them.

My father had told me, for years, he was leaving whatever money he had to me. He justified that decision by angrily explaining how my brother and his wife wouldn’t let him and my mother live in their home unless they turned over their funds to them. And so, when I got back to my pad in New York City and opened for the first time my father’s Last Will and Testament and found that he left my brother half of his estate, it shocked the shit out of me. But after a few seconds I began to laugh. Fearing if he told me the truth about his plans I’d no longer do what he wanted--come down to Miami, take him in and out of hospitals and nursing homes, be a friend, a son, a whatever--he did what he’d done his entire life: divide and conquer.
When my brother and I began speaking again, we compared notes. It became apparent to us that from an early age my father would tell my brother and me two different things about the same situation. Whether he feared us “ganging up” and not do his bidding or if he promoted our suspicions of each other to “work us” at his convenience, we’ll never really know. It wasn’t just coincidental that when I was speaking with my parents my brother wasn’t and vice versa. And given the fact that there were huge chunks of time that my brother and I weren’t speaking to each other, and certainly not honestly, there was no way for us to see how our father was playing us off one another. In fact, the flaws in our characters and personalities, and our shared jealousies and mistrust and anger toward each other run so deep, that after trying for almost two years to repair our relationship we are now not talking with one another. He, of course, grew up in the same house with the same parents. And had the misfortune of having me as an older brother. Many of my experiences growing up are his as well, even though there’s more than a six-year difference between us. But in a strange way I might have been luckier. My diabetes provided me with a structure that needed to be adhered to. The disease forced me to develop an intelligence and curiosity that were polar opposites from their world in Brooklyn.

Everybody has the “Dawn Phenomenon.” Between two and four in the morning, the body starts secreting glucose in order to begin waking. In those “wee small hours of the morning,” a recent scientific data show, insulin has a tendency to break down or become weaker. What this means is that diabetics, who have had nothing to eat from the time they went to sleep until the time they awoke and, who had blood glucose readings within the normal range (80-150), could find themselves with a higher or elevated morning glucose reading. There are different interventions to combat this given the differences in each of our physical profiles and our body’s idiosyncrasies. Bernstein knew and understood this. He also understood that positive, absolute control is impossible. Some mornings I’m higher or lower without explanation. This is because each night, or early morning, my body capriciously secretes glucose. I could eat the same thing, at the same hour, in two, three, and sometimes four consecutive days, and my blood glucose readings would fluctuate, some days wildly, even when I’d done the same amount of physical exertion during those periods. I’m not going to say that glucose readings are arbitrary, they’re not. But this, like living and dying, is not an exact science.
Good diabetic control implies structure, work, planning, and deprivation, food deprivation. If you adhere to some rules and regulations, your odds are better of living a life relatively free of too many problems and complications. My gut instincts are to rebel against such a life. I’ve got to try to control them, too. I’m all too familiar with what Nietzshe said, “Be wary of casting out your devils, for that may be the best part of you.” Well, Freddy, I love you, always have, but I’ve got to try to figure out some way to stay here a little longer, not so much to figure it out, but to fuck with it some more. Under the best of circumstances, I’m operating with a cylinder missing. This is not to say that if I take care of the car, I can’t put some serious mileage on her, but I have to take care of the car, and get lucky. I have to try to keep the “revs” somewhere in the middle where the engine functions best, make sure I take her in for periodic mileage inspections and have a very good mechanic.
Jerry Bernstein, my doctor, friend, and confidant, is now working as an educator and administrator in a major teaching hospital complex, Beth Israel Medical Center. He’s just returned from a trip to Russia and has become a great force in the field of endocrinology the world over. I’m happy he still returns my phone calls.
After Jean returned to San Francisco, she fell in love with someone, and they’ve been happily married for over a decade at this date. Jean and I speak often; unusual for the way I used to end my affairs of the heart.
Diane, too, while not married, has moved out of Manhattan and is living in a little town outside of Atlantic City and while we don’t speak often, we try to keep up with each other. I’d carried a torch for her for many years after our affair ended, but some women, no matter how hard you’ve loved them, and no matter how much they’ve loved you, the reality destroys whatever desire, no matter how feverish it had once existed.
Katsuho has become an owner of a business. She’d been working, as I said, as a designer and maker of furniture. When the owner of the shop decided he wanted to go back to North Carolina, he asked Katsuho if she would take over for him. Nervously, she accepted. I told you she has moxie. Except for exchanging emails once or twice a year we aren’t in touch. However, I did get an unexpected email from Katsuho not too long ago. I’m sure she struggled writing it and thought twice before sending it. She told me that she’d gotten married a few months before and said as unambiguously she thought possible, “I am happy.” Katsuho went on to say she did not want me to be surprised when I get a letter from the church regarding her and her marriage. Her husband, a practicing Catholic, felt he could not comfortably practice his faith in a church of his choosing unless he received some kind of Papal Dispensation. For Katsuho, as devout an anti-organized religion gal as one could imagine, I was somewhat taken aback by her request to fill out whatever the church would send and get it back to them. But a second later I thought: What’s true for Katsuho is true for all of us: Love will make you do the damnedest things at various times in our lives, and only the further passage of our time will reveal, from moment to moment, if it was worth it.

And me? I’ve become an “Everythingian.” Knowing that the brain of an ant is more complex than our most advanced computer, how the hell am I going to choose one explanation for how I developed and survived? I could pin it on genetics, certain pre dispositions, psycho and neurobiology, the psychic tensions between Eros and Thanatos, attachment objects, environments, social lubricants and maturation, or dumb luck, capricious and arbitrary. It’s all those, and more.
The field of Evolutionary Psychobiology interests me because it focuses on “adaptation” rather than “disease” as currently understood by medical literature. An “adaptation” is an evolved trait that solves some particular problem for a particular organism that enables it to survive, grow, and of course, reproduce. That’s what we’re about, ain’t we, to keep it going. So imagine a person casually walking around his forest, not thinking of much, maybe a little hungry, maybe pissed off about his wife, or girl, or kid, or tribal leader, or his gods, and he sees an apple lying there. He picks it up, takes a bite, and it tastes different, not bad, but different. In a little while his mood changes. He doesn’t feel so shitty, but a little silly. The next day he sees another apple and does the same as the day before. Before too long he moves his whole fuckin family and builds a house near the apple tree. Then he turns some of his family and friends onto this. For all we know he wrote The Bible tipsy, and later, while sober, invented what we call capitalism today.
Then I began thinking about God in relation to evolution. If there is someone or something orchestrating this mad affair, than that “forbidden fruit” sure did lead to and make a lot of things possible. It enabled a person to either hold on for a little while longer and it provided some incredible insights. And any insight can potentially father future insights and inventions from science to industry to the arts to academia to just about anything. Of course, there’s also a very fluid and dangerous line of demarcation when that same substance tears away at the fabric of a person or society, but the mystery, the magic, is not knowing where that line is. One thing I do know: as of this writing I’ve survived and that’s triumph enough.

I’m reminded of a wonderful story I heard about Miles Davis and John Coltrane when they were playing together. It seems that Trane was at that point where the musical ideas that were exploding in his head were being played out on the bandstand with Miles. The ideas would come so fast and so furious that often times he’d forget that he was playing with other cats, and the sound would just jump out of his horn. After one particularly long solo by Trane, he was walking with Miles off the bandstand during a break in the set. “Miles,” Trane began, “I know that I’m taking all this time during my solo, but I can’t seem to stop. The ideas are happenin’ so fast and my fingers are just flyin’ and I’m tryin’ to keep up with all of them. How do I stop?”
Miles looked at Trane and with all the love that Miles could ever muster said, in a voice that could be described as a kind of marbled grit, “Take the horn out yer mouth.”

There are days when I wish the syringe I was holding in my hand was filled with junk instead of insulin; there are days when I order a club soda in a restaurant and for the briefest of seconds I actually taste Chivas Regal. There are days when I know that a taste of sweet reefer would make this picture better, or book deeper, or food more delicious, or laugh sillier and I’d be able to make a whole lot more sense out of my life than anything else. And those aren’t days I’m feeling particularly bad. I still can’t go by a liquor store, a drug store, a hospital, certain locations in New York City and elsewhere and not be seduced by my history. But so far, I’ve managed not to dance to that tune.
Now, however, at age sixty plus, I feel that I have a kind of foundation, a hedge, against this mad and beautiful refrain that’s been playing in my head ever since I was old enough to walk to a melody that has the confluence of all that I experienced growing up, grooving to my very own originality.

But now it’s time to take the horn out of my mouth. This tune’s over.

###

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

LOVE, 1965--FROM CHAPTER 5: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

The only thing I “cut” was class. If high school had little meaning for me, college had less. Fewer controls meant fewer classes. From time to time I’ve pondered this: Is “freedom” easier with structure or without? Don’t kill yourself thinking about it. However, if you spend more than a few minutes thinking about it, you have your answer.
Every Monday we got into Larry’s beat-up, rusted, tin can of a Ford and made our way into Manhattan. Greenwich Village was our usual point of reference, beginning with Latin Night at The Village Gate. We had a few drug connections in the city and would shop after the set, before starting back to Sullivan County. One particular disastrous trip began with me driving from South Fallsburg, wearing a sweater that had seen better days. On this sweater I had a button, popular in the sixties, as buttons were at that time that said, simply, “It Sucks.” I was going very fast and was clocked by a state trooper somewhere around Middletown. I pulled over to the shoulder of the Interstate and waited. He came, all six foot four of him. His waist was at my window, and the belt holding his gun. My future danced before my eyes. After giving him my license and Larry’s registration, and after he gave me a ticket, he asked the meaning of my button. I told him that it answered any question he might want to ask. He paused for a second, and then asked me how I felt now that my license was going to be suspended.
On another occasion, after ingesting a portion of magic mushrooms, I tripped into my biology class where we happened to be dissecting a fetal pig. I figured this was going to be fun, until I saw the pig move. Quickly, I grabbed it by its short puny hind legs and hurled it out the opened window. Luckily, my teacher, somewhat the faculty rogue, thought it funny. The dean, however, after some reports from other teachers concerning my arrogant and abhorrent behavior, did not. When he visited my dorm, after the incident, he found it even less funny. To say my bed wasn’t made would be like saying there was loose dirt in Dresden after the blitz. He made it clear to me and my parents, that I was not to return there next term, and hopefully, not to the Catskill region of New York at all.
I was a physical and mental basket case the day my folks came to pick me up. I wore the same sweater the state trooper had delighted in, tired dungarees, muddied sneakers, no socks, hair parted in four or five different places, and an expression that said, “take me anyplace.” Fred Astaire danced a suicide two-step in my head while my parents bombarded me with the truth of my behavior and situation. I had to take drivers end classes for my suspended license mandated by The Motor Vehicle Bureau, work in the supermarket immediately, and see Dr. Zarawitz next week. The summer looked grim.

My folks saw my condition and just allowed me time to rest and heal. I don’t know if that was a conscious decision, or one based on fear, confusion and non-confrontation. In any event, I ate good foods and rested for days but still my depression didn’t lift. However, after a week, after the chemicals left my body, it did. One day I woke up and didn’t feel so bad; I didn’t feel great, but good enough to go out again and see some friends who I knew didn’t get high, at least not yet.
Donny, who was going to Brooklyn College and who had joined a fraternity, persuaded me to go to one of their parties. Reluctantly, I went. I was desperate for company. I was never one for fraternities, sororities, big parties, gatherings, or crowds. I do not like crowds; I distrust crowds. I think the crowd becomes mindless with the very real possibility of mindless action. An action that an individual would never do when alone somehow becomes not only permissible but also encouraged among other humans of cowardly bent.
When in crowded rooms with people I don’t know, I usually look to do one of two things: either I look for a drink, or a place where I can hide, preferably both. Donny brought me there but was soon lost amid his fraternity brothers celebrating the end of the semester and the beginning of summer. Summer for spirits at rest, for minds uncluttered by defeat. I grabbed a beer and looked around for a spot that seemed isolated. I spied an anteroom near the front of the house, snatched two more cans of beer, and went toward it. If somebody thought they could drink two cans of beer, I could drink four, and so on. In fact, I thought I could piss more than most people could drink. Hey, any of our social masculine trappings would encourage me, motivate me, and elevate me, beyond the ozone layer. I turned a corner, sipping on one beer, and clutching two more when I saw Corinne sitting on the edge of a sofa, alone.
“Hey man.” She looked up. Her face brightened. Between the two of us we could have lit up Broadway. “What the fuck you doin’ here?” I stuttered, beer dribbling down the corner of my mouth. She laughed with one of those stupefied expressions and said, “I really don’t know.”
“Me neither, let’s get the Hell out of here.”
“I’m ready.” She stood up and came over to me.
“Wait right here, I’ll be right back.” I ran into the living room, grabbed some more beer and hurried back to her. I put my hand through the crook of her elbow, and the first wave of adrenaline rushed through me. On legs that could best be described as “wobbly,” I guided her out the front door.
Both of us laughed and breathed a sigh of relief. “It’s a good thing I showed up when I did. In another minute you would have been dead.”
We walked and talked and sipped our beers. We traded confidences and told each other the disappointments and, to some extent, the pain, that the year had wrought. It was difficult and easy at the same time. She had outgrown Marty and had moved on, but her home situation was unraveling. Her mother had taken up with her father’s best friend who lived next door to them, and she felt obligated to sustain her brother and sister. Her academic work was in a shambles. Her concentration had fled, and she was now thinking of dropping Russian as a major and switching to Art. “It’s easy to hide behind art,” she explained. “You can make a case for anything.”
“That’s what Dostoyevsky did, didn’t he?” She looked at me long and hard but said nothing.
We caught a bus back to Seagate and talked on the beach until the sun inched its way out of the water.
“We really shouldn’t say goodbye now, you know,” I said.
“I can’t just do it like that. I need a little time.”
“Take your time,” I said, but didn’t really mean it, “I ain’t goin’ nowhere; I’m gonna be here.”
I walked her home and kissed her gently. “Tomorrow?”
“Yes, tomorrow.” She turned and walked inside her house, and I knew that I was going inside with her as well.
That’s all it took. That’s all it ever takes, for any of us, isn’t it? A little bit of hope. Love is like knowledge: you never know when it’s going to leap up and grab you around the throat. But, if “thinking” is to “knowledge” is to “head’, and if “love” is to “feeling” is to “heart” then I did a whole lot of “feeling” and not very much “thinking.” In my “heart” I was a victim; in my “head” a victimizer. Rarely does that coin ever land on its side. It would take me years to become aware of that. But, it was summer! The wounds of that winter would heal, scar over, and fade. Romance had careened around the corner like a mad streetcar with a raving conductor playing a silly Sousa march. What else can make you forget the dead loves, the betrayals, defeats, and dreams unrealized like the first budding of a new love?

Problems and responsibilities were like so many pieces of lint that you brush away with a flick of the hand. That behemoth of bureaucracy, The Motor Vehicle Bureau, had me going into New York City, to watch a film that featured car accidents, violent, graphic and thoroughly enjoyable, before I could get my license back, and my father had me going into his store a few days a week. Neither could diminish in any way the exhilaration I felt before, during, or after being with Corinne. And Corinne and I were nearly inseparable those first few weeks. Talking in the early morning and then hooking up in the evening to talk and walk some more bracketed our days. And there was plenty to talk about: Vietnam, civil rights, Coltrane playing like a priest conducting mass in Latin on Meditations on the one hand and Dylan Bringing It All Back Home on the other; Ginsberg and Ramparts and infidelity and communism/socialism and liberation and burning burning burning the human dynamo in the machinery of night. She converted me to Dylan; I turned her on to Billie and Bird, Miles, and Trane. She brought me back to The Impressions, Miracles, and soul, and I told her about The Towne Hill and Sam Cooke. I showed her my poetry, and she told me how I might want to polish it. Whatever we did, whatever we talked about, sex permeated the air around us. The tease of unspoken promise heightened our senses. We were already lovers who had yet to consummate our love, and the fever built like heat rising off the asphalt tar, swirling around and through and over us and up over our heads.
Curtis Mayfield was singing Gypsy Woman on a hot June day when we finally made love in the basement of her house in her bedroom. It was beautifully awkward. We fumbled with each other and strained to please. It was too conscious, and not conscious enough, but by the end of the summer we were familiar with each other’s likes and dislikes, trusting and experimenting with tongues and teeth and fingers and eyes and ears and flesh and sweat and sweat, our hair wet and our bodies devoured and devouring. We’d walk the boardwalk in Coney Island or the beach in Seagate after making love; the air, sweet and salty licking our bodies, making my cock, and her nipples, hard again and making us laugh as the breezes played with and through unbuttoned shirts and leather sandals. We were as invincible as the ocean. Nothing was unobtainable. She’d lightly place her hand on the small of my back and rub or stick her hand in the rear pocket of my jeans. I’d hold her around her waist and watch the white foamed waves, etched in black, roll in and out, and in again. Nothing would change, ever. And, as new lovers would, we’d make love anywhere, anytime: the backs of cars, the beach, a hallway, staircase, her bedroom in the basement, or my bedroom which was next to my parents bedroom. The only thing that mattered was whether or not we had a few minutes to play with. And really, that didn’t matter much either.

pgs 48-51: From Chapter 5: JUNK SICK: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015