JUNK SICK

Maybe it starts with a flutter,
a body vibration
in the tips of your fingers
or a ripple behind your neck.
Perhaps it begins with voices
vying for space in a motel
where the No Vacancy neon
has lost a letter or two.
Maybe that's followed
by a craving for stillness;
or maybe there are ghosts
in your morning coffee;
or perhaps there is a silence
of love
and its perils:
your mother's nipple, once,
as big as your thumb,
now receding from view,
the slam of a door
and your lover's footsteps
retreating and getting fainter
as the evening's rush swallows
what you thought was;

or maybe it starts
with some success--
accidental or not
and suddenly you're naked
standing in a forest
of doubt, surrounded
by fear,
a feeling of fraud
corroding the wires
to your heart, disbelief
punching your worth silly;

or perhaps it comes
from nothing, a nowhere day
in November, idle thoughts,
dreamless, stagnant,
until you look, unknowingly,
at a vein
in the crook of your arm
scarred over
from how many times you've traveled down it,
hundreds, maybe thousands of times,
sliding the spike in
like getting into well-worn slippers,
and you remember the ease and the warmth
of the amniotic highway,
suckling, murmuring, nurturing
a life you blessedly know nothing of,
yet know where the key to all things
is hidden.

You now are able to locate the ache
and lean, ever so gently,
into remedies
that can take seconds or years
as your unconscious churns
to fulfil. But no matter--
you have nothing
but time.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

YOU SLIP THE NEEDLE

in the vein
like you're getting
into an old pair of slippers
only to find it collapsed
and you searching
for a new one--
what a drag!
You've worked so hard,
been through so much,
only to be betrayed
by your own damn body
and its secret
expiration date.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

WHEN MY EX-WIFE WAS BORN

I was already in love
with another woman.
In fact,
I was crazy in love with her.
It moved pieces of me around.
But then,
junk took over,
and made the living
dead & the dead more real
than the living,
but the dead didn't dance
for decades--
until my ex
became my now
& now became new
& shiny.
But then,
the junk took over.
And darkness fell
on a soft
& useless
dick.
These women,
loves of my life,
were born three days
but twenty-six years
apart.
One was straight-laced New Jersey finishing school;
the other radical Japanese artist Nagasaki poor.
The common denominator
was me...
& poetry.
Always is.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2018

ZOMBIES ALL

For George Romero

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

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

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

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

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

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

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

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

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

BEING DEAD WAS A LIFE WORTH LIVING--FROM CHAPTER VI--CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

Drugs are the “great equalizer.” Everybody who abuses them is the same age, around three months old, emotionally not yet at a stage when they can ingest solid food, and having no teeth to masticate, they nurse at the nipple of liquor and reefer, or the powder or liquid of junk, coke, or both.

There’s a major difference between a “hope fiend” and a “dope” fiend. “Hope fiends” gives someone their money and they “hope” he’ll come back with the drugs. A “dope fiend” goes out and gets his own. In today’s drug market some who are wealthy or are too scared to go into neighborhoods that cater to street addicts, can have their drugs delivered, which at the end of my use I did. But in the sixties and seventies you went out and got it, or you were lucky to get it brought to you while you waited, and waited, expectedly on street corners or the vestibules of buildings.
When Bobby, the construction worker, confided in me that he was using junk, I told him that I had used and wanted to use again.
“No problem,” he said. “You can meet me at work or I can bring it back here to you.”
“I’ll meet ya,” I replied.
Bobby had a friend in Seagate, Michael G., a school teacher, who had just gotten a ten thousand dollar inheritance from his grandfather. He was just “chipping,” a phrase used by junkies to mean “using just a little occasionally,” and he asked Bobby if he could turn his inheritance into some real money. “Sure,” Bobby told him, by buying “weight” (a significant amount of the drug), he would get heroin that was purer and thus could “cut it” with agents such as lactose, maltose, quinine, etc., tripling or quadrupling his money, and getting high at the same time. How could a dope fiend pass up an opportunity like that? And so, every day Bobby and I would dip into his stash, take out some of the purer heroin that was waiting to be cut, exchange that for the real cut, and get high with it.
Syringes were, of course, no problem for me to get or get accustomed to using. Soon, instead of snorting scag, we were shooting it. And that was the bridge, which transcended the traditional “transitional objects,” like a nipple, thumb, or favorite blanket that psychologists would identify that connected me to my mom and her womb. Unlike my insulin and syringe needle which allowed me to merely exist, the needle on the syringe of junk (that contained an ironically cloudy thin milky substance that looked like the insulin I used), allowed me to be close to mom and her “safety” while allowing me my fantasies.
For someone like me who had always struggled with inchoate voices and craved a kind of independence I’d never achieved--a separateness from both my mother and father--junk worked. (Once I’d found the drug and it had “solved” all these confused and conflictional “I’s” it provided a fierce discipline to the passing hours and at the same time a liberation after injecting it.) Heroin, and all drugs, are inert. Dead. You have to pick them up and use them; you have to impose on them your own symbols, myths, and affect. Suddenly you realize, without being told, that she, heroin, will not tolerate any other gods, competition or intrusion. I couldn’t trust my family, let alone other humans; they’re inconsistent at best, liars and emasculators at worst. But that which is dead is wonderfully consistent. And if you’re obedient and persevering, she will reward you. If not, you’ll be sick.
I believed then, and I believe now, that heroin was, in large part, medicinal for me. Like insulin I needed the junk not to be sick. It slowed everything down and quieted the voices, both inner and outer. I could stare at my sneaker for four hours and be very content, “Yeah, a sneaker, yeah, that’s cool.” It grounded all the loose wires in my head and body. It worked in a variety of forms, all of them insidious. I suppose that’s how the term “fix” emanated. It did “fix” me in place and time; it did “fix” and keep the world at bay and in place. When the whole world seemed chaotic and threatening, this drug supplied a numbed and safe consistency. I wanted to be uninvolved, uncaring, and not of this world. Junk did all that and more. The middle-class life, espoused by my Jewish middle-class parents and upbringing, was severely challenged and usurped by the route my existence had taken years before I became immersed in the abuse of mood altering chemicals. It gave me an identity. Instead of being a “sick” diabetic--in some ways deformed, a freak--I was a rebel poet, a tough but romantic junkie, smart, too. Just what the other doctor ordered.
The good news was that heroin, unlike some other drugs that I had been using, had no apparent affect on my diabetes, at first. Though I didn’t crave food, I could eat when I needed to, but the danger in long term intravenous use is, of course, physical tolerance and addiction. The diseases attenuated to heroin addiction are many including hepatitis, pneumonia and HIV/AIDS. However, that says more about the lifestyle of the junkie than the drug itself.
The taboo of heroin forces the user into the bowels of whatever place he/she happens to inhabit. The degradation, while not swift, is, however, legendary. I was lucky. I was white, middle class, educated, and my “runs” while never short (one to three years) were never that long either, and because these “runs” were usually done in the homes of those who had jobs, I always had shelter, food, and clothing. Also, my diabetes in a freak happenstance saved my life. Had I’d shared needles to shoot up, which I never did, I would have been vulnerable to the ravages of AIDS; an horrific by-product for those who were only trying to cope with the hands they were dealt. I am in no way trying to justify, excuse, or exonerate those, myself included, who have done horrible things, not only to themselves but to other people, especially to those other people who at one time trusted, even loved them, and perhaps still do. I am not proud of some of the things I’ve done and imagine other people feel likewise.
Michael G. and his wife left for a two week vacation that summer. He also left any hope of having any heroin when he returned. Bobby told him it was stolen. I told Bobby to wear a long sleeved shirt, even though it was a steamy New York August.
Michael believed him because he wanted to believe him, and bought more, and started to use. Big mistake. Years later, after I had stopped using, I ran into Michael on Eighth Street, in Greenwich Village. His eyes looked like they were back lit. They were radioactive. They glowed. He told me he was on the methadone maintenance program, swallowing three hundred milligrams of that orange-colored juice a day. The average dose at that time was forty to sixty milligrams. He had some habit.
If my folks saw my glassy eyes or heard my slowed speech, they pretended not to. Maybe if I nodded in the chicken soup, they might have suspected something extraordinary was afoot, but not yet. They suspected, but couldn’t confront. They were afraid of me and a situation they knew little about. How the weak tyrannize us! What they said instead was, “You need a job.” I turned some of my attention to finding one.

The reality was that drugs were becoming more important than any sexual union. Heroin takes the place of women. Perhaps that’s one reason why heroin dealers used to be called, “Mom.” The style that I hadn’t achieved in the bedroom was achieved by the style that I practiced and perfected in drinking and drugging.
Years later, “Mom” became my doctors and any object that enabled me to “safely” bridge the divide between me and the outside world. The hours of frustration I’d tolerate waiting in a doctor’s office for a prescription of Percocet, Vicodin, Oxycontin, Morphine or Dilaudid as I did forty years before when I was waiting for a connection on the corner of 128th Street and Lenox Ave, was preferable to the uncertainty, anxiety, and depression that I experienced in all my waking hours. But when I turned my doctor’s into dealers, it was not only “legal,” but less threatening, too. With my doctors I could use my diabetes and my denial of having diabetes to my advantage to obfuscate and subvert the reality of having to grow up and face a reality of being independent and separate from my parents. I was good at an early age at “playing” a grown-up, but never much good at being one. I was able to use my diabetes to legitimize my request to pretend: my shoulder was frozen, my toes amputated, my teeth and gums turning to rot, my heart by-passed, a diabetic ulcer aggravated. That “physical truth” obscured my underlying psychopathology that would, over the course of time, prove more destructive to me in regard to making my own way in the world including, of course, social relationships. I didn’t know it at the time, but the wall that had been created shortly after my birth separated me from all others.
Whatever intelligence and personality I possessed was in service of whatever drug I was doing. So, whether it was a tooth abscess or something worse, I took each and every opportunity to feed the demon. In fact, I relished having a tooth abscess or other illnesses which required pain medication. I couldn’t wait to get to their offices, and engage in what I thought was intelligent conversation and begin manipulating them to get out their pens. Seeing what was a triplicate form for narcotics (and then was streamlined to just one prescription Rx) would excite me enough to cause my heart to beat fast and my bowels to loosen. Codeine, I would say, would upset my stomach, while Percocets would not. But, if forced, I would take codeine, too: “Tylenols 4, please.” And sometimes I would then try a different doctor to get the pill I really wanted and I’d keep the codeine as a “booster.” Then I’d pray that there’d be no line at the drugstore. I’d wait there while the prescription was being filled, angry with impatience. Hearing the sound of those pills cascading into the vial--sometimes three or four hundred of them--filled my body with joy. I knew I was “home” and would also be there soon. There, too, was the mystery of the Internet. Searching and ferreting, out those sites I could trust to deliver. And there were the excursions into Washington Square Park to make the acquaintance of a real “black drug dealer” who, for a surcharge, would give me his beeper or cell phone number, and go into neighborhoods that I now, because of my age and vulnerabilities, feared, to get the drug for me and bring it back to my apartment. Finally, to be alone with my drugs, the world outside safely at bay.
I had my own ritual with pills: take two or four upon awakening, take a shower and brew some coffee because I wanted to enjoy the first sensation of the rush of opiates while not getting too numbed, then wait another few hours and take a few more, piggybacking on the first. That game plan would hold true through the day (though I’d usually substitute hot tea for coffee, making the pills come on faster) until I thought I could lay my head down and find blessed sleep at night. Of course, I’d count my pills diligently, as you would count bags of dope, or bags of reefer, or bottles of booze, or money; I’d know exactly when I’d need to gear up to find more.
Shooting junk, to use a sixties expression, was my thing, even though it was difficult finding my thin, rolling veins, which tapped into my masochism. But the reward! I’d feel, especially at the beginning, orgiastic. I’ve had more powerful experiences like shooting dilaudid, a synthetic narcotic; a yellow/orange pumpkin exploded behind my eyes. But the high, while similar to scag, was too frazzled for me. Speed balling (injecting heroin and coke together, creating a roller coaster of a high) was interesting, but not as smooth as dope. With junk, you’re out to sea, drifting, nodding. Finally, everything, even your defeats, makes sense.

Coney Island was deteriorating as quickly as I was. It was drifting, into the urban ghetto it is today. The Jews, Italians, and Irish had taken off for greener pastures, as did most of the manufacturing jobs that New York City and its boroughs were built on. It left in its wake the crushing sense of hopelessness that intergenerational poverty brings except for three businesses which thrived: liquor stores, bookmaking operations, and drugs. It didn’t take long for me and Bobby to find the kind of “hope” we wanted.
Also, at the same time, a friend from my New School days introduced me to a dyke singer from a band who lived with her “wife” and who was a junkie and who sold junk on the side. I was traveling to and from Manhattan for my fix, which was better than what they had in Coney Island. I came upon some pretty bizarre scenes over there, a ceremony celebrating the artificial insemination of her “wife” with the sperm of her lead singer. She said it was because of his voice that she chose him. I attended a gathering of her lesbian “boosting” club (“boosting” is an expression that means stealing), of which there were fifteen or twenty members getting blessed by a Filipino priest before descending upon Macy’s. I would purchase some of her dope, cut it, and sell it in Brooklyn, or I’d visit my father’s store, steal some steaks, and trade them for dope. I felt guilty, but not that guilty.

pgs 70-73--From Chapter VI, JUNK SICK: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

SPELLING "LOVE" BACKWARDS: FROM CHAPTER VI: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

THE DESCENT


"No defeat is made up entirely of defeat--since
the world it opens is always a place
formerly
unsuspected..."
--William Carlos Williams

Traveling through Europe gave my ideas a chance to simmer...and pop. I thought about all the literature I read, all the philosophers I studied, all the music I heard, the loves I’d won and lost, the influences like Brasz and Ginsberg and Yarber, and decided that everybody’s right, and anything’s possible. When I met Brasz soon after he returned from abroad, he had decided, coincidentally enough, that philosophy was about being right or wrong and essentially everyone was both. He declined the Carnegie and opted instead to go down to New Orleans to teach art at Tulane and begin painting in earnest again. I decided to begin writing a novel I had begun to think about while in Europe and try to publish some of the poetry I was most happy with.
What I didn’t think about, much less consider, was that Brasz had a gig. Donny, Steve, and Tony had jobs. I reasoned that my job was to write the novel, have it published, get money from the book to support myself, get famous, which would enable me to meet a lot of women. Once satiated I’d get up the next morning and start the creative process again. This would furnish me with an identity and, almost as importantly, an income. I would no longer feel like a fake, a leach, and a thief. I’d be real, whole, and legitimate. I would create myself, invent myself, and this would be good.

While in Europe, I met a guy from New York City who told me that he knew of a publishing house looking for new authors. I wrote the name down, got together a manuscript of poetry and sent it to them. At the same time, my next door neighbor in Seagate had a son, a few years younger than myself, who was studying communications at Long Island University while working for the school’s radio station, WLIU. Bullshitting with him one day, I told him of my interest in having a radio program. He invited me to meet with the program manager. I met with him the next week. I showed him some literary credentials, and we talked jazz and poetry and the next week I was slated to do my first show at the station.
The following week I received a letter from Vantage House accepting my manuscript for publication. Boom. Just like that. I thought I could walk on water. It was a big “fuck you” to the people (my father, in particular) who doubted me, minimized me, and made me feel like what I was doing was inconsequential, even worthless. I telephoned Anna in Madrid, imploring her to come now, immediately, tonight. Just pack up and leave. Too much shit was happening. You must be here now, with me, to enjoy all this good fortune. I told her I’d wire her two hundred. She said she’d make time mid-September. She needed to be home in Georgetown anyway, she told me, and would stop in New York first and spend some time with me. I called Brasz after I got off the phone with Anna. “Hey man, what’s up?”
“Nothin’ much...just got back a few days ago. You?”
“Gettin’ published, and I fell in love in Spain man. She’s comin’ in soon. Saw those Goyas at The Prado too, man. Whew! You gonna be home tomorrow, I wanna show you the contract?”
“Yeah man, here all day.”
“Cool; I’ll breeze in 2-3.”
“Seeya.”

“You can’t do this, man,” he said when I saw him the next afternoon.
“You’re kiddin? Why?” I asked.
“It’s fucked up man. This is a vanity press. You can’t publish in a vanity press if you want to be taken seriously.”
I was stunned, punched in the solar plexus. I needed air. He must have seen the expression on my face. The world had just said a big “fuck-you” to me.
“Listen man, you’re good enough not to need that shit man. Just keep workin’ and sendin’ your stuff out to the presses. It’ll find an audience. It’s good man, just don’t do that shit. You don’t want to be Rod McKuen, do you?”
“Rod McKuen? Shit. Fuck no! We didn’t allow him in our houses man. Listen' to the Warm? don’t make me puke, shit. When ya leavin’ anyway?”
“Thursday, me, Theresa and Yarbs gonna drive down there.”
“Gonna miss ya man.”
“Me too. You got a place down there with us anytime. You should make it. New Orleans is hip.”
“Would like to. Wanna get high? I got some good smoke, smoke and hit Katz’s.”
“Fire it up.”
I was fucking depressed riding home. When my mother offered to pay the price for the book to be published, I had to think twice before saying, “no.”

The following week was almost as bad. WLIU took me off the air. I had read some of Amiri Baraka’s, a.k.a. LeRoi Jones, poetry advocating for the violent overthrow of the American government, sanctioning the looting of Newark in the riots of ‘67, shooting Roy Wilkins, and other assorted acts of aggression to the music of avant-garde jazz. Some of the professors had registered complaints. That’s a good sign, I told the station manager. Not to him it wasn’t.

The week after that it got worse. On Yom Kippur, the highest of Jewish holy days, Anna landed at Kennedy. She, as most any other sane person would be, was very uptight about going into my house to meet for the first time, relatives from both sides of my family, on this day. Not a problem, I told her. But in my heart I knew it was a mistake, a bad mistake. Hell, in for a penny, in for a pound, I reasoned. I pushed harder on the accelerator. Into the lion’s den we went. Only, I lived there, she didn’t.
Upon meeting Anna, my father’s mother, the tough, saloon owning, foul-mouthed life of the party, squeezed her tits. “Oh Norman, ooo, she has such nice tits, you’re lucky.” The living room full of twenty to thirty relatives looked and laughed. Anna’s face first blushed, and then blanched. If there were a hole she would have gratefully fallen in. I grabbed her arm to steady her. I introduced her to my folks. My mom had her social face in place and made the best of a situation she’d rather have not been in, having a Cuban woman, no matter how attractive, involved with her son, sleeping in her house on this of all days. My father gave her a kiss and did what he did with all attractive women. He charmed her.
“She’s a little beat from the trip,” I said. I showed her to her room where she heavily sat on the bed and looked at me in disbelief. “Don’t worry, you’ve been through the worst. You did good. Let’s get out of here, take a walk.” She would have dived into a sea of sharks rather than go back into the living room.
“Norm, I can’t stay here. I don’t belong here, not on a day like this.” We had gone out the back and were walking along the rim of a park looking out over the Atlantic.
“No, it’s O.K. really. Just give it a little time.”
“I think it would be better, for all of us, if I went to see my parents and then, after your holidays are over, come back and stay with you before going back to Madrid.”
“No, no, that ain’t no good. Just stay, it’ll work out. I’m tellin’ you, it’s just a little crazy today, that’s all.” But it was not O.K. The feeling in the house was so tense from all of us that I couldn’t see any sense in prolonging it. Before another day had passed, I told her it would be best if she went to see her parents after all. I drove her to the airport. From the ecstasy of anticipation came the eternity of a twenty minute ride. We hardly spoke. She told me that it just was bad timing this time around and we should try this again, but next time on the same footing we found in Europe. I nodded my head but knew that that was not going to happen anytime soon. She knew it as well.

I was tapped out. Fucked. I looked around. What the fuck was I going to do now? Write, of course. I put all my strength and summoned up all my energy into the novel that had sprung in my head while in Europe. I titled it, Inside These Fences. I modeled it on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. I pushed all those recent defeats aside and feverishly began to work.
I needed to work fast, and I mean fast. Get those shitty tasting feelings out of my mouth. Amphetamines! Amphetamines for the head, for the work, for the inspiration, for the imagination, for the furnace. Blackbirds, dexedrine, speed and pure crystal methedrine when I could get it, and pots of coffee. However, speed in whatever form acts as a catalyst in the body to increase glucose production. That would explain how I was able to get away with eating as meagerly as I did without constantly going in and out of insulin shock.
The killing took place in The Albert Hotel on University Place between 10th and 11th Streets in Greenwich Village. Marc Speer, who thought himself a genius, and above the law of mere mortals, killed a woman for no reason other than she had money and happened to be there. Sound familiar?
The Albert, before being turned into cooperative apartments (the ruination of everything really worth a shit in Manhattan) was a hotel for transients, drug addicts, alcoholics, musicians, artists and any combination of the above, was where the woman lived. She was a drug addict/dealer, prostitute/pimp herself but one of the more endearing characters in the work. She was modeled after an older chick I had met many years before whose services I had engaged for an evening.
The inside of The Albert was worn with pain. The front desk was inhabited by Jimmy, a man always on the verge of sleep. Chipped and scarred mahogany wood held up his elbows. Torn and tattered grayish red spotted carpet led to the elevator the black doors of which sometimes closed when those black buttons, chipped from all the times they were pushed and punched, were engaged. The corridors were always dark, even in daylight, lit by red bulbs behind exit signs. I counted the steps from the desk to the elevator to the room to the eventual murder. I used my years spent in Greenwich Village as movement, as landmarks, as character, as the engine that would drive the novel. Back and forth I went in the morning, afternoon, in the dead of night to inhabit the places my characters did. Across the street from The Albert was The Cedar Tavern, the old haunt of the abstract expressionists of the Forties, Fifties and early Sixties: Pollock, DeKooning, Kline. I quickly became friendly with one of the owners, Joey. The Cedar became the saloon that I would drink in for the next 40 years.
I wanted to make the novel tragic, funny, sad, romantic, nihilistic, symbolic and, most importantly, brilliant. I tried to put everything I had ever learned, thought about or could imagine into one work. I raced, I ran, I wrote, I typed, I fantasized, I cooked, I burned and was burning out. Speed and coffee for six months. But I finished the first draft, two hundred and twenty-one pages, in those months.
Perhaps it was delirium, a psychotic episode or break, certainly a moment of temporary insanity, that suggested I show it to my father the day I finished it. He was a reader, and he was my father, but again, like Dostoevsky’s underground man two and two doesn’t necessarily have to add up to four. Unlike the underground man however, in this instance, I wanted the numbers to work out.
“Sorry, Norm, don’t like it; just not my cup of tea.” He handed the 221 pages back to me. I don’t know if he finished it, or how far he read. We never discussed it. You might think by this time I would have been smart enough not to let what he said, or didn’t say, affect me so much, but you’d be wrong if you thought that. My head said one thing but my heart, my stomach, kidneys, lungs, blood, bone and viscera were saying something else in tongues I had no trouble translating. What I could have or should have done is quite beside the point. What I did do was put the book away, not to look at it for years, and never, to this day, able to work a second draft.
Would the benediction of my novel by my father have altered the course my life would take from that point forward? Probably not. I had already started rewiring my neural network long before that rejection occurred, and if he would have said he loved it, was in awe, been changed in fundamental and primal ways, and now looked at me with the respect and admiration one reserves for heroes and certain potentates, would I have acted and reacted to the world any differently from that point forward? Probably not. If the latter would have happened, I would have looked into his eyes, gauged the countenance of his facial expressions, the tone and inflections of his voice, and known, as sure as I know my own name, that he was lying. At this point in time he could not win, and neither could I. And, honestly, in retrospect, I never would have gotten published with the manuscript I sent out. It simply was not ready for print. It was a first draft and even a good, or great first draft is still what it is, a first draft that needs work and more work, something I really didn’t have a handle on.

I was burned out; tapped out, lower than whale shit. My nerves were doing a St. Vitas dance. Everything seemed to hurt. Simon sez, “Take one giant step, backwards.” I wanted out of the harsh light, and into a safe and secure darkness. I dived into a warm and comforting womb.

pgs 66-71: From Chapter VI: JUNK SICK: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

I'M CLOSING IN

on two hundred pages
and figure I'm a little more
than half way done.
I also know
where it's going,
though I have no idea
of how
it's going
to get
there.
I could say,
I'm confused,
but that's not true;
confusion
is just
my normal state
that no one word
describes, it's part
of me.
I'll take that
anytime.
The word gods
have been
very very
good to me;
they always
have.
It's a Christmas gift
and New Year harbinger
of allowing me to do
what I do best:
play with myself.

I'm bloated
with words; rabbit
pregnant pushing
out poems
& paragraphs
& pages.
But
there is
a cost.
If you fuck
with those gods
you fuck with losing
what those gods have granted.
You believe
that there will always
be another girlfriend,
but there might not be
another poem
about her. History
has told you that.

I have no intention
of returning the gift
that fits so well
& feels so good.
Words of cashmere
and silk; words
that taste good;
words that linger
like the glow
around the bulb
after you turn-off
the light.

And I am a junkie
on that kind of run.
I've got enough
dope for tonight
& a wake-up shot
in the morning.
What else
is there
for a junkie
to know?

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014

THERE'S NOTHING AS HOT

For DG

as a good Catholic girl
gone bad.
All that genuflecting,
all those wafers,
wine, whispered confessions
in dark wood confines,
aged from guilt,
candles & sin & Hail
Mary's cannot predict
what's happening
under the hood.

She grew-up
in a Father Knows Best home:
Robert Young wasn't as nice:
patched-elbow cardigans
and a pipe-pinched mouth
didn't say a word;
a Jane Wyman mother
saw faces
in her apple pies
& named them after
Saints.
One day
all those Christ'
came off the cross
& hitched south.

I saw her
when I was charging merchandise
in Bloomingdales on stolen
credit cards and returning them
for cash to feed a junk habit.
She modeled and worked
behind the glove counter.
I had no choice
but to buy gloves,
many gloves.
If I were straight
a woman who looked like her
would have unnerved me; it
would be impossible for me
to approach.
But junk is the blood
of cowards. And every cell
that was still alive
moved me forward
despite the fear.

Her eyes were mahogany
but flecked with green
and lit with danger.
She was reading Mark Stranded,
John Ash and all those NY
concrete intellectuals; I read her
Roi & Paul & Hank & Savage
& put a smile on her face,
rhythm in her step & we
laughed & loved & fought
& loved some more & it was 1971
& we were in the thick of it.

And we did that off & on
for the next decade
& then split.
Our contact was few
& far between
until the other day.
She had sold off
The Father Knows Best house
& was living in a small town
outside of Atlantic City,
but came into town to see me.
We hit the old spots--
a little Italian joint, Emilio's,
and then Serendipity for dessert.
Nothing is lost
to memory.
Two old shoes
fitting easily
inside them:
a frigid winter night
in detox, her birthday,
she came onto the ward
in a fur coat
wearing nothing
under that
& we held the bathroom door
shut while we made it;
the Bukowski reading
at St. Marks while she took
me on the balcony & performed
her own verse.
"Remember,"
she asked,
"how I rouged my nipples?"
"Yes, I remember."
"They're not pretty anymore,
my tits; now you need a compass
to find them. Old balloons
at the end of a New Year Eve party;
you don't notice them anymore; you
just swat your hand at them
to get them out of the way."
"My dear, my dear,
my body is shot too--
fucking is like trying to shoot pool
with a rope."
"You could always make me laugh, Savage."
Her hands were more beautiful than ever:
her veins, blue and magnificent,
threatened to come out of her skin.
"I knew you'd age with the grace
of a Georgia O'Keefe, Jean Moreau."

We brought each other
up to speed and walked.
The hotel I had lived in then
is gone, as is Rumplemeyers,
most of The Plaza and checker cabs.
But we're no different. No older,
no younger. And not wiser.
We've made it
despite the odds.
We'll do it again
soon, we said.
We weren't stupid enough
to set a date.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014

THE NATURAL AND UNNATURAL ARE NATURALLY UNNATURAL

THE RITUAL

Trumpet shouts blind
on Rays' disc;
blood gets sucked
up
twice.
Black sun
rise changing,
climbing broken steps
into steam-heated
quinine room:
who'sdat?
meman.
(quiet

dry tongues lick
empty bags
water sque
ezed
gently into cap
match lit (it began before the climb)
draw it
draw it
up (again)
(again
eeez
get it mixed
boot it (once
boot it (twice)
now...
aw,
dat's nice.

That was the way the first day ended.

Norman Savage
Coney Island, 1969

AFTER

Smoke,
after the rain,
rising
from black tar
syrupy streets,
are all that's left,
after
a summer's
lightening storm.

Norman Savage
Coney Island, 1969

THE QUESTION

You think
you're hip
& fast
& because
I smell you
I know
you're there.

I don't know nothin
of the kind.

I don't know why
your eyes
are hungry;
or why
your arm
looks like perferated paper
dotted red.

Come off it,
you say,
& fuck me.
Just a second,
I answer,
it's cookin.

Norman Savage
Coney Island, 1969

SAXIFRAGE

A code of valor--
we slay too many dragons
in quest for a fair maiden
that more often than not
stays in her ivory tower
far from the clutches
of a saintly suitor
who pants
far below
waiting
for her word
to climb.

an insipid hunter
waits
outside the coliseum
with hands clasped,
mouth watering
demanding a soul
for a Roman heart--
We are all gladiators
awaiting
a lion.

Norman Savage
Coney Island, 1969