DAYS AS STALE AS MONTHS OLD BREAD

as flat as a busted tire
and as predictable as worry
sits above the drippings
of a black bile
congealing on the hardwood floor
under me as I wait...and wait...
and wait for a fucking word
to show up.
Any word would do.
But obviously, they're better at hiding
then I am at seeking, and they know
how easily I discourage.
I decide to give up on the ineffable
lowering my gaze to the bellybutton,
intestine, naked balls & hairy ones,
fingernails & eyelashes, timecards & taxes,
strike one, and two, and three, first
& third, mouths, lungs, hearts, teeth
biting & teeth encased in glass,
tongues wagging or stuttering or silent,
and suddenly
I'm so fucking weary and wonder,
can I be the only one?
I would like my world
to be meaty & tempestuous
instead of picayune & vicious.
Let the seat that cradles my ass
be hot & anxious allowing roots
carrying the terrors of Callas
& the sorrows of Pavorotti
into my unflinching pen
writing words bloodsoaked
and blasphemous to the few
pockmarked souls sitting
in the stew
of their own making.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2020

THE VIEW AT 72

For my brother, Bobby: ...as a result of an afternoon conversation, 10/23, where we tripped down the road to Hell, but found a marriage made in heaven...A random fragment of that conversation.

It feels like shit, I said,
if you wanna know the truth:
legs, shot;
lungs, shot;
heart, stoppard by pinpricks of lunacy;
dick, marcescent, safe
as a steel condom
molded to the shaft,
weighing heavy
in the mocking mirror's grotesquery;
a bunghole corked, a runway
stacked-up with cancelled flights
of fancy...my brain, though,
and I'll be a sonofabitch,
still revs past the red line.

What else do you wanna know?

Those?
Those are paint chip stalacites;
when I'm working, getting this shit down,
they threaten to behead me,
forcing that ground control asshole
to get the flights out
before this soul crushing ennui
denies my reprieve: fucking
with words.
Because that, my brother,
has been the one thing that works,
that still works,
against the honest vows
spawned from bullshit & bravado.
They've allowed me to look
for angles, for impossible
bank-shots; to see behind
dead ends & rear ends & time bends
& warped trends; they've allowed me to wait
behind lies for easy preys
and rare sightings; they've made sense
of nonsense. They've given me shelter,
a vacation from life, if you will,
from solitary--
And all I had to do
Was wait...and bite
into a Lucky Strike
between pursed lips
for the next good word,
for the next good line.

Simple
ain't it?

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

USE WHAT YOU GOT; USE EVERY ITTY-BITTY THING GOD GAVE YOU OR THE DEVIL SOLD YOU; USE YOURSELF UP

1.

Use it like a gun
or a pocket mirror;
use it like a hairy fist,
or a set of fast thumbs.
Use it
as if your mother is hiding
inside you,
clocking your action,
judging, finger pointing,
wagging her stupid floppy tongue
cursing your infidelity.
Your memories
are simply oiled up
& begging to be caught.
Catch them.
Let the wind
drive them into your bones.
And let your bones rattle
and scatter in God's celestial crap-game.

2.

Make love to your disease--
if you're lucky enough to have one;
it pleases the gods
who thought it wise
to grant you a gift.
Embrace
its confines,
lick the edges
where, as all fugitive lovers know,
lies the sweetness of evanesence.
Your disease
will make you a better liar,
a better fabulist,
a better spinner of tales;
in short, a better artist.

3.

Winter has leaned early
into your crib
and froze your sap.

4.

I am
an old bull elephant
in must...

5.

Since I was a young boy
the fears have come
with regularity; I hold
an empty can of Coke
in one hand
& a Lucky in the other.
Neurosis drips
over the side of the bed
& pools in the can
with the ashes.
They are all useless
except as instruments
like music.
I have sung
the sad meat of my bones
and now gnaw the gristle.

I'll take some hot sauce with that...
make it to go.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

I WON'T PAY FOR YOUR LOVE,

For P, a black cat prowling...

but I'll gladly pay for your book.
Some work
is too dear
while others are,
as they say,
"on the arm."

"Love," a miserable shape-shifter,
is maleable, wily, untrustworthy,
dangerous in its excess
& yet more so
in its absence;
it's unhinged, schized,
juiced with questions,
& arid of answers...
& always,
always, costs
much more than you ever thought.

While a book
no matter how twisty,
no matter how difficult,
is solid, its pages glued,
its letters made of concrete
spawns words which spawns sentences
which the eye can see & digest until
it makes sense
or doesn't; you're enriched
or you move on. But
in all accounts,
if the writer is serious,
you know that those words
were fought over, paid for,
in the only currancy art knows:
blood.

And so, my dear,
if I love you,
or you me--
that's our problem.
It's our Coney Island funhouse
or madhouse
or doghouse
of the mind.
But your book exists
outside that as yours,
your peculiar take
on this carnival,
as a testament
of a survival
outside the bounds
of a pedestrian matrimony;
an affirmation
in the boldest sense
of a life lived
despite the odds
of an early exit,
as revenge
for a life lived
without permission
accepting payment
like the grandest of hooker's acknowledgement
of just what a fantastic lover she is.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

POETRY

like a worm
inching into the bird's beak
these years swallowed
& turned into an excrement
of words.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

AFTER THE IDEA HITS,

but before laying it down--
before putting pen to paper,
before putting fingers to keyboard,
before putting mouth to mic,
I must stop
to procrastinate.
I could tug
on my balls,
dig in
a little;
the decision hanging
in the balance--
type it?
scribble it?
breathe
into this smartphone?
or maybe take a shit?
brew a cup of tea?
or coffee?
start a fight
with dead people?
or look for butterflies
in my fist?
maybe stringing up
a rope?...

You see
a poem
has an urgency
I want to control
because it feels so good
and comes
so infrequently
I want to punish it
for being so stingy
while making love to it
for being so goddamned sexy.

The risk, of course,
is having them die
before they fully show,
but who said
being a hedonist
was ever easy.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

DID YOU KNOW

you could die
from constipation?
It explains
why I write.
I'm determined
to get the shit out
one way or
the other.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

I SOUND LIKE AHAB

walking the deck
of The Pequod.
I thump
up & down
the empty stairs
of my brownstone
with my cane
sounding my own
particular madness
raging at God's
insensitive deafness
& my brown & drying
departed youth;
a body
in the midst
of rebellion
& decay.

I will give any man
this enigmatic gold doubloon if,
with this harpoon,
forged by a devil's fire,
to find for me
a memory
that doesn't speak
in simple sentences,
but rhapsodizes in soliloquies
righteous of prosaic complications--
going one step
to the next,
going out
& coming home
& warming myself
by the word furnace
of make believe
so elementary
& so endless.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

IT'S DAYS LIKE THIS

when I'm feeling most fine,
when my body hums
with glucose regularity,
obeying the speed limits
of 80-120 defying its dead
insulin producing organ,
when words dance
like a mad Nureyev
in my brain,
when a woman
is preparing me dinner
while I get my heart
up to speed,
when tragedies zip by
without stopping...
that I most want a cigarette,
a shot of dope,
a whorey woman
with a sick grandmother,
when I want some madness
to descend
on top of my head
crashing like the cymbals
on Elvin Jone's drums;
I want something,
anything,
to show me
who the hell
I am.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2018

I'VE NEVER BEEN VISITED BY THE DEAD

Maybe
they've been busy,
I've reasoned,
lighting the runways
for those
about to take off,
or land?
We all have our jobs
to do--like writing
this poem
in the dark.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

WRITING

My hands
have wrinkles,
seven hundred
and eighty four of them
to be exact:
770 poems,
3 novels,
1 memoir,
and 10 short stories.
You might say
I have honest skin.

If I don't finish
this poem
I'll stay
at 784
and never get
another wrinkle.
More than that
you can't ask for.

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

SOMEWHERE IN CHINA

one person,
in a country of 1.4 billion,
checks my blog everyday
around 11, 1130 a.m. to see
what's up.
Undoubtedly,
he
or
she
is the hippest
cat
or
chick
in the land.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

I DROP WORDS

like breadcrumbs
so others
can find their way
to my home and I
can find my way
back.
It is a two-way
highway
of neurosis
on a one way
blacktop.

Men
are so obvious,
needy
& weak;
women
so devious,
cunning
& cruel.

Woods
emit light
from the center
of a sorcerer.
The evil parent
has been killed;
the house licked
clean. Bite marks
lace veins
in the finest filigree.
Memory
is the killer.

I no longer write
from instinct
but intention.
You've captured
me and we both
remain lost.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

THE SUN DRIPS

its Monday morning mercy
through the slats.
I've taken off
to parts unknown.
Perhaps
one word
will follow
another
until
something
is formed
that resembles
nothing
else
that came
before it.
It's a poor excuse,
I know,
for living
but
it's the only one
that continues
to make
sense.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

WORDS ARE SHIT, TOO

Basically,
you gotta let em
come out
all at once
when they want to.
Later,
you gotta clean em up
only because
you don't wanna stink
too much.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

"HABIT, THE GREAT DEADENER"--FROM CHAPTER VIII: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

Slowly, Jean had begun to tell me bits and pieces of her life with Jeff. She had met him when she was a young, twenty-one year old, a stewardess for T.W.A. Airlines and, after a brief courtship, began living with him. Shortly thereafter, he was having this young, but ballsy, lady fly to Italy, where she smuggled in baby laxative, used by him to cut cocaine. He was from a well to do family on Long Island, had already been married and divorced, and was supporting two kids he had fathered. At six feet, six inches in height and weighing two hundred and thirty pounds with a mane of red hair, he was an imposing figure. Kenny, who worked behind the bar with me, had a girlfriend, Merrin, who had worked in a bar across the street from Elaine’s that Jeff frequented. He was not a man to trifle with, Merrin told me after Jean had already moved in. She related several incidents in which Jeff had pursued those with whom he’d argued and even shot at. Jeff, Merrin had told me, was said to “eat trees.” Jean concurred. She told me however, that I had nothing to fear, since he was taking it “on the lam” after DEA agents had begun pressing him to provide names that had bankrolled his last drug deal. Jean, not knowing the name or names of his drug contacts, did know that it was some crony of our late president, Richard Nixon, that the DEA wanted to nail through him and was pressing him for. Rather than give up the name, Jeff had cut a deal with them that made them believe he was going to inform on this person and, once the meeting was set, never showed. Instead, he left with pounds of cocaine, while the DEA was left with egg on its’ face and anger in its’ heart.
I was impressed by the story, but not too concerned about my safety. At that time, I was more concerned that a potential supply of free drugs was out of reach. After walking her back to my apartment, helping her unpack, and giving her space in my drawers and closet, I made a hundred different compromises in my mind to allow her to stay with me. But it was Jean who was quickly compromised. I needed all things an infant does: food, clothing and shelter. It began as a lie and ended in this truth: Jean probably saved my life.

As this life with Jean began, other things ended. My attempts at getting my last screenplay bought went nowhere. I left Jay Allen’s cable TV show for which I’d been writing.
I started to resent everything that I “had” to do. I hated the fact that I was “serving” people; I disliked paying rent; I felt that therapy was a poor excuse for living; I believed I should be out in Hollywood pushing my work. Hearing what Jason and Sig would say about “them”, meaning the studio executives, having to see you in order to believe you and your work existed, made me that much more obsessed about getting out there. I reasoned that success hinged on three things: you had to have been born into it, fuck into it, or luck into it; a boxed trifecta, but, in all instances, you had to be there to lay down a bet.

I broached all the subjects with Handelsman. He knew about my slide back into drug taking to some degree and felt me slipping away. He cut down my sessions. I felt he was lining up new meat. However, there was one session when I casually related the conversation I had with my mom, the one about my father not being able to visit me in the hospital when I first got diabetes. For Handelsman, this had epic ramifications. He’d known, of course, how crucial diabetes was to me, how it had altered my life, reached me at the time of puberty and effectively separated me from my father. I had no real memory of what my life with my father was like before diabetes. Try as I would, I’d only be able to recall certain vague incidents before the onset of the disease: when I tried to put my fingers through the slats of a metal electric fan at the age of four or five, he, sitting next to me, slapped me hard in the back of the head; I remember rubbing my groin up against his leg (and it felt good) when we’d play wrestle on Sunday mornings in his bed; and I remember the time we faked boxing with each other when I was about ten in the living room where we had a floor length mirror. I backed up into the mirror which broke in a million pieces and he chased me around the kitchen/living room with his hands outstretched trying to grab me by the throat. Other than that he was a very “gentle” man. I probably brought this up at the very time when therapy was unraveling. I knew, subconsciously or not, my drug taking would make it impossible to delve any further into this now. In effect, I protected my very destruction.
Handelsman asked, a few sessions later, if I wanted to take a break from therapy for the rest of the Spring and Summer and resume in September. I took this as rejection saying to myself, “That motherfucker!” and then out loud, “Yeah, sure, I think it’s best,” and left. Had I developed a sense of entitlement, a self-esteem, an anger properly directed, I would have said something like, “You ain’t throwing me out now! Not after the pain and the money and the effort that I put in here! Yeah, I’m using drugs again, but that’s what a drug addict is supposed to do. Let’s find a way out of this mess!” Instead, I felt like I let him down, like I let my old man down. That weepy self-pitying bullshit that I so much loathe hit with a vengeance. I was embarrassed by the fact that here I was again doing it in the same old self-destructive, morally indefensible way. I had a very difficult time deciding who were my doctor, my friends, and my family. It all fused, I thought, into some sort of bizarre conspiracy, one that was out to get me. Probably, more to the truth, was that Handelsman thought that maybe the intensity of therapy could be better addressed after a brief respite and that we’d pick it up again come September. That idea never made it into my head.
Jean, my “need” incarnate, was the exception but I didn’t know her all that well yet, so I was also none too sure about her. I quickly tested her and put her through, what can only be described as accompanying me on a trip through Hell.
When Jean’s cocaine ran out, I found myself asking Paul, my upstairs illegal tenant, to sell me quarter grams to grams of coke (when I couldn’t obtain the drug for free from the patrons at the bar or other characters I knew), and deduct it from the monthly rent. Also, I was about to change business addresses.
Ray Garcia, the maitre d’ from Tavern On the Green, whom I’d written about previously, and the new manager of Oren & Aretsky’s were going into the restaurant business together. Bankrolled by this wealthy tax shelter operator, Herman, who had successfully backed this French restauranteur, Robert, in a number of well-known places, such as La Cage Au Foile and Chez Pascal, was now going to put the three of them together in another venture, Bistro Pascal. The location was in prime territory, Sixty-third Street between Second and Third Avenue. It had three separate floors, each with private banquet rooms, a small, but cozy marble bar, floor length sculpted mirrors, seductive lighting, plush carpeting, fresh flowers, the best in wines, champagnes and liquors, three different chefs preparing foods, and waiters, skilled in the art of presentation and service. I opted for what I thought would be a better job, but it wasn’t.
When Bistro Pascal first opened, we enjoyed the blush of first love. Celebrities, whom the owners knew, paid their respects and brought their friends and others who fed off, or on, them. The booze flowed. The food was wonderfully prepared and consumed eagerly by mouths that were really more concerned with talking, while coke spoons glittered in recessed corners. Most everyone who patronized us for the first few weeks did so gratis. And, at first, the tips were generous. Later, after the bloom was off the rose, The Bistro generated little heat. Decadent though it was, it was not enough to interest those who either created scenes or took part in them. Those of us who had been around restaurants for awhile could smell the odors that emanated from the corpse, only hours old, once the process of decay took over.
First to be let go was the chef who was hired just to make pasta, next to get the ax was the sommelier. Then, as business worsened, waiters left, either on their own volition or they were asked to leave.
However, at the time, it didn’t bother me at all. I was experiencing a rebirth of the senses, of creativity, in part fueled by the alcohol I was consuming but especially from the reefer I was smoking. Again, it coincided with Brasz arriving from New Orleans.

I must say, at this juncture, I was, in the parlance of literature professors, an “unreliable narrator” for chunks of time between 1980 and April 1987. Not that I would purposely lie or fabricate events in order to make this memoir more engaging, or readable. Simply put, I was under the influence of many different drugs (sometimes singularly and other times in consort with one another), that consequently, the events which I’m going to describe, flow into and out of one another with no clear remembrance of time. The clarity of each experience is also colored by various substances. There was the tedious suction of the cycle of addiction, the repetitious stutter of days without content or light, there also were days, weeks and months, whole chunks that, while hardly ever being devoid, or free, from the influences of certain chemicals, were however, given to flights of fancy and, in no small measure, hope. It was in those times that I had some marvelous bursts of creative energy, and certain adventures, that would not have happened if I were stolid and tame, instead of being, what I was, which was, unquestionably, “unreliable.”

I wore an off-white suit with a party colored, striped tie and blue shirt that I’d bought at Paul Stuart to my parents’ anniversary party I’d made for them at Bistro Pascal. They were celebrating forty-two years of wedded bliss. My father, almost sixty-two, was nearing retirement. In expectation of reaching that milestone, he’d bought a large two-bedroom condominium in, what once was, one of the more exclusive buildings in Miami Beach. A man whom he’d helped get his start in business, who became a multimillionaire thanks, in part, to my father’s introductions at his initial business undertaking, had lived there before him and introduced him to this luxurious way of living. My father, not nearly as wealthy, nevertheless wanted to emulate him. Also, he had little patience to hunt for a place that would be more suited to his and my mother’s lifestyle. He was a Jew, who liked Jews, defended Jews (he was busted in the Army after he punched a Captain who’d passed an anti-semitic remark), yet he didn’t want to be around Jews who were...too Jewish. His plan, though not well thought out, owed more to expediency than anything else.
Bobby, according to my father, had cost him close to three quarters of a million dollars by persuading him to purchase another store in Brooklyn that would be his to nurture and run, but instead ran it into the ground. Bobby, along with a young butcher (who liked his whiskey, his women and his cocaine), tried to make the store successful but could not. Once seeing that this new sibling of a store was deformed they, like the elders in Sparta, left it on a mountaintop to die. My father could not make it any better and, six months after they bought and renovated it, sold it for a substantial loss. Still, my father could not let go. My brother, not thinking very clearly and caught in the addictive process as well, abandoned the business and went out to make his way in the world, but he was floundering, like I was. I had, of course, introduced him to Paul, who was subletting his pad and so Paul also became one of his cocaine connections. And so my father, wanting to facilitate a lifestyle of “the rich and famous,” reluctantly turned to figures he knew could not be trusted, but instead thought could be manipulated. It would prove, in the years to come, to be his undoing.
My mother, closing in on sixty-one, was experiencing the Jewish version of living death: having a first-born Jewish son co-habitating with a woman of not only another religion but another race as well, in this case, Chinese. She’d long ago given up the wish for me to be with, let alone marry, a Jewish woman. She was fond of the expression she’d often repeat to me: “Lord, throw me amongst my own.” I, however, had never really had wonderful dealings with “my own.” In fact, in so many ways, I was running away from “my own,” my own mother in fact. However, my mother imagined what others would say about her and her parentage, after seeing her son involved with an Oriental woman, and it embarrassed her. Mom, whose sensitivity knew no bounds and whose pain was visible and endless, demanded a respect from her immediate family that, due to all of our self-serving and narcissistic natures, was impossible. Never realizing the price she tried to exact from this particular family, she grew more bitter and angry as time went on in response to our collective inability to honor her wishes, in matters both deep and superficial. She, unlike the three males that circled around her and flew into her arms only when necessary, was essentially honest, hardworking and guileless. Her one flaw that caused her immeasurable suffering and pain, among the many flaws that each of us has, was her inability to allow people, especially herself, to have flaws.
Ray and Ron treated us to a wonderful anniversary dinner that night. Oysters, shrimp cocktails, melon and prosciutto, rack of lamb, Halibut, scalloped potatoes, asparagus, salads, champagne, whiskey and brandy were brought by waiters who lit our cigarettes, emptied our ashtrays, and fawned over my parents in ways each of them thought they deserved, but rarely experienced At the end of the evening, when my father asked for the check, even though I’d already told him that I had taken care of everything beforehand, was simply told, “It’s been taken care of.”
I was comfortably uncomfortable. My father could have stayed longer and stared at the “action,” especially the women, but my mother was relieved when he decided to leave. I would suspect it was when I ordered my third cognac, which John poured, with a heavy hand.

Brasz was now contemplating moving back to New York City and teaching in one of the public schools here, something Louis, his father, had done all his life. Becoming his father freaked him in similar ways it freaked me when I noticed my own replications with my father.
As early as 1965, my first go ‘round at Kingsborough Community College, a professor had us reading Max Lerner’s text on American history. The title escapes me now. It was there that I read about the symbolism involved in American’s defeat of England, its’ father figure, necessary to becoming a man, or independent, in its own right. Later, of course, once I became enamored of psychology in general, and Freud in particular, the book which profoundly effected me, among his many works was, Totem and Taboo. Many times Brasz and I would discuss this work in relationship to others, such as Levi-Straus’ Trieste Tropics, but mostly in ways that impacted on our upbringing and current lives. The love and disgust we had for our fathers manifested itself in the many ways we were drawn to their lives, emulated their lives, but were also repulsed by their lives and, sometimes in the case of my father, his flesh as well. The thought of having to assist him in getting up or, if a time came when I’d have to assist him in managing his hygiene or other daily needs, was enough to make me want to either be so far away as to make my intervention impossible or die first. Brasz, unlike myself, confronted his demons, walked over and through them, never around them, ate them, laughed at them, and accepted them, sometimes without the benefit of understanding or liking them.
Jean, who was always a diligent and hard worker, had begun a career in selling co-ops and condominiums in the hot New York real estate market in the early 1980’s. She’d made a few quick sales, which totaled well over fifty thousand, and made my life a hell of a lot easier. By this time, we had settled into a domesticity that seemed quite natural. We were together and, as such, shared in expenses and confidences. Her time, scheduled around showing apartments, was her own and we, Brasz included, made the most of it.
Brasz and I were like two old washer women. We could talk and gossip forever, sometimes calling each other two or three times a day, whether we saw each other or not. We could trade barbs, create syncopated riffs, ideas, indulge ourselves in music, literature, and painting, comment on writing and writers, loves--past and present--and compliment each other’s strengths and weaknesses. In short, we, while never fucking each other, were the closest thing to lovers, falling over and sorting out each other’s adolescence in an attempt to sway and subvert the advance of age.

A little reefer, clams and black bean sauce, Chinatown, Sonny’s East Broadway Run-Down, Cecil Taylor’s loft, Chambers Street, Fat Tuesdays, Museum of Modern Art, the rumblings of hip-hop Bronx, graffiti, Crash, Daze, A-1, East Village run-down, comeback art scene, midnight ramblings, day-glo, Haagen-Daz, a smattering of coke, The Bistro, painting and a different way of writing: short poems, titled, “One For...” which took jabs at our cultural heroes of the day, such as: One For Nancy
Nancy Reagan is on top
of the drug problem.

It’s made five Colombians
With stiff dicks,
Very happy.
Or,
One For John

John Wayne, doctors said,
Is in stable condition
After having everything
From the neck down
Removed today.
He’ll be given,
As protective measure,
A football helmet,
Upon his release;
Baring any further
Complications.

It was in that vein that one hot summer afternoon that I, high as a kite on some powerful sinsemilla, ( a potent strain of marijuana), strolled in the summer garden of The Museum of Modern Art, and came up with an idea for a play, Starsky and Butch. I was with Brasz and Jean and we, besides digging the paintings, were enjoying a glorious June day in New York City, talking about whatever nonsense came into our heads. A few weeks before, a building exploded in Queens, (certainly, nothing to make light of--except when your twisted on some good pot), and a Puerto Rican terrorist, Willie Morales of the FALN, was taken into custody, but not before he’d blown off all the fingers of one of his hands in this, their hideout and bomb factory. Yet, miraculously, incredulously, Morales had escaped from a locked ward in Bellevue Hospital, under the twenty-four hour a day guard that our finest, The New York City Police Department, was able to provide. John Santucci, the Queens District Attorney at that time, had sat red-faced in front of a blistering assault by the city’s media, and sworn that they were in hot pursuit and it was just a matter of time before he’d be apprehended and the city could, once again, sleep peacefully. The question of “how” he’d managed to escape, despite having no fingers and little left of his hand, (not to mention the rest of his cuts and bruises over his whole body), remained unanswered...until now. I surmised, to Brasz and Jean, that a gigantic ace bandage, with a metal clip, was hurled into Morales’ room by none other than the District Attorney, John Santucci, (named “Douchie” in my play), himself. Morales was having an affair with Santucci’s punk-rock daughter, compromising pictures were taken by a renegade terrorist, and Santucci had promised the FALN that no efforts would be made to stop their next and last act, (they’d promised to leave the country if they’d successfully complete their final and most appalling act of terrorism) until Morales had thrown a wrench into the agreement by blowing himself up. This came at the worst time: Santucci was about to be supported for a higher political office and his wife, a long suffering, whining, Jewish woman would, at long last, get out of Queens and into a position she’d long aspired to: First Lady of Brooklyn, where her parents still lived. Santucci, forced to put his best detectives on the case, called into the investigation: Lt. Tootsie, modeled after Telly Savalas’ TV character, Kojack, a New York City police detective and Starsky and his irrepressible partner, Butch, a send-up of another TV cop drama.
Brasz and I took the idea and created these mad riffs until the bones appeared, followed by the flesh and viscera. We lampooned our TV heroes, politicians, marriage, alternative lifestyles and love; we even managed to broach the subject of AIDS, (just beginning to gain notoriety in the media), by creating a character who was a doctor who lived in a bubble, rode around in a wheelchair, and treated all police personnel.
After this burst of energy subsided, after the laughs, and the insights and the language and the inspiration retreated into the reality of work--work at The Bistro and work on the play--I could not sustain both. The play was shelved.
Artaud, in his book of essays, The Theatre and Its Double, equates writing with any biological process. You can no more “give up” writing than you could pissing. It’s really not a big deal, almost like being born with a sixth digit on you foot or hand. Hopefully, you never learn how to live with it, but how to use it.
Because I had difficulty staying with one thing when that one thing presented obstacles (I was either unwilling or unable to work through), I flitted from one thing to the next, much like the women and jobs I’ve had in my life. Poetry, was usually what I returned to unless the spirit had been temporarily extinguished from my world. Besides, poetry, as Bukowski has said, is the fastest horse in the literary race. Why say something in a hundred pages when you can say it in ten lines? For me though, it was not philosophy or literary principle; the reality was (and is), that that is how I thought; that is how I trained my mind to think. I have done it so often and for so long that it’s as natural as, well, pissing.
And so, with a niggling feeling inside me, a feeling that was not new to me, a feeling that told me I was copping-out, lying, that I was too easy on myself, that I was afraid, afraid of failure, looking stupid, unlearned, not assured, clumsy, awkward, and most importantly, vulnerable, I went back to concentrating on poems.

The summer passed in a kind of blue haze interspersed with jolts of lightening. I worked and I wrote poems And when I wasn’t working I was with Brasz in Cecil’s loft on Chambers Street, listening to him, Jimmy Lyons, alto sax, Allan Silva, bass, Andrew Cyrille, drums and Ramsey Ameen, a gone violin player from New Jersey, rehearse for their gig at Fat Tuesdays. It was magical and I felt privileged to be in their presence digging the way Cecil’s compositions came together.
It was at Fat Tuesdays that the music, played in front of an eager and receptive audience, adhered to the structure of practice yet allowed for the thrill of improvisation: Jazz. Brasz and I would meet at my place and go to the club where we’d be let in and into the band’s dressing room. We’d break out a little reefer, while others opened a secret stash of hashish, and we’d pass the joint or the pipe. It was in these moments I felt that I’d realized a dream: to be among jazz men and writers and friends, sharing a moment like it’s no big deal, like I belonged there, because I was there. At the end of the sets, when evening turned into night and then morning, we’d sit with the musicians sometimes commenting on how they (and we) thought the sets went, any interesting occurrences that were detected by the few and many, and where should we go now, either to eat or hear more music.
Luckily for me, I mostly kept myself in check that summer. But, ever so slowly, I was becoming pray to the web that I myself was weaving, shutting off avenues of escape as this cocktail of chemicals and creativity sweetly spiked and distorted what I thought were opportunities or interpreted as reality.

That October, I turned thirty-three years old, and still in my own dark wood. Having no guides, either Sherpa or of a metaphysical nature, to navigate this secular Hell I was in, I tried to write my way out. I’d come up with another idea for a play shortly after my folks made the move to Miami Beach. Whether it was an attempt to keep them close or because they were gone I felt secure enough to begin it, I can’t say. The play, Eat It, It’s Good For You, is a surreal exploration of growing up Jewish in Coney Island in the Sixties. The entire play would take place in the kitchen where a gigantic refrigerator would spill some of its contents every time a character would open it while they exclaimed that there’s nothing inside to eat. The characters would sing and dance in response to the mother’s telling them what she was preparing for meals; one son would come to the table swathed in syringes; another son would have his brain removed after consenting to drop out of college and begin working for the father; each character would demonstrate their madness but never have it acknowledged, much less discussed. The kitchen is the battlefield, words are bullets, and food is love.
Try as I might, I could not make it work. As much as I loved the idea of writing this play, I was beginning to get more consumed with the life of decadence that was engaging me at The Bistro. Even when Brasz’s father died, I was not able to make it to his funeral. It wasn’t as if I was too fucked-up; it was too inconvenient to go on a Saturday. Brasz played it off at the time, but later told me how hurt he was that no one, especially me, thought enough about him to be at his father’s burial... “I was by myself, man, just alone back there in the chapel.” He didn’t have to tell me how he never really spoke to his mom and sister much. I knew that, and I also knew that even his father’s death held little sentimentality for him. That wasn’t the point. I felt like, and was, a first-class prick. Some things I did want to look at too deeply, and this was one of them. Had I looked, I would have seen a person as emotionally stingy as my parents were, maybe worse. I gave when it suited my purposes, seemingly afraid that emotions were a finite ingredient and would, if one were not careful, exhaust themselves.
What seemed to be inexhaustible was the cocaine that was permeating every nook and cranny in every social scene that New York had to offer. I had now taken to stealing and bartering with Paul, my upstairs tenant. I’d call him up, all hours of the day and night, and tell him either to leave a package of coke for me under his mat or, if I had some expensive wine or champagne to exchange for his product, I’d see him in person when I got home. There was still the chance encounters in The Bistro that provided the drug to me for free. For instance, one evening as we were all sitting around talking, sipping our drinks, getting ready to close, Robert, the part owner of the The Bistro came to visit. He motioned to me, the largest, (and he thought strongest), of the group to accompany him downstairs to where the dress lockers of the staff was located. He asked which of these was Charlie’s locker and I pointed it out to him. He informed me that Charlie was keeping amyl nitrates, or “poppers” (a capsule that, when broken, emits fumes so powerful that they give the user a rush of euphoria for a short period of time) as they were colloquially called, in there for him and that, before going home, to where his girlfriend or wife waited he would need their company. “I cannot fuck without my poppers,” he informed me in an accent so French I saw Paris on his breath.
“What’s the combination?” I asked.
“I do not know, the fuck Charlie cut out man without telling me,” he growled. “I need poppers to fuck,” he repeated.
“Don’t panic,” I said, “we’ll think of something.”
“I need a fucking crowbar,” he said, “wait here.”
I sat down and lit a cigarette and wondered how my life had come to this. Robert returned carrying a crowbar and a bottle of cognac. He took a swig from the bottle, passed it to me and, while I was drinking, reached into his sport jacket inside pocket and produced a baggy full of cocaine. As I was drinking, my eyes were drawn to the bag where I saw that good yellowish hue of rocks and powder that promised a high uninhibited by coarse mixtures of cut coke of inferior quality.
“Here, have a toot. The coke will make you strong,” Robert said as he passed the crowbar, baggy, and straw to me.
“Hey Robert I appreciate it, but I want to take some of that home, put it in my pocket. I get stronger when some of that shit is in my pocket.”
Robert laughed. “Yes, I know what you mean. Get started I will make you stronger as you go. Take a toot.”
I did. Robert took a twenty dollar bill from his pocket, took the baggy back and poured a very generous amount into the bill and began to fold it just as I snapped the lock. Inside Charlie’s locker was a box of amyl nitrates which Robert took and put the whole box into a pocket of his jacket.
“Those beautiful faggots, know how to fuck,” Robert exclaimed, as he drank off the rest of the cognac and walked back upstairs.
Tommy Sig had introduced to me to a friend of his, Donny ..., who had been the accountant of a famous and legendary entertainment impresario, Bill Sargent. When I had met Donny, he produced two two-gram vials of cocaine, a bottle of Martel, and a pack of Camels. During the course of getting shit-faced that evening, we shared a few secrets, and a few laughs. He’d told me a few things about Sargent that he knew and some rumors that had circulated among the Hollywood gossip mill. I realized Donny, like a lot of the people I had met, was very good at his chosen profession, but also out of his mind.
Sargent had produced the play, “Knockout” on Broadway, which ran for quite awhile, among other theatrical and film projects. He had negotiated, unsuccessfully, with the National Football League to have the Superbowl become a close-circuited event to which he’d have exclusive rights. He was a short, stocky man who, rumor had it, had tastes that were gargantuan. One evening as I was tending bar at The Bistro a limo pulled up outside and out he stepped with two young blond beauties on his arm.
He made his way into The Bistro speaking loudly about how an ugly fuck like him could have the good fortune of being serviced by these two foxy young “things” on his way over here in the limo. He appeared to be somewhat high but, the educated eye could see, he had just begun to fight. Sargent made his way over to the bar and ordered drinks all around. I looked at him and said, “Donny ...says hello.”
He backed away, pushed the two young girls from his arm, and glowered at me. “What did you say?” he bellowed.
I read it like this was anger feigned and did not feel the least bit threatened. “Donny ... says hello,” I repeated.
He rocked on his heels and moved closer. It seemed that all the noise in The Bistro ceased. Ray, who knew he was coming and had greeted him at the door, just looked from him to me, seemingly to prepare for whatever was going to go down.
“Do you know what that cocksucker did to me?” he shouted. He spoke fast, out of Brooklyn, like a Damon Runyon character.
“No, I don’t,” I replied, trying to keep the smile on my face from showing.
“He stole my fuckin’ car in California, the prick. Fuckin’ Rolls, fuckin’ Rolls good choice, huh? Stole the fucker and down in some fuckin’ Southern state, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas some fuckin’ state down there they caught the bastard for drivin’ drunk, drivin’ high drivin’ some goddamn way and he was broke, the sonofabitch always broke, a head for figures but always broke, and they threw him in the clink and who do you think he calls to bail him out, who?...Me, he calls me Goddamnit. And what do I do? I fly the fuck down there, wherever the hell it was and I go and I’m sweatin’ my balls off down there it was so goddamn hot and I bail him out and I’m at the fuckin’ desk signin’ the papers and what do you think the cocksucker did?...He stole my fuckin’ car again! Can you believe that!? As I’m bailin’ him out, he goes behind the cow shit police station, opens up the car with the keys that these dumb ass cops just gave him back and before you know it he was off again. Never did find the sonofabitch, either.” He laughed so hard then that he coughed and turned beet red.
“What did you do?” I finally asked.
“What did I do? I’ll tell you what I did. I found a goddamn bar, had a few quick fuckin’ drinks, and got my fat ass out of there and went home. Do you know where he is now? Cause if you do man call him, tell him I love him, all is forgiven. He’s so good with numbers.”
“Nah, I don’t, but if I do, I’ll tell him...what are ya drinkin’?” I asked.
“ Cognac, of course. If you’re a friend of Donny’s I better watch my ass. I’m takin’ everyone to The Palladium after this. Come with us. I want to keep you close.” And then he laughed that massive laugh again. He came over and stretched his frame across the bar and pulled me close and whispered, “You do any blow?” I nodded my head. He reached into his pocket, produced a suede sack lined with thin plastic, and gave it to me. “Just put it in your pocket, hang onto it.”
Later, when I went to the bathroom and opened the sack, it was filled with a white substance I had little trouble placing.

It started to get bad toward the end of November. I’d come home, slightly “lit” or drunk or both, at one or two in the morning from The Bistro. Usually I’d have coke in my pocket or, more likely, I’d made arrangements with Paul to get some in exchange for wines or rent. I’d open the door and the light and hear the T.V. from the bedroom. I knew that Jean was up, but I wouldn’t go in there right away. First, without taking off my coat, I’d get a glass of water, tissue, a piece of cotton and a spoon. Then, I’d go into the bedroom where I’d place them on the table where my diabetic supplies would be, hardly able to make eye contact with Jean. She’d be sitting up and after I took off my coat, got out of my outerwear and sat on the corner of the bed, adjacent to the table, Jean would slide over towards me and we’d kiss, briefly. My mind, my being, all my energies were directed at getting that drug into my vein. Sometimes, because my veins were so beat-up and difficult to find, she’d help me to find a new one. Other times, after the first shot, I’d throw-up the food I’d eaten that evening and wait for it to be over, then continue. After, if I was lucky, and finished with the first run, I’d go to the refrigerator and consume a tall six-pack of beer, or a bottle of booze or wine, until I could relax enough to lay down and try to find sleep.
If I was not lucky, it would be the beginning of a run that would take me into places that only desperate people inhabit, and it wouldn’t end until other forces, from within or without, muted then dissipated the uprising.
“Old money” always danced to its’ own tune. The period of the early 1980’s saw the swift and, sometimes brutal rise, of the new barometers of society’s privileged class: Wall streeters and drug dealers. The climate in New York City, especially in those areas neglected because of social class and voter registration roles, and dominated by an insatiable urge for “more,” made the neighborhoods pulsate with “more” desperation.
In those early years of the 1980’s, the East Village was littered with chicken bones, rib bones, paper and plastic bags from newspapers and bodegas, half-gutted buildings with yawning black doorways or other carved entrances, the sound of mice and rats ticking through the garbage and the wails of fire alarms and police sirens. There were lots more to be seen and heard, but usually I had my head buried too far down in my collar for them to make much of an impression. I’d begun to notice the first wave of crack cocaine from those who flew madly around the streets, their eyes wild with pleading, saliva congealed in the corners of their mouths, young people brazened by necessity displaying different acts of desperation. Neither desperation or neighborhoods like the East Village were unfamiliar to me. What was different was my age. When in my late teens or early twenties, the element of danger was on the periphery of my actions. I was not stupid about the risks I took, and I tried not to be too reckless or visible. The truth is that I was reckless and did stand out though I didn’t think so. I believe most, if not all drug addicts believe, for quite awhile, that their actions go undetected by all who matter, their loved ones, authority figures and, most importantly, the law. Now, I looked at the scene and recognized that I, now in my thirties, was more vulnerable to both those who sold and procured drugs there and the cops who chased them. For now, the drug scene, even during the seven years I’d been clean, had gotten more unstable because the age of those involved got younger and the drugs harder.
There were new indignities and humiliations suffered, beside the traditional dangers that attenuated my cravings, sparked by my appetites and mania. When I first made my journeys into the drug world I’d met up with those who sold “dummy bags,” bags that were supposed to hold dope, but instead had turned out to be nothing more than milk sugar, baking soda or aspirin. Also, I had had my share of run-ins with violence: I’d been cut and held-up at gunpoint. Now, twelve and thirteen year old kids were having us stand in line (which sometimes snaked down entire buildings and into the street), only, at their discretion, accept bills larger than ones, and arbitrarily decide who was and who wasn’t going to get served that day. Sometimes they’d serve you themselves, while at other times you’d have to go to a door, which had a hole cut out, and ask for what you wanted: “I’ll have four D’s and two C’s,” which meant: I’ll have four bags of dope (heroin) and two bags of coke; the dope being ten dollars a piece and the coke five. You would then put the money through the hole and wait for the bags to be placed into the same hand, then you counted it, quickly, and split. Of course, everyone waiting on line and those downstairs knew you just scored, so getting off the block could present problems. Luckily, it never did.
One of the reasons it never did was because there were times when I was able to persuade, cajole, or beg Jean to go down there instead of, or with, me. There were nights where I’d have just enough coke to wet my appetite but be unable to procure the amount necessary to satiate my thirsts. On those evenings, I’d walk or cab down to the alphabet blocks to get what I thought to be the amount needed to satisfy the craving, usually thirty dollars worth. I’d get back, shoot the drugs into my system, get so wired that I’d go right back for more. And more. And more. I had taken the Freudian act of stuttering to new and more frightening levels.
I’m sure Jean thought if she left me, I’d die. And that is probably true. She had also turned into my nurse, as well.
There was a study made of nurses who, during and at the end of World War II, married some of the quadriplegics that they cared for. They loved these men, of course. Yet, on other levels that the study addressed, they discovered that the power and control that they had over these men were enormous. These men needed them completely, forever. In a sense, that gives one a pretty secure feeling. Well, a drug addict or drunk also gives the other person (if they aren’t an addict), a similar feeling of security. Where is a three month old infant going? He might crawl around the crib a little, get lost for a period of time, but that’s about it as far as his excursions are concerned. He’s really not going far and will always come back. And that can, and often times does, infuriate the addict. Because along with all those other fucked-up feelings is that we, I, hate to feel controlled. Of course, we put ourselves in that position being as goddamn needy and helpless as we are and project, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it! In fact, we begin to suspect that there are “ulterior motives” behind the person’s kindness. It’s fucking madness. “If she does that, then she’s really making me do this and I don’t wanna do that, but I want her to do this,” and “what kind of idiot can she (they) be if I get them to do this for me and even though I asked them to how could they do this knowing what “this” really means to me and...” How can anyone win with a stacked deck like that?
This is not to say that Jean was passive or silent during my periods of addiction. She’d prompt me to seek help, keep doctor’s appointments, eat as appropriately as I was able and make it known that she had confidence in me that I’d eventually tunnel out of the hole I was in. She did not demand I do anything, nor did she remove herself from my equation of self-destruction, though she did make a few suggestions. She wanted me to see Bernstein for a physical exam, and, to escape from New York City by visiting her folks in San Francisco shortly after Christmas.
Once again, I sat facing the fish of North America waiting for Bernstein to appear and calm the voices raging in my head. I sat, stripped to my waist, looking at myself in that examination room light. My arms appeared thinner with fresh needle tracks in the crooks of them. I’d lost muscle tone. My eyes felt glassy and dulled, while my nerves, the ones on the surface, were raw and bleeding. I’d decided to just lay it out to Bernstein and see how he saw it. I was hanging on by a thread, even Ray Charles could see that.
Bernstein came in, looked at me, began to smile then thought better of it and remained silent. I told him what I’d been going through. He didn’t look upset or displeased. Those are feelings I am so sensitive to that the slightest hint of them is enough to heat the emotional beaker even before I’m conscious of the match being struck.
In his office, after the examination, I sat opposite him and waited to hear what I’d waited to hear each and every time I sat facing a person I was attracted to and depended upon, magic words to make it all go away, to make it all better, to make me well again. The first words he said to me were words I never imagined him saying and, almost twenty years later, in the writing of this work, are the real “magic” that has allowed me to, so far, avoid the consequences of the spiral of addiction. He said, “Why didn’t you call me?”
A friend? A friend and doctor? Could this be? I didn’t know. That possibility left me in uncharted waters. What did he really want from me? What toll would he exact? And if there wasn’t a toll, if this was not a question designed to manipulate me at best, enslave me at worst, then what? That kind of honesty was beyond my ability to understand, let alone trust. Yet, it insinuated itself so profoundly that twenty years later I not only remembered the question, but the inflection and tone as well. But at that time, sitting opposite him in his office, I couldn’t sort anything out. Instead, tears began welling up in my eyes that I struggled for control. “I’m so goddamn depressed,” I began. “I aborted two things I started to write that I liked. I want to sleep when I’m not using and burn myself up when I’m not sleeping. I don’t know what the fuck to do at this point. Maybe tranquilizers, maybe...”
“No, no tranquilizers, not now. I think that the reality of using drugs again depresses the hell out of you.”
I looked at him and nodded, yes.
“I’d like you to try this antidepressant, Mellaril, twice a day, once in the morning and one right before you go to bed.”
“What should I look for?”
“Don’t look for anything, let it find you. And if that doesn’t, we’ll try something else. Stop the drugs, if you can. Give this a chance to work. And call me. Anytime. Even if it’s just to talk. If you find that you can’t stop this slide by yourself, we’ll figure something else out, but let’s not wait too long. I want to see you in a month, O.K.?”
“Yeah, O.K. And thanks.”
He wrote out the prescription and I left. I didn’t take the pills, stay in touch, call, or see him in a month. In a month I’d be in San Francisco, trying to improvise on a torpid script. I was trying to get some jazz back into my life.

pgs 154-164, From Chapter VIII: JUNK SICK: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

A HARD DEATH OF DREAMS IN NYC--FROM CHAPTER VII: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

New York City is saturated with dreams by people of all ages. Everyday, those dreams are crushed out, if they’re lucky, or shit rubbed into them if they’re not. Numbers are big. Lotto is big. People are working at what they don’t want to be: There are actresses as waitresses, writers as bartenders, actors as cabdrivers, dancers as horticulturists. All of them are making the rent while waiting for a phone call. When the phone rings, it could be from your agent, a publishing house, Vegas, Hollywood, Broadway, or God. Usually, it’s your mother complaining about her hemorrhoids and why you haven’t called. It’s such a tough town that your dreams have to be tougher, more tenacious, and harder to extinguish. If you give them up you’re no longer a child, you’re just an adult with an asshole and an opinion, and Christ, everybody has those.

I opted out of group. I felt I had had enough. I didn’t want to hear the same people with the same voices enunciating the same problems, including myself. “Shut the fuck up and get on with it,” I said to myself. Perhaps the decision to leave group was evidence of a further withdrawal from humanity where everyone was allowed to be human, painfully human. I, however, was leaning away from that. My next screenplay, A Case of Insanity, would testify to that. What is closer to the truth, and what I believe today, is that the addict (me) on an unconscious level always desire a substance or substances that will allow them to return to the fantasy. They are never neutral and each and every decision or rationalization that turns you away from a structure or situation that represents “health” or the possibility of staying in “reality” is a step, perhaps a small step at first, back to the abyss.
A Case of Insanity was a fictionalized recounting of the Son of Sam murders. In it, I tried to sum up the narcissistic and dangerous 1970’s. It was a cold, ice-like work that should have been directed by Fassbinder, in black and white. There was no one in the work that the audience could root for, let alone identify with. It was self-interest that paved the way for the decade of mergers, consolidations, ice, cocaine, and money, that was but a prelude to our run toward shallowness and homogenization.

The latter part of September, a thin strip of magnesium was lit: flash/poof. When that happened in science class, a blinding flash occurred and then, like The Lone Ranger riding out of town, you Hi-Ho’d Silver’d it to another class. However, when that flash occurred in my life, it lay smoldering in my brain for weeks, sometimes months.
A friend to whom I’d given my first screenplay, Coney Island, had in turn given it to a big-time producer, and he called me. He told me that my script was one of three being considered for production. He was to have lunch with him later that week and, since he’d done many favors for this man, was sure that he could push my interests further. The flash occurred, and I was not to wait. I wanted to work harder on A Case of Insanity. I went out for coffee to fuel the effort.
I bounded down the flights of stairs and out the door into the afternoon bustle. Nothing could go wrong. I was invincible again, a king in spite of myself. There, parked in front of my building, sitting in a blue, beat-up Kharman Ghia reading, was a beautiful Asian young woman. “Jesus, this is too good to be true. Everything fits,” I said to myself. Fate grabbed me by my balls, and led me toward the car.
She looked like my alter ego sitting there. She was tranquil, self-contained, and absorbed. I was like an inert gas possessing no valance. “Ah, excuse me,” I said, bending my knees slightly to get on a level with her window. Her face turned slowly toward me. “Christ,” I said to myself, “she’s more beautiful full-face.”
“Excuse me,” I said again, “are you an actress?”
“No, I’m not,” she replied pleasantly enough, with no hint of being put off or arrogant.
“You’re not, huh?...Well, maybe you should be.” I pressed on. “Listen, I know this might sound a bit strange but I just finished a screenplay where my protagonist meets and falls in love with a woman of Asian background, and I’m not sure whether some of the scenes I wrote work. Would you mind reading it and maybe we could talk about it later?”
“I’m not an actress, and I’ve never read a screenplay before.”
“You read; I see you reading,” I said, and we both laughed. “That’s all you really have to do. Either it will sound right to you or it won’t,” I continued, pushing her.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so,” she said, trying to let me off easily and without too much discomfort for either one of us.
I was not to be deterred. “Why don’t you give me your number?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Stop saying that, will you? You’re not married, are you?”
“No, I’m not,” she answered.
“Well, I’ll give you my number. How’s that?”
“No, that won’t work. Let’s just leave it at that.”
“Do you live in the neighborhood?”
“Yes, not far.”
“Good, think about what I said. I’m sure we’ll meet again or, if you change your mind, you can contact me through The Cedar Tavern across the street. Everyone knows me there. My name’s Savage and,” I turned around pointing, “I live right here, 2-A.” I looked back at her, smiled and said, “O.K. take care of yourself.”
“You too,” she said. I turned and walked away. By the time I returned with a container of coffee it was after six p.m. (the time when those who play the alternate street parking game in Manhattan can safely leave their cars without getting a ticket or towed), and she was gone. As I was going up the stairs, I thought about being out there the same time tomorrow, but, once I got upstairs, I couldn’t wait for tomorrow. I wrote a note and put it on her windshield with my phone number, asking her to call. I got upstairs and it began raining. It was the kind of rain that stopped and started again. When it stopped, I changed the note. It began raining, again. I changed the note. Again, it rained. “Fuck this,” I said to myself. I set my alarm for six a.m. I woke up, wrote the same note and left it under her wipers. I forgot about the trees, they leak. The Kharman Ghia and wet note was still there; I ran upstairs and changed the note.
Two weeks later, I saw her again. I went up to her car and leaned down. “How come you didn’t call?” I asked, trying not to startle her.
She turned her head slowly in my direction and said, “I’m still deciding.”
“It’s a good thing I didn’t need open-heart surgery. Well, how about it? Will you read it, or what?”
“I’m going away to my sister’s in Cape Cod. I guess I could read it then, up there.”
“Wait, don’t go nowhere. I’ll get you a copy. And call me when you’ve finished. My number’s on the first page,” I turned to go but quickly added, “What’s your name, by the way?”
“Jean.”

A month later and I heard from no one: not Jean, not the producer, and not from my friend who gave it to him. I decided to call him. I’ve learned, most painfully, that when you have to call “them,” “them” being jobs, producers, women, in short, any person that you want or expect something from, it’s usually no go and no good. The answer you were hoping was “yes” is invariably “no.” This time was no different. “Norm, I’m sorry,” he began, “I made a mistake. I’ve been meaning to call you back, but I’ve been busy, ya know? Anyway, I misinterpreted what he had said to me initially, I’m sorry.”
“That’s O.K.” I said to him. “You only heard what we both wanted to hear. Anyway, at least you tried for me. Most wouldn’t have done that. I appreciate it.”
After two years of waiting and hoping, I resigned myself to the fact that Coney Island, was a dead issue.

I needed a gig. I continued writing A Case of Insanity, but needed to make rent. I was friendly with a guy from Handelsman’ group who was a lawyer, whose family owned banks, who wanted to fool around with television stardom, and thought with the rise of cable and public access stations, he could become a TV talk show personality, eventually being picked-up by the more traditional networks. Really, he enjoyed fucking society dames and this segued nicely into that. He asked me to write for him for nothing until he made it, and he’d give a few bucks as a stipend per week. When I asked him if he knew anyone in the bar business that he could introduce me to he said, “Yeah, sure my cousin has a very successful spot he just opened. It’s right around the corner from the studio. We’ll go after the show for a few drinks. I’ll introduce you.”
Steve Oren, was a half partner in Oren & Aretsky’s. It was one of the more successful watering holes on Third Avenue, between 84th and 85th Streets. It was the saloon of destination for The New York Yankees, Knicks, and Rangers from the late 70’s until the early 80’s. Oren, once the male model for Winston cigarettes, had been married to Jennifer O’Neal. After meeting me, he introduced me to his other half, Ken Aretsky, who hired me. He started me at first with two shifts but shortly expanded them to include brunch on Saturday and Sunday.
Where there are high-priced professional jocks, there are beautiful women, and where there are beautiful women, there are guys spending lots of money to be seen with them and, if they’re lucky, bed some of them down as well. It’s synergistic and combustible, while it lasts. Everyone who’s associated with the saloon makes money, and I was no exception. In fact, I made a lot of money because I knew what to do behind this kind of bar. I was fast, funny, but aloof. I remembered the customers, not by their names but by what they drank and how much they tipped. I manipulated most by knowing who they were and what they wanted and purposely crossing up their signals in conspiratorial exchanges and intelligent and funny repartee; and, like most bartenders I knew, stole. I poured generous amounts of whiskey into their glasses, bought the tippers drinks, and averaged between one-fifty and two hundred dollars per shift, cash. I also ate and drank for nothing during the time I spent there. The food was terrific, and the liquor top shelf.
My three compatriots, Kenny, John, and Barry had been working there for quite some time when I arrived. Kenny and John were bartenders and Barry was the head chef. There were many other people who worked there. There were two Chinese men who worked in the basement, for instance, who did nothing except peel potatoes for the hundreds of orders we received each night for French Fries, but it was those three with whom I grew close. Both Kenny and John were working to support themselves while they tried to do other things. In John’s case it was acting, in Kenny’s, writing.
It did not take me long to make the “Savage Rules” at the bar. No one, no matter how attractive the man or woman might be (unless they were regulars who left a large tip because they were hip to the fact it was your stool they were sitting on, and you needed to see a return on that piece of property), was allowed to stay at the bar waiting for “somebody” to come in without drinking. No one, was allowed to remain at the bar nursing a drink, or worse, a bottle of Perrier, for a period determined by how busy the night was; and no one could drink without tipping. At first, John and Kenny were amazed at some of my actions, but it made them money too so they didn’t complain.
The management was making so much loot they didn’t much care what we did. As long as they heard the cash register ringing, they usually backed our play. Aretsky, a slick Jewish boy from Long Island, dressed in Armani, always had his hand draped around the jocks who hung there, and was the public relations force behind the saloon. The athletes did make the saloon their home, and why not. They were treated like kings and “comped” for what they ate and drank. They made hundreds of thousands, in some cases millions, of dollars a year and never had to reach into their pockets to pay for anything. Interestingly enough, they tipped worse than jazz musicians. At least most jazz musicians had a reason. They worked sparingly and when they did, usually it was for “short money,” but these athletes, Christ! At first I tried to be humorous with them. “Hey, it’s O.K. to tip, I won’t say nothin’,” I’d say to those who would belly-up to my bar, but they were a dense lot, with a few exceptions, like Pinella from The Yankees and Esposito from The Rangers, who tipped and tipped well. Two incidents serve to illustrate their arrogance and density. The first was with Mr. October, Reggie Jackson. He’d come into the place, and we’d have to hang his white fur coat in a room in the basement and, store bottles of Miller Light just for him because he was one of their spokesmen. We’d lug it upstairs to serve him and whomever he happened to be with that evening. He would point to people he knew and motion for us to buy them drinks, which we did, of course. He never got a tab, and he’d leave us nothing. Finally, one evening, after running around for him for hours, he was getting up to leave and I went downstairs to bring up his coat. Handing it to him I said, “Reggie, I know the booze and food are free, but the service isn’t. That’s how we, I, make a living.” He handed the coat back to me, reached into his pocket, and handed me a buck. I handed it back. “Keep it,” I said to him.” He turned and walked out, shaking hands with a few people as he went.
The second incident happened during a Sunday brunch. It was kind of slow that day. I had the TV on to some football game and a few regulars were at the bar, drinking beer and eating some fries. There was one attractive blond woman, who I didn’t know, sitting further down, alone, sipping on a white wine. I had a seven dollar tab for her behind the bar. I ran tabs for everyone. Walt Frazier, or Clyde as he was known, double parked his Rolls outside the saloon and sauntered in. I said hello to him and he to me as I watched his eyes light upon the comely thing at my bar, fingering her wine glass. He went over to her, said something I couldn’t hear, and she rose to leave. Frazier began walking out of the bar when I stopped him.
“Clyde,” I began, nearly whispering, “she has a seven dollar tab here.”
He turned to her as she was going past him, obviously going to his Rolls, grabbed her elbow and said, “Pay your bill, I’ll wait in the car.” He rounded, and left.

Jean called and apologized for the time lapse between her taking the script, reading it, and getting back to me. I asked her to meet me at The Cedar Tavern where we could discuss it over drinks. I did much more drinking than talking about the script. I didn’t have much interest in the script at that time, but pretended, as I often did at any time, especially with women, that I meant what came out of my mouth. She told me that a ten year relationship was coming to an end. When I inquired further she was, I thought, purposely vague, although she did intimate that the guy she was seeing was wanted by many law enforcement agencies for questioning. When I probed, she resisted and said it would be better, for both of us, if she didn’t say anymore. I usually took what other people said, especially about criminal enterprises, with a grain of salt. Coming from the background I did, it was hard for me to imagine how this diminutive, cultured, and very attractive Chinese woman could be involved with real tough guys. Besides, by not telling me too much she was being loyal, which I admired and respected. I walked her a few blocks to where she was staying and kissed her goodnight, and we said we’d continue this at a time in the very near future.
Being involved with so many different things on different levels did not stem my anxiety from escalating. I began asking the types of questions that smack of self-pity and lead, eventually, to the short and sweet anthem sung by the many drunks and drug addicts that I know, “Fuck-it.” ‘All those years that I’d worked, for what? All those years that I’d abstained from drugs, for what? Where had it all gotten me?’ These questions led to more shallowness. It had just made me more aware of what people had that I didn’t. In fact, it was more painful. Self-pity is one of the more nauseating indulgences that a person can perform, whether silently or for public consumption, it smells of the worst kind of sentimentality and corruption. I have engaged in it more times than I like to remember. It usually is accompanied by a drink or a drug which serves to ease the slivers of razor blades as they cut the memory of recriminations and regrets.
Handelsman, sensing my deterioration, cut down on my sessions rather than increase them. He saw I was no longer able to concentrate for long periods of time without getting distracted. I would say to him that I was feeling like a woman who goes to the seashore and tries to put just the amount of shells she can carry in her apron and take them back to her home to get through another day. My days were being lived only to get through. The constant drinking had begun to take its toll and wither away a resolve that I’d spent a great deal of time and energy to secure.
I began to think: If I just smoke a little reefer again it would take less of a toll on my body.
I was about to unlock a bolt.

pgs 144-148--From Chapter VII: JUNK SICK: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

PLUCKING THE FRUITS OF A MISSPENT YOUTH--FROM CHAPTER VII--CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

It was nearly summer, and rather than try to land a gig in the straight world of nine-to five, I decided that bartending, with the double-barreled action of quick money and women, better suited my desires. Besides, I had made many friends from my nights spent at The Other End with whom I played basketball on a concrete slab of a park, on Sixth Avenue and Houston Street, in the afternoon, and I wanted to preserve this day/night dichotomy. Also, I had become friends with someone who would become an important part of my life and influence my thinking for some time to come. One evening I was invited to a crap game hosted by a bartender from The Other End, George, where I met the singer/songwriter, Tom Waits. We became fast friends after our bantering back and forth after we discovered that we had much in common, the appreciation of the writer, Charles Bukowski, with whom he used to play gigs with, being just one.
Waits was carving out a place in the music world that would be uniquely his and enjoying the stress that goes with it. Funny, irreverent, and multitalented, he rekindled the writing bug in me. He’d call me in the middle of the night from places that seemed like outposts in America, small cities in Idaho or Minnesota, that he played in to coincide with the release of his album. We’d usually talk for a few minutes and fill each other in on what we were doing, or reading and sometimes writing. When he stayed in Manhattan, usually at The Chelsea Hotel, a few blocks from my apartment, we’d see each other frequently. We’d bounce ideas off each other and laugh, always laugh about the absurdities each of us experienced and tried to formalize in words. “Savage,” he’d growl, “tell me what you know about Potter’s Field,” or, “what can I do with my strung-out sax player?” One of the most important things Waits told me was during an evening in The Cedar Tavern. I drinking Chivas Regal and he, Wild Turkey, discussing the difficulty of expressing the “truth in confessional writing.” “Savage,” he said, “you’re a writer; it’s O.K. to lie.” He was well ahead of the curve on “creative nonfiction.”
Pat Kenny, a legendary saloon keeper, was opening a place on Bleecker Street. I opened the saloon with him that summer. It was a place that was so old it could have been designed by Margaret Mead. You had to walk down a long flight of rickety wooden stairs to get to the ice-machine and then lug buckets of it back upstairs. You’d do this five to seven times a night. I made all my money in tips from four to five-thirty in the morning when ten to fifteen cops, just having gotten off their shift, would come in to kill a few quarts of Irish whiskey before going home, or wherever it was they were bound.
While working and hanging-out with Waits and Doc, I began writing poetry again and, as if by magic, I came up with an idea for a screenplay. Coney Island, would be about a writer who meets and falls in love with a Japanese woman. However, he is being manipulated by a wealthy socialite who has promised him publication and fame. Does he sell his soul, not to mention his balls, in the bargain? Stay tuned, for a hundred and twenty pages.
At the same time, Handelsman and the group were encouraging me to go back to school to earn a Master of Social Work degree. He thought that I’d make a good therapist, especially in treating addictive-compulsive disorders. I didn’t disagree and, in fact, was drawn to that particular area of psychology and therapy.
The plan that Handelsman had put in front of me was straight forward. The shortest route to being admitted to a psychoanalytical training school would require an M.S.W. He suggested the Adelphi School of Social Work. It was too late to apply, but give me an angle to work on, give me a mountain that is difficult to climb, and I’m pretty resourceful. My father had been friendly with Charles Raffa for decades. Raffa owned a business that sold refrigeration equipment to supermarkets. He had a daughter, Matilda, who was married to the then Lt. Governor of New York State, Mario Cuomo. I contacted Charlie, explained that I needed Cuomo to write a letter asking Adelphi to make an exception to their cutoff date for applications in my case. The Lt. Governor was accommodating, as husbands generally tend to be. I was accepted in the fall term and chose to go at night, leaving a few evenings and weekends open for me to still bartend.
Kenny’s Castaways, the bar on Bleecker Street where I was working, was not throwing off enough money to make it worth my while to remain. A friend, Richie Jossin, whom I met while he was a bartender at The Other End, and with whom I gambled on basketball games (and lost plenty of money, but wrote a poem, Hoops, 3 and a 1/2 Points, which, in a way, while never making it even, struck a sort of balance), suggested that I join him working at another saloon on The Bowery, The Tin Palace. The Tin Palace was an interesting combination of saloon and jazz joint, and pretty soon I had a couple of shifts there.
That September my pop got tickets for the Ali vs. Norton bout for The Heavyweight Championship Of The World, held at Yankee Stadium. I had been an Ali fan since he’d won Olympic Gold. My father, who’d only heard his words from the papers he read, had minimized him for years until I convinced him to watch him fight. Once seeing him in action, my father converted. He acknowledged that even his favorite heavyweight, Joe Louis, would probably have lost to this ring magician. He could punch with either hand, hit hard while backpedaling, dance and box like Sugar Ray for fifteen rounds on a six foot four, two hundred and twenty pound frame, could take a punch and, was one of the great ring tacticians to ever lace-up a pair of gloves. Angelo Dundee, his trainer for all his professional life, had said he was the first fighter he’d ever seen who could go the full three minutes that a round lasted and never blink his eyes. In his prime, I don’t believe there was anyone who could beat him. I remember listening on a little transistor radio the night he fought Jerry Quary in Atlanta, after serving a three year exile for refusing to go into the Army and serve in the Vietnam War. I didn’t hate Quary, but I wanted to see Ali destroy him, which he did; he stopped Quary on cuts in five or seven rounds.
Even though we had ringside seats, the action before the fight was, in many ways, more exciting than the fight itself. Sinatra and Stallone and Frazier nestled among the pimps and women plumed and turned-out in the most outlandish outfits of peacock finery and broad-brimmed hats. They walked in and around Yankee Stadium that night, leaving a scent of sex in their wake. Before the fight, you could see the air pulsating and hear the buzz from the swell. Heads swiveled and turned, and when you looked around, you saw fifty-six thousand other people enjoined in the spectacle.
The awkward style of Norton always presented problems for Ali. He, however, prevailed in a decision that night, but seeing him live and moving in the ring was enough for me. It is enough sometimes just to see them live, working their craft. I used to get a thrill seeing Jordan in his prime, just dribbling the basketball up court.
Waits was back in town promoting his second album, The Heart of Saturday Night, with a couple of nights performing at The Bottom Line and appearing on Saturday Night Live. Doc and I made most of his dates and, after watching Duvall perform brilliantly in Mamet’s, “American Buffalo,” sat in the “green room” while Waits performed on TV. The good times we had though were usually quite separate from those of his professional life.
We would journey to Times Square arcades, catch flesh at some strip club like The Baby Doll Lounge, go to The Cedar or Doc’s pad or mine, talk and laugh and bullshit through the night and then get some food, the greasier the better, at an all night diner or cafe. One night, we even saved a woman, Miriam, in Coney Island. It was after a torrential rainstorm that we decided to journey into Brooklyn, eat at Nathan’s, and show Waits Coney Island where we played some Skee-ball and shot some bears.
In a way I felt that Doc and Waits were the embodiment of the years I’d spent at The New School. Waits was trying to carve out a place for himself in the entertainment industry. He was a triple threat: musician, writer, and singer. Doc, though a psychiatrist, wanted to write and was battling those instincts in his everyday life while attending to people, and I was writing now, while tending bar and going to graduate school.
Things were not nearly as exciting or humorous at Adelphi. After seeing the other students and attending the first few classes, I questioned whether this was the right profession for me. Not only did I feel superior to the students there, but to the professors as well, with the exception of Michael Fabricant, my sociology professor, who espoused the redistribution of wealth as the only real answer to rectify the ills of the ruling class.
The students, mostly women, wore “Have A Nice Day” faces in class that went well with their “reindeer sweaters.” It seemed they were prepared to lie down on the curb’s edge in order for “the suffering masses” to step on their backs while crossing over the puddled streets to the other, and more brightly lit, side. Their maternalism disgusted me. They believed their desire to “help and do good” was enough to warrant their place in the social work world. I wanted to suggest to a few of them, after listening to them espouse their reasons for getting into this line of work, to cut off a tit and hang it on a nail in the caverns of Grand Central Station so any poor person who needed a good suck or two could get one. And the teachers were, by and large, no better. Most believed there was a formula that could and would address any and all existing problems. It was hard to sit and listen to those who so obviously had never been outside a classroom (except, perhaps, in the internship phase of their graduate work), and in the world they tried to represent, theorize. The idea of writing papers for these professors nauseated me. In fact, as far as I was concerned, they should just give me the degree based on my life experiences and accomplishments. Knowing they were not about to do that, I was ready to leave and concentrate on working as a bartender and writing, taking my chances on what would happen next.
Handelsman tried to get me to stick it out and stay in school. He thought I was getting too hung up in the process and was losing sight of the goal. I, however, was enjoying the night life, and all that it provided.
The money I made, working behind the bar, was fast, and so were the women. My only two concerns prior to bedding down with them were: Did I have enough to eat that night to thwart going into insulin shock?; and, did I drink enough not to care what I was doing and with whom I was doing it with? Once I got home, a glass of orange juice would eliminate the first concern, and the drinks I had at the bar would have taken care of the other. Alcohol, like drugs before it, created a wall between me and the women I was with at any given time. All of these things, the money, the job, the booze, the friends, the women, and the writing, allowed me to keep the myth I had of myself and the world alive, and that was not necessarily a bad thing.
The Tin Palace was, as I’ve said, situated right on The Bowery. Across the street were two local dens of iniquity and infamy. The first was CBGB’s, the first pantheon of punk-rock in America. The second, adjacent to it, was The Sunshine Hotel, the home of those who have hit the skids and, consequently, the underbelly of life, transients, derelicts, alcoholics, addicts, and other pilgrims who have discovered an America that exists in stark contrast to the dot.com fever of our age. The Tin Palace had a glass enclosed front that served as a dining room and looked out at the denizens on The Bowery who, at times, looked in. Our patrons would sit in front eating a steak or lobster special, sipping wine or a cocktail, and those failures of Puritanism would come over, press their face against the glass and stare at them as they tried to eat. We had a bouncer, Jimmy Blackwell, who tried to shoo them away or sometimes had to resort to tougher measures. One night, Jimmy was late in getting to work and I, besides a waitress and chef, were the only ones in the saloon other than a few customers. I looked out front and saw a young woman walking her dogs. I knew her because she lived in a loft next door. It was a time when lofts were still cheap and artists, not brokers, could live in them. I saw one of those “Plymouth Rock” dropouts, very obviously mentally deranged, accost her. She screamed, and I leaped from behind the bar and ran outside. I tried to separate them, but he had her by the hair and would not let go. I saw from the corner of my eye some other booze hounds and former jailbirds running towards us. I didn’t know if they were going to help me or him. While still trying to separate them, I heard noises coming from the other side of the street. I quickly turned my head and looked behind me and saw people I recognized who worked at the gas station, and they were carrying pipes, as they crossed the street. I did not want this to turn more bloody then it was already. Try as I would, I could not get this guy to let go of her. Finally, I took hold of his hair that, because of the grease, nearly slid out of my fingers, and lifted his head up to a point where I could get in a clean shot. I hit him, as hard as I ever hit anybody, over his eye and knocked him over, opening a gash above his eyebrow. But he finally let go. The others from the gas station had scared off the other wanderers. I took the young woman inside the bar and let the cops, who had just arrived, take care of the mess outside. I gave her a drink and poured myself one as well.
The woman went with the cops to the precinct to file a complaint and Jimmy, who had just arrived, called Jack, who owned the place, to get another bartender to cover for me because I couldn’t work. My hand had swelled so badly that I couldn’t put it around a glass, let alone pour whiskey. I took a cab to St. Vincent’s Hospital, where the x-rays on my hand and wrist were negative. A week later the young woman found me at work, invited me out for dinner a few days later, and fucked me afterward. I told her it wasn’t necessary, and she said she knew that. I’d say she had class to do that as a matter of course. It simply was something she needed to do to balance the celestial scales.

Bobby, my brother, had moved into my building. Working in my father’s store and living in my parent’s house were too stifling for a lifestyle that favored alcohol, the occasional drug, and women. Although he was tremendously influenced by what my father said, or didn’t say, he still chose to live in Manhattan. Knowing what I did about him, his life in the store and how he’d had to capitulate to most every one of my father’s demands, I’d been encouraging him for quite some time to, at least, live an independent life out of their home. Perhaps, after going through drug treatment, private therapy, and had begun to craft my own life (or so I felt), I was less threatened, jealous and more giving toward him. He had initially found a place near me on Ninth Street, off Fifth Avenue. However, my father rejected it. He waited until my father approved. I introduced him to all my friends from The Cedar Tavern, and The Other End: Waits, Jason Miller, the author and actor, women and the assortment of friends I consorted with at that time, such as Ken Brown, the Pulitzer nominated playwright of, The Brig, Tommy Sig, the actor/director and Dutch, the waiter, actor, stevedore and professor of life lived on the margins. He seemed to enjoy the differences in personality, intelligence, and wit from those friends he knew and grew up with in Brooklyn. In fact, it was like night and day. He was able to enlarge his universe to include those with talent, art, music, and madness in their blood into his own world, enlarging it, and in the process, making him bolder. I did not know, until many years later, that he’d already begun his cocaine odyssey. Knowing what I’d been through, he hid that fact pretty well from me. I knew he liked his alcohol and could drink, but then again, so could I. The only real drawback of having him in my building was my father. He’d call and wake me up early in the morning to go upstairs and rap on Bobby’s door to get him up to go into work. I asked him why he didn’t call Bobby himself and he responded by telling me my brother wouldn’t pick up. They fought with each other all the time and, though I tried to avoid it, involved me too often in their arguments. I have often thought they liked and, in some perverse way, needed it.

Nearing summer, I had finished Coney Island, and the poetry I was writing was beginning to find an audience in small magazines and presses. I was also finishing my run at bartending. The night life was taking a toll on my diabetes. I felt by arbitrarily taking my morning shot whenever I arose and eating at different times, coupled with the amount of booze I was consuming, I had compromised my health. When I saw Dr. Bernstein, for the first time in nearly a year, he confirmed it. Even though my mood was as good as he’d seen in a long time, he didn’t like how I looked, regardless of what the blood tests would determine. Alcohol, he was quick to tell me, is dangerous for diabetics, especially hard liquor; first it cuts blood sugar and then increases it. Who can say how much and when? If there’s one thing the diabetic, especially the insulin dependent diabetic, needs to be is consistent. I was about as consistent as a person running for president.
At the same time, therapy with Handelsman was becoming more intense and painful. I was dealing with identification, or lack of it, with my father. My feelings of being less than a man were compensated by drugs, booze and, to a greater or lesser extent, women. My anger and self-contempt knew no bounds. However, with that pain came rewards. I was clean (if you forget the booze) going on six years, independent (a rationalization at best--for I still depended on the largesse of my parents), and had a social life which rewarded me. Although I had not found myself “professionally” yet, I was sure it would come.
Waits was up for a role in the film version of Edward Bunker’s novel, No Beast So Fierce. It was later renamed, Straight Time, and starred Dustin Hoffman. I’d sent my screenplay to Waits at the motel that he stayed at in L.A., The Tropicana, and he had given it to Hoffman. A few weeks later, while sitting in my apartment, Hoffman called to tell me he enjoyed the script but felt it wasn’t right for him, nor his production company, Sweetwall. We spoke on the phone about what I was working on now, and I told him it was a legitimate play about the offspring of concentration camp survivors, the premise being that the children were enclosed in the barbed-wire of their parents’ experience and the harshness and brutality of the parents’ lives impact greatly on the lives of their children. He told me that that subject had always intrigued him, particularly Hitler, and asked me to share some of what I had read about the subject, which I did. He asked me to keep in touch, should I finish that or anything else. It boosted my spirits and was a confirmation of sorts. Still, I knew it was time for a change.
I decided to leave The Tin Palace at the end of that summer and concentrate on getting a square, nine-to-five job. Besides, jazz musicians don’t tip.

pgs 138-142, From Chapter VII: JUNK SICK: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

YOUR MOST VICIOUS ENEMY--YOURSELF--FROM CHAPTER VII--CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

My stomach began bubbling as the cab approached the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. I knew that it was dope memory. It’s the recollection by the body and brain that junk is near and, more important, available. Every fiber, each granule of your existence cries out for a state, when bliss was, even in hell, achieved. It’s primordial. It defies language. You have no control over the feeling. I’m convinced that even if sight were not an option, there would be a conduit into your consciousness that would inform your being that heaven is just around the corner, and a step to the right. I was going home.
By the time we were through the tunnel and on the Belt Parkway, I was very aware just what was in store for me in Seagate: my parents and opportunity. And I knew that “opportunity” was a charged word. The Verranzano Bridge, proud and majestic, offered proof to me of where I had come from and where I was going. I had seen it being built from my bedroom window and marveled at the sheer will and brilliance of those who designed and those who built her. We curved under her and began the last leg of the ride. Now I was able to look south and see the lighthouse in Seagate, its red eye lit and turning in the sunset. I struggled to see my home from where we drove and tried to imagine what my family was doing as I was, once again, traveling home. We exited on Cropsey Avenue, stayed on the lane that brought us to the first light, made a right, and continued to Surf Avenue. I noticed that less than a year later there’d been changes. Buildings had been gutted that once held friends and dope connections. There seemed to be less commerce and fewer people on the avenue for a summer night, and more street prostitutes on Mermaid Avenue then I remembered. Also, for the first time I felt different. After spending so much time living in Manhattan, I felt more part of that borough than Brooklyn.
My eyes began to open wide as soon as we got to the Surf Avenue entrance to Seagate. I was searching for familiar faces. The cop stopped us at the entrance, looked inside the cab, saw it was me and waved us through. I directed the driver to my home, paid the fare and got out of the cab. I gave him directions on how to get back to Manhattan and watched him leave. I was buying some time to think this out. It was the first time I had been home in about a year.
I walked up to the door, rang the bell, heard the dog bark, and waited. My father opened the door, looked at me and smiled. I walked in and placed my bag on the landing and kissed him. It was a weird feeling. I had, since going into a therapeutic community, begun not to feel intimidated, hesitant, shy, embarrassed, awkward or gay, when hugging or kissing male friends, but with my father and brother I never quite got used to it, touching their flesh never felt right to me. It felt, if you want to know, false and, on my part, insincere.
I walked up the few stairs to the kitchen where my mom was and kissed her as well. The house looked and smelled the same. Everyone was in their right place, except me. From the very earliest age I never felt I fitted there. Perhaps, I said to myself that was exactly what I was still trying to do. I pushed it aside. My brother, Bobby, was still at the store and would be home later. My mom asked if I wanted anything. Coffee would be nice, I said, and sat down in the kitchen. I thought this was a good time to iron out a few things that needed to get said in person. We spoke about our expectations of each other both in his business and in his home. We discussed my personal life with Diane, whom they loved, being personal. My privacy was important, but their involvement was welcome. We would try to respect each others’ boundaries, and, while I didn’t think I could see a future in his business, I’d keep an open mind.
I went downstairs to the room I’d lived in behind the back of the house. My brother had been kicked upstairs because of his escalating erratic behavior and my father wanted to protect his investment. I began to unpack and, as I was doing this, I remembered all the insanity's, large and small, that took place down there. I hoped this wasn’t another chapter.
My brother came downstairs after he came home, and we seemed awkward around each other. I wanted to try and be “adult” and set boundaries for us and so we spoke briefly about my being home, my working in the store, and him getting high. That was his business, I told him. As long as he didn’t do it around me, I had nothing to say about it. I believe he wasn’t too thrilled about me having my old room back and felt threatened by my presence, not only in the house but in the store as well. The relationship we’d had was bolstered by drugs. Take those drugs away and those simmering jealousies, rivalries and fear based realities come bubbling to the surface. At the time I thought there was nothing much he had that I wanted, always a precursor of manipulation for me, and so I concentrated on what I needed to do, staying clean, and working, which was, for me, difficult enough.

In the ten months I lived in Seagate I made it my business not to run into any history other than my family. What’s past is fiction, and what’s fiction is a lie, someone said. I only wanted to cope with the reality of my day to day existence, and for the first seven or eight months that was enough for me. I worked six days a week, ten to twelve hours a day. I worked the front-end of the store and was in charge of the cashiers, scheduling, checking in deliveries, doing the daily cash receipts and, when the spirit moved me, I helped unload the eighteen wheelers that delivered thousands of pieces of weekly merchandise for a very small weekly paycheck. I usually came home pretty tired, ate, watched a little T.V., tried to read, and slept. One day a week, I’d go into Manhattan to attend, “splitee groups” run by Chris Maples who’d inducted me into Project Return. These groups were designed for those who’d left the program early to earn the right to “graduate,” should they remain drug free. On Saturday and/or Sunday I’d see Diane. Sometimes she’d come into Brooklyn and stay downstairs with me while other times I’d stay at her place. Things between us were good, not great, but good.
I assumed, because I was doing all right, my diabetes was as well, though there was no basis for it. I still refused to test my urine, much less chart it, so I really had no way of knowing how my glucose was running. What I did know was that I ate pretty good and had no overt symptoms like excessive thirst, urination or hunger, and my physical activities were not hampered, in any way, by my disease. Yet diabetes, as I have said before, was a second class citizen to me. I had it, and that’s all I’d admit. Put a gun to my head, you’d have to shoot me for me to say any different.
Dr. Bernstein was glad to see me. We had begun to develop a relationship that went beyond the physical ailment and stretched into creative, literary, and emotional areas. After the physical, he asked how I was really feeling. “ Like shit, Jerry. I’m not writing, and I want to write. I’m not reading and I want to read. I want to talk about shit, and all I talk about is the store and things I’m not all that interested in discussing.”
“Well, it’s not forever. Are you looking for other things?”
“No, not really, not yet. Maybe it’s time to start looking.”
He studied me for a few moments before he said, “There’s nothing wrong with owning a business you know. You’re not breaking any creative laws. Stevens, was a banker; Williams, a doctor, for Christsakes.”
I smiled for the first time in a long time. “No, nothing wrong in it. I just think I don’t want to do it much longer, but I feel so goddamn guilty about leaving my old man.”
“Children are supposed to leave their parents. That’s how it works.”
“Take care, and thanks, Jerry,” I said and left. I knew my blood tests would be all right. I wasn’t too sure about anything else.

My bones were rattling around again. Writing was tugging at my arm. I began thinking at odd angles. I became unsettled. I saw everything in terms of words put together. It was random and exciting. For some time now I had tried to subvert the process. A writer can no more try not to write than try not to piss. Also, I had come to doubt my motives, which had to do with validation through publication, a very dangerous peg on which to hang my hat, or head. My energy had no place to go. The work I did in the store, the sex I had with Diane, the conversations I had with people, did nothing to stifle the urge I had to write something. In fact, I felt that very urge beginning to turn against me. There were sentences I didn’t want to complete, thoughts were aborted, sex was becoming angry, and the work in the store was repetitious and dull. This could be a trick, I said to myself. You’re really angling to get high again, and this puts you on the fast track. Not only are you putting yourself in a position where the work, imagination, isolation and alienation scream out for a substance or substances to inspire, coat and balm the process but immediate gratification--meaning publication--is slow to come and, maybe, won’t come at all. Then, a descent, terrible and terrifying will follow. If I could not see past the reflection of Norman Savage, diabetic, I was in trouble. Inwardly, I harbored a distorted picture of myself as a grandiose doormat. My fantasies slept side by side with all my insecurities, which usually took much of the bed and blanket and woke up first. Investing so much time and emotional energy in relying on an agent and publisher’s knowledge, whim or lucky guess about what was good and what would sell, was standing on shaky ground at best.
Handelsman, the psychologist who had told me to seek the help of a program before consenting to see me as a patient and, whom I’d see for many years as a therapist, said that my background was precisely why writing appealed to me so much. Besides my loving literature and being a good writer, it tapped into my parental history. I’m never sure from one day to the next if I’m going to be accepted or rejected, and, since rejection was my parental currency, writing, and the “arts” in general, had more of that than just about any other profession. It made sense that I’d want to return to that testicle-slicing machine in some way, shape, or form.
My father, when I told him that I didn’t think I would have much of a future in his business, tried to entice me with money. Without working too hard, he said, both my brother and I could conservatively earn a salary in the low six figures a year. It was then, and is now, a lot of money. I knew, for my father to say this to me, my brother had him worried. He was not at all comfortable with entrusting him to manage the entire business. But, in fact, fearing that my brother would develop a “thought process” of his own, consigned him mostly to the backbreaking labor of managing the nuts and bolts of keeping the staff and merchandise flowing while he made most, if not all, of the financial decisions. He’d minimize my brother’s intelligence, lauded his physical prowess, thus consigning him to a specific and limited role in his business; and it was his business, that he made crystal clear. My brother, though, was demonstrating the very behavior patterns that I had when I used alcohol and other drugs. He was abrasive, late, and sometimes reckless. My father was covering his ass.
Diane’s first husband was a writer and teacher, and she knew what a grinding, frustrating, and backbiting profession it was. She also knew, and loathed, the world of academia where most writers find themselves, either because they need a job when writing or can’t write but need a job. She knew about artistic betrayals, the pilfering of ideas, and spouses. Yeah, Diane was really thrilled about the prospect of my seriously considering taking up the pen again.

It was late February or early March of 1974 when Diane and I decided to take a weekend trip to Provincetown, a beautiful little town on the tip of Cape Cod. It was even better in the dead of winter when the beaches and sand dunes shifted with the winds and the grayish blue ocean was capped by frothy white waves that bit the sand and sprayed your face. The poetry there was rugged, spare, and graceful.
“Writing is a vacation from life,” said O’Neill, the quintessential alcoholic. Even though I realized, on certain levels, that writing was frustrating and dangerous, it was still the best game in town. When I was inside a work, I was lost. When I found words from some part of myself that spilled on the page, I was high and giddy. When I saw my name in print, I felt euphoric, and when I read, I felt myself being sung. It was jazz, freedom, a solo, lyric, a rhythm that was wholly mine, and mine alone. It was power directed at the stupid institutional reality of assholes, myself included. My work ran counter to what academics would consider poetry. Good. I knew I was on the right track, whatever that track was. I knew I hadn’t lived in the poetic garden of the academy where words were measured against meter, and thoughts were reflected in moon streams. My world was not crafted like that. It was unkempt, overgrown with weeds and the detritus from failures. It was Ginsberg’s sunflower in a broken-down greasy train yard. It slept on the I.R.T. subway. It made love to Bennington women and Lexington Avenue whores on the same night. Green pastures were not my thing unless they were bombed-out, and cratered by disease and hopelessness. I liked fucking women who were pregnant with another man’s seed. Why should I make the line rhyme and make sense, when it made no kind of sense to me? I didn’t have to question humanity or the universe. I knew both of them were suck jobs.
I told this to Diane in a Provincetown bar late one night. We were drinking cognac. I was trying to excite her. She was trying to bring me down to earth.
“There’s nothing wrong with owning a business. It’s not like you’d be one of these cheap sellouts. Besides, you could still write and maybe that would show you just how much you want to write.”
“Whatdayamean? I want to write,” I responded, my voice sounding shrill to me despite the balm of the cognac.
“Well write then...you’re lucky to have a business to go into and use as a hedge against the artist’s life. Every one I know who’s trying to make a living as an artist is miserable.”
“Shit, Diane, you’re an artist too. I can’t believe what I’m hearing.”
“I don’t think I want to go back into those ridiculously small circles of academic artist’s posturing, all those stupid luncheons, and teas and students who just want to fuck anyone who’s a minute older and holding court in a classroom. They think older is wiser, a professor is a trophy that can just fuck wisdom into them. It’s torture and I’m not sure I want that kind of torture again.”
“I’m not your husband.”
“Ah, everybody says that until some eighteen year old bats their eyes at them at a time when there’s some difficulty at home. Maybe there’s money problems, or problems within the department, or the politics of the place is particularly vicious or the sex at home is too predictable, and the thought of a new conquest arouses the blood. Norman, I don’t want that anymore.”
There was no resolution that night. We went back to our motel room whose windows faced the beach. We were liquored up and a little more estranged from each other than when we left New York. We made love that night, but it was angrier and more self-centered than it had ever been.
A short time later, after we returned from Provincetown, an opportunity arose which I thought would solve our differences. Oddly enough, the call came to Diane. The call wasn’t odd. Telling it to me was. In retrospect, I’ve been lucky with women. They have been much more loving and honest with me than I have ever been with them. It sounds patronizing and cowardly (and well it should), to do on paper what I was never able to do with them at the time and haven’t been able to do in person. If it hadn’t been for their love and graciousness, there was a better than average chance I’d not be alive today and, even if I were, would certainly have become less of a man.

Brad was in Mt. Sinai at the same time I was and for the same reason, but Brad was seventeen. I had told him that I was going to enter Project Return and suggested he do the same. He didn’t, but he did have a crush on Diane and kept in touch with her. Brad had called Diane recently to tell her he had left this private school upstate and was now going into a drug program. Also, he said that his school was infested with teens who were substance abusers and, knowing how I felt about teaching and the background I’d bring to the school, perhaps I’d want to get in touch with them. She relayed this information to me, and I made the call. I spoke with the headmaster, telling him of my background and credentials without telling him too much. He invited me to come up the next week for an interview.
That evening, at supper, I told my folks and brother my plans. My father appreciated my honesty, but was neither encouraging nor discouraging. My mom wished me well while Bobby, at first, registered disappointment and then, almost in the same breath, offered to drive me up to the interview. I knew I’d been stepping on his toes, both in the business and in the house. He felt I’d usurped his place in the store as well as the room downstairs and, though he’d never admit it, was probably jealous of my relationship with Diane. I suspected that he felt his life would improve if I was somewhere else. He never came out and said it, but he didn’t have to. And, I wasn’t all that crazy about him either, not if you scratch the surface, I wasn’t. I was diabetic, he wasn’t. I was sick, he wasn’t. My pop had fawned all over him ever since he’d begun playing basketball, and I was certainly jealous of that. My old man, without putting it into words, encouraged him to drop out of school in order to be in business with him, damn the cost, financially or emotionally, to either one. My brother and I really only felt comfortable with one another while drinking or doing drugs. I’ve lived upstairs, in my head, mostly, Bobby the reverse: Dimitri and Ivan Karamazov.
As close as my folks wanted our family to be, that is how far apart we were. The extraordinary amount of energy that each of us gave, trying to be close, made it all the more divisive when any one of us had his own viewpoint to voice, feeling felt, or action to take. The slightest deviation from that point, arbitrary though it might be, could only result in the overwhelming feeling of guilt, as if you’d betrayed your entire family or compromised what was really in your own best interest. Instead of becoming more comfortable with each other, and each other’s voice over time, the egg shell just got thinner and thinner. The sad fact is that both sides of my family tree is littered with fractures between siblings. My mother’s two sisters have not spoken with each other in nearly twenty years since one of their daughters, who was close friends with the daughter of the other sister, was sleeping with her husband. My father’s two cousins, who were brothers, have not spoken to each other in almost a two decades, over money. My father’s sister’s two children, well into their forties and fifties, have had an on-again-off-again relationship with each other for most of their lives. When my father’s mother was still alive she, from the force of her will, brought us together on the traditional Jewish days of observance, birthdays, funerals and, the occasional visit on Sunday. Her personality, overbearing and selfish, as it sometimes was, nevertheless was heated by an unchallenged allegiance to those bearing the family name, Savage. Yet, she couldn’t instill, nor could her children instill in their children, the desire to transcend differences, or geography, to maintain those ties once she died. It was as if we all took a big breath, let out a sigh, and collectively said, “We don’t have to do that anymore.”
“That won’t be necessary,” I said to my brother, “Diane is going to go up with me, but thanks anyway.” Diane’s name was something my brother didn’t want to hear too much. He had registered his displeasure with her months before. Apparently, Bobby felt, if Diane was to truly become part of the family, she would have make sure she took pains to talk with, soothe, placate, sacrifice for, and stroke the ego of everyone who’s last name was Savage, particularly the males, and, as far as he could see, she was not doing that, especially with him. She had not made an attempt to greet him once, and it made him feel very unimportant. She quickly told him that her mission in life was not to be liked, much less loved, by anyone’s entire family, though that would be nice if it happened. Just loving and being loved by the person she desired was sufficient. He was rebuffed, and he felt she was cold. I wouldn’t worry about it, I told her when she told me. She said worrying about my brother was the last thing on her mind.

The drive up to Saratoga was great for me and Diane. There’s something about driving long distances that has always put me at ease. We decided to pack some clothes and stay a day or two to explore the countryside. We both were a little burned out and needed some time away from the trappings of Brooklyn and Manhattan.
Ten miles outside of Saratoga, across a little wooden bridge, adjacent to a narrow stretch of the Hudson River, sat Schuyler Preparatory School. The main building was an old wooden Victorian house with a porch that ran around it and overlooked the river. Inside, the building smelled wonderfully old and had wooden floors, comfortably worn armchairs and sofas, a dining room, and administrative offices. The headmaster, Mr. Pouliot, a slender, stern-faced, nervous man in his late fifties, greeted us. I asked if it would be all right if Diane sat in on the interview. He agreed and ushered us into his offices.
The population of the school, he told us, drew kids from the tri-state area who were very wealthy. They’ve all had difficulties in school, he went on, and those difficulties were either predicated or exacerbated by their use of alcohol and drugs. I suggested that their subsequent truancy, suspensions, and ultimate expulsions from other educational venues, could be argued as being a direct result of their substance abuse and learning disorders which were linked to deeper emotional disabilities. By providing them with a safe and nurturing environment and giving them the tools whereby they could confront and support one another in their individual behavioral and emotional battles, they might be able to reduce, perhaps eliminate, their abuse of alcohol and other drugs. They could then, collectively and individually, reap the benefits that had eluded them for so long. I told him about my past in general terms. We discussed my academic credentials and my creative, as well as athletic, interests and skills. Most importantly, I told him about my ability at running “groups,” elaborating on what I had discussed a few moments earlier. It sounded good, even to me. I weaved a very educated and seductive package to someone who needed little in the way of seduction. Pouliot, who’d been looking at Diane as much (maybe more) as he’d been listening to me, hired me on the spot. I believe that if Diane had hiked her dress up further I would have owned a piece of the joint. He told me he’d be sending me some papers to sign and to be up at school at the end of August. I thanked him, got up, shook his hand, took Diane’s arm, and we left. I looked at what would be my home come the fall.
We drove into to Saratoga looking for a place to eat. We passed a slew of little shops and restaurants that are nestled into side streets, finally deciding on Hattie’s Chicken Shack, an old and weather beaten establishment that appeared casual and inviting. Inside, I heard the opening notes to Miles’ Someday My Prince Will Come, and knew we had chosen wisely. The owner and staff were black, and Hattie’s specialized in southern cooking. Diane had fried catfish, and I had the fried chicken. We both shared the corn bread, black-eyed peas, collard greens, slaw, potato salad, and topped it off with thick, rich coffee and banana pudding. We stayed for a second helping of Miles, Monk and the rest of the gang. I asked our waiter where we could stay for cheap, and what else there was to do in Saratoga. He told us about Saratoga and it’s history of horse racing and spas, fun for the mannered gentry. Then he gave us, those with little manners and less money, a place to bed down and where, on the old grounds of Franklin Roosevelt, for twenty-five bucks, you could enjoy an hour and a half of being soaked in a bath generated by the springs underneath the earth and rubbed-down for an hour by a person with educated hands and strong fingers. It sounded wonderful, and it was.
In fact, I felt so good after Diane and I returned that I even enjoyed going with my father to watch Bobby play with other people I knew, basketball in The Brighton Beach League. He was a very good ball player who never really knew just how good he could have been because he, like so many others, subverted and sabotaged himself through drug abuse, but we did, for really the first time in our lives, enjoy each other without using drugs, although the booze did flow.
Besides coaching basketball and running “groups,” I’d be teaching American and European literature in the Fall. I called up Bruce Rosen, my professor from New York City Community College, and pumped him for information on classroom technique and lesson plans, never having been in front of a class, except for the course I taught at The New School. Obviously, Rosen told me, knowing the subject matter well was important, but it was enthusiasm that was usually the difference between understanding something, and teaching it.
I had begun to fantasize, always a risky proposition for me, about what miraculous changes I’d be able to bring to the school, students and, most importantly, myself. How, through my own love of literature, I’d teach them to love what I’d come to love. My job, I believed, was to challenge their fundamental assumptions about themselves and the world they lived in, and coach some of them in the harmony of pure, unselfish basketball. Most importantly, I’d show them, share with them, the tools I’d learned in order to talk about their hidden most feelings and then facilitate their opportunities to change behavior. Then, at night, after I’d put the dorm to bed, under a desk lamp, I’d write my ass off. I’d have time and I’d have peace and clarity, and the words would pour out of me. What I couldn’t catch would collect and puddle under my feet to be mopped up in the next morning’s light. Soon I’d be published, recognized, vindicated, redeemed, and validated.
I was so sure of this that when Julio and his wife came to visit a week later, and Julio offered me a job working for him, I refused. I loved this man and felt a debt of gratitude, but I still said no. That’s how strong the fantasy reflected the conception I had of myself. I wanted to carve out my own life on my own terms. I felt it was time to take that step. And I did.
Diane’s steps were anything but sure, and God forbid someone should be unsure when I thought I was so right, especially if I loved them and wanted, needed, them to agree with me. She had always said that she wanted, needed a “resting place,” but I had no intentions of providing one. I was speeding in the other direction. I was an adolescent searching for whatever identity felt right at the moment. She fed on betrayal yet raged against it. She didn’t want defeat but fueled it. Her regalness and her indignation at life’s absurdities was slightly askew. It begged the question, “Why did I do that for?”
I did what I always did when I felt threatened. I got a back-up, an alternative, an ace in the hole, an “ya see I don’t need you” kind of fuck you, and a righteous (because it was I who was sinned against) fuck you at that. I found Nina, a dark-haired, interesting young woman who, conveniently, lived in Seagate, grew-up with my brother, ran in similar circles and who was a photographer studying at Pratt. Yeah, I was being real grown-up about the whole thing.

pgs 106-111, From Chapter VII: JUNK SICK: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015