THE TWO COASTS OF INSANITY--FROM CHAPTER VIII--CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

Jean left for California and took with her a fur coat that she’d bought for her mother with some of the money she’d made selling apartments. I could tell from the way Jean described her mother that this gift to her was as much a wish for her love and respect as it was a token of Jean’s belief that somehow she’d let her down. Her mom, according to Jean, sounded somewhat like my father’s mother, fiercely loyal to, and protective of, her family and, ruling that family with an iron will which, in part, she’d handed down to Jean. She learned no English in the considerable time she’d been here and, as far as I knew, had no love affair with the customs of her new country, including her daughter’s propensity for being with those of a mongrel race, Americans.
The day after New Year’s day Jean flew out. I met her eleven days later. I’d left Bistro Pascal after working New Year’s Eve knowing I, and the saloon, were going downhill fast. That night, New Year’s Eve (after scoring coke from Paul with Frankie, a friend of Garcia’s and one of the managers of the legendary gin mill, P.J. Clarke’s to begin the evening), was one long death knell for us at work. We tried (and some of us didn’t try too hard) to pretend otherwise, but it was a low point for all of us there. Garcia, though, with his charm made it work somehow. He did away with the customary staff meal and allowed us to order off the menu and kept feeding us what we desired. I made sure to have the prosciutto and melon, rack of lamb, French green beans, and lyonaisse potatoes, with a glass of red wine, before I consumed any drug that was on the scene that night, and there were many drugs that were being passed around. In a peculiar way, I was happy that we weren’t busy, even though on a night when bars, restaurants, and saloons and those who worked there made much money, we didn’t. New Year’s Eve, like many other “drinking” holidays, is a night for amateurs. If I had my druthers, I’d rather be with another person, preferably in my apartment, with the shades pulled down and doing anything or nothing, then being outside, at a party or in a bar that evening. If I couldn’t manage that, I’d then rather be working, having a thick piece of wood (in this instance, marble), come between the revelers and me. I’d then serve up fun and desperation in equal measures while keeping out of the fray.
Jean met me at The Bistro just before it struck twelve and produced a few grams of coke, which I had her pick up from Paul earlier that evening. We closed early for the kind of evening it was and made our way to P.J. Clarke’s where the night was just hitting it’s stride. We drank for another few hours, but I felt pretty hollow doing it and could not wait to get back to my place where I could just shoot the coke until it was gone. To that end, I was able to convince a few of the people I knew to give me what they could, said my New Year’s salutations to them and went home, where it got uglier.
Drunks and drug addicts are solitary, isolated people who become more so when in the act of drinking or using drugs, especially shooting them. We got home, and I immediately began using up what I’d brought back with me, with a compulsion born from a coagulation suffused with grief and riddled with the most corrosive feeling, fear. Grief for everything that had and hadn’t happened and fear, for what I’d turn into should I stop. When there was no more coke left, I opened up a bottle of wine and began drinking. The sun was up by now and Jean had quietly drifted off and I, looking around at the culmination of another year, was beginning to feel the wine work and was just grateful for that.
Jean met me at San Francisco International Airport. We stopped at Cafe Trieste, one of the oldest coffee houses and distributors in America, and had a wonderful cup of espresso amid the signed photos of Ginsberg and Kerouac among other beat writers who adorned the walls. We sat on the old rounded scarred wood chairs underneath a corrugated tin ceiling, sipped our coffees and smelled the rich aroma of roasted coffee beans. We didn’t talk much then, but rather just stared out the windows. I remembered being there well over a decade ago on a young odyssey into Southern California and Mexico with San Francisco being the first stop in my attempt to win back Corinne, whom I did, but at a price. How much of a price to her I’d never know. My mind always had a difficult time staying in the time I was in but would much rather fasten itself to where it had been, or where it was yet to go. We walked the few blocks to City Lights Books, where I hadn’t been since the late Sixties. It was as beautiful and as chaotic as I remembered. I inhaled deeply the wonderful smell of the flesh of books and it was here, in this environment, I browsed aimlessly for an hour before we made our way to her parent’s home. I was feeling better than I had felt for months, having stopped the cocaine binge New Year’s Day and had also cut down on the amount of booze I was putting into my system. I’d willed myself to stop and was lucky there was still some brake fluid left in the drums.
Her family greeted me warmly and was generous to me throughout my stay with them. Her mom eyed me suspiciously, yet showed me as much hospitality as anyone ever did and, when I ate with them, made sure my plate was filled first and kept filled with the most delicious of Chinese foods. She was a wonderful and seemingly effortless cook, and I ate her homemade dumplings and wontons and soups with tremendous enjoyment each night Jean and I dined with her and Don, Jean’s father. Don was the opposite of his mate. He was quiet, shy, and gentle, quite unlike his wife, the matriarch of the clan who, though I could not understand a single word she said, seemed to have a comment about everything, and everyone. Don was a retired medical lab technician who puttered around the house, tending his garden and plants and reading. We didn’t speak much, and he did not try to force the issue in any way but instead, just by his glances and acknowledgment of me, made me feel very welcomed.
Jean, however, was upset. Her mom had refused to take the fur coat she’d bought her, and no amount of reasoning could persuade her otherwise. If the coat was bought out of love or out of guilt or, as gifts like that sometimes are, bought out of a complicated childhood necessity made that much more important by the perplexity of unresolved adult hunger, parental acceptance, I didn’t know. What I told Jean was that I thought her mother should have just taken the gift and moved on, but now that she hadn’t been very gracious about receiving it, it was time for Jean to move on. Easy for me to say, I know.
After dinner that night I called Yarber, my old crony from my New School days, who had converted an abandoned Bar & Grill located near a whorehouse, across from the bus terminal in Oakland, into a studio where he painted and sometimes, if the painting was going good or the relationship with Hilary bad, lived. He had left Tulane in New Orleans where he’d been teaching painting primarily and was sometimes painting and relocated to California where he was primarily painting and sometimes taught. He’d been enjoying having his work shown in San Francisco and Los Angeles and was slowly, but steadily, gaining recognition as an artist to be reckoned with. He was supporting himself through his craft, which, as anyone who’s tried to pay his bills by way of his art knows, is triumph enough. We spoke and made up a time to meet. Jean was eager to meet him as well, after being regaled with my tales of the old days and her own desire to encounter a world she hardly knew.
It was dark with a light rain falling when we found the terminal for some of Oakland’s bus lines and Yarber’s place. I looked around as we were slowly searching for a spot to park and noticed the whorehouse that Yarber told me about across the street, on the second floor, with it’s curtained windows and dim yellow and red lights looking as sinful as sin.
Yarber, this tall, lanky, one-eyed Texan, stood at his front door apparently waiting for us to arrive. He peered at our car, trying to discern if I was in it, as we cruised to a stop in front of him.
“Hey, Savage,” he said in his half-drawl, “glad you could make it man.”
“Me, too. What’s shakin’?” I asked.
“This and that. Come in. You must be Jean.”
“Yeah, yeah, sorry. Bob Yarber, Jean,” I hastily said.
“He has the manners of an alley cat. Good to meet you.”
“You too,” Jean replied.
“Can we go the fuck in if this Love Fest is over?” I said, laughed, and moved past both of them, through the door into this yellow lit, ground floor of an abandoned saloon. To my left were the bar proper, broken in sections, so that the skeletons of old plumbing showed and the mouths of cabinets, once holding the booze and glasses stood ajar. The wood had layers of dust, while the mirror behind held the spider veins of random fractures. The wooden floor pitched and sagged and there were pieces of lumber scattered throughout while a few hurricane lamps, hung over doorframes or strung over a beam, provided whatever light there was. “How ya been man?” I asked.
“Makin’ it, ya know,” he replied. “You?”
“Can’t complain. I missed you man.”
“Missed you too Savage; how’s Brasz?”
“He’s cool; he’s painting a little and getting in trouble with chicks.”
“Who isn’t...oh, sorry Jean.”
“That’s O.K. you two guys catch-up. I’m going to look around, is that all right?”
“Sure, go ahead, just watch it. Hey guys, I got some beer upstairs.”
“Sounds good. Show me what you’ve been up to since I saw you last. Brasz tells me they’re finally starting to pay you some notice...and bucks.”
“Yeah, yeah, got some nibbles. Let me show you around.”
Yarber grabbed one of the hurricane lamps, with a long extension cord, and we followed him up a knock-kneed, doddered, decrepit, wheezing staircase to the second floor where he had his studio, but not before we paused to look at two of his older works. Each, I believe, was done in the early to mid-Seventies. They were huge canvases. Each measured roughly six by eight feet. One, facing the staircase directly was, “Mao Descending From Heaven.” It showed Chairman Mao, dressed in his military outfit, floating earthbound, with his little Red hat slightly askew. The colors, reds and browns mostly, were somber. The other, a gigantic portrait of Clifton Chenier, the Zydeco king of New Orleans, was Mao’s opposite. Chenier, showing a mouthful of teeth, some of which was inlaid with gold, was joyously playing his accordion while various crustaceans danced at his feet. Here the colors were dynamic, striking, infused with a rhythm of colorful joy.
The paintings in Yarber’s studio and the canvas he was working on, were much smaller in contrast to those just described, the colors just as vivid but the content addressed a more Southern Californian subject, the culture of swimming pools. The execution of this subject was funnier, and more vicious. He had bodies lying on chaise lounges in various states of repose, isolated in their own world, around a swimming pool while The Pillsbury Doughboy was about to either fall or jump into the water.
“Well, Yarbs, I can see you’re in some fuckin’ shape,” I said humorously. I was standing on his paint-splattered floor, a can of beer in my hand, looking at his painting. The studio was large, with canvases leaning against walls in various stages of completion. A small refrigerator and sleeping mattress was in one corner of the room, a large picnic like table holding his brushes and paints ran almost the length, while a sink stood alone in another corner. Windows, on two sides of the studio, overlooked the street and an alley.
Maybe it was looking at Yarber’s work that triggered it, or perhaps it was being in a strange and unfamiliar landscape that unleashed the desire, or maybe, as Toni Morrison suggested in her novel, Sula, if an artist doesn’t practice his craft that craft will eventually turn against him, that was the final arbiter in my cortex which prompted me to ask, casually, “Hey, Yarber, you know where I can get some coke around here?” And just like that, my stutter reappeared.
Bi-coastal mania. This time, however, having to live in Jean’s parent’s home prevented a full-blown episode of anarchic, perhaps nihilistic, addictive behavior. I settled for a part-time insanity assuaged by being able to travel outside myself and into Jean’s world of family considerations and San Francisco’s world of culture including it’s food, art, and literary Bohemia. I was relaxed enough to allow Jean to take me, and not my compulsion, around town and was thoroughly taken by her ability to understand what I was mostly fighting, and allowing me ample opportunity to work through that most formidable of enemies, myself.
My devil overtook me the night Jean and I were going to attend her Uncle Doon’s 60th birthday party. Jean’s mom had planned, and was the force behind, a banquet for 150 of their family and friends at a restaurant in Chinatown. When her parents left, I was free to pursue my mania without imposition or guilt. It was as if my parents, after days, weeks or months of imposing their peculiar brand of stricture, had abdicated their parental roles leaving me to do what I secretly desired, in this instance shoot coke. I had a gram and too many hours to kill. After I exhausted what I had, I called Yarber’s contact to get more and being that it was Sunday, it was more difficult, but not impossible. With each passing hour, Jean’s concern grew longer and her patience shorter. Again, I managed to call a halt to this run, and we arrived just a little late to her Uncle’s party. I was indeed an infant, and she indeed mothered me. I arrogantly thought my intellect and what I could show her, compensated for the work, time, and money she put in tending to my ass. Now I realize it’s anything but fair. For the knowledge I had was locked away upstairs while she’d had to rearrange her emotions everyday and, sometimes, from hour to hour, minute to minute. Not an enviable job.
Luckily, there were many toasts to Uncle Doon before any food was brought out and after I consumed enough alcohol to calm my being, I was able to eat and enjoy myself. On each table in the middle sat bottles of Johnnie Walker Red & Johnnie Walker Black scotches, and bottles of Remy Martin and Hennessy cognacs. If they noticed me pouring enough liquor into my glass to hasten my metabolic balancing act, they didn’t say. The foods that appeared at our table never seemed to end. There were various kinds of fish and also shrimp and lobster, soup was served in the middle of these courses and the meat, including pork and steak were served afterward. All during the meal, beer and booze were consumed amid the talk and laughter. Jean’s parents stayed to the end, but she and I left to meet Yarber and his girlfriend at a bar in North Beach. The next day, we left in a rented car for Malibu. I was going to see Jason Miller at his home there and also see someone I played basketball with in a park on Houston Street and Sixth Avenue, Bob Madero. He’d gone to L.A. to seek fame and fortune and, as yet, found neither in sufficient quantity, but he did land a job, through a relative, on a low-budget horror film. He’d mentioned to me that should I get out there within a prescribed period of time that he’d do what he could to get me some work on the film as well, as a writer.
We drove the magical coastline down to Los Angeles from San Francisco, taking us through the small towns that dot Southern California’s Big Sur. We purposely began our trip before sunrise and planned to be hitting our stride when the fog lifted off the lower depths of the earthbound highway and sea, exposing the majesty around us and skyward. We’d been able to score some good reefer before we left and, with the radio alternating between Bird and Beethoven, it was a wonderful journey. I do not hesitate to say that I believe that that stuff (smoking reefer) and doing that stuff (smoking reefer and doing anything else that reefer tends to augment) never grows old or stale and, if I were able to consume marijuana with what Dante says in The Inferno, XXVII, without fear or infamy (or in my case, leading to self-defeating drugs or drink), I would be sorely tempted.
We breezed into L.A. and when I called Madero he welcomed me with open arms, imploring us to visit him in his offices as soon as we could get over there. It seems there’s a heated competition between the East and West coasts that was going on long before I got here. The East coast is believed to be smug while its opposite holds an industry that provides untold riches, hostage. Whether it’s an arrogance borne out of New York City’s belief in our primacy in the universe of authenticity, or our aversion to anything sunny, is something I don’t profess to know. But whatever it might be, Madero warmly introduced me to those who were the money behind the film as a terrific writer from New York City. When he asked where I was staying I casually (but purposely) replied Jason Miller’s place, knowing he knew of Jason and his work and, as importantly, so did they. I met Jason through Tommy Sig (Signorelli, the actor and Tony nominated director of Lamppost Reunion), in the early Seventies while Jason was putting on his play, That Championship Season, for which he’d later win the Pulitzer. We spent many nights in The Cedar Tavern drinking and talking about writing and literature and the sometimes bane and balm of our existence, women. I called him at his office and he invited me to stay with him.
Madero’s producers, after I cradled the phone, asked if I wanted to help rewrite sections of the film for seven hundred and fifty dollars a week. They envisioned the changes would take between two to three weeks. I asked them to pay for a round trip ticket and, when they agreed, I told them that after cleaning up some business in New York, could be back in two weeks. I was secretly elated. I felt that finally I was getting paid for what I wanted to do, write. I’d come back, write and get healthy and then, who knows, check out other opportunities. A door had opened.
We drove the treacherous Pacific Palisades Highway and found, almost by accident, the little opening that proved to be a narrow dirt road leading to Jason’s home. The road eventually opened on his place, a two storied Mediterranean looking dwelling, sitting on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It is something that, if you’re unaccustomed to seeing, which I was, you never forget. There were wildflowers growing around a patio with wooden chairs and benches to the left. To the right were windows looking into the downstairs living room and, on the outside, a staircase leading up to Jason’s apartment. Directly behind the patio was a staircase which descended onto the beach and its rocks, some on sand and others in the surf, carved by time and the pounding of the Pacific Ocean.
The smell of brine and salt was in his apartment. He was listening to Waits’ Blue Valentine when Jean and I came in and we spent a few minutes talking about him and me cavorting in Coney Island and Greenwich Village. His apartment brought no attention to himself. You’d never know he’d won the Pulitzer or played one of the leads in one of the highest grossing films ever made, The Exorcist, in which he played Father Damian.
We sat on sofas in a space adjacent to the open kitchen on the left drinking beer and catching up on each other’s lives. Behind us was a large workplace with a desk, chairs, and fireplace. You could not mistake this space for being anything other than what it was, a writer’s room. For, above all else, he was a writer. Books lined the walls and were piled on the floor in stacks arbitrarily designed and placed, it seemed, in any location that presented itself. The atmosphere reminded me of some places I’d been in Provincetown and Gloucester Mass. It felt like the sea. Leading from this room, to the left, were three bedrooms and bathrooms, designed like the old railroad apartments in New York City. Jean and I were given the bedroom that faced the ocean.
I told him of the offer I’d just received and he cautioned me to be careful. “We’re mostly whores out here,” he said and quickly added, “try and lift your skirt only for those without disease or duplicity.” It’s said that the powers that be in Hollywood know they really have you after you’ve received your first jolt of fame. Like the first rush of junk into the brain and body of the neophyte, you try to reproduce it (and while in the hunt are willing to do just about anything), again and again and again. He was in the process of trying to get That Championship Season made into a film and we spoke about that and other projects he was working on at the moment and those he wanted to begin. I told him of my last screenplay and he seemed interested. Once back in New York, I told him, I’d send him a copy so that we’d be able to talk about it when I returned. Jean looked on and enjoyed the afternoon as well. We had brought some pretty potent reefer with us, and we went outside and sat on his patio and smoked it and watched as late afternoon turned into early evening.
That evening we piled into our car and went to a restaurant for dinner called, I Love Sushi, in Malibu. Jason introduced me to the owner as, “This is Savage. He might move here. He wrote parts of Francis’ Apocalypse Now.” The owner, now deferential to the point of my own embarrassment, proceeded to buy all of us sake before we ordered our dinner. Soon we were in our cups and began to talk about writers who influenced us. I said as weird as this might sound, coming from a person who’s lived near the exhaust fumes most of his life, Eliot had impressed me the most early on in my pursuit of language. Without missing a beat Jason began, Let us go then you and I,/When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon the table;. I picked it up from there: Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,/The muttering retreats...And so on until we finished the poem. The other patrons, by this time, had stopped eating and were watching and listening as we played off of and on each other until we reached the final stanza, which we recited in unison: We have lingered in the chambers of the sea/By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown/Till human voices wake us, and we drown. We then looked at each other, laughed, and heard applause from those in attendance. Our meals and after dinner brandies were bought for us, and shortly afterward we left. The whole day seemed too well timed to resemble anything like life.
We stayed the night at Jason’s and then drove back to Jean’s family in San Francisco. After saying goodbye to them, we dropped off the car and flew back to our pad in New York City. I didn’t really have much to do and, after speaking to Madero to confirm my job and sleeping arrangements, I began to gather the things necessary, like diabetic supplies, for my stay in California. I’d hoped that this would be a chance to “start fresh.” I had the same feeling each time a new year would start in elementary school. I’d buy a new notebook or loose-leaf binder and those tiny white and round reinforcements I’d glue to the holes in the clean lined, white paper in order that the pages wouldn’t tear away and get lost. Usually, after a week or two I no longer cared.

Madero picked me up at L.A.X. “There’s a little change in plans,” he announced, with the kind of a smile that tells you, you’re fucked. I felt like turning around and boarding the quickest jet back to Neuva York...and certainty. Perhaps, I should have. The person who Madero was sharing space with in a huge house refused to have company, and so he’d made arrangements with a woman he barely knew to shelter me, temporarily.
I’d taken, for security, five grams of coke and an ounce of potent pot from Paul before I left. As it turned out, that was hardly necessary. After making introductions he left, telling me he’d pick me up at eight the next morning. If he knew Nancy was a coke dealer, he didn’t tell me. It seemed she supplied every Mariachi band in Southern California. They were arriving at her home through the night. Sometimes, they stayed to play her a song or two before journeying to destinations unknown. The music wasn’t as bad as her coke, with which she was pretty generous. I found myself augmenting her supply with some of my own. Though I did so with, and by, myself.
When Madero picked me up the next morning, I explained the situation of last night and he promised he’d find me another place to lay up. My trouble deepened when, at the studio, one of the executive producers asked him who I was and what I was supposed to be doing on the picture. Madero, with some embarrassment, explained the chronology of events to him and who had approved my hiring. We moved to the office I’d be working out of and, after the door was closed, Bob explained to me what had transpired recently. His uncle, who had placed him, was fired, and the picture seemed to be in jeopardy of not continuing production. He tried to reassure me that he felt reasonable secure that the film would go on and I’d be O.K. as well, though I felt none too safe.
Madero moved me from house to house, apartment to apartment, that week while I rewrote parts of the script. I carried all my baggage with me and, early one morning, was stopped for jaywalking while going to work by a motorcycle, sun-glassed L.A. cop. In the bright sunshine I was wearing a raincoat, shades, and trying to balance, what must have looked like goods from a heist, in my arms. He let me go after I explained why I was in the shape I was in.
Most notable in all I was rewriting was the scene about a telephone cord unraveling, slinking up the leg of a chair and wrapping itself around the throat of a character whose name I have long forgotten. In fact, most of it was forgettable. At the end of the first week, when I went for my pay, the bookkeeper said there was none for me. I went to Madero who went to them. After he came back to me with that same embarrassed look on his face, I went into their offices and asked for what they’d promised me. They tried to play it off like they didn’t know what I was talking about. I went into Madero’s office, picked up the phone and dialed a number of a friend of my father’s in Brooklyn. He asked if I knew who they were and who, if anyone, they were “connected” to who might matter. I told him that some of their money was coming from a person involved with the garment center in Manhattan and gave him his name. He asked me for their names and telephone numbers. A half hour went by and the heaviest set guy walked into Madero’s office. He apologized and gave me an envelope with two weeks worth of pay. I took it and didn’t work the second week.
Instead, I got in touch with Jason (who’d been out of town) and stayed with him for the rest of my stay. He gave me a bedroom and the keys to a car. It was difficult to get the taste of defeat and failure out of my mouth. I knew that I’d be going back to New York with no more of an idea of what to do than at any other time in my recent past. When I spoke with Jean and she told me that she was working with a person I knew who owned a bar in my neighborhood, I asked her to see if I could get a job there. I was sorry to leave Jason, his home and some others who I met, but I needed to work. He drove me to the airport.

pgs 164-170, From Chapter VII: JUNK SICK: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

SPINNING THE BOTTLE WITH THE DEAD--FROM CHAPTER 5: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

During registrations that fall, there was a table set up with students soliciting for people who might be interested in the school’s literary magazine. I was feeling good about my writing. Actually, I felt ballsy and went over to find out what I could. I learned that a professor, Dr. Bruce Rosen, was the faculty member in charge of the publication. I decided to take a few of the classes he was teaching. A short, bespectacled man, who had a pencil thin mustache, wore sport jackets and shirts and ties, all worn and aged from use, with little or no regard for the fashions of the times. He turned into a colossus for me. He breathed life into whatever he taught. Finally, I began laying the foundation in American and European literature on which to build my own edifice. He was the first man who validated my writing; the first man who cared not one wit about appearances, who had no “con” in him; the first man who was not a faggot but loved writing and literature and who made no bones about it. He was my substrate; he unlocked, and gave vent to, my talent, curiosity, and a spirit that was mine and needed only to be owned.
“Appreciate the genius in voices, in different voices. Recognize those who, even if they contradict your beliefs, do it in ways of brilliance: Eliot’s Prufrock and Steven’s complacency of the peignoir for example.” He told me about his taping of Dylan Thomas and his inability to say, without stuttering, his line about “sailing on.” Ah, what more can I say about Rosen without it turning so sugary that even I would overdose from it?
Rosen liked my work and I was getting better. If you keep at it, you always get better, at least for a time, until age, or fame or natural decay takes you out. The lucky ones never succumb to that, the ones who have a choice that is. However, I was writing with a fluency I never had before and, for the first time, seeing it in print. I became one of the editors of the magazine and appeared on radio debates between the colleges. I was, in this small time college environment, getting known. Getting known meant that those women, women who shared an affinity for trouble in that feigned way that rebellious artists share, found me and I them. Before classes, in between classes, and after classes we’d get high. Marijuana, Mary Jane, reefer, boo, pot, grass, weed, gold, red, black, opiate, permeated, surrounded, infused, imbued, colored, shaped, formed, informed, and pole axed us. We listened to radical or counterculture radio, wrote, read, dreamed, saw, talked, and loved. There was Midnight Cowboy and The Velvets. We heard Richie Havens opening for Cream at The Cafe Au Go Go, Hendrix at The Electric Circus. It was New York, man, and the buzz was in the air. You felt it; it was inside you. We went to Max’s Kansas City and The Chelsea Hotel. There was Burroughs, Andy, and Allen. We got high to Sgt. Peppers and The Goldberg Variations, and Trane and Miles. The feast was always in front of us. It seemed we always ate and never got full.
Most “art” I believe is about “absence” and “desire” and how that “absence” gives rise to any form of creativity that addresses it. Unconscious or otherwise it’s an attempt to fill that emptiness with what is thought to be desired and keep the past alive.
“There was another world I lived in” implies a fracture, a schism, or space travel from one planet to the next, but it wasn’t. Those two worlds were seamless. Life was a progression of semicolons. I simply put one foot in front of the next until the light shifted, gradually, one way or the other. This other world however, was one of convention, obedience, lies, fear, anger, confusion, conformity, and ease. The ease of athletics, home, girlfriend, friends who were going straight ahead to wherever they were bound, and even though the inner map of ourselves is hidden to those outside, there are some, most, who get there with only minor detours. This does not imply they are without character, intelligence, sensitivity or originality; only, that perhaps they have had less doubt, and I was selfish and egotistical, and cruel, and childish. I placed little value on human relationships, but if you were to tell me that, I would have been greatly hurt, perhaps astonished. I always had my own good reasons for doing anything I did. Though other people certainly must have, I never spent too much time believing I was a sinner.
Martha Reeves and the Vandellas were singing, Dancin’ in the Streets. They predicted, with uncanny accuracy, the race riots in practically every city that that song mentions: New York, L.A., Detroit, Philly and more, much more. Our TV souls were lit with the fires of romance and the ecstasy of righteousness. Ah, that beautiful, pure, blissful, and transcendent rage! And just when I was burning from my own brilliance, Corinne decided to go to California.
She had had enough. Her mother had split, moving in with their next door neighbor, and her younger sister was being sent to camp as was her even younger brother. Her father, remote to begin with, had retreated further into himself. She was anxious and upset at my inability to make a commitment, not only to her but also to a life outside of this straight, square and shallow, life of surfaces. In fact, my behavior towards her suggested my interest had waned, and it had. Yet I had no intention of telling her the truth. I did not know how to tell the truth, especially to a person for whom I still had strong feelings and was not yet ready to lose. She had a friend in San Francisco who was a year or two younger than her. He had already moved from his parent’s home and into the Haight-Ashbury section. “If I had any balls,” I said to myself, “I would have already moved myself.”
“Well, go ahead, if ya haveta go. Just keep in touch, willya; let me know where you are, how I can reach you...maybe I’ll get out there too. How would that be?”
She thought for a second while she looked at my eyes in which I must have seemed lost, and said, “Norm, I don’t know. I’m not going to sleep with the guy. He’s just a friend. I mean that, a friend. You don’t have to worry about that but I need some time you know, to sort through all this stuff, you know. It’s just been so hard so, so fuckin’ hard, so hard.”
“All right Core, all right, come here, lemme give ya a kiss, c’mon, get your ass over here.” I put my arm around her waist and that beautiful sense of being that only comes after doing something so simple and so natural yet so intimate hundreds, thousands of times that, for a brief moment, you know where you are on this earth. You’re not this creature without an address, let alone a home.
A few weeks after she had gone, my friend Steve and I decided to go to California. He too had a girlfriend, Ginny, living in L.A. that he said he loved who was living with her sister. We decided to stop first in San Francisco, pick up Corinne, drive to Los Angeles, pick up Ginny, and head for Mexico. My conversation with Corinne long distance was not encouraging. She maintained that “time” and “separation” and “thinking” trilogy. The more she repeated that mantra, the more anxious I became, until finally, I just told her my time and flight number and said “if I see you, we’ll take it from there. If I don’t see you that would be a drag, but we’ll take that from there too.”
I was really going to California determined to bring her back. There was no doubt in my mind about that. Yes, I thought, I loved her. But I was incapable of feeling that love unless I could see and touch her. Yes, I knew from a mutual friend who had seen her and her new living arrangement that acid was beginning to play a part in her life, and I construed that as “bad,” but I didn’t know “bad” from “good” from shit. I could rationalize anything I wanted about it, but the hard cold fact is that I didn’t care why I was bringing her back. Of course, parts of me loved her, but my colossal and rather fragile ego could not accept her being with another man. That really was the deal, and I did not have a suitable replacement. You don’t have to call me a prick, except if it makes you feel better. I’ll do it for you.

The day I was ready to leave for San Francisco, my father came home to tell me that my mother had tried to throw herself out of the car on their way home from The Catskills. My bags were packed in the living room. A friend was arriving in a few minutes to take Steve and me to the airport. “Whatdayamean she tried to throw herself from the car?” I asked, with a look of disbelief.
“We had a terrible fight and she opened the button and tried to throw herself out the door while I was doing 80 on the Interstate. I grabbed her hands and held them in one hand while I steered the car. Scared the shit outa me.”
As he was telling me this I was trying to process the information. I didn’t ask what the fight was about because they always fought. She’d scream at him, he’d scream back and, with almost a hint of physical violence, the argument would end. He’d say something to intimidate my mom or make her question her sanity or her feelings. There was not a single time, that I can remember when anyone would discuss, much less reason, the different places we protected as our own and our very real reasons for protecting them. Besides, I figured, he’s telling me this now, to keep me here as a buffer between him and my mom. Not expecting him to tell me the truth, even if he knew it, I said, “Why you tellin’ me this shit now?”
He looked spaced. “I uh, really don’t know. I thought...”
”Thought what? That I’d cancel this trip and stay home and do what?”
“No, no, go ahead and go, it’s all right, go. I just thought you needed to know about it, that’s all.”
“Why the fuck would I need to know about that now!? Christ! Is she O.K.?”
“Yeah, she’s all right now...Listen just go ahead. Enjoy yourself. Say hello to Corinne for me.”
I looked at him for a few seconds, trying to discern what was real and what was not; trying to understand my place in all this and, more importantly, my obligation to it. With the slightest amount of resignation in my voice I said, “I’ll call you.”

Corinne met us at the baggage claim at the airport. I breathed easy. She slipped her arm through mine and, at two in the morning, we found ourselves in Berkeley looking for a place to crash. A guy was coming out of a movie theater. I went up to him and asked. “Sure,” he said. We followed him to this large Victorian house where Corinne and I were given our own bedroom. After doing what young people do who haven’t seen each other in weeks, we lit cigarettes and spoke to each other like a couple comfortable with each other’s ways. She told me matter-of-factly that acid had become a part of her life in San Francisco, and while she didn’t know if this was particularly good for her, she knew that it was something that released her in ways that other drugs simply did not. I listened but didn’t comment. I was instinctively afraid of acid; pot was enough of a trip for me, and after hearing that she had planned to travel with us down to Mexico and go back to Brooklyn with me, I had heard all I needed to hear. I had her back. My ego grew bigger than my dick, and that was enough for me.
The next day we hit Berkeley to score some pot. We did, got high, and watched Ginger Baker, the drummer of Cream, play his traps in a fountain on the Berkeley campus. The sun beat down on our heads as we watched this mad drummer drum through the water that cascaded through the sunlight, and fell on his body.
That night we stayed in a draft resisters’ commune. The next day we dropped Corinne in the Height, scored some more pot while she picked up her stuff and once she was done, we all journeyed down to L.A. by way of Big Sur. The first time driving that route was miraculous. We drove, hugging the coast line, and saw the Pacific breaking upon the huge rocks that jutted out of the sea. Being high for most of the trip didn’t hurt either. The lights on the Sunset Strip twinkled and blinked their way into our stoned consciousness. We picked up Ginny, and drove to her sister’s house in the hills where she put us up in her fallout shelter, underneath her home. We lived for 3 days with 3 Great Danes, a harlequin, brindle and black. Stoned, and on our own Fantasy Island, we went to Disneyland. After getting what we could out of the frozen mouse, we went down to Mexico, smoking reefer and drinking white lightening. We stayed in a hotel on a beach where we rode horses and swam and laughed and thought about nothing at all.
We returned to Brooklyn like new lovers. It lasted for a few weeks, and no more. It dragged on for two more years. Corinne’s parents had officially split, and her mother took the kids to their new residence on Eastern Parkway, across from The Brooklyn Museum. The next summer, she would return to San Francisco, the guy, and L.S.D., this time in depth.

Near the end of that summer I consummated a love affair that had begun the previous fall, with a married women, Suzanne. The wait was excruciatingly wonderful. She happened to be married to a friend of mine. She was beautiful. She was an artist and writer; she wore black sweaters and dresses and leggings. She was older than me. Nothing else mattered. She was my Beatrice. It was the kind of love that I would have done anything for. I wanted her to have my baby; I would have had her baby if she asked. I would pull my teeth out, shave my head, do handstands, walk on coals, pluck out my eyes, any fuckin’ thing to be next to and, more importantly, inside her. Taboos sure do raise the heat, don’t they, and marriage? What could be better initially than sneaking around, waiting, savoring each moment of sin? Sounds so fucking hokey, doesn’t it? Sin? But what could be better, except more sin? And one night there it was.
She invited me over. I went up to her brownstone in The Village and the front door was left ajar. I walked in, closed the door, and went into her living room and sat down on one of the Moroccan cushions thrown about the parquet floor. She came out of the bedroom wearing black panties, nothing else. I thought we’d smoke some of the strong pot or hashish she usually had on hand and then make love. She had other ideas. Bringing her hand from behind her back, she opened her clenched fingers to reveal a white envelope, a stamp collector’s bag. “Smack,” she whispered, “have you ever done it?”
My heart raced. I wanted it; I feared it; I desired it. ‘Yes. No. Yes. C’mon, go ahead. Fuck it. I wanted to fuck her, fuck me, be a man, fearless, deep, connect, yes. The high, the degradation. Yeah, it’s cool. Yeah, no problem; yeah it’s a problem, it could be a problem but you’ve done so many bad things why not one more? Just try it. What the fuck’s the difference--go on, go ahead, just once, no big fuckin deal. Just once.’ All this in an instant; all these feelings and thoughts like the lighting and incandescence of a magnesium strip. I thought about Burroughs’ Junky, Bird, and Selby: all idols, all heroin addicts. “Sure,” I lied.
She handed the bag to me. “Be careful,” she cautioned, “it’s very strong. It’s uptown dope.”
I clumsily opened the bag, dipped a finger in, brought it up to my nose and sniffed, snorted was more like it. It hit the back of my throat. I swallowed. It tasted like quinine, though I didn’t know what quinine tasted like then. My stomach felt like someone punched a hole in it; I felt queasy.
She must have seen the blood drain from my face. “You’d better sit down,” she said and took my arm and led me to the couch.
“Don’t worry about it,” I answered, but was happy to have something under me. Not to look scared, I did a little more.
“Careful,” she repeated.
Within a few minutes, I felt it begin to work. It crept up the small of my back and trickled up my spine, like a hot river reversing itself, working itself over my shoulders, extending to my arms and fingers and finally running up through my neck. I was incredibly warm, but scared. I had never in my life experienced this, a soft warm wave breaking over and over and over against the outsides of my insides. I felt slightly nauseous, but that was quickly subsiding. In its place, there was a peace I had never felt. It was draining every ounce of anxiety from my body and allowing my brain for the first time since I don’t know when to forget about anything and everything that had ever caused me to question, doubt, challenge or fear anything that I suspected my scared self to be. It left, in its place, dreams of heroism and safety. I felt my forehead break out in a sweat as my eyes began to close and my head began to nod. She lit a cigarette for me and that drag tasted like nothing tobacco had ever tasted like before. It was rich, sweet, luxurious, and although I was not to become physically addicted for another two and a half years, I was hooked from that moment on. We never did make love that night--it was beside the point. I was, finally, home.
After much talk about divorce, marriage, how wonderful our children would look and be like, places we wanted to live, cars we wanted to drive, movies we wanted to make, poems we wanted to write, dreams we wanted to realize, she left with her husband for a teaching position outside of New York that Spring. When next I saw her, she was pregnant and pretending she didn’t like her marriage but loved her unborn child. I let her pretend and moved on as well.
That previous spring, Professor Rosen and I discussed where my next move should be. He suggested a school that had recently begun a program for just the junior and senior years of college. It was an experimental and innovative approach to education and Rosen felt I could benefit from it. Besides, there were no “required” courses I’d have to take. It was The New School for Social Research, located on 12th Street in Greenwich Village. When it had begun in 1919, it was dubbed “the university in exile” for all the European radical political scientists and their literary, philosophical, and artistic brethren; intellectuals who were leaving a hostile Europe to live in America. That was all I had to hear. I applied, was accepted, and began that following September. I also managed to persuade the woman who had bought me the Grand Prix to allow me to trade it in for a Porsche. I explained it was more fuel efficient. As I said, I was ready.

I picked up my Porsche in August and spent the next few weeks getting to know her. She was forest green with a saddle leather interior, wood steering wheel, five forward gears, and fast. If you haven’t downshifted a Porsche going into a right angle corner at 50, you haven’t lived. Lenny Bruce once said this about The Pope: “How you gonna listen to a guy who never downshifted a Porsche, who’s never made it with nobody?” He’s got a point.
The rest of that summer, besides playing softball with a team comprised of Seagate and Coney Island athletes, was spent perfecting another craft, lying to women. I never thought I was particularly good looking, sexy, or strong, and I secretly thought, besides my dick being too short that I climaxed too soon. However, I knew I was real smart. I knew I knew a ton of things that guys my age never knew and never would know and knew I had bullshit that just wouldn’t quit. As important, if not more so, I knew what I thought to be my weaknesses. Anybody with a buck could get laid in a whorehouse, I thought, but to get laid without a buck, that was saying something. You needed a mind and a gift of gab, that was getting sharper as I went along. Yet, I was pretty indiscriminate. In fact, I’d fuck a snake if somebody held its head down. Besides, at that point in time, who wasn’t beautiful? I liked them old and young, black, brown, yellow, or white, either with creases of experience, or as smooth as a cue ball. Usually there was something that grabbed me, a scar, a turn of a phrase, eyes, legs, fingers, a kind word. There was only one rule: Be back before sunrise to the earth of my ancestors to take my morning shot. Bela Lugosi had nothing on me. In truth, for whatever it’s worth, I was uncomfortable taking my shot anywhere else; not that I wouldn’t, but I wouldn’t like to, and would lie and manipulate so I wouldn’t have to. In a sense, I appealed to their maternal instincts gone haywire. Actually, I was doing absolutely nothing, except taking my morning shot, in controlling my diabetes. I was waking up when I wanted to, eating what I wanted to, never testing myself, and not too concerned about seeing Dr.Z. If they’d ask if I could go to their home or apartment after getting my insulin, I’d stress how much easier it would be for me and “us” to go to my house where my father had built an extension, a private den that I had converted into my room, and I wanted to show them, if they never had been exposed to Coney Island and Seagate, the geography of romance. Usually it worked. Many mornings, my mother would bump into a strange woman going into or coming out of my room. My new friend would often times say, as if she knew my mom a hundred years, “Good-morning Mrs. Savage,” and my mom, in her own early morning stupor, would warmly reply, “Oh, hello, good-morning to you, too. Would you like something to eat?”

My father held the bets, and sometimes the guns as well. We got up a team that summer, The Sanders, comprised of the best softball players that Seagate and Coney Island had to offer. We would play in a field that was in back of my old junior high school, Mark Twain. If the ball was whacked hard, which it sometimes was, it landed in Gravesend Bay. Also, we traveled around to different parks in Brooklyn to play the same team in their park. My old man enjoyed everything about it: the money, the bets, the games, the action, and the guns. Thankfully, it never got to the point where the hardware came out. In fact, I only remember one or two fights, and they were just the routine run-of-the-mill stuff: You wuz out! Safe! Out! Safe, motherfucker! Out, cocksucker! Bang, a few Booms, and it was over. The guys in Coney Island liked, respected, perhaps loved, my pop. They knew (or thought they knew) he knew tough guys. He had a tough guy morality and the tough guy ethic. He talked like a tough guy, spent money like a tough guy, and bullshitted like a tough guy, but he was definitely not a tough guy. Not in the classic sense. He was not tough enough to be a tough guy. I remember being sixteen or seventeen when he was indicted for coupon fraud. He, like many owners of supermarkets, would cut out coupons for products that supermarkets would carry, and those coupons would be redeemable for the purchased product. He’d cut out hundreds of extra coupons and forward them to the maker of the product and get a rebate check for many times more than the amount of the product actually sold. It was fraud.
The federal government had put in a fictitious item, Breem, (supposedly a soap detergent), and when these brilliant operators sent in the coupons they had their criminals. They had my father. Not The Brinks Job, but illegal nonetheless, and I wasn’t embarrassed by this. The day he had to go to court, he asked me to keep him company. I saw him sweat. He was nervous. He was scared, scared shit. Even though his attorney had assured him that the case they had against him would not be going to trial, my father could neither contain nor conceal his anguish. It was felonious penny ante, light stuff. I’ve seen, and he knows, guys who were facing long stretches for murder, loan sharking, hijacking, armed robbery and other serious felonies give themselves parties the night before they had to turn themselves in. Whether they had balls or no consciences is not for me to say, but they were not scared. My pop was not them. My pop had heart, a twisted, misguided, loving, manipulative, judgmental, critical, ambivalent, divided, bleeding, granulated, diseased by hurt and betrayal heart, but he had a human, a very human heart. I still could not reconcile my inner life with his outer one. I knew relatively nothing of his inner life. I still felt in his shadow, but, Goddamnit, I liked being around him. I enjoyed his humor because it was my humor as well. I was informed by him. They said we could have been twins, even our voices were eerily alike, and we were both superficial sonsofbitches, but we still fought like mountain lions. Only this summer we seemed to have a truce. We met on the playing field of boys/men and held our differences at arms length.

I dug Eileen whom I’d met at my last school. She was very sexy. She had that long lanky body and deep brown eyes and pouty lips and those long wonderful educated fingers (you know the deal). I lusted after her but she was hung up on this guitar player that pulled her in and threw her back and reeled her in again and let her run (you know the deal). Only one day it was different. If I had written a poem then about what transpired, it might have gone something like this:
“and we found ourselves together on the weekend that cars were backed up 50 miles outside of Bethel, NY and clouds were breaking and mud was flowing and electricity was infusing the air and we were breathing hard and I had just persuaded a cousin to advance me a thousand to buy some coke and cut it and deal it and make a few bucks and have some fun as well and she was riding in my forest green Porsche digging Prospect Park’s curves percolating with sound from the Blaupunkt I found my hand on the inside of her thigh slick with sweat and she began fumbling with my zipper and then her mouth was down there her head and body twisting around the gear shift and before I knew it we were at my house and went through the back way into my room and we made it somewhere around 3 a.m. and she wanted to drive up to where the music was playing but that was not gonna happen with me because I don’t like mud and I don’t like too many people getting naked around me and doing things that I don’t see myself doing and so I said to her do more coke we can sit here and dig whatever you want and make love again and smoke some pot and listen to the music but she wanted to be there and I was too beat to stop her and she left and my summer was nearly ended.”
Her summer did end when that guitar player she was glued to moved in with her, and she came home one day to find him sitting naked in the middle of the living room with his guitar cradled in his lap, and he poured gasoline over his body and lit a match.

pgs 56-60: From Chapter 5: JUNK SICK: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015