Another? Why not?
Which he brought, and I downed and ordered one more, and then another…
Heard thrashing, felt sharp stabs and scratches—balled up in hedges in a housing project in far western Chelsea, and with a post-nuclear apocalyptic aftermath hangover. Came to my feet at roughly four o’clock in the morning. Should have known exactly when, but my Rolex was gone from my wrist, and so guessed by the feel of night, color of darkness, a world in which every last inhabitant seemed to have died, except me, shivering, sick, head split by white-light frenetic high-pitched screaming headache, nose swollen and mouth puffed, as if pounded on by mobs of fists and baseball bats, stomach struggling not to heave out both my lungs and liver.
“God almighty,” I groaned, standing up. Where was I? Realized. “How the hell…?” Looked around wildly for my leather satchel containing my wallet, valuables, take-home work. There it was, unmolested. Blood stained my shirt. Smelled vomit from my trousers, saw it caked on my shoes.
I staggered across town, pausing to lean against walls privately, out of sight, closed eyes, stabilizing, and trudged on, nauseated, desperate to reach my Fifth Avenue office near the Flatiron Building, where I let myself in, found the bottle of unopened scotch that we kept for special visitors, dignitaries and such, poured myself a tall glass, hands shaking. I downed it so fast the liquor splashed my chin and shirt. Luckily, I always kept a fresh suit in my closet. I cleaned myself up so well that when the secretary came at her usual hour, 8:00 a.m., she found only Mr. Kaufman, quietly poring over some files, looking up with a cordial business smile, bidding her good morning.
Another night, soon after. Went out for sushi with Rick, a friend. Ordered warm sake with our food, several cups. At meal’s end, I proposed that we adjourn across the street to a place I’d spotted called “Downtown Beirut 2.”
“I can see why,” said my friend, “with your Israeli Army background, you might have an interest in such a dump. But I happen to know that place. It’s a skinhead dive. I’d pass on it if I were you.”
I grinned. “I’m going in.”
“You and Arik Sharon. Well, good luck with that.”
It was packed five deep with warlike skinheads wearing white-laced boots—Nazi supremacists. There must have been fifty in there tightly packed. And me. Jewish fund-raiser in a sports jacket. But inside, coiled for violence, triggered to explode. Had noted of late when I drank the frequent appearance of a grenadelike blasting rage in my midriff, strapped-on emotional plastique that boiled through my musculature, ached for detonation. The bar sold only warm beers, buck apiece. Put away about thirty. Looked at my new replacement watch, a cheap Rolex knockoff bought off a Jamaican street vendor on West Broadway. Two a.m. The barmaid, a bottle brunette with Bettie Page hair, dressed in low-cut sweater, tiny pleated scotch-plaid skirt, and high-laced Warlock boots, locked the doors, dumped coins into the jukebox, and as Mick and the Stones played “Street Fighting Man” climbed onto the bar, pulled her blouse over her head, tossed it, undid her bra, tossed that, and with proud breasts jutting did a strutting street-fighting go-go war dance down the bar, kicking beer cans aside with her boots, arms raised above her head.
The skinheads shouted and started body-slamming. Fists flew. Blood spurted. Something struck my head, and as I turned to swing hands from all sides laid hold. Went down in a volcano of kicking, stomping boots. Though blind drunk, knew this was “Crackin’,” as they called it, could result in homicide. Came to my feet somehow, swung, connected. But too many fists replied. And down I went, too booze-numbed even to feel my own body.
Was dragged out by my feet, dumped on the sidewalk. Heard distant enraged voices, felt the thud of more boots to ribs and back. Then someone said: “Kill him!” and something hard-edged smashed my forehead. Insensate, yet I felt this was no ordinary blow. Bystanders screamed: He needs an ambulance. Hurry! Please, help. Someone call! A woman’s voice leaned close, out of the pandemonium. “Hello! Sir. Can you hear me? We’ve called for help. You’re safe now. Can you hear me?”
This bounced off consciousness, weightless.
“No,” I muttered. “No ambulance…”
“What? Sir? What’s that?”
Another voice: “Did you hear what he said?”
Crawling on hands and knees, I reached a lamppost and used it to find my feet.
Concerned voices urged me to stop. Mentioned vast amounts of blood loss. Begged me to stay put. I could hear sirens in the distance and staggered away in escape, down a street, to a doorway, then another. Glancing back, wiping sticky blood from my face, I could see red and orange lights pulsing nearby. In the doorway, I slumped to the ground. Huddled there. Darkness-enshrouded. Collar turned up. Face hidden. Hiding white skin. Just make me a shadow. Oh, please, make me invisible now. And after a time, night buzzing and anonymous again, and gone the pulsing lights, the crowds closed over my near murder, I shuffled hurriedly to the nearest subway station, the one on Astor Place, at the intersection of the East and West Village, and purchased admission from a token booth vendor who studied me with sleepy-lidded interest. I pushed through the turnstile just as, thank God, a near-empty Brooklyn-bound local pulled up.
I boarded a car with a single passenger aboard, a middle-aged lady, who shrieked as if in a poorly made, badly acted horror flick. Catching my reflection in the tunnel-blackened window: my face completely masked with blood, and shirtfront and trousers black with it.
“Itttsssuright ma’am.” I smiled reassuringly. Figure of grinning madness. Took a seat. Passed out.
45
ESTHER GAVE UP. I SIMPLY STOPPED COMING HOME. To me, the world was new. A fresh graveyard. I showed up only to put money into a kitchen measuring cup, mostly for Isadora and something for the witch.
I took a mistress, an art student named Eileen, who, one night, in the Ludlow Street bar Max Fish, sidled up to me and said that more than anything on earth she wanted to punch a hole in my earlobe with a safety pin and stick a ring through it. “Go ahead,” I said indifferently, belting back a shot. Straddling my leg, she dipped her finger in my booze, rubbed it on my earlobe, and with sweater-molded nipples brushing my arm, punched the pin through the lobe and inserted one of her own earrings through the bleeding hole. I was too drunk to feel any of it.
That night we went to her place, an East Village dump, and made art school love, hungry, clawing sex paused by long monologues about Keith Haring and David Wojnarowicz.
She had a slight, waiflike body, fed on ramen noodle cups, cigarettes, and Diet Coke. Thrusting into her was like ravishing a Third World famine refugee. I took her to eat in oppressive low-lit overpriced steakhouses where you sat at a white tablecloth, drowning in dense mahogany, dull brass fixtures, and stifling chandeliers. They brought racks of lamb as big as butchered horses, big bowls of mint jelly, and small roast potatoes greasy with garlic butter. Her large, hungry urchin eyes devoured everything, but she only nibbled like a bird. I ate myself sick and washed it down with tall whiskeys and took her home and had her.
Sometimes I drank too much to be any fun and she kicked me out. Began to sleep at the office on an inflatable Boy Scout air mattress from a nearby sporting goods store. My employer was sympathetic. I could sleep suspended upside down from the ceiling like a bat, so long as I kept up my end of work and the money rolled in.
Greenwich Village points south became my roaming territory. At the invite of a poet acquaintance, I attended a reading where about a hundred bohos sat on the floor of a performance loft called the UpFront Muse, run by Tom Weiss. A succession of desperadoes who were loath even to refer to themselves as “poets”—the poetry world, said one of them, is corrupt, the term poet become one of dishonor—read impassioned and I thought ingenious texts that sounded suspiciously like poetry, though they went beyond anything I’d ever heard or read in the Norton Anthology of Modern Verse: more raw, naked, personal, outraged, and streetwise than anything I’d encountered, including the Beats, who, by contrast, seemed almost self-c
onsciously literary.
This new nonpoetic poetry was cement given voice, the revealed thoughts of alleys and gutters, the inner life of tumors.
“What do you think?” my friend asked.
“That’s the greatest stuff I’ve ever heard from a contemporary,” I said. And meant it. Was introduced, met everyone. These were just some of the beginnings of the Spoken Word scene in New York. R. Cephas Jones. Dave Hudson. B. Betterlife. David Huberman. Gail Schilke. Mike Tyler. One night, I joined a group of them to attend the opening of the Nuyorican Poets Café, the first slam night ever held in New York, and we all signed up for the open mike after. It went on until 4:00 a.m., poet after poet, and our poems burned the house down. That night met Bob Holman, Miguel Algarin. Returned Friday nights like it was religion and in time got to know Paul Beatty, Ron Kolm, Carol Wierzbicki, David Huberman, Jim Feast, Hal Sirowitz, Danny Shot, Kathy Acker, Eileen Myles, Pedro Pietri, Steve Cannon—amazing poets, editors, writers, novelists. Where had they all come from? Yet they kept pouring in from everywhere. Carl Watson and Tommy DiVinti from Baltimore, Bruce Isaacson and David West from San Francisco, Ken Dimaggio from Connecticut—poets from Boston, Chicago, LA, Ann Arbor, Detroit, London, even Johannesburg.
The Unbearables were a group of veteran downtown avant-gardists who crossed intelligent, urbane punk satire with serious poetry, fiction, and lit crit. Every so often they put out the call for an “assembly magazine” and the whole scene converged on the Pyramid Club or anywhere that had a pool table, each of us bearing fifty xeroxed copies of a poem, sketch, cartoon, or essay, and with Ron Kolm’s huge industrial stapler we’d assemble them into magazines and have a reading.
Wednesday nights, Jennifer Blowdryer and Bruce Craven hauled a game show wheel into whichever performance space would have them and held “Wheel of Poets.” You got a number as you came through the door and Blowdryer, renamed “Vanna” for the occasion, strutted about on high heels, tossing tiny rubber lobsters at your face. Craven spun the wheel as we chanted “Wheel of Poets,” and if your number turned up, you jumped onstage, read a poem, and got a dime-store prize and a sexy hug from “Vanna.”
At Max Fish, B. Betterlife, a lesbian Gertrude Stein look-alike with a gravel voice and a tender heart, hosted a reading so raucous that poets had to perform behind a chain link net to deflect beer bottles thrown by the art students. It was here that I saw David Huberman, dressed in a Wolfman mask, perform an astonishing rant as he backpedaled around the floor on his back screaming, “I’m afraid!”
But the focal point of it all was the Nuyorican Poets Café. On Friday nights, after you handed three bucks to Julio, the big Puerto Rican bouncer, you entered a brick-walled space hung with street art and saw at the end of the bar a black man in dark jazz sunglasses. This was Steve Cannon, the blind editor of Tribes magazine. About a hundred people led by Rome Neal salsaed to Latin music. “This is the shit,” my poet friends laughed. We danced with beautiful women and drank ourselves into oblivion. The music quit and out slid Holman on one leg, hat in hand, vaudevillian, which in many ways he was, a W.C. Fields of slam, and said: “Welcome to the Nuyorican Poets Café! And this round of the New York City Poetry Slam Championship, where poets compete to be crowned Slam King of New York and win book publication by Nuyorican Poets Café Press! After the slam, we’ll have open mike! And more dancing! And then more open mike! And more dancing!”
Audience judges were appointed. Holman went around to tables, handed out scorecards, asked us to score poems on a scale of zero to ten, zero being, he said, a poem that earned boos from the mouths of normally introspective and polite people, and ten a poem that caused the very stage to levitate.
It was a competition for money, prizes, glory, with poets throwing poems instead of punches, and it was more fun than anything I’d ever seen.
There were readings every night—I attended them all, night after night. I began to write in earnest, drunken stabs at nonpoetic poems, and noticed that I seemed to take well to this nameless new art form. We regulars encouraged each other, urged each other on and listened to each other carefully, to learn, acquire, steal, emulate, experiment. We were in the laboratory of language, trying to unlearn and so reclaim poetry; determined to rid ourselves, our very voices, of affectation, to write poems that could be read with the ears and heard with the eyes.
Different tribes arose: Nuyoricans, Unbearables, Big Cigar poets, Apathy poets, Wheel of Poets poets, the Tribes poets, The Upfront Muse poets, the ABC No Rio poets, and on the scene from San Francisco, the Babarians. There were similar uprisings in San Francisco, Baltimore, Chicago, an emergent avant-garde, and many of us were prepared to stake everything on the new development.
The characters were spectacular, especially some of the women, who called themselves kitty cats and dressed like felines, or were self-proclaimed fallen angels and wore wings, or white trash debutantes in dirty wedding gowns, or dangerous revolutionaries with toy plastic weapons, and aging Loisaida shamans who wandered around in pajamas and bathrobes. There were Dadaist musicians, a whole group of them, who appeared at gatherings with marching band instruments and exploded into a cacophonous call for street action, and whole parties emptied out to follow them into the streets, crazy parades at dawn through the East Village or Tribeca. We colonized clubs and bars all over town with our readings, as far north as the Paris Bar in Washington Heights, where Dave Hudson and B. Betterlife ran an open mike, and on Upper Broadway in the West End Bar, my former stamping grounds, where R. Cephas Jones and I led a group of jazz poets and musicians in a weekly open, then down to the Life Café, where the Unbearables, led by Ron Kolm and Jim Feast, held court, and farther south at Under Acme in the Bowery, where David Shapiro ran his open.
Some nights, though, all I wanted was to drink alone. Couldn’t stand to think of Isadora, the broken bond, the impossibility of having the only real love that I had ever been given. To drown my grief, I’d go to Billy’s Topless, get smashed. On those nights I belonged to nothing and no one, not poetry, not my daughter, and death was my road dog.
Awoke in gutters or curled up to keep warm on manhole covers and grates in cul-de-sacs, filthy, nauseous, hungover, astonished at my gargantuan appetite for the abyss, hands held despairingly to head and muttering “God almighty” over and over in a voice trembling with chilled amazement. And yet, no sooner had evening come than the morning’s devastations were forgotten. Felt ready to entrust myself once more to the black snake of my unconscious, follow it anywhere.
My rapid, spectacular decline was no longer a secret. It was known at work that I had a serious drinking problem, and in the poetry scene I showed up to readings wasted. The legendary underground club the Knitting Factory featured me on a bill with some other rising names of the downtown scene, but I stumbled around onstage, incoherent, a drunken vomitous nightmare figure, and saw the pity in my poet friends’ eyes. I realized even in my barely conscious state that I was blowing something that I would keenly regret, yet was helpless to do otherwise.
We all drank to excess, I reasoned, no point in singling myself out for special blame. Yet I had the sinking feeling that my star was waning fast even as my Spoken Word comrades started to ascend. The higher they rose, the lower I fell. They tried to bring me along, but everywhere I appeared I was an embarrassment, a stumbling drunk.
One night, I went home to stuff a cash wad into the measuring cup. The flat was dark. Esther and the kid asleep. I crept into the kitchen, not to wake the banshee; left money, turned to go. As I neared the front door, heard from behind a patter of tiny feet on hardwood floors, looked down, and there she was, my Isadora, all of a year and three-quarters, come out by herself, into the dark, so brave. She locked her little arms tight around my leg, a wordless plea for me to stay, as if to say: Daddy, please don’t go.
Astonished, I leaned down gently and lifted her eye-level with my face. Her innocent blue eyes met my unfocused bloodshot gaze. Then her little arms hugged my neck, her sweet, soft blonde head tucked int
o my collar. She hugged me so tightly that guilty tears filled my eyes.
“Your daddy loves you, sweetheart. Really, I do.” Never had I loved anyone as I loved her.
I kissed her forehead. She gazed at me, hopeful that I’d stay.
I put her back to bed. Left, returned to Manhattan, to Billy’s Topless.
When I needed to drink, nothing, not even an angel, could bar my way.
46
NOW THERE WAS NO STOPPING.
In short order, was terminated from both jobs. My mistress, Eileen, tossed me out. I left home for good and moved into a flat in Washington Heights with three acid dealers; paid one hundred dollars a month in return for the right to crash there nights on a filthy sheetless mattress. In the morning I would awake in a fogbound purgatory where I lay for minutes or days staring at the familiar: a cockroach trying to stay afloat in a beer bottle on an unraveling cigarette. Lifting the bottle, gulped down the whole concoction, stumbled out to the day, passed a crack junkie—the neighborhood a major center of vicious drug gangs and crack houses—rummaging for food in a Dumpster outside a Burger King. Catching the disdain in my glance, he held up a half-eaten Whopper, said: “Why you lookin’ at me like that, man? You think you better than me? They’s some good food in here!”
What a loser, I thought. The next day, I got thrown out of the crash pad and played homeless hide-and-seek with a squad car downtown, outside a Sixth Avenue MacDonald’s, waiting for the cruiser to pass so I could Dumpster-dive for my Happy Meal.
Sat down at restaurant tables from which others just rose, to finish their plates. Ate donuts from garbage cans, pizza crusts from sidewalks, half-rotten fruit found in doorways. I kept my cash for booze, which I drank in doorways, on bridges, on night docks overlooking the Hudson, and was kicked away from under tables on barroom floors and directed, drooling head hung low, out the door, face-first—staggered, fell, and passed out by storefront gates that rapped up at dawn, snapped me awake, with a proprietor’s rough shouting, “Hey, pal! Wake up! Gotta open up! Mister! Get the hell up or I call the cops!”
Drunken Angel (9781936740062) Page 17
