Waterfront Journals Read online

  Young Man in Silver Dollar Restaurant

  NEW YORK CITY

  One night I was down by the Hudson River around the parking lot where out-of-towners cruise in their cars and I was walkin around checkin out the river and the people. I walked to the end of the lot where there’s not too many cars and this voice says hello and I turn and there’s this handsome guy sittin in his car with the motor going so I walk over and lean on the door and talk to him for a while. He was pretty cool, I mean friendly and handsome … I checked out his body his arms and chest were really nice and I glanced down at his crotch but it was in the shadows. After a while he asked me to get in the car and go for a ride. We went up the Hudson to a place along the river in the Twenties or Thirties where there’s this old railroad track that ends suddenly at the river’s edge. It was a hot night and the windows were open and he pulls out some reefer and we were smokin and talkin for a while. At some point his hand slid over onto my leg and I was feelin good so I reached over and put my palm on his chest and rubbed it slow, moving down towards his crotch. When my hand reached his legs it just passed through the air … I mean my hand suddenly went into nothingness … you know that moment when your brain is given information that’s almost too much for it to deal with, like something so unexpected that it can’t be broken down right away … I stopped for a second and this guy’s still rubbing around my leg and I decided that I was just going to ignore the fact that he had no legs and at some point he reached over me and hit this lever on the bottom of my seat and it made the seat fly back so I was parallel to the ground and he does the same to his seat and then lifts himself up on his arms and swings up and over onto me and I close my eyes and move with it. After we had sex he told me he lost his legs in Vietnam, he said he stepped on a minefield two days before he was gonna head home … so he’s sittin there in this field still conscious with both his legs gone and he sees this helicopter comin to rescue him and it landed right on a mine and blew up … three copters one after another blew up trying to rescue him and finally they got him outta there. After tellin me this he suddenly says desperately: I need some hot water right away so I give him directions to my place and he pulls up outside of my house and says: Make it really hot and bring a rag or somethin … he seems almost hysterical so I don’t question it. I run upstairs boil some water and bring it down in a plastic container. He asks if he can keep it and I say Yeah and he takes off. I go upstairs and my boyfriend comes outta his room and says: What’s going on? and I don’t know what to say …

  Night Guard in a Bookstore

  NEW YORK CITY

  I wear a watch out of habit not because I need it but I’m always checking what time it is … that’s what makes this job drag so much … I wore a watch for the last forty years … had to in the job I had before. I worked in a power company in New Jersey … had to check the pumps and water like every minute … had to check it against my watch and when it got hot I had to let more water in and check my watch again. When I married my first wife I needed a job and she was working for this company. She tried to get me some work and they said they weren’t hiring but then they called up one day asking Would you work in a boiler room? I said sure I’ll do the work. Them days it was tough trying to get someone for the boiler room … most guys never lasted … I worked in there till about 1938. Then I quit after I divorced my first wife … I should’ve stayed cause now they’re having a picnic. They got themselves some new hydraulic pumps and modern machines so they hardly do nothing. Had I stayed I’d be an assistant foreman, would’ve been walking around with a tie and white shirt.

  Then I worked for the Jersey Pacific railroad for seven months … see this bump on my hand? I can pick up something heavy for a while and it’ll raise right back up. Look at it. I could peel it right off and it’ll grow right back … can’t get rid of these things ever … I got it using these big air machines, we called them guns, used them to straighten the tracks. They’d drop lots of stones underneath them. We’d go along the tracks with guns and you know those big machines they use to break up the streets outside? well it was those kind of machines but worse, louder and heavier. We’d follow right along the tracks and use them to push the track down into the ground breaking up the rocks till they lay straight. At the end of the day I’d go home couldn’t hear a thing. I’d yell at my wife: For christsake can’t you talk no louder? I couldn’t hear a word she was saying. There we were just married and she had to yell at me I couldn’t hear a word. And boy did she double-cross me … I’ll tell you I should’ve done what I planned to do the night before the wedding. I was gonna call the whole thing off. I liked her a lot and we got along fine but then her family comes down from Pennsylvania a couple of days before the wedding … I should’ve known then it was no good … and as soon as they see me her sister and her mother and father starts lettin right into me telling me I better do this and I better do that. Her sister kept saying I was a no-good bum, why didn’t I have a better job. I finally got so sick of it I said: To hell with all of you the wedding’s off and I walked right out of the room and down the stairs. All of a sudden my wife was right next to me begging me not to pay her family no mind. I said Look you and me get along fine but then they come down and start telling me this and that hell I ain’t marrying your family, I want to marry you. Her mother and sister came running down the stairs saying they were sorry and everything. So I let up and we got married. Boy was that woman nice as could be before we got married then all of a sudden she changed … started up the same stuff her family did. Let me tell you I told myself after my first wife I’d never marry again but I did and I made a mistake. I’m still married to her but I’ve been separated for thirty years … she wanted to divorce me … her lawyer called me up about the papers and all I said was one thing to him and he called her back and said: Forget it I ain’t getting myself involved in this thing at all. So I didn’t let her get the divorce but I was a fool … I should’ve given it to her when she first wanted it … I made my first wife pay for the divorce but my second wife … I didn’t let her have one … I should’ve when she first wanted it …

  Boy on the Lower East Side

  NEW YORK CITY

  I was workin up in Provincetown this summer … it was a desperate situation lemme tell ya … I was workin as a chambermaid desk clerk short-order cook and waiter. Not only that but sometimes I was handyman cause there were these porch windows that opened out onto the deck and sometimes they would fall out and I had to fix them. I mean they did have a handyman for a while, this 300-pound guy named Bobo who wore Hawaiian shirts and tight shorts. He’d drive around in this ’56 Chevy, a real bomb I tell ya, cruisin people on the sly. Anyway he dropped out of sight. I think a hitchhiker did him in cause he was always pickin up hitchhikers and trying to cruise them. One day these cops came in after he hadn’t shown up for work for a while and they showed me photos and asked me if I knew him. I said: Yeah I know him. He used to work here but we haven’t seen him around. In fact we have a check in the safe for him. The cops said he was missing and they never did find him …

  Well one weekend I was hangin out at this hotel called the Tortilla Flat with some friends of mine, this girl named Janet Planet who had a roommate we called Morphine Marie. Janet Planet and I were comin back from this restaurant when we bumped into this guy named Chuck who lived at the Tortilla Flat. He was a drug dealer and into drugs himself and when we found him he was wanderin around goin: Where’s my dog I lost my dog but the guy didn’t even have a fuckin dog. It turned out he had swallowed ten or more downs. We didn’t know how long he had them in him so we started walking him around to keep him from goin to sleep. Finally we got tired of doin that so we took him back to the hotel and put him in his room. We kept watch over him cause he kept turnin over on his stomach to fall asleep … we had to keep turnin him on his back cause we were afraid he’d start to puke and maybe drown in it. It was intense cause we had to do this every ten minutes and then right in the middle of all this a friend of
Chuck’s came burstin into the room with news that the police were plannin a big bust that evening and Chuck’s name might be on the list. And I guess a whole lot of other people’s names were on the list cause it seemed everybody we knew was packin up and leavin town. The police got wise to the fact that everybody split so they called off the raid. So after we made sure Chuck was okay me and Janet Planet split and go down to the lobby and there’s this little five-year-old kid who was the son of Morphine Marie. Here he was with this piece of paper in his hand sittin in the middle of the floor. Morphine Marie had sent him downstairs with this fuckin note after takin a hundred downs. The note said: TAKE CARE OF THIS KID … IT’S ALL OVER FOR ME … so we quick rushed up to her room and kicked in the door and there was Morphine Marie lyin across the mattress completely out of it. We called the rescue squad and they came and rushed her to the hospital and pumped her stomach. They took away her kid cause she was always abusin him … she used to beat him up … a nice kid real cute …

  So I got back to my hotel and was readin and later in the evening my roommate this guy named Grace comes in with this guy named Arnie who was livin off this woman in town named Annabel who worked for one of the wealthiest people in the area, some guy who adopted somethin like ten or eleven kids, even adopted a couple of twenty-five-year-old brothers. This guy was fucked up cause he used to sleep with the kids he adopted. So Grace comes in with this guy Arnie who had all these prison tattoos of snakes and shit up and down his arms. Arnie was straight and was just interested in getting a blow job and Grace met him in the street and brought him up to the room to get it on but when Arnie got there he ended up bein more interested in me than he was in Grace … so he kept trying to come on to me … like I thought he was kinda interesting but because he wasn’t into being mutual in sex I figured Fuck this. Grace got pissed off cause Arnie was ignorin him so he started in on the wine we had in the house. After he finished the wine he went downstairs and broke into the hotel owner’s private liquor cabinet and grabbed a couple of bottles of Scotch and brought them back up to the room and polished off one bottle and started on the other. So he ended up pretty drunk and tryin to get Arnie to go to bed with him but Arnie just ignored him and kept buggin me. So I got tired of the whole thing and it was pretty late so I went into my room and lay down on the bed to try and go to sleep … I mean I didn’t want this fuckin Arnie to come near me so here I am tryin to sleep and Arnie gets up and comes into my room followed by Grace. Everybody in the fuckin house comes into my room and Grace starts hangin all over Arnie and Arnie keeps pushin Grace off him and tryin to talk me into getting it on with him and I’m thinkin: Jesus Christ I’m tryin to get some sleep so Grace starts gettin rough and grabbin Arnie and finally Arnie starts hittin him and finally punches Grace out. So Grace gets up and starts screamin … lemme tell ya it wasn’t just yellin … Grace was screechin at the top of his voice … so I turned to Ronald, one of the guys who was adopted by that rich guy Annabel worked for … I figured he was the only one who didn’t have that much to drink so I turned to him and said: Get rid of him will ya? Now when I said Get rid of him I meant for him to get rid of Grace. I shoulda said: Get rid of her, then Ronald woulda understood, but he thinks I meant get rid of Arnie so what does the jerk do? He goes downstairs to the lobby and calls the police. Now Arnie was on the lam from paroles in Boston and this is all he needs right now. So the fuckin police come and lemme tell ya, my room was a wipeout … I had all these fuckin clothes and books strewn all over the chest and floor and hangin out of closets, and all these people in there yellin and screamin and it’s dark on top of that. So the police arrive and as soon as they open the door Grace stops screamin and Arnie stops yellin and the whole place goes silent and Ronald says: Look get rid of that guy, and points to Arnie. Luckily all the police do is escort Arnie downstairs and out the door and they let him go without checkin up on him. Right after all this is over fuckin Grace goes into the other room and starts laughin like crazy …

  Man on Christmas Eve along the Rainy Hudson River 3:00 A.M.

  NEW YORK CITY

  I don’t know if you can understand this, what you might feel about this but I want to box with you, get the sense of us both in the room boxing gloves tied over our hands our clothes off and naked boxing with each other … I don’t mean S/M I’m not into giving pain to anyone in that sense … I don’t want anyone who could be dominated either. I want that sense of resistance and yet simultaneously of submission … I want it to be a trade-off of blows. First you punch me in the chest then I’ll give you a right to your chin a slam in your chest blow for blow maybe occasionally jerking each other off maybe going down on each other. I want to do this with you but I have to know that the idea would turn you on, you have to have a sense of the eroticism inherent in two men trading punches … the line being drawn at defeat … see I’m not interested in beating the shit out of you and I’m not interested in being beaten up myself like I can’t see either of us being dominated by the other … that would break the whole sense of us as men … I’m not attracted to these leather guys with S.S. uniforms they’re screaming queens anyway I have no desire for uniforms or images of that sort. These guys who are into masochism are under the impression that it’s psychically as well as physically gratifying but really all they are doing is warping their psyches because a person cannot be continually dominated without that sense invading and overpowering his entire life: a masochist in sex will eventually withdraw in all other activities. He will eventually be so moved by the sense of dominance that he will suffer, he will never be fully what he is capable of being.

  I first got it on in the army. I was an MP no big deal I mean there was nothing great about it image-wise, but I got it on with other MP’s who happened to be as young as me and who happened to be handsome and who weren’t neurotic. I mean they were guys who got it on with men and women and even animals I guess small-town farm boys who were filled with a highly charged desire that found its escape through any form of simple sexual contact … look at that, there’s probably nothing more lonesome than being a drag queen out in the rain hustling the cars along the West Side Highway on Christmas morning … see most of the guys I meet out here in the city want to be fucked … it’s ridiculous they come home with me and flop over on their bellies and want me to ram it up their asses. Now I like to fuck but when I fuck a guy I want to feel that I’m fucking masculinity that the guy beneath me is a guy who has a sense of himself as a man. That’s why fucking in a standing position is so great cause one guy isn’t on top of the other, there’s no sense of dominance or submission other than what’s always involved in one body penetrating another but that can be absolved by trading roles so that both men are equal in each other’s eyes. I tell ya though even these toughs you meet along the river they put on these hard mannerisms and tell ya they want to fuck you but as soon as you get into bed with them they change their minds they take one look at you and if you happen to have a big cock they want it up their asses … I don’t mean to say there’s something wrong with getting fucked. When I was younger I wanted to get fucked all the time but it was doing something to my head because it was so one-sided there wasn’t the necessary opposite force involved. So now that I’m getting older I find I have less sex because I’m choosy. I don’t often find guys who will get turned on to the idea of an equal trade-off of force like that which is involved in boxing naked with boots and gloves on and nothing else it’s hard to meet a guy who will do it this way. I mean I don’t have any kind of uniform to attract the kind of guy I desire. I can’t get into wearing any hankies or visored caps or whatever … but I feel attracted to you but you’ll have to make up your mind if you can get into this scene. I realize it’s selfish because it’s basically my fantasy but that’s all I’m interested in exploring because the form of it as I explained will only make us stronger … we’ll both be driven to extreme points but it will be equal and simultaneous …

  Man Lying Back on a Couch in 90-Degree Weather

/>   BROOKLYN

  Once I found four grand in Canadian money. I was scuffling around the city one night … it was pretty cold out and I started walking up Seventh Avenue trying to find something worth money … I wasn’t feeling too good. Well up around Carnegie Hall I put my hands deep into my coat and turned around to walk back. I figured, Ah hell no use wasting my time out here. I lived down on the Lower East Side, Avenue C and Tenth Street, so I went all the way downtown, down Fifth Avenue most of the way and then switched over to another avenue where there were a lot of hotels like the Albert and the Edgar. I would case the cars and hotels cause sometimes they’d have something in them. Those hotels back then were pretty fancy … not the dumps they are now. So anyway I saw this big station wagon with its windows covered with these whiskey ads: Canadian Club and some other ones. It was parked right in front of the hotel so I crossed over and checked it out. There in the front seat I saw these money bags filled with Canadian cash. There were also a few cases of whiskey in the backseat and at first I thought the money was fake, you know, part of an ad campaign, after all the windows were plastered with these posters. So I grabbed the money there were coins too but they aren’t worth anything so I didn’t bother and I grabbed two bottles of whiskey to boot. I figured if the money wasn’t worth anything at least I could pick up a few bucks for the booze. So Jeanne and Joe and I got in a car, Jeanne was hurting in a bad way, and we went up to Canada but the border guards wouldn’t let us in. Jeanne was really young at that time, a beautiful young girl, and the border people took one look at her in the car, she was sitting between Joe and me, they took one look at me and one look at Joe, we looked like pretty rough guys, and that was it, they were afraid that maybe we were taking her out of the country against her will. So we ended up spending a week in a small hotel on the border surrounded by these beautiful pines and small rushing streams. And the people who ran the hotel baked these fresh homemade pies for us … it was quite beautiful …