Waterfront Journals Page 5
Twenty-five-year-old Guy at YMCA Two Weeks after Self-imposed Hermitude in a Boarded-Up House in New Orleans
SAN FRANCISCO
I worked and saved up enough money to buy a house … I hate work because I have to please people and I have to worry about them firing me when they find out I’m a homosexual. I can’t be bothered with pretending that I’m straight. I mean straight is okay if you’re straight but I hate the manic ways men go about proving they’re virile whenever a woman walks by and then they expect me to do the same and it becomes complicated so I can’t work in one place too long. I hold a job for a few months and then that’s it. In New Orleans I managed to work enough to save for a house and then I withdrew into it. The neighbors tried to get rid of me cause for the first couple of months I rented to a few musicians and they were the first blacks to ever come into the area. They were up at all hours beating on their instruments and having loud wine parties. I had the other half of the house and I’d moved into the smallest room cause I wanted to prepare myself for being able to live in the smallest space possible. All I had in there was a mattress on the floor and a rocking chair. I need a rocking chair, it’s something that I grew up with in the South. My father and I would sit on the rocker on the front porch and rock for hours and hours watching the changing light and the sun going down and the neighborhood slowly moving indoors. I sat on my rocker in my room most of the time and rolled joints and rocked and rocked. One time I rocked for twenty-eight hours straight just to see how long I could do it. A couple of months later the musicians moved out because nobody would sell them food at the stores around there and they were tired of it. I was kinda glad they moved out because I really wanted to be alone …
Most of the people in that neighborhood were into manicuring their lawns and putting up plastic on the outside of their houses but my lawn grew big weeds and after the first year people were complaining and when I’d go into the supermarket they’d try to get me out as fast as they could. I’d hear them talking about me and insulting me but I’d just buy what I had to buy and go home. For a year I saved every piece of garbage left over from the stuff I bought, nothing that would rot but cans plastic wrappings bags. I put them into one room and after a year I couldn’t believe it. It was ceiling to floor garbage …
I burned all my writings after the first year in that house because I didn’t want them to know what I was thinking. If you have no possessions except a couple of clothes and a little food they’ll never know what you think. I mean it was like what Dylan says in “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”: that if they could see what’s behind his eyes they’d bring him to the guillotine … I used to listen to Dylan a lot … I was so happy the first time I heard one of his records. It was as if Dylan was me … all that time before I had thought about things that I could never explain to people and when I first listened to a Dylan record it was like he said everything for me, all the fears and stuff about the things I saw in this country … I mean about how powerful this government is and how it’s programming everybody without them realizing it. But I didn’t buy any of Dylan’s records after “Lay Lady Lay” came out. Come on! what’s this shit? this isn’t Dylan. He no longer spoke to me in the lyrics. They weren’t important anymore. I think Dylan is controlled now … so it’s like you can’t change anything. They’re too powerful. I’m sick of being around people who say they’re changing things. They’re doing it all wrong. I’m waiting to die and while I’m waiting for that to happen I’m going to sit and watch while they do themselves in. I mean it’s going to fall apart after a while because they’re pushing in that direction … for years I feared death but I realize that this body is just a karmic vehicle for this lifetime and that I was meant to go through all of this … I thought about suicide for a while but I don’t want to cut a life short of its planned term, the consequences are too dangerous … but I am ready for death. Somebody could break open the door to this room right now and rush at me with a knife and slash my stomach open I would just sit here, maybe smile and look at my stomach but I wouldn’t try to stop the person because that’s the way I was meant to go. My father died a few months ago and he didn’t say a word to me for years and years even when I lived in the same house with him. He didn’t understand what I was or what I was doing. My mother was glad when he died cause she just wanted the inheritance and to live with her lady friend. I mean she was a lesbian but could never accept it and she lied even to herself all these years, but now that my father’s dead she can finally do what she wants. My father was a direct descendant of English royalty … the present queen of England’s greatgrandfather was my father’s great-grandfather … my father married a woman whose father was black and mother was white and the Royal Family was upset. The marriage took place sometime in the ’20s and my father was immediately disowned and monies cut off but he continued to live with my mother and had two children … so I’m part Negro … I can see it as I get older … my features are changing and my skin is getting darker … look at my hands my belly they’re getting darker. My father died about a month ago and the funeral was ridiculous. My mother hated him but at the wake she put on a big show so that nobody would realize what she really felt. My mother and my brother bought a set of new clothes but not me, I don’t get that way about death … the show routine … I had on a pair of old dungarees and a cotton shirt. My mother waited till all the people arrived then went into hysterics and threw herself onto the open coffin … she felt she was supposed to look uncontrollably upset so she started mumbling and making noises and smoothing the hair on his forehead. I walked over and said: Come on, cut it out, and I took her by the arm and threw her into the chair. I was pissed off that she was putting on a show. She stopped her noises immediately and looked at me like she wanted to kill me. Everybody got up and left and my mother went home with my brother. Well, they tried to lock me out of the house. First they wouldn’t give me part of the inheritance … my mother had papers signed to keep me from touching what I was supposed to get … then they locked all the windows and doors and figured that would keep me out. So I smashed the glass and climbed inside to take money out of my mother’s purse and eat everything in the refrigerator even when I wasn’t hungry as often as I wanted. One day when I came into the kitchen my mother said she was going to call the police if I didn’t leave. I told her I wasn’t going to do anything but eat and take some money and then I’d leave but she started screaming and trying to hit me and I grabbed her by the throat then my brother came in and grabbed me and put my head into the wall. They called the police and told me to leave. I said: That’s okay. I want the police to come. Call them. I continued eating my sandwich while the two of them screamed at me and finally the police arrived and ended up arresting me for disturbing the peace. Can you believe that? Here I was eating a sandwich perfectly calm and those two were screaming and I was arrested for disturbing the peace. Well that’s when I spent time in jail three days and my mother had them transfer me to the mental hospital and they ran me through some tests. They hooked me up to electric shock machines that had red brain waves, dozens of these little electrodes attached to my scalp … I still have this feeling that they left some of those wires inside my head so they can pick up on what I’m thinking about … I know that sounds crazy but that’s what I feel at times. When I did something wrong there they would beat me up or make me feel terrible … I’d do what I wanted over and over until they left me alone they couldn’t get at what I was thinking and they knew I would never stop doing what I wanted. They had my mother come in and talk to them and ended up talking to her more than they talked to me. They told me afterwards that she was the one who really needed to be there not me, so they released me a few hours later. I thought about it for a while and decided that the only reason I was living there was to be near my father and now that he was dead and my mother and brother didn’t want me around I might as well sell the house and go to California … this is where I want to be anyway …
Young Boy i
n Seafood Restaurant
NEW YORK CITY
My friend and I hang out down here in the Square all the time … it’s better than goin to Yankee Stadium. I don’t give a fuck about baseball anyway … we know a lot of people on this street … we can get into almost any movie on the block for free and some of the whores buy us cigarettes and give us money for the game room cause we let them know when the cops are coming. Sometimes there’s nothin to do if we have no money so we let some of these guys around here buy us meals. They think we’re gonna go to some hotel with them but we split after we eat. We don’t like those fuckin guys who wanna take pictures of us. See this. It’s a pen right? Well look, it folds down into a knife. If any of those guys bother us about strippin for pictures we just pull this out and tell them to fuck off. They don’t bother us that much anymore … hey ya see that guy over there? He’s into bein treated like a slave. He came up to me and my friend yesterday and took us in here for sodas. We sat in that back booth. He was tellin us he wanted to pay us to come up to his place in Brooklyn and he’d be our slave for the day … he told us he liked to be ordered around, not sex or nothin but like makin us drinks or food. He said he likes bein told what to do … another friend of mine knows him. He said that that guy had him and some of his friends in the back of an empty laundry truck one summer. They ordered him to take off his clothes and when he did they tied him up. He thought they were gonna let him go after they were finished but they left him in the truck and took off. So yesterday after we hung out with him for a while my friend stood up and shouted: Buy us hamburgers! and he got really pissed. He said: No no don’t do that here … I never act like a slave in the street. Ya gotta come home with me, that’s the only place I do it. So we split and went over to the Horn & Hardart instead. There’s these deaf-mutes there and they pay you twenty dollars to go to a hotel and let them lay on top of you. They don’t even get a fuckin hard-on they just make believe that they’re fuckin and after a couple of minutes they give you the money. So we did that … we get around okay … there’s always some place to get money … once ya hang around down here ya find out from a lot of the other kids but ya gotta watch out cause they got a lot of cops around now … some TV station did a film on the Square and now the cops go around in a van and arrest ya if they think you’re hustlin …
Elderly Transvestite on Second Avenue (Evening)
NEW YORK CITY
Those muthafuckers got outta jail last night but they’ll never come near me again … they got three years probation apiece … yeah last week honey this muthafucka comes up and hits me, I got marks all over my arm here, and his girlfriend Camille that white bitch comes and grabs my purse with thirty-five dollars in it. Honey let me tell ya I went straight down to the police station. I don’t fool around. I had five detectives plainclothes ones waiting in a car for em … that guy the Puerto Rican one, he’s sittin there against the fence of the church and they jammed outta the car. His girl wasn’t around. I said Oh, she’ll be right back I know she just got in a car to give some guy a blow job and make ten bucks. The two of them they’re dope addicts honey, let me tell you, they handcuffed him to the fence and got back in the car and waited and sure enough in five or ten minutes this blue car comes pullin up and she steps out and she didn’t see her boyfriend was handcuffed and the detectives walk right up to her and say You’re under arrest and she has the nerve to say What for? She points to the driver of the car and says he’s a friend of mine, just drove me here, so they took the two of em down to the station. They spent a week in jail and just got out last night. They come walkin up while I was sittin here and you know what she says to me? She says Well thanks a lot because of you I got three years probation. I said Look, don’t you fuck with me cause I’ll walk over to that phone and dial the precinct and they’ll have your ass in jail in a minute. They won’t mess with me. The only thing they can do is kill me, cause if they don’t kill me no matter what they do I’ll go down to that precinct and bring charges if I want to. They’re sitting a few blocks down by the church now. I just seen em there a little while ago … I don’t mess around … let me tell ya honey. I got the cops all the cops in this city in my corner. They know me. They see me comin and they say Don’t you come back in here bitch. After they arrested Camille and Juan I went down to court and the judge he said to me Try and stay clear of that area of town, you know over by the church. They all know me downtown baby, down at that courthouse. I spend a lotta time in court … I know the law honey … I know the law real well … I’m a lawyer ya know. Why I’m helpin out a lot of the people down along here. I’m helping some person over here prepare a case. I interviewed them and I got the papers typed up in my purse … see my new purse? some woman gave it to me and lookit this honey … someone came up and gave me this tonight. It’s a pants suit … lookit this nice jacket … it’ll be good for the wintertime … they all know me around here, honey … they all treat me real good …
Canada-bound Trucker on Interstate 90
NEW YORK
I was a coast-to-coast trucker for twenty-five years … lemme tell ya it’s hard work … I mean I know they put out these books makin truckin life look glamorous but it ruins ya … if I had the choice to do it all over again I wouldn’t choose it but what can I do now … I can’t quit it … not with that pension I’m buildin up … I’m forty-five and I gotta do this north-south drivin for another thirteen years before I can retire …
I seen a lot of strange things drivin coast to coast. This one time I stopped off at a truckers’ rest stop, this big restaurant refuelin place I would drop by whenever I was goin through Arizona. I stopped off and there were these two kids who couldn’t have been more than eighteen or twenty years old. The railroad bulls had caught them ridin boxcars and beat the hell out of them … this one kid had a big white bloody patch over the side of his head. They beat them up with clubs and threw them in jail for a week … so this one kid came up to me and started beggin me: Listen, man, the cops beat us up and run us off the freights and we tried hitchin and got thrown in jail. We ain’t got no money and we’ve been in this stop for three days. We can’t go out to the highway to hitch or we’ll land in jail again. Ya gotta help us out cause I swear if I don’t get a ride soon I’m gonna go out and steal a car. I can’t take it no more. I haven’t eaten in three days and I got no family to call for help. I felt awful but I couldn’t take them. My partner was with me and we had no room …
There ain’t hoboes like there used to be … I remember hoboes … real ones … used to be out on the roads all the time … we’d give them lifts in the trucks when we were travelin alone. Boy I’ll tell ya these guys had the gift of bull. They’d tell ya stories from here till tomorrow. I’d pick up guys who were dentists scientists teachers doctors, a lot of them had good educations and high-payin jobs at some time or other but then somethin happened and they started on the bottle. I picked up this one hobo once who told me that he had been with NASA at one point. He was with them when they were buildin the first rockets to put up into space and he was gettin quite a bundle of money and had a wife and two kids and then outta nowhere he finds out his wife was havin an affair with some guy. Turned out the guy was his boss, the fella he worked for at NASA. He said he and his boss were real good friends too and this was goin on behind his back so he started hittin the bottle and quit his job and left for the road. He told me he was goin on back to Florida soon, that’s where his wife and two kids lived, but he wasn’t gonna look them up cause he didn’t want his sons to see what kind of guy he ended up as … no aims left in the world and no desire to do anything with his life just drinkin himself away …
Ya see somethin happens in their lives and they end up not wantin to do anything but move on get away from everything and everybody. They don’t even wanna work again for nobody … they don’t wanna be around anybody for too long … just movin on when things get crowded … movin from town to town and drinkin their wine … that’s all … that way they don’t have to face any
of it … they don’t recognize any of their past in anything … they consider life one big zero and they themselves show what they think by becoming the same thing … no aim and no point …
Man in Sheridan Square Park Drinking 1:00 A.M.
NEW YORK CITY
I can dance … I can dance … lemme tell ya I can dance … I ain’t bullshittin ya … see that corner over there across the street. Well you just keep your eyes on that corner cause in another two or three weeks I’m gonna be dancin there … first I gotta get me a pair of leather shoes though … see these shoes here they ain’t shit … they made of rubber on the soles … I need a pair of real leather shoes for dancin … I just got back from Florida … been down there for three years … just got back a couple of weeks ago … lemme tell ya this straight slim … I hope ya don’t mind me callin ya slim … see I was a dancer for years … I do real dancin not any of that where you shake your ass and do that boogaloo bullshit but real dancin soft-shoe tap … I can do some mean steps … I’d do some for ya if I had a pair of leather shoes … I could show you some fancy steppin and slidin. Ya know how ya slide on roller skates? Well I could show you a slide on my heel where I do a fancy step like this and then I could slide from here to that manhole cover just on my heel alone … I bet you never seen dancin like that. I learned to tap in the Savoy Ballroom up in Harlem in 1956 … bet you was just a kid then … well I loved watchin them movies with Fred Astaire. Fred was my idol but see I feel bad cause he had the chance I’ll never have and I know I coulda outstepped him … I could do a step that would upset Texas … now I’m serious. I could do a step that would have Texas come all the way up here to New York and arrest me it would be so good … see all I’m trying to do with this cola cup here is get a little money up to buy me a pair of real leather shoes … then I’d be on that corner I’d chalk up a square the size of this sidewalk and I’d have me a fine time steppin … I’d have all these people’s attention right away … see that? lemme tell ya I seen all sorts of stuff standing on this corner. I just came down from Grant’s Tomb and the Jazzmobile this afternoon … I be standing here on the corner and these two men come by and start kissin each other right here on the street … two men … and I be lookin around and here they are tonguing each other. Now I’m lost … I don’t understand that shit but that’s their game I won’t be callin them up on their game. Hell I’d be in a whole lot of trouble I’d have some argument on my hands if I woulda said somethin so I just kept lookin around don’t pay attention to none of it … but it ain’t my scene lemme tell ya slim … if I had me a pair of leather shoes I’d cut that shit out right away … they’d be forgettin about kissin and watchin me … lemme tell ya I know how to dance … I was a star once … hear this slim, for a while all you see is stars and then ya don’t see nothin … that’s how it goes …