Island No 2 - Sensitive Skin Magazine

Shamed by your English? You can soon speak and write like a college graduate if you read Sensitive Skin 15 minutes a day!
Number 7
Writing
Rob Roberge
Díre McCain
Mark Netter
Drew Hubner
Erika Schickel
Marguerite Van Cook
John S. Hall
City of Strangers
Video
Flame Schon
Music
Michael Jon Fink
LaMacchia/Myrner/Feiszli
Art
Shalom Neuman
Janice Sloane
Fall 2011
$5.95
Sensitive Skin Magazine is published 2–3 times a year and is available online at
www.sensitiveskinmagazine.com
Publisher/Managing Editor: Bernard Meisler
Editor/Webmaster: Tim Beckett
Music Editor: Steve Horowitz
Associate Editor: Rob Hardin
Contributing Editor: Ron Kolm
Special thanks to Mike DeCapite.
You can find us on:
Facebook—www.facebook.com/sensitiveskin
Twitter—www.twitter.com/sensitivemag
YouTube—www.youtube.com/sensitiveskintv
We also publish in various electronic formats (Kindle, epub, etc.), and have our own line of books. For more info
about Sensitive Skin in other formats, Sensitive Skin Books, and books, films and music by our contributors,
please go to www.sensitiveskinmagazine.com/store. To purchase back issues in print format, go to
www.sensitiveskinmagazine.com/back-issues
You can contact us at [email protected].
Submissions: www.sensitiveskinmagazine.com/submissions
All work copyright the authors, 2011.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of
both the publisher and the copyright owners.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
2
Contents
Money and the Getting of Money — Rob Roberge4
photograph — Chris Bava
Fat Wallet — Díre McCain16
photograph — Jeff Spirer
Li’l Punks: A screenplay — Mark Netter22
Six Compositions — Michael Jon Fink25
New Work — Shalom Neuman26
Mt. Eden 1978–82 — Drew Hubner41
photograph — Ted Barron
Unsupervised: My Life As a Bad Girl — Erika Schickel48
Snow Advisory — Flame Schon53
Twenty-Four Islands — Marguerite Van Cook54
paintings — Jim C
Our Song — LaMacchia/Myrner/Feiszli62
How They Fucked (In 3 Parts) — John S. Hall63
New Work — Janice Sloane66
Pilgrims — City of Strangers75
graffiti — Sofles
3
Money and the Getting of Money
Rob Roberge
I
met johnny mo’s father only a few hours
before he killed himself at the end of what had
already been a long day. I hadn’t seen much of
Johnny Mo after we’d had the trouble in Las
Vegas. After that guy Mike’s crazy father shattered
my ankle with a .22 in the drug deal with Johnny
Mo and Mike. It’s not like there were bad feelings
between the two of us, but maybe we’d fallen out of
touch because of the bad luck of our last deal. Maybe
we thought the next time would be worse and in
some ways, we were right to think that.
I’d ended up healing down in Long Beach with
my girlfriend Amber who worked as a dominatrix
out of a house in LA and kept us in money while I
was all but worthless, sleeping all day on her couch,
taking over half her drugs, which consisted mostly
of the Percodans and Xanax she kept us in steadily
enough for neither of us to get dopesick more than a
few times in those months.
Amber had gotten kind of famous, a big fish in
the small pond of fetish models and the BDSM
scene. She taught extreme-sex education classes and
got offered a high-paying job with her ex-girlfriend
in San Francisco and said she had to take it, which
left me without her. No way could I follow her dragging a foot and not able to work, and I couldn’t pay
the rent in Long Beach. And without an apartment
it was time to make some choices. I wanted to go
with her, but I knew the answer would be no. Along
with the issue of my physical and drug problems, she
would be living with her ex-but-sort-of-still-currentgirlfriend up there. And I was still in love with my
wife Olivia, who’d left me when I relapsed, but didn’t
divorce me so I’d still have her insurance if I came
to my senses and went back to rehab. And Amber
knew I loved Olivia. There wasn’t a future with us.
So I saved myself the embarrassment of having her
tell me there was no place for me in her life in San
Francisco.
I had to leave the apartment she was leaving. And
I knew I couldn’t keep living the way I’d been living
so I entered a thirty-day residential rehab program.
I made it fifteen days before I called Johnny Mo
to get me the hell out of there.
Things weren’t good. i’d turned 43. since i was
18, I’d spent most of that time fucked up. That last
stint in rehab worked and I thought I’d left my past
in the past. I’d stayed clean for seven years. Rebuilt
my life. Got married and got back playing music
and started a recording studio that was making good
money and good records for a few years. And then
when I was on tour two years ago, I broke a finger.
Re-broke it, actually, as it’s one that’s been broken a
lot over the years of abuse and neglect. Even before
this break, I had trouble closing a fist on my right
hand. For two shows, I played with the finger ducttaped to another finger so I could hold a pick. The
pain became too much. I went to an emergency room
and got some Vicodin, thinking I’d grown up and
could take them responsibly. The doctor gave me a
hundred and twenty pills. The pills lasted five days,
and I was off and running.
And here I was, a couple years later, broke, separated from Olivia, unemployed, with a shattered
ankle that had escalated my opiate addiction and a
new ex-girlfriend.
Before my latest relapse, Olivia had never seen me
using. We’d met and been married while I was sober.
While I had worked hard to be ethical and good and
honest. She was a beautiful person and I hated myself
for it, but I’d chosen drugs over our life together. She
kicked me out of the house we’d bought and the life
we’d made together.
Her last words to me were, “I love you too much
to sit around and watch while you kill yourself.”
4
I hooked up with Amber, who was great, but
who considered monogamy an archaic notion. She
taught her sex classes all over the country, classes
teaching women how to be a “gusher” when they
climaxed. How to maintain a polymorphous relationship. How to properly hog-tie your partner without
putting them at risk. How to use piercing needles
for sexual play. How to use urethral sounds for pleasure and about a hundred other topics and who was
already growing weary of me being too fucked up to
fuck most of the time.
Before the rehab I’d just left, I wasn’t even really
getting high anymore. I
was, on a good day, getting just enough drugs
to not feel sick. I hated
myself with the intensity
of a hurricane. It’s one
thing to be young and
stupid and think you’re
only hurting yourself
and whose business is
what you do with your
life anyway? It’s another
thing when you’ve gotten
clean, faced up to your
actions and their repercussions on other people,
made amends and
become a good person
and then started becoming the beast you used to be.
I wondered how much longer I could live like this.
How many more people who loved me could I keep
letting down?
It was no way to plan for a long life. My next overdose could be my last and I wasn’t sure I was too
scared by that anymore.
right off.
“So what’s the plan?” he said.
“I just left rehab. I was hoping to get high.” I
said it, not even sure if it was totally true. I mean,
of course, I wanted to get high. But the price was
becoming enormous and devastating. I was just over
a week removed from the end of full-blown dope
sickness. The first three days of cleaning out are a
pain and suffering you can’t believe are happening.
And the suffering gets wrapped in awareness that
you did this to yourself. That you’d been doing it to
yourself for years. Every cramp, every sandpaper hot
rusty pained blink of your
aching eyes, every stream and
eruption of puke and piss and
shit you can’t control escaping from your clenched, hurt
body, every nerve ending
going off like a trillion simultaneous electric shocks, every
second of begging for sleep
and not getting it. Through all
of that, you sit there, rolling
on the floor, despising yourself and swearing you’re never,
never, never going through
this again, no matter what.
And here I was, just over
ten days removed from getting the poison out of my
body, feeling not really terrible at all at that point,
save some massive cravings to feel good again, and
thinking, damn I’d love to get high. Love to feel
good. Love to shut off the never-ending waves of
anxiety and dread and fear and voices that flooded
through my brain. I felt like a failure, too, so why
not just accept that I was a fuckup? But I knew, too,
always, where it ended up. It ended up with me lost,
desperate, pleading to whatever force in the universe
could possibly listen to please let this agony end.
“I’ve got about five 80-milligram Oxys left,”
Johnny Mo said.
I laughed to myself when he said “about five.”
A pill junkie might not know what day it is. What
month or even year it is. They don’t know who’s the
Things weren’t good. I’d
turned 43. Since I was 18,
I’d spent most of that time
fucked up. That last stint in
rehab worked and I thought
I’d left my past in the past.
I’d stayed clean for seven
years.
The day johnny mo picked me up when i walked
out of rehab it was pouring rain.
He wore a leather jacket against the wet and cold,
or what passes for cold in a Southern California
winter. He had Plasticsoul’s new CD Peacock Swagger on, which sounded like a great marriage between
the Beatles and Badfinger and it lightened my mood
5
number-one pop singer or the newest famous reality TV star or their senator or whatever else passes
for important news and information to most people.
But they know, to the grain and spec, how many
pills they have left once the number starts to get low.
If you have six, you know it. If you have a hundred
some money in the desert, I know a guy with some
morphine. Then we’re set.”
And this, a single pill, while generous, was the
sharpest of double-edged swords. One 80-milligram
would have me floating pretty well for about four to
six hours, maybe a little more if there was any Xanax
Chris Bava
or Valium to stretch the high. And then what?
It’s always better to say no to a limited supply. But,
then, eventually everything is a limited supply.
“I’ll take it,” I said. “And thanks.”
“You sure?” Johnny Mo said and I couldn’t tell if
he was worried for me or if he just didn’t want to put
a dent in his dwindling number of pills.
I looked at him and he gave me the little round
blue pill with the “80” marked on it. I could chew it,
but that would take about ten minutes to get in my
system, plus it dulled the high a little bit. I reached in
the backseat where Johnny Mo had a bunch of empty
and eighty, you might not know how many you have
left, but get under twenty and you know. The dumbest junkie I’ve ever met could do the quickest math
imaginable about how much they had left and how
long it could and would last. We can shift metric to
standard in our heads and we can tally up the number
of pills in our pockets faster than a room full of MIT
grads with calculators.
“About five?” I said.
He smiled. “I have eight. You can have one, if you
want. But just one. I don’t know where the next are
coming from.” He lit a cigarette. “If we can make
6
pill bottles. I dropped the pill into the bottom of one
and started grinding it with the end of a Bic pen to
get it down to a powder. Once the powder was fine
enough, I took the top end off the pen, licked it and
tasted the beautiful residue of the OxyContin, and
poked the ink tube out so the tube of the pen could
act as a straw. I thought briefly about only snorting
half of the pill. Forty milligrams would probably get
me going just fine to start, with my body clean. It
wouldn’t be the worst idea to save some for later. I
snorted all eighty, though, hoping for a better high.
“New sober date,” Johnny Mo said, smiling.
I didn’t smile back and said, “Yup.”
We didn’t say anything for a while and I started
picking at this infected abscess on my left forearm
with one of the 22-gauge piercing needles Amber
kept around the house for needle play. They took all
of the ones I had at rehab intake, but this one was left
from a coat Johnny Mo had brought me. This lump
had been around for about a month, stubborn as poverty, and it had turned hard as a marble under the
skin. Still, some days, I could poke around enough
with a fresh needle to get some pus out, which meant
that it might not have to be lanced. Soon, though, I
was going to have to hit a hardware store and grab
an X-Acto knife and slice the damn thing open if it
wouldn’t cooperate.
I was, I noticed in a warm sudden rush, feeling
pretty good. The opiates had kicked in and were busy
ironing out every kinked nerve in my body. It was
like every good thing in the world at once: the feeling
of a warm robe out of the dryer, a cotton candy pink
sunset over the ocean, a blow job, cold water after
exercise, Al Kooper’s organ in “Like a Rolling Stone,”
a peaceful solitude that made you feel like you fit
in to every fractured crevice of a fragmented hateful
planet. A first kiss. Something like love, flowering
inside of you.
Johnny Mo said, “So, you up for some money?”
I was broke. “Sure. Where in the desert are we
headed?”
“Twentynine Palms,” he said. “Actually Wonder
Valley. To see my dad.”
“You have a dad?”
“Everyone has a dad.”
“You’ve never mentioned him,” I said.
“I don’t remember you mentioning yours.”
I thought about my dad for a moment. Feeling
good from the pills, I felt a world away from his
influence. “My father killed at least one man,” I said.
I didn’t talk about that dead man much, but he still
floated to the surface of my consciousness whenever
I didn’t expect it. I’d gotten resigned that he always
would. There’d be strings of months where I’d only
get two hours of sleep before I woke up, seeing him
dead on a woodpile. I’d be able to forget the scene for
a while, and then the cycle of nightmares would start
again. Sometimes they were of the man he killed. The
worse ones were of my mother’s suicide.
Johnny Mo looked over. “You shitting me?”
“He killed this guy in front of me when I was 13,”
I said, and told him about the man who came to buy
the used car. The man my father killed with the axe. I
didn’t tell him my father’s side of the story, because I
don’t think I believed it. The side of the story where
my dad said he killed the guy because the guy had
made my dad from his days when he did undercover
work. That he killed the guy to protect me and my
mother. It could be true—anything was possible. But
I doubted it and I didn’t mention it to Johnny Mo.
“He was a state trooper. He got away with it.”
“And I thought Mike’s dad was bad,” Johnny Mo
said, talking about the guy who’d shot my ankle with
the .22 in Vegas.
“I would say Mike’s dad was pretty awful.”
We drove a while before Johnny Mo said, “How’s
the ankle?”
It felt, always, like your foot feels after it’s been
asleep and starts to jangle with needles of pain. At
its best, with some painkillers in me like now, it
had a relentless throb of hurt. When I wasn’t medicated, I could barely walk on the thing. Johnny Mo
felt responsible, to a degree, that my ankle had been
fucked up on that deal that he set up. It wasn’t his
fault, but I wasn’t above making him feel a trickle
of guilt about it if it could get me more OxyContin.
“It hurts like hell,” I said. “But, what can you do?”
“I am sorry about that,” he said.
I didn’t want to talk about it if he wasn’t going to
offer me more pills. “So, why are we seeing your dad?
7
He have money?”
“I was hoping to borrow his truck.”
“You don’t know anyone in LA with a truck?” I
said.
“Not a big truck. Before he couldn’t work, he had
a water-delivery business out in Twentynine Palms.
Lot of people on tank water there. So, he’s got this
big truck with a water tank off the back of it. But I
only want the flatbed part. I got a deal on some scrap
metal.”
I wondered how Johnny Mo had any idea of what
scrap metal was worth. He worked, when he worked,
at Amoeba Records. Or he sold drugs. “What constitutes a deal on scrap metal? How would you even
know?”
“There’s this abandoned construction site from a
casino they were going to build before the recession. I
know a security guard who’ll let me in and take some
of the scrap. Scrap metal’s worth a fortune.”
“That’s not a deal. That’s stealing,” I said.
“It’s a very good deal. Don’t get all semantic on
me.”
“Stealing copper wire is jail time,” I said. “They
take that shit very seriously.”
“So, we won’t steal copper wire.”
“Copper’s worth the most,” I said. “Plus, all of it’s
stealing. The same crime whether you take steel or
aluminum or whatever.”
“So we will take the copper,” Johnny Mo said.
I changed the CD to Centro-matic’s Redo the
Stacks. One of the great things about an opiate high
is that good music sounds so incredible. Like it’s
seeping into your cells on some level it doesn’t normally. An invisible goodness, the way radiation is an
invisible bad one.
“This is your way to get money?” I say. “Stealing
scrap metal?”
“You got any better ideas?”
The rain picked up as we headed out toward the
desert, past the sad towns of the Inland Empire, past
the former steel town of Fontana, which all the movie
people called “Fontucky” when they had to shoot
there, where almost a century ago Henry Kaiser
had been an early golden god of the shining West
Coast, past Riverside with its restored and at times
beautiful downtown and then into the hills where
junk towns like Beaumont and Banning sat without
much seeming purpose. Billboards announced swap
meets and chain restaurants off the 10 freeway. Signs
most people took that these were towns made to pass
through, not towns to settle in.
i thought about stealing scrap metal and if i
had any better ideas. There was surely a lot of money
to be had in the world, but I didn’t have any thoughts
on how to get my hands on it. Sober, I could get paid
for playing guitar or sitting at a poker table. Using,
I wasn’t worth much. The band I’d formed had fired
me twice. Once in the old days and again when I
relapsed on a reunion tour three years ago. I said,
“Amber’s making a thousand dollars this weekend
doing some sex demo.”
“What does she do? Fuck someone for that
money?”
“No,” I said. “Well, sort of.”
“Make up your mind,” he said.
“It ’s a workshop teaching women how to
ejaculate.”
“Like those gushers in porn?”
I nodded. “Amber has this theory that all women
can do it. So, she teaches workshops in it.”
“So who does she fuck?”
“Her girlfriend up in San Francisco,” I said.
“That doesn’t bother you, dude?”
“They don’t really fuck. Amber gets fisted in front
of all these people.”
“Yeah, that’s not like fucking at all,” Johnny Mo
said, laughing.
“The front row at these things, they practically
have to wear ponchos. It’s like a porno Gallagher
show.”
“And that shit doesn’t bother you?”
“Wouldn’t matter if it did,” I said. And I thought
again about what I offered Amber at this point in
our lives and I didn’t think I could mount much of an
argument for being her first choice in love right now.
I cared about her. When she was gone, there was an
ache of loneliness I couldn’t even find a name for. But
I knew what real love was with Olivia, and me and
Amber were just friends who loved each other who
8
fucked. She didn’t ache for me when she was gone.
I was lucky enough she kept me around as much as
she did. It was amazing to me that anyone was able
to make love work in this world, the way our greasy,
damaged souls clatter together.
“I don’t think I could handle my girlfriend sleeping with chicks,” he said. “Unless, you know, I was
there.”
“She does that, too,” I said.
“Well, that’s something,” Johnny Mo said.
“That it is.”
“Fat, but not obese. This is new. The last few years,
he’s let himself go.”
johnny mo’s dad lived in a double-wide in a
half-deserted blight of a trailer park outside of Twentynine Palms. I don’t know what I was expecting
when I heard he’s let himself go, but I wasn’t ready for
what we walked into. The two trailers on either side
of his were abandoned, both of them littered with
graffiti and empty liquor bottles and beer cans.
Johnny Mo shook his head. Less than ten feet
from the steps, there was a mattress, soggy from the
rain that had turned to snow. In the center was a
giant burn hole that went all the way down to the
springs and through to the sand beneath it. A lizard
zipped from under it, stopped, did its little push-ups
for a few seconds and darted back out of sight.
“What’s that about?” I asked.
“Pop smokes in bed. He falls asleep a lot.”
There was a rusted green dumpster, overflowing
with garbage. Next to it was, I guessed, the truck we
were supposed to borrow. It didn’t looked like it had
been moved in a while and it sagged in an ugly unfit
way on a flat rear tire. It sank into the sand and the
fractured asphalt.
Johnny Mo walked up the creaky stairs and
pounded on the screen door. “Pop!” he yelled.
No answer. He pounded again, waited, and then
again even louder.
The door swung open and an enormous man stood
there. He was too large to get out of the door and he
stood in a pair of shorts and nothing more, his gut
hanging like a puckered waterfall of flesh, hanging
so far down so that all you could see was the bottom
tips of his shorts at the tops of his knees.
“Hey kid,” he said.
The minute I saw him, I don’t know why, I got
a terrible feeling and my first thought was that I
should go back to rehab. This life simply didn’t work
anymore. I felt a familiar dread of self-loathing and
wondered why I’d let myself get into this again. Here
I was, with Johnny Mo, about to do something stupid
for money. And if I was lucky, the best-case scenario
was that I’d make a few bucks, be able to get high for
a day or two, and then be flattened and wrecked by
we got off the 10 and started the climb into
Morongo Valley on Highway 62. I poked holes
around the abscess on my arm and blotted the blood
with the tail of my shirt, which had started to look
like a gory Rorschach test.
“Your dad live alone?” I said.
Johnny Mo said, “The thing is, my dad doesn’t
much leave his place. He’s gotten fat.”
“Too fat to go out?” I said. “That kind of fat?”
“Actually, yes,” he said. “He’s pretty sick. And over
five hundred pounds, I’d say.”
“Jesus,” I said. “And he’s alone.” I wondered about
his life. Alone, unable to go out. How could anyone
spend day after day like that? I thought about a guy
in my friend Brad’s building in Chicago. He was dead
a month before anyone knew it. Finally, the smell
gave it away. A month of mail piled up at the door
and him dead in a recliner and no one in the world
missed him enough to even know. I thought, too, of
the guy whose apartment Wendell and I cleaned out
that one time for the cleaning company he worked
for. He’d been dead for weeks. No one to take the
body. His possessions auctioned off at public storage.
The possessions Wendell and I didn’t take, anyway.
“My mom’s up in Humboldt,” he said. He lit
another cigarette and offered me one that I took.
“What about yours? She stay with that killer father
of yours?”
“My mom died,” I tell him, trying not to let the
details and memories slug me. I cracked the window
and watched the smoke swirl out. I tried to think
about something else. “Has your dad always been
fat?”
9
despair for who knows how long. I felt uneasy, like
something was about to go horribly wrong, and all
I was doing was sitting around and watching. But,
then I told myself, I’d had these feelings before, these
vague worries that everything was about to go terribly off, and then nothing had happened. Or, rather,
the same life just happened over and over. Heavy wet
snowflakes fell over us, but didn’t stick to the ground.
The fat man said, “Who the fuck is this?” pointing
to me with a cigarette jutting out from between his
ring and middle finger.
Johnny Mo introduced me as “A buddy of mine.”
When the fat man didn’t respond, Johnny Mo said,
“We were hoping to borrow the truck for some
work.” Johnny Mo lit a cigarette.
“Some work? That what you’re calling it now?”
“Pop, it’s freezing out here.”
The fat man pushed the door open and let us in.
To the right was a living room. The fat man took up
the whole hallway, so turning left wasn’t an option
and we went into the living room, while Johnny
Mo’s dad followed us, forced to walk sideways like a
hermit crab in his own hallway.
We sat on a ratty couch in a living room crowded
with boxes in piles against every wall in the place. A
love seat with a footstool made of a milk crate covered in a pillow faced the television. The walls were
covered with pictures of ’50s film and TV stars.
“Big fan?” I said
Jack said, “I used to be a big shot in TV.”
“An actor?”
Johnny Mo said, “Pop, can we borrow your truck?”
Jack looked at him and smiled. “You can have the
fucking truck for all the good it’ll do you. Fucking
two-ton paperweight.” He lit a cigarette with the end
of his previous one and dropped the old one on the
floor, still lit. He said, “Not an actor. Cameraman.
Jackie Gleason’s personal cameraman. Jackie wouldn’t
shoot a home fucking movie without me behind the
camera.” He laughed. “I shot all his private porn, too.”
“Jackie Gleason porn?” I said and tried to keep the
image at bay.
“That man got more pussy than Elvis and Frank
Sinatra combined.”
“Really?” I said.
“Danny Thomas, too,” he said. “Wouldn’t work
without me.”
I looked around. The walls, sure enough, had what
looked to be framed, signed pictures of Gleason,
Thomas, Danny Kaye, Sophia Loren and a bunch of
other faded and mostly forgotten stars of the ’50s.
I said, “Danny Thomas did porn, too?”
Jack laughed. “No. Danny did his kinky shit
behind closed doors. No cameras.”
“What kinky shit?”
“I’m going to tell you something disgusting, kid,”
Jack said.
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just tried to
look attentive. “Okay.”
“You know what Danny Thomas was into?”
Johnny Mo said, “Don’t tell this story.”
Jack ignored him. “Danny Thomas used to hire
two whores to come over to his house and have one
tie him up under a glass table and take a dump over
his head while the other whore jerked him off.”
“Really?” I said.
Johnny Mo said, “I don’t believe that shit for a
second.” He took a drag. “Plus, they’re called prostitutes, Pop. ‘Whore’ is an ugly word.”
Jack laughed and his laugh turned to a painfulsounding phlegmy cough. When he got his breath
back, he said, “Believe what you want to believe, but
for years after that, every Hollywood whore I knew
called shitting on a table or shitting on a guy’s chest
a ‘Danny Thomas.’” He laughed again. “Had to come
from somewhere. And I knew a lot of whores. A lot
of crazy fucks are into that. And every whore called
it a Danny Thomas.”
I wasn’t in the business of judging people’s fetishes,
not living with Amber. Some things were my thing
and some weren’t, but so long as people didn’t fuck
kids or animals, who was I to judge much of anything
on this planet?
I looked down at the cigarette he’d thrown down,
still burning on the floor.
Johnny Mo said, “The truck’s not working?” He
sounded crushed. His plan, slim and fragile as it was,
floating away like a marine layer under the noon sun.
Jack saw me staring at the lit cigarette. “Don’t
sweat it, kid. The floor’s asbestos. You couldn’t burn
10
this shithole down with a flamethrower, welcome as
that might be.”
Johnny Mo went to the phone booth of a kitchen,
a kitchen so small I wondered how Jack could possibly get in and out of it. He came out with two beers
and handed me one.
Jack said, “Get me one while you’re being so generous with my liquor.”
“You’re not supposed to be drinking, Pop.”
“Not supposed to be smoking, either, but if I quit
smoking, I’d be dead.”
I wondered how that logic might work and Jack
started to tell me right away.
He pointed to his enormous chest. “If I sleep for
more than twenty minutes at a time, I go into congestive heart failure.”
I took a long drink of beer and lit a cigarette,
happy to be somewhere I didn’t have to be banished
to a porch to smoke, especially with the snow outside.
“How do you not sleep for over twenty minutes?”
Jack stuck out his hand. Between his ring and
middle fingers was an open sore, cracked and bleeding. It looked like a cauliflower of scab and pus and
pain. “Just stick a filterless Pall Mall there, take a puff
and sleep until it burns my finger.”
I felt myself making a face. “Jesus.”
He flopped down in his love seat and took a drink
of his beer. “Yeah. Nice, huh? It’s a hell of a life.”
He sounded more tired than any man I’d ever heard.
Every breath was a wheeze.
“The truck’s no good?” Johnny Mo said again.
Jack looked at him with a distant expression, like
he was thinking about something else. “You know
I’ve loved you, right son?”
“What are you talking about, Pop?”
Jack looked at me. “We’ve had our problems, but
he was a hell of a good son sometimes.”
I didn’t know what to say. But it didn’t matter. Jack
took a hit of his cigarette and fell asleep.
Johnny Mo said, “I can’t believe that fucking
truck’s dead.”
“What’s the plan now?”
Johnny Mo shrugged. We sat drinking Jack’s beer
and watching him jolt awake every ten minutes or so.
He’d jump from his seat, make some hideous snort
11
and drop the cigarette on the asbestos rug. He’d light
a fresh cigarette and fall back asleep.
Around 2 am, I was drunk and trying to figure
out a way to get another of Johnny Mo’s Oxys. An
ad came on the late-night TV advertising money for
gold.
“That’s it,” Johnny Mo said.
“You have gold you’ve been holding out on?”
“No, but I know where to get some.” He took a
drink of his beer. “Dude, this could be a little ugly,
but we’d get some gold. We could pawn it for the
morphine.”
“How ugly?”
“You read about those guys last year that tried to
rob Lincoln’s grave?”
I hadn’t heard of much of anything in the last year.
I could barely name the president, as much as I kept
up with the world outside my life. “You want to rob
Lincoln’s grave?”
“No, dude. Fuck Lincoln. My grandmother was
buried with a shitload of jewelry on. A couple of
miles from here.”
“Buried? Are you fucking crazy?”
“She’s my family,” he said. “If it doesn’t bother me,
why should it bother you?”
I lowered my voice, not wanting Jack to hear me.
“You want to rob a grave?”
“My grandmother’s grave. Not some stranger.”
“Listen to yourself,” I said.
“Dude, she’s been dead since I was a kid. She’s
probably a skeleton by now.”
“They have all sorts of chemicals that stop a body
from decomposing naturally,” I said.
“So, we’ll buy some K-Y or something to slide
the rings off, if she’s still like a person.” He paused.
“With fingers and skin and shit.”
I looked over at Jack, who was a snoring wheeze
next to us. I didn’t know what to say to this.
Johnny Mo said, “She’s in this little plot out in the
desert. No one would see us. We could be in and out
with gold to pawn. I really don’t see the problem.”
“You don’t?” I said. “You don’t see the problem?”
He shook his head, looking a little tired. “I hear
you. It’s an extreme move. But it’s money and I don’t
know how the hell else we’re going to get it.”
I looked at him hard and thought about it. She
was dead. Who would we be hurting, exactly? “Give
me two of your OxyContin and I’ll go with you.”
“Dude, I only have a few left. We get this money,
we’ll have plenty for both of us.”
“So, give me two now.”
“You’re just out of rehab. You don’t need much.”
“A hundred and sixty milligrams isn’t much,” I
said. “You want me to go with you, that’s the price.”
“You have to do more than go with me, you have
to help.”
“I’ll dig,” I said. “In the casket, you’re on your
own.”
“Well, then you’re digging a lot,” he said and
handed me two blue pills. “Maybe all the fucking
digging.”
Mine was a square-edged one and we followed his
weak beam of light and I listened to his and my
boots softly crunch in the dirt. We’d grabbed work
gloves and I put mine on, getting ready to dig when
we found what we were looking for. He stopped.
“This is easier in the day.”
“We’re not robbing a grave in daylight,” I said.
“I didn’t say we were doing it in the day. I just said
it’s easier to find in the day.”
“You better get the right one,” I said.
“Don’t worry. They’re marked. We won’t disturb
any stranger’s graves.”
I didn’t say to him that I didn’t really care about
that. His grandmother, after all, was as much a
stranger to me as anyone else buried here. I just
wanted to make sure the person we dug up was the
one he was sure had gold on her when they put her
down there.
The sand and snow shined in the moonlight.
Wind rustled through sagebrush and smoke trees
on the perimeter of the graveyard. I followed Johnny
Mo and his jerky faint light as he paused and looked
at the beaten grave markers. Some were chipped, a
couple cracked from age and low-grade earthquakes
that had peppered the desert over the years. We
looked for what seemed like a long time, but probably wasn’t. I was only scared of being caught, so
seconds lingered longer than they normally would
have in a fear-stretched sense of time.
He stopped again, looking down.
I said, “This is it?”
“This is it.”
The pill was starting to work on me and I already
dreaded the fact that they wouldn’t be working like
this in a few days. Stay clean for a couple weeks and
you might get three or four days of good highs. After
that, life was back to just trying not to be sick every
day. For now, though, I had the calm electricity of not
giving a shit about anything or anyone. My head was
gracefully quiet and I started digging a few feet to
the left of the gravestone. Johnny Mo started on the
right. The ground wasn’t too bad. Not nearly as hard
as I feared it might be.
“How much morphine are we getting?” I said.
He shoveled. Shrugged. “Depends on how much
i pocketed one of the oxycontin and, in a
hurry, chewed the other one. I took several deep
breaths, trying to will the drug to seep more quickly
into my system, but I knew it would be ten minutes
or more until I felt better.
It had, at least, stopped raining, stopped snowing. I hoped the ground wouldn’t be too hard to dig.
I’d done some work in Wonder Valley once, digging a new hole for a thousand-gallon water tank
and it hadn’t been so bad. But, then, it was dry and
it was summer. The heat was too much, but the
ground came up easily in barely resistant shovelfuls
of decomposed granite, which was what most of the
desert soil was made of. Now, though, with all this
rain, and then snow, I had no idea what the ground
might be like.
The graveyard looked like something from a
period piece movie. It didn’t look like anybody had
been buried here in a while—the kind of place you
might visit in an old town. Like going to see Lizzy
Borden’s grave or something. The clouds had parted
and the light from the moon made the desert look
luminous. There was light, but little color, like a
black-and-white movie. The fence around the graveyard was old and broken in several places.
Johnny Mo carried a spade shovel and a flashlight
that was dimmed by low batteries. I had the other
shovel. We’d gotten both from his father’s garage.
12
gold. What price we can get. A lot of variables.”
I dug deeper. My muscles ached with the labor,
but it was labor with a payoff and I felt the sweat on
my body grow cold in the night air. Every once in a
while, I paused to see if I could hear anything other
than us disturbing the world at this hour. I looked at
my watch. 5 am. We had less than an hour until the
sun started swelling from
behind the mountains out
towards Amboy. People in
the desert got up early.
“We need to get this
done,” I said.
“Really?” Johnny Mo
said. “I thought we could
linger. Take our time robbing a grave.” He stood
straight, looked up at me.
“Stop stating the obvious.
You think I’m stupid?”
I laughed. “You’re not
stupid. You’re a lot of
things, but not stupid.”
“What the fuck does
that mean? I’m a lot of
things?”
“Dude. Look at us.”
He seemed to think
about it for a second.
He lit a cigarette and handed it to me and then lit
another for himself. “Fair enough.”
We kept digging, not taking a break for the cigarettes, so the smoke filled my nose as it curled up and
I breathed hard. I hit something hard. It had a warm
thuck to it, the sound of the shovel hitting wood.
“I think I hit the coffin,” I said.
In a moment, he’d hit it on his side. The soil
deeper down was packed harder than the sand on the
surface, more like a dusty clay that came out in fistsized chunks. We dug faster than I thought either
of us were capable of. In under ten minutes, we had
most of the dirt off the top of the coffin.
Johnny Mo helped me dig down to the handles
on the side. We tried to lift the top off. It wouldn’t
budge. We dug a little deeper to get to the big center
handle, but it was an odd hardware. Not like the clips
on a suitcase or a guitar case. I didn’t see any way to
get into the coffin.
“I think we’re fucked,” I said. “Maybe they make
these with some safety contraption.”
“Now why the fuck would they do that? It’s not
like people try to get out of these.”
“I’m just saying.”
“Saying what, exactly?”
“Maybe they make
them so you can’t open
them. I don’t know.”
Johnny Mo muttered
something about not
coming this far and before
I could register what was
happening, he slammed
the shovel onto the top
of the coffin several times.
He got it to chip and
splinter a bit, but it didn’t
seem to give.
He leapt from the
ground above and started
jumping up and down on
the top of the coffin.
“Help me,” he said.
The sky to the east
warned light was only a
half hour away. It seemed as good an idea as any at
this point. I joined him.
“Try to stay in the middle,” he said. “It’s weaker
there.”
We jumped up and down. At first, it wasn’t much
different from jumping on a hardwood floor. Maybe
twenty jumps in, though, I felt it start to give. We
kept on. My feet ached, my bad ankle felt like it was
being hit with a hammer with every jump, but I was
glad I’d worn my steel-toe boots into rehab because
they were the only shoes I had when I left. The rest
of my stuff was scattered like buckshot all over LA
County at various friends’ places.
The next time I came down, the coffin totally gave
way. My leg broke through the top and I next felt
something hard give and snap like a twig under my
The pill was starting to work
on me and I already dreaded
the fact that they wouldn’t
be working like this in a
few days. Stay clean for a
couple weeks and you might
get three or four days of good
highs. After that, life was
back to just trying not to be
sick every day.
13
foot. I rolled my bad ankle and it knocked me off balance. I was down to the top of my thigh through the
wood and I’d slipped onto my side. I felt sharp pain
in my upper leg. I saw a chunk of wood as long as a
ruler deeply imbedded into my thigh. My bad ankle
throbbed from whatever I’d broken in the coffin. I
tried to lift myself out. Splinters ripped my leg and
had lodged deep in my skin and muscle above the
knee. I needed Johnny Mo’s help to get out. After
we’d broken a hole, we broke through the rest of the
top with the shovels. I felt
warm blood on my leg.
Johnny Mo had smashed
through most of the wood
and dirt fell inside as he
frantically made his way
toward where the neck and
the fingers should have
been.
“Hold the flashlight for
me,” he said.
I aimed the beam of
light to where I’d broken through the top. My blood
was on the splintered wood of the coffin and for a
moment I got scared about being caught but quickly
realized my DNA wasn’t in any system. Fear had me
thinking crazy. The only thing we could have left that
were in the system were fingerprints and we were
safe there with the gloves.
Underneath where I’d fallen into the coffin, I saw
what I’d felt break under my foot. It was a hip bone
and I’d shattered it into several pieces. I shook my
head. Why this made it seem worse, I don’t know.
Johnny Mo said, “Could you please hold that light
where I’m fucking looking?”
I moved it up by the skull. There didn’t seem to
be any flesh left on his grandmother’s body and I
was relieved. Clothes still clung to some of the bones.
They looked red under the flashlight, but they could
have been some other color in full light and I hoped
not to find out.
“Yes!” Johnny Mo said.
Down in the coffin, he’d snapped a locket off that
sat near the ribcage. He turned and, kneeling, started
on the fingers. He must have put some weight on the
body because I heard more bones breaking and saw
him collapse face down and then push himself up.
He stayed down, working one hand’s finger bones,
then the other. He jumped out of the grave.
“Four pieces,” he said, smiling. “Not bad.”
“You sure they’re gold?” I said, thinking that she
might have been one of those old women who wears
crap-ass costume jewelry and brags about how much
it’s worth. My family was positively clogged with
people clinging to shit they swore was worth keeping that was junk.
“She had money,” he
said. “I’m as sure as I can
be right now. You want to
put it back?”
“No.”
“Then why ask me if it’s
real now?”
He had a point.
“Because it occurred to me
now.”
“Just ’cause shit occurs
to you doesn’t mean you have to say it. Stop being so
negative, man.”
I nodded. “Let’s get moving.”
“We have to fill this in.”
“The sun’s coming up, dude.”
He looked at me like I was a stupid kid. “We are
about to pawn a shitload of old jewelry not more
than twenty miles from here. I’d like to be out of this
town when people see this.” He pointed to the hole
in the ground.
I started shoveling the dirt and sand back into the
hole. My ankle screamed with pain. My thigh was
sticky with blood, which had started to get cold on
my jeans. I’d need to get a look at it once we made it
back to the car.
We filled the grave back up, but there was a problem. With the coffin open, more dirt went inside of it
so there was still an indentation in the ground when
we were done. It looked like a sinkhole.
“It’ll have to do,” Jonny Mo said.
“Just cause shit occurs to
you doesn’t mean you have
to say it. Stop being so
negative, man.”
We found out later that while we were out
there somewhere, in the quiet desert night, Jack blew
14
his head off with a shotgun. No note. But, walking
out of the graveyard, we didn’t know that. We didn’t
know, either, this long day and night in the desert
would send us both back to rehab. Not right away.
We still had a few ugly runs left in us, but Jack’s
house and the night in the graveyard was a turning
point in a life of turning points that sent us back to
trying to get clean, hoping it was our last time.
In the next few hours, we would sell the gold
at Rocky’s Pawn Shop in Yucca Valley for a stunning eight hundred dollars, which got us enough
morphine for a while. A hundred and twenty 30-milligram pills—the time-release kind, but you could get
around the time release and get a good dose from
them. We would go to the Highway 62 Diner where,
even though I was starving, I would only drink a Diet
Coke because I didn’t want to screw up the high from
the last OxyContin and the two morphine I’d taken.
I felt so aligned with the world, like all the molecules had lined up in their infinite potential patterns
to let me feel good for once, even though I knew it
couldn’t last. But still, in that moment, things were
peaceful and peace was one of the rarest visitors my
head ever received and I wanted to savor it. I watched
Johnny Mo eat while I took wood chunks and thick
splinters out of my thigh with a pair of needle-nose
pliers and the waitress winced while she watched me
from behind the counter. I figured I’d take a shower
or bath later and soak the slivers out and try to avoid
an infection.
After we left the diner, we went back to Jack’s
double-wide. We should have just split after the
graveyard, but we had been in such a hurry to get to
the pawnshop, and then the dealer, we hadn’t gone
back for our stuff at Jack’s.
It was still morning, coming up toward a sunny
noon and it had stayed cold. The snow had stuck to
the ground and glistened on the ocotillo and smoke
trees and cholla. The door was closed, but unlocked
and we went in and found him in the back bedroom, sitting up in his bed with what was left of his
head tilted sideways and leaning against the wall. I’d
never seen a gun suicide before. I don’t know what I
expected, but it wasn’t what I saw. What I had horrifyingly expected—parts of his head and hair and
15
brain and bone splattered behind and above him—
was there. But what I hadn’t expected was the image
that stayed with me for months and I guessed would
for years after that morning. His left eye was moved
across what was left of his face. Like it was looking at us as we entered the doorway, and then stayed
looking toward the door when I was looking at him
straight on. His right eye looked forward and his left
sat nearly where his left ear should have been. His
jaw was gone, his throat spread and open so that I
saw the bone of his spinal cord from the front.
“Jesus,” Johnny Mo said. “Fuck.”
I didn’t know what to say. It was like all the words
at my disposal, all the words that had clanged around
in my head and fallen out of my mouth all the years
I’d been alive were worthless and hollow and I might
as well spit up sand as talk for all the good it could do.
Johnny Mo walked out of the bedroom. I heard
him on the phone, probably calling the cops or an
ambulance or whatever. It was only then, with the
sound of his voice starting to come into my brain,
that I realized the television was still on and it
reminded me of all the car accidents I’d ever had and
how it always surprised me after the accident, in the
quiet of the wreckage, how the radio was always still
playing.
On the floor, I looked at all the criss-cross patterns
of burning cigarettes Jack had dropped over the years,
waking him up, over and over and over, when all he
wanted, needed, probably, was some sleep he knew he
would never get again.
but that was all a few hours down the road.
At dawn, before things would turn so ugly they’d
scar whatever good had come of the morning, when
the day still looked swollen with promise, we left the
graveyard and started back toward Johnny Mo’s car.
The sun burned a faint sepia yellow as it came over
the mountains. We walked back to the car with our
tools, Johnny Mo getting farther and farther ahead
of me as I dragged my bloody and damaged right
leg behind me, wincing and sweating and seeing my
breath as the weak cold light swelled slowly into the
morning air.
Fat Wallet
Díre McCain
A
s luck would have it, tecate flats
turned out to be a goldmine. Throughout the duration of my addiction, I
had a fortuitous knack for attracting
people—more specifically, men—who not only facilitated my habit, but subsidized it. I’ve often wondered
how long my junkie career would have lasted if I’d
been forced to work at it.
It was a Saturday night. Mia, Tits, and I headed
over to Tecate Flats in search of stimulation. When
we arrived, Flaco and Rico were sitting in the main
yard, listening to Dire Straits, which was odd, since
I’d only ever heard Tejano playing on that boom box.
They looked ridiculously happy, almost too happy.
“Que onda!” they yelled, grinning ecstatically.
“What the fuck are you guys on?” Mia asked,
smiling and motioning with her hand. “And where’s
mine?”
“No shit!” Tits laughed. “You guys are flyin’!”
Tits was an interesting character. Her most
remarkable asset was both a blessing and a curse. At
13 she had the biggest knockers I’d ever seen, hence
the nickname. But unlike most overly endowed
women, she was quite svelte, which made her a real
freak of nature. On this particular night, the mammoth bosom was stuffed into a low-cut postman’s
vest she’d swiped from a mail truck earlier in the day.
Rico—who had a Pablo Escobaresque penchant for
pubescent girls—took one look and was smitten.
“You are in for a real treat tonight, mis amores,”
he said, rubbing his hands together. “Come on, hop
in the Caddy.”
“Where are we goin’?” Tits asked with an angelic
look on her face.
“That, mi amor, is a secret,” he said, smiling slyly.
“Well, when are we gonna be back?” she asked,
putting a cigarette into her mouth. “My dad wants
me home by midnight.”
“Then we shall get you home by midnight, Cinderella,” he said, lighting the cigarette.
Since Mia and I had no curfew to speak of, it
didn’t matter where we were going or how long we’d
be there. It could have been a weeklong cruise to the
Mexican Riviera for all we cared. Our parents would
have flipped and contacted the authorities after a few
days, but that was beside the point.
After bidding Flaco adios, we piled into the
tricked-out Biarritz and were on our way. A half hour
later, we pulled into the driveway of what appeared to
be an auto body shop.
“I have been wanting to bring you here,” Rico
said, driving around to the rear of the building, “but
needed to be certain I could trust you.”
My curiosity was piqued and running at full tilt.
The first thought that popped into my head was
CHOP SHOP, but I couldn’t figure out why he’d
brought us there.
“Okay,” he said, quickly surveying the area, “vamos,
rápido!”
We quickly got out the car and made a dash for
the door, where we were greeted by two men, both
decked out in garb similar to Rico’s.
“Buenas noches, Jefe,” one of them said, kissing
Rico on the cheek.
The other followed suit.
After conversing in Spanish for a few minutes,
Rico made the necessary introductions. Then he
clapped his hands together and said, “Okay, mis
amores, are you ready to party?”
“What do you mean?” Tits asked naively, batting
her eyelashes.
The coy act had been going on since she’d shaken
Rico’s hand, and it was all part of a well-calculated
scheme. Biologically speaking, Tits was merely
13—practically a baby—but in siren years, she was
pushing 30. The girl was a ruthlessly skillful operator
16
who was only interested in what a man had to offer,
and this man, quite obviously, had much to offer.
“Allow me to show you what I mean,” Rico
laughed, wrapping his arm around her waist.
Without further ado, our hosts escorted us into
a spacious cement-lined room that was strategically
hidden on the opposite side of the building. As I
walked in, I nearly croaked from shock. Inside that
bunker, was a mother lode of cocaine, bag after bag
after bag, from floor to ceiling—it was breathtaking.
The girls and I let out a collective gasp, which
caused our hosts to burst out laughing.
“Omigod! Omigod! Omigod!” Tits exclaimed
repeatedly.
“Someone fucking pinch me,” I said, gaping at the
magnificent vision that sat before my eyes.
“Woooo hoooo!” Mia yelled, pinching my ass.
“Let’s party, man!”
Which is precisely what we did. Unfortunately,
my vivid, often paranoid imagination was lurking the
entire time. The fact that Rico was obviously a majorleague drug trafficker—while certainly thrilling—was
a bit unnerving. I was coked-up out of my gourd, and
in my mind’s eye, kept seeing graphic images of my
own murder preceded by hours of rape and torture.
Of course, it was only delusional nonsense that was
being fueled by the drugs, but as I’d find out later, it
wasn’t entirely illogical.
Around midnight, we piled back into the Caddy
and headed home. Planning to make a move on Tits,
Rico insisted that Mia and I be dropped off first.
Much to our surprise, he gave us a fat bindle as a
parting gift. And if that weren’t enough, he asked if it
were enough. The guy gave new meaning to the words
“chivalry” and more important, “munificence”—as
we’d soon learn, when he began to feed our habits
regularly and liberally, seemingly out of the “goodness” of his heart. It seemed too easy, too perfect,
which it was, of course, but I’m getting ahead of
myself again . . .
Jeff Spirer
17
Mia and I thanked him profusely and got out of
the car.
As we stood on the stoop of her father’s house,
waving goodbye, a head popped out of the front door.
“And where have you two been?” the head asked,
staring into our vastly dilated pupils.
It was Mia’s brother, Heath, who was ten years our
senior. He knew we were soaring, but wasn’t sure how
we’d gotten off the ground.
Mia answered with a grin and two words: “Fat
Wallet.”
His eyes lit up like
asteriated sapphires.
Fat Wallet was code
for cocaine. Mia and
Heath’s father was a diehard jazz fan, with an
extensive vinyl collection
that had to be worth
a for tune. W hether
records were spinning
or the pianola was playing, the joint was always
jumpin’ whenever he
was around. Amid it all,
Mia and I had discovered that Fats Waller
was a hoot and a half
when you’re high. One
night, while searching for a flat surface on
which to mince cocaine,
Fats beckoned from the
phonograph. From that
moment on, whenever
cocaine was snorted
under that roof, he joined in. Mia dubbed the ritual
“Fat Wallet.” She had a knack for paronomasia, and
was also a skilled parodist. She could have given
Weird Al a run for his money any day of the week.
After snorting through the eightball in record
time, the three of us hopped into Heath’s truck and
set out on what would prove to be a near-disastrous
cocaine search.
*****
“Okay, guys,” heath said, pulling into a 7-11
parking lot in Garden Grove, “I’m not sure if it’s cool
to bring you along, so just hang out here for a while.”
Mia and I got out of the truck, and walked around
to the driver’s side window.
“How long are you going to be?” she asked.
“Ten minutes max.” And he was gone.
She and I went into the store to buy some water,
and after chatting with the cashier for a spell, went
back out. Seconds later,
a police car pulled into
the lot, and merely seconds after that, Heath’s
truck appeared. The
instant he caught sight
of the black-and-white,
he gunned it, leaving Mia and me in the
lurch. My initial feeling was anger, but his
reaction was perfectly
understandable. He was
wired to the hilt, and
unlike us, if he were
busted he’d go straight
to County.
We watched as he
sped off into the night.
“Let’s get the fuck
out of here,” Mia whispered, glancing over at
the cops, “before they
spot us.”
“I’m right behind
you,” I whispered back. “Whatever you do, don’t turn
around.”
We sauntered aimlessly along the eerily quiet boulevard until reaching a Jack in the Box restaurant.
“Detour,” she said, grabbing my arm. “We’ll lie low
in here until Heath comes back.”
“How the hell is he supposed to see us if we’re
sitting in Jack in the Crack?” I asked, in a slightly
annoyed tone.
Mia and I had discovered that
Fats Waller was a hoot and
a half when you’re high. One
night, while searching for a
flat surface on which to mince
cocaine, Fats beckoned from
the phonograph. From that
moment on, whenever cocaine
was snorted under that roof,
he joined in. Mia dubbed the
ritual “Fat Wallet.”
18
“It’s Itch in the Crotch,” she laughed, “and we’ll
just have to be on the lookout for him.”
Once inside, we planted ourselves in a rear booth.
Within seconds, a police car pulled into the parking
lot. Seconds later, two patrolmen got out.
“Are those the same fucking cops from 7-11?” I
said, peering out the window.
“Sure as hell looks like it,” Mia replied, glancing
over at them as they walked in. “Malloy and Reed.”
“Shit,” I whispered, “they’re coming over here.”
“No they’re not,” she argued.
“Yes they are.”
They were now standing right over us, and oddly
enough, did bear a resemblance to Malloy and Reed,
with an extra thirty pounds of adipose tissue apiece.
“Hello, girls,” Malloy said, looking at his watch.
“Kinda late for you to be out, isn’t it?”
When you enlist as a juvenile delinquent, it’s
imperative that you learn how to deal with the
police. Number-one rule: never, ever, under any circumstances, volunteer unsolicited information. While
you should remain cooperative throughout the entire
interrogation, being overly forthcoming will only
make you guilty in the eyes of the law.
“We’re waiting for our ride,” Mia replied politely.
“And who’s coming to get you?” Reed asked.
“My brother.”
“When’s he supposed to be here?”
“Any minute now.”
“Alright,” Malloy said. “Just stay in here till he
arrives. It’s not safe for you to be wandering these
streets at night.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” Mia said, smiling.
“Thanks.”
They nodded and walked away.
Ten minutes later, there was still no sign of Heath.
“Maybe we should ask the cops for a ride,” Mia
said, chomping on some ice.
“What if they figure out that we’re high?” I asked,
obviously.
“They won’t,” she said, trying to convince not only
me, but herself as well.
“How can you be so sure?”
“I can’t, but if I have to sit here for one more
second, I’m going to fucking snap. I need a fix…
19
another line… another something… anything.”
“I hear you loud and fucking clear,” I sighed.
“What the hell, let’s give it a go.”
We slid out of the booth, and approached them.
“Excuse me, officers,” Mia said, after clearing her
throat. “Do you think you might be able to give us a
ride home?”
“Where do you live?” Malloy asked.
“Los Alamitos.”
“Out of our jurisdiction,” he said, shoving a handful of fries into his mouth. “Can’t do it.”
Unbelievable, I thought. When you actually want
them to lock you up in the back of their car, they
refuse.
“Are you sure you can’t make an exception just this
once?” Mia asked, smiling flirtatiously.
“Nope,” he replied gruffly, shoving more fries into
his mouth. “Call a cab.”
I was livid. I felt like shoving those fries up his fat
ass, and couldn’t help glaring. Luckily, he couldn’t pry
his piggish eyes away from the grease feast that lay
before him.
“Okay,” Mia mumbled, “maybe we will.”
“Good luck,” Reed mumbled back, through a
mouthful of milkshake.
“Isn’t it bizarre that they’re not harassing us?”
Mia whispered, as we walked outside, entirely
directionless.
“They’re too busy stuffing their fat pig faces,” I
said, loud enough for them to hear. “We’d better get
the hell out of here. I bet you a billion bucks that
once they’re done, they’ll be on us like white on rice.”
Besides hitching a ride—which was unwise, given
the area and time of night—the only option was
to head back to 7-11, and hope that Heath would
return at some point.
Five minutes later, there he was.
“I’m so sorry, you guys,” he said, leaning out of the
window. “Those cops freaked me out.”
Mia and I got in, and fastened our seat belts.
“Don’t sweat it,” she said, smiling, “I would have
done the same thing myself. So, did you get the
goods, or what?”
“Uh-uh,” he said, shaking his head, “he’s tapped
out till tomorrow.”
“Aww, man!” she exclaimed. “That’s a bad fucking
trip!”
“I know.”
“What the fuck are we going to do?” I asked,
thinking about the inevitable crash that was waiting
in the wings.
“We’ll figure it out when we get home,” he said,
retrieving a joint from the ashtray and handing it to
me. “In the meantime, spark this baby up.”
*****
Once back inside the
saf e confines of the
house, we discussed our
quandary at length, but
couldn’t reach a solution.
Until Heath broached a
precariously interesting
idea, that is.
“I have some morphine
left over,” he said contemplatively, “but I’m not
so sure I want to give it
to you guys, it might kill
you.”
Earlier in the year, he’d
been involved in an accident that had broken both
his legs. Needless to say, he suffered varying degrees
of pain throughout the duration of his recovery. At
the most excruciating point, he’d been prescribed
liquid morphine.
“What the fuck are we waiting for?” Mia said,
motioning with her hand. “Let’s do it.”
“Uh-uh,” he said emphatically, “I couldn’t live with
myself if you croaked.”
“Yeah, but if you croak too,” she said, smiling slyly,
“you won’t have to live with yourself.”
It was a morbid line of reasoning, but she did have
a point.
I can’t tell you with any certainty what happened
next, but it was strikingly similar to the phenomenon
that occurs when you’re put under for surgery.
At 2:30pm the following day, i was jarred
awake by a blaring clock radio. Bobby Darin’s “Splish
Splash” was pervading the room at full volume. I
found myself lying faceup on the top bunk of a fivefoot-long, child-size bunk bed, with Mia sawing
wood in my face. I was unusually drowsy and hadn’t
the slightest recollection of how I’d gotten there. It
was extremely disconcerting. During my seven years
of chemical servitude, it was the only time, no matter
what I’d ingested, that I ever blacked out.
I rolled Mia aside, stumbled down the miniature wooden ladder, and
switched off Bobby D,
then reached up and
shook my snoring bedmate until she was
conscious.
“ What the fuck
happened?” she asked
sluggishly, rubbing her
eyes.
“Your guess is as good
as mine,” I yawned. “I’m
going home. Don’t forget,
you have to read The
Great Gatsby by tomorrow morning.”
“Fuck!” she exclaimed.
“I haven’t even opened it yet! What day is it?”
“Sunday.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“Motherfucker! There’s no fucking way I can
read that fucking book by tomorrow morning!” She
paused for a moment and pursed her lips, which
meant she was scheming. “Hey, I just thought of
something.”
“And what’s that?” I asked, yawning again.
“Didn’t you read it?”
I knew exactly what she was hinting at, but I was
in no storytelling mood.
“Yeah, but I’m in a fucking coma at the moment. I
can’t even remember my name, never mind a book I
read when I was ten.”
“Just give me a brief synopsis,” she begged, tugging
I can’t tell you with any
certainty what happened
next, but it was strikingly
similar to the phenomenon
that occurs when you’re put
under for surgery.
*****
20
on my shirt. “Come on, please? I’ll be your best
friend?”
“You are my best friend,” I said, heading for the
door. “Go buy the Cliffs, or better yet, rent the film,
the one with Alan Ladd, if you can find it.”
She looked at me with helpless doe eyes and an
adorably tragic pout. Many a sap fell victim to this
little ploy, but it never worked on me, for I knew her
too well. What’s more, I’d been known to use the
same ploy myself.
“I need more sleep,” I yawned once more, walking
out. “I’ll call you later.”
She mumbled something in French, then rolled
over and resumed sawing wood.
The instant I stepped out into the blinding sunlight, I saw a trio of beaming faces waving from the
garage across the street.
“Good morning, sunshine!” one of them yelled
cheerfully.
It was Ganja Ron, Green Bud, and Burnout Jackson. They were neighborhood denizens and buddies
of Heath’s. I think you can deduce from the nicknames what they were all about. Each was invariably
stocked with the most potent marijuana around,
which they thoroughly enjoyed sharing with the girls
and me. Running into one of them was a real score,
but all three at once? A hat trick—although I wasn’t
so sure about the timing.
I forced a smile and waved back.
“You look like shit!” Ganja Ron yelled, holding
up a hefty bag of weed. “Come on over, I’ve got just
what the doctor ordered!”
Like an idiot, I dragged my carcass across the
street.
When I entered the garage, I heard Tangerine
Dream’s Phaedra playing softly on the stereo. Ganja
Ron was not only hooked on drugs, but also Kraut
and Prog Rock, which according to him “facilitated
the journey.” Exactly where he was headed, I never
knew. I doubt he knew either.
“What the hell happened to you?” he asked, laughing. “You look like you just went fifteen rounds with
Marvin Hagler!”
Green Bud and Burnout Jackson were laughing
too.
21
“It’s a looooooong story,” I replied, shaking my
head. “Do yourself a favor, unless you’re in a hospital,
don’t fuck with Sister Morphine.”
“Ahhhh,” they said in unison, nodding their heads.
“So,” Ganja Ron said, “you wanna get high, or
what?”
“Why the hell not,” I yawned. “If I’m lucky, maybe
it’ll finish me off.”
“I scored a half pound of that Golden Thai I
smoked with you last month,” Burnout said, raising his bushy, overgrown eyebrows and grinning.
“Remember that shit?”
“How could I forget?” I scoffed.
He was referring to a premium breed of opiumlaced marijuana, which had caused me to believe that
the half gallon of vanilla ice cream I was devouring
was changing flavors with every bite. First it was
butter pecan, then peach, then pistachio, then chocolate malted crunch, then pecan praline, etc.…
“Should we use Dr. Phibes?” Green Bud asked,
pointing toward the workbench.
Dr. Phibes was a bong that Ganja Ron had built
from scratch. What set it apart from other bongs was
the respiratory mask attached to its body via a plastic
hose. Can you see where this is going?
They took several turns apiece loading Dr. Phibes.
After three rounds, I could barely stand, but continued to inhale the pungent fumes anyway. The rest is a
blur. All I can remember is asking Ganja Ron for the
time, and his answer verbatim: “A heckle past a frair.”
I often wonder why I remember this useless crap.
I looked at him confusedly, then staggered out of the
garage, crawled across the street, climbed back into
the bunk bed—the bottom bunk this time—and fell
into a deep slumber until the following morning.
[An excerpt from a work in progress]
Li’l Punks: A Screenplay
Mark Netter
It’s 1977 and four upstate–New York high-school students who have
formed their town’s first punk rock band are in NYC together for the
best night of their lives. They’ve been brought to NYC this particular
Friday night by Nick, a somewhat older Brit manager who’s looking for
a new band to Svengali.
They’ve just played a freak gig at CBGB, a smashing debut for the upstate band, and their (upstate) hit single, “Toys.”
Now they’re enjoying the after-party, an unimaginable experience for
Neil. The self-styled loser has an opportunity to run into his own
icons, as peers.
He’s watching as Dan-El works the crowd of sophisticates like the primal sophisticate he is.
INT. EAST VILLAGE LOFT - NIGHT
CROSSFADE from “Toys” to David Bowie’s “Heroes.” Jammed party in an
unfinished space. JOHNNY THUNDERS trolls through the crowd behind another aging ROCKER fronting for him.
ROCKER
Anybody have any coke? Any downs?
Neil taps Steve on the shoulder.
NEIL
Is that Johnny Thunders? New York
Dolls Johnny Thunders?
They look over at Johnny, hitting on a death-mask punky chick with all
of his street-legal proto-punk glamour. Hard to tell whether he’s trying to cadge drugs or sex.
Neil sees Patricia laugh it up with a handsome poser with long black
hair who looks like he’s in a band, who whispers something in her ear
as two geeky fans gawk at her.
22
She’s not too far from Doreen, chaperoning Phil taking long hits from
a joint being circulated between the lead singer of the Bent Ones and
the guy he tussled with in the club.
Behind Neil, Dan-El is with a few intense guys and Nick, Zipper Khan
with his Walkman out and recording just like in the opening, and WHITEY, shockingly bleached like his name.
WHITEY
Once a band signs with a major label,
it’s over, it doesn’t matter anymore.
It’s just part of the machine, why
waste time listening to anything that
serves the corporate body, which is
what happens when they cash that very
first check?
DAN-EL
Back in LA the Screamers, with their
insane genius lead singer Tomato du
Plenty, they refuse to even make records. They just perform live and on
these weird sick videotapes they make
of their songs.
NICK
Great, and then who gets to hear the
music? The chosen few?
DAN-EL
Indubitably, dear chap.
WHITEY
Be here now. That’s cool. That’s real.
Neil sees the poser lead Patricia out and considers following, when
Steve approaches Johnny Thunders.
STEVE
Hey, Johnny. We’re friends of Deg.
Johnny gives the smallest acknowledgement imaginable.
23
NEIL
(clearing throat)
I’m a big fan of your guitar, you
know, style.
Even less acknowledgement, if possible.
NEIL
I, uh, have some pot. If you want to
maybe we, um, could go smoke.
JOHNNY THUNDERS
(cutting off the girl cold)
Follow me.
INT. LOFT BEDROOM - NIGHT
”Subway Train” by the New York Dolls KICKS IN as Johnny leads Neil and
Steve in, the room spacious and empty save for futons on the floor and
a little party around the Bent Ones guitarist, still strapped to his
guitar.
JOHNNY THUNDERS
Where?
Neil pulls out a film canister half full with shake, begins to fill his
pipe when Johnny stops him.
JOHNNY THUNDERS
You’re wasting it.
Johnny usurps the canister, pastes together three rolling papers from
his pocket, breaks open a Marlboro and empties the tobacco and all of
Neil’s pot onto the papers.
Neil watches numbly as Johnny rolls the spliff, sparks it up and
starts toking. He motions to the Bent guitarist and takes his instrument, starts noodling a few steely chords as he walks off enjoying the
spliff all by himself.
STEVE
At least you can say you got Johnny
Thunders high.
24
Six Compositions
Michael Jon Fink
Michael Jon Fink has composed concertos for
soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, violin and cello, as
well as incidental music for two plays by W.B. Yeats
and three by Wajdi Mouawad.
the Negative Band, Musica Veneris Nocturnus,
Stillife and Ghost Duo, and currently plays electric guitar with Pickaxe (noise), Gods of Rain
(experimental metal), the Feedback Wave Riders
(free improv) and Trio Through the Looking-Glass
(jazz-inflected).
He recently composed the score for Tareq Daoud’s
short dramatic film La salle des maîtres, an official selection of the Film Festival Locarno. He is
currently composing a chamber concerto for the
world-renowned avant-garde cellist Frances-Marie
Uitti ( who plays with two bows at the same time).
His “Prelude to Alone,” for clarinets, trombones
and electric guitar, will appear on the soon-tobe-released Cold Blue Two anthology (Cold Blue
Records).
His music appears on the Cold Blue, Contagion,
C.R.I., Trance Port, Raptoria Caam and Wire
Tapper labels.
Though perhaps best known as a pianist, here are six
tracks featuring Michael on guitar.
M.J.F. has been a composer/improviser with experimental and new-music groups that have included
To
listen, please go to
www.sensitiveskinmagazine.com/fink
25
New Work
Shalom Neuman
If our world is composed of overlapping stimuli
which create constant sensory overload, then why
should visual art limit itself to any one discipline,
such as painting, sculpture, print, video or computerized digital images? Is it not true that imagery is
inseparable from sound and evolution in time? And
if that is the case, shouldn’t art be a mirror that accurately reflects our environment, society and culture?
successfully integrating all artistic media into one
indistinguishable statement or genre which I call
fusion art.
As an artist I want to bridge the existing barriers
between all disciplines, such as painting, sculpture,
light, sound, performance theatre, video and digital
art. I want to make these individual genres indecipherable from one another. I love figurative painting
and I am firmly committed to it. My belief is that
by breaking away from the canvas I can bring the
classical approach into the contemporary arena,
especially when I am incorporating computer generated art, artificial illumination and video projections.
In this way, I am creating a bridge between the past
and the present, where classical tradition fuses with
our continuing cultural and technological evolution.
With the assistance of a graduate-student physicist
I built my first computerized dimming system in
1968. It was programmed for an infinite number
of lighting combinations which created a multisensory environment where two-dimensional images
became indistinguishable from the three-dimensional objects and sculpturally painted elements in
my work. There was an overlay of evolving colored
lights and projections in conjunction with a looped
sound system which distorted the viewer’s perception of his/her surrounding physical space, thereby
—Shalom Neuman
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
Mt. Eden 1978-82
Drew Hubner
I
t started in a pool hall. juan colon had
a girl friend, and so did the cop, Jimmy
O’Donnelly. The problem was it was the same
girl. Usually a policeman is issued whatever
number comes up, but special requests can be made.
His father arranged for Jimmy O’Donnelly to get his
namesake’s shield, from grandfather to grandson. His
wife had their third kid in four years. They were high
school sweethearts. Neither of them had been with
anyone else.
Juan Colon on the other hand was a mac daddy.
And this girl Clemente had it bad for him. She was
trying to get Juan’s attention somehow and she met
O’Donnelly.
That day after the protest we all met at the pool
hall. Not O’Donnelly’s wife of course, she was home
with the kids, but the other three and the men got
into it.
The sister was playing with the cop and she bent
over the table and Juan Colon whistled. It wasn’t just
any whistle either. It was like I’ve had that shit and I
can get it again any time I want.
Jimmy O’Donnelly didn’t like that. He didn’t like
where he was. He didn’t like the fact that he was here
cheating on his wife while she was home with the
three bawling children.
Juan Colon was the kind of man to pick up on
something like that. Juan had that easy confidence
and that really strong sense of himself in his own
skin.
Jimmy O’Donnelly was the exact opposite. He was
that white boy shutdown angry energy, all uptight
and not in touch with his physicality at all. They say
that white boys can’t dance. Juan Colon could dance.
He moved like a woman, and he fought like a wild
cat.
O’Donnelly got in over his head, and he had
41
to back off. He had gone in there alone with the
Clemente girl. Something in him did not feel too
comfortable with what he was doing and who he
was. He never had a choice in love. He and his wife
knew each other from way back, from dads in short
sleeves off work from the job at cookouts cracking
open beers in the backyard, little girl, little boy chasing each other around, all cute and cuddly from the
beginning of time as they knew it.
He had to be a cop. Yet he was a natural; he was
good at it and if he had ever the chance to grow into
that role he would have been very good at it, but he
never got that chance. Not after Juan Colon.
In the poolhall O’Donnelly was surrounded and
humiliated. He popped Colon real good a couple of
times, but there were no other cops and a lot of Juan
Colons.
Miss Clemente was tall and curvy and pistol
smart. Her father took her out of school and put
her to work in that clothing store on the Hub. She
and Jimmy O had in common that they were under
the great big thumb of their fathers. Officer Jimmy
O’Donnelly went back to his wife and his family.
What else was he going to do? He told himself it was
forever with Lucy Clemente every time they were
together, but it was only forever in the moment. She
fell into the discos. She was well known in the Bronx
and even in Manhattan.
When next she was seen, it was in one of those
heroin and crack sweatshops with one Manny Colon.
She was not one of the naked girls who handle the
product, she was the one with the whip, the overseer
of the slaves. While Manny ran the streets, she oversaw the operation on the home front.
She got into it a little herself at the time, a
little too much blow, the pretty girl’s cold, back and
forth with dope to balance each other out, then she
dropped out suddenly. Even Manny could not find
her. She had met a man on the train; they had gone
on a few dates. She had one of those irresistible faces
and like Juan, a graceful leonine athleticism. After
five or six dates they became serious and this man
proposed to her.
She lives in Greenwich now and has a horse and a
stable and three beautiful children. He does not ask
her about her past and she does not tell him.
That afternoon Jimmy O’Donnelly took her by
the hand and out of the pool hall, but in a matter of
seconds by the way she looked back, it was clear even
to him, blinded by rage and pride as he was, that she
would never be able to leave behind Juan Colon.
Jimmy O’Donnelly released her and she ran back
inside, and for the most part, out of his life. They saw
each other a few more times, but that moment had
made itself clear.
Juan had yelled out to O’Donnelly, something
tough and cocky like,
Don’t ever let me see you again.
O’Donnelly said at most two words of his own,
something like,
Bring it.
So next they met on Melrose Avenue in the
middle of the night, on the occasion already
described by two different witnesses. Clearly through
no fault of their own they experienced mere fragmentary aspects of our complete story. Let me
humbly add to the confusion.
First and foremost Juan Colon did not die on
Melrose Avenue that night. He certainly must have
appeared as good as dead to the adjunct professor.
And maybe he was confused about the timing of
it all. Which is understandable under the circumstances. One of Juan Colon’s back ribs was ruptured
and sticking through his skin, puncturing his lung.
His face was a bloody mess, his skull cracked.
O’Donnelly did not run him down with the car as
wantonly as the adjunct professor describes.
Juan saw the car and tried to jump out of the way.
O’Donnelly swerved and at the last instant in a
jump of balletic grace Colon leaped atop the car as it
screeched to a stop, then bounded against the windshield, since the Dodge was not going that fast, even
if he had gunned it as described it was up hill and
he was barely moving as they pulled away from the
curb after making the pickup of the bag of money
from one, Frank Ellis, itinerant piano jazz genius,
paramour and escort of blue blooded young ladies
by evening, little league coach by weekend, capable
of paying off teenagers to induce them to commit
casual arson and at the same time convince an heiress to trust and marry: Pleased to meet you, hope you
guessed my name.
In fact old Frankie did a Latin jazz Willie Bobo
accompanied Stones medley of that song with
“Gimme Shelter” and “Midnight Rambler” that was
funny, freaky and chilling all at the same time, my
brother.
Follow this: Frank Ellis witnessed the beating
Jimmy O’Donnelly administered to Juan Colon on
the Melrose Avenue sidewalk. I got this from the
lucky devil himself.
The thing was that O’Donnelly got it just as bad.
A cop is taught to shoot for center force. A cop
is not supposed to be marksman; this does him no
good. He is not taught to shoot to kill. A marksman
is someone who can bring down a target with one
shot. This is well and good for a sniper, but we are
not talking about a sniper situation. We are talking
about a squad of vice cops going into a known narcotics operations spot with their weapons drawn and
flushing out between fifteen and twenty perpetrators.
The facts are known that O’Donnlelly shot Colon in
the chest twice and if the first shot, which pierced an
already damaged lung, was not enough to kill him,
the second, which essentially exploded his heart, was.
Colon was dead in a few moments and
O’Donnelly and the bust went on. Colon was
holding a hammer and clutched it in his death convulsions. Whether the circumstances of this decision
or instinctual shot haunted O’Donnelly is a good
question, he never talked about it. He never talked
about much besides his family, the Yankees and the
job.
What’s interesting to think about for any student
or inquirer into the nature of manhood is whether or
not their prior relationship had anything to do with
the way that either man reacted to the moment of
42
the situation. They saw each other. They shouted in
recognition. They were barely inches away, in a darkened hallway that both had stepped into in a virtually
simultaneous instant of movement. Colon raised the
hammer and O’Donnelly pulled the trigger.
Another sidebar worth mentioning is the amphetamine habit that O’Donnelly had at the time. It was
going around. It was the age of greenies for baseball
players and a lot of heads, even college students were
into pink hearts, white crosses and the like. It was the
peak year for No-Doz nationwide in terms of sales,
which is interesting to note. Whether this all got
replaced by cocaine when it got easier and cheaper to
get is, while pretty much obvious to any dopefiend,
not something that anyone has the means to prove.
At this point, O’Donnelly, like the crowd he ran
with in the department, was popping pills to get up
in the morning, pills for the job, pills for sex and pills
to drink more and then drinking more to be able to
pass out and then having to pop another pill or two
in the morning to make up for that. He was always
a speed freak. His brother talks of him going into
crazy Evel Knieval-type tricks, even as a kid with
his bicycle, jumping over trash cans, a gushing fire
hydrant, even once the family dogs: a collie and a lab.
That three of the other dealers involved were shot
in this raid had some bearing on how the whole
thing played out. There were witnesses among the
underground who saw what happened between Juan
Colon and Jimmy O’Donnelly and one of them was
a brother by the name of Manny Colon a/k/a “The
Mule.”
He witnessed his brother’s death from less than
twenty paces. He saw the fatal confrontation from a
stairway. He stopped dead right there and was taken
under arrest by one of O’Donnelly’s partners.
He was walked by the body of his heaving, dying
brother.
O’Donnelly had caught a glimpse of Manny without of course knowing who he was. O’Donnelly saw
him being subdued in the next frame of instant and
moved on. They had a house to clear, an operation
Ted Barron
43
to eliminate, a job to do and the fact that he had
just shot a man did not allow him even an instant to
pause for that might get him shot.
They ended up in the backyard with 12 men and
boys including Manny Colon on their faces in the
scraggly dirt in grass of a late afternoon. The paddywagon arrived, the prisoners were marched single
file around to the front and taken to the 3rd Avenue
courthouse and jail for eventual arraignment. The
arresting officers went to the bar.
Since Manny Colon was only seventeen, he was
released to his father hours after the Walton Ave
stash house bust. Two days later they held poor
Juan’s funeral. From which Juan Colon, a popular kid,
became a Tremont legend. The wake filled the three
blocks surrounding the funeral parlor up by Poe’s
Park, with fire hydrants open in Juan’s honor, and 4
two-man squads of police on patrol.
For the Mule, it became the thing in his life, at
first a motivator and later quite something else. He
never got the look of the guy who shot his brother
out of his head, point-blank range, twice in the chest
and so when he saw him again he knew what to do.
It was like a picture that was already painted. It
was just a matter of filling in the colors.
Two things were set into the inextricable destiny
of the world in that dusty hallway on Walton Ave
by the college: that Manny Colon would become a
kingpin and that one day he would avenge the killing
of his brother at the hands of one Jimmy O’Donnelly.
He finished his schoolboy football career all state
topping the league in tackles and concussions. He
had a way of leading with his head. He became the
Mule. What once had hurt him, he started to enjoy,
to relish, to explore. He shook his head a couple
times and got back in the game.
He went through money like it was water. He
treated women with respect and grace, but cheated
on them at will and whim. He had a place on the
upstairs porch of one of the stash houses on Bush
Ave where he sat and took time for himself. Otherwise he never stopped in his single mission. He
fought, killed, and fathered. He was a man of his
word. Who didn’t know his name paid for it.
Somehow when he sat on the porch, he got that it
was already written somewhere and it was his job to
take it as painless as possible, to turn water into wine,
to fill others lives with grace, no matter the circumstances and that was what everyone would say about
Manny that he was a man nonetheless. You might
shake your head, but you would respect him. He
never even cheated the low-level corporal or dealer.
He always treated the police with respect. He
spoke reverently of his childhood dream to be a pilot
as if he had somehow achieved it, as if it were a real
thing. He was a true psychopath in the strictest sense
of the term. He had the ability, the innate talent,
to perform whatever task he had before him while
having his mind exist in a wholly other realm. He
told his recruits tales of King Arthur and got them
to believe. He believed his own bullshit.
Until that day on Anthony Ave when shots rang
out and everyone on the street ran up the hill, just a
block and a half from the droning din of the Cross
Bronx Expressway. A crowd of hundreds gathered in
moments.
The Cassidy Mansion was the first house in the
Bronx.
If you’d ever had the opportunity to be invited
there to a birthday party back in the day, you still
spoke of it. Everyone was welcome. Even Frank Ellis,
when he was the prince of the place for his short
reign, invited some into the yard during the neighborhood block parties.
Because that’s what they were, the Royal family
of Tremont, and the way that subjects identify with
the kings and queens was the way that we felt about
our Cassidy Mansion, so on that day when the shots
rang out and Townes Walker lay on the driveway, we
all went up there to see what happened.
Maggie’s mother was bleeding and someone had
given her a handkerchief. The police and ambulances
were there.
The fallen man was put in the rescue squad
truck and the crowd parted. The Mule was watching with everyone else until the instant when he saw
O’Donnelly. Then it was like one of those parts in
the movie when a laser point comes on the screen
and zeroes in one face like a sniper sight on a high
powered rifle.
44
He recognized O’Donnelly though it was almost
four years since the killing of his brother Juan on
Walton Ave. Manny Colon had become the youngest kingpin in our knowledge of the world; he was
a legend. He had been checking his crew of four or
five dealers in the area, four who manned the corners opposite the points of the circle where Tremont
meets Webster and one that roamed, getting customers wherever he could.
There was a constant stream of traffic and business
in those days. It is hard to describe except to note
that a dealer, from the moment he showed up on the
street with product, was busy until he left. Guys were
accosted until they became weary of the sight of their
brood, until they became hooked to the power they
held over their own minions.
They kept their stashes in their pockets and a
larger one in a paper bag they would discard nearby,
in a trash can by a curb or whatever, and if anyone
touched it, or even looked at it, there would be a very
big problem.
This was Manny’s biggest rule. It is not a matter
of shit, it’s a matter of pride. If someone takes you off
they don’t respect you and this must be taken care of.
There is no other way.
O’Donnelly had put on a little weight. He wore a
military regulations mustache out to the corners of
his mouth. He had a crew cut because it was dead
summer. He had taken his hat off to scratch his
brow. The Mule saw a certain look in his eye and said
something like,
Uh, can I get you something?
O’Donnelly wasn’t stupid. He saw who and what
Manny was. He was a man who could get him as
much crack as he wanted for as long as he wanted,
for a nice two- or three-day run until he discarded
him because you know he was a cop. He was vice
squad, and Manny Colon, he didn’t recognize him
in the front part of his awareness of the situation
though he knew who he was as a local dealer.
Drugs are like that; they allow the taker to layer
the things in his mind so that there are different
levels of reality. He knew who Manny was, pointblank, but if anyone asked him he needed to have a
level of plausible deniability, why, don’t ask that kind
45
of question. It is enough to say that it had come up
in passing a couple times in precinct business that
this wannabe kingpin kid was the little brother of
the man he had killed with his service revolver. Most
cops, contrary to television and popular conceptions,
never kill anyone in the line of duty. Most seldom
even fire their guns, so if you do, you remember.
There was another emotional dimension that had
to be respected.
He could not admit at first that he still dreamed
of Juan Colon and that hallway. He dreamed of what
could have happened had it gone down differently at
either stage, at the pool hall, on Melrose Ave or in
the hallway.
He and Juan matched up perfectly as opponents,
and just as a man, if he is lucky enough, gets to meet
his or her perfect lover, or certainly the closest thing
that will come to it in their lifetime before death,
and always dreams of this person as a fallback sort
of thing, whenever unhappy, if he ends up with
someone else or not, even if he may dream of the
younger more agreeable version of his own wife, as
Jimmy O’Donnelly also did; but Manny Colon and
O’Donnelly didn’t bullshit each other, they were too
smart for that, and for the next four days they danced,
each teasing himself with the delicious idea of killing
the other at the right moment, like a delicious tango
that neither one of them could deny, like the couple
who see each other across a crowded dance floor and
simply must end up having a drink at the bar.
Then it’s your place or mine.
This is what happened that moment with Jimmy
O’Donnelly and Manny Colon. But let’s forget, if we
can forget all that three- and four-dimensional crap
and get to the bare bones of the what took place in
the next ninety-six hours.
O’Donnelly had made detective.
He wore his shield on his shirt now. He looked
good, he looked like Burt Lancaster in From Here
to Eternity, with white shirt and chinos, in the sun,
but if you looked closer you realized he was much
more like Monty Clift because there was something
haunted about his handsome face. He was looking
for his own death and, just as something clicked in
Manny in that moment, something also clicked in
Detective Jimmy O’Donnelly because he had found
his destiny.
You got something for me, you say.
They played it out like it was a tip. This was plausible enough. Dealers, especially ones as high up as
the Mule, often talked to the cops, to tease them, to
get them drugs or women if they were so inclined or
to lay a seed for later if they were not. They reinitiated contact and proceeded to have a conversation at
a pizza place that had a window where they served
slices and sodas to the people of the sidewalk.
This was back down Tremont Avenue. Even here
they were still on the fringe of the crowd that had
gathered around the scene of the murder. There
would be people soaking up the remnants of dispersed energy and madness there for the rest of the
day because murder scenes are like that. This is what
the ghetto gets off on, the street dramas that everyone is so addicted to it’s like sports.
They stood talking even though anyone watching
would not have been able to tell Manny gave him the
small paper bag of crack and heroin he just happened
to have as a drop off to one of his lieutenants. As in
look what I found officer you better take care of this.
Jimmy went on a legendary run, and went on to
suffer the worst death of any of the rogue crack cops
of his era. He was found in a room on Webster Ave
with his head stove in and the carpenter’s hammer
that had done the deed still stuck in his skull four
days later.
Manny kept an eye on him whether it was his or
not until O’Donnelly was depleted and delirious and
then he took his life, as O’Donnelly had taken his
brother’s.
Manny was able to stay on the street for some
time and then he himself was arrested and there
was no one to testify to the murder and no evidence
that could be pinned to him. What Manny had done
was put Jimmy O’Donnelly in the able hands of his
lieutenants both male and female, so he knew where
he was and what he was doing the whole time. He
checked on him once or twice. He knew he cried to
a whore, that he bragged to a barroom full of Yankee
fans that he went home to tearfully kiss each of his
children as if he knew what train he had gotten on
and where it would crash.
It is said that O’Donnelly spent the last hours of
his life looking out a corner window of the Tremont Plaza Hotel south and east toward the Tremont
Oval, where in those days at night the gatherers there
at the head of the drug bazaar the circle had become
wandered to and fro like the penitent congregants of
some long forsaken and outlandish pagan pageantry,
where its denizens sat on the benches jabbering in
unintelligible tongues, lighting up in full view of
passersby or passed out on the same grass in various
states of ecstasy and ruin. In his mind at the end it
was a source of both envy and disdain for the born
cop that he could not join them, that his own bloody
transcendence awaited him, and would be met in the
dark hovel, his final refuge.
Officer Bobby O’Donnelly was found in the Webster Hotel with the carpenter’s hammer embedded
in the frontal bone of his skull, it was only a matter
of time for Manny Colon. Granted it would take a
little while. These things always do. The police force
was in shambles, overworked, underpaid and undernourished in terms of appreciation from the public.
The shine had worn off the badge. Also he was only
one asshole and there were a lot of them out there,
but if he was not public enemy #1, for what he had
done to O’Donnelly, he was running a close second,
rogue cop or not.
Note one: the frontal bone is the one at protects
the brain and as such is the strongest bone in the
body. The officer’s skull had been penetrated not once
but not less than four times. The bone was effectively
broken in half and the point of the back-end of the
hammer damaged the officer’s inner ear.
Even the most seasoned officers upon entering the
room and looking around for a moment soon rushed
out when it dawned on them what had happened
here and were sick in the hallway bathroom, a few
only made it as far as the trashcan by the cot.
Officer O’Donnelly was given a full honor guard
funeral. For those of you who don’t know, Tremont
Ave goes all the way east to the end of the great
North American continent in the Throggs Neck section of the Bronx. A few blocks south of our avenue,
on Lafayette, there’s a graveyard, St. Raymond’s, and
46
that’s where Bobby ended up, next to his grandfather, on their graves was carved the very same
shield number. The wails of the widow reached such
a pitch that they were imitated by a flock of birds
that alighted in the upper branches of nearby trees,
achieving at one point a relatively perfect pitch of
high C.
After he left the room in the Webster Hotel,
Manny Colon took a shower down the hall, shaved,
shit, changed his clothes, applied cologne and went
on a hot date with a freaking fly sister by the name
of Delilah Gomez. It had taken him six months
of preparation for this. She was an undergraduate
nursing student at Hostos. She was 19. That was by
day. By night she graced the club sport spots of our
neighborhood with her long legs, leonine grace and
bubble packed booty.
If the bus stop and the bump were not invented
to show off her God-given gifts, after a few minutes
watching this fine young thing in their employment
any witness would agree it was academic anyway.
Nothing mattered after seeing her shake that thing
and more babies were born just because of what
watching her did to the boyfriends and husbands of
those girls present in Delilah’s sphere of influence.
For all that it was her teeth, her smile and the well...
intelligence with which she danced, that she brought
to the dance floor that distinguished her. Manny
was with her when they saw the police report on the
O’Donnelly cop killing. Jimmy came on and spoke
briefly about his brother and it was in that instant
that Manny realized he had killed the wrong one.
He dropped a water glass and it shattered on the
tile floor. He put on his pants and walked out the
door.the young lady yelled after him, to no avail. This
was the first year of the Serrano Scholars program at
Hostos, and she would be one of the first students
chosen to continue her education begun at Hostos,
at Columbia University. After graduation she next
landed in Ethiopia, Sri Lanka and Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia before decamping to a 3-bedroom condo in
Bethesda where she worked in the state department.
At each stop of the way, accommodations had to be
made for the son she had conceived with Manny
Colon the very night of the morning that began with
47
Officer Bobby O’Donnelly’s head stove in.
Manny the Mule lasted on the streets for exactly
337 days and nights, which put him exactly that
many steps behind his mentor Frank Ellis on the
staircase down to hell that officials call the New York
State Penal system. Manny Colon had enough uncut
cocaine to keep him up all but maybe three hours
a night. He only slept well after sex and when he
awoke like a bolt he did a little of the white horse to
ease himself into the next thing that happened. The
one or two nights that he slept through were spent
in the wreckage of the train station where our grandfather still stood sentinel. The transit company had
installed automated ticket machines and the building
was condemned so only our grandfather went inside
and for his old ward Manny Colon it was the perfect
place to hide and the only time he knew any rest.
There was an All Points Bulletin put out in all five
boroughs for the arrest of Manuel Colon thirty two
minutes after Officer O’Donnelly’s body was discovered, which happened not incidentally a full 83 hours
after he expired. It was on a tip from a desk clerk who
became disgusted upon discovering that some local
rounders were bringing gawkers by for looks; and the
smell, which was awful, even with the window open.
Manny Colon’s wandering sojourn often ended for
some minutes respite on the park bench at the end of
Mt Eden Ave where he liked the view of the passing
cars especially at night on Webster Ave. Other times
it ended on one of the benches of Echo Park across
Tremont Ave from our church.
I saw him myself after he had been on the run
for the better part of a year. Sure he had lost a little
weight, but I can swear in the words of the bard that
he did look great. In the Cassidy mansion in the
drawing room was a Steinway piano. I was walking
by the big empty house one night and decided to pay
a visit. I was playing for hours before Manny came
down the stairs, wiping sleep out of his eyes.
What are you doing here?
We both laughed at the same time. He was
arrested a few weeks later, it was the last time I saw
him for a long time.
Unsupervised: My Life as a Bad Girl
By Erika Schickel
I recently watched a “reality” show called The Bad
Girls Club and was saddened to see what has lately
become of the Bad Girl brand. The show devotes
itself to a lot of scantily clad, cranky harlots who do
nothing but party and fight with each other, trying
to scratch each other’s eyes out with press-on nails.
It seems modern day slut culture has totally co-opted
Bad Girls, and it makes me ache for young women
today and the tepid model for misbehavior they are
being given.
I came of age in a time when the term “Bad
Girl” connoted rebellion and iconoclasm, independent thinking and free-spiritedness. Bad Girls were
badass, and that gave us our power. Not that the term
“Bad Girl” hasn’t always had a patronizing, pejorative
twang. It’s always been one part “You go, Girl!” and
two parts, “You’re a slut.” But nevertheless, Bad Girls
and Party Girls have gotten all shuffled together into
the same deck of pornographic playing cards. Bad
Girls were the ones who blew off the party to smoke a
joint outside. We did all kinds of stuff with guys, and
not just it. We were accomplices, we were troublemakers, we were always dressed inappropriately for
whatever occasion, and likely to cause a scene. Okay
sure, we were also on the easy side, but sex was conducted in the spirit of “fuck you”—not “fuck me.”
I feel I should at this point offer my Bad Girl
bonafides, so you can be sure you’re in the hands of
a seasoned pro.
In my 47 checkered years on earth, I have engaged
in just about every kind of Bad Girlery you can
imagine:
Premarital and adulterous sex, of course. Smoking,
drinking, drugging, cursing, necking, heavy petting,
hooky, hickey, almost-turned-a-tricky, eye-rolling,
bird-flipping, shit-flipping, cow-tipping, tripping,
mashing, flashing, reputation-trashing, trespassing, shoplifting, re-gifting, mooning, booing, lying,
spying, fake-crying, hair-dying, fake-ID-buying,
tagging, bagging, sarcasm, orgasm, party-crashing,
dine-and-dashing, dirtbikes/roadbikes/grassbikes,
drink spikes, one-nights, cheating, speeding, pussyeating, two-timing, one-lining, line-snorting,
sheet-shorting, and aborting.
Oh, and taxi dancing.
Like all bad girls, i started out as a good
Girl. What happened? I was torn from the breast
young, I was spanked. I was humped by a Spaniel
and groped by a camp counselor. But more than anything, I think it’s because my parents had an epic,
toxic divorce when I was twelve. I learned that love
was a shuck just as I hit willowy, blonde puberty in
Manhattan in the late 1970’s. It was the summer of
Taxi Driver and I was a dead ringer for Jodie Foster.
I was jailbait and unsupervised and the world came
on to me fast.
New York in 1976 was Ground Zero for sex.
Women were freshly liberated and on the pill, the
Stonewall Riots brought out the gays, no-fault
divorce was sweeping the nation and people were getting it on. Nobody was worried about genital herpes
or G-spots. Hang-ups were hung up, swingers swung,
and platonic relationships were in retreat at Plato’s
Retreat. AYDS was a diet candy. Everybody was
doing it, even my parents—just not with each other.
My dad cheated on my mom in London with a
chippie who worked for Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Mom
called him a cab. They both wrote thinly veiled novels
about it all and made me and my younger sister
choose opposite sides of the split.
Pop was more inconvenienced by the divorce than
he was heart-broken. He adjusted his aviator frames,
combed out his mustache and went out and swung.
My father was Mr. Goodbar, mowing down liberated ladies like a John Deere in deep wheat. “I once
48
had sex with three different women in one day,” he
bragged to me not long ago.
While my father notched conquests on his water
bedpost, my mother took up with Daniel, my friend
Gemma’s dad. In today’s terminology, Gemma was
my tweenage bestie, and our two families were not
just close, our brownstones shared a front stoop.
Gemma and I lived at each other’s houses practicing
our Bad Girl moves together at the age of 11. We
stole and smoked our first cigarettes and made prank
calls and reenacted scenes from The Three Musketeers
(but dirty) in my bedroom on sleepovers. We stole a
condom out of my father’s drawer and stuffed it full
of newspaper in an attempt to understand the mystery of the penis. The day Mom and Daniel told us
they were moving in together was the last time I saw
Gemma. She never spoke to me again.
Alone and frightened in my broken, atheist, culturally enriched home, I had nowhere to turn for
answers but to literature. That is how I came across a
Erika, 1980
49
copy of “Fear of Flying” while prowling my mother’s
bookshelves. The cover showed a woman’s breasts
exploding from a tight shirt as her zipper was being
slowly run southward by a male hand. I felt a spasm
of prurient curiosity. I hid the book under my purple
sweatshirt and, alone in my room, discovered the
“Zipless Fuck” in breathless surprise. It embodied all
the sophistication, mystery and emotional remove
that I dreamed of at twelve.
It wasn’t long before I was peeling my Gloria
Vanderbilts off in front of Neighbor Boy, who was a
year ahead of me at school. His mom caught us, scandal ensued, and thus it was that “Erika is a HOAR”
was scratched on a stall door in the girls’ bathroom
at school. I read the epithet sitting on the pot, praying that I would get my period—not because I was
worried I was pregnant (that would come later), but
because I hadn’t yet reached puberty and I needed my
body to catch up to my reputation.
The classic bad girl is the catholic school
Girl gone wrong. While you really can’t beat repression-meets-rebellion-in-a-pleated-mini-skirt for
sheer iconic appeal, I would argue that the Atheist
Bad Girl, in her ripped jeans and shit-kickers, is a far
more compelling creature. Catholic Bad Girls have
a lot of obvious stuff to rebel against, whereas the
Godless must draw their angst from a more mutable source. We confront the existential question, “if
no one is watching, then what is the point of being
good?” Like Algebra, virtue seemed to me to lack
practical applications.
Alone in a world that offers no identifiable moral
superstructure, “badness” can root tenaciously in the
grout of a girls’ soul and briskly come to flower. As
an Atheist Bad Girl, I didn’t just need to break rules,
I found I wanted to make my own.
Badness for me was a means to a lofty end. my
mandate was to live a life of romance and adventure,
then turn the raw stuff of unfettered experience into
an epic love story in which the very mysteries of the
universe would be revealed. By 14, I could see that
my virginity was holding up the works. So I tossed it
off to a cute, available boy poetically named Adam,
In the spring of my senior year of high school
I pulled the ultimate Bad Girl move—I had an
affair with a married teacher and got kicked out of
boarding school. I was an A student with nearly four
months to fill before I matriculated at Sarah LawBut you’ve got to start somewhere, and the rence College in September. My father was so angry
cigarettes I smoked with Gemma were the gateway he couldn’t talk to me without spitting on me, so
to everything else. Next came pot, then some light I flew to my mother who was living on Cape Cod
shoplifting, then truancy and sex. Some indiscreet with Daniel. There I discovered I was but a casting
diary-keeping led to my mother’s discovery of my from my mother’s own Bad Girl mold­—she conwicked ways, which ultimately led, as it so often does fessed she herself once had a passionate affair with
for the over-privileged Bad Girl, to banishment in her own married teacher while at Sarah Lawrence.
boarding school.
My mother knew firsthand the stormy cliff on which
I stood. She didn’t have a spare bedroom for me
The school i wound up in wasn’t your typical though, so I joined my teacher in Vermont.
ivied, repressive, knee-socks-and-blazers prep school.
That summer was bliss. I lived in sin, I was the
Buxton was an alternative, co-educational hippie object both of desire and gossip, and I was a social
school housed on an old summer estate in the Berk- outcast. I had reached the exalted Bad Girl status of
shires. At Buxton girls chewed tobacco and guys wore being “the other woman” and I got my man. Moreskirts. There were no “rules” at Buxton, only “customs” over, I loved that man ferociously and I lived that
which I got right to work breaking my freshman year. summer high on his cologne. I wanted little more
I wiretapped faculty meetings, embraced Anarchist than to watch him shave every morning. After six
politics, fucked boys in the tall grass and wandered weeks the teacher called my father from a pay phone
alone in the woods, my head stuffed full of Anne and asked him to come and get me. I never saw or
Sexton and D.H. Lawrence, imagining myself the spoke to the teacher again.
mysterious heroine of a Peter Weir film.
Bad girls don’t exist in a vacuum. we all start
Bad girling is a cinematic calling, it’s a des- out as good girls. But for some reason, we realize
tiny best suited to those with a sense of destiny. I was the Good Girl is unlovable, so we get all bad n’ shit
raised to believe I would have a starring role on life’s so nobody will think we care. But of course, inside,
stage. As the daughter of a film critic and a novelist, we want love with a fury that would immolate most
both with epic senses of themselves, I felt genetically men. Molten with heartbreak, I realized I had to get
called to narrative. A high-drama lifestyle was cru- rid of the Bad Girl if I wanted to survive myself.
cial if I was going to cull material and shape it into
I locked that Bad Girl up in the dungeon of my
my own Homeric saga later on. I may not have had heart, and I moved to Los Angeles to reinvent myself
God or family, but I had something even better­—the as a Good Girl. I achieved this transformation via
Audience. I never wrote in my journal without the the sanctity of marriage and motherhood. I found a
thought that some day it would be published and kind, respectable man who I didn’t love so much so
read. I never was alone without imagining a camera that it hurt, and I married him. We had two lovely
somewhere capturing my every haunted expression. daughters and made a comfortable home for them
It was my duty to make my story a good one, and so together. I lived a double life.
I gorged myself on experience. I was high-minded
and full of shit and suffered from grandiosity and low Twenty years of attachment parenting,
self-esteem in equal measure.
school volunteering, water-wise gardening and
free-range chicken roasting had my inner Bad Girl
then got to work looking for a man big enough to
keep me company on the vast, lonely wash of my
soul. Little did I know it would take thirty years to
find that man.
50
circling the drain. I tried to ignore her desperate cries
for help as I knitted dishrags and chaperoned Girl
Scouts. Sometimes I would sneak away to visit her in
the basement, and try to perk her up with lap dances
or sedate her with OG Kush, but it wasn’t enough.
She was dying from neglect and I was moving
through my life like a woman doomed. I realized
that in trying to be good, I had sacrificed my soul.
I was living somebody
else’s life, and at 46 years
old, I suddenly understood that life was not an
open-ended proposition.
I couldn’t decide whether
I wanted to live or die.
***
me off. I told him that I was married, that I had children to protect, that I was middle-aged, miserable,
peri-menopausal and unworthy. He said, “Those
aren’t soul qualifications.” It turned out he loved both
the Bad Girl and the Good Girl in equal measure
and he wanted to help me put the two halves of my
fractured self back together.
So I left the Good Man for the Bad Man, and
simultaneously destroyed
the whole Wacky Pack
house of cards I had built
on a lie about myself I’d
made up in a moment of
despair twenty years earlier. Friends turned away
from me in disapproval
and embarrassment.
Bad Girls, it seems,
come with an expiration
date. A young, single Bad
Girl is sparkly and sexy,
but past 40 she is camel
toe and a smoker’s growl.
She’s the cougar, leaning
over the bar revealing a
crêpey décolletage and dating herself by saying things
like “let’s book” as she picks up the check and a sozzled frat boy. A Bad Woman is unseemly.
Only a bad woman would leave a perfectly good
man and destroy her family for someone who refers
to himself in the third person as “The Demon Dog.”
I was not only condemnable by my tawdry actions
and dubious choice, but by the era I lived in. A divorcee in 1976 was seen as liberated, but a divorcee in
2009 is just selfish, and an adulteress with children is
that most unforgivable of creatures—a bad mother.
I became, for the second time in my life, an outcast.
I felt shame, not because of the man I had chosen,
but because I had gone and done the one thing I had
spent two decades trying to avoid—I had recreated
the exact circumstances of my own downfall, for my
eldest daughter. At 13 years old, my firstborn was
as full of passion and poetry as I was at that age.
Her eyeliner started coming on thick, and I smelled
cigarette smoke in her hair. I found a pot pipe in her
Twenty years of attachment
parenting, school
volunteering, water-wise
gardening and free-range
chicken roasting had my inner
Bad Girl circling the drain.
Among the slouched,
paunc hy mid-listers
glomming free food in
the book festival green
room, the Bad Man stood
out like a 6’3” golem in a
seersucker suit. I knew
who he was immediately,
of course, not that I had read any of his books. But
I knew his famous rap: self-confessed peeper, pervert, truant, miscreant, ex-drug addict, sober alcoholic
and twice-divorced serial monogamist. He was part
genius, part dipshit and 100% bad, bad, bad.
When he stood up to shake my hand I was surprised by his propriety. He was nervous and seemed
oddly vulnerable. His Adam’s apple bobbed over his
bowtie. He was a Lutheran Choirboy dressed for
church with starched manners and a gaze that could
warp steel. My Bad Girl sat up in her cell. She peered
out at him through the bars and knew instantly that
he was the man she had been looking for all along.
He was the one who was going to set her free.
It took two more years before the bad girl
managed to get a message out to the Bad Man, and
when she finally did he immediately busted her out.
I tried to stop the whole thing, I swear. I told her she
was being selfish and irrational, and she just flipped
51
room. I realized my sweet, tenderhearted daughter
was going Bad Girl on me.
My daughter doesn’t have to contend with
Manhattan in the swinging ’70s as she negotiates the
turbulent waters of adolescence—instead she’s got
“The Bad Girls Club” culture to contend with, which
is worse.
Sex is no longer the bold, brave, independent
adventure it was when I first started having it. The
party that started in the ’70s has gone on too long
and gotten too big. Bad Girls are a dime a dozen,
“owning your sexuality” pretty much means giving
it away to a culture that insists on sexual conformity
from women. The challenge today is to raise a girl so
fierce and sure of herself that she can blow off that
party to do something better, like live authentically,
pursue her interests, speak her mind. As mothers, we’ve got to put the “ass” back into Bad Girls,
and raise Badass Girls who so are comfortable with
themselves they can ignore all that tired Bad Girl
shit.
This is why Bad Girls make such good mothers. We hate the status quo and can inoculate our
children against its lamer forces. We have seen and
done it all and there’s not one trick in the Bad Girl
playbook that I can’t spot at sixty paces. There’s no
lying to us or hiding from us. I am very good at busting my little Bad Girl.
When she slips into risky behavior, instead of
pushing her away, I have tried to pull her in closer.
She has managed to redirect her energy into art,
politics, and being herself. We have had tough times
together, but the worst, we hope, is over. She has
emerged fierce, authentic, happy and healthy.
My daughter is also about to leave for boarding
school, and the reflecting plotline of her story gives
me the bends sometimes. But I am not sending her
away, I am sending her forth, and that makes all the
difference. She wanted to go to drama school, and I
wanted it for her. I hope she finds her audience, and
I hope she finds a different kind of drama than I did.
I hope she never feels so unsupervised that she feels
completely alone. God may or may not be watching
her, but her mother always will be.
a still from Snow Advisory by Flame Schon
52
Snow Advisory
Flame Schon
I started these thoughts
from the simplicity of where it was shot
and suddenly realized that the landscape
is the star of the movie.
The ‘location’ is the story
The land itself & also the land as metaphor.
I didn’t write a story and then ‘scout locations’;
the ‘locations’ had burned themselves into me
begging for a story.
in a helicopter
—a place that Georgia O’Keefe was fond of
—overwhelming at all times of the day.
I shot there at dusk with Sabine and her pet wolf
at near dusk
using a blue filter
Now it makes sense and it’s easy to write
(because the location is the ‘story’—
the land itself & also the land as metaphor)
And the further realization that over this long stretch of
time living here
I’ve become attuned to this landscape
& stoned on its stony beauty—
and its evocative-ness? -ity?
ummmmm
the numinous rockscapes of northern New Mexico
Snow Advisory was shot in ’99
at Plaza Blanca in Abiquiu
and at Tsankawi Caves right near Bandelier National
Monument
near the Jemez Mountains and the infamous Los Alamos
New Mexico.
These 2 ‘locations’ are really the principal players in this
story.
Plaza Blanca—with the towering lingam where we see the
3 women running
with the golden egg while being pursued by unknown
forces
To
watch
Snow Advisory,
please go to
www.sensitiveskinmagazine.com/snow
53
The dream cave, the womb of all imaginings
was an off limits cave
that we had to shoot in surreptitiously.
These caves were inhabited by long ago native tribes.
On the walls are some petroglyphs—
we see the hand petroglyph which in the context
looks possibly menacing.
There are also caves within caves . . . & dark.
I went there alone before sunrise to shoot the empty cave
with the sunlight
and the red feathers.
And I also went to Plaza Blanca before dawn to shoot the
sunrise
in the shot where the golden egg
zooms towards us
and breaking apart
disintegrates.
The landscape itself is the earth dreaming.
(so, “it’s all about location”)
In other words
the ground is the ground. Snow Advisory
(The Earth’s Dream)
Twenty-Four Islands
Marguerite Van Cook
Island No 1
This island is inhabited by turtles,
Flowering shrubs linger past the drift stalks
Seashells flock the debris
This is the island where I forgot my sweater
That summer my breasts began to grow
The beach evenings were cool
I wore shorts and my legs were bare
Island No 2
Black sand frills purple hills
Island plum trees
At night, insects dine on fallen fruits
Intoxicated by sugar
Sated by dreaming
The Island where I lit a fire
Inspiration heavy eyes
I slept on the beach, warmed by flames
Island No 3
The honeycomb land of caves!
Thread throughout, a Chinese puzzle
Each flower framed
White like ivory
Blue insect husks flutter
The island where I journey inward
Island No 4
The island is bird-swarmed
Scream from treetops
Trees sheaved in aqua leaves
Smacking parrot beaks kiss together
Seed shells shimmer in the clearings
Discarded by dissident birds gangs of
Yellow Island in a black sea disappears at night
Last boat won’t linger
54
Island No 5
Fruit-fed hogs run delinquent squealing
Break bushes, graze bark with bristles
Hog hair paints skyline
Swamps, feeding flies
Line truffle-raped hillsides
This is the island that calls for fire but has none
Island No 6
A flat island given to floods
Home to small interior lakes
Tsetse flies swarm and no man of heart ventures inland
The flies mists too dense
Block stars
Three dogs roll to stop the bites
Drive them mad
The transvestite’s canoe brings scraps
The weather turns dry
This is the island where I left my notes on Aristides
Island No 7
This is the island where terrible things happened to the young Florimund sisters
A memory, Thank god
Hut stands empty
Snakes in roof and the pots are full of mold
The sky gold at night
And the jasmine flowers smell sickly
The island smells of babies
Island No 8
This is the island where the grandmothers hid
From poets new, (me)
Drinking Portuguese wine and smoking Cuban cigars
Smoke on hills
The train station is shuttered
Holy Oaks whisperings floated sea
The women stay indoors
Island No 9
The place of the holy springs
Lily-white sins turn black
Guilt rides big horse, looks from under big brim
My sisters walked into the sea to marry mermen
Or drown on sanctity
55
Cell phone stops working
Sand got into it
Rinsing made it blacker
Island of dark Iris.
Island No 10
Empty boats fill quays and on the hill a man watches them
Ancient fellow scowls at the skips
Ripple-bob beads on a string
Dawn tide daily murmur
Bear a bream of unaccounted names
The dame of the sea, the salty girl, my sisters
This is the island where I bought a telescope, I walked coast spray mist
Monkeys hang out in deserted cabanas
Mock humans, my sisters, my friends, my monkeys, my island
Island No 11
Graves on the hillside are littered by plums
Orchard hangs over a terraced garden run amok
Go where you would see
The graves are tidy, tended well,
Beach stones shine brightly and catch the sun
Mirrors flashing across the sea
Morse messages from the dead
White path cuts up
A few goats zigzag nanny, nanny, “Sappho was here”
They were poets who overreached
Where I cried for my family
Island No 12
Cat’s tails wave together Chinese plate jugglers
Thin and gaunt, eyes demand knowledge
Lovers hunt
Threadbare smiling kitties
Till dark to roust mice from the ivy
They piss and shit
Giant flies bejewel their turds
The sun beats the patchy lawns
Island No 13
This is the island where names are changed
(Ariel cries for Prospero)
The Scottish play
Harry is Harriet and Sally is Jack
56
This is the island where the deaf blind woman teach the secret language
These islands disconnected from logic, defined by lack of connection,
The animals and ships ferry stories to and fro.
Jim C
Island No 14
is the face of Christ when viewed from the west.
From the east a small Buddha sits in the water.
Happy on one side, sad on the other.
Island No 15
This island empty baby baskets hang in bamboos
I left my child there
The one that was not born
The one I dreamed of at night
The one to be a brother
The one to argue with his brother about Proust
And the stars
Who lied about all the books he read till questioned closely
And then laughed with corny yellow hair and cornflower eyes
Lips like poppies in the summer
57
Jim C
58
Island No 16
This is the island of empty crosses
The crucifix’s mark missed chances
Wrack the pain of unwritten tales
Bleached away poems of stretched skin nailed on them
As if they never were because they never were
The mottos written in the language no one knows
Escaped words of woman with no memory who sits at foot of the hill
Sings each line once
In lines freed again
You can wait a lifetime to hear it.
Island No 17
Hair hangs from trees
It is my sisters’ lost hair
My lost hair
Women’s hair given unwillingly away.
Hair torn by poets frustrated
It is the hair given to common sense and nice workable bobs
For jobs we did not want nor care for
For reasons that were alien to our hearts
These hairs were cut when I pretended to be a man a boy to gain a foothold
These tresses came out in sickness
Turned grey and sat in the horror hand in clumps
Ringed the bathtub caught in the scum of fear
They are thick on the island
Stretching as far as eyes can see
This island waits for you to come.
Island No 18
This is the island of toothless mares,
They hobble bone-bare up stony paths to the hills
The meadows are sweeter on high
The grasses softer, gentler on the gums
Their drooped heads find the grass easily
Good because the climb is hard
At dusk descend to flinty sheds
Leeward from the wind
59
Island No 19
These mares are strong and have ripped the tits from milking mothers
Pass by
Rage like this is not easily shaken
Stop, anger
Dream for those who have earned their nightmares
Flare their nostrils from the stench
Trample the strongest psyches
Harridan horses leap into volcano pit
And come out their teeth filled with bloody screams and fire
Hooves pounding like drums in the ears
Flanks flashing like knives
This is the island of too much fire
Island No 20
This is the island of x where things break
Plates and pencils, nibs that never write for snapping and
Porcelain statues and teacups and mothers and me—everything breaks
Dogs’ legs, flower stalks and membranes
And watch straps, oaths and you and eggs
Models with lolly sticks or matches, and codes,
And my fucking heart—computers, syntax and the middle C key on the piano
Jammed.
Island No 21
This is the island of stupid girls who think it’s all right, everything is good and it isn’t
It isn’t a bit
The island where stupid girls deny reality
The island where stupid girls think it’s okay to pretend the world is fucking nice for women that it’s all over
and it never was a big deal
This is the island where stupid girls choke on their own pompous words and are so dumb they don’t notice
they are being buggered and fucked from both sides because the are not moving because they cannot turn
They cannot look, they dare not breathe, because they know they are fuckadentally flawed.
This is the island where those who complain are ridiculed by the stupid women
It is a drag to be on this island and anyway it’s barely real and walking into it is like walking into a big empty
cunt.
To me this island feels overcrowded.
60
Island No 22
Is where the girls dance for themselves
Don’t know what it looks like because me too I just dance there
No eyes to care
But it does feel good I’ll tell you that
We dance there till our mouths water with the taste of bread
Saliva fills our mouths and we breathe blossoms wafts
Colors in the head fly round down the spine
I love my skin yes I do
I love to move
My feet
Oh my sisters I cry for you who never danced for yourself
Island No 23
Has a velvet rope and doesn’t let people in unless they are cool or on the list
Drinks with fruit in them, champagne
From the air it is shaped like Dante’s rings
Difficult to get into the interior circle
You have to be really special
Beatrice avoids the place says it’s as crowded as hell and
She tends to be right
Island No twenty-four
Is as tiny as a rosebud and its sands are pink-tinged
And the sea around it is filled with carmine kelp
Its seashells are baby fingers curled in sleep
Three virgins cry milk instead of tears
Trees sway soft visitors look backward through telescopes
It’s a good place to have a jolly good cry when you are tuckered out.
And then we could talk about the reef but that’s for another day.
Maybe Sunday.
61
Our Song
LaMacchia/Myrner/Feiszli
Michael LaMacchia’s adventurous new trio recording is an alluring arc of luminous songwriting and
deeply centered conversations that capture our
attention and invite us to participate. “Our Song”
sonically narrates a very personal journey that shimmers with a blend of pastoral memories, mysterious
To
storytelling and vulnerable confessions. Each of
the eleven songs takes shape from spirited group
interaction and contoured dynamics that, together,
reward us with incandescent insight and reflection
into our own passage.
listen, please go here
www.sensitiveskinmagazine.com/our-song
62
How They Fucked (In 3 Parts)
John S. Hall
I
Well, yes, they fucked like bunnies, and yes,
they fucked as if it was their last night on earth
(when in fact it was early afternoon), but more than
that, they fucked like so many, different other things
completely.
They fucked like dogs and cats. They fucked as if
they were fucking in the rain. they fucked as if were
raining cats and dogs.
They fucked as if there was a war going on, a war
between the states, a war between states of mind, a
war that leaves hundreds of millions dead, some in
horrible, hideous ways, some with half their bodies
blown away, some strung up from trees, some with
holes in their heads, leaking brains and blood and
bits of bone, some with bodies contorted inhumanly,
some with eyes open, staring up into the empty sky.
They fucked as if the feeling of emptiness that
flooded their being for much of the day were somehow mitigatable through the sometimes rhythmic
sometimes arrhythmic pounding of their fucking, like
a metronome set sometimes to adagio, sometimes to
presto, sometimes to anarcho.
They fucked as if Reagan had never been president. They fucked as if Reagan had never been born.
They fucked like cats and dogs from other planets,
like a planet where a cat could be a land mammal
and a dog could be a sea anenome, or a planet where
a cat could be an insect and a dog could be still a dog
They fucked as if they were cyanobacteria, poisoning the planet through photosynthesis, breathing out
oxygen that destroys most of the life on the planet
but makes way for the oxygen breathers that might
one day evolve in to human beings that could then
start fucking like cyanobacteria.
They fucked like two planets, maybe Venus and
Mars, or maybe more like a Paul McCartney album:
63
Ram, or Band on the Run, or McCartney II or Venus
and Mars, and when they fucked, it made music,
the kind of music that no sentient being could
comprehend.
When they fucked, it was if nothing else mattered,
as if nothing else existed, because it didn’t.
They fucked as if their fucking could change
everything, when in fact, it only changed certain
things, most of which were of no consequence.
They fucked with pride and shame and honor.
They fucked without fear of the aches and pains and
sores and yeast infections that would no doubt ensue.
They fucked liked donuts, floating in a vat of fat,
They fucked like jackasses on that show Jackass,
as if they were tied to a skateboard tied to a rocket
flying over snake river canyon, without parachutes.
They fucked like records on a giant turntable while
a needle scratched through their grooves.
They fucked and fucked and fucked so masterfully,
that if they had been in a porno movie that you were
jacking off to, you would have to stop and marvel at
the wonder of it, because it was like a ballet, and you
never could jack off to a ballet, could you, no matter
how hot the dancers are, because it’s so beautiful and
masterful. Ditto the fucking.
They fucked as if their fucking could unravel
ancient riddles, as if they could explain to every kabbalistic expert the meaning of the sepheroth Da’ath,
knowledge, why it is where it is on the Tree of Life,
what its function is, why it’s not as fully formed as the
others, what it meant for knowledge to be inchoate.
They fucked like the first mammals to crawl out
of the sea. They fucked like mountains and rocks and
trees.
They fucked liked nobody’s business, but I’m
making it my business because I feel that it is my
responsibility, as possessor of firsthand knowledge of
the way in which they fucked, to provide a firsthand
account of it, a detailed and metaphorical account
of it, so that we might all learn from their example,
not just how to fuck, but how to live and die and be
reborn again.
They fucked like they would die a final death that
would break the cycle of endless rebirth.
They fucked as if their fucking would somehow,
one day, help a marriage equality bill pass through
the Republican-controlled state legislature of the
state of New York.
They fucked, then took a break then fucked again.
Then fucked again.
I never mentioned did I—were they members of
the opposite sex? Were they members of the same
species? Were there only two of them? Were they
human? Maybe they fucked like cats and dogs
because one of them was a cat and one of them was a
dog. Maybe one of them was a woman with a dildo,
and the other was a man with a strap-on vagina or a
lubed-up ass. I never said, did I? Do you feel bad that
at some point, when you visualised them fucking, you
had the image conform to your own narrow-minded
conception—two beautiful human beings, one male,
one female, both of them in shape, attractive, neither
of them old, or fat or incontinent, neither of them
wearing a colostomy bag, both of them with all of
their teeth, neither of them with unpleasant odors or
bad breath, both of them beautiful, one with a dick
and the other with a pussy, because like our traditional conception of marriage between a man and
woman, when I tell you they fucked, you picture a
man and a woman because that’s what fucking means
to you? If you were gay, would you picture something
different? Wait—are you gay? If you’re gay and you
pictured two people of your own sex, aren’t you kind
of guilty of the same thing I was just talking to the
straight people about?
They fucked like a totally different story. They
fucked like something your small unevolved mind
can’t imagine, like—you know how they say that the
human mind cannot comprehend god or infinity, or
that a flower cannot comprehend a flower? Well, you
can’t comprehend their fucking. To ask questions of
gender or species or number is to trivialize and to
degrade their fucking. Their fucking was made to
stand the test of time, to be written about in Wikipedia, under “Fucking,” to serve as a model for all
that come after them pun intended fuck you, yeah,
pun intended, or more accurately, pun not intended
initially, but then immediately after it was written it
was noted and the decision was made not only to let
it stay but to draw attention to it.
Recordings of their fucking were made and put
into time capsules, one of which wound up in the
Voyager rocket, to be discovered by life on other
planets, who will think about our species and say to
each other, fuck me, those motherfuckers sure knew
how to fuck.
They fucked and fucked, oblivious to my commentary about their fucking.
They fucked as if they existed in a realm beyond
time and space, greater than the universe, smaller
than the subatomic.
If it seems boring to think about how they fucked,
you are free to stop considering it and go jack off or
fuck or eat a sandwich or something. Don’t let me
keep you.
They fucked as if they were starving for sex, as if
they hadn’t had it for centuries, when in fact, for one
of them it had been relatively recently.
Man, you should have seen them going at it.
Everybody should have. They should have sold tickets. They should have fucked in a grand arena. They
should have made a movie of their fucking, it was
fucking amazing. Did you get that yet? The way they
fucked was amazing. My words do not, will not,
cannot, do their fucking justice. It’s a Sisyphean task
to try to convey to you the majesty, the artistry, the
pornographic beauty of their fucking.
The other day as I walked down First Street, I saw
a pigeon fucking another pigeon. That was nothing
like this fucking of which I speak.
I’d like you to close your eyes and picture the most
awesome fucking fucking you ever had.
That fucking was fucking bullshit compared to
this fucking of which I now speak.
Well, okay, I guess I better wrap this up.
I’d like somehow to wrap this up with a pretty
little bow that would somehow justify the couple
thousand or so words I’ve used to describe this sex
64
act.
While I’m thinking about that, it occurs to me
that I didn’t really describe it. I made no mention of
the sweat, the heavy breathing, the particular positions or devices used, the moment of penetration, or
even whether there was penetration (there was) or
even what penetrated what, and how often and for
how long.
Well, maybe that’s a little personal. Maybe that’s
more intimate and graphic than I choose to be just
now.
Although I’ve been accused otherwise, I do have
some sense of decorum.
I’m beginning, however, to be embarrassed about
the way I’ve gone on and on and on about it.
I hope, if they ever come to realize that I was talking about them, that they would find it in their hearts
to forgive me, and to accept it in the generous kindhearted way that Joe Schrank accepted my poem of
last year about him.
Because god, I love the way they fucked, and I
would never want them to resent me or even worse,
to become self-conscious about the beautiful way
they fuck and as a consequence, stop fucking. For
that would be fucked, if they were to stop fucking on
my account. Because of my account.
Especially considering I’ve used their fucking to
serve my agendas.
I used it to serve my political agenda by mentioning marriage equality and Reagan and I had meant to
mention something about how the investment banks
and the politicians who do their bidding have led to
the near-collapse of our economic system, by saying
something like “They fucked as if their fucking was a
call for all oppressed people to take to the streets and
vilify the CEOs and investment bankers and politicians who have stolen our parents’ pensions and our
children’s future” but I forgot to put that part in.
I used it to serve a social agenda, in that much
of what I write is designed to encourage people to
come up to me and talk to me about it, although this
seldom actually works.
I used their fucking as a way to talk about fucking
because I like to talk about fucking.
In a sense, you could say that they fucked to serve
65
my agenda, although that was not their intention.
At any rate, be that as it may, when all is said and
done at the end of the day, I’d like to thank them for
the excellent job they did fucking, and I’d like to ask
you all to join me in giving them, as a show of our
collective appreciation, a hearty round of applause.
Thank you.
II
The next day they began again. and because of
their relief that last time wasn’t their last time fucking after all, and partly because it was a new day, they
fucked in an entirely new way.
The fucking was more violent this time. There was
a persistent sense of stabbing repeatedly into the
same place, over and over, and of a wound gushing
out like a fountain. They both saw it in the eyes of
each other’s minds, and in the minds of each other’s
eyes.
They fucked as if their immortal souls depended
on it, even though they didn’t believe in mortality or
souls.
They fucked as if they knew they were fucking for
posterity, for the redemption of humanity, to help
alleviate the suffering of all sentient beings.
It was good of them to fuck in such a selfless way,
and to do so with such gusto and commitment.
I’m so glad they had that time together.
It was really quite considerate of them to fuck the
way they did.
III
The next time i fuck, i will try to keep my
mind focused in part at least on the way they fucked,
because it should serve as a template for us all.
We cannot compose like Bartok, we cannot play
like Yo-Yo Ma or Stradivarius or Hendrix, we cannot
write like Shakespeare or sculpt like Rodin, or fight
Godzilla like Rodan, or fuck like they did, but all
these masters can inspire us all, so the next time I
fuck, I will think of them all: the fuckers, Bartok,
Ma, Stradivarius, Hendrix, Shakespeare, Rodin and
Rodan.
And I will fuck with gratitude that I was born in a
time filled with so many inspiring figures.
New Work
Janice Sloane
In my work, the theme of skin and its impermanence has always been a constant—starting
from the use of wax in painting, to create a textural body, which then emerged from the canvas
to the elastic skin of a model I collaborated with
and photographed for 7 years until his death. I
am now continuing with these themes of impermanence while relating them to women’s issues
regarding aging, “ideal beauty,” sexuality, eternal
youth, and cosmetic surgery. I am also inspired
by African sculpture, ritual objects and painting
references.
in which to convey impressions of skin and flesh.
With these materials I was able to reference aging,
deformities, discolorations, decay and exaggerated
features as they are used to create the “horrific.”
For many years I was working with latex and vinyl
in the form of sheet latex or fragments of Halloween masks—very tactile and sensuous mediums
—Janice Sloane
66
I took a series of photos of boiling objects. The
work was inspired by my finding a set of dentures on 25th Street. I was boiling them to clean
them and became fascinated with the bubbles,
their movement, breath and how the objects got
obscured by the energy of the bubbles. This gave
them life while at the same time abstracting them.
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
Pilgrims
City of Strangers
I
met dupont at the bar x, a totally anonymous-looking place with tinted windows
wedged in-between a McDonald’s and a pizzeria. I might never have noticed it had it not
been for the neon Bud sign in the window and the
sandwich board on the sidewalk advertising a happy
hour: two beers for a dollar. I went in without any
expectations. From the street, the bar had a kind of
transience, like the façade in the corner of a train
station or an airport, the sort of place where, for a
few moments, at least, you can feel poised between
one part of your life and another. I wanted to have
a couple of beers, contemplate my very near future
over a cigarette or two, then go somewhere in the
East Village and see if I couldn’t meet some people
and make something happen. I never imagined that
the Bar X would become my hangout. Or that I’d be
hanging out with someone like Dupont.
I had a lot to think about: I’d been in New York for
a month and my money was running low. If I didn’t
figure out something quick, I’d have to leave. I’d been
off booze and drugs more or less since I arrived and, up
until that afternoon, I’d been happy. I had a little room
in the Hotel 17, off Stuyvesant Square. A friend from
back home had stayed there ten years before in the
early ’80s. He’d told me that the other guests, an odd
collection of old men, drag queens, punk rock musicians, and out of town thrill-seekers like my friend,
did blow in the rooms and held wild, all-night parties
on the roof, while junkies fixed openly in Stuyvesant
Square, and half the storefronts along 3rd Ave were
abandoned. I checked it out because, whatever its history, it was listed as good value in the Lonely Planet I
scanned in a bookstore, and because I had nowhere else
to go. Almost despite myself, I was relieved to find 3rd
Ave fully re-occupied, the hotel lobby clean and quiet.
Clearly, the party had moved on.
The room was just wide enough for a bed, a dresser
75
and a table, but whatever I experienced walking around
in the city was enough to charge the graying bed sheets,
the stains and burns on the carpet, the loaf of bread
and package of cured ham stored on the window-ledge,
with dignity. Poverty can be tolerable, even desirable, if
one finds meaning in it.
Part of my happiness came from the feeling that I’d
escaped. I’d picked up a mild habit over the winter; as I
became healthier, clearer in my mind, I became aware
of just how awful it had been, and how much more
awful it would have become had I not quit. At first,
dope had been fun, something to kill the day. Montreal,
where I’d spent the fall and winter, wasn’t a bad place
to have a habit. The dealers would deliver right to your
door. One guy even brought along purloined groceries,
which you could buy at discount prices. The rents were
cheap. I lived off unemployment, and the remains of a
rapidly diminishing stash I’d accumulated working out
West the year before. If things got tight, I could always
pick up a day or two of crappy work on the side.
Of course, it got out of control. All I did was get
high. Even if I was pretty far from a full-blown oilburner habit, I’d wake up sick and get sicker if I didn’t
go and score. I knew if I stayed, it would only get worse.
Much worse. When I got to New York, away from
the influence, I decided to straighten up. Withdrawal
wasn’t so bad. A couple of days not sleeping, a couple
more of panic attacks. Even when I’d tried to kick in
Montreal, the withdrawal itself hadn’t been so bad.
The hard part had been how it dragged on. Mornings
waking up with shaky limbs, then a cold through the
day that never left. Depression like a man-sized stone
on your chest. Fleeting, yet acutely painful memories
twisting in and out of my consciousness with diamond
sharp clarity. Missing old girlfriends, old hangouts,
missing what had been . . . unbearable. When these
longings kicked in; I’d be dialing the dealer’s beeper
number within an hour.
In New York, I walked. Walking kept the depression
off, kept me distracted. I had nothing else to do, no
one to see. I couldn’t focus enough to go to a movie or
a museum, and I hated TV. Usually, my day followed
the same path, walking through the West Village into
Soho and Chinatown, back up through the Lower
East Side. Sometimes I’d go right to midtown and
on to Central Park. Exhausted, I’d return to
my room and pass out for twenty or thirty
minutes. When I came to, half-dazed, I’d lie
on the bed letting the sensations of the day
wash over me before getting up and trying
to describe people I’d seen and the places I’d
experienced that day in my notebook.
Within days, I’d turned inward, ceased
desiring anyone’s company but my own. The
first weeks alone in a great city, where no
sight or sound is familiar, is a taste of real solitude, the kind Christian hermits must have
known in the desert. New York’s late winter
gloom suited my mood. The first Gulf War
was just wrapping up, yet despite the profusion of flags, the yellow ribbons tied around
every lamp-post and fire hydrant, the city
felt curiously somber, even a little depressed.
Every second day, great fogs washed in,
obscuring the graceful skyscrapers, the iron
bridges leading off the island, making them seem like
extravagant props on a movie set. Yet the city popped
out of the fog like a tableau, and you never knew what
you’d see walking around.
Despite the skyscrapers, the sense of being at the
centre of Empire, the city felt like it was not quite of
the West. Even in midtown, trash overflowed in the
bins and blew about the pavement. Like London,
where I’d lived for a couple of years before I went back
to Montreal, New York seemed a very working-class
city, full of working man bars, where conversations on
the street were shouted rather than spoken. But unlike
London, it seemed an overwhelmingly black city: all
the jobs that kept the city running, from driving the
busses to manning the post office to digging up the
roads, seemed to be done by black people. Homeless
people, nearly all black, were camped out in every
second doorway and, in the East Village, a homeless
camp had taken over a whole section of Tompkins
Square Park. In the Lower East Side, Spanish was the
dominant language, spoken at a rapid clip by toughlooking Puerto Ricans, a people about whom I knew
almost nothing. Standing on Canal Street in Chinatown, the street stalls and crush of people, the insane
traffic barreling off the bridge at one end of the street,
made me feel like I was back in Asia. Everywhere I
went, the city unfolded like a flower coming into slow
bloom; changing neighborhoods was like changing
worlds.
I came down with no other plan other than to
get out of Montreal. Vaguely, I thought about going
back to London, but I didn’t have the money and I
wasn’t sure I wanted to go back. London had been fun,
my first experience of a true metropolis, the city I’d
wanted to live in since my teens when I started hanging around the punk rock scene in Vancouver, long
before I moved east to Montreal. I’d claimed my British passport, my birthright, through my British parents,
even picked up an English inflected accent. I’d gone
over with my girlfriend Molly, a dual national like me,
and she had introduced me to a whole squatting scene
which allowed us to live all over the city, supported by a
ready-made network of out-of-city and expat refugees,
76
punks, anarchists, and artists. We hung out in what was
left of the hardcore scene and travelled: Europe, North
Africa, Asia. A couple of months a year I went back to
Western Canada and made enough money working in
the bush to travel when I got back to London.
It was a good life until it wasn’t. By the end of the
’80s, it was becoming harder and harder to find work;
Sofles
harder still to make money. All our friends were using
dope, and eventually I started using and so did Molly. I
knew that if I went back, I’d get right back into all that,
just like I would if I went back to Montreal.
I didn’t want to give up what I had, tenuous as it
was. Even after a week, I could see that New York
offered the same kind of freedom that London had
those first couple of years, if I could figure out how
to get below its fabric. But America was an unknown.
I’d never crossed the border before, not even for a day.
The people I hung out with, whether in Canada or
Britain, had often despised the US and everything it
stood for, especially under Ronald Reagan, and for the
most part I’d gone along with their opinion. But after
the Yanks pounded Iraq, wiping out Saddam Hussein’s million-man army, I got curious. America reigned
supreme, even more than Britain had at the height of
her Empire, and I had to check it out for myself.
77
I was surprised to find out I liked it, even felt at
home in it. I didn’t think I would at first. I caught the
night train, traveling fourteen hours down the eastern
seaboard. At the border, I was grilled by huge men
with names like Bud and Tex, who kept their hands on
their guns while they interrogated me, and just when
I thought they were going to throw me off the train,
they disappeared and I was free to go to the
bar car and calm my nerves. A can of Bud
cost a buck, a mini-bottle of Jack Daniels a
buck-fifty. After the first stop in Vermont,
the bar was packed and stayed packed right
down the coast. Working people mostly, all
knocking back the beer and the Jack. The
staff put out Styrofoam bowls of cheesy fish,
and a big black dude with an Afro came
out and played Jimi Hendrix melodies on a
Farfisa organ. I met a girl, a willowy college
student with long brown hair, kind eyes that
offset her slightly stern Midwestern face. She
told me I reminded her of Holden Caulfield,
and we spent most of the night necking in an
alcove in the very back of the train, American
cities passing by like cities lit up in the night,
until she had to get off somewhere in Massachusetts. I woke up with two hours sleep
just as we were pulling into New York, that
miraculous Manhattan skyline spilling across the rose
purple dawn, as startlingly familiar as the features of
my own face in the mirror. It was perfect.
Even with the withdrawal, New York seemed a
minor miracle. The people were considerably more outgoing than people in London, or anywhere in the West,
so you never knew when you’d start talking to someone. This openness, as fleeting as it often was, made
it easy to be alone and just stepping out on the street
allowed me to forget whatever had been bothering me
that day. And while it was new, it was also familiar.
Like every other kid in the West, I’d been raised on a
diet of images from New York, and everything from
the skyline to the graffiti, to the way black kids talked
on the street felt like it had been pulled from a movie
or a TV show.
Still, I needed money if I was going to stay. Even
at 150 a week for a room, and fifteen dollars a day for
expenses, I didn’t have long left. I’d need a job. I had
no idea how to find work off the books. I could hardly
go through the want ads, or go to a job centre. I’d have
to meet some people, preferably expats of some kind,
who could advise me, and the only place I knew where
to meet people was in bars.
Bars meant booze and I was scared booze would
lead back to drugs. I wanted to hold off as long as I
could, hope that by some miracle a job would appear,
at the hotel, at the diner where I had breakfast every
morning. I wrote my ex, leaving the hotel as a return
address, hoping against hope that she’d write back
saying she’d got away from our old friends, got away
from drugs, that we should try again. I needed a sign
that would tell me whether I was meant to stay or go.
I lived by signs in those days, as if my future could be
dictated to me from the outside, if only I could read
it all properly. New York, more than any other city I’d
been in, seemed a city where one was meant to live by
hunches, and it baffled me a little when no clear sign
emerged.
Uncertainty began to eat at me, disturbing my equilibrium and finally my resolve fell apart when I was in
Times Square. It was early evening, the time when the
light goes into full retreat, the time when I most felt
like a drink. I’d been up since four am, my limbs stiff
with exhaustion, yet I was so keyed up I knew that I
would be unable to sleep if I went back to the hotel.
A drizzle had set in, making walking impossible, yet
I didn’t want to go anywhere near Times Square. For
the first time since I’d crossed the border, New York’s
tremendous energy felt inaccessible, something I witnessed but did not feel. Traffic filled the street bumper
to bumper, horns honking pointlessly. Hordes of people
rushed the subway exits, faces distorted by drizzle.
Marquee theaters down 42nd advertised porn and more
porn. Beneath this dizzying motion, the square felt not
just anonymous, but empty, like the lights, the city’s
energy, hid a void that was truly frightening if you
looked into it. As I stood under a construction awning,
the cold crept in, turning my thoughts, bringing on a
longing for something I couldn’t place. I lit a cigarette,
but smoking only made me anxious. I looked over
the ragged men and women camped out in sections
of cardboard over the subway grates. I’d expected to
find scores of homeless in Reagan’s America, though
I hadn’t expected to find them camped out in every
second doorway at night, a shadow army living in a
parallel existence to the city’s relentless motion. I’d give
them change, even stop to talk to them if they weren’t
aggressive or angry, but I’d always felt protected from
their fate by my nationality, my inherent optimism
about the future that buoyed me those first few weeks.
Now, I wasn’t so sure. I was 25, I had no skills, no one
to turn to when things got tight. It wouldn’t take much
for me to be forgotten and suddenly it seemed that all
my forward motion was an attempt to keep this possibility at a distance. If I did run out of money, I’d have
to leave the hotel room, and New York would become
a much less benevolent city. When I did make it back
to Montreal, the most I could hope for was to wait out
the rest of the winter in a rooming house room, most
certainly using heroin again, living off my UI claim
until the cheques stopped coming, as they would in a
couple of months. Even if I’d never have to brave the
New York streets, I knew that if I entered this parallel
existence, I’d find it hard to come back.
One of the dealers who’d appeared around the
square with the evening eyed me, then moved in, hissing something I couldn’t make out. I tried to ignore
him, but he was on to me. I saw drug dealers all over
the city, hissing from doorways and street corners,
sometimes coming right up to you on the pavement.
Scoring on the street was an unknown, a possibly dangerous unknown, and I’d never felt tempted, not even
on the shakiest of days. The drug world in New York
was in itself an unknown, driven not just by heroin,
a crack I’d never tried and never wanted to try. I had
become adept at keeping the dealers out of my personal
space, either by ignoring them or waving them off, but
I couldn’t keep this guy away. He was a short black guy,
not physically threatening, but he’d sensed enough of
my need and my vulnerability to become bold. “What
you lookin’ for, man?” he said, almost turning it into a
joke as he pressed closer and I knew I’d never get rid
of him if I stood there. I started walking, ignoring the
drizzle against my face and in my hair.
Walking made me feel better again, but the wetness only made me more tired. More than anything, I
was weary of being alone. That momentary loss of faith
78
under the awning had drained me, left me scared of
what would happen if it happened again. I wanted to
be surrounded by people, to feel connected again like
I did when I was traveling. I wanted to feel like I had
some control of my situation.
Inside, the Bar X was a curious mix of styles. It felt
curiously dated, though in the moment I couldn’t figure
out why. Though not even six, it was already crowded.
A basketball game careened across six big-screen TVs
mapped out around what looked like a typical sports
bar with silver stools and a big American flag over the
bottles behind the bar. Above the twin pool tables in
the back, a disco ball glittered, its light obscured by a
miasma of cigarette smoke. The wall opposite the bar
had been painted a flat black, with jagged red lines cutting at odd angles across the surface, and even more
jagged iron stools lined up along the counter, so that
part of the bar could have been out of a mid-’80s
new wave disco. The Doobie Brothers ‘What a Fool
Believes’ blared from somewhere in the back.
I took a seat near the end of the bar and ordered a
Rolling Rock, the only brand they had besides Bud and
Corona. The beer was watery, but not as bland as the
Budweiser I’d had on the train on the way down, and I
downed half the first bottle in one go, and by the time
I’d finished the first beer, the cold had gone away and I
could focus on the people in the bar.
It was mostly an after-work crowd. Office workers,
ties undone, or in casual suits. A couple of Spanishlooking couples, a trio of Filipino-looking nurses still
in their uniforms. A couple dozen construction guys
occupying the space around the bar, dressed in construction boots, jeans and wool shirts. Whatever their
background, their faces looked pretty much like the
ones I’d been seeing on the street for the last month,
though considerably less guarded now that they were
in a bar. I smoked one cigarette, downed two beers in
less than twenty minutes, then ordered a couple more.
With the beer, the cigarette smoothed my nerves, and
I felt comfortable in the bar, a drink in easy reach,
the cold safely outside. A part of me didn’t want to
go out at all. I loved the Village in the daytime. The
trash blowing across the pavement seemed exotic, one
of those iconic New York images that made it seem like
you were walking through a movie. The iron fire escapes
79
running up the fronts of the buildings, the old synagogues and cathedrals, the graveyard off 2nd Avenue, all
made you feel like you’d gone to another country, some
corner of Europe maybe. Some streets, dotted with
little stores and narrow diners, where people hung out
on their steps when it was sunny, felt like a small town.
A network of small towns in the heart of a very big
city. Even the homeless camp at the bottom of Tompkins Square Park was strange, beyond understanding.
A couple hundred people, camped out under blue tarps
or in rickety shacks made of scrap wood, the smoke
from their fires trailing through the tree branches into
the street. I’d walked around the camp once or twice,
surprised to find signs of community in the way people
brought each other food from the mobile soup kitchen
in the corner, or gathered around a fire in an empty
barrel, like the further edges of the squatter communities I’d been a part of in London.
The night was another matter. I’d been living in,
hanging out in, neighborhoods like the Village since
I’d been 16. Bohemian neighborhoods, where internal
refugees like myself came to find themselves. After
awhile, these neighborhoods had a sameness, no matter
what city or even continent. Walking through the East
Village, I felt the same weariness below the surface
that I had, too many times, in other cities. Junkie punk
rockers, long past their expiration date, lurched past
with that windblown look, like they’d just stepped out
of a wind tunnel. Late ’80s hardcore, blaring out of the
same dark, graffiti-scarred bars it had blared out of in
Montreal or London, Vancouver or Berlin. Now that
I’d been away from my tribe for a few weeks, I wasn’t
sure I wanted to find them again. I liked being in this
bizarre little sports bar; looking at people who had
regular jobs and went home to parts of the city I knew
nothing about.
I gazed at the American flag hanging over the bar.
I’d been looking at that flag my whole life without
really seeing it. Before I’d crossed the border, I’d mostly
resented it, but in the context of New York, I found it
oddly comforting, the way I’d once found Union Jack
comforting, and for similar reasons: it was a symbol
of something I wanted to be. I wasn’t sure what that
was exactly, but somehow in crossing the border I felt
I’d become someone different and I didn’t want to go
back to whoever I’d been before I left. Stepping out
of the train station into the brilliant sunlight along
the Avenue of the Americas, I’d been taken by the
emblems of all the American nations on the lampposts, Venezuela right down to Argentina, with Canada
just before Costa Rica and Columbia. I’d walked the
whole length of the street, carrying my one bag, fascinated by the thought that I was an American. That
had never occurred to me, not in Europe, nor even in
Canada, where, for most of my life, I’d largely assumed
I was basically British, if born on the wrong side of
the Atlantic. Now I knew that I’d miss that flag if I
had to leave, regret not following whatever promise it
held out.
The bartender was pouring out a round of shots,
spreading the glasses along the counter. Big glasses,
with at least three ounces of what looked like cough
syrup. To my surprise, he slapped one of the glasses in
front of me.
“Don’t worry. The guy next to you is paying for it.”
He pointed at a guy standing a couple of places
down the bar with a pool cue in one hand and a
Corona in the other. The guy put down his Corona and
picked up the shot, pointing it in my direction.
“Jagermeister,” he drawled in an accent that sounded
not quite New York, “German or somethin’. Gets you
fucked up, whatever it is.”
He and what seemed like half the constructionboot-wearing men along the bar knocked their shots
back in one go. I followed suit. Jagermeister had just
started being promoted in North America, and I’d
never tried it before. It not only looked like cough
syrup but tasted like it as well. My new friend caught
my grimace and laughed.
“Don’t worry. Gets easier after awhile. Maybe too
easy.”
A black guy sitting behind him grinned, like this
was an old joke between them. I wondered why this
guy had bought me a drink. He definitely didn’t look
gay. He wore his feathered light brown hair parted in
the middle, and a silver rope was just visible beneath
the open V of his white sports shirt. Unlike the men
around him, he was wearing white runners, but he
seemed affiliated with them in some way. In his sallow
eyes, there was just a hint of East European melancholy,
but his casual way of holding himself, one foot on the
railing below the bar, leaning forward with one elbow
on the counter while his other hand fiddled restlessly
with the pool cue, made him wholly American. He
even seemed a little out of place in the city, as if his
natural setting was at the wheel of a pick-up, six-pack
open on the seat beside him, shotgun rack mounted
in the back window. A good old boy in a plaid shirt
taking pulls of chewing tobacco while jawing with the
neighbors about last year’s crop.
Before I’d even had the chance to thank him, he
ordered another round. “You don’t look like you’re
doing anything important,” he said to me. Then: “My
name’s Dupont. This here is James.”
He pointed to the black guy sitting behind him.
James had close-cropped hair and wide-framed tinted
eyeglasses. Though he wore the same outfit as Dupont,
his shirt and jeans fit him better, as if he’d taken more
care in their selection. He kept one toothpick between
his teeth and another threaded in his hair. He had a
kind face, yet seemed a little guarded as well, separate
from the other men along the bar. He nodded and said
something, but in some kind of patois so I couldn’t
understand him.
Dupont ordered another round of beers, including
me again. I was becoming a little embarrassed by his
generosity, but curious about him as well. He seemed
popular: every second person that came in the door
stopped to shake his hand, yet he didn’t seem like
he owned the place. What he reminded me of most
acutely, was a guy I’d known in high school who’d been
a very successful weed dealer. He greeted everyone
he met with the same mix of familiarity and casual
appraisal. Yet no money, no substance ever changed
hands. He just seemed like a guy everyone wanted to
know.
“You livin’ here in the city?” He said in a pause
between greeting people. He said it while watching
the basketball game on TV, not even looking at me, as
if it was a question he asked a dozen times a night. As
best I could, I shoehorned my situation into a single
sentence. He glanced over, and for the first time since
he’d included me in his rounds, he seemed to actually
see me.
“Montreal? Buddy of mine went up a few years
80
back, said it was a real good time. Lots of bars, lots of
nice women.” Here, he puffed himself up a bit. “Might
have to visit myself sometime. Go up with the shirt on
my back and twenty bucks and see what happens. Hell,
I can make a party anywhere.”
For a moment I thought I’d placed him. I’d met
a lot of Americans like Dupont in Europe, hanging
around the tourist bars. Outgoing, almost aggressively
generous, basically uninterested in any world outside
their own. But here he was on his own turf, a big man
of sorts and, despite an initial skepticism, I liked him.
I’d have liked him even if he hadn’t bought me three
drinks: he had an openness, a naïveté even, that offset
the qualities I’d seen in him from a distance. Up close,
he looked less like someone in charge than a guy who’d
won the lottery and couldn’t believe his luck.
“You from New York?” I asked him. I didn’t think so.
It wasn’t just his accent: the faces I’d seen on the street
for the last three weeks had many appealing qualities
but naïveté wasn’t one of them.
“Hell no! Lived in Columbus before I lived here,
but from Cleveland originally. Not much in Cleveland
now, but Columbus is all right. Lots of partying, lots
of young girls. Nothing like New York, though—don’t
know why I didn’t move here years ago.” Then: “You
visiting friends or something?”
“No. Just came down to see how it was.”
“Oh yeah?” He told me later he’d been impressed
that someone from a different country would come
alone to the city for the hell of it. “How long you planning on staying, anyway?”
“Long as I can.”
He peered at me again, pupils expanding ever so
slightly.
“Ever work construction?”
“Oh yeah.”
He laughed again. He seemed to laugh at everything
and yet I had the sense that, despite his joviality, he’d
been assessing me as I’d been assessing him.
“We’re working a big job around the corner. Need
someone to take care of odd stuff around the place. A
little carpentry, a little painting. Almost done now, but
it’ll keep you going for a couple weeks at least.”
Even if this was exactly the opportunity I’d been
looking for, doubts crowded my mind. Maybe this guy
81
was just some big talker. Maybe he’d rip me off. He
hadn’t asked about that and I wondered if he thought
Canadians could work in the US. And even if he was
legit, now that I had the chance I wasn’t so sure I
wanted to get up early and go to some job site. I’d had
enough of job site routines in Montreal, long days in
warehouses or dusty building sites, listening to smallchange rednecks call each other ‘fag’ and ‘cocksucker’
for hours. Compared to that, collecting that bi-weekly
cheque was a dream.
Dupont laughed again, catching my hesitation.
“Don’t worry about tools or experience. I’m the GC
and James here is the foreman and a year ago neither
one of us had set foot on a job site.” Guffawing. “Hell,
we can show you whatever you need to know. And the
owner pays cash, every Friday.”
When James grinned as well, I decided to take
the chance. Even if I still had doubts about Dupont,
something about James made me trust him. I liked
how James seemed bemused by whatever Dupont said,
grinning at me while Dupont was talking as if to let
me in on the joke, and I figured if the foreman was
a West Indian who hung around with the GC doing
shots after work, this wouldn’t be like any job site in
Montreal. When I said sure, Dupont beamed, like I’d
paid him a compliment. Now that I’d decided, I felt
confident again, like the city was protecting me. I was
drunk, but I didn’t feel out of control like I’d feared; I
felt like I was looking down at myself from a distance,
the same feeling I used to get when I first started doing
dope, a feeling of disembodied confidence.
People swayed in and out of the bar. The music had
gone up a notch: Boston’s ‘More Than a Feeling’ blared
down from the ceiling. Dupont signaled to the bartender for another round. He seemed to have a thing
about it, like he was proving something to himself.
Eventually, I don’t know what time, I stumbled, quite
hammered, back into the midtown blur, clutching a bar
coaster with a nearby address scrawled across the front,
and instructions to appear at 8:30 the next morning.
[an excerpt from a novel in progress]
Contributors
Díre McCain is a five-dimensional creature who fell
through a Lorentzian traversable wormhole into a
three-dimensional universe, landing on what was,
at the time, the second rock from the Sun. After a
nebulous sojourn in the Zone of Avoidance, while
trapped in a self-induced state of suspended animation, McCain was unwittingly converted into a
transportable energy pattern and ultimately rematerialized on 21st century Earth. McCain “suffers
from” Aboulomania, Planomania, Eleutheromania,
Habromania, Hydrodipsomania, a severe case of
Logomania, and innocuous Daddy Issues; possesses
a ridiculous number of utterly useless skills, including the mythical mantic Seventh Sense, which is
merely another of myriad delusional beliefs; is cofounder and co-editor of Paraphilia Magazine &
Books; and can be found loitering at www.diremccain.com and www.paraphiliamagazine.com.
English-born Marguerite Van Cook came to New
York with the punk band the Innocents, after touring with the Clash. She stayed and opened a gallery,
Ground Zero, with James Romberger, where she
showed her own and others’ art. She has enjoyed a
varied career in the arts as a painter, writer, poet and
multimedia artist. She collaborated on the groundbreaking graphic novel, Seven Miles a Second, which
was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s
Millennium Show, with Romberger and David
Wojnarowicz. Van Cook both makes and acts in
films, and her work is in many major galleries and
collections. She holds an MA in Modern European
studies from Columbia University and is currently
enrolled in a French PhD program.
Mark Netter has spent too much time both in and
out of Hollywood wasting a perfectly good NYU
grad film school education in the television, movie,
videogame, entertainment, advertising and socialmedia industries. He bought his first guitar, a Tele,
and taught himself how to play in early 2010 in
order to write the songs for his “Li’lPunks” screenplay (done). He tends to trust people he meets from
upstate New York, where he was raised, because in
those winters you really learn the meaning of friendship. After living in Providence, London, NYC, LA
and SF, he makes his home in Santa Monica with
his wife and two rambunctious boys he likes to take
to the movies, especially revivals. He has been told
in the past he looks like both Lou Reed and Elvis
Costello; more recently, the dad from “Modern
Family.”
Rob Roberge is the author of the upcoming book
of stories Working Backwards from the Worst Moment
of My Life and the neo-noir novels More Than They
Could Chew (Perennial Dark Alley/Harper Collins,
February 2005) and Drive (re-issue, Hollyridge
Press, 2006). His stories have been featured in
ZYZZYVA, Chelsea, Other Voices, Alaska Quarterly
Review, and the “Ten Writers Worth Knowing
Issue” of The Literary Review. In his spare time, he
plays guitar and sings with Los Angeles area garage/
punk bands the Violet Rays, the Danbury Shakes
and LA’s legendary punk pioneers, the Urinals.
www.robroberge.com
City of Strangers writes about NYC and related
subjects at cityofstrangers.net.
Guitarist Michael LaMacchia was born in Kenosha Wisconsin, than moved to San Francisco at 18
82
and began his musical career. He bridges worlds
including, brazilian, jazz, african, latin, classical and
pop, creating a special sound that is personal and
passionate. Niels Myrner (drums), a San Francisco
native, currently lives with his wife Yvette in Mill
Valley, California where he performs, records and
teaches full time. Dan Feiszli (bass) lives in the Bay
Area where he records, tours and performs with a
wide variety of artists.
Czechoslovakia. He is the last surviving male of
a large Jewish family, most of whom perished in
Nazi Germany’s Holocaust. His family escaped
from Prague toward the end of the war and emigrated to Haifa, Israel, where he spent the rest of
his childhood. The family emigrated to the U.S.
when he was 12 and he has lived there ever since,
currently residing in New York City. He is the
recipient of dual BFAs and MFAs in painting and
sculpture from Carnegie-Mellon University, has
dual residences and studios in both New York and
Prague, and divides his time between the two. He
currently teaches at Pratt Institute of Technology.
In September 2011, his exhibit “Talking at You –
Promlouvání,” premiered at the National Gallery in
Prague.
Drew Hubner is the author of American by Blood: A
Novel and We Pierce: A Novel. His latest work, East
of Bowery (with Ted Barron), will be published by
Sensitive Skin Books in fall 2011. He lives in New
York City with his wife Sarah and children Henry,
August and Eleanor. He works as a Lecturer of
English at Hostos Community College of the City
University of New York.
Under her former name, Diane Rochlin, Flame
Schon co-directed and co-edited Vali: The Witch of
Positano, a documentary about an Australian artist/
shaman that won the social documentary award
at the Mannheim International Festival in 1966.
Moving into video with a new Sony Portapak via
a grant from the American Film Institute in 1969,
she collaborated on videotaping The Living Theater’s historic final performance of “Paradise Now”
at the Sportspalast in Berlin. Dope, a feature-length
16mm film on the London drug scene, premiered
in 1975 in the First New American Cinema Series
at the Whitney Museum. Since 1989, she has lived
in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she creates video
and digital art.
John S. Hall is 99% vegan, 98% agnostic, 97% heterosexual, and not as delicious as he used to be. He’s
the vocalist and lyricist of King Missile (Dog-Fly
Religion). He works as an Intellectual Property
Analyst at a big law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell. He supposes he is still a poet and is currently
working on a memoir/novel. www.myspace.com/
johnshall
Erika Schickel is the author of You’re Not the Boss
of Me: Adventures of a Modern Mom. Her essays,
reviews and reporting have appeared in The Los
Angeles Times, The L.A. Weekly, L.A. City Beat and
Bust Magazine. She is currently working on a fulllength memoir, Unsupervised: A Love Story.
Michael Jon Fink is a composer/performer who
resides in the San Fernando Valley just north of Los
Angeles. For the last thirty years, he has served on
the faculty of the Herb Albert School of Music at
the California Institute of the Arts where he teaches
Composition, Orchestration and Analysis.
Janice Sloane has shown her work in numerous
group and single shows throughout the United
States and Mexico. Her most recent exhibition,
entitled “That’s It,” took place at Governor’s Island,
NY, in 2011. www.janicesloane.com
Additional art by Jeff Spirer, Chris Bava, Jim C,
Sofles and Ted Barron
Shalom Tomas Neuman was born in Prague,
83
Sensitive Skin #7
Fall, 2011
www.sensitiveskinmagazine.com
Writing:
Rob Roberge
Díre McCain
Erika Schickel
Mark Netter
Marguerite Van Cook
Drew Hubner
City of Strangers
Video:
Flame Schon
Music:
Michael Jon Fink
Lamacchia/Myrner/Feiszli
Art:
Shalom Neuman
Janice Sloane
available from
Sensitive Skin Books
84