In the Shadow of the American Dream (5 page)

Left off at Kalamazoo exit while they went on. A Kalamazoo county policeman pulled up just as we were walking to get off the interstate onto the exit ramp. Checked our ID. A young cop who watched too many TV police dramas, he said to us, You know, gentlemen, that it's illegal to hitchhike on interstates. You could get fined (lifting mirror glasses from his nose) and you could even get thrown into jail, but I'm not that kind of guy. He told us to hop in the car and he would give us a lift to the exit ramp where we could legally hitchhike. We got in the backseat cage and he drove us the quarter mile up to the ramp, spoke into his radio, turned, and said, Well this has got to be a quick drop-off 'cause I have to get back. We tried to get out of the car but the police break the locks and handles off backseats of police cars so the suspects don't have a chance to run off. He had to get out and open the door for us. I was tempted to mock a royal accent: Thank you, Charles, but refrained.

July 31, 1976

17th day. Left YMCA St. Paul Hostel and headed for grocery store to buy provisions for freight hop to West Coast. Bought a bag of:

12 rye pumpernickel rolls (small)

1 can tuna fish

1 box raisins

1 can mixed nuts

1 small bag peanuts

1 small bag sunflower seeds

1 gallon distilled water

2 small cans peaches

3 cheese cracker packages

Went and got a haircut at a slightly redneck place. The guy said (when I got up), Oh you're the one getting a haircut … ha ha … that's a surprise. Usually the guy who really needs the haircut doesn't get one and the guy with short hair does … ha ha … really that's happened before.

He gave me a classic short haircut while joking about the trials and tribulations of hitchhiking: You ever hear about the minister who picked up three girls who were hitchhiking and they held a knife to his throat and raped him? First he said, Sorry but I can't, but when they held a knife to him he did it. It was written up in all the papers around here. You never heard about it?

He charged four bucks for the cut. Also asked about hitching. How easy it was to hitch etc. I told him the best was as a pair—a girl and a guy, second best a guy, and that two guys represent hostility psychologically to motorists. His reply was, Well I guess one of you will have to start wearing a dress … ha ha.

David lived in Brooklyn Heights in his early twenties and was hanging out with writers and artists, taking drugs, and going to downtown Manhattan nightclubs and gay bars. He started to take himself seriously as a writer at this time, and began collecting material for stories he called monologues
.

July 26–September 4, 1977

Brooklyn Heights, New York

Human Head

July 26, 1977

Woke up early with a phone call from Herbert Huncke. He was calling to ask me to please meet him at the courthouse on 100 Center Street. He had been busted on 14th Street around 3rd Avenue a couple of weeks ago. The neighborhood is all broken bottles, yellowed milk-colored glass marquees, and coffee shops which are hangouts for the night crowds—those that gather slowly in the daytime moving from doorways of pawn shops to used magazine stores to tobacco stores to dusty apartments all heatroached and sticky with summer weather. At night the whores come out along with pimps and everyone struts in high-heeled regalia under the glitter of a half-dead moon and fluorescent lights and lamp poles. Small kids with their trusty collarless dogs dash through it all. Avenues of pushers and between 3rd and 2nd Avenues—it's hot like wall-to-wall body tension, like people waiting for a connection somewhere in that wall of sound and flash. The cops had been after one pusher for a while and were watching him through the window of a closed-down shop. Huncke bought four Valiums and felt a hand on his shoulder just after he dropped them into a little brown paper bag. He dropped the bag to his feet and said, Wha … What's going on here?

Two cops said, Okay, where's that stuff you bought? I saw ya put it in the bag. Oh … here it is. Stooped down and picked the bag off the street. Huncke said, That's not mine, I don't know what you're talking about. The cop said, Now ya wanna make it rough on yourself or what?

By this time the other cop was relieving the pusher of bottle after bottle of pills, all colors and effects. They were booked and the cop said to Huncke that they didn't want to prosecute him just the pusher.

Met Huncke at the courthouse around 9:35
A.M.
wandering down the hallway towards the room AP3, where his case was gonna be. We smoked cigarettes and hung around inside the courtroom all day long with a procession of cases in front of the judge. The judge was “lenient” as compared to most judges, but sentences were reeling out right and left along with fines. One girl who lifted a wallet stood holding her rosy black arms around her slim sides and traded back and forth with the legal aid lawyer with the sentence. She was caught up in it with no chance. Sixty days minimum. She didn't want it so they had her sit in a chair to the side to think about it while more cases were heard. She sat down and looked over the courtroom with the saddest eyes I've ever seen. I only saw a look like that on cattle before shot between the eyes with a hammer upstate on a slaughter.

A lot of people paid their fines and took their sentences without any arguments. The prosecutor district attorney hung out leafing through volumes of papers inside folders recommending this or that for the defendants. He was blond and very handsome but looked like he was straight out of the colonial-style suburbs of Long Island where lawn sprinklers whizz—whizz all day around vast columnar houses and little kids run through shady quiet streets oblivious to anything even faintly resembling the dome of New York City.

Huncke's legs jumped up and down and his fingers twisted around in half-knots from tension. Periodically he rushed downstairs to the bathroom or out in the hall with me for a cigarette. His legal aid lawyer didn't show up once all day and during lunch recess Huncke frantically called his office and asked other legal aid lawyers to give this guy a message that he was waiting for the man.

The tension was so unbelievable I wanted to put my fist through a wall. Poor Huncke and I were dancing in our seats, twisting right and left with apprehension.

The lawyer showed around 4 o'clock and Huncke showed him the two letters—one from a methadone clinic he was in at this time, and the other from a professor of English in New Jersey. Both had good effect on the judge and the district attorney who let Huncke plead disorderly conduct and let him off. I rubbed his back and hugged him in the hallway and we crash-stumbled around trying to get out of the fucking building as soon as possible. We walked over the Brooklyn Bridge 'cause we were broke and Huncke borrowed five dollars from a neighbor in the building and slipped me one dollar saying, Here's a fin for ya.

At lunch recess we walked around through Chinatown with Huncke showing me all the old eating joints and telling me how the Chinese gamblers gamble all day and young whores'll come up and each gambler will take a break and fuck for a while—ten dollars a shot—and then return to the game. We shared a couple of oranges and a candy bar, and I bought him a Coca-Cola.

The sunlight was dazzling and beautiful, almost unreal against the shady streets of Brooklyn Heights—freedom in different measures after such a day. I was walking Huncke down State Street on the way home and I was slightly ripped from the smoke at Ondine's and Louis's, and that mixed with the weariness of the day brought the sunlight broken lenses and center crossroads traffic light sky into a swirl looking up. Feels real good, I said to him. Yeah man, it feels good, he answered.

Up at Ondine's Huncke asked me to come up 'cause he needed to hit on Louis for some of his piss. He had done two Valiums the night before court to get some sleep. He was real nervous and it didn't help. Wednesday he was going to have to give a urine sample at the methadone clinic and the only thing that should've shown was meth, not Valium. Louis was slightly ticked that Huncke had called me up to come down to the courthouse and didn't ask him to come. Huncke assured him that he did it only 'cause the wait would've driven him up the wall. I agreed knowing how it would've felt to Louis after the third hour. Louis could only piss a little into the bottle so I pissed the rest and a couple of drops of methadone was added to make it look cool.

July 28, 1977

Had a hopelessly beautiful dream—whole landscapes sliding by at rapid pace, retarded child imagery, lots of body movement, embracing. One old guy reappearing quite often in the frames, married and exuding all kinds of strange sexual energies. As soon as a guy appears in my dreams it seems I am faintly aware of the sexual currents inherent therein. Nothing terribly physical came of it all but the dream was one of the first I've had that when I woke up I recalled no violent fears or pressure of death and anxieties floating within it in the ropy passages of light and dark. It was like a night on the grand calliope of Breton's Amusement Park—something more soothing than the sexual Asbury Park of my seven-year-old mind.

July 30, 1977

What will I think of all this scribble ten years, thirty years from now in the change of history, where will Jim be or John or me in relation to all these activities? It's the starry mirror of the eyes' slow revolution to the impossible or fictional future then reeling back again to the past. FZZAMMM …

August 1, 1977

Met Huncke after work, dropped over to Arlene's house where he was staying. He was wrapped up in a bathrobe with white flesh coming out from the folds of cloth. He made us a vodka and grapefruit drink and we talked about Louis and the book. He said Burroughs and Ginsberg were to write notes for the back cover of the book and he would do the intro! I told him about Louis and Ondine trying to fix me up with the girl in Brooklyn. We were eating pitted black cherries and vanilla ice cream. I explained that I slept more with men than women at this point in my life. He said he understood and before I knew it he was calling it an evening. He repaid twelve dollars of the original twenty-two. I was under the impression that he owed me seventeen dollars, not twenty-two. Since he had no change of a twenty, he gave me twelve. Don't know if I'll see the rest and at this point don't care. I like Huncke both in an awestruck way: it's been great meeting him after reading stuff by and about him; and he is a kind of model in roles that I form my life after, things that directly influence me in directions. I also like him personally: his storytelling abilities are almost unmatched. But I'm not sure what he thinks of me. I'm sometimes like this naïve dude who's very easily taken, not by him necessarily but apt to be taken by anybody who has the desire to do that. I don't know if he looks at me that way, if I should assert myself at times and not do certain things. The things I see as going along to make a strong friendship, someone else could see as foolhardy or soft.

August 13, 1977

Jim McLaughlin, Louis Rivera, Dennis Deforge, and I went to a bar on Christopher Street. A miniature Ponderosa Ranch—style place with bleached cow skulls on the wall and a horse hitching post in the center of the room. Little lightbulbs flickering all over the place which was shadowy dark. One leather guy with muscle-bound chest and belly protruding from suit of leather with straps and white pants low sexy the belly kept moving through the crowd like one moves through a thick fog or water of a flood—looked like an SS agent with marble eyes and abandon wiped across his lips.

Met a guy there. Had noticed him looking in my direction but he didn't seem to want to approach with Jim, Louis, and Dennis around so when they split I stayed behind and talked with him.

We went for a walk around the Village near Soho—Houston Street—West 4th. His name was Ken Sterling. I liked him immediately, can't tell exactly what it was but a mixture of self-assureness. He was handsome in a way that people are handsome but not centered on it—one who doesn't spend time exercising good looks is extremely attractive in itself. We ended up at a cafe drinking cappuccino and a thunderstorm broke out. He finished college at nineteen. Just turned thirty years old. Was interested in linguistics, self-taught five languages, and currently studying Chinese. We went to his place in the West Village—a small two-room place with two small dogs, Electra and [?], a broken frame containing a print, an old washed color of North American Indian basket lid weaving of frog. Showed me a book on linguistics that had references to Aztec codices that had been banned by the Catholic Church. Burroughs had talked about such incidents in
The Job
and
Book of Breething,
I think. We lay down on a small mat/foam pad half under a desk and he read part of a poem by some guy twenty years old. It was quite good language smooth and rounded, rough in spots but not as hindrance. We turned out lights and made love without actually going the route for a fun time. The man is sensitive as hell. I can feel it through his touch and eyes and skin surfaces. Even without getting sexually involved to a high degree he was satisfying to be with. Someone I feel I could spend time with.