“He governed his conduct by considerations removed from the obvious, by incredible assumptions, which rendered his logic impenetrable to any reasonable person.” Conrad on Almayer.

“The Seven Deadly Sins are pride, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, avarice and sloth. Brecht declares these offences to be virtues. They are sins only to the petite bourgeois because, under capitalist conditions, he cannot afford to live a natural, human life. Pride in personal dignity is bad for business: one must do what is asked of one provided one is paid for it. Wrath over the brutal tricks played in the fight for one’s daily bread is not permissible. To eat one’s fill can spell ruin: a dancers market value is determined by her figure. Pursuit of the fleshpots is called gluttony, as a precaution. The lower classes are advised by their rulers not to abandon themselves to ‘base material pleasures.’ To love for pleasure is penalized and called immoral. Only those who have money and pay money may be loved, but avarice is not to be commended either, if crime is seen to be the result. Similarly the petit bourgeois must not permit himself to be the envious of the fortunate ones who disregard the social conventions. As a ‘free born’ human being he is only free to bow to the norm of the bourgeois order of things.”  From Brecht bio – Volker.

“We who are thieves without a license are at war with another set of men who are thieves according to law.” Godwin “Calab” Williams.

Monsignor Ronald Knox’s Ten Commandments of Detection:

The criminal must be mentioned early on.

Mix in the supernatural.

The detective must not commit the crime.

No accident must ever help the detective – no unaccountable intuition, no Divine Revelation, no feminine intuition, no Mumbo Jumbo, no jiggory-pokery, no coincidence, no Acts of God.

*

“I think that the whole anti-sex orientation is basically manipulated by female interests. Because it is in their interest to keep sexuality down; that’s the way they hang on to a man, or latch onto one, and then he’s not supposed to do anything else. It is the vested interest of the female sex, which is antisex. I think they were a basic mistake and the whole dualistic universe evolved from this error.”  — William Burroughs. The Job.

 Took a day off from my new job at Madison Avenue Bookshop to walk around town and make some small necessary purchases that come to more than I can afford. Two shirts from Brooks Brothers amounted to over $30.00, one dress button-down, one golf collar, both plain white, on credit. My only other purchase on a fifty-block walk being a discounted Sinatra from Sam Goody.  In the Wee Small Hours. Watching my money dissipate to dangerously low I passed on buying a second-hand paperback that caught my eye on Third Avenue. Wretched condition to be in, easier to take without my too usual hangover.  I sometimes think I live in New York so there’s no question of me getting behind the wheel of a car.  I can get too dumb to drive.

*

Last night, my third night with long-legged Nancy since we became close. She’s a Carly Simon looking girl. Tight trim everything. We made love with vicious ardor for four hours easy.  What started during a Bogart/Bacall movie lasted into top floor dawn over the East Village with a pinch of this and a puff of that and a little red wine all over tight firm everything. We first met last year, just before Christmas, and it was through her that I got the apartment at 214 East 10^th Street. An overly well-endowed high school sweetheart passing through town was the mutual acquaintance brought us together expressly that we should end up like this.

They had something in mind.  Nancy has that tom boy frilly filly flirtatious quality with that fashionable dash of androgyny that appeals to sexes, a country rock and roll zest out of the West, and is an accomplished art schooled photographess who winks well.  At the time I was between things, living at the Hotel Irving on SE corner of Gramercy Park where the cats and I were terribly cramped. There was a vacancy across the hall from her 6 floor walk up, unheated toilet in the hall, bathtub in the kitchen, Pollack landlord, place on 10^th Street, ½ block from St. Marks on the Bowery.

I stepped up to tenement living and for six months she listened to me with other women.  My high school sweetheart visited for a week, changing planes between Paris and Minneapolis. There were three, four ladies I’d teased her with before one night I’m out drinking at the Hollywood Bar on 2^nd Avenue with Gardner and there she is.  We got to shooting pool and she could shoot pool okay. Gardner was chatting up her bodacious little friend, Joan.  She and me, we went home and stayed there.

That night she thought herself wanton, sensual, even deliciously crude and lewd. Leggy, hands between, hot blooded, just unapologeti,, she couldn’t help it and me neither.  Preferred it. She was a tall cool woman in a black dress. We woke up together.  I left a love note tucked into her door later and she loved me even more for it.  Make dinner and the cats, Sims and the Llama, stroll across the hall checking out her other corners.  How convenient.

*

Auden’s favorite joke: The story of Christ and the whore, in which Christ comes across a crowd readying to stone an adulteress and says, “Let he who is without sin be the first to cast a stone,” and a good sized rock clouts the woman a good one. Christ scans the crowd, turning around, and shouts,
Mother!”

*

29 May, 1976

Druggy weekend spent, despite lovely weather and my home girl, almost entirely alone indoors. Kept company with JK doing dope. MW, the preacher’s son, came by reconciling his Vedic and narcotic paths. Garbling faith healing and no mind with heroin highs and meditations on apathy.  All charkas look the same in the dark. His shit’s going on behind my carefully turned back. It was a great consolation being absolutely numb listening to this boy’s dumb lame shit.. When it got to be more than we could stand we threw him out, snorted some coke and went to Paul’s Lounge. Today spent reading Dupee’s bio of Henry James, waiting for Nancy to come home so I can flip her laughing face over.

17 June, 1976.

Week of debauchery with the poet, Braying from Tuesday night to Friday morning. On finishing his Backwoods Poem of Hate he intends to write on a novelist who is continuing a manuscript that dates back to ancient times, prepping members of his family to continue the work when he’s gone. His ambition is to script an esoteric manuscript worth immortality. Ha! Gothic high camp, like his Guidebook to Small Animals for Pot Smokers. He is moving back to NYC in a month.

From Joseph Conrad to Cunningham Graham:

“What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it. To ba part of the animal kingdom under the conditions of this earth is very well, – but as soon as you know of your slavery, the pain, the anger, the strife, – the tragedy begins. We can’t return to nature since we can’t change our place in it. Our refuge is in stupidity, in drunkenness of all kinds, in lies, in beliefs, in murder, we thieve. It is only the consciousness of ourselves that drives us about a world that, whether seen in a convex or concave mirror, is always but a vain and floating appearance.”

*

Summer weekends start on Thursday night at JK’s with JC and me over a few spoons of Eagle, as they’re branding the stuff this week. After months without even thinking of the stuff. Celibate three days for his and hers herpies, I was in search on non-alcoholic escape. Sophomoric talk of James Joyce and Theodore Adorno.

“Their malice is stitched in white thread. They are disguised and ugly. To look at them breeds in my melancholy soul thoughts of murder and suicide, – such is my anger and my loathing of their transparent pretenses….”

K shooting On Like Popcorn, which knocked him out. I plucked him down in front of Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel playing on the tv.  We’d bought some dope for a friend of Ada that JC’s overly enthusiastic approach usurped, in a mildly comic, immature and self-deluded kind of way…bragging about his abuse…fancying himself a seasoned user…still, suckering this guy into paying for all of us.

But then it is the guises of social attainment that provide JC with his ill script. PB says JC is the only person he’s ever met as inept as himself. We were all fucked up, engrossed in Emil Jennings endearingly pathetic performance, effecting the dark thought overwhelmed by the beauty in the luminescence to the humidity making a glow over Union Square as my head cleared just before hitting the bed in the wee hours.

*

“Genuine memory determines “whether the individual can have a picture of himself, whether he can master his own experience.” “Every passion borders on chaos, but the passion of the collector boarders on the chaos of memory.”                         Walter Benjamin. Reflections.

Girlfriend in town. It’s six years ago we fell for each other when working together at the Guthrie Theater. I’d been ogling her for weeks. One evening she usheretted over to my aisle and asked me if if anyone had ever told me I’m beautiful. Nobody ever had, nobody beautiful at least. Nothing immediately came of it as we had prior commitments that conflicted for a year and a half and we have been seperable ever since. Three months on, six months to a year off. I’d move to New York, she to Palm Beach, Bar Harbor, Paris.

Her reluctance to commit to anything with me was perfectly understandable. While there were many ladies, few considered emotional attachment.

June 30: Getz/Gilberto/Byrd at Carnegie Hall.

Most memorably noted are Getz sittin in with Byrd and playing O Pato, Meditation and So Sano Samba. Getz set more jazzy the Brazilian, featuring a bop pianist and a very hot conga. At intermission some crazy colored man giggling hysterically put four lines of coke ‘neith my nose as I waited for the urinal. I was lit during Gilberto’s exquisitely quiet set of material off of the Amorosa album, to which I have fallen in love nearly as often as the Girl from Impanema album. The evening culminated with the three playing Corcovado and One Note Samba.

July 11: “Mr. Bungle pays his regards.” – Old German catchphrase.

Returned home from a friendly birthday party to a third time broke down refrigerator and to this I allowed myself to despair, throwing myself lengthwise onto the bed and smack into a puddle of cat piss.

“In me you see a man on whom you cannot depend.” – Berthold Brecht.

“… the most passionate investigation of the hashish trance will not teach us half as much as thinking (which is eminently narcotic), as the profane illumination of thinking about the hashish trance. The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flaneur are types of illumanati, just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. And more profane. Not to mention that most terrible drug – ourselves – which we take in solitude.”                        Walter Benjamin on Surrealism.

July 15, 1976

An exceptional night out on the prowl with MB and JK, making the rounds of Prescott’s, Barnibus Rex (a shit hole) where we picked up a couple of Dutch girls, Inge and Lisa, “Come on, let’s go dancing.” They wanted to see an American disco, they wanted New Wave rock music. Mel steered them to Night Birds and the Hollywood, dive bars where they weren’t impressed by his winning streak at the pool table.

I took Inge off to the palm court of Lady Astor’s in the Colonnades, where we switched to martinis and got mixed up with some rockin’ rich groovie French Soho guy and his really wildsville heavily accented swingin’ chick who steered us to their loft where she stripped down to the hottest of hot pants and unbuttoned to throw into sight an out of sight perfectly adorable pair of tits while launching into a real passionate striptease dance. It was a hard act to follow. I sat there on the couch in The Thinker’s crouch mesmerized, impervious to all but the swish and the sway of her wicked, wicked ways.

Then Inge! Inge starts doing the Pogo, a punk step she musta seen on tv. I was perfectly happy to switch girls. None of the weird sex acts I was cooking up on the couch pulled off, however they seemed implied. I smoked some reefer that got me where morning becomes desire. I did not see her on her on him or me on them. Oh these fun lovin’ Europeans! And here we are in our glory poundin’ pavement while they lace the necessary element only I can provide. I wanted to see Inge get it from hot pants but No. Shit.

July 20, 1976: Sister Min arrives in New York.

July 22, 1976: Min’s return throws SK and I together for the first time in over a year. We’ll just forget he sold my library off the sidewalk on 14^th Street for dope. I made gin and tonics and we talked about other peoples drinking, who have fallen from favor.  Since I last saw S he’s divorced Bean, courted and married Astor, The Big Blonde Baby, all doing 90 mph down a dead end street.

July 25, 1976:

Reconciliation with the Minnesotans didn’t last. This is much more melodrama than I can handle. I’ve never been so bored in my life. I’m having a little breakdown. Nothing serious. Falling out with the neighbor girl as well.

Quiet music followed by quieter music. Perversion of the nerves ebbed. Unspoken difficulties with the next door neighbor. Melvin and I ran into Kramer and visited his new studio on Bowery and Grand. His new boxes are wonderful, his sense of humor intact. Rat wallpaper designs, a rat photo booth box where the rat’s face is yours, a box that sings Blow the Man Down to seasick mahogany rats rolling across the deck of a ship and animated waves. We wound up in a Chinese bar on Delancy resplendent in plastic flowers drinking gin rickeys.

Breaking up with my girl.  Post-alcohol depression dulls my wits from two nights of serious drinking with Paul Cyrus Bray. The second night blacked out a memory that should contain leaving my sister’s and ending up on the roof here on 10^th Street.  Down with a summer flu, my guts are ringing and an ear is aching, dully anesthetized by Excedrin and decongestant.  Dreams last night of termetic insects boring through the ear into the brain and of a soporiferous infection of coral fungus sprouting from said traumatized ear.

Must stop drinking for a while and get well. Possibly the deteriorization of our affair has made sexual association with the neighbor girl a bore, just as being fluish makes the idea of drinking distasteful. Lost friendships praying on my mind. Lost loves and missing again. Though she has done nothing to repel me, next door’s too close and I’m just over her.  Just 23 and I don’t mind lying.