Friday, November 12, 2004
D'entre les morts
It's very late somewhere in Queens, forty years ago. Ol' Bob Hamm and I are in a graveyard drinking cheap wine. Bob's telling me about his friend Joe, whose girlfriend is a drag queen named Nicole. Much undefined sexual tension between Bob and I (despite a furtive unsatisfactory blow-job one night so very long, long-ago), never really relieved -- save for the drinking. For it's this period -- mid-sixties, when I was in college -- that drinking had somehow begun to replace sex. No, take that back. They ran on parallel tracks. If I couldn't get laid I'd get drunk. And sometimes vice versa. A desire to "lose myself in the dark" was the common denominator. Cemeteries were welcome spots for the application of cheap wine to an already hazy mind and troubled soul. (There's a great cemetery scene in the film version of A Home at the End of the World )
One night Bob took me to visit his friend Joe and Joe's girlfriend Nicole in their apartment on the lower east side. A singular experience. Joe wasn't gay, by any standard I knew of then or now. And Nicole certainly wasn't a woman. Yet they fulfilled roles that redered them "boy" and "girl" in the accepted sense. Joe was just another junkie -- flegmatic and funny. Nicole another mark -- quiet, self-contained. How Bob (possibly the squarest hipster I've ever known) came to meet Joe I never found out.
The image is beginning to fade just now. Probably wasn't meant to last, hazy as it was even at the time of its conception. Like a jazz refrain played on late night FM radio whose title I never quite learned. Something by Eric Dolphy -- "You Don't Know What Love Is." It begins to fade like the identity of someone who also lived on the lower eastside who I used to drop by and fuck in the afternoon around four. Up the stairs, knock on the door, fall on the floor with him -- without so much as saying hello. The fuck was the hello. Smiling, giggling, grabbing at the buttons and zippers, coming rather quickly too as I recall. Some talk, some tea-- and then out.
Gone now, all gone. Buried somewhere down there (points to ground ), or up here (points to head.)
One night Bob took me to visit his friend Joe and Joe's girlfriend Nicole in their apartment on the lower east side. A singular experience. Joe wasn't gay, by any standard I knew of then or now. And Nicole certainly wasn't a woman. Yet they fulfilled roles that redered them "boy" and "girl" in the accepted sense. Joe was just another junkie -- flegmatic and funny. Nicole another mark -- quiet, self-contained. How Bob (possibly the squarest hipster I've ever known) came to meet Joe I never found out.
The image is beginning to fade just now. Probably wasn't meant to last, hazy as it was even at the time of its conception. Like a jazz refrain played on late night FM radio whose title I never quite learned. Something by Eric Dolphy -- "You Don't Know What Love Is." It begins to fade like the identity of someone who also lived on the lower eastside who I used to drop by and fuck in the afternoon around four. Up the stairs, knock on the door, fall on the floor with him -- without so much as saying hello. The fuck was the hello. Smiling, giggling, grabbing at the buttons and zippers, coming rather quickly too as I recall. Some talk, some tea-- and then out.
Gone now, all gone. Buried somewhere down there (points to ground ), or up here (points to head.)
