City on Fire (70 page)

6.20.76

today pizza + some pills (c can’t smoke cuz of asthma) + we end up at an art gallery where they’re showing b/w s+m by this photographer who used to date patti. c doesn’t say anything but goes red as a balloon + sucks on his inhaler a lot. i try to keep a straight face. then in front of a picture of a naked guy w/ a dong the size of a stud pony’s, i just lose it, + then c loses it, i think out of relief. we are laughing so hard the girl at the desk says we have to leave. right at the door, we turn + shoot her the finger + run. i’m surprised how nervous i am to show c my own pictures after that, but i’ve brought my binder in my bag, not “burners, bombs + blowups,” but the one with all the pictures i took at shows last winter. some of those bands are already legends now. which doesn’t guarantee the pictures are any good. we sit on some stoop in the west village looped on pills, + he goes quiet as he flips through the pages, blinking like it’s hard to focus, + i kind of sit back + the sky is blue + summery + moving overhead + i’m scared he’s going to give me some fake compliment, like i’d given sol’s graffiti that one time, but he stops at a picture of johnny thunders + taps it with the pad of his index finger so lovingly that i don’t even mind the print of pizza grease it leaves on the plastic. you know what this needs? he says. a big old wang, right here. i tell him when i get to college in the fall, he can come + crash at my dorm, + we will be the king + queen of nyc. we will take over this town.

6.30.76

ran into sol at the dictators show last night + he invited me to a 4th of july party at a certain notorious pad in the east village. his invisible friend had finally decided to meet me, sol said, + he gave me something special too, to make it a really memorable night. he told me not to take them until we met up. okay, i said, but i’m bringing a friend of my own. sol turned about three shades of purple then. jealousy: the least punk of emotions.

7.10.76

whenever i call c’s house now, his mom picks up. he’s grounded, she told me the first time. i said for how long? she said who is this, at which point i hung up. now i just hang up as soon as i hear her voice. i’m dying to tell him about the php. i don’t think his mom is lying to me, but still, not hearing from him, it feels like he’s mad at me for something, or like i’m betraying him, throwing him over for this punk-rock world we fantasized about the way i end up throwing everything over. overturn overturn overturn.

THE SORROWS OF PSILOCYBIN

It was supposed to be one of the great nights - the Bicentennial - but when Gloria Buonarotti awoke the morning after, it was like she was coming back from abduction by space aliens who’d extracted all the moisture from her eyeballs and then backed over her face with their spaceship a few times for good measure. Here she was, in yesterday’s clothes, on the cold concrete floor of a basement whose nearest window gave onto the brick wall of the next house over, less than a foot away. Her camera, thank God, was still in her bag. There was a mattress, the back of a couch, a sound of breathing nearby. She did her best to avoid all three, making her way toward the memory of stairs. Apparently, the aliens had left her basic ambulatory structure intact, because she reached the top with only one stumble. Pretty much every myth in the whole of human history recommended against looking back, but now she couldn’t help herself. In the shadows, three pairs of legs tangled on the mattress. Jesus Christ, what had she done?

Upstairs was a war zone: bodies slumped in corners and along baseboards. Holes - fresh? - in the walls. The night had concentrated the smells of keg beer and cigarettes and grass and blended them into a single thing. It was her need for a smoke that led her to the kitchen. There, a guy stood at the counter, dark, not unhandsome, copiously tattooed, rinsing out a paintbrush in what had once been a container of Cool-Whip. He didn’t seem at all surprised to see her. “Guten Morgen” he said, his cigarette bobbing in his mouth and scattering ash in the water. His glasses were the little ones with the steel frames, like from the 1920s. Then he pinched the water from the end of the brush, a little fussily, almost as if he was copying the gesture. “Do we know each other?” she asked. This was his house, he said. Ah. She introduced herself, shook his hand, followed his gaze to the easel near the window, where a canvas had been set up to catch the sun. It was still damp, but totally incoherent, a bunch of lines crisscrossing in the center and then blankness, save for two words, “Captain” plus something unreadable, in the corner. She had the oddest feeling for a second that all of this, the painting, the cigarette, his waiting here with this leering familiarity, had been prepared just for her. She raised the camera. There was something iconic about him, with the a.m. summer light streaming through the rear window - he might as well have been wearing a beret - or maybe it was just the stories her friends had told that now seemed to gather around him … but he said the rule was still no pictures. “You know how to get home from here?” And she thought: well, good question. Do I?

harmless terror, a.k.a. “detournement,” by anonymous

1) Swallow some snake bite antidote then walk into your local army recruiter’s office. The antidote (most types are harmless—make sure you get that kind) will make you vomit. Do so all over the carpet, desk, clothing,
etc.
Then apologize profusely.

2) You can make a very effective fuse by inserting a non-filter cigarette in a book of matches so that it will ignite some matches when it burns down that far. Then loosely crumple paper around the matches and cigarettes so they are hidden. Toss it in a trashcan or any other area with a lot of flammables. It takes about 5 minutes to ignite—by then you can be far away, though hopefully not too far away to watch.

3) Pick up some dog training liquid at any pet store—it smells like concentrated piss. If you can’t figure out something to do with it then you shouldn’t be reading this.

4) Stage massive searches on busy sidewalks for “lost” contact lenses telling people not to walk there or “you might step on it.” Pretending you’ve lost something is a great cover for all kinds of subversive behavior.

5) Leave notes all over town that say, “Tuesday’s the day.”

ring

ring

hello you’ve reached the united states of amerikkka. a broken chaos mixed with interracial tensions at a congressional hearing. more at eleven robbed at gunpoint protesting a march held by some radical extremist group who doesn’t like some policy says the public relations advisor to the president passed a bill rates will be increasing. if you do not pay wages have been decreased again because of fighting in some foreign country and we have to intervene in these heinous acts for this special news bulletin as we take you live to the scene of the crime. Police report the suspected of rape, murder, loitering, and jaywalking. Soon to be a made for TV movie star found in bed with such-and-such who broke up with such-and-such decay in the blocks backed up when a gass main attraction event at your local mayors race to your nearest convenience store held up again by a masked man and some sports team beat another sports team in ratings even though they came from the same factory layoffs as a result of stagflation is improving benefits to unemployment rates declining value of the dollar is up by twenty percent risk of heart disease control center issued a report that there is no illegal activity needs to be stopped in the innercity pollution ordinance to put an end of the line for criminals gaining a college education…

HOME-EC CORNER

SG’S Millennium Brownies

The secret to a good brownie isn’t the brownie … take any old Duncan Hines mix to start. What you’ve really got to pay attention to is yr dope. Essentially, you’ll be butter-poaching at extremely low heat, for 1–2 hours. Then when yr dope is nice and tender, pull it out and dice very fine until you’ve got basically a paste. tip: make sure you hang on to the butter to incorporate into the batter. loads of thc in there.

There was this old church somebody knew about. You had to climb over a fence and get a boost up through a broken back window and then you were inside, trying to let your eyes adjust to the moonlight. A few steps forward and you’d be under this immense dome that as you looked up seemed to be breathing. Other people must have known about it, because from up in the organist’s balcony, you could see blacked-out places down among the pews where bonfires had been kindled for cooking or for warmth. Elsewhere there were little almost art projects, assemblages of old umbrellas and shopping carts and mirrors. It always struck Gloria Buonarotti as beautiful, this urge to make something and leave it even where no one would ever see. Like the murals she’d shot in abandoned tunnels. She was here to do the same, she thought: leave big burners of graffiti running up the columns - gargoyles, vines - and then to preserve it all with her camera.

These bombing runs, as Iggy called them, had been bringing their little circle to the Bronx a lot lately. This was where people’s minds were ripest for blowing, he said, but more likely it was that the cops had given up on the place, and artists were free to do whatever they wanted. The only people likely to step in would be the men who stared from out front of the bodegas when they piled out of the van. On one level, she was afraid of these men. On another, different level, she knew that was wrong. Didn’t she, too, know what it was like to feel hostile and abandoned? From out on the Island, the city looked like this place of utter freedom and life and all that, but it was really shocking to see from up on the expressway when the sun went down - Iggy liked her to take the passenger’s seat, so they could argue while he drove - the square miles of forsaken buildings, neighborhoods. And as her flashlight beam surfed the church’s innards, she started making a catechism: What is a church anyway? The body of Christ, which is also the people. Gloria didn’t believe in Christ anymore, but hadn’t given up on people. She shook her spraycan, a vision of her piece coming on. What if you could have bands play up here on the altar, while the pews filled with folks from the neighborhood, drawn in by the music? What if you could have photo exhibitions up in the choirs, painting studios in the basement? A food pantry, a free clinic? What if kids could come after school to find out what they were good at? A house of worship for all. A kind of commune or Phalanstery, only turned inside out, like in that hand game little kids play: open the doors, see all the People. It was too big an idea for her to pull off in aerosol, let alone reality, but now she had friends. Then she looked down and saw them roaming the pews, splashing them with stuff from big cans she assumed to be paint right up until someone lit a match. As if they really were just the vandals the reactionaries dismissed them as. But Iggy, naturally, had a theory. The world had become a picture of itself, he explained on the drive back downtown, and in that picture, nothing real could happen. One had to free people to see the faultlines.

I thought that’s what art was for, she said. Like your painting.

Nah, it turns out I’m no good at that.

To be an artist, Iggy’d have to be able to create, said someone from the back of the van.

That’s exactly what I’m trying to tell Gloria here, smartass. You have to find some way to create a discontinuity. Strike through the mask. Jolt people awake.

“But without them getting hurt. Like that fire.”

“Yeah, right, exactly.”

And now the other girl, the one Iggy called Sick Grandma, spoke up, though to whom was a little unclear. I told you, she said. Don’t say I didn’t tell you.

8.20.76

confused + conflicted - the personal, the political: the political, the personal. i feel like i spent so much time preparing myself for finally belonging, + now that i’ve been inducted into the inner circle i’m not sure that’s where i want to be. all of this is invisible to the php of course. for them, once you’re in, you’re in, + they just assume i’ll be the permanent fixture i currently am. all of this comes home to me today when i encounter this rather beautiful preppie in a jacket and tie on the front steps of the brownstone while they’re all in the little garage out back. he’s come to deliver some package, but ends up giving me a ride uptown + we talk + for a quick minute i’m not only seeing this entire other life i could be a part of (as he asks for my phone #), but also seeing how my current life or semblance thereof - my holding pattern, let’s say - might look to someone standing outside it. + where is my c, with whom i once might have talked this over? still grounded out in nassau, is where.

8.27.76

writing this in my new dorm. classes aren’t until the 7th, but i told dad yesterday was the only day to move in, because i’ve got to get out of the house ASAP. on the drive in, we sat in traffic downtown for an hour + didn’t say a word. he seemed sad, in a way he hasn’t been since the magazine guy started coming out to interview him for an article on fireworks. + it’s ridiculous, it’s not as if we’ve ever had like long meaningful talks, + lately we hardly see each other. it’s only the idea of me he loves. still, i felt shitty watching him drive away, but then, at last: a place all my own.

8.28.76

sol + dt walk over from the squat today to see the new digs; i have to keep them from breaking anything in the hall or otherwise getting me in trouble. i have the last bottle of old sequoia whisky smuggled out from flower hill + they end up killing it + sol decides he wants to do a piece on my wall. no, i say. my dad’s on the hook for any damages + it’s not like my wall. dt, that little asshole, has noticed at some point i’m not drinking much + starts to rag on me, like, what, does the college girl think she’s better than us? what i don’t dare tell them is i’ve got a date tomorrow night + i’d rather the room not look like wild animals have been living in it. i end up giving sol a little bit of wall above my bed to work on + now the damn room smells like spraypaint, which is why i’m up this late writing. (or is it nerves? the sense that something again is about to change?)

In conclusion, reader, I’ll share with you the one interesting thing the professor said in one of the few college classes I’ve managed to attend to date (one of the first and, it’s looking increasingly likely, one of the last). He said our concept of time isn’t something we’re born with, but something specific to our culture. “Clock-time is only as old as the clock.” It goes back to the monks, he said, with their matins and complines and all that. And as our ability to divide our lives into little increments has improved, time itself has sped up. The professor went on to build some kind of braintacular air-castles out of this, but I was already tuned out, stuck on that one idea: the dividing of time into more and more little boxes to be filled, and how it can distract a person. The question you have to step back and ask yourself, I think - the question you don’t stop to ask yourself, getting caught up in all that speed - is like: where will you be twenty years from now, or thirty? Or when you look back from your deathbed, where will you have been?