Drunken Angel (9781936740062) (23 page)

Different tribes arose: Nuyoricans, Unbearables, Big Cigar poets, Apathy poets, Wheel of Poets poets, the Tribes poets, The Upfront Muse poets, the ABC No Rio poets, and on the scene from San Francisco, the Babarians. There were similar uprisings in San Francisco, Baltimore, Chicago, an emergent avant-garde, and many of us were prepared to stake everything on the new development.

The characters were spectacular, especially some of the women, who called themselves kitty cats and dressed like felines, or were self-proclaimed fallen angels and wore wings, or white trash debutantes in dirty wedding gowns, or dangerous revolutionaries with toy plastic weapons, and aging Loisaida shamans who wandered around in pajamas and bathrobes. There were Dadaist musicians, a whole group of them, who appeared at gatherings with marching band instruments and exploded into a cacophonous call for street action, and whole parties emptied out to follow them into the streets, crazy parades at dawn through the East Village or Tribeca. We colonized clubs and bars all over town with our readings, as far north as the Paris Bar in Washington Heights, where Dave Hudson and B. Betterlife ran an open mike, and on Upper Broadway in the West End Bar, my former stamping grounds, where R. Cephas Jones and I led a group of jazz poets and musicians in a weekly open,
then down to the Life Café, where the Unbearables, led by Ron Kolm and Jim Feast, held court, and farther south at Under Acme in the Bowery, where David Shapiro ran his open.

Some nights, though, all I wanted was to drink alone. Couldn't stand to think of Isadora, the broken bond, the impossibility of having the only real love that I had ever been given. To drown my grief, I'd go to Billy's Topless, get smashed. On those nights I belonged to nothing and no one, not poetry, not my daughter, and death was my road dog.

Awoke in gutters or curled up to keep warm on manhole covers and grates in cul-de-sacs, filthy, nauseous, hungover, astonished at my gargantuan appetite for the abyss, hands held despairingly to head and muttering “God almighty” over and over in a voice trembling with chilled amazement. And yet, no sooner had evening come than the morning's devastations were forgotten. Felt ready to entrust myself once more to the black snake of my unconscious, follow it anywhere.

 

My rapid, spectacular decline was no longer a secret. It was known at work that I had a serious drinking problem, and in the poetry scene I showed up to readings wasted. The legendary underground club the Knitting Factory featured me on a bill with some other rising names of the downtown scene, but I stumbled around onstage, incoherent, a drunken vomitous nightmare figure, and saw the pity in my poet friends' eyes. I realized even in my barely conscious state that I was blowing something that I would keenly regret, yet was helpless to do otherwise.

We all drank to excess, I reasoned, no point in singling myself out for special blame. Yet I had the sinking feeling that my star was waning fast even as my Spoken Word comrades started to ascend. The higher they rose, the lower I fell. They tried to bring me along,
but everywhere I appeared I was an embarrassment, a stumbling drunk.

One night, I went home to stuff a cash wad into the measuring cup. The flat was dark. Esther and the kid asleep. I crept into the kitchen, not to wake the banshee; left money, turned to go. As I neared the front door, heard from behind a patter of tiny feet on hardwood floors, looked down, and there she was, my Isadora, all of a year and three-quarters, come out by herself, into the dark, so brave. She locked her little arms tight around my leg, a wordless plea for me to stay, as if to say: Daddy, please don't go.

Astonished, I leaned down gently and lifted her eye-level with my face. Her innocent blue eyes met my unfocused bloodshot gaze. Then her little arms hugged my neck, her sweet, soft blonde head tucked into my collar. She hugged me so tightly that guilty tears filled my eyes.

“Your daddy loves you, sweetheart. Really, I do.” Never had I loved anyone as I loved her.

I kissed her forehead. She gazed at me, hopeful that I'd stay.

I put her back to bed. Left, returned to Manhattan, to Billy's Topless.

When I needed to drink, nothing, not even an angel, could bar my way.

NOW THERE WAS NO STOPPING.

In short order, was terminated from both jobs. My mistress, Eileen, tossed me out. I left home for good and moved into a flat in Washington Heights with three acid dealers; paid one hundred dollars a month in return for the right to crash there nights on a filthy sheetless mattress. In the morning I would awake in a fogbound purgatory where I lay for minutes or days staring at the familiar: a cockroach trying to stay afloat in a beer bottle on an unraveling cigarette. Lifting the bottle, gulped down the whole concoction, stumbled out to the day, passed a crack junkie—the neighborhood a major center of vicious drug gangs and crack houses—rummaging for food in a Dumpster outside a Burger King. Catching the disdain in my glance, he held up a half-eaten Whopper, said: “Why you lookin' at me like that, man? You think you better than me? They's some good food in here!”

What a loser, I thought. The next day, I got thrown out of the crash pad and played homeless hide-and-seek with a squad car
downtown, outside a Sixth Avenue MacDonald's, waiting for the cruiser to pass so I could Dumpster-dive for my Happy Meal.

Sat down at restaurant tables from which others just rose, to finish their plates. Ate donuts from garbage cans, pizza crusts from sidewalks, half-rotten fruit found in doorways. I kept my cash for booze, which I drank in doorways, on bridges, on night docks overlooking the Hudson, and was kicked away from under tables on barroom floors and directed, drooling head hung low, out the door, face-first—staggered, fell, and passed out by storefront gates that rapped up at dawn, snapped me awake, with a proprietor's rough shouting, “Hey, pal! Wake up! Gotta open up! Mister! Get the hell up or I call the cops!”

I stumbled off in the pale-blue early waking city chill of morn, hungover, broke, sick to my guts. I had acquaintances so lonesome sometimes they let me stay over on cat-piss-reeking floors matted with filth and dust, in quarters that stank so bad you had to fight the urge to gag. It was out of the rain, a reprieve from the hard pavement, the all-night wind exposure, and a damp chill that burrowed deep into your bones, stayed there. Hugging a bottle, pretending interest in their oddball, hopeless prattle and talentless writing; invited to opine on their work, I lied, raved about how good it was. Anything to buy one more night that I wouldn't have to use the moon for a pillow.

The night was hard, its iron sometimes too fierce to withstand, its dark too menacing, and you just knew in your bones that were you to stay out in it tonight it would kill you—stab you as you lay blacked out or abduct and torture you in some basement or set you afire or kick you to death. At such times your nerves became so bad that the touch of a crawling fly on your skin made you cry out for your mother.

Despite this, I kept up my commitment to the Spoken Word
scene. Clung to it for life and meaning. Was all that stood between me and the abyss. The women and men who were each day founding the conditions for a new literature to exist didn't know at the time that they were not just fostering a revolutionary cultural direction but fashioning, reading by reading, event by event, book by book, a new reason for me to stay alive.

ONE NIGHT AT THE NUYORICAN POETS CAFÉ, MET an Australian woman named Bernadette, petite, with long red hair and sly blue sundowner eyes. She was an associate of the San Francisco poets, the Babarians, in for a few days to make the New York scene. Our attraction was immediate, strong. We were each in our own way gutter pirates, prowling life's open seas, targeting other people like so many merchant ships for the having, our roguish smiles nakedly exploitive, and we liked that about each other. Neither of us had real hopes for the future, so we were willing to stake everything on a good time had now.

I talked my friend Tom Weiss of the UpFront Muse performance space into letting us crash over at his place. Naively, he agreed. Bernadette and I took over his bedroom and were soon working our way through his pot stash and liquor hoard.

At first, annoyed but amused, he acceded, and then, as one night passed into several, made indignant speeches about our impertinence, which only made us want to hit his well-stocked larder that much
more. We laughed, Bernadette and I, continuously drank, smoked pot, cigarettes, and made love. She had a small, pert, compact form that I wanted to hold firmly between my hands, penetrate, and plunder. We wrote poems to each other, read them aloud.

“You should come to San Francisco,” she said. “Get the hell out of New York. You don't belong in the streets. Stay with me!”

Told me about the readings at Café Babar, Paradise Lounge, and the bookstore, City Lights, home of the Beats. Beat yet lived in the city streets, she said, a bohemian sprawl over North Beach, the Mission District, the Western Addition, the Haight-Ashbury.

 

When she left, Weiss, angry at the way I'd treated his generosity, wanted nothing more to do with me. I understood. I returned to street life. If I had anything like an address, it was Tompkins Square Park, a kind of outdoor commune for the damned, where I colonized a bench facing the Christodora, the Yuppie Condo high-rise.

Returning to my park bench from the Nuyorican Poets Café one night, I spotted a café regular entering the park, bearing a beer quart and a broken umbrella. Sauntered over in the charcoal gloom.

“I recognize you from the Nuyorican.”

“Yeah? What? You want to keep me company? So, sit.”

I sat.

“What brings you here?” he asked. “Can't sleep?”

“This be my current forwarding address.”

“Oh yeah? Any mail come so far?”

“Yeah. Part of a newspaper. Used it as a pillow. It blew right up against my bench. Like a message.”

“Well, you know what Kerouac said.”

“What's that?

“Fame is like yesterday's newspaper blowing down Bleecker Street at dawn.”

We both laughed.

“Here,” he said, passing the bottle. “I know thirst when I see it. Thirst first.”

I drew some, sighed, drank more. “Thanks. Goddamned needed that.”

He nodded. “You're welcome. Got a name?”

I said it and saw him flip it through a mental index. No match turned up.

“Jim Brodey,” he said.

I knew who that was. “You're in Anne Waldman's
Angel Hair
antho.” He nodded, pleased.

“You were with the New York poets.”

“I stand accused.”

“You mean honored. You're a famous guy.”

“To who?”

“Me. And other poets I know. I've read your stuff. Great work! You're not that regular at the Poets Café, though. I see you there just now and then.”

“There, no. Here, often.”

“I never saw you here before.”

“Usually I'm on the other side of the Park. Near Life Café.”

“So, how's a guy with your rep end up here?”

“How'd
you
end up here?”

“Me? I'm nobody. Just this, that, and the other.”

“Yeah, me too.” He held up the bottle. “This is my ‘this.' ” Then lifted his arm and let the unbuttoned sliding shirtsleeve reveal a poppy field of abscessed needle tracks. “That is my ‘that.' My ‘other' is I've got AIDS.”

“With me, it's just this,” I said, nodding at the bottle. “The
AIDS thing, I understand that's not so good.”

“No, not so good.” He pulled on the quart. “Lucky healthy you,” he said. Held up the beer. “But this shit, bro, and the harder stuff, they will kill you over time just as dead.”

“I feel like I'm dying inside.”

Brodey drank, wiped his mouth, said: “In which part of you?”

“Every part,” I said. And added: “My heart especially.” Then I explained and Jim listened patiently to the whole litany of my complaints, the beatings from my mother, my early schoolyard soul-murders at the hands of molesters and my conversion to thuggish violence, my catastrophic failure to realize my gifts as a writer, my disillusioning experiences as a soldier, my disastrous inability to find love with a woman, especially my betrayal of true love with Anna, my ruined Ivy League career, my blackout bride and abandoned baby daughter. I spoke at length about Isadora.

When I was done, he said, simply: “That's not it.”

“What d'ya mean?”

“I mean all that you just said, that's not why you're out here ‘dying inside.'”

“No?” I laughed angrily. “Well, then, what the hell is it?”

“It's this,” he said, hoisting the bottle. “This and nothing else but this. And this,”—surveying the park with his eyes—“here in hell is what ‘this' gets you.” Then added: “Gets us.”

It began to rain. He snapped opened the umbrella. The bat-wing flaps hung broken-necked. We huddled for protection.

“Quick! Lift your feet!”

A soaked rat the size of a cat charged under, rain streaming from its coat.

“Yeah. That's very beautiful,” said Brodey, shaking his head. “Fuggin' New York City.”

Quietly we sat and drank, listening to the rain.

“It's weird to hear you say that,” I said.

“What?”

“You know, about booze doing this. When I was at Columbia there was a reception for this visiting writer who came to give a talk to us grovelings. And I got, you know, totally sloshed.”

“As usual,” said Brodey.

“Right! I was sprawled out on this sofa with a dumb grin, cradling a bottle, and as he exited he passed me, looked, stopped, and said: ‘I hear you're a pretty good writer.' And I said: ‘Yeah? So?' You know: like a real wise guy. And he said, pointing at the wine, ‘But that is gonna get in your way.' I forgot about that until just now. I mean, you're the second writer with rep to point to the booze.”