Walking along West 8th Street in the Village on a touristy Friday night, a woman sidled

up to me. I’d only glanced at a poster stapled on a wooden barrier at a construction

site, not absorbing its words. “They’re hiring welfare caseworkers,” she said. “The test

is easy.” She patted my back platonically, walked away and merged with the nighttime

energy of whatever-seekers on 8th  Street. I figured to escape the army draft and get a

deferment.

I took the Lexington Avenue local from Astor Place uptown to 110th Street. I parlayed

my degree, the only requirement other than the civil service test, into a $5,850-a-year job.

Now, as a bona fide salaried man, I felt entitled to carry The New York Times to work

every day. I tried to read the paper on the subway, but the crush of folks gathered at the

stand-up pole by the doors left only one hand free. I hadn’t mastered the double-fold yet

as my father had as a suburban commuter to Chicago..

Further downtown from my Bleecker Street hotel stretched the Bowery. Its human

fetor prodded all Americans to maintain success-dreams, however distant and unat-

tainable, or else be dumped on the Bowery. In January, I’d been essentially ejected from

the Bowery as I stood in a cough-shrouded lobby filled with seated, over-coated  and


inert old men. The desk clerk told me to leave, my two American Tourister suitcases

wouldn’t fit in a room upstairs. The Bowery wasn’t an option. If the New York

Welfare Department hadn’t existed and the city had no poverty and the American Dream

had been attained by all citizens, then I would be a critically accepted novelist. Maybe I

could use the caseworker experience and write the Great American Novel. 

Though I probably flunked the welfare caseworker test, President Lyndon Johnson’s

War on Poverty program needed all the college graduates possible to oversee the poor.

An open sore in the capitalist system provided me a job. Otherwise, I’d still be busing

trays in New York University’s cafeteria, wiping tables where future attorneys, doctors

and investment bankers ate their meals.

I still lived in the bum hotel on Bleecker Street. I stood on the stoop, watching people

go to the Café Au Go Go, the Village Gate, and seeing them walk drunkenly past my

roost in Greenwich Village. I showered in the morning, washing off any hint of fear I

accumulated over my twenty-four years. Hysteria crawled on my skin, and I had to rid

myself of the pungent odor of failure. I hoped to expunge High Appointment Anxiety.

Today, fortunately, I’d no vomit-bedazzled tenant sprawled on the hallway bathroom to

avoid.

The first week was an introduction to welfare casework and procedures, pleasing me

since I’d get paid for doing nothing, a condition I had always aspired. The docent, her

well-informed presentation attempted to transform my acolyte standing. While others

took notes, I sat and stared through the window, admiring the slum-skyline. I felt

comfortable knowing a training unit with an experienced supervisor awaited me. Why



bother with hobgoblin abstractions when the actual recipient would be downstairs,

requesting emergency rent payment before the landlord evicted her. I’d handle it, no

problem.

I shit-kicked academia when I withdrew from a Midwestern graduate school in

January, traveling to NYC seeking real life. Damn, the leggy woman four seats away

looked great. Every woman wearing a miniskirt was a stewardess. I fantasized

prurience was my only flaw, but my self esteem still plunged into the abyss. It

would be hard to organize my brain, sequencing what I learned in a concise, orderly

fashion to earn a living. Traveling through East Harlem would pull me closer toward 

minority status, if only by association, letting me jettison my wasp history.

Lunchtime, the class breaking up in two and threes, others finding companions, but I

struck out alone. I found a Chinese restaurant on Lexington and drank my lunch. I sat in

a large booth, ordering shots of Jack Daniels, listening to loud and sometimes raucous

diners enjoying their pot-stickers and egg rolls. Drinking solitaires like myself were privy

to life’s true values. Those diners over there knew nothing. I read the paper, finally

learning the long-way, vertical-fold, creasing the newsprint with aplomb after three shots.

See. Look at me. Watch how serious I am reading The New York Times and the genius of

playwright Edward Albee.

After five shots, my uncertain gait took me to the cashier, who scrutinized me closely.

Who got drunk in a Chinese restaurant? Coming back ten minutes late, I interrupted the

instructor’s spiel.  She cast a threatening look until I flopped into an empty chair. The

chair nearly tipped over backward, my neck rolling around, hearing disconnected



babble.

Nothing had been written down in my lined notebook, though I saw others turning

pages as they soaked up applicable skills, enabling them to service their clients’ needs.

My stupor made social interchange impossible. My badge of cowardice: drunkenness.

Just as I started dozing off, thankfully the final class ended early Friday.

I’d a weekend until going to work in the training unit. I drank in my room at the

bottom of an airshaft, pissing in quart Rhinegold bottles, leaking all over the ratty

linoleum floor, stinking the bed sheets. But I made sure my sport coat stayed clean

and I polished my well-worn Thom McAn’s with as little piss as possible.

Monday, I walked up one flight to the unit, coffee in a cardboard cup in one hand, the

Times in the other. I was characteristically early and met the supervisor, Kay, a black

woman. Her southern accent, having moved from New Orleans, where she lived all her

life, put me at ease. Kay seemed winsome and sweet; too bad the rest of the city

hadn’t her charm.

Larry, a NYU graduate, sat to my right. I never told him I worked in the cafeteria. I

wished my co-workers would be dolts, never grasping the fundamentals of welfare

casework. I welcomed incompetence, for then my inferior standing wouldn’t be

highlighted in flashing neon. The other three in the unit were older and we spoke to one

another, though my wall of tension dissuaded them eventually.  

Kay explained home visits, periodic appointments to clients’ residences, determining

their continual assistance and when to issue special grants. She showed me a thick file of

Ms. T, mother of three, and her missing “paramour” as Kay referred to him. Roy, a



putative father, was responsible for child payments. One department sought these men,

though halfheartedly. Before I left, Kay defined poor mans’ fat, persons living in poverty,

eating cheap food loaded with sugar and saturated fat.

All caseworkers carried a black spiral notebook, making them conspicuous. Like a

schoolbook, I walked to ten o’clock class. The special occasion-sport jacket from the

once-upon-a-time suburb era became a uniform. I got off the train and speed-walked to

the 115th Street apartment of Ms. T, having never entered an officially designated home

of the poor.

Her railroad apartment, rooms connected to another from the front to the rear, I thought

beautiful. Had Ms. T put that framed portrait of John Kennedy of the wall just for white

boy me, letting me know her politics aligned with mine? Jesus’ picture next to it, had that

been a conscious display of Christian beliefs, allaying my fears? When I looked into her

intense and powerful eyes, I saw a hungry, anxious, proud woman of mental and

emotional substance. Blacks were people, too, suburbanites, and if it weren’t for welfare

programs black militias would turn suburbia into war zones.

The ur-welfare mother walked behind me as I viewed each room. I saw red and yellow

plastic curtains, a single green plant in a cracked pot, photos of her kids scotch taped

to the walls, a can of Crisco, a box of Cheerios on the kitchen counter, a dull bedspread

tucked neatly under the mattress, an ironing board with a pink blouse ready to be ironed,

a yellow, fractured ceiling and fissured walls, a Mickey Mouse windup alarm clock: I

wrote everything down as I sat in her living room.

She wanted a “linoleum rug, so named by the department, for the entire apartment, a



household item I didn’t know existed. Kay told me to ask where her husband Roy was.

Of course, I never considered him any of my business. Instead, I drank a hot cup of

instant coffee Ms.T served me, listening to her talk about wayward and often missing

children. I kept writing, as if doing a New York Herald-Tribune feature, trying to absorb

a stranger’s life, waiting for a word or phrase from Ms. T that would crack open the heart

of the world. I asked whether she needed clothes and, yes, she could use a warm sweater,

new shoes, and coats for her kids.

What was the difference between my mother purchasing clothes for me with a credit

card to a high-end store and Ms. T asking me for them? I’d been taken care of by my

parents’ bank account. Now I wished to benefit Ms. T with public assistance. Some

circuitry wired and connected to all lives, and now I had the power to make real the

linkage.

I desired to write “WELFARE FOR EVERYONE” on every surface in NYC. The

image of Christ in a business suit, proclaimed by Bruce Barton in The Man Nobody

Knows, had been my dad’s favorite read. If social Darwinism prevailed, Christ’s foot

would crush me, his eternal boot grinding my face in the gutter. I couldn’t contain my

anger as I left her apartment. “Damn white people!” I said walking to the subway station. 

I sat in the train, picturing myself as an avenger, twisting barbed wire across my father’s

chest, bleeding him slowly.

I used a Dictaphone as a putative novelist would. I turned home visits into fiction. I

used words such as “indefatigable” describing Ms. T’s face, “accoutrements” referring to

the furniture, “impecunious” noting her lack of cash on hand, “lumpenproletariat”



depicting her economic class, and even some portmanteau words spooled off my

tongue. A real breakthrough, this job, I thought, taking a long piss in the office

bathroom, staring at the tall urinal, certain I’d become the  American Zola.

By my second week, I ate lunch with Jenny outside on the grounds of a housing

project. She was in another training unit, the woman with the long legs during orientation

class. After class, she had brushed my hand walking out for lunch, though I ate alone.

When I mentioned the Bleecker Hotel, it stunned her. Jenny suggested I leave that stink-

hole and look in the Village Voice for a place to rent, telling me apartments were cheap

in her neighborhood.

The following week at work, Jenny asked whether I found a place. When I told her no

she said to meet her at the corner sandwich shop at lunch. I sat on a stool, eating a corn

beef and mustard sandwich, drinking Dr. Pepper, when Jenny entered. She ordered a

small container of potato salad and a Coke. A teenager played “Reach Out (I’ll Be

There)” by the Four Tops on the jukebox. Jenny stretched her legs out as we faced the

jukebox at the wall.

“Why don’t you come over tomorrow night for dinner,” she said. A girl did a double-

Dutch on the sidewalk, two friends swinging two jump ropes.

“My friend Harriet and her boyfriend will be there.” Levi Stubbs’s rough-hewn voice

traveled through my bones.

“I’d like that.” I lowered my eyes, looking at the abstract patterns in the tiled floor.

Three blue rhombuses disappeared after a moment.

“Harriet designs furniture and is a part-time painter,” she said, “and Frank’s a potter



and wielder.”

They both worked with their hands: they must love touching. I looked at Jenny and

couldn’t decipher her serious face, the concern she appeared to show. Had she my best

interests in mind? She gave me the address, about six blocks from the hotel. Levi

Stubbs’s voice sang in my mind. I never saw anything through, hanging around until the

mission succeeded. A real threat, this adult business about seeing everything to

conclusion.  

Wednesday, and I walked to First Avenue, between 7th and 8th streets, knocking on the

second d-floor apartment. Jenny opened the door and invited me in. I looked around,

seeing a claw-legged bathtub in the kitchen. “It’s Frank’s apartment.”

“You take a hot bath and make a tub of instant coffee,” I said. Jenny, Harriet and Frank

laughed, and I let out a big nervous laugh, stopping them cold. I’d amassed so much

isolation that to living-in-the-flesh persons my social graces sounded violent and

unpleasant. My belligerent spit burst through the air. Thankfully, Jenny poured us Chianti

and that camouflaged my panic.

We listened to Eric Burden and the Animals, Yardbirds, Rolling Stones, Beatles,

Them and the Kinks. “Brits have better music,” said Frank.

I agreed. “They understood the American blues better than U.S. bands. We listened to

Jerry Lee Lewis too much.” No one challenged me, so I added, “USA, Union of South

Africa, that’s our country.” A hush filled the apartment.

Jenny and Frank danced, while Harriet told me her parents got married with A.J. Muste

conducting the service. “He was a famous pacifist,” she said.



I asked, “Could he help me evade the draft?”

She said, “Resist.” Flippancy made serious discussion impossible, a state of affairs I

liked to foment.

“He was a Trotskyist, organizing unions in the Depression,” she said. “He organized

the peace march from San Francisco to Moscow.”   

“They came through the quad in college. I was tempted to go along with them, throw

my life away.” A slight frown grazed her face.

“Come upstairs sometime. I’ve got one of Muste’s books,” Harriet said. Sure. Why

not? I’m scared to death of you upstairs, that’s why not.

We sat at a table in the living room. We ate pasta, with good sauce, a big salad with

radishes, anchovies and olives, along with French bread. Afterward, Frank played guitar,

singing two Dylan songs from his second album. Finishing the wine, he and Harriett split

upstairs, leaving me alone with Jenny. I’d never been with a woman before, at least not

like this at this hour with nothing to cloak direct one-on-one experience.

We listened to Murray the K on FM radio. I said the last song, Bob Dylan’s “Masters

of War,” was the greatest anti-war song ever. Jenny said her husband volunteered for

Vietnam. That quieted me. I beamed paranoia: She was a government agent spying on

anti-war sympathizers. Fear, its pain like a rheumatoid arthritis attack, shot through me. I

never questioned her or asked about his duties. I wanted to bolt to the hotel. Why did

every radio song have double entendres?

She told me I could sleep here, with her in Frank’s bed.

“We’d go to work together,” she said. Cutting off the angle, the mongoose always



defeated the cobra. I was reluctant.  “He can run but he can’t hide,” Joe Louis said of

Max Schmeling before knocking him out. Barbara Stanwyck in Sorry, Wrong Number

came to mind. She played a bedridden hypochondriac, who overheard a telephone

conversation about two men plotting to kill an unmarried woman. I clearly saw myself as

her character when a man entered Stanwyck’s celluloid bedroom, about to kill her in the

final scene. The victim, female or male: either one fitted my situation.

And Jacques-Louis David’s painting, “Death of Marat,” commemorating his friend’s

death by Charlotte Corday in his bath. He’d been blindsided no less than Stanwyck’s

character had. Both trapped, incapable of fleeing. Marat had written “The Friend of the

People,” justifying violent revolution. Hadn’t I sided with Castro’s revolution, supporting

the overthrow of a fascist regime? And couldn’t Jenny peer into my mind, trained by her

CIA husband, to read my thoughts? Was her hubby in the Green Berets or Navy SEALs,

known assassination outfits? Paranoia, sort of supreme narcissism, taken it to its ultimate

climax: sex and murder. No slouch when it came to mental disfigurement, my life.

She lay naked and I hadn’t taken off my Jockey shorts beneath the sheet. I avoided

foreplay and its offspring, coitus, by telling her about my faux sex life. Too scared to slip

the hard dangle into her, I explained that my genitals hadn’t lived up to their full

potential.  “My Jockey’s kept everything from growing, they’ve been too tight for fifteen

years.”

Four A.M. and the boredom of reciting my anhedonistic history fatigued me. Her

breath, Chiati and Dentyne: Lower East Side perfume. She tried to take the Jockey’s off

but I fought her, grabbing and twisting her wrist, saying my penis wasn’t large because



the underwear was a size too small. I never considered that before, how Jockey’s the

world over could stunt male growth. She tried again, but I held her off. I figured I could

hold out until daylight when we’d have to go to work.

But when a boom box below on First Avenue blared Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the

Night,” its convergence, forces conspired against the status quo. I capitulated and took off

the shorts. Synchronicity couldn’t be taken for granted, even though I fashioned myself a

Marxist, having only read the Communist Manifesto. Dooby-Dooby-Doo: I had

no defense against scat. I thought sex was clichéd, it had been done to death. I slipped

inside her after she pulled my hard-on toward the promised land, and soon lost

everything.

In the morning, she mentioned Frank was going to Wisconsin tomorrow, that he’d

be away for the summer and needed to sublet his apartment. Did I want to rent it for

$90 a month through September? She massaged my buttocks as she spoke, drawing me

close to her. Of course, I’d rent it, knowing she lived two flights above me. Women on

top from now on. I envisioned the sexual astride architecture, our new arrangement. We

stood hip to hip, holding the pole of the crowded train, striding in unison as we walked to

the office.

When I saw Jenny later that morning on the stairs, she looked haggard, telling me she

felt empty. Strange, I had an extra bounce today, invigorated by manhood, hokey as that

sounded. I joined the ranks with conquering males throughout history, from the earliest

progenitors to the present. But stud-hood quickly flagged after seeing the chaos of

files and uncompleted forms, yesterday’s New York Times, stubbed-out Marlboro butts



in my ashtray, and unread letters from clients..

Later, Kay told me one of my clients was downstairs needing emergency money to

keep Consolidated Edison from turning off her electricity. The desperate woman and I

walked with fast-paced sweat to 125th Street, and I paid the bill just before the office

closed. Her nose bled from high blood pressure. She recovered on a bench and I said

goodbye.

I didn’t go back to the office because it was closed so I went to the hotel, packed my

things and lugged the suitcases to Frank’s apartment. I drank Rhinegolds, listened to Jean

Shepherd on WOR-AM as he extemporized on life growing up in Hammond, Indiana and

was a raconteur of humorous anecdotes on the human condition. He brought nostalgic

tears to my eyes, not as in wistfulness for the past. I had none. Shepherd’s tales, for me,

were emboldened with the desire for degradation and depravity. Who was there to contest

that? I lived alone.

I stroked my putz after finding a passage in Frank’s Tropic of Cancer, jaunty drops of

semen wetting the pages. I stayed up late, beer-drunk, and phoned in sick the next

morning, Friday. I needed a long weekend; this love and work regimen wiped me out.

That night, Jenny knocked. She wanted to go to Slug’s, a bar on East 3rd Street. I told

her I called in sick with stomach flu and couldn’t make it to work. I had clients waiting

all day downstairs, she said.

“Why the no show?” she asked.

“Too drunk and wiped out, I guess,” I said, getting closer to the truth.

Slug’s was jammed when we arrived. We found a table in the back, and drank beer,



both of us observing the packed house. How singles entered, drank beers or shots, then

left with a partner. She watched the males, I the females. I talked about Vietnam, who

really killed Kennedy, police brutality at anti-war demos, the comedian Lenny Bruce’s

legal persecution, a new Lower East Side band, the Fugs, but nothing interested her. At

the bar drinkers sang the long track of Dylan’s “Sad Eyes Lady of the Lowlands.”

Lust swept across her face as she stared past me, watching sexy guys hustle females.

I walked to the front, putting nickels in the jukebox, and “Sally Go Round the Roses” by

the Jaynettes played five straight times. That slickness failed to stir her when I got back

and told her to listen to the poetry.

At midnight, as newcomers still jammed Slugs, we walked out, barely squeezing

through tight knots of long- and short-haired people. “It’s a happening place,” she said,

our hips sometimes touching as we walked back. I never heard that phrase before, though

I knew what she meant but changed the subject, telling her Tompkins Square Park

shouldn’t have iron railings along its sidewalks. “They’re repressive,” I said. We kissed

and went to separate apartments.

Work dragged on, and my write-ups of home visits came back marred by the typists’

failure to appreciate my writing talents. They couldn’t spell many “literary” words, and

my neo-Faulknerian stream proved impossible to decipher on Ditaphones. I asked

Larry to help me out since he had organized work habits, buying manila folders for each

client, alphabetizing them in his desk drawer. He had time to explain how the system

operated, though for me it would always remain opaque. “Always keep up to date,” he

said, a bureaucratic 11th Commandment. Faster assumed some basic skill level that I



lacked.

My dad wrote, saying how brave I was to work in East Harlem, but I shrugged it off,

thinking bravery had nothing to do with welfare protocol. I had copied in tiny letters an

epigram from Martial on the back of his business card: “The wretched may well despise

and laugh at death; but he is braver far who can live wretched.” I pulled it out of my

wallet after reading his letter.

On Friday after work, while walking to the subway, Larry invited me to drink wine

with a friend who had a studio on the Upper East Side. The living room had a double bed

as its sole furniture. We finished off the Riesling quickly and I wanted more, or at least a

couple of shared six packs. Instead, the two gave me an odd look, as if they expected

something. I was surprised, thinking we’d get drunk and ride back to our respective

abodes. Larry complained about his old girlfriend, telling me she wanted too much from

him. His friend agreed, and said women pressured him. Hell, I just laid, so what had I to

bitch about. They stopped talking, struggling to see some gesture on my part.

I lied, explaining that I’d a midnight date. With a woman, I stipulated. Sorry. I left

them in the bare studio, their faces red, shocked that I wouldn’t spend the night together

with them. No pull my daisy. From that point on, Larry and I rarely spoke to each other at

the office.

Once, at work, Jenny casually mentioned that she and Harriet had weekend

reservations at a dude ranch. That drove me crazy, thinking she’d be away from me with

male strangers. I bought Playboy, masturbating as many times I could that weekend,

crudding up the pages with neurotic sperm. Between handjobs, I drank Rheingolds,



hearing the Lovin’ Spoonful sing “Summer in the City” on AM radio, waiting for Jenny’s

arrival Sunday evening.

I stood naked in the hot, groggy apartment, pulling back the curtain a bit to see Jenny

get out the car with a guy. A Mercury Comet parallel-parked outside the building: it had

to be them opening the downstairs door. I couldn’t be sure because the poor angle

distorted certainty: I wanted belief, not knowing whether she walked up the stairs with

him. Doubt: Was it really Kim Novak free-falling in Hitchcock’s Vertigo? I’d have to see

the movie again. Jenny starred in my movie, depriving me of virginity at twenty-four. I

expected loyalty but she refused to play that game.

Later that week, Jenny knocked on my door. Her brows furled as she guided me to the

couch, pushing me gently back with one hand, unzipping me with the other. My cock

grew in her mouth and I felt the blood-rush of semen move closer to the Holland tunnel.

The moment before release, my cock lost its stiffness. “There,” she said, patting my

softie, getting up and leaving the apartment. Thirty minutes later, I felt horny. I

realized she plugged my urethra with her tongue to stanch my pleasure. I ripped

out the Playboy centerfold and blew one off. Jenny was quite adroit.

I thought about Leopold Bloom cuckolded by Blazes Boylan but quickly fell from that

lofty perch. How many Blazes around NYC and beyond had un-husbanded Jenny have?

After reading a tiny notice in the Village Voice about a magazine called Entrails

soliciting erotic poetry for its next issue, I sat down at the kitchen table, writing, re-

writing, scraping pages, until I had written the opening sentence. “Lady Cunt Vortex

gobbled Cock Forever off his feet.” A cosmic fuck prose poem written in one sitting. I



mailed it to the editor, Gene Bloom, at a Lower East Side address. Bloom, two blocks

away, would read my untitled work.

His geographic expanse from me was greater than the short emotional distance from

me to Leopold Bloom, cuckolded by Blazes Boylan. Visiting Gene, something I thought

other poets did, entailed familiarity. I wouldn’t do that any more than go again with

Jenny to Slug’s. A pickup launching pad wasn’t what I needed. No. I wanted to stay in

the apartment where I could have Jenny all to myself. Like capitalists, I hated competi-

tion.

Larry’s supreme orderliness and a counterintuitive knack for bureaucratic skills

rewarded him, and he moved into a regular unit. The guy who replaced him, Joey, had

little trouble with casework. He informed me his first day that amphetamine never

bothered him.

“The brain cells always grow back no matter how many black beauties I take.” He told

me he needed some backing for a light show, that it would be spectacular, “a blast,” Joey

said.

“Strobes, speakers, amplifiers, monitors, oscilloscopes, slides, swirls, projectors, trips.”

He talked fast about the venture. “Even if you only invest one hundred dollars, you’ll get

double back, at least,” he said.

The following day, I handed him five Jacksons and he invited me to come celebrate at

his apartment on East 9th Street that Saturday afternoon.

“We’ll have a good time at my place,” he said. Daylight suggested a harmless way to

kill a summer afternoon. I could handle it. I’d be there. Dylan sang “Sad Eyed…” as



I knocked on the door. Marijuana smoke poured from the apartment. Joey greeted me,

smiling, others laughing and loud in the small apartment. They glanced at me, grinning,

moving their bodies to Dylan’s poetry. I was so frightened by the claustrophobic Others

that I couldn’t even smell pot smoke. Or was it oregano they smoked? I got the feeling

they wanted to show that Joey had friends, not just caseworkers in the training unit. He

could be trusted. 

They talked about how high they were but I felt nothing. Joey beat me out of

Jacksons and was too cheap to share real weed with me. Walking into the kitchen, the six

of them left me standing alone. I saw them pressed together, jumping up and down, the

Temptations spinning around the turntable, loud and strong. The pot-cigars were held

over their heads while I stood alone. I forced myself, against my natural solitude, into the

kitchen but then they chose to leave, and I smoked a Marlboro.

“The show will be tonight,” Joey said, changing the record to Jefferson Airplane. “I

rented a hall off Union Square.” He wrote the address on a napkin.

“I’ll be there,” I said, crumpling the damp napkin into my loose change pocket.

Anti-magneticism overwhelmed me. I stood apart, moved quickly to the door and left. I

thought Joey played as if he were a hippie, all the while a hustler. Their long hair looked

like wigs, the noise emitted from their mouths echoic and indecipherable. I had spoken a

few sentences to Joey, the others were immunized against me like I was the plague. I left

the door ajar, not wanting the partygoers to hear the click. I didn’t bother going to the

light show. I never tripped so, if I went, my isolation would amount to bad vibes.

Back at my place, I ate Dinty Moore beef stew and a can of green beans, drinking



Tropicana orange juice from the carton. After eating, I lay in Frank’s bed reading

Lawrence Durrell’s Justine where I’d creased the page. I loved the novel’s introspection

as Durrell retreated into the past, autobiography merged with fiction, making clearer

personal truth, examining Justine the ex-lover. I sank my hindbrain into the novel.

Frank’s paperbacks lined a small bookshelf at the head of the bed. I wouldn’t have read

the Alexandra Quartet had it not been for Jenny. As I turned the pages, I asked myself,

Had Frank boffed Jenny on these sheets? I held Justine over my head, reading on my

back, the small lamplight needed since I kept the windows facing First Avenue closed.   

A hot summer afternoon, I forgot Joey and losing the Jacksons.

I attended a poetry reading by Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg’s longtime friend and

lover. The reading was held in the basement of St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery. Peter

read very fast, itemizing everything from sex to cooking, a verbatim yet musical

inventory of things personal. He never flinched: all was material. I never understood

homosexual lovemaking until Peter’s clinical description, how it was as common as

drinking a cup of coffee.

I stood at the rear of the packed space, scanning the crowd, landing upon Ginsberg

who looked at me. His eyes locked on mine. My eyes panned back to Peter, watching

how emphatically he flipped the loose pages, delivering his lines, barely pausing to catch

his breath. I checked back to Allen, checking his reactions to Peter’s poetry. Still

Ginsberg’s eyes stared at me. Was it my wrinkly collared sport coat that gave me away?

Had my Midwestern taint been obvious to him?

I wanted to rush over to Allen, detailing my loss of virginity, connecting Jenny, Peter,



Allen and myself into one immaculate, explainable skein. I felt his Kaddish-eyes pierce

mine, knowing if I approached him afterwards, he’d respond and my creative juices

would begin to flow, marking a personal genesis. But, after the audience applauded

and drifted towards Peter and Allen, chatting and getting their autographs, I withdrew

into my familiar husk, unwilling to shuck old habits.

When I told Jenny about the reading, she asked why I hadn’t invited her. We stood

outside my door, and she asked if she could come in. I wanted to read Ginsberg’s

“America,” that last line: “America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.” But I

didn’t and Jenny sprawled on the couch, those bare, gangly legs flaunting me. I threw

myself on top of her, grappling with her skirt and found it wasn’t difficult to raise it past

her navel. Silence except our breaths.

She resisted, then told me, “No, please don’t,” but I forced myself into her. Maybe if

the world wasn’t so personal, if I hadn’t peered into her eyes, I could’ve lasted longer,

giving her an orgasm. She gathered herself afterwards, and walked to the door. “Try

asking me out next time,” she said.

My second real letter I got in the box downstairs was from a friend, Jack, a college

friend. He came from a working-class background and when I excoriated the bourgeoisie

with frantic-talking jeremiads against the middleclass, we struck a similar discordant

chord. He’d been editor of the college newspaper and gave me a column. We shared

interest in Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. He was

now broke in Mexico and starving, living in a small, jerrybuilt apartment atop a roof in

Mexico City. Could I send him money?



I sent a $100 money order and explained that I was a welfare caseworker doling out

checks to the underclass. I withdrew the money from an East Harlem bank. I mentioned

having a bank account in East Harlem to a caseworker and he thought I was crazy. Why

not bank in near your residence? I countered: Why don’t you bank up here? He turned

and never spoke to me again.    

I soon received a heavily wrapped package from Mexico. He told me to swallow the

worm after I drank the slightly psychedelic mescal. “Get out of that death trap and come

down where things are really real,” he wrote. He informed that mescal originated in

Oaxaca, the region where the Zapotecs originated nearly 4,000 years ago. People who

believed they had descended from directly from rocks, trees, and jaguars couldn’t be

more authentic. After slowing draining the bottle, I heard the Lovin’ Spoonful sing

“Summer in the City” for the hundredth time. What commercial trash. Mescal wised me

up. I switched it off and listened to the traffic’s musical drumbeats. It massaged my brain.

I felt rejuvenated. That lasted until I got off the subway and trudged to the office.

Ms. T was downstairs, wanting to move. I told her I’d write a special grant of $960 for

everything. New furniture, everything. I felt proud of myself. I told Kay I was glad to

get deferred from the draft. These special grants I requested always came through and it

satisfied me because it served the interests of the poor rather than the wealthy class. I felt

relieved knowing Ms. T got the money from a caseworker who had stayed out of

Vietnam.

Fay looked surprised, telling me casework doesn’t give you a deferment. Fear

raced through my belly like poisonous snake venom. My hands shook and I grabbed a



Marlboro, sucking its nicotine, my quick fix tranquillizer. Eventually, I’d get that draft

notice and have to fight in the Vietnam jungle. I’d been so ignorant, thinking welfare

casework would get me exempted from murder or maimed by land mines. Special grants

were worthwhile, slaughtering peasants wasn’t, but the USA had different opinions.

The very idea of standing bare-assed naked in a jungle clearing, bathing in front of

Americans and the Viet Cong\scared the hell out of me. A newspaper article stated

Simbas, fighting Europeans in the Congo, were warriors so armed with revolutionary zeal

there were convinced bullets couldn ‘t kill them, invisible to colonial powers. That I

could get behind. But, Vietnam, forget it. How could I squirm out of the draft.

Fay pressed me to seek Ms. K’s consort, her putative husband, because the investi-

gative unit pressured her to find him. Glad to get some morning air after the beer-

pollution the previous night holed up alone in darkness.

I entered a small candy store next door to Ms. T’s apartment building. I asked the

Puerto Rican owner behind the counter about the whereabouts of Mr. T. The man looked

sacred and remained silent, gazing at a man seated on a folding chair to my left as I went

into the shop.

“Hey, you looking for me?” the man said. He told me his name.

“Yeah.” He reached out his hand and shook it. I smelled liquor on his breath, but he

hadn’t slurred his words and stood without wobbling.

“Glad to meet you,” he said. “I hear you’re doing right with my old lady.” I looked at

the gregarious face, how many expressions flicked at me in quick succession.

“Want a beer. I can get you anything you want around here,” he said, sweeping his



arm towards the window. Clearly, he hadn’t meant eating free chocolate bars.

“I needed something sweet so I came in here. On a whim,” I said. I figured Roy

extorted the owner, or maybe ran numbers from his store. But what did I know.

“There’s all kinds of sweetness, if you catch my drift,” Roy said, smiling big. “In this

world, if there’s anything you want, I’m your man.”

Both arms spread eagle-wide, taking in all of Harlem. Very tempting, insider Roy. Had

his fingers pointed toward Ms. T’s apartment or had that been my imagination.

“Thanks for offering but I only want a tootsie roll.” I paid the proprietor, whose

trembling hand gave me change.

“Come back anytime, you hear,” Roy said, sitting back down and relaxing.

“I hear you, man,” I said, walking out into the late morning sun.

When I told Fay I met Mr. T and never confronted him about his legal obligations to

support Ms. T’s children, she cried. “How could you do this to me?” she said.

I made her look irresponsible to an in-house legal department. My outright admission

that I willfully disregarded her instructions baffled her. She stood near my desk,

speechless, then registered poise and resumed work at her desk. I assumed she’d

have to report my misconduct to her supervisor, a man who had already chastised me for

my “incapacitated reports” of home visits. My only hope lay with the strong city

employees’ union if it came to my discharge for incompetence.

Jenny taped a handwritten note to my door. Jenny wanted to go out, letting me decide

where. The Café Au Go Go seemed right. I telephoned Jenny and bought a bottle of

Thunderbird wine on the way over, taking sips from the brown paper bag as we walked.



“You can be awkward sometimes,” she said, my right arm clutching at her elbow, “but

other times you’re gentle. I never know which guy shows up.”

I never had a real date until Jenny. I couldn’t account for the spasticity. An

undiagnosed cerebral palsy victim? Rather her elbow, I wrapped my arm around her

waist, chugging T-Bird as we entered the club. She removed it.

Richie Havens and Otis Spann headlined. I sat a few feet away as Havens sang,

“Handsome Johnny” a spine shivering anti-war song. Jenny ordered a bourbon and soda

and I paid for it. The bill got soggier after I spilled a little T-Bird. I handed the cash to the

frowning waitress. Jenny scoffed, trying to make the nighttime sparkle. Otis Spann

played piano, sipping from a paper cup. More Big T, the explosive chemical high made

me talk loud to Jenny, who rubbed my arm. I order two beers, both for myself.

I shout-sang “Drinking Wine Spodi odie,” as Spann sang a blues number. He didn’t

appear bothered by my vulgar nightclub intrusion. My song came from the forties and I

only knew the four-word lyric. “ ‘Drinking Wine Spodie Odie’,” I shouted into Jenny’s

ear. She gave me a blank look. “From On the Road, ya know.” I drank from the bottle,

not exactly club policy. When Spann finished the set, he walked and sang into the

kitchen, all of us clapping and yelling. Jenny got up to leave. I wanted to stay but

she helped me out of my seat, guiding me outside.

She led the way, clearing a path for me since I couldn’t walk straight and kept

bumping into people. She helped me with the key, walking me to bed, telling me to sit

down while she took off my shoes. She tucked me in between Frank’s sheets. When I

woke up to piss, I hadn’t any memory of what happened after Havens’s set. I couldn’t



find my way back to bed, so I slept on the grungy couch, drawing my trench coat

over me. I woke up, shivering, and looked at the radio clock: 10:30. I had to make

another sick day call, dialing Fay’s number. No answer. My absenteeism irked her. She’d

cover for me but I knew her patience would soon end. I re-dialed until I realized it was

Saturday. “What a trouper,” I laughed loudly. Sarcasm and hangovers went well together.

A week or so passed and Jenny hadn’t put in an appearance except during working

hours. Then she never looked me in the eyes, and I felt ashamed. She in no way was the

motherly type. I was the negative space in Henry Moore’s sculpture. Nothingness

incarnate. I took a bath in the kitchen tub, and she knocked. I knew her faint sound. I

could’ve opened the door, wet and naked, inviting her in. More knocks. But wasn’t that a

cliché comparable to the pizza delivery guy knocking on a single woman’s door, only

with a different rate of exchange than money?

I stopped washing myself, knowing she would hear water splash. Instead of soap, now

simple fear sheathed my body. “Victor, are you there?” I took shallow breaths as if she

were an enemy combatant, my life in jeopardy. I triumphed: she gave up. One helluva

way to win a war. An intern once said to me in Roosevelt Hospital’s ER: What are you

afraid of?     

I hadn’t seen Harriet except occasionally on the stairs and then only minor league

chitchat ensued. She invited me upstairs to her apartment. I sat down and drank

herbal tea. On the wall hung a painting of a naked man.

“Recognize him?” she asked, sipping Hibiscus tea.

“No, not without his clothes.” I gulped the cup down.



“It’s Frank,” she said. “It’s my first nude and hope it won’t be the last.”

I talked about the difference between nakedness and nudity, heading off the

conversational flow. I had powerful effects, all negative, over females, the opposite of

Franz Liszt. He even liked coitus with wart women who begged him for sex.

“How would you like to pose for me?”

“You do good work for an occasional painter,” I said. I saw how she gave Frank’s

region between navel and upper thighs cubist distortion. No old school, single

perspective for Harriet. He looked like he had a few too many lingams.

“See the Shiva poster on my door.” I nodded my head, but even Shiva had only one

phallus. Harriet admired men with erections to spare. That door again. How could I

compete with Frank and Shiva when Jenny knocked?

“I’m waiting for Jenny to meet me downstairs.”

Harriet smiled, and said, “She’s worth the wait, I assume.”

Lying is easy around Harriet. Without trying, I mastered it. I didn’t worry

about Harriet corroborating it. Frank probably lied to her all the time.

Later that week, I found a large envelope stuffed in my mailbox. Entrails: The

Magazine of Happy Obscenity arrived. I saw my name in the table of contents. I knew

only two other poets: Clarence Major and Aram Saroyan. Mine was the only untitled

poem. I read my name in the contributors’ page in back. BUCHANAN, THAT’S WHO.

When you don’t socialize and were a basic recluse, you’ll always get capital letters

screaming your anonymity.

Suddenly, the end of September: Frank returned from Wisconsin. I had to look for



another place. He went bat-guano when he saw the kitchen floor.

“Why so dirty? Are you that filthy? I bet you don’t wash your hands after shitting.”

“As a matter of fact, you’re right. I used your washcloths.” I couldn’t help myself. He

turned beet red and shook his fist at me.

“Why don’t you act real around people?” I blushed. Animal fear pierced the pit of my

stomach. People incessantly evaluated me.

“I don’t act, I react,” I said. “John Wayne said that about acting.”

“He was a real man. And what about reacting to the filth you’ve accumulated?”

He probably contacted Harriet who knew from Jenny my living conditions. Even

though it would be impossible, my ideal life would to live alone in rooms. Neither

utopian nor hopeless, I was an Impossiblist. Eternal verities were clichés, lies, but

couldn’t I have just one tiny fugitive truth lurking underground, creeping into

reality for me alone. Like the equivalent of a guaranteed national income so that no

citizen fell below basic emotional self-sufficiency. Was that why I claimed I

was a socialist?

We had strong union and had once picketed the department. I walked that line with

them. I voted for Hal, the supervisor next to my unit, for union rep, but for the wrong

reason. He told me he could see air. Apparently, he’d no regard for my opinions about

work-related issues, figuring I tripped out on acid too much. When I told him that was

a feat I’d want to do, his eyes lit up, morphing to goofy, unlike his nine to five work face.

But idiosyncrasy had redeeming qualities. What had Hal known about me other than I

was a natural-born free spirit, off all free association charts. Sacrificing coherence for



anarchical thought, I fancied myself a poet, that I had a future. I read Frank’s book, The

Ginger Man, Sebastian Dangerfield’s subversive sexual exploits, undermining middle-

class life. His aggression appealed to me. I even had affinity for the sociopath Richard

Speck: torturer, rapist, and murderer of eight nurses earlier this summer. Of course,

aggression revealed itself in many ways, like when I received the Letter of Blood, my

draft notice.

I now lived on 7th Street between Avenues B and C. Abandoned and stripped cars were

the main attraction. My apartment was clean, in a good building. I had a folding chair and

a mattress on the floor. I gave Jenny my new address. I listened to Murray the K on FM

radio. Bob Dylan and Beatles songs galore. I left for work as usual.

“Who’s Buchanan? Where’s Buchanan?” the man said. It was just after lunch and I

smoked a Marlboro. A stack of files needed overdue attention. I saw a man wearing a

wrinkled and sweaty white shirt. It made him look he’d work harder than those who

didn’t need deodorant.

“Right here,” I said, raising my arm, taxi-hailing style. He waved a file above my head.

“This is outrageous, this special grant to Ms. T. Do you realize this had to get

administrative approval.” He jerked his thumb upward.

“So? Did it get signed?” I said.

“Yeah, it got signed.” He sounded like Moe Stooge from a Three Stooges film.

“Good. Now her family will have new furniture and clothes.”

“What’s wrong with the old stuff? Do you think we’re Sweden?”

“We should be,” I said. “We wouldn’t be in Vietnam then.” The guy wanted to hang



me, his eyes hateful, but he dashed back to his office upstairs.

“I don’t know about you, Mr. Buchanan,” said Kay, her kind and dismissive eyes

watering up. Affectionate tears? How long had I left here? Could the union hold back the

saber-toothed tigers from the upstairs mob?

On a nasty November day, I reported to the Armed Forces Induction Center on

Whitehall Street downtown. Three nights before, Jenny and her brawny, mustachioed

friend came to my apartment. Jenny’s boyfriend, Adam, passed a joint around. I told

them my plight and he said, “Ask to see a psychiatrist right away.”

“What do I say to him?” I smelled the marijuana but wasn’t high.

“Tell him you’re a drug addict,” Adam said. Jenny nodded in agreement.

They laughed and I laughed too.

“My husband is missing in action,” she said. “You don’t want that.” She could’ve saved

me lots of paranoia by telling me sooner. We each inhaled deeply and I felt a buzz.

Murray the K talked about John Lennon, the volume turned low. We smoked it down

to the nubbin. Adam swallowed it. They headed to California tomorrow. I hugged her.

Those sweet breasts.

I raised my hand when the sergeant asked the crucial question. I went upstairs and sat

down, a man in civilian clothes behind the desk.

He asked, “What wrong with you?”

“I’m a junkie,” I said.

“Have you ever been in a mental hospital?”

“Not yet. Hope to some day.” He didn’t laugh.



“What drugs are you on?”  I could have my choice?

“Heroin.” I pronounced it, “Hero-in.”

“How many times do you use it?” About as many as a man pisses, I wanted to say,

holding back my contempt.

“Usually three times. Four if I get sick.” Like right now, puke.

“That’ll be all.” He wrote down his evaluation.

Three weeks later, I received another notice to report to Whitehall Street.

“I want to see a psychiatrist.” Upstairs again with a different doctor.

“You’re here for more questions.” He looked stern.

“I didn’t tell the other psychiatrist I was a homosexual.”

He wrote on a sheet of paper and said to see the major downstairs. He gave me the

room number but I asked for directions.

“How many times?” the major asked. I hadn’t expected that.

“A lot,” I said, conjuring satyrs.

“Five times?”

“More than that.”

“Ten times?”

“More.

”Twenty-five times?”

“Much more,” thinking how great being a real homosexual would be.

Incrementally, the numbers rose and when he reached five hundred, I gave him a break

and answered:



“About that many.”

He wrote that down.

“And the entire Army is homosexual.”

“That’ll be all.”

I was delighted that the major thought homosexuality vile, perhaps contagious.

I had tacked a Nietzsche quote on my apartment wall: “At times one remains faithful to

a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.” Ye swarm of insipid

militarists.

After dark, I celebrated. I got off at Times Square and strode Broadway. Winking

neon bordered a theater marquee held my attention: Days of Sin and Nights of

Nymphomania. Yes, there was a Danish movie called that. “Beyond Booze”

the poster read.

After opening credits, my moping phallus stiffened to full alert. But priapic

voyeurism gave way to flaccid boredom. When would I see nakedness? Penetration,

spumes of manhood? The dubbed voices out of sync, women stripped down

to bra, panties, and black hose. Why the partying without an orgy? I deserved more than

insipid titillation after declaring myself unfit for universal soldering. Toward the end

a fully clothed man stood in a corner, back to the camera, and did a terrible rendition of a

guy masturbating. I refused the Great Patriotic War. Where were the Moments of

Reckoning? Ejaculations. Big Climax. Release.

Drizzle fell on Times Square as I stood beneath the marquee, wondering where to go.

What should’ve happened never did. I’d never return to that job.   



Lone men walked into the theater. I wanted to pull them aside, tell them the truth.

Forget about it, it’s a complete waste of time. Every man had to find out for himself.

On 42nd Street, I saw a young Spanish-speaking couple. Yeah, I’ll go down to Mexico

and drink mescal with Jack. What would I lose except disappointment?