Waterfront Journals (9 page)

Woman in Coffee Shop

SAN FRANCISCO

Man I'll tell you … they wouldn't take me down under a hundred grams … shit my habit was big when I walked in there … the first day they tried to take me down ten grams … hell they can't get away with that, with that new law that came into effect … I threw myself down on the floor and started screaming: Aghhh, uhhnn, I'm sick, I'm sick. Shit man they can't take me down till I'm ready. Ya know today I checked out my file got a look at it and it said I don't give in at all … like when I'm in an argument about something even when it becomes ridiculous, you know like when I know I'm wrong, I still give reasons and arguments no matter what I don't admit that I'm wrong. It said a lot of other shit too like about when I went to jail for the first time I walked in there and I was scared cause they got a lotta big women … they sit around and as soon as the door opens they say: Aahhhaaa, look at this young turkey look at her, so small and young. And they start laying for ya man just like it is in men's prisons. Five broads holding your arms and legs while one goes down on your box … especially if you're small like I am ya know man. Like Louie now he had a lotta problems with that kinda stuff cause he's small, shit he had to bang someone on their head with a board soon as he got in jail cause otherwise they'll getcha … hell he even got in trouble for settin fire to someone with hair tonic or aftershave or some shit like that … ha ha … I shoulda looked around for a two-by-four to carry around everywhere with me …

Boy in YMCA

SAN FRANCISCO

I arrived here by Greyhound … I had one of them Ameri-pass tickets … it was good for two months. I started out in New York City … figured they wouldn't be able to follow me if I rode the bus … I didn't stay in one city too long and I'd decide what direction I was gonna go in only after I was at the bus station but they would always find out where I was going and follow me. I'd get on the bus choose a seat by myself and look out the window. At first the people who got on looked normal, like I didn't know them and they'd act like they didn't know me. Then after an hour or so they'd all be talking in conversations between themselves and would start to let little words or sentences slip into the conversations … things that only I would know about, little references to what happened in New York … like I knew this guy … we were lovers and after a year of living together he suddenly didn't want to live with me anymore. I was really upset and I knew his parents didn't know he was a homosexual so I called his mother up and told her … I knew it was fucked up but I didn't think about it … another time I called the police on a guy I knew … there was some murderer going around. I told the police that he was the one doing it … he was a dealer and when the cops got in his apartment they found the stuff … I felt guilty about it and tried suicide. I swallowed this bottle of some kind of pills and just got really sick … Then I realized that's what they wanted me to do so I left New York but they always catch up to me … I'm really tired of running … I have no more money and this is the end of the line for me … I don't know exactly what I'm gonna do … I wish I would die … that's all I'm waiting for now … I can't do it myself but I don't want to go on existing … just waiting for it to happen. Everywhere I go I find people who I think might not be part of the plan … then after a while I begin to realize that they're just acting like strangers … they're just waiting for me to do it … like you … I don't know why I'm talking to you … for a few minutes I thought you were okay … but as I keep talking I see little things going on in your expressions so I'm not really sure …

… I keep having these strange dreams … last night I dreamt that I was a giant … I was draped over the planet … my head rested on North America and my legs rested on South America … my arms stretched for miles and miles over the oceans … and I could feel millions of fish just below the surface of the water … I could feel them nibbling on my arms … real gentle …

Man in Lower East Side Tenement Room

NEW YORK CITY

One night during the summer I was in the park and all of a sudden it started pissing rain I mean raining hard … all the regulars took off and I was left standing there alone. I was still cruising and this kid appeared we were both drenched and he said hello … well we talked for a few minutes and then he mentioned money and I said No, I'm not about that and I was leaving the park when he called out something. I turned and he called me back over and asked me if I had enough to get some beer and I said Yeah. He was about twenty, a Puerto Rican kid, absolutely gorgeous, sorta moved like this, with his arms out with this loping gait so we left the park and he starts walking north and I say Where the hell you going and he says he knows of an all-night deli further up around Twenty-first Street … so we walk uptown in the rain and we get to the deli. Finally we get this quart of beer and we start walking downtown again and he's going off about this and that and somewhere along the way he stops to talk to this hooker and share the quart of beer with her … we finally get here I bring him back to my place … that was when I didn't have any electricity I had told him this but I guess he didn't believe me so when we get back here he's sort of surprised. I had all these candles lit in the room and it was pretty dark … he liked that chair over there and he sat in it while we talked … then he looks out the window at the mission house and says Man, it's not very nice to look out there or something like that and Man, you have to fix this place up … and at some point I mention that I do some acting and he starts telling me about his family about his mother and his grandmother and there was this knife of mine on the table and he picks it up as he's talking and then he starts imitating them, acting out the role of his grandmother as he's talking about her, I mean it was scary, this whole sort of ritualistic thing passing the knife back and forth as he's acting out parts of this movie talking in different voices and flashing his eyes … it was pure voodoo …

I brought him back here a couple of times and mentioned him to other people I know … then one time I was in the park and he showed up and I didn't want anything to do with him so I left and he followed me out and started demanding money. I just happened to have about forty bucks on me so I said Sure okay I can give you a few bucks and I gave him some and he kept following me and then he wanted a beer so I stopped in a deli and bought him a bottle of beer and wanted to get rid of him so I walked on ahead of him and instead of coming around Second Avenue it's too dangerous that way at night I walked up Fourth Street to the Bowery and then cut down to Third Street. I didn't see him anywhere so I figured he was gone well I get near my building and I spot him sitting out in front in a car drinking the beer. I thought Uh oh. So I go into my building and he caught me between the two doors and said Let's go up to your place and I said No, look I'm tired I'm going to go to sleep he said Look do I have to rough you up or are you going to let me come upstairs? so once he got inside he started demanding money. I got up from the couch and went into the kitchen and tried to get rid of the money in my pocket. I fumbled doing it. He threatened me and then he said he was gonna start picking up my cats and throwing them out the window so I gave him the money … I had some pot here and he took that and sat down and started rolling joints … I told him I was tired and wanted to go to sleep, I asked him to leave but he wouldn't … then he got up and went into the bathroom he did this several times during the time he was here and at one point I told him I was really tired and going to sleep and got into bed and lay down and closed my eyes I didn't sleep I couldn't do that but I lay down and he came back into the room and started throwing money on the table and the floor and then finally he left. As he was leaving he said I'll be back and I said No you won't. You can't come back here …

I would get phone calls from him every once in a while up until just a month ago he would call me collect from St. Mark's. I'd get this operator saying Will you accept a collect call from Jose or Stanley? his name was Ricardo but he would call up using these assumed names. One time he called up having actually deposited a dime in the phone and I said Hello Ricardo and he said I wanna come over and I said No you can't and he said Look man you owe me ten bucks …

Girl Sitting on Pavement in Front of Coffee Shop

ALBUQUERQUE

I live in a hotel a few miles from here … I come down just about every day since I quit my job … I was working as a waitress in a restaurant downtown … worked at it for two years … I don't know how I did it for so long … it's like the time just went by behind my back. Before I became a waitress I hitched all over the U.S. … I'm originally from San Antonio … my family still lives there and I hate the place … the people there are almost dead … all into their little trips with the way they think lives should run … the way their folks taught them … my father had a lot of money and my two sisters got married real young … I didn't want nothing to do with the whole apron thing … I just wanted to run around … I mean there's just so much going on in the States alone that it makes me dizzy to think of what I'm missing sitting here. My father said he'd cut me out of the will if I didn't go to school so I split … it's kinda romantic I mean I've been hitching for the past five years … lived just about everywhere and mostly followed the migrant people picking produce and stuff. What got to me was that it was only romantic because I had the choice … I mean there was security behind me if I chose to go back … but no, I was tough and could make it on my own. So I worked this waitress job because I was tired and I thought maybe I could settle down and do some thinking instead of all that continuous experiencing but man after two years of serving all those people … let me tell you there's two things in life people get really bitchy about: one's money and the other's their food … I'd hassle with these people over food and then sit down and like the counter is over here and the kitchen is over there and the windows are here and the door is there … that's the only part of the job I really liked … walking out that fucking door. I mean everything's outside and I was thinkin how much it picked me up to walk through the door so I said: That's it I quit I have money saved up not a whole lot but enough to make some plans to go somewhere else. Right now I'm just taking it easy and thinking. I come down here because there's a lot going on on this street … all these people rushing around helps me to make sense, to see how to live. This afternoon I was sitting out here watching those prostitutes across the street and one of them stepped out of the doorway and took this little guy with a guitar by the hand, he had just jumped off some dump truck from Arizona, she took him by the hand really gentle like he was a kid going to school for the first time and they walked down the street to the hotel together, him carrying this guitar without a case, like he played that guitar all around the country just to end up in some squeaky bed in a ratty hotel where somebody's gonna hold him for a while, even for ten minutes ya know … and like I felt kind of sad because that's really it … it's never any more than that scene … and when it becomes more … then the whole idea of measure in your life is forgotten … you never make sense of nothing …

Guy Waiting for a Bus

NEW JERSEY

This friend of mine went on a trip to Portugal last summer … he was there for a few weeks … one day he was walking on this beach along a stone wall where all these natives were walking around carrying large machetes, they use them to cut down bananas, well this one guy came up to my friend and pulled his machete on him and robbed him. My friend gave him forty dollars which was all he had on him. The guy dragged him over the stone wall where they couldn't be seen then he pointed the machete at my friend's crotch and went into this harangue about the rich tourists who fuck over the country … the guy demanded more money and my friend told him, I don't have any more if I had ten thousand dollars I'd give it to you … the guy went back into his harangue and kept the machete on him and started pulling off his pants … he told my friend he wanted a blow job … my friend started crying and begging him to let him go but the guy continued taking off his pants … just then my friend remembered something a friend of his had told him … so he gets down on his knees and clasps his hands together and starts praying out loud to all the saints and religious figures he could think of: Oh please St. Francis Mother Mary of God St. Peter … the guy freaked out … his eyes got wide and he stumbled into his pants and jumped over the stone wall got into a taxicab and split …

Hobo on Flatcar Eastbound for St. Paul

MINNEAPOLIS

I came east from Spokane Washington last night … been riding all night headin to St. Paul to a mission so I can get a meal and some sleep … ya gotta watch these overpasses at night …
it's dangerous …
them kids who live up around here'll attack ya or stone ya to death … there's no lights in these cars and these kids think there's nothin funnier than to jump some guy and beat him up or hit him in the head with rocks … hey ya see that guy come outta that tunnel? ya know where he just came from? Well a lot of them homosexuals come down to this area to have what they call fun … those kids never mess with the homosexuals cause a lot of them are rough … yeah they're demonstratin in the streets for their rights to marry one another … a woman marryin a woman, a guy marryin a guy … hell! I don't know why they wanna do that … I wouldn't get married … too many bills too many problems … now I don't mean that I don't wanna be around a buddy … I just mean I don't want no wife … ya know some of them women homosexuals are just as strong as men … one time I was in this bar and one of them women was sittin next to me she says: Hey buy me a drink … so I bought her one and then she tells me to buy her another one … I said Hell no. No woman's gonna take advantage of me … then the bartender leaned over and said: You better watch it she's a dyke and the woman said: Yeah I'm a dyke. So I bought her a drink … ya gotta watch it cause some of them are really rough …