Ghetto bar
“Monday Sept 17th, 9:30 a.m.: Pausing in the hall after taking a shower and hearing hammers banging I think: “Ah, methinks I hear the tinkling sounds of progress and our eviction”. How much like an American author felt I last night as I sat beside her in Scott’s half-built room listening to her as I rubbed her head. She told me how she has ‘a very vivid imagination’ and mustn’t let it go, as we first went back to his room after scoring, before she shot up. She was happy for a few moments and turning on that love song she did a clumsy twirl in front of me, to the music, and beamed a smile at me. She hardly ever smiles, wearing a consistent, expressionless, blank face almost all the time.
“Monday. 10 p.m. This morning I went with Margery and Jim warehouse hunting. (Two days earlier we had all received the three-day eviction notice). We ended up in a new bookstore-coffee house looking at the books. Marg. had friends working there. Later I drove her to Henri’s boat in Alameda. He was very glad to see me and unusually friendly. He said he even might have some business for me as a witness in a lawsuit against him.
“Home at 6 p.m. May drops by at seven, to get high and talk. We discussed Bones mostly. I stated my present reservations about aspects of his character which she was strong enough to listen to and comment upon them. (They’d split up again temporarily but were still in love). It was good for me to clarify my own position and options concerning him while I tried to explain them to her, reaffirming values of mind above money we both shared… She left glad we had the talk.
“Then ½ hour after she leaves I run into Nicky in the hallway and then help her do Scott’s dishes in the bathroom. She had tapped on my door lightly earlier when May was there but politely left right away, excusing herself when she saw I was ‘busy’ with another woman. Then I saw her walk out from the shower about 10:30… At midnight she knocks on my open door, comes in and asks if she can stay with me the night as Scott has just kicked her out, for good, after one last romp, (thus the shower). I agree. She brings her few bags in, drops them on the floor. I drive her to a score, approximately 500 yards, round trip, which she does in bare feet having no accessible shoes. Back in five minutes.
“We sit at the table, look out the window occasionally and make small talk. I’m in a half-dull state, tired, watching, like she watches, little things, the bubbles in the blood of her needle, me chopping lines, the gaping drug fascination. After 20 minutes she wants to go to a nearby lounge, perhaps a little uneasy at the quickness of our cohabitation, or (more likely) just restless. Out of the blue she says: “I don’t bite, I just nibble a little”. When I start up the car (from the sound) she says: ‘one of your lifters is messed up’, — an accurate or lucky observation? I dropped her off and returned to my room.
“When she was sitting at the table she turned to get a special T-shirt she wanted to show me and from bags full of clothes she goes to just the right one and pulls it out straightaway, as if totally sharp and organized. She has a fine sense of smell. She told me twice that she would commit herself to a clinic, reform, even get a job — tomorrow — and she mentioned a possible apartment for rent, hinting she and I could live there together cozily. We shall see. We shall see.
“Tuesday 11 p.m.” Our situation spins at an ever more dizzying pace. Once you side with an outcast you become one. You step across the line of respectability. I got little sleep last night because Jim was having a very loud party, (of five), playing punk, paranoid-mad music, ugly stuff as if to reflect the turbulence of our present affairs. (We were all a little worried about the eviction notice, if it was serious or not). Twice I complained, told him to turn it down. I had a headache from it, laying down in my loft. Then too I was awake from the lines and the radical changes and anticipation of Nicky’s return. Slept 4:30 to 6:30. Nicky did come in, but not up to bed till 7, turned on the radio as I lay half asleep. She leaves at 7:20. At 7:40 someone is throwing rocks at my window, big ones, threatening to break them. I slowly get up. A black guy is below and upset at Nicky, wants to know her whereabouts. I yell down that she’s not here and I don’t know. He splits. I go to work having to leave the room unlocked because she has the key she was supposed to return. I stash the guitar and shrug my shoulders at the loss of everything else, even my books and notebooks, imagining myself trying to repair their loss, knowing some very fine things would be lost but also the greater gain in all the effort to replace them. (I had Carlyle’s burnt “French Revolution” and Hemingway’s lost suitcase in mind).
Work was a strange and singular day, hot muggy weather with no rain, then evening lightning flashes with no thunder. I was so high from 7 to 9 p.m. that I suspected the flashes were in my mind, driving Nicky around Emeryville, almost pointlessly.
“I got home and couldn’t get in so I went to Steve’s for a half-hour and returned and she was inside and happy. We made plans to go to a movie. She could get some money by selling ten needles on the way, so we stop near the ‘B’ club. An old methadone junky, (37 looking 67) gets in the back seat, wrinkled, his voice messed up and stuttering, promising to sell them for twenty, splitting it 50–50, though he complains he should get more for doing the ‘leg work’. She asks if he has any cash. He says he has three dollars but great hopes for much more if we drive him to his methadone connection, junkie woman for an advance of some drugs which he can turn, turn, turn into money, working it up in one after another scam.
“This is the junkies constant dream, turning ten into twenty and soon a hundred, wheeling and dealing. They know even how they mess-up each time and how not to. But they always turn the ½ working capital into an immediate fix for ‘energy’ and have fine, intricate explanations, (they are super-rich in these) of how they lost the other half three hours later, explanations eloquently rendered when they are very high. We kick him out. Nicky looks at the time and says we stop at the ‘B’ club. She can make some quick cash. I’m too high to care. So I U-turn and drive to that little bar, where dizzying amounts of prostitution and drug deals take place. I tell her we have 40 minutes.
“She bumble-bees around the place, packed with 25 lost souls, hangs out at the back end, sits down between these two regular dudes, (both long-haired, mustached, scroungy looking guys in their mid-thirties) for a few minutes and downs a peppermint schnapps. Then she speeds over to me sitting in the middle of the bar drinking a beer. She quickly says: “I’ve got the ‘C’ sold and think I’ve got a date with these two guys. Get me a peppermint schnapps with an orange juice chaser, straight up”. Then she rushes back. I call over the bartendress, a dumpy, white girl and order it. She gets a sour, displeased look on her face, knowing exactly who it’s for, thinking me some kind of pimp. She says she knows where it’s going, walks to the end of the bar and delivers it, Nicky all the while is waving at me wildly, motioning me not to pay for it as she’s gotten someone else to. She downs both drinks in a few seconds goes to the jukebox, where the white guys follow her. She puts on loud music and talks to them in the din. I keep my seat trying to look innocent, though she runs up to me and whispers very closely in my ear and speeds off again several times, which probably makes others think I am her pimp.
She run’s back to me one more time and whispers that she’s got a deal for 80 or 90 bucks but has to get back to the warehouse for a moment for another shot. I’d just ordered another beer so I slam half down and leave it. I ask about her drink. “It’s gone, honey. I just open the hatch and it’s gone”. We drive back here, 300 yards. She explains we’ll miss the movie but make money for the illusive apartment we’re moving into. She shoots up a goodly portion of the half gram of speed I’ve got on a mirror. I do a few lines. It’s three quarters gone. Her arm bleeds quite a bit.
