The Niagara Falls public library in 1978, just built when I started working there.
Life in Niagara Falls was dull, uneventful, friendless in fact, the life of a hermit, but rich in books and health restoring. I would work awhile then travel back to Berkeley with some money, eager for adventure, and easy to find. Then back to Niagara Falls, broke and burnt out, to my mother’s basement, to rest and recuperate, taking on another easy, dead-end job, reading all my free hours, and little else.
My first job in the Spring of 1978 was with the Niagara Falls public library. I parlayed myself into that work telling the head librarian that this was my first job since out of school, and that the government would pay half my wages for ten weeks, something I’d read by chance in the local newspaper. So for half the minimum wage they took me in, something less than two fifty an hour. I’d had my hair cut and wore a light blue, summer leisure suit, spoke politely, but with collegiate fluency, making the impression of a model youth, a future community leader, far different from the motley crew of bohemian poets and free thinkers who ranged through my head. A perfect disguise. The fact that I was only using this job to get back to that lifestyle has some irony in it.
Although I loved books, (certain books) and enjoyed these ten weeks, I could never be a librarian. Most of the aisles were filled with trash which I could never recommend or stamp out to the feeble-minded public who approached the front counter. If it were my library to do whatever I liked with, there would soon be a huge bonfire in the back parking lot, burning for days and nights, and all the shelves would soon be nine-tenths empty. But each patron from then on would walk out the front door with something far better than what they came in for, entertainment, and improve their minds.
Since I was only temporary they, all female workers at the library, young and old, gave me a pleasant taste of the different aspects of library work, filing returned books, coding new acquisitions with the Dewey Decimal system, cleaning up. One week they let me compose a short, one paragraph synopsis of fifteen new arrivals. One was a large print bible, very large print, so I wrote: ‘A book benevolently designed for those with infirm eyes as well as infirm souls’. Word of it spread like wildfire. I was treated with great deference the next few weeks but the ten were soon over so I packed up and hit the road.
I traveled to Connecticut to spend a week with my father, lately divorced from my mom. He’d bought a condo and worked in N.Y.C. at corporate headquarters for American Can. While I was there he had to go on a business trip for three days. During that time, I received a letter from John and Bones. I’d told them my itinerary. The letter was written from the Plough, urging me to come back and as an incentive, they dumped about half a gram of speed right in the envelope, not even wrapping it in plastic. So I spent the next two days going through my father’s large Jazz record collection, day and night.
A few days later I was on a hippy bus called the Gray Rabbit, from N.Y.C. to S.F., non-stop. They’d taken the seats out of this old bus and built a platform at seat level, then covered it with mattresses that were bent up to the window level at one end so you could sit or lay down as you pleased. Two drivers took turns and drove continuously. Pot smoking was encouraged, but not beer, to cut down on rest stops. I sat next to a German girl named Christina, very pretty, her boyfriend sitting on her other side. I talked with her briefly at times but read Caesar’s ‘Gallic wars’ almost the whole way, eight hours a day, in a pocket Latin edition. I think this impressed her.
As I came up to the Plough Bones and his new girlfriend May were hanging out the front window waving at me. He’d returned from Iowa after three weeks and met her at a party a few weeks later. She was very pretty and they were inseparably in love. Kim had taken my room while I was gone, (he had found some carpentry work) but gave it back to me and returned to John’s floor. All was as before except there was much less speed. We had to buy it now and it was expensive, so it became a weekend affair, at most.
As I look back upon this seven-month long excursion and gauge it, I can easily see that this was the apogee of my Bohemian days, the meridian sunshine of carefree and reckless youth. I don’t recall if I’d already purchased an old, ragged copy of Murger’s ‘Scenes de la vie de la Boheme’, but it was around this time I read it in earnest and often carried the book in my pocket, like a bible, a template for real living.
In my last years at school I developed an interest in the subject, reading Hunter S. Thomson and ‘Dylan Thomas in America’, then bio’s about the lives of Gerard de Nerval, Poe, Bret Harte and the bohemian writers in New York city in the twenties and thirties. Then, on a wider scope, ‘Le Libertinage Erudit’, by René Pintard, a fantastic description of youths in Paris in the sixteen hundreds who defied religion and social standards by their Classical learning, (a great book no one reads), Carlyle’s essay on Heine, Valeriani’s ‘De literatorum Infelicitate’, (on the misfortunes of authors) a book not one in a billion reads. All these books I dipped into, but Murger was the gold standard and I devoured him whole, like a Turk, fervently, with sweat on my brow, my eyes probably bulging out as I read.
And what I read I was eager to imitate. This is the only way to account for the scenes that follow, and so I preface it.
Bones’ new girlfriend, May, had a long and sad history of abuse and drug use in the sex trade. A runaway at fifteen from a very affluent Boston family, she was soon a hooker and heroin addict in Vancouver, where a few years later she had a son which her parents somehow found out about and managed to take from her and raise without any rights of visitation allowed her. This made her permanently bitter, as she’d raised the boy in perfect sobriety for several years, quitting drugs and prostitution when she knew she was pregnant. But such are the privileges of money and corrupt judges. When her one reason for living was ripped away, she fell back into the gutter. Now in her mid-twenties she was trying to straighten up again, leave the trade, and Bones was there to help her. She still had a radiant, blond beauty and they were both deeply in love.
Bones had formed a new band with a female lead singer named Annie. They had a gig that very night I arrived at the Plough. She’d been told a lot about me, probably much exaggerated, and Bones was playing matchmaker, so it wasn’t long, in a dark corner of the bar after their first set, sitting at a table with Bones and May, Kim and his latest flame Brittany, (a rich college girl), that Annie was in my lap and we were kissing wildly, a trio of lovers.
It proved to be a long, hot August night, thanks to a few lines and many beers. When the bar closed Bones and May went upstairs, but Brittany had a car. Her father had originally bought her a Beamer, which she promptly crashed. So then, to punish her, he bought her the most expensive Volkswagen money could buy, a convertible with all accessories, painted purple. In this we took a long moonlight drive, top down, Brit at the wheel, Kim in front and Annie and I in the back now trying to set a world record for continuous kissing. Our random destination, strangely enough, was across the bridge to Marin, a place we would soon end up, that is, me and Kim and Bones and May, by different routes. That night we just drove there, turned around and sped back to our impending trysts.
So I ended that night in Annie’s bed and woke up in her odd household which I’ll describe later. My trip was starting out with a bang, so to speak, or fireworks. I still had my room paid up at the Plough for the next three weeks, until the end of August, when Bones and May planned to move.
