New York City
I don’t really know how I wound up addicted to smack, but maybe it was the trauma. Or maybe it was the times. Or maybe it was just despair. Everyone was dead or gone: the Colonel and the General and Rina had all departed, and I’d lost touch with them, and Ani, Stokes, and my beloved Etsy were dead. I wanted to die. And yet I couldn’t bring myself to do it. At least, not directly.
I burned through all my money, and I was so broke, and my brain was so broken too, I think, that I couldn’t even get together the energy or the intention to go somewhere else. I’d stopped writing to my parents years before. I had no idea whether they were still looking for me, but I guess I should just assume they’ve forgotten me.
I keep writing in my journals, though. I guess I’ve got the habit so deep, especially in this loneliness, that it still feels like I’m talking to someone. I pawned my typewriter months ago—the little Olivetti that my folks bought me, years before when I went off to school—but I keep writing on yellow legal pads: I can boost those from the drugstores when I go in to try to steal cough syrup or samples.
I’ve been panhandling for change, and sleeping in flophouses, and shoplifting for cash or food. Sometimes I don’t eat, but you know I’m going to get the cash for that fix every day.
And, these days in Manhattan for someone like me, there’s always at least one way to get cash for the next blast. I started turning tricks at the end of last year, after the Pentagon. I didn’t go to jail with those Quakers, and I was ashamed about that. So I came back to New York, and I got hip to the guys who come in on a Sunday or a Tuesday, hiding their secret lives from Mom and the kids.
The Holland tunnel approaches are good—guys who don’t want to come too far into the City will come through from Jersey, and try to find themselves a hooker in the first few blocks. So me and my friends are down there, at the stop lights, and we can usually make dates right there.
Sometimes the johns want weed or a line of coke, but a lot of times they’ll settle for head. If I’m working the right block, I can knock out 6 or 8 blowjobs in the front seat of a car, and I’ve got enough for Listerine and the next fix, and a $20 hotel room, and I don’t have to think about things until tomorrow.
The weird thing is I keep writing in this damn journal. I’m not kidding myself: I know it’s never gonna get published, and I know I’ll never have a byline again. But maybe, sometime when I run out of legal pads, I can mail it to my folks, or stash it with Ginsberg and Peter, and it’ll find its way to them, or to my friends in Bassanda.
There were places in Lower Manhattan where it was OK to be queer. I was in Alphabet City, and I had good days and bad days with junk: on the bad days, when I hadn’t been able to score, I’d curl up in a vacant room in a smelly condemned tenement, and wait for the shakes to go away. On the better days, in the early spring when it started to get milder and the panhandling had been okay, I could score, and shoot up, and then just nod off sitting on a bench in the sun in Washington Square Park.
By May, once I knew my way around and even had some regular Johns who’d come to find me, or if I’d had a good night tricking by the Tunnel, and there was money in my pocket, I’d stop off at the Stonewall, or another one of the Christopher Street joints, to have a drink and shoot the shit with the street junkies and hustlers who hung out there. We’d stand at the bar under the red lights, and nurse a weak drink. Sometimes, if I was feeling especially good, I might dance. On the best nights, I’d find someone to go home with. That might’ve been what I was looking for that Saturday night in June at the Stonewall.
Something felt off, though: I got there about 11:30, and when I stepped up to the front bar to get a drink, and the mascara’d bartender had mixed my highball and set it up on the counter, he kept his hand on the stemmed glass even as I reached for it. I looked up at him, and he looked out of the corners of his eyes and jerked his head to the left. About halfway down the long narrow room, standing at one of the high-top tables, there was a party of four—two guys and two girls. That in itself wasn’t totally weird: sometimes the straights liked to come down to the Village and gawk at the fags and the street people and the crazies. But then one of the guys caught me looking at his feet: he was wearing a striped silk shirt, and wheat-colored corduroys—typical suburban rags—but then I looked down further, and saw that he was wearing white socks and heavy black shoes: cop shoes if I ever saw them.
See, that’s what the cops would do: they were in cahoots with the Mob guys who owned the Stonewall, and so they’d usually call ahead—or there’d be some kind of a high sign—and management would know the cops were coming. Usually, they’d show up fairly early in the evening, and the drag queens (anybody wearing 3 pieces of women’s clothing was a “transvestite”, according to NYC law) would know to keep out of sight until the pigs had collected the kickbacks, and a couple of cases of free booze, and taken off. Then the party could start again.
But what we didn’t know was that things were getting worse between the cops and the gangsters. The city was cracking down on police graft, and so they had to be more circumspect, and that made ‘em mad.
And I fucked up: the dude saw me looking at his feet, and for a split second I caught his glare, looking right into his eyes. That was enough: in less than a minute, he’d leaned over to his table mates to say something, and he sauntered toward the front of the bar, and I saw him lift the receiver of the pay phone just beside the front door. And, don’t ask me how beyond that, but I knew what was coming. I went back to the bar, and stood up on the rail, and said to the cute bartender, “There’s cops in here. Hit the buzzers and warn the Marys in the back rooms.”
And sure enough, after 25 minutes later, two pigs in uniform came in, and one of them yelled “Police! We’re taking the place!” and the other pulled out his nightstick, and moved toward the back, penning people in, and said “Awright you faggots! You know the drill—everybody line up so we can check out your panties!”
Some of us lined up, but the place was so damned crowded that even the ones who were scared, or hadn’t been busted before, or would have complied, couldn’t get out of others’ way. And some of them—maybe especially those Jersey guys—didn’t want to give anybody, least of all the cops, their real names, and they started saying “No” when the cops demanded ID, or “I don’t have any.” There were like 200 patrons in the joint, and only the few cops.
The four plainclothes cops who’d cased the joint—the two guys and the two women—had come back inside as well, and now there were six of them, and they began to separate out patrons dressed like chicks from the ones who wore men’s clothes; the two women cops herded the girls back toward a separate room, to check out their apparatus. The four guy cops who were left were having fun, but there was a hard edge to it, because you could tell they’d rather have just taken the week’s kickback in cash, and a case of booze: you could tell they thought busting drag queens and fags instead was too much work, and bad for business. They’d rather have taken their kick and their booze and gone back to Staten Island or wherever it is pigs sleep. And they were pissed enough that when they got their hands on some of the dykes, they started grabbing their crotches, “searching the ones who look like guys.”
The cops got some of the patrons separated out—the queens who had on women’s clothes were an easy target—and told them to sit tight until the wagons came. The two uniforms went behind the bar and started pulling out beer cases and stacking them up; they always claimed that this was because the booze was illegal in an after-hours “private” club, but we always just assumed they just split it up and took it home.
But there were too many us…