Cat Food, Twentieth-Century Boy

June 1971. Frankfurt, Germany. Got a layover, staying in a brand-new germ-proof high-rise hotel. Outside, body odor and bratwurst. Sex supermarkets with brightly colored rubber ticklers in the window. Photo of a girl in bed with a pig. She’s holding the pig’s long, pencil-thin pink thing. Germans! I spent the afternoon at the zoo, mostly at the baby-chimp cage. So human. Fingers in their mouth like they’re thinkin’. Giving me that “Why are you lookin’ at me?” look. There’s a masturbating chimp. A street-fighting chimp. I buy some postcards of chimps. Drink big glasses of beer and eat a sausage sandwich.

Naples. Italy is everything I ever thought about Italy, except magnified a hundred times. Very like the Mastroianni-Loren movies I’d seen. Little changed since World War II. My sister’s elegant, marble-floored, high-ceiling apartment overlooks the Bay of Naples. Three balconies. Rent is cheap because locals say it’s haunted. It’s not. The view is of the orange cubist roofs, palm trees, the blue Mediterranean. The top surface of Naples bristles with TV antennas. Tiny Fiats beep their shrill beeps. A lit-up gondola climbs Vesuvius in the distance. I love it. I feel exalted, elated, intoxicated. I am, in fact. Whiskey, wine, and beer are cheaper than Coca-Cola at the PX. Streets smell of French cigarettes. The men wear tight pants and open shirts and ogle my sister’s bust and derriere. Fat ol’ toothless mamas yell at kamikaze Fiats, lots of hand gestures. Stop lights don’t mean anything. Honking is for honking’s sake. Sandaled children off to church. I bought five pairs of continental-style shoes for ten bucks down at the market. A ragamuffin kid rattles clear plates to show how unbreakable they are. Roosters rush past on the cobblestones. I love the girls with their fleecy armpit hair. There are fish markets on the sidewalk full of huge sideswiped swordfish, dry and gray on the outside (flies buzzing around) and peachy pink and moist on the inside. Buckets of squid and octopus. A tripe stand. A medieval cart with an enormous hippopotamus head sticking up. For real. Whiskered nostrils, little gray ears. Stolen from the zoo? Sold to make soup? Surreal. The tobacco shops carry tobacco, salt, shoelaces, and auto parts. On New Year’s Eve, at the stroke of midnight, Neapolitans throw their garbage out the window.

There’s a walk I often take from the top of the hill we live on down to the port. A long, narrow alley that is populated by large rats, large enough to challenge me, but it’s cool because I know the password. We have christened this “Rat Alley.” Past open doorways of afternoon dinners and siestas. Clotheslines hanging overhead with colored cotton garments. Past impromptu kickball games. At the bottom are beggar kids asking for chocolate or cigarettes, their flies held together with safety pins. Old Neapolitans left over from the war, humpbacked, sucked-out, pinch-cheeked, arms in slings, belts cinched tight, limping along cockeyed, cigarettes dangling from their drawn-in mouths. What we like to call “gimpy.” Then too there are the breezy, tree-lined avenues, like Paris, with expansive outlooks of the city. Vestiges of a once powerful city. The colors are the best thing of all. Sun-bleached Indian reds, old roses, mustards, terra-cottas, ivories, and chrome yellows, chipped and worn and scraped.

We go to the NATO beach where international babes are changing in the blinding sun, a trickle of soft black down reaching from their belly buttons to their mottes. We suck on rainbow popsicles called arcobaleno. Red is cherry (top), yellow is lemon, orange is orange, etc. Nothing better. Tanned mothers with their crying naked infants. Someone’s mom’s screaming “Babette! Babette!” It sounds like a war hospital except for the whooshing of the ocean. The thick-crust coal-oven pizza is delicious. The lifeguard calls me “Signor Ha Ha.” Locals call this the Three Swim Beach: the sweaty swim on the drive out here, the swim you take when you’re here, and the swim back in your car on the return.

Summer of ’71 Reading List

The Hobbit, Tolkien

The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway

A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway

This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald

The Benson Murder Case (S. S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance mysteries)

The Gracie Allen Murder Case, S. S. Van Dine

The Ginger Man, Donleavy

The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B., Donleavy

Ada, Nabokov

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe

Zelda, Milford

Barrs is on the ship most of the time. It’s just me and Holly. She’s worried that I’m an alcoholic, because I drink alone, when there’s no one to join me. We both smoke Winstons.

Holly and Barrs befriended a family called the Cristianos, headed by Salvatore, a taxi driver. He has twin pigtailed daughters in the third grade, Nunzia and Rosaria. They look like little Italian mice and are total lunatics. They call me “Danke” or “Ta.” We go out at night for arcobalenos, hand in hand, not being able to talk, but they just laugh at me because they pointed me out in an animal book: a skinny gorilla eating a banana. They find this hysterical. Nunzia says she and I are to be married. I say “Sì.” She pulls at my long hair and says, “Bellissimo.” She looks at a picture of an orangutan and says “Mamma mia, what a brute!” Rosaria has schemes, shakes her finger at me and says “Attenzione, attenzione!” I play T. Rex’s “Woodland Bop” for them and they dance around the living room, declaring it to be the best thing ever. They try on my hats and shriek with laughter. Nunzia is a natural actress, having studied old movie queens on TV, and repeats their body language as best she can. We dance (me on my knees) and I say, “My love, you dance divinely,” and she sighs “Amore” and falls back over my arms in true thirties romance fashion. She sings sad love songs at the top of her lungs with open arms. Real anguish!

The huge extended Cristiano family sits around the dinner table at night, everyone screaming and laughing. Dinner is usually eight to midnight. Mamma says, “Long hair—you like Beatles.”

I sit in the Galleria. Several stories tall, with a vaulted glass roof. An indoor/outdoor atmosphere. Gargoyles are perched up high. Shops line the courtyard, wings shoot off in all directions. Everyone gathers here. I sit at a café with a beer. Happy to watch all the Europeans doing what they do, many doing what I do: watch, look, listen. A schoolboy in a blue uniform leans against a tobacco shop, playing with that wooden ball on a string that makes that infernal clacking noise. A female impersonator, or sex change, tries to pick me up. I keep saying, “No capeesto, no capeesto,” as I look up at his badly concealed beard. He went away angry, fake tits ’n’ all. I read the International Herald Tribune.

June 26. Naples. Returned from Positano. Aquamarine beach with two beautiful bikinis next to me. Navy-blue nipples fresh from the salty sea. Roman-nosed teenage girls with their arms linked through the crook of their mother’s. They have to be in at eight every night. They have nowhere to go, except if a fella’s got a car; then they park and steam up the Fiat windows. Virginity is well protected here. The mother-and-the-whore bit. Highly sexed Catholic country. An Italian man always marries a girl ten years his junior. Italy has the worst reputation in Europe. Naples has the worst reputation in Italy. “Florence is the lady of Italy, Rome is the woman, and Naples is the idiot bastard daughter.”

July 4. Jim Morrison just died in Paris of a heart attack. Only twenty-seven. I saw him twice at the Minneapolis Auditorium. The first time was fantastic, the Doors transcendent, took me to another world. The second time Morrison was drunk, surly, bearded, bloated, a disappointment.

Barrs’s Harvard roommate Mike shows up from teaching English in Japan; he’s cool, he’s riding his motorcycle across Europe. We bunk together. He says I smile in my sleep. We stay up late drinking liters of local wine and smoking some hash he got at a gas station in Morocco. Watching Vesuvius steam, listening to Soft Machine, Third. Perfect.

Mike and I walk up to a scrubby park with clay soil and cropped palms. We’re sitting in the shade talking about the cherry bombs of our youth and two girls approach us. They want to take our picture because we look like the Rolling Stones. A crowd gathers to listen to this exchange. The more forward of the two girls is called Tina; she had a ratty shag, dirty feet, and a cold sore on her lip. On the plus side, she had a nice exposed stomach and round tits in a halter that looked fun. She said, “London is very beautiful and so are you.” Then she tugged on my hair to see if it’s real. She takes off my new tortoiseshell sunglasses and says something about “night, sì?” and “drugga.” There are some guys standing around smiling, winking at me, giving me the thumbs up. I pass out cigarettes. One guy told Mike that she was propositioning me, and that she’d already been tried and tested. Wink, wink. She gave me her address, 23 Geronimo something. With some sort of rendezvous I didn’t understand. Why did she have to be so grungy? I’ve got two female admirers, one the neighborhood slut and the other is nine years old.

I woke up with the sound of a dogfight in the courtyard below. I had a terrible pain in my chest. I get up and pad barefoot (flap flap flap) across the cold marble floor, where I piss and drink some tap water. Went back to my Sunday-morning bed and tried to get back to sleep. No dice. My left lung was popping, gurgling, sputtering, and bubbling. I vowed to never smoke again. I’ve been lucky so far. When I drew a breath I got a sharp pain.

Next day I played tennis with Mike and it hurt like hell. I’m in bad shape. Holly says we come from a long line of rheumatoid arthritis and muscular dystrophy. I breathed shallowly as I contemplated my early demise. TB? Cancer? My poor seedy lung!

I was meant to go to Capri today with Mike. Mountain climbing and café drinking. Instead I was put on a Navy launch, which brought me out to the USS Cascade. Barrs was waiting on deck for me, looking embarrassed. He gave me a little wave and hustled me to the sick bay, where a doctor x-rayed me and tapped on my chest. Doctor was stumped. No spots detected. Pleurisy, maybe? He gave me pain pills and sent me back to my worried sister.

Someone asked JFK how he got to be a war hero. He answered, “They sank my boat.”

July 26, 1971. My chaste summer continues. I fall back on memories. Girls I’ve known and girls I wish I’d known. I think back to a day after school in suburbia, the jeweler’s daughter letting her expensive sheepskin coat slide to the kitchen floor, landing with a thunk, in a fiction of seduction she picked up in the movies. Kissed her pasty lips. Unzipped her pink turtleneck. She led me to her “little girl /slut” bedroom (her words) with the single bed and white wicker furniture, where she wrapped her flexible and elongated limbs around me as I buried myself in her nonfiction cunt.

So I devote my time to watercolors and reading. I go outside to prowl the neighborhood. Two luscious girls approaching, swinging their butts, and one alerts the other to my approach, we’re getting nearer. What do I do? Ask them to show me around or something? Submit to their open Italian stares? Now we are next to each other and this dazzling creature unexpectedly breaks into a full-faced, lascivious smile that reduces me to a blithering idiot. That was it…that was my twenty-second intense romance, struck by Cupid’s arrow. And now it’s over. I limp into Piazza del Maggia Dore and plop into a chair, order a Pernod, wiping the sweat from my brow. Why am I so devastated by beauty and desire?! The despair of desire. Sigh.

August 1, 1971. Only two weeks left of my Italian summer. I’ve gained fourteen pounds. I weigh 129. Big fat Naples hit me to my midwestern American soul. The rotten bay smell, the high-rise hairdos, the young magazine vendors, the cappuccinos, the marble statues, the mad beggars, the ratty palm trees. The squares are like stage sets. Families fanning themselves in their plaster sitting rooms lit by the blue glow of their televisions. The parking-lot attendant looks up from his comic book and says, “Hey, English! You wanna buy a watch? I can get you anything.”

“I don’t want anything. I’m content with what I’ve got, thanks,” and wave. The sound of Ringo Starr’s “It Don’t Come Easy” wafts from the café jukebox. Squealing tires.

The commodore of the Sixth Fleet lent my brother-in-law his private launch. We were joined by a couple of bearded sailors and two English girls from Brighton they’d met at the USO. I couldn’t help but notice that one of the lovelies’ pubic hair was bursting from the side of her paisley bikini bottoms. We had a picnic of fried chicken, potato chips, and beer. Lots of beer. Because of the intense heat, you see. The girls were on the foredeck while we men ogled and my sister scowled.

We anchored in a pirate cove off Capri. Very reminiscent of Skull Island in Peter Pan. I couldn’t believe how perfect this location was. I dove in and swam to some carved sandstone steps on the cliffside and scuttled to the top. Took in the blazing blues of the Mediterranean. Climbed down and put mask and flippers back on. Moseyed about in the clear aquamarine water with little fish, followed them into a tunnel, leading to a round grotto with a small sand beach at the end. Illuminated by the outside sunlight refracted through the water, creating an otherworldly glow. I fantasized about coming to the rescue of pouty-lipped Hayley Mills. A lock of her golden hair falling over one eye. I stayed in my private cave in a state of excitation. When I swam out at last, the sun had begun to drop from the sky, leaving orange streaks. Naples was a washed-out pastel on the horizon.

I read Candide in one sitting. I enjoyed the adventure very much. The implied raciness leaves much to the imagination. How does one treat sex? Each in one’s own way, I suppose. As the sun and the moon in a celestial master plan? With honor? With lewdness? With grubby-fingered junior-high delight? With wide-eyed never-get-used-to-it wonder?

Then I moved on to Nabokov’s Ada, which I loved. I remember staying at the Montreux Palace with my parents in the spring of 1967. It was foggy and quiet (off season). There was an older man in the enormous formal breakfast room every morning reading the paper by himself. Was it Nabokov? That’s where he lived. I’d like to think it was. That trip I was recovering from a broken leg (ski accident at Vail) and walked with a cane. I wore a brown beret. I was in love with Europe and Jane Fonda and had recently discovered masturbation, of which I had become a great devotee. I remember swimming in the pool alone, gusts of mist wafting over the chlorinated water. Very moody indeed. I remember thinking that I would never forget this, and I never did.

Bought an excellent LP on pink vinyl, called Never Never Land by the Pink Fairies. Their drummer is called Twink. Great anthem called “Do It.” Not only are they telling us to do it, they are doing it! “Don’t think about it / All you gotta do is…do it! Don’t talk about it /All you do is…do it!” Great riff, great message.

Some old Pope’s blood is kept in a phial and is supposed to boil three times a year, and if it doesn’t the superstitious Neapolitans get uptight, businesses fail, candle makers don’t have the heart to work with tallow anymore, etc. So the new conqueror goes to the local priest and says, “You better make that blood boil, man!” So the priest makes the blood boil and the people say, “Ah, good! The blood boiled!” and go back to their jobs.

Three days in Rome with Holly. Still hot as hell! We sit around various sidewalk cafés drinking cappuccinos (freddo e caldo), Pernod, anisette, Chartreuse, Guinness stout, dark German ales, etc. Rome is noisy. Rome is chic. Rome is where Leda and her relationship with a swan is captured in oil and marble over and over. I ran into naughty Pauline Bonaparte reclining on an Egyptian couch in a lovely villa. At night they turn out the lights and view her cold marble sheen by candlelight. When asked how she could have posed for the scandalous statue in the nude, Pauline replied, “Oh, the studio was heated.” I was here in 1963, reading The Agony and the Ecstasy, madly excited by the Colosseum, where I found a bone. I was convinced it had belonged to a gladiator and wanted to bring it home, but my mother wouldn’t let me.

August 14. Back at Steigenberger Hotel in Frankfurt, continental breakfast next to airline executives, marmalade and The Greene Murder Case.

Returned to Minneapolis just in time to see the Who playing Tommy at the twelve-hundred-seat Guthrie. Searchlights roaming over the audience, Townshend banging his cherry-red Gibson over his knee; he does a little two-step, then charges his Hiwatt amps like an enraged animal, Moon doing an antic pantomime, Daltrey center-stage bathed in a silvery halo, singing his “See me, feel me, touch me, heal me…” as Pete rips it up from the wings. They debuted songs from Who’s Next. FANTASTIC!

Moonlight, 10 p.m. skinny-dipping at Cedar Lake, which supposedly has a sea monster in it. Lainie, Angie, and I silently glide in the cold, inky water, pools of love and seaweed, beautiful, naked teenage-nymph euphoria. Dripping sirens emerge from ankle-deep shallows against shadowy shoreline. Timeless.

Two a.m. A trio of freaks (two boys and a girl) drove up in a Valiant and tapped at my bedroom screen. Wanting to say hello to me after my return from Italy. I slipped out and talked to them in the backyard. Mom magically appeared in her nightgown, shooed them away, and then let me have it.

“I have never been so disappointed in anyone in my entire life! What a stupe!”

“No, and I don’t care if you do! Or with boys! In fact, I don’t care how much you get—just make sure she’s on the Pill! And don’t get syphilis!”

Speaking of which, Angie’s virginity has finally been breached. She’s got an apartment on Chicago Avenue with a couple of other hippie girls. A nice room. Bed level with the window, moonlight streaming in. She’s nervous and passive, but she is nude. That’s a good start. I realize I have to take charge. I put two pillows under her. I put her small fingers on my smooth cock. Her legs go back. I work around the ground gained, a little bit of rhythm, she’s back, I’m forward, and by accident we hit it just right, with an intake of breath and a gasp, the taut membrane snaps aside and takes me in. She fades away just like a heroine in a Victorian novel, eyes closed. I marvel at her pretty face, colored with passion. Ardent tongues and biscuit odors. She kneaded me and rocked me ever so subtly, and then swooned off. Ecstasy! We slept encased in one another.

In the morning, soft light, haystack breath, gypsy hair, rumpled sheets. Angie whispers, “Do you wanna make love?” Once the genie is out of the bottle…

I had to go to court for a speeding charge, and my dad had the judge changed to a family friend. Dad asked me to cut my hair for the occasion. I said I couldn’t. “Why?” he asked. “I can’t put it into words—you just have to be nineteen to understand.” Something to do with outrage and cool. The judge had the charges dropped, told me to keep my nose clean, as I was on probation now. Whew!

Honey called from Dixie this morning, saying, “I’m ready to be your girl forever.” Her baby is due in January! I tell her words she doesn’t want to hear, that I can’t, I’m still a child myself, must go to college, must travel the globe and meet everyone in the world. “But can’t you do that with me next to you?” she pleads. Poor Honey, all this misplaced love, she never had a chance.

I’m rooming with a curly-haired kid from Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Lloyd Bosca, in a modern white cinder-block coed dorm called Tewksbury. Resembles a Holiday Inn. This must be the male-ponytail capital of the world. The fashion is work shirts, blue jeans, and sneakers. Same for girls, except for the addition of nipple-showing T-shirts and art deco dresses. Women’s liberation is in full force. There isn’t a brassiere in sight. Seven hundred students total. The East Coast kids can’t believe I came all the way from Minnesota. “What’s out there, anyhow?” they ask. The hallways smell of dope. A guy that looks like Charlie Manson, actually named Charlie, says, “Well, you can major in sex, or drugs, or religion, etc.” Bard’s sister schools are Goddard (where the drugs come from), Hampshire, Bennington, Antioch. Expensive radicalized colleges for creative types.

Lloyd is a bit of a character, loves Pinocchio and his bad friend Lampwick. He’s got a Volkswagen Beetle, so we drive down to the city to see Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks at the Cafe au Go Go. Laconic Dan says, “We’re gonna do a series of tunes, know what I mean?” Sid Page on violin during “I Scare Myself” was sublime.

Lolita. Such writing! Such feeling!

Memoirs of a Beatnik by Diane di Prima.

The Tin Drum by Günter Grass.

The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski

Bard girls

1. Quiet, sad, dark-haired girl on a stair landing has on a skintight white T-shirt molding her perfectly shaped tits, complete with very visible ebony nipples. Eyes front! She has a German shepherd, and someone told me they saw her in the woods giving her dog a hand job.

2. Jean Hammond from Boston in her oxford-cloth shirt and pale-blue sweater, horn-rimmed glasses and barrette. Very pretty. She’s in my Art and Aesthetics class. We walk into the woods and linger under a hoary stone bridge. She knocks on my door at night to share a bedtime joint with me in her nightgown and bathrobe. She says I don’t have a heart for anyone. I act silly instead. I should just kiss her and let nature take its course. She said, “You must have really nice parents, because I never met anyone like you before, you’re so free.” Most of the kids here have divorced parents. They’ve seen shrinks. They have antidepressants.

3. Suzanne from Woodmere, Long Island. On a diet of Fresca, lipstick, and Kools.
She bends over and I see her pale-pink untouched nipples (another virgin). She lost relatives in the Holocaust. She loves the Kinks.

On the KLH

White Light / White Heat, Velvet Underground

Desertshore, Nico

Rough and Ready, Jeff Beck Group

Rory Gallagher

Looking On, The Move

Electric Warrior, T. Rex

Letter from best Minneapolis pal Kurt says he got drunk with Angie and they had sex, because “they missed me.” Then he described it in detail, in faux Kerouacian prose, like I’d enjoy that! True, I am far away. What’s she supposed to do, wait for me? I’m jealous just the same and feel left out. Possessive me. Double-standard me.

But it’s autumn, and the leaves are exploding with New England color. I walk to the waterfalls rapt in my fantasy world. I always go to my classes, I only have five or six a week, I try to outwit my teachers.

My next-door neighbor John Browner comes in my room and says, “Hey, Shakespeare, what ya say we go down the road?”

Eight beers later and he’s singing his pornographic version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” for the third time. My drawing teacher is at the next table trying to make a tough little chick. We stagger back to campus, stopping often to piss, crying for a joint to solidify our sloshy beer high. There’s a sign in our hallway that says, “Whoever ate my guinea pig, thanks a lot! Paul.” Someone has written underneath, “It was delicious.” There’s a sign on my door (214) that says, “Sorry, NO visitors, Duncan has contracted a rare ape-like disease which is highly contagious.” We check on my roommate, who’s talking in his sleep. We go to John’s room and smoke some weed, and dissolve to the Soft Machine. “Moon in June.” Never tire of that song.

November 10. The sky has ribcage-shaped clouds. Read The Picture of Dorian Gray, gave me some good ideas. Also The Song of Roland and Flowers of Evil.

My drawing teacher, Jake Grossberg, is angry at me for handing in lazy homework. He says that I’m not expressing myself with art, I’m expressing myself with drugs and sex. He says to break through, to attempt what you cannot do. Push! “You’re better than most superstar high-school hotshot artists—sometimes you’re mind-blowing! But then you’re masturbatory and hand in this San Francisco comic-book bullshit. Break through it!” He says I’m compulsive. Tells me to look up Egon Schiele. Jake doesn’t like him but knows I will. He’s right. Blows my mind. I am also in the throes of de Kooning worship.

Lloyd and I got drunk and went to the Rainbow Room to hear Jerry Vale. Lloyd’s twisted idea of surreal fun. Jerry had blue skin. Sang “Norwegian Wood.” Creepy. Captain Beefheart is more my speed.

Back at Bard the sky was so gray and foggy and misty that I realized I was alive! Walking down dirty black Annandale Road, breathing air, smelling the wet earth. “ALIVE!” I scream it at the fir trees…Alive! I wonder at the world. I am here. Now! I’m alive. One of the living things!

Pretty friend Suzanne got us tickets to the Kinks at Carnegie Hall. First dinner at the dark Russian Tea Room (her father’s treat; he slipped me a fifty-dollar bill), cherry duck and Mateus. Then into the Carnegie bar, where all the NYC British rock fans are sitting out the first band. Some I recognize from the recent Faces concert. There’s Rick Derringer! Suzanne buys me a couple of Pernods. Quite an array of peacocks, resplendent in velvet, feather boas, high heels, and those are just the boys! These creatures only come out at night. Inside the hall, it’s all about to happen, “Ladies and gentlemen, after a long absence…the Kinks!”

Ray Davies in a Dickensian stovepipe hat, tails, gap-toothed drunken grin, Telecaster with the price tag still on it. He bows like the music-hall showman he is. We go Kinks krazy. “Waterloo Sunset”!!! “Apeman”! “Dead End Street”! “Wonderboy”! “Berkeley Mews”! “Big Black Smoke”! “King Kong”! “Dedicated Follower of Fashion”! And of course, their new AM radio hit, “Lola,” where Ray really camps it up. The next thing we know it’s the third encore (“Louie Louie”) and Ray is bidding us a good night.

Back in snowy Minneapolis for Thanksgiving. Go to a party in someone’s house. Angie’s on the Pill now, tits grew, busting out of her Ruby Keeler dress. We drink too much Pernod, which has such an intense high. I rub her monkey. Girl and boy, little joys. Ankles away.

I go see family doctor, who says I have arrhythmia or something, and I better quit smoking, drinking, and taking drugs. My dad says I’m “pathetic” and that if I flunk out of college, I’m out of the family as well.