Chapter Twelve
I walk around with my life in my head. It’s inside my head. I see it if I’m on the train or in the street: if I smell it, then I smell myself. It doesn’t go away. I can smell the smell in my head no matter where I am. I could be outside a house and if I want to think of that smell, of being dirty and homeless and wanting to die, I could. Really wanting to die but not having the balls to do it, wishing somebody would just take my life. I used to shake, not being able to hold anything in my hands, not being able to shave. It’s a terrible, terrible feeling. I never thought it was going to end. I had something in my head for the ten years from 1960 to 1970 that told me that the way people thought in that decade was never going to end.
I was an old gunfighter at the end. Everything I tried just failed, it never worked out. I couldn’t get back to the sixties, the old times. I couldn’t bring back the money. If I had $10,000, I’m gonna shoot $10,000! The funny part about it is, I never knew I did this my whole life. That’s why I never had any money. Every time I thought I had a lot of money, I’d buy some drugs.
When me and my friend Joe—“Coney Island Joe,” “Popcorn Joe”—came out of this detox, the winter was coming and we were hiding up in Sally’s house. We got thrown out of one apartment and tried sneaking in and out of another one on Reeve Place. It was kind of like living on the streets because I couldn’t get back in there all the time. Some nights I had to sleep in a hallway or go somewhere else. When I came back to Sally’s house I had to sneak in because her mother was at the ground-floor window. I snuck in and hid under the bed from her son Leo. He found me and said, “I know you’re under there!” Very humiliating, very humiliating. I was never afraid of anybody, why am I afraid of this kid? Why don’t I just sit up in the room? Part of me knew, or thought I knew, this kid’s pain. Never mind what I was doing. I was doing something I couldn’t stop doing. I tried a million times, but I just couldn’t stop hurting this kid no matter what. I needed a fucking place to stay; it was ice cold outside.
I remember me and Joe going up to my brother-in-law’s house to get a shovel off him so we could shovel people’s sidewalks for drinks. We shoveled taxicabs out in the snowstorms just to get four to five bottles of wine. I would say, “Wow! It’s snowing, this is good!” Walk out, work our ass off, I didn’t mind working. The benefits are good. The wine was there. Getting up into Sally’s house and being able to get into some warm dry clothes, that was a big deal. Then that ended. I had to get out of that house, they wouldn’t allow me back in there. I don’t know if Sally got thrown out or what.
After Sally, we were living on the streets for a couple of years, coming back and forth to Brooklyn. I was a shopping cart kid. Once in a while staying with my brothers, cleaning up and then going back to the street, living in the park in the summertime, at night sleeping on the benches. I was living underneath the West Side Highway down by the meat markets with Joe, who was a short order cook. We also lived in a rooming house down in Coney Island where Joe had a room with one little tiny bed. We would both just cuddle up there and go to sleep. Joe would give me half of anything he ever had. If he had one cigarette, he made sure I had half. If he had one piece of candy, he made sure I had half. If he came back to the hole in the cellar with a pillowcase he said, “Here. You take it. I’ll use something else. Don’t worry about it, I’m used to this. I’ve been doing this longer than you.” We were like two fucking very self-sufficient winos, but I was always in a lot of pain.
Living on the piers, using a pushcart, me and Joe went pushing up the West Side Highway to the East Side gathering things that people threw out in their garbage or would give us—suits, shoes, lamps—and we would walk it all the way down to the Lower East Side to the swap shops and would sell it for two to three dollars an item. Maybe a nice lamp or ornamental metal rooster we could sell for four to five dollars. People threw away really good stuff. If I owned a house in the country I would never buy anything. I would go in a van or a station wagon and find it. I would put little ads in the bakery. “If you don’t want some furniture, I’d be glad to pick it up for you.” You get people that would say, “Just call this guy up, he’ll take it away.”
So I proceeded to live on the streets and I’m going down. It was very painful. Very painful living in cellars on Thompson Street in the West Village; living in Washington Square Park and Tompkins Square Park back in the early eighties. I couldn’t call my family. They knew where I was; they knew what I was doing. It’s like a committee, The Committee, telling you, “You belong here. This is where we got you, this is where you’re staying. You did what we told you and this is the reward! Total bankruptcy.” So all I used to think about was the millions of dollars I had, the houses I had, the cars I had, the apartments I had, the gold I had and now I was living with nothing. I had solid gold watches, coats, mink fucking scarves, five-hundred-dollar boots and the big silk shirts, and I dressed like a king. Now I was a bum.
I smelled. I lived in cellars, under the West Side Highway, and on the piers with no bathrooms. We had a little hibachi inside the pier with a hole in the ceiling roof, a piece of pipe where the rain water would go into a big bucket and we’d get water to wash with. I lived there with two or three guys, all bums—two black guys, an old Spanish guy, Joe who was Spanish, and me the white guy. We let other people in when they came for one day.
We would cook chicken on the hibachi, drink our wine, and get high while hanging found velvet paintings and rugs on the walls of the big enclosed dock. There were about two hundred bathrooms there. It must have been used as an old sanitation garage. There were one hundred stalls. None of them worked, but we used every one of them as bathrooms. They were a block away, so you could go to the bathroom there and it would never bother you. The ocean would blow it away. That was our bathroom. “Where you going?” “I’m going to the bathroom.” Walk all the way to the end so you wouldn’t stink up. We would sleep on blankets and mattresses that we dragged in, cook up stuff, go out during the day and bring all your shit back, whatever you grubbed up. It was terrible. The feelings I got walking in the streets were, “Where’s my life?”
I remember Joe having to shave me, cut my hair, cut my mustache out of my mouth, go out and get some food. I was losing the ability to communicate with people. I couldn’t talk so good. I was losing it. I was becoming what they call a wet brain. I just didn’t want to talk to anybody. That’s the way I lived on the street.
One day Joe went out and he didn’t come back for a couple of days. I started getting scared by myself. Bums are very treacherous; they’ll kill you for a pair of shoes. I used to carry a knife with me and I threatened to kill a few guys, chased them away. I told them I’d cut their fucking heads off and I did scare a few people. But not as much as I was scared. I was fucking frightened to death to be alone and be out there like that. I used to think about my children all the time, about my life, about the money I had, the women that were in my life. I used to blame it all on them, blame, blame, blame. So at the end, was my will dying? Yeah. My will was dying but I didn’t know it yet.
I finally got a token off somebody and got back to Brooklyn to my old neighborhood. I think I went up to see Sally. I was hanging out on the parkside drinking wine all day with a guy named Bonesy. It was the worst place for me to go back to, my old neighborhood. Everybody knew me there. I had some friends that were also winos, the old timers. The cops were torturing me, putting guns near my head. Sitting on the bench I used to get humiliated, pissed on, beat up, talked down to. I wouldn’t say a word, I couldn’t say a word.
I was a terrible, terrible panhandler too. If people didn’t give me money I wanted to kill them. I remember a guy telling me one time, “Why don’t you go get a job?” and I said, “Fuck you, I worked all my life. I asked you for a miserable fifteen cents, you bastard.” I used to get mad at people, so I wasn’t good at panhandling. Joe was a pro at it. He’d been on the streets for many years and he had this rap with the cab drivers. “Hey buddy, how you doing today? Nice day. Got a good cab there. Got some change for an old partner?” Joe used to do a lot of the panhandling and get a pint, a couple of pints, maybe half pint of vodka, two pints of wine. He had a whole game. I didn’t have that. “You got fifteen cents? No? Fuck you.” That’s the way I was. So I wouldn’t have done very well on the streets.
I used to remember looking at old movies and seeing the hero, the gunfighter, getting old and then people taking advantage of him. I would think about those things while I was on the bench, about how weak I was, how I couldn’t fight anymore. Didn’t want to fight, didn’t want to fight anybody. That’s why I let people beat me up. I was probably hoping to die, or just didn’t have it anymore. The world was dying, tired, old. I lived the life of a man who should have been eighty by the time I was thirty-nine. I stayed on the bench with Bonesy hanging out, washing in the waterfalls, our usual shit. Then we both decided, “Let’s go to detox.” It was a year since I was in my last detox. I said to him, “Listen, tomorrow I’m going to Kings County.”
I went down to Sally’s house that night and told her that I was going into detox. So I went back up to the parkside at seven o’clock in the morning, waiting for Bonesy. He didn’t show up. I says, “Fuck this, this guy isn’t coming, let me start walking,” because I had about a three-and-a-half-mile walk ahead of me. It was June of 1983. I walked through the park. Sally met me. She came with me to the last detox. I went in and I sat there shaking and baking, shaking and baking. No booze in me, Sally ran out and got a pint. I drank it outside, came back in still shaking, sweating, stinking, sick as a dog. Thought I was dying. Really thought I was dying. A guy said, “I might have a bed for you.” I said, “Alright, that’s good.” Waiting two to three hours was the most painful time of my life, waiting for that detox because I was so sick. Suffering from a terrible anxiety and the anxiety never went away for a couple of years. Every morning I woke up I was shaking, sweating, stinking.
But I did get into the detox that day. He said to me, “I got a bed at the end of the day,” and I said to him, “Could you hold that bed till tomorrow?” And he says, “Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. Either you take the bed now or you don’t.” So I did and I stayed in there thirteen days. When I went in, the guy was asking me questions and he said, “You were here last year, right? I remember you.” I said, “Yeah, I was here last year”—my hands were shaking like I was mixing eggs, mixing batter, they were shaking that bad. The guy says, “Boy, you got them pretty bad,” meaning the DDT’s and “Yeah,” I said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” I had this big beard and fucking long hair and I smelled. The guy says, “All right, sign this,” and he put a pen in my hand. I went to sign it and the pen went flying out of my hand. He says, “Never mind, you got ’em too bad.” They put me in a wheelchair and took me up to the detox. I had a bladder infection, I had pancreatitis, my blood pressure was sky high. I was ready to explode and die.
The doctor told me at that point that if I’d stayed on the streets a couple more weeks the way I was, I probably wouldn’t have made it. I probably would have died. I felt that way too. So no wonder I couldn’t fight back. I was surrendering. This was the part where I was literally dying and surrendering and I didn’t know it. I was surrendering to win. The will was gone. I had to kill the will. I had to kill the will that wanted to get high. I had to kill the will to live again. If I had any money that day, I would have walked out of the detox. If I had $1.10, I would have walked up to fucking Ocean Avenue and gotten another pint of liquor, come back, missed the bed, and might have stayed out there a little while too long and died.