The Honest Truth

There is this very slim blonde woman early twenties sweet and lithe pretty blue eyes dancing or trying to with a heavy guy who absolutely will not let her tug him onto the dance floor in Whiskey Dick's, where my friends Charlie and Fred are playing a mix of jazz and blues...and a fine black woman from Carolina singing everything from Louis Armstrong to Patsy Cline...very expertly full of feeling innovation and power. Charlie is fantastic on the piano. Fred has a subtle light touch on the congas and the guitarist and drummer are equally gifted...it drives rocks and drills and feels so lovely I dance with first a black gal then a white one then the black one again—she’s best...I feel most comfortable with her...ah this is what I love about New Orleans they dance here...









she laughs for real and it’s a pleasure and she is not drunk either...I want to play with her on a big feather bed... I kick out the jams for a few seconds and feel how I felt the night I discovered Jennie Busch...every muscle in my body working the way it's supposed to...But it looks like she’s taken by another...AREN'T THEY ALL?...Then like a spark of divine love comes this fine-looking person with lovely long straight light-blonde hair naturally falling like a waterfall of clover honey nearly to her waist and urged by loneliness & lust I tell her You don't have to drag me out there and she drops the guy and floats into my loving arms. O woman where did you come from? We dance but she is slightly drunk and we are a little out of synch she wants to lead and I let her but it's not natural yet so I just dance as well as I can as if I were alone but very aware of her. She dances a foot from me then comes into my arms light as a dandelion and the inevitable thing happens and I press it to her what the hell. She laughs delightfully and presses back. So I improve my aim and put it solidly where it belongs so there is no mistaking what is actually going on here and she emits a gale of laughter as I nearly lift her off the floor with it. I am about to fly out the door with her to the nearest privacy and she is really close to me..closer means naked...and I say would you please relieve me of this hard on? She erupts into hilarity it is the funniest thing she has ever heard. I am feeling damned good the dance is over and we are starting to talk by the bar she is saying she loves to dance with me and suddenly this young dude walks into the scene like a curse of black magic and puts himself between us and a minute later he has her sitting with him at the bar. I go outside get my bayonet come back in and stab him through the heart. As he is laying there dead I spit on him. “Steal my girl son of a bitch?” I say. Someone calls the cops what a drag. Here they come. Four of them guns out. I shoot the first one through the head blood & brains all over the tables and walls and get the next one through the heart and the other two duck behind the armored cop car. These are not New York cops. Radio crackles and sirens are descending on the set from the four directions...



Sigh. I want to get my bayonet from the van and put it in his heart but a lifetime of pacifism or at least a desire for it wins and I let him live. That is what young guys inevitably do to old guys I know I've seen it plenty before. They see an old guy with a gal more their age and think what can that old dude do with that young chick and move in try to take over and usually do because I give way and refuse to compete for a female. I nearly popped one guy for it once though in Durango back in my forties and won the girl, ha ha, who enjoyed being with the victor in a contest for her--body; and she was drunk but I was too then. A memorable nightmare although some sexual satisfaction was enjoyed by all.



She had been raped like I think most women have and brutally, life-threateningly...amazing that she got away from the monster, she knew his identity, too rich too connected to prosecute cops wouldn't do a thing made her look like the rapist and he the victim...her story sort of put a damper on the proceedings...her sobbing nakedly on the bed afterward telling me it...The only time I ever got my back up over male intrusion though and of course losing out this time hardly perturbed me at all. Just too bad was all I could think. She was lighter than air in my arms her breasts were small firm and bra-less under a form-fitting shirt she felt so good the bastard doesn't know what he did to me...don't forgive him Lord he knew what he was doing all right. More compost for my own brand of literature such as it is. That's really what happened about an hour ago before I came back to my writing spot near the French Quarter. We could be dancing babe our own intimate dance sweaty and funny and now you are sitting there with a real dunce who would rather talk than dance or fuck. I know I heard him talk. If you were with me you'd be flat on your back ankles by your ears. This is the honest truth.




I stick around for a few more minutes bored now. Then I say goodbye to Fred & Charlie no sense in even trying to say it to the slim one sunk in deep conversation with the guy working out his complicated seduction scheme. I climb in the familiar solitary confinement cell of a van and drive but where? Realizing all coffee shops closed now I end up in Bugga’s Boogey Shack buy my coke and set up in the back room with the pool tables and bar that I’ve never seen used. Sit there for an hour head in my hand trying to think what to write and why. Life slipping away and still I can’t get laid. How many more hours or days before the lights go out? Why is it so important? One thing I know it doesn’t matter to anyone but me. I’m thinking of standing on a corner with a sign: No Pussy for 10 years. As if anybody would get anything more than a laugh from it or a little outrage look Maggie nearly anything goes now you'd never see that back in Paduca...well this is New Orleans dear...but not even a sympathy fuck you can bet... Poor guy you must be going nuts...Come on you funny man I'll take care of you..Nothing else works...That won’t either. Make yourself an object of ridicule. Nobody ridicules you more than yourself...Mike you are the most absurd being in New Orleans. Wishing I was anybody but me...wishing I were a dancer like you.

The outrageous thing to me is unspoken unwritten rule nobody can initiate an inter-gender conversation about sex except females. If a guy starts talking about sex females turn off, who the hell does he think he is that’s my prerogative, call a cop he’s probably a molester, a harasser, a stalker, a masher, a sex-maniac, a rapist, an asshole put him down hard he doesn't obey the rules. Women can start the conversation and sometimes do but it seldom goes anywhere and you wonder why they did. I’ve had one sit across the table telling me how long and thick it was how it felt how long they did it and with how many guys then make a mild pass at her all worked up and had outrage returned. I didn’t mean to get you all worked up man I was just talking geez why are guys so obsessed with sex? Sorry honey stories about sex from people who have actually had some get me all worked up and for some odd reason make me want to do it. Sorry about that sorry sorry sorry sorry. I been apologizing to them all my life. Sorry I stepped on your female privilege that one in particular, source of your power over me. Sorry I got an erection I’ll have it surgically-removed will that make you happy? Or would you rather cut it off yourself? Squash me like a bug that's your mission in life isn't it?




What's the point? I don't know. No point. Wishing that woman who was here last night was here now. Or the one I was dancing with an hour ago. Or the one before that, whichever one it was I don't remember. I'm distracted by my own digression into that rape-story. Others come to mind. I don't know if I should tell them. Oh hell yes why not? Maybe someone will learn something. Here's one: Sweet Madeline and I were driving home on a main road not an interstate near Charlotte back in the early mid-seventies and picked up a gorgeous Canadian woman on vacation hitch-hiking because she had always wanted to do it. She was so attractive intelligent and open we invited her home for dinner. She was nice company. After dinner we were sitting around a fire in the living room. I asked if she'd had any interesting things happen while hitching down from Canada. She said she had been standing in the middle of a small town in Virginia or somewhere about dusk when a large man in a pickup truck stopped. She spoke with him a minute or two trusted him and got in the truck. Immediately he clamped a vise-like hand on her arm and said Not only am I going to rape you and kill you I am going to rape you after I kill you! He proceeded very fast to a spot on a deserted road outside town tore her pants off and proceeded to rape her. She said it was absolutely futile to resist he was so strong. As he entered her however, instead of crying out or fighting she had gently instinctively put her hand on the back of his head and stroked it very gently the way a mother might. Even as he was brutally fucking her she did this. Suddenly she said the fellow stopped softened withdrew and broke down sobbing. She comforted him awhile with her arms around him, and they spoke for an hour or more. He told his life story, which of course was sad. Then he dropped her back in town said goodbye and drove away. She had clear blue eyes dark blonde hair and a firm feminine figure. When we dropped her on the road next day I was wishing I could go with her. I hadn't known what to say on hearing the story, and said little. Today I'd probably say she wasn't meant to die beneath a maddened brute, and hopefully he met her just in time. But think of the poor women who weren't so blessed. Where is the redeeming lesson in their suffering? In the thousands and thousands of destroyed and missing women done every year in that fashion or worse and left to be eaten their bones scattered by animals. The enormity of this crime stultifies imagination.



Somehow I ended up at the rocket-propelled jump over the Snake River by Evel Knieval back in the seventies. It's a long story but I was hitching somewhere else and told A.J. Geigerich back in NJ that I would meet him and some other chaps there because they were doing a cross-country biker trip, and where else but the spectacular event. I'm not a biker though I had one once and it's not my crowd just a curiosity so I went out of my way to get there, set up my good North Face tent and proceeded to get high on pot and stoned on some pretty good acid. Everybody was stoned on something. That was the event where the barbarians began shouting "Show your tits!" and compliant biker-gals and others too would oblige pulling up their shirts revealing some pretty nice ones to cheers and tumult. Somehow I missed AJ and the others by getting the day wrong or something but it didn't matter much. I wandered around and talked to people and got more stoned. I don't remember sleeping in that tent at all.

Twin Falls is two waterfalls of course with a pool at the bottom of each. The bottom pool is most placid and on the second day I wandered there to find about 200 men and a few women sitting around the stony edge of it nearly dead quiet all eyes looking at the center where an incredibly beautiful woman on a small rock barely a foot above the hushed water stood completely naked almost like a statue except when she turned slowly to gaze back at the gazers. She had a small golden bush long blonde hair brilliant blue eyes and a perfect figure. Her breasts were firm and brownish-pink nipples erect. The quiet was unnatural, broken now and then only with nearly inaudible talk. I sat for about 30 minutes then departed. I wondered why she was doing it. Was it a dare or an initiation or did she simply like to give 200 men a hard-on? What would have happened if I had swum out for a talk as I wanted to and would have done if not for the 400 eyeballs fixed on her. It tortures me to imagine she might have been thinking the first one with the guts to swim out here lays me down. Nothing I would rather do than get in a time warp and swim out to her rock. Too late now of course it always is.

I'm sitting in the Fine Grinds coffee shop going completely crazy with horniness and an inability to contact my Muse and call Bob Fass on a whim. Ah! Success! It's hard getting through to the great broadcaster but here he is and finally I start feeling good he almost always does me that way. Bob tells me a rabbit joke meant to alert me to the fact that he wants me to stop smoking because he wants to keep me around. I love this guy who had so much influence on me his program on WBAI and introducing me to Abbie. I am actually going to try to quit for him, because I can't do it for myself folks sorry that's the way it is. I wish it were different but it isn't. I don't feel as valuable as others say I am to them, why because self-esteem problems or inadequacy or because I just can't get laid I don't know. It amazes me I deadheaded off the computer last night because it froze and forgot to save four hours of work and lost it. Trying to re-create it exactly IMPOSSIBLE so I stab it and twist it and kick it and walk out on it only halfway into it because of this nagging feeling the end is approachinig how many more days do I have to lie in the arms of a woman feel wanted and be relieved of this fucking hard-on? Viagra? GUFFAW! I could probably produce the stuff. But I had a photo of me taken last night and I look like a cadaver ready for burial. Downright scary!

During the Democratic Convention protests in Miami 1972 demonstrators and every other form of American weirdo had pretty free rein in Flamingo Park because Miami didn't want what happened in Chicago in 1968 to happen there. Pot-smoking was pretty open in fact I smoked a joint sitting in Lum's Restaurant and others were doing the same, all of us cracking up at our open defiance of the stupid marijuana laws. Gays and lesbians were about and gay men had a tent compound sort of roped off in a corner of the park and who knows what was going on in there let me guess. One morniing I walked into the large shower room for men and found 20 naked men and one naked woman showering. All the guys were half turned away from her with erections or the suppression of one. I wanted to go soap her back but figured it was a trick maybe the guy next to her was a boyfriend. Imagine the women tolerating me showering with them without an invitation. I stayed stoned on some Panama Red I had bought cheap must have been the last cheap ounce of that particular grass sold in the United States because I haven't seen it since. One night I was in my bag in the yippie parachute tent and woke to hear a rather loud voice looked out saw it was Allen Ginsberg whose path I had crossed once before at the Newport Jazz Festival 1967. He looked at me and said You look very comfortable in that sleeping bag. I indicated with my hand that he could sleep in it. Will you be in it he asked. I shook my head no and smiled. He smiled back and now I wish I had said yes. Allen Ginsberg made a pass at me and I didn't catch it. What an opportunity to touch greatness maybe learn something from a Master equal to Whitman Blake & Pound and get off too. At least once I was attractive to somebody with a brain. And not only once so why am I sitting here like this now with no relief and no prospects? Beause I'm old and blue and have to learn yet-another lesson. Or is that the case? There's that one at the Marie Antoinette Hotel I think will part the Red Sea for me if I only take the time to drop by. But I don't know. She drinks too much and is ugly uptight and phony as a four-dollar bill, and suddenly that matters where it hardly did before. I don't want to get mixed up with an active alcoholic. Although...like who cares? What do I want a relationship or a nude woman on a bed? Every human contact is a relationship even an inrfrequent frenetic fuck. I know she's mine for the taking but not what to do...it's untrue that men are ruled solely by their gonads. Every passion every failing and everybody else seem to rule me. I'm still sitting here waiting for the right one. She comes by occasionally gives me a hug even kisses me or dances with me tells me she loves me writes me letters and gives me gas money but she always belongs to another or wants to. I know the feeling. But it makes me see red.