Waterfront Journals (3 page)

SAN FRANCISCO

I used to hustle with a buddy but things got bad between us … it was hard cause we were good friends for a long time before we hustled together and we just couldn't get it on with a guy in front of each other so some guy would pick us up, see we'd help each other out by tellin guys that we wouldn't go with them without each other, some guys dug the idea of two kids but when we'd get up to their place we'd end up not wantin to go down on the guy or whatever while the other was watchin. That caused a lot of hassles and sometimes it'd almost keep us from gettin paid. The last time me and my friend hustled together some spade approached my friend and told him that there was a guy waitin in the parking lot around the corner who was interested in makin it with him. My friend said he wouldn't do it without me comin along, so the spade checked it out with the guy and the guy said okay. We walked around the corner and into the parking lot and there was this black limo sittin there. This young couple got out of the limo and stood there watchin us as we walked up … it was weird … I can remember the girl was real beautiful and she gave me this funny look with these sad eyes, I mean we were pretty young, only about thirteen or fourteen, so this fat guy inside the limo told us to get in and we did. He had this color TV and a pink phone in the backseat of the car and a driver with a uniform. So we agreed that he'd pay us fifty bucks each and then we drove to this fancy apartment building. The guy lived on the thirtieth floor … he told us he was with the Mafia. When we got inside his apartment he showed us a bunch of San Francisco Police badges and a German Luger. It was a pretty gun, had a clip with seven copper-tip bullets in it … my friend picked up the gun and aimed it right between my eyes and I almost kicked the shit out of him for it … thank god the fuckin gun wasn't loaded … so this guy starts suckin us off and then after a while he sees we ain't gonna do anything in front of each other so he takes my friend into the other room. After a few minutes my friend came out and tells me the guy wants me to go in. Well I got in the room and I lay out on the bed and the guy flips me over and tries to stick it in me … it was killin me … he's breathin in my ear like a sick hog goin: I'll give ya another twenty-five bucks if ya let me. I couldn't get him off me he weighed too much and he kept trying to stick it in … finally I twisted over and the two of us fell off the bed on the floor like a fucking earthquake boom! so the guy gave us our money and told us to get out … we split and after that I stopped hustlin with my friend …

A couple of times we tried to do some muggin to get some money but we were really bad at it, we didn't have the guts for it. One night we stayed up all night walkin around the fuckin city tryin to find an easy mark. Around four in the morning we spied some guy with a suit walkin about three blocks away and we figured we would run as fast as we could and slam into him, knock him down and grab his wallet and run. So we started runnin and we get up right behind the guy and he must've heard us cause he turned around and we saw that he was just an old bum wearin some suit that was too big for him and we burst out laughin right there … it was awful. Another guy we met was real drunk and we started talkin to him tryin to get invited up to his place for a drink. We figured we'd tie him up and take whatever was in the place and fence it. So we wandered round with the guy for three hours makin friends with him. At one point he gave my friend five bucks to go get him a pack of cigarettes at the all-night coffee shop. My friend ran down and got the cigarettes and while he was gone the guy started tellin me how he was wounded in World War II and how he laid up in the hospital for a year and a half and then he started crying and tellin me about how his father died in World War I and how he still missed him after fifty-something years. I almost started crying cause it made me think of my father … I mean the guy really reminded me of how my father was when he got drunk. Well my friend came runnin up with the cigarettes and the guy was thankful for the favor. He invited us back to his place for food or somethin. My friend said yeah yeah but I told the guy no we had to get goin and maybe some other time. My friend got pissed off at me and after the guy split I tried to explain to him why I couldn't go through with it … he thought I was off my rocker …

Man in Mickey's Dining Car 2:30
A.M.

ST. PAUL

I've been living here a few weeks and it's starting to get a little hot for me … I've written myself out of several states in the last six years … Florida would love to get a hold of me I'm sure … see I was working for a bank seven years ago. I worked in the section that dealt with the papers and accounts of persons deceased. I was cashing checks against the accounts of this doctor who had dropped dead and whose money was tied up pending the outcome of some wills he'd left behind. I finally got snagged and did a little time in Elmira for it … it was easy for me to go through it … if you got a little money on the outside you can get a lot of shit … steaks, drugs, even women if you pay enough … but I ain't that interested in women … too much time in prisons changed all that. I've been mostly going with young boys from every meat market between L.A. and New York City … lots of cute kids out there. I got four sets of checkbooks from dead doctors and a load of ID and some sweet fuckin smiles that pay my way through every state. See that kid over there he's into smack pretty bad. I've known him since I got here and he's hustling down by the terminal just about every night … sweet kid, lemme tell ya. I did something that I ain't proud of … don't know why I did it and it's left me with a bad taste about myself … I can't look the kid in the face no more. See I've wanted to fuck the kid since I met him but he's always refused and there was no way I could get him to turn over in bed. Two nights ago he came up to my hotel room pretty sick … he said he had to get some money fast did I wanna trick with him. It was awful he was getting the sweats already and in pain. I told him: How bad do you need the money? bad enough to turn over? He started crying but he turned over and I went ahead and fucked him … gave him thirty extra cause I felt so fuckin guilty afterwards. I really don't know what to say … I don't know why I did it to him … he hasn't said a word to me since then and I figure it's about time I split from here … maybe head back to New York. There's some halfway houses I can work in keep a low profile for a while anyway …

Young Boy in Times Square 4:00
A.M.

NEW YORK CITY

It's okay down here … I got lots of friends lots of people watchin out for me … a couple of prostitutes are like my second parents … they give me money for coffee or cigarettes when things are tight … I let em know when I see the vans comin around … I tell ya I learned more down here about real people in a year than the last seven years in school. Tell me what the fuck Lewis and Clark would do if they sailed down the Hudson and got off on Forty-second Street and they didn't have no money to get somethin to eat … I could hook em up with a guy who'd put both of em in soft fuck films in a second … ha ha … no no, really I do okay down here … there's a weirdo once in a while but most of the guys are nice … ya learn to pick em out by the way they move … if a man's crazy you can pick it up in his eyes in a second. There's other ways to pick up money besides hustlin the Square … by Saturday afternoon business is bad … most of the payin johns have got some kid for the weekend and there's not too much goin on … there's this crazy kid I know he's been showin me a lot of shit … he took me out to Coney Island and hipped me to kickin clothes … that's when ya get two kids like me and him and ya take off your shirts just like any normal kids on a beach and when it's crowded ya run down the beach chasin each other and every once in a while ya stop and throw each other around in the sand and all ya gotta do is keep a smile on your face and laugh a lot like you're just two kids havin fun … then ya get over by a blanket where there's some pairs of pants folded up and if no one's watchin close ya chase each other past the blanket and kick the pair of pants in front of you … ya just keep shouting and laughin and kickin the fuckin pants down the beach till ya get a ways away and then ya fall down like you're out of breath. If no one comes screamin down at ya for kickin their pants around ya go through the pockets and take whatever money's there … we did this for a whole summer on the weekends … I finally stopped doin it though cause the last time I did it see usually I'd let my friend kick the pants and we'd split it fifty-fifty but he got tired of it and said if I didn't kick for a while he'd give me a smaller cut so I started kickin and about the seventh time I kicked we got far down on the beach and I reached into the pants for the wallet. It was thick like there was a lot of money and when I opened it my eyes almost took a vacation there was this fuckin gold detective badge hooked inside it … I gave it up then and there. This guy hipped me to a lot of other things too. We'd ride dumbwaiters up and down these old buildings in Brooklyn from the roof and kick in doors and pick up some cash. Sometimes we'd raid the refrigerator if there was anything worthwhile in there. Lemme tell ya this guy is crazy though … a couple of weeks ago he walked into this butcher shop downtown the owners were busy in the back makin repairs and he walked over and picked the key to the register off the wall and opened the cash drawer. There was about three hundred bucks inside. He stuffed it into a shopping bag and walked out. We bought a couple of tubes of glue and a pair of socks and split to Jersey for the day. We went to this amusement park and sniffed behind the beauty show stage and walked around in the freak show for a while. We saw this two-headed turtle in a jar of alcohol and a load of pictures of women with small bodies growin out of their bellies. We ate too much food and then my friend got the idea that we should ride the octopus and sniff while it's going around so we went up and this fuckin machine is goin up and down and spinnin around every once in a while. I started getting sick from the glue. They put this onion or garlic oil in it now so that ya get sick if ya sniff it. So I started getting ready to heave and I yelled down to these two guys runnin the machine: Whoa let me off I'm gonna be sick and these fuckin guys think it's funny. They start pointin at me and laughin like it's a big joke so I start chuckin and I hold it in till we're stopped right over the guys runnin the ride. We're spinnin and I let go … it was like a fuckin April shower all over em … well they stopped the fuckin ride fast and when I got off I could hardly walk and these two guys are screamin at me: Why the hell you go on ride if you sick! … ha ha … they were covered, man …

… last night was the first time I ever saw a guy and a girl fuck … I was in the Comet Hotel over on Forty-fifth Street and this guy brought me up there and asked special for room number seven … he must've known what the room was like cause after we got in there he had me take off my clothes and then he pulled up a chair to the door that separates our room from the next room. It's like a double room for families but they keep the door locked when only one room's being rented. So there's this big crack in the door and when the guy shut out the lights you could look into the next room without being noticed. So he had me wait till someone rented out the next room and then he had me watch what was goin on while he went down on me … it was crazy … this prostitute I remember from in front of the Port Authority walked in with this Spanish guy and they threw off their clothes and the guy hops on the bed and this girl jumped on top of him and the two of them went at it, changin positions every couple of seconds until he shot, then she got up and put her leg up on the bed and took a wipe at herself with a towel and they got dressed again. The whole thing took two minutes and when she turned around to get into her dress I could see this huge area of her chest and stomach all scarred up … fresh scars with stitches in em … I almost puked … the guy I was with gave me a lot to make up for it but it flipped me out … it made me feel really funny watchin them …

Young Runner Hanging Out by the River

THE BRONX

I know this guy who deals amyl nitrite. A friend of his, this chemist, makes it pure, not like that shit they sell over at candy stores, so this guy I know sells it for him. Last night we were out running along the river when he says: Look I gotta stop by some guy's house to drop off some amyl ya wanna come? So I said: Yeah so we took a run over to this house over in the middle of the neighborhood, this old place built around the 1800s. We ring the bell and this heavyset priest opens the door. He's wearing these thick glasses and he's got a funny look on his face like maybe I shouldn't be there. Then he invites us in and starts apologizing for this, mess in the hallway. It was a huge load of Louis the XIV antiques obviously worth a shitload of money. So we go down the front hall and this ratty little dog jumps out at us. It was like a poodle but fat as a watermelon. It started shrieking and gurgling and running around in circles and the priest takes us into this living room filled with tons of porcelain and crystal and brass and this little dog follows us in jumping into the air doing little pirouettes and licking us all over our bare legs and fingers … it was disgusting … and we're sitting there and my friend and this priest are shooting the breeze when this cellar door opens and this other priest comes up with another dog. This dog was about as big as me and fuckin ugly and when it walked over to me and stared at me for a few minutes without moving I felt obliged to give it a pat cause the two priests were watching me. Then this one priest says: Oh please please don't pet the dog she's really quite old and paranoid. She may bite. Man, what a fuckin relief. So my friend gives these two priests a couple of bottles of amyl and they start talking about their drug experiences. The priest with the glasses turns to me and says: Now I hope this doesn't shock you. I said: Oh no, and he goes on about how he tried this THC that a student gave him and it was: Ab-so-lute-ly marvelous and how he copped twenty tabs of it cause: It has all the effects of marijuana without the fuss and mess. It was like a fuckin commercial. The other priest didn't say anything but: Um ah hum. And this heavy guy kept talking about doing acid and how he was worried he'd have a flashback while he was working. Then he got into talking about guys he's been to bed with, how this guy named Stone from Coney Island had a big cock and how this other guy from the Village had a bigger cock and how this guy he met on vacation in Puerto Rico knew how to fuck best of all and how he had thoughts about this student who was hung like an ox … I don't know man … it just sounded so fuckin lonesome …