1 Savage Amusement I’m smoking a True Blue and drinking a little Marsala. I’m about to move to another apartment, one that has sun in the morning. My new roommate is Betty Boop, aka Connie Salter. She runs a second-hand shop. She’s as nervous as a wounded squirrel. I went to dinner at her place, then on to a party at her invitation. We dipped gin punch from an avocado wastebasket. Betty’s boyfriend, Jon, was there. He gazed drunkenly at Betty. She told him I was a poet. “Don’t show him any of my stuff,” he said. I have a book due out in the fall, a collection of five poets, but I’m not writing poems, right now. Instead, I’m reading and regrouping. “Making changes is strange and difficult,” I think, and nothing feels truer. I’ve been divorced for a year, separated for two. “I could use a little happiness,” I said to myself, the other day. I’m recovering from a venereal infection, the second time in twelve months. I’m 33, and I’m about to change my line of work. I want to perform on stage. My cousin, Karen, is coming out from Chicago, to join me in a dramatic career. I think we could be another Nichols and May. I went down to LA for two weeks a while back, to see if I could get into show business with the help of my rich Uncle Harry. Instead, he suggested I go over to the Balboa Bay Club and pick up a rich widow and he was serious. Harry’s wife, Teddy, once married to a top executive at MGM, working on her fifth face lift, which is the limit, I’ve been told, suggested I forget about the silver screen, get a job, and write poetry as a hobby. Teddy is proud and Harry is humble to tell me he plays cards with John Wayne. The Duke. I went out for more cigarettes and ran into my roommate, Paul. Paul is just back from a music festival at a Mission District high school, held in a room filled with nubile Chicanas. Like me, Paul distracts himself chronically. He suggests we go to Garcia’s on Haight Street for Mexican food. He was gone a year in Mexico, and now he’s back, unemployed, broker than I am, under suit from the New Jersey State Police, and the gay landlords are demanding his eviction. He’s troubled, left and right. At Garcia’s I asked for a fresh ashtray. The plump teenage waitress coolly opened the front door and chucked the dead butts and ashes into the street. “Classy,” I said. 2 I ordered coffee first. It didn’t come. It comes with the coke I ordered for later. The other waitress, younger than the first, looked at me mystified. “You want coffee and a coke?” she saod. We stopped in at Cat’s Cradle, converted from John’s Playhouse, from gay to bluegrass. Onstage, after the two-dollar spaghetti feed, the same faces were playing as played with and around my brother, Mark, three years ago and two years before that. It’s a seedy joint, populated by musicians and musicians’ girlfriends. “This is my old lady,” etc. “It’s like the poetry scene,” I thought, “low energy, laid back, dull.” Now I’m back home, drinking Hiram Walker’s Ten High. Paul comes back from the corner with fresh toilet paper. No ripped-up Sunday paper for him. I chip in. Paul hands me back a quarter change. I think I have to get some money to Betty, so she won’t balk at taking me on as a roommate. I suspect, at the same time, she’s nervous about me backing out. “My god,” I think, “it’s another relationship.” I suspect I’m being hired as a buffer between her and her peripatetic boyfriend, Jon. Betty works part-time as a waitress at Yancy’s, a pick-up, dance place, with undertones of urban violence, frustrated energy warming into the pool of night air, at 2AM, Coupe de Villes in the street, motorcycles, girlfriends whispering to each other, a few steps ahead of their anxious, confused dates. Dates? What constant, anachronistic, language blows. Business is bad at Betty Boop’s. Someone smashed the door window and stole fifty bucks and a few rings. Her place has lace curtains and a Donald Duck clock with moving eyes. The clock doesn’t tick. It blinks, “Blink, blink. The mouse ran up the duck.” The thief was into kitsch. He’s addicted to it. It’s probably boyfriend Jon, who steals Betty blind, when he can get her blind. He gets nowhere when she can see him clearly. Paul is dispossessed in his own apartment. It’s mostly my furniture and my stereo, but worst of all, here I am sitting in his chair. Paul is wandering from wall to wall, from pillar to post. He sits to read the Mexican poet he’s translating, Oscar Oliva, and he’s astounded. He finds Oliva simple, eloquent, and apolitical; a poet who uses simple words, like “beautiful.” “Where’s the party?” I ask. Both of us are flush with sexual desire. I go to the phone to call Betty, to see what’s up. There’s no answer. I come back in a talkative mood. The little girls on the block caught me talking to myself on the street and nicknamed me Talk-It-Over. Here 3 comes Talk-It-Over. It makes me self-conscious in the city. Walking along, talking to myself. I turn a corner and try to make a song out of my words. It never works. “Hey, Ronnie, did you catch that guy trying to turn his mindless jabber into a song?” “Man, this city is on the skids, nice looking guy like that, talking to himself on the street.” All neuroses in plain sight. Erica Jong (Fear of Flying) is waving her bum in public, but she doesn’t mention stretch marks. I know she’s got stretch marks. Everybody’s got stretch marks. Not to mention Werner Erhard and Erhard Seminar Trainings, EST, assholes feeling good about being assholes. But, the best advice I’ve gotten, recently, was from an ESTie, Curt Mackey, a fellow poet, with whom I share this venereal disease, or one of its more benign cousins, transferred from Curt to me, via Anne Valley Fox, another fellow poet. And a good fellow she is. I would walk on glass to get to Anne. (I’m not saying broken glass, mind you.) The advice was one word: responsibility. Curt talks about the joy and virtue of taking responsibility for everything that happens to each of us. Curt is implacable. He takes to responsibility like the immune take to disease. “Somebody’s going to have to buy me a new shirt,” I say, standing at the closet, and he says, “When you find out who that is, you tell them I need a shirt and some new pants.” I take out a brown shirt I found in the dressing room of the New Committee Theatre, five years ago. We were putting on a play I wrote in collaboration with Charles (not Chuck) Borkhuis (also called Bowery, for his clothing style) in order to help end the war in Vietnam and, specifically, the bombing in Cambodia. The shirt was left over from Fortune and Men’s Eyes, starring Sal Mineo. It has a patch on the sleeve that reads, California Correctional Facility. I ripped off the patch, and the shirt. Unfortunately, the war continued unabated, including the bombing of Cambodia. I watched Julia Vose boldly strip in the middle of the dressing room between scenes. And Marilee Janson, who changed her clothes in the corner over by the cement block wall, with her back to the room. Both of them were tantalizing to my eyes. I’m on the piss parade, now, taking regular hikes to the toilet. The misty, soulful voice engulfing the room from FM 101 says, “It’s just one of those things you put down to experience.” I have some more Marsala. Paul is in the kitchen, talking to David, a real nice guy from upstairs, who says he’s into poetry. There’s a song on the radio, hard-sell soul. “Voulez-vous couchez avec moi, ce soir?” David says Charlene, who also lives upstairs, has him in her harem. He says she comes up and rapes him, occasionally. 4 Charlene, David, and Paul are being evicted at the same time. It’s ménage-a-trois into the street. A while back, Paul and I came home drunk and stood shouting up from the sidewalk, “CHARLENE!!” She never came down. Her full name is Charlene Funderbunk. Her daughter is Rainbow Funderbunk. Charlene is in the hospital in Santa Cruz, after she dropped acid, fell off a chair, and cracked her skull. On the radio, one deep FM voice is asking another, “And what do I do, if I find that I have rats in my apartment.” “What are we listening to?” Paul smiles. I jump up and switch to phono. I drop the floating arm onto “The Seasons” by Vivaldi. I stand, facing the stereo, seriously directing the Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra of New York, as if I have a dripping Popsicle stick in my hand. It reminds me of a college friend, Phil Landrich, from Des Moines, skinny and homely as Abe Lincoln, who would stand for hours, straight as one of Abe’s split rails, directing his stereo, perfectly.