The Tufnell Park Notebook





A.D. Beller

































©2005
Nina Ndoto: I first met her in 1997 outside a café called The Rat and Deer. It was a privately owned sandwich shop which employed lesbians, hippies, freaks, strong women. There were two tables on either side of the entrance. I sat at one she sat at the other. We knew we were there. She asked If I’d like a cigarette.


London, Summer, 2005

1

I’ve come to live in this place, in Tufnell Park, a leafy green street infested by families, children, and little mobs of punk kids. This is what happens when I leave my wife. I’ve moved into this place with two Canadians. I’ve been living here for almost three weeks. This place of separation.


2

I decided to take the day off. Monday I mean. I’d gotten too little sleep for Monday to make any sense. I came home from Sunday night shift at the pub, about 1 am, having got 5 hours sleep the night before. My body was desolated. Every movement was a great and dramatic effort. I fell asleep on the couch. Angel came into the room about 5am and woke me up. I’d been dreaming strange dreams.
‘How long have you been here?’ I asked.
‘How long have I been in the room?’
‘How long have you been home?’
I pulled my body which felt like a bag full of sand from its place and hauled it down the hallway and onto the bed and fell asleep. I dreamt I was in another world full of green trees and woke up at 1 pm. I took a shit and as I reached for the toilet paper I wrenched my back and every time I turned after that was pain. Maybe it was from sleeping on the couch.
After I left the library yesterday I sat at a pub and sent messages to my wife from my magic phone. She said she had a gift for me. I had three hours until work. And where I worked was just minutes from where she lived, where we used to live. I stopped by and she gave me a pretty paper bag. Inside were some fancy packages of incense and a burner. She brought me some gin with ice and we sat there. She said,
‘Do you want to have sex?’
‘Yes. But I can’t.’
I couldn’t. I was living with Angel. In the end I straddled her on the couch and untied the knot of her dress behind her neck and felt her firm tits and kissed and sucked her nipples. We mauled each other for a while, demurred, and carried on. I lifted her dress, pulled aside the green panties and plunged my fingers into something that felt like hot rain, but only for a moment. We gathered our senses and quit. Something had happened. We were friends again but in a strange way. One day she would find another fellow and maybe I would meet him. No… fuck that. She didn’t want to meet the girl I was living with. I would never want to meet him. She told me about the black jazz drummer she’d been following around. But he was back in New Orleans now.
This whole time Angel was up on Primrose Hill with Paul, the guy she’d been with before me. I used to see them leaving Safeway together. Then there was the day when I was talking to Bosun from dairy and I told him that things between me and wife were over. Those things, they just ended – just like that. Angel walked up on our conversation and heard the facts: I was no longer a married man. She seemed confused, or sad. I ended up in bed with her two weeks later.
Now we were both with our previous things. I went to work and an hour into my shift she appeared seated in an empty corner of the pub. She’d gotten served without me noticing. She sat with a pint in front of her on a low wooden table and she was burnt to all hell. She had a pair of weird sunglasses on I’d never seen before. Up on the hill she’d shared two bottles of champagne and a bottle of white wine with Paul. I brought her some olives. It was Sunday and sunny and warm as hell and the dumb happy Londoners kept coming so I never got a chance to do anything besides bring her a glass of olives but I managed to see her out discretely and smoke a cigarette as she stood on, sun burnt and near delirious. I gave her some money to buy me some beer and tobacco so it would be waiting when I got home. By the time I got home I was near useless.
Now I sit here going on 2am and she stirs in bed. This giant computer is down here in the bat cave. What we call our bedroom. Enter the apartment, take a left, go down the hall, take seven steps down and there is our bedroom, facing the rise of the sun. She is a strangely pretty girl but I don’t know what to do with her. She says this typing doesn’t keep her awake. Even so, I type gently. It’s the creaking hard wood floors as I leave to fetch another beer that make her stir. Sometimes she kicks her leg like a dog, dreaming. She is a strange Aquarian, and a painter. She sleeps; her eyebrows move emphatically. She has trouble with her creative nature and we often talk about art. She’s been eating up my books. So far she likes: Truman Capote, Charles Bukowski, E.E. Cummings, and somehow she managed to finish off Last Exit to Brooklyn which I could never start. I’ve just begun Einstein’s Monsters. It made me feel sick as I took a bath this morning.
So I live here in Tufnell Park and this is my life. I live with a Canadian queer and his artist sister. I have a job shelving books at the Birkbeck library on Malet Street and a job tending bar at the busiest pub in Camden. I’m a writer and an alcoholic and a bastard son of a bitch (absent father, angry mother) with no future. I have a rather surgical looking scar running down the back of my head and two more on the front of my face. Two years ago I invented a literary magazine as joke on the small press world. I called it La Reata. I’m working on the 4th issue. Even so, I don’t know what to do with her. She leaps suddenly from the bed and kisses my shoulder.
I think about Nina in a woman’s home in Portland, Oregon. Think how I’ve acquired her energy, how she changed my life, my penmanship, my bathing habits. How I inevitably mimic Angel’s facial expressions. How I re-learned to nurture a human being by living with Rybeena. All these things I learned from women… the presence of malignant spirits from Gwen. I suppose that’s it. The rest of them were non-consequential. I would give anything to speak with Gwen but she seems so long gone. I no longer know how to get in touch with her. There is only Nina, only Nina Ndoto. And we tend to love each other in a desperate and clinging way now that we are 5000 miles apart. Distance makes our history so very sharp. All our transgressions have become beautiful. Dogs barking in the dark, at intervals – helicopters… the city. Where are you now sweetheart I once curled against… One day I will write you a letter. One day I will find you and take care of you like you did me.

Everything is quiet now. The smoke is being sucked outside. This computer hums like a goddamn serious machine and tomorrow, in a few hours, I’ll go back to the library to shelve books. What will I do with the rest of my ‘freedom’? I am fairly predictable. Maybe I should do something else. Maybe I will. The world smells like flowers. The world is black. There is a cold breeze. The window is open. She says this doesn’t keep her awake… The helicopter has moved off.


3

It’s the first day of summer. Remember Nina when we walked along through the Garden District and saw it was Midnight so went to the Half Moon for a drink. And coming out of the bathroom someone called my name and it was Miriam from Portland. And what the hell was she doing in New Orleans. I had a wary smile on my face but she would have none of it. She was glad to see me and gave me a big hug. And I hung around with her and her friends far too late and you left but came back because I had the keys and that look on your face. I actually wasn’t coming home with you. Not yet. And was I going to fuck her. No, not that night. Nor any night. After you left with Cully she came around the café and I’d make her a waffle and listen to her troubles because she’d never left Portland before and was a bit lonely and I was a piece of home. I was her best friend’s boyfriend at one time. She liked coming around. And there was the night we got a few drinks in the French Quarter and left because it was too expensive and went back uptown. I took her to the secret pool even though I knew it was green but she couldn’t see that because it was dark and it was a good way to get her naked. Miriam. She’d hung around for a couple years while I was with Elena and now she was strangely naked in the dark, lit by an odd lamp. She must have been twenty-two, cute, but a bit paunchy for such an age, and we held each other and kissed a little. We ended up back at the place, naked again on that white couch but she wouldn’t fuck me. I’m not sure if it was because of Craig sleeping in the corner or the piece of writing I showed her before about the pain running though my balls. I didn’t see much of Miriam after that. Craig, that goddamn queer, never had a clue, never knew when to leave. Just slept and slept and screwed up my sex life. He was there the first time I fucked Molly. He was always there until I kicked him out.
Tomorrow morning is the morning I’m supposed to go back to Safeway. Life has never felt so good, being away from that place, so I won’t go back. I just got my summer schedule at the library today and it’s only short the Sunday shift, which is fine with me. But I know how it’s gonna go. I’ll be making much less money which means I can’t afford to drink which means I better get that hash tomorrow because my mind needs it anyway. I get bored of drinking. I get tired of the taste in my mouth. And I have to write a novel before I’m thirty, if only for sentimental reasons. To be able to look back and say – I wrote that in my twenty’s – that’s how I wrote back then – that was who I was…
Sometimes I sit back and read all this contemporary poetry, this clever, posturing, ornamental, finely crafted dance and it says nothing to me. Some of it is entertaining, you could call it delightful if you were in a good mood, but all it amounts to is poetry caught up in poetry. I have to go back to Rilke or Paul Celan to find anything real, revealing, true. Why do I have to go back so far to find something true. There was a time when the poet, in some countries, was seen as a visionary; a person privy to new experience, a person who sought us ought by habit, his nature magnetized. Seek and ye shall find. I know a great many of our poets are poor possessed bums who cannot help writing what they write. Some are also educated fucks whose sense of spirituality has become clinical, economized. They can only communicate within the milieu of their orientation: the nuclear death of God. They dispense with clarity because we live in an unclear world. But the world has always been unclear. I don’t believe these are special times at all. All people in all times have wished to believe that their time was a time like no other. And it was. Like this time. But this time is no more fantastic than any other. Death by fire has been at hand for thousands of years. The atom bomb is only our vision. The world is not going to end any time soon. I know I’m right in this matter. If only because I feel like I am. It works for me. Maybe only because a Tarot reader once told me I was from the future, from a far distant future. And how could I exist if the world were broiling in flame tomorrow. Quite a lady, that Tarot reader. I think she hypnotized me into giving her that 50. I wonder how many other people she told.
The indirectness, the un-clarity of post-modern art is pretty, is intriguing stuff, but it’s all a sham. An over complicated sham. Emotion is at the heart of all things. Its augmentation in artistic trends such as irony and cynicism, is interesting – but merely dance. It will never reach the core. In the end it is sincerity that will win.
I suppose. I feel sick nearly all the time. All people feel sick nearly all the time. That is our state. That is why I am at war with the ostentatious, with the optimistic, with the good-time boys. Sometimes, in a room, among people, I love to let my natural sense of disgust shine through. It is a vulnerability – my irritation with humanity – and I wait, wait for them to say something. Like when I worked graveyards at the Plaid Pantry on PSU campus. I would get off at 7am and walk down to the only bar open in the area, some place called the Turtle or some ridiculous name. I would sit there in a corner and drink and write, sometimes until noon. And then the good-time boys would walk in. The moon-faced college boys with absurd grins. They would play pool and talk about shit and spoil my mood. But I’d sit on out of spite, incapable of hiding my irritation at their presence. And I’d write without stopping. In a room full of good-time boys my energy would be provocative and one of them would ask: whatcha writing. And I’d say I was writing a letter to my mother. It was their gleaming and false confidence that pissed me off. Their urban mentality, their transparent egos. Their absurd belief that they had it right when I knew they had it horribly, horribly wrong. When you are incompatible with a system the system will attack you, inevitably.

This funny girl looks at me from the bed with a green sheet wrapped around her breasts, which are like yours. Her face is almost frightening, it resembles so many things. And she has a pale ass that fits in my hand and a sunburnt back from that day on Primrose Hill… and she likes to act like a cat when she’s in a good mood. But there’s something wrong with me. I can’t dive into the wreck. Though maybe I have already and it just didn’t feel like I thought it would. In the beginning we confused love with lust quite categorically because we don’t say it anymore (thank god). I don’t know what kissing means any more. I was married to a girl for three years who didn’t fit my mouth. We pressed our faces together but it just wouldn’t go in. Teeth got in the way. And now my tongue is free but it doesn’t know what to do. And now I can fuck this Canadian child, I can look at her as a piece of pornography, I can get her wet, hold her ass in my palms, nudge my cock into her ass because it was bored out some Frenchman a few years back, sex, fucking… why do I think there is a need to love her. Togetherness we have. But no real passion I’m afraid. Our fucking is… satisfactory. Sometimes I think, if I could get my hands on you just one more time, I’d feel again what it was really like. And things would make sense again. For a while. Because I would be fucking that mind of yours which I love so much. Which is in me somewhere.

I suppose the night is over. I’m going to fit myself next to that long white rib of a body and think about things and go to sleep. One day soon I will write about all the sex that we had. Because it was strange and satisfying and pure. And we did it only barely knowing that we loved each other. We had no idea that it would survive.


4

1:30am. That’s how it goes when you’ve been drinking in the fashion of lies and charm. I went to pizza today with the boys and they were pretty boring the boys but that wasn’t their fault. Poor Juno was tired and he left soon after we paid the bill. He’s going to the states for the summer, a couple readings, New York, Toronto… He gave me a distinction on my final project. Good ole Sammers, the T.S. Eliot of our time...
As the bill came Walt’s magic phone rang. It was Rybeena. He handed the phone to me. She was crying. Her magic phone had been stolen and she was pretty upset about it. She’d been violated. The phone was taken straight out of her own office while she was out. I said I’d stop by later. And I did. She poured us the last of the Glenfidich and we sat around and talked like old friends. We were old friends. We talked about all the relevant things: her guitar lessons, her solitude, she was going to Yorkshire with her parents tomorrow. I had very few relevant things. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was lost. She was lost too but – I was about to leave when I cornered her and undid the knot of her dress. The same dress, the same knot. I kissed her and kneaded her firm tits and said, you got some nice firm tits, Rybeena, you got that going for you. She unzipped her back and the dress fell away. She rubbed my dick against her hairy pussy and I pushed her down on the black swivel chair. We did it there, for a while, but the chair made a horrible noise and we hurried into the bedroom. She laid back and spread her legs and I rubbed my dick into her warm fur. And we fucked away. Poor girl hadn’t had it in two months and she was very moved by the whole ordeal. She cried in the end. No tears really but her eyes were wet. It soon passed. I went to the bathroom and washed my crotch area with soap and water. ‘If she smells you on me then shit’s gonna hit the fan.’ We sat in the living room and crossed our legs. I began thinking about things going to shit between me and Angel and suddenly moving back in with Rybeena. Wouldn’t that be funny. When I came home Angel was in a cranky mood because I’d been out all night. Before I left she asked me if I was coming home. I said sure, unless Walt wanted to hang out, but Walt never wanted to hang out these days. He was going old man. But of course I did hang out with old Walt. I never saw Rybeena. God know what she’s up to. I came home and played up the fact that I’d been drinking all night. But she was still upset. We never see each other. She soon got over it and now she sleeps.
That was the day in a nutshell. But I did wake up awfully early, 10am, and couldn’t go back to sleep because this room faces east. This room is a hotbox in the summer. Maybe I rolled around until 11, finishing Einstein’s Monsters. Then, having a dry and moderate hangover, I flicked the porn into the VCR and took care of that problem. I made a pot of coffee, did the dishes, ate two crumpets, watched some Wimbledon, ran a hot bath, edited some of my short stories, crawled into the bath and read some of Doody’s writings on the ancient novel. I was making to leave, in the bathroom trying to extract an ingrown hair in my neck with a needle and tweezers, when Angel put her key in the door. We rubbed each other in the hallway. Then she went to the bedroom and stripped off all her clothes, as she always does now that summer has come. She was naked on the couch and I patted her pussy, kissed her and left. She’s been though some shit, that girl, from what I can gather. I will only add to it. I know this. My shit is inevitable. Even from the beginning she seemed so unreal to me. Maybe I don’t get Canadians. But that’s not quite it. I read a few postcards from friends of hers. They ask her to keep being creative and ‘enigmatic’. They talk of her ‘mysterious power over men’. At the supermarket she had a following. Even the retards loved her. I must have been the only male in the store who didn’t hit on her on a daily basis. Here we are.
I used to tell myself: it’s too bad I don’t love Rybeena as much as she deserves. And now I sit here saying the same thing. Either these women don’t wholly do it for me or I’m just too wrapped up in myself. Too wrapped up in my goddamn art. Everything else seems to disintegrate around me and my goddamn art. And I never even touched the word before I came to this city. Now, because of my peculiarity, because of what I am, or because this city… people have been throwing the word at me from day one: you are an artist. And I don’t know what to do with that word. As far as I can tell, it means I’m a subversive motherfucker. It means the air is dirtier on my side of the lake but I eat the air and find nutrients.


5

3pm. I may start looking for cheap bachelor accommodation. In a few weeks I’ll have a thousand pounds on me. I’ll tell Angel to keep my share of the deposit, about 160 pounds, and give her 140 pounds. That equals 300 pounds, which is what I had to borrow from her to get into this place. My own goddamn room someplace. And no girl-fiend to get upset with me. Because I am an upsetting individual. That will always be the way. They’ll be fine in this place. They both work full-time, both make twice what I make. Biff’s going to become the goddamn manager of the whole Camden Town branch. They’re expecting the security deposit from their old place any time. And, like me, they’re both getting hefty tax returns in a few weeks. They’ll be in the money. I may have just enough to get into a place. We’ll see how things go… I barely make 500 pounds a month. And that’s pretty much what it costs to live here, bills and all. Rybeena will have to help me move. But by the time the money comes she’ll be in Croatia, then Greece for two weeks. She’ll be turning 33. But she’s going to leave me the keys to her place, needs someone to water her plants. Hmm. How will things be a month from now…


6

4am. Nothing happened with Barely. Me and Angel were so bored we took the tube into Camden Town and it was too late for the video store so we bought some beer and went to the Edinboro Castle but Barely had found nothing. He returned my 10 pound note. There was a strange fellow standing next to us at the Friday night bar and he was talking. He fell in love with me and I set my teeth against my lip by way of allusive charm. Some things cannot be avoided. Angel and I sat out amidst the picnic tables and leaves. We didn’t know what to do. Nothing was important and I was tired of getting drunk. I was tired of drinking, period. It was getting old. It was all I spent my money on. It was all there was to do in the absence of life. Life was absent. I was bored. How could I possibly be bored. You knew you were bored when you searched for something to say, when you searched for substance, for life. I scratched my head. It was still there. Eventually we went home. When we got home I emptied a can of spaghetti into a pot and placed it on the fire. I ate it down with a fork while she ate bread and oil in the kitchen. She lay down on the couch and I listened to music for an hour. I tried to figure things out. Things were un-figurable. I saw the calling cards on the bookshelf so I grabbed one and went down into the batroom and tried to call Legrand. I misdialed a few times. When I finally got through the electric lady said I had 2000 minutes to speak to Legrand. So generous. I said hello. And Legrand was there. I wished I had more to say but I guess I had enough. I felt like I was in Italy. I felt like he was in Japan. But we were neither. I caught him on the bus. I asked him if he’d talked to Nina. She sounded destitute at her woman’s home. Destitute? No. She lived with us for a month. She seems quite happy to be there. Oh, did I have everything wrong. We never quite got down to it. I suppose if we needed to we would have, we would have cried out, but we knew better, we knew better than to say more than what was going on. What was going on? Everything and nothing. That was the problem. Everything and nothing. Keys lost in the woods but no keys and no woods. How then can you speak when you haven’t found a context. All the fault of Jupiter. All the fault of Styrofoam cows and abandoned buildings and electric birds. All the fault of plants and their genuine reach for the sun. That would be it. The human reach for the sun. The natural human reach for nuclear death. We cannot reach it from here so we create it down here. Down here where we can touch it. The sun giggles at the way we clothe ourselves. We shall burn.
Tomorrow is another big day. The minstrels tap their feet on the concrete. The birds chime in the morning. So many birds the world laughs. The sex of the world puckers its lips and lets go the most diabolical fart. It has been fucked for so long. By people like us. Once invincible – it now begins to blister. Several men with good intentions begin to blow their heads off. The fat lady no longer sings but holds her larger left teat while slapping her patch with a carrot. It is many a day since she felt human touch. Sometimes her karma leaves her half-dead. She wakes up in the alley with violated thighs. Bruises she put there herself. Sometimes, after the allocation, she finds her self handing out fliers on the high roads, or begging for money in the name of…
There is a cat outside. A nice cat like the one I used to have when I was 9. Sometimes the rain rakes the garden. Or the leaves position, some of these things have nothing to do with her back. Her peeling skin, her inter-dimensional moles. Any pain is a good pain. So long as it can be called. Intention is always clumsy, like a newborn kitten. Mew. Mew. I am terrified of something. And no one will tell me what it is. So I guess there will always be a rustling in the bushes. When no one helps you want to kill the no one. That is violence. The death of the impotent crossed out. Cradle pain. Boundary pain. Waking pain, pain in the legs. Oxygen pain. Curling pain. The pain of trees.


7

Nothing’s happening. Something’s always happening. Nothing’s happening to me. Maybe there’s something in the wings, waiting to happen. Maybe I’m secretly aware that the life I’ve moved into has set itself very quickly. It’s the sudden absence of being in a classroom, no more pre or post class drinks with Walt, who seems to have had his fill of me. Then of course when I lived with Rybeena we were always doing something, going somewhere, seeing somebody. I was called in to work yesterday. That was different. I was sitting around drinking beer, on my third when the phone rang. Kirsty needed me at the pub. I was there an hour later and the place was muggy and packed with only two people behind the bar. Later it began to pour and everyone crowded inside. The pint glasses filled with rainwater. After sundown, the rain fell away and people went back outside under umbrellas. A large group was passing a joint around. Barely suggested we should be aloud a toke for services rendered. We didn’t think anyone heard him when a real swingin’ mulatto with a righteous face appeared and handed Barely the joint. He took a couple short hits and nodded to me asking if I was swingin’ enough to join in. Mulatto nodded. So I hit it twice. Small talk. I went to gather all the wet glasses. 30 minutes until closing time.
On busy weekends when the night ends with every staff member’s face looking sweaty and harassed, or like on Tuesday when the bar was just understaffed and everyone did the work of two people, the waste sheet is brought out and everyone pours a pint and sits around, usually 5 or six of us. It’s at least midnight by now and the good-looking twenty something English boys seem to know each other and share lives outside of work.
So they talk on and on and they are more or less intelligent student types most of them. And they all drink and do drugs and go to clubs and listen to contemporary music and have one or more girlfriends. Because either I’m too old, or too new, too American, or too independent I tend to sit on the side, drink my beer and leave before everybody else. But they seem like swell guys, a much better sort of people than the ones I encountered at Safeway, where the daily adolescence was like a circus and ignorance threatened to pounce on you at any moment.
Maybe one day I’ll turn off the grammar controls of this computer and sit down to write something….natural.
I have to go to work again in two hours. Been sitting on the couch all afternoon reading Thomas Wolfe’s New Journalism. Angel came home and she’s curled up naked on the bed. ‘My boobs and my cunt were sweaty all day. I had to go in the bathroom and take off my underwear to let my cunt breath.’ Poor Angel’s store is overheating. All the ice cream is melting. The soup is expired. She’s tired of working in retail. Her brother brought home an easel [L asinus, ass] the other day. She has two canvases full of bubbles. ‘Can I have a bit of yogurt?’ ‘Yah man, eat it.’ Maybe I’ll go take a bath.
Earlier it was raining but now it’s fucking beautiful and when it’s fucking beautiful, the pub is fucking busy which tips the scale in a bad direction because I get paid the same no matter how busy it is, not to mention the trauma incurred on the busiest of nights. But you learn to deal with it, it takes a few weeks but eventually you learn how to deal with uppity customers. You must say something to put them back in their place – you have to keep them as begging consumers. If you pretend to ignore them, they win. Their grumbles come up in waves from a 3deep crowd. 30 middle-class cunts waiting to be served. What kind of idiot walks into a place populated with 300 people and a 15-minute wait at the bar and decides to stay? I work at one of the busiest pubs in the whole fucking country.


8

3am. Lie, cheat and steal. Bossman was back from Glastonbury. He always laughs when he comes back because things have gone to shit. He’s a real fellow, that Craig, how he deals with his ‘management’ position. How he deals with us. He’s just a kid himself but. At the end of the night he came out with 3 pitchers of beer. Showed us how much beer had been wasted. How it came down to him etc. We all left and we were walking down the rainy street and Stephanie said something. Are we going for a drink? So I stood in the Dublin Castle and Stephanie was studying English Literature and she reminded me of Gwen, her face, her off kilter eyes, her baggy clothing, long dark hair, covert alcoholic. And there was the guy from Cyprus studying politics and economics. He was studying in York. Fucking Greeks. They all study economics. Not an artist left among them. When they ask you questions their bodies stay nearby and they don’t move. They try to place you. What happened to the Greeks? All we have now are a bunch of opportunistic cunts who study economics and politics. I ended up at the bus-stop with him.
When I got home the place was empty except for Angel in the bed. She was there. And many things afterwards. Yes many things. Biff came home with his boyfriend. Alan is a pretty fellow. He sells his art in some places. Or he used to. He liked Angel’s canvases. The birds are waking up. He flipped through her sad portfolio and said, THESE THINGS ARE BEAUTIFUL. And I looked at Angel and she didn’t budge. She was a smart girl.

And all I can think about are these curious assholes. I am infested with people. People destroy me. I dance around them. They dance around me. Say nothing please. I speak only to Nina. I hide my phone. The window is held open by a cow. A small cow. She’s been there all evening. She no longer cares. The author is crossing his arms. He is full of sex and confusion. He vibrates, slightly.
I am stupidly alone, my girl. I don’t know what to do. I imagine sitting on the toilet and trying to get a hold of you. But no. Thinking is such a dangerous activity. Especially heavy thinking before bedtime. Because there’s always tomorrow and always the teeth. FUCK SHIT CUM! FUCK SHIT CUM! Let me add………KILL FUCK SHIT CUM KILL FUCK SHIT CUM. The kill you see is what makes it better. If only because kill is accuracy and the rest is natural elimination.

(This is how it goes for you, forlorn Englishman. This is how you die. Green in the spring, twigs in the summer. And always more crossed arms. More frustration – and more terror for the day, the next day, the next day to follow. We stick it out as something only approaching human. We stick around. Why we do this. We want you to love us. But you are sad yourselves. Why we do this. Because you are sad yourselves. You are always here you people.)

4pm. Received two calls within 10 minutes. One from Gemma asking if I’d trade Saturday for Friday. Sure. Then one from Manja asking if I could work for her tonight. Okay. It’s all gray outside anyway. I think after this weekend it will begin. But I still don’t know where to begin. Miller wrote about Paris while he was still in Paris. But he also wrote about the old days back in New York. I don’t know if I want to go as far back as Portland, unless I did something to it like Anderson did in Winesberg, Ohio. Then there’s the opening quote by Emerson that Miller used in Tropic of Cancer: These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies – captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences and how to record truth truly.’ Miller begins at a time when he has already been in the muck for a while. At the time of writing he has a casual orientation with Paris, knows his way around, there is a bit of history there already. I suppose then that leads you to what has been obvious for such a long time: you’ll have to write about Molly. Yes yes this sounds good. It means you’ll have to start on the day you and Nina went out and decided to take a left down St. Charles instead of a right. And you ate at Tara’s Café. And Cliff was your waiter. And you asked about a job. You’d been in New Orleans for… a few months. 2 months? Not quite two. Your memory doesn’t really kick in until that job anyway. It gave you a context. You remember very little of what happened before that. There you have your opening characters: Tara, Patty, Bob, Jason, Craig, Cliff, Cliff’s fat girlfriend with the big tits, Jill, Molly. And what was the name of that bar around the corner. Someone will know. And there was the Avenue and the Half Moon. That’s where it all happened. And the pool in the apartment complex where you nearly broke your leg. Nina left with Cully, Molly went to Grayton Beach. There were those few weeks before Nina left again, that thing that vaguely resembled a threesome with that guy from D.C. She read your diary – the beginnings of pain down your legs and stomach – bleach in the eye. And when she was gone Molly returned and you set off for Illinois. THAT is a fine opening chapter. Now all you have to do is collect as many details as possible…


9

my the open mouths all around us they gaggles and swarm
all around us miving end checking out
affectation walking toward us we half cower
one arm in the crooked part of life
as it swongs you arounddelerious bitch
swallowing all the left sides of me gaping
sides that were never quite removed no na-
val inquisitions here. No dream visoter mister
no dreams here w

___

1am


10

1am It’s not the 4th of July any more. I spent it mostly indoors except when I had to go outside to pay the rent. Finally got that hash from Barely. Didn’t manage to make it to the library today. Got strange ideas, submitted work to three magazines. Re-situated personal space. Realized a few things yes things I can’t tell you. I speak only to the Nina. And she hides these things away.

Ambassadeurs

The 150 page notebook the chicken headed phase of Galchinskey

No more Siamese traffic down here

Please move on yes fish heads are aloud yes

Puking cats yes small Greek islands yes

Feet bloodied by blind walk through field of briars at 6 am yes

Inert glasses of retsina yes

Yammas! On the morning birthday I had to avoid because

I needed to eat something




11

And then I clapped my hands because someone had gotten away with something. I wasn’t sure who. But I could see him running off down the street. Happy as hell. With something under his coat.

Earlier he had told me that
all the world
was puking down his throat

So he couldn’t truly speak

but later, when the stomachs had settled, I would understand.

There were so many people throwing things out the window. I started throwing things out too. It seemed like the best thing.

Please to understand me half starved fox all I want to see is what you have made of this earth in your warmest places.
Irrational creature! How many times has your head been against the brick! In the name of love! How many jacks will you follow –


Written on a piece of paper –

what a perfect thing to do sit at a place with
better furniture than ours
our backs feel great
a couple beers on top of a Greek salad
id be drunk enough
and we were already stoned
two fine chairs on either side of a Formica
table
the bluish light that came out of the window
in the ceiling was in that dull grey tin
and it saw her there looking in up and out
lighting up her face with an evening
summer colour which was blue and yellow
and brown
or so her hair was around white blue and
yellow and pink – or maybe it was a
sheen of vibrant walnut that surrounded
the colours the colours of her face
a creature apt to look funny rather
un-molded from some angles but beautiful
because of the strange look in her far distant
her reflective brown eyes

ah yes drink beer golden in the candle light
glance at party of three seated around fire place
long day at the firm
the old secretary has her bottle of corona in hand
she wields it in the air. And when she sets

the bottle down her hand carries on time
pointing rapidly

‘my boyfriend Grass wanted to start a commune
but I wanted to stay in college…’


‘…with a girl who was a medium by default…..
who could feel the presence of spirits in
whatever room she occupied. Sometimes
a room was fairly obviously fucked
and the cherry on the sage stick would suffocate
or she would see an old woman sitting
on a fence in the backyard at night.


<><><>


it’s 2am I really should go to bed. Too many ladies. Too many dead braids of hair.
But no there is no bed for me. All the castles are dead. But there is still a future dead-man laughing in my ear. Prismatic Thursday. Don’t you threaten me with your metaphysics. I have learned to clone happiness. She sits in several pale green chemical dishes on the window sill. Angry dishes. Give them a week and they smell of death. These are my problems not yours for chrissake. I just wanna talk to ya you know and hold ya like you were always that strange sexy little belligerent thing in a blue dress who stubbed the toes of her boots in the dirt of the median.
Several instances later the door opened and out dove the sleeplessness of letters.
And the final crooked look of all images also knelt in the dryness

These modern days are doomed to end in sadness. Oh the stupid horror of it all. And the sad old ladies in the supermarkets on Saturday, full of life
full of Saturn the dumb old bitches full of DEATH!
spilling over to the darkside as they greedy claws reach for skim milk
and leave a scent as they go isle 18
processed meat turkey ham liver sausage
scotch eggs in 4 different sizes and Pork
pies
pork pies in all different sizes.

It all gets smoked away. NO RECOVERY say all the signs of life
No self same semblance from here on my dear no
Hyper-sensitive ear dance listen as
They come for they will always come as through
Alleys and always toward you ms no recovery
Is has all been smoked all smoked down and away

Who are these assholes in our living room. No recovery
No lamps. No similar ideas. Dishes on the window sill
Only no glowing.
But mother says no dead attempts in this house

Name the music of any voice and add water
39 grams of water let it drip where


<><><>


nothing more for the delirious witch
I’m putting every thing away. all the
world has gone to shit. I can no longer
write in Pepe’s note book – it stinks of life
damn Pepe and his visions… I damn him
to hell!

damn Pepe and his visions
damn pepe and his visions

all outlooks from here on out have been ambushed
all perceptions must be kept in the pocket
all intelligent and vivacious women must shut their mouths
and bow before the terror that lurks within Pepe’s vision

one pepe in the glass is as good as two bent over a sink in the mens room at some bar….

One pepe …. Oooh
Let’s not talk about pepes ass

It is one of the secrets of the world

<><><>

6 2nd class stamps please and 6 1st. yes 3 something. that’s right. my liver is bursting and I’m here drinking fish-water here waiting for you yes thanks. all my companions exploded. don’t touch my legs.

Yes roll her over she’ll be fine. God give grace to her lotus body. Let it shine in the sub-dermal fabric of the tree tops.

You fell asleep baby I’m always waiting for you


12

Four bombs went off in central London today. 21 people died at Kings Cross. 5 at Edgeware Road where the floor was blown out of the train. Thousands of shards of glass embedded in faces. Amputations. They banged on the window of the next carriage to be let in. In the next carriage there was already a heavy burning smoke and they saw several bloody faces pounding bloody fist marks onto the glass. 7 on a train 50m underground on it’s way from Liverpool to Aldgate station. And the one that went off on the upper deck of the 30 bus in Tavistock Square. Ripped the roof right off and sprayed blood all over the walls of the Royal Society of Medicine building. They’d been having a meeting. 50 something dead. Few hundred in the hospital. Today is my day off and now the Library is closed over the weekend because if you leave the library and take a right and another right Tavistock Square is right there. It’s strange to think that a bomb went off in the middle of Bloomsbury, in a neighborhood I’ve wandering up and down for two years. That one of those big red lumbering double-decker busses should just combust on a sunny July morning. And 10 hours later it’s pouring outside. Washing all that blood off the walls, onto the sidewalk and into the gutter.

I sat around all afternoon with Biff and Allen watching the news coverage. Angel was at work and had gotten off at Old Street station an hour before the blast. The explosions had set the crowds into retrograde. People still walked about affecting calm, but they hardly felt like shopping. And the news had asked everyone to stay precisely where they were. Her store shut at 1pm. And the staff were forced to sit at the pub next door and wait for company paid taxies. After the news had recycled three or four times, I went into the kitchen and did the dishes. And look, there were two greasy, uneaten eggs, sunny side up. And a strip of crinkly bacon. I scraped the plate into the trash. The G8 summit was that today? And the rock and roll people threw a big party in Hyde Park a couple days ago. London won the Olympic bid yesterday. I just got out of the bath. Biff and Alan have came back from the store. They’ll have some beer for me. I suppose I should call my mother, whenever Biff gets off the goddamn phone. Throughout the day I’ve received 3 messages on my magic phone. To the third I replied, ‘Ah – person who cares #3. Yes I’m doing fine. Thank you.’ But when that proved to be difficult I settled for, ‘still here.’
Just talked to my wife and she said that Polly was over for a few day and they were making curry. I vaguely remembered Polly calling last night and asking for Rybeena’s number. So she had moved in for a few days. Polly who was in my class at college but dropped out after the first year. She’d tried to form a writers collective at her place, once paying Sue Hubbard 200 pounds to come over and a teach a ‘master class’ in her living room. Ten or twelve people in our class tried to meet there twice a month or whenever. I went over to her place on Little Russell Street twice. I drank as much wine as possible, said some ostentatious gibberish and left. But Polly used to corner me outside class. And we would walk along through Bloomsbury, talking, while I got increasingly lost. It was Polly who I first started talking to – about the end I was facing with the wife. After Polly left her boyfriend she started calling. We would wander down to the south bank and walk along the Thames and talk and I would get a beer at the NFT bar and ask her didn’t she want anything to drink at all, some tea? If we weren’t talking about our perspective others we were talking, with great weighty pauses, of our creative desires, suggesting the fact that we were both of that wretched class of souls: the unfulfilled, the unrealized artist. And she had come over to one of those strange dinner parties that had happened during those two months of ‘inevitable separation’; those two months that it took me to find another place to live. The energy was unique then. Polly, the strange little Dutch girl with the pretty face, the wide set goblin eyes and the mouth which seemed to grimace as it smiled. The Dutch journalist, classically trained in violin. The struggling playwright, the struggling actress. The depressive. That 30 year old Dutch girl living in London. Living with my wife for a few days. If they were both five years younger I could get them drunk and have sex with them. But with the limitations of soul they’ve acquired in the last five years, coupled with the diminishing of certain appetites…
It is not a real possibility within this arrangement of time.
Yes my view of 4 trees and vines and brick walls. The weeds growing in the orange pebble garden, all of it thrown upon a giant black sack, weeds nestled in their own tears.
The ugliest garden on the whole goddamn street. Bush was in town today. I suspect there are a certain number of American divorcees living in London. Quite a few hundred I believe. Everyone seems to know an American or two who has split with their English partner. This one ended up in a little room on the back of a quiet street with a bunch of green trees outside and the birds and the sirens and the clotheslines and the vanilla sky.

Last night in the middle of the night I said to Angel, ‘You dark… uncivil girl.’ She was upset because I hadn’t fucked her yet and when I finally crawled into bed she started getting nasty. She turned into the stained glass demon I once thought Nina was. And I expected at any moment to have my throat slashed apart by her enraged glass arm. Instead, resonating, with rib cages aglow, we let ourselves pass into darkness. Beer has become one of the prime motivators in life. It is fuel and food in between the strange experiments that develop out of our attempts to prepare solid food. The ingestion of beer is something we persistently try to count and minimalize, but all too often we throw off the yoke and say what the hell, we’re moving here. Or is this just me here. Is it only me that’s moving. I’ll go make some potatoes and eggs with thyme and basil and tomatoes and white cheddar. Maybe some Tabasco. Some warmth in our cock-eyed bomb ridden lives.

Sometimes I walk upstairs to give Angel the joint I’ve been smoking. Get the damned thing stoned. Zombify her so she sits on that hard blue couch and stares at the T.V., beer in hand. Keep her at the mouth of the cave. Well what do you do life is just one big bore after another. I’m down here in the bat cave obliterating my senses. Suppose I should wander back into the kitchen.

No. said Juno San Sammers.

And Legrand Galchinskey

And Pepe Willy

Rybeena Beckett

Biff and Alan

And Walt Windermere

But the Nina said nothing.
Neither did Molly
Or Gwen
Or young Barely

Or Polly

But

I am… losing weight. And there we were trying not to drink at such a morbid level that it was as if the board had been turned over and suddenly everybody wanted to play the next game. This demon weed keeps stinging me. Don’t you spit at me. I’ll call the pub at 4pm tomorrow – see if they need me. Perhaps the whole of central London will be in a state of quiet drinking panic, a sort of celebration. People always finding things to yell about, reasons to drink.

Yes we were all gloriously addicted to some one thing or another. At the core of our very souls was hatred for it. It was we, as a legion, who had been cast out of heaven, and we recognized our kind here on earth, and we hated them most of all, because they were the ones we loved most on a world that could never be seen again.

So getting something down. From the great trades of plasticism. All spiritual clansmen continue sucking your thumbs. Enough coffee, cigarettes, beer and hash. No more vodka. No more bottles of whiskey. please. no. yes I’ll have one of those thanks. bit a soda water cleans the soul. Please send more cookies. Always a reflection in a window. Always the dentist. Never the rain when you need it. Sometimes the atmosphere needs to cry more than we do. We all feel better when it lets loose. We all look at the same thing. The unabashed dumping forth of the clouds. Look how wet everything gets. Look how many fibers it breaks up. Look how many things it destroys.

This blue light. Nothing exists outside it. All else is dissolve and decay. These new Romans have seen the rebellion of another Christ and he’s pissed off after 2000 years. He’s blowing holes in their architecture. All else is phlegm. I’ve seen the little fibers. I know they exist. The strands. I’ve seen them as falling pricks of light in the gymnasium. Bouncing off the floor.

Aye and even Nina had that nice furry cunt you violated by the pool. Where you got down there on the concrete and destroyed your knees. And dignity was up there in the trees. Remember the last time you wanted something that bad. When all else could burn in hell, burn in your wake as you walked past casual of all laws of all boundaries. I wanted to relate to you all those things which happened since we parted on that street corner in Portland, Oregon. Which was two years after we parted on that street corner in New Orleans. Yes everything is fine. I was saved in 1999. Separated from the circumstantial cattle, but bound to your voice thinking nothing but a miserable world might exist outside our conversation. Then stumbling over three growing deterrents – I rolled around the room and collapsed into my chair and looked at her and repeated softly to my self, what a serious bitch you are. Over and over. What a serious bitch you can be. A form to accommodate the masses. What I saw written on the side of a builders truck when I lived near Seven Sisters. That was when I first saw the urban fox. Ravenous her coat torn by greedy children. Her teets swinging in the moonlight. The boundary of her nest pushed outward by urban concentration….

At least in the instance of Angel Blacklord I solved Legrand’s (very old) question about vice versus art. I got her drunk and stoned and she started painting the best work of her life. What a girl. I watched her go at it. Choosing her reds. Finishing the goddamn thing. Putting on the shine.


13

Angel was crying earlier. She knows I’m leaving and she’s read this notebook. Two days ago she showed up at the pub. I finished with my customer and walked over to her. She handed me a plastic bag. What’s this I said. It’s a present she said and walked off. I looked in the bag. Toothbrush, glasses, contact lens solution and a brown envelope. A charge went through my body. She had already left. I must have had a horrible look on my face because Robert the cook asked what was wrong. You know what it means when a girl gives you a bag like this, I said, and I opened it for him to see. He smiled. He knew. I went downstairs into the basement and read the letter. It was full of inaccuracies. She’d even read my longhand journals. I’d finally remembered all the things that happened before Tara’s Café in New Orleans. I’d been sketching out scenes at the Audobon Hotel. Angel thought I’d gotten a Hotel with Rybeena. ‘I know she likes Hotels…’ Rybeena was desperate and trying to steal me back. Angel wanted me out as soon as possible. She was angry. I put the letter back in the sack. I stood there for a minute. I began to think how funny everything was. This had all the marks of a dramatic life turn but it couldn’t be that. I just wouldn’t let it. Fuck her I thought. Nobody kicks me out when I’m paying the goddamn rent. What she didn’t and still doesn’t know is that sealed it for me. Can’t live with anybody who pries into my writing. Rybeena did the same thing. On three eerily identical occasions Rybeena woke me up sobbing with one of my journals in hand. How could I…. How could I say these things. I had to pry you never communicate…
I considered staying with Rybeena that night but figured that would make things even worse. On the bus home I saw Polly again and told her everything. Our relationship is centered on dramatic crises. As always she was having a rough time too. But I didn’t feel like things were rough. I didn’t care. I thought things were funny. Then Biff and Allen got on the bus. I whispered to Polly, ‘That’s her brother.’ It all happens on the 134. I walked home with Biff and Allen and Biff was drunk.

‘You know Angel tried to kick me out tonight.’ I said.
‘Yah, we heard.’ said Biff.
Allen said, ‘I think that’s completely awful! You know we are completely on her side.
How could you do that! Angel is such a lovely girl!’
‘Yah she’s all right.’ I said.
Allen said, ‘Oh my god. What is going on.’
‘I have the same problem with him – he’s always fucking his boyfriend.’ said Biff.
‘Well at least I’m not fucking married.’ said Allen.
‘Yes I’m bad I know.’ I said.
‘Oh there’s going to be so many rows tonight!’ said Allen.
‘There’s not going to be any rows tonight.’ I said.

It was after midnight when we got home. Angel was awake. The light was on in our room. I went in there. She was fully clothed lying on her stomach on the bed, drawing. We said hello and she smiled. She wasn’t expecting me back. She thought I’d take that little sack she gave me and try to make due. We talked things over calmly for a few hours, drinking, I rolled the last of the hash. In the end we solved things with some dirty hour long fucking. It was 4am by the time we went to bed. She called in sick the next day.

Now the day after, she insisted I dance with her for one song. I go upstairs and dance with her to some guy named Pete Tong. It was tiring. Now I’ve come back down and I’m wearing a silver necklace with a red diadem and the letters W H O R E scrawled across my chest in pink lipstick. It’s Friday night. These kids and there modern music. No one reads Balzac, Hamsun, Maupassant. Stephanie said Joyce was a bore The neighbors have stopped playing ping-pong. They’ve gone inside to play with their computers. I look outside the window and see their internal living arrangements. The lamps, the tables, the dirty dishes, the blinds. Angel has come back down. ‘I feel like a whore.’ I say.
Don’t say anything.
‘Why?’ she says
Long pause.
‘You are a whore.’ she says. Yes yes. I am then. Of the two most ancient professions. The poet and the whore. I’ve been around for eons. Nothing has changed.

But manic we are up and down all the time.
‘Everyone needs other people to some extent. What would you do if you had no friends, no family, no girlfriend to talk to.’
‘I’d probably feel a lot better.’
‘Could you live up on a mountain where you were just by yourself?’
‘Yah like that’s ever gonna happen.’
‘I know how to make it happen.’
‘Oh do you.’

Pause

‘You’d need sex though.’
‘I’d have sex with myself.’
‘You’d have sex with a goat if you had to.’
‘Yah.’

She mumbles.

‘I once tried to fuck a collie.’
‘What happened?’
‘I couldn’t do it. I felt sorry for her. It was her eyes. So sad looking.’

More or less a conversation I had with Angel. Now Biff and Allen have come home. I am a bad man. This is where I live. I can hear Allen’s screeching voice out there. And Angel is laughing because they all love each other. She happy up there. Down here we talked about the absence of love. ‘You show no emotion.’ ‘I keep it where it belongs.’

Now I’m excited. Nina, what should I do…

‘Now that Americans have bought the company…’

‘I’m so happy!’

Dear Lord. I’m getting drunk tonight Nina.


14

6am. I’m incredibly stoned. There’s a sleek fox in the garden. Not as ratty as most urban foxes. Went over to Rybeena’s and chopped her block of hash in half with a hot knife and gave her £10. She made some coffee. I got on the computer and read Nina’s message. She’d been sexed on the way home. Without her consent. She tried to fight him off but in the end she didn’t struggle. She gave in. I just wrote my resignation letter to Safeway. It read, dear Safeway, My Resignation: I quit. The sun is out on the green wormy trees. For some reason I have been drinking heavily for 48 hours. It just occurred to me. It is the weekend. I submitted work to Magma and the Penniless Press. I Have a list going. I love testing out bizarre things on all these magazines: Oasis, Stand, Acumen, Poetry Review, The Rialto, Tears in the Fence. People send odd submission to La Reata. The submissions are funny. They are mostly bad but some of them are very emotional. Angel’s face is bagged against a pillow. She’d been out drinking all day with Biff and Allan. And I got her stoned on the hard blue couch.

Somewhere in the world Legrand was masturbating and plotting immediately after. By Whitman’s beard! The insect trees are not purple in London like they are in Surrey. In London they are fever green. The fox totters on the wall. That calm haze down there. The bird bath is dry. Finally the trees revealed their secret to me. They were all hanging themselves. Wise old trees. Forever growing and dead. Hanging still because there is no wind. The insects are elegant rapid filaments. Darting across the garden. In the morning dance. Hey Modigliani. Where are your mothlike breasts. Balancing on the window sill. No we don’t want to go no. My morning begins at 3pm. She has put her urine in the toilet. When she returns she says, ‘Aren’t you tired?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You’ve been up a long time.’ ‘Yes I’m tired.’


15

We have to fax a letter of immanent of vacancy tomorrow. I called them this morning and we said yes your one thousand pound deposit that’s what it’s gonna take. Angel keeps attacking me. Chases me around the place tearing at my pants begging me to suck to bite her clit. Rybeena met Don Henley at the 100 Club last night. He went back to her place and they talked about music until 4am. He’s bringing her some new guitar strings tomorrow.


16

A few more bombs went off in the city today. And today is Rybeena’s birthday. Gonna go to the 100 club tonight and see the Handsome Family. And tomorrow Rybeena leaves for Croatia and leaves me her keys and I start moving all my shit back in. Three weeks is what I got to get my stuff out of here, into there, and find my own place. Have to have a place ready to go by the time she gets back. Angel might stay in London if she can find a suitable bed-sit. Biff has taken a few days off to find a place. Gotta cancel all the bills. Place will have to be empty by August 8th. Have to find a way to get this giant computer and those bookshelves out of here.


17

Numbers. Sitting here at 6 in the morning with the T.V. on – the news all night, the news all morning, more or less the news. Sitting here back in Camden while the wife is in Croatia, while the wife is in Greece. With my keys and my £1400 but Angel is due £300 but those bills and the Council Tax – the lease is in my name, they’ll hit me up for £200. I have to go back to Tufnell Park tomorrow because I need my clothes, my razor, my MS.
(I’ve been wearing the same clothes for 3 days. And then I’ll have to work at the pub at 6. Have to do it. Got to go over there. Angel called tonight and asked me to come over. I told her I didn’t feel like it. I’d cracked another beer and gotten stoned when she called again. And again. She called 4 or five times. I just sat there. I didn’t feel like talking.
But I have to go over there. I need to shave. I’ve been wearing these clothes for three days. Now that the pub schedules me so much I keep missing days at the library. Each shift at the library is worth 10, £15. The shift of a shelver is two maybe three hours long. Completely unsupervised. You just wander in, push around a cart of books, browse, look at people and wander out. I do that three times a week. I work at the pub two to five times a week, depending on the weather. I need to find a new place to live. I have 3 weeks to do that.
I am nearly numb with hash. Just don’t know what to say any more. Angel is depressed and lonely and bored now that she’s quit her job. She’s depressed and sad because I don’t want to live with her, or be with her.

Idea: See-through bookmarks and magnifying see-through bookmarks.


18

I’m no longer in Tufnell Park. I am here which makes everything different. I think the story, if there ever was one, is lost from here. I am back in Camden. But this is for Nina so I will try to finish it off, will try to wrap things up, for her. I talk to her on the phone all the time these days so this diary has lost its purpose. This was just to let you know, Nina, let you know what was going on. I have a communication problem, they say. But this is what happened; can’t tell you much more than this. But I can I can tell you much, much more than this. I’ve told you nothing. Isn’t it funny?

My hash has run out and I’m drinking like a fish again. Angel came over tonight and I fucked her on the futon. She needed finishing off. There was a snorkel on the floor. It made a funny sound. She is asleep. And for some reason, right now, I am very, very sad. She’s not a fan of country music.

Earlier, she wrote ten odd pages while I sat here, doing things. Now I’ve read the pages. I do not like them. Beyond the bad writing she said some things, “It used to be allright when I thought that you loved me. But now I need more. I need a big thick long cock. I can’t feel yours in mine. It’s the 2nd smallest dick I’ve ever known. I try to pretend but it’s no use.” And there were so many smiles afterwards. Well, we can’t have that around. It’s over. I’ll have to keep her away I think. It’s 4:30am, July 29th, 2005





19

Getting my own room in this city is looking difficult. I looked at the price of a flight back to New Orleans departing August 19th. It was way too much – almost half my current funds, but that was only a curiosity. I’ll have to stay. Angel found a room in Camden for £100 a week.

I woke up this morning feeling what I’d done to myself over the last four days. It took me an hour to eat a banana and I only barely held that down. After fucking Angel on the floor I felt dizzy and took a hot bath. I was in bad shape. She rolled around on the futon for an hour hoping I’d fuck her again but it never happened. So she left. A dick is a dick. A cock is a cock. Time is running out.


20

Last night I fell asleep with 4 beers and 50mg of Codeine inside my system doing a slow dance. The click of the lighter made the nerves in my head jump as I lit a cigarette. It was nearly 6am, blue sky, sirens, birds, seagulls.
I am no closer to finding a place than I was a week ago. This place where I lived for three years, it’s all mine, but I can’t stay here. I talked to friends on the phone tonight. They all seem to be suffering. Legrand is more than broke and jobless. Nina has tuberculosis. The wind is rustling the leafy tree outside, a wooly mammoth trying to shake off dementia.
Sometimes I look in the wrong mirror and see my teeth have become yellow fangs, all the rolling tobacco and coffee. My teeth are the color of dehydrated piss. Sometimes I picture myself as a burden on several people before finally ending up in the gutter. Oh but things are bright. I’m in the prime of my life. Tomorrow is Sunday. I have to be at work at 5pm.