i became the jumpin' jack flash in november '77. there was slush in new york city and the bums at the piers still burned trash in metal barrels you could see from over on coney island even. just like kerouac said.
in the daytime foolish kids picked weeds in central park and called them flowers. they got laid by stringing charming words together as they gave them to the thousand daughters of manhattan's old monied men, the wall street hacks hanging from the teats of the great & frenzied cash cow of capitalist interest. the milk came slow that winter.
one week, early december when the slush gave way to furtive snowfalls i took a bus to patterson, NJ for a few days, drank a lot of awful coffee writing obscenities in my journal but speaking them aloud in the restaurants and bars and so was deemed just like everybody else in patterson, NJ. drunk & high, helicopter tours, stuffed with bread and half-truths. and when shortly my irish luck ran out i raced back to the big smoke in a drop-top mercedes driven by a man whose thick accent i couldn't quite place. whose only serious question was whether i knew anyone who had good coke.
in the city it rained for three weeks straight and david byrne, in some bowery apartment wrote a song called 'flood' which was never released on any talking head's album but lingered in his brain as a reminder of the three weeks he spent cooped up, eating saltines and dancing to the rhythms of the thunder and rain outside. totally alone with his mind & a bass guitar. tina weymouth, naturally, was furious. the bass was the last thing she had left in a band she half-started. and david had stolen even that.
but that was tina weymouth, that was new york.
feels good to be back with my typewriter, spinning roxy music records in the basement.