9/1/00

the first six chapters of 



STARVING IN

THE COMPANY OF

BEAUTIFUL

WOMEN

 

http://www.DeadFromDrugs.org







(c)1993-1998, 1999, 2000 Michael W. Dean









All rights retained by M. W. Dean

www.kittyfeet.com

kittyfeet@kittyfNO-SPAMeet.com







This is a work of historical fiction.

Any perception of any similarity to any persons,

living or dead,

or to any events

only proves that you

have a better imagination than I.

(Except for real folks in dream sequences, which are exactly that.)





Dedicated to everyone who put up with my bullshit, 

and especially to everyone who didn't.





Chapter 1:  I'll Bury You All

I was sk8boarding down Valencia Street, hanging up posters. It was a bright and dreary day, warm and overcast. Very San Francisco. It was Saturday, and I felt good.



Two of my girlfriends and I were looking for a love-doll, kittywhore supplicant and we'd decided that it would be a hoot to take our search to the streets:





CASUALLY SEEKING "CINDY"



(OR "SALLY." OR "SUSIE." OR. . .)

LOVE TRIO ON A FUN-FILLED MISSION TO OBTAIN A FOURTH PARTICIPANT TO ENGAGE IN 

FANTASTIC AND FITFUL FROLICKING, IN AND OUT OF THE BEDROOM.



WE ARE: 2 WOMEN AND 1 BOY, IN LOVE AND IN OUR MID-TO-LATE 20S.

GIRL #1 IS: JAPANESE, BRAZEN, CLEVER AND CAPRICIOUS. SHE HAS

LONG LEGS, PRETTY VIRGINAL EYES, PIGTAILS, CROOKED TEETH AND A PRETTY MOUTH THAT BEGS TO BE KISSED. SHE IS SMART, STUNNINGLY GORGEOUS AND LOVES TO LAUGH.



BEHIND DOOR #2 IS A BELLA ITALIAN-AMERICAN GAL WHO'S TALL, BRUNETTE, OVERWHELMINGLY ALLURING, PRETTY AND POETIC, FEARLESS AND ATHLETIC, STRONG IN MIND AND BODY, WITH FELINE FEATURES AND EYES, PROBING MIND AND HANDS, SUCCULENT LIPS AND STRIKING FACIAL STRUCTURE.



THE BOY IS A BLOND, SHORT, BEAUTIFUL ANGLO-AMERICAN-ADONIS. HE IS OVERSEXED (THE GIRLS CAN'T KEEP UP. . .THAT'S WHERE YOU COME IN, HONEY.) AND UNDERFED,

WITH DEFINED CHEEKBONES, ROMAN NOSE, A TATTOOED, HAIRLESS, SINEWY

CHEST, FULL LIPS AND A GREAT ASS. (HE LOOKS GOOD IN A SKIRT.)

HE POSSESSES PIERCING BLUE-GREEN-GREY EYES AND AN UNMISTAKABLY KEEN MIND THAT

REQUIRES AS MUCH, IF NOT MORE, STIMULATION THAN HIS SACRED AND PERFECT BODY.





YOU ARE: AN INSATIABLE YOUNG GIRL (AGE: 18-27) WHO IS EAGER TO PLEASE AND ANXIOUS TO BE ENJOYED. YOU ARE SWEET BUT SMUTTY AND

LOOKING FOR MORE LOVE AND EXHILARATION THAN ONE PERSON COULD EVER POSSIBLY INSPIRE.



WE'LL KISS AND FUCK AND TALK AND GO FOR WALKS AND MAKE MUSIC AND COOKIES AND GO TO SHOWS (FROM THE MELVINS TO JOHNNY CASH TO BACH, ART SHOWS AND ANY EVENT IMAGINABLE) AND LAUGH AND CRY AND LOOK AT THE MOON AND MORE. IF YOU ARE THE RIGHT WOMAN, WE WILL NURTURE,PROTECT AND ENCOURAGE YOU IN ALL YOUR AMBITIONS, AS WELL AS USE YOUR BODY FOR OUR OWN SWEET ENDS, AND WE MEAN THAT WITH ALL THE LOVE IN THE WORLD, BABY. WANNA CUM ALONG? EXPERIENCE NOT REQUIRED. START THE NEW YEAR RIGHT!



Send a photo and 69-word essay to: PO Box 421805 San Francisco, CA 94142



It wasn't that I/we had any trouble getting laid. We just thought that it would be neat to hang flyers and see what washed up on my doorstep. Actually, the real fun had been writing the copy for the posters.



We had been naked, high and out of drugs. It was 4 a.m. and I still wanted to fuck. Both girls were exhausted. Debbie (the Japanese chickypoo), laughed, "Cash Newmann, you are a fucking animal! What this three-way needs is a girlfriend! . . .some young, little slut to crock on your knob so us gals can get some sleep!"



"Here here!" snorted Melody Annabella (the overwhelmingly alluring, athletic poet-and my Soulmate, of sorts.) Cash, where the fuck is that typewriter of yours?"



"I think it's over by the foot of the bed, under that pile of clothes by my guitar," I said.



Melody crawled over to the end of my huge cast-iron bed, and grabbed my non-electric typewriter from under a pile of crap. I slapped her gorgeous, sweet, full-moon ass as she bent over.



"Slut!" she yelled lovingly at me and plopped the typer at Debbie's feet. "Bitch, take a letter!" Melody ordered Debbie. She then grabbed Debbie by her straight black hair, and yanked her lips to her own and kissed. Then we composed our ad copy.





By the way, my life is weird and good and weird.



I feel like I am tripping most of the time, but I'm not. I was insane for several years. It sucked. The word "insanity" is bandied about in song and talk like it's a goal. It's as if insanity were a positive attribute. "Let's go crazy." "It was cool, I was out of my mind!"



If you have ever really been out of control of your facilities, you know it's a drag.



It used to be that all my heroes were do-or-die rockers. Then the last one put a shotgun in his mouth and sprayed pretty blond brains all over his room. About a month later I started to find new heroes.



You haven't heard of most of my heroes.



They are just common folks who quietly have their shit together, and are all about putting good into the world.



Most of them have an edge, though. I adore these kick-ass, rock 'n' roll, subtle angels;



Healthy, shining boys and girls and women and men who straddle the edge of light and dark, and fuck it hard, sweet and mean.



I love people who can dress up in Mother Earth's pumps and play life ruff, like the way puppies fight with love.



People who prefer this side of the chasm spanning dominance and degradation.



I love to get really, really dirty. . .and really, really clean.



I feel that I am on this earth to have fun, fuck, laugh, help folks, feel, sing . . . and do tasks. Lately I have been looking at each day as a laundry list of small duties that reveal themselves to me in a linearly logarithmic manner.



At the end of a day, if I have put most of the things in their right place-that song on that tape, that kiss on that letter, that letter in that mailbox, that message on that machine, that kiss on those lips, that ear to listen to that friend. . .and get the dishes done, too-then I can sleep a happy man.



Every time I finish consuming some product, I throw the container on the recycling heap or down the garbage chute in the hall and do a little victory dance and think, "Yes! That much closer to death! That much closer to winning this game with grace!"



At the end of each day, I X it out on my calendar. Not nihilistically hash marking away my life sentence-no. It is me celebratorially rejoicing in another day well done and 24 hours closer to the completion of the grand scheme.



At the end of my days, if I have done most of the tasks put before me, I can die a joyous kitty.



I used to want to die a fiery, cool death before I turned 30.



Later I wanted to die old and healthy of natural causes, in bed with two 23-year-old girls.



Now I think about slipping calmly of old age into that dusk in a room full of books and albums and paintings by me, surrounded by children, grandchildren and lifelong friends.



I'll race ya. . . .



I have been through a hell of my own making and I've stayed alive to enjoy telling the tale. I am not going to tell it here, not yet. Today, I am all about today.



I have some hobbies. I sk8board, and oil paint. I also sing in a band. I sing like a devil-angel being run over by a truck. Pretty people from all over the world write me and tell me that my singing is tattooed on the inside of their spine, like a drug. God has blessed me with an unholy Beauty of a voice. I am not rich or famous; I am poor and popular. I get to travel the planet and play clubs and halls packed with fervent fans. I work part-time and make a plumber's wage doing what I love, and there are certain fringe benefits. One of them is lying asleep, naked, next to me as I scribble this journal entry. She sure looks good. Her pretty lips are just barely open, and they move a little each time she breathes.



I like to live life pretty fucking hard, and I live it really pretty. They say that when you are dead, you are dead for a very long time.



I like to pray. My friend, Sudsy, says that the more other people that you pray for, the sexier God makes you.



She and I get drunk on God.



When I was little, my mother told me that I have a guardian angel. I must. They say that God looks after fools and drunks and dogs and little children. I am at least three of those things, and should have been dead many times over.



I have heard that the god to whom a little boy prays has a face very much like his mother. I like that. I think that prayer is sexy. I think that people who pray are sexy.



I watch to see which girls look like they really mean it.



I take walks in Chinatown (a block away) and buy cheap disposable cameras and have a blast trying to see my pretty little town through the eyes of a tourist. I go on dates with different gals. I work out at the YMCA. I try to eat well and moderate my drugging and drinking. I have a lot of friends, but even so, I enjoy spending quality time alone. I call that "going on a date with Baydoll." Baydoll is my god. She is a 700-foot tall, really sexy woman. I am in a monogamous relationship with her, but she lets me see other girls.



I like clean girls with dirty minds.



When I get lonely, I just call a woman from my rotating Rolodex of willing tragic Beauties, and have my fun. Most of them fall in love with me. They all know that the others exist, they are all disturbed by the existence of the others, and they all act like they don't care. I seem to have the ability to love a gal so completely, to look her in the eye and mean it so intently, to focus my attention with such singularly spiritual attendance, that I am capable of making any one of them feel like she is the only being in the universe. And for that moment, singing sweetly in my bed, she is.



By the way, although it may seem that I have women practically dripping off of me, I must say that I am eternally impressed when one actually takes any sort of interest in me.



I love women. Wine, women and song. (Or sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll.) And I love music. I tend to get a record and listen to it two or three times a day for a month or three. This month it is the album, Deep by Peter Murphy. Music pumps my heart, lights my Soul and enbiggens my mind. I play music because I love music.



I live in a really nifty neighborhood in San Francisco-halfway up Nob Hill. It's very nice, but very "city." The vista from my front fire escape looks a lot like views in Manhattan. I live on Pine Street. This part of town is cool and old and falling apart in an interesting way. It's all urban decay, cockroaches, brownstones, overpopulation, street people, shops, money, etc. My 'hood is bitchin' and groovy and cosmopolitan, with batches of tourists always in my way. That doesn't bum me out much, because in my old stompgrounds (Divisadero and Oak) there was an abundance of crackheads and an overall violent vibe.



New York is ugly in a Beautiful way. LA is Beautiful in an ugly way. San Francisco is a different country entirely, a kingdom of century-old Victorians with psychedelic paint jobs.



Even the bank presidents here have tried acid.



Someone tried to break into my house last night while I was home. I was drifting off to sleep at about 3:30 a.m, and was awakened by a noise in the kitchen. Without turning on the light, I picked up my sk8board and went to check it out. Outside my kitchen window, on the fire escape, was a tall, very skinny guy, about 35 years old, in a baseball cap, trying to jimmy the lock with a big knife. I yelled, "What the =*SPl@tb@ng!¥ÐÑÖnil!<p> are you doing!!?" and banged the glass with the sk8board, trying to smash the window (whatever. . .I was barely awake and was not thinking.) He tried to pull the knife out of the window frame, but it was stuck. I called 911 as I watched him rock on down my fire escape. I opened my living room window and loudly described his retreat to the dispatcher lady so that Mister Jimmy could hear me as he fled. He didn't seem in too much of a hurry; he walked fast, but did not run.



The police took about fifteen minutes to arrive. They took the knife as evidence. I talked to them and filed a report. I fell back to sleep pretty quickly.



I'm kinda freaked out today, but do I not hate the guy. He was just a junkie trying to get through another day. God has a sense of humor, and in a year, I will probably end up being Mister Jimmy's friend.



My friend, Sammy Nietzshe, said of the event, "When sk8boards are outlawed, only outlaws will have sk8boards. . .and I'm glad that my favorite outlaw was packing that night!"



My one-bedroom, rock 'n' roll bachelor pad is calm, peaceful and pleasant, but I can hear a lot. I attend the quiet roar of car alarms and sirens mixing with the wafting sounds of the drunk lady down on the first floor playing Beautifully demented classical piano late at night with her window open. I can hear the bells on the cable cars a half-block away. It's funny-in movies that are supposed to take place in SF, you can always hear cable cars in the background (and the inevitable, obligatory, improbably non-lethal madcap car chase always goes by my door.) In reality, there isn't much of The City where you can actually hear them. I am fortunate to live where you can. On summer nights, I can almost feel the baritone bellow of foghorns on the bay, eight blocks away.



There are a few bums in my neighborhood, but not many. Les gens misérables don't generally bother walking up hills, but I don't live at the top. There are enough bindlestiffs in my 'hood to make it interesting. They use the stairs of the Stockton tunnel as their toilet, and sometimes cop a fix in the alley next to my house. On full moons especially, I can hear the peasants' muffled cries from the streets-the siren song of lunatics freaking out on bad drugs. Their shrieks filter through the summerfog and fill me with all the care of a king counting gold while hooked up to an IV drip of pharmaceutical Diladuad.



"Let them eat Codeine!"



My apartment is on the top floor of a honed and hoary old downtown San Fran, six-story building. It's a two-room, bed/living/painting/reading/music/sex space. It is small, but that's O.K. because at 5' 5", so am I.



The main room has three bay windows, plenty of light and a bas relief view of a wall that is pretty interesting as views of walls go. I sleep on a delightful, old, iron, fold-out-of-the-wall Murphy bed. I've added handcuffs and fleece restraints-or, as I call them, "lambcuffs." (The sheets are relatively clean today-I did laundry last week. These linens usually smell of sweat, old sperm and the perfume of one of my many lovers.) My pad has a bathroom with a big claw-foot bathtub. I have a small kitchen, with the aforementioned window, as well as a refrigerator, stove, some shelves and a few roaches. I have a closet and a little entrance way. The passage has a little altar-alcove where I hung up my parents' wedding picture. They haven't been married since I was nine, but it is a Beautiful photo, and I love my parents.



There is an odd calm in my room, always. Before I moved in an old man died here in his sleep.



Rooms have power, and retain the energy of the inhabitant after he is gone. The room in which I lived on Divisadero is now occupied by a former nice girl who has picked up most of my bad habits since she moved in. My old roommates still live there and tell me so.



I used to shoot Dope in that room and look at a girl across the street that had a crush on me, and I her. I would parade around in a dress, wasted out of my mind, and call her on the phone. She had a boyfriend, so we never got together. We just enjoyed the delicious, painful agony of desire. When her light was on, I hurt, and vice versa.



"You think so loud that I cannot sleep. . . ."    



I collected photos of all my lovers. She never made it onto my wall, but I remember her more than most.



The writing on the wall. The scrawling on the wall. One wall in my room is covered with writing and drawings ranging from childish to brilliant by musicians famous, semi-famous and wannabe famous and by many twisted women I have loved. It is interspersed amongst flyers of my shows in a half-dozen countries and with photos of me in various locals, some with my arm around different gals.



It used to be that many of the pictures on my wall were of women I'd fucked. Nowadays, most of my photos are of family. My ex-girlfriend, Ruby, who is a very good friend still, says that this means that I am growing up.



I've started wearing rubbers when I fuck and earplugs when I play. I remember when sex was safe and music was dangerous, but I want to be able to hear the birds when I am 50, and I want to live to see 50.





So anyway, I was sk8boarding down Valencia Street hanging up those damn cat-wanted flyers. When I passed 16th Street, some teenage Mexican boy said, "Chiva. . ." to me.



I kept skating.



"Chiva" is Heroin. Chiva is Spanish for "goat." Mexican tar Heroin looks like goat shit. Thus; Chiva. I have been addicted to Heroin on and off for ten years. I'm clean now, and I swear I'm never gonna do that shit again. No sir. I am through riding the white horse. I have been bucked off and foolishly climbed back on over a dozen times. That trash has been nothing but hell for me.



I consider Heroin to be consigned entirely to my past. Banished to the hut. A small speedbump on the road to sanity.



I passed up the boy and sk8ed into The Chatterbox for a beer. I usually don't go in there, 'cause I hate getting recognized when I'm drinking. Folks often bug me on the street, and in bars. I try especially hard to lay low when I'm playing an in-town gig, because people always wanna weasel onto the pest list. I'm playing a show tonight at The Kennel Klub, and all 1200 tickets for three nights are sold-out. I'm getting a $7,500 guarantee for the entire run under the condition that I keep the pest list low. Last time I played there, I had 130 guests in one night.



So, if I'm hiding out, you may be wondering: Why am I out hanging up posters advertising for a girlfriend? I don't really know. I guess because I told the girls that if they made them, I would help hang them up. Besides, I didn't put my name on them, just my P.O. box. . .and the girls looked so adorable telling me that I had fucked them raw and that we should find a playtoy to give them a rest. Well, I just couldn't resist. . . .



The Chatterbox rocks. It's a sleazy little dive that advertises, "Pool, wine, pinball, no art." There are autographed, broken cymbals from unknown bands on the wall, and the bathroom smells like vomit. The soundman sells speed, and he is out of his mind on the stuff. The beer is cheap and the girls are sleazy.



There is graffiti on the women's bathroom wall. (I went in there once, to fuck a girl-standing up in a stall.) It says:



How to pick up Haight Street boys:



1. Wear crushed velvet

2. Be willing to sink to his intellectual level

3. Pretend that you actually like his band



The corresponding graffiti in the men's room says:



How to pick up Haight Street girls



1. Grow your hair long

2. Grow your hair long

3. Grow your hair long



The 'Box is a dark place, and at four in the afternoon it's pretty empty, save for a couple of bike messengers ditching work. They ask me for tickets, of course. I tell them that I can't help 'em. I buy them beers and go sit by the pool table and pull my journal out of my Zo bag. I begin to write:





JULY 10. . . .



"Wow, today seems so late. . .so late in the grand scheme of things. . .seems like only yesterday I was nine years old and my parents were getting divorced. . .and I was tiny and powerless.



"I am sitting in a dark corner of the Chatterbox, contemplating my life and my time in the city and county of San Francisco. This Halloween I will have lived in the area for ten years, three-and-a-half years in the same place. That's a record for me!



"I am 32 years old. I have been clean for four weeks. I am doing well.



"I still love sex, but I am realising that to fuck a crazy person is to allow her insanity into your life. No thank you ma'am. . .I'm busy working on myself, and you can only love others as much as you love yourself.



"I am attracted to girls who are healthy; I used to be attracted to dysfunction.



"I have been working out at the gym. I look good. I haven't had a cigarette in over three weeks. I am done.



"Today is a really good day. I am winning so hard. . .Every bus I wanted to catch was right there. Every gig I wanted was waiting for me on my answering machine when I woke up. Girls are smiling at me. Life is good.



"I feel old sometimes, but these days I have a little more self-confidence than I used to. I feel like I can still do a lot.



"I have started oil painting. I dig it. I've made a promise to myself to try to paint, sing and write a little bit every day.



"I will not use Heroin again. Never. When I relapse, I tend to relapse hard. I have stuff to do, and drugs get in the way. Maybe when I'm 80 and have accomplished a lot, I will take a little break and party. When I have created a great body of work, when I have fucked all the women that I want to fuck, when I have traveled everywhere that I want to travel, I will be able to sit in my silk bathrobe in the study of my mansion and relax. I will be surrounded by records that I recorded and paintings that I painted. The naughty nursie will come in and administer the morphine every time I frantically clap the bell.



"But not today. Today is all I have. I want to pursue life as fucking hard as I chased death. Let's burn it down, b@by!!



"Change does not hurt; resistance to change hurts.



"I used to think I'd be dead by 30. I'm still alive, so I have to figure out what to do with the next 60 years or so.



"I really am in love with the idea of being a daddy, but it scares me. On Father's Day, Mandy called me for the first time. She said 'Hi Dad.'



"I said 'Who is this?' I thought it was some crazy adult girlfriend of mine. I hate lying, but I lied and told her that I thought she said 'Hi Doug,' cuz I didn't want to explain that I had forgotten that I was a father.



"It is hot as Hell today, all over the country. Fucking global warming. Fuck everyone who has ever treated the world as a non-expendable resource, including me.



"Some folks care. Yesterday, my lover from back in the day, Karoin, called me up. She was the hot, sexy hippie girl with the biggest ass in the world. Her Beautiful butt is huge, as big as her wonderful spirit. She is an exhibitionist. She likes to get naked in the street and cause minor accidents with that obscene, traffic-stopping ass, while her friends take pictures.



"I called her two weeks ago and asked her to sleep with me. She said 'No.' Yesterday when she called, she told me that she was canvassing to raise money to save the redwoods. I told her I would make a donation if she came over and fucked me. She did. I gave her $250.



"You gotta love a gal who cares enough about ecology to whore for Mother Earth.



"It is used to bug me that I was broke all the time, and that I scammed off of chix. These days I'm doing O.K. with this rock 'n' roll shit. I will be 32 in May. 32 seems pretty old, but I think I'll like it. I am finally relatively happy, and finally making money at music after years of trying. I have graduated from Soup Kitchen Celebrity to third-rate Rockstar?.



"I have a new solo band. We are simply called, 'Cash.'



"Mario Killingsworth has been playing some gigs with my band, but he's forgotten how to play drums. The man with the golden arm is really outta practice. He is still as consumed with self-will, riot-a-go-go, as he always was, but he no longer possesses the skills to justify my putting up with this. He is insolent and indolent. I fired him last week. It felt good.



"Despite all this, we are finally finished with the new album. It sounds great. I am putting together a new band, with Jamie Crow on guitar and J. J. Harms on drums.



"I have a gig tonight. Bitchin'. I'm out hanging up the sex-flyers that the gals made.



"As soon as most people realise that they are major dorks and I am a minor god, we will all get along fine."





I finished my beer and put away the pen. I bummed a ciggy off one of the bike messengers. As I lit it (with a wooden match-I hate lighters) I thought out-loud, "Just one won't hurt. . . ."





Later:

The gigs that week were serious. The nifty combo, Lithium Milkshake, opened. My band was cracking, and totally on. My voice was in great shape, and I felt simultaneously relaxed and jazzed. The secret to doing a great gig is to be willing to die on-stage every night.



The first night, I had garbage bags of presents to throw out to the crowd. I brought three bags-full of "clothes that I don't love anymore, and love letters from girls who no longer love me" and disseminated them as projectiles to the fervently adoring fans. People were pumped and nuts and dressed sexy and pretty and crazy. It is considered an event whenever I play in town. It happens so infrequently, and people who like my music really LOVE it. No one just kinda likes me. It is either love or hate.



One guy up-front was yelling, "Fuck you!" over and over at me. I think that he actually liked us, but I was getting sick of it. I nailed him to the wall: between songs I said, "Sir, If you don't stop saying, 'fuck you!' I am going to climb down there and fuck you!" People loved it, and he shut the fuck up.



I went home with different girls each night. I love playing the Kennel Klub. The third night, I ended up going home with a British gal called Daniella, who had some Heroin. My reserve was out the window; I was high on a bellyfull of beer and low-budget stardom.



She and I shot up, and spent the night melting and melding into each other's Souls. She told me that she had been turned on to shooting coke at gunpoint, at age thirteen, by a pimp who raped her. Daniella said he's still her pimp, and that deep down, she loves him. She talked some very impassioned and poetic psychobabble about how she and I were Soulmates and how what's hers is mine and vice-versa. She had me convinced. We got naked, but didn't really fuck. I just lay inside her, holding her and loving her.



I sort of woke up in the middle of the night, and barely noticed that she was gone. It wasn't 'til the next day that I realised that she had stolen a guitar.





I sat squinting in the sobering light of morning, staring at the very loud space where my baby blue 1963 Fender Stratocaster used to live. I popped a micro-cassette into my Dictaphone? (a very small pocket tape-recorder that I carry almost everywhere, and use to organize my life, document my thoughts, and tape girls' throaty, chirpy sex songs in my bed. . . . Sometimes he is Mister Dictaphone or even just Mister D. I consider him a personified confidante-a little motorized mentor.) and listened to a conversation that I had recorded four years earlier. I flashed back on that silver sliver frozen cross-section of a moment in time:



". . . and you were asleep with a lit cigarette in your mouth, Cash. You were lying prone, fully dressed, and the light was on. You had the radio blasting. I took the cigarette out of your mouth."



The day that I had made that tape, my housemate on Divisadero Street, Alfredo, had been describing the disturbing state in which he'd found me the previous evening.



He and I, and my other flatmate, Craig, were standing around our kitchen, on a rainy San Francisco Sunday afternoon. Craig was fixing himself some toast. Alfredo was drinking a glass of orange juice. I was holding a spoon over the gas flame of the stove, cooking up my morning dose of Heroin.



My roommates didn't do hard drugs, but they were very nonchalant about my use, even though I was an addict, and spent about $75 a day on the shit. They didn't blink when I pulled a capped syringe out of the pocket of my second-hand, long-sleeved shirt and drew the acrid, brown liquid up from the spoon into the rig. I tied off my arm with a microphone cord that was lying on the floor and began plunging and plugging the needle into my arm, lunging in vain to find a vein. To Craig and Alfredo, I may as well have been eating my breakfast. In a way, I was. Heroin had become a vitamin to me, one that my body couldn't do without for very long.



My roommates weren't always so tolerant. When I'd moved in, they told me that they would kick my ass and kick me out if I even did Heroin just once. (My reputation had preceded me. It always does, even in a small, medium-large city like San Francisco.) But gradually I started partying, a couple months after I moved in, about the time that my band, The Vagrant Vampires, got signed to a major label. I had lots of money and impending fame, two things that my roommates, also musicians, wanted very much. And I'd always brought lots of yummy girls over, so the 'mates liked and admired me and were willing to overlook a few indiscretions.





I pressed "stop" on Mister Dictaphone, stopped hanging out in the past, and drew the Heroin soup up into the insulin-type syringe and slammed it into a fresh vein.



I'd cooked the Dope with a little holy water that Melody and I had stolen from a church. (She needed it for some witchual that she was planning on performing.) "Maybe that will keep me from getting addicted again," I laughed out-loud as I unwrapped the tourniquet of Vanessa's discarded garter belt from around my arm and laid back to nod.



I know I said that I wasn't gonna use, but I was kinda depressed. I get that way from time to time. I was not strung-out yet, but probably would be by tomorrow. This was my second day in a row using, this time.



The first time that a person ingests an opiate, it can take weeks or even months of daily use to become addicted. But once you have burned those pathways into your brain, your mind is electrochemically trained to get strung-out in about three days. And the more you get strung-out and kick, cop-shoot-cop-shoot-cop-shoot-cop, the quicker and harder and further down the spiral you slide each time.



Time will not undo it. There are hardcore career junkies who get forced by their actions into the hell of kicking Dope in jail. They spend ten years in prison, get "out the gate at eight, into the spoon by noon." Within a week, they are committing enough felonies to get a hundred bucks a day from the pawnshop.



I know that this is how Dope operates. And I understand the physiology of how Dope fits its corkscrews into your Soul. The reason for the ever-increasing need is thus: The liver perceives Heroin as a poison. It produces ever-larger amounts of the enzyme that metabolizes Dope. Therefore, over time, you need a lot more to feel the same.



Despite the fact that I knew all of this, I also knew that I was different. I figured that I could research and discover a way to make it work for me. So I was spending the afternoon listening to old Dictaphone diary tapes, reading old letters and lyrics and trying to fathom what to do differently this time.



I did my third shot in as many hours and lay back to dream. But I had miscalculated my increasing tolerance, overcompensated, and passed into a deep nod. For a timeless hour or so, my consciousness was a blank-slate dreamless sleep. My heart rate slowed to half, my breathing became dangerously shallow. I know this because I'd left Mister Dictaphone running mid-lyric. A later listen showed that I had degenerated from some slurred songwriting:





"Standing on the Golden Gate Bridge 



looking for the girl who did not like to live.

Look for the girl with the atropine eyes, as she flies

 

It's another fucking sunset, and I'm checking out tonight.

Slipping into sleep, your memory slaps me awake

I don't wanna die, I wanna fuck you one more time

I feel that wave of. . . . . . . ."



into a frighteningly strained, slow snoring.



Later, as I slipped out my mini-overdose, I felt lucidly melancholic. Memories from my past flushed and blushed my stirring, nodding consciousness. I recalled vividly some of the most important episodes of my childhood:



Chapter 2:  A Mean Childe



"Cash Newmann, you be careful down at the pond!" my mother called after me. Words of wisdom, considering that I could not (and still can't) swim.



I didn't care. It was one of those idyllic Indian summer days that seemed ergonomically engineered for little golden haired, seven-year-old boys. A day for fishing and looking to birds and trees for the keys to the mysteries of the spheres-the Chinese finger trap that only reveals itself to the young, the insane or those under the influence of certain psychedelic drugs. . .and, oh yeah-to those in love.



My family was visiting my Aunt Valerie and Uncle Ray's farm. My parents were up at the farmhouse talking about whatever it was that adults talk about. I didn't care. This day, this cow pasture, this pond were mine: created for my sweet, devious seven-year-old brain alone.



I looked over my shoulder as I skipped down the hill to the pond. I watched the farmhouse getting smaller as the distance between us grew. I thought about perspective. I thought about vectors and angles and other things that I had read about. I'd been reading since I was four. I had an addict's thirst for books, especially those about science. To me, the world was one big playground of my own creation, or at least of my own interpretation. I was constantly reinventing my reality based on the combined magics of science, religion, imagination and observation.



When I reached the pond, I stood and smiled back at the sky. Fat Old Sun was ripe in the late afternoon, and sparkling his golden flakes on my longish (for a seven-year-old) golden hair. I thanked science for the fusion of hydrogen atoms 93 million miles away that produced the rain of warmth upon my happy face.



I stretched my arms out to Mister Sun and yawned. I took off my Keds and my socks, sat down at the pond's edge and got ready to kill some fish.



Dipping my little toes in the water was cold, but I didn't care. I squished my feet into the mud and thought of the millions of years of history that had tortured hard rocks into this soft goo.



I plundered into my paper bag and took a worm out of the Styrofoam bait cup. I regarded Wormy for a moment, all a-squimmer in the sunlight. Then without hesitating, I stuck a hook through one of his five hearts and plunked the line into the water.



The worm and I sat there for some time, watching the orange sky-orb slink towards the horizon. I was thinking lots of thoughts. Little boy thoughts. Fishing thoughts. Science thoughts. Fun, enchanting thoughts.



I thought, with some glee, pride and maybe a little shame, about my expulsion from Sunday school.



At first I'd enjoyed my religious training. I liked the lessons and stories in Sunday school. I listened eagerly to tales of the wise, 33-year-old hippie from Bethlehem who tipped the tables of the money changers and turned the world on its ear. I liked hearing about his early following of inquisitive (and sometimes treacherous) men, and his curious, Beautiful and brave women



I'd even liked church. I adored the pageantry of it all; the stained glass, the timber and melody of the words, the cadence of the ritual and the crystalline resound of the music. Oh yes, the glorious music. I loved the choir; that legion of farmers and dentists and mill workers and their wives who transcend their lot in life to became angels every Sunday. (It would be years later, at "The School of Jesus in the Field," that I would actually sing in a choir-and get expelled from said choir for smoking cigarettes.)



Um. . .the music. That thunderous organ, whose amazing, throaty bass notes would rattle the church rafters, shake my lower back and make me squirm in my seat and smile.



I guess I thought too much for my Sunday school teacher's liking. She was some poor old, Episcopal marmey matron who looked like a good orgasm would kill her. She was the defender of the Lord's will to me, though-as sage as any scientist to little Cash. That is until one day, when she told us that the Earth was only a few thousand years old, that all of the world's critters were created in a few days-not over millions of years. The scientist in me smelled a big white lab rat. I did my research that week, and the following Sunday, brought her two pieces of evidence as irrefutable by me as the bible was to her. One was an article from Scientific American about Carbon-14 dating. The other was the Encyclopedia Britannica's entry entitled, "Evolution." She listened patiently to me and then, in effect, changed the subject.



That week, I wrote a story that reconciled, in my mind, how the theory of evolution could co-exist peacefully with the creation myth. My version began: "Adam and Eve were amoebas. . . ."



When I showed it to my teacher, she called the priest, then my parents. I suddenly found myself the only boy in recent memory to be excommunicated from Sunday school.



It was not the last time I'd lose standing in a group for thinking too much and sticking to my sling-shots. But it was the first time I realised firsthand that knowledge is power and that the truth threatens those who simply parrot the words of others.



I should have figured this out earlier. All of my heroes at the time (Jonas Salk, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, and David Cassidy,) were strong, freethinking men. Their vocabularies, it seemed, lacked the phrase, "you can't do that." Either they had edited it themselves through years of empirical thought, or maybe, just maybe, some divine intervention deleted it (and pointed it in some other direction, perhaps Albuquerque.) Maybe that's what makes men great, I thought to myself-the absence of that phrase in their neuro-cortex. (It would be even more years before I would consider the possibility of the existence of great, freethinking women. Like another sleeping princess-I'd have to kiss a few first.)



I sat at the pond watching the nibbles on my line and thinking these and many other thoughts. I was more watching the ideas float by then actually thinking them, as actual thought requires work, and goddamnit, this was my day off.



The fishing bobber was jumping at the end of my line, playfully taunting the place where the water threatens to join the sky, held in place only by the crushing air pressure that I knew to average 14.7 pounds per square inch. Finally, the bobber dove under the skin of the water. I had a bite! I was busy daydreaming though, barely aware of my luck. I was occupied with watching my (?) thoughts float by on the imaginary screen in my head. At the exact instant, more or less, that the fish had struck my line, the screen went blank, then it was filled with blinding white light. Not so much white, but every colour at once, including some I'd never seen before. (Perhaps infrared and ultraviolet? Perhaps even further to the left and to the right of the dial: microwaves and sound and radio? Regardless, it was a blazing and Beautiful chord.)



Then, words began to form on the screen. Well, not really words, and not really images, but a completely formed thought expressed in some sort of endoceptual binary cipher, encrypted to fit only my unique DNA. Actual elapsed duration was close to nil, and in less time then it took my bobber to duck, surface and dive again, I suddenly had a complete understanding of the true nature of God, put into terms that any mortal seven-year-old scientist could understand. And it was this:



The universe is a dream created for my benefit. . .and the dream exists only in the minds of three giants who have no bodies and live in the sky. They spend most of their time playing poker and smoking cigars.



I was so knocked out by this revelation that I forgot where I was. No, that's an understatement. Much later in my life, while taking hallucinogenic drugs, I would occasionally forget not only where I was, but even my name. (Or, on the most psychedelic of all drugs, inhalants-particularly ether and nitrous oxide-I would sometimes forget my species.) This time however, fishing at my aunt's farm, I was not on drugs. It would be a good four years before I would try marihuana, let alone LSD or the bane of my late twenties and early thirties, Heroin. But I was more altered in consciousness that early autumn day then I would ever be again in my life. I momentarily forgot not only where I was, what my name was and my species, but I couldn't for the death of me remember what form of energy I took. I couldn't be sure whether I was a single-cell organism, or perhaps all single-celled organisms, at once. Or maybe I was a rock. Or a small village of lichens and slime molds on one of Saturn's moons. Or my grampa. Or his work boots. And I was (or was it we were?) squashed down to about two dimensions (or maybe four, but I didn't understand tesseraction yet-or even know that crinkled time might exist.)



This sensation stretched an eternity of frozen light years in my mind, and perhaps five seconds in "real" time. Somehow my fishing neuro-function went into autopilot.



About the time I was recovering from the file-transfer download of this glaring knowledge, I was landing a Beautiful, shimmering, rainbow-opalescent, twelve-inch, blue-gill fishy, all flopping and drowning in air at the end of my line.



I felt a certain empathy for him, as I was, and still am, about as home in the water as this fish was in the air. (My whole life, whenever I get into water up to my neck or deeper, I panic. I experience a sensation similar to being strangled. I think, but can't be sure, that someone held me down and choked me as a child. To this day, I hate hands on my neck, even in a lover's caress.) In water, I panic and begin to have an asthma attack.



This feeling of aquaphobia is almost identical to the sinking, drowning feeling I used to get whenever a doctor or nurse would stick a needle in my perfect body. I later overcame this fear in San Francisco, when I got into Heroin. Somehow I never got over the water thing.



I looked at the fish dying on my line. Was it sent by the three discorpereal giants in the sky as an affirmation of their existence? I couldn't tell; it had all happened so quickly. I took the fishy in my little hands and removed it from my hook. I held it and petted it a little, loving the feel of his glistening slime in my hands. I saw his powerful mouth gasping for air, I watched his primitive gills opening and closing. Suddenly I got an impulse to throw him back as an offering to testify to the three giants who now equaled GOD in my head. Sometimes when I didn't keep a fish to eat (endor dissect it to perform electrocardio experiments with circuits built from parts from Radio Shack), I would throw it as hard as I could at the skin of the water, where it would lay stunned for a few seconds on the surface, then regain consciousness and swim back down to waterworld. This time however, I simply gently let Mister Fishy go at my feet and watched him swim happily back to his family. I'm sure he had a great story to tell the other fishes, and was probably received either as a hero or a liar. (Do fish lie? hmmm. . . .)



Regardless, it must, I thought to myself, be quite an amazing thing to a fish to spend a few moments, however painful, in that other world above his sky.



I had fished and learned enough for one day. The Sun was going down. I decided to go back to the farmhouse and see my aunt, uncle, mother and father. I decided not to tell them about God revealing themselves to me. I knew that my family would consider it a flight of fantasy, a product of my very developed imagination. . .and I knew it to be much bigger and more real than that. I knew it was the truth, and I wasn't about to have the truth tainted by the disbelief of others, even if those others were people who loved me very much.



I decided to just tell them about the fish I had caught, and the blue heron I had seen. (Herons are an endangered species that frequented the pond.) I told them about the flock of geese that had flown over my head and squawked their odd song at me. (My favorite Grampa, Lyle, called them "Canadian honkers." An avid hunter, he loved the "honkers" and would never shoot them. He would tell me stories about their habits and games, in between playing reels and jigs on his fiddle and quoting bible verse at me, as my amazed self sat cross-legged at his feet, loving every enchanted second.)



(Lyle was the first in a long series of friends who've died on me. I was ten. I cried for three days, and will never forget him for living.)



On my way up the gentle hill through the cow pasture that separates the pond from my aunt's house, I heard a rustling in the grass. The scientist in me (or perhaps my inner-brat; maybe the brat and the scientist are the same person) decided to investigate. I walked slowly over to the clump of wild wheat that seemed to be the source of the sound. I peered into the tall grass and saw a small garter snake. Naturally, I reached down to pick it up, after first gingerly setting my fishing rod and paper bait sack on the ground. The snake detected my movements and took flight, eventually resting in another clump of wheat. As I reached down to pluck him up in my hands, I noticed the purple rust of ergot mold growing on some of the grain. I knew from reading that ergot was the precursor to the drug LSD, as well as being a powerful poison, uterine medicine and a psychedelic in its own right. I also knew that bread from ergot-infested wheat and rye was the source of the hallucinations that caused erratic behavior and visions in many of the women burned as suspected witches during the middle ages.



I gently picked the snake up in my little paws, and marveled at his majesty. He shimmered a thousand colours in the setting sun. He looked at me with his cool, mysterious, black/translucent cataract eyeholes. We studied each other for some time, and I decided to keep him as a pet. I explained this to him, speaking earnestly and with patient supplication, and he seemed to agree. He at least seemed resigned to the idea, even though he was secreting the milky substance that snakes squirt from their nether regions when frightened. (Perhaps this is why people think that snakes are slimly. They are not. Anyone who has ever beheld one knows that they are glassy and cool to the touch. They seem wiser, in some ancient way, than we. They have been around a lot longer than people, and like cockroaches, will probably be here long after we blow this place up. That seems fitting and right to me. Who better to inherit the Earth than insects and snakes? I have always felt that man, and especially men, are silly in a lot of ways. War is, or at least most wars are, a good example of this silliness. Maybe that Nick Zedd quote in graffiti I saw when I was squatting an abandoned factory in DC was right. Maybe "war is menstrual envy.")



I put the snake in the paper bag that had held my bait, and walked the rest of the way up the hill to the farmhouse, being careful to dodge the poopie landmines with which the cows had littered the field. (My too-cool, cigarette smoking, delinquent teenage cousins called them "cowpies.")



When I got to the top of the hill, I decided to put the bag with the snake in it in my dad's car. I would have brought Snakie inside to proudly display to my parents and relatives, but didn't, as my mother had a general abhorrence of all things that creep, especially spiders and snakes. Pretty strange for someone who had grown up on a farm (both my parents had been farm-brats, and they also had owned a farm together before I was born), but I guess it made sense in light of the fact that my folks had left behind their farming ways. They'd moved to Welchton, New York, a bustling metropolis of 3000, and set up life in a big house with a teenage son, a nine-year-old girl and their darling, blond baby boy, Cash. Dad was a real estate agent, Mother was a happy housewife, and I was me.



I put the snake-bag in the backseat of the large, sleek black sedan and shut the door. I went into the house saying, in a loud voice, "Hi honey, I'm back from the club," which is how I always announced my arrival. (Later, in San Francisco, this would be amended to, "Hi honey, I'm homo!" or sometimes, "Hi honey, I'm homeless!")



My mother was pouring tea, and offered me a cup. I took it. They wouldn't let me drink coffee, and I enjoyed tea. It was relaxing and stimulating at the same time.



"How was the fishing, son?" My Uncle Ray inquired.



"It was fun. I caught a pretty big blue-gill, but I threw him back. I also saw a flock of honkers."



"Grampa Lyle and I saw a huge flock of them yesterday," offered Aunt Valerie.



"It's that time of year, alright," said my mother.



This degenerated even further, into the sort of small talk that adults use to whittle away the time left in their limited spans. For Christ's sake, I'd just seen God, and these folks were talking about the weather!



"I'm gonna go outside and watch the sunset," said I, turning on my heel and spinning around to face the door.



"We'll be ready to leave soon, Cash Newmann. Enjoy yourself."



"O.K, Mother. I will."



"Of course I will. . . ." I thought to myself. How could I not; I now held another key to understanding of the universe.



I walked through the dimly lit hallway, marveling at the fresh smells of the farmhouse-hanging herbs, food cooking, my uncle's pipe. Even the scent of cow dung-encrusted workboots in the hallway contributed to the formation of this heady perfume.



I opened the front portal and was amazed. The Sun had slunk even lower in the sky in the few moments I'd spent inside. The horizon was awash with a million colours, made just for me by the giants in the sky. It was perdition-orange, jade-blue, frozen-lake-hell-violet and a colour I would later come to call "lysergic purple" after the tinge that my hallucinations' halos took on when I was under the influence of LSD.



I sat on the front porch and contemplated my good luck. Sometimes I just couldn't believe how amazing this world was, and how it was all created just for me. . . .



By the time the Sun was down, I found myself in the backseat of my dad's car. I didn't recall getting up and walking there. That sort of thing happens to me a lot. Later in life, when I was playing in a rock band, sometimes I would step offstage and not remember any of it. It would be a blur that seemed to have only lasted about two minutes. I would call this "out-of-body bass playing."



I looked around my feet and found the brown paper snake-bag. I picked it up and peered inside. Snakie was not there! He must have crawled away while I was humoring the 'rents and drinking the sunset!



I felt sad. My little pal was gone. I also felt bad. I was horrified at the thought of that prehistoric reptile snaking across my mother's high heels and giving her a heart attack.



Mother and Dad came out to the car, all happy and chattering about banal things. They climbed into the front seat. My stomach was sinking into my feet, but I attempted to maintain aplomb or two.



I later told my dad, but we never found the snake. . .I think he crawled out a vent. My mother, however, refused to get into the car ever again, and made my dad sell the sedan soon after.





!~~##(c)?????????????$$$?????????????(c)##~~!





I stumbled out of those retrospective reminiscences and got upright and contemplated shooting more Dope. The sick, sour wine smell of that drug had filled my heart and would not leave. "Why do more? I am all about Dope," I thought. "If I am Dope, who needs Dope?!"



I was coming down and wanted something. I walked out my door and down the stairs and went to the Hill Top Pub for a closing-time beer.



Chapter 3:  Buy This Life



The world is fond of the image of the starving artist. People love the archetype of the struggling, brilliant young man or woman, garrisoned away in a garret, slowly going insane while producing a dazzling body of work, and then dying or being consigned to the madhouse or skid row.



The rock fan who works in a gas station cannot afford to trash hotel rooms and snort coke off of a supermodel's breasts, so he pays Mötley Crüe or Too-Live Crew to do it for him. The yuppie consultant cannot leave his job to pursue madness, so he finances madness in another by purchasing a powerful painting.



When you buy a great rock record, you are acquiring more than music; you are procuring a lifestyle.



I hate this crap. I am too busy living it to buy into it. "Tortured artists should be! Fuck starving artists! Here's to selling out with style!" I said as I raised my glass to Jack, the bartender at "The Hill Top."



The Hill Top Pub is my favorite bar to drink in whenever I'm in town. In fact, it is pretty much the only bar in which I'll drink. The fact that it's on the first floor of the six-floor brownstone I call home not withstanding, I like the anonymity that the place offers-the clientèle is mostly Chinese laborers and Filipino well-to-do types who don't know who Cash Newmann is and don't care. I am often recognized at the trendier bars in The City, places in the Mission District or the Haight-establishments where the latest crop of 21-year-old, cigar-smoking brats congregate to sip martinis and drink major microbrews and be nostalgic for an era that occurred 30 years prior to their collective birth. I used to like being recognized on the street, but after years of it, it's a hassle. I am not popular enough to be afforded the financial rewards that could buy the isolation that big-ticket Rockstars? enjoy. I am popular enough, however, to attract a lot of idiots. The public interactions that they foist upon me range from doe-eyed adulation to verbal insubordination to, more than once, a stranger's slap in the face for no manifest reason at all.



Nope, I like to drink undisturbed, write my music alone and just cash my occasional royalty checks-from seventeen records on almost as many labels. (I have trouble playing the music-industry game. I make music. If the industry wants to get involved, they have my number.)



I tour Europe three months of the year. I hate touring the states. I make more money and am treated better in 90 days of playing 1200-1500 seaters in Europe than in nine months of bars in America. I usually only play two gigs a year in the states-New Years Eve and My Birthday.



(Nice work, when I can get it.)



Some of my royalties are substantial, but the smaller ones, I simply sign over to Jack, in exchange for swabbing out my massive bar tab. Jack knows the drill-I scribble my John Adams on the back of the check. He hands me all the twenties in the till, wipes out my debt and starts working towards another one, a couple hundred dollars in the black.



Jack doesn't drink. He is a recovering alcoholic. He goes to "those darn meetings" (his words, not mine) every day before his shift, but he never preaches at me. It is an unspoken bartender-barfly confidentiality: Jack will help me if I ever ask, and there is nary a word about it otherwise.



Jack is a kind man, quiet and physically imposing. At 6'3" and 185 lbs., he towers over me. He's a very young 40-year-old; a righteous babe with a long brown veil of hair and sleeve-tattoos on both arms. He's a handsome man of Irish derivation, and is in full possession of chiseled-yet-boyish good looks. He works out and eats well. He's married to Missy, a Beautiful little 21-year-old gal from the Bronx whom he met at a meeting. They live nearby, and Missy brings Jack a sandwich every night and talks to him and me for a half-hour or so before she heads off to work.



Missy and Jack are the prettiest couple I have ever seen. She's a tiny, little blonde-pigtail thing with huge hazel eyes. She looks like a sexy lemur caught in the headlights of a UFO. She's a gorgeous sexcartoon of a woman, with huge, firm breasts, an aerobically thin waist, shapely hips and pouty lips. She looks like my mental image of God. She has a figure to live for and usually wears a Harley-Davidson shirt and thigh-high leather boots. Missy is very intelligent, a great listener and a good conversationalist. She talks of going to law school, and I believe that she could pull it off. She wants to defend juveniles.



Jack told me that when he first got clean, he prayed for a woman just like Missy. Actually, his sponsor had told him that you can't treat God like Santa Claus and ask for stuff. Jack's sponsor told him to only pray for others. So Jack made a list of physical, mental and spiritual characteristics that he wanted in a woman and made a deal with another guy. The other guy had a wife, but wanted a better job. So Jack prayed for the other guy to get the job, and the other guy prayed for Jack to get his dream girl.



Jack turned down every advance by all other women (Jack is very good looking and gets a lot of offers) and stayed celibate for nearly a year until a shivering, dirty, skinny, little toe-up, ex-ballerina prostitute showed up one rainy night at Jack's homegroup. Jack ignored the advice of his sponsor and all his friends and let Missy kick Dope in his house. He played motherbird by feeding her and wiping up her vomit and diarrhea. She gave him permission to handcuff her to the bathroom sink while he went to work, so she wouldn't split to turn a trick and cop Dope when the withdrawal got particularly hellish. He also took the phone to work so she couldn't order out. He held her and petted her for 21 nights, until she quit shaking and started sleeping.



The other guy got the great job, and Jack and Missy got married two months later. They've defied all conventional wisdom by living very, very happily ever after.



I am fond of telling my friends that "behind every great man is a good woman he steals all his ideas from." I may have even stolen that soundbite from some girl, I'm not sure. For such an intelligent man, my brain is kinda scrambled from drugs and alcohol (and carbon monoxide from a teenage suicide attempt.) I can remember things that I did two years ago better than I can recall what I had-if anything-for dinner last night.



It doesn't matter anyway. One of my other soundbites is, "Everything that can be done has been done. Being a great artist consists simply of being a good editor."



I certainly operate on this principle-I'm as likely to include an uncredited strophe or two from a Dear John letter in one of my songs as I am to brilliantly pull the other 23 lines out of the ether. I do believe that songs come from the air. . .but I certainly didn't mind cashing the check at the end of the day.



Thanks, air. . . .



I guzzled some more beer and soliloquized to Jack and a few others in the Hill Top:



"Anyone who gets his dick sucked for playing rock 'n' roll, and thinks he actually deserves it, is sorely deluding himself."



I love to dispense such pseudo-wisdom to my less successful friends and to the press, in the believable, almost religious manner that only glad-handing, ass-kissing folk like Rockstars?, politicians and priests can get away with.



Then I'll turn and let some 20-year-old, low self-esteem Beauty crock on my knob backstage, or in my Nob Hill apartment, and believe that I am special because she is there for me. Like most third-rate Rockstars? (and less attractively so, most would-be third-rate Rockstars?), I simultaneously sk8 the razor edge betwixt two conflicting yet related ideas-that I am, on one hand, the crowning king of creation, and that on the other cut toe, I'm some gum underneath God's roll-top writing desk. I either think that I am the most important creature on this green earth, or the piece of shit on the bottom of The Almighty's shoe.



I rarely just realise the reality of the day-that I am good at what I do; I am a small yet important part of this world.



My mind is a closet full of jammed contradictions. The worst part is that I know it. Self-knowledge hurts. Sometimes I envy stupid people.



"Do me some favors, and maybe I'll let you owe me some money!" I'd yelled out at the bar last week while buying red wine for a room full of well-wishing strangers. . . .



I often speak in quotables like this. I feel that I should be remembered, that my purpose on this earth is first to feel and second to be commemorated. People are good at retaining about ten words, tops. So I tend to speak in bumper stickers, pop song hooks and pull quotes. Actually, I think in slightly more contorted and layered parenthesis-within parenthesis (a helical syntax perfectly suited to the non-linear, bang*splat&pow!-somewhere-else-fast connectivity of HTML, but I'm a rocker, not a web page designer.) However, I've become quite good at distilling these serpentine soups of reasoning down into little, pre-packaged nibble-thoughts.



At age fifteen, I practiced being interviewed, with a tape-recorder and a mirror. I lived in many houses as a child, dragged and trounced around by a divorce. In the closet of these dwellings, and in hotels on tour, and in some strangers' habitations, I'm fond of writing little snaps of thought on the underside of shelves in closets, and on walls behind dressers. I always follow these petite quotes with the four dots of ellipsis to indicate that these words are a snapshot out of a short, desperately important life. I'm writing my own, "Cash Newmann slept here. . . ."



I have always felt that if you don't believe your own hype, then no one will. . . .



I knew I'd be dead by age 30. I have always known that. Legends always expire young. So, it was quite humbling to actually celebrate my thirtieth birthday and be relatively healthy, somewhat happy and facing the future with a childlike, naïve, enthusiastic optimism.



The day of my thirtieth birthday, I bought myself a silver ring at Touchstone. I have never taken it off. I will be buried in it. I bought it as a present for myself for defying all the Heroin OD or beat-to-death-in-a-bar odds and living to a decade plus a score.



The day of my thirtieth birthday, just for that day, I quit worrying about the future and the past, took a big ol' hit of now and just grooved.



Later that afternoon, I found out that two friends had just died. One was Christian Gavin. He overdosed on Heroin, overmedicating a broken heart. The second was Brian Goldbaum. Brian and I had once bonded over the death of his friend, Bobaholic. Brian and I had mourned by cashing Bobaholic's welfare check and getting as much Heroin as we could.



Bob didn't need the money anymore.



(Brian and Bob were two-thirds of "The Three Musketeers." The third was Eric Fiend. Eventually dear, sweet Eric died.



(It has been my experience that people with elective surnames like "Fiend" or "-aholic," don't usually die of old age.)



Merely living to the age of 30 is not to imply that everything is all good. While it probably is on an outward level (I have enough cereal and a nice apartment. I have lovers and a sporadic career as an underground rock-guy), I feel pretty confused inside. I pass off my constant contradictions as part of the artistic temperament (or part of the human condition), but the reality is settling in deeper-I hurt. It is that dull pain common among entertainers. It's hard to tell where the cause leaves off and where the effect begins.



The artist is too busy making omelets with his brains and plans to worry about whether the egg predated the chicken.



I am not a wealthy man, but sometimes I have money. I usually have either a lot, or none. I get a royalty check or an advance and live high with it until I'm broke. I blow it living like a low-rent Rockstar?-taking taxis everywhere and eating in restaurants-Mexican food, Thai food, sushi, even cereal. I spend loosely, treating friends and lovers to dinner, movies and presents. I also lend freely.



I am pretty conscientious about taking care of all my bills. Whenever I get a chunk of change, I pay my rent a year in advance and mail a batch of cash to Mandy's mom. Then, right before I run out of scratch, I go buy a big bag of rice and a big sack of beans and bum cigarettes 'til some more mailbox money arrives.



I probably could play the music game a little better. About three years ago, an A and R rep was ready to offer me a HUGE deal. She had been perusing and pursuing me as a signing for some time. She was talking to me in the dressing room after a wild and tight set at Club Lingerie in Los Angeles. I whipped out my penis and showed it to her. She walked out, muttering some quip like, "Hey Cash, don't make a big thing out of this, not that you could."



Snoopy, my manager at the time, had looked dismayed. Seeing dollar signs winging out the door, he said, "Cash, I need to give you a little refresher course in talking to A an R people."



I slurred, "Man, git me 'nother beer."



He fired me a few weeks after that.



I haven't sold out, but it isn't really due to integrity; it's from ignorance and laziness. I would sell out hard if someone offered, but I'm considered unreliable. I do show up for most gigs and sessions. However, I've blown enough commitments that people think "Only a fool would invest a lot of time and cash into Cash."



I push these occasional allegations aside; "I make music for people with disposable lives, not disposable incomes."



Girls like me and do anything for me. I attract a particularly pretty and particularly desperate class of female-raving Beauty, raging co-dependents who do not feel like real women unless they have some broken man to mend. I enchant ladies who have somewhere replaced their need to be a complete human with an aching desire to be half of a twisted whole.



I usually have three or four of them in my wings, with one more on her way in and another on the way out. The quandary of having five lovers is thus: it is not five times the fun, it is five times the hassle. One of them always feels like killing you.



Most of my kitties are pretty, but not all. I tend to pull in comely gurls, but I'm not picky-I would take up with almost anyone who would don the pumps and spread her stickies for me. Somehow though, I bat pretty near a thousand in the looks department, and the ones that aren't really pretty are usually really foxy, or really smart or have some other attribute that makes them worthwhile to me.



"When your mojo ain't workin', go fuck a fat girl," I once told a pick-up bass player. "When you don't get laid for a while, it gets harder and harder to get some. Women smell desperation like dogs smell fear. Fuck a fat girl, and fuck her really well. Not only are you doin' a good deed, but they're usually really appreciative and dirty in bed. Most important, you will stop smelling like desperation and start smelling like sex."



As callous as I am in this backstage (i.e. locker room) talk, I'm right-on with this desperation thing-people who get laid, get laid even more. People who don't get laid continue to not get laid-and they get bitter. I've been there, and I've resolved to not go there again. I never go more than about six weeks without gettin' some, even if it means going to bed with someone that I wouldn't go to lunch with.







Chapter 4:  Money For Nothing



I sat in my room, drunk and high. I pulled Mister Dictaphone from the inside pocket of my well-worn, brown leather motorcycle jacket and began spouting:



"I have an unhealthy disregard for money. Money means nothing to me. I like to have it, but I hate to have to work for others in order to obtain it. I cannot hold onto it, and I don't panic or even worry when it is gone. I somehow always manage.



"This not-quite contradictory, dichotomous attitude may have some basis in the fact that I grew up in a house filled with rare pets, with the price tags still on them. My mother ran a pet store in Wehauqua, a summer resort town ten miles from Welchton. The summer population of Wehauqua is 15,000 (not counting the bats.)



"In the off-season, the town is ghosted. To keep from getting ripped off, my mother would bring the store's stock home. We would live the winter among five thousand-dollar purebred Pomeranian puppies and priceless Persian pussies. It warped my sense of material worth, and made money into something that I felt giddily guilty about. I still find this somewhat amusing.



"Everyone in my family is self-employed at something we love. We're all workaholics. We all work on holidays and my parents happily drudge on and refuse to retire, even though they are in their 70's.



"As a child, I would sit in the back of my dad's car as he drove around the backroads of our county. He made every moment a guided tour. He was a well-meaning storehouse of trivia about everything. I would watch genteel, rolling hills slant by, the late-afternoon sun kissing the cool breeze, and feel that anything was possible. Dream it, then be it. . . .



"I was seven when God revealed itselves to me at the pond. I was a really smart, aware and shimmery kid. I was relatively happy. This changed when I turned eight. I was molested by a fourteen-year-old boy, and it really pissed me off. He was the brother of my baby-sitter. The bastard didn't shotgun me, but an eight-year-old doesn't really have the decision-making capacity for sex to be consensual, even if he goes in the room without being forced.



"I was turned on by the act. This was very confusing. It caused me to begin thinking about sex almost all the time, at an age when I should have just been sublimating my desires by worrying about things like whether to become a fireman or an astronaut.



"I have talked to women who have been raped. Most of the women I know have been. They all hated it. The most confused ones are the few who also physically enjoyed some aspect of their bodily violation. I think I have an inkling into that. It fucked me up pretty bad that I took pleasure from my molestation while I was despising it.



"After that pussy-ass, trophy-stealin' punk motherfucker did his deed, he gave me a present. It was a bribe really, to keep me quiet. He handed me a small reel-to-reel tape recorder. This did several things. First, It made me associate sex with being materially rewarded. This later came up time and time again with me letting women support me. It also gave me a fascination with prostitution.



"In addition, being given a tape recorder also helped me become interested in music and in chronicling my existence. I loved that tape recorder. Even now, I feel incomplete when I am too far away from the mechanical means to chronicle my thoughts.



"I can find good in anything. This is why I am such a festive cat, despite my darkness. . . .



"Later the same year, a sixteen-year-old girl baby-sitter threw a pot party in the house while my parents were gone. I didn't see the pot, but I smelled it. The lights were out and all the teenagers were paired off, necking on my parents' antique chairs. The girl pulled me onto her lap and made out with little me. She French kissed me and taught me to pet, and she put her hands all over my hairless, little boy chest. I got very turned on and thought that she loved me.



"The next day, I got her phone number and rang her to ask her out on a date. She laughed at me and hung up.



"I got the feeling that somewhere, someone had lied to me.



"A year after these violations, my parents happened to get divorced. My little eggshell mind mixed that with my guilt over being molested. I felt that I had caused their divorce because I sucked a boy's dick in the closet. I stopped being happy all the time. Sometimes I was happy, and sometimes I was filled with rage or shame. This vehemence would manifest itself in me screaming at my parents and torturing and poisoning and cutting small animals. I guess I felt powerless in the world, and it made me feel powerful to hurt other smaller critters, the same way that the bigger boy had hurt me."



    

Close your eyes, to catch yourself from falling. 

Close your eyes, to keep your skin form crawling. . . .  



"My shame came out as being sorry for everything. I would overapologize. I also went through a period of being overly honest, telling everyone everything that entered my head. (I later heard a friend describe this as compulsive disclosure.) I got really anal with honesty; if you wiped your boots off in my doorway, I would try to give you the dirt because if I kept it, I felt that I was stealing.



"After a year of this, I got sick of guilt for imaginary stealing and started stealing for real.



"I got caught shoplifting shotgun shells. I stole the book Steal This Book, and decided I needed to steal shells to get powder to make bombs to overthrow my school. When I got pinched, they decided to try to scare me straight. The shopkeep called the cops, and I was taken to the county clink, a half-hour away. They paraded little blond me by some caged crooks, who had been told to say lascivious things to this pocket delinquent."



Scared straight by threats of violent homosexuality?



"My dad had to come and pick me up from the pound. When my mother found out, she said, 'First stealing, next it'll be dope, and then sex!!'



"She was right.



"The highwayside, redneck, bait 'n' beer shop that I stole the shells from was the same place that my second dead friend died. Four years after my shoplifting episode, my buddy, Todd, was riding drunk at 120 miles an hour. He had his head out the window, groovin' on the rush, when the driver missed the turn and drove through one wall of the bait store and out the other side. Todd lost his head.



"Needless to say, they couldn't put it back on.



"Sometimes his head would appear to me at night. I had a series of recurrent-dreams/quasi-nightmares as a child. They all contained highly evolved, surreal symbolism and a bathetic sense of the absurd.



"In one of them, I am laying in bed dreaming with my eyes open. The ceiling of my room is filled up with the hum of two electric motors that take up my whole view. I'm holding my arms outstretched, with a piece of string in-between my hands. There is a force-field betwixt the string and the turbines. I can feel it keeping their weight from crushing my chest.



"In another dream, I hold my arms out to the Sun, which is 20 feet in diameter and three feet away from me. I can feel its heat, but it does not burn me. Inside it, I can see a cross made out of iron. The cross is charred, but does not melt.



"In another, I confront a little man with injurious, glowing eyes. He is in my backyard saying that he will have to take me 'to the tower.' I woke up from this one trying to scream, but no sound would come out.



"Yet another dream found me in the backseat of a car, looking over the shoulder of the me in the driver's seat. I am going somewhere, but I never get there. I keep passing a witchy-woman in the woods. She is tending to a psychedelic-coloured pile of glowing, ice-like crystals that are growing out of the ground. The crystals are emanating a pulsing, frozen-lake orange and hell-violet aura. (I would later be amazed to meet Kitty in DC and see that she had independently painted my dream and titled it Crystal Goat.)



"To little boy me, dreams would seep into my waking hours. I would lay on the couch and hallucinate that the TV was watching me. My eyes would telescope the set to a million miles away and then up to a centimeter close and then back again. I would perceive hallucinations that were more powerful than (but similar to) drugs, which I had not yet needed to discover.



"The first time I had this waking dream, I was watching the particularly surreal, Christian, children's series, Davy and Goliath. Later, it always made me associate that show with a feeling of vertigo. I tried to describe this experience to adults. In another era, I would have been thought to be possessed, but it was merely consigned to the realm of 'an overactive imagination.' (Later, when my fever hit 103 degrees and I was taken to the hospital, they figured out that I had mononucleosis.) But the mold was set; I could later have these feelings at will. (And often independent of my will.)



"When I was eleven, I started smoking pot, with the bad seeds in my town. My pal Jody literally lived on the wrong side of the tracks. His mother was on welfare. She would lie and lay in bed, high on Valium and booze and lure truckers to her house with her CB radio. (Her handle was 'Sugar Britches.') There was almost always an eighteen-wheeler parked out-front.



"Jody could come and go as he felt. He had a plump, sexy, white trash girlfriend, Latisha, and he got her pregnant. (She looked like it was really fun to make her pregnant. . . .)



"Jody was fifteen, and knew how to drive a car. I really looked up to him. My dad was a good person, but my parents were divorced, so I didn't see Dad much; therefore, I looked elsewhere for my male role models.



"The first time I smoked pot, with Jody, I didn't let on that it was my first time. I am not even sure that I got high. I do know that the next day, I stole pot from him. When confronted, I lied about it. Then I offered to turn him on to some of 'my' pot. He kicked my ass, took the pot (and my money) and then offered to smoke some pot with me. I did.



"I am amazed at how much I looked up to him.



"I always have had a Jody in my life-some stronger, older, more bad-ass male. I don't know if it is latent homosexuality or simply poor identification with males, but I seem to have a need for this character in my life. Later, in The Vagrant Vampires, it was Dick Hopper. After that, in my solo band, it was Wolf, or sometimes Pee. I don't know why I need someone to fit this role, and I don't know why I get so co-dependently insane caring about what he thinks of me. When more sensible people are furious with my behavior, I don't much care. But when my Eddie Haskell is slightly irked at me, I have a hard time even having a good day."





Chapter 5:  All About Kaia





I dropped Mister D. and noodled out into nods of more memories of my little past:



The period from age eleven to fourteen is a blur. I was smoking pot and getting shuffled around between parents, and getting into trouble. I was raging at kids twice my size and getting beat up. (Less likely than you would think; a lot of bullies are all talk.) I started skipping school. I still got good grades, because I was smarter than most of my teachers. (This only added to my frustration. They would sometimes correct me when I was right-because I knew a word or understood a concept that they did not comprehend.) The whole thing leaves a bitterness in my heart. Maybe a few years of therapy would fix it, but I would prefer not to recall some parts of my life.



A lot of things happened to me when I was fourteen. . .I guess this is in keeping with the astrological idea that things happen, your most important, life-changing events occur, at intervals of seven years, i.e. age 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, etc. Not necessarily your best times; they could be your worst. But unmistakably the most tumultuously momentous. So far, it has worked out for me: at age seven, I met God. At age fourteen, sexdandrugsandrockandroll happened. (In Lolita, Nabakov informs us that whatever a boy does at 14 sets the tone for his life. I took LSD, learned guitar and fucked.) At age 21, I moved to California and started my band, The Vagrant Vampires. When I turned 28, The Vagrant Vampires got signed to a major label, an end I'd been working on since age fourteen. The seven-year thing is supposed to have something to do with the alignment of the planets being similar to where they were when you were born. My explanation for the seven-year thing's biorhythmic validity, other then observation, is that, according to some science article I read, every cell in your body is replaced every seven years. . .every seven years you are a completely new person. (Except, I think, for your brain. You are born with a finite number of think-cells, and as they die, they are not replaced. . . .)



So, when I was fourteen, I had consensual sex for the first time. I took my first hit of acid (after much time spent in a local library; I researched all drugs thoroughly before trying them.) That year, I also started playing guitar, keeping a diary, writing poems and lyrics, carrying Mister Dictaphone and otherwise documenting my thoughts.



I met Kaia in Wehauqua. The funny thing about Wehauqua, New York is that since people are only there for nine weeks, a lot of the bullshit is automatically dispensed with. You can get past "Hi, where are you from?" really quickly, and become someone's really good, lifelong friend in a day. I've kept this attitude and skill my whole life. I can't measure the number of occasions that after a short period of time, someone says to me, "I feel like I've known you a lot longer then I have." It's a recurring phrase that has haunted and delighted me forever. But it started in Wehauqua.



Kaia was sweet, short, smart and curvaceous. Enough baby fat to give me a hard-on and enough emerging woman to keep me hard. We were both fourteen, both virgins and both in love. We spent the summer holding hands. This lead to kissing, leading to other things. We professed our love to each other, and felt that we meant it.



It was a slow and Beautiful process. I would meet her every day, after my typing class, outside the octagonal building where she took her guitar lessons. We would take long walks and make out in the woods. We would hold hands and drink the luxury of smooth-skinned youth and the promise of the Beauty that the future held. We would joke that holding hands was a digit-strengthening homework exercise for our respective summer classes.



The trees, the grass, the sky, the chimes of the bat-filled clock tower by the lake-the whole world was all made just for us. Everything seemed bright and unlimited.



We would kiss for days. . . .



I Turned Kaia on to pot. (This was back when I cared about such things-now I only smoke marihuana medicinally, if I am kicking Heroin.) We liked to smoke a little, every few days. We'd watch the world, our world, slow down to comprehensible speed. It seemed so. . .ours. It felt like we could travel anywhere together, just by sitting in one place and letting the Earth turn past us. When your destination spun by, you'd simply jump off onto that spot.



Kaia's friend, Karen, also wanted to try weed, but wanted to try it alone. I gave her a little and told her how to smoke it. She got busted by her dorm mother and shipped home. That girl also, I heard, got pregnant the first time that she had sex.



Some kids have all the luck.



Kaia and I spent the whole summer unfolding into each other's arms. Near the end of the season, we knew it was time.



We skipped up the stairs to my mother's apartment, hand in hand. Lady luck was being good that day. Lady luck had even left a note:



Dear Cash. . .I've had to leave town for the day on business.

I won't be home until very late tonight. There's cereal for you.

Here's $5.00. Go see a movie and have fun.





-Your loving mother.

PS: Please make me always proud.





I Took Kaia by the hand and lead her into my mother's room. I laid her on my mother's bed and started kissing her. I kissed Kaia all over, from stem to stern. She reciprocated with that delicious, hungry teenage mouth of hers. We were one person, not sure where each other began and ended. We were trying to occupy the same space at the same time. Somehow we ended up naked. Kaia pulled my body on top of hers. I placed my erect member inside. I lay within her, kissing on nape and pretty, fleshy lips.



But I didn't know that you were supposed to move up and down. After about five minutes, I rolled off of her. I got the feeling again that somewhere, someone had lied to me. It wouldn't be the last time. I asked her if it had felt good.



She lied, "Yes my love."



About a week later, the summer was over, and Kaia returned to her home in Lackawanna, New York (a suburb of Buffalo.) I wrote her several long and ardent letters, professing my love to her. She didn't answer them. After ignoring three or four such pleas, she wrote back, a very short, stern note:



Cash. Don't say you love me. You don't know what love is.

I'm dating a 28-year-old coke dealer who makes me cum.

I love him,

and he loves me. Please stop writing.



Love, (sic) Kaia.



There it was again. That nagging feeling that somewhere, someone had lied to me.



Sometimes I feel that sex, even great sex, is a lie. How else could someone look into your eyes and mean it, claw at your back and drown you in orgasmic juices, become one with you, be totally vulnerable and then weeks (or even minutes) later, be yelling at, or worse yet, ignoring you. I'm 32 years old, and still don't know. Maybe I never will.



After Kaia dumped me, I got another girlfriend, Margaretta, right away. She was a short, pretty, witty, Salvadorian artist. She was very brown-almost lookin' Negro to some. (What is it about me that makes dark-skinned gals go so gaga for my firm, sweet, pink little English/French-Canadian/Welch/Irish/German ass?) She was Beautiful in the way that I love; she looked like a cat caught in the headlights of a car. Her birthday was Valentines Day, and she was witchy and twitchy and full of smart, creative cool.



At sixteen, Margaretta was older than I. Like Kaia, she played guitar, but was also an excellent painter. My involvement with her was the beginning of me considering the scent of linseed oil an aphrodisiac. I think she defined my archetype of the ideal girlfriend-the template that I still run. Margaretta and I are friends today. I try to just forget about Kaia, and consider Margaretta my first gal.





+===<<?÷~¢¥å@Ž?Ž@奢~÷?>>===+





I sat up. It was still night. I was still in a waking-overdose and I was still unstuck in my past. I sleepwalked into the bathroom and tried to piss. I was too high to tinkle. I stood there for a endless fifteen minutes and finally un-nodded enough to pee. I shot up the Dope left in the spoon and recalled more of my early adulthood:



At the end of that Wehauqua summer, my friend, Sasha Maduro, was going back to DC and he said that there was room for me in the car. He also said that his dad would still be summering in Wehauqua for another month, and that I could stay in their mansion for a few weeks.



Chapter 6:  Brother, Can You Spare Some Herpes?



We stopped along the way and Sasha double-parked while I ran into a store and bought chips and candy with food stamps, and produced a triple-take from the cashier and bag boy as I walked out and jumped into the Jaguar convertible. We ate government-subsidized junk food and blasted the Blaupunkt as we sped south towards my new life



When I first got in the car, I hadn't thought much about what was in store for me, or how long I'd stay.



Sasha and I whiled away the drive time by talking about punk rock. Now understand. . .like my hick Welchton friends, my first knowledge of punk had come from Rolling Stone. That magazine had painted punk as an ugly scourge of disaffected Brit-youth who loved to fight and hated Pink Floyd. I loved Pink Floyd and at the time, hated even the idea of violence. At first, I had no clue that the American version of punk rot could hold a place for me. . . .



But Sasha painted a pretty fairly glowing picture. . .that the DC punk community was a place where misfits were not only readily accepted, but also celebrated for their rogue attitudes and caviler approaches. He told of a brilliant, spontaneous network of kids who had decided to throw away convention and make their own rules. . .he spoke of band-run record labels, teen-organized gigs, alternative (back when the word actually meant something) radio shows, etc.



About three hours into the nine-hour trip, I had begun to form my own grand scheme for world domination: Tonight, I would arrive in DC. Tomorrow, I would find some rich senator in search of a young, blond, long-haired boy to keep as his pleasure pet. I would move into his mansion, and he'd give me lots of spending money. I'd take the third day off, drinking in the opulence of it all, ordering around the servants. By day four, I would start a group. I would enlist the most cutthroat, insane young musicians I could pull out of the squats. They would be blistering players, but lacking in direction. They would trust my crystalline vision, follow my word as gospel, and revere me as a god.



Day five would see my group setting up residence in the Senator's mansion and composing a blistering set of supercharged, antiestablishment youth anthems. I would be the main singer, but they would all yell along on the choruses, in true egalitarian spirit.



On the sixth day, we would make a single (recorded on a boom box), press a thousand copies, and quickly get famous.



On the seventh day, me and the band would relax, and sit around the Senator's pool, guzzling martinis and daiquiris, and see that what we had done was good.



When Sasha and I actually arrived at his dad's mansion (in an extremely affluent DC suburb in Maryland.) I was relieved and amazed. Relieved, because my back hurt from sharing the non-existent backseat of the tiny sports car with a spare tire for hours; amazed, because I could never have dreamt that the place could be so plush.



The habitation was a twenty-five-room spread of wealth and prominent consumption. Dad was a powerful lawyer whose specialty was suing the United States government for various corporations. I feared yet liked him. . .he played guitar, and he mowed his own lawn rather then paying some kid five bucks an hour, and then joining a gym that he'd never go to, like most millionaires would. He also was trying to invent a way of quanitizing all songs with nascent copyright software, to make them all searchable in a huge database, for copyright litigation.



Sasha and I wasted no time before breaking out the two hits of LSD that I'd brought for good luck. (Back when I cared about that crap. . .my motto was practically "don't leave anywhere without it.") We drank huge mugs of coffee as we waited for the legendary stuff to do its legendary thing.



We watched the regal mansion breathe around us (it was exceptionally strong LSD.) Sasha had never tripped before. He spent an hour looking at a particularly accurate brass bust of himself make faces at him. (His dad is an amateur sculptor. . .and quite a good one.) I wondered and wandered around the estate in one of Dad's silk bathrobes, pretending that I lived there. Sasha and I spent about half an hour sitting on the basement floor and staring at his friend's drum kit. He finally came up with the hilarious truism; "Drums are the ultimate in, 'What the hell do you do that for?'" We saw a silverfish climb out of an unused basement fireplace and decided that it had crawled up from hell. Then I found a pile of mildewed Time-Life books on Nazi Germany. I spent countless moments enthralled with the act of consuming page after streaming page of holocaust horrorshow. Then I decided, in a flash of inspiration, that I had to shave off my long, Beautiful blond locks and change my name to "Billy Auschwitz." Why not? No one knew me here-why not begin anew with a completely fresh misidentity? When I informed Sasha of my plan, he said, "Um, Cash. . .are you sure you want to do this?"



Hmm. . .the thought of not doing it had never even crossed my liquefying brains.



"Of course I want to do this. Will you help me?"



Sasha went upstairs, and then returned from one of the many rooms with the family dog clippers in his hand. We ceremoniously buzzed my head while listening to the only punk rock in the house-his copy of The Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bullocks. I had never heard it in its entirety, and hopped-up on hallucinatory chemicals, it sounded amazingly vibrant.



I watched in shuddering laughter as he deftly manipulated the buzzers across my skull. It felt great. . .and I was astonished to watch the transformation that was taking place in the mirror. With the fall of each goldie lock, I was incrementally going from being a soft, feminine-looking hippie to being an extremely mean looking, masculine creature. I kept saying out-loud,



"I. . .AM. . .A. . .HUMAN. . .MALE. . .ANIMAL!"



To compound the effect, here and there we impatiently left some little tufts. . .the impact of these patches was to make me look like a chemotherapy client or concentration camp victim. I dared the mirror to a stare-down and thrice declared, "I AM BILLY AUSCHWITZ!!!"



We lounged around the Olympic-sized pool, drinking more big mugs of coffee. I imagined that the pool, the mansion, the Bösendorfer grand piano-all of it was mine. I strolled around the two-acre grounds and pretended that I owned it and had bought it with the profits from punk rock.



We finally came down from the acid around midnight. I picked a room out of the dozens available and drifted off into a goosey sleep. I had several dreams of being a punkrockstar and taking the world by storm as Billy Auschwitz.



After about a week, I came to my senses and changed back to my given name. The next day, Sasha's dad returned, and I was becoming a nuisance, eating all his cereal and filling up his huge house with my Beautiful, undeodorized stink.



I started sleeping in an abandoned factory in Georgetown (a very yuppie section of DC.)



I stopped staying in the factory when a rat crawled across my face one night while I was falling asleep. He was after the stale bread I'd dumpster-dived and had in my knapsack/pillow. I decided it would be better to sleep in the park, and did so many nights that summer and fall.



That year I ate out of garbage cans. I begged, borrowed and occasionally, stole, but I rarely went truly hungry. I have always been staving in Soul, but almost never in tummy. I have forever been emotionally hungry, seeking more, never satisfied with what I have on hand, even if it is all I could ever need.



I have always been, in one way or another, starving in the company of Beautiful women.





(to be continued)