Mine was a junky/hippie building, yeasty like the rest of the neighborhood, shit happened regularly. At about 2pm a Latin kid said something to a guy standing outside the building across the street from me, the guy slapped him, he left after a few more words and all was quite again. I was back in the window at 4pm. Then, in an instant, out of nowhere, appeared “The Dynamite Brothers,” kids in leather jackets with their colors; they filled the intersection of 3rd and B, packed tight they overflowed past the 3rd rail bar on the corner. Maybe 200 to 300 of them. Just as quickly the people on the block disappeared into buildings, and they started up the block. They had chains and garbage can lids to shield against the crap that people soon began throwing at them from windows. They systematically smashed all the car windows and threw garbage cans in the street. about this time I broke off to call 911. There is no way the cops didn’t get another hundred such calls (the cops showed up after 50 minutes and a good 10 minutes after the Dynamite Brothers disappeared with the same military dispatch with which they had shown up).

After a couple minutes they closed ranks in front of this building across the street and one of them started yelling in Spanish, I assume it was demanding that the slapper come out. After several minutes the slapper did come out. A brief and, all things considered, suprisingly civil conversation ensued, and then The Slapper was shot in the face with a pistol, and The Dynamite Brothers quickly melted away down Ave. B.

This happening was not newsworthy, nothing in any of the papers, nothing in the media, but so help me God this happened just as I say.

1972

These are the kinds of thoughts I used to have when I thought of her. I first saw her sitting on the lip of the fountain in Washington Square Park one winter day in 1969. I caught her eye and got a strange smile back. She was fearsomely beautiful and the smile didn’t compute. I forced my own smile out past my panic, and sat down next to her. It turned out talking to her was easy, she was almost totally inarticulate while putting forth a foolish and somehow sweet attempt at uptown sophistication. She was German, her English halting, her voice low and raw and guttural, her talk touchingly pretentious and street earthy all at once, the sound of her perfectly set off by the contrast, god forgive me, of the pure timeless ethereal Nordic beauty of her face.

She showed me a small black leather binder she had with her, her “portfolio”, with many haughty shots of her in magazine poses. She was quite proud of her modeling career, and she surely had the beauty for it, although she had only had one job credit and that for the catalog of a down town sporting goods store. In fact she was not really a model at all but rather a welfare case and an out-patient with a program for schizophrenics up at Lenox Hill Hospital where she spent every other day in group therapy and art workshops. Later she gave me a work she made there out of a four foot square piece of plywood, string, nails, black and white paint. It is full of tension and fear and darkness, and at the very center of it is a quarter sized hole burned through the wood with a blowtorch with a jagged fringe of stained wood around it; the not so abstract picture of her own pussy. If she understood what it was she never said so.

She was born a bastard in Germany just before the war, her mother was a bitter nasty maladjusted hotel maid and her father was a nazi soldier. She remembered her mother placing her in one of the nazi orphanages of that time, and reclaiming her after the war, but they couldn’t stand each other and by the age of 18 she had come to New York alone. There had been a car accident with a head injury, which some of the doctors had told her was the cause of her late onset mental problems. She had over a hundred self inflicted razor blade scars on her chest from the year before, and beyond the transient friendships of her outpatient community she was all alone. She had somehow married an uptown actor who mainly did voice overs for commercials; very handsome (I saw his picture) with a fine black forelock. But the marriage had just exploded and rent was about to run out on the apartment they had shared.

All this was just my cup of tea. Lonely marginal guys with horny spontaneity like many kinds of tea. We spent the next forty eight hours together, till I had to go to work or lose my job. We got up from the fountain without a word said and went to my place where we made strangely disjointed yet beautiful love. Then we went uptown to her old apartment and there was Snooder, her sweetly-paranoid Belgian shepherd dog, the one thing on earth she loved if she loved anything. Later she gave him to me when she left the city, because she saw I loved him and no one else would have him. He tried to bully me the first moment we met, but I just scolded him from a high moral plain and when he flipped back to ashamed puppy mode I reached into his psycho heart and held on as I could never do with her. He was her dog and he was her, I fell for him like I fell for her. He had a Prussian myopic devotion to obedience and doing the right thing as he saw it through the dark lens given to him. He worried constantly about it. He could walk in the city without a leash obeying commands like a drill field soldier, he could drink from fountains in central park, jump wrought iron fences on command, dive for rocks in lakes, and much more. And always behind the worried concern there was that crazy glint in his eyes that told all that he was quite insane. In years to come he eventually bit every friend I had, always on their right hands, leaving a small blue indentation between their thumb and index finger, like an incomplete paper punch, very painful but no blood drawn because his canines were worn to stumps from his obsessive passion for carrying big rocks. Every six months or so he would threat-growl at me and I would have to wrestle and hold him till he understood again that I was the dominant one. Very much his mother’s son, but I know the love reached him. We lived very happily together till he died, me giving him what she wouldn’t take.

Toward the end of that first week she moved in with me and brought the reality of psychotic disintegration with her. I had to work a job. When I came home there she was sitting in a depressed stupor, punctuated by a snarling nasty demanding surliness that didn’t let up. There was no cajoling her out of it. Patience and understanding had no effect. Her tone was now of a queen who had fallen from high station into this lower east side gutter. And now I saw my first clear view of what she thought, saw, that I was. Not a miraculous knight of sensitivity and love come to save her, but a faceless functionary from the serving class, one of the vast untermenchen chorus of New York, lucky to have this fleeting moment of actual contact with her. It was the wrong tack to take with me, not that she could help it. The two narcissisms, her psychotic one and mine, presumably stable but no less powerful, could not stand together through such foul weather. Within two days there was a scene I vaguely remember, her down on third street demanding to be let in, me throwing her few shabby clothes out the 4th floor window. Now she was dumped, had to scramble elsewhere just to get off the streets. The nerve of that brassy nazi cunt, she never even saw me.

Here’s the good part. When all is said and done I believe LSD is a sacrament. At the right time and place it can transform your life. No doubt it kills off brain cells or turns them out to pasture every time you use it, no doubt some people flip out and don’t come back. But there are times when its’ benefits, in ways beyond measurement and that cant be studied, make it… transforming, and worth a huge risk. How do I prove this? And what a shame if the dull methodical two plus two equals four crowd, our rulers, our sensible elites, manage to extinguish it from the tools at hand for those of us who want to try to live. Yes, these are the last days, and they are very strange indeed. A day later Cristina came back to my place and we sat around the kitchen table, to talk about what had happened. We both took LSD and what unfolded then remains with me as maybe the most vivid out of body, out of mind experience of my life, and I don’t have the first idea how to communicate it to you. I can approach it clumsily by saying that when we were both completely out of our minds, then our minds came together really for the very first and very last times. She spoke to me slowly, in simple single syllable words, I don’t remember any of them. I do remembered that she revealed to me the absolute darkness and absolute loneliness of her psychosis, and that it had always been so with her, right under the superficial froth of her life. And to meet this void of existence, which in some ways even extended to her own self such that her very inner identity was a tiny barren island, to meet this void she somehow summoned up the courage from someplace to whistle and sing inside, and fight, and not kill herself. Now, in that instant, I came to love her very deeply, and that love has never left. If my life is built on drug induced delusions, then so be it. When I look around at the rest of you I say so what.

I spent the next two years trying to win her back. I was utterly hopeless, “she really did a number on me” said my perceptive friends, or did I do it on myself? She had no time for me, although she used to like to call me fairly regularly at night to toy with my devotion. She liked to ramble on about the fashion world and her friends till I would try to reach her, then she would get angry and hang up on me, and sometimes call right back and sometimes not. I also had a toe hold as Snooders’ baby sitter when he became an awkward inconvenience to her during some new redemptive fling. Her program at Lenox Hill must have been well regarded– it was full of chic, hip, rich Upper East Siders who helped keep her afloat till she left the city. She married and divorced again, twice during those two years, first to Cordie, a wealthy psycho wastrel from the program who had a trust fund sufficient for the gliterati life, and later to a well placed sleek warrior who kept her in style for a while on West End Avenue. Most of what I saw in her life, when I could gain admission, was plenty of drugs and bad loud rock music. But there was one time, when I had been waiting an hour outside her 5th floor walk up apartment on east 6th St., just hoping she would give me a few minutes, that I heard the street door open, and the sound of her bounding up the stairs singing some silly happy little German kids song in that croaky voice of hers, that took me right back to that day at my kitchen table when she showed herself to me for the first and last time.

Then she gave me Snooder, then she left. She said she went to Oregon to join an apple picking commune. Ten years after I left the city I got a letter from her, incoherent, sloppy, barely legible, saying she sometimes thought about me and it made her cry. I didn’t try to answer. I’m sure she’s dead now and I’m sure it was a bad end.

I knew in five minutes that he was crazy and that he would be my brother. He loved me too, instantly. We talked for hours in my filthy kitchen with its single bare light bulb and “EYE CONTACT” scrawled in big block letters in red paint on my wall. All the visions, all the plans, they’re lost now. Two days later Jamie showed up with a 50 page typed manifesto that he asked me to stash in my bedroom bureau because he was expecting the cops to bust him. It stayed in the bottom drawer of that bureau for seven months till narks took it along with much else that they later denied any knowledge of. I let these sleeping dogs lie.

I guess you would call them florid personalities. Rick introduced himself to several others in the building that night and his brilliance in the phase he was in made many of us an instant community. A friend from the street life outside told me Jamie had already fucked one of the local tough- but- nice junkies, so from that among other things there came to be a feeling of an even larger community extending into the 3rd world jungle for which our building was the core. I believe it. Jamie was called puta by some on the street, but she was so much more, free and wild and beautiful, but sometimes showing fear of the ride her husband was taking her on. The name of Rick Deohlie’s magical community was “Symbiosis Associates.” Symbiosis associates was real. Those 188 tenants in his spell changed overnight from being a collection of isolated counter culture poseurs with various pathologies to being close friends. Many later went on to fuck up each others’ lives. Shortly after the events described here, Rick took the front door of #2 off its hinges and declared his home an open peoples’ apartment in the name of symbiosis associates- “la familia”.

At this point Jamie left with Hannah, went uptown to speak again with his doctors, and saw the legal aid lawyer on avenue B about divorce papers. She also fucked the peoples’ lawyer , and I think they eventually got married and moved to Nyack. Within 48 hours Rick had been beaten to a pulp and the apartment stripped clean. But even this was only one of many revolutionary moments, and the sequence of events doesnÕt matter. Its the light of his life that matters, its the beauty within the insanity of this child of the long island suburbs. You’ve got to wonder just how many revolutions there were back in those days. Rick’s’ was the best I ever saw.

He was in some kind of out patient program: that was always vague. The program had gotten him a job as a telephone installer. A few days after we met he came home in the late afternoon wearing a brown monks habit. All of it, head to toe. They had sent him to St PatrickÕs Cathedral that day to work in the basement on the phones. There he found the habit and 1500 colored autographed 5×7 photographs of Cardinal Spellman, who Rick thought was a faggot judging by his dress. He had walked home all the way from the cathedral distributing over half the photographs and speaking out about the Cardinal’s falseness and hypocrisy. Nothing came of that phase of the revolution. I still have a framed picture of the cardinal on my wall, other than that it’s as if it never happened.

Shortly before his hospitalization he began fucking Judy, an ex girlfriend of mine, who had left her family in Westchester to come to 188 East 3rd Street and join the revolution. Everybody in the building pretty much fucked in their back bedrooms, on the common airshaft. These were railroad apartments; everybody pretty much heard everybody else fucking. Judy was in the 5th floor left rear, # 2 was 1st floor left rear, I was 4th floor left front.

The night I heard Rick upstairs in the process of fucking Judy, Jamie was downstairs hearing it too. In minutes she knocked on my door. She was crying tears of desolation and begging for something with her eyes. I don’t remember any words being said. She hugged me, then took me by my hand and led me the five feet from my apartment door through the chintzy bead curtain to my tiny bedroom. All I really remember of it is the moment I slid into her, the silky sleek tightness of her pussy, those few seconds unlike any I’ve ever known. One stroke. One. Then the door opened and Rick was standing in my kitchen looking through the curtain at me inside his wife. She pushed me off and told him it didn’t mean anything. I don’t remember that we had made any noise, but now the mature ex- asshole that I am knows that she did make purposeful noise and that is how he knew to stop his own party and come downstairs.

Rick seemed very nonchalant. In fact neither of them ever discussed that moment with me. I loved her after that. Two days later she gave me a hippie necklace of tiny clear blue beads which has hung on a hook in my bedroom for the last 30 years. But within two weeks she had made it very clear that I was unconditionally dumped despite Rick’s’ collapse. God I hated her then.

This night of my one stroke love fuck was not over. I don’t remember how it came to pass, but the four of us got in my van and drove to an empty summer house on a lake in Putnam County, to sort things out I guess. We each dropped 1000 mikes of Osley Orange Sunshine on the way there. I was hoping to get to finish fucking Jamie and Rick finish Judy. When we got there the acid took hold, before long Rick had butchered my ego with the elegance of genius and reclaimed his wife. Now I see that he was magnificent that night, it might have been the finest moment of his life, maybe one of the great moments in the life of our species.

We sat around a simple country living room, and as the acid took control he took off his clothes with a quick fluid sureness. A hunting knife appeared in his hand, he climbed onto an end table and jumped from table to chair to couch to table around the knotty pine walls of this little room. He made a low animal noise, his body lit by the light from the fireplace, murder in his eyes, it was the stone age, I was frozen with terror. Now I blame it on the acid and excuse myself. I couldn’t move or speak. I remember him taking Jamie by the hand and the joy and triumph of her as he marched her to a bedroom… and his colossal boner, the only time I ever saw his cock. Twice as big as mine.

Judy, who seemed oblivious to what had just happened before her eyes, suggested that I fuck her for old time’s sake. What I am proud of is that even in abject humiliation my ego knew what I needed to do to survive. I bundled up and walked into the freezing night, walked a mile across the still frozen lake through the dead still cold beauty of that night, and climbed up a pristine snow covered hillside, sat down in the snow and looked a long time at how the snow sat on one low branch of a pine tree right next to me bathed in the moonlight. I guess the acid washed it all clean and I felt flooded with the beauty of life and my ego somehow popped up whole again. I had been a coward, but the next morning, still tripping, I took Rick “hunting” in the deep woods behind this house, I gave him a 22 rifle to hunt with, I talked very straight about everything and gave him a clean chance to kill me. Instead he said he loved me. It seemed to me that we had completed some sort of circle and were whole again. We went back home to 3rd St.

My next recollection is that the following weekend Rick and I, without Jamie, were back at that country house, this time with my brother and a bunch of his friends, maybe 8 or 9 people. We all did that orange sunshine, and then Rick had a major psychotic breakdown, and this time 8 or 9 tripping people were very scared for themselves and what might happen when the straight world showed up, all getting progressively into their own acid paranoia as Rick retreated into gibberish, making sing song chant over and over with crazy eyes and slobber on his face…”symbiosis associates, symbiosis, la familia, symbiosis associates, la familia”…all the way to New York down the Taconic Parkway with its fascist state cops while I held him in my arms in the back seat.

We called his parents from the city. They had been through this before, they came and took him to Creedmore Hospital on Long Island. Jamie told me later that week that his diagnosis had been refined, now his label was mixed state schizophrenia/ bi-polar disorder, not compliant with lithium or anything else. She said they said he was likely to spend the rest of his life in and out and getting progressively worse. As of my last knowledge before we broke of all contact Jamie was pursuing the divorce and taking up with a better class of revolutionaries from around the corner on avenue B, her poverty lawyer friends. Rick disappeared. Six months later he showed up again on a late summer afternoon, walking down 3rd street looking crisp in new chinos, a haircut and a golf shirt. He had a cool detached edge.

We were never close again. He’d been out west, completed a degree in St. Louis at McDonalds’ “Hamburger University”, and spoke at length about his bright future with the company. He’d also developed what he implied were deep ties with the American Continental Army, some sort of secret armed militia that was going to move the revolution to the far right. Later, in front of our common street friends, he started in on me for being half a jewboy, which I am. I said something about that being my best half, and a comment about character disintegration as a marker in psychosis, and that is the way we ended.