Archive for December, 2009

So I’m a failure in life. Spending the last days trolling the East Village visiting places from the past, my old sleeping spots in between tenement buildings, in doorways, in vans, and finally in squats, freezing my ass off because it had been a terrible, icy winter and I didn’t much heat or hot water throughout the whole fucking thing. The cold gets into your bone marrow when you spend your waking hours in it, and sleep in it, and eat in it, and cry in it. I didn’t want to be around people and I got sick of reading books in Barnes & Nobles to stay warm. If you don’t have enough food to eat or sleep or heat, sentences and then words start to lose their meaning after a while and become just jumbles of letters. I wanted to die. I started taking a lot of drugs.
The squatters took me in. It happened when I ran into an old acquaintance of mine playing speed chess in Thompkins Square Park. He was a red-headed guy about as old then as I am now. I told him my troubles while wiping him off the board in each five minute game (I was a big chess player when I was eighteen, rising up through the chess world ranks for about a year before I got beaten by a Cuban grandmaster in twenty-six moves during a world championship game in Mexico. I haven’t played a game since. It’s funny how almost everyone whom I explain that to (and who can play chess) asks me to play a game of chess with them. No!).
Anyway, this guy whom everyone called the Engineer let me stay in his squatted apartment on 7th street while his roommate was away in Italy. He had a grand piano in the place and he sat down and started playing Chopin while a few of us cooked a can of baked beans over a Bunsen burner. My new digs didn’t last long. The roommate came back the next day and I had to go to another squat on Cypress Avenue in the South Bronx. Their community was pretty tight, much tighter than in the East Village, but that was probably because we were a semi-humane outpost in stark contrast to the violent ghetto that surrounded our building. Well, we didn’t shoot each other, but I think the place really sucked. We didn’t have heat, hot water, or electricity, and I’d say that everyone there who wasn’t at least slightly crazy was a drug addict, and more than a few (myself not included) were both.
I spent my time shirking community duties and hanging out on the A train with Lobster, a junky like me who played a single string washboard bass for spare change. He kept rows of loaded needles in his sock so that he could shoot up in between subway cars with a minimum of hassle. He was definitely a bad influence on me, and we got busted by the cops for really dumb shit more than once.
At the squat I also got to see what happens to people if they grow old and stay homeless… It’s not say that everything there was bad. We had a scrawny garden in the back lot that used to be a garbage heap. It supplied a little food (along with donated rice and beans) at the communal meals which we had every evening, and we occasionally put up some European squatters and migratory artists who would join us for them. Of course I was too fucked up to bother with conversation but the intellectual boor inside me appreciated the possibility.
Going back and seeing all that in my mind’s eye as an overlay on reality while being high on and then withdrawing from a cocktail of painkillers, tranquilizers, and the lesser downers while finding love (but not being able to wrap my arms around it) on the floor of a squat in the East Village really sent it home for me like a stake through my vampire heart. I have everything but I have nothing because I’ve destroyed my inner self in order to acquire what I wanted from the external world. I knew that I would have to rebuild my personality after making the sacrifices needed to create the world I wanted around me, but I couldn’t predict that I might end up feeling like a lost cripple because I couldn’t find the way to put the humanity back inside me, the softness. It’s like the Tin Man trying to hug a teddy bear.
I having a hard time letting go and being open to love. I find myself losing interest in it. It’s as if I’ve seen so many horrors on the battlefield that I’m immune to the next wave. I’m stuck in the pattern of seeking greater thrills, ever darker and deeper, while being aware that the possibility of my breaking out of this terrible circle is becoming more and more remote, slipping out of reach. Yet, I want to put a stop to it all and feel real love. Mostly, I don’t like the girls I want to fuck and I don’t want to fuck the girls I like (I won’t explain what I mean by the word “like” right now.)
The logical solution would be to find a girl I want to make love to to try and keep the emptiness at bay for a while. The problem is that I’m used to the high life. I don’t want to settle down. I don’t want to compromise. I want to see how many walls I can crash through before I get tired of chasing after new experiences and have to retire to the lesser world of self reflection because I’ve became too old to matter. I think I’ve found the one thing worse than suffering. Boredom.