gingivitis, my gums bleeding and disappearing up the sides of my teeth from bad nutrition and bad drugs. It's a common street affliction, another credential in my downward slide toward authenticity. Marilyn had a broken nose, three cracked ribs and assorted bruises from a trick tormented by second thoughts.
“I thought you had a pimp, Marilyn,” I said, watching a gunshot victim bleeding freely on a gurney.
“The pimp, he get killed by the Colombians,” said Marilyn. “He never protect me anyways, the bastard. He punch me hisself.” Marilyn laughed through his nose, then winced. When he could speak again, he said, “Last time my nose got broke, it's my papa do the breaking. He beat the shit out me when he find me dressed in Mama's wedding gown. I'm holding the lipstick and he opens the door of my room. Smack me good, scream at me, call me a dirty little maricón, say he don't want no maricón for a son. The boy last night, he was like that, this big bulging muscle New Chursey boy. After I do him, he start hitting, calling me faggot. A lot them like that, they don't like what they want. Hey, man,” he said, scrutinizing me with new interest. “Why don't you be my pimp? I give you five dollar every trick.”
It was a measure of my prospects that I thought this was a pretty good offer. In fact, I'd been unemployed by another Colombian murder and was sleeping in Abingdon Square Park. I was dealing halves and quarters of coke out of a bar on Thirteenth when my man got whacked and I was left without a connection. Before that I'd been in a band, but the drummer OD'd and the bassist moved to L.A.
When I first met Marilyn, I was living in a cellar in the Meatpacking District. Marilyn worked all night, and I was up jonesing on coke or crack and trying to write. I'm a songwriter, you see, a poet. There is beautiful, ugly music inside me, which plays in the performance space deep in my mind. Walking the streets, doing the bars, I hear snatches of it in the distance, above the subliminal bass line of the urban heartbeat. I am most attuned to it in moments of transport, when I'm loaded on cheap wine or crack. Sometimes I'm dead certain that with one more drink, one more hit, I'll grasp its essence and carry it back with me to the other side. An aesthetician of ugliness, I am living here in the gutter like Prince Hal, biding my time, waiting to burst forth like a goddamn sun.
A refugee from the western suburbs, I used to skip school and take the bus into the city. I hung out on St. Mark's Place and the Bowery, copping the look and the attitude of punk, discovering Bukowski and the Beats in the bookshops. Returning to the subdivisions of Jersey was an embarrassment. The soil was too thin for art. No poetry could ever grow in the grapefruit rinds of the compost heap. Ashamed of my origins, neither high nor low, I dreamed of smoky bars and cafés, steaming slums. I believed that the down and dirty would lead me to the height of consciousness, that to conceive beauty it was necessary to sleep with ugliness. I've been in that bed for several years now. So far, nobody's knocked up.
Like Dylan says, “Someday, everything is gonna be diff'rent, / When I paint my masterpiece.” I'll be rich and famous, photographed with models who will suddenly find me incredibly attractive—my goodness, where have I been all their short, naughty, long-legged lives?—and I will do a lot of expensive designer drugs and behave very badly and ruin my promising career and end up right back here in the gutter. And I'll write a song cycle about it. It'll be excellently poignant, even tragic.
Marilyn grew up in Spanish Harlem, where he was christened Jesús, a delicate boy with a sweet face who is a plausible piece of ass as a girl. He wants to get married and live the kind of life I grew up in. Except he wants to do it as a woman. At night he looks longingly out over the Hudson at the dim glow of suburban Jersey the way I used to look over from the other side at the lights of Manhattan. He wants a three-bedroom house he can clean and polish while awaiting a husband who works in the