drugstore cowboy

ive been not writing. i havent even been bullshitting on this bullshit blog. ive just simply not been writing. ive been somewhat stunted. unable to make phrase. unsure about the words i would use if i could make phrase. and uninspired with the feeble amount of words that i have come up with that i might have maybe been able to use if i could ever possibly make phrase.*

ive been doing almost everything but writing. well, everything on the small scale that i measure my life with. this includes a lot of drinking and thinking and being sorta charming. meeting people. ignoring people. sleeping on the couch. smoking cigarettes in the thick summer heat, enclosed in my office, not writing.

riding my bike and cutting through the still heaviness of traffic on Flatbush and turning down Pacific street to avoid the plague of Atlantic ave.. the street vendors selling bottles of water and oils and incense and weed and hot dogs and necklaces. gypsy cabs idling on every corner, sometimes in the middle of the street, talking on their cell phone headsets in another language, one i can never place but i know and im familiar with it.

ive been going out and letting the old shrew of temptation buy my drinks and pay for my taxi. wait, no that was too vague. what i mean is ive been going out buying my own drinks, and letting the old shrew of temptation give me a lapdance. i guess that was vague too. whatever, i wrote it so read it, chump. thats how this whole thing is done.

i met a couple that was here on holiday from dubai. my age. they were canadian but they came off like they were from california. he was wearing a tie-dye t-shirt and she was wearing a long flowy skirt thing with old acid wash looking jeans and cowboy boots. they both had long hair. he was a photographer and she designed clothes and after a shoot of the arabian hip hop scene for Mtv, the special clothes she had designed became somewhat of a style in the middle east. they are a mix of traditional middle eastern burka robes and western bling. they go for ten thousand dollars each and she was in a bar and a guy came up to her and asked her if she could make ten each for he and his twenty six brothers. his surname was bin laden and she said they have a loose verbal agreement.

i met them, the couple, in a room at the chelsea hotel. they had been staying there for a month and a half. it was a decent sized room with a bed and a refrigerator and a sink and a mirror and a piece of art on the wall. there was a balcony that over looked 23rd street and we smoked cigarettes and watched the city under the glow of a large neon sign that climbed up almost four stories of the building. it was a cocktail party. there was me and my girlfriend and our friend john (a money making flaming queen that does a lot of cocaine and calls everybody bitch. he's pretty cool. we like him), the couple from dubai and a few of their friends, and this guy dennis, who was living in the room next door to them.

dennis looked a very weathered 50-some odd years old. he had stringy black hair [though there were some strands of grey in there] that collapsed down to his shoulders. he had large, drunken jowls that shook a little when he got excited while talking. his voice was the low growl of a two pack a day smoker. his accent was from all over the place. when i walked in he was telling a story about this middle eastern girl he used to date that made him keep a sword (a gift from her father) under the bed. he said he was always afraid she was going to kill him during sex. but the danger sort of turned him on.

he was born in LA. he was a director. he was visiting from paris, where he now lives and does a lot of commercial tv, every now and again dumping all of his savings into a small independent flicks (he told me one of his biggest achievements was a short, 50 minute film he made about a guy that was afraid to show his feet to people) then heading back into the european television industry with his tail between his legs asking for another gig. from what i gathered he spent his childhood in LA, then moved to paris when he was in his early teens.

in paris, as he told me, he met this guy. a kid a little older than him. this kid used to drive around paris at night and break into all the pharmacies. he would steal the morphine and cocaine. then they would drive back to this hotel, it was a very hip hotel in the center of paris. equivalent to what the chelsea was in new york. anyway, so they would go to this hotel and the guy would give these drugs to miles davis and chet baker and all manner of legendary musical geniuses of the time. dennis admitted he had no idea who these guys were then, only that they were all black and very intense and smart, and that they did a shit load of drugs.

after paris at some point he moved to new york, because he said in the year 1978, he was staying at the chelsea hotel. at the chelsea during this time, he said, things were stranger. a lot of artist would stay there for free, and just pay back rent after they sold a painting or threw a big party or got published or made a record. i guess this was right around the time that sid vicious killed nancy. he said it was a dump filled with artists. man, it was way different then, he said, way different. he told us that on this particular visit, not three days into it old friends that had heard he was in town were knocking on his door asking to borrow money. some things never change i guess.

after i left the cocktail party i went to the bar but i really wanted to be home and not writing. i drank until 4am. i kissed a hot bartender. i came home and crashed. end of story.

*(the term, "make phrase," though, i just kinda came up with on the fly. its only so so. worked when i was typing it. [shrugs])