You know I'm no good - RIP Amy Winehouse

2011 - 1984 = 27


Home is the Sailor

...One need not necessarily be a masher to enjoy the delights offered by the rackety, clackety, flashing, rocking, rolling contraptions with all their attendant high-pitched friction sounds and smells, that special, cloying hard rock dust and that unique blend of tunnel air, perfume, female funk, suntan lotion, hairspray and hurtling abandon flinging protoplasm, bone and hair along at terrifying speeds into cooler, darker, unknown catacombs.

I found her - two of them - Gina and her pal Rosalie, roasted coffee colored by the summer sun, nearly naked and brightly feathered in summer colors, lolling on the lawn in Washington Square Park, listening to the transistor belt out "Grazing In The Grass" in all its blaring African brass.

We danced. Smoked hash, giggled, kissed, chased each other around and around the fountain splashing sun-scorched pitter patter titters thither and held the chess tables hostage, laughing uncontrollably, in mad games of tag, their bronzed skin shining wet and curly permed hair dripping.

It was the heat and the humidity. That's what did it. Something in the air. We wound up in the Greenwich Hotel with its infinitude of slamming junkie doors and urine-reeking bathrooms down the hall...all night long on a narrow steel-framed bed.

In the night, the rains began and lasted for two more days, pouring out of leaden skies. We ordered in Chinese in greasy little waxed paper boxes and continued.

Dawn... Coffee, something new to me called bagels toasted with cream cheese and strawberry preserves, gray stone and sharp, angular shafts of sunlight pouring through freshly rain-washed air between the hard, unyielding stone and steel temples of finance and power.

The Apple, best viewed for what it is when her people sleep and her streets are quiet...