Authors: Glenn O'Brien
So I was walking and I saw a light go on in a bathroom window. There was a driveway next to the window. I’d hardly ever walk into a driveway, but I noticed there was a house in the back so I’d have an excuse for being there. I walked back by this window. It was open, and I heard water running so I knew it was a bathing scene. I didn’t know if it was a man or a woman, and I tried to peek in, but the window
was too high to stand and see. Down at the bottom level, near the ground, there was a kind of vent. It had little slats where I could put my foot so I stood on it and reached up to the sill.
I peered in. It was a woman. She was in a brassiere and panties, and she was evidently going to take a bath. The tub was right under the window; the toilet was to the left; the washbasin was to the right; and there was a little scale. She got off the scale and then she stood looking in the mirror over the washbasin. This chick was very pretty. She had blonde hair and white skin, and when she took off her bra and panties I saw she had blonde hair on her cunt and her nipples were hard. I thought, “What am I
doing
, man? What if somebody sees me or the slats break and I fall?” But I was all fired up. I held on to the sill and peeked in.
She’s standing in front of the mirror. She takes her breasts and hefts them in her hands, and then she rubs them around in a circular motion, looking at herself in the mirror, and she starts to get a glazed expression, and she rubs and tweaks at her nipples with her fingers. She does this for a little while and then she runs to turn off the bathwater. She stands and looks at herself. She starts rubbing her cunt, rubbing down her legs and rubbing her cunt. She sits on the toilet and spreads her legs and takes the first two fingers of her left hand and rubs up and down on her cunt, and she closes her eyes and she’s got her head back and with her other hand she’s tweaking her nipple, and she starts quivering and shaking and then she holds her hand real hard on her cunt, and I guess she had come, and then she got up and looked at herself again and she kissed those two fingers, which really turned me on. I just couldn’t help myself. I had unzipped my fly and reached in and grabbed my joint and started rubbing across the bottom of my joint, and I came right about the same time she did. And then I really panicked. She got up and got into the tub, and I jumped down to the ground. I was scared to death. I thought, “What if somebody’s seen me? What if somebody looked out a window and called the police?” I got back to the club and sneaked into the bathroom. I had come all over my shorts and the top of my pants. I
wiped myself off, and when I buttoned my coat it covered the area. I felt awful and I thought, “What’s happening to me? What would Stan think and the guys in the band?” I thought, “I’ve got to stop this!” Heroin stopped it for me.
I
N
1950 I was in Chicago at the Croyden Hotel. That was the hotel all the musicians stayed at. I was rooming with Sammy Curtis. He was a tall guy with a roundish face, rosy cheeks, blonde, curly hair, and he had this lopsided grin; he played the little boy bit. He thought it was charming. He was very talented.
I think we played the Civic Opera House that night. I was featured. I got all the praise and applause, and it was great while it was happening, but after everybody left, there I was alone. I wandered around the town. I went to all the bars. I ended up back at the hotel and went into the bar there. I just had to continue getting loaded; it was a compulsion; I had demons chasing me. The only way I ever got loaded enough, so I could be cool, was when I passed out, fell out someplace, which is what I used to do almost every night. They kicked me out of the bar at about four o’clock in the morning, and I didn’t know what to do. There was no place I could get a drink. It was getting daylight, and I couldn’t peep in any windows. There was no one on the streets.
I went back up to the room. Sammy was there and Roy King, a tenor player, and Sheila Harris, who’s a singer, and some piano player. They were all using heroin. Sammy had been using stuff for a long time, and I knew it, but I never would try it because I knew that the minute I did it would be all over for me. I asked them if they had anything other than stuff, and they didn’t. I was so unhappy, and Patti was two thousand miles away, and there was nothing I could do. I had to have something.
Sheila came over to me. She was a good singer who worked with another band. She was about five foot, two, and a little on the chubby side—what they call pleasingly plump. She had nice breasts, large, but nice, and although I’ve never liked chubby women she was one
of the few that turned me on. She had long eyelashes and large eyes, bluish-green. Her face was oval and full, and she had full lips, and her eyebrows were full. Most women in those days plucked their eyebrows, but she had let hers grow, and I liked that. She had long fingers and nice nails. And she was a nymphomaniac. When she looked at a man she was thinking of sucking his cock; that was her thought and she turned you on because you could feel that; everyone could. And you were turned on by the stories. She was a legend among musicians. Whether they had ever made it with her or not they’d all tell stories about balling her. She was purely sensual, but only in a sexual way, no other. No warmth, no love, no beauty. When you looked at her you just saw your cock in her mouth.
She came over to me and offered me some stuff, just to horn it, sniff it. She said, “Why don’t you hang up that jive and get in a different groove? Why don’t you come in the bathroom with me? I’ll show you a new way to go.” I was at my wit’s end. The only thing I could have done other than what I did was to jump out of the window of the hotel. I think we were on the fourteenth floor. I started to go into the bathroom with her, and Sammy saw what was happening and flipped out. He caused a big scene. He said, “I won’t be responsible for you starting to use stuff!” But Roy said, “Man, anything would be better than that jive booze scene he’s into now. What could be worse? That’s really a bringdown.” We cooled Sammy out, and me and Sheila walked into the bathroom and locked the door.
When we got in there she started playing with my joint. She said, “Do you want me to say hello to him?” She was marvelous, and she really turned me on, but I said, “Wait a minute. Let’s get into this other thing and then we’ll get back to that.” I was all excited about something new, the heroin. I had made up my mind.
She had a little glass vial filled with white powder, and she poured some out onto the porcelain top of the toilet, chopped it up with a razor blade, and separated it into little piles, little lines. She asked me if I had a dollar bill. She told me to get the newest one I had. I had one, very clean and very stiff. I took it out of my pocket and she said,
“Roll it up.” I started to roll it but she said, “No, not that way.” She made a tube with a small opening at the bottom and a larger opening at the top. Then she went over to the heroin and she said, “Now watch what I do and do this.” She put one finger on her left nostril and she stuck the larger end of the dollar bill into her right nostril. She put the tube at the beginning of one pile, made a little noise, and the pile disappeared. She said, “Now you do that.” I closed my nostril. I even remember it was my left nostril. I sniffed it, and a long, thin pile of heroin disappeared. She told me to do the same with the other nostril. I did six little lines and then she said “Okay, wait a few minutes.” While I’m waiting she’s rubbing my joint and playing with me. I felt a tingly, burning sensation up in my sinuses, and I tasted a bitter taste in my throat, and all of a sudden, all of a sudden, all that feeling—wanting something but having no idea what it was, thinking it was sex and then when I had a chance to ball a chick not wanting to ball her because I was afraid of some disease and because of the guilt; that wandering and wandering like some derelict; that agony of drinking and drinking and nothing ever being resolved; and . . . no peace at all except when I was playing, and then the minute that I stopped playing there was nothing; that continual, insane search just to pass out somewhere and then to wake up in the morning and think, “Oh, my God,” to wake up and think, “Oh God, here we go again,” to drink a bottle of warm beer so I could vomit, so I could start all over again, so I could start that ridiculous, sickening, horrible, horrible life again—all of a sudden, all of a sudden, the demons and the devils and the wandering and wondering and all the frustrations just vanished and they didn’t exist at all anymore because I’d finally found peace.
I felt this peace like a kind of warmth. I could feel it start in my stomach. From the whole inside of my body I felt the tranquility. It was so relaxing. It was so gorgeous. Sheila said, “Look at yourself in the mirror! Look in the mirror!” And that’s what I’d always done: I’d stood and looked at myself in the mirror and I’d talk to myself and say how rotten I was—“Why do people hate you? Why are you alone?
Why are you so miserable?” I thought, “Oh, no! I don’t want to do that! I don’t want to spoil this feeling that’s coming up in me!” I was afraid that if I looked in the mirror I would see it, my whole past life, and this wonderful feeling would end, but she kept saying, “Look at yourself! Look how beautiful you are! Look at your eyes! Look at your pupils!” I looked in the mirror and I looked like an angel. I looked at my pupils and they were pinpoints; they were tiny, little dots. It was like looking into a whole universe of joy and happiness and contentment.
I thought of my grandmother always talking about God and inner happiness and peace of mind, being content within yourself not needing anybody else, not worrying about whether anybody loves you, if your father doesn’t love you, if your mother took a coathanger and stuck it up her cunt to try to destroy you because she didn’t want you, because you were an unclean, filthy, dirty, rotten, slimy being that no one wanted, that no one ever wanted, that no one has still ever wanted. I looked at myself and I said, “God, no, I am not that. I’m beautiful. I am the whole, complete thing. There’s nothing more, nothing more that I care about. I don’t care about anybody. I don’t care about Patti. I don’t need to worry about anything at all.” I’d found God.
I loved myself, everything about myself. I loved my talent. I had lost the sour taste of the filthy alcohol that made me vomit and the feeling of the bennies and the strips that put chills up and down my spine. I looked at myself in the mirror and I looked at Sheila and I looked at the few remaining lines of heroin and I took the dollar bill and horned the rest of them down. I said, “This is it. This is the only answer for me. If this is what it takes, then this is what I’m going to do, whatever dues I have to pay . . .” And I
knew
that I would get busted and I
knew
that I would go to prison and that I wouldn’t be weak; I wouldn’t be an informer like all the phonies, the no-account, the non-real, the zero people that roam around, the scum that slither out from under rocks, the people that destroyed music, that destroyed this country, that destroyed the world, the rotten, fucking, lousy people
that for their own little ends—the black power people, the sickening, stinking motherfuckers that play on the fact that they’re black, and all this fucking shit that happened later on—the rotten, no-account, filthy women that have no feeling for anything; they have no love for anyone; they don’t know what love is; they are shallow hulls of nothingness—the whole group of rotten people that have nothing to offer, that are nothing, never will be anything, were never intended to be anything.
All I can say is, at that moment I saw that Id found peace of mind. Synthetically produced, but after what Id been through and all the things I’d done, to trade that misery for total happiness—that was it, you know, that was it. I realized it. I realized that from that moment on I would be, if you want to use the word, a junkie. That’s the word they used. That’s the word they still use. That is what I became at that moment. That’s what I practiced; and that’s what I still am. And that’s what I will die as—a junkie.
Straight Life: The Story of Art Pepper
(with Laurie Pepper), 1979
Herbert Huncke’s life was a relentless adventure: hobo wanderings in the Depression, pre-war junkie hustling, wartime Merchant Marine service, and serving as tribal elder to Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac, in whose books he appears as a character. A peerless raconteur, Huncke published his journals in 1965, followed in 1980 by the collection
The Evening Sun Turned Crimson.
This selection from that volume evokes a Times Square bop age version of a salon.
S
PENCER
HAD
a pad on 47th Street. It was one of the coziest pads in New York and one which it was an experience to visit for the first time and to always relax in. It existed in a period when the world was particularly chaotic and New York exceptionally so. For me it represented the one spot at the time where I could seek surcease from tension and invariably find a sense of peace.
Spencer had gone to some pains to make it attractive. He painted the walls a Persian blue and the woodwork a bone white. He kept the lighting soft and had placed big comfortable chairs around his main room. Along one wall he placed his Capehart with records stacked to one side. Long soft rose drapes hung across his windows. A chest sat between the two windows and opposite a fireplace was a studio couch (the same shade as the drapes) faced with a long coffee table.
Spencer presided over all this with great benevolence and good will, making each of his guests welcome and concerning himself with their wants.
Spencer never used drugs—although I have seen him try pot and recently he told me he had sniffed heroin. But anyone was quite free to use whatever he chose and Spencer always managed to maintain
environmental conditions conducive to the fullest realization of whatever one happened to be using.
The Capehart was exceptionally fine and acted as a sort of focal point in the pad. Great sounds issued forth from its speaker and filled the whole place with awe inspiring visions. I can recall one incident clearly when the people on 47th Street stood along the curb listening and some were dancing and they were laughing and we were in the window watching while music flowed out on all sides.