Shortly after I got out of jail, we moved downtown to the 1200 block of Charles Street. It was one block and one street away from the drug apartment where I’d lived on Calvert Street when I first moved to Baltimore in ‘68, after getting kicked out of the U.S. Naval Academy for marijuana. Our apartment was in one of those old rich places turned into multiple living units, and had a Sunset Boulevard curving staircase going up to the second floor. Robin’s mother was afraid to come downtown, so we didn’t get to see her much, which was fine with me. She was a good woman, but still an in-law, and outlaws don’t much like in-laws.

Divine, who acted in a lot of the John Waters movies, lived on Charles Street near us. I’d see his huge self in his tiny, tight, white t-shirts walking his itty bitty, rat dog. And Edith the Egg Lady, who’s also in John Waters movies, had her shop a couple blocks away. I’ve been in there. Never did see John Waters, though.

I promised to keep in touch with certain people in jail when I left, but once you’re out, that’s it, you don’t go back. They’re dead to you once you’re free. Every prisoner who got out promised to send a bag of oranges spiked with LSD. Nobody did. One person did send a bag of fruit, and we ate it all and waited to get high, but nothing happened.

Two weeks after I got out of jail, the Federal prisoner Blackie called me at home, repeating his offer of the job with the mob. I don’t know how he knew I was out, or how he knew my number. It shook me. I said no, but thanked him for thinking of me.

I’ve been on parole or probation three times: once as a juvenile delinquent for stealing 13 cars, once for armed robbery, and once for drunk driving. All three parole officers tried to psychoanalyze me and play mind games, so each visit I became Chameleon Man and gave them the answers they wanted to hear.

My armed robbery parole officer came by our apartment for a sneak visit, trying to catch me doing something wrong. I was home alone, baking cookies. I offered him one. He turned it down, fortunately, because I’d used baking soda instead of baking powder, and they tasted horrendous.

I shoplifted only once after jail. It was my first theft that I didn’t enjoy. I felt guilty, small, unclean, wrong. Morality had set in and I quit. The only thing I took after that was for art, like when I went into a Baltimore department store, walked up to a mannequin, took her hand in mine like we were shaking, twisted, pulled the hand off, and walked out with it. I put it in one of my first assemblages.

Going to jail changed my behavior; I quit crime after that–I don’t count drinking and drugs. I felt total shame when my parents came to visit me in jail. If I hadn’t gone to jail, my arrogance and lawlessness would’ve destroyed me, and maybe others. I have no remorse about the first armed robbery, because it was funny. Everybody was laughing, including the clerk. It’s hard to feel like a criminal when your entire take is $64. I do have extreme remorse and shame about the second robbery.

I had to have a job to get out of jail. An advertising agency I called on when I sold Mudge paper gave me one as their ad salesman. So, more days of sitting on the bench in Baltimore’s Federal Park, taking tokes and staring at the Chesapeake Bay instead of calling on customers. They told me I wasn’t working out, so I went to a placement service to find a new job to replace my get-out-of-jail-job and was honest about the robbery. The job agent told me, “The only way you are ever going to get anywhere is to go back to college and graduate.” Loyola College was one of the clients I called on as an ad salesman, so I talked myself into the college for two years to finish my degree.

I’ve sold newspapers, life insurance, printing paper, milk, women’s shoes, and I’ve failed in all of them. After failing as an ad salesman, I became an extra man at Bethlehem Steel. An extra man is an odd job: if somebody doesn’t show up, you do their job, whatever it is. If everybody shows up, you sit for eight hours and get paid. Once the next extra man didn’t show up, so I sat sixteen hours doing nothing, except reading. The magic of Bethlehem Steel was watching the molten steel pour into rivers of hardening steel, walking on low bridges over orange molten heat watching sparks fly.

After I started at Loyola College, I couldn’t work at Bethlehem Steel anymore because of the hours, so I became a snow cone flavor delivery boy. I stopped eating snow cones off the street because I saw how filthy the flavoring vats were. They even spit into them every now and then.

Then I became a women’s shoe salesman because they had flexible hours and I could still go to school. After we sold a pair of shoes, we were required to try to sell a belt and purse to go with it, which made me feel unclean and indelicate.

I asked my boss one day, “I’m not carrying my weight around here, am I?”

“No,” he said. “But you add a sense of class.”

I didn’t wear underwear then, and one night my pants ripped in the crotch, as I crouched down to put on a customer’s shoe and my testicles hung out. The boss gave me a canvas money bag, and I went down to the mall’s men’s room with its seven urinals and green metal toilet stall walls and sewed the bag to the crotch of my pants—and got this poem out of it.

National Debt

He huddles

I have never seen as much bare female flesh as I did as a shoe salesman. Women knowingly spread their legs as I crouched at their feet, and asked me help them on with their boots. But after the first couple weeks, all I cared about was the commission.

Our business dress code meant we had to have our mustaches end at the corner of our lips, but I had a TV audition coming up. A local TV station was starting a critics show, and since I was writing weekly reviews for the newspaper, they asked me to test. I grew my mustache halfway to my chin to look cooler for the test. I was nervous before the audition, and I smoked too much grass and drank some wine. My prepared part went well, but the ad lib impromptu didn’t because my mind was too slow. I stood in the control room afterwards and watched a playback of the segment. It was cool to see myself on TV, but I didn’t get the job and the shoe store boss made me trim my mustache.

My boss had a small rat dog which walked through shit and then walked over his pillow, giving him an eye infection. Twice a week they’d stick a needle in his eyeball. Just thinking about needles in the eye makes me shudder, like the thought of sliding down a stair banister that turns into a razor blade.

I did make some interesting art at the shoe store. The wedding shoes came with extra patches of white material to test the shoe dye color on, so I made abstract shoe-dye art compositions.

One night before I went to work to sell shoes, my wife casually said, “My hips don’t match my breasts, do they.”

I agreed, lulled buy the calmness of her statement. She yelled, “How dare you tell me my hips are too fat!”

I lost my temper at her stupidity and kicked the wooden couch. I was wearing tennis shoes, and broke my big toe. It swelled up. We laughed, decided I couldn’t go to work since I couldn’t get my shoe on, and dropped some windowpane LSD.

LSD is the perfect painkiller. We sat for hours laughing, watching my toe get bigger and bigger, just like a purple expanding cartoon toe. No pain. I was hallucinating too much to go to the hospital. Eight hours later, I came down enough to go.

The Indian doctor took my blood pressure and pulse and snapped, “Why’s your pulse so high?”

“I’m in shock.”

“Well, you broke your toe.”

Journal Entry April 22, 1971: I heard on the radio that Papa Doc died last night and my immediate reaction was envy. I am in the same mental frame as before the armed robbery fourteen months ago. My problems are not to be blamed on job, money, wife, writing. My problem is me. Inside I am useless. I am on total self destruct, my failure programmed. I can see myself as an addict, a failure bum on skid row, spending the rest of my life in prison, committing suicide. I cannot fathom how people get through life, make livings, take care of families, advance, and succeed. Robin has many problems and I should accept the responsibility of helping her, but instead I’m desperately in need of her helping me.

I blew my top in English class at Loyola. We were reading one of the Bronte books, Jane Eyre. The master of the house was in love with the heroine and she with him, but he had his crazy wife locked upstairs in the attic, so Jane kept rejecting him, putting him through hell, until by the end of the book he’s physically disfigured; only then does she accept him.

I lashed out, “That’s the way it is between men and women! Women have to eviscerate and emasculate and disfigure the men before they want them,” and stormed out of class.

The teacher apologized for me, and told the class I was going through a rough time. Afterward I went to her office to apologize. I told her of my marriage with Robin.

“No one deserves to be that miserable,” she said, after she’d heard my story. “You should get divorced.” That was the straw that did it. Carol Abromaitus was an older teacher, a conservative and avowed Republican Catholic, as straight-laced as they come. To have such a person tell me that, led to my leaving Robin.

My wife moved out for six weeks, and went home to her mother because we weren’t getting along. I was supposed to move out of the apartment and she was going to move back. I didn’t have a job, and the only money I had was from a college grant and the GI Bill. I couldn’t afford to move. Robin didn’t like living at home, so she moved back in with me.

I met my longest lasting friend Stone Ranger in 1971 at Loyola College. We overlapped in the occasional English class. Ranger was a Ken Kesey type, a Furthur Merry Prankster, and hearkened back to the hippies, who were fading about that time. He and some others bought a piece of communal land in West Virginia. One Halloween, they rented a school bus, dressed up as Merry Pranksters, and drove around Baltimore.

I asked Stone exactly how we met and this is what he sent me:

“Well, here’s what I remember and as you no doubt know, my memory is pretty sad. I entered Loyola with the class of ‘68 and I was supposed to graduate in June of ‘72. Unfortunately, when the government tried to settle anti-war unrest by instituting the lottery, they had a drawing and I lost. Being number 36 guaranteed me a ride to the jungle, a ride I did not much favor. So I started going to day school, night school, and summer school, so I could pick up enough extra credits to get out in Dec ‘71 — which I technically did — because that would give me 6 months to figure out a plan, re the draft board. I worked out an agreement with the head of the English dept and my various profs so that they’d sign off on my early exit, if I showed up now and then and took at least a couple classes in the winter term, which was fine with me. Thus, beginning in Jan ‘72, I was still around Loyola but not as much as the previous 3.5 years, and if I remember correctly, I only audited classes.

At some point when I was on campus I started hearing from other English Lit majors about this ‘really smart guy’ who was ‘a lot older than us’, but I had no idea who that guy was. Then, one day very early in the semester, I was sitting in a class (I do remember that it was the very last row in the chair closest to the door, so I could come in late and leave early). Dr Abromitis was teaching and I think the subject was romantic poetry. I could be wrong about the subject, since I was just auditing the class, and so was probably not paying real close attention. I was startled out of my daydreaming to see and hear this formidable lady prof having a spirited discussion with someone near the front. I stretched my neck to see what was happening, and saw this guy with long hair vigorously defending the fine point of some argument. She’d give it to him and he gave it right back (much to her glee, as in my experience at Loyola, NO ONE would take on Dr Abromitis). So I thought to myself, ‘who the hell is that?’ Then it occurred to me… ‘IT WAS THE REALLY SMART GUY.’ Sometime after that, I got to know you, most likely through Tony Kern, as you and he did a lot of yearbook work (I did little or none). Anyway, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it….”

I wrote him back explaining I’d had no idea I’d ever been noticed, much less talked about, and got this in return:

“Oh yeah man, you were definitely the buzz around campus. Not only were you a genuine intellect, AND older, AND had long hair (you’ll recall that very few did at that august Jesuit institution!), AND had this mysterious past that had something to do with the military. I mean, there were *serious* discussions in the student lounge about whether or not it was safe to even approach you. I think some of the underclassmen from rich New Jersey families thought you might be dangerous! Hah, and you didn’t know that? That’s too funny.”

Stone was a macrobiotic vegetarian for a decade to clean out his system, a vegetarian since. Mother Dwarf and I ate the worst Christmas dinner you could imagine at Stone’s place: all macrobiotic, tasted like chewed-up, spit-out sawdust.

I did a lot of drugs with Stone, until he gave that up and moved to West Virginia to become a photographer and drive a school bus. He married another school bus driver who was also a stained glass artist. Then he gave up the photography, they moved to Hamlin, and he and Ma’am worked craft fairs.

Ranger took a great photograph of me where he painted my face like a patchwork clown, had me look up at an angled cork panel with mirror shards in it, and shot my face in fragments. He has my first large white assemblage, Mourning Becomes Dyslexia and at least eight other collages of mine; says they’re his retirement fund, but my price doesn’t seem to be going up. Like Billy Preston suggests, Nothin from nothin leaves nothin.

Of all my friends, Stone knows the most and has the best idea of how bad the world is. Good mind. Good heart. Good creativity.

I started writing record reviews for the college newspaper and an agent from A&M Records appeared, and gave me ten albums. He pulled out his bong, got me stoned, and said, “You can write whatever you want, but if possible, if you can find something good to say about one of these, and ignore bad things about the other ones, that’d be nice. But not absolutely necessary.” Smart man.

The college newspaper gig led to a weekly Arts/Political newspaper in Baltimore called Performance. I received five dollars per review. I soon became Assistant Arts Editor and got an extra twenty dollars a week for that. On a good week, I could make a whole thirty-five dollars.

In the early 70’s, I went backstage to interview Bill Haley of the Comets. The usher took me back and said, “Excuse me, Mr. Haley, this man’s here to interview you for the paper.” Haley looked up at me and said, “Go away, kid. I’m counting my money.” And that was it. The sad part is I could have interviewed Little Richard instead of a frigging used car salesman.

I was at a radio station to interview Alice Cooper and his opening act, Flo and Eddy (who were the main half of the Turtles and had also played on Frank Zappa albums). The radio station supplied the dope, and we all got wonderfully stoned. Alice Cooper was cold and kept insulting fans who called on the phone, while Flo and Eddy, who also recorded as Phosphorescent Leech and Eddy, were warm, funny, friendly, and marvelous.

As I left the radio station without my interview with Alice Cooper, a parking lot full of teenyboppers started SCREAMING. One little girl ran up to me and said, “Are you somebody?”

“No, I’m nobody.”

I got drunk with Paul Williams who had written a bunch of hit songs for other people, like We’ve Only Just Begun for The Carpenters, and had had a couple hits himself. He was very funny, and very short. He ordered up a box of white wine, tore it open, and we talked about hobbits. He wanted to play one in the movies.

I interviewed Tiny Tim for 45 minutes. He was broke, touring honkytonks. I watched his act, and after he went through all the normal routine like Tiptoe thru the Tulips and the vaudeville jokey stuff, he went into a fifty song medley; one song would be from 1890, the next a Creedance Clearwater Revival. I went back after the show and told him, “I’m blown away. I think you’re a genius.” Tiny Tim was so hungry for recognition, he took the tape recorder out of my hand, and for 45 minutes talked and sang into it. He did a Bob Dylan song in Rudy Vallee’s voice, he did a Rudy Vallee song in Bob Dylan’s voice. He told me about a party in New York City where he opened a closet and there was George Harrison in a cloud of marijuana. He told me he was ripped off by his managers and was flat broke—they’d stolen everything. Every now and then his wife, Miss Vicky, would try to get him off to do something else, and he’d brush her off.

After my time was up and the tape was finished, the manager came in and said, “Mr. Tim, There’re only six people out there for the next show. Do you want to cancel?”

Tim said, “I don’t care if there is only one person in the audience. I’m going on.”

He wrote his address in my notebook and made me promise to send him the review, which turned out to be a front page piece. I wrote what a genius he was, and I never mailed it to him. Man needed it. I promised it. I didn’t deliver, and it still bothers me. Shame never goes away.

I became manager of an avant-garde experimental theater. It was one of those places where if the play started twenty minutes late, everybody sat there wondering if nothing happening was part of the show. It wasn’t very good stuff. The playwright was fascinated by my being a poet, a milkman, and a writer and asked if he could write a play about me. I said, “No. I’m saving me for myself.”

The theater lasted less than two months. I didn’t get paid, but met a lot of interesting people. One of them brought his synthesizer over to our place and played. We tried to get him a record contract with the record man who stopped by once a week with free albums and his bong and good smoke. I had passed recordings of the synth player on to him, which sounded a bit like Rick Wakeman in his Six Wives of Henry the VIII phase. The record guy passed the recordings on to his company. For a while we thought we were getting close to signing. I was going to do the album cover, and we’d get money out of it. It fell through though, just another dream along the way. Seems to be a lot of those.

I graduated from Loyola with a BA in English and minor in Philosophy. I still needed a job, since the weekly newspaper only paid five dollars an article. I went to some poor people’s program and they sent me to a dead Catholic church to be taught speed reading. They timed me and I read faster than their goal, so they sent me to a milk company to become a milkman. I figured I could get up early in the morning, do the milk route, go home, get some sleep, then go out to review concerts and interview bands.

One morning on my milk route, I saw a fox in the middle of the road. I stopped and got out. The fox and I stared at each other for ten minutes. Another morning, I drove very slowly, as a leaf skipped down the road in front of me. It skipped a long time; it’d start, and stop, and skip, and I’d start and stop with it, talking to it as if it were alive.

I don’t have any sexual milkman stories. I did see a wee bit of early morning female flesh, but not much. The worst part was they expected me to call on non-customers and try to sell them milk. The milk route was badly designed, so after my three week training period was up and I was on my own, I redesigned it and cut two hours off the run. My boss was furious. He raged at me, said there was no way I could make the route more efficient than its senior milkmen had been able to do, and fired me. As I left, he caught up with me and told me to keep my job. That afternoon I parked the milk truck, but had milk on the bottom of my foot and it slipped off the brake. The truck rolled forward into my boss’s new car and crumpled its fender. Boy was it hard to tell him; he assumed I’d done it on purpose. A week later, I quit. They owed me three hundred dollars, and gave me a check for $5.37.