he came over for a while to smoke some pot and listen to jazz records

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We walked past the Music Box Theater and the Bijou, heading west. When we got to the Henry Hudson Parkway, we stared walking south. It was after midnight as we passed the Fortysecond Street Ferry and stopped around Fortieth Street in a little dock cafe that had a small lighthouse structure on the roof. A kind of sinking fog was blowing in on the piers. He had a little bunched-up wax-paper ball he unwrapped and handed me a white pill. “Bite it in half,” he said, “and swallow the rest of it later.” I asked what it was. “Bennie,” he said. “You can walk all fucking night, man. It opens up your eyeballs...” We gulped the pill halves and drank coffee, and he wanted to know what I thought about dying young. I could feel the pill kicking my heart into third gear.

he moved through the "underground" as a snake slides through grass

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Unfooled by the self-excusing liberalism and the "freedom" rhetoric babbled by Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey or Allen Ginsberg, or the clot of literary and scholarly fringe-kickers looking for late-night T.V. notoriety. "Wads of phlegm in the throat of life," Charlie called them. He saw with socially untarnished eyes, eyes accustomed to walls and basins and uniforms. What he faced in the outside world was nothing more than a jailhouse joke. Seeing himself as standing knee-deep in puke, Charlie says, "I could see these people on the street - see them with clean eyes, you know. These people on the street were like me. Thrown out of life like your paper coffee cups and hamburger sacks and rags and stinking Kotex pads and dirty rubbers. They were the garbage floating around and shit sticking to the sides of your toilet and your drain holes ... That's what they were doing as hippies, floating around like orange peelings and sinking to the bottom like rotten garbage - food for the sharks and for the barracudas ..."

“Like an anteater, Hollywood cannot see beyond its fucking nose.”

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Writer Norman Mailer wasn’t going to forget it. He waited until Marilyn was dead before launching his masturbatory, chest-beating scenario of Monroe’s legend, his fantasy based upon a previous crackpot’s short publication two years after Marilyn’s death. The crackpot was Frank Capell, a rabid, right-wing anti-communist friend of Walter Winchell who underwrote whatever barb against the Kennedys could be manufactured. Capell’s tale ushered in the notion that Robert Kennedy and his “Gestapo team” deliberately caused the death of Marilyn. “Capell told me his theory,” said the chairman of the Hollywood chapter of the John Birch Society, “but he lacked any concrete proof. He said Marilyn was a communist sympathizer under constant FBI surveillance, and Arthur Miller had been shadowed by the FBI, at Director Hoover’s orders. Miller and Monroe attended suspicious meetings.” Mailer snatched up Capell’s scenario and deliberately pressed the tale to stir a controversy. He needed money - he knew every fool in the world would jump at his tale: Marilyn Monroe murdered by FBI and CIA agents. Mailer’s publisher fired the volley of fake facts at the public and promoted Mailer’s book to bestseller status. A regretful but unconvincingly sorrowful Mailer later admitted he had avoided researching Monroe’s death, had never met her, but had manufactured the “controversy” in order to sell books - because he needed money.

Sleazy bars, dirty rooming houses, movie extras, drunken servicemen

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“I didn’t like going to the morgue,” Willis says. “It was an awful place.” For ages there had been threats to shut the morgue down—plans for condemning or moving the facilities. Time and again they got out of it with improvement schemes, but nothing was done. “There were other changes going on in the city, but a lot of things were staying the way they’d been—pockets were being filled and the dead weren’t going to kick.” Rooms opened off halls that were filled with deputy coroners drinking coffee, joking, and talking, while in some rooms the bodies were stacked two and three deep— “stacked up like cord wood,” Willis says. “I once had a judge order a check on a particular decedent in a case, and a deputy took me into one room and dumped one body off the other like you’d roll logs to get to the one on the bottom. I never found the right corpse. When we left the place he didn’t bother to stack them back up again, but left them where he’d turned them over looking for the one I needed. Guys at funeral parlors griped that bodies were sent over half the time without being sewn up or put back in shape. Sometimes body parts were put in wax paper—especially with traffic fatalities— or put into boxes for the independent undertakers. I remember one incident where the face was still folded back over the top of the head, which they’d sawed through, and the body was sent out like that, with the wife and relatives waiting for it at the other end.”

“He wants me to talk dirty and he'll be licking my legs like a dog.”

 

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“The bedroom was a mess, crowded with clutter and filth. The floor was strewn with clothes and papers, blank music scores, half-eaten hamburgers, and even apple cores and popcorn. The bed was in disarray where the body had been covered with a blanket, bedclothes flung about and the sheets were stained with blood. We even found traces of blood on the mattress covering. Other areas of the house yielded more bloodstains, even on the edge of the desk in the bedroom. There were bloodstains on the door and walls and on the headboard of the bed. We discovered bloodstained clothing in a washing machine, which we figured to be clothing worn by Spade Cooley. The garments were sent to the crime lab for analysis, along with a .22 caliber rifle and a kitchen broom. The furthest end of the broom handle revealed what appeared to be traces of bodily fluid and Vaseline.”

"He had his hair dyed black, wore engineer boots, Smitty was bitchin'."

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"A wild expressive mass jerks spasmodically to the liquid drums and pulsing sounds from the amplifiers. All the yes sirs and no sirs are absent, and an exchange of physical desire obscures the rancid reality around them. The hungry kisses accented by a pill or a few beers is a cheap and easy way to find security, and the quick, too-soon responses and climaxes insure protection from the outside world. The teenager is frightened beyond belief by the world he is being forced into. What sense is it to wait for sexual intercourse, he reasons, when it's available now? Why not take a pill, or get drunk, at least there is a happy void to fall into. All the doubts are still there but they're pleasantly obscured. All that matters is the good feeling you're getting from speed and intoxication. Granted, there are some kids who try to untangle the incredible mess, but how can they do it alone when the rest would rather sit in the corner smoking pot? But why shouldn't they be disillusioned and find other worlds? All the pretty little tinsel and ribbons society wraps the box with to tantalize them in hopes they'll want it and try harder than ever, is just a fairy tale to conceal the dirty contents inside. The blind faith you try to project to seal the leaks is proving to be more and more fallible. It doesn't matter anymore if some button happy idiot blows up the world."

He tore pages from the Holy Bible to wipe his rectum

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I find myself re-reading one of my favorite showbiz memoirs, a book that got almost no attention here in New York when it was published back in '97 (I assume it must have made a stink in L.A. because when I was there in '97 living at the Chateau Marmont just a mention of Gilmore's name would send folks into seismic frenzies of denial), but I assure you this is a book you want to read: Laid Bare by John Gilmore. Gilmore's clear eyed, lucid prose captures Janis Joplin years before fame as a down and out North Beach tramp ("She fucks like a truck," he said. "She wants to get on top and jam up and down. She practically busted my rib cage.'') , Hank Williams at the Opry on the verge of superstardom and then pissing his pants months before his death, the only account of James Dean I've ever read that made him seem like a real person, scathing looks at Steve McQueen ("I'd see him stealing tips from bars and from tables in coffeehouses."), Dennis Hopper, the underbelly of Hollywood - the Black Dahlia, Manson, Mickey Cohen, and wait, a side trip to Tucson to cover the trial of Charles Schmidt, the Pied Piper Of Tucson, sleaze galore from Barbara Payton and Franchot Tone, sad sack Tom Neal, the sadly forgotten John Hodiak, Brigitte Bardot in Paris, Jane Seberg, Lenny Bruce, Vampira, every page of this book is fascinating. I can't remember who turned me onto it, I've given away a dozen copies over the years and have read every other book Gilmore's written, but Laid Bare is something truly special, a tell all that tells the truth, and it is written so well it sparkles like jewels on the page. I'm going back to my sick bed for a few days, I suggest you hunt down a copy of Laid Bare for yourself.- The Hound.

Burroughs knew where to find the best absinthe in a section of Paris he called "the sewer," and I went with him and another poet named Frank Milne, from Hoboken, who wore some sort of turban on his head with a bunch of fake jewels stitched to the front above the eyes. Burroughs kept staring at my crotch and almost obscenely licking his lips, or making strange remarks about "a penis colony in the desert." He drank quickly, painfully, and at one point began sweating and shaking. His eyes rolled up like an epileptic's, and he seemed to go into a kind of fit. I got up and away from him when he started frothing at the mouth and shitting his pants.