A New York Story

 

So I found Patti Smith's M Train book on the kitchen table when I was cleaning it up. My friend Claudia V, whom I have known for 40 plus years, gave it to me. I liked Smith, not just for her music but because she and her then-boyfriend Robert Mapelthorpe, lived in New York City's Chelsea Hotel at about the same time I did. I think they were a year earlier or two years earlier. And I was only there for 5 weeks or so, after my breakup with CL.

Smith talked about Maplethorpe falling in love with hustling his ass on 42 street, with his friend, the poet-songwriter Jim Carroll. Both became famous: Carroll for his poetry, songs,and the book The Basketball Diaries.

Maplethorpe became famous for his photos of the extreme homosexual life.

So I was talking to my daughter Madeleina about Patti Smith and the Chelsea Hotel, and that led into a discussion of Maplethorpe and Carroll, which led into a discussion of the chicken hawks who plied 53 Street and Lexington Ave at the RR train station line, which led to talking about my gay cook at my The Cold Beer Blues Bar in Iquitos, Peru, who was fine until he tried to kill my son Marco -- def a pain in the ass -- with a kitchen knife, and then Madeleina said my story was getting too confusing and could she excuse herself to go to the bathroom.

I let her, of course. But damn, if I just had another hour, I could have brought that story back home....hahahaha. Sometimes I just take too roundabout a path. Darn it. I know it was all connected.