I pick up books from my vast mobile library—which has moved everywhere with me all these wild, traveling years—and snag one at random and start reading. I’d recently finished a book—Tom Robbins’ brilliant 2000 novel, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates—and was up for a new book. So I scrounged around and opened up Jim Carroll’s Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries, 1971-1973. A “sequel,” as it were to his explosively popular diary-memoir, The Basketball Diaries, which was one of those books (like Kerouac’s 1957 seminal On the Road) that changed my life. My debut novel, The Crew, is in the literary and gritty, bombastic vein of The Basketball Diaries, complete with Heroin, alcoholism, anarchy, trouble and the hot loss of innocence. (I list The Basketball Diaries as a comp to my roman-a-clef autobiographical novel.)
Anyway, Forced Entries—published in 1987—continues the saga of Carroll’s early twenties living as a seedy heroin addict in the savage blood-inflected, rock-and-roll madness of New York City in the early 1970s. Carroll is a solid writer, no question. His syntax, his diction, his authoritative voice, his strong understanding of precise vocabulary, and his willingness and even desire to bare his whole, total soul on the page, make the book a delight to read. Easy—yet deep—reading.
It made me think of my own early years in New York City. Not living there—I wouldn’t move there until spring of 2019—but going there. Particularly my first trip there. I was 23; it was 2006. I’d recently read Kerouac’s On the Road and decided, almost instantaneously after finishing it, that I must really, actually do that, live the life Sal Paradise was living (aka Kerouac, in most but not all ways) in the “novel.”
At the time I was living in complete, alcoholic irony: My buddy and I, still angry, drunk and punk rock to the core, had somehow ended up fleeing our native Ventura, an hour north of LA, for the frat-bro, beach-bunny silliness of Pacific Beach in San Diego. Don’t ask. We were 22 and 19 and just wanted to get out of our hometown.
Anyway, we lasted one year there before hating each other—we shared a tiny one-bedroom apartment, each with his own cum-stained mattress in a corner of the room—and hating P.B., as the locals called the area. (Pacific Beach.) The frat bros and dumb blondes seemed extraterrestrial to us, braindead zombies, as I’m sure we appeared alien and bizarre to them. We both still wore beat-up leather motorcycle jackets, tight torn black jeans, black Converse. We smoked a lot of cigarettes. We drank every night. We found random girls and took them home. We went to punk shows downtown.
And so, splitting up—I would later move back to San Diego in the fall but alone and uptown in my own little apartment—I sold my few possessions, stuffed a steel-frame backpack full of clothes and a copy of Dharma Bums and a notebook for writing everything down, and I started thumbing around California and the Pacific Northwest. A month later I caught an Amtrak train, from Seattle, east across the country for three-and-a-half days to New York City.
The train ride was an adventure, of course. I met girls. Drank a lot. Watched the landscape shift and change out the windows. Smoked Marlboros at five-minute breaks in small, no-nothing towns. I read, I wrote, I started random conversations. I never slept. I was too excited. I remember stopping in Chicago for an hour, switching trains. And then going around a bend and, finally, after roughly 78 hours, seeing the Manhattan skyline, and feeling the pounding of my heart, the surge of adrenaline, the fear and excitement and joy all at once.
Lord I was so young. Twenty-three.
The train switched at some point—I forget where—and I had to join others on one of those Amtrack busses, the blue and red image along the scratched silver, the classic Amtrak emblem. I felt alone and alive, young and tough and afraid. All of it.
The bus dropped us off in Hell’s Kitchen. I think it was somewhere around West 49th and 9th Avenue. I stepped groggily, sleep-deprived, into a hostel a quarter block from the bus station. I didn’t know one single soul in this city. I had zero plan and little money. The point was that I was here. The rest, I figured, would resolve itself somehow.
I sat on a chair, setting my heavy pack down, brushing the sweat off my brow. The woman behind the desk was helping someone; briefly, she glanced at me with a weary, slightly worried look. The A/C was blasting. It was hot, mid June. I sat back and took in the cool air rushing at my face. It was staggeringly beautiful. I felt the heat of the sun against my skin from days on the train, sun gleaming against me through the windows. I closed my eyes. I felt I could sleep right there.
It turned out the hostel was full. I was exhausted. No space, she said. Sorry. I sighed loudly. This city already tired me out. What was I going to do? Then I remembered a guy I’d met in San Francisco who’d connected me with one of his buddies who lived in Greenwich Village, at the corner of MacDougal and Houston near NYU and Washington Square Park. None of these places meant anything to me geographically but I recalled them vividly because the guy I’d met at a bar had spelled them all out clearly multiple times.
I pulled my old small flip-phone out of my dirty, stinky jeans pocket. (This was pre-smart phone.) I scrolled down, found the guy I knew, and located the number of his friend, which he’d texted me weeks prior. The guy’s name, the text said, was Martin Dooly. This SF contact had said Dooly had solid weed, if he needed that.
*
I sat there a moment, eyes closed, unmoving, feeling that cold rushing air, knowing outside was hot, humid and crammed with assholes. That brief moment arrived: Why the fuck am I here again? Then the answer: Youth! Adventure! Life! Experience. Kerouac.
Right.
I dialed Martin’s number and pressed the button. After four rings he picked up. He sounded half out of breath. A harsh Germanic accent. He remembered now, his SF contact had said Martin was originally from Berlin.
“Yes?” Martin said, breathy, as if he’d just run up four flights of stairs.
“Is this Martin Dooly?”
A pause, a moment of silence.
“Yes. Who’s this?”
“Hey, my name’s Michael. I know your friend in SF, Ed Benson?”
“Ohhhh, old Benson. Nice! How is the bastard?”
“Well. Honestly I don’t really know. Truth be told, we met one night in a bar and got wasted together. I told him I was going to New York for the first time and he said to look you up.”
“Oh. Ok. I see.” He paused. His breath had calmed. “Alright. Well. Come on over.”
He gave me the address and I told him where I was and he explained how to get the nearest subway train and where to walk, etc.
Nearly an hour later—I got lost, got on the wrong train at one point—I walked up to the address. I pressed his name at the silver intercom. He buzzed me in. I entered. Up five flights of stairs, narrow stairs and narrow walls. I felt nervous and claustrophobic. The walls seemed to somehow be breathing. I didn’t know this guy from Adam. I didn’t know Ed, really, for that matter. We were a long, long way from Ventura and San Diego.
I stood in front of Apartment #12-A. Green door, paint-peeling. Smelled like formaldehyde. I sighed, steeled my courage, hefted my pack a bit back up on my shoulders, and knocked weakly.
He opened the door right away. Tall guy, thick, jet-black hair pointing in all directions, loose blue jeans, white Addidas, yellow T-shirt that said New York City, Motherfucker in cracked red lettering. It was a well-worn shirt.
“Come on in,” Martin said, loud and brash, the thick German syrupy against the awkward English words.
I stepped inside. He closed the door and locked it behind me with the deadbolt.
The place was absurdly tiny, a little studio with a miniature kitchenette, a window overlooking Houston Street, posters all over the walls—mostly in German, and of rock bands and naked women—and the smallest bathroom I’d ever seen.
“No offence, man,” he said, “But you stink.”
Dropping my pack to the floor I said, “Sorry. Just got off Amtrak. Three days and some change. Haven’t showered since before that.”
“Jesus.” He sighed. “Well. Sit down. Coffee?”
I nodded, sitting on his small blue leather couch, which crunched loudly as my weight inveighed against it. “Sure. Thanks. Just black, please.”
He made the coffee and then put on a German metal band, low volume, on a vinyl record player. I watched the record spin slowly, lazily, round and round and round, slightly uneven, seeing those white streaks of reflection along the black vinyl as it spun. Music wasn’t bad, actually. A little like Megadeth.
He handed me the white mug of black coffee and then stood away from me, leaning against a section of bare white wall.
“So,” he said, matter-of-factly. “How much do you need?”
I swallowed a gulp of coffee. His place, I realized, was pretty cool, figuratively as well as temperature. “Sorry?”
Martin smiled. “What was your name again? Sorry…”
“Michael,” I said, stifling a nasty burp.
I needed to fart badly, too, and take a shit, but I held back. I also desperately needed water and food and a hot shower.
“Right. Michael. So anyway. Cut the bullshit. How much do you need?”
“I apologize.” Anxiety snaked its way up my spine. “I don’t understand the question.”
Martin smiled even wider, and his gray eyes seemed sociopathic for a moment. “What are you, some kind of cheap-ass police narc?”
Taken aback, I chuckled. “What are you talking about, man?”
“Look. I’m a heroin dealer. I deal heroin. You connected through Ed. You’re looking for dope, right?”
I felt my cheeks blood red and my eyes bug out. “Woah. No way, man. I don’t do that shit. Just drink and occasionally smoke pot.”
Martin appeared shocked. “Then I don’t understand. Why are you here?”
I took another swig of black coffee. I stood up abruptly. What a story, I thought. I grabbed my pack and hoisted it back onto my now-dry-sweaty shoulders.
“I was hoping for a place to crash for a few days. Just until I get things sorted out.”
Martin said nothing. I felt ashamed and foolish. I turned around and walked to the door, opening it. A part of me wanted to ask him directly, plead with him, but I knew it was pointless.
I stepped out of the apartment back into the stairs. That nappy formaldehyde stink again. A few steps down and I heard Martin’s door open behind me.
“Hey,” he said.
I stopped. Turned. Saw him. He stood in the open door frame. He looked serious. He jerked his head. “You can sleep on the floor for a few nights. Long as you don’t mind junk deals going on night and day.”
I smiled, part in fear, part in excitement, part in gratitude. “I don’t mind.”
I went inside and took a long, hot shower, cleaning myself from head to toe. I jerked off in there, too. Then we walked to a bar nearby and drank a few cold beers. I liked him. He liked me. It was a great start to what became an obsession: Manhattan.
Three days later I found a hostel in Harlem.