Every Drug Has It's Person

I'm not stressed out.

I just finished a cup of coffee and I'm a little wired. I'm thinking about this reading tonight and wonder to myself: what is up with me? As much as I hate crowds and audiences and groups of people, why do I consistently place myself before them? How I would like to just sit and listen to the readers, but invariably someone or someones will ask for a poem.

Not that I'm any good, but they are a sharing bunch and would like everyone to participate in the reading. It's a wonderful feeling... for someone not as socially paranoid as I am. Thank god for LYRICA. Let me stop saying that. Dr. D. and Dr. L. say that the drugs are only helpers and that I am the one actually performing these feats of daring do. That sounds nice, but I feel that it's my trust in the drugs that give me the courage. That's how it works.

So now I'm sitting in Starbucks, waiting for my brother to come back from the neighborhood soup kitchen, getting his dinner. I'm writing sonnets and emailing. Can you believe it. I'm writing sonnets now. I tried it a couple of times and I like them. I only have a few, but I have them. Maybe I might put some online. They're a little more sunny than some of the poems that I've been writing lately.

My brother arrives and we head to the Perch Cafe, not far into Brooklyn, in a gentrified part of the borough. Upscale restaurants, boutiques and shops line the streets at night, very few people on the walks. Maybe because a light drizzle was beginning to fall in the night. We walked into the railroad restaurant, with everything in a straight line from front to the back. A dining area in the immediate front before the bay windows, a very long bar and counter area, and then a lounge area in the back with sofas and chairs. It was here that the Perch reading was being had. Because of the trains, we arrived late and therefore missed our friend read.

I sat at the bar and noticed that they had liquor. I ordered a glass of Merlot for my brother and I and handed the bartender a twenty. When he returned two dollars I almost fell off my chair. There went nearly a weeks pay for me!! The bartender leaned over the bar and whispered under the amplified voice of the reader in the middle of the lounge: "The next one is on the house." You bet your damn skippy that the next one should be on the house. Nine dollars a fucking drink? I thought the wine would be five dollars TOPs. I didn't say that to him though. He might reach at the bar, liberate a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon and bash it over my head like in those spaghetti westerns.

I turn to the reader. Our friend, Patti, asks to read again because her friends had just arrived and she wants to perform for us. Everyone agrees and she went again. She has a very powerful style, with a hint of sexuality...fuck that, a strong current of sexuality. She uses the word fuck more than I do. Meaning the act, not the expletive. My brother and I go and he plugs the SHOUT OUT, also D2theL's gig that he has going on this Friday.

A thing about D2theL's gig: He is hosting it with another friend of ours, Dimitri the M and they have some heavy hitters coming, such as Tatum O'neil, and Patty Smith to do the music. It's supposed to be a blowout, and they want my brother and I to work as key grips. Handymen to do gopher work (go for this, go for that). We're ready to get the job done, especially because the guys are going to pay us in alcohol and invite us to a massive party with a Yippee Mogul whose name I can't use, which is supposed to be off the mother fucking Richter scale. But that's a future story. Needless to say, we are stoked.

I lament the lost of some serious income in that place. We say our goodbyes from the reading and head back to the F train and home with some of the friends who were going our way. I'm soon jetting home and get to the vestibule only to see Cautious Carl in the man trap. We walk to the elevator together and enter in. He nods to me and says hello. I reply back to him in kind. The man reeks of marijuana. Strong, very strong, as if he swam through a river of marijuana smelling cologne. He is so strong that I feel like I'm catching a contact high. We walk from the elevator and part company in the hall only after saying good night to each other. Well, at least he's kinda cordial. If not a stone cold pothead.

I get into my room, set up my laptop to see if I can get online. NAVARRE is playing its same game, sending out signal but not giving data. I am incensed. Stingy bastard. I hope he needs something somewhere, sometime in the future, and really need it, and be told by some stingy bastard that he can't have it. Stingy mother- fucking bastard.

Maybe it's time that I should stop thinking about getting things for free. Free is not a word used genuinely in this world. Nothing is free.

Maybe it's time I start giving back for free. Help my fellowman when I can...for free. That's why, whenever I get ZAPRANOTH up and running, I'm going to pump the Internet all over the goddamn place...for free.

Stingy fucking bastards.

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