In
1979 Billy McEwan met Tammi
Honig. He does not save her life, but perhaps she saves his. Thanks
to her, he enjoys (or experiences, at least) many adventures on New
York's Morningside Heights, back in the days when the City was still
dangerous, dirty, and romantic, back in the days of punk rock, Thai
stick, and Checker cabs. His adventures eventually lead him beyond
the boundaries of the Upper West Side. He ventures far south of West
72nd Street and far north of West 125th Street, even as far afield as
the San Fernando Valley...
Frosty sat down
on a bench on the 10-foot-wide median strip that runs down the
middle of Upper Broadway. The median strip had many rose bushes
on it, and the roses were just starting to bud out. Tammi's
apartment was just around the corner, on a narrow side street
that ran downward towards the Hudson River. He pulled out a 4x6
spiral-bound notebook from his jacket pocket and wrote Tammi a
love letter. He wrote her a love letter every day. Tammi sneered
at these letters and made fun of his cliches and dead metaphors,
but Frosty kept on writing them. His excuse was that it was a
good exercise for preventing writer's block.
Death Trip
1979
Frosty started
laughing softly, but not at Benjie's last remark. Rather, Frosty
thought he saw someone playing with a helium-neon laser on top
of the World Trade Center, projecting a 1000-times-lifesize
hologram of Otis Redding onto the smog layer over the city.
Frosty found the sight of a 6000-foot image of Otis Redding
hanging over the world's largest city to be highly amusing.
Twilight
Jones And The Elvis Clones
The Block Party
was sponsored by the fraternity council, ostensibly for the
purpose of funding some public-minded activity or another.
Actually it was just an excuse for todo el mundo to stand around
in the street and drink beer. I used to enjoy helping clean up
after the Block Party: the block would look like it had been
struck by a blizzard of celluloid beer cups. The beer cups would
be piled up literally 3 feet deep in the gutters. We shoveled
the cups up with snow shovels into 30-gallon bags. In 1977,
Martin "Doc" Thompson (head resident of Carman Hall)
and I counted 325 black plastic bags of beer cups at the end of
the evening.
The Golden
Road To Unlimited Devotion
Chad pointed me
out to Tammi. They both cheered, threw their shrubs in the air,
and ran over to me. They pulled me to my feet, and we joined
hands and whirled around and around in a Dervish circle. The
iridescent aluminum towers of the World Trade Center zoomed in
front of my eyes once every 1.7 seconds.
The Proper
Degree Of Chaos And Darkness
Frosty walked out
of Ruth's bedroom into the adjoining living room. There was no
door in the door: just an opening. The party wall seemed to be
covered on both sides with the same satiny wall-covering. "Oh
no, it's still undulating!" he said out loud as he stared
at the eastern wall of the living room. He started to feel
dizzy.
The Girl
With the Beautiful Yams
The marijuana was
a fragrant Christmas-tree variety (pine-green with dark red buds
embedded in it) very expensive and very classy. Veronica
slithered off the desk, and leaned out the window to admire his
view of New York City. "What a gorgeous view! It's
panoramic!" she exclaimed.
I thought someone
had sneaked into my room and was now sitting at the foot of my
bed. The person smelled like coconut-oil. I assumed that I was
hallucinating. I groped for my glasses. They were bent out of
shape, and the plastic UniFit bridge was missing. My eyes were
fogged over from the previous night's drunkenness, and the
perspective through my glasses was skewed. I had to look at the
person a couple times before I recognized her as Tammi Honig.
"Hi, Billy," she said in a perky, matter-of-fact tone
of voice
On the
Beach
We followed a
circuitous route to Asbury Park along potholey highways that
always had signs directing us to the Garden State Parkway (but
we never actually saw the Parkway itself.) We stopped just once,
at an isolated 7-11 in the midst of an invisible but foreboding
swamp. Tammi and I stood in the brightly-lit entrance to the
7-11 and listened to a series of eldritch howls being howled
somewhere out in the darkness of the swamp. Tammi said, "It's
the coyotes, I bet. They've finally made it all the way to the
East Coast."
Punk!
Punk! Punk!
I thought I heard
something exploding outside, but I didn't worry. I just assumed
I was hallucinating.
Death to
Karter
Tammi kissed me
on the lips in front of the Eastern Air Shuttle terminal. It was
only a brief lip-peck, but to me it felt like one of those
sparkly, extended, delicious kisses you see in old
black-and-white movies. "Have a great Thanksgiving,"
Tammi said as she gently pushed me out onto the sidewalk. "See
you Saturday."
The Brown
Game
The stadium fell
completely silent. I could actually hear a city bus grinding its
gears on a steep city street across the Harlem River, in the
Spuyten Duyvil section of the Bronx.
A Five Ton
Block of Bleachable Beef Tallow
"Are these
blocks expensive?" I asked her as I moved closer to the
block of fat to get a closer look. The fat was quite beautiful:
it had the lambent opalescence of fine marble. I saw why we talk
about steak being "marbled with fat." The guard
glowered threateningly at me and began moving his hand towards
his gun, so I backed away from the block of fat.
Not
Suitable for Our Needs at This Time
Mostly though,
the Orange Bowl was sinister because of its logo: a gigantic,
anthromorphized, cold-eyed, evilly-grinning orange that always
reminded me of something I might see on a bad acid trip. This
was one psychopathic-looking orange: I'm talking about the kind
of orange that goes on serial-killing rampages, the kind of
orange that would deliberately inject itself with mercury.
We Live By
Night
Matt wanted to
talk about Course Guide business. (We hadn't had a chance to sit
down since we came back from winter vacation.) But I (probably
rather annoyingly) replied, "Oh, right now, the Course
Guide just seems like a tiny speck of immaterial reality within
the materiality of the larger metareality, if you know what I
mean, the larger metareality of the universe as a whole."
Feeling
Blue
A delicate
pearly-gray haze hung over the Hudson River. "See that
fog?" I said enthusiastically. "That's part of a
sphere of thoughts, dreams, ideas, and whatnot created by the
collective mental processes of all us sentient beings here on
earth. You can only actually see it right at dawn, but it's
always there." (I was bullshitting, of course: the haze was
just a normal morning fog.) "This is the NOOSPHERE!"
The Bells
of Corpus Christi
Instead of going
straight to the BHR vestibule, we made a slight detour. We
turned right instead of left at the gateway, and sat on a bench
in front of a statue of a peplos-clad virgin who was carrying a
javelin. The statue was seriously corroded. "Acid rain,"
Tammi explained. "I feel kind of guilty about this,
personally, since most of the acid in the acid rain here in New
York comes from smokestacks in Detroit."
No
Stravinsky During the Tea-Party
I handed her the
present, but first she made me sit on the bed beside her, and
she put her arm around me. We sat together for about half an
hour without doing anything except munching Passover matzos.
What I
Can't Feel
"This is
total crap. I've read Hallmark greeting cards that were better
than this. I mean, take an image like 'The fog came in on little
cat feet.' That's sentimental garbage: it doesn't tell the
truth, and moreover it just isn't very good. Even Dylan Fyfe
could do better than that."
Zelda's
Fountain
I could see her
reflection, but I couldn't see my own. I wanted to say
something, but I could not speak.
Ghost
Train
Tammi was
sleeping next to the softly-rumbling typewriter, with her head
resting against the table. I examined her face carefully. Most
people look peaceful when they're sleeping, but tonight Tammi
looked even more troubled than she usually did while awake.
Exam Week
I hadn't been
listening very intently to Byron's and Genevieve's conversation:
instead I had been staring up at the REINHOLD NIEBUHR PLACE
street-sign below the regular W 120 STREET sign. I was trying to
remember who Reinhold Niebuhr was. Genevieve looked up and saw
the same pair of street-signs. "Let Reinhold Niebuhr worry
about Tammi! Whoever the hell he is." Then Byron started to
tell us who he was.
A Joy For
Ever
We spent the rest
of the afternoon wandering around in a seemingly aimless
fashion, dropping small bundles of records and tapes at ugly
doors in some of the scariest Loisaida tenements imaginable.
"Don't worry about the junkies," Charles remarked.
"It's the record reviewers you really have to look out
for."
Victory Is
Within Our Grasp
She was wearing
the same outfit as the night before, but it was wrinkled and
stained. She had a different, muskier smell than usual. She sat
down next to me, and without even saying hello, she abruptly
said "I slept with the Senator last night."
A map of Hawaii
appeared behind the newsreader's head, along with Carter's
smiling face in a box off the coast of the Big Island. Then we
were shown a chart which indicated that Hawaii had finally been
called for Carter: with 96% of the precincts in, he was ahead by
2000 votes.
Morning in
America
This time,
though, the Pinhead's sign just said, "GABBA GABBA",
and Tammi came out, also dressed in a red and white smock (but
no mask), carrying a sign which said "HEY!" The crowd
went nuts: I had been to a dozen or so Ramones show by this
point, but I had never heard such Gabba Gabba Heying.
Or, you could get my book from your
local bookstore. In the USA, you can locate an independent
bookstore in your area (or in someone else's area for that matter)
by checking out: BookSense.com
And of course you can also get the book from a
ubiquitous chain such as Borders
or Barnes
& Noble.
One of my friends from the period depicted in The
Forgotten Liars, the actress and screenwriter Catherine
Lloyd Burns, has just published a memoir entitled It Hit Me
Like a Ton of Bricks. It covers some of the same
ground as my book, though it's mostly about what happened before
and after. For me, and for my fictional alter ego, the
early 1980s were an amusing adventure. For Cathy Burns, it
was the low point of her life. In any case, please buy and
read her book!
I definitely hope to make some personal appearances at
bookstores, etc. in the future, and I would of course have books for
sale at such events. If you have any questions email me.
In
June 2005, I donated five copies to the 2005 Northfield
Mount Hermon School annual alumni auction. I (or— more
accurately— the winning bidders) raised $450.00 for NMH.
I was only going to donate one copy, but I brought a few extra with
me to my 30th reunion, and one thing led to another...
Retail:
The best way to get my book is from a local independent
bookseller (or failing that, a chain store such as Borders,
WaldenBooks
or Barnes
& Noble will do just fine in a pinch.) Many independent
bookstores belong to an excellent consortium called BookSense
. In many cases, you can order any book in print, mine included,
from the store's website, and of course you can always simply visit
or telephone the store. Here are a few of the stores:
If the store doesn't have my book in stock, simply give
them the ISBN (1-4134-5442-9), etc. above and they will be happy to
track it down. (See below for comments on wholesale
sales.) The list price is $28.99. I know that's not cheap, but it's
worth it! The books are (generally) printed as needed (hence the term
"Print on Demand"), and are very nicely produced trade
paperbacks; if you are in Europe, your book can be printed in
Britain.
On-Line
Booksellers:
There are many
places where my book is available on-line. The best way, from my
perspective, is for you to order it directly from Xlibris. (I get the
largest royalty that way.) Go to this web page to buy my book:
I must confess that I know less than I ought to about
the mechanics of ordering books wholesale. The simplest way to get
the book for your book store is to order it from the Ingram
Book Company, a leading book wholesaler. Baker
& Taylor is another wholesaler which carries my book. The
books will usually be printed by Lightning
Source, using print-on-demand technology. The quality of the
printing is as good as or better than most trade paperbacks on the
shelf at your local bookstore. Many of those books are printed using
the same technology as mine.
My book is also available from Xlibris.
The Order Department's email address is orders@xlibris.com.
You can also telephone them at +1 (888) 795 4274 (toll-free from
North America only) or at +1 (215) 923 4686 (from anywhere on Planet
Earth, as well as from the Space Station Mir.)
Other
Stuff:
Check out my "Other
Works" page for more stuff you can buy which I contributed
to (if only in a small way.)
I may occasionally be selling stuff on SecondLife.
My main avatar's name is "Timothy Zapotocky." I can refer
you for membership if you want to be referred. If you are interested
in being referred, log onto:
Please make your request as a brief text or HTML email
(though it is OK to attach an image as long as there is also text
which says what the email is about) with as few misspellings as
possible. The main thing I need is your email address.
(NOTE: Not
that spammers are going to pay any attention to this, but please note
that this email address was put up there for a very specific purpose,
which has nothing to do with the usual BS which spam is about. The
same goes for your email address, should you send it to me. See my
Spam
Pagefor more
info.)
In
1979 Billy McEwan met Tammi
Honig. He does not save her life, but perhaps she saves his. Thanks
to her, he enjoys (or experiences, at least) many adventures on New
York's Morningside Heights, back in the days when the City was still
dangerous, dirty, and romantic, back in the days of punk rock, Thai
stick, and Checker cabs. His adventures eventually lead him beyond
the boundaries of the Upper West Side. He ventures far south of West
72nd Street and far north of West 125th Street, even as far afield as
the San Fernando Valley...
In
June 2005, I donated five copies to the 2005 Northfield
Mount Hermon School annual alumni auction. I (or— more
accurately— the winning bidders) raised $450.00 for NMH.
I was only going to donate one copy, but I brought a few extra with
me to my 30th reunion, and one thing led to another...
as well as the 
Amazons.
