Wandering through the ether of a NY Cafe toilet

It's Summer, 1962. In France students were claiming themselves Marxists and anti-imperialists and setting fire to the streets. Meanwhile the cats in down town New York were Snorting pretty patterns into impact clouds of speed off cheap plastic table cloths and fucking each other stupid to a soundtrack of empathy. And that's what I had heard from my domestic cradle in Kansas, so I had quit that scene and travelled half the country on various boxcars with shamanistic hobo dropouts for company. Dropouts who would tear away the normality of the quotidian night with the beautiful freak ballads of their wild lives whilst burning beans on their tincan fires. And I had ended up here. It was 7.15pm on the 3rd of June. I had arrived an hour ago and sat down int he first dump I could find that would sell me a cheap hot drink. Now I was a stranger from a small country town stuck on the wrong side of a big city where I didn't belong. I had a buck fifty in my pockets and nowhere to sleep.

I hadn't eaten all day and the moonshine I had bummed of a bum tasted like bum. My hands were clammy and my mouth was full of cotton balls. And perhaps I could've just sucked the sweat off my knuckles - quenching my thirst and drying my hands all at once, but I cared far too less to give a shit. Plus I would've probably got thrown out and it wasn't exactly warm outside. All I had left to live for was sex. And rock and roll. And drugs. And Cars. And Dr Pepper. And playing it like a true free spirit on the edge of society with no respect for the man and a pocket full of burnt out tooth-picks. I stared at the plain dumb face of the waitress in the two bit café that I had would up in and I told her to bring me some more of her filthy coffee. The bitch turned face into her scumbag kitchen and as she did I took the hip flask from my slacks, drained the acrid chemicals clean and dropped the bottle onto the chess tiled floor. They burnt like the reality of being a tortured artist deadbeat poet anti-hero hobo rebel in a classic American counter culture beatnik novel who was full of rage. And it tasted good.

She returned from behind the curtain. The coffee cost 80 cents, leaving me with a meagre 70 cents to go on with. As she went back across the chess board to her till I figured that I could probably find a downtown shop front to collapse in for a couple of hours before I went to find Ernie and the boys to lend me some bread. Man. So thats what I did. And If you don't like it you can get in the cue with the rest of the sad sack square asshole despots that make life the uphill mass produced escalator that it is. And no I won't write back to your stiffly worded letter, cos I'm too busy living.

ANON "Letter to no-one" Written onto the wall of the men's toilet in a cafe in Greenwich Village. 1962.