Free Waterfront Journals by David Wojnarowicz Page B

little slow since the convention in Portland. My son is out of the army and finally off drugs … he’s not so much a problem anymore … my wife still gets angry as hell but I don’t know what to say to him. I mean he’s working fairly regularly, drives a cab, starts around midnight and works till six o’clock in the morning … we hardly have words these days because when he gets home around seven he goes right upstairs and hits the sack. Some nights he’ll get into an all-night card game with the fellas down at the taxi stand … I can’t get angry with him … I mean, I don’t know what he’s been going through … he used to be a beautiful kid, long hair and built like an athlete. Now he’s gained weight he’s up to 250 pounds and lays around most of the time drinking beer but he does work. He rides in the car I bought him two years ago … god you should see that car now, what a mess, the two sides dented in like a nutcracker squeezed them, the back fenders hanging off and some days the backseat is piled up to the rear ledge with beer cans. My wife gets really upset because she’s home all day. My daughter, she’s a real doll, she’s a sophomore in college now, she’s engaged to this terrific young fella who’s with RCA … the two of them flew off for a week to the Keys together …
    Work has been slow for me since the beginning of the year. I feel bad because I’m not pulling my share of the load … it’s just that there’s so much mental activity holding me back … I try to stay away from the city … I’ve been pretty successful with doing so … I mean I walk down Forty-second Street and I’m sad to say it’s changed so much since ten years ago. I can remember that in the summer of ’69 you could walk down the block and there were all these beautiful kids hanging out … now they’re all addicts and in gangs looking to rob you … but occasionally I still go to the bars in the upper Forties … they have some great music and the dancing kids are really wild, good-looking kids and they move in a great way. But I don’t go for the sex in those places … it’s like two minutes in some smelly dark cabinet and there goes thirty bucks. Where I live I have some wild times … there’s young boys in their late teens, sixteen or seventeen, hitchhiking all over the place and a lot of them are into sex … it’s really something I mean I have to keep telling myself that I’m a man with responsibilities … I have an outstanding job and a wonderful family … I really can’t afford to get arrested. I’d lose it all yet I can’t help it … I mean it’s so simple to go for a drive … after I pick one of these kids up I work in four sex words into the conversation. There’s this one kid who goes to high school just a mile from where I work. I picked him up hitchhiking one time and three minutes later we were in the parking lot of my job in the backseat making love to each other. I’ve seen him a couple of times a week for a while but I guess he’s decided to end it … he hasn’t shown up in three weeks … I drive over to the school every now and then and wait for a half hour or so but I guess he’s not going to show up …

Guy on Fourteenth Street 3:00 A.M.
    NEW YORK CITY
    I got busted once while I was in my apartment doin acid. I lived in this building that had an intercom but if somebody buzzed I’d just ring em in without askin who they were so the buzzer rang and I pressed the button and two cops in plain clothes came in. They flashed their narc badges and one of them said: We busted Daniel tonight and found your name in his telephone book. Now I really had balls that night … I said: Look man if you ain’t got a search warrant get the fuck outta here and they were pissed but left.