By admin 
On the table in my room, cigarettes, knife, notebook, 7 P.M. I sit down to write so my head don’t blow up. Perhaps you know my things, my little song. Well, we got this far, now we’re going to have to wait till the memories die off to start again.
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Days, the wind is your enemy. You get disconnected from your building, wind gonna flip you over. Wind more than 25 m.p.h. you don’t go up. Feel that wind, think about your family. Without wind it’s heaven up there, just you and the windows, you don’t hear nothing, the quiet is, the quiet is a new city. I prefer to be up there looking in at people all day inside tipatap tipatap tipatap. I had a partner fell nine hundred feet—his cable broke. That’s not supposed to happen.
Cockroaches. Nest in your coffee filters. Ever alert. Do they like you? In light, they shock then shoot like stars. In dark, they nonexist. You know the big hotels have a nondisclosure agreement with their exterminators.
Once I was seated next to Rudolf Nureyev and squeezed his thigh, which felt like marble. Andy snapping flash pictures of everyone, then Andy and the queen at the next table got in a debate about whose boyfriend had bigger pecs. They bet the meal on it. Buttons were loosed. Andy won. All those girls are dead now. It was a giddy planet, not enough oxygen.
I used to hammer my own meat hooks when we first got the shop—it’s a beautiful thing, a properly made meat hook—and the metal canopy too, to shield our meat from sun. There were packing houses all up and down this street. Here’s a joke: I came here 1968 when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague and guess who’s throwing me out of my building now? A Russian developer!
We were technically squatters. Howard said “orchid of intimacy.” Howard was writing a poem a day then, I seemed to bring it out in him. I’d had crushes before but this was falling stars and jellyfish for me. We took turns showering by emptying buckets of water on each other. Howard was having trouble giving up Rick but he said I looked like Jane Bowles. Later he couldn’t shower standing up, I had to find a wooden stool with arms.
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I come into your life as a flash, I’m gentle, polite and versatile, an historian and man of letters and albeit I’ve created a vital new literary form and written some things will last as long as the English language, it’s also true I smell and when I visit Knopf they have me sit on the windowsill so I don’t get lice on their chairs. Genius isn’t contagious, I tell them.
The unbearable boredom of animals. Tracing the meaning of horsepower. Four or five horses placed one each side of the boat on a circular treadmill turned by cogs and wheels to which they were hitched. By forward movement of their feet they’d turn the wheel, propel the boat, facing always the same direction, let’s say they live seventeen or eighteen years. They do not laugh or weep or see the Hudson plunging past. They do not scoff to hear someone on deck talking about his consciousness, the problem of consciousness.
I’m afraid now. New York don’t help me. David Byrne don’t help me. Traffic control don’t help me. Cupcakes don’t help me. My hybrid vehicle don’t help me. Six to eight glasses of Icelandic glacier water per day don’t help me. The insane sanctity and maddened madness of ungodly godlike Ahab don’t help me. The clear eyes of pigs don’t help me. The gift of fire don’t help me. Rock ’n’ roll don’t help me. Alas, O my soul! Rock ’n’ roll don’t help anyone anymore.
December sun going down, a little dark on the street but coming in the daytime you get off the train, you follow directions, you’re fine then at night there’s something different, out of place, you could be anything, you could be a cop, a target, you could be anything. Go past our old building, visit the doorman, his name is Claude. Everybody loved Claude. What we do as human beings, we’re constantly finishing ourselves, that’s why when I hear some Jeremiah wail on about vanishing New York, I’m like, Dude, that’s the way it is, this is the bargain we made. It’s ever of us. They were saying the same in the eighteen-forties. It’s pain and joy and high and low and soft and hard and rats and cupcakes and boom boom boom boom hello dusk. What is dusk? Dusk reinstates the vague; redistributes your contemplation; resolves matter into phantasms that rove your mind; estranges you from your present self into a hush, into a hustle, into a darkness you can lean on.