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The New Journalism,
The Participatory Search for
Ink and Kink,
Living It Up to Write It Down…
CBGB 1977!
(Hunting the Wild Mapplethorpe Model)
The media call it “Punk Rock” and to me punking always meant fucking. I got my curiosity through the New York Times and from hanging out with sickboy Mapplethorpe who was all over his punk diva, that poetic Patti Smith girl who was actually happening. So I figured to check it out. The clubs are a gonzo dream for a New Journalist in search of kink and ink. Editors pay by the column inch for reportage any man would do for free in the underground world of black leather, rock ‘n’ roll, and sex. Mixed with art and cameras, social devolution is only interesting served raw before it becomes pure style on the runways and in the malls. CBS News got a boner showing a clip of “punk dancing” which to me looked like a lot of fighting, punching, and kick-boxing with a beat. So I split out of Mapplethorpe’s loft where I was staying on Bond Street, fucking with him among his cameras and curios, and exited by Bleecker Street and headed to the bottom of the Bowery, stepping over for crissakes winos cadging tourists for bottles of Tawny Port.
Somewhere in the middle of all this lower New York garbage, Time tells tourists, and Mapplethorpe tells me, lies CBGB, the hole-in-the-wall capital of Punk Rock. CBGB stands for “Country/Blue Grass/Blues.” Shit. Those initials long ago lost their meaning. CBGB is closer now to heeby-jeeby with a gothic-mod crowd that downshifts the concept of fabou to a new low cool. So no wonder Mapplethorpe, Hasselblad in hand, mentioned to keep an eye open for models if I met anyone with a “Look.”
Outside CBGB, a Bowery drunk and his three pals were tossing up cookies in the doorway. (Hey, man, New Journalism reportage is what it is about! And punk is about the Stuff of the Night. Fluids. Sex. Blood. Art. And other outrageous dark voodoo that scares Mom and Pop like the inside of CBGB). I stumbled in through the gloom over loose floorboards, tripping on gigantic roaches, and plopped my ass into a wobbly chair made in a correctional facility for terminal assholes, trying to see the goddam stage. Outside, the Bowery Bum Ballet had sounded like all four faces on Mount Retchmore doing an upchuck quartet. Inside, CBGB was stirring like a morgue of necrophiliacs anticipating a hot autopsy.
Tonight. On stage. Live. Sort of. Was appearing the punk rock group, SMEGMA 4SKINZ.
Looking around, I saw weirdos. I mean young, young, young weirdos. Before hippies, people didn’t get weird till maybe twenty-five or thirty. These babies were born weird. All of them, not old enough to grow a moustache, looked cloned out of what was left of James Dean. They had deadwhite faces made up over black leather jackets.
Fuck. Gimme an empty table. Quick.
To my right sat Fan Tan Fanny. One fan came out of her crotch and spread out over her tiny chest. The second fan came out of her ass and reached up and across her pale shoulders where the two fans joined, baring her mortuary sides. Her small dead breasts dangled forward as she leaned to light her Camel from the table candle.
She was no apprentice nymphomaniac.
The guy behind me was no guy to have behind me. He was a burnt-out twenty-two, 6’2”, and 300 of the ugliest pounds this side of a fat man’s amputated left leg. His tit-length beard, parted in the middle, spread out to two sticky points. His shaved head was covered with Day-Glo green bristle. His tits, his nose, and his left ear were pierced. The lobe stretched, like something out of National Geographic, halfway down his neck. Through the hole in his lobe he had stuck a big, corked test tube. Inside the test tube crawled two live cockroaches.
Suddenly the stage was lit. The houselights dimmed to black. A deafening hum buzzed feedback from the speakers on either side of the floor. A disembodied voice announced, “Ladies and Gentlemen! SMEGMA 4SKINZ!”
As the stage lights blazed bright, then down, something dark pulled up a chair to my table. In the candlelight, I saw he was young and leathered. Our eyes met. Some fucking enchanted evening. His face had the tough hollow look Jim Morrison had perfected in that bathtub in Paris. He took out a Gauloises Blondes. I struck a match. He moved his face to the flame. The cigarette dangled. He inhaled and sort of grunted thanks. I dropped the lit match into his leather crotch. Our thighs touched side-by-side under the table. He smiled and licked his lips. He sucked on a cut across his knuckles. “I punched a guy,” he said. He held out his bloody fingers. “Want a taste?”
“SMEGMA sucks,” I said.
“Mr. Gauloises” smiled and snorted his agreement. I checked him out again. He looked at me as if he were asking for something I knew I had.
The music was too loud to make normal conversation.
On stage, Pontius and Pilate, the leaders of SMEGMA 4SKINZ, were laying out their opening number. Pontius Smegma wore a blue ski jacket and stretch pants. He stood stage-rear moving his hands without any particular effect up and down on a synthesizer. He made elevator Muzak sound like the Pachelbel “Canon in D.” Pilate Smegma’s leather jacket was torn to shreds. How the fuck can anyone tear up a leather jacket? His black Korvette’s $1.98 wig slipped to his stencilled eyebrows as he struggled to look EVIL.
“Sixty-nine Cumshots!” Pilate Smegma shouted, then hit himself in the side of the face with the microphone torn from its stand. POW! “Sixty-nine Cumshots! SIXTY-NINE CUMSHOTS!” He screamed. Then POW! POW! POW! Slamming himself in the side of the face.
“WHAT’S YOUR NAME?” I yelled into Mr. Gauloises’ ear.
“You can call me ‘Bryl.’”
Behind his nose ring, he looked like his parents called him “Buddy.”
I pretended not to hear him and leaned over for another listen using his right thigh to support my weight. I pressed hard. Very hard. “Did you say ‘Bryl’?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said “A little dab’ll do ya. Brylcreme. But nobody ever calls me ‘Mr. Creme.’”
Crissakes. This kid was straight out of the Toob.
The music was maxing. The crowd was rushing the stage for a taste of SMEGMA. The bleeding performer was alternating his mike from his mouth to his asshole, jamming it for a few hot licks into the faces worshiping him. Before he could sing another chorus of “I Wanna Eat Your Load,” I asked Bryl, “You want to go out for a good smoke?”
We shouldered our way to the door. A Testosterone Case with Popeye forearms stamped our hands as we left. Stepping over the bum and his pals lying in their puke-o-rama, we headed into the alley behind the club. It smelled of piss. We ignored the skag servicing the suit.
“Okay, Mr. Creme. What’s your real story?”
He looked at me like a naughty cocker spaniel who just shit on the rug and expected the Sunday Times across his ass. I reached for his leather lapels. His right hand shot up and grabbed mine. The back of his hand was angry, red, and blistered with fresh cigarette burns.
Terrific. Another creature from Alpha Centauri.
I shook his hand away and slapped him across the face. He went down like shot snot. He knelt in the bum piss and clutched my knees like the Saving Cross and whimpered. I grabbed the shoulder of his jacket, unsnapped the epaulets and using them as handles, forced the punkfucker’s shoulders back up against the wall. He grabbed my foot and put the sole of my boot square against his chest. Lordy! Make me a footstool at thy feet! Taking his cue, I crushed him against the wall. His tongue stuck out wet and sticky licking the toe of my boot.
For something in his youth or childhood, he deserved, or thought he deserved, the kind of thing I got to give. I could see a bulge rising in his tight Levi’s. My own cock was at fighting stance. (What do authorities mean about sex and violence. Sex is violence. These days.) Outpunking this punk was not a problem. He reached for his fly held closed by six big safety pins. I scraped my boot down, knocking his hand away.
“Mine,” I said. “Me. Me. Me. Mine. Asshole!”
With trembling hands he reached up and unlatched my Harley belt. Slowly he popped open my buttons. He lowered my jeans to my knees. Who the fuck wears underwear? My cock sprang out toward his face. I was gonna have me my first genuine certified punk mouth. I slapped him once more, just for the bloody good juice of it. “Not so fast.” I spit on him. When in Punkdom, do as the punks do. “We got all night. Go slow. Treat it nice.”
Bryl reinvented the blowjob. He had an all-pro tongue. Every few seconds he raised his mournful eyes to check if he was licking me all right. I sneered my best Presley sneer-of-death. Elvis would have liked my version of his style.
Gradually, Bryl worked his way to my roots. He sucked long and steady. I was almost this side of cuming when suddenly goddam coughing came from my left. The soylent green bums had found their way into the alley for more puke time in the old corral. I pulled up my jeans. “Later,” I said.
We showed our stamped hands to Mr. Testosterone at the CBGB door. SMEGMA had finished trying and a new group was on stage. A table opened up. We sat thigh to thigh.
“Hey, Fuckers! Meet PLUGG AND THE DRAIN BOYS!”
The crowd managed a cheer. Yay. Yay. Who the fuck are THE DRAIN BOYS? They looked like abortions that got away. The guitar-punk wore a tight dog collar. A safety pin dangled from his ear. The lead singer, Plugg, was meditating, masturbating, waiting his cue, stripped to the waist, ropes of drool hanging from his mouth to his muscular belly. Suddenly he sprang to his dead feet and started the song: “Why do I wanna fuck you Girls when your dog is so mean Girls I don’t wanna hold your gland Girls I’m talkin about a plan Girls I don’t really want you Girls I need sex Yeah Baby I NEED SEX!” (This shit is copyright 1977 by Plugg Drain Music.)
Bryl and I looked at each other. Suddenly, because everything happens suddenly in the punk world, Plugg threw himself from the stage into the audience, landing on our table. Our two bottles of beer crashed to the floor. We kicked him the shit away just for the fuck of it and he crawled back onto the stage toward the drums. He stuck his head inside the bass drum to really hear a few hot beats then threw himself onto the floor again, flopping like the beached fish at the end of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.
Again, suddenly, another punk from the audience dashed for the stage. Just as suddenly the vicious-looking DRAIN BOYS drummer rose from behind his drums, and with his sticks in his thick mitts played twelve bars of “Bolero” on the punk’s face. The entire CBGB broke into a mosh scrum of flailing fists and screams. The punk, who now knew “Bolero” by heart, was hum-wiping his bleeding face across the safety-pinned tits of a tattooed earth-mother punkette. Fan Tan Fanny ran trailing her rear fan along the floor. Behind us, glass shattered.
“You want to blow this joint?” I asked.
“What?”
“Are you ready for your close-up?”
I pulled Bryl to the door.
“Wait a minute,” he said. Outside, he dropped his jeans, squatted, parted his cheeks, grunted twice, and dumped a load on the heeby-jeeby sidewalk. Street light showed off bone structure and boner and butt.
We walked east through the meanest part of the Village. Bryl’s punk-patrol attitude made anyone we passed choose to think we were invisible. We reached the East River. No problem. I turned to Bryl. “Okay,” I said. “Now where were we? Oh yeah. Now your little dab’ll do me. Do me!”
He stood mute.
I punched him in the stomach as hard as I could. He turned green. I could see that puke-look a guy gets in his crossed eyes, so I grabbed him by his greasy hair and held his head over the water in the dark river below. Why the fuck mess up one more nice city sidewalk? He up-chucked straight beer. This kid was gonna end up back in the Bowery, but right now he was in bloom and hot. “You and the night and the sewage,” I said. He sank to his knees, lapping at my crotch like the East River lapped at the cement wall below us. God! I felt poetic. I also felt hard again. “Stop!” I said.
He looked up at me, his mouth still around my cock like a punk choirboy caught on the fourth note of “O Holy Night.” I slapped him hard and he let go. “Turn around,” I said.
He opened his mouth to speak. I raised my hand. He obeyed. “Drop your jeans.”
He reached for his belt and dropped his trousers. “Now, boy, down like a dog.” He went down on all fours.
“Bryl,” I said, “they should call you ‘Doggy.’” I steered my cock straight toward his asshole. Was he ready? Is Flushing in New York? I plunged in. Surprise. He was tighter than I expected. Good. New punk. I pumped him harder. Car lights flashed by. His butthole bloomed. New York rose bright all around us in the dark. His ass had talent a camera would love. His mouth was chanting fuck-me-fuck-me. I pulled out. He thought I was finished. He had another thought to think. I pushed him down further. “Okay, Bryl baby, daddy’s gonna teach his doggie a new trick.”
A shiver ran down his spine. He wagged his butt. Somewhere in the summer night conga music floated on the fucka-fucka air.
I rubbed my hand through the thick Brylcreme in his hair, then held it at his mouth. “Slobber on it,” I said.
Without question he slurped my hand. The mix of beerpuke, saliva, and punk grease lubed my fist just fine.
He whined “I can’t take that.” He nursed a small brown bottle of poppers.
“Don’t play Brer Rabbit with me.” I pushed my middle finger into his asshole. “Easy,” I said. “You’re easy.” I slipped in my ring finger. “Greasy.” Then my index finger. “Sleazy.” He moaned. I reached under with my other hand and pulled his butt back to me by his balls. He had a safety pin stuck through his cock. Sirens screamed over the rumble of traffic. My pinky slipped in. “Cheesy.” His butthole snapped at my knuckles. I bent my thumb across my palm and drove my fist home to the wrist. The suction of his butt pulled my arm in deeper. I braced my boots.
“What you on?” I said.
He made whining sobs. Music to my ears.
“You underestimate yourself,” I said. “Big punks don’t cry.”
He whined again, but his butt suctioned like a sump and my fist turned a slow 180 to the right and a faster 180 left. Oh yeah. I punchfucked him loose. He liked it. I yanked out my fist and stroked my hard cock, listening to him pleading fuck-me-fuck-me. The night was hot. I spit on my dick and wrapped my fist around it. His butt pucker made little kiss-kiss-kissy sounds flirting with my cock. Like a hand grenade, I jammed my fist, full of my dick, into the ventriloquist lips of his butt. His fruit juicy young hole was punk perfect. His internal heartbeat pulsated around my forearm. I humped away, moving my fist inside his asshole jerking off my dick inside my fist inside his butt. Hell, I even let the guy jerk at himself. And, oh God, how he pulled, his ass-ring tightening down harder on my fist and cock till suddenly we both suddenly shot off suddenly together arching up in shouts and juice and rapture into the noise and light of the brilliant New York night that left CBGB down below like a dot on a grid.
God bless participatory journalism.
I kicked him down on the sidewalk. “You been fistfucked, punk.”
“It hurt.”
“What’s your point?”
“I liked it.”
“No shit!”
He licked my greasy hand and looked up at me. “You want to go back to CBGB?”
“Fuck that noise.”
We cleaned up with a rubber hose at a faucet outside a warehouse. In the lamplight, I figured next day I’d take Bryl back to meet Mapplethorpe at his studio.
“You ever modeled for a photograph?” I asked.
“I can’t show my face.”
“It ain’t about your face, Fist Boy.”
On our way back to the West Village, we saw two girls on a stoop. When we passed, they looked up. One of them pointed.
“Mira, Juanita, mira!” she said. “Los punks! Los punks!”