This guy Eric, who talks so loud we used to call him Ear Ache, came to my Modern Times reading recently, just to start shit, or rather stir up 20 year old shit.

“Marie ShBoom’s coming!” he crowed.

Though Marie’s older than me, we’re both from a time when you could spend most of the night putting makeup on one eye, and if you were doing really well you might make it to the club before last call. Detailed, obsessive, missing the main chance, what they’d call low functioning nowadays though we often came out looking terrific. In 1979, when I was 18, Marie had been my love rival for the attentions of a blues bass player cab driver junkie called Linwood.

I had spotted him at a warehouse party South of Market, before people called it that. Two missing front teeth, a pork pie hat, and a big grin that came from a whole city (Philadelphia), a whole drug, a whole music, and I wanted him. I invited him to a party at my house, on Octavia Street, and he came. I tried to pressure him into sex, but he couldn’t get it up.

“Don’t leave!” I implored.

“Alright” he promised, nonchalantly.

Now I know the current narrative rule is to just say that somebody SAID something, not to dress it up with adjectives like “Implored” or “Nonchalant”, but Linwood and I weren’t big talkers, at least not to each other. He had this great way of walking, the first great street walk I’d ever seen, and I wanted that walk. For our first rendezvous, I waited over an hour for him in the Zimm’s on VanNess, a place that never had anything good to eat and practiced the retro name tagging of wait staff.  I needed a friend to sit with me and get me through that damn hour.

We went to the Foghorn, which is long gone and probably never even had a presence on the web, and Linwood ordered a Gin and Tonic.

“Me too please!” I imitated. We played pinball, really living it up.

We went back to his apartment, near Polk Street, he had cleaned it up just for my first visit, and I needed him. I loved to fuck him. It’s probably the last time I could really fuck, riding him hard until I came for the first time in my life and wanting to go to his bedroom again and again, with just a sliding door between us and the junkies on the living room couch. He always wanted it a little hard, and now that I’m numb and have been full of opiates on more than one occasion I can understand Linwood better, sometimes I wish an 18-year-old me would tackle me out of my sleep.

Linwood had this other, decade-older, girl called Marie ShBoom, who was married. She left a leopardette G-string under the bed and knew how to give cute birthday cards, and we all went ridiculous rounds with each other. Marie, I realize now, was fun. She owned this store, ShBooms. She’d said she’d gotten the capital for the store when she found some diamonds in a box of rags.  She had bad scars on her face because she and Linwood were fucked up and lit a match to see what was wrong with their car battery and it blew up in her face and she had to go to the emergency room, then she kicked in Linwood’s ribs and he had to go to the emergency room, and then I went with him because he had Bobby Tomorrow shoot me up a few too many times and I though we had hepatitis, and on and on it went.

Once I saw Marie with brilliant green hair and was so jealous I wanted to immediately dye my own hair green until I found out it had been a tragic hair dressing mistake, what I though was a trump card on her part was actually a minor loss she’d suffered.

Once Linwood walked into a bar that contained both Marie and I and quickly left.

Ah, life with a junkie, stylish yet dull. Especially after Linwood hit me a couple of time when I shook him out of a nod to get him to pay a cab driver. And the time when he drank a margarita and immediately puked on the table of a (nice) Mexican restaurant wasn’t too romantic either. His main friend in the building was Fast Floyd, who was like a caricature of a terrible person, pale white, jet black rockabilly hair, sporting a cummerbund for the special Fast Floyd gigs Linwood played bass for.

Floyd had a rich pretty girlfriend called Eva Destruction who he’d smack around.

“C’mon, hit me again!” I remember her urging.

She was supposed to be going to SF State, like me, but wouldn’t attend her classes no matter how many times I counseled her to, though I did once see her carrying a couple of books.
At the time, in NYC, a lot of young women were these sort of vampy nurses to stylish junkies ––Johnny Thunders had a coterie of gals in arm socks vying to be near him–– in San Francisco that wasn’t enough for me, and I kept some of my life separate from my Linwood obsession, staying in my own band, The Blowdryers, until my guitarist Susan, who’d been snorting Amyl in her car, lost her keys and climbed up three floors to get into her place before she realized that what she thought was the fire escape was actually the drain pipe, let go, and fell, crushing her body and destroying her guitar playing capability, which was limited in the first place.

I was through with Linwood, but Marie was not, she kept right on imbibing and hanging out with him right up to his last day, about a year ago.

Thanks to Ear Ache, I saw Marie on the corner of Valencia and 20th, right after the reading. It was as close as she could come to attending I guess, and though he’d tried his best to set up a fight, “Marie is PISSED!” I have friends who are younger than our original hatred. She was supposed to be mad after somehow hearing about something I wrote, maybe about the car battery incident, but when I saw her standing on the street with a tenderloin zombie, all I could do was look her right in the eyes with my new and hard earned compassionate gaze. Nothing really matters, after all.

“Marie, I’m scared” Linwood told her the day he died, shivering in some blankets.

“Don’t leave him alone!” she told his associates, but of course, they did, and I’ve still got that walk I worked so hard for, which came from an orphaned musician straight out of Philly who wore a great pair of socks, smooth with raised stripes.

Jennifer Blowdryer got her dumb name from a punk band she sang with in San Francisco, 1979, The Blowdryers. When she put her first book together for Last Gasp, Modern English, people were friendlier if they knew it was Jennifer from the Blowdryers, so the name stuck. Her book, Good Advice for Young Trendy People of All Ages, was published by Manic D Press. She dreams of being a kook lecturer one day, just like Gore Vidal.