Memories. 14th St in the 60s and 70s. Endless employment places seeking casual laborers. Places offering to buy a pint of your blood. Luchows with its great lentil soup and the scale at the entrance where Diamond Jim Brady used to weigh himself before and after he ate.
Bob Whalen took Joco’s advice and found himself a girlfriend who emerged from the St Marks Free Clinic, Jean Mallizia (or sometimes it was Farshtey). Formerly property of the Hells Angels, she had just been cured of the clap. She had developed a pus filled infection of her fallopian tubes that had beaten any that they had seen before. Jean though would not join him when he eventually left for a job in Iran. We found out later that this was because she was vastly underage. You wouldn’t imagine, a young woman stacked as she was, to be underage.
Jean couldn’t seem to be able to hold down a job and so she moved in with us for a while. She then got a job as a yoga sensitivity instructor at the Pink Pussycat at 14th and 2nd Ave. She would wash out her uniform by hand and leave it to dry in our bathroom. Not that there was much to wash. It was the skimpiest uniform I have ever seen. Some might be ungenerous enough as to call her a prostitute. She was emphatic though that she always lit incense in front of a statue of the Buddha before she had sex. One of her customers was, she said, a very charming professor from CCNY who was in his 80s.
Jean then met Mike Parzini. He came from a family of sculptors who had been scultors in Florence Italy since the dark ages. The parents lived in Old Bethpage. His father, Archie Parzini, told me that it had taken him 20 years to learn how to properly sculpt the human hand. Mike’s sister had become a cripple as a result of a car accident and his brother was retarded. It was thus up to Mike to carry on the family tradition. Unfortunately, Mike had become a junky.
Jean moved in with Mike. They lived in a hotel at 7th Ave and 14 St where every inhabitant seemed to be a dope fiend. The walls were paper thin and you could hear everything that went on to the sides of you and in the rooms on top of you as well as below you. The husband of one of the women living there was on methadone. This has the unfortunate effect of depressing the libido. She got so horny that she offered to pay her husband $20 to fuck her. He could not come for the longest time and the metal bedframe made an incredible racket, keeping the whole hotel awake. When he finally came, there was applause from virtually the whole hotel. At last, they were going to be able to go to sleep. He then demanded his $20 from his wife. She told him to go and fuck himself.
Yes, 14th St has memories for me
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