Chapter Fifteen
Joe's inner alarm went off when Jenny asked just after they awoke on Sunday, "Maybe you could score some dope before work." The alarm had words in them, "Weekend junkie."
He spoke them aloud. "Jenny, I went through the same thing."
"What thing?"
"I'll just shoot up on the weekend. No big deal. It's an insidious thing, dope. How many thousands have said the same thing to themselves? Weekends always spread to weekdays and then every day because you need to get high to get straight."
"We won't even be able to get any when we tour," Jenny practically whined.
Joe sighed. It wasn't like he couldn't hear that demoness heroin whispering in his ear as well. "I knew it was a bad idea."
"Please?"
"Fine."
"Yay!"
Joe could only shake his head.
He'd brought the kit along and got her off in the downstairs women's toilet at Max's after work, convenient because she had to poop after, the little bit of kid's laxative cut affecting her. Him too as it turned out, and he went to the neighboring men's room.
Afterwards they walked despite hours on their feet and like they had that first time, all the way downtown to their apartment. Joe checked the afterhours club along the way but perhaps being Sunday (or Monday morning) it was closed. Neither of them really cared. The dope was good, added to by a joint they shared along the way. The cocaine influence, borrowed from the upstairs bartender, had been subsumed by the sweet and somehow intense calm of the heroin. They both nodded over their coffee and sandwiches at a diner, the waitress waking them when she plopped down the check. Joe paid, adding a hefty tip before the two continued their walk.
In the apartment, neither could Joe get fully hard nor Jenny get all that wet, so they cuddled naked.
"It's just too good, Joe," said Jenny.
"I know," Joe sighed.
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Joe awoke too early Wednesday still tired from working at Max's every night since Thursday, having replaced one of the waiters wanting nights off.
"Get up, lazybones," Carol insisted, which made Joe laugh despite himself.
"I'm awake!" Joe reported.
"Bitch," Jenny muttered.
"You can keep getting your beauty sleep bitch," said Carol. "Go shower and dress but make it quick, Joe."
"Yes boss."
He got up naked and displaying a piss hard-on, his pubic hair tacky with the juices of Jenny, who'd woke up horny when he got home, Joe insisting he wear condoms again, Jenny pouting but understood. They'd already been a bit dangerous about that, the rhythm method being their excuse, but neither wanted to push their luck, especially Jenny.
Once ready, he and Carol headed to Canal Street to grab a cab for the long and expensive ride to a bus rental place in Long Island just past Queens. It was a short bus thankfully, but Joe, volunteered as driver, still had to get used to it. They stopped at Connie's and Sue Anne's place since it was sort of on the way, the rest of the troupe except Gio and Pete, another gay dancer, converged at the studio to be picked up there. The men had headed up the evening before in a U-Haul truck, Pete being the volunteer truck driver, the truck with the furniture serving as the set for the dance along with their costumes and programs for the show. Joe made his way slowly and carefully through heavy traffic.
The troupe grabbed their choices of various kinds of bagels in a sack which Carol had bought along with little tubs of cream cheese. All of them managed to get some coffee to go. Joe, the strippers and Carol had already managed to have their breakfast along the way.
There wasn't as much traffic once out of the city thankfully, most of it heading the other way. A couple hours driving, they arrived at Bard, heading to the Annandale Inn where most of them would stay. What Joe and the rest of Bard called "Down the Road," Bard's place to drink and dance, had old, small rooms, anything but fancy, but it would serve as a place to sleep.
Most of them because Carol had scored a guest room at Joe's old poetry professor's house near the Inn, across a traffic circle where an old and useless water pump sat incongruously, supposedly referred to in Bob Dylan's song Subterranean Homesick Blues, supposedly about a bust at Bard: "Must bust in early May." And "The pump don't work because the vandals took the handle." The song The Mighty Quinn had been about Sheriff Quinlan supposedly, the author of the bust, and not about Anthony Quinn. Dylan had lived around Woodstock across the Hudson River during the time of the bust supposedly going to Bard to score hot young coeds.
Once Carol got the rooms secured for her troupe, the three headed to Robert Kelly's house where Robert's wife led them to their room. The guest room had a queen sized bed in which Jenny and Joe were invited to stay with Carol. Joe might have read Helen's amusement at the probable threesome. Joe looked at the bed longingly, but Carol had other plans.
"Come on Joe," she insisted.
They headed to Barrytown, ("I know by what you carry that you come from Barrytown"--Steely Dan) basically a single road that went down to the Hudson River and looped back up, the Annandale Inn sitting at the head of the road.
In Barrytown, they passed small houses on the right, stopping at a house midway down, a small graveyard across the street with a field perched high beyond it, a couple horses looking down on them.
Carol knocked on the door of the small modernist wooden house, and a tall, handsome looking and beautiful dark haired woman opened it. Joe had met Susan Quasha, wife of the poet George Quasha, owner of the performance space where the troupe would perform, before. He'd been in the house, Susan showing him the old fashioned presses in the basement, a letter press and a press to create homemade paper. It had been part of a tour involved with the Fiasco workshop headquarted next door where the composer and poet Franz Kamin lived.
After being introduced to Jenny, Gabby bounced up behind Susan. "You're here! Come on!" She guided them downstairs.
Gabby showed Carol proofs, samples of the poster and the program for the group show. The poster ended up being screen printed, something she'd done at home, the size more than anything necessitating it. Three colors, brown for the background room, red for the back of Carol's head (her hair) as well as at the top where the company's name was printed and black for the words at the top and on Carol's head.
The program samples had more to do with the color of the pressed paper as it was the graphics, from brown to red to a beige white, and the printing on it, which colors were printed on it and which weren't needed because of the paper. Carol decided on the beige, the writing much easier to see on it, the beige writing on the darker paper being black on the beige/white.
Like Joe had felt the first time he'd been in that basement, the primitive technology excited him. It seemed in a way essential to being a poet, being so involved in the printing of it. He gravitated to Susan setting type.
"A lot of work," she chuckled.
"I think it's cool," Joe responded. "The type?"
"I go travelling to find it," Susan smiled. "Sometimes I go to Woodstock where a guy makes them for me, but that can be expensive."
"I think about publishing a book of my poetry, whether anyone would even want to publish it, and then I see this, how beautiful it could be, just the paper, and then the design of the type and how it would be set on the page, being in charge of it entirely, and that seems much more...satisfying I guess."
"You should show George your book. He's started Station Hill Press, and a few of the smaller pressings I press here gets distributed under Station Hill. You could come up and help with the printing and the binding."
"I wish I could," Joe responded.
"You live in the City?"
"Manhattan."
"It's not that far. You could take the train up and could stay here or with Franz."
"Tempting."
"Did you bring your book?"
"I did."
"Leave it with me. I'll have George look at it."
"It's my only copy."
"How long are you up here?"
"Through the weekend."
