Performed by Val Cole

POEM:

“I’m so fucking broke it’s absurd,” Floyd noticed the tear inside his jacket pocket. There are miserable times and there are the best of miserable times. Weeks had gone by and his dog Sue had been eating from the hand that fed him, trolling along on a loose rope. And then gone. Floyd remembered having found Sue running outside the Hermann Park late one night in February. He was sniffing at something lying next to the kiddie railroad tracks, an old muffin or something. He’d lost his tag and was without remorse. “Hey there buddy. Didja find something good?” It wasn’t snowing; it hardly ever did in Houston. But it was cold enough. He looked like a dog named Sue, like the old Johnny Cash song, and it seemed like Sue took pity looking at who Floyd was, or at least the way Floyd wanted to believe he was, backwater and fatherless.

Floyd got up off the curb and kicked the gravel underneath his weathered, old Doc Martin boot. Or was it crushed glass? He walked down the Bowery and lit a borrowed, given Marlboro. “God those taste like Shit!” Floyd thought about the conversation with the bartender at 2A, the musician who had some demos produced by the guitarist from Patti Smith’s band. The guy who knew his amigo from the art camp for disaffected city kids up in the Catskills. He was from Illinois, and was a decent musician, kinda Marshall Crenshaw. And he was friends with Handsome Dick of the Dictators who always had a Super Bowl party at his joint in Brooklyn.

There wasn’t much to the scene these days, Floyd thought. God, I wish I’d been here back in the day when CB’s was the place. You could crash anywhere downtown easy. Now it’s all stock-market exploding inevitable cock-suckers, he thought. Floyd had been staying for a while at the commercial space on 44th Avenue in Long Island City, but that wasn’t going to last forever. There wasn’t any plumbing except for a shower on the floor below, and you had to bring water up the four floors of back-and-forth stairs that make it seem twice as long since the elevator was usually broken. And it didn’t make it any easier that he was supposed to pay the dude who lived there, and had been making excuses the past few months.

There was a nasty smell coming up from the subway grate, the bizarre mix of urine, fish, sweat and milk that is brewed by an invisible witch on and under the New York summer streets. “Man, Sue would not dig it here,” Floyd muttered to himself. It’s a dog eat dog world. Or, a dog eat cat world… or something. Man, I should go back home.

Floyd wandered into a liquor store on Delancey and checked the prices of bourbon. He walked past some bridge-and- tunnel girls buying cigarettes, who’d probably lost their way from the PATH train. There’s a Korean place over by the beginning of the Williamsburg Bridge near Essex that’s cheaper, he thought. But what’s the point. I’d have to lift it anyway. Floyd wandered down past the barrage of international sweat- shop clothing stores and wondered how all this got here. The Ritmo Latino record store with the Tower-like Celia Cruz and Tito Puente airbrushes, and of course hell-hath-no-fury in a fluorescent dungeon McDonald’s. He turned up Essex, since Jenny his favorite bartender at the Johnson’s bar on Rivington would give him a few drinks on the house. He showed her some guitar licks and changed her strings sometimes.