2/22/23
Newsletter 255
The Crack of Dawn
It was New Year’s Eve, 1973-74, and me and my buddies, Jim and Robert, had heard about a party in Southfield (Detroit’s biggest suburb), and though we didn’t have the address, we knew where it was. In celebration of the new year, Jim, Robert and I had taken LSD. When we got to the house with the party, there were cars parked all up and down the street and a lot of people were streaming past with beer and bottles of wine. As we followed the others to the house, I recognized it. “Hey, wait a minute, this is my mom’s friend, Bonnie’s, house.” It turned out that Bonnie and her husband were out of town for the holidays, so naturally her three teenaged daughters threw a party.
The house was jam-packed with young people – with an inordinate percentage of girls since the party was being thrown by three girls – and Jim, Robert and I were just getting off on the acid. It all seemed like the perfect set-up for a great party. Me and my pals staked out seats on the living room couch, got beverages, lit a joint, passed it to whoever was next to us, everyone partook, and we all began to party like it was already 1974. This had all worked out perfectly.
And then a scuffle broke out upstairs. From where we were seated we were looking right at the stairway leading upstairs. We could hear the thumps and bangs of an altercation occurring upstairs in a bedroom. People from all over the party pushed their way into the living room to see what was happening up at the top of the stairs.
Two fully-grown, 18-year-old guys, came out of the bedroom in an angry, not-kidding-around clinch. One guy was clothed, the other was in white gym shorts. As we all watched from below, the two guys grappled at each other as a girl came out of the bedroom wrapped in a sheet, screaming for them to stop fighting. Still locked in a standing clinch, the clothed guy pulled a knife and began to rapidly plunge it into the other fellow’s bare back, which faced out to all of us. After four or five deep stabs into his back, the guy in the white shorts stumbled backward and went down the stairs standing up. He hit the wall at the bottom of the stairs hard. With at least thirty people watching, this guy slid slowly down the white wall leaving a big red smear of blood, and landing in a sitting position. Everybody was deathly silent.
Tripping on acid, I went over to this guy and put my face right in his. As I looked him in the eyes, the life went out of them and he died. His head dropped over to the side. I turned and said, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Many of us drove to nearby Providence Hospital and waited for the ambulance to arrive. The guy was DOA. The boyfriend had come into the bedroom to find his girlfriend, my mom’s friend’s oldest daughter, in bed with this other fellow. The fight ensued.
The next day, New Year’s Day, 1974 — I was fifteen — I recall sitting in the kitchen in the morning in my family’s house and feeling sufficiently confused to not mention what had happened the night before to my parents or my sister. They would certainly hear about it soon enough, but not from me.
Without hesitation, I looked in the newspaper to see what movies were showing, and when. I hitchhiked up to the Showcase Cinema (a long gone theater, but located within a few blocks of where I now live). I bought a ticket and went in and saw Papillion with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. I came out 150 minutes later, thinking, “Fuck, that was great.” I bought another ticket and went straight in and saw The Sting with Paul Newman and Robert Redford. I came out 129 minutes later thinking, “Shit, that was terrific. Movies are great. Honestly, who gives a flying fuck if a guy got stabbed at a party last night?” Thus my worldview was formed.
I was questioned by the police and I told them what I saw, which is what everybody else saw. I didn’t get called as a witness. The boyfriend was convicted and sent to prison, and apparently he and the girl were married while he was in prison.
But presented with the harsh realities of life, I was immediately able put them into their proper perspective with the aid of movies. People are getting stabbed and shot and killed all the time, everywhere in the world, every day, that’s a fact and it sucks. But good movies, great music, art in general, was here to make it all bearable. Reality, when you considered it for too long, kind of blew; but movies, on the other hand, could be terrific. And even if they’re not terrific, at least they’re diverting. So why not just make movies? Reality will take care of itself.
In Barfly (1987), Henry Chinaski (Mickey Rourke) says to Faye Dunaway and Alice Krige, who are in a catfight in the bar, “Girls, please, there’s no reality to any of this. Let’s listen to some jukebox music.”
Live long and prosper.
My mother was such a bad cook I think she wrote down the recipe when Papillion adds cockroaches to his gruel.
I can relate. After I saw papillon at the age of 14, my worldview changed too. I became grateful for my mom's cooking, in that I did not have to mix insects into it for protein.