Wednesday, March 6, 2013

love & work

the IMHO  infamous Sigmund Freud once said
the purpose of man is "to love and work"...

looks like the failed economy
has taken care of half that equation (snark)...

hola,
have been mulling this over for a few days and it took
an odd turn this morning to Harlem.
LOVE ( & alcohol)  meant routine beatings,bruises,
black eyes and the infrequent broken jaw.
my Aunt Bessie,who routinely slept with her pastors,
once took a hot steam iron to the face of her sleeping husband.
his crime? frequently  screwing his nubile underage doottirs?
no, it was screwing a legal age woman he met in church.
even during my childhood it was almost routine for
 the husband to get a few furious slaps before
the husband KO'd the wife whereas the
other woman sometimes got a surprise lye facial
or public shaming.

my cousin Barbara, who became a welfare mom
 -Puerto Rican babymaker in Spanish Harlem,
as a child would eat razor blades and light bulbs
and "act the fool", so as not to be molested.
did not hear of too many instances of incest
outside the Deep South where she and Bessie
and her sisters grew up.

underage sex among consenting minors was
more or less the norm in Harlem.
there was a girl named Tina
who was "slow" but whoaslo really really
 liked sex. among the thousand or so
underage boys,and some men,
in the Abraham Lincoln Projects of Harlem
i was one of a mere handful who did NOT have sex with her.
not that she didn't offer,several times,but it was like
kicking a puppy or kitten...instead i had sex with
the minor sister K of two brothers, friends of mine,
often.i was 8 or 10 and she but a few years younger.

later when we were both adults and K
was a former street whore and longtime junkie
she asked whether we could do it again.
thought about it but sadly declined.

on a tangent many of the girls and many many boys who
did not go to 'Nam, fell to the scourge of heroin,
"flying on the ground" in druggie slang,
and would end up selling their bodies for sex
((vaginal,anal or oral  gay & srtr8)
in the dark byways off Times Square
(pre Guliani).  i was often warned against getting
 free handjobs/blowjobs (mostly from white men)
 in the balcony of many
 grindhouse Times Square movies.

junkies,some got clean and were
welcomed home like the Prodigal Son
but many more did not.
one of my best friends Micheal,
his dad owned a dry cleaners in Harlem,
moves his family from the Harlem projects
to Long Island where Micheal and his lil sister
Alice then became junkies (sigh).

think this blog was ignited by the Superbowl commercial,
now running frequently.where a kid in the back seat asks
"Where do babies come from?"
and the father gives a preposterous answer about
a Baby Planet and spaceships
and when challenged the father quickly
switches the topic to some kids song.
the usual bloodless WASP prudery?
IMHO.is this why so many of their lily white
dottirs "experiment" with black men?
by making The Other FORBIDDEN
you also make it almost inevitable.

my cousin Jessie , the only college going
black man i knew then,dated white wimmin exclusively
until they got what they really wanted from their parents
-usually a new car or trip to Europe,
then they dropped him like maggoty fruit.
he became very angry and probe to depression,
in Harlem slang he was "snowblind"
his mother was a well known carousing slut
"she was fast" who lied about her age but i liked her.

when i was a young black boy growing up in the ghetto
and seeing dog eared copies of Playboy
passed around,it never occurred to me to
ever sleep with white wimmin.
there was one white woman in our building ,
who met her black soldier husband in Italy during WWII,
and her unhappiness radiated off her like flies on shit.
even as a child i could see it.

when i moved to L.A. was the first of
many times i was hit on by white wimmin,
i was so naive i had no idea what was happening
but i soon wised up.  my Mother had so
damaged my self esteem and made me feel worthless
for so long that the thot of a strange
white woman  wanting to get nekkid
with me or even just date me
was outside,waaaay outside my worldview.

just as the first time i was hit on by gay men in frisco
i was equally clueless until i "experimented"....
being gay in Harlem in the 50s
meant you were "funny" and apparently
did not carry the same onus it did in the white community.

back Freud, the purpose of Life to me is
"to aspire,love and work" for
where are we without our dreams?

aloha2u today
namaste
mega

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