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By Root 821 0

for all of us. A stretch of East Second Street was later renamed in honor of Joey, the commemorative sign eventually raised twenty feet above ground level after having been stolen so often. That’s where so much creative excitement ends up, with souvenir collecting. After years of Laocoön legal and real-estate tax battles, CBGB’s closed for good in 2006 with a farewell performance starring Patti Smith, which was only righteous, Patti’s birth star being where it truly began and now would snuff out. At one point she relayed a message from an absent Tom Verlaine: “Tom reluctantly sends his love.” I laughed at home, listening to the live broadcast on Sirius satellite. It was the best use of an adverb since Hemingway’s “magnanimously” in A Moveable Feast. I had been invited to CBGB’s finale but decided not to go on the afternoon of the show, telling myself I was on deadline (I was, I always am), that it was too much of a drag to go that far downtown, that it would be a complete mob scene, all that. But I also think it was because I was afraid of how happy I might be to see everyone again after so many years, a coward when it came to unembarrassed joy and affection. I might have gone on a hugging spree, which is not how we did things back in those outlaw days.

PART IV:

Bodily Contact

A fiction writer friend of mine once told me about the exact moment she knew her marriage was sunk. It was the afternoon that she entered their East Village apartment and in the living room sat her husband and his brother, watching a porn movie together. That wasn’t what unnerved her. What unnerved her was that they heard her come in, saw her standing there (the reaction on her face must have made for a classic close-up), and yet remained fastened on the screen action in the room, as if it were an NFL game, not even bothering to mute the groans or hit the pause button, perhaps not wanting to interrupt the “flow.” For my friend, this was it, the final indignity. It betrayed such a down-deep disregard and disrespect for her feelings, such sofa-slug inertia and evolutionary backdip, that “alienation of affection” was no longer a legalistic phrase but a palpable presence, a cold slap. It was right out there in the fuck-you so-what open, a form of infidelity so indolent it didn’t even require another actual woman. I shared my friend’s revulsion—I hadn’t met her husband but had always assumed he was a snake, based on creditable hearsay coming mostly from her (she is now happily remarried)—but for me the real mind-boggler of the story was that this skink had been watching a porn movie with his brother. I have three brothers of my own, and I couldn’t imagine settling in with a snack tray and watching a wankeroo with any one or any combination of them—how tarantula-crawling, the very idea. What if Mom found out? The very prospect made one crinkle inside. No, I maintained a more traditional attitude. As far as I was concerned, porn was to be enjoyed solely within the privacy of your own shame and guilt, or among strangers, unable to identify you from police suspect photos.

That’s how the seventies raised me, one of the enduring values they instilled.

It was in the seventies that porn swamp-gassed into an atmospheric condition in culture and society, became part of the parlance, no longer treated as contraband or projected on a sheet in your weird uncle’s living room. If in the sixties sexual liberation promised rainbow-arching orgasms that would melt the shoe buckles of puritanism and banish possessive ego to the bourgeois boneyard, that illusion was pretty much shot once the peace sign from the Summer of Love was bent into the swastika self-carved on Charlie Manson’s forehead as the symbol of the decade. Porn was the prowler that made itself permanently at home, a movie projector beaming from the rear cave of the urban skull. Urban, because it was in cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York that movie porn was produced, played in theaters, and available to choosy shoppers, the day of the local strip-mall adult distributorship having