DAVID'S LAST PARTY

DAVID’S LAST PARTY

drinking was in his blood

but when he remembered

his mother’s drunken madness

it kept him out of bars

the first time i met him was one night

i stopped by this used bookstore

in haight and fillmore where i worked

david was talking to the owner

i had a bottle of johnnie walker black

in my pocket and handed it around

david passed

irish parents.

irish neighborhood.

irish church.

altar boy. (the priest once walked back into the candles and set himself ablaze before the silent congregation. david put out the fire and the mass resumed.)

assistant to sam beckett.

trappist monk.

the monk thing didn’t  work out when he called pope john paul II a fascist

david was also masturbating too voluminously in the shared quarters, his bed boards slapping while the monks tried to say their bedtime prayers.

he had wanted to be a trappist monk

but he did much better as an existentialist

writer.

aids volunteer.

computer whiz.

a painter’s painter.

a flaneur –

a nocturnal and alienated intellectual

who strolled the city by night

and then got up and drew and painted

the first time i visited his place i saw paintings hanging from clotheslines the length of his huge apartment

i was an art critic

and i had just entered matisse’s studio

later

david lived austerely

made it on social security

on sixth & mission on section 8

dyed his own hair black

shopped out of cardboard boxes

on the steet

rode the night bus home

to his stouffer’s meatloaf dinner

and gave niggers the utter contempt

they were looking for

then his aunt died

and he inherited $120,000

he stayed on the row

where he continued to step

over murder victims

outside his front door

but he started going to bars

mostly the same bar

cassanova

where a family of hip, famous, the hoping to be famous, and those with tattoos blossomed

for him

while he drank dylan thomas

more than once below a table

he did buy a new computer

new teeth

and visited me on the east coast

and took cabs instead of buses

always asking the cabby to stop

a block before

they reached his building

we’d exchange emails 2:30 a.m. western time

and he continued sending drawings and paintings of women

david had a masculine hand, but the feminine in his models prevailed

of several thousand works

there remained about 100

and i think this is what broke

his creative heart: he had lost his life’s work

40 years worth of paintings

to a storage place

for the lack of $85

i was glad he had made

many new friends

at cassanova

but i knew these people

were drinking first

and so was he

one bartender,  margarita

sucked off as many

men employees at the

bar

as she could

and a sort of rivalry developed

between them

as well as a coke addiction

but she had a liver

that put her in the hospital

routinely

she brought david ensure and cereal

after that doc cut his intestine

and sealed him

to his death

by peritonitis

david’s estranged twin sister

a republican

who was repulsed by gays like david

and knew nothing of art

wrote me to say she had removed 17 boxes from his room

(including 100 pounds of our correspondence, which she was kind enough to mail me)

and she gave his last paintings

to margarita

his sister was perplexed

that she could find no cash in his room

and asked me for help

“where did david put his money??”

she said he could not have

spent it

not the way he lived

i laughed and multiplied

the whiskey and hustlers times three years

and all i could say was

“look in his books” – all 20,000 of them