Punk Avenue Read online

  In July, Bruce decided to go back to the States, and he invited me to come along. He arranged it so that his dad took me on as a student au pair, meaning I could get a visa. My parents, always cool, paid for the plane ticket to make me happy, although they probably weren’t thrilled with the idea of their seventeen-year-old son leaving for the States with some hippie freak, without even having graduated from college.

  I’d never been on a plane before, so that alone was exciting.

  Of course, once in Boston, we didn’t stay at Bruce’s dad’s for more than five minutes. Instead, we bought a badly beat-up Ford Econoline van from a Hare Krishna for a hundred bucks. We equipped it with an eight-track tape deck in the front and a huge mattress in the back, and we hit the road, the big one: Route 66. We were beside ourselves to be starting our grand adventure, our epic journey, our Easy Rider by van.

  I couldn’t believe it. “California, here I come!”

  First we went up north, to Maine then New Hampshire, passing by the mountains of Franconia where Bruce had a splendid idea.

  “We could climb up a mountain while smoking joints and watch the sun go down once we get to the top.”

  Why not?

  After an hour or so of relatively easy climbing, it suddenly became much harder. We’d already gotten quite a ways up when we found ourselves at the foot of this huge cliff. We should have stopped there, but after smoking another joint, we decided to keep going. We figured once we made it to top of the cliff, we’d be on top of the mountain (super cool), and once up there we’d be able to find an easier way back down. Yeah, right.

  I went first. Grasping the cracks of a near-vertical rock wall, we slowly made our way up. We must have been about halfway up the cliff when suddenly it all went wrong. A few feet below me, Bruce was starting to panic. He was drenched in sweat and shaking like a leaf.

  “Holy shit, I’m gonna let go. I can’t go up or down, I’m losing my grip.” Below him, the big void. … It was terrifying.

  Just above me, I saw a little niche in the rock, and I climbed in and sat, trying to figure out the best way to get back down to help him. I was starting to sweat now, too. I was wearing sneakers, the rock was wet, and my hands were damp, and the indentation where I was perched was slanted. Slowly I was sliding toward the edge of the cliff. I was trying to hold on to the rock but it wasn’t working—there was nothing I could do. As my shoes slipped over the edge of the cliff, I remember saying in a trembling voice:

  “Shit! Bruce, I’m sliding, what should I do?”

  Sticking out of the rock a few feet to my right were thick tree roots, and in a last desperate effort I jumped toward them, grasping for something solid to hold on to.

  I missed by only a couple of inches and plunged into the void.

  In the end, Bruce was able to make his way back down without my help. When I woke up, he was kneeling in front of me, crying from joy because I wasn’t dead. I’d fucked myself up pretty badly, though, with a cracked jaw, the skin on my knee and my hip ripped to the bone, and holes just about everywhere in my body. After landing on rocks then trees then rocks again, I had fallen over a hundred feet—the equivalent of eight stories. I sat up, my face covered in blood, and told Bruce in French:

  “Don’t cry, try to sleep,” before promptly passing out again. Seeing that my back wasn’t broken, he lifted me onto his shoulders and carried me down to our van. It took several hours and it was nighttime when we finally got there, completely unaware that forty-five forest rangers were searching the woods for us, because someone far away had seen me fall and called for help. I was bleeding pretty badly and was still unconscious. Bruce had been ripping up his shirt to make tourniquets, and when we stopped at the first restaurant on the road, he was wearing only his collar, perfectly buttoned up as always. Somebody called an ambulance while a girl claiming to be a nurse came to the van to see what she could do. Unfortunately, she passed out too.

  When I woke up at the hospital the next day, I couldn’t remember a thing. We stuck around for a few days while I convalesced and then we hit the road again. In our van, the Stones cranked up all the way, me with bandages everywhere and smoking joints between the metal wires holding my teeth together, we laughed our asses off ’cause we’d taken off without paying.

  We got back on our way to California, going south this time: Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York. New York! Wow! We came down through Harlem at night. It had just rained and the sidewalks glowed under the streetlights. I’d never seen anything like it in my life. Everything was broken: shattered glass everywhere, turned-over trash cans, skeletons of abandoned cars, and especially graffiti—tons of it, covering more graffiti, which covered even more of it. As we passed in front of the buildings, we could see it was the same story inside. This graffiti was made up of “tags,” signatures and logos from each kid trying to identify himself in this urban wasteland. Each tag systematically indicated the name and street number of the artist—never anything else. It wasn’t “Joe loves Mary,” or “Free our nation,” it was “Dog 132,” “Killer 156,” “Apache 149.” There were also initials to mark each gang’s territory, such as DTKLAMF, which meant “Down to Kill Like a Mother Fucker.”

  It was very hot. Everybody was on the street, standing in groups on and around each stoop. They wore white tank tops with tennis shoes or tight Bermuda shorts with white socks pulled up knee high, under which you could make out their packs of Kool Menthol cigarettes. Most of the women were enormous, their hair in huge Afros with white plastic combs stuck into them. Most guys wore do-rags, women’s stockings they wore on their heads to flatten down their hair. Amazing!

  From inside the van, I felt like everyone was looking me right in the eyes. I discreetly locked the door. …

  We stopped near Columbus Circle, where a friend of Bruce’s put us up for the night. When we came out the next morning, we found that our van had been vandalized. A window was broken and, worst of all, our cassette player had been stolen. Welcome to New York. Now get the fuck outta here!

  We continued our journey: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, where we made a quick stop in Ann Arbor, home of Iggy Pop and the Stooges and the fabulous MC5. I knew a girl in Ann Arbor: Susie Kaminsky. I’d met her the year before on the banks of the Seine, serving as her guide/French kisser during her week in Paris. She had written me from the States, and I still had her address.

  Susie looked like a Robert Crumb drawing. She was as nice as one could possibly be, and I wasn’t surprised that she welcomed us like kings, even when we arrived on her doorstep without any warning. Immediately she took me into her arms shouting, “Phiillllliiiiipppe!!”

  We spent the next few days at Susie’s place. She and six roommates shared one of those gorgeous, classical, two-story wooden houses typical of suburban Michigan, with a large fireplace and a porch facing the street. There was a huge American flag hanging on the living room wall and posters everywhere: Angela Davis, Lennon, Lenin, Karl Marx, the Marx Brothers. … Susie would change my bandages as her freak brothers—radical students from the town—rolled hash-oil joints while educating me on Mao, Nixon, Vietnam, and others.

  After giving Susie a big kiss we got back on the road. We went west a little: Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma—where we bought a new cassette player, completely sick of the radio—New Mexico, Arizona. While the scenery was becoming spectacular, the van was becoming something of a tea parlor on wheels. We transported dozens of hitchhikers, who paid us in gas, sandwiches, or pot. Once, an adorable little hippie girl was even glad to make love to me, bandaged as I was, while we were rolling down the highway. What a feeling, fucking while passing other cars.

  Almost every night we found drive-ins on the side of the road. I had never been to a drive-in before, and it was fabulous to watch old horror movies under the stars. We would park the van backwards, open the back doors, and watch the movie lying down on the huge mattress that filled the back of our van. Smoking joints all the
while. Since our budget was limited, we usually snuck through the back once the movie had already begun. We only got caught once.

  To keep the van running, we siphoned gas from other cars, squatting on all fours behind some parked car at four in the morning, sucking on a plastic tube to get the gas to come up. We’d stick it in our tank as soon as it started flowing. I did swallow a few gulps of gasoline, which I didn’t really mind except one time when I got too much of a mouthful, and I started puking all over the van a few minutes later.

  We often ate at Howard Johnson’s. Their billboards advertised All You Can Eat Chicken—thinking, of course, that no one would eat more than two or three servings. Naturally, we went in equipped with a plastic bag, and after finishing our first serving, we would start to discreetly slip everything straight into the bag and then order more. We would leave with about a month’s worth of chicken for the price of one serving. One time, after five or six free servings, the bemused waitress asked: “You eat the bones too?”

  We stopped at the Hog Farm, in New Mexico—a hippie commune notorious for having succeeded in getting an actual pig on the ballot for the national presidential election. We took mushrooms, psilocybin, ate peyote in the Arizona desert while gazing up at the Milky Way. We were as free as the wind in the desert night, and really getting our kicks.

  At each stop, there always seemed to be at least one girl wearing plastic pearl necklaces and a whole bunch of scarves around her neck, ready to welcome us, to roll us joints, make us dinner, and …

  The pill already existed but AIDS didn’t yet. American girls were liberating themselves, and I was happy to help.

  A young Native American girl from a reservation in New Mexico gave us a few dried-up plants. She told us it was Datura stramonium, also called Jimson weed, promising us a fantastic trip, a mystical experience.

  A few days later, in a motel in Flagstaff, we made ourselves tea with the funny-looking spiked plant. The smell was unbearable. After drinking this disgusting elixir, our mouths were kind of dry, but that was it, and after about an hour without anything happening at all, we concluded these plants had no effect whatsoever.

  Somebody knocked on the door. It was a girl in a white dress with completely white skin and hair too. An albino, but with piercing blue eyes. She was strange and beautiful and was holding a white rabbit. She stepped into the room and sat on my bed.

  Meanwhile, Bruce really had to pee, but he claimed there was another girl, a black one this time, in the bathroom. I opened the bathroom door laughing, but there was indeed a big black woman sitting on the toilet, smiling at me.

  “Oh, sorry, miss. If you could please hurry up, my friend needs to pee,” I said politely, before closing the door. Now there was a dog with very wrinkled skin in the room. We had no idea where he had come from either.

  I was trying to hold a fascinating conversation with the blue-eyed albino girl, but the other one was still refusing to come out of the bathroom and Bruce was gonna pee his pants.

  Over twelve hours passed before we started to realize that these two girls, the dog, and everything else in there were only extremely realistic hallucinations we could both see, like ghosts.

  I also discovered that I had completely taken apart the air conditioner, perfectly aligning every little screw and bolt on the carpet. I seemed to remember that I’d thought it was the entrance to another dimension, but I must have been wrong.

  The next afternoon, we started to slowly come down and only then did we discover that our wallets were missing! Unlike everything else, that was real. Apparently the maid had helped herself when she saw us happily talking to the walls. Our eyes were so tired that our vision went blurry, and we decided to try to find some info about what we had taken before we went blind. We went to the university in Flagstaff. There was a nun sitting between us in the van. I don’t know how Bruce could drive. Once at the university library, we noticed there were hideous bugs on the walls everywhere. We asked a few students how they could stand it. They seemed surprised.

  Finally we found an encyclopedia in which, with the help of a magnifying glass, we could read:

  DATURA STRAMONIUM: LETHAL POISON.

  After a long sleep in the van, we got back on the road. Our next stop: Grand Canyon, the little town right on the edge of the Grand Canyon, where an envelope holding a chunk of hash was waiting for us at the post office. Bruce’s friend had sent it from Amsterdam. Unfortunately, we didn’t know that the narcs were waiting for us there too.

  When we arrived at Grand Canyon, the post office was closed. So we went to visit the famed canyon, one of the seven wonders of the world, before going to the supermarket. Here Bruce was arrested for trying to steal a leather puncher, and he was sent to the station to spend the night.

  From his cell he overheard one not-so-bright cop telling another: “What do you know? That’s the guy the narcs are waiting for at the post office!”

  The next morning, I went to visit him, and he whispered the news to me through the bars of his cell. As soon as I left the station, I reasoned that since he was locked up, the cops wouldn’t be waiting for him at the post office, which meant I could make the stuff disappear and get it back later.

  I told the little lady at the counter that I was Bruce, and she handed me the package without even asking for my ID. Almost assuredly, she’d been told that a young kid with long hair was going to come pick it up. I went straight to the Grand Canyon to hide it under a rock.

  Of course, it was the stupidest thing I could have done. I blame the Datura stramonium. …

  They let Bruce go and we left town in a hurry, but we didn’t get very far before sirens started screaming and three police cars surrounded us.

  We were thrown in the back of two cars. Bruce was taken directly to jail in Florence, but since I was only seventeen, I got sent to the juvenile detention center in Phoenix.

  There I was grilled by the narcs.

  “Your buddy claims that you did everything.” An enormous cop dressed like a cowboy was trying to get me to crack.

  “He’s going home tonight,” he went on, lighting his cigar. “But you, Mister French Connection, you’ll get blamed for the whole thing. Unless you talk. Where’s the stuff?”

  He must have taken me for an asshole.

  I was thrown into a disgusting concrete cell with neither a mattress nor a window, with an old stinking blanket and an unusable toilet as my only consolations. They left me isolated in there for days on end, without even soap or a toothbrush. Nothing. The only person I saw was a sullen guard who brought me a cold McDonald’s hamburger and a glass of water at 6 a.m. every morning and the same thing again at 6 p.m. every night. What a feast. …

  After a week in there, I turned eighteen and so I was transferred to the Federal Penitentiary in Florence where I met up with Bruce once more.

  Our new residence was a large white room completely enclosed with white bars, about thirty beds in two parallel rows, three long tables with benches, a TV bolted to the ceiling, and a toilet seat with no walls around it. You had to go to the bathroom in front of everyone. Have you ever tried to wipe your ass in front of thirty people? To pee standing up was also impossible. Having thirty inmates staring at you would block the whole operation. I think they did it on purpose. You’d find yourself standing there like an idiot, putting your dick back in your pants without having done anything.

  “I can’t pee!” I told Bruce.

  “Do it like everybody else. Sit down!”

  Every day, an alarm woke us up at 5 a.m. Immediately, we had to get dressed and make our beds, and then stand at attention for a short inspection. Afterward, we were let out in the courtyard for half an hour, then stuck back in the cage for the rest of the day. There was absolutely nothing to do but watch TV, smoke cigarettes, and wait for our dinner, served through the bars. At 8:30 p.m., the lights went out and, though ultimately nobody bugged me, I didn’t sleep a minute my entire st
ay there.

  There was one aggressive creep who tried to start something with me.

  He started with, “Wanna give me a blow job?”

  I took advantage of being French and pretended I couldn’t understand anything. “Job? I-not-have-job, I-do-not-work!”—my accent pushed to the limit. It confused him, and he went to bug somebody else.

  This huge black guy kept complaining of a toothache. For at least three or four days, he kept demanding treatment before he completely lost it and grabbed a guard’s tie through the bars. Just like me, he was shocked to discover that the guards’ ties didn’t actually go around their necks but were pinned to the collar of their shirts. Those bastards thought of everything! The poor guy found himself standing there with the cop’s tie in his hand as the sirens went off and five burly guards, armed with nightsticks, charged in to get him. In the end, I don’t think they took him to the dentist.

  A young Mexican guy with a nasty scar across his forehead sat next to me and started chatting. We talked of this and that for a while, and then he told me, “Be careful what you say and to who. Some inmates are cops looking to get a confession out of you, without you even knowing who you’re talking to. Also,” he went on, “be aware of prison codes. If an inmate offers you presents, like cigarettes or an orange, it’s to let you know that he wants to visit you in your bed later on. If you accept his presents, it means you’ve accepted his offer.” He then asked me why I was there.

  “Oh … it’s for a little piece of hash, but I’m innocent, it’s a mistake,” I said, hoping he wasn’t about to offer me a few cigarettes.

  “You know,” he then told me, “for such a small crime, you shouldn’t have to be stuck in jail waiting for your trial date. It could be quite some time—a few months for sure. If a resident from Arizona signed a paper to say that he’s putting you up and pays your bail, you don’t need to be stuck here. You can be let out on your own recognizance.”