The Stoned Apocalypse by Marco Vassi

Author:Marco Vassi [Vassi, Marco]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Erotica, General, Romance
ISBN: 9781497634916
Google: nmmaAwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0759243689
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1973-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

6

As though following some predetermined curve, the next day I moved from the Haight pad to North Beach, and found a room in a place called, appropriately enough, the Circle Hotel. I paid the sixty dollars month’s rent in advance to a prototypic Irish landlady who was absolutely inured to the worst the species had to offer. Over the years she had come to view prostitution, drugs, murder, freak-outs, police raids, robbery, despair, and suicide with the calm of a Buddha sitting by a riverside chanting Om. She was an adept in the yoga of business, and had achieved her enlightened state through a thorough understanding of the dollar. One rented a room, one paid the specified price, and short of burning the hotel down, one was free to do whatever one liked. As far as I could see, she made no value judgments, cared not the least for anyone’s opinion of her, and treated mayor and criminal with the same scales of justice. I have met few people I have more fully trusted to be totally consistent within the parameters of social interaction. She had a husband, or boy friend, but his sole function seemed to be to check on rooms after people had left. The only times she spoke to him was to give orders, and I never heard a single word pass his lips.

The room was classic. Twelve feet by twelve feet, a rusted sink, a peeling dresser, and a squeaking bed complete with wrought-iron headboard. One entered from a long hallway that opened onto twenty similar rooms on each side of a complete square, making some eighty inhabitants to a floor. My room being on the inside, I could look out the window to a concrete courtyard, and the scores of other windows from which all the transient and already lost souls looked back.

When the landlady’s husband left after taking me to the room, and I locked the door behind him, I was totally without an identity. For one of the many times in my life, if I had died on the spot, there was not a single person around who would know what my name was, or how to contact next of kin. Of course, I signed in under a pseudonym, writing “Augustine Tocco,” with a flourish in the registration book.

I don’t think I had any thoughts at the time. Living with others had become intolerable. And I didn’t have enough money to take an apartment. And, most important, I hadn’t the slightest idea of where I wanted to go. All the guidelines which help an obsessive-compulsive over the hard spots were gone. Subjectively, I was one of the damned.

My possessions, by this time, fit into a knapsack and small suitcase. This was a long way down from the apartment full of clothes and appliances and furniture and books I had had in New York less than a year ago. But now I took out a half-dozen books, a few pants and sweaters, my hash pipe, and some of the cloths I had learned to carry with me.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.