You are a good young kid but you will be broken like the rest of them. Your first mistake was not to take the 5 years rap. It would not have killed you, not nearly as much as the 30 days you are doing now. But that’s the way it works. It’s very tricky. we are finally tricked out of the last of our wits. so be it. so says this drunken voice from the top of a syphilitic mountain.

Pappa Webb pissed at me now for various reasons. this is how it works. gangrene in the beef stew. so, they held me up to the sun and the sun shined on me. but whatever is left must go on, a while…huh?

If you want any advice from an old head, I’d havta say—try to hold off any real or desperate entanglement with women as long as possible. The problem is not so much in losing a woman, this is expected, but it is in seeing where they finally go…toward the rottenest death, toward the falsest of the false, toward the lie, toward the obvious lie forever. It’s like a comedy, only you are the only one in the audience and they are on stage.

And look, pretty boy, I still don’t get your movie-writing shit. are you, alone, going to turn the whole rot upside down and make truth of it? you couldn’t take 5 years, how you gonna change a whole industry? I think that you are in some kind of dream-state. If you have the guts to wash dishes, surely you have the guts to know where you are. One doesn’t work without the other. You confuse me because you have too many cards in your deck.

I talk to you straight because nobody else will and also because I have a little time now, having had my asshole sliced a bit, and unable to work. but actually, yes, I did meet more death in you the last time I met you than the first—you were more cosmopolitan, less human, more full of angles and ways…. Christ, I know the Romantic in us must die sometime, but must all else die too? But, this is the same old horse-shit!—the old talking down to the young…I went through so much of it, and all their advice was bad. So, all ya gotta do, is turn everything I have said to you, turn it upside down and you’ve got the truth.

I told off some Catholic priest the other day. you think I’m turning into an old crank? enjoy your next piece of ass to your full capabilities, hahaha ha ha!

[To Steven Richmond]

May 16, 1966