"Duke and Jill do drugs. They live on the corner of Avenue A and 10th Street, in a mostly burnt-out building."
Ron Kolm sets the tone with his first line that plays off the traditional nursery rhyme – “Jack and Jill went up the hill.” Ron's simple, straightforward language captures the brutal, in-the-moment pulse of Duke & Jill's grind to keep alive, get high and stay high.
It’s the 1980s and we’re in Manhattan, in Lower East Side Alphabet City, a time and place where young dropouts like Duke and Jill could crash in a tiny apartment and score coke on nearly every street corner, a time before gentrification, Starbucks and all the high-powered real estate money took over.
Sure it’s dangerous, sure it’s punk-ass weird but it’s soooo alive, man, you gotta get your dope and get with it.
As Bud Smith writes in the book’s intro, “But here in the land of make believe Duke and Jill live in, it’s still that time when deadbeat kids full of blood and wonder live and play and fuck on the lower east side of Manhattan, no one wants it yet – it’s on fire."
As Ron Kolm riffs, that’s “on fire” as in fires set accidentally (smoking in bed while high on coke or heroin) or on purpose (hell with this shit, let’s burn the damn building down!).
Lots of fires every day and night - spilling all over the Alphabet City soup.
"But things keep happening to them. Their best friend, a junky, rents a truck, backs it up over the curb, kicks in their apartment door, and takes all their stuff."
This is Duke and Jill's first stroke of bad luck. Ron Kolm first published episodes of Duke & Jill in outsider magazines like Between C & D, writing about the pair's happenings in his capacity as recorder of the social and cultural terrain he observed in the downtown scene. Back in the day around St. Mark's Place, Ron came across a real life pair on whom he could base his urban tale.
Many thanks to Unknown Press for gathering up these chapters into one book in 2015.
"A bright flash of orange sound bounces around the nearly empty room, stunning Duke and momentarily blinding him."
After their stuff is stolen, Duke buys a gun. Duke's friend comes over. Duke tells him the gun isn't loaded, he got it to kill the scumbag who stole their stuff. Excited by such a far-out toy, his friend grabs the gun, points at the door and pulls the trigger, giggles and points at his head and pulls the trigger. POW! - bright flash and there's blood and shit all over their apartment. Damn, after the police take off, Duke has to do the clean-up. Bummer - the rent goes up and they have to split to Avenue D.
The dark beauty of D & J is they have no emotion or sense of guilt over the guy's death. In Alphabet City it's every man and woman for himself or herself. Other people are there for buying drugs, selling drugs or selling your stuff or stolen stuff to so you can get more drugs. And, oh, yes, maybe treat yourself to a shot of sex - and that's it.
But how do you come by money to finance your life on drugs? Here's one of Duke's great ideas. You gotta hand it to Duke, this time he struck pay dirt:
"He made up a flyer announcing the availability of their space for sublet, and notched a row of tear slips with the telephone number of a pay-phone near his afternoon selling spot on the bottom. He xeroxed about fifty copies and posted them in health-food stores, coffee shops and in the neighborhood bookstore on St. Mark's Place. The response was immediate.
He ended up getting one month's rent and security from seven different people. They all seemed very happy to give him their money - and Duke was equally happy to receive it.
"Let's go get stoned," he said to Jill, as they walked west on East Fourth Street."
The above doings are from only two of the twelve chapters of Duke & Jill. Many more adventures await a reader. Ron Kolm has written a one-of-a-kind minor classic documenting a searing East Village scene that poked its finger in the eye of convention of any stripe, even those old 60s hippies with their peace and love shit.
American poet, editor, activist, fiction writer Ron Kolm, born 1947
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