But the real problem, I think, was that it was too far west, inaccessi ble by subway, exiled to the lonely, geeky waterfront. AT WEST 33RD STREET AND THE RIVER, we are inTrocchi territory. In April 1956, Alexander Trocchi arrived in New York. The Scottish born writer, already a very seasoned thirtyone, had come from Paris where he had dazzled all with his literary promise and charisma (handsome and tall, he resembled Burt Lancaster, one friend wrote, though in the photographs I've seen, he looks more like early Jack Palance), had edited an avantgarde journal, Merlin, which showcased Beckett, Genet, and Ionesco before they were international names, had written several pornographic novels and one serious one (Young Adam) for Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press, and had gotten himself addicted to heroin. He moved to New York-why? he was never able to say, except that it seemed more downbeat than Paris, and he was on a downwardly mobile quest. After several months of mooching, Trocchi got hired as a scow captain with the New York Trap Rock Corporation. It was one of those jobs tailor made for writers, like being a hotel night clerk or caretaker of an estate: no other gig, he said, paid so well for so little work. "And no supervision. That was important." All he had to do was catch the huge ropes, or hawsers, thrown by the tugs, and secure them to his post. Operating a flatbottomed scow or barge that possessed no locomotive power, but needed to be towed everywhere by a tugboat, must have seemed, to a junkie, the quintessence of apt passivity. The life of a junkie is austere to begin with, and his scow contained only its load of crushed stone (800 to 1,300 tons) and a small cabin-a wooden shack with a single bed, coal stove, cupboard, chair, and table, at which he could type or shoot up. In New York he spent much less time in literary circles than he had in Paris, but he wrote more seriously, producing his finest work. ItwaS an ideal life for the solitary sort; the problem was that Trocchi could not bear to be alone much, he was feverishly social, a barroom entertainer, always looking to score drugs, and sometimes made anxious by the sight of Manhattan, with no way to get to it, stuck in "a lowslung coffin in the .сед PIERS AND TROCCHILAND 125 С H E L S t я grey water." One night he almost lost contact with the tugs and oldhave easily drifted out to the Atlantic, lost at sea. C f occhi described the incident vividly in his autobiographical novel, • ' Book which came out in i960. He also described picking up a p rto Rican man and bringing him back to his barge to make love, and h'tting on his scowman friend's wife, a beautiful onelegged woman ("She ved her stump between my thighs and pressed her belly close to me," wrote the expornographer, though in a later conversation with Allen Ginsberg, Trocchi admitted that "I couldn't get a fucking hardon! Now if I had got a hardon that night, my whole life maybe would have been changed, and so would hers.").