‘Homeboy’: One Final Lunge at a Happy Ending

Seth Morgan is back at his old place of employment, a Bourbon Street strip joint that’s as black as a hole in the universe, save the dingy neon galaxies of liquor signs and revolving disco lights. On a red tongue of a stage, just inches from the nearest patrons, a young woman in a G-string writhes in the undulating illumination. From the surrounding darkness, eyes are fixed on her body like suction cups.

Morgan looks on matter-of-factly. Now 41, he’s worked in the flesh trades for years, turning his hand to pimping, drug-dealing and armed robbery. Along the way he was Janis Joplin’s lover and a fellow inmate of “Charlie” Manson at Vacaville state prison.

But Morgan’s life as a thug has a twist. The son of Frederick Morgan, founder of the venerable literary journal, the Hudson Review, and scion of an old-line New York family, he is the quintessential rich kid gone bad: an ex-con, ex-addict, ex-alcoholic, now back from the netherworld on the road to redemption.

He has brought with him a first novel, “Homeboy,” based on his experiences in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district in the 1970s and his three years in Vacaville on a five-to-life sentence for armed robbery. Careening through the underbelly of American life, the narrative focuses on the autobiographically drawn protagonist, Joe Speaker, a barker/pimp at a low-life dive, and his “squeeze,” Kitty Litter, a stripper-prostitute.

To be published in May by Random House, the book has a fast-track jailhouse beat that is winning early attention in publishing circles. “It’s the real thing,” confirms an editor who worked on the manuscript. Morgan’s agent, Gloria Loomis, adds more portentously, “Seth isn’t all the way out of the woods.”

On a spring evening, when the magnolias are in bloom on the lawns of the city’s antebellum homes, Morgan tramps down Bourbon Street, revisiting his old French Quarter haunts. He is still a recognized face on the street. Dope peddlers whisper their wares in his ear; prostitutes, slipping off to the shadows, greet him by name.

When he hit town three years ago, Morgan worked as a barker at the strip joint he now visits, drawing in tourists and convention crowds with a slick patter of promises. His then-girlfriend, a prostitute who turned tricks to pay their way from San Francisco, was a stripper there. (He salutes her: “a good whore, a real race horse.”)

Morgan came to New Orleans intent on drinking himself to death. “I ran out of highway,” he says. “I ran out of space to run away from myself.” Instead, he wrote “Homeboy,” appropriately choosing a literary salvation.

Raised on Park Avenue, in an apartment filled with rare books, Morgan wandered among get-togethers of such literary pals of his father’s as T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell and Anthony Burgess. He read Latin at St. Bernard’s, a tony Manhattan elementary school, and left on cue to prep at Hotchkiss in Connecticut.

But early on, a son’s fears and an adolescent’s perception of social-register hypocrisy lethally combined, turning the young aristocrat into a budding criminal. Sexual liaisons with town girls and the extortion of school money from fellow students got him sacked from Hotchkiss, while participation in group sex with the daughter of a prominent businessman earned his subsequent ouster from the American School in Lugano, Switzerland. After a Holden Caulfield-style binge through Manhattan and an alcoholic stint in Mexico, Morgan was accepted at UC Berkeley with a sophomore standing in 1967.

Here he graduated from liquor and marijuana to cocaine and heroin, running a drug shuttle to the East Coast and becoming enmeshed with his most famous client, Janis Joplin. He rode his Harley-Davidson out to her Marin County house to peddle a gram of cocaine and soon after moved in as her lover. Morgan recalls the singer as a “simple girl with home values” who today would be reading something on the order of Tom Clancey’s “The Hunt for Red October.” “She wanted us to get married on a cruise ship,” he says, adding that the last call before her death was to city hall inquiring about a marriage license.

“We had fun sex,” recalls Morgan, who found himself to be considered a “status” lover. “Everybody wanted to know what Janis Joplin saw in me.” A full-fledged heroin addict by then, Morgan dropped out of Berkeley in his senior year and says he joined up with the most beautiful, fatal woman he could find--Clint Eastwood’s “squeeze.”

The couple married to get cash wedding presents to support their heroin addiction. It was Morgan’s second round of matrimonial vows; the first marriage, annulled after six months, was to a young woman who was paralyzed in a drunken crash on his motorcycle. “I married her to keep her from suing me,” he says, adding with a burst of hoarse laughter: “She sued me anyway.”

With his second wife, he descended into the Orphean depths of the Tenderloin. Working as a barker and pimping for the strippers-cum-prostitutes, he would save the wealthier customers for his spouse.

“This didn’t cause any problem,” he says. “Knowing she’d just made love over the course of the evening didn’t bother me one way or another when I made love to her.”

Partners in crime, the couple started hustling drug money by snatching purses from elderly women and playing out the con act known as “the Murphy.” “She’d pick up a trick and take’m to a hotel room,” Morgan says of his wife. “She’d go to the bathroom and drop the keys out of the window. Then I’d come in and strong-arm the guy when he was naked.”

From there it was an easy step to emptying cash registers at gun-point, and, on a day in 1977 when his luck ran out, to a cell in Vacaville prison. In plea bargaining with the district attorney, Morgan says he took the rap for full sentencing, allowing his wife to get off with a stint in a half-way house. She skipped out six months later, and, according to the Vacaville grapevine, Morgan says, she picked up with a murderer fresh out of Folsom, shot-gunning their old drug connection. “He was cold-blooded himself, but he didn’t need killing,” says Morgan, who divorced his wife while still in prison.

Inside Vacaville, some of the company was no better. Morgan saw “the cold fire” in killers’ eyes and was on speaking terms with mass murderer Manson. He remembers Manson as “a dim-witted, ineffectual guy,” who, in his loneliness, would send cigarettes to new inmates via cockroach couriers tied to a thread.

Yet, after a life of hustling, Morgan found prison offered a quiet, constructive time. “It was like an ashram,” he says. After swabbing maximum security cells on Saturday mornings, he would take his radio out to the prison yard and listen to the Metropolitan Opera’s broadcast. He took voluminous notes on prison life and won a writing award from the PEN literary association for a story about the last days of Janis Joplin. One “sentimental Christmas,” he re-established contact with his father after a hiatus of several years. “He wrote back and told me he loved me,” Morgan says.

But Morgan still wasn’t ready for the straight-and-narrow. No sooner was he back out on the street in 1980 than he was back at his old barker’s job in the Tenderloin. Soon he was also hooked up with a fan infatuated with his PEN award and who had been doing time for drug sales in Georgia. Sending her plane fare to the West Coast, he set her up as a stripper, then proceeded to become a “knock-down” alcoholic.

Not long afterward, he and another prostitute began what he calls “a horrific hegira” across the country. “She would turn tricks to get me a room and booze. We would go from town to town, smashing up motels, getting warrants, going to jail.”

By the time they reached New Orleans, Morgan was spiritually anesthetized. “I made a choice to die or write,” he says, finishing his life’s narration. “It sounds like a B-movie cliche. But I’ve lived life in a lethal context so long that it’s true yet trite.”

He also sees writing as a sort of moral expurgation. “I hope that if any of my victims read ‘Homeboy,’ they will feel I have atoned for the wrong I’ve done them.” And he has worked out an analysis of cause that centers on his now-deceased alcoholic mother (his father has since remarried twice). It was her diminished maternal affection, he says, that left both him and an older brother with a fatal sense of abandonment.

While his brother committed suicide, vaulting from the Oakland Bay Bridge while a student at Stanford, Morgan adopted a sociopath’s behavior (“I can con the paint off the wall,” he says), honing skills of deceit and manipulation aimed principally at women.

“What I’d do under the influence of cocaine is plan the strategic degradation of women,” he concedes. “I wouldn’t touch a woman unless I wanted sex.”

He hopes to work out his feelings in a second book, pondering the substantial consequence: “If I allow a woman to love me, then I accept the world.”

Meanwhile, he laughs benignly at offers by new publishing pals to fix him up with a nice Ivy League graduate: He still feels more comfortable in the company of whores.

But their incursions into his life are becoming more controlled (the last, he says, “was a pretty straight chick”), and his need to satiate his writing addiction has become his overriding concern.

“This is Fortress Morgan,” he declares, waving at the house he has purchased. It is a neglected example of Greek Revival architecture, filled with a pastiche of curbside furniture along with red satin chairs and Classical garden statuary, inherited from his grandmother’s Palm Beach residence.

It is a household constructed on the camaraderie of men: a recovering adolescent drug addict, whose mother was one of Morgan’s bed-mates, and a homeless man who does chores around the place in exchange for room and board.

Morgan rules over this family like a parental potentate, alternately ranting at the boy for staying out late, and, in a habit learned from his father, reading him bedtime passages from “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

On an afternoon’s outing, he rummages through antique shops, buying a regulator clock for his office and even considering acquiring a set of rare books. He looks at a pair of cowboy boots, albeit at a sex paraphernalia shop, and buys fresh fruit and vegetables for his cook at a roadside stand.

At outdoor market stalls in the French Quarter, he picks up a Soviet Army watch for his ward. “To teach him to come home on time,” he declares. He admires it as he draws on a soda in a nearby bar, and only later, when he is half-way down the block, does he discover the watch is missing.

Back at the bar, he waves a $5 bill as reward for the $15 purchase, but there are no takers. Charging down the street like a wounded bull, he allows that, sure, he once would have stolen the watch in a flash. “But for $5, I would have given it back.”