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I Was a Teenage Bohemian
A Two Month Journal
December 7, 1977
I come home after the reading and there's heat. Never been happy over heat before. All day dreading the cold night in apartment and worrying about Karen being comfortable. Walk Gyorgyi to bus stop at 14th and 3rd and really become involved with that no-heat dread. Up the stairs with the juvenile delinquent on the 6th floor who's always screaming at his mother and beating his friends up and I'm explaining to him the court action that's gonna happen Friday and how the tenants are organized and we're trying our best to get heat for ourselves. Even the lawyers always saying what a good group we are, but I'm not sure he knows that everyone at those tenant meetings is a poet so some of that fraternal determination is just due from our being glad to see each other.
So, in through the door, noticing in the hallway on the stairway walk up that it's not as cold as it should be—Karen walking around in pajamas like Doris Day, blowdrying her hair after a bath. Heat. The bathtub in the kitchen has some water in it with bra and panties. And I'm typing in the bedroom after thinking I'd have to type in the kitchen because it'd be so cold that Karen would be in bed already avoiding the cold. Under the two blankets—the new one she bought, her realizing that we/she needed a second one and I probably would never get around to buying it. A bargain she assured me. And the new old one I got from my mother at Thanksgiving along with a pot. My old blue one having been slowly, over say three months, getting increasingly torn and shredded. That one down at Steve's now, me making the decision to give him warmth over Karen's desire of it for sentimental reasons.
My eyes are hurting because both pair of eyeglasses are broken. Thought I'd fixed the old plastic pair with Super Glue, but then at the Museum of Modern Art, after a slight paranoid meditation on the street in front—how do you meditate unobtrusively on 53rd St.—in preparation for Cezanne show—trying to get it all into context—college art history and involvement since—first, into bookstore, pull out glasses from shoulder bag and they fall apart again. Oh not now. I put on my groovy shirt. Tape from the bookstore cashier, "so I can see Cezanne," I say humanly to her and amble over disappointingly to the admissions cashier. It is here that I realize I'm still stoned from this morning's joint with Michael and Gary at breakfast (my giant omelet that bubbled like at Yellowstone). The same unfriendliness and mission relationship from that teller as the two at the bank earlier. There it was, have a nice day as she continued talking to her friend a teller booth over, things were slow. No line. And this one confusing me. I thought it was $2, that's it. I'm not a member, but no, for this show, contribution, must be great Exxon grant with notice at entrance, sure enough, but when she said—me having given her $10—"well?" and my pause trying to figure things out, oh well the cheapest, a buck I volunteer, get my change and try to make her human in my eyes. I have to ask her for a ticket, you took it she says, yes, in my wallet.
It's a matter of I don't have the time to bring the damn glasses to a place that'll fix them. I even know a place pretty close to work, the place that fixed them three months ago, fragile stuff these gold rims, but how much can be accomplished on a half-hour lunch hour. Today was involved in emergency purchase of book and mailing that Chrisi called from Connecticut yesterday to ask where is it, and then new sneakers at Paragon and arrangements made with Karen for her to pick them up with her discount and here they are, over on the floor. After having needed them for these last six months. Talk in June of a new pair for my trip out west, didn't get around to it—they'll hold out, they held out. Holes in August, paint in September, beyond wearing to work. With a glance, tomorrow's feet will be shining.
December 8
The day is: waking up to my old clock radio my parents bought me when I was in junior high school, them having to take back the first one they bought, an AM, because I wanted FM—I'd heard the Young Rascals, and for the last three years it's sounded like a speaker's cracked. Brought it in once, $5 and came back exactly the same. Then me off to the Catskills for six months.
The alarm goes off which at first is music, usually classical—that being what WKCR plays in the morning though it's new jazz at night and most of the time that I listen to it now that I'm working and don't hear the afternoon classical shows like past summers or some season. Lately it seems, either me or Karen have been turning it off and falling back to sleep. If she does it, not resetting the alarm, but we've not been late to work. So eventually out of bed. She up first to piss. I lay there not wanting to go to work like everyone else. Everyday. To the stove and light it for heat, a bath if there's hot water, cloth on the pits if not. Get a little upset when Karen lights a cigarette, but don't say anything, except here. Sometimes, if there's time, breakfast. I try for orange juice anyway. Nice slow rushing. This morning played a Bowie ballad that I sang all day long. Twice out loud, once past that new girl upstairs that's been talking to me. I think she invited me to a music bar, but what a rushed conversation that was, she a little manic. No time to go out to bars, even for music, even with a new woman that invited me. I'm intent on writing every night and, so far, two days in a row, have been. A St. Mark's reading coming up in two months and I don't have much new stuff. Those who'll be there heard my newest at my last reading which was the cable TV show and most of that has been revised or scrapped to be worked on, which is someday. Over all, disappointed with last six months' production. So I'll get an hour to lie down and watch the Paul Simon special on TV before going off to the cable TV show—tonight Tom Savage and Tony Towle. Tony, who I'm excited about hearing—having just read his latest book then all his other stuff readily available, which is one other book here then Gary's collection. Never heard him read. Tom also looking forward to—he being certainly always an affecting experience. During supper read Andy Warhol's Philosophy book, that marvelous and clean in the muddle.
December 9
At work I continually seek diversions. I do what's expected of me, keeping the rows and counters stocked with books, making up endless inventory lists on scrap paper or order form sheets, help customers, which is the most enjoyable part—when they're not idiots. That's about it. Then comes the diversion stuff. Standing closer to the record department, which is a little out of where I'm supposed to be, but not far enough away to make me look like I'm fucking off. That's a simple diversion. I can hear the music they play all day, mostly stringed classical music, The Four Seasons over and over again, but that's always pleasant, a lot of Bach, today Beethoven's Ninth Symphony for the first time, Klemperer conducting, too slow, too slow. They play The Greatest Concert album—Charlie Parker, Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Max Roach—Toronto, and can always stop everything and listen hard to Bird's solos, but that's as modern as they get. Once they had Shostakovich on and one of the guys said, "Now that's as 20th century as you can get." Didn't offer an argument. It's pleasant enough though. I've always liked the cellar jobs I've had where I had control of the radio. Then, of course, it's looking over at either Joan or Ruth. Joan, long black hair, a little growth on her right eyelid, sings opera—wants to be a soloist. Once I listened to her through a wall in the cellar sing scales and phrases. Ruth is prettier and I'm interested in her, I guess. Just from appearance stuff. What she looks like she is. Soft. A little more flesh than I'm used to in bed. Wet lips. The works. The clothes she wears hide the form of her body, I guess she feels she's chubby. She's one of those women who's quiet until you get to know her, then she reveals everything and it's either tender or boring, you want in or out. Maybe. She never comes over to talk, a polite shy hi when she passes. I, on the other hand, don't go over and try to start conversations with her or them. Seems so awkward. One guy in the record department was supposed to start work as Virgil Thompson's secretary, but that was a month ago, maybe it fell through. As for the other employees, there are plenty, most are not friendly or even decent courteous. All uptight New Yorkers. That attitude made me ignore a hello from someone today, just didn't look up, faked it. The woman who invited me to the bar wasn't in today. Tomorrow I'll explain to her that I can't go for a while because I've not been going out. I wonder if I'll tell her it's because I'm a writer and spend my evenings writing lately. Not even to movies or to go see Barry or Regina who's seven blocks away. Just to readings and will be cutting them down these next two months.
A trip to the cellar is a major diversion. I can always stretch them out and savor that time off the sales floor. Lately taking the route which cuts through the record department then down through their stock area, stacked neatly and orderly according to labels. At least twice the size of Larry Fagin's collection, no, much larger. So tempting to steal and it would be so easy, but I'm being good. Once I do whatever I'm down there to do, sometimes I can mosey over to where they're sorting all the used paperbacks, hundreds of them. They come in large bins and Milton is in charge of sorting them into other bins. He puts away stuff like Kerouac for me, but I go through those bins when I can for the less obvious stuff. I arranged for Karen to pick up a shirt at Paragon with her discount for him. Always, down there, large stacks of books are being moved with power jacks. Some have horns on them. The guys are running around with packing lists and order forms, steering the drivers of those jacks around corners—radios sometimes tuned to different stations, always rock though, sometimes the black soul station BLS—so either grand stereo down throughout there or loud madness. I thought of suggesting they try listening to a classical station all day to see how it would calm them, but knew how ridiculous a notion that was before it was off my mind's tongue. This is New York City anyway. Wanting to be calm here is like wanting to be catatonic.
December 10
Dinner at the Ukrainian National Home on Second Avenue. Karen meets me right after work and we're both tired. She suggests a drink. I was about to suggest the same. We're on Fifth Avenue and the air is very cold. I like it like this. It's clean and in charge. I'm dressed warm enough, Karen is cold. She's ready to go into the Lone Star or Beefsteak Charley's, but I decide I want dinner too, resolved now to putting off my writing until 8 or so. We walk east. The streets are pretty empty early evening. The bars, as I look through the front windows, are empty. Lone people bundled with scarves and hats, obviously uncomfortable in the cold, walk by past us in different directions. I kiss Karen's face to warm it up and can't help remembering the other time I was doing the same thing to her, but then she had tears coming down her cheeks and we were caught in a snowstorm on a camping trip—having trouble following the trail markers half covered with snow, some of them completely. Then I'm back on Fifth Avenue. Thankful again for our sane levelheadedness in that situation which got us back to the town of Phoenicia wet and cold, but able to order cheeseburgers and feel miserable. I can't think of any better place than the Ukrainian Home for drinks and dinner without going out of the way. Karen mentions Little Italy, but I'm wanting to get home early. Since starting this journal I'm obsessed with it and don't want to spend any time after work not writing. No desire for movies or visiting. Not exactly no desire, but would rather be doing this. Conveniently, there's a 15-minute wait for a table. I give the guy my name and ask him to call for us in the bar, please. I order my drink right away at the bar as Karen sits at a table and suggest she get this other foreign beer instead of a Heineken because I want to taste it. It's watery and too light. This bar is comfortable. It's a neighborhood bar, old Ukrainians playing chess, one of their sons or something the bartender, cheap. I figure it must be happy hour. Karen and I are talking. I drink slowly. I don't want to buy another one. My name is shouted from the doorway before we're done with our drinks. I feel good as we move over to the dining room. The familiarity, spotting the waitress I like—ethnic daughter—the rushing of the waiters and waitresses, the sounds from the party room. It seems to be taking a while for the waitress to come back to take our order. I start talking somehow about my trip to Europe and decide I need to draw some maps. My pen is not in my shoulder bag. I remember where I left it. I tell Karen what to order for me and run out to the stationery store across the street—Veselka's, next to the restaurant, didn't have any, just empty boxes in a Bic display rack where they once were. I take large strides running across the street. I'm out there with just a sweater on. The cold feels like a thin layer of cellophane around every part of my body. When I get back to the table I don't feel like continuing with this storytelling stuff, but do, sort of out of obligation and because I think it might amuse her and me. I start in Paris though that's four months into the trip. That's what I can best draw maps of. The Seine across the top third of the page, the Ile de St. Louis with Notre Dame, 4 o'clock organ recitals every Sunday—I start going into some detail. Shakespeare and Co. is next. I mention Ulysses to her and the glass-bound first edition in the back which I once leafed through when they were cleaning the case. Then, that I used to read upstairs there and met some weird people, but already I could sense myself losing interest in telling her all these things. One remembrance sparked off others and stories were beginning to layer up in there, my brain, and the whole project was getting out of hand. I said, "I'd need a week of straight talking to recount this stuff for you." I thought: she's not getting excited. She's not asking questions or showing too much enthusiasm. She asks why it's called the Latin Quarter. She only knows Puerto Rican Latins. I draw a map of Europe and explain the rise of the Roman Empire from Italy, which I draw looking like the boot I was told in fourth grade it resembles. The map gets more involved—the main streets and little boxes representing bars and student cafeterias where I ate, the hotel I lived at, the open markets on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, some of the movie theatres. I was losing steam. Our meal hadn't arrived yet. I wasn't thinking about it. I said: in that hotel at 20 rue du Sommerard, I slept in about six rooms. With different people. But I didn't go into any of the details and the details are god as Wordsworth or somebody back there says. The only name I mentioned was Randy, which was the last room I slept in in that hotel. That time sneaking in for three days and sleeping on his floor after my return from Spain and Morocco. Away for a month. Black guy, I slipped in, from Seattle, hustled cars. I explained the whole American Express street tourist operation—buy cars up in Holland, sell them in front of the American Expresses in Paris and Amsterdam. I was supposed to go on one of those runs, but I forget what happened.
December 11
Not sure, in the bodega, what size frozen OJ I've been buying to fit into my apple juice bottle. Up and down the three aisles to find a comparable size container. Getting looks from the three guys, but they know who I am. The large size with three of water looks like it'll fit. Only when I'm home, here, looking for my bottle under the dishes in the sink do I remember that it's in the bedroom filled with water and some shoots from my rubber plant and has been for three weeks. For orange juice, we've been using a large plastic container that Karen bought two or so weeks ago.
I've rewritten December 10 tonight. Now some TV.
December 12
I haven't remembered any dreams lately. Maybe tonight because I'll get more than six or seven hours of sleep, tomorrow being my day off. I like Karen's dream of a few days ago—a whale coming ashore looking for snails. And another one. Her being made to sleep in her old bedroom, but now there are a stove and refrigerator in there with her. She was afraid—both dreams.
The Amityville Horror is about a haunted house. From what the book jacket says, it sounds real good—and stupid. This family moves into a house in which the previous owners have been murdered. Within a week they flee—leaving their belongings, vowing never to return. All true! is the big final statement. People come into the bookstore and ask for it. A few requests a day which is a lot. Many waiting for the paperback version which is due shortly—I called the publisher to check. Tolkien's new book they're very willing to pay hardcover price for. It's number one. I have to restock The Hobbit and trilogy every day. That, Frank Herbert's trilogy, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Crockett's Victory Garden, The Joy of Sex (not The Joy of Fantasy which has much better pictures). Today, two David Hamilton paperback photobooks. These will sell, I'm sure. Soft focus pictures of beautiful girls, nude and lacily clad in fields of clover, with sheep. One with text by Robbe-Grillet. He knows what sells. I would spend a lot of time leafing through those two books, sailing around the sales floor, except I have to watch out for the manager, Fred. So, quick glances.
This dream talk reminded me of a talk with Rene in the Orchidia about ghosts. I'm sure I saw one when I was four-years-old. He was lying in bed next to me. I turned over and there he was, his face close to mine. Smiling. A friendly expression. If I was cool, maybe we could have spoken. But I ran to my parents' bed. I remember it very clearly. I would be able to make a police composite of his face, I guess. Rene says the fact that I didn't tell my parents about it is conclusive proof that it was real. I believe it. Rene had some stories too. And knew the terms and levels of ghosts. He got mad at a ghost once that kept moving things in his apartment when he was married. I'll listen to anything that Rene says.
I have too many books. Or, rather, not enough time to read them. Or I don't use my time to read them, like last night spent three or four hours watching TV. Nothing on, just kept switching channels. Autumn of the Patriarch has been lying on my amplifier opened to the page I left off over two or three weeks ago. I'm reading at least twenty books at once. It's nuts. Like the lady in Golden Notebook who cuts out newspaper articles and wallpapers her room with them until her friend slaps her in the face and pulls her together. On my floor—two Simenon novels waiting, three Yeats' books, an Unmuzzled Ox, Tony Towle's last book, five Tom Clark books which I read a lot of last night between commercials. I've been preparing for the last month to write him a letter asking him for poems for Mag City. A quick flash about Joe Rudi on the warning track. Outbursts like conversation. He talks just like you except he edits out most of the shit. Also on my floor—one beer can, some socks, a trail map of the Catskills that I had to get out to look for the name of the town I got to wet and cold in the other day's entry, last week's TV Guide, a New York Times I picked up in a back room last week or two ago, a map of Oregon, a penny, a Bic pen cap off, and more. The kitchen is in worse shape. A postcard today from Bobby Meyers, now in Boulder. He's listening to Haydn trios in front of a fire in an adobe hut with the girl he loves. She's resting, he's working. The postcard is a scene in New Mexico, a sunset with silhouette rock formation that look like a camel and is called Camel Head, or something. He asks midway through, "Where are my books?" I'd promised to mail them to him, that is the books he gathered while he was here in New York City in September. That was four months ago. They've been sitting in a neat pile in my kitchen since October which is when I moved them from my bedroom—reading the two I wanted to and holding off mailing them because I wanted to read one more. Then it became—I'll hold off until Mag City 3 is done so I can include that. Especially wanting to include a letter with them which I never did get myself to write. Haven't written a letter in over six months. Debbie said if I don't write in a month she'd be upset. That month went by. Michael in Ireland hasn't even written me it's been so long since I've written him. And old high school and college buddy Tom who got married and moved to Virginia, wrote in the summer and needs to be answered. Deserves to be answered. I want to answer. Now I can just send xeroxes of this with a note. Dear Bobby, when you left we were both still high on peyote. I couldn't get to sleep at all that night and starting at say 3, 4 AM I was pissed and anxious because I had to go to work in the morning. I felt like coming down to Allen's apartment to see you more, but figured you might be sleeping and I was writing some stuff anyway and didn't know exactly what to say to you. I wrote this:
The moment when
I said good-bye to you
and left
Last look: your head bowed down
(sitting at kitchen table)
and sad eyes looking down into
pit of what?
couldn't believe my glance
That wasn't really the last look, it was next to
last—but the one I wanted to talk about
(I'm going to sleep now. I won't see you tomorrow
I just remembered)
And it goes on, sentimental and ends with this line:
Good-night
the rain sounds tinny outside
I can work on it and make it a good poem. During the period when I sit down and work on all my poems and make them all good.
December 13
Slowly becoming awake. Some minestrone and I'm ready to crawl back into bed. So spend some moments sitting reading poems from the three new Frontward Books books. The way frontward is such a positive statement. That's Bob Rosenthal. For last night's collating session I bought a cheap bottle of brandy—meager, but a significant prelude gesture. Bob lays out the stacks of pages and around and around we all go making a new Alice Notley book. Reading phrases as I go past the different piles, repeating some of them out loud. Everyone else doing the same thing plus chatter and the usual information exchange. After a while, after the process is in full swing, I walk over to the piano and play unobtrusively. Simon Pettet comes over and he plays some top discordant melody to my underlying blues pattern. We can't make sense together. I think about how the duets I play with Regina always end up sounding all right. I look back at the collating table and see that Gary is off a little to the side, reading one of the pages, and other people are grouped talking while the others, keeping up a steady conversation, are going around the table still collating. I continue playing for a little while longer, some nice stuff using only the black keys and a lot of pedal, some harsh minor chords. I'm back collating.
Alice comes in quietly and sits down. "I've been interviewing George Schneeman. What a job." She's tired, it's evident. There's a black thread on her shirt that I tell her about 10 minutes later as noone else has up to then. Luckily, there's at least one more swig of the brandy left which I give to her. She drinks it. She doesn't have to check the label to see what it is. Gary goes out and buys some more beer. Then starts all the signing. The two other new Frontward Books, collated Saturday, are also here. Shelley signs for her covers. Steve signs for his. Alice and Bob sign their title pages. Art Lange is in Chicago, he can't sign. Rose is going out there with copies for him. There's a search, it seems, for the only pen around each time a signing is to take place. Me, Lenny and Gary compare our dedications. Do the same thing in the Grassroots two hours later. What I find fascinating is that Shelley has handcolored each of her 350 covers, all basically the same, but each slightly different. Layed out you can see the differences. I lay out about 29 covers to choose the one I want. I choose one that has the blue wavy streaks on the left more wispy and cloud-like than the others. It looks more thought out. When two-thirds of the books are stapled with the covers, we're down to what are the first 50-60 covers that Shelley colored. These are a lot different as you can see her experimenting with different colors and patterns. I think that having a book in the bookstores with each cover colored a little differently is wonderful, especially since they're not going as signed and numbered editions meant for collectors. The price of the books is nowhere in or on the book. They'll be about 2 or 3 bucks. For an hour and a half's work I make: three books.
I wish I could find the nail clipper. My toe nails are getting out of hand.
So I begin to clean up the apartment. Do one major job which is to finish screwing in the new door lock and start to clean the hallway out. Had been getting used to it cluttered—never foreseeing it empty. Put on John McLaughlin metal Buddhist fire music and dance like superstar rock guitarist knowing each beat and oncoming burst. Suddenly remember long collaboration done last night in Grassroots with Gary and Lenny and one line from Rachel who I called over from the bar. Read it over and there's a lot of good stuff—
I need heat
I need Alice
I need Gregory's heart
I need it all
And I got it
I'm a fool to cry
I turn the album over. It's so good loud. Hope I'm not disturbing anybody, especially John or Judy above me. Feel like getting up again to listen. This is the first Mahavishnu album. Saw this band five or six times. Driving once from New Brunswick, NJ, where I was going to college, to Passaic, an hour, where I'd grown up, where my parents live. With Jackie, who the last letter I wrote to over a year ago, was a long poem about seeing Cecil Taylor at MoMA. How when I got home to my parents with Jackie for dinner that night of the concert (to be held at the Capitol Theater, my old movie house, cartoons on Saturday, now an important rock palace), a letter waiting from Lois, which I go upstairs to read. Long letter telling about the regret of her marriage and asking for help. I'm devastated. Jackie notices the change in me, but I don't say anything. We go to the concert and she won't sleep with me when we get back to New Brunswick. Thanks me for the cocaine. Jackie, who was torn between music and her father's mathematics. Who was the only woman my friend Fred fucked, she asking that he turn off the lights. Fred goes on to become homosexual and I guess I lose interest in him, not answering his letters or phone calls. Not because he's gay, but taking Barry's advice, just breaking with the constant attention to his problems. Eli once saying to Barry—you're just doing missionary work on her. Fred once criticizing something about me, in a car waiting in a shopping mall, and me saying, we're talking about your problems now.
December 14
I ran up five flights of stairs to call her after seeing the note she left in my mailbox. First thoughts: Pamela! From Paris? Pamela . . . Then the clues—this place is like the one in Paris . . . Curtis says hello . . . THEN I don't have time to spend running around with her. She'll be taking away from my writing time—I'm obsessed. There are no sex thoughts when looking at the women at the reading tonight. I don't want to spend any time womanizing. I come home here and type and have Karen. That's pretty domestic. I'm sweating as I dial. Karen has been sleeping, but is waking up. I say, "Hi, a friend from Paris is in New York for a few days. A good friend I haven't seen in three years or heard from in two. Karen says . . . I forget. A woman answers the phone and is gone some time fetching Pam. I wonder whether to start thinking or go on emotions and excitement. I try not to think. I start to write something on a piece of paper which ends up a doodle. Pam is totally asleep, no chance of waking her (drunk it'd turn out). Call in the morning, says Pam's cousin who introduces herself. Tomorrow night, the TV show, so she can come to that. I won't have a day off the whole time she's here.
Paris for the four of us was like a romantic 1940s black-and-white movie with no sad endings. That was Pam, her friend Elaine, my friend Michael and me. Pam, Michael and I'd met in Copenhagen and had cemented what turned out to be a long friendship (continued with dozens of letters overseas with hopes of rejoining on these shores) with a trip out to the Louisiana Museum to see a big Miro show—caught in the first-class section of the train on the ride out, walking the grounds filled with sculpture pieces given enough room, close to Hamlet's Castle, Elsinore, but we didn't see it, perched on a mountain overlooking the sea. Back in Copenhagen that night laughing and drinking, the three of us, some more days and a promise to meet again in Paris in a month. Which happened, remarkable somehow to all of us, but here I come wandering into the front courtyard of Notre Dame, January 8, 4 PM as planned and spot Pam and Michael (he'd gone to Belgium to meet her, the sneak) sitting over on a bench, coats in their laps, comfortable as tourists. In a few days, joined by Pam's friend Elaine, and all together on that first day laying out exhausted in the hotel room I'd had the week before with the girl I'd traveled around Germany with the month before who'd left now back to Cincinnati to get an apartment and build the furniture to furnish it. So the four of us are kind of collapsed on this large double bed and me and Elaine start fucking, nothing to it, thinking Pam and Michael are asleep. Maybe they were, maybe not. In a while we separated the bed and then I listened to them. It went on from there. Eventually, we get two rooms and after sleeping a few days with Elaine I say, you and Michael should sleep together, me wanting to with Pam, but she sees that and makes it plain, but I deny it. We run around Paris together for two weeks or so, then they get on a bus and go to Spain or somewhere. Michael and I get that first room back, 20 rue du Sommerard, Monsieur Victor, his wife, the cat, Minnew, and the Spanish maid who'd every morning knock politely on the door, waking me up most times, and sweetly say something like "Lilee?" which I took to mean, 'are you up?' Michael once gave her a drawing he made and she didn't know what to make of the gesture. Or the drawing I suppose.
Three francs to take a shower. Michael and I would slip the key to each other a lot, but that'd usually mean that the person second in the shower, halfway through, with a head full of shampoo, would run out of hot water. That was alright though. Monsieur Victor was good to us and spoke English and told us stories. Never introduced his two good looking daughters to us though. He'd help us with our French and let us sit with him and his wife in the room back of the desk lobby to watch some evening TV. A wallpapered room with plastic flowers where I'm sure on hot summer days someone would be passed out on the sofa—a nap in France.
In the mornings once in a while you would hear Minnew. He roamed the hotel and I'd let him in anytime I did hear him. On the sixth floor and stroke his long hair so that he'd arch his French little cat back and one finger rubbing the base of his tail would roll him over onto his side like his American cousins. Companion in the morning. Pam though . . .
The other incident that stands out like a highlight—the three of us, again in a bar, Elaine on a date with some French guy that picked her up shopping. She'd come home later all disappointed and laughing. The bar we were in now was called Storyville and it had a jazz record collection and would play these albums one after the other all day and night. A lot of great stuff. I went there maybe once a week. The bartender knew who I was. I had him put on an Ornette Coleman album once, Free Jazz, but three-quarters through the first side he came over apologetically to tell me a customer had asked him to take it off. So Steve Lacy went up there or maybe it was Bix Beiderbeck. Michael was sketching someone at the bar. It was kind of dark and I had to squint to see the pad in his hand. Red wine. Always red wine at that bar. The beer was too expensive. Six francs, which was $1.25, for a glass of wine. It was good, but you had to drink it slowly—which kind of extended that nice smooth warm perfect taste—because the most we'd ever have money for was two glasses. On two different occasions the house bought rounds. Pam says to me, "I want to sleep with you." I made believe I didn't hear. She says, "Did you hear me? I said I want to sleep with you." I'm in a bar in Paris. I don't remember what I said, remember looking down not knowing exactly what to do. The time never caught up with us. We were sleeping with other people and then the time they had in Paris was over and there they were, Pam and Elaine, getting on a bus with their suitcases and backpacks.
Since then we've written a few times, but she's always been off on that other side of the planet. Two of my letters went to APO numbers in Germany. Then she was in Ireland visiting Michael which he wrote to me about in some detail, promising to send more details, which is a common practice of his, then didn't, which is also common. But she was there with him and I got a snapshot which now is on a little shelf by my bathroom door. Tomorrow or so, Pam'll see the poem I wrote about that snapshot.
I'll have to save last night's dinner at Bob and Shelley's for tomorrow. Moby Dick is subtitled 'or, The Whale.' Moby Dick or, The Whale. Important find from their bookshelves.
December 16
If I were a DJ, I'd open some show with this Tracy Nelson album and play at least the entire first side. Where is Tracy Nelson? Linda Ronstadt's got all the fame.
Food shopping took care of that hour after work. Today at around 3 I thought, how surprisingly intelligent Michael Scholnick is in his poems at times—like how he reduced Scott's voyage to the South Pole to three lines and did it with respect and illumination.
At 5:30, Regina came into the bookstore and shook up a bit my behavioral refrigerator apparatus stuff by herself, melting a little in front of me then shining.
This morning, I knocked softly on Larry Fagin's door to give him some money I've owed him, knocked not too loudly.
At some point I talked about plans for February.
At closing time, a backpacking magazine reminded me of the pleasures to be sought there, then
A book about expeditions to Antarctica had preceded that in bolder terms
Which must have been around 3 to prompt me thinking about how intelligent Michael Scholnick's poems can be
I thought—for how long am I gonna work in this bookstore—until my first book frees me with the fame, notoriety & riches it brings to its author from this hourly drudge?
A customer asked me what time is it
Pam, not feeling well, went home early—she had taken an extended lunch hour and come back from that feeling better
I compared our time cards
Her boyfriend came in 10 minutes after she left. I said wait a minute maybe she's still here. But he missed her. Tomorrow maybe, she won't come in. Saturday is the busiest day. It's been a rough month with Christmas approaching. A lot of work to do. I like it better constantly being busy—projects occupying the reflective gaps of slower days. In the Catskill Mountains I liked those slow days. But not in Oregon. Which goes to show that it's all in your head.
'There must be some way out of' 'going through all these things twice' though I'm not at all feeling like that, though I might have been in those Blonde on Blonde days, but I don't think so. I always thought existentialism was depressing and the wrong attitude. I read Sartre's The Wall twice because I thought it was good literature
No Exit was highly visual
Nausea the print was too small and I read it in high school because George, from the next town over, Clifton, was reading it—Clifton being smarter than Passaic. Then in college I wrote my first play influenced by French drama. Not my first play. I had written one in seventh grade—a collaboration with Anthony Scialli who went on to become valedictorian, now I guess, a doctor, med school, me hearing of him last. It was about the Beatles being quarantined in this country because of an epidemic and then drafted into our army. We each wrote consecutive scenes and performed it in our English class. To make copies for the performers I typed the entire play over using ten sheets of carbon paper. It worked. The ninth and tenth copies went to minor characters. At high school graduation, I didn't wear a black armband. That's all I remember. The first time I ever shook the principal's hand.
All things are explainable, including astrology
three parts water, one part frozen orange juice
If I'm to have Mrs. Curtis in Ireland make me a sweater, I'll have to send her the measurement of my arm, from armpit to wrist, etc. and send her $40 through a time change
I haven't written her son, my good friend, in some months. Since he sent me a big collection of his paintings and drawings and I didn't like them. Worse, didn't think they were very good. He's moved to London where he has little time to make paintings now, working three jobs in his first serious effort in a long while to make money
I'm in the kitchen with Dinah and the Tombstone Blues
Oh how we loved and danced in the aisles so that the stewardess had to calm us down and draw our attention to the movie, but we had no headset. As we were headed into an African sunset—there, down in the flat field, a herd of elephant my sweet. The colors stretch, purple and soft yellow, blending together like muscle in motion. We walk through it as explorers. Our eyes are open. Funny how I smell city perfume, but you always have surprises for me.
I buy books and put them aside until I get to them, could be sooner could be later
Debbie said, if you don't write within a month, I'll be upset. That was 2 months ago.
Barry said, I spend the mornings sometimes just walking around the streets. I was envious, of just that, or maybe the Jean-Pierre Leaud way he said it.
I don't have time this month to go out. I'd like to say to some of the new women I've been meeting at work. "I'd like to take you out. Say, around February."
Today is Tuesday, the day I can go and pick up the film I brought in to have developed. My boots won't be ready until next Wednesday, $17 to be resoled, but what can you do. The first guy, on Avenue A, could only half-sole them. The man in the shoe store on First Ave. told me Robert's at 15th, or the one I went to, or one on 14th between 2nd and 3rd. I gave them to old Roberts. 'They're good boots' I say to Robert or Mr. Roberts, 'they'll last another five years, right?' 'yeh' he says
Was it Benny Goodman who wrote 'Avoid the Void' or am I dreaming
The coats I can pick up tomorrow afternoon at the cleaners at A and 14th, but won't have a chance to until Thursday before work
The way I can glide down the stairs and through the halls in pitch black night at my parents' house. Thought of many times on those overnight visits, but only now noted down. Moving sleekly, gracefully, confidently in the blind night, to piss—movements assured by years of the same motions—expectant fingers finding wall trim and corner edge
A friend who's moustache has disappeared, owes me $20 since April.
The moon beats like a hummm
December 19
Writing a letter to Debbie last night took away all my energy so that I ended up just going to bed after that. No big deal letter, two typed pages, but it was the first letter that I've written in six months besides the two I wrote to Karen from Oregon. One of those was a journal of a backpacking trip, but written just for her—missing her beneath the stars, etc. Now maybe I can write one to Michael in Ireland and Bobby Meyers in Boulder and some others.
Karen is on the phone with her mother. The train was late an hour, Karen is saying. Her mother hears me typing, in Connecticut. Karen's voice is calm and comfortable. They're having a lovely discussion. I'm still a little sick, says Karen. O mothers, hear our every complaint . . .
I haven't seen Barry in six months. Since before I left for the West Coast. It almost doesn't matter because we still know who each other are, but by now it is getting a little silly maybe—his being only a First Avenue bus ride away. We're both very busy and work a lot during the day. On the phone we discuss plans to do a collaborative piece on the Catskills—his photographs and my text. In book form. I say, give me until the end of January before we start. But already I'm excited and have made some of my own sketches for that piece. A few times over the years we've talked about going on extended car rides to photograph and document and make a book out of the trip. A trip we made to Port Jervis when we were living in the Catskills is the closest we've come to actualization of that idea. I wrote a long poem called "Port Jervis" and his photos match the sad, lonely moods and somber decaying atmosphere that I wrote of. But we never attempted to put our work together.
Now we're talking about the women we each have at work. I tell him about the one from upstairs who asked me out and the one downstairs who today is wearing a black silk blouse with an extra button undone revealing mucho cleavage and she works all day down there with the cellar guys. Tight jeans all the time. Barry says he's asked one of the women out and so far she hasn't responded. A lot of the women here, I tell him, wear tight jeans and try to be sexy, successfully, but they're stupid. I always hear them talking about their boyfriends or makeup or going out. Joe called one of them the French whore. They yak. The other day, after the store closed and I was waiting in the foyer for a friend to pick me up, two of them were also waiting and after a while I had to go outside into the rain because I couldn't listen to them anymore. Barry's got a pie in the oven that he goes to check. I've called him just to get an address, but we've been on the phone an hour. He wants to finish off the pie—"the crust isn't so good," he admits—and go into the darkroom and print up a negative from 1960. I've seen that shot. It's him and his brother at the beach buried up to their necks in sand with their cousins Nancy and Susie looking over them. Everyone is smiling. We say all right, good-bye and talk for another five minutes.
December 22
WKCR in the second day of a six-day Bach festival. Continuous Bach. Wake up to Bach. Come home from work and do the dishes to Bach. Listen all night and count on all week listening anytime I tune in to Bach. I'll wait to cook an omelet and finish up the sausage perhaps after this—Cantata Number 33—comes to its noble and logical conclusion. Perhaps I'll set the candelabra on the dining room table and wear a ruffled shirt and ring a bell. Tell me what's happened to the harpsichord as an instrument of passion. (This guy playing has some extra fingers.) The harpsichord has gone the way of the perfumed handkerchief. Now listen to this guy soprano sing in German with illustrated letters. The thought of that sausage weighs as heavy on my desk-ridden mind as it will lay in my stomach soon. As it does now. The meal did not become baroque. I hardly remember preparing it and eating it though it was seconds ago. Here's what I remember. Applesauce is a great balance to the sausage and its place on that round corner of my plate was refreshing and I think calming. That's about it. Always glad to have prepared a meal then eat it. Rye toast is also a perfect complement.
Funny how suddenly an incident from three years ago pops into my head. This. I was hitchhiking down in the south of Ireland. Way out in a very remote region. I was on my way to a small island off the southernmost tip. At a junction, a pin in my backpack breaks. I have nothing on me with which to fix it. First, I'm aware what a beautiful spot I'm in. One fork of the road rounds to the left and is going up over a hill. The other fork bears right—the one I'm going to be taking—and gets lost in the distance into some trees. Some of the fern leaves on the side of the road are over 5 feet in width and I'm amazed. There are pigs wandering across the road back a bit by the barn I've just walked past. I feel as loose as I'm supposed to. I walk over into the bar to get some help fixing my pack. A young guy gave me a piece of wire and I returned to my hitching spot to repair the pack knowing I have the time, probably, as so few cars are using this road. I get the pack fixed and as no cars have gone by I redo the whole thing. I didn't bother replacing that bond until I knew it'd be easy to find the right clevis pin attachment I'd need and that was when I was back in the states 10 months later. The next car that passed picked me up and took me 30 miles to Skibereen, an old stone town near the coast where all you see are old fishermen and worn men of the sea. I took some great black and white photographs of a group of these men talking on a street corner. Color would have been silly.
December 23
Well, it seemed that today people were more concerned with tomorrow, Christmas Eve, than today. Or, all day at work everyone was buzzing about the xmas party starting at 7 tonight and, in fact, the entire day the basement was going through changes in preparation for it. Work down there was at a standstill and the floors were swept cleaner than they've ever been and the new room, which they've just busted through to in the last three days, was decorated and out of an unused basement warehouse of the last couple years appears a clean and funky room for a party. Then next week, new storage space. I look down over that row of cashiers—one with her parents in Japan, Ava with her winter once in the Catskills . . . And here's a party coming up that they'd be at plus all the cellar guys who I guess wouldn't have talked with that much, but point beer bottles at each other or so. So this party everyone going to and near closing the platters of food start being carted in, platter after platter of sandwiches, cases of soda. I saw $80 exchange hands to go get some more 7-Up and last night's talk of cocaine and everyone asking: are you going, not everyone, and my apologetic excuse: no I can't make it, explaining only once, when in earshot of the one with her parents in Japan: have to attend a tenants' meeting, we've taken over the building, and then the real reason also being I want to write and those minutes at the meeting and then the minutes at Michael's afterwards, anxious about getting to work. This is getting obsessive.
I've been looking forward to going home for the xmas holiday, it being my father's birthday and there being a big family get-together at Bern and Miriam's. I've been buying books for my father, wanting to give him a lot which at this point is giving him a lot of books. When Julian Bream plays Bach on guitar, I'm back in a Spanish monastery in the 15th century weeding the pea beds with devotion. There's nothing around for miles and that's the way I'm liking it. I stop my weeding for a minute and straighten up, wipe some sweat from my forehead and look up into the sky which surrounds me like I'm submerged in water.
One more work day then off and that's it for this six day a week, long hours month.
Sitting for a while with my parents and one of my father's old workmates who's come to visit with his girlfriend. Manny, the old produce manager. I worked with him too, summers and weekends during high school. I never liked him as he was always kind of crabby and condescending. Now I'm sitting down there enjoying the conversation—making lasagna was a major topic. Details, how to freeze it. I'm looking at the three characters in the room through the camera in my mind, editing the scene, making camera movements—one nice slow ride back and forth a la Godard from Ruth to my mother and back as they and the men are involved in their lasagna talk—close-ups of Manny capturing eyebrow movements. How do you bring a camera or video unit into this kind of scene? $14 a month union dues my father says. Either I wait until I'm 62 or can take it with a cut at 55. 30 years of paying dues and now that he's switched jobs, can't collect anything on the benefits, like medical. Butcher's Union. My mother always filled out all the forms on the dining room table for my father's medical bills Manny into the bathroom. My father: "Stand close in case I go in barefoot later."
December 25
Exhausted after day's festivities, but went out for walk with Simon Pettet to find woman with flesh like the one I see in magazine laying around his apartment. Gem Spa our talked about destination, but end up at the bodega on First Ave. buying small orange juice to wake me up. It doesn't work. My notions of continuing on are defeated. No woman on the block walk back to the building.
Chicken breasts, big mushroom cold, broccoli chopped up with something added and some kind of carrot loaf was the fare at the big family dinner tonight. Great speech from Anna in her 90s extolling her 13-year marriage to my grandfather and her love of the acceptance she's received in our family—eloquent, brief and real. Left everyone quiet and saw at least Bernie and my mother wipe tears away plus me is three. My father spared the necessity of making his birthday speech after that, but his last one, five or so years ago at big party for my grandfather, was sincere and touching if not eloquent.
Both Barry and I are in Passaic/Clifton for family things today. So go over to see him. One of the first things he says to me is that Charlie Chaplin has died this morning. Peacefully, he repeats twice. I'm afraid I'll be gloomy all day, but I'm happy enough to be seeing Barry and Dorothy his mother and I'm staying up late to watch the news for some mention of Chaplin's death. I'm exhausted, but I want to see what they'll say. In the middle of the show, like a brief, they announce he died without saying a word. They call him an artist who satirized Hitler and spoke out against McCarthyism. Then go into a commercial and come back and talk about a blizzard 30 years ago. Somehow, I'm a little afraid of the attention he'll be getting now though I really can't see how it'll harm him. The best thing would be showing his films on TV. With no commercials, please.
December 26
Dennis gives me his New York Times when he's through with it so I can read the Chaplin obituary at lunchtime. By coincidence a customer has left a Daily News lying around so I grab that knowing they'll have a lot of pictures in there. Before I get a chance to look at the Times obituary, Dennis tells me it's the largest one he's ever remembered seeing, two full pages. I haven't finished reading it yet. I know anything they'll be saying. Pat, a manager from Paragon, comes into the diner where I'm eating lunch and reading the columns so I put it away. The place was crowded, it being the only restaurant open in the area, it being a legal holiday. The streets were a little unsettling so quiet with all the stores and restaurants closed. I tell Pat that Chaplin died, but it gets no response so I settle for what's left. The Times article, as I began to read it at the counter before Pat came in, had begun to get me a little watery eyed and I guess mournful is the word. I remember this line from the obit, talking about his last public appearance at a circus last year near Vevey, where he's been living: He shook hands with one of the clowns at the end of the performance. Quote unquote, I looked it up. Knowing that clown's respect. So he's gone. His art, his importance preserved of course in the films he constructed into perfect expression. I used to watch his films, especially the old Mutual two-reelers made between 1915-17, over and over again marveling at his timing and the fluidity of the action. At one time I had in my possession prints of two of those shorts, The Adventurer and The Cure and I viewed them constantly and showed them to friends and anyone at all interested. There was no chance of tiring of them. You knew the action. It was the beauty of the performance, Chaplin's body grace carrying him through celebration or into some pathos scene. As a writer, constructor of film and above all as a performer, he could do with our emotions whatever he pleased. He knew how to control our every anticipatory reflex so that he could twist our expectations into the absurd comic or the pity of the pathetic. When the Tramp finds himself in the company of some rich benefactor and ends up dressed in the tuxedo that's part of his moment's situation, he'll still stop the limo and push away a bum reaching for a discarded butt to grab it for himself, get back in the limo and drive off—the camera stays on the confused face of the bum. This memory—came to New York City from New Brunswick, NJ, the night he was being honored by the American Film Institute at Lincoln Center prior to his going out to L.A. to receive a special Oscar. It was his first return to this country after 20 years of McCarthy-instigated exile. A triumphant return. Getting a lot of favorable press and the nation's attention was on him. I didn't have the $10 to get into the hall and hung around the entrance I thought he would use. Couples came in very elegant and flashy. No sign of Chaplin. Waiting hours. Have tried sneaking in three times, third time being escorted out by security police. I walk away feeling like the dejected tramp, knowing that he turned this emotion into a universal cinema.
I'm sad as an elephant looking at the corner picture on the Times front page, the tramp alone following the ever-waiting road into the ambiguous distance. He shuffles his shoulders out of the newspaper. There's no forlorn. Though failed in some love affair, the little man, dressed in dignified rags, summons up his sense of a good tomorrow and heads into it. An attitude that was and will continue to be universally appealing. Applied philosophy or religion with his shoes a little absurd.
December 27
That was the Third French Suite for Harpsichord, says the DJ man. Next we'll move to the Sixth Brandenburg Concerto. And I'm immersed in this regal pomp and have been for six days now, sort of my Baroque awakening. A bath in physical logic and order—that being, two melodies interweaving and bouncing off each other or this left hand bass progression that contains the nymphlike right hand and maintains its earthly presence. At say the age of six, Bach got the right idea and made music the rest of his life illustrating it for the rest of us.
I don't feel like going to the laundromat even though it'll mean reading some Bernadette Mayer, but the pile extends into two rooms and today is the only chance for a week. I don't want to leave this the room of continuous Bach, not having to get up to change albums and now so comfortable with the unexpected find, potato chips that Karen obviously bought at some point.
Michael comes up to tell me about a CCLM grant we should apply for, deadline next month. I'm reminded of an anthology for small presses being assembled in Iowa who's deadline is in four days and show him that notice. The business talk between Gary, Michael and myself today is the purchase of the necessary size staples we'll need to complete Mag City 3. Bob and Shelley have advised 3/8 inch. Gary calls today during his lunch hour needing to know the brand of stapler. Buy both boxes of staples, we'll return one, I say. The new Mag City, with staples a little too large (we stapled enough copies last night to give to the 20 or so people who helped us collate), is lying on the floor by my bed, next to a large close-up of Bernadette Mayer, which is the cover for a book of hers, Bob Rosenthal's new book and the last issue of Simon Schuchat's 432 Review, which I haven't finished reading yet, though the only three contributors are those last three people. In last night's jerking off frenzy, open eyes near ending excitement to see Bernadette's face right next to mine life size.
So go out to do laundry and mail letter to Channel 13 requesting they rebroadcast a Chaplin special (five hours of his Mutual shorts) that they aired a few years ago and a check to WKCR.
Karen comes back after the weekend home in Connecticut, but only get to see her for a half-hour before I go down to finish stapling Mag City at Michael's. At some point, come back up here for something and she's made a pork chop dinner with broccoli so bring a plate filled with all that back down. I'm drinking the remains of her can of Pepsi, it's a stimulant. She opens a can and drinks only half and puts the rest in the refrigerator. What is going on while we're stapling is bootleg Dylan album brought over from England by Simon Pettet that none of us have heard, then the last hour of the WKCR Bach festival—I hear the final DJ thanking everyone and us, the listeners, then a blast of Phillip Glass music, then a Columbia basketball game. I turn off the radio.
Miguel Algarin and Willie, with a slick new haircut, have come over. We discuss sexuality with as much emphasis on men's ass as cunt. Good dope has been circulating. The talk seems confusing to me and I can't follow Miguel's thoughts though he's laughing a lot showing nice teeth.
Later, Gary, Michael and I are trying to get the CCLM grant together. We're hung up on the essay. We dislike having to select only five poems from the last three issues for the anthology in Iowa. We do narrow things down, but still aren't happy with the necessity of such a small selection. Here's a scene portraying the politeness of Gary Lenhart. I'm saying something to him. He's next to me. I don't see his face, but I can tell by the way his fingers are resting on my forearm that that's his "hold it a second, I'm thinking" expression on his face and he reaches for a piece of paper and writes something down.
December 29
Rosebud. You want to know about Rosebud. How much is it worth to you. A thousand dollars?
Karen is deathly sick, but gets up to raise the volume as I start typing. I've made her potato soup, trying to suppress the lumps which upon investigation I discover are pieces of potato. I hadn't counted on Campbell's using real potatoes. Here's where Kane has his fit and destroys a room in his house, making a lot of noise and soon the entire staff will be observing from the doorway. Once I got a letter from a good friend while I was living on Martha's Vineyard. She said she'd just seen Citizen Kane and understood my enthusiasm for it (I'd just seen it for the first time there on the Vineyard and written her), but, though she loved it she was asking what Rosebud meant. That's one of the two times the butler hears Charles say Rosebud. There, an urn in the case, given by the newspaper staff, an hour film time ago—a leitmotif. Here, the ominous music again. Ten minutes before I leave to go do the TV show. I'm tired and would rather stay home and at least watch television. So, goodnight . . .
I liked hearing Hannah Weiner talk about a friend in Lenox, Massachusetts. The post office she described around the corner and how I could send mail with just the town name, it'd get there. Oh how it's so late and I got work in the morning, the early A.M.'s lately and I'm probably getting sick again, but that's not what matters. I liked Hannah's reading tonight. I didn't like so much Ned Rorem's diary entries which I read today in the store. Hannah read from her continuing spawning Clairvoyant Journals; the month's selection she read tonight differing in tone and season from the month she read in the fall. Her improvisation during a long monologue being read by Sharon Mattlin was creating exciting rhythms, very musical and percussive libretto. I was as excited and enthused as one could be and still operate a video camera.
December 31
One minute of this year will be extended to 61 seconds they just announced on the news. The agency in Paris which regulates the atomic international standard clock, something like that, made the announcement. I get up to write it. I like flukes in science which throw a wrench in the textbook.
I don't want to get off the phone with Gyorgyi. It's near the end of the conversation, she wants to get off to take a shower and get ready for tonight's parties, but it seems I have a lot to say at the moment to her. I can tell her how sad I was feeling before and why. I ask her to explain exactly what valium is for, but it doesn't sound like the thing for me. She doesn't want the heavy drug her shrink recommends. "No thanks, chum," she says. Joan, Sara, Ruth—the one with the biblical name in the record department. I'm afraid to call her by name because I'm always afraid I'll get it wrong, all those biblical names. Well, she got her hair cut short. "I like your haircut. You look like a boy from a Thomas Mann novel," I said to her. Not exactly sure it was Thomas Mann I meant, but the boy who plays Tadzio in the movie of Death in Venice is pretty close to what I'm meaning. She said, "How old? Twelve?" Great response. I thought and figured one second and said, yeah, and that was it, back over to my department. And I tell that to Gyorgyi and moan and go into some of the other obsessive encounters with her today. I see her for the first time without one of the company jackets on. Not chubby, perfect like a Greek statue. Better. With a bra. And then the one that made the walk home sad. Her leaving work. I see her walking out the door and don't get to say goodbye or anything or Happy New Year. She doesn't see me. Now I understand this is all obsessive garbage, but it's the facts.
I said to Lenny on the phone: I'm writing, but come on up, maybe I'm almost done, maybe I'll stop. We talked about Hemingway and Conrad, other writing stuff, some other stuff I don't remember, but it was good for a half hour. So I'll stop and get ready for New Year's Eve.
January 1, 1978
Enjoying some dream when the phone rang loud. I look at my watch—12—not bad. Am grateful for no hangover, must be the big meal in Chinatown at 2 AM or the pie a la mode at 3. I'm deciding whether to answer the phone, it's Gyorgyi. I'm too tired to ask her anything and a little bothered at having been woken up. I have no intention of staying awake, see you later, and get back into bed, but now I am awake and reminded of last night's party sequence of events and wondering how much of the two playoff games I'll get to see today. Pretty soon, this part of the journal will end and a Part 2 or something will begin, that being when I find out my new work schedule and start working only 3 or 4 days a week again. This last month I've been writing at night after coming home from a long day at the job. Nothing can match the feeling of a night when you know the next day is a day off. And then the pleasure of that day off. Like how I used today—mostly slept, through the entire second playoff game into the night. No phone calls. No, one from Regina, one right now. Rehearsal with Tom tomorrow night and we discuss the party last night, was I too drunk to be discreet? The things I said, did they make sense? Were valid criticisms? Everything's cool, Tom says. The conversation with Regina was a little one-sided with me being in sleep stupor and not enthusiastic about leaving it. She asks if anything is going on tonight. I don't know, I respond.
January 2
I don't have to change the calendar part of my watch. Things worked out smoothly for this month's change. Yesterday I said to Gyorgyi: Judy, upstairs, is going to give me some cuttings from her plants and help me pot them. That's great. That's great? responded Gyorgyi. Yeh, that's what I consider great.
I was laughing pretty uncontrollably on the subway reading Flann O'Brien and didn't care too much about what that appeared like to the other passengers. I wanted to hold the book up and read the passage out loud to them. The narrator as a young boy is recalling the stench in his home caused by the huge pig Ambrose who, along with the other animals of the household, reside with him, his mother and the old grey fellow in their one room stone house under the continually pouring rain of western Ireland. At one point, when the pig apparently develops some sickness, the stench, he reports, was such that at night, the old grey fellow and his mother were likely to go for a ten mile walk in the downpour to escape it; he being an infant, not yet able to walk, was forced to remain behind. All are accepting of their fate so that it isn't until a passing neighbor taking note of their beds outside near the road in the rain, as by now the house is filled with pig-steam, develops a plan which kills the pig (which the old grey fellow had been reluctant to do as it'd been a pet) and everyone accepts this new fate. This isn't just humor like Art Buchwald or Erma Bombeck who are best-selling authors. This is first class literature beyond the uniqueness of its having originally been written in Gaelic. Folk storytelling by a Greek scholar. This is the third or fourth time I'm reading this book, The Poor Mouth, the copy in hand being one I've bought for Steve. They had five copies at the bookstore for $1.95. Over the last three weeks, I bought all five, giving four copies away and keeping one for myself so I'd have it in impressive hard cover. The first copy went to me, with my discount it was something like $1.30. The next copy went to a guy I work with as an xmas gift. That time I brought it up to one of the back registers and just told the cashier: a buck. The next two also went for xmas gifts, one hanukah actually, but at xmas time. I don't remember what I ended up paying for those. I stole the copy today. Theft number two. I'm keeping them down. I feel justified because I've been working so hard with no reward other than the paychecks on Friday. No 'Great job you're doing!' None of the managers ask me if I want anything when they send out for coffee and I'm standing right there. I'll take a damn book once in a while.
Tom Carey calls and tells me about rehearsing with Vincent Katz tonight, working on some new tunes. The message hadn't gotten to me that the studio rehearsal tonight was cancelled so I made the trip all the way downtown for nothing except that my hour involved in that was so pleasant that I didn't mind and still don't. Leisurely strolling, waiting for that 8 o'clock rehearsal time. Dinner in new find cheap Greek fancy restaurant. I read some Flann O'Brien while I'm waiting for my souvlaki. I'm relaxed and comfortable and I have a glass of water. I'd been looking for the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club to get a drink, but couldn't find it and didn't have the time for searching so settled for dinner. Tom continues that Alex was there, Vincent's father, the famous artist, and that he was reading Mag City, so I go 'wooo'.
It's a sad state of affairs that we have no money to pay our contributors with. Same with the cable TV show. Poets are asked to perform and get no reimbursement except the presentation of their art. I'm sick of lottery tickets. Haven't bought one in a month. At a reading the other night, someone read something about poets being revered in Latin America. Jim Brodey in the audience yelled out, "Get the tickets." Now, I should stay home and read or write some more, but got the whole day off tomorrow so will put shoes back on and head for the Grassroots where I assume my compadres are. I'll wait to hear the rest of this Miles Davis album. I'm thinking of buying the new Talking Heads album and the new Joni Mitchell, but I really do listen to that music so seldom. When I come into money, first thing would be big record store exultant spree. Then art books. Then enough cocaine to keep me supplied for months. Then, maybe, some clothes. I have everything else on this lower east side and I'm a fool to cry.
January 3
Ed Koch wants Emile La Guardia's desk. Not the one used by Abe Beame or Lindsay. Koch is 6'1", La Guardia was 5'3". There are problems in Gracie Mansion. However, Koch announces he will issue an executive order allowing homosexuals into the fire department. Some people are upset about that. The other day one of the cellar guys is telling me about a conversation he had with a cop friend (actually I happened to be standing there as he told it to someone else); the cop made some familiar remark about homosexuals. They'll be no problem about being gay on the force now, he says, now that everyone knows our mayor is homosexual.
Reading over a piece of this, my two-month journal, I'm informed and reminded that my boots are still at the shoemakers and today is the day I've been meaning to pick them up. Experience is subject matter. Godard's criticism of this media-conscious generation at big meeting six years ago—how we see an event through a camera rather than being present at it. Our reality of the experience is the one documented on the film. I'm, in fact, preparing to write a letter to my friend Michael as part of this text. Not write a letter and copy it over into here, but make it in here, xerox it and mail it to him. It's the logical step after Frank O'Hara. It's Post-Personism. It seems Andy Warhol would like to obliterate emotions entirely. It's evident of course in the works, but he talks about it in his book Philosophy of Andy Warhol. Six-person chaperones so nothing will happen between he and his date. Everything remains the same. I still like Jean-Pierre Leaud and the entire French New Wave.
The record store doesn't have the Talking Heads album, instead I buy used copies of an old Cecil Taylor album just reissued which is on now and sparkling and One Man Dog by James Taylor which is as classic as any Charlie Chaplin movie. I think only musicians like James Taylor now—people who respect and admire his taste and impeccable arrangements. Clean. This a real folk album hitting the villages with electricity.
I get so much accomplished and have time for a two-hour walk on my day off. It was only supposed to be an hour, but I felt so free and irresponsible like 'Call Me Irresponsible' that I let myself stretch it out, with that side trip to 7th St. to see if maybe Hall's Record and Book Store might have the Talking Heads album or any Band albums or James Taylor not expecting any of that, but to see anyway and ho! There's a new bookshop just opened up, the Rivendell Bookstore, with a nice older woman cheerfully trying to remove the snow and ice from her shop steps with hot water. That ought to do it, I volunteer. Lured in to see that it's a fantasy and children's bookshop. I tell her the Tolkien books sell remarkably well at the bookstore I work in and she ought to get them. Not so impressed with the shop, but she's just starting. Good luck and out the door. Hall's, of course, is the hardest place in the world to look for records. There are hundreds of them, all cheap, but they're in piles and shelved so that it's difficult to look through them. Always get discouraged right away. For the first time I see someone looking the only way possible in that store—going through each stack, taking a pile and looking through it, replacing it and getting the next stack. You'd need a day or several hours at least. The large, bulky guy always listening to or talking about opera is there, which is common and pleasingly predictable. He says, I'll take whoever this basso is (on his little transistor radio) and get going. Mr. Hall is busy copying lists of serial numbers from one notebook to another, those funny black & white covered school composition notebooks. I imagine how I'd re-design the store and organize it to make it easier to find what you're looking for. I knock down the center wall, close the store for a day to organize, rebuild the bookshelves so the books stand up instead of piled on their sides. He's a nice man, says goodbye before I do, even though I've not bought anything.
Next stop a used clothes store a few steps down, maybe this is the one Steve's friend runs, yes, but I don't say anything to her. I'm looking for a sweater for Karen. There are none. We're out of sweaters, she says. I watch the only other customer, a woman, take off the top she's tried on. She takes it off slowly and deliberately, sort of like she's really enjoying taking it off. I don't let myself think any further. I kind of want to hang out in there a little longer, but also feel like getting on. I still have to stop by St. Mark's Church to see if Gary and I still have our jobs for Wednesday nights assisting with the reading series now that the directorship has changed hands. I meet Ron Padgett and his son, Wayne. After we introduce ourselves, Ron asks why I've stopped by. This impresses me. A man who gets right to the point, no time for dilly-dallying. We have a nice short chat, he explaining a little to me the administrative jungle of the Poetry Project. I'm checking him out. He's a fine-looking man, the way fine is well-sculpted. He looks like a young old scholar with his gray hair and eyeglasses. His son had given me a cordial and refined handshake. Ever since my father 15 years ago or so commented that he disliked a cousin of mine because he shook hands like a fish, I've taken notice of handshakes and do tend to make immediate character judgements based on them. The office of the Project is already quite changed. Ron has cleared a lot of wall stuff out and made things very orderly in there. He appears to be taking a firm grip on things. There's no money for a secretary anymore so that means Shelley's job is through. Mine and Gary's positions are also up in the air because of uncertainty of funds. The copy of Mag City I give to Ron has the cover stapled on upside down. "Collating madness," he says, grinning to alleviate any embarrassment or loss of pride he thinks I might feel. But I don't feel any of that. I'm glad we caught a mistake. I give him a correct copy. As we're leaving I think: shit.
A 2 AM. Accounting of the Day's Expenditures
(it having been an unusual day of expending)
Afternoon
Jiffy mailing envelope .40
Postage for mailing (Bobby Meyers his books finally) .85
Boot repair (thought supposed to have been $12) 10.00
Pizza and soda .75
2 records (used) 5.00
Groceries 2.00
Evening and Night
Movie (I run most of the way to the Quad to meet Gary) 3.50
Ice cream (at movie) 50
Record (Talking Heads) (at this point break the $50 bill in my wallet for 4 days) 5.00
Drinks at CBGBs 3.50
Tip .50
Minus $1 which I spot on sidewalk, allow Gary to pick up, but which he gives to me 1.00
Dinner and tip 2.50
Book 3.00
Drink at Grassroots (Gary has bought my first round and I end up not having
another, but buy drink for birthday girl, Elinor) (not really her birthday I find
out months later) 1.00
Total 37.50 cash
Order $15 worth of books from Z Press 15.00 check
52.50 total
Part 2
January 6
Not that my work days are shorter, but I've been keeping this up for a month and it's time for some kind of change. I still don't feel the unbounded open space that working less hours would provide leading to a change in the style of these entries. I assume they'd become less esoteric and more reflective, probably more boring. Someday when I have a lot of time I'll write lies. I don't want a vacation I just don't want to work anymore for a paycheck, but that's so common a complaint I guess I don't have to make it. But I will. I'd like to write about the meal I just prepared and ate, then washed the dishes and cleaned up a bit, all in just a little more time than one James Taylor album. I'd like to write about that more than the reading I was involved in on the radio two days ago.
But I don't do any of that. Instead I go and watch the news and feel like I'm avoiding the issue. The president has just come back from a nine-day trip abroad. I didn't know he was away. I'm feeling I should be writing. He's slighted the mayor of Paris and has himself photographed with the socialist candidate bestowing credentials and compliments on him. Le Monde is enraged, I guess. He stands at Normandy. A reporter says it was the most emotional point of the trip. I'm finishing up the Flann O'Brien book. It's terrific. I've asked Regina somewhere in our long telephone conversation what's on the 11:30 movies. All the stations are carrying these reports of Carter's trip, but at 12:20 Forbidden Planet is on. I'll stay up and watch that. It's based on The Tempest I've told Regina hoping that will interest her in watching it. She likes my taste in movies, but will be going to bed. I watch until the disgusting love stuff between the crewman who's been aboard a rocketship for two years without a female and the female who's grown up on the distant planet with nothing, but her father, Robbie the Robot and her 'animal friends' which she calls with a space dog whistle. I turn it off as she's telling Robby to synthesize her a new dress that'll fit in all the right places.
January 8
Hey, Joe diMaggio. I don't believe you anymore. Shut up on the TV.
January 9
Cab rides. 6 o'clock and no Miguel. Me with excuses and thank yous to Dennis, my boss, for an hour off, swift walk to Strand Book Store to get Tom. First cab ride to 6th and B and waiting in the cold and some back and forth up the block, but Miguel doesn't show up with his van. Up to First Avenue to get a cab. Plan now: One Checker cab to fetch band equipment in Upper West Side and back down with it and other band members in two Checkers. The ride up becomes a Ulyssesian journey, I say to Tom, feeling literary. We make metaphors: The freezing cold wind is Aelious, stuck in the tunnel on the east side is Scylla and Charybdis, no escape from the Lower East Side and waiting for a Checker is Circe, etc. Fun in the back of a cab with two hours to get things together and the meter running. The temperature I'm afraid will keep the crowds away. Our first cab driver said the roads were terrible icy sheets that cover five, six blocks at a time. Bad news. Second Avenue below 50th Street is OK, he says, but we'll never be using that, I'm thinking. We're up in the Upper West Side where there are hills and roads can slope. I saw Columbus Circle go by like a memory. I'm not thinking about the traffic or what is happening later in the night. One thing at a time. These cab rides.
First rendezvous, they're there. Lindsey's got a tape recorder with music and Vince has some chicken. Zip up in the traffic, dodging corners, West End, Riverside to 125th and some side street no one ever visits. We load up the cab and the first carload takes off. A number of us carry a big speaker column over to Broadway and get a second Checker. It's freezing. I'm thinking about hypothermia and camping trips in snow. I'm amazed I still have my scarf in the confusion and rush.
Stop at Lindsey's for bass and electric piano. And then the home stretch. That section of Second Avenue, we're on it. The 4 AM place to eat, my neighborhood. 11th Street. St. Mark's Church. The gig. I run in to see what's happening. Hallelujah! A huge crowd with notables. I'm busy and noticing friends in the crowd. Hello, hello, what's up? Rush. You you and you. Her and her. It's 8:30. The night is young.
I wrote that much while one of the performers of the night were on. I won't mention names because it was boring and long. She read an entire scroll that always showed at least halfway to go.
January 10
The hour walk around town stretches out to two hours, as usual. It's freezing cold out. The air is sharp. I like it cold, the colder the better. I'm dressed for it and am only cold on my face. All over people are reacting to the weather. Inside people talk about it. Outside they huddle and show discomfort and bend their heads into the wind. That's what I did. I run into Ted Berrigan on my way home and change direction to walk with him the next block.
He says: "It's the kind of day to stay home and type up your poems."
"That's what I'm doing," I say, though I'm typing prose, but I figure that qualifies. "This is my hour walk around town, but it's stretched out to two hours," I tell him. He's on his way to St. Mark's to pick up mail.
"I'm between jobs," he says. "Five years between jobs." We chuckle.
"That's not too funny," I say.
I'm a week late in delivering some Poetry Calendars to two spots on 4th Street. I hadn't intended to leave the house today, but Karen is sick and is heading back up to her folks in Connecticut so I see her to a cab for Penn Station. I've grabbed the pile of Poetry Calendars which has been sitting on my kitchen table for a week and we walk downstairs. Simon Pettet's door is open so I call in to see if he'd want to go for a walk. "Allo," he says. "Yeh sure," fast paced words coming out of him. He has a hat on. I think he said he's off to a friend's to take a shower, but at First Avenue while I'm flagging down a cab for Karen, he's heading up while I'll be going down. See you later, Simon. Karen being delivered in a taxi, off. The streets of New York City are frosted white from last night's salting to melt the ice. All over the streets have a new white sugaring. I remember passing the bodega with the sign in the window advertising the 100% pure OJ quarts on sale. I'd intended to walk back on First Avenue and get a quart on the rebound, but it turned out Second Avenue was being interesting when the time came for a repass and then the Ted Berrigan detour rerouted me and it was only a dime or so to save and I don't really ever pay attention to pennies saved here or there anyway. What's ever closest. I can't even figure out if it's cheaper to buy frozen or fresh orange juice. I mean, I don't stand there in the aisle and compute the ounces. I pay for it. Then I eat it. Though I did go in to one of the fresh produce stands run by Koreans to check the prices of their juices. No better than the health food store which I go in to buy some things though I hate the people who run it. The co-op on 4th Street is too far away and who's organized enough to want a week's worth of groceries every week, on Tuesday. I bought a very small onion not too long ago and when I unwrapped the tin foil I'd put around it this morning, wanting to slice it up for an omelet, it'd gone bad already. I can't even eat tiny onions up fast enough. Understand? Everyone says this building, because we all know each other, should start a communal kitchen which is a great idea, but will never work because, well, for one thing, it's all guys.
At the bookstore I have to deliver Poetry Calendars to, I buy Edwin Denby for $1.90, not Tom Clark for $3. I chat there for a few minutes. That's how these hour walks stretch out (here I pause to go into the kitchen to try some of those other nuts and pick up the Denby book, read one poem and throw the book down, fucking great! glee, and knock over the ashtray with Karen's cigarette garbage).
The light around New York City, the light New York City is in, is getting darker. Now it's at its blue haze stage. Through the window gates, then my dirty window, then the iron rods of the fire escape and then a couple hundred yards of air, then through a large window with criss-crossing supports, I see a postal worker in what is a large back sorting room of the Stuyvesant Post Office. The best view I have into a neighboring apartment always has the curtain or a piece of cloth closed over the window. I think I once saw in there and it was an older woman, so there's nothing in there I want to see anyway. I notice a small patch on the windowsill I missed painting way near the bottom. Sometimes I worry that the piece of cord which hangs from the bamboo curtain will be ignited by the radiator which it hangs down on if I don't drape it over the nail from which hang the keys for the locks on the window gates.
What have I been doing for this last half hour silent at writing table. Mostly reading things lying around, within reach. Well, I don't have that kind of time. At the East Side Bookstore, I'm browsing through the new poetry magazines, Roof IV and Shell, and here are pieces by favorite writers, but no time it seems to stand and relax and read them. Just an old survey glance which is like powdered potatoes without water. And another chat, this one with Jim Brodey, discussing last night's gala performance. The obligatory check for used albums at Freebeing. There was a time when I'd stop in Gem Spa and check out the magazines, but I've cut that out. I want a day with no tomorrow. I feel like I'm always walking around in parentheses on those jaunts which I always limit to an hour or two, the most. Then back to writing. Next month, after the January 30 reading, my days off will be used for hiking, city—walking and lots of movies. I've missed two month's worth of movies. Tonight, breaking discipline, will go see two Wim Wenders films. Lots of jukebox, Gary said.
January 11
I'm not going to the party at Eileen's. Karen has pneumonia. I've got to go to work in the morning. I'm tired. I was worried I'd have trouble pulling off my boots because I wore thick hiking socks today and it was hard putting them on. I sat down and thought for a while of what to write and how to write it, but then dove right in. I thought of this: She came into the room and I was glad to see her and I know that showed on my face in our greeting. I was glad about that. When we got to talking I noticed she had on a V-neck sweater and right there at that V crescendo some flesh cleavage and I stopped it right there. Too busy minding the door to get involved with anyone at these Wednesday night readings. I'll see her tomorrow night at the TV show, but more than these will have to wait until next month. The day of my reading at St. Mark's, January 30, is the final day of this journal. It's also Shelley's birthday and I told her I'd be sure to bring that out. Holidays mark periods of time. Bob said continue your journal until at least Groundhog Day. I hadn't thought about it. I thought it might extend to my birthday, which is the end of February. Or the day I was Bar Mitzvahed which is the middle of February. Or maybe until I'm 35. No way. Anais Nin had no day job, I guess. Did she die a couple months ago?
While Steve Carey was reading I thought of this: Everything I'm learning to do as a writer involves simply relearning the language, which isn't so simple. Forgetting every rule taught in grammar school and approaching the language as a constructor, making it new always. I'm just learning this. In prose it's more natural to just follow your brain around, but in poetry the space is confined.
I knew I shouldn't be thinking all this while Steve was reading, but that's what his broken language made me do.
January 12
I couldn't write while this piece that turns out to be Arthur Blythe played on the radio. Now a Miles Davis piece is playing and I'm thinking about how Debbie insisted that the stuff he did with Wayne Shorter and that band in the 60s is so much better than anything he's done since, explaining how involved all the theory and harmony stuff was, going: "Oh man." Reaching that point when you realize you can't tell anyone anything they don't already know. In this late 50s, early 60s piece, it's clear to hear how he stretched form and put melody lines on top of measures with no bar lines, trumpet and sax in unison declaring some exaltation with a rhythm section that's earth motion for it.
Well, I don't know. The radio's good.
She walked by me without saying a thing. That's
things that upset me
I like the Gerard Malanga "Secret Diary" piece I
just read though it might be boring, I like the
poems being in the middle of the prose, continually,
So I'll change things and put that in here.
Margaret writes from Florida saying among other things she's
horny. She says that from Florida. I'm in NY.
I wish like anything that she was here, but maybe things then
wouldn't work out as well as the miles have seemed to
make it. The Blue Ridge Mountains are involved.
Where Jeff has been. I'll go hiking with you anytime, pal.
Jeff, I met Kay in the grocer while you were down south for
the holidays. I didn't want to bring you up, figuring
on giving her a life of her own, but she said you were
bowling down there with your brother. That was the
best thing I heard all day and I still like it.
Elmo Hope, not Herbie Nichols on the radio. I
was almost right. I learned that from A.B. Spellman's
book.
I didn't exchange many sentences at all with her at work
today but one stupid thing she said that made me feel
good which I don't have to tell you about.
This moment: On a street corner I put my little army
shoulder bag and the record I've found, Frankie Vivaldi
and the Seasons (I've wanted to use that all day, did
twice in conversation, but in here) down on a car to
write out something in a notebook about the crescent moon
over the buildings. And a man comes out of the bodega and
goes into the car, packages in there that look like
pizza boxes apparently making a deliver. He doesn't
say a word to me, like, "Get your shit off the car," but
proceeds beautifully in his business totally letting me
continue with mine.
I stood on the corner of 1st Ave. & 12 St.
Gazing at the crescent moon
over the Asher Levy School building
Watching out for the cars, don't hit me
in my rhapsody, going by in lines
with their headlights on in twos
And aware of my bodega on
the other corner
Knowing I'd have to take off my gloves
if I wanted to write this down
Trying to remember what the difference is
that makes the moon slower
when seen through trees
Yesterday we all saw the stars clear over NYC. An event,
then continued
the moon was something out of place over the Asher Levy
building and accompanying tenement background landscape.
Before, I thought I was tired and went to lay down
and even thought of making sure to set the alarm but
got up to fetch the new magazine I bought at the Strand
Read stuff including that Gerard Malanga piece with,
I guess, our Rene in it, and now here I am excited in
writing a poem of my own
Fucking A!
January 13
The peanut butter on crackers with the foreign jam was good-tasting survival lunch. I thought of adding some of the little remaining brandy to that first cup of coffee, but kept talking instead. Me, reading the new Dylan interview. Gary, something else. "Want some coffee?" he said. "Sure." I never drink it. I didn't have a hangover this morning. I woke up and felt alright. Must have been all the pot we smoked.
Karen's got a favorite restaurant in Little Italy that seems to excite her, even the prospect of going there. But the two times we have gone I didn't like the food so much. I don't get excited over big meals. I like the bread best. The first time we went was when we were first starting to see each other and we walked down there in the rain. I ordered a bottle of wine, but she doesn't drink wine and I ended up drinking the whole bottle and getting a little loose. Karen was amused and commented that my face has gotten redder and I'm doing some funny things there in the restaurant. We're enjoying ourselves, though maybe the conversation isn't so constant and excited. We'll go back there again after she gets over her pneumonia. I owe her a dinner since Christmas. I owe Gary a dinner, at Luchow's, I suggested with good intentions, since his birthday before the last one. I owe a drum teacher $5 for a final lesson I never took somewhere in the 1960s. Taking that #2 bus all the way to Bloomfield, an hour ride through Nutley, past the big ITT complex with the tower a lady fell or jumped off. The bus continued, making dozens of stops. It would pass a park where there were always people shooting basketball with other people playing baseball or football in the field next to there. Once we got that far, I knew I was almost in downtown Bloomfield and started thinking about my lesson, usually worried because I hadn't prepared. Bloomfield College was next and finally downtown Bloomfield, New Jersey. An hour ride from my corner in Passaic. I always got off the bus and went straight to the music shop, had my lesson in the back room, got right back on the bus to get home in time for supper, 6:30, when my father got home from work. "How was your lesson?" I guess he always asked.
There was a time in fourth grade when I took up clarinet and every day would practice in the kitchen while my mother was preparing dinner. I'd have my little music stand and turn one of the kitchen table chairs around so it faced the sun parlor and would start squeeking through "Red River Valley" or whatever those songs are in a beginning music book. My mother would be walking around the kitchen chopping onions or something and she never said, "Why don't you go upstairs and practice." I was fascinated with scales. I thought I was fantastic, able to finger them correctly on such a complicated-looking instrument. I'm sure I must have played them for my mother quite a number of times.
Thousands of dinners my mother prepared for our family, or just me or my brother or father, but we ate together mostly. My grandfather, too. We moved in with him after his second wife died. I was four. I remember sitting in the basement on moving day among all the belongings being moved in. We lived together, my mother and four males, for the next eight years, until my grandfather remarried (he was 68) and moved into an apartment with his wife in downtown Passaic. My parents married near 30 years, now, my mother preparing, say, 3/4 of those dinners works out to 8,211 meals and that's not including lunches here and there or breakfasts on Sundays.
January 14
At work I'm reading the new Richard Brautigan novel, Sombrero Fallout, on the sales floor. Over the last week, I've gotten to page 50 in these stolen punchcard moments. I'm in total fear of being spotted by Fred, the floor manager. I think of him as a Nazi, as a total interference in any comfort I could have at my job. I look up constantly from the pages of the book. The first few weeks I worked at the bookstore, I was warned a number of times not to read on the floor, but lately I haven't been. Now though, I have a new project—to finish this book. It's hilarious and I'm drawn to it compulsively. During this one stretch of 15 minutes, I feel involved in war games. I know I'm taking advantage of my luck in not being spotted and convince myself to stop before I'm caught. But once I put the book back on the shelf and take a token walk around straightening out some books, checking to see that Fred is still involved in his paperwork over at the cash registers, I go back to the book and read another page, anxiously looking up when I think about it, which is spaces in my concentration. The book makes me feel relaxed. It soothes me. At one of those quick glances up, a customer who looks like Fred walks around the bend where boxed sets are displayed. Actually, he doesn't look at all like Fred, but I get all tight inside for that flash of paranoid moment. That one was too much. I've learned my lesson. On my afternoon break, I take the book downstairs to the record stockroom and sit in there and read in total freedom from fear and laugh out loud at some points.
I'm not anxious for 6 o'clock closing time to come as it starts to get late in the afternoon. I know all I'll be doing tonight is coming home to an empty apartment to write. Next month, I keep saying. Next month I won't have to watch as she puts on her coat with me standing making conversation, then leaves. So I do come home and fall asleep almost immediately watching the news and wake up during Laverne and Shirley, turn it off almost as immediately as I fell asleep, though some funny stuff was happening. Magic crackers at a party are making everyone fall in love with the first person they see. One guy happens to be looking in the mirror when it hits and he takes the mirror off the wall and is carrying it around with him going: Oh you handsome hunk of man. The rest are male-female couples, of course. What ruins the whole thing, why I get up with all my strength to turn it off, is you know at the end of the half-hour, everything will be restored to normal and people either won't remember a thing or else will be embarrassed and get goofy and slip out the door escaping a valid situation. Gary said: If the guy had killed the little girl in Alice in the Cities, instead of the film being their sweet escapades around, then you would have had a movie.
January 16
Still spaced from last night's marijuana. Pleasant waking up in no hurry. Here it is early afternoon already. Third time hearing the same side of a JJ Cale album with me futzing around the house, like making tuna fish and checking out new books received in mail today, but I'm ahead of myself. I'm too lazy to flip the album over or change it. Why bother. I like it.
Some kind of double body-clock wakes me automatically at 8:30 on work days and 12 or a little before on days off. A day with a notice of a package at the post office so a trip outside is necessary and we'll do it first thing because what is it? Finally, jump out of bed and write some checks—we'll take care of business while we're out there. The laundry, maybe. A letter to Michael C. Downstairs, another letter from unemployment. I open the Con Ed bill first to create suspense. Damn. Bastards have refused me again. Means writing another letter and xeroxing. Why don't they want to decide in my favor and award me the thousands dollars I deserve or don't deserve.
Dear Michael,
When I got a notice of a package at the post office, I figured it was from you. It was Saturday night when I checked my mailbox and found the notice, which meant waiting until Monday which is today. It took the guy at the post office a long time to find the package. While I was waiting there I wondered what it could be if not something from you and I began composing a letter in that dream of line-waiting asking if the package the post office lost was from you. It turned out that my package was a group of books I ordered, but it's given me the incentive, finally, that final push I needed to write you. Pam filled me in pretty thoroughly about what you've been doing the last months (did you get the postcard we sent you?) and it only made me sorrier I hadn't written before. Actually, I still have two pages of a letter I started writing in October which I'll enclose with this and Pam told me you had beginnings of letters to me which you never mailed. So if you still have them, carried with you from Ireland to London, mail them to me. It bothered me that Pam said that with your working making money taking up so much time, you weren't doing so much art. By now though, you must be settled and I guess you've accumulated enough money to quit one of those three jobs and can summon the muse again. Here, musey. I get this red-tinted remembrance—you sketching as we're sitting on bar stools in that jazz bar, Storyville, in Paris. I hope I'm not being nostalgic, but I'd like to be doing that again with you, Paris or anywhere. Pam says you're coming to the states in June, but I'll believe that when it happens. I can't see myself back in Europe in the next few seasons. No money, for one, but more than that, I don't want to leave New York City for any length of time. There's too much happening here for me to leave for even a few weeks. The best poetry readings are here, the best poetry magazines are done here, and it looks like the best drinking partners I have are the poets in this area. I do need to travel and do see another big trip somewhere in the not-too-distant future. I've fixed up my apartment, but haven't gotten around to building the bookshelves which I have the lumber for. I haven't gotten a cat which I wanted to do when I first moved in because I know, eventually, I'd have to find it a home. I'm comfortable here, but I ain't gonna buy chandeliers for the place. If you really are coming over, then plan on spending time here before you go out west to see Pam. I have an extra room that can be made comfortable for you and we won't be too crowded. This is where the art is, Michael. I don't know what's happening in London, but it can't be as thorough as here. I've been off this island once in four months. If anyone I knew had a car I'd have seen some trees. But what happens is you walk around on days off from work or stay home and read, write, etc. For two months, I've been writing this journal and working at a huge bookstore. I come home from work and write for two or three hours. The first month I was writing this, my friend Karen was living with me. It was a rough month because we were both working so much, me six days, her seven days a week, and long holiday hours. Don't ask me where all the money I made went to. I wasn't going out and didn't spend any on drugs. I don't know where it is. At least hers went all on Christmas presents. At the beginning of the month, we said that every night we'd come home and make a good meal, but that happened only twice the whole month, I don't know what I ate for dinners the rest of the month. And we'd both be so tired at 10 or so o'clock when I'd finish writing, that we'd go to bed and have energy enough for only one orgasm apiece. One-orgasm fucking all month, and every morning trouble waking up together with only the prospect of another long working day ahead. Already, though it's only two weeks since I was immersed in that, it seems so far away and so long ago.
Meanwhile, again I ask you for drawings I can use for my magazine. Design us a cover, 8-1/2 x 11, that says somewhere on it: Mag City 4. Black and white, color is too expensive for us to reproduce. We're applying for a grant that we're bound to get, but the money wouldn't arrive until we're on Mag City 5.
It was great to see Pam, but the magic that is there when you're traveling was gone. She looked a lot older. The three years of traveling showed on her face. Reminiscing got boring. I had her tell me everything she could remember about you and that seemed to be the only thing left between me and her. If we'd had days instead of hours reunited here in NYC, I'm sure we would have gotten back that Paris and Copenhagen rhapsody, but as it was, we had one night and then she was off in the morning for a bunch of stops in the U.S. before finally arriving home in California to be with her father for Christmas. I guess she was a little overwhelmed, too, in being back in the states for the first time in three years with the burden of starting over again looming. I thought there was some kind of attraction between me and Pam's cousin, but I haven't had the time to follow up on that first night's glances. She'll be leaving town soon, too, but maybe I'll get to see her before she leave.
In London, I stayed at a cheap rooming house hear the Paddington Station. My room on the top floor was so small you couldn't open the door all the way, but that was alright with me. I had to brush my teeth in the bathtub two floors down. The toilet for the floor was right next to my room and I got to listen to everyone using it. I'd read until very late at night and then sleep until early afternoon. It was my first month in Europe. I was lonely. I'd go into bars at night, but was so quiet that I never met any people. I'd sit and watch. Eventually, I bought a watch and that got me to more of a normal time schedule. The place I was staying at was a bed and breakfast, but I made it to breakfast only once the month I stayed there. The deal I'd made with the owner had me paying a pound a night for that small room—which at one time must have been a storage closet—and getting no breakfast. The guy who managed the place, though, said when I first moved in, "I won't say nothing if you come to breakfast." When I left, with my backpack on, having to call Fred, the manager, from downstairs, contemplating for a few minutes walking out without paying the week's rent I owed—noone was around and there was the door—I yelled down to him, cleaning up after breakfast: "Fred, I'm leaving." I heard him mutter: "Good." I never could figure out why he didn't like me. I assume because I was always sleeping when he came around changing the sheets. He wouldn't take the money I offered him as tip. That was an alright place though. The book I read that month was Virginia Woolf's Night and Day. It was one of her first books and pretty bad, like a soap opera or parody of one, but I finished it, I guess because it took place in London. And I liked the title. I ate fish and chips. I'd go to movies and plays, amazed at how cheap they were. The Tate three times. I'd walk around all the time. I met a woman from the NW section and visited her once. Her roommate was an artist who had some of his pieces at Biba's, which I hear has since closed down. That's too bad. That was one of the best things in London. I went to that street where all the antiques are. I went to Hyde Park on Sundays to hang out at Speaker's Corner, but I never heard anything there I liked except an old lady who maybe was a little crazy. She asked questions about literature or history and if you gave the right answer she had all these 'certificates' she'd award you—dozens of different collage type pieces that all had a stamp of graduation on them. I still have the two she gave me. She'd also give out candy and cookies. At one point she fell over and continued her questioning from the ground. I got to know the Underground system. Lost 25 pounds to two street hustlers in a phony card game. Got membership to a gambling club and lost 25 more pounds in a half-hour playing blackjack. Spent some time shopping, researching and traded my camera in at a pawn shop for a new one (Olympus OM-1) which I immediately brought to the manufacturer's factory on the outskirts of London and had checked out. I took a bus tour of the city. Remember the old banking part—the only time I went there. Walked all the way back to Paddington one late night from the London Film Festival at that new art complex on the Thames after seeing Jacques Rivette's film, Celine and Julie Go Boating, which remains one of my favorite films. I remember walking over the Thames on the Waterloo Bridge and the silence, late night full moon and Big Ben. And that last shot of the film, a close-up of a cat's puzzled face lingering in my mind. It's still there. Not one woman picked me up the whole time I was in London. No one's done it here either. I must be hard to pick up. I found out about a set of phone booths at an Oxford Street Underground Station where you could call the states for the price of a London call. I went there to call my friend Barry, but he wasn't home and I never made it back there again. I saw where Sherlock Holmes lived. I never ate at an Indian restaurant. I should have. One afternoon I was in Bloomsbury. Another afternoon, someplace else. I saw Last Tango in Paris in London. A few months later I saw it in Paris. I've seen it in NYC, too. And once in New Brunswick, NJ. I grew to dislike Maria Schneider as an actress. I felt the same in London as I've always felt. The diary I kept on that trip, the section in London which I've just read over, reflects that. I sound younger, enthusiastic instead of literary. It was Baker Street not Oxford Street where the phone booths were, my diary corrects.
January 17
I felt threatened one afternoon in a pub and left. There was a record store across the street and I went in and listened to the Frank Zappa album they were playing.. Those two incidents are a set. Entering London on the train from the south is depressing, passing through old, poor neighborhoods, like going to our Bronx Zoo on the subway. One time hitched out of London west to Wales on A40, another time north on the M4. Entered once from the airport, being picked up, I swear, by a chauffeur-driven limousine (a friend's connection), on a bus from Liverpool, the equivalent of $5 for a five-hour ride, what the hell, and on that train from Dover in the early morning rain. With only one hour to walk around before I had to head back to the airport to get my flight back home. I had $12 in my pocket. My plane landed in Montreal and I hitched back to my sleeping parents in New Jersey, stopping first for a malted at the Allwood Diner at 6 AM then walked into their house after 10 months away.
That's what I remember about London, So, everything else is fine. My health is good. I've grown a beard. Michael, sorry for not writing sooner, but this is only the third letter I've written in a year. I think of you a lot. Send me a phone number and we'll arrange another call. So, write, etc. Send me artwork. If you really are coming in the spring, I'll start cleaning up now (it'll take me that long). I guess you know about the rooms of Blake etchings at the Royal Academy. I think that's where they are. Does the Tate have a cellar? Could have been there. Anyway, for now . . .
Love,
Greg
I Knew I'd Be Writing This
Sensory assaults on laundromat time
While my clothes get clean and I use the
Time to read ZZZZZZ with some glances over
At the flat-colored-like woman at the end
Near the broken dryer. Is she giving me the eye?
No time. This is a great Kenneth Koch poem. I
have to tell Georgyi about this and the two epics.
A man with a broken foot sits peacefully at the window
With his casted foot up on the ledge, like siesta time
In a Spanish village. Near the end of the
Drying cycle for my clothes, he makes some weird sound,
Alone, so he's crazy after all. The nice young man
Seated next to me is reading Sons and Lovers, he's almost
Done with it. Wish I could have been there when he closed
The cover on the final page to have discussion. I'm
Intelligent enough to take my sweater out of the dryer
After one dime. I'm learning, ma, and fold it comfortably
Over the bench. Today I trust everyone so I cross the street
To shop for blanket cover, my blanket's getting shredded again.
"What size is it? Is it a blanket or a quilt?" I'd anticipated
these questions, but had not prepared for them.
These are too expensive and probably the wrong size. I won't
Buy these. I'll measure and come back. And look for a cheaper
Store. And never come back. Back in the laundromat and pick up
My reading, but something is bothering me. I can't get past
The first line of this John Godfrey poem: The rain, confined
to dignity the rain, confined to dignity The rain, confined to
Dignity . . . I remember the encounter in the street just occurred, me,
Hurrying my pace to catch up with two people with backpacks
From the back looking the same, same Alpine Designs packs,
Same ensolite pads rolled on top, sleeping bags hanging from
Bottom, in twos. I think: "That's cute." Two women, ah. "Coming
In or going out?" "What?" A non-receptive response. Am I
Creepy guy to overtake these travelers to wish them well in
Their fair journeying. I say, nay. German or Scandinavian accents,
Blond, "Need directions or anything?" They've been warned about
The people of NYC. I don't seem so safe. They're right to
Assume I mean more than tiding, though I don't. I'm doing my
Laundry then writing a book. They continue on in their
Postcard wanderings. I cross the street in the falling snow.
To Karen at 2 AM
Today I vacuumed
Listened to the same album over and over again
While I wrote prose
Went out at some point for something. Oh,
To do laundry. No O like O Laundry!
Didn't call you until 10:30 at night but
You know about that. This is for everyone else.
I called Gyorgyi at work around 3.
Didn't do the dishes. Then came the
Night when things can change.
Lenny came over. Previous to that: cocaine, pot and
Two beers with . . . the CIA
Might read this. At midnight off to the Grassroots.
Pouring rain. We're all thirsty. Now I'm
Home listening to Elvis Costello and doing this.
Actually I'm done.
January 20
The worst storm in 30 years, they're saying on the news. There are no cars on the streets of Manhattan. The snow is still white, layered everywhere. Or it was last time I was out which would be five hours ago. Came home from work and took four-hour nap. The news is nostalgia for the day. Interviews with commuters stuck in Brooklyn. "I don't know where I am." Tourists say it's pleasanter than the blackout. So far as I can tell, the only person I saw all day who wasn't enjoying the break in routine, the emergency fraternity, was the kitchen worker at the deli, unused to such a sudden crowd at lunch hour—sullen man hurrying to the back with an empty pickle container, his deli the only restaurant open in the area and our store sending in employees in droves.
Manhattan has a new hairstyle. It affects everyone. The L.I.E. is closed. It's a weather phenomena. The sanitation crew is always prepared for the worst, says the commissioner of sanitation in the news office. Herman Badillo sidesteps the interviewer's question and launches into his prepared statement about the National Guard about to send in plows and ambulances.
On the walk home from work there are snowball fights everywhere. On Fifth Avenue, two forces pellet each other across a deserted avenue. They're all laughing. I don't see anyone get hit in the face. The snow is perfect for snowballs.
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