A D. Journal 1985

  Pauly knows he’s making a mistake. But the hole in his heart is so vast, he’ll do anything to try and fill it. I’d do as much myself in his place, desperate to rid myself of the pain, leaping into new situations that I hope will make things better, but ultimately know they will make things worse. But who’s pain are we talking about? Pauly is not always a nice man, or considerate of other people’s feelings. He often only considers himself and his own feelings – natural for all of us, who have been through similar situations, and yet seems childish in someone we all assumed as being more mature than the rest of us. He blames Jessica for deciding against him, deciding for someone other than him, calling her “The bitch!” Yesterday, he complained about her showing up at the Fotomat booth to get her check and left without a word. (Chrystal claims he manipulated the situation by having the check go to the store in Garfield, so she had to go there for it – although I suspec...

  H er name is Jessica, not Jezebel or Judas, Jesus or Judith. Pauly claims she’s 22 or 23; others say she is 19, maybe younger, stretching out the difference in ages between Pauly and her (Pauly just turned 36). Pauly calls her beautiful, and she is, but in a quiet way, some much like Pauly’s previous girlfriend, Jane, I sometimes have to blink twice to think I’ve not traveled back in time. Such similarities go to the root of Pauly, features that draw him in ways other women don’t. Both women carry themselves with remarkable dignity, a Celtic royalty Paul finds irresistible, less so in Jessica than Jane, yet there in both, and perhaps as with Jane, Jessica will grow into it over time. Maybe we just got to used to Jane, we forget what she was like back when Pauly first met her. If they are royalty, then Jane is queen, and Jessica a mere princess, fine and fancy (she even studies French) and has the “right kind of attitude, Pauly says – whatever that means.) and gets goo...

  Immanuel is a broad-shouldered, puffy-face Latino with a hint of Asian thrown in. You can tell in a glance that he’s friendly, but competency is another matter. He shuffles around the Bloomfield Dunkin Donuts with a slow, steady pace that accomplishes as little as possible in the most amount of time. The other employees of this Dunkin tell me he likes to do cash receipts more than he likes to do the work. “A born manager,” one of the employees say. But is he? His sloped demeanor is utterly relaxed, lacking any of the tension typical of managing a store. He coasts through the store, telling people what he wants, sometimes getting into a squawking match in Spanish with one of the other bakers, who insist he is wrong. But he must be right more than he’s wrong since the plaque on the wall near the kitchen says he once was honored as employee of the month. I’ve never seen him wear the manager’s uniform. Maybe because he lacks the sharp edges physically people expect ...

    It’s easy to hate banks and government institutions that constantly belittle little people. Bankers, with their chests puffed out like pompous self-satisfied rooster, pursue cash with all the greedy integrity of a snide fox, and getting it back from them is about as pointless as chasing a greased pig. You can’t blame bankers or politicians since we as a society have given them license to steal, if through high interest rates or worse, high taxes. I used to hear a lot from professors at college about the idea of property, how the founding fathers ripped off Indians, setting up rules – through the concept of Freeholders – that held back those who did not own land, in particular black people. A more than dishonest argument – in particular when it came to the reforms of the 1840s – when for the first-time non-property owners got the right to vote. Radicals claim this was an effort to disenfranchise black people, when in fact, it was the first bold step towards gi...

  Secaucus? Strange happenings. The first few times I came to this Fotomat, I came at the bequest of Bonnie, the area manager. Secaucus was notoriously busy, a sitting duck out in the middle of the Acme parking, where harried customers lined up on each side of the booth, all demanding immediate attention, making me feel like Lucy from that episode with the candy machine – I just could not keep up with the demand. Bonnie had directed me here through the center of town rather than allowing me to make a simple right off Route 3, maybe to lull me into the false impression of a small town not being as manic as some other towns are. I soon learned differently, as helpless in this book as the westward settlers in a circle of wagons surrounded by attacking Indians, people thrusting canisters of undeveloped film at me, or demanding my providing them with the photos from canisters they dropped off days earlier when some other poor fool suffered their assault. Maybe Bonnie was sim...

    Here again. Debating the chance of taking Ritchie out of the hospital, knowing deep down it is fundamentally a mistake, compressing my life into a single room and responsibility for a man I have largely come to hate. Maybe hate is the wrong word. Yet, looking at him I struggle to avoid seeing the past open up, a psychologically bloody past where I hid in my room in the old house day and night to avoid seeing or hearing his drunken lectures, and from our mutual madness. Not just his, mine, too, the whole house had it. My mother had it worst; she couldn’t function at all. But the whole family struggled to survive in society, seeking a place where we could fit in. Early on, Ritchie did best (even if it took alcohol to achieve it) because he could set his own agenda, working at his own pace, isolated from society with his tape measure, hammer & nails and saw. The rest of the family hated him for it, and perhaps still do. They envied him and his life style, ...

   Back again. Three years after the beginning of settling old scores, finding some new means of survival (or old means), I’m back again. I’m shocked at how much time we spend reversing ourselves, going back to those things we think served us well in the past. Sometimes even when the past didn’t serve us at all and we look back with nostalgia at an imaginary past, what we thought was or what could have been. Louise and I went through this a half dozen times during our brief relationship, constantly seeing the grass as greener on the other side, even though it wasn’t as green as we assumed when we were on the other side in the first place. We went to and from Denver twice, to and from Portland twice, (only for Louise to repeat both of these later on her own, throwing in another trip to Las Vegas, and some time in Norther California through we only passed while together.) Rarely satisfied with what we have, we keep looking for something more, some sense of perfecti...

  I spend much of my time these days in the state of exhaustion, somewhere between New Jersey and insanity. Jerry, the latest fascist boss at work, decided he doesn’t want me to leave. Things were so much easier under Phil when I could come and go, and still be assured I had a job to come back to if I later changed my mind. I went through this back in December 1981 and managed to hold out until early 1982 when I realized I could not make a living off my writing and decided not to starve. I mistakenly assumed I could sell my literary efforts to the world and somehow the world would sustain me. I ached to do what I do best and needed more time to focus on producing novels – some of which I had started when I was unemployed. I still envy those few months when I lived the artist’s life unencumbered by an empty stomach and terror of eviction. Writing is a slow, cumbersome process and as physically exhausting as baking donuts, so impossible to do both at the same time. Fo...

    We went back to WPC looking for something; I’m still not sure what. In the midst of work and writing, we got a little lost, desperate to get a clearer vision of the future, perhaps needing to get back on the cutting edge of a new revolution. Each generation needs its own revolution, and though I am technically not a part of the current generation, I’ve adopted their revolution as if it was mine. I arrived slightly too late in the late 1960s to fully embrace the revolution of that time, most of the heavy lifting already done by the time I came on the scene, at a time when No Ideology became a buzz word, and most rebels already rejected the war in Vietnam. We came to the campus to seek out our old mentor, someone who Michael always had a rocky relationship with, his generation seeing many of the flaws the professor had, or perhaps simply felt slighted by the fact that Ripmaster was a local icon for a movement Michael had missed by ten years or more. Ripmaster mor...

  Today was one of those days where nothing went right, covering a period that started at about 11 p.m. on Sunday through to about 5 p.m., Monday – although the seeds of all this had been sowed days ago, growing without my knowledge as the temperature outside dropped. The alternator light started coming on, not for long, just long enough for the car to warm up. I kept thinking the battery needed charging (despite deeper fears of something more serious transpiring.) Maybe this was just too Freudian in thinking I wanted something nasty to occur. I have been in a self-destructive mood of late, looking for an excuse to get out from my job, more still to escape my responsibilities for my uncle. So, seeing the flicker of light on my dashboard triggered some primitive fear deeper than just a mechanical failure. The truth is, even mechanical failure binds me to my uncle mor, forcing me to “borrow” more money from his account to make the repair, adding to my increasing level of gu...

      I haven’t talked much about Fran or let myself feel much about our separation. It’s just too hard for me to go through again, even though it is also something I really wanted for some time. Maybe I’m just too much like Pauly, needing more time to myself than I had been getting with Fran. There is always a price to be paid for having company. Especially burdened with having to care for my uncle, Ritchie, whose apartment I am living in now. With Fran, I faced the constant conflict between pleasing her and doing what I needed to do, as a writer, even just to keep my sanity. Yet losing Fran, I put myself on a road to self-destruction, unable to tamper down the pain as he creeps back into my consciousness the way she used to creep into my bed. I’m on the verge of depression I know will last for months. I’m trying to work it out, like a controlled crash, so I can keep on with my life. But I struggle to fill the vacancy inside me. Maybe Christianity is ...

  Good ole Mickey comes stormy into work this morning, telling everybody to go fuck themselves. This comes after I made the dreadful mistake of telling one of the other guards, Mickey might get the axe this morning. Mickey always lets his temper get the best of him. He also has a bad attitude. He’s been bitching since the day he started about the money he’s not making – this includes when he and Mr. Wayne M, the other manager, were still buddy buddy. Mickey frequently griped at me. He wants the same arrangement I have, being paid by the session not the hour, when nobody pays finishers like that – no matter how much work they do. So, out of spike, he slowed down. Even Mr. Wayne M complained about him dragging his feet, claiming he didn’t like Mickey taking advantage of their friendship. Sometimes Mickey came in, sat down and bullshitted with Dan (then the night guard) for hours. Other times he came in so late he couldn’t get the orders out on time.   Once (by his ow...