A D. Journal 1985

Dear Terry: It was wrong of me to attempt to express how Michael feels about you when he has clearly done so for himself in our current issue of Scrap Paper Review. As for your claim about my “scrambled thoughts,” what can I say? I lay no claim to be the intellectual you are. I am full of rage and sit not on the edge of society, but on the edge of a world gone insane. I am Jew to march around Jericho with the hopes I might bring down the walls of hypocrisy, but rather a simple man trying to bash it down using my forehead, or my working class fingers to dismantle it brick by brick. I don’t think I deserved the A you gave me for your radical history class last semester since you clearly think I am more in tune with your philosophy than I really am. Yes, like you, I lived through the 1960s, but unlike you, I never had the radical beliefs that remain a stigma on society from that era, always just a blue-collar kid swept up by popular culture. I didn’t need to read that fraud ...

  Dear Bob Fass: I listened to your radio program this morning with late regret. I live in great fear of losing people like you from the airwaves who give me great joy. I have listened to your program on and off for many years; there has always been a connection between me and the radio station, early on when you still occupied the old church and my two closest friends hide under a table there, tripping on LSD, wondering where all the sounds were coming from. Recently you brought back very tender times with the old tapes you played, particularly those surrounding the protest at the Chicago Democratic National Convention in 1968 when my uncles did everything possible (short of chaining me to the furnace) to try and keep me from attending. Old names popped into my brain: Peter Rabbit, Gandalf, Jude and all my other friends from St. Mark’s Place and the Renaissance Switch Board where I hung out with Abbie Hoffman. – all of whom disappeared when I wasn’t looking and when the old ...

  Dear Joe: What bothers me about the whole matter is that you have no clue as to why I am angry, nor do you care. You seem satisfied to let things go or to pass over everything with a joke. This forces me to make clear why I am so upset. First, there is the matter of the pizza – a small item considering what came later. You insisted on using my oven at 1 a.m. forcing me to rush through making my muffins so the oven would be ready on time – only to have for henchmen, Bill come and tell me you wouldn’t need the oven until 2:30 a.m. after all. I got upset and showed it, telling Bill you should use the oven as the bagel shop since I couldn’t take the chance you might change your mind again. Then, as I suspected might happen, you decided to cook the pies at 1 a.m. after all because any later wouldn’t be convenient for the bagel shop, I cooked the pies, but when nobody came to collect them after a half an hour, I shut the doors to the store. I figured if you wanted the pies ...

  Dear Suzanne Something strange has happened with Pauly over the last few weeks. Actually, looking back, it may be more typical than unusual. Since I know you have feelings for him, I thought you should know. Please understand that anything I say here is strictly between you and me. Pauly find out I told you or anyone about this, he would burn my apartment down with me in it. About two weeks ago, Pauly called me, waking me about two hours before I normally get up. He apparently was working a double shift at the Fotomat and had been there all morning. His voice sounded queer, not at all like Pauly. He told me something funny had happened. He meant funny as in humorous, though he didn’t sound like he does when he is telling a joke – even his nasty kind. He didn’t go into details, which is something that annoys me about him. This lack of information wouldn’t let me get back to sleep. Two days prior to that Pauly had been conducting covert activities over the telephone...

  Dear Louise: Merry ho ho and happy ooh year! We’re two weeks into the grand new year of 1985, fifteen long years since Boulder and LA, fifteen going on millions. Soon, it will be your birthday again and this makes me think of all those birthdays past. How strange it is to tumble through life like this, getting older and older as memories pile up behind us like a mountain of gravel. How are you? Did you get a car yet? Are you still living with you know who? I talked to Raeann yesterday. She’s doing pretty well, working for some lawyer on Route 4. You’re going to have to come here to see her child before the kid gets much older. She’s wonderful. Johnny is doing all right, too, as are Pauly and Hank and Garrick, each going round and round in the usual circles, ending up here and there. Garrick is looking to get out on his own, away from living with Hank. Pauly is next door here, settled in for winter, windows covered with plastic, one room closed off to save on...

   Going back to the Willowbrook Dunkin felt strange. The mere month and a half away seemed like years. Bernard was still there, but bitter at the fact that Phil took over again as owner, as if a return to slavery. Last night, Phil mumbled something about “Niggers,” confident I would take Bernard’s place as baker and Bernard would return – in Phil’s thinking – to his rightful place as porter. Bernard had other ideas and came into the store hot a hell, his brown head shifting from side to side like a boxer wading into a match in anticipation of a fist fight. “It cost me fifteen bucks to get here,” he told me as the time clock clicked him in at 1 a.m. “I don’t know why I’m here.” Habit, no doubt, since he worked this shift before I returned, and like some ghost destined to haunt the same place, he returned. A more apt question is why I came back since Phil like all the owners and managers prior to him intimidates me – much the way my uncles did when I lived in the ...

  They call this having a conscience – this rude state of waking in which one spends life walking around zombie-like, eyes narrowed, mouth shut. “He’s here,” people say, “but not all here.” Dawn doesn’t help me either, a cold moist world without puddles, just contradictions. Newspaper headlines bearing Reagan’s name and Nazi symbols; nobody actually believes the media myth that Reagan likes Nazis. But like the day itself, these issues are masked in cloud and misinformation. Throughout history, politics conveniently attaches labels to enemies, and we turn allies into enemies when the fit suits us, once the Brits were our enemies, then our allies, the Japanese our friend against Russians, then bombing Pearl Harbor only to become our friend again, just as the Germans went from enemy to friend when a bigger Soviet threat emerged. The term Nazi is different, too filled with images beyond the scope of reconciliation, gas chambers and death camps from which we can always dra...

      The rains are late. But the usual storm of ill circumstances came right on time. Something seems to happen this time every year. So why should this year be any different. Nine years ago, I face legal issues concerning child support payments. I went to court and argued the fact that Louise was not allowing me visitation rights, and strangely, the court being more sympathetic ruled in my favor. The whole thing cost me about $200 for the lawyer. Only later, did I learn that the scumbag told the court my daughter was not my daughter, which I never said and never instructed him to say on my behalf. All I wanted was visitation. I went back to court and the kindly judge notified Louise she had to allow me access to my kid. Maybe it was coincidence, but Louise finally found another potential husband and took off with my daughter to live with him 3,000 miles away in Portland, Oregon. A few years ago, she and my daughter were back in Scranton, allowing me visita...

  Life would be easier for me if I could blame Pauly for everything that goes wrong. Sometimes, he’s a cold, ruthless and calculating person, or as Garrick frequently points out, more than willing to exploit people. I can’t pin point any time or place when he did not. A regular capitalist yet done on such a minor scale that I find it impossible to pass judgement on him for it. He claims he’s non-materialistic, and true, he owns very little, although doesn’t need to own anything when he has us, me, Garrick, Hank and such to provide him with those things he doesn’t own or believes he needs. And yet, he owns little and can honestly hold out his hand and ask, “What do I own?” His professing to be a student of Tao may be an overreach, a wish perhaps for what he can never be, or perhaps it is a cover for what he is not. Once in one of his weaker moments, he expressed regret for having given up his scholarship to Princeton, for the more glamorous but superficial art school...

    Saturday.  Weather? (I haven’t looked yet)   Stoned again. And my dreams are full of Louise. I suppose love lost isn’t always satisfactorily lost, filled with the irritable feeling of something left undone. I get this from Pauly, too, when he muttered something about getting a note from Jane saying (in secret since she has recently married someone else) that he and she should still be friends. I feel a bit guilty about getting stoned, as if I am wasting precious time after having wasted a good portion of the 1970s in self pity after having lost Louise. I should be writing. I should be out searching for another lady friend. As it is, I tend to alienate people I love and who love me. Michael takes our underground newspaper so seriously; we might never put out another issue. I write to my ex from college, feeling an utter failure. Writing to her about my feelings is a lot like taking a personal ad in the back pages of the Village Voce that reads so...

  Perhaps it is a stretch to celebrate the 13th anniversary of a car crash that broke my nose. But in some ways, it was a lucky day when looking back at it, even if at the time it seemed like a disaster. That night when Hank driving came around a curve too fast in a despite attempt to make up time getting to the rock clubs in Greenwood Lake and crashed into another car making a k-turn. Hank doesn’t see the accident as lucky, partly because he broke his neck as opposed by my broken nose. This, however, was not Hank’s first accident, nor his last major ailment, and treatment for his neck became the first of four hospital events in six years – any of which could have ended his life at any moment. While the crash that broke his neck was the most dramatic, it was among a number of such events I was to endure with him – nor was it unusual. Hank was a terrible driver from the beginning, a fact that drove his father crazy, when his father helped him learn how to drive. Within...

  Cloudy, cool, Wednesday   It is hardly the end of the world although for Pauly it seems like it is. For most of the time I’ve known him, Pauly seemed remote, keeping free of the apparent entanglements the rest of us have suffered through. Then, at age 36 – going on 37 – he leaps into love with both feet, and he’s gotten in way over his head so as to nearly drown. The whole situation changes so rapidly, I can hardly keep up with it. Two weeks ago, he sat here in the kitchen in a panic over his belief that the woman of his dreams was about to leave him to be with her ex-lover. Now, he’s up early like a boy scout, exercising, then rushes across the river to the Fotomat to meet her as she starts her shift – six whole hours before he’s supposed to relieve her at 3 p.m. He stands behind her in the booth, rubbing her shoulders, whispering disgustingly sweet things in her ear. I’ve seen yoyos that go up and down less than he does. No man seems so smitten a Pauly ...

    The men in the Dunkin Donuts kitchen hate women. This is one of the oldest hobbies in the history of the world. Some anthropologists (none of whom have investigated this kitchen recently) claim men are jealous of women’s ability to bear children and have a more stable sex life than men. I’m not sure men would want to bear children, but apparently impotence is modern man has become an epidemic, driving many men to take insane measures. I don’t follow personal columns, but I know men who do, searching for perverse pleasures. The more the men talk here the more they reveal themselves and their true desires. Gary is the most blatant, having once been accused of rape – right here in the back of the store. According to Gary the whole things started with an argument about who should carry a heavy bag of sugar out into the front for the women who work there. They asked Miguel, a small Spanish man and for some reason this infuriated Gary. “Why can’t one of tho...

  Saturday, Hazy, cool   I recognize the signs of depression. When I catch it, I get resentful, towards Pauly, towards Michael. People expect too much from me. I hate the idea that I’m not the genius I ache to be. Writing demands a certain kind of suffering, if not starvation (my weight gain proves as much.) We have to struggle with our art, wrestling each word, each syllable, correct spelling and such, thorns poking me each time I turn. But the break up with Fran plagues me most, finally dawning on me and leaving me in the same state of non-existence I suffered after my breakup with Louise more than a decade again, after which I gave up women (and men for that matter), Isolating myself so as not to get hurt again. I don’t know which is worse, since both scared the bejesus out of me, feeling empty or wounded. Going back to that state makes me feel as if I’ve failed again and exposes me to all my other inadequacies. I am nothing; I have done nothing; I wil...