Desperately seeking me April 27, 1985

 

 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 something like this:

 

UNSUCCESSFUL WRITER AND HUMAN BEING seeks same – I am an attractive male who needs and attractive female to abuse with my habits of inattentiveness and non-love. If you fit this particular mold of masochist, please respond.

 

All this in the vein of Desperately Seeking Susan, the movie, even though in my life, there are many other stories that fit this bill. Long before my ex, Susan, at college, there was the search, for Louise, and for other prior to her.

This sense of worthlessness has plagued me nearly from the start of my life, when in grammar school, I had to play the role of clown in order to get attention. Later, in junior high, I made trouble. In high school, I made more trouble.

Nobody saw these things for what they were.

Now with Fran gone, I live in vacancy again. I’m sure if I called her, her cold reception would drive me away, a barrier even self-pity won’t penetrate.

I also can’t get passed the drugs – her drugs, not mine. I do mine so infrequently that I really slip out of the known universe. Fran does hers everyday and so they become her universe. I don’t crave pot the way she does cocaine. When she can’t get high, she gets mean.

Drugs, however, didn’t create the distance between us, they only made the vacuum worse, made being with her unbearable, even when I couldn’t bear not being with her.

Fran needs love like a junkie, demanding a fix no one man can supply – least of all me.

Her attraction to me is one of absorption, she swallows me up whole. Or at least that’s how it feels, stirring up in me the same self-destructive tendencies I get when around my uncle when I simply fall apart, as if that’s what I wanted all along.

A few minutes ago, I got a call from my Fotomat boss, who wants me to cover at the store in Rutherford, the haze of the pot hangover haunting me as well as the guilt of overeating earlier, an ever-cascading avalanche of guilt I can’t reason away.

The nurse at the hospital commented on my gaining weight, as if this was somehow connected to my crazy uncle being houses in Graystone, eating too much while my uncle starved.

All this is nonsense. But the morning after my indulging in drugs leaves me with the same dismal thought I always got when living in Los Angeles – a strange mixture of good and bad, ultimately hinting of hopelessness, hanging by my finger tips on the edge of nothing, getting nothing, going nowhere.

The pot dreams brought back Louise in her LA role, a sexy wonderful woman whose urges demanded she share more than just my bed, me again attracted to her the way I was when I was that crew cut kid straight out of the army, wishing I could afford the same leather biker’s jacket I had worn then so I could go out and make romance with her as I had back then, when in fact, that is the last thing I want, needing to know who and what I am before I can handle that kind of lust.

 

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