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.

 

 1985 Menu


Main Menu


email to Al Sullivan

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An old nemesis December 11, 1985

Image
    Surisky hated me from early on in grammar school, although “hate” may be too strong a word to describe his reaction to me. I was simply available to him for abuse, Third grade was pivotal for both of us. Prior to that, we were simply feeling our way through Catholic School routine, emerging eventually as whole personalities from the muck of early childhood. He came across as a thug, trying to convey the image of a tough guy. He wore a leather jacket and spiked boots, and snuck into see James Dean movies. Third grade was tough on everybody, including the teachers, who considered us the worst class in the history of the school – even in the safe grades of Kindergarten, First and Second. Two of the three nuns retired after passing us on. But it was in the third grade that we began to work our magic, driving even the stout-hearted nuns crazy. Later, the nuns tried to break our spirit. But we fully represented our age and had the full impact of the 1960s behin...
Read more

The clock is ticking July 18, 1985

Image
  We’re talking love here – silly fictional love with all the connotations of disaster. I seem to be on the meat chopping block with Safire looking for qualities in me that are lacking in her husband. The fact that there is a husband in the first place greatly disturbs me. All this said, I’m uncertain as to why I haven’t ended this already, except to know she is too much like my ex-wife to pass up without a closer examination. Even the way she thinks: slow, methodical, going from point A to point B. It has only been a week since she blurted out drunk that she wanted me in bed. It seems like much longer. And she hints of something more permanent, suggesting that I might fill in for her husband for a much longer duration. The night before last she suggested I come see her in her trailer, as if she is legally separated from her husband, when in fact she is supposed to be biding time until he finds them both a place to live in Baltimore. This is the same kind of smoke and...
Read more

Pauly leaves Passaic for the final time July 24, 1985

Image
    Pauly is leaving Passaic again. This comes after two years of us rubbing shoulders after he had been cast out of paradise in Towaco, after his goddess, Jane, went and married that man Pauly calls “a bum.” This has been a tough two years, filled with Pauly’s typical manipulation, his usual shaping of reality to his own needs often at other people’s (mine) expense. When Pauly first came I had Fran’s cultist brother as a temporary guest and Pauly spent most of his time trying to push me into getting that guest out. A few months later – in November – Fran got the ax from her ex and changed her mind about moving in with me after I had committed the spare room to Pauly. He assumed she meant more to me than he did and was already packing when I told Fran no. She had no place to go except for her father’s house, a father she had a love/hate relationship with, and she held it against me, even though we continued to see each other romantically. Pauly being Pauly drove ...
Read more