A D. Journal 1985

    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 me out of

  Another hundred bucks into the car. That seems like all I do these days and have been for quite some time. It’s my version of self-mutilation, my rusted bucket of bolts that someone must punish me for sins I’ve committed. My self-castigation for immorality and lust, and finally taking liberties with a married woman. So, what if the husband is a bastard; maybe I was that kind of bastard once myself and so have no right to judge, let alone cuckhold him. I get chills just thinking about it all, the tale of woe Safire tells, even though I’m not the first to share her bed behind her husband’s back. Mary Jane (always reliable for such information) has informed me about all the times she’s had to lie for Safire when Safire has stayed out all night. I even heard the deep voice on the Fotomat telephone calling for Safire just after the change of shift, she telling me later with a snicker and an odd look that he was a very close old friend that her husband knew nothing about, because

    Mary Ann hasn’t written yet, perhaps upset about the story I sent her, and perhaps the fact we did our anti-Bible issue of the zine. Mary Ann never was one for realism. She likes things romantic, and after having decided the direction of her life, she buried her head in her faith, punishing herself for past sins like flagellants, although her mortification is of the spirit rather than the beaten flesh. In many ways, she’s become symbolic of our generation that has gone too far to excess and now must atone for its guilty pleasures, purifying their souls through austerity we all found unpleasant when we grew up with it as kids. For all the years in-between, she has struggled with her religion, a jet set kid with a Catholic school conscience, a dual existence she somehow maintained until she decided to take the deeper plunge and found God again. She rode the fast lane, but kept looking back, while the rest of us – too cowardly to go as far as she did – looked on with envy.

  They say some people get depressed after sex – especially unsuccessful sex. I suppose that’s how I felt when she was gone; but trying to explain this to Pauly left me speechless. I simply said, “it didn’t feel right.” The sex was fine, even if I didn’t perform the way I would have liked. The touching and closeness came across, which was what mattered, considering how exhausted I was from working two jobs. The inappropriate feeling came later when she asked if she could see me next Tuesday, as if making an appointment. I couldn’t convey this feeling, nor how cheap I felt each time I thought about her husband. I kept envisioning old TV shows in which husbands chase the lover of their wives, or the cuckhold husbands permeating English literature. Shakespeare seemed to believe that a cuckhold husband deserved what he got. It still doesn’t make if feel right or good, and I’ve come away with the impression that I am company for Safire right up to the point when she decide

  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 mir

  I should have figured it out for myself. After all, Hank pointed it out to me some years ago when I introduced him to my then-girlfriend, Suzanne. He claimed I always dated the same kind of woman. He meant at the time women that looked similar since Suzanne strongly resembled my ex-wife, Louise. In truth, I tend to go for the same type of women, who may or may not look alike, but are plagued by the same psychology, deep down fundamental features to which I am inextricably drawn. Flawed women, who need to be rescued, and I need to play the role of white knight and come to their aid, and who would ultimately reject me. Or more to the point, I would find a way to get them to reject me. I rarely see this in advance and so cannot detour around what is clearly a mine field full of potential danger. The warning signs are always clear, women like Louise or Suzanne or even Fran, who tie me up inside, twisting me into shapes they desire until I wake up at one point, realize what ha

  The last words of Pauly’s Tarot reading haunt me. He told me to “beware.” But he didn’t mean Safire, he meant Mary Jane. She’s on the loose with all her claws out. I’m still uncertain about the whys and wherefores, maybe she’s jealous of Safire. There have been hints of bad blood between those two for quite some time. A few weeks ago, when I wrote my letter to Safire – criticizing her and which made her cry – Mary Jane egged me on to do it. Then, Mary Jane jumped into the fray with a lot of accusations. This love/hate thing between those two drives me crazy, since I don’t know which is happening at any given moment, hate or love, and it goes back to those days when the two of them shared a Fotomat booth. Safire seems paranoid, not just about Mary Jane, but Bob and others. She cut off her friendship with Mary Jane when she suspected Mary Jane of having slept with her husband. Yet it’s not just paranoia. Mary Jane is a little devil, and deceptive enough to even fool S

   They promised rain and it rained, splotches of wet covering the Fotomat booth and its joints, one bolt of lightning caused a hiss on my radio at home, dangerously close. Here, out in the open with a ballfield on one side and a parking lot on the other, I feel much more vulnerable, and I half expected when I got here this morning to find the booth in cinders. If I was superstitious, I might take violence of last night’s storm as some kind of sign, coming at it did in the middle of tarot reading Pauly conducted. Pauly is good at drama and effects, but not quite that good. Still, he managed to twist the cards into meanings that seemed to have relevance in my life. He seems his self as rogue and saint, casting spells for the sake of goodness. The whole reading seemed to center on my relationship with Safire, pushing me closer to a point of making a decision. “Go ahead,” Pauly said in reading the cards, “It won’t kill you.” Maybe not, but it will turn me in a direction di

  “if I tell you three times, It’s true!” Well, Safire told me three times, then got very quiet for a while. I get scared when her voice gets distant and harsh. Maybe she is, too, and so went quiet in order not to push me away. “But if you don’t want to, we can still be friends,” she said, lying, of course, since she wanted what she wanted and wanted me to want it, too. I’ve heard this same tale about friendship so many times, I know people never mean it. Pauly once talked about his friendship deteriorating into love. What Safire wants ultimately from me I still don’t know. She went to Baltimore this week to look at a house. Free and easy sex, and after a brief fling, go our separate ways? I’m not used to that kind of thing, and perhaps I’m simply bracing for what ultimately happens, rejection of some sort and maybe more hurt. If I do get involved, it will be heavy; I can sense that much in myself. I am extremely attracted to her, partly because of who she is and what s

   Dear Mary Kay   Here I go with another chapter of the Patty Mills saga, chapter 3, to be exact. It is no cheerier than the previous ones but does delve a little deeper into the character of Patty, showing more of her homelife than the first chapter. The home life will grow even more as the classroom scenes shrink. After a while, the novel will become the walls that enclose Patty and complete her isolation. Her struggle to escape may well be shown by her growing interest in going to Israel, and has suggested in this chapter, she is the girl staring into the sky and wishing she was over the rainbow. Maybe she already is, but just doesn’t know it. This is a novel I’m writing for my daughter but may come too close to reflect her real life, Patty doing things my daughter might have done, feeling the same embarrassments. I have assured her that the novel was not written with that intention, but in some ways, this is a lie It certainly symbolized the absolute fruitlessness of h

   Am I fucking crazy? Contemplating sex with a married woman. It’s not the marriage that disturbs me so much as the whole routine of desperation, on both sides of the proverbial aisle. Safire is going to Baltimore with a husband that she doesn’t love, puts up with, goes to bed with as a matter of survival. She’s about my age and has a history of go go dancing and prostitution, a profession she took up perhaps to make up for the blotched face (due to a childhood disease) that kept her from a career of becoming a model she is otherwise pretty enough to have pursued. The scarring doesn’t mar her beauty. She has poise and grace that more than make up for it. Her deepest wounds are inside her, some inflicted by her husband, who beat her once so badly she lost all sense of taste or smell. She feels helpless because of it, thinking she can never be independent with such an affliction. When I first met her, I thought she was a bitch, a tough hombre at the Fotomat, who seemed to ha

  Dear Rita: Well, here comes more of the Patty Mills stuff. It seems to go on and on, like immeasurable suffering, not bad in small doses, but as it floods in on you it becomes unbearable. Fortunately, for all concerned, the quality tends to improve as it goes along, the pain dropping in as little droplets of truth seep in. This chapter is a throwback, although not much of one. I still have serious problems with it, even though I also enjoy it greatly. I particularly like the part about the stadium tunnel with the saying written on the walls, as a frame for the game that gets played. I also like the characterization of Darrell by the faded marks on his head where the horns from his Halloween costume had been pasted. By far, Slimy Mulligan is my favorite character not just in this chapter but in the whole series. He is very autobiographical and grows as the novel goes on. The process in which Patty puts on his jacket is an education, and I can remember having a jacket

   I woke up angry, hung over, worried about my eyes. I couldn’t read for a while, splotches of color danced on the page of my book, blotting out whole letters. My shoulder still hurts as does my back and head. I took my temperature, praying I had a fever. No go. I just don’t want to be here. Or even write these words. But I’m caught up in the rituals of my own life, demanding that I press on regardless of how I feel. Last night, we went and saw Ginsberg at the college, a strange fellow, touring the country, making his political speeches. A few years ago, his appearance here got canceled when William Paterson was still a teachers’ college and having a radical poet like him seemed inappropriate. Things have changed. We have all sorts of right- and left-wing radicals coming on campus, Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, Abbie Hoffman, and now Ginsberg. Kissinger came last November. Haig in February. Abbie – who I knew from the lower east side before he went underground to es

  It’s Ginsberg time! Tonight, tonight, when the highway’s right, we’ll travel up to WP to Ripmaster’s home away from home to watch him pay homage to the long-gone 1960s, as if the names Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and Mario Savio mean as much to this generation as did to ours. Ken Kesey is remembered for his Koo Koo Next – that is when he’s remembered. I remember him from having befriended one of the whackos from his legendary bus while I was living in LA. Neal Cassady as Dean Moriarty or Cody Pomera are names that have lost all luster in the new world just as the anti-heroes of the 1930s were lost on us. I’m not sure Ripmaster sees this or cares, needing us to relive a youth he really never lived, trying to keep the sixties alive through this generation of students. He like me well enough. Yet I am close enough to his age for him to feel threatened by me, since I’m not as enthralled with the sixties as he is, having lived through them on the street, having lived wi

  Dear Mr. Adams: When you first left for the west coast some six months ago, we at this office were greatly relieved. You have long been on our most notorious file, always wandering around the back roads of western New Jersey on your motorcycle or worse your VW. Very, very suspicious, Mr. Adams. We did nothing. We were content to watch and wait, wait for that inevitable moment when all these practice runs turned to something more devious and diabolical. We waited. But nothing happened. Then, you went west. It was like a dream come true, us believing that you finally chanced the error of your ways and chosen a simpler and less adventurous way of life, one that would reward you with the benefits of civilization. We had no idea that you would continue your scurrilous ways on the roads of Southern California. Perhaps we should have suspected something when we heard that you had purchased property along the eastern side of the Andres Fault. Indeed, some of our staff – f

  I was wrong. There is no compromise with liberals. They will always protect their person interest first, then cater later to kindness. I’m too tired to argue the point any more, too many days in a row working, too many times leaping out of bed just ahead of the alarm. I’m in a spiteful mood, and it started on the highway when I deliberately slowed down when a station Wagen got too close to my rear bumper when I was trying to pass someone in the fast lane. When I pulled over, the clown shot passed me, pulled in front of me and slammed on his brakes causing us both to nearly crash. I had forgotten (or chose to forget) that the Teaneck store opened at nine rather than ten. So exhausted, I deliberately stayed in bed and extra hour, then had to make up the time racing on the highway. Teaneck is a mostly wealthy town full of mostly wealthy people. South African gold coins are sold there. People get threatened with fines even jail if they bring their books late at the library. I

  Dear Rita: I’m enclosing the third installment of the Crystal Tales series. This tends to confuse my daughter who doesn’t understand that almost everything I write lately is about isolation. Sometimes the characters overcome it; many times, they don’t. But it is always at the core of the struggle and the outcome of the work. This is where I failed, I think in the story “Hello, My Name is Sparrow.” In that work, I didn’t quite pull off the nature of Sparrow’s isolation as compared to the other characters such as Kenny and the city itself. I hope to correct that in a rewrite soon. In this work, I’m introducing the underlining theme of Oz, but only a few times does it actually rise to the surface. At some point, I’ll have to tell people what’s going on. In a later chapter, the wizard appears, not as Saul completely, although Saul does take on some of those characteristics, but in another character that may surprise you. But think of who the Wizard really was, and the chara