On edge again as always April 17, 1985

 

 

Dear Suzanne:

Sorry about that last letter. Spring time has become synonymous with strangeness, people slipping in and out of the weirdest moods.

Pauly is still depressed and hounds me day and night to keep him company. Two nights this week we got drunk together. No, I got drunk. Pauly is too depressed to get drunk and therefore in keeping him company I slowly slip into an oblivion of my town, staggering home to sleep and into nightmares.

Pauly isn’t the only one doing flip flops. Hank suddenly found love, too, and went from a sick old man back into spouting youth. He hasn’t been around his parents’ house where he lives with Garrick, giving Garrick the cheeriest of grins before vanishing again. Some of us wonder if he’ll even be around when the band starts up again on the 27th.

Rick and Garrick seem the most stable of the lot these days, but I see very little of either.

Pauly talks to them on the phone. It always takes the band to bring the various elements of my life together. I’m even considering making a regular appearance, though their first few gigs are on weekends, and I work Saturday nights into Sunday.

Maybe it is just as well. I’m not sure I’m ready for the unveiling of the new Pauly, who has been twisted by pain and self-pity, similar to what I felt a few years ago when you and I broke up, or when my marriage fell apart a few years prior to that.

Such things change people, and I’m not completely whole myself since I broke up with Fran, a lot of nightmares that leave me shaken when I wake.

I’ve seen Hank go through what Pauly is going through now, back in the mid-1970s when he fell in love with a young rich girl and talked me into driving all the way up to Stockbridge who was going to school there at the time, only to have him reject him again. He hid in his room for months after that.

It is good to see him out and about again, looking for love I’m sure in all the wrong places.

I’m not drinking as much as I was – even though I feel the sense of loss as acutely as ever. I’m looking for a moment of release. For a long time, I spent my days satisfying demands or making adjustments. Now I’m down to mere survival and trying to shape out some kind of future.

If only I could get over the nightmares. They suggest of something deeper, something I must be deadly afraid of, with hints of memory of my crazy mother and her regular trips to Graystone Park. Maybe I’m scared I might go mad the way she did. Being a loner like I am brings me closer to the edge. Yet I hate getting too close to other people and find myself swinging between a need for companionship and the need to escape.

Maybe that is madness.

I’m also going through a downtime with my writing, something that usually happens around this time of year and again in the fall. I get so down I think I can’t write at all. I start looking at my limitations and suddenly come to the conclusion that I’ve blown it. That’s partly what prompted the bad mood in my previous letter to you, a bitterness at my losing everything all at once. I don’t blame anyone but myself. Yet, I blame myself.

Oh well, this letter is depressing enough. Time to move along. Things ARE actually going better even if you don’t get that from the contents of this letter. The band is starting up again just in time for summer. Hank has found a new love. I’m thinking of cleaning up my act – which includes my apartment, replacing my shades, drapes and perhaps my rug. I’m working two part time jobs which is providing me with a livable living and yet allows me time to write. Pauly’s current depression is so twisted and something humorous, it helps me to forget my own. Sometimes he acts so stupid, I can’t help but laugh.

And before I forget to ask. How are you? What are you up to? How is it living out in middle America in the Average American Community?

Last Christmas you mentioned you might be changing universities. Is that still in the works? If so, where?

Enough said, seen you soon.

 

Sincerely yours

Al Sullivan

 

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