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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