Better than 1984 was Dec. 31, 1985

  

I keep thinking of the Paul McCartney lyric about nobody being left in 1985 as this year concludes even though the year did not open as ominously as 1984 did with the front-page article in The York Times talking about scary FBI surveillance – which only further reminded me of just how right George Orwell was about our society.

But 1984 started in the aftermath of the death of U.S. Marines in Lebanon and the American invasion of Grenada.

I just published my story “Joe’s Diner” to reflect that strange Christmas with Hank had hung out with a number of outcasts. Phil had already sold the Willowbrook Dunkin, sabotaging the new owners with rumors. My uncle was already back in Graystone after yet another series of attempts at suicide, and I was making plans to move back into his apartment, leaving Pauly to occupy the old apartment on his own, giving me desperately needed privacy I could have living with him.

I was worried about my cat Dudley, who was jealous of my relationship with Fran and started to spray. He died shortly afterwards. Someone would steal my dog, Spud.

Fran got more and more paranoid, mostly due to her heavy cocaine use and stress. She came to my apartment and stopped short saying, “I smell blood!”

My cat had been in a fight probably with a dog and the wound was serious enough for the vet to say the leg would have to come off. We took the cat to the local shelter where the vet did his best, but it was not enough.

On the way out, Fran saw someone staring at her – a paranoid delusion that kept her terrified for weeks.

During that summer, Louise decided to give up her independence and moved into a camp site in the woods, giving up job and home in exchange for a wedding ring. He left her there.

That September, I got to be with my daughter for a week, a strange and uncomfortable experience as I tried to do things to make her happy, taking trips to New York City, retracing the steps her mother and I had taken up to the day of her birth, landmarks that are only landmarks in our minds.

When we got back to Pennsylvania, Louise with her usual manipulation pissed off Fran, continuing the hateful relationship between those two that had gone on since I started dating Fran two years earlier.

Dunkin saw a progression of new managers, the best of which lasted a few months, the last of which was so bad, I threatened to quit, but got offered extra pay under the table if I did not.

Fran moved in with a girlfriend in an apartment next to the Clifton Theater on Main Street with me visiting her everyday after I got out of work until I changed shifts and could no longer do so. She hated the job and was often in pain, due to her ulster, often taking trips to the emergency room where they gave her drugs to deal with the pain and condition, things getting worse and worse until by the end of 1984, we both knew we couldn’t go on that way. She was drinking on top of the drugs, and doing cocaine, and splitting her time in my bed as well as the bed of her ex-boyfriend, Bill, who I resented.

Looking back, 1985 with all of its depressing moments seems much better than all that.

 

 1985 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