A D. Journal 1985

  I keep thinking of that Christmas in 81, after Mary Ann made her decision, and floundered, not just because Johnny couldn’t give up junk, but because she was bringing him out into a world with some many temptations and dangers. As said earlier in my journal, Johnny was never the person he pretended to be. I got a hint of this when Johnny made Mary Ann destroy all the writing even remotely associated with Danny. Maybe this was understandable, if not at all excusable. Johnny was punishing Mary Ann for being human. She made errors in judgement he held against her. This from a man whose record of failings is mapped out in tracks on his arms, legs, even between his toes. Johnny’s rich father from Englewood gave him a camera which he used to take nude shots of Mary Ann, piling them up inside his dresser as if she was a prize won in some cosmic lottery, always emphasizing her intense beauty, but rarely her real inner beauty other people saw. The romantic appeal that had ...

  It’s hard to tell at what point Mary Ann realized her mistake – before or after Christmas Day in 81 when she finally picked Johnny. Her life since has been a lot of “I should haves” if not consciously, then deeper inside herself where something snapped inside her like an overwound rubber band. In the weeks following her breakup with Danny, she got nasty, especially at Johnny who she claimed she had helped “rise from the dead.” Johnny in this light seemed like an unfortunate victim, who ought to be grateful for all Mary Ann had done for him in getting released. She expected him to change overnight. Unfortunately, he did what most junkies do when they get released, he went back to his old habits. He had never stopped using heroin even in jail, spoiling some of the illusions Mary Ann maintained about him, yet she refused to give up on him, partly because so many of her close friends and family warned against him. She became more determined to save him, partly out of spit...

    Fleas, fleas, eating me alive! I thought I got rid of them last week when I gave Spud a bath and a subsequent treatment. But alas, the little devils are not so easily tamed.   Not even a roach bomb will completely void them. I do not like taking life indiscriminately, but these buggers are eating me alive. I write this on the anniversary of Hiroshima, knowing that I launched two bombs of my own to free myself of this invasion. It is easy to kill when you look at everything simply as their side and ours, and any excuse for murder will do. We excused the bomb dropped 40 years ago by claiming they would ultimately save American lives, when in fact they established American hegemony in the Pacific and kept the nasty Ruskies from filling in Southeast Asia the way they did Eastern Europe. But then, it is easy to make judgements about the past based on what we know four decades later, when we are still looking at Vietnam in the rearview mirror. This is the re...

  Maybe I’ve given Mary Ann too much credit in assuming that she had led her life through rational choice. Certainly, the emotional investment she’s made in her marriage as well as the other people’s manipulating her played a huge role in her fleeing west. Until 81, relationships didn’t mean much to her – none serious enough to lead to heart break, deadbeat fellows for a quick lay, even once a race horse jockey, whose small body she claimed reminded her of a child. Then, everything changed on her 30th birthday, as if with a bolt she became aware of the ticking biological clock, and she began to struggle for purpose – not rational so much as cravings for something she’d not yet had. Johnny showed up in her life at that moment, a fantasy at first, a quirk like the jockey perhaps, an imprisoned man seeking to seduce her long distance through extremely romantic letters – as if he could read her better than she could read herself. Mary Ann until then was the classic liberal,...

   After ten letters, two stories and two magazines sent, Mary Ann has yet to respond. I suppose at 35 years of age, she has the right to hide, cutting ties to those of us in the east. Maybe I’ve given her reason, offending her with my letters and stories, although I get the nagging feeling that it may well have to do with the company she currently keeps. While I may have offended her sensibilities, I keep hearing Johnny’s rasping voice complaining about Mary Ann’s books. “I won’t have the devil influence our child,” he said. Even Mary Ann seemed to believe her move west would be best for all concerned; she could not pass up this opportunity to help her husband and her child. Yet the feeling she’s been snagged persists – not just by Johnny, who had miraculously converted from a down-and-out Junkie into a husband, but by his mother who has insisted on tagging along. The mother seems to see Mary Ann as a prize she fears her son might spoil without her help to ret...

  Uncle Frank is approaching the age of 50. He talks a lot about when he was young, while fingering his new hearing aid, waiting for it to whistle the way his old one did, a whistle like a tea kettle but with an electronic edge. It always announced that he was in a room. His silence otherwise makes him invisible, despite his being a hulk of a man, his thick fingers reaching constantly back to his ears. Maybe that’s the cruelest part, his silence. He had always been a man of words, loud words, angry words, too bitter to keep contained, seeing the world as fundamentally unfair, a system working against him or any working man, telling me all too often how everything sucks, and how he ought to have become a hippie, only born too soon, to the wrong kind of parents, in a town far too conservative to put up with him as a beatnik. Born five years later, he might have made that choice, but born and raised in the midst of The Great Depression and later The Good War, he could no...

    Toms River. It’s been eight hard years since my mother moved here from Paterson, of feeling trapped by her decision, a decision made for her, in spite of her. Now she has to make a decision for someone else and she’s puzzled about it. Grandma needs an operation on her eyes – cataracts – and my mother is worried about the details, about the danger, about the money. Ted, grandma’s youngest son, doesn’t want to hear anything about it. “It’s a simple operation,” he said matter-of-factly, unsympathetic to a fault, and worse, insensitive to my mother’s feelings. He’s always been one of the great non-caring, not-wanting to hear about other people’s troubles kind of person, except on a very superficial level. He’s always managed to decide things for other people without caring what impact those decisions had on the people he decided things for. He was one of those (along with his brothers) who sent my mother to Graystone Park mental institution when I was younger...