AUGUST 4, 1978 JOURNAL ENTRY - EAST VILLAGE

The Red Sox break out of their slump, taking two games from the Yankees. Jim Rice looks slow, but they are playing in 95F weather. The weather is no better in the East Village. The August air is exhausted by summer. I've only been to the beach once in comparison to my beach bum days of 1975 in Miami Beach and on the West Coast; Encinitas-Torrey Pines-Matzatlan-Esquinapa-Puerto Vallarta-Gloucester-Provincetown.

I don't have the money to go anywhere now.

LATER

We wake to birds singing in the alley and make love on a dusty futon. The two of us shared a bath in the kitchen tub. Alice washes me and I shampooed her hair with the sun streaming through the willows in the alley. After I go to buy groceries at the bodega and on the way back and the domino players across the street greet me with a wave.

Hakkim is sitting on a stoep farther down the street, sporting a bloody head bandage. George has a black eye and a swollen cheek. Their eyes follow me, but neither man tries to attack me. I enter the apartment. Alice has cleaned everything for the tenth time.

"Do you want to wake up at 9 tomorrow morning and take me to school?" she asks, touching my hand.

"I don't know." Her acting classes were on the Upper West Side. The other side of the world from the East Village. Some of the streets were as bad as these, but Alice was worried about Hakkim.

"You don't have to be so mean." "I don't expect that from you>"

"Then I'll be your bodyguard." I came from the South shore. We fought everyone no matter what the odds. "And I'll do it in the winter when the city is dark."

"My hero."

I looked at the collapsible steel guard gates.

She only wanted one thing.

To be safe.

After putting up the gates we painted the walls.After one coat I thought we were done. Alice held up another can.

Ivory white.

I've have had lovers before, but never lived with any women than my mother and sisters. This was just about sex and one month ago Harriet the thin nurse from Boston said, "Fuck me anytime you want." We lasted a month.

After leading the American League East most of the summer the Red Sox have collapsed into a slump and surrendered First Place to the Tampa Bay Rays. I hate every team from the Gulf Coast city. The Rays win too much.

I watch nothing on the TV. I look at my journal a little. Mostly I surf the internet for my condition.

This morning the surgeons sealed my stomach lesions. The anesthesiologist gassed me with propofol. I said, "Tell me go and I'll see if I can count backward from ten."

"Okay. 1-2-3 go."

My consciousness disappeared along with reality and I woke in a blinding whiteness. I have been an atheist since age 8, but I am a true devotee to nothingness and that coma was nirvana. was it.

As for sex.

I've been faithful to Mem.

I know she loves me.