January 7, 1979 - East Village - Journal

Rain falls on the grimy snow piling up in the alley behind 256 East 10th Street. New York has declared a snow day. I love snow days. I blankly watch the James Bond movie on our black and white TV. The plot of YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE lazily saunters between fucking and killing tangents with 007 doomed to prevent the end of the Free World and Capitalism with the help of the Japanese CIA. Alice sits in the kitchen frustrated by the demons of ambition.

"I can't relax. If wish I could, but...."

My beloved hillbilly is close to tears. She wants her future yesterday. Fame and fortune. The TV switches to commercials and I go into the kitchen to massage her shoulders. The muscles are so tight. She shrugs off my hands, thinking that all I want is sex, instead of offering her comfort.

"What is wrong?"

"I don't know."

I don't know what is wrong with me either.

"Why don't we go out to eat at Leshko's?"

The Polish diner on Avenue A had the cheapest breakfast on the East Village.

"I'm fat."

"No, you're not."

"I want to be skinny like Susan." She wanted to body-double her anorexic partner from the Vaudeville. "I see the way you look at each skinny girl in CBGBs."

"But I stayed with you."

"Faithfully." she laughed.

"I hate when you're this way." I hate when she hates herself.

"I know." She stares helplessly at her hands. "But I can't help feeling this way. Nothing is happening in my life. Nothing."

"It's January. Nothing is happening and you had a great success with New Wave Vaudeville."

"I want something now." She would be happy or at least not unhappy until something happened.

"A director's job, to lose weight, and to be desired by men and women."

"You have it easy. You get into all the clubs for free. You fuck any woman you want, and are happy to be no one>"

There's no arguing that."

She had nver caught me being unfaithful, but she had a good sense of smell.

The movie resumed and I left her to brood at the kitchen table. His world is on the edge of a nuclear holocaust and 007 breached the volcano fortress of a queer madman. After a bloodless battle James Bond saves the world and gets the girl. I wish my life could be so easy.

I would go out, except the rain and lack of money or a place to go. There are no other movies on TV and the clubs aren't open. Lost in the city with a sad girl at the kitchen table. The rain is once more snow. I pick up THE BASKETBALL DIARIES by Jim Carroll, wishing I could be a basketball junkie and skinny too, but no one plays basketball in the snow.