October 26, 1978 East Village Journal Entry

On Alice; she is very frustrated progress on Moliere's GENTLEMEN OF VERONA at the Kurt Dempster's Ensemble Theater, since the young actors all hate each other. She is the director of this production and I asked, "Can't you channel the hatred?"

"What do you know about theater?"

We were on the Bowery and I stopped walking to ask myself, "What am i doing here with her?"

Alice hadn'tnoticed that I wasn't with her. She had been lost in this maelstrum of anxiety and anger forthe past month, as if her this play was on Broadway.

Last night in my SRO I went to the dresser to take out my contacts. Alice thought I was leaving to drink at CBGBs and turned off the light, saying, "Fuck you."

I turned and she said, "Don't hit me."

"You fucking stupid bitch. What do you think I am? I love you and you say you love me. What are those words? Something you memorized like a script. That's all you can give. Words. You can't wait to be with someone new to use as a dumb actor for your scenes."

She shriveled into the pillows.

"Please don't hit me, please."

She wasn't frigthened, but sounded like she really wanted me to hurt her. "Yesterday was my birthday and all I got from you was your freaking out about nonthing. This play, I know it is important to you. But I matter not all to you. I'm nothing to you."

"I'm sorry." The words sounded sincere, but she's a better than good actress. I loved her, even now.

"Sorry. Another word. It means nothing. Words on more words meaning nothing. If I didn't live in this shithole, I would leave you. What can you do to make me not throw you out."

It was late and I wanted her in my life. I had no one else. I never did. I breathed deeply to cool down and asked, "Have I ever threatened you?"

"No, but you fight people all the time."

She was right and I had no answer for why. I have always fought. I have never hit a woman, although I had taken off a Fyre boot and thrown it at my younger sister, who had said she hated me after I picked her up late at a bowling alley when she was 12. women are normally terrorized by men. All their lives. I stripped off my clothes and slipped under the covers.

"I'm sorry I scared you."

We went to sleep without a kiss or a carress and I remembered a line from Wim Wenders KINGS OF THE ROAD.

"I don’t know how one can live with a woman,” says Robert. “I’ve always felt lonely inside a woman."

I had a horrible dream about being trapped on an interstate. I woke and saw Alice sleeping. She looked at peace. I returned the nightmare. It wouldn't go away.

In the morning she parted without a word. like we would never see each other again. after the play she's going back to Ohio to finish her last college semester. Even her keaving this morning is hard on me. She'll be gone maybe for good. We've been together since March. Nothing lasts in eternity except eternity.

foto from KINGS OF THE ROAD

October 25, 1978 East Village Journal Entry

The dalliances of October are coming to a close. Alice remains my favorite. She is hurt by my sexual adventures. I wish I could be faithful, but I feel so free and she is frequently not in the mood for sex. Maybe it’s just with me. I think she is having an affair with her friend Susan, but I doubt that. Alice is my safe house, a harbor from the storms, a friend, a lover, someone who cares for my soul as I care for hers.

We shared phrases from our speech after these months of living together at 256 East 10th Street. She has a better understanding of the English language while I know more slang. My cousin Cindy is married to the managing editor of the National Geographic. Oliver Payne was born in Rhodesia and educated at proper English school and said during a visit, “You speech is difficult to decipher.”

Understandable with my Boston accent crippled by speech issues.

I purport myself to be a modernist, believing the world has reached a watershed in history. During the Ice Age man was an omnivorous hunter, Neanderthals were on the menu. Cro-Magnon and Homo sapiens sheltered in caves. Food was scarce. These people gnawed meat and snow. Human flesh before they discovered pigs, which tasted as good as man. Classical Anthropologists liked to portray our antecedents to assume the genetic acme of Man, but we were, are, and will be savages driven by climate and hunger for flesh. Human flesh. Supposedly we taste like pig.

The last known man to be eaten in this century was Michael Rockefeller by the Asmat tribesmen in Papua New Guinea

After the melting of the glaciers the sea level rose inundating Atlantis. The lands covered by ice grew green. Man raised animals and crops to east along with Man. Man went from a savage to a savage with cattle. Previously our sense of ownership pertained to caves, women, men and a shank of meat. Herds of cattle became property. Man fought over these possessions, then with the discovery of beer Man settled down to reap the harvest. Tribes divided the land. Their territories had names. None that we remember. We remained savages as we do now,

Copps Hill Cemetery

On an October afternoon I wandered through the Copps Hill Cemetery.
One of the oldest in Boston.
HP Lovecraft wrote a story About tunnels running underneath the graves.
To a hellish world.
Pickman's Model
"There were witches and what their spells summoned; pirates and what they brought in from the sea; smugglers; privateers—and I tell you, people knew how to live, and how to enlarge the bounds of life, in the old times!"
The horror.
None of a sunny autumn afternoon.
I looked for my family Brewsters Howells and Hamblins.

On the black flat tombstone
I knew none of the buried
But recognized the names

Of the dead from three hundred years ago.

Dead for centuries

But still alive in eternity.
As we get old

We forget
As we get older
We are forgotten
Except by the gravestones
Until the wind erases away the names.

OCTOBER 23, 1978 - JOURNAL ENTRY - EAST VILLAGE

QUITING MARK AMITIN

Tore up your phone number Written on a scrap of paper I never memorized it And I'm glad I hadn't I'm so happy to walk away from your shit The screaming The tantrum The lechery I tell you, "Fuck you." "You'll be back." "Fuck you in case I do." I walk out the door I don't turn around No second thoughts Glad to be gone I'd say it had been fun None of it was.

Today I quit ALBEE DIRECTS ALBEE. Edward is a good man, But Martin Amitin questioned my accounting. I did it once again and came up with the same numbers.

"I guess you're good at cooking numbers," said the acne-scarred producer.

"I was a math major in university. If I wanted to cheat, you'd never know and the only reason you're busting my chops is that you want me to have sex with you. I might, but you're dick is too small."

"What?"

"Small. It isn't ever two plus two." I burned him in effigy and wished he caught an incurable tropical disease, as he yelled at me.

"I quit."

If you quit, I'm not paying you."

"Then I'll pay myself." I took my wages from the petty cash. "$120. Can you count it?" I had not been brought up by my Yankee father to quit jobs Some how I would find another.

"That's theft."

"Call the cops." I left the office, as Edward entered with a press release.

"Going someplace?"

"Yeah, I quit. Good luck. It's been an honor working for you."

Outside I felt free, but then Mark screamed in a high whining voice from the 17th floor.

"Stop that man. He's a thief."

Not a single pedestrian paid attention.

I love a city where people know enough not to get involved in other people's bullshit.

I called Alice from 27th Street.

I quit."

About time. That old queen hated me."

"He hates all women."

"You want to meet me for breakfast at the Kiev."

"Sure, you feel bad?"

"No, I have enough for rent."

November's rent?"

"Sadly only October's rent, but don't worry, Mrs Golding love me."

"Everyone loves you." She was a little jealous of how I got into clubs and venues and ate for free.

"And I love you." I hadn't been seeing Alice at all as she devotes all her time to NEW WAVE VAUDEVILLE. I have gone to sleep alone veery night for the last month

"It's strange, but I feel married. and I don't know how to react to that. I've never lived with a man before." She was 22.

"I've never lived with a woman before." I was 26.

Are you crazy about me?"

Yes, you are my love, but lately you've been distant, because of the show, so I understand. You feel your freedom, so you can be creative. I haven't been seeing anyone.

"Yoy, the sexual adventurer?"

"Yes, the libertine has retired." I'm not concerned with my cheating. Alice??? I pray that she isn't sleeping with that horrible shrew, her co-conspirator in the show. Susan Hanneford. At least I'm happy to see that the witch hates me more than I hate her.

After Alice went to rehearsal at Irving Plaza I spoke with Michael Selbach. We drank Rhein wine and the sculptor bemoaned his wife's desertion. "She's gone and I don't know where. At least you know where Alice is.

With that stupid bitch.

We finished two bottles in record time.

And then decided to hit CBGB's for beers.

It was still daylight, but nothing said fuck your boss better than hitting a Bowery Bar early.

Seconds tick to seocnds A ragged man's death rattle on the Bowery. Not death, but something far from life. The bum had been hit by a car. Drunks live hard and die harder. Blood flows from his head. Seoncds tick to death A siren approaches fast. The man opens his eyes. Laughs Cries An asks "I never thought I would die here." He groaned and breathed again. "Maybe I ain't dead, but I can't call this living." Seconds tick back to his heart. The ambulance workers load him inside Life goes on.

OCTOBER 22, 1978 - JOURNAL ENTRY - EAST VILLAGE

Last night at CBGBs there were plenty of fights. Several women tried to lure me into bathroom sex. Stupidly I only wanted Alice, who was at Irving Plaze with her long-nosed girlfriend, Susan. I almost walked over the Polish meeting hall to confirm my fears, but drank beer instead and did a few lines with Guadalcanal, who is leaving fora tour with Johnny Thunders. I have never spoken to Alice about my suspicions of their pussy-bumping, but Kim Davis has intoned that she thought Alice and Susan were a thing. I don't think so, but I'm a man in love and we always believe the best.

Wet Autumn Rain

A soft Autumn rain Then harder Raindrops bouncing off the sidewalk Of Myrtle Avenue Shutting my eyes I listen To the rain on the street The sizzle of car tires on the wet Engines acceleration on a Friday afternoon Listen harder To passersby. "Her bottom is bigger than my umbrella." Laughter I open my eyes. Smell the damp. Feel the wet Drifting on the air As raindrops splash On the street. Mexican workers off early All smiles It's cerveza time A young rapper nods to the beat. Of his words. Water dripping from his hoodie. School children Hand in hand With a father Or a mother Happy to be going home Out of the rain On an autumn afternoon. I stay outside Serenaded by the rain. It's its own music

OCTOBER 20, 1978 - JOURNAL ENTRY - EAST VILLAGE

NEW WAVE VAUDEVILLE has Alice and the other participants in a panic. I've seen a few rehearsals. Klaus is fantastic, David McDermott is the quintessential fey emcee. Stanley the Polish manager of Irving Place, tells everyone that the show will be a big success. Alice is giving it her all. We haven't been together in weeks. I wish I possessed her drive. I'm only capable of writing in this journal and scribbling bad poetry on blank paper. I throw most of it away without reciting the verses to friends or strangers or reading it myself.

Failure.

A twenty-six year-old failure at school, work, and love.

"I think I'm getting too fat," Alice said this morning before the mirror above the kitchen bathtub. "I can't make love to you until I'm skinny."

"You don't look fat to me. You look as beautiful as the first day I met you."

"That's because you're blind to anything other than your own narcissism."

"What?" I was prone to regarding my reflection in mirrors and windows, so there was truth to what the West Viriginan had said, but her to me revealed a cold side of her. Cold to me.

"You're always glancing at your reflection in mirrors and shop windows."

"True." I sat at the table, as she pulled on her jacket. "I also look in people's eyes, because people really see you for who you are."

"You're not Adonis." She slammed the door shut and I was alone.

No sex.

I've been celibate before.

When Alice directed OUT TO BRUNCH, the hillbilly beauty rejected my advances to the point where I slept on the living room couch. Some nights she would steal under the covers and huddle close, saying, "I'm cold."

The sex during the no-sex period was all for her. She came and went right back to the bedroom without a good-night kiss. After that I went on strike.

I'm working for Mark Amitin. I need the money more than I don't need the grief. His cat, Camus, sits on this journal. Mark wants to fuck me. He wants to fuck everyone. I leave after lunch, saying, "I have to go to the doctor for a clap test."

I walked south down Second Avenue. Women stare at me. Most I wouldn't touch. They exude no sexuality, which I prefer to beauty. Last year this time I was whoring my way through Brooklyn with Betty, a married bimbo with augmented breasts, Roz, a lesbian, who liked my cock sometimes more than licking pussy, Fran, a skinny Jewish pinball player, who begs me to cum on her baby-powdered breasts, and young Ellen, a scrawny teen runaway, who gets off one my fucking her ass in between subway cars the night Elvis died. Last year I told her about Alice and that we couldn't fuck anymore.

"What about blow-jobs on the D-Train?"

"Fellatio isn't really sex."

I said good-bye to her last Spring when Alice Graduated from her Midwestern liberal arts college. I can never remember its name. I arrive to East 10th Street without seeing a single women exuding sex.

I'm cursed with desire for one woman, who fears me, but not my cock.

OCTOBER 20, 2021 - BROOKLYN

I can do nothing right for Old Yellah.

Today I hadn't replaced the heater to the bathroom. I should have. She heats up the bathroom for yoga. Hot sauna's one of her great pleasures. Sh tells me that my apologies are fake. I don't respond to the valid accusation, since she is so absorbed in her efforts to save outdoor dining and a million other projects that my cancer hasn't registered with her.

I haven't mentioned the fatality rate of liver cancer to her or anyone else. 2-5 years. No one at NYU hospital have discussed my future other than to say that I'm a perfect candidate for a liver transplant. I thought about telling Alice about my ailment, but opted to spare everyone, since they are wrapped up in their cellphone existences

This afternoon the NYU team checked my heart condition. Everything was normal. It looks as if I'll live to the end of the year.

ps I am the world's # 1 failurologist.