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DIARY 1877  4/24/71

INTRODUCTION TO GLENN AND CHARLES

It's now over a week since it happened, so hopefully it's settled down in my mind enough to write about it without getting "spaced out" while doing so. Glenn had called on Wednesday or Thursday of that week to say that we'd met at Bill G.'s, even though I hadn't really seen him, only Charles, and he hadn't seen me at all, but had certainly encountered John. He wanted to get together, despite the fact that he didn't know whether Charles would join or not. I told John about it, and he decided that Friday night would be good, and I called them for about a day before I somehow got suspicious of the number I was dialing and looked in the phone book to find I HAD a number wrong, and finally got in touch with Glenn, who seemed most willing for us to come over there, and I was curious what their place was like, so we agreed that John and I would meet there at 8:30. In typical fashion I was late, so I jumped into a cab, so that I wouldn't ruin the chance of getting there to find John already IN bed with them, and not ever be able to get into it, and took the wrong elevator up, and walked down two flights through the sumptuous building to have a T-shirted and tattered-jeans Glenn answer the door, saying that Charles was out buying Pepsis and such for the evening. He hung the coats up in a room large enough to be a bedroom, but which was just a closet, and the effect of the rest of the enormous apartment was one of genteel clutter: the huge living room had a grand piano, open, dramatically displayed against the arches and draperies and curtains of the far windows, and between that and us was a mélange of furniture in sitting groups, hassocks, chairs filled with books and papers, tables loaded with bric-a-brac, and a fluffy white dog, Heather, who left white hairs over everything much like Esme, the Warner's cat, from whose hairs I had just had my blue trousers cleansed. No one offered us seats, so I sat in the French Provincial settee, looking at the expensive table and its array of rich crystal, clocks, silver, gold, and ormolu, and then up to greet Charles, who was cuter than I'd remembered, and when the conversation got around to our trip, it turned out that he was a doctor, and a very expensive one, working out of Columbia Medical Center, and thinking he knew who Dr. Eryol was, and praising his pathology lab more than Azak would. Drinks were asked for, and they had nothing to mix with vodka except Crème de Cocoa (which I finally distinguished from Crème de Menthe), and then John mentioned the grass that he brought and we all went into the auxiliary sitting room, which was a still more enormous clutter of an electronic organ (I forgot about the clavichord along another wall in the living room), with stand covered with music and wires and headphones and papers, and an enormous bed-settee with an elaborate cover, and multitudes of pillows, swatches of cloth, and pieces of what looked like fur coats, all intermingled with books, clothing, and more and more pillows and throws. At one end of that room was a whole wall of three enormous built-in fish tanks, whose lights didn't work, and they said with some awe-filled reverence in their voices that they hadn't changed the water or fed the fish in months, and they were feeling guilty about it, but the fish seemed to thrive, and indeed, through the algae-covered windows could be seen swarms of silver-glinting fish all clustered around the top of the water, with a few pallid bottom feeders nuzzling along the bottoms. I got a tremendous sense of decadence and profligacy in the apartment, with all its musical instruments, colors, toys, kaleidoscopes, pipes, and paintings, and decided that when the pot went around, I would smoke too, since Glenn didn't really turn me on with his wiry stringiness and lashless eyes, and Charles didn't look ready for sex at all, and he would de facto turn into my partner, so maybe we could both get stoned and enjoy things, rather than bodies. They got out an enormous pottery jog-pipe like Bob M. had, with its enormous fire area for burning, and this one had a bristly looking phallic stem that fit into the mouth most obscenely, and I looked forward to smoking. I took off my shoes and settled onto the bed with Glenn, and Charles was on one side and John on the other, and we passed the pipe around and I got hazy all at once, and was taking very large tokes without looking at the burning area, so I couldn't tell how much smoke I was getting, thereby not being tempted to cough. But finally I coughed, and my eyes burned, and for the first instant wished I wasn't wearing contact lenses. The pipe was finished, refilled, and passed around some more, and John expressed surprise at my smoking, and I said I usually went way inward on my own trip when I smoked, and both hosts assured me that my assumption was right: I could do whatever on EARTH I wanted, I was to consider the apartment my own, could do anything I wanted, even if that was to curl up with my own toes for the rest of the evening, but if I wanted to SHARE what I found in my toes with them, that was just fine too, and I had absolutely nothing to worry about. I said that was wonderfully kind of them, that I had intuited much the same from their actions, and then we went on a short tour of the house, and by that time I was so high I couldn't keep things straight in my mind. Behind the fish-wall was a bathroom, red accented with a modernistic commode that simply didn't look functional, more like a decorator's showpiece, and behind that was someone's elaborate bedroom, this time with a canopied bed, more antique furniture dimly seen through beautifully indirect lighting, and then across the hall was another section of the apartment, with dining room and kitchen, and from the bedroom was another bathroom, so that if one was full the other could be used. They were talking about something or nothing and I was back in the living room, then out to get another drink, getting lost getting there and getting back, and telling them I was quite high, and they seemed to enjoy the news, and then into the sitting room, where they started showing off their organ, and John played for a bit, and I put on earphones and was blasted off my head by a series of syncopated bass tones that the organ seemed to generate effortlessly. I knew it was going to be a far-out evening, and drank some more, and then they passed around a joint that they said had been made from great grass dipped into two or three artificial things, and everyone was talking about acid and DMT and other things, and I figured "What the hell," so when the joint got to me, it was about 3/4 there, and I closed my eyes and drew in such a spaced-out way that by the time it was withdrawn, there was only about a third left, and a long dangling ash, and Glenn was remarking rather worriedly that I should be careful, as it was powerful stuff. I knew I was already out beyond normality, so going further wouldn't really change things that much. The organ seemed capable of thumping out bass tones for tango and cha-cha-cha and other rhythms at just the touch of a button, and I listened to the sounds, and John sat down at the keyboard and produced non-sequential music, and I went completely out, enjoying the music, standing with my glass in my hand, being encouraged by the hosts, swaying and tripping with the music. Then the glass was down, and Charles was bumping and grinding in the doorway to the living room with the music, and I bumped and grinded back at him, and figured he was enough into the evening to be a part of it too, and he was mine, and he looked rather cute and sexy dancing away, and we danced together for a bit, starting to kiss, and he kissed very nicely, and I could feel what seemed to be a very shapely body under his formless shirt, and thought that the evening might turn out very sexy after all. We danced on for a bit, and I took no notice of what John and Glenn were doing, and then Charles asked if I wanted to go into the bedroom, and my senses were operating only well enough to enquire "Why not?" and we kissed delightfully at the doorway, both seeming to get hard with playing, and we went into the bedroom, the music seeming to follow us. John and Glenn (John Glenn?) were already naked and rolling together on the bed, and they glanced up briefly to acknowledge our entrance, and I was still going with the music, and somehow Charles was changed into someone I had to entertain by undressing very slowly, and I was feeling very good about it, and he looked on with a pleased smile as I very carefully got out of my clothes and put them over a chair, noting with a sober part of the mind that my house key fell out of my pocket and I'd have to remember to pick it up or I couldn't get into my apartment. My clothing seemed to come off very slowly, and when I was down to my shorts, somehow Charles was there in his shorts, and his hairy chest seemed absolutely perfectly developed, and I wondered, vaguely, if I hadn't at last stumbled into that perfect situation that I'd always wanted: someone enormously wealthy falling in love with me, offering to keep me for the rest of my life in wealth without my having to do anything but occasionally make him happy, and he's such a complete doll himself that I have no trouble obliging him. That fantasy came and went through the evening, and when we were standing, groping, at the foot of the bed, I was sure he was up and enjoying it, but finally I just got too dizzy to stand, and we negotiated the side of the bed and I fell onto it. The change of status was crucial, and it seemed I fell into a new level of stonedness, where I could scarcely identify the body part nearest me, and people lost their individuality, and I had moments of lucidity when I thought I might be breaking up some other twosome, but seemed them to realize that there was really no series of twosomes, but just one mass of flesh on the bed, and poppers came out, and I went streaking out on my "All things are one" trip, where I seemed to swim through masses of flesh, feeling my own flesh poked and prodded and attacked from all sides, and I had the vague sense that I was soft and being worked over, but that really didn't matter very much. Glenn seemed to be slapping John around, who was enjoying it, and Charles seemed always to be DOWN somewhere, at my feet or crotch or the foot of the bed, and at one point he even seemed to vanish. I then started being probed in the ass, and I went through the old cycle about feeling good and bad at the same time, about shitting that was the same as giving birth (like the River is Elaine's shit-birth), and how giving birth was a woman's function, but being fucked was a woman's function, too, and how I didn't like getting fucked, but wanted to be, though gently, and that would make me a woman, which might be what I wanted to be anyway, but that didn't seem right, since I enjoy my cock so much, but then it's not EITHER a man OR a woman, it's BOTH a man AND a woman, and I could enjoy the functions of both, but weren't the spreads on the bed expensive, and what were they doing down there prodding into me, and had I already shit over the sheets, making a complete mess of them, myself, my reputation, and the evening's sex: but maybe that was what they WANTED, good shit to wallow in, as some perverts seem to want, and then it all united into a rushing roar, and I opened my eyes to see my own knees in my face and feel Glenn's body over me, and he was fucking me! John was full of concern for me, because he said my face was awfully contorted, but I told him later that the face didn't matter, that was connected with my inner thoughts, but that if my body were being hurt beyond my endurance, it would be my VOICE that would reflect that fact, and that's what should be heeded. John and Glenn were both being solicitous, and I was making things as easy as I could, and then it did begin to hurt, possibly when I came back into it, and then I began hoarsely uttering some sort of incantation for Glenn to COME, and he hastened his strokes, slamming into my ass, and shuddered and fell atop me, where I could feel his heart pumping in a flurry of thumpings, and he gasped to catch his breath, but I could feel no throbbing in his penis, nor no fluids invading my anal canal, and I lay, quietly, waiting for them all to be finished, and he withdrew, heightening my feelings of evacuation, and slowly, with verbalizations I'd not the wit to follow, they withdrew from the bedroom, and they seemed to assume I wanted to stay, and at one point during the activity they checked with John about my inactivity, my softness, and my not breathing for long periods of time, and he assured them that that's the way I always was. Glenn came back into the bedroom to check on me, asking if I wanted to sleep there, and I thought he meant for the night, and I certainly didn't feel like dressing and going out, so I said yes, and he pulled the bedclothes up around me and I drifted off, after assuring HIM, too, that I was all right. I drifted and may have slept, listening to sounds of organ and piano playing from the next room, and I drifted along for a bit before I decided I was being out of it, and wanted to get back into it, and I had to go to the john, anyway. Out and wandered around for a bit before being directed into the bathroom, and shit nothing much, and then tried to get my contacts out, a process made ferocious by one being out of center, and I couldn't get it back ON center, and I stood there, faintly nauseous and dizzy, trying to keep command of my faculties enough to GET the thing centered and OUT of my eye so I would have no more worries about it. Finally, after an age, it came out, and I wandered back into the living room to find they were about to go into the kitchen, or else I went back into the bedroom and John came in and said we were ready to eat, and I went into the dining room for the first time, and my highness got a jolt when I saw the metal coated walls of the room in panels, stark in their functionality, and thought of the metal inward-sliding walls of "The Pit and the Pendulum" and sat through the midnight dinner in vague apprehension that the walls would glow and slide in and splinter our bodies along with the dining table. Which was set in an extremely elegant way with linens and silvers and crystals and china, and I passed up the wine and settled for Pepsi, since I thought my system had had quite enough of intoxicants, thank you. I didn't feel like talking, and could only barely listen, but Glenn seemed to have no trouble filling in the conversation, talking about people and places and things, and finally leaning toward John with a hard avidity asking "You're really interested in the S/M scene, you mean you REALLY are?" And they talked about their common friend who showed films and had parties, who was now having parties again, and about all the toys they had for sex, and I could at least berate them for not bringing them out for John, and we talked on and on about sex, Glenn loving the vocalization about hard cocks shooting their come into someone's mouth or ass, and John said he really didn't like to be fucked, and I said I thought I SHOULD like it, and liked practice, so long as there was adequate lubrication, and Glenn said he liked it ROUGH, and would rather use a little spittle than whole gobs of gooey creams or lotions. Charles was taking the things off the table finally, and we'd eaten, though I couldn't identify anything but the salad, chopped beef and some kind of vegetable, and had some sort of dessert with a hard cookie that really didn't go down, and it was something to do with someone's birthday cake, but I really didn't much get anything. Then Glenn and John were going at it in the bedroom again, and I and Charles were together, and necking somewhat, and then I was in the bedroom and Glenn and I were necking, and I was amazed at the thin hard sinewiness of his body, as if he exercised every fiber of it to maximum hardness, or as if his driving demons so tensed his body that every fiber was attuned to its peak of performance. We started necking and sucking, and I got hard for a change, and then John joined in and I got distracted and then other things started happening (and now as I type I remember that John finally came off with a great deal of fuss, Glenn had theoretically come in me, and I had, with an enormous flurry, beat myself off with everyone circling around cheering me on, while I flailed away, shouting and screaming at myself, and finally grinding into a spraying climax that seemed to exhaust everyone), and before I quite knew how it was happening, I was lying on my stomach on the bed, actually ready for sleep again, and Glenn was lying on top of me, then lubricating me, then fucking me, and I lay there, taking it, trying to enjoy it: trying to FEEL it, and he'd said at dinner that he came so often he really didn't shoot very much, and was amazed at how much John shot, and maybe that was why I didn't feel him when he supposedly came a SECOND time in me. I lay there, and then John said we really had to go home, and I didn't want to, but was willing to listen to him, so I crept around salvaging my clothes from chair backs, remembering to pick up my key, and my contact lens case in the bathroom, and located my coat in the closet, my shoes under the bed in which Charles now slept, and I kissed him goodbye, and John and I kissed Glenn goodbye and got to the car at 3:30AM!

 

DIARY 1936  5/8/71

DIZZY FROM "CHANGES"

Get the pipe going well, and John takes only one puff, and I drag and suck down the rest of the smoke, having put on the Bach tape that I had on when Liz was here, and I sit and watch the muted colors (since John doesn't like the colors straight) and the music whirls around in my head and the colors and lights whirl around in my head, and my cold maybe somewhat affects me, and I'm breathing more and more deeply, feeling quite light-headed about it, and I move around in the chair and get a nausea attack, and as I sit there I get more and more dizzy watching the picture's effects on the marbled face, and when I close my eyes I feel sharply worse, and lean forward in my chair to try to stabilize myself, but I only get more and more dizzy, until finally I feel that I can't look at the picture anymore, and stumble over to the sofa, hoping I'm not going to vomit all over the place, and I lie down for what I hope will be a few moments, but the changes of status make my head spin, and I can only double up and clutch my stomach and hope I won't be sick. John doesn't say anything, merely sits and watches the "Changes," and finally I hear the tape run out and the "flip, flip, flip" as the end rubs against the housing, and I'm too dizzy to get up and fix it. Finally John gets out of his seat and announces that he's going to bed, shutting off the set, and it's as if I've been liberated, since I lay for a few minutes and then feel good enough to get up and turn off the tape machine to stop the awful noise. But still don't feel quite normal, and crawl into bed, then have to get up to brush my teeth, which I'd forgotten, and feel dizzy and very cold, and turn my electric blanket up to 5 as I fuss with closing the blinds and drapes, feeling terribly cold, and crawl into bed, shuddering, trying to keep it away from John, and he seems not to notice how broken apart I am until I tell him about it the next day. Finally my shivers begin to subside and I turn the control down from 5 to 3, but still sleep that night under the hottest control I ever had to dial, and that probably also helped the nasality I had the next day, and even toward the end of the week I was still spitting into a glass.

 

DIARY 1947  5/12/71

SMOKING AT POPE'S

When Mike R. offered a joint to the group, after Tiko left, I thought vaguely that the whole thing might turn into an orgy, but the thought of sexing with Pope and Mike was a bit much, though John and Lee were there to counterbalance it, and Lee was smilingly, friendlily, eagerly willing to share in the smoking, so when Mike lit the fat licorice-papered cylinder, I accepted the second drag, saying "Well, why not," and knowing that I would quickly be going to John's, and he and I would have fun. The first drag left me rather lightheaded, and I figured there was going to be quite a buzz coming, and there certainly was by the time the joint was passed from Lee to Mike and back to me two or three times. Pope was sitting rather stiffly, keeping rather out of things, and Lee was expansively slouched down on the sofa, beaming good naturedly at everything, and I settled back into my chair to get the idea that everyone: Pope, who seemed so taken by me; Mike, who seemed always ready to attack me; Lee, who seemed so completely friendly with everyone; and John, the nervousness seemingly only a shield for his desire for me, and I sat in my chair, not participating in the inane conversation about the Russians and astrology and the West Coast, seemed to see the focus of the evening in my own body, and I thought if I just lay back and let them attack me, it could be very pleasant and I could absent myself from responsibility. But the longer I lay there the more apparent it became that nothing was going to happen unless I started it, and I didn't feel like starting it, and again I got my "And all of LIFE is spent in this surrounding" high, and told Mike I was ready to leave, and he said he demanded someone to walk to the subway with him, and he was ready to leave in five minutes, so I decided to wait for him at 10:10. I caught glimpses of my watch, and it was 10:30 before the quietness of time caught up with me, and I was saying nothing, merely resting my face on my chin, sipping a bit of Triple Sec from Pope's new Hennessey glasses, quietly listening to everyone, thinking that what they were talking about was a complete bore, why didn't they get down to serious matters, but I didn't want them to get to matters like sex, because I really wanted to get to John's as soon as possible. Thankfully, at 10:35 John stood up to leave, and everyone sort of got to their feet and I manipulated myself into the bedroom to get my jacket, say a few words to Pope in thanks for the lessons, maneuvered past the glowing colors of the posters in the hallway, and took an eon going down the stairs, going into gales of laughter, happy that I was leading the way, getting dizzy from the turns, almost experiencing changes of pressure from the five-floor descent, and I leaned against the mirror weak with laughter when I got to the bottom of the stairs. There was talk between Lee and John, who were driving further into Brooklyn, that seemed heavy with double entendre with Mike, who knew he was going home, but seemed to be playing with the idea of going with them. But we said goodbye and we walked off, making remarks about our highness, and I pointed out the Hotel St. George to him, waved goodbye, and ordered myself to walk the enormous distance to John's apartment, ring his bell, walk up his more manageable steps, and he was on the telephone, and I very quietly undressed and lay down listening to the radio on the living room floor. John finished, came in talking about Charles and Glenn and how much of a success we made with them, but they couldn't see us again, but they might see us again next week, and I lay there smiling vaguely up, and John finally diagnosed my condition by saying "Are you stoned?" and I said "Yes," with a pleased tone, so he undressed and came in with the cock resonator for HIM, and he started playing his body ballet with me, and I let myself go so far that I didn't get high, gave myself up to being tickled by him, rigidifying my midsection when he seemed to want a washboard effect, and finally he grew tired of my lack of erection, said we should get into bed, and I stumbled into the bedroom, completely exhausted, and lay down on the bed, and he thankfully didn't pursue the idea of sex, merely put the cock resonator aside until the next morning, when we have lovely sex, though again somewhat frantic, though there's lots of time because it's Tuesday.

 

DIARY 1950  5/12/71

"ROMEO AND JULIET" QUARREL

John didn't want to see "Romeo and Juliet" at the beginning, but after he was impressed with "Taming of the Shrew," he said he'd go, and I was happy. We get there, after eating and his exercises, and I know only that his day at Boosey and Hawkes was a hard one, he was tense, but he went through his exercises with such spunk I didn't think he was actually TIRED. But he sat on his spine through the first part of the first act, so that I thought he must have the bar railing RIGHT at the dancers' level, and he was propping his face up with his hands under his nose, breathing heavily onto his clenched fingers, and then he began nodding as in sleep, and I whispered (too loudly, I'll admit) "If you wouldn't sit on the back of your spine, and sit up straight, you wouldn't be falling asleep!" He glared at me and I self-righteously went back to my binoculars, noting that he didn't move an inch. Then later his breathing got through to me, and I debated what to say, and decided brevity was best; "Would you move your hands away from your nose, please?!" in a tone he would later call "sarcastic." But he continued to doze, though I kept looking at him, and I kept being annoyed at the ballet and dancing, which wasn't as good as I'd remembered it being, and when the lights went on for intermission, and John didn't applaud one bit, I said, testily, "Either you're going home or I'm going home, but you're ruining the evening for me," and he responded with the fact that since my first shot at him, he hadn't been able to enjoy the second part of the first act. He said he was tired and feverish from the shots and the fact that he hadn't slept last night, and I retorted that he didn't seen very sleepy when he was exercising. He said he didn't know what was wrong with his hands under his nose, and I imitated him, snorting loudly into my fists, and he said that I COULD have explained WHY I wanted him to move his hands, rather than curtly ordering him about like a computer. It dawned on me only much later that the five extra words HE wanted as explanation could have been far MORE easily triggered by ONE word of inquiry from him: "Why?" But we exchanged a few more heated comments, and then he said quickly, "I guess I will be going home," and he walked down the row and left. I was taken aback, and went into the lobby to find him gone, trembling at the encounter, but happy that I could enjoy the rest of the show in peace. Out on the balcony, I saw someone walking with John's walk with a pink polo shirt on, white pants, and carrying a jacket, who stopped to glance at the fountain. I watched him looking at the fountain, decided he had changed his mind, because he didn't have his ticket stub and probably would have been too angry to pick up a get-in pass, and I dashed down the steps and out to the fountain to see him walking to the corner of the State Theater, when it dawned on me that the guy had BROWN hair and that John was wearing CREAM pants, not his white ones, and I sheepishly went back into the theater. The rest of the performance was ruined for me because I was thinking what I'd say to him, what he'd say to me, and how he might be REALLY at his place. During the third act, one of the standees sat in the seat next to mine, and when he nodded I didn't mind NEARLY as much as with John. Left at 11, at the end, and got back to the apartment to find the AUTOMATIC lock locked, so I had to go downstairs and get Ben to call about the key to let me in. He said something about my friend coming in, and he called Ceil, who told me that John came in, wanted the keys for the apartment, and she had to argue with Mr. Douai that she KNEW he used my apartment to give him the keys. And that Mr. Douai had taken the keys back. I told Ben to call Douai and shouted into the phone that "I JUST WANT TO GET INTO MY APARTMENT." He said he'd be right there, and Ben said I should wait on 17. Stood and waited and waited, and he came up angry about being gotten out of bed, and I asked him only one question, "WHO locked the snap-lock?" It took two questions to get it out of him, and he said "I did," and I said he had no right to change the setting of my lock, and he said he'd been in the business for 24 years, knew better than I did, and he had a son my age "just like me," and why wouldn't I "be a man." I seemed sure that he was talking about my gayness, and I didn't say anything about it, deigning to thank him for letting John into my apartment, though he had his own keys for it, and I got in to find his bag gone, as Ceil had said he'd taken it, and I phoned him, got a busy signal, changed and got quarters for subway fare, called him back to a busy signal, checked the verifying operator to find that "The verifying equipment for 522 isn't working," and caught the slow-moving subway to Brooklyn at 12:30. Into the apartment fearing he'd double-locked the door, but he hadn't, and I got into his bedroom before waking him with "John, can I stay?" and he rustled and uttered a groggy "OK," and a few minutes later, when I couldn't sleep, the phone rang and he explained he'd put the phone off the hook because he'd gone to bed early, and it was friends of his from California, the LSD doctor and his friend, who were coming out here next week, and they'd call me on Tuesday if they couldn't get through to John. We then both slept until the morning, when I asked him why he came home, and he said he just wanted to sleep. I thought about what to say to him, and decided that I simply couldn't continue to argue with him, but I'd just humble my angry side and apologize, and I'd said "I'm sorry," last night, and he'd responded with something that sounded like "That's OK," but could just as well have been "Fuck you." Then we talked through the morning "rest period" and he kept being angry whenever I tried to explain WHY I'd done what I'd done, and he said I didn't TRUST him enough NOT to do what he'd done DELIBERATELY to annoy me, and I had to admit that that was right: I DID think he was doing it deliberately, BUT he'd made NO attempt to explain it to me, and I said I knew I was stupid, and that HIS stupidity, about leaving, on top of it, made it just worse. He wouldn't admit to being wrong about ANYTHING, and I put my head down in frustration and said the only thing I could think of: "The only conclusion I can draw is that I'm always wrong and you're always right, and that if the argument continues it'll just get worse, so the only thing I can do is apologize and say I'm sorry, and I'll try never to do anything so stupid again." He had some small quibbles about that, but essentially that was the end of it, and he caressed me lightly around the shoulders before he got up, and then before we left, he caressed me and kissed me and said "I love you," and I added rather acidly, "Despite the stupid things I do," and he didn't say anything, only agreed to come here after dinner with his own food. Talking to Cyndy the next lunch, she suggested that we were both feeling the space between us, trying to see who had what power, and I certainly told her that I was very stupid when I said some of the things I did, and reminded her of my promise for "one month's notice" from John, since I'd feel awful if the relationship ended, rather than RELIEVED that the relationship was ending, as I would have felt before. She said she felt the same about Phil, and went on to say that what I was saying to John sounded like Berne's Transactional Analysis PARENT laying down the law to John's CHILD, and that I was asking for lack of success by counting on his child to pout, get angry, or escape, as John did by leaving. I said I KNEW it was stupid, but that's why I promised John to give me a month to patch up whatever stupid mistakes I made. I told John that I was getting to the conclusion I had to be VERY careful what I said to him, EVEN WHEN I WAS VERY ANGRY, because I would be endangering the relationship, since I couldn't expect HIM to help me OUT of any of my own mistakes. He didn't pick up on the sarcasm of that, either, and he even seemed to agree with the statement that "Everything I do is wrong, everything you do it right," at least in these circumstances. But I concluded to myself that our relationship is far MORE important than these PETTY details, and far from thinking that this was important, I stressed the idea that these DIFFERENCES were so minor in comparison to our enormous areas of compatibility, that they could very quickly be ironed out, even though I felt the aftermath of them through the day, and waited for the evening when John and I could get together and talk about them some more, and through the unpleasantness, come to an even greater degree of understanding of each other.

 

DIARY 1981  6/1/71

EARTHQUAKE!

I dreamed I was in some sort of laboratory, and someone with unquestioned authority announced that the earthquake would take place in just a number of seconds, and I had the perfect image of myself looking down at the second hand moving around my watch face, and suddenly I was lying in my bed, and there was the achingly powerful faraway thump and cracking sound of an earthquake, and the room seemed to settle, as if it had been picked up about a millimeter and allowed to drop onto hard-packed mud. My entire body seemed to convulse with the quake, and I lay there, frozen with fear, and there were very much smaller thuds, like heavy trucks passing by just outside. For a moment I tried to convince myself otherwise: there aren't any earthquakes in the Adirondacks, it's just another earth slide, but the smaller ones followed two or three times, and I sighed deeply, as John told me later, as if it were JUST too much to tolerate, REALLY it was. I can't say that I broke out in a sweat, but it FELT as if I SHOULD break out into a sweat, and I pictured the whole cottage lurching forward off its pilings, or the whole hill rolling down on us, but I had faith in the solid construction of the log cottage, and felt it could roll with just about anything, and was glad I wasn't in a large apartment building when a jolt like that would happen. I heard John moving in bed in an alert way, but it was dark, so I couldn't see him, and I didn't even try to look at my watch to see what time it was. I went back to sleep fairly quickly, once I convinced myself that the smaller quakes had stopped, but with the fear that these might just be the preliminaries to a LARGE quake that would REALLY break things up. After sleeping three hours, there was another whack in the air, this one seemingly louder, and this time I talked back and forth to John, and we agreed it was an earthquake, and I felt shivery and small and completely vulnerable inside, wishing John would come across the cold floor and crawl into bed with me, but he didn't, and I lay there, again feeling the tremors of the aftershocks, again wondering if these weren't leading into some grand cataclysm, and then drifted off into uneasy napping. Only after looking at my watch to see that it was 5:30AM. When Norma and Arnie got up, they said they'd felt it too, and Norma said that afterwards someone had been walking around the cottage. And then Arnie pointed with a laugh to the askew pictures over the fireplace, but I wouldn't have been able to guarantee that they hadn't been like that all the time. But up at the Hall it was the only topic of conversation, and the consensus seemed to favor the idea of a sonic boom, but I said that the aftershocks were very strange, but our breakfast partners seemed to think that echoes off the mountains could have caused them. But then after breakfast we talked with Mr. Webb, and though he said he hadn't ever heard of earthquakes in that area, he was sure that was it, though he thought it might have been something about our hot water heater that had been troubling us, so he had come down without his flashlight to feel his way around our cottage: so Norma HAD heard someone walking around it. We agreed about the times it happened, too, and he said that a delicately hung chandelier above the round table had fallen and broken because of it. When I got back to the city I called the Coast and Geodetic Survey, and they said that the only seismograph readings were available in Washington, so I took the number and called them, and the fellow who answered checked very quickly and said it was "about 3" on the Richter scale, but that since they didn't have the readings from the Canadian stations yet, they really couldn't pinpoint the center or the strength, but for now it looked like it was somewhere near "Spec---ta---lator?" he paused, and I said "Speculator?" with certainty, and he said, "Yeah, that's it." Later, looking at the map, I found it hard to square THAT with the fact that people from Indian Lake, whom the Webbs had called to see what had happened, said they hadn't felt a thing, and Indian Lake was 20 miles CLOSER to Speculator than the 30-mile distant Blue Mountain Lake. The guy thanked me for calling (saying that he didn't know how to charge the government for the call), and said there WERE incidents of earthquakes in the Adirondacks before. News to us! Told Arnie and Norma and John about my call, and they were delighted to pass the news about.

 

DIARY 1995  6/2/71

INCREDIBLE PARTY AT JOAN'S

First to arrive are Hans and Virginia (in addition to Joan, John, and me), and Hans is positively flying on something, his eyes even more manic and alert than Roger's at HIS best, which is pretty wild and manic, and Virginia has that unnaturally bright-eyed look of an actress or a head, also, and Virginia's mainly in violet, and Hans is completely in black and white, with a filmy lacy shirt with a ruffle at the neck that is incongruously topped with a black bowtie, and he wore some sort of dapper black hat that really floored me when I looked around from the picture of the two nude men over the stove that I had been removing. He said he'd dressed specially that way for the party, and I believed him, but figured he'd be dressed strangely ANYWAY. A few minutes later Hans' father came on the scene, and he was, in his older way, more bizarre than Hans, talking about girls and pot and drinking and turning on like someone half his age ten years ago. John and I were busily demolishing our wine, and then Hans suggested that he had some nice grass, and then Joan said that we should smoke hers since she was trying to get rid of it, since she didn't want to smoke while she was meditating. There was a lot of talk about a letter from a Greek girl, and Hans established at 5 that he DIDN'T have to be at work at 5, but at 8, and Joan said she didn't think Pat would show up, because he could only come late, and she didn't want the party to come too late to an end, since she just wanted to SLEEP, having waked up this morning at 5:30 for no good reason except her cold. D. wasn't showing up with the salad, but the beans --- about three gallons of them in an enormous white pot on the stove --- were quite done and the meatloaf overdone, so we might as well start. The joints had gone around a few times and I was beginning to feel spaced out, and the food was so god-awful, except for the purity of the beans, that I was glad to see D. and the salad come in, particularly when he was trailed by his own covey of quite attractive males, primarily Steve, who was now his platonic roommate, who was entertaining cute young Jim from Kentucky, who raised gerbils, and Nick and Joel, who were sitting by the kitchen doorway, and thus particularly vulnerable to me as I passed in and out of the kitchen for the salad. There was also fat Tom, who was a loser from the start. The salad started going around, and it was full of olives and avocado and green peppers and cukes and lettuce and tomato and celery and, surprise, surprise, especially to Joan, quite brimful of grass, too. Joan sputtered out in mock-crying "But I was trying so HARD to stay away from it," and Bill just grinned conspiratorially. This only had the guest list up to 12, but the wine was going quite fast, and when I went out for more salad, someone came up from behind, turning out to be Bill, and put his hands on my ass, saying "What a LOVELY ass," and Steve agreed somewhat tentatively, I thought, and then he raised my shirt front and started exclaiming about my belly button, and then he had to take me into the living room and show everyone my belly button, and they started talking about how they had to "celebrate" my body, and I grinned as I hadn't since I was about 22 at Lenny's, being made a fuss over one of those rare and delightful times. Everyone started crowding around and hugging and fussing over me, and at one point Hans came into the kitchen when Bill was pawing me, and rather kept it in his stride, and then a pipe came out with hash in it, and I took a number of deep puffs, in my paranoia thinking that I was drawing the flame from his lighter, not too terribly far removed from my lips through his short pipe stem, right through the hash, through the bowl and the stem, right into my lungs. And then the people seemed to circle closer around me, handling my ass and my legs and my chest and my belly, and I stood in the corner, "protected" by Joel, whom I'd been getting the most delightful signals from, and then I slumped down, still drinking wine, still taking a joint when it came my way, and found myself leaning my head onto his lap, then twisting around backward to kiss him, and Bill was making some sort of obscene parody of Carol Channing and even Julia Child in the background, and singing gay songs in his white canvas---ill-fitting---jumpsuit that everyone said he looked just fine in, and I was just having a fine old time, and Virginia and Hans left, and I thought the party was breaking up, and then Virginia came back, which caused me no little confusion, and then Joel came to my rescue by inviting me to his place in the next building, and again I thought the party was breaking up, but John said it went on for another hour. The two of us, for our part, said goodbye, that we'd be back, until Joan said I should take my coat, and we went down the stairs and up the stairs, myself keeping a stiff control over my sense of time so I wouldn't be going up or down the stairs forever, and we got into his apartment and he immediately had to take a shower, and I undressed and lay down in his bed, feeling very comfortable on the too-soft mattresses stacked on the floor, and I was particularly struck by the fact that this was MIKE'S apartment that I'd slept overnight in before after a party at Joan's, with the dim porch light in the ceiling making the gray walls look like a summer's evening in the Midwest. The kitchen was painted matte black, which was rather sick, and I could hear him in the shower and then he was out and cuddling in bed with me, and I felt his cock growing in my fingers, and I grew in his, and we wrestled around on the bed, necking like mad, scratching, cooing, saying how high we were, and he seemed to want to fuck me, but I kept playing with his cock, sucking it and wetting my fingers and sliding them around on his head, and finally he crushed himself into my hips and said "Oh, shit, I didn't want to come yet," and squirted white liquids onto my stomach, which I took up in my eager fingers and used to lubricate both our cocks. Then he made a bridge above my body, and I started working away on myself when, much to my dismay, there was a rattle at the door and in traipsed John and Bill and Steve and Tom and Jim and Nick, and clothes were being shucked, and I really didn't want any of them nearby, since Bill and Tom seemed most interested in the bed scene, and then John was lying on top of both of us, and we were necking and kissing and rubbing together, but then he was gone, and others were dressing, and finally only Tom lay on a fleshy heap on the floor at the foot of the bed, and Bill was sacked out there, too, waiting for us to do something, but I didn't know that, and knew only that both Joel and I wanted me to come, so I started jerking myself off again, and when I came, it was practically soft, and I sprayed semen all over the place, and I was stonily amazed to feel another hand reach out and a pair of lips take my cock into its adjacent mouth, and Bill had gotten to me at last. Then the two of them left, and Joel and I sat around amazed at the turn of events, and then the apartment was again filled with Nick and Jim and Steve, and everyone was going to the Gold Bug, where they had dancing and a buffet, and we had to hurry, because it was 9:45 and the buffet was over at 10. So we dressed and got ourselves together and took out for the street (I don't remember going down those steps at ALL), and I was walking with Nick in front, and he gave me one of his cards, and he seemed to be greeting everyone on the street, which was nice, and Jim came up to talk about his gerbils, and Steve remained behind, very handsome and very quiet. The Gold Bug was $3 for two drinks, and the first two screwdrivers went very quickly, so we ordered me another for $1.25 and I tipped 25¢, which made them the same price as at the Four Seasons. Joel and I danced, and then Nick asked me to dance, then he got involved with a white-trousered hunk named Tim, with whom he made a date for later in the week, and I asked Bill to dance, and Jim asked me to dance, but though Steve and I rather looked at each other, we each feared to be turned down, I hope. There was another lovely there in a pink torso shirt of magnificent, albeit short, proportions who was very nice to look at. We drank and sat and talked, and even ate a roll with sliced ham and cheese and pickles, and then they felt like leaving, and Joel and I sat around for a bit, until I asked what he really wanted to do, and he said he'd like to walk, and we went out to find it was raining, so we went back toward his place, detouring so I could have a slice of pizza, since I said I hadn't had much protein that day in all, and he looked at me in amazement, and then when we got back into the building, he suggested we stop into another Steve's apartment, and there was the tabi sock and shower clog and Japanese kimono of SOMEONE, and it was Steve's friend another John, and we chatted there for a bit, and then John invited us to HIS place for some tea, and we went into a nicely decorated apartment where he changed into a regular set of clothes, to our disappointment, and proceeded to serve red tea in an English service, and then afterwards, while we sat around and talked about the state of the world and our heads, most of which I just sat back during with an amused smile on my face, and we started testing drinks, and John mentioned Galliano and milk, but he didn't have enough Galliano to bring it off, and I told him of gin and milk, and then he thought of this cherry stuff that he had, and we tried to mix it with varying proportions of Green Chartreuse, which I thought might mix, but it really didn't. Then he got out some Grand Marnier and we sat around and sipped that for a bit, and there might have been a few other things, and I recommended that HE try a Crème de Noyeaux, and then I looked at my watch to see that it was approaching 2:15. So I stood to leave and everyone had to stand also and get ready to leave, and I thought we'd have sex (I even took off my shirt, but nothing happened), and the music was nice when it wasn't being interrupted by Village police calls to some car up in Riverdale, and we talked about Mike for a bit, and my book and my jobs and everyone else's jobs, and I said goodbye to everyone, and then there was nothing to do but steel myself and go home. Home to find that John wasn't there, as I thought he might not be, since he had his car with him, and he'd mentioned he was going to the Eagle, and I just figured he'd be returning to Bill's, but he didn't. So I'm up to my apartment to get John's keys, and subway the long way to his place, too tired even to read much of "City Life," which I finished tomorrow, finally, and got into John's apartment at the ungodly hour of 3:30, and he was a bit annoyed with the both of us that he didn't simply say (or I ask) that he was going to end up at his place, and what was I thinking of doing for the night? I didn't know at the beginning, and at the end it really ended up DELIGHTFUL.

 

DIARY 2044  6/15/71

HIGH HIGH

He starts running his hands over my body lightly, and I begin to go along with it, and get very high with the Moody music, and run my arms and hands around over my head as "the world opens up," and get into a mental wrestle with the idea of "waking up" as getting high is supposed to be, and "falling asleep," which getting high implies for me. I think of my body almost simultaneously coming awake and falling asleep: responding to John's heavy touches, but ALLOWING him such complete freedom that I'm ACTUALLY ABANDONING my body to him, which TAKES as much freedom from me as if I'd ACTUALLY been asleep. He starts specifically genital actions, and I wish he'd bring out the Baby Magic, and he does, but he starts using the Boy Scout fire-lighting twirl with both flat palms, meanwhile bearing down on the balls, and I just can't take the pressures, so my hands take over, and I'm soft, and he pulls up his chair and starts pulling on his own meat, and we both recline there, gasping, pulling, and I alternate between frenzy and agonized pulling, and get to quite a peak of sound, so that when I finally come, I convulse inwardly again and again, not being able to let go my cock, and still strain upward when he brings in a towel, and I feel each cool dot of come on my belly against the towel, and can't bring myself to move into the bedroom. He finally comes in and leads me in, and I lay down, completely stoned, coming to the conclusion that "IF YOU KEEP YOU ALIVE, WHEN IT WOULD BE BETTER THAT YOU DIE, YOU'RE BEING YOUR OWN SOLE, WORST ENEMY." And I think of the Life movie review that EVIL EXISTS ONLY WHEN THE PAST IS RELIVED, when people can't go forward to change in the future. Now the only REVOLUTIONARY change existing into the future is death, and people have to opt for that voluntarily, or they'll be condemned to repeat and repeat "until you get it right," as the teachers say. I again relinquished control over my breathing, and I ACTUALLY fell asleep at the time I wasn't breathing, so whether it was a faint or a falling to sleep, my body took care of me (even though I don't take care of my body?), and I don't have to worry about dying THAT way anymore. A very relaxing, stimulating high. At one point, afterwards, I told John "my balls are STILL tingling," and he said "UMmm."

 

DIARY 2047  6/18/71

THE KIPNESS MÉNAGE

John's directions to their place are woefully written and confusing, so we run up and down the country roads trying to find a statue of a drummer that turns out to be a Drummer Road, and I'm sorry to see that it's a new frame house, rather than the old stone house I'd remembered from too many conversations ago. Tannhauser comes barking out to greet us, then quickly loses interest in us. Igor comes grumping out that everything's gone wrong today (the license plates won't come off their rusted nuts even with me helping, and Jeremy's lost his bicycle pedal, and I overhear a terrible conversation during which Igor INSISTS Jeremy MUST know where it fell off). Judy's her tautly smiling self, showing us to Jeremy's room where we get to sleep in double bunk beds, and John hurries off to shower and shave while I escape from the household uproar to walk in the backyard, listening to the drip-drop of what sounds like morning rain on the leaves, but which is really the shit-fall from the myriad caterpillars to be seen outlined against the green underbellies of each leaf on each tree, except for the hickories, which are practically denuded of foliage. Looking at the grass, one black wriggler catches the eye, then another nearby, until the vision clears and the whole area is alive with the worms, and I studiously don't look where I'm stepping; it would just be impossible to step without squishing at least one of the creatures. Judy said she sprayed, but they're still alive, though it might account for the languid torpor of some, moving in slow motion, trying to find their way off a leaf's dead-end, while others move in convulsive corkscrew twists and agonized-looking contortions of their legless mid-bodies. To add to the charm, among the thousands of black worms I look at, there's a black-spotted yellow underbelly who seems to be somewhat different from all the others. Back inside to watch Igor going for the babysitter through Jeremy's keen battery-zoom telescope, and then we're all dressed and ready for the restaurant. Back to look at the stars, which are bloated into disks by the lack of proper focus, but when I draw it closer, the stars focus into fiery points, but one planet goes into a disk of pinhead diameter, and standing off, two on the right, one on the left, appear to be pinpoint moons, the same size as stars without their fiery brilliance, so it must be reflected light, just as the planet is lit. Judy comes out but can't see it, Igor agrees with me, and Jeremy finally, I think, lies to say he's seen it, because he's getting tired being held up to the eyepiece, and he's chattering his teeth with the cold, and still Igor can come up with his regular "Jeremy, will you JUST SHUT your MOUTH?" When I get to bed after listening to his bassily-oriented hi-fi system, I can still hear Jeremy talking to himself at the end of the hall, and with all the lights on, he may never have gotten to sleep at all. Wake a number of times, starting at 5AM, to hear Tannhauser barking without any restraint, and the neighbors must be crazy about their new friends, and Mr. Bush, the Negro whom they'd not yet met, telephoned to say that Jeremy had scattered dirt all over his driveway. What problems that family HAS! I settle down with a Playboy to try to pass the time while John's working, and Jeremy's watching TV until he tells me to make a glider, and I make a paper plane that he flies with increasing gusto and loudness, and I suppose I can trace it: he has my undivided attention while I'm making it for him, and he's quiet and attentive, and I'm interested in the first few maiden flights when I tell him to throw it slightly upward, and possibly not as hard. But then I drift back to the book, interested in only a few more flights, and he starts getting louder and louder, throwing harder and directly at me, laughing hysterically when it hits my back, clambering up on the stairs to get more altitude, yet he fails to hold my attention, and the same thing must happen with his parents all the time. Later, John surprises me by saying Judy had a hard birth, because she'd said that it had been "uncomfortable, but not really painful" and that agrees with John's thought that she quite masochistically refused to DO anything to alleviate her troubles, but simply prides herself on being able to STAND them: Igor, Jeremy, Tannhauser, the worms, the new house, guests --- and more money would give her MORE.

 

DIARY 2049 6/18/71

STONEHENGE II

I tell Igor to get the sausage, but it's not the same as I had, but like chopped bits of wiener with cheese, which has little taste and interest. I apologize, and he can only accept it. My lentil and egg roulade is interesting but not much more, John's quiche Lorraine is fairly ordinary, made with Swiss cheese for a change, which he says he likes, but I don't think adds anything. Judy has the salmon mousse, which I don't care for, and she says they added gelatin, which they shouldn't have. Our first wine is a 1969 Rhine wine, and it's got a pleasant aroma, but its taste is thin and unvarying in the mouth, rather like a diluted Lake Niagara. Then there's no avocado vichyssoise, which excites everyone from the menu, only carrot vichyssoise, which is fairly nice, and I have cream of chicken with green oats, which is pleasant, but nothing to rave about. Then we order a Mozelle wine, and it's even more pleasant to smell than the other, rich and fruity, but the taste, though more bodied than the Rhine, is STILL rather unspecial --- even more like Lake Niagara. (Oh, yes, I forgot that Igor had a bloody Mary and Judy a scotch on the rocks to start with, while John said he'd had enough at Judy's, and I didn't want anything --- partly fearing it would boost the price too much.) Then Judy had the "blue" trout, whose taste and texture I liked better than Igor's broiled trout, though the skin was marvelous on his. We all had good cauliflower au gratin, even though John had a cauliflower mousse under his braised beef, which was fabulously tasty under its brown sauce. My medallions of pork with pureed chestnuts were tasty but not special, and the chestnuts were coated, as if they'd been sitting around for awhile. Then for dessert John and I had their cheesecake, which turned out, surprisingly and sadly, chiffon-light, though tasty, Igor had the coupe, which was just a fruit cup with a scoop of raspberry sherbet on top, and Judy exclaimed again and again over her orange soufflé, saying that though she seldom likes desserts, this one was topnotch. Oh, and they complained about the salads coming after the soup, though I just ate mine; that the BREAD was DRY, except in the middle, where it was chewy. Odd. Judy had Drambuie at the end, and the bill came to $63 and change ($ and $13 for the wines, good), $71 with tip!

 

DIARY 2051  6/18/71

THOUGHTS ON LEAVING NEW YORK FOR GOOD

The air, which was so bright and clear yesterday, is thick and gray and foggy today, and I can see chimneys belching yellowish clouds into the air, which hangs around the ground like a layer of gaseous mercury. We commiserate with each other about living in such an awful atmosphere, and I get the amazing idea that, since I'm not sure how I'll take NOT being able to see ballet and opera (this stems from a long train of conversation about my sending a journal to Rita almost daily on postcards, which I'll then want back, and he berates me for this "Indian giving," saying that I concentrate too much on keeping my past life around me, and that I might feel better if I just FREED myself from this accumulated past and struck out anew. I say that THIS is a factor in my NOT wanting to leave New York, since I have such a HISTORY of SEEING ballet and plays and movies and TV and opera and concerts and happenings, and maybe one of my reluctances to leave New York stems from the idea that I'll leave THAT part of my critical past behind, "unused," though the living THROUGH it should be "use" enough for these activities) after I move out of New York into "the country," that it would be better to move to ANOTHER TOWN, rather than directly into the country. That way I could TAPER OFF my "addiction" to ballet and opera and other blandishments of the big city, while there could be still the attraction of "people" that is another of the big reasons I have for staying in New York. Since John said a couple of times that the only city HE would think of moving back to was Washington, there might be something THERE for us. AND then I had the subsequent idea, startling in its simplicity: say I DO move out of New York, whether to Washington or Rio or somewhere else, and I don't like it. There's nothing to say that I can't move BACK INTO New York, even though it WOULD be a pain trying to find another apartment, and the ensuing moves would be boundlessly expensive, since all the books and records and furniture and souvenirs would have to go too. And this is NOT the time for thinking of getting rid of everything: if I'm going to live in a city, I'm going to have the amenities of music and books in the apartment in which I live. Only when moving BACK TO NATURE could I rely on the songs of the birds and forest to take the place of canned music. But the idea of leaving New York WITHOUT making a commitment to a VERY COUNTRIFIED setting, and the added idea that I could always move BACK to New York, seemed to make things quite a bit clearer. Then we got into the city, and traffic got worse and worse, and we followed enormous trucks at very close distances, and I thought how amazed someone would be from the past who would see the DENSITY of traffic on the roads: who would have dreamed that things as BIG as trucks would go as FAST on a narrow highway and maneuver SO CLOSE to each other and to the tiny cars between them. As we got onto various skyways, I saw the buildings boarded up in great numbers below, all falling into ruin, and the few newly renovated buildings only served to make the contrast greater, particularly when the only NEW looking house had tape across one window from where it was cracked, probably from a stone flung from the adjoining elevated highway. Then there were miles of concrete railings with gouges and lumps taken out of them where cars had encountered them, and again it all seemed so brutal and concrete and unnatural. Looking over the towers of the city it all seemed so INHUMAN, which was the sort of idea I'd seldom gotten before. And the roads were so dirty, the rooms we passed were clean of Venetian blind, certainly only because they were washed about once a month. The junk on the streets, the scarcity of green in any natural state (coupled with the thoughts at the start that the gypsy moths might REALLY DENUDE a section of the country from its greenery, and no one's DOING anything about it). I thought of the stacks of people in the tenements, unhappy, hanging out their windows, breathing the foul air, noisy with passing cars, and thought that NO WHERE is safe anymore: go to the Arctic or the Islands and be prepared for SONIC BOOMS from SSTs to enliven the day: there's NO escape from civilization, even in the far Indies, there's corruption in government and suppression of the poorest. No place to go, but certainly there are BETTER places than NYC!

 

DIARY 2056  6/21/71

PARTY AT JOHN'S FOR FRED RZEWSKI

The punch is nothing but grape juice and bitters, it tastes like, and everyone is rather depressingly Presbyterian, and I sit around and mope while everyone talks to everyone they know, and meets no one new. Then Jeff and John and I take off to the Promenade to look over the nonexistent cruising, though there's some on the streets, and we're up to John's for the first guests: a black fellow who knows lots about music, and Miss Carsch, who's delightfully open about her job on the National Council for the Arts, or whatever, and we sit and chat about the trip for a bit, and then Fred and many others come in, and there are almost enough chairs for everyone, and I chat with the Bible saleswoman for a bit, until she gets to be too much, and then I talk to Jeff about half-price paperbacks and he gives me the names of a book by Miss Guin that he says I must read, and then John and I start talking with Teitelbaum about his work and Clive Backster's work, and they're chattering on, Jeff's talking with Carsch, Fred's talking about this and that work of his, and the dreary fellow I thought was some sort of parson turned out to be some sort of composer, and I sat in my chair, wondering how I could make them all leave, aside from looking at my watch incessantly, as it went from 12:30 to 1:30 to 1:45, and I debated falling asleep in my chair, as the Chinese fellow had on the sofa. Then a few said they had to leave, and I guess they cast rather suspicious eyes on me, since I said I lived in Manhattan, yet I wasn't particularly ready to leave. I'd drunk a lot of wine, out of lack of anything else to do, and was fairly high, so that made the time past fast, too. The meat pies weren't the success John had thought they'd be, since there were two left over from the first box, and the whole of the second box. Poor John was kept so busy with his book and his working, that when I left on Monday morning, it was after washing the punch cups that were still in the sink from Saturday night, and I made the joke with John that I HAD to do them because he KNEW how much I disliked seeing dirty dishes standing around in the sink. We finally closed the door and collapsed into bed just after 2AM.

 

DIARY 2058  6/24/71

HAPPINESS!

The feeling is delicious and unavoidable. It bubbles up inside me many times during the day, starting down somewhere in the gut, blossoming over the stomach, which contracts in excitement, spreading over the lungs that inhale a gulp of air, and onto the face, where a silly grin spreads my lips as I merely walk down the street. John called with the news of a job interview on Wednesday, and his possible next freelance editing job in the arts. Two real estate offices that had been giving me a hard time suddenly began to cooperate when I started issuing ultimatums, and Mr. Sol Fleischer is so busy, so zany in his Walter Brennan way, so touching when trying to be rough with the woman who owes his company $890 for two months rent who can't afford to pay it, and his retorts of "Fucking office" are so apt when someone crosses him, and he gets such a delight in working with me, that I leave the office bubbling with energy, pep, and zing, so that when I come home to put on the trumpet tape, the richness and brilliance of the music inspires me to dance across the floor and smile asininely at myself in the mirror, not even depressed one little bit at what I see. And then of course there was the incredible session with the bull-bodied Louis L., with the pale blue eyes and muscled torso who puts me so in mind of John C., and the two of them would probably make the most beautiful pair in creation. I grinned after that, grinning again when Joan called to say that Alex and Norman would be interested in reading "Acid House" with the view of making it into a MOVIE, and all the good feelings of the last few days just rose up around me (it's impossible to write about happiness without using the words "rising" or "sweeping up," since the feeling has so much to DO with these directions of motion of Emotion). And there's a full feeling to the stomach that is just the opposite of the grip of fear, yet rather the same, and the intellect just seems to simmer in the heat, bouncing from one good thing about the day to another, and still the music blares in beauty in my ear, and Joan's about to come over, and I see John tonight, and all is GREAT with the world! [Phere haste triffled mine breadth: in pencil on the back of this page!]

 

DIARY 2094  6/28/71

HIGH ON BEER

I'd felt that the Champale was hardly alcoholic at all, and I drank it down very quickly, and then I started on the Millers with the same speed, and I hadn't had much to eat that day, and I was dehydrated from the heat, so maybe the alcohol got into my system very quickly, condensed in the blood by the cool bath, because I was very high when we crawled into bed, and I felt very sexy and voluptuous when John and I started plying each other with the Baby Magic. It was just like being high, and I was quite sure that John was on the verge of coming a number of times when I would withdraw my touch and just tickle him, but when I asked him later, he denied ever being close to coming. But at a couple of times he rolled over on top of me and thrust against me, and kept playing with me with most remarkable effect. But then when he got down to the point of wanting me to come, he started using his mouth, and that wasn't very satisfactory, and then he used his hands in what I thought was the wrong way, and --- again in the same way I do when I'm high --- I started making orgasmic sounds too early, because it simply felt very good, though not necessarily like I was about to come, but then I felt that I had to keep up with them, and then I felt myself going slowly down, and John beginning to work frantically on me, wanting me to come, and I thought I had to help him out. The first few times I tried to take over, he wouldn't let me, but finally I grabbed myself, squeezed mightily, and worked away, sweating, sweating, sweating, flailing away, until I could feel it coming from a great distance, could feel it slowly approaching, and paused long enough to almost stop completely before I came, squirted again, groaned, clasped, squirted again, and again, groaned, writhed, squirted again, spasmed, clasped, squirted, spasmed, spasmed, gasped, groaned, spasmed, and kept on going in the amazing cycle until all I could do was lean against John on the bed, thrusting my entirely sensitive cock against his body, feeling the extreme of sensation for minutes afterward, enjoying the pressures, marveling at the high feeling, and most surprisingly, fell asleep for a couple of minutes before I found him getting up again to take another shower.

 

DIARY 2096  6/28/71

STRANGE HIGH HERE AT HOME

John says he's tired, but that we should smoke, and if I feel like going out I can, and if he feels like joining me, he will. So we smoke, and I find that I'm coughing that little cough more and more, and I wonder whether it might not be a smoker's cough from smoking too much pot. I go to put on some early Schubert, which I think will be light, but it isn't, though I don't know what's coming next. When the pipe is out, John lies back on the sofa, and I sit beside him, with nothing in my mind, and then I berate myself for not paying attention to John, and reach for his leg, then his knees, then his thigh, then his cock, and finally, slowly, he comes up, though not opening his eyes. When he's fully up, he seems to be into it enough for me to get the Baby Magic, and I do so, and start playing with him with real pleasure, but then the high gets higher and higher, and the music is a very strange trip, too heavy for me, and I begin to get sleepy, and think that John's falling asleep under my hands, so I vary the touch, and he groans, and shifts positions, and I hope that I'm giving him a good time, but then I want him to come, and work on him harder, then with my mouth, but that gets tired, so I work with my hands some more, and he starts reaching down, but I want him to come so I work on him VERY hard, and after a LONG period of time, it's really no use, he says he's numb, and then Hamp calls from SF, and we all talk for a bit, and then I try again, but John really says he's numb, and I lay back on the sofa. I'm lying there for only a few minutes, I THINK, and wish I could put my feet up without bothering him, and when I open my eyes, he's GONE off the sofa, and I lay there for a bit, but decide I have to go to bed, and it's already dark out, though we started at 7:30, and it must be about 9 by now, and then John said he had ANNOUNCED that "It's time for bed" when he got up off the sofa, but I hadn't head ANYTHING. For a person who demanded he be in control, this is two nights in a row (now, twice in one day) that I've quite gone out of touch with everything, even something right next to me, without any conception of actually doing so. Now THAT'S a significant change --- but for the better??

 

DIARY 2099  6/29/71

BEFORE THE TRIP

Again the typical thoughts before a trip assail me: why am I going? Why can't I just stay in New York and be happy? But about this time it's evident New York isn't the charming place for me it once was. I predict waking up on strange mornings, feeling exhausted and vaguely sick, not knowing what the day will bring, concerned about where we're going and staying next, wishing we weren't on the trip anymore --- maybe even with John feeling the same way. Then I'll want to be back home. Maybe I'll even vow never to travel again. And the feelings will be heightened when I get high. Oh, yes, there'll be nice things to see; days of great happiness, food and sights and visions of beauty that will remain with me: like Rio, and Sete Quedas, Cuzco, those Tizi's in Morocco, the Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto, the smiling kids in Bangkok, the jungles and the mountains and the beaches. But there will be conflicts with John, and we'll get angry with each other about what to do or what not to do. But we do that in NYC, so we may as well be ready to do it everywhere. WHAT'S THE POINT OF IT ALL? We're traveling to see what the rest of the world is like, to look at its past, to check out its present, to talk about its future. I've met people in London and Paris and Meknes that I've liked very much; I'll meet MORE people on THIS trip. That'll be nice. I'll read and write, relax and get tired. That's nice. But I'll also anticipate with fear (GODDAMN IT, STOP IT) the flights, fume when we have to stand in line: then the flights will be THERE, the lines will be THERE, so I'll just have to learn to accept it, as I've accepted (and I'm glad I did) the idea that the trip NOW isn't fully planned, and that we'll have to spend time getting visas and hotels and travel arrangements IN towns. That's life. It's better than dying. Yes, certainly, it is that. It's hardly a trip, it's a new life for four months: I'll be different when it's over --- in a small way, but still different (but I would have been different --- but in a much SMALLER way --- if I'd stayed in NYC). But at least I've done what I wanted to do: gotten to the bottom of 2099, and now I can finish Volume III of DIARY and go on to Volume IV. This is it!

 

DIARY 2105  7/2/71

CHILDISH HIGH

Find myself getting back into a childish frame of mind as I might have been when I was listening to the serials back on the radio at home. There were memories of overly cheery announcers with their nonsense syllables, like A-E-Ooop, which I recall coming up with for Claude's class in nonverbal communication, and I could hear announcers repeating it: "Hey, kids --- OOO-OOO-EEE --- let's listen to the next chapter." I again have the feeling that something's going to come very clear, but that's mixed in with the dread that THIS time something different WILL happen, and that I WON'T be able to take another breath. And the fear of the plane is very immediate, and I even try to convince myself that "the worst" has happened and I'm actually ON a plane that's going down, but it just doesn't work, and I want, again, some force to come down and sweep me UP off the sofa, so that I'll know there's something existing in the world besides me and my fear. I swing my head around on the back of the sofa and get very dizzy, and try to play with that, but it doesn't get anywhere. John's lying strangely half on the sofa and half on the table, but he's not doing anything, just lying there, and I reach out to touch him, and fall sideways on the sofa to doze without dropping off to sleep. At least the smoking's made me tired, at least I'm not trembling with fear --- and now it dawns on me that not ONCE did the thought: this is the last night I have to go to sleep before the trip starts --- cross my mind, and THAT'S some sort of progress. And no thought of how I'll get through the next day, which haunts me at this very moment, disturbs my flight back to childhood. I think that maybe there's something there that I can learn from, but there's no one there but me and the radio (maybe there's something in that, at least), and this morning John makes me feel better by saying "And this time you won't be alone on your trip," and I TRY to tie in my fears with fears of being abandoned when I was a child, but it doesn't work. I debate throwing myself on John for help, moaning and crying, but that just doesn't seem right. And then it all gets fuzzy until we get into bed, and I fall immediately asleep.

 

DIARY 2511 11/15/71

DTW PARTY FOR HALPRIN

At first it's a bore, with the West Coast visitors talking to themselves, and the East Coast people sticking to themselves. I break away from John talking to Art and Jeff and Rudy and sit with coffee and an apple, and soon a short built blond begins dancing with a girl, and then when the music gets faster they begin throwing themselves around the room, flailing their arms and legs and head, faster than any possible beat, and with their constant movement, fertile inventiveness, and sinew-cracking dexterity, they must both be dancers. Then Doll-Santiago begins dancing quietly with some black girl on the make for him, and three stoned people share their third joint and begin doing intricate, outlandish, but quite controlled figures in the center of the floor. Then as more join them, the air gets hotter, and the blond and Santiago take their shirts off, and I immediately have the fantasy of a lush orgy, albeit straight, with bodies in profusion to view. The stoned one takes off two shirts and a pair of pants to get down to sweat trousers and an undershirt, and he begins throwing the girls around, who crawl between his legs, and they roll on the floor and move slowly back and forth from one position to another, almost as if it were rehearsed. When the blond and his girl finish their throwing-around exercises, they start athletic things, and the lifts, leaps, pulls back and forth, touches and non-touches, look better than many things I've seen on the stage. Then humpy Mr. Silver and Ze'Eva Cohen begin to go at a sort of mirror dancing, cavorting comically around the room as cats and horses and children, crawling, pumping hands together, waving limp wrists as if finding a new scientific principle, all with theatrical looks of surprise, delight, puzzlement, concentration, and humor on their faces. Then John Moore and Cathy Posin begin dancing together, and he emphasizes the dancer's skill in intricate steps, all in complete control, but looking dazzling to the viewer. Jeff and some tranquil girl begin dancing in an aloof, meditative way, rubbing shoulders and backs and arms as they turn about each other in some modern version of the stately pavane, pointing their toes and performing Egyptian movements of aligned fingers and angular arms. Art and someone else begin dancing, too, Art with his loose-limbed grace, she with white cuffs that glow under the ultraviolet lights that now make teeth glow like greenish bones and eyes glimmer beastily in the gloom. Then some of the blacks begin to dance with spectacular effect, maybe going through routines that they'd rehearsed before a mirror to insure that they showed off the musculature, the beauty, the bulk, the masculinity of the black bucks of the company. The girls paled by comparison, though some had some hip gyrations and breast pumpings that, to a straight guy, would probably have been most appealing. Others sat along the sides and watched, some of them even taking off their shirts to further tantalize me, and I took off my sweater and then my pullover, but I'm sure my faded white T-shirt didn't attract any attention compared with the fabulous bodies on the dance floor. A tall English guy got up and danced with himself, and a nameless fellow wandered as if stoned back and forth across the floor. At the first there were equal numbers of boys and girls, then the boys seemed to pull numerically ahead, but later it evened up again when almost everyone was dancing, and it began to be clear that it wasn't going to turn into an unbridled orgy. Maybe if there'd been more pot, more wine, more music, fewer older people at the beginning (maybe fewer people like me sitting around on the sidelines watching --- ) it might have been fabulous. Jeff tried and tried to talk with Santiago, at one point they even carefully skirted each other, almost abstractly, absentmindedly going through dance steps, so that I could tell Jeff I approved of his choice of dance partners, but no one could really PROVE that two guys were dancing together. The effect of the company, with all the white female groupies latching onto them, was of strict heterosexuality, and Santiago was kept very busy, his cute face smiling and smiling, kissing almost every little girl who came to talk with him. But the effect of all their legs pumping away to the music, the fantastically fast interplay of couples on the floor when the crowd is mostly dancer or choreographer (there were no collisions except where they were meant, and certainly more crawling and creeping on the floor, and more aerial supporting and throwing than otherwise) makes a truly memorable evening to watch (plus a suck on a joint to color it a bit).

 

DIARY 2530  11/29/71

BEJART ON TV

Jorge Donn is dancing Bejart's conception of Nijinsky, and combinations of things make it very impressive. First, the dancing is done in a huge amphitheater, audience invisible, but potentially in the tens of thousands. This is the ritual, everyday, democratic style of dancing that he's helped make famous, and I can feel that the people would LIKE it, and am very annoyed at all the critics, and John, who would say that it's not artistically valid, that it's not worth watching. Shit! It's deeply FELT, and he has a group of dancers who must be one of the most beautiful in the world, and if anyone says they watch a dance WITHOUT being influenced by the dancers' beauty, they're MISSING something, not gaining anything because of their "objectivity." And then there's the use of terribly romantic music: again, no one likes it except the "common people," and if it's common to like Tchaikovsky, I'm glad I have that commonness in me. He choreographs just the way I would wish to choreograph, had I the talents, the time, and the money. He certainly has the group I'd like to choreograph! And then the TV cameras are used wonderfully: first they have the slight after-image that makes some rapid movements magic to watch; then they flick back and forth from one scene to another to symbolize his madness, and it's so effectively done that tears start to my eyes. Then two different cameras pick up colors differently, and I get the idea that there's a strange distortion of color and position, a subtle "wrongness" existing between two consecutive shots that's an electrifying possibility and facet of madness, and Bejart's point that madness is a frontier whose limits are very poorly known is well taken: critics think HE'S mad, everyone who's always been a SAINT has been mad, and SOCIETY quickly judges anyone mad who doesn't believe exactly what society WANTS them to believe. It's so nice to see dancers AT their peak, not before, as in Joffrey or Feld or ABT, or after, as in Bruhn or Fonteyn, but AT, as Donn and Bortullaci, and Gielgud, and others. A fabulous TV presentation of what must be a fabulous ballet. Yea! Bejart!

 

DIARY 2538  6/14/72

EXTRA GEM

Forgot to type a T37 back in November, and so rather than throw the whole series of pages off by one (though I thumbed through to see that there wasn't an EXTRA page in the next few dozen pages) I'll type an extra page here, and the obvious topic is the system of page numberings and volume numberings that I'm keeping up with. It may be cumbersome, but the true value in something comes from doing it OVER A LONG PERIOD OF TIME. John's only too willing to let something drop away if he's not interested in it over a long period of time (such as the restaurant ratings), but it's only as these DO last for a period of years that they come into their true value. Pepys diary wouldn't be so famous if it didn't go for such a period of time, through such relatively unknown times, and of course he wrote about things OTHER than himself that give it intrinsic value. The RANDOM reading of these pages won't produce anything, but the OVERALL effect should be quite a bit greater than the sum of its pages. So the volumes sit on top of the cabinet, and naturally I think occasionally of what will happen to them if the apartment burns up: namely, they'll go up in smoke, and all the effort will be for nothing. But this is true in any case: store them in a safe deposit box and the hydrogen bomb comes along and destroys everything anyway. At least no one would want to STEAL these dozens of bound volumes of typing! So they'll stand and gather dust, until I make SOME kind of breakthrough into the field of writing, and then they can be used as a rich mine for all sorts of things: individual topics, as I culled for Elaine's "River," or general writings, and I might gather into a set of essays about one topic, or something about sex, or New York, or travel, or introspections, or day-to-day attitudes. It should be simple enough to keep up the one-page-per-day stint, even when I get back to work, since only a weekend hour should suffice to get through the ten or so pages for that week, and surely I can continue that effort, along with evening times to try other sorts of stories or mood pieces, or to record my reactions and thoughts springing from readings and seeings and goings. And the pages WILL be in good ORDER!

 

DIARY 2561  12/15/71

SMOKING AND SEXY TALK

I was in my robe and slippers, having just washed and shaved, and John undressed and we smoked in the living room, filling the pipe twice to make sure we were both sailing, and I steered him into the bedroom where he could pull down the covers and discover the Kake books that I had bought that evening. He smiled and oohed and crawled into bed to look at them, and I cuddled up next to him watching the pictures go past in my increasingly pot-smogged mind. The similarity to Captain Marvel drawings hit me quite strongly, and I tried to invest them with some sort of life, but that didn't work, though I was feeling terribly sexy just moving back and forth next to John as he looked at them. He went through all the books, and then I made some kind of remark about the "new book" and took the blankets off his cock and began sucking him, and he said "That's the best book of all" in his most seductive voice. He turned off the reading lights and put on the colored flashing lights, then got out the Baby Magic, and there were great moments of intense sexuality as we squirmed and squeezed under the dim lights. Then he started concentrating on my orgasm, and I began to have my typical rush feelings of "Someone's going to come into the room in a moment and we'll have fabulous sex," or "Some catastrophe is about to happen, and everything will be permanently changed," or "He's going to start doing something very sexy that I'll love his doing," and was amazed when the last started coming true. He began rubbing me up and down and talking at the same time, saying how I should go along with it, how great I looked in those lights, how I was straining toward an orgasm, how he liked to feel my hard cock in his hands, and I found myself gasping in appreciation as he said "Oh, I love your body, you have such a beautiful body," and I lapped it up and self-consciously started arching my torso up and down and around, looking down at myself as he worked over me, thinking "Yes, you've finally seen it, I DO have a beautiful body," and then he took a detour to start licking me all over and kissing me full on the mouth, saying "Oh, I love you," and "Oh, this is so exciting," and I thought it was about time he had caught onto the fact that I liked him to talk, and I felt that I should say something in return, but I felt terribly self-conscious about it, hoping I wouldn't break any kind of spell, but in thinking about my self-consciousness IF I started speaking, I began thinking too much even when I wasn't speaking, so I started going down, and he kept playing with me, and I kept working over him, and he started playing with himself, and I started whacking away at myself, and the whole scene ended up the way most of the high-sex-scenes ended, each of us doing ourselves, and my head aching very much into the bargain. But this time I came right at the peak of highness, and I gasped, and gasped louder, as I came, and rolled over on top of him and went into a sort of eternal orgasm, squeezing myself against his body, mouth twisted with the agony of the semen squirting out, flabbergasted that the sensations of the feeling went on so long and so intensely, mouth dry from the labor, lungs heaving and muscles aching from the stretching I'd done trying to come, and I vaguely thought in the back of my mind that one of these days I'm going to seriously injure myself with these gyrations in coming when high, and I found myself with a vague sense of "too-much-ness" even before the sensations of orgasm had stopped. John kept close to me, loving the feeling of my coming, but we didn't have the courage to speak to each other right afterward, nor the next morning, and it's now four days later and I'm still wanting to ask whether he did it more or less intentionally, or whether the words, which I loved so much, just fell out in a natural way. How I wish I could be freer with him, do some of the things I'd like to do, even being surprised when I found he liked to look at the books, when I had the idea he DIDN'T like to look at pornography as a main thing. I remember a past time when he said HE wished I would be wilder, while I was wishing HE would be wilder, and neither of us would show the other, for fear of being laughed at, or put off, or being thought strange. All toward more freedom in the expression of self, I guess, as an avenue of expressing ourselves more freely in our RELATIONSHIP. Still room to grow, anyway!

 

DIARY 2569  12/15/71

SLEEPING ALONE

Finish with the first story from "Revolt in 2100" about midnight, then undress and put my bathrobe on in preparation to smoking, and after I smoke and put things away slightly, I'm very aware how cold it is in the apartment, and I stand there in the middle of the floor, shivering, debating whether to go to bed. But I decide I have to do something, so I sit down in the chair and put on the new Moody Blues record, and when it starts, it seems much slower than before, and I try to invest it with the mystical qualities needed to transport me into the LSD-like world of light, and I keep thinking someone's going to knock on the door or ring me up on the telephone and demand that they come over, and it's going to be Louis L. or Arthur M. or someone else equally stunning, and the sex is going to be out of this world. Primed by these thoughts, I start playing with myself, but the music doesn't quite go along with it, and though some of it is very mind-blowing, it's not particularly sexy, so I tell myself I'll wait for the second side, and that'll be better. But the second side seems to go very slowly, and I'm sitting there beating away on a limp cock, and I'm finished with the record about 1 am. VERY tired, but very hungry, so I eat a toasted English and debate more, but go into the bedroom and put the blanket on rather high, between 4 and 5, and crawl into bed, again debating whether just to fall asleep, but I want to come, so I get out the Kake books and look through them, all the while feeling slightly nauseous and stupid and cold from the evening, and finally I get warm enough to turn down the blankets and really whack away at myself, but there's no feeling of impending good feelings, only the whacking determination to have that jet of liquid so that I can turn over and go to sleep. Try to keep myself at some sort of plateau, but the magazines don't help at all, and finally the only thing left to do is MERELY come, and I whale away at my cock, looking down with fury at my uncooperative flesh, whacking away until I think I'm going to be sore, automatically discarding Baby Magic as a way of doing it, and in desperation I get out the vibrator, putting it on and grabbing my cock, thinking that the sheer INHUMANNESS of the feeling will be exciting, and I manage to get some sort of feeling going, glaring down at my one-eyed cock that won't even drip with excitement, and finally I can feel the wet sting coming up, tingling my legs, and I gasp and strain and turn red in the face, while my cockhead turns a dull mottled purple from being held too tightly, and then the tingle turns to a jet of quasi-pain up my cock, and there's a small white spurt of welcome fluid, and it jiggles out as the vibrator continues its work, and I hypnotize myself into a long orgasm, and it comes and comes while I writhe about, dry mouthed, and finally, completely exhausted, I switch it off, and lay, spent, until the loosening curds of semen start dripping down my side, so I hold it back with a trembling hand, get rid of the vibrator, and stagger into the bathroom to wipe off the sticky belly with a tissue, and THEN I have the English, rinsing my tacky hands off in the kitchen sink, blindly eating the under-toasted muffin, and crawl back into the overly hot bed, taking care to turn the control down, and the lengthy evening, now being 2AM, has succeeded in knocking me out, and I fall asleep without a thought about anything. Next morning, when I wake, I come with the same automaticity of the previous evening, knowing it's not going to make any difference, closing my mind to the unpleasantness of the solitary act, but after I wake I can't resist calling John and telling him that I was very sad about sleeping alone, and he didn't even bother to ask for details, but told me that he loved me, and that he was looking forward to seeing me the following night. If I could only take it more in stride, it would be OK, but I had this idea that it had to be completely self-indulgent because I was alone, and I had to stay up late and do things I wouldn't ordinarily do when John was around WHETHER I WANTED TO DO THEM AT THE TIME OR NOT. And that makes such a difference, but there are so FEW evenings that John's willing to sleep alone, and with my confession of loneliness to him NOW, those days will be even fewer, so I can see myself resigned to frequent trips out to Brooklyn Heights until we get an apartment.

 

DIARY 2610 12/29/71

PARTY AT THE CRILE'S

The signs all around the house were charming for about the first dozen, but then the second dozen was a bit too much. Took the coats upstairs and even the bedrooms seemed to be display cases, and the large glassed-in back patio with the huge glass cases filled with sand, displaying shells and rocks and glass and beetles and butterflies and spiders and coral, with the names either on stickers on written in the sand, and books spread about with the latest mod subjects, and the whole house seemed to be devoted to their travels, including the huge dining room with what seemed to be a permanent arrangement of about 50 nonfolding chairs facing the banks of five or six tape recorders, the built-in piano, and the movie screen. Drinks flowed in profusion, and the first films were innocuous enough, except the determination to be happy seemed a bit over-abundant, and then they showed the animal film that he voiced-over in a train of thought that was killing to Helga Sandburg about her two previous marriages and the "one-night liaison" that produced an ape as an offspring, with himself as a snake who at the end disgorged (or ate in reverse-action photography) two huge rats that symbolized her former husbands. A worse way of saying "We're just two ordinary people very much in love, and you should forget her two former marriages and my one former marriage, and above all forget that I'm 64 and she's 58, which seems to be old, but we don't want anyone to know us from our ages, only from what we do" couldn't be found. I went out for another handful of nuts and drinks, and Helga passed me, asking "Are you making out?" and I lied by saying yes, annoyed even at the TONE of her question. Then the "Moore-Crile War" came on, with the perfectly side-splitting shots of Adolph Hitler and the atomic bomb and Hirohito (they really missed a hilarious interlude by omitting shots of German concentration camps), and even the audience reaction got less and less, and after the orgy of killing and destruction, the neighbor accepted his bronze cannon award for the best screenplay by saying "Thank you for giving us an opportunity to forget the India-Pakistan war, Vietnam, and the terrible troubles the US is in," and that about summed up the party. I said to John "I'm ready to go when you are." And we were leaving when Dr. Crile INSISTED we stay for the first number of the pasty sweating violinist, who proceeded to flirt with two pretty ladies in the doorway, and THEN we left. I said I thought the evening was despicable, and John got very annoyed, and only LATER did he bother to admit to me that I reminded him of what his parents always did to him: condemn anything that he liked, saying he was stupid for liking it, and here I'd taken the ONLY thing he'd enjoyed about the trip home and SHIT over it by saying that I didn't like it. I hastened to add that that was only MY opinion, and I may very well have been biased about the party to start with, but I liked the films of my UNCLE far better than THOSE, and I said it showed some desperately unhappy people. He didn't agree, saying that he'd been having some lovely conversations with intelligent, witty people (and I couldn't even admit that I hadn't spoken with ANYONE because I didn't find anyone I WANTED to speak with), and he thought it was a fabulous party. He started by saying something about the impossibility of our relationship, since we ALWAYS disagreed, and I suggested this was the FIRST time HE liked something that I didn't like, and I'd LEARNED to swallow my disappointment that HE didn't like it, but since I liked almost EVERYTHING, he'd never had to swallow HIS disappointment that I didn't enjoy something he did, and that maybe HE'S getting a taste of what I know so well, and am so disappointed with on various occasions. We ended up talking in the fogged car in back of his house, and ended up holding hands and kissing a few times after I apologized for ruining the evening for him, but he still insisted that it showed enormous imagination to not send out Christmas cards, but to do THIS for friends, and that he loved their abilities to make do with their entertainments. I, personally, was impressed with the framed Gahan Wilson cartoon of a boy in front of a gloomy Crile Research Clinic, saying "Trespassers will be experimented upon," and I felt that I had been the subject of a GRUESOME experiment that evening; sorry that JOHN liked it.

 

DIARY 2613  12/29/71

GRAND DINNER IN AKRON

Henry and Marion are already there in the near-empty place at 6:30, when we get there, already two drinks gone, and Rita has a brandy Alexander that sets her off tipsily for the rest of the evening, grinning broadly, laughing at every joke, rocking back and forth in her seat, hanging onto me for protection. The daiquiris are huge and tasty, and I'm off nicely, too, telling the second part of John's "Oh, it was so awful" trip between Srinagar and Manali, and Rita'd suggested that John sit next to Marion, and for the rest of the meal they had a head-together talk about her ideas of raising children ("So he quit in the fall: what a NICE time to be out of work, I thought") and the surprise of good-natured Gary suddenly going in for lifting weights an hour every day, even after he quit the wrestling team because the day he lost no one talked to him, but the day he won, he was the hero of his group. Henry was feeling VERY good, telling the joke about TWA pulling out on time, so that's why there weren't any baby airlines, and I counter that it also helps to keep the lid on the TWA tea, but Rita doesn't know the term, but knows by merely asking "Male or female?" and then she gets the point. Mom is feeling good, keeping quiet listening to the conversation, and John reported that at least eight heads swiveled around when he reported taking marijuana to help calm his nerves on some Indian occasion. More often than not ours was the loudest table in the whole place, and Rita referred to Marion as the nicest relative we have, which was pleasantly acknowledged, and she talked a bit about her innocence, which we agreed was, like mine, mainly a front. Henry a few times laughed too loudly and spun his finger in the air, and I noticed many heads looking wonderingly over at us. Then some friends of Marion's came in and she said "Oh, you'll have to meet them," but somehow she went in ALONE to talk with them, and Mom later said she NEVER introduces her friends to the family. She thoroughly enjoyed John, and John truly loved his conversation with her at the dinner table, and though we were all disappointed when they declined our invitation to our place, and didn't extend one to theirs, John and I agreed it was the best part of the whole trip, and that MY family was definitely nicer than HIS family.

 

DIARY 2620  1/1/72

YEAR-END PARTY

No answer for a bit at 10:15, then a striped host, Carl, answers, and we get in to give our coats to a surprisingly female coat-person, get plastic glasses of drink from the punch bowl, see another old lady sitting in a chair, and into the black-light sensitivity of a double-tiered room with stairs leading up to a sleeping balcony, and it's already quite crowded, John meets people he knows and I stare into the fish bowl for awhile before sitting on the sofa and talking to Jack, who turns out to be a dud who hypnotizes himself into flops like his first European trip where he found every city the same and no personal contact with the people. But he has a nice body, which never gets investigated. Introduced to Keith and John, who offers a puff on a capable (cap-able) pipe, and then dancing begins and some spectacular people arrive: the pneumatic doll in a white stretch ribbed shirt, and tight-jeaned blonds who look as if they're wearing skillful makeup, the green/black and black/green sweatered lovers who have eyes only for each other, the Azak-like sleepy-eyed fellow who looks familiar, a couple of butch numbers in T-shirts and cocky trousers, a few leather numbers in ersatz pants, and midnight arrives with a few kisses from John and Jerry and Bob G., who seems to spend most of the evening standing alone, and a ring-nippled baby comes down the stairs, then quickly goes back upstairs again. I'm thinking there are enough lovelies to make waiting for the party worthwhile, but get very depressed because I won't speak to anyone while sitting on the sofa waiting, I suppose, for the ugly ones to speak to ME. Mike S. sits down and gives me a whiff of popper that could set me off if anything was going on, and John said it was starting upstairs, but he came down, said something to me that I didn't catch, which was "I don't feel well, I'm going home," and then he was sitting, for what reason I couldn't understand, in the doorway, and then he fainted outside the john, and when I got there he sat and shat and we went home as quickly as possible, he putting his trousers in the tub to soak, taking a shower, and we got into a rather chilly bed just after 2AM, John quite embarrassed.

 

DIARY 2635  1/18/72

A DIFFERENT STONED

I turn out all the lights except for the paper-shaded lamp, and stare out the window for a moment, feeling that I've never gotten so stoned that I had a replay of the fear of throwing myself out the window. John comes in and sits down on the sofa, and we sit next to each other, hardly touching, listening to the music. We begin to move slowly back and forth, and I get the idea that he's playing with himself, and this is an aversion of his that I DON'T test again, since I know before that he grimaced disparagingly when he thought of the idea of masturbating as a form of pleasure, implying that that's NOT what one does when one is with someone. But I have the fantasy that John will act exactly as I'D like to act: playing ever so gently with myself to get to a peak of excitement, and then remaining at that heady cocky plateau for as long as an hour, feeling the tensions built to unendurable heights, and then coming with a tremendous relieving shot of sperm that would arch to the neck or face from the pent pressures. But I move slowly closer to him and he's NOT playing with himself, though he is hard, and we begin very slowly sucking each other. Then I have to turn the record over, and we get back to playing and playing, and I'm quite hard, very spaced, thinking that any moment the record is going to take off on an unheard track and go into infinities of glorious sound that would carry the two of us with it, and again I have the urge to make the tape of a number of climaxes, which could be turned up louder than even the records, and would go on for about two hours without intervention. At the end of the record we're still very stiff, and I wander into the bedroom, turning on the blinking lights, but I'm so stoned that I command JOHN to reach across and turn on the electric blanket on my side: I'm just not able to coordinate. We play and he comes very close, but I dilly and dally and he finally doesn't come at all (though the next day he has to ASK, since he doesn't REMEMBER coming, but was so stoned that he thought he MIGHT have), and I go down, refusing to come back up, and finally have to whack away at my self body for a long period of time before coming with a PAINFUL spasm.

 

DIARY 2668  1/22/72

TALK ABOUT APARTMENT

I say I know this isn't the time to bring things up, since he's sick with a cold and I've been very depressed for the last week, but I want to know if there's anything wrong with the relationship EXCEPT for those things. I find nothing from him, then ask when he's going to start looking for an apartment, and he says when I start looking with him. This goes back and forth for a long period of time, but he finally summarizes it nicely: HE doesn't really want to go through the time, expense, and trouble of moving from HIS apartment, which he likes very much, and I don't really want the same thing. Now if we BOTH wanted very badly to move into an apartment together, we'd find one, and that would be best, but since HE'S the only one who wants it badly, he's not about to FORCE me into it (I can't make him see the difference between doing all the work himself and FORCING me into it), so he doesn't think it should be done. At a point I said I had the feeling "If we GET an apartment together, the relationship will break up, and if we DON'T get an apartment together, the relationship will break up." He said he was sure if HE forced ME to get an apartment with him, the relationship WOULD break up, and I guess I had to agree with him. So we left it that we WOULDN'T go out of our way to find an apartment, since he couldn't UNDERSTAND that it would really be HIS say about which apartment we would take, since he had far more demands on it, and since none of them actually went against the few things that I wanted, it would really be HIS job to find one. He said he thought he was doing ALL the work, before the trip, sleeping together every night, and I said I thought it was more 60-40 his part, rather than the 90-10 he seemed to think it was. At that point I felt even WORSE about the situation, but then I had some sherry and we went to bed to talk about it, holding hands lightly under the covers. I admitting I felt guilty about not necking with him, but I didn't want to expose myself any more than necessary to his cold, and he said he figured if I'd CATCH it from him, I would even if I TRIED to stay away from him, since he even thinks he gave the cold to Virgil, which I thought was silly. We talked about things like jobs and the trip and the state of our relationship in order that I might clear up things in MY mind, and I began to feel better about it, but I said I thought I might have been making HIM depressed, and he seemed to say "No" too quickly for my taste. I also asked him what he thought the chances of our staying together was, and he thought for a bit and said "50-50" that struck me as very BAD odds, but later I figured he would think of them as GOOD odds. At one point I asked him "Do you WANT the relationship to go on?" and he said "What will happen, will happen." That made me very uptight, so I insisted, and finally we got to the awful "IF the relationship is MEANT to break up, then I want to break it up; IF the relationship is NOT meant to break up, then what I want is IMMATERIAL." I pointed out to him that that made it 1-0 in favor of the fact that he WANTED it to break up! So then he obliged me by saying, "OK, if the relationship is NOT meant to break up, then I don't want to break it up." But I remained unconvinced, fearing that his complete non-concern might kill it. I asked what he thought would go first of the "sharing" that he characterized the relationship's sole effect as, and he assumed it would be sex. I thought that would be the most UNcharacteristic thing to be dropped, since we enjoyed so much sex outside, but he said he was only sad when what he WANTED from me he had to get outside. We talked about many other things, but still agreed that we DID see MANY things the same way, which made me feel somewhat better before we finally got to bed. I said previously that I was AFRAID of the thought that GETTING an apartment would mean something MATERIAL that would make us keep the relationship AFTER it was over, and he seemed to think we could SURVIVE as only roommates (I don't). But he said something EXCELLENT when I said "What would be the effect if the relationship WAS breaking up, and THEN we got an apartment together?" and he said that if it WAS breaking up, we'd better look at the RELATIONSHIP rather than for apartments, and with the understanding that APARTMENTS were subordinate to the RELATIONSHIP, I felt reassured, and could then fall asleep easily at 12.

 

DIARY 2695  2/2/72

WHERE AM I NOW?

This is the first one since the trip, and though I typed the headline yesterday, I don't feel like writing the PAGE today, since I've looked back at OTHER "Where Am I Now?" pages, and they were ALL written when I wasn't feeling well, or was confused about some problem, or felt completely listless and didn't feel like doing ANYTHING. It's rather the same case now, but the sheet is here, so I'll follow it up. I'm still getting over (or getting into another) sickness and/or the "Peking flu," and feel listless and uncomfortable, rather like reading all day, but after a day of reading, there's the same blah feeling as after enormous sexual self-indulgence: the feeling of "Well, now that I did THAT, what has it gained me?" In fact, all that it HAS gained is that some time is passed without too much thought (in fact, THAT'S what "Where am I now?" is, a system of typing some pages without too much thought, seeking to get OUT of the funk). I'm even thinking it's about time I looked for a job, since I'll have to get some money either before or right after John's and my proposed trip to the Balkans in September or thereabouts, but I still have things I want to DO, most notably finishing the days of the trip diary, sending out "Acid House" again, and getting caught up with correspondence. That's what I SAY I want to do, but I guess I really DON'T since I never get around to DOING it. Seems that I'm avoiding it for some reason: probably because when I finish with that I don't know WHAT I'll be doing, and the thought of having NOTHING to do is just as appalling as the thought of having TOO MUCH to do. But there doesn't seem to be a happy medium, except for the times when I'm simply ENJOYING things blindly, and then there isn't much to TALK about. The continual process of self-adjustment, self-evaluation, self-seeking and self-searching goes on and on. The problems of the apartment in John's building, I guess, seem to be bearing down on me: I haven't yet convinced myself that I want to DO it, yet there seems to be no good alternative: already John and I have fringes around the edges of our relationship, and MY not feeling well about MYSELF isn't helping our RELATIONSHIP any.

 

DIARY 2697  2/4/72

WHAT DO I DO NOW?

I finish reading Burrough's "The Soft Machine," and I'm depressed. I sit in my chair and look at my bookshelf. Books from Crown and Simon and Schuster, from Doubleday and the eyed press of University. The poetry anthologies of MacMillan along with the first of the Velikovsky books, the rest by Doubleday, and others from Doubleday and paperback presses and semi-vanities like Julian Press, written by doctors and hacks. All those pages! Feet and feet and yards of bookshelves, with dozens of books, each with hundreds of pages and hundreds of words. One hundred thousand words per book through one thousand books is one hundred million words read. Five thousand pages typed of three hundred and fifty words per page is one and three-quarters million words, written. And I've sent to Harcourt Brace and Random House and Hawthorn and agents and everyone's said now it's no. And I don't send it out to more houses, because I'm too lazy to go shopping for envelopes and stamps to send them out. The mailbox is empty and I'm disappointed, but I don't write anyone. The phone doesn't ring, but I don't call anyone. I'm depressed from low blood pressure and cholesterol-clogged arteries, but I don't exercise, and lavishly butter English muffins and shove them down my starving throat, encircled by the double chins. Need a mask for the ball tomorrow, but neglect going to 22nd and Broadway to get it. Don't really feel like seeing the movie. But now that I'm writing, I feel the vague urge to MOVE! DO send out the pages to Porcelain; DO send the book to Dutton and Other Traveler and Dell and Pocket Books. DO, DO, DO! GET the laundry out, EAT lunch out to fill the stomach, DON'T bother to join John at the Harrison concert --- unless I FEEL like it, and don't sit around the house moaning. Make out a list if I have to, but DO something. And again, the typing has galvanized me into action, and I hardly can wait to get to the bottom of the page so that I can shit and change clothes and make out a little list of all the things I want to do today, and FORGET about the details of the pages and the words until ANOTHER time of depression, and then maybe something DIFFERENT (which will just be the same thing) will happen.

 

DIARY 2699  2/5/72

CAN WE KNOW EACH OTHER TOO WELL?

He'd gone to the trucks before and been very keen on sex, yet was disturbed to find himself not too active with me, as I thought. I reported that I found a number of very nice people at Tsi-Dun [which I now remember I haven't typed the pages for], and had pleasant activities, and I found it difficult to come up with John under circumstances that were not the best. John said there was something wrong between us, and I suggested that he'd misinterpreted our actions, which were based on knowing each other VERY well. We KNEW we were sick, and that forms the basis for lack of activity at this time, as I saw it. Also, when he rolled over to me and touched me, he knew VERY well that if I came up fairly quickly, or was up already, it would most probably turn to sex, and I knew the same about him. We also both KNEW that he COULD play with me for a bit, and I'd go down, and no matter how much he'd try, he wouldn't be able to get me up again, unless I went into a self-flailing kick, which he didn't care for, and he knew it. I knew that usually he WAS interested in sex, and that once he got up, he was fine to the end, but that there WERE times, now, that he DIDN'T come up, and I think he was concerned about that, since it so seldom happened to him in the past. But in the past he was usually meeting people he DIDN'T know, whose reactions were NEW to him, and he had the adventure and suspense of learning what their reactions would be, what hand, lip and body motions they'd use, how they progressed as they got hotter, how they'd work over him, how big they'd get and how much they'd come: all these were mysteries, which a good sexual curiosity heightened to a state of high romance. Of COURSE a person would react more strongly under these circumstances: THAT was only natural. There's a huge difference between unwrapping a package with UNKNOWN insides, and unwrapping a gift that someone's slipped and TOLD you what's inside. You may be VAGUELY curious about color or style, but the BASIC FACTS are known, and that cuts down on romance. He seemed to agree, and I realized that I'd explained a facet of a long-term relationship to myself that could NEVER come up, both in the area of understanding a relationship and in understanding MYSELF, in any number of one-night, or even one-month, stands.

 

DIARY 2704  2/5/72

ANTI-DEPRESSANT HIGH

When I got to John's, I listened to the sounds of the radiators, the noises from a radio turned too loud either above or below, street sounds that seemed overly loud in the silence of the apartment, though certainly quieter than the ambient roar in my apartment, and felt that John was interested in some kind of activity (work activity) for part of the evening, and I got into the state of depression mainly from thinking about MOVING out here to all these noises, away from my central location in Manhattan, here to these SUBSTITUTE pains, and not even on the top floor, and not with the great view. But then I started reasoning with myself about the good points: I would have more room, I would be away from the roars and explosions that woke me during about a half-dozen nights on 57th Street, I would have a bigger kitchen and more closets, I would BE CLOSE TO John, and it WOULD save lots of commuting time: but not if I got a job in the city and had to commute twice each day, I reminded myself miserably. And when the Cinemateque starts up at City Center or Lincoln Center, will I be going back and forth on a subway where once I could have easily walked? But I was confusing things: I couldn't be depressed about BOTH commuting to work AND commuting to the movies, because obviously I couldn't be doing BOTH of them at the same time. I debated smoking, fearing that the high would only EMPHASIZE my sensitivity to sounds, BUILD UP the unpleasant characteristics of these surroundings, and make me even MORE depressed. But I couldn't really recall a time when I HAD gotten worse, instead of better, after smoking; the general effect seemed to be that I stopped thinking in a rut, went off into NEW ruts that were more exciting, and therefore less depressing, than the old ruts. So I decided to smoke, with the misunderstanding described on T198 [DIARY 2698], and we sat on the floor and smoked. From the moment of smoking on, I was no longer aware of ANY noises (except that I DID insist on the clock being stopped, which John did by shoving tissues into the swinging bob, and not by lifting the weight as I had initiated), and I DID become aware of a number of OTHER facts. I told him to put the colored lights on, and recalled that if I DID live here, my mirrors and my blinking lights would be in the SAME PLACE as his little gadget, and we could put them together. We didn't have any background music because his radio (with its awful stations and horrendous newscasts: I DO remember something about floods or murders over the radio killing a high of mine, now that I think of his radio) is being repaired, but I know that if we were having sex in OUR apartment, MY stereo set would be there, and we could use THAT. And I thought with delight that John could TAKE CARE OF me to a certain extent that seemed very appealing in my high state: he could cook for me, even though I would have to do dishes, and maybe I would be able to inspire him to new heights himself, or use the excuse of teaching ME how to cook as a lever to get some fabulous menus generated in combinations. So the total effect made me feel better, and as I watched the colors sweep past on the ceiling, I felt close to him and reached out for his body, which was propped against the sofa on which I lay, and we gradually drew closer and closer to each other, so that I gradually slid onto the floor and he excused himself to get the cover for the floor and the Baby Magic, and we lathered ourselves up, and I felt relaxed enough to stay erect for much of the time, and I so thoroughly concentrated on the pleasure that I was giving him that I hardly thought about problems that I MIGHT have, so I didn't have any of them. I enjoyed holding, handling, squeezing, sliding my hands along his cock, and we wrapped ourselves around each other as we built toward a climax. After we came, we lay together and he kept his hands on my body, so that I could feel the prostate spasms that tremored the whole groin area reflected against the pressures of his hands on my body, and I wondered if he was insensitive to that as he said he was to the pulsings of blood that I so clearly felt in his cock, which he said he didn't feel at all, no matter how I tried to bring him to a realization of their presence. I washed in the sink, druggedly realizing I was dripping water all about, and then crawled into bed, happy to have made John happy.

 

DIARY 2718  2/8/72

JOHN'S EXTREMISM

He says he wouldn't like it if I left his place at 9, accusing me of using him for a cook, and leaving the entire duty of hosting to him. I retort that the MAIN reason I like the evening is so that he'll be happy with food to prepare, and I get a good meal, but that I wasn't very happy with the dance-talk at Art's last night, and didn't think I'd be happy with the shop talk this evening. We go a bit more and he ends up by saying "I think that would be very rude, and I wouldn't want to know anyone who talked like that." Of course I don't like that, though he later reminds me that he went through various milder forms of distaste before that finally CONVINCED me that he meant what he SAID he meant: namely, he didn't want me to do it under ANY circumstances. I bring up Art and his "only time" ballet performance, and he says that he'd never plan a party with Art as the central character, because he's proven his instability as far as John's concerned, he'd only be invited if he could be easily replaced in case something ELSE came up. I felt terribly boxed in and told John that, saying that I was afraid to talk to him because he'd explode to some crazy extreme, and wouldn't give me a chance to explain. I came up with the accurate analogy that I felt like a poor mortal who had offended a god in ancient Greece: for an action or a word that I didn't fully realize; I had suddenly reaped the wrath of the implacable deity, wreaking his vengeance on me in ways that were all-encompassing and terrifying. Later on, I said that he depended too much on the WAY things were said, but then I said I would have been happier had he said "I'm very disappointed in you," or "You hurt me very much," rather than "I can't know you any longer." I suggested that he may have learned such extreme statements from his parents, in lessons never forgotten about how to hurt, and he was unconsciously applying them to me, and I didn't like it any more than HE did. I felt my independence being eaten away, and told him as much the next day, so that I felt as if I were TESTING the boundaries of his acceptance of me AS I AM (not as he would wish me to be, or as he would try to change me to be), and found that he was very quickly goaded to an extreme position. The next day I tried to think of the circumstances that brought this up in the past: but I couldn't think of either the petty trivial detail that brought up the general principle that came to be under discussion, nor could I remember the principle, and when I asked John about it, he couldn't remember it either, and I said this might SUGGEST to him that therefore, from a BROAD view, what he'd gotten so angry about BEFORE hadn't been TERRIBLY important, if he couldn't even REMEMBER what it was, but as I've observed before, he can't admit he's wrong, so even though there seemed no place for him to retreat, he didn't apologize to me, or even show any regret, except to say that he HAS been feeling poorly. I investigated the possibility that he might be feeling a sense of lack of accomplishment, as I've been feeling, but he insisted that might have only a small part in the whole thing, and that it dated from his having to leave the Mardi Gras Ball from sheer boredom, even though he insisted that it had no part of anger with ME for liking what HE thought was so shoddy and cheap. But I don't quite believe THAT. We talked the next day (evening) about it, and from that time distance, it seemed far less important than it was, and we both admitted that it seemed like that particular hazard had been passed, and he said he didn't feel as uncomfortable about it. But I still felt that he was setting himself up as my superior, and that I had to adhere to his book of rules, which he kept insisting he didn't have, and woe be to ME if I ever offended those rules. I had to admit to myself that in a certain sense I HAD been taking him for granted, but I DID plead that there were times when I wanted to SAY things to him that DIDN'T show me at my best, but I wanted to know I had the trust in him to be able to SAY it without incurring his wrath. He didn't answer that, either, giving me the idea that I had to be careful in the future, because if either of the two of us were going to change, it wasn't going to be him because he was right most of the time, anyway. Again I smoked the next evening, making it easier to go to bed without the reasons whirling through my brain.

 

DIARY 2721  2/8/72

STONED; BECOMING EASIER

I fill up the pipe, marveling that he said he'd felt his stomach turning with nausea, even bending over the toilet to have some saliva-heaves, when smoking Saturday night after the Ball, and I said I hoped it was more the ball than the grass, then told him that I suspected my bug-spraying may have been adding some stomach-turning ingredients to the grass, and he kept figuring it was merely a question of aging, and that he should age HIS also. We smelled the can, and it certainly DID seem strong. I smoked and went in to shower and brush my teeth, and came out to find him standing with another pipeful, and even as I smoked I felt the sexual charge in the air, and started getting hard. I closed the shades and he put on the lights on the ceiling, and we started necking on the floor, feeling very high and very sensual, and we ended up over on the bed, where I sucked him with great effect, and then paused to look at the whole picture in the voluptuous flashing lights, feeling very good about it. Sucking and pulling on him, whacking his balls back and forth, he groaned and enjoyed it, giving me what he thought I'd like, and he mostly mounted me so that I could suck him lengthwise, fantasizing about his semen shooting out and flying all over the place. The Baby Magic came out with great effect, and he started working over me with determination, and I almost felt that I might be able to reach some sort of plateau, but finally I merely settled into straining to come, and I came with an explosion of tension and semen that shot me upright on the bed, gasping and moaning, and the spasms kept on ever so long, so that it seemed that I was at least five minutes in coming. That left him to do, and I kept trying to get him off, and he kept saying "Slower, slower," and I kept putting on more Baby Magic, using the excuse that my changing of pace would get him away from my automaticity, and he'd find it tantalizingly exciting, and come even better. Toward the end I really whacked away, and he strained into an orgasm that shot and shot until he forced my hand away, and we both lay, sighing and groaning, I barely mustering the energy to swing around to get under the covers to sleep.

 

DIARY 2744  2/22/72

NOW!

Feel absolutely terrible when I finish reading the New York Magazine that came in the mail this morning. Sat slouched in the chair and stared off into space, running through the alternatives: I could come for the second time this morning, thereby making the evening at Tsi-Dun at Henry M.'s even more frustratingly uncomeable; I could smoke and listen to music, which would hint frighteningly at my addiction to pot, or even more to my desire to escape from current inactivity with some inactivity that would seem more pleasant; I could call someone for wild sex, which would be negated for the same reason that the first would, except that it would fulfill rather vague fantasies that float through my mind about rabid sex with Louis L., Ed B., or Bob R.. I feel just the slightest bit guilty about feeling such things, since John often says that he'd prefer me to fulfill his most pressing sexual needs, and then he feels good about getting incidental stimulation from lots of others. So it appears that John's not satisfying my immediate sexual needs (though they couldn't have been any MORE satisfied this morning), but it might be that he's just getting me back into the rhythm of frequent sex, and it's being more on my mind, so that would postulate that the CAUSE of my horniness IS the sex we've been having recently. Anyway, it was very confused, but I felt that I had to drag myself out of the chair to type SOMETHING, since I was so far behind, and though it seemed impossible to get myself uprooted merely to catch up on the diary, the idea of typing a page called NOW appealed to me, and THAT got me out of the chair and into the typing seat, so once again the typing has performed its exorcism of various doubts and listlessnesses, and I'm now ready to find the end of my thoughts when I get to the end of the page and catch up with the nine calendar days that I'm behind, later to do some of the typing and re-typing for Mattachine Times, which will undoubtedly take me up to the time of showering and eating in preparation for the Tsi-Dun this evening, and I don't know exactly HOW I'm going to put the divided "Man's Country" entry into the table of contents for THIS volume, with NOW! between.