STRAIGHT
DIARY 12158 7/21/77
PEOPLE WINNING CHAMPION / TV GUIDE / ALL STAR CONTEST
Schwalbe, a VP from Champion, was a pain though he liked meeting his people. Lots of doubles of guys traveling as Mr. and Mrs., and the beautiful Haakenson can't even appear uncomfortable brooding about his suitcases lost. Old Mr. Gebenini keeps making eyes and telling me about his wartime experiences. The Wojciechowskis were friendliest. He HAD to talk about how great I was and how he disliked his job and how people didn't have any interest in doing a good job today. It was nice the way the VIPs from Champion mixed with the winners, and especially the caricaturist on the ship had a lot to do with the people mixing in. Halstead was blatantly phony with his greetings, and Bill Christopher called him a monkey in a cabbage patch: the guy who'll act gracious and then cause all the problems. The TV Guide people of Kryla, McDonough, Cambria, and Bloss were a bunch of weirdoes. Many of the winners had never flown in a jet before, had never been in NYC before, and two couples had been married recently: one on Sunday, one the previous Saturday, and this was their honeymoon, which came in for laughs when the husband slept most of the way around the island. Even Margitta was forced to say, "We don't usually get such guests," and came off her superiority to admit that they seemed to be having a lot of fun. They universally raved about the rooms if they had suites, making those who didn't get them somewhat jealous, and since I got the last room, I probably got the grandest suite of them all, except that mine didn't have a view. They talked about the filming of "Superman" that they saw in front of 9 West 57th, the nude black woman on the center strip of Powell Boulevard on the way back from the game, Mrs. Halstead and her attack at the game, how hot it was, how they wanted to buy souvenirs from Macy's and Bloomingdales and Schwartz's and shops along Broadway and wanted to see the Empire State Building and World Trade Center and United Nations and Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, but nary a museum or an art gallery (except for the person who wanted to buy a painting) or an opera in the lot (except some who came earlier and stayed later and saw some things), but they were a great group to work with and had NO concepts of tipping at ALL.
DIARY 12317 10/9/77
PARTY AT ANNA-TERESA'S
As I greet Anna-Teresa (hardly the outgoing person that Dennis described) and the more vivacious Fran, I could look into the back and see a curly-haired trick who was a cut above the older, sedate Fillin's and Fran's grumpy looking husband. Right away there were more people than the 8-9 that Dennis had said: the Fran-couple, us two, the Fillin's, the Roger Englander threesome, Anna-Teresa (who didn't like to be called Terry and was too kindly to come right out and SAY it), and Cathy and Guy, so there were 12. She didn't make enough of her pork covered with tuna sauce, and she complained about Anna-Teresa's cannelloni, saying that the pasta should have been more al dente, though I thought it was marvelous the way everything in the dish sort of melded together in taste AND in texture to a marvelous mash. One of the guys had brought wine that was a bit tastier than the Savant that she'd told me to bring (and it was colder, too) so she had me fill up two decanters with his wine first, but we got well into my second gallon before the evening was really over, and Andrea and someone else didn't even get to come. I said some nice things to Roger Englander (whose name I remembered from SOMEWHERE, but it wasn't until Anna-Teresa introduced him to someone else as FROM Camera Three that I remembered where it was I heard his name, except that he went way back to Leonard Bernstein's programs for Omnibus, and it seemed that he might be over 40 in a pleasantly preserved way) about my appreciation of Camera Three, and his two cohorts had a lot of pleasant stories to tell. Dennis was much the center of attention with our up-coming trip to Paris, with the Frans going to their apartment to get menus and Michelin's for our use during the trip, and Dennis copied down a number of names of places and restaurants, and Cathy Cashion said that she'd make out a whole list of places to go from the time they'd been given three months there for their wedding present by an uncle. I drank a bit too much wine, but that's because there wasn't enough food, I didn't know any of the people who were all chatting together, and until Dennis's rum baba came out, there wasn't any other booze. But it was a pleasant party, toilet seat-leaving even meant that I had to leave Roger and Dennis and RETURN to get it.
DIARY 12685 1/17/78
DINNER PARTY AT SUSAN'S
Linda is very attentive to Don but she can also turn to me, remember meeting me, confessing herself a Francophile (and then getting into a boyfriend named Franco that she wanted to make a file of), and saying she wanted to work in films where she'd had lots of experience. Don gabbles on and on about translating for the UN, traveling, friends, and his personal experiences in such an intense way it's hard to turn away from him, and he does a nice job in getting more sense of my Christmas card, saying that "Tachanka" is a kind of a bird, which is obviously a pet name for that flying war wagon with a machine gun. Dennis starts quiet until the joint is passed and then he goes off on his own things nicely. Tom says he took two beers on an empty stomach and bombed himself out, but it may have been more than that since his grass WAS very good. Susan kept spilling things around me: tea and Grand Marnier and other things, and then gave me mushrooms to take home as souvenirs of her beef stroganoff, which thankfully was served in small enough portions that I didn't have to eat very much. I wandered into the kitchen a number of times to get away from the Don-controlled talk in the living room, and Tom mentioned that he'd just done some porno translation for the French, so he seems like a kick. Susan will try to get Dennis an apartment in the building across the street from her "and then YOU'LL be a neighbor, too," she smiles slyly at me. Edwinna is in the bedroom "because she has so much to do" and gets a phone call to put a cap on the drunken evening. Susan takes a toke and seems to feel good. Everyone caresses only people of the opposite sex goodbye, and Tom leaves first because he's almost falling asleep on the tablecloth. The dog has taken to chewing the toe of my sock, the wine is starting to go to my head, and HER mandarine tastes as if it did NOT have Campari added to it, so the drink is better than what they served at the Deux Magots. Lots of good laughs, though Linda WAS a bit shocked when Dennis offered to go to Paris with her, and he kept talking about how much he liked it and how much he'd like to go back. Talked only a little about the Caribbean since none of them had been there and they weren't interested that I was going. Glad that it ended early: would have hated to get SICK on her carpets.
DIARY 12988 5/13/78
SECOND TREE STAFF PARTY
Anna-Teresa greets us first, chatting about Venice and disappointed that she didn't know we were going to Milan since she had so many English-speaking friends she'd like us to meet there, and then met Harold, her husband, who partnered me to a victory in Bumper-Pool against Webb and a freelance writer who seemed somewhat interested in me, and the rules are simple: just get all your balls into the other's hole, cue last, and it takes partnership and a sense of sacrifice, and from their lead we take over and win very handily. Couple of sexy guys in faded blue jeans, but they don't seem to look at me. The place looks disco-y with a parachute suspended over a Japanese lantern, but the food array: salami and a Dutch-ham-like loaf-meat, two kinds of bread, sliced carrots, strawberries that vanished quickly, chocolate chip cookies for nibblers, olives and pickles and mustard, and then just lots of cheeses, somewhat on the cheddary side, with Swiss and brie and pepper-cream, and the bar with beer and wine and punchy and sherry and hard stuff, but no sweet vermouth to mix with the dry. Loud music for dancing and lots of strange unattached women who seemed to talk to me: Glass, the Japanese shopkeeper --- rather Japanese-shop keeper --- and Klass the freelancer, and Andrea likes my beard, Linda chats dizzily, and Cathy is cute but Guy isn't there so she looks rather lost. Some nice crotches don't pay any attention to me, and I go into the corners of the room to look around. Dennis comes up every so often. Same women keep coming back. Others are dancing in a weird way, including very sexy Rodney in black but for a white vest dancing with Andrea, and they make a NICE couple, and the co-owner's brother with the co-owner standing out in black tie, and lots of people talking and laughing and dancing that I don't feel a part of. Sit and look at the porno book, my index in the Running book, and through Cathy's coin-and-card-trick book that takes a lot of time. The time went fast enough, with trying to get enough protein to eat for dinner, trying to talk to sexy guys without having the vaguest notion who they are, explaining to people what an indexer does, and Dennis scooting around looking somewhat lost, suggesting to me that we can go anytime as I sit and read, feeling quite detached from the whole thing.
DIARY 13159 7/9/78
ROGER EVANS TELEPHONES
I jump out of bed at 7:15, amazed that it's ringing, and it's Roger, giving me his address for 1.5 years at 4881 Del Mar Avenue, San Diego, CA 92107, and he's 1/2 block from Sunset Cliffs and loves it, having two halves of a garage-top detached apartment, making lots of money as an information consultant (Rolf never called) but not having enough time to use it as he'd wish, traveling cross-country and stopping off with people he likes to be and talk with, as I'd like to do. He has a permanent P.O. Box 7402 in San Diego when he kept moving around, and his phone is 714-222-4656, and he tells me that the Aerospace Museum and Globe Theater reproductions burnt because of some firebugs that we both wish to burn in hell for a bit. He talks about the ANSI FORTRAN, Basic, and COBOL of a great microcomputer, a 32K byte 32K in diskette and up to 4 megabyte drives IMSAI for $3500, and I say I was thinking of sharing one with Rolf for indexing, and he tells me about his Texas Instrument 59, 960 bytes on program chips, magnetic cards, for $220 with a $150 printer that has only typewriter font. He asseverates that a 16-byte machine is only good for dedicated use, that at least 24 and probably 32-byte machines needed for general purpose, and he loves the Commodore Pet with 4K memory and 14K read-only storage for $600, but says that the Printronics italic dot-matrix character 300 line/minute printer is best for $5000, though he also likes a $1000 pin-font printer of a friend, and he recommends the game that HE calls "kala" or "cala" but which EB III tells me is "MANCALA," says that he's heard marvelous things about Don O'Shea's favorite terminal game, "Adventure," and that Creative Computing Magazine came out with a special two-month issue of "Art and Computers" giving all the ones that do marvelous things, and I connect that to my idea that "Fantasia-like" computer programs for all classical music, to be played on videotapes, is one of the lucrative businesses of the future, as would be board games like "Adventure" and he says he wishes we could get together more often but that he's now talked out, doesn't say he's "with" anyone. I say I've been traveling and have Dennis "for convenience" and we hang up DELIGHTED that he called.
DIARY 13262 8/7/78
JAMES JENSON (?) / JJ AT DR. HSU'S
Long light-blond hair frames a flawless complexion that's NOT pink nor feminine, his friend's far prettier than he is, though both are hippie-loose in clothing, though his shoes are ENORMOUS! (And Hsu tried to give me them, which should have flattered me.) He asked what I did as he came into the tiny bedroom with me, and I said indexer, and when he sort of boggled, I said "$22/hour is a good rate that lets me work 2 hours/day and leaves me the rest of the time for things like this." I waved my arm at the room. He smiled, asked if I ate much sugar. I confessed to the plate of fudge that might last 3 weeks. Drank? I said mainly water. Coffee? No, mostly orange juice. How much? When I got going, maybe as much as a quart, and he asked, "Have any idea about how many oranges go into a quart? Maybe as many as 30, and even people in fruit countries don't get into them much, only selling them to tourists, lot of sugar, not solid stuff, not the type you'd eat if you were in the Arctic about to hunt a polar bear. Admit you know nothing, be humble and you'll be chosen leader; play the fool with cheer. Ease up, love everyone, you take nothing with you, relax. Try fasting from whatever you feel you're addicted to. Told me about the Rainbow meetings of hippies camping out for a month in Oregon, 8th year, hippies from the 60's finding that what they affirmed THEN is still true NOW. He didn't know Peter Burguess, and when Don laughed I said JJ WAS a "Western M.D. into new stuff since enough people are pushing the old drugs" and PB was a radiologist who had a farm in southern Oregon which MIGHT be where they were gathering. When I came out he asked "How are you? And I said "Spacey," and he smiled, and I said "You're in Washington?" and he nodded and I said "I'd like to ask more questions," and he said go ahead, and I said "I drink liquor too?" "Make it yourself?" "No, but I'd like to." "Try fasting from it. Alcohol is a quick high, too, rushes the blood." And then he talked about Ananda Ashram. I pulled out "Tantra of the Great Liberation." Hsu babbled something about it about Buddha. JJ picked it up and pointed out "Ananda" which in fact I'd remembered just reading. And we hugged when I parted, saying I hoped I'd see him again, and his huge hands felt good, contrasting with his rather bony not-there body, and I waved to Mel on the phone, happy I didn't have to chance his name, and he read a closing "reading" from a book, and looked forward to talking more to Mrs. Hsu next time, 23 hours from now, feeling ODD. Feeling more normal now, 8:30, though I feel remnants from backs of calves, but no marks I can tell, except two warm spots near my elbows which MAY have been the [acupuncture] places.
DIARY 13392 9/13/78
RODIE SIEGLER'S FORTRAN BOOK BUSINESS
On September 1 she told me that a friend of hers was married to a Puerto Rican programmer who told the two of them that there were no books written about computers or computing in Spanish, and they began to think a killing could be made in the field. I met Lloyd Moore at the est seminar and on Sunday the 3rd asked him if he knew anything about it: on 9/13 Julian Suez called from Poughkeepsie to say that someone from FSD in Mexico said there was NOTHING in Spanish. They use something called Spanglish; that there was MORE translating doing in Germany and France than in Spain, and that the South Americans, less formal than the Spanish, were content to work in English and didn't translate manuals and books in general. I called Madge on 9/8 and she game me Ralph DeMarco's name; I called him 9/12 and he said that he KNEW there was no FORTRAN and didn't THINK there were any manuals, but he'd check further and call me today if there was anything new: he didn't call today. Then I phoned Rolf today and asked his opinion, and he said that Rodie's comment, "I wouldn't tell an existing company; they'd just take the idea and make a mint on it themselves," was wrong 9 times out of 10: that if there WAS an area, it would be gone INTO unless there were VERY good reasons why no one entered it, and they SHOULD ask companies who publish Spanish books why they don't do programming books, and maybe they'd find an answer they should KNOW. I said I could see why there wouldn't be a COMPILER in the language since it was rough enough to maintain ENGLISH FORTRAN itself. He said that manuals, too, were updated so frequently that it would cause a problem if we translate IBM's, and he was quite sure that SOUTH American scholars had the same "publish to get ahead" pressures that we have here and he would be quite sure that there WERE basic texts in Spanish, but he said that we'd have to find out about that. I said I wasn't that interested in the publishing business, and then he started telling me about his ideas for getting a computer (see DIARY 13393), and that seemed like an easier way to make lots of money than setting up a mail-order company using her first husband who'd done that business all his life, the translator-wife, the programmer who knew Spanish, and me to write the books in English for translation.
DIARY 13469 10/3/78
PARTY AT SUSAN'S
Dorothy's in a heavy red dress making an enormous salad out of peppers and cucumbers and lettuce and celery and green beans and tomatoes and lots of other things, and Susan is mixing a pot of spinach with lemon and parmesan cheese that she lets Dennis taste. He says it's too lemony and puts in more cheese and other things and it ends up great, everyone says, and he's very pleased. My champagne goes over very well, everyone getting just a little bit from each. Marie, Pat Mandino's roommate, is there but she's not in the work and quiet. Elaine Claudio comes in with her two pesky kids (the boy is slender and going to be a heartbreaker, but the girl is angular and insists on doing the "Hustle" with everyone that ends with her twirling around your thumb and falling backward for you to catch her, and the "Clap" with Patta-Cake in the center, and the "Bump," where you bump ass-sides) and her quiet Live-with-someone Pat, who'd not taken anything. Mr. and Mrs. Lieber come in and she's OK but HE goes on for minutes with stories that aren't that intrinsically interesting. Bill's rather solemn, though he gets off a few good cracks, but he just doesn't seem like a $25,000-a-year person. Pat Mandino comes in wearing a fabulous quilted Chinese jacket, giggling from the minute she sees me, and then Robbie enters, bright and cheery, who makes jewelry, makes another salad which she says everyone should have (and Pat Mandino brought salad, too, so it WAS a bit much). Joyce Ayala is a rather pretty glassed blond, but the hit is when Stephen enters (Susan says, "But he's only 17 or so.") with keys on his belt and his bright eyes and his shaved-tooth smile, bumping with the daughter with delight, moving like a kid, yet still being fascinated talking to others, and I loved the huge cookies he brought for his contribution. Others came in that I didn't know, and I kept drinking wine and feeling better, but after Dennis left there wasn't much to talk about. I glanced at the awful article about the "Gay Guru" in Wings, which was unpleasant. We agreed that Leonard Orr was rather heavy. My "continuation after air-crash" went over with a dull thud, and then I got activated with the cats and took that as an excuse to leave, AND Susan said she'd continue to come to my place for sessions, and that's why Arthur didn't show up, and Bruce had scheduled something at center that afternoon, ha!
DIARY 13485 10/6/78
DENNIS AND MARTIN AT TREE AND TIME-LIFE
Dennis laughs about another idiotic demand by Martin: the "insulator sunset" had gone from the back of the article to the front, and then he got the idea he wanted a diagram of the function of the insulator to open the article. Tree insisted it'd be boring. He insisted it be done. It was done: the collector sent a very nice diagram, clear explanation: they sent it down to him. He said it was boring so they killed two pages in insulators and transferred it to Japanese prints. Dennis said he just couldn't be involved in it anymore: it happened, his job was to do what he was told, his soul wasn't invested in it, he had more interesting things to pour his energy into, if he started fighting all the battles between Tree and Time-Life it would suck away all his energy and still do no good, he knew that any interested private individual could get someone committed to an asylum, which might in fact be what Martin needs, but he's interested in his apartment and things connected with that, interested in the people and their problems at Tree, and isn't really interested in Martin and his problems at Time-Life. Martin insisted on letters from collectors that "lightning rod ornaments are in fact ornamental and not at all functional." But that's the point, Martin, lightning rod ornaments are lightning rod ORNAMENTS. But that didn't satisfy him. So Dennis called one of the leading collectors, president of some collector's organization, who was out, and asked for a letter, in print, from his secretary, and even SHE laughed and said, "Everyone knows that lightning rod ornaments are just ornaments, but if you want me to put it in writing for the president, I'll do it." And they all got a long laugh out of it and snickered about Martin, and he'll do it. Dennis just let it go, just let it be, and I hassled and was concerned about it (and I guess I LIKED hearing the story rather than hearing nothing like that from him, though I'd rather hear GOOD news than such BAD news, but if he doesn't even TAKE it as bad news, just part of his job, just earning his pay, just humoring Martin, something to laugh at, HE'S more together on it than I am, who keep getting angry and frustrated and upset about it and insist that Dennis try to get that idiot OUT of that position and let DENNIS'S "light shine the brighter," to quote Peter Ustinov on his recording. Oh, well.
DIARY 13487 10/6/78
CHATTING WITH AMY ABOUT "TRAVEL"
She comes into the kitchen to have some chocolate cake, so engrossed in my talking about me and Dennis allowing ourselves to have sex with anyone that she doesn't think till later to say that it was good. She said that she got very activated when she saw the grass growing, since she'd been a real pot-head, a real hippie, and she'd loved acid the few times she took it, glowing with the memory of "clear light" that she said was only an artificial high, but she still wanted it. She talked about "love at first sight" with a number of men, one of them a tall blond fellow in Belgium who spoke French, just as she'd dreamed of him for a few months before. She told of her mother flying from one point to another in Afghanistan (and, like I talk of my mother, she said "Imagine, MY mother flying around Afghanistan!") and the landing gear wouldn't lower. So they buzzed the field about three times while the passengers got more and more panicked and screamy, while her mother looked out the window and saw HER mother (dead) sitting on the wing, smiling, saying, "There's nothing to worry about, Diane!" Then she told of the time in college when she didn't want to be a medium because she didn't want her body to be taken over by anyone, but a HAND came on her shoulder, which then shook her wrist as she drank coffee, spilling it all over the place, so they got into position, took her hands to squeeze for "Yes" and "No," and established he was "Uncle Bob" who wanted to talk to a woman, saying that she couldn't get a divorce now or her husband, his nephew, would kill himself, and she saw a brick window, too. The woman drove her to the house but she didn't see it, then returned another way and saw ANOTHER window and said, "That's it!" and the woman gasped: it was the window of the husband's MISTRESS! She traveled in Bangkok with an old boss and his wife, but she didn't care for it, loved Kyoto, not Tokyo, wanted to travel more, took my advice about looking into Guadeloupe or Martinique for a cheap vacation, said again I'd meet Adam soon, said she didn't know ANSWERS to questions (and seemed piqued at being pushed), but delighted in my books and pictures of Sri Lanka, loved Bali where she saw a prince being cremated, and said that we'd have to get together and talk more, having hardly scratched the surface.
DIARY 13490 10/9/78
SUSAN AND BILL AND DENNIS AND ME AT DINNER
I suggest we have wine and that we sit down, getting us away from standing in the kitchen leaning against appliances to sitting down at the dining room table, nicely lit with candles, with my wine glasses, and they seem to like the place, and there's heat from the pipes, too. She brought lots of salad from the party last Sunday, which was quite good, Dennis came out with the pumpkin soup about 10:30, after showing everyone the books he'd bought at the Danbury Fair and the first few volumes of the encyclopedia of collectibles, and the bread-dough finally rose and he baked it nice and dark, cut into huge rather farinaceous slabs with butter, and we had it with the salad, and then came dessert, the cherry cake with rather more-than-crisp almonds which I just loved, and it went over nicely. They finished my wine and most of Dana's wine, not to mention having some of the rosé they brought, and they were both saying they were sozzled. I told Bill of my Akron-IBM-LSD-indexing background while Susan and Dennis talked about redecorating and cooking, and Bill had a chance to say a FEW things, but Dennis said that he didn't seem like much of an exciting person to be with and wondered what Susan saw in him, and didn't understand how he could make $25,000 per year at his computer consulting job. They loved the idea, as I had when Dennis called this afternoon about it, of Dennis's putting up rough grass and fabric African-type hangings to GO WITH the roughness of the walls, rather than competing with it or trying to cover it, and then they oohed and aahed about the Beaubourg poster and postcards and our trip to Paris and Venice, but they wouldn't want to go to Sicily and he'd taken scuba classes without having gone diving, and she was so afraid of water that she simply stooped down with a face mask, but said it was beautiful anyway. So I recommended Buck Island, talked of Bimini and Atlantis and the Fountain of Youth. They're probably going back to Andros and wherever else. but they have no real idea what they want to do or see, haven't packed yet, and figure to return to the same place on Nassau, which they already know they don't like. Susan giggles a lot, Bill is quiet, Dennis just smiles and smiles, and I sort of sit back and watch it, except when bending Bill's ears with my tales of life. He says hardly anything in return but maybe I don't give him time.
DIARY 13502 10/10/78
JIM CONNOLLY ON INDEXING AND SECURITIES
He's a blond, aging, pleasant fellow, taller than he appears at first look, with a firm handshake and a direct manner. He's had experience as a securities analyst, and at one point I thought I heard him say HE wrote a book on the buying and selling of options, and then I mention that Rolf is interested in THAT as the other computer application, and he says that EVERY company had people fooling around with such programs, and that it wasn't good only to buy puts but to hedge both ways, and I said he'd have to get in touch with Rolf. Then he mentioned a friend of his who worked for Harcourt Brace, and her sister was an indexer and had mentioned that they were doing something about putting indexes on computers, so I said I'd be very interested in talking with her and he said he'd see what he could get from the 40s-ish birdlike Mrs. Arcati-like sister. He said he'd read the chapter on "How to Do an Index" and was amused at McGraw-Hill's control of everything, said that he knew what an index should and shouldn't have, and when I showed him the microbiology to see if he'd be floored by the terminology, he said that he'd had Greek to a large extent and Latin to a larger extent, getting 100% on the Regents exam and having gone through Homer, so he looked at Pseudotuberculosis and had no trouble remarking about its components. He said he'd be willing to devote 30 or even more hours to doing a sample index in a week, said he read quite fast, typed well enough with all fingers, and thought he'd be good at it, so I thought HE might start well before some of the others. He even asked ME about how easy it was to expand my field of indexing contacts, told him about my companies, about Dennis's starting in such a slow manner and he KNEW that wasn't the way to increase productivity, and then left by complimenting my apartment, saying he liked the space and the order. Then he talked of how he told Arthur to just let the low frequencies and the activations go (though he complained about the Spanish "Don't go between the cars" comments on the train that was taken out of service for him) and get on with the process of Actualism in which he's half through Basic. So he seemed to be a GREAT guy. I gave him Rolf's phone number and he left at 1 after having entered, apologizing for lateness, at 12:10. Good deal!
DIARY 13506 10/11/78
BRUCE AND JEFF OVER
Bruce is very pleased with Amy's reading, even to her waving her hands and intoning in a Jewish manner, "Puh-lease, don't worry about the fiddle music, it'll always be there wherever you go," and I thought of the Castaneda section he quoted last night about Don Genaro embracing the earth and Don Juan saying that he would have the nourishment of the EARTH wherever he went. She said that it wasn't right, now, with the woman he fell for in the house in Escondido: she's not pleased being in a woman's body, but maybe if they go slow ... His body and spirit would be better nourished if he moved to the West Coast, but it's not certain whether he'll move or not. He had lots of anger about the way his mother vacillated in giving and denying him love, so his feminine aspect was very curtailed and he had to learn to deal more with his magnetic. His purpose, or part of it, is to catalyze other people into the work so he should continue doing just what he's doing on THAT account. His eyes will be helped if he doesn't work so hard, his centers are good except that his will center zooms in and out erratically, partly due to parental circumstances and conditioning. His job is good. He'll benefit from staying with it. There was nothing about being an Actualism teacher that HE said. Then Jeff and he got into a HEAVY talk about Bruce wanting Jeff to get into Actualism as he wanted to get him into est. "Give me ONE CONCRETE way in which you've improved," he demands, and Bruce phumphers until I remark, "Now he's asking you to go to Actualism and is NOT asking you to go to est." Jeff freely admits taking the role of "the bum" and Bruce sways me at the end by saying that he might be taking him in as a roommate, and Jeff responds by "honoring" Bruce for being one of the few persons who CARES for him, so he'll have to take the ear-bending with the generosity and love. I come up with the "lens" that Actualism furnished: you MIGHT be able to see the craters of the moon using est techniques, but using a LENS you might see it from HERE more quickly. Then I bring up the OBVIOUS inability of the person to go through what a TRAINER (another type of lens, I point out) can TAKE him through by being very FORCEFUL. I finish by saying that I NEED some of that structure to change, since my life has so little structure as it IS (we talk about IBM and indexing a bit, too), and I LIKE the pushing and nudging that Actualism does for me. Personally, however, I find him a diffident, confused, self-destructive, red-pimpled person.
DIARY 13646 11/18/78
JIM CONNOLLY HAS PROBLEMS
He talks about his two daughters, then 8 now 20, who went mute when their mother died, and they've been schizophrenic, as has been their son, who was 10, but with greater age he's sort of pulled out of it and he hopes the two girls, very beautiful he says, pull out of it too, though one's into alcohol. He was accosted on the way to the subway by his super, "The Wop," in his car saying, "I'm a-gonna get you OUTTA my building-a" because the girls wander around, particularly around the full moon, and make a lot of noise and can't keep quiet because of their illness. He's spent $120,000 in medical bills for everyone, out of his proofreader's salary, and things are particularly tough at work right now: Art's allergic from his father's sheep when he went to South Caroline for the funeral and hasn't been at work since. Someone else has been retired, so they're not working. Someone else is out sick, so the pressure is rather great on him. He also says that things aren't very quiet at home, so when I ask him to estimate how much time it'll take for him to finish the index, I make sure he includes distraction time. His former wife (the second one, married only for sex and of course it didn't work out) will do the typing for him on Sunday, and in case she doesn't show up, one of the daughters will do it for him. He'd been wanting to schedule 12 hours for Tuesday but I pushed him to do marking and typing on Saturday and Sunday, editing on Monday, and final typing and proofreading on Tuesday, so he said that was OK. I keep thinking about how I can do BOTH indexes if I have to! He's read the book in 12 hours and extracted the first 177 pages in 5 hours, but figures it'll only take him about 3 hours to mark the rest of the book, which obviously doesn't work. When I show him how to do it, he continues to be exasperatingly slow at marking, keeps saying that he's being watched by "the master," and my telling him I've done about 120 indexes so I SHOULD be fast doesn't seem to be helping him. But he's confident he can make it (and Art says he works well under pressure) and I'm just sorry he didn't call me earlier to say he was having so much trouble and not even MARKING anything because he was afraid of damaging the pages!
DIARY 13682 12/4/78
TALK WITH ADAM ABOUT CARIBBEAN AND INDEXING
I get out the brochures and he said he was interested first in St. Maartin, so I showed him that, but he concluded there wasn't much to DO there, since he was looking for a place to settle and GAMBLE (having taken a junket before to the Bahamas, being obliged to wager in $25 chips and go through at least $500 every night, and he said he lost LOTS in the four days he was there!). Looking through my maps, became slightly interested in Young's Island and St. Vincent for the scenery, or Dominica for the wildness, but then I think the lure of the casinos returned and he started talking about Eleuthera, and I said that Susan and Bill had gone there, I thought, and he said he'd call them, and Susan said she went to Eleuthera, Harbor Island, and Spanish Wells. THEN he started talking about indexing, saying that if the average index was 250 pages and $250, it would take 4,000 indexes to get $1 million per year ("You don't have to worry about getting the money, just get the program and you'll find the money" --- but he never took my hint about how good it would be for me NOT TO HAVE to index and just train people, and for someone to hire Rolf to write the programs, but he wasn't about to bite.) (Didn't connect this opportunism of his until NOW with his urge to GAMBLE!!) I said it was a PAIN training people, that it took MUCH too much time, and he blithely said that at the height of the activity I might have to plan on having a 3-4 week school for 50 people every 3-4 months to replace the fast turnover of indexers. I suggested he might not know the people, that it was all based on word of mouth (though he suggested full-page ads in "whatever it is these people read") and personal experience, and he said that I should have gotten busy sooner (I'm making him worse than he SOUNDED, but I don't think worse than he WANTED TO BE). He said he'd like to talk to Rolf but that he thought he was busy Tuesday and I was busy Wednesday, but that we should get into it more quickly, and it was NECESSARILY true that someone else would have gotten into it if there was a profit waiting, and he seemed disappointed, as I was, that Rolf hadn't contacted all the people who HAD been burned by computerized indexing to find WHY it hadn't worked in the past. And he knows nothing of machines, publishing, indexing, or Rolf, but he's eager to get INTO it!
DIARY 13728 12/24/78
TALK WITH AMY ABOUT READING BUSINESS
She still delights in giving me credit for pushing her to get her cards, which "announced" her willingness to give readings, and she's been told by many who have been to the LEADING psychic readers that she equals or SURPASSES them in the veracity of readings and may exceed their skills in putting things into a more positive, action-taking, nondirective framework. So she's feeling very good about it, and I suggest that she raise her prices since she's figuring that she and Adam won't be together forever, that's what she sees anyway, and that someday she'll want to support herself in a comfortable style with her Alexander work and her readings. I say that she should, however, since I'm biased, retain her lesser price for her more faithful clients. She says that's a good idea, but she still has trouble putting it out that she's GOOD, and I say that she should talk to Pope, since both of them seem to have the same sorts of problems. Mara at Amy's party said an interesting detail, I think truthfully, that Amy used to be able to read astrological charts, but then she began to pick up things by just brushing her hand over the charts themselves, which led her to the position of having confidence in her ability to "read" without having ANY aids such as charts about. She said that sex between her and Adam wasn't even that good, but I observed, which she thought was GREAT, that she seemed to be coming from POWER, and maybe things would work better if she came from LOVE OF HIM rather than POWER OVER HIM. She said I was so SMART, and then echoed it louder when I suggested that she invite the people who wanted to join her in a pre-party gathering to come EARLY so that even Adam didn't have to attend, and the people who would be turned off by this would come LATER and not have to be confronted by it. She LOVED looking in my souvenir case, wanted me to bring the Taj Mahal to the party, which I forgot, loved looking at the Indian headdress, fingered some of the other things, and said that she'd like to take more time looking through my treasures. Then she helped me clean up the wine, but it stained, and I'm happy to have cleaned it so that she can see that it's gone TODAY, Sunday!
DIARY 13750 12/26/78
ARNIE'S PARTY FOR NORMA
In with the chili to see someone who's LIKE his strong-women friends, but it's not the one I went to see Michael Moriarty with whose name I can't remember. Couple of gay guys who just moved into UN Plaza talk about their living together, and they're packaging friends of Norma's. Cathy looks just FABULOUS with dark eye makeup and a black dress and VERY short, VERY blonded hair, and Kostos, her lover, is thick and accented and looks like he might be fun in bed. There's a grab bag that I'd forgotten about, but it's for the better, for what would I have done with a plastic bird house or a Dorothy Sayer paperback in exchange? Only 4 have brought chili, but they're all quite different, but Cathy doesn't like macaroni, but Arnie gives a 1977 sex calendar to everyone anyway. Norma enters at 7:30, saying she's surprised, looking different in longer hair, loving the West Coast, showing pictures of the trailer she used to live in, and I'm talking with a French Jew who loves to travel, other women, and then to Norma about how much she likes the course in Change she's taking, and then she and another woman talk to me about Actualism and I tell them some strange stories, and we talk about what est did and what Actualizations did, and then we're eating the chili and his paté and raw vegetables and hot meat balls that are sweet, and there's more conversation centered about Norma, and there may have been other people that I talked to but there wasn't anyone really beddable, so when everyone started to leave and I was one of the last ones out at 11, buzzing back in to give him the Christmas card I'd forgotten to hand that I made out because he's sent me one in the mail today, that I wasn't sorry to have to go to Rolf's to work. Had lots of white wine, even after the ice ran out and it was warm, and enjoyed his cheesecake, but it didn't taste as fabulous as before, and he got the woman I was talking to (Lynn, with her husband who's interested in real estate and modernizing) a cheesecake t-shirt, saying that was one of the last of the medium-sized ones, and he was pleased with how it turned out, Norma was pleased, and I left feeling that it was pleasant but nothing to write very interestingly about later.
DIARY 13752 12/26/78
McGRAW-HILL CHRISTMAS FREELANCE PARTY
Rose tells me where to leave my coat and leads me to the table, which is COVERED with candy, nuts, cake, cookies, pies, homemade cakes, donuts, pralines, nougats, M&Ms, a bit of cheese, punch, almond cookies, candy bars, sweet rolls, and just a kids' dream of non-nutritional food with a few oranges and apples intermixed with the pretzels and potato chips. Take some small stuff and watch the prize-drawing where someone gets a sousaphone which blares through the office for the rest of the afternoon. Andrew is very tall and slender and works on the YEARLY Columbia Encyclopedia update that comes out in 1.5 volumes, but he only MARKS the entries and someone else types them and somehow puts them into a computer for the final product, and he works in an office there but takes home-office expenses off as he explained to new-innocent Sally, or whoever, who's worked only at McGraw-Hill for the past 3 months. An older indexer comes up and says he's never found a good book to teach anyone else indexing, as he's done a number of times, but he says something about a 7,000-page medical book that I run to talk to Audre about, but she refers me to Helen Ferguson, the mother of the sousaphone player, who is talking to the dominating woman who happens to DO her medical indexing, showing pictures of her daughter around and about to go to the Guggenheim for a display from a school that her son has drawn some pictures in. Terrible conversation. Helen Ferguson is not good at ANY sort of socializing, Audre is interested only in introducing people to people and not in talking herself. There are lots of single women looking for a man. Helen surprises me by saying that her freelance list probably includes 30 indexers and I've met 5-6 today, one of whom recommends the [Editorial] Freelancers Association as being good for contacts, and I get pretty sick of the food except for one tasty homemade cake (and fudge and buttercrunch, I'd forgotten) and Andrew leaves and there's no one else coming and people are starting to clean up, and someone from the office who always wins things gets one of the two gingerbread houses being raffled off, and I leave, not figuring to come back again next year, even if I'm still working there.
DIARY 13759 12/29/78
AMY'S PARTY
Her sister Dana talks of living on 11th when Adam lived on 11th St. Rochelle/ Shelly talks of moving, Actualism, zip codes that Dana knows and how we've moved SEQUENTIALLY though them in moving, and she seems "after" me. Adam showers while we have the gathering, moving chairs into bedroom and Amy not wanting to do gathering aloud until I suggest Michael do it and then she tunes in and does it, somewhat awkwardly, but not bad. We're out as other guests arrive, and Scott is blond and reasonably cute, but he's dour most of the time and Amy mentions that he's been separated from his girl for 3 years now and still talks of it as yesterday. Lawyer for the city. Ruth is avid for attention. I brushed her down and she did it very gently on me. Talked about indexing and publishing with Hugh, who wanted to learn it in 3 weeks before moving to the West Coast. Then I sat at the table to eat with Mara, and Michael sat down next to me, and I still loved his fawning attention on her, and Michael admits to being 24 and Bruce says Mara is 31, and they met on night one and that's the night he moved in with her. He tells me lots about Actualism (see DIARY 13760). I'd eaten lots of dip, thinking the cheddar cheese was shrimp, then carrots, with chips and carrots; then almost cleaned out the Genoa salami tray with brown bread and mustard and good cheeses, then Amy served eggplant, a quiche bought from Balducci's, chipped zucchini that was fabulous, and a salad that was good, and then peach and apple tarts for dessert. I'd started with sherry even before the alcohol-less gathering, then went to white wine and didn't have too much. Adam fixed a lovely fire that we put the lights out for and sat in front of, Amy seemed to be enjoying it though she moaned that people were leaving so early, and odd people came and left without even my getting a chance to talk with them, but most guys were with gals, so it's not a very cruisy party. We talked about the apartment, indexing, Actualism, Amy's readings, friends in the Heights, who all didn't come, the food, and the fire in the fireplace, and the Incredible String Band whose sound I very much liked, and I hope to get records for recording some day.
DIARY 13928 1/12/79
FOURTH READING WITH AMY
She said she'd been thinking of working in something she'd never worked in before but "wondered what it could be, Ruby Red?" So I came in and suggested we work in Ruby Red and she smiled and smiled. As we sat down she said "I'm really glad you're here again since I like so much talking with you and reading for you," and later she said something about how everyone seemed to get so much out of being with me and liked me. I smiled and smiled and thanked her a lot. She said she's be talking more time, and first of all she said that she was delighted with the increased amount of room she seemed to have inside. I suggested it might have been the salt decrease, and she said she thought that might be true: less salt, less mucus production, clearer lungs, better-working urinary system, better circulation, so she thought that was great. "Usually I work with systems that are on the downgrade, just deteriorating. It's great to work with a system that's getting better." Before we went into the room she said she could see sparks and jets on my aura, that INDEED lots of things were going on, and she liked the looks of most of it. "You're going to the theater a lot more, recently, and that's good. Art's taking more of a back seat, and that's proper." I thought that was strange unless she considered "The Ruins" and "Lord of the Rings" as theater since I hadn't been to live performances since Bali with her December 21 or the show at the Ice Palace October 3, an unusually LONG time away from the theater! She also said, "I see travel taking a back seat, not that you're not interested in it, but it's not top priority," and when I told her about "the sky falling" twice with the Caribbean trip, she said, "I didn't think it would work when you said you'd be traveling in February. I thought then that you'd better start in January to get it all in." I said I'd probably cancel it and mentioned her house, at which she said they had it for the last two weeks in January so they'd be going up on the 19th-21st alone, and she'd be back on the 22nd, and THEN they'd see about inviting anyone up. "Your mother isn't as much of a shrew now as she was before," she observes another time, "but she doesn't like to be crossed --- wow, not at ALL. I just gave her a poke in the midriff and she slipped and fell on the ice and BOY IS SHE MAD!" I can well imagine! She talked about Colonel Davis, saying that he was so friendly and warm with me because he had been my father in a previous life. "You didn't get into the army this time because you're not intended to deal with that kind of warfare this lifetime --- and in a previous lifetime I see you in Japan during the 1500's, a writer, writing with these brushes --- like calligraphy? I interrupt --- yes, it was beautiful, as everything was intended for beauty as well as function in those days, but it was also meaningful, political philosophy --- there were wars going on around you, the warlords were fighting, but you weren't drawn into it. You sort of sat in the middle of it and let it all pass by, just writing. Your wife was like the women then: very small, beautiful skin (I thought of Dennis right then!), looked only to serve you, but since you didn't want much of anything except writing, she just had to bring you your meals and wash your brushes and fix your ink and such. You were happy but she didn't have very much to do with your life. Very sweet, she was; very pretty." It was only LATER that she thought the wife might be Dennis, and in checking she found that it WAS. "THAT could give you problems now!" she laughed. "Can you see an intervening life," I asked, "that would shed more light on some of his not wanting to answer questions or take responsibility? I'm willing to treat him like an adult until he trots out his child, and then I go right into my parent. I don't like that but I wish he'd stop being a child." "Let me tell you something about the way I read past lives," she said somewhere in here. "It's not around you, in layers, so that this one close in is the most previous, the next one out is the next prior, like the layers of an onion; they all flow into one another: if an influence was VERY great from a DISTANT past life, that would be right up against you, but something from your immediate past life might not even be there at all." Then she looked farther and said, "In the next life I see him as a doctor, in Yugoslavia, in one of those old villages where the houses are built up on stilts and they have very black sides, so I guess they're very old, and they don't look very sanitary, either. There was a terrible pestilence, something that started in that village, something that was an animal disease that was passed on to man and caused them to die, but Dennis, even though he had wanted to take on MORE responsibility in his next life, bit off more than he could chew. He really didn't want to go out and treat the sick and dying. He was afraid. YOU were there, too, very much in authority, shouting at him that he had to go out and treat the sick --- I can't tell if you were a wife or a sister or a mother --- THAT would be interesting! --- but you certainly had authority in the family. He was afraid of the pestilence, didn't know what to do, and lots of people died and he felt very guilty about it --- and then she came out of it and addressed me directly --- and I can't say there's a happy ending to it, either, so it's not finished, there's still karma to be worked out, and it's coming up again in this life." I'd asked her if she thought I could tell Dennis, with no ill-effect, about his life as my Japanese wife, and she sort of laughed and said, "Try it and see what happens; he may not be too interested in this sort of thing because he's never come HERE before," (and I was rather surprised that she thought he might), "but I wouldn't tell him about the Yugoslavian doctor. That might be a bit too much for him." I asked her to tell me more about my immediate past life as a baker --- I sort of assumed it was in Italy or in Brooklyn. She laughed. "No, it was in Europe, but north of Italy, and not in the Alps, either, sort of to the northeast where it's more flat. I don't know what the countries were there --- (I vaguely guessed Austria-Hungary) --- but you baked VERY haute cuisine pastries, VERY carefully laying down the loaves of dough and putting on jams and sugar and spices, making VERY perfect cakes. There's your perfectionism again!" Not much notice of the gay and carefree attitude I seemed to have had before, I thought. Nor did she seem so reluctant as in the past to delve into my past lives, but I said nothing about it. She said that I was going into many projects, would be very busy and possibly overworked. "Take care of your chest during the next few days," she said, pawing at her chest and kneading her blouse-neck. "I see a lot of phlegm and mucus and you could catch a cold if you get over-tired and don't relax enough. Don't take it too hard." At another time she said, "I see you writing. You might even write a book!" she said brightly, and then I guess I told her about the agent who said I should be writing inquiries NOW to publishers, and she said she thought she'd seen something like that. Again she was talking, without too much detail, about lots of projects coming up and when I mentioned the computer (which she said she wishes I hadn't), she looked and saw me sitting ALONE at a desk "with white wings on the sides of it, sort of like a plane," which was my computer, and she saw someone "from Europe" standing behind me who wasn't INVOLVED in it but was interested in me. I mentioned that Andre was from Europe and she thought of him as Asian but then recalled that he DID seem more European than Asian, and she remarked that I had quite an influence over him, sort of protected him in a friendly way with my arm around him, and he really looked up to me as to an older brother. I laughed and said that he accused me of setting an example by quitting IBM, which cause him to leave his MD role at Harlem Hospital. "He thinks very highly of you and you have a great influence over him," she repeated, and when I said he might be thinking of investing in the computer himself, she didn't mention anything at all about the possibility of Adam being involved. "You'll have to furnish most of the impetus for it yourself," she said, seemingly contradicting Rolf's stated working on the program specifications, "but treat yourself to a new toy; it'll have VERY many additional uses to you. You'll be able to do ALL KINDS of new and interesting things on it. You won't want to use it only for indexing and it'll be just great, what comes out of it." I thought of graphics and computer games and even designs with classical music and decided that it was SO expensive that I'd just have to let it slide. I'd told her that I'd been giving myself a vacation these past two weeks and enjoying myself but that I'd have to get back to indexing, particularly if we decided on the trip, which DID seem to be taking a back seat as we talked. She said I could continue to treat myself, having a lot of fun, and that I didn't have to worry about things working out. She said something, again, previously, about seeing my mother selling her house and moving into an apartment, but that was all to the good. She was happier there, was drawing in as she was getting older, but the money would come in handy for me, and she couldn't quite see the connection with what she'd said about my mother before, but again I thought about her "you won't have to worry about her for the next 15 years at least" from before. She spoke again about my sister's not maturing very fast but she didn't say much more.
DIARY 13939 1/13/79
BILL FUCHS AN INTERESTING IBM SALESMAN
It comes out he's not married when he talks about the "fishing party" organized for "singles between 25-35" that he's been invited to, but he says he doesn't intend to get married. "In the seven years I've been with them I've managed to become inured to the flack about wives, mustaches (which he has a bushy one of), beards (which he shaved off after 6 weeks), and sports cars (which he drove Pepe, or whoever, around in one day and frightened to death by taking the 20-mph curves on the freeway at 60 in his glued-to-the-road Opel with extreme bucket seats and high sidebars. He and Rolf compared characteristics of various Jaguars, and Bill's got his eyes set on a Maserati or something else that retails new at $100,000, but can be bought used for $10,000; how he wants to get a racing team together: "a good team can make a pile of money but I haven't decided yet whether I want to be a driver or a repairman." He compares notes about LSD with me, delighted about IBM's paying for my trips, but he just did it in the neighborhood, getting no effects on his first trip, having a friend in Washington who has a lab of his own and can evaluate the strength of the acid and tell how much strychnine it's mixed with, and what other things it has for or against it. His MOTHER is a branch vice president of his division, or something, and he has various other relatives to the extent of 12 working throughout IBM, so it was never any doubt that he'd be there. HE wanted to take a vacation to Europe to "look around" but he was sole repairman of some communication system that they'd come up with and now he has his territory, no salary, only commission (and awards taking place in the office for "policy reasons" since they don't like to publicize his photo with the bushy mustache.) He's bright and engaging, talking about his home in Queens with the three-car garage with cars up on blocks in various stages of repair, his summer home in Pennsylvania between Scranton and Stroudsburg, his wanting to buy a race car, having had 60 hours of the needed 100 for licensing for racing on dirt tracks, and had been hospitalized for 3 months for $40,000 that IBM paid for when he skidded off a highway while racing and hitting oil in his motorcycle, and having slowed to 80 he managed to survive with severe internal injuries rather than being killed. INTERESTING!
DIARY 13950 1/16/79
BOB DUKES TALKS ABOUT HIS LIFE
He talked about "people on a 9-5 job" being "rather like school" and I said that "at least in school you know it'll end," and he laughed and said, "When I was in school I thought it'd NEVER end. I wasn't what you'd call goal-oriented, so I just had to go along as best I could." He also, at start, rather provocatively said, "I'm really pleased that you're helping us all by being in Second Advanced, it feels GREAT." I asked about his folks and he said his dad was still in Philadelphia but that his mother was down in the condominium that they owned in Boca Raton, which was between Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach. I mentioned Don't statement that the rich of Palm Beach were VERY unhappy with their wealth and Bob said that it WAS a problem, that it was very separative, and I said that when I was making a good salary at IBM, I felt self-conscious about actor-friends saying that they only needed $100 for a week's showcase but it was a lot for them and not much for me, and he interjected, "Or they needed it to eat. When you have a LOT more money, it's even difficult to have friends at all," and he seemed to imply that there would be a suspicion that people would be trying to get at some money, and he seemed to talk from experience. He talked of the very rich in Palm Beach, saying "We weren't THAT well off, but I suppose you'd call us more nouveau riche," and I thought maybe THAT would explain why he had no goals in school, and maybe few friends either. But now he's into the van, branching out from automobile interiors to the interiors of nightclubs and bars, working at odd hours, and somehow supporting the $400+ rent he pays up here, and I'm wondering if he's not being supported by some rich family. I yearn to ask him about it but he turns around and expresses great enthusiasm about my computer indexing project, giving me Jamie Ostrow's name to telephone about talking about putting her on the list, though she doesn't want to think about it now, and we talk about how I can change my appointment with him tomorrow so that he can stay where he'd be and finish his job rather than break and get home. I try to call Dorothy but she doesn't call back until the next day, so when he calls at 11:30, just as Dennis and I are looking for Tennessee for him in the Advocate and we're reading an ad from Boca Raton, and I say "That's Bob," and Bob says he'll call Wednesday morning and concludes, "Good night, and sweet dreams," and it's such a sweet-sounding, sweet-meant touch that it lingers in my ear later.
DIARY 14093 2/20/79
CHARADES AT AMY'S
I tried to remember all we gave but all I could remember last night was Amy: Kneejerk Liberal; Ramakrishna; Vacuum Cleaner; Fascination; Visual Purple; Beach Blanket Bingo; Maria Tallchief; and Federico Fellini, though she had LOTS of people. Dennis; the kind of girl that you'd like if you liked that kind of girl; The Day the Whores Came out to Play Tennis; After Many a Summer Dies the Swan; Worlds in Collision; Irma la Douce; Diet of Worms; The Dodo Books; The African Queen; and Society for Cutting Up Men, though he had a LOT more plays and songs to his repertory and had a cuteness when delivering his clues. I could remember I want A Girl Just Like The Girl That Married Dear Old Dad; Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Charge of the Light Brigade; Dialogues of the Carmelites; Boston Symphony Orchestra; Julius Caesar; Episcopalian Church; The Wizard of Oz; Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary; The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe; and Giancarlo Giannini, though I think I did even more than those 11, so Dennis must have done more than those 7, as well as Amy. She had a fire going smokily when I got in, but it died and she had only large logs so she didn't make another one. Dennis loved her couch, saying it felt like a dog, and loved her kitchen though they agreed she needed more wall outlets for the working space. She served red wine, chilled, which both of us drank with vigor, and we had no trouble with the ice cream and lemony-flavored pound cake, and she seemed delighted to have us. Dennis liked seeing her apartment and we all enjoyed staring out the window, looking at Manhattan across the way and listening to her showing off her private space of the meditation and body room and her almost constant talk about her Alexander work and her Actualism. Dennis seemed to enjoy the evening, and I thought it was a kick to play Charades again, particularly since I got such GOOD pats on the back from them from the imagination I'd show in selecting and then acting out my charades. We might even do it again since Dennis said he wasn't very much into card games. She said she didn't know the rules for Canasta but maybe Adam would play sometime, and I phoned both of them to have a contest who could remember the most from the evening, but Dennis didn't want to and Amy never called to say her total.
DIARY 14115 2/23/79
SHERRYL FEINSTEIN
She seemed to want to come on so STRONG: loving the apartment and the look of the plants through the glass doors, sitting on the opposite end of the sofa and asking about the Actualism table, saying she'd been into Kinetic Integration, or something like that, that did deep massages ("The teacher went deep and the student just went diddle-diddle-diddle, and I ended up like this," and she hiked one shoulder up and let the other relax) and then free-form dancing. She was interested in my experiences in acupuncture, said she went to a chiropractor for her bad back and he put an ultrasonic machine on her that HURT like hell when it got to a tense muscle, and he could use it as a diagnoser or as a therapy, and I said that was something I hadn't tried before. She talked about her friend who went to Texas for a 24-day fast for $25/day, "and she's on welfare, too!" and came back looking awful, but "she's intelligent, so she thinks she knows what she's doing." I'm so glad to meet a meat-eater," she said when she talked about her vegetarian friends who thought the whole world should share their views, and I asked if she knew La Frigata when she said, "I only have one street to cross when I go to the Charlie Chan double at St. Marks tonight," and she said it was a good place if you didn't want to drink, but she'd have a beer every so often. I showed her three indexes and she said the Kidney would be beyond her, she thought she might take the "Pain" one except that she had Student's Syndrome, getting everything described, and told about her male friend who battled cancer for 3 years and DID have a malignancy removed from his breast when I told her about Dick Sime, and then Malvina Zapp called and gave Amy the $1000 job while she was here, so I said she'd not be able to predict when anything would come in, but that she wanted something simple but knew she'd hit the deadline OK since she was compulsive and fast and couldn't stand her friend downstairs who took two hours to feed the cats and walk the dog, always working. We talked about authoritarianism and I assured her I was one, and she shook hands and said she was glad she met me, thought the write-up looked good, and promised to mark it up as I'd asked. Dorothy hadn't read HERS yet at ALL!
DIARY 14120 2/26/79
CLAUDIA BERNSTEIN TELEPHONES ABOUT HER LIFE
"Love Bob? This is Love Claudia!" So she says that SHE moved out on Stu in Webster, taking Adam with her when he said, "I have two mommies now," and she didn't want to share him with Stu's amours. Now he's in Belgium and she seemed to agree with me that he was dynamic but didn't seem to know himself, so he wanted something different all the time while we ARIES take so much time thinking about ourselves that we know ourselves VERY well and know want we want, and it isn't usually money. She said about four times that she could have been stuck in an insane asylum, that she doesn't have the logic or the memory for programming but she's determined to make a go of it because she has to earn her own living, that her sex life isn't messed up anymore, though there was an Italian who seemed to have done a number on her, and she's only 34, so she said since I'm 42 there's a good reason why I know more than she does. We talked about the necessity of taking responsibility for our own actions, the need for constant learning and growth, and the relative lack of need for money and power since we KNOW that's not what automatically leads to happiness. She laughed frantically a lot, saying she liked me SO much and she wished I were closer to talk to, kept asking me if I thought she was doing OK, and asked me questions about my own life only to respond with something from HER life. She loves Adam beyond anything but still gives him the right to do anything he wants "unless it isn't self-destructive, of course." He likes living with his grandparents in North Dakota, and she's never had colds though she had been troubled with sore throats for awhile, but she loves the Minnesota winters and goes swimming when it's 34 degrees outside (did she MEAN it?). She talked a LONG time, said she wanted to talk with me, and if I'd called HER when SHE didn't want to talk, I'd get --- and then she paused. I said "Hello?" and she said, "You got it," and I laughed long and loud and said, "I got it." She just wouldn't say anything, and here she'd been babbling away for about an hour until I reminded her it was her nickel, and she hung up fairly quickly after that, after we said that we'd keep in touch with each other by mail or phone.
DIARY 14149 3/7/79
LUNCH WITH LAUREN BAHR
Jesse has his own design firm that he started in as mail boy and now owns, in which he works more than 40 hours per week, and his hobby is Mexican artifacts from the smaller cultures (not Mayan or Incan), and they're going there for two weeks in May around Mexico City and Acapulco and Puerto Vallarta. She finds herself working more than 40 hours per week, too, and is getting increasingly disgusted with his mother living with them. They usually eat 9-10, she wanted to eat at 6:30 and would prepare poor-tasting meals. They sent her on a trip to Florida for 2 weeks, giving THEM a vacation, and she changed it so they'd tell her when they WERE eating with her, rather than when they WEREN'T eating with her. She wakes at 6:30 in the morning and, in the kitchen right next to their bedroom, slams cupboards and bangs pots on the stove and wakes her UP: "She can be AWAKE, but let her make the sandwiches for Jesse's lunch LATER." She wants to relax on Sundays with the papers, and into her room will come mother-in-law asking if she can dust. "She does it every DAY, so it doesn't need it; I'm going out later in the afternoon so she can do it THEN. Why can't she just LET ME ALONE." She looks quite frantic when she says it, reluctantly repeats, as if to herself, that she knows it's a given of their marriage that she live with them, but she IS 82, she can't talk without getting into an argument. "Jesse and I were dreaming of the places we'd like to travel to and she said, 'Only millionaires can travel like that. Why don't you stay home and work?'" And she knows NEITHER of the women will change EITHER of the women at this point, but why have them so close and asking for squabbles? "It's OK on Saturday when his daughter comes to have dinner. That's fine. But not OTHER than that." They have a large enough apartment that they're redoing themselves largely, which also takes a lot of time, and she seems to like being with him, but it's sad to see how CLOSED she is to living with this old lady. Her job's going well, she compliments me on the idea of going into computers for indexes, likes working with me, pays for the lunch meal, says I'll have to treat new clients sometimes, regrets I've had no more from Gregg, and I almost kiss her when I dash out to my appointment, leaving her with a credit card payment and tip.
DIARY 14152 3/7/79
SUSAN ON HER TRIP TO CALIFORNIA
She's giving her car away, the woman didn't call, she asks if I want it, I say "Yes," and she says "It's yours," and I laugh idiotically and say that I'd mentioned to DENNIS on Sunday that we should rent a car for the summer! Then she says she had to get two wisdom teeth pulled, was sick the first week of the trip, didn't get along well with Bill, who didn't talk much anyway, hated the lines of ticky-tacky tract houses that were taking up ALL the available land area, that she didn't see ANYONE who didn't have to be driving a car, that it was terribly impersonal: "You have to buy your NEWSPAPER from a machine," and that she didn't like the way people LOOKED there: there was no LIFE in them, nor was there any minority group, nor were there any people in wheelchairs or with disabilities. But there was no LIFE there: everyone had gotten what they wanted, the American Dream, and it was NOTHING. There was NOTHING to do at night, the highest point of entertaining was to go out to dinner. People lived in front of their TV sets, drove EVERYWHERE, and seemed not at all happy. She stopped in Arizona for Paolo Soleri and was highly impressed with his Archology, the model for his new city, and she and Bill lucked into his sitting at their table in the cafeteria, thinking they were members of his once-a-week seminar. He believes that the Noosphere will expand with GROUP consciousness, and I said I hoped he gave credit to Teilhard de Chardin, and she said he certainly DID, but that it wouldn't get off the ground very quickly, maybe not even before he died, and that Earthpoint seemed to be moving much more quickly, but that his city has just upped its ante from 2500 to 5000 people, like Earthpoint at its biggest. She loved the openness of the architecture with birds flying through and wild asses on the paths, the feeling of the people living together, owning things like laundromats and TV sets communally (and I thought I didn't want to share my EB with ANYONE -- but would so long as they didn't mark it up and didn't mind if I marked it up), and THIS was the way the world had to rebuild itself, NOT like the extended infinite suburbs of the West Coast, where the TINIEST coast house was selling for $150,000 and there was NO WHERE left to build except where chasms were being filled in to be built on NEXT.
DIARY 14168 3/14/79
ALEXANDER INTRODUCTION BY AMY FLEETMAN
She had me lay on my back, clothed, and said to think about the pictures she gave me to think about, starting with "Think of the head as a balloon that's loose on the neck, so that it moves easily anywhere I put it or wants to float gently up from it." I concentrate on that as she takes it in hand rather like Dorothy Hunter does at the end of the body sessions, but she doesn't have quite the finger-energy Dorothy has so it feels somewhat tentative, and I can hear her breathing somewhat heavily above me and I sympathize with her that she has to develop her strength. She tries a number of different positions, tugging lightly up from the neck, and I feel a certain amount of relaxation in the muscles and a degree of benefit from the simple motions already, trying to keep in mind that I've just been relaxed by the NSH of ACTUALISM, too! Then she places the head gently down and goes to the side and puts her fingers under the edges of my shoulder blades and supports them momentarily, then runs along them and then across them to give the effect of pulling my shoulders out from the body, and gently pulling my hands down to lie more straight along my body. She does the same on the right, then goes down to the feet to pull gently on them, going down the legs, lifting and bending them slightly (as she'd done to the elbows, letting the weight of the forearm pull down the elevated elbow as if she were seeing the amount of play I had in them, and she said my arms were about the best part of my body for looseness and flexibility), and then pulling them from the bottom as Dorothy does, though again with less strength, seeming to want to point the toes more upward. In the middle I said, "I feel that my shoulders and upper torso are to the RIGHT of my body axis," and she said she was delighted that I saw that so quickly, that it was part of realigning, and when I stood she said she saw my shoulders as being LOWER (and she pressed DOWN on them much as the O-V does, making me think Carol Ann may have had Alexander technique and used part of it), my neck LONGER, my head back more, and strikingly said that my LOWER rigs should FALL so that my UPPER chest would be more prominent and fuller, and I was so impressed I said I hoped she could continue, but she squatted, holding her back straight, saying that she should be in this position but she tends to round her back, demonstrating, saying that was bad for her body, so her teacher said she could practice a bit, but she shouldn't do too much of it or it would hurt her OWN progress, but she liked me and wanted to do it for me, so she'd check with her teacher and find out.