OBSERVATIONS
DIARY 5524
MATURITY, UNNATURALNESS AND PRIDE
1. AS facet of maturity versus immaturity: the mature person always LOOKS the same; the immature waits too long for a haircut, often has erectile hair problems in the AM, is troubled with facial disorders, and wears an immense variety of clothes. The MATURE person usually always looks the same in hair, face, dress, deportment. Only the young can come up with so many facial expressions.
2. How unnatural it all is: 1) Work week so short people have fantastic problems with leisure. 2) Women capable of having children are sterilized (Pumpkin Eater) to prevent her natural faculties. She sees nothing else to DO, maybe because it wasn't meant for her to do anything else. 3) The OLD, kept alive by medicine, and their problems of retirement and children.
3) Look, you people of Fifth Avenue and CPW and Central Park South, how lucky I am. You can, by looking out, see only me, while I, looking in, can see ANY of you.
Why must I concentrate on such trivia (as above) and let the important things go unthought?
DIARY 5526
QUOTES AND THOUGHTS
1. "There can be no great art without great discipline."
2. "He who spares not himself gets spared not by others."
3. Dare we hold our conscience above the code which guards our country?
4. The unexamined instruction is bound to have a bug in it.
5. The unexamined WORLD is not worth living in.
6. Question for educating the intelligent: How to stimulate without overwhelming? How to guide without limiting experience?
7. (June, 1963): The ideas popped in my mind like parched corn in a hot greased pot. The record business cut off because Marty "Couldn't take being torn apart" by his wanting Joanne and her wanting only a good unattaching time. I think of the plays and movies I've just seen in NYC, and the multitudes from the trip. I think of Marty's talk from his trip. Bobbie's honeymoon in Jamaica, and my possible next year's trip to South America. I think of the books I'd just read, the thoughts of the end of the world, and "The Answer" with Ylie's angel with the message "Love each other" and John Knowles "The Separate Peace" and the closeness of these friends leads me to the thought of me with Bill, how I tore Bill apart, and the tears shed by both of us over our odd relationship. Think of JJ and Walt Swan, and the excellence of the book makes me think of MY writing and FW course and how I might type with a pencil between teeth if I lost my arms, or should dictate this to a tape recorder. Each kernel pops and brings out tasty white thoughts, brushed aside by the next thought explosion. Mad. And thoughts of the details at work, the job card program and documenting the SDP program, and the meeting with Bobbie. Sleep at 3 and rattle through next day fairly tired, help Mozelle hang Venetian blinds till 8, and home to finish "Separate Peace," read "Doors of Perception," and dine on 14 cherries, 2 rotten; 3 peaches, 2 overripe, one under; a large segment of packed-in-wax Baby Gouda cheese, imported from Holland, and a large piece of perfectly ripe, slightly mushy cantaloupe. Then to bed at 12:30, feeling drooping and possessed of the runs.
DIARY 5527
PERSONAL COMPLEXITY
1. One of the most miserable parts of a relationship comes when, in order not to do something with the person concerned I say I'm sick or don't feel well, and thus must sound listless and logy over the telephone, and usually succeed in putting myself into that mood. I have to tell them I'm not going anywhere, then end up mooning about the house not doing anything. This is the low point.
2. Avoid, avoid, avoid. Tell Jim, sorry, I'm tired and really don't want to come out Friday night. To Dick: no, I'm getting people in from Philly (no, they wouldn't want to come to the party, too). To Sheila: Philly people in, and I'm tired, too. To Cyndy: How pleasant of you to call to offer a glass of sherry before my walk, but I'm walking to 116th and 64th is really out of the way. To Jerry Margulis: I've made other plans for Christmas, so tell Marty I can't take his Parisian blind date out New Year's Eve. To Mom: I'm too busy to come home. To Warren, I'm busy, no Christmas dinner. (Christmas, 1962).
3. "But I've been to THESE movies," and he lifted a list, "and seen THESE plays," and lifted another list, "and been to bed with THESE people," and lifted another list. And the words, as the deeds, choked his aged throat and he had nothing left but mold.
4. To February, 1962: two lunches at the Colony cost $20, with Harvey. One supper at the Latin Quarter cost $12, but with a show. Two dinners at 21 took the cake, sending Jean-Jacques on his way, for $31.50, which includes the tip.
5. Jose Glasserman thinks it's perfectly right for a person to kill himself; that gloominess is basis for the world, that most people cannot have aims, look at all alternatives and refuse them ALL; old solutions are not OK, much energy to spend and no good way to spend it. "La Notte" and "82" and "Krapp's Last Tape" were good; man's animal instinct more important than philosophy. I say NO!
6. I'll never do WHAT I'm expected to do BECAUSE I'm expected to do it.
7. A very complicated personality: what a lovely flattering term, and how I hope I have one.
DIARY 5528
NEED TO CREATE; AWAKE OR DREAMING
1. Man's basic aim is to CREATE. We envy God, maybe, his powers of having created everything. We would like to say WE created Bob Junior, my son, or MY daughter. THAT'S why the rich are bored, they don't create. Their money creates their living. This is why men are MORE frustrated with automation. ART is man's pride in his creation. The appreciation of art is the appreciation of others' activities. Happiness is the appreciation of YOUR OWN activity. That's why I envy a pianist, a singer, or a dancer: I ENVY their creative powers. The process, so necessary, of communication is the display of this creation. ABSENCE of this creation produces absence of stimuli, giving entrance to those diabolic visionary experiences, a feeling of depression, a feeling of brooding, a desire---a need for escape.
2. Anyone who cannot be sure whether he is awake or is dreaming is either trying to be sophisticated, or is a fool. In the annals of dreams I have yet to come across the dreamer who has successfully tried the "Pinch Me" test while dreaming. Most often, in the most convincing dreams, the idea that we may be dreaming never occurs. However, communication between me and my inner component, into which category dreams fall, is NOTORIOUSLY troublesome. If I close my eyes, I can very easily visualize a maple leaf. I see the shape, the color, the venation, the sheen of light off it. However, there is hardly a miniature leaf stuck between my retina and my eyelid, so I really DON'T see a leaf. If I don't bother to TEST its presence, according to WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE, it matters NOT AT ALL whether there's a leaf there or not. BUT, if I want to test it, I could presume to change it into, say, an ELM leaf, or make it turn colors from green to brown. Now, since I'm testing it, it DOES make a difference---if it's real, but the properties of reality it CANNOT change---if it does, it's imaginary. The same holds with dreams. WHAT DIFFERENCE does it make if a convincing dream is real or not. If, in the dream, you have fifty dollars under your pillow, it makes NO difference whether it's real or not, UNTIL you reach under the pillow for the money.
DIARY 5529
FEARS AND HAUNTS
1. "OK, the IDEAS may be ideal, and be good, but the people who have to pass judgment on the ideas AREN'T ideal."
2. The only real fear is the fear of FAILURE in the creative process. This is the reason for wanting to escape from self.
3. Any feelings so LOUSY as waiting for the dentist? And your stomach turns to froth and you defecate a foul stream from a vaguely sore stomach.
4. The infinite disgustability of the human race, when an intelligent individual wished HE could do something annoying to the people who do things that annoy HIM, such as clipping fingernails beside a bubbling salivator in bus, or jingling a tiny bell in the ear of a lady with a jangly bracelet in a movie, or crunching a paper bag near a candy-wrapper crinkler.
5. Such a phobic fear of elevators pervades my life. Do many others have dream after dream about being killed in a falling elevator that refuses to adjust to a particular floor? And how does the elevator operator always manage to disappear as a the car plummets toward hell?
6. He suddenly had an awful vision of himself trekking through rain soaked cities, eating in sodden lunchrooms and sleeping between damp sheets. He then, in panic, saw himself starting out, and somewhere in the middle, in dreariness, simply stopping and the thought appalled him.
7. When we lack all stimuli---when we float, or don't breathe, or don't eat or feel nothing, or don't sleep (for who can say the fetus sleeps?) we might be said to revert to the fetal stage---which is unknown, and thus frightening (or suffocating and not alive, and thus like death?)
Remember my dreams of frantically trying to turn on lights, but all of them being burnt out? The horrid half-dream which changes to reality of things (roaches) CRAWLING, and brushing them off the bed, and crushing them in the bedclothes.
And the night I wrote this, about automatically reverting to the INFANT'S crooked sleeping position for relaxation?
DIARY 5530
MIXED EMOTIONS
1. Might all I THINK I have of genius be simply a prank of loneliness? But, even so, I must test my silver talent before I can prove it is dross. I must ring it against the world, and see what a sound it produces. If the sound is false, I am a fool, yet I have proven, really, nothing. If the world is false, IT may have caused the clangor. But if the sound is pure, ah, THINK of what I have gained.
2. He had always considered urinating into the water as vulgar, but then one day, urinating with no trousers on, he decided that urinating really made quite a splash, which disappeared as he directed the stream into the water at the bottom of the john. So that was why people (men) sometimes splashed when urinating!
3. Programming is such a WONDERFUL job. Look for a bug on and off for a week, intensively for two days, being discouraged and tending to let it slip through, when I FIND it and I beam and tell people and sit smiling at my desk, feeling very pleased with myself---hardly able to work but feeling very good ABOUT the work.
4. Are there many feelings so GREAT as going for the MAIL in the morning? Worlds open before you---fame and fortune just inside that slot, papers and books and packages and best of all, notes that a package is waiting at the post office, too large to fit.
5. The aplomb with which I can listen to two deaf-mutes talking to each other in the theater after spending four weeks in the vicinity of the incomparable Ray Beer. Remember the marvelous evocation of grandeur in her photo in a rickshaw in Hong Kong---how LOVELY it is to PLACE-NAME drop (like when I went to BED with John Reardon).
6. I can't trust love because of the mess my parents made of theirs. I love clothes because I was so ashamed in school of mine. I love security because I had none of it---financial or emotional---as a child.
7. Do I write so much because I have no one to TALK with?
DIARY 5535
OPERAS, PLAY, FILM
1. "He rode to Seville on a horse."? "Well, he jumped out the window on FOOT." Marvels from Gordon's "Marriage of Figaro." The City Center COMIC operas are so much more pleasant than Grand Opera at the Met. I just sit there with a big grin on my face from the Gardiner's solo to the magnificent septet at the end of Act II. Perfect for novice and children and grand opera bugs. And most of the ones at the Met are SO boring. Here EVERYONE is good, not the GREAT stars and names I must admit; it's ALSO heartening to SCREAM at the names.
2. I resolved never to get Concert Opera Association. At LEAST with American Opera Society I could be bored with good NAMES and a good orchestra, but here the names were none, the orchestra very unexciting, and the audience dismal, except for the dozen formal women, even more than at the Met---but maybe they were only super-boors.
3. Thoughts at "Three Sisters." How an older, lumpier Kim Stanley looks like a large Helen Hayes. Does EVERYONE in the theater look alike? Except Carol Channing---or does SHE look like Carol Burnett??
Don't really like Chekhov, unless it only proves that a 19th-century Russian can sound exactly like a 20th-century American. His plays aren't GREAT, but when hoked up by a Kim Stanley and a Geraldine Page, it's interesting (HARDLY moving) to see. The HATE one could so easily feel for these three stupid, frustrated, ineffectual old MAIDS (for the married one is hardly married and the young one is already old).
4. "Winter Light" was a HARSH film. A woman writes a wrenching letter to a minister: "I love you." He rants to her for half an hour: "I despise your eczema, myopia, fawning, timidity, chilblains, periods, and mother." A pregnant woman with three children brings her husband to see the priest. After they talk, the man shoots himself in the head. Died, of course. A sexton, crippled, believes he suffers more than Christ. Ends with priest, ALONE in church, saying, "Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts. Heaven and Earth are full of Thy Glory." THE END. Nice film? "Um, anyone sexy in it?"
DIARY 5617
May, 1965
JOTTINGS - CINEMATEQUE
CINEMATEQUE DES FILMMAKER'S: Manifesto by Preston, better than most. Paperdolls---Jack Smith. The Maze. The Directions of Harry Hooten. Tree. Le Chien Andalou. Lousy program in all. Harlow, one half-hour in which NOTHING happens but four fellows (one MAY be a girl) leap around a sofa while ONE eats, two bananas and comes to ONLY funny part when she DROPS one. And Warhol and lover make out in bed, talk about Edith Shitwell, laugh at the movie, and he talks about hair around nipples and beautiful legs and about amateurs on 42nd Street. Are you well hung? A combination of Learned Hand and well hung. And then the two boys kiss---for about two minutes. Puts the banana between her legs. "We're born crazy, and we have to uphold the tradition. Pussy, pussy. Harry." Fellow takes cigarettes, turns them around, and finally lights and flicks away. "Ah, she's getting to the nitty-gritty." And music comes on, "Oh, peel me, and music swirls and voices get wild. ONE FUCKING HOUR.
December 7, 1964, Sixth Independent Film Award, to Warhol. "It's a happening." It's NOT a happening." Pulling coats off chairs and leaving, but the majority settled back in their chairs, looking, not smiling, not frowning, merely looking (at Harry Geldzaller). Amazing the number of glass lenses, reflecting sheet-white matte from the screen. Cigar bobbing up and down much like a spirited stiff prick. Cigar sequence possibly half-hour. Monument to boredom and tedium. Incredible spurt of humor after twenty-five minutes: he poises cigar over the ashtray, looks at camera, and puts cigar back into mouth. I'm SURE that cigar stopped more smokers. Lovers, boy-girl, boy-boy, restore heads on shoulders. "Hey, Andy, someone's at the piano." and indeed he WAS. "Oh, oh, look at the scratch." "Cigar scene," 2 reels, over at 1:55 am. The "Award Film" was a party about eating: banana, cucumber, mushroom, focus, UNFOCUS, yawning, ha-haing, fellow sleeping. Eyes closed, talking, milling in lobby. Left breast; snake face (owned the breast); Bat man, mat ban on beach with nude, and seaweed beaters. Cigarette smoker; cryer (Man), long hair, woman with tears. Sun glasses. Shag-haired blond girl. Wild-haired blonde. Fat man in chair: "Henry, stand up." The crowd at the Cinemateque was like all the other crowds. except that it combined all the other crowds. The top was represented by a richly handsome woman with a pile of black hair, chemise and Chinese drop earrings, and a gray flannel overcoat that dropped, suspiciously, over her black pumps. She was escorted by a man in black tie and black coat. The lowest class was there, and it was difficult to choose the lowest: young girls in black, black, black, with stray blond hair. Or a fellow in a black pinstripe with hair that stood out three inches in every direction. Unpleasantly, they seemed to allow smoking in the theater. On the lowest might be the unshaven (NOT bearded, though there were many) blond in the hugely wide-wale corduroy trousers that seemed about five wales in circumference, topped by uncombed lank hair and an ineffably angelic face. But after a bit, it bored.
DIARY 5619
IMPRESSIONS
Impressions crowding in---pushing to be recorded: I'm getting a callous on my writing finger---soon I'll be deformed as Arnie Fishman, yellow-handed and corned. The ropes flapping alarmingly against the huge metal flag poles on Park Avenue, reminding of men swatting thighs to keep warm. The beauty of the flower beds on Park. Above the NY Central railroad, hardly noticed by autos, possibly only by side-glancing cab passengers, but pedestrians looking sideways, unable to get the panorama of white rock (looking like marble chips in their hardness and crystallinity) only from the tops of the Park Avenue glass cereal boxes. The echo of look to look in the Traveler's Den, the Greek family, son watching father rub steel wool over his stove, then scrape cleanser off with spatula, looking part at the work and part at his father, the brother-like creature looking at the family and at me, chewing french fries with my fingers. Playing kneesies with the plump little collegiate in "Seven Days in May" at the Sutton, and the very loud, varied horse laugh I'd heard before convulsing the attendees at 57th St. Normandie even more than "Le Million." Joan moaning Johnnie's death---burned in a strange tenement, found in the bathroom, the girl he was with burned and in a state of shock. The trills running through the patter of conversational feet at the Met auditions---and the soprano "practicing" for Boheme, "It's easy, but there IS that C#," talking to her date, an Italian with reddish (tinted?) hair, and she saying, "They'll go WILD OVER YOU on the coast." He replies, "Oh, I don't go for these theatrical women." "Oh, I don't mean the WOMEN, my dear." And the conversation is interrupted by two groups of two. "My roommate," and the limp wrist is extended as if to be kissed, and eyes close seductively in "How do you do?"
DIARY 5638
January 1965
TAPE JOTTINGS - FANTASTIC STORIES
What fantastic, fantastic, phenomenal stories; first of all Ted James, with whom I have a ridiculous run-in one evening on Third, and we talk and we talk and we talk; he forces himself up here, lights go off, and he says he isn't drunk; give him some cloudy water and feel stupid about it. He dives into my lap, and we get into bed and he rips my clothes off, and chews and pummels and pushes and I can't do anything. Then later we talk and he says he'll call me. So later he calls, and he calls and he calls again. Finally last Sunday, the first of November, the eighth of November, I go down to his place on the corner of 4th Street and 11th Street, and he entertains me by singing songs about death, and about sex, and about the ABC's of little Johnny and aunt Trixie and Mommy and Bergdoffs, and all very funny. And he tells the story about Princess Alicia Tishkevich, who leaves her body to the Columbia Medical Center, and gets a printed note, saying 1) bodies will be accepted between 8 am and 6 pm Monday through Friday. We will not pay for the cost of transporting the body. You must make your own arrangements. If you die on the weekend, please DO bring it in the first thing on Monday, but DON'T embalm the body, as we want none with no blood in them. And she says, how wonderful to have two handsome interns staring into your asshole. And Bill tells the little story about the fellow down the block who loves to lie next to Bill and kiss and kiss, but won't touch Bill, or he has to take a shower, but the only thing he wants to do is kiss. He had some relation with a friend, and the friend dared him to undress, and they were together for two years, but they broke up, and he got the back of his hand slashed because he kept bothering him and bothering him. If you bother me once more, I'll cut you; and he bothered him and he cut him. So now all he wants to do is lie with Bill and kiss. Then Bill again about the tall blond Norwegian Burnt Ellie and the 25-year-old doll David, who goes to Malachy's 5 or 6 times a week to get a girl to screw, but David follows after Burnt, draws physique photos in class, takes good care of his body, doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, so they get to the West End and they talk. The talk turns to Bill: Burnt: I have the feeling you had an unhappy childhood, you didn't get what you wanted. Bill: Right. I suspect you've made an unorthodox settlement on sex? Bill: Right. Burnt's been to bed with men, but never satisfied. Dave, have you ever had a man? Dave: only once in camp at 15, he dared and dared and dared me to jerk him off, but first I had to get toilet paper and wrap it around his penis. Tell me when you're going to come, I don't want to touch it. Burnt says, what you need is a man. Dave: I tell a woman to rub my anal sphincter. Burnt: you need something else to rub that. Burnt tells of parties at suites in the Hilton, party in main room, sex in side rooms, as you choose. Burnt is excited before men AND women, but satisfied with neither.
DIARY 5657
March 1962
JOTTINGS
I am NOT a woman. I do not want to BE a woman. I do not want to be LIKE a woman. I do not want to be USED like a woman. I am willing to submit to browning, in the case of Mario, because I LIKE him very much, want to satisfy him, know he's not satisfied by my hand, and know he's subject to pain if he goes erect for a long time without satisfaction, know also his disgust for my doing him. At first my not being erect bothered him, but last time he made no great fuss about it. Yet he says he refuses to talk about it, yet says we both think too much while having sex.
WHAT IF teeth were painless, like hair, to repair. It hurt to have hair cut. Fingernails were perforated. Toenails grew a foot a day. Pubic hair had to be cut. Eyelashes curled downward. Eyes worked like Zoomar lenses. Knees bent forward, too. We had no toes. Head could turn 360Ε on neck.
After "The Children's Hour." "Well, that's just what I like right after breakfast on a Saturday morning. A nice cheerful comedy. Lots of laughs. Got a gun?" "Gosh, I'm glad I'm not like that." Later in subway, a man with a horn tootled through, blindly begging. As he reached the end of the car, the door opened and a blind man with an accordion and same cup appeared. There was a short unheard interchange, and the man with the accordion got off at the next stop.
"Just you wait, Henry Higgins," played with oriental lute and seductive twist like an exotic dance.
DIARY 5684
September 1962
CENTRAL PARK NIGHT
The group of people moved ahead. One detached himself from the group, and I saw it was the exotic queen with the cap-like hairdo. He walked back and looked at me, and I stopped, and he stopped. I walked over and said, "Quite a parade." He said, nasally, "Oh, yes, it's the witching hour. Everyone has to work tomorrow and they have to get home." I asked if he worked, and he said no. I said, "Some people are lucky." He glanced at the sky and said it was a nice night, and I looked up and said, "Yes, I'd been in the park, and it was windy." When he looked up again he gaped and said, "The sky's moving." I looked up and saw nothing but blackness, and thought he was pulling my leg. He said, "Look, the star is moving." I looked up and the star WAS moving. The twinkling star moved slowly behind the building. "It might be a satellite" he said, "Can you tell which it is?" I said, "No, I can't see the stars or sickles on it." We walked out to the curb and again watched the star move behind the building. We talked about the shapes of the buildings on the street, saying they all looked the same, and talked about the garage across the street, saying that they should redo the front, and all the while he got more and more faggoty. Nevertheless, I asked him to come up. He said no, he was just walking. I said it was a waste of the night, he said "My nights are never wasted." He said, "If I went to bed with everyone I saw, I'd be in bed all the time. He said he liked sex once a day, and he'd already had it. He said he had to get his hair fixed; he'd tried to get it blond, and it ended up the color (here he searched up and down the street), the color of that "Park" sign over there. That sign was an orange-red, the loudest sign on the street. I laughed. He said he didn't have the patience just to sit there. He said they'd stripped it, and put a booster in, but he knew it needed another booster. He said he had very dark brown hair, and one booster could only lighten it five or six shades, and after six shades it was left this screamy red. He had to wear a straw hat all the time; he looked like Huck Finn. Whenever he'd meet a friend on the street, he'd just raise his hat and they'd just scream. He said to get a good job you'd have to boost it again and strip it down until it was colorless. He said it was kind of like corn silk, no, like maize. VERY sick and very yellow---he said it looks awful, and then you can put whatever color you want into it. He said, "I couldn't stand to have it that red color for three days. I tried to make it blond, but the color wouldn't hold, because the hair wasn't porous enough. I tried a black dye job, but I couldn't do it; it didn't set well. Now I have a brown rinse, but it still doesn't hold very well, because it runs. Whenever I wash my face, some of the water gets back in the hair, and it trickles down my face and I have a black beard." So finally he sauntered on. It had been a halfway successful night. I'd gone into the park at 11:15, and saw this fellow in a pink T-shirt and faded blue jean shorts. I walked up and asked if the insects were biting him, and he said no, then I reached around and felt him and he was all bunched up in front. We stood looking either way, and people passed and we parted, I went toward him again, and put my hand down and tried to stand alongside, but he wasn't interested in investigating me. He backed into the bushes and walked down into the trees. There were people in there, and he wasn't satisfied, and so he walked out again into the path, across it, and down by the stream. We ducked to avoid the branches. When we reached a little clearing in the center, I stood beside him, and I fumbled for a while and he put his hand down there and took it out. I felt him for a while and just once he reached over and felt me; I was half-hard, but he didn't pursue it at all. One of his hands half curled around and took my other side and half drew me in, and I squeezed him as he grew hard. He said something about having to get home in about ten minutes when I asked him to my place. I figured: this is what he wanted, so I went down on my knees, put my two hands on his hard calves and started to operate. It took about 25 strokes, and with no assistance at all, and with no straining, though the calves were iron-hard under my hands, he breathed just a tiny bit harder, and I felt the liquid rinsing my mouth. I held it as the last throbs died away, and he stood. When I stood up, he put himself away. As I stood, he said, "Watch your head," because of a dead branch hanging over the clearing. Previously there had been two faggots walking past our post. He asked, "Are you still in here?" They said, "Oh, yes, but we're getting scared." He said in a big brotherly voice, "You shouldn't come in here if you're scared." Coupled with his concern about my not bumping my head, and his concern about the police not being able to shine their lights down and catching us. As he said this I saw a car driving up, and a light cutting through the woods. He walked off in one direction, and I crossed the little bridge in the middle of the stream and stood there, then quickly left.
Pity the poor girl down in Virginia. She was as ugly and a girl, yet she had a lot in common with Jim, so she tried to win him. The sad look on her face told me that she knew about Jim and I, and then she avoided me, and hated me. I could see the hate, the jealousy, and the sad pain. The pain of a person not beautiful in her own sex trying to get the interest of someone uninterested in that sex at all. Could she be anything but discouraged?
The situation down on Third Avenue had gotten just too complex. A had looked at B, B had looked at C, C was looking at E while D was just standing there, and suddenly thought, being caught in the middle, that both A and B were looking at HIM. The whole thing, out of sheer weight, collapsed, like an elaborate train of logic that collapses, not because of a fault in the logic, not because of a lack of logic, but simply because of its own ponderous weight.
But girls are so soft. One thing she had, that I liked, was her chin line. I'd searched for a particular chin line in the boys I'd been to bed with, none had it, but she had. A straight strong assured chin line. Forming the base for a handsome face. And clean straight hair. Her neck was thick but well proportioned. And I could fit quite comfortably into the crotch of her shoulder. Her breasts didn't interest me at all. Except when she raised her arms above her head and they flattened out, and her chest looked distinctly like a bodybuilder's chest, with the huge, slightly pendulous pectorals. As I laid on top of her and caressed her, I marveled at their resiliency. I had always thought they would be in the way, but they weren't. They slid out of the way when they weren't needed, like the noses in Hemingway. Her waist was thin, and when she tensed herself, it was hard as a boy's. When she turned over on her back, it was sexless, and both sexes. The hips, however, were much too wide, the buttocks were much too soft. There was no straight rod between the legs. She said, "I know you expect me to do certain things, but I won't. I want you to try for yourself." I lay on top, and looked at the chin, and she ran her hands up and down my side. Finally, because of the heat, and the feeling of the soft sheets, and the half-dimmed light, and the flesh reflections, and the curves of flesh that are really very little different between men and women, I got excited. I moved up and down her body, leaving a layer of lick. There were bones in places I hadn't expected. There was an appalling softness where I desired firmness. I said "I didn't know the motion." She embarrassed me by saying that I'd gotten too used to the hand. I remarked that the Italians, who seemed so straight, put much stress on the motion of the buttocks. She lay perfectly still, and simply let me try. The first few times I went down, but finally a thin sensuous film formed between the bodies, and made them slippery.
Visualize the fantasticness of it all. Come home from work, eat a quick dinner, out to the movies to see "Way Down East." Then sit on CPW, talk to Howard, who asks what I like, and when he says he likes fucking I can easily say I don't like that, and we part. I walk back up into the park, and roam the paths. After passing many fellows, following down paths, I get looked at by a tall, extremely well-built Negro. I stop, he stops and repasses, and I say "Nice night?" He laughs and starts talking about Tallulah Bankhead, and imitates her, and his femininity disgusts me. I leave him, saying that I'll see him, and he calls back "Do you really think so?" I say, "You never know." I walk down around by the little pond, and there are two young fellows sitting on a bench. There's a tall white form that I recognize as the fellow I'd seen in the other bushes, and had admired. One of the fellows looked back into the woods and called for a cigarette, and the white form pulled a pack out of his sock and gave him one, and returned to the woods. I decided this was my chance, walked further, and turned left into a little path into the woods, and was surprised to see more than a few people in there. The white walked past into the light area in the center. I walked toward him, but a fellow came up behind him, dressed in black, who was of medium height and well-built, with a large tousle of curly hair, and as he passed, he showed a long projection down the side of his trousers. He passed by a few steps, then turned around, grabbed onto this projection, and stroked it back and forth. I walked over and reached out to stroke him. He allowed that, reached over to me, felt that I was quite soft, but continued to feel. I continued to stroke, and finally pulled his zipper down. Then there were movements behind us, and he zipped himself up and moved away. I turned and found the white fellow had moved into the middle again. As I moved toward him, he walked toward the left, and I figured the party was over, so I followed him into the darkness. There, suddenly, was the group. Six or seven were gathered, with the white on the near outskirts of the ring. I stepped closer to the fire betrayed by the smoke of the crowd, and found one doing another while the others watched. I pushed my way into the group, and noticed the effeminate negro I had talked to before; so I had seen him again. The fellow in black was there also, looking intently at the thrashing duo in the center. I again took hold of his sizeable cock. His hand went out, but not forward toward me, but backward, to grope the fellow in white. I stayed with the black, even when I noticed his other hand was fondling another in the ring, and he grew hard and excited under this triple stimulation. Taking his lead, I looked around to see where I could put my other hand, when suddenly, from behind the doing duet, came a head across the group, and a hand groped, and this time I was hard. A hand neatly pulled my zipper down, pushed my shorts down out of the way, and pulled my cock out. In a second he had brushed aside the people between us, and was down on his knees in front of me. I had the black fellow out by this time, and was jerking him back and forth. The crowd moved around, and I saw that the fellow being done originally had his trousers down around his knees. A bald head had engulfed him, and a negro head was down between my legs, with a large mouth and soft lips. He rattled himself back and forth, and I felt myself excited, and lost interest in playing with the fellow beside me, which was just as well, since the white, behind him, wanted to reach around and take him. There were other flurries of activity around the group, which made the fellow being done originally nervous. He kept glancing around, and I noticed that he was quite handsome. He kept looking back at the light, and flinched whenever anyone cut across it, entered or left the group, coming and going in the alleyways. I was very excited and came quickly, breathing faster and faster as others glanced at me. He sucked brilliantly, and when I came, and it became torture. He eased off, gave one last lick, then flipped it up and in in a business-like manner. I zipped up and stepped back, weak in the knees, feeling a bit guilty about being so easy, and toying with the idea of being harder to come the next time, to sustain the attention. The handsome fellow couldn't take any more, and stepped back and waved his erection in the air to dry it off and make it more sensitive. I noticed one handsome fellow I'd seen at Riis Park in tight trunks and on Fifth Avenue in a priest's collar. Also in the group was the intellectual who had sat next to Marty and me in the Mayflower Coffee Shop for breakfast one Sunday afternoon. But it was dark, and he wore no glasses, so he didn't recognize me, if he had ever known my face to recognize me at all. The group broke up into twosomes, and others scattered through the brush. The black and the white were still standing, front to back, then moved away from the crowd. The Mayflower fellow followed the two, and I followed the three. Still trembling in the knees, I walked over to hear them mumble, "Oh, God, here they come again," and obviously they wanted to be alone. I passed to the path, the Mayflower sat on a bench between two others, and I passed and grinned, but there was still no sign of recognition. I stood at the corner for a few seconds until I waked to the fact that I was spent, then turned and walked back through the paths to Fifth. All the way back I was humming and singing. As I passed a police car in the boathouse yard I felt they could tell what had happened to me in the park. I came up with the phrase, "Visualize the fantasticness of it," and I walked singing the song "Maria" substituting the word "Fantastic" every time the title came up, and came home and recorded this.
He looked at himself in the mirror, and said to himself quite deliberately, "You are an Idiot-Bastard." It was one word, and to make it less humorous, he elaborated, "You are a damned, omnipotent Idiot-Bastard." and the contradictory qualities of damnation and omnipotence appealed to him. He could laugh at nothing but himself. He had succeeded too well when he wanted to rid himself of the chain of friends and acquaintances who phoned him. Now, he had conditioned his friends, the few there were, so that, if the phone would ring, he would have no idea what the response should be to it. He had painted himself into a solitary corner, and had only himself to commiserate with. He began to fear that he had been wrong, that he needed people, that he needed companionship. He began to feel maybe he wasn't meant to be a hermit. He began to want someone, and the thought that he had closed all the gates frightened him. So he continued to torture himself. He continued in his compulsive ways. He tortured his body with lack of food. He continued to wrench his eyes, and things flowed around him in a circle, and he found himself in the position he had been in a few months before, and the round would begin again. Yet this was what he had wanted. He thought for a moment, miserably, that he may be losing his mind; but then he thought, even more miserably, people did not lose their minds through loneliness.
I must admit a feeling of guilt in not speaking to Marty since his father died, but what could I tell him? What could I say? I can say nothing about death. I love life so much that I hate death. I fear death. A day of pleasantness can be stopped by thoughts of death. I feel embarrassed in the face of death; I want to avoid it. I'm so afraid of it, I can't cope with the thought of it, and I try to ignore it hoping that I need not admit its presence. In avoiding its presence, I avoid the people afflicted with it. (Some live with it in themselves for years. We call them pessimists.) I try to believe it doesn't exist.
What can I tell Sheila? Can I tell her I'm afraid of love? I can't tell her I'm gay, because she might tell everyone in the office, everyone who doesn't already know. But how can I tell her anything? Can I tell her I don't want to date her? The truth always hurts. The thought of telling the truth is like the thought of stepping on a broken shampoo bottle in the shower, severing an artery in the foot. The truth is cutting, and painful, and even thinking about it sends a sick shiver through the viscera. I'd been cut before when I'd been told the truth, but what I called love at that time was childish and silly, so being told I wasn't loved was no catastrophe. I'd caused pain before when I refused love proffered to me. There's so much pain in the world, why should I inflict more pain? Is there any doubt that I would like to avoid love? Only in order to avoid the possibility of inflicting pain (or receiving pain)? If I say I know myself, can I tell anyone else about me? What would they think? Would they think I was being dramatic in order to gain attention? Melodramatic in order to be laughed at or be sympathized with? What can they think? How can I tell the truth? I have to fib around the truth, not admit, and presume that they'll believe the half-truths, and the lack of truth. I say nothing and hope they fall away, and ignore me, but then it happens so much, so successfully, and I am so completely ignored.
DIARY 5695
October, 1962
JOTTINGS - INTERMISSION
Stood in a latticed balcony overlooking the checker-tiled south lobby. The portly man in black tie and wrinkled dress shirt, cane and cigar and complete isolation. The pretty boys standing alone, or camping with negresses in tight dresses. And the young fop trying to get in good with the intermission pass taken by grinning wryly at him. And then the feeling almost of relief when the intermission (which everyone expects must be over), but each loathes to display and trace of mediocrity by rushing in before the bell sounds, but can hardly wait to drop their conversations, their cigarettes and their masks and hurry into the theater, where once again the darkness will fall and the lithe young lady, whom every young and not-so-young female envies (not to mention some of the males) and the athletic young man (who may not, oh, dear, be so young after all, under all that makeup) again take the center of the stage, which was relinquished gratefully by the amateurs.
DIARY 5700
February, 1964
JOTTINGS - BALLET AUDIENCE
Perfect sign at the rear of Brooklyn Academy mezzanine for a ballet program "Please tiptoe during program." An admonishment not followed by poor Roni Mahler of the Washington National Ballet, who during her final turn in "Les Sylphides," found her feet slipped from under her, and she landed with an endlessly audible thump, amid deep heaving female gasps, an actual outcry from a frightened female, a hint of a laugh from a gentleman, and a smatter of one or two pairs of hands clapping. The buzz rumbled as she very quickly jumped to her feet and continued her routine and got a large amount of applause as she sped gracefully, but sore, offstage. Les Sylphides is not the type of dance for a male star with stringy black hair and hardly hairy chest. The Bunthorne white tights and black velvet tunic help not at all, and a large white satin bow was just too much for the poor fellow to carry off. It should be done with a willowy blonde, slender, esthetic, and who hopefully could keep his hair in place and not sweat on his #1, young boy, makeup.
What a bunch of anti-heterosexual people populate the ballet audience, it would be false to term them homosexual, though a great number are that, but many of the young maids, preludes to old maids with their over-curly hairdos and their completely tasteless, colorless, formless and guiltless tresses, who laugh too loud and stare at unmarried fellows in the crowd with glazed glee. A more than quorum of gaunt lean hungry slick-haired model women types with their arms and plaster of Paris faces. Old in truth maids in hotted jeweled suited sameness, clots of aging faggots in tight suits and lacquered faces and coiffed hair, talking and grinning at each other like natty niddy-noddies. Some perfectly plain people, too, mostly in company with women of the opposite sex who are trying terribly hard to appreciate the slow figures. The art colony is present in old women who MUST be someone, considering the way they trail their court behind them like a whispery train, and buzzes of talk go through the audience---HIM he's standing up, that's Mr. SO and so---you know who HE is?" And long lost passing acquaintances meet with geysers of gush and limp handshakes and drip kisses and moist smiles with glittery teeth. They chatter among themselves, group anchored to group, and finally the little Spanish fellow next to me leaves his coat on the seat and wanders off, abandoning the self-conscious shroud he feels compelled to drape over his quasi-expanded genitals showing through his skin-tight, skin-color, skin-all-but-revealing trousers which slip to halfway up calf when he sits with no trouble. They slide, with no trouble at all, he SITS WITH considerable trouble. The women with the beaded hat in front of me asks the Puerto Rican beside me if she should take her hat off, but he doesn't understand, simply looks eagerly behind himself and she smiles and removes her hat and whispers scandalized to her neighbor. He must have been so lost in USA because he doesn't come back for the second act. Lesbian-looking girls chatter back and forth, moving with exaggerated gestures and many ending sentences. "Last year she was," she grappled with the air, "you were afraid she would," she shrugged and tossed her head and creased up her face, "not quite got there" and she gasped and chuckled and squealed and grunted, "but this year's she's" she screamed and giggled and I began to fear her foaming at the mouth. "We sat up and talked" and her motions relayed all the words and laughs of those hours, "And this year she KNOWS what she's doing," and her voice was a triumph of accomplishment and relief and happiness, and her contorted face lavished flowers and kisses and puddles on the poor dancers. She left, molto agitato, and the row seemed to heave a sigh of relief that she was gone, and the ears of the balcony relaxed and the fists unclenched and life settled back to normal. Now I know why they name tropical storms after girls. The Spanish next to me greatly disappointed me by having a crotch that was greatly wrinkled, but which was so well hidden almost nothing of value was able to show. Conversation stumbled on in the typical way of an intelligent older balletomane talking with a young, shapely, stupid, young Puerto Rican. Such is the inevitable turn of youth and age.
DIARY 5703
TWO DYKES
The breathless, drunken encounter with the two dykes in the quartet. One older, stony-faced, slimly tailored without fluff, with a wickedly handsome face and a tired mouth. The other a frou-frou, heavily made-up with skirts which rose much too far above her knees. She would bend over to dispose of her elephantine bag and simper at me while the other glared. Not being interested in the woman (and having great basis for the knowledge that she was not interested in me, but, similar to the great butch numbers who make large pretense of ogling girls, she wanted to impress her girlfriend). I only grinned silently back and raised my glass in mute salute. She would lower her perfumed presence close to me, and attempt to brush her monkey-fur neck-piece against me, the smooth teeth like apple pulp in the broken skin of her red skin-lips. The other got progressively grayer as the evening commenced, and she stared much too boldly at her partner as she gabbled in her chair. She only perked up when the frilly one allowed their feet to entangle in bony contact under their chairs. Then they left, the stern one triumphantly allowing herself to bid me farewell as she made off with her catch.
DIARY 5710
SEX THOUGHTS
the sink might possibly serve to indicate that I'll be going down very soon. Probably a good thing it happened when it did, too; I know I couldn't have stood the strain of getting a new sheet of paper in. Back to the WC, since the drop looks ready to plop off the end of my dork any second. And now the sink is fairly clean, the toilet has a new sheet of paper, rather heavy and crumpled, floating in it, and I'm dry, and not in my trousers, but in my pajama bottoms, which I'll be using soon, since it's 12:30. Anyway, the excitement has made my fingers what you might call uncoordinated, and it's been a hard night anyway. After all, it's Monday, April 10 (well, really, it's the morning of the 11th, but I suspect I'm just trying to think of extra things to type) and the last time I came was the morning of the Saturday, April 8, and for me, that's quite a while. To bed.
DIARY 5711
JOAN'S FRIENDS
Alan and Rox have been staying at my place for the past week. They have a new apartment on Hudson Avenue, but they don't have any furniture except the mattress. They just go to work and have mad sex. The apartment is a mess. Then the mice came. I was attacked by a sewer rat when I was five, and I've been afraid of them since. There were two dead ones in the bathtub. I guess they didn't take showers for the week they were there. The place was a mess. They were leaving at nine, and I said they had to clean up the bathroom, since it was all over powder. I wasn't going to do it. I slammed the door, but not too loudly; they still owe me money. They may be my friends, but they can't be inconsiderate. I was walking out of Brooks and this very well dressed old gentleman was coming in, and he took off his hat to mop his brow. He had a summer overcoat over his arm: it must have been 85Ε. I just opened my hand and dropped in whatever change was in it. I didn't look around to see his face, even though I wanted to. In two minutes I'll be twenty-one; then I'll be legal. Cheryl has four children. Her husband was an Italian type with much hair and a big face. A real stud. They live in a big house down in the valley beside the canal, the children run around and she shoos them away, telling them to sleep in the backyard of somewhere. She offered me this 23-year-old she'd just gotten bombed. I didn't take him.
DIARY 5712
IT WAS THE FIRST SPRING DAY THERE EVER WAS
"It was the first spring day there ever was---" in truth in that April 18, 1964, and before "Right You Are" at the Phoenix. I wandered across the bridge at 71st St., only missing the hydrofoil, and watched the cars stop and stand on the East Side Highway as they swung to avoid a stalled car on the center lane. There were couples and singles, and a mite of cruising, and the day was so ingratiating that as I crossed the bridge, the scruffy Italian (what other breed could look so scruffily appealing, and act so extravagantly happy) leading a dog laughed aloud at some sober antics in a playground and then began to whistle the inane melody the jingle scoot played. Later in the theater, the first intermission revealed many people standing in front of the theater, ALL OF THEM alone. Each read his own program, leaned against his own pole, thought his own thoughts. Each a solitary spectator, just as I felt on the bridge over the highway, watching the kids prepare to dash out into the streets to get a ball. I stood, silent, when I should sensibly have been shouting down "Stay off the street." But I watched, as the hundreds of passing cars watched the stalled car, not one of them volunteering to help until a colored soldier hopped out, looked, then drove on again. The same feeling of the spectatorship of the US came when the Circle Line ship sailed past the rows of people sitting on the benches waiting for the sun to bake them brown. The two sets of watchers looked at each other and none waved, none said anything, both assumed that the other was put there for THEM to see. The same thought came up in Cohen's "The Tavern" when the stranger thought HE was the only spectator at the great stage production the world put on. And in Pirandello's "Right You Are," the echo of the thought: NO one could see YOU as YOU see yourself, thus everyone has a different idea of YOU, but the important thing is that people are for you to WATCH.
DIARY 5725
ELT INTERMISSION; BARLOW'S TRICK
1. Intermission at ELT reveals more character parts than there are on stage. The tart-wife of "Of Mice and Men" is more than echoed by the pallidly-powdered red-pouffed floozy fawning on a greasy-faced overweight unsightly man who looks possibly like he might have "influence." Then the "innocent" young man wanders past, short, nondescript, not quite handsome, looking over the audience as if he expected to be "discovered" by the same means that made James Dean and Robert Wagner and Warren Beatty and Tab Hunter. The cruddy fellow in the red jacket stares at the door with thick black curls hanging down the back of his head. The tall smooth-faced, desperate-looking, desperately looking middle-aging young man has his hair perfectly in place and his face flawlessly scrubbed, his clothes studiedly casual. Then the elegant older ladies in the audience in tailored suits and beautifully grazed grayed hair and mask faces, looking for a star or a husband or a gigolo. And as the lights dim the producer-types STILL sport their dark glasses and cigars and air of affluential influence.
2. As I locked the door after stepping out into the hall, I saw a familiar figure which had obviously just come out of the elevator. Behind him is a small flurry of motion. I tried the lock, satisfying myself that the door was locked, and started toward the acquaintance and the flurry. The acquaintance nodded a pleasant hello, and the flurry peeped out from behind, showing wide, agreeable, dark, eager Spanish eyes, surmounting a mouth creased into an impish grin, looking somewhat like a cherub caught with the cookies. Neither paused, but both looked as the acquaintance fumbled with his keys. So Barlow had found someone to keep him occupied since I preferred not to spend much time with him as of late. Why was I to complain, except I must remember to tell Barlow of the broad, red-faced grin with which I faced the elevator, waiting to go down, and the resolutions I made to ask him if he had a good time, and perhaps, cut me in on the booty: such cute, innocent booty.
DIARY 5727
CONTRASTS
1. It was a cold day, but his topcoat button was open exposing his soft pink neck to the cold wind. By its downy texture it was certainly not itself cold, but warm from the heat from the young body.
2. He looked like a man with an alter ego: bespectacled, meek, his huge hands and powerful muscles visible under his quiet suit gave him the affectation of a Clark Kent.
3. The progress of the beautiful boy through the lobby crowd could be easily followed by watching the direction of the intent hawk-gaze of the fat old lecher I remember with a shudder from the halls and showers of Columbia University's John Jay Hall.
4. Profile as fetching as a well-filled pair of ivy league buckle-in-the-backs, his cleanly cropped hair shining shortly, he studies the paper intently, raising his head to reveal---oh blemish, oh spot---his eyes, crossed one upon the other, stare out askew. Conscious of the cross he bears he keeps his lovely head down, buried in his one-eyed reading; looking up under wrinkled brow to regard the couple across, then down again, turn to look, born to scorn, he looks out, and sobs inside.
5. Woman with hemispheric lumps on her face, covered with clipped white hairs, being berated by her varicose-vein-legged daughter, steadily, monotonously, falsely black hair as hard as her black eyes under wrinkle-less brow. The ABSENCE of wrinkles made the eyes look larger and more fierce. The mother sat expressionless, then rubbed her wet temples with her left hand (toward me) and made little drilling motions toward her frazzle of gray hair with the hand's middle finger containing an animal nail: yellow and grotesque, more like a Norse's giant splayed hoof than some part of a human. I frowned at this ugliness, then a boy of great beauty came and sat beside me, and the contrast was chilling---but it was almost worth stomaching the ugliness, in order to further appreciate the beauty.
DIARY 5728
IN THE PARK
1. The fellow in the park, as I sat on the rock, nudged and nuzzled and groped, but I steadfastly resisted his hand's reaching below my waist, and when finally he began to rub himself along my bicep, and breathe heavily, I murmured, "If you think you're going to mess me up (recalling Paul's moist lapel), you're nuts." At that he said, "If you don't want to be bothered, I'll leave," and zipped up and went. Could he have been a cop? Who have been known to go all the way, THEN make the arrest.
2. 7/8: George, short, pocked blond, 10", 127 E. 84th Street, gr flr, 9:45-1:45.
7/9: Nameless, mid-height, butch, gravel-voiced kindly blue-jean shorts, and orange hair queen, three minute do from 10:45-12:45.
7/10: Nameless Peter Sellers in park and cross-eyed college shorts in laundry room of 213 E. 66th with chihuahua, 10:30-1:00.
7/11: Luis Alvarez, my size, Bill's size, dream size, worth it 10:45-1:45, 1431 York Avenue.
3. (May, 1965) I walked into the park at 95th, and noted with pleasure that a well dressed single man was walking his dog further up the walk. I passed him as he looked curiously back at me, and then I realized it only led to a dais-like platform with benches around: a dead-end. I looked, nonplussed, and walked back. "Many people have been disappointed up there." I smiled and asked directions. He said I could go south along the road, I said I wanted the park. He said to take the path above the next street. I said thanks. "Have fun," he said cheerfully, "but watch out." I said, "Oh, yeah." The walk was cold and pleasant.
4. "Um you mim a cigarette?" "No, I'm sorry, I haven't." And when I looked, and he had one in his mouth, I supplied the missing words "do" and "want," instead of "do" and "have," and felt a bit silly. We stood close and I walked away minutes later. Beautiful fellow strolled up, too good to be cruising. Third time past, I asked, "Still walking?" and he pursed his mouth in a smile and nodded a grunted yes.
5. The light from the cigarette swayed through the underbrush, then flashed upward and was lost to sight, and the sound of a dead struck branch thumped out at me.
6. The police wagon roared up a dark walk; there was a crash in the underbrush and two fellows dashed through the woods, vaulted a bench, muttered "God," and vanished across the fields.
DIARY 5729
MOVIES, OPERAS, BOOKS, BEETHOVEN
1. All movies invariably (or through my vision-inducing eyes) treat of love: four movies in three days: "Story of Three Loves," "Rhapsody," "Lawrence of Arabia," and "Lovers of Teruel." The middle one the perverted love which Lawrence feels by killing young Arabs, his unexplainably inexplicit relationship with his two young slaves, and that electric scene with the Turkish Bey who strips him, stares at his blond hair, then fondles his breast, saying "What fair skin you have," then that closeup of the Bey's lips, red and trembling, and Lawrence's eyes wanting and hating, and lashing out in anger at his dilemma. And WHAT happened afterward---did he glory in his beatings and have mad sex with the punishing soldiers?
2. "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" points up the perfect relation between husband and wife. It is easy to be a Don Juan with women, since they never have sex very much. But with men, they, the pretty ones, can have more than they can use. In LLD, again, SHE attempted to be equal, but he got all the affairs.
3. The long thin cypresses in BOTH Cav and Pag look like an immense arrowhead, or a charred feather. Never, in Pag, was so much BEAUTY attempted to be concealed as in Canio and Tonio.
4. Me, in Family Circle, smiling at the fellow in the Balcony focusing his opera glasses on a cutie in the Dress Circle.
5. His eyes filled with tears as he finished the sequence of Brigham Anderson's book from "Advise and Consent." He stood up and sighed deeply, his mind filled with the numb wonderment that a single string (simple string) of words on a page could affect him so much.
6. On looking into Doré, imagine finding one mention of a book of "Doré's Orgies," and then maybe having a chance of seeing the orgiastic revels revealed.
7. Beethoven's "Heiligestat (?) Testament" bears a remarkable parallel with the loneliness of homosexuality. October 6, 1802, when he was 32, with 25 years to live, written just after the Sixth Symphony.
DIARY 611
10/1/69
CATCHING UP (BEFORE RAM DASS)
1) If it was possible for me to do ANYTHING wrong, I did it wrong!
2) PLETHORA of stimulation results in LESS reaction, because one "lesson" doesn't have time to sink in before next lesson "overwhelms" it.
3) Joe's humor: "I had a brandy, then I had a few MORE brandies."
4) Problem of plagiarism (or music stealing) can ONLY come when a complete computer possesses all books (or songs) and compares them AUTOMATICALLY for former use in that sequence.
5) Jules has a philosophy of life that he is always "about to tell" but never DOES, and people wonder "Is it 'none at all,' 'whichever you say,' 'inexpressible,' 'does he mean WORD or IDEA,' 'all philosophy,' etc" and question is NEVER answered, which IS the answer!!
6) In Akron we have BOND issues to get money for AU. Why not have FEDERAL bond issues, so the people who WANT war in Vietnam can PAY for it, those who WANT schools can PAY for them. Put on INCOME TAX FORM what the money must be spent for.
7) Gay guys fear toothed vagina (vagina dentata), but they happily stuff cocks into toothed MOUTHS!!
8) "God" comes SPONTANEOUSLY to mind in fear, surprise, EXTREME emotion. Best proof of his existence? Or of human's wishful thinking and brainwashing??
9) "Walk in the Shadow" ideas: Daughter was punished for the sins of the father, and he did not "Do unto others as he'd have them do unto him."
DIARY 1006
3/27/70
JOTTINGS
TAKEN AT BOB'S GALLERY: Maybe the reason for increased hunger during pot is the idea that man is ALWAYS hungry, and pot merely lowers the inhibitions about FEELING hunger?
He's learned to fill his day: lifting the eyehole to WATCH the coming person, looking to see the other's reactions of Carlin---and a guy asks about "small drawings with---black frames" (the cock drawings!)
PAUL'S MALAPROPISMS: The Iraqis are just the pyorrhea of the earth!
We all ate until we were simply GUTTED with food!
MORE WORDS FROM BOB: Added to "Satisfication," the satisfaction through fornication; Thisexhibition = sexhibition; and I don't recall whether Fernando called his nipple rings Sexitations (sex exitations) or Sextractions (sex attractions, or for that matter, see DIStractions).
QUOTATIONS FOR NOTATIONS: The Duke of Wellington said that Ireland must be considered an enemy country, but when he was reminded that HE was Irish, he remarked: "Because a man is born in a stable, that does not make him a horse."
Then Petronius Arbiter in the "Satyricon" wrote something that permitted Paul Gillette to translate as: "Just because the physician can make a diagnosis, does that mean he is immune from the disease?" (P. 270)
Circle, circle, circle.
Life!
Whirl, whirl.
Where is any there which has not been a here before?
Spin, span, spun.
Is there ever a now which will never be a then?
Turning, turning, turn.
You have seen, I see, we will see.
Any? Many! One wan one won.
Six billion, four hundred eighty-seven million, two hundred fifty-one
equals one.
John is Jon is Joan is Johan.
Whiz, gee, haw.
And it doesn't go any further than that because there isn't anything more than that to say.
DIARY 3473
12/13/72
MISCELLANEOUS NOTES
1. Pilobolus (PI-labalas: PIE labalas) GK: pilos: felt cap, ball + bolus, throwing. A genus of saprophytic fungi (order Mucarolia) notable for the forcible ejection of the entire ripe sporangium.
Sporangium: a case within which spores that are usually asexual are produced or borne.
2. Note from the ACC john:
Sartre is a fartre
How sinistral
Judging by the slant of your writing, you're not so dextrous yourself!
How gauche
There's nothing LEFT
RIGHT!
THAT was aDROIT!
DIARY 4326
1/21/74
NOTES FROM 1/7
Funny to see John on the sofa, tuned into TV, and ME in the chair, with my earphones throwing me into the midst of the Rolling Stones. I decided I just wanted to listen to music to relax and take advantage of the phone call to Charlotte Rosenberg, who said that I didn't have to have the Sociology index in until next Monday, so I had a few days spare to relax in before churning THAT out, and I really wanted to FINALLY feel that I heard the latest records I got so I could put them fairly away. But I'm caught up by the sounds from the TV in the middle of the passages of the songs, and I'm not really APPRECIATING the songs of the Stones, so I decide I have to get stoned to enjoy them! On "Sticky Fingers," then, the BEST parts are the "Bandal" (if orchestral, why not bandal?) parts when Mick's not singing. (Why can't I write without the impulse to underline, or to put into parentheses, or use the dash?) Probably, I say now, because I'm not sure enough about my writing itself communicating the tone of the piece, so I need all the typographic help I can get!
Then I record a dream: Incredible future world of a resort which is decorated in "antiques," present-day stuff, and going around to TINY chambers and being switched (probably from my talk of the big freighter rooms with Bernie this afternoon). Colorful rooms with greens and browns, but flecks of EARTHQUAKES thrown in. WHAT IS THIS earthquake mania I'm hitting? When I get VERY stoned and am expecting "something" to happen, I think any stray rumble from upstairs or downstairs or the subway beneath is the beginning of an earthquake (indeed, with the subways beneath, we COULD be experiencing earthquakes and THINK they're due to the subway!) and there's definitely this feeling in the DREAM, too. Maybe I'm conscious of the INCREASING probability that the quake is going to hit the WEST Coast any day, week, month, or SURELY year now, and that AFTER that happens, Jean Dixon said that it will happen on the EAST Coast, and then the news of earthquakes being studied in the Adirondacks, where no one associates quakes happening, would help to keep the idea fresh in my mind, ready to grab when it empties from grass.
DIARY 4345
1/22/74
MOVIE-AUDIENCE CIRCUS
Firstly there was the constant eating: one guy in front bought an ice cream cup, then immediately went out and bought another. Guys filed in with hot dogs in one hand, soda in another, and candy in the pocket, then they'd go get popcorn. A few things were thrown from the balcony above. People talked openly back and forth, particularly a black who would shout out to the screen "Fuck her," or "She ain't got no NIPPLES," or "She ain't got two good tits, don't bother with her, throw her back." And then when a woman behind chose to tell him to shut up, he got ENORMOUSLY incensed: "Shut up? Who you telling to shut up? I wouldn't even tell my DOG to shut up!" And I resisted telling him that his DOG would know enough not to talk during the movie, but I desisted because I finally couldn't stand the kid kicking the seat behind me, so I told him to stop kicking, and the black father got mad at "the mother-fuckin' white" who didn't even say please, as if I was to be blamed for his SON'S kicking someone else's SEAT. And then two women talked openly together behind me, being joined by some guys in front of them, and I guess they were just trying to get some customers for their trade after the movie. Then there was the instant camaraderie of three guys who exclaimed about the situations in one film, the uproarious applause when the NEW "God father" was becoming a godfather as about a dozen other people were being shot with bloody pellets, and the Coroleones were obviously the HEROES who were laboring under these AWFUL people who hated them for killing others, and how they just couldn't UNDERSTAND why anyone would want to kill THEM in RETURN. There wasn't even particularly the feeling that they were very unhappy with having to lie to their wives "No, I didn't have anything to do with killing him," a BALD lie that tickled the audience greatly. But it was like visiting another CULTURE, with different WORDS and sounds and morays being used, talking perfectly permitted "Hey Frank, where are you---are ya in the john?" food essential, and the movies only quite secondary, and the OTHER people in the audience not existing at ALL. When it will all erupt into open warfare I hope I'M not caught in the crossfire.
DIARY 8324
2/26/74
MORE BOOZE
MORE BOOZE
(Baubles---or was it Bubbles?---Out of Zolnerzak's Exuberance)
The turning point between idealism and realism is the Christmas you receive more cards than you send.
Daytime is light, night is dark---yet STARS are the farthest man SEES.
WHO WAS IT WHO SAID: "May you treasure each passing moment as if it were your last on earth, with people you love, and yet may your last moment delay until you sincerely desire it."
For dinner, fresh cherries and cheese.
All he has is what he was.
An enormously intimate production.
"He had a right to know."
"He may have had a right to know, but did you have the right to tell him?"
"So what you're trying to say is---"
"NO, I'm saying it; you're trying to understand it."
She stepped out of her apartment and covered the sidewalk with dogs.
She burped up an orange pool that smelled the way yellow looks.
She had the face of the prematurely artificially young.
"This goddam snake came through the grass and this fuckin bastard cut a fuckin dee-stick and caught him behind the fuckin head. The snake kept his fuckin mouth open and the son of a bitch lit a goddam firecracker and put it into his fuckin mouth. Blew his goddam head off, and the mother-fucker said, 'Look at the fuckin snake without a goddam head'."
When the alarm rang after that awful night, I picked up the vibrating clock and stared at it, wondering what it was and what I was to do with it.
"Let's play 'Mommy'."
"Not it!"
Children came into the room with "boo" written all over their faces.
"Her ain't talkin' to we, cause us's doesn't belong to she."
Columbia University subway station: "Larry loves Alice," with "loves" crossed out and "is dependent on" written in.
"If you had a brain, you'd take it out and play with it."
"This luxury round-the-world flight is only $1800!"
"One way?"
"Argh, I'm a horrible monster. I'm going to eat you alive."
"Fix your hair, dear."
"Your argument isn't new; your argument is the argument everyone uses who's opposed to that."
"You should sit quietly in a boat and listen to the calls of nature."
"She might be marvelously adjusted, but how much FUN is she?"
EVERYTHING he said was verbal.
"Did you beat the meat?"
Pause.
"Did you beat the meat?"
Pause.
"I phoned the grocer and told him you'd be home before he brought the groceries and meat over."
"She's a very pretty nice girl."
"I keep taking pills for vitamins. Vitamins aren't what I need, but what I need they don't have pills for."
They live in a very circumcised world.
"Bergensfjord. You know, that ship sponsored by the Fjord Foundation."
"How's the weather?"
"Cool, calm, and dry."
"Oh, just like my underarms."
"Gare d'Est."
"What's E-S-T?"
"Is."
"If her dress was any lower, it would fall off on her."
"No one's insulting you, stupid."
Eternal Films, Limited.
484 a pint, and only 974 for a full quart.
She shall have Muzak wherever she goes.
"And underneath her curlers she has wimples in her hair."
A tumultitudinous crowd.
Grave marker on Boot Hill in Tombstone: "Margarita: stabbed by a gold dollar."
Why is it that anything touted as sensitive is rarely sensible?
There were things in the lettuce, things which had crept or flown in and gotten caught when the head was picked. Perhaps they scurried about in green labyrinths scrambling to find the lost exit, or maybe they were crushed immediately by a hard muddied thumb between green book-leaves of fiber. But there they were, sodden and clinging, as I ate raw leaves plucked from the head: little black motes with wings and crooked legs. When I rubbed a brownish rust spot, much of it came off in a coherent piece of carcass, limp legs clinging to my finger as in life, and I brushed it against the table thrice before it scraped off. I crunched sand left from the washing and grimaced at the thought of small heads and thoraxes splitting between my molars.
[Elaine: ANY ONE TYPE of these could go on and on and on.] [lemmie no]
DIARY 8392
3/23/74
THREE IDEAS FROM 3/12
[There is SOME irony in the fact that I FOUND the pen to write down the three ideas, and then wrote THEM on the paper with the LTS HOURS, and then couldn't find the PAPER for days (must have left it at LTS?) and finally had to RECONSTRUCT the three ideas, thinking of the last one JUST NOW, too.] [Also, the note that on 3/22 I had a DREAM that "told me" the paper with the LTS hours and the 3 ideas is in the UPPER coat pocket, and I was quite SURE that that was TRUE, and went to the coat with triumph that was turned to ashes when all that was there was a soiled handkerchief. How sad.]
1. Read over someone's shoulder that the FCC has COMPELLED cable TV to make FREE time available for people as a forum---this sounds good on the SURFACE, but it takes me BELOW the surface to the idea that the FCC, far from REGULATING the industry, is out to MILK the industry for the membership OF the industry, and the FCC members probably OWN the cable TV companies, force the GOVERNMENT to pay for the "free" time for the people in the hopes of making EVERYONE want to OWN a cable TV set, putting MORE money into their pockets because the "value" of cable TV would have been "established" by the GOVERNMENT-SUPPORTED start of it. And, of course, as soon as it gets to be VALUABLE and IMPORTANT, the people are tossed off the airwaves and they DO start charging for the better movies and the ballets and opera and the specials that are now FREE on TV, turning what is GOOD into what would cost US money which will go into THEIR pockets. HATE them for it!
2. I don't write characterizations well because I don't READ for characterizations (the sci-fi novelettes I've been reading have been BORINGLY overlong on characterization for MY taste, though someone thinks sci-fi "ought" to be like that and VOTES for them), and don't VISUALIZE the people and the settings except for GEMS of moments, like "Lord of the Rings (settings, not Hobbits)" and "Orlando" and "If," all so powerful I CAN see them.
3. The idea that people are SEARCHING for answers they may have FOUND and covered with layers of OTHER things: I FOUND a set of answers with Krishnamurti, but now his ideas play LITTLE part in my life; I've FORGOTTEN their strength, and I have to RE-SEARCH (hm) my answers that I found BEFORE. People are SO strange!!
DIARY 8618
5/20/74
QUADRILOGUE: STRANGE DATE
HIS THOUGHTS:
She's really cruising me; I always wanted to try a woman, so why not try THIS. I wonder what she thinks of me as a PERSON? I hope I don't come across as being TOO much a novice. What do I do next? Maybe it'll just turn into an evening of conversation. She HAS got a nice body. I really CAN'T worry about not being turned on: like someone said, just go along with it, and if it works, fine; if it doesn't, OK too. I could die of embarrassment. What must she THINK of me? I wish this all never would have happened. But maybe it might work YET! There IS some feeling there! Hey---an erection!! She shouldn't have SAID that. Ogod, there goes the erection. A total loss. But at least I TRIED it. Maybe I'll try it AGAIN, sometime. Not too soon, though.
HER THOUGHTS
Groovy guy, wonder if he's got a place around here? I'll bet he's gay, it would be just my luck. I hope he doesn't catch onto the fact that I'm a virgin. He's got a nice apartment, he must be rich; that's nice. He's not very aggressive; I wonder where his fantasies are? Oh, he's older than I thought he was. Must be gay to keep together like that. I don't know what to do now. Maybe if I just go along with it, things will work out. I can always say it's my bad time. He's still cute. I should have paid more attention to the guy on line, HE probably would have been a real groove. HE was as cute as they come. Maybe I'll see him again somewhere, and we can make it. Just GOT to get out of here, it's a bad scene---I think he was just USING me, what a rotten thing to do to a nice girl like me!
HIS WORDS:
Hi, how do you like the movie? My place is just around the corner. Wanna drink? Smoke? What kind of music do you like? I don't see why not. Freelance work, but let's not talk about it. Nice tits. Oh, gee, thanks a LOT. Maybe if you just washed up a BIT? Well, I had two yesterday, maybe I'm a bit tired. But this is nice anyway, isn't it? Want another joint? Yeah, but it's all guy-guy stuff. I didn't know gals like that kind of stuff, too. Maybe I can call you some other time, when I'm not so tired. Thanks a lot for coming up. See you around.
HER WORDS:
I didn't have a thing to do tonight. I've got a roommate. Sure, why not? Whatever you like. I like your place. Wanna ball? What do you do? Want me to suck you off? A girl I once knew said that you had to be perfectly honest with what you said, and everything would turn out for the best. Hey, what could I do to help you turn on. I like you, you know? Oh, I'm getting so HOT! Do guys really do THAT, too? Remember my name. I'm in the phone book. Sure, I'd like you to call again sometime.
DIARY 8685
6/18/74
3 AM
3 AM Bob Zolnerzak
I ache from being upright too long.
Not easy with bending,
I stiffen.
Fluids freeze and cannot flow.
" ... dissolve to dew ... "
But there is liquefaction and liquefaction.
Why do echoes sound the same?
What rigorous unbending justice
adamant against mercy
returns like for like without a smile?
Ideas coil and recoil, snakes of smoke
that eat their tails.
Hold me.
Oh, care for me.
Cradle, rest, comfort---say that all is well.
Lie to me.
Yes.
I'm tired of truth;
let me melt in self-deception.
"Everything is just fine."
DIARY 8718
7/4/74
LAST OF THE JOTTINGS
Make the former "JOTTINGS" drawer into a "Writing for jobs" drawer, so I have the following LAST items to transcribe, some of which I think I DID already:
WHAT I DON'T LIKE ABOUT JOHN (ha, hardly makes any difference NOW!):
Trivial: 1) Occasional total closeness to new experience; 2) Unwillingness to gab SOMETIMES about trivia; 3) Unwillingness to admit that CIRCUMSTANCES change eating "habits," list "habits," and interest "habits." 4) Total lack of enthusiams for the WHACKY; 5) Total lack of hobbies, or interests other than work, sex, food, and people; 6) Lives to work and doesn't work to live; 7) Doesn't like sheer SCENERY on a trip; 8) Unwillingness to try something if he thinks it WON'T be fun; 9) CONSTANT fears about calorie intake; 10) Rationing my mother's visiting time; 11) eating HOT foods and taking COLD showers; and 12) we don't NECK much anymore!!!!
DEEP: 1) His mind-body disconnectedness in sex; 2) His NEED for fantasy during sex; 3) His difficulty in COMING OUT with talk and opinions; 4) His quality of "I'm always right, you're always wrong."
E = mc2 Energy = ML2 / T2 ENERGY = FORCE TIMES DISTANCE
"Basic energy/at speed of light = "Basic" mc2/at speed of light
"Basic energy = "Basic" mc2 TIMES c/ at speed of light
"Basic" energy = "conventional" mc3!
"I wouldn't be a doubt it a single bit." Dror Ami Schwadrom: 10:48 am, 11/13/73 A.D.
From the Third Unabridged: SMYTRIE: Scotch (orig. Unk.) collection of small creatures or things. Talk about a FEARFUL smytrie!!
Good words: Eclampsia - Discribing throes of orgasm
Criticastor - Clive Barnes
Also, I stumbled across "pelerine," a lovely word for a narrow woman's cape with narrow ends hanging down in front: this is Webster's SEVENTH New Collegiate Dictionary.
Graffiti in the subway: "Gay is good," and added below "Don't pick up the soap."
IT WAS PROPESTEROUS
DIARY 8809
7/31/74
POEM AFTER THE CLUB BATHS
To them, you were that beautiful
because
To you, they were that beautiful.
Stop right there.
Still, still those tears
Yet those tears?
Silent those tears?
Stop those tears?
Distill those tears?
Happy, happy, happy, happy
Sad.
Enantiodromia retroactivates criticasters.
Just do it,
Don't think about it.
That way lies time.
Ladies, time lies.
Sighing belies trying;
Trying belays sighing.
There is no placebo for death.
Some of the time most of the people try too hard most of the time sometimes.
DIARY 8965
9/24/74
AIR-UNIVERSE
Each half-breath is a cycle.
Breathing in, breathing out,
I could sense wisps at the ends of each gasp,
and that was the birth and the death of the universe
as was born and died the completed volume of air in my body.
DIARY 9083
11/20/74
NEWTON-RAPHSON'S POSTUREPEDIC COCKSUCKER
Note from longago: maybe a week: "Why does the phrase
"Newton-Raphson's Posturepedic cocksucker"
so DELIGHT me that I must jot it down
(though I shiver my timbers to get pen)?
Call it "The Name of Chapter 15."
OK?
DIARY 9149
12/14/74
NOTE FROM 12/12 PM
"Mother explains yogurt to a child and he sits in his corner, sucks his thumb (though he'd NEVER do that when MOTHER was around), and fantasizes about: the culture turning HIS body to yogurt, then the chair and the table and the bed and the room and Mom and Dad and Chester the dog and baby Margaret and the whole house and the whole block and even over to the SCHOOL and the whole---the whole ZIP CODE area and the whole CITY and the whole TELEPHONE zone area and the whole STATE and the whole---whole---whole DEMOGRAPHIC REGION and then the whole country and world---(big eyes, big circled arms, big mouth) and then---and then---it's go out to the MOON and the SUN and the STARS---and---and the AIRPLANES and the ships and the WATER---of (gasp) yeah, the water TOO and then, then---a dragon (or God, if you want) SWALLOWS it (laughs and claps) and then he SPITS the stars out like SEEDS. (Laughs and claps hands)---but decides he'd better not risk eating any yogurt, even though he likes the way it tastes.
DIARY 13944
1/14/79
BON MOTS
Bruce talks about his esthetic traits, saying he's becoming "less so, but so, nevertheless." He says he's "learning what it's like to be human," and I say "Far in---or foreign, as you like."
Dennis and I are talking about his emu, and I interpolate "Did you know that emu backwards is You me?" He laughs and I quickly say "Don't ask me what cassowary backward is." Dennis says, "Cassowary! ... I don't either."