Chaos again Jan. 4, 1986

 

By August 1983, everything caught up with me.

Pauly hadn’t paid anything for the upkeep of the apartment for more than two months, and I was broke.

I had to put my car in the shop and so required me to take buses to the Fotomat in Clifton.

Fran was involved with Bill romantically, yet still coming around to have sex with me.

Things really got out of hand after Labor Day when I bounced two checks I had made out for food.

And the job turned into a nightmare as well, bad processing and late orders turning customers into lynch mobs with me the only possible target.

More importantly, I understood I needed to break my ties with Pauly, Fran and her brother or otherwise go crazy.

My nutty uncle leaned heavily on me for emotional support I didn’t have enough of to give him.

I went back to working at Dunkin. Having a real job went a long way to easing my psyche.

I worked my way back into becoming the night baker with the luxury of isolation. For the first time I truly understood what the piano tuner in Mollenkott’s class years early had meant about having too many people in her life, people making demands of time and energy.

Fran hated my going back to the night shift. She didn’t understand my need for money and space.

In November, Pauly and I had it out about Fran’s brother, who still hadn’t left even though he was supposed to have months earlier. Fran hung around a lot, too.  Pauly said it was all right for her to come around as long as she didn’t try to move in – even though he used frequently made use of her cookware, her stereo and other items she left behind with me.

Things got nasty one night when I let her stay over when I went off to work. He demanded to know why she was spending the night when I wasn’t there with her. He said he needed his space and didn’t want her hanging around. And strangely, I fully understood even when Fran got angry for me siding with him on the issue. If he was paying rent, he had some say in who got invited to stay.

And all this was on top with my trying to keep the peace with my ex-wife so I could continue to see my daughter.

Strangely, I felt more comfortable around Pauly, Hank, Garrick and Michael, than I did around the women in my life, perhaps some repressed homosexual tendency, or just the common pain of men whose women had abandoned them in the past.

And yet, whenever a woman came into anyone of our lives, we started avoiding each other. And the others tended to degrade each woman as if we were jealous, coming back together as a group only after the romantic relationship ended.

I remember how mean Pauly, and I were towards Hank’s Rona back in 1976 when we made that horrible tape about Hank’s life.

Pauly tended to put down all the women in Hank’s life, even before he got a chance to meet them, as if he automatically assumed they were “dogs.”

I was always attracted to Hank’s girlfriends.

Of course, by the end of the year, everything was in chaos again.

 

 1986 Menu


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