A D Journal 1986

   There comes a time when people seem different. Not because they have changed drastically, but because of how I’ve changed, and have come to look at them differently. This was particularly true with my relationship with Hank. I thought Hank had changed utterly from when I first met him in 1967 to what I thought he became in 1973, when in truth, I’m the one who changed, having grown up, gone through experiences I hadn’t had before. I was a naïve redneck when I met him at the theater, and he was so avantgarde, someone who seemed to have landed on my world from Mars or beyond. I was utterly impressed, and took to the streets of Manhattan with him, in search of a Greenwich Village that hadn’t existed since the 1950s, but we both ached to find. It never occurred to me he was a lot like Peter Pan and I was too consumed by pixie dust to notice just how selfish he was, and petty, much like the generation he ached to be a part of, excluded from the cool club in school so ...

  Media is calling it the greatest disaster since the Hindenburg, if not in total loss of life, then in money, a billion-dollar machine gone up in smoke, exploding on the edge of space, taking seven lives as well as the dreams of a country. The loss may be even greater than they are telling us, space itself. Mary, my uncle’s wife’s sister – a high level muckity-muck from high level muckity -muck university, had a project on the shuttle, and has been on the phone with high level muckity- mucks all day about it. She knew what few others knew that the crew did not perish in the explosion but screamed the whole way down until their craft impacted with the earth. The whole affair has left me shaken. This last year has been one filled with disasters, national and personal, including the fire in Passaic that nearly left me homeless. The cumulative effect has left me pessimistic about the future, though this last one hit me in the gut because I watched the deaths occur on natio...

      Super Bowl Sunday is over and the haze of it fades like a bad dream, whose details didn’t matter to me in the first place since football is not my sport – except maybe in the early 1970s when cigar-chomping Cecil (Pauly’s father) constantly bitched about how bad the New York Giants were, and me, Pauly, Alf, Garrick and others played our own sad version of the game. In play, I was practically thrown over some hedges. In another, I deliberately tripped Alf and he got so peeved he threatened to kill me. The day after each of these “games,” I was so sore I vowed never to do it again, but always did. The last time we played, I was in better shape. But Pauly had an issue with Stevie’s boa constrictor which shit on Pauly’s foot. There was always some comic relief when it came to these sporting disasters, even when only three of us showed up. Pauly like his father had the NY Giants in his blood. This year it was infectious, so even I caught a bit of the hype. I ac...

   It’s hard when you give someone hope and then yank it away. That’s what happened in 1974 when Louise refused to let me stay at her house, ending any thoughts of reconciliation. For years, I hated her for that, but only recently came to understand why she needed to do it. The 1974 incident was preceded by her calling me in November 1973, telling me we needed to talk, and promised to call me back. I was living in the rooming house in Montclair at the time, but didn’t trust the pay phone, so rushed down to my mother’s house on Trenton Avenue, Paterson, to await her call. Since I didn’t have a car, I had to take three buses to get there, a two-hour trek that might have taken twenty minutes by automobile. The whole idea shocked me because we’d been estranged for more than a year and half without any hope of resolving our differences. I thought she would never talk to me again after my idiotic behavior during our break up and its immediate aftermath. When I got ...

    Phil is a good businessman. From outside, anyone observing him would think he has everything attribute necessary to be a truly successful American capitalist: he’s cheap; heartless’ ruthless, a bigot, with more than a little touch of Machiavelli. He’s not one of your typical cigar-chomping capitalists. He’s a mouse of a man, with small hands, and a thin moustache like a Mississippi River boat gambler, the kind that always get shot when caught stealing. His narrow, dark, pin point eyes never look in one place long, won’t be pinned down by anyone else’s stare. His gaze jumps nervously everywhere, at the background, at the foreground, always searching the landscape for lost pennies. His smile (and he does this way too often for my comfort) is more like a sneer, upper lip lifted to reveal two large teeth like that of a rabbit. His business experience comes from instinct for doing just what he needed to advance himself, going four years to college only to graduate...

 Michael the intellectual. It is his dominating trait, broadcast in a thousand little ways, although at the same time, he rebels against it, desperate to seem hip and not a nerd. Yet lately, he’s changed his style of dress, pull over sweater, casual shoes, button down shirt, and dark dress jeans. His bag is always at his side, of ragged green canvas, stuff with the current book he is reading, a proper notebook, pens and an assortment of other curiosities. He is tall, lean with dark hair and sports a scraggily black beard much like D.H. Lawrence, and though the styles eye glasses have changed drastically over the last few years, Michael maintains old fashion blacked framed glasses more popular in the 1950s than in any times since. He changes his appearance slightly when he goes to his job at the book store in New York – white shirt and tie – but even there, or perhaps especially there, he retains his role as preacher of literature. At home, his hair comes down. The floor...

   There is an old saying that claims that the world can’t be wrong. If enough people are saying something, then it must be true. Maybe it’s time for me to reevaluate my priorities. Dr. Grant invited me to submit something to the playwriting program at college. Unfortunately, I was working on a TV sitcom and submitted an episode of that, something that just did not fit well on the stage, even though the student actors did their best to make it work. It was only seeing it on stage did all the flaws become obvious, the wrong timing, breaks for commercials rather than natural breaks a short play should provide.   It was also so utterly superficial, a more or less meaningless plot. For several years, I’ve been obsessed with putting “bones” into my writing, rather than jazzing it, my stories prior to this rising out of my poetic sense rather than any fictional structure. But in seeking to insert structure into my work, I lost an important poetic essence that made...