A D Journal 1986

  So we've come back to George the night guard, a man is lonely and isolated as any man I've ever met or rather part of that club of men who I often meet and befriend even though I often disagree with their lifestyles and their politics in general night guards at Willowbrook are not liked by other guards and people close to the mall perhaps this is do to the isolation and the envy of others who see them as something special or perhaps is something within the guard himself who is drawn to such duties  I don't remember whether Gene was hated but Chuck was and his replacement Dan as well as Billy and Joe and John and this man George In George's case it is love of power--  not flagrant power abuse like most guards get into--  but a deep seriousness about the uniform and the job that causes him to perform acts of aggression against those he believes unfit to inhabit the same uniform according to others in the night crew his partner and other people,  George...

  it's raining sort of and one of those days when I can hardly think and I want to write as much as I want to think these are Moody Days full of that same sour taste they used to get as a kid sitting protected on a porch as the rain pattern on the roof this and it's cold and I guess too much like a rainy Monday I keep thinking about Bob and all the other disappointments this year people suddenly getting the urge to move on poorly row and three families upstairs even Fran and is always the not exactly how I expected her to go she's still in Clifton working with her father and that almost employment record for her I thought she would head for Texas or at least for points further west instead she seems to have located herself within blocks of her job living I believe with a girl named Sue a superficial soul that friend used to complain about on a semi regular basis recently she and Bob talked largely about me about those things that kept Fran and I from being friends friend ...

  By this time, Bob Adams is rumbling West in a big yellow Ryder truck. his gold German rabbit into like a small child in supermarket clinging to his mother's hand I got to Morristown early yesterday and set by myself at the speedwell watching the water looking over the places where Anne and I had climbed once before. When I finally got to Bob's house I was nervous knowing well that this would be another one of those painful goodbyes Bob has been more than a friend Than many of the others realize. We got high at the neighbors house and waited for the others to begin the slow process of packing Bob's life away. He's less organized than he pretends but then anyone who's worked for him knows this already. But it didn't hit me as hard as this before when poorly and Rick showed up the day became comic snide remarks passed back and forth like bullets in a World War One trench comments mostly about Bob S simple unorganized blind 3 times we tried to pack a plastic bag...

    I talked about Mone yesterday and how she saved me when I freaked out on acid. But she did not long remain our friend, While my drug of choice was LSD, hers was cocaine, and she had more than one freak out of her own -once, when Hank and Bill Capella (the lone survivor of the building the Weather Underground blew up by accident) came visiting. Louise was pregnant, Bill was already nervous because the FBI was looking for him, wanting him to identify those who were in the building when it blew up. He would have hid out in New Jersey, but business forced him to come into Manhattan. Bill was a trooper who had been part of a number of merry Garleyland adventures, including the infamous trip to the shore in 1969. He had not wanted to go into the Weatherman’s building, but a friend and grabbed his hand and practically dragged him up the stairs. When he got there, he saw people sitting around a table full of bombs, and they were smoking pot. He decided it was not hea...

( Much of this is told in one of my novels ) The year 1971 began when Hank, my best friend, moved out of New York City, a place he had ached to live in from the day I met him at the Fabrian Theater. We had come back from the West Coast to be with him, and after only a few months since our return, he and his girlfriend (Peggy or Laura, which ever name she was using then) decided to relocate to New Jersey. Hank had been mugged once too many times and had developed a mythology about his own superpowers and defense stories which would get exaggerated as years went on. For a long as I can remember, Hank ached to live in The Village, as a musician and a hippie, ultimately proving he could be neither – not in lower Manhattan anyway nor on the Lower East Side. I was changing jobs at the time from one that I loved at the Mercury Messenger Service to one I came to hate at Service Hardware near East 90th Street. Louise was still pregnant despite our hopes that our child would be born ar...

  email to Al Sullivan

  Fighting the machine   Feb. 25, 1986   It’s no easy thing, fighting the machine – the network, the mindset that cares nothing about the individual, giving people numbers and designating each to a category of life which none can to readily escape sometimes this process is obvious like getting threatening letters from insurance companies and banks this subtle pressure comes from other ways like in the price of a car repair which climbs steadily up upward and without reason for instance, the simple repair of shocks which in most cars boils down to a matter of a few bolts. But redesigned it rises up to a job unbelievable. In my case $290 worth The threatening letters came by way of fotomat corporation over my benefits package I did not make enough money to cover the welfare garnish so in the end I find myself unable to force them to be human. Part of the problem which makes welfare people ashamed to collect and working class into slaves Louise d...

    My old car is dead; I can’t get it through my head. Don’t believe it’s already gone; but my old car is dead. My 60 chevy sat like this for a long time behind Donald’s warehouse in Fairfield, breaks shot, rods rattling, engine and transmission groaning each time it moved. I drove Donald’s van while waiting for my new Pinto to arrive from the factory. Eventually, I had the chevy towed away for junk, feeling then as I feel now, as if losing an old friend. The Pinto, or “The Old Grey Ghost,” as Bob Adams calls it, is dead ten years later. We went up there to try and revive it yesterday, bagging on the starter, putting water in the battery. But the heart and body of the old creature has begun to fade. I remember picking up the car from the dealer in the snow – my new car straight from the factory. It didn’t have snow tires. So, I had to stop off at the tire place on Passaic Avenue in North Caldwell, where I found I could not get the key out of the ignition. I drove ...