Chicago
Betty Carter is perfection. They just played her version of “What’s New” on the radio. It’s on her latest record, and I think I’ll buy it for Dad. Female jazz vocalists are just about the only things we agree on. When good music would come on the radio at home, he used to call me into the living room and make me sit still until the song was over, saying as it played, “Are you listening to this? My God!”
April 8, 1984
Chicago
There was a severely handicapped guy at the IHOP tonight. He was with two men and a woman, and I watched as one of the men spooned ice cream into his mouth. Everyone involved was black. The guy in the wheelchair could not talk; he could only moan. I couldn’t tell what it meant, though: Was he in pain? Was he unhappy? It sounded like he was being tortured—horrible to listen to. The woman kept scolding him and calling him a show-off. She said she would quit taking him to nightclubs if he kept on acting that way. Does he think the IHOP is a nightclub, I wondered, or is she referring to someplace else?
April 29, 1984
Chicago
At night in warm weather, the courtyard of my building is crowded with children jumping rope and playing various games. They’d bashed in a pi?ata while I was at the IHOP, and I returned to find bits of it all over the ground, lying among candy wrappers. This afternoon I was working, and when someone knocked on the door, I answered wearing a hideous rubber mask I’d brought back from Raleigh. I’d assumed a kid had come around, but instead it was the man down the hall, who asked for a cigarette.
April 30, 1984
Chicago
The woman next door came, asking for a cigarette. Four minutes later she sent her daughter to ask for another one. The next time I just won’t answer. All day long I fend off people who want my cigarettes. It’s not right that I should lose the battle in my very own home.
May 24, 1984
Chicago
Last night Neil caught another mouse. It was two a.m. and I was in the kitchen working. After presenting it to me, she set the mouse down. He was still alive, and she pounced on him when he tried to make a run for it. She batted the poor thing about, and after a while I started feeling sorry for him. “You’re being cruel,” I said. “Put yourself in his shoes, why don’t you?” I picked her up, and the mouse ran into a hole under the radiator. Looking back, I shouldn’t have gotten involved. I went to bed then, and she stayed up to sulk.
May 30, 1984
Chicago
Edith Sitwell said that one of her favorite pastimes was to sharpen her claws on the wooden heads of her opponents.
June 14, 1984
Chicago
I met with a guy named Harry, who’s started a refinishing business. I’d hoped I was done with chemical stripper, but he’s offering $5 an hour and we’ll be working in people’s houses rather than in a garage. The interview was held at Harry’s apartment, a big clean place, nicely decorated but with the TV on. His wife was at work, and after asking me a few questions, he offered me a beer. Then he rolled a joint, and I thought, Great, I’ve found a job.
June 25, 1984
Chicago
I found a letter on the ground near the neighborhood McDonald’s. It reads:
What I think about my mother
My mother is a bitch.
Motherfucker shitty ass.
Haffer goddamn nigger sucker she raisin’ witch. Shit.
signed Charlene Moore
June 30, 1984
Chicago
At work Harry told me about his brother Bob, who died a few years ago at the age of twenty-six. Bob had bad luck. He was an epileptic, and a seizure he once had while driving caused a ten-car pileup. Later he fell down some stairs and broke both his legs. Finally he was hit by a train while walking, which is strange because trains don’t generally sneak up on people. For the most part, barring a derailment, you know exactly where to find them.
All that was left intact after he was run over were his hands.
August 13, 1984
Chicago
Ken Shorr, the guy I had for 4-D, called a few days ago and asked if I’d be interested in being in a play he wrote. I haven’t acted since high school, but it’ll be just the two of us and he is terribly funny. I went to his place last night and met his wife and newborn son. They didn’t have any ashtrays, so I used a plate. We talked, and he gave me a script I brought home and read. I already have the first page memorized. I play his father.
August 15, 1984
Chicago
Tiffany was rushed to the hospital in New York the night before last. It turned out she was four months pregnant and the baby was growing in her fallopian tube rather than in her womb. It’s called an ectopic pregnancy, and she knew nothing about it until she started hemorrhaging. “Do you have any questions?” the doctor asked before he performed the operation to extract the fetus.
And in a weak voice Tiffany said, “Yes. When can I have sex again?”
You really have to hand it to her sometimes.
August 26, 1984
Chicago
Tiffany’s been home for two weeks, and Mom can’t take it anymore. Last night they had a fight and pulled each other’s hair. Tiffany is twenty-one now. Mom called to tell me about it and to offer me $300 to spend on school clothes. Three hundred dollars!
August 30, 1984
Chicago
Tonight at the IHOP two men were hostile to Lisa the waitress. They had ordered hamburgers and kept pestering her as to their whereabouts. Were those them, under the heat lamp? They better not be!
The men were gay, a couple. Both were in their fifties and one had a mustache. Lisa gave them some lip and they stormed out. I was at the register when one of them returned and told her she could take his hamburger and shove it up her ass. When saying this, he lowered his voice to a whisper and narrowed his eyes.
The two men live near the bowling alley in a basement apartment. I often walk by and see them in there, sometimes lying around in colorful underpants watching TV. Their floor is carpeted and there’s a dumbbell in one corner.
September 6, 1984
Chicago
School started, and I had my first writing workshop, taught by a woman named Lynn Koons. There are twenty-five students in the class, and she had us arrange our chairs in a circle. Then she asked us each to recall a vivid image from a dream. Oh, no, I thought. Dreams!
September 10, 1984
Chicago
Tonight was my first art history class. It’s called Artists’ Diaries, Journals, and Notebooks. The teacher, Stephen L., explained what we’d be reading and told us we’d have one major paper. I think I might want to do mine on Edmund Wilson, but it’s early yet. Before the break we were shown a number of slides, and when we came to a Paul Klee painting, the guy beside me said loudly, “I could do that.”
He was wearing a leather jacket, just trying to be funny.