Chicago
Jehovah’s Witnesses came again this morning, this time a pair of young black women. I told them I already had both current issues of The Watchtower, and they gave me some information on their next big meeting. If I were to become a Witness, then I could go door-to-door just like they do.
June 3, 1987
Chicago
This afternoon I found a $50 bill in the foyer of the building near the mailboxes. It was folded thin and full of cocaine. Some of it spilled when I opened it up, but there’s still plenty left. So that’s $50 in cash and around $80 worth of cocaine—$130! If I find $50 every day, I won’t need to get a job.
June 7, 1987
Chicago
I dared myself to lean too hard against one of the living-room windows yesterday, and it broke and cut my elbow up. Later in the afternoon I took the empty frame to the hardware store, where they said it would cost $30 for new glass. That seemed exorbitant to me, so I was walking back home by way of the empty lot when an American Indian woman grabbed on to it, saying she’d been looking for a window frame just like this. “I need it,” she said. “Hand it over.” Her face was strikingly flat, and for a second all I could do was stare at it.
The woman was holding a beer bottle and put it down so she could grab my window frame with both hands. “Turn it loose,” she said, and the several drunk people behind her cheered her on. Then a man who was slightly less drunk told her to let it go. “Leave him alone, Cochise,” he said. “This here’s a working man.”
I haven’t worked in more than three weeks, but it was nice to be mistaken for someone with a job. Today I took the frame down a different street to the L, where I thought I’d try another hardware store. Right near the station a man asked me for money, and when I walked by he shouted, “Watch where you’re going with that thing, asshole! You almost killed that girl. You almost hit her with that window, you fucker.”
I said, “What?”
“You just about hit that baby, you son of a bitch. I’m going to kill you. I’m going to teach you a lesson you’ll never forget, you little fuck. You can’t get away from me.”
The guy was really beside himself, and I’m lucky I was so close to the ticket window. I worried he’d panhandle enough money to reach the platform before the train arrived, but luckily he didn’t. And what baby? I didn’t see any baby.
Why did I have to break that window, and on a dare, for God’s sake?
June 11, 1987
Chicago
I got a few days’ work painting for Lou Conte, a nice guy in a high-rise. On Tuesday afternoon the doorman in his building chewed me out for riding in the elevator. He said, “How did you get upstairs this morning? How?”
The main elevator is burled walnut. It was very clean, and riding in it, I wondered why anyone might ever think to deface anything so beautiful. Not that it was defaced.
The doorman marched me around back to the service entrance. He said, “Our tenants don’t want to come home and find people like you in the lobby.”
I just happen to be a college graduate, I wanted to say. But of course I didn’t, as it never works to get huffy in these situations. If I have to, I’ll just take the nice elevator from Lou’s floor, then change to the service elevator on two. The service elevator is like riding in a cat-food can.
There were two men at the IHOP tonight. One was brokenhearted and did not give the other guy a chance to talk. His topic was getting over Beth. “The relationship didn’t fall apart,” he said. “It was torn apart.”
June 13, 1987
Chicago
We went to Betty’s Lounge for a drink last night. It’s never crowded, and when we arrived, there was only one customer. She looked like a grandmother and wore rimless glasses and a straw hat with fake flowers on it. The woman was drinking beer and playing pinball, fighting the machine but never calling it names. I was watching her when three other women came in, two of them wearing feed caps. The bartender singled out the one who was bareheaded, saying, “I’ll close up shop before I ever sell to a nigger, and that’s what you are: a white-faced nigger.”
All three women appeared to be drunk. Two of them adjusted their caps while the third one said, “You can’t talk to me that way, you son-of-a-bitching asshole.”
The bartender told her to leave. Apparently she’d shot a friend of his named Doug, with whom he had once worked at an ice factory. He said he would not serve any bitch that would shoot a man in the back with his own fucking gun, shoot him while he was shaving, no less. “How many years did you get, bitch?”
“Your mama’s a fucking bitch,” the woman said.
The bartender lit a cigarette and threw the burning match on her.
Then the woman started to cry. She said that Doug deserved to die and asked how the bartender would like it if someone pushed his head through the basement window and kicked his ass up and down Magnolia Avenue.
The bartender said she deserved it.
“Why, you bald-headed…you white-haired bastard,” the woman said. “I’ll shoot you too.”
“You ain’t never going to get the chance to kill me, nigger, ’cause I’m never going to turn my back on you,” the bartender said.
The woman stepped toward the door and called the man more names. She said she didn’t want to stay in this dump anymore. “Come on, girls!” she shouted. “Let’s go down to the Wooden Nickel.”
But her friends didn’t join her. They stayed. After she left, they ordered drinks and told the bartender that they never liked that bitch in the first place. Never.
June 14, 1987
Chicago
Geraldine Page died yesterday of a heart attack. I heard about it on the radio. She was one of my favorite actresses.
I went to the beach at Montrose Harbor and sat on a towel for a while. People there barbecue and then dump their hot coals on the grass and drive away, leaving everything else behind. They throw garbage into the lake just to watch it float. Children swim in the shallow water and pull soiled Pampers up from the bottom. What I like about Montrose Beach is that all the loud music is in another language.
Bad teenagers hang out in the alley behind our building, and whenever they see me on my bike they call me Pee-wee, after Pee-wee Herman, because I have an old one-speed that cost $8. It gets on my nerves, but if I had a better bike they’d just steal it.
June 16, 1987
Chicago
I had an elaborate fantasy yesterday after the kids called me Pee-wee again. I kept thinking how great it would be to follow them home, buy their apartment buildings, and evict them. I don’t know what I would do with the buildings after I bought them. I wasn’t thinking that clearly.
June 19, 1987
Chicago