I ran into Walt on the L this morning. He owes me $450 and said he was just going to call me the other day because Gail, his wife, is always saying, “We need to pay that David Sedaris.”
I actually don’t hold anything against him. I miss Walt and Gail. Walt said that last week she got a profit-sharing check for $10,000. That was why he planned to call—to pay me. He said he took the check to the bank but lost it along the way. It was physically big, he told me. “I folded it in my top pocket, and wouldn’t you know!”
He called the bank to cancel it, then he called New York for a replacement check, but the woman whose job it would be to write it was on vacation. “Wouldn’t you know it!”
At around five, I took the L home. A woman near me had a three-year-old child on her lap, a girl, who looked at me and said, “Mommy, I hate that man.”
Hours later, walking up Leland, I heard someone running up behind me. It was a guy who lives in the halfway house next door. He is black and wore a long-sleeved shirt buttoned all the way to the neck. The man called me sir and asked how I was doing.
“All right,” I said.
He told me that he had a taste for a steak sandwich and asked me if I’d buy him one. You can’t pull money out of your pocket on Leland Avenue. It’s like ringing a bell, so I said no and he ran across the street to ask a woman the same question.
Later still I saw two men sitting in a car in front of the halfway house. They had the door open and were listening to the radio. As I passed, one of them asked me for a cigarette.
“I don’t smoke,” I told them. Then I thought of the guy who wanted a steak sandwich and of the little girl who hated me and thought, What the hell. I handed the guy in the car one of my cigarettes, and he scowled at me and said, “Fucking liar.”
June 21, 1987
Chicago
I listened to a radio tribute to Arch Oboler, the creator of Lights Out, a scary program that aired in the ’30s. They interviewed him at his home in Studio City and then they played a few of his radio dramas, starting with “Cat Wife,” about a woman who hangs out with her friends, drinking and gossiping. Her husband calls her a cat, and then she turns into one.
It was a fifteen-minute story dragged out to half an hour. Boris Karloff played the husband and would say, “You, Linda, are nothing but a cat. A cat, do you hear me? You remind me of a cat. When I think of you, a cat comes to mind. You…cat, you. You belong in an alley with your friends, yowling and carrying on. Cat.”
When Linda turns into a cat, Boris Karloff feels responsible. He tries to keep it a secret and murders two people who discover the truth. Then Linda claws his eyes out and he shoots himself by accident.
June 22, 1987
Chicago
When John Tsokantis was growing up in Greece, he learned to play water polo and smoke. He told me that when kids misbehaved in class, the teacher would send them to the corner, where they had to kneel on a pile of rocks.
I like the kind of man John is. He watches things closely and then does nothing with the information. His English has improved since I met him four years ago, shortly before he had an aneurysm. The other night at a pizza restaurant he played a game of picking out the thirty spies hidden in the landscape of his place mat. I couldn’t find even one, but then he explained it. “Is not the whole thing,” he told me. “Only the heads of the spies.”
July 11, 1987
Chicago
Last night I watched a made-for-TV movie called Consenting Adult. It was another of those programs about how people with station wagons solve problems. In this case the problem was the son, who turned out to be gay. Marlo Thomas played the mother, and after learning the truth, she pulled her car off the side of the road and wept. It was silly, and watching it I wondered why such movies always concern the upper middle class. If they were a minority family, the show would be a situation comedy and everyone would laugh it off.
July 16, 1987
Chicago
I went to the library and passed a street musician who had a live weasel in his guitar case. It was on a leash and was taking a nap. There was a girl at school who had a weasel, though she called it a ferret. She said it was sweet and would burrow under the covers while she was sleeping.
If there was a weasel in my house, I’d move.
July 26, 1987
Chicago
When Steve was six years old, his family lived in Hollywood and he appeared on The Pat Boone Show, which had a segment involving kids and the adorable things they sometimes come up with. He remembers saying, “A doctor or a fireman,” but can no longer remember whether he was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, or who he wanted to sleep with.
September 13, 1987
Raleigh
Amy said loudly to Paul’s girlfriend yesterday, “Hey, did that bleach ever work on your mustache?” They were in a crowded ladies’ room, and everyone turned to look at Angie’s upper lip.
Later she said to Mom in line at the grocery store, “It’s great they gave you your license back so soon after that DWI.”
September 20, 1987
Chicago
Before I left Raleigh, Mom walked the dog up the street and back. It’s part of her exercise, and she went as far as the Andrewses’ old house, where Melina peed in the driveway. Just then a boy drove up and told my mother to get the fuck off his property. He called her a bitch and a cunt, so Mom returned home, dropped off the dog, and went back up the street, where she told the kid that he couldn’t talk to her that way. “Yeah?” he said. “Well, how’d you like it if I shit in your driveway?”
Mom said Melina was only peeing, but peeing and shitting were the same to this kid. Again he called her a bitch and ordered her off his property. Then he threatened to come to our house with his Doberman pinscher.
“Do you have a Doberman pinscher?” Mom asked.
He said no but that he could just come alone and pee in our driveway.
Mom said it was good that he didn’t have a dog and that she wouldn’t put it past him to pee in our driveway. She told me this in the kitchen as she poured herself a drink. Then she made me promise not to tell Paul because he would make trouble and as a result Melina could wind up dead.
I can’t keep a secret to save my life, so she said that if I do tell him, she’ll never help me out again.
Help means money.
My lips are sealed, which is a pity. Paul would have gotten inventive revenge. He’s not the type to pour sugar in someone’s gas tank. Rather, he’d steadily chip away at this boy and his family. He’d be patient, and just when they thought it was over, he’d start again. It would go on for years until they begged for mercy. That Mom felt safe telling me about it is a real shame. An embarrassment, really.
November 2, 1987
Chicago
I bought an old newspaper photo of a suicide note left by a man named Wilbur Wright who hanged himself in the county jail. “I can’t go on,” it reads. “Life isn’t worth anything without you forgive me. Bobbye I love you more than you’ll ever know. May God watch over you and our baby. Bill.”
November 3, 1987