Chicago
At the library I got a biography of Dorothy Parker, and on the L, I dipped into the middle of it, where an old man reaches under the table for a lit cigarette. As he bends, his arthritic knees pop, and Parker stretches out her hands, saying, “Ahhhh, there’s nothing I love more than a good crackling fire.”
May 8, 1988
Chicago
They hired a waiter at the IHOP, a guy named Jace. He was OK at first, but now he brings in a portable TV and sits at the worktable smoking cigarettes and watching it. He tells customers it might be a twenty-minute wait before he can take their order, and one after another they leave. Last night there were three occupied tables. It was me, a couple, and a heavy man who waited for fifteen minutes before getting up to complain. Later at the cash register, Jace apologized for taking so long. “Sorry,” he said. “But I was watching a bullfight.”
A bullfight?
May 29, 1988
Chicago
I got so sick of being called Pee-wee that I bought a new bike with the money I earned painting for Gene. It’s like the one I had in Raleigh, a Frankenstein bike, made of different bits and pieces. The brakes are new, and the pedals. It’s been painted umpteen times and there’s a Playboy insignia on it.
June 7, 1988
Chicago
I checked The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories out of the library. One of the entries in it is titled “The Day I Sat with Jesus on the Sundeck and a Wind Came Up and Blew My Kimono Open and He Saw My Breasts.”
June 10, 1988
Chicago
The poet Elaine Equi was supposed to teach a writing class at the Art Institute this fall. Instead, she and her husband are moving to New York, so Jim phoned this afternoon and asked if I might be interested. It doesn’t mean I’ll get it, just that I’ve been invited to apply.
Adrienne started teaching a few months ago in Denver and wrote that it leaves you with a constant feeling of deceiving people. That you know nothing they don’t, or couldn’t learn on their own if they cared to.
June 13, 1988
Chicago
Frank, the super of the building I’m working in this week, is full of jokes. “Hey,” he said, “how come Puerto Ricans don’t pay with checks? Because they can’t write that small with spray paint.” Another joke was about a Polish man who, forced to shit in the woods, was advised to wipe himself with $1. In the end he winds up with shit on his hands and four quarters up his ass.
June 23, 1988
Chicago
Frank told me that the metal disk on the floor beside the bathtub is a cover for the drain and that when it clogs, you unclog it with a product called Clear Out. He then pulled down the neck of his T-shirt and showed me a half a dozen welts on his chest. “I opened a jug of it once and it spattered, so be careful,” he said.
Next he showed me a scar on his arm. Here he’d used Clear Out to remove an embarrassing tattoo. Now he has only one, a heart on his upper arm that reads I Love Patty.
I asked who Patty was and he told me she was his first wife. I asked if that made things difficult with his second wife, and he told me that Patty and their three kids all died in a house fire while they were still married in 1977.
House fire sounds different than just regular fire for some reason. It sounds meaner, hotter. He has one daughter left and told me that since the fire, he has gained two hundred and fifty pounds.
June 27, 1988
Chicago
Someone shit on the floor of the foyer I’m working on. Luckily Frank got to work before me, so I didn’t have to clean it up. It’s so sad to see human shit out of context.
June 28, 1988
Chicago
I got the job teaching a writing workshop at the Art Institute, and I owe it all to Jim, and to Evelyne, who typed up my résumé. My class will meet on Thursdays at one o’clock, hopefully in the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue, where we can sit around one big table. I love the rooms there but not the lights, so maybe I can bring in lamps to make it more appealing.
On Thursday I need to fill out forms and order books. I can make people read things! I’m thinking I’ll assign Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Tobias Wolff’s In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, and an anthology called Sudden Fiction because everything in it is short and it’ll make writing seem possible. They’re all great books, but between now and the start of school, I have to figure out why they’re great.
As a teacher I’ll have faculty meetings and cocktail parties. I can hardly wait. It’s only one class, but still I plan to buy a briefcase and play the part for all it’s worth. Now I can refer to all the Art Institute teachers as my colleagues. Dad is super-proud of me.
July 4, 1988
Chicago
We took a cab home from the Hotel Belmont and the driver scolded me several times. “Hey, buddy, don’t be crawling in my taxi.” Then he got mad at me for running my fingers along the track where the window meets the top of the door. “You’re nervous,” he said. “I know you. You’re going to ruin all the rubber up there with your nervous touching. See that No Smoking sign back there? See how it’s all worried around the edges? Nervous people done that too.”
Ronnie was catering a banquet where the guests were drunk and annoying. A man asked her if she was Italian and when she told him yes, he said, “I thought so. All Italian women have mustaches.”
I’d never noticed that Ronnie had a mustache, but still it upset her. When she got home she told Blair, who said she’d probably feel a lot better after a shower and a shave.
July 8, 1988
Chicago
I saw a man being handcuffed under the Sheridan L stop. He’d been beating a woman who wore a tight red pantsuit with an image of a cat stitched on each leg and the word Cat written above them. Her face was puffy from the blows, and she stood there threatening the handcuffed man, who tried to break free and kick her.
“Look at what you done now,” he kept saying.
July 10, 1988
Chicago
New American Writing published my story “Firestone” and sent me a check for $15. One of the things I bought with the money is a terrarium I saw at a yard sale. I was thinking I could put hermit crabs in it. I thought of a hamster as well, but they really stink up a room if you don’t keep on top of them.
July 15, 1988
Chicago