At the IHOP a boy had an epileptic seizure. I’d never seen one and didn’t tonight either. I knew something was going on behind me but didn’t turn around to look until the boy was asleep on the floor. He was snoring and his mother stood over his body while his sister ran to use the pay phone. Firemen came, and then an ambulance. An EMT guy woke the kid up gently, saying, “Terry? Hey, buddy. Hi, boy. Say, buddy, do you know what day this is? Do you realize you’re at the International House of Pancakes? Do you?”
They put him on a stretcher and told him several times to relax. When they wheeled him by, I saw his face. He looked like someone had woken him up in the middle of the night and told him to get packed because it was time to move. He was black, and very light-skinned. Do black people become pale? Why don’t I know that?
Last night Gretchen wore high heels, and the minute we got home she kicked them off, saying the sound was driving her crazy. “I swore to myself I’d never have a roommate who wore shoes like this,” she said.
It’s been nice having her here. Every day she goes to the beach to revive her tan, and every day men fuck with her. They call out concerning all the various parts of her they’d like to have access to. Men on bikes, on the street, on the train. I forget how much crap women have to put up with. Last night when she was walking down Devon, a group of six boys called out, “Wooooo, baby. C’mere.”
She walks on.
July 22, 1988
Chicago
I’ve been working on a new story and have pages of IHOP notes spread before me that I can’t read. One says gammerstrayer.jermei.
Oprah had a show about people who have forgiven the unforgivable. One girl forgave the fellow who stabbed her twenty times and then stabbed her father, a minister, to death. She had pleaded for a stay of execution, as had the man whose grandmother was stabbed to death by a gang of teenage girls. I remember when that case was all over the news. The grandmother who was murdered taught a Bible studies class.
A woman on the panel forgave the man who killed her son while driving drunk on Christmas Eve. He’s a frequent visitor at her home now.
There were two other guests, a woman who would never forgive the man who raped and drowned her sister, and a black woman who was shot in the stomach by gang members who then molested her daughter. She said she could hear the girl crying out, and Oprah said, “Did you help her?”
“No,” the woman said, perhaps feeling put on the spot. “I was shot and bleeding profusely.” She explained that she still has a bullet lodged in her kidney and doesn’t see the sense in forgiving anybody. “Hate is what’s kept me alive,” she said.
In today’s paper I read about a six-year-old girl who was stabbed seventeen times by her mother’s cousin. He was looking for money, apparently. I’m always struck by how many times people get stabbed. It seems like it’s never just once or twice. It must be one of those activities that, once you get started, you just can’t stop. The girl lived, but according to her grandmother, after the stabbing she developed a mean streak and is bossy now and picks fights.
July 29, 1988
Chicago
The subject on Oprah was profound handicaps. Two of the guests were parents of a teenage boy who weighs only thirty-six pounds. He is blind and dumb and now has impaired hearing due to an ear infection. He doesn’t have any thoughts that they are aware of, and he lives at home.
The father explained that the government will only pay SSI if you make under $17,000 a year. He advocated for a national catastrophic health plan and that was fine, but he wouldn’t stop talking about it. He said his daughter has diabetes and that his other daughter almost had cancer. Again and again he interrupted his fellow guests, and in time I grew tired of him.
In the middle of the show, Oprah brought out a twenty-four-year-old man. She said, “Jimmy, here you are. You have no arms. You have no legs. What keeps you going?”
Jimmy was optimistic and spoke about his life at the university where he studies child psychology. He kept saying that: the university. He said that his roommate in the dorm keeps the TV and radio and computer on the floor so he can get to them. Jimmy’s neck was thick and muscular. He wore a suit with the arms and legs pinned up.
Another guest, a young woman, had all her limbs but they were too small. She could walk but needed crutches for long distances. Forks she could manage, and light loads. She said she wanted to die but didn’t have the wherewithal to commit suicide.
Jimmy said he just wanted to help people. Once, when he was talking, they identified him at the bottom of the screen the way they often do on talk shows (Judy: seeks revenge; Marco: loves women). His read Jimmy: happy to be alive.
A couple in the audience stood to talk about their twenty-seven-year-old son who had the mental capacity of a newborn baby. The husband was handsome and in his late fifties with a West Side Chicago accent. “I ain’t fed my boy in twenty years,” he said. “I’m ascared to.”
I think I’m the ideal viewer for a show like this. After watching, I felt so lucky, like it’s a blessing just to be broke and have bad teeth.
I worked in Linda’s garage today, and at one point the kid who lives across the alley came over to me, asking, “Are you a boy or a man?”
July 31, 1988
Chicago
This afternoon I went to Montrose Beach, which was quiet and not nearly as packed as Foster. It rained yesterday, so the sand was hard. I’d been there for an hour, reading, when two men and three children moved near me. One of the men was missing his left hand. His arm was fine until a few inches above the wrist, where it tapered to a point. He sat on a blanket while the other guy took the kids into the water, all of them fully clothed, some with long pants on, even.
While they horsed around, the man with one hand turned on an enormous radio and tuned it to a mastermix station where the songs are not sung so much as bleated. Bleated and repeated. After a few minutes of this, a fellow in a tank top came over and asked that the music be turned down. The radio was so loud I couldn’t hear their argument, but at the end of it the one-handed man lowered the volume.
When his friend came back, the one-handed man related what had happened. He made a fist with his good hand and held the other arm straight out like a lance. “I was just about to hit that asshole,” he said. “I tolt him, ‘This is a free country, isn’t it? Isn’t this a public beach?’”
The wet guy looked off toward the water, trying to pick out the person who’d told his friend to turn the music down. He said it was good to bring up the free-country business. He’d have said the same thing.
August 7, 1988
Chicago