On Tuesday I handed back seventeen papers I’d gotten from the beginning class, including one from L. It’s about a little girl who gets out of bed on Christmas Eve to spy on Santa. She never sees him but gets a shiny new bike the next morning. The final line is “I knew that this was going to be a very special Christmas.”
It was something a fifth-grader might write, and it made me sad that I was reading it. Her other story, “The New Me,” was about a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. I was talking about it to Sandi in the teachers’ lounge, and she told me she’d gotten the exact same story from someone else last semester. I looked in the right-hand corner of the title page and saw that L. had just whited over this other idiot’s name and then typed in her own. When I confronted her later in the day, she said, “Look, just tell me. Am I going to pass the class or not?”
Man ordering at Butera’s deli/prepared-foods counter: “Hey, give me one of them chickens what spins around.”
May 9, 1989
Chicago
This morning I made a list of chores that might lift my spirits:
1. Lose ten pounds.
2. Rewrite the last two stories so I can start something new.
3. Paint a picture of a mole.
4. Make myself go out when I don’t want to.
Again this year I made Mom a Mother’s Day card. It reads:
M is for the Morbid things you showed me
O is for the Other things you did
T is for the Thousand bucks you owe me
H is for the things you found I Hid
E is for the Error of my caring
R is for the Ranch house you call home
Mother dear, I wish that you had shown me
how to shave and how to use a comb.
May 28, 1989
Chicago
I have seen two fistfights this weekend. One was across the street from Steve Lafreniere’s, where two men confronted a skinny guy they’d seen beating a woman. “You ain’t supposed to hit girls, you stupid fuck, you asshole,” they said as they punched him.
Later, on Beacon, I passed two men fighting over a small bicycle, just pounding on each other.
June 21, 1989
Chicago
Since moving farther north I’ve been taking the bus to the IHOP. On the way home tonight I sat across from a woman with teardrops tattooed on her face. She had a bad complexion and hard features made all the more jarring by her outfit: a skirt and blouse, the blouse one of those high-collared ones with ruffles that a conservative lady might wear. The skirt was cream-colored. From my distance I could see that the clothes were cheap. I’d seen this woman before, but never sober.
After a few blocks, a man boarded. All the teeth on the right side of his mouth were missing and when he saw the woman, he said, “Doris!” He commented on her clothing and said it was fancy.
“Yes,” she said. “I decided to wear a dress for once in my life. Wonders never cease, do they, Roy!” She raised her hand to swipe away her bangs and I saw that there was a tattoo on her forehead as well.
July 4, 1989
Chicago
While on my bike I passed a woman walking with two young children. The little girl had a plastic six-pack ring wrapped around one of her feet, and her mother, noticing it, shouted, “What the fuck are you doing, bitch?”
July 20, 1989
Chicago
There was a shooting in Amy’s neighborhood last night. She and her boyfriend, Paul, heard the shots from their living room and figured they were firecrackers until they saw a crowd gathered in front of the house across the street. The man who lives there is very ugly and is missing a hand. In its place he wears not a hook but a pincer that starts at the elbow and is sort of like a crab claw. Eight police cars came. Officers led the man out of the house and started to cuff him, but then they noticed his pincer, at which point they took him by the arm and locked him in the paddy wagon.
On All My Children, Erica is being stalked by a dwarf. For a long time they just showed a hand that would draft ugly letters to her and turn off the local news whenever she appeared. I get the feeling I’m supposed to know who this person is, but I’ve been watching regularly for only four years so I’m at a loss. Meanwhile, on One Life to Live, Vicki has been shot in the stomach. Megan watched it happen and hasn’t made a sound since. I’ll bet anything she inherited Vicki’s multiple-personality disorder.
July 21, 1989
Chicago
I was right about Megan. Vicki’s shooting triggered her latent inherited multiple-personality disorder and turned her into someone named Ruby Brite, who likes gambling and speaks with a Brooklyn accent.
July 25, 1989
Chicago
Amy gave me her old toaster, which I put in the pantry and forgot about until last night at two a.m. I’d already had dinner, and plenty of it, but still I made two peanut butter sandwiches with canned peaches on them. I don’t eat like this when there’s no pot in the house, but now I’m back to sucking up everything in my path. Peanut butter and peaches? Since when do those two things go together?
July 30, 1989
Chicago
I was standing on Clark Street when an elderly woman approached riding one of those electric carts people take to when they’re not quite crippled enough for a wheelchair. “Out of my way, asshole,” she said. I moved to the side, and after driving a couple of feet past me, she chained her little chariot to a parking meter and hobbled into the restaurant I had just walked out of.
July 31, 1989
Chicago
Jewel is having a sale on chickens, 49 cents a pound, so I bought several and stood in line reading an article in New Woman titled “Infidelity: How to Keep Your Man from Straying.” It included several warning signs, as you need to know when your boyfriend or husband is feeling insecure and neglected. You need to take notice when he loses interest in sex, and you have to fight, fight, fight to win him back. The article suggested that a man’s infidelity is always the wife’s or girlfriend’s fault. It never considers that maybe he’s just an asshole.
August 7, 1989
Chicago
Anatole Broyard on Jane and Paul Bowles in this week’s New York Times Book Review: “Their marriage was so open it yawned.”
The blind fellow was at the IHOP last night with his father, and I listened as they discussed geography, particularly the states that make up the Great Plains, the Sunbelt, and the original thirteen colonies. Then he asked his dad about New York City, saying he’d heard they have no alleys there and that the people are rude.
“Rudest sons of bitches on the face of this earth,” his father said. “It’s crammed full of rude people and rich foreigners—Jews, Arabs, Japs—and they make it so you can’t afford to shit.”
The blind guy has a small voice and is very polite. His eyes are in the far corners of their sockets. Last night I noticed a lot of food stains on his shirt. The blind guy’s father, when talking about New York, reached behind himself and used his knife to scratch his back.
August 9, 1989