Jack uses the word tits to mean great. The hotel in Hawaii was tits. That red Camaro is tits. Replacing the valves beneath the sink was not tits. I stood and looked down at him on his back, his big belly exposed, while he cursed. In his own way, he’s a nice-looking man. In the late afternoon, we made a second trip to the hardware store.
Jack honked at shapely women as we passed them. “Hey,” he’d yell, “turn around, you stuck-up bitch.” He wasn’t what you’d call the silent type, not at all, and he charges $20 an hour.
February 6, 1990
Chicago
I asked my students if any of them had stolen anything lately, and two raised their hands. R. said he’d taken a sweatshirt at a party because he was cold. A few days later its rightful owner, a young woman, confronted him, and he ignored her. “She was rich and could buy herself another one,” he said.
There are a couple of students this semester I have a real hard time liking.
February 10, 1990
Chicago
I went to bed at three thirty last night and had just lain down when I heard a woman yell, “Somebody help me! Oh, God, help me!”
I couldn’t see people out on the street, but I could hear them, so I called the police and opened the window, at which point I could make out two shapes. The man kept trying to yank the woman upstairs. She would say no, and after he hit her, she’d scream for help again. Then he told her to suck his dick and gave her what sounded like a real wallop. When I heard her being slammed against a chain-link fence, I stuck my head out the window and told him to leave her alone. “I called the police!” I yelled. “I called them and they’re on their way.”
He must have heard me, but he didn’t stop. Just as I started looking for the baseball bat I don’t have—that and my missing courage—the cops came and flung open the doors of their squad car. I heard them call the man a son of a bitch and a motherfucker. They said, “You get your kicks from beating up women, asshole?”
The guy yelled that he wasn’t doing anything wrong, and the cops told him to shut up. They handcuffed him, and then they talked to the woman, who wasn’t sure she wanted to press charges. Two more police cars came, and a few minutes later they took the guy away.
February 19, 1990
Chicago
I spent all day waiting on Kool-T, who was supposed to deliver a bag of pot at one this afternoon and finally got it to me at nine thirty tonight. First his car broke down on the expressway, then his initial connection fell through. At nine I went over to his place. Then he, me, his wife, and their two-year-old daughter drove across town to some other connection’s apartment. It made me crazy to be inside all day. For a long time, I read. Then I graded student papers and wrote to a kid I had last semester who has since left town and wanted my opinion on a story he’d just finished. It was about his dog, Tipsy, having puppies.
At around five I called the mother of the deaf child whose birthday party I was supposed to go to. Then I talked to Lisa and Mom and Amy. Mom told me that Tiffany is dating a mailman, and Amy and I made plans to send her postcards reading “The tests came back positive” and “I need that $10,000 you owe me.” At around seven I watched part of a TV show where a kid with Down syndrome sang “Fight the Power” for his high school talent show. On the radio I learned that Keith Haring died of AIDS.
I really felt like I was in prison yesterday.
February 27, 1990
Chicago
It looks like I’ve got a place to live in New York. It belongs to Rusty Kane, a two-bedroom in the West Village. The couple he’s been subletting to is moving out, so he’s moving back in and has asked if I’d like to be his roommate. My half of the rent would be $400, which isn’t much more than I’m paying here, plus the utilities are included. New York, finally. Or almost. I think I can make it by August or September.
March 3, 1990
Chicago
I hailed a cab at four thirty this morning and got a driver with straw-colored hair. After I got in, he met my eyes in the rearview mirror and said, “Did you see any pussy out there tonight?”
I told him I hadn’t been looking, so some might have slipped by unnoticed.
“You can usually see pussy further south, on Montrose,” he said. “But a lot of that is sick pussy. ’Course, it’s a little bit cold out there tonight. Cold and late. A lot of that pussy is home now, home asleep.”
I’m often talked to like this by taxi drivers, and it makes me think their cabs should be a different color than the others—that way women will know to avoid them. It gives me the creeps that this guy might pick up my sister. Then again, if anyone could destroy him, it would be Amy.
March 22, 1990
Chicago
I taught today. Sometimes I go in with no idea of what to do. I have them write in class and then I go into the stairwell to smoke and try to think of something. Today I told my students about a friend of mine who is going through a breakup. “What do you do when you’re trying to get over someone?” I asked.
They gave me the best advice.
April 1, 1990
Chicago
Last night I watched the last half of A Patch of Blue on TV. I hadn’t seen it in ages and couldn’t help but wish that Sidney Poitier were my boyfriend. He’s so handsome and has such a great voice. At the end of the movie, Selina says that she knows he’s colored and that it makes no difference to her. He has arranged for her to attend a school for the blind, and just as the bus arrives to take her away, she announces that she loves him. He feels the same, I can tell, but needs to do what’s best for her. At the end, when he heads alone up the stairs to his apartment, I cried. I’d been wanting to do that all day, had tried most of the afternoon.
“Boo-hoo,” I’d said, lying in a fetal position on my bed. I’d hoped it might trigger something, but it felt artificial. And so it was great to happen upon A Patch of Blue. I was crying more for myself than the movie, but that’s how it usually goes. I cried hard. I sobbed. I went to the bathroom mirror, watched myself cry, and cried even harder. “I loved you,” I said to my reflection.
I wished then that someone would call so I could answer in my weary, broken voice.
“Wrong?” I’d say. “No, there’s nothing wrong on my end. Why do you ask?”
April 6, 1990
Chicago
Sarah Vaughan died three days ago. I have always loved her.
April 13, 1990
Chicago
I told the beginning students that it’s a tradition for the class to buy the teacher a gift at the end of the school year. Then I said I’ve had my eye on a watch that costs $160. “That’s only fourteen dollars each.”
After describing it in detail, I told them where it could be found. The end of the semester is approaching, so I’ll make a point to mention this again over the coming weeks. I want that watch. I must have it.
April 16, 1990
Chicago
On Greek Easter, I drank Scotch followed by retsina followed by ouzo followed by Scotch followed by brandy, and today I feel like I’ve been raked over by an acetylene torch.
April 18, 1990