Chicago
Again in class we talked about love. A.’s fiancé just slept with her best friend, and she’s written them both off. D. was beaten by her boyfriend twice before she left. R. confessed to hitting his girlfriend so hard, he knocked her out. Two students are married, two are engaged, three have mothers who have been married three times, one has children, three are heartbroken, three others can have sex tonight if they make a few phone calls and beg.
April 25, 1990
Chicago
Amy and I decided a few years back to call ourselves the Talent Family. In the fake bio I’m constructing for us, I claim that two of our earlier plays were A Testament to Tansbury and Cassandra, Albeit Cassandra.
May 6, 1990
Chicago
A bumper sticker I saw on a beat-up car: THIS AIN’T THE MAYFLOWER, BUT YOUR DAUGHTER SURE CAME ACROSS ON IT.
A man at the IHOP tonight lifted his entire steak with his fork and held it before his mouth, chewing off hunks of it.
May 20, 1990
Chicago
Mom called to tell me that, according to my horoscope in the Raleigh News and Observer, in two weeks I’ll get exactly what I’ve been striving for. That’s two weeks from yesterday, meaning June 2. She sounded excited, so I got excited as well. Why do I always fall for this?
May 21, 1990
Chicago
Amy and I were leaving the Century mall when a guy approached and asked if we’d take part in a survey for a new candy. We answered two simple questions and thought we were through, but then he led us downstairs to a basement where we were shown a mock-up of the product and interrogated for what felt like hours.
The guy who took down my answers had frizzy hair to his shoulders, and skin that was too white even for a white person. He wore a blue cotton lab coat and laughed nervously after everything he said. He was really a mess. This was a marketing test for a “lite” candy bar called Forever Yours. The pale guy told me it contained NutraSweet and was only 120 calories. One of the questions he asked was “Do you think this product fulfills a continental heritage?”
I was like, “Huh?”
Next he asked if I thought it had a traditional American flavor. I said I couldn’t eat chocolate, but that didn’t matter as they never offered us a taste of anything. Eventually I said that the whole idea was stupid. If you’re worried about calories, then don’t eat a candy bar, or eat only half of one.
“Everything’s ‘lite’ now,” I said. “And the letters that spell it out are always yellow so our eyes won’t get fat looking at the label.”
He asked what I thought of the name Forever Yours and I said that it was silly. “Because it’s not forever yours. You’ll eat it, then later in the day you’ll pass it, and the experience will be over. It has a beginning and an end. There’s nothing timeless about it.”
The guy then asked if I was married, single, or divorced. This was perhaps his way of gauging how jaded I am regarding the word forever.
May 25, 1990
Chicago
Katherine Anne Porter’s Collected Letters has been released, and the Times review included one she wrote to Hart Crane. “Your emotional hysteria is not impressive, except possibly to those little hangers-on of literature who feel your tantrums are a mark of genius. To me they do not add the least value to your poetry, and take away my last shadow of a wish to ever see you again.…Let me alone. This disgusting episode has already gone too far.”
Ouch.
June 4, 1990
Chicago
Amy’s neighbors were kicking a ball on the front lawn her boyfriend, Paul, had recently seeded, so she opened the window and politely asked them to play somewhere else. “We’re trying to grow grass,” she explained.
“You’re trying to grow it now?” one of the kids asked, as if she could put it on hold for a while.
June 18, 1990
Chicago
Summer school started this afternoon. They said they’d cancel the class if I had fewer than twelve students, then they changed it to seven. I started the day with eight. One was absent, two added at the last minute, and one dropped out, so now I’m at a relatively safe nine. That’ll be $2,300 ($1,900 or so after taxes) I can add to the $1,000 I already have saved for New York.
June 26, 1990
Chicago
Amy and I went to Hoffritz to find Dad a Father’s Day gift. Our original idea was to buy him a knife, but in the end we spent $72 on a vibrator. It’s a Panasonic with a long stem and a thickish disk on top, designed so you can reach behind yourself and work out the kinks in your back and shoulders. We also figured he’ll use it on his dog.
“Our father’s going to love this,” Amy said to the saleswoman as we laid the vibrator on the counter.
The woman smiled.
“The next time we see him, though, I bet his front teeth are all chipped.”
The smile faded.
June 28, 1990
Chicago
A few days back, at the library, I found the new biography of Jackson Pollock, who was surprisingly naive. On the advice of a Park Avenue “healer,” he started drinking a combination of bat shit and ground beets, this to establish a “proper balance of gold and silver in his urine.”
In 1951 the doctor put him on a special diet for his alcoholism. No dairy and plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables. The only meat permitted was fowl, which had to have been shot within the past two hours and had to be wild—“Eat no bird that can’t take off at fifty miles per hour.” Meanwhile, he could still drink as much alcohol as he wanted. The trick, the doctor explained, was to balance out the metals in his body.
Jean Detzer came by the other night, and she and Evelyne swapped stories about the Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons and the time they’d spent working there as meeting planners. American hotels have a rule that you can’t display a cadaver in any room where food is being served. “How archaic,” Jean said. “I mean, really. In this day and age!”
Perhaps the rule had something to do with wakes, but for whatever reason, it was instituted, and both Jean and Evelyne have broken it. Evelyne once traveled with half a woman, a cadaver from the waist up, that she named Tracey and had to smuggle into a convention. Jean once sneaked an entire dead body into a meeting room at the Fairmont. She said they dressed the dead man in a suit and mussed up his hair to make him look drunk. “Then we carried him in supported by two sober doctors.” She took a swallow of her Scotch. “The only hard part was finding two sober doctors at the convention.”
June 30, 1990
Chicago
As I passed three teenage girls on the street yesterday, one was saying, “Don’t you just hate it when you meet a guy and he’s got the personality you always dreamed about but is ugly? I swear I hate that shit.”
July 2, 1990