Chicago
Before leaving for class this morning I found out that I won another literary award. It’s $1,000 for “The New Music” from the Illinois Arts Council, which gives the same amount to the magazine that the story was published in (ACM). This was the final day for claiming the prize so I let my students go early and rushed out to get my money. I’m as shocked as I was the last time. “The New Music” was written two years ago, right after I graduated.
July 7, 1990
Chicago
I finished the Jackson Pollock biography and started a new one about Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy in Gone with the Wind and was married four times, once to a man named Wonderful Smith.
July 12, 1990
Chicago
For the third time this week, a man approached me and asked if he could have $1. He pointed to a van and said that it was his. “It broke down and if I don’t get to work, I’m in big trouble.”
Each time it’s a different guy, but it’s always the same van. A scam, obviously, but even if the story was true, who goes to work with no money in his pockets? What if you ran out of gas?
When I taught my night class in the Fine Arts Building, I was often asked for money by a woman who said she’d been robbed and needed to take a commuter train to one of the northern suburbs. Even the first time I saw her I thought, Really? You can’t call a friend or a family member? You’re honestly going to hit up total strangers for your fare? Like the men with the van, she was always well dressed and acting frantic.
July 26, 1990
Chicago
Last night I read at the Park West as part of the Orchid Show, and it seemed pretty full to me, maybe five hundred people. I’m hoping that a year from now I’m not regretting my decision to leave Chicago. It was always my dream to read in such a fancy place in front of such a big audience. Now I want a bigger audience, but in New York.
One of the other acts last night performed a rap number with two other guys. Backstage he’d hogged the dressing room and made a big deal out of having a manager. Then he got out there and I saw that his fly was down.
July 30, 1990
Chicago
I read in an interview that David Lynch used to go to Bob’s Big Boy in Los Angeles. Every day for seven years he’d have a milk shake and six cups of coffee and take notes before going home to write. I sure will miss the IHOP when I move to New York. Every night Barbara carries a menu to my table and says, “Just coffee this evening?” Every night I cross my fingers as she hands me my change at the register. Every night as I leave, she says, “Take care.” The few times she hasn’t said it, I’ve worried I’ll get hit by a car while riding my bike home.
At the IHOP I go through phases of sitting in different booths. I can look at the one in the very back and think, I remember those days. I recall sitting near the front where I could hear people on the pay phone. Each phase lasts about six months. I always stay at the IHOP long enough to smoke three cigarettes. I never have four. I love for things to stay exactly the same, but I can’t have this IHOP and New York.
July 31, 1990
Chicago
Again tonight on Addison a man approached me and said that his van had broken down. “I need you to give me a quarter,” he said, as if that’s what it would cost to have the thing towed and repaired.
August 7, 1990
Chicago
Today was my last day of teaching at the Art Institute. The summer-school class was so sweet, one of the best. I brought my black-and-white Polaroid camera and Ben stepped in from the office and took group photos, one for each person. Students read their stories out loud while we ate cake. We all said how much we’d liked one another.
Seeing as I had my camera on me, before leaving the IHOP tonight, I took a picture of Barbara, who has worked evenings on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays the entire six and a half years I’ve been coming here. In the background of the photo I took are the rotisserie chickens, the ones what spin around.
August 13, 1990
Chicago
As a going-away present, Amy gave me some sort of a paw. It’s mounted on a thin slice of mahogany, and beside it, written in pencil, is 1888. I thought it maybe belonged to a sloth, but the fingers are splayed. It’s like the hand of a Dr. Seuss character. Amy really is the best gift giver. “It’s beautiful,” I told her. “Every time I look at it, I’ll think of our paw.”
She gave it to me at the going-away party. It was held at the Quinns’, and when vegetarian Janet saw it she flew off the handle. How dare I bring this into her house? Did I have any idea what this animal had gone through, etc.? She put a sort of curse on me. This morning she left to attend massage school.
August 17, 1990
Chicago
I passed a fight on Broadway near Belmont tonight, a chubby white guy and a black kid who was maybe fifteen. The white guy seemed a little crazy and I got the idea that the kid and his friends had provoked him into being just that much crazier. At one point he screamed, “Go back to nigger town, nigger!” The black kid took off his belt and charged, swinging it above his head, but the white guy just grabbed it. The two friends, meanwhile, hung back and laughed.
August 28, 1990
Raleigh
Dad, Paul, and I spent eighteen hours in the front seat of a Toyota pickup truck. Eighteen hours through Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, and North Carolina. At one point I fell asleep. Paul reached into my Dopp kit then, got out my shaving cream, and covered a good three-quarters of my face before I woke up. Later he elbowed me in the ribs while I was pouring coffee. It went from the thermos to my bare legs and burned me. If I tried to read a magazine, he’d take the page and crumple it up. He dumped a cup of water over my head. He grabbed the skin beneath my arm and twisted it until I begged for mercy. The three of us were crowded together side by side. It was hot, but I never lost my temper. It was all funny to me, and I laughed while Dad drove and we all three listened to the radio.
August 30, 1990
Raleigh
I told Melina, my parents’ Great Dane, that we were going to have her put to sleep on Saturday, and Dad got super-angry. As if she could understand me! So I said to her, “OK, we’ll wait until Monday.” This made him even angrier, and he ordered me to leave his house.
Yesterday I told him I’d ridden my bike to the grocery store and bought a chicken.
“No, you didn’t,” he said. The chicken was right there on the counter, along with the receipt, but still he insisted for absolutely no reason that I hadn’t bought it. He refuses to be wrong.
August 31, 1990
Raleigh
I would rather be a Klansman
In a robe of snowy white,
Than to be a Catholic priest
In a robe as black as night;
For a Klansman is AMERICAN
And AMERICA is his home,
But a priest owes his allegiance
To a Dago Pope in Rome.