Today we moved the office from the Chelsea Hotel to Alba’s house on Bleecker Street—four full floors and two basements. She hired movers, two nice Colombians who have a company called Going. I don’t think Alba understands the thoughts of people who are working. If you’ve carried a big TV up four flights of stairs, you don’t want a lot of hemming and hawing about where it goes—you just want to set it down. At one point I suggested that if she was going from the first to the third floor, it wouldn’t hurt her to carry a little something up, a magazine, maybe, or a coffee cup.
She told me that she was not a lazy person, and then she went up empty-handed. Later she had a fit when one of the floor refinishers broke a mirror. It was the type you’d put on the back of a closet door, nothing valuable or hard to replace, but still she went bananas, throwing her purse against the wall, throwing down the book she was holding. “Fucking fuckers!” she shouted. “How dare you do this to me. You broke that mirror. It’s my first day in this house and now I am stuck with the fucking bad luck you have made.”
“I thought you told us you didn’t want this mirror,” one of the guys said.
Alba yelled that that wasn’t the point. “It’s here and it’s broken and now I have to suffer.”
When he reminded her that she didn’t break it and that perhaps the bad luck wasn’t hers, she got even angrier. It was an amazing tantrum.
May 16, 1991
New York
Alba dictated a letter today, which, when typed up, made no sense whatsoever. I don’t understand how someone can use the word contemporary twice in one sentence that runs for nine lines and then get upset because I misspelled completely.
June 22, 1991
New York
After Bonnie and Clyde were gunned down, souvenir hunters mobbed the car, taking with them shards of windshield glass, upholstery, and even hanks of human hair. One fellow was caught attempting to saw off Clyde Barrow’s ear. I read that somewhere yesterday.
June 25, 1991
New York
Tiffany was hit by a car this weekend while riding her bike. This is the second time it’s happened, and again she went to the hospital. There’s no great damage—she’s just scraped up is all. Now she’s planning to sue and has hired herself a shyster lawyer. He told her to make twenty visits to a chiropractor he frequently works with and says they’ll aim for a $5,000 settlement, of which he’ll retain a third. It seems she’ll spend her share on the appointments, won’t she? Plus the lawyer told her to take a week off from her job, and that’s another financial setback. Tiffany never mentioned a thing about it. It was Mom who told me. She’s furious.
June 26, 1991
New York
I began a writing class at the Y tonight, and though the teacher hasn’t a knack for generating critical discussion, I still get a kick out of her. At one point she read a poem by someone I’m not familiar with. “History has borne him out to be something of an anti-Semite and a racist, but he was funny,” she said. Our homework assignment is to write a story in the form of a diary entry.
June 27, 1991
New York
In addition to the house on Bleecker Street, Alba has two apartments on 7th between C and D, one in the basement and another on the ground floor. I emptied out the former this afternoon with the help of a mover named Patrick who drives a big van and wears plastic-framed glasses. It must be hard having someone who never lifts a finger telling you all day to be careful, to not scratch the walls or drop something, etc., but he was good at tuning it out.
Patrick is maybe five years older than me. He lives in Chelsea and pays $650 for three rooms. At the end of the day I gave him my number and told him to call if he ever needs any help. It turns out he can use me on Saturday morning and will pay $10 an hour.
June 29, 1991
New York
I worked today, hard, for Patrick the mover. It was a thirteen-hour shift, and I left with bruises on my thighs. It reached 97 degrees this afternoon, and at times I could wring water from my shirt. That said, between the payment and the tips, I made $155. I also drank seven Gatorades.
Our first job was a double, two people moving to two different places. One of them had packed in plastic bags, while the other had used huge boxes, which is always a mistake, especially when you’re moving into a sixth-floor walk-up.
Joining Patrick and me today was a guy named Willie, who lives with his parents in Queens and was once thrown into prison in Argentina. As for the people we moved, it was amazing to watch them walk up the stairs of their old and new apartments completely empty-handed.
What was great was driving all over town: Harlem, the Upper West Side, Chelsea, the Village. Patrick says, “Let’s ride.” At one point we went to his apartment on 16th Street, which was really dirty and messy. On our way back to the van, he told me that Alba had not tipped him. Even worse, after we’d unloaded all of her stuff at the house on Bleecker, she tried to talk him down on the previously agreed-upon price. She’s leaving for Provincetown tomorrow, so no work this week.
July 10, 1991
New York
My writing class is held at the Y on 63rd Street. One Life to Live is filmed just three blocks away, and tonight, while passing the studio, I saw the actor who plays Max Holden talking to two fans.
After commenting on the stories we turned in last week, our teacher advised us to “throw all taste and decency out the window” and use lots of violence in our next assignment.
Walking home, I fell in behind two black women, one short and one tall. Some little bitch kept phoning the short woman’s house, and she’d had it. “When I get mad, I don’t argue,” she said. “I swing.”
July 15, 1991
New York
Hugh and I were on the subway when two women boarded. One was obese, and she pointed to the far end of the car, saying, “Oh, look, Dorothy, two seats together!” The two of them walked over and then the heavy woman sat down, filling both the seats.
August 1, 1991
New York
I worked for Alba again today. She’s preparing to leave 7th Street and is kindly giving the basement apartment to the writer Herbert Huncke and his twenty-one-year-old protégé Jason. I asked the kid where the two of them met and he said, “At the methadone clinic.”
In our past encounters, Herbert was almost grotesquely polite. He’s a charmer, always begging and borrowing money for drugs. He’d hoped to move into the apartment tomorrow and complained that it wasn’t in the state he’d been promised it would be in. So that was my job today, to paint it: shitty latex on shitty, unprepared walls. Herbert wanted the floors done in black enamel, but Alba had already bought white and didn’t feel like exchanging it. This put Herbert in a foul mood that soured as the afternoon progressed.
The place needed to be finished by tonight, and at seven, Alba asked the two men to help. Jason suddenly remembered an appointment he was late for, and Herbert angrily dunked the latex-paint roller into the enamel. The roller was ruined by that point, so he started painting the floor, a dumb thing to do when the walls weren’t finished. When I mentioned this, he turned on me, saying, “What do you know, office boy?”
Office boy? Me? He doesn’t know how to work a roller and I’m the know-nothing? Herbert had a tantrum. Then he asked for turpentine—“turps,” he called it—and I told him we didn’t have any.