New York
Tiffany arrived yesterday for a short visit. She’s on mood stabilizers and they seem to have made a significant difference. She listens to people now and doesn’t get angry quite so easily. I took her with me to Little, Brown and introduced her to everyone. Hugh made a rack of lamb for dinner and then we all went to the play and out for drinks afterward. She’s especially entertaining when talking about Ludovic, the French guy who stayed with her for a while. “He said to me, ‘I like you, Tiffany, but I don’t love you.’”
She’d responded that here in America, if you don’t love someone, you don’t tell them; rather, you just say nothing. I wish I’d written it down verbatim. It was so funny the way she said it.
March 5, 1997
New York
Dad came to town for the book-release party, and I woke him this morning at four. A short while later I accompanied him to 6th Avenue, where he caught a taxi to Penn Station. It was still dark, and a lot of remarkable people were out: a man screaming about shitty black criminals, a sobbing woman, the drunk super from across the street. Funny how normal it all seems to me now. Before getting into his cab, Dad shook my hand and told me to be a good boy. He said it as though I were seven years old, as if he didn’t know that I had grown up. It made me so sad.
March 28, 1997
Iowa City, Iowa
Someone told me that Minneapolis, where I was yesterday, is the slimmest city in the United States. I don’t know if that’s true, but it did have a Laundromat called the Spin Cycle. I also passed a gift shop called the Caardvark. I did a reading at a gay bookstore called a Brother’s Touch. It was what I’d feared it might be, lots of rainbow-striped flags and wind socks. My mike was set up in the magazine section, so behind me were pictures of all sorts of men, some in jockstraps, some with gags that looked like Ping-Pong balls in their mouths. What killed me, though, was the incense, which was coconut, I think.
March 29, 1997
Atlanta, Georgia
The Cedar Rapids airport was decorated for Easter. They’d put plastic grass, marshmallow chicks, and plastic eggs atop the X-ray scanner, and I was looking at them when one of the guards, a young woman, asked to check my bag. She found the bottle of Scotch that Little, Brown had sent me and said, “I’m sorry, sir, but I’m going to have to pour this out.”
I thought that maybe this was a rule in Iowa, but then her boss stepped over and said, “No, Tanya, you don’t pour it out. You just need to smell it and make certain it’s not gasoline.”
“Really? I’ve been pouring it out for the last two months!”
“Well, you shouldn’t have been,” her supervisor told her.
The woman named Tanya opened my bottle of Scotch, held it to her nose, and winced. “Now I got liquor on my hands,” she said. “Great!”
Her supervisor rolled her eyes. “Oh, just go over to the fountain, add a little water, and have a drink,” she said, sighing. “It’ll do you some good.”
April 13, 1997
Portland
This morning at the Seattle airport I saw a kid, maybe ten years old, jerking his head every fifteen seconds or so. It was like seeing myself as a boy. His father said, “Aaron, I’m warning you…” I wanted to rush over and scoop the kid up.
May 10, 1997
New York
I finished Nickel Dreams, the new Tanya Tucker autobiography. Every time she used the phrase “my new friend,” I pulled out my pen, knowing there would be a great name coming. The book is full of them, my favorites being Peanutt Montgomery, Sonny Throckmorton, Michael Smotherman, Dave Dudley, and Sheila Slaughter.
May 17, 1997
La Bagotière
Mr. G’s new colt is sick so we went to the barn and watched as he milked the mother. He then fed the baby from a bottle, eventually taking the nipple off and pouring the milk down its throat, saying, “Come on, now, drink.” His wife then shoved a thermometer up the colt’s ass and together they force-fed it some paraffin oil—all this because the vet charges extra on weekends.
Coming from New York, I find it really shocking to spend time around animals. The baby geese are in the garage, their backs bare and bloody from where they’ve plucked one another’s feathers out. Lambs are in their pen. They’re friendly, the babies, but already their coats are caked with dirt and shit. In the pen next to theirs, a nine-year-old ewe sits on all fours facing a bowlful of mush. All her teeth have fallen out, so she can no longer graze or eat hay or pellets.
June 19, 1997
New York
I was watching The Simpsons last night when Tiffany called. She’d just spent a month in Raleigh and it was strange listening to her talk about it. “Then Gretchen wanted me to change the hat on her taxidermied beaver, and I said, ‘Are you telling me or asking me?’”
She was particularly bothered about a lamp and how she needed Dad to put it in his car and bring it to her at Paul’s place. “This is about respect,” she kept saying as I looked at the TV screen with the sound turned off, wondering what I was missing.
June 27, 1997
New York
Last night I talked to Paul, who lamented, “I ain’t seen pussy in so long, I’d throw stones at it.”
I wished it weren’t too late to add that line to our play. Then I noticed that we’re listed in the special children’s section of Time Out.
“Our show?” Amy said when I told her about it. “The one that includes the pot-smoking and cursing and has the line ‘Psssst, Glen. Hey, Glen, you want a blow job?’ in it?”
I’ll worry about it tomorrow.
June 28, 1997
New York
As if Amy didn’t have enough to do with learning her lines, one of her friends has invited herself over to cook eels. I don’t know how she gets herself into these things.
She was in the drugstore today and saw a female police officer open a bottle of base makeup, cover a blemish in her nose, and then place the bottle back on the shelf. A cop!
July 1, 1997
New York
We did a read-through of the play for fifteen people from Lincoln Center and when we finished, John, the man in charge of the festival, stood up, saying, “Well, I don’t care what anyone says. I liked it.”
Afterward I walked through the park for a while, thinking. On my way back home a woman, very thin with a missing front tooth, entered my subway car and said, “Can I please get a little fucking attention?” When no one looked up, she called us a bunch of stuck-up snobs. “You’ll give money to those other bitches. You’ll help them but not me, so fuck you.”
She got up in someone’s face and the young woman gave her money, as did the next person she confronted. “Well, that’s just fucking great,” the woman said. “Fucking great, shitheads.”
July 6, 1997