Raleigh
I was accepted into the SECCA (Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art) show. My name will be published in the catalog, so once again I’ll get to see it in print. Now I’d like to get into the phone book.
July 30, 1980
Raleigh
I’ve been raging for three days, so I was grateful when H. gave me half a quaalude, which I’ll down as soon as we reach the reception for the SECCA show. This is probably a mistake.
August 7, 1980
Raleigh
I haven’t written in a week. Hence the news in brief:
I packed everything into my crates and carried them downstairs. Allyn and I lived together for a few days. Then she moved to Pittsburgh. Gretchen moved into my old place.
Julia is gone, moved to New York.
The night of the SECCA reception, it must have been a hundred degrees. It was good to see my photos again. The quaalude wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
Tulip, the dog Ronnie was looking after, killed the next-door neighbor’s Chihuahua. Ronnie is wrecked, Tulip oblivious.
On August 2 I went to the beach for five days with the family. We stayed in a condo with air-conditioning and now I have a tan.
In Pittsburgh Allyn will go to school. Lately I think of going back to college, maybe the Art Institute of Chicago. Just being together enough to apply would be an accomplishment. Talking to Lyn, I realize I’m still young.
October 1, 1980
Raleigh
Gretchen and her friend Carl found a fetal puppy this morning on a sidewalk at NC State. Now it’s upstairs in her freezer and she’s named it Pokey.
Some crank called the house and told Mom he wanted to eat her pussy—his words, not mine. “Isn’t that sick?” she told me. “I’m a fifty-year-old woman.”
Actually, I think she’s fifty-one.
October 9, 1980
Raleigh
If by Monday at five I haven’t given the phone company $79, they’ll cut off my service and make my life miserable until they get their money. I was better off when I lived upstairs and used the pay phone at the IHOP, except of course that people couldn’t call me.
October 10, 1980
Raleigh
I dropped my telephone again. Now it never rings and I have to guess if someone is trying to contact me.
October 19, 1980
Raleigh
Randall, the gay alcoholic in the house next door, boldly peeps through my windows. “Boy, you sure rock in that chair a lot,” he said last week, his face pressed against my screen.
This time I was lying on my bed with Katherine’s cats. I’m watching them while she’s out of town. I can be very mushy, and he watched me kissing them and saying that all the other cats in the neighborhood were jealous of their beauty. Then I heard, “David. David. It’s me, Randall. Listen, I’m running low on money and wonder if I can maybe borrow thirty-five cents for cigarettes.”
He has to be forty years old, at least.
December 20, 1980
Raleigh
A girl who lived down the street from us when we were growing up got married. Dad reminds me that not only is Andrea a college graduate, but her husband is too, and that they both made good grades. After the reception, tipsy, Mom and Dad stopped by for coffee. It was the first time they visited together.
1981
January 6, 1981
Raleigh
Ronnie and I worked last night on the performance piece we’re calling HUD (for Housing and Urban Detectives). I’ve borrowed Paul’s typewriter for two weeks and given notice at Irregardless. My last day is Friday, January 16. The performance is Saturday. Meanwhile, I’ve applied for a job as a teacher’s aide at the Tammy Lynn home for the retarded.
February 1, 1981
Raleigh
We went to Lance’s for dinner last night and I learned that he keeps a dead rattlesnake in his freezer. He found it on the highway somewhere. The snake’s not messy dead, just missing some guts, and even frozen solid it still looks alive. Margaret wants to photograph it in my freshly painted apartment, but I’m afraid to even remove it from the bag. Were my dad to see it, he’d drop dead of a heart attack—wham, no questions asked. Half the people I know have dead animals in their freezers: reptiles, birds, mammals. Is that normal?
February 17, 1981
Raleigh
Mom took me to the IHOP for lunch and told me not to worry about the $20 I owe her. It’s her birthday.
February 20, 1981
Raleigh
I went tonight to the Winn-Dixie on Person Street, across from the Krispy Kreme. It’s a low-income neighborhood, right on the line separating the white and black areas of town. I was walking from the parking lot to the front door when I saw a man enter. He was tall and black, clearly drunk, and behind him were two girls, laughing and pointing. The man was pushing an empty cart, and just inside the door, one of his feet caught on the carpet. He fell to his knees, and a moment later the cart he’d been putting all his weight on fell over as well. With nothing to support him, he crashed face-first onto the floor. I was maybe twenty feet away but didn’t rush forward to help him. No one did. I was looking for magazines, so I decided at the last minute to try the Fast Fare across the street instead. When they didn’t have what I wanted, I returned to the Winn-Dixie, where the man was still lying on the floor. It made me uncomfortable, so I decided to skip the magazines and just go to Krispy Kreme instead.
February 25, 1981
Raleigh
Jean Harris was convicted of second-degree murder. I kind of liked her.
February 26, 1981
Raleigh
Mom dropped by this morning with at least $60 worth of groceries: pork chops, chicken, hamburger meat, salami, cheese, cereal, eggs, oil, pancake mix, broccoli, canned tomatoes, corn, beans, pasta, bread, syrup, oatmeal. I feel guilty and grateful.
Later I went to the design school and saw Komar and Melamid, the Soviet dissident artists, who are funny. They showed a photo of a human skull placed atop a horse skeleton and claimed it was a Minotaur. Then they showed three bones glued together and said it was a triangladon. I sold them my soul for $1.
March 17, 1981
Raleigh
I went to pick up my pieces that were rejected by the Wake County show. “Oh, yes,” the woman said when I gave her my name, “you’re the one with the little cardboard boxes.”
“Yes, that’s me.” I’d wanted to get in just to trouble people like her.
I’m making corn bread for dinner again. Last night I had an omelet with old rice in it.
April 5, 1981
Raleigh
Wednesday’s performance went very well—sixty-four people. I was convinced there would only be eight. Everyone was very warm afterward, complimentary. On Friday I felt divorced from the action. Can’t tell whether or not the audience noticed. There were sixty-nine of them that night. Large party afterward, lots of people, half of them strangers. I had four Scotches and passed out before making a major spectacle of myself.
April 6, 1981