September 5th, 1978 It’s only my long-standing rule forbidding me to edit my journal that keeps me from tearing out the last page.

I choose not to acknowledge the desperation that I’ve felt this summer. I prefer to ignore the loneliness and craziness that I’ve dealt with for months now. My inability to fall in love– my exasperation and frustration with my daily life. The emptiness I’ve struggled with. I want to throw my head back and take a slug of whiskey and laugh through the bad times. I simply cannot give credence to fear.

—-

Sunday I met John. If every bleak moment I have spent lonely has been a prelude to that meeting– then, every second was worth it.



Late afternoon at Mr. P.’s guzzling gin and tonic and bullshitting with some guy from Yukon, Oklahoma. John swaggered into the bar knocking me dead at first sight and stood at the bar next to me. I continued to talk to the guy from Oklahoma. Suddenly he was touching me– at first gently, then definitely. My back was to him. Finally, in no uncertain terms, we were subbing ourselves against each other to the music from the jukebox. I turned to see what he looked like in the mirror over the bar. I was flabbergasted. He was beautiful. Hunky devil in a t-shirt with a small Clark Gable mustache. As I stared at his reflection in the mirror he looked up and saw me watching him. He gave me a big wink and we both smiled. Then we were talking.

He came back home with me to Allan’s apartment and we drank bourbon and water and later when to Cafe de Paris and had dinner. Home to a wonderful night of lovemaking. Perfect man. Perfect body. Perfect sex.

He spent the night with me and last night (Monday) I went to his apartment and he took me to dinner at a restaurant in his neighborhood.

Let me say this bluntly. He has brought me back to life. I have fallen completely and hopelessly in love with him. He is the most wonderful man I have ever met.

I am most vulnerable right now. The feeling is both delicious and frightening.



So, here I am tonight. He had plans. I sit at the dining room table and start into my second six pack and blast Shirley Bassey and bury my head in my hands and cry into my typewriter. The thought occurs to me whether I could electrocute myself that way. What a dramatic ending…

Oh, please don’t let me fall in love. It only hurts. It never works out. It’s useless. It’s a mythology with no roots in the real world. It exists in Hollywood and Old Montgomery Clift movies. He’s not going to love me back the way I love him. No one ever can.

Oh please let this work out. Oh, God, I want this so badly.

—-

He has beautiful black hair. He’s Irish/Italian. He’s Catholic.

—-



September 2nd, 1978 Suddenly, the weather changes. Today has been beautiful. Washington is so beautiful in those rare blue skied days when the air is crisp and clean.

My weekend at Allan’s passes quietly– and somehow sadly. Although I’m not really sure why it should feel melancholy. I think I feel sorry for myself– my weekend of solitude and privacy.

I went out last night– late. Had a good time. It was fun to have the bars and apartment so readily at my disposal. Didn’t quite care if I made out or not. Perhaps that’s why I did. First Mr. P.’s and old friends. In the bathroom, getting ready to go out, I practiced holding my facial muscles in a sort of half smile. I think when I go out alone that I look morose and unhappy. After Mr. P.’s, I went across the street to the Fraternity House and almost immediately a swarthy guy named Tony (who had had a few) came over to where I was standing and in a matter of moments he was kissing and mauling me and inviting me to his apartment. Actually, I wanted to cruise his friend who was standing at the bar. I seem to be losing my taste for Latino types. I was only half interested in him (he asked me questions like “what do you like to do in bed…”) so I concocted a story of how I was waiting for a friend who was coming in for the weekend but I wasn’t sure whether he knew to meet at Mr. P.’s or the Fraternity House. So I told him to wait for me and I would run across the street and see if he was there.

That’s when I met Jack. The bar was nearly closing– I walked in and ordered a beer and stood at one of the little tables in the center of the room. I saw him right away. Standing a few feet from me looking wonderful in a white shirt. Our eyes met and he flashed me the most incredible big grin. I was charmed and in a moment he was standing next to me. We went back to his apartment and had a really nice evening together. Typical sex. It turns out that he works at The Prime Rib as a waiter and knows Rich, Russ’ former lover. This morning as I was leaving (he lives across the street from here) it was I who suggested we exchange phone numbers. I hated that leaving was so methodical.

All day I’ve been curious. Was it another trick? Or will he call? Was he interested in me? Does he want to see me again?



Who knows– I’ve managed to lose all my sophistication.



I’m walking around like a teen-aged girl with my heart on my sleeve– wanted so desperately to fall in love. Hating the aimlessness to my life. Drinking beer and listening to sad love songs.



September 1st, 1978 Labor Day weekend. Allan has gone to Philadelphia and I am staying in his apartment. Wendy, on her way for a night out with Chippy, brought me over with my dog, my typewriter, a small bag of clothes, and a shopping bag full of miscellaneous items. Now I am drinking white wine and listening to Phoebe Snow and feeling like I’m in some exotic city on vacation.

Another weekend in that house and I think I would go crazy. All the calm and security that I needed so badly six months ago is suffocating me now. So, I have three nights and two days in the organized luxury of Allan’s apartment. The bars are two blocks from here and I’ve already ironed a shirt and intend to go out for a nightcap later on.

—-

My last D.C. journal, at least for a while, assumes awesome proportions to me. I want this special quality to pervade every thing that I do, every thing that I experience from now until I leave.

—-



August 18th, 1978 long afternoon in a dining room blaring with old beatles albums and lukewarm beer and hot cigarettes and regrets



July 10th, 1978 Downtown I walk with my eyes balanced so that I catch my reflection in store windows as I pass. Each vision makes me wince with disgust. But I keep on watching as if suddenly I will see the image I want. I have become overweight and slouched with my embarrassment of it. I see young bright faced boys and their tight flat stomachs and wonder how I stopped being that way without knowing it.

Washington wallows in summer heat. Humidity hangs like fog over the noontime noise and sluggish movement to downtown D.C.

Nothing matters to me now. The flood waters that carried me here so many years ago have receded with the death of my father and I am left beached. Now that I am no longer running away, I seem to have lost my purpose. My years with Richard; my striving to make home in so many different circumstances; my romances; my jobs– all have been efforts to avoid the basic lack of direction I’ve always felt.

Now I string my days together like hollow beads joining bi-monthly pay checks together, blankly waiting for that day when my debts are paid and I can fly away to Key West and become a writer.



“I thought my life…going out in drip-drops, in nonsense, and I suddenly was in the kind of rampage anger that I have known all my life, still know, and certainly in those days was not able, perhaps did not wish to control.” — An Unfinished Woman, Lillian Nellman



July 9th, 1978 The theme that seems to recur is this: that nothing is ever accomplished suddenly. Everything valuable is done gradually and slowly. I long for swooping drastic measures. I want everything to flash like fire and complete itself before my eyes. Homework annoys me with its sweaty tediousness.

Chippy drove off to Baltimore last night to rendezvous with her married man. Today they were to go sailing on the Chesapeake Bay. That’s a flash in the summer sun. I long for flashes and dripping romance. Meanwhile I sit in my obese glory and listen to the dryer spin and sniff the ammonia-stench of the kitty litter box. Upstairs, the kitchen awaits my presence for cleaning. I become weary and long for something else.



July 9th, 1978 It seems very important to me that I have done this.

Starting to clean house today. I was faced with what has become the chronic problem of cleaning my writing paraphernalia off my dining room table– which has been the only place in the house where I could spread myself out to write. My hot stuffy bedroom is so cramped that I can never make myself go there to write. No one has objected to the use of my dining room table as a study of sorts. But, it’s so unprivate there and late at night I feel that this humming whirring clacking typewriter must surely annoy anyone upstairs trying to sleep.

So, I transported my oak table (desk size) and the typewriter down here to the basement where I have the typewriter plugged into an overhead light fixture.

Now, in the musky bowels of the house, I have a place.

