The Diary Project: 3
Feb. 23rd, 2023 11:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_camera
Continuing to pull random diary volumes from the pile…
This one is a plain loose-leaf notebook, spanning dates between September 1974 through January 1975.
I was 22 years old.
Living on Colby Street (technically in Oakland, not Berkeley, though Berkeley and Oakland are contiguous.) Three houses down the block from George, my Texas millionaire (whom I had yet to meet) and right around the corner from Jessica Mitford (whom I had also yet to meet.)
I wrote in pencil, and at this nearly 50-year remove, much of the writing in this volume is barely legible. But interestingly, the handwriting itself is much, much neater than it would become 15 years later.
As many of the misspellings, mispunctuations, and stylistic peculiarities—ampersands instead of “and”—as possible have been left unchanged.
Gotta say: It's probably very boring to anyone but me-e-eeee. Hence the cut.
10 September
Dreamed of monsters conjured from postage stamps1 …
There is too much slack in the fabric: I’m running very hard to stand in the same place & I’ve been in this place too long, too long—it’s time to keep promise and wend my weary way home.
2The summer was not a complete loss—nothing ever is—but it had holes in it like a leaky membrane, pores through which I felt myself diffusing into a nothingness, a void—no deposit, no return. I compared very badly with the other people I met whose manifest virtues from simplicity to symbol—icity while I bickered and whined and tried to enmesh Mark3 in a poisonous intimacy that kept him perpetually on the threshold of 2 worlds. Two evenings before we left, par example—very ugly scene. Susie and Cathy4 had not so much ganged up against me as formed a symbiosis that had no use for me. Susie, great-eyed, wandering to and fro, fixing herself pots & pots of esoteric herbal teas & brewing her secret. Talking baby-talk—I suppose I’m a very horrible person, why should I wish suffering on her just because it makes her a more interesting person? Her complacency was not smug, it was tentative, fragile, grateful even—like Fember Grey’s5. And if relaxed, she became innocuous, saw things in terms of block shapes &n primary colors—well, who could blame her for wanting a simple world for her unborn baby? I could & did—beneath her docility seethed resentment, dislike. Mark runs off to go pear-picking: I am left with two women whom, despite the lack of a tangible reason, I dislike. Folksy, wise, & warm Cathy—new earth Madonna mit homegrown son, pregnant Susie, incorrigible Patty5. We sit in a semi-circle in the backyard. The word is out—Patty is pissed off, capital P, capital O, because Mark has split without a note. Cathy twinkles merrily, “We—ll, you know that Mark. He’s a real pirate.”
Susie says low, intense, “Larry knew you’d be angry. Larry wanted to run after him, get a note or something but I told him: mind your own business.” And she smiles, a peculiarly self-satisfied smile which wrenches me to the bottom of my soul because I can read its subtext so clearly: It is saying: I have contrived to hurt you as I myself have been hurt, but it’s all within the limits of the group mores so you can’t complain. I’ve hurt you & I’m glad. She says, watching me, her eyes glinting, “I used to get upset when it happened to me but I don’t anymore. And you know what? I’m glad—I think it’s made me a stronger person.”
Susie’s notion of strength bears investigation. She tells Cathy in the halting, childish speech she employs during confidences to her mentor, “I’ve had dreams about Ketra6. I saw her doing her yoga exercises one afternoon. She looked so strong. I wanted to be like her.” What I got off of Ketra was a slow sense of her being eaten alive by her zesty, earthy, rampaging husband—a lady locked into calmness by the dictates of the balancing principle, must be yin to his yang, collected to his colorful. But then Susie is similarly into making herself a human sacrifice. Read her “book” before I left (nice notion: books of prints and pictures and songs instead of my own introspective unwindings of the alarm clock.). Her pretty printing—colored inks on colored pencil background—“My honey loves another and I have decided to gather the poison hemlock.” You see? She’s suicidal. One night at Chris and Rodo7’s she told me as much, fixed me with her dark eyes, “I’ve been thinking so much of dying recently. What do you think it means?”
I said gently, “I think it means you need a rebirth.”
“What would you do if you were me?”
“You really want me to answer that?”
“I really do.”
I take a deep breath. “Well if I were you, I’d get an abortion. I think you’re crazy to have a baby. But I know you’re going to have it anyway, so it doesn’t matter what I think.”
She says wildly, “I told Larry8 that I might have an abortion and he told me I was no better than all those men in Indonesia who killed people. I’m not a killer! And then he wouldn’t touch me.”
I wonder how she sees me? The first day I met her she was not anything the way I had imagined her from Mark’s 1st description of her during that Acid Trip that has since been anthologized a thousand times. This scare crow of a girl with a face like Ichabod Crane’s & painfully dark eyes—was this the woman Mark shyly confessed to being still half in love with, who had run off with his best friend? “You remind me of a woman I know. She’s the most perceptive person I’ve ever come in contact with.” Susie’s eyes are wide with feeling, a nascient almost animal-like feeling of someone who’s been yoked & blinkered & suffers because there is no way she can release herself. She is sensitive to vibrations, yes, has precognitive dreams etc. but lacks either the sophistication or the desire to deduce further from that. She is possessed of a grace—she dances in her hoola hoop, dainty side steps, her long hair and her long skirt swaying to invisible musicians & she is like a flower blown in the breeze. A fragile flower, a blue bell, easily stepped on. I am like a peony full-blown & bright. Is this why she resents me? Not that I am strong but that I am gaudy. I am demonstrative with Mark. This sets a trend. All the couples are demonstrative—Susie flings herself into Raeburn’s arms, he grins, pats her, and goes on talking over Susie’s shoulder. I am vociferous, opinionated. One night Susie gets into a fight with Raeburn & he throw up his arms, tells her, “Why don’t you and Patty just go get an apartment together.” Other people perceive some bond between us. Mark says, smiling one night, “It’s a fantasy of mine that you two are drawn together on some level." I do not feel it & I think neither does Susie but she struggles to eleucidate what is expected of her. “Do you and your mother fight a lot too? Oh yeah so do we—”
Back to Portland. Susie is collecting well-fare. Every time I see her, it’s “We’ll pay back your hundred dollars as soon as we can.”9 Did I so much as ask her for the money back? She makes it seem as tho I did. She makes it seem as tho I nag her incessantly. Pretty soon I grow calloused. All right bitch, I think, watching her hunch her shoulders over still another pot of herbal tea. “Do you want some of this?” she offers in her tremblingly self-effacing way.
“No,” I say. Brutal. She almost flinches.
Meanwhile Cathy is giving Susie many helpful hints about her belly—how to make it grow big & strong etc. Cathy warrants “plucky,” “spunky,” & similar descriptives on my adjective checklist. Cathy is another ex-love of Mark’s—from which I am forced to conclude that Mark’s taste in women, except for me & Gay, is rather unspectacular. Or maybe just Deese-dominated. Cathy is very cheery. She does a passable imitation of her hubby, shuffling, good-time Steve. But the judgements she passes upon us all are severe—witness her monolog in the park that day.
One day I am sitting in the room they’ve alotted us—a horrible box-like room hung with Wordsworth quotes (one of the Deese girls is an English teacher Back East and likes to inflict them as part of the family’s artistic heretige) & I began to cry. It was more like leaking than weeping, the tears came & I couldn’t stop & finally Mark came over, cuddled me a bit & announced he was taking me out for some beer. Mark was maintaining a curiously landlocked consciousness that last week in Portland, I suppose it was the stress of feeling himself pulled into abdicating his childhood loyalties for the woman he loved. Mark noticed me! What childlike jubilation this gives rise to. I dance into the kitchen. Cathy & Susie are locked into a heart-to-heart over the kitchen table, Raeburn is standing, idly strumming. I destroy the conversation by saying something irrelevant. They give me amused, polite smiles—impatient for me to go away so they can resume their intimacy. I say devilishly gleefully, “I think I will put you all into my next novel.”
Raeburn raises his eyebrows. “Next novel? I didn’t know you’d finished the first one.”
“Yes Raeburn. I’ve finished it & I’ve sold it to the movies for fifty thousand dollars. But my next novel is going to be in a different style completely. My next novel is going to be an expose. There’s this family, see, that thinks they’re really cool and hip because they finally left New Jersey. It’s going to be how they finally fall apart. I’m going to call it The Destruction of the Deeses.”
“The Destruction of the Deeses, huh?” drawls Raeburn sardonically.
“You didn’t know you were being destroyed? Oh but you are. You are a dying race! You are cursed in your mother’s womb.”
The three of them sit very still as if politely waiting for me to finish my speech. Their faces are expressionless—they are like inanimate objects to me, robots or worse, I’d like to smash them, hit them, cut them open and tattoo my name on the ridges of their brains, anything to get them to notice me.
Mark takes me out and gets me drunk. I am in a translucent state of conscious that afternoon, freyed about the edges. My chronology10, in fact, stands rather confused: the vignette on page opposite actually took place the morning before. Similarly its aftermath: Cathy & Susie are drinking organic tea together in the kitchen. They are also rapt in conversation. “But I’m happy here,” Susie is saying earnestly, “so you know she makes me very uncomfortable.”
“Well I don’t know what her problem is,” says Cathy shaking her head, "she thinks she’s better than we are or something.”
“I guess she’s just not happy around us or something—”
“She’s like a baby always needing attention or she sulks—”
At which point Cathy looked up to discover me smiling radiantly down upon her. (That smile nets me fifty bucks an hour in NYC, Cathy. What does your smile ever net you?). Cathy blushed violently. My smile deepened. “Look, Patty,” Cathy said brusque & business-like, “did I say something before that you took offense at?”
“Oh, no, Cathy, not in the least. I’m just a nasty person, I guess. Maybe it’s genetic or something.”
Mark & I return to the house. We are pretending to be festive. Mark selects 6 bottles of beer for which I offer to pay. We will all get drunk together, the great reconciler, in vino veritas—let the buyer beware. We troup back to the house, carefully rowdy, consciously drunk. Mark descends into the basement. I work on my dream analysis. Later I garner my strength—why should I not also go down into the basement? What is stopping me? Downstairs Raeburn is holding court, Mark is arguing with him half-heartedly, Cathy & Claud are giggling from the side-lines. “You think alcohol’s more addicting than heroin?” demands Raeburn who is so pickled that he’s ready to be potted.
“I didn’t say that,” sighs Mark wearily.
“Oh, Excuse me. You didn’t say that. What did you say?”
“Raeburn, man, I said the opposite.”
“Are you an alcoholic?”
“No—”
“Well I am,” says Raeburn smugly, jabbing at his chest with his thumb. “I am, Jack. I can tell you absolutely one hundred percent that heroin’s more addictive than alcohol—”
“That’s what I just said, man—”
“What? That alcohol’s more addictive than heroin?”
“The other way around.”
“The other way around? Man you don’t know nothing about nothing—”
“Raeburn, a minute ago you just said—”
“Oh you know what I said. I don’t know what I said but you know what I said.”
“You said it’s easier to get hooked on heroin than it is to get hooked on alcohol. I agreed.”
“Man I’m an alcoholic. I have a physiological need for alcohol. I crave alcohol—”
“Yeah but it built up over a longer period of time than it would have if you were on smack,” I said. “That’s all he’s saying.”
“Oh you know all about it,” he said smiling his nasty smile at me. (“Raeburn is really the kindest, openest, most generous person I know,” Cathy tells me fervently. “It’s just that so many bad things have happened to him.”)
“I know something about it.”
“How long does it take to get addicted to heroin?”
“If you shoot smack for a week you’ll show physiological symptoms of addiction—”
“Seven times!” crows Raeburn. “Are you trying to tell me that if you shoot heroin seven times you’re gonna get addicted?”
“I said a week man. That’s like 2 or 3 times a day—”
“Oh you know all about it—”
“No you know all about it Raeburn since you had the advantage of being born & raised in Plainfield New Jersey which every civilized person knows & recognizes as the center of the universe. What do you think, that you have a monopoly on experience? You’re a rube, Raeburn. And a small time rube if it comes to that—”
Raeburn stares at me, confounded. “Why are you trying to start an argument? We’re just trying to lay back & enjoy the party, man.”
Dazed silence. Mark is staring ashen-faced into space. Cathy embarrassedly looks down. Claud fiddles with a tape and in another second there is music, mindless la-la. Raeburn is shaking his head. “I’m not going to talk to you. Hey man did you say that heroin is heavier than alcohol?”
“I said it’s more addictive, says Mark in a low voice.
“Hey man, that’s cool. That’s cool. What’s all the shouting about?”11
____
1 Ha, ha! Even back then, I was into dream oversharing! 😀
2And once again, you can see how as a writer, I was some years off from important things like knowing how to paragraph. 😀
3
Some background…Mark was my boyfriend at the time.
I’d skipped both the third and the ninth grades due to being labeled “smart,” so I was 16 when I entered UC Berkeley as an undergraduate in 1968 and 20 when I graduated in 1972.
I had some idea back then that I might want to be a doctor, so I spent the next year (1973) taking hard science medical school requirements at UCB, racing back to NYC intermittently to model when I wanted $$$, and traveling to far-off places.
Mark was my assigned organic chemistry lab partner.
The professor who taught undergraduate organic chemistry back then was Melvin Calvin, a Nobel Prize winner who hated undergraduates. So, it was quite the coup when I managed to earn an A from him. In fact, I found the book part of organic chemistry quite entertaining! Our final consisted of one question: You’re on a desert island; you have access to every inorganic reagent and piece of laboratory equipment known to man! Synthesize [name of ginormous complex organic molecule goes here.]
I absolutely sucked at the laboratory part of organic chemistry, though. And to this day, while I’m a fair cook, I’m an awful baker because baking actually requires you to measure ingredients and pay attention to things like temperature—things I am not very meticulous about.
Anyway. The reason I got an A in organic chemistry was that Mark was so good at the laboratory part of it and completely indifferent about sharing that credit with me, his lab partner.
In fact, Mark was kind of indifferent to me generally, which naturally intrigued me.
So, after we took our organic chemistry final, I sidled up to him and suggested we go up to the Berkeley Botanical Gardens and drop acid together.
So, we did!
And during that acid trip, I got imprinted by Mark and fell in love!
Mark was a spectacularly smart human being and an extremely decent one besides. And a mad talker when you penetrated that Van Allen belt of reserve, simply a brilliant conversationalist. He could talk about anything under the sun except for one thing—human emotion. He was singularly reticent and repressed on all things having to do with human emotion.
And that one thing was the only thing a 22-year-old girl wants to talk about!
So, in retrospect, I would have to say, we were singularly ill-suited.
4 Mark and I had had a Huge Fight in the summer of 1973, so I ran off with another boyfriend, Jean-Luc, who was going to medical school at McGill Universityin Montreal.
I actually enrolled at McGill myself. But I never included my sojourn there on any of my subsequent transcripts because I flunked all my classes. Three very important things happened to me at McGill, though: (1) I discovered Joseph Campbell in the McGill Library stacks and read through his Masks of God tetralogy; (2) I discovered Larry McMurtry in the McGill Library stacks; (3) I met up and enmeshed with Ann-&-Jon-&-Reed, My Own Private Bloomsbury, who became very significant to me over the next decade.
In the spring of 1973, Mark and I reconciled by letter.
So, I ran off to be with him in the Pacific Northwest while he—get this!—became an itinerant farmworker, picking fruit! I picked fruit, too! So very, very Steinbeck!
Mark was tight with a peculiar posse of male friends, all of whom (with their wymyn!) had run away from Plainfield, New Jersey, to escape being drafted to fight in the Vietnam War.
The Deese Family—which included Susie and Cathy—was at the center of this peculiar posse. They were based in Portland, Oregon.
5The nickname of my youth! I was still four years shy of staking a claim to my full name. In those days, I was kind of embarrassed by “Patrizia”—nobody seemed to know how to pronounce it. They still don’t, for that matter. 😀
When I finally started using “Patrizia” in my 26th year, my entire personality changed. For the better, I think.
5 Fember Grey was a greatly beloved cat I shared with Jean-Luc.
6. I have no idea who Ketra was. Don’t remember her at all.
7 More members of the Plainfield posse. They lived in Raymond, Washington.
8 Larry Deese was Susie’s boyfriend. The James Dean of the Plainfield posse. An alcoholic and a guitarist, and not very good at either if you asked me. Not that anyone did. 😀 For some reason, he often went by the nickname “Raeburn.”
9 I had all that modeling ca$h in the bank, so I was rich by Plainfield posse standards. I was quite happy to share it (within reason.). But I think that contributed to all the resentment.
10 My chronology for all of this is pretty confused. In retrospect, I am quite certain that they were nasty to me before I was nasty to them. But I had not yet learned the trick of separating out the time stream at age 22 when I scribbled this diary entry.
11 Even at a nearly fifty-year remove, I do like this dialogue! The Deeses would have made a great subject for a Sometimes a Great Notion-like novel! Too bad the times we live in now wouldn't welcome such a novel, and I am no longer sufficiently interested in these kinds of interpersonal issues to write it.
no subject
Date: 2023-02-23 06:36 pm (UTC)The name change; I went to Prague in the 1990s some time after my sister had been there and I met several resident Americans who knew her only by her full name 'Josephine'. After that she reverted back to Jo.
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Date: 2023-02-23 06:50 pm (UTC)Yeah, they avoided Vietnam. Mark died in 2011 from complications of MS.
"Patty" is kind of an idiot name. I'm much happier being a "Patrizia." 😀
no subject
Date: 2023-02-23 06:58 pm (UTC)Poor Mark. Now that the beards and hair are back in fashion, men in those old photos look like kids that just stepped off the street today.
I just completed one of those compact five-year diaries. I must write an entry here about it. Not the same as mining my youth like you are but a rather revealing experiment in other ways.
no subject
Date: 2023-02-23 07:11 pm (UTC)It was good to see that photograph of Mark. I remember him more vividly as he was toward the end—because he and I remained close pals after we broke up. In fact, he taught my older kid how to play chess! 😀
I think it's always good to reacquaint oneself with one's past selves. Humanizing somehow. Though often embarrassing. 😀
Skimmed
Date: 2023-02-23 08:20 pm (UTC)Re: Skimmed
Date: 2023-02-23 08:24 pm (UTC)So glad I outgrew that tendency.
Et cetera
Date: 2023-02-24 04:59 am (UTC)Re: Et cetera
Date: 2023-02-24 12:32 pm (UTC)Let's start a movement!!!!
no subject
Date: 2023-02-24 12:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-24 12:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-24 12:56 pm (UTC)I know I tossed my junior high and high school diaries somewhere along the way. I think I still have some diaries from my 20's on, when I started using loose-leaf notebooks for them to make it easier to edit my life.
no subject
Date: 2023-02-24 12:59 pm (UTC)Don't want to bequeath them to some faceless diary collection project.
The best thing would be for them to remain on LJ/DW for all eternity and be discovered now and again by people searching for specific keywords.
But I don't think that's possible. 😥
no subject
Date: 2023-02-24 01:02 pm (UTC)XXX
no subject
Date: 2023-02-24 01:47 pm (UTC)It's very, very odd to reread these entries after so many years because I half-recognize the person who wrote them but not entirely.
Like I shudder, thinking, So much drama!. (Interpersonal drama is something I steer clear of these days.) And I wonder, Since you had the money, why didn't you just book a plane flight and get the hell out of Dodge?
I was very confrontational back then and went straight for the jugular.
I suppose that's how I managed to survive.
no subject
Date: 2023-02-27 09:56 am (UTC)I salute that young woman. For all her vulnerabilities, she was strong and sharp in a world that wanted to devour her. She brought us you!
Well done for surviving XXX