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The Diary Project: 5
Mar. 5th, 2023 07:09 amThis entry is seven pencil-scribbled pages in a bound spiral notebook.
On the top of the first page, I’d written humor springs from inability to cope—transactional analysis.
On the top of the fourth page, I’d written in ink: I believe that the soul consists of its sufferings for the soul that cures its sufferings dies. – Antonio Porchia
14 September, 19741
We’ve found a place—a little stucco bungalow with white-washed walls & a tiny wedge of garden. Colby2, soon to be of Colby Street, is delighted, & I am pleased—the house is sunny & above all clean—no troups of gorilla cockroaches waiting to overthrow the administration. Mark has reservations. In the car on our way home from driving John to the airport (his aunt is busy dying of cancer in Southern California—John is somewhat flustered but also secretly pleased by the whole affair—it gives his life such a sense of drama, of urgency. “Imagine being someone whose decisions mean something, he says, eyes shining (vis-à-vis the Rockefellars.) They shine the same way when he tells us the afternoon he left, “My aunt called for me last night.”) I am prattling innocuously about some clothes I’d like to buy—“I can’t help it if I sound bourgeois,” says I self-righteously, “I’d like to look nice—”
“That,” remarks my wry lover, “is a word I want banished from the English language. Nice3 —” This being the main argument in favor of the house: I-want-to-live-somewhere-nice—
The spectre of the bourgeoisie hangs over us. Last night we attended a dinner party given by one of John’s summer acquisitions—a slender, cat-eyed pot-tress named Caren, whose full smile reveals straight small teeth with a flash of metal4 & a demonic sense of urgency. “She certainly is very sexually demanding,” says John rubbing himself ruefully. She has a laugh like china breaking, a mechanical ripple, a music box caught on two notes but there is something poignant about her nonetheless withal it coexists with a knife’s edge of desperation so that she reminds me of one of those metal-toothed dolls that attacked Jane Fonda in Barbarella.
The party itself was a complete drag. Like attending a funeral: remember to keep your speech decorous and your legs crossed—is that another distinguishing characteristic of the middle class5, this inability to enjoy—? Lovely house—a large stucco bungalow with white-washed walls and a tiny wedge of garden. Done in plants and Indian prints, Mexican wall hangings & Caren’s pots—“I’m the only female macho potter in Berkeley,” she confides & then laughs, rat-a-tat-tat like the staccato of a machine gun. She is a gifted potter. I’ve met the guests before over the course of upteen thousand reincarnations: the hostess herself, bare-armed in a childish white-and-posied frock; the birthday girl (“person,” she corrects drily), a depressed looking young woman whose hair needs washing; a Megan Fitzwilliams6-esque young beauty who spends most of the evening cuddling with her boyfriend. These are the proprietresses of the establishement: Caren, Betsy & Becky. At home I smear on the battle paint while Mark sheepishly changes into a pair of John’s woolen slacks (“You have to take a chance some time in your life,” smiles Mr. Martin of Martini realtors, “& anyway you’re all clean-cut.”) We are both self-conscious over the metamorphoses we are trying to effect in one another’s presence—like learning to shit with the bathroom door unlatched.
“This is Mark & Patty,” Caren announces, her fillings gleaming. Dutifully we file into the living room & seat outselves amid the other inanimate objets d’art. A virtual7 joint is passed around. One of our fellow revelers, a pretty boy with smooth slanting eyes & a mop of dark curls, takes charge of the dope, twitching his ass pertly as he carries the joint around & breathes the smoke, chillum-like, at the faces of each person in the room. “Hey! You inhale like a real head!” he cries at Mark approvingly. His name is Jack. He collects food-stamps & exciting places that he has picked up girls at. He is dangling the bait at the most unlikely looking girl in the room, a bespectacled miss with a Peter Pan collar but apparently it worked—by the end of the evening he was practicing “body massages” on her body & she was submitting with the slightly wistful scowl of a person who doesn’t particularly like one night stands but supposes they are the hip thing to do8.
Jack is flashing his dimples at us. Mark lamely manufactures topics for conversation, “W-e-ell. We almost didn’t make it up that hill. You know that hill? My car stalled at the intersection—”
Ensuing conversation about stalling Volkswagens. A Joni Mitchell record played 3 times in a row without anyone changing it.
“I’ve been living in my VW bus for 4 months,” Jack tells us. He’s as cute as Shirley Temple, and almost as pretty as Miss America & apparently knows it—he poses just like a professional model. “I’ve got it all fixed up. I’ve got a stove, & a refrigerator & a shower. I’ve got a 60-piece set of sterling silver. I bet I’m the only guy who lives in a bus with a 60-piece set of silver. One time I was at a party & ran out of forks so I volunteered mine—wow, you should have seen their faces—”
“Wow. Is it warm enough & everything?” asks Mark gamely.
“Well, I have a genuine army down-sleeping bag,” Jack reassures him.
“And you’re going to live in it during the winter?”
“I’m going to Denver in a week,” says Jack.
What are we talking about? Food stamps, we’re talking about food stamps, we’ve having a very heated conversation about food stamps. Joni Mitchell9, the Laurel Canyon nightingale, sings on.
“You know how many food stamps you can get in Alaska?” Jack interrogates the room & when nobody does, answers himself, “Ninety-six dollars worth.”
“You been to Alaska?”
“I was born in Anchorage. And you can get $56 worth in Hawaii. I was just in Hawaii. I spent 6 months in Hawaii.”
“What part of Hawaii?”
“Waikiki. And Maui. That used to be a leper’s colony.” Jack slips into his reminiscences with the seductive air of a party girl slipping into something “more comfortable.” But despite his pretty face, nobody loves him here except for the plain girl who doesn’t really love him but supposes she’s got to get fucked some time in her life. “I went to this party given by these rich people & they flew 13 people in from the main land, that’s how rich they were. Thirteen people. I didn’t live in my bus in Hawaii,” he adds politely for the sake of thematic continuity but everyone’s been in at least one encounter group so they all know what Jack is doing is ego-tripping.
At the dinner table personalities resolved themselves further. Betsy, seated in the place of honor at the head of the table, looks as tho a close friend has just died. Caren is genteel & gracious, her hostess smile, her tinny ripple of laughter. At odds somehow with the little girl’s dress she is wearing. The real little girls are trotted in—wide-eyed little elves10. “Did you hear what they were talking about?” simpers Caren with a little screech. “We’ve got a bunch of eighty year old midgits living here.” The good little girl, fat cheeks, yellow hair, is hers; the difficult little girl belongs to Betsy. “Chrissie, go to bed,” murmurs her mother.
“Not until Melissa’s finished her ice cream,” chimes the daughter. She will be a dark-haired, imperious beauty when she is grown.
“Chrissie, now.”
The little girl ignores her.
Betsy sighs and lays back in her chair. Something tragic has penetrated her & she does not know how to give birth to it. The evening for me is dominated by this other woman’s sadness, one of those empathetic moments that are so intangibly motivated that you wonder whether the sense of identification you’re feeling isn’t just a totally arbitrary contrivance to get you through a boring situation. I fancy that Betsy is tired of her nice life, tired of her nice home, the nice dinner party thrown in her honor, longs to stand as sweetly-defiant as her little daughter, say: fuck it all. “Excuse me,” bubbles the irrepressible Jack, “I’ve forgotten your name. What’s your profession?”
“Optometrist,” says the man with a pale, uncomfortable, death’s-head smile.
“I knew it. I just knew it! I said to myself doctor—”
Across the table, the self-appointed cynic of the evening sneers at him. We are politely surveying the grounds for topical subjects of conversation: “Woody Allen11,” says this man, clasping his hands to his heart in an attitude of rapture. “I adore Woody Allen. Everything he ever did. Exc ept that sex movie. Ugh!” His little Hitler-esque mustache quivers in distain.
“Oh really,” says Caren, “Betsy says that’s the one she like the best—”
“Did you?”
“Yes,” says Betsy, forcing a smile.
“We-ell,” says the man with an appropriate lift of his eyebrow that translates as I-am-too-polite-to-say-anything-more.
“I liked that movie best too!” I cry, my nervousness shuddering my determination to make myself heard behind a little girl flutter.
“What movie?”
“Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex12. I mean Woody Allen’s a very funny man but he’s so topical. You know—New York, Jewish humor—”
“Well I am neither Jewish nor a New Yorker & I find Woody Allen to be ab extraordinarily funny man,” says the man sporting his prize sneer. He bears the nondescriptive name of Charlie & earlier was expounding on a management meeting he had attended that morning in a voice that had been bred to carry.
“Well maybe you were reincarnated into the wrong body,” I mutter but nobody hears ne except the cadaverous man sitting next to me who draws his lips back from his teeth in a parody of grinning revealing pale gums & nicotine eroded roots. He leans over & grasps my hand for a moment. “What sign are you?” he asks, making his eyes moist & meaningful for me.
But enough—one gets the general impression. This is the consumer market for which transactional analysis was invented (the other day sitting in a restaurant, we hear the beer-embalmed voice of an unseen but no less florid matron boom from behind a tasteful bamboo partition—“That’s no fair, Irving—you’ve given Sheila more strokes than you’ve given me!”), these people whose only self-definitions spring from the social situations at hand. It is the key to Charlie-the-insurance-salesman’s humor—humor is derived from someone else’s inability to cope, in fact becomes a kind of social Darwinism in action—you prove your own ability to cope by seizing mercilessly upon another’s inability. This is banter13.
1 There’s a difference between writing to express oneself and writing to communicate.
Here I was indulging the former impulse, and it shows. Makes for a boring read: Unadulaterated self-expression almost always does. Nothing is interesting about this dinner party or my observations of its various participants. I transcribed it because it is a part of the record. It’s reproduced with as many of the original misspellings as spell-check will allow.
2 This would be John Colby, something of a creep.
3 Mark had no aesthetic sensibility whatsoever. Every place he lived was utilitarian bordering on ugly. This has been true of quite a few of my male consorts over the years. Ben was like that, too. Absolutely no intrinsic sense of harmony or beauty in his surroundings—which is weird because Ben was snotty about things like antiques and art.
4 In fact, this entry is singularly obsessed with dental work. I can’t think why.
5 My musings on the bourgeoisie and the middle class throughout this entry are a hoot! Like I wasn't middle-class? 😀 I suppose I thought the fact that my family was totally insane protected me from economic categorization.
6 Megan Fitzwilliams (not her real name) was part of my high school clique. She had these knee-high green suede boots that I thought were the coolest things ev-ah!!!!
7 I have no idea what I meant by this adjective. From the context, it was a real joint. It is quite possible I didn't actually know what the word "virtual" meant. In those days, I was always using words I read in books whose dictionary meanings I had only guessed at from the context of those books.
8 And, of course, this was typical of so many male/female sexual interactions in those days.
9 For the record, I will note here that I didn't like Joni Mitchell then, and I still don't like her.
10 At this point in my life—age 22, you may recall—I didn't much like children and couldn't imagine myself having any. I had absolutely no sympathy for Caren's struggles as a single mother.
11. What's most interesting about this exchange is that my mother had actually been Woody Allen's production secretary on Take the Money and Run, Woody Allen's first feature movie, and thus, I had been introduced to Woody Allen on several occasions. And I didn't bring this up! 😀
I knew Woody Allen's producer Charles Joffee much better because I babysat for Joffee's fiancee's two enchanting daughters—one of whom grew up to become the film director Nicole Holofcener. In fact, it was through this connection that I had started modeling.
12 To this very day, I think Gene Wilder in the gutter quaffing Woolite is one of the funniest things ever put on the screen.
13 So odd! I was using "banter" as an insult here! Clearly, back then, I thought that people should sit around and talk about their feelings all day long! 😀. These days banter and small talk are my very favorite things, and I never want to talk about feelings—my own or anyone else's. 😀
On the top of the first page, I’d written humor springs from inability to cope—transactional analysis.
On the top of the fourth page, I’d written in ink: I believe that the soul consists of its sufferings for the soul that cures its sufferings dies. – Antonio Porchia
14 September, 19741
We’ve found a place—a little stucco bungalow with white-washed walls & a tiny wedge of garden. Colby2, soon to be of Colby Street, is delighted, & I am pleased—the house is sunny & above all clean—no troups of gorilla cockroaches waiting to overthrow the administration. Mark has reservations. In the car on our way home from driving John to the airport (his aunt is busy dying of cancer in Southern California—John is somewhat flustered but also secretly pleased by the whole affair—it gives his life such a sense of drama, of urgency. “Imagine being someone whose decisions mean something, he says, eyes shining (vis-à-vis the Rockefellars.) They shine the same way when he tells us the afternoon he left, “My aunt called for me last night.”) I am prattling innocuously about some clothes I’d like to buy—“I can’t help it if I sound bourgeois,” says I self-righteously, “I’d like to look nice—”
“That,” remarks my wry lover, “is a word I want banished from the English language. Nice3 —” This being the main argument in favor of the house: I-want-to-live-somewhere-nice—
The spectre of the bourgeoisie hangs over us. Last night we attended a dinner party given by one of John’s summer acquisitions—a slender, cat-eyed pot-tress named Caren, whose full smile reveals straight small teeth with a flash of metal4 & a demonic sense of urgency. “She certainly is very sexually demanding,” says John rubbing himself ruefully. She has a laugh like china breaking, a mechanical ripple, a music box caught on two notes but there is something poignant about her nonetheless withal it coexists with a knife’s edge of desperation so that she reminds me of one of those metal-toothed dolls that attacked Jane Fonda in Barbarella.
The party itself was a complete drag. Like attending a funeral: remember to keep your speech decorous and your legs crossed—is that another distinguishing characteristic of the middle class5, this inability to enjoy—? Lovely house—a large stucco bungalow with white-washed walls and a tiny wedge of garden. Done in plants and Indian prints, Mexican wall hangings & Caren’s pots—“I’m the only female macho potter in Berkeley,” she confides & then laughs, rat-a-tat-tat like the staccato of a machine gun. She is a gifted potter. I’ve met the guests before over the course of upteen thousand reincarnations: the hostess herself, bare-armed in a childish white-and-posied frock; the birthday girl (“person,” she corrects drily), a depressed looking young woman whose hair needs washing; a Megan Fitzwilliams6-esque young beauty who spends most of the evening cuddling with her boyfriend. These are the proprietresses of the establishement: Caren, Betsy & Becky. At home I smear on the battle paint while Mark sheepishly changes into a pair of John’s woolen slacks (“You have to take a chance some time in your life,” smiles Mr. Martin of Martini realtors, “& anyway you’re all clean-cut.”) We are both self-conscious over the metamorphoses we are trying to effect in one another’s presence—like learning to shit with the bathroom door unlatched.
“This is Mark & Patty,” Caren announces, her fillings gleaming. Dutifully we file into the living room & seat outselves amid the other inanimate objets d’art. A virtual7 joint is passed around. One of our fellow revelers, a pretty boy with smooth slanting eyes & a mop of dark curls, takes charge of the dope, twitching his ass pertly as he carries the joint around & breathes the smoke, chillum-like, at the faces of each person in the room. “Hey! You inhale like a real head!” he cries at Mark approvingly. His name is Jack. He collects food-stamps & exciting places that he has picked up girls at. He is dangling the bait at the most unlikely looking girl in the room, a bespectacled miss with a Peter Pan collar but apparently it worked—by the end of the evening he was practicing “body massages” on her body & she was submitting with the slightly wistful scowl of a person who doesn’t particularly like one night stands but supposes they are the hip thing to do8.
Jack is flashing his dimples at us. Mark lamely manufactures topics for conversation, “W-e-ell. We almost didn’t make it up that hill. You know that hill? My car stalled at the intersection—”
Ensuing conversation about stalling Volkswagens. A Joni Mitchell record played 3 times in a row without anyone changing it.
“I’ve been living in my VW bus for 4 months,” Jack tells us. He’s as cute as Shirley Temple, and almost as pretty as Miss America & apparently knows it—he poses just like a professional model. “I’ve got it all fixed up. I’ve got a stove, & a refrigerator & a shower. I’ve got a 60-piece set of sterling silver. I bet I’m the only guy who lives in a bus with a 60-piece set of silver. One time I was at a party & ran out of forks so I volunteered mine—wow, you should have seen their faces—”
“Wow. Is it warm enough & everything?” asks Mark gamely.
“Well, I have a genuine army down-sleeping bag,” Jack reassures him.
“And you’re going to live in it during the winter?”
“I’m going to Denver in a week,” says Jack.
What are we talking about? Food stamps, we’re talking about food stamps, we’ve having a very heated conversation about food stamps. Joni Mitchell9, the Laurel Canyon nightingale, sings on.
“You know how many food stamps you can get in Alaska?” Jack interrogates the room & when nobody does, answers himself, “Ninety-six dollars worth.”
“You been to Alaska?”
“I was born in Anchorage. And you can get $56 worth in Hawaii. I was just in Hawaii. I spent 6 months in Hawaii.”
“What part of Hawaii?”
“Waikiki. And Maui. That used to be a leper’s colony.” Jack slips into his reminiscences with the seductive air of a party girl slipping into something “more comfortable.” But despite his pretty face, nobody loves him here except for the plain girl who doesn’t really love him but supposes she’s got to get fucked some time in her life. “I went to this party given by these rich people & they flew 13 people in from the main land, that’s how rich they were. Thirteen people. I didn’t live in my bus in Hawaii,” he adds politely for the sake of thematic continuity but everyone’s been in at least one encounter group so they all know what Jack is doing is ego-tripping.
At the dinner table personalities resolved themselves further. Betsy, seated in the place of honor at the head of the table, looks as tho a close friend has just died. Caren is genteel & gracious, her hostess smile, her tinny ripple of laughter. At odds somehow with the little girl’s dress she is wearing. The real little girls are trotted in—wide-eyed little elves10. “Did you hear what they were talking about?” simpers Caren with a little screech. “We’ve got a bunch of eighty year old midgits living here.” The good little girl, fat cheeks, yellow hair, is hers; the difficult little girl belongs to Betsy. “Chrissie, go to bed,” murmurs her mother.
“Not until Melissa’s finished her ice cream,” chimes the daughter. She will be a dark-haired, imperious beauty when she is grown.
“Chrissie, now.”
The little girl ignores her.
Betsy sighs and lays back in her chair. Something tragic has penetrated her & she does not know how to give birth to it. The evening for me is dominated by this other woman’s sadness, one of those empathetic moments that are so intangibly motivated that you wonder whether the sense of identification you’re feeling isn’t just a totally arbitrary contrivance to get you through a boring situation. I fancy that Betsy is tired of her nice life, tired of her nice home, the nice dinner party thrown in her honor, longs to stand as sweetly-defiant as her little daughter, say: fuck it all. “Excuse me,” bubbles the irrepressible Jack, “I’ve forgotten your name. What’s your profession?”
“Optometrist,” says the man with a pale, uncomfortable, death’s-head smile.
“I knew it. I just knew it! I said to myself doctor—”
Across the table, the self-appointed cynic of the evening sneers at him. We are politely surveying the grounds for topical subjects of conversation: “Woody Allen11,” says this man, clasping his hands to his heart in an attitude of rapture. “I adore Woody Allen. Everything he ever did. Exc ept that sex movie. Ugh!” His little Hitler-esque mustache quivers in distain.
“Oh really,” says Caren, “Betsy says that’s the one she like the best—”
“Did you?”
“Yes,” says Betsy, forcing a smile.
“We-ell,” says the man with an appropriate lift of his eyebrow that translates as I-am-too-polite-to-say-anything-more.
“I liked that movie best too!” I cry, my nervousness shuddering my determination to make myself heard behind a little girl flutter.
“What movie?”
“Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex12. I mean Woody Allen’s a very funny man but he’s so topical. You know—New York, Jewish humor—”
“Well I am neither Jewish nor a New Yorker & I find Woody Allen to be ab extraordinarily funny man,” says the man sporting his prize sneer. He bears the nondescriptive name of Charlie & earlier was expounding on a management meeting he had attended that morning in a voice that had been bred to carry.
“Well maybe you were reincarnated into the wrong body,” I mutter but nobody hears ne except the cadaverous man sitting next to me who draws his lips back from his teeth in a parody of grinning revealing pale gums & nicotine eroded roots. He leans over & grasps my hand for a moment. “What sign are you?” he asks, making his eyes moist & meaningful for me.
But enough—one gets the general impression. This is the consumer market for which transactional analysis was invented (the other day sitting in a restaurant, we hear the beer-embalmed voice of an unseen but no less florid matron boom from behind a tasteful bamboo partition—“That’s no fair, Irving—you’ve given Sheila more strokes than you’ve given me!”), these people whose only self-definitions spring from the social situations at hand. It is the key to Charlie-the-insurance-salesman’s humor—humor is derived from someone else’s inability to cope, in fact becomes a kind of social Darwinism in action—you prove your own ability to cope by seizing mercilessly upon another’s inability. This is banter13.
1 There’s a difference between writing to express oneself and writing to communicate.
Here I was indulging the former impulse, and it shows. Makes for a boring read: Unadulaterated self-expression almost always does. Nothing is interesting about this dinner party or my observations of its various participants. I transcribed it because it is a part of the record. It’s reproduced with as many of the original misspellings as spell-check will allow.
2 This would be John Colby, something of a creep.
3 Mark had no aesthetic sensibility whatsoever. Every place he lived was utilitarian bordering on ugly. This has been true of quite a few of my male consorts over the years. Ben was like that, too. Absolutely no intrinsic sense of harmony or beauty in his surroundings—which is weird because Ben was snotty about things like antiques and art.
4 In fact, this entry is singularly obsessed with dental work. I can’t think why.
5 My musings on the bourgeoisie and the middle class throughout this entry are a hoot! Like I wasn't middle-class? 😀 I suppose I thought the fact that my family was totally insane protected me from economic categorization.
6 Megan Fitzwilliams (not her real name) was part of my high school clique. She had these knee-high green suede boots that I thought were the coolest things ev-ah!!!!
7 I have no idea what I meant by this adjective. From the context, it was a real joint. It is quite possible I didn't actually know what the word "virtual" meant. In those days, I was always using words I read in books whose dictionary meanings I had only guessed at from the context of those books.
8 And, of course, this was typical of so many male/female sexual interactions in those days.
9 For the record, I will note here that I didn't like Joni Mitchell then, and I still don't like her.
10 At this point in my life—age 22, you may recall—I didn't much like children and couldn't imagine myself having any. I had absolutely no sympathy for Caren's struggles as a single mother.
11. What's most interesting about this exchange is that my mother had actually been Woody Allen's production secretary on Take the Money and Run, Woody Allen's first feature movie, and thus, I had been introduced to Woody Allen on several occasions. And I didn't bring this up! 😀
I knew Woody Allen's producer Charles Joffee much better because I babysat for Joffee's fiancee's two enchanting daughters—one of whom grew up to become the film director Nicole Holofcener. In fact, it was through this connection that I had started modeling.
12 To this very day, I think Gene Wilder in the gutter quaffing Woolite is one of the funniest things ever put on the screen.
13 So odd! I was using "banter" as an insult here! Clearly, back then, I thought that people should sit around and talk about their feelings all day long! 😀. These days banter and small talk are my very favorite things, and I never want to talk about feelings—my own or anyone else's. 😀
