Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002
Page 22
I wouldn’t mind but I’m broke right now and could have made a lot more money working for Jeffrey Lee today. I have to do something about my finances. I don’t want Hugh to think I’m shiftless and I don’t want to scare him away by relying on him. I’ve always counted on things to work out, and they usually do, but the stakes are higher here.
I’m surrounded by people who have more money than they know what to do with, and none of them have earned it.
March 27, 1991
New York
I received an offer for the Citibank Citicard, which promises me instant cash privileges if I need to spend time in a hospital. If I lose both hands and feet, I am entitled to $20,000 under their “cash benefits for accidental dismemberment” clause. If I lose one hand or one foot, I get half that, but if I lose one hand and one foot, I’m back up to $20,000.
April 3, 1991
New York
Jeffrey Lee says ish a lot.
“How do the curtains look?”
“Ish.”
He can pay me $200 on Friday so I can pay Rusty the rest of the rent money I owe him. So far with Jeffrey Lee I’ve earned maybe $650. I’ve earned another $100 with Alba and I have $80 in the bank. So I’ll be rich. Ish.
April 9, 1991
New York
I read last night at the Knot Room. The opening act was a singing duo, the guy on ukulele and the woman on violin. Their first song was called “Everyone Here Is White Tonight.” When they finished, eight people left. That happens all the time. People leave after their friends are done. After the exodus, there were maybe twenty audience members left, but it’s a tiny room so it didn’t feel empty. Alba came, which was sweet of her.
April 13, 1991
New York
I worked today for David Donner, a marketing analyst who paints apartments on the side. He’s been hired to do a one-bedroom on 29th and Lexington and I’m helping for $11 an hour. We met on the sidewalk outside the building this morning because the doormen were giving him such a hard time. They’re the worst, these guys. They take loads of shit from the tenants and then heap it on whoever’s less powerful.
The service-elevator operators were just as bad. They say we’re not allowed to work on the weekends and that if they knock on the door and find us painting, they’ll cut off the electricity.
He’s tireless, David. Five minutes for lunch. His regular assistant is on vacation. I asked what he was like and David used the term workhorse three times. At first he was very terse, but he loosened up as the day went on and told me that his dad is a veterinarian. You’d think that would spell pets, but his mother didn’t want animals walking through the rooms of their house unescorted, so they had none.
We worked eight hours, and he paid me in cash at the end of the day.
April 18, 1991
New York
Alba spent the better part of the day crying. I asked what was wrong and she said, “Everything.” I felt bad for her.
April 21, 1991
New York
I worked with David Donner again today, which is Sunday. The doormen were on strike, so they brooded outside the building as opposed to inside the building. In their place are private security guards who issued David and me passes we need in order to exit and reenter.
I went out at one to buy lunch and was in the lobby when one of the striking doormen stepped in and called me buster, as in “You’re going to have to clean up those footprints, buster.” He pointed to something I could barely see.
So I said, “All right, can you give me something to clean them with?”
He told me to go upstairs and get something. “Would you make a mess like that in your own home?” he asked. And again, I could barely see what he was talking about. And wasn’t he supposed to be outside on strike?
“I’m a very clean person,” I told him.
He said, “I’ll have you thrown out and make sure you never come back. I’ll take that goddamn card of yours and tear it to pieces, you hear me, buster?”
People in the lobby turned to see what the fuss was.
“Goddamn you, you’re out of here,” the doorman said.
I went upstairs and returned with a damp rag. Then I got on my hands and knees and cleaned my faint footprints off the carpet. Boy, my blood was boiling. It was pouring when I went out for lunch. On my way back in, the security guard asked to see my pass, which was complete bullshit as five minutes earlier he’d seen me crawl in front of him on my hands and knees. So I had lunch in one hand, an umbrella in the other, and as I searched in my pocket for my pass, I get yelled at for dripping water onto the carpet. I don’t know where to begin with these assholes, I really don’t.
April 25, 1991
New York
Today we moved the office from the Chelsea Hotel to Alba’s house on Bleecker Street—four full floors and two basements. She hired movers, two nice Colombians who have a company called Going. I don’t think Alba understands the thoughts of people who are working. If you’ve carried a big TV up four flights of stairs, you don’t want a lot of hemming and hawing about where it goes—you just want to set it down. At one point I suggested that if she was going from the first to the third floor, it wouldn’t hurt her to carry a little something up, a magazine, maybe, or a coffee cup.
She told me that she was not a lazy person, and then she went up empty-handed. Later she had a fit when one of the floor refinishers broke a mirror. It was the type you’d put on the back of a closet door, nothing valuable or hard to replace, but still she went bananas, throwing her purse against the wall, throwing down the book she was holding. “Fucking fuckers!” she shouted. “How dare you do this to me. You broke that mirror. It’s my first day in this house and now I am stuck with the fucking bad luck you have made.”
“I thought you told us you didn’t want this mirror,” one of the guys said.
Alba yelled that that wasn’t the point. “It’s here and it’s broken and now I have to suffer.”
When he reminded her that she didn’t break it and that perhaps the bad luck wasn’t hers, she got even angrier. It was an amazing tantrum.
May 16, 1991
New York
Alba dictated a letter today, which, when typed up, made no sense whatsoever. I don’t understand how someone can use the word contemporary twice in one sentence that runs for nine lines and then get upset because I misspelled completely.
June 22, 1991
New York
After Bonnie and Clyde were gunned down, souvenir hunters mobbed the car, taking with them shards of windshield glass, upholstery, and even hanks of human hair. One fellow was caught attempting to saw off Clyde Barrow’s ear. I read that somewhere yesterday.
June 25, 1991
New York
Tiffany was hit by a car this weekend while riding her bike. This is the second time it’s happened, and again she went to the hospital. There’s no great damage—she’s just scraped up is all. Now she’s planning to sue and has hired herself a shyster lawyer. He told her to make twenty visits to a chiropractor he frequently works with and says they’ll aim for a $5,000 settlement, of which he’ll retain a third. It seems she’ll spend her share on the appointments, won’t she? Plus the lawyer told her to take a week off from her job, and that’s another financial setback. Tiffany never mentioned a thing about it. It was Mom who told me. She’s furious.
June 26, 1991
New York
I began a writing class at the Y tonight, and though the teacher hasn’t a knack for generating critical discussion, I still get a kick out of her. At one point she read a poem by someone I’m not familiar with. “History has borne him out to be something of an anti-Semite and a racist, but he was funny,” she said. Our homework assignment is to write a story in the form of a diary entry.
June 27, 1991
New York
In addition to the house on Bleecker Street, Alba has two apartments on 7th between C and D, one in the basement and another on the ground floor. I emp
tied out the former this afternoon with the help of a mover named Patrick who drives a big van and wears plastic-framed glasses. It must be hard having someone who never lifts a finger telling you all day to be careful, to not scratch the walls or drop something, etc., but he was good at tuning it out.
Patrick is maybe five years older than me. He lives in Chelsea and pays $650 for three rooms. At the end of the day I gave him my number and told him to call if he ever needs any help. It turns out he can use me on Saturday morning and will pay $10 an hour.
June 29, 1991
New York
I worked today, hard, for Patrick the mover. It was a thirteen-hour shift, and I left with bruises on my thighs. It reached 97 degrees this afternoon, and at times I could wring water from my shirt. That said, between the payment and the tips, I made $155. I also drank seven Gatorades.
Our first job was a double, two people moving to two different places. One of them had packed in plastic bags, while the other had used huge boxes, which is always a mistake, especially when you’re moving into a sixth-floor walk-up.
Joining Patrick and me today was a guy named Willie, who lives with his parents in Queens and was once thrown into prison in Argentina. As for the people we moved, it was amazing to watch them walk up the stairs of their old and new apartments completely empty-handed.
What was great was driving all over town: Harlem, the Upper West Side, Chelsea, the Village. Patrick says, “Let’s ride.” At one point we went to his apartment on 16th Street, which was really dirty and messy. On our way back to the van, he told me that Alba had not tipped him. Even worse, after we’d unloaded all of her stuff at the house on Bleecker, she tried to talk him down on the previously agreed-upon price. She’s leaving for Provincetown tomorrow, so no work this week.
July 10, 1991
New York
My writing class is held at the Y on 63rd Street. One Life to Live is filmed just three blocks away, and tonight, while passing the studio, I saw the actor who plays Max Holden talking to two fans.
After commenting on the stories we turned in last week, our teacher advised us to “throw all taste and decency out the window” and use lots of violence in our next assignment.
Walking home, I fell in behind two black women, one short and one tall. Some little bitch kept phoning the short woman’s house, and she’d had it. “When I get mad, I don’t argue,” she said. “I swing.”
July 15, 1991
New York
Hugh and I were on the subway when two women boarded. One was obese, and she pointed to the far end of the car, saying, “Oh, look, Dorothy, two seats together!” The two of them walked over and then the heavy woman sat down, filling both the seats.
August 1, 1991
New York
I worked for Alba again today. She’s preparing to leave 7th Street and is kindly giving the basement apartment to the writer Herbert Huncke and his twenty-one-year-old protégé Jason. I asked the kid where the two of them met and he said, “At the methadone clinic.”
In our past encounters, Herbert was almost grotesquely polite. He’s a charmer, always begging and borrowing money for drugs. He’d hoped to move into the apartment tomorrow and complained that it wasn’t in the state he’d been promised it would be in. So that was my job today, to paint it: shitty latex on shitty, unprepared walls. Herbert wanted the floors done in black enamel, but Alba had already bought white and didn’t feel like exchanging it. This put Herbert in a foul mood that soured as the afternoon progressed.
The place needed to be finished by tonight, and at seven, Alba asked the two men to help. Jason suddenly remembered an appointment he was late for, and Herbert angrily dunked the latex-paint roller into the enamel. The roller was ruined by that point, so he started painting the floor, a dumb thing to do when the walls weren’t finished. When I mentioned this, he turned on me, saying, “What do you know, office boy?”
Office boy? Me? He doesn’t know how to work a roller and I’m the know-nothing? Herbert had a tantrum. Then he asked for turpentine—“turps,” he called it—and I told him we didn’t have any.
“Then how do you expect to wash your hands?”
I told him I planned never to wash my hands again, and he stormed off and sat in the front window. There he crabbed at the people who passed by. He yelled at a guy who touched the sewing machine Alba had left on the curb, hoping someone might take it. He yelled at a neighbor whose gate squeaked. “You ought to oil that damned thing.”
“You ought to oil your fucking head!” the man shouted back, apparently unaware that he was talking to a very important petty thief and heroin addict.
August 4, 1991
New York
The day before yesterday, Patrick and I moved a humorless waiter from 171st Street to 110th. The guy said that he’d had both Milton Berle and John Gotti as customers and that the latter had left him no tip. We didn’t like the waiter, but he was much better than Lola and Raoul, the idiotic club kids we moved last night. She’s from Nigeria, he’s from Israel, and between the two of them, they hadn’t a single box. Who moves without boxes? They had vases of flowers, plates, all the things you’d find in an apartment, just sitting there. Unbelievable. Lola was very beautiful and must have had money in order to afford all the expensive clothing I handled. She had a little lapdog named Poochie that yapped nonstop. The entire job was a nightmare. I’d carry something to the truck and she’d say, “No, not that lamp. Take it back upstairs.”
And Raoul was just as bad, all “Come here now” and “You must listen to me.”
August 20, 1991
New York
Before moving people, I talked to Tiffany. Then Mom called to say that Lisa and Bob’s wedding will take place in a dry county. Bob’s parents don’t approve of cigarettes, so she said we’ll have to drink and smoke in our hotel rooms.
September 20, 1991
New York
Amy is in town to do our play so we were together last night when Mom called and told us that she has lung cancer. She phoned from the hospital, her voice stuffy-sounding due to a tube she had in her nose. We are all of us shocked. The surprise isn’t that it’s lung cancer over any other type but that she has it at all. It made sense that Mrs. Steigerwald, Mrs. Rury, and Uncle Dick had cancer. Not that they were deserving of it, but you could picture them in waiting rooms. I always felt certain we weren’t that kind of people. It’s silly, but that’s what I’d told myself.
The tumor is lemon-sized, but it hasn’t spread, which is good. On Monday the doctor will present a treatment plan, and she’ll let us know what it is.
After Mom hung up, Amy and I talked to Lisa and Tiffany. Paul doesn’t know yet. She hasn’t told him. On the phone, she said it very simply: “I have news for you. I have cancer.”
This is the last day of summer. The temperature was in the low sixties, crisp. Before rehearsal I went to the new apartment on Thompson Street and watched for a while as Hugh chipped away plaster and exposed the brick wall beneath it.
September 24, 1991
New York
Mom called to say they have outlined a course of treatment. Surgery’s been suggested, but first they have to make her strong enough to withstand it. They have her exercising, trying to improve her breathing. It’s hard to imagine Mom jogging or riding a bike, so for the time being, she’s just walking. Meanwhile, she’s going through her jewelry, setting things aside for each daughter. She said she’s not stepping into her grave but just managing her time, and that since I don’t wear jewelry she’s sending me a thousand dollars. Lately, what with the play, I worry about money until my gums bleed. So it will come in handy.
Next week Mom and Eleanor are going out wig shopping, which is scary. She told me she’s still smoking, but only four cigarettes a day. Afterward she sprays the bathroom with perfume so that Dad won’t smell anything. She has a collapsed lung, so it’s not a great idea for her to go to the mountains for Lisa’s wedding, but still she’s determined to make it. “I’ve t
alked about this with Tiffany and Gretchen and I don’t want any of you smoking at the wedding dinner, not at the table. Bob’s people don’t like it, so the least you can do is to step outside.”
October 14, 1991
New York
Lisa got married on Saturday afternoon on top of Eaglenest Mountain. I’d worried it might be sort of hokey, but in fact it was nice to be outdoors and in such a beautiful place. Lisa wore white but not a wedding dress. She and Bob stayed someplace nice and the rest of us were at an Econo Lodge in Waynesville. It was on a highway, but across the road was a pleasant cemetery we could walk to and get high in a circle of stone crosses tall enough to actually crucify people on.
This morning Mom has her first appointment with the radiologist, and tomorrow they’re doing a scan of her brain. Wednesday they’re looking at her bones, and she’s just taking it as it comes. All weekend she was sneaking cigarettes, asking for a drag off mine or Gretchen’s or Tiffany’s.
October 15, 1991
New York
All day I had a terrible headache, so I went and had my hair cut at a place on 6th Avenue that I’d passed several times but never entered. The barber was Italian and really took his time. All the magazines, I noticed, had naked women in them, Playboy on the soft end, and on the hard side, Pink in Film, which had on the cover a woman wearing a strap-on penis.