“Well, if you could spare a few dollars.”
“Jan, you should have said something. Whatever you want, whatever you need. Just pick a number.”
“Well—” trying it on “—well, see, I generally get twenty-five dollars.”
I wish I had a picture of his face to paste here. Out of sight. He was really a study.
“A joke,” I said, cutting it off, taking his arm, laughing so that he could gratefully join in my laughter. “But I had you for a minute, didn’t I?”
I wonder if I’ll ever see him again. The only pleasure I got out of balling him was the humor of it. The sex wasn’t good or bad. It was — how to put it? I was not taking part in it. It was going on, and there was certainly nothing about it that I didn’t like, but neither was there anything the least bit involving about it.
July 7
Twice today I thought I saw Eric on the street.
I went to a lesbian bar last night. I don’t think I’m ready for that scene just yet. Girls dancing with girls, some of them in very butchy drag. Maybe I could have enjoyed it if I had been high at the time. I wasn’t, and I got lower hanging around there.
One girl gave me the eye rather obviously, but I didn’t respond. Maybe if she had pushed it, if she had come over and started a conversation. But she didn’t, so I finished my two-and-a-half-dollar drink and went home.
July 8
Jesus, what do I do now?
At least the book is still here. But what do I do? Nobody’s around and the rent is due in a couple of weeks and for God’s sake what do I do?
July 9
The entry for yesterday looks inane. I wish it didn’t mean anything. I keep looking at the words like an inside-out cryptographer, hoping that if I study them long enough they will cease to mean anything to me.
Doesn’t work.
Yesterday evening when I got home after a sort of combination of lunch and dinner I found out I had been robbed. Burglarized, I guess I mean. You have to be home to be robbed. I think. Not that it matters.
They got all my money. I had my purse with me. Twenty dollars in it — I never carry a lot for fear of having my purse snatched, which is laughable, now. I left the rest at home, all carefully stashed in my dresser at the bottom of a pile of sweaters, because after all who would think of looking under a pile of sweaters, right?
Wrong.
They got over a thousand dollars from me. I don’t know how much it was because I don’t know how much I had exactly. Between a thousand and fifteen hundred. I think.
Leaving me with between twenty and twenty-five.
When I came home I almost had a stroke. I’m still someone who belongs in intensive care, no question. Funny things dept. — Before I ran to the sweater drawer, I first made sure that they hadn’t found this book. Over a thousand dollars up for grabs and some fucking junkie bastard is going to waste his time reading my diary, right?
Why do I keep thinking that this is funny? The one thing it’s not is funny. But this nervous giggle keeps wanting to develop somewhere in the back of my head, somewhere in those sinus cavities they show you in the Dristan commercials.
They didn’t wreck the place. That was one thing, I suppose, to be thankful for. My clothes got sort of thrown around a lot, because I guess you can’t expect burglars to put everything back neatly. But there was no tremendous damage done, like pillows and mattresses cut open and all that.
I suppose they stopped knocking their brains out when they hit the cash.
You know, I can’t get away from it, but I keep thinking he had something to do with it. Eric. I can’t think of any logical reason why he should waste his time burglarizing my apartment. It doesn’t make any particular sense. If he wanted money from me, which he wouldn’t, he could simply ask for it the way he can ask anything else from me.
I keep thinking about the time he burned up my credit cards. Cutting a link to Howard, he said. But maybe it was a way to make me dependent upon him instead, and maybe this was another part of that process. No credit, no money, no friends, nothing — not even Eric, because I still haven’t heard a word from him.
People keep floating in and out of my life. I got bored once because of the sameness, and now nothing’s the same from one day to the next. Not that things are that interesting, but the whole shape of my world keeps changing.
Fancy talk. What it comes down to is I’m broke, and what do I do now, Mother?
I am honestly damned if I know.
The jobs I checked out, the jobs I looked at but did not touch, were all pretty much the same thing. Nine-to-five crap for a hundred and ten dollars a week. It didn’t seem worth the trouble when I had money and now it just isn’t enough. What am I going to do on a hundred and ten a week? That comes to about eighty-five a week after taxes, and I pay more than that right now for rent alone. I pay three hundred and seventy-five dollars a month rent, and there is no kind of job I can get that will give me that kind of bread.
I suppose I could get out of here. Except that I really like it here, and where am I going to go? I could find some shithole in the East Village for fifty dollars a month, but how long could I live there before I started to go crazy? It wasn’t too bad visiting Arnold and David at their apartments, although it was occasionally depressing, especially Arnold’s, but then I had them with me. I can’t imagine being alone in a place like that, returning to it after a day’s work pounding a typewriter or whatever you have to do to bring home a lousy eighty-five dollars a week.
There are these jobs they advertise in the East Village Other. Modeling, which means nude work of one sort or another. Once in a while I suppose it’s a legitimate job for a photographer who takes dirty pictures, but I gather that mostly it’s working in those modeling clubs where creeps bring cameras and take nude pictures of you, half the time without film in the camera.
(What sort of men actually go to those places? I mean, I can see a man paying a whore, but to pay money to click a camera at some bored, naked girl. I mean, why?)
They pay five or ten dollars an hour. Ten dollars an hour to have some goon snap pictures of you isn’t too bad. But I don’t suppose the work is very steady. Not the sort of thing you can count on. Those places must get shut down from time to time, or else the customers must get tired of the same old faces.
Faces?
Besides, it’s not much different from being a whore, except for being less interesting.
That’s what it all keeps coming to, doesn’t it?
Oh, I don’t want to think about it. I really don’t. I can’t think about anything else and I don’t want to think about this, certainly not for the time being. It was all something I knew I was going to have to face pretty soon. Another three months at the outside and my money would have run out, even if that son of a bitch hadn’t walked off with it. (Maybe I shouldn’t call him names. Maybe he was poor and he really needed the money. Well, he isn’t poor now. Now he has my fifteen hundred dollars, the son of a bitch.)
God, I wish I could get high! I mean really nice and high and just sit around feeling great for a couple of hours. I think I could face anything right now if first I could just get high and have a little time to myself, just high and happy. That mixture of grass and hash that I smoked with the boys. I would love to have a taste of that now and go off on one of those happy bubbly cerebral highs. Or that red crud that Eric keeps around the place, the sweet-and-sour rose petals, whatever the hell it is. Some kind of a sex drug, but you could take it and get high and skip the sex and it would be better than sitting around like this.