I called Liz. She was back at her place and had just finished turning the first trick of the day. She works a lot by telephone, and gets morning people quite frequently. She calls them the coffee-break crowd.
“Who’s my lawyer?”
I told her why I wanted to know, and she told me the name of her lawyer, who she said is reasonably good. Jason Silverblatt. I love that name. I like to write it, the way it looks on the page. Jason Silverblatt. Jason, wherever you are, whoever you are, I’d ball you for free. I love that name.
“Jason Silverblatt,” I told Howie, and gave him the address. He wrote it all down. “And what else is there to say besides See my lawyer?
“I want your address and phone, too.”
“Up yours.”
“I don’t see how in hell you’re the injured party, Jan. Why come on so strong?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re the one who walked out. Not after a fight, not because I did anything that I know about. You just walked out.”
“I know. You were right before, I’m a bitch.”
“Well, people have problems.”
“Problems. Are you getting married again, Howard?”
“Eventually, I suppose.”
“I mean is that why you want the divorce?”
“Oh. No.”
“Just to get it over with, I suppose.”
“To get rid of loose ends.”
“Sure.”
“There are some girls that I see, one more than the others, but I suppose I’m a little reluctant to get too deeply involved with anybody right now, Jan. Once bitten and all that.”
“Sure.”
“Well, I don’t want to keep you—”
“We might as well finish our coffee.”
“All right.”
So we sat there and finished our coffee, but nothing much else got said. And then he paid for our coffee — poor men, they always pay for everything. And we went our separate ways.
I haven’t even called Silverblatt myself yet. I suppose I ought to. I told Liz I don’t want any alimony from him, or even anything from the house. She told me to take a cash settlement then.
“If you don’t take it, you’re throwing money away. You know what you could get? About half of what he earns from now until the day you remarry, and you’re not going to remarry.”
“But I’ve treated him badly enough already.”
“Men and women always treat each other badly. It’s a law of nature.”
“You know, I think that might be true.”
“Of course it’s true. Would I lie to you? Listen, at least talk it over with Jason Silverblatt. I’m sure you can get five or ten thousand dollars in cash just for signing a paper saying good-bye, Charlie.”
“I looked at him today and I wanted to take him home with me.”
“You’ve got the hots for him all of a sudden? For your own husband?”
“No, it wasn’t that. A pity thing, I guess. He looked so pathetic.”
“Terrific. You screwed him up and you feel sorry for it and now you want to screw him up some more.”
“I know it doesn’t make sense. That’s why I didn’t do anything about it. It was just an impulse.”
“You have to watch these impulses.”
“I know.”
“You take the money. He had the best years of your life, the son of a bitch.”
Maybe she’s right.
August 22
I had an orgasm whipping a John.
I thought it would be impossible to come with a John. It isn’t. Every once in a while one of them gets to you. Of course they never know the difference, because you fake it anyway, so it all comes to the same thing.
I don’t too much love the S-and-M stuff. I had this one a few days ago who wanted his balls spanked. That was what he wanted. I was supposed to suck him into a state of magnificent erection, then take my mouth away and hold his cock out of the way with my one hand and slap him across the scrotum with the other until he got his gun. He kept wanting me to hit him harder, and I was certain I was going to hit him too hard and ruin him for life. I kept hitting him and eventually he got where he was going. He shot all over himself, the hair on his chest and everything. I let him take a shower, the poor son of a bitch.
This one today, it was more ordinary. I whipped him with his leather belt across the behind. Maybe because I wasn’t touching him and he was just whimpering quietly I was able to trip way out on my own private thoughts and associations, and I got into various similar experiences I had had, things with Susan and Eric, and it got to me, and surprise! I came.
It’s funny when that happens when you didn’t expect it.
August 25
The weather has been really impossible lately. It’s just too hot to breathe. Of course the apartment is air-conditioned and so is Liz’s place but even so the heat has to get to you. You take one step out of doors and you literally wilt.
You would think, or at least I would think, that the men would wait for cooler weather. Who wants to screw in weather like this?
But nothing stops them.
August 29
I can almost pay Liz back already. Not for the kindness, that will take a long, long while to pay back, but for the actual cash.
It constantly amazes me how much money there is in this line of work. There is really a tremendous amount of money involved. I keep thinking about those jobs I once considered, five days a week of nine to five for a hundred and ten dollars a week.
Girls prettier than I am have jobs like that, and for what? Self-esteem?
September 1
Still no break in the heat.
I keep thinking, when I’m with one man or another, that here’s one I’ll want to write about in my diary. A couple of times I find myself sitting down determined to write about one of them and then I change my mind and don’t write anything at all, I close the book and go out or go upstairs and talk with Liz or something.
Evidently I don’t want to write about them.
I guess what it amounts to is they cease to have anything going for them, any aura, that has sufficient impact upon me to leave me with something I have to get rid of by getting it all down in pen and ink. I mean getting it down in black and white. Pen and ink is what I use to get it down in black and white. (Except that the pen and ink are sort of a stable entry, this being a ball-point pen, so that when you’re out of ink you’re out of pen. And the ink is more blue than black. Technology kills clichés.)
Today is the day I’m officially delinquent in my rent down in the Village, which is nothing to worry about since I moved out of there two weeks ago. I wonder what happens now. Is the sculptor hung for the dough because it was a sublet? Well, if he’s in Bolivia or wherever the hell he went to, I don’t see how they can bug him for it. Let them worry.
You know what I miss most about the place? That there were a few dozen cheap restaurants close by that you could go to without worrying how you were dressed. Little Chinese and Italian and Spanish places you could go to in slacks. Here it’s either plastic coffee shops (home of the dollar eighty-five hamburger!) or class restaurants where you have to be dressed and you wind up spending ten dollars, and you feel awkward going there alone anyway.
All in all, though, I like it better here.
September 4
I had a nice high last night. I had a John during the afternoon, an advertising man who decided that he would rather bitch than screw. Mainly about his wife and his ingrate kids and life on Long Island, the whole suburban trap. By the time he got around to balling I was very depressed.