Have to remember to get my paycheck on Monday. No problem, enough cash to last the weekend. Always enough cash when there’s no place to go, nothing to do, no way to spend the money. Stay inside your apartment all weekend and what do you need but fifty cents for the Sunday Times?
I have to stop this.
Have to see someone tonight. Who? Doesn’t matter. Bad phone conversation yesterday that started my bad mood, a letter answering my ad, and I called this man and he was nice enough, decent enough, but anxious to arrange everything in advance, to discuss carefully just who would do what and with which and to whom, and a feeling of — what?
I don’t know. I should know but I don’t.
Let us figure it out.
Of two sick and pitiable creatures mechanically arranging to lick each other’s wounds. Joyless and personless, the meeting of two people who do not themselves exist. Would I be willing to urinate on him? Not that he insists on it, I am to understand, but if I could find it in myself to do so his pleasure would be complete. As for his part of the game, he would be glad to show me anything I would care to examine, to perform whatever little playlets I might require, to contribute to my fantasies as I contribute to his. Quid pro quo, this for that, do that ye might be done to.
Plummeting me into depression. “I’ll call you back,” I said, knowing I wouldn’t. Piss on you, I thought, cradling the phone, and thought that the phrase should amuse me, and thought then that it did not, and that little if anything did in fact amuse me.
Made calls to two other correspondents and hung up before anyone could answer. Remembered sitting with my handful of fourteen letters dreaming dreams of fantasies now and forever fulfilled, and now those letters and the fantasies and dreams along with them turned to ashes in my hand, in my mind, in my heart. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, dreams to death and decay, for Jennifer, for Arlene, even as for every philodendron on God’s imperfect planet.
The mood still there this morning, reinforced by sufficient physical malaise to make the sick call legitimate enough. Stomach upset, head aching dully. Sick and slick with night sweats and feeling bad head to foot. Bad dreams all night. Tossing and turning all night long, sheet damp with sweat.
Hell.
Do things, push yourself, take it step by step by step, and then you find out you’re the same person stuck in the same hell. Orgasms with another person are nicer than orgasms all alone, and being able to bring a man or woman pleasure with hands or mouth or cunt is better than being terrified of so much as a hand on one’s arm.
But still incomplete, still utterly alone. Still Arlene in one’s heart however many beds Jennifer shares.
The hell of this is that I at once believe it and disbelieve it. Last night it meant enough to make me mostly wish for death, and this morning it was still strong enough to keep me away from the office, to keep me in bed with the covers over my head waiting for the day to go away. And now I still believe it but also disbelieve it, both at once, disbelieving strongly enough so that I do think it is important that the philodendron is adding leaves, do think it is important that I am growing in certain ways if not in others. And important to seek, and to grab at excitement and orgasms and snatches of pleasure.
Better to have the black moods, bad as they are, for the sake of having the good times when they come. Before, in Brooklyn, there were no good times and no bad times either. It was bad when I thought overly much about who I was, but these thoughts came less frequently and did not have so much impact when they did. The highs were lower, the lows higher, and life went on without anything happening, inside or outside of the prison of my self.
I am alive now in ways I never was. Better to be alive. Though it is this state of life that makes one think unhappily of dying.
The philodendron, eternal or not, does not know that it will one day wither. The Human Condition — knowing that one is born to die.
I am not good at philosophy. It is not my best subject, nor am I its best object.
I will call Paul and Gregory, my gay boys. I am not good at philosophy but I am strangely good at pleasure. Not so good at pleasure of my own but surprisingly good at achieving the pleasure of others.
Whores, I have read, are frigid, turned off, feel nothing. The better they are at satisfying men, the less the likelihood of their ever experiencing satisfaction themselves. They suck cocks magnificently while their heads buzz with thoughts of television programs and hair appointments.
Fantasy of some day picking a man up on the street and posing as a whore. Taking him to a hotel, bedding with him for money. Pretending to be a whore? If I did it, would it be pretense?
I’d never do that, though.
I could call someone new but not tonight. Paul and Gregory. Made a tentative date to call them tonight, though didn’t expect I would keep it.
Why not?
24 April — Saturday
I wonder what I do for them, exactly. I wonder what it is that endears me to them.
Paul and Gregory.
Paul, tall and very slim. Must be six-four and slender as a reed. Close-cropped hair like a cap on the top of his round head. Flat buttocks, imperceptible hips. Looks like a penis, standing so straight and reed-like and tall, the round head, the tight cap of short straight limp brown hair. His penis also very long, very thin, but no cap of hair on its tip, not surprisingly. Capped, though, by a foreskin.
Gregory a few inches shorter but much different in build. Used to lift weights “until I got out of that whole muscle-boy bag and decided just to be a person.” The muscle fetish routine may be immature and narcissistic and sick, but it does leave a man with an attractive body. The ones who overdo it turn me off a little. The supermen who bulge everywhere. I would have difficulty relating to that, I think. I’m surprised they can even relate to each other. Actually I don’t think they can. “The muscle boys aren’t really into sex,” Gregory told me at one point. “They want to be admired, want to be adequate, but when you’re in that number you don’t really want to ball anyone. It’s just the pleasure of being admired that’s important, and admiring in turn someone who’s better at it than you are. I like to stay in shape. It’s a turn-off when a person doesn’t stay in shape, but it’s also a turn-off when you have a guy who spends all his life drinking protein supplements and lifting weights and never having anything more intelligent to discuss than triceps definition.”
If I didn’t know that a triceps was a particular muscle, what would I think it was? A three-wheeled septic tank, I suppose.
They are gay, are Paul and Gregory. But neither Gay Lib militants nor closet types. Both have made it with girls, and are capable of so doing. Only problem is that they are incapable of enjoying it.
Either Paul or Gregory speaking, hardly matters as they are both in very much the same situation here: “I can get off with a girl. It gets hard and I stick it in and move it around until the gun goes off. I can stay hard long enough for the girl to get there. No problem there. But it doesn’t mean anything. It isn’t real. It’s jerking off, fucking a hand or a pillow or a chicken.”
(Chickens!?!?)
“I can’t relate to a girl. I read lines instead of talking normally. I feel as though I’m on stage or on camera, being observed by some extraterrestrial intelligence. And the girl, whoever she is. Our minds touch but our bodies don’t touch. Another man is a duplicate of self. It’s easier that way. I’m myself and he’s himself and we can get it together. I’ve read about homosexuality being neurotic, immature. I’m far less neurotic and far more mature in bed with a man than when I try to get it off with a woman.”