4:20 PM Fri Oct 14 – 77
Blessed book! The joy, the solidity, the security this diary has afforded me all my life can’t be measured. Bizarre letter from my dentist thanking me for referring “Mr. Arlen” to them! Apparently Ryder is stalking me. Now I have to wear makeup to the dentist! Hope I don’t run into Ryder while wacked out on Novocain. Usual day of quotidian pursuits, washing lingerie & hair, filing, letters. Avril writes that Mason is moving in with a friend! He thinks it will be “better” for her. Bet the “friend” is female! Sure sounds like death knell to me – he dragged her all the way out there, ran busily through her money & lost his spark. Still other’s relationships are always so much clearer! Now we can be glad she’s not going to school – she needs to get out NOW.
Plush Palace – Mon – 11:40 PM 17 Oct 77
4 Dancers on tonight but Cindy and Linda walked out, ticked about my raise (I didn’t tell them.) So more dancing (and $$). Plus coffee machine broken and we need to order out so I treated myself to 2 Krispy Kremes. Ah, the simple joys. Five-year plan guy is back. His fave play? “Love is Alive” – unfortunately.
The most gorgeous autumn weather tonight driving here – my heart soared. ONE MORE SET! Then fling on fake fur “Shakespearean” coat, jump into El Diablo, off into the night. Bar deserted, tips unspeakable. Asked if I could cash a check with Randy he just handed me a $20 bill, so there’s gas. Kiki says she’s getting married, worked the whole evening on her guest list for Big Event in Fredericksburg. Reading Hardwick’s Seduction & Betrayal and appreciating it although something’s “off” about her. Why won’t the ventriloquist put down the dummy and just talk? And she’s just flat wrong about Woolf and Plath.
I brood about letting R. know where I work. Brave or stupid? Stupid, I think. Better class him with “dead end relationships”. I have plenty of people I’d never want to see again – Bruce and Kyro springs to mind. Other people I feel good about like Toss Sheffield. He’d be fun to see again. Could he handle my dancing? He had a fun “hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy” attitude in general towards effort & enterprise.
Insomniac
I can’t sleep
Because you’re gone
My muscles wake
My mind goes spinning on
And where your fingers
Plied and pruned my face
Night air is cold and
Caustic in its place
And where we turned and woke
In complex rhyme, I’m left
To face the music frayed by time
A waltz which once we won
Losing battle choreographed for one.
None to explore or
Appreciate my line though now at last
It’s incontestably mine.
12:10 PM- Plush Palace – Wed 19 Oct 77
Dance night, then dance the next day kind of rough. And tips are bad when the weather’s good – no one comes in. I seem to have a lot of bills – just turned on the heat – but I’m meeting them. Making some inroads today on Thomson’s Life of Frost. Randy fired Robin –
Yvonne needs $300 immediately because she just bought a piano. Well good luck getting it out of this crowd is all I can say. Paz’s “on call” because she left her husband and moved into the motel across the street. Let’s hope she shows up. Last time I saw her she was pretty depressed; said she gave him “the best four years” of her life. I have to get this all down in case I need it someday. Ryder used to be especially pissed when I got nostalgic for dancing. But dancing is its own little world.
7:30 PM- Plush Palace – Thu 20 Oct 77
This afternoon I was getting ready for work phone rang, I say hello and Ryder’s tight little voice says: (very meaningfully) Hello.
I turned the radio down (Lakmé) and said casually as I could, “How are you?”
He said he should enroll in FBI school after all the
trouble he’d had tracking me down.
(It couldn’t have been that hard since Mom and Dad’s
house sitter has been giving my # to all and sundry.) Said he was punished now for being a non-communicative procrastinator who should fling himself off the 14th St Bridge.
I told him I lived in Beltsville and danced in Virginia, refused to give further details. I didn’t let him get away with any of his garbage. He said I’d been in town since Sept 8 without contacting him. I said he’d made it pretty plain he didn’t like what I had to offer. Then why did I come back? I said, I like it here. Creep!
Like he owns the world!
He said, will you eat with me? Hmmm. Something
rattling in Pandora’s box. While I hesitated, he said don’t make me disguise myself
as a girl scout cookie salesman (he could get away with it, too.) He said he hasn’t gone out to dinner since our last night at Alfio’s!!! (I guess the Emmys don’t count but I said nothing.) Said he’s having to give back his furniture and sleep on an air mattress because he can’t make the payments. Aww.
This is the idiocy of buying furniture on time, but I still say nothing. So we’re meeting Babe’s Sun at 3:30.Sunday. Seems fairly safe… Rushed to library and took out every true murder book I could find. Just in case.
2 Nov – Plush Palace – 6:05 PM.
Ryder called this morning to “report in!” Just to chat about his day! No more of that, I said. I’m busy. Slam. I don’t chat and I’m not sorry and it’s too late to learn. Actually, feeling amazingly happy. Kiki showed me how to cut off my corn with an exacto knife. Instantly better! Still in Vol I of Life of Frost. He was a repulsive human being, all right. Nowhere near as fun as Agatha. Precious equilibrium recovered.
8:30 PM 8 Nov 77
I gave him the full treatment, poor guy. Red Italian boots, glittery eyeshadow, tight, tight jeans. Ho ho ho. Deliberately drove Connecticut Ave but no markers from the past reached out their claws. Felt strong and blissful.
I was first there (of course) so could order carafe of wine and think. Thinking,
I’ll just explain to him that my idea of friendship and intimacy requires a
degree of truth telling that appears to freak him out.
He wore his high heels, too. His hair is blonder, longer
and messier than I remembered and it suits him. Off to the Bahamas next weekend, he says for a “dive”. He wore the pinky ring I gave him (he says he can’t get it off.) But that holy glow, that shine he used to have is gone for me. I get it that he doesn’t know the pain he caused –
shallow people can’t. And that’s pitiable, really. He’s not just deaf in one ear, he’s deaf in his soul.
He has a carefully worked out a “barstool rationale” for what happened to us; we became lovers before we became friends.
I have no comment. Postponing sex would not have helped – and it might have made things worse dumping all the responsibility for timing on me. I think when he saw how easy it was to draw blood he couldn’t help doing it, and I was a fool and an idiot. I ordered the fruit and cheese plate but left before it arrived. Realize how much I want all this to be in the past. No future of any kind exists for us. Not even in fantasy. The future is what matters. Told him to give my regards to the folks at the Shalimar. He said he’d give me a buzz.
Bet I can finish Demon by Thanksgiving. Avril coming.
Lucky I have a second bedroom. Furnish it with Kliban posters, a
thrift shop bureau and a mattress on the floor.
Alysse Aallyn 