NEW WAVE VAUDEVILLE has Alice and the other participants in a panic. I’ve seen a few rehearsals. Klaus has been fantastic, David McDermott the quintessential fey emcee. Stanley the Polish manager of l of Irving Place, tells everyone that the show will be a big success. Alice and her co-hoster Susan have given it her all. We haven’t been together in weeks. I wish I possessed her drive. I’m only capable of writing in this journal and scribbling bad poetry on black paper. I throw most of it away without reciting the verses to friends or strangers or reading it myself.
Failure.
A twenty-six year-old failure at school, work, and love.
“I think I’m getting too fat,” Alice said this morning before the mirror above the kitchen bathtub. “I can’t make love to you until I’m skinny.”
“You don’t look fat to me. You look as beautiful as the first day I met you.”
“That’s because you’re blind to anything other than your own narcissism.”
“What?” I was prone to regarding my reflection in mirrors and windows, so there was truth to what the West Virginian had said, but her to me revealed a cold side of her. Cold to me.
“You’re always glancing at your reflection in mirrors and shop windows.”
“True.” I sat at the table, as she pulled on her jacket. “I also look in people’s eyes, because people really see you for who you are.”
“You’re not Adonis.” She slammed the door shut and I was alone.
No sex.
I’ve been celibate before.
When Ann directed OUT TO BRUNCH, the hillbilly beauty rejected my advances to the point where I slept on the living room couch. Some nights she would steal under the covers and huddle close, saying, “I’m cold.”
The sex during the no-sex period was all for her. She came and went right back to the bedroom without a good-night kiss. After that I went on strike.
I’m working for Mark Amitin. I need the money more than I don’t need the grief. His cat, Camus, sits on this journal. Mark wants to fuck me. He wants to fuck everyone. I leave after lunch, saying, “I have to go to the doctor for a clap test.”
I walked south down Second Avenue. Women stare at me. Most I wouldn’t touch. They exude no sexuality, which I prefer to beauty. Last year this time I was whoring my way through Brooklyn with Betty, a married bimbo with augmented breasts, Roz, a lesbian, who liked my cock sometimes more than licking pussy, Fran, a skinny Jewish pinball player, who begs me to cum on her baby-powdered breasts, and young Ellen, a scrawny teen runaway, who gets off one my fucking her ass in between subway cars like the night Elvis died. Last year I told her about Alice and that we couldn’t fuck anymore.
“What about blow-jobs on the D-Train?”
“Fellatio isn’t really sex.”
I said good-bye to her last Spring when Alice graduated from her Midwestern liberal arts college. I can never remember its name. I arrived to East 10th Street without seeing a single women exuding sex.
I’m cursed with desire for one woman, who fears me, but not my cock.
OCTOBER 20, 2021 – BROOKLYN
I can do nothing right for Old Yellah.
Today I hadn’t replaced the heater to the bathroom. I should have. She heats up the bathroom for yoga. Hot sauna’s one of her great pleasures. She says me that my apologies are fake. I don’t respond to the valid accusation, since she is so absorbed in her efforts to save outdoor dining and a million other projects that my cancer hasn’t registered with her.
I haven’t mentioned the fatality rate of liver cancer to her or anyone else. 2-5 years. No one at NYU hospital have discussed my future other than to say that I’m a perfect candidate for a liver transplant. I thought about telling Alice about my ailment, but opted to spare everyone, since they are wrapped up in their cellphone existences
This afternoon the NYU team checked my heart condition. Everything was normal. It looks as if I’ll live to the end of the year.
ps I am the world’s # 1 failurologist.