For once in my life I had the presence of mind to say the right thing: “Well, if you feel that way, you can get someone who’s not stupid to do the work.” And I slammed down the receiver with such force that the phone nearly sank right through the night table.
I had occasion to watch Hilary make her move on Cliff during an otherwise apparently pointless conversation recounting an argument she’d had last week with Reggie Jackson in a Fort Lauderdale restaurant.
Janice and Jay came over and we drank wine and listened to dirty old records and played Perquackey and laughed because Dolores’s Barbadian Banana Surprise mold turned out to be a hideous glop.
As I was walking by Colden Auditorium, a guy about 22 came up to me and asked by any chance did I know where Allen Ginsberg was reading. Yes, I said, the Student Union, I’ve been there before, I’m going to the reading too, follow me.
Yesterday Alice went into Bus Stop Pizzeria, and Noel was surprisingly friendly. He said he’d gotten married two months before but was unhappy about it. “But it’s starting to get a little better now,” Noel told her. After two months?
Hilary and I got into an argument over First Amendment rights covering Hustler, and she said I couldn’t understand her point of view because I had a penis and not a vagina. “My having a penis is irrelevant,” I told her.
The house was a shambles: completely ransacked, it looks as though the thieves had turned everything upside down. It was pitiful, like a rape; it’s as though the integrity of one’s private life had been violated.
I can’t stand so much of what I see in the Soho posh art gallery scene. The other day at Jack Gelber’s house, John Ashbery said, “Well, doesn’t everybody read the Soho Weekly News?” I don’t, sir.
At the Baumbachs’, Georgia gave me lunch with Jon and the baby. Jon and Jack kept tossing off their friends’ names – “Joe” Heller, “Phil” Roth, “Jimmy” Baldwin – so I assume I’m going to be in the major leagues now.
It’s 1977 – God, that sounds so strange and future-y . . . This afternoon Elihu called and said, “I bet you’re saying, like everyone else, ‘I sure hope this year is better than the last one.’”