August 7th, 1980
Dinner with Richard and Sarah was a delight. John cooked gourmet Chinese and I brought fortune cookies and Wendy produced a luscious strawberry pie from Reeves’ bakery. Animated evening of conversation and stories. Sarah, Richard and John were all friends during the Vietnam years, all prominent Washington activists. Sarah was a radical DJ with a radio station. John eventually became self-exiled in Europe after his political profile reached FBI proportions. We recount our lives from those days, pleased to find a group of survivors from those years who still recognize the counter culture birthmarks we all bear; which in these aimless years on the job market often resemble scars. Weren’t we really creating a new world? Were we not the brave architects of a new order? And, are we really now wearing our designer clothes to offices, the new executives, the new money makers– It is good to find each other after all these years– and to see the new clothes we are wearing. We have become citizens of Rome but we carry dormant vipers in our bosoms.
After dinner, I met Bill and Chris at Equus. We stay for a drink and go to the Snake Pit. The music is better there. We drink tequila and Chris and I leave Bill at the bar to spend the night at my house. I enjoy him very much– ai am fascinated by the mixture of worldliness and boyisheness. He is only 22. I talk to him as an equal, rarely remembering that I’m older than he. We are clearly interested in and enjoy each other– but no resonance occurs, no common chord struck. It is a dumb, simple enjoyment of each other. I am enormously attracted to him, and cannot quite understand why he likes me. He is a tall, good-looking stud hustler from LA. Yet our time together has a certain innocence to it. We sit at the kitchen table and get drunk and talk about cynicism. I feel a strong sense of love for him, this stranger– the wayward Texas high school boy working in gay whorehouses, drifting from city to city. We sleep together but do not have sex– we hold each other close. I wake in the morning with a hangover and for a moment cannot remember the night before or who is sleeping next to me. Then I remember sitting on the sofa with the formality of a ritual slicing my finger with an x-acto knife and watching him calmly do the same. We pressed our fingers together and I told him that I would always be his friend. Now, just after dawn, I curl next to him and kiss his back.