December 7th, 1980

I spent my twenties running from monsters. My parents were drags that pursued me unrelentingly through years of drugs and boozy despair. A fugitive from the emotional wreckage of my parents’ lives.

In the fall I moved to New York and settled into a new life in the Village. A life of solitude and self-dependence. I realized that finally the running was over. I turned to face the demons only to realize that they were lifeless figments of my own battered childhood memory. The old man lies dead in the cold Missouri ground and the wild waitress is a sad tattered lady living in a double-wide trailer in Mississippi typing recipes for spam casseroles on index cards.

And I am the product of that dark tangled drama.

Both have spent time in psychiatric wards. Both have spent years in wild alcoholic violence. They sought to destroy each other. Finally they did. The blue van stalled on the dark highway. My father, a skinny old man with a broken neck. My mother’s defeat in the fact that her opponent had left her.

These two people were the architects of the drama I have been acting in all my adult life so far.

How does the baggage of my childhood affect my life now?

How do I learn how to really love, and not just reenact the drama of Lawrence and Jerri?

The cowboys on the street are bogus– they are not cowboys they are drag queens.