July 27th, 1980

My day was spent yesterday quietly wandering around Washington alone. I arrived at the Hecht Co. to deserted advertising department with office doors locked and no notes or information left for me. Just as well, I really didn’t feel like working. I wandered. I wandered back to the subway. I wandered back and forth in the subway– not sure whether to take the subway home on to DuPont Circle to see the new Brian De Palma film “Dressed to Kill.” I never really decided, but rather got on the DuPont Circle train because it was closer to where I was at the moment. It is a quiet, hot, lazy day. Not many people out. I am an hour and a half early for the film so I wander to Mr. P’s. It’s not open yet. I wander to Connecticut Avenue and have a chicken sandwich and french fries at Arthur Treacher’s– I get cruised by a blonde who I ignore– and a bearded bureaucrat type on a motorcycle stops to cruise me. I tell him I will be at Rascal’s later that evening. He says he will be there. I have no intention of being there. Because I have to pee. I go to DuPont Villa for a beer. My old hangout from the early days. The place is dark and littered with plastic grapes hanging from the ceiling and Muppet puppets over the bar. I drink a lukewarm beer and watch the hunky Spanish bartender and muse at sexual attraction. The guy on the motorcycle who stopped to talk to me might well be a sensitive, creative, kind loving man– but he looked like a bureaucratic nudge to me. This hunk behind the bar is probably a total moron straight man. Yet I find him extremely attractive.

I finish my beer and got to the movie. Excellent film. Afterwards I go to Rascal’s and have a few beers and stare at myself in the mirror and talk to some boring man next to me at the bar. His name is Woody and he’s “in furniture”– lives in Falls Church. I tell him I am moving to New York and he gives me the basics– I love New York but could never live there conversation. I leave and come back to the hill. With a six pack I go to Rob’s. His friend Louis, a chorus member of the New York City Opera who is in town performing at Wolf Trap. He interests me. From Texas– transplanted to New York. It is that Midwestern/Southern quality that I have always loved.