November 23rd, 1979

Charlie and Vickie love to entertain. Watching them yesterday I saw clearly how hospitable and enthusiastic they are as hosts. They would have their home be an artistic and intellectual salon. It is, with a certain confusion. The confusion, I think, is between conformity and distraction. All the people I have met at Charlie and Vickie’s are extremely unconventional, but not consequently interesting. Eccentricity, different-ness that is born from intellectual activity is usually interesting; basically interesting because of its uniqueness. There are, however, many people I have met who lives are extraordinarily bizarre and weird; yet whose intellectual world is non-existent. Yesterday, I found myself spending Thanksgiving with a drag queen and two very odd, unattractive attendants, a blonde, dumb dyke (constantly telling everyone in the room how stoned she was) and her friend, a former veterinarian attendant of unknown, seemingly quite homespun virtues. And Charlie getting real drunk and real stoned real fast. And, of course, everyone– myself included, trying to stay up with him. And everyone drinking a bit too much because everyone senses the lack of comfort– the uneasiness with each other. It lasts the afternoon. Finally everyone is so drunk and stoned and poppered out to really care how people are relating. Charlie passes out. Vickie retrieves him from the bedroom and he does an impersonation of a guitarist to the rock record on the stereo. We do more poppers, two or three joints are being passed at once. We open more beers and smile and watch Charlie play guitar. Nick, a.k.a Susan Saint James, whose glamor I have marveled at so many Friday nights at the drag show at the Rogue, sat next to me all afternoon on the sofa: an overweight, pallid, bitchy queen, whose femaleness alarmed me all afternoon (alarmed me with the internal fears I have when a woman comes on to me sexually). Charlie passes out again. This time to formal apologies and for good. I leave shortly after to a long walk to the subway which was closed and an eventual taxi ride home to buy take-out turkey dinners at Millie and Lou’s for Wendy and quickly passing out across my bed with the window opened– too drunk, too stoned, too full; and realizing I had managed to spend, waste, the entire $100 check from Pla– which was meant to be my salvation. Wide awake at 2:00 AM– feel better; vomit, smoke a cigarette– masturbate to fantasies of George O’Reily and Paul de’Lourt. Can’t sleep. At 4:00 AM I hear two gunshots. Shortly after a siren. I drift off to fitful sleep wondering if someone has been murdered. Waking this morning to enormous fears that I am destined to a chronically disastrous life.