What I recall about this evening, but fail to mention in the letter, is that I had noticed that my wife displayed a level of familiarity with and affection for one of her male fellow classmate skit performers. This indicated to me that she had likely shared some sort of physical intimacy with him. During the eight years we spent together she was a serial cheater. Eventually she moved out of the apartment we rented together in Berkeley so that she might pursue her sundry romances in an unrestricted fashion. But when it appeared likely she would be relocating East to attend medical school, she moved back in. I think she knew that she would need a reliable caretaker to get her to the Big Apple; and then once there to cook her meals and maintain the household while she studied. So I was reeled back in.
Drinking and typing letters to friends on the West Coast was my summum bonum.
Autumn 1988
I almost got scared right out of my skin a few hours ago. I went down, twenty-two floors in the elevator, to a congregation hall where Ashley and some of her fellow first-years were putting on a "skit." Much to my surprise the fucking thing was not just for first-years, it was medical-school wide.
I peek my head in the door and it looks like somebody has spilled the Cheerios box: all this simpering student conservative power, muscle money and clean clean, like some grand divine academic senate. A second-year group is on stage doing a rap skit, a fucking rap skit; what else did I expect? I'm getting sick, really scared. The first thing I think of is getting out of there fast: I know my wallet is in my pocket; I know I have enough for a six pack. But what I'm thinking the whole time is this: My God, I forgot, students still exist; and fuck! they look so Godawful powerful -- pretty, beautiful, strong, comfortable -- that is, like they've always looked; I just forgot. I B-lined it for the exit, shot out of the building and up to the Columbia Deli (where we bought our ice cream), and asked the price of a six of talls. $5.50. Great! I walked back home and got into the elevator.
When I get off at the twenty-second floor, the woman right next to us in apartment B is out in the hall. She had just sold this stationary bike to some nameless son of Israel who is conscientiously wrapping it all over with large stretches of tape. I say to her, "Congratulations!" She says, "It's finally sold! " (You see, it had been sitting out in the hall for a long time with a sign on it -- "$20.") I say, "Wonderful," and then make it inside the door. I imagine that she has seen the paper bag in my arms and has guessed its contents; I imagine that she knows loud music is to follow; and I imagine that she is reaching for prayer beads and television set to wash my callow bullshit from her heart and ears. But she's cool and has never knocked on the door or wall. So I crack my first tall boy and spin some SOFT BOYS.
I've finished the six of talls and am now on the tequila, and thinking is very hard. But please, let me try. It's like thinking through several grade-school chalkboards, but let me try; I'll get something eventually.... I had this thought this morning about the first time I went to work at Baker, that is my first day at Baker, and I met you guys for the first time. And when I woke up this morning I was trying to remember those images, of you guys, as they appeared to me then and not as they appear to me now in my memory after all these damn years. First I remember Lyn because I think she came into the office first (but maybe it was because she was a girl -- no, I distinctly have in mind a scene at the fiche readers, which at that time where over by the side of the office that had the windows looking out at the T-buildings, where Lyn came in first and then Oliver followed). Anyway, Lyn came into the office through the only door there was, and I remember before anything I guess that the light in the office that afternoon, like a lot of afternoons that first summer that I worked there, that the light was this deep languid phosphorescent green-blue, like the sun was fighting its way through a dense tropical canopy of foliage while people swung in hammocks sipping mint juleps, you know, like fish in a very nice aquarium. Anyway, Lyn comes into the office and she's wearing, as my memory tells me, this green and blue sweater, which isn't a turtleneck, but a V-neck with one of those mountain high floppy weird collars. And I'm thinking, Wow! Now that's an angular face. I thought she might be a boy -- very vertical, hair short in that big floppy sweater, very up and down. But then I quickly clued in to the fact that she was like my girlfriend -- who you guys hadn't met yet, who was Ashley -- a women-boy, one of those peculiar hybrids. So I'm introduced to her and she's very nice and demure and polite, and I'm watching all of this from a roughly perpendicular angle, sitting in front of that mound of gray metal shit which is Ben's old desk with all the rapidly yellowing Frank Robinson Giants Chronicle cutouts Scotch-taped to the filing cabinet which housed the old Baker requests, and then Oliver walks in with Laurie and sits down in the empty seat in front of the fiche reader next to Lyn. He's got this monk straight haircut and a pair of wonderful glasses -- "A real scholastic," I say to myself; he's kinda tall and pretty damn skinny. And I know right off the bat that he was older than I was. (It was probably your living with a girlfriend, and all those shots and $3.00 club beers.) But there was love -- this real intense energy -- between the two of you right then, and I think I was the only one there just then, or at least the only one paying any attention to it, in that green-blue light. I felt like I was perched on top of a hundred-foot willow tree looking down between these sharp pencils of praying mantis green at two beautiful urchins, one blond and one brunette.
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