dressing up
I had many more ‘crazy nights’ with Lindy over the next two weeks, about every other night, as it would take one in between just to recover from the last twenty-hour escapade. But they’re all so similar in drunkenness and bar hoping and lines and strange encounters and stumbling to bed that they’re too repetitive to transcribe.
I had one more, wild night with Lindy which isn’t in my journals but I remember it well. It was right after Thanksgiving and it was pretty much ‘the end of the affair’. I’d been seeing her so much that one day she told me we were spending too much time together, ‘almost as if we were married’, as she put it. But I loved sleeping with her any chance I could get so one Saturday evening, after attending a wedding reception for my old college pal Joe, (with Craig and Hiram), dressed in my best suit of clothes, (a white shirt, slacks and my silver, velour, dinner jacket) I show up at her doorstep, already tipsy.
She agreed to party so we headed out to a bar in San Francisco called ‘The Achilles Heel’. We’d been there twice before because it was near where her friend Terri lived, where we could always get coke. We did and spent hours at the bar talking away, sitting beside a sixty-year-old black man, also well dressed and very polite, who kept telling us what a lovely couple we made, all dressed up.
But this repeated refrain rang a bell in my head. We weren’t a ‘couple’ anymore, if ever we were. I decided then and there to quit pursuing her. I asked her to drop me off at my place that night and quit calling her. She did call me once about a week later. It was at 3:30 a.m. and she was looking for a drinking partner. I declined, saying I had work the next day.
As I re-write my past I find I tend to simplify events, trying to end affairs with crisp, clean closures, as one might end a chapter in a novel. But my old notebooks tell me a different story. There was no final date with Lindy to end the affair. It was more like what T.S. Elliot said: ‘Not with a bang but a whimper’.
After it sunk in that she was no good for me (or herself) I wrote and delivered a blunt, honest letter to that effect, in late December:
“Over the past couple of weeks I have noticed and realized that I feel more pain than pleasure in seeing you. I would have told you this, instead of writing it, but you expressed a desire not to talk feelings from the beginning. This left us only the ambiguous realm of gestures and silences, of which I am sick.
We are going after two different objects. I want, quite simply, to fall in love, to meet a girl who can reciprocate affection, with whom I can talk endlessly and share what I have to share. You seem to want only company and diversion, through certain desperate hours when you would not be alone. I suppose you think your life a tangled mess, (and thinking it enough will make it so) that you’re playing for time to sort out your head, want no commitments, no decisions even, to add to the confusion. It’s clear to see from the ambiguous way you treat others. I can’t even tell who you like or don’t like. There have been times when I was sitting across the table from you seriously pondering whether you liked me or disliked me, and I came to no conclusion. Your mood changes rapidly. And the way you drink and party has a vicious, ugly tinge to it, as if you were not sure whether you liked yourself…”
I go on to say that I hope she does well but that I’m calling it quits, that she’ll never lack for bar-room company on her road to self-destruction but that I’m too young for that. I go on to say that if this letter makes her angry at least I’ve effected my purpose in making her not want to see me again.
You would think that handing her such a letter would be the end. But my journal tells me I was still calling her in January. I find this entry from then: “A love poorly buried rises up again, like a ghost”.
A few pages later I resolve not to find my next girlfriend in a bar, advice not followed, as I found my next three girlfriends, not only in a bar, but in the very same bar, the Starry Plough, over the next two years. Explain that degree of ‘Folly’.
