Chapter 10: July 8-22, 1988.

"It has to be early," I said as I broke out lines July 8.

"Okay, okay. What else is new?" Joe sneered happily. He was still indulging less than Angus, Hettie, and I--even Dee was doing more than him, though less than the rest of us--, but tonight he felt like going all night long and knew we wouldn't. "What's wrong with us?" he asked, not because we were cocaine addicts but because we were so moderate.

Alone in bed I stared into my new mirror, which had only arrived this afternoon. My head was the first part of my reflection to lose detail, and I soon saw myself as though I were a featureless colorless cut-out. After a time, and gradually, detail re-emerged; my penis, which had been vertical, was less so but still raised off the bed. I did another line and, after spending time with Lee, talked to my father. A few months after Lee and I had become lovers he had died, but not before walking in on us as she was straddling me at 6 one (school-day) morning. "I don't know if I should tell you you're crazy or congratulate you," he said; all three of us knew he was congratulating us.

I’d talked to him tonight about what I was feeling, and what I'd said had felt good. I wished I knew more about his sexuality and how he'd dealt with it. In his fifties and sixties—he'd died at 64--he had had woman friends who were in their twenties and thirties. How close were the friendships? Had he wanted them sexual? Were they? What had he made of his behavior, his abstinence or lack of it, his desire and frustration? What of Florence? I'd been told that when he died he'd had two cartons of letters in his office, some to and from young women, and that, to spare Florence, a colleague had destroyed them. I still regretted the loss and deplored his co-worker's well-meant presumptuousness.

"I wish I had the letters," I had said tonight. Masturbating, I had said, "Well Dad, I'm still normal. Help me, Dad, help me." (He was the best editor I ever knew.)

I smoked for a last time, spread my legs, saw that I was again hard, and lay back on my pillows. It was after one. I pulled myself up, wrote and rewrote one last note at the lower right side of a fresh page, then knocked the extra pillow I'd been using to the floor, pulled the sheet over me, turned out the light, pulled my towel across my head so that it covered my eyes and nose but not my mouth, and lay my hand between my legs. Sighed. "Thank you," I murmured. Shortly past dawn there was a 30-minute downpour that pleasantly intruded on my consciousness, hearing and smelling the drumming rain scarcely other than dreaming.
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Thursday July 14 was Marjorie's thirtieth birthday, the chicory was blooming, and I was cruising Cottage Hill Road. I heard a cuckoo to my left, stopped to look for it, then saw enough of it to think it a black-billed. Earlier in the day Throck and Faith had found an almost-black heavy-bodied 4-and-a-half foot snake that had appeared uninjured but seemed too tame to be healthy. She’d been run over and would be dead by midnight. "I can feel the eggs in her," Faith said, holding her gently as she talked to me in the living room.

Thursday night Faith set me up with my pillows and mirror and I set to work editing. As at the typewriter, I was utterly absorbed. I'd used red pen the day that I'd begun what I was working on, then written a lead-in and edited it in black; tonight I was editing in green. When I eventually transferred it into Love Note, I used normal, italic, and bold-faced type instead of red, black, and green, but, though some such devices have survived later edits (examples will soon follow) these did not: From outside the gate, from before the orgasm's beginning, he did not know what was inside, what was so overwhelmingly worthwhile. Outside, he didn't feel the love, so couldn't know it, could only guess, remember, rationalize. Within the feeling, he could speak from it, describe it, trust it. Outside, he forgot or, at best, merely remembered.
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The next night I was feeling when Faith came into my room without knocking. I kept my thumb and index finger around the base of my hard-on and my eyes on the mirror; she looked on top of the bureau at the foot of my bed and then began opening drawers and rummaging. My ignoring her presence felt like an intimacy; we both knew that she had known what I was doing before she'd entered. When I looked toward her, still not moving my hand, she looked back.

"I didn't mean to barge in," she said. "Want anything?"

"I'm glad you came in," I said, paused briefly, and then continued, "Am I right in assuming it's okay to just keep doing what I'm doing when you come in? Do I ask too much of you?"

"I like what I do," she said. "Nothing you do bothers me. I just came down to get some pot, but do you want anything? Do you want pillows under your knees? I can try to put them there." I'd not yet named her Faith in what I was writing but finally did tonight.

"Okay," I said. "I would like that." She moved my left leg a little farther from my right and put a pillow under my knee to hold it in place, then did the same with my right.

"There," she said. "Is that okay for visibility?"

"Move the left one a little farther left," I said.

"Good?"

I liked the way the pillows exposed me and liked even more that the innovation was hers. As victim she would make me impotent; as collaborator she strengthened me.

"That's good. And I do like you to barge in like you did tonight. It reassures me."

""Not knocking's easier for me," she said. "I never know if you've heard me and I don't like seeming to listen outside your door."

"Just come in."

"I will."

My penis hadn't softened two hours later. It would have, I felt, had Faith not come in as she had; I thought the duration of my arousal further proof that my emotion and erection were not irreparably disconnected by the scar tissue in my spinal cord. I still had volumes that I hadn't said to her or anyone, but ever so slowly and tentatively I was beginning.
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July 18 I was reading Nostromo: "A man haunted by a fixed idea is insane." P. 305. I smiled. It was a day off sgurding.
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I started the tape recorder and said "July 21. Tape 2 A." In the past seven weeks I had already recorded a Tape 2 and also a Tape 3, but all of both, like most of 1B, had been irrecoverable; this was a new Tape 2. The machine was next to me, as usual, but on a pillow, so it was a few inches closer to my mouth.

Faith was standing to the right of the angled mirror at the foot of my bed and touching the side of her neck.

F Oh no.

A. What?

F. Oh, I'm sick. One little thing gets infected in my mouth and my whole face goes berserk.

She'd burned the inside of her mouth and the burn was infected. There was a lump on her neck, too.

(Flash forward:

(It is November 30, 1989. Seven months ago I bought my first computer, a MacIntosh Plus. I don't usually like to name or assign gender to machines, but my computer's name is Evangeline; the first words I wrote with it were "This is the forest primeval/ The murmuring pines and the hemlocks." What I wrote today, rewritten, is in parentheses in this latest version of Love Note. Recording has become indispensable to my mirror nights but, with few exceptions, I haven't been disciplined enough even to try to transcribe. A week ago I hired Faith to begin doing it; she has transcribed 2A—that I recorded July 21, 1988 and am working on today--and six other sides, 9A, 19A, 19B, 67A, 69A, and 69B.)

Like what I first wrote November 30, 1989, the work I did today, February 4. 1990, has been rewritten uncounted times. Here in the July 21 section of Chapter 10 the February 4 entry is italicized.

By July 21, 1988 Love Note was become a daunting stack of typescript, and by the time I bought my Mac the following March I not only had still more typescript but also dozens and dozens of still-untranscribed tapes. Evangeline turned out to be exactly what I'd needed; she was to my IBM Selectric Typewriter as a tractor to a shovel. On November 30 I hired Patricia, my across-the-street neighbor, to put all the tapes, all my notebook work, and all my LN-related type-writer work onto disk; I cut and pasted what she'd given me and soon had all I'd written, regardless of where I'd written it, accessible and chronologically ordered.

I'd thought July 21, 1988, when I’d made and tried to listen to 2A, that it would be useless, and Faith's transcription of it, which I first looked at as soon as Patricia said I could, was full of gaps. February 4, 1990 I was at Evangeline's keyboard, 2A on my voice-operated tape recorder to my left, Patricia's hour-old copy of Faith's transcript on the monitor in front of me. It wasn't until the seventh time I heard the tape's first phrases that I understood that Faith had said, “I’m sick;" the realization gave me the same satisfaction as getting a long-sought word late in a Sunday New York Times crossword; I noted ironically that they were similarly useful triumphs. For what was I doing this? Did it add so much to my story to know exactly what words Faith had used to say that she was sick on July 21, 1988? No, but it did remind me how often she was (and is) sick, never knowing how seriously. Today, for instance, her mouth again is hurting and she is running a fever, though she is better than she was day-before-yesterday or yesterday. She hurts a lot and often.

She has now transcribed tapes 2 to 21B--I made 21B October 23, 1988--and today Patricia has finished putting them on disk. I haven't listened yet except cursorily to any but 2A; eventually I mean to, and then to correct, cut, and enhance.

Faith bunched the covers into a big ball for me in case I wanted to use them to support one or both legs.

A. Will you put the catheter under my leg?

On the tape my voice was almost inaudible but, listening one last time, I heard, as though subliminally, "the catheter," and realized what she had been doing. Carrying the information I moved out of the future, February 4, 1990, and returned to the present, July 21, 1988. She lifted my left leg and maneuvered the tube under it. Having the catheter under instead of over my leg gave me more freedom to tuck my penis head under my balls or to either side of my scrotum--I favored the left--, all three of which positions made my genitals appear labial.

F. xxxxx xxxxx xxx xx blankets and stuff.

She spoke softly, intimately, and despite the loss of her words her tone, like mine, conveyed caring. Her neck still hurt but she was in a better mood than she'd been when she entered; she even sounded happy.

F. Should I come back in thirty minutes?

A Good.

The tape spun as I lay looking in the mirror. I lifted my balls so they hid my penis and, aware I might not be—was not--speaking audibly, I raised my voice and began to repeat my phrases. I wished to describe what I saw in the mirror, not re-imagine it with memory (my memory is virtually blind; how common or uncommon is such visual-memory blindness?), so couldn't turn my head away from the mirror and toward the recorder. I lay feeling, holding my cock and balls in my hand, not mesmerized, not lost, not even extraordinarily foolish, an animal unconditionally reporting its life. I knew I would feel more were I silent; my speaking was a sacrifice to the book: Notes from the Blunderground?

When I turned the light out my crotch was visible in the mirror in the moonlight; I again pulled my scrotum toward my belly, restraining my hard penis under the warm stretched sack. My gender seemed transmuted, and I wanted to call Faith's attention to the transmutation when she returned. Words came and went and feeling surged. My light was on again when I heard her coming downstairs. She came in without knocking and long lovely seconds passed before she smiled and spoke. I still held myself as I'd hoped I would, my scrotum over my erection.

F. Need anything?

A. A pipeful, and can you let me have another line?

I never knew before the fact whether I'd do or say what I'd imagined that had aroused me as I had imagined it. Often I didn't, which I guessed was sometimes best. As she prepared a line I said:

Isn't it amazing how vaginal this looks?

My tone was matter of fact, conversational; I'd lost the imagined words but at least had broached the subject.

F. How what?

A. How vaginal this looks?

F. I don't know the word.

A. Vaginal--like a woman's sex.

She looked.

F We're not so different are we?

Soon after Faith left me alone for the night the phone rang. It was Joyner, and I could hear music and talking in the background.

"I'm in a bar," she said. "I've decided to whore. Why not? Why do it for free?"

Her manic mood seemed nine parts drink but her words were a gift. What better verbal opening could she have offered me? I wanted her to be with me and ask for me to feel, and I'd no objection whatsoever to paying her to do so. The idea of Joyner as my whore did not excite me and her sexual ambivalence tended to seem sad, but she might be superb as a willing and aware collaborator. Might I hire her? I knew she needed money, which I had. I failed to tell her what I wanted.

After she rang off I pulled myself up and began a letter:

Dear Joy,

I want to tell you more than I did last month of what I'm doing and say things I didn't say on the phone tonight. I feel that by not asking for your help I've not trusted you.

The letter was a failure, verbose and rambling. Money bobbed briefly to the surface, then sank without a trace. The money's ironic. This letter's-- I had ideas what the letter was, too many, and moved on without trying to write about them. When we'd made love before Clarence's visit I'd tried to tell her what I wanted but failed and soon desisted. I was having much the same trouble now. Trying to simplify, I outlined a scene I imagined we might play. At 11 this Wednesday night I want you to come into my room where I'll be naked in front of my mirror, Faith having left me there at 10:45. When she leaves me I won't (unless you've called) know if you're coming but I will know, even if you don't come, that you know what I am doing here. I knew I could fantasize, stay hard, and know exactly what to say to Joy for the first ten or fifteen minutes after doing lines. I also knew that by the time less than half an hour had passed, I'd likely have to try to remember what to say or do when she arrived, would no longer, simple and feeling, know. Love can be so simple. With Joy, I thought, I might be able to do what I couldn't, at least hadn't, with anyone else; but probably not. I neither rewrote nor sent the letter.
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The following afternoon I scribbled a few notes. Ellen's birthday tomorrow. I will abstain tonight. Is the catheter going bad? Should I have it changed?
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The next part of LOVE NOTE is Chapter 11 part i. To go to it click here.
To go to the THE HEALING & LOVE NOTE DISCUSSION FORUM click here. I want to hear almost anything you are willing to say, including whether you have had similar or contradictory experiences. Criticism of my behavior and beliefs is also solicited and will be (more or less!) welcome.