A “trial” and work for Colin Flaherty and Tom Ashley, readying myself for Paris Marathon, and making fun of the Sausage Lady.
March 8, 2005. I walked over to 54th Street with a growing sense of dread. It was a beautiful day, always a bad sign. I found my friend KP outside the Community Court, a few minutes before 9 am. He was smoking a cigarette. He’d been there for a half-hour. Yes, indeed, I was on the calendar. They wouldn’t let him sit down inside; not enough room, they said. So my case hadn’t been dismissed. I read the NYTBR and tried to work myself into a state of calm. Since I found myself rereading the same sentence seven times over without making any sense of it, I wasn’t doing very well. Finally, around a quarter-after, Ita showed up, in a black fake-fur hat. She looked bright and cheerful. We entered and went through the metal detectors—just Ita and I, because KP refuses to apply for an attorney ID which would allow him to sit in on any proceeding. He stood and waited outside by the steps, clutching his vinyl document wallet.
About eight rows of pews with an off-center aisle, so the pews on the left were half the size of the ones on the right. The court was due to start at 9:30 but the judge, one Eileen Koretz, didn’t show till after 10. I was first on the docket. When I saw my name up on the telescreen, my pulse jumped to 120. I know because I timed it.
After a minute or two, Judge Koretz called us up. I kept my mouth shut while the repartee went on. Ita introduced herself as the counsel, and the judge asked if the defendant were willing to accept an ACD with the ‘quality of life’ session. ‘Actually,’ said Ita, ‘I was going to request a dismissal.’ She reeled off several reasons: the factual allegations were based on hearsay, the cop wasn’t present, precedents in NY County have been thus and such. The judge agreed, adding, ‘And the officer should have taken a depositon of the theater manager. So the case is dismissed.’
I wasn’t exactly on Cloud Nine for the rest of the day; I got too keyed up to enjoy a real sense of relief. It was more like a reprieve. But I joked nervously with Ita, as she and I and KP walked to the subway, that I hoped to have something more substantive for her next time. She laughed. ‘Don’t forget me.’
March 21st, 8:45 am. Day off. I sit up in bed with Pismo Number One on my lap. Outside it is grey and wet. Last night with KP at Eight Mile Creek. I started to feel queasy on one glass of sickly-sweet cab-shiraz, so forwent further wine and had one beer with dinner. Kangaroo skewers and mudbugs. The roo was delicious but I awoke at 4 am with pain in my gums. A chunk had got stuck in the usual slot (betwixt two crowns) and I hadn’t flossed before bed. Fortunately I always keep plenty of floss around. Three years ago I had monstrous gum pain after eating a jambon salad at that awful Montparnasse place (La Coupole?) with Alma and Tessa, and found I was completely without dental floss, and struggled to make do with thread and pen nibs. In fact, I wasn’t able to buy any for another day and a half, when I picked some up at Boots in Swiss Cottage. That was May 5, 2002, I believe: the day Pim Fortuyn was assassinated. Another overcast day.
I have much on my plate.
Ashley wants storyboards redone and lots else.
Need to do a cartoon or two for Colin.
Take a serious look at TT for the first time in two weeks: hammer out that whole transition period, chap 22-25, where everything happens. Hanging around too long.
Should work on the Equity Research drawings because I am behind. But first things first.
Run. Gym.
Laundry.
March 26, 2005. I have done bupkis (is that yiddish or turkish?) in getting ready for Paris, unless you count the purchase of a second-hand iPod, which I have not yet gotten around to using. Furthermore, my freelance accounts (see above), are expecting great things out of me shortly. Last night C phoned in from the road (from the ROAD! I-15 near Fallbrook). We’d been tagging it for a day or two, and now, when I was feeling ill and anyway having to hit the hay early for the 5k this morning, C finally reaches me. He says he’ll send a check even if I can’t fax the invoice in. He’s working on the Escondido business plan. Mick P. will be funding the newspaper, but the other party (who already owns throwaway weeklies in the Inland Empire), may be difficult to persuade of the need to raise this revamped paper to the level of a quality publication. Briefly I mentioned noticing the new quasi-memoir by an old acquaintance of ours, the Sausage Lady. We call her this because she once wrote an article about watching sausage being made—she was fond of dense subjective feature articles that winged off some inverted cliche—and the piece began more or less with the words, “Oh how I love to eat sausage, rolling the little bits of fat over my tongue.” When I saw her book mentioned in the NYT I wondered if this were our very same harridan, so I did a quick net search and found an unmistakably bilious self-commentary.
Most fat women didn’t write the truth about fat. They didn’t write about fat fat fat fat thighs and how tender flesh on the inside of fat thighs rubs and rubs. The skin on one thigh rubs the skin on the other thigh down to raw blister. Every step you take, this raw blistered skin hurts. You can’t tell anybody “I have blisters” and “I hurt” because first off, you don’t want to talk even in whispers about anything that goes on in the gloom between your thighs. No way. You are disgusting and what goes on between your thighs is disgusting, so you don’t tell. Besides, anybody you told would know you got the blisters because you’re fat. They’d cluck-cluck-cluck that you were fat because in one sitting you poked in your snout and gobbled, with warm garlic French bread: an entire four-serving bowl of the perfect Cobb salad (Romaine and Bibb lettuces, Haas avocado whose soft ripe flesh turns an immeasurably buttery green, watercress, tomato loosed tenderly from its tight skin, cold chicken breast and ham cut into batons, hard-boiled egg, chives, crumbled Maytag Blue cheese, bacon fried and broken up, and for dressing, a heavy sluice of whatever you like).
C had a charming characterization of the Sausage Lady: “You know, all I knew was that she was a fat, ugly bitch without any redeeming value…but now she’s apparently a member of the Club.” The Club being the club of published popular authors. Sausage Lady has in fact published about three books, the first two being essentially vanity publications.
C’s phone gave out suddenly and I went to bed after waiting a few minutes for him to call back.
I got up at 5:30 in the morning and dressed for my run on Randall’s Island. All went well. No queasiness. My pace was better than ever.
