Looks like a reasonably pleasant day, in the 70s. I shall take a run, color the roots of my hair, see if I have any sort of wearable dress in the closet, for going to brunch with Paul and Anthony, arriving tomorrow morning.
The Gusto payment from Gov is is 128.65 net. I accidentally paid Barclay’s twice. Contact them and get a refund for the overcharge last December.
The toggle/dimmer switch in the hall by the bedroom is broken. Go to Home Depot first of all to get that fixed. Check which circuit breaker first. Any sales at Bloomie’s?
A mystery with the 1999 diaries seems now solved. At the start of Diary 46 (Michael Rogers Press, pink marbled cover), on the inside cover, there’s a passage that begins ‘from 41a.’ I took this to mean some Diary 41a and hunted around for the thing. I do believe any 41a is a lost diary from the London-Seattle period. But upon waking this morning my first thought was that I probably meant, ‘continued from page 41a in this book.’ And what do you know, the passage does continue from there.
My focus on the 1999 diaries began a few days ago when I found a typed-up page of some entries from mid-1999, on Word 5.1 on the Color Classic or one of its Zip disks. Now I’ve scanned in many of the drawings from that year, including shitty cartoons for Colin, cartoons of Regina and her dogs, Moki in Australia, and people in coffeehouses and on airplanes and trams.
Moki in Newtown, Sydney, Feb 1999
There are four main diary-books for the year, covering a happy first third, a troubled and enjoyable middle, and a really upsetting end. Moki goes to NZ and Oz. I visit Regina in Belmont and Falmouth. I go to Oz, we drive from Sydney to Melbourne and back, Moki is thoroughly drunk for three days in St. Kilda, I fly home, go back to work, visit Regina again, and we go to Nantucket for Daffodil Day. Morris dancers and Tommy Hilfiger in an antique convertible.
Usually pleasant and generous, Regina Wagner had an emotional instability that always came as a surprise.
I visit the Egregious Nicki in Wisconsin in March, and in Mass. in April. I see Bryan and Anne, in town and in New Canaan. I get headshots taken, never pick up final proofs. Moki comes back May 1, is unhappy. Sends me off on errands and complains about them. Sends me out to get Progresso tuna in oil, and I get the little cans, not the big ones, so he goes on about that. Moki complains that the kitchen and bathroom aren’t clean enough. (Ironic complaint, considering.) We do the 5 Boro Bike Tour but he wants to give up after we get to Brooklyn, so we do. He’s bicycling with a oj-vodka in his water bottle. I go on rafting trip on the Delaware with some coworkers. I see this terrible psychotherapist, Mada, who annoys me more than anyone I’ve ever seen. Moki gets more irascible, tells me to find my own place. I get the share in Hoboken, but it doesn’t start till end of August. Moki’s friend Pat Thompson visits from NZ, but Moki never goes biking with us, he’s perpetually drunk. We dine with Edmund and Carol, we see movies. The odd and moody Sandra Albert enters and exits our lives. I move with the help of Dana and friend. The Egregious Nicki keeps stirring things up with the Friends list and gossiping to Lynn Conway.
In the Fall I go to England. Andrew and Claire and the mysterious Eric Newman in Devon. In December Rod and Jill get married in Dallas. Moki’s doing well, stays in Texas a while. We visit Roy Boe and family in Connecticut around Christmas. The year ends in bitter cold, and bitter feelings between Moki and me.
Again: when he got back from Australia in May he was in a near-chronic bad mood. I don’t know why he turned on me, but he did, and as I say he found all sorts of pretexts to excuse it. I remember at one point he went out to dinner with Dick Carr, at an Italian place at 56th St. and Ninth Avenue, and he asked Dick for advice on getting rid of me. “Pick a fight,” Dick said. Eventually I found that share in Hoboken, 928 Hudson Street, which was fine location-wise but unheated and uninsulated. Something wrong with the radiators. An 1869 building. My Ikea folding bed was about three feet from the uninsulated wood-mullioned windows. Marian, my flatmate, had a space heater running because of the cold, but I believe I couldn’t get one because it would blow a fuse. Around Christmas I happened to be with Moki for a couple of days. And after coming home drunk one night he said to me, “I want you out of here, if you’re not out of here, on February first I’m going to change the locks and spend a month on Cape Cod.” The obvious fact that I was out of there was past his reckoning.
Initially, sometime around mid-1999 he told me he’d give me $10,000 to move out. Later he said $5000. He didn’t, of course. Just as he’d proposed to pay for my plane ticket to Sydney, and didn’t; he said he’d buy me a ticket with this Continental frequent-flyer miles, then changed that to an insistence that I pay him for his frequent-flyer miles, and pay an amount rather more than I ended up paying for a return ticket on AA and Qantas.
Moki driving in Canberra or on the Hulme Highway. After Canberra I did most of the driving because he was nonstop drunk.
He’d gone into a tailspin that he’d only gradually come out of in the next few years, after Dr Summeroff sessions in Concord or Lexington, with the sessions and travel expenses paid by his brother Brian. Meantime I was dealing with my own nervous issues. I’d gone to see a psychotherapist, beginning with a guy named William Hapworth, who prescribed an SSRI called Celexa. A psychiatrist, he was married to this cartoon Jewess named Mada. She was a horror, full of misreadings and misunderstandings. I think I saw her for about a year, often canceling appointments. I gained weight from late 1999 through 2000, largely from the Celexa, and I was still carrying it around in early 2003 when I went on the weight-loss campaign that eventually took me down from 155 to 125 and had me running 30-40 miles a week.
Very therapeutic, this. I love him, I miss him, somehow I could overlook his deadly moodswings. He went to pieces in mid-2003 after Miss Kipper died and we adopted her sad cat. Remembering all these bits explains such later incidents as his NYAC fracases and the Grimm chef’s-knife stabbings. Without taking back any of my tears or protestations of love for him just before and after he died, I have to admit I may be better off now that he’s gone.
