10-29-1980

 

Ah, Carol

(From Suburban Misfits)

 

I’m scared and cold, insecure about where I am and where I am going, and what I should expect next.

Poverty plagues me, and I’m scared my dreams will end up as dust on the bottom of somebody’s shoes.

The fear is worse than the poverty, fear of not making rent or paying utilities, fear of losing my license or my car insurance, fear that I might have to go back to the hard labor I thought I had escaped when I chose to go to college.

I have neglected important details of my life, letting my head fill up with wishes while allowing my survival to falter.

Susan has dreams of moving to Boulder for her graduate work – an ironic bit of my own history since that is the place to which my first love moved, and I gutted my life with a criminal act to follow.

Sometimes I envy Pauly and his carefree existence, living his life as a true artist, free of the fear more practical men like me face when forced to choose between living and art.

Pauly has numerous abilities I lack, a fact I realized tonight when he, Susan and I sat together.

He and Susan talked of things I barely comprehended, and I felt myself shrinking in my seat, more Susan’s child than her lover.

Later, we went to Garrick’s house to sit before a fire.

Carol was there, the queen witch of our rock and roll days, the desire of whom never leaves me.

I lusted after her from the day I first saw her and every time since, and tonight was no different.

She was in good form, too, the ultimate tease, casting her spell around me with just a glance.

Susan noticed, but didn’t believe me when I said I hated Carol, when my flushed face testifies to the exact opposite.

So adding to my fear of not surviving, I add guilt at lusting after another woman.

Carol always senses these things and knows how to plunge her dagger even deeper into my loins.

Tales about her abound, though none is so vivid as the one time when she walked into a smoke-filled room where the boys of the old gang were playing poker, all aware of her coming the way they might be of a tropical storm, all fixated on her short, short skirt, jaws dropping the moment she sat and all noticed her lack of panties.

She knew all right, and got her kicks off their discomfort.

Tonight, she noticed me and began a slow sucking on the tip of her pen, drawing me in even as I saw beside Susan, making me stiffen in my despair.

I could hardly breathe, and could not talk, though for a time I feared less about survival than usual, grateful in some strange way for the ghost of Carol, who I know will haunt me later in my dreams.