A day in a life May 16, 1983

 

We’re playing musical chairs, but with people.

My uncle (after yet another attempted suicide) is back up at his room in the mad house, allowing, Fran and her brother to move in with me temporarily.

My life overflows with women from my longest friend from grammar school, who sits in her apartment, burdened with the guilt of having chosen between two lovers – desperate to find meaning in her life.

Fran, on the other hand, has given up pursuing any such noble efforts, completely living her life in the present without apparent regrets over the past or concerns over the future., starkly determined to live her life on her own terms, even when sometimes that might cause me hurt, as with the fact that she insists on my sharing her with her former lover, and goes back and forth between us, sometimes arriving at my place still bearing his seed inside her, and expecting me to add to it.

Fran’s desperate need for love scares me, so intense almost all the time, I feel like a sex machine, she switches on and off.

She seems as addicted to me as she is to cocaine, insisting on kissing and touching and making love, sometimes even in public.

I ought to feel flattered, but struggle under the burden of it, but this is the way love plays out in my life, people insisting on my giving attention even to the point I get emotionally drained, and I’m caught in that bad place where I fear if I say “no,” I will lose them forever.

My ex-wife still haunts me, too, with a lifestyle that hasn’t changed much from her days in LA, not satisfied with one or even two men, but needing the attention of any and every man she encounters – her calendar filled with appointments that allows her to make rent at the end of each month. I still cringe when I call her and find her line busy, my imagination painting the worst of it.

All the men in my life are equally confused, my oldest friend’s husband (a junkie), Fran’s brother, a religious cultist, Pauly, an undeclared drug addict ever in the search of a refill, my one time best friend, Hank, who slowly kills himself with alcohol and picks up risky chicks in questionable dives in Manhattan, and other friends from college, whose lives are in tatters as mine seems.

My uncle’s desperation to put an end to his life, and my desperation to prevent him is an ongoing chest game I suspect I am losing, since my intake of alcohol corresponds to the tension his suicide attempts cause.

I get drunk at least once a week, usually at the local strip club on Friday nights, making me think I might be following in my uncle’s footsteps.

Fran has saddled me with her brother, a temporary stay, she claims, but which seems to go on and on as she seeks to make more permanent arrangements elsewhere. (I wonder what goes through his head when he hears me and Fran making love in other room).

She hopes to relocate him to some commune in Vermont, but has yet to make the connections that will make that possible.

I scribble all this out just as Fran finishes up in the bathroom, in anticipation of yet another night of making love, while I wonder, why she always comes to me after seeing him, and why I need to share her at all.


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