Wednesday, July 13, 1977
5 PM. So much seems to be going on. I couldn’t get to sleep until 5 AM last night, as my mind was whirring away with feelings, thoughts, ideas.
I think I was angry with Avis because she didn’t stay the same; that’s what she expected of me too, but neither of us could stop growing in our separate ways. It struck me, tossing and turning in bed, that at 26, I have yet to learn to let go.
I’ve always had this awful need to preserve things as they were. That explains much of my life: my writing, my living at home, my keeping in touch with everyone, being the editor of the Class Notes. I couldn’t give up Shelli and till now I’ve been unable to give up Ronna.
In some respects I’ve been extremely fortunate. Only one person that I’ve loved – my great-grandmother – has ever died.
And I visit Bubbe Ita’s grave, her photograph is the one on my desk, I write her, I track her family in Canada down . . . I’ve never really accepted her death twenty years ago. I realize now that I’ve been half-expecting her to show up at the door one day, looking the same as ever.
Perhaps Ronna merely wanted to preserve the memory of our relationship and not put it out of focus with the two people we’ve become in the present. I must accept her desire to terminate all contact with me, let her go, and let myself go. I want to remember the Ronna I loved, not some stranger.
Which reminds me: I wonder how Avis and Scott are getting along together right about now. I’m rather glad I’m not there. Though neither of them would consider me an intruder, I didn’t want to take away from their reunion, however it goes. For once, I put other people over my need to be an observer.
And I do have my own life. If, as Avis suggested, we are turning into our parents, is that so terrible? My parents, Avis’s, Scott’s, Alice’s, Libby’s mother: they weren’t bad people. They worked hard and tried to do the right thing; if they made mistakes and behaved badly, I like to think they couldn’t help it.
During the late ’60s we were adolescents and rightfully in rebellion. But now we’ve become more tolerant. We want to change some things and we’re trying to do it: Scott and Mikey through the criminal justice system, Teresa with her tenants’ association, Alan Karpoff teaching retarded kids, even Elspeth working for the police department, who are not quite the fascist pigs we called them – they do help, in many cases.
We couldn’t sit around LaGuardia Hall all our lives, dreaming and gossiping. I do respect Avis for her choices, but we all can’t leave the country. My great-grandparents came to America from Russia, where they had been persecuted, and they got a measure of freedom here.
There was discrimination, there were violations of their rights, some terrible things happened to them; they didn’t always prosper. It’s hard to say this without sounding like Bob Hope or a high school civics text, but I 
I spoke to Mikey about it last night. He just quit after a week’s work as a Pinkerton guard at the World Trade Center for a lousy $2.30 an hour, which is terribly demeaning for someone like Mikey, a law student with a graduate degree in criminal justice, and a sign that the system is not working. (There are many signs like that today.)
But when I talked to Mikey about the scorned-in-1970 idea of “working within the system,” he said in effect that there’s no alternative. And he’s right. Enough preaching for a day.
Today I wrote some terrible stories (truly awful ones); got some rejections (one was devastating, using adjectives like “flatulent” and “incomprehensible” to describe my writing); got a postcard of Union Square in San Francisco from Laurie (“RG – I’m having fun – LF”); had three cavities filled; floated in the swimming pool; spoke to Vito and invited him to the party next week (Scott had bumped into him yesterday).
It all may not be me living up to my potential, but it’s the best I can do on five hours’ sleep.
Thursday, July 14, 1977
The lights dimmed and the air conditioner lowered and I went running around the house, telling everyone to shut off all appliances, as we were about to blow a circuit breaker.
By the time I got to the kitchen, everything shut off. I guided my way to the front door after hearing Evie next door telling her family they’d overloaded their circuits.
Outside, everything was black. “It’s the whole block!” I shouted as people 
We still don’t have electricity yet, nearly a full day later, and I’m writing this from the porch, where it’s still light and somewhat less hot than inside the house.
This was a much worse experience than twelve years ago. They’re calling it “New York’s worst night” as hundreds of thousands took advantage of the darkness to loot everything they could get their hands on.
In bad n
There’s no account of the damage yet, but doubtless it’s well into the millions as many small storeowners – in Flatbush, say – must be ruined totally.
We got candles and flashlights and slowly learned the extent of the damage. Evidently a massive blackout was caused by something as natural as a lightning bolt hitting a Westchester substation. The whole system soon crumbled, as 3% and 5% brownouts couldn’t halt the blackout.
Driving was treacherous without traffic lights, so Deanna spent the night here. Alice called to ask, “Isn’t this exciting?” I told her I could have done without it.
I decided the smartest thing for anyone to do was to go to sleep. But sleeping was very difficult with the 90° heat and no air-conditioners.
–– Cheering has just broken out all around me. People are shouting, “The lights are on!” It’s 8:15 PM and finally we have power. Thank God. Now I have to deal with the spoiled food in the refrigerator.
To get back to the past: I awoke at 7 AM, although of course all our clocks had stopped at 9:35 PM, and I heard that the first power was just beginning to be restored. On the transistor, there were stories of looting, fires, traffic accidents.
Around 8 AM, Grandma Ethel called from Rockaway, where their only problem was no TV until the stations’ emergency generators started. Rockaway is serviced by LILCO, not Con Ed.
Last night when all the TV stations first went out, Grandpa Herb phoned Marty in Oceanside, wondering if an atomic bomb had hit Manhattan and 
At 10 AM, Avis called, saying their power had just come on, and soon after Deanna’s mother reported the same thing. Sheepshead Bay was the first lucky area in Brooklyn to go on.
I went over to pick up Avis. It was so hot I wore only a pair of cutoffs to drive there, and when I saw her, she said, “I like your shirt”; of course, I wasn’t wearing one.
When we got back to our house, Marc was nearly in tears. Jonny, whose routinized life was threatened by the disruption, drove Marc crazy, and Marc ended up knocking down the master bedroom mirror, shattering it 
I know how Jonny can get to you. Marc and I are both frightened of him by now. He and Deanna and Avis and I relaxed in the pool all day. It was the only way to cool off; the filter wasn’t working, but so what.
Avis and I went over to Kings Plaza, which has its own generator, to bring back lunch for all of us from Nathan’s. As we were eating, Deanna seemed surprised to hear that Avis lived in Germany. “I thought you lived in Europe,” she told her.
Deanna also misheard all the references to people “looting” as being about people ’luding: meaning “taking Quaaludes.” She is incredible, that Deanna. Like me, Avis wondered how Marc could be attracted to her.
At around 6 PM, Avis and I went back to her parents’ house, where I had dinner with them, appreciating the air conditioning and electricity in a way I never had before. What an experience!
Friday, July 15, 1977
4 PM. I feel very tired and I have a slight headache. But tonight Avis and I are invited to Teresa’s, and I still have to shave and shower and drive all the way up to Manhattan.
I’d rather just fall into bed, but that’s not possible so I’ll just have to make the best of it. My lethargy is caused by last night’s insomnia. So many things seem to have hit me all at once, and I was trying to sort them all out in bed. I got less than four hours’ sleep.
That first day, I was angry with her for putting down America and New York. Yet the looting and fires and rioting of the blackout seem to have belied my defensive optimism. The European press, I hear, has called it “the city that went berserk” and “the night of the animals.”
Evidently the news has not reached St. Maarten or my parents would have called. As it was, we had several phone calls last night. Aunt Sydelle assumed our power had returned when Robin’s did, at 2 AM, just six hours after the blackout began – but Briarwood was the first section of the city to get electricity back.
Grandpa Nat phoned from Florida and was relieved when we told him we had lights again. He sounded stronger than ever since he got a good report from the doctors last weekend.
I called Alice, whose enthusiasm for the blackout when it began on Wednesday night had turned into depression. She said yesterday was like “the end of the world,” burning hot, with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Even that ball of energy, Alice, just slept for a lot of the day yesterday.
Maud didn’t have electricity back in the Bronx until 10:30 PM, when the last city neighborhoods got their lights on again. Stuck on the seventh floor in her building, Maud was without water as well.
Last night Marc and I had some job, throwing out more than $30 worth of food from the freezer and the refrigerator: all dairy products, frozen dinners, and anything suspect.
At 9:30 PM, I drove out to Rockaway to buy milk, cheese, and some other staples that I was afraid we might not be able to get in Brooklyn today.
After all these years, Avis’s lithe body still strikes me as beautiful – her small, supple breasts; her firm stomach, her tiny ass – and I really like Avis’s cute hair under her arms and the sprinkling of hair on her legs.
Anyway, it’s nice to know that passion – even unconsummated passion – can last. My relationship with Avis is different than my relationship with Alice in that it has always had an undercurrent of sexuality running through it.
At Avis’s urging, I’m going to invite people over to the pool on Sunday, and late in the day we’ll have a barbecue.
Dr. Tucker wrote me that Confrontation accepted “Triptych”; I feel embarrassed, wondering if he took the story on its merits or because he felt obligated. He told me I was a good writer and that I’m “very high on the list” for fall teaching at LIU, but I don’t think there will be any jobs there.
Saturday, July 16, 1977
I haven’t gotten to sleep before 4 AM in nearly a week. My throat is scratchy, as though there’s a film over it. My air conditioner keeps icing over. I am playing with skin cancer, with all kinds of cancer.
Virginia Woolf thinks we are all part of a novel, and I suppose them’s my sentiments, too. Let me write about other people for a while. I am sick to death of Richard Grayson.
I hate him by now, this smug, overambitious, moralizing neurotic whom I cannot quite make come alive. He exists only on the surfaces of paper. Only I am real. But let’s forget about Grayson for now. A literary exercise: Complete this diary entry without once using the word I.
Avis was wearing a long skirt last night. To be cool, she said.
Teresa looked tired. The subway ride home from work had gotten to her.
Don, the live-in lover, fortyish vice president of the New York Times Corporation, having left wife and four kids in suburbia, was wearing shorts. He looked the way he was supposed to look: sexy in an avuncular backyard-barbecue kind of way.
There were some small silences, nothing uncomfortable. The guests arrived too early. They had smoked marijuana on the way to Manhattan – at Avis’s behest, of course. Before she enters Teresa’s apartment, Avis says Teresa’s trouble is that “she never got into dope.”
After dinner, everyone retired to the air-conditioned bedroom to make plans for the party. It was decided to serve bagels and white wine. “That should keep people up all night,” Don said, and he informed Teresa that he’d be away that night, visiting his kids.
Teresa wanted gossip; there was none. Everyone discussed New York. Teresa didn’t like the photos of the blackout looting going out to the nation.
At midnight it was thought best to call it an evening. Driving back on Flatbush Avenue, Avis pointed out some evidence of looting. She was walked to her door – look out for Son of Sam – and kissed on the cheek.
Back at home, the garbage pails had not been put out despite admonitions to younger brothers and a note left as a reminder. A party was going on downstairs. Marc and Deanna slept in the master bedroom again (they are in bed at this moment).
She and Andreas are going to Paris in late summer, and last night he agreed that they should take an apartment in the city so they can live together on weekends. Alice was so happy she cried.
Bad News Department: Dolores has a perforated uterus and has to have a total hysterectomy. She’s really upset, of course, and Alice says we should try to cheer her up. First Janice’s mastectomy, now this: something’s wrong somewhere.
Other news about other people: Avis reports that Wayne and Angelina have broken up. It’s probably temporary. Wayne got a job making $230 a week scrubbing bathrooms at Pace University on the night shift.
Scott’s old girlfriend Sheila was hitchhiking with a friend in South Africa and they got into a terrible accident. Her friend was killed and Sheila broke every bone below her waist. After she testifies against the driver, she’s going to London to stay with her parents, and Scott will fly to England after his bar exams to see her.
It turns out that Jonny’s friend at the synagogue is Mr. Denker, father of Melvin, Morty and their little brother. I guessed it when Jonny described the man.
Tuesday, July 19, 1977
It was hot when I went to pick up Avis yesterday; her father was talking to her outside. She told me that he had just come from his monthly chemotherapy treatment.
He’d taken along his father-in-law, and while they were waiting for the results of his blood test, Avis’s grandfather went to look up some of his old black customers downtown where he used to sell appliances on time.
The 83-year-old man climbed up four flights of stairs to look up a woman known as Mother Brown. She recognized him immediately and got so excited you’d have thought she was going to have a heart attack.
“How old are you?” Avis’s grandfather asked.
“Eighty.”
“Why, you’re younger than I am!” he said. “Not so old.”
Avis’s grandfather keeps asking her the price of things in Bremen; he’s pretty sharp for his age.
One could write so much about the International Arrivals Building, but I’ll just give one anecdote: an elderly lady decried the effusiveness of disembarking Alitalia passengers who kissed and hugged and screamed. “You’ll find the English coming off the Laker flight far better-behaved,” she said.
My parents looked tanned, young, refreshed: the way I’ve seen them come out of Customs a dozen times over the years. I kissed them, they introduced me to some friends, and I said I’d see them later and went back to Avis, who was starting to get worried.
But Helmut soon emerged from the whitened-over doors and Avis gave him a restrained kiss. He was wearing a leather jacket and didn’t want to take it off despite our warnings about the heat.
Helmut’s very bright, too; as we were driving up Flatbush Avenue – he said, “It’s always easiest for you to go that way, eh?” – Avis was asking me about the new telephone checking accounts and how they worked. I told her you used a code word, and Helmut said, “A commercial mantra?” – and at that moment I knew why Avis loved him.
Libby told me she was grateful to have the chance to ride home from our pool party with Josh on Sunday because in college she’d had a crush on him.
Libby also told me about the problem of her friend (I think it’s Thomas, whom I met at the hospital and really liked) who can’t decide if he’s straight or gay. He tried going to a gay bar and it depressed him, so he’s going to try to put homosexuality out of his mind. (Good luck with that!)
We talked about Vonnegut and the SPD and nuclear energy and other things; Helmut asked me what “the trends” were here. We went back inside, and looking at American TV through Helmut’s eyes, I see how ridiculous it all must seem, especially the commercials and Eyewitness News.
With Wayne at work by then, Helmut and I had to bring the foldaway bed downstairs. As it got late, I took Angelina and Avis home and got back at midnight myself.
*
After I dropped Avis off, I had this stray thought about the grandparents’ health: I said to myself, “I hope Grandpa Nat is all right; I just spoke to him on Sunday and he sounded so well. Doesn’t it always happen like that?”
And when I walked upstairs, I was about to go in to see Dad, whom I hadn’t had a chance to talk to since our brief greeting and kiss
at the airport last night. He was sitting by the phone, his shoulders slumped, looking smaller somehow. I felt resentful that he was in a bad mood and wouldn’t want to talk.
“Another heart attack?”
He nodded. “It’s very bad. . . They’re not hopeful.”
Grandpa Nat was playing cards when he passed out. He’s in Intensive Care right now, unconscious, with no response to the treatment. They don’t expect him to live out the night, and I don’t, either.
It’s as if he realized he could leave because everyone was all right. He was my grandfather, and I loved him for that, and I also loved him for being the man he was.
But he wouldn’t want me to stop living to grieve for him. “Whatsamatter, you crazy?!”
At 5 PM, I managed to get myself to the Judsons’ in Park Slope. Helmut wasn’t feeling very well: he’s very tired from lack of sleep and jet lag, and he’s probably coming down with a cold.
We watched TV for a while, and then at 7 PM we picked Libby up at the Y and drove into the city. The four of us had dinner at Shakespeare’s at the corner of MacDougal and West Eighth, a very nice place, sort of woodsy and 
We lingered at the table for a couple of hours, just talking really nice talk. It was a relatively cool 90° when we went outside again, and we walked, Libby and I, Helmut and Avis holding hands behind us, down toward Washington Square Park.
As we sat by the edge of the fountain, it felt bearable, for the first time in days, to breathe the night air. I thought of us sitting there – Libby, me, Avis, Helmut – and how we’d make this really beautiful photo if someone were there to shoot it.
There were dogs fighting and people kissing and a drunken black man came 
Then Helmut and Libby got tired, so we drove back into Brooklyn, over the Manhattan Bridge this time so Helmut could see the Brooklyn Bridge, which we’d come in on, and the skyline at night.
Back in Park Slope, we spoke with Mrs. Judson, and with Wayne, who was on his way to work at Pace. Mrs. Judson said she didn’t mind the heat so much because the factory was air-conditioned. Love Story was playing on
Helmut got into his cot in the living room and I said, “Gay schlafen,” and Avis gave him the orange juice she’d just bought on Fourth Avenue, and Libby said she shouldn’t have bought it because Anita Bryant says such terrible things. And we said good night, and I drove Avis home.
I probably won’t sleep tonight, given the shock about Grandpa Nat and thinking about all that has happened lately. I can feel the start of tears because I’m so afraid of the morning, of the mourning.
Right now I’d like to be the happy image of myself in that imaginary photograph of us sitting at the edge of the fountain in Washington Square Park.