Polly’s hometown on north shore of Long Island … Oyster Bay … her grandmother’s house Mully Hill … there’s no hill, the area a lot like Lexington horse country or Palm Beach.  A little gardener’s house next door. Polly’s smoking Parliaments …

Sez she: “Your journal seems written with an audience in mind.” [Quite the opposite. And I should have been appalled by the invasion of my privacy.]

She calls her grandfather Chief. A terribly strong man. We heard from his duck blind the blom-blom of a shotgun …

Favorite words? Polly “far out,” Nicki “yuck,” Len “dig” or “stomp shit.”

I feel there’s this stranger inside me, the real me. The other self, the one I know, is an external shell, the intellectual/jokester/speaker/writer/observer/participant/moralist. The inner self is a pearl, an essence within a dark cave, surrounded by space. It is tormented by demons, driven by fears, seeks sexual release and union. One is rational; the other, irrational. Which is closer to God, I know not.

Marj or Judith, either or both: I’m afraid of a relationship, platonic or passionate.

Headlines? When top French radio show offers advice, astrologer is a big star.

Judith called to say she’d received an “A” in voice, it surprised her, though she’s one of the few operatic voices at Harpur. Her prof gives an “A” only to the elite.

Polly called to see if I’d join them for a movie. “Can’t, I just put a pot pie in the oven,” but she erupted, “Pot pies and onion soup, nothing changes.” That made me angry, why should I cook for solo mio? Now, if we go Zen macro?

Fay signed her postcard from Bloomington, “See ya!” I wondered how to take that. What was she doing there, anyway, rather than West Lafayette?

Ann [whoever] told of her new roommate who talks only of her boyfriend who has a girlfriend …

Started reading Gary Snyder last night: fine stuff. His entries seem to follow weekends: was this a journal, day-off work thing?

Nikki called, collect (2:30 now). Strange conversation, distant, she didn’t know why she called [repeated several times], too much to write: something about a 25-member commune, maybe Sufi, but soul searching, reaching, suicidal.

Somehow, I had expected her to call. Things are looking up. She would bring me down. I couldn’t follow her orbit.

[This was the moment, though, when I mentioned considering yoga and then chancing upon the notice the next afternoon. As I noted on the last page of my journal, “yoga – Steve, 723-7226, 7:30, 131 Clinton St,” a rather fateful commitment.

Of course, we believed there were little men inside our television.

~*~

Although I had three summers in Binghamton, including a college internship, my only winter there had snow cover from Thanksgiving to nearly Palm Sunday, sometimes several feet deep. There was no place to pile it, either. January’s cold was brutal. Global warming lessened the Snow Belt lock by the time I revisited the region a dozen years later. These photos, from the milder winters, convey none of the exhaustion we experienced. Even so, it could be breathtakingly beautiful.

 

 

 

Just about every time we thought it was going away, we got hit with a fresh round. The storms seemed to hit us twice a week. As I recall, the heaviest hit in March: a 24-incher followed by 30 inches and then a 36-incher. Our parking was already packed in on the street.

~*~

In the meantime …

Read Marj some of my Corinthian Columns: very fine shit but my arrangement of words is shifting: my prose style: how awful.

Reading piles around my mattress: self-imposed obligations and duties.

When I came home, wanted to play violin but Marj was studying but Marj was studying so I cooked noodles with mushrooms and broccoli while she watched.

How great it is to say that Sunday has been one of the most beautiful days of my life (had I gone to the Byrd tonight, probably would have overloaded my circuits.)

What shit I put up with from Nicki! Standup, standoff: why don’t I do that with others?

Snidely jumped out Molly’s kitchen window and ran away: dumb cat!

The Inca was king!

In revisiting these, I’m finding my Dark Age was quite fertile.

~*~

I could probably try to reconstruct the time sequence by weeks, but I did suspect the volume covered more than the two months between the holidays and the end of February, when the next volume begins. A lot was happening in the midst of seemingly nothing.

My updated perspective now accepts that I did, indeed, fill 150 to 210 pages in a little over two months. It was the cusp of a life-changing turning point.

~*~

Misc. loose slip of small notated paper: Doctors Bonebroke, Sickler, Dieman, and Hazard. As for Thelonious Panter? The small slip of paper was printed with Date, Instr., Period, Class, Absentees, and Tardy as the header and two columns to list the offenders. A school attendance document! Did I really find that floating, blank, on the street?

[Incinerated]

~*~

From Spiralbound Hippies, with commentary from now.

Nay does not mean no, except in oral voting.

Nark:

• From nok, nak, nose: Brit a spy, employed by police: informer, stool pigeon
• To act as an informer
• To become irritated, annoyed: “Hope you aren’t narked at me”
• Killjoy, wet blanket, an unpleasant and irritating person
• Nark it, meaning to cease, as command

Narky, ill-tempered and irritable

Mencken: “America has no institutions, only fashions.”

From Antioch Review, Summer 1970: “If everybody pleaded not guilty, the judicial system would collapse.”

And then: Laws “should not be understood as meaning what they purport to say, even after being interpreted in court. They can be properly considered only if one examines the intersection between the stated laws and the particular interests that are being served by it, in an actual setting.”

“Fairly obviously, then, the posted law … was intended and used for a purpose exactly opposite to the one stated in words.”

“A stable balance of illegality requires that the law, in practice, exclude from prohibitions the ‘normally’ illegal behavior of particular groups.”

“In this way, the customers get the law they want.”

“Law defends the rights of ownership.”

[Joseph S. Lobenthall Jr., “Buying Out, Selling Out, Copping Out: The Law in the City”]

~*~

Len announced he’s moving out, he can save $12.50 a month in rent and another $25 in food stamps. It hit me bad, at the wrong time: I’m broke, don’t want the hassle of getting a new roommate and getting to know him – most of the “character” here is Len’s: the lights, god-chair, dancing Victorian virgins. I’d like to live alone but can’t afford the extra $250.

Judith’s Wandering Minstrel says he loves her, she said bullshit but she loves him: three days during finals, no studying

[Later entry]:

She has decided:

• She hates Teddy, he’s really messed up
• She pities him (what did Spinoza say about pity?)
• She was crying after 10-minute confrontation when she told him to get lost

[Note that Teddy was in reality the same badass who would later cast a shadow over a promising fling with Stephanie of Bear Mountain.]

He condemned her because

• She likes school more than him
• She took him in to feed and shelter, “I don’t want that”
• She’s afraid of getting involved
• She won’t trust him
• She won’t take off with him to go nowhere
• She won’t give him anything, “I’ll give you anything you want”
• She’s not free

He’s 28, plays guitar and banjo, sings: no home, no income, and a parasite who believes everything should be free.

He doesn’t like classical, “It’s not people’s music, they can’t understand it.” As for opera, her major: “Why be better if you’re good?” Literature, ditto.

Looks like a sandy-haired, sad Allen Ginsberg.

She was crying: You shouldn’t see me like this.

Later, we were wrestling and laughing. Good! I can get through …

~*~

Marj G took Len’s room …

Mixed feelings about her moving in: a feminine touch, cooking, redecorating. A fear, too, of getting involved. She was going to be Polly and Molly’s roommate. Molly sez she’s fine. Tom O’S sez she’s funny, something about Baptist Corners …

Her friend Pebble, the Italian, so euphoric in a raucous way, promised to cook us a lasagna dinner

Adele, resembling Nicki’s sorority roommate of the polka-dot bra: very high strung, beautiful, into Ted. He keeps showing up, like bad karma, first at the old place, then Judith, then again tonight. Lives on Grand Avenue.

Still deep winter at this point of the journal, “it’s 2 degrees, my beard and mustache catch the water vapor from my breathing and it freezes”

I got a fat letter, with newspaper clippings, returned: insufficient address, addressee unknown, and no such street, it said. The Post Office knows so much but won’t disclose it. Are you dead or did you run away to British Columbia with him or merely to a country farm? It will not say. Goodbye, witch, leave me alone, my own life: do not come near me: you can destroy me, I hate you [or that] and fear you: my heart beats too fast. [Nicki? Or Fay? Or]  …

Style is projection.

Judith called this morning, wanted my box number, said she wrote me a long letter and didn’t have time on the phone … she wants to move in with me and split the rent with Marj “and I can pick up after Marj, she’s not too neat” – yeah, neither are you, babe. And she sez Teddy isn’t so bad, “I know so much more now, I can control people better, I don’t have to worry” and her voice tightens, pinched, nervous, “Teddy and I might go away for a couple of days … could I come up a few days early and stay at your place? I can’t stand it here, I can sleep only seven hours” she’s grabbing again, “If I stay with Shayna, I won’t grow”

Mixed feelings I have [too].

Perhaps I should have dropped Nicki when Cox told me to, but then there would have been no loss of virginity, no Florida, no Montana-Utah … am guessing my changes/growth would have been lesser.

Len, who seldom does the dishes, frequently tells me to rinse them immediately upon using. Today he made an omelet (with my eggs, he never uses eggs, he sez); he left the milk out and the dishes, “Oh, yeah, I was too busy kissing Zeezy and tucking her in bed.”

He was also talking about Dr. and Mrs. [his last name] and about hitching out west this spring. He’s in future-possessive bigtime.

~*~

Friday, Judith was here, I called the neighbors to turn it down, “I’ve got a biddie here and she’s trying to study,” “a what?,” “I said biddie,” and she attacked my bare back with a magic marker and I started laughing and Tim on the phone started laughing, couldn’t stop, any of us

Next day, when I returned from work, she was playing records, broke the spin on my Max Rudolf Don Giovanni album, put the discs back in wrong order, slopped up my collection

I enjoy telling people about the books I’m reading before I actually do enjoy reading them

Wrote to Fay today: what an effort! Pain, fear, trepidation, desire.

At the post office, a letter from Judith, sez she’s so much together, stronger, etc., but the script is tiny, tight, 5^th grade appearance … tried going downtown to try to get some arcade photos of myself, no luck finding a photo booth in any of the discount stores downtown

Pips was rushing a sorority … Polly and I were going down to the river by now …

Polly related that Esmeralda had told her the only time she’d seen me with my guard down was on our 4^th of July attempted camping trip … and she felt a sexual power.

In conversation, even if someone makes a trivial flat comment, I have to intellectualize it, a broad interpretation, etc, make the speaker feel guilty for saying anything – sez Polly. Or as Dick Allen had said, I say more than is asked for; it’s great for the prof and me but not for the rest of the class.

~*~

From Spiralbound Hippies, with commentary from now.

 

Volume 10, mostly tiny script, often difficult to decipher. This is the first volume to have an actual date inscribed (Sunday Jan. 15), though the practice is not yet the norm. Many of the entries are introduced, though, by the day of the week, which at least provides a sense of progression.

I am surprised to see how much opportunity – missed opportunity, in fact – was finally appearing in my social life, if I had only known how to “close the deal.” I was meeting young women, finding some fascination and crossing paths repeatedly but failing to consummate the action. We were even going to movies (on campus, I’m guessing) or to casual meals but never really “dating.” I just couldn’t get serious, not with Nicki weighing so heavily on my soul. Many of these I have no recollection of now (among them, Karen, “with the big breasts and small nipple,” as I recorded, who I kept running into; or Janet – and who was the nymphomaniac living in the apartment behind Polly and Molly? The same one who was getting into sadomasochism? Or who, for that matter, replaced Esperanza as the third roomie?). Judith kept returning to the scene, at one point hoping to move in with me, or even my [now] housemate Marj [after Len moved off with Esperanza] – I’m left wondering why I didn’t just settle for convenience there, as well as pleasure. Polly was more involved than I’d thought, while Molly was just plain scared of sex (like Kara, but much funnier and more insightful) but also a key figure.

I must confess how often the descriptions of the new women I met mentioned their breast size (usually small), relative height, and eye color. A real pig, then, or simply desperate. In a fuller view, I was unintentionally comparing them to my two previous loves, Fay and then Nikki – first real girlfriend, as I came to consider the former, and my first lover, or my college lover, for the latter. To some extent, I was looking for an accessory, to give me value I deeply sensed I was lacking. If I could only have seen myself as something other than a tall, skinny, crooked-toothed impoverished intellectual, my engagements would have been different. Maybe that self-perception is what generated the funky vibes D-Man and Thor picked up on.

These pages reek of deep loneliness and depression. I clearly wasn’t out for fun but something utterly serious.

For all of its dross, this volume (and others from this period) had flashes that might be revised into a Brautigan set of poems – an homage to Brautigan, possibly. The recent publication (2025) of my Antique Menu and Aquarian Leap poetry sets in this light are a revelation; many of the lines and stanzas originate here. .

Other pages became the Susquehanna chapbook or bits of Hitchhikers, Daffodil Uprising, and High Jinks.

The stabs at poetry arise largely in my rejection of general society – the superficial Christianity, pompous political motions, ongoing Vietnam war, and consumer-based capitalist economics. What I lacked was a definable, positive identity apart from that: an inner vacuum, back hole, was at my core.

~*~

This notebook picks up, apparently, right on Christmas Eve. Me in the third-person, with Esperanza. We went out to the fancy place just outside town; she had duckling, I had crab (surprising, considering how central it would become six years later, in the Northwest), “in the glow of intimate candlelight.” [On Christmas Day 1989, Yankees legend Billy Martin would die in a single-vehicle crash after leaving the establishment heavily intoxicated.]

Then the trip to NYC for New Year’s with Len and D-Man.

At the close, this fat volume also covers much that would prompt what sits as Big Inca, or originally, Inca Invasion … as well as a lot more, which is a good thing, considering that Inca still has a few memo entries that need filling.

WHAT WAS I EATING IN THIS PERIOD? BESIDES CANNED SOUP?

One note has me boiling many of my meals. Another mentions that Len has no idea about broiling anything, especially a steak.

And apple turnovers from the Italian bakery a few blocks over became a huge favorite, along with their napoleons.

~*~

Other gleanings:

Just read De Sade, Pinter, Bergman [movie scripts].

Lambert called me Hodson, just like Jennie in Love Story called him Barrett. Guess it’s an Ivy League thing.

I work best in extended spurts, unpredictable.

Judith spent the night. So nice to have soft-soft warm body to cling to. She said she slept so much better than she did in the dorm. She’s talking about moving in, but I don’t want that. Her uptightness repulses me, I like my solitude, too. Her voice can be like an upright out-of-tune piano wire.

Next entry regarding her: Went straight to campus after work [apparently, I had the early Saturday shift, which would later become the zombie-shift “presidential death watch”]. Saw Judith, we talked, she mostly about Howie and how she was going to let him down gently, how much he likes her, etc. [Who the hell was Howie?] I swam ½ mile in the women’s pool because of a swim meet in the men’s. Except for one girl and the lifeguard, I had the pool to myself. In the deep quiet, muffled and grumpy, sunlight angled in through the south windows so that as I swam into a patch of sunlight, my body transformed briefly into a gold, a fire-fish! And then turned off as rapidly. Swam twice my usual distance and felt I could have swum more. I love that feeling in my arms and chest and now understand Fay’s “torturing” her body in gymnastics.

Slept in Judith’s dorm room, went for coffee around 7:30, ran into Renee [first mention: who on earth was she] and went with her to see monster flicks. The first one was in color, right there I knew it wouldn’t be spooky. And then Moose Sinatra showed up as a convict, so I was so certain. It was very funny, unintentionally, a very formulaic. The other film, though, was excellent, based on Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House. … Very terrifying, half of the audience stoned, screaming, tense, laughing, Renee screamed and grabbed me and I was glad I could grab her, too …

With both Nikki and Fay, when the relationship started turning south, they were always late in meeting me. One night when I, too, was 45 minutes late to pick up Fay, she was an additional 45 minutes getting ready.

The week after Florida was the week Nikki and I had the flip-out at the Preservation Hall Band concert. [Why was I finally recording these bits of already ancient history? Here I was, a full year later and a world apart.]

~*~

From Spiralbound Hippies, with commentary from now.

My first autumn there exposed me to a mixture of New England’s intense fall foliage and that of the Southern forests. I drove many miles in the afternoon hours after my shift at the newsroom ended in explorations of the neighboring forests. The region was called the Southern Tier of New England, paired with the Northern Tier of Pennsylvania. Sometimes I got lost on lanes like this or on winding country roads.

~*~

The cover of Volume 9 of my journaling purposed a college geography course. I didn’t recall ever touched a map there, either. Turns out to have been Geog 314, urban geography – anything as long as it’s related to the city – part of my Urban Studies certificate program.

Includes a page torn from another notebook, about spending the night with [Judith, I presume, or perhaps Polly], and her moistness. Very confusing now.

Mostly Christmastime ’70: more winter observations.

The Kara lobster incident, quite telling: “What a little girl she is, how frightened of growing up into sex she is, of how much she is running away from herself, using work as an excuse.” Etc.

So she was home from Cornell for the holidays?

Also, reaction to getting Fay’s letter … “She’s further down than I am.” Also, my comments that we would never get back together, because “there is so much she will never tell (her friends) / bikes [motorcycles], sex thrill, freedom … she is physical” in contrast to me.

I was apparently spending time with Judith at this point, much earlier than I remembered. The book includes Christmas Eve, when D-Man and Helene moved to the second-floor place with the rounded bedroom.

I’m surprised by the lack of any record of the spectacular autumn foliage and my explorations of country roads after getting off work in the early afternoon.

Much of what was percolating in my life through these months will instead be found in my novel Pit-a-Pat High Jinks.

In general, it was a difficult time for me.

[Incinerated]

~*~

From Spiralbound Hippies, with commentary from now.

From banter with Esperanza, I see I was already harboring a dream house in the woods, rather than the sleek flat in a high rise in midtown. Woods, but no mention of lakefront.

From there, the volume leaps rapidly into autumn. “It’s been so long since I have written. … Vagueness replaces articulation.”

Molly says everybody talks about their problems, but very few talk about what makes them happy.

At one stretch, I ranted about how few people could relate to my love of classical music etc., yet also how little I knew of rock or Hollywood stars. I see now that wasn’t the root of my loneliness, but rather my inability to see them as feeling creatures for reasons other than what facts they might share.

~*~

Out of the blue: “Nikki’s fucking up my head. I look strange (though mystic, interesting, intriguing) when I see myself in reflection: the hair and beard: where am I? I want to run but realize the malaise is within. … I’m homesick, but for where? Not Dayton, unless it’s [her family]. Not my parents or the Moons. Or Antioch?

~*~

Molly’s “We’re going to discuss infinity.”

“Oh, that will take forever.”

A note of taking a bubble bath at Molly’s – we didn’t have a tub with our apartment.

Also, her friends had the strangest names: Leo, Lousy Ruly, Zoom-Zoom, Beaver. How would a plain James fit in?

~*~

“It kinda pissed me to discover I paid $1.95 (plus tax) for Trout Fishing in America only to see it was set not by Linotype but rather electric typewriters, probably some poorly paid secretary …”

~*~

Interesting, when I claim there’s nothing Quaker about Quaker Lake, other than being in Pennsylvania. “Nor is there a meetinghouse for miles about. … Unlike Brackley’s roadside dive.” Quakers were still way off in my future.

~*~

Recollections of Fay, her smiling baby teeth and playful body, her wordplay mind, yet eons behind … while Judith gives nothing but her body but wants my soul, says I still love Nikki and should see a shrink.

~*~

Much of the volume continued the lines of judgmental social commentary cloaked as verse. Interwoven are attempts to define the landscape, both surrounding me and for the nation at large.

There were also pages written in pencil, now too faint to decipher.

The back page has both Nikki’s brother and Pips’ phone numbers and their addresses at Cornell. [Kara was now also there, all three as freshmen.]

A typed teletype roll insert: Time is flying by on dragon wings. Let us use Chinese dragons: they are beings of beauty and magic and have a pearl between their teeth.

So who I was addressing when I concluded, “Catholic hang-ups are beyond my scope of comprehension: I hope you arrive to where you can not only name them but comprehend them: the task of living is immense: we have no other choice. Peace & love.”

[Incinerated]

~*~

From Spiralbound Hippies, with commentary from now.