5/26/82.

I found another journal!

There have been huge gaps, sometimes of many years, in my journal-keeping, particularly frustrating because they often occur at times when the most is going on in my life. But this one is a real find — a lot is happening.

Armelia McQueen died today (or yesterday?), which sent me looking for the Playbills that I saved from my first trip to New York in 1979. The second Broadway show I saw was Ain’t Misbehavin’. For years, decades, I used to tell people that I’d seen the original cast with Nell Carter, and I truly believed that I had, but several years ago I was looking at the Playbill I’d saved and I realized that I’d seen a replacement cast over a year after the show had opened. So … I love Armelia McQueen, my college friends and I wore that cast album out so I’m very familiar with her voice, but I wanted to see if by chance she was still in the Broadway production when I saw it. She was not.

But as I was digging, I found a stack of pages tied with a shoelace, and it turned out to be my journal from spring of 1982 to June 1983, for some reason stored separately from the other journals. It’s the period of time when I’m becoming more and more impatient with studying fine arts at Parsons, contemplating and then deciding to leave school and just be an artist in the city.

I spent that summer back in Greencastle, Indiana, working at a menial job on the graveyard shift at IBM and living cheap to save up a little cushion (back then, $100 was a sizable cushion). But before that, in Indiana for Christmas, I met this guy Paul. I don’t remember a lot about him, except that he was visiting my friend Nancy, that the night we met we played footsy under the table at dinner or a bar where we’d gone out with a group of friends, that he was very handsome, and I think a music student, and that I was obsessed with him for a disproportionate length of time considering we saw each other twice.

We slept together that night, and I fell deep into a crazy obsession, which was par for the course for me back then. That was before I learned that lust and love are two different things. He gave me crabs, which took a while to get rid of. Then, I saw him again that spring, and he gave me crabs again! As far as I remember I didn’t see him again.

I don’t remember any of the stuff I’ve written here about Chicago. Scott was my best friend in college, and I don’t think he even knew Paul.

His last name was unusual enough that I found him quickly with a Google search. He worked as an actor for many years in Chicago and Los Angeles. At some point, he met a man and together they started a successful catering company. He died of AIDS in 1995.