October 10, 1983
You can hear the cries of sea gulls above the collage of
sound I hear even before I climb out of bed.
Winter comes to the city and the river.
Last week, the geese made their passage through this place, a
wedge in the sky honking as they made their way south.
The gulls stay here, braving out the winter with the rest of
us.
I am cold, trapped beneath this blanket like a child, filled
with memories and hints of the upcoming holidays.
Clayton is leaving tomorrow for parts unknown, Austin for
certain, possibly San Francisco before that, in search of peace he cannot find
here.
I feel more than a little guilty for the way Jimmy and I
have treated him during his brief stay here.
We should not have given him such a hard time about his
beliefs.
Jimmy has a tendency to decimate anything that interferes
with his personal plans, and I was his willing accomplice, even though I got
nothing out of it in the end except grief.
I was once a victim of this tactic back in 1975 when I was
Clayton trying to live with Jimmy and Garrick here, and Jimmy orchestrated a
similar scheme to drive me out.
I hear the gulls again, reminding me that I must soon rise
and face the cold day, and the approach of winter – still reveling in Fran’s
visit yesterday, and our hours of love-making, before we ventured out and made
the trek to Bear Mountain to glimpse the first sprawl of changing leaves, yellows
and reds that have not yet had time to reach here, contrasted against a
backdrop of evergreens and the sharp shimmering surface of an almost pristine Hudson
River, the glimpse of other lakes between the sprawling limb whose names I did
not catch from the road map.
Neither one of us thought to bring a camera so the image
must remain fixed in memory instead, finding peace closer than Clayton can,
although a bit alarmed by the sound of gun fire as hunters made their way
through the woods not far from where we stood.
We saw deer fleeing below us, trapped in the sanctuary of
federal preserves.
Sometimes I feel trapped like that, pursued by realities I
am helpless to otherwise cope with.
Standing there on top of that mountain made me realize just
how Jimmy must feel having been cast out from his garden of Eden in Towaco
where he had puttered around in his own private sanctuary, only to return to
Passaic where he had to confront a harsher world.
Perhaps this is why he is so bitter and so angry at Clayton,
envying Clayton’s ability to carry his own sanctuary on his back, hiding in his
books and tapes the way the deer do in the federal lands, while Jimmy and I live
on the edge of a world where there is no sanctuary.
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