Gail Gordon has been my friend through thick and thin. She was my roommate at Jackson and later in New York. We even went to the same elementary school for a while in Roxbury, Massachusetts, but we didn't find that out until we met in our college dormitory. The years of trial were after college when I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was a constant monologue of confusion and fantasy, and I couldn't keep things together, like arrive places when I said I would, balance my checkbook, get the laundry done before I totally ran out of underpants. I had the notion that it was attractive to be suffering, it was what you were supposed to do if you were at all sensitive. People didn't just tolerate you when you were down, they loved you for it. [I don't know whether that idea was part of the fifties or, as John Limon says, it's an eternal delusion, at least since Rimbaud.) Gail listened to it all, with close attention but not indulgence. Slowly it dawned on me that her life was moving, that I'd better do something about my own.
The picture of Gail here is from summer 1973. She, Norman, and her two daughters Deborah and Julie came for several days. It was Julie's sixth birthday and we put up streamers, had a marvelous chocolate cake. It's a party. Deborah and Julie decorate my kitchen window shades with Magic Markers. Paint Styrofoam wig holders. Norman slaves over two old tires, trying to cut them with a meat knife to make swings out of them. But they're steel radials, and Norman breaks three different kinds of knife blades, swears, and won't give up. Finally, finally, they're cut. Then he has to tape the edges, the interlaced metal is so sharp. We sigh at all-American persistence.
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