Flowers are exploding all across the East Village community gardens. The temperature is in the 90s. The air in our apartment has no oxygen. The streets only have a little more. Alice and I have lived together for the last month. I haven’t worked a day. Alice is heading home to West Virginia for Labor Day, the traditional end of America’s summer, although astrologically the equinox is three weeks away.

I wander downtown. the Jones Diner is packed with blue-collar workers. The staff is third world. Two secretaries shriek in New york accents. Their boyfriends remain silent and eat their lunch. I order a bagel and coffee. At 1 the diner clears out. Everyone has gone back to work. Two Greek children draw in books at a corner table. Strangely they speak Spanish together.

Has anyone ever changed their sex to become a hermaphrodite?

A BEACH DREAM
I was at a seaside resort with Alice
Our cottage was a wreck.
My Uncle Jack visits with kids, all of them six years-old
He complains, “This place is a mess.”
I recall his first beach house on the Cape
It was so big
Sand was deep on the wood floors
My Aunt never cleaned anyplace
later we are at the beach
I rescue a child from drowning
I drag him onto the pier
I lose my balance and fall into the water
Ropes entangle my limbs

I wake up before dying.

<

September 1, 2021 – Brooklyn

A hard rain all day. I haven’t left 387. I wrote from the 1979 journal, napped, and ate several small meals. I only spoke with Jake and Brigette and then only briefly. I have really talked with anyone on the phone or texted someone about nothing.

Brigette painted me as a hermaphrodite. They had heard my tale of the Hermaphrodite statue at the Louvre. Their friend Soap had a tattoo of l’Heramphrodite on her arm. I would love to see it one more time, except it’s raining buckets in Brooklyn and I’m not going anywhere, until after my procedure at NYU. Trapped like a laboratory rat seeking reincarnation as a marble statue.