Josh told the FBI agent everything, explaining that he knew it sounded paranoid and crazy, but that he wanted to have things on record in case something happened to him. The agent wrote down what Josh told him and seemed especially interested in Straniere’s boast that he had a cache of weapons in his apartment.
In my pathetic Spanish – everyone in Sweetwater is Nicaraguan – I asked them to change my tire. Although I had trouble making myself understood, eventually they figured out what needed to be done and did it. “¿Por qué no habla español?” one asked, and I shrugged and said, “Yo estudio español en escuela en Nueva York por cuatro años pero no . . . remember.” “Recuerdo,” said the teenage boy next to me.
She told me that Lori got engaged to her boyfriend on her birthday last weekend, but we didn’t talk about the consquences of Lori moving out. I know that it wouldn’t be good for me to move in with Ronna. I just wish she could find a great guy who’d give her the marriage and kids that she wants.
It’s nice to be able to spend time in the Grove and the Gables among the kind of people I might see on the streets of the Upper West Side or Lower East Side. My class at Coral Gables Senior High went well today. After a brief lecture on the history of computers, I had the students use an Introduction to the IBM PC disk tutorial.
At times, as Ronna noted, her grandmother would make spoonerisms, but she’d also substitute one word for another – like “wall” for “porch” – and at one point she referred to Billy as “she.” This morning, as Ronna and I walked along with her for a few hundred feet, she introduced us to a neighbor as “my granddaughter and his friend.”
What prospects did I have in the summer of ’68, when I graduated from Midwood High School? If my classmates had known anything about me, I probably would have been voted Mostly Likely to End Up in a Mental Institution.
After the Inner Circle dinner, Frank called Teresa into his office and berated her for being “a floozy and a flake.” He said she can’t keep her mouth shut and has to change her personality if she’s going to stay in P.R. and politics. Teresa was very upset and said she couldn’t help it if this married guy latched onto her.
The worst that can happen is really what I think about myself. I hate to let myself off the hook, but I also understand that I didn’t act dishonorably. The road to hell, of course, is paved with good intentions, and it’s going to be a long while before I get over this.
The callers tonight were moronic, as usual, and as I was driving home from the WNWS studio, I heard one guy make fun of my nasal, high-pitched voice. Sometimes this voice problem bothers me, but then I think if I’ve got an easily imitable and distinctive voice, it may be an advantage in getting public attention. Who knows? But I enjoyed doing the show.
When Bert told me he was into klezmer music and had attended a five-day klezmer festival in the Catskills, I knew he’d know Dave Tarras’s name, and of course Bert said that Uncle Dave is revered as a god in klezmer circles.