dreams of the ‘80s

The last four years I’ve been working on a project that I hope will someday exist in a more material form than it currently does. The only thing certain about it is the title: 1983. I started thinking about it in 2016, a span which was for me what 1992 was for the Queen: “not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure”.

It began almost immediately after New Year’s with finding out my best friend was dying — which she did, before the year was out, so obviously a worse year for her than for me. Her death in May was followed almost immediately by my kid’s fraught graduation from high school (just barely and contingent upon jumping through a number of hoops) and in the midst of the overflowing personal, the political came crashing through like a rough beast. There was no rest, for any of us.

When I found out Mary was dying, I started scanning old photos of us and putting them online. What else was I going to do? She liked that — her new friends (she’d moved out of NYC about ten years prior) would see her in her glorious youth. I followed up by sending her bits from the journal I kept then, but she was less interested in those; not concerned with the past, more focused on what lay ahead. But I kept reading — as a way to return and, as the months went on, a way to start living with her again since that was never going to happen on this material plane.

There is nothing really special about these journal entries for anyone but me. 1983 was a peculiar year: certainly more an annus mirabilis than an annus horribilis. I left an abusive husband on New Year’s Eve and moved in with Mary. Always practical, she’d offered me a month on the floor of her front room “after that we won’t be friends any more” — time to get on my feet but not too comfortable.

I moved again, on time, into the living room of a spacious West End Avenue apartment (my bed a futon under the grand piano) and then a third time that year to the street I still live on today. I fell in love a whiplash-inducing six or seven times (picking the meat off, one sees the bare bones of transaction here). I went to parties, got appallingly drunk, worked double shifts, looked at art, tried to make some and, in the end and to use an anachronistic phrase, “fucked around and found out”. At the very tail of the year (another holiday season!), I met the man who would eventually become my second husband. Of course I’d forgotten his name the next day.

What I wanted to do, when I started this project, was to give myself context. I started by reading newspapers and magazines from the time, matching them up to the dates I had. Some of what I read there I knew at the time, much I didn’t. I wanted to know how we got here. Still working on it.

In the meantime, I found some sheets I’d labeled “dreams from the 1980s” I’d typed up (before I had access to a computer, presumably). They have about as much weight, “reality”, as my journal entries. Solid liquid. Solid gold.

31 october 2021