Episode 16 ❤️‍🩹 1979 : Love & Rage, You Can't Have One Without The Other.

Starved for attention, almost any recognition was intoxicating.

Hello lovelies & wild things. It’s June 2025, but I’m taking you back to Summer 1979, where you’ll meet Red Wolf, who I’d find in Washington Square Park that summer. Not my first, the low bar of trawling for men who practically—sometimes actually—lived in a park & repackaging them as “boyfriends” was becoming a habit.

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Wolf

He’s been singing since we met two weeks ago, hanging from low branches and singing to me, about me. Wrapped around my ankles like a sweet, harmless snake content to warm himself at my feet, he sings to me.

Some days, he squats motionless, arms clasped tightly around his shins, on the other side of the fountain, watching me. Silent, a terracotta gargoyle.

Pale with wild Howdy Doody red hair, he’s hard to ignore. I don’t want to. I’m being wooed. It’s new to me and I like it.

When you’re starved for attention, have learned to subsist on emotional crumbs, almost any recognition is intoxicating.

I was getting drunk on him.

Everyone else is getting drunk on beer. A half dozen beers are hidden beneath my long wish-I’d-been-a-real-hippy skirt as a cops cruise the outside circle of Washington Square Park where we drink. They—the Onondaga Reservation Indians, Sleazy John & Rat, Jack & Carmine, Johnny One Eye, the Starriders motorcycle club, Haney & random runaways, retrieve their beers when the cops are gone. I carry a deerskin full of wine.

I’ll only drink beer when I’m out of wine. And there is no vodka.

There must have been other girls, but I don’t remember any. Wolf made me feel like I was the only girl in the world.

That summer of the long skirt, in the park not sharing my wine, I’m supposed to be writing a script for my directorial “debut” at NYU film school,

They never should’ve put the university so close to the park, so it’s not really all my fault, the way things went. I’d had aspirations of being an Academy award-winning film director, that’s why I came to study with Haig Manoogian¹, Scorsese’s Svengali. But that park…

but I can’t think. Too much singing. Or too much wine. Or not enough. I’m waiting for the muse to offer inspiration. Some days the only thing that’s offered is a tab of acid. Other days there’s just the monotony of watching cops roll up, roll past, roll away.

Inspired or not, there’s Red Wolf.
Always here.
He sleeps here, in the park, I think.
He’s kind of out of his mind, I think,
and
I think I love him.

I kept Floyd a secret from him
I stayed in the center of the park, trying to avoid Short, Papo & Jesse,
They worked the northwest corner near the Hotel Earle.
Priority One: Avoid anyone else who’d been there the night the Bon Soir closed, the night all those people were shot.
It feels forever ago, but it’s only been a year.
Wolf wouldn’t love me if he knew.

Nada

There’ve been decisions and actions that, looking back, changed the arc of my life, but at the time they seemed like nothing.

I threw Nada out of the apartment in the middle of the night like she was nothing. What she was, before that night, was my roommate and a friend.

The memory of that night, that moment, feels jagged & violent, like hacking up a flaming hairball. It feels like I was angry enough to kill. She’d interfered with the first man who made me feel loved.

Had I already forgotten about the Frankie?

Maybe, after feeling unlovable for so long, I was protecting what was mine. Screams and the full blast of my anger sending them all out into the night. Nada. Red’s brother, Brown Wolf. And the runaways. And I didn’t think about any of them again, for a long time. Didn’t wonder if anyone had a place to go.

It wasn’t an alcoholic blackout. It was rage.

Rage. (noun) violent and uncontrolled anger. I had that.

They say, if it’s hysterical, it’s historical, and this was old, this anger, it felt ancient, rising up from a bottomless well. I didn’t know it at the time. The summer of ‘79, I was defending my home, my marriage that wasn’t a marriage. Rage may have its beginnings in perceived threats; feelings of helplessness or powerlessness; past trauma like abuse or neglect; feeling unheard, unprotected or unloved. Check, check, check.

It me.

It can also be a defensive response to shame. That will take years and years of therapy and recovery before it starts making any sense. But, that? It me.

I’ve watched friends go blank with rage fighting each other, unaware of the level of damage they were doing, with no recollection afterwards.

My mother said as a child, I’d slice up the couch, flipping the cushion to hide it. I recall the nubby texture of the weave, the thinness of the foam inside. I used a steak knife I think. I can remember the couch, but everything else? A constructed memory, details pulled from her story.

A vague memory of a Popeye punching bag, given to me, I’m told, to channel anger I don’t remember having.

Overwhelmed by the anger and fear in the house, I hid in the closet or under the bed. When things get angry, if I can’t get my body out, I get out of my body. I’ve done that forever. Eventually, I’d learn to crawl inside a bottle of vodka and hide. Then in sex. I’d left so often I still struggle to stay.

Being in my body was the anomaly.

But, blacking out, leaving to avoid feeling my own anger? That was new information. It relieved me of the responsibility for my own actions, because I wasn’t even here. My body—yes, but not me.

Decades later, I’d look for Nada, to try to make amends. I tried Craigslist, Google, Facebook, even a shout out in VIBE Magazine, hoping someone would see it and pass it on to her. She must’ve come back the next day or two for her things. Did I toss everything out in the hallway behind her? Did I lay hands on her?

I don’t know.

2025

I Googled Nada one more time. In her mother’s obituary, there was her married name. Working somewhere in Sweden, with a photo that very well could be my Nada. I emailed late on a Friday:

Subject: Were You Nada Tokay? Did you go to New York Institute of Technology? I'm trying to track down Nada Tokay, to whom I owe amends for my unforgivable behavior when we were roommates, briefly, in 1979, in New York City's East Village. Was this you?

I included the only photo I have of her. Early the following Monday: Yes Jodi, thats me. Needless to say that I was surprised to hear from you…²

If there were calendars or date books from those years, they’re gone. I’d relied on that record keeping to control what I could, trying to make order out of chaos. But, just as life started getting really out of control, it seems I stopped keeping records.

Chaos: A yawning empty darkness, confusion with no order. A goddess, she is the origin of the universe.

Fear and anger are primitive emotions & survival mechanisms. Dump them into a salad spinner, and spin forever. Chaos. Blind rage. Emotional blackouts. Days gone. Months unaccounted for.

I was powerless, like George Jetson trapped by the electronic dog walker, screaming Jane, Stop this crazy thing.

The gas pedal is stuck, the brake line has been cut, and the doors won’t open. All I was making out of chaos was more chaos.

1. He will be dead within a year. So, no do-overs for me.

2. And so began a correspondence, amends, forgiveness and validation of my memories.