I guess I’m not paying much attention to this journal anymore. Been very busy. But I should try to keep it up. The book came out and it got good reviews. One of the stories got published in The New Yorker and another is going to be published in the Year’s Best Short Stories along with Joyce Carol Oates and Richard Ford and T. Boyle and all these other cool guys.

Very exciting. Met Philip Roth at a party. He didn’t seem very interested in me, more interested in Katie, kept staring at her with his black eyes.

Life moves on. Sid Vicious killed his girlfriend. There’s a new club called the Mudd Club down on White Street.

I’ve been seeing Katie nonstop. She takes care of me. Our sex is deeply intimate and intense. And she’s very intelligent and insightful. She’s good for me. She’s got me to slow down on the dope and coke and booze. Which is good. I’d been pretty messed up lately and didn’t even notice it.

Did another reading at the Poetry Project and this time the place was packed. Standing room only. I guess I’ve arrived. Ginsberg was there. It’s obvious that the crowd loves my work. I’m good at reading in front of an audience. Still not making enough money.

Some people in Amsterdam are going to fly me over to work there for a month. And someone I know is setting up a string of gigs on the West Coast as part of a “New York Reads” series. They pay all the expenses plus a stipend of seventy-five dollars a day, which is pretty fucking cool. Plus the book royalties. It adds up.

I’ve begun a novel. The story I wrote about John was so good I’m expanding on it. Really explore the mind-set of a modern Renaissance man, circa 1977. It will be one of those “the rise and fall of” type novels. About how he put it all together when he was young, and what happened to him. How he ends up selling weed with his beautiful old lady and corrupts young impressionable minds. (Like myself.) (Did I get corrupted by him?) Oh and by the way, Leon left Esquire. They’re giving him his own imprint at Vintage. So I’m doing this book with him. Blake is ecstatic.

March 6, 1979