The new roommates seem like okay people. Haim and Dagmara. He’s an Israeli and she’s from some Eastern bloc soviet satellite, either Hungary or Poland, I’m not sure. I don’t think they’re a couple, but they haven’t been very clear about that. (I think Haim wants to have sex with Dagmara, but she’s not into him.) They live in the bedroom together, which has a door, and I’m going to live out in the dinette area where I will be exposed to the comings and goings of anyone who visits the apartment. I’m going to build some kind of bookcase/wall to block off the living room. Altogether the three of us live in about seven hundred square feet. But it’s a modern high-rise so we have big windows and a view.

Dagmara is some kind of Slavic femme fatale. Nice round breasts, very white skin, big blue eyes. I think she bleaches every hair on her body. She’s sexy in an Eastern European way, which takes a little getting used to but she actually is sexy.

Haim is a dopplegänger for the guy from Fiddler on the Roof. Big bald shtarker with a bushy beard. He sells fine art posters (e.g., Mo-digliani’s nude, Van Gogh’s Starry Night, da Vinci’s Mona Lisa) on the sidewalk in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They both speak perfect English but have accents, so hanging around them is like being in a foreign country or something.

This journal will track what I see and hear in New York. Who knows how long I’m going to stick it out, but I figure I should keep a careful notation while I’m here. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man etc. etc. The things I see on the “mean streets” (M. Scorsese) will provide a foundation for my future writing. Can I remember everything? Kerouac is the pole star. Remember everything, write everything.

So back to the journal: Once I got all my stuff moved over from the first apartment, I ate a quick lunch with my new roommates (Haim is loud and boisterous, Dagmara smiles shyly at me) and then I went out for a stroll in Central Park, and roamed under the leafy oaks and maples. It’s a beautiful place, this park. But I’ve been warned to stay away at night. While I was walking I saw a few people who looked like they might be dangerous. Not only is our apartment close to the park, it’s close to Harlem. 96th Street. After Times Square, I’m both less worried and more on alert.

When I got back to the apartment, Haim was gone, so Dagmara and I hung out, drank some Darjeeling tea and had a nice talk. She’s a poet, but while she’s waiting for her poetry to be published she works at a real estate agency here in the city.