DayBooks: October 29, 1993 (Fri) 03:25 - Freeman Lake

The last entry does not say much, and I haven't been through the 10½ hours of audio tapes to get an accurate chronology, but here's what happened in a nutshell.

Bill Zimmer's son, Aaron, was born on my 25th birthday, February 17, 1975 - I guess he must be in college now. Around that same date, I decided to close Luminscript, Ltd. and take a job at Lincoln First Bank as a bill collector in their credit card department - they were my biggest creditor, so they consolidated my debts into one note and put me on payroll deduction rather than wait in line at bankruptcy court.

Since I was employed, Chic and I got an apartment together (from the same landlord as Rundel Park) and I thought we were very happy together until she surprised me with her decision that we could not continue living together. Once she had offered to support me and pay the rent while we lived together and I pursued my career as a photographer. When I gave up photography, I changed, and by then, she had changed as well. She woke up one morning and asked herself if she had met me as I was then, would she still want to start a relationship with me and share an apartment - she decided that she would not, so she unilaterally terminated the relationship.

It's probably the hardest thing she'd ever done in her life, but it was starting to get painful, and she didn't want to get hurt any worse than before. I've done it myself - it's called "cut your losses and vamoose". You've got to know when to hold them, know when top fold them, know when to walk away, and know when to didi-mau.

Some mornings she would take Geoffrey, her pet guinea pig, from his cage and we would play with him on the bed before we got dressed for work. We woke up one morning and he was dead - we tried to bury him in a park, but the ground was frozen, so we chopped a hole in the ice and sank him in a pond. I always thought of that as the time when things started to fall apart between us.

In many ways it was more devastating than breaking up with Beth, but I learned a lot more from it, too. Chic introduced me to a new way of looking at the world, and I feel that I'm a better person for having known her. It was the dawn of the Woman's Liberation Movement, and I had come to realize that taking pictures of naked women as a way of making a living was only contributing to the objectification of women - I began to look at my choice of vocation as a Bad Thing, and no longer found any pleasure in it.

But the most important thing I think I learned from her was that I could love again, a lesson that I was just too late in learning. She has a new life now, and has graciously consented to letting me include a few of the photographs of her in this work - her only conditions were that I not include any of the nudes and that I not use her last name. She has been with her current lover for over 15 years now, and they are very happy together, which makes me happy, because I was probably one of the greatest ... pains ... in her life, and nearly caused her to become as cynical about love as I was when we met.