I was by now no longer living with Marge Passasini in our brownstone apartment. I had left and moved in with my Peace Corps friend, Annie Boylon, in her railroad flat just a few blocks away.
It was now about 1970. Herman wanted me to get a teaching job. He brought me into his huge office one day and started sorting through his stacks of business cards. I said, “What are you doing?” He said, “I’m finding you a teaching job.” I said, “I don’t want to be a teacher; I don’t want to be in a university.” He said, “Yes, you do, Dan. You like books, ideas and thinking.” I resisted him, even though I went on a few job interviews just to please him. I wanted to be an organizer.
I think Marge, too, expected me to get a real job, but I wasn’t going to. I don’t really know what happened between me and Marge. I don’t think it was really anything about me or Marge. I think it was context, the radicalization of people within the context of Vietnam, the push to act, to stop things. Marge thought it was about “relationships.” She wanted to talk about ours. I didn’t. Marge was probably right. I know what I did was wrong.
My desk faced the window onto 14th street. From there I could watch the young kids play their touch football on the school yard. I loved touch football since the seminary days and I had a good arm. The length of that school yard was not that long and I could easily throw a bullet spiral the length of it. Those kids liked to see me come out of our brownstone and join up for an afternoon game. Even if I didn’t come out to join them I liked to watch them from my desk.
There was a problem, however. Marge had made these beautiful drapes and hung them on that front window. After Marge would go to work in the morning, I would take them down and carefully place them on our bed just to the left of my desk. Sometimes I would forget to hang them back up before Marge came home from work and she would get mad about it. One evening she told me that if I didn’t like where the drapes were that I should move my desk. I did and never went back.
Marge wanted to talk about “our relationship” and I just wanted to live with her, but I don’t remember that we ever met again. It was a waste of two nice young people who loved each other but didn’t know how to get through life together. I apologized to Marge years later, but, if there was still mortal sin in my world, the way I left her was certainly one.
