It would have been bliss to take a long nap on a day like today, hearing the rain patter on the roof. Very gray and still, like a giant hand was cupped over everything, muting sounds.

James Hogan, a husky, square-headed Englishman, visited Locus at about 4:00. In between running out pages of Fritz’ manuscript, I went out into the front room to watch rain on the leaves and listen to his conversation with Shelly. They talked mainly about income tax. He said the IRS is why he has never become an American citizen though he’s lived here, off and on, for seven years. He said Anne McCaffrey was having tax problems. The American government would not (according to him) allow her to become an Irish citizen because none of her grand-parents were Irish, and the IRS had decided her horse farm was a “hobby” rather than a business and was therefore not tax-deductable.

As I read this entry in my diary, I’m a bit curious. Usually Charlie was the one to entertain writers. Where was he during Hogan’s conversation with Shelly? Was Hogan‘s Holocaust denial known at that point? That might have been a reason for Charlie making himself scarce.

A note at the end of this entry reads “Horns honking in tunnel on bridge.” I remember this. On my way home to San Francisco that evening, rush hour traffic had backed up in the Bay Bridge tunnel. Someone leaned on their horn, then another person, then another, and all the horns echoed merging, like the chords of an organ. Wierdly beautiful. Of course, that bridge has since been replaced, but there is still a tunnel. I believe now there is a sign outside it warning “No Honking.”

We’d ordered some takeout sushi for dinner tonight, and when I walked out to the car to go pick it up, my first indication that something was wrong was an empty Thunderbird bottle set on the ground near the front bumper. I opened the door and saw a pair of legs and boots stretched out in the back. The large, groggy man with a sandy moustache responded incoherently when I told him to get out, and only stirred slightly. One eye was almost swollen shut and he had a crack in his head.

A clean-cut, lean blond man was sitting nearby on a dumpster, and when he saw me walking around the car, opening doors, trying to reason with someone inside, he asked if I needed help. He and a black man managed to get him out, while I went upstairs (ostensibly) to call the cops. I didn’t want to. When I checked the front upstairs window and saw they had him out of the car, I came back down. After I thanked him and before he walked the man away, the blond guy scolded me for “confronting” the man rather than simply going in and calling the police.

This was one of those moments when I wished that, instead of being a small, skinny woman, I was a big man with a ponytail. After they got him out, the blond guy asked me why the car was unlocked. I pointed out that nobody in that SOMA neighborhood who parked on the street kept anything valuable in cars or locked our car doors. The windows would just get smashed.

I can still see that injured man, the state of him, the way he had trouble heaving himself up, could not quite focus his good eye on me. I can still hear his half-pleading voice when those other men told him I was going in to call the police. “But my head’s already broken.”

Strange weather this morning, the kind of day when a single building will stand out sunlit on a gray street. Just as I came off the bridge to work, it began to pour from a clear sky and I drove through a white, glittering curtain of driving rain.

There was a ridiculous article in Image, “Warren Hinckle on R. Crumb,” actually an appreciation of Dori Seda which quoted Crumb a couple of times and included not one example of her work. It also made no mention of the car accident, or the delay in getting treatment.

The car accident worsened Seda’s lung problems and likely lead to her death. Because of the miserable state of medical care in the US back then, she did not seek out medical treatment because she was far from wealthy and feared incurring even more bills. Seda was not eligible for Medicaid. She died a casualty of Reaganomics.

As for the article not including her work, what I didn’t know was that Seda’s mother, who hated the sexuality of Seda’s work, was refusing to allow it to be published after her death. (Every artist’s nightmare.) Fortunately, Seda had left a will granting her partner, Don Donahue, full ownership of her work after she died, and in 1991 the will was successfully filed by Dori’s friends.