Ronnie

Ronnie is a peripheral but sharply consequential presence in the 1985 diary, known through his relationships rather than through any account of his own. His return to Gigi after breaking up with Tama Janowitz gives a brief street-side reunion an uneasy edge: the narrator sees Gigi’s little dog and recalls that Ronnie drowned cats when he and Gigi were breaking up.

A reunion on Leroy Street

At a softball game on Leroy Street, Glenn O’Brien’s team played Futura’s graffiti team, with Matt Dillon among the players and Ronnie on Glenn’s side. A woman walking by with a little dog stopped to say hello; it was Gigi. She said she and Ronnie had been back together for two weeks. The reunion was ordinary in its setting, but the narrator’s immediate association between Gigi’s dog and the drowned cats made Ronnie’s past conduct part of the scene. The diary offers no explanation from Ronnie, leaving that recollection to shape how his renewed relationship is seen.

The breakup with Tama

The next day, Tama came to the office to see Paige, upset because Ronnie had returned to Gigi. The narrator kept bringing Ronnie up unintentionally. Tama initially seemed to be holding up, but later broke down and said she was still in love with him and did not know what to do. The account establishes the breakup’s emotional aftermath through Tama’s distress, not through Ronnie’s perspective.

The narrator tried to console Tama by praising her talent and appearance and questioning why Ronnie would leave her for Gigi, whom the narrator considered awful. The advice was practical as well as sympathetic: Tama should get over the romance and use it as material for her writing. Ronnie’s part in the episode is thus defined by a choice that leaves Tama grieving, while the diary turns that pain toward the possibility of creative work.

Relationships and narrative presence

The two entries frame Ronnie through contrasting traces of intimacy: Gigi’s announcement that they had reunited, and Tama’s continuing love after he left her. The remembered drowning of the cats complicates the apparent happiness of the reunion, making the dog in the street an unsettling prompt rather than incidental scenery. Ronnie remains offstage as a speaker; the reader encounters him through what the women say and through the narrator’s recollections and judgments. That limited perspective makes his relationships—and the harm associated with their breakups—the substance of his presence in these passages.