Homeplace



   Today a lifelong friend visiting either for two weeks or two years posted on his blog (http://wwwscriblets-bleets.blogspot.com/2012/03/old-roots.html) about the “feeling of being lost at home” when one returns to long absent youthful haunts. As I commented on the post, not that I ever take my homeplace for granted, but there is always a sense of personal renewal and appreciation when shown and described with other eyes.

  

   Have a look at my friend’s fine writing and get a peek at the patio where friends are entertained and afternoons are spent with a cold beer and the sounds of birds and the splash of the waterfall making music to accompany thoughts both large and small.

Enough About Me -- What Do You Think Of Me?



Three letter excerpts

One

Before going to bed last night checked hotmail and had two rejections—one from a theatre in Texas for a reading of Pallbearer’s Social and from some theatre for the short patio play. Not the way I like to be sent off to bed. Can tell yourself all the right things but can be discouraging for a Constant Submitter. So I will plow ahead although sometimes I feel like those brothers in traces in The Wake of Forgiveness, pulling their father’s plow until their necks are permanently cantered.

Two

Spent all day yesterday sending out scripts—one even to a theatre (obviously without a home) called Occupy the Empty Space. Hmm. At this point I don’t care if a play of mine is performed on a subway platform during rush hour. Was looking over the spreadsheet and saw I sent 17 submissions out in October then the numbers dropped to 5 and 7 for the next two months. Determined to get those submission numbers back up. And have decided to push Memorial Video quite a bit more since its revision. And am also fishing around for what I want (or am driven) to write about from my past for the memoir. And it may be a matter of touching bases and expanding upon topics previously written about: ancestors, parents, wife and daughters, friends, etc. Hopefully something will strike sparks.

Three

Will be doing some reading this weekend on the memoir. Want to back up some and read for momentum, to see what should come next. Have 6 “memoir” chapters done and 18 short chapters done of the journal. Want to see how these fit going forward. Do remember feeling when I was transcribing (and making literary) the journal about Jen coming out of the coma and having brief lucid moments (usually around 2 or 3 AM) that those chapters needed to be in a string, that they read with gathering force about what was happening. So I don’t want to just throw some “memoir” chapters in to stem that flow. So getting a head start reading up to the few chapters in Part Three will serve me well. I will finish the memoir this year.

Violent Chess



Keeping a journal during all those dark days gave me an outlet, a foundation, something to grab and weather the everyday changes that shaped everything. It was a time of life folding back in on itself, the view from the hospital window of the old neighborhood, the history there, where even Jennifer lived as a child, and the history of the hospital itself, where I was born, where family members had died. Life repeating familiar patterns and doing the best to make memory make some sense of it all—and both memory and events co-existing in the now, both alive and in a dance as one.

   Down there, below the hospital window, two streets over from Bernardo, Bill Leet lives on Wabash, near Coco Lumber Company, where among the lumber bins thousands of secret passages exist for nighttime forays: seeing how close we can sneak up to the nightwatchman, Charlie, before he discovers us; retrieving the softest wood from the scrap pile and whittling rifles and Tommy Guns for games of War, swords for stabbing the yielding trunks of banana trees, crumpling the large leaves with a single stroke; if they are out of favor with us, spying from woodpiles on Jimmy Thompson and his brother Dan (who failed an early grade and is only a year ahead of us). It is behind Bill’s house, on Park Hills, where the field lined with four oaks serves as our most serious playground. Nighttime Molatoff Cocktails (blame Jimmy for those) exploding among abandoned Christmas trees, all in the name of Battleground and Battle Cry and Battle of the Coral Sea, tend to bring adults and cops so we mostly keep to football, bloodying each other if we hit hard enough, always the dirt on jeans and shirts Glory Mud. Skills honed there serve us well when we play football for Bernard Terrace Elementary in the 5^th and 6^th grades.

   Dan Thompson talks the coach into letting me on the team after I am sick and miss tryouts. No more practice uniforms are available so I borrow pants, jersey, and helmet from friends. No shoes, most playing barefooted. I am fast if nothing else and shortly become the starting Wingback in the Single Wing formation that the Bernard Terrace Panthers utilize. We win more games than we lose, beating neighborhood friends who play for the Dufrocq Ducks. I am hell on the reverse. Ball centered to Dan at fullback instead of the quarterback, a few steps forward like he is plowing into the line, turning and handing off to me, flying around the left end, the joy of yardage gained like an elixir. It is my first taste of attention from schoolmates I don’t know. (Later it is the laughs I get at rehearsal as a smartass Wise Man in the Christmas Pageant who slyly puts his crooked staff between his legs and aims it at Mary Toups, the perfect Virgin Mary every boy in school is in love with.)

   The following year, using the T-formation, joined by classmates on the first string, the Panthers go undefeated. Bill Leet is the starting fullback and punter, coming up to me during one pregame warmup for a strategy session, asking if he should practice his punts, giving away his punting distance to the other team. I play right end and the end reverse still works. In a Jamboree game at Memorial Stadium we run the reverse five times and then Bill fakes the handoff and half of the other unblocked team comes charging through the line to smear me for a loss; just before they do I show empty hands and we all turn and watch as Bill weaves his way downfield. I run for a long touchdown but it is called back and the shortened game ends scoreless. The rest of the games we win, many of the players going on to play junior high and high school ball. Although we go out for practice in the 7^th grade a few times, Bill and I discover DRAMA, realizing football practice takes place at the same time as rehearsal, girls without pom-poms more plentiful around the stage, recognition coming without battering heads and bruising bodies.

Wonderful Town / Part Three

  There is a last drive back to New York, maybe just two of us this time, Lynn and myself, another half-hearted attempt by me at staying forever, catching a ride with David Cohen, getting stopped again in some small town because David has a CB radio with a whip antenna that is on the same frequency as the local police. Again being let go after questioning David about why he answered some official police communication. That’s the trip after Bill and I have the small apartment, him off to summer stock, me to home and college again, then me back again and him home from a season of stock, the three of us crashing with Martha Devine and Ellen Britt, staying with them for weeks, months, in their two-bedroom apartment on East 77th. Both Martha and Ellen have jobs and knowing we are imposing after a week we clean the apartment completely—sweeping floors and mopping, lining up magazines on the coffee table precisely, flushing toilet and bathtub stains into the East River. When they come in from work and come down the hall, stopping in the living room doorway, after an intake of breath and a quick survey, we are told we can stay as long as we want.

  And I will never forget the green-flecked apothecary bowl filled with Dexedrine and Dexamyl, the nightly parties, staying up for days at a time, people coming and going during the day, night, an endless stream of friends and tenants in the same building, me hooking up with some girl from Brooklyn and being on the roof with her, clothes scattered and the wind moving them over the gravel and tar like whitecaps on a dark sea, her holding a sheet over us, it whipping in the wind also, laughing hysterically while trying to consummate the fun. Speeding days on end and the body giving out, screaming for sleep, lying awake and alert and hurting for hours

  No idea how long it is before the welcome wears thin, before Martha posts a duty roster, rules and regulations about who does what when, the long list igniting deep anger and speeding like wildfire along drug-singed nerves. The image of holding the roster in my hands is there, of sitting down and posting some wild burning-the-bridge takeoff on it, probably saying something to the effect that being called down the hall to service Martha in her room should be rotated like all the other duties. Posting it, packing my bag, having called my mother for bus fare home and being told by her I better use it for that, then a cab ride to the Greyhound Bus Terminal and the long ride home, days later talking to Lynn, who is laughing so hard about Martha’s reaction that I can barely understand him. 

Wonderful Town / Part Two

  After a semester or two of theatre in college, also armed with theatre experience from Teen Town and BRLT, some work as extras in Alvarez Kelly, a film starring William Holden and Richard Whitmark (with a Saturday serial hero of mine named Don “Red” Berry), thinking there wasn’t much to this minute-at-a-time acting on horses, Bill Leet and I take a long train ride to New York City, sitting up so long in bottom-sprung seats that even the allure of moving north loses some of its glamour.

 We stay on Staten Island in a rambling four-story house with an old friend from Teen Town, Dee Wood, whose father was transferred by Standard Oil to New Jersey. More than accommodating, treating us like family, Dee’s parents, Ruth and Jim Wood, good people, allow Bill and I to come and go at all hours. A half-hour on the small commuter train from Fish Kill to the Staten Island Ferry, a half-hour trip over water, then usually another half-hour on the subway, it takes a while to get use to planning ahead by two hours for job searches and apartment hunting.

 I get an interview for a clerical position at Simon & Schuster, at the division of Pocket Books, and somehow the promising interview is cut short when in answer to a question about my long-term work plans I tell them I want to be a writer. Blank looks—like they’ve never heard of the profession. At the New York State Department of Labor, standing in a long, long line of recent high school graduates, some employment guy comes down the line asking if anyone knows how to type and I am the only one to raise a hand and follow to a room for a typing test.

 If you would please ship 47 loads of A-1 cotton material @ $62.37 per load which would equal a total of $2931.39 (which will count against the balance you owe us of $10,287.39) . . .

  And on and on, calling for all those little-used top row keys which makes my typing test sound like someone has scattered corn over the keyboard for a hungry hunting-and-pecking goose.

 The apartment we finally rent is on West 87^th, between Amsterdam and Columbus, a one-room walkup on the 4^th floor with a bath and a kitchen we never once cook in. Only a matter of weeks and Bill’s contacts for summer stock come through and Lonnie Chapman is standing in the apartment, saying he is double-parked, so there are quick goodbyes and good luck wishes and suddenly the apartment is quiet, mine, suddenly empty, the unexpected aloneness not bargained for so soon.

 For weeks I stay in the apartment, lacking the drive and even the knowledge on how to become an actor, shielding myself from busy streets, from jostling strangers without apology for sharp elbows and packages swinging like pendulums, from the uncertainty of destination, no direction known other than home. When I do make contact with a few friends from Louisiana, we spend an inordinate amount of time in the Village, hanging around Washington Square and listening to musicians with guitars and open cases collecting a few tossed coins. Once we go to some friend of a friend’s apartment rented by two girls and one keeps disappearing and reappearing in different clothes and doing her best to pretend like she is not modeling them, each outfit more revealing than the last, three of us guys sitting silently on the couch like underage teens at a strip club. Finally, a surprise when I open my mouth.

 You enjoy doing this?

 What?

 Modeling for us, showing off.

 What are you talking about?

 You’ve changed clothes six times and then it’s like you’re on a runway.

 It’s my fucking apartment. I can do any damn thing I want.

 People on the sidewalk are still jostling each other, still walking with purpose stamped on their faces.

 Fuck. You had to say something, hunh?

 Let’s go to my place. I’ve got beer.

 My landlady is a woman named Mrs. Mulhman who monitors all the comings and goings of her tenants on the four floors above her. More warden than anything else, she carries keys to all the apartments and uses them for unannounced entry when she hears more than the usual number of shoes echoing in the stairwell. The first raid happens right after the fashion show in the apartment in the Village. Sitting with the two friends from Louisiana, talking about the two girls, if the blonde is prettier, the motive of the brunette dressing and undressing, and Mulhman barges in, the maintenance man trailing behind her like a bodyguard. Surveying the room, she doesn’t see any heroin use going on, but spotting a bent screwdriver on the mantle and going to it, she picks it up, showing it to the maintenance man and asking for verification if it is his missing screwdriver. He nods.

 We found it blocks away on a street.

 I don’t like a lot of strange people in my apartments.

 I thought it was my apartment since I’m paying rent.

 No, it is always my apartment.

 Back and forth for a while then Mrs. Mulhman and the maintenance man leave, taking the bent screwdriver with them.

 I guess she’s going to fingerprint it, one of my friends says.

Wonderful Town / Part One

  After graduating from high school, Bill Leet, Lynn Kipp, and I drive straight from Baton Rouge to New York City, some 30 or more hours, stopping only for gas and quickly grabbing snacks and taking bathroom breaks. And that one time, late at night, being stopped for speeding and being asked for the registration papers we don’t have for the borrowed ’57 yellow Plymouth with the transmission push-buttons on the dashboard. A late night call to Joe, Lynn’s friend who owns the car, and the cop sends us on our way with a warning. Arriving so early in the morning, trying to sleep in the car in the parking lot of some business on Staten Island, we still call too early and wake up Dee Wood’s family. Crashing a few days with Dee before renting a two-bedroom flop-suite at the Rex Hotel right off Times Square, it is easy remembering that first night in Manhattan, giddy from lack of sleep, seeing our first Broadway show, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, being amazed at the laughter during this deadly serious play. Two shows a day for two weeks. There’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum with Zero Mostel who is a big man and floats around the stage; Tovarich without Vivien Leigh, ill or drunk that night, and her understudy getting a standing ovation from a group of her friends close to the stage; Best Foot Forward without Liza Minnelli who at a young age is following in the tradition of Vivien; Enter Laughing, on its last legs with a young and funny Alan Arkin, Bill securing us tickets in the balcony for 95 cents each; Oliver! with sets that moved and catwalks that meet just in time as the characters run from pursuers high above; How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, an impish Robert Morse who gets into his VW in front of the theatre after the show, him thinking we are muggers when we are approaching and knocking on his window and telling him how good he was; Anthony Newley doing his Chaplin routine in Stop the World—I Want to Get Off and me liking it a lot; Bill and Lynn seeing Paul Ford in Never Too Late, me maybe hanging around the city with Dee Wood, no doubt talking about the on-again/off-again romance with the other Dee. 

I See By Your Outfit / Part One

Bookseller, actor, theatre owner and producer, author.

Casting director for film, theatre director.

New York actor, writer, teacher in Japan for 28 years.

Software developer

College theatre professors in California and Nebraska.

Senior Lecturer and Coordinator of Creative Writing in Stockholm.

Freelance journalists.

Author and editor of The Advocate in Los Angeles.

Madame Librarian.

Editor and author.

Art historian.

What we become, the artistic, fortunate youths, with an outlet for theatrical adventures in Baton Rouge, all attracted like moths to mates, to peak experiences, a cross section of youth everywhere, the adopted, the verbally and sexually abused, ones unsure of sexual leanings and some who consider themselves aberrations because of it, the over-sheltered girls whose parents consider theatre a playground of the Devil and his Corrupters of morals, the merely directionless with closed avenues everywhere they look, the sad, the shy, the well-adjusted, all banded together as conspirators in the creation of Art, fulfilled and thrilled by their accomplishments, by their sense of belonging.

A hot gym, echoey, an entire wall of windows facing 10^th Street, bottom windows opening outward and doing nothing more than serving as an airfoil for the hot breeze flowing along the building, basketball goals on each end, a proscenium stage on one end with barely enough wing space for set pieces and actors waiting for cues. But it is the hardwood firmament from which dreams are launched.

Teen Town Theatre.

A musical every summer. Those without automobiles catch rides on humid summer mornings for a day of building sets and gathering props and sewing costumes and memorizing lines before rehearsal in the afternoon. It is an everyday thing, something to look forward to while other friends the same age hang around swimming pools or cruise neighborhood streets without destination. Two or three plays during the year, catching rides after the last school bell and heading downtown for the same routine and rehearsal in the evening.

In time, shows adding up, crushes unspoken, painful first real romances, facing audiences with learned lines and surviving, thriving, knowing so much is out there to blunt the fear and slowness of growing up, word gets around and some are lying, sneaking to work on shows at TTT, parents somehow finding out about nightly trips to Sammy’s Lounge to hear Nelrose English pounding the keys while older singers around the piano bar are howling out dirty lyrics, congenial booze hounds with upturned faces, teenagers edging closer to the bar, prized bar stools coming open, raising drinks and voices, wise to the world of show tunes and bawdy ballads.

Some nights after rehearsal, long before the interstate, long trips down Highway 90, through small towns with speed zones and neon-lighted bars in gravel parking lots, heading toward New Orleans and the dark mystery of jazz, Alan Jokinen carrying his guitar, looking every bit like Conrad he plays in Bye Bye Birdie, leading us to smoky French Quarter apartments where there are other musicians and girls dressed in black like characters out of experimental plays, apartment doors thrown open to enclosed patios crowded with plants, girls named Sissy and Decky with dark eye shadow and pretty faces who take notice, unexpected twists, night-long romances.

The Final Frontier

  In the early days of the space program, Bill Leet and I are always experimenting on lizards in the name of furthering scientific research. And once Bill’s father asks why we are torturing those animals. And we have Orville and Wilbur disbelieving looks on our faces, confused by the question of why the thrill of experiencing flight may not translate to some green lizards. After all, isn’t there a Russian dog orbiting above our heads, sending yip yips back to earth so one day Death Rays can be launched from orbit?

  Having graduated from games of Indians slaughtering Pale Face Settlers, our bows and arrows are now launchers and missles. Borrowed hankerchiefs become parachutes drooped over the point of the arrow, strings on the four corners knotted neatly on the shaft. So before the first lizard is launched into space, Bill’s bicycle is turned over on seat and handlebars, the back wheel now the Johnsville Centrifuge that will generate up to 40 g/s. Strap the first lizard down and start the back-wheel centrifuge slowly, building up to a speed where the spinning pedal is difficult to hold. Apply brakes quickly to test rapid deceleration. Look and find the first scientific principle: when placing the astronaut lizard on the centrifuge, always make sure the head of the astronaut lizard is also secured.