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. 

Journal / December 7th, 8th, 9th

Baton Rouge General Hospital

Tuesday December 7, 1993

  Feel like it was Pearl Harbor yesterday. Awake feeling drugged and tired beyond belief. 8:15 AM. I call Dee, asking if she is going to see Jen at the 9 AM visiting time. She is disoriented and makes no sense. Showering and dressing quickly, I get there just in time. There is a note from one of the nurses on the Critical Care floor, Maddie.

  I checked on Jennifer during the night. I hope you both got some rest! I don't know when I'll be back again but I will come to check on Jennifer. I'm praying for all of you.

  Bless that woman. Good-hearted, really cares for her patients, takes losing one personally.

  Anxiety gnaws at me. Visitors are herded into the corridor leading to MICU. Wanting to sprint down the hallway to quickly end the wait, to find out any news, good, bad, Jen's nurse greets me with a slight smile and nod, telling me Jen's temperature is normal.

Baton Rouge General Hospital

Wednesday December 8, 1993

  Dr, Stewart breezes into MICU and leaves without any real acknowledgment. Laurie visits her sister and as soon as she touches Jen's hand and starts talking, Jen's heart rate drops into the 90's. Blood pressure still high. No fever. Hopefully her brain is regulating itself, sending out the best system signals it can at this point. Jen looks better. Color good. But the Respiration Therapist treating her gets concrete-like junk our of her right lung.

  Dr. Moreland checks on Jen during his rounds and I thank him for the other night. He replies that he doesn't deserve an award for his work, what with the trouble with the trach tube. He tells me he lost a daughter about Jen's age, shaking his head, remembering that long ago loss.

Baton Rouge General Hospital

Thursday December 9, 1993

  Jen continues to improve in color. More stable vital signs. See Dr. Moreland, miss Dr. Meador. Dee and I sit in the waiting room down the hall from MICU, waiting, waiting, waiting for Jen to be transferred to room 325. Sitting there, sharing stories with others, concerned parents and friends of other patients, this woman from Hammond starts telling us all about her husband's heart blockages. She's one of those people, poking her listeners with her finger for emphasis, keeping them awake maybe. She has the diagram the doctor gave her showing what her husband's problems are, a marked X where a 99% blockage is in one of his arteries. We tell her why we're waiting, what's wrong with Jen. She says, "My nephew got bit by a mosquito and just died . . . just kept having seizures that kept destroying his brain until he died." She rattles on about her nephew's death and funeral until Dee and I glance at each other, communicating the same thought, that we should tell the woman, With that much blockage where that little X is on the diagram means your husband will croak . . . no chance . . . But nice meeting you and hearing about your nephew's death and funeral.

  Bizarre.

  On the way home after the visit, the rusty old Lincoln breaks down for the second time in a week. Typical. When you least need something like that.

  Home to rest and change clothes before going back for the next allowed visit, I get a bill in the mail for Jen's one week stay in BHU. 

  $13,000.

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.

Kadair's

  Below the hospital window, a short block away on the west side of Bernardo Street, on the corner of Park Hills Drive and Florida Boulevard sits the old Kadair's Camera & Records building where many of the photographs in the suitcase were developed. Forty years ago, it is the place to flip through albums of Broadway shows, Slaughter on 10th Avenue with a man posed, knees bent, one arm above his head, the other out to a dark-haired woman doing a dance split on the floor, her short black skirt bunched up around her legs. Stand and peer into glass cases at 35mm cameras with lenses pointing back at you, 8mm movie cameras with windup cranks on the side, the mysterious early Polaroid Land Camera ready to pop up and spit out instant images.

  Kadair's is part of a string of businesses along Florida Boulevard, a few blocks from the sign at South Acadian and Florida that reads:

You Are Now

Entering

Florida Boulevard's

Vibrant & Dynamic

Business District!

  Big deal. Ten blocks of squatty buildings stretching to North Foster. Beyond that there are few businesses until later, in the late 1950's, early 60's. Sears Roebuck moves from downtown to further out Florida, then the Bon Marche Shopping Center is built, considered classy but is nothing more than a large strip shopping center. Much later, further out Florida, another shopping center is constructed, this time an honest-to-goodness mall. Kadair's opens a branch store there, at Cortana Mall, and it is there in the 1970's, when the girls are young, the marriage between Dee and myself still fresh, that I go to work selling cameras for the Kadair family, for Howard Kadair, the kid working behind the counter at the original store while I pursue albums and drool over the glass camera cases.

  Looking back, our work ethic reflects the times, when so much of the 1960's still bleeds over into a laissez-faire attitude of the early 70's, a let's-party-because-the-bomb's-still-out-there syndrome. All of us at Kadair's in Cortana are young, some married, most finishing up at LSU, and we don't take shit off of anybody--especially customers who want a 35mm camera but don't know from Instamatic crap. If they are rude, we are also. If nice, hey, we wait on them. When the weather is bad--tornados buzzing about, hurricanes on the coast--the mall is home to real trailer types (as Sarah Reed calls them), folks who know the value of getting out of their tin foil homes, strolling around with fried chicken legs while the storm rages overhead. We have a Cretin-of-the-Week contest and judge the results from Polaroid pictures. Anytime one of us gets a candidate--say, a fat lady with underarm stains and torn stockings or someone with shit on his boots, feathers in his cowboy hat, and rotten teeth, or a kid with a rolled-up t-shirt and lurid tattoos or even a Japanese buying a camera from us--one of the other salesmen without a customer gets out a Polaroid and saunters over on the pretense of testing the camera. Snap. Zip. Watch it develop.

  There are boxes of Polaroids taken of each other posing and goofing off in the storeroom or drinking wine or beer we keep stashed in the refrigerator next to the VPS film. We drive customers crazy by turning the sound up and down on the bank of remote control televisions while they are watching them. The frustrated customers turn and look around, see us engaged in quiet banter, totally unaware of them. The customers turn back to the televisions, the sound magically restored just as their fingers almost touch the volume control. And of course we look at every roll of processed film that comes back from the lab.

  We have regular customers who call themselves professional photographers who shoot housewives in messy bedrooms, posing on the bed in lingerie, their fleshy legs dimpled with fat; giggling teenagers who give themselves away when they drop the film off and whose pictures show Bobby or Jimmy or Eddie driving a convertable with his dick sticking up like a floor-shift; and even one nun who takes pictures of herself in the mirror with her black dress hiked up to reveal a shaved vagina being saved for Jesus. Kadair's lab doesn't discriminate, as Sarah is fond of saying. A shaved vagina is the same as a shot of Ralph and Lulu on vacation at the Grand Canyon.

  When I quit Kadair's, I take some of the best Polaroid shots of the crew there, some of Sarah--standing at the register, ringing out the receipts at closing, one barefoot resting on top of the other, working, smiling, laughter forever caught in her eyes.

  

Marriage / The Early Years

  Dee is always letting herself get talked into crazy-ass things that somehow involve me.

  I still shiver.

  What are their names?

  Juan and Libby. No. Mario and Libby.

  Damn Dee.

  I walk in the house on Parker Street one Friday afternoon, six-pack of beer in one hand, newspaper in the other, see this cake on the dining table.

  "Happy anniversary," I tell her.

  "You're two weeks early. This is for Libby."

  "Libby who?'

  "Libby . . . unh . . . you know, that strange girl I use to work with. I told you all about it."

  "About what?--Libby?"

  "Libby's getting married here."

  "Here? When?"

  "Tonight."

  "Who the hell is Libby? And why is she getting married here tonight?"

  "You've forgotten. I told you last week."

  "Oh, come on, Dee. I never heard of Libby."

  "I use to work with her. She was here last week, remember? She and Mario needed a place to get married. Her mother drove over from Atlanta."

  "Why us?--here, I mean?"

  "All their friends think they're married."

  "Let me get this straight. There's a wedding . . . here . . . tonight . . . a secret wedding . . . between Mario and Libby, for the benefit of some mother driving over from Atlanta. Why not me as best man?"

  "I knew you'd remember."

  "Wait. Wait a minute. You mean to tell me you've booked a wedding into here with me as best man?"

  "I told you last week. And I mentioned it last night."

  "You did not! If you did, I thought you were going to some wedding. I didn't realize we were taking such an active part in some stranger's happy day."

  "You don't listen to me. That's your problem, Raymond. You don't listen to me. Anyway. Libby came over one afternoon. Told me about her and . . . unh . . . Juan having to get married and all."

  "I thought his name was Mario. I'm listening, I'm listening, you don't have to test me."

  "Mario . . . yeah. Libby said wouldn't it be nice to have it here. What could I say?"

  "Oh, Lord."

  "That's what I said."

  FAST FORWARD TO:

  INTERIOR. THE LIVING ROOM. EVENING.

  I have added a tie to shirt, jeans, and ragged tennis shoes. Dee, Mario, and Libby are facing me.

  "Mario, this is Raymond, my husband,"

  "Hello," Mario says with a heavy Spanish accent.

  I shake his hand and smile. "A great honor. I was so excited when Dee told me I was going to be best man to a stranger. You want a beer?"

  FAST FORWARD TO:

  Mario, the Minister, and me. Dee and Libby are talking in the background.

  "From Mississippi, hunh?" I say to the Minister. "And your first in-home ceremony."

  "Yep, yep. Miss'sip'pi. First time in a house."

  I smile. "Let's all have another beer, hunh?"

  FAST FORWARD TO:

  Libby's mother from Atlanta and me.

  "How long have you known . . . unh . . . my future son-in-law?"

  "Juan?"

  "Unh . . . Mario."

  "Oh. Twenty minutes. You want a beer?"

  FAST FORWARD TO:

  The ceremony.

  "Mare-ree-ooh, please say after me-eee . . . Do yuh, Mare-ree-ooh, take this woman to be . . . unh . . . Oh . . . I made a mistake, don't say after me-eee . . ."

  Mario's eyelids drop suspiciously.

  FAST FORWARD TO:

  The Minister praying. All heads lowered.

  ". . . and watch over this here fine young couple as they start on their journey through life and all its . . ."

  The telephone rings. Dee hurries to answer it, smiling at me with a shrug as she passes.

  Me. Close Up. Eyes like Bela Lugosi, staring at her throat, loving her madly, wanting to strangle her.

Journal Excerpt / December 6th (last)

 Baton Rouge General Hospital

Monday December 6, 1993

Part Four 

  Dee continues crying, repeating her litany. I can't take this anymore I can't take this anymore I can't take this anymore.

  Suzie emerges from the room to get something from the Nurse's Station, glances at us, at Dee on the floor still sobbing.

  She's okay.

  Suzie helps get Dee to the Nurse's Lounge. Moreland comes in and tells us Jen's trach tube was too long for her, that it was resting against the side of her trachea which caused it to dislodge, and that it was lucky that Suzie was so close, that she did a fine job. He says he will recommend Intensive Care if I insist.

  Things bump along slowly, entirely too long before something is done, Waiting, waiting, for someone from Intensive Care to come get Jen.

  Why the delay?

  Jen's heart rate is 160 and climbing.

  Bitch, curse, scream.

  Two of the nurses decide to take her downstairs.

  The lightbulb goes off again: take total charge, demand things be done more quickly.

  And it works

  We are not allowed into MICU (Monitored Intensive Care Unit). Hard to leave, but a relief knowing it is one nurse, one patient. And, really, it is the best thing for us, too. Limitations reached long ago. Being sent home is a godsend. Becky Horne, a friend, is with us now.

  When did she come?

  The three of us walk down the hall away from MICU, toward the back elevators. Approaching an open doorway, a stack of metal trays falls into the hallway like a felled tree, telescoping into another room. Dr. Rogers, one of the neurologists treating Jennifer, walks up and waits with us at the elevator doors.

  Nods.

  "You have children?' I ask him.

  "No."

  Silence.

  "Are you going to have children?' Dee finally asks him.

  Rogers smiles, shrugs, shakes his head.

  Silence.

  "Were you ever a child yourself?" Becky asks.

  Smiles, all, battle-weary.

  The door to the elevator opens. Two tall black men in trenchcoats are standing on each side of a gurney with a covered body on it. There is no movement from anyone. The elevator doors slowly close on the tableau.

  Guilty about being home, showered, crawling into bed, sinking into sleep rapidly. It is 12:40 AM. One last call for a report. Linda, Jen's MICU nurse for the night, say Jen's fever has spiked to 103, that she has called Moreland and Meadors, has a cooling blanket coming.

  I slide into sleep helplessly.