THE PAINTED WORD I - Ode

   Sometimes it is bitter cold walking  up Eighth Avenue on Thursdays in a hat that comes down over my ears. Sometimes it is autumn and I am wearing an orange Australian hat at what I feel to be an angle as rakish as my mood. Sometimes it is spring. Whenever, I stop in the narrow vestibule at 939, rarely have to press the buzzer for Shetland Studios because singers and dancers and actors are coming and going at such a rate that the door rarely clicks into its locked position. And then I am in a cramped little elevator with singers and musicians and dancers and actors. We all burst forth on the fourth floor ­ like 20 clowns coming out a tiny circus car.  And others are there, milling about the hallways outside the studio rooms, some sitting on the floor working on lines or lyrics as they ready themselves for auditions that are always about to begin. 
  
And I shall see Amy and we shall have a room with a piano for my voice lesson -­ a new passion after so many years of never singing. I am enveloped in déja vu that is sweet nostalgia, for this is so much like the Art Students League, where 20 years ago I was drawing and painting and sculpting from earlier in the morning than I had ever in my life started anything on regular basis, early morning till late at night­ drawing and painting and working in clay after many, many years of never doing any, many years not even remembering that I had even drawn in childhood - as unlikely  that I would ever plunge into visual art as that I would ever sing.

 Without art my writing and my life would have been sadly dry forever. And now singing too is need if I am to save my writing from irrelevance.

  After the singing lesson last week we walked up to a Kinko¹s on 59th Street to copy the latest versions of our Song and Story scripts. And then I started to walk east to get the subway down to the Starbuck¹s at Park and 29th where I would read and/or write until time for our writing workshop nearby at TRS.

But I was turning around ­ involuntarily, it seemed ­ going back down Eighth to 57th Street and then the half block over to he League¹s old French Renaissance Building. I¹d read and write in the League's old cafeteria, which is tucked away on the third floor near the main print-making room. 

When I came into the League building  I saw the precise counterparts of who had been there in 1987 -­ some of them deeply dedicated artists, others who dabbled and hung around. I passed the closet-like art supply store and the area for milling about before the daily open drawing session, where a model goes on at precisely 5 every day of the week ­ as her counterparts have done ­ precisely at 5 ­ for a hundred years.

Inside the cafeteria, the exact counterpart of the pretty girl artists who worked there in 1987 gave me a wilted egg salad sandwich which could have been one I ate before the  5 o¹clock session 20 years ago.

   Five o¹clock! I look at my watch. It is 5 to 5. I rush down to the office and buy what is still a $6 ticket. I run into the small art supply store - get a pad -  a 6B pencil - add a 3B, a 3H and an HB - and a conté crayon - and a medium charcoal pencil, and a soft charcoal pencil.

   And I am there in a center seat, which is miraculously still free, precisely at 5 to see the model of this day in this year lift her arms  high and go up on her toes in a one-minute pose that is an ode to spring.

ON TOP OF OLD SMOKEY

   So much of the music that  blew through the dormitories - with the smell of dirty socks - or was always blaring out of the juke box in town at Edgar's Diner -­ with the smell of burgers and fried onions - so much of the music in the air then -  so dumb and stupid and the singers so lacking in life -­ Julius Larosa, Teresa Brewer, Frankie Laine -­ so discouraging, this music, because it did not connect in any way to anything I wanted or anything that seemed real.

  So much of it this way. Then suddenly everywhere from all the radios and juke boxes there was something else. Burl Ives. Sad and strong and real.


    On top of Old Smokey
    All covered with snow
    I lost my true lover
    From courting too slow.


 `  It was instantly my music. It reminded me of how sweetly sad and hopeless life could be,­ which made me think at the same time of possible happiness and hope - of life that might succeed or might fail but would be warm and important -­ a life of love and longing -­ a life where the stakes would be very high.


    For courting's a pleasure
    And parting is brief
    And a false-hearted lover
    Is worse than a thief.


   Kitty was singing the Burl Ives songs now - "Foggy, Foggy Dew," not "Napoleon's Retreat" -­ "Wayfaring Stranger" and "I Know Where I'm Going," not "Blueberry Hill" or "Shrimp Boats Are A-comin'".

   She is singing in the back baggage area of our plain maroon Chevrolet sort of
station wagon -­ not quite a station wagon since there is no wood on it.  Kitty and I and my twin brother don't drive yet ourselves so Mother and Dad are driving Peter and me back from New Hampshire from the end-of-the-school-year-weekend where the seniors - what we call­ Sixth Formers -­ graduate and even the rest of us can bring dates to dance in the gym and rent boats on Squam Lake. Kitty's skirt is pulled up high and her fine, rounded bare legs are stretched out and up from where she sits in the baggage area, her heals resting on a narrow metal ledge beneath the permanently closed rear window.

   Her skirt had gotten wet when she and I strolled off and found a brook while
Mother and Dad were having pre-lunch drinks in a parking lot near the Vermont border ­- "It is a crime what they charge for simple high balls in these roadside places." They always chose to have cheap blended whiskey and tepid water in the car. We could smell it as we got close from our stroll -­ holding hands, stopping to kiss -­ back from a place so foreign from this family scene.

  And now we were moving again -­ Mother and Dad in the front arguing about the route - in the next seat my seemingly helpless southern grandmother and the good twin Peter. Peter  would glance back and try but fail to smile. I thought maybe it had been bad enough for him when I was so inept and unhappy that I was an embarrassment -­ and worse now that I was so far outside the family even here in this family car.

   And Kitty sang in this place where music seemed so unlikely -­ as the car rose
and fell with the hills we were traversing -­ singing Bur Ives ­:


    And the grave will decay you
    And turn you to dust...


   And I chimed in being funny, pretending to sing harmony that I could not sing: "Turn you to dust."

   "Not  one girl in fifty," Kitty sang, "That a poor boy can trust."

   "Can trust."

   And we kept on -  "Snow," "too slow," "decay you," "To dust."


    They'll hug you and kiss you
    And tell you more lies
    Than cross ties on the railroad
    Or stars in the sky.


   This moment with Kitty all the more sweet knowing betrayal could never, ever, be far away.

   Kitty and I kept singing and laughing ­ down Vermont, across Massachusetts, into Connecticut all the way to the Sound, and no one else laughed. And for years
Mother and Dad and Peter would do snide dinner table imitations of me singing "On Top of Old Smokey."


    So come you young maidens
    And listen to me
    Never place you affections
    On a green willow tree.
      
    The leaves they will wither,
    The roots they will die
    You'll all be forsaken
    And never know why.

GOLD MINE - II

   I was not a complete stranger to corrupt free-loading. I had known an Australian in Bangkok in the mid-sixties who had so many free tickets that when he was broke he would fly to Singapore and back or Manila and back or Saigon and back to get the airline meals. I had always looked down on these practices, even once when I was staying in the Peninsula in Hong Kong and smuggling in fried rice and fish & chips wrapped in newspaper because the deal did not include food. I had mentioned this to Seymour Ralston -­ that I had done it but not my deep contempt for it - and he said sternly that he had never in his life taken a free hotel room without also insisting on free food. Give me a call when you need help, he
said.

   I would never make such a call, I thought. I had been very young when I had stayed at he Peninsula and anyway it had  all been part of something I had been putting together which I eventually realized was for  a novel, so there was a bigger  purpose than a free room. A bigger  purpose, far from  the most corrupt sort travel writing, which was almost all travel writing that appeared in periodicals, which almost always entailed  taking these bribes on the at least implied promise you would write in praise of some probably less than admirable
place.

    A couple of weeks after I was in Hunting World helping Seymour check out elephant hide luggage, an aspiring playwright friend of mine who now edited a business publication called to say he had been offered a silly press junket -­ a dubious organization that was inaugurating a gold mine in the Dominican Republic. He said he knew I had to do a lot of traveling, so maybe this free flight and hotel would be useful.  I certainly wasn't going to say anything good about the airline or the hotel, and it would be useful  since there was an ambassador I wanted to see in Santo Domingo, so maybe I could break that rule of mine about no corrupt travel writing ever again, which was right up there with my rules about no entanglements ever again  that entailed married women or abortion. 

   I called Seymour in Miami and told him about the junket and asked for his advice.  It's a good start, he said. But while you're down there you should go to the other end o the island, these great indulgent new Gulf & Western resorts, they're the most expensive in the Caribbean.  Let me call Gulf & Western, then I'll call you back. 

   Casa de Campo, he said when he called back. That's the newest and most expensive. They'll send a car to pick you up in Santo Domingo. There's also the more famous one, Ramona, the converted sugar mill, Gulf & Western bought that one too, and you can eat there, but I think you'll be more comfortable in Casa de Campo.

   In my mid-twenties --  my God, almost 15 years ago! ­ I had had great contempt for the Dominican Republic, partly because is was run by Trujillo, the bloodiest of all the tin pot dictators American outfits like the CIA & Gulf & Western sponsored in the region, Contempt too, 15 years ago, because of my involvement in the far more intriguing rival end of the island of Hispaniola ­ Haiti, where I'd gone out of curiosity and then found myself involved with the vibrant local artists and arranging  shows back in New York ­ which for a time had seemed like the sort of life I wanted ­ Haiti, the most real and independent and actually exotic  of all possible places ­ mountains and sea and vibrant painters and the world's most graceful dancing and the most beguiling women -- which was about a far as you could get from travel publication free loading. I had been right in the thick of the complex place, hiding out from Papa Doc's tonton marcoutes, then emerging to dance the nights away in the beneath the stars in dance hall brothels where I had hid, then trekking by camion to huge deep and dark mountain voodoo gatherings where I had seen people possessed by, and turned into, the voodoo gods -- and in art circles I'd come in contact with Katherine Dunham, who was establishing a national dance troupe for Haiti, and then in New York I had had the most gorgeous of all possible girl friends, Anne Marie, one of the Haitians who came the shows of Haitian paintings that  I put on. 

   And now I wondered what I would have thought back then, art and Haiti and the gods of Africa and the Duvaliers and Katherine Dunham and Anne Marie - if I had come across the person I was in this present time in danger of becoming.

STORY AND SONG - an explanation

Every piece on this blog is about writing. Occasionally I address the reader directly from my experience with the Authentic Writing Workshops. Much more often I post stories from life in which writing is a key factor.

Recently I have been posting stories with song titles. These song stories do not use the words "writing" or "writer" but are nonetheless always about writing. They are tied to songs I know that instantly bring up memories. It is like time travel. Because of the songs, I find myself living intensely in scenes from the past that I then presume to bring to the page.

The page and the stage. These song pieces are all part of a theatrical performance work that is coming together. And this is another related connection that gets to the heart of writing. In the Authentic Writing movement, we have begun to collaborate with theater professionals. No one knows so clearly as to do writers and performers - whether singers, dancers, instrumentalists or actors - that for their most authentic work they must go deep inside themselves.

OL' MAN RIVER

   There were moments in the New Hampshire boarding school time ­- that time when they used to beat me ­- moments in that time when I had hope -­ hope maybe from the discovery of serious necking in the shadows of a rare  dance at our sister school, though they beat me.

   Hope maybe because I was New England's  champion debater and barely 15 years old, though they beat me.

   Hope from last summer, so long ago, up in the White Mountains. I was popular there and I was loved by a pretty girl with freckles under her tan - which was as strange to me as my deep unpopularity here, as strange as that I was the unpopular, hated, too-smart boy now, while last year I had been the unpopular, hated, too-dumb boy. It had reached such a point that they held me down, ran a sword blade across  my throat, bent my arms back till I thought they¹d snap. They made sure I was always in pain, always in fear.

   But some events were proving that I was not what they thought, 
And also there was a more mysterious hope:

    He don't plant taters, he don't plant cotton,
    And them that plants 'em is soon forgotten.              
          But Ol' Man River, he just keeps rollin' a-long.


   One cold night in what we called the schoolhouse -­ its core an actual old one-room schoolhouse with classrooms added round the big, dusty, central room, the assembly and study hall room where we each had our old ink-stained, rutted desks,
 
  In this chilly and dank flourescent-lit room - empty now -­ alone now -­ pushing a push broom - ­ twenty-five minutes to ten, which was very late in this school world where they got you up in the dark and made you turn lights out at ten - late in this hollow room, pushing a broom, hearing the voices from the crowded
day -­ the day voices of popular athletes whispering they would kill me -­ the day
voice of the very gray and disturbing master we called  Grim. The sound of my
own voice in debate,  

  The robust sounds of young males singing a hymn, which we did each morning before classes began. (I joined in very careful, because I could not sing.)


    Our shelter from the stormy blast
    And our eternal home.


   Pushing a broom now in this room where, a year earlier,  I had been forced to sit each night in compulsory evening study hall, nighttime study hall which was only for the retarded, sitting on a seat attached to the desk behind me, living
without assignment into the anthologies at hand even though I was stupid,
discovering in secret first Kipling and then Shakespeare and Wordsworth, and
Conrad and Keats, taking in their words while trying to look like I was doing
homework in Algebra, which was taught by the football coach, or World Geography, where the text book was in baby talk, or Latin, where even the master lived on the edge of violence.

  In this room at night alone now, sweeping up, which was my job here   ­ - each boy had a menial job ­and knowing while I was sweeping with one broom, then pushing with another, knowing we were out of earshot of brick dormitories
and brick masters' houses....

   Knowing this, each night I sang. I sang....


   Ol' man river,  that ol' man river
    He must know somethin', he don't say nothin'
    He just keeps rollin', he keeps on rollin' along.


   I sang mostly Ol' Man River. I had just been overwhelmed by the new movie version of Show Boat. Ava Gardner, so sad and tan -  dress straps dangling down smooth bare skin....

  And justice in that movie, like justice here, so skewed....

  Singing as loudly as I could, pushing the broom, projecting what I hoped  would one day be a real bass voice....

    Bend your knees and bow your head
    And pull that rope until you're dead.

   I loved that it was loud. I had tried out with innocent hope for our school's performance of Patience, and I had been given  the only non-singing role in all of Gilbert and Sullivan ­ and they thought I was nothing and they might be
right.... 
   Loving music but wondering if the music in my head would ever come into my life,  would ever be for me, wondering what surprising turns my life might take, wondering if I would ever sing, ever could sing, wondering and somehow getting peace from the loud somewhat, if not exactly, musical sounds of myself -

   While almost certain I would die without ever singing....  

  BUT:

    You and me, we sweat and strain,
          Body all achin' and rack with pain
          Tote that barge, lift that bail, 
          Get a little drunk and you land in jail.

    I get weary, and sick of tryin'
    I¹m tired of livin' and scared of dyin'
    But Ol' Man River, he just keeps rollin' ­ A-long.

GOLD MINE - I

   MY AGENT John Cushman, who rarely represented anything not distinguished, was saying I'd better meet Seymour Ralston. The last time my agent had wanted me to meet one of his clients he had gotten me together with a guy named Bernie who was doing a rip-off book called The Joy of Oral Sex, and Bernie, it turned out, was putting together a taped panel discussion he wanted me to join because as author of Bangkok After Dark, Taipei After Dark and Manila After Dark I would surely be a great addition. So there I was late one night in 1974 in a darkened office building sitting around a table that had three open bottles of Scotch, an activated tape recorder, glasses, ice, and some strange liqueurs. 

   I sat there drinking and pontificating with a lovely porn actress named Tina who had not yet committed suicide, a skinny guy who made and smoked pipes shaped like penises, a pretentious erotic painter who seemed as underdeveloped as if she were a member of my family, a witchy woman who apparently organized sex tours, and a disheveled man who had once worked for Playboy. The liquor flowed and I spoke with great authority of the plethora of blow jobs in Taiwan and the surprising lack of them in Thailand. And I was sure, as drink followed drink, that I was a great help to the venture, even a great success in this interesting crowd -- seemed  that way, though the next day I could remember nothing of what I had said -- and when I saw The Joy of Oral Sex in a Hong Kong bookstore a year later I did not have the heart to read the transcription of that panel discussion.

   The reason now for meeting this other client of John's, Seymour Ralston, was that I was several levels below broke - trying to look like a functioning man on the New York scene but living in a small dusty room in a condemned Upper West Side building in a forgotten apartment shared by a Maoist, a Daily World
reporter, his girlfriend who fluctuated between Trotskyism and Anarchism, and two unhappy but sexually active militant feminists. Some months I could not come up with my 50 dollars rent money. I had used up the Harper & Row advance John had negotiated for what had seemed like a lot of money but which vanished quickly since in order to get the two-book contract I had promised that I would interview stolid, dull American ambassadors on the one hand, and reckless or saintly American expatriates on the other, on all five continents. The advance money was turning out to be only a fraction of what I needed to make good on my promises. It felt like like any future I might have as an important American writer was in the balance.

   "But Seymour will have some ideas," John said. "Seymour started writing us from Miami two years ago with his book ideas. The last was for a history of the electric chair. We kept turning him down in boiler plate rejection letters and
we refused to set up an appointment for him when he came to New York but somehow  he talked his way past the reception desk and then talked his way into our private offices, and without knowing why or how I found myself inviting him onto our client list. I know he¹ll have some good ideas to help you get out of the
fix you're in."

   We met in John's office, which was on 43rd across from the New York Times in the same building as the New Yorker. Seymour was a stocky, hyper-alert black-bearded fortyish man in an open neck shirt and a wide-weave tweed suit that looked as if it has been tailored, and then carefully rumpled, for Robert Morley. He was carrying what looked like a dark green bowler hat that seemed to be part of him. He had a big welcoming smile between the black beard and twinkly black eyes - as if this were his office and his city and his world and he was welcoming both
John and me to these places.

   "Let's go for a walk," he said in a strong, cello-like Southern voice. We headed uptown to Central Park South. He told me about his wife, a pretty water skiing performer at Cypress Gardens, who had just beat cancer, as he had too, he said. He told me how he traveled everywhere first class for free and always stayed for free in luxury hotels (he was currently in a large park-view suite in the Essex
House), and he told me about how as a writer he could make something out of
nothing - like this very routine story on electric chairs he told me about that he had sold 57 times in 30 states to Sunday supplements by just changing the names of the city and the state and the death-row convict mentioned in the lead.

   And now we were opposite Central Park and entering a rich little store called Hunting World where he had never been before, he said, but where in 20 minutes a woman who had thousands of dollars in clothes on her back was trying to get him to accept as a gift a $10,000 elephant hide briefcase because, she said, he was the sort of person they wanted people to see carrying their merchandise. 

   Maybe, I thought, Seymour Ralston really is the one to help me.

SOME ENCHANTED EVENING

   It was as things were getting even worse at that cold little brick boys boarding school in the New Hampshire lake country, where so recently I could not pass any of my courses, and where even now I lived in pain and fear when I did not escape into Keats and Wordsworth. Getting worse even now when it began to seem I was not stupid and I started directing my wrath not so much at the unhappy school boy sadists as at the far removed bully Joe McCarthy and at the other bigoted, greedy  Republicans who would not let Truman -­ so hated right here in this school -- would not let him make America a decent place.

 No one, I was certain, would every make this boys school a decent place.
  
  This school where it was getting worse, this school where  I could play no games in ways that did not lead to ridicule. Getting worse. I was told by the
music master when he turned me down for the glee club that I should not think ever again of trying to sing, for even if my cracking voice should settle down he said, it was clear that I would never be able to carry a tune. It would not have surprised me if I had somehow learned then that it would be 50 years more before I tried again to sing.

  But also in  that the glee club barred me, I went along in  a school van - full of farts and punches - to a rare evening dance at our sister school, the
all-girls St. Mary¹s-in-the-Mountains.
  
  This room where they had the dance, it was all soft colors and gentle
lights, unlike our school¹s place for a rare casual dance, which would be a room with a linoleum floor, harsh lamps and black leather chairs.

  From one end of this girl-like  room we boys, flushed from the cold drive, came in. And we saw these girls in girl clothes, some with soft sweaters that
followed actual breasts. It felt like crossing a dangerous mountain pass to get to that end of the room where she was standing. Smiling. Black hair. Chubby, which seemed lush. Big sad eyes that darted. White teeth.

  I muttered something about dancing. She nodded yes. And I was not here. I was back in the Broadway theater we¹d gone to on Christmas vacation. It was World War II, and I was a distinguished old French planter in the South  Pacific. I
had spied a shy, appealing American army nurse.


   Some enchanted evening
   You may see a stranger
   You may see a stranger
   Across a crowded room

   And somehow you¹ll know
   You¹ll know even then
   That somewhere you¹ll see her
   Again, and again.

  
  And it was quickly clear that that this girl I was with knew all the things I had learned  a year and half back in 8th grade about how to really dance, things people like us did not learn in the formal white-glove dancing classes to which parents like ours had sent us on Friday evenings back in Connecticut. My outstretched left arm and her outstretched right arm gave way simultaneously,
her right hand, which had no glove on it, was now down and cupped in my left
hand against my school blazer shoulder.  My right hand was way out of dancing-class position, way down her soft back. And the fingers of her left hand, oh God, were on the back of my neck.

  And her leg!

      She was no more a hesitant army nurse, like the one in South Pacific, than I was a suave baritone-bass French planter. And I had a problem for which musical theater was no help ­  for although  my penis was not much more developed than my singing voice, it had to be clear to this non-nurse that this non-Frenchman had an erection.


   Some enchanted evening
   You will find your true love
   You may feel her call you
   Across a crowded room

   Then fly to her side,
   And make her your own
   Or all though your life
   You will dream all a-lone.

BLUE BLAZER

   After our Saturday morning anatomy class  up at the National Academy ­old-master style charcoal drawing and a real skeleton beside the standing model I went to lunch at a Polish coffee shop over on Madison with my fellow art student Eve. No studied trendiness, heart-breakingly eager, this slightly chubby dark-haired young woman who drew each Saturday at the easel beside mine. Far from my own generation,  yet it was the time when it felt like I had been pulled back over decades, as if a bungee cord had taken me from this new life, back over wives  and girlfriends like Anne and Bonnie and Judy and Vannie ­and war zones-­ like Laos and Cuba and Angola and Beirut -­ back to a distant time when, like now, life was starting.

   The ashgrove how graceful,how plainly is speaking
    The wind in its playing has language for me.


  Over kielbasa we talked of how the latsamus dorsi  is the guide for the line of the model's back, right down to the gluteus maximus. We talked of this morning's model's real life latisimus dorsi and also her actual gluteus maximus and how we handled it. And about a 40-year-old friend of Eve¹s who Eve thought might be right for me -­ funny and intense like you, she said -­ me at 53  younger than I
had ever been. Forty sounded very old.

  I had no intention  of anything more with Eve than these Saturday Polish lunches. It was enough that she led me into  a time warp. When I looked at her I heard songs from a joint glee club chorus from long ago ­ long before wars and
wives.

   Whenever the light through its branches if breaking
    A host of kind faces is gazing at me.

  Over pirgogis  Eve said she would get me in free into a concert that night if I wanted -­ this great Ukrainian violinist playing  Tchaikovsky at the 92nd Street Y, which was where Eve lived in exchange for being an usher at concerts and
lectures.

   The friends of my childhood again are before me
    Each step wakes a memory as freely I roam.

  When I arrive at the YMHA, Eve, in a Navy blue blazer, programs in her arms, runs down the aisle to hug me. In these art schools I had been frequenting
around the clock now we were all hugging each other all the time. And still the old songs in my head will not go away. These songs I¹d heard from the rear of the Plymouth State Teachers College auditoruim at a special glee club concert joining our school with our sister school -­­ me 15 years old with eyes locked on 14-year-old Sandie who was up there in bright stage light while I stayed in the back of the audience  because I could not sing.

   My lips smile no more, my heart loses its lightness
    No dream of the future my spirit can cheer.
    I only would brood on the past and its brightness,
    The dead I have mourned are again living here. 


  Eve's blue blazer could be the school blazer Sandie wore for that glee club concert.

  On the stage in front of me now, this little round Ukrainian, whose hair is long and died black, is attacking his violin with glee, waving it, pumping it,
dancing back and forth and from side to side, looking sad or desperate at one
moment, hopeful or ecstatic the next ­ louder and louder, faster and faster. And still, more clear than this 92nd St. Y stage is that stage in New Hampshire that held Sandie, her young and open round singer¹s face in the bright stage light.  And beneath Tchaikoveay I am still  hearing snatches of those songs I had not been permitted to sing, and once tried to forget.

   From every dark nook they press foreward to meet me
    I lift up my eyes to the broad leafy dome
    Then other are there looking downward to greet me.
    The ash grove, the ash grove, alone is my home.

BEAUTIFUL MORNING

  On Thursday nights after the workshop we walk through Times Square. We are jostled by the New Jersey crowds pouring out from Mary Poppins, which till recently has been New Jersey crowds pouring out of the Lion King.  Dowdy people when seen against some of the people who in my memory used to be there. Limousine drivers now hold up signs with the names of theater-goers. Limousines that are rented, like limousine-company limousines  hired for proms, not like limousines owned by some of people who once crowded into Broadway musicals, when musical theater was not for square suburbanites and not for late night TV jokes about gay proclivities. Musical comedies used to be at the heart of the culture, when a new work  by Rogers and Hammerstein was awaited with great  anticipation not by Disneyed Jerseyites but by people who also awaited Eugene O'Neil and Arthur Miller.

  I was a child then and a long way from those old musical theater throngs.All alone I would play these fast spinning music records in a low-ceiling
Connecticut place, the smaller of our two living rooms.A small fireplace, a floor made of big wide boards that did not fit together very well ­ and big heavy antique pictures ­ flowers painted on glass and backed up by what looked like crumpled tinfoil.  Tilting lamps on teetering tables.  Old golf  tees tucked away with highball coasters. Crushed cigarettes with lipstick on them. Dad¹s cheap drug store pipes and his  Revelation tobacco. Beside an unhappy sofa stuffed with horse hair. A cabinet on the floor that also served as another  table, with doors that you had to be careful opening because the hinges were nearly falling off. On one shelf the very  breakable records. The other shelf had the record player.

  Except on winter nights no one was in this  room much except me. Carefully I lifted out each record and played each one over and over day after day. One was of "The Beer Barrel Polka." Another a song called "Pop Goes the Weasel." A set of records in a box of their own called "Songs of the South African Veldt by José Marais and Miranda." Some Bing Crosby Christmas records and some Barbar the
Elephant records. I played all of these records, except for the childish elephant ones,  played them over and over. They represented something to me that
was not there, might never be there, but had to be somewhere.

  Then one evening my brother and I are in jackets and neckties close up to a big stage in a theater down in New York City. I feel excitement all around me ­ the expectant chatter ­ the sight and smell of lovely  women  with bare shoulders who seem nothing like family women, and ruddy-faced confident men in new looking suits that would not hold dirty pipe cleaners.

  All seats are taken, right up to the boxes and balconies, which look like happy places though they are not so close to the stage, at which everyone is looking even though nothing has happened yet. And now the lights are going down very gradually. A deep red curtain is going up to reveal another curtain, a pale one,
and spot lights are playing on it. And from down below, in front of us but below the stage, I see the flash of brass. A big man in a long coat struts up, raises a stick in the air, and music Starts ­ the music I had sensed all along was way out there is suddenly here.

  I want it to last forever, but the music comes to a climax  as  the second curtain goes up, and it is summer in some great place of rolling hills and blue
skies and graceful trees with a woman churning butter ­ even better than what was around our New Hampshire summer place ­ even more real than at our own summer place - and a man in a cowboy hat walks out on the stage looking strong and then happy, and the music is sounding like the soft summer day, and then it gets strong and the theater is filled with his singing:

   There¹s a bright golden haze on the meadow,
   There¹s a bright golden haze on the meadow,
   The corn is as high as an elephant¹s eye,
   And it seems to be climbing clear up the sky.

   Oh what a beautiful morning,
   Oh what a beautiful day,
   I¹ve got a beautiful feeling,
   Everything¹s going my way.

THE WATER TANK

THE WATER TANK   

   When I first saw an El Greco painting of Toledo, this dark but shimmering city on a hill, I recognized it. Such a dark shimmering city lay just beyond the green Connecticut hill that was in my line of sight from my bed in the small yellow room at the back of the house into which I moved when I was three. And much later when I climbed a hill in the Arboretum and saw the actual towers of Boston I was in a familiar place again. That hill.

   In a pre-commuter time this place had been an old  Connecticut boarding house, and so my bed was three feet from a second floor door that opened at the top of a shaky outside staircase -­ flaking gray paint and a banister you had to be careful of because of splinters - this staircase that made me feel much of the time that it was not so much that I was an outcast in this house as that where I lived was actually another house, and while their house had ties to the town of Westport and to the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad in Saugatuck, mine was connected to things that were much grander.

   When I was at last studying art, and going to every art school in New York and then into figure drawing studios late into every night, I was often drawing, in addition to pretty girls who had no clothes on, inanimate things that seemed like live things that I saw around me in the city -­ cars parked around the ILGWU houses, hanging traffic lights, buildings receding into the distance, for which I used perspective I had learned in the third grade forty-something years earlier, and thought I had forgotten. I was particularly taken with rooftops -  Greek temples high on old buildings on Sixth Avenue, and on the tops of buildings everywhere cylindrical wooden water tanks with flattened dome roofs which I had not till now much noticed in New York but now could not get enough of, to the point of risking my life hanging from a fire escape at Parsons to get just the view I needed.  These water tanks I had known since I was three -­ the exact shape and composition of the tank that held water for our house, which was at the top of the hill that was on a line from my yellow room. And I knew all about windmills too. Ours had an electric motor down below that pumped water from our old spring well (on the top of which copperheads sometimes sunned themselves) up  to the water tank, but the windmill wheel kept on turning as if it were still needed.

   In my bed, on a line from the hill, my dreams more often than not were nightmares, but sometimes they took me up the hill, right to the top, where suddenly I could see the equivalent of Toledo or Boston. And sometimes I would be up there as the groom in a wedding with a pretty girl -­ and there were rabbits and skunks and possums all around.

   My most frequently recurring dream was of being caught in poison rain, wet red stuff that meant instant death coming down from the sky, with of course no place to run. But sometimes the sky was clear and I was a performer. 

   Sometimes I had to be on a platform at end of the our driveway that let through bright forsythia onto Lyons Plain Road (a road so wide and important it had a stripe down the center).  I had to be on the platform because so many people were coming up the road to hear me sing and give speeches.

A WAY OUT

    My agent John Cushman was saying I'd better meet Seymour Ralston. The last time my agent had wanted me to meet one of his clients he had gotten me together with a guy named Bernie who was doing a rip-off book called "The Joy of Oral Sex," and Bernie, it turned out, was putting together a taped panel discussion he wanted me to join because as author of Bangkok After Dark, Taipei After Dark and Manila After Dark I would surely be a great addition. So there I was late one night in 1974 in a darkened office building sitting around a table that had three open bottles of Scotch, an activated tape recorder, glasses, ice, and some strange liqueurs. I sat there drinking and pontificating with a lovely porn actress named Tina, a skinny guy who made and smoked pipes shaped like penises, a pretentious erotic painter who seemed as underdeveloped as if she were a member of my family, a witchy woman who apparently organized sex tours, and a disheveled man who had once worked for Playboy. The liquor flowed and I spoke with great authority of the plethora of blow jobs in Taiwan and the surprising lack of them in Thailand.  And I was sure, as drink followed drink, that I was a great help to the venture, even a great success in this interesting crowd -­ seemed  that way, though the next day I could remember nothing of what I had said -­ and when I saw "The Joy of Oral Sex" in a Hong Kong bookstore a year later I did not have the heart to read the transcription of that panel discussion.

    The reason now for meeting this other client of John's, Seymour Ralston, was that I was several levels below broke ­ trying to look like a functioning man on the New York scene  but living in a small dusty room in a condemned Upper West Side building in a forgotten apartment shared by a Maoist, a Daily World reporter, his girlfriend who fluctuated between Trotskyism and Anarchism, and three unhappy but sexually active militant feminists. Some months I could not come up with my 50 dollars rent money. I had used up the Harper & Row advance John had negotiated for what had seemed like a lot of money but which vanished quickly since in order to get the two-book contract I had  promised that I would interview stolid, dull American ambassadors on the one hand,  and reckless or saintly American expatriates on the other, on all five continents. The advance money was turning out to be only a fraction of what I needed to make good on my promises. It felt like like any future I might have as an important American writer was in the balance.

    "But Seymour will have some ideas," John said. "Seymour started writing us from Miami two years ago with his book ideas. The last was for a history of the electric chair. We kept turning him down in boiler plate rejection letters and we refused to set up an appointment for him when he came to New York but somehow he talked his way past the reception desk and then talked his way into our private offices, and without knowing why or how I found myself inviting him onto our client list. I know he¹ll have some good ideas to help you get out of the fix you're in."

    We met in John's office, which was on 43rd across from the New York Times in the same building as the New Yorker. Seymour was a stocky, hyper-alert black-bearded fortyish man in an open neck shirt and a wide-weave tweed suit that looked as if it has been tailored and then carefully rumpled for Robert Morley. He was carrying what looked like a dark green bowler hat that seemed to be part of him. He had a big welcoming smile between the black beard and twinkly black eyes as if this were his office and his city and his world and he was welcoming both John and me to these places.

    "Let's go for a walk," he said in a strong, cello-like Southern voice. We headed uptown to Central Park South. He told me about his wife, a pretty water skiing performer at Cypress Gardens who had just beat cancer, as he had too, he said. He told me how he traveled everywhere first class for free and always stayed for free in luxury hotels (he was currently in a large park-view suite in the Essex House), and he told me about how as a writer he could make something out of nothing­ like this very routine story he did about electric chairs that he had sold 57 times in 30 states to Sunday supplements by just changing the names of the city and state and the first death-row convict that was mentioned in the lead.

    And now we were opposite Central Park and entering a rich little store called Hunting World where he had never been before, he said, but where in 20 minutes a woman who had thousands of dollars in clothes on her back was trying to get him to accept as a gift a $10,000 elephant hide briefcase because, she cooed, he was the sort of person they wanted people to see carrying their cherished merchandise. 

    Maybe, I thought, Seymour Ralston really is the one to help me.