The Aqua Mustang 15 - CLICK FORWARD

I am on a verge. Verge of what? I have not crossed over to the White Mountains yet. In fact when I am with people here I am talking about making Vermont, which is the anti-New Hampshire, my base – staying in countryside, even staying in this country, taking up painting, improving my horseback riding. Though I cannot shake the near certainty that I have crucial unfinished business already unfolding in the city. A new life in art, perhaps. And I carry this mental picture of blonde Gillian, who had returned in early spring from Dharmasala to join these meetings I had been going to in the city.

The meetings in this search for the past, and my dreams too, in this time that the visual has taken over from the literary. Dark woods in Hobbema, Gorky’s knife edge passage into suicide, light and hope in Deibenkorn and Matisse.

The songs in the car:


Forsaken, almost human
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone


Gillian back from India. We had begun to date, or was it dating? She said she was drawn to me because we were the travelers. We are going mostly to inexpensive outdoor places in the East Village, a little like a couple of buddies getting together. Neither has seen the other’s apartment.

I had been watching her when she was sitting a few places away from me in these circles of people probing the past. She had seemed to me like a model for a Matisse bronze.

What she says in the circle shows she’s been around, must be older than she looks. But she seems pure girl, soft, a heart-breaker. She sits there attentive, so pretty when she concentrates on what is being said, sometimes with a mysterious knowing smile that I think speaks of sex, sometimes raising fine arms to pull up and back strands of long blonde hair, then letting the strands fall down, playing with them. Serious. Then that smile. Eyes laughing at something secret. And that is my main picture of her still when we are sort of dating.


Lets the river answer
That you’ve always been her lover
And you want to travel with her
And you want to travel blind


On Vermont roads with these songs playing, the parade of women, who were meant to be left before they left me, is passing through the car again but this time in reverse order, starting now almost at the beginning, not my mother but chubby, eager Sandie from our sister boarding school, kissing with tongues when we were 15, Sandie whom I betrayed, click, then click click click Kitty, then click Alma,then Alice, click Dina and Tina and Ina, click Cindy, click Jeannie, click Irma, click click Bonnie and the other Bonnie too. Click Gillian and then back a step, Jocelyn.

On Vermont roads with these songs in the car, I go from the just past memory of Gillian playing with her blond strands to the not long past memory of Jocelyn, when she and I watched Traufaut’s Small Change while in her bed. She had the video long before it was available in America, just before most people had VCRs, had it because she had connections with celebrated figures who were connected to everything.

Watching the scene where the schoolmaster explains to his class in Lyon that a mysteriously missing boy was abused at home, I have to check myself from starting to cry – the schoolmaster’s kindness, the almost forgotten boy.

“Were you an abused child?” Jocelyn asks, and I do not answer. And she tells me how her grandmother in Algiers used to set upon her in the shower, beat her black and blue. But I cannot tell her anything about myself, not then and not when she talks of what she for the moment seems to take to be our star-crossed love, me lying on my back on New Year’s Eve, she talking while sitting up above me in gleaming nakedness. Like what was in dreams in lonely times, but I have no words in this non-dream time, no words to even say I have no love to give her. Though I feel on a verge.


There are heroes in the seaweed,
There are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love now
And they will lean that way forever.


Driving through green Vermont, a stone’s throw from granite New Hampshire. My head filled with music and these women.

The Aqua Mustang 14 - CLICK BACK

Now Suzanne takes your hand
And she leads you to the river
She is wearing rags and feathers
From Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey
On our lady of the harbor…


Over and over these tapes in this time drifting over these Vermont hills, driving by pure water and below the soft Green Mountains. These tapes, Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne, as real as anything, a girl in a song who could be one of any number of women I had known or gained or lost or longed for. This music coming back to me, some I once knew, some that came while I was away. My car now filled with this gentle Judy Collins version.


You know that she’s half crazy
But that’s why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges
That come all the way from China…


It is all mixed up with the old deep and bright and very dark places over in New Hampshire, and it is all mixed up with other women there and in the world.

Last year, after the briefest of times together, early 1985, I had had a final falling out on the phone with Jocelyn – Joce-leen, I used the French pronunciation – who was exotic French and Jewish and had grown up under the North African sun. Joce-leen, calling from near the Carlyle, me answering the call down in a furnished room off Eighth Avenue, me hearing her say it was over. She had caught me in something small I’d hoped she missed, but to her it meant betrayal. I had told her I had not checked my answering machine and so had not caught a loving message from her that I had heard all too clearly. I was revealed as someone who had no words for her. Never had, she now knew, neither at her table nor in her bed, nor in her bath, nor in those French places where we ate steaks in the West 50s. And when she broke with me on the phone, I still said nothing, though I was suffering the white hot anger I was beginning to know from looking into the mystery of my early life.

And to my horror, as I held the phone, things went click-click-click in my head and groin, click-click-click all the way back. Click Jocelyn, click anger at ex-wife Anne, click Bonnie in Bangkok, click Judy in New York, click Sheila Ng in Singapore – click Vannie, click, Rae, click Susi, click Anne Marie. Click click, click click – all the way back till, by God, I was trapped in a sad cliché, clicking on my mother.


And just when you mean to tell her
That you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer.

I’d lied to Jocelyn that I’d missed her message.


And afterwards, before now, I tried so hard to get everything back where I had long thought it should be. Before now in this short time I tried for the last time the old way of writing to put my life in place. Before in this short time another dream figure, this gorgeous travel photographer from Rome briefly traveled with me. And before a dead end in the tourist-ridden Bahamas topped by an even deader ending just afterwards in New Hampshire, where they were all speaking trash covered by fake British accents. Before, in this very short time, what seemed like the ultimate depression. And before what then seemed a time touched by grace as I stepped for the first time into the deep past with my eyes open, for the first time stepped with no control into my stories. And so much had happened that I was skating through Vermont, alone and ready in the aqua Mustang, playing songs that, unexpectedly, had lodged in my heart.

The Aqua Mustang 13 - FRIENDS?

And it was not just the addition of parks to my life that made everything so new and different. I hardly ever saw my friends of a lifetime who were still living in Manhattan. Which might have been fine with them, but I think was not for it but made one of them, the political writer Walter Karp, angry enough to call and shout at me as he was finishing his usual a six-pack on a Sunday afternoon, which was the time I had for years, when in town, been part of a group including Walter that often met at his apartment, which I had once used as mine in exchange for he and his striking wife Regina using an apartment I had had for time on Cheney Walk in London.

This time when I was moving in these intimations of counryside was when it began to seem to very strange to me that I never met by chance the many people I had known in the many different times and live I had lived in New York between my lives in the Balkans or the Middle East or Far East or Africa – lives that went all the way back, though I did not remember the city part of that first year of my life, just the chaos in a drawing room of an old steam train that was taking me in my first summer up to the White Mountains, which was supposed to be the place from which no one of my blood would ever escape.

I did not see the people from all those years in the city between years of travel, even when I walked on streets I knew they lived on. But I was meeting by chance, nearly every day, people I had come to know in the past few months , some of them from these new meetings where we were all attempting to unravel our lives. I saw them on the streets and on the subway and in the parks and in the lobbies of movie houses where the new Traufaut would be showing. Saw them in coffee houses I had never noticed before. Saw them in all these places just as I never saw the people – there must have been thousands of them by now -- from what I had thought had already been such a long and, though often discouraging, basically fruitful life. And what more recently I had thought of, as I entered what seemed like the ultimate and final depression, thought of as a life that could never change, no matter how often I went away – which was something that at one time had given me hope and a feeling of solidity, and by now made me fear that life would end without any of its possibilities realized.

But these new people. These new places. And always the pull of countryside, countryside even if it was just a single tree coming out of a square of earth in the sidewalk. This pull. And the pull of the museums, that I had nearly forgotten, as I had nearly forgotten my first time in Paris at the Jeu de Paume, nearly forgotten my first year in New York with my girlfriend Vannie, an action painter with whom I went over and over again to look at Franz Kline and deKooning and Pollack, and also Rembrandt. His deep sad self-portraits, and the silent but exciting Polish Rider. Nearly forgot what I loved even in the crushingly lonely times that I tried to edit out of life. And also Central Park, where long ago I had known what I honored. All of which might never have been retrieved if this present time had never happened.

And now I was going further afield. To the Bronx Botanical Garden. To Bear Mountain. To a small house in Sullivan Country owned by a photographer who, like me, had been with the New People’s Army in the Philippines. And on I went to Vermont – and this seemed a far bigger start and change than when I first took a freighter to Italy, a plane to Bangkok, a market truck into a place with no roads in Central Africa.

The Aqua Mustang 12 - CARS?

Until now I had never had a car in New York. The last car I’d owned – a tank-like Humber, which I learned to my dismay was the car of choice for the police in England – had been in Singapore, 17 years ago. Before that in Bangkok I’d had another big, heavy English car, a green Rover with leather seats that was simultaneously and seedy jaunty and I loved it. We lived across the river in Thonburi, so we’d take a small ferry to a Bangkok side landing where I left the Rover. When we got in we’d sit for a time with all the doors open, it was so hot. I would put two cigarettes in my mouth, light them both, and place one of them between Bonnie’s lips. This was living.

When I was first in Bangkok a friend there from days I’d lived in Greece was talking about the Indian merchants in Bangkok, and he asked me what the people from India were like in New York, and I had no answer, for back then you rarely saw Indians except around the UN. Then the friend asked me what kind of car I drove in America, and again I had no answer. I had never owned a car in New York City. I’d dismissed people who did as adding an unnecessary burden to their lives since it was so easy to get around and if you really did leave town, which I did not do so often as I thought I did, there were always rental cars. But even as I had these thoughts I suspected they were the sort of thoughts appropriate to my old play-it-safe relatives, not to me. Though for the two years before Bangkok I did keep a 90cc Honda motorcycle.

My pattern of life from very early, from the late fifties on, was that I would be in New York for two or three-year stretches between my times abroad – except for this last stretch, in the final five years of a marriage, which I’d spent in an Upper West Side apartment whose living room view was of an air shaft. But now a year later, 1986, I was in this bright new place on 25th Street with South light and a view that stretched seemingly into infinity.

And now I was being physically pulled into countryside, as if I had never been aware of nature before. I was moving from being a wild but prudent non-car owner to someone who needed a car to get into countryside. I knew I needed it, for I was getting closer. At the start, even with some snow on the ground, I had begun to explore Central Park, where I practically never went when I lived in that airshaft place on 81st Street even though from there the park had been only a crosstown block away.

Now on 25th Street I could not just stroll over, but I was in the park every day and so much of it was new to me – the great lawn, the band shell, the Dairy, Bethesda Fountain, the Ramble, the mall where I walked between even rows of great tress planted in the French style to a place with silly romantic statues, such as one of Beethoven with his pretty muse. New places to me even though I had been dealing with the city for decades. Rolling hills and water I had missed except for the lake where I used to take girls out in rowboats. Now I also had the pond with its romantic curved foot bridge down in the shade of the Plaza, and now way up on the edge of Spanish Harlem, the Meer, where people fished with worms in the shadow of graffiti splattered concrete – the Meer like so much else neglected by the city in 1986, a year I had to step around or over homeless people to get to the subway. And I discovered the great formal Conservatory Garden with its fountains and statues, not least Secret Garden kids and the three graces, and also its perfect hedges, just below the gone-to-seed Meer. And I moved on out to Brooklyn, partly for the museum and partly because I became fascinated with the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, saw the spring of ’86 there —all of it new to me, from the Japanese garden, so calm and pure that even Japanese tourists came to out to Brooklyn for it – but I also saw the nearby area that displayed local wild flora that kind of frightened me because it had been the flora of Connecticut when I was growing up.

A young woman from the new life and I – her father had been a failed Republican politician in Alaska which gave us family horror stories in common – went to the casual Prospect Part stables, which were the flip side of the Central Park stables where everyone went in costume, dressed like prissy little Upper Class English horse people. Out in decaying Prospect Park I thought I had never been happier than sitting in the sun in a Western saddle while astride a big lazy old Brooklyn horse.

MY BOOK, May 31

The publication date of AUTHENTIC WRITING a memoir on creating memoir is Saturday, May 31, when there will be a signing and more, sponsored by the amazing Woodstock bookstore The Golden Notebook.

The Aqua Mustang 11 - AMAZED

I’m still amazed that I can wake up in this sinewy girl’s big not quite fully furnished shared apartment, New York City summer air wafting over us from wide open windows that have coal soot on the sills, and we have no clothes on, so I wake up celebrating, for I know it is another of these new moments to remember. I am still amazed to have this sort of history that I had dreamt of, not the ultimate love story yet but so much else. That I can wake up and we have a history, me with Rae, who studies design at Parsons and has that look. Lovely Rae, short for Ramona. All this so amazing for this is still the fifties, the awful Eisenhower time in history where my small generation – small because people took precautions and did abortions in the Depression – is supposed to be the silent generation, and you rarely fuck outside marriage except in whorehouses, as I was doing well two years back in Cuba, and hardly use the word fuck for anything except swearing. But I have lived experience now that proves this new time in America does not have to be this way, for now I am actually living in New York and it seems clear that in New York the fifties never took hold, the same way I would find places the sixties never hit, such as my family’s places in New Hampshire, which would be as innocent of the sixties as places like Indianapolis – as innocent of the sixties as, thank God, this Manhattan I know was innocent of the fifties. I do not know that a time would soon come soon when I would would look and look to find Rae again and could not find her.

Barely awake with Rae and there is someone calling out. Rae's angry landlady has appeared and there are not supposed to be people whose names are not on the lease sleeping in this quite large apartment way over east in the 80s. The landlady goes from room to room inspecting, looking for anyone Rae or her roommates might have let in. The rooms open onto each other in a circle, and I stay just one room ahead of the landlady, my shoes and socks and jockey shorts in one hand, my shirt and khakis in the other. I quietly exit the circle at the front door, dress in the hallway, dash down the stairs.

I stop in for a beer on Third Avenue, sitting on a stool beneath a string of dusty red and green cutout letters spelling Merry Christmas, though this is August. I have a beer now, I think, not so much because I crave it, though I do, but more because the man I mean to be would have a morning beer now – like Humphrey Bogart or a tragic figure out of Fitzgerald.

And then I realize I am very near Carol’s red brick building where Carol has an apartment paid for by her family.I ring her buzzer, even though she is really Harvey’s girlfriend and I had recently slept with her roommate B.J. – B.J. who is so amazingly Southern clever and pretty that when I slept with her I gave no thought to the fact that she had been born missing a hand. And Carol is home alone, and so she and I go the park together and rent a rowboat and the air smells of flowers.

I can go anywhere I like. Another girl who is neither Carol nor Rae nor B.J. is out of town. This wonderful city life. This city that I love. And I am pulled into the park with Carol, this city life now combined with the nature I knew even before I read Keats and Wordsworth. This nature is drawing me almost out of the city.

I think of that late fifties morning I outran the landlady and took Carol to the park now in this time, 30 years later, when everything in my life has changed. It seems like such a big thing now to have headed for the park – something I knew then and am just remembering in this time just before Vermont and the aqua Mustang, this time that I am already on the hunt for what happened in New Hampshire in the dark distant past that led to the violence that is killing my cousins today. I think of the city and those girls from the past where the fifties had lost its power. And I think of how I am drawn physically now to countryside, though as interested still, after all the affairs and a just ended marriage that did not start until I was in my forties, in finding the right woman, the right girl. I put myself back in the time the fifties were dying and I was with Irma whom I met in the Corso, and Anne Marie who arrived when I was staging a show of art I brought up from Haiti. I think of them all now in the eighties these many years after the fifties, now still interested in finding just the right woman to love and to love me. This part about finding the woman, the girl, is something I never forget.

And it seems, 30 years later, like I had somehow lost most of the other part, the part about countryside – countryside drawing me in again now in 1986 to such a degree that, much as I like the world’s cities, I know I will stop breathing without the woods and fields and streams and lakes and mountains that for so long I have avoided.

The Aqua Mustang 10 - HOME AGAIN

The first time I went over the border from Vermont that summer I immediately drove the aqua Mustang through Sugar Hill Village, the destination of the daily walks my twin and I took with my grandfather Gaga – who wore a floppy sun hat with green isinglass in the front brim, and always used a walking cane (as did I, in imitation, starting when I was six). We’d walk from White Pines up the long twisting drive through the tall pine trees that bore the name of the house and that my grandparents had had planted long ago. We’d turn left when we reached Davis Road, a dirt road with three more of our big family houses and little else on it except a big house, also deep in woods, belonging to my grandfather’s old Princeton roommate Otto Mallory.

At the end of Davis Road was a the small wooden Episcopal summer church, St. Matthew's, where they sang "God Save the King" even though this was America, and where we’d gone with our grandmother Nana every Sunday, Peter and I in neckties taking up the collection. Then onto a paved road and past the turn up to the sprawling Sunset Hill House. Also past the Homestead Inn (which the family ignored on grounds it was too self consciously New England quaint and owned by a family with an Italian name). Then on down into Sugar Hill Village, using a very old wooden sidewalk, past warm seeming picket fence houses that were in their way as picturesque as the big summer people’s places. Down the wooden sidewalk into the village, which was a post office/ general store. It was here that I would get comic books – Dick Tracy with his wrist radio and Gravel Gerty and B.O. Plenty – and Donald Duck with his nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie – and little Nancy with her rakish little low class boyfriend Sluggo. I learned from comics before I learned from books that I need not be bound by the cast of characters or the places in the world into which I had been born.

It was at the turnoff to the Sunset that Gaga had told two people who stopped their sedan to ask directions that there were no hotels here. And because I objected he took me aside on another day to tell me it was just that Jews work harder than anyone else and often take a fellow’s job away from him. And he really did have a very close Jewish friend still from his old radical settlement house days.

That church – where we took up the collection, and where everyone sang “God save the King” to the tune of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee – was overseen by Nana and it was where Mother and Dad had been married.

This was where I found my self going first on my return to New Hampshire from Vermont in this time when the entire landscape of my life was changing. I stopped and looked at the church. Then I turned up to where on my right the Sunset had been, passing on my left the ruins of a rakish, brown-shingled place called The Pioneer, a place to dance and neck in the dark with whisky provided by liberated college kids who worked at the hotel. By now the Sunset had been torn down, but its outsize rental cottages – one of which had been used by my Mother’s Southern family - were still intact. And across the street was a concrete sidewalk with a small viewing platform for the most pure version of the official family view of the Franconia Mountains.

This was one of the days the mountains looked green and soft, not blue-gray-black and granite. A wooden building a little past the viewing platform had been known as “the bachelors’ quarters” in my parents’ time, when respectable young men could stay cheaply because they were in demand as escorts for the daughters of the regular, mostly Southern, Sunset guests. In my own time (which began in the Depression) it had become the place where the college kids who were bellboys and chambermaids lived – these dashing people who could be seen necking in the shadows of the Sunset’s unending wicker chair lined porch during the Saturday night dances where old people sat in a great circle examining young dancers. Now it was being turned into a Waspish inn-size in that would use the Sunset Hill House name.

Across the road was the small golf course, still there, where Mother, an only child, played round after round alone, and from where she saw, coming up and the hill, my father, a lonely little boy in a pony cart.

I wondered if this were correct procedure for the new life I was in, focusing in this way on these people of the past rather than on myself – remembering past times with the pleasure I often knew then rather than the horror I knew now.