THAT LUCKY OLD SUN

performed 8/16/07 at the Fletcher Gallery, Woodstock, NY


I am heading north from the city – November 1986. From the tape deck of my cheerful old aqua Mustang, Willie Nelson is singing a very a old Frankie Laine song. A song that I have not heard since 1950. Nineteen-fifty when I was 15 and the song was everywhere – Everywhere except in the big formal summer houses our family used to own – Neckties at breakfast. Pedigreed people in rarefied places sealed off from rural poverty. Where I head now hoping to save a pretty cousin.


Up in the morning, out on the job,
Work like a devil for my pay
But that lucky old sun has got nothing to do,
But roll around heaven all day.


The White Mountains of New Hampshire – place of perfect summers – so I once thought. That family up there – so safe seeming back then with their popovers, Floating Island and Anglophilia. My grandfather with his distinguished walking stick. My grandmother orchestrating formal finger bowl dinners. Their compliant children. And their children’s children -

My generation. The dead or walking dead – suicide, drugs & incest. Me in peril recently, a foreign war zone enemy of my twin in the CIA. Now Cousin Lauryn, the youngest, my favorite, beaten and fucked before puberty, back now, sprung from a battered women’s shelter.
I drive north on the hunt now for what really happened. Driving by aqua Mustang through time into scenes from earliest childhood – until at 15, in 1950, it seemed I could escape. Friends, girlfriends outside our estate. Regular people’s songs and a life – please God – not bounded by their tasteful striped awnings, their marble bird baths, granite mountains.

I go for years without seeing those mountains but they are always there in consciousness - even when I am in war zones far away. And in this new time, 1986, I realize that also in consciousness, every day of my life, whatever might be happening, there were and are always songs in my head. Never sung aloud, for I do not sing yet – but always in my head. Songs. A parallel if hidden reality – a world beyond.


Fuss with my woman, toil for my kids
Sweat till I’m wrinkled and gray
But that lucky old sun’s, he’s got nothing to do,
But roll around heaven all day.


So fine, this working man’s chant. In the Mustang I feel so fine, though I believe I am driving into the belly of the beast. I fear for Lauryn, who has returned…

She was going to be a dancer. I drive north to do battle with the ravenous past. And yet as I point the car north, my heart leaps – and it is almost as if I am headed not into the belly of a beast in a freezing November but into happy summer days – mountain beauty and romance.


Dear lord above, don’t you know I’m pining,
Tears are in my eyes,
Send down that cloud with a silver lining,
Lift me to paradise.


The night is blacker than I had expected. I reach Franconia Notch. That’s the mountain pass you have to cross to get to those old summer places.
Deep in the notch, on the highway between Cannon Mountain and Mt. Lafayette, there is no starlight, no moonlight , no traffic except me. I sense more than I can see of the icy black granite that rises on either side. Suddenly a fierce early mountain snow storm, like out of the past, it creates a full white-out. Opaque whiteness. I can see nothing in front of the car.

This is just the sort of thing so feared by the upright people who were my people in the rich houses – the way they feared lighting strikes on golf courses, and brake failures on ill-kept mountain roads, and hunters’ bullets in the woods, and non-Episcopalians, including cute New Englanders who use the adjective “wicked”— They feared the rage of mama bears, and they feared the larceny of poor people. Feared everyone and everything except what they should have feared – each other.

No way to tell in the white-out if I’ve stopped the Mustang in the middle of the notch road where something might crash and crush me. No way to tell if I’m on a shoulder at a ravine with no guard rail.

Am I to die here so near to where I began? Die listening to old music and remembering old scenes. Die in this whiteness just as the past is coming clear?


Show me that river, take me across,
Wash all my troubles away,
Like that lucky old sun, give me nothing to do,
But roll around heaven all day.

GRANITE STATE IX - Driving and driving

I drive and drive through these hills and mountains of New Hampshire, on the trail, in the summer in ’86, of what had happened to them all – the cousins dead or dying or drugged out or molested – but not just the cousins of my generation in this family I came from but all of them in those grand houses in the White Mountains where everything was supposed to be so in order, though no one in my childhood time seemed to honor much that had happened since the turn of the century except maybe World War I, and the non-Marxist phase of the Russian revolution, covered by my grandfather the writer – which meant there was no room for another writer in this family – these rarefied people in these formal summer houses – where the men tended to have neckties on at breakfast.

That world seemed the enemy now. The cousins, who died, seemed my allies. But the version of the past that had held in these houses I was revisiting – driving and driving that summer – this was more dead than the mere dead bodies of cousin Paul and Cousin Elka and Cousin Margaret, or the battered body of my favorite, Cousin Lauryn.

And yet I had never felt more alive than in this time. I had stopped my writing, which was too controlled to be of any use to me as night became day and day night and gentle places became dangerous places and my mother and brother betrayed me and I too could have died – my brother revealing himself as a C.I.A. man in Manila , where I had been there under death threat dealing with the opposition to the Marcos dictatorship the CIA had helped set up, in this time when the heroes of my writing were being murdered. In Manila , where my brother swore he’d never been. And it was exhilarating too, new freedom, new worlds opening up to me. I had stopped writing but I was about to start painting. In ways I had never considered, never realized were there, I stepped into art – seeing things I had never seen before, from Piero della Francesa to Arshile Gorky – and nature – noticing for instance how it was not just new leaves coming in, the tree were billowing.

I said more than once to new people coming into my life that it would not be all that bad if I died now for now at last in 1986, though I did not feel being in my fifties made me old, at last I knew things I could so easily, like the others in the family I came from, gone to my death never knowing – art and life. It is true I would wake up some mornings in my Chelsea apartment putting all this new knowledge out of mind – the death of the family version and the deaths of the cousins - thinking at first that if I kept it all away, none of these things would have happened – so long as I could hold off remembering. Yet when I remembered it, I was elated.

And then as I drove through New England on this hunt for what had happened, with some side pleasure too, I felt that kind of freedom that I knew goes along with the end of a prolonged dying – like when my father died three years back, deserted by all his close relatives and friends except for me and my about to be ex-wife, whose picture he carried with him in his last moves from nursing home to home care to hospital, to home care, to nursing home to hospital, and on and on. Deserted by all except my then wife and also by me, which may not have counted for I was never considered in step with this family that enclosed them all.

And now I was free. As I drove through New England with Willie Nelson on the tape deck singing songs I knew from my hidden radio in childhood – “Stormy weather,” “Don’t Get around much anymore,” “I’m gonna sit right down and write myself a letter,” “Old fashioned love,” “Someone exactly like you.”

GRANITE STATE VIII - Visuals

I favored time-warp roads in these trips I was making into the past – two times in August over from Vermont, where I had gone using the old Taconic rather than the thruway or the interstates – financed for the summer with money from Penthouse – one of many lives I was leaving – and then in September a trysting trip – and now this trip to see Lauryn.

On the trysting trip each time I called in to my answering machine in Chelsea I got the voice of my Aunt Alice – who, as someone once defined it for me when he saw an old smiling photo of her - your aunt, the black sheep of her generation, who has sex on behalf of all the family members who have none –

At the end of the tryst – the end of the affair, which seemed in motion so long as we were in motion – traveling in foliage time through the mountains of Vermont – so soft and comforting, so many shades of green – some of it in perfect square patches of planted high altitude clover – and in motion traveling through the mountains of New Hampshire – big and wild and jagged and scarred – these mountains we were in in New Hampshire while practically at the doorstep of this aunt who could not know I was back in town after so many years, and was trying to reach me in New York.

When the tryst, the affair, was over – for it did not transfer from being on the road in New England to being planted in life in New York – when it was suddenly over I returned the call to my aunt – and this was when this aunt, the only relative with a light touch in my childhood, this pretty laughing woman whom I had called my favorite aunt –

This was when on the phone she said something awful had happened to her - and then told me about the awful thing that had happened to her daughter Lauryn – and this was when she said she really could not blame the guy –

As I listened I was cold.

I was remembering.

I was getting what I had recently heard a person searching hard for clear memories call the “the visuals” – the visuals I had hoped for when I began the search to find out what had happened.

GRANITE STATE VII - Empty Landscape

I had had ideas that there was something solid here with Gillian. We kept on laughing, all through this time. We hugged on Vermont village greens. And when we finally moved into the same room she asked what took you so long, and for some reason that seemed to confirm that there was something really solid here. And it was as intensely erotic I had hoped – thinking at the time how all this would appear in memory – Gillian in the bath, Gillian with a book to identify trees, Gillian blowing on me gently. And strangely she talked in these British tones that were as prissy as they were sexy, as British as my apparently non-sexy family that had once been up here, sometimes still could be found up here, that family where everything was so cold, as opposed to this present when everything seemed so warm. The same tones the family would use, but not the same subject matter – as in Gillian’s “I always tell young people to learn anal sex. It’s the only safe way.”

I was here in one life, and all the places and people around me were from another nearly dead life. The Village of Sugar Hill, where when I was a child I used to go every day with my brother and grandfather, walking past the turn-off to the summer hotel, the Sunset Hill House, with its sweeping veranda, and then along a wooden sidewalk, past village houses with flowers and picket fences, to the tiny post office general sore – it all looked exactly the same. No K-marts. No fast food. No strip malls. Nothing to indicate it was l986, not l946 or ‘36 or ‘26. It was almost as if my grandfather was still here, misdirecting – to my horror when I was 9 – a driver who asked about the Sunset Hill House, misdirecting him because, he said, the couple looked Jewish and would not be given a room if they found the place. And when he saw I was upset he scheduled another walk alone with me to tell me how barring Jews was right because it was not fair that one fellow would work harder than another and get that other fellow’s job. Already I was finding I needed to tune certain things out.

And now over in Vermont we were in a borrowed house that had belonged to an old Foreign Service officer. It was rustic, though on the walls there was England – reproductions from very old issues of Punch. And each of the little mildewed bedrooms upstairs had been designed to remind the owner of a place he had been assigned – one filled with cheap figurines of happy Bavarian men in Lederhosen playing accordions, and on the wall a cheap cuckoo clock. And another that was supposed to be French and thus filled with cheap gilded frames of tourist pictures, the Eiffel Tower, Chartres, and another was supposed to be England again, on the walls prints of hunting scenes. All this cheap fakery in the present which forewarned me the present could be as flimsy as this past I now detested.

We lingered. It turned out to be a wonderful house. We got in the car again and explored. We crossed into Canada. The gas tank started to leak. We got back to Vermont and found we’d have to linger until a garage received a new tank. This seemed just fine. We turned it into a celebration. Filled the little house with balloons. Found a single tape cassette, which was of forgettable New Age Wyndom Hill music that was new to both of us, for we had both spent so much time abroad. I thought when we danced among the balloons that it would be music I would remember.

But when the car was working we had been going over to Franconia and Sugar Hill, which I now saw through her eyes as well as my own. The Pines, the main former family house, now had a tin roof and was split up into apartments, but from the outside it still seemed much the same. “Your magic kingdom” was what Gillian called it. We circled the house, and she saw that down in the back there was a big, thick walled ice house. This indicated to her, she said,that when my grandparents built the The Pines 60 years ago it might have been looked upon as a survivalists’ place. And I recalled the great bins in the sprawling kitchen containing what looked like enough flower and rice and sugar to last for years. And I saw with her eyes now the sweeping landscape that seemed sometimes an extension of this house – this landscape that covered maybe 50 miles – and I realized there no a sign of human life in it except for, in the distance, a cable car on Cannon Mountain that you could see for an instant as it emerged from the pines, no much more than a dot, was backed for an instant by the pale sky, then to disappear again.

And I saw the harshness of the mountains. Lafayette bare above the timber line and scarred with avalanche marks.

And I thought of the trivia my family would have talked – who belonged up here and who didn’t being a constant refrain, balanced by talk of happier times long ago, the best times being before World War I. I thought of how I would tune out bigoted things they would say. Just like, I knew, in the car now I had been tuning out her tales of convoluted sex.

GRANITE STATE VI - And on the Phone

It took me a while to get up there this time – close to two months since the last time and since I heard the news. Up there once last year, 1985, and twice this past August, 1986, and once in late September – and now it was late November. My fourth trip – two times from Vermont and two times up from the city – after going most of my adulthood with no trips to the White Mountains, the family place, the place of the awninged formal houses and the lawns with white benches and marble bird baths, the panorama of the Franconia range always in view – the place against which they judged all other places – as in how they used to say that the Franconia area, which was mostly deteriorating and rustic, was just like Switzerland, where everything was spruced up, saying it in tones that made clear Switzerland was no competition – and I had continued all these years to hold it as the world’s most beautiful place, though like most of them in the family I hardly ever went there – finding it easier to get to Laos or Angola or Brunei or Egypt than to get to the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

The last trip came on the spur of the moment. I was locking my bicycle to a post just down from the Museum of Modern Art, which these days I visited more days than not. And I heard a very cultivated, Anglofied but stilll quite pleasant woman’s voice saying “That’s a neat bike, Fred” – and I realized it was this blonde woman, Gillian, whom I knew from meetings – where she listened intently, like a little girl listening, while she played with her long hair, lifted it up, let it flow down. This to me very appealing looking thirtyish woman I had seen but did not know. And now here she was on the sidewalk in front of the Folk Art museum, just down from the Modern, and she had a big hand-lettered sign that said "OUT OF AFRICA" (which was also the title of a current movie) – and she was surrounded on the sidewalk by wooden West African fetish figures she was selling. And when I came out of the museum – I had needed a fresh look at Mattisse’s child being forced into a piano lesson by a gray matriarch while he looks at a warm, bronze nude woman – when I came out we connected again and it seemed we had more or less decided on the spot to drive up to Vermont in a week, which would be the time of my birthday, and also the peak, up there, of the folliage season.

Despite my resolve to stay in Vermont, we hit New Hampshire and it was a trip into the past in more ways than I had expected. She was out of the WASP world too – a sexually convoluted version on the fringe of celebrity and incest – and this was just when everything in my life had been turned upside down – these family people had become devious, vicious and dangerous figures in a landscape that at one moment had seemed in memory soft and nurturing, like the memory I held or created of the family, and in the next moment had seemed deadly – full of traps – sharp spears and spikes rigged up everywhere – no shelter in sight

And all of this change that was taking place seemed to coicide with what she too was undergoing. We had met in a place where people dealt with such changes. And now this change, and the fury and the new hope, were concentrated in sexual energy.

While we traversed all my old scenes in the White Mountains, I would from time to time call in to my answering machine in Chelsea. And on it now were calls from my Aunt Alice from right up here over in Littleton, saying she had something to tell me but not saying what. I did not return the calls – not until after our return and the failure of the tryst to extend into Chelsea – a sudden rift – sudden bitterness, and, yes, abandonment coming from all directions – this chaos that was familiar, that was deep in those old landscapes that I knew again now –

And when I did call from Chelsea it was Aunt Alice saying "It’s really Lauryn’s fault – she’s too good looking, too appealing, she brings it on herself."

GRANITE STATE V - Seductive

On this trip in the snow storm – which included a night dressed in the wrong clothes I’d brought from the city, moving by moonlight, 30 degrees below freezing, a foot of loose snow everywhere – through all those old scenes – the staid, formal summer houses where I and some kids I knew back then seemed the only inhabitants who could develop other lives – houses which seemed not quite right even back there in childhood when I did not even have words for what I feared, what seemed so possible, could happen in them.

On this trip now in what would be called middle age, a mission – save Lauryn! – this trip I was careful that no one in the family – not her mother, my aunt, to whom I did not speak and not anyone up here tied to family – making sure none of them know I am back here – back in this place –

Lauryn could be forty now. She was just as lithe and pretty as ever – still to all appearances an early twenty-something heart-breaker – and I knew how this had infuriated the family – my grandmother saying as if she cared when Lauryn was in her teens that she couldn’t see how anyone could be attracted to someone with that long straight hair that Lauryn seems to think is so wonderful – her mother saying years later, as if reporting something horrible, “She just looks the way she’s always looked. It makes me so mad. Her mother, my Aunt Alice, to whom it was becoming clear I had been too close in that dark past – her mother whom I recently learned had been in stiff, sexual competition with my grandmother Nana, this grand dame who ran a house where no one mentioned love much less sex – Nana and my Aunt Alice there in the past competing for men who would be friends of my grandfather.

Here in the upstairs sports bar in this mill town a few miles and also light years away from the old summer houses – pool tables here and guys at the bar doing shots with chasers – Lauryn drank a lot, the drinks kept coming to our table now as she told me how it had been – beaten and molested form the age of 8 till 16 when her brother Lenny was killed – beaten and fucked from the moment she was large enough for the probing to become penetration –

Early this year, she said, she had been back visiting in Littleton at her mother's house along with her older brother Lawrence and his wife.They had all been watching a made-for-TV movie that turned out to be about a girl horribly molested by family, and Lauryn,as she told me now, "Just completely lost it. I started screaming. They were amazed." The story had gone around in the family - even I had heard it, though I had so little conscious contact with family - but the tellers implied that it was something that had happened only once, her brother Lenny molesting her just once, which to other members of the family made the story hard to hear but, it seemed, easy to dismiss. Lenny, after all, had been dead for more than twenty years.Lenny, after all, had, like, Lauryn, been adopted.

Telling me about the years of being beaten - "The marks were there on my back" - beaten and raped - telling it in the unlikely Clam Box’s unlikely upstairs sports bar – drinking faster and faster – getting younger and younger – and I knew there must be some very clear psychological explanation – that was also my explanation – for why now my favorite cousin would be getting more and more seductive. The looks. The conspiratorial giggles. The smiles and the laughs and the unconscious touch. Which I had to admit was still appealing, the way she was now, though not the least bit tempting. The fact that she was adopted – which some of them seemed to think meant she was not really family – still did not make the possibility seem any less like incest. Like in the deep past after a night we kissed – that was all but it was enough so that we, Lauryn my ally and I – the only ones, it seemed, who had lives beyond family – we both pretended we could not remember it.

GRANITE STATE IV – The Clam Box

In Littleton that night, after Cousin Carolyn and her husband Thor had left – Thor living proof since I was very young of how wrong they could be. Carolyn always so level-headed, they said, so unusually effective – for a woman in – business. They said it silently clicking their tongues and tutt-tuting through pursed lips. So solid, they said, until that vacation in Norway (which was 45 years ago now). Can you imagine it? Someone from our family marrying her young ski instructor?

Which is why they had made fun just now of Carolyn after she left , and by implication of me because what had been so outrageous was her admiration for a very small and light piece of my writing. And the we went off to dinner at Littleton’s newest restaurant – here in the far north, just below the Canadian border -- surrounded by the highest mountains in the East – this new restaurant was called the Clam Box. Right at our cramped table - one of those family scenes I had been so good at avoiding for so many years – a cousin and an aunt of whom I was suspicious – here about as far as you could get from any sea – right in our face at the table an aquarium tank filled with slimy monsters – a banded water snake, a sort of squid thing, small cat fish sucking up something nasty at the bottom of the tank – a very slippery eel – all right her at the table where we were supposed to eat their close relatives.

This had been in August – this part of the hunt for what had happened in the deep past up here. And now it was late November and in-between was a trip that turned into a trysting trip – which combined intense sex with longing and what felt like instant betrayal, a trip during which this present seemed strangely familiar and the information about the past was pouring in and reaching flood proportions - and now it was nearly Thanksgiving and I was back. My first night – caught in a death-like whiteout in the notch = I’d gotten up to my old friend Ellen's house very late, but the next night I met up with Lauryn – who it turned out was recovering from her recent time in and out of Minneapolis battered women’s shelter with a new boyfriend in New Hampshire – a Littleton man who worked construction in summer and ski patrol in winter, and whose father was a locally famous Canadian mob figure from prohibition days. Not exactly what our family fancied itself, and it was seeming to me likely that this new place of Lauryn’s was far safer than any place for her in our dark, careful, faux Victorian family.

She said on the phone that the best place to meet, the best food, was the new sports bar above this new restaurant called the Clam Box.

Clams in the mountains. A Sports bar.

In the summer I had noticed how on nearly every village green in Vermont there were folksingers – the sixties seemed alive in Vermont’s eighties – and every Vermont town had all these new eating places – sometimes fancy nouvelle this or that, and sometimes health food that was thankfully as far removed as the fancy food from the traditional tasteless New England boiled dinner.

Most New Hampshire villages did not have village greens. I did not know of the Clam Box in August but would not have gone there if I had. I went to the Littleton Diner – which had a big blackboard advertising new specials – just like in all the new eating places in Vermont.

There was only one special on the Littleton Diner board. Oh God – am I becoming as snotty as the tight-ass people I came from? But so help me, the special was Cheeseburger quiche.



This strange part of the world that was supposed to be the happy summer place of my childhood – this past which was changing from sunshine to dangerous darkness so fast I had to be alert to keep up.