Morgan - I Become A Playwright

I was seventeen when the trifecta kicked in. That same year I heard Miles Davis', Kind of Blue; read Jack Kerouac's, On the Road; had my heart broken for the first time. I remember sitting in a circle in an unheated beatnik "pad" feeling oh, so cool, yes, cool, but dark and brooding as well. Portrait of the artist. Lord Byron. "Mad, bad, and dangerous to know." I remember thinking Kerouac had written me a personal letter. "Where do y'wanna go, amigo? I'll take you there!" I remember the agony of that broken heart, worse, I fancied, than the malaria our troops contracted in the jungles of Burma. It came in waves. Each wave worse than the last. Seventeen, and I wanted to die. Instead, I wrote poetry. It was this trifecta that years later led me to Morgan. Let me explain.

Why a blues loving poetry freak decided on medical school is a matter of speculation? But, there y'go. America in the fifties played by stricter rules, and those rules dictated a button down conformity that no longer exists in the same gun point way. Kerouac might have become my guru, but med school was still my go to, as if carving a cadaver in a cold morgue were the same as reading Keats', "When I have fears that I may cease to be...", on a windy hillside.

Heartbroken, infused with the rhythm of beat street, wailing with Miles' horn, broke down and undone, I wrote my first poem, a love poem: Love is a feeling, a feeling feeling, a hell of a feeling, a wonderful ecstatic feeling, or is it...? What a load of crap, huh, but it caught on, and suddenly I was reading my poem to packed houses in coffeehouses up and down the East Coast. Suddenly, I was a real live poet complete with Beatnik "chick", Shelly, who wore too much eye make-up and, after I finished my reading, would roam through the audience with a bread basket beseeching , "Bread for the poet". Can you believe this crap? All true. Shelly managed to rupture my heart even further by running away to South America with a drummer.

What has all this got to do with Morgan? I was still a poet when I got there. The Marines never stopped me. In fact, it was in the Corps that I discovered Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, both World War One poets of immense power. It was also at the base library in Camp Lejeune that I discovered, "Johnny Got His Gun" by Dalton Trumbo. I don't know what the base librarian had in mind, but that material burrowed deep down into my soul, and I've never been the same since. Once a Marine always a Marine. True. Still, something lodged like grape shot, dug in, and stayed there. I no longer harbored the desire to do bodily harm to someone else equally as innocent as I now knew I was. At this point in my life I consider myself fortunate that I never saw the worst of it except that I've been left with a serious case of "Survivor's Guilt". Better that.

I don't know where the idea came from, but it struck me that I had a poem to write that was essentially a dialogue between two men - an old one and a young one. As usual, once I got started I could not stop, even during class which, in this case, was romantic poetry taught by Dr. Holmes, a gentle man with doe-like eyes and coca colored skin. After class he asked me what I'd been writing, gave me a skeptical glance when I told him I'd been taking notes, and gestured for me to turn it over. I remember him wiggling his fingers. It was Friday. I did. He read it, told me to finish it. Go home and give it to me Monday, he said. I remember running to the library and writing 'til the lights went off then writing furiously all week-end until the thing was finished - a very lengthy poem that was kind of like a play. Kind of. I'd never written one before and didn't know I was writing one now, a play in verse, no less. Anyway, Dr. Holmes read it, turned it over to Dr. Waters Turpin, head of the drama department, who took it the next step, produced and directed it. The production even went to a venue in New York City. Now, I was a junior at Morgan State College and a playwright. Life was finally getting to be fun.

PS

The following excerpt is all I remember of my play. It's the young man speaking to the old one.

"This I know and only this, that I am given a life, a gift that only once I will receive to do with as I choose, and I choose to wring it dry of all its pleasures so that when I am wombed in death's certain eternity I cannot reflect in anguish that I have had but birth and death and nothing more."

I was twenty-one. Say what you will. It got me into Yale.