MORGAN, Fall, 1962 - February, 1963

I thought I was writing a poem. I wrote a lot of them back then. The Beat Generation had sent me an invite, and I'd RSVP'd. It was nineteen fifty eight. Maybe late fifty seven. Three things colluded to trigger my need to write. First of all, Miles Davis', "Kind of Blue", which I listened to for the first time sitting cross legged in a rundown building on the cold floor in winter of an unheated apartment that contained only a record player and a huge painting named, "Bleeding Eyeball Tree". Very cool. Very hip. Like, man. Dig it, y'dig? Second of all, Jack Kerouac's, "On The Road", was a personal invitation to pick a place and Jack would meet me there. The third factor was heart break, my first. I wanted to die. No one ever suffered so much.The Checkmate, a coffee shop, the first and only, was a quick skip down the street. Baltimore's Bohemia. It was where I read my first poem wearing a brand new black turtleneck. I was seventeen. 

I can't remember whether it was romantic poetry or Shakespeare, but the class was being taught by Dr.Holmes, a soft spoken,very kindly man with large,doe-like eyes.It was Friday, last class. There were half a dozen of us. I sat in the last row as I always did scribbling away in my notebook, this time a poem set in eternity featuring an elderly man arguing with a young man, two people, back and forth, very meaningful stuff, worse yet,in verse, worse yet, they were wearing togas. After class Dr. Holmes stopped me and asked what I'd been doing back there?

    "Let's see," he said. 

He held his hand out and wiggled his fingers. Then he wiggled them some more. I handed him my notebook. He took a look and said,"See you Monday."

I can't remember if it was Keats or Coleridge,Lear or Ophelia,but it was Monday. I was back in Dr. Holmes' classroom. Not a word about my notebook until after class when he handed it back and told me to finish it.    

    

I blew off the rest of my day in the library writing until it closed. Long hand. A ballpoint pen and lined loose leaf paper.The IBM Selectric, that totem of the successful screenwriter, was not even a glint. I gave it to Dr. Holmes Tuesday morning. The next day, Wednesday, he'd given it to Dr.Waters Turpin to read. Dr. Turpin was the head of the drama department and wanted to see me on Thursday. On Thursday, he told me I'd written a play, and he intended to produce it. By Friday, one week after Dr. Holmes asked to see what I thought was a poem I was a playwright. The planets aligned. Life and Morgan had brought me to this place. 

Go figure.

An elderly tracker once told me, "Just because you lose the trail don't mean it's the end of the trail." He'd led search and rescue missions on horseback into the wilderness for a lifetime. I'd been bushwhacking for years until Morgan helped me find my way. I wrote a play, it was produced, ergo, I was a playwright. The fact that I had no idea what I was doing probably had everything to do with it. Instinct is all. I had begun to think of myself as a Byronic poet on the faculty of a fine liberal arts college some where in the woods publishing chapbooks seven people might read if I stuffed them in their Christmas stockings. I also thought about going into the tire business, my father's, retreading, a facet of the industry, even at that time dying out of existence. Shows you where I was in those days.

Dr.Turpin produced and directed the play at Morgan. A five hundred seat house was filled, both with faculty and students, friends and family, but also local personalities, politicians, and dignitaries. Newspapers, too, and all three local television stations.

It was February, 1963, two months before my father died.I'd had my troubles, to say the least. Half the time he didn't know what to make of me. That made two of us. Half the time I didn't know what to make of me, either. It got very confusing never knowing which half didn't know what. However, he came back stage after opening night, looking natty in a light gray Chesterfield overcoat with a black,velvet collar, put his arm around me, smiled, and said, "I guess you're not gonna be a bum after all." He was joking, of course. Wasn't he? I mean, eyewitnesses thought so. What?

Somehow, Dr. Turpin wrangled an off-Broadway production on stage at the Columbia Teacher's College in NYC. A sweet bite of the Big Apple.This was followed next year by a second play written as an Honors project and directed by Dr.Turpin at Center Stage Theater, Baltimore, Maryland, with a mesmerizing performance by the first actress I'd ever worked with, Carolyn Dotson now Wainwright, still a friend after all these years.

Not long after the production at Morgan, our local television station, WJZ, Westinghouse Network, approached Dr. Turpin about creating a documentary on the history of the American Negro. I researched and wrote it. My fellow students acted in it, WJZ aired it - The Unknown American. The first of its kind. So many Black people in so many fields doing so much for their country, our country, yet our country didn't know anything about them. And Black people,an entire campus full, for no reason other than they were good human beings seeking  the very same things I was, helped me find where I belonged. In today's world I might well be accused of cultural appropriation, but this world was not that world. I see things now that I didn't see then, but I saw things then that needed to be done and tried to help do them. Morgan brought something into the world that hadn't been there before. It won a national broadcasting award as well. We'd done a good thing. We believed we lived in a time when facts mattered and faith was a staple of the heart, except, of course, they didn't and, ultimately, faith, well, I don't know what to say about that. 

I left a trunk filled with memorabilia - early poems, letters from a dear uncle, yearbooks, a varsity wrestling letter - at the apartment of a woman I'd been dating. I liked her very much but didn't love her, though she loved me. It wasn't that she wasn't wonderful. She was. It's just that the needle went so far and budged no farther. I was in California when I told her I wasn't coming back.The transition from east coast to west had been underway for some time.I'd been dragging that footlocker around for years. She dragged it to the curb and left it on the street. New York City. Upper West Side. 110th and Riverside. My only copy of the play was in that trunk. 

The following excerpt - young man arguing with older man - is all I remember. Dr. Turpin's notes claimed it took place in the "womb-tomb of time and space". No set to speak of, ramps and levels and lighting. Music: Satie

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 it's 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.

 

Eden - corrected version

 He’s over there asleep on the sofa in front of a dancing fire. It’s brutally cold outside but not in here, not with last spring’s firewood blazing in the fireplace. The “He” I’m talking about being my2 ½ year old grandson, Dorian Alexander. What a little pistol he is! If cuteness were firepower, Little Man would wipe out the room. My own children, Sevi and Madden, have been the wonders of my life - breathtaking , sometimes difficult, but still  life blood throughout my entire being. As an old cowboy in Montana once told me about his children,”Wouldn’t give ya a nickel for ‘em, wouldn’t take a million”. Now, I’ve got Little Man asleep three feet away. How does a person keep from exploding when a body overloaded with feelings sends you flying through air like a loose balloon? My experience is no different from millions of grand parents, but I’ve taken to wondering why, really why? You may disagree but here’s what I’ve come up with. I’m not certain these thoughts are original, but, y’know, lock ‘n’ load. No guts, no glory.

 I passed the sofa where he was sleeping to bring in more firewood. He was asleep on his back. That face, unblemished, free of wrinkles and blotches, stopped me cold. “Let the damn fire go out. You don’t want to miss this.” I looked at his closed eyes to see if there was movement. I wondered if he were dreaming and about what? His sweet breathing was sometimes interrupted by a purring sound, like that of a kitten. An unmarked face completely at peace. A face that was peace. I was mesmerized, unable to look away. I even forgot to breathe. I remember when my son, about the same age, asleep in his crib in the dark of night, I walked into his room, stood by his crib, overwhelmed by feelings foreign to me until this little creature kidnapped my life. I reached down and touched his head. Instantly, a flash, a jolt, a powerful charge of some kind of unleashed energy that bound us one to the other for life. This connection between my son and me (unleashed again two years later when Madden Rose became our daughter), a connection as powerful as anything I’d felt before caught me by such surprise that it felt as if I were being hurled by a tornado, free of the earth, no fear, free from everything on earth except my son. It beggars the question:

Why?

Lots of reasons but I’m looking for “The Reason”.

He is innocent, as yet unburdened by the minefield ahead. When last I checked, the Garden of Eden was the first and last place of pure, unvarnished innocence: cradled, cared for, no worries, no enemies, no concept of good or sin or evil, loved as you will never be loved again. Nothing to line his face or turn his hair gray. Not yet. It’s a perfect world. He is so innocent. Now. But, he won’t be for very long. He’ll be entering a foreign world. I watch his unbounded joy and discovery, “That was me!”, and that epiphany sends me back to Eden before the gates were thrown open, and the only two innocent beings in creation were told to take a walk. They were issued consciences as a parting gift. After that, they would never again have that sense of peace and innocence except that brief sliver of time at the very beginning. I delight in his innocence and, for that split instant, his innocence is my innocence, too.

New Year's Eve - December 31, 2020

"In with the new, out with the old" sounds like the proverbial new year's toast, but not for my mother. Upon meeting Jamie for the first time, introductions were barely over when these very words came out of her mouth, only in reference to how I played women like lottery tickets. "He leaves 'em all sick. Out with the old. In with the new."" she said and quickly segued into "The only reason Jewish boys like gentile girls is for the sex." Jamie replied with a straight-face, "I know that's important to Stephen, Elizabeth."  Right then and there I knew I had a winner. Why am I thinking about this now? I don't know why I'm thinking about this now. No clue. It came into my mind as I sat down. It is New Years'Eve after all. And that's the way it works, anyway. 

I've been an octogenarian for a week now, and I'm down, we be cool, I got stuff to do. It must be said that these days have been just about my best so far. I don't feel any worse than I did at seventy-nine, and, except for a few aches & pains, I felt pretty good then. Mostly, I'm anxious for the holidays to be over so I can get back to a regular work schedule. I've had no plans to write another novel (Three's enough and who needs the hassle?), but New Year's eve, without forethought or planning, out came eight pages. I was just sitting there staring into the fire thinking how different this was from all the other NY's Eves we've celebrated. How quiet. No earth-shaking thoughts. No epiphanies. Just mulling things over when, all of a sudden, my computer jumped into my lap and began giving me instructions. My fingers hopped around the keyboard on their own like Mexican jumping beans. Eight pages later I fell asleep. 

Back in 1968 I made my living as a stage manager. I remember looking around my first year at Yale wondering how all the playwrights who graduated were making a living. Mostly, I discovered, they weren't. Now, I'd had no theater experience whatsoever except that I'd had this play produced. My room-mate at the time was a director who was about to turn down an assistant stage manager gig at the Cape Cod Melody Tent in Hyannis. As I ran down the stairs I yelled, "Hey, Rog, tell 'em I'll take it." He did. They called me. I went to NYC for an interview. Had I acted? Of course. What? Howard in Picnic, Greek chorus. Directed? Of course. What? The Sandbox. No Exit. However, really, of course, I'd done nothing at all. I lied. Apparently, they didn't see through me because I was hired. Two weeks into the season I was nearly fired because I didn't know what the hell I was doing, so I dug in and learned, and, by season's end, I had my equity card and a way to make a living. Cut. Dissolve. A couple of years later I was Edward Albee's stage manager for the premiere of a new play at the the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, directed by Alan Schneider.. Pretty nifty gig. For a month I was around GianCarlo Menotti, Stephen Spender, Buckminster Fuller, Michael Cacoyannis, John Cazale, Irene Pappas doing an imitation of Danny Kaye begging her to have sex with him, Edward Albee, Israel Horowitz, a young Al Pacino...Others I can't remember, but I do remember the famous sculptors, Henry Moore and Isamu Noguchi. All this glamour and fame, but what they wanted most was to go home and back to work in their studios. They wanted out of there. I heard them say it. Back to work. I sort of understood it then, but I really understand it now, especially now, since, no matter how optimistic a guy is, time is limited, and I have another book to write. Jim Harrison, a favorite of mine, died with his pencil in his hand and a sheet of paper on his desk with an incomplete sentence. Sounds just about right.