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.
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