Ellen was right

I was in New York last week for the current iteration of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, this one starring the strikingly handsome Orlando Bloom and the equally lovely Condola Rashad. Ben Brantley’s review in the New York Times called Bloom’s performance a “first-rate Broadway debut.” About Rashad he writes, “Good as she is in the early scenes, Ms. Rashad doesn’t yet have the vocal heft and variety to take Juliet into the echoing halls of tragedy.”

I would say that about Orlando Bloom as well and, in fact, about the production as a whole. There were pretty people to look at, there were intriguing pyrotechnics to wonder at and there was a general ability to deliver Shakespeare’s words and cadences well enough – there just wasn’t much emotion on that stage, in perhaps the most emotional of Shakespeare’s tragedies.

This is not, however, a review. For that I would need to have seen the entire play and, I’m sorry, but I bailed just after the morning scene. (It was the nightingale, and not the lark / That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear). I wasn't willing to have my love of tragedy dashed in the tomb scene. (Eyes, look your last; arms, take your last embrace…).

Leaving the theatre I knew what I would do as soon as I had a free night. That turned out to be last night, when I settled in for a thoroughly enjoyable two hours and eighteen minutes watching Franco Zeffirelli’s BRILLIANT 1968 interpretation of R&J. I cried when I first saw it in the movie theatre all those years ago, I have often cried listening to the soundtrack, and yes, I cried last night.

Why is that? It’s not like I don’t know how it ends. It’s not like it’s REAL – I know it’s a film, a film based on a play. It’s not even that I relate to it personally; luckily I've never had to make the kind of choices this doomed pair faces.

It’s that it’s emotional, and I have come to realize I am an emotion junkie. Some people play up-tempo, happy music when they’re sad, to climb out of that hole. Me, I milk the mood, revel in the feelings and revisit the pain. And it has nothing to do with my overall feeling about my life. Bitch though I do, I am ecstatic about my life: I have the best possible husband, three wonderful dogs, a great house and a thoroughly enjoyable job.

But another thing I have was identified by my friend Ellen all the way back in high school. She meant it as a compliment – and I took it as one – when she said, “Walt, you have the feelings of a girl.” I’m now Walter and I’m now a man – and I’d trust the feelings of a woman over a man’s any day.

Avant-garde in Brooklyn

This is the bicentennial year of both Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner; orchestras and opera companies have been rolling out their music all year. Today though I’m thinking of the centennial of another classical icon; Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring debuted at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris a hundred years ago, on 29 May 1913.

As you probably know, the premiere provoked a near-riot. The audience was not prepared for the double whammy of avant-garde dance coupled to music unlike anything they had heard before. This was no Swan Lake.

I was in Brooklyn last night, thinking of that premiere. I don’t think there was a riot at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, but I can’t swear to that, for I left after forty minutes of avant-garde NONSENSE!

When Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Cesena begins, the stage is nearly in total darkness. There’s a man making lots of strange noises; that much I could tell. Then he runs in a circle for a few moments; he might be naked; I’m not sure, it was too dark to tell. He leaves the stage.  Next perhaps twenty company members walk on stage; they move back and forth, left and right. Nothing they did would I call “dance.” Some sang polyphonic medieval music known as ars subtilior. The music at least was intriguing.

But still, the stage was in almost total darkness. Was that a man or a woman who just threw himself/herself on the floor? No idea. 

About thirty minutes in – at least fifteen minutes into my own “should I go or should I stay” debate – a woman not far from me shouted “Turn up the lights; we can’t see anything. This is unfair!” There were murmurs of what I took as agreement, though there were also hissings of “Quiet!” An usher approached her to tell her to stop.

Moments later the lights did come up a bit. I don’t think this had anything to do with her outcry, for the program notes told us that this piece was originally staged outside, using only natural light and began at 4:30 in the morning, in darkness. Since it lasts almost two hours, with no intermission, it would end well lit.

Clearly this was going to happen at BAM last night; before the performance started I had seen banks of stage lights awaiting their cue.

As I said though, I left. I realized that what I had been able to see made me want to see LESS, not more. I was on the 9:08 train home. I read Wild Tales, Graham Nash’s autobiography -- with plenty of light.

More on the summer of 1971

My post Remembering the pain, and the joy from October 1 has been on my mind ever since I started writing it. I have dug out and read my journal* from that summer and even gone online trying to find some of the people involved – not an easy task forty-two years later. It has been on my mind because, quite simply, it was the most intense summer of my life. I told the story of Matt in the earlier post, but there are other, equally emotional, stories to tell.

I was living with my friend Judy – not the Judy I asked to marry; no, that’s yet another tale – in Union City, New Jersey. It’s just through the tunnel from Manhattan, but a LONG drive to Merrick and Hempstead, New York, where I was working. It was a crazy drive: down Palisades Ave to Route 495, through the Lincoln Tunnel, all the way across Manhattan, through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, out 495 again to the Cross Island Parkway to the Southern State Parkway to the Meadowbrook State Parkway to Merrick Ave --but I was young and was driving my first-ever car, an AMC Gremlin.

Soon after starting work at Steak and Brew I became friends with a fellow my age named Paul. I wrote in my journal that the most striking thing about him was that he was a real challenge to me. He was smarter, more well adjusted and at least as strong a personality as I. Most of my friends up til then had been more likely to follow my lead than challenge it. Not Paul. He was in my face anytime I was less than direct or honest, or whenever I was manipulative, while also being loving and gentle, and, as I said, smart as hell. I loved him and cherished our time together.

Soon after, I met Sue and Jay, more waiters. We became inseparable. Jay was a bit younger and shorter, so he became the “son” to my “father” and Sue’s “mother.” We saw each other virtually every day, worked together most nights; we called ourselves “the family.”

Drugs and alcohol were a daily part of our lives, but not to terrible excess. Binge drinking had either not yet been invented, or we hadn’t heard of it. Mostly we talked and laughed and listened to music and talked and hugged and talked.

Through the entire month of July my life was blissed-out happiness. If I wasn’t with Paul I was with my family, or we were all four together. Then, on August 2, I think, I met Matt and that relationship took me away from my three friends. I still worked with them and went out with them, but not as much.

You need to remember that Matt was my first boyfriend. I had had gay sex before but I had never had a relationship, and even though ours was incredibly short, it was also incredibly intense and mind-blowing. We were both Catholic boys from the 50s doing things that guaranteed us a ticket to hell – it was a lot to deal with.

I was being pulled in too many directions and I handled it badly. To this day I cannot tell you exactly what I did but I know I hurt my four friends badly and I take most of the responsibility. The family broke apart, though it’s partly true that Paul took my place. My individual relationships with Paul, Sue and Jay each suffered and the group dynamic was ruined.

Then Matt kicked me out of his life and I was totally destroyed.

Sue and I patched things up and she was supportive of me at the end of the summer, but the magic was gone. Pretty much the same was true of Paul. He was too good a person to add to my pain but, as with Sue, the relationship never regained what it had lost.

Jay was harder. My memory fogs but I think he was more hurt and he also had a harder time with my new sexual explorations. (For the record, everyone else in this tale, probably even Matt, was straight).

One final friend, a woman named Riki, got me through the last terrible week of the summer. Sue had gone back to college, Matt had told me never to see him again and Jay and Paul were casual friends at best. Riki listened to me, held me and tried to cheer me up; she kept me sane.

When I said in the earlier post that I cried most of the 400 miles to Richmond, I really was not exaggerating. I was always someone to feel the pain, to “experience” it; when I was sad I played sad music. Graham Nash and Cat Stevens were my misery mates; I played those tapes over and over.

I want to believe I learned things that summer and that my dealings with later friends were better. At Notre Dame I had been guilty of throwing over one friend for another, and on Long Island I played that scene again, less blatantly perhaps, but with worse consequences. Moving to Richmond and, especially, taking Education of Self, helped me toward being “self-actualized” while still being kind and considerate. It’s a process that continues.

__________ 

 *A shout-out to my friend Don, who, on my seventeenth birthday, gave me a journal. The tale of the summer of 1971 comes at the very end of that first journal. There have been ten more volumes since then.

Finally, some of you may wonder what happened to the cynicism and the currency that gives this blog its title. The truth is, I find the current political scene so stupidly depressing that I have almost nothing to say. I’d rather share myself with you; I hope you don’t mind.

The Eyes

Paul Auster wrote in one of the New York Trilogy books (I read them too long ago to remember which one: City of Glass; Ghosts; or The Locked Room) that the eyes don't change. A picture of a young boy will allow the keen observer to pick from a group of old men which one was once the boy. Is that so? I don't know. You be the judge. Many of the above images of eyes are of mine. Can you pick out the ones that are me? Here's a bigger version of my contact photo to help you out:

Answers:

Left 1 - NOT me; my brother Raymond actually

Left 2 - me

Left 3 - NOT me; Ransom

Left 4 - me

Left 5 - me

Middle 1 - me

Middle 2 - me

Middle 3 – David T, a friend

Right 1 - me

Right 2 - Josh (our Sound of Music tour guide in Salzburg)

Right 3 - NOT me; my Dad

Right 4 - me

Remembering the pain, and the joy

It was 2:00AM on a Sunday morning maybe; likely it was July, though it may have been August; we were at an empty apartment in Queens, or perhaps Long Island. The thing I know for certain is that it was the summer of 1971.

I was working at two Steak and Brew locations, both on the island: Hempstead and Merrick. I had dropped out of Notre Dame after Kent State – for anyone too young to know, to my generation that’s a date as much as a place. I spent the summer of 1970 working in Manhattan and the winter in Wilmington, Vermont, living the incredibly hedonistic life of a ski bum. When the snows melted I went back to the city to reclaim my job, but the only one they could offer me was in Merrick and later, Hempstead.

Between the two restaurants I found many friends and lots of good times. On this particular night a bunch of us, maybe a dozen, were sitting around smoking dope (weed in current parlance) in a truly empty apartment; someone had just moved out, or was about to move in, and so the place had no furniture, no running water and no lights. We were sitting on the floor passing a joint and when I started coughing a buddy handed me the only thing we had to drink, a bottle of Jack Daniels! Oh, the things we did for our highs back in the day.

At around two in the morning I announced I was going out for a walk; Matt, a waiter I knew a bit from Merrick, said he'd come with me. We were all killing time before a pre-dawn road trip to Boston and I needed to clear my head. Matt, as you'll see, needed the same, in spades.

Matt was gorgeous. I mean drop-dead, head-turning, Italian model gorgeous. Think John Travolta in his Saturday Night Fever days, but far prettier. He oozed sex, but also charm. He had the best hair on Long Island. His girlfriend Sally was a hot Italian babe who got huge tips from the men, nasty stares from the women.

They were a dream couple and I liked them both, if only superficially. (Left: Matt was this good looking, and then some).

So Matt and I are walking on a beautiful summer night; I was stoned enough to think the street lamps were showering us with magical light and we were talking about work, about Boston, about New York and about wanting to have sex together.

WHAT?

Yes, it’s true. In the middle of nothing in particular Matt says, “Walter, I've never told anyone this and I've never done anything about it, but I want to have sex with a guy, and I want that guy to be you.”

I was stunned. Shocked. Astounded. And delighted. The thing is, this was 1971; I wasn't out to anyone. In fact I wasn't totally sure I was gay. I had had sex with all of three men, and none of it had gone particularly well. Yes, I was well aware how good looking Matt was but I don't think I had even entertained the idea of bedding him. He was straight; he was with Sally; end of story.

But there it was. We opened up to each other, walked for at least another hour and struggled hard to not jump each other’s bones on a random neighbor’s suburban lawn.

As fate would have it – or, the queer gods, if you will – Matt and I ended up in bed that very night. We were in Boston and five of us stayed with my Notre Dame buddy Steve. He was the one who assigned the sleeping spaces and, with no idea what it would mean, he told me and Matt to take the room by itself up on the third floor (thank you, queer gods). Obviously, Sally was not on this trip.

Matt and I fell madly in love. He demanded we keep it secret and I was closeted enough that I was okay with that. Anything to be with this beautiful man. It was intense. It was emotional. It was wonderful.

And it ended within a month. Badly. Very badly.

In a shouting scene worthy of Edward Albee Matt told me he wasn't gay, that he hated me for making him think he was and that he never wanted to see me again.

He got his wish. I haven't seen him or heard from him in forty-two years. The pain no longer throbs of course, but the memories are clear as a bell, and I remember that pain. Though I don't think what he said was true, I know that whenever a couple breaks up there’s fault on both sides. For years I wanted to try to talk things out but he never responded to any attempts I made to contact him.

And that, folks, is the incredibly long preamble to the story I am really here to tell today. (Note: I told a shorter version of this preamble in April of 2010 in a post named Coming Out, Part 1).

Just three months before this painful, painful break-up Graham Nash released his first solo album, Songs for Beginners. To this day it is still easily in my Top 5 albums of all time; it may well be my number one favorite album of all time. I have quoted before in this blog a few lines that hit me very hard that summer:

When your love has moved away

You must face yourself

And you must say

I remember better days

On the drive down to Richmond, Virginia, at the end of that summer, within maybe two weeks of Matt's devastating exit, I played Graham Nash’s album over and over and over, crying for most of the 400 miles from Long Island to the Old Dominion. (I also played Cat Steven’s album, Tea for the Tillerman a lot: "Now that I've lost everything to you / You say you want to start something new / And it's breaking my heart you're leaving / Baby, I'm grieving." My heart was breaking).

In all the years since I have played both those albums hundreds of times. I have bought many other Graham Nash albums as well as Crosby and Nash albums and, of course, albums by Crosby, Stills, and Nash, with or without Neil Young. But I go back to Songs for Beginners more than any of them.

This Sunday, forty-two years later, I finally heard Graham Nash in concert for the first time. I went with my friend Kathy who, ironically, I met within weeks of arriving in Richmond after that tortuous, tear-filled drive. She lives in Nyack, NY, across the river from the concert venue, the Tarrytown Music Hall. We were dear friends and roommates in Richmond, and have maintained contact ever since.

It was a terrific concert. He started by reaching all the way back to his days with the Hollies, opening with Bus Stop. He sang songs from all sides of his career; from my adored Songs for Beginners album he sang four songs: I Used to Be a King, A Simple Man, Military Madness, and Chicago. Though he didn't sing Better Days, he sang for almost two and-a-half hours and I was thrilled. He talked between each song, not too much, just enough. Often he told us the genesis of a song. Remember Our House from the CSNY second album, Déjà Vu?

I’ll light the fire
You place the flowers in the vase
That you bought today . . .

Well that’s exactly what happened when he and Joni Mitchell came home after she had bought a vase she had admired in a store window. By the time he got to the chorus, “Our house is a very, very, very fine house, with two cats in the yard / Life used to be so hard / Now everything is easy ‘cause of you” everyone in the audience was singing along – at Nash’s encouragement.

The final encore was another sing-along, the immortal (yes, I choose that word carefully) Teach Your Children. I turned to Kathy as we were walking out and said “it’s hard to choke back tears and sing at the same time.”

Was it worth the 42-year wait? Absolutely! And what have I played since Sunday night? Oh, Songs for Beginners four times, Teach Your Children as many, and lots of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young tunes from this wonderfully-gifted, politically-perfect 71-year old musician whom I now love more than ever, if that’s possible.