I opened the apartment door on the following vignette:
My parents were up from DC. Harmony's parents were down from New Hampsire. Littlefield's parents were over from wherever, helping him move out. This was a ton of parents in a three bedroom apartment, almost, but not quite all at once.
To back up a page: We'd taken to torturing Littlefield in an effort to get him to move out. I wanted Harmony in and Stewart out. The tipping point came when he performed an all Chopin recital and put us through homo hell both decorating for the after-party and trying to coach us on what to say to his many admirers and parents. Both Yoshi and I found this insulting. He assumed that we could not be trusted, so we moved from being sympathetic to being deliberately untrustworthy saboteurs. The most infuriating aspect of his nagging concerned his misogyny. He couldn't stand the fact that I'd allowed a woman in his living quarters. This was a familiar point of view. It had been presented to me by Goode before meeting Davis, and tacitly reiterated by Davis when he recounted the story of the naked lesbians. The outrageous lesbians on the beaches of the Cape remained in my mind as dystopian models. I had seen a couple of dykes arguing on the beach at Truro, and realized that they had the same burdens as the rest of us. To single out a gender or a sexual preference as abhorrent had worn thin in my mind. I was getting around to the idea that we are all in this together and we are all equally unworthy of being included in the party. The idea that Stewart might have been still remotely fond of me, and that it chafed that I had blown him off did not ring true. His behavior as a wastrel, out all night, home with different boys each dawn, and his increasingly shrill rejection of anything I liked (jazz, women) ruled this out. I wish now that I could have found something sympathetic in him. He had, for a short time, been an exemplar of an ideal of physical male beauty. Now I simply found him pathetic. I was also beginning to fight back for my aesthetic. Davis and company had played endless recordings of the same handful of Chopin pieces. They sighed in rapt admiration over 'the quality of the writing.' The more I heard the Revolutionary Etude, the Polonaise in A Flat Major, and the Raindrop Prelude, the more I became convinced that this composer had no sense of humor. I was beginning to see through Van Dykes eyes, and they dimmed considerably when it came to filigree. I think, actually, that Van Dyke would argue that filigree that had structural purpose was tolerable, even referring to it as passagework rather than curlicue. I know that he himself played some Chopin. I myself eventually came to play, enjoy, and to try not to parody, the Nocturne in E Flat Major. That work itself parodies Bellini and Donnizetti by way of Field.
Oh, right. Littlefield. I was getting around to the night of the party, from which Harmony was banned and Yoshi and I labored under a list of instructions as to what we could do, say or think. The recital program was on a music stand in the kitchen printed in pink ink. The bunting and crepe paper were all in perfect place and not to be disturbed. We sat there trying to decide whether we should even attend this travesty when Harmony knocked on the door in her evening gown. She had a key, so her knocking was a gesture of respect towards the delicate Littlefield.
"You look great."
"Yes, Harm, you're a knock out for a persona non-grata."
"He never let up on that did he."
"Nope. You're banned from the party."
"Well, he can't ban me from the recital hall. We'd better get going."
"We were just trying to decide if we were actually going. I mean, I'm not sure I can get through all of this pink ink."
I flicked a hand towards the program with its all Chopin gobbledygook.
"Shit. There's another complication."
"What's that, Harm?"
"Sorry to shock you Yosh, but Cal, I'm on the rag. I need a quick change of plug."
"The bathroom is still down the hall."
Off she went. In a moment, she calls:
"Hey! Cal, where're the tampons? I had a whole new box over here!"
"I don't know," I yell back. I'm getting up to check on my lover in the loo.
I push past the cracked open door. She's sort of skirt up, panties down, looking vulnerable. I look in the medicine cabinet where only this morning the tampons had lived, causing a Stew to boil over again. I looked beneath the sink. A pile of scotch tape balls and crepe paper remnants filled the wastepaper bin. I saw that the bulk didn't quite match the contents. Littlefield, in his obsession with neatness, had emptied the bin just yesterday. I peeled back a layer of crepe. There, buried beneath the detritus of party prep was the whole new box of tampons. I fished them out. I handed Harmony one.
"Mystery solved. Here's a fresh plug."
"That's a bit over the top, don't you think?"
"C'mon, we been going at it for months."
"No, I mean for Littlefield to throw out my tampons."
Before we quite knew what damage we were doing to the peace that passeth understanding, we were, all three of us, tying tampons from the arcs of turquoise and pink crepe. We taped some to the walls. We laughed our heads off as we taped one to the bathroom mirror. The final touch, I taped one over the blushing letters on Littlefield's program that said "Prelude Number 15 in D Flat Major (Raindrop)." It took a bit of time for all of this ersatz creativity. Littlefield's program was not extensive. We had dawdled quite a bit beforehand waiting for Harmony. So timing wise, just about the time I stood back and looked our devil's handiwork over, there was a burst of merriment in the stairway. I heard loud, congratulatory voices.
"You were simply marvelous, fabulous."
"A thousand and one kisses."
"Not half bad for an old queen!"
"And that last bit, that "prelude" thing...
"...love that one! And I nailed it!"
The door burst open and for a moment there was a flicker of consternation because the instruction to loose the 'bitch' had not been followed. Then, when, like the Colonel in "The Bridge Over the River Kwai," the first tampon was spied hanging from the crepe, and then another, and then yet another...the queer eye racing all the way to the one taped to the fancy paper triumphal banner, the consternation became a scream of mortal anguish.
"How could you!"
Murmurs from the inrushing gathering. What in hell was going on here?
"You! And you! All three of you!"
Littlefield's parents, his father slowly bouncing back from an incapacitating coronary, were in the very rear of this well of humanity. They made it inside to find their only son in tears, sobbing at the dining room table, being consoled by his latest boyfriend. For a good Catholic mother and father, it would have been hard to determine which indignity was worse, the roommates and their despicable, utterly tasteless redecorating scheme, or the blatant fact of their son's aberrant sexuality. They already knew about it, I assumed. And Catholics aren't quite Baptists. Still, we three didn't linger over this scene. We passed them going in on our way out. We three went to Charlies in our tuxes and her gown of green satin. We sat there trying to rekindle the merest hint of our former mirth. It was not a good feeling. Looking back, I still think tolerance and restraint would have been preferable. As it was, it set in motion the next scene, which, as noted, began with opening the door on three sets of parents.
It was the end of the semester, the beginning of another winter break, and the beginning of the end of my relationship with Harmony. I killed it by sheer obtuseness. This is the difficulty with a memoir. Either you make yourself the hero, or you tell the truth. It's a sliding scale; some things can be fudged for self-interest. Leaving out of considerations things that are not worthy of reportage (every burp and fart), some things may not be felt to be recordable for the sake of those still living or for that same self-interest. It boils down to the same thing. If you blow up your support group, you've damaged yourself. Every autobiographical author has a bottom drawer and also, likely, a hidden compartment. That is the human condition. I have a place where I draw the line, but the rush of words in a confessional has a therapeutic effect. I'd rather skip this next bit, just as I skipped the bitter end of the Goode affair. I can't. Too many plot lines emanate from this conference of parents.
My parents sat at one side of our dining room table, and Harmony's sat at the other. I walked in and saw that this was the case, and that Harmony was serving as hostess. She was at the sink, making tea. I took this mental snapshot, and it remains in memory unblemished. These days I would have joined the party no matter what the level of my animosity for the participants. I loved my parents of course, and love them still. That sort of affection is part of the bond that brought us into being in the first place and radiates out in all directions, across time and space. (There's another metaphor that a philosopher might want to get hackles up over!) The sight of Dr. What's His Name, however, made me recoil. My disregard for him had increased since my visit to New Hampshire, not abated. I did not wish to sit down with the estimable Professor Hard Tack.
"Cal," pipes Harmony, "sit! Have some tea!"
"Mom, Dad, How was your trip?"
I stood in the doorway to the dining room and kitchenette, still in winter gear, my snowy boots making puddles on the floor. My Mom answers,
"Fine, fine. We drove the new car."
"Really. What kind of car did you buy?"
"It's a Chevy Wagon," offers Dad.
"Great."
I nod at Harmony's Mom, but I can't get myself to acknowledge her father. His wheelchair is folded against the cabinets, his cane is by his side, and he's not looking at me either. He's staring at a spot on the table about two feet in. There's nothing there but cheap vinyl tablecloth. In a way, his surliness is a feature that excuses mine. It almost, but not quite, lets me off the hook.
"OK then. I need to get out of my boots and stuff. I'll do that in my room."
Down the hall I clomp.
I'm not sure what sort of opera I thought I was in. It surely wasn't buffa, though there was going to be a confusion finale. I like a lot of literature, but I come up short when trying to analyze or name the genre or even the mood of the following scene. It was anti-dramatic in a way. Dramatic would have been to confront the Old Fart and be a lively participant in the debate over my own future. I sat down on the bed and took off my boots. I continued on and took off my wet socks. I threw my coat and scarf on the back of a folding metal chair. I tossed my hat on the seat. The steam heat was clanking and I was upset, so off came the flannel shirt. In T-shirt and jeans, pants legs rimmed in snow melt, I grabbed Lao Tzu and flopped back on the bed. I cracked the slender book.
"The way that can be named is not the unchanging way."
It took about 15 minutes for Harmony to realize that I was not forthcoming. I heard the footfalls of her platform heels coming down the hall. I saw her head poke in the open door. She saw me in bed with a book.
"What in hell are you doing?"
"I'm reading a book."
"I can see that, but we have guests...your parents, mine..."
"I don't want to be in the same room with that asshole."
She realized, face reddening, that I was talking about her father.
"That's just as assholian. He's my father. I can't change the fact, or him."
I turned back to the book.
"Watch your actions. They become habits."
I heard her footfalls as she went back down the hall.
My next visitor, quite a few pages of the Tao later, was my mother. She had no trouble barging in to my room. She stood for a moment quite near the bed, then threw my hat on the bed in the general area of my head and sat in the folding chair. Now I was in deep shit. The battle of wills had come to me, despite the fact that I remained in my private space like Achilles. I smiled to myself at this thought and, as though Mom and me had done the mind meld, I glimpsed myself as small, foolish, and engaged in uncivil war. After all, what had the man done other than speaking the truth and insulting my cream of wheat?
"Cal, I don't know what's the matter with you. Can you explain it to me?"
The temptation was strong to read another morsel of ancient wisdom at random. The image of the paperback pages, yellowed with age, and bearing a serif type that seemed to hover before my eyes in eidetic memory provided a quip, even as I stared directly at my mother.
"When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everybody will respect you." Did I say that out loud?
"That makes no sense. What you're doing, by staying in your room is rude. It's embarrassing your father, Harmony's folks, and, most importantly, me! She's a lovely girl, bright and talented and sociable. How is she going to enjoy life with a baboon like you?"
"I like her too, Mom. But I can't stand her father. Being in the same room with him is intolerable."
"Her father? What'd he do to you?"
"Oh, nothing really..."
"Then why are you being so silly?"
"He accused me of sleeping with his daughter."
"You are sleeping with his daughter, aren't you?"
"Of course."
"He said I had to abide by his rules in his house."
"That sounds very familiar. I think it sounds like good policy."
I'm rapidly running low on ammunition.
"He said my cream of wheat tasted like carpet tack."
At this, my mother begins to laugh.
"You get your sorry self out into that kitchen and stop making a fool of all of us!"
She was always good at moving from one emotion to another. She'd laugh and joke. We'd fool around like a pair of kids. Then she'd pop me in the nose. It always made it hard to find 'a girl just like the girl that married dear old dad.' She was a hard act to follow. The blocking, for any actors following along, was as follows: she rose to her feet while delivering her last line, and then exited, stage right. Mother-son conference over, I picked up the Tao again.
"He who controls others is powerful, but he who controls himself is mightier still."
With heaven and earth in agreement that I was being an asshole, and that two assholes does not make for a spotless toilet, I renounced the necromancy of my sit down strike, and padded barefoot out to the kitchen. I got there just in time to see Harmony's mother helping her husband to his feet. As he took the coat from her and went for the cane, he leaned forward to me and said:
"We came a long way to wait too long for you to put in an appearance. We're leaving."
Then, turning to Harmony, he said:
"You know, you don't have to move in with this guy. We can afford a nice apartment down here for you."
"I know, Dad."
She had the wheelchair and was going to brave the elements for the time it took to get her elders in their car and on their way. She was a devoted daughter and a good woman. She didn't, as her father had said, have to move in with me, or even put up with me.
Fathers in wheelchairs move slowly. The confusion finale was about to commence. As one New England patriarch made his way out, another was out on the sidewalk working his way in, with the rest of the clan in tow. On this evening, with the crunch of snow cover underfoot, the result of that other blast of incivility was coming home to roost. It would be better to mix a metaphor that involved large moving vans such as the one that was now clumsily lumbering down the Fenway access road to my address. Roosting? No. Stew; moving out. At the steering wheel of the truck was Stewart Littlefield. The elder Mr. Littlefield was also moving slowly. His coronary had set him back. A roaring lion of business, he now took care and plodded. Meanwhile, in the outgoing clan, Harmony's mom did all the driving. The car, by miracle was parked in front of our stoop. The clans met up at about this point. Do I need a Gettysburg-style electric map to tell of these armies of the North? The men did not know each other, and the women were preoccupied, so it was merely a matter of choreography. Old Cream of Wheat had to be installed in the Buick. It occupied the exact piece of real estate that Stew hoped to occupy. He pulled in close and turned on his blinkers. His ineptitude as a driver had him pulled partially abreast of the car that needed to exit so that he could enter. Riding shotgun with Stew was his lover, and the sole truly able-bodied member of his moving team. The lover stayed in the cab while Stewart jumped out to help his dad get up the steps. He encountered, therefore, the hated Harmony. We were all hated, of course, but she was the one with the tampon supply. They nodded at each other. No words were necessary, the truck told all. At last the New Hampshire clan was ready to pull out of the coveted space. They could not, since the truck was in the way. I stood in the entrance hall, and watched past the lace curtain. I was now a professional driver. I possessed the skill to pull Old Futz and Gutz out despite the obstacle. I was in my bare feet, which were cold on the marble. I was still frozen inside. I did nothing to help, but watched. I watched as the slow moving Mr. Littlefield, guided by his son, and followed by his mother, worked his way past me on their way upstairs.
"Oh, God!," the old man gasped. "I'd forgotten about these stairs!"
"It's OK, Dad, just take it slow."
They were impeded by my parents, who'd put on their coats and had come down the stairs to say good-bye. They were not so lucky as parkers. They were parked at the Westland Ave Garage. (Two dollars.)
Harmony, having been outside enough to turn a bit blue, went past me also, the crowd on the stairs forming a bit of a bottleneck. The impediment inside was the slow moving father and son. The impediment outside was the truck blocking the Buick. Harmony's mom was a patient woman. I took the time to say farewell to my parents. It was tempting to walk them down to the good old Garage and introduce them to the cast of characters. Obviously, though, I had the night off and was not that keen to put on shoes. The traffic inside had abated at last.
"Bye, Mom."
"Bye Cal."
We're not a hugging bunch, old Calvinists that we are.
"Dad...sorry about all of this confusion.'
"Son, I wish you the best of luck with all of this."
Down the stairs ran Stewart. The door flew open and my father held it open for my mother as they filed out. I thought of marital harmony, but not of marrying Harmony. Her wretched father could never be my in-law kin. Both sets of impediments had now dissolved. I watched from the window as Stewart clumsily maneuvered the truck out of the way of the Buick, which then slowly pulled away into past history. Then Stewart commenced the act of parking a truck in a tight spot. The voice of Lamont Dixon filled my head.
'Pull it up once,' he'd be saying.
I was about to turn tail and head upstairs, but I held the door for Yoshi who was returning from somewhere.
"Yosh, the Littlefields are here. Stew's moving out."
"Well, so what?"
"I suppose we're breaking up the old gang."
We're up the stairs together.
"Old gang? We're losing a fag..."
"...and gaining a babe."
"Long live the gang."
Harmony and I retreated to our room (and now, it was ours at last, though she still maintained a presence in the dorm her parents paid for). We lay on the bed and turned towards make up sex as we listened to the furniture moving opera raging in the hall and on the stairs. Yoshi, too, stayed out of it. We occasionally heard, 'take it easy, Father, just do what you can do.' The fluting voices of Stew and his lover were mostly engaged in swearing. The swearing out of furniture is the only way to move your shit. I never heard a peep out of Mrs. Littlefield. I wonder how she did as a light hauler? I suspect she mostly packed stuff.
Now, with the mix to my liking, I can settle down and get the lawn chair of memory and wait for the fireworks. My narrative is now becalmed and the style is the sort of lightly accompanied singing that moves the dramatic action forward.
As I mentioned, many threads radiate from here. In the summer, with our school year ended and our lease up, Yoshi and I went our separate ways. He might have stayed in that apartment with all new people, but I don't remember. I moved out and moved across the fens to shack up with Harmony. I carried my books, clothes and stereo, including my battered tape recorder, over the roadway to the other side of Backbay by hand, no truck, walking each arm load, bit by bit. It was sunny and hot in our new place, and we were free to get sticky. We had a few good times, but the relationship cracked in a few months under the burdens of my doings with Van Dyke, Tennant, Rod, Xenia, and a few others from Dance. Especially damaging to that relationship with Harmony was the experimentation with psychedelic drugs which Harmony did not abide. The real killer, of course, was my unwillingness to tolerate the woman's father. Blood is thicker than water. It became water under the bridge, blood on the tracks. An apartment opened up in a basement row back on the Conservatory side. It was dirt cheap, painted in day glow, full of pipes and odd outcroppings of woodwork that covered the machinery of an old brownstone. It was accessed by an ascent then a descent via stairs or elevator. It had been inhabited by a graduating dancer, a thick waisted woman who never shaved her legs or pits, and who I found utterly exotic and resistant to any sort of flirtation. She was known as the Gypsy Queen. She worked in the costume shop. Perhaps she was a lesbian. When she offered me the place I took it. Had I taken to bitching about Harmony and flirting around? I carried my shit back the same way I'd carried it forth.
One thread that flows from this parental conjunction and aftermath is the hazy, perhaps inaccurate self-knowledge that my subsequent serial monogamy was predicated on the idea that I had trouble with commitment. In the mythology that I developed about myself, I thought that it was my commitment to art, art-making, the life of the artist, that made me turn tail and run at the first (or at least third) sign of trouble. It is certainly true that I remember, both going forward and back in time, the places I lived as much by the pieces I made there as the people I lived with. In 1974, I had Mara and her dancing to think of as I penned my ostinato. (This leaves out the assignment, given by Bonkowski.) Sophomore year was a drier, less fertile period. Perhaps that's what is meant by 'sophomoric:' you arrive at school full of youthful drive and ambition only to learn as a freshman that you don't know shit. The subsequent semesters, you have to claw your way back up, starting at the bottom. I remember working on a score that would have accompanied Dylan Thomas' play "Under Milkwood" while living with Harmony. I'd written an explication of "Do Not Go Gentle" for Nosh. He loved it. The 'Milkwood' score never made it out of pencil draft and certainly never sounded in any theater pit. It was aborted, like the relationship it paralleled temporally. Were the women to blame for art failures? Sex was a distraction, certainly. In the beginning, I made complete work for Harmony. I embarked on a series of studies for instruments that I couldn't play. For Yoshi and Harmony I made a duo. (The duo later made it into a larger work.) Then came a trio. I was clawing my way up. Far better that than to be making ambitious pieces for pit ensembles. I foundered on the quartet. Three voices were all I could manage. Still, I'm asking myself, what did my relationships have to do with the work? One bit of my mythology was that as the relationship began to falter, I became distracted by the emotional noise. I needed a placid mind to work. There's some truth to that. If a woman has just thrown a plate of spaghetti at you, you can't think the sublime thoughts that art requires. Two questions emerge from this one. Why did she throw the spaghetti? Are artistic thoughts sublime? Answers: she didn't, I made that up, and no. Many of the difficulties I had with women were formed entirely in my own mind. I nursed and perpetuated the conflict with Harmony's father. Had I toughed it out with a willingness to bend, we might have gotten to know, respect, and maybe like each other. Art is made out of shit. You are better off digging down into the perverse nature of your psyche to find the muck from which creation springs.
So going forward into the 'book of babes,' as I jokingly refer to my journals, it seems an endless, un-dramatic repetition of making stuff up that makes things fail, and at the same time failing to acknowledge the primal ooze deep down in the psyche that would, ironically, make things work. This is true both in life and the making of artwork. There is no dichotomy, and the two efforts run in parallel. Wagner was a baboon (an anti Semite) that made good work. That's just the way it is. I was unable to keep at a relationship, and I managed to write some music. I might have worked a little harder at both. I remember Zoltan Eminescu saying:
"An artist should be a good person. An artist must be the cream of society."
I was too obsessed with cream of wheat to be the cream of anything.
Places, people. It is a bewildering procession in a life. It doesn't make good fiction. To make the narrative work, connections must be made that were missed. An overly large dramatis personae must be concatenated. I am not interested in the boring actual truth. I'm interested in the essence of the perceived truth, even though the perception does not occur until well downstream in the river of time. "Harmony" was some other parameter of music, maybe all of them combined. She was any number of my serial monogamies all mashed up into one essential tale. Same with Mara, Adelle, Linda, and onward to Heidi, Lori, Marcie and Anne. There once was a woman named Kim. That is not to say that I am not telling a truth. I am needing to cut it short and get on with it. Things are happening around me that cannot be put off. Scenes also, and not just people and places, must be concatenated. It's a fake memoir. Did I tell you that up front? My mother reading of my sex life will find this novel misleading. It is not meant to be accurate. She'll read the words I put in "her" mouth and know that I have lied. She'll understand, maybe, what is meant by the term autobiographical fiction. That does not mean that if published, I can't be sued. It doesn't mean that I won't be stopped by a cease and desist. From his prison cell, Wilde worked into the twilight. It is a thing that must be done.
