Years ago, actually many years ago, I wrote what would become my first Rizzo book. It was called like a deuce, which was a reference to the Bruce Springsteen song Blinded By The Light. The lines went:
He was just blinded by the light
cut loose like a deuce, another runner in the night
blinded by the light
Mama always told me not to look into the sights of the sun
Oh, but Mama, that’s where the fun is.
Springsteen was referring to a souped up car, like “a little deuce coup” to quote a Beach Boys’ song, but I intended a double meaning. Rizzo just wasn’t a sports car zooming around in the night but also a wild card, as in “deuces wild” in poker, so he was in essence unpredictable. He was my journalist protagonist who was too cocky for his own good. And Rizzo in the first Rizzo books (like a deuce & Rizzo & Mike) had a dog who was a little wild, too.
Now Rizzo as a character stayed with me and aged in a series of books I wrote using him, mainly because various agents I had couldn’t seem to sell any of those books and I just refused to let him go. He became, as had many of the characters in those books, personal friends of mine, as real to me as real friends of mine, who in many ways influenced the characters in those books. The bantering between Rizzo and his best friend Peter was so similar to the bantering over dinner tables, in kitchens, in bars, walking on the street, in theatre lobbies that friends of mine and I indulged in all these many years. Those characters were, in essence, my friends and me. And the nameless dog that was, as Jimmy Powell once quipped after reading the earlier book, the second most realized character in the novel, was my dog Frodo, alive in those pages, a ghost in the novels to follow, haunting Rizzo, and also that other character who pops in and out of various novels of mine, Anthony Provenzano.
So it wasn’t unusual that one day last week when I was talking via skype with my old friend Chuck Thegze, he started asking me about some parts of my life he only became aware of by reading my blog. Now Chuck has known me since he was the West Coast editor of Avon Books and he tried to buy my book Rizzo & Mike for Avon (that was 1978) and though the house eventually passed on the book, Chuck and I became good friends. We both still remember the night we played pool in some pool hall in Santa Monica and also the night he came to my house in Santa Monica for dinner of my famous red clam sauce and he met my ex-wife Jane (who wasn’t my ex-wife at the time) and my dog Frodo, who left a lasting impression on all my friends and family.
So we got to talking about Frodo, who in Chuck’s mind is spiritually connected to the Rizzo books and to LA even though Frodo was a native NYer just like me who just happened to spend part of our lives in Ohio (perish the memories) and LA. He wanted to hear the story of my first night in LA, when after having driven across the country in a make-shift caravan with 3 cars, a U-Haul 24 foot truck, 6 adults (Dave Capus, his girlfriend soon to be second wife Peg, Dave Reed, another friend of David’s named Bill, Jane, and me), one child (Peg’s daughter Ivy), a cat (Dave Capus’ whose name, sorry, David, escapes me)and my dog Frodo (and yes, he was named after that character in Tolkein’s books in the hopes he, too, would be loyal and brave, which he was, though a bit wild, too, perhaps because of the way I played with him.). The two Daves, Jane and I, and the dog drove ahead to find lodgings for us all and that first night we all stayed in a 4 person motel room in Canoga Park which allowed pets. We did find a 5 bedroom house in Simi Valley where we all lived together for 2 months but that’s another story. The first night, though, the two Daves went off scouting out bars while Jane and I drove into Beverly Hills to have dinner with my only friend in LA, Rip Crystal, & his girlfriend who would eventually become his wife, Fran.
Whew. That was a long intro.
Anyway, we hired some kids to stay in the motel room to watch Frodo while we were gone and when we came back around midnight, the room was empty but there was a note to call their mother. As it turns out, she had the bright idea of bringing them all to her house, and Frodo, who probably thought he was being kidnapped, bolted out of their door at his first opportunity to escape and disappeared somewhere in Canoga Park miles from the motel, lost and probably scared, which pretty much sums up how we felt when after spending 2 hours driving throughout their neighborhood calling his name every 100 feet or so, finally dragged ourselves back to the motel thinking we had lost him forever on our first night in LA.
However, much to our surprise and relief, he was waiting for us expectantly on what was to be our bed, his tail wagging profusely, those cries of joy coming from us all, and the two Daves laughing as they explained how Frodo was pacing up and down the block in front of the motel waiting for someone he knew to come home. How he found his way back was a mystery; however, that night I let him sleep between us though insisting he stop wagging his tail.
There are so many stories featuring Frodo but my favorites revolve around his total loyalty to me. As a puppy, he wouldn’t eat unless I sat next to him on the floor and would throughout his life insist on climbing onto my lap while I was trying to write, hunched over my trusty Smith Corona, even when he grew up to be a 60 pound dog. He was black & tan, half German Shepherd and half Collie, with a slightly pointed head and those long, floppy ears which I refused to have clipped. He was fixed late in life (when he was five) by Jane who had him living with her the first time we separated in North Hollywood because I agreed to let him live there to protect her since she lived with another actress and both felt safer with Frodo around. Besides, I lived in a much smaller place in Malibu and it was really too small for him. How he became neutered, though, without my permission happened because he bit the first boyfriend she took up with after leaving me. I loved him for that, but was distressed she had him fixed and almost took him away from her. But I relented because I did worry about her and Lauretta, her roommate.
The other time he proved he was my dog was just before I left LA after losing my store. I had been housesitting at Ren Weschler’s mother’s house for the two months prior to leaving and Frodo was staying with Jane and her soon-to-be second husband Jack. Our agreed upon understanding was that arrangement was only temporary until I left for NY because up until that time he was with me but I couldn’t have him at Ren’s mother’s house. A few days before I was to board the plane for NY I called Jane to arrange picking up Frodo. She then asked if I could change my mind and let her keep the dog because, as she said, “Jack likes him.” I thought that Jack was getting Jane but there was no need for him to also get my dog and told her to let Jack get his own dog. She kept pleading, though, so I offered a compromise. I told her to bring Frodo to the acting school where she was working when no one else was there and that I would come to the school, sit for a while talking to her, and then get up to leave. If Frodo followed me out to my car, he went with me to NY. But if he stayed in the school with her, she could keep him.
Well, that’s what we did. He was happy to see me, jumping, running circles around me, and finally calming down enough to lay on his back so I could rub his stomach and chest. After a while, when he was resting quietly, I got up to leave. As soon as I stood, his ears perked up, and as I walked to the door, he got up and followed me. We walked down the stairs to the parking lot together, and when I opened the car door, he climbed in, and laid his head on my lap as soon as I was seated behind the wheel. He never even looked back. And thus we flew off into the sunset together.
He would let me take a bone out of his mouth without once objecting, chase a stick for hours and dare me to take it away from him, bark at anything or anyone that came within a block of whatever house we lived in but could tell the sound of any car belonging to a friend of mine within 150 feet of the house and stand, his tail wagging, at the door waiting patiently for them to enter, would walk next to me off his lease and would stop on a dime if he tried to chase another dog or squirrel when I yelled “no!” He had the saddest dog eyes and the wettest nose which he would somehow find a way to stick inside my shirt. He loved spaghetti, lettuce, and raw peanuts, and would go through a large box of milkbones in less than a week. I loved him more than I’ve ever loved any animal and it broke my heart when after fifteen years, he finally couldn’t walk anymore. Taking him to the vet who finally gave him an injection that put him to sleep forever was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I cried for over ten minutes in that vet’s office, unable to leave him there, still seeing his eyes as he looked up at me just before the needle went in. I had him cremated, and his ashes sit on my desk today, just as they have sat on my desk these 20 some odd years since that day, physically with me just as he is with me in spirit, still in my memory, my heart, till I join him once again to play fetch in some heavenly field.
memoir writing
Cypress Hills Cemetery
Cypress Hills Cemetery, Brooklyn. My summer job two years in a row in high school. First my junior year, and then in my senior year when my first summer stock experience in Benton Harbor, Michigan ended with the company closing after two weeks because of protests led by the two directors over unfair working conditions. But that is another sordid tale full of intrigue, sexual deviation, drunken pool games, and why I’ve always mistrusted the Midwest. But now it’s summer in Brooklyn and I’m getting a great tan under a hot merciless sun among tombstones and some people I used to know.
First there was Theresa Farrell, my mother’s cousin and daughter of Aunt Lizzie, who we saw quite a bit of and whose husband, Whitey Farrell, got me the summer job at Cypress Hills Cemetery. Theresa was a big woman, dark haired, laughed a lot, and loved my mother. Whitey was a former weightlifter, had tattoos on his arms of dragons, stilettos, a laughing Hot Stuff Devil complete with pitchfork, who would only smoke unfiltered Camel cigarettes because that was what a real man smoked, and chewed on toothpicks when he didn’t have a cigarette stuck on his lips. He was a gravedigger at the cemetery and drove one of the gravedigging machines that broke the ground. He loved to show how strong he was by letting someone dangle from his arms and if he wasn’t barechested, he wore his Mickey Mouse t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a pack of Camels tucked in one sleeve. When not working, he could always be found playing poker in what was a sort of breakroom for the workers, drinking his draft beer in the paper cartons they would get from the bars to make it look like they were drinking something else, though everyone, including the foreman, knew exactly what was in those cartons. Whitey would always drive around in the mornings just before breaktime to take coffee and buttered roll orders from everyone and there actually wasn’t anything in life that quite equalled to what that coffee and roll tasted like during those long summer mornings, sitting under a tree at the cemetery and letting work stop for twenty minutes while watching the world go by. Afternoon breaks brought that draft beer in those cartons and again, beer was never as cold or refreshing as it was those hot afternoons in Brooklyn.
The workers were all Italian, Irish, or Portuguese, they being the newest immigrants to take these jobs, and most never finished high school. It was a dream of many of the younger ones to pass the GED test (General Education Development) so that they could apply for a job with the NYC Sanitation Department. But like most dreams, no one that I knew or heard of actually did that.
I worked with Rosario Rizzo, who did not like to be called by his first name and was constantly teased by our co-worker Danny Gallo who would sing out “Rosie” whenever he was far enough out of reach of Rizzo’s hands. Rizzo, it seemed, was actually a distant cousin of mine, his mother being a Durso related to the mythic Frank Durso who was at one time the head of the Durso clan in New York and to which I also belonged somewhere in that genealogy.
Danny Gallo, also the son of one of the gravediggers, was a skinny kid from Jamaica, Queens, with a broad smile and eyes filled with the promise of better things to come. I never saw a dark cloud pass over his face, nor heard a curse, or a sigh. He was always happy, always content, perhaps because he expected nothing more from life than what was in front of him.
Rizzo was a big young man: fat, but with strong arms and legs, like a weightlifter gone to seed but still retaining most of the strength. He had a deep laugh and loved to sing Italian songs when we worked, a booming tenor among the tombstones. And though Rizzo himself was not the prototype of my favorite fictional creation, I did borrow his name for that character and adapted the lack of a first name for him.
Then there was Phil, the son of a Portuguese gravedigger who spoke a little more English than his fellow countrymen, but still did not understand most of what Phil said. Phil was entering college, like me, and loved books, the only one who actually read more than a menu who worked there. He was a typical NYer, sarcastic, a bit jaded, he looked at life through tired, mistrustful eyes, knowing that no matter how bad things were, they would only get worse, and if things were good, it wouldn’t last till nightfall or morning, whichever came first. We went to a Broadway show together, he took his then girlfriend and I took Karen Deene. It was Baker Street, based on the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, with Fritz Weaver and it was the first Broadway show I actually went to. And later that week, during lunch, Phil and I would recite lines from the play, sing the lyrics of the songs we could remember and make up others to fill in the gaps, pretend we were Sherlock and Dr. Watson, amusing the other green attendants.
Lunch was sitting under trees near the entrance and away from the tombstones, eating hero sandwiches, drinking Coke or beer, speculating on how hot it would get that afternoon and whether or not they would let us go early because it hit over 95 (a union regulation, and we were all card carrying union members: AFL-CIO Local 365).
There were others, too, whose names elude me but the faces are clear, the way they talked, the walks, the dreams spun on those lawns, the purr of the trimmers as they skirted the tombstones, the power mowers, the raking, the pitchforks we needed to load the garbage truck, and my favorite job: stoking the fire that burned the grass, the discarded wreaths, the dead flowers, the leaves. Danny and Rizzo worked the truck with Dick, an older year round green attendant who drove the truck and liked to stop by the overpass of the parkway and watch the cars, hoping to see a woman pass by with her skirt pulled up exposing legs.
There was Reilly who once told me to sit in the truck going up the road to drop us off at our individual work spots when I was standing because, as he said, you would stand enough in life so you should sit whenever you got the chance. Reilly was a big Irishman with the red nose of an alcoholic who was a seasonal like the majority of them, working from March through November before being laid off to collect unemployment until March 1st when he would get the call to come back to work.
The foreman, our immediate supervisor, was Ned, medium height, wiry, wore glasses that he was constantly pushing up his nose, and always had a Yankee’s baseball cap on. I actually never saw him without it. He didn’t laugh much, but he would smile at all the workers, chain smoke Lucky Strikes, and knew everyone of us by name, age, and where we lived, who we were related to or knew at the cemetery because no one got a job there without some kind of connection to someone else who worked there. He coughed a lot and I imagine he must have paid dearly, like Whitey did eventually, for all those cigarettes.
I cut myself on one of those trimmers one afternoon, a stupid mistake that earned me five stitches in a doctor’s office without any anesthesia while Ned waited patiently by my side. The scar is still there, a white line just above my left knee, to remind me of those summers, those people, a life working class people much like my family were destined to live, a life I somehow avoided because of my senior year in high school that was sandwiched between those two summers at the cemetery. I like to think Phil escaped it, too, though I know Danny’s and Rizzo’s ambition was to work full-time among those tombstones, among those men, till they were eventually laid to rest under those trees in a discounted plot reserved for employees in good standing.
And whenever I would visit my mother’s and father’s graves at St. John’s Cemetery in Queens, I would think of Danny, Rizzo, and Phil, and wonder who would burn the flowers I left behind when they dried up. And thank whatever power there is in the universe that it is not me.
My Senior Year of High School
Senior year of high school found me attending acting school in Manhattan. It all came about because I was enacting some story in my head to Jimmy Hanley who looked at me with a half smile on his face and said, “You oughta be an actor.” Now I probably thought the same thing at one time or another like every kid thinks, but never really taking it seriously because the only thing I ever wanted to do since I became enthralled by E.B. White’s Stuart Little was write. I mean, I loved reading, loved the worlds I discovered in books, loved getting lost in other people’s lives which in books I seemed to be able to do so easily, and I thought I’d kind of like to do that, too. Create worlds people could get lost in, create characters people could care about, want to get to know, have coffee with, maybe, and watch logs burn in a fireplace as they traded stories. So writing is the only thing I thought I would ever do, but then this idea of acting, getting lost in characters in real time, seemed like an interesting complement to what I thought would be my life’s calling, so I mulled it over a few nights, then told my mother I was thinking of going to an acting school to see where it could lead. She, naturally, thought it was a great idea, being supportive of us as always, and so I thumbed through a Manhattan phonebook looking for the school I thought I remembered people like Gary Cooper studied at, and quite by accident picked the wrong one, but in the end it didn’t matter.
The New York Academy of Dramatic Arts. On 57th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues. My new second home for a pivotal year in my life. The year I had the two most influencial teachers I would ever know and the year I made friends with people, though I lost contact with as the years slipped by, who would leave their imprint on my heart and mind for the rest of my life.
That year I had my senior English class every morning at 8 and was exposed to Dr. William Jaeger, called Wild Bill affectionately by his students, who opened my eyes to literature in a way no one had previously. We read over 15 novels and plays, poetry, etc., including 2 novels by Camus, J.D. Salinger (whose Catcher in the Rye was banned in the school district so he had us read Seymour: An Introduction & Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, which was his surreptitious strategy of sneaking Salinger into school), Jonathan Swift, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Stephen Crane, Orwell, Conrad, Sophocles, selected Dialogues from Plato, Shakespeare’s King Lear, which he would act out for us, and so much more. Each morning was an adventure in his class because you never knew what he would do. He was a big man, a part-time actor (I saw him in a small role on TV once), and he pranced around the room, his tie loosened at the collar, his shirt sleeves rolled up, his eyes flashing, his arms flailing in the air. We would sit in a big circle and he was in the center, like in a circus, with him challenging us to think every second of those class periods. I loved books before but he made everything jump off the page. And the class was the strangest mixture of students: honor roll scholars, student body officers, hoods, loners, geeks, athletes. We all couldn’t figure out why we were in the same classroom but a few years later I met another alumni of his who told me because he was that rare PhD teaching high school in those days, the principle let him have the top 100 IQs for his classes, regardless of their GPAs. And his stated mission was to save us before we grew up into adults. I don’t know how many he “saved” but he certainly changed my life.
Then there was Lee Stanleigh at night: my acting teacher. He used a distilled version of The Method to tap into our inner emotional lives in order to get us to “feel” the roles he assigned us for scene study. The breakthrough role for me was Starbuck in The Rainmaker, which no one in their right mind at the time would have thought me capable of. But Lee did. And he talked me into the role, as he talked me into roles like Brick in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, with Big Ed playing Big Daddy and throwing me around the room in our version of the mendacity scene. Lee saw Tennesse Williams stamped on me and so had me also take on Tom in The Glass Menagerie and Shannon inThe Night of the Iguana, all tormented souls. And each time before I would get to go on, he’d talk me into the mood of the piece, sometimes for 10 minutes or so, and then let me loose with my emotions on my sleeve.
Between those two, my brain and my heart got a workout but I grew in ways I never imagined possible and found pain beneath my surface begging for a release.
And then there were my classmates, everyone older than me and from every possible corner of the city and social-economic class:
Big Ed, an alcoholic, from Elizabeth, New Jersey, and hung up on old Western gunfighters, telling tales he read from Western magazines right out of Zane Grey, his favorite TV show being Gunsmoke, had once worked as a runner for NJ gangsters bringing cigarettes and whiskey across state lines until his partner shot some of the competition in some bathroom in a bar and Ed got spooked enough to quit. His hands shook uncontrollably, his eyes were shot, I saw him suffer from the DT’s once, shaking on the floor, foaming at the mouth. I’d often sit in bars with him late into the evening listening to his stories and even took a bus out to NJ once to visit him in his lair. He was one third of the trio that spent time with Lee after hours, including me and my first real love: Karen Deene.
Karen’s real name was Karen Gross but she preferred her adopted stage name Deene. A NYC Jewish girl from the lower East Side, she grew up in Peter Cooper Village, one of the first middle-income housing projects built in the city. Her father was a doctor who worked for the city in a clinic somewhere, and Karen graduated from Hunter College as an Education major. She was 2 years older than me but graduated college when I graduated high school because she skipped a year in grade school and I lost a year due to contracting ringworm on my head when I was seven and had to stay out of school for 6 months, causing me to repeat third grade. Karen became the prototype of almost every woman I ever fell for: long, dark hair, deep, dark eyes, a sly sense of humor, book smart, cultured, intuitive, perfect in every way except she was in love with Lee who was married to Carol but was openly gay. The marriage happened because Carol had an hysterical pregnancy and got Lee to marry her, only to find out it was a false alarm. They stayed married for reasons I never understood but did not live together. For Lee, it was an attempt to go straight that didn’t work. It was a source of anguish for Karen which made it a source of anguish for me.
Henry Munoz was a Puerto Rican from Jackson Heights, Queens, who looked 16 but was almost 30. He worked in the graphics department of Penthouse magazine and was secretly gay. He confessed this to me while we were having ice cream after watching Zorba The Greek one Sunday afternoon in Lynbrook. He was afraid I would reject his friendship but since he never propositioned me, had always treated me with kindness and respect, I saw no reason to stop being friends. He would often come out to the house on Sundays to get away from his abusive father (he still lived at home) and have dinner with my family. My mother loved him, and he always brought her a gift, spent holidays with us sometimes, and we remained friends for several years afterwards. I lost contact with him, though, after grad school in Ohio and often wonder what became of him in the decades to follow with AIDS ravaging his world.
Alvin Miller, an African American from Springfield, Massachusetts who came down to NYC to study acting. He was a year older than me and lived in Canarsie, Brooklyn with his aunt who I later found out wasn’t exactly his aunt which explained why he was sleeping with her. She was very nice to me, and I often went out there to visit him, and he came to the house, too, many times on Sunday and as explained once before, ate 3 plates of spaghetti with meatballs and sausage. He moved out to LA in my freshman year of college and though we wrote for a while, I eventually stopped getting answers to my letters. He used to joke that he would end up like Sam Cooke, shot by some woman under questionable circumstances, and I always wondered if that didn’t happen one day.
Roger, from St. Albans, Queens, who introduced me to Miles Davis and Charlie Parker and tried to get me to go out with his sister. They lived together without any parents around and I was never exactly sure what Roger did for a living since he rarely seemed to be working but always had money.
Nelson, who lived in Harlem and co-wrote songs with another guy I can’t remember the name of but can see him clearly in my mind’s eye. He was short, wore thick glasses, had a pencil thin mustache that looked painted on, and always had a hat on, a white shirt and sports jacket, no tie. Nelson was tall, athletic, handsome, with the sweetest smile, and questionable sexual preferences. There was a sailor from Haiti who lived with him sometimes and girls were constantly going in and out of his apartment. His New Year’s Eve party was held the same year that the subway strike happened at 5am on New Year’s Day and because of that, I didn’t get home until 4:30 the next afternoon. I slept, more or less, in the living room of Nelson’s apartment and sometime in the morning another friend from school, Lou something who was so in love with Barbra Streisand that he saw Funny Girl on Broadway four times, and I shared a cab downtown and I had breakfast at Karen’s apartment, meeting her parents and coming as close as I ever came to getting a real kiss. I think if I hadn’t been so shy around women then, I might have convinced her to go out with me, but I wasn’t able to read the signs right and whatever opportunity I might have had passed me by.
John Woods, Julian Richards, and Victor Stein and I used to spend two or three evenings after class at the Barney Stone a few blocks from the school on Eighth Avenue doing boiler makers, eating corned beef and cabbage or a ham and cheese sandwich while talking about acting, theatre, films. John was from Brooklyn, Julian from Jamaica (the island, not the section of Queens), and Victor was from Kew Gardens, Queens. Sometimes Big Ed would join us. Julian would sneak a pint of Canadian Club in under his coat and we’d spike the draft beer that we bought at the bar. I’d always get home late those nights, usually catching the 1:52am train on the Long Island Railroad, and get up the next day for school. And on Saturdays, I’d go into the city and meet those three guys along with Henry Munoz and sometimes Alvin at the Cornell Club where Julian worked. He’d get us an empty room and we’d drink, watch TV, talk shop until the evening, then most of us would go out to catch a movie, then go downtown to The Village to eat some more, find a bar, and stay till closing, talking about the one thing we had in common: acting.
And there were others, the names faded from my memory but not the faces, not the way they walked, danced in our modern dance classes, the way I would leap about in fencing class pretending to be Errol Flynn, the instructor shaking his head and saying, “Discipline, Len. Fencing is about discipline not jumping over chairs and slashing the air.” Of course I understood that, but would still jump over chairs anyway with John Woods playing Basil Rathbone to my Errol Flynn and Karen clapping with the others as the instructor gave up with a sigh. And the time we had to recite lyrics using our own stress and intonation patterns and I used the lyrics from the Bob Haymes/Alan Brandt song That’s All which I learned from the Sinatra and Strings album and though I could only look once Karen’s way, she understood and rested her hand on my head after I sat down in my usual spot next to her.
Later, after I drifted apart from them all when I went away to college, and performed the roles I was most proud of: the drifter in Hello Out There by William Sarayon, Leslie Bright in The Madness of Lady Bright by Lanford Wilson, and Biff in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and my formal education began, I really never learned anything those people during that year didn’t already teach me.
I remember it all. That year. The year that changed the trajectory of my life. And the people who helped put the finishing touches on the person I was and helped point me toward who I am today.
On Writing About Myself
I think it would be fair to say all writers write about themselves even if they don’t because what we omit is as revealing as what we include in whatever it is we write. Besides, writing, like all the other art forms, is an attempt to communicate something to someone, otherwise why make it public? We all can’t be like Emily Dickinson, but even she showed her work to some people even if she did not publish it. And I am no different than any other writer in that I, too, within the act of communicating, expose myself.
Actually I’ve always said that to understand my character one would have to read my books because though the books are not necessarily factual in regards to my life (they are fiction, after all), the tone or voice of my books is all me. My sensibility, as it were. But the facts/details in the books in the back stories of the various characters, in the events described, are partially mine and also belong to those people I have known, whether friends or acquaintances, or even passing strangers. So you can’t think I am the characters, but I am the books.
Which leads me to explain why I have suddenly begun writing these pieces on this blog that are included in the “thoughts and observations” category. I am, in this way, putting down the facts, my facts, or at least the way I remember them, which is, of course, subjective, but which is something I feel at this stage in my life compelled to do.
So I’ve written about my two fathers, my brothers, on the differences between the youth of today and my generation, on protests, on my bookstore, on life in LA, among other things, and will soon write about my mother, the other women in my life (grandmother, aunts, in regards to how they have influenced me in terms of the women I have chosen to become involved with), my dog, the men in my life (grandfather, uncles, and the effect they have had on my character), and who knows what else. It is all a new venue for me: nonfiction. Chapters in what I suppose could be called a personal memoir. Something my friend Chuck Thegze has been after me to do for some time now, so Chuck, and I know you read these because you comment on them, thanks for the motivation.
Why now? Well, why not? But to go beyond the pat answer, because in talking about these facts to the few readers who actually read them, I am also recording what happened so that I can continue to understand why I ended up where I am. I think if I were back in the US among my friends, I might not be doing this, even with Chuck’s urging, because I would be having conversations with some of the friends who are reading these, and you all know who you are, during our normal interaction. But here, in Turkey, where I have no real friends, I find this is an adequate substitute, or at least the only substitute open to me. For though I find myself relaying stories here to people around me, I know they are only half listening, their interest level in me being minimal, being defined by the nature of our relationship: student or teacher working for me. They have to at least pretend interest, though I can tell very, very few are really interested. I know this because though I’ve given books to many people here, only a few have actually read them. And though I used to share the posts with facebook “friends”, I only now share them with the handful of designated “close friends” since these posts are too personal to share with people with whom I would not be having those conversations with in person.
And I think also I am at that stage where I now regret having no family of my own. I think of my brother Johnny, or close friends like Dave Capus who have offspring that they can relate their stories to. But I, for reasons now that somehow do not seem as important as they once did, managed not to. And so these remembrances are really my way of passing on these stories, of not letting the ghosts in my life fade away. So with the indulgence of those who are only interested in the poetry that I mostly post, I say that these memories will keep popping up, for they seem to be buzzing around my head, waking me up in the middle of the night and demanding I pay attention. And this is not a good thing because I don’t sleep well to begin with, but now, besides all those fictional characters that call out to me to give them a voice and who, at times, seem more flesh and blood than the people I share the ferry and bus with, that sit in classrooms or the cafeteria, that bump into me on street corners or at Ali Usta’s when I’m just trying to get my two scoops of walnut and almond ice cream, now, yes, now there are these shadows that have come out from behind the curtains, from under the bed, from along the walls, and they say, Len, it’s time to tell our stories, too.
So I listen up. And I record. And if you’re not interested, just skip over these pieces and wait for the next poem because there will be more poetry. I can assure you of that.
Leonard Durso 