43.5. Shortly after I began my second term at City College, I collaborated on an opera with a black musician and actor, then in his upper thirties, named Lorenzo Fuller. I met him through my friend Bernie.
Were this a true biography, rather than a memoir, a collection of impressions and fragments, there’d be as much—or more—about Bernie here than anyone else. Through adolescence and adulthood, Bernie was not only my mentor, but Marilyn’s and Ana’s as well. He was an ebullient, gracious, and gregarious New Englander, just past fifty when, at seventeen, I met him—a man interested in all aspects of literature, music, and theater. He had been a practicing psychologist, working first in the New Hampshire school system and later at the Payne-Whitney Clinic in New York City. In New Hampshire he’d managed a professional theater company and as “Philip Drury” he’d played Cassio to Jose Ferrer’s Iago and Uta Hagen’s Desdemona in the famous Paul Robeson production of Othello at the Old Met. There are some dozen songs of his copyrighted at ASCAP under the name of “Brad Kearny.” The day I first went to visit him (at the urging of a young painter and sculptor, David Logan, a student in Marilyn’s French class who roomed at the back of Bernie’s and Iva’s apartment), he served tea in a red T-shirt, explaining that he had recently returned from a few weeks in Puerto Rico, and had just completed a novel based on the Gilgamesh epic, sections of which he read me that day. He and his tall, stately wife Iva had acted for longer or shorter periods as parent figures to any number of youngsters, many of them black and Hispanic, and some of whom went on to be quite famous—such as actors Marlon Brando and Earl Hyman. Bernie had directed the teenaged Brando in Allen Kaufmann’s children’s play at the Adelphi Theater, Bobino. A recent Brando biography says the young actor played a giraffe, but Bernie maintained it was a wooden soldier—and he was, after all, the play’s director. Brando, with the young actress Elaine Stritch, spent a lot of afternoons sitting around Bernie’s and Iva’s apartment, then on Gramercy Park. And Hyman tells a charming anecdote of how, when Bernie first invited the sixteen-year-old black youth to visit and served him a cup of hot chocolate, Hyman, terribly nervous at meeting a professional man of the theater, managed to pick up his cup and immediately spill it on the floor. Seeing the boy’s embarrassment, at once Bernie overturned his own cup of chocolate and said, offhandedly, “Oh, that’s the way we always do it here.”
They remained lifelong friends.
But these were anecdotes from the forties.
By the sixties, Bernie’s spacious West End Avenue apartment was the center of an exciting circle that included endless musicians, actors, and painters, as well as his old friend, Harlem Renaissance writer and artist, Bruce Nugent—and Lorenzo, who had played Sportin’ Life in the Porgy and Bess troupe that had toured Russia in 1956.
It was the closest I’d ever gotten to a salon.
One of Bernie’s adoptees, Fred, was a musician and actor who had gone on to join the church, had become a priest, and had eventually become musical director of a fairly large midwestern cathedral. Bernie was a devout atheist. But he was also a great-hearted man and a musician. Some years before, as a gift to Fred on his ordination, Bernie had composed a Mass in D Minor. Shortly after I met Bernie, arrangements were made to perform the work at a small church in Brooklyn, and Ana, Marilyn, and myself all sang in the chorus of twenty-odd of Bernie’s friends. Numerous mornings I rose at five to come up to the apartment and help him copy out parts. At the performance, Bernie played the organ—as he had when a boy for his father’s congregation in New Hampshire. We were accompanied by a small woodwind orchestra. For three months Lorenzo rehearsed us, and, at the performance, he conducted—and sang the baritone solo.
Lorenzo had picked up the nickname “Father” because he called everyone else “Father.” I was “Father Chip,” Bernie was “Father Bernie,” Marilyn was “Father Marilyn,” and Iva was “Father Iva”—and Fred, when he stopped by to visit, was “Father Fred.”
Inspired largely by my adolescent infatuation with the music and cast (and the Oliver Smith scenery under the glorious Jean Rosenthal lighting!) of West Side Story, which played at the Winter Garden from the time I was thirteen until I was at least eighteen, the opera libretto I’d drafted was about Puerto Ricans and drug addiction and juvenile delinquency, with a Hispanic bruja, or “witch woman” (the contralto) whose spells really worked, thrown in for color.
Lorenzo read them over in Bernie’s living room and, half an hour later, looked up and announced that he’d love to write the music. And, when I confessed that I had a few musical ideas of my own, generously he suggested we spend some time together working on it: as thirty-six-year-olds sometimes do with bright eighteen-year-olds, he’d developed quite a crush on me.
For a few weeks, after classes at City College, I’d go up to Lorenzo’s Edgecomb Avenue apartment (the penthouse of a rather famous building, I later discovered in various histories of Harlem, though I didn’t know it at the time), and, in his fairly small, somewhat dark living room, filled with plants, the glass doors to the terrace ajar behind us, we would sit together on the piano bench before his upright and work on aria after aria, recitative after recitative.
Lorenzo had come to New York from a dirt-poor midwest farm at eighteen or nineteen; he’d started out as something of a musical prodigy in his hometown, and in his first years here had done very well in the city, with a scholarship to the Julliard School of Music, where, as the prize for winning some composition contest, an early symphonic work had been premiered by Toscanini with the New York Philharmonic. He’d had string quartets performed at Carnegie Hall. But he’d also found that, despite bits of adulation here and there, there just wasn’t very far you could go if you were a serious black composer in this country.
Lorenzo also happened to be a stunningly handsome man: he looked rather like a more severe Billy Dee Williams—only a few shades blacker. He also had a fine baritone voice. He had a warm and outgoing personality—so he’d taken up acting. And dancing—enough to negotiate musical comedy. At twenty-five or so, well before the Porgy and Bess tour, he’d landed parts in the original Broadway productions of Finian’s Rainbow, and Kiss Me Kate, where (as Larry Fuller) he’d been the first to perform the showstopping number “It’s Too Darn Hot.”
When I met him at Bernie’s, he was writing cabaret acts for various nightclub performers and giving voice and piano lessons at his home. At the time, he was doing a show for Butterfly McQueen, called The World is My Oyster (today, every six or ten months, I find myself sitting next to her or across from her on the Broadway M-104 bus: a diminutive, smiling black lady in a somewhat worn black coat, holding a black bag in her lap, one of the two principals still alive from the cast of Gone with the Wind …). I knew Lorenzo was gay. I’d even thought of going to bed with him—though, at eighteen, I had no idea how you broached the subject. I knew he liked me; but I was truly unaware his own interest had a sexual side to it. In 1960, this was just not the kind of thing gay men let be known to teenaged boys they met socially—or, for that matter, to anyone else. Lorenzo’s personality was energetic, electric, even frenetic, and, in his and Bernie’s social circle, he was considered something of a genius. And I was writing an opera with him.
It was probably our third work session at Lorenzo’s apartment. We’d been jumping around some in the libretto—I think we were working on something in the second act. Lorenzo sat beside me on the piano bench, debating some phrase with me—“Now, let’s see. Let’s see, Father Chip! Maybe if it swung way out, here … like—” and he’d play a few chords and intone some booming melodic line.
“Yeah, I like that!” I said. (That’s what I tended to say a lot with Lorenzo.) And he would lean forward and scrawl a handful of notes and chords on the ten-stave music sheet on which it was all going down.
At some point, however, when I was looking over what he’d written, he put his hand on my shoulder. I was saying something like: “You know, here, if we go between C and E-flat a lot, here—I mean back a
nd forth, almost without any recognizable modulation, we’ll build up an awful lot of tension for when Pop makes his entrance in F, right down here—”
I looked over at Lorenzo’s hand.
He was staring at me.
I smiled, looked a bit confused, and, indeed, suddenly felt a little excited. I thought: Oh, he’s going to proposition me! I was wondering if and how and when …?
But what he did was start to quiver.
Suddenly he leaned his head against me, holding my arm so hard it hurt. For a moment I was worried that, no, he was sick! I asked, “Are you all right …?”
But when his other hand moved to grab my leg, I realized, yes, we were indeed within the sexual.
Without letting me go, he staggered up from the bench and, in a kind of quivering daze, dragged me into his bedroom, fell with me on the bed, and began to tear off our clothes, mumbling things like, “Now, now …!” and, “Please, please, don’t be frightened! It won’t hurt! I promise!” I think at one point I even said, “I know you’re not going to hurt me, Lorenzo, but could I at least get my arm out of my sleeve?”
Which I don’t even think he heard.
For the next seven or ten minutes he labored on top of me to climax, while I tried to get into it, realized I wasn’t, tried to pull away from him, found he was holding me too tightly, tried to get into it again, got a little scared, then tried to relax, and at last, in an uncomfortable state, moderately passive/responsive, just waited till it was over—though I wondered a couple of times if it mattered at all what I was doing.
He came.
He may have even asked me, afterwards, if I could, or wanted to, come. And I just shook my head and said, “Naw, that’s okay.” But I’m not sure of that.
There was a quick, awkward, and silent redonning of clothes. I was probably the one who said, “You want to finish up the scene we were working on?”
With great relief, Lorenzo returned to the piano bench; I sat beside him again, and we worked for another hour—till I went home.
There was no mention of the sex from either of us. My own feeling was: that it was awfully silly and not much fun.
When I left, I made another appointment to come back in two days and we’d start on the third act. Save for a slightly sore shoulder (from the initial grab) and a somewhat bruised lip (from one of his rougher kisses), no, I wasn’t hurt. But I think I was quietly appalled.
There was never any more sex between Lorenzo and me—nor any mention of it either. Both before and after, he was as friendly, kind, and solicitous of me as any man in love with an eighteen-year-old could be. This is one of the places where I learned that a person can be a truly kind and thoughtful individual while absolutely unacceptable in bed—unacceptable in a way that has nothing to do with being a “good” lover or a “bad” lover as far as technique goes. Indeed, the difference between the acceptable and unacceptable I mean is a qualitative difference that begins to distinguish willing participation from physical coercion.
Bernie was one of the first adults with whom I could discuss sex. Certainly he’d suspected Lorenzo’s crush; at one point he asked me how we were coming along. I knew he meant the opera, but I said,
“Well, we went to bed. He was very … energetic about it. Though, really, a couple of times I had the feeling that if I’d just gotten up and left in the middle, he wouldn’t have noticed.” It was, if anything, an understatement.
Bernie said: “Mmm? Well, I know what you mean. There’re lots of people like that.”
And over the next few months, Lorenzo and I finished our opera.
But even I was unable to say to Bernie that I had actually been unable to get up in the middle and leave—at least without much greater violence that I was prepared to exert.
43.51. As I pondered all this in the hospital, I figured that the experience with Lorenzo had been my fifth, possibly sixth, sexual experience (i.e., adult, gay); certainly it was early among the incidents where a social situation led, however clumsily, to the bedroom. And, if I’m honest, it had as much to do with my turning toward “promiscuous sex” and away from social sex as any single happening.
The eyehook of an autumn evening while walking down Central Park West, where the two of you turn into the park for five or fifteen minutes and one of you blows (or fucks) the other, seemed quietly calmer, physically more satisfactory, and—nine times out of ten—far more friendly in its air and attitude. (Parks and Forty-second Street movies were what my “promiscuous sex” more or less consisted of at eighteen.) I’ve often wondered whether people who talk, in a heterosexual situation, of marital rape aren’t speaking of something rather similar—perhaps with penetration—to my experience on the piano bench. Perhaps it was simply a much more common aspect of sex in general during the fifties.
What could have happened to a serious opera by two black composers (one of whom was eighteen) in 1960?
Not much is what.
But a few months after we’d finished it, when I completed a novel called Afterlon (where, for the first time, I wrote about the deaf-mute adolescent boy called Snake, who had come to me—yes—in a dream) and needed a typist, Lorenzo insisted on typing up the entire manuscript of some three hundred plus pages for free. I think the whole friendship, on his side, was a terribly complex combination of identification, guilt, and honest admiration for the very bright black kid I was. He had been a prodigy too, and was at the tail end of a painful transition that those who bid for, but are finally not accepted into, the First Ranks of Serious Artistic Endeavor in their twenties must make to survive their thirties—a transition I knew nothing about at the time.
I do today.
It’s a hard one.
I haven’t seen a copy of the opera since I was twenty.
43.6. The spring after my father’s death, within a week one way or the other of my nineteenth birthday and before Marilyn’s and my sexual experimenting shunted us into marriage, while I was walking through the Village around Eighth Street, on a lamp post I saw another flyer someone had taped up:
POETS ! SINGERS! ACTORS!
PLAYWRIGHTS! MUSICIANS !
CHAMBER THEATER
IS LOOKING FOR YOU!
The flyer went on to explain that “Chamber Theater” was soon to be reconvening for its spring ’61 session and had a place for any and every creative person. Those interested were to call Risa Korsun, after five-thirty, on weekdays.
I copied the phone number down in my notebook. Later that evening, I called from my parents’ home and was answered by a nasal Jewish contralto. Yes, this was Risa. She was trying to find a time when we could all meet—what about the following evening at seven-thirty …? and she gave me the name of a Village coffee house. Gave it to me several times, in fact. She seemed to think I should know where it was from that alone. But since she didn’t know the exact address, she had to describe where it was—and during her vague, complicated instructions, I got the impression she rather wondered who, indeed, I was that I didn’t know this most famous of Village landmarks.
I still don’t remember the name of the place. (It was not the Figaro. Could it have been the Reggio on MacDougal Street? No, because it wouldn’t have taken so long to describe its location.) At any rate, the next evening I found it—it didn’t look much different from the Reggio.
Sitting at a small round table in the corner was a short, rotund woman with a grayish mustache, terribly rough hair, wearing thick glasses and an ordinary enough bohemian-style dress (maroon print) for the times, with a particularly large metallic necklace—of the sort my elementary school art teacher, Gwenny, used to have us make out of aluminum plates and wires; Risa’s was bronze or brass.
Sitting at the table around her were several young men and women. She looked up at me as I looked about the room, smiled, and extended her small, rough hand. “I’m Risa!” she declared.
“I’m Chip,” I said.
She began to introduce me to the others sitting around the table.
There was a honey-haired young woman of twenty-or-so in a blue sweater, whose name I don’t remember.
There was a six-foot-four, dark-haired young man, who was moderately handsome in an actorly sort of way, named Peter, who unfortunately rather slumped and had a very soft voice.
There was a slight, blond guy with glasses called Willie, who as soon as he said his friendly hello, I realized had some speech defect verging on an actual lisp.
There may have been two others—I’m not sure.
I pulled up a chair, and Risa began to tell us about Chamber Theater.
Today, with a few decades’ knowledge of life and dreams, as well as some experience of the mechanics by which one turns into the other, I can tell you much more about Chamber Theater than I could have at the end of that evening session. Chamber Theater was simply Risa’s brave, marvelous fantasy. What Risa talked to us about was a potentially international organization that should have had an office and meeting rooms and rehearsal spaces and institutional funding, whose first meeting should have been attended by thirty or forty writers and actors and composers, whose board of directors and artistic organizers should have been delivering statements and writing manifestos and organizing wonderful projects.
What we—very slowly—began to realize was before us was a thirty-seven-year-old woman, who worked as a telephone operator in a Fourteenth Street department store that specialized in clothing for overweight women (Lane Bryant’s). She had a serious (and frequently painful) gallbladder condition—sometime later, I had to take her one night in a cab to the Bellevue emergency room. She also had a dream, Wagnerian in its ambition, that involved Poetry, Theater, Art, and Truth … however vague she was about what constituted each. And what Chamber Theater was, of course, was the interplay falling out of the dazzlement and the not-so-little confusion of the half dozen or so out-of-work actors who had shown up, with moderate curiosity, to check out Risa’s dream.