AUGUST 19th

MY ANNIVERSARY WITH MYSELF

(Above: Photo taken of me by Dean Pittman at a state drama festival in Mississippi held at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg where I won the Best Actor award for my performance in Tad Mosel’s Pirandello-like one act, Impromptu. The moment my name was announced is a moment still embedded in me. It was for whatever reasons my first moment of worthiness. I have been setting out in search for such moments and the reasons behind them ever since. The search continues.)

This morning when I awoke my first thought was of my driving though the Holland Tunnel with my friend and mentor, Ted Hannah, on this date in 1975. He was from my hometown in Mississippi but had a year or so earlier moved to New York to work in publicity at King Features Syndicate after heading up the PR office at the PBS station in Jackson. He had been back home to collect some furniture from his mama for his Murray Hill apartment in the days before I was to start my classes at Juilliard’s Drama Division so I loaded my grandmama’s old wicker rocking chair I had painted black and some boxes of clothes and books into the Ryder Truck he had rented to haul it all, which included a reupholstered sense of ourselves as much as that hand-me-down furniture. As we emerged from the Holland Tunnel on August 19, 1975, Ted was returning home and I, reupholstered and ready, was arriving finally at mine.

I am about to embark on a kind of pilgrimage for the next three years of my life in which arrivals will play a part and yet again a reupholstered sense of self. Maybe, come to think of it, I wouldn’t have to reupholster it so much if I didn’t think of it as playing a part. The photo above was taken after I had played a part in a play for the first time and realized that playing parts was something I was good at. Since making that discovery I have been trying to find the roles that fit. I have been trying to cast myself in my own life.

I am deeply feeling this morning the arc of these last 47 years, from that arrival back then to my upcoming departure from Hudson at the end of October. I will be living in London from November until March when I will head to Barcelona for a month and then in April and May I will walk the Camino for a second time. June will find me back in America for a month somewhere. Then back to London or Europe or South America. Not sure yet. As I lay in bed this morning in the stillness I feel before a change in my life I thought of the first time I felt such resolute stillness when I lay in my boyhood bed back in Mississippi the night before I got into the passenger seat of that Ryder Truck and headed for the world.

When I posted the photo above, I went to writer Tad Mosel’s Wikipedia page. You can click on it here. I was very touched by the life he lived and the career he had not only because he died of esophageal cancer as my mother had but also because he was a gay man who for 40 years had a partner who had been McCall’s graphic designer. They were a certain sort of gay couple one could run across in New York who had carved out a lovely life for themselves there and you hoped to have them as friends. I had no idea that Tad Mosel was even gay. I just found that out this morning when I decided to read about him. I love that a gay writer in a most seminal way set me on my path when I was 19 and at 66 is still a part of it as my finding out he was gay proved to me this morning.

Back in 1975, I longed to be a part of such a gay couple one could run across in New York. Alas, that was not to be. But Mosel, who came up as a writer in early television before he won his Pulitzer for his play All the Way Home which he adapted from James Agee’s A Death in the Family, is quoted saying something about stillness that spoke to me even more deeply after I lay in bed this morning anticipating change and remembering that earlier stillness the anticipation of it could conjure within me right before the movement of it entered my life. “Paddy Chayefsky and Horton Foote and all of the group of writers that I knew, we grew up at the same time, and our eyes were on the theater,” he said. “That was the Emerald City. That was the goal. Now, television came on after World War II, and television was a pauper. It had no money. No ‘self-respecting writer’ would deign to write for television. Even drunken screenwriters wouldn't write for television. So who was there left? It was us. It was kids who would work for 65 cents. And so with a very patronizing attitude you thought, ‘Well, if I could make a few bucks doing that, it would give me time to write the great American play.’ It didn't take too much experience to realize that television was a medium all in itself, and that it was a career all in itself, and it was a thrilling one. But we stumbled into it by being snobs if I may say so. They would give anyone a chance. I look back on it, and I think, ‘Weren't we lucky to be there?’ Because it was pure luck that we were there... It was the stillness before you went on the air that was so dramatic because everybody would be in place in plenty of time, but everybody would be silent. Nobody talking, nobody moving--the hands on the keys but not moving. The only thing moving was the second hand on the big clock, and then when it hit the top everybody started to move. It was very dramatic, that peace, that calm before you took the dive into it. It was a great thrilling moment and you suddenly loved every actor, and you just wanted them all to be rich and have children and go to happy graves.”

I stopped on the phrase “that peace, that calm before you took the dive into it.” I had been feeling anxious and scared and worried that I had made the wrong decision to change my life so late into it. But this morning a certain sort of stillness that can come over me - and my first memory of experiencing it before heading to New York on this date in 1975 - calmed me. Back then I knew I was setting forth for home but this time home is what I’m settling into inside me before I set forth.

Last year on August 19th, I posted on Facebook about this anniversary in my life. I pulled it up and reread it this morning when I stirred from the stillness. This is what I wrote:

Forty-six years ago today on August 19, 1975, I drove through the Holland Tunnel as a nineteen-year-old boy from Mississippi in a rented Ryder truck to attend The Juilliard School’s Drama Division and begin my life in New York City. In many ways, I measure my life by this date even more than I do my birthday for it was on this day that my life really began. My friend Ted Hannah – who later died of AIDS – drove up with me. He already lived in New York back then but had been visiting his mother in our hometown of Forest and was taking some of her antiques back to his apartment in Murray Hill where he kindly let me sleep on his sofa for a few weeks until I found my first apartment on 78th Street and Broadway.

Ted and I didn’t know such a thing as AIDS was on the horizon as we drove out of the tunnel on August 19, 1975, and marveled at the urban horizon before us, the tall twin towers of the World Trade Center hovering over this place that had always beckoned me because I sensed it was where I would finally feel welcome in a way that Mississippi could never conceive of.

And yet Mississippi conceived Ted and me – we were southerners to our core – just as such states conceive so many boys like us, ones who are lost and not accepted and come to New York to find themselves and that acceptance through the discovery of accepting themselves. By teaching me to accept myself, the city also taught me how to say “Fuck you,” and “Fuck off,” for the first time and truly mean it. It taught me the importance of difference even within the concept of “we’re all the same.” It taught me, moreover, that such conundrums and contradictions are what make life a bit less dreary. I learned the importance of irony in New York. I learned empathy.

The towers of the World Trade Center are no longer with us. So many Teds are not. I have lost many friends over the intervening years to AIDS and addiction and other illnesses, that steady, rocky toll of life’s wearing itself away, the smoothing of its pebbles. But many of those friends I made in my first few years in New York are still around. I cherish them as a bridge to that time, to that nineteen-year-old boy brave enough to make that journey. It is a journey that still continues.

I often as well think of my grandparents on this date each year and how much love it took for them to let me go at such a young age, how brave they too were. I guess they knew they couldn’t stop me. I had been planning to make the move since I was eight years old and my parents had died consecutive deaths which had led my little brother and sister and me to that country place where my grandparents lived and its gravel drive on which they, crying and waving and clutching each other, stood that day Ted and I backed that Ryder truck out of that drive to head to New York City, all of us listening to that growl of gravel, those first rough pebbles in my life that needed smoothing, that growl that grief had become in my life each time I pulled into that drive now sending me off as I pulled away and toward another kind of life and all the grief yet to come for a gay man in New York City, and all the hope too. I felt hope for the first time that day I left for New York. It is a hope lately I’ve been trying to find again.

When I first moved to New York, I had mentors – Henry Geldzahler and Howard Moss among them, men younger than I am now – who would reflect on New York’s past and tell me I should have been here in the 1950s when New York was New York. When it was grittier, cheaper, artsier, truer to itself. I hear myself now telling young people they should have been in New York back in the 1970s when it was grittier, cheaper, artsier, truer to itself. What Henry and Howard were telling me back then and what I am telling others now is that you should have been here when we were young. It is our youth we miss as much as any earlier version of the city.

When I awoke here in Hudson, New York, this morning on this August 19th, my first thought was of that nineteen-year-old Mississippi boy in that Ryder truck, that earlier version of myself. I felt so much tenderness toward him. I wonder what he would make of me now that I am 65, a “me” who is about to head this morning to a 7:30 a.m. Zoom meeting in order to convince myself that this ever-continuing journey toward recovery is a rigorous one, a journey that also started in some profound way on that August 19th in 1975 when I drove into New York City, detoured through addiction, and found, through lots of growling, through lots of grace, a road to recovery that has not been as smooth as I had hoped it would be but one that is paved instead with that graveled grief of my youth. I hope that boy still full of grit would tell me to “Fuck off” when I get sentimental about “him” and “me” – about us – and our recovery together and my use of graveled metaphors for grace and grief. But I also trust he would feel empathy for this sentimental old guy who has earned the right to feel sentimental about these last 46 years.”

This morning after reading that, I realized that this pilgrimage on which I am about to embark is a kind of conversation I am going to have with myself, not one reupholstered but stripped back to its original version. Like the New York of my youth when I arrived there on this date in 1975, I will be grittier, cheaper, artsier, and truer to myself.

Onward.