I’ve never really detailed the first years I started writing poetry. Recently, I found out all the houses on a street in the neighborhood where I lived during that time in my life have been emptied of tenants. Apparently, the tightly packed, two and three story, one hundred plus year-old homes, have gradually (or not! who knows?) been swallowed up by the nearby university hospital system. Now they stand empty, awaiting the wrecking ball.
Many of us have become familiar with the way these things play out, even in our own towns and neighborhoods. Despite the ever-sounding knell of alarm from the PR departments of the corporatized healthcare systems in the States—always proclaiming a crisis level, startling, lack of adequate operating funds—entire blocks of housing, small businesses, or farms and wetlands, are routinely levelled and replaced by parking lots and the newest, shiniest, monolithic roadside attraction healthcare facilities. I know a once walkable and what I might term “full service” neighborhood where I lived in another city, sometime after the events I describe in this memoir, was likewise leveled and replaced with shimmering medical offices and shiny if bizarrely convoluted hospital wings. Gone was the corner grocer, the drugstore, bank, five-and-dime, cheap Italian restaurant, laundromat etc. Gone, the low-income tenant and community friendly housing in multiunit older homes and apartment buildings.
But anyway, my purpose here is only minimally about bemoaning this aspect of living in an entirely profitized society with its entirely disposable architecture and, I would say, disposable worker population (can’t find a job or a place to live? It’s off to prison, a homeless encampment or the next refugee camp resulting from the current ecocide/genocide for profit and resources).
Do I sound angry? Hm. Let’s rewind a bit: this is supposed to be about a neighborhood where I once lived, way back in the 1970s, when I first found my way into the loosely and haphazardly connected world of writing poetry and the kind of places that seemed to germinate and feed such beginnings.
The street, the street of emptied houses I began speaking about, was actually the street, or part of the street, where I lived back then. It carried the same name, E. 115th St., as the part of the street where I lived, though the two sections were separated by a major artery in the city and a long lot on that artery in the odd but common way city streets of the same name can stop and start again within a block or two.
This was in Cleveland, Ohio. Not ever known to be a center of any monumental poetic upswelling. Not to my knowledge anyway. But then, I believe, almost every city of any size in the country at the time harbored the ever-wishful seeds, the earnest and somewhat wrinkled and scruffy, weedy, beds of poesy sparked by a renaissance in poetry writing and reading that followed the rather unexpectedly fecund trajectory of poetry that appeared decades earlier in the spontaneous, even revolutionary, emergence of post-war poetry scenes on both coasts, most notably in New York City and San Francisco.
It is highly probable that many, if not most, of those who participated in this newer movement harbored some quasi-religious faith in a kind of unlikely, improbable, rebirth (in their own city, of course) of the equally unlikely, improbable, advent of that original poetry renaissance. Every poet in every city held out some hope that they would be a part of the next New York or San Francisco poet's scene, each populated with their own completely original cast of characters that would eventually if not immediately be likened to Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Koch, Ferlinghetti, Corso, Snyder and the rest. Meanwhile, in the more academic halls of poesy, monthly workshops and creative writing classes were populated by co-occurring and sometimes competing factions of the next poetry suicides and alcoholic manic-depressives, a hopeful next generation of Anne Sextons, Plaths and Lowells and their brothers and sisters in the ever-loosening leathery straps of American poetry composition, proclaiming their right to intellectualize, poeticize, their struggles and their opaque yearnings and personal mythologies. Oh, it was a fecund and truly magical time, even if many who were pulled into the center of the poetic cyclone were just interested in the parties, the drugs and the sex.
But seriously folks, it was at least an interesting and provocative phenomenon full of interesting and provocative people… at least. And sometimes, even often, there was a kind of brilliance that everyone hoped for but no one expected.
So, it’s hard to say how productive in the longer term any of those latter-day offspring of the mid 2oth century rebirth of poetry were or have been. Like everything else, the little workshops… free, open to all, often contentious, often insufferable, but often enough brilliant as well… were profitized and sucked out of the poor neighborhoods and flailing English departments where they were born. Turned into highly selective and even more highly expensive MFA programs and numerous poet-celebrity of the hour, expense driven, multi-day conferences by the lake or in the mountains or repackaged as proto-spiritualized poetry camps that often turned mean and cultish… only sparing, perhaps, maybe, some pretty hilarious parties, sex and a propensity to glorify the suicidal and the insane.
I believe the old three-story house on 115th St. where I lived for the majority of my time in Cleveland is long gone. It was a big place, turned into multi-unit apartments at some time in its long life (maybe it had always been a kind or rooming house) catering to students from Case Western Reserve and the nearby Art and Music Institute Schools. Hart Crane was said to have lived nearby. There were two of these old houses with a gravel parking lot that took up what must have once been their backyards. It was where my roommate parked his '66 Bonneville, and I parked my '66 Chevy Impala. I didn’t drive much though. Euclid Avenue, the main artery through the east side of the city of Cleveland and the road that divided our length of E115th street from its other stretch of road as I described it at the start of this rambling discourse… you know, the road with the emptied houses... was where one could catch a bus downtown or out to the near burbs every 3 or 4 minutes during the week and every ten minutes or so on the weekend and after 8pm. That was my main transportation, other than my feet.
Euclid Avenue, by the way, was only separated from the house where we lived by a gas station where, if we were lucky, we might look out one of our dusty windows on a particularly cold winter morning and witness the gas station attendants, one by one, taking turns rocking the tow truck with a local street gal.
I came to live in that old house, in an apartment that took up half of its first floor (the other half being occupied by a painter, a student at the Art Institute school, who painted spectacular super realistic depictions of people and places, a rebirth with flare of, say, a Bouguereau in an era of waning abstract expressionism) when I followed my best friend to Cleveland where he was accepted at the art school. I met him a couple of years previously at the state college we both attended. Actually, we both quit college at the same time and initially planned to work to save enough to take a backpacking Euro-rail trip together. That never happened. He decided to go to this very prestigious art school instead and I was left in the lurch, not completely unhappily, but I did accompany him to Cleveland to help him search for an apartment and ended up deciding to move there with him. It was largely the neighborhood and the vibe of the place that got to me. Kind of unexpected in Cleveland but… besides, it became apparent that the once ultra cheap Euro-rail passes had climbed dramatically in price, beyond what my savings for an acceptably long hejira there would accommodate. I had no other plans and didn’t relish the idea of staying in my parents’ home any longer.
We settled into the new apartment. We were both messy and unconcerned about housekeeping so that made us pretty compatible. And my roomie drove his Bonneville up to Michigan almost every weekend to visit with his girlfriend, soon to be fiancé, soon to be wife. So, lacking any comparable attachments back in the home state (though I recall having numerous visits from some of my steadfast and dearest friends) I was able to explore on my own and at my own speed.
Leaving the back door of the house and taking a diagonal path across the gravel parking lot to the back border of the lot, one came upon an opening in a rusting chain-link fence that was festooned with vines. One passed through that opening and onward through a narrow passage between two three- or four-story apartment houses, brownstones if my recollection is correct, and came into the butt end of a dead end road, Hessler Road.
Hessler Road is possibly a primary reason I decided to move to such an unlikely, and rather completely unhip (for the era) place like Cleveland. It still had the vestiges of a kind of hippie artist haven. A narrow dead end crowded on both sides by old brownstone apartment blocks and other aging housing not unlike the multi-unit house I moved into. The passage that opened into this street was, I have to say, a little magical. People kept trailing plants and little gardens tucked away on all the balconies and porches. There was often music, often enough from students at the nearby music college and oftener from a lone guitarist and maybe even a drummer or two. I soon discovered the music and arts festival held on the street every year. It was easy to feel included or a part of something even if one had few real connections… at first. And if I continued down Hessler Road and down a few more blocks, university buildings soon dominated, and I was delivered to the back entrance of the art museum itself. What a find!. Eventually I came to spend many Sunday mornings there. The gardens and pond, on the other side of the museum, out the museum’s grand front entrance, were a little bit of heaven on hung-over Sundays. I seem to recall sharing MD 20/20 and pleasant conversation with an African American fellow from the nearby Hough neighborhood, where there had been riots not ten years before. During the summer barbeque grills made of big industrial metal drums cut in half lengthwise were active all along that part of Euclid. (Apparently the Cleveland Clinic’s various expansions have since erased that neighborhood). I met that fellow in that park one of those Sunday mornings. It was that kind of place.
By the way, much later, after I left Cleveland, I found out Hessler Road was threatened with extinction for similar reasons that the portion of E115th street is currently doomed. But a movement to save it sprang up and it was eventually made into an historical district. Bravo! Although, if the plans for 115th St are any indication (and from what I've seen of the area in more recent but still quite long-ago visits) Hessler is increasingly isolated from any of the other well-worn and interestingly occupied residential areas that were a vital and lively part of that neighborhood when I lived there.
The part of E115th St now scheduled for demolition, during the time I lived there, was a kind of sister enclave across Euclid Avenue and up Mayfield Avenue from Hessler Road. It had its own interesting, colorful, long- and short-term tenants. It was, as I recall, greener with trees… made shady and cool on those humid summer afternoons, plus it had its own arts and music festival. Not so much in competition with Hessler but as an added attraction to the area. As time went by, I made friends and acquaintances on both streets. Artists, musicians, craftspeople. I recall spending one weekend with friends in a house on that part of 115th street. We took half hits of acid every couple of hours the whole weekend. It was an exceedingly and abnormally warm December weekend. And it was the last time I took hallucinogenics; the big insight I was given that weekend was that I didn’t need such drugs to feel the way they made me feel and as an added benefit I would have more control over how long the effect lasted without the drugs.
But I get ahead of myself a bit here. About a month after I moved to Cleveland I got a job in a bookstore on the corner of Euclid and Mayfield Ave. It was a medical/technical bookstore with a good-sized selection of literature and trade books to boot. The store was not more than a block away from my apartment. If I crossed to the other corner of the back yard, the corner opposite from the passage to Hessler Rd, there was a path through a little weedy patch (we found what we thought was pot growing there one day!) and then across a long empty lot occupied by a tiny little ramshackle bar that hosted blues bands; packed and rowdy on weekend nights. Now it is a strip mall. Or was the last time I went through there.
I always fought the idea that I was living a kind of cliché, especially after I got more serious about writing poetry—you know, that “young poet working in a bookstore” thing. But it was a fine job and I felt, as any 20-year-old might, that I had made it. I was independent. The rent was 90 bucks a month and I could manage that even after my roomie left to go live with his fiancé for the summer before they were married. I was the best man.
The place, the apartment, was furnished. Did I mention that? And my roommate friend and I agreed that he and his wife could occupy the apartment when they came back. I would find another place to live. That search for another place to live got a little scary for a while. I hated the idea of leaving the neighborhood and not being so close to my job. At first my search in the immediate area was fruitless, but then one of the huge attic studios/lofts in the same house became available at exactly the right time. It was furnished too. The landlady even brought up clean sheets once a week! Though one of the first nights after I moved in, after I had painted one wall bright blue and separated my sleeping quarters from the rest of the place with some cinderblock and board bookshelves, I got up in the middle of the night for a snack or a drink of water, walked over to the little alcove kitchen, turned on the light above the sink and found it full of cockroaches. I declared war the next day. Yikes.
I want to talk a little about the bookstore manager, Tom, the guy who hired me and kept me on until he left the company, and I was made supervisor of the store. Lots happened between the time I was hired and the last months I lived in Cleveland and worked as the manager of the store. I don’t think I ever gave Tom enough credit for helping me out. Not that I was desperate or anything when he first hired me as a part time warehouse worker, packing and unpacking cartons of books, pricing and shelving new arrivals. Law books. Medical texts. Nursing manuals and textbooks. The store was a part of three store chain with a main office in Detroit and a branch there, in Cleveland, and in Buffalo. But a lot happened in the three years I worked in the store.
I especially recall a bizarre period of months when I was clearly off my rocker, paranoid and pretty delusional. For some reason I demanded Tom fire me. In some ways I think, now, that broke his heart a bit. He may have had more invested in me than I knew. I mean, it wasn’t romantic or anything like that at all. But I believe, maybe only now, that he felt some fatherly or big brotherly affection for me and besides, I was a good worker, fast and efficient with decent enough customer relation skills, so he gave me increasingly more duties until, as I have said, he found a job elsewhere and handed over the manager job to me. I remember I asked him if he thought I could do it, take over as manager, and he said “As long as you don’t get distracted”.
Before that, a year or so before that, after I insisted he fire me (for absolutely no sane reason), I approached him to fill out some forms for unemployment. I was clearing up a bit, but still clearly off kilter and he was kind but distant and filled out the forms. Then there was the day I found a carton of his brand of cigarettes on the table where the mail was delivered in the entry hall of the house. I’m pretty sure he left them there for me. And then, after a grueling and difficult summer with no money, I came to my senses a bit and he graciously rehired me. Did I apologize? I don’t remember. I certainly should have. Tom was an unheralded major support to me in those years and I never really thanked him. I was too distracted I think. He had an absolutely gorgeous wife who came from Germany… and he was active in a local theatre company, maybe more than one, on the west side of the city. He would get very excited when he landed a part. Laughing a lot, even a little giddy. I remember he had a great voice. One of those fine deep melodic voices that, I’d imagine, could easily be made to boom. He had a kind of Vincent Price look about him, goatee and all.
You know, when I first thought about writing this, I imagined it would primarily concern my entry into writing poetry. And it still is. It’s not as if all these extraneous details and personalities, neighborhoods and occupations are entirely unrelated. Things don’t happen that way, especially as one remembers them. The connections emerge practically unbidden. If there is a mystery to our lives, this is one component.
I don’t recall when or why I decided to take college classes. I do know I didn’t want to muck around with taking any required classes I wasn’t interested in and I think I was lucky to be able, when I first explored taking classes downtown at Cleveland State, to enroll as a part time student and just take classes I wanted to take. I’m not sure that kind of arrangement is as possible now and I’m positive I would not be able to afford any classes at all at the rates they charge these days. I paid out of pocket from my earnings at the bookstore and my first class was a poetry class, not writing but reading. I remember a paper I wrote for the class on Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” and then there was another paper I wrote concerning a poem about Malcolm X’s murder. I still have the dogeared oversized paperback Norton anthology that was used as the textbook for the class. Little notes in the margins and yellow highlights and all. I’m holding it right now. There is a note I scribbled to myself on the very last, blank, page: some guy’s name, “Jeff Sanile”… his phone number and address on Hessler Rd., and the notation, "$68". Was that for a shared apartment I was going to look at? Who knows?
Yes. It was in that class I fell in love with Auden’s “Musee Des Beaux Arts” , Denise Levertov’s “What Were They Like?”, Marianne Moore’s “Poetry”… etc. and so on. The poem about Malcolm X that I mentioned is by Etheridge Knight by the way (and the anthology is marked by a couple of exclamation points I made next to the title of that poem). Many notes in the margins near Dylan Thomas’s “A Refusal to Mourn…” and a nice interview with Adrienne Rich I remember reading as an assignment. And I quote: “I don’t know if poetry changes anything. But neither do I know how or whether bombing or even community organizing changes anything when we are pitted against a massive patriarchal system armed with super technology… … I believe in dreams and visions and “the madness of art”…”
The instructor of the class was a very kind gentleman who, of course, was more than willing to read my own nascent verses. (Aren’t all college instructors anywhere in the vicinity of the study of poetry, absolutely aching to read all their students’ attempts at poetics? Right.). I was most enamored of e e cummings at the time, so you can imagine how my first poems looked on the page. The instructor was, as I have said, kind, and he encouraged me to take a verse writing course that was offered at the college. And I did.
Alberta Turner was my first and most influential writing teacher. I am at a loss to be exact about the order of the way things unfolded under her tutelage. At any rate, she was willing to offer me a kind of independent study and we would be joined by a woman name Rosalind. Rosalind Neroni. Rosalind, it turned out, was deathly afraid of elevators and Alberta’s office was on the 18th floor of what was called University Tower. Prior to the first meeting of our little study group, I was waiting with Alberta in her office and the phone rang. It was Rosalind. She could not come up the elevator. I heard Alberta’s end of the conversation: “Don’t you think it’s time you got over that?” (and I don’t believe she and Rosalind had any more of a history together than Alberta and I did).
Apparently, it wasn’t time for Rosalind to get over it and Alberta and I proceeded to the ground floor where there were several study rooms and we were joined by Rosalind, a stunning, dark woman with a brilliant smile and a sharp assertive wit. We became great friends.
Oh… I haven’t told you about a phone call I got from Rosalind at the bookstore before I ever met her. Alberta must have asked us to come to a decision about when we could all get together and in the process of doing so gave Rosalind my work number. I am not clear about the details, but I do remember the phone call. I was pretty excited about the chance to study in this way, though Alberta was a little stony and distant at first and I didn’t know what to expect from someone named Rosalind. At any rate, we had a very brief conversation about how and when we would first meet with Alberta and for a reason I don’t recall, Rosalind brought the conversation to a close by saying something like “Listen honey, I’m tough. I don’t mess around.” Something meant to impress and probably strike fear into my inexperienced heart I suppose. I was intrigued more than afraid, not easily put off from people like that and I replied “Well… I’m twenty so back off a little” …something like that. What’s interesting, in spite of her tough demeanor, it didn’t take long for her to invite me into her life. I soon met her boyfriend, another Bob, who was patient with me but a little stand offish, and a smattering of her friends. Eventually we spent a lot of time together, Rosalind and I. And I remember going to a poetry party sponsored by a guy who lived in a high-rise apartment on Lake Erie. We had to take the elevator… or tried to. She absolutely fell apart and, in the end, I walked up the numerous flights of stairs with her. I think that was the same party where the devil made an appearance. More on the devil later.
Rosalind is dead now. She moved to Santa Monica some time before I also left the city, and we lost touch. I became curious about her whereabouts some years ago and found an obituary notice. That was kind of tough. She was a fine poet. The Poetry Center Press the university sponsored published a book of hers. I have it around here somewhere. We attended many readings, laughed together often and she saw me through some of the darkest times in my life, unobtrusively but present in really kind and reassuring ways. She had me over for meals when I was jobless (you know, when I forced my boss to fire me) and getting hungry and we attended our first poetry workshop together, a monthly meeting held in a university classroom that tried, rather unsuccessfully, to ape a hippy sitting room with shag carpeted berms around the entire perimeter where occupants of the room could sit or lean… quite uncomfortably, to tell you the truth. I believe the shag carpet was bright orange. After that first meeting Rosalind and I literally skipped down the hallway laughing about the whole thing. But we went back almost every month. It was one of those things where you were required to provide copies of your poems to all participants, copied via a mimeograph machine in the English Department. At the time I was attempting to mimic other poets I liked… I recall a try at a Frank O’Hara-esque poem that I decided had to be read double time. It wasn’t actually all that bad. Not a terrible way to start. Now that I think about it.
Later, the next term, I enrolled in a verse writing class Alberta taught that was an extension of the independent study I had just completed. I don’t recall if Rosalind was in that class or not, but I met a coven of other young poets and after class a group of us would routinely head to the on-campus beer and wine pub and get sloppy drunk. I finally exited that scene when it became apparent that the one guy (who wrote verse I was pretty impressed with) was an alcoholic who mostly wanted company for his afternoon drunks. I didn’t like being drunk that much and after one afternoon when I witnessed one of our group vomiting all over some Kelly green carpeting in the study lounge next door to the pub, I went home, hugged the toilet for a while, and decided I would not join them again.
You know, Alberta is gone too. She died quite a few years before I discovered Rosalind had died. Alberta kept an emotional distance from me. Probably that was wise. But I wasn’t really looking for a mother, if that was what she was concerned about. Efforts to mother me were generally unsuccessful anyway and particularly ungratifying to anyone who tried it. Maybe she sensed that. And she continued to encourage me, and we wrote sporadically after I left Cleveland. She introduced me to a number of well-known poets. I had lunch with WS Merwin with her and I remember how the other faculty member in our little lunch group, maybe he was a department head or something, pestered Merwin about making more appearances in the area. Merwin was completely noncommittal. A little visibly irritable. Alberta told him he would be hearing about me and the other student poet with us, another good friend. I was pretty embarrassed by that, though I ate a hot pepper to show that I was in complete accord with him and his uncommitted stance in the face of such entreaties. Ridiculous. I remember going to the reading that night (or was it the night before) with Diane, the other student, and on the way reading one of his poems in the car and understanding it better than almost anything I had ever read before. God, I love poems. Good ones. Ones that open a portal into the known and unknown. There’s nothing like it.
Oddly enough, after I found out Alberta had died, even though we hadn’t seen one another in quite a few years and our correspondence had withered, I was determined to go to her funeral. But I got the date completely wrong and drove down to Oberlin from Grand Rapids a month or more before the memorial service was to be held. How does stuff like that happen? It was a bizarre but not entirely unproductive little hajj and maybe even more moving than when I returned later for the actual event. These things are difficult and revealing. Stuffed with meaning that is often enough opaque, defying any attempt to produce a lexicon of cause and effect and clear outcome… but there they are: some brilliant starry multidimensional miasma swelling and changing in the blankness of the procession… the welling of space.
I met and formed friendships of varying intensities with many aspiring writers through her and through the other writers associated with her and her workshops, as well as other workshops and readings I began to frequent. I am currently in touch with few if any of these people. There is a kind of regret in this, in the way our lives pass and how we join with others in very intimate and convivial, creative, even ultimately important ways and then drift or are pulled away.
My first published poem appeared in “Dark Tower”, a literary magazine put out by the university and later I won some scholarship money with some poems. Maybe it was a little chapbook I put together. Rosalind won that one. And later, Diane, the woman I shared lunch with Merwin with, had a chapbook published as well. I remember being interviewed for a show on the University radio station hosted by one of the writers I met through Alberta’s classes and workshops. What happened to all those people? Is there a record of that interview? Wouldn’t that be a kick?
I think I prefer to keep that neighborhood frozen in time and in my memory. There is something magical and telling about how it exists in my imagination and the dreamscape of memory. I did go back once and poke around about half as many years ago as when I lived there. That’s when I saw that the house where I once lived was gone and the little blues bar was supplanted by a strip mall and Hessler was left kind of isolated in the expanding concrete brutalism of the university and its associated hospital system.
The bookstore moved downtown while I worked there. I took the bus downtown to work for the last year there, but I had also moved to a duplex up the hill in Cleveland Heights by then, near the corner of Cedar and Lee. I’m still not sure why anyone thought moving the bookstore was a wise move. But about a year after it moved to an area that was considered to be up and coming, Playhouse Square, I left the job and the city, and the CEO of the company came down to talk to me about my decision. He laughed derisively at me when I told him I was moving to Grand Rapids with no job and then he pushed me. Physically. Angrily. On the chest. That was weird. He was a little guy. I almost laughed in his face. He was always kind of an asshole, though… and that made me even more glad that I was going.
My life had reached a kind of psychic dead end in Cleveland, and I wanted to pursue some other direction, maybe even go back to school… but on different grounds than before. I was unclear about the whole thing in some ways but also had an instinct about what I wanted to find and do. And in those days, it was easier to simply pick up and move. Finding a place to rent didn’t often involve credit checks and divulging the minutiae of one’s personal and financial life. Like I said, the places where I lived generally cost less than one hundred dollars a month at the time. Not fancy by any stretch but serviceable. A bit frayed around the edges but in creatively productive ways. And I considered going back to the college I had left years before and retrying the self-directed, Montessori, open classroom models it offered, where I could design my own curriculum. I think I had an inkling of the kind of learning I was most successful at. I was certainly a poor or at best a mediocre student in any of the conventional terms of academic learning… and I was getting a feeling that what I wanted most was to make time and carve out an atmosphere where I could write and cultivate a life that would give me the raw materials of what I might write about. Nothing dramatic, but something rich that had little to do with money.
You know, I think I should fill in some details about why I insisted that Tom, the manager of the bookstore, fire me. I’ve talked a bit about this in past writings, and there's really too much to detail and describe here, all in one scoop. It was a bizarre and surreal series of events that I am still not quite sure I completely understand. It involves love and purpose and sexuality and the unrecognized stress of a young guy’s attempt to self-define, away from the parameters that were quite unthinkingly passed down to him about what his life should mean and be. I don’t think even I understood how unlike the fellow my family insisted I must be I was when I left the family home and ventured out on my own. I think I was, unbeknownst to me, stuck in a shell of misguided and uninformed perceptions of what my Self was and had to be. And that shell had to be cracked. I had to get out. Whatever it took. The old saying about eggs and omelets comes to mind here, but I won’t repeat it. Although it’s exceedingly difficult to leave even an uninformed and misguided notion of self, foisted on you by powerful others in your life, if you have little to no understanding of who you are and how you might best function meaningfully in the world.
I was a late bloomer, maturity wise. I was naïve and inexperienced in the usual courtship and attachment rituals that seemed to come naturally to other people my age and even somewhat younger. And I was pretty unassertive about sex in particular. I knew attachment and strong friendship well enough. I liked the idea of sex well enough too but was clumsy and lacked confidence. I rarely pursued anything unless I knew I was good at it, so there were things I rarely pursued at all. In my first months of living in Cleveland I even saw a counselor at a free clinic that happened to be just down Euclid from where I lived. (His name was Chip. My god, how do I remember these things??) and we spoke primarily about the very strong feelings I had for a woman I had been seeing in the months prior to my move. I continued to hope she was as attached to me as I felt I was to her, but the distance was hard and I don’t think either one of us were very well versed in how to get on with it, especially from a distance. It was clear whatever relationship I envisioned was there was failing and I was devastated.
That all passed soon enough in my new environment, though I was a bit lost in the land of hippie artist courtship ritual. I had very close male friendships too and recognized a sexual aspect to those attachments as well. I had had sex with very few women and had been approached and participated in sex with a couple of men… but it all seemed clumsy and not at all compelling beyond the physical urges the acts themselves addressed. I’m not sure how connected to love any of this was. It all seemed experimental and unsure of itself.
To be sure, I was making some progress along these lines. And it was a good place to experiment. But I never expected to suddenly be blown out of the water by the whole dynamic.
At any rate, I continued to take a class a semester at the college. I signed up in person at the beginning of each term. One term I was greeted during the sign-up process by a faculty member who encouraged me to take his class, even though it was a class meant for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students. He assured me I wasn’t to worry about that. It was a class in Victorian Prose… you know J.S. Mill, Carlyle, Bentham etc. I’ve told this story before: how he completely bowled me over for some unexplained reason and how I was completely wiped out by him. As I think about it now, I think I had no other way to consider such an attraction except to put it in a primarily sexual realm. To deny that it was in fact, or included, the sexual would be absurd but since then I’ve pretty much determined that much more than sex was at work. Much more. The egg that would release my Self was cracking.
.
Anyway… one thing led to another and at the same time I was having this unexplainably deep infatuation with my teacher, I had entered into a brief affair with a woman who worked at the deli counter in the little grocery next door to the bookstore.
Yeah… this gets weird.
I had this habit of falling in love with any woman I had sex with, and there weren’t that many. And she was pretty much outside the category of who I would fall in love with. She was more experienced, older, than I and there was no indication of any kind of deep attachment. The sex was great. But later, somehow, I got this idea in my head that she had an abortion as a result of the sex we had. I had no information to back this up at all, but nonetheless, I got some money and insisted she take it. To pay for the abortion. Things got even more bizarre from there. My mind continued coming up with a pattern of bizarre and delusional thoughts… including concerning the teacher I was completely infatuated with. I even told him how I felt, but then felt completely overrun by vulnerability (despite his being quite open about it and kind) and flunked a test I thought I had passed in stellar fashion. So I dropped the class.
This is where my forcing my manager, Tom, to fire me comes in. And where Rosalind and I attended that poetry party where, lo and behold, that teacher appeared. It was announced that he had taken on the job of being the lawyer for the poetry organization that sponsored one of the workshops I attended. I attempted to speak with him at the party, but I spilled wine on myself and took it as some kind of sign. What a fucking mess.
A little later I whispered to Rosalind “The devil is here” or something just as crazy and then I left the party.
Weird part? As I very slowly recomposed myself after this psychotic period that included coming out as gay (Because, of course, if a guy loves another guy he must be gay. Right?) I played around a bit and explored sex with men, even had some short experiments with relationships. Very short. But at the same time, mind you, as the months and years passed, I started having more sex with women than I ever had. And seemed to become more confident and comfortable with it.
And it took me some time to recompose myself after this wild and bizarre period. Many of the details and wild voyages into the overly connected and reconnected features of a dissembling mind I’ll leave out. I told few people the specifics of what I was going through at the time, and often it would subside, and I would be fine, though in those times I felt emptied and dulled, depleted in some way. Rosalind was aware, I believe. In fact, after she moved to California, we exchanged letters and in one I remember she wrote that I sounded like I was getting paranoid “again” and that I should be careful. She was probably right. It was probably between five or ten years before these “symptoms” disappeared, though I had learned ways to compensate for them before that and had cultivated a kind of self-observation skill that could measure their impact and counteract them as they appeared and were recognized.
In my work in the mental health field, with people beset with similar and very often much more serious thought and mood issues, I learned a lot about the processes of these kinds of patterns of thinking and the nature of how one heals from them, if one is lucky enough to find the correct combination of supports and healers (professional or not). During my first job in the field, on an adolescent ward of a psychiatric hospital, I used to have repeated dreams that I was actually a patient in the hospital and that my treatment plan was my job. In several of these dreams I was even given my chart to peruse, though I never recalled anything I read in the chart.
And poetry was a mainstay in this healing process. My poet/artist friends and cohorts and the writing itself was a primary feature of how I proceeded through my life to a much richer and more pronounced familiarity with myself and how I am made and what I am here for. Having a very real and connected neighborhood of attachments and familiars was a very very important part of how I came through this, what I now prefer to call, vision quest.
I think it is unfortunate that natural gathering places, living areas that actively and passively promote the kinds of connection that brought me through what could have turned out much less positively, are less and less accessible to those who need them. Low-income convivial housing in neighborhoods that are at once highly social, accepting of difference and that permit privacy, self-acknowledgement, growth, and access to rich human experience and a possibility of integration. Not only of various kinds of people but of the nature and compartments of self that absolutely require increasing levels of self-knowledge and the tools and self-initiated supports to promote integration of aspects of personality and true self.
Interesting enough is the fact that the most cutting edge psychiatric approaches in the field to date reinforce the idea that supportive, non judgmental community is perhaps the most important ingredient to full recovery for people who experience periods of extreme thought and mood. The most successful “treatments” use little in the way of forced hospitalization or anything other than short term employment of the powerful antipsychotic medications that, in the US at least, are the sum total of the fulcrum of interventions that are used… and the outcomes are miserable when compared to outcomes in systems that use intensive community support organized approaches.
It is interesting to me that a piece that I am writing in which I meant to explore my early history with writing poetry (and my other writing as well) brings in so many parts of myself and my history; parts that, on the surface, may even appear to be unrelated to one another in any meaningful way.
But why would that be odd? How can anyone talk about the growth and development of essential identifying characteristics and activities of self without bringing in all of the other aspects of self? Can we even attempt to talk about one characteristic in self without implying and actively involving what is, it seems to me, the community of self? Can we work to build communities of self… though arts, or food, music or just about anything else that makes life ultimately meaningful and worth living… without involving and recalling all the streets and neighborhoods, houses, and paths and associations?
I don’t think so.
I want to go back to Cleveland some day and check out the neighborhood once more.. It’s good, I think, to unfreeze moments in time and in memory. But I am still sorry about E 115th Street’s demise. How lonely Hessler Road must feel, you know?
I enjoyed reading about your youthful days in Ohio! As is everything you produce, it was very well written.