Well, today’s the day. The Big Fucking Deal Day when my essay becomes the center of attention for a brief, unshining moment. It’s a polished thing with a lumpen structure, which I hope I will be given insight into changing. It documents my circuitous coming out process, the pitfalls, cul-de-sacs, and tedium of self-awareness.

“I quite smoking and six months later I was a homosexual.”

My helpful peers suggest I start the essay with this sentence and I’m inclined to agree with them. The timeline of the essay has been called into question. It wasn’t so much a working/not working quandary and it wasn’t that I was ‘in love’ with its pieces, as much as stalled. Now I know that, in addition to the tunnel, there is a light within.

So I feel free, free to join the afternoon tour of five Erice churches. They are beautiful and in varying states of repair and use. The grand Duomo had a lush plaster ceiling, painted a pale golden yellow, like an over-reaching butter sculpture dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The Church of San Martino was attached to a convent of cloistered nuns and featured all the technological wizardry required to keep the sisters from being seen while allowing them to worship in the church and sell their sweets after the service, elaborate latticework balconies and in-wall Lazy Susans. An arch spans the narrow street between the church and the convent so the nuns could get to and fro, and nowadays a statue of The Virgin illuminated at night by blue neon gazes down at passersby from the crown of the arch. And San Guiliano, a church that serves as the repository of the town’s sculpted-wax Baby Jesuses. Clammy-looking little babes, some dustier, some more melted, and some with strangely unarticulated winkies. One weird collection, that.

Oh yeah, it was student reading night. I read first and I read three of my poems; two recent ones and good ol’ My Barber’s Arm.

Hurray for Wednesday. I feel okay, and I’ll take that. In the morning lecture, David Rivard deconstructs two poems – “The Day Lady Died” by Frank O’Hara and “They Flee From Me” by Sir Thomas Wyatt. I could have listened to the discussion for another hour. Words are so sneaky and blatant.

Field Trip! They herd us onto a bus for a day trip to Segesta, a jumble of ruins with elements of a thousand years of successive civilizations. Its glory is an ancient temple and theater. The amphitheater cannot compare with the temple, which sits above a ravine, embraced by wooded hills in unbowed majesty. Constructed twenty-five hundred years ago from golden limestone now much eroded, the structure glows. It is complete, yet incomplete. Though fully intact, with all its columns upright and both pediments in situ, the building was never finished, never roofed. The story is quite convoluted and subject to much conjecture. Our guide is a well put-together woman whose labored and heavily accented tone and tendency to throw all the gods, Greek and Roman and Phoenician, into a loose theological bag makes her difficult to follow. She displays a curious affinity for the accomplishments of Mussolini, remarking several times on his local railway buildings.

I feel whipped when the bus deposits us back in Erice. A shower can provide only the illusion of spiritual renewal. We’re on our own for dinner and I join a group of ten. I’ve struck up a rapport with a personable young guy from Athens, Georgia. The table is alive with banter.

The search for dessert results in disappointment. The legendary (to Erice) Maria Grammatico patisserie is a bust. “This isn’t good,” I say staring sadly at my weird custard tart. Go fuck yourself, Maria Grammatico.

Complaining can feel good, but cannot be sustained before absurdity takes over. An aria of self-pity, however entertaining, doesn’t play well to an audience of myself. Therefore, not sleeping efficiently or at all is really a big ‘so what.’

Harken. I lay in bed, lying awake, waiting for Erice’s goddamn bells. Every quarter hour, a peel counts the hours and then, a sweet little afterthought ding, one, two, or three, to indicate which quarter it was. So easy to anticipate: so easy to get wrong: so easy to hate.

Tuesday is a wash. We have workshop; I am inattentive, lost in non-thought. Caffeine and resentment just prolong the misery. Finally, I bolt when a pair of gray lunch sausages settles in front of me.

I let my friend Katie know of my need to duck out of our afternoon plans and slither up to my room and into my bed. Two hours later, I am awoken by a solicitous knock and rouse myself, restored. A shower enables me to resume the human pantomime. People come up to me, cocking their heads and clucking. I respond brightly, idiotically. Fuck jetlag. No – Fuck TriQuarterly and their otherworldly request.

The afternoon, I spend taking care of life details. Then there’s the wine-and-cheese reception and poetry reading in the secluded garden overlook where a semicircle of white plastic armchairs mirrors the sweep of in a grand, but treacherously worn staircase. Natasha Trethewey reads her lovely poems, as does Hope Maxwell Snyder. I do not drowse. Dinner follows, always at eight o’clock, European-style. I sit next to Patricia Hampl and across from Lynn Freed and have a great old chinwag.

I conk out. Big fucking deal.

Good Morning, Erice. I slept well, which is the point and, knowing jetlag, probably a one-time event. Breakfast features croissants with nametags – ‘con cioccolato,’ ‘con crema,’ and ‘empty.’ Also, plenty of rich, dark caffeine.

After a shower, I push off on a walk on the ramparts. Erice’s ancient origins and strategic impregnability are everywhere in evidence, from Norman battlements to recycled Roman columns in churches. As in many Sicilian municipalities, there is a church on every corner, though typical of most medieval towns, there are no corners, not in the ninety degree sense. From absolutely every vantage point an extravagant vista appears. Because Erice is 2,500 feet above sea level and a ‘crow-flies’ four kilometers from the sea, the landscape she overlooks is infinite – Mount Cofano and the sweep of the Zingaro Peninsula to the north and the Egadi Islands and the salt marshes of Trapani to the southwest. Breathtaking is the worthless adjective that comes to mind. It’s cloudy this morning, but I imagine on a cloudless day you could also see Mount Etna to the east and Africa to the west.

Today, we meet as a workshop for the first time. Thank you, Jesus. For me, it is always hard to sit with the anticipation. I have read the work of my compatriots and despair/gloat. Neither of these feelings do me credit nor has any basis in reality. Patricia Hampl leads the workshop. After two hours, the workshop feels like a ‘we.’ We trust her.

Our whole Bread Loaf group, poets, prose writers, and staff, meet for wine and cheese in a hidden garden overlook not far from the hotel. It feels like real conviviality, not socially anxious, jetlagged hubbub. Lights come on the land below, a twinkling panorama from an angel’s perspective. A violin / keyboard duo plays sweet and hokey music. I am both delighted and awkward.

Before dinner, two instructors read their work in a classroom: Chris Castellani from his forthcoming novel about Tennessee Williams and Frank Merlo and David Rivard his poetry, most appealing to me, a poem about Owsley Stanley, the 60s ‘King of LSD.’

The workshop then splits into four smaller group and adjourns to four restaurants for delicious food, notably impossibly thin and perfectly grilled swordfish filets and a silken lemon sorbetto. More chatter, even at a table where no one is drinking wine. I’m repeating myself, I’m sure.

I yearn for modest repose. Just a little fucking shut-eye, for chrissake. At 1am I awake, thrash a while, and finally open the laptop in an attempt to coax weariness from writing. I check my email for bullshit, only to find astonishment. TriQuarterly has seen as essay of mine in the recent Post Road magazine and asks me to submit to their January 2016 issue. I never.

It’s going on five o’clock.

Flying over Europe at dawn. Cities spread out like banked fires, skeins of embers faintly aglow. A seam of sodium orange appears in the inky horizon ahead of us, and suddenly the seam bursts open in a great blaze. Slowly and quickly, the light pushes the hemisphere of night away. The beads of fire that stray across the terrain fade. The sun turns the frost on the window to topaz dust. Then, the earth below becomes obscured by a landscape of clouds. A tiny jet crosses our path miles below on its perpendicular way.

No one can sleep on this airplane, meaning – not I. I doze, as the guy next to me punctuates my reverie with heinous flatulence. He watches Asterix on his personal device. Announcements in German inform us of something.

Munich Airport is dazzling. Glamorous merchandise piled everywhere, but unobtrusive signage requires concentration. I pass through passport control and find my way to the gate for my Palermo connection. It’s a smallish plane. Many babies wail. They are pissed. The respirator of the sick man in the row behind puffs relentlessly. Good for him.

My bag is lost! My bag is lost! It did not descend to the carousel with its putative companions. Lufthansa lost a bag? The mind reels. Inquiries reveal it to be sequestered in a special customs room. Ah. That makes sense. Though my passport was stamped in Munich, my luggage didn’t get the treatment until Palermo. I’m squared away and pad off to find the Bread Loaf people. Yes, I attend a writers conference. And they are happy to see me.

Together with another couple I am driven to Erice. The countryside is breathtaking. Great limestone bluffs and towers and promontories on the left, the utter blue Mediterranean on the right, while we drive through red-tiled suburbs into sere countryside on a four-lane motorway. The driver points in Italian and says, “Segesta.” Distant, up against green hills, is the temple at Segesta, built in 500 BCE by Greeks. It is considered the most intact and perfect in the world. It passes from view. I am happy.

I succumb to the total spacedness of lagging jets. Nodding and smiling, I head to my room for napping purposes. It’ll work, this room, though it has an unsettling sewage-y aroma and doesn’t offer a vista. Fuck it. Naptime.

Later, there’s a reconnoitering walk through Erice and the welcome dinner. I’m not feeling terribly conversational. Oh, well. This’ll be fun.

The sewage-y aroma has gone. I close my eyes.

Published in February, 2015 in Post Road Magazine. Now online.

Link in Written Works

My father was modest and forthright in all things. Pop (I called him Pop) held himself to the highest standards, yet his virtues were the sturdy kind that emanate from the Golden Rule – decency, generosity, loyalty, humor. Granted, his jokes were mostly groaners too often mortifyingly off-color, but we smile because we all remember his twinkle. His good nature could warm a room.

Everything I love about art and culture and the world I love because of him. He was a master of ‘Show – Don’t tell’; he didn’t editorialize or promote; he just gave me a ticket. The list of startling, unforgettable experiences my father opened to me would take all afternoon to do justice to. There was this one time though, that changed forever the way I would see things. In the fall of 1963, I was thirteen and we were on a family excursion into deepest Pennsylvania and, for some reason, Pop and I went to the movies by ourselves. We saw Lawrence of Arabia. I had never seen anything like it and every movie, indeed every play or book or piece of music, I’ve encountered since has been colored by that epic afternoon. When Omar Sharif appears to the parched Lawrence, slowly coalescing in a desert shimmer, I surrendered absolutely. When something colors your life like that, you are truly beholden. Yes, Dad.

My father had two uncannily allied abilities, the knack to ask the right question and an intuitive sense when to keep his mouth shut. He knew when to suggest you needed a plan and when lighten up on the leash. The two often came together in acts of gallantry. Should some enterprise run aground he always claimed sole responsibility, and likewise he would sidestep the spotlight at the moment of triumph.

In third grade I was an indifferent, verging on hostile, Little Leaguer prone to wandering distractedly around the outfield. Pop had volunteered or maybe had been volunteered to coach us. We belonged to a truly benighted squad, the leftover kids stuck on a jerry-built team with no ‘corporate sponsorship’. Eventually, we were backed by the elementary school’s PTA and wore green ball caps with PTA in white letters above the brim. We were not inspired. Despite my anti-baseball behavior, Pop always pulled the I-was-a-terrible-coach card. “It was my fault, Bob, I couldn’t help it.”

For both of us, the only good thing about the experience was the ice cream after the game. So, once in a very blue moon, and only because we’d be talking about the restorative magic of ice cream, we might find ourselves back on that dusty playing field. It was be as if the sullen boy and the hollering coach had never existed.

I know there are as many perspectives to an event as there are participants. So, I hope you can hear this little voice from somewhere out in right field – I love you, Pop.

My final stop was the city of Akron and the house where Bill Wilson and Bob Smith, two drunken Vermonters, met and where on June 10, 1935, Dr. Bob Smith took his last drink. From that date, Alcoholics Anonymous marks its beginning. The little house was built in 1915 and Bob Smith was its first owner, living there until he died in 1950.

I am sober since 1985. For me and many, the story of how Bill W. met Dr. Bob carries the resonance of a creation myth. The principles and history of AA all depend on the simple practice of two alcoholics sharing an honest conversation. Only that kind of intimacy can keep us from drinking. I believe this in the very center of my being.

Swooping over the dips and swells and dips of the red brick streets of the old suburban neighborhood, a fluttery excitement tussled with anxiety. I might get lost, really lost, hopelessly lost. My directions had me peering at each passing street sign and slowing down to make a turn every three or four blocks. The house would shut for the day at three o’clock. It was going to take hours to find 855 Ardmore Avenue. And then, there I was, parked at the leafy curb of a street like any other. The house sat high on a corner lot, white with yellow trim and a wide front porch with brick pillars.

I couldn’t help feeling just a little self-conscious, climbing the twelve steps (yes, the twelve steps) to the front door. Once inside, that sensation dropped away: the building enveloped me. From the vantage of the front hall, one could see, or certainly sense, the house’s four exterior walls; it was that small. This also meant it was full of light. A half dozen people milled around in the entry and living room; coming or going, it was impossible to tell. Signing the guestbook seemed like a good place for me to start.

A stocky, open-faced guy in blue coveralls approached and asked if it was my first time. I chuckled and he chuckled back. The name embroidered above his pocket read ‘TJ’.

“My name is TJ. I can give you a tour, if you want. We’re all volunteers here,” he said.

“I’d like that,” I said. “This is my last stop in Ohio. I’m here on purpose. Uh, I guess we all are. On purpose, I mean, Dr. Bob and all… TJ.”

“Uh-huh. Yeah. Let’s start upstairs, then.”

I poked my head into the bedrooms that had provided respite for countless drunks, often forcing the two Smith kids to bunk in the third floor attic. This must have been a lively place; both before and after Bob Smith stopped drinking.

On the ground floor was the kitchen table, around which Bob and Bill had their life-changing conversation. In addition to two half-full cups of coffee, on the table sat a plate of windmill cookies, the kind I see all the time at meetings in New York. The only other spot where I have felt the presence of such quietly turbulent spirits was Delphi in Greece in the early morning. Maybe that’s a metaphysical reach, but the restorative legacy of 855 Ardmore Avenue is unquestionable.

Eventually, we made our way down to the cellar, a whitewashed room remarkable for nothing in particular. Being so high up on the corner lot allowed the basement to have a set of double doors that permitted off-street parking. Even in 1915, being a doctor necessitated having a car. Photographs of Dr. Bob’s automobiles lined the walls.

“How much time do you have, TJ?”

“Seven years clean and dry in a month.”

“That’s pretty impressive. It sorta rolls along after a while, the not drinking and going to meetings,” I said. “This commitment must help. How often do you take people around?”

“Only once a week.”

“Only? How come?”

“There’s a demand. Some people say it’s the best job in Akron.”

“And you’ve got the Tuesday afternoon slot. Lucky me.”

We continued in this good-natured way – simple questions, simple answers, pauses, fencing, more pauses, sideways admissions, laughter – just gabbing on and on. His eyes welled up. I felt abashed. And then a big hug.

It’s all in the eyes. ‘AA eyes’, as my friend, Brigid, says: what Dr. Bob called ‘the language of the heart.’ TJ and I fell into an easy rapport in the course of a half an hour. We didn’t have much in common in the specifics of our lives, but we weren’t drinking and that took care of everything. I have never been happier, more at ease, more in my skin, than that moment in the basement of that little Akron house.

The pleasures of Ohio were unanticipated and unforgettable. But crossing Pennsylvania took forever.

I approached Cleveland via a boxed-in interstate that gave way to a tumble of squat, banged-up factory buildings. All of a sudden, at a stoplight, a mylar-shiny baseball stadium ballooned into view on the left. An afternoon game would soon be getting underway. A beefy crowd clotted at the crosswalk, then streamed across, more likely to aggravate a melanoma than see the Indians win. After driving just fifteen more blocks, I could see the Lake and, jesus, another stupendous stadium. Cleveland – city of light, city of magic.

The Hyatt Regency hotel had been retrofitted out of a grand nineteenth century structure called The Arcade. In its original configuration, the five-story atrium was surrounded by lower floors of retail and, on the upper ones, offices. Now it was all hotel. The atrium ran the length of a city block beneath a glass canopy, so that the space flooded with soft, saturated light. Cast-metal gargoyles circled the fourth floor, leaning balefully into the vastness every twenty or thirty feet, each with a small incandescent bulb in its mouth. It’s a breathtaking interior. I was to meet my friend, Chet, there. He had driven up from Dayton to join me at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

A couple of phone calls and a knock on the door and there he was, lanky and gnomic, wearing jeans and a blue Indian-style shirt. Chet had flyaway white hair and a white beard that he tucked into the buttoned collar of his shirt for some odd reason. His features were large and well-formed; the ears had been pinned back many years ago, so it was up to his noble nose to give focus to the entire facial menagerie. He carried himself with the quiet aplomb of the professional actor. Chet was fond of me and I him. I offered him a seat and we proceeded to catch up – his search for community among the far-flung and long-lost, my writing process, the comings-and-goings of our children.

We adjourned for a dinner reservation nearby. A quick stroll along the ground floor canyon of The Arcade, out the back door, and soon we were seated in the noisy frat-bar front room of a highly regarded tavern. Though the decibels rose and fell insistently, we gabbed with enthusiasm. Chet recounted his curious method of decision-making, which involved a rubber cork on a length of chain that, held aloft, waggled one way for ‘yes’ and the opposite for ‘no.’ His technique had a friendly name I immediately forgot.

It developed that Chet had decided to forego the Federal Reserve Bank of Rock ’n Roll in favor of visiting an old friend from his days in the copy department of a greeting card company. His little rubber stopper jobber had advised him to alter his plans. I felt a twinge of abandonment, but quickly adjusted to the new normal. We agreed to meet for breakfast in the hotel and then proceed on with what the cosmos had in store.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has affixed itself to the shore of Lake Erie, a striking prism of glass, a bell jar of nostalgia and hype. A banner blazed across the marquee announcing THE ROLLING STONES, prematurely it turned out. First thing, the ticket guy proposed I take advantage of a photo opportunity by posing against a blue screen holding a red electric guitar with rockstar intention. At the end of the visit, 4×6 prints would be available for purchase. Oh, no thank you: not this time. I have posed as Elliot on his bike with ET in the front basket and nothing could ever possibly come close to the stupid magnificence of that.

Holy Shit! The Hall of Fame of Rock and Roll was a ridiculous, entertaining, exhausting place, crammed to the gills with minutiae, a lot like Ash U, but without the Republicans. In addition to a tsunami of ephemera, small print to squint at and presumably read, there was treasure – you could find pieces of the plane that took Otis Redding down, an ‘Otis’ fragment and a ‘Redding’ one; Jimi Hendrix’s sofa, an uncomfortable-looking section of a sectional; Michael Jackson’s glove revolving on a plexiglass pedestal, pinned by a spotlight, resplendent and dead as a butterfly; and CBGB’s awning that I used to see from my New York window until a couple years ago. The Hall of Fame sometimes had the feel of uniquely glamorous, museum-quality episode of Hoarders. The exhibit space in the basement was pitch dark, with labyrinthine, chronology-averse catwalks and cul-de-sacs that whipsaw you from Metal to Doo-Wop to Disco in an eyeblink. The whole thing was claustrophobic, over-reaching, and spectacular, like Aretha Franklin being squeezed into one of Diana Ross’ gowns.

On a higher floor, I stood in the back of a darkened theater and watched a compilation film of the famous inductees, beginning at the museum’s inception in 1986 with this bunch: Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, the Everly Brothers, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, and Elvis. It played the soundtrack to my life. When it came The Band’s turn, they included a snippet of Levon Helm singing The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. It lasted only a fraction of a second. Those seven words rang, my chest tightened, and my throat caught. I love this music. This place will always be just an attic full of stuff: fun, but really kind of beside the point.

More hill-and-dale driving, this time in search of authentic Amish baskets. Becca knew of a gentleman who set out his excellent wares in the parking lot of Shisler’s Cheese House on weekends. We stopped by, got his address, and then lit out on a GPS adventure. A half hour later, we beheld a hand-painted sign – baskets – in red lettering on a white section of corrugated metal nailed to a post. Abruptly, we turned left. I was in the back seat as we bucked down a dirt road. Out the side, I saw a pair of curious sheep pacing us from behind a fence. We stopped short of the house and chickens ran across our bow. No signs of human life.

I strode onto the porch and announced, “Hello?” through the screen door. The interior of the farmhouse lay deep in shadow. No response. I turned back to my friends with a shrug. The screen door creaked.

“You woke me from my nap.”

“Oh, hello there. Your nap?”

“After the noon meal. My nap.”

“We got your name from Shisler’s,” Becca said. “We’d like to see your baskets.”

“Baskets, yes. In the shed.”

He stepped off the porch and we followed quietly across the hardpack yard and through a dutch door. Spilling off a workbench and piled underneath, every conceivable form of woven container – breadbaskets, wastepaper baskets, pie carriers with leather handles (one-, two-, and three-pie), baskets that fit baking dishes of all sizes, and hampers with and without lids. The sharp smell of linseed oil cut through the dusty gloom. The basket man grew increasingly animated as he displayed his handiwork, which was very handsome and not without some quirky flaws. Before we knew it, he had disassembled the great pile basket by basket and I had selected four different ones for Christmas purposes. Well, three. The two-pie basket was for me.

The joy of beautiful, simple things, an encounter outside the bounds of my customary experience, made for a chesty exhilaration, a core happiness shared with friends. Back at the Amstutz farmhouse, I stowed my finds in the trunk of the car and bid Becca and Michael good-bye. The music of Cleveland beckoned.