The conference did not provide breakfast on departure day, so I tracked down some to-go coffee, gassed up the vehicle, consulted the next page of directions, and then pointed the car’s nose toward Kidron, Ohio. My friend, Becca and her husband, Michael, had offered to show me around the Amish counties of eastern Ohio. She had grown up there, for all intents and purposes, on the family farm. Ohio is home to more Amish and Mennonite families than Pennsylvania. The centerpiece of the tour would be lunch with her grandma, Ruth Amstutz, who lives in the farmhouse built after the family emigrated from Switzerland in 1840.

I pulled into the yard on the dot of ten o’clock. It was a damp, soft-focus morning, somewhere between overcast and foggy. From the looks of it, there didn’t seem to be anyone home. Despite a smidgen of doubt, I reaffirmed my steadfast, manly faith in printed directions. I double-checked the address, then rang the bell. Becca answered. She stood in the doorway, always taller than I remember, her strawberry blond hair pulled back and a big, sweet smile on her face.

She tilted her head just a bit to the left and said, “V.”

“Becca.”

We embraced.

Michael stood behind her and Grandma behind him. I was ushered into the fine old house, spotless and modest. Did I want lemonade or iced tea? Grandma Amstutz carried a pitcher of lemonade and four glasses onto the back porch and we fumbled joyfully through small talk. The chatty dachshund seemed to like me.

After draining our glasses, we departed for a pre-lunch exploration of the rectilinear byways of the Ohio countryside. The farmland was still bare or covered with new green. Proud barns with acolyte silos lorded over congregations of dusty outbuildings, casting nets of white fence everywhere. In the fields, mighty horses pulled plows, and in the yards, wash hung limply on lines. The farm folk always waved as we passed by. Kids were dressed identically as their parents. Walking beside the road, a man in overalls, navy blue long-sleeved shirt, and straight-brimmed straw hat held onto the hand of tiny, perfect version of himself.

They brought me to a rambling emporium called Lehman’s, which strives to meet all the simple requirements of the farm communities while anticipating summer tourists’ insatiable need for stuff. The practicality and impracticality of the abundance extended to fifty types of hatchet; psychedelic displays of seed packets; stiff, tubular denim trousers in every imaginable size except ‘fat’; and Amish romance novels.

I guess we had been working up an appetite. By the time we got back to the farm, Grandma Amstutz had laid out an epic meal – a plump breast of chicken accompanied by egg noodles, mashed potatoes, stuffing, asparagus, and crescent rolls. I had scarcely wiped my chin when appeared a mountainous apple pie and coffee. If I were heading back to the fields I would have energy to burn, however, after such a painfully hearty lunch I was predisposed to snooze.

Becca and Michael had other plans for me, but first, she beckoned – “V, come to the springhouse.” Behind the farmhouse, the whitewashed springhouse was tucked into a hollow, two rooms stacked one on top of another. Small windows flanked the thick door that opened with the gravitas of a bank vault. In the half-light hung a rich, chill dampness. The smell was elemental. A stone trough stretched against the back wall, filled with cold water of unearthly transparency. Opposite the trough was a great fireplace with a heavy kettle suspended above the swept hearth.

“Everything happened in the springhouse,” said Becca, “It was the center of existence.” “I see,” I said, really seeing.

We stepped out into the now bright May air.

I pushed on to Ashland, Ohio, site of the conference. Tedious interstate unspooled before me. I scanned my directions anxiously. Ashland lay between Columbus and Akron and I half-expected it to be the Ohio equivalent of those moribund New England mill towns, a hodge-podge of seen-better-days with a hollowed-out downtown and weary streets of unhappy houses. The new green on the trees that lined the streets provided a scrim of promise.

I picked up my room number and key and my sheets and towels. The dorm was a three-story, motel-style slab at a right angle to a busy intersection. The rest of the university sprawled across the street, in a mid-20^th century industrial park sort of way. Lavish beds of tulips, generous swaths of color, softened the utilitarianism. Remarkably for a one hundred and twenty-five year-old institution, no building predates World War II. Ash U had nurtured a fine nonfiction literary magazine called River Teeth which sponsored this conference.

Perhaps the most striking feature of Ashland University was its rococo fetishizing of memorabilia. Every vertical surface of every building displayed framed and captioned photos, documents, posters, and tchotchkes, as well as trophies, beanies, balls, and plaques. Every corridor was a walk down somebody’s memory lane and every staircase a spillway of arcana to an end so trivial that all you registered were the bouffants, bellbottoms, and vaguely familiar celebrities. One could not help but observe a dismaying partiality for magicians and Republicans.

Back in the fall, when I submitted my ‘manuscript’, I asked for an ‘assessment.’ No one had seen the thing, a swiped-together collection of personal essays, since its days as a master’s thesis. I discarded about forty percent in favor of current writing. In addition to the many other stimulating aspects of a gathering of like-minded writers, the opportunity for someone of reputation to read my writing and proffer their opinion had me vibrating with apprehension. While I’m not shy about letting other people see my work, I can sometimes play a very self-manipulative game with fantasy outcomes.

We sit at a picnic table in the quad in the afternoon shade. Kate, my reader, says I have a book here. She points out areas that need expansion and whole pieces that should be set aside. But she says I have a book, if I want. How about that.

Some people say the most splendid thing about a road trip to Ohio is the road trip from Ohio. A month ago I might have agreed. However, if you follow this simple itinerary, you may come away with affection for benighted, rustbelt, flyover, swing state Ohio. Spring is a good time to go.

I had signed up for a two-day nonfiction conference at a small university in a small university town in the middle of Ohio. The keynote speaker, Scott Russell Sanders, was someone whose work I respected. He had written a wrenching essay about his drunken old man I could not get out of my head. Once I decided to drive, I started examining the road atlas for possible routes. There is no getting around Pennsylvania if you want drive to central Ohio from New York City. Two basic corridors exist – Interstate 80 to the north and the Pennsylvania Turnpike to the south. Driving the full distance would take more than a day’s work: so, to break up the trip, where to stop? What’s beyond Harrisburg?

Fallingwater.

I could finally see Fallingwater – Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece that sits astride a stream in the western Pennsylvania forest. I have been an architecture nerd since a college survey course and I believe Fallingwater to be one of the supreme achievements of twentieth century art. So I went.

I dropped my things at a B&B nearby, then found some very good sushi, and ultimately wound up at the multiplex in time to be disappointed by Star Trek Into Darkness. Early the next morning I wound through wooded hollows pillowed with ground fog to the invisible town of Mill Run, Penna.

Wright built Fallingwater as a weekend home for department store magnates from Pittsburgh. They gave him free rein and what they got was a glory, a stack of cantilevered terraces that stunningly recapitulated the cascade below. The rugged watercourse added music to the breathtaking geometries, while the yellow-green leaves of spring seemed to respond by scattering counterpoints of light over everything. It felt like there was a breeze. The terraces levitated, suspended from a supple column of stone and glass by good fortune alone. Standing the great room, the boundaries of inside and the outdoors dissolved. Somehow, gravity didn’t operate. The sensation was almost Cubist in the way the sights and sounds and smells and textures activated each other. But there was no mistaking it for anything but a family home. It served their needs as it elevated their spirits. Entering Fallingwater fulfilled a persistent daydream.

Minutes after the graduate recommendation transaction, a ruckus about a missing prescription erupted between her and her home health aide. In seconds, Brigid was shrieking.

“Motherfucker!”

From her bed, she wheeled on the aide, her gaze incinerating everything.

“You stupid cunt. I gave you the piece of paper. I put it in your fucking hand.”

She forgot about me sitting there. I rose invisibly from the chair, let myself out, and walked east to my apartment. That was the last time I saw her. She probably knows I got into the MFA program, but not from me. Letting go of an old, rich, difficult friendship is hard. I used the no-fault clause and stopped calling, but I live with sorrow and tenderness. I try not to regret, but I often wind up playing tetherball with rationalization.

Our relationship had been yielding steeply diminishing returns. We always cared about each other, but we didn’t need each other. That was the beauty part, but it meant there was an element of expediency between us. We could carry on like schoolgirls, then go about our hyper-self-reliant way. But now came her hour of need and I couldn’t hack it. I barely had the emotional resources to cope with my ancient parents and their endless decline. But, jesus, she loved me, she did, and she loved my daughters, particularly Alice.

When Alice applied to boarding school, she had to write an essay about the person she most admired. She picked Brigid. Not Hillary Clinton. Not some figure skater. Not some pop star. She wrote, “I admire Brigid because she lives her life exactly the way she wants to.” and she went on to recount a story Brigid would tell of her girlhood in the Bronx.

Brigid lived with her parents and four sisters in a second-floor apartment a block from the Bronx Zoo. One afternoon, at St. Clare of Assisi Elementary, the Sister explained to the class that people went to heaven because people had souls. “What about animals?” asked Brigid, always with an eye out for controversy. “No, dear, animals can’t accept the sacraments,” said Sister. Young Brigid went right home, poured the Holy Water from the household font into a Mason jar, replacing the blessed liquid with water from the kitchen tap. The sun was going down, so, with one of her little friends in tow, they snuck into the zoo and went from cage to cage, baptizing the animals. Alligators and crocodiles were too scary, but the lonesome okapi, the first of its kind in North America, was in particular need.

The two of us were walking up Church Street one afternoon after an AA meeting. The day was sunny, but summer was definitely over. Brigid belonged to a playwriting workshop and she bemoaned the obstacles inherent in collaborating with ‘cheapskates and no-talent hypocrites.’ That day she made me a proposition.

“I got this play, V.”

“The old saloon thing? When does your O’Neill period finally end?”

“Asshole. This is the other one and you’re directing it.”

“Yeah, right, Bridge.”

I’d just come out as a gay man, left the wife, the two young daughters, the dog, the cat, and the yellow Oldsmobile station car, and moved back into Manhattan. I was uncomfortable with everything about myself. I would have preferred to stay miserable, but Brigid told me to do this thing, so I said ‘yes’. I could feel my ass falling off. All of sudden, I had responsibility for unfamiliar and complex situations. The play had a cast of eight, two acts, a budget of $1500, and a run of two weekends on a makeshift stage in the common room of a nursing home on the Upper West Side.

It was called Since Big Al’s Come to Town. Big Al, insisted Brigid, was another name for AIDS, though no one could hear that without snorting into their sleeve. Set in a large Upper East Side apartment, the play was not about AIDS, but followed eight yuppies as they dealt with yuppie dilemmas in yuppieville. The one gay character, Glenn, a sadsack of hapless unfuckability, couldn’t even qualify as The Specter Of AIDS.

I put an ad in Backstage, held auditions in my living room, and in a week, had the play cast. By the third rehearsal, half the actors had quit. Brigid had written a potboiler all right, but she had stuffed it with tedious quotations from the dim literary past. You could see a speech coming from a mile away: some character would lean back on his heels, put his thumbs under his lapels, and yawn, “As George Santayana would say…”

The play sucked. My cast rebelled. The producer stonewalled my ideas. Meanwhile, Brigid attended every rehearsal. She didn’t really intrude, but she resisted altering any but the least problematic lines. Then, one night right before rehearsal, I got a phone call from her son.

“V, my mom’s in St. Vincent’s. She fell on Fourteenth Street and broke both her elbows.”

I called the producer. “Buck up, boy,” he said, “this might not be so bad.” The nursing home space had already been paid for. Most everything else was in place. As I prepped for that night’s rehearsal, it dawned on me, now I had sole custody. Out went every gasbag quote. Thus shorn, Big Al became a chatty melodrama, one young woman’s decision to chuck the accoutrements of ’80s New York City and move to the west of Ireland to find spiritual renewal. The cast found it hard to complain about having to forget lines. We had three more weeks of rehearsal and it all fell together.

On opening night, Brigid got a pass from the hospital. Her health was precarious even then. Two broken elbows was major. At the curtain call, she stood up and turned to the crowd to acknowledge the applause. The room gasped. Not only was she was flying on Percodan, but she looked like she was about to become airborne. She had been welded or duct-taped into a contraption. Two rods sprang from a girdle around her waist and held her bent arms immobile at chest height. I have occasionally reminded her she was there at Big Al’s Opening Night, but she usually tells me to shut the fuck up. And she either doesn’t know I thoroughly overhauled her play, or she has held her tongue.

My stabs at self-expression continued. Two years later, busy Mr. Director Man received his Certificate in Filmmaking from NYU. My thesis, a thirteen-minute, 16mm film called: Hi. My Name Is Valerie. And I’m a Codependent, chronicled the young woman’s very bad day. I wrote and directed the thing, which nowadays plays out as a semi-autobiographical fantasy. And I gave myself the role of Valerie’s sexually predatory boss. On some stenographic pretext, I called her into my office and wheedled, “I’ve been a naughty, naughty boy,” a signal for her to bend me over the desk, tie me up with her pantyhose, pull down my trousers, and wallop the bejesus out of my large white behind.

Poor Valerie. The film featured Brigid in the role of her mother. Valerie promises that she will be at Uncle Sean’s engagement party. “I deeply regret missing the last one.” Returning to her apartment to get ready, she plays a phone message from Mother. Brigid’s voice-over is still unspooling when Valerie, now all dressed for the party, closes the door behind her. The final scene has beleaguered Valerie being ushered into the party by Brigid with the words – “Look, everybody! Here’s Valerie! And she brought her umbrella!”

“The shells go on the floor.”

That was Brigid’s command to her clientele at The Back Fence. She worked there as the weekend cocktail waitress for decades, taking delight in sticking the adjective ‘sober’ onto her job description. The Fence has been on the corner of Bleecker and Thompson Streets since the end of WWII. Its ceiling and walls were painted black to hide the cobwebs and create a thirsty gloom. Tiny tables draped with red-and-white checked tablecloths clustered around the bar. Sawdust covered the floor. Brigid swanned around with her pencil stub and little pad, pitching bowls of whole peanuts onto customers’ tables, along with her terse injunction to dispose of the shells.

Sunday afternoons, the management let her host a poetry reading. The readers were twitchy or mopey and the poetry was rarely very good. Lots of poems about not getting – laid, paid, heat, respect, enough beer. One poem was all you were allowed; two if they were short or you were aggressive. You put your name on the list and waited to be called.

Brigid had been the grande dame of this salon for eons. She offered me my first-ever opportunity to read my work in public. I was inordinately proud of a sonnet I had composed while flunking out of college. In a fanciful attempt to graduate, I had taken a poetry workshop. I called the poem ‘Kissing My Ass Good-bye,’ applying what I hoped were Elizabethan cadences to a fantasy of having my backside actually disappear. The fourteen lines rhymed in hit-or-miss fashion, up to and including the final couplet – Condemned to wander celestial halls / A eunuch for want of ass, not balls.

Adding my name, I waited my turn. Nothing came of my poetic debut at The Fence, but I had taken a baby step. Every single creative undertaking I have attempted however tentatively; Brigid played a part. She has been my crabby muse.

I liked to show up at the Fence in the clear cold light of a late Sunday afternoon. With the place empty I could hang with her, sip on a diet Coke, and try to get a word in edgewise. One snowy Sunday, however, I found myself stuck sitting there with Alice, my nine-year-old daughter, listening with half an ear to a parade of luckless poems. Things perked up when Brigid announced the next reader would be two people.

The twosome jumped up, bouncy gray curls spilling out from the hoods of their puffy parkas. They clapped their mittens together and beamed. “We are the Acrobatic Poets.”

They unzipped their coats and kept peeling off their clothes. Uh-oh, here we go. Quickly and efficiently, they shimmied down to shiny lycra unitards, one red and one blue, and it became apparent they were a man and corresponding woman. “We believe poetry has been divorced from physicality for too long.” Backstroke flourish of four arms.

The red one crumpled to the floor in a slo-mo ‘S’ motion and lay on his back in the sawdust and peanut shells, then raised his arms and legs into the air in unison. Blue faced Red and, shifting her weight from one leg to the other, settled her midsection onto his outstretched feet and, stiffening, rose until she was parallel to the floor, one hand in his and the other holding a small leather-bound book. She craned her head back and read some verse that was completely beside the point. Several more dramatized contortions followed.

The grand finale consisted of a Y-shaped pose accomplished by Blue again faced Red and, holding his hands, stepped onto his bended knees. The pair leaned away from each another. As they balanced carefully, they let go of their near hands and faced the room, arms out-stretched, transported.

A swell of murmuring rose from the peanut shells and was, after several long moments, supplanted by erratic clapping. Acrobatic poetry: we are still astonished.

So, here we were, almost twenty-five years later, both of us going through changes. I had finally decided to apply to a masters writing program after decades of dissembling. Brigid had always told me to write; not ‘if I really wanted to’, not ‘because I had the gift’, and not ‘when I stopped fucking around.’ No conditional baloney, no argument. She was one of those very persuasive, full-of-shit people who, despite their utter lack of grace, could bend you to their will. Without her persistence, my literary inkling would have winked out long ago.

I sat by her bedside on the room’s sole piece of movable furniture, a wooden folding chair, the chair where her Bangladeshi home health aide sat, except when she prayed by the front door. In addition to my offerings, I brought along a couple of the short essays I had banged out as an application portfolio, including an anecdote recently published in The New York Times Metropolitan Diary section about shopping for styrofoam with a nickel stuck to my forehead. I read it aloud to her. “Oh, V,” she said, “That’s fuckin’ brilliant.” I chuckled with pride and disbelief.

“So, Bridge, do you have that recommendation?”

“Yeah, it’s in my black notebook,” she said.

“All your notebooks are black.”

“Here,” she said, pulling a folded piece of paper from a black notebook. Her longhand was a fine cursive, every third word illegible.

“I may have to transcribe it onto my computer and get it notarized,” I said.

“You and your fancy-pants machines.”

to whom

it’s like a dream come true that V. – Robert V. Hansmann – has made up his mind to write. as a poet and playwright i’ve been after him for years and as a smart shy man, he’d just smile …

and now that he has taken the giant step, the world is a better place. thank you for your kindness for reading this and thank you for V., he’ll make you proud.

as ever

                                    brigid m———–

I slipped the thing into my inside jacket pocket.

Brigid was an Irish Stoic: you knew better than to ask what was wrong. For nine months, she had been triangulating between St. Vincent’s Hospital, the Village Nursing Home, and her walk-up on Bleecker Street. She waved away all concerns about a diagnosis, but process of elimination indicated Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. About once every two months, she’d recover from pneumonia or something equally grave, get out of bed, pull on her clothes, head downstairs, and wind up in the hospital the next day. Her health had stabilized in recent weeks, which was why she was back on Bleecker Street.

In 1985, when we met, I was a pup of thirty-five and she was my age now, fifty-eight. Brigid was there at my second AA meeting. Not drinking was new to me: the whole idea ridiculous, appealing, and terrifying. In a room full of stiffs in suits, she blazed like a comet of anarchy trailing great clouds of profanity. Cocksucker this: motherfucker that. And when I discovered she had run away and joined the circus at age forty, I adored her absolutely. She left her elementary school-age daughter with her mother in the Bronx and followed a one-ring operation around the Midwest for eighteen months.

She liked me, it seemed. I could make her laugh. I teased her about her preposterous opinions, while her no-bullshit compassion blew an enormous hole in my middle-class depressive’s complacency. She insisted I not take myself too seriously. “Booze. Now that’s fuckin’ serious.” Her love of beauty, acute sense of personal injustice, and heedless vulgarity could erupt into great, baroque rants. I would hear her out, every last cockamamie riff. And, man, could we dish.

She had the dazzling capacity to juggle as many as four trains of thought at the same time. A simple conversation might devolve into a breathtaking scramble up one side of the space/time continuum and down the other. You could find yourself entangled in an elaborate discussion of James Joyce (she called him ‘Jimmy’), Asian women’s alleged propensity for bossiness, and coleslaw, ingredients of.

Her passion for experience, to go and see and hear and read and do, was a quality I envied. I envied her contradictions and her chutzpah. One winter we took a trip to Rome and she initiated a willy-nilly treasure hunt to see all the Caravaggios in the city. We tracked them down – every last incandescent altarpiece and every sassy, naked man hiding out in a long row of sleepy women in gilded frames.

More than anything, Brigid loved words. She filled notebook after notebook with, I don’t know, notes. Notes, quotes, resentments, epiphanies, dialogue, scribbles. Fairly soon after that first meeting, she would let you know she was a poet of ‘The Beat Gen.’ One of her poems, ‘Daisy,’ is occasionally included in Beat anthologies. It’s a lovely little thing; probably included more on account of her gender than anything else, for you can count the women Beats on one hand. In addition to poetry, she wrote stage plays. She always had some project underway.

Brigid’s door always stood slightly ajar. This gesture expressed either her bohemian nonchalance or the fact that, if it closed, the door would seal with such powerful molecular adhesion that to gain entry would require firemen with crowbars and possibly acetylene. I pushed and it gave way a little, smacking into something soft. I tucked my head in and saw a woman sitting on the floor wrapped in green fabric. She looked up at me. “I’m so sorry,” I mumbled and squeezed by.

At the distant end of a dim series of chambers, a television cast wan shadows. I approached. Brigid reclined upon her bed, a tatty odalisque in faded leopard print pajamas and a housecoat the lurid sheen of motor oil on a puddle. Her gray hair, clinging desperately to an ancient blond tint, was in pin curls. “How’re you feeling?” I asked.

“How the fuck do ya think I’m feeling?”

“There was an impediment in the corridor.”

“She’s Muslim.”

“Of course.”

She raised the remote, muted the TV, and fixed her fierce, black eyes on me.

“So. Did you bring the money?” she said.

“One of these days, Bridge, I expect a freebie.”

“Fuck you, V.”

“But look! I brought chocolate and nylons.”

I handed her an envelope with eight twenties, then took a license-plate-sized Hershey’s chocolate bar and a couple bottles of San Pellegrino from my bag and carried them to the kitchen. Her refrigerator had only two shelves, both full. In the time it took me to find space for the water, she’d misplaced the money. After much whooping and digging and rolling from side to side, the bills were found.

“So, you keep all your money under the mattress?”

“Oh, go fuck yourself. I knew where it was.”

This was mid-winter 2009 and I’d come to pick up a recommendation for graduate school. The document was ready, so I had been summoned. As an afterthought, Brigid had asked me to bring some cash. “Ya know, just some ‘walking around’ money, V.” Ever since she emigrated to the Village as a teenager from ‘the Holy Land of the Bronx’, she had had an extremely relaxed relationship with personal finance and now that she was more or less confined to her Bleecker Street apartment, she had become dependent on the kindness of friends.

I find ‘gratitude’ an exasperatingly convoluted concept. Its expression walks the fine edge between honesty and hypocrisy, too often tumbling off into cliché, trailing clouds of ulterior motives. The present human population does not possess the requisite humility for genuine gratitude. What passes today for gratitude is at best, a negotiation technique, a feint, and at worst, a falsehood. Gratitude frames its meaning in language that has evolved to mimic and hinder understanding, to have it both ways. All too often gratitude will hide a bad motive beneath a good one.

The phrase “Thank you” can convey both kindness and insincerity with the same neutrality. It encodes dishonesty. On the occasions that a ‘thank you’ greases a social transaction, it does so with a mercenary subtext. “Thank you” is currency for counterfeit emotional commerce. Sentimentalized, denatured, and commodified virtue nowadays passes for manners.

If one needs express appreciation, a descriptive sentence would be more accurate. For example: “The piece of gum you gave me calmed me down, at least I think it did.” This gives the recipient a both reasonably accurate assessment of his or her behavior and a report on its effect on the speaker: cause and effect. Still, there’s plenty of room for utter bullshit.

This brings me to the haunting Thank-You Note. There may be no other childhood formality more painful to recall. During the period between Christmas and New Year’s, I would be confined to my room until I could grunt out a snarky turdlette to Aunt Mary and Uncle George praising the utility of their unwearable sweater.

I write Thank-You notes all the time. I tell myself it’s because everybody loves to get mail, but in reality, I am a duplicitous son-of-a-bitch who can never have enough sweaters.