Just a few notes: RIP Elizabeth Taylor

For Elizabeth Taylor: a memory

New York, 1964. I am working at the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows and, though I am not terribly fond of the job, I love New York. Slathering mustard and relish on hot dogs, making change, listening to complaints about the expense, hearing hundreds of dialects and languages, I am not impressed with the fair. My feet hurt. My eyes hurt. My sense of smell is incredibly dulled. I go to see Michelangelo’s Pieta: alabaster woman, son lying across her lap-so white, so pale. And yet protected by bulletproof glass, my feet on a moving sidewalk that draws me quickly through the room. Not New York, Disneyland, long before Disney cleaned up Times Square.

I live at the Dixie Hotel, a few blocks off Times Square and I have a girlfriend, Sharon, I met at the Fair. Years later, I wrote a poem for Sharon, an aubade, a morning poem:

There should be flowers, sweet fragrances
the buzzing of bees. When I wake, your bottom
hot against my groin, the sun has got to rise,
golden beautiful in the east, to paint your body.

But we are in the Dixie Hotel, a block or two
off Times Square and the windows are streaked
with grime from back before the war, no,
not that war, I mean the second of the two.

No air conditioning and the ceiling fan doesn’t
work any more if it ever did back when the Dixie
was fairly swank if such times ever were. We’ve
left the window open, can hear the sounds

not of sweet birds and of crickets rubbing their legs
together, but of cabs and buses, the crashing
of garbage trucks. Still, your body touches mine, and even
with this dawn, this heat, the air in the room barely

moving, we can sing the morning in, ignore dark soot,
let our fingers draw lines of damp sweat on naked canvas.
Ah, love, outside noise and hot streets call,
but let’s remain a while, here, in this still morning.

I take long walks any time of the night and day. No one ever mugs me. On the day I arrived, I was insulted, but the old woman was crazy. She heard my voice, assumed I was from Texas, and accused me of killing John F. Kennedy. Crazy, I suppose. But I did kill Kennedy, as much as anyone did, anyone in our society of celebrity. He is avenged a few years later when I am sent to Vietnam.

We are all crazy, beyond the grasp of reality. Have you imagined New York is real? Any more than the London Eliot called “Unreal City?” I find New York as I have so often found New Orleans or Washington, D.C.: a dream world where I can lose myself and become something other.

One day, Sharon and I walk a couple of blocks to the theater district to where Richard Burton is performing Hamlet. The building is, for some reason, unlocked. We walk in and see the dark interior. I flip on a light and climb up on the stage; Sharon sits on the front row. “Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw, or dissolve itself into a dew,” I whisper to her and to a thousand empty seats. I am young, in love again and enamored of theater, and all the seats are full.

I am Hamlet and am in love with everything, even as Hamlet loved everything. He did, you know, he loved everything and truth most of all. “I have been so great a lover,” Rupert Brooke says to open one of his poems, and so I have. Later, he would write “If I should die, think only this of me / That there is some corner of some foreign land / That is forever England.” I have never been that much of a romantic about war. Perhaps it was just the war that I happened to have. But I have loved the dirty streets of Times Square, a filthy hotel room, the grime of Far Rockaway, a young woman who came onto me one late night in New York and whom I could not afford and would not have afforded could I have.

I see the last acts of a dozen plays. I cannot afford to see the whole play—much too expensive for a young man subsisting in New York on minimum wage. But I find the money to see Burton perform Hamlet a few weeks later and continue, so many years later, to think it was worth it. Late at night, long after I have seen Elizabeth Taylor pick Burton up in a limousine, I open my window in the Dixie Hotel and sit on the fire escape. I whisper the “to be or not to be” speech out across the back alley.

No air conditioning, no rest room (I go to a common bathroom at the end of the corridor when I need to go). The room is a pale green, some of the paint peeling from the walls. It has a burner and a small fridge. Many of the rooms, I am certain, rent by the hour. I rent mine by the week and manage to make ends meet.

One Sunday I go to a matinee of Never on Sunday with Melina Mercouri (I do not mean to imply that Mercouri was my date, she was the star) and I fall in love with her. She is much older than me, but I had also fallen in love with Simone Signouret when I saw her in Room at the Top. I am busy falling in love; it is what I do best when I am in my twenties. I fall in love with my cheap hotel room, with small pizza-by-the-slice places, with winos in the crowd, with the pieta (only a passing flirtation), with street musicians, with Central Park, with everything in the city. But Melina Mercouri is both love and lust. I notice nothing around me in the theater except her and then the man in the seat next to mine gropes me and throws his coat over my lap. I push his hand off and throw his coat back on his own lap, turn to him and say, “No, thank you.” He is about sixty-five, I think, and is embarrassed. I am more interested in Melina Mercouri. After her four curtain calls, I leave the theater.

I am not certain I can tell you what my summer in New York meant to me—that summer of the World’s Fair, that last summer before I was drafted and sent to Vietnam. That summer in the city, that summer going to the theater, to a few cattle calls, before going back to the southeast corner of Texas to teach high school and then go off to war, that summer living in what I would call poverty had I taken the days in another way of taking something seriously, that summer that comes back to me when I chart where I have been and how I have gotten where I eventually arrived and where I might have arrived had I remained there as something other than a romantic, romanticizing tourist.

You see, I loved the Manhattan of 1964. It was dirty, profane, not yet cleaned up by Disney and Associates. I loved the idea of me there in those years before I ever thought of writing and when theater and love were everything.

It has been too many years for me to remember precisely what New York meant to me when I was a very young twenty-two years old. That is so long ago that I now remember only bright images. But I can remember that young man who walked out of the Dixie Hotel and wandered over to Radio City where he was offered a job as an NBC Junior Executive (that meant “usher” in those days) and preferred just walking through the streets looking at things, staring up at buildings taller than the pine trees in Southeast Texas, and losing himself in crowded streets and falling soot.

Late that summer, I left New York, hitched a ride to Philadelphia where my uncle had taken up residence with his upper class Philly wife thirty years earlier. Tall at 6’ 4” and a certified WWII hero, Purple Heart awardee and member of the renowned “greatest generation,” he went to the Wharton School at Penn on the GI Bill and, ultimately, became a steadfast Republican and ally of Governor Scranton. I am not sure Scranton knew who my uncle was, but my uncle mentioned him frequently. I am, I am afraid, being uncharitable to my uncle whom I loved and who was always kind to me. I don’t mind, though, and he’s no longer with us. Besides, I drop George McGovern’s name probably as often as he dropped Scranton’s.

He really wanted me to find a job and tempt me to settle down in the Philadelphia area. So, it seemed counter-productive to me for him to keep complaining about how awful Philadelphians were. I mean I could never figure out why he wanted to stay in a place he seemed not to like, much less why he thought what he was saying would influence me to move there. But this isn’t about my uncle or even about Philadelphia. It’s about young lust and, even, towards the end, about young love.

To that end and to entice me to stay, he set me up with a few girls, daughters of his friends for the most part. One, I remember, had been his kids’ baby sitter. All were white, protestant and a year or two younger than me. Each one, except the sitter, had a nice car and belonged to a good club. In that year, 1964, the summer before I would be drafted, the beginnings of the sexual revolution, predating the summer of love by a few years, had already started to emerge. The Beatles had exploded into our consciousness only recently and “All ya need is love” might not have been recorded yet but was an ever-present nagging sound in my mind. And love, love, love was all around.

With my uncle shouting about the undesirables in his neighborhood, I closed my ears and went out with a few young women and groped and snuggled and made love along the river, in their parents’ houses when their parents were out for the evening, and almost, once, while the baby sitter was driving across the Walt Whitman Bridge into New Jersey. I am not, really, ashamed of any of that. It was merely the zeitgeist.

Then, with only a week to go, I went with my uncle and his family for a brief stay at their beach house on the Jersey coast. I loved the house, even got along with my aunt’s mother when we visited and putt-putted around with my cousin in his small boat. And there was another girl and, as always, she was enticing. I walked along the beach with Connie whose last name I cannot remember even though I do remember that the water seemed strangely cold for August and not at all like the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. I can remember her touch, the warmth of her skin, even a small dimple, but not her name. Somehow, that seems sad to me now. I suspect she doesn’t remember my name either but does remember some boy from Texas she spent time with one summer in Avalon.

I did not have to hitch a ride back to Texas. My uncle was generous and bought an airline ticket for me, the first time I had ever flown. And I’m pretty sure the plane was a DC-3. In Vietnam a few years later, we would call them C-47s. I suspect my uncle was pleased to get rid of me and had changed his mind about the possibilities of finding me a good job in Philly.

Back in Beaumont, I met Jenny. Jenny was unlike any other woman I had met up until that time. She was ahead of her time and definitely ahead of mine, too. A few decades later, I wrote a poem for her. It’s never been published, probably because it’s pretty bad; so I won’t reproduce it here.

This whole little series of stories is for Elizabeth Taylor. I never met her, but she is, somehow, like the girl in the white convertible in American Graffiti. I turn a corner...and she is there. I see a new production of Hamlet and her limo sweeps into the alley and picks up Richard Burton. Beautiful, beautiful Elizabeth Taylor, violet eyes luminescent in dark alleys, lighting the sky for all of us.