In 1984, I became a character in a play. By this, I do not mean I performed a role in a production of a play. No. By this, I mean a play was written in which I was one of the major characters - not I Edward Thomas-Herrera mentioned by name I, but I in this play there was a character modeled after me I.
The play is called Birds in the Night and it takes its title from a poem written in 1872 by the French symbolist poet Paul Verlaine. The poem is, in essence, a lament, an elegy to the time Verlaine was living in England with Arthur Rimbaud, a fellow French symbolist poet with whom he was conducting a homosexual love affair. Verlaine was 28 years old at the time; Rimbaud was only 17.
Historically, both Verlaine and Rimbaud were highly complex men. Verlaine spent a great deal of his life torn between his desire for the comforts and assurances of a bourgeois lifestyle, and his passionate hatred of that lifestyle's requisite artistic and moral limitations. Rimbaud, although prodigiously gifted as a writer, was something of a sociopath: infamous for his rude, insulting behavior, his frequent bouts of heavy drinking, and his inability and/or reluctance to hold down meaningful employment.
Act One of Birds in the Night is set in London and recounts the story of the dysfunctional and oftentimes abusive relationship between Verlaine and Rimbaud which ends one night in a violent argument during which Verlaine slaps Rimbaud across the face with a large fish. Act Two takes place some time later in Paris where Verlaine, having undergone a religious conversion, returns to the wife and child he had abandoned several years earlier.
The character of Verlaine, as depicted in the play Birds in the Night, is a tragic figure, a conflicted prodigal-genius at the mercy of his sexual appetites, whose inner divinity eventually allows him to discover redemption. The character of Rimbaud is a vain, self-centered, self-destructive, emotionally unbalanced artistic snob who takes advantage of Verlaine's all-consuming love to further his own agenda of socio-politico-literary-sexual anarchy.
The character of Verlaine, as depicted in the play Birds in the Night, is meant to be a self-portrait of the playwright. The character of Rimbaud was modeled after me.
When I was 19, life was beautiful and full of possibilities. I was studying piano and composition at Rice University (the Harvard of the South) and yes, Reagan was in the White House and all, but more importantly, Laurie Anderson had just recorded a duet with Peter Gabriel called "This is the Picture" that was the coolest song in the history of Western Civilization.
When I was 19, I had a serious boyfriend, my very first. His name was Larry and he was the smartest, funniest man I had ever known in my entire life. Larry and I met at the Sound Warehouse on the corner of Westheimer and Hillcroft where we both worked part-time in the classical music department. We fell in love with each other between stints at the cash register and making fun of customers who didn't know how to correctly pronounce "Camille Saint-Saëns." I was so taken with Larry's near-encyclopedic knowledge of contemporary literature and foreign film that I didn't care if he had a crooked smile or bad posture. He was clever and unpredictable and when he told me I was gorgeous, I was smitten. And when he told me he was a writer, I became his emotional slave.
When I was 19, writers were romantic figures leading fascinating lives of moral transgression and intellectual pursuit. Actors were too stuck on themselves and painters always had dirty hands, but writers were stuffing sonnets into sock drawers, attending bullfights in Pamplona, romancing tortured blonde sex symbols. Other than landing a VJ spot on MTV, it was my fondest 19-year-old wish that I would some day meet some great writer and serve as his muse, a regular Brenda Venus to his Henry Miller. After his death, documentary filmmakers would interview me about his formative years and I would publish his 4,000 love letters to me in a best-selling memoir.
To accomplish this of course, first you had to find writer and secondly you had to make him love you. Done and done.
A typical date with Larry would go something like this: drive to his place, open a bottle of wine, listen to a few Maria Callas recordings, discuss the absence of God in Ingmar Bergman's Hour of the Wolf, get naked, have sex, go out for sushi (his treat!), discuss his wild student days living in France, back to his place, more wine, more sex, debate the theory that Shakespeare's plays were actually written by Christopher Marlowe, discuss the best place to hang his new David Hockney framed lithograph, say goodnight, drive home. Pretentious? Yes. Intentional? Mais oui.
During our time together, Larry wrote constantly - poems, short stories, political essays, you name it. Today, I would consider such genre-jumping symptomatic of an author in search of some character, but when I was 19, I was convinced this meant that Larry's literary gifts (like Susan Sontag's) could not be confined merely to one discipline. He was working on a new translation of some obscure Mallarmé poems. He was researching a biography of Jean Renoir. There was a satirical take-off on Chekhov's "Three Sisters" in which Masha, Olga, and Irina put together a magic act and get booked on an Aegean cruise ship. Larry was quite the prolific author.
During our time together, Larry wrote constantly… or so he said. Curiously, Larry never shared any of his work with me. It wasn't finished yet. It wasn't any good. He didn't have a clean copy and I'd never be able to decipher his handwriting. OK. Whatever. I didn't have to actually read his work to just instinctively know it was monumental, groundbreaking stuff. When I was 19, claiming to be a writer and actually writing were pretty much the same things.
When I was 19, I didn't think much of the fact that Larry was 10 years my senior. Older men were such a turn-on with their studio apartments and their graduate degrees and their male pattern baldness. I couldn't relate to guys my age. I was too intense. I scared them all away.
Older men liked me back, too. They liked laughing at my jokes. They liked impressing me with stories of world travel and hallucinogenic drug experiences. They liked buying me drinks, watching me get all fucked up, then using my 19-year-old body to re-capture their fleeting youth. Older men thought I was really cute and really fun - like a really cute, really fun little puppy: hopelessly devoted, unendingly enthusiastic, capable of ejaculating three, four, even five times a night. If guys my age wouldn't cross the street to spit in my styling mousse, older men went out of their way to make me feel like a person - a witty, charming, barely legal, easily manipulated, horny, barely legal person.
When I was 19, I didn't think much of the fact that Larry was 10 years my senior, but looking back now, I probably should have given it some serious thought, because outside of Mozart/da Ponte operas and fellatio, Larry and I were very different people at very different points in our lives.
I was on the verge of a brilliant musical career. I planned on moving to Europe right after graduation and writing an opera that would set the classical music world on fire. I didn't exactly know how this artistic inferno would come about, but I was convinced it would, because when I was 19, everyone in the world was just stupid. Except for me. And Alban Berg.
Larry, on the other hand, was suffering from a condition I like to call "early onset mid-life bitterness." He was focused on premature hair loss and health insurance benefits and borrowing money from his mother to make car payments and keeping his job teaching English as a second language when the school board kept talking budget cuts and layoffs and he really liked deflowering fresh, young men but he didn't always have time for their my pie-in-the-sky idealism or their frequently grating naïveté or their penchant for flirting or their fascination with Duran Duran.
Unable to always hide his contempt for my tendencies towards youthfulness (the same tendencies, I might point out, that attracted him to me in the first place), Larry began to pepper our conversations with condescending remarks regarding my admiration of Boy George or the amount of product I insisted upon wearing in my hair. At which point, I would respond with some light frothy quip about the thick, wavy locks Larry seemed to be missing from his head and how they had miraculously re-appeared on his lower back. So forth. So on.
A few months into our amour fou, Larry and I began to alternate lovemaking sessions with angry shouting matches. I was under the impression that any writer worth his salt would find my child-like innocence and refreshing candor a never-ending source of inspiration. Larry was under the impression that college-age party boys with clear ideas of how to conduct meaningful relationships sprung forth fully-grown from the head of Thomas Mann.
Now… it doesn't exactly take a MENSA membership to see this relationship was headed for disaster, but apparently it does require you to be at least 31 years old, because as unhappy as Larry and I made each other, it never occurred to either of us once that we should just break up already. So we soldiered bravely on, only now, our time together was spent on addressing our differences, in a calm, mature manner. That's what adult people do, or so we told ourselves: they talk things out. Constantly. At length. In great, excruciating detail. Again and again and again and again. I soon learned that if I could just avoid any discussion of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Grace Jones, Madonna, Anton Bruckner, David Bowie, Thompson Twins, Paul Celan, Richard Strauss, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Jean-Pierre Ponelle, John Guare, Puccini operas, French grammar, anal sex, and movie musicals, Larry and I could get along just fine.
I think we can all safely agree that serious relationships are hard work, but my relationship with Larry was something more like slave labor. Fatigue quickly set in. One fateful evening, Larry picked a real doozy of a fight over my reluctance to spend the night with him because I had to take a final the next morning and it finally occurred to me that I had absolutely had it. The Bourdeaux, the Fellini, the sashimi, the Faulkner, the fucking - none of it could compensate me for the emotional mine field that accompanied our half-a-generation gap. Unequipped with a suitably large fish with which to slap Larry across the face, I burst into tears, declared our relationship over, and walked out, determined never to see him again. Nora Helmer, eat your heart out!
***
Of course, one of the many drawbacks of a workplace romance (because even Barbara Cartland couldn't deny this story's Sound Warehouse origins) is that very frequently the workplace outlasts the romance. Larry and I may have no longer been star-crossed, but we still had to check in the Deutsche Grammaphon shipment together and this meant we were going to be a part of each other's lives for just a little while longer. We handled this new challenge in the best way we could. While on the job, Larry and I would treat each other in a manner which, if not exactly friendly, could at least be considered civil. We were going to take all the anger we felt towards each other, and do what people working retail do worldwide: focus it on the customers. It was closure of sorts.
This also meant that I got the distinct pleasure of meeting Allan, Larry's new boyfriend. Allan was a lawyer with bad skin and the kind of white man's afro popularized in the early 80's by earnest young actors like William Katt. Unsurprisingly, Allan was the same age as Larry and he knew all about me. Larry (employing a journalist's objectivity, no doubt) had filled him in our history together.
Allan used to come by the store every now and then at the end of Larry's shift to pick Larry up for a hot date to… oh, I don't know… count their age spots, I suppose. One night, Allan came by early and, seeing as how Larry was busy with a customer at the time, struck up a conversation with me. Allan was always very nice to me, if not a little chilly, but I made the effort to be as charming as an Alpine village.
"Larry's been working on a play. I was reading it the other evening," Allan said to me breezily, unknowningly revealing a privilege of which I was never deemed worthy. "It's quite good actually. It's called Birds in the Night…"
"Oh, really?" I asked Allan, genuinely half-interested, taking a step and shifting my weight forward, a hellish abyss slowly opening wide at my feet. "So… what's it about?"
