"Passages East, Brooklyn Unbound: On Bridges, Bumbling and Allen Ginsberg" By Pamela Hughes - 2017 Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize Semi-Finalist

"Passages East, Brooklyn Unbound:

On Bridges, Bumbling and Allen Ginsberg"

by 

Pamela Hughes

To my left, the cathedral arches of the Brooklyn Bridge tower above the East River. Though the Brooklyn Bridge is the architectural poster child for Brooklyn, I said all my prayers while driving across the Manhattan Bridge.  At my first crossing, while stuck to the inside lane, never the right lane, I gripped the wheel white-knuckled.  I would not glance down over the cliff-like edge that led down to the East river. Procrastination and fear sometimes stopped me from taking practical steps in my life—crossing new bridges—so, two weeks earlier when I was afraid to cross the actual bridge, the expanse of the Manhattan Bridge that married Manhattan to Brooklyn—or vice versa depending on how you looked at it—I had to have two friends come along and coax me across. My transition from prayerful, slo-mo driver, was swift, and complete.   

          Two weeks later, I’m speeding like a taxi driver, weaving between the lanes across the Manhattan Bridge. The Clocktower looms up alongside my right. Time this big spurs me on, so I step on the gas and push from 55 to 60 where I can.  I was about to be late for my first day of class as a graduate student at Brooklyn College. It’s the late 1980s, long before the new Dumbo or Jane’s Merry-Go-Round. All the other developments.  

          Along Flatbush Ave, I race with other cars in the right lane and switch back to the left to get around double-parked delivery trucks or cars.  A few blocks away from Bedford Ave, I almost rear end a double-parked Coke truck on the corner and veer over, cutting in front of a brown Buick. I hit the brakes. The driver veers left sharply, just missing an on-coming car, flips me the middle finger and drives on. I exhale, relieved that we didn’t crash.

          Around fifteen minutes later, there’ll be an actual collision.  Where crossing the Hudson to Brooklyn would be part of my coming age story, a crush of poetry would be a sort of climax, a small but concussive moment that would propel me forward, literally.

          After parking in an illegal spot on Campus Road and dashing across the quad, I race into Boylan Hall and across the large entrance hall on first floor, thinking about how much I did not want to be late. This is when I crash into the poet, Allen Ginsberg.  My books and his books tumble onto the floor and lay askew around our feet. Alongside my upside down Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, my new blue spiral notebook is splayed on the floor open like a gymnast doing a split.   

          Allen’s eyes goggle ever so slightly out of his head like cartoon eyes that extend from a character’s face so they can see more clearly or when they are surprised. He has brown searching eyes. He is tuned into irony, tragedy, comedy and people’s bullshit.  He is a gay, Jewish, Buddhist, Beat poet, and human rights activist, who didn’t take to being censored.  At this point he didn’t have to be. It’s been over 30 years since he stood trial for indecency charges for his book of poems, Howl.  His lips remind me of Mr. Potato Head’s, kind of placed onto his face over the contours of his salt and pepper beard. Though verging on old, somehow he maintains a sort of child-like innocence.

          “Oh, Jeez,” I sputter, “I’m sorry. I shove his books into his arms, then pick up most of my own.  I notice that the last book I thrust into his arms is William Blake’s, Songs of Innocence and Experience.   

          Allen is oxymoron. You know, two things that don’t seem to go together, like jumbo shrimp or loving hate. Innocent lamb, experienced activist. 

 

          “It’s Ok,” he says, smiling, his demeanor calm and measured to my chaos and frenzy.  He stoops to pick up my notebook.  I didn’t want this older man who I just barreled into to have to pick up my stuff, so I bend quickly to try to get it first.  In doing so, I just missed head butting him.  Apparently grace is not my strong suit, though unintended physical comedy is.  Neither one of us is laughing.    

          He scoops up my notebook first, closes it, and hands it me. 

          I don’t’ say: Oh my god, you’re Allen Ginsberg, the famous poet! Or: I met you at a poetry reading in Rutherford, New Jersey during the William Carlos Williams Centennial Reading.  Instead, tardy, and tongue tied, I mutter, “Thanks. Sorry. Sorry. I gotta run. I’m late for class.”  He smiles and takes off also in haste towards the long staircase on the west side of Boylan Hall and I, unsure of where my class is located, run towards the long stair case on the eastside.

          I take the steps three at time so that the cartilage in my knees jar and my shoulder-length spiral curls rise up into the air, then crash down over my face. I did not want to be later than I was already. It was bad form, but mostly because it would be embarrassing and my face might turn bright red under florescent lights of the classroom. 

          As I open the door, trying not to breathe too heavily after my sprint up the many stairs, I see Allen sitting at the head of the table. He nods up at me and smiles, as I place my books on the conference table the other students are sitting around, and drop into the chair. He asks the students to introduce themselves. 

          I had no idea that Ginsberg would be my teacher or that he was teaching at Brooklyn College at all. Still a clumsy waitress--an oxymoron or an occasional moron--I had just graduated from college and was big on winging it--a carpe diem kind of attitude that often had consequences.  Besides the dangerous stuff, like nearly being mauled by a wolf in the Prague zoo while trying to pet it as a rehearsal to touching the tiger, or riding my motorcycle alone into NYC to go clubbing and then ending up stuck on the desolate covered roadway outside of Hoboken on the return, being out of the loop was one of them. It turned out John Ashbery had been teaching at Brooklyn College before Allen.  I didn’t know that either. Two of my undergrad, creative writing professors, Klein and O’Brien—I called them by their last names--also poets, told me that said I had to get my MFA in Creative Writing, so without much forethought or research, winging it again, I applied to Brooklyn College and got in. 

          On the classroom wall to the left of me, hangs what looks like a real Miro painting.  The disjointed reds, green and blues of the flying triangular figures are as frenetic as my thoughts. Wow, Allen Ginsburg and a Miro!  As an undergrad, I was an English major and an Art minor, so poetry and art, still plush and new to me, were like twin babies I wanted carry around in my arms all day.  Myself and seven other students, including future published poets and writers: Paul Beatty, David Trinidad, and Karen Kelly, are sitting around the rectangular wooden table. We were about to get to know each other, each other’s poetry and Allen.

             He was never elitist or highfalutin.  Allen used to have us, his graduate students of Creative Writing, over to his apartment on East 12^th Street in Manhattan for potluck gatherings.  We would sit on his couch and look out at the beautiful white church across the way with its bright turquoise pediment, the odd, yet pleasing, mix of Greek columns and two Spanish-influenced bell towers (now all lost to condos) and chat about poetry. Or art. Or anything all. Because Allen was a vegetarian, I cooked up a big pot of cream of mushroom broccoli soup and toted it to his place to share. 

          He shared his knowledge and his friends with us.  Once he had Gregory Corso take over his class. Wild-eyed, Corso railed about how we had “save words,” that people were no longer using as many words as they used to—vocabularies were getting thinner and thinner so “YOU­—THE POETS—NEED TO SAVE WORDS!”  (Corso was wild-eyed and flirtatious. He also tried to chat me up, which I played dumb to.) Back at Allen’s apartment, among others, we met Allen’s partner, Peter Orlovsky and writer, Herbert Huncke.

          Allen was the real deal. He cared about the well being of others, and us, his students.  I can’t speak for my classmates, but I appreciated his quirky smile and wry wit, the way he cocked his head to the side when he listened carefully to you.  His graciousness.   

          When Allen died in 1997, Brooklyn College held a memorial reading. Poets, former students and his friends read poems in honor of him.  Allen had many connections to poets, present and past. In a visionary experience, he met William Blake, who recited some of his poems to him. But what about Walt I found myself thinking?  He and Walt Whitman would have gotten along great, Bards and friends of Brooklyn.  If Whitman were to read a poem at Allen’s funeral, he would probably read some lines from his poem “Crossing the Brooklyn Ferry” with its shuttling passengers from one place to another and setting sun:

             Others will enter the gates of the ferry

             and cross from shore to shore, 

             Others will watch the run of the flood-tide, 

             Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west,

             and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east, 

             Others…will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide,

             the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide. 

          But somehow that somber resolution doesn’t seem a perfect fit. Allen was an upbeat Beat, celebrating both the metaphysical and the physical worlds.  Although he sometimes came off as a sedate academician in class, he could be zany-humored and fun.  If Allen were to read a poem at his own funeral, he might recite a few lines from a poem he wrote with Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy:

          Pull my daisy

          Tip my cup

          All my doors are open…

         

          Pope my parts

          Raise my daisy up     

 

"The Lady Vanishes and My Absent Mother" By Sharon Dolin - 2017 Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize Semi-Finalist

"The Lady Vanishes and My Absent Mother"

       by  

 Sharon Dolin

You'll excuse me if l run away?—Miss Froy in The Lady Vanishes

Sometimes I find it easier to remember things by not thinking about them directly. I call this method peripheral memory. The way I can see a star in the sky better by letting my gaze veer to the side of it, I can recall a name only when I turn my mind to something else.

I find myself drawn to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938) because of what it might trigger in my peripheral memory about absence, which I lived with my entire childhood, when my mother would periodically disappear from my life. When I attempt to remember these scenes too directly, they stay hidden in the cloudy night sky of childhood memories. So I drift my gaze over to Hitchcock intermittently in order to allow certain early childhood scenes to come into focus.

                                                *

The enigmatic Miss Froy: Who is she? She writes her name with her finger on the steamy club car window and shortly afterwards she vanishes. In The Lady Vanishes, Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood), the pretty young brunette, becomes frantic when she realizes that Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), has disappeared. Everyone in her compartment denies having seen her. As Iris goes running through the cars searching for Miss Froy, she bumps into Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), the young folk musicologist she had scuffled with the night before in the inn. Now smitten with Iris, he still does not believe there is a missing Miss Froy, since all the other passengers are in on the cover-up and insist Miss Froy never existed.   

 

Iris had begun to doubt her own sanity until she sees the trace of the letters FROY that Miss Froy had written with her finger on the steamy glass of the club car window. That peculiar name. But as luck would have it, the writing disappears when the train enters the tunnel—before she can show it to Gilbert. Another lady—her name this time—who vanishes!

                                                            *

A summer day in Brooklyn in the late-1940s. A young woman in her twenties boldly leans back against the boardwalk railing, flaunting her body in a provocative two-piece outfit: high-waisted flowered shorts that reveal most of her upper thigh and a matching, flowered cap-sleeved top that shows off her midriff and ties between her voluptuous breasts. Her light-brown hair, parted on the right above her high forehead, is gathered in a rush of waves to the side, highlighting her prominent Polish cheekbones. She has planted her sandaled right foot on the ground, bent the other leg back at the knee to rest on the bottom crossbar of the railing. Joyfully at ease and squinting up into the bright sun of Manhattan Beach, a few blocks from where she grew up on Dover Street, Selma gives Irving a full, toothy smile as he snaps the picture.

Selma snaps the companion photograph of Irving wearing a navy cap, in a pair of loose-fitting khaki shorts that highlight his slender thighs. He is bare-chested with a slim torso he enjoys showing off. Like her, he stands posed, back to the railing, one foot resting on the lower bar as he squints into the sun, grinning at her.

                                               

                                               

Wintertime. Selma beams with Irving, self-possessed, on the front lawn of her parents’ home on Dover Street in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn. She wears an ankle-length lambs-wool coat, strap-on heels with a peephole at the toe, a sheer scarf thrown over the back of her hat, tied gracefully under the chin. Irving has a winter coat on over a suit and tie and he wears a hat whose large brim shades his face from the sun. He is smiling broadly as he grips her around the waist with his right arm.

Early Spring, 1949. Now they are on their honeymoon, skiing in the Laurentian Mountains in Canada. Wearing a ski sweater, Selma chuckles as she makes a show of rubbing snow into Irving’s bare chest as he leans in toward her, both of them hamming it up for the camera. Selma, so at ease in touching her new husband, and equally at ease in being touched by him.

                                               

I study these photographs as though they are movie stills because that is what remains of my mother’s past before I was born. Looking at these snapshots reminds me that my mother was not always as I knew her. By the time I came into the world and throughout my childhood in the 1960s and early Seventies, she was a woman who frequently disappeared, who stopped being Mommy every time she had to enter the psychiatric ward at Kings County Hospital. The label she wore for life was paranoid schizophrenic. She would receive electroshock treatments and high doses of anti-psychotics before she came back home to be Mommy.

She is my lady who vanished.

                                               

                                                                   My First-Grade Portrait    

I must be around seven years old the one time my father takes me and my sister to visit my mother in Kings County Hospital’s psychiatric unit, where she often remained for three or four weeks. My father leads us into a large visiting room with grey-green walls. I quickly glance around to see other seated families visiting patients. Oh. So I am not the only one with a mommy they have to take away. He takes us over to a seated woman who looks like Mommy the way a wax figure resembles a live figure, and I sit down opposite her.

Her thin, light-brown hair looks a little greasy and is brushed and parted to the side. She is wearing her hot-pink lipstick and her small blue eyes fix me with a maniacal, moist stare before she comes to life, this usually quiet, slow-moving woman, the words tumbling out of her faster than I have ever heard her speak. “Sharon honey I missed yuh so much, ya know what they did to me tuhday, they stuck something in my tushy so I could go to the bathroom and yestuhday they put electric wires in my head and oh it was terrrrible. You can’t bulieve what goes on here.”

I sit there frozen, not knowing what to do or say. Mommy still sounds like my mommy, but speeded up, like a 45-record played at 78.

She leans in towards me, fishing something out of the pocket of the apron she wears over a green hospital gown. She holds out her right hand, which curves in, as though her fingers have tight webbing between them and are stuck together. “Here, Sharon, I made something for yuh. I wan’cha to have it.”

She puts something in my hand. Cool to the touch, the size of a Benjamin Franklin half-dollar but much thinner. I am too frightened to speak, so I look down. A circular copper pendant with a muddy enamel swirl of greens and pinks fired into it sits in my palm.

“I made it special for you. Yuh know, I wanna get outta here and go home with you.” “All right. That’s enough, Sel.” My dad steps between us. “We all came to visit you. How ya doin’? Say hello to Marla.” He prods my big sister in the back to get her to move forward. “How’s the food? What’re they feeding ya here?”

I get up from the chair and step back, and spend the rest of the time a bit dazed, half-listening and looking at her, as I finger the gift she has just given me. Is this now my mommy? I feel dizzy and nauseous as I turn the pendant over in my hand. Why is she making this kid stuff?

Soon my dad tells us it is time to leave. On the car ride back home, no one says a thing, as the radio wails: “Don’t let the sun catch you cryin’ . . .”

He never takes us back to visit her in the hospital.

                                                *         

For close to fifty years, I have held on to this fired copper medallion, never able to wear it, never able to throw it away. As an artifact from that time, it tells me that at least once, I saw my mother at her most helpless and childlike and I understood, however vaguely, that I could never go back to being the child again. Like the end of “Toyland,” a song my mother liked to play on the piano: Once you pass its borders you can never return again.

                                                           

I vaguely understood that things with electricity were done to her there. Though no one told me, I knew I had to hide from my friends what had happened to my mother and where she was. That there was shame in it. When the Rolling Stones came on AM radio, It’s just your 19^th nervous breakdown, I belted it out along with my friends.

My friends lived in single-family homes their parents owned in Mill Basin and Bergen Beach—middle-class neighborhoods a bus ride away from my working-class one that had no particular name other than being near Canarsie. My parents rented the downstairs apartment of a modest two-family brick home, where my sister and I shared a cramped bedroom. Each night one of us pulled out a high-riser bed and tucked it away each morning.

                                                *

The Lady Vanishes. Why do I feel compelled to re-watch it? Each time I am doing my own dreamwork of a woman in search of her mother, identifying with Iris and casting off my childhood role of being in on the cover-up.

                                                           

At the outset of the train journey, Iris briefly loses consciousness because of an accidental blow to the head before boarding the train. When she awakens, she finds Miss Froy sitting opposite her in the train compartment, who soothes her, offering her a handkerchief daubed with eau de cologne to put to her forehead. Miss Froy steadies Iris, who is still quite woozy, and leads her by the arm to the club car for a cup of Miss Froy’s special tea. When they return to their compartment, Miss Froy urges Iris to rest, and the concussed, dizzy Iris dozes off.

When Iris awakens, she finds Miss Froy has vanished, and she becomes frantic. No one says they have seen her—neither the sinister-looking woman in a black headdress by the window, nor the magician. In the club car, the steward is adamant that she took her tea alone. Iris must find Miss Froy. Miss Froy acted like a mother to her before she disappeared. Now Iris is determined to act like her daughter.

                                                *

Didn’t I spend my entire childhood covering up my mother’s condition? And haven’t I spent my adulthood searching for my mother? Who was she? Where was the lively, playful, glamorous woman I saw in the photographs from before I was born? Who, before she met my father, poses in several shots with different boyfriends. Who hams it up in a bathing suit with her girlfriends. Who sits in the center of a circle of teens, laughing into the camera.

Selma, the nineteen-year-old, stands in Washington Square Park, a young coed at New York University before she had to drop out when she had her first schizophrenic episode. The young married woman who, in 1951, kept a diary and made lists of the books she wanted to read, including Finnegan’s Wake, who also wrote essays such as “The Value of Socialized Medicine to the American Public.” The woman, I discover, who wrote poems in English and in Spanish under a pseudonym before I was born. Who sent a poem called “Patience” to Redbook Magazine and received a typed, one-page rejection letter. Where had she gone?

                     

                                                   8 years old

                                                *

My mother’s breakdowns happened until I was around ten years old. My dad must have worried that my mother might have a breakdown while he was away on one of his month-long sales trips. At the advice of a psychiatrist, my mother took pills daily and her breakdowns ceased.

From then on, I lived with a mother who was no longer hospitalized. She became a zombie. She slept until 11:30 each morning. She would buy some groceries and do a bit of dusting. Sometimes she would pick me up from school in the car, bringing me a hot cocoa. When we got home, she would lay down in bed in the late afternoon, with The New York Post before resting, her right arm bent at the elbow to cover her face.

This was a different kind of vanishing act.

Through my teen years, I sought to hide who my mother was just as she had become hidden from me. She moved slowly through the house like a sleepwalker. She gained a lot of weight, though she continued to wear her bright pink lipstick. When she undressed in her bedroom after dinner, I watched her deflated breasts slump out of her brassiere before she slipped into one of her pastel, cotton nightgowns and into bed once more to watch TV with my dad.

Now my mother moved in slow motion, as though she were walking through water. In her drugged haze she spoke little, and held her hands stiffly at her side with her thumbs lying like spatulate spoons, limp and useless, in the palms of her hands. Her hands always unnerved me, reminding me she was not normal. I was afraid it must be obvious.

                                                 

My mother took Thorazine (Chlorpromazine) for years. Now I discover that Thorazine was (and still is) routinely given to schizophrenics starting in 1954. French researchers discovered the drug and thought it would be a good sedative for surgery. It was commonly referred to as a chemical lobotomy because the doctors were pleased to find it controlled and sedated patients, producing detachment, relaxation, and indifference, according to clinical trials. 

Chlorpromazine (Thorazine) is still the first drug mentioned in a list of Antipsychotic Medications on the National Institute of Mental Health’s online booklet Schizophrenia.

My mother also took Stelazine (trifluoperazine hydrochloride), another strong anti-psychotic, at the same time. The list of side effects characterize my mother perfectly: She was sedated, drowsy, lethargic, emotionally dull, and didn’t have much to say because she probably had difficulty thinking, due to the medications.

                                                *

I return to Selma in her photo album from before I was born: The woman in a white turtleneck who rode a bicycle. The one who went fishing with Irving on the Dorothy B. from Sheepshead Bay. The woman who occasionally wore her hair up in a turban like a Hollywood starlet. The one who played show tunes like “Some Enchanted Evening” on the piano. A lively, curvaceous woman with a broad smile who had several boyfriends propose to her, she once told me.

This Selma had vanished. I would never catch a glimpse of her again.