I rode up with Merril on the subway to Port Authority, where she caught the bus back to Milford, Pennsylvania (famous to SF readers as the home of numerous SF writers, back then):
We talked very seriously about SF on the subway from Eighth Street. You told me about your daughter … you were very nice and the Hope-we-meet-agains (you shook my hand with both of yours) had a nice warmth. …
After putting Merril on the bus (according to the letter), I walked home through the snow-mounded city in the aluminum colored morning, from Port Authority to 113th Street — and burrowed into the daybed across from Bob’s ham equipment for a few hours sleep.
Toward the end of April, at the Coffee Gallery, a small, second floor art gallery and coffee shop, then on Tenth Street, between Second and Third Avenues, I restaged Perseus — this time with Daniel Landau in the role of Voice Three. The program was expanded with a recitation by Marilyn of a poem called “Helen,” a ten-minute monologue presumably spoken by Helen of Troy:
In her long dress (black), with her waistlength hair held back by a black band (and made up by Daniel in the tiny room in which we changed), the velvety-voiced eighteen-year-old poet brought if off stunningly. Added to this, I read a story of mine, “Silent Monologue for Lefty.” Now the program ran slightly over half an hour.
The Coffee Gallery was upstairs from the printshop where Diane Di Prima and LeRoi Jones were producing The Floating Bear. At least once Diane and some of her friends stopped in to see the performance. The program ran on weekends, Friday and Saturday night, for five weeks, with audiences ranging from three to fifteen.
In May I cut all my final exams. Unofficially, I had dropped out of school. (I managed, however, to fulfill my duties on the college magazine.) Over the previous six months I had written a number of short novels, with titles like The Flames of the Warthog, The Lovers, and The Assassination. Along with some earlier novels, I regularly submitted these to a number of New York publishers — by whom they were regularly rejected.
In mid-June Marilyn became pregnant with our second sexual experiment.
About then, a three-thousand-word article an editor at Seventeen magazine had suggested I write on Folk Music in Greenwich Village was rejected as “too informative.” A friend of the Harcourt Brace editor who’d helped me get my Breadloaf scholarship, she now suggested I try writing on something about which I knew less, striving for impressions rather than fact: jazz was something about which I knew nothing. So, early that July, I took off by bus to the Newport Jazz Festival, held on the same site as the Folk Festival. The three afternoons and evenings of open-air concerts included performances by Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, and a whole afternoon Judy Garland extravaganza. At night, again in a sleeping bag on seaweed-strewn sand, I made notes by firelight before drifting off to sleep, while beer drinkers — an older and more rambunctious crowd than the Folk Festival had drawn — lurched about. On Monday I bussed back to the city to plunge into my article, completing it days later.
Back in New York, after the festival, I went with Marilyn to rent a four-room apartment on the Lower East Side.
In August, with a loan from another old high school friend, Sharon Ruskin (nee Rohm), Marilyn and I took a three-day trip to Detroit, Michigan, where we were married.
At the beginning of September I got a job as a stock clerk at Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue and Eighteenth Street, in time for the September textbook rush.
In October, almost exactly a year after my father’s death, Marilyn miscarried. She recuperated in my sister’s old room at my mother’s apartment. Two or three weeks later, she got a job as a salesgirl at B. Airman’s department store. Let go even before New Year’s, almost immediately she got a job as an editorial assistant at Ace Books.
Probably within a week (certainly no more than ten days), after a set of obsessively vivid dreams, I began what, not quite a year later, would be my first published novel, The Jewels of Aptor.
Looking over this bare and untextured chronology, it’s easy to read a fairly clear emotional story. My father’s death, my subsequent dropping out of school, and my hasty marriage speak of a young man interested in writing and music, but still under fair emotional strain. With the facts that I was black and Marilyn was white, that I was gay and both of us knew it, the implication of strain — for both of us — only strengthens. The story is so clear, I wouldn’t even think, at this date, to deny it.
Still, it is not the story I remember from that time. While all the incidents listed are, in my own mind, associated with vivid moments, rich details, complexes of sensation, deep feelings, and the texture of the real (so indistinguishable from that of dream), their places on the list are wholly a product of research. And my inaccurate statement, “My father died when I was seventeen in 1958 …” is an emblem of the displacements and elisions committed upon that more objective narrative, if not a result of that strain.
I have clear memories of my father’s death.
I have clear memories of my first weeks of classes at City College, of my new teachers, of the new friends I made there, of surprises and disappointments and great excitement, of lunches with new and old acquaintances in the cafeteria, of trips between classes through crowded halls, of extracurricular activities, including a small choral group I sang with during the afternoons, under the direction of Allan Sklar (a former music counselor of mine at Camp Rising Sun), where we prepared for a recording of an a cappella version of the Orlande de Lassus’s Two-Part Motets.
But there’s no connection between those memories and those of my father’s death in my mind. I retain no sense that one came along to interrupt the other. My entrance into college and my father’s death, instead of incidents separated by weeks, seem rather years apart. To the extent I retain any context around my father’s dying at all, it is some vague and uncertain time during my last two years of high school — possibly because I saw a friend or two I connected with that period right before or right after he died. Or because that was when he first became ill. Or because. …
But I don’t know why memory separates it so completely from the time in which, objectively, it occurred.
From the October a year later, I have clear — and painful — memories of Marilyn’s miscarriage.
I also have clear memories of the afternoon back at East Fifth Street, when, waking from a nap, I became aware of the recurrent dreams that, a day or so later, impelled me into the writing of my first science fantasy novel. In the same months when I was writing through the winter, Marilyn, thinking of her miscarriage a little before, wrote: