My cohort had impressive facility with language. Their rough drafts were sophisticated, with imaginative plots and keen structural surprises. Mine felt naïve by comparison, with melodramatic storylines and on-the-nose dialogue. One day after workshop, a classmate chatted me up in the hallway. I had seen one of her plays produced on a major Philadelphia stage and it was staggering, dreamlike. Her work and career accomplishment awed me. What could she possibly want out of a grad school education? “Can I make a suggestion?” she said. “Your dialogue is grammatically correct. Every line has proper syntax. But real people speak in fragments. Not every line needs a subject, noun, and verb.” I forgot right quick about her impressive writing. The fuck you think you are? I thought. Gettin’ up in my ass talkin’ ’bout how people speak. But then I remembered the dynamic markings in Chopin and Bach—staccato and legato. Grammar could deliver such variety, too. That night I cut almost every line in my rough draft down to three or four words. One paragraph became a single word. It worked, she was right. My dialogue had been untied from a corset.
Owning my ignorance, not with pride but candor, was the only viable strategy. I confessed my shortcomings to Vogel, who assigned me a bespoke reading list a hundred plays long. Written responses were due by the last day of classes. Managing the workload was on me. So here came a new string of firsts. My first August Wilson. My first Edward Albee. My first Caryl Churchill. My first Harold Pinter. My second, then third, then fifth Nilo Cruz. Early in Paula’s list was Roosters by Milcha Sanchez-Scott. It was a little-known play set in the American South, exploring the world of Chicano cockfighting. The dialogue and plot were a tad banal, the characters never fully leapt off the page, and yet the play’s stage directions were a revelation. They detailed how the cockfighting scenes (neither possible eight shows a week nor ethical onstage) were to be enacted not by fowl but humans using martial arts. No rooster costumes allowed. This was eye-opening stuff: that one ritual might replace another. That an empty space created the possibility of going double-mythic.
As if horse-whispering my nascent voice, Paula knew which authors to put first. The list was not chronological nor arranged by canonical position. Instead, she ordered it with a sense of where my curiosities lay and the playwriting mechanics I’d not yet encountered. The breadth of Paula’s knowledge on contemporary plays was inscrutable, and she was a fervent B-sider. So rather than assign me one of José Rivera’s lauded masterpieces, she had me start with Sonnets for an Old Century, a forgotten oddity with an ecumenical structure, like a ribald Sunday mass. It was a series of earthbound, ecstatic, and ruminative monologues that proceeded in the way hymns might at church. Except R-rated. After finishing, I flipped to the author bio. José Rivera was Puerto Rican. I had felt it while turning back to reread, re-savor before proceeding to the next monologue. His poetics of the human body as animal—craven, withering, and holy—resonated in my core. Words that spoke Abuela’s world. Never before had my schooling and Boricua culture held common space. I turned to page one and read Sonnets anew.
Savoring those early plays on Paula’s list, I had to force myself to remain seated, to read all the way to final lines, to see “end of play” before bolting to my desk. Each new play an acclimation, an ecosystem. I was digesting a cosmos and building my own.
As promised, Paula drove us to the Cape. I believe it was an equinox, fall or spring, but maybe it simply felt like the moon was perched on some precipice. We arrived after dark and settled in with the ghost stories. Paula spun a ghoulish yarn about disembodied purple toes. We crashed in various rooms on couches and floors and awoke to blinding white sand dunes out every window. “Playwriting can get you this!” she said, lifting the blinds and asking how we took our oatmeal. It was a favorite bit of propaganda: that we need not be starving artists, that writing would afford us luxuries our younger selves had not dared hunger for. A new house on the Cape, a new convertible, Pulitzer money.
But it wasn’t the potential payday that quickened my pulse, that opened and dizzied me in equal measure. It was the notion that no single hemisphere or address wore an aesthetic crown, that the task was to put one’s world onstage. It was how curiosity saturated and energized the woman. It was her enthusiasm at the next item on the to-do list. How her untired eyes sparkled as she made us oatmeal. Untired eyes—I hadn’t known many women with those.
The pot took a good long while to stew. Quick oats, she said, was the stuff of nonbelievers. She placed on the table a buffet of mix-ins: brown sugar, Grade A maple syrup bought directly from the tapper, dried cranberries, raisins, flaxseed (“At my age, regularity is a godsend!”), and cinnamon sticks to swirl it all together. I watched as warm meals were ladled into bowls, listened as spoons scooped first bites. But when my turn came, I placed my hand over the bowl and declined. I was unexpectedly nervous to dig into Paula’s meal. Reticent to fall wholly under her spell, then wake up embarrassed, like I’d shown too much skin. Best to take it slow. To not burn love’s candle all in one sitting. To not let the oatmeal lower my defenses, nor allow her magic to thrum me into full acquiescence. Though I skipped breakfast, I enjoyed the aroma and the delicate chime of spoon on bowl. All of 195 East back to Providence, my stomach churned and moaned and roared. I was hungry. This was a good thing.
On Obscenity
Find your fellow travelers. It was a foundational Vogel teaching.
When a door opens for you, bring another person through. Oft-repeated Paula scripture.
* * *
—
At the start of each semester, the door swung open and Paula bounced into the room, doing a leprechaun bop. We were in for a treat, she assured us, drumming her fingers like some swell prank was in store. She would name the next guest artist and, eyes gleaming, list their accomplishments: downtown rabble-rousers, performance artists, punk-rock opera scribes, founders of theater collectives with names like Split Britches and The Five Lesbian Brothers. Then she’d reopen the door and the guest, who’d been standing in the hall awkward and alone, would make their royal appearance, embarrassed and honored by the theatrics. They were, like Paula, artists with a penchant toward mischief. Her fellow travelers.
One of the people behind the door was Holly Hughes.
* * *
—
In middle school, if I had fellow travelers they were Keith Haring and Spike Lee. They traveled with me all over Philly, SEPTA tokens of my young artistic dreams. My eighth-grade backpack was a kiosk of Haring pins. Silence=Death. No Glove No Love. National Coming Out Day! Skipping lunch was worth it for the two-buck Do the Right Thing rental. The long-haired tattooed anarchists minimum-waging at West Coast Video didn’t flinch at the R movie in my twelve-year-old hand. So many afternoons those tense Brooklyn scenes played out before me. Radio Raheem shouting at the shop owners, “D, motherfucka, D!” Radio Raheem with that boom box on his shoulder as Chuck D screamed, “I’m hyped cuz I’m amped, most a my heroes don’t appear on no stamp.” Sal windmilling a baseball bat from behind the pizza counter, pounding Raheem’s boom box till the circuits popped like eyeballs. The cops storming in, nightstick at Raheem’s neck, his sneakers kicking in struggle, then sputtering in weakness, then motionless. Death as a sneaker close-up. I rewound and replayed Raheem’s motionless sneakers over and over, again and again. In eighth grade, the world hadn’t fully Radio Raheemed my cousins, but that movie was prophecy on like a hundred fronts. Spike Lee was a wake-up call, a middle finger, barbed wire at the nation’s throat.
By 1993, sophomore year of high school, art as fuck yuppies life is chaos, art as I will name my wound without apology, suffered a setback. Congress threw a hissy and the NEA stopped funding artists. An instant, nationwide defanging. It became a gamble for artists to be too wild or countercultural. Before, if Mapplethorpe got fifty thou, he didn’t need an institutional greenlight. He could develop his photos and produce his own opening. After, institutions became the financial gatekeepers of the a
rts. You might go to the museum or theater and see something that stormed your heart, but good luck finding anything that stormed the gates. Our national rebel-needle shifted toward the palatable, marketable, and sustainable. Art as a renewable subscription.
I learned about this via Channel 1, an eleven-minute Board of Ed–approved string of ad spots masquerading as a news broadcast. Mondays my homeroom teacher wheeled a TV cart to the blackboard and unleashed the brainwashing upon our minds. The episode about the NEA Four was eleven minutes of theatrics about Twisted Sister’s front man, Dee Snider, and Robert Mapplethorpe’s infamous bullwhips. They didn’t show the offensive works alluded to, meaning, of course, I was desperate to get my hands on them. What they did show was Jesse Helms and Tipper Gore pissing their pants about obscenity. These artists were depraved souls who, Helms and Gore asserted, smeared shit on their naked bodies and called it art. Still, that Disneyland broadcast got me hip to the NEA Four, so props are due.
I spent lunch in the library, but the periodicals section was lacking. After school I hotfooted it downtown to the main branch, 19th and Vine. Hell yes, I was gonna check out the “disgusting, insulting, revolting garbage produced by obviously sick minds” that Helms abhorred. Nice sales pitch, Senator! Turns out Holly Hughes, Karen Finley, and company didn’t pee or jerk off on the audience, didn’t smear shit all over themselves. I discovered artists who spoke frankly (and in Finley’s case, nudely) about sexuality, queerness, and the body. Yeah, some of it was definitely obscene (an obvious plus). Some of it was beautiful. All of it did something my family was unable to. Back then Perez deaths were wordless dull aches, quiet question marks. If my family could not bring themselves to utter the word “AIDS” in each other’s company, these artists screamed it, shouted it, claimed it. The Central High AIDS Quilt, the essay about Tico’s death I read at City Hall? Those happened after Holly Hughes and her colleagues came into my life. Their work gave me permission to claim my silences aloud.
American History was less dull that month. I wrote a book report on the NEA Four’s foulmouthed poetics. That’s how I mastered the Dewey decimal system, scouring collections for obscene art. I got microfiche headaches thanks to Tipper Gore’s beloved death metal. My poor American History teacher probably had to take confession after grading that book report. He circled half the words in red ink and wrote notes in the margins like “not appropriate” and “unnecessarily explicit.” He returned the graded report not to me but to the principal. But he couldn’t deny me an A-plus. The research was impeccable.
* * *
—
A decade had passed since that book report. I was now twenty-five. Still, when Paula opened the door and Holly Hughes walked through, I was like Hell yes, gracias a la vida, this puta was born ready BEEYOTCH! The microfiche had captured a sliver of the woman—her broad toothy smile and tiny stature. But that loud easy cackle was new. That terrier’s jumpy ebullience. Her thought lines and crow’s feet were an abacus of good times had. She got right to business, too excited for name games or warm-ups. “List your identities!” She more screamed it than spoke it. There was a pause as we waited for more. “That’s the whole exercise. A list of your identities.” “Should we explain them or, like, elaborate?” someone asked. “Nah. Five minutes sound okay? Go!” The task brought me right back to Dr. Phillips’s essay test. “Flannery O’Connor uses the theme of fire in her work. Discuss.” An ask so terse it’s essentially a dare.
Every identity I could think of…I started with the chosen ones. Pianist. Poet. Composer. There were identities thrust on me, census stuff. Female. Latina. Boricua. Mixed. Twenty-something. There were alter egos. Rock star. Girl who saves the world. Barrio Grrrl! What else, what else? I loosened up, got playful. White rice chef’s apprentice. Girl with the stiff hips. Hides-on-Abuela’s-staircase-during-the-party girl.
Then it rushed in, jolting and heavy, as though a tap had twisted open or a water main had blown. Tremors coursed through my hand, knees, shoulders. I gulped for air like a toppled goldfish, bowl nowhere in sight. My pen moved, this much I could feel, but of some other accord. The ink was autonomous, it would not succumb to my brain. It had been a decade since Dr. Phillips’s essay test, but the same violence ripped me, the same volcanic heat thrashing my heart, lungs, larynx. I was thrumming, asphyxiating. Holly Hughes, gone. Classmates, vanished. My hand lanced the page, an undomesticated thing, a sword slicing through battle. I’d vomit any moment. Half of me pleaded, “Stop! Stop!” while some other half, which sought no permission, thrilled at the precipice. Ride the wave, grab the reins, mount the beast.
Then time was up and people were sharing aloud and it was rude, I knew, how rather than listening I was reacclimating. Regaining consciousness felt old and familiar. I knew how to do it. You’re trapped underwater, swimming countercurrent toward the surface, daylight shimmering nearer as breath, at last, finds you. Based on everyone’s behavior, I apparently hadn’t done anything unusual. Had my shaking even been visible? It felt, in the moment, as though I had collapsed to the floor, torso heaving, legs twisting. But no one looked my way. I put my pen down. Kneaded my throbbing hand.
My classmates’ lists were ten items long, maybe twenty. Their identities tended toward the accurate and objective: gender, sexuality, age. Thumbing through my notebook, I saw a list that continued for pages. Some of them two or three columns thick. My identities were neither accurate, objective, nor purely autobiographical. Reading them aloud, each one struck me as obvious yet surprising.
Fat ass.
Junky.
Crackhead.
Twelve Stepper.
Yalie.
Illiterate.
Witch.
Welfare Queen.
Righteous Thighs.
West Philly.
North Philly.
Spirit Medium.
Santera.
Quaker.
HIV positive.
I was somewhere in the recipe but not the main ingredient. Asked to name myself, I had instead named my Perez women, my matriarchal family tree.
Each Orisha is a source energy, with particular creative and destructive powers. Yemayá for the ocean surface—her ripples, swirls, and tsunamis, her saltwater hips the essence of maternal life. Oyá for the tornado—the winds. The cosmology of my cousins was divvied up, too, into specialized forces of creation and destruction. Flor was wild-me, promiscuous-me, junkie-me, recovery-me, regrets-me, me-on-the-couch-in-a-depressive-coma, reborn-me, serenity-prayer-me, me-who-laughs-volume-eleven-mothafucka! Nuchi was streetfighter-me, most-truth-telling-jokester-in-North-Philly-me, talk-shit-me, illiterate-me, sits-at-the-back-of-class-me, me-who-lights-a-blunt-with-my-teenage-son. Mary Lou was church-wedding-me, laugh-at-the-ceiling-fan-me, strict-young-mom-me, shake-your-ass-like-your-soul-depends-on-it-me, me-who’s-gonna-outrun-el-barrio, me-who-died-too-soon. Cuca was caretaker-me, loyal-me, virgin-on-my-wedding-day-me, granny-panties-me. Gabi was planet-earth-belly-me, lotsa-sass-square-ass-me, diva-style-me, fat-bullied-me, dyslexic-shamed-me, sharp-tongue-to-hide-the-tears-me.
My pantheon, my Perez women, my biblical ribs and mud. Out of their rough, mortal flesh was fashioned my tempo and taste. Being three hundred miles from Philly did not mean opting out. Each mile of distance magnified a self I’d always sensed but only newly named. My cousins were that of god within me.
They were not the faith I chose. Like mom’s ghostly visitors when she was five, my cousins chose me, knocking on my midnight door, portentous at my bedside. After all my god denying and god shopping. After all my hours in Quaker pews, reading Yoruba books, studying Lukumí prayers. Just so the universe could be cute a decade later and pass me a note in class. You were born into the church, Qui Qui.
Cold Drink Became a Play
Pop spent his early childhood in Barranquitas, an agrarian mountainside in Puerto Rico’s interior. The midday sun radiated s
o heavy it melted afternoons, tempered by cool daybreaks and midnights. All the postcard images of PR—turquoise water, white sand, flat glimmering horizon—that’s coastal stuff. Before age five Pop never laid eyes on the ocean. His horizon was a verdant zigzag behind which the sun didn’t so much set as ooze. A sunset like a shirt tossed over an armchair. Barranquitas was lush terrain, farmland. Residents could squint ten mountains away and tell you which green patches were plátanos versus ñame. Rush hour sounded like hooves on gravel. Cars weren’t uncommon in Barranquitas, but horses were cautious and stayed on roads, whereas vehicles had the nasty habit of toppling over switchbacks. At night the coqui’s thunderous chorus was its own monastic silence.
Most households had battery-op radios. Some were blessed with the occasional ice delivery. But lightbulbs and Frigidaires were not a part of Barranquitas life. Electricity had not yet been poled up the mountain.
Still blows my mind. No electricity. Forget counting sheep, one of my teenage sleeping tricks was imagining five-year-old Pop, no nightlight save the moon. By necessity he lived on a dual-function clock: sunrise, sunset. It’s hard for a West Philly girl to comprehend. I’d never been to a plug-free zip code. No TV? No Nintendo? Shit, just do what all of North Philly does when they miss a PECO bill: run an extension cord through the neighbor’s window. Maybe cook them chuletas as a thank-you. Me, if an AC shorted mid-August, I ran to the basement and switched a fuse.
My Broken Language Page 24
