When theater-ace Terry trooped down that staircase
into the bowels of the Theater Building,
on the fringes of North Halls, I noticed
he (it seemed) felt nothing. For me, it was like
a plunge into empty nothingness, some
infernal realm of inversions; several
times I almost fainted. The Black Box
theater space was always mobbed on
those Thursday nights, not far from
midnight, where Terry reigned as secret
Outlaw Playwrights king— officious, daring,
beneficent or malign, as the mood took him;
& as Justine Caskey traipsed past me in the line,
vulpine teeth glistening in the fluorescence—
Justine, who we referred to as "Caesar Girl"
around North Halls, for making Caesar Salads
for herself daffily in the dining commons.
I spent an uncomfortable few months obsessed
with Ms. Caskey, whose eyes stretched
lugubriously across a pinched, cadaverous
face. Was she a witch? Did she worship Satan?
Did she know who I was? Yet here, Terry
didn't think she could act, & that was all that
mattered. As I did my apprenticeship, Terry decided I couldn't act but write. I began to
spew out one-acts, working my way assiduously up the ladder to him. A dispensation of God- like power— to see my work staged— was at hand.
The State College townie kids, bound
to Happy Valley, got their kicks where
they found them, gave off an air of
ennui shot with doom (human life
having granted them no escape valve),
yet were accommodating to me. On
what it means to look around a small
town, and know that it is everything to you,
encompasses all you are, Lords over you
confining curses: to trip with these kids was
to understand these limitations, the magic
& the agony. Lisa smirked, skinny in her boots,
hair cut short but for the one fringe over
her left eye, & passed me water for the E high—
Lisa— after twenty years, the bathroom,
you remember, in The Coffee Cellar,
was all black, with a wide mirror.
Stoned, I dragged you (sweet sixteen) in there
to see if I could kiss you, wrapped in
black leather pants; you banged in
two-inch-high boots, tawny hair-fringe
there, over your eye. I got the kiss; we ambled
out hand in hand; wound up back in
again. You made me vow to you
something I can't remember. How
townie girls talked— I'd nod, get lost.
But the womb-space was complete—
we were safe, ascendant into space, hopeless—
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