Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2003

This afternoon, a few of the writers in my group, who are dispersed in Massachusetts, Colorado, and California, were chatting in email about horror movies they plan to watch this week. When someone wrote about how he loves the movie Alien 2, that started stirring up memories. So I wrote this little memoir.

In the early 60s, about this time of year, I once had a close encounter with Lance Hendriksen, the actor who played the robot in the Alien movies. Lance was an artist then, and he had crafted a studio and a separate loft and dwelling space out of the top two floors of a dented-can warehouse in the shadow of the elevated train line that used to run along Washington Street in the South End of Boston.

I met Lance when he was chatting with poet Alan Ginsberg over dinner in a restaurant in Boston's Chinatown. Alan was visiting from the Lower East Side of New York with his lover Peter Orlovsky for a poetry reading at Harvard. (From the way that Alan and Peter kept trawling for lovers during the few days I observed them, they must have had some kind of "arrangement.") I was one of about a score of people who tagged along with the poet while he was in town.

Over chop suey and egg foo yung, Alan and Lance spent some time reminiscing about meeting in Marrakesh on some other occasion. Lance apparently decided he liked 18 year old girls better and started paying attention to me. Alan turned his attention to a sweet handsome-faced blond Harvard student, who also tried to direct his attention to me. I think I didn't respond to the student's attention, though, because he wasn't "someone." As I did numerous times in my life, I turned away from decent men because I thought they were not cool enough. What a foolish, foolish girl.

Some of us traipsed over to the South End, after Alan paid for dinner, to see Lance's studio and the living space he'd fixed up. Bob Dylan's manager, Allan Grossman, drove us in an old blue station wagon. Alan Ginsberg played the harmonium sitting cross-legged in the back, chanting Hare Krishna with Peter. I thought the whole evening just reeked of cool.

My high school ambition to bond with avant garde writers and artists and musician types was coming true. Maybe this would be the start of something for me. I was hoping to be a famous writer too.

As we were all getting out of the station wagon and assembling on the sidewalk, Grossman suddenly pulled me over and tried to kiss me. I pulled away, pointed to his wife for Cripe's sake sitting in the front seat. "We have an arrangement," he said.

My ideas about marriage did not include having an arrangement. How could anyone put up with such a thing? "Besides, even if you weren't married, you are a very unattractive man," I thought as I turned and followed the others. I said a lot less than I thought those days.

While we were in his studio, Lance made me nervous by coming up close to me as I looked blankly at one of his 10 x 12 foot canvases slathered with dark red and blue paint. He asked me how it made me feel. Feel? I couldn't answer him.

I was trying to decide how his work fit into my art-critical intellectual scheme of things, and he wanted me to feel something? If I had been able to be honest with myself and him, my true gut reaction would have been that he had thrown a whole lot of paint on those giant canvases, and I don't feel anything except uninterested ignorance about what he was trying to do-- mixed in of of course with a desire to be considered cool.

However, if his paintings were considered great by art critics, my feeling might have been one of excitement at knowing someone who was "in" in the art world. As it was, I was already excited about having met a famous writer.

I'd gotten in trouble for reading Alan Ginsberg's work. My uncle with whose family I was living had ordered me to leave his house because I was reading Ginsberg's long poem Howl. I think Uncle Ray didn't like the verse that pointedly urged America to do something unpleasant to itself with its atomic bomb. And maybe because Uncle Ray had been a sailor, maybe he didn't like Ginsberg's lines about having sex with sailors. Maybe he didn't like the many lines about insanity and sex with anyone. I had thought Uncle Ray should be more tolerant. This was a great writer, after all! I'd show Uncle Ray. I had found my true people. People who knew where it was at.

When Lance led us through the folding doors and up the wooden staircase to the living space, the tenant wasn't home. Another artist had let us in. There! I'd met two actual artists in one night!

The second artist, a light skinned African Italian man named Anthony, was doing a sensitive drawing on grey pastel paper on an easel in an open space under a loft.

Other things that happened the rest of that night and the sad life lesson I learned the next day are the stuff of another story.

Fast forward three or so years. By what seemed to be cosmic coincidence at that time, I met and fell in love with George, the tenant who had been out for the evening. I moved in with George into the space that Lance had once fixed up. When seeking to fulfill one's ambitions in life, trying to be somebody, getting a groovy space to live in ranks as an achievement, a major step in the right direction.

And the man I fell in love with had good credentials in the crowd that I ran in, deplorable as the credentials now seem to me. Those "credentials" are yet another story.

Our seemingly groovy beginning was followed by the fulfillment of another dream of mine: travel. After about six months of scrimping on our salaries from our jobs, my "old man" and I set out for a road trip.

We zig zagged up and down the country camping for four months in an orange VW van, ran out of cash, picked prune plums in Utah, and walnuts in Mendocino, CA until we got enough money to get to the Bay area.

We arrived in San Francisco at the end of "the summer of love," and stayed there for three and a half years. We married and had our son, Liberty.

And then my life took another surprising turn. Six months later, we moved to Fargo. My husband was taking over his father's greeting card distributing route. I was not so secretly appalled.

We arrived at the in-law's cozy pale yellow wood-framed house in late December when the temperature was 1 degree below zero, and that was just a prelude to -40 in January for three weeks in a row. One interesting feature of life in Fargo is that my in-law's summer sun porch did double duty as a winter freezer. Talk about cool! I had it made.

Fast forward once more to a Halloween party for my 17 year old son in NE Minneapolis. I was divorced. My unfortunate ex-husband was dead by his own hand.

From my disdain of the medium, we didn't own a TV but for a Halloween party for the kids, I rented both a TV and a VCR along with the movie, Alien 2, just for that night. Trying to watch the movie, especially resensitized by not having watched movies for years, I would get so freaked out that I would have to get up and leave the room every few minutes. Every time the creature broke through the ceiling or wall or floor, to be more precise.

One time when I came back into the room there on the screen was Lance Hendriksen cut in half bleeding white blood on the deck of the space ship. Look kids, I went out with him once.

And that my dears is the story about one of my few claims to fame.

Roseanne

February 4, 2004

Did that all seem like a lark? That period of my life was in actual fact a sojourn in hell, a horror show. I got led into those scenes and situations step by step, by accepting one authority's opinion after another, and by following my ambitions to "be somebody." As I disparagingly wrote above, I really was trying to find my true people. My family was rejecting and mean. I'd lost my spiritual anchor and like the old cliche goes, I was adrift. That drift led me into strange dank shoals and fetid backwaters.

There was only one woman writer who met the standards of the day, Anais Nin. I couldn't relate to her stories of uncommitted unloving sexuality. One of my big mistake those days trying to get something impossible out of sex, I was trying to get love and marriage and family and kids. It seemed like it was heretical to want those things. And love and marriage and children were the dirty topics that didn't seem to be getting into the literary works I read.

I keep thinking about how the great John Updike has spilled out his talent for most of his career writing about the not-so-sublime topic of adultery. I can almost cry when I think of the genius in his early story Pigeon Feathers, pretty much wasted. In the stories that made Updike famous, he describes a piggish man sneaking around having sex with the townie women or with their higher class neighbors' wives in prosperous suburbs in Connecticut, all of the partners seemingly interchangeable, callously ruining marriages and hurting families, all in a kind of depersonalized rutting. I just can't imagine that his well-written books about such shallow people will give him the lasting fame all of us writers want.

I remember reading one Updike story that summed the whole dismal scene up for me. Updike describes a man who is divorcing his wife for another woman and who is going through the things stored in the family attic, obviously grieving over the games he's packing that are evoking the times he'd played with his kids. What gets me is that he was fully sorrowfully aware of the pain he was causing, but foolishly resolute. "A man owes it to himself to pursue his sexual happiness," is a line I recall.

The whole huge picture of human experience that portrayed on the written canvases of Dante, Tolstoy, and Dickens, was reduced in my times to a description of the pursuit of orgasmic experience, with a dash of hatred against the establishment for setting limits to their pursuits often thrown in.

By the October day I met Lance Hendriksen, I had abandoned traditional sexual morality in a desire to be intellectually correct. The rules as far as I could tell were that you had to have sex without any preliminaries and hope for the best. Lance followed me into the house where I was staying when I got out of Grossman's car, and so I let him come in and I went to bed with him. I remember him being disappointed that I was over eighteen. He would have preferred it if I was younger.

The next evening after my file clerk job was over for the day, I found Ginsberg and his crew in the Blue Parrot coffeehouse underneath the Brattle Theatre. Hendriksen did not look up or talk to me.If I could have, I would have gotten under the table into a fetal position. I had the stuffing knocked out of me.

I still thought Alan Ginsberg was a cultural hero for a number of years more, and I was proud to have met him. When I lived in the Lower East Side of New York for a summer, I ran into him a few times, and years later, after my divorce I ran into him in a writing conference in North Dakota and was glad to see him.

Then, a few years later in Minneapolis, his name came up in another context, after a sex abuse scandal broke at the Children's Theatre. My daughter was in her second year there.

As it came out in the newspapers, the founder and artistic director, John Clark Donahue, used the school to recruit boys for himself and his friends. I remember noticing but not thinking about how the girls like my daughter looked anxious and somehow diminished at that school, and now I realize that was because all the attention was going to the boys.

And I remember one night when there was a workshop with Donahue, that I walked into a dark stairwell at the Theatre and found a young boy waiting. He was maybe 11 years old, with a strange white face, and was dressed like a minature bohemian with a cane, a cape, and a hat. Donohue walked through the same space while I was there, and he also was wearing a cane, a cape, and a hat. The boy stepped forward out of the shadows, but Donohue brushed by without acknowledging him. Now that I think of it, the postures of the two of them were like the postures of me and Lance Hendriksen the night at the Blue Parrot. Don't you want me any more? was one posture. I'm done with you, don't bother me, the other.

When the news broke about Donohue, Italian restaurant owner Vicky in NE Minneapolis told me at the cash register that her handsome young son, Tony, had been in the school, but dropped out. Donohue had told Tony that he had to go to Donohue's parties or Tony wouldn't get parts in the plays. Tony son returned to his family and left his dreams of being an actor, eventually starting an Italian deli in the same neighborhood. A child without a strong family or with a stronger need to "be someone" might have stayed.

And get this: some of the parents rallied in support of Donahue after he got out, and helped him return to work in adult theatre. And get this too: I was interviewed by the local news when I went to pick my daughter up from a rehearsal the day the story broke. I told the newscaster that the parents were paying Donahue a lot of money to teach their kids, not to use them. A little girl who was interviewed after me was wise beyond her years. Her comment was "It takes two, you know." And I did know, that I've heard that kind of comment from adults before.

Donahue was a member of the Man Boy Love Association. Can you believe that there was high tolerance for that kind of thing in the early 80s, even in the midwest? I remember seeing that the Minneapolis Convention Center had displayed a Man Boy Love Association convention on their marquee the year before. And a woman in a psychology Ph.D. program told me that the professional magazines were saying that the only harm from sex between adults and children occurs if the sex is discovered and the parent makes a fuss.

Will the tolerance of the admirers of Alan Ginsberg be affected by knowing that Alan was a MBLA charter member too? Isn't it obvious? There is something really wrong with people like that!

I read biographies of Ginsberg as he was dying. His mother was insane, and his father was unbalanced enough to let the little boy in bed with him masturbate on his father's leg. All of his adult life, Ginsberg went cruising at gay bars. Short and ugly as he was, he was able to find the lovers he described in Howl -- which (as you might guess) now strikes me as a loathesome demented rant.

As a kind of fitting coda, in Julian Lennon's tribute to Alan Ginsberg after he died Julian cheerfully wished for Alan to be reincarnated as a hunky guy.