Stephen Koch

The Most Important Person, Angelica, Grandma Susan and I are doing a little August time in our longtime town-away-from-town, Greenport, New York, on the North Fork of Long Island. Last night Susan, the MIP, and I took the ferry over to Shelter Island, where Itzhak Perlman and his wife Toby run a summer training camp for young classical music prodigies. Two master classes were open to the public, with Perlman himself in dialogue with the wunderkind. The music was wonderful, the kids dazzling, the summer heat in the performance tent no joke, and Perlman so masterful I learned something new not only about music, but about teaching, too. 

Now, please do believe me, I have no wish to return to teaching. Been there, done that. I also know that performing music and writing prose are two different things. But if I were running a workshop again, I’d follow Perlman’s lead in two ways.

 
First, I’d MAKE WRITERS PERFORM. Each writer would give the class a reading of the whole piece BEFORE THE ACTUAL CLASS BEGINS. Preferably one full day before. REASON: What does not read well when read aloud usually does not real well, period. The ear is the best editor, and any writer’s friend.

Second, I’d weigh in harder with my own views. Perlman’s views on performing music are what he offers these kids. He tells them how HE thinks it should sound. Egotism? Sure, but what of it? He’s Itzhak Perlman.

I make no ridiculous comparisons between IP and SK, but presumably when I’m running a workshop instead of joining it, I’m in the front chair because I have some sort of special experience to impart. I used to underplay that in my teaching, partly out of insecurity and partly because I didn’t want to impose my views. (No egotism for me!)

I’d change that now. You take my workshop, you get me!

After a first hour (or half hour) of a group discussion, I’d devote a second equal time to a very focused public exchange between the writer and me.  I’d build on the group’s ideas of course, but for better or worse the dialogue would be between two people, not twelve. I’d want my contribution to be tactful but forceful and opinionated, given with a little something of the verve, tough love, (accent on love), and wisdom Perlman showed last night.  

Because it all made great sense, and it looked like fun.

On the ominous date of September 11, the Most Important Person and I will be in my home town of Northfield, Minnesota for the—groan—fiftieth reunion of my high school graduation. The classmates arranging it all have suggested I send them a few words about what I’ve been doing this last half century, but for brevity’s safe let me stick to one small but revealing encounter from right after I left high school. It was in the fall of 1959, and I was a lanky, still-pimply teenager with big ideas.

I had proceeded from high school to become a freshman at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where I wasted no time beginning a relationship with a lovely, very smart girl named Sheila, who would later became my first wife. Sheila had just come to the U. of M. from New York, hoping to continue studying with Saul Bellow, who’d already been her teacher at Bard College in the Hudson Valley. And we decided our souls could mingle.

At the same time, another kid arrived at the Minneapolis campus. Another kid with big ideas. He came from Hibbing, Minnesota, and his name was Bobby Zimmerman.

And I couldn’t stand him. Not that I knew him, exactly. I just saw him around everywhere. He annoyed me to a disturbing degree. He was just so insufferably cool. So, uh…impressive in a way I was far from sure I was. There was that Harvard book bag slung on his shoulder, the very last word. Dark glasses.  His Chesterfield cigarettes were rolled up in the left sleeve of his black tee shirt. Black. Solid black. Not white or some normal color. Black.

You could puke.

At that moment, the arty coffee shop near campus was a place about the size of a largish dorm room and called “The Ten O’Clock Scholar.” (Some of the rock-history books reverently refer to it, mistakenly in my opinion, as just “The Scholar.” ) Anyway, the place was tiny, and it too was pretty cool. Every chance we got, Sheila and I installed ourselves behind a rattan screen that separated the rear table from the space in front and discussed, at length, Great Things. In front there was a dazzlingly ornate Italian coffee machine, complete with bronze eagles and all kinds of immaculate little tubes that steamed and hissed. There was a stereo on which was played either Vivaldi or folk music of the utmost refinement, like—say–Cynthia Gooding. Occasionally we’d slum with the inauthentic-but-fun Weavers. Sheila had once met one of the Weavers. She said he was a jerk. But talented.

And then came Bobby.

Somehow Bobby Zimmerman—who had started calling himself Bob Dylan— talked the manager into letting him use “The Ten O’Clock Scholar” for his very first singing engagement—maybe ever, maybe anywhere. And the night he began, Sheila and I happened to be behind the rattan screen, discussing, (let’s say), ecstasy. Our kind of subject.  Context: John Donne. Vivaldi on the stereo.

And then Bobby arrived with his guitar, a Folger’s coffee can, and those damn Chesterfields rolled up in his sleeve. First he turned the stereo off. I barely noticed because I was explaining ecstasy to Sheila. But then, the singing began.

I paused in mid-ecstasy. What the HELL was going ON? That wavering, tuneless, whining …sound. That awful… noise. Who was making it? And WHY?  I looked past the rattan screen. There sat Mr. Cigarettes in his sleeve, performing for a seemingly content audience of maybe six or seven people.

I managed enough decency to sit still through three songs. My speech on ecstasy was shot, but I ground my teeth and waited. I rolled my eyes. I closed my eyes. I hated it. Finally, after the third song, I decided somebody had to do something. I walked out front, got myself another cup of mulled cider, and then walked up to the kid who would  become the foremost American musician of my generation and told him that we had been listening very patiently while he sang, but he’d been singing a long time now, so would he mind calling it quits for a while so we could turn the stereo back on?

Bob Dylan’s anger is legendary, and I am here to tell you that it is totally genuine. My request left the eighteen year old singer quite literally strangling, gagging with fury. Horrible sounds came from his throat. Luckily, rage paralyzed him, because if he could have done anything, he would have gladly killed me. I sauntered back to Sheila, and as we started talking again, I could hear the sounds of angry pacing and a coffee can being slammed around. But the stereo was back on.

Looking back, I don’t know whether to laugh at my callow, competitive, self-absorbed snottiness, or blush with shame. Dylan kept singing at the Ten O’Clock Scholar, though not (as I recall) when I was there. On campus, he and I would shoot hate-rays at each other whenever we crossed paths.

Within months, Sheila and I were out of there, on a bus to New York, leaving Minnesota behind for destiny.

And so was Dylan.

Last Friday afternoon, the writer C. Carr interviewed me for her forthcoming biography of the late David Wojanrowicz, the phenomenal young painter and writer, who died of AIDS in 1992 at the age of 38, and who was the surrogate son of Peter Hujar.  We had a lot to talk about. David and Peter’s lives and deaths were momentously intertwined.

David Wojanrowicz was the decisive artistic relationship at the end of Peter Hujar’s career. Peter was (I think) the decisive artistic relationship in the beginning of David’s. Their story is one of the most fascinating in the annals of the downtown eighties scene in New York, and when I heard the news that Cindy Carr had signed with Bloomsbury to write David’s biography I felt a shiver of excitement, sensing that this story had maybe found its storyteller.

And when I told Cindy I’d been waiting for her call, she seemed mildly surprised, and that surprised me a little. This encounter had to happen.

“So how much time do you think you’ll need?” I asked.

Cindy is really terribly polite, not in the least intrusive, and so she murmured something about maybe an hour. One hour? “I think,” I said, “we’d better plan on two. At least.”

In fact, we barely got started in just under three.

Peter and David met in a bar: a plain old pick-up sometime in the winter of 1980-1981. David was twenty-six, a driven but directionless kid battered by dazzling but anarchic gifts that he was not yet even close to knowing how to handle.  And like Peter, David’s physical presence was a little intimidating: you could feel the heat of his youthful anger feeding and his youthful need feeding each other’s fire.

Peter was by then pushing fifty, the strong silent eminence of Deep Downtown.  He was a somebody who knew Everybody, and yet he was chronically alone, an artist who who’d produced several decades worth of masterful artistic achievement known to Everybody from Arbus to Warhol to Mapplethorpe—but to nobody else.  He could make art.  He could not manage a career.  From the outside, he looked commanding.  Inside, he struggled with depression, and woke up many mornings thinking he was maybe getting to the end of his rope.

The older artist with his achievement and the younger artist with his possibilities transformed each other’s destinies, and their story is a tremendous biographical read.  I am not going to steal any of Cindy Carr’s thunder here, but I do want to note the broad outline of how I see their friendship, and while I’m at it, clear up a myth.

The myth is that David and Peter were partners.  Wrong.  True enough, step one was a pick-up in a bar, and David and Peter certainly did have a sexual fling.  It lasted maybe two months.  Maybe less.  David’s actual partner, then and to the end of his life, was an admirable and very together guy named Tom Rauffenbart, who is now David’s executor and heir. I know of no evidence that David ever once considered leaving Tom for Peter, and David soon let Peter know (probably to Peter’s regret) that he did not want their obviously life-changing relationship to remain sexual.

After that, the really powerful phase of the friendship began: mutual artistic transformation.  Peter looked at David and saw life-redeeming young talent.  David looked at Peter and saw life-directing achievement. Peter’s achievement gave David’s talent direction and definition.  David’s promise gave Peter’s achievement rejuvenation and vindication.  David needed someone who cared passionately about what he might do.

Peter needed someone who cared just as passionately about what he had done. David needed direction–shaping, seriousness, discipline.  Maturity, in a word. A father.  Peter needed someone whose boundless energy and boisterous talent gave him new life, and in whose success he could rejoice without a second thought.  In short, he needed a son.

What you see here is a taste of what went between them visually.