I take all of this input under advisement and keep pounding out the words. I am four cities and a number of individuals in at this writing. I'm well over 90,000 words and have at least another 100,000 burbling inside me for their own release.
From "My Glass House, The Book", Chapter Four - "Virgin Beach/Vagina Beach"
[NOTE: Ellipses (" ... ") indicate that I have edited out substantial sections of the rough draft for purposes of length in this column. -- RA]
When I began this confessional book, I did not include the city of Virginia Beach, Virginia (then called "The World's Largest Resort City") in my outline. I had decided that I simply had nothing of value to say about the place. Though many believed that I had triumphant experiences there and germinated as a writer -- that was and is only a public view. I had some of the worst experiences of my life there, including the violent conclusion of an unhappy childhood and the experience of some of the most oppressive and insulting racism I've ever encountered.
Writing was my retreat from many of the horrors of that place and the life I had there. Writing or reading.
My family moved to Virginia Beach -- the rural section of the city, very near the oft' maligned city of Pungo and the posh area of beach h ouses on stitlts called Sandbridge -- your last populated stop before the North Carolina border -- when I was about ten years old. This because my father was finally realizing his lifelong dream of owning a farm. My father had always wanted to own a farm because his own father had done so. He told us that a man needed to own his own land. He told us, my brothers, sister and I, that this land would be our legacy. He went on about his will a lot.
His assertion turned out to be a lie. I had heard that we would never see the promised real estate from my youngest brother, Nicholas ("Nick"), while I lived in Baltimore after leaving Manhattan. I c
hose not to concern myself at the time, as it was a moot point until my mother died. When my mother finally did leave the realm of the living, in October, 2003, I learned that NIck had been right. Rumor has it that he intends to litigate for his birthright. I have neither the resources nor the energy. Besides, the only use I have for any inheritance in Virginia would be to sell it for the proceeds. I despise the place and would spend extra money to avoid going there for any reason ...
... Here is what happened: I was already spending as much time as I could away from home. I was immersed in every extracurricular activity I could be in school. While attending high school, I held almost every office in the student government, culminating with being elected President of the student body; I was writing plays that were being produced by the drama club every year from ninth grade forward, three of which would win the state Drama competitions and one of which would appear in a local dinner theater; I was captain of the debate team for two years running; a member of the drama and pep clubs; I worked on the school newspaper and the year book (senior year). After winning the second state Drama competition, I received a scholarship to attend a summer theater workshop at Georgetown University which changed my entire take on theater and how I wanted to present my work. I wrote poetry extensively, at that point, as well as plays, and was dabbling with the novel. I made it a point to stay as far away from my father as possible. When not busy with all my other obligations, not writing or reading, I was off to visit friends who lived in the suburban part of the city -- the new White people in my life who thought I was a prodigy, and especially Sam Hallock, a woman who was having a great impact on my life and thinking at the time and for decades afterwards. (We'll talk about Sam later. She's a special case. A "story" woman,)
... Were you to visit Floyd E. Kellam High School in Virginia Beach, Virginia, USA, it is likely that you would notice stone benches in the grassy areas of the outdoor part of the campus -- unless they have fallen victim to vandals over the last thirty years, a reason I chose stone. I don't recollect if they are inscribed with a legend saying that I commissioned to have them put there, but it would not surprise me, considering how meglomanical I was at the time. I was obsessed, during the latter part of my high school years, with receiving the love of the masses. And I had the wherewithal, by way of the student council budget, over which I had dictatorial control, of buying that love. I once told Sam (Hallock) that I had concluded that having the love and adoration of hundreds (or thousands) was the equivalent of having the love of a single person, something of questionable duration.
This student council budget I have mentioned was the largest in the history of the school and may still be the largest any single high school student body president has ever amassed. There is a simple reason behind that assertion: I had established an organization during my junior year, when I held the office of Vice President of the student council (and had orchestrated to have my best friend elected President, because of an incipient movement among the senior class of that year to keep me from becoming a "dictator, ") that included all of the high schools in the city.
During my senior year, when I was also President of this organization, I imposed a tax on all those other high school councils' budgets in order to finance a brainstorm I had had while summering in Georgetown: Senior Day. My tax was ten percent of all the funds the other schools raised from fees, bake sales, car washes, et cetera. Being a Machiavellian child, I already knew that Senior Day -- an event during which high school seniors would take over elective offices in the city and I would stage a concert at the local auditorium into which all members of that year's senior class could get in free -- would never exhaust the funds being levied. I can now admit, considering the statute of limitations, that I used a portion of those funds to establish my legacy (as with the benches) at my high school and to fete my political favorities (or people in the "In" crowd from whom I needed favors) with lunches and such.
This sounds nice until we consider one fact: I was functionally homeless at the time many of these machinations were taking place. I was embarrassed about my father's attempted murder of myself, so it was not the type of thiing I wanted to discuss with my peers, or even close friends like Sam. (Henceforth, we can refer to Ms. Hallock as "Sam," I believe.)
I slept in the woods for a number of weeks, sneaked to school early to use the showers in the gymnasium and went about my daily routine as though everything was as it had been. I had my image to protect, after all, and as an adolescent "image" was my paramount concern. I was about to run for student body president against another student who had been my chief intellectual competitor throughout high school. Only thirty percent of the students in our school were Black. There had never been a Black president of the student body and I meant to be the first and foremost.
And then there was the situation with the principal of the place. It was as though the Fates had put he and I in each others paths. Here I was the best known Black student in the city. Through my organization of high schools, I had a pipeline to the school board, I was on a first name basis with the mayor's secretary ("Secretaries rule the world," I used to quip) in preparation for Senior Day. I even did things like send the womann gifts from my slush fund. I had built a solid political base, in other words, not only in my high school -- the largest in the city at the time -- but beyond it.
But I had a principal whose name happened to be JEFFERSON DAVIS. For those readers unfamiliar with the history of the United States, Jefferson Davis was the President of the Confederate States of America, the rebels who had fought this country's civil war at the time Abraham Lincoln was President of the United States of America. My principal proudly displayed a framed picture of the Confederacy's President on his office wall so that people might admire (?) their resemblance. For all I know, he was a descendant of the rebel leaderä
So even as I moved to gain more leverage and power in our school, Mr. Davis was there to clip my wings. He attempted to suspend me != often with justification for my changing things by fiat and beyond any authority I might actually have had != on numerous occasions and was usually thwarted. I was holding too many cards by the time I reached his radar screen.
One classic example of when he was within his rights was the day I abolished our high school's dress code. I had no right or authority to do so. It happened during one of the monthly campus-wide assemblies I had instituted with all of the students to present entertainments, propaganda for my agenda and have a "town hall" type gathering to hear their concerns. This was the '60s and most students thought the student council (any student council, in those days) was bullshit. As I had chosen that organization as the staging ground for my power base, I was determined to prove them wrong.
The grievance that came up on this particular day was the dress code at our high school. The code was uniformly administered at every high school in the city and discouraged what was then considered the "hippie" look. It was, in fact, enforced by the teachers and staff and onerous. Even though I was the type to wear a necktie to school almost every day by this time, I considered it a legitimate grievance. What did clothes have to do with learning? So, in that particular assembly, I announced to the students of my school that the dress code was abolished, effective immediately. I was a hero.
Jeff Davis had me in his office and on the carpet before the end of the day. What the hell did I think I was doing? What made me think I could take such a decision?
My response: I just did. Tomorrow morning kids will come to school dressed as they like. You can't suspend them all.
But he could suspend me. After leaving his office, I was on the phone to my contact at the school board ...
... At the north end of the oceanfront strip of the city of Virginia Beach, on the landward side, stands the large buildings which house the Edgar Cayce Foundation, known as the Association for Research and Enlightenmentt (A.R.E.) Cayce was a famous mystic who predicted that Atlantis would rise, Virginia Beach would one day be a movie capital to rival Hollywood and that Phoenix would become a seacooast, among other things. He was known as "the Sleeping Prophet" because he would go into sleep-like trances and supposedly contact the spirit world and pronounce miraculous perscriptions for his client's illnesses, both physical and spiritual.
Whether any of this is true, I don't know. I do know that, having lived in Virginia Beach twice in my life, Cayce's draw is such that people from all over the world flock to the A.R.E. to be closer to his ideas and like-minded ecumenical mystics. I went to the only sÈance of my life in Virginia Beach, a city that then had more mediums per capita than any other I could imagine. When I moved into my first off-campus apartment, while working on my thesis, one of my roomie's was a Cayce devotee. So much so that a familiar saying in our place was, "Edgar says --- ".
The southern end of the most populace seafront of Virginia Beach is dominated by hotels, restaurants, nightclubs and other tourist traps. It was there, during my second sojourn in that city, that I became one of the habitures of the Pequod, arguably the hottest disco in the city in 1976, located directlly across from the Peppermint Beach Club. The latter had long been a popular hangout for sailors ("squids") on leave in the area.
Because of the polar opposition of these two parts of the city, I -- along with many others -- began to think of the place as bifucated: Virgin Beach at the north, Vagina Beach to the south.
I was in a personal rutting period when I moved to Virginia Beach in the mid-'seventies, after time in Cairo and then back to Connecticut, and it was extremely easy to get laid in that town.
Three women dominated this period of my life -- though I would cheat on each of them along the way, so absorbed was I with my need for sexual experiences at the time -- Dorothy, who had been a patient at the Connecticut Valley Hospital, the location of my first job after returning to the States from Egypt; Nancy, who I had become involved with because of my friend Wally's description of hers as a "photogenic pussy," and; Sherrie, the second woman to whom I would become engaged in my young life. Sherrie had told me as soon as we became intimate that she had been a prostitute while living in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Sherrie, the last of my Virignia Beach women, was seven years my senior. Her biological clock was beginning to tick. She was ready to move out of her mother's home in Norfolk and settle down with a man. After we met and fell in love, we both thought I was him. We both underestimated my wanderlust ...
... Among the bartenders of Virginia Beach during those halcyon years of the advent of the disco craze, as well among other hospitality industry workers -- waiters, waitresses, hostesses, bellhops and desk workers from the hotels along the strip -- it was common practice to end the night of watching other revelers by going to a private after-hours club at the other end of the beach, located up in "Virgin Beach" territory ironically enough, called the Shark's Club. We would all leave bottles of our beverages of choice down there because they were only licensed to serve us mixers. Virginia, like many places in the South, was a Blue Law state. No alcohol could be sold or served after two a.m.
The Shark's Club was where we all went to let our hair down after the night's work. We drank our sour mash whiskey, our vodka, our gin, snorted cocaine, danced the night away, traded bed partners, got in fist fights, lied, bragged, bullshitted, home-wrecked and went out to the beach below the doors of the music-blaring club to watch the sun rise over the Atlantic ocean turning the droplet's of spume off the incoming breakers into rainbow-colored pearls -- frozen for an instant as they crashed toward us, suspended in mid-air! Then the wave would break and dissolve, frothy, into the receding spume. The woman and I are off to Grumpy's, the all-night diner back down in Vagina Beach, to eat steak and eggs before retiring to the apartment I share with Rick Shurtz, my high school buddy who bartended at the Pequod, so that she and I can fuck like minks.
The Pequod was the best and worst place for me to be during that rutting season. It was like returning to Kellam High School without being the Machiavellian I was once. I had been to Egypt, I had come back to Connecticut to begin an abortive attempt at a career in mental health, fleed their in shame after an embarrassing suicide attempt following my final breakup with Lynda and an episode of counter-tranference during a family therapy session I was conduciting.
When I fled back to Virginia Beach, it was to find my high school hero, Wally Wells, managing a bar owned by another Kellam alum', Buck Dugan, who had married the daughter of a locally-alleged mob boss. The bartenders were all my old fellow classmen from that high school, as were the bouncers. That was the top of the food chain at the place. Lower down on the food chain were the non-Kellamites, the waitresses and -- once the bar converted from a beer box into a discotheque != the Disc Jockey (DJ).
Being at the Pequod those years was a double-edged sword for me, though. Yes, these were the people with whom I shared most of my adolescence, with whom I' d grown up. But, with the exception of Rick Shurtz, who became my Vagina Beach flat-mate, many of them != including Wally != made no bones about reminding me that I was The Nigger in the crowd. I had difficulty stomaching their racism.
I remember that first day when I found my old crew down at the Pequod. Everybody was buying me beers, asking me about my time in Egypt. Wally and Rick kept playing the song, "The Boys Are Back in Town". It was one of those "Big Chill" experiences without the benefit of my having died. The first of a few I've experienced in this lifetime when returning to a place where I was loved.
While I had been in college, I did stay in touch with the lay of the land in Virginia Beach. The summer after my freshman year, I had lived with my lifelong friend, Ric Williams' family and worked construction. We had saved our ducats for a trick to Montreal, Canada, one of the world's most beautiful cities. After the next summer in Charlottesville, Lynda and I "vacationed" in Virginia Beach, sharing an apartment two blocks from the ocean with another couple down in Vagina Beach while I worked for the Parks and Recreations Department driving the boardwalk train.
So it was only natural that I end up at the Pequod with the members of my old crew. I lived with Wally for awhile, sleeping on the floor of the extra room in his flat, making extra bucks helping to clean-up the bar at first, and then moved in with my other Kellam pal, Rick Shurtz, where I would stay until I felt I must leave that benighted city or surely die a young, sodden and (most-likely) violent death.
The Plan when I first moved to Virginia Beach was to finally get on with becoming a writer. "When are you gonnah finish that book, Amis," Wally used to quip in his cups, "so's I can collect my goddamned immortality?" (Note to Wally Wells: I'm doing it now, pal. Hang on!) ...
Thanks for coming back this week. Keep me in your prayers as I keep you in my own.
NEW ORLEANS - 10 June, 2004
: I'm doing something I haven't done in over two years now; I intend to produce this entire column "on-the-fly," as the colloquialism goes, in one sitting, on the day of publication.
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