Chapter 10

I wanted to film my life like this story but more so, more gestural. The camera can project the soul somehow more than words. I hadn't seen it done, but I felt it.

I began schooling myself. First I went to the fashion photographer. My sister accompanied me as she would throughout my schooling. He taught me about light. He let me film one of his nude study sessions. After the models had gone, my sister filmed me and his pretty new boyfriend while the fashion photographer shot us. I felt comfortable with the flow of images making motion pictures instead of the slow strobe of photography, confirming the old flapper's diagnosis when we first met. The fashion photographer also found me a place to develop the risqué, illicit film of the orgy and the nude studies. A place specializing in industrial film development loved the shock. They probably made copies. The photographer brought me to a showing of some avant garde film, but though interesting, they didn't reflect my vision. At times tricky and fun, at others poetic and symbolic, they seemed formal and composed and a continuation of the illogical logic of the surrealists. I wanted more gesture.

The Vase transformed with the camera. My sister filmed rehearsals or each of us took the camera and focused it on the others as we babbled and moved. I discussed with my collaborators each of us making autobiographies, shooting things representative of who we are and where we've been. We wanted the creation of the vase to occur during the performance, something new out of old texts and choreography. The films contained the oldest part of the performance. Whatever I edited held previous moments. It represented where we came from before arriving on stage and creating the new vase. We decided on four acts because each act focused on the three of us individually and then all of us together. We'd show movies between acts. Though appearing in each other's movie since we performed in each act, the first three movies featured one of us until the final act when the individually focused movies meshed.

The camera emphasized our need for more collaborators. We had resisted because of the relative ease of three of us meeting without others needing to be worried about. But the silence of the film demanded music. Also a need for light, or the lack thereof became apparent. To emerge from the darkness necessary to project film we needed the kind of spots the director had used in the show the princess and I had performed in. As far as the set went, my sister happily involved herself. We ignored costumes and makeup figuring to be ourselves on stage. We never walked the City in leotards unless hidden beneath daily clothes. We debated this. Setting up role playing scenes like teacher and students or mother and children ended up rejected out of silliness and lack of reality.

Finding collaborators turned out easier than we thought. The kid who inevitably took charge of the lighting at high school since a freshman thrilled at the chance, especially when he met my sister. Though not reciprocating his dog eyed passion, she liked his company and found his desperate crush thrilling when they consummated, her first male lover after me (one can't count quick cash whoring as having anything to do with love). He took her to a couple movies and they necked like teenagers during and afterward. But the evening she invited him over, opening the door for him in her French maid uniform she had decided to wear to amuse her and us, tight and low cut with a skirt covering little and garters showing thigh and, at least that night, fish net stockings, he nearly fell on his back. He sported an impressive erection pushing the front of his pants revealed when he handed her the flowers he had briefly lowered as concealment. She knew of his large penis, having touched it on one date and unleashed it from his trousers and stroked him to orgasm at the back of a movie theater on the date prior to the consummation. When she told me about it after I fucked her horniness away, considering how perfect I fit inside her, she felt a little afraid of and a little looking forward to expanding her vagina to make room.

An hour after he entered the penthouse, she found out. Later she found out again, the second time had her growling like I never heard before. The hour before consummation they spent in foreplay. They had planned dinner, but my sister knew he couldn't wait and brought him directly to her room. They kissed and touched and slowly got naked. Once naked, she gave him his first blow job to release his need and prepare for a longer fuck. It didn't take long for him to recover, but she delayed it to teach him her pleasure. The blow job proved ineffective. He ended up cumming quickly inside her. However, he revived, slower but comparatively swiftly, and lasted a long time, bringing her the grand finale orgasm I heard easily through the wall. Only afterward, his smile loose along with the rest of him, did they eat.

The musician we found in Harlem. The child of an old friend of my mother and me since I was a cherub in speakeasies, a talented jazz pianist and arranger, his son proved equally as talented. The father never had the big break his talent deserved, probably due to his staying in town, rarely touring. A musician's musician, he found a steady gig as an instructor at the School of Art and Music in Harlem. His son following in his footsteps took his dad's class, and though embarrassed, he said, "Dad's the best." An amazing drummer, the son played a wicked piano as well. We engaged him because of the mulatto. My sister, the princess, the mulatto and I headed uptown occasionally. I still got grief about my copping drugs, and the Negroes were cool about us getting off the stuff even if they hadn't. Neither father nor son did anything heavy, only taking a hit off a reefer if passed to them. The two jammed with three others, the son playing a steady beat with hardly any flourishes but propelled the music. His drumming swung. When he spotted the mulatto, he couldn't stop looking. She looked back. He sat out the rest of the jam. They talked until we had to head downtown. They exchanged phone numbers and chatted on the phone nearly every night. Since our play preoccupied her, she told him about it. He attended our next rehearsal excited about trying something new.

Memorization turned out to be the hardest thing about the project (I hate calling it a play because it wasn't, and calling it a performance before it was performed is confusing, so I'll refer to it by name or as our project). The stream of consciousness writing made sense. However the context struggling against the meaning of the words thwarted us. Associating speaking with meaning helps memory. The mulatto taught us a technique. It helped. A lot of words needed to be memorized though. We experimented with improvisation, but found the text had more resonance. Each of us added sessions on our own of unconscious writing, and the three of us spent an hour writing before rehearsals. Those sessions ended early on, so as we worked through the rehearsals, the words became set. One advantage of having such a long period developing the project was memorization.

We had begun with shuffled texts, reading our own words and the others'. At one point early on we debated the appropriateness of giving voice to other's thoughts. We found unshuffling and reading our own words lost excitement. They may have been other's thoughts, but we shared language and related to the words and bringing our meaning to other's words had a sense of wonder and discovery.

We needed several settings, at least two each for each of our acts and one for the final act. The mulatto had a train and the train station, having had a peripatetic life. The princess located herself in the Hell's Kitchen apartment and the small stores and the dirt of poverty in the streets below. I had my penthouse and the rich clean streets of Fifth Avenue. Central Park appeared in all acts. The minimum of lines on large canvases suggested each. My sister created them, sketching while watching rehearsal, defining the quality of each setting by it's performer, then reducing it to its minimum so the lines and colors purely and succinctly gestured the place and the person.

When my sister completed her first canvas, the largest, the Central Park setting, we discovered a need for another collaborator. We couldn't transport the stretched canvas even in the lighting kid's father's truck/van. His father was a repairman of various electronic contraptions and he blessed the project by letting us use the van. But it would take a semi to fit the canvas stretched. We rolled it up and brought it to the rehearsal space and stared at it and the lumber and tried to conceive how to make it stand and move, not to mention having the perfect sized and immaculately constructed stretcher. The lighting kid remembered a friend, a fellow apprentice he met the summer before in summer stock. Unfortunately the person lived in Westchester County.

What with being young and in school and having various things going on in our lives we found it rare to have all the collaborators meet more than once a week. Despite this, we decided to pursue the apprentice. We gathered tightly into the van and headed to the lighting kid's apartment above his dad's shop just a few blocks north of the princess in Midtown and waited for him to locate the information. Then we headed to my spacious penthouse across town where he called, each of us sharing three extensions, the two sets of lovers leaning against each other's amorous heads and the princess and I sharing my extension in my bedroom. We called just after noon during Spring Break on a Wednesday. We hoped the apprentice shared our school schedule. Though the name suggested a male and the voice on the line sounded deep, I knew her gender. To make sure, after the lighting kid told her why we called I made myself known, asking what her full name was. She giggled and said, "He didn't tell you I'm a girl." I asked my collaborators if they wanted to go on a field trip. They agreed. The apprentice knew the trains and said she'd meet us at the station in a couple hours. We had a quick lunch thrown together by my maid playing sister before rushing to Grand Central.

There's nothing better to gel a friendship than to journey into different environs. On the train, we had facing seats to chat, and filled the time discussing theater: summer stock and school and Broadway and moved on to dance and the music involved and ended up discussing what the drummer did for us when he played, how it helped us move. Both the mulatto and I had training, but the princess had not. Her body, long and gawky encumbered her movement. By working with her using our different skills, the mulatto and I taught each other as well. We enjoyed the new techniques, but the princess did not. Only when the drummer began participating using percussion and piano did she loosen. She shut her eyes and flowed. My sister filmed it. Letting go of inhibitions, the princess achieved beauty from which eyes could not retreat. It would come and go. Not trusting our opinions, it took the film, which I quickly printed and edited to show her her talent. Confidence achieved, she became unstoppable and breathtaking, making the mulatto and I work harder to equalize her focus.

As soon as I saw the apprentice, my heart stopped. Love at first sight is the cliché, but for me love is too quixotic and vague a word, perhaps because even with the tomboy it didn't seem to label my experience with intimate relationships. Like my sister and the lighting kid and the mulatto and the drummer, I felt an immediate attachment or wanted to be attached to her while staring at her gorgeous face. Only the princess would be without one of the new collaborators. She made due sharing beds with my sister and an ecstatic lighting kid.

The apprentice was an Amazon. Her broad even face with dimples on her cheeks when she smiled and a light smattering of freckles and azure eyes and wispy blonde hair framing it appeared large but proportionate to her body and beautiful. Her face made my heart stop, so noticing her body waited a minute or so. Dressed in a flannel shirt and jeans, her proud breasts pressed against the shirt, small but sexy, on a thick torso that barely tapered to her hips. They flared out, with a strong round butt that moved majestically when she walked away to lead us to her small truck. Watching her butt move, I felt moved and my penis moved upward and outward. My quick scan of the beauty reached her feet clad in army boots amusing me. Her work clothes and big body might presume the masculine role in a lesbian affair, but her frequent, timid, shyly smiling glances at me while I stared at her told me otherwise.

Even though friends with the lighting kid, the princess and I sat with her in the cab while the rest climbed into the metal truck bed. "Nice truck," said the princess.

"Thanks," said the deep voiced Amazon. "It's mine."

"Cool," I said.

"My dad bought me a sporty two seater on my seventeenth birthday, kind of pink and feminine, you know. I traded it in and kept the cash. Not that I got a lot on the trade. It had a bunch of miles on it too. I don't know what he was thinking. Well I do, but..."

"So school will be over soon," I said. Like the lighting kid she was a senior. "Any plans?"

"I want to make things, carpentry you know. I want to build my own house someday with a big workshop where I can make things and fix things. Upstate somewhere in the country like Walden, you know, Thoreau," I nodded. "Yeah, but close enough to a city so I can do business. That's my dream at least."

"Sounds cool," I said.

"How about you?" she asked me.

"I'll be a senior next year," I admitted.

"Really?" she said surprised, glancing at me and meeting my eyes again and connecting. "I mean you look sort of young, but old too. And isn't this your project you're doing? It sounds pretty ambitious."

"Mine and hers," I said.

Princess shook her head. "It's his fault really. He's the crazy one here."

"So he forced you?"

"Yeah. He's always forcing me to do cool things. He kind of saves me from my self."

"What do you mean?"

"You should have seen me before we became friends. I was like a turtle disappearing inside the shell."

"But you're beautiful!" exclaimed the beautiful Amazon.

"Thanks," said the princess. "So are you."

"Are you kidding?" said the Amazon. "I'm enormous. I scare the little boys away."

"You're gorgeous," I said. The princess nodded.

"Why do you say that?" asked the Amazon.

"Because it's true. Why would I lie?"

"Because..."

"Tell me," I insisted.

"Because you ... uh ... want to ... Because you're fresh," the Amazon stuttered, blushing.

"Is that a bad thing?" I asked. "And even if I am, you're still beautiful. And if I am, why would I be if I didn't find you attractive?"

After a long pause, she asked timidly, "Really?"

I nodded. She looked at the princess. The princess nodded.

Whenever the princess and I travelled together on a bus or subway we would sit as close as possible, hold hands and occasionally kiss. Despite the cramped space of the cab, Princess gave me as much space as possible and our hands kept separate. She knew I liked the Amazon and she liked her too, but didn't want to complicate our hoped for seduction by revealing her desires.

Parking in front of a large suburban Georgian style house, the two car garage already filled, we followed the Amazon inside, my focus on her posterior. The family gathered around the first television I ever saw. It was round and the image was unsteady. I wondered if the oldest son of the blonde mother filmed whatever they watched.

For hundreds of generations, the hearth had been a gathering place for the family to share their intimate and cherished commonality, keeping each other warm and alive and away from the deadly cold world outside. The problem was it was nice outside. The warmth of the television set meant nothing. And the family I witnessed didn't cherish togetherness. The fraternal twins, about my age, bothered each other. One, a bespectacled studious sort read while watching television, and if that didn't distract, his brother, surprisingly soft with fey gestures insisted he listen to him going on about Judy Garland's latest movie. Nearly as big as their sister, their size and character created an odd mix. A more annoyed girl not yet ten years old tried to shush them and demanded attention. She wore a pink and frilly dress, very girly and appeared to be surprisingly lean. The mother revealed the daughter's source, also on the thin side, at least her face, though pretty and intelligent looking. She had wide hips however, either from good mother genes or giving birth to mostly large children. Both she and the dad looked displeased at their Amazonian daughter, the mother emphasizing displeasure by holding a long cooking spoon like a club. Leaning into her daughter and whispering loud enough for us intruders to hear, she said, "Couldn't you have at least changed?" She shook her head, as did her father. He glanced at his children in front of the television not quite hiding his displeasure until his gaze met the youngest daughter. Then he smiled. She smiled back and soon after returned to petulance.