When we returned to Boston I discovered that all but one of my apartment mates had moved out, and she was soon to go, leaving the apartment empty. Luckily a friend – I forget now if he was from the CAI or the Petruccci family – knew someone who had a huge mostly empty apartment building on his hands. It was part of some financial scheme: a tax write-off, a way to cover excess wins or losses, or some other financial sleight of hand; in any case, it was a good deal for me, something like $50 a month.
The building was a giant classic red brick monster, 8 stories or more high, taking up half a block, and no Beacon Hill height restrictions here!. There was a lot of cheap marble alternating with the faded yellow wallpaper on the inside.
There were only two other people living there when I moved in, a nurse on the third floor in back, and a guy way up on the 5th floor or higher, whom I saw only briefly when he was walking out of the lobby to the street.
This meant that not only did I have a huge apartment – half a whole floor! – but also that worrying about noise complaints was no longer a problem. I could practice any time of day or night, and have band rehearsals with up to seven or eight people, and play my records at top volume.
Also the location was great. There were several neighborhood Italian restaurants – mainly pizza parlors and ‘sub shops (sub = submarine = the hero sandwich or roll made with fresh bread and truly Italian ingredients: salami, mozzarella, etc). There was also a standard American diner which served hominy grits as a breakfast option along with the usual hash brown potatoes, steak, eggs, and so on. This was when and why I my belly began to expand. Up until then I had been thin except for my muscular legs from having to walk everywhere, and muscular arms from piano practice. Now my belly was getting its opportunity to get the attention it deserved; and was ready to tackle 15 years in East Hollywood - with its Mexican, Central American and Near Eastern restaurants and rural America’s own grits-and-eggs diners - got my weight kept going up in a straight line. It was not until 30 years later, when I had reached 230 pounds and saw a video tape of myself performing, slouched over the keyboard like a mildly curious sea lion, that I reversed the trend and got back my weight into the low 200s.
1. An Ecstatic Encounter at Fenway Park (the other side of the wall)
But let’s jump back 40 years to the Fenway apartment building. In addition to giving me the freedom to indulge both my music and my belly, the building was just a few minutes walk from the main Boston bus and trolley lines, and just a little further from the cluster of book and music store around the New England Conservatory and the Berklee School of Music. And another ten minute walk to an extension of the Fenway - a little park a few hundred yards from the Muddy River - a lovely extension of the Charles River cruising grounds, because it was so small and out of the way, much more private – a great little cruising ground for more intimate encounters, with lots of trees and bushes to act as a screen for privacy. And on one side this huge gray wall for some building as a tremendous screen for privacy from that direction.
With my complete lack of interest in sports, I didn’t realize that this gray wall was one part of the famous Fenway Stadium. And I also didn’t realize that an epochal baseball game was being played on the other side of the gray wall, and so the Stadium was packed. You see, the Red Sox had not won a world series since they sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1918 (the so-called Curse of the Bambino). And the game being played the night that I happened to be cruising my little private park was the sixth game for the World Series championship against the Cincinnati Reds.
The stadium was packed to the gills with pennant-starved Boston fans – but that big gray wall kept all the noise out of my little cruiserie. All my attention was absorbed by the gorgeous Puerto Rican middleweight boxer whom I had a wonderful encounter with a couple of years before, and who was ready for a return match. In the privacy of the Fenway Park greenery we quickly undressed and enjoyed each other’s body to the max (I had just started my road to obesity, and was looking good – and the boxer was a Greek statue come to life.
Just as we were both starting to come, both ‘had reached the point of no return’’……………………………… well, let’s see what was happening on the other side of the wall. Carlton Fisk at that very moment won the game with a home-run that kept the Red Sox in the race, now tied with three games each with Cincinnati. The entire stadium erupted in a huge cheer – 40,000 plus voices! – at the precise second when the boxer and I both climaxed. Imagine, you think you are alone together in your own private world, and then as you come together, together, 40,000 voices shout ‘”YAY!”
A very unique experience for me. I will always remember the smell of the green grass, the night shade of the trees, and the astonishment that hit us both when the wave of voices appeared to push the come out of our bodies. My first and last ovation for erotic achievement (haha).
2. A Morbid Christmas Eve: The Dying Rats
(if Stephen King had collaborated with Charles Dickens)
The only problem with where I was living was the loneliness. Before wherever I lived there were neighbors to talk to. But here the only two neighbors were on faraway floors. Michael was living in Provincetown again; he would come up for the occasional weekend but that was it with him. I had a handful of students who would show up for their half-hour, band rehearsals in the next spring (mainly the formation of Creation City with Ben Petrucci and Jack Jarnis), a few dates – particularly with Ronnie, a Southern blonde ballet dancer (ballet dancers and boxers have the best bodies out there, I think) – but even putting all these encounters together, that left hours of alone time, with my few neighbors hundreds of feet away.
Now when you have a huge, tall, and wide building with dozens of empty apartments, just a few hundred feet away from the aptly-named Muddy River - well, you get lots of rats. Hundreds of rats. And rats with no fear of humans – since there are so few humans there. Once I opened the oven door and a rat jumped out at my face. Another time Michael Gullage was waiting for me to return from a Petrucci gig, and stayed huddled on the bed while various rats roved around the apartment. Mike was afraid to set one foot off the bed.
So finally the whole building – all three of us –complained to the landlord,
and he sent around an exterminator. This was during the start of the Christmas season. Mike was down in Provincetown, my friends at Tribal Rhythms were celebrating in their Jamaica Plain mansion, and being Christmas Eve, no students were coming by. I was alone, except for the hundreds of dying rats, whose moans, groans, and retching deaths filled the building – echoes from the higher floors, very audible ones from my floor and its neighbor.
After a while I just couldn’t stand it alone, so I called our landlord, the owner of the building. He answered, with a soft, gentle Italian-Jewish voice,
“How are you? Are the rats taken care of Did the exterminator do a good job?”
“Yes, they’re all dead or dying, but they’re all making these horrible death sounds, and I am alone with these dying rats on Christmas Eve.”
“I can see, that must be very distressing, being alone on Christmas with this situation,” he said consolingly.
“It must be very upsetting. Well, if it’s any consolation, I won’t be charging you for the exterminator. It will be on my tab, and even though tomorrow is Christmas, I will send a guy down to collect all the bodies."
Then he asked about my life, what was I doing, my plans to go to New York or Los Angeles next year, his voice getting sweeter and softer the more we talked, as if I was talking to my grandfather, while the moans and groans of the rats grew louder as more of them succumbed to the poison.
What a nice guy! And true to his word, Christmas day, two men came around with large burlap bags into which they dumped the bodies of the dead rats. Sort of like Santa Claus in reverse, don’t you think?
3. “Shoot Me!”
Of all my erotic encounters in the Fenway apartment, the most lasting and wonderful (aside from when Mike Gullage came up from P’town) was with Dennis, the ballet dancer from the South, now trying to make a living teaching high school in Boston. An enterprise doomed to failure, as he was the most effeminate lover I ever had (including the Cockettes) and Boston was generally homophobic, and high schools always the most homophobic anywhere. Dennis lasted around a year before he had to quit or be fired – it was impossible for him to maintain any sort of discipline.
I thought his character and body were divine. He was always funny, laughing, ready to sympathize with any problem I had. And had a charming naivite about life. He thought that no Black man would ever harm him because he sent a $25 donation to the NAACP every year. ” They all tell each other, you know.” And one night when I had just finished cooking my mother’s version of spaghetti with butter sauce and basil, a small amount of lightly fried garlic cloves, everything just right. The pasta dish completed and sitting on the kitchen table, when Dennis came triumphantly in with an open can of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee tomato sauce and dumped the whole thing over my plate. The pasta was drowned in tomato sauce, and completely smothered all the tastes I had carefully concocted. “Now!’ said Dennis. “You poor thing, don’t even have enough money to sauce for your spaghetti! Well, there you go.” Yup – there it went.
But the most charming thing about Dennis was his absolutely incredible body. Muscular legs and arms from his ballet and gym workouts, covered with a smooth velvet skin, and a headful of beautifully blond tightly curled hair, it still excites me to think about it. He liked to lie on his stomach, while I lay my hairy muscular Jewish body on top, and when he wanted to come, he would cry out “Shoot me! Shoot me!”
Some weeks after he had gone back down South to a more hospitable climate, I thought of him and wrote a blues in New Orleans style (I had been listening to New Orleans a lot since 1970) called “Shoot Me!” I put it aside for around ten years. Then one night, when Mel Wiggins and I were playing a duo gig at the Co-Art Studio (a Black run coffee shop music venue with a wonderful piano) I decided to play “Shoot Me!” We got into a nice groove and kept going for a long time. When we stopped I saw that there were only five people in the audience. One was a middle-aged Black man – blind and wearing those dark glasses that blind people do – and he called me over to him. “That was a fine blues you played. It really has the spirit of New Orleans! I should know, because I play piano in New Orleans myself. My name is Henry Butler.”
Well, I almost fainted on the spot. Henry Butler was the most recent of a line of New Orleans R&B and jazz pianists. This was all the honor I ever wanted to get in my life. (Tape rot killed my original copy, Parkinson’s stopped a repeat recording.
Comments
Post a Comment