6. Heaven and Hell in Five Minutes

Before I left the cast party Mac the theater director also gave me a hug. His energy made my skin feel all crawly, even though I knew he would never try anything sexual on a guy. Jeffrey also congratulated me and said I was marvelous and beautiful. He gave me a hug so powerful and caring that I felt suddenly six years old. I was scared to feel so small but I could trust him. There was nothing fretful, tentative or fusty in his energy. But he was seriously insane all right, and an outspoken homosexual when it was very unpopular to be one. Perhaps in me he saw a younger spark of his own creative madness and joy. I felt he could not harm me without uprooting his own heart from its anchor of original innocence. His hug was not powerful in a way that possessed but in a way that gave. The same was true in his art; his plays testified to a deep integrity in life. His scathing satire did not spare himself anything, and the actors-including me—truly took less of the brunt.

Happy this ordeal of the play was over, Jules hugged me sideways, saying, "You did it!" as though I had passed an initiation.

I understood his awkward hug-love between straight friends usually shows itself indirectly. But weeks later-after I was released and living at his place-he was stoned and admitted he had a dream about me being a beautiful virgin whom he asked to marry. What would I have said, he then wanted to know, had I been a girl? I would have had to say "No way" because he would always cheat on anyone, and we both knew that. I didn't blame him for his promiscuity (because sex was still another world to me), but he looked disappointed.

Kathy the choreographer also gave me a kiss goodbye. She had a warm smile that sparkled in her eyes, and her sleek mid-length evening dress shined to echo her bright eyes. Having seen her only in the dregs of off-duty dancers before, I was stunned and mystified by the constellated pinpoints of light in her wavy tresses.

Taking my hand, she said, "You were lovely.... You stole the show."

"You too," I said, at which she laughed without realizing what I meant.

"You mean the dancing?"

"No. I mean you, even in the audience."

At that she blushed, suddenly coy. She cried out to me to 'Take care' while watching me go up the aisle and out of the theater.

And weeks later, when I was cut off from almost everyone, I was grateful to her for offering her kind smile when no one else did. She had innocent-looking ways of luring me near as if to whisper in my ear only to secretly kiss my cheek while the people around saw nothing. And one time when I saw Kathy appear once at the top of the stairs in the rear of the amphitheater, I shouted her name and ran, half-falling, up to meet her while she feared for my every stumble. Leaping two and three stairs at a time to reach her, I overwhelmed her before she reached out to take my hands in hers, but only my hands. I remembered how shy I was up there, out of breath, and only let my eyes look into hers.

Outside there was a windless damp and chill that only happens in January nights—the peak of the season for suicides. I got my ride back to W-6 and in three minutes Mac the director dropped me off and checked me back in.

When those elevator doors parted to let me in, the light swam out into the darkness. There they were, crouching shadows around a lone ashtray. I recognized each one dimly by his or her silhouette. Their aura was of a drugged stupor mixed with fear and jealousy. Most of them took what used to be called psychoactive drugs, "mood-altering" drugs taken with every meal that "fixed" behavior mainly by blocking any strong feelings. I understood that they only wanted to be let out too, to feel again. Laura, the Country Singer spoke first.

"Welcome back. Ain't ya glad to see us?"

"Did you have a good time?" another voice mumbled, and a man sadly laughed as though this were a joke.

I had stepped in among them and the light of the elevator closed behind me. I felt isolated among them and tense.

"It was okay," I said.

By then I knew better than to aggravate their sorrows by showing too much happiness around them. With no intended malice, they resented joy simply because they had none themselves.

"Siddown, boy. Relax."

This kindest voice belonged to Errol who was clairvoyant. Since he read minds, he almost never spoke except to answer. At first I was skeptical but he did it to me with unflinching accuracy and steadiness.

I sat down among them and they were soon comfortable with me again. In their way they liked me, but I dared not make waves among them.

Laura was very practical compared to most of them, having been a wife, mother, performer, drug addict and-when she was young-rape victim. She never got over it completely. "Nobody ever does," she had said. In these quieter moments she shared her whole life with me, and I listened to her carefully no matter how painful it became. Errol had tipped her off that I was a writer. He told them all my secret thoughts—that I wanted to be great, that I had published, that I loved a certain woman 'out there,' and that I would fulfill my destiny. I might have shrugged off a few of these, but not all of them (no one knew I had published in W-6). He had come here because after reading his wife's mind across the country—he drove a truck-she could not bear it and divorced him. He had seen the thoughts of her and his best friend and gone mad. There was adultery, and his melancholy had a defeated, maimed bent to it.

One day before I was released Laura asked me to write about her and all of them. Then, I was touched, thinking it was childish and naive of her to put such faith in my powers. She was sitting slouched on the tile floor between the elevators and smoking when she said: "Tell the world about us.... Will you? They'll listen to you."

Only then did the depth of her desire hit me.

"I will," I said.

But then, afraid I was only humoring her, she made me say, "I promise. I will."

In a kind of parallel way, she once was touched at my own naivete too. After she asked me to have sex with her in the bathroom I refused because I was in love.

"What a waste," she said. (Okay, "touched" might be too strong a word.) Then she tried to taunt me, "Maybe you ain't man enough."

I was surprised, but said nothing. Then she let up, wanting to stay friends.

For years she had been doing so many uppers and downers while touring as a singer that she'd had a nervous breakdown. Since she'd been in W-6 for a long time she knew all about everyone. At first I couldn't understand why she chose to be here at all. It turned out she actually liked having no responsibility. No husband, no drugs, no bills, no problems.

"That's just how it is touring. You do a little club in a hick town, do music, do drugs and roll on. You never know where you are even if you do care, and on top of all the drugs it costs so much to travel there never was anything left."

Tired of her own story, she changed the focus to me. Sometimes she was so intense that her questions made me feel like a pinned bug.

"Dijou see your Jenny?"

"She was.... she was there...."

"Didn't you talk to her?"

I didn't understand yet why Jenny took no notice of me after the play, even when I waved to her at intermission. Errol's voice finished simply the thought I was ashamed of, a thought I barely knew was in me:

"She has a boyfriend."

"Oh Christ! sorry, we didn't mean to embarrass you, I forgot you're in love...."

Though she was half-sincere (and half-mocking), the thought of Jenny's boyfriend hung over me like the gateway to Hell (abandon all hope, you who enter obsession....) Laura didn't mean to wound me with what she said; it was just habit. I know all of their minds became 'insane' at times, but they were a strangely gifted group, and in their souls they could be as sane as anyone when they wanted to. Though there was something crucial missing, more than sanity it was all happiness that they had lost.

In the darkest corner, Jon who was the youngest among us smoked a cigarette which the night-duty nurse had given him. It was getting very late and he yawned. He was the nephew of a famous actor in Hollywood. The scene through the big window was so under-developed that the paltry lights seemed like a tantalizing gesture toward a city that never would shine into being. Allentown mattered to no one. Long ago in New York mobster slang "Going to Allentown" was a euphemism for going to be murdered and dumped. Mobs did that here because it was like a blackhole, a hicksville no-place where no one would ever be found. Now, I suppose they use New Jersey.... Be that as it may, this place from which all talented people like Jeffrey had fled, almost without exception, could still sting me with its chaste beauty.

I lit a cigarette and Alicia, Laura's friend, spoke in whispers only to Laura. More small talk broke the silences, and I was startled to hear Alicia laugh—it sounded so normal. She usually stared into space all day, and I could never imagine how this frail and nearly anorectic woman with pretty blue-green eyes could have raised kids and been married and divorced. Yet she had done all that and more. She also told me how she had come here. Her voice was half-child and half-woman; it seemed to break like a silk thread does, a smoke-like wisp where a tenuous line had been tugged. I felt badly for her. She was raped while in elementary school and when she told her parents they were outraged and confused. When the case was widely publicized, other parents told their children to not play with her because she was 'dirty' now. Even her parents unconsciously blamed her for it. Since then I have learned most people blame the victims of sex crimes—unconsciously, if not overtly-even helpless kids, even men, and even me, later.

"What would you've done if it'd been your daughter?" Laura asked me.

"I'd try to help her get over it."

This answer popped out straight enough, for I knew I wouldn't reject her. But some tiny doubt snared me and I too felt a qualm of which I was ashamed. I figured out that poets are bred to worship chaste ideals too often and too unconsciously. Thus so many poets die young and insane or old and lecherous.

Not much to look forward to.

Under these conditions I began to see why "greatness" is without any meaning as most people conceive of it. In art the true justification is not social value, public acclaim, inner growth, or 'mastery of form,' but love. You do what you love or you give it up. Everything in between is ego, id, escapism, or drugs. In the end only the love will remain.... for all the people who created will be gone—me too one day.

Jeffrey Ethan Lee had his first full-length poetry book, Invisible Sister published by Many Mountains Moving Press, 2004 (visit www.mmminc.org and click on the MMM Press link and the link for the invisible sister web page). Lee won the 2002 Sow's Ear Poetry Chapbook prize ($1,000) for The Sylf (2003), published Strangers in a Homeland (chapbook with Ashland Press, 2001), and won the first Tupelo Press Prize for literary fiction in 2001. He has published hundreds of poems, stories and essays in Many Mountains Moving, Xconnect, Crab Orchard Review, Crazyhorse, Crosscurrents, Drexel Online Journal, Green Mountain Review, Washington Square, American Poetry Review, etc. He teaches creative writing at University of Northern Colorado.

Visit www.unco.edu/poetry/jeffrey.lee