Midlife is a time of terminal ordeals. Parents sicken and need to be dealt with. Marriages that worked in earlier eras with their GREAT TASK sputter and fade, new lives luring the partners to better things. Career phases change — some jobs go and others come — while children need tutelage into larger worlds and away from the perpetual apron strings. I have been a theatre artist since second grade, in latter years, mostly a playwright. Unless the theatre hasn’t “worked” and you are not in the midst of life dramas of your own, the opportunity to spend twenty hours a week at a job that doesn’t pay seems beyond reach.
What is a theatre writer to do but look elsewhere for the theatre, a play that doesn’t rehearse, an audience that doesn’t necessarily assemble all at the same time and space, dialogue that screen viewers can recognize without actors?
So it was that after my mother’s death in 2014, I began exploring another medium. I call it a “novel,” but it has morphed into more of a “happening in narration.” I was living in New Jersey and working in Manhattan and decided to write a ghost story. Research into local haunted locales threw up the idea of a haunted yacht club just ten blocks from my home. I visited the Club a few times. Some of the members were kind enough to chat with me in the Club’s Tiki Bar about the pet ghost and show me around the place.
That is how these chapters were written, many of them at Grumpy’s Coffee Shop on the Lower East Side, between 2015 and 2018.
My grandmother grew up on the Olympic peninsula, in a sleepy little town called Quilcene. One time one of the local boys got a part in a play in Seattle. The entire town showed up. The young man came into the auditorium with a bottle of ale in his hand, drunk as a skunk, and began yelling at another young man on the stage. Then he got up on the stage and ruined the whole play.
Everyone was aghast. Can you imagine Tom showing up to that play drunk?
It took a bit for the cooler heads to explain that Tom wasn’t drunk. Tom was acting in a part that was a drunk. He himself was cool as a cucumber.
So I must sheepishly report that none of the people in this novel are real.
Those two lovely girls and their apartment in Williamsburg — they are not real.
That stalwart high school teacher and her boyfriend, the Bayonne establishment dude — they are not real.
The late Commodore who had been a longshoreman — he never existed.
The local parish priest may be Latino, but I doubt he has any involvement with the Robbins Reef Yacht Club.
In the words of a playwright concerning his characters, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
