Trigger

Grief is an extraordinary motivator.

As a veteran in the memory of loss community (don’t worry, it’s a big club, we all get to belong at some point or another), I have seen how grief can show up as a gigantic forest fire that sets you off running to save yourself, or as a gigantic crater that feels impossible to crawl out of.

And sometimes, it shows up thirteen days after a friend and mentor has been called back, and you’re sitting in the car with your mother in front of a dim sum takeout place waiting for your number to be called (the food one, that is), and my mother senses something and asks if I am okay.

I tell her about my friend Morgan. She nods her head in empathy and says in Spanish, “You have to know real sadness in order to know real happiness. God tells us to keep going. To not go on is the sin. You make the choice, even if you don’t want to, and… you go on.”

I remember her telling me this on the day my father died as well.

Even in her elderly forgetting-condition state, she always knows what to say.

The trigger was a picture that someone posted on feisbok.

I know it well. I took it. September 10, 2017.

We are having dinner at Chay Yew and Randall Friesen’s place in the East Village. At various times in my life, this place, and its magical rooftop, it has been a haven, a sanctuary, and even a recovery center.

That’s the great playwright, Alice Tuan, who I have known exactly thirty-five years, when we started the Writer’s Workshop at the Mark Taper Forum, and we were both studying with Maria Irene Fornes.

Chay and I are deep in rehearsals for Oedipus El Rey at The Public Theater. I am in heaven because we are rehearsing at La Mama down the street, and I know the legend of this space, because I once knew the legendary founder, Ellen Stewart. You feel her in rehearsal.

I am also deep in rewrites, and it’s a Sunday, and when we end rehearsal, I run off to write at a place called The Bean on 9^th near St. Marks Place.

I am living on 12^th between 2^nd & 3^rd, and as I approach the coffeehouse, I see Morgan Jenness. A chance encounter with Morgan Jenness, my longtime dramaturg, agent and public mother.

Of course, I see Morgan Jenness, she is the doyenne of the East Village. We laugh, we hug, and she agrees to join me at The Bean, and she reads my new pages.

We sit on the same side of the table like an old couple. She spreads my play out on the table and squints at all my notes. I don’t remember the specifics she gave me, but I remember she said, “What is it with you and this Calibri font, is that really your personality?” We laughed a lot that day. She lectured. I sipped coffee and well, it was a perfect moment.

I don’t think everything was perfect then. When I look back at the pics of that month, I have no idea how I did it all, but I flew to Chicago to work on another play at Victory Gardens Theater, I was flying weekly to teach at USC in L.A., I threw a Latinx festival at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and I was, of course, rehearsing this play in New York. There are also pics of an exhausted me in three airports at four in the morning, a poetry gig I managed to do at the Bric in Brooklyn and a retreat at the Ford Foundation.

I have all the pictures that indict me, so it must be true.

Earlier that week I had gone to see my friend, Laurie Woolery’s adaptation, with Shaina Taub, of As You Like It, at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. It was a beautiful heartfelt critically acclaimed production, but my favorite pic was when we were arriving, and all the rats were on the path from the train daring us to come through. I show it to Morgan, and she seems non-plussed, “Well, it’s their park, we just perform in it.”

That night at the apartment is perfect. We laugh, we eat, we catch up. If you look closely at the picture, we are enjoying Randall’s Mennonite berry dump cake, with a big tub of ice cream. Morgan has a big mug of coffee.

It had been a long time since we had been together, and it felt as special as it did important.

It’s ridiculous, I know, but you think it’s going to be like this forever, although to say that is impossible.

I was a boy when Morgan met me. Not really a boy, but a reckless young man. My mode of transportation around L.A. was a Moped that the photographer Laura Aguilar gave me as payment for posing nude in one of her series of works that showed up in a beautiful book that now sits on my shelf. It’s been years since I grieved her leaving as well.

It was important to meet Morgan then. She said serious things to me about art that she thought I might be capable of. I never imagined them for myself, but then Morgan and Irene Fornes came into my life, and they became possible.

Ah, this photo.

I will sit with these feelings now. And tomorrow I will get up before dawn to get ready to teach, to write, and see a Monday night show, if I can.

Then I will do what my mother suggested.

I will go on.