September 21, 2019

Writing in the Delta Sky Lounge at La Guardia.

Battery Park, empty when I got there, later brimmed with environmental protesters led by that Swedish girl who rowed across the ocean (or something). Subway from the Battery to Columbus Circle, where I fell in with the Hare Krishnas. Being in their presence and being, for a while, laved in their chanting was a real comfort. I had a spiritual experience there at the edge of Central Park which is difficult to tell of now. Went to The Great Society at the Vivian Beaumont. I arrived early to take in the evening ambiance of Lincoln Center. One of the things I saw was a man seated near the fountain with a script of The Great Society open to a page heavily highlighted in pink. The man’s eyes were closed and his lips moving. I thought if the actors were still memorizing their lines it was a bad sign. He turned out to be playing General Westmoreland in an ensemble cast, so maybe he was tapped to fill in for that role at the last moment. My seat mate was a young man (three years out of college) named Zach, from Los Angeles, whose mother had given him the money to come to New York to see Sea Wall because he was attempting to write monologs. There’s a supportive mother. I was just wondering why people bring backpacks and giant parcels to the theater when in he walks with a duffel bag, which somehow he manages to get completely under the seats. It crossed my mind that it was a bomb, but there were guards searching every bag at the door. Zach is an intense young man concentrating on writing scripts, who blames Kerouac’s The Subterraneans for infecting him with paranoia. I told him to go see Edward and Gaveston when it opens in his home town. The play was essentially a dramatized documentary concerned with things I remember from when they really happened. Zach had experienced none of it, and was having an altogether different evening at the theater. My history plays are better. I kept imagining the better use they would make of that extraordinary space. Otherwise, my luck held, and I caught a taxi the instant I hit the street.
Lying in bed to catch the 4 hours of sleep left to me before my limo to the airport I thought, “everything this trip has gone well.” One fears to say such things before one is home under one’s own roof.
However liberal my ideas on immigration might be, it’s irritating when your driver speaks only Chinese, and on top of it tries to carry on a conversation. We did finally connect when he turned the radio on and I said “I like that music.” He said, “You young. Only young people like that music.”