LOST IN TENNESSEE by Zipper Bird Copyright 2006 (True New York Tales, Chap. 3)
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At the end of the 60's, I sat in Mr. Silverstein's tenth grade English class in upstate New York. But I got lost in Tennessee.
I can't pinpoint exactly the moment it happened. Weeks before, we had been taking turns reading Macbeth aloud, going around the class desk by desk, each moron struggling through a page from Shakespeare's great play. By the second day of these student readings, I was cursing myself for being a moron. The kids in the "intensified" upper track English class, where probably enthusiastically reading this play aloud, affecting Elizabethan accents.
It was through my own sloth, rarely doing homework, that I became rotten fruit, dropping from the burning-to-learn tree to the ground with a thud, tracked out of the gifted class for poor grades, to wallow among fellow thugs in the stupid class and be made to suffer this torture. Listening to these cretins stumbling through Shakespeare was akin to having one's finger nails pulled out with pliers. And it went on for two classes.
It was not only ignoring homework that was my problem academically. Most of the time, during classes, I was off on Pluto. Today, they'd call it Attention Deficit Disorder. My attention could be brought into Earth orbit by certain things, even in English class. While enduring the torture of these student readings, I could study Rick's package with ferocious intensity, bringing my peripheral vision into laser like focus, and opening up a world of erotic fantasies. Rick was a fellow moron who sat next to me in the back of English class, who was also in my gym class for the previous few years. So, I knew the hanger that was lurking in there, causing that bulge in his pants, just a few feet and a zipper from my grasp.
I could have just reached over and grabbed for Rick's cock at any time, and risked being put in a straight jacket and carried away to a mental institution. In my second year in high school, I was ostensibly a mediocre student, but I was also an autodidact in mental diseases and various surgical procedures, including schizophrenia and pre-frontal lobotomy. Don't ask me why. We had none of these mental conditions in my family. Maybe I was afraid my queerness. If it weren`t a phase I'd grow out of, it might somehow manifest itself in another mental condition, such as schizophrenia.
I liked Rick's cock and I knew Rick liked his own cock too. He even mentioned how proud he was of it a few times. In gym class, he was one of those kids who were always slow about putting on his underwear after a shower. Made a big deal of having to arrange his cock and balls for comfort, when he did get around to putting on his jockey shorts. It didn't help my comprehension of cretin-read Shakespeare, that Rick's face was cute also, but the crotch bulge was the main distraction.
After two days of Shakespeare read by morons, Mr. Silverstein did a smart thing. He brought in a record set of the play, and played them on a record player, so we could listen to it performed by London's Royal Shakespeare Company. The Marquis de Sade had left the building. Their rendering was good enough that I could keep at least half my mind off Rick's crotch, and appreciate the genius of the great bard.
After we finished Macbeth -- although like most of the morons in the class I probably didn't read the actual play at home -- we moved on to THE GLASS MENAGERIE. Knowing few studs would read the play, teach began reading the entire play aloud in class, acting all the parts out himself. He was clearly in his element. When reading Amanda, the mother character, a loony living out of her days stuck in the mindset of the antebellum South, a southern belle long after her bell had suffered multiple fractures, Silverstein gave a sensitive, passionate reading. Mr. Silverstein's voice rang out with a shake'n'bake "and-I-haalped" fake Southern accent, augmented by feathery gestures, and ethereal looks off into space. His rendering could only have been bested by The Royal Monty Python Does Tennessee Williams Company.
Mr. Silverstein's ability to get inside the character of Laura, the sensitive, fragile unicorn girl^ÅYou could almost see the horn sticking right out of her forehead like a big stiff dick. You could smell the puke, feeling it splashing in your face, when Laura vomits over her typewriter keyboard on her first day of typing class. Laura, fragile sensitive human Laura. Too fragile and sensitive for this world. Waiting for her gentleman caller. Waiting for that stiff unicorn dick on her head to drop off so she could get one up her ass. Waiting to projectile vomit all the pain and lust out of her system. Her longing to love and be loved, and get on to the richness and fullness of what life had to offer. Wanting to get out of English class and high school and start fucking and sucking. Oh, I guess that was me, not Laura. Sometimes I get us mixed up.
Somewhere along in Mr. Silverstein's reading of THE GLASS MENAGERIE, I realized Laura was me. Although male, I was like her in many ways. That gentleman caller? I wanted him to call for me.
However, I wasn't exactly like Laura. After two classes of Mr. Silverstein reading this play, and reaching the half way point, doing all the character voices, flitting about the room emoting his fucking brains out, as Amanda, Laura, Tom, the gentleman caller, he finally paused to ask.
"Does anyone have any questions about what I've read so far?"
My hand shot up immediately.
Silverstein was surprised that one of his studs would have a question, given that most of the morons in our class rarely had any questions. We never had answers, and it was hard to formulate questions, because it takes a lot of knowledge, experience, and intelligence to even know how to ask the right questions. But I had a good question anyway.
"Yes, you, you have a question?" He said nodding at me.
"Do you know if there's any like, sets of records you could get a hold of, where they have real actors reading this play, you know, like those records we listened to for Macbeth?"
"Wha?" he said, trying to maintain a half smile and grasp my point.
"You mean you, you don't like my reading? You don't think I'm good enough at^Å"
"Well, it's not that exactly, it's just that those records were so great." I said interrupting him.
Interrupting the teacher was part of my classroom mode of operation. I liked being disruptive. It gave me something to do when I wasn't off on Pluto, hiding my perpetual hardons by pressing my sizeable erections against the bottom of the desk, while surreptitiously studying the profile of Rick or some other boy's face or bulging package. That's why I sat in the back of class. It was easier to do that trick without other people sitting at good crotch view angles behind me. A few times in the past, when I came out of my horny universe, or other reverie, to ask a sardonic question or make a comment, I was asked if I would like to teach the class. But not this time.
Mr. Silverstein was reeling a little bit from the ego blow, of me requesting records, instead of listening to his live rendition. Some members of the class appreciated the wry humor in my question and started tittering. Silverstein himself got it after a few seconds, and smiled, appreciating the humor. He was a little embarrassed too.
"No, I'm sorry, there are no records for THE GLASS MENAGERIE. You`ll just have to put up with me reading the rest of the play."
He continued on, in the next few days, reading the whole damn play. I call it "damn" but I really mean glorious. I got lost in Tennessee. I got lost in Tennessee Williams's plays, and I also "found" myself there too. The first time I heard Mr. Silverstein begin reading THE GLASS MENAGERIE, I knew intuitively, it was all about me, being gay and everything. All of Tennessee's characters were about me.
I went home and read the play twice that year. Wrote a paper on it for class which got an A minus, but had Silverstein's comment that there was something special about the style of my writing. It had bad spelling, terrible grammar, messy handwriting, and teachers hated that. But most of them wrote the same type of comment on my papers. "Something special." "Shows talent for language" "Unique style." "Never read humor quite like it" one professional editor, for whom I wrote satire, said years later.
Before I finished high school, in the next two years, I read SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER, ECCENTRICITIES OF A NIGHTINGALE, A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, and other Tennessee Williams' plays. In college, although I didn't take any classes in literature, I sometimes compromised my regular studies with my insatiable desire to read everything.
Years later, I became the lover, as in we fucked for three weeks, of an intimate friend of Tennessee Williams, and had the opportunity to meet and befriend the famous author himself. But I declined. A year later, Tennessee choked on a bottle cap and was dead. To this day, I'm still lost, and found, in Tennessee Williams's work. -------------------------------
To read other stories by me, Zipper Bird, go to the Nifty Archive's STORIES BY PROLIFIC NET AUTHORS link on the main page and scroll down to "Zipper Bird." Other stories, including ones from my TRUE NEW YORK TALES will be linked there.
I like getting mail from readers who enjoyed reading my story, or someone who would maybe like to know me through being a pen pal. Don't hesitate to write. If you just want to write to say you enjoyed or liked my story, fine, but I really like it when people tell me what they liked about the story, or how they related to it, or maybe just a phrase they thought was funny. This is what all authors want to hear.
Presently, 2006, I'm working on a full length erotic novel, and am just taking a break from it to write some of these true stories for Nifty. The novel is going well, and depending on how a few friends think after reading it, whether it is commercial, well, I may attempt to have this one published.
I would especially like to correspond with someone from France or Germany/Austria, for fun. If your English isn't good, that's okay, I can read in French and German somewhat, but I can only write in English.