Groovemasters Night At the Met Cafe

By Basil Rosa

The second novel in Basil Rosa’s Lotion State Trilogy, Groovemasters Night At The Met Café pays homage to Balzac’s Lost Illusions, chronicling one autumn of a May-September romance in Providence between Shura Levy and Ship C. Cusack. At age 20, Ship prefers his middle name, Chandler, and narrates this tale of joie de vivre. Self-absorbed, brimming with enthusiasm and unearned confidence, insecure and impatient, yet so guileless and eager to succeed that we can’t help liking him, Chandler is burning to know what love is. He must know. It’s all so urgent.

At the novel’s beginning he’s employed at Channel 36, Providence’s only public television station. He’s also acting in a play directed by Shura in Newport. When the play closes, Chandler suffers a bout of depression. He also loses his job due to funding cuts. He finds happiness in dating Shura, who, cigarette and glass of scotch in hand, agrees to educate him in more ways than one, but he must promise her, “We’ll always be friends no matter what I choose to do.”

Inspired by her guidance, Chandler finds work as a line cook, lands a small part in an original play and makes visits by bus to Boston where he shaves his grandfather. He enjoys lots of sex and long philosophical conversations with Shura, a RISD grad from Long Island who gave up painting for the theatre and who describes her lifestyle as one of “genteel poverty.” She reads Zola and Shakespeare and waits tables, travelling periodically by train to audition for plays in Manhattan.

Shura finds Chandler charming and amusing, though insists he not get too attached. She treats him to exorbitant meals and they go out often to blues bars, and they sleep late after enjoying wild sex all night. Shura becomes something of a dominatrix with Chandler, as well as a star on the Providence theatre scene. As much as she likes the attention from locals, she despairs over being pigeonholed as an actress who must play mothers and aunts. Time is running out. She must move to Manhattan. Her goal all along has been to really make it in the theatre.

Life begins changing rapidly for Chandler. His roommate Gail moves to Los Angeles. His other roommate, Kevin, has been diagnosed with a strange new disease called AIDS. His Iranian friend KJ, who still hasn’t married Bree in order to get a green card, has been forced to live in a squalid room with Derek and Doughie, a pair of male strip-tease dancers. Chandler’s new roommate, Marshall, is turning out to be a cocksure bully who insists Chandler is “a homo” who likes “Frenchy” things. While Shura’s away in Manhattan, Chandler realizes how much she’s at the center of his life. He fears the longer she’s away, the more she’ll lose interest in him.

Shura returns and meets with Chandler to explain why she was away so long. She had an abortion. Chandler is puzzled and feels betrayed. Maybe he’d want to have a child with her. He does love her, after all. Why hadn’t she discussed this with him? Had there been another man? He doesn’t like admitting that this is possible. Shura elaborates gently to Chandler how difficult a decision this was for her, though maintaining “Having a child is not what I want right now.”

Though they resume their romance in Providence, it’s more subdued. They watch Jean Luc Godard movies at the Avon, and have what feels like one final fling seeing The Groovemasters on a Thursday night at the Met Café. It’s after this night that Shura reveals that she’s found an affordable apartment in Greenwich Village. She’s going to move, at last. She’d like him to visit, though not until she’s settled.

It’s already November and Thanksgiving. Chandler goes home to his parents, feeling lost and knowing when he returns to Providence that Shura won’t be there. A chapter has ended. His life will be different, one he’s not even certain he wants to go back to.

Perhaps Shura had been right when she’d told him, “Love is in the grasping.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Michael Flynn
• Release date: May 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463662601

Basil Rosa

John Flynn (www.basilrosa.com), who also writes as Basil Rosa, has published chapbooks, as well as complete collections of poems, which include Moments Between Cities, and Restless Vanishings. He has also published three collections of short stories: Something Grand, Dreaming Rodin, and Off To The Next Wherever. He’s earned awards from the New England Poetry Club, and the U.S. Peace Corps.

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GROOVEMASTERS NIGHT AT THE MET CAFE

by

Basil Rosa

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Copyright © 2020 Basil Rosa

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Cover and Book Design by Erika Brent Hollen

Author website: www.basilrosa.com

For all those who still love without fear

A laugh at sex is a laugh at destiny.

Thornton Wilder

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

One

Ship C. Cusack. Why not begin with my name.

Not Skip with a K either, but Ship, as in large oceangoing vessel. Don’t laugh. I was born at a time when parents could get away with tagging a kid, say, Rage Moon, or Sunshine Droplet. Mine didn’t, God bless ‘em. Just as I didn’t title this narrative The Autobiography of My Swinging Dick Before I Had It Lopped Off.

Sometimes, a little reason prevails.

The C, by the way, stands for Chandler. It’s the handle I started using at about age ten. No, I wasn’t like that entitled goofball from the TV show, Friends. Far from it. If I had anything going on, it was that I could think for myself. But I thought too much. It kept me running in place or in circles.

Here’s another handle: Mallory Doucette. After meeting Mallory, I started accepting why some among us believe in angels. I was 20, broke, all befuddlement and thwarted ambition. We met during my first week on the job at WSBE-TV, Channel 36, the only public television station in Providence. When Mallory had learned that I, the new man in the scene-shop, was a friend of Orbit Newton and an aspiring actor, she rode the service elevator from her fourth-floor office down to the basement to ask if I’d like to audition for Henry IV, Part One.

As I cut lengths of wood on a table saw, I listened to Mallory shout her explanation that Orbit had given me a glowing recommendation. She knew Orbit well. She knew all the acting students at the new conservatory program at Trinity Rep. This surprised me.

It’s Rhode Island, she shouted. All the actors and all the politicians and all the lawyers have slept with each other.

Small program, I shouted back. I shut off the table saw, liking the way whine from its motor as it slowed down. I think there’s only about twenty of them altogether.

Thirteen last year. And even they can’t find work, said Mallory.

Orbit was one of only a few men in the Conservatory. He had enough acting and directing experience to have earned his Equity card. The program was run by a man who Orbit venerated as a genius. Orbit had praised this man to the point of convincing me to move out of my room on Grafton Street in Worcester to Federal Hill in Providence where I could find a cheap apartment and audition to get into the conservatory program. I’d driven up Route 146, made the big move, but I hadn’t auditioned. I lacked ready funds and knew that the Conservatory didn’t offer scholarships. I also knew my parents wouldn’t co-sign for more school loans, especially to an acting program.

I was already carrying school loan debt for my first two years at Worcester State College, where Orbit and I had become fast friends during my first semester. Orbit had nerve; he was a sophisticated Boston native who’d chosen to live in Providence because it was more affordable. He’d been doing theatre in Worcester because, as he put it, it was experience. He hoped to direct one day for Worcester’s Foothills Theatre.

I’d never met anyone like Orbit. He was prone to dry understatement and subtle jibes. He was also gay and that was a big deal to me coming from a small town and having worked for a construction company each summer since my sophomore year. But Orbit didn’t fit any of my preconceptions. He wasn’t obnoxiously defensive or flamboyant and he’d told me once that vamping like he was Bette Midler in her mermaid costume was just another of way of supporting possibly hurtful gay stereotypes. Orbit was a pensive, brooding sort who liked having straight male friends and wanted to be accepted as one of the crew, so to speak. I agreed with him when he told me what he did with his sexual life was a private matter.

We met when I was cast in a tiny role in a semi-professional (meaning the lead had her Equity card) production of Cabaret. Orbit told me one night after rehearsal over pizza at The Boynton that he liked guys like me because I wasn’t a queen and I was the only dancing waiter, perhaps the only cast member in the show who wasn’t a preening self-obsessed pain in the ass. But there’s hope for you yet, he’d joked.

My skimpy resume showed that I’d left Worcester State with an Associate’s Degree and the suspicion that perhaps I wasn’t college or corporate material. After talking with my father, who recommended I consider the Marines, and my mother, who thought I had the smarts to get into Princeton, I’d decided that no one on the planet understood me, least of all my own kin. More than once I’d been introduced to family friends as the actor in the family as if I carried a rare nocturnal virus.

I’d decided the best move I could make was to attempt at least a year off and to work any job I could find and save a while before deciding whether to stay in Providence or to move on to Manhattan. In my mind, actor and Manhattan were synonymous, but I wasn’t sure about Manhattan as a good fit for me. Come to think of it, I wasn’t sure about much beyond my regular fugues of self-doubt and loathing.

I had lunch with Mallory later that day and with as much earnest intensity as I could muster, I explained my plans. She listened, growing bored and eventually shrugged as if she’d heard it all before. All I know, Chandler, is that you’d be a good candidate. Shura Levy’s the director. Orbit knows her. They’ve done some TRIST shows together here in Providence. You’ll like Shura and I definitely think she’ll like you.

Mallory’s energy and stamina inspired me. Her day job as one of the station’s fundraising coordinators didn’t impede on her duties as assistant stage manager for TRIST, The Rhode Island Shakespeare Theatre. After a full day she’d leave the station at evening rush hour and drive two hours to Newport, stage-manage rehearsals that never ran shorter than five hours, drive back to Providence after midnight and be fresh as a daisy and at her desk with a WSBE mug full of coffee at 7:30 a.m.

This was how I wanted to be: efficient, determined, forthright and too busy to be mired in philosophical existential quandaries.

How do you swing it? I asked her. To me, Mallory wasn’t a girl. She didn’t pop her chewing gum and wear pink sweatpants. She was a sexy working woman, intelligent and resilient and I found it easy to talk to her. I respected and admired her; I didn’t mind showing her that I suffered from the inexperience and lack of knowledge that my downy features suggested.

I don’t think about it, she said. Neither should you.

She explained that if I was cast in the TRIST play, she could give me a ride to rehearsals whenever I needed them. I boasted I had a car. She wasn’t impressed. I’ve seen that jalopy of yours, she said. I guarantee that one of these nights you’ll need a ride.

I defended my car, finally getting Mallory to laugh as I related how I’d held it together with duct tape, wire coat hangers and hose-clamps. I’d bought it for $100 dollars because it lacked a driver’s side door. The only one I’d found at a junk yard on Granite Street in Worcester was white and I’d managed to hang it myself, but I hadn’t gotten around to painting it. The rest of the car was red, except for what was left of the rear rocker panels. They had rusted out so badly that I’d had to cover them with sheet-metal panels that I’d pop-riveted into place over the rust. I’d spray-painted the panels thinking they would match. They didn’t.

But I don’t care, I told Mallory.

Yes, you do, she said.

Right. No. I mean, yes. I’m lying, I told her, flustered. Of course, I care. Each time I get behind the wheel I’m worried I’ll get pulled over for some kind of cosmetic infraction, or one of my taillights is missing, or my inspection sticker is out of date. Plus, every driver on the road is staring at me like I’m some kind of freak.

Are you? she asked.

I nodded yes. That’s why I want to be an actor.

Not a very good reason.

Is there such a thing?

Ego. She laughed. By the way, I know a garage you can go to. She liked to boast she’d grown in Providence and both her father and grandfather grew on the South Side before it was red-inked as a ghetto for mostly black new arrivals. It’s off Elmwood. You can bring your car there and use my father’s name. Ask for Auggie. Tell him you know the Doucette family and that I sent you. Auggie’s a sweetheart. You’ll just have to pay him a little extra in cash if you want an inspection sticker.

I’ll pay, I’ll pay, I said. This relieved me. That’s all I do anyway. Seems every time I turn around that I’m paying to keep that car alive.

You shouldn’t whine, said Mallory. It’s not becoming. Besides, if you’re really serious about becoming an actor you might as well get used to being broke all the time.

Since I had Mallory’s ear, I rambled on about how I’d thought the car issues would change in a compact city such as Providence, where getting around on foot or RIPTA bus was a common practice. I already used my car much less often, but I still had to park the thing. This led me to telling her the story about my first day in my apartment on Federal Hill.

I’d parked my ride on a corner of DePasquale Avenue near Africa Street and a rambling unpainted multi-family with sagging porches and clotheslines. The thing looked as if any moment it was going to collapse. It was dark on that corner, eerily quiet, and I was just a couple of narrow blocks from my apartment, which had no parking other than a short gravel drive for the landlady who lived downstairs.

I’d just locked the car, glad the locks still worked, when I heard a shout, Hey what the fuck you think you’re doing?

It had come from a squat, unshaven man with broad shoulders who had the blunt feral look of a bulldog as he steamed and lurched toward me. Seething, he shook a length of chain in one hand and wielded a short steel pipe in the other. He wore jeans and a tight dark-blue T-shirt and a black longshoreman’s cap. He’d barreled out of a corner building that was so well camouflaged I hadn’t even seen it.

I took a closer look and saw that the building wasn’t lit anywhere. It was built of cinderblock, one-story, painted off-white with a flat roof and not a single window in it. The word Spa was painted in black in three crude letters above a heavy door reinforced with cast-iron bars. The door was open behind the man, emitting only a faint light and making it impossible to see what went on in there.

I stood my ground and shouted firmly, but without sounding too self-righteous, that I was just parking my car and that I rented an apartment a couple of streets away. This was the nearest spot I could find.

In spite of my best attempt at sounding as if I knew I belonged there and wanted a congenial resolution to this problem – if it was a problem, at all – the man knew he had scared me and had control of the situation. Muscular, menacing, the edges sharpened in his rasping voice, spittle flying off his lips as he told me he’d rip my head off if I didn’t get that fucking piece of shit out of his lot right this minute.

Quaking in my sneakers, I wanted to tell him I wasn’t in his lot, but on the street. Couldn’t he see this? Taking a closer view of the situation, sizing up the ferocity of this stranger, a wiser part of me intervened. I shouldn’t argue. Any indecisiveness I felt, or any need for having my say was short-lived. I quivered as he lurched at me in that up-from-under way that short wide muscle-bound men learn how to use when they attack. Rattling the chain over his head, his eyes glazed, he was about six feet away, close enough to hit me with that chain as he shouted that I’d better get the hell out of there or he’d shove my nuts down the car’s radiator.

Sweating, terrified by how real and out of control it all felt, I hurried out of there and parked over a mile from my apartment and worried all night I’d find my car burned to a crisp in the morning. It wasn’t. After breakfast, I found that it was untouched and so I trooped back to my apartment to talk to my landlady who lived downstairs and didn’t look at all surprised or sympathetic when I’d told her what had happened. She said flatly that it was a tough neighborhood and I had to see Mr. Brown. That’s right. An appellation straight out of a noir movie like The Big Combo. Long before Tarantino hijacked it.

Then she explained how. Mr. Brown. This corny alias out of an old movie. She called it the P and A. It was a club, she said. Located about a block from my apartment and the Federal Sign company. Neither a bar nor a restaurant in any legal sense, it was a dingy first-floor gathering place in a three-story clapboard building with a small hand-painted wooden plaque for a sign that read P and A above its door. Inside under a low ceiling it was dark and cramped, and a reedy silver-haired man with liver spots on his forehead stood in front of a makeshift bar smoking a long thin cigarette with a white filter. The man had a busty woman on one arm who wore dark mascara and thick pancake make-up, her hair platinum-blond.

Upon second glance, I realized she wore a wig and was old enough to be my grandmother. She, too, smoked and didn’t mind marinating in a cloud of nicotine haze. She had long legs and slender hips and gave off a whiff of perfume that smelled nutty, almost like pine needles. I didn’t dare make eye contact.

I asked the old man if he was Mr. Brown. He didn’t look impressed with me, didn’t ask my name or even say hello. He just grunted and looked away. When I stepped closer and told him what I was there for, he asked the name of my landlord and the make, color and model of my car. He snickered when I described my car. Then he said he’d always be in this place on a Wednesday afternoon. If for some reason he wasn’t, I should ask for Enzo.

Why Enzo? Why not Mr. Turquoise, or Mr. Velour? I kept the thought to myself.

I paid cash for two months in advance at $45 dollars per month. Mr. Brown didn’t give me a receipt or a handshake or a welcome to the neighborhood. Nor did he promise that my car would be safe.

Yet so far it’s been safe, I told Mallory.

She frowned. Just keep making those payments. I lived up there on The Hill for a while and you can have it. I saw cars get torched. Some were stripped in broad daylight. And the nicer ones, they tended to vanish.

Live and learn, I guess.

Oh, you’ll learn, she said. You can count on that.

• • •

So, I auditioned for Shura Levy. Here was a woman who, much like Mallory, tended to stand in one place, grounded there, taciturn, sensitive, alert. Shura was different from Mallory in that she emanated less of a working-girl’s energy and more of a bohemian elegance. Added to this was a comely earthiness that spoke directly to my loins. In short, she turned me on. I felt all the sluice gates open, the juice running, a strong attraction to her the moment we met. She fit my image of the wise and sensual and voluptuous woman I had been looking for in various dreams. She also projected a maturity that I ascribed to the comforts of self-knowledge. The same self-knowledge I wanted for myself.

Added to this, I found it a breeze to talk to Shura. She was sisterly. She radiated intelligence and gravity and a good dose of edginess. When she turned her face a certain way and the stage lights limned her profile, she looked a tad like my mother. At first, this scared the pants off me. It also made me realize how instantly obsessed I’d become with her after only a few early impressions. Was I smitten? I lied to myself, thinking that I couldn’t say. But I knew it was a lie. I’d felt a powerful connection and I wanted to sleep with her.

Shura had this mesmerizing unisex look, as if she could pass as a stocky young man. Age-wise, I guessed her to be about thirty, which seemed old to me but not too old. Her voice, her lips, her comforting gentility became comfort food that stoked my wildest sexual fantasies. I wasn’t a virgin, but I lacked what could be called significant experience. Shura could have been the captain of the Grade-A Independent All Woman Ballbusters Squad. She wouldn’t hurt me. She might even show me the ropes in and out of a four-poster.

She wore a sleeveless white collared shirt that exposed her soft tanned arms. Her black hair was cut short in a page boy. She wore no make-up and she definitely didn’t shave her underarms. She smelled faintly of patchouli and along with her boyish look something deeper and more mannish about her made me think, at first, that she was a lesbian and would not be interested in anything physical with me. However, the more we spoke, the more her small brown eyes softened and her smile bloomed and she looked into my face without flinching. I knew that she wasn’t going to turn me away. That she saw something in me that I couldn’t yet see, that she was with me completely, sizing me up and accepting me in spite of my insecurity. I felt as if she liked what she saw, and all this upon our first ten minutes in each other’s company.

I gave a cold reading from one scene of the play. She watched me walk across the stage a few times, telling me to turn left and then right. She asked if I could grow a full beard to compliment a costume that would be a sheepskin vest and knee-high suede boots. I said I could and that I’d wear any kind of costume. Anything.

She didn’t laugh at this the way I’d hoped she would. No, you won’t, she said.

I will.

You won’t wear the anti-costume.

The anti-costume?

You won’t go naked on stage. That’s the anti-costume. No costume at all.

Expose my own body in public on stage?

She nodded and grinned, a touch of slyness in her features. But it’s such a nice body.

That’s when I knew I had the part.

A few days later Mallory brought me the good news at work. I’d been cast as the Earl of Douglas from Wales, a warrior and friend to the rebel Hotspur. It was through Mallory that I met the man who’d play Hotspur. His first name was Brad, but everyone referred to him as Campbell and he insisted I do the same. Blond, blue-eyed, lean and athletic, Campbell struck me as a heart-throb of an actor who likely had his choice of attractive women. Whenever I saw him with Mallory, it seemed there was romance simmering between the two of them, though I could have said the same regarding two other women in the cast, both of whom were just as attractive as Mallory. Campbell showed no interest other than a friendly professional one in Shura. I assumed she just wasn’t his type.

Campbell had at least ten years on me, but who didn’t? I was the youngest and least experienced member in the cast. This didn’t bother Campbell at all. Because we had long Saturday rehearsals that started late in the day, he’d invite me to stay overnight at his place in Newport and go to Second Beach with him during the day. As I spent more time with him, I learned he rode his Australian-made ten-speed bike to work each day, from Rhode Island Avenue down Broadway to the Brick Marketplace on Thames Street where he was a line cook in the tiny kitchen of the Brick Alley Pub.

I learned it was a heady time for Campbell. He was auditioning regularly for plays with all the theatre companies in town. With the Second Story Theatre, he’d starred in Key Exchange, and Sexual Perversity in Chicago. He’d also acted with The Incredibly Far Off-Broadway Theatre Ensemble (TIFOBET), which during the summer used Truro Park as a venue. A native of Pittsburgh, he held a bachelor’s from Oberlin and he’d finished a year of training at the London School of Drama where he’d specialized in stage combat. He’d come to Rhode Island to teach a theatre history class part-time in Kingston at the University of Rhode Island. He hadn’t liked teaching much. He preferred the lifestyle in Newport and the theatre scene there.

Campbell and I had to spar on stage in a friendly fashion, as if we were warriors in training ready to bring down the throne. Our costumes showed too much of our bodies for us not to appear buff and ready for war, so he encouraged me to work-out and to swim with him whenever possible, body-surfing the waves at Second Beach. During pauses in our rehearsals when we had ample free time, we threw a Frisbee on the lawn at Swanhurst, which was the name of the converted carriage barn off Bellevue Avenue that had become the theatre company’s summer home. It was a huge cast, so along with Campbell there were always more than a few willing participants.

Off came baby fat that I hadn’t even realized I was carrying until I had to use an awl to bore new holes into my belts. The fleshiness that had defined my awkward maneuverings through adolescent years began to give way to a new me, one who looked not only acceptable but desirable in tight leather pants and pointed shoes. I let my hair and beard grow. I began to make up for lost time by wearing clothes that looked more space-age and closer to what the musicians in bands such as XTC, and Black Flag were wearing. I ate healthy, spurred on by Campbell who tutored me in ways to prepare creative vegetarian dishes. I even bought a wok.

As I spent more time with Campbell, we grew closer in the intense way actors tend to do during the run of a show. On weeknights when our rehearsals didn’t start until around 8 p.m., I’d leave directly from work and show up in my car at Second Beach minutes after the parking lot attendant went home. Campbell would be waiting for me there with his bicycle. After our swim, we’d wash the sea salt off our skin at the outdoor facilities in front of the bathhouse, change our clothes when no one was looking, and arrive early to rehearsal to go through a brisk workout regimen. This included push-ups, stretching and various lunges and throws that we’d practice as part of choreographed fight moves. Other cast members would join us and together we’d practice the riskier moves such as groin kicks that were part of our choreographed fights. Since Hotspur and Douglas were both men who were leading armies, we each had to look comfortable with a dagger in one hand and a heavy broad-sword in another. It all sounds easy, but at first it wasn’t.

Though we never fought each other on stage, we had plenty of fight scenes to learn and memorize and we had to juice them up,