George Dawes Green - Coming of Age in a Mausoleum

 

When I was 15 years old, I lived for a while in a mausoleum. Actually, a very short while, less than a week. But it was actually a wonderful time. It was summer, and there was honeysuckle and fireflies. I was desperately in love with a girl who was dead, and with a man who was living but psychotic. It was the happiest time of my life. And this is how I came to be there.

 

When I was twelve years old, my parents took me down to Glynn County, Georgia. And that was, to me, like being buried alive. Everything was gray. The skies were gray, the Spanish moss was gray, the cicadas were singing that song all the time. I was lonely, and my parents were drunks, and I'd just wait for them to go to sleep, and then I'd turn on the light and stay up the whole night reading about exploration, mostly arctic exploration, or searching for the source of the Nile, or really anything that was about getting as far away from Glynn County, Georgia, as one could get.

 

Of course, because I stayed up all night, mornings were torture to me. Glynn Academy was torture to me. My grades went into a death spiral through the 30s to the 20s to the teens. I actually longed for the perfection of absolute zero, but I didn't have the stick-to-itiveness. So, I dropped out of high school when I was 15 and I hitchhiked north. I got a job in New York City as a messenger. I got to wear this really sharp tie and jacket. I loved not being a civilian. I sneered at all yellow school buses. And for a while, I lived in some flops around Manhattan. 

 

And then, one Saturday, I went with a friend of mine on a road trip up to New Rochelle, New York, which is a little suburb. I don't actually remember why I did it. I guess we were on a drug run. [audience chuckles] But anyway, we wound up hanging out at this sort of divey apartment full of drug dealers and derelicts. At one point, I went back to the bathroom, and I saw in a back room a man sitting at an upright piano and singing an operatic aria about an orangutan. I was mesmerized. He turned around after the song, and he looked at me and said, "Do you play chess?" 

 

His name was John Orlando. He was about 30. He was kind of a slender-- If you can imagine, he was kind of a slender Alfred Hitchcock. We wound up playing chess for a week. John's strategy for chess was to gather all of his pieces into a fortress in the rear of the board on the left side, which he called the West. And from there, he would send his knights out on these long, gallant expeditions from which they'd never return. It would take me hours to pick my way in there and find his king and kill it. And during the whole time, John would be laughing hysterically.

 

Afterwards, I never really could see the point of competitive chess. I just wanted to play what John called chivalric chess. [audience chuckles] But why was this original man living in this flophouse with drug dealers? The rent was very cheap, and it was split eight ways. When I moved in, it was split nine ways. I used to then commute to my job down in New York City, and then come back on the train, back to this drug den every night. I didn't do all that many drugs, but I did happily help to sort and clean. It was an utterly depraved life for a 15-year-old.

 

There was a 15-year-old girl who used to come by. She was this beautiful redhead, and just exploding into her sexuality. And of course, she came by for the older guys. She didn't even notice me. But I was just painfully in love with her. When I would just smell her, it would cripple me. Downstairs was this little old lady, Irene, who used to worry about me and tell me that I had to go home. She would bake me lasagna. I would tell her, "I really have no home, because my parents are drunks." I loved her. I loved talking to her. 

 

I loved John Orlando, who was unbalanced and who would sit up there at that piano all day long working on that opera about the Bronx Zoo, where he had once worked. He was making all of the keepers and all of the animals sing these arias. I think that this opera was driving him insane, because one day I remember walking up from the train station and John was coming toward me and he had this fedora. He didn't really see me. He just walked almost past me, and then he stopped and said, "Mr. Glo, there's a four-ply Fozzie flying out of here at 5 o'clock. Get a line on it." And then, he just walked away. 

 

I was in love with him. I'm not gay, but this was a physical love. When I was around him, I couldn't breathe. I felt like he was the world. I felt like I loved him the way that a worm loves its apple. I think he loved me, too, because the drug dealers were always trying to throw me out. They were always saying, "John, this punk kid, he's 15 years old, he's going to draw some unwanted attention." And John would say to them, "No, George stays. I don't know if you've noticed about George, but he has one amazing thing about him, is that he doesn't buy into anything. He just floats through life. I want to see what he's going to buy into. So, he stays."

 

So, they threw us both out. [audience laughter] And then, we had nowhere to go. We were homeless. I wasn't going to get paid for a week, and John never had any money. But he said that he knew that there were these mausoleums in the back of the local graveyard that were in disrepair. And so, we packed up some blankets and some pillows and some wine, and we went and broke into one of these mausoleums. It had two marble shelves on either side. And under one was the mortal remains of some man, and then under the other was his wife. John and I made our beds on these marble shelves and we felt so safe there. 

 

The caretaker was old and never came around at night. And the police never would go into that graveyard at all. We just wandered around and got to know our neighbors. There was a dead 19-year-old girl buried there. She had died in 1928. And her name was Hazel Ash. Her inscription read, "She lived for poetry." And I immediately forgot the sexy redheaded girl. When we went back to the mausoleum, I said to John, "We have to write poems for Hazel Ash tonight." He just wrote these horrible, disgusting, obscene verses. I had to tell him to shut up. He just laughed at me and his laugh echoed in that mausoleum.

 

People ask me if it was spooky in there. I'll say, “You know, it really wasn't spooky to me. I will say that if you don't like spiders, you would not have liked living there. And I will say it was clammy and gray and lifeless.” I probably would have been scared out of my wits if John Orlando hadn't been with me. But he was with me every second because he wouldn't spend a moment in that graveyard alone. So, if I went out at night to take a leak, he would come shuffling out after me and stand behind me. And in the morning, when I got up bright and early and put on my jacket and tie and went to my job, he went out of the graveyard with me. And then, when I came back on the train that night and walked up to the graveyard, he was waiting there by the fence. 

 

We were both so hungry. So, we were hungry to the point we had to do something. John had a friend of his, and we walked to the friend's house. As we walked, we made up a poem about John's friend. When we got to his house, we recited the poem to the man who in exchange gave us supper and a few dollars. And then later, when John and I were walking home to the graveyard, John said to me, "Now, you're a professional writer." And I said, "Oh, come on, John. He just gave us dinner and five bucks." And John said, "That's what the hooker said. You're a pro." [audience laughter] 

 

I was so proud. I had a little piece of pie that I saved for Hazel Ash, and I put it on her gravestone. And then, John and I went into the mausoleum, and he sang his songs of the elephants all night. Every now and then, he would let out these amazing farts that he called El Destructos, and we would have to evacuate the mausoleum. [audience chuckles]. And then, the sprinklers came on in the middle of the night, and we just ran around buck naked under the sprinklers. I was so happy that my scalp ached. John saw this, and he said, "You know, you're buying into this, aren't you?" And I said, "Into what?" He said, "Living in a graveyard." [audience chuckles] I laughed. But I wasn't buying into that. I was buying into being with somebody who turned every moment of his life into art.

 

Then a few days later, I was on my way home from work, coming up the graveyard lawn, and I saw that our mausoleum's door had a brand new lock. I just immediately turned and ran. I went to Irene's house, and she said to me, "So, now, you have to go home." And I said, "I can't go home until we find John." So, I went looking for John every day. 

 

About two weeks went by and then one Sunday morning, someone came to get us and said that John was at the chapel on Mayflower Avenue, and was singing songs about zoo life in the middle of the Mass. I ran as fast as I could. When I got there, they were putting John into a police car and taking him to the mental hospital from where I don't think he ever came out, as far as I know. But as he got into the car, he saw me and he tipped his fedora and said, "Mr. Glo, I got to go." And then, so did I. I had to go home.