Blue Monologue
from
The Best American Short Plays 2007–2008
one of seven works collected by Daniel Gallant under the heading Five-Story Walkup
You have to understand Queens. It was never a borough with its own identity like Brooklyn that people clapped for on quiz shows if you said you came from there. Brooklyn had been a city before it became part of New York, so it always had its own identity. And the Bronx originally had been Jacob Brock’s farm, which at least gives it something personal, and Staten Island is out there on the way to the sea, and of course, Manhattan is what people mean when they say New York.
Queens was built in the twenties in that flush of optimism as a bedroom community for people on their way up who worked in Manhattan but wanted to pretend they had the better things in life until the inevitable break came and they could make the official move to the Scarsdales and the Ryes and the Greenwiches of their dreams, the payoff that was the birthright of every American. Queens named its communities Forest Hills, Kew Gardens, Elmhurst, Woodside, Sunnyside, Jackson Heights, Corona, Astoria (after the Astors, of all people). The builders built the apartment houses in mock Tudor or Gothic or colonial and then named them the Chateau, the El Dorado, Linsley Hall, the Alhambra. We lived first in the East Gate, then move to the West Gate, then to Hampton Court. And the lobbies had Chippendale furniture and Aztec fireplaces, and the elevators had Roman numerals on the buttons.
And in the twenties and thirties and forties you’d move there and move out as soon as you could. Your young married days were over, the promotions came. The ads in the magazines were right.
Hallelujah. Queens: a comfortable rest stop, a pleasant rung on the ladder of success, a promise we were promised in some secret dream. And isn’t Manhattan, each day the skyline growing denser and more crenellated, always looming up there in the distance? The elevated subway, the Flushing line, zooms to it, only fourteen minutes from Grand Central Station. Everything you could want you’d find right there in Queens. But the young marrieds become old marrieds, and the children come, but the promotions, the breaks, don’t, and you’re still there in your bedroom community, your life over the bridge in Manhattan, and the fourteen-minute ride becomes longer every day. Why didn’t I get the breaks? I’m right here in the heart of the action, in the bedroom community of the heart of the action, and I live in the El Dorado Apartments and the main street of Jackson Heights has Tudor-topped buildings with pizza slices for sale beneath them and discount radios and discount drugs and discount records and the Chippendale-paneled elevator in my apartment is all carved up with Love to Fuck that no amount of polishing can ever erase. And why do my dreams, which should be the best part of me, why do my dreams, my wants, constantly humiliate me? Why don’t I get the breaks? What happened? I’m hip. I’m hep. I’m a New Yorker. The heart of the action. Just a subway ride to the heart of the action. I want to be part of that skyline. I want to blend into those lights. Hey, dreams, I dreamed you. I’m not something you curb a dog for. New York is where it all is. So why aren’t I here?
When I was a kid, I wanted to come from Iowa, from New Mexico, to make the final break and leave, say, the flatness of Nebraska and get on that Greyhound and get off that Greyhound at Port Authority and you wave your cardboard suitcase at the sky: I’ll lick you yet. How do you run away to your dreams when you’re already there? I never wanted to be any place in my life but New York. How do you get there when you’re there? Fourteen minutes on the Flushing line is a very long distance. And I guess that’s what concerns me more than anything else: humiliation. The cruelty of the smallest moments in our lives, what we have done to others, what others have done to us. I’m not interested so much in how people survive as in how they avoid humiliation. Chekhov says we must never humiliate one another, and I think avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy and probably of our lives.
I went to Saint Joan of Arc Grammar School in Jackson Heights, Queens. The nuns would say, If only we could get to Rome, to have His Holiness touch us, just to see Him, capital H, the Vicar of Christ on Earth—Vicar, V.I.C.A.R., Vicar, in true spelling-bee style. Oh, dear God, help me get to Rome, the capital of Italy, and go to that special little country in the heart of the capital—V.A.T.I.C.A.N. C.I.T.Y.—and touch the Pope. No sisters ever yearned for Moscow the way those sisters and their pupils yearned for Rome. And in 1965 I finally got to Rome. Sister Carmela! Do you hear me? I got here! It’s a new Pope, but they’re all the same. Sister Benedict! I’m here! And I looked at the Rome papers, and there on the front page was a picture of the Pope. On Queens Boulevard. I got to Rome on the day a Pope left the Vatican to come to New York for the first time to plead to the United Nations for peace in the world, on October 4, 1965. He passed through Queens, because you have to on the way from Kennedy Airport to Manhattan. Like the borough of Queens itself, that’s how much effect the Pope’s pleas for peace had. The Pope was no loser. Neither was I. We both had big dreams. Lots of possibilities. The Pope was just into more real estate.
My parents wrote me about that day that the Pope came to New York and how thrilled they were, and the letter caught up with me in Cairo because I was hitching from Paris to the Sudan. And I started thinking about my parents and me and why was I in Egypt and what was I doing with my life and what were they doing with theirs, and that’s how plays get started. The play I wrote next was autobiographical in the sense that everything in the play happened in one way or another over a period of years, and some of it happened in dreams and some of it could have happened and some of it, luckily, never happened. The play was a blur of many years that pulled together under the umbrella of the Pope’s visit.
In 1966 I wrote the first act of this play, and, like some bizarre revenge or disapproval, on the day I finished it my father died. The second act came in a rush after that. But then the steam, the impetus for the play, had gone. I wrote another draft of the second act.
Another: a fourth, a fifth. A sixth. I was lost on the play until 1969 in London, when one night at the National Theatre I saw Laurence Olivier do Dance of Death and the next night, still reeling from it, saw him in Charon’s production of A Flea in Her Ear. The savage intensity of the first blended into the maniacal intensity of the second, and somewhere in my head Dance of Death became the same play as A Flea in Her Ear. Why shouldn’t Strindberg and Feydeau get married, at least live together, and my play be their child? I think the only playwriting rule is that you have to learn your craft so that you can put onstage plays you would like to see. So I threw away all the second acts of the play, started in again, and, for the first time, understood what I wanted.
Before I was born, just before, my father wrote a song for my mother:
A stranger’s coming to our house. I hope he likes us.
I hope he stays.
I hope he doesn’t go away.
I liked them, loved them, stayed too long, and didn’t go away. The plays I’ve written are for them.