It's a Book!

After months of toggling between a sort of panicked mental reeling and total despair, having less idea every day since the advent of the pandemic and sharing the apartment all day with my now working at home husband, not to mention the shutdown of live theater, i.e. the world in which my art lives, of what the fuck to do with myself, a state of mind that for all intents and purposes from the outside I’m sure is indistinguishable from mere whining and moping, a couple nights ago I felt a simple, clear shift. I finally relaxed into the idea (the fact?) that this is not temporary but the new condition of my life.

I decided to go back to structuring my day to spend the better portion of the afternoon doing something productive toward a larger project: writing or researching or thinking or planning. Working. I will stake out the bedroom/office every afternoon and relinquish the living room to the inner workings of the financial industry. Save my marriage, preserve what’s left of my sanity, make art. Win, win, win.

And since I still have paralyzing questions about the future of theater, and because writing is something I can do alone at home every day, and because working on something that is finished when it’s written, rather than something where the writing is just the beginning, removes my apprehension about writing for theater, I am going to write a book.

I’ve had this story in my head for quite a while. (My musical Jack sprouted from the same ground but is much more limited in scope.) It’s a multi-generation saga radiating out from memoir to tell the stories of my grandfather Ed Cheslik who, homeless in Tucson, died under a tractor trailer where he’d crawled looking for shelter; Larry Eyler, the gay serial killer who murdered 21 teenagers and young men in the early 1980s mostly in and around the county where I went to high school; and finally the 40-year-old man with whom I had my first sexual experience, a service he provided to gay teenagers for decades in that small town in Indiana, mostly right under the noses of anyone not too repulsed to care. Which was practically no one until 1983 when he was arrested and convicted of child molestation in a lurid trial at the Putnam County courthouse.

Anyway … I found in my research today two items that thrilled me and I wanted to share.

Mrs. John Kirby is my father’s older sister, Jane. She married John Kirby, who, until I read this item on the society page of the Winona Republican-Herald, I didn’t know had studied acting. He went on to have a long career as a lawyer and judge in St. Paul. My father never liked him. John and Jane must have been very recently married at the time of this article. They had a daughter Lucretia a few years later and then in 1957 Jane became very ill with some kind of infection, spent nearly a year in the hospital, and died in 1958, a little over two years before I was born. She was in law school at the time.

That’s Ed, my grandfather, posing for an ad in the Winona Daily News, 1947. Ed and my grandmother Lenore owned and operated Eddie’s Tavern in Winona, Minnesota for several years. Two years after this ad ran the same paper announced that Ed and Lenore had sold Eddie’s Tavern. My dad would have been 16, and I believe this is when the family moved to Waukegan, Illinois under a cloud of scandal. (Waukegan is where he met my mother and where I was born.) I don’t know the details of the scandal — pulling teeth is way easier than getting my father to elaborate — but the gist is that Ed was caught somehow somewhere fooling around with another man. Finding him here behind the bar in his long white apron smiling with his hand on his hip made me very happy today.