Ernie, Scott, Move Over, Guys!

My recent reference to novels I have written pushed some of the many psychological buttons attached to my over-sized ego which propelled me to try to remember them.  Like all novice fiction writers I took my own life as the carapace upon which to hang the story's details.  My first attempt recalled a student in my class at Yale who in real life had suddenly before my eyes grown truly ill, dramatically declining by the day, so that I intervened, and when he confessed to his feeling sick hustled him off to the student infirmary where he was discovered to have diabetes, whom I met on a train platform years later, a married man in the suburbs.  In my novel of course it is all different, I really can't remember much about it although the title came from a song Perry Como used to sing "Everybody Falls In Love With Someone", but my intervention had to do with discovering that the kid was suicidal because he realized he was gay, and then later when he has grown up and started work, the two meet again, and of course, guess what? Cupid strikes with his arrow!  The next written in 1980 or so was situated in Ibiza where I had spent part of the previous summer staying with two fifty something Italian sisters adjacent to another house full of Madrileño friends.  The title "Provide Provide" alludes to Robert Frost's poem of that title, I believe, which ends "better to go down dignified/with boughten friendships at your side/provide, provide!"  The narrative line has to do with the jealousy of the one sister that the other has formed a close non-sexual bond with a young girl from Madrid who is taking over the familial function, becoming daughter, sister, friend.  Another plot line involves this vivacious young thing who is also secretly sleeping with one of the young marrieds in the party, and still another depicts a fiftyish American gay professor (now who could that be?) who frets with worry that he might have AIDS when he is not moaning over his loneliness.  The professor was added in a rewrite to give a more serious tone to the narrative, and it was a mistake; he is tiresome and lugubrious throughout.  When I was fifty five, teaching in New York, and working several mornings a week as a volunteer in the kitchen at Gods Love We Deliver, I wrote a novel about a young straight couple, he a cook in such a place, an Italian-American from Staten Island, she working as a volunteer, a WASP debutante from the Upper East Side, oh, god, you can see where this story is going, right into one of the greatest clichés of all time, so it got spiced up a little with the introduction of a flamboyant queenie sort of manager in the kitchen, who eventually dies of AIDS, causing a reunion of the couple who are of course in the grand tradition of Boy Meets Girl, Boy Breaks Up With Girl, Boy Gets Back Together With Girl.  The last time I found a paper copy of this (entitled Kitchen Duty) whilst organizing (what a laugh!) my files I teared up as I read it.  Last of all I wrote a shorter novel about a teenaged gay boy whose silver cigarette case, a family heirloom, is stolen from him by some townies when he is having sex with them, and the desperate measures he goes through to get it back.  It is a study in his courage and perseverance as he goes to the police and they help him with a sting operation since they want to get something on these early onset thugs before they get dangerous, and at the same time a mordant look at the social structures in a small mid western town where an upper class boy can break the law engaging in sodomy and feel free to go to the police about it who use the situation to gain control over some lower class troublemakers in the town. It was called "Give or Take."  I still think it is a wonderful story and very well written.  Gee Willikers, I clean forgot about the novels about Medea and Clytemnestra.