Month: September 2019

Elvis Presley released Blue Suede Shoes in March 1956, and I was captivated by the music and the song lyrics. I constantly danced to the song and begged for a pair of these magical shoes of mine that you better not step on! My Mother Ruth thought that they were a luxury item and not a necessity for living. However she told me (challenged me) that If I wanted them and earned the money to purchase them that we would go to Corpus Christi and find a pair. This was all I needed as a support sign and I set about finding three part-time jobs.
1. sweeping out the local barber shop after school for which I earned a quarter each time
2. rolling newspapers and putting a rubber band around them for their front lawn tossed delivery
3. cleaning out the local feed and seed store of any debris and trash on the weekend

I was diligent and in three months I had a shoe box filled with the $40. and proudly showed and counted out to Mother my treasure in coins and bills. Her response was that she would check with the best store in Corpus Christi and we would take a trip to purchase my coveted shoes. The next weekend on Friday afternoon we drove up the coast of Texas, and checked into the nicest hotel in downtown Corpus Christi in walking distance of the elegant department store called Lichtenstein’s.

I was up with the light of dawn and we were waiting outside of the store for their opening. Mother sent me with my shoebox of money to the Men’s Shoe Department and there a portly older sales clerk assisted me. He seemed to know exactly what I desired and after a short visit to the back of the store he emerged with a shoe box which he handed to me … finally he asked if I was going to open the box and so I did and froze in time. A perfect pair of lace up round toe dress shoes in blue suede captured my heart and they were my exact size. He encouraged me to try them on and they fit.

I started dancing across the store to find my Mother and she asked is this what you want to spend your $$ on? I responded Yes! Yes! and continued dancing. As I passed through the store I spotted a pink dress shirt with navy stitching on the collar and down the front placket… Just my size! The pink shirt was priced at $5. The Blue Suede dress shoes were priced at $30.
So including tax, I had enough left over to buy my Mother an Ice Creme Sunday with a cherry on top. We celebrated! She added a pair of grey flannel slacks to my outfit.

Later I learned that Mother had called to Lichtenstein’s in advance and knew they would have my exact shoe size of 7 and a half D.
She had also asked them to display the pink shirt that caught my eye. This was an orchestrated shopping trip to Lichtenstein’s. It was also a test of my desire and learning to earn the price of luxury. I wore those shoes and shirt for every dress up occasion for the next four years and by the end of Senior prom the suede was worn off of the toes of the shoes and my toes were being curled under.

I think I was a proud and cocky boy that owned the only pair of Blue Suede Shoes in the Rio Grande Valley. The shoes were retired when I went to college in fall of 1960. In 2018, I found the dancing do not step on me shoes in a store house with other memories of those special times for earning my way lessons in life.

Entry – October 15, 2018 and September 15, 2019

In Tokyo, the first lesson with Kanzaburo was given in his private home in the dance studio. In this lesson, I became challenged by many mishaps of costume and fan. It started when I dropped my sensu (fan) and knelt down to retrieve it. I stepped on the Kimono hem and tore the fabric. With the balance of my body thrown I re-stepped onto the fan fracturing one of he bamboo bones that helped the fan to fold. As I stood to erect myself, the obi about my waist untied itself and slid down to the dance studio floor. In this instant the kimono furled itself open, and there I stood in my white boxer Brooks Brothers underwear. Broken fan, torn kimono, lost obi, and a tremendous moment in the sense of how poorly could I have performed!…and was this a hopeless quest of study?

Kanzaburo sat through all of this with a totally Noh mask face and not a reflected moment of visual comment.
As I apologized and asked of him to be forgiven for such an awkward display he was impassive.
Then he said in Japanese the equivalent of “once more, please” and I went to the side of the studio to rearranged my costume and find another fan to continue “once more” …
And so it went lesson after lesson, until I was actually performing the entire dance and being progressed to more complex repertory.

I always wondered what he must have thought of this blond haired Texan attempting to go where no other non-Japanese had attempted in the dance. But he was forever patient. He saw some gift. He blessed me with his teaching, his great acting interpretation, his brilliant technique, and his time.

When I performed in Japan, he came to see me and the next week the lessons became ever more complex.. He challenged me at every nuance of rhythm and phrasing, eye focus and hand gesture, entrances and exits….his was some of the most detailed and exacting instruction.

Then once I had mastered a new solo, his instruction would be to return to the next lesson and make it my solo with my interpretation and style or personal stamp in performance. He would give me a critique and notes to work upon about how to manipulate the costume and fan technique. I was expected to arrive prepared and well rehearsed for the next lesson.

Usually one cold run was made before he joined me in the studio and then it was a full out performance. No starting over. When and if something was not exactly correct, I was trained to fix it in the moment, make it a part of the performance, and keep going no matter what happened.

Once he intentionally placed the wrong music in the tape machine, and I reshaped the solo as I adjusted in the instant to the new music. When I arrived at the ending and bow, under his breath he whispered …keep in character until you are out of sight of the wings. This lesson repaid itself many times over in the following 50 years of world touring. The most repeated adjustment was to find the lights and perform with them where and when ever they appeared on the stage. The strangest adjustment was to find the wrong hand properties on the stage and to make them work within a solo. A basket of pine cones had been filled with freshly harvested onions. A solo about the pine forests became a homage to the onion fields, and the theatre was perfumed with the pungent smell of raw onions.

Entries – October 20, 2007 and September 15, 2019

Every time I went home to Texas and to visit Rea there would be a cooking lesson. She insisted that at least all the extended children could navigate a kitchen. There had been lessons in making fudge from all the raw materials – even the detail of melting the chocolate with constant stirring.
We had beheaded a chicken, plucked feathers, gutted, cleaned, stuffed with lemons and baked.
In the winter we baked a roast and made cornbread from scratch.
In the summer of 1989, I awoke early one morning before 7 am to find her in the kitchen with a large tub of peaches in scalding water. She was removing the skins and today I was going to learn to make peach cobblers.
First was the process of creating the cobbler dough, rolling it out, lining the pans, and cutting the topping strips.
For an unknown reason, there were to be 9 peach cobblers made in various sizes from round to oblong to square.
While I prepared the glass baking dishes, Rea skinned and sliced the fresh peaches form her trees and added sugar and let them marinate.
The oven was lit and only fit three of the cobblers in at the same time. The cobblers were lined on the bottoms and brushed with butter and sprinkled with more sugar. The marinated peaches were added with more butter in chunks on the top.
Then the artistic work began with the lattice work of the dough strips gracefully placed over the tops of each cobbler. These were pinched at each intersection, fluted around the edges, ruffled around the entire outer rim of the cobbler, and sprinkled with more sugar and a slight glaze of cinnamon. Over the next three hours, we baked the cobblers and cared each group of three to the summer porch to cool on top of metal racks or make shift metal pots turned upside down.
It was an entire days work and we stopped for sandwiches at
lunch.
About 5:30 pm, Rea announced that she was going to freshen up and that I should do the same and then ready the car.
The next surprise was that she wanted all nine of the peach cobblers placed in a separate bag and placed on the floor of the car or in the trunk. The next project was a drive to nine different friends or business associates homes and the delivery of the cobblers by the end of the evening meals. We took these delights and surprise desserts to the head of the water district, the pastor of the People’s Church, the superintendent of the PSJA school district, the mayor of San Juan, the owner of the hardware store, the owner of the lumber company, the tax accessor/collector of the county, the foreman of the ranch, and her dressmaker.
These deliveries of the peach cobblers took us to Donna, Alamo, Edinburg, Pharr, and back to San Juan.
We did not eat any of the peach cobblers we made and only licked our fingers and the bowls.
We went to the local hamburger stand and celebrated our day of work with juicy drippy burgers and chocolate malts.
Later in the evening when Rea had settled in the parlor and had read her evening paper I asked why we did not have a cobbler for us to keep? and why she selected these nine people to receive our creations? – home grown and home made and with personal delivery.
Her response was at best terse. It was also a lesson.
“You will keep the memory of creating and sharing.”
“There are many ways to pay your taxes and to earn interest.”
The next time we cooked it was autumn and we made a stew and she had me deliver a large pot to the police station.
Entry – August 28, 2007

…”This is a story of the heart and exploration and a deeper need
you have to bond and embrace and support and believe”…

In January 2007, I was in a bar in Chicago where a breathtaking
26 – 28 year old of some Arabic background walked directly into my
body and entwined himself without a word.
The fit was as a well-worn boot or many years old jeans.
After some time, I said you must tell me your name to him.
And he responded, “You are Butch, I am Saleh”.
We moved to the bar and started a long conversation about him.
From Yemen, working in a gas station 12 hour days – 7 day weeks
from a family of 12 children – a wife in Yemen – no children – does
not want to return –
his preference is a man and better a mature muscular man.
I fit his fantasy need at first visually and I refused to have sex.
We exchanged telephone #s.
He called me first.
We met again two more times and only talked.
Finally we bonded and I satisfied him thrice.
In April, I invited him to my hotel “Whitehall”,
and I introduced him to all from doorman to concierge.
He had never seen Chicago from a rooftop.
I was in the Katherine Hepburn suite with its own private deck –
kitchen – elevator service.
He slept deep and quiet with his medusa thick curls all about his face.
He has perfect teeth and delicate hands that are greased from the gas station.
We were wearing the exact same design – make and size of shoe – mine new
his worn and scuffed.
We have seen each other now 8 months.
He calls at intervals erratic in bundles and then not for a set of weeks.
He wants a commitment I can not make as now I am trying to sort out my
own future fates.
Tomorrow I will travel to Chicago for Lawyers
(a fortune of debt I will never be able to pay)
and Doctor and Hospital on Wednesday to further explore
the nature of my diabetic condition and what to do now
and try to have some control over the future.
Saleh and I will meet and he will for the first time meet 2 of my
friends if he will come and visit me there.
I have refused to go to a bar or bath or other such place and only
fulfill a carnal emotion.
He said I was the first to treat him with respect.
I retorted that if he only saw himself as a “piece of ass” that was
how he would be treated by most men in US or Yemen.
I see him as a poetic message of complex rushing narrative.
 and I also have seen my impetuous youth in his moods.
Just to talk I am satiated by his rapid rhythms.
To look into his burning ginger eyes,
I awaken and become a mentor of his inner spirit turmoil
and a quiet place inside me surfaces.
I have no explanation –
it just is –
and it is a most strange form of loving
and yet it is complete.

Now September 2019, and our friendship endures.

Saleh has moved me twice form Illinois to Texas, and he took care of me in my home in Texas for a month after my heart attack in February of 2014. When he learned that I was placed in a nursing home in fall 2018, he drove three days from Chicago to find me and get me out and take me home. There he nursed me for 9 days until I said in recognition that I was in my home. Next he drove me to Chicago to see doctors there and he drove me to the airport for my travel back to Texas. He is a rare friend for over 12 years. A blessing sent from the Yemen Gods.

Entries – August 25, 2007 and September 15, 2019

Dear Jim,
I am fascinated and absorbed.
You write in a unique gripping style. 
I hope that I can hold your interest with my life moments.
Did you receive them as attached – I am writing as I remember and dating each time I write. 
Yes, here is more to frame and I will share some of my notes. 
This will be a replenishing of spirit through recollection of memory. 
To have you to talk with through the air is a thread and a lifeline.
You have returned at the right time.

In autumn of 1979, when I was in living in the apartment building behind the National Theatre in Tokyo,
One entered the building by going across the grounds of the Hirakawa Tenmangu Jinja.
I lived on floor seven and an elevator took one up or down.
In this little apartment, Minoru came to visit and would stay overnight.
He came one night when I had a visitor from Smith College, Susan Waltner.
Susan and I had been classmates at U of Wisconsin and she became Director of Dance at Smith
and continues to teach there. 
Early the next morning, Minoru and I were in the midst of starting to engage our passion
after much drunken affection and the telephone rang and I let it ring. 
This was the first of the odd telephone calls.
Susan opened the shoji to alert me to answer the phone, and one of the most precious moments of my
time with Minoru was lost forever. 
He became embarrassed and soon took leave, and I followed him across the perspective of the temple garden. 
This was in 1979, when I was on the Japan Foundation Fellowship 
and completing my degree in Classical Japanese Dance.

The telephone continued to ring on odd occasion and I would have a conversation
with a stranger who knew many things about me and some how had received my telephone number.
The calls over a six week time increased and became most curious with details of my appearance, 
or my being seen about Tokyo, or my clothes at a sighting.  
Finally I told the caller to never call again or to meet me.
An agreement to meet was made. 
It was decided that the place would be in the front of Wako department store in Ginza at 6 pm on a Saturday,
and that each of us would wear an object of the color Yellow. 
I wore my yellow aviator glasses. 
He wore a yellow windbreaker jacket that was turned inside out with a red lining on the outside.
At first I did not spot him as he sat very still in front of the corner window on the ledge.
After about 15 minutes of my waiting, he slowly removed the jacket and turned the yellow side out 
as he displayed a magnificent hewn torso and put the jacket back on with the red to his body. 
Then we approached each other in slow motion – greeted – went to have a drink on a side street – 
and another drink at another bar – and finally touched hands at a sushi stand.
It was electric as I felt the calluses form his hard work in the Gym and from gripping the handles of his motorcycle.
This was Kohtaro Yamamoto.  He was Kohtaro Yamamoto and we visited Minoru at the shop in Kamakura. 
We became a partnership of passion and experiences for the rest of 1979 and into 1983 when he visited me 
in Seoul Korea while teaching on my 3rd Fulbright. 
I last saw him in Japan in 1995 (high in the mountains of Ouda Hazama) where he visited me at the temple where John Toler was the abbot and eventually died. 
On occasion I called to him, he worked for the city of Yokohama. 
He never came to the states. 
I pierced his nipples and genitals. 
When we last visited his hair was grey and he had a scar the length of his abdomen from too much drink. 
He was still a magnificent specimen of age and debauchery and endurance.
He knew Minoru and Yugi and that was how he learned of and found the contact to call me.
It took from 1979 up to 1995 for him to reveal to me how he first called when Minoru was in my arms 
on the fated morning the shoji was opened by Susan as the phone rang.
I think of him often and wonder of him and lost a bit of my being to his passion and ever-kind watchful eyes.
How little I knew then of how I would value his memory and the sanctuary he provided in the wildness of our exploding youth.

Entry of response letter to James Freeman –
August 18, 2007

Dear Lon,

Right. I take your point. Let us see if the ways we frame our thoughts and
the words we can find to express them are worth
the effort.

The beginning of this first chapter dates from the moment I walked into the
home of Julie Meech’s parents
one day when you were to give a performance in their living room. Besides
my curiosity about that there
was a greater incentive for me to attend. You had already told me of the
dock-fingered window washer you had met
and how charming it was to have him curl up and drift off to sleep beside
you with his hand wrapped around your dick.
You said he would be at the event. I was prepared to be interested. No
surprise, one quick glance around the room
was enough to identify him, and another glance from him to me kindled the
flame. I made a date for us to meet a
day or so later, and from that time one in the fall of 1968 I could think
of little else. He asked me to his little room
in Komagome and I brought him once to Kyoto to stay with me in that house
where I lived on the mountain path
behind Ginkakuji leading up to the top of Daimonji-yama. Through all this
not one single full-blown sexual episode occurred,
much as I desired it. Looking back I don’t see how it could have been
otherwise, given the ambiguities running through him.
And it was precisely these which attracted me the most, as if I were doomed
to be frustrated in every erotic encounter.
Then sometime early in 1969 our paths parted and I didn’t see him again
until the early 1980’s when just like you I bumped into
him by chance. He was walking toward me on a street in Kamakura. Joy! Once
again we resumed meetings, at a different level
this time. He came to Kyoto a couple of times, met Isao and then slipped
out of sight with a new wife, as I said, to somewhere
deep in the hills of Niigata prefecture, where I hope they are both still
happy today. There is no way of finding out. He is
a lovely person, somewhat sad in his limitations of opportunity, but I
guess no more so than the rest of us if we could take
a god’s eye view of everything. My best memory is the trip we took in dead
winter to his family home in Sakata on the Japan Sea
coast. Snow country. All that part of town later burned to the ground.

From years before meeting him I had developed a taste for his type. A
clever Chinese professor I had at university and who knew
me very well described this type as the “honest woodcutter.” But of course
in every so-called type there are infinite varieties.
I was to learn that some “woodcutters” were quite ready to engage in almost
any sort of sex, playful or not so playful, at any time of
night or day. That is where Thailand enters the story.

I have an old friend who teaches philosophy at the University of Hong Kong.
For many years he had been going to Thailand
and always brought back photos of the boys he met and described his
sporting life there with a kind of subdued relish that amused me.
I would critique the photos and we would have another drink, then move on
to more intellectual matters. Nothing ever really
stirred me to follow in his footsteps… until one day. In his latest album
of photos was one fellow who looked straight out not at the
camera but directly into my eyes, or so I fancied anyway. He was the
absolute epitome of the “woodcutter”, the “woodcutter”
writ large in gilt lettering, if you will excuse the hyperbole. I decided
on the spot I had to meet him, and without any delay booked
a flight to Bangkok. I knew where he hung out– in the park at the outdoor
gym in the late afternoons- so after checking into a
low-dive sort of hotel nearby I beat a quick path there. A bit late as it
turned out, or maybe just in time, for as I was entering the
park he strolled out. He gave me a sidelong look and continued on his way
with a slow, dreamlike rolling gait I came to know
and love. I followed him awhile but did not approach. The next day I went
earlier and made contact while he was exercising
bare-chested. And what a magnificent body it was, in every department. A
smile to die for, delicate hands of an artist, oddly so
for someone who had been working in a blacksmith’s shop when he was first
discovered. Preecha Narkwichit. Him I do know
how to find every time I go to Bangkok. There are too many stories to tell.
But after all, a sad boy, who has become a sadder man,
even with my friendship to rely upon. Change is to be dreaded above all.
Look at America.

Next chapter will retreat from this territory to the more demanding one of
the occupation to which I devoted my energies. I’d never
call it a business and even less, a profession.
That is, if you want to hear any more.
To you it may all sound slightly drivelish.

Jim
Entry of Letter from James Freeman –
August 17, 2007