- ​It’s been almost fifty years since I left the confinement of prison. I had no interest in ever returning.

And yet …

Yesterday, I participated as an instructor in a class inside a state prison in Wisconsin. There were twelve inmates, four instructors and three dogs. It was the second class. This was the first time that dogs were introduced to the inmates. The class is preliminary to the inmates getting dogs that they will train – inside the prison – to become guide dogs for the blind. Next week, the first dog will go to live inside a prison cell with two of the inmates, and in following weeks, more dogs will be added until the twelve inmates have six dogs living in their cells.

It took half an hour for us to get passed into the prison. The exchange of ID’s, taking off belts and shoes and passing through the metal detector, the wait for the staff escort, the opening and closing of sallyports, the walk across the yard to the mess hall where the class was to be held …
​
The inmates had the mess hall re-arranged for the class according to instructions they had previously received. All tables and chairs were pushed against the walls. There was a large circle of chairs, and in the middle, three dog crates, each with a water bowl and a food bowl outside it, and a Kurunda bed for training.
We arrived with the dogs and the class began. For the first half hour, the lead instructor spoke to the inmates about the dogs. Then the three dogs were turned over to the inmates – one inmate at a time – so they could begin to practice how to take care of and train the dogs. How do you put the dog in its vest and take the vest off? How do you put on the leader collar? How do you get the dog into the crate? Out of the crate? How do you feed the dog? How do you hold the leash? How do you walk with the dog? How do you dispense treats? What kind of treats? How do you talk to the dog? How do you take the dog to poop?

Here's the deal. This is it. Right here.

​The first inmate took the leash of the first dog. It was fucking electric. He was nervous. Unsure. Tentative. The dog was chill. I was on fire. Every moment that passed, the inmate became more confident, the dog became more responsive. The room lit up. I took a breath. Then another inmate took charge of a dog. Then another. Then another. Eventually, all of them practiced walking the dogs. I walked beside them one at a time, coaching them, encouraging them, as they took their first steps as raisers of guide dogs for the blind.

I don’t know these inmates. I don’t know anything about them other than that they are in prison and that they were chosen by prison staff for this program. I don’t know how long they have been there. I don’t know how long their remaining sentences are. I don’t know what convictions they have behind them. I don’t know if they have family outside the prison who care for them or if they are alone in the world. I don’t know about their education, their backgrounds, their work experiences. I don’t know anything about them.
I do know this. Those twelve inmates fell in love with those three dogs. And for the hour that they were working with the dogs, they weren’t in prison anymore.

I know from my own experience, fifty years removed, what that feels like. I remember being transported, when I was in prison, by certain activities. Activities which allowed me to forget, for a while, that I was in prison.

​What a gift to give to give these inmates on Thanksgiving week. What a gift for me to be able to give it. And what a gift these inmates will give, eventually, when the first dog that has been trained at this prison is given to a blind person.

Seeing Dionne Warwick on CBS Sunday Morning reminded me of this story: In 1978 or 1979, I was sitting at my desk at Park West in Chicago. It was a mid-week day. Nothing much was happening. I remember Jolene Tanty was also sitting at her desk. I looked up and a tall elegant woman was standing in the office doorway.
I stood and asked Dionne Warwick if I could help her. She said she was supposed to be meeting her agent and some television people. Jolene and I looked at each other. We didn't know anything about a meeting, or why Dionne Warwick was standing in our office. We weren't even sure how she had gotten there, since the inside lobby doors were locked. She said she found the coatroom door open, so she made her way inside through the coatroom. She found Park West dark and empty, but then found the stairway which led her to our office.

She asked to use our phone, and learned that her agent was on his way. We offered her a cup of coffee, and she took off her coat, sat down, and we chatted a bit.

Before long her agent appeared, along with the producers of a public television concert series. I turned on the lights in the club and led them to the stage, then left them to negotiate the details of the concert.
The concert itself was stunning. A full orchestra, a packed room, and Dionne Warwick. The televised production was beautiful.
​
Here's what I remember about my brief encounter with Dionne Warwick. She was elegant, composed, warm, friendly, and unflappable. Arriving at a venue that was ignorant and unprepared, she was as gracious as if the opposite were true. She was a consummate professional, and a consummate lady. She was charming.

Once upon a time there was a painter. A portraitist. For years, decades really, he had practiced his craft until he was quite good at it and had gained some measure of recognition for his talent.

One day, he encountered a woman with a particularly interesting face, and he asked if he could paint her portrait. She couldn’t afford to pay him, but that was okay with him. There was something about her face that he felt he had to paint.

And so he did. For days, weeks, months … she sat for him and he painted. After each sitting, she would look at his work and make some small comment. She would suggest a slight change to the background. She would ask about a certain wrinkle near one eye. She would question a shadow, comment on a tint, praise a minute detail.

Finally, the portrait was finished and exhibited in a show. It drew wide praise and acclaim, so much that the line stretched out the door and not everyone who wanted to see it could.

The day after the show closed and the portrait was taken down, the woman told the man that she didn’t like it and she wanted him to paint it again, this time according to her instructions. She didn’t say what she didn’t like about it, or what those instructions would be. She told him she had been afraid to tell him her true feelings about the portrait because she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Later, she told him she had been dishonest because she was afraid he’d walk away. And still later, she said she had been dishonest because she was afraid he would blow up.
​
None of that made sense to him, because he had accepted every suggestion she made during his months of painting her portrait. And he hadn’t the kind of temperament that blew up over anything.

They would paint the new portrait together, she said, a brush in each of their hands. And she, not he, would have the final word on what strokes were used in the construction of the painting, what hues, what lines, what shadows. Keep in mind that the woman had never held a paint brush and had no experience in painting.

Finally, she said, when the new portrait was completed, she would sign her name on the canvas. The new work would be presented as a self-portrait.

The painter said no.
​
He later burned the portrait he had made of the woman. He hated to burn it. He had liked it and thought it his best work. But it was never to be seen again.
​

July 22, 1968.

50 years ago, today, a man I didn’t know ordered me to take a step forward.

I didn’t.

Four months later I was sentenced to five years in prison after a 30-minute trial in Oklahoma City’s Federal Court I was twenty years old.

I knew when I stood my ground what the result would be. And yet, I didn’t move. Why?

Because I believed then, and believe now, that the war in Vietnam was wrong, that the United States should never have prosecuted it, that hundreds of thousands of young men should not have been drafted into fighting it, that 58,000 American lives shouldn’t have been wasted, that 2 million Vietnamese should not have been killed.

I gave up my student deferment voluntarily. I thought it was wrong for me to be privileged, while so many of my peers had no means to avoid the draft. I had a half-dozen ways to avoid the draft. I chose to confront it instead. I could have held on to my draft card. I could have applied for conscientious objector status. I could have faked a medical exemption. I could have told my draft board that I was gay. (I am gay. But I thought that was irrelevant and I refused to use it as an excuse.) I could have escaped to Canada, but I opted not to join more than 50,000 young American men who fled the US to escape the draft.

I chose to stay here and make my stand and speak out against the war. I chose to do what I could to stop the war.

I could have opted to refuse induction in Syracuse, less than 50 miles from where I was attending school, and where a judge had recently handed down a sentence of probation to a draft resister. But I chose to return to Oklahoma, even knowing I would likely face a five-year sentence, because in my home state practically no one was opposing the war and someone needed to.

In 1977, those 50,000 self-exiled men were pardoned by President Jimmy Carter. The two-thousand-plus of us who chose to remain in the US and were subsequently imprisoned – we were not pardoned. I have spent my entire adult life as a felon.

I have no regrets. I’ll never know if my act of resistance had any impact on shortening the war. But it doesn’t matter. I resisted an unjust war. That was - and is - a good thing.

Today, in 2018 we find our country in trouble again – quite possibly in worse trouble than in 1968. And not enough is being done about it.

Eventually the US got out of Vietnam. Eventually the draft - which targeted marginalized populations in America while exempting the privileged - was ended. Eventually the leadership of our country that dragged us into the Vietnam War became recognized as the villains they were. Johnson, Nixon, McNamara, Kissinger, Bundy, Westmoreland, Hershey.

Eventually.

May America survive its current heinous administration and its crippled legislative paralysis. May it find the means to thrive for another fifty years and beyond.
​

From Tits to the Wind – The Park West Chronicles
 
I often didn’t know what Jolene was doing at her desk, even though it was only two feet from mine. Same with David, his desk a more proper five feet away. It was clear what I was doing – reconciling last night’s receipts. Seven bank bags stared at me from my desk’s uncluttered surface, where I had plopped them after retrieving them from the basement safe hidden in the back of the liquor room. I was good at counting bills, and good at numbers in general. Fast, too.

I opened the first bag, pleased to see that Ray had, as always, properly aligned all his bills facing in the right direction, saving me time and aggravation in my counting. I knew Vince’s bag would be helter-skelter as always, but at least his bag routinely reconciled correctly. Not so with Ray’s. A cocktail napkin peeked out of Ray’s bag, and I knew what would be on it – an “IOU” from Dale saying that he’d taken $500 or $1000. IOU my ass. It was Dale’s club and when he needed cash for drugs or his monthly Bentley payment or anything else, it was his to take. My job was to hide his self-theft from the books. Everyone knew what was going on, including the bartenders and waitresses with whom he shared cocaine.

I needed coffee. Why hadn’t anybody made any? I grabbed the pot and headed to the hall bathroom to rinse it out and fill it. When I got back that’s when I noticed the coffee basket was empty. Shit. Jolene and David were studiously not paying attention. They’d already been here for hours, Jolene anyway. Why hadn’t they stocked the coffee?

I exited the office, navigated the narrow hall and entered the main room through the door to the lighting booth, then headed down the balcony stairs and cut around to the lobby. I strolled down the bathroom hallway, past the Neidermaier Display glitzy wall hangings, to the auxiliary dressing room/catering room, and said hi to Octavio, my newest busboy, whom I could hardly keep my eyes off of and who was filling a tub with ice. I unlocked the basement door, flipped on the light and descended. Then I unlocked the liquor room, nestled under the stairs, where we had to keep the coffee next to the cases of Dom Perignon ever since I discovered that we were losing cases of caffeine every month from the cabinets in the catering area.
In those days, I had a saying: leave the cash on the counter, but lock up the t-shirts. Tour t-shirts were desirable, rare and valuable, and had to be carefully guarded. Same with coffee it turned out.

Back in the office, a fresh pot finally brewing, I settled in to count the cash. David, it seems, had departed, probably for a run along the lakefront. He was in training for another Ironman. David was twenty years older than I - bald, tall, thin, sinewy, eagle-eyed. He was a gazelle on the Lincoln Park track. I counted the money and filed the payroll and Jolene paid the bills, but David was the real money man - handling the books, filing the taxes, telling Jolene when to pay what, and occasionally squeezing turnips from stones.

Someday, I thought, I might have to try this running thing myself.  Not today.

From the bulge in the bags it was clear last night had been a good night, with the bar clearing ten or twelve k, maybe more. It had been a Phil Johnson night. Phil was a black entrepreneur/ impresario, who rented the club a couple nights a month to throw his ‘private’ disco parties. He had a mailing list of several thousand VIPs, who waited anxiously to discover one of his colorful postcard invitations in their mailboxes.

Our waitresses hated Phil Johnson nights because blacks didn’t tip, but if they wanted to work on the money nights – the jazz nights, the blues nights, the rock & roll nights – they had to work the black nights too. We made one small concession to the waitresses. On the good tipping nights, the cocktail waitresses only made $5 a shift, but they were happy to get it since their tips usually surpassed $100, and sometimes hit $200, and in 1979 that was ridiculously good money. On Phil Johnson nights, we upped their pay to $15/shift.

Phil always drew a good crowd -  a thousand or so well-heeled, attractive dancers, womanizers and players, their white-walled and chromed cars lined up at the start of the party to be driven off by a fleet of valets. Phil was a gentleman, reliable and courteous, who always paid his $1500 rental fee up front and never failed to exceed the $2500 bar minimum or tip the DJ and lighting maestro. He was good to the doormen and security staff, too.  On slow months, when our booked talent failed to provide sufficient funds to meet the payroll or pay the bills, Phil’s parties filled the gap.

Ray’s bag was off again. His register receipt showed he should have stuffed the bag with seven hundred and change, plus Dale’s IOU for a thousand and his drawer bank of a hundred. He was precisely forty-three dollars short. It was time to cut him loose. I’d warned him.

“Hello,” she said.

Glenne Headley was standing in my office. Two feet in front of my desk. Looking at me.
This was before people knew who Glenne Headley was, but I knew who she was. The year before, she and some pals formed a little outfit called Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and they produced avant garde plays in the basement of a northside Chicago church. This year they had moved to a storefront on Halsted Street, where, with makeshift lighting and sets and a scant two score seats, they put on the most riveting theatre I’d ever seen.

“Hello,” I said back to her, dumbly.
“I need a job,” she said.

And my heart melted. Glenne Headley, as talented an artist as I would ever see, was standing in my office asking for a job. This was so wrong.

“Okay,” I said.

She needed money. The whole company, including her husband John Malkovich, needed money, and they all were out looking for jobs to pay the rent and keep food on the table while they toiled to get their theatre company going.

“I don’t want to do this,” she said.

“I’m sure,” I responded. “My name is Coleman.”

“Mine’s Glenne. Glenne Headley,” she said, and gave me the slightest smile with that signature tilt of her head.

“I know,” I said. “I’m your biggest fan.

She relaxed a little then. “So, can I have one?”

“Waitressing?” I asked.

“Yes. I guess. That’s where I’d make the most money, right?”

“Yes,” I said. “Let’s go downstairs, and we’ll get the paperwork taken care of and I’ll show you around.

Glenne Headley was a terrible waitress. She scowled every minute of her employ. She hated the slinky white silk waitress uniform she was forced to wear, and she hated the high heels and she hated slinging drinks.

A week after she started, she was back again, in front of my desk, this time with a glow in her eyes and a big grin on her face.

“I quit,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

“We got a grant. I don’t need the money anymore. I quit.”

“Great,” I said. “That’s really great.”

I never spoke with her again, except occasionally in my dreams.
 …

My doctor (whom I greatly respect) recently advised that as I approach the age of 70, I should give myself permission to slow down.

I'm sure that's sage advice. Still, it's advice I'm not particularly fond of. I'm not interested in slowing down. As the grim reaper comes somewhat closer into focus, that's precisely when I want to speed up. I don't want to waste a fucking minute.

​Recently, my vision has been a bit blurry. Damn. It had to be cataracts. Or something. Glaucoma, maybe. Anyway, I went to my optometrist, and he informed me that yes, my vision has changed since my last visit. My old glasses are TOO STRONG. My vision has gotten better.

​Take that, grim reaper.

1968. Oklahoma.
A Warm September Night.

It was a stupid thing to do, but … if I was going to spend the next five years or so in prison, which seemed likely, I needed one last visit to a gay bar before I got locked up.

I’d been so careful to hide my preference from men – from myself, from my friends, from my family, and most of all from my draft board and now from the judge. Hell, I wasn’t even sure I was queer. It was all new to me. Or rather, yes, I was sure, I guess. Of course I knew.

Or maybe I didn’t.  

It was a foolish risk. Someone might surely recognize me from the news, from all the damned print and TV coverage. Word might get out. The bar could be raided. If a reporter got ahold of this, everything I’d been working for would be ruined. I’d just be a faggot, which all by itself would be more than enough to lock me up without the rest of it. It was one thing to refuse induction. It was something altogether worse to be queer.

I had heard somehow, the way people hear these things, that there was a gay bar in Oklahoma City. It would have been easier to believe that there had been a real Dorothy who really was taken by a real tornado from Kansas to Oz where monkeys flew and scarecrows talked. A gay bar would never (could never) be allowed in Oklahoma. Not by the people who mattered. The very thought of such a thing was ridiculous.
Nevertheless, it was there. Smack dab in the middle of bustling May Avenue. I’d driven by it more than once. A low, squat ugly building with no sign giving any inkling what it was there for. A blight, really. On fashionable May Avenue.

I looked good, I thought. Which means I would probably get lucky. Or not. Probably not. Maybe. I wasn’t sure I wanted to get lucky. Maybe I wasn’t sure what getting lucky meant. But still, I might get lucky.
Traffic slogged along the flower-bedecked four-lane boulevard. On Friday night, May Avenue was for couples on dates. (Boys and girls, of course. What other kind of couples could there be?) May Avenue was for cruising up and down, grabbing a malted in the Big Boy down the street, or retreating to some quiet dark corner of Will Rogers Park, or continuing down the road all the way to 63rd and the new 70mm Cinerama Cinema where Yellow Submarine played to an audience that didn’t get it.

I parked where I could, a couple of blocks away, which allowed me to get a good view of the handful of people headed to the same ugly building as I. I slowed my pace and gave them plenty of room. I still had time to change my mind.

A fist.

A fist, or something hard.

A fist I think. On the back of my head. Hard enough to make me stumble and almost but not quite fall. Before I could come to terms with what was happening, I was hit again. In the back. Twice. And then again. Something punched my stomach. an anvil perhaps.

I was on the ground. They kicked my sides, my head, my legs. They stood on me. They jumped up and down. There were one, two, three, four … five, maybe?. I’m not sure. Through the fog of my pain and my fast-swelling eyes I still took notice of their tattered blue jeans and scuffed cowboy boots, their plaid shirts and ragged t-shirts and soiled straw cowboy hats. Their wide leather belts with big bronze buckles. Their singular Oklahoma twang.

They were as young as me, only twenty. Maybe older, but if so, not by much. No, I think they were younger.

As fast as it began, it stopped. They leaped and skipped and giggled back to the rusting red pickup truck at the curb, their arms around each other’s shoulders like lovers, grabbing at each other’s asses like straight men who grab each other’s asses.  They hopped up to the truck bed, hooting and hollering, clapping each other on their slim, muscular backs. They grabbed more asses; hugged more shoulders; and fell - out of breath – laughing, into the truck.

They left me on the cracked cement walk.

Bloody, broken alone.

Hurt. Defeated. Ashamed.

Stupid, embarrassed, confused.

Angry.

I melted into the sidewalk and tried to disappear.
​
Queer.

We got us a queer, they yelled. The truck vanished.
​
We got us a queer!