Ada Calhoun - Also a Poet

Also by Ada Calhoun

Why We Cant Sleep

Wedding Toasts Ill Never Give

St. Marks Is Dead

Frank OHara, My Father, and Me Poet

ADA CALHOUN

Grove Press

New York

Copyright 2022 by Ada Calhoun

Jacket design by Becca Fox Design

Photo of Frank OHara Renate Ponsold

Used with the permission of Renate Ponsold

Photo of the author and her father James Hamilton

Used with the permission of James Hamilton.

In Memory of W. B. Yeats, copyright 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden; from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and divisions of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Copyright 1940 by W. H. Auden, renewed. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

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FIRST EDITION

Published simultaneously in Canada

First Grove Atlantic edition: June 2022

This book is set in 12-point Dante MT

by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH.

ISBN 978-0-8021-5978-6

eISBN 978-0-8021-5979-3

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

My childhood home was a top-floor walk-up apartment in Lower Manhattan. By the time I was born, most of the bohemians belonging to my parents downtown scene had decamped to suburbs or college townsor at least to elevator buildings on the Upper West Side. Even I left New York for a few years. But my parents remained in their East Village apartment, decade after decade.

In the fall of 2018, I popped by to look for a toy to give my baby goddaughter. In the warren of their buildings basement, my parents stored papers, books, and bubble-wrapped appliancesnot antique so much as just old and unused. That afternoon, I went through the small, tiled lobby, past a padlocked door, and down narrow metal stairs into the dank space, ten degrees cooler than the hall. I hit my head and cursed myself for doing it. On the rare occasions Ive gone into the basement since I reached five foot nine in high school, Ive reminded myself not to stand up straight, and every single time Ive forgotten and smacked my head on a ceiling pipe.

In a heavy filing cabinet almost as tall as I am, I found what Id come formy old miniature plastic foods for playing kitchen, in storage since Id graduated to a Spirograph and Sit n Spin thirty-five years earlier.

Then I noticed something in another of the heavy drawers that, in my haste to spend no more time in the basement than necessary, I hadnt seen before: dozens of loose, dust-covered cassette tapes labeled with the dates 1977 or 1976, the year I was born, along with names like Willem de Kooning and Edward Gorey. Id never met any of these people, but I knew their names. They were painters and poetspeople it would make sense for my fatherPeter Schjeldahl, an art criticto have known.

Before I was born, hed been a hotshot poet, giving readings at crowded galleries, lofts, and churches in Manhattan. His inspiration both for writing and for moving to New York City was his idol: the poet Frank OHara.

OHara wasnt as famous a cultural figure of the midcentury as the Beatles or Andy Warhol, but to people who cared about art and literature he and his cohort of cosmopolitan New York City poets and painters were the ones you would push past more famous people to get to. They ushered in a lusty new gay sensibilityurbane, witty, obsessed with all forms of culture from Russian ballet to the trashiest Hollywood movies. OHara was the groups beating heart.

In his early twenties, my father met OHara, sixteen years his senior, a few times at parties. With his crooked nose and wide smile, high forehead and light blue eyes, OHara looked soft and hard at the same time: part boxer, part librarian. He was short, but thanks to his perfect posture and a tendency to walk on the balls of his feet, he seemed taller. The last time my father saw him, OHara inscribed a catalog to him at a Museum of Modern Art opening: for Peter with palship from Frank.

A month later, on July 25, 1966, OHara died at the age of forty in a freak vehicular accident on Fire Island, a gay-friendly vacation town off the South Shore of Long Island known for being car-free. A beach taxi he and his friends were taking from a dance bar to the house they were staying in broke down. While they were waiting for another taxi in the darkness, OHara was hit by a dune buggy driven by a young man on a date. In my fathers obituary for the Village Voice, he wrote: is easy to demonstrate and exceedingly difficult to understand. And the aura of the legendary, never far from him while he lived, now seems about to engulf the memory of all he was and did.

The less affectionate New York Times obituary, which appeared with no byline, is riddled with an impressive number of errors, given its brevity. Among other things, it said OHara was hit by a taxi, not a dune buggy, and it gave his address as that of Grace Churchs churchyardnot a likely residence for a lapsed Catholic. Worse, it minimized OHaras literary importance, suggesting he was little more than a museum functionary and a muse who posed for a scandalous painting by the abstract expressionist painter and troublemaker Larry Rivers. The headline identified him as a museum curator; the subheadline: DIESALSO A POET.

My father, long-haired and glassy-eyed, wearing spats and a dandyish vest with pockets for his pocket watch and pillbox of amphetamines, spent the rest of the sixties and early seventies staying out late, he said, so he had time to make the maximum number of mistakes.

At an art opening at the Whitney Museum in 1973, he met my mother, Donnie Brooke Alderson. Shed recently retired from musical touring shows like Youre a Good Man, Charlie Brown. (No one who knew her would be surprised to hear shed played Lucy.) Shed spent a good part of the sixties working as a hostess on a cruise ship. On one voyage, she had a mystical experience while staring out at the ocean, a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other.

working with her accompanist, Gary Simmons, shed begun doing stand-up comedy in lesbian bars. A Texas girl, she never went to a party without full makeup and high heels, and she still carried herself like the ballet dancer she once was. As a child, shed appeared as Clara in