Hold Tight Gently (8 page)

—Cinqué developed a loyal following. Wayson was quoted in the
Washington Post
saying “there is a big tradition of jazz poetry, which we are a part of but not limited to. We’re trying to overlap between some already established traditions [to develop something] that, if not brand new, is creative and fresh.” Wyatt O’Brian Evans, a friend of Essex’s, attended one performance on a sweltering night in 1985 and found it “absolutely mesmerizing.” The writer Jim Marks, of the gay bookstore Lambda Rising, was so enthralled with Cinque that he attended not once, but three times. Wayson recalls that the stillness of their audiences during a performance was so profound that “the cliché ‘you could hear a pin drop’ was literally true.”

—Wayson briefly left Cinqué for about a year to work in a band and was replaced by Chi Hughes, both a poet and a performer. In 1984 Essex, too, left to form a duo with Wayson, billing themselves simply as “Essex Hemphill and Wayson Jones.” They performed at D.C.’s Blues Alley and at the ENIKAlley coffeehouse. Larry and Chi carry on Cinqué together.

—The Coffeehouse became the most prominent nurturing ground
and outlet for gay black artists in D.C., and Ray Melrose its chief figure. Located between I and K Streets in Northeast Washington in an old two-story carriage house owned by Ray’s partner, in what some Washingtonians viewed as an “unsafe” part of town—meaning that to reach the Coffeehouse you had to come off the street and walk down an alley. Ray was (according to Wayson) “irreverent and in your face . . . charismatic, extremely intelligent, arrogant, creative, connective.” He would bring people together, was (as the photographer Sharon Farmer describes him), “a great unifier, a hero who tied all the threads together.” Ray was also one of the founders of the D.C. Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays, and an activist in other regards as well. A few years later he would share a house with Wayson for a time. Later still, in 1994, he would be one of many from the black D.C. artistic community who would die of AIDS. But in the early 1980s, according to Wayson, AIDS wasn’t “a real issue. . . . It was around then, but we didn’t know about it.” When the
Washington Blade
ran a brief story in July 1981 that a few cases of some rare “gay cancer” had occurred in New York City and California, the news hardly registered. Such weird, isolated incidents—like Legionnaires’ disease or toxic shock syndrome—were always surfacing, and would, it was assumed, just as suddenly disappear.

The Coffeehouse had a fireplace, a welcoming atmosphere, and an open loft with a rail around it that overlooked the main floor. Chris Prince remembers it as a “very special” place, “vibrant artistically,” a cutting-edge outpost for mostly (but not entirely) African American gay and lesbian artists. They chipped in a few dollars each to keep logs in the fire (the place was unheated) and to pay for minimal snacks. The Coffeehouse when crowded held at most thirty or forty people. Performances were predominantly by local African American artists, but not solely—the black lesbian vocal duo Casselberry and DuPree and the New York poetry collective Other Countries were among the many well-known figures who performed there early on. Later, in 1985, the Coffeehouse would play host for three days of performances to the Blackheart collective, which included Joe Beam, Craig G. Harris, Donald Woods, and Assotto Saint—by then all well-known figures in the black gay artistic world. For Essex, the Coffeehouse proved an artistic awakening ground. He met a large number of other black
artists there and watched them “work out the butterflies.” He and Wayson not only performed there together, but Essex did some of his first solo readings.

—Michelle Parkerson, who’d been friendly with Essex since 1980, became part of a circle of friends that also included Sharon Farmer (the well-known community photographer) and her lover Joyce Wellman, the painter. Michelle joined Alexis de Veaux in a joint reading sponsored by
Nethula
at the Market Five Gallery, which the African American journalist Dorothy Gilliam praised in the
Washington Post
as another important marker of the growth of a creative community among black gays and lesbians in D.C. Another marker came in 1983 when Michelle and Essex received a collaborative performance grant from the Washington Project for the Arts (WPA) to co-produce
Murder on Glass
, an experimental dramatization of their poetry, for which Wayson mixed sound and provided music. The WPA was a nonprofit visual and performing arts space in operation since 1975 that had become the premier venue in D.C. for postmodern work; it was particularly devoted to showcasing new artists who lived in the D.C. area.
Murder on Glass
was staged in 1983 at the WPA’s Monday Night Performance Series in its black box theater, which accommodated two hundred people.

Murder on Glass
was conceived by Essex and Michelle in the context of a crack epidemic, accompanied by drug wars, that by the early 1980s had become rampant, especially in their own Southeast neighborhood in D.C. Serial murders occurred along the freeway, chopped-up bodies of young men and women showing up randomly in garbage bags on the strip of Interstate 295, the borderline between Southeast and the rest of Washington. The duo described
Murder on Glass
as “contemporary urban poetry” visually underscored through a “stark and minimalist” backdrop. On entering the performance space, the audience was confronted by DayGlo body outlines and black plastic bags that moved and rustled on the stage floor, eighties club music with an avant-garde edge sounding in the background. Suddenly the lights came on, a target-practice figure unscrolled onstage, and the live torsos of young men crept from the garbage bags as Essex, standing in the foreground, started to read from his powerful ode “Homocide (for Ronald Gibson),” a young transvestite hustler whose
chopped-up body had been one of those found in a trash bag on Interstate 295:

                        
Grief is not apparel.

                        
Not like a dress, a wig

                        
Or my sister’s high-heeled shoes . . .

                        
While I wait,

                        
I’m the only man who loves me.

                        
They call me “Star”

                        
because I listen

                        
to their dreams and wishes.

                        
But grief is darker.

                        
it is a wig

                        
that does not rest gently

                        
on my head.

Essex, Wayson, and Michelle continued to work collaboratively, but one theater piece, due to be performed in Brooklyn, produced conflict between the two men. Apparently at some point Essex insisted (“adamantly,” according to Wayson) that Wayson quit his day job, move in with him to save money, and that the two devote themselves full-time to becoming artists. The idea was “way too much” for Wayson; he “couldn’t imagine not having a regular paycheck—I had absolutely no talent for frugality,” he humorously admits. With hindsight, he acknowledges that he was also afraid of being “totally subsumed” in Essex’s vision. Wayson felt that Essex was “the most ambitious person I’ve ever known, and had a backbone of steel.” His response to Wayson’s hesitation was to tell him that he “needed to grow a spine.” If he had, Wayson later wryly commented, that would have produced still more conflict in their relationship.

Though the two men continued to care deeply for each other, the rift led Essex to announce that he wouldn’t do the planned performance in Brooklyn—wouldn’t even call the theater to tell them so. Wayson placed the call instead, canceling the gig. But it made him feel humiliated and put out. It reminded him of the time he got busted when, at Essex’s request, he tried to score some pot for him in Meridian Hill (now Malcolm X) Park; Essex had never even offered sympathy to Wayson for the scrape he’d gotten him in—which led Wayson
to tell Essex that he was “very full of himself” and “an arrogant bastard.” Cancellation of the Brooklyn gig led to “a major falling-out” between the two men that lasted for about a year: “We kind of had a little alienation thing going on there for a while,” is how Wayson later put it—“in fact, we had bookings for the two of us that we couldn’t stand to be around each other enough to fulfill. One of which, I think, was at the Kitchen in New York. So he did those with other people. . . . We were sort of walking on eggshells with each other at that point.”

But the two men did finally have what Essex called “a very positive airing out, a refueling of our focus.” Essex ended up feeling certain that Wayson “is truly a ‘brother’ to me and I only hope to be as much for him.” Reflecting today on their temporary estrangement, Wayson is honorably frank in acknowledging that it hadn’t helped their relationship that as Essex’s reputation as a poet continued to grow over time, “the instrumental music aspect of our collaboration became less significant.” It helped even less when Essex at one point suggested that Wayson tone down the volume of the music so that the poems could be more clearly heard.

The assertive, feisty side of Essex’s personality dated as far back as childhood. On one occasion, after being badly teased by some neighborhood kids, he went to the second floor of the Hemphill house, pulled down his pants, and through the window mooned the boys below, shouting that they could kiss his ass. He got a whipping but felt it was worth it. Essex was especially likely to flare up in anger when he perceived an assault on his dignity or on the integrity of his work. Meticulous and exacting about all aspects of how and where he presented his poetry, he did (as one acquaintance puts it) “butt heads” if details for a presentation were overlooked or sloppily organized.

Far more dangerously—for his own safety—Essex would fiercely react to any suggestion of racism on the part of authority figures. In D.C.’s Union Station, he was once stopped by a police officer while traveling to fulfill a public engagement—stopped simply because he was dressed in jeans, a down jacket, and a Raiders baseball cap—in other words, as Essex put it, “in the standard attire of what we will call the ‘butch queen’ look, the home-boy look, the look of the ghetto.” He boldly, adamantly refused to cooperate with the officer or to allow himself to be searched for drugs or weapons. He told the officer to search the white women and men in the station first, and loudly accused him
of harassment. When a white man in a suit handed Essex his business card, suggesting he would testify for him in court, the officer nervously relented and let Essex go. It was a narrow, and highly atypical, escape for a black gay man. “You don’t mess with Essex,” became a byword.

Despite his deserved reputation for feistiness, Essex, as Wayson has put it, “had a very warm, gentle, and nurturing side.” As an example, he offers Essex’s treatment of his younger brother, Warren (called “Dimp”—for his dimples). Though they’d had considerable conflict with each other while growing up, Essex did all he could to encourage Dimp’s ambition to become a singer, and asked Wayson to work with him. Wayson tried but found Dimp’s ambition greater than his talent—and somehow found a diplomatic way of conveying that to both brothers. Wayson was touched at Essex’s effort to help his brother. To him it was emblematic of his friend’s “boyish, sweet side,” the side he felt “that many people probably never saw.”

Their relationship restored, the two men continued to work together for several more years, often joined by Michelle. Probably the most impressive of their collaborative efforts would come in 1987, when Gerry Givnish, head of the prestigious Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia, invited the three to present a collage of performed poems and stories, which they called
Voicescapes
. Together they created their own lighting and stage design, with (in Wayson’s words) a minimalist “postapocalyptic feel” (days were spent painting huge chunks of Styrofoam orange, leading Michelle to swear off the color forever). The piece opened with a slide montage of people telling their own stories in 30-second slide/poems put together by Sharon Farmer, Leigh Mosley, and Ron Simmons. Other poems with different themes followed, many of them performed “in a ripple-style syncopation or in unison as a recitation . . . with music providing an effective poetic transition.”
Voicescapes
drew considerable praise, the reviewer in
High Performance
describing the evening as “highly engrossing . . . dramatic performances par excellence and a rhythmic choreography of movement, sight and sound.” In 1989
Voicescapes
would be successfully repeated, once again at the Painted Bride.

During this same period, and sparked by poet and playwright Garth Tate, six black male poets formed the group Station to Station. It became a wonderful incubator for Essex and others to try out different
styles for reading poetry aloud. Among other efforts, Essex utilized Wayson’s music to add live synthesized sound to some of the poems he performed in public. Yet after a time, a certain amount of friction developed and Essex dropped out of Station to Station. Chris Prince, another member and one of Essex’s friends, ascribes the friction to Essex’s demand that the group recite more gay-themed poetry. Several members weren’t gay and several others weren’t “out.” Chris ascribes Essex’s insistence to his “thick-headed, fierce” side; he could, like his mother, Mantalene, become stubbornly uncompromising when convinced, rightly or wrongly, that some important principle was at stake. As Ron Simmons, another close friend of his, has put it, “sometimes Essex was difficult to get along with.”

Absorbed though they were in honing their artistic abilities, Essex and his friends did manage to spare time and energy for political work. The D.C. Coalition of Black Gays and Lesbians had transformed itself into the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays, and according to Renee McCoy, herself active in the Coalition, Essex “provided significant support and guidance when we were building” the group. Though he wasn’t temperamentally well suited to the give-and-take of organizational work, he and Michelle as early as 1983 did show up for an ad hoc meeting to plan for a black arts component to D.C.’s annual gay pride celebration. On that occasion, a variety of artists and writers each performed a kind of “audition,” and Jim Marks (who thinks he “may have been covering the meeting for the
Blade
”), remembers listening “to the first few poets thinking that their work consisted primarily of hackneyed ‘he done me wrong’ self-involved efforts.” Then it was Essex’s turn. He began by reading a brief obituary from the
Washington Blade
for a murdered street transvestite/prostitute, and then performed the dramatic monologue he’d written in her voice. Recalling the event, Jim says, “it still raises the hair on my neck.” Michelle read as well, and Jim felt that the two “were clearly head and shoulders above the other poets there.” Unfortunately, there was no follow-up meeting—and apparently no arts component to the gay pride march.