Robert Roth
Five Stories That Have Never Made Their Way into the Pages of And Then
My friend Bennett Lerner, the great pianist, would drink a big bottle of Gatorade before a concert. It gave him a lot of energy. I would often tell people about this. Many years later, I spoke to him about it. He said he didn't remember doing it.
And Then, Volume 20
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1. Emmet Durant grew up in Lake City, a small town in South Carolina. His father had been in the military. Originally, I had met him in New York where he worked as a bartender at the Annex located on the Lower East Side. He was white and the clientele at the bar was largely, though far from exclusively, black.
Lake City was a small Southern town that had a segregated movie theater. There is a hole in how I remember the story. It went something like this, I think. Segregation was outlawed. But at the local movie theater, if a white person wanted to buy a ticket they could, while a black person would be told that the theater was sold out. Emmet was part of a group trying to integrate the theater.The strategy was to mill around with the crowd outside the theater and at a signal, two people, one black, one white, would step forward and go to the ticket booth and attempt to purchase a ticket.
While Emmett was waiting his turn, an old white man who knew him since childhood, who had real affection for him, who always treated him kindly, started up a conversation about outside agitators stirring up trouble. Emmett listened politely, said a few words, and then it was his turn to step forward. As he moved to the ticket booth, he glanced back and saw the old man looking bewildered, hurt and betrayed.
I tried looking Emmet up on the Internet. His name wasn’t there. I called up a Durant in the town that he once lived in. There were a number of Durants living in the area. I got an answering machine and didn’t want to leave a message. If something had happened to him, I didn’t want to have to have them tell me. I liked him so much and it was so long since we had contact.
2. The second piece involves Robin Walsh. I first saw Robin riding a motorcycle through the streets of Cambridge, Mass. As a freshman at Radcliff, she was a long jumper with world class ability. At her very first meet, an unsanctioned event, she leaped beyond the sandpit and broke her ankle. Though she recovered, she could never compete at that level again. The sandpit was where it was because meet officials never imagined that a woman could jump that far.
3. The third story involves Richard Brown, whom I had known for years and with whom I had a warm acquaintanceship. We never really spoke, but we both always lit up when we saw each other. I remember him mostly from Broadway Charlie's, a bar I would hang out in. It was a bar that Gary Francis Powers would come to. Powers had flown the U-2 spy plane that was shot down by the Soviet Union in 1960. Here he would sit on a bar stool drinking silently for hours. Don’t have any other memories of him. Just an occasional figure out of the corner of my eye. And I also remember a broad-shouldered guy, rumored to be a hit man, who would sit at another part of the bar. He was a bit more gregarious. I saw him once lose his temper, but it didn’t seem like it would escalate beyond that.
Richard was always quiet, not in a sullen or angry way. Didn’t seem like he drank all that much. I didn’t drink at all, just hung out with friends, some of whom did drink a lot. Richard had a sweetness and warmth about him. One afternoon, while I was sitting alone at a table, he asked if he could join me. It was the first time we were ever this alone with each other. He told me about having once been convicted of murder in a very public trial, months of New York Post headlines. He was sent to prison. Two detectives who were sure he was innocent spent the next two years gathering evidence that would eventually clear him.
Try looking up Robin Walsh and Richard Brown. Particularly Richard. I think he moved to California. I don’t think it is even possible to count the number of Richard Browns who live in the country. The Robin Walshes, while not even remotely a close second, are way too numerous to track down. Maybe I could find Robin with some effort. Recently I got the address of a mutual friend from long ago. But I am far from sure.
Robin was a good friend. I spent one summer in Cambridge, immersed in a world made up mostly of lesbians and gay men. One time, I spoke to Robin and told her that no one ever called me just to say hello. She called the very next day. I am still touched by the memory of that call.
She was a singer as well as an athlete. She was straight out gorgeous with a playful sparkle in her eyes. She also played basketball, had a killer jump shot, and was an excellent swimmer for her college team.
But it was as a long jumper that she excelled at a world-class level, and that would never be the same again.
4. The fourth story involves my friend Sharon. Once when we were teenagers, she told me, at an event at the local synagogue, that she and two friends of hers, two young black men, the same age as her, got stoned smoking grass while hanging out in a Jewish cemetery and started scrawling graffiti on tombstones. She thought at the time that it was an ironic hoot that three kids who were as politically and emotionally aware as they were, three people you would least expect it from, would do such a thing. I always remembered that story. In part because it was very clear that what they did wasn't motivated by hate or malice but by stupidity and lack of awareness of the impact it might have. I thought that distinction was important to keep in mind. Once while visiting Jackson Heights for the High Holy Days, I ran into her walking with her mother. I pulled her aside and asked if she would be up to writing about it for And Then. Not exactly the smartest or most sensitive thing to do after not seeing someone for decades. But it was something I always was hoping she might write and reflect back upon. So it was still very alive and active in my mind. She said it never happened. And that was that.
5. The fifth story would have been a scoop of world-shaking importance, even if only a thousand or so people would have first seen it.
Someone I knew had possibly the most grotesque job of anyone I have ever met. He had been a medical technician in China. His job was to examine death row prisoners to see who had compatible organs for someone with influence and power who needed a transplant. He would then select that person to be executed. After the execution, he and his medical team would run out to immediately extract the organs for transplant. The story he was going to write was about selecting a seventeen-year-old prisoner who had been in prison since he was thirteen for murdering someone. In China, no one could be executed till they were eighteen. But because his organs were especially needed, they moved up the execution date. The piece was about to be completed when a front-page article in the Times spoke of rumors about the harvesting and trafficking of organs from executed prisoners in China. The writer panicked and thought there could be terrible consequences for his family in China if his piece was ever published.
Robert Roth is the author of Health Proxy (Yuganata Press, 2007) and Book of Pieces (And Then Press, 2017). He is also co-creator of And Then magazine since 1987.
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