The O.W.L. Passes: A Tribute to Venezuelan Playwright Isaac Chocrón

Watching People Leave...

The big down side to being a lifelong military brat was always having to leave people or watch them leave – often suddenly (“Dad’s got transferred to…”), and never seeing them again.  Nothing you could do about it.  Some you kept, most you lost. 

Then came the Internet, decades later.  Some you could find again.  Some still remain lost.

As a young adult, I found myself still relocating every couple of years.  My father sent a letter commenting on that and reminding me that I had spent the first year of my life on the road (Route 66 mainly) bundled up in the back seat of a Studebaker, feeling the vibrations of the road.  He was somewhere on the planet where Air Force duty called, and Mother drove back and forth from California to Oklahoma and Louisiana, trying to decide where to live whilst he was gone, herself and a baby girl. 

So he thought this might be a relevant reminder to myself.  It was.  I decided then and there it was time to find a place to settle, to CHOOSE it (not have it chosen for me), and STAY there.  See what it was like to form roots and stay, no matter the result.  Watch people evolve around me, watch myself grow.  I chose New Mexico and stayed there 25 years before coming to Scotland.

However, despite forming roots and the Internet, some people still seem to get lost along the way and it doesn’t have to do with lack of care as much as…time, space, and some sense that “well, that person is still there, need to send a letter, an email, put it on the to do list…”

The other night I saw that someone from Venezuela had visited my blog and it reminded me it had been “several months” since I’d heard from or emailed Isaac, in Caracas.  I had sent a few emails here and there with no response and wasn’t sure anymore if I had the most current email address.  Anyway, I was in Scotland now and Venezuela seemed oh so very, very far away…though in his last email he had intimated he might someday visit me in Scotland…

I then wondered might he be on Facebook by now?  We were friends before all this Internet and social networking thing…had he, also, climbed into the porthole, gone through the threshold into cyberspace and was he therefore now more accessible to me?  I typed his name at FB and, lo!  There he was!  I rushed to his page and grinned at his photo – and then realised it was a tribute page with links to his Obit and various articles about his life and work…all in Spanish…and that he had died in November 2011.  So…it had been more than “a few months” since we last emailed. 

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Isaac-Chocr%C3%B3n/280823478628082?fref=ts

Being His Gal Friday

Isaac was very important in my life…a generous loving bright light at a time I needed that.  I was working on my Theatre Arts degree at University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.  One day the chairman called me in and asked if I would like to be “Gal Friday” to a visiting important playwright from Venezuela, who would be with us for a few months teaching as the PNM Endowed Chair.  My assignment was to show up at the airport, gather him up, give him a tour of Albuquerque to help him look for an apartment, and then deposit him at the Hilton.  And be generally on call to help him and chauffer him around as needed.  I was game and agreed to pick up Isaac Chocrón at the airport a few days later.

That was all that the chairman told me.  No description of  Isaac, no photos, just be at the gate he named and “you’ll find him”.  This was pre-Google days, I couldn’t do the usual advance research. 

But there are other kinds of research available to us sometimes.  The night before Isaac’s arrival, I had a dream in which I was in a car with the chairman and a stranger who was Isaac.  He wore a long trench coat and had dark hair.  He turned to the chairman (I was in the back seat) and said, “Michelle is the O.W.L.  One Who Loves.”  I heard his voice, distinctively.

Odd dream, I thought, on my way to the airport the next day.  And there he was, at the gate…the man in my dream, wearing the trench coat.  He took one look at me and said, “Let us drive somewhere to talk.”  We just knew each other.

It was a rare day of snow in Albuquerque, I recall it was quite cold and we had to wait for the windows to defrost in the car with the heater on.  I took him to eat New Mexican food and then we drove around and ended up sitting near the Rio Grande in the car talking for hours, letting the heater blow.  We spoke about life, death, love, passion, writing, the arts.   He told me he had come to Albuquerque, had accepted the honorary professor position in order to escape from Caracas for a while because he was in grief.  (And that he could see I was also in a period of grief, of another kind.)  His young lover had recently died, and it was too painful to be there in the house they had shared.  He would find an apartment here and then his housekeeper Sara would follow, who cooked and looked after him.  We talked as if we had known each other our whole lives or in some other life…it was an instant and loving connection.  It had nothing to do with romance or sex or anything like that…just two old souls, who recognized each other, and were both in a time of needing some healing companionship (I had just gone through one of my infamous relationship breakups).

I finally took him to the Hilton (which he pronounced “the Heeeeeelton”) quite late that night.  The restaurant was closed but Isaac had a way of commanding attention and being treated like royalty.   He just expected it, and if he didn’t get it, he had the greatest “Who are these heathens?” look he would level, which would cause anyone to skedaddle and do his bidding whilst they wondered, "Who is that guy?".  Obviously in Venezuela he was used to being recognised and given due respect.  Probably also in parts of New York City.  But this was Albuquerque and…the waiters didn’t yet know who he was.  He somehow managed to get the kitchen to open and he ordered two deep bowls of black beans and a loaf of bread.  He showed me how to stir olive oil and honey into the beans (to keep from gas).  We ate in the dim lights of the closed restaurant, and then I left him, drove home in absolute amazement.  I could see it was going to be an interesting semester.

Sara came and was so loving.  I recall that in the apartment she always kept a tall Guadalupe Virgin votive candle burning on the tile floor of the bathroom, a pink one that smelled like roses.  We taught each other English and Spanish – mostly she watched American soaps on TV to learn her English (and when I visited Isaac and Sara the following year in Caracas, I did the same, watching their soaps). 

Show your love...

My memories of Isaac are pivotal moments, life-altering moments.  A former lover was in an auto accident and near death with a collapsed lung.  I had just found out and was upset, as I was en route to some event with Isaac.  I recall we were on our way to the campus from my car as I told him this story.  He stopped us in the middle of the sidewalk and commanded me to immediately go get back in my car and go visit my friend in the hospital.  I was hesitant, not sure what his new wife would think, not sure it was appropriate, not sure enough healing time had passed…and Isaac ranted to me about Americans being in their heads too much and it was obvious I cared for this man and I needed to go see him immediately because he had almost DIED for god’s sake!  He was outraged at my hesitancy. 

So I did what he said, I about-faced, left him on the sidewalk, got in my car and drove to the hospital.  It turned out just fine and by going there the healing was finalised between me, my former lover and his wife.  And we are still friends down through the years.  It was a very important lesson from Isaac.  Say your piece, show your love, “shower the people you love with love” as sings James Taylor.  

(Isaac, I do try.  I do still remember what you said and in the most difficult moments with people, I do still try to just love and say what I really feel, sometimes even if they don’t think they want to hear it.)

The night before Isaac flew back to Caracas, he booked us each our own rooms at the Heeeelton, as we were both flying out early in the morning; I was going to Louisiana to visit my family.  We had our ritual black bean stew again in the restaurant.  By now the staff was quite familiar with him; he often came there for meals and meetings, as he had some kind of love affair with the Heelton.  He was flying out much earlier than me so we said our tearful goodbyes in the lobby before going off to our rooms.           

A few months later I had a call from Isaac.  He had written a play, “Escrito y sellado” (“Written and Sealed”) which took place in New Mexico – a play about death, grief, God, friends and the desert - and I was a character in it.  He insisted I must come to Caracas for the opening.  He told me to get my passport and he bought my ticket and off I went.  One of my life’s grandest adventures.  His friends were all in the arts and my week there was powerful.  They all said, when I arrived, “You are home now”.  And it did feel that way, a warm familiarity about a place on the planet I had never imagined myself visiting.  I met such loving, passionate people, wide open.  Sara fed me and took care of me like a daughter.  Each morning she brought us strong Venezuelan coffee and oranges and croissant on the honeysuckle vine-laced balcony of Isaac’s apartment, overlooking the city.  Armed guards were at every corner, even in the arts centre…yet a freedom of expression prevailed.  When they asked why I couldn’t stay a few more weeks and I explained I had to get back to my job, they were puzzled.  For most of them, their jobs were their art.  Dancers, writers, visual artists…through the government, they made their living doing their art. 

Forget About Yourself

When my first book was published (Hunger in the First Person Singular), Isaac wrote a preface for it.  He said, in it, “…these stories immerse us in a very private world, that of a woman unsatisfied with the relations she establishes and, even worse, with her behavior in them. . . .exposing the dramatic and touching complexities of today’s liberated woman.”

So I saw myself and my stories through the eyes of someone from another culture…and someone who was obviously satisfied with the relations he had established.  And I am sure his behaviour in them was essentially loving and gracious and generous.  As he was to me.

Regarding my subsequent novel, Journey From the Keep of Bones, he wrote: 

 “Having had the fortune of living for a while in New Mexico, where nature overwhelms and, most strangely, compels one to ascertain the presence of one's soul, I was flabbergasted by Michelle Miller Allen's uncanny new novel. She manages to blend the farthest past, probably not real, with the anguished present, too real as to be desperate. No wonder that the desert where the characters' imaginations erupt like volcanos, is called Ojo de Sombras, 'Eye of Shadows.' Miller Allen possesses that eye and keeps the reader enthralled by the vastness that human nature can attain.”

From the last interview with Isaac, by Milagros Socorro:

“I ask him about failure. He put the thought aside without fuzz. “I believe I never failed. I couldn’t because I love to write. And take my vodka”.

-What would you say to young people- I asked him knowing it was a stupid question, but it is a last question. I know I will not see him again.

-I would say- he answers without hesitation-: forget about yourself and write two hours.”

http://milagrossocorro.com/2013/03/isaac-the-last-interview/

What Isaac said, “forget about yourself and write two hours”…such a simple legacy but so profound.  Because truly that is what writing is all about.  Forgetting about yourself.  And WRITING.

I’m not sure my dream was exactly correct.  It was not myself who was the Owl.  It was Isaac.

Wherever he is…I do hope he is being treated like the royalty he is.  And as he would wish to be treated.

For more information about this brilliant writer and human being:

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Isaac+Chocron%3A+Tap+Dancing+Until+the+End.-a061026260