Minnesota Boy: A Memoir

Minnesota Boy

A Memoir

Mark Abramson

Published by Minnesota Boy Press at Smashwords.com

Copyright 2017 by Mark Abramson. 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by Minnesota Boy Press

MinnesotaBoyPress@gmailcom

www.markabramson.net

Published June 1, 2017

Cover based on Map of Minnesota by the Langwith Map Co. of Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1941.

This book is dedicated to my mother—Beulah May Gudmundson Abramson May 8, 1919 – April 27, 2015, a lifelong Minnesotan, who always told me to write what I know.

I would also like to thank old friends who prodded me, jarred my memory, and encouraged me to tell these stories —Carl Beck, Glen Straight, John Donahue, John Hustad, and especially Toby Johnson, who so creatively ushered me through all the steps to this final product.

Mark Abramson

—June 1, 2017

Prologue

M ark, I just had the best idea and I might not be here on Sunday, so I wanted to call you now, just in case.

Why? Where are you going to be on Sunday?

I might be dead by then.

My mother’s name was Beulah May. She called me on the phone in San Francisco every Sunday morning when she and my sister Ann got home from church, but this was a Wednesday evening. Well, gosh, I hope not. What’s going on? Did you have another stroke?

No, but you never know when I might. But this isn’t about me. It’s about you!

Okay…sorry, so what’s your big idea, Mom?

I think you should write a book about that trip you took to Europe when you were right out of high school, playing your saxophone with that band, you know? I’ll bet there aren’t too many writers out there who’ve had that same experience.

Yeah, Mom, that might be interesting. I don’t know if there’s a whole book in it, but it might make a good start to one.

I got to thinking that for me, that trip to Europe wasn’t just about music and sightseeing. Before I left the Minnesota farm where I grew up, I didn’t have an inkling about politics, for one thing. During that concert tour I started to understand more about some words I’d heard bandied about, like patriotism and brainwashing.

You know, Mom, that’s a really good idea! I had quite an awakening on that trip, come to think of it.

You did?

Yeah, I wasn’t much aware of what was going on in the world outside of high school and the farm and my music. That trip forced me to grow up in a lot of ways. That’s a terrific idea you had. I’m so glad you called. I wasn’t sure it was a great idea, but I wanted to make her happy. Besides, you don’t argue with your mother when she’s dying.

Okay, well, I just wanted to encourage you to keep on writing. We’ll talk some more on Sunday if I’m still here.

Thanks, Mom. I love you, Mom.

You’d better…I’m the only mom you’ve got! Goodnight. 

I had published eight books by then, with two more on the way. Could I remember everything that happened on that trip so many years ago? Maybe not, but I could write down what came to me and fill in the gaps from my imagination. What I learned on that musical tour of Europe had more to do with developing my view of the world than I could have imagined.

Chapter One

Igot up early on my eighteenth birthday, excited to be on my way to Europe with the Band of America, but first I had to drive into town to register for the draft. There was a war going on in Vietnam and that was the law; every eighteen-year-old boy had to sign up on his birthday. Slayton, Minnesota was the small farm town where I’d gone to school from kindergarten through my senior year. I wasn’t worried about getting shipped off to Vietnam. I was heading off to college in the fall. I knew I’d have a student deferment for as long as I kept my grades up and I had always been a great student. I liked school…except for all this assimilation into the heterosexual world stuff.

I must have heard that I could check a box somewhere about homosexual tendencies, but maybe not. I was a good boy. I went to church every Sunday with my parents and I played the saxophone so well that it was taking me all over Europe. I was blissfully unaware of most things outside of my personal realm of experience at the age of eighteen.

We got to the cities in plenty of time for supper. Minnesotans call the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul simply the cities. It was about a four hour drive with my dad behind the wheel, slowing down to point out the height of the corn crops, hail damage to the soybeans, and the water level of every stream we crossed. If I had been driving, we could have made it in three hours, tops.

We spent the night at the home of my dad’s sister, my Aunt Helen, and Uncle Carl Olson. My eighteenth birthday and my last night in America, I slept on an air mattress on the basement floor of a duplex on Chicago Avenue in South Minneapolis. I didn’t care. Early the next morning I was on my way to Europe. Boeing’s brand new 747s had just started flying from MSP to JFK that week and this was the first commercial flight I ever took in my life.

I had never been so excited. New York City had always meant the city in my imagination. The biggest city I’d ever seen before was Minneapolis, which is beautiful, but more like a string of green parks and blue lakes with old mansions plopped all around them. A real city, in my mind, would have jazz and gangsters and cocktail lounges and the air would be scented with cigarette smoke and exhaust fumes and Chanel # 5 perfume. I’d stayed up late to watch Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show enough times to know that New York City was real. Europe was still a fantasy.

At JFK I picked up my saxophone and suitcase at the baggage claim and found a map at a kiosk. Now I had to find my way to the Commodore Hotel* to check in with the rest of the group and meet some of the people I would be touring with for the next month. A middle-aged woman dressed in black must have noticed that I was lost. She spoke very little English, but she asked if I needed help. I knew just enough high school Spanish to communicate that I needed to get to Grand Central Station. She told me to follow her and do what she did, take a shuttle to a bus to the train. She had just returned from visiting her daughter and new grandson in Argentina. The rattling subway train was too loud to talk over, so once we got settled in for the long ride, she sat back and concentrated on her rosary.

* The Commodore Hotel was opened in 1919. A few years after my first trip to New York City, Donald Trump rebuilt the hotel, spending $100 million to gut the first few floors and put a reflective glass façade over the existing masonry exterior. It was renamed the Grand Hyatt New York, but the Trump/Hyatt partnership later collapsed with Trump filing suit against Hyatt Owner Jay Pritzker.

I found the Commodore Hotel and got registered. They gave me a name badge and told me to be back no later than 9 p.m. It was late afternoon, so I had a few hours to kill. I found a long bank of pay phone booths along one wall of the hotel lobby. I remember their beautifully crafted wooden doors with a round black plastic seat inside. I fished inside my pocket for a dime and called my parents collect. They were already home on the farm and glad to know that everything was going fine so far.

I walked to Times Square. People were everywhere, walking, running, moving, yellow cabs, horns honking, sirens shrieking, shadows looming between the tallest buildings I’d ever seen, women wearing more make-up than I’d ever seen, men and women with strange accents, New Yorkers and foreigners yelling in languages I’d never heard. I went inside the Howard Johnson’s and sat at the counter for a hamburger and a hot fudge sundae. Another turn around another corner and the summer sun was setting somewhere beyond skyscrapers, more lights coming on, flashing, splashing neon colors. Music blared from car windows and boxes on the shoulders of sexy black men, dressed to the nines. I still got back to the hotel with plenty of time to spare.

We all piled into buses to head back to JFK, at least a hundred of us with all the band and chorus members, conductors and chaperons and other grown-ups whose purpose I can’t remember. Our chartered flight’s departure was delayed until about 1 a.m. It felt so small compared to the empty 747 I’d been on earlier that day. This was the second commercial flight of my life and it was claustrophobic. I imagined a giant football player tossing a big tin can full of teenagers in one long pass across the Atlantic Ocean in the middle of the night, through the darkness.

I tried to sleep, nodded off a couple of times, was awakened when the captain announced that we were flying over icebergs. I looked out the window at moonlit clumps of white ice floating in the black ocean. The Titanic was still deep down there somewhere. I shivered and pulled up the thin airline blanket around my neck.

We landed at the Brussels airport in daylight. I remember climbing down a steep metal staircase onto a grassy field. Someone ushered us into a high-ceilinged building like an airplane hangar. They processed our passports and gave us our bus assignments. It was a jolt of reality to see that signs weren’t in English. Emergency Exit was easy to figure out, but some of the others had me stumped.

At our hotel we got our room keys and I finally met my roommate for the next month, a trombone player from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I’ve forgotten his name, but I remember his first words to me. "My dick is so big when I sit down on the terlet I have to hold onto it to keep it up out of the water. I imagine those Yerpeen terlets are gonna be even worse if they’re made for shorter people."

I must have heard southern accents on television, but I’d never met an actual southerner before. As a budding young homosexual, I might have been intrigued by his boast about his dick size, but he wasn’t sexy at all. If I even knew what sexy looked like, this wasn’t it. He was blond, for one thing. Coming from a land where blonds are a dime a dozen, I was attracted to people with darker features, Latinos or Italians or maybe red-heads. He was greasy too. Was it Brylcreem in his hair? He smelled of cheap bar soap and cloying aftershave.

Were we even old enough to shave? Yes, I remember that my sister Ann bought me a special electric razor for my high school graduation. It had a switch so that I could use it in with either 120 or 240 voltage. High school graduation had only been a few weeks ago. Now I was farther away from home than I had ever been before. I was thrilled!

The next three days, instead of seeing the sights, we spent eight hours a day rehearsing. It wasn’t that we needed to learn the music—they’d mailed us the sheet music several weeks earlier—but we had to learn to stage the show, figure out the order of who enters when and at which point the chorus comes out to join the band, the order of the songs and who got the solos. The finale was John Philip Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever with six piccolo players lined up across the front of the stage when the time came for their big obbligato. The audiences went wild for that bit every time.

The music was traditional high school band material, Aaron Copland, a Vincent Yeoman’s medley, all-around Americana. But we weren’t chosen just to make music. We were there to represent the best and the brightest of American youth. I began to understand that the Band of America was a combination of Up With America and every boy and girl scout troupe, 4-H club and Junior Kiwanis times ten. We were TAR (teenage Republicans) and Teens for Christ combined. This wasn’t exactly what I had signed on for, but I would make the best of it. I didn’t much care, as long as I got to see whatever the world outside a small Midwestern farm town had to show me.

After three days of rehearsals there, we didn’t have a concert in Brussels. That would come later, in the center of the Grand Place, about the third week of the tour. Our debut performance was in Luxembourg, a one-night gig and then off to sleep in a hotel even older than the one in Belgium. The room I shared with the horse-hung Carolina boy was at the top of a flight of stairs that ended in a blank wall with no landing. From the top step, we had to reach up to the door, fit the ancient key into the keyhole and step back down the stairs to let the door open outward. It was a good thing we were sober.

That was another thing, the rules. No drugs, alcohol, tobacco, chewing gum, profanity, and the list went on. We might as well have been in Catholic school with a bunch of sadistic nuns watching over us, not that I’d ever experienced such a thing, but I’d heard stories. We were not to leave our hotel rooms out of uniform, which meant black shoes, socks and slacks, a crisp white shirt and a blue blazer with the tour logo appliquéd on the pocket. Boys wore neckties and girls could leave the top button open on their white blouses to reveal a small cross on a chain, but crosses weren’t mandatory.

From Luxembourg we crossed into France for concerts in cities and towns around the country, but we never went to Paris. I don’t know why. We performed in beautiful and famous old concert halls, though. I wrote down their names in a small diary, my first ever go at journal keeping. I lost that little book years ago, but I remember what was in it. I wrote down each city we were in, what we ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and where we played concerts that day. I even numbered the concerts from one to twenty nine in my little diary. I just wanted to keep track of things. I wasn’t in a hurry to finish this experience. I wasn’t homesick in the least, like some of my fellow musicians were. I was a well-organized and industrious budding homosexual, after all. I was adventuresome and I hadn’t even smoked pot yet. There would be plenty of time for that when I got to college in the fall.

Still, it didn’t take long before the insides of concert halls all began to look the same, even though the hotels varied greatly. The audiences grew to look and sound alike too, even though they spoke different languages. Cheers and clapping sounds are pretty much the same no matter where you are. I learned to sleep on the bus, especially at night, riding back from a concert. In the daytime, I made sure to get a window seat because I didn’t want to miss anything. I was so excited to be in my first foreign countries—not counting Canada—that I was desperate to take it all in: the Alps, the fields and vineyards of France, the ancient cities with foreboding cathedral towers, even the smells, the sounds, and all the food, of course. I treated this experience as if I might never go to Europe again and all these years later, I still haven’t gone back. I’m glad I made it count as best I could as a farm-boy of eighteen. I was dazzled by everything, snapping dozens of pictures, even from the dirty windows of a moving bus.

Most of our concerts were in the evenings with a few matinees, sometimes two shows in the same venue on the same day. I don’t know where those audiences came from. Did they pay to get in or were the concerts free? They must have been well advertised because they were always packed with cheerful throngs of music lovers of all ages. I especially remember one afternoon in an enormous glass building beside the North Sea in England, another saxophone player and I got stopped on a staircase and asked for our autographs. They were teenage girls, not much younger than we were, but giggly and shy. They were so worked up you’d have thought they spotted Elvis.

Most mornings we were on our own and most of my band-mates slept in. That was my time to go sight-seeing. I even set my alarm clock, another gift for my high school graduation a few weeks ago. It was square and covered in green plastic that looked like leather. It folded out in thirds like a wallet and I had to wind up both the clock and the alarm.

I took myself to see the Albrecht Dürer house in Nuremberg, Germany and learned that it was built in the sixteenth century. My Aunt Helen and Uncle Herman, who had given me the green alarm clock, had a copy of the famous Dürer praying hands hanging on the wall in their dining room. I had to see that house and take pictures of it. My parents told me that our farm house in Minnesota, the house I grew up in, was already over a hundred years old when I was born. The Dürer house didn’t look nearly that old, so I was mildly disappointed.

On the bus, I always tried to get a window seat, preferably in the front row, opposite the driver. That gave me the least obstructed view of the scenery outside. It also meant that I usually sat beside Mrs. Jackson. She was the chaperon assigned to our bus and she liked to find a seat down in front because she often needed to make announcements over the microphone that was installed next to the driver. We have an early call tomorrow morning, so be sure to set your alarm clocks. Breakfast will be served in our hotel starting at 6:30. Buses will be ready for boarding at 7:45. Don’t be late. We have a matinee concert in Lucerne this afternoon.

Mrs. Jackson took a liking to me, maybe because I was respectful and infallibly polite. I’m not sure why, but for whatever reason she liked to tell me about herself. She hardly ever asked about me. She was lonely, I think, and wanted to share her story with an attentive listener. Mrs. Jackson’s daughter had been on this same tour several years ago. She played the flute, was first chair in All-State every year. She was second runner-up to Miss Ohio when she was twenty and now she was out of college and married, but there were no grandchildren yet. Mrs. Jackson never mentioned a Mr. Jackson, only the daughter who had made her so proud. Maybe she was widowed or maybe her husband had left her. I got the feeling that she was far too Catholic to have gotten a divorce.

Mrs. Jackson was plump and determined. She reminded me a bit of some of my Swedish aunts, but much more stern, totally humorless, in fact. I can’t say that I liked her, but I was used to middle-aged women like her, whether they were teachers or shopkeepers or waitresses. She wouldn’t have looked out of place in an apron. Even at a formal event, you would think she was one of the help. But here on the bus she held some authority that I instinctively knew not to cross.

I adapted to her monologues mostly by tuning her out. I suppose I nodded and made enough appropriate sounds for her to think I was paying attention, when I wasn’t the least bit interested in her exemplary daughter or her arthritis or her church work or her latest bunion surgery.

Our first day in Milan we didn’t have a concert until the evening, so I struck out on my own to sightsee in my silly uniform with a street map in one hand and my camera in the other. I was determined to find LaScala, the famous opera house. It was closed, of course. It was barely noon. I snapped pictures of the front of it and stood outside, trying to sense the history of the place, maybe hoping to hear the ghost of Caruso.

I heard nothing and there were too many other things to see, so I started walking again. I loved walking down big city sidewalks where everyone was speaking a language I couldn’t understand. When I was in junior high, a family in Slayton hosted a foreign exchange student from Italy. I longed so much for something outside my small-town life that I tried to make friends with her, as if she could fulfill my need for something exotic. She was a senior, though. She was there to immerse herself in our culture and to learn better English, not to humor me. Besides that, I was already gay; I just didn’t know it yet. If the Italian exchange student had been a boy, I might have developed a crush on him, but been too intimidated to approach him. Girls were safer. Girls made easier friends.

Now here I was in Italy. If I wanted Italians, Milan was full of the real thing. I took pictures of cathedrals and sidewalk cafes. I stared into store windows and tried to guess what was written on the signs I couldn’t read. I snapped photographs of unsuspecting strangers climbing in and out of taxi cabs.

That night, after our first concert in Milan, I had to listen closely to our chaperon, Mrs. Jackson, because I couldn’t believe what she said to me. When we came out of our evening performance we were met by a mob of Italian protesters with a bullhorn, banners, and signs that said, Yankees, go home! and U.S. Out of Vietnam!

The polizia came along soon enough to disburse the young crowd, who appeared to be college-aged students, so that we could get onto our buses. Then they escorted the buses back to our hotel with lights flashing and sirens wailing. I was thrilled by the whole spectacle of the event, especially the noise. Mrs. Jackson was even more excited than I was. She practically screamed in my ear, How DARE they? Those filthy, dirty hippies!

Some of the young men had long flowing hair, but it looked clean to me. I thought they were beautiful. Mrs. Jackson said she hoped the authorities would take them all to jail and give them the harshest punishment their laws allowed. I had never seen her so worked up. I already knew she was from Ohio and she soon managed to segue her disgust with the filthy, dirty Italian