The Private Poet—Ted Hechtman

Young Ted Hechtam at Shimer.  Portrait of the artist as a young dude.

There is a tremendous amount of poetry written in America, the vast majority of which is never published in print or on line.  It is scrawled in notebooks and journals, jotted down on odd scraps of paper and shoved in shoe boxes and drawers, penned in lavender ink in greeting cards, or sitting in computer files that are never shared at all.  Think of millions of Emily Dickinsons out there, albeit the vast majority of them not nearly so talented.  It is called self-expression and is or sometimes, depending on the confessional content of the verse, therapeutic poetry.  It is communication between the writer and or herself.  It lacks the urgent need to make contact with an audience that drives published poets and performance artists.  The vast majority of it is objectively dreadful to mediocre.  But that doesn’t mater at all.  It is the satisfaction and fulfilment of the writers’ creative urges and energies that is critical.

Ted Hechtman is not the stereotypical secret poet.  He readily shares his creations with friends on Facebook and in his Brooklyn community.  I am sure he would not slam the door in the face of anyone who came knocking with an offer to publish his work.  He readily agreed to my request to share here.  He just has not pursued wider publication and circulation of his work.  And he is also a far finer wordsmith than many private poets.

My connection to Hechtman is through tiny Shimer College then in rustic Mt. Carroll, Illinois.  We were both there in 1967.  It was his last year and my first at the quirky Great Books school.   Despite there being only a little over 300 students on campus we did not really know each other.  He was living off campus and was one of the relatively few students with wheels and I was stuck in dorm floor with other freshman.  He was a guitar player and singer, so I undoubtedly caught him performing in a lounge or in the off-campus coffee house The Shire which I later became a proprietor of.  But the memory is hazy.

We connected through Shimer Facebook groups and became FB friends.  I have come to admire his keen intelligence, sometimes fearless introspection, and willingness to share those deep vulnerabilities most of us men are trained to hide.

Hechtman was born into a middle class Jewish family on May 30, 1948 part of the early crest of the baby boom in the Forest Hills neighborhood in Queens, NYC.  After graduating from Lawrence High School in Cedarhurst, New York on the South Shore of Long Island in Nassau County, he elected to go too far away Shimer, a school with a reputation as a haven for brainy misfits.  Musically inclined, rebellious, and with a taste for motorcycles and fast cars, Ted fit right in.

Ted and Melissa in high '70's splendor.

He met another student, lively, elfin Melissa de Laguna.  She was the love of his life.  I met a girl at Shimer, too, who I thought was IT, and pined away for her years after in unrequited love.  Ted and Melissa’s love was very much requited.  After they left Shimer they settled in the Philadelphia area where both continued their educations and Ted became a successful retail clothing manager and she a photographer.  They married young and were has happy as couple could be.

On August 4, 1973 Melissa was at the wheel of a car heading to a summer family vacation in Maine.  Ted was asleep. Also in the car were Melissa’s niece and two pet dogs.  The car slammed into an overturned vehicle from an earlier accident.  Melissa was killed instantly.  Ted was seriously injured and woke up in a hospital room to the news that his 25 year old wife was dead.  The news was naturally devastating, his grief profound and unending.  He has written “not a day goes by without me thinking of her.”  Sometimes he is still nearly overcome.  Every year around her birthday and the anniversary of the crash, the haunting memories come back and Ted often shares his memories and pain in posts and poetry.

Connie Crispell

Hechtman eventually remarried a union that produced a son, Oren.  But while Hechtman was living in New York City when he became involved with another woman, Connie Crispe a Virginia belle with a preppy look who worked at Brooks Brothers by day and liked to party.  Eventually that party life style led to her supplementing her income as a high end hooker.  Hechtman asked “Do you want me to save you?” and she said, “I don’t need saving.  Hechtman returned to Philadelphia and tried to salvage his marriage.  In 1984 he received a terrible phone call with the news that Crispe had been murdered by her pimp and become The Girl in a Trunk of sensational tabloid headlines.  It was yet another devastating loss.

 His marriage did crumble and Hechtman returned to New York, left the retail world and began a career at Queens College and is now Assistant Archivist at Brooklyn College.  For some yeas he has been in a happy relationship with

Beth Evans.  He lives in Brooklyn with her and their dogs and cats and a large collection of guitars.  He is active in the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Brooklyn where he recently performed newly written songs at a church talent show.  The old heart aches never completely go away, but Ted has found peace and genuine happiness.

Happy at last with Beth Evans.

Different Deaths

There are different deaths

Deaths of speed

And

Deaths that are slow

Deaths you prepare for

And

Deaths that surprise

Unexpected

And unseen

Deaths that arrive on the express

And those that arrive on the local

And those delayed because of traffic ahead.

There are different deaths

Deaths of our loves

And

Deaths of those others

Deaths of devastation

And

Deaths that stain

Deeply

And forever

Deaths that arrive on the express

And those that arrive on the local

And those delayed because of traffic ahead

There are different deaths

Deaths of distance

And

Deaths of proximity

Deaths you can touch

And

Deaths that are vapor

And whispers

Unheard

And unseen

Deaths that arrive on the express

And those that arrive on the local

And those delayed because of traffic ahead.

—Ted Hechtman

May 15, 2014

Hechtman is a gifted writer and a natural poet.  A caption he posted to a photo of Connie Crispe is, whether intended or not a moving and glaringly honest prose poem.

Connie had honey colored hair. Not just a single variety. There were strands that were blossom and a few that were tupelo and everything that wasn’t either of those two varieties was rich clover. She had a long nose that started straight between her large eyes and seemed to spread out above her top lip, which was a straight line. She smiled from her bottom lip. When she did smile, she had a few too many teeth and strong vertical crescent creases that would frame her face. Her ears were a bit too large and protruding for her face. The lobes were always punctuated with tasteful earrings. Connie was tasteful even when she was cursing you out which she did, to me at least, rarely but proficiently. I would describe her laugh to you but I don’t know how. It was an extension of her voice and her voice was molded by her accent, which may have been the sweetest modulation of English I have ever heard. Her voice would change the color of your clothes and lead you out to some porch someplace where the breezes were warm and the drinks were too sweet but just fine actually. I won’t give up on the laugh though. Here…her laugh was loving, welcoming, infectious and had a taste somewhere between pralines and sex. She stood about this tall. Just here, right below where my hair meets my forehead. I’m 5 foot six. She was not thin. Not at all. Her legs were fine and in proportion but her calves were a little too wide and her thighs not long enough. She dressed like Barbara Bel Geddes. She dressed as if every place she went expected the well bred and pedigreed to show up eventually. She dressed as if she was attending Smith College in 1958. She dressed as if every place she went was restricted in membership.

Connie was not beautiful. She was not beautiful in the way that Sophia Loren or Uma Thurman isn’t beautiful.  In the way that Amanda Plummer isn’t beautiful. But if you went to a party with Aphrodite, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor “the younger”, Kate Moss, Nicole Kidman and twenty or thirty other A-1 certified grain fed consensus approved beauties and Connie was there you would not only spend the night trying to get her attention but you would probably send her a dozen roses the next morning. Only, instead, she sent them to me with a small card in a small envelope that read, “Tag you’re it!” And of course I was. It didn’t work. It couldn’t work. There was a marriage and there were two religions and two cultures and New York Jews sometimes just don’t get it.
A few years later, when I had moved myself and my son and my wife to Philadelphia where the marriage fell apart anyway, I got a call. My broker/square jawed/blue-eyed friends who had found in me their Judd Hirsch. He was the Jewish therapist to the Ordinary People in the film. They had drawn straws to see who would call me and the fellow who got the short straw started the sentence by telling me just that. He had drawn the short straw. Of course I knew why they called. Of course I knew. I had thought it would come one day and it did. She was dead and she died because of the life she lived. That's enough of that. One last thing. I called her Holly Go Darkly. One last thing. I asked a friend who knew us both a question. I asked it only a few years ago. Twenty years after. I asked him, “…how she felt about me.” He answered, “Hechtman…I thought you knew.” Well, shit, sure I did. Eight million stories in the Naked City baby. Eight million stories.

—Ted Hechtman

September 12, 1998