Joseph Tirella: Behind the Trees
Photo: Joanna C. Valente
Newport, Mid-November, 2014
“Not a single leaf that ever falls from a tree is ever out of place.”
—Gary Snyder
The mansions here all have hard names: The Breakers and Rough Point, that’s where Doris Duke killed, accidentally of course, Eduardo J. Tirella, an interior designer—no relation, thank you very much—some have soft, names like The Elms—right across from where we stayed—all curated palaces, shrouded in another era, locked on their gilded estates like caged beasts so we—the common folk—could peek at them, oohing and aahing—How magnificent! How elegant!—at the pleasure-domes built with the knotty hands and raw knuckles of workers who had to pee behind the trees while no one looked, and spoke with accents of foreign geographies; who carved and chiseled the styles of the Continent into the walls, the floors, the ceilings of the mansions where the soft-handed souls lived—ya got soft hands from counting money all ya life!—there amid the ivory china, in the pantry of museum pieces and crystal sconces embedded in the walls of painted platinum—yes, platinum, I kid you not—while the others lived on the outskirts of a city where the money is older and harder than the trees’ knobbed roots, wide as elephant toes, that sprout from the fascist, orderly lawns, littered by the mid-November leaves in all their imperfect, chaotic, democratic glory.
Joseph Tirella the author of The New York Times Best Seller, Tomorrow-Land: The 1964-65 World's Fair and the Transformation of America (Lyon's Press; 2014). A graduate of CCNY's MFA program, his nonfiction has been published in Slate, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Vibe, among other places. His poetry and fiction been published in Yes Poetry, Barzakh, Newtown Literary and Promethean.
