Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir (2 page)

(CHAPTER 1)

A Coupla Cannibals Are Eating a Clown . . .

The year 1969 was a culturally packed dividing line, or a closing of many circles that changed scores of things, not only for me but also for history. Nixon was sworn in as president, and the death toll in Vietnam reached 320,000. A man had actually walked on the moon. The Jets, quarterbacked by “Broadway Joe” Namath, had won the Super Bowl, and the underdog Mets would win their first World Series. There were student protests and the Chicago Eight, and madman Charles Manson would go on his Helter Skelter senseless killing spree. The Academy Award for Best Picture would go to
Midnight Cowboy
, John Wayne would win a long-awaited Best Actor Oscar for his performance in
True Grit
, and the young and dashing Newman-and- Redford duo would bust the box offices and hearts of American women in
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
. And on the radio that year the counterculture had gone commercial: the big hits blaring from every transistor and car tuner were the songs “The Age of Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In,” “Come Together,” “Crimson and Clover,” and “In the Year 2525.”

Theater was also at an apex—culturally well regarded and important and probably never to return to the status in which it was held then. The thing we now call Off-Off Broadway was invented in the
basements and factory lofts of the Lower East Side. And during that very week when my girlfriend and cousin tracked me down, there were over one hundred thousand people converging on Max Yeager’s farm in Woodstock.

This is how the script was written for me that day: a guy walks out of a restaurant in late summer of 1969. He’s about to get the big kind of news that happens only a few times in life, a notice of the caliber that packs a
For Whom the Bell Tolls
–type of emotional gut punch, which he surely didn’t want to hear just then, not when for the first time in his life he was actually feeling sort of good about himself.

He’s in the quaint little New England town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, nestled in the Berkshire Mountains. It’s a beautiful sunny day, the kind with blue-eyed skies and air as fresh as a fucking dinner mint. He’s laughing, joking around with his buddies, as he steps out onto the sidewalk, though he has absolutely no warning and no clue of what’s going to happen in the next few minutes. He’d just finished lunch in a cheap eatery, a hole-in-the-wall joint named Alice’s Restaurant, the same one made famous by folksinger Arlo Guthrie, the one where “you can get anything you want.” Although when he spotted these two people who were very special to him—up here in the green mountains, a three-hour drive from the city—showing up unannounced and walking toward him, he knew he was about to get something he surely didn’t want or need.

This guy—whose future would have him being a Neanderthal; a lion-faced man; a red-tailed, red-bodied, wiseass devil; a Romulan; a hunchback; a cross-dresser; a cop; a lawyer; a biker; and a hundred other personas—was just a nineteen-year-old kid then. He was six foot two with piercing blue eyes and curly blondish hair. He was thick boned, as they used to call it, though not noticeably overweight as he had been the majority of his childhood. He did, however, have a unique face, a distinctive kisser, as he’d been told a thousand times, with a pronounced jaw and high forehead. It was the kind of face that was not ugly but surely one of its kind, and he’d gotten accustomed to people sometimes taking a double look. He had learned to
counter this seemingly endless barrage of negativity with a tough-guy, good-humored bravado, which he had learned as a necessity to survive when growing up on the streets of Washington Heights, NYC.

But that day in Stockbridge he was working as an intern for a theater troupe and was thrilled, pumped up to be finally hanging around with real, working actors. He had just finished his first year in college studying drama and had had the luck of getting an internship as an assistant stage manager, or a PA, which was really a glorified coffee getter in the hierarchy of theater, but it was still an opportunity this kid was just ecstatic to have. He’d spent the previous weeks with the troupe as it rehearsed toward bringing a play, a Leonard Melfi experimental piece titled
The Jones Man
, to the stage. He had been aboard since early June as the play was rehearsed in East Village Off-Off Broadway playhouses and then went to the Provincetown Theater Festival on Cape Cod. And now he was on the second leg of this magical summer, having moved to the Berkshire Theater Festival to assist in still another out-of-town tryout of a brand-new American play, this one starring Ed Setrakian and Richard Lynch, two up-and-coming and highly regarded downtown New York actors.

It all changed and came to a halt when these two people came toward him. It took a second of focusing to recognize his girlfriend, Linda, and cousin, Kenny. He immediately got a warm smile at such a surprise, but within less than a second a sense of dread filled him with the speed of those internal light switches we have that change our emotional reactions from lights-on to lights-out like the snap of a finger. It was the simple fact these two people, who were so dear to him, just being together that didn’t compute. They had never been in each other’s company in their lives. It was this incongruity that made him know that something cataclysmic had happened. He could see this incredible sadness and dread on his girlfriend’s face. Her usual beautiful, big brown eyes were red and puffy as if she had just forced herself to stop crying.

They seemed so afraid of the news they had to give and what it might engender that he already almost knew what it was he was about
to learn. Linda looked so sad, and even though his first reaction was, “Holy shit, here’s my girl,” and a surprise that brought a big smile to his face, his stomach knotted up a moment later as her usual warmth was oddly not reciprocated—that was the giveaway. Then he looked at his cousin’s face, one that had mastered the street look of neutrality, and he too seemed uncharacteristically forlorn.

To an observer it might’ve appeared like some heartbreaking romantic turn was about to tear apart the young man. Maybe his girlfriend and cousin were here to personally reveal their affair. But in reality, on that day that type of idea never crossed his mind, nor could he imagine either to be disloyal. Instinctively he knew it was something else, a betrayal of a much grander kind.

He turned to Kenny, because his girl was in too much pain to mouth the words, to intone this news he was about to get . . .

“It’s bad, isn’t it?”

Kenny took a deep breath, and the young man waited for a response that seemed like a million years in coming until his cousin finally spoke: “Yeah. It’s your dad . . . he died.”

It was impossible, he first thought. His pop was only forty-nine years old and had seemed healthier than an ox the last time the kid saw him, only a few weeks earlier. He was the rock, the inspiration, the steadfast example of fortitude. What would happen to his family now, himself, his older brother with his special needs, and his mother, who by temperament was not built to handle even the smallest changes and challenges—and now this?

That kid was me, of course, or how I remember myself, now at age sixty-three, looking back on that day. I didn’t have my shit together at that age, not by any means, although I took the news stoically—or at least I appeared to. I knew I needed to get home, take charge. I told my girlfriend and cousin to stand by and give me a half hour to gather my things and tell the bosses in the company that I needed to leave and that I was unlikely to return to finish the summer internship. Death is a thief, the grandest perpetrator of larceny of all. It robs the potential of all the things left undone and reimburses the living with bits of
memories that, with each day, pass through the fingers like a handful of sand.

It would take more than two hours to drive back home to find out exactly how my father died, which would be the most moving and poetic way a man’s life could end. He had taught me to have big dreams and convinced me that I would one day grab the world by the balls—or at least try to with all I had by dedicating my life to acting. He had told me that I could silence the naysayers by showing them what I had. When I got this news I went into action because that’s what always worked to subdue the overwhelming bouts of self-doubt and self-loathing that plagued me.

I was sorry I had to leave, because that summer, finally, I was feeling good, like a million bucks, even if I only actually had twenty-five in my pocket and was sleeping on a mattress on the floor in a shack of a cottage the theater company provided for our class of peons, or PAs. I had been doing it—actually being in theater, mingling among people who were real performers who had dedicated their lives to the art, as I planned to do too. During that summer it had become absolutely clear that I not only
wanted
to pursue acting but also
needed
to. Before, my exposure to performing arts had been fundamental, sophomoric, but the last six weeks had been eye-opening and an epiphany.

In life it seems like events go from point A to point B, but that’s not the way it really is. These are all only segments that end up making circles, some that never get closed and some that intersect with only another circle, until one’s whole time on earth is a chain of these seminal rings. That’s how life is, or at least how it seems to me now after enough water has passed under the bridge to have given the illusion of some grand plan.

After giving notice I raced back to my cousin’s car and asked him to let me drive. They had been through enough—with the effort it must’ve taken to find out where I was and truck all the way up here—and besides, I needed to be doing something. I needed an activity to keep me from disintegrating. He handed over the keys to his big, wide Buick and sat in the backseat. My girl squeezed next to me, in the
days before seatbelts were required, and pressed her shoulder against mine and put her hand on my leg. Me, I was gripping ten-and-two on the wheel, the windows were down, the radio was off, and I beelined down toward the city. Gunning along the two-lane, tree-lined parkways with the speed of the gushing wind and the whoosh of passing cars created a welcomed sound to fill the car’s deadly silence.

Everyone in the theater company—the director, producers, the other PAs, and even the actors—had been exceptionally sympathetic and understanding, which was a surprise considering how low I was on the totem pole. Most of what I’d been assigned to do had been basically busywork and hardly of value. I especially remembered the heartfelt reaction of the principal actor, Richard Lynch. He was then and continued to be throughout my life a genuinely stand-up guy, despite the demons he battled. In the last few weeks my job had been to get Richard onstage sober each night and keep him away from the vodka. Sometimes I was successful, and other times, not so much. I went from being a protector to an enabler in about five seconds flat on occasion because Richard could charm the keys right off of the warden.

That was the first time I was drawn into the wilds of the performing arts and exposed to the internal torments so many actors dealt with in trying to get through the day’s performance. It comes to that thin line between creativity and self-destruction. I stopped at the liquor store whenever he pleaded, as he promised to have only a quick guzzle and no more. The director would scold me when I brought Richard to the stage in a cloud of booze breath: “I told you he was going to charm you into a fucking bottle.”

Richard was an incredibly handsome guy, so much so that it was hard to stop yourself from staring at him even though it might be construed as a bit gay. Richard was one of the next generation of young actors around whom there was buzz that he was about to break into the big time. On top of his amazing good looks, he had the acting chops of Brando. Yet already he also had this very toxic combination
of forces working on him. He was very ambivalent about success, and he was very pro-substance abuse.

His claim to fame was that two years before I met him he had dropped acid and lit himself on fire in Central Park. So the Richard Lynch I knew, even though you could actually still see how naturally good looking he was, had suffered third-degree burns that nearly destroyed his face. He had to be completely surgically reconstructed. I remained active friends with him after our time in Stockbridge, and over the years there was this wonderful, real simpatico between us every time we met.

When he found out my dad had died, he stepped up and made sure I knew he was sending his love and support. He was a really talented and kind-hearted man who, unfortunately, would go on to battle a lifelong drinking problem. But watching him that summer, as he transformed into the actor’s persona, was absolutely thrilling to me, and he inspired and taught me so much. Richard died at age seventy-two in 2012 after playing a wide array of heinous villains in film and television. He made his feature acting debut in 1973’s
Scarecrow
alongside Gene Hackman and Al Pacino. Like myself to a degree, Richard became very popular on the sci-fi and horror circuit later in his career.

Somewhere on the Taconic Parkway I looked in the rearview and caught my cousin’s eyes looking at me.

“My brother,” I asked, “is he around?” I was hoping, for my mother’s sake, he wasn’t having one of his episodes, as we called them long before the mental health disorder from which my brother suffered even had a name.

“Yeah,” Kenny said. “He’s at your place. He’s cool.” And then he named my uncles and aunts who were staying with Mom in the apartment. The last time I had called home, from a pay phone, my mom told me they were heading out on their annual vacation. Even though we didn’t have much money, my folks always took a two-week trip to the Catskills or the Poconos, to the resorts that Jews went to in the fifties and sixties. That year they had been gone only a week to the
Tamiment Resort in the Poconos, so I knew something must’ve happened to my dad while they were there.