Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir (8 page)

Goldsberry thought I had talent and handpicked me and another dude named Arthur Mulford to be his protégés. For the next two and a half years, Artie and I alternated playing leads in every play done at GW. It became a given; we were like the Hope and Crosby of George Washington High School. Because of this strange but meaningful anointing, Artie Mulford became my first best friend from outside the circle of kids growing up. Artie was an OG (outstanding gangster), a tough Irish kid from the Heights with a no-bullshit demeanor and rugged good looks. As a leading man, he was a natural. And as a best bud, he had everything it took to gain my ultimate respect and trust. Plus, he was drop-dead funny, not to mention the fact that he was the other straight kid invited into this exotic world of Goldsberry’s to absorb, for the first time in our respective lives, a glimpse into the real inner workings of the New York Theater. On more than one occasion Ken invited us to his very elegant brownstone in Chelsea, where he lived with his partner who worked at Brooks-Van Horn, the most prestigious costume house to all Broadway Theater. He was a very legit guy and also piss elegant—I mean fuckin’ piss elegant—but both were theater people to the core. They would have us to their house and give us Heights bums a real look at the finer things in life. We were taught what forks and spoons to use in a formal dining setting. We were used to a spoon that you just rinsed off in the sink; now we were seeing an army of silverware on either side of the plate. I remember first thinking,
Why the fuck would anyone need so many utensils for one meal?
But we
learned how to use them in order. Goldsberry and his partner served this food we couldn’t pronounce, but it was incredible. Not bad at all for a couple of Oscar Mayer frank aficionados. All of a sudden I’m eating Paella Valenciana and getting a glimpse of this whole subculture theatrical New York universe. I might as well have been on another planet!

Another buddy of mine, named Spencer Schwartz, and I even went off on our own to try a stand-up comic routine, mimicking the comic deities we worshipped. We called ourselves “Stewart and Perry” because we thought Schwartz and Perlman were a little too ethnic for the times. Back then gays kept to themselves and a lot of Jews and Italians changed their names. We rehearsed by getting up at a school dance, for example, and doing a ten- to fifteen-minute routine. Most of our material was stolen from everybody, from Henny Youngman to George Carlin. Stewart was the straight man à la Dean Martin; I was the clown, like Jerry. We tried that for a while and actually started getting some gigs in local discotheques. Some of the joints were a bit dubious, though. One night we were performing in a club off Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. It was a pretty rough part of town, with a lot of gangbangers and a lot of unequivocal types. Somebody in the audience heckled us after I made a comment that was taken as disrespectful. The entire back row got up en masse and started for the stage. Stewart and I saw this and freaked, knowing these guys would have us for fucking dinner and hang our huevos out to dry. We quickly exited, literally stage left, and found a backdoor. We hightailed it north for a few blocks and got a taxi. That was the last stand-up we ever did.

But I didn’t give up comedy. Believe me, there is no small amount of energy expended into developing one’s identity as a clown, as somebody who basically did anything for a laugh. My dad used to say, “You’d break your fuckin’ leg to get a laugh.” He was serious. He couldn’t believe it, the lengths I would go. But the comedy thing could have its drawbacks. I remember there was this one sweet, adorable, beautiful girl. She had a smile that lit up the whole goddamn world. I had a major, major crush on her. But I was a mess when it came to knowing
what to say to her and how to go about it. My best pickup line was, “Are you gonna eat that?”

So one time we were sitting in the cafeteria, and this beauty is at our table. It’s Monday, and I’ve just kind of set the high school on its ass with this play I was in. The performance I gave particularly was all the buzz. There was all this “Perlman’s cool” around school. I felt like I was in the zone. So I figure now was the time to make the move.

I said to her, “How would you like to go out on a date?”

Immediately she starts busting into a wild laughter. “You almost had me,” she said.

It only took me a second to read the tea leaves: she thought I was doing my clown routine. I turned to my pal sitting to my left and said, “That’s it, man. I’m fuckin’ moving to Detroit. No one knows me there. I’m changing my name, and I’m starting over, because this whole clown thing—I ain’t ever getting laid.”

My family went to that opening night of my first play and a few other times over the years. My dad and mom were very receptive, and they were really tickled that I was actually decent. They were both very encouraging from that moment forward. But my brother wasn’t so down with the whole theatrical thing I was doing. He was this young jazz musician, too cool for school. I asked him if he liked my performance.

“Yeah, it wasn’t so bad. But I personally wouldn’t be caught dead doing that shit. In costumes, the makeup, and shit like that. But go ahead, man . . . do your thing! Whatever.”

While all this good stuff was going on for me in high school our home was becoming like a volcano starting to shoot out plumes. Until it abruptly blew. That year my brother turned eighteen and finally got his cabaret card, which meant he was a professional musician, allowed to play at better-paying venues where alcohol was served. He was in huge demand in the city because he had so much talent, but getting that card was the beginning and end of everything for him.

My brother hit a brick wall during the summer before my senior year. He was working in the Catskills at one of the better hotels up
there. He’d come down to the city or go really anywhere a band hired him to play at a club or a big gig. That’s how musicians made a living, and many still do. Then I see there’s this sudden major drama going down in the background at my house. No one wanted to tell me exactly what happened, but I knew it had to be something bad. I finally found out my brother had what was being called a “behavioral incident.” It was serious enough to have him picked up immediately from the Concord Hotel and brought home to figure out what the fuck was wrong with him. My father went up there to pick him up and brings him home.

Once back at our place—I remember like a scene out of a movie—my brother is standing in the kitchen, looking really weird and rambling. He’s just saying whatever, free associating, making no sense. My mother is in the far corner with her hands to her mouth in disbelief. My dad’s trying to reason with him. He grabs my brother by the shoulders and makes my brother look at his face. But my brother has a kind of angry, hostile tone to his rambling. He pulls away from my father’s hold and nearly squares off, with his clinched fists at his side. My brother’s tone escalates to confrontational. This was freaking my father out because he thought Les was being disrespectful. My father raised his hand to slap his face, but he held it there aloft. Dad then turned, deeply exhaled, and sat down in a kitchen chair, his hands laid out flat on the table, though I could see them slightly trembling. My father stared out the window as my brother rambled on. Although we had no idea what was wrong, as it was not easy to diagnose back then, what actually happened was that my brother started to have what are now known as manic depressive episodes. This was the very first one.

No one could understand how he got it. There was no mental illness in the family line, as my father would say. He couldn’t understand what was wrong or how to fix my brother. Years later my brother told me he had taken some acid while up in the Catskills. One of the other musicians and Les dropped some home-brewed LSD, and both had nightmarish trips that lasted for twelve or more hours. Once you’re tripping, you can’t untrip at will. So if you’re having a bad trip, you are
fucked. I’m not certain this is the thing that truly kicked off my brother’s manic depression. He had been a candidate for it, with or without the acid trip, but whatever happened on that acid trip triggered some sort of a chemical imbalance in him that he never recovered from.

The next day my mother convinced my father to have my brother hospitalized. I don’t know whether they even had a term for manic depression in the late sixties, but they anesthetized him with Thorazine, which is a horse tranquilizer. They prescribed huge amounts of the drug to calm him into a state until he was zombietized. After two days of being in the hospital he looked like Jack Nicholson at the end of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
. He had no fuckin’ life in his eyes. It was a very sad thing to watch.

They then put him on lithium as well and told my folks he needed therapy. He was released after about two months of lockdown. When he came home he was tranquil, to say the least, because he was so sedated. Yet he lost his edge, his creativity, the thing that made him the genius musician he was. To this day I think of Les as a pure talent and myself as the charlatan. I really think I got by on a very thin set of skills, whereas with Les, he was really touched by some major muses. The heartbreaking part was that he had these demons that overwhelmed his phenomenal talents, such that we never got a chance to see the genius shine through. That’s the real tragedy.

It’s a double-edged sword, this artistic genius, as is the disease he had. He knew he needed the meds, but he eventually refused to take them. He said he couldn’t play drums when he was on the drugs. Like most who suffer from the disease, my brother just said, “Fuck this.” He felt so good in the upside of manic depression that he simply believed other people just didn’t understand. All that free associating to the manic is empowering, and they feel phenomenally brilliant. When my dad or anybody said, “You’re outta control. You need to take the damn medication,” my brother would laugh and say, “What are you talking about? This is the best I’ve felt in my whole fuckin’ life.” That’s the trouble with the manic side of manic depression—you feel fuckin’ fantastic!

The family was rocked considerably. My brother had numerous outbreaks, with at least another eight serious enough to require further hospitalization. All of it took a horrible, horrible toll on my dad. First of all, my dad kept saying there was no such thing as mental illness in our ancestry, so it couldn’t have been that. There was always this kind of tension between him and my brother. Maybe because my brother was the first and a trailblazer; they’d been butting heads since Les was a kid. There’s often a dynamic like that between the first-born son and a father. The tension grew until one of the ugliest things I witnessed between my father and brother happened. My brother was rambling about some semicoherent nonsense that also had phases in it in which he put my dad down and mocked him. My father lost it and starting swinging at Les. He yelled with each punch, “You can’t fuckin’ talk to me like that!”

My brother just looked at him like, “Fuck you.” He didn’t seem to even feel it. It was ugly. I didn’t get in the middle of it, but I remember thinking Dad was wrong. Les needed hugs, fucking real help. But neither my dad nor I knew how to reach the old Les. Where was the person who was his son? Where did my big brother I knew go? My father believed he could find the solution to anything by putting hard work and effort into it. But this?

My mother tried her best, but she didn’t have the resources. None of them had the resources. None of them understood anything. My mom was worried for my dad then because clearly she’d never seen him like this. We had never seen him get into a situation in which he didn’t know what to do. He was a very capable guy. He’d been in the Army; he’d seen it all. He served during wartime. He came up on the streets of New York. This was a guy who always prided himself on knowing what to do. And then he gets into a situation in which he’s completely fucking helpless. And everything he’s trying backfires on him. He didn’t know how to deal with Les. It killed him that he didn’t know how to save his own blood, his son. The stress of it could have had something to do with what eventually caused his fatal heart attack two years later. I’ll never know.

I suddenly realized how the stress at home that last year had made me immerse myself into theater and the drama department even more. It was such a relief to become absorbed into a character, making believe I was someone else, someone with a different life. Yet there was no discernible cause and effect that I brought to school or performances. My love of theater didn’t need anything to enhance it or any external torment and suffering to expand it, but obviously I welcomed having theater to get a reprieve from the discontent and sadness that filled our apartment.

As I mentioned, the emotional stuff in life surely can be used in a performance to help give a character an authenticity. As for me, there’s no magical Zen thing; there’s no switch you can flick on. The transformative process of becoming the character is a result of the performance. Even if I am escaping reality, I try to tap into emotions that have to do with the human condition, those things we all go through, the sufferings and the joys. That’s what the theater is. That’s what movies are. That’s what all of the arts are, that, if done right, are reflections of the human condition. Even painting: the great painters are capturing truth. Was it Jean-Luc Godard who said, “Cinema is truth twenty-four frames a second”? That’s what it is, and it’s hard to know it when you see it in real life because the continuum of time doesn’t allow for that. You’re too busy living. But when you’re creating art, you’re basing the whole exercise on some exploration of facets of the human condition. And in getting the performance to the point at which it’s sublime, you’re coming closer to perfection than you could ever come in real life.

I became addicted to creating, trying to figure out how to present that human condition either in a play or in a movie. You get a script, and when you decide you’re going to do it and you have a role to play, then you need to figure out the execution of it. It’s a riddle. You have to absorb the character’s traits and motivations into your own psyche and make sense of them and personalize them. Then you come back with your own version of a seamless telling of that. That’s the performance. So it is a very technical thing because it begins when you read
something and acquire an intellectual understanding of it. Then, little by little, you hope it seeps its way down through your fucking dick, your balls, your calves, and your toes, and then you can physicalize it.