Friends: A Love Story (12 page)

There were many times I wanted to break up with Charles, beginning at around that year-and-a-half mark. Instead, I allowed our relationship to stretch on for something like three years. When it was good, it was really good. We'd go to plays together, the movies or his mom's house in Baltimore, and she'd make crab boil and we'd hang out. We had a lot of fun, and I have to admit it felt nice to be connected with someone people held in such high regard, and to be part of this held-in-high-regard team. But I wasn't as strong as I could have been in insisting upon my standards. I spent a lot of time wondering, Hmm…is he telling the truth? I'm not sure. Is this the truth? Is that the truth? Is it a lie? A lie mixed with some truth? Let me suss it out. I also thought I could fix him and that he needed me to take care of him. I'd think, Oh, this poor thing. He can't even wash his clothes without turning everything pink. Or, Poor thing, he can't cook. Or, Poor thing, he can't pay the bills. I'd tell myself, I guess I have to put up with this unsavory part of it. Other times I just wanted company. I was new to New York City, working in a tenuous profession. I needed someone familiar.

One of our major problems was that Roc could be insanely jealous. He couldn't stand the friendship I had with a guy named Bill, who'd been my friend since freshman year. He wanted me to end it.

“What are you seeing Bill for—are you fucking him?”

“Hey, you'd better back up,” I'd tell him. “Bill is my friend, and I ain't never letting him go. Now you? You can go. But I am not letting my friend go.”

Then he would back off and wouldn't mess with me about
Bill. But if I met a guy I wanted to have a friendship with, I'd have to call him; I didn't want him calling the apartment. Though Charles was jealous of Bill, who wasn't a threat, he failed to detect the threat of a fellow actor I did some work with in New York. Then again, maybe he wasn't much of a threat—the man was about eighty! I really liked him as a person. But one day when I was at his apartment for some reason, he said, “Angela, let's take advantage of each other.” I didn't want to hurt his feelings, but I thought
You'd
be taking advantage of
me.
I don't see what advantage
I'd
have. His hair was as white as snow. I knew there would be gray hair—oh, never mind! I thought it was funny. I got out of there as quickly as I could. He died shortly thereafter. Thankfully it wasn't in my arms.

After a while, my relationship with Charles became habit, just habit. I got used to it even though it was dysfunctional. At one point things became so bad I would tell myself, “If I just mark an X on the calendar on every day we have a fight, the whole month would be blacked out; there would be more black days than clear days.” I developed a way of working within it. We fussed, we fought, we made up and were happy. Then it started all over again. The highs were high and the lows were low. This is my boyfriend, I thought. This is how it is for now. It's not going to last forever.

In the spring of 1985 Charles got nominated as Best Featured Actor for a Tony, the annual award celebrating achievements in theater. We were all excited. I asked, “I should go get a dress, right?”

 

“I dunno, I dunno. I don't know what I'm going to do. I might take my mama.”

“Oh, you're going to take your mom. Oh, okay…” I figured I'd watch the ceremony on TV.

The night of the Tonys, one of my dear friends, Michael Knight, a director in drama school, and his mentee, James,
came and watched the show with me. When the nomination for best actor came, we were all psyched up. The camera panned to Roc wearing his white ascot and suit. I thought he'd have been smiling, but for some reason he was looking real tight, tense—it looked to me like he had a hot poker up his ass. I wondered why. Then the camera panned over some more. I saw this really pretty woman in a gold dress sitting next to him.
She
was smiling.
She
looked happy and proud.
She
seemed to be excited. But she
darn
sure wasn't his mama! Behind them, Jim Simpson, our director friend from school, was also smiling. But Roc wasn't smiling. I guess he was saying to himself, “This obviously ain't my mama, so I guess she knows now.”

I was just stunned.
“Ohmygosh!”

There it was as plain as the nose on my face. My intuition had been right.

“And the winner for Best Featured Actor is…Barry Miller for
Biloxi Blues!
”

“Yeah! Uh-huh. See!” I hollered at Charles through the TV. “God don't like ugly and he ain't too fond of cute!”

I felt terrible, I felt so embarrassed. Everyone in New York's black acting community knew we were together. And now he had humiliated me.

“I don't believe it—on
national TV!
”

Fortunately, I had my boys there to comfort me. I collected myself and called up his mama; she liked me. I was the girl who had put the money in the Bible and who had paid the rent and who was making sure the roof was over our heads and the lights were on. Now it was payback time.

“Hey…”

“Oh, my God!” she said and started crying. “Aw, my God, Angela. You're just so nice and you've always been so good.”

“Look,” I said, getting right to the point. “The rent is due and I don't know where he is. Where is he?”

“Here is her phone number.”

“Okay.”

So I waited until about 8:30 a.m. the following morning. He picked up the phone half-asleep.

“Hullo…”

“Hey!” I put on my nice “Julia” voice.

“How'd you get this number?”

“Oh, don't worry about it. I've had it for a while. Anyhow, the rent is due.”

“Okay, I'll bring you a check.”

“All right, have a great day. Bye!”

Click.

And he gave me the check, too, for about three months rent or something. He's always been generous—that's one good thing I can say. But then everyone was walking around looking at me, staring at me. And people I hardly knew were saying to me, “Oh, God, it was terrible, terrible, terrible.” That was the worst part of it.

Now, you would think that would have ended our relationship, but we still kept dealing with each other in some kind of way—him going back and forth. He ain't really gone, but he ain't really with me.

He would ask me, “You wanna break up?” probably hoping I'd say yes.

I'd say, “Y-y-y…no….” Then we'd go on a little longer, then a little bit longer than that.

I remember praying, “Lord, if it ain't meant to be, please kill it—and end it in such a way that I won't go back, 'cause I ain't strong enough. So, Lord, really end it good. Let me know.” By then I was getting regular work and starting to think I could make it on my own. I remember appearing on a couple of episodes of
Cosby,
which was a big deal at that time.

Then one day we were in the apartment having another blow-up argument, when Charles claimed an agent only agreed to meet me because I was in a relationship with him.

“Awww, shit!”

Shoomp!
In that split second the window came down, the drapes were pulled, the hatches battened, the shutters closed, the door was slammed
and
locked. I only got something because of him. Hmmph! That was complete and utter bullshit. After receiving standing ovations at age sixteen, four years of college, three years of grad school and a year of performing in New York, I was certain of my acting abilities. People have different gifts and I was fortunate enough to discover mine early on. It is a gift from God. It has nothing to do with anyone else. In other areas I might have to compromise and negotiate about many things in my life, but I never had to compromise about acting. So trying to mess with me about acting was intentionally messing with my self-esteem. It was like you don't want to whup my ass, but you do want to sabotage me emotionally to try to make me your slave.

“Oh, I see what you doin',” I said to him. “You got an ego and you tryin' to con somebody. Well, you know what? I may not know everything, I may not know a lot. But I can act my
ass
off! You can mess with me about some other stuff, but 'bout some actin' you'd better step back—you can't do it. 'Cause this is what I do and it's not something I chose to do, it's from God.
He
gave it to me, not you.”

That was absolutely the end of our relationship—it was sho' 'nuff over. I may have been weakened in some ways because I didn't have a father, but on the other side of that, I had my mother's take-no-prisoners, no-bullshit “get out!” as an example. That strengthened me, so I used it. I gathered up all his things, addressed them to him in care of the woman in the gold dress and sent the package off. Honestly, a part of me was kind of glad he had somebody because I knew he would be all right. After that I said R.I.P! “Thank you, Lord!” I lit some candles and gave myself seven days—oh, yeah, I gave myself some time. It had been three years; I had never dated anybody
that long; you gotta mourn the death of something. If I wanted to cry, blubber, fall out, feel sorry for myself, what the heck. But at the end of seven days, that was it; it was over. I'd wash my face and blow out the candles.

After that, folks tried their best to drag me back through my shit. “Oh, you must have been so embarrassed!”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was embarrassing,” and this, that and the other. But, I said, “Moving on!” I'm sorry, that was yesterday. Ain't nothin' hap'nin today. “What? Who? Huh? What's wrong with you? Please! I'm over it. What you talkin' 'bout? Girl, please, put some music on! Come on, what club we goin' to? Oooh, ain't he cute!”

By now I was in the second half of my twenties. I wasn't sure about marriage—when or how it would happen—but I did entertain the notion of having a baby. I had gotten the idea in my head that I should do that when I was twenty-nine. But when I mentioned it to Mama, she put an end to that notion by reminding me about the opportunities I had, what her life had been like and that the Bible said things should occur in “decency and in order”. Marriage came before babies. “Oh, Angela,” she told me. “I hope you'll get married first.”

 

That same spring of '85 Lloyd Richards, the former Yale drama school dean, called me. Aleta Mitchell, an alum from the year behind me, would be leaving
Ma Rainey
to get married. He offered me the opportunity to play the role of Dussie Mae. I was excited! I had actually played Dussie Mae one summer during grad school when I had worked at the Eugene O'Neill Theater in New York. But by the time the play came to the Yale Repertory Theater, I had already graduated. Now something good, exciting, that I'd always dreamed of, was finally about to happen. Of course, you-know-who was also in the play. Yet I knew this would be my pièce de résistance. The fact that I would be performing with Charles didn't even matter.

My character, Dussie Mae, was the friend of Ma Rainey played by the late great actress Theresa Merritt. Charles's character, Levee, likes her, but one of the other characters tells him to watch out.

You better get your eyes off Ma's girl.

Ma ain't got that girl. That girl got a mind of her own,
Levee answers. He flirts with Dussie Mae, and she tries to get what she can get. There are scenes in the play where Dussie puts on her stocking in front of him, leans over him, sits on his lap. I worked those scenes.

Do you want some of this lemonade?

Charles and I were on the outs, but all our scenes were
hot!
We treated each other nicely behind the scenes, but when we were onstage we were battling out our personal life on a Broadway stage. Our performance was infused with all the drama that was going on in life. This lasted for about two weeks, until the play's eight-month run ended.

About a year and a half later, Lloyd asked me to come to Yale Rep to play the character Martha Pentacost in August Wilson's third play,
Joe Turner's Come and Gone.
In the play, set in Pittsburgh in 1910, Martha had lost her husband, Herald Loomis, after Joe Turner, a notorious Tennessee plantation owner who existed in real life, had enslaved him illegally on a chain gang for preaching and trying to save some black men's souls. Martha and Herald had a child together. When their love was ripped apart by these circumstances, Martha dealt with it by leaving her daughter with a relative, migrating north to Pittsburgh and pouring herself into the church—in essence, by marrying the Lord. In the meantime, locked up, Herald turned away from God. Once he was released, he set off to find his family. But they weren't where he had left them. He searched for them, eventually finding his daughter and, finally, Martha. The play is over two hours long and you hear about Martha the whole time, but she doesn't come onstage until the last twenty
minutes, during which she goes into something like an apostolic trance. Her only scene is with Herald, who was played by—who else?—Charles.