Impossible Vacation (30 page)

When I ran out of ideas for protein and got bored with fish, eggs, and meat (no milk because of lactose), I resorted to swigging from a plastic bottle of flavored animal collagen (melted intestine), which came in three flavors: orange, cherry, and grapefruit. It was sweetened with saccharine and tasted horrid, but it did the trick; it stabilized my blood sugar, though in the most unpleasurable way. I was now able to stay awake long enough to get uptown to see my new therapist, and that was important. I was even able to stay awake through the whole session.

A friend of Barney’s had told me about a good therapist who worked on what they call a sliding scale, and said he might see me for only thirty dollars a session, which, unfortunately, was not sliding enough for me. Thirty dollars a session was an enormous amount considering I had no money coming in. Anyway, I’d talked with Dad about it and was amazed when he offered to pay for half of it. So by
November of 1976 I was on my way to some sort of slow recovery—but recovery from what I was still not sure.

H
ARRY BRILLSTEIN
was a psychiatrist and not just a psychotherapist. He was able to prescribe tranquilizers for me, and he did that the first day I saw him. Harry worked in a kind of classic Freudian mode. He never spoke first. He always waited for me to speak, and if I didn’t, we would go the whole session in a tense, silent standoff, which he would usually end by saying, “Well, I’m afraid our time is up. I’ll see you next week, Brewster.” After a while Harry tried to get me to come in twice a week, which I thought was odd because I wasn’t doing all that much talking. I told him I couldn’t afford twice a week, because I was also paying for my megavitamin therapy sessions. When I told Harry that, he said something that made me really distrust him and just lump him in with the whole disgusting crowd of drug and medicine men, like the guy on the admissions desk at Bellevue. Harry said, “Why are you taking all those vitamins, Brewster? Is it because you’re afraid of growing old?”

I had the feeling that Harry was probably a good man, and was only saying those stupid manipulative things to provoke me; and I was curious to see who he really was under that damned neutral mask. One day I came into his office and saw a book on his desk. I wondered what he was reading, so I just went over and tried to take a peek at the title. Harry picked the book up, turned it over, and slammed it down on his desk. Then he just stared at me with that damned neutral stare. I didn’t say a word. I thought it was weird. I just sat down and stared back at him. I’d be damned if I was going to give in to his methods of provocation.

Now, as I said before, this psychotherapy was coupled with megavitamin therapy, and my new light protein diet, and slowly it all began to come together and make me feel better. Slowly my horizons broadened beyond “Honeymooners” reruns; and toward the end of October I had a minor breakthrough with Harry.

It all happened one day in therapy when I was telling one of many stories about my family and how my brothers and I had longed for some sort of mystical transformation in my father. It was not so much that we wanted him to convert to Christian Science and be happy with Mom but, rather, we all wanted Dad to simply cop to the fact that there were forces larger than himself at work in the world, forces outside rational thought. In short, I think we all longed to blow Dad’s mind. One night Coleman succeeded. I was in my bed and only heard it. I didn’t see it, but I heard it, and I couldn’t believe what I heard. I heard Dad in all sobriety crying out to Mom, “Katherine—Katherine, come quick! My slippers are flying! My slippers are flying!” I jumped up and ran in to witness what sounded like a great suburban miracle, but when I got to Mom and Dad’s bedroom, the miracle had turned into a typical family fight. Dad was scolding Coleman for what he called his “weird behavior,” and Mom was laughing in the bathroom doorway, laughing at Dad’s confused rage. As usual she was laughing so hard she was wetting her pants, or in this case her nightgown.

When everything had calmed down and Dad was back in bed grumbling and pouting and trying to tune his radio into some relaxing mood Muzak, Mom took me into the bathroom and told me the story of the slippers. It seems that Coleman, who was then about fifteen years old, had crawled under Dad’s bed some time before Dad came upstairs and just waited there. Every night Dad would go to his bed, usually in his blue pajamas and mahogany-colored L. L. Bean slippers. He’d arrange his slippers just so at the foot of the bed and then climb in to listen to his Muzak. But this particular night, Coleman reached out from under Dad’s bed and tossed both of his slippers straight up into the air with such strength that they hit the ceiling, and Dad cried out, “Katherine, come quick! My slippers are flying! My slippers are flying!” And for just a few split seconds, Coleman was able, to his eternal satisfaction, to witness Dad as a true believer.

Well, when I told this story to Harry, that whole neutral mask of his dissolved into laughter, and I felt good for the first time in his presence. I felt a kind of connection to my history. At last I felt Harry open up and let me in.

I
T WAS
a few sessions after he laughed that, in some simple pop-psychology way, I had an epiphany with Harry. I understood that the guilt I felt running away to the Alamo Theatre when Mom was in the throes of her nervous breakdown had inhibited and prevented me from fighting for the role of Konstantin Gavrilovich in that production of
The Sea Gull
years ago. I did not fight for what I wanted, and in a way I had been as depressed about that as I had been about Mom’s suicide ever since. I understood that I couldn’t bring Mom back from the dead, but I could perform
The Sea Gull
in my own way, and put some part of my history in order so that I could go on. I had flown the nest to become a successful actor and I had failed, and now I had to go back and succeed on my own terms. I had slipped into a postadolescent passive state of unproductive fantasy, which I’d not been able to come out of for years. I knew I had to stage my own version of
The Sea Gull
, and only when I did that would I be cured. Only now I decided to play not just the role of Konstantin Gavrilovich but all the other roles as well.

This decision was influenced by readings I’d done of Gestalt concepts about dreams in which the dreamer is an aspect of all the characters in his dream. I had had a very powerful dream at that time about Meg being pregnant, and in this dream Meg and I were both standing naked and her belly was very full, and I was standing there with my hand on her belly and I was all three of us. I was me and I was Meg and I was the child in her. I knew, too, that this dream meant I was to play all the characters in
The Sea Gull
and that Meg would direct it and we would be pregnant together with this play. I know this may sound like a big leap to you, but believe me, in my new clear megavitamin mind I was sure that I had to be directed by Meg in our experimental version of
The Sea Gull
to clear myself of the past.

So that was the next item on my agenda. I knew that I would be the actor and Meg would be the director. It was clear. Barney had
an empty space in the back of his loft that he let us work in. I began by making a tape recording of the whole play, in which I read all the roles. Then I played the recording back through speakers set up around the loft. At one end of the loft I hung some dark curtains, so it was clear that I was backstage peeking out. The only props I had were a small tree that looked quite large when it was set in the loft and a whole bunch of old china plates and flatware that Meg and I had picked up at the Salvation Army. For a costume I had black pants, work boots, a sort of Russian peasant shirt, and a large faded-yellow stuffed sea gull that Meg and I had found in a taxidermy shop on the Lower East Side. I hung that around my neck. Then what I did mainly was move around the loft space, telling Meg, who acted as my audience, my personal history with that play. I told her what I remembered of the production at the Alamo Theatre. I demonstrated how I made the naturalistic party sounds with the dishes and flatware. I took a number of Konstantin’s speeches and memorized them and then in a direct-address form spoke them out, interrupting them at different points to explain why I found it difficult to say certain lines in a truthful and honest way. I talked about how the translation felt antiquated and foolish to me at times. I told the story about eating the soybeans and how I gassed that carload of people, and about Mom’s nervous breakdown, and about how a whole lot of young people were trying to get me to take LSD and go to Houston’s first be-in. I told about all the offstage lives of the different actors and how the woman who played Nina would never go out of her apartment, and how the man who played Trigorin was having an affair with a wealthy art dealer in Houston, and how the actress who played Arkadina was knocked out by an overstrenuous character actor when their two heads bumped while making drunken love. Oh, it was a shameless production I was doing. It was as though I was doing a giant, scandalous, gossipy audition for the audience. I’d have to call it creative gossip. I even created a scene that never happened, where I at last confronted the director of the play and demanded that I have the role of Konstantin Gavrilovich.

It was definitely a deconstruction. For instance, I would focus on the speech Konstantin makes to his mother just days after he has tried to shoot himself in the head. His mother is sort of infantilizing him as she changes his head bandage. She says, “You won’t play
about with a gun again when I’m away, will you?” And Konstantin replies, “No, Mama. That was a moment of mad despair, when I had no control over myself. It won’t happen again.” Then there is a stage direction—“kisses her hands”—and Konstantin goes on to say, “You’ve got magic hands.” And that was where I’d take my subtextual associative break and go into stories about my mom and her hands and how she touched me in two different specific ways: one to wash my uncircumcised penis when I was too young to do it myself, and the other to give me a back rub to put me to sleep. I followed that with a story of how at a family picnic just before I left for Houston, and just before Mom killed herself, I had seen Mom’s hands as suddenly very old. I had said, “Mom, your hands look so very old.” Then I went on to tell my “audience” how I knew I’d said it to hurt her as soon as it was out of my mouth. I just let these associations go on like that, at last ending up with the story of how when I once knocked myself out (hyperventilating) and burned my arm on a radiator, it was Dad and not Mom who changed my bandage every night. After I got all of this stuff out, I’d go back and say the speech. I’d say Konstantin’s speech, and both Meg and I thought it would then have new meaning. That’s what Meg said anyway, and I trusted her. She said there will certainly be people who will walk out on this production, this deconstruction of
The Sea Gull
, but there will also be people who come with a knowledge of the play who will appreciate it even more. Meg said we just had to look at it as a new kind of personal translation. And I agreed.

In the end, our production of
The Sea Gull
was a mad deconstruction, a rambling hodgepodge of mixed emotion, straightforward acting, and a lot of direct autobiographical address. Meg in her own ingenious ordering way had been able to help me frame it and put it all together. At first, only friends came to see it. Then, when the word of mouth was good, strangers came. The play—or “piece,” as we called it—was entitled
A Personal History of “The Sea Gull,”
and it even got a favorable review in one of the downtown papers which read something like, “In this small downtown loft production, Brewster North explores the backside of a misguided
Sea Gull
in Texas.” And the headline over that read, “Misadventures of Big Bird.” It was, if nothing else, an interesting review, and it brought people in.

My life was suddenly coming together in an odd way. Meg and I were running this little theater in the back of Barney’s loft and even pulling in enough money to pay half of Barney’s rent. People were coming to see our crazy little play, and on those nights life had meaning. The rest of the time was spent mostly waiting to put on the play. It was as though Meg and I only lived for our newfound art. But as I got better at it, I began to want my life to be as full as the play, only I had no idea how to make it that way. The fullness only existed in fantasy, and the fantasy kept growing in what was left of my private mind. The fantasy was about me living somewhere on the West Coast, perhaps San Francisco or a small town north of there, with a wife and children in some very together community. I kept seeing myself as this man I made up. Brewster North would act the role of some man actually living his life.