Life Beyond Measure (11 page)

T
hroughout the years of traveling into adulthood, as you may have seen already in my stories so far, I rarely took the path of least resistance. Most of the time, in fact, I walked a proverbial razor-sharp edge. Time and again, had I fallen to one side, it would have spelled my doom; time and again, I stepped back and landed on the side of fortune and opportunity. How? Why? That’s the bigger question for all of us whose lives might have gone either way.

When I look at everything that happened after I left home at age fifteen as a kind of proving ground that opened the floodgates eventually to a life that only a soothsayer and my mother could have believed in, a question that nags away is—why me?

Did I become the protagonist of an extraordinary lifetime by my own engineering? Or, as I’ve questioned before, was it predetermined by external, intangible, conscious forces that quietly pushed, guided, and delivered me onto a path of destiny’s making?

Why me? Why did I become an actor—me, a kid who at the age of ten and a half didn’t know that there were such things as actors. As to the thought of becoming one, nothing could have been further from my mind, even after becoming fascinated with movies as a teenager. For that matter, why did I become a producer, a director, or an author? Me, a kid who had practically no education; a kid whose vocabulary was exceedingly limited when he quit school at age twelve and a half; a kid who was well into his twenties before he even read a book; a kid who couldn’t spell (and who is still not terrific at it) and had no concept of the rules of grammar or the demarcations so widely known as essential elements in speaking, reading, writing?

I am as unlikely a candidate as anyone for what became my multiple callings. The voyage that I took could have been taken, and it has been in many other cases, by any number of other people, born at another time, raised in another set of family circumstances, out of one ethnicity or another, one race or another, one religion or another, one set of societal circumstances or another.

So, the question of “Why me?” remains a challenging one. But it’s important for me to ask it and to answer honestly, so as not to mythologize my life or myself, but to stay grounded in the truth. In my way, I can best answer it by looking at many of those trial-and-error passages of young adulthood and by seeing the combination of forces at work: the component elements of this activity, this movement, this journey, this happening. If you do that, you have to begin to think: what are those forces?

There is God, possibly. There is happenstance, possibly. There is a sort of individual sense of self that might be a part of it, a small part, in my behalf.

There may be more than a small amount of good, sound choices that I have made, but they have to be put in the category of chance, because I didn’t know that much about the world. My MO was to make immediate, small incremental choices that were going to get me, almost from moment to moment, almost from hour to hour, almost from day to day, the necessities of life. No grand design there, other than a reliance on instincts, and, from time to time, on decisions made to stand my ground—and to live out the consequences no matter what.

For example, when I arrived in America, I had to make my adjustment, first of all, to the kind of segregation that existed in Miami, the kind of life available to black people. What prepared someone for the dismissal of a black person because of the color of their skin, and the inbred attitudes of slavery that held sway throughout the United States at that time? Ill-equipped with education for trying to drive my way through all that, I had only the value system of my parents.

So I arrived in America with nowhere to turn except to those values that life had implanted in me. That was the only ground that I could stand on. Much of that terra firma had to do with who my mother was, and who my dad was. Because of those values, I was not long for the stay in Miami and left town at my earliest convenience to travel north, as I have described to you already, on my way to New York City.

What I’d like to add to that picture for you are more detailed accounts of two pivotal events that helped cause an early change in my fortunes.

The first, most significant turning point came one morning when I happened to stop at a newsstand at the intersection of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, where I picked up a local newspaper, the
Amsterdam News,
and thumbed through it to the want-ad pages, looking for a job as a dishwasher. With my couple of years of schooling, I couldn’t read much in the paper other than the help-wanted listings. Not seeing anything of interest, I turned to toss the paper into the trash. But just as I was about to crumple it up and pitch it into the trash can, I looked again at the paper and my eyes caught something on the opposite page from the one with the dishwasher listings, which happened to be the theatrical listings. It was a headline streamer that said, in bold type: “Actors Wanted.”

Knowing nothing about actors, I was still curious enough to look more closely at the article underneath the heading, which told me of a production being cast at a place called the American Negro Theatre in Harlem—not many blocks from where I was standing! The proximity was a major enticement.

After all, ordinarily when looking for work I would get on the subway early and go all the way downtown to stop in at the scores of employment agencies where I would invariably find a dishwashing job somewhere in the distant reaches of mid-to lower Manhattan. But this was a different kind of help-wanted ad, and the theater was close enough to home that I figured,
Why not? Why not go to this place, this address, and see what kind of a job it is and what I will have to do?

With that one tiny flash of nothing more than curiosity, I unwittingly altered the direction of my life. Right there on the sidewalk of Harlem, standing over a trash can, a newspaper page in hand, puzzling over two words: “Actors Wanted.”

How exactly, you may wonder, did it go at the audition—a word that was then as foreign as the fascinating sights, smells, and flamboyant personalities of the people who inhabited this strange behind-the-scenes world of the theater? Ayele, let me tell you, it could not have been worse! The first clue that it wasn’t going to be easy was when the director had me read for him from a book. Needless to say, reading silently to myself was still a struggle, but reading aloud was painful for both of us. Before I got very far at all, he said abruptly, “Thank you very much for coming by,” and he snatched the book out of my hand.

An extremely large, truly massive fellow, he didn’t stop there but actually spun me around, grabbed me by the seat of my pants, and marched me to the door, letting me have it every step of the way. “Go on, get out of here,” he bellowed. “Get out of here and stop wasting people’s time. Why don’t you go out and get yourself a job as a dishwasher or something? You can’t read, you can’t talk, you’re no actor!” And with that he opened the door, pushed me through it, and threw me out. He threw me out! Not quite finished, without skipping a beat, he slammed the door shut.

There was no mistaking the message he had meant to send me, to be sure. But as I was walking to Seventh Avenue from Lenox Avenue and 135th Street to get the bus to go downtown to hunt for a dishwasher job, I got to thinking, and it suddenly occurred to me—Why did he recommend my going out and getting a job as a dishwasher? Not once during the audition did I tell him that I was a dishwasher, so why did he say it? And what became clear to me was that dishwashing was his view of my value as a human being.

In that moment, I made the choice that I could not and would not allow that to stand. Now, what was I operating on? I was operating on
what I learned from my mom, and what I learned from my dad—that I am somebody. I was always somebody. And here this guy who didn’t know me from Adam had fashioned for me a life that I could not allow to happen if I had anything to do with it. I decided then and there, in that pivotal moment, to be an actor, if only to show this man
and
myself that I could.

As I’ve written before, up to that moment, I had no interest in being an actor. What did I know about acting? Get out of here. But I was determined to stand my ground and prove to him that his view of my worth was wrong.

A fateful event soon provided another pivotal moment. After completing another shift at yet another dishwashing job, this one in Queens, I took a seat at a table near the kitchen to wait for a group of waiters to finish up their coffee so I could wash the last dishes before heading home. To pass the time, I started idly browsing through a newspaper that had been left lying there.

An older Jewish waiter, seated with his fellow waiters, noticed me, stood up, and came over. “What’s new in the paper?” he asked.

“Oh,” I said, somewhat awkwardly, and hesitated, not sure how to answer. “I wish that I could tell you,” I offered, “but I don’t know how to read very well.”

“I see,” said this gentleman. “Would you like me to read with you?” He was offering me a gift that would transform my life in ways that I couldn’t imagine. And the gesture was one of basic kindness, made not so as to embarrass me or obligate me, but because that was who he was.

Of course, I answered yes, enthusiastically. And starting that night, and on many nights that followed, he sat with me after work for as long as we were able to remain, and he taught me to
read—sounding out words, explaining syllables, pointing out the patterns of sentences and paragraphs, giving me pointers even on pronunciation.

Long before I could let him know in substantive ways how the power of literacy would change my life, my friend and teacher procured a job waiting tables elsewhere, and we didn’t keep in touch after he left. That remains a tragedy, as far as I’m concerned—one that has haunted me for years. My heartfelt regret is that I was never able to properly thank him and tell him the story of how, in part because of his help, I became an actor.

The willingness to receive help and appreciate its value when it arrives, sometimes unannounced, is a subject that returns us to the question of why and how our lives turn out as they do. Serendipity—like the newspaper’s “Actors Wanted” listing and the question “What’s new in the paper?” posed to me by a waiter at my place of work—is a vital accomplice to the other forces that shape us and our destiny. But the real answers to the why and how of journey’s ends also come down to choices. I believe that I am sitting in this chair writing today in large part as a result of choices I have made—good ones, not-so-good ones, and bad or wrong ones.

Bad choices got me into a lot of trouble, sometimes got me hurt, sometimes got me rejected, sometimes destroyed opportunities that would come as the result of choices I made. But those are choices as well as the choices you make that you can later applaud yourself for having made.

All in all, I made a good number of sound choices before and during my acting career. It was my recognition of a need to read better and to speak better, driven by a rebuff for the lack of such skills, that put me on the road to becoming an actor. After that initial
rejection by the director of a production at the American Negro Theatre, I returned and auditioned for acceptance into their training program—and was again rejected.

But being a kid who had grown up trying to figure out how to avoid being stung by wasps in order to reach fruit at the tops of the trees on Cat Island, I came up with a novel strategy that allowed me to override this second rejection. As it happened, I became aware that there was no janitor at the facility where classes were given, and I volunteered to take the job—in return for being allowed to study for a semester. To my delight, the arrangement was made, with the understanding that if I didn’t show reasonable improvement by the end of the semester, the deal would be off and I wouldn’t be invited to continue. But when the first semester ended and I missed the mark, I managed—with the help of some of my fellow students who lobbied on my behalf—to have the agreement amended so that I could continue on with my janitorial services in exchange for acting classes through a second semester. This time, when the semester drew to a close and the teacher cast a student production without giving me even a walk-on part, my fellow students rallied on my behalf again. Together they went to the teacher and asked, on the basis of how hard I’d been working, if she couldn’t see to it that I was given something to do in this play. When she granted their appeal by casting me as the understudy to the lead, she knew that the chances were one in a million that I would ever get to go on. And no one, least of all me, could have predicted how rapidly doors would begin to open after that—as I wrote to you previously.

Once they did, and later, after I achieved some success, I made the conscious choice to go beyond the basics and to reach deeper into the art of creating believable characters for an audience, and thereby maximize my talent and my opportunities.

On the flip side of the better choices that I’ve made, I will emphasize to you, dear Ayele, that I have made and continue to make choices that I regret. It is the nature of free will, with which each of us is endowed, that sometimes choices are very hard to make, and sometimes you are ashamed to make some that diminish you in your own eyes. But you cannot exorcise those choices out of the millions of choices you make in life. They are there, as if stamped into the passport of your existence. You can’t escape it, you don’t like it, and you would like to change it, but it’s there and it’s OK.

And these observations and stories—such as they prove useful to others who ask “Why me?”—are as close as I can come, for now, to an answer.

L
ove comes in many colors and stripes, and we encounter it throughout our lifetime, for good or ill. You, my darling Ayele, by the time you are sixteen, no doubt, will have discovered boys. You will have been aware of their existence much earlier, seeing them possibly as merely nuisances that girls have to put up with. But somewhere in your teens you will “discover” them as an intriguing (and perhaps infuriating) species. The question of love may even arise. The emotion will not be new to you, for you will have felt its outpouring from the members of your family, and you in turn will have experienced love for them. But with boys, and later men, the aspect of love will be different.

As the father of six daughters and a veteran of many complicated relationships over the years, I come honestly to the following observations of love’s many dimensions, and pass them now on to you, your peers, and those of other generations for whom the subject of love is never outdated or ahead of its time.

We all have a capacity for love, for kindness, for passion. We also have a capacity for the opposite, but love is infinitely more effective in the world than hate, although they exist as equal opposites. So I reject hate and choose to explore the nature of love, both emotionally and philosophically.

There is love of self, there is love of family, there is romantic love for another individual to whom we are not related, and there is love for a friend. Then there is love of things that are cultural in nature: music, art, and literature; love of animals; love of adventure.

The first and foremost of these is a mother’s love for her child. It is all embracing, all forgiving—even though it may not seem so at those times when she is administering the discipline that is necessary for a child’s growth and understanding. But it is a love of such fierce magnitude that any unwelcome intrusion is likely to meet with disaster. The powerful connectedness of mother and child is evident throughout the animal kingdom, where death is often the penalty for trespassing.

Although we talk of love as residing in the heart, it is actually a function of the brain. That fact, however, doesn’t diminish what love is, and it doesn’t change the fact that you feel it inside you. Emotionally, love is a conscious state driven from within.

If it is romantic love, it is no mere cliché to say that in its presence your heart seems to beat fast, and your whole body has a quivering over it. You see another human being—nowadays, we know that for some it’s not necessarily of the opposite sex—and something about
the visual impact of that individual triggers something inside us. And it might not necessarily be the triggering of love at first sight, but it is something in the configuration of the face, how the lips and the nose and the eyes form the forward aspects of the face. Then the smile complements all of that, and the sound of the voice contributes to the overall impact. And of course, the eyes, when they glitter and sparkle, sparkle like you would expect those eyes to sparkle. Bodily contours also often come into play.

All this, then, prompts in us an interest. Not necessarily love, although I’m sure falling in love at first sight is probably a valid description in some cases. But when we see such a person, the longer we look at that face, the more we like it. We’re not talking about love yet, but a kind of visual compatibility that affects you internally.

Given opportunity, you carry this to its logical conclusion. That is, you meet, have an intellectual exchange, and you find that the person is quite intelligent, has a nice sense of humor, and is very easy to engage. There is no sign of anything negative, and the conversation works out very nicely. So you have a date, if they’re not married or attached to someone else, and if you can arrange one, because you’re interested in knowing other things about them. And if, over lunch or dinner, or perhaps on an outing, the discovery lends itself to further exploring, you may permit yourself to be invited to the person’s house. Afterward you go back home and say, “Wow, what a terrific person.”

You get together with them a few more times, and before you know it, you are forced to say, “You know, I’m having a problem. I think I’m falling in love with you.” And if the feeling is reciprocal, the other person says, “Oh my God, I thought I was the only one.” And there you go.

That’s one kind of love, where the emotional, physical, and psychological elements all come into play.

Then there is another kind of love—for humankind or for concerns—that can be roused in a person enough to make a choice to leave home, father and mother, brothers and sisters, and go to work in Asia or Africa with agencies like Doctors Without Borders, as one example. This love is derived from the compassion that is in the person’s being, either inherited from forefathers or seeming to have appeared on its own. Such people may join the Peace Corps and go into places like Darfur, often putting their lives on the line. During the civil rights movement, there were white kids who went down South and stayed for weeks and months, and some of them were killed because they believed in the brotherhood of mankind.

There is love of God and love for the values of one’s faith, of course. In many people there is a strong love of country, and it motivates them even to go to war to defend their homeland. In many people there is similarly a love of and quest for peace that is motivated by a willingness to take a stand for its pursuit.

There are people who love children, who love family, and those who love other human beings, other living creatures, and nature itself. In my daily comings and goings, I hear of those in my community of Los Angeles who volunteer at animal shelters, who work on violence prevention, who spend time downtown in some of the most marginalized neighborhoods helping fight homelessness—all with no reward for their actions other than self-satisfaction. There are many examples articulating that kind of love.

There are several philanthropists I know who not only have the ample means to give to important causes but genuinely love knowing that they can be instrumental in benefiting others. One of the women in our family’s circle of friends who has made a history of being true to her charitable instincts is now focused on contribut
ing funds to stem-cell research, which promises to produce findings that will help millions who are suffering around the world. Those motivations are likewise from love.

There are people who actually love the pop culture, and see themselves as part of it. They have idol representation: individuals in the pop culture, either in films or television or music, for whom they feel love. Then there is a love of self-improvement, which people indulge in to develop themselves to be better human beings. They simply love their efforts in that regard.

Oddly enough, there are also people who love turmoil. Their temperament is best articulated by chaos. In my years of forming a variety of personal and professional relationships, I encountered more than a few of those, as you may well also in your explorations of the different facets of life.

The point here is that love is never elusive. In all its permutations, love surrounds us in the world, whether we are accepting of it or not. There are people who reject it; they become antisocial, reclusive. But I believe it is the nature of people to seek love—no matter what they later become—as babies right out of the womb. And it ultimately, to a great degree, shapes who we are in terms of how we develop as individuals and how our lives evolve. After all, it is by love that we are often joined to another individual. That joining, in a way, determines who we are as we develop.

Now comes the challenge. Since love is universally available, and also universally sought after, how do we—realizing that love is nevertheless still a minefield that we have to chart our way through—engage it successfully and safely, or if not successfully, at least with the least amount of damage?

It seems to me that we have to be accepting of the idea of love in order to find it and to have our lives shaped by it—even though we
know the minefield is there. We have to be willing to take chances. We have to be willing to expose ourselves to some degree.

So far I’ve written to you of the dimensions of love in the abstract, hoping you’ll be able to relate different situations in your life to some of those points. Now I have some real-life stories to include in the discussion, as I was there once in learning that love, possibly the most glorious way that we can experience life, can be a many-splintered thing.

I was shy and couldn’t get a date for the longest time. On Cat Island, my friend Fritz and I plotted daily about methods to attract attention from the opposite sex, even resorting to voodoo practices that involved catching frogs and burying them in boxes until the appropriate waxing of the moon, at which point their bones could be retrieved and combined with the hair of our love interest—with no luck whatsoever! There was one girl, lovely Lurlene, whose name and alluring face I could never forget, having once inspired a love letter from me, written in my boyish hand, and who I was certain would be susceptible to my charms and the voodoo magic that I’d practiced so diligently to attract her. But she turned out not to be interested. When I saw her years later as a grown woman and reminded her, she said, “Yeah, I remember that time.” And she still didn’t recall it all that fondly.

My progress with females wasn’t much better after we moved to Nassau. There was one girl at school, when I was about eleven and a half, who was my dream girl. Her name was Vernice Cooper. Never spoke to her. Just smiled a lot. Vernice would give me a little bit of a smile in return, or she would turn her head just before I caught her eye. But my handmade clothes, sewn by my mother from flour-sack cloth, were a signal that I was from the wrong side of the tracks, while Vernice was from a family that was substantial in every way:
strong educational background, middle class. In fact, she wound up as an executive for a telephone company. And in our grown-up years, we wound up with a warm friendship that has flourished.

Then there was Emmy Gibbs, another girl at school, who was kind of rough-and-tumble and tomboyish, but very pretty. I liked her a lot as well, but that was the extent of it.

None of these fleeting attractions came close to the ardor inspired in me by the compelling and sweet Dorothy—with whom I could actually converse, albeit in my shy, unworldly way. Dorothy—who I was surprised to learn was the half-sister of my racist friend Carl, from the other side of the island—lived close to the ocean. Because I lived over the hill at quite a distance, in order to see her I either went the long walk on foot or rode on the front handlebars of my friend Harry’s bike—whenever I could talk him into taking me. The effort notwithstanding, it was worth it just to see her and exchange even a few words.

But over the course of our shy courtship, I could never figure out how to move past friendship with Dorothy to a more serious romantic relationship. With so little experience and exposure to the opposite sex, how could I? Throughout these adolescent years, I never had any physical contact with any of these girls, or bought them so much as a piece of candy or a trinket; I didn’t have any money to do that. Totally unaware of how lacking I was in sophistication and gracious behavior, not savvy at all in matters of the heart, I had never held the hand of or exchanged more than three or four words with any girl, except for Dorothy.

So by the time I left Nassau, it was with the intention of returning worthy of her affections and of marrying her one day. By the time I was in a position to do so, she had married someone else. And after he passed away and she was available, I had gone on to
other relationships. Years later, I did stop in to say hello to her at the British Colonial Hotel in Nassau, where she was then working as a waitress. In a flash, I was fourteen years old again, amazed at how great she still looked, and at how easy it was to talk to her. But we both realized that the time had long ago come and gone for any possibility of getting together.

In the meantime, back when I first arrived in Florida, there were lots of pretty girls there. But my native shyness—as well as now having reached the age of fifteen without any dating experience—left me clueless. If there had been openings with any of the girls, I probably wouldn’t have recognized them. Besides, I had no female friends, and hardly any male friends except my brother’s children who were around my age. They were the ones who knew the girls, and I was just a young cousin who wasn’t really up on anything in terms of how young people behaved and got along.

When I made it to New York, I was as virgin as they come, and by then I was sixteen years old. At long last, as I began to acclimate to city life, I ran into a couple of girls who took a bit of a notice. However, I didn’t know how to follow through. Each of them invited me to meet their parents, and I did. The parents were fine with me because I seemed like a decent person. But nothing came of those two friendships.

It seemed almost as if I was waiting for lightning to hit me. One day, I felt as though it had when I spotted a particularly striking girl at the top of a set of steps, sitting beyond the balustrade of an apartment building on 116th Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues. She was dressed simply, with a simple manner, an open demeanor, dark brown complexion, bright eyes, and an aura of niceness. The impact was so powerful I can still remember at age eighty how it was as I walked by and saw her sitting there and the somer
saults I turned inside as she kind of smiled at me. Without hesitation, I kind of smiled right back. A few paces past her door, I mustered the courage to turn back and walk in her direction, while trying to drum up enough nerve to say, “Hi, how are you,” but I actually walked right past her again! Finally, I turned back and shyly approached, seeing her shyly trying to say hello, too. Magic! As we talked, I couldn’t help noticing that there was a movie theater across the street. It would have been so natural to invite her to the movies, but I didn’t have any money to pay for tickets for the two of us. And soon enough the moment of opportunity passed me by and into the fog of memory.