Take Your Shirt Off and Cry: A Memoir of Near-Fame Experiences (3 page)

BOOK: Take Your Shirt Off and Cry: A Memoir of Near-Fame Experiences
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“Yeah. I’m in rehearsal for a production of
The Maids
right now. I play Madame, and I think this is a good one to use on the maids: ‘Get these assholes to cater to my every whim.’”
Mamet’s eyes widened, and he looked up to the ceiling.

“Well, OK . . .” he said, beginning to laugh as he considered it. “It’s a bit over the top, but it works. And, it’s funny.”

“There’s also a bunch of times where I use ‘putting an ass-hole in her place,’ but it’s not as fun as the other one.”

“So perhaps we need to investigate ways to make it more fun for Nancy to do,” Mamet said, addressing the class. “ ‘Putting
an asshole in her place’ is the essential action,” he said, turning his attention back to me. “It’s ‘as if,’ what?”

(The “as if” was the last step in Mamet’s technique. It was used to help the actor better understand and personalize the action
they had chosen. Using your imagination and your own words, what does the action mean to you?)

“It’s as if I could tell the English teacher I had freshman year to stop patronizing me.”

“Excellent—go.”

“Look, asshole, I’m gonna tell you this for the last time:
DON’T CALL ME HONEY. OK? My name is not ‘Honey.’
You wanna tell me something, you wanna address me, USE MY
NAME. It’s Nancy. N-A-N-C-Y. Get it? NANCY! Like the
First Lady. Only, actually, nothing like the First Lady, except
maybe for the part where I ‘Just Say No’ to assholes who insist
on calling me Honey, despite the countless times I have asked—
nicely—to be called my name, which, in case you’ve forgotten,
is NANCY. Oh, and by the way? I totally know that you
thought I was a moron because I didn’t know what the fuck a
gerund was, but guess what? I have finally figured it out! Here,
I’ll use one in a sentence: ‘Excuse me, but do you mind my
ASKING YOU TO GO FUCK YOURSELF?’”

“OK, this is exactly so,” Mamet said, cutting in. “We have found an ‘as if’ for the action ‘putting an asshole in his place.’
It was simple, it was clear, and it looked fun. Was it fun?” He asked me.

“Very.”

“Good. By the way—do you write?”

“No.”

“Well, you should. Write a one-act, maybe. Why not?”

“Hey, Nance, how’s it feel being the teacher’s pet?” asked Charlie, one of the guys in my class, during a cigarette break.

“Aw . . . shut up. Don’t be a douche,” I said, firing up a Camel.

“You know he just wants to fuck you, right?” he asked, grinning a nasty, malevolent grin.

“Fuck
you
. He thinks I’m
good.
That so hard for you to believe?”

“I’m sure he does,” he laughed, pinching my ass. “Good at
what
, though?”

“Be sure not to choke to death on all those sour grapes you’re sucking on. Dick.”

I didn’t want to entertain the thought that even a whiff of what Charlie was saying was true.

“Come on, Nance,” he said, giving me a wink and bumming a drag off of my cig. “Don’t be pissed. You’re a total piece of ass.
No shame in that!”

There was, in fact, plenty of shame in that. I needed to believe that if I was a “teacher’s pet”—in Mamet’s class or anyone
else’s—it was because they thought I was good, not because they found me attractive. I didn’t dare imagine that it was possible
to be both.

“You can act with the Boys,” Mamet commented one day after I did a portion of his “Fucking Ruthie” monologue from
American Buffalo.
“Good for you.”

The monologue, as well as the play, is written for men, but I was hot to work on it. It’s about betrayal of friendship in
the name of “business” and what happens when someone’s ethics clash with their desire to succeed. But it’s also about the
corrosiveness of anger and how, in the end, people betray themselves. I had an innate sense about these themes; I felt I understood
them.

“He’s very cool,” I told my father when he picked me up from the train station for Thanksgiving. “He’s, you know, real smart
and he’s this great writer. You’d love him: he’s from Chicago and he smokes a cigar . . .”

“Is he a
faygele
?”

“No! How do you come up with that?” I said, laughing and incredulous. “What of what I just told you makes you think he’s gay?”

“I dunno, he sounds like an asshole,” my father said, yawning. “You know what they say about guys who smoke cigars, dontcha?”

“No . . .”

“Small dick.” He looked at me. “It’s true.”

“And you know this how? You’ve conducted a study? I mean, Jesus!”

“Common knowledge.”

“What ever. Anyway, he’s great, really nice. He just started a theater company with all the kids, you know, like Therese,
who studied with him up in Vermont—”

“How is Therese? She still fat?”

“She’s fine. Anyway, so David Mamet bought all the kids in this theatre company jackets. You know, company jackets that are
really cool. He even got their names sewn on.”

“So what? Small price to pay to feed his no-doubt-huge ego, you ask me.”

“You always hate everybody . . .”

“What’re you
taw-king
about?”

“Everyone I like: Barbra Streisand—”

“Oy vey—”

“You hate her.”

“Barbra Streisand is a
dawg
.”

“She is not!”

“An absolute beast!”

My father and Barbra had grown up together in Brooklyn. He wasn’t exactly a fan.

“No, you have some kind of weird thing against her . . . something about growing up in Flatbush and shared misery, and—”

“My only misery is when I have to fucking
look
at her. Christ, what a
meeskite
.”

“You’re so limited. According to you, there is only one way to be beautiful, and it’s blond, with big tits and a small nose.
It’s sexist, and it’s self-loathing, and it’s, you know . . . totally anti-Semitic.”

“Oh yeah? You think you’re
so smart
, well, lemme tell YOU something, Nancy: You’re getting to sound awfully
shrill
and
strident
, like one of those
big-mouth brawds
, AND I DON’T LIKE IT. You wanna start in with this kinda crap, I’ll put you on the train, send you right back to the Village,
and you can have Thanksgiving with fucking Gloria Steinem!”

After Thanksgiving, things with Therese really began to deteriorate. She had started taking classes in experimental theater,
and somehow even her advances were assuming an avant-garde flavor. After staying out till all hours, knocking back pitchers
of sangria at Panchito’s Mexican restaurant on MacDougal Street, Therese would arrive home, crawl into bed with me, and recite
Aristotle’s
Poetics
to the tune of “Back on the Chain Gang” while cupping my breasts.

“This has to stop. I can’t take it—I can’t do this anymore!” I yelled one night as I pushed her away and stormed out of bed.
I flipped on the light. Therese sat, clutching my pillow like a baby and weeping.

“I knew you were falling out of love with me,” she moaned. “But you didn’t have to rub my nose in shit by fucking that . .
. that . . .
homunculus
while I’m lying in the other bed!”

I had recently begun sleeping with a guy from the Film Department. He was very short.

“Look . . . I don’t know what to tell you. I’m not in love with you! I-I’ve never been
in love with you.
I
love
you, just . . . not in that . . . not like, you know . . .”

“FUCK YOU,” she exploded, throwing the pillow at me. “You fucking
stomped
on my heart. You fucking just ripped open my chest, pulled out my heart, and fucking just . . . annihilated me!”

“Therese, please . . . you know how much I care about you, but this is just . . . you know what I mean, I just . . .”

“HOW?” she screamed, throwing herself on the floor. “How can you do this?”

“Do what? What have I done? I’m just telling you my feelings,” I said, sinking down next to her.

As horrible as I felt about hurting her, I couldn’t help also feeling angry about being in this situation and about Therese
not just being cool and “getting it.” But I was nineteen years old, far from savvy about the intricacies of expressing myself.
I’d known what I needed to tell her ages before it came to this crazy scene, but I hadn’t had the wherewithal or the wisdom
to speak up.

Therese ran to the bathroom and locked the door. We didn’t have pills, but we did have disposable Lady Bic Razors, so I followed
her.

“If you don’t open up, I’ll get the RA,” I said, banging on the door. When she finally emerged, she walked past me, in a sort
of catatonic stupor, and started packing her things.

“Where are you going?” I kept asking her, but she just mutely continued folding and stuffing. She was done with talking. When
she finished packing, she zipped up her bags and duffle and looked up, briefly, into space, as though she saw someone there,
and she smiled, wiping away her stream of tears. She stood for a few minutes, crying and nodding at what ever it was she was
looking at, like Jennifer Jones seeing the vision of the Virgin Mary in
The Song of Bernadette.

On her way out, she told me that someone, someday, would break my heart into a million pieces, just as I had done to her.
She was right, of course; someone did, and when it happened, I wondered, in the way that one does in desperate moments, if
my Therese fiasco had completely screwed up my good standing in the Universe.

I was heartbroken and terribly ashamed, and since I had never confided to anyone what was really going on between Therese
and me, I had no one to talk to. About a week after she left, I was wandering around the East Village when I ran into my friend
Dennis, a wonderful, kooky intellectual with a penchant for William Burroughs. He invited me over for a cup of coffee at his
book-strewn railroad flat on Fifth Street, where, in the dim, lava-lamp glow, I spilled my guts. I told him about the Therese
make-out sessions and how it had just all gotten out of hand and that I felt like an awful person for leading her on. I also
told him that I was scared of the Universe being mad at me.

“You think the Universe gives a flying fuck about that?” Dennis said, firing up a Marlboro Light and exhaling through his
nose. “Come on! You’re not a Nazi! You’re not, you know, fist-fucking retarded children. You didn’t wanna
munch rug
—so be it! Trust me, the Universe really doesn’t care about stuff like that . . .”

As good as it felt to unburden myself about the whole debacle, I was still miserable. I had lost my best friend.

Mamet’s appearances in class, never regular to begin with, seemed to dwindle as time wore on. Though we were told that it
was work that kept him away, I suspected that his complicated relationship with academic institutions contributed—at least
in part—to his prolonged absences. When he did grace us with his presence, there was always a great deal of pomp and excitement.
And he never disappointed: always with big stories about small men; funny, pithy observations; and a dirty joke or two, mixed
seamlessly, as usual, into class exercises or scene work. After one of these classes, near the end of my last semester, I
was walking through the bowels of Lincoln Center, toward the subway, when I stopped to light a cigarette.

“Got a light?” I heard a voice say. It was a question, but since there was no inflection, I turned as I lit. It was Mamet,
holding an unlit cigar. I obliged his request, and we walked for a while, through the warren of dimly lit corridors, past
empty rehearsal rooms and dressing rooms and costume and prop shops. I don’t remember what we started out talking about—class
that afternoon, probably—but what ever it was led to a brief conversation about actors, in general first and then, in particular,
me. Walking through the Beaumont stage door and into the parking garage, we paused for a moment between the street and the
mouth of the long tunnel that separated the theater complex from the number 1 train.

“You’ve worked hard. Good for you,” he told me. “Good work; you’re very good. I won’t say you’re talented. I don’t believe
in talent; talent is meaningless. The only thing that matters is your
will
. If you exercise your
will
. That’s the only thing that means anything. And courage. You seem to have courage. Good. That’s good, ’cause you’ll need
it.”

He paused for a second, looking at me ruefully.

“There’s nothing worse than being a woman in show business. Being a woman in this business, you’ll be asked to do only two
things in every fucking role you ever play: take your shirt off and cry. That’s it. Take your shirt off and cry. Still, there’s
no reason that you can’t do those things and do them with dignity and the scene properly analyzed. Be brave. Be strong. Are
you writing?”

“No . . . not really. Not at all.”

“Why not?”

“I just . . . I don’t think I can.”

“I know. Do it anyway. I know it’s hard. Do it anyway. When something’s hard, just do it anyway. That’s all you can do.”

Mamet told me he was going out of town for a few weeks, and when he came back, he expected me to have written a one-act, which
I was to cast, direct, and present to the class.

“And if there’s no play when I get back, I’ll fucking fail you,” he said, turning abruptly and walking toward the street.

“I thought you said you don’t believe in grades.”

“I don’t,” he said, and then he was gone.

I put off dealing with the one-act until the night before Mamet was due back in class. I freaked out, smoking and pacing around
my dorm room, having no idea how to even start and, without Therese, no one to bounce ideas around with. I forced myself to
sit down and at least stare at the blank page. In my mind, I could hear Mamet say, “Tell the truth . . .”

I contrived a single-scene play that aped the whole Mamet vibe with a role reversal involving a girl and a guy on a first
date at an upscale coffee shop. I called it
ONE ACT
and followed Mamet’s rule that there should be minimal stage directions. Other than placing the location, the only stage direction
I gave was that as the guy spoke (floridly about “the meaning of Theatre and its cultural implications in the ’80’s”), the
girl ashed her cig into her melted hot fudge sundae. The guy spoke without interruption for a few minutes, after which there
was a long pause.

BOOK: Take Your Shirt Off and Cry: A Memoir of Near-Fame Experiences
8.59Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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