Take Your Shirt Off and Cry: A Memoir of Near-Fame Experiences (7 page)

Maybe it was the weed, but they always seemed so
interested
. They listened to me intently, as though I were some kind of prophet.

“Far out . . .” they’d repeat. These people were fantastic; they always made me feel like I was OK.

But . . . the Pass still made me uneasy. However absurd it may have felt at this point, I just couldn’t ignore it. It was
like an alarm buzzer or a yeast infection.

Ned called the next morning to make plans for dinner, since it was Monday, his day off from the play. This would be our first
time having dinner; we had thus far seen each other exclusively during daylight. He suggested John’s, an Italian restaurant
in the East Village. His vibe on the phone was disquietingly datelike. Also, John’s was well known as one of those Very Romantic
Places—incredibly dark and lit only by what seemed like thousands of candles, erotically dripping white wax. It was adored
for its cheap Chianti and fabulous spaghetti and meatballs, both of which were hungrily sucked and slurped by hipsters in
a pre-sex haze.

I decided that this was an opportunity to set Ned straight about everything. I needed to tell him (a) that I was not in a
place to jump into another “thing”; (b) that I was feeling pushed and that if there
was
the possibility of a “thing” with him, it would have to evolve organically, and my timeline and pace would have to be respected;
and (c) after all these years, how I felt about the Pass.

“Gosh, you look great! What a delightful skirt!” Ned gushed as we got settled and started perusing the menu. “I’ve always
said you look so pretty when you dress like a girl.” As cool as Ned was, he also had an archaically corny side to him that
gave off the whiff of a closet sexist. While he applauded the fact that I had “a mouth like a sailor” and was thoroughly impressed
with the vigor with which I uttered the phrase “Fuck you,” he couldn’t contain his belief that, in the end, I should “act
and dress like a girl.” It pissed me off royally whenever he brought it up, but he was always careful to couch it as something
I should experiment with “to get acting gigs.”

Ned and I ordered spaghetti and meatballs, a mixed salad, and Chianti, and as we ate I felt him staring at me.

“Ned, listen, I’m—can I talk to you about a couple things?”

“Of course! Shoot.”

“Well . . . it’s just that I’m feeling . . .
pushed
. Like, I’m sort of getting the vibe that you might be wanting something . . . more. More than I can . . . commit to. And
you know how fucked up I’ve been. I’m just—I’m not in a place—”

“Naw, naw . . .” Ned put down his Chianti and grabbed my hands and looked directly, intensely into my eyes. I could tell he
was pretty stoned.

“We are totally
copacetic
, you and me.” But he winced a bit, and that’s when I saw it for the first time: the chink in Ned’s armor. Beneath the smile,
the mettle, the ballsy confidence, Ned seemed scared—but of what? He pressed on, cajoling me and convincing himself.

“We’re pals, you and me—great pals!”

Taking a deep breath, I pressed on.

“Look, Ned. I wanna talk to you about something else, and it’s pretty huge and weird and . . . it’s hard. This is hard for
me.”

“I’m all ears.”

I took another deep breath.

“Remember what happened that night seven years ago, after we had dinner together and we went back to your place to hang and
sing some songs?”

“Uh . . . no,” Ned smiled. “Should I?”

“We went back to your place. After the Westbank Cafe. We went back to your place, and we sat on the couch, and you started
playing that tune by The Band . . .”

Ned looked at me blankly.

“Yeah?” He shrugged.

“So—none of this is ringing a bell?”

He shook his head.

“OK, well, did it ever occur to you
why
I stopped speaking to you for seven years?”

“You stopped speaking to me?” Ned looked perplexed. “I just thought we, you know, fell out of touch. I was with Binky and,
you know . . .”

“Right. You were with Binky. You were also with Binky when you made a pass at me in your apartment seven years ago.”

“What?”

“Binky was out of town,” I continued. “You invited me over. We were on your couch. You were playing guitar and started singing
that tune ‘Take a load off Fannie’?”

“ ‘The Weight’! Fuck! SUCH a GREAT tune!” Ned started singing, conducting with his fork. “ ‘
And! (And!) (And!) You
put the load right on ME-ee-ee!
’ ”

“Right. Anyway, we were on the couch, you sang a couple choruses, then stopped, turned to me, and said, ‘Now I’m going to
make a pass at you,’ and stuffed your tongue in my mouth. Coming back to you now?”

Ned thought for a minute, spaced-out, glassy-eyed.

“You know, honestly, I don’t remember. I remember that we kissed once and it was fucking great. But, you know me and the details.”
He laughed. “One of the drawbacks of pot, you know . . .”

“Well, let me refresh your memory. You made a pass at me. You made a pass at me, and afterward I pretty much fled. And, by
the way, whenever I told the Jazz Musician about what happened between you and me, he always pointed out that after you shoved
your tongue in my mouth, I did, in fact, continue making out with you, as opposed to, say, biting it off or pushing you away
or kneeing you in the nuts, so it’s not like I don’t recognize that I was
there
and culpable—sort of—since I
did
keep kissing you back for whatever it was, five minutes? But the point is that I was confused. I was young. You were my teacher
and my friend, and I really looked up to you. You’d just directed me in that awesome play, which got me all kinds of attention,
so, I dunno, maybe a part of me was intrigued. But a bigger part of me was freaked out, especially when you maneuvered us
over to your brass bed under the dimmed track lights, where slung over the bedpost was Binky’s white silk negligee. And I
asked; ‘What about Binky?’ And you said, ‘She’s in Philadelphia.’ Huh?
What did that even mean
? That once she was across state lines, all bets were off?”

“I don’t know . . . I don’t remember,” Ned sighed. “But I think we had a different
arrangement
back then.”

“Really? ’Cause I seriously doubt that Binky would have been psyched to see what was going down—”

“I don’t know about ‘psyched,’ but she’d be maybe—”

“Pissed. Pissed is how she would have been, Ned. Let’s face it. And then I was, you know, all discombobulated, and you started
telling me how you had always been attracted to me—”

“Well, that’s true.”

“And I felt all fucked up ’cause I thought you actually thought I was
talented
and thought I was a
good actor
—”

“So? I
did
think that—”

“But really, in the end, all you wanted to do was fuck me—”

“Hey! Now that’s not fair. Wanting to fuck you doesn’t preclude my admiring your talent, you know. I think you’re damn good,
your
winsomeness
notwithstanding.”

“OK, but it made me feel terrible. And dirty and wrong. Especially when you told me you wanted to have a thing with me
while
you were still with Binky! Like a Mormon!”

“What can I say—I dug you both.”

“What in the fuck would make you think I’d be willing to go halvsies? That any chick would? Anyway, we made out a little more.
You took my shirt off and then your own and flung back the covers. Which is when I saw—on the perfectly crisp, five-hundred-count,
Egyptian-blah-blah, white cotton sheets—a teeny, tiny speck of blood. Binky’s blood. On the sheets, staring right up at me.”

“I definitely don’t remember this part . . .”

“And you go, ‘Oh, shit, Binky musta had her period or something. I’ll just get a new sheet,’ and I go—and I know it’s all
very soap opera–y, but I was twenty—I go, ‘You can’t just throw Binky into the hamper, Ned. Binky is
here
.’ Then I got up, put my shirt on, and asked for cab money, and you said, ‘You’re really gonna split, huh?’ And I said, ‘Yeah,
I really am. I don’t wanna be just another bloodstain on your sheets.’ Which really is a pretty good exit line for a kid.
And then I left, and we didn’t speak again till I signed up for your class a few months ago.”

“Wow. I’m just . . . floored.”

“I know it all seems really melodramatic in retrospect, but Ned, you know, I was very, very fucked up about that.”

“I hear ya . . .”

“And I have to be honest with you about this, about how I felt about what went down between us. If we’re gonna be ‘pals.’
It’s not easy to even talk about it, and I’ve spent years feeling awful because you meant a lot to me, you know? I was incredibly
disillusioned and, quite frankly, I also felt really ashamed.”

Ned sat motionless, looking supremely chastened.

We sat there for a few minutes, staring at each other. I was exhausted from the confession yet felt enormous relief at having
unburdened myself to him.

“I am just . . . ugh . . . what can I say? I am so, so SORRY. I mean—UGH!” Ned, full of remorse, rocked back and forth in
his chair and kept thrusting his head into his hands on the table.

“I’m desperate here,” he blurted, dolefully.

“Well, look, don’t be desperate. This is good. We needed to clear the air.”

“What can I do?”

“What do you mean?”

“I am so—SO SORRY!” He took my hands. “Do you even REALIZE how SORRY I am? How can I make it up to you? How?”

“Look, I don’t—”

“I just hate that something like this has been hanging over our heads. We’re such
great pals
, you and me. We have SO MUCH in common, you know? We—our
souls
—are connected in a really, REALLY cool way. Past-life shit, possibly. Who knows? And I’d hate to think that I’d somehow,
inadvertently fucked up our swell friendship!”

One of the candles on our table burned out, and Ned quickly relit it with his Bic. Once we were again sufficiently illuminated,
Ned offered to take me up to his cabin in Maine. We would leave, he suggested, that Sunday, the day after his show closed,
for a week as a sort of peace offering, a kind of burying-the-hatchet-type oblation, meant to wash away the old and inaugurate
our newfound adult camaraderie.

“Ned,” I said, “you know how much you mean to me, how much I appreciate everything you’ve done for me and how great you’ve
been, how great you
are
. It’s just, I can’t be in a ‘thing,’ and I can’t feel like that’s what you’re angling for. What I really want—what I really
need—is a friend. It’s amazingly generous of you to offer, but . . . I think it would be weird at this point. I totally appreciate—”

“I know, I know, I know,” he soothed. “But—can I just say something here? This would be a trip as
pals.
Nothing more. No pressure, no weirdness. I want to do this, just so I can give this to you. It’s that
simple
. Totally on the level, totally
copacetic
. Just to make up for . . . for the thing that happened. So that it doesn’t fuck us up with hard feelings and stuff. So we
can move on. Really.”

Ned put his hand over his heart and two fingers in the air. “Scout’s honor.”

His smile was unfeigned, and the candlelight deepened the crow’s-feet around his eyes, making him seem strangely vulner-able.
I pictured him as he must have been twenty-five years before: long blond hair, open, boyish. Still stoned, but less fried;
wicked yet unsullied by the bitterness that would later engulf him when disillusionment set in. Watching his buddies get ahead
of him, his marriages crumble, the world become more uptight instead of less. I felt incredibly sad, not just for Ned, but
for me, too. Tears came to my eyes.

“Whatsa matter, Nance?” Ned said genuinely concerned. “You know, I’m being sincere, right? I would never just use ‘Scout’s
honor’ in vain—you know that, right?”

“I do know that, Ned.” I felt such affection for him right then and such hope that perhaps now our relationship could enter
a new phase, one of true friendship. It all made me feel so hopeful at a time when cynicism had overtaken me. “We will be
friends for a long time,” I thought.

“You’re sure? I just don’t want to have it be weird. And, like, confusing, you know . . .
at night.
”

“Totally sure!” Ned said.

“I mean, no hanky-panky.”

“Hey, you be Hanky and I’ll be Panky! Wait! No, I’ll be Hanky and you . . .” He smiled. “Kidding. Look: you’ll have your own
room, and I won’t lay a hand on you. What d’ya say? Deal?”

It was March, the most depressing and gray part of the winter. Going north to Maine, with its fresh air and slower pace, did
have its allure. Why not? I had been clear with Ned; we were “copacetic.”

“Can we watch the Oscars? They’re on Sunday night, and I wanna see if Marisa Tomei wins.”

“You betcha!”

“Deal,” I said. “Thank you so much!”

I don’t know why, exactly, I felt the need to stipulate Marisa Tomei as part of the agreement. I didn’t even
know
Marisa Tomei, though she floated in some of the same downtown theater crowds as both Ned and I. Occasionally, I’d see her
at a party or at a mutual friend’s late-night gig, always laughing, looking beautiful across the room. While I did want to
watch the Oscars, my insistence had more to do with the desire for a linchpin. It was something to hang on to.

When I climbed into Ned’s gleaming pickup truck early that Sunday morning for our six-hour journey, he was seated behind the
wheel in his Maine Getup: a chamois shirt, a lumberjack jacket, and rubber all-weather boots. His hair was gelled, and he
held a bouquet of yellow tulips.

“Yellow means ‘friendship,’ ” he smiled sheepishly, turning up the radio. “Well, off like a prom dress!”

The highlight of our road trip was singing along with Ned’s sixties mix tape. The greatest hits of Crosby, Stills, Nash and
Young; Peter, Paul and Mary; Buffalo Springfield; the Doobie Brothers—Ned singing lead and me taking the harmony parts. Busting
out on all these tunes, we couldn’t help occasionally laughing at their mannered histrionics and all the overwrought beseeching.