Take Your Shirt Off and Cry: A Memoir of Near-Fame Experiences (9 page)

“So, is that where the expression ‘stuck in a rut’ comes from?” I asked Ned as we maneuvered our way into his driveway.

“Probably,” he smiled. As I then pondered that old saw “spinning your wheels,” Ned grabbed my hand and looked meaningfully
into my eyes. “What d’ya say I teach you how to shoot a pistol?”

The afternoon sun was bright, the sky a glorious azure, and as we listened to the Velvet Underground on a boom box, Ned taped
several quarters to a wooden board and loaded a .357 Magnum. At Singing Oaks Day Camp, when I was eleven, I had taken riflery
and been OK—nothing special. So I was pretty amazed to find out that I demonstrated a savantlike aptitude with a firearm.
I was a great shot.

“Woo-hoo!” Ned hollered, running over to examine my handiwork. “Jesus Christmas, you nailed the fucker!”

Retrieving it from the board, he wiped it off on his jeans before handing it to me for inspection. George Washington’s face
was grossly disfigured, the bullet’s force having smooshed and splattered it. The quarter was concave, as though it were about
to fold in half.

“You should keep that thing with you for luck,” Ned commented wryly.

We continued to blast coins to a fare-thee-well until almost sundown.

“That was fucking great. I can’t believe how fun that was,” I told him as we put away the ammo and locked up the guns in his
shed.

“You’re a natural,” he said, grinning.

“Well, you explained it really well and made it easy. You’re a great teacher!”

“Aw, shucks,” he said, laughing, pretending to be bashful. “But seriously, you are pretty goddamn good with a gun. Thing is,
most girls are usually better shots than guys, but you are pretty amazing even still.”

“Why is that—that girls are better?”

“ ’Cause they’re calmer. When they know they have the shot lined up and they’re ready to pull the trigger, they just know
how to breathe into it, staying steady. It’s innate. Guys get too pumped; they got too much adrenaline or testosterone or
something. Fucks ’em up every time . . .”

We went back to the cabin, and I lay on the bed to read a bit before we figured dinner out. Ned put some wood on the fire
and, after a minute or two, joined me on the bed with a book of his own. Then he made another pass at me. I was now officially
in some sort of existential hell, experiencing an endless loop of the same scene.

“Ned. No.”

He threw his book across the room.

“NO AGAIN, HUH? NO AGAIN?” He was in a full-blown rage. “How long is this going to last? How long are you going to put me
through this?”

“Put you through what?”

“I just don’t get you. You really are something. WHY DID YOU COME HERE?”

“Ned—please. Calm down!”

“GODDAMN YOU! YOU KNEW WHAT THIS WAS! YOU KNEW THAT I WAS SHOPPING!”

“
Shopping?
”

“THAT’S RIGHT! SHOPPING,” he screamed. “SHOPPING FOR A WOMAN! YOU KNEW THAT AND YOU HAVE WASTED MY FUCKING TIME!”

I sat on the edge of the bed, stunned, and wished to god I was still packing a loaded gun.

“Um . . . ? I hate to tell you this, but one doesn’t SHOP FOR A WOMAN. This isn’t a fucking Moroccan bazaar, Ned.”

“You know what I mean!” he shouted.

“Actually I don’t. And you know what else? I don’t care. You haven’t been listening. You haven’t listened to one word.”

Ned walked away, livid, and started rolling a joint, which he smoked as he put on his sneakers. When he was done, he went
out for yet another stoned run. I was so mad that I was shaking. Standing on his porch, chain-smoking, I decided that I hated
him. I grabbed the portable phone—the one piece of modern technology Ned’s cave came equipped with—and called my best friend,
Bridget, back in New York and told her the whole thing.

“He took me here under totally false pretenses!” I stormed. “I mean, I was completely duped into coming.”

“I know, Nance, I know. Just take some deep breaths.”

Almost a de cade older than me, Bridget usually assumed the role of patient big sister or “mom we’d most like to have.” Nothing
much fazed her—especially when it came to complaints about men or families.

“I think,” she continued gently, “you need to ask yourself why you’re there.”

“You mean—you think he’s right? I shouldn’t have come up here unless I was prepared to put out?”

Therese’s voice popped back into my head: “
Yes, cunt! He’s
right! And you are a total whore! Your fault! Your fault! Your
fault! Hahahahahaaaa!
”

“No, I mean in a more cosmic sense. I think we get ourselves into things all on our own. Yeah, he’s a scumbag, or he’s fucked
up or, you know . . . has weird, archaic views of women. That’s him; that’s who he is. Most likely he won’t change; it’d be
like rerouting a river. Whatever. Forget about him for a sec. You are
there
. And you need to ask yourself why.”

I started to cry.

“So, it
is
my fault. I fucked it all up. Again . . .”

“Now come on, that’s just silly. There are no fuckups, Nance. Be better to yourself than that. All I’m sayin’ is you can use
this as an opportunity, a gift. You know? On a certain level, you knew what this was and what would happen. Yeah, you made
a deal with him, some kind of ‘contract’ or some kind of ‘out’ clause about what this week would be, but in the end,
you
went up there
. You made that decision. For yourself.”

“But why?” I wailed, wishing I could Jeannie-blink myself into Bridget’s lap. “What’s the reason?”

Bridget sighed. I heard her lighting a cigarette.

“I think it’s ’cause you don’t want to be alone. None of us do. And I think you need to be a bit more unapologetic about your
needs. I feel like your remorse over this is out of whack; you didn’t wanna fuck him. Even if you did and you changed your
mind—mid-fuck even—that would be your prerogative.”

“I told him, though, Bridgie. I did. It was a big thing, too: to say my feelings and be honest and tell him what I needed
and then—”

“Again, forget about him and what he did. Doesn’t matter. You beat yourself up for just expressing yourself. You’re so will-ing
to accept the crumbs, and then you berate yourself with ‘Oh! Maybe I took too much!’ Know what I mean?”

She was right. I sat there crying, listening to her smoke on the other end, Buddy Holly warbling in the background. A few
feet away from me, Ned’s truck seemed to have sunk even further into the mud. It was lopsided now, the front dipping lower
than the back.

“Nance?”

“Yeah. I’m just thinking.”

“ ’Bout what?”

“I was just remembering this time I went with my dad and brother and sister to visit my grandmother on Long Island.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It was a long trip—two hours or something—and on the way back, I had to pee, so I told my dad, ‘I think I need to pee,’ and
he goes, ‘Can you hold it?’ and I go, ‘Yeah.’ ”

“Mmmm-hmmm.”

“I really needed to pee, Bridgie. Bad. But I knew, I just knew the right answer. The answer he wanted was ‘Yeah, I can hold
it.’ But I couldn’t hold it. I ended up peeing all over myself, and all I could think was god I hope I didn’t get it on my
father’s car.”

Bridget sighed.

“I’m so sorry, Nance.”

“I must have been ten years old. Old enough not to be having accidents and peeing on myself.”

“But this wasn’t an accident. You knew what you needed, and you ignored it. And you know what, Nance?”

“What?”

“I think you might have a little pee on yourself right now, too.”

“I know. You are so right. So, now what do I do?”

“Go change.”

When Ned got back from his run, I told him I couldn’t stay and had called and made a plane reservation to fly home that night.
Ned agreed to drive me to the airport. But there were forces conspiring against me by now: the mud had reached biblical proportions.
We spent an hour in Ned’s driveway trying to steer the truck out of the mud, but it was hopeless; I was stuck. We called the
local mud puller-outers, but they refused to come, saying that the mud was too severe and that they wouldn’t be able to get
to Ned’s until the morning. The next morning, as we waited for them to come pull us out, I became frantic.

“Ned, I’ve got to get outta here. Please, I’m begging you. I’ve got to go!”

Ned got out of the truck and circled to the back, and I got behind the wheel, and somehow, after forty-five minutes, we were
out of Ned’s driveway and on our way to the airport. We drove in silence. After a while, Ned turned on the radio. The station
started playing “The Weight.”

I pulled into Nazareth, was feelin’ about half past dead;

I just need some place where I can lay my head.

“I’ve always loved this tune,” Ned said. He sang along softly, and I looked out the window at all the barren trees.

“Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed?”

He just grinned and shook my hand, and “No!” was all he said.

On the chorus, Ned turned to me.

“Do you know what this song is about?” he asked.

“Um . . . yeah. It’s about doing a favor for a friend. And about, you know, sharing the burden or ‘weight’ of responsibility.
Something like that.”

Ned nodded, then furrowed his brow, reflecting.

“Actually, it’s about a chick who gave a guy the clap.”

“What?”

“Supposedly,” he continued. “That was the rumor, anyway. That’s what ‘taking the load off Fannie’ means.”

I looked at him.

“Some chick gave some poor slob the clap,” he sighed mournfully, shaking his head. “Oh, well. It’s still a great song, huh?”

Well. It was quite an interpretation. That he
still
didn’t remember singing “The Weight” to me in his apartment all those years before blew my mind, but I just had to laugh.
Was it the pot that made him so hazy about the details of the past? Was it that, like a lot of people’s, his memory was selective?
Was it that he just didn’t give a shit? Was “The Weight” really about the clap? Did it matter? I decided, in that moment,
that no, it did not. What mattered was that I had learned to shoot a bullet through a quarter and I had made it out of the
mud.

4. The Debra Winger Thing

I used to
do a pretty impressive impersonation of Debra Winger.

During my NYU years, my friends and I used to hang out after rehearsals at this dive bar called Phebe’s on Fourth Street,
drinking warm beer and trying to outperform one another until dawn.

“Hey, Nance,” someone would snicker. “Do the Debra Winger Thing!”

Rising from the lopsided table with a flourish, I’d begin.

“Remember the scene in
An Officer and a Gentleman
when Richard Gere is being an asshole after he gets into a fight with those townies at the bar, and then he and Winger are
back at their motel room, and she’s trying to get him to ‘open up to her,’ and he gets all pissed and goes,

‘OK, what do you want? You wanna fuck? You wanna fuck? OK, take your clothes off, get on the bed, and I’ll give you a good
fuck.’

‘Where’s that comin’ from? You know somethin’, Zack? You ain’t nothin’ special. You treat women like whores, and if you ask
me, you ain’t got no chance bein’ no officer!’ ”

Then I’d act like I was Winger, all fucked up and upset, running out of the motel room. My friends thought it was a scream;
it always made them hysterical, no matter how many times they’d seen it, despite the fact that I always did it the exact same
way. As much as I enjoyed making them laugh, I never thought about it that much. To me, it was just a dopey little gag I would
do when people were drunk or stoned, occasionally trotting it out for an audition, like I had for
Remote Control
. But time moved on, and as my school days faded into the distance, so, too, did the Debra Winger Thing, becoming one of those
fun things I used to do—like tap dancing—that I no longer did, simply because no one ever asked.

Shortly after I turned twenty-eight, I was cast in an off-Broadway production of the Molière play
The Ridiculous Pré-cieuses
, at the Kaufman Theatre. The production was bankrolled by our leading lady, who happened to be an heiress of one of our country’s
great, philanthropic, robber baron families. She had Philip Morris as a backer, so in addition to our Equity minimum salaries,
the cast were offered as many packs of cigarettes as we could smoke a day. Undeterred by the homicidal innuendo, we all graciously
accepted the producers’ largesse.

I was thrilled to land this job, but the production was a mess. The Leading Lady, who had precious little acting experience,
could say her lines and walk across the stage, but never at the same time. The director was a willowy blond from L.A. with
fabulous clothes and scant directing credits. The Leading Lady and the director were best friends from college and loved each
other “like sisters.” Frequently, rehearsals were interrupted for various conflicts and tantrums, and the phrase “Fuck off,
bitch” was bandied about with far more conviction than any of Molière’s hilarious dialogue.

On one of these impromptu rehearsal breaks, I got to know Billy, who was to become one of my best friends. A squabble had
erupted over the pronunciation of the word “inexorable.”

“It’s ‘in-EX-orable!’ ” the director admonished.

“No, it’s ‘in-ex-OR-able!’ ” the Leading Lady insisted.

“Fuck off, bitch!”

“No,
you
fuck off, bitch!”

And the cast was dismissed for the better part of four hours.

Billy was a well-trained thespian from Texas who was living with Bobby Lewis, the theater legend who had been part of the
original Group Theatre and cofounded the Actors Studio. Billy had turned a two-week internship with Bobby into a full-time
domestic arrangement, wherein Billy saw to the substantial and constant needs of a cantankerous, partially deaf, eighty-year-old
theater director and gained entrée into the rapidly disappearing world of the New York stage in its heyday.

Billy introduced me to Robin, an agent at a big Hollywood firm, who would later coax me out to Los Angeles to meet casting
directors and audition for sitcoms. In nostalgic moments, Billy and I now refer to
The Ridiculous Précieuses
as the beginning of “our Lunt-Fontanne years.”

One night, my parents drove in from Connecticut to see the play. I met them afterward at Chez Josephine, a restaurant I adored
for its dramatic crystal chandeliers and crimson walls festooned with nude pictures of Josephine Baker. The proprietor was
one of Baker’s adopted sons, Jean-Claude, who had a penchant for the color red that extended even to his toenail polish. Billy
and I frequently went to Chez Josephine for post-show drinks, so Jean-Claude made a big deal when he saw me, sweetly seating
us under one of my favorite topless pictures of his mom.

“Well, that was just
brutal
,” my father said after our entrées had arrived and the piano player had begun a Kander and Ebb medley.

“Aren’t you ashamed to be in this piece of shit? Aren’t you just
humiliated
? These people are so
god-awe-ful
, and as usual, I didn’t
undah-stand
what anyone was sayin’. What can come of this? I mean, really—what? You seem like a
lose-ah
working with such people. Seriously.”

My mother sat mutely sipping her Scotch sour on the rocks, turned toward the window looking onto Forty-second Street, as if
she’d forgotten something a long time ago.

I stared into my plate of Spaghetti Josephine, searching for meaning in the swirls of orange-mottled angel hair and flecks
of Bolognese, but found only a face that looked a lot like an Ed-vard Munch painting.

I tried to explain that a life in the theater was a process; it was hard work, and really, I didn’t think it was my place
to judge this production—or any of the cast and crew—since I was trying to accumulate credits and gain experience. I told
him that “work begets work,” and that invariably I would get parts because someone saw me in something, and even if it was
something bad, it would lead to me getting hired for another something. I told him that I felt lucky that they’d hired me.

Admittedly, the play was a colossal disaster, and everyone knew it. In an effort to micromanage the response of people who’d
sat through ninety minutes of abuse, the director and the Leading Lady made the ushers hand out roses for the audience to
toss out toward the cast during our curtain call. And yet, I loved it. I knew it sucked royally, but I loved it all the same.
How could I not? I was
in New York. Acting onstage. With
Billy.

“And anyway,” I told my father, with as much sangfroid as possible, “I met an agent from doing this crappy thing, and she
wants me to come out to L.A. for a week. So, see? You just never know. Just like Mamet said, it’s the old poker adage ‘You
can’t win if you don’t play.’ ”

“Ugh, Mamet,” my father waved me off and signaled for the check. “Christ, this Mamet’s a real
beaut
, lemme tell ya. If he’s so great, how come he doesn’t give you a goddamn job? Poker, he’s teaching her. Maybe he’d like to
pay y’rent?”

I got home that night and sat on the floor in my underwear, staring at myself in front of the full-length mirror attached
to my bedroom closet door, crying and smoking my free cigarettes.

At three A.M., as I was dozing off, the phone rang. It was my old friend Sam, now a cast member on
Saturday Night Live
.

“Hey, Goofy, you still doin’ the Debra Winger Thing? I want you to do it right now, over the phone for Phil Hartman. NBC’s
giving him a deal to do his own show, and I told him you should be the chick. ’Kay, ready?”

“Uh . . . yeah, I’m . . . yeah.”

“Phil, pick up.”

So, I did it over the phone for Phil Hartman.

“Nancy, what would you say if I told you I might have a job that will change your life?”

“I’d say, ‘Oh my god, I’ve been waiting my whole life for someone to say that to me.’ ”

“Can you meet me here on Saturday at two?”

I arrived at the appointed time and was whisked via elevator to Studio 8-H. The place looked like it hadn’t been refurbished
since the seventies, when the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players first stumbled in. It was actually my third time at
the fabled studio. The first was six years before with my friend Jane, rehearsing bit parts that would never make it to air;
a couple years later, I was there with the Jazz Musician, when the band he was in was the musical guest. Both times I felt
merely peripheral, incidental—would this time be the charm?

Phil met me and took me to his dressing room. I did the Debra Winger Thing for him in person, and over the next hour he had
me improvise some others.

“You’re a voice actor, like me! This is great!”

He explained that the network had given him a development deal and that he’d originally wanted Jan Hooks to do the show with
him, but she didn’t want to leave New York, and the show was to shoot in Los Angeles.

“Sam suggested you, and for Sam to suggest any girl for
anything
. . .” Phil laughed. “Well, I suppose we all know what a big deal that is, right?”

It was true: Sam, like most of the male comics I knew, hated “comedy chicks.” Whenever I made him laugh, he’d look at me with
amazement and say, “Holy shit! You’re
funny
! And chicks are just not funny,
ever
. . .”

At the end of my meeting with Phil, he walked me over to Sam’s dressing room.

“I’m going to need you to meet some people. How can I get a hold of you? Your agent?”

For the first time that day I felt nervous. How could I tell Phil, who was in a froth over how “terrific” I was, about my
pathetic representation situation? While technically I
did
have an agent, she was a malevolent troll named Sandy, who worked out of her mother’s apartment on the Upper West Side and
who, after signing me when I’d gotten out of school, had never spoken to me again, except to inform me one afternoon that
the casting director of
One Life to Live
had said I wasn’t pretty enough to be “soapy.”

In a burst of moxie, I told Phil I was actually trying to get out of my contract with my agent because I couldn’t trust her.

“I just . . . see, the thing is . . . I don’t want you to call me there, ’cause if I end up on your show, I’ll be bound to
her for years. Know what I mean?”

Phil nodded sympathetically.

“I know
exactly
. I had an agent like that, and to this day, I’m still paying them. It sucks. Don’t you worry.” He put his arm around me and
gave my shoulder an avuncular squeeze. “I’ll just call you at home. OK?” He hugged me. “Good-bye for now. I really look forward
to working with you.” He smiled at me, his eyes crinkling sweetly.

I spent the rest of the day hanging out with Sam and some of the other guys on the show. From what I gathered, there seemed
to be quite a bit of unrest at
SNL
because the “boys” were not getting along with one of the girls who’d recently been hired. The atmosphere was warlike. The
girl in question was a terrifically talented comic who maintained that the vibe over at
SNL
was at best childish and at worst completely misogynistic. She frequently made negative comments to the press about the show’s
poorly written material and sexist energy, the ongoing grievance of
SNL
women during the pre-Fey years. Sam and the rest of the boys insisted it was her own fault; she was “bitter,” they said, “angry”
and ultimately self-sabotaging.

From time to time, I would zone out during their gripes about their castmate or their assorted scatological bits and marvel
to myself about how uncomplicated they were. Just doggies that wanted a cuddle and a cookie. No challenges, no complications,
no fuss, no muss. “You’re fun,” they told me repeatedly, and I certainly was, smiling and flirting, laughing at all their
jokes, an Auntie Tom, gamely going along with their gags and, to their surprise and delight, even adding some quips of my
own. I was reminded of my father, who, though he adored that I had a mouth on me—goaded and encouraged it, in fact—never for
a moment would have tolerated that same mouth used in any way against him. Throughout my childhood, he enjoyed me as his pal,
guffawing on cue at the hilarity of my in-your-face antics, my rants and cutting observations, but always cautioning that,
lest I think otherwise, dear Dad was surely unique in his appreciation; not all men would be so amused.

“Men don’t like brawds who break their balls” was the pithy explanation, the neat little wrap-up that concluded our most uproarious
exchanges, and I would come to view my father’s oft-repeated assertion as a benediction of sorts, delivered absently but nonetheless
pointedly from the cozy comfort of his La-Z-Boy recliner while he watched sports on TV. For many years, the scene played out
exactly the same: me yammering about this or that, my father laughing and egging me on, until the moment came when, before
turning his attention back to the TV, he would pause to reflect on his cheeky daughter with her big mouth, doomed to a lonely
life of ball breaking. Our laughter would wane, turning soon to slow, irregular chuckles, until all that was left after a
few audible sighs was the din of whistles and cheers and fans in stadiums beneath overcast skies.

Sitting in Sam’s
SNL
dressing room that day, I hovered betwixt a sense of smug satisfaction that they all seemed to feel their balls were safe
with me and, at the same time, exhaustion, as though I were carrying a building’s worth of disloyalty to my gender.

And as the yukking it up reached a fever pitch, I psychically floated down the hall to the Angry Girl’s dressing room and
tried to imagine what it looked like inside.

At some point that afternoon, one of the boys got the idea to run up and tell Lorne Michaels that there was a chick there
whom they actually
liked
, and by the way, she did a smokin’ impersonation of Debra Winger. Before I left that day, I had a meeting set up for that
Monday with Dan,
SNL
’s head talent coordinator.

By Sunday, I was in a full-blown panic. “This is insane—what will I even
do
?” I freaked out over the phone to Sam. “They’re gonna want to see an
act
! I don’t have an
act
! I’m not a comic; I only really have this ONE impersonation!”