Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent (5 page)

“You can say that again,” Sue interjected.

“But for now, just allow yourselves to be informed by the power of a full-on rock band.” He smiled. “Okay, Tim, whenever you’re ready.”

“Oh,
sure,” Tim said, clearly excited. “Let’s start off with ‘Rent,’ shall we?” He bobbed his head up and down for a few counts, setting the tempo for himself, his whole body getting into it, and then, whipping his arms in rhythm, he called out, “A two three
four
!”

The explosive racket of the drums and guitar electrified the stage, and the entire cast looked around in amazement at one another, surprised and driven by the song’s blazing kick. This didn’t sound
anything
like Jonathan’s demo tapes; this
rocked.
I suddenly began to worry whether my voice was jagged enough for this kind of music—singing these songs with just a piano was way different from singing them now. But I dove in, and did my best to bring out the edge in my voice. I could barely hear myself over the din of the music, but it didn’t matter; I was too excited, feeling too much like a rock star, to care. During the guitar solo, I glanced over at Jonathan, who was beaming as he stood in the middle of the auditorium, awash in the huge, gorgeous clamor he’d created.

At the end of the number, we all whooped and cheered and applauded like crazy. My excitement shot to a new level, and the lift in everyone’s adrenaline and spirit was palpable. Tim deferred all of our hollering—with a wave of his arms and vigorous pointing—to his band members, who looked overwhelmed and shocked that we were so psyched, but applauded right back at us, shyly grinning.

One of the joys of tech rehearsals is that it’s the only time actors can sit out in the house and watch their fellow cast members’ work from the audience’s perspective. I took advantage of it every chance I got, which wasn’t a lot because I was onstage during most of the show. But I did get to sit, captivated, and watch Daphne Rubin-Vega as Mimi cavort around the stage in her power-pop anthem, “Out Tonight,” trying on and throwing off outfit after outfit like some coked-up runway model, blaring and growling out lines like,
“I’ve got an itch to be a bitch / I need to laugh like a child,”
each phrase full of fire and sex and abandon. I’d had no idea from the bits of her performance I’d seen in the rehearsal room that she was such a power-house. And she was
tiny
offstage, maybe five-four, but onstage she could have been six-four, there was that much energy and intensity blasting out of her.

I also sat out in the house, with the rest of the company, to watch Sarah’s hilarious performance piece, “Over the Moon,” for the first time. Accompanying herself on the cello, she deadpanned a pitch-perfect send-up of pretentious performance artists, complete with sudden fits of screaming that transformed instantly into robotic calm, non sequiturs galore, and the surprise bonus of several full-throated, manic “moooooooooooooos” to finish it all off. We all laughed like crazy during the piece, and then hooted and whistled and clapped for her when she was done.

On the night of our first performance, in the midst of all of the preshow backstage bustle, Michael thrust a piece of paper into my hands. “Do you mind reading this when you go on tonight?” he asked.

“Um, no,” I replied. “What is it?”

“I just felt like we needed to set the scene a little bit. Let everyone in on the fact that we know it’s just a workshop.”

I glanced at the paper, skimming it. Lines like, “In the real production, there’ll be lots of dancing, but we didn’t have time for that this time around,” jumped out at me.

“It’s fun,” I said, flattered to be asked to be the spokesman.

“Good. I’m glad you think so. Have a good show.”

“Thanks.” Michael went off to make his rounds, and I turned to my dressing room table to find that several cards had been placed there. One, a postcard, featured the campy black-and-white photograph of a young, bespectacled, exasperated man, his hair a mess, holding two silver film canisters, out of which the film had exploded, wrapping itself all around him, hanging off his neck and arms. On the reverse was the inscription,
“Your Mark is great. Especially in ‘Goodbye Love.’ Love, Jonathan.”
I smiled to myself and placed the card in front of my mirror, making a mental note to thank him for it later.

The audience response during our ten-performance run varied from mildly respectful to extremely vocal and enthusiastic, and by the end of the run we were standing room only. The responses from my friends who were able to make it were mostly positive but occasionally critical; my agent, Paul, felt that the second act got too sentimental, but he loved the first act, while my friend Jay was completely blown away by the whole thing.

“I
loved
it,” he gushed after the show, giving me a huge, warm hug in the back of the theatre. “Oh my god, it was incredible. Can I meet the guy who wrote it? He’s a genius. I swear to god.”

“Sure,” I said, tickled by Jay’s almost breathless glee. I brought him over to where Jonathan was receiving admirers and introduced him.

“Thank you so much for writing this,” my friend said, pumping Jonathan’s hand vigorously.

“You’re welcome.”

“How did you do it? It’s amazing.”

Jonathan shrugged, his grin sheepish and pleased. “I don’t know. I just…wrote it.”

“Well, it blew me away.” I had never seen Jay so focused and hyped up. “Really. Totally.”

“Thank you,” Jonathan said, glancing at me with a grin. He then turned to meet another fan who was tapping him on the shoulder.

I escorted Jay out of the theatre, into the balmy, clear autumn night air and down East Fourth Street. He continued his gushing, and even started to sing bits and pieces of songs from the show.

“I love that theme—
‘And it’s beginning to snow,’”
he trilled. “What a great melody. The whole show was great. I can’t say it enough.”

I couldn’t help but smile; Jay’s joy was so infectious, I felt like I was breathing it in. I had done many shows in New York, but it had been a few years since one had engendered such an undeniably exuberant response. I was proud and happy to be a part of this show for so many reasons, and I very much didn’t want it to end.

I
n November, right after
Rent
closed, my mom’s father, Grandpa Baird, died. He’d been ill for a while, living, mostly bedridden, at home with Grandma Baird. I hadn’t seen or talked to either of them in almost a year, but I had sent him a card a couple of months before his death, surprising myself; sending cards and letters was something I wasn’t normally good about doing.
Dear Grandpa,
I’d written,
I wanted to wish you well and tell you I’m thinking about you. Love, Anthony.
It wasn’t much, and I didn’t know whether he was even cognizant enough to read it, or to understand it if it was read to him, but when Mom told me he’d died I was glad to have sent it.

Grandpa Baird had been a tiny man with big, sad eyes, a thatch of thick, close-cropped gray hair, and a perpetual salt-and-pepper bristle on his wrinkled cheeks. He’d always sat folded into himself at the corner of his and Grandma’s huge dining room table when we visited their old house in Manteno, Illinois. He’d only speak to me when I spoke to him first, and with what seemed like a great deal of effort, his lips faintly trembling as they formed wavering words, his eyes roaming around or cast downward or occasionally meeting mine. Grandpa Baird had never read me bedtime stories when I was a kid or taken me to the zoo or told me jokes or ruffled my hair or pretended to discover quarters behind my ears or hugged me or told me he loved me. He had never been cruel to me either; he had just been a vaguely sweet, mostly silent, half-presence in the background of my life.

The only time we’d ever been alone together was in December of 1986 when I was fifteen and he spent two weeks with me as my guardian in Toronto while I rehearsed
Adventures in Babysitting.
He’d go with me to the rehearsal hall, sit and wait for me all day, and then shuffle silently through the snowy streets behind me as I impatiently slowed my pace, wishing I could be alone in the city so I could shop for CDs or see movies or play video games or simply explore Toronto and not have to worry about him. “What do you want to do, Grandpa?” I’d ask, and he’d reply in his barely audible, nasal, singsong voice, “Oh, I don’t know.” So we’d pretty much do nothing, or I’d go out and leave him in the hotel room by himself.

My mother told me later that he’d had a wonderful time. “He really enjoyed himself,” she said.

“Really?”

“Yes. He thinks you’re very sweet.”

I didn’t know what had given him that impression; I hadn’t really treated him with much kindness during his visit.

Grandpa’s dying meant that there would be a funeral, and that meant the Baird clan would assemble, which was always an epic undertaking: Grandma and Grandpa had produced thirteen children (twelve of them still living), who in turn had five spouses remaining among them (the rest having disappeared due to death or, like my father, divorce), and eighteen of their own children.

Mom was the eldest sibling. She could name all of her brothers and sisters in one breath, ticking them off with her fingers: “Tony-dianachrisrobertasheilajuliejoeamygraciakatrinalucieroman,” she’d say, her voice calm and sweet and monotone, never betraying that some of them drove her crazy, or that she barely talked to others, or that, conversely, her sister Roberta was one of her closest friends.

Tony, her first brother, had died as an infant in his crib, from what was probably Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. “I sometimes think that’s why Mom had so many kids,” my mother said once. “Because Tony died. She just kept trying to replace him.” That made sense, but I guessed Grandma’s staunch Old World Catholicism had a lot to do with it, too.

Whenever I was around Grandma, images from the stories Mom had told me since I was an adolescent, about her experiences growing up, echoed through my mind like phantoms: Grandma grabbing my mother by the hair and banging her head against the wall while screaming at her, “I wish you were never born!” Grandma hitting my mother over the head with her hands and fists and brushes and hangers and pots and pans. Grandma telling my mother she was ugly and stupid and nasty. Grandma running away on several different occasions with whoever was the youngest baby, only to be found each time sitting in the same spot on a cliff at the local quarry, clutching her baby to her chest, weeping uncontrollably, threatening to jump. Grandma choking and shaking her youngest child, Roman, when he was a baby, because he wouldn’t stop crying, almost killing him, until Grandpa was finally able to yank him away from her. Grandma following these episodes by holing herself up in her room for days on end, refusing food, leaving my mother to run the household and take care of all of her brothers and sisters.

I had never witnessed Grandma’s violence—or even much of her temper—when we visited the old Manteno house, but I feared her all the same; I always imagined I could see something sinister in her open, pleasant, enthusiastic, frequent smiles. She was both vocally and physically more formidable than Grandpa, her strident voice and its throaty chuckles bouncing all around the house no matter what room she was in. Usually it’d be the tiny family room, where she’d plant herself in her oversized, cushioned rocking chair and hold forth, her eyes bright and clear and her strong jaw, broad shoulders, and large hands emblematic of the German heritage of which she was so proud. It seemed that the many years of struggles involved in managing such a large and troubled family had squashed Grandpa down while they had fortified Grandma. In fact, sometimes she could be downright jolly, and she was unusually lucid, not to mention hardy, for a woman her age.

“Has she still not ever acknowledged anything about the way she treated you?” I asked my mother from time to time.

“No,” Mom always replied. “Never. She says she doesn’t remember it that way at all.”

Mom had pledged on more than one occasion to never treat my sister, my brother, and me the way Grandma had treated her, and except for a rare loss of composure when one of us was particularly ornery or sassy or obnoxious, she had kept her word remarkably well. I had always admired her for that, since I’d heard that very often children of abusers turned into abusers themselves. But not Mom.

The morning of Grandpa’s funeral, Adam and I flew into Midway, the low-budget, smaller airport in Chicago, on a cheap airline, and shared a cheap limo straight to the funeral home, an hour away in Kankakee. We planned on zooming in and out of town; neither of us relished the thought of spending more than the minimal required time with Mom’s family.

As we pulled in, there they all were, milling around the parking lot of the funeral home. Well, all but one: Julie, the seventh child of the clan, had fled to a Jesus cult in Vermont almost twenty years earlier and had lived there ever since. I remembered her only from a picture taken shortly before her getaway: a close-up of her grinning a sparkling, closed-mouth grin right into the camera, her face uplifted and triumphant and mischievous.

“Oh boy,” Adam grumbled as we came to a stop. “Here we go.” I chuckled and emerged into the bright, clear, breezy Indian summer morning, straightening my suit and steeling myself for the onslaught of our preadolescent male cousins, who were already crowding around the limo.

“Hey, guys,” Adam muttered to them as he crawled out. “What’s up?” Nathaniel and Matthew and Chris and Eric all played it as cool as ever, barely suppressing what I took to be their excitement at being around us, their older, exotic, New Yorker cousins. Adam casually slapped them all five, looking down on them from his towering, six-foot-three height, then scanned the horizon stoically, his jaw clenched. I greeted them with a wave and a hello, lacking, as usual, the offhand, austere style of my older brother, and feeling small and weak next to his bulky, athletic frame. Around these kids, I felt like a weirdo, interesting to them only because I was a teeny bit famous for having acted in
Adventures in Babysitting.
Adam was the much hipper, much more macho, much more compelling basketball star; they probably had no idea that he also had a career as a published novelist and burgeoning playwright.

Suddenly, the tiny, loose-limbed, explosively energetic, seven-year-old Rachel was sprinting toward us. “Anthoneeeeeee!” she cried. “Aaaaaaadam!” She leaped into my arms, tightly wrapping herself around me, giggling like crazy.

“Hi, Rachel,” I said, also laughing. I squeezed her to me. “How are you doing?”

“Fine,” she said, matter-of-fact as ever, and abruptly leaped down and lunged at Adam, who deftly deflected her by crouching down low enough to half hug her, his large hand patting her back.

“Hey, Rachel,” he said. “Good to see you.”

Rachel was technically our cousin, the little sister of Nathaniel and Matthew and the daughter of Lucie, Mom’s youngest sister. But six years earlier, during my senior year of high school, she had become our little sister. Right after Rachel was born, Lucie’s husband left her, and, since Lucie was out of work and in need of both emotional and financial support, Mom took Lucie and her three children in. It wasn’t the first time Mom had helped out a sibling in such a way; in fact, she was famous in her family for offering endless amounts of support to whoever needed it. So for the next several months, Lucie and her kids lived with us, sleeping in the damp and chilly concrete basement of our small condominium, filling the house with chatter and fights and toys and a seemingly endless supply of crises large and small. I simply couldn’t wait for them to move out and return some semblance of peace to the house.

“How much longer are they going to be here?” I’d whine to my mom.

“She’s my sister, Anthony,” she’d say. “They’ll be gone soon. Just try to be patient.”

Finally, Lucie got enough money together, and enough confidence, to move out on her own, to a small apartment a few minutes away. When she left, she took the boys with her but left Rachel behind; Lucie had agreed to allow Mom to continue to raise Rachel and become her foster mother. I couldn’t believe that Mom was going to raise another child at her age—she was forty-six at the time, and had a full-time nursing job. On the other hand, her decision made some sense to me: the eldest of thirteen, she had raised children her whole life, and I was about ready to move out of the house, so why should she stop now?

Even though I questioned Mom’s wisdom, I knew how loving and supportive she was going to be, and I also knew how insane and chaotic Rachel’s life with Lucie and her two troublemaker brothers would have been. Matthew, the younger of the two, was especially diabolical: his beautiful, huge, ice-blue eyes, pale, prolifically freckled skin, and dark black hair and eyelashes reminded me of the young actor who had played Damien in
The Omen,
a movie that had given me many vivid nightmares as a child. When Lucie admonished Matthew for hitting Nathaniel or teasing Rachel or talking back to my mom, he never seemed remorseful or cowed; he usually just laughed or stared his mom down with cold fury, his lower lip jutting out, his arms folded, and spat out to her in his shrill whine, “You’re
stupid
! I
hate
you!” Nathaniel, however, cried and sobbed copious, deeply tormented, repentant wails when he got in trouble, his chubby face contorting and turning various shades of magenta as he frantically paced around the living room, alternately clutching at his stomach or waving his arms as if he were on fire. While melodramatic, these displays of his conscience, of his little boy’s heart breaking wide open, forever endeared him to me and gave me some hope for his future; Matthew was already a lost cause.

Unlike her brothers, Rachel was a happy baby, adorable and active and sweet, her crystal-blue eyes alight and eager, her smile infectious and almost constant. She found out early on in her childhood the truth of whose child she was (I was already out of the house by then), but decided to continue calling my mother “Mom” and her mom “Lucie.” I didn’t know if this was all going to confuse her later in life, but for now, she seemed perfectly at ease with it, and with the idea that Anne, Adam, and I were as much her siblings as Nathaniel and Matthew were. Having been the baby of my family before Rachel came along, I relished my role as her older brother, showering her with attention and love whenever I was around her.

“Hi, boys.”

I looked around to see Mom walking up to us. I searched her pale, soft face for some signs of grief, but didn’t really find any, and gave her a hug.

“Hi, Momma.” She was a few inches shorter than I, and skinny, and her hugs were never firm—she wasn’t strong enough to squeeze tightly—but they were always warm and open. Her large, comforting hands subtly pulsed into my back.

“Hey, Mom,” Adam said when we broke apart, stooping down to her for his customary half-hug, which she met on tiptoe.

“So you guys made it,” she said after their hug. “How was the flight?”

“Fine,” I said.

“That’s good.”

A silent moment passed. I thought about saying something about Grandpa to Mom.
I’m sorry for your loss?
Too formal.
It’s a shame, isn’t it?
Same thing, only worse. She was my mom, not some stranger. Even though she and her dad weren’t close, she must have been feeling sad about his death. I stared at the ground, and then Rachel suddenly broke the silence by clutching my hand tightly, spinning around on her heel, and flailing her free arm as if she were a spastic, errant, one-winged bird.

“Rachel, honey,” Mom said, “calm down. We’re going to go inside now, and I need you to behave, okay?”