Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir (10 page)

Who could say no?

I started being in productions from the beginning. The theater department was under a professor named Ralph Arzoomanian. (His real name is Raffi, and we remain friends to this day.) The son of Armenian immigrants, having grown up in Rhode Island, he was the most colorful guy I ever met. Period. But not only was he vibrant; he was a fucking genius and an amazing teacher. I took every fucking class he taught in college. He had this incredible way of taking us from discussions of the Greeks all the way to Sam Beckett. The way Ralph taught the class, there was no fat on the bone. Every single playwright he chose to explore exemplified a movement, an epoch, an era. I diligently studied the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and some of the Roman playwrights, followed by Shakespeare, Molière, Racine, and then Ibsen, Chekhov, and Bertolt Brecht—so by the time I was finished, I had really absorbed the entire history of the genius of theatrical literature. I knew the Aristotelian definition of tragedy and comedy and why Shakespeare got the joke better than any of ’em. I walked away knowing the effect all these geniuses had on the pages of theatrical literature and why theater offered such a profound understanding of the human condition, equally important as the philosophy of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant, Freud, Jung—you name it. Fuck, Sam Beckett alone encapsulated to poetry the useless, tragic,
funny, mysterious morass we call life as much as fifteen Einsteins did for physics.

All this genius was wrapped up into four years and presented by what can only be described as the Damon Runyon of Ivy League. Ralph came from the seedier streets of Providence, Rhode Island, one of the toughest towns on the eastern seaboard. His folks had nothing but pride and a great work ethic to pass down. Once he discovered his love for the theater, he managed to get himself a first-class education, ending up in the famed writer’s workshop at the University of Iowa along with Vonnegut, Edward Albee, and a couple of other guys you might not have heard of. Anyway, to say the least, he knew his shit. His teaching style, however . . .

Every other word out of Ralph’s mouth was fuck. Or motherfuck. Or cocksucker. Fuck you, you cocksuckin’ muthafucka, what the fuck . . . well, you get the idea. Whereas every other professor was wearing the herringbone jacket with the leather patches on the sleeve, Ralph’s uniform consisted of Levi’s, white converse sneakers, a white T-shirt in spring (a long-sleeve sports shirt in the colder months), and a set of binoculars that hung around his neck. The binoculars were there ’cuz every day, the minute his teaching duties were done, he bolted to either Aqueduct or Belmont racetracks to catch as much of the afternoon card as he could. Ralph was an itinerant, degenerate horseplayer, and a damn fine handicapper at that, a rather complex skill, which he tried to pass on to me. But alas, anything requiring even the slightest of math skills, and I was hopeless. I did enjoy accompanying him to the track, though. He always sat in the most expensive part of the clubhouse and only bet long shots, which made for as much excitement as one could bear. “Fuck it,” he’d say. “I like to play the fuckin’ horses!” Hey, who was I to fuckin’ argue?!

I really wanted to get into his head because this fucking guy was brilliant, a bona fide iconoclast. He was completely different from anybody. He rubbed the whole staff the wrong way. He made everyone uneasy, ’cuz in a world where people were trying to curry favor to further
their careers, Ralph thumbed his nose at all pretense, thus symbolizing the hypocrisy of it all—fearlessly, to make things worse.

I’m at the point now at which my position as an actor is very, very different. My enthusiasm to be an actor and the motivation behind it is more in line with my devotion to the literature of it and the nature of storytelling, as opposed to what started it all: the high of performing it. Storytelling started from the time we could speak. The earliest of humankind gathered in damp caves to tell stories of their lives. It’s apparently a genetic need we have as a species to tell and hear stories. That’s what it’s about for me now. It’s as much about why we need it, why we make films and tell stories, as it is an essential means of reasserting our humanity. That’s what it’s evolved into for me, and it all started with this guy who I met in college, this Arzoomanian, this chance meeting that turned into something profoundly divine!

I had a great first year of school. As a freshman in college, though, I remember thinking,
Damn, girls are actually looking at me in a different way
. Who knows, maybe this was my Detroit, my new beginning, in my new skinny jeans. I soon met Linda, my first steady girlfriend. We went the whole sixties route together: we shacked up, lived together, set up house, and had a dog and three cats in a little apartment in the Bronx. I met her because she was designing costumes for the school plays, so when, one day—it mighta been around the same time she was measuring my inseam—we suddenly clicked. And that was that.

That first year I acted in two plays during the first semester and another two in the second. Ralph always directed one of the four because there were three or four other theater professors, each doing one. But what I quickly learned from Ralph was that acting was not just about getting my jollies off and digging audience applause. I developed a different perspective, one of “Holy shit! I get to act out the character created by these genius playwrights.” The great ones created a reality that moved us, instructed us. They hit the bull’s eye that all
great art achieves. If something appeals to our collective consciousness—the things we have in common as humans, the same thing that joined us going back to the cavemen sitting around the fires telling tales—then it’s a hit, a marvel, a work of art appreciated by all. What nobler thing could you do on this planet than participate in anything that tries to perform so realistically that it touches the nerve of all who witness it? If high school was the awakening to the magical element of the theater, then college and, in particular, Ralph gave it depth, gravitas, universality.

That year I was cast as the lead, Sky Masterson, in a production of
Guys and Dolls
. I remember it was on a Thursday, the opening night, when my whole family came to see it. Afterward they gave me the typical family “atta boy” kudos, which I was pleased to get. But the next night, as I’m leaving the theater, I see my dad standing in the alley near the backstage door.

I said, “Pops, what are you doing here? I’m really sorry but I was planning on going out tonight with a bunch of the cast.”

“No,” he said, “I’m not here for that. You go out with your friends. I just came by to check something out. Go have some fun, I’ll see ya back at the house.” And then he split. I didn’t know what he meant “check something out” until the next day, when we were in the car together, and he lowered the radio.

“You know, kid, you gotta do this.”

“I gotta do what?”

“This acting thing. You got no choice. You gotta do this! You got this thing that only some get. It ain’t like you
should
do this—you
gotta
! So don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise!”

He then turned the radio back up. But in that moment it was like a wax seal on a document. My father gave me permission—permission to follow my goal, to perform. And don’t think for a minute there weren’t times when the universe was more than giving me signals to chuck the shit. Don’t think I wouldn’t get tested down to the very core. Don’t think when the bank account was on empty and the phone hadn’t rung in two years I didn’t think to say, “Fuck this, old man, and
your fucking advice! This is nuts!” But I never did. ’Cuz when my dad said those words he had a look about him. That order was sacrosanct. In fact, it wasn’t an order at all . . . it was a blessing. And within a few months, just like that, he was gone. As if it was some holy, sacred deathbed wish. Give the shit up? Sheeeeeeit!

During the first year Ralph found that he happened to get a good bunch of us kids in the troupe who wanted more than what the school was willing to give. He started to bring in some of his downtown friends, some of his ex-real theater-type people. He brought in a guy named Arlen Digitale, a hopeful downtown director who was always on the cusp of big things but needed to subsidize his income with a little light teaching. Arlen saw without looking too hard that my passion for the stage was more than a passing college tryst. So he hooked me up the following summer with a PA gig working with some real players on some new plays they were trying out of town. As soon as classes were over in June I started hanging with this theater troupe as they rehearsed in the Village before taking it to the Provincetown Playhouse.

I’d never really hung out in the village. I was a Washington Heights and Bronx kid. But suddenly I’m downtown for the first time, hanging out on Bleecker Street, right in the middle of where the whole Beat generation was converging. I started meeting all these people who are like Actor’s Studio people, who were really poor but really starry eyed and totally into what they were doing. I started to get exposed to this horrific life—these people had nothing but holes in their shirts and sweaters and were struggling to put spare change together to pay the rent, but they were doing it—and suddenly I wanted to be a part of this special breed more than anything else. We ultimately went up to the Provincetown playhouse and then down to Stockbridge to mount these two brand-new plays by up-and-coming writers.

It was the biggest, best party I ever went to and a summer that could never be duplicated. Here I am in Provincetown, Massachusetts, right on the fuckin’ beach. I mean suckers saved up all fuckin’ year to spend two measly weeks vacationing on that beach we’ve taken over for free. And I got every fuckin’ Actors Studio muthafucka who’s right
on the cusp of greatness comin’ up from NYC for a few free days on the beach to get out of the hot, smelly city—and whatever free weed they could inhale. We even rented fishing boats when nobody had a dime to his name. (How we pulled that one off remains a mystery to this day.) I went tuna fishing with no rods or reels with actors Lane Smith and Jamie Sanchez, with Lane, the country boy, leaning over the rail of the bow, calling out, “Tuuuuunaaaaaa,” coaxing the fish to jump in the boat the way he’d call pigs into a barn. It was crazy. It was simply the best time. Then we moved down to Stockbridge, rubbing elbows with Eugene Ionesco, who was there for the world premiere of his newest masterwork. I’m chillin’ with William Penn because it was his hometown and he was . . . well, we were all just totally chillin’. And then, sure enough, one day I’m walkin’ out of the famed Alice’s Restaurant having had lunch, and what do I see—my girlfriend, Linda, and my cousin Kenny, together. And I go, “What the fuck? . . .”

Didja hear about the optometrist who fell into the lens-grinding machine and made a spectacle of himself?!

—Bert Perlman, 1919–1969

(CHAPTER 5)

Forever-ness

The week of my dad’s funeral, or the traditional weeklong Shiva that Jews “sit” after a death, as I mentioned earlier, is when you bring out all the photos of family life. It was a week of intense polarities, part of me wanted to crawl into a dark cave and just listen as my inner voices struggled to find direction; but the part of me that knew better knew my Mom needed me. And with my brother also having moved out years earlier, I wanted to make sure she was okay. It was the kind of challenge I had never experienced before, with no one there but myself to orchestrate how each moment of the day would go. And all the while the struggle with the eeriness of it provided me with just enough activity so as to prevent me from dwelling on the obvious; the apartment was silent, no music, no dad. The smell of dad’s old clothes mixed with the souring fragrances of all the flowers that had been sent during the Shiva. It was just on the verge of being too much.

That week you bring out all the photos of family life. My childhood was wedged into these plastic album pages and in shoeboxes filled with Kodak three-by-fives or older black-and-whites, the ancient-looking, sepia-colored kind with those wavy corrugated edges. But like all photos, there’s a long list of events and unbelievable coincidental situations that led up to the moment when you stood still and said, “cheese!”
That’s what I was looking at—the unseen area and space that no photo can ever really capture. For me, it seemed like I was prematurely urged to start to piece together everything. I had to—my old man had just died, and I knew it was my duty to take the reins, like the heroes in the Westerns my dad and I loved to watch. I was gonna need every bit of the strength and manliness I saw in those movies we watched together, especially now that we lost our lead actor. I was gonna be the one who leapt onto the team of runaway horses to
whoa
them down in order to bring some stability to this rocking stagecoach of our family life.

We didn’t have hundreds of people show up that week. To the world, it wasn’t like losing a head of state, even if to me it was more paramount than that. It was a very small, intimate group, as I mentioned: family members, neighbors, my mom’s coworkers from the county clerk’s office, and my dad’s peers, who were then mostly TV repair guys and fellow teachers. By that time my dad had long hung up the dream of being a professional musician, and I had never met the people from that era. He had been a TV repairman ever since my brother and I were young kids. In the last days he taught television electronics in a vocational high school, the kind of school where they sent kids unable to make it anywhere else, already deemed longshots and marginalized, pigeonholed to either learning a trade or becoming career criminals. In those days those schools were one step away from being sent to a locked-down reform school. He used to tell his class straight up, “This is like the last-chance saloon, you know what I mean? You don’t make it here, you ain’t going to make it anywhere.”