Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir (12 page)

Initially I simply ignored the accumulating tickets, but I then began to see the seriousness of the results of my double-parking ways. In my mind, I was basically a fugitive from the law because of fucking parking tickets. There was not a moving violation among the lot. No speeding tickets, no plowing through red lights, nothing as sexy as that—just double parking. I felt like Al Capone when they got him for tax evasion. At the end of senior year I started to wonder how I was going to address this snag. Everybody in my troupe was figuring out what their next move was going to be once June came around and our college days of having that safety net was about to be pulled out from under us. You graduate from college; it’s time to make the move. Being a scofflaw in the biggest city in the world—and with me smoking copious amounts of weed—I got a little paranoid. I saw myself being carted off to county jail, and I never took myself for a guy who’d do well in prison. I always liked tossing my own salads.

The decision to go to graduate school was sealed by the parking ticket dilemma and was fueled by me wondering if I was indeed ready to jump off the cliff. In truth, I didn’t relish the thought of segueing into the starving life of a beginning actor. I saw a glimpse of their lives, as I mentioned, while I was a PA in Provincetown and Stockbridge. I saw what a shitty quality of life they had (except for the occasionally crazy parties). It was a heavy price to make a living as a working actor in New York, but that’s what it took. Although I wore bell bottoms and had a semi-Afro, I wasn’t ready to be that bohemian. Don’t get me wrong: I was no bourgeois either, but I did like the idea of having shit in my refrigerator at two in the morning when I was stoned and had the munchies. Primal needs. Need I say more?

Joel and I noticed this flyer on a bulletin board in the drama department locker room that the University of Minnesota was offering
a full ride to get a master’s degree in fine arts, with an apprenticeship to Guthrie Theatre, which was, at that time, the premiere reparatory company in North America. It was called the Bush Fellowship. My best buddy, Joel Brooks, and I applied and were called. Neither Joel nor I was awarded the fellowship. I was, however, invited to attend the university on a partial scholarship because of my financial situation—my dad having just passed away and my mom having limited resources. I decided to take the offer because I figured, hey, no self-respecting New York cop would look for me over a couple of parking tickets in fucking Minnesota! Joel agreed with my nonlogic, and the plan began to take shape.

My girlfriend, Linda, who had also graduated college but wasn’t ready for grad school, encouraged me to go. But she wanted to come along. I told her that I didn’t know if that was a good idea.

“It’s cheaper to stay in the dorm. And I might not even stay there that long . . . it all depends,” I said.

She put her arms around my waist and hugged me. “Come on,” she said, “let’s commit to this.”

So we did. We loaded our crap up into an eighteen-foot rental truck and drove out there with our dog and three cats. We rented a beautiful house in the country. It was very scenic, very peaceful, and very much
not
like New York. Within a month of setting up house together, I told Linda I had to leave. We had been emotionally separating slowly since the latter part of college. She was from Upstate New York originally, and she mentioned she’d like to go back to live there one day. I think she had had enough of the New York City experience for this lifetime. I wanted to sow my wild oats and thought it would be much better to tell her up front that I wanted out rather than sneaking around and cheating on her. We didn’t argue. I moved into a cold-water flat, a rat-hole efficiency, in an area called “Dinky Town” near the downtown campus.

Although we both knew it was best for the both of us, it was tough and not pleasant. It was the first time I ever had to separate from someone I was very close to. I had not yet experienced the pain or the spoils of a relationship when it ends or transitions into something else. Linda stayed in the house and did fine for herself. She still lives probably
within a mile of that house we first rented in 1971. Who knows? Maybe our paths crossed for that reason, because she always seemed so comfortable there.

I looked upon my adventure to the Midwest with curiosity. When you grow up in New York or in Los Angeles you can develop a stilted view that everywhere else in the country is uncool. I wanted to learn what folks, real American Midwest folks, felt and thought—what their process was and how they moved through life. I wanted to use this opportunity to look at being an American through a different lens.

The University of Minnesota is a top-ten school. It’s filled with resources and has huge operating budgets, an amazing sports program, and a highly regarded drama department. Minneapolis was as culturally vibrant a city as any city I’ve ever been in. There was also lots of money in the Twin Cities. The rich, with time on their hands, donated substantially to make the city have the best galleries, the best art museums. The Guthrie Theatre had a modernist style and an interior with circular seating, rising concentrically from the stage, for an audience of more than eleven hundred. I had some really cool professors there, but there were no Ralphs. There weren’t even guys who were a fraction as dynamic and unique and interesting as Ralph. I tried them all because part of the reason why I decided to extend the educational direction in theater wasn’t solely because of parking tickets. Ralph had lit a fire under me; I wanted to find out if there were other people who were going to blow my mind and turn me on to unbelievable ways of thinking about the dramatic arts.

I had a very tough time finding anybody who liked or accepted me in my first six months on campus. I didn’t think I was particularly hard to get along with or that big of an asshole, but I saw there was this miniresentment about having a bona fide New Yorker in their midst. It seemed the Twin Cities wanted to emulate New York culturally and was determined to show me that being from the Apple wasn’t “all that”!

But as much as I loved the place and the people in it, I never thought I would stay there once finished. Joel only lasted a year and went back
to New York City to begin his acting career. I thought about going with him, but I stayed and wanted to finish what I started. I remember one dinner, when the lead actors in the production were invited to a dinner held for the sponsors of the Guthrie. I was among the glitterati of Minnesota, as well as professors—guys who were brilliant educators, sophisticated, well-read, well-traveled PhDs—when a discussion about Watergate came to the floor. This was an incredibly dramatic event in the political history of the United States: a president got caught blatantly putting his middle finger up to law and order. I listened to the conversation in utter amazement.

They were saying, “There’s no way in the world Nixon could’ve done that.” “He’s our president, right or wrong.” “Presidents are completely above this kind of suspicion. Why don’t they just leave him alone?”

I was thinking as a New Yorker, saying to myself, “What a schmuck Nixon was for getting caught. He was running the greatest country in the world, surrounded by the brightest and the best, and he goes and gets involved with a bunch of fucking losers.”

I had to bite my tongue that entire dinner, because I almost shouted, “Of course, he’s guilty, every fucking politician is fucking guilty . . . it’s just that the smart ones never get caught!” When you grow up in New York, where I came from, you just understood that nearly everybody is shady, meaning everybody’s got an angle, especially the guys who run for office. Everybody’s doing something for a whole set of reasons that’s different from the set of reasons they said they’re doing them for.

In the summer of ’72, between my first and second year at the University of Minnesota, before Joel split back East, we decided to drive to San Francisco. We wanted to get a glimpse of the very hip, very celebrated Haight-Ashbury. We’d never been out West, and it was our Jack Kerouac
On the Road
moment. We drove through Nebraska, Colorado, and Utah. The moment we hit the Rockies . . . well, it was like I was tripping. My whole life’s experiences never provided me with anything that could compare to the majesty of what I was seeing with my own eyes. I was taken aback by the grandly insane beauty of America.
Standing below those mountains and looking up as they soar to the clouds in this black massiveness and are crowned with brilliantly white snow crowns—it is incredibly humbling, tremendously moving.

When we finally hit San Francisco we fell into the whole hippie world, sleeping on people’s floors and couches and wearing tie-dyed clothes. We worked as day laborers to get enough money to eat and get high at night. We did some rehearsals and got to see the inside view of the kind of experimental theater that was happening out there before we drove back to Minnesota. Joel left right off for New York that same night we arrived back. Overall, it was a cool trip, one you could only do when you’re young.

Even though I was kind of a fish out of water in the Midwest, in truth the people there were super-nice. I had a great time and made a lot of really good friends who I still have to this day. Although no Ralphs, I got to meet some phenomenal people and encouraging and nurturing teachers. And although I learned next to nothing, I did get a master’s in fine fucking arts—whatever the fuck that means. (I have that diploma covering up a hole that I punched into the wall in my bathroom, so it wasn’t completely useless.) As soon as I graduated I headed back to New York City. I showed up with this rather large dog I had adopted from a shelter in Minneapolis, and this didn’t exactly make my re-entry to New York all that smooth.

After I bald-tired my way back to New York City, I had no place to stay. Lots of friends offered a-few-days places to crash, but I wore out my welcome everywhere. Once, I slept on a friend’s couch, and when I came home at the end of the day, my dog had eaten the guy’s couch and a few chairs. So my return to New York was an inch short of triumphant.

And now a guest appearance from the professor . . .

As often happens in life, my first encounter with Ron Perlman was accidental and, in the wash of time, serendipitous. I was teaching a class in theater at Hunter College in the Bronx (now Herbert Lehman
College) when I saw him walk by in the adjacent hall. I didn’t know him well, but I had heard that he participated in some of the campus musicals. As he strolled by I left the classroom and called out, “Goldberg!” He continued walking away, and I made another attempt, “Yeah, you! Goldberg!” He turned, looked at me, pointed to himself, and mimed, “You mean me?” I said, “Yeah you, Goldberg. I need to speak with you.” It was as necessary as it was an inelegant introduction for both of us. The theater division was having trouble casting for
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
and I used that occasion to urge him to try out for the play and help out a colleague of mine. Somewhere in there I got Ron’s name straight and held on to it for dear life for the next fifty-plus years.

Well, he did try out for the play, was cast as the lead “mechanical,” and was outstanding. In the ensuing months he took academic classes with me in Play Analysis, History of the Theater, and so on, and about a year later I cast him as the lead character, Max, in Harold Pinter’s
Homecoming.
I have to add that I also cast Joel Brooks as his son Teddy, and I never had a better tandem of actors in all the years I directed at that college. Ron was a revelation in that part. First of all, the character of Max is not only a colorful and complex character; he is also the generator within the play. He’s similar to a basketball star who improves the play of everyone around him. Ron proved to me with that production that he could drive a play from the center out and keep it moving. And I’ve seen him execute that dynamic in all his professional work. It is a singular ability that is generous as well as rare.

I was never nuts about encouraging my student actors to make it a profession. While an active playwright I saw too many instances of actors in and out of my New York productions having an extremely tough go of it. Case in point: I was directing a play of my own Off Broadway
, The Moths,
and I made it a point to have Ron and Joel attend to the open calls and early rehearsals. But the open calls were my imperative because the actors came “out of the cold” as it were, uninvited and usually miscast for the roles for which they
were auditioning, not to mention here and there physically worse for wear. But Ron was determined to stay the course, so when the next semester came around he was off to the U. of Minnesota for graduate study in theater. I recall him telling me after he graduated that he was well prepared for the academic requirements at Minnesota as a result of his studies at Hunter. Although I was thrilled with his acting as a young man, I was more than thrilled with his development as a student in the subject matter dealing with literature, history, theory, and the like. He was a straight-A student with me in all those areas, and there’s no doubt in my mind that the intelligence that informed all his acting roles was one of his stronger attributes. I also take great satisfaction in having introduced him to horse racing and good cigars. There were times after his studies were over when he would secure a box of Punch cigars for me from a store in Greenwich Village. He and his sidekick, Burton Levy, who I loved dearly, would get me the cigars when I so prompted. I believe Burton is mentioned in this book, and I’ll leave it to Ron to describe the essence of that relationship, but I will say this: for years and years Burton would call me and speak of nothing but Ron, and I mean on and on. I loved it.

When a young guy is going to college, everything he takes in gets magnified. Ron has told me more than once that I taught him a lot that he eventually used in his career. But he has to know that I basically put things out there and it was his intelligence and innate talent that pulled it together and made use of it on a practical level. But if I can be given credit for the cigars he uses as a prop, I’m more than content. It was one of the best things in
Hellboy
. Every puff he took gave me a definite charge.