Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir (13 page)

There is an area in which he excels that few are aware of: his ability to direct plays. Years ago he took it upon himself to direct a couple of readings of my plays in NYC. Neither of the two plays is chip-shot, and one of them is unproduced for two reasons. One, not many venues have wanted to produce it, and two, I’m not confident that there are a lot of directors out there who could handle it. The reading Ron
directed was sensible, extremely competent, and a revelation to me. I would trust him with any play I’ve written, case closed. Again, there’s no substitute for intelligence and talent, and when you throw in a quart of sensibility you’ve got the whole bag. And Ron has that versatility. I once watched him act the role of an Amish father whose child was murdered by a bunch of vandals throwing stones. As a Jewish kid from the Bronx, he couldn’t be more unlike the character he played, and yet he gave a brilliant, understated, yet piercing performance. I kept waiting for the cigar, but unfortunately the Amish don’t smoke, so I was out of luck. Cigar or no cigar, I was thrilled. There’s not much in the repertory he can’t do. I used to tell my students that if you can act in a Restoration play, you can pretty much do any style that exists. I’ve never seen Ron do Restoration, but there isn’t a doubt in my mind he can’t pull it off.

At this point he’s done a lot of films and television, and most of it has been readily available to the public. There’s no need for me to go over all that. I was there at the beginning, loved witnessing the middle, and am curious to see how his career takes shape and evolves. And yes, it will evolve. Oh, and I love him.

—Ralph Arzoomanian

(CHAPTER 6)

Godfather

After sleeping on people’s couches, with my dog fucking up all over the place, throwing up, chewing up everything from sneakers to couch legs, I rapidly pissed away whatever goodwill I had left. I was losing friends. They didn’t answer my calls or want to speak to me again. I was having second thoughts about whether leaving Minnesota had been a good idea. I mean, I was at least getting laid in Minnesota. Yes, you heard me right! And with
women
! I know this sounds irrelevant, but to a young man at that age, only breathing was more important.

In Minnesota, however, I knew, as culturally vibrant as the Twin Cities were, I could only go so far in theater. In New York the sky was the limit. There was no ceiling. In fact, there was no place you couldn’t go. Shit, if your imagination was big enough and the chips fell where you wanted them to fall. . . . Despite the difficult settling process, I needed to be in New York to begin my quest to become a professional actor. I was finally ready to no longer be running from it; I was finally ready to run toward something.

The people of the real heartland of America were, for the most part, upfront, solid folk, yet I needed to be back in my hometown, the land of corruption and cynicism. I don’t mean this to come across as a condemnation, but it’s true and part of what makes NYC the most unhypocritical place on earth. You know the code, you know the rules.
In the Midwest I once gave the ticket guy at a ballgame $20, and he started to hand back change. I said, “No, that’s for you.”

“Sir, the ticket is fifteen-fifty.”

“No, no, I’m asking you to give me a better ticket.”

“Oh no, I can’t do that.” I realized at that moment I was in the wrong fuckin’ town, because if you do that shit at Yankee Stadium, you’re going to be sitting right behind the dugout. It may not be $20 anymore, but that’s what it was when I was a kid—now it’s $100 or whatever—but people know what grass looks like and it’s fucking the way fucking business is done in New York.

As for the parking tickets that awaited me, the bureaucratic side of New York City was dead serious. While I was at the University of Minnesota the Parking Violations Bureau was better than the Canadian fucking Mounted Police or Scotland fucking Yard, and it must’ve operated under the same slogan: “We always get our man.” They didn’t know I was in Minnesota, so instead they found my next of kin, which happened to be my poor mom in Washington Heights. They kept sending her harassing letters. They wanted to know where this Ron Perlman was so he could write them a nearly $8,000 check. They sent more and more letters and even called her and said they were going to put me in jail. I didn’t know about this while it was happening, but it was sad. My mom pleaded, “Please, don’t hurt my boy.” And she wrote them a check for $7,500 and change. (I expect to be all paid up with her a week from next Tuesday. I’m kidding. That’s a joke. And thank you, Mom, for letting me be a free man upon my homecoming.)

What saved me from my first few weeks in NYC living the life of an unwelcomed squatter was the return to the city of my best friend, Burton Levy. He had visited me a few times in Minnesota, but of late he had been in Upstate New York trying to put together one of his many business deals. This guy became my Medici, my “sponsor of the arts” during the next five years while I pursued acting. I met Burton in college. I noticed him hanging around the theater. He had this kind of fascination with theater and saw it as a way to make money if you were able to produce a hit or make a film. His curiosity turned
into something of a friendship between us, which burgeoned into something that will never be replaced again, an incredible bond we developed. Burton was the first guy I ever met who taught me what a stand-up guy is supposed to look like. He’s the first guy I ever met who taught me what it means to have someone’s back. It’s more than just the phrase, “I got your back.” He taught me what that was supposed to actually look like and that it was something people mean when they say it. I’ll tell you something, at sixty-three years old, that’s pretty fucking rare. Because I’ve heard a lot of people say it but have seen very few people mean it. Burton meant it, and it was the other way around as well.

Burton had been a real character in Lehman College. Whereas most kids made ends meet by bussing tables, driving cabs, or working as camp counselors, Burton got a job as a concrete inspector. This was a fairly important position in the New York construction scene. No building got green lit in New York if it didn’t have concrete samples that passed certain standards. Burton was one of a handful of guys who were certified at either putting the kibosh on or giving the go-ahead to huge jobs. There might be ten concrete trucks waiting in line to pour a foundation, and all were on hold until Burton gave the thumbs up or down. Talk about sleeping with the fishes—there were an awful lot of people with an awful lot at stake riding on his decisions. It wasn’t the safest job, but Burton knew how to walk that tightrope.

Subsequently he was the only guy I knew on campus who had his own money from a good-paying job. It wasn’t family money or inheritance money; he had money that he was pulling in on his own. There was a kind of exoticness to him that made me think, “Maybe this is a guy I need to get to know better.” It turned out—and I say this without exaggeration—that Burton Levy was the toughest Jew I have ever come across in my whole fuckin’ life. He grew up in Yonkers, in one place not mentioned too often in the book
Where Famous Jews Came From
. Burton got to be tough the hard way—on the mean streets of one of the toughest little suburbs of New York City.

I remember one night when Burton, another friend of ours, and I went out to have a drink at this bar in Yonkers. Burton was kind of a controversial figure up there because he was one of these guys who told you how it was and didn’t make any bones about it. He had a lot of friends, but he also had a lot of enemies. So we walk into this one bar, and as we walk in a guy on his left and a guy on his right both punch him on the chin at the same time. It was like it was choreographed. It was like Busby Berkeley. Because Burton was blindsided and didn’t see it coming, it was the one and only time I ever saw him go down to one knee. As he was going down to the ground after being cold-cocked, somebody came up from behind and hit him over the back of the head with a bar stool.

My other friend and I started to jump in, but Burton put his hand up and said, “No.” That crack on the head with the barstool seriously pissed him off and only woke him up more. Burton was built like a bull, with calves the size of Montana and a neck the size of New Jersey. I watched Burton single-handedly beat the piss out of probably eighteen guys at once. He was a little disheveled when done, but he insisted we stay nonetheless. We sat at the bar and had a drink. He just wanted to let them know there was no question of who was the toughest muthafucka in that place. After he gave a fuckin’ sizeable tip, held down by our empty scotch glasses on the bar, he stood and casually straightened out his clothes’ creases and brushed off his clothes—and then we left.

That was my best friend, Burton Levy, and eventually the godfather to my children. While in college Burton and I often went with Professor Ralph to the track. Burton also had a little taste for horseplay, and like me, he liked Ralph’s point of view about culture and the world. Burton and I started smoking good cigars and drinking the finest scotch. We went to Madison Square Garden and watched Muhammad Ali fight, and then Jerry Quarry fight, with Burton somehow always managing to get ringside tickets. All of a sudden Burton showed me how you could actually demand stuff out of life rather than have a
backseat and just take whatever shit fell off the back of the truck. It was an empowering period for me: I didn’t have to accept borderline poverty as my family had been resigned to for generations. Burton and I dreamed together, me wanting to be an actor, with Burton thinking he might become a theater impresario and raise enough capital to make a difference in the theater scene.

Burton Levy, who was my very first and always will be my one and only lifelong best friend. And when I say best friend, he’s been gone since the year 2000, so for fourteen years now, I’ve been without him. He’s still my best friend—he’ll never be replaced. I really don’t float the word around very much; I actually think there can be only one best. Burton never married, even if he had short-term things with a lot of different women. Although not the marrying kind, he loved kids. As the godfather to my children, he showered them with every single thing a godfather is supposed to shower a kid with. From gifts to ideas to “You can come to me if your father or your mom does something really fucking stupid—I’m your haven.” He became this shining symbol of safety for them, for both of my kids. Even though we lost him when my daughter was sixteen and my son, ten, to this day they’ve never had a figure in their lives who’s come close to the space that Burton occupied. He had a horrific time toward the end, and he died horribly and very young at fifty-two years old. He was an example of somebody who was too big for his own limitations. He was one of those stars that burn out the brightest and the fastest.

Burton became my “sponsor of the arts” within a month of my return to the city. He had gone to Woodstock, an Upstate New York hippie town, and struck a deal to become partners with an older guy who owned an exotic jewelry/handmade handbag store on the corner of Eighth Street and McDougal, right in the middle of the hippest street in the hippest part of NYC. The guy was getting older and had nobody to leave the store to, so he took Burton’s offer so he could
phase himself out. And because I needed a little income and wasn’t exactly knockin’ ’em dead in my quest to take the New York theater by storm, Burton enlisted me as a part timer.

The store did great from the beginning, and I made enough to rent my first broom closet–size apartment in the Village. It was so small—are you ready for some small jokes? “It was so small, you had to go outside to change your mind.” “It was so small, you couldn’t laugh ‘Ha-ha’—you had to laugh ‘ho-ho.’” “It was so small, you put your key in the lock, turn the key, and you rearranged the furniture.” That’s how fucking small this fucking place was. But hey, the store paid handsomely for Burton to keep indulging in his expensive habits and paid for me to keep my lights on while I pursued theater.

I had been a professional student for the last eighteen years. Suddenly I found myself in the cold, hard world, needing to figure out quickly how to get work as an actor, and I began to plant some flags in the ground. I had no agents. I had no credits other than academic, which meant nothing. I basically started flat-footed and inert. I relied on two publications; one was called
Show Business
and the other,
Backstage
. I think
Show Business
folded, but
Backstage
is still around. These publications listed auditions a little bit for Broadway, a little bit for Off Broadway, but mostly for free shit, which was Off-Off Broadway. These publications would come out once a week, and I would circle every audition I could possibly go to. And that’s what I did. I did a lot of auditioning for Off-Off Broadway plays. Every once in awhile I would see an open call for a Broadway play, and I’d go to those as well. That marked the beginnings of me auditioning for musicals with a particularly mediocre voice and getting three bars into the audition and hearing somebody in the middle of this darkened theater go, “Thank you! Next.” That same thing, or the equivalent, happened for at least three hundred plays I auditioned for. It’s 99 percent rejection, and 1 percent of the time someone would say, “Yeah, come do this play,” but it was always for free. I was just good enough to not get paid. It seemed as if I was running in place as fast as I could while getting absolutely nowhere.

Here’s the dynamics of what actors have to do to break in. If it’s an open call, they post what time to be at the theater. Because they are seeing people who are unrepresented, without appointments, you need to get there really, really early. It’s first come, first serve. You might need to be there at ten in the morning, and you don’t get your chance to be seen until 4:30 in the afternoon. At least one hundred, maybe two or three hundred show up. Most of the time you stand outside the theater in a line that snakes along the sidewalk and around the block. If it was the middle of winter, they might put you in a big room or cram the hopefuls into the lobby—it’s called “a cattle call” for a reason. But you went and took a chance because you have to run out every single ground ball and go after every long shot. I did auditions for
Evita
,
Hair
, and whatever was playing in the seventies. Most of the open cattle calls were for musicals. Rarely were open calls for a straight play. For that, you had to be sent to the audition by somebody who had vetted you and signed you as a client. You needed a bona fide agent, but I didn’t have an agent the first three years I was in New York. The plan was to throw shit against the wall and hope that something would stick. I always stayed busy with Off-Off Broadway plays. They paid nothing unless the piece was being played out of town, and then at least you’d get a fuckin’ dump of a room and food money.