Impossible Vacation (9 page)

Cole brought Topher and me wineskins from Spain and we filled them with Almadén burgundy and danced around the picnic table squirting red wine into each other’s mouth. Dad laughed once or twice and didn’t even get angry with Cole when he did his crazy version of a Spanish dance around a full glass of wine in the middle of the driveway until at last, quite by accident, he stepped right on it and smashed it to bits. I really expected Dad to blow his top on that one, but he didn’t. It was as if Dad was so happy to have Mom home that he was really trying to turn over a new leaf at fifty-six.

I
T WAS THAT
happy reunion that let me think it was all right to fly off to the Alamo Theatre to pursue an acting career.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the last time I would see Mom forever and ever. You see, you never know; you never know when it will be the last time forever.

Upon arriving in Houston I was at first a little stunned and overwhelmed by the newness of the place. It was almost tropical and I’d never been to the tropics before. It was hot, very humid, lush, and there were palm trees everywhere, the first I’d ever seen. But after a while things began to settle into a routine and I began living a rather isolated life. I played small roles and kept to myself, occasionally going out to smoke dope at the homes of Houston locals. I didn’t get on that well with the other actors, and after a while I wasn’t really sure why I was there—if I was just doing time to earn my Equity card, if I was trying to escape from Mom, or waiting to see if I would get to play the lead role in
The Sea Gull
. I didn’t have a telephone in my apartment, so I only wrote letters to Mom and Dad, but rarely. Mostly I wrote letters to Meg. Some time in early winter, which really wasn’t
winter for me down there in Houston with all those palm trees and swimming pools and muggy warm days, I got the following letter from Dad:

It was as though the mad bird in Mom had at last burst out of her and broken free like a heart with wings flying out of that sanitarium, to find its way to home to crash and die on Dad’s bedside table. Then, after all of that, to at last be eaten by Dad and his mother … well, it was all really too much.

And what was happening in Houston didn’t make it any better. The role of Konstantin in
The Sea Gull
was given to an older, less sensitive actor named Brian, who was not at all right for the role. But he had tenure, which means he’d been suffering down there for five years, and I, after all, had only just arrived. And to add great insult to injury, the director of the theater decided that because of my obviously tortured sensitivity, Brian should use me as a life study. He should observe me in my daily routines. What he was really observing was my disappointment at not having the role of Konstantin. I went home and cried alone for one whole day.

The director, who was this very histrionic, flamboyant woman named Thelma, decided that I should also “create” (I think that was her word) a very imaginative collection of sound effects for the final dinner party that is going on offstage while Konstantin has his last sad unrequited love meeting with Nina. She wanted me to organize the other actors to sit around me in chairs offstage while I conducted them like some demented symphony orchestra in the jangling of silverware and the striking of empty glasses. I was to give them cues for laughter as well as maintain a constant improvisational mumble of “rhubarb
rhubarb rhubarb” or “peas and carrots, peas and carrots.” All of this had to be orchestrated around Konstantin’s and Nina’s onstage lines. What was worse was that I agreed to do all this. So there I sat backstage during each show conducting all these ridiculous, meaningless sounds while Brian as Konstantin spewed and strutted his badly performed sensitivity for all of Houston to see.

Good God, what was I doing? I wondered. Maybe I was trying to punish myself for something. It seemed like I had run away from Mom’s insanity to come to an even more insane world. The whole situation was producing great anger and rage in me, but for some reason I could not express it. Instead I judged it as being bad and tried to purge it by going on what I thought would be a purifying diet of soybeans. Trying to escape Dad’s corrupting legacy of meat, I was eating soybeans morning, noon, and night, and those soybeans were causing enormous intestinal gas. Wherever I walked I was leaving those silent but deadly slow hot burners. But I was not taking responsibility for them. I just kept moving and wafting and letting them drift in, reeking hot invisible waves behind me. You see, I’d not learned how to express my anger through the proper orifice yet.

The only time I held back, and with great pain, was when I was conducting the backstage sound effects. I was afraid I would be discovered as the volcanic source of those perverse stinkers, so there in the wings while conducting Russian party sounds I would squeeze my sphincter tight against those hot winds.

For the entire four-week run of
The Sea Gull
my rage grew. Then at last on closing night I had a chance to vent it fully. The closing-night party was held in Galveston, a short drive to the gulf from Houston, at an authentic Greek restaurant where all the Greek merchant marines came and danced when their ships were in port. We drove down in three fully packed cars and I ended up with Brian, the New York actress who played Madame Arkadina, the actress who played Nina, and Thelma, the director. The woman driving the car was a Houston native who ran the theater box office and often went dancing that old Greek grapevine dance with the sailors who had just come into port. It was her idea to have the party at the Greek restaurant, and everyone else followed.

As she drove, she gave us all a preparatory lecture for the upcoming
event, how to act or not act around a bunch of horny Greek sailors who had been out to sea for months. And somewhere in the middle of her precautionary notes she said, “Oh, by the way, just before we get to Galveston we’re going to pass through some very sloppy lowlands, and I have to warn you that the smell is quite intense. In fact, it’s almost overwhelming. So just before we get there I’m going to warn you all to roll up your windows.”

I felt the car seat burning under me. I couldn’t hold out any longer and let out the longest, hottest, most silent slow burner ever. As soon as that cloud reached the sweet little turned-up nose of our lady driver, she cried, “Oh my God! There it is! I didn’t know we were there yet. Roll up your windows! Everybody, roll up your windows!” And up all the windows went tight, real tight, while everyone wept and gasped and cried, “Oh my God! Oh, help! Step on it, let’s get out of here!” I sat still, weeping with the silent angry laughter that was buried so deep. There I sat, tears rolling down my cheeks, with no idea that this was a fun version of Mom’s soon-to-come exit from this world.

A
FTER THAT
closing-night
Sea Gull
party, I knew my relationship with the Alamo Theatre, or maybe all theater, was over, but I felt too inadequate to walk away from it all. I was determined to finish the season out so that I could save enough money to spend the summer in Mexico with Meg. That was my big celebration plan. I had been writing her about it, and she planned to join me as soon as she graduated from college.

I’d decided to relocate in San Miguel Allende, an American art colony high in the central plains of Mexico. I made arrangements to ride down there with two Houston locals, Axel and Odele. In my deepest fantasy mind it was a sort of trial run for Bali, just to see what it would be like to vacation in a foreign country.

The trip down was like a hallucinogenic dream. I rode and sometimes drove in Odele’s VW bus while Axel rolled joints and took
photos with his little Leica. I don’t think we had one normal slice of conversation the whole way down. It was just driving, looking, smoking, peeing, and eating trashy hot Mexican food at roadside stands. I don’t know how Axel and Odele drove stoned. I was incapacitated by the grass most of the time and lay on the back floor of that VW bus vibrating all over. When I was able to pull myself up to look out the windows, all I could see was endless armies of cactus that looked like they were fighting each other.

We got to San Miguel forty-eight hours later with very little rest or sleep. I was spent and very ready to be alone. Then Odele and Axel went their own ways, Axel off to the Michigan area to deal in pre-Columbian art and Odele hitchhiking on to Mexico City to visit a Dutch sculptor.

I walked into my little hotel room and stood in front of the tin-framed mirror and just stared at my gaunt bearded face. I didn’t dare move. I just stood there watching my face dissolve and then re-form in the mirror. I felt out of touch and really away from home for the first time. And as I stood there, barely having arrived, I had that fantasy again of coming through the driveway gate with a duffel bag full of dirty laundry and presents, and Mom rushing out to greet me. I could see myself standing there, a brave independent hero, like one of those Greek sailors dropping in with gifts and stories just long enough to get his laundry done before heading out to the next port. Coming from Mexico would not be as great, perhaps, as returning from Bali, but it would still be triumphant.

The following day I found my own apartment up at the top of a hill overlooking the entire town and the wild purple central plains beyond. Far below I could hear church bells chiming and the sound of slow-rolling wooden wheels on cobblestones. It was old, it was beautiful, it was slow. It felt just right, and I immediately sent off a postcard to Meg with a little map to “our” new place in Mexico.

She arrived, and we settled into a comfortable routine of working, shopping for food, and just walking around looking at it all: going down to the
zócalo
, the public square, at dusk, with the long-tailed black birds cruising in at sundown to fill the trees, and fill the entire square with their mad cackling.