The Truth is Bad Enough: What Became of the Happy Hustler? (5 page)

There were a few new photos in the drawer, recently added to her private collection. One of them captured Mr. and Mrs. Kearns at least fifteen years after their passionate night at the Latin Quarter.

He was attempting to smile at the camera, but it was bad acting. The look on her face was harrowing. She stared straight ahead, zombie-like, as if she was unaware of the flashing camera. All that could be read on her severe face, showing its age, was an expression of unspeakable disillusionment. Still beautiful, yes, but the beauty of sadness.

Those two photos serve as bookends, encompassing the years that included the births of my brother and me and the collective pain of a family on a collision course.

There was another photo that would, in years to come, contradict what I’d been told by Mommy. Even though he seems wooden and ill at ease, my father did hold me in his arms, albeit awkwardly, when I was a newborn. On the back, in her handwriting, she had written, “Michael, 1950.”

As the divorce went into overdrive, my mission to save our family continued, but the answer could not be found in the photographs.

The divorce of Pauline and Joseph Kearns had all the ingredients of a Hollywood screenplay: reports of mental instability, infidelity and physical abuse along with some sharp courtroom rejoinders that included, “The truth is bad enough.”

In spite of her obsessive philandering, proven beyond doubt, the court did not find her to be an unfit mother.

Did I?

While she managed to intermittently commit to playing the mother role, her desperate quest to find a new husband became her priority, especially post divorce, often threatening the well-being of her children. If she suggested that she was looking for a man to be the replacement father to her children, she was lying to herself. She was looking for a man to make her feel desirable.

I knew that I had to find something to lower the volume on my loneliness, something that I could excel at. I needed to succeed in order to escape my tormented family.

Little did I realize that my reinvention would play into the Kearns family railroad motif. Well, kinda.

CHAPTER 8
               

“Pardon me, boy, is that the Chattanooga Choo Choo?”

Miss Kohl, my otherwise demure third-grade teacher, placed herself in front of the classroom, histrionically gesticulating and mouthing the words to a recording (45 rpm, spinning on a player about the size of a birthday cake). She tapped the shoulder of an imaginary boy and then pointed in the direction of the imaginary train.

We, her students, had been instructed to stand next to our desks and try to capture Miss Kohl’s precise physical moves, not to mention her animated facial expressions, which were right out of a silent movie.

“Boy, you can gimme a shine.”

I could almost see my dilapidated tennis shoes begin to sparkle as I performed the shoe shining bit, buffing them with a make-believe cloth. Even while studying Miss Kohl’s every subtle twitch and shift, I was able to steal a glance at my classmates, most of whom were not even trying. The boys were downright clumsy and even the girls were a bit stiff.

Me? Well, let us say that I was aware that Miss Kohl, without missing a beat or letting on to the other students, was watching me more intently than she was the others.

“Nothin’ could be finer than to have your ham and eggs in Carolina.” Gosh, I could taste the yummy ham and eggs. My mouth was watering.

One of us, only one, would be chosen to act out the song, front and center, while the less talented third graders huddled in the background, singing the lyrics. This big number was for the upcoming school assembly with a train theme.

Some of the other kids had virtually given up and stared at me in envious disbelief. Many of them were the same kids who had routinely made fun of me.

“There’s gonna be a certain party at the station. Satin and lace …” Miss Kohl caressed her body like she was Marilyn Monroe. So did I.

I’m gonna win, I thought. I can’t do math, I can’t catch a ball, I can’t spell, but—more than any of my schoolmates—I can make it look like I’m wearing satin and lace. In truth, I was doing it better than Miss Kohl was.

Never in my life had I felt so powerful. Finally, after nine years of feeling like a loser, a misfit, a freak, I was winning.

After we’d gone through it three or four times and I got even more connected to the material (especially the satin and lace), Miss Kohl looked at me pointedly and said, “I’ll let you know who will perform in front of the rest of the class tomorrow.” The bell indicating the end of the school day rang on cue.

I played it cool, and gathered my books together and affected a nonchalant air of self-confidence. I floated out of the room, giving Miss Kohl a meaningful half smile. She knew I knew and I knew she knew I knew.

I couldn’t wait to get in front of the full-length mirror that hung on the inside of my mother’s bedroom door so I could watch myself do the song and dance.

With the divorce finalized and my dad officially moved out, my mother spent hours in front of that mirror. Usually with a freshly made drink nearby, it was where she readied herself for her forays into the night in search of the next husband.

I bought a soda on the way home with money I’d saved from one of my many odd jobs (the most lucrative was working at a Laundromat with pale blue washers and dryers). I planted myself in front of the mirror, attempting to perfect every move. My mom wouldn’t be home for at least two hours, maybe more, depending on whether or not she had to “work late.”

Reveling in his bad-boy image, my fourteen-year-old brother, Joey, was rarely home. It was as if he, too, was granted a divorce. Part of me admired him for his escape-artist absences. When he was missing in action, I didn’t have to worry about him barging in.

Sometimes “working late” meant that my mom didn’t come home until the sun was about to rise. On those nights, I slept in her bed and waited, often half-awake, listening for the sound of her unlocking the front door. I could hear her, attempting to not make any noise but inevitably bumping up against something, dropping her keys, and muttering a “bad word” as she made her way to the bed.

The smell of her smoke-saturated clothes, boozy breath and what remained of her stale perfume was all at once revolting and comforting as she lay next to me, a bit too close, in the double bed.

As I went through the theatrical moves for the umpteenth time, I wondered if tonight would be one of those nights.

“There’s gonna be a certain party at the station. Satin and lace. I used to call ‘funny face.’” I found one of her slips in the pile of dirty clothes and held it up against me to achieve a sense of verisimilitude, even though my mother’s face was not funny.

She was in her mid-forties and her beauty had survived, miraculously. Petite (“I would really have been a true beauty had I been taller,” she often stated, as if her height was her life’s curse) and blessed with a face that miraculously belied her hard living, she could still pull off an entrance. Especially if she was walking into one of the dives she frequented—“taverns,” she called them, sanctuaries for the drunken and heartbroken.

“What are you doing?” she asked, catching me in the mirror. She’d come home a few minutes early. If she saw it, she didn’t mention her slip, which I quickly tossed. “Let’s go to White Castle for dinner,” she said.

Those cheap dinners at White Castle stand out in my mind as rare times when I had her to myself. The hamburgers, soaked in onions, were miniature, but we could afford to order more than one. I loved her when we were eating out together at White Castle.

I told her about the train assembly at school and how I felt there was little possibility of anyone other than me being chosen. She was skeptical but promised, if I got “the part,” to take off work and be there for my big moment.

CHAPTER 9
               

“Mike Kearns,” Miss Kohl announced the next day, “will act out the song in front of the rest of you.” My classmates looked at me with a newfound respect—even the ones who had previously belittled me. I had an identity beyond being a sissy. I had evolved into some sort of performance artist (even though my niche had yet to be labeled as such).

I was anxious to share the news with my mom, but it was one of the nights that she didn’t come home for dinner, or even call with an excuse.

On those nights, I’d make my own dinner—a can of soup or macaroni and cheese. Sometimes I’d cash in soda bottles to come up with the money to buy my “meal.”

After many attempts to find her, calling taverns with names I thought I remembered hearing her refer to in half-whispered phone calls, I’d give up and go to sleep. If I would miraculously get her on the phone, she’d speak in a fuzzy voice, promising to be home in “an hour.” It never, not once, happened.

Eventually I quit believing her.

Some nights she’d drop me off at a movie theater. “I’ll pick you up at nine,” she’d say, as if she was trying to convince herself.

Charlton Heston and Stephen Boyd were my babysitters. From the pumped-up male competition to the heartless treatment of lepers, I’d immerse myself in every frame of
Ben-Hur
.

When she didn’t show up after the first screening, I watched the three-hour movie a second time, constantly jumping up and checking the front of the theater (never when Jeff and Chuck were shirtless).

When the second screening ended at approximately midnight and she still hadn’t shown up, I improvised—walked, took a bus, or got a cab.

“I have to go inside and get the money,” I’d lie to the cab driver. Then I’d disappear into the backyard of the house I’d indicated was mine and wait until I heard the cab speed away.

Her negligence seemed to hurt less after I got picked to do “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” Once the day of the performance arrived, after I wooed the entire student body, the teachers and the parents in attendance (including my mom), my sense of self began to blossom. Not only was I the one picked from an entire classroom of a couple dozen kids, but I also seduced an audience of at least one hundred with my dazzling display of talent. Everything became secondary to the goal I created for myself.

My mother was a hard worker by day but took off to see my stupendous performance. A bit contradictory to her irresponsible lady-of-the-night mode, she went into her practical mode when I shared my heart’s desire.

“I want to be an actor,” I told her.

She looked up the word “dramatic” in the Yellow Pages, and there it was: “Junior Theater, Acting Classes for Youth, Marian Epstein, Director.” She called and arranged a meeting with Miss Epstein (who would be played by Eve Arden in the movie).

With her booming stage voice and tailored wardrobe, Miss Epstein was a grande dame, formerly “a New York stage actress,” she announced without providing much substantiation. I was both intimidated by her and magnetized to her.

“Did you notice the length of her skirt?” my mother asked on the drive home. “Perfect for someone her age. And the light gray color of her blouse matched the color of her hair.” These were the kinds of observations my mother routinely made.

My mom would also make very astute comments about total strangers that we’d see on the street, often spinning a psychologically complex scenario, simply based on what she saw. “They just had a fight,” she’d say of a couple sitting next to each other at a bus stop but not relating. “Look at the way her body is rejecting him. And she’s holding on to her purse like there’s a secret in it.”

Later in my life, I realized that her big imagination greatly influenced my writing. She consistently dug for the subtext, never content with what everyone else could see. Based on keen perception, she would concoct a story that was never judgmental and always human.

This ability to perceive what is unseen was a gift from my mother that would also influence my ability to bring fully developed characters to life. She taught me to look beyond the obvious, to plunge deeper into the human condition.

I quickly amassed a list of credits from Junior Theater productions. My first small part was the Tall Boy in an original play, a rather benign beginning. Next up was the title role in
The Knave of Hearts
, in which my frilly costume overshadowed my acting. The role I was really able to sink my teeth into was Bottom in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
—the artisan who, in the play within the play, dons a long yellow wig and plays the tortured female character in a bastardization of the
Romeo and Juliet
death scene. It would not be the last time that I’d play a death scene in a wig (or play a bottom).

A clown was born. Being able to make ’em laugh was added to my growing repertoire of ways to get attention. I remembered my father not being able to attend the performance of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
at the last minute, but my mom and Grandma Katie were there in the audience, sharing my triumph.

Ultimately, it wasn’t the list of credits I accumulated at the Junior Theater that mattered. What Miss Epstein taught her young thespians was the art of empathy, rooted in the methodology of Stanislavski.

“Do not ask how you are different than any human being,” Miss Epstein would say. “Ask yourself how you are similar. There is something that connects you, and as an actor, you must find that connection in every role you play.

“Begin in real life. You have something in common with every person on the street, every member of your family, every student in your school.”

I can honestly say it was the most valuable lesson about acting that I ever learned and it eventually provided the blueprint for my life’s work.

This is not to suggest that Miss Epstein was uninterested in the nuts and bolts of performing and putting on a good show. When I once played a critical telephone scene, mistakenly grasping the dangling phone cord with the mouthpiece to my ear instead of my mouth, she greeted me backstage upon my exit with a few expletives that took me weeks to recover from. I had disgraced her—and myself.

Miss Epstein wasn’t shy about investigating my home life to see if some domestic drama was interfering with my concentration. She confronted my mother: “Is he getting enough sleep?”