Easy Street (The Hard Way) A Memoir

  Copyright © 2014 by Ron Perlman

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information, address Da Capo Press, 44 Farnsworth Street, Third Floor, Boston, MA 02210.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this book.

  ISBN 978-0-306-82345-9 (e-book)

  Editorial production by Marrathon Production Services. www.marrathon.net

  DESIGN BY JANE RAESE

  Set in 12-point Dante

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  This book is dedicated to the believers, quintessential of whom are my beautiful wife and best friend, Opal Stone, my kids, Blake and Brandon Perlman, who always direct me to true north, and my dear, dear Mom, Dorothy Rosen Perlman Kestenbaum. And equally important, to the unbelievers, who have shaped me as surely as the waters shape the mountains.

  contents

  Foreword by Guillermo del Toro

  1 A Coupla Cannibals Are Eating a Clown . . .

  2 A Coupla Drunks Walk Out of a Bar . . .

  3 Out of the Drink

  4 Grinding Machine

  5 Forever-ness

  6 Godfather

  7 Just Good Enough to Not Get Paid

  8 My Cave or Yours?

  9 Wanna Set the Night on Fire . . .

  10 Get a Real Job

  11 Stage or Scream

  12 Name of the Rose

  13 Birth of the Beast

  14 Beauty in the Beast

  15 How You Doin’?

  16 Not So Good . . . Until

  17 They Call Them Shrinks for a Reason

  18 Enfants Perdus

  19 Como Day Peliculas . . .

  20 The Doctor Will See You Now

  21 Piled Higher and Deeper

  22 Meanwhile . . .

  23 Mudville

  24 Legacy

  25 The Power and the Glory

  Acknowledgments

  foreword

  Memory is, by definition, imperfect.

  In reading Ron’s memoirs, I am delighted to discover nuances and details I had long forgotten. This proves to me that it is not enough to have lived one’s life if you have no one to share it with. The Perl and I have been friends now for well over two decades. He is my brother, my blood, and my confidant. I love him because he is, as you are about to discover, one of the most imperfect, most charming human beings on the planet. Agent Myers in the first Hellboy film expresses one of the few maxims I have been able to verbalize and one that I live by day to day: “We like people for their qualities, but we love them for their defects.” In writing this line I meant to say that we must not simply “accept” imperfection when it is revealed to us—we must celebrate it. This, I assure you, is the true sign of friendship.

  Ron and I hide nothing from each other, and we are, therefore, able to be at ease when we hang out. Ron wears his imperfection with great pride, but he went through a long and painful process to be able to achieve such a state of grace. This process is detailed in several chapters of the book you are about to read. The Perl has embellished every anecdote in which I am involved, that much I know.

  I am glad he recalls—or has fabricated—so many details. It makes no difference whether I agree with them because I would much rather hear Ron tell the story than pursue accuracy. You see, Ron happens to be the best raconteur I have ever met. All the stories he tells have a setup and a punch line and are always entertaining.

  You can and will spend hours with the Perl and learn more about yourself, what it means to be human, by hearing him tell you tales in which he fumes, cringes, or grovels at the feet of life. His triumphs and struggles are instructive and entertaining in equal measure. He is not gossipy, but he stays compelling. He gives you a map of his flaws but is kind enough to be mum about the many flaws of others. He is Virgil to his own Dante and takes us all on a travelogue of self-discovery and acceptance.

  Ron’s journey as an actor is woven tightly with my own growth as a director. I was a fan of his early enough that we caught each other in the infancy of our careers. He neglects to tell the story, but he stood by me on Cronos when his team advised him to leave the production. We were entirely broke and unable to pay him his due weekly salary, but he trusted me. I gave him my word that he would get paid every cent if he stayed and finished the production. I never forgot this, and I, in turn, stood by him as my choice for Hellboy. Back then it didn’t make the financing of the movie any easier.

  I didn’t really care. I stuck to my belief that Ron was Hellboy. It was a simple fact because, naturally, I had written the part for him. All those lines in both movies, the ones that seem improvised and spontaneous, seem so because I know the man as well as I do and have such kinship with him. Ron is Hellboy, yes, but I will always look upon Ron wishing I could be him when I grow up. That has proven to be out of the question as I turn fifty and my only growth is now lateral. But one can hope . . .

  Ron and I are not afraid of a good fight or a verbal dustup when we get too big for our britches. We knock each other around from time to time, but we always end up standing on a burnt-out battlefield when everyone else has toppled. We have gone through day shoots, night shoots, all nighters, seventy-two-hour days, lack of funds, mutiny or bliss, explosions, slime, blood, freezing rain, six-hour makeup jobs, and each other’s tempers, and we’ve got each other’s back every time.

  Our friendship is stronger than ever. I love Ron. I love his defects and love the fact that he has chosen to ignore mine. We are fallible as humans and very exacting as artists, and that is a combination you can only reveal to your closest companions and accomplices. I have seen Ron grow into the most unlikely of leading men, and he has remained my constant partner in crime. Some of our adventures together are chronicled in this book, but most of them are not. Each movie we’ve made would give enough chill and thrill to fill a book this size, but Ron is chronicling his most important endeavor: his truce with himself and the long journey to being able to live at peace in one’s skin.

  I read speedily and hungrily through every page and discovered details and episodes in Ron’s life that I knew nothing about. This book is bound to surprise you too, even if you are already a fan, and it will turn you into one if you are not. May we all love Ron for those precious defects he has made all his own, and may we all live long enough to witness and share his earnest, pratfall-laden journey into full realization.

  Love the Perl. You will too.

  Guillermo del Toro

  Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy, Pacific Rim

  (CHAPTER 1)

  A Coupla Cannibals Are Eating a Clown . . .

  The year 1969 was a culturally packed dividing line, or a closing of many circles that changed scores of things, not only for me but also for history. Nixon was sworn in as president, and the death toll in Vietnam reached 320,000. A man had actually walked on the moon. The Jets, quarterbacked by “Broadway Joe” Namath, had won the Super Bowl, and the underdog Mets would win their first World Series. There were student protests and the Chicago Eight, and madman Charles Mans
on would go on his Helter Skelter senseless killing spree. The Academy Award for Best Picture would go to Midnight Cowboy, John Wayne would win a long-awaited Best Actor Oscar for his performance in True Grit, and the young and dashing Newman-and- Redford duo would bust the box offices and hearts of American women in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. And on the radio that year the counterculture had gone commercial: the big hits blaring from every transistor and car tuner were the songs “The Age of Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In,” “Come Together,” “Crimson and Clover,” and “In the Year 2525.”

  Theater was also at an apex—culturally well regarded and important and probably never to return to the status in which it was held then. The thing we now call Off-Off Broadway was invented in the basements and factory lofts of the Lower East Side. And during that very week when my girlfriend and cousin tracked me down, there were over one hundred thousand people converging on Max Yeager’s farm in Woodstock.

  This is how the script was written for me that day: a guy walks out of a restaurant in late summer of 1969. He’s about to get the big kind of news that happens only a few times in life, a notice of the caliber that packs a For Whom the Bell Tolls–type of emotional gut punch, which he surely didn’t want to hear just then, not when for the first time in his life he was actually feeling sort of good about himself.

  He’s in the quaint little New England town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, nestled in the Berkshire Mountains. It’s a beautiful sunny day, the kind with blue-eyed skies and air as fresh as a fucking dinner mint. He’s laughing, joking around with his buddies, as he steps out onto the sidewalk, though he has absolutely no warning and no clue of what’s going to happen in the next few minutes. He’d just finished lunch in a cheap eatery, a hole-in-the-wall joint named Alice’s Restaurant, the same one made famous by folksinger Arlo Guthrie, the one where “you can get anything you want.” Although when he spotted these two people who were very special to him—up here in the green mountains, a three-hour drive from the city—showing up unannounced and walking toward him, he knew he was about to get something he surely didn’t want or need.

  This guy—whose future would have him being a Neanderthal; a lion-faced man; a red-tailed, red-bodied, wiseass devil; a Romulan; a hunchback; a cross-dresser; a cop; a lawyer; a biker; and a hundred other personas—was just a nineteen-year-old kid then. He was six foot two with piercing blue eyes and curly blondish hair. He was thick boned, as they used to call it, though not noticeably overweight as he had been the majority of his childhood. He did, however, have a unique face, a distinctive kisser, as he’d been told a thousand times, with a pronounced jaw and high forehead. It was the kind of face that was not ugly but surely one of its kind, and he’d gotten accustomed to people sometimes taking a double look. He had learned to counter this seemingly endless barrage of negativity with a tough-guy, good-humored bravado, which he had learned as a necessity to survive when growing up on the streets of Washington Heights, NYC.

  But that day in Stockbridge he was working as an intern for a theater troupe and was thrilled, pumped up to be finally hanging around with real, working actors. He had just finished his first year in college studying drama and had had the luck of getting an internship as an assistant stage manager, or a PA, which was really a glorified coffee getter in the hierarchy of theater, but it was still an opportunity this kid was just ecstatic to have. He’d spent the previous weeks with the troupe as it rehearsed toward bringing a play, a Leonard Melfi experimental piece titled The Jones Man, to the stage. He had been aboard since early June as the play was rehearsed in East Village Off-Off Broadway playhouses and then went to the Provincetown Theater Festival on Cape Cod. And now he was on the second leg of this magical summer, having moved to the Berkshire Theater Festival to assist in still another out-of-town tryout of a brand-new American play, this one starring Ed Setrakian and Richard Lynch, two up-and-coming and highly regarded downtown New York actors.

  It all changed and came to a halt when these two people came toward him. It took a second of focusing to recognize his girlfriend, Linda, and cousin, Kenny. He immediately got a warm smile at such a surprise, but within less than a second a sense of dread filled him with the speed of those internal light switches we have that change our emotional reactions from lights-on to lights-out like the snap of a finger. It was the simple fact these two people, who were so dear to him, just being together that didn’t compute. They had never been in each other’s company in their lives. It was this incongruity that made him know that something cataclysmic had happened. He could see this incredible sadness and dread on his girlfriend’s face. Her usual beautiful, big brown eyes were red and puffy as if she had just forced herself to stop crying.

  They seemed so afraid of the news they had to give and what it might engender that he already almost knew what it was he was about to learn. Linda looked so sad, and even though his first reaction was, “Holy shit, here’s my girl,” and a surprise that brought a big smile to his face, his stomach knotted up a moment later as her usual warmth was oddly not reciprocated—that was the giveaway. Then he looked at his cousin’s face, one that had mastered the street look of neutrality, and he too seemed uncharacteristically forlorn.

  To an observer it might’ve appeared like some heartbreaking romantic turn was about to tear apart the young man. Maybe his girlfriend and cousin were here to personally reveal their affair. But in reality, on that day that type of idea never crossed his mind, nor could he imagine either to be disloyal. Instinctively he knew it was something else, a betrayal of a much grander kind.

  He turned to Kenny, because his girl was in too much pain to mouth the words, to intone this news he was about to get . . .

  “It’s bad, isn’t it?”

  Kenny took a deep breath, and the young man waited for a response that seemed like a million years in coming until his cousin finally spoke: “Yeah. It’s your dad . . . he died.”

  It was impossible, he first thought. His pop was only forty-nine years old and had seemed healthier than an ox the last time the kid saw him, only a few weeks earlier. He was the rock, the inspiration, the steadfast example of fortitude. What would happen to his family now, himself, his older brother with his special needs, and his mother, who by temperament was not built to handle even the smallest changes and challenges—and now this?

  That kid was me, of course, or how I remember myself, now at age sixty-three, looking back on that day. I didn’t have my shit together at that age, not by any means, although I took the news stoically—or at least I appeared to. I knew I needed to get home, take charge. I told my girlfriend and cousin to stand by and give me a half hour to gather my things and tell the bosses in the company that I needed to leave and that I was unlikely to return to finish the summer internship. Death is a thief, the grandest perpetrator of larceny of all. It robs the potential of all the things left undone and reimburses the living with bits of memories that, with each day, pass through the fingers like a handful of sand.

  It would take more than two hours to drive back home to find out exactly how my father died, which would be the most moving and poetic way a man’s life could end. He had taught me to have big dreams and convinced me that I would one day grab the world by the balls—or at least try to with all I had by dedicating my life to acting. He had told me that I could silence the naysayers by showing them what I had. When I got this news I went into action because that’s what always worked to subdue the overwhelming bouts of self-doubt and self-loathing that plagued me.

  I was sorry I had to leave, because that summer, finally, I was feeling good, like a million bucks, even if I only actually had twenty-five in my pocket and was sleeping on a mattress on the floor in a shack of a cottage the theater company provided for our class of peons, or PAs. I had been doing it—actually being in theater, mingling among people who were real performers who had dedicated their lives to the art, as I planned to do too. During that summer it had become absolutely clear that I not only wanted to pursue acting but
also needed to. Before, my exposure to performing arts had been fundamental, sophomoric, but the last six weeks had been eye-opening and an epiphany.

  In life it seems like events go from point A to point B, but that’s not the way it really is. These are all only segments that end up making circles, some that never get closed and some that intersect with only another circle, until one’s whole time on earth is a chain of these seminal rings. That’s how life is, or at least how it seems to me now after enough water has passed under the bridge to have given the illusion of some grand plan.

  After giving notice I raced back to my cousin’s car and asked him to let me drive. They had been through enough—with the effort it must’ve taken to find out where I was and truck all the way up here—and besides, I needed to be doing something. I needed an activity to keep me from disintegrating. He handed over the keys to his big, wide Buick and sat in the backseat. My girl squeezed next to me, in the days before seatbelts were required, and pressed her shoulder against mine and put her hand on my leg. Me, I was gripping ten-and-two on the wheel, the windows were down, the radio was off, and I beelined down toward the city. Gunning along the two-lane, tree-lined parkways with the speed of the gushing wind and the whoosh of passing cars created a welcomed sound to fill the car’s deadly silence.

  Everyone in the theater company—the director, producers, the other PAs, and even the actors—had been exceptionally sympathetic and understanding, which was a surprise considering how low I was on the totem pole. Most of what I’d been assigned to do had been basically busywork and hardly of value. I especially remembered the heartfelt reaction of the principal actor, Richard Lynch. He was then and continued to be throughout my life a genuinely stand-up guy, despite the demons he battled. In the last few weeks my job had been to get Richard onstage sober each night and keep him away from the vodka. Sometimes I was successful, and other times, not so much. I went from being a protector to an enabler in about five seconds flat on occasion because Richard could charm the keys right off of the warden.