Easy Street (The Hard Way) A Memoir Read online

  Another buddy of mine, named Spencer Schwartz, and I even went off on our own to try a stand-up comic routine, mimicking the comic deities we worshipped. We called ourselves “Stewart and Perry” because we thought Schwartz and Perlman were a little too ethnic for the times. Back then gays kept to themselves and a lot of Jews and Italians changed their names. We rehearsed by getting up at a school dance, for example, and doing a ten- to fifteen-minute routine. Most of our material was stolen from everybody, from Henny Youngman to George Carlin. Stewart was the straight man à la Dean Martin; I was the clown, like Jerry. We tried that for a while and actually started getting some gigs in local discotheques. Some of the joints were a bit dubious, though. One night we were performing in a club off Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. It was a pretty rough part of town, with a lot of gangbangers and a lot of unequivocal types. Somebody in the audience heckled us after I made a comment that was taken as disrespectful. The entire back row got up en masse and started for the stage. Stewart and I saw this and freaked, knowing these guys would have us for fucking dinner and hang our huevos out to dry. We quickly exited, literally stage left, and found a backdoor. We hightailed it north for a few blocks and got a taxi. That was the last stand-up we ever did.

  But I didn’t give up comedy. Believe me, there is no small amount of energy expended into developing one’s identity as a clown, as somebody who basically did anything for a laugh. My dad used to say, “You’d break your fuckin’ leg to get a laugh.” He was serious. He couldn’t believe it, the lengths I would go. But the comedy thing could have its drawbacks. I remember there was this one sweet, adorable, beautiful girl. She had a smile that lit up the whole goddamn world. I had a major, major crush on her. But I was a mess when it came to knowing what to say to her and how to go about it. My best pickup line was, “Are you gonna eat that?”

  So one time we were sitting in the cafeteria, and this beauty is at our table. It’s Monday, and I’ve just kind of set the high school on its ass with this play I was in. The performance I gave particularly was all the buzz. There was all this “Perlman’s cool” around school. I felt like I was in the zone. So I figure now was the time to make the move.

  I said to her, “How would you like to go out on a date?”

  Immediately she starts busting into a wild laughter. “You almost had me,” she said.

  It only took me a second to read the tea leaves: she thought I was doing my clown routine. I turned to my pal sitting to my left and said, “That’s it, man. I’m fuckin’ moving to Detroit. No one knows me there. I’m changing my name, and I’m starting over, because this whole clown thing—I ain’t ever getting laid.”

  My family went to that opening night of my first play and a few other times over the years. My dad and mom were very receptive, and they were really tickled that I was actually decent. They were both very encouraging from that moment forward. But my brother wasn’t so down with the whole theatrical thing I was doing. He was this young jazz musician, too cool for school. I asked him if he liked my performance.

  “Yeah, it wasn’t so bad. But I personally wouldn’t be caught dead doing that shit. In costumes, the makeup, and shit like that. But go ahead, man . . . do your thing! Whatever.”

  While all this good stuff was going on for me in high school our home was becoming like a volcano starting to shoot out plumes. Until it abruptly blew. That year my brother turned eighteen and finally got his cabaret card, which meant he was a professional musician, allowed to play at better-paying venues where alcohol was served. He was in huge demand in the city because he had so much talent, but getting that card was the beginning and end of everything for him.

  My brother hit a brick wall during the summer before my senior year. He was working in the Catskills at one of the better hotels up there. He’d come down to the city or go really anywhere a band hired him to play at a club or a big gig. That’s how musicians made a living, and many still do. Then I see there’s this sudden major drama going down in the background at my house. No one wanted to tell me exactly what happened, but I knew it had to be something bad. I finally found out my brother had what was being called a “behavioral incident.” It was serious enough to have him picked up immediately from the Concord Hotel and brought home to figure out what the fuck was wrong with him. My father went up there to pick him up and brings him home.

  Once back at our place—I remember like a scene out of a movie—my brother is standing in the kitchen, looking really weird and rambling. He’s just saying whatever, free associating, making no sense. My mother is in the far corner with her hands to her mouth in disbelief. My dad’s trying to reason with him. He grabs my brother by the shoulders and makes my brother look at his face. But my brother has a kind of angry, hostile tone to his rambling. He pulls away from my father’s hold and nearly squares off, with his clinched fists at his side. My brother’s tone escalates to confrontational. This was freaking my father out because he thought Les was being disrespectful. My father raised his hand to slap his face, but he held it there aloft. Dad then turned, deeply exhaled, and sat down in a kitchen chair, his hands laid out flat on the table, though I could see them slightly trembling. My father stared out the window as my brother rambled on. Although we had no idea what was wrong, as it was not easy to diagnose back then, what actually happened was that my brother started to have what are now known as manic depressive episodes. This was the very first one.

  No one could understand how he got it. There was no mental illness in the family line, as my father would say. He couldn’t understand what was wrong or how to fix my brother. Years later my brother told me he had taken some acid while up in the Catskills. One of the other musicians and Les dropped some home-brewed LSD, and both had nightmarish trips that lasted for twelve or more hours. Once you’re tripping, you can’t untrip at will. So if you’re having a bad trip, you are fucked. I’m not certain this is the thing that truly kicked off my brother’s manic depression. He had been a candidate for it, with or without the acid trip, but whatever happened on that acid trip triggered some sort of a chemical imbalance in him that he never recovered from.

  The next day my mother convinced my father to have my brother hospitalized. I don’t know whether they even had a term for manic depression in the late sixties, but they anesthetized him with Thorazine, which is a horse tranquilizer. They prescribed huge amounts of the drug to calm him into a state until he was zombietized. After two days of being in the hospital he looked like Jack Nicholson at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He had no fuckin’ life in his eyes. It was a very sad thing to watch.

  They then put him on lithium as well and told my folks he needed therapy. He was released after about two months of lockdown. When he came home he was tranquil, to say the least, because he was so sedated. Yet he lost his edge, his creativity, the thing that made him the genius musician he was. To this day I think of Les as a pure talent and myself as the charlatan. I really think I got by on a very thin set of skills, whereas with Les, he was really touched by some major muses. The heartbreaking part was that he had these demons that overwhelmed his phenomenal talents, such that we never got a chance to see the genius shine through. That’s the real tragedy.

  It’s a double-edged sword, this artistic genius, as is the disease he had. He knew he needed the meds, but he eventually refused to take them. He said he couldn’t play drums when he was on the drugs. Like most who suffer from the disease, my brother just said, “Fuck this.” He felt so good in the upside of manic depression that he simply believed other people just didn’t understand. All that free associating to the manic is empowering, and they feel phenomenally brilliant. When my dad or anybody said, “You’re outta control. You need to take the damn medication,” my brother would laugh and say, “What are you talking about? This is the best I’ve felt in my whole fuckin’ life.” That’s the trouble with the manic side of manic depression—you feel fuckin’ fantastic!

  The family was rocked considerably. My brother had numero
us outbreaks, with at least another eight serious enough to require further hospitalization. All of it took a horrible, horrible toll on my dad. First of all, my dad kept saying there was no such thing as mental illness in our ancestry, so it couldn’t have been that. There was always this kind of tension between him and my brother. Maybe because my brother was the first and a trailblazer; they’d been butting heads since Les was a kid. There’s often a dynamic like that between the first-born son and a father. The tension grew until one of the ugliest things I witnessed between my father and brother happened. My brother was rambling about some semicoherent nonsense that also had phases in it in which he put my dad down and mocked him. My father lost it and starting swinging at Les. He yelled with each punch, “You can’t fuckin’ talk to me like that!”

  My brother just looked at him like, “Fuck you.” He didn’t seem to even feel it. It was ugly. I didn’t get in the middle of it, but I remember thinking Dad was wrong. Les needed hugs, fucking real help. But neither my dad nor I knew how to reach the old Les. Where was the person who was his son? Where did my big brother I knew go? My father believed he could find the solution to anything by putting hard work and effort into it. But this?

  My mother tried her best, but she didn’t have the resources. None of them had the resources. None of them understood anything. My mom was worried for my dad then because clearly she’d never seen him like this. We had never seen him get into a situation in which he didn’t know what to do. He was a very capable guy. He’d been in the Army; he’d seen it all. He served during wartime. He came up on the streets of New York. This was a guy who always prided himself on knowing what to do. And then he gets into a situation in which he’s completely fucking helpless. And everything he’s trying backfires on him. He didn’t know how to deal with Les. It killed him that he didn’t know how to save his own blood, his son. The stress of it could have had something to do with what eventually caused his fatal heart attack two years later. I’ll never know.

  I suddenly realized how the stress at home that last year had made me immerse myself into theater and the drama department even more. It was such a relief to become absorbed into a character, making believe I was someone else, someone with a different life. Yet there was no discernible cause and effect that I brought to school or performances. My love of theater didn’t need anything to enhance it or any external torment and suffering to expand it, but obviously I welcomed having theater to get a reprieve from the discontent and sadness that filled our apartment.

  As I mentioned, the emotional stuff in life surely can be used in a performance to help give a character an authenticity. As for me, there’s no magical Zen thing; there’s no switch you can flick on. The transformative process of becoming the character is a result of the performance. Even if I am escaping reality, I try to tap into emotions that have to do with the human condition, those things we all go through, the sufferings and the joys. That’s what the theater is. That’s what movies are. That’s what all of the arts are, that, if done right, are reflections of the human condition. Even painting: the great painters are capturing truth. Was it Jean-Luc Godard who said, “Cinema is truth twenty-four frames a second”? That’s what it is, and it’s hard to know it when you see it in real life because the continuum of time doesn’t allow for that. You’re too busy living. But when you’re creating art, you’re basing the whole exercise on some exploration of facets of the human condition. And in getting the performance to the point at which it’s sublime, you’re coming closer to perfection than you could ever come in real life.

  I became addicted to creating, trying to figure out how to present that human condition either in a play or in a movie. You get a script, and when you decide you’re going to do it and you have a role to play, then you need to figure out the execution of it. It’s a riddle. You have to absorb the character’s traits and motivations into your own psyche and make sense of them and personalize them. Then you come back with your own version of a seamless telling of that. That’s the performance. So it is a very technical thing because it begins when you read something and acquire an intellectual understanding of it. Then, little by little, you hope it seeps its way down through your fucking dick, your balls, your calves, and your toes, and then you can physicalize it.

  It’s the human condition that the playwright or the screenwriter is trying to shed light on. The great plays are the ones that have the most to say about who we are and who we aren’t, what our limitations are, what our weaknesses and our strengths are, and what heroism looks like. It shows us what self-sacrifice looks like, what devotion looks like, what loyalty looks like. These are all things that started out with the Greeks and the plays they wrote. And nobody got it better, by the way. Nobody. To this day. Nobody got it fucking better than the Greeks. From Socrates, Euripides, Aristotle—none ever wrote more insightfully about the human condition than they did. Everything that we do, in all of our performing arts, are variations on shit that they came up with nearly four thousand years ago.

  I remember understanding this in a new way the very first time I went to a Broadway play. Even though the theater district was 130 blocks south of where we lived, it might as well have been on the moon, ’cuz my old man just couldn’t afford it. After a rich aunt and uncle from Long Island came to see one of my high school performances, they invited me to join them to see Fiddler on the Roof. It was thrilling. I remember every fuckin’ move, every line, and every song.

  Fiddler on the Roof is a perfect example of how great art can tap into that human condition I’m referring to. Who would think a story about a Jewish man with five daughters would be a sellable tale? But we love it. Why? We share his desires to keep his family together; we identify with his struggles and joys. These are ancient feelings we shared from the first time we banded together as humans and buried them in what Carl Jung called our shared consciousness. This is what the Greek dramatists understood. We relate to the play’s depictions of how outside forces sweep into our lives and how we cope. Because the writer, choreographer, lyricist, directors, cast, set designers, and many more all came together to tap into the human condition, the play turned into a legacy. For ten years it was the longest-running play on Broadway, until Grease knocked it from its throne. It still remains the sixteenth-longest in Broadway history. The play is still being produced, and I’d bet that some high school or college troupe is rehearsing it somewhere right now. That’s how powerful and noble the arts can be: oftentimes many of us don’t know why we think a certain movie is great, but it is because it manages to capture and speak to the very things that make us human.

  Even though the home life was going south, my parents still insisted I go to college. They didn’t care what I studied. For that generation, just going to college was the goal. They believed it would give us a chance to break the poverty cycle we were stuck in. Yet getting into college wasn’t as easy as I thought. It wasn’t for lack of schools or being accepted. I made it into two, in fact, but, again, I nearly blew it. Unchecked, I can make myself my own worst enemy. Shit, who of us can say otherwise? But when it came to either letting my flaws keep me from college and drama or doing something about it, my decision was rapid and decisive. No school, no more theater? It wasn’t going to go that way for me.

  (CHAPTER 4)

  Grinding Machine

  During my senior year of high school, in between the trips to the hospital to see my brother, my parents were very much on top of me about applying to college. They harped about application deadlines. Both grew up during the Depression, and neither had college educations. To that generation it was imperative that a child go to college, almost as if that was the guaranteed magic carpet ride to a life of happiness, kinda like on the Donna Reed Show or Father Knows Best. So I had to go, no matter what. It didn’t matter what the fuck I studied; I just needed to get the fuckin’ degree. But because we didn’t have any money, the notion of applying to a college that specialized in theater—by that time the die was fully cast—seemed a wa
ste of time unless I was going to get a full ride. My parents couldn’t afford to send me. Full stop!

  I tried to apply for scholarships at some Ivy League schools, but nothing promising panned out. Let’s not forget I was working off a 2.7 high school grade point average, a reality that completely ruled out any possibility for the Einstein Scholarship. I started focusing on schools within New York’s city-university system. Every borough had one, and back then they were free, so if the numbers added up, you were eligible to go to whatever one was in your borough: there was CCNY in Manhattan, Hunter College in the Bronx, Hunter College campus in Manhattan, Brooklyn College, Queens College, and Staten Island College, all making up CUNY, the City University of New York. These schools required a $150 registration fee, and that was it—now it can be six grand per year for New York residents. The schools were for lower-to middle-class families like mine. So my little 2.7 GPA was just enough to get me in—not to CCNY, but I got into York College in Queens.