Easy Street (The Hard Way) A Memoir Read online

  After a little uncustomary tap dance on the part of my old man, I managed to get my acceptance switched over to another campus of Hunter College that was renamed Lehman College in the Bronx on 204th Street. It did have a theater department, but there was no word on whether it was any good. I figured, “Hey, I’ll be in college, it’s liberal arts. Whatever little education I can get from the place would be better than nothing. I’ll find a way to join the drama club.” That’s where, for a second time and shrouded in circumstances mysteriously absurd, life was about to take another profound turn, once again sending me on the trajectory I remain on to this day. For it was there, at this dinky little last-chance saloon of a college in the Bronx, that I met a man who I can only describe as the Carl Jung of theater literature. This man was about to shape my place in theater in a way completely separate from my earlier encounter. Talk about the unplanned miracle—this man would awaken and solidify my entire aesthetic. But I digress . . .

  To get into a CUNY college, it was required to take a physical at the end of your senior year of high school. I flunked mine. I was 310 pounds. I had high blood pressure and salt in my urine, all of which might not have been so bad were I an eighty-seven-year-old Jew. But I was seventeen. Not good. In short, I was admitted to Lehman College, but the caveat was that I had to remediate these two health issues, or no entry. The salt in the urine was something that demanded attention because it was off the beaten path for a kid my age, and it was something that required a very special treatment. I was put on a sodium-free diet. It wasn’t just putting down the salt shaker but also included a list of nearly everything I normally ate. You don’t realize how many foods naturally have salt in them until you have to go on this fuckin’ diet. Virtually everything has salt in it. At least everything that provided me with a reason to live! I had to eat stuff that was either processed without salt or naturally contained no sodium content. The only condiment that had any zip to it I was allowed to use was mustard. Oh yeah, onions, curiously enough, also contained no salt. To this day I eat mustard and onions on everything, from my fucking cereal in the morning to my muthafuckin’ hot fudge sundae at night! It’s the only thing that made the food I was allowed not to taste like cardboard. My Jewish mom who encouraged me through my childhood to eat “healthy-size” portions now realized that I needed to do this to get into college. She did everything in her power not to fuck that up. She threw aside her selfish need to watch me eat and be happy in order to see me pass this physical. Dear old Mom!

  It became an exercise in discipline on everybody’s part, because it really required all of us to start eating differently. I stuck to it to the decimal point and never once cheated. I only had two months, from the last weeks of June to the end of August, to affect this thing. The final result was that I lost ninety-five pounds in nine weeks. A lot of interesting things take place when, for the first time in your life, you have a goal. You have to sacrifice a lot of the things you love in order to achieve it. You have to exert, for the first time, some real willpower. And you find out a little about yourself. You ask yourself, Am I made to do this? Do I have what it takes to do this? That was the first time I ever had any real demands put on me in which I had to rise to an occasion that was seriously outside my comfort zone.

  By the time September rolled around and I retook the physical to start Lehman, my health was dandy. What I found most odd was that it was not only a physical change but was also a change in persona. I saw myself differently in the mirror and was looked at differently by the world at large. That marked the beginnings of the turning away from that kid with the low self-esteem. From that moment forth anybody who met me, especially in college who didn’t know me before, would have looked at me really askance and gone, “Fuck you talking about? Fat kid?” There was no way for the outside world to understand what I was feeling on the inside because, well, once you’re fat—I don’t give a shit if you now weigh forty-five fucking pounds—you always think of yourself as fat. Weird, I know.

  To demonstrate, during my senior year of high school, when I was 310 pounds, we did a production of Carousel by Rogers and Hammerstein, which is one of their iconic musicals. I played Enoch Snow, this fat, jolly character whom everybody loves. When I became a freshman at Lehman College around nine months later and had lost the ninety-five pounds, we did the same play, except I played Jigger Craigin, who is the bad guy, the lean, nasty, mean motherfucker. That was a transformation that sparked a palpable change in self-perception.

  It’s an interesting thing that to this day I’ve never come close to being that heavy again. The most I’ve ever allowed myself to get to was about 255 pounds, but I’ll get back quickly to around 205 to 210, which is what I call my fighting weight. I still have a thing with food; it’s my number-one vice. I still eat at least one piece of chocolate every day. I remember for City of Lost Children I opened the movie shirtless as a street performer who broke chains with his chest. I had to get into the shape of my life! It was nothing but egg whites, chicken breasts, and broccoli for, like, five months. Then I got to Paris to start filming, and they had gotten me a flat above the best chocolatier in Europe. So now I start obsessing over how much chicken breast I gotta give up so I can have my pound of the good shit every fuckin’ day. At any rate, it’s a very fucking fundamental part of me, being fat. It’s just one of those conditions you resign yourself to.

  Many years later during therapy, in my obsession to change this perception, I was introduced to what, in Jungian terms, was called the “Shadow.” It’s powerful when you identify the Shadow in yourself. Everybody has one. Most people spend their lives running from it. What you really want to do is the opposite. To be truly happy and at peace, you need to embrace that kid who you once were. He’s still there, so take care of him as if he were your own child, as if you’re his parent. You’d love that kid and nurture him, wouldn’t you?

  That was probably one of the most game-changing things I did, to come to terms with that fat kid who had been the source of so much discomfort and unease. All you need to really do is just fucking love him. And know that that’s your fingerprint—that’s what separates you from the crowd. And there’s gold in them there hills if you just know how to make peace with it. This once self-destructive image, with all its flaws, can instead become something you see as a bright, shining asset. If you start beating up on yourself, with internal talk like, “You’re a loser, it will never work out, you don’t deserve this . . . ,” stop your fucking brain in its tracks. You can’t help the thought that crosses your mind, but you do have the power to change it with a new and more positive one. When I think of myself as that kid everybody made fun of, I know his pain better than anyone and, instead, I treat that boy right. As sure as I am of this being the fastest route to find true self-acceptance, that lesson took another twenty years for me to learn.

  But during college I was ready and had that swagger that only eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds can have. You know when you thought you had it all figured out and knew how the world worked? It’s a sort of nice, naïve moment to live through. The very first thing I did in college was to find the drama department.

  Actually, the drama department sort of found me, because I was leaning toward doing musicals. As I already mentioned, and in my frenzy to greet my college experience by finding the very first stage on which to do my thing that I possibly could, at the beginning of my freshman year I did Carousel with the school’s Musical Theater Society. So, fresh off that little experiment, I was walking down one of the corridors at Lehman in the speech and theater building. Now, the classrooms at Lehman have two entrances, one in the front and one in the back. So as I was passing the back of one of these classrooms I heard someone shout from inside, “Hey Goldberg!” For obvious reasons, I kept walking. As I passed the front entrance to the very same classroom I heard, once again, only much louder, “HEY! GOLDBERG!” Well, it didn’t take me long to realize I was the only person in said hallway, so I peeked into the room where this shouting is
coming from. And there was this rather dubious-looking teacher in front of this quite full classroom filled with eager participants.

  “Excuse me, were you referring to me?” I asked.

  “Yeah, you—Goldberg.”

  “I think you might be making a mistake,” I said. “My name’s Perlman.”

  To which he said, “Goldberg, Perlman, who gives a fuck—you act, right?” And before I could respond, he came back, “You did that musical with those musical types, right? Why don’tcha come do some real theater with some real serious theater types?!” And then he said—again I was given no shot at responding—“Auditions are today at three. Be there, Goldberg!”

  Who could say no?

  I started being in productions from the beginning. The theater department was under a professor named Ralph Arzoomanian. (His real name is Raffi, and we remain friends to this day.) The son of Armenian immigrants, having grown up in Rhode Island, he was the most colorful guy I ever met. Period. But not only was he vibrant; he was a fucking genius and an amazing teacher. I took every fucking class he taught in college. He had this incredible way of taking us from discussions of the Greeks all the way to Sam Beckett. The way Ralph taught the class, there was no fat on the bone. Every single playwright he chose to explore exemplified a movement, an epoch, an era. I diligently studied the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and some of the Roman playwrights, followed by Shakespeare, Molière, Racine, and then Ibsen, Chekhov, and Bertolt Brecht—so by the time I was finished, I had really absorbed the entire history of the genius of theatrical literature. I knew the Aristotelian definition of tragedy and comedy and why Shakespeare got the joke better than any of ’em. I walked away knowing the effect all these geniuses had on the pages of theatrical literature and why theater offered such a profound understanding of the human condition, equally important as the philosophy of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant, Freud, Jung—you name it. Fuck, Sam Beckett alone encapsulated to poetry the useless, tragic, funny, mysterious morass we call life as much as fifteen Einsteins did for physics.

  All this genius was wrapped up into four years and presented by what can only be described as the Damon Runyon of Ivy League. Ralph came from the seedier streets of Providence, Rhode Island, one of the toughest towns on the eastern seaboard. His folks had nothing but pride and a great work ethic to pass down. Once he discovered his love for the theater, he managed to get himself a first-class education, ending up in the famed writer’s workshop at the University of Iowa along with Vonnegut, Edward Albee, and a couple of other guys you might not have heard of. Anyway, to say the least, he knew his shit. His teaching style, however . . .

  Every other word out of Ralph’s mouth was fuck. Or motherfuck. Or cocksucker. Fuck you, you cocksuckin’ muthafucka, what the fuck . . . well, you get the idea. Whereas every other professor was wearing the herringbone jacket with the leather patches on the sleeve, Ralph’s uniform consisted of Levi’s, white converse sneakers, a white T-shirt in spring (a long-sleeve sports shirt in the colder months), and a set of binoculars that hung around his neck. The binoculars were there ’cuz every day, the minute his teaching duties were done, he bolted to either Aqueduct or Belmont racetracks to catch as much of the afternoon card as he could. Ralph was an itinerant, degenerate horseplayer, and a damn fine handicapper at that, a rather complex skill, which he tried to pass on to me. But alas, anything requiring even the slightest of math skills, and I was hopeless. I did enjoy accompanying him to the track, though. He always sat in the most expensive part of the clubhouse and only bet long shots, which made for as much excitement as one could bear. “Fuck it,” he’d say. “I like to play the fuckin’ horses!” Hey, who was I to fuckin’ argue?!

  I really wanted to get into his head because this fucking guy was brilliant, a bona fide iconoclast. He was completely different from anybody. He rubbed the whole staff the wrong way. He made everyone uneasy, ’cuz in a world where people were trying to curry favor to further their careers, Ralph thumbed his nose at all pretense, thus symbolizing the hypocrisy of it all—fearlessly, to make things worse.

  I’m at the point now at which my position as an actor is very, very different. My enthusiasm to be an actor and the motivation behind it is more in line with my devotion to the literature of it and the nature of storytelling, as opposed to what started it all: the high of performing it. Storytelling started from the time we could speak. The earliest of humankind gathered in damp caves to tell stories of their lives. It’s apparently a genetic need we have as a species to tell and hear stories. That’s what it’s about for me now. It’s as much about why we need it, why we make films and tell stories, as it is an essential means of reasserting our humanity. That’s what it’s evolved into for me, and it all started with this guy who I met in college, this Arzoomanian, this chance meeting that turned into something profoundly divine!

  I had a great first year of school. As a freshman in college, though, I remember thinking, Damn, girls are actually looking at me in a different way. Who knows, maybe this was my Detroit, my new beginning, in my new skinny jeans. I soon met Linda, my first steady girlfriend. We went the whole sixties route together: we shacked up, lived together, set up house, and had a dog and three cats in a little apartment in the Bronx. I met her because she was designing costumes for the school plays, so when, one day—it mighta been around the same time she was measuring my inseam—we suddenly clicked. And that was that.

  That first year I acted in two plays during the first semester and another two in the second. Ralph always directed one of the four because there were three or four other theater professors, each doing one. But what I quickly learned from Ralph was that acting was not just about getting my jollies off and digging audience applause. I developed a different perspective, one of “Holy shit! I get to act out the character created by these genius playwrights.” The great ones created a reality that moved us, instructed us. They hit the bull’s eye that all great art achieves. If something appeals to our collective consciousness—the things we have in common as humans, the same thing that joined us going back to the cavemen sitting around the fires telling tales—then it’s a hit, a marvel, a work of art appreciated by all. What nobler thing could you do on this planet than participate in anything that tries to perform so realistically that it touches the nerve of all who witness it? If high school was the awakening to the magical element of the theater, then college and, in particular, Ralph gave it depth, gravitas, universality.

  That year I was cast as the lead, Sky Masterson, in a production of Guys and Dolls. I remember it was on a Thursday, the opening night, when my whole family came to see it. Afterward they gave me the typical family “atta boy” kudos, which I was pleased to get. But the next night, as I’m leaving the theater, I see my dad standing in the alley near the backstage door.

  I said, “Pops, what are you doing here? I’m really sorry but I was planning on going out tonight with a bunch of the cast.”

  “No,” he said, “I’m not here for that. You go out with your friends. I just came by to check something out. Go have some fun, I’ll see ya back at the house.” And then he split. I didn’t know what he meant “check something out” until the next day, when we were in the car together, and he lowered the radio.

  “You know, kid, you gotta do this.”

  “I gotta do what?”

  “This acting thing. You got no choice. You gotta do this! You got this thing that only some get. It ain’t like you should do this—you gotta! So don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise!”

  He then turned the radio back up. But in that moment it was like a wax seal on a document. My father gave me permission—permission to follow my goal, to perform. And don’t think for a minute there weren’t times when the universe was more than giving me signals to chuck the shit. Don’t think I wouldn’t get tested down to the very core. Don’t think when the bank account was on empty and the phone hadn’t rung in two years I didn’t think to say, “Fuck this, old man, and your fucking ad
vice! This is nuts!” But I never did. ’Cuz when my dad said those words he had a look about him. That order was sacrosanct. In fact, it wasn’t an order at all . . . it was a blessing. And within a few months, just like that, he was gone. As if it was some holy, sacred deathbed wish. Give the shit up? Sheeeeeeit!

  During the first year Ralph found that he happened to get a good bunch of us kids in the troupe who wanted more than what the school was willing to give. He started to bring in some of his downtown friends, some of his ex-real theater-type people. He brought in a guy named Arlen Digitale, a hopeful downtown director who was always on the cusp of big things but needed to subsidize his income with a little light teaching. Arlen saw without looking too hard that my passion for the stage was more than a passing college tryst. So he hooked me up the following summer with a PA gig working with some real players on some new plays they were trying out of town. As soon as classes were over in June I started hanging with this theater troupe as they rehearsed in the Village before taking it to the Provincetown Playhouse.

  I’d never really hung out in the village. I was a Washington Heights and Bronx kid. But suddenly I’m downtown for the first time, hanging out on Bleecker Street, right in the middle of where the whole Beat generation was converging. I started meeting all these people who are like Actor’s Studio people, who were really poor but really starry eyed and totally into what they were doing. I started to get exposed to this horrific life—these people had nothing but holes in their shirts and sweaters and were struggling to put spare change together to pay the rent, but they were doing it—and suddenly I wanted to be a part of this special breed more than anything else. We ultimately went up to the Provincetown playhouse and then down to Stockbridge to mount these two brand-new plays by up-and-coming writers.