Easy Street (The Hard Way) A Memoir Page 8

  It was the biggest, best party I ever went to and a summer that could never be duplicated. Here I am in Provincetown, Massachusetts, right on the fuckin’ beach. I mean suckers saved up all fuckin’ year to spend two measly weeks vacationing on that beach we’ve taken over for free. And I got every fuckin’ Actors Studio muthafucka who’s right on the cusp of greatness comin’ up from NYC for a few free days on the beach to get out of the hot, smelly city—and whatever free weed they could inhale. We even rented fishing boats when nobody had a dime to his name. (How we pulled that one off remains a mystery to this day.) I went tuna fishing with no rods or reels with actors Lane Smith and Jamie Sanchez, with Lane, the country boy, leaning over the rail of the bow, calling out, “Tuuuuunaaaaaa,” coaxing the fish to jump in the boat the way he’d call pigs into a barn. It was crazy. It was simply the best time. Then we moved down to Stockbridge, rubbing elbows with Eugene Ionesco, who was there for the world premiere of his newest masterwork. I’m chillin’ with William Penn because it was his hometown and he was . . . well, we were all just totally chillin’. And then, sure enough, one day I’m walkin’ out of the famed Alice’s Restaurant having had lunch, and what do I see—my girlfriend, Linda, and my cousin Kenny, together. And I go, “What the fuck? . . .”

  Didja hear about the optometrist who fell into the lens-grinding machine and made a spectacle of himself?!

  —Bert Perlman, 1919–1969

  (CHAPTER 5)

  Forever-ness

  The week of my dad’s funeral, or the traditional weeklong Shiva that Jews “sit” after a death, as I mentioned earlier, is when you bring out all the photos of family life. It was a week of intense polarities, part of me wanted to crawl into a dark cave and just listen as my inner voices struggled to find direction; but the part of me that knew better knew my Mom needed me. And with my brother also having moved out years earlier, I wanted to make sure she was okay. It was the kind of challenge I had never experienced before, with no one there but myself to orchestrate how each moment of the day would go. And all the while the struggle with the eeriness of it provided me with just enough activity so as to prevent me from dwelling on the obvious; the apartment was silent, no music, no dad. The smell of dad’s old clothes mixed with the souring fragrances of all the flowers that had been sent during the Shiva. It was just on the verge of being too much.

  That week you bring out all the photos of family life. My childhood was wedged into these plastic album pages and in shoeboxes filled with Kodak three-by-fives or older black-and-whites, the ancient-looking, sepia-colored kind with those wavy corrugated edges. But like all photos, there’s a long list of events and unbelievable coincidental situations that led up to the moment when you stood still and said, “cheese!” That’s what I was looking at—the unseen area and space that no photo can ever really capture. For me, it seemed like I was prematurely urged to start to piece together everything. I had to—my old man had just died, and I knew it was my duty to take the reins, like the heroes in the Westerns my dad and I loved to watch. I was gonna need every bit of the strength and manliness I saw in those movies we watched together, especially now that we lost our lead actor. I was gonna be the one who leapt onto the team of runaway horses to whoa them down in order to bring some stability to this rocking stagecoach of our family life.

  We didn’t have hundreds of people show up that week. To the world, it wasn’t like losing a head of state, even if to me it was more paramount than that. It was a very small, intimate group, as I mentioned: family members, neighbors, my mom’s coworkers from the county clerk’s office, and my dad’s peers, who were then mostly TV repair guys and fellow teachers. By that time my dad had long hung up the dream of being a professional musician, and I had never met the people from that era. He had been a TV repairman ever since my brother and I were young kids. In the last days he taught television electronics in a vocational high school, the kind of school where they sent kids unable to make it anywhere else, already deemed longshots and marginalized, pigeonholed to either learning a trade or becoming career criminals. In those days those schools were one step away from being sent to a locked-down reform school. He used to tell his class straight up, “This is like the last-chance saloon, you know what I mean? You don’t make it here, you ain’t going to make it anywhere.”

  The night before my old man’s first day as a substitute teacher at Chelsea Vocational he came to my bedroom when I was just about to sleep and asked to borrow my baseball bat—I had a prized Louisville Slugger that he had managed to get a couple of Yankees to sign.

  I heard him opening the chest at the foot of my bed. “Can I take your bat with me to school?”

  I said, “Sure, I guess. Why not?” I thought he was teaching electronics, but I knew my dad well enough that he must’ve had something up his sleeve.

  When he came back that night we were having our regular family supper, which was always at six o’clock on the dot, when he talked about his first day as a teacher.

  “I walked into class and said my name’s Mr. Perlman. Anybody comes within thirty feet of me I start swinging this fuckin’ thing. The whole class looks at me in shock, like I’m an escapee from the loony bin. But I’m keeping a straight face until they realize, ‘Holy shit, this dude’s fuckin’ with us.’”

  From that point on my dad won those kids over, and he eventually became the most popular teacher at the school. I only wish he had found this calling earlier in life, because this was clearly what he was born to do—be a big brother, to be somebody who, through love, understanding, and patience, was able to redirect misguided energies. I’m pretty sure there’s no higher calling than that!

  Irving, Dad’s older brother, like everybody from my father’s side, had all tried to be musicians. He had worked hard to be a professional violinist; my dad’s sister, Aunt Mildred, a professional singer, and another uncle played the accordion, until the hard knocks of the creative life made all eventually throw in their towels. Nevertheless, at every dinner party at my house or at another relative’s place, after we ate, boom: all these fucking instruments would come out of the woodwork, and the whole night would be a fantastic escape from the ordinary. I loved those times. People were singing; people were playing. People were telling jokes; people were getting drunk. The booze was flowing, and I began to become addicted to ways of removing myself from the mundane, which I found to be really deadly. I dreaded routine, the sameness of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Every day was deadening to me, and there was nothing to aspire to; nothing about it had any kind of color to it—it was just drab, drab gray.

  “The Perlman curse,” I said. Those were words my father used. My father was citing the fact that very few in the male Perlman line ever lived past fifty—Uncle Irving and I are the only exceptions. Everybody on my father’s side tended to die young. My dad’s dad didn’t make it past fifty. My dad didn’t make it past fifty. It was kind of a curse on all the Perlman men. Hell, my brother didn’t even make thirty-nine. I mean, fuck, this shit was so palpable, I remember when I was in my forty-ninth year I got so nuts that every month I was buying another quarter-million dollars’ worth of life insurance. Even my wife started lookin’ at me like maybe I was worth more dead than alive. But Irving’s story inspired me deeply about how life sometimes makes you throw the dice, whether you want to or not, and in the most dramatic way. He was supposed to be dead when he was twenty-one because he had an inoperable tumor where his spine met his brain, and nobody wanted to touch it. The last doctor he went to said, “So what’s everybody telling you?”

  “Everybody is telling me I got three to six months to live.”

  The doc said, “If you do nothing, that’s right. So then, why don’t I try to take it off, and if you die on the operating table, well, then, you lost three to six months of your life. This is the only chance you got, and by the way, I’m not guaranteeing you anything, but who knows.” So Irving got the operation and lived until his eighties, thus being the first to break the deadly Per
lman curse.

  During Shiva I talked with my uncle about when Dad got sick a couple of years ago. I remember it was a scene right out of Spencer Tracey in Boy’s Town. Dad was in this big ward in Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, and I went to visit him at around 5:45 in the afternoon. So you know how the light is at that time of the day. (In cinema I later learned that little sliver of time was called “magic hour” and one every cameraman wants to capture because . . . well, it’s magical!) So he’s in this huge ward, the size of a half a football field, and his bed was all the way on the other end, right by the window. There’s this streaming sunlight, late afternoon sunlight, coming in, and it’s backlighting this sort of tableau, and I know I’m kind of walking toward the bed, but all I see are shapes. I see about thirty figures all sitting around someone propped up in a bed. As I get closer and closer to this beautiful image I notice that this crowd is all young Puerto Rican and tough Irish kids sitting around my dad. His class had come to visit him, you know, in the hospital, and that was the moment when I realized I wasn’t the only one who thought of my dad as angelic. The look on every one of those kid’s faces—and these were tough kids, man—I mean, these kids really, really loved Dad.

  The only grandmother I knew was on my mom’s side, my dad’s parents having died long before I could remember. My father’s family was third- or fourth-generation Jewish Americans, originally from Hungary, but my mom’s mother barely escaped Poland just as all the Nazi shit started to hit the fan. She fled with three daughters, leaving her husband to come meet them later. Two of the girls died before she made it safely to New York City. That’s where she had my mother and my mother’s baby sister, Natalie. And although my grandmother wasn’t a particularly religious person when she was in Poland, because of the whole debacle of being ethnically threatened and shot at and her children dying simply because they were Jewish, she found religion when she got to the United States. Imagine losing your flesh and blood, your little daughters, to some insane global hatred? She became more and more religious as she got older. She was the reason why my parents insisted I get bar mitzvahed and all that stuff. My mom was not particularly religious, and my dad, although a true humanist, was a self-declared agnostic; he had a palpable disdain for anything religious. But out of respect for my grandmother, everybody kind of wanted me to go through the motions, which is what I did. And that’s all because she was such a great lady and commanded true respect.

  I hung around with Mom for the few weeks before school started, but soon after I returned I suddenly felt like I existed in a surreal world, partially because one of the strangest things I ever experienced occurred. And it happened every night while I slept. Prior to this I never really had an ability to remember my dreams, but that suddenly changed dramatically. It happened for one full year after my father died, for 365 days exactly. Then it stopped, and I haven’t been able to remember dreams more than in snippets ever since. But that year, every night when I went to sleep, from the first moment until I woke up, I experienced these vivid, Technicolor dreams. They were as if presented by Cecile B. DeMille; they were Cinemascope, Cinerama, flamboyant, and bizarre. There were also some Hitchcockian moments to them. There was a lot of flying and soaring and falling off rooftops.

  The only constant in all these varied dreams was my dad. He was the star and overbearing presence during each of these nights. In all the dream scenes it was me and my dad going through sometimes very surreal, sometimes very mundane situations, though all of it can only be described as truly cinematic and epic. The longer this happened and the longer I realized these dreams were going to keep occurring, the more I knew this must be important and that I must pay attention. Because it was lasting for so long and it was such a departure from anything I ever experienced before, I didn’t know if it would ever stop happening. These visitations, which are how I began to view these dreams, seemed to be coming out of some very primal need on my part. It felt good after a while, and I saw it as a way to steal back a little of the time with my dad that had been stolen from me.

  I sensed there was a sort of mysticism, for lack of a better word, to the exchanges my dad and I had in these dreams. I was not a bystander in these dreams, and a lot was asked of me and being shown to me. Some of the dreams were explicitly instructional, whereas others were violent and unsettling. Some had some really horrific things happen; some were very languid and pastoral. There was this incredible cornucopia of experience that felt so real and more vivid than anything that was happening to me in my waking hours. I began to understand something intensely special was transpiring. I was getting this glimpse of some other space outside the materialist world of time and the brick-and-mortar world we know. There were happenings that were unexplainable, as if coming from another unseeable level. They were meant to be funky and weird, but they were way bigger than I was fully able to comprehend. It seemed clear that there were other forces in the universe that were more than the pragmatism view that my dad raised me to believe. These forces I saw in these dreams were unexplainable, ever-present and omniscient, and larger than the universe.

  In a strange way, when that year ended, I had my first personal relationship with a higher being. And even though the person who was the star of these dreams was a proclaimed agnostic and maybe an atheist, he was my guide to these mysterious forces, forces that man called God to begin with. I was able to regard Dad’s passing as a gift and a loss. He gave me the gift of knowing that he was going to maintain a place right next to me forever. He showed there were other powers that allowed his spirit to live on. And although I retained a disdain for all things religious, I began to create my own version of a deity.

  I never talked to anyone about these dreams or my beliefs before. So let me admit here that I do pray, every day, anywhere from two to eight times a day. I have this deity that I purposefully allow to remain undefined and ethereal. And yet I know He sees all and knows all. Punto. Period. It came as a result of my dad’s loss. This was not a drug-induced experience that gave me a gate to another door of perception–type of horseshit, with all that astral plane stuff; instead, I got an uncomplicated and simplified understanding of a being that was grander than I could imagine. Later I realized something like this doesn’t happen often or to too many people. It must’ve been akin to what inspired writers of texts such as the Bible and other religious dogma to attempt to explain. But the experience is such that words can’t describe it and in fact only screw it up and regurgitate it into dogma. I also knew my higher power didn’t need to be worshipped or given lip service or proselytizing for, that I did not need to convert anyone. It’s a personal relationship and needed no church to validate it. The more I realized this, the more I saw how the chance people who came into my path were not so coincidental, Ralph Arzoomanian being one of them.

  I finished college after doing numerous productions, though my maturity level changed after the death of my father, his dream world visitations, and from Ralph’s enthusiasm for art. Eventually I understood a performance was a means to express a playwright’s point of view. I tried to understand what it is he’s writing about and why, his modality, and what he’s capturing. When I took the focus off of me and put it onto the character itself, then I was really cooking. I mentioned Hemingway before: guys like him, the iconic legendary writers in literature, every single thing they wrote got me to say, “Were you tripping on acid when you wrote this? This is fucking awesome. Where did this come from, and how did you pull it off?” You know, you could spend a year just analyzing Waiting for Godot as an existential sort of document. Forget about the fact that it’s entertaining and funny.

  In the last years of college, in addition to the school productions, a bunch of us in the troupe formed a little ensemble to write and perform sketch comedy. It’s called blackout sketch comedy, like what you see on Saturday Night Live. Our impromptu production was fairly good as far as the mad-cap, funny kind of quasi-barbillion genre of comedy goes. We went around and performed at old age homes, underpriv
ileged high schools, and hole-in-the-wall clubs—we had a ball. I was just experimenting, trying to find where I could fit in the performing arts and who I was as a performer. Mostly what came natural to me was comedy.

  I lost touch with the girls of our blackout troupe, but one of the guys, Joel Brooks, is still here, like me, banging it out as an actor in Hollywood. He’s one of the most talented guys I ever met. Joel made a career as an actor, and if you check out his IMDb entry, you’ll see he’s got a very long string of credits. But why Joel and I decided to go to graduate school together at the University of Minnesota was for another reason, something other than theater. By the end of my senior year I had turned into a wanted man. I needed to get out of Dodge because the law enforcement department of the City of New York was looking for my ass. I needed to go on the lam, and in a hurry.

  It started after my dad gave me that first car of mine toward the end of freshman year. I was doing plays and getting home between 11:30 to a quarter to midnight every night. I was living in the Bronx, where there was absolutely no parking at all, ever, so I pretty much double-parked for the entire last three years of college. In turn, I accumulated $7,536 in parking tickets. It might as well been $750,000, because when you don’t have a dollar, $7,500 is a fortune. What happened in NYC back then is that if you didn’t pay the $35 ticket, it became a $65 ticket, which became a $90 ticket, which capped off at $130. At a certain point you are deemed a “scoff-law.” Then they treat you as if you are running a drug cartel, and they can put one of these things on your tire, the boot, so your car is immobilized. (Now I think they just tow the car and you can’t get it back until you pay.) But they can stop you at a red light and put you upside a wall and make you spread your fuckin’ legs like ya just killed Grandma!