By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There: A Memoir (6 page)

Eventually, I did become the featured waiter. By then Michelle was working as a hostess at Fafi, a restaurant in Brooklyn Heights. But a year and a half into our life in New York, we were still working these server jobs. Moreover, I was starting to feel less passionate about our relationship.

In the spring of 1987, at an audition for a Sam Shepard play,
Cowboy Mouth,
I met a pretty, red-haired, very talented girl named Tisha Roth. There were just two people in this play—Sam and Patti Smith played the parts initially—and Tisha got the female part. I didn’t get the male one, but I was so mesmerized by her, I almost didn’t care. I was also doing another play at the time—
The Indian Wants the Bronx
at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Tisha had been working at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, at Williams College—it was where all of the seriously talented people went; Christopher Walken was also there that summer. Tisha was considered one of the best actresses there.

After Tisha and I met, we started spending a lot of time together.
I hadn’t been with anybody but Michelle for nearly five years—hadn’t even kissed anybody else—but when I met Tisha, my attraction to Michelle began to cool. I was confused because up until that point I’d pretty much assumed I’d stay with Michelle forever.

One night at Tisha’s apartment, we began fooling around. I broke down, though, because I felt so guilty about Michelle—I literally started crying. Tisha was very concerned and asked me what was wrong. I didn’t know how to explain it.

I didn’t know—and I still don’t—how people fall out of love with each other. It really is one of the great mysteries of adulthood. And after that night with Tisha, I was trying to make sense of my feelings around all of this. I was writing a lot in my journal, and then Tisha and I started exchanging letters. And here’s what an idiot I am: I liked the letters I was writing her so much that I photocopied them. They weren’t love letters—they were mostly about why I felt like I couldn’t just jump into a relationship with her because I didn’t know when I’d be emotionally ready to do that again. This letter writing went on for several months.

In late May of that year, Michelle found all the letters. And she read every fucking word of them. When I came home that day, she said, “You have to move the fuck out.” She didn’t know who Tisha was, and she didn’t care. She just said it was clear that I was in love with somebody else, and I had to go.

I was in deep shock. I’d kept the letters behind my dresser in our bedroom, in an envelope taped to the back. They were very well hidden. But she was cleaning some area where she never cleaned and found them. And when Michelle was done, she was done. She didn’t care that kicking me out was going to make her life harder. I honestly hadn’t known she had that kind of strength until she did that.

It was terrible. I had loved our life and our little apartment on
Clinton and Degraw, two blocks from Atlantic Avenue, in Brooklyn. Michelle understood that I wasn’t great with directions and that this was the only part of New York I knew, so she called the landlord of our building and asked if he had any other apartments in the area; he did, and she found me a new place the very next day. I was inconsolable, but she was very matter-of-fact about everything, and in fact packed up all my stuff. She didn’t let the kind of shape I was in prevent what had to happen. I begged her to let me stay, but she just wasn’t hearing it. Within four days she had me packed up and moved. Not only that, but she’d also found me furniture, bought me toiletries and cleaning supplies, and hired the movers.

I moved two and a half blocks from Michelle but she wouldn’t see me at all. Still, she was such a good person that she wanted to keep track of me until she knew I was going to be okay. Of course, I wasn’t okay for a while—I cried for a year and could barely get through my life at all in the first six months.

I realized I had to go home, to Michigan—to my mom. I took a leave of absence from the catering job and stayed with my mom for two months. And once I was there, I was so disconsolate that I didn’t get out of bed for twelve days. Finally my mother said, “You have to get over the sadness. You have an apartment back in New York—you signed a lease there.” My dad came over and told me, “I know you’re afraid you’ll never fall in love again, but you will.” And then my mom said something I’d never heard from her: “I know that I didn’t support this idea of you being an actor six years ago, but I do now. Because you’re good at it and you’re only going to improve.”

At a certain point, I started to feel a little better. My interest in Tisha had been completely obliterated by my desire to get back with Michelle, but while I was home, I reconnected with a girl that I’d had
a dalliance with in high school, and being with her—being with someone besides Michelle—wasn’t as jarring as I’d thought it was going to be. That helped me. Looking back, it’s hard to believe that I was so concerned with being with someone new. If only I knew then that there would come a time when I’d want to be with somebody new
every hour
.

One day my mom walked in and said, “Pack, because you’re going back to New York tomorrow.” And I did it. I went back to Cobble Hill. Of course, I was still trying desperately to get Michelle back, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

And yet out of this horrible depression came renewed vigor and ambition. At this point I was twenty-four, and I knew my odds of making it as an actor were still slim. But I was also getting a sense of my own abilities, and I felt in a lot of ways that I’d just tapped into those abilities. I was cast in a one-act Arthur Miller play alongside people who a year before I’d thought were very good. Now I was working with them and thinking, “I need to be working with better people.” The director was a Broadway big shot who told me, “You’re working at a higher level than your co-actors, and you need to know that. You need to carry this play. That’s the only way it will work.” When that play was over, I was moved up to the master acting class at Ensemble.

Not long after that, I was sitting in the waiting room of Phoenix Artists, waiting for a meeting with an agent, and I started talking to a charming, sweet aspiring actress who was also there. She got called in before me, and when I came out of my own meeting an hour later, she was there waiting for me. Her name was Edie Falco.

Edie and I decided to go to a Mexican restaurant on Sixteenth Street and Eighth Avenue called Mary Ann’s. I liked her right away; she also seemed so worldly. I was still hurting from my breakup with
Michelle, but Edie gave me the hope that it was still possible to fall for someone else. We started dating and I took an enormous amount of solace with her; she was very kind to me.

Our sensibilities were fairly similar. I’d say we were both openly miserable but in a sort of bemused way. We liked each other but not enough to take care of the other person’s misery—we both knew we had enough misery of our own to worry about.

By then I was living with a friend, Tom Benson, whom I’d met working for Great Performances. I hadn’t been able to make the rent on the apartment Michelle had found for me in Brooklyn—it cost seven hundred dollars a month—and I’d started to become almost irrationally worried that I was going to be evicted. Someone at work had put the fear of God into me by telling me that if you get evicted from an apartment in New York, you can never get another apartment for the rest of your life. So I’d started asking around at work, trying to see if anyone was looking for a roommate. Tom told me he had a rent-controlled two-bedroom, third-floor walk-up in the West Village for $219 that he’d inherited from an ex who had left New York. It was on Thirteenth Street and Seventh Avenue, and the minute I saw it I knew I wouldn’t leave that place until I could afford to live wherever I wanted. It was a brownstone with high ceilings, in a great part of town, and cost almost nothing.

Edie was living in Brooklyn’s Park Slope section with some roommates, but she started staying with me in my room at Tom’s place, and we basically began plotting to try to get him to move out so the two of us could have it for ourselves. She irritated him already and we knew it, so we’d attempt to come up with other ways to bother him. He was a writer, and he liked peace and quiet, so at one point I left the TV on in my room for nine days straight, thinking it would slowly drive him crazy. It did, but when he eventually exploded, instead of
leaving he said, “I strongly suggest that you two move into Edie’s old place in Park Slope.” We didn’t, though; we all just stayed where we were.

Edie and I were a funny couple; we both basically believed that we deserved to be big stars and were getting a raw deal because we weren’t yet. I have no idea where that sense of entitlement came from, but we assumed we were talented and thought it was a damn shame that the world was slow to catch on to this. She was hilariously focused on us succeeding as actors. We’d be at dinner with people, talking about something or other, and then she’d suddenly interrupt and say, “Hey, Tom, have you come up with any ideas for how we can get jobs as actors where we’re actually getting paid? I’m tired of us having to pay to act; I think it should be the other way around.” At that point, we were doing these showcases where we’d rent out a space for nine hundred dollars, say, and put on plays and try to get agents to come see them and sign us. We’d make up a bunch of invites and drop them off with at least fifty different agencies in town; then maybe eight of them would show up, and they wouldn’t even be the agent but the assistant’s assistant’s assistant. Then we’d put on our showcase and have everyone in the audience fill out cards—one for each of the actors in it—that showed what they thought of us. The cards were supposed to have two options for them to check: either “call the agency” or “send a picture.” But I made the cards so I added a third option—“drop dead.” That actually got me more attention than anything else at the showcase: some of the agents who were there laughed when they saw the cards and said, “Who thought of adding ‘drop dead’?” Someone would tell them, “Tom Sizemore did,” and the agent would turn to me and say, “Hey, that’s pretty funny.” Whatever it took to get noticed.

When Edie and I went out, I think everyone thought we were crazy. We’d get all dressed up—she’d put on a dress and a hat and we’d talk about how that was probably how Rosanna Arquette would dress;
so it was good to dress like that because Rosanna Arquette was a big star at the time. Then we’d go into restaurants and Edie would say to the waiter, “Do you have any idea who you’re waiting on?” The waiter would look at me, look at her, then shrug and say no. Edie would pretend to be aghast. She’d go, “Are you insane? Did you just get out of a monastery?” It was a joke but at the same time we were kind of serious. And I did think she was incredibly talented—the most talented actress I’d ever seen. I saw her in a play that she did with some students from the State University of New York at Purchase, and she was magnificent. Essentially, what Edie and I had in common more than anything was a sort of gallows humor. Some mornings, we’d have to Ro Sham Bo to decide who was going to get out of bed and get the coffee, because we both felt too discouraged.

Edie and I were together for a few years and she introduced me to a lot in that time. She grew up in Northport, Long Island, but had been coming into the city since she was a kid, so she knew Manhattan up and down and showed it to me. She took me to the theater a lot—I remember we saw Will Smith in
Six Degrees of Separation
together. We also drank quite a lot together. But Edie was smart and started hauling herself over to an AA meeting in Greenwich Village. She saw the writing on the wall. Her problem was never drugs—it was alcohol. But the truth is, she fucked a lot better when she drank. She was such a lady, but when she drank, she was like, “Come here and fuck me.”

I did all sorts of odd jobs besides waiting tables. I tried telemarketing. I even worked as a bouncer at a strip club. But things started to happen for me, careerwise, faster than they did for Edie. I’d met a casting director named Risa Bramon through the Ensemble Studio Theatre, and she really liked me. Risa had been one of Curt Dempster’s first students at Ensemble and eventually she became the casting director for the theater. She did a wonderful job—that woman had an eye for
talent—and because of that, she got hired as the casting director on the Madonna film
Desperately Seeking Susan
. That was her big break, and she didn’t look back; as a result, she ended up essentially being responsible for bringing all of the great New York actors to Hollywood—Alec Baldwin, John Turturro, Ethan Hawke, Anthony LaPaglia, and Edie among them. Before
Desperately Seeking Susan
, a lot of movies weren’t reading actors out of New York, and Risa helped to change that.

Risa brought me in to read for the role of a thief in
Blue Steel,
and not only did I get the part but my scene was with the star of the movie, Jamie Lee Curtis. The project also introduced me to the director Kathryn Bigelow, whom I would work with again in
Point Break
and
Strange Days;
she later won an Oscar for
The Hurt Locker
. Kathryn liked me from the get-go and called up Oliver Stone, who was producing
Blue Steel
, to tell him he should cast me in
Born on the Fourth of July
. I had already read for that film because Risa had brought me in, but Oliver hadn’t made a decision yet. But Kathryn’s call was all it took: “Tell Sizemore he’s cast,” he told her.

At the time, Oliver Stone was the biggest, most powerful director in the world. He’d won Oscars for
Platoon
and
Wall Street
. And I was being paid $150,000 and getting to fly to the Philippines to work with him. At that point, I had never been out of the country. When I found out I could go out there early to adjust to the time, the climate, and the set, I got on that plane as quickly as I could.

I flew to the Philippines on January 12, 1989, and had twelve days before I had to shoot anything. I think I was the first one there besides Tom Cruise. Billy Baldwin arrived later; Daniel and Stephen Baldwin were in the movie, too. I knew the Baldwins from New York; Alec and I had the same agent starting out, and I’d even been out to their family’s place in Massapequa. I remember being blown away by how damn attractive they all were.