Forever the Fat Kid: How I Survived Dysfunction, Depression and Life in the Theater (9 page)

Although the classes were held in the auditorium of the junior high school that I attended, enrollment was open to kids from neighboring towns as well. On the first Saturday, I recognized only one other person among the dozen or so that were present. We were both students at Rahway Junior High, were in the same grade, were in the same gym class, but had never spoken to each other. His name, I learned that day, was Steven and we became good friends and remained so throughout junior high school. As for the others, they were all new to me but we bonded instantly, all of us young drama queens–and I mean that most affectionately. This was my first encounter with a group of people who exhibited the qualities that I would find myself attracted to and surrounded by for years to come. They were free spirits. They laughed in the extreme; they cried in the extreme; they seemed to experience life so much more vigorously than most other people. We were all from different ethnic, religious, social, and economic backgrounds, but it didn’t matter. The things that made us different from one another were a non-issue in our insular, little world. Nothing was wrong, or stupid, or disgusting; it just was. Initially, I questioned the sincerity of this total lack of prejudices. However, as time went on, I realized that this personality trait of my new circle of friends wasn’t an act. I liked who and what these people were, and I wanted very much to fit in and be a part of their world. Of course, to those on the outside, we were all a bunch of weirdos. And maybe we were, but I couldn’t have cared less. I finally found kids my age that I could relate to, who didn’t make fun of me, and who shared similar interests and points of view. We began getting together on days outside of our weekly Saturday morning class, usually at the home of our instructor who lived a block away from the school. By the time the course was over, we knew that we would be “friends for life.” How naïve of us.

THE TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGIN’

My adolescence also happened to coincide with a time of racial unrest throughout the nation. It touched almost every part of the country, including my little hometown of Rahway, New Jersey. As I said earlier, I would have rather submitted to Chinese water torture than deal with issues of race. As I reached my teens, I believed that I had left that particular topic in the past. Wrong! It became even more of an issue than before thanks to all that was going on in the country at the time. One of the major urban areas to be hit by race riots was Newark, New Jersey, less than fifteen miles away. This was a time when black people took a stand and demanded justice, and many white people just weren’t having it. The result was rioting, looting and even killing. I tried to ignore what was going on, hoping it would all work itself out and disappear. But that wasn’t going to happen; there was no escaping the real world and all of its turmoil. And as wonderful a relief as it was, even the theater wasn’t able to completely shut out that particular ugliness that still existed beyond the footlights. But at least I had found a place to channel all the emotional crap building up inside of me. I decided to use my heightened awareness of the world and its ills to learn even more about human nature. This, in turn, would enable me to offer more as an actor. And, believe me, the life lessons just kept coming.

GAME GONE BAD

I’ve always welcomed change, and I constantly sought out what was new and different in the world around me. I came to realize during my pre-teen and teenage years that, in my circle of acquaintances, this was not the norm. While I welcomed all of the changes occurring in my life during adolescence, I noticed that others didn’t necessarily see change the same way that I did. I discovered that most of those I was coming into contact with at the time regarded change as a bad thing. I noticed that while I was, at last, growing as a person, many of those that I shared my life with were not. I found that some even harbored resentment toward me for moving on.

My passion for the stage alienated me from many of my peers. In my mostly black neighborhood, theater was something that only the white kids did. That I had now become a part of that world made me the butt of jokes and subject to both overt and subliminal forms of abuse. Even while professing to be supportive, many of my friends thought less of me for following my heart and my instinctual desires. Maybe it was because they had none of their own. Or perhaps they did, but lacked the initiative, drive, and the support of others to pursue them; their resentment often expressed itself in the strangest ways.

One of the things I learned in my Saturday acting class was a popular acting exercise called improvisations. “Improvs” involved two (or more) actors being presented with a hypothetical situation from which they would perform a scene, making it up off the top of their heads as they went along. I loved doing improvs and, of course, was anxious to share this new game with my friends. Okay, I admit that I had by now developed an almost fanatical obsession with theater and anything related to it, and often overdid my zeal, but at least my obsession was theater and not something harmful like, say, religion or drugs. (Okay, okay…my apologies to the born-again and the addicted, no hate mail please…)

One day while playing at a friend’s house, I suggested to her that we do some of these improvs. After explaining how they worked and how much fun they could be, she excitedly agreed. The first five or ten minutes went well enough, and we both really got into it. We would give each other such suggested scenarios as, “You’re at school and the teacher wants to know where your homework is. You didn’t do it but you can’t tell her, so you make up any excuse you can think of.” The atmosphere was light and fun. That is, until the third or fourth time that it was her turn to come up with a situation for me to act out. After much thought, she looked at me and said, “Okay, I got a good one. You’re at school and there’s about to be a big fight between the black kids and the white kids. The white kids want you on their side and the black kids want you to fight with them against the white kids. Go!”

All of my racial issues and insecurities rushed to the surface and I felt my face go flush. Although an innocent suggestion on the surface, I couldn’t help but feel that there was a bit of vindictiveness in her suggested scenario. The awkwardness was so great that my stomach literally wrenched in pain. I muttered something to the effect of “that’s not a good one” and made a lame excuse to leave, rushing back to the safety of my home down the street. It was clear that she had a problem with me becoming involved in what she perceived as “their” world. No doubt she saw me as confused or, worse, as an Oreo (“black on the outside, white on the inside”). As an adult, I can look back and feel sorry for a child so strongly influenced by what she had been taught, no doubt, at home. Yet, even now, my inner child still feels the pain of being ridiculed for who he was. I never asked any of my non-theatrical friends to do improvs with me after that, not my black friends anyway.

A BABY BROTHER

Addiction. Here’s another word that our society has given a negative connotation to, yet everybody has at least one, right? And they’re not always necessarily bad. It’s an interesting fact that 1919, the year that Ruthie was born, was also the year that AT&T introduced the dial telephone. Maybe that explains the fact that they were inseparable soul mates throughout the years. If Ruthie could be accused of having an addiction, talking on the telephone was it. Well, that and shopping. She lived on the telephone. One of her favorite phone buddies was her childhood friend, Madge. Ruthie and Madge had grown up together in Georgia, and they both wound up living in New Jersey. Truth be told, much of what transpired in their phone conversations could be labeled as pure, unadulterated “gossip.” Not that I’m judging. I love a good piece of gossip myself every now and then.

In one of their many conversations, Madge told Ruthie about a woman who lived down the street from her. It seems that this woman had a grown daughter who was married with five children. The family in question was a “Caucasian” family. It seems that the daughter, who was married to a white man, and who had parented five white children with him, had strayed. The “whys” and “hows” and all of the details of the situation I can only imagine. Anyway, she ended up having an affair with a black man and became pregnant. Apparently, her husband wasn’t very understanding and, as a result of her faux pas, they separated. The woman moved in with her mother and soon gave birth to a baby boy, whom she named after his (Negro) birth father. Soon after the little boy was born, the woman and her husband started communicating again, and it wasn’t long before they deciding to get back together and salvage their marriage and family. However, the husband had one condition for the reconciliation: she could not bring the recently born, mixed-race baby boy into their family. The woman agreed, returning to her husband and family, leaving the now five-month-old baby boy with her mother, his grandmother. This much of the story, alone, was gossip of the highest degree. However, the story didn’t end there. Madge had even more to tell.

The child’s grandmother, up in age and probably living on a fixed income, had no desire to be burdened with a child at this point in her life, let alone a biracial one. How she addressed this situation was the juicy climax to Madge’s story. Each day the woman would place the baby in his carriage, stand outside of her house, and ask people passing by if they wanted–or knew of somebody who wanted–the baby. Madge was shocked and outraged that she could do such a thing. “How could she be so mean?” she asked my mother. “I’m surprised ain’t nobody turned her in to the police! She ought to be ashamed of herself!”

If Madge was shocked by the woman’s actions, she must have been completely floored by what Ruthie said next. “Go tell her that I’ll take the baby,” my mother told Madge. So, sight unseen–and without so much as a second thought–my mother agreed to take the child, assuming full responsibility for raising, nurturing, supporting, and loving him for the rest of his life. And that’s exactly what she did. For the next thirty years she did her best to see that he had a loving home, clothing, a family, toys, whatever it was that he wanted and needed. Initially, many people, Jamesie included, thought that Ruthie must have lost her mind. But what most people failed to realize was that losing her only daughter had left a gaping hole in my mother’s heart. In this child, she saw her chance to fill it.

In addition to having lost her only daughter, Ruthie was also suffering the loss of three of her grandchildren, as well. Less than a year after Annette’s death her husband remarried. Her children were told that his new wife was their mother now, and were instructed to call her “Mom.” Apparently, he felt that the best way for them to get over losing their mother was to remove anything associated with her from their lives. He remodeled and redecorated the house, destroying all remnants, traces, and memories of Annette. He also minimized the children’s interaction with relatives from Annette’s side of the family, including–or maybe, especially–us. There was an obligatory visit or two from them in the first year following her death, but soon after that, contact between us dwindled and then came to a screeching halt. No visits, no telephone calls, no cards or letters. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to read between the lines, we were an unwelcome and unwanted intrusion into their new life. The void in our lives needed to be filled and that responsibility fell to the new baby now joining our family.

WELCOME TO THE FAMILY

The news that I was about to become a big brother was a wish come true! I was sick and tired of being an only child and, at thirteen years old, the idea of having a little brother had me on cloud nine. Fact is, I had always wanted a younger brother and had told my parents this, a suggestion they always laughed at and never took seriously. But I wasn’t kidding; I really did want a younger brother. I thought it would be cool to have a younger sibling who looked up to me, that I could nurture and guide. It would also be nice, after years of being the baby of the family, to have another human being that I could boss around.

Arrangements were made and, within two weeks, Ruthie and I hopped in the car and set out to pick up the newest member of our family. Jamesie didn’t join us; although he grudgingly went along with the plan, he wasn’t too keen on the idea of bringing a new baby into the family. He felt that he and Ruthie were too old take on an infant child. I’m sure that there were many heated exchanges about it when I wasn’t around, but Ruthie won out as she usually did.

The baby boy was named “Wally” and I remember well the day that we picked him up. His mother brought him to Madge’s apartment. When I saw my new sibling for the first time, my excitement increased tenfold. He looked just like me! Anybody that didn’t know would think that he was my honest-to-God birth brother. After being self-conscious, and having to answer so many questions about the difference in skin color between me and Ruthie, and between me and my half-siblings, it was a relief knowing that I wouldn’t have to face those questions about my new baby brother. I couldn’t wait to hold him, to play with him, to teach him things. His birth mother, who couldn’t help but notice my excitement that day, later told Ruthie that after seeing us together she knew that she had made the right decision.

Over the next few weeks, legal documents were prepared that gave my parents legal guardianship of Wally. There was also a Consent for Adoption that gave my parents the right to legally adopt him when, and if, they chose to. No turning back now, this was a done deal, or so I thought. So you can imagine my reaction when, a month later, I walked in on Ruthie on the phone engaged in a very heated discussion with Wally’s natural mother over his being returned to her. The thought of losing him at this point was devastating. Not just to me, but to all of us. And why did she want him back? Well, as it turns out, the reconciliation between Wally’s birth mom and her husband was short-lived. They separated a second time and she was back again with the man who had fathered Wally. They had decided to make a go of it and wanted their little boy back. After much debate, Ruthie finally gave in…sort of. “Okay, you can have him back, but you will have to pay to legally undo all of the arrangements that we’ve made.” She said this knowing full well that there was no way his mother could afford to do so. Regardless, we started preparing ourselves mentally for Wally’s departure.