God, if You're Not Up There . . . (7 page)

But he, too, never mentioned it again.

On another occasion when I cut myself, my sister took me to the emergency room. I told the doctor that I had been in a fight. He looked at the cut and said, “You weren’t in a fight, that’s surgical.” It was the first time someone looked at me with a mixture of pity and revulsion, as if to say,
There’s really something wrong with you.

M
ost people experience moments of terror at some point in their lives. Maybe you were on a plane and you hit an air pocket and the plane dropped for a second. Maybe you had a near miss on the freeway. One day when I about ten years old, I went fishing with my father in a small boat in a nearby swamp. As we were nearing a tuft of land, my father screamed at something behind me. I turned and looked, and there was this enormous cottonmouth snake coiled up, ready to strike.

Now take that instant and prolong it—not for a night, not for a week, not for a month, not for a year, but for
decades.
That was the kind of fear that overtook me the moment I arrived at the University of Florida in Gainesville. I had no idea why, but I was in a state of terror that first day. It was perhaps ironic that it struck when I was finally out of my parents’ house. It was so bad that I had trouble making words come out when I spoke, like one of those nightmares where someone is coming to get you and you scream but nothing comes out. Even weirder, if someone spoke to me, I could see their lips moving, but I didn’t hear the words until after they’d stopped talking.

I had rented a place at the Picadilly Apartments, known for its proximity to campus. When I woke up the second morning, I looked out my kitchen window at the traffic down below. I remember thinking, How can they just sit there in their cars in all that traffic when this is happening to me here? And as I watched the cars stop and start, I realized I couldn’t hear anything. I walked out of my apartment and stood in the hallway, and I couldn’t hear the traffic. No honking, no engines, nothing.

I went to the university’s mental health clinic. The poor grad student who interviewed me grew increasingly nervous as I tried to explain what was happening to me. After a time, she excused herself and brought in her supervisor. It was the first, but not the last, time someone said to me, “We don’t have what you need. We’re not able to take care of you here.” But that didn’t stop them from giving me a shitload of antidepressants and an antipsychotic prescription for good measure—Triavil, Elavil, and Mellaril. Sounds like the members of a 1950s girl group, but the only number this trio did was on my brain.

Nevertheless, I went ahead and enrolled in classes, hoping the fear would subside.

One afternoon an attractive coed came up to me, and said, “Hey, my name is Betty-Ann. I’m in your journalism class. Some of us are going out for beers later, would you like to come?”

I opened my mouth to answer her, but I felt as though my face had been shot up with Novocain. I could see her puzzlement turn to alarm, and she ended the conversation.

So I did the next logical thing and signed up for an acting class. Oral interpretation, to be specific. The professor’s thing was to help students learn how to project to the back of the theater. He wouldn’t cast you in the plays he directed if you didn’t have a decent voice.

I started to do a scene one day in his class, and I couldn’t get words out. He interrupted me and said, “If you were underwater and had a snorkel and flippers, it would sound like that.”

Everyone started laughing at me. Needless to say, I was never cast in any of his plays.

Then I auditioned for a play called
When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?
which was written by Mark Medoff, the same dude who wrote the classic
Children of a Lesser God
. Let’s put it this way: like
Children of a Lesser God
,
Red Ryder
ain’t exactly a musical. When I got the part of the cook, Stephen—Red Ryder’s his nickname—it was a new play; it had opened in New York just a couple of years earlier. My character slings hash at a diner in New Mexico; some time before the play begins, someone has decided it would be fun to build a new highway around the place, so it’s down on its luck. I banter with Lyle from the filling station next door, and then there’s the quiet little waitress (her name’s Angel, of course), and my boss, Clark, who’s kind of gruff.

Eventually two couples arrive—the well-heeled Richard and Clarisse, who are waiting while their big car is gassed up; and Teddy, a fucked-up Vietnam vet, and Cheryl, his hippie squeeze. In Act 2, Teddy gets all weird and shit and holds the place hostage, making us all do stuff we wouldn’t normally do. He leaves, finally, thank God, but his games make Stephen decide to leave New Mexico and head east. I guess that meant something to me, somewhere deep down. I mean, I didn’t want some psychotic Vietnam dude forcing me to New York, but I guess when he says, “You never would’ve found the real Red Ryder sittin’ around a dump like this starin’ at some tourist lady’s tits,” he had a point. (Not that I’m against tits, you understand.)

I was most fond of the moment in the play near the end where Stephen gets to tell Clark—after he admonishes him for drinking coffee and “greasin’ up the customer’s newpaper”—“up your hole with a ten-foot pole!” It’s something I’d said often and with great glee when I was a kid.

Everyone knew that I was a fucking joke because I couldn’t really talk. But Stephen is this punk who’s very inarticulate and can’t express himself very well. He’s all mouth and bluster, and he tries very hard to be a man of substance and valor, when he’s this terrified little guy. I got the part.

After the first rehearsal, the director came up to me and said, “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” I lied. “I think so.”

“How can you do that, what you just did?”

“I don’t know.”

“They can’t teach that. I can’t teach that. Are you sure you’re okay?”

A few weeks after the play wrapped, the director wrote to me. In the letter, he said, “I strongly suspect you are an authentic genius.” The truth of the matter was, I was playing a scared guy, and I was scared. It showed.

But all of a sudden, I’m a genius. The girls started coming around. “Ooh, look at this blond kid. He’s a genius, he can’t talk. He’s like Marlon Brando.” They called me a mumble scratch actor, which is how Brando and Dean had been described.

But I doubt Brando and Dean were drunk all the time. I didn’t drink before a performance or a rehearsal, but I was drunk every night, and I was drunk most mornings. That seemed to fix the problem.

Meanwhile, I was working at the university radio station. I spent a year alongside the Alachua County Suicide Prevention Center on a nineteen-part series on suicide prevention. I interviewed students who had attempted to kill themselves as well as health professionals around the state commenting on why people do it. A congressman was going to hold a press conference about it, but it was cancelled at the last minute when the spots were deemed too disturbing to air.

And then a revelation: Truman Capote spoke to us in front of the library. Microphones had been set up in the audience so students could ask him questions. The first question, from a kid with a distinctly Southern husky voice, was, “Are you a homosexual?”

Capote paused, and then in his tinny fey voice said, “Is that a proposition?”

Four hundred gay-hating white kids went insane laughing.

I thought, Whatever that is, I want that.

CHAPTER FOUR

From Hell to Hell’s Kitchen

New York City

1977–1995

I
moved to New York after college with my friend Larry to try my luck as an actor. Our basement apartment was at 340 East Eighty-fifth Street between First and Second avenues. We were so poor we once went two days without eating. If we made $5, we bought a tuna sandwich and a couple of beers. One night, we heard Martin Luther King’s voice booming from a neighbor’s radio across the alley. It was a brilliantly edited version of “I Have a Dream,” followed by “How Long, Not Long,” the speech he gave after the march from Selma to Montgomery. We both wept.

I was working on Fifty-second Street at a place called the Boss Pub, later called the Boss Saloon. I’d heard that you could see everything that had ever been on TV at the Museum of Broadcasting, which was a few doors down, so between shifts I’d go watch Martin Luther King.

By this time I’d known something was wrong with me for a few years, but no one had been able to tell me what it was. When I heard this line in “I Have a Dream”: “With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope,” I believed, if only for a moment, that I would find some answers. That was part of what the cutting was about, that someone would notice and say, “I know why you do that, and here’s the solution.”

I had stayed drunk through college, and I stayed drunk in New York. I used to walk around Times Square at all hours of the night, carrying a quart bottle of Budweiser.

Thirty years ago, the “Crossroads of the World” was not the family-friendly mecca of Disney, MTV, the Lion King, double-decker tour buses, swank hotels staffed by German runway models, pedestrian plazas, and outdoor cafés serving double chai lattes. Hell, these days they advertise walking tours of Times Square
you take at night.
In the 1970s, you took your life into your hands if you were there after dark. It was the putrid cesspool of
The French Connection
and
Taxi Driver
:
peep shows, strip clubs, triple-X movie houses, and head shops that sold tourist T-shirts, bongs, and fake IDs. Prostitutes for every appetite trolled Seventh Avenue looking for prospects: women with 48JJ breasts spilling from fake rabbit fur halter tops and lipstick red hot pants, six-foot-tall Puerto Rican transvestites in stilettos and fishnet body stockings, toothless old heroin scags charging $2 extra to take their dentures out for a blow job, young boy runaways in gold lamé and fake eyelashes making eyes at the wizened chicken hawks before returning at dawn to sleep in the Salt Mines on the West Side Highway, where the Sanitation Department kept the salt for snowy winter roads. The pimps were a spectacle themselves: one guy staked out the corner of Forty-sixth Street and Broadway, sitting in an easy chair and resplendent in a full-length fox fur coat and matching hat, a gold-and-white telephone, with a wire running to a nearby utility pole, by his side. And my personal favorite, a guy with a sign that said,
TELL ME OFF FOR A DOLLAR
. In other words,
Good Morning America
did not greet the nation from a street-view glassed-in studio every morning with a live audience peering in from the corner of Forty-fourth and Broadway. Middle America was not ready for
that
tableau.

And here was this naive drunk white kid from the South wearing a black T-shirt that read, “How Long? Not Long,” across the front, walking among the derelicts and reprobates, the dregs and untouchables, proclaiming Dr. King’s words as loud as I could.

No one even looked at me.

(Flash forward twenty years, I’m drunk as fuck, doing a show at one of the big colleges in Milwaukee, and I’m still pining for freedom from my inner torment. At the end of my set, I say, “I don’t want to do any more comedy. I’m going to close with the last ninety seconds of ‘I Have a Dream.’ ” I do it in King’s voice, but I’m deadly serious. The audience is all white kids, and the place goes nuts. They start clapping before I even finish. When I call out the last line—“Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last”—standing ovation from a hall filled with white kids. It wasn’t for me, it was for Dr. King.)

I
wasn’t intentionally pursuing a comedy career then—serious theater was in my head—so it was only inadvertently that I did my first New York stand-up in Hell’s Kitchen, an area on the west side of midtown Manhattan. A neighborhood doesn’t get a name like that without a reason. A gritty industrial area that sprang up when refugees of the Irish potato famine poured into it in the middle of the nineteenth century, Hell’s Kitchen was an overcrowded, crime-ridden collection of tenements that became particularly violent during Prohibition in the 1920s. Fifty years later, the neighborhood was still populated largely by blue-collar Irish Americans with a healthy dose of Puerto Ricans thrown into the mix.
West Side Story
, anyone?

To pay the rent, I worked in the kitchen at the Skyline Motor Inn on Tenth Avenue at Forty-ninth Street. These days, the newly renovated Skyline Hotel boasts about its heated indoor pool on the penthouse floor with great views of the Manhattan skyline (get it?), but twenty-five years ago the bar was where gangsters had sit-downs. At least that’s what I read years later. At the time, I didn’t know fuck about it. On occasion, the manager stuck me out front as a substitute bartender.

One day a guy with dark hair and a pretty fierce mustache came in and ordered a spritzer. When I put the drink down in front of him, I told him what he owed. He looked up slowly and glared. “I don’t pay,” he said.

I went into the kitchen to find the manager.

“This guy at the bar says he won’t pay,” I said.

The manager pushed the door open a crack and peeked out.

“Oh, hell, kid, that’s Jimmy Mac.” The name meant nothing to me, but it obviously meant something to my boss. “You don’t want to fuck with him. He only pays for every fourth or fifth drink. But don’t worry, he always leaves a huge tip.”