Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors (29 page)

Even if the years lost to illness had little to do with my exclusion from that club, the fact that I had been rendered hairless was not going to make membership any easier to procure.  Although wigs could easily have been used had a director wanted to cast me in a film, I had not yet taken the step of gathering my own private collection of them.  I was embarrassed to show up at an audition for clean cut fraternity characters looking the way I did.  But when I read
The Winter’s Tale
, I was able to imagine myself playing the part of the clown, a rustic country fool, without any problems.  I went to the audition, feeling a bit self-conscious about suddenly emerging after such a long disappearance, and, after two readings, I was cast in the part from my very first audition back.  I was elated by my good fortune and stunned by the ease with which the theater community welcomed me back.  And I was amazed to discover that in my life, the most secure thing that existed was an acting career.  Two weeks into rehearsals for
The Winter’s Tale
, like the statue at the end of the fifth act of the play, my platelets came back to life.  I was strongly urged to have the final injections.  I had to leave the show.

If anything, short of a recurrence of leukemia or getting hit by a bus, could have crushed my spirit more, I didn’t know what it might have been.  The one thing I had wanted to be absolutely certain about was that once I took a role, once I proclaimed myself ready and able to perform, I would never again leave a job for any reason having to do with health.  I may have established the continued presence of my desirability by getting the first part I tried out for, but now, I was afraid, all people would remember was that Evan Handler was still too sick to work.

Even if I had made my return to the stage a few moments too soon, that didn’t keep me out of the view of audiences for very long.  Jackie’s play, called
Lost and Found
, was being presented in several venues all around New York.  Although I was represented as one of the characters in the play, I had been absolutely forbidden from taking part in any of the productions myself.  I was asked for advice about who might best portray me, and I received detailed reports about how the various actors were faring as they rehearsed.  After this play, Jackie wrote another, called
AML
, for acute myelogenous leukemia.  This play was a masterfully written interwoven series of monologues for five actresses, each portraying the same woman at a different stage of caring for her sick lover.  In this play, at least, I was given credit for my recovery, and didn’t end up dead.

Meanwhile, over at Naked Angels, a theater company formed by many of the friends who had been my regular visitors over the past few years, a one-act festival was being presented.  One of these plays, written by Jon Robin Baitz, was the first act of what would later become his brilliant full-length,
The Substance of Fire
.  I sat enraptured by the tightening web that my friend Robbie, as I had always known him, was spinning for his characters.  About two-thirds of the way through the play, one of the characters delivered a long monologue about his chemotherapy treatment.  I listened, astonished, as he expressed to his family onstage many of the same thoughts of life that I had shared with Robbie during his many visits to my bedside.

Those evenings in the theater left me with two different, but equally powerful, impressions.  First, I was proud.  I was proud to have lived a life that inspired others.  I got a sense that, if I had been forced to endure the trials I had, at least they’d affected others to the point where they felt the need to publicly express what they had learned.  I have always been obsessive in my desire to be the center of everyone’s attention, and the fear of dying had, at least partly, been a fear of being forgotten.  My friends’ plays were proof that, even in my absence, I had stayed on their minds.

But I also felt trapped.  Bound in an indentured servitude to a destiny that I wanted more than anything to reject.  As I made the rounds of the theaters in New York, as I appeared in the same places, with the same people as I had for years, everything I could see outside myself looked just the same.  It was as if I had been uprooted and given a transplant of fate, rather than of bone marrow.  Watching the way my life, the life that I would now be forced to live if I wanted any life at all, had been masticated and incorporated into the creative digestive systems of my friends, left me feeling as if I had become The Subject, fated to live the life out of which others would make art.  It started to dawn on me that the living of my life had been my artistic expression for years already, and that perhaps I was doomed and blessed to have become one of those people whose mere existence makes a greater statement than anything they might ever do with it.

* * *

I was brought up, in my family, to believe that birthdays are important.  And I do.  Birthdays tell us things.  They are the days that we celebrate a person’s life, and they act as markers in time.  Between what has been, and what is now.  Between now, and what is hoped for someday soon.  In my family, we had no Christmas, no religious holidays at all, but we had birthdays.  After all that I had been through over the last few years, birthdays had only grown in significance.

My twenty-ninth birthday was the first birthday that fell after the one-year anniversary of my bone marrow transplant.  The first birthday since I could consider myself to be
cured
of the disease that had consumed almost five years of my life.  But, on my twenty-ninth birthday, it was clear that if Jackie did have any more love to share with me, she no longer had the strength to show it.  After working so hard to nurse me, to drag me, back to safety, it had become as if saying “good morning” was just one more thing that Jackie had to do for me.

On my twenty-ninth birthday, Jackie showed no excitement over our accomplishment, and there was no celebration.  I told her that it felt like she didn’t even give a damn that I hadn’t died after all.

Jackie said, “Yeah.  That must not feel very good.”

And that was the end of that.

I left the house that night reeling and disoriented, feeling cut loose from the only anchor, the only stability, I had known for the last five years.  I went to meet my friend Daniel, whose soothing voice had calmed me in some of my darkest moments, to play pool with him and his friend at a billiards hall in Chelsea.  I met up with them first at Sam Chinita, an aluminium-sided railroad car diner that serves the ever-puzzling and popular combination of Cuban/Chinese cuisine.  I slid into the vinyl booth next to Daniel, and, with the fluorescent lights burning my swollen, bloodshot eyes, I faced his friend Matthew, a total stranger to me, as I tried not to burst into tears.  I didn’t know what Matthew might have known about me or my history, how much he had been told or what he might have heard.  I had called Daniel only a couple of hours earlier myself, telling him that Jackie and I had broken up and that I was upset.

“Happy birthday,” Matthew said, and he pushed something toward me across the Formica table top.  “It’s a present.”

I looked over at the stranger, a smiling, friendly presence, and then down to the gift sitting in front of me.  It was a tiny cactus plant, no more than two inches tall.  The plant was a single plump stalk, growing out of the sand in a minuscule terra-cotta pot wrapped in green decorative metal foil.

“You can take care of each other,” Matthew said.  And then we went and played pool.

I took the tiny cactus home with me.  The home where I had fought for my life, and loved and lived with the woman who was now gone.  I put the cactus on the windowsill where I liked to sit, and I cared for it with intense concentration.  I spoke to the cactus, encouraging it to grow and feeding it water and love with all the tenderness that I would have wanted from someone for myself.  After about two weeks, I accidentally bumped its baby-sized planter and the cactus fell over onto its side.  As I carefully picked it up to plant it back into the soil, I saw that the cactus had no roots at all.  In fact, as I examined it, I saw that the cactus was not alive, nor had it probably been from the moment it was given to me.  I had been caring for and nourishing a life that didn’t exist.  I laughed as I tossed the dead cactus into the trash, thinking that Daniel’s friend Matthew had given me a gift more perfect than he knew.  A dead cactus, supported by nothing but sand.  The perfect metaphor, I thought, for the futile efforts Jackie and I had made, for years, to reawaken our corpsified relationship, obviously dead to anyone who looked closely enough, but propped up to give it the illusion of life.

Having lost everything that I had ever had: my hair, my youth, my love, my confidence, my career — everything except my life, which now appeared to be the only thing that was safe — I set about the reconstruction.  I’ll develop new confidence, I decided.  I’ll build a new career.  I’ll embrace adulthood.

That left hair and Jackie.  The two things I’d have to learn to live without.

As often happens, my reasons for pursuing an acting career had long taken a backseat to my desire to simply
have
a career.  As a teenage acting student, I had scoured the underside of Manhattan, studying the bizzarre characters around me, and I tried to re-create them in my classes.  My mission in life, I told myself, was to show people the truths they’d rather not confront.

Eventually, however, in the hunt for employment and career advancement, those ideals were largely abandoned.  I was tremendously proud of my accomplishments as an entertainer in film and theater.  But I had also learned how painfully rare it could be to work on a project that held any deep meaning, any personal connection, for me as a storyteller.  The work that I found, while often exciting and provocative, was largely in a mainstream arena, where hard “truths” weren’t necessarily what sold tickets.  Just as well, I told myself.  I’d rather make a living in the mainstream than have only “truth” for dinner each night.

But, while lying in my bed in various hospitals, having felt the full impact of life’s force, the old inspiration had crept back in and taken hold.  I ached to be back on the stage.  The wild swings of the last several years had filled me with an overflow of emotions I felt a consuming need to express.  And not only was my desire recharged, but I felt a power, a justification for my presence on that stage, that I’d never had before.

When I envisioned myself back in front of an audience, I saw myself driven by the same urgency I’d felt as a student ten years earlier.  I imagined myself giving searing performances, filled with a sadness, rage, and passion for living never before displayed.  After all I’d been through, I thought, I would be able to focus an intensity onstage and in front of the camera that would make people want to look away — and not be able to.  As usual, I had set my standards rather high.

Six Degrees of Separation
, John Guare’s smash hit play about the emotional hunger of wealthy, modern-day New Yorkers, produced by Lincoln Center Theater, was my big comeback.  While I had been working on various workshops and projects for the past six months or so, some as exciting as an early production of  Tony Kushner’s masterpiece
Angels in America
,
Six Degrees
was my first appearance in a major production in over a year and a half.  Except for my brief, interrupted run in
Broadway Bound
, my last appearance on a New York stage was nearly three years past.  It had been a frustrating period, as I tried to reestablish myself as a dependable, desirable presence in the eyes of casting directors and producers.  I had given several auditions over the course of the six months prior to being cast in
Six Degrees
that I thought would have been, before the illness, more than good enough to secure a role for myself.  I could rarely be certain if  my medical history was being held against me when I went up for a part, but I could understand it if it was.  I didn’t, at the time, consider it to be “discrimination” if someone felt banking on me was a greater risk than necessary in an already perilous venture.  But in certain specific instances, such as when I auditioned to play one of the roles in a hit off-Broadway comedy called
Enter Laughing
, and the director apologized to me for being unable to cast me due to the producers’ concerns about my health, I would be hurt and angry.  Besides feeling upset about the obvious ignorance of the medical facts, I felt cut out of the competition, with no method available to make up the distance I’d fallen behind in the race I experienced my career as being.

As I tried to reclaim my status in the theater-and-film-world hierarchy, the difficulty I had accepting my somewhat diminished position was probably mirrored by the people who had replaced me.  I went to an audition while I was in
Six Degrees of Separation
.  As I sat in the waiting room amongst the nervous and hopeful actors, my attention was drawn to two young blond men conversing animatedly.  One of the men in particular seemed very familiar to me, and I had to resist the temptation to interrupt their chat.  First, I thought I might actually know the guy only from seeing him on TV or in the movies — a situation that I’ve had happen before, and it’s embarrassing.  Second, whoever he was, even if he did know me, he hadn’t seen me in years.  And I was wearing a wig.  The bone marrow transplant, I’d since learned, had permanently damaged the hair follicles in my head, and so I was wearing a wig for the audition.  And when I wear my wig, no one who knows me recognizes me.  I’m invisible.  Even to some of my most intimate friends and lovers.

It wasn’t always that way.  When I first began to reenter life after having disappeared six months earlier to go to Baltimore for my bone marrow transplant, the opposite was true.  I started popping up at all the places that I used to haunt in the innocent years, seeing all the people who were, at least on some level, my friends.  Maybe colleagues is a better word.  Friends, colleagues, cohorts, acquaintances. All those people.  I’d show up, look around the room, and smile at all the familiar faces, eagerly awaiting the rousing hero’s welcome I had imagined so many times during so many dark days. But no one would return my gaze.  If I was able to lock eyes with anyone, I got that vague, polite half smile reserved for strangers who insist on being given some sign that their presence has been noted.  And then I realized.  No one knew who I was.  But, in those days, I was invisible because I was bald.  The last time anyone had seen me, I had a head of thick, curly hair.

Thus began an incredibly awkward and painful quest to reintroduce myself to everyone I’d ever known.  I went to see a play in which there was a man with whom I’d worked a year or two before, and afterward I stood in a circle of seven or so people which included my friend Donald, the playwright, and his wife, Lynne.  I congratulated the actor once, and then a second time, after which he responded, “I’m sorry, do I know you?”

A hushed silence came over the group, broken by my voice. “Yeah, Larry, it’s Evan Handler.  We worked together in
The Young Playwrights Festival
last year.”  He looked utterly confused.  Eventually, he gathered himself up and said “Oh, I’m sorry.  I didn’t recognize you.”  Well, no wonder.  Not only had I lost my hair, but I had lost ten pounds, and the shape of my face had actually gotten puffier, less angular.  A development that has lasted through to today.

And that became routine.  Whenever it became necessary to reacquaint someone with me, I’d try to put on an unflustered, ironclad expression and hide whatever mortification I felt in order to spare the poor soul opposite me any hint that my feelings were hurt or that I might have any feelings about anything at all anyway.  I myself have still not gotten used to the way I look now.  To me, my baldness is an aberration.  A cruel joke of the spirits that rule, much as Rip Van Winkle must have felt when he passed a mirror and saw that after a short nap, he had awakened an old man.

I first realized that everyone else had come to accept my new look when I went out with a wig.  The same exact syndrome was to be played out, but in reverse.  Not only with those who’d met me and gotten to know me since the illness, but also with those who’d been my friends for years and years; they all looked right past me when I showed up with hair, looking just like I used to look.  Back when life seemed to make some sense.

So, at the audition, as I studied the blond actor sitting across the room from me, for the first thirty minutes or so I didn’t say hello.  I didn’t call out to him.  I didn’t even try to make eye contact.  I passed on by, pretending that I was a stranger in my own town.  Or perhaps a ghost, roaming among those with whom he once lived.  Seeing, but unseen.

“Were you in
Biloxi Blues
?”

It was my voice, and one of the blond actors swung his head in my direction.  I wondered if it had been a mistake to speak.  To engage.  The young man’s eyes looked at me quizzically and then widened into an expression of utter shock and confusion.  He stammered, he sputtered.  “Y-y-you.  You were very ill!”

He said it again.  “You were
very
ill.”

“Yes, I was.”

“It was…I heard. Very serious. Very bleak.  I was told.”

“Yes.  Yes, it was.  There was a time when it was.”

“I called later, some months.  I spoke.  It was still very bad. 
It was very bad!
”

He seemed to be defending himself.  Trying to convince me.  I was giving him no argument.  I just looked at him with understanding and nodded my head.  I knew what he wanted to say, and I was hoping that I could make him feel safe enough to say it.

“I…I…I thought you were dead!”

What so many had thought, someone finally said.  It was so refreshing.   Then I thought, Uh-oh.  Now I’m going to have to help him get over his horror at what has just come out of his mouth.

“Well, I’m fine now. Cured in fact. Completely healthy.”

“Th-th-that’s good news. That’s very good news.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Yeah, it really is.”

Eventually I started to develop a pride in my new look and all the repercussions of it. I’d had my first wig made with the intention of wearing it everywhere.  I was going to be a Mike Nichols kind of guy.  Everyone would know I wore a wig, but I would never be seen without it.  And people would always wonder if the rumor was true or just some strange show-biz legend.  Show-biz legend.  Show-biz legend.  I was going to be a show-biz legend.  But I realized that wasn’t for me and I endured the awkwardness and tried to cultivate a new self-image.  One of the tattooed survivor.  Forever branded by his battles, but refusing to cover his scars for the comfort of anyone else.  Sometimes other actors would even express jealousy, as if I had an unfair advantage in being able to alter my looks so completely from day to day.  None of them ever shaved their head, though.

At night, I’m still plagued by dreams in which I look in the mirror and see that my hair is growing back.  I remind myself of how many times I have been fooled by these dreams before, and, after checking and testing thoroughly, despite my suspicions, I become convinced that I really am awake and that my hair is, indeed, coming back in, as thick and luxurious as it used to be.  Then I wake up, confounded by how, or why, I’m capable of playing such a cruel hoax on myself over and over again.

* * *

On Saturday morning, May 4, 1991, I was woken up by my phone ringing a bit earlier than it usually does.  I stumbled out of bed and into the next room to answer it, and I found my father on the line.

“Hey, buddy,” he said.  “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m all right,” I told him.  “What are you talking about?  Why wouldn’t I be all right?”

There was a short pause.  More like a hesitation.  “Well,” my father said.  “Have you seen the papers?”

I hadn’t.  But I didn’t usually run out to buy the newspaper before nine-thirty on a Saturday morning.

“Well, buddy,” my father was saying.  “Big article in the Times.  You might want to take a look.”

I left my apartment quickly at nine-forty-five and headed to the Gem Spa, the newsstand at the corner of Second Avenue and St. Mark’s Place.  It’s a particularly seedy corner, bustling with activity all night long, that seems to quiet down only shortly before dawn for a couple of hours.  The corner, and its strange flow of transient inhabitants, seemed to be reviving itself after its brief respite.  I picked up a copy of the
New York Times
, pushed my dollar bill through the Plexiglas window, and stood waiting for my change.

The
New York Times
is, for me,
almost
the perfect newspaper.  Reading it each day, for an hour or more, is often the only relief I get from my furious obsessions and self-examination.  I hear a lot of people say that they can’t stand to read newspapers or watch the TV news because it’s too depressing.  They’d rather be oblivious to the nightmares in play around them.  For me, it’s the only way to relax.  Reading about horrors that are happening far away — to people other than myself — is the only thing that stops me from thinking about my own problems.  It’s not that it makes me feel
better
to hear about other people’s grief, I’m not
comparing
myself to them; it’s just that those stories
take the place
of thoughts that I would have been having if I wasn’t reading the paper.  And so it feels like a rest.  A rather violent, ugly, depressing vacation from myself.

But the
New York Times
doesn’t have horoscopes.  And, it’s pretty short on sexual titillation.  That’s why, occasionally, I can be spotted peeking at the
New York Post
.  I never actually buy the
Post
.  I’ll look through it if I find it lying around somewhere.  But most often I just glance at the headlines when I’m standing around the Gem Spa, waiting for my change from the dollar I’ve paid to get my dependable, my defendable, my presentable
New York Times
.

When I looked down to where the
New York Post
was piled, I caught only the first word of the day’s banner headline.  But it was unusual enough to catch my eye right away.  “BROADWAY…,” it said.  Hey, I thought.  That’s cool, I work on Broadway.  I wonder what happened.  I wonder if it’s about anyone I know.  When the whole picture came into focus, I had a sensation that I’m not sure I can describe accurately.  The closest I can get is that it felt like I was walking down the street, when I suddenly saw myself go by.  It was a “No, wait a minute, that’s not right.  That can’t happen,” kind of feeling.  On Saturday morning, May 4, 1991, when I stood at the Gem Spa looking down at the cover of the New York Post, under the headline “Broadway Swordplay Turns Real,” I saw a picture of myself staring back.

My first impulse was to hide.  I had a completely instinctive urge to dive behind something, like a crate, and seek cover.  I stopped myself from doing it, but before I could, I did do an amazing thing.  I looked all around, very slowly, so as not to draw attention, to see if anyone was watching me.  I can only guess that those are both learned responses to hundreds, no, thousands, of movies and television shows that portray fugitives’ reactions when they see themselves plastered on the front pages of all the newspapers.  Even though I hadn’t committed any crime, the fact that my face was on the cover of the
New York Post
made me feel like I must have pushed someone in front of a subway train.  Once I was sure that no one was on my trail, of course, I did the next thing that all movie outlaws do.  I bought copies of all the papers.  I turned my collar up as high as it would go, I drooped my head down low and, looking like the most suspicious character on the corner of Second Avenue and St. Mark’s Place, I slunk back home to hide out.