There we are, the old blind man and me, onstage at the Winchester Community Center theater. He's Alfieri, the wise attorney. I'm Eddie, the gruff longshoreman. We're about to perform a scene from A View from the Bridge, by the writer Marilyn Monroe left Joe DiMaggio for.
The house lights are down. I've escorted the old man from stage left to a table and chair center stage, and taken my position stage right. The lights come up; Alfieri begins.
It was at this time that he first came to me. I had represented his father in an accident case some years before, and I was acquainted with the family in a casual way. I remember him now as he walked through my doorway—
Eddie ascends the stairs to the stage and walks over to Alfieri.
His eyes were like tunnels. My first thought was that he had committed a crime, but soon I saw it was only a passion that had moved into his body, like a stranger.
Alfieri turns to Eddie: "I don't quite understand what I can do for you. Is there a question of law somewhere?"
Eddie: "That's what I want to ask you."
Alfieri: "Because there's nothing illegal about a girl falling in love with an immigrant."
Eddie: "Yeah, but what about it if the only reason for it is to get his papers?"
Alfieri: "First of all, you don't know that."
Eddie:
Eddie:
Eddie?
Eddie!
This is not like Eddie. Not at all. He isn't well-spoken but he is never at a loss for words. Until now. Eddie Carbone doesn't know what to say because I have forgotten his lines.
I've forgotten Eddie Carbone's lines and don't know where to find them. They've been erased so utterly and completely from my memory that they might never have been written. An F5 tornado has touched down in my hippocampus and swept them away.
I'm paralyzed in the spotlight, but my mind is racing. I'm searching everywhere for the words, even the dark places I don't like to look. I have to, I'm desperate. My mother is in the audience, and two co-workers. Maybe even, God forbid, the reporter who mentioned my name in her last review of a Joseph Bernard Acting Studio showcase.
I search my mind and see an old Kleenex covering a malformed pile in a far corner of my temporal lobe. Could it be Eddie's lines? I cast the tissue aside and instead find myself leaving a breakup note on the windshield of my girlfriend's car.
I look the other way and see a bare bulb hanging by a thread from the ceiling of my cerebral cortex. I pull the chain and find myself at 13, roasting red ants with a blowtorch. But not Eddie's lines.
I'm frantic. By now it's obvious to all 12 people in the audience that this isn't a dramatic pause, but an amateur thespian going down the shitter.
I see a last resort: a laundry bag hanging limply from my synaptic knob. I rush over and stumble on the prone form of me vomiting after a hard night of binge drinking. I'm not sure how old I am. Anywhere between 17 and 41, I'm guessing.
I open the bag and find not Eddie's lines, but Dale Langman on top of chubby 10-year-old me, pinning my arms to the ground with his knees and dangling a piece of dog shit over my mouth.
Dark places: illuminated; Eddie's lines: still missing.
This all happens in a matter of seconds—long enough for me to know that I'll never retrieve them. They're gone for good, and I am left to consider something that kind Joe Bernard, a method acting disciple of Lee Strasberg, never taught us in class. I know the theory behind sense memory, but lack the antidote for senseless memory loss.
I look helplessly at Joe sitting in the front row, folded arms resting on his round belly, and commit the cardinal sin: I break the fourth wall. I drop character and in the dead silence of the dark theater, frozen in the spotlight like a fruit bat, ask if we can start over. He nods grimly.
And so we begin anew. The houselights dim and I take my place. The houselights rise and Alfieri begins his narration. I walk toward him. He says his line to me, I say my line to him. So far, so good. He says his second line, I say mine. Things are looking up.
Alfieri: "First of all, you don't know that."
Eddie:
Eddie?
Ah, Eddie!
Arthur Miller wrote Eddie Carbone as an archetype, the definitive Brooklyn blue collar with a repressed sexual desire for his niece. Eddie would put his foot in my ass for doing this to him.
I walk offstage through the curtains without a word (of course) and into the dressing room. I'm hazy on what comes next. I'm not sure how many actors are there, or if they know what has transpired. They see I'm back sooner than expected, and that I'm laying in anguish on the floor with my face buried in the crook of my arm.
Is that the distant voice of Joe Bernard telling the audience that it happens sometimes? I can't be certain. I hear voices asking what happened, what happened, and me saying I forgot my lines, I forgot my f--king lines.
I lay there for I don't know how long. Eventually I get up, grab my things and walk out the side door so no one can see me. I go to a bar and get drunk. And I wonder how long the old blind man sat there before he knew he was alone.
A month later I leave for Los Angeles. To become an actor.
*****
I've got 500 head shots in my car and $5,000 in the bank as I pull onto Interstate 15. I've got my clothes and my copy of How To Make It In Hollywood. It is August 1997. Two months before, I had quit my job of 10 years as a feature writer for the Las Vegas Sun, which isn't exactly the Actors Studio, to pursue an implausible notion.
I remember when the acting bug bit, but I'm not sure why it did. It was early 1996; I was 33 years old. Single; never married; no prospects. The thought of becoming an actor had never crossed my mind. Why it would, when it did, is a mystery.
Perhaps the acting bug, an omniscient opportunist, sensed in me a dormant desire to be noticed; divined the dour vibrations of a guy going nowhere personally or professionally, but lacking the inclination to do anything about either.
I was moderately discontented with my job and my employers were reasonably dissatisfied with me, a miserable malcontent who had managed to keep his $28,000-a-year position despite years of unsatisfactory performance evaluations. It seemed we were stuck with each other.
Then it occurred to me that I wanted to be famous, though I didn't know how. The acting bug is insidious that way. At least it was with me. The symptoms didn't reveal their intentions all at once. They were subtle and slow-acting. I began to have the occasional flash thought that I was wasting my best years, that time was a train going by fast, that a life lived anonymously wasn't worth living.
I thought that if I didn't soon get out of Las Vegas, where I'd spent my entire conscious life, and the Sun, where I'd spent my entire career unconscious, I never would. And that was unacceptable.
One night I went to Joseph Bernard's Acting Studio, then in a strip mall space rented by the Las Vegas Little Theatre, which in turn sublet the space to Joe two nights a week.
I walked through the front door into an empty lobby. I heard voices coming through the curtain leading into what I presumed was the theater. I turned around and walked out. I drove once around the block, trying to summon the courage to go back. I found some and did. I walked through the curtain and into my new preoccupation.
This (and the various other locations Joe called home) is where I spent the next 18 months honing my delusion. Everything I know about acting I learned here, from Joe, who has something like 28 Broadway plays to his credit and a bunch of film and TV roles, including The Twilight Zone and Judgment at Nuremberg.
Over the course of a year and a half I would perform in half a dozen showcases (usually two-person scenes from Broadway plays), the first less than a month after I'd joined the acting studio.
I memorized entire monologues and regurgitated them verbatim in class; learned to summon emotion through sense memory; and forgot my lines during my last performance, a night after I'd gotten through the same scene without a hitch.
I'm sure some people would consider that a sign, and I probably did as well, but by then it was too late. I'd quit my job and there was no going back. There was only going south.
*****
So now I'm in Los Angeles. What next? I don't need to find a place. I have wealthy friends, and they have a large house in the Glendale hills. They let me stay there for free. I should probably try to get a job, just to avoid depleting my savings. Screw that. My job is acting, baby.
I read the trade papers. In back are listings of all the major studio, independent and student films in pre-production, a plot synopsis of each and a physical description of the characters. Thinking my chances are better, I target the independent and student productions.
When I see a description of a character matching my own (tall, thin, brown hair, mid-30s), I send the casting director a head shot and padded résumé. It includes every monologue I've ever recited and the name of every character from every scene in every Joe Bernard showcase I was ever in. I do this for probably a month. I get no response.
I have better luck with the soaps. Two weeks after arriving in Los Angeles, I get a phone call from Days of Our Lives. The casting director leaves a message. She has received my head shot and wants to know if I'm available to work as an extra tomorrow. I check my schedule. Yes, I'm free.
And astounded. Some people wait tables for years and never get a soap.
I report to NBC the next morning and wait eight hours to work 45 minutes. I and perhaps eight others have been hired to play airline passengers. Two of the show's young stars are heading to an exotic locale for their honeymoon; the scene requires tops of skulls and parts of faces in the background.
We are led to a cavernous sound stage and board a halved airplane fuselage. It contains windows and maybe six rows of three seats on either side of an aisle. It's important to strive for authenticity. Keeping this in mind, I pick up a magazine and read it. Really read it. I'm not acting; I'm being. The scene is over before I'm halfway through the Sky Mall. I get a check the following week for $183, just for giving them some head.
I'm back a month later, this time paired with a young woman. We're patrons in a Parisian café. Human background furniture. I work four hours and make $125.
I can't adequately describe the sensation of getting hired—and paid—so soon. Open a thesaurus and look at the synonyms for "thrill."
By the time I put the second check into my savings, the first one is already spent. But I'm still solvent.
It's late September. I've been here almost two months, and already acquired a taste for unemployment—a desirable condition made more delightful by my tony (and rent-free) living conditions and Los Angeles itself, where I was born and lived my first month.
I see now that a life spent in Las Vegas had anesthetized me to the rest of the world. Its ministrations compensated for its deficiencies, and I existed without mourning what I was missing. Two months in LA have shown me that I was missing quite a lot. I had partaken of surface Los Angeles often as a visitor—a Dodger game here, a day at Disneyland there—but you can't begin to know it in a weekend.
Living here, I've driven its side streets and drank in its Bukowski bars, basked in its jazz clubs and specialty bookstores, sampled the foods, customs and cultures of its melting pot, caught a boxing card at the historic Olympic Auditorium downtown and a Clippers game at the desolate Sports Arena, seen the Silverlake dumps where my mother and father lived in the '50s and felt a pang for—what? Their lost youth? Broken promises?
*****
Fast-forward to my last day in LA. More money has gone out than has come in. Much more. I have less than $200 in my savings. I don't know where the money has gone. Days hasn't called in months, and when it finally does, near the end of December, it's too late. I've made up my mind to leave.
I've lost my focus. I've applied for jobs, without success. I've joined a talent agency that represents nonunion extras. I get no calls. I've attended two acting classes in five months, both obligatory freebies most of the acting teachers here offer prospective students.
One of them advocates primal screaming as a way to break down the barriers that inhibit actors from tapping into their emotions. One by one his students walk into the studio, lay onstage and begin to wail. Soon the space sounds like the Tate house, and I find a new way to summon annoyance. I leave before I scream.
What else have I done? I've gone to an open audition for the lead role in an indie crime drama set to start production in Thailand in two months. Roughly 200 other guys who look more or less like me are also there.
A production company employee hands me a set of lines to study and a sheet to sign. It's a list containing the names of actors waiting to audition. I'm No. 34. I wait two hours, and when I finally get in front of the casting director, he says he won't waste my time or his. I'm not what he's looking for. I don't even get to read.
The inevitable drought has arrived and it could last years. I'm 35, and don't have the time to waste or the love of acting to sustain me on a maybe. On less than a maybe. Michael J. Fox reportedly was sleeping in his car when Family Ties called. I have a 1990 Acura; you've really got to want it. There are plenty who do, and still it won't matter. LA is swarming with wannabes like me and people with actual talent, fighting impossible odds for the chance to live forever.
Or land a hemorrhoids commercial.
*****
And so it has come to this: stay or go? It's about noon, January 4, 1998. It's raining steadily. The question isn't whether I should leave LA; it's whether I should leave now or wait out the rain and leave later, perhaps tomorrow. My car is packed; I decide there's no time like the present.
I navigate the steep grade down Pacific Avenue from the hills and head west on the 134, the first leg of a four-hour drive home. The rain is intensifying. I get about five miles when it occurs to me I should have waited. When I say it is raining, what I mean is, it's Niagara Falling. And getting worse. Can't-see-out-of-your-windshield worse. It-never-rains-in-California-but-man-it-pours worse. Other commuters don't seem to notice. I'm in the middle lane and they fly past me on either side, doing their usual 95.
I decide to get off the freeway at the next exit, but have one problem: I can't see the next exit. The rain is masking the signs, and worse, concealing me from the other drivers. Visibility is zero. If I slow down I risk being rear-ended. If I move over I chance colliding with someone in the right lane. I have no choice but to keep going. My right leg is convulsing, and I smell fear. Before now I never knew you could smell fear. It is sour.
I'm somewhere outside Pasadena when the tornado hits. The radio's report of it hitting Long Beach is no consolation; it only underscores the extreme conditions and my imminent peril. Somehow I manage to keep the car inside the lines, and eventually the rain begins to slacken.
I take a chance and slowly move to the right lane. Expecting a sick crunch, I instead find a clear path—and just up the freeway a Pasadena exit. I pull into a restaurant parking lot just off the 134 and try to collect myself. I am badly shaken.
I have a fleeting thought: Is LA is trying to prevent me from leaving, or is it a sadist seeing off another failure? Soon the downpour becomes a drizzle, and then the clouds part. I get back on the freeway and continue onward, to Las Vegas.
Just as I reach Cajon Pass, the entire episode repeats itself, this time with supplementary thoughts of a 500-foot plunge into the gorge. Suffice to say I make it home, but not without residual (and apparently irreversible) psychological damage.
Looking back, I only regret I didn't stay longer. I should have slept in my car and earned some hard-living stripes. Should have suffered more. Should have abandoned the comforts of free room and board for roaches in the rooming house and neighbors with delirium tremens.
I would have still been an unemployed actor, but what stories I'd have to tell. Instead, I've gotten a job writing these immortal lines: "His name is John Barr, he's gonna sell you a car ..."
It's a living.