NYU was a difficult adjustment. I was back in a dorm. And I didn’t know New York well, in any sense. Plopped into the middle of a world of “student actors,” I had little in common with anyone else. At GW, people followed the herd into, usually, some rather compelling courses or off-campus internships. I remember the cutthroat competition to get into Stephen Wayne’s lectures on the American presidency, a truly great class. These acting class types at NYU, just like boys who had played football in peewee leagues since they were eight, or girls who had taken ballet class nearly their whole lives, had been at this long before college. Their bubbly chatter went something like “I spent the summer at the Blah-Blah theater camp doing Guys and Dolls.” Turning to me, they asked, “Have you ever played Sky?” No, I would reply. “Have you ever played Hamlet? Val? Edmund? Billy Bigelow? Chance? Mercutio? Ensign Pulver?” My answer was no, across the board. Other than high school productions of Teahouse of the August Moon and The Spiral Staircase, as well as scene work from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with my Long Island Maggie the Cat, I had no acting training or experience. I thought that I might have gotten in on my appearance as much as anything else. I was the only blue-eyed “young male ingénue” type in a class filled with pretty female dancers and budding male character actors. The more intense and serious members of the class wore black clothes, drank coffee, and smoked a lot, their faces buried in copies of Balm in Gilead or In the Boom Boom Room.
I began to worry. I asked myself, “Did you pass up law school for this?” Why was I spending hours at the Lee Strasberg Institute weeping or directing scenes wherein we staged our dreams or shouting into a corner at some unseen source of my anxieties? I walked to class through the old Union Square (before the developer William Zeckendorf cut a deal to clean up the park in exchange for constructing a hideous apartment building that blocked New Yorkers’ views of the gorgeous Con Ed clock tower). Drug dealers greeted me at eight a.m. with their whimsical pitches. “Loose joints here! T’s and V’s! I got the herb superb, the weed you need. The smoke you love to toke! Seconal! Valium!”
I had no time to relax, let alone get high. During my last full-time year of school, my father stressed about money more than ever. I worked throughout the year, first as a busboy at the twilight of Studio 54, then selling men’s shirts in a discount apparel store on lower Fifth Avenue. The older clerks glared at me when the place slowed down, as if I had brought a curse through the door. I waited tables at a bistro called Café Bruce Waite, named after a sometime actor and the brother of Ralph Waite. Some of the female staff flirted with me, and Bruce fumed. Bruce had a full-length oil painting of himself in the restaurant’s entry hall, posed as if he were Lord Mountbatten. In this Billy Budd tableau, he fired me, accusing me of stealing from him by giving my friends free food. After that, I was a chaperone for a tour bus company, escorting older African-American women from Baptist church groups in the Bronx to the Corning Glass Works and then to wine tastings in the Hudson Valley. Driving back with these proper ladies in hats and lace gloves was a kick. Slightly buzzed, we sang gospel songs all the way home. Back at the dorm, I would sneak into the dining hall to pilfer a meal. The manager was a kind, discreet guy. Nonetheless, he had a job to do, and would sidle up next to me and whisper, “You know I gotta ask you to leave. Now finish your slice and get gone.”
I studied acting with Geoffrey Horne and Marcia Haufrecht, both outstanding teachers for young actors. I took a fantastic History of Dramatic Lit course with Bill Bly, one that everyone professed was their favorite. Jim Brown taught a survey on the history of comic performance that I loved. Everyone loved Jim. I slowly began to see that there was a pretty substantial chasm between those who delighted the teachers and those who would actually leave there and work, between those for whom acting was a craft and those for whom it was a potential occupation. “Look in a magazine,” a teacher once said. “Do you see yourself there? Then, maybe you’ll work. Or, if you don’t see yourself there, then the business is simply waiting for you to show up.” I finished my first year at NYU and in the summer of 1980 found myself living as a boarder in the unair-conditioned Yorkville apartment of a friend of Jim Brown, herself a teacher of anthropology with several children. My six-by-six-foot room came with a lot of rules. “You are to confine yourself to your room and the bathroom. Your rent does not include use of the kitchen or living room or any other area of the apartment,” said Mrs. Gleason, who looked like a cross between Eleanor Roosevelt and Rose Sayer, the Katharine Hepburn character in The African Queen. The only thing missing was Noah Claypole calling me “Work’us” as I came in. I suspected that my tiny room had originally been a luggage compartment for storing trunks and suitcases.
Back home, my parents were spent. They hardly said a word to each other. The financial stress had crushed my dad. My brothers and sisters seemed to be gone whenever I visited. While I basted in this cell in Manhattan in August, I did some simple math. The looming dissolution of my parents’ marriage meant I wouldn’t be able to afford the remaining single semester to finish NYU. I couldn’t go home, and I couldn’t swing the remaining credits to graduate. And then something strange happened.
4
Patchogue by Nightfall
During the summer of 1980, I got a job at a private health club/restaurant at the top of an apartment building near Lincoln Center. I waited tables at the café during lunch, where a couple of dozen women would snap, gesturing toward their cups, “My cawfee is cold,” every fifteen minutes. They barely ate. They just stirred “cawfee.” In the evening, I lifeguarded at the club’s indoor pool. I was in no hurry to rush back to Mrs. Gleason’s stifling apartment in between shifts, so I headed to the Drama Book Shop, where I rolled the most famous lines of the greatest playwrights around in my mouth. “O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, that I am meek and gentle with these butchers.” “It was a great mistake, my being born a man.” And “You ever heard of the Napoleonic code?”
One day at the café, a woman who was there as a guest asked me, “Do you have an agent? My friend is casting a soap opera and you seem like just what she’s looking for.” In a moment that would become a pattern in my career, I didn’t bother to ask exactly what that was. I just wanted to work. The role was on a daytime show called The Doctors.