In 1981, Gary and I moved to the apartment on 58th and 1st, around the corner from the 59th Street Bridge and the Roosevelt Island tram. I fell in love with Linda, a nineteen-year-old who lived across the street. She was the first woman I ever dated who was born and bred in Manhattan. I went with Linda to visit her cousin in Los Angeles, my first trip to California. Like a lot of my travel when I was younger, it was constrained by lack of money, ingenuity, and inspiration. We spent the whole week hanging out at her cousin’s house in the Valley, with no car. We might as well have been limbless.
As I couldn’t broaden my professional horizons much, due to the soap, I did small showcase productions, some for only ten performances. After work, I lounged around the city, drinking while watching Gary in clubs. And once in a while, I went home to Massapequa. Compared to the nightlife and the fruitless auditions I was going on with directors like James Ivory and John Sayles and for theater companies like Manhattan Theatre Club and Circle Rep, going home felt like a chore. Home began to change around that time, as my mother had gotten a job at the local shopping mall doing marketing research. The company that hired her was called Quick Test, and it was essentially a brigade of women, mostly housewives and college girls plus a few guys, who cornered people on the floor of the mall and asked them a series of survey questions. If the shopper was lucky, she would be invited to come to the office to sample anything from hosiery to fabric softener to hand lotion. My mother changed, markedly, once she started getting dressed up, getting her hair done, and going to work for the first time in decades. At times, she seemed transformed, grateful for the companionship that any professional life brings. My father began a descent in the opposite direction. With other kids heading to college, his expenses were higher than ever, and my parents’ combined income still didn’t make a dent.
Many years later, my wife Hilaria once said to me, as a means of underscoring some forgetfulness on my part, “When I’m not with you, I still exist.” That comment reminded me of how wrapped up in my own concerns I was during this period. I saw my siblings infrequently, something I look back on with a lot of regret. By contrast, my sister Beth was a steady presence in the lives of our siblings even after she moved out to marry her boyfriend, Charlie, when she was nineteen. She had met him when she was sixteen, and although he was a tough, working-class young guy from a family of firefighters and cops, perhaps not her type, nonetheless he gave her a way out of our parents’ drama, which was now steeped in resentments. Beth wanted to make her own home and quickly. It didn’t matter if the guy she made that home with didn’t go to Harvard or take her to Paris. Like me, she was conditioned to believe, “As long as the bills are paid.” Remarkably, she would replicate our very household by having six children of her own.
Beth had moved out when I was almost seventeen. Soon after, when I went away to college, I could sense how difficult things were becoming for my siblings when I spoke with them now and then. When they were out of the house, they found companionship, joy, and identity. When they came home, they had to traverse a minefield. I would call my mother and she often sounded sad, as she must have perceived that she was getting close to some transition. My father was almost impossible to reach in the age before cell phones. I pictured him sitting in the driveway for a long moment before he sighed and finally went in. Calling the house was painful, and brought on feelings I wanted to run from.
I recalled that when I was around thirteen or fourteen years old, my brother Daniel and I found out that the local town park was offering tennis lessons during the summer for a very low enrollment fee. The instructor was an older student in our town named Jimmy Luchsinger, who, along with his brother Jack, was a sports legend in our school. As Daniel and I stood at the bottom of the stairs talking, my father overheard us and said, “I will get you the lessons.” He then added, in his typical fashion, “But if you miss one lesson, it’s over.” A couple of days later, he came home with two of the old Wilson wood racquets with “Davis Cup” emblazoned on them. Our mouths fell open. As we offered our thanks, he went in to the den, turned on the TV news, and hid behind the New York Times, which was the wall he built around himself. When that paper was up at half-staff, you might try your luck. But full staff meant stay away.
As he lay on the daybed, he would fall asleep and often remain there overnight. One of my strongest images of my father is of him stretched out on the daybed, his shoes dangling over the edge, the soles worn and two large holes visible from wear. He smoked cigarettes for years, and once he quit, he smoked a pipe filled with Amphora Brown tobacco. When the pipe sputtered, it sent tiny embers onto his shirt. One day, I opened my dad’s closet to look for something, and in the sunlight, I saw the dozens of pinholes burned through each of his shirts. No moths were here, only Amphora Brown. He never did anything for himself. Nothing, that is, that mattered. When he wanted to binge on something, he sat down with a bucket of blue crabs and a jar of mayonnaise and ate the whole thing.
As we clutched the tennis racquets, beaming, he lowered himself onto the daybed, holes in his shoes, his shirt, and his psyche. The pressures and frustrations that swirled inside him barely concealed a pent-up rage that actually served to tamp down some greater sadness.
At one point, around the fall of 1981, my father moved out. As always, I learned about it from Beth. Everyone was stunned. He had no money to sign a lease somewhere else, so he went to Massapequa High School, his other home. He carried with him his mother’s frugality, compassion, and conscience. He had that key ring that could choke a hippo, with the keys to everything, including the faculty lounge, where there was a couch no better or worse than the one at our house. He slept there, and he showered and dressed in the coaches’ locker room. Surely some knew what he was doing, but they said nothing. Finally, after a couple of months, my father told me that Frank, the chief custodian, approached him and said he would lose his head janitor’s job if the situation continued.