My brother Billy and I spent the night at a weird motel where the lounge, called the Frank Sinatra Room, featured a trio of middle-aged guys playing and crooning the hits of the Chairman of the Board on Friday and Saturday nights. One wall had a mural, perhaps fifteen feet wide by eight feet high, a knockoff of the cover from Sinatra’s Main Event album from 1974. Maybe this was God offering us something truly bizarre to take our mind off of the situation. Just across a narrow alley, my father was suffering unimaginably, while we drank and listened to “The Shadow of Your Smile,” performed by the Frank Sinatra of South 54th Street, Philly.
The next morning, my dad opened his eyes, and as a tear rolled down his cheek, he said, “I’ll never see my grandchildren.” Then, overwhelmed by morphine, he went back to sleep. An oncology resident from India asked, “Did your father ever work in heavy industry?” No, I said. “Near a steel mill or factories?” No, I said. “Your father has a very high lead content in his blood,” he informed me. I told the doctor that my father had coached riflery in a high school for twenty-eight years, and he ventured that an unventilated shooting range may have been a cause. There, for over a quarter century, lead dust was inhaled not just by my dad, but by his team members and my brothers and me as well. Other area schools had installed ventilation in their shooting ranges long before. Some months later, my sister asked school officials to provide us with sample material from walls, flooring, and ceiling tiles to assess the level of toxicity. These men, my father’s colleagues for decades and some his longtime friends, denied our requests and gutted the rifle range, incinerating all of the material in order to shield the district, and themselves, from the litigation we were exploring.
*
On April 15, I was back in New York to meet for a general audition with the casting director John Lyons, and read “Let us sit upon the ground . . .” from Richard II. It was probably bad, but John only smiled and said, “Well, I’ve never seen that done that way before.” Though some casting agents were assholes, others genuinely cared, like Lyons and the late Howard Feuer. In 1986, I auditioned for Peter Shaffer’s Yonadab, and at one point, the director, Peter Hall, expressed concern about the paucity of my theater credits. Feuer, who was short, corpulent, and spoke with a wheeze, blurted out, “Well, he’s very stageworthy!” Dear, dear Howard. I owe so much to people like him.
After the audition, I took a long trip by subway, then bus, to Yonkers to meet a bail bondsman. It seemed that my brother Daniel had either borrowed or stolen a car and had been arrested while visiting my brother Billy at college in Binghamton. I had to post the bail so that Daniel could get down to Philadelphia to see our father. I got to the bail bondsman’s office and, matter-of-factly, he said, “I am authorized to use deadly force, if need be, to bring him in. You realize that, don’t you?” After a pause, he repeated, “Deadly force . . . if necessary,” his tone suggesting that he was rather fond of deadly force. I signed the bail papers to spring my brother and made my way home to the apartment on 58th between 1st and 2nd. I walked up the three flights of stairs, opened my door, and got a glass of water. It was five p.m., and I hadn’t been in the door five minutes when the phone rang. It was my sister Beth, convulsing. I could barely understand her until she got out the words “Dad died.” I don’t remember anything after that. I don’t remember the cab ride to Penn Station, the train ride to Massapequa, or the taxi to our house. When I got there, my mother, Beth, and I seemed to unconsciously move into the den, where we stood near the daybed that my father had slept on for many years. I felt as if I had fainted and come to in that room. My journey to LA had been not only encouraged by my father but also underwritten, in some sense, by the lies about his health, lies that had brought us to this awful place. I started to sob uncontrollably, and I blacked out again, awake but unable to hear or recall anything.
My father was the first person for whom I was charged with arranging a burial. His wake was held at the Massapequa Funeral Home. Prior to the services that evening, the owner, a man not much older than me, quietly asked me if I was ready to bid farewell to the body. I hesitated, not quite sure I wanted to see my father’s body, and that must have showed. The man leaned in and said, “One day, I assure you, you may see your dad walking down the street or sitting in a park. You’ll swear it’s him. So I urge all of the family members to view the body and say a proper good-bye. That way, you have no doubts.” The thought had never occurred to me. The next thing I knew, I was in the room, standing over my father. With makeup, he looked a good deal better than when I’d last seen him. He was beloved in my hometown, and that night many, many in our town came to his wake. My mother sat in a widow’s chair and received the condolences of half the town, with no acknowledgment of the state of their marriage.
After my father’s death, my relationship with my mother would hit an all-time low. As I look back, I attribute this to her fear and economic insecurity as a widow. However, we now entered a period where I was more of an ex-husband than a son. My mother had often relied on Beth and me to function as lieutenants in her army. However, as I spent more time in Los Angeles working, my mother’s needs and her inimitable way of expressing them drove us to a frosty, unpleasant place.
The funeral was held at our church, St. Martin of Tours Catholic Church in Amityville. Another Catholic church, St. Rose, had opened nearer to us in Massapequa, but by then we were dedicated St. Martin’s parishioners. It looked like every seat was taken. I came in and out of my battered state, picking up on snippets of the Mass text. I stared at the floor. Then, I heard the priest recite, “Eternal rest grant unto him and may perpetual light shine upon him.” I cracked again, but it was different this time. The word, as I learned, is “keening.” I thought I might pass out. My sister reached over and squeezed my thigh and whispered, “You’ve got to stop.” But I couldn’t stop, because this was incomprehensible. My father couldn’t be dead. That wasn’t possible. The only person in the world I trusted was now gone and everything would be different. Throughout that day and beyond, I worried about the lost opportunities to thank him for his generosity and selflessness. I fantasized about the clothes I would have bought him, the trips I’d have sent him on. Many in my family needed help, and I tried to provide that help, but I always imagined that, in his case, I would have done anything to thank this man. Anything. He had sacrificed so much to carry me on his back up this hill of life.
Two years later, while shooting a TV show, Dress Gray, at Warner Bros., I noticed a man sitting at a picnic table at an outdoor commissary. It was my father. I froze. Then I walked a few steps toward him. The funeral director had been right. It was not my dad. After that began the unconscious and ultimately unhealthy search for someone to substitute for him.
6
The Love Taxi