That time I was in a Sartre play: part of a memoir, sort of.

I’m considering penning a memoir.  I’m serious.

I’m sure there’s a finer art to it than what I’m putting to paper. No, I know there is as evidenced by PaperGirlMemoir’s blog. I enjoy her blog, among several others, those detailing their writing journeys. I suppose she’s serving as a “model,” though she has a much better, cleaner handle on how to go about writing one than I do. I tend to ramble. (I’m pretending it’s my style, so don’t say anything).

Sometimes, it reads like this, but it doesn't feel like it.

At first, I thought, why on earth would I think anyone wants to read a memoir by me. And then, I thought, why not?  Words don’t exist just for those with accomplished lives. Nor do they wait for sentences that only come from the pens of established literati. I have lived, and that is miracle enough.

If we take Jung at his word, and dip our own toes in the “collective unconscious,” then surely there is no life unworthy of being written about.

Besides, what you say isn’t the point, is it?  The challenge comes in how you say it.

I’ve been stressing and stressing this to my students, this first summer term: that their opinions are of merit, that they really already know most of this critical theory “stuff,” (we do it daily in our normal lives) they’ve just never had to give it a name, before.  The higher hill to climb for them is in learning just that: how to justify their opinions. Most of them immediately jump to Reader-Response criticism, overlooking the necessity of understanding the purpose of becoming an “informed reader” within an “interpretive community.”

But, twisting that critical concept, a bit, I suppose, that’s what I’m trying to do, too: justify my opinions (except in this case, they all total up to My Life)…but, I mean, that’s one way of looking at a memoir, or the impetus behind writing one, right? It’s the ability to interpret your community.

I’ve been irregularly writing a memoir, or two, for the last couple of years. I never put a great deal of steady stock in it, but the idea, I find intoxicating. One day, maybe, I’ll put all these random pages together. But, in the meantime, I thought I might share a couple with you.  I’ve put, perhaps, a total of 60 pages into two different collections; the reason for that is they come from two very different stylistic approaches: singular personal (mostly me with opinions) and plural personal (mostly me + others + opinions). The titles I’ve given them are Loud Enough and Deer in the Road. I’m writing the titles here for posterity’s sake.

I got first dibs, in other words. (I worked really hard on coming up with them, too). 

…from Loud Enough

Maybe this is a work of fiction.  There’d be a certain irony in that, if it were.  Maybe this is an autobiography; there’s a good deal of personal experience and truth to the subject matter.  Or, maybe it doesn’t matter.  I’m probably only vaguely aware of what I’m saying.  But first things first, of course.

I’d been obsessing over a book, a memoir, for a long time because I thought I was interesting; I’d conquered (and that’s a term I’m using loosely) prose and poetry and playwriting.  Granted, these conquests occurred mainly in the privacy of my room, and the only witness was my cat, Aristophanes.  

Still, she was nonetheless proud and a harsh critic. 

But you know, I almost didn’t get this far.  I was almost too afraid of having to be responsible for words.  I’ve also been obsessed with that concept, with language in general.  For instance, I don’t own any of these words, and yet, by putting them into these sentences I’m basically contracting myself to their overall impression, their intent. 

There are few words more disappointing, more potentially upsetting in the whole English language than intent. It’s a frightening responsibility, too, to commit to something as determined as intent […]

I was haphazardly cast as The Tutor in Sartre’s The Flies, one February, early in the month, years ago.  I use haphazard because, to be honest, I didn’t want to be in the play.  I’d grown very upset with acting and tired and weary.  After all, I’d just turned 27.  I was already washed up, I felt.  I’d done nothing with my life, in theatre, at that point, of any real significance and I’d had such plans.  God, did I have plans.  All my friends were doing their, you know, plans, but not I.

Even a picture of flies is aggravating.

I fell in love.

That’s not so necessary for this book, though. 

At least not for this part.

I still had my professional experiences.  I still worked with good people who had a lot of knowledge about their place in the world of theatre and masks. 

A large criticism in my past has been my reluctance to commit; perhaps, I should use the colloquial term here for easy reference:  I was lazy.  But, now wait.  I had a good reason to be.  My procrastination came from an abundance of directions.  I was consumed with ideas for plays, for scenes, as an actor, as a singer, cabaret artist, and in character analysis, for design and costume, and so on and on and on.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the possibilities, and when you’re  faced with an endless array of potential, no matter which way you turn…what do you do?  I slept, usually.  My potential was deeply rooted in depression, a rhetorically habitual Remembrance of Things Past (I really should have read more Proust in life), a negligence of what was right in front of my face – I was nearly my own demise. 

Surely, you know that feeling.

Now, of course, I should explain about Sartre.  He’s really the reason I’m at this point, and really, in all honesty, why the hell should you care if I don’t at least explain the basis of this bizarre ramble…because of all the things I’m kinda OK at, rambling is not one of them – I’m more than OK at it; I am a Master of rambling. 

And, besides, you have no idea who I am.  But, you will.  You’ll care, because despite the idiosyncracies that are me, despite how different I might seem, I represent you, in a way.  I had a story I wanted to tell, and now I’m telling it.  I just decided, Enough!  It’s self-pity or self-preservation.  I suppose, though, you’ll decide that later, after reading this.  Still, that sort of passion in life is sorely overlooked, I think.

Don’t you?

As I said, I was The Tutor.  I had been unwilling to accept the role, even though I was asked three times to take it; the director, bless her beautiful heart, had offered it to me originally but I was suffering from a severe nonchalance of the stage. I’d spent, a few months earlier, over 350 rehearsal hours, every day of the week, on a somewhat shoddily written, original musical (though two of the songs were digestible), with a director incapable of producing a random scribble from a pencil, much less a vision for the piece (which was in and of itself a powerful story), and this, all from a nonprofit theatre organization with really good intentions (i.e., we all had day jobs, other contracts, etc.).  It was a painful process and nearly destroyed my faith in theatre.  That’s the part that would be severe. 

So, I wasn’t terribly excited or looking forward to another venture on stage.  Especially, Sartre’s The Flies, in which, I almost had to perform barefoot…which I never do. Ever. It was quite a struggle: me and the costumer.

You should know, first off, that The Flies is an excruciatingly lengthy production, and not one of his best.  Or perhaps that was only the case for ours? Most of our leads were magnificent, I must say, (though we did have a weak Orestes), and personally, I loved the material. It was, perhaps, my reticence that kept me; I also got in trouble for sneaking out, in costume, during Act One, third night of the run, and buying a bottle of champagne. I also got gas; I was on empty. (For shame!) But, The Tutor doesn’t come back on, after Act One, for a very long time. (Kris, Kris, Kris).

The play was still a poignant piece, and well-attended.  But, I took the role out of pity, a major offense in the craft of acting. 

No caption necessary.

That didn’t change much throughout the course of the run, either. I carried my plastic cup of pathos everywhere I went.

However, despite my best efforts at being indifferent and “put-upon,” Sartre got to me with one line. One line that would not escape me. One single line that made the entire show “worth it.”

[…]

There’s a moment in the opening of the play in which Orestes, the rightful heir to the throne of Argos (though I can’t see for the life of me why he’d want it) turns to The Tutor who had begun to politely berate him, if you will, about his aloofness to his upbringing and of course Orestes, being displaced royalty and spoiled, immediately starts in with “I know how lucky I am, but all the same, yadda yadda yadda…”

Kids.

But then, in one of his diatribes to The Tutor, he actually turns the tables.  It’s very slight, very subtle.  He’s in the middle of another “yadda yadda yadda” spiel when he suddenly (this is Sartre, so the use of the word suddenly is generous) accuses The Tutor of having no “joy in going somewhere definite.”

And all of a sudden, just like that, I was not The Tutor anymore. 

I was a 27-year-old man on a plain stage in Bloomington, Indiana, and I was…well, I was exactly what Orestes said, a man who had no joy, not going anywhere definite, not really going anywhere at all. 

Anymore.

And I wanted to know what happened to that curly-headed kid in glasses from Mississippi who had all his life been lauded as the next great piece of poetry in motion.  When did he slow down?  And why? 

So, here I am, writing a book about my life as if I’m great, one painful, pulled minute after another.  As if I’m worth it.  

And you want to know why? You want to hear the truth?  It’s because I’ve never believed I wasn’t. And that’s why I’m not afraid to write. This or anything else.

More to come…?

God, I hope so…(though it is a tad boring. But, I’m working on that, sorry).

The Parable of the Good Alcoholic.

I figure there are two ways to burn a bridge:  whiskey, and everything else.

I admit it: There’s something beautiful in a martini glass; something so achingly elegant in the way a champagne flute plays its score.  And I know it must be in my blood because I wasn’t brought up to drink, it was never glorified, and certainly not encouraged, not in a Baptist household.  (At least the Jews in my family drank wine, but I didn’t know them very well, and they always seemed to be committing suicide or losing a few children in Oklahoma or some such dramatic thing as that which didn’t lend itself very well to summer visits). No, at Uncle Larry’s house there was no alcohol, of any kind, ever, except that one time Aunt Ruby came to visit from Memphis and left some peppermint brandy, for her nerves she said, in the cabinet over the stove.

Oh, but there were stories about alcohol.

Grandfathers forever sneaking off, in the middle of the night which seems to be between 10:00 PM and 11:00, and involved Bingo Halls, I’m thinking, and running cars into ditches…almost making the driveway, definitely making the Yaupon and Boxwood. Mothers ruining church cantatas by showing up late, and wearing running shorts and sun hats under which her pills were kept, dangling on the arms of men with names like Churl and Bud. And fathers. There were fathers in there somewhere, I don’t know how I know it but I do.

And there were sons, too. Sons who drank despite, to spite, the parable(s).

I’ve never been to a meeting, never had counseling, like two of my brothers; they told me their experiences and I adopted them as mine.  Never had the privilege of rehab, like the other two, though it was appealing on some level to have known people, and smart people too, who went to rehab. I’ve certainly stood in the family pulpit and made pronouncements on them all about their vices, but unlike the rest of my siblings, I seem to be the one who inherited the Key to Managaeability, often disguised as moderation.  A good alcoholic can hide right out in public, cloaked in gin or vodka, if he stands very still and smiles as if he’s got a secret confidence. The right amount of teeth shown can convince anyone.

I was…still, am, at times…that kind of alcoholic, and I’m using that term because that’s the point of this blog.  I was always fun, always funny, Wildean wit, a Williams flare for the quip, when drinking.  It made me sharper, and I think there’s a research study in there somewhere. I think it’s absolutely true that liquor does this for some of us. And I didn’t want that to stop; I’m a writer, I needed it, I needed my brain to click over so I could save myself from the Thousand Thoughts.

Unless I’ve been drinking whiskey, Bourbon, any of that family, though, that wasn’t pleasant.  My blood can’t take it. My mouth can, but the man I turn into after a few tumblers is not a nice man. So, what do you do? 

You just stop drinking whiskey, is what I said, and did. Or… 

…or you do it when no one’s watching.  Except Aristophanes. She’s very open-minded and nonjudgmental; she’s also part bobcat. And still, I didn’t have her declawed. I didn’t agree with that.

I had a dear friend who used to hide bottles around the house, mostly vodka, that was her crutch. I never did that. We weren’t hiders, no. We drank right out in front of each other; on my father’s side, we did. If you were going to stare at us, you were going to get the whole picture. It made a life more honest, and also, a lot damn harder to love through. My mother’s side drank too, at least the women did. But not Uncle Larry and not Nana. They had a different size of shoulder. 

I get so tickled at people, though, who believe that so long as they make the admission, any admission, that they can use honesty as a defense. That’s not how honesty works at all. The point of honesty is to keep the bridge afloat, not charge a toll. And, for me, I guess that’s what made drinking so glamorous; I could just ignore the toll with a glass in my hand.  Hell, I could ignore the whole bridge. I would just drink myself into Who Cares Anyway, and laugh at some personal joke instead, happy as a potato, right in front of the bridge and devise some other method of Getting Over the Creek. One that usually involved driving.

I never drank out of rebellion. I didn’t drink because I wasn’t supposed to. I drank because it was within reach. It was as easy to grab as the fork, or napkin. (But not the bill…ugh, the bills).

To show the whole total would just be too gauche.

I didn’t start drinking until I was 21, living in Orlando, working at Disney on the College Program. No one pressured me into it, no one did anything, and so the mystique became the idea of its privacy. I wanted a secret as much as anyone else did. I had no idea, honestly, that it’d make so much sense to me to drink. I couldn’t possibly be the Total Sum of a Family Tree; I couldn’t be That Root, not when I didn’t grow up with them, or know them, not when I was transplanted at the age of three to a smaller Eden, born away to a great uncle’s house in Mississippi. Not a thousand miles from Home in Orlando.

But, I was.

It wasn’t until My Indiana Years that I fully slipped. I’d used alcohol as a coping mechanism before, yes, but Indiana was the tipping point. I worked solely to drink, to escape the relationship I didn’t really want but took and kept because it got me out of Mississippi. It was easy to drink, and the bloat that seeped into my face and stomach and chin told the story a lot better than I’m doing now. It was a gross story. And, I’m sure, in time, there will be people to thank for the actions they took. But, that’s not now. And, so you know, there’s a good chance that that Time is kept on a watch I gave away accidentally last Christmas.

Time heals all wounds, dries all alcoholics sober, but nothing comes with conditions quite like Time.

I used to say, in jest, that I had to drink until I was drunk enough to drive. Why God saved me from those nights, I don’t know.  They were long and shameful nights, the next morning, but never during, and that’s where the intoxication comes from. The things I’ve said, and done, while drunk, are best left unmentioned for two reasons: 1) those stories belong to other people, now, and 2) I can’t really remember them anyway. I hated realizing I’d had a blackout, but god, I longed for them because I was a terribly, privately depressed young man. And if alcohol was a disease, then the blackout was your treatment. To be given the right, or to take it, to forget because of a blackout…that was a blessing.

It wasn’t until last summer that I decided to cash in on this old world and trade it in; I didn’t get that much for it. But, at the same time, I don’t blame anyone for my drinking.

I do blame a select few for making a bar a better bed than my real one.  

Still, I don’t drink some liquors at all anymore; I limit my nights out, a social experiment, I suppose, which is appreciated most of all by my wallet, but have I stopped drinking? No.

A fish can’t change his fins. But he sure as hell can keep them to himself and not muddy up the riverbed.

And to be honest, as I still struggle with this everyday, and this being as close to a microphone about it as I’ll ever get, I’m more than a little frightened. I didn’t realize that twelve years had already passed, until this morning, twelve years.  I’ve been an alcoholic longer than any job I’ve ever held, or all my years of college and graduate school combined. If only I could find a creative way to put that on my resume to prove that there are some things to which I’ve been faithfully and gainfully employed. If only there were some way to highlight that commitment.

The last interview I went on, they took me to dinner…and drinks. (Sigh).

Over a third of my life has been spent with alcohol, and what scares me is that I won’t like who I am without it. But, that’s what I’m doing, that’s what I’m trying, and if nothing else, my trade in gave me enough money, at least, to pay the toll.

So, I’m gonna pay it, for the very first time (again) and see what happens.