It's Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive (4 page)

“Ummm…actually…you see…this is a wig on my head.”

Jerry’s face registered no ability to comprehend what he was being told. Either that, or he was trying so hard not to let his eyes wander up to my hairline he
looked
as if he couldn’t comprehend. The role I was playing was that of a healthy, mainstream college student. I asked Jerry if it would be all right if I left the hair at home for the next few weeks, until we got into dress rehearsals and costumes. I suggested we could then add back the wig, which I’d wear to make sure my appearance was appropriate for the play’s performances.

“Yes, yes, of course,” Jerry stammered. “Whatever makes you comfortable.”

I was relieved. But “comfortable” was more than I could have hoped for.

Six Degrees of Separation
was an enormous hit, not only over the course of its original off-Broadway run in Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater, but also for the length of its Broadway run in the larger Vivian Beaumont. The show, or at least its title, etched itself into the vernacular of the nation. Theatrical productions like that are rarities, and being involved in creating one is about the most exciting thing a show business career can offer. From our first invited-audience dress rehearsal, when the crowd exploded with laughter and appreciation, it became clear we were in for a spectacular ride.

But the
Six Degrees…
experience was made even more special by a confluence of events just as difficult to cultivate as creative magic. The cast of
Six Degrees…
coalesced into a collection of friendships of rare depth and intensity. Several of my closest friends nearly twenty years later are actors I met during the run of that show.

We played to sold-out crowds and overwhelming critical response. We traveled Manhattan as members of an envied clan. The roles in the play were split along generational lines: there was a group of parents and their friends, and there were their teenage and
just-beyond-teenage offspring. Almost all of us playing the younger set were in our mid to late-twenties. We were almost all single. We were dating. We were almost all involved in psychotherapy of one sort or another. We were, essentially, searching for our adulthoods while being paid to portray children. But while the other young members of the cast were rushing enthusiastically into the future, I was trying to keep up, haunted by my preview of where we were all eventually headed.

What did I have in common with those other twenty-five-year-olds? We were engaged in similar activities, but our frames of reference were worlds apart. I remember hours spent backstage, over months and months, laughing at one another’s dating debacles from recent years. Inverted nipples, lost erections, the wrong bodily fluids making unwanted escapes; nothing was too private or grotesque to mention. I generally tried to monitor which stories I shared with my cast mates. One night I dove in without thinking.

I recounted an anomaly I encountered in the hospital not long before. The more debilitated I got from my medical treatments, the more turned on I got. I’d never been hornier than when my life was ebbing away, I said. I figured it had something to do with the body sensing its extinction and wanting to propagate. I told them how my ex-girlfriend and I had had sex in the hospital bathroom while a comatose roommate, rendered senseless by a suspected brain tumor the doctors hadn’t been able to locate, lay in bed on the other side of the door, only inches away. My girlfriend didn’t even need to be there. I held my thumb and forefinger a quarter inch apart.

“I jerked off this close to death,” I said, smiling.

I looked up to see a roomful of stricken faces. Hands covered mouths in horror. One of the women started to cry. I thought I’d said something funny. Instead I’d ruined everyone’s good time.

It didn’t seem fair. Weren’t we telling our horror stories? I’d thought that was the game. It was as if I’d shown up at a Halloween party where everyone was dressed as skeletons, only I’d brought a real cadaver along.

I felt cut off. Isolated. Friendships are generally based on shared experience. I didn’t know anyone my age who could identify with where I’d been, or even anyone twenty or thirty years older. The only companion I had during the dark days was my ex-girlfriend, who had recently embarked on a new life with a new man. We weren’t spending time together or talking. It was too painful for me.

I was something more than lost. “Lost” is a blanket cliché for all manner of dissolute wanderings. Me, I was a refugee, who’d barely survived a war zone, had fled from it, and then found himself a refugee all over again – this time from the very life he’d fled the war to live.

And I was angry – angry about what had happened to me, what had been taken from me, and angry that no one around seemed to accept how livid I was. “What is this guy’s problem?” a lot of them seemed to be wondering. “He got well from leukemia, he’s lucky to be alive, and he just seems pissed off that it happened to him in the first place.” Sometimes people would come right out and say it.

“Well, yeah,” is what I would say back.

I thought my feelings would be easy to relate to. If not among those who’d avoided catastrophe, at least by those who’d had some exposure to it. The lack of understanding I felt from both quarters made me angrier still. At the same time, I could see their point.

Anger is what I’d been hired to bring to my role in the play. The role of Doug consists of a series of diatribes against his father that top the milder scoldings the other “kids” give their parents. “You’re an idiot!” Doug finally screams. “You’re an idiot!”

I remember Jerry Zaks’s one direction to me during rehearsals.

“That was good,” he said. “Very good. You started at seven and went to ten.”

“Now,” he continued, “what if you start at ten?”

Doug’s explosions resulted in huge roars of laughter from the audience and spontaneous eruptions of show-stopping applause. It surprised me at our first invited-audience dress rehearsal, and continued to occur at two junctures of every performance of the run. Taking it higher and higher every night, until I had nowhere left to go, was some of the purest fun I’ve ever had.

Another nightly event was a less pleasing ritual. Celebrities who’d seen the show flooded the backstage area after every
Six Degrees…
performance. One after another they promenaded by: Meryl Streep, Steve Martin, Sidney Poitier. Katherine Hepburn, Richard Avedon, Lou Reed. One visitor was a guy I’d costarred with in the film
Taps
just a few years before I’d gotten sick. His name was Tom Cruise. While I was living in and out of hospitals, fighting just to stay alive, he’d opted to spend those same years becoming the biggest movie star in the world.

It wasn’t the presence of the celebrities that irked me, or even the divergences in our fates. It was the same thing that had set me off at the dinner party years before. It was the compliments. They were abundant. They were heartfelt and sincere. And, since I was unrecognizable once I removed the wig I wore each night in the show, they were doled out to everyone but me.

The pack of six or seven of the younger cast members would gather our gear, hurrying toward whatever bar or restaurant we’d chosen as that night’s destination. We’d work our way through the crowd toward the theater’s exit, only to run into Ms. Streep or Ms. Hepburn. That night’s royalty would embrace each of the other young actors, and turn their back on me.

“Oh, you’re all so marvelous!” they’d coo. “I’d like to wrap you up and take you all home. You make me laugh so much!”

Sometimes one of my friends might try to intervene. “This is Evan,” they’d say. “He was in the play, too.”

“Really? Who did you play?”

“I was Doug.”

No response.

“The kid in the window. Who calls his father an idiot…? The scene when the whole audience bursts into applause…?”

“The scene where…? But…but…that boy had hair. That…that was you??”

By then they were so embarrassed that, instead of being generous with compliments, they generally needed consoling themselves. I was more embarrassed than they were, but I’d do my best to comfort them.

“That’s all right. Don’t worry about it.”

I made light of it, but it tore me up. I was finally within millimeters of what I’d wanted for so long: professional recognition from those I admired. Except it wasn’t “recognition,” because no one recognized me.

There were times I even considered wearing the wig out after the show when I knew there was someone in the audience I wanted to meet. I never took that tack, but I did wear my “Evan Handler costume,” as I took to calling the wig, to the party at Tavern on the Green celebrating our opening night on Broadway. It was the only way I knew to attend the event and enjoy the experience of being treated as a member of the cast.

Toward the end of the party the crowd had thinned out dramatically. The core of young actors was huddled close, barking made-up songs in tribal fashion as we each took turns stripping off portions of our elegant outfits. It became a ceremony of shedding the enforced formality of the event, of returning ourselves to the casual state we were more comfortable in. A few dozen other party guests were still spread around the room. My friends turned to face me and started to chant.

“Take it off! Take it off! Take it off! Take it off!”

I assumed they meant a tuxedo jacket or tie, but after hours of drinking and dancing, the adhesive from the wig tape was burning through the flesh of my neck. I reached up and peeled off the wig, back to front, as if scalping myself in reverse. There was a gasp, and all the singing stopped.

“Yea!!!” came the cheer from my friends, louder than I could have imagined. Some of the other lingering guests turned to look, but by then the group was vibrating like an amoeba again. It was as if they’d been set free by my gesture. Everyone was shrieking and dancing at twice the intensity of the second before. It was probably the first moment that I felt more authentic, and more accepted, with my naked head exposed than I did covered up.

The leukemia diagnosis had slammed me five years earlier. The bone marrow transplant had been completed three years after that. I’d spent a full year recovering from that procedure and had been wading back into life for another year since. I was in a hit Broadway play. I had a passel of exhilarating new friends. I was classified as cured of the disease that had almost killed me and was considered to be something I hadn’t been for five birthdays:
I was
healthy
. But I wondered how long it might be before I’d be able to walk through the world without thinking back on those bad old days. I wondered when I might be able to skip the step of putting every experience I had into perspective by comparing it with how awful things had been back then. I was excited by thoughts of the future, a concept I hadn’t had the pleasure of contemplating for half a decade. But I had the sense it was going to be a while before I again felt like a “normal” member of the human race.

I had no idea what an underestimation that time frame would prove to be.

Steven Silverstein committed suicide when he was seventeen years old and a senior in high school. I was fifteen, two years behind. I don’t know why he did it, and I don’t know how, though the method I heard involved a car with a flexible tube threaded through a window from the vehicle’s exhaust pipe. But there was no way to be sure. There was no proof. No witness to the fact. The word just spread.

I always pictured Steven in the car at night, parked on the chopped-up, rarely used private roads that wove around the dilapidated Pine Lake summer bungalows across the street from his house. These roads weren’t even supposed to be accessible from Furnace Dock Road, the main artery through the wooded area where the Silversteins and my family both lived. There were two entrances from Furnace Dock to the Pine Lake cabins, and each had a worn, thin chain that sagged between two cockeyed, rusty, hollow metal posts. The chain draped mostly on the ground, making passage as easy as if it weren’t there. But in 1976, the simple fact of its existence was enough to keep most people from crossing over. We kids walked past the chains all the time. To jump the fence and use the always-empty red clay tennis courts. To play basketball on a cracked, weed-strewn court hidden high up the desolate hill. To get out of sight and smoke a joint. But cars didn’t tread those roads out of season. The tire tracks and patchy asphalt were barely distinguishable from the woods and fields on either side. This hidden cobwebbed collection of ancient summer recreation is where I always imagined Steven Silverstein to have died. But I don’t know.

I didn’t know Steven well, or his sister Reva, herself a year or so younger than me. But we had many friends in common. One of Steven’s closest friends was Russell, the oldest of the Lesh brothers who lived down the street. Ron Lesh, the middle brother of the three, was my best friend. Russell wasn’t only my friend Ron’s big brother, though. He was also the official boyfriend of seventeen-year-old Linda Halliday, the girl who would come to my house to kiss me for hours on my bed before going down the street to have sex with Russell. I don’t know why Linda never had sex with me. She said she didn’t want to do the seducing. I don’t know if that was the real reason. And I don’t know why I was too shy and scared to take what was being offered. I just don’t know.

I remember gathering at the Lesh house a day or two after news of Steven’s death spread through the high school. That’s the way it happened back then. There was no announcement or school assembly. No grief counselors offered support to shaken students. The only confirmation of the truth of the rumor was that no adults denied it. And Steven wasn’t there.

Steven’s sister Reva was ushered in and out of the house, her head bowed and silent. Stan Dorsk, a huge, already graduated black sheep of the basketball team and one of Steven’s good friends, bent low to enter mournfully and mumble before walking out again. Stan was a clearly unhappy young adult, with a violent temper that flared whenever he was drunk, which was almost every night. It was Stan who ended up closest to Reva. They each took their connection to Steven, fused it onto the other, and became the oddest of couples. Stan, six foot six and almost twenty years old. Reva, five-feet tall and all of fourteen. They became inseparable – stoned, stone-faced companions in mourning. Their union was scandalous at the time, and probably thrived for that reason. Whatever rage Reva might have held toward her parents and their possible role in her brother’s destruction was, I would think, soothed by giving herself over to a depressed giant who drank himself fat and brawled often in the two years since he’d left high school. As for Stan, when asked about Reva’s tender age, he simply burped and said, “If they’re old enough to sit at the table, they’re old enough to eat.”

In the days after Steven died a steady flow of older schoolmates continued at the Lesh house. The house had always been a central gathering point for various clumps of high schoolers due to the relative lack of parental supervision, or even – as most of the other kids understood the term – parental concern. It was the house where a Lesh brother could close the door to his room with a girl inside and count on not being disturbed. It was the house where pot smoking was allowed indoors. For better or for worse, the Lesh house was the place where fifteen to nineteen year olds could congregate and interact with little fear of interference. Where they could be true to their purest natures.

This freedom from adult influence allowed its own strict hierarchy to develop, with rungs of privilege often determined by nothing more than grade level. In the days and nights after Steven died there were closed doors and myriad conversations to which Ron and I were not privy. There were sounds of sobbing, and teenagers reappeared red faced. Linda Halliday, the girl I loved, closed the door to Russell’s bedroom – just off the living room where we all tended to gather – and his brothers and I tried to make believe we weren’t hearing him cry.

“Jesus, this is awful,” I thought. But, for me, it was better than the usual, which was listening to them fuck.

As for what they all talked about, whether Steven left a note, who felt angry or who felt hurt, who felt guilty or who was secretly pleased, I don’t know.

Michael Gould was a kid my age, and he died in ninth or tenth grade. The story was he slept out in his tree house with his best friend Paul Santino. When Paul went inside to go to the bathroom, Michael knocked over the kerosene lamp in his sleep and burned up with the tree. I remember Michael and Paul as the kids who used to call me a fag and laugh in Mr. Bowles’s science class.

Tammy Albanese was killed by a car while riding her horse on the road the summer after eighth grade. A few months before, I’d caught her defacing posters I’d put up in my campaign for student government president.

I didn’t know how to feel about the deaths of these kids who’d behaved badly toward me. I hadn’t wished them dead. I didn’t feel vindicated. While I was shocked, I wasn’t particularly sad. I didn’t know if any of the stories about how they died were true, or if they were even really dead. I had no reason to doubt it, other than its incomprehensibility. But I didn’t really
know
. And I always wondered if Tammy’s horse was killed as well, or if somehow it survived. What happened to Steven Silverstein’s car? Was it sold? Given away? Destroyed? I don’t know.

Kevin Gheen was my friend from ten years old. He died when he was about thirty, climbing mountains in France. Shortly after I heard about Kevin’s death, I saw Ron Lesh, who’d also known him, for the first time in some years and he asked, “Do you know what the story is with Kevin? Do you know how it happened?” Ron and I were eating pizza and talking about turning forty, him married with two kids and me single all over again.

“No,” I said. “I don’t know.”

Rema Hort was a friend, and she died, too. Cancer. Thirty years old. My cousin Greg, maybe thirty-five, of AIDS. Jeff Lowenthal, one of my earliest agents, one of the first to go from that illness. Brother Jonathan Ringcamp, Andie Lui, Willie Dingle. Twenty-three to forty, each one. Martin Herzer. A.J. Antoon. Gary Petrillo. So many of them have been gone now for so long. Where did they go? Why did they go when they did? Why didn’t I? I don’t know.

Due to my history of illness and recovery, I started getting asked my views on complex issues when I was only about twenty-five. A young age for philosophizing about life and death, even for a theologian. Sometimes the questions would come from friends, but often from mere acquaintances. The inquisitors might be my age, or two or three generations older. Do you think things happen for a reason? I’d be asked. Do you think you can alter your own destiny? Does prayer really work? Do you think life has a meaning? Is there a higher power?

I don’t know.

A very common question, when I was a kid, was whether or not you believed in God. It came up all the time, and it was used as a kind of introductory identity test. Almost like asking a stranger from what tribe they hailed, the question flew in quick succession to several other standards.

“What religion are you?”

“You like the Yankees or Mets?”

“How long can you hold your breath?”

“Do you believe in God?”

I’ve always had an odd relationship to that last question. For me, the answer has always seemed straightforward and inevitable, and it’s always been the same. I don’t know. I just don’t know.

I don’t mean that in a passive sense. I don’t mean it as a cop-out from contemplation. I’ve tried to live my life from a position of being open to all possibilities, with great curiosity and wonder over what, to me, can never be known. To the possibility that there is meaning beyond what’s easily seen; to the possibility that there’s not. To the possibility that there is some form of intelligence guiding the intricate systems that sustain us, and to the possibility that there’s not. But if you’re going to ask me what I think the situation
is
, when I close my eyes at night and dream, wondering if I’ll get to wake up again, or if it matters whether I do or not, then you’ll hear what, to me, is the most sensible refrain: I don’t know.

I am fascinated by our conundrum as humans living on planet Earth. I’ve said to friends, probably more times than they’ve wanted to hear, “We live in outer space. Do you know that? Can you believe it?
We live in outer space
.” It’s a crucial thing to remind myself, because it justifies and enhances my choice to remain committed to philosophical non-commitment. We do not know where we live. We have no idea of our own address. As many maps as have been produced, with all the stellar observations and radio frequency surveillance, we have no idea what substance contains us, where it came from or where it’s headed, if it has a purpose or what it might be, how it started, or how long it will last. We do not know. Whether we admit it readily or not, the most advanced of our species are, in relation to the universe beyond our planet, identical to tribes that have no conception of the world beyond their rain forest.

I don’t mean to endorse atheism. I embrace that point of view no more than the idea of a deity. My favorite argument in favor of a guiding force came from my brother when I was seventeen. I was involved in my first sexual relationship with my first requited love, Noreen. When somehow the topic came up, my brother surprised me by declaring, “Of course there’s a God, Evan. Why do you think your thing fits inside hers? You think that’s an accident?”

That gave me pause.

But I’ve remained a fairly “I don’t know” guy. Not in the passive, desultory manner most would imagine. I’ve made a conscious, emphatic decision to remain undecided.

I once heard a story told by a songwriter who recounted having a new song criticized by a peer. “He hated it,” the songwriter said. “
Hated
it! He told me he thought it was maudlin and sentimental.”

The songwriter’s reply was splendid. “Well,” he said. “All I can tell you is that it came from an extremely heartfelt place.”

It’s a perfect response, I thought upon hearing it. It takes all questions of quality, and even taste, away. It brings the discussion back to the heart and soul of the writer, who has communicated both his pleasure at having been true to himself, as well as his commitment to his point of view. “It came from an extremely heartfelt place.”

I feel a great kinship with his philosophy. When it comes to the questions I’ve been asked about suffering and existence, about patterns versus chaos; when it comes to life and death, or light and dark; when I think about Steven Silverstein, or Michael Gould, or Tammy Albanese; my friends Kevin and Rema or my cousin Greg; Jeff Lowenthal, Brother Jonathan, Andie Lui, Willie Dingle, Martin Herzer, Gary Petrillo, and A.J. Antoon. The millions who’ve died early, suffered unjustly, or been inexplicably blessed. Why others succumbed and I escaped, or a plane crashes killing hundreds while Mr. Smith decided not to fly.

Do I think there’s a God? I don’t know. A reason we’re here? I don’t know. Is there a spirit that survives, or do we disappear? I don’t know.

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

It’s not that I don’t wonder, I just don’t know.

But what I can tell you is this: I don’t know from an extremely heartfelt place.