It's Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive (6 page)

I’ve broken up twenty-seven times. Not only do I disagree with the song about it being hard to do, I’ve found it’s impossible to avoid.

That twenty-seven is an amazing number when you consider that those breakups have been spread over only ten women. That’s an average of two-point-seven breakups per relationship. Since I have ended some relationships cleanly, that means I’ve had other relationships within which the breakups have numbered four, five, six, or even seven. Lucky seven.

You’d think one’s greatest failures and successes would occur in separate arenas. If one were to excel in cooking, say, one might expect to fail in, oh, civil engineering. I wouldn’t anticipate that the chef who dazzles with a flawless Chilean sea bass bathed in
lemongrass-coconut broth might fall flat on his face with scrambled eggs. I, however, have somehow managed to combine my greatest successes and failures into the same category: women.

I had my first sexually loaded kiss at fourteen. The girl’s name was Joanna, and we were seventeen days into a four-week American Youth Hostels bicycle trip. Joanna had been open until then about her interest in Brett, a sixteen-year-old member of the group. Brett was six feet tall, a sharp-jawed, straight-haired, chiseled piece of teenage dreamdom. I was five-foot-four, weighed barely a hundred pounds, and had a tangled mess of wildly uncombed hair. Over the course of our six-hundred-mile journey, I was mistaken for a girl more often than my new girlfriend.

But Brett was a trifle odd. He’d started boasting, about one week out on the road, that he hadn’t showered since setting off from Manhattan – and that he didn’t intend to until he was back home again. Our entire trip was scheduled to last thirty days, and Brett kept his word.

It took Joanna seventeen days to change her mind. I’ll never know what would have happened had Brett decided to bathe after sixteen. But Joanna and I were never really a “couple.” Even our late-night, sleeping-bags-next-to-each-other-on-the-church-floor make-out sessions were surreptitious, illegal by American Youth Hostels standards. On the nights we camped out in tents, both her tent-mate and mine offered to do the old switcheroo to allow us a night of what would have been, to me, inconceivable pleasure. I have no idea whether Joanna was eager to accept or not, or whether she was disappointed by my inability to imagine her desire as equal to mine. I just know I was thrilled that the cute Jewish girl from Long Island found my scrawny, unkempt self sexy at all. A few secret wet kisses when no one was looking were more than I’d come to expect on that summer bike trip.

I actually liked Joanna’s friend Tracy more than I liked her. Tracy’s the one who had been the object of my fantasies since we’d set off two weeks earlier. When she approached and asked if I liked Joanna (the eighth-grade method of being asked out on a date), I figured Tracy wasn’t interested. I felt lucky that at least one of them was, and, instead of saying, “Well, yeah, but I like you better,” I settled for what I could get. The first telling inaction in a life of romantic missteps.

My first real girlfriend, my first sexual partner, was Noreen. We started dating when I was seventeen and just out of high school. Just to show that I don’t give up and leave relationships easily, Noreen started things off shortly after we started seeing each other by having sex with my older brother. Then she told me about it. I’m not endorsing this strategy, but I stayed with her for another year after that. Only when she told me that the two of them had done it again did I break things off with her. One relationship, one breakup. One for one. I’m not sure how, or on what grounds, you break up with your brother, though.

It took a year or two before I’d recovered enough to try again.  I was nineteen and a student living in the East Village when I met Graciella. Graciella was twenty-five and an aspiring actress who earned her living as a waitress. It was with Graciella that I began my experimentation with repetitive breakups. We were together, off and on, for four years. When we finally split for good, after five or six false stops, I was twenty-three and an established off-Broadway actor. I even had a couple of Broadway and film credits to my name. Graciella was twenty-nine, and still a waitress. I suffered, and made her suffer, from an irresistible desire to co-exist with someone who felt more like a peer, coupled with a fear that no one else would ever love me as much as she did. As soon as I met someone who seemed as if she might, I dropped Graciella cold.

I remember the final scene with her clearly. We’d already survived the dreadful “see a bit less of each other” episodes, and had even passed through the euphemistic “date other people” period. Still, after emotional rejection and sexual infidelity, the connection survived. When I was sure I had to go, and when telling her I’d met someone else I was interested in and wanted to pursue wasn’t enough to unseal the deal, I fouled the waters in the only irreparable fashion I knew. I told Graciella the truth: I said that, while I thought she had oodles of gifts to offer, I didn’t think they were in the arena of acting. I told her I didn’t think she had the talent to get what she wanted in that world, and that I thought she was cheating herself out of potential happiness and fulfillment by continuing in her unrequited quest.

Graciella told me that if I didn’t respect her as an actress then I couldn’t respect her as a human being. She announced that she wouldn’t stay with me even if I changed my mind. “Oh, and by the way. Remember when my ex-boyfriend Ryan was in town two years ago and stayed over and I told you we didn’t have sex? Well, I lied.”

It’s disturbing to learn you’ve been deceived, even when you’ve decided you’re through with a relationship. I took Graciella’s exiting jab as evidence I was making the right decision. Years later, I learned she was living happily in New Jersey working as a master Yoga instructor, so I suppose I was right about her future as an actress, too.

The woman I left Graciella for is named Jackie. Just weeks after we’d moved in together, after being a couple for a year, I was diagnosed with acute leukemia and told that my life was almost certainly over. Jackie remained my girlfriend and supporter during years of navigating the treacherous terrain of drastic medical treatments. I’ve already said more about our relationship in print than anyone ever wanted to hear to begin with. Suffice it to say that she’s the one I broke up with seven times – if not more. The final split was sixteen years ago, and she’s been my closest friend ever since. I guess it pays, when ending a relationship, to really be sure.

This sad recap has already brought us into my thirties. I suppose my precocious professional success, as well as my four-year stint with a woman six years my senior, shielded me from recognizing my often infantile behavior. It was only in the midst of my next attempt at a relationship, and its multiple breakups, that I had the first inklings of my own immaturity. I met and began seeing a woman named Ellie, and things seemed for a time to be stable. I felt, amazingly enough, relatively content. There were the rather routine nights when I’d wake up at three in the morning to find her crying in another unlit room, but she’d assure me that it had nothing to do with me or us, and that crying regularly alone in the dark at 3 A.M. didn’t really mean anything anyway. I accepted her explanations, figuring if she couldn’t share her worries with me, I wouldn’t make them my problem. I then developed an infatuation with an actress I was working with who liked nothing better than fucking other women’s boyfriends and husbands, and I started the grueling process of breaking up with Ellie and changing my mind so many times that she finally shoved me out her door for good. But things were – all in all – coming, somewhat, back under control. All told, I think Ellie and I broke up only three times.

My next girlfriend, Christina, is one of the people in this world I admire the most. She took every episode of my insensitivity toward her and, with great creativity, aimed it back at me. Christina has been the Roadrunner to my Wile E. Coyote. I left Christina, after a year and a half, with brutal swiftness, when I met and fell in love with an actress who seemed poised to have some success as a film star. Shortly after our breakup, Chris requested a meeting at my apartment. “You’re a monster,” she said. “I hate you, and I wish you a miserable life.” At the time she said it I thought her tirades were proof that I’d made the right choice. Of course, it wouldn’t have been so hard to hear if I hadn’t been afraid it was true.

A year after that I was left even more suddenly than I’d left Christina when my film star girlfriend was seduced away by the lead singer from a rock-and-roll band we’d discovered and enjoyed together. I’d encouraged her to use her publicist to secure us seats to one of their sold-out New York shows. After a great night at the concert, having shared post-show beers with the band, we got home and heard a message from the band’s manager inviting my girlfriend, and only my girlfriend, to return the next night. The next night came and my girlfriend, exercising some short-term decorum, didn’t go. But within another week she was gone for good. I recently spent a couple of evenings with her for the first time in more than five years and asked if she was still in touch with her rock star pal. “Yeah, he calls once in a while,” she said. “But it got too crazy for me. I was always hearing about some nineteen-year-old or another.”

What did she expect? I thought. Trace the story back just half an inch, and you could ask the same of me.

Christina, whom I’d left for the actress, wrote a brilliant play in the aftermath of our breakup, which contained at least a few references to her rage toward me. It changed her life, gave her a pride and professional identity she’d never had before. I fell in love with her for the first time, including the year and a half we’d been together. I began an extended series of approaches in which I begged her to forgive me and take me back. I think there were a couple of occasions when she came close, but, ultimately, the most she ever offered was one of the parts in her play. I therefore got to be close to her by spending five ferociously hot summer weeks living in an un-air-conditioned college dormitory in the decrepit town of Poughkeepsie, New York, where I performed in her play nightly and watched her flirt with and, at least in my imagination, be seduced by a varying string of men around me. Christina and I never so much as kissed again. I admire her as much as anyone I’ve ever known, at least partly because she allowed me to break up with her only once.

One brief affair that stands out in my memory from the years since was with a woman named Melissa. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t have been an involvement that would have required an official breakup. We dated only briefly, and started to when she’d barely ended a long-term relationship with a man she’d been living with. Their split was so recent that, in one of those gloomy New York stories, they still shared an apartment as roommates in Brooklyn. After our second or third date Melissa started referring to me as her “boyfriend.” She couldn’t understand why I went pale with each reference. When I told her that I felt there was a difference between dating, exploring compatibility, and being in a committed relationship, she started referring to me as her “bad boyfriend.” I broke things off cleanly after only a few weeks. I thought I’d done it kindly. I told Melissa that I liked her quite a bit, that I thought she was a fantastic and loving woman, but that I just didn’t think the kind of deep feelings I craved were going to develop. Melissa was taken aback. She complained she’d been misled and betrayed.

“What do you
meeeeaaaaaannnnn
?” she moaned in outrage. “How can you
saaaaaaaaay
that?” In one of the great exit lines I’ve had hurled my way, she demanded, “If you didn’t love me, how could you take me to see Ricki Lee Jones???”

I really didn’t know what to say.

And now I’ve split up with my second fiancée, Patricia. I thought for a while we’d get back together, but, so far, it’s back to a one-for-one average. In looking back over my various relationships I can’t help but feel sad. I wish I could go back and love the person better than I did the first time around. Some people claim to live lives free from regret. It sounds great, but I can’t relate. Most of my memories are made up of just that, especially in regard to relationships, and most especially in regard to their endings. Each one can be defined not by whether I’ve felt regret about them, but by how large or small those regrets are in comparison to all the others. I’ve lived under the illusion perpetrated upon us by our novels, motion pictures, and fairy tales: that there is a perfect partner out there waiting for us; that, once found, our relationship will be free of conflict; and that the only friction between us will be the kind that culminates in orgasm, preferably simultaneous. No matter what age I’ve reached or how many relationships I’ve saved or sabotaged, I’ve still got a long way to go when it comes to just growing up. In regard to love, I feel both overdue and unprepared. But in one of the most optimistic patterns of my pessimistic existence, when it comes to love – just like life itself – I still can’t wait to give it another shot.

I first fell in love with Patricia as a result of selling off my past. I suppose that’s one way to get rid of it. Or to feel like you did.

In 1995 I optioned the motion picture rights to my first book,
Time on Fire
, to an old friend, Tim, who’d become a TV star and was looking for a film project to direct. Tim and I had met and become great pals more than ten years earlier while working together on an off-Broadway play. We’d bonded, as actors often do, out of mutual frustration over the direction rehearsals were taking. We started having beers to talk over the scenes, and found ourselves making more progress during our drunken laugh-fests than we did in the theater during our sanctioned work sessions. We were playing a pair of mind-altered teenage punk rockers, and the play took place in the men’s room of the legendary New York music club CBGB. Late-night alcoholic investigations were probably the most appropriate form of research.

Our first steps into that hallowed – and beer-and-urine-drenched – hall of rock and roll history demonstrated how drastically we’d need to alter ourselves to portray the inhabitants of the club.  Tim was a clean-cut figure, muscled and robust. He looked like a well-reared kid from suburban Long Island. I had already cut my hair into a timid attempt at a Mohawk by leaving an Astroturf length of hair on either side of the longer middle stripe. That didn’t stop me from looking like a well-reared kid from suburban Long Island, too. I just looked like a well-reared kid who’d gotten himself a funny haircut.

The other people in the club were the real deal. I’d never witnessed such mass emaciation outside documentaries about droughts and genocides. Spikes and razor-sharp ridges of shellacked hair extended up to thirty-six inches above the heads they sprouted from. Tim and I dodged whenever anyone around us passed or turned, afraid of being sliced apart by hairdos that could have cut concrete. We laughed at our own timidity, then stifled the laughter out of fear of being filleted: there were knives strapped to the legs of a significant percentage of the clientele.

Tim and I had a great time in the play. Neither of us was well known in New York, and we wanted to make our marks. But our nightly shenanigans were mostly geared toward making each other laugh. There was a woven metal garbage receptacle on the set filled with all kinds of junk. We’d rummage through it as part of the action of the play and take turns coming up with business that might make the other crack up. Tim took to dousing himself with the remnants of a can of soda during a euphoric outburst. One night I found a red felt-tipped marker deep in the bin. I started drawing diagrams of the webs of veins running under the skin up and down my arms.

After our run Tim and I spoke or saw each other just about every day. We were in our early twenties with few responsibilities to anyone other than ourselves, and were always on the lookout for girls to flirt with. Our skills in attracting them far outpaced our success in bedding them. We’d tell each other the most torrid details of our dates, and share the most tortured details of our fledgling relationships. Once one of us had an established girlfriend, we were usually so tormented over the loss of all other possibilities that we’d betray the one we’d worked so hard to win. These caddish qualities weren’t restricted to us, or the men we knew. The young women we were with often instigated their own versions of hit-and-run collisions, with only minor variations.

Just like all our friends, we then hurried off to confess our sins to our psychotherapists as if they were priests. Since we all got our therapeutic recommendations from one another, this small assortment of mental heath professionals was hearing about the emotional pummelings we were giving one another from every angle. It wasn’t unusual for boyfriends and girlfriends to see the same therapist. If those shrinks weren’t constrained by professional restrictions, theirs would be the books I’d want to read.

Tim and I also developed just a hint of a big brother/little brother dynamic to our relationship. I’d been working as a professional actor for several years longer than he had, and had already appeared in at least a couple of Broadway productions. I’d made films. I’d worked with movie stars. It wasn’t unusual for him to call and ask for advice about agents, about which job to accept, or even about which woman to date.

“Hey, Ev. I met this girl last night…” phone calls would often begin.

“…so what do you think I should do?” was a common end to whatever story was told.

Tim and I were both supportive of and competitive with each other. We’d see each other’s performances, and meet each other’s prospective partners. The plays or films we performed in were often the same ones the other had auditioned for, and the women we dated were often the same women we’d seen date other friends. For the most part, these conflicts were easily managed. We enjoyed the work we were doing, we enjoyed watching each other do it, and we had great appreciation for the individuality we each brought to it. We were playing hard and working playfully, all while operating in a comfortable zone of small-time success, gaining reputations that were still below the national radar.

These fun and games were all interrupted when I developed leukemia and had a series of hospitalizations from which few believed I’d reemerge. Tim was among a group of friends who visited during my extended out-of-town hospitalizations. They dropped what they were doing and traveled two hundred miles to spend several hours with an extremely ill and possibly doomed companion. That’s no small gesture. For all the festive decorations one might find in a hospital’s bone marrow transplant unit, it’s not a cheerful vacation destination. And I was not a gracious host.

“Hey, Ev. How’s it going?” my arriving friends might ask.

“How do you think?” was a standard response.

Tim and our pals took out hotel rooms in Baltimore, where I was undergoing a bone marrow transplant procedure, and made a party out of their trip. They arrived in my hospital room the second morning bleary-eyed, telling tales of having raided the hotel kitchen’s refrigerator during a marijuana-fueled frenzy the night before. A security guard had arrived, and they’d had to hide for hours in cabinets under the sink.

These visits always stirred up a mélange of emotions for me. I was deeply moved that they’d made the effort to see me; I would have been wounded if they hadn’t. Still, it was not pleasant to be seen in a severely debilitated state. It was agonizing to hear of the adventures I was locked away from. It was hard to connect to the laughter over their exploits the night before when I’d spent the same evening vomiting into a plastic basin. They took my girlfriend out for much needed dinners and nights out on the town, respites that probably extended her patience with my situation. I was appreciative to the point of tears. At the same time, I often imagined that they took turns sleeping with her behind my back.

Toward the tail end of my medical trials, well before I was able to reenter the workforce, my friendship with Tim was knocked off course when he was cast in a network television show that became a hit. He relocated to the West Coast for some years while filming episodes, and was cast in several choice roles in feature films. I was jealous of his success, and couldn’t help but wonder whether a similar elevation in status might have awaited me had the illness not kept me imprisoned for the better part of four years.

I was also uncomfortable with the reversal of our big brother/little brother roles, with him now being the more experienced businessman after his contentious negotiations with his television network. Tim had attained a level of operations many of us only dreamed of, with high-powered agents, lawyers, business managers, and publicists all on his payroll. With his popularity from his television show continuing to rise, he certainly wasn’t seeking me out anymore for advice about girls. They turned to stare wherever he walked. Our friendship continued once I was well, but we were never as close as we were in earlier, more innocent, days.

Since Tim had been among those to witness some of my suffering firsthand, it made a certain amount of sense that he thought of my book when he went looking for material for a film. Tim wasn’t the first to express interest. Others had already approached. I’d once tentatively agreed to option the material to a producer associated with Tri-Star Pictures. The producer, a friend of my very first literary agent, approached days before I gave the first public reading of the seeds that would eventually grow into the off-Broadway production of my one-man show. The offer he made on behalf of the studio came with the caveat that it was only good up until the play’s premiere. Once the production opened to the public, when competitors might see it, Tri-Star’s offer would be off the table. Being the novice I was, I took my agent’s advice and accepted the deal, which was never negotiated to completion.

The Tri-Star deal fell apart over the film studio’s contractual “template,” from which it would not deviate. The template stipulates that every property purchased by the studio must come with sequel and prequel rights to all the events and characters contained within. They – whoever “they” are – gave no weight to the notion that what was being pursued was autobiographical, and that the characters within were real people. They could not understand that I was not in a position to grant them perpetual rights to the life stories of every person my story mentioned. Nor was I interested in granting them automatic ownership of everything I ever wrote, or simply did, for the rest of my own life. Not that Tri-Star’s retreat was tragic. The morning after a review of the play appeared in the
New York Times
I got a call at the theater inquiring about the rights from a director by the name of Mike Nichols. Mr. Nichols beat his own hasty retreat when my literary agent convinced me that I was obligated to honor the still-uncompleted (and soon-to-be-defunct) deal we’d theoretically agreed to with her friend from Tri-Star.

The predictable update to this story is that, though these approaches were all made well over a decade ago, no film has yet been made from the material.

It was never my dream, upon uttering the words that made up my version of my life story, to have them duplicated (or, more in tune with most screenplay adaptations, distorted) on film. But I’d discovered the power of the tale. While performing the stage version, or traveling upon the book’s publication, people of every stripe – including, but not limited to, patients, relatives of patients, and health care workers – came to hear the story and sought me out afterward to talk. The experience inside the theater was a communal roller coaster ride. Audience members found themselves laughing at the horror, then becoming horrified by what they were laughing at. They choked up with tears, then forgot and laughed all over again. If I was going to make a movie out of the material, I wanted to stick with the storytelling instincts that had succeeded on stage and on the page.

Most of the exploratory conversations Tim and I had focused on procedure, rather than the story and how it would be told. We talked about what our working relationship and responsibilities would be. We fantasized about inviting people we’d idolized to work with us. We were two great friends who’d dreamed of such an experience for years before it had any chance of becoming a reality. Tim’s success made it seem as if the adventure would actually happen. The project seemed to have the potential to be both a thrilling creative experience and a rekindling of a friendship between two men who’d done a lot of their growing up together.

There were only a few occasions when we engaged in more detailed explorations of the actual work at hand. Since Tim was consistently complimentary about the book and its insights, saying things like, “I can’t wait to see how you transfer the sperm bank scene to the script,” it seemed implied that our working relationship would begin with my writing a screenplay that I’d then present to him. I expected, based on our conversations, that we’d be
like-minded in our views. Still, I expressed concerns about the film veering too far from the principles that drove me to write the story in the first place.

“Why would I want to make a movie that wasn’t true to you and your vision, Evan?” he asked. “You’re the best resource I’m ever going to have.”

Even more time was spent enduring excruciating periods of legal haggling to work out a deal. I was trying to get written confirmation of most of the promises Tim had made to me in conversation. I’d insisted, and he’d promised, that I be the sole screenwriter on the project. I wanted protection from being replaced. I wanted the right to be present on the set, and even the right – though rare for a screenwriter – to have approval over casting choices. Tim’s lawyers offered stiff resistance to these clauses, even though they were guarantees he had offered up in person. The creative meetings between the two of us were still filled with his pumped-up hyperbole. These discussions contrasted drastically with his demeanor on the occasions I tried to cut through a negotiation impasse by appealing to him directly. Those phone calls were handled with spectacular detachment, and always culminated in his claim that he wasn’t aware of any of the contractual details.

“I just leave those things to the lawyers,” he’d say.

I always pictured him, when he made those statements, wearing earphones and sitting in front of a bank of video monitors, overseeing every utterance in regard to his business interests. But I’ve got no proof.

Tim’s talent agency was also eager to conclude the deal. At the time he was courting me he was represented on several fronts – as actor, director, and producer – by the William Morris Agency. William Morris was also the employer of the lone literary agent representing me, who encouraged me to accept the ill-fated Tri-Star offer and to shoo away Mike Nichols. The president of William Morris was a man named Arnold Rifkin, who was said to have a “Zen garden” incorporated into his lush office at the firm’s headquarters in Beverly Hills. While I was performing the stage version of
Time on Fire
in Los Angeles, in the midst of one of many stalled moments of our negotiations, my William Morris agent informed me that her boss, Mr. Rifkin, wanted me to come in for a meeting. It’s not every day the president of the most famous talent agency in the world requests my presence, so the invitation stirred some excitement.