This Is How (14 page)

E
VERY TIME I WATCH
some trembling, weepy girl stand at the podium to accept her best female pop vocal performance Grammy and start thanking her ICM agent and God, I cringe because I know what’s next. “And I just want to say to every little girl watching out there tonight, listen to me: never, never give up your dream. If your dream is to stand here where I am, you don’t let anybody stop you. And I promise, someday the world will be watching
you
up here.”

I just want to ask one of these singers, have you ever watched a single one of the many thousands of abysmal covers of your own song that are on YouTube? Because those are dreams. Dreams are not always beautiful things.

I know these Grammy winners in their spaghetti strap gowns mean well but there are many, many people who do not need to be told to cling to their dreams; they need to have
those dreams wrenched from their little fists before they waste their entire lives trying to achieve them.

I am one such person.

IT FELT LIKE A
physical touch, a thumb firmly but gently pressing along the path of my sternum.

I just knew.

You know?

My certainty was that thumb pressing my chest. As I stood in front of the other students in the acting class, in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1981. And while they watched me, I looked over their seated heads at the wall, yet in a way watched myself.

And by watched myself, I mean, I really saw myself.

I may have held just the slightest British accent in my voice because I loved movies from the forties, especially the way the actors said our ordinary American words with English-flavored flair.

“Half as big as life, that’s me,” I said. And as I said it, it was as if my eyes were two windows facing a gray, endless pelt of rain. “Half as big as life, that’s small. But deep in my heart I can feel that I’m ten feet tall. Ten feet tall.”

That rhyme—along with several others, throughout the monologue—had itched me initially because there was something so
cute
about it. Kind of cloyingly cute. Not my thing, really. It seemed chirpy. But I ignored this concern and memorized it anyway, because this was easier than selecting another play; one without rhyming dialogue.

I told myself, this is an incredible opportunity. To take this dusty, forgotten play yanked from its grave of a shelf and make it amazing. That would be a real accomplishment.

The more I read, the more I loathed the play. This struck me as right. I had always needed to defy the odds, hadn’t I? I had always needed to be the one who finds a diamond ring, right there in a mound of old dog poop.

I would take what was obviously a play written not by a writer but by a happy person who was given a typewriter for Christmas and I would turn it into a dramatic masterpiece.

Which is exactly what I did in class the following week.

As I stood before the other students delivering my monologue with chilling emotional precision, I could actually
feel
how good I was. Goosebumps rose on my arms and, surely, on the arms of the other students and the teacher as well.

I was going to be one of the—or possibly
the
—greatest actors of my day. I had known since a very young age that I contained extra colors within my emotional range that I did not see displayed in other people but that they recognized when they saw these colors in me.

That’s the only way I can describe my certainty that I was born to act, to inhabit other people. Because I, my own self, could not make connections with others. And when I did, they were staged. I had always been acutely self-conscious, as though I spoke a separate, small, little-known language and didn’t want to give myself away.

My inability to touch other people now made perfect sense.

And as I finished my monologue, I felt the first calm I had ever known. As though I had been handed a gilded-paged volume called
Life
. And I had been allowed to open the book and look up the answer to the question of me.

What happened next remains so vivid that even in private, my face flushes.

The acting teacher looked at me with an expression like,
“This can’t be true, but this is true, right?” and she asked, “You know, that’s not a monologue. Right? I’m curious to know why you chose to use the lyrics of a song from
Promises, Promises
as your piece? Maybe it’s an interesting concept to explore, but have a seat and let me play it back for you.”

Thank the Lord Jesus for making video recorders and playback decks at just exactly the right moment in time. Because I was able to now see myself not in my own mind, but rather with my own eyes.

And it was a stunning revelation.

The
knowledge
that I was giving an incredible performance in no way aligned with the reality of what I saw before me. Except for the nervous twitch of my left eyelid, the motionless figure on the screen appeared to be a JCPenney mannequin.

At first, I actually thought something might be wrong with the machine. But I thought this only for the briefest instant.

Because I then had another physical sensation: one of falling—but not far—and landing—but not hard—at the bottom of something dark with an earthy, repulsive, yet comforting floor. I felt myself land on the very bottom, the flesh of the earth, the ground everything in the world is built on top of and hides from view.

I fell and landed on the truth.

Not the truth I believed in my heart or the truth I wanted to be true, but the truth in a more mathematical sense. Like, “Yes or no: you are wearing shoes at this moment?”

That is what truth is. Truth is an unassailable fact. Not your opinion of the fact. Nor is the truth your report of the events from your own, uniquely distorted and biased view, where there could be a disco ball hanging in the way blocking the most important element.

Which, in this case, happened to be the fact, the truth that I sucked worse than anything has ever sucked in the history of suckage, at acting.

I did not have the expressive range required to deliver the title of the monologue, let alone the meaning contained within the words.

What I felt, what I saw myself express, the nuance, the authenticity, existed entirely inside my bright red head.

I saw this for myself and I recognized immediately, this is not the kind of thing where improvement is possible.

If you bake a cake and the cake sinks in the middle, you can hop in the car and drive over to Quik Mart, pick up another can of vanilla-flavored frosting, and then load up the sunken center with that whole can and when you bring it to the table, it will look spectacular. There: you improved the fallen cake. Until, of course, somebody actually bites into it and their teeth get a razor stubble burn from the sugar, but at least until that happens, improvement has occurred.

But you cannot do this if the cake has baked itself out of the pan and gone missing.

Nothing does not get better with hard work and dedication.

I was not an actor.

Okay.

What now?

It took a long time, but I became a writer. Which is the same thing, except I’m better at it. Probably because I can be alone when I do it.

I have absolutely no regret.

When I ask myself, why did I want to be an actor?

The answer is so plain: to be with people, to reach them.

In my normal life, this is very, very difficult for me.

But writing has allowed me to reach people and feel a connection.

I don’t feel I gave up my dream. I gave up my choice of vehicle used to deliver me to this dream.

I thought it would be a big-ass Ford pickup and instead it was a pale blue hatchback.

The worst advice we’re given on the subject of dreams happens each year during the Academy Awards.

Sooner or later, the best sound editor, composer of an original score, or supporting actress will stare directly into the camera, not the audience, but right at us—the person at home in the dark watching—and say, “I am the proof. Never, never give up your dream.”

When you hear those words spoken by a total winner, and backed with so much obviously sincere emotion, it resonates inside you and you think, “Oh my God, she is totally right. I was about to give up hope. But I won’t. I’m going to keep at it.”

When in truth, if you happen to lack talent at whatever it is you want in life, and if you never stop trying to attain it, you will spend your life feeling like a movie with an out-of-sync soundtrack.

What you have to do is know the truth.

The problem is that nobody else can tell you. Only you know what you contain. What others see of you is only what you show them.

All of us are richer and more fascinating and more complex than we can ever know.

If you want to be a singer and maybe you just are so annoyed by your stupid brother and irritating parents you never, not once, sang anything in their presence aside from a begrudging
“Happy Birthday” now and then, but you have spent years singing privately, maybe recording yourself and you’re 99 percent certain you’re not just fooling yourself, then I agree with the winner for the best sound design in a foreign film under four and a half minutes: never give up your dream. Or if you can’t really sing all that well and you are gifted with both the ability to realistically and objectively appraise your own talent but also supplement it with showmanship or “star quality,” then I also feel you should cling to this dream and make it happen.

It’s a little confusing because in some cases, the right thing to do is to hold on to your dream, even if maybe you’re not the best at whatever it is. The key is self-knowledge. If you
know
you were meant to be a rock star and you realize this defies reason to some extent but still, your certainty does not waver and there is no other possible life for you, you must pursue your dream. Probably. Even though it’s actually quite rare to become hugely successful at something you’re not all that great at, just because you are so skilled at compensating in other areas. It’s rare because there are so many other people who want the same thing and are actually quite excellent. What’s also rare is the self-possession to continue in pursuit of one’s dream in spite of this knowledge.

And
rare
is valuable.

If you feel almost the same except you can imagine another kind of life, like being a vet tech, and you wonder if this is what you should do, that “wondering” could be the weak link.

Another way to think about it is like this: if you
can
let go of the dream, you probably should.

If you can’t let go of the dream, don’t.

People who live with regret over not “following their dreams” are frequently people who did actually have the talent
or the charisma or the whatever-it-takes to have found success and they can see this now; they wish they had just followed their instincts
back then.

People who did follow their dreams but never found the success they expected, walk away with the door prize of being that person who followed their dreams, no matter what.

That’s a lot harder than just entering medical school and coming out the other end a doctor.

When one’s dreams and one’s abilities are aligned, it is faith and dedication that are most required.

Where there is a distinct misalignment between the dream and the talent, before deciding to pursue the dream anyway, you must test its seaworthiness.

You must examine this dream of yours.

The question to ask yourself is, why?

Why do you want to be a pharmacist? Why, if you cannot have biological children and not used, adopted ones, is your life not worth living?

You need to grab your dream out of the sky like it’s a kite and pinch the string through your fingers until you reach the spool.

When you taste or smell or feel this dream of yours, how would you describe that residue?

If you immediately imagine yourself on a private jet surrounded by bodyguards and wearing eighteen-carat diamond-drop earrings, you’re in luck. That’s an easy one. You don’t want to be a singer; you want to be hugely wealthy. So you need to invent something the world wants. Like a conveyer belt runway for jets, so small countries like Japan can increase their landing and takeoff capacity while reducing the amount of acreage spent.

Or become a supersuccessful criminal. Or write a stupidly amazing Facebook game.

Dreams often have a misty, smeared, watercolor resolution. So we don’t always try to rack them into focus and ask, “Okay, why do I want this?”

You have to do this. The rock-bottom, earthy truth is exactly the only thing that can make you happy and satisfied in your life.

I blame kindergarten.

That’s where we’re all taught that everybody is “equal” and can “do anything!” When in fact, we are as equal as squids and puppies.

In the last century I dated an Italian who, like most Long Island–bred Italians, continued to do his laundry at home, despite the fact that he occupied a one-bedroom apartment in Midtown with its own built-in washer and dryer. But it was the frequency with which he called his mother on the phone that made me feel like I was involved in an interspecies relationship.

The Italian Who Basically Still Lives at Home had a teenage sister. He’d spoken of her frequently. The whole family believed she might well be the next Meryl Streep, right there in their midst, hogging the bathroom.

When I finally met his family, I was both puzzled and disturbed. His sister was very open and genuinely warm with lots of kinky red hair. She was mentally disabled by some degree of retardation. It made the girl anxious to operate a fork because she didn’t want to screw up and spill something. I could see it on her face and it made me ache with tenderness for her. It made me think if I had such a child who was afraid to use her fork for fear of dropping it, I would be the bad parent that says, “screw forks,” and the family would always eat
with their hands like cave people. I don’t care if that’s fucked up; I know I’d do it anyway. Unless I could make her laugh by eating with a straw, then that’s what we’d do. For the rest of our lives.