Ask Me Again Tomorrow (10 page)

I no longer had a future. I had no idea what I would do next. I couldn’t go back to Boston and face my family and the shame I had visited on them. I couldn’t bear the idea of going home and seeing pity in their eyes.

I decided to stay in Dallas and enroll in classes at Southern Methodist University. I wanted to take more humanities courses, since I had concentrated so much on the sciences. That was the extent of my plan. I enrolled in a handful of classes, including a fiction writing class. I began writing poetry, and encouraged by the teacher, I submitted a few poems to literary magazines. They were published. I had been alone working the epidemics, but I had never felt lonely until now. I was again the outsider, but now I was separated not only by my ethnicity and because I was a northerner. I was also isolated because of my circumstances. Here I was, a young woman who could hardly pull herself out of bed in the morning, drinking Cokes and smoking cigarettes for breakfast, who wore her pajamas to class. The social world at SMU was built around the “Greek” system of sororities and fraternities, and I was considered a freak by the standards of this system. Or at least an exotic East Coast bohemian. On the “fuckability” scale that everyone talked about, I scored the highest rating—the highest for being the
least
likely to succumb to the charms of all the good ol’ boys around me. One of my fiction-writing classmates approached me after class one day and asked if I was a lesbian, as though this would explain why I came to class with uncombed hair and no makeup. The only thing that kept me grounded was the encouragement I got from my fiction-writing teacher.

At the end of my second semester, I got a phone call from Uncle Panos, my father’s brother and our family physician, calling from Boston. My father was gravely ill—could I come home at once? My father, then in his mid-fifties, had worked many nights standing at the printing press, and he had terrible circulation problems from his varicose veins. He had gone into the hospital to have them removed, but the routine surgery hadn’t gone well and he had developed a postsurgical pulmonary embolism. I looked at the meager amount of money I had left in my drawer and decided that I had just enough to take a train from Dallas to Boston.

Two days later I went directly from the train station to the hospital and to my father. He was going to be okay, but it was immediately apparent that something else was going on.

“I just want you to know that your father has done nothing bad.” These were the first words out of my father’s mouth when I walked into his hospital room. Then he said, “And if anything happens to me, you have to help Apollo get an education.” I had no idea what he was trying to say. That night at home, I learned what had been going on.

“Do you know Dad was gone for awhile before this?” Apollo said. My father had simply driven off one day and didn’t come back for almost two months! Before he left, my mother had found cups with pink lipstick stains, smelling of liquor, in my father’s car. And then he was gone. He would call her every three or four days, telling her that he had
had
to flee—that he was being pursued by Senator Joseph McCarthy. His prolonged absence sent my mother into a complete tailspin: she would rage and curse, and run weeping out of the house to pound on the doors of churches. She took on the keening and lamenting that reminded me of the women in her village back in Greece who I saw many years later. My mother
lamented
my father as though he were dead. I remembered when I was still in high school, my mother would stand weeping in the kitchen, in the dark, waiting for my father, who was “working late,” to get home. He was absent this way much of the time when I was growing up. And here she was again, waiting for him.

Apollo, who was only seventeen and still living at home when my father disappeared, was furious with me for leaving him to handle this alone. Now my father had come home, in order to have the operation. My parents were back to their old game of pretending nothing had happened. It was as though they had a pact that relied on silence as a way to convince the world—even their own children—that everything was fine. My brother and I felt worn down and confounded.

My father had been somewhere in Delaware or Maryland, presumably traveling from one cheap motel to another with some woman, though we never knew for sure. Whatever he had done, the transgression was so great that he would never again have the moral ground over my mother, but some things remained the same. My mother dressed herself in the role of dutiful wife and my father once again wore the mask of his “Anatolian smile.” In this way, they went forward in their lives.

I was now almost twenty-three and Apollo was almost eighteen years old. Once again, I had to leave. I had worked one summer during college as a waitress on Martha’s Vineyard, so I decided I would spend another summer there, working and writing. I found myself just hanging around and partying, not getting much writing done. I also began to hear over the radio repeated calls for physical therapists. This time the epidemic was closer to home: it was in Boston and it was bad. I knew that I was wasting my time, so I left the Vineyard and went back to work.

At Boston’s Hospital for Contagious Diseases, many people had already died and more were dying daily. I was working around the clock, alongside an army of doctors, therapists, and nurses. One afternoon the power went out and we were forced to manually pump the respirators in order to keep our patients alive. I will never forget that sound—the rhythmic mechanical rasping of those machines—as I sat hunched over, pumping the handle of a respirator. It was exhausting, physical work. I developed blinding headaches that came every day. I realized I could no longer do this work. I went to the head therapist and told her I was leaving, that I was going to pursue the theater. “The world doesn’t need another actress,” she said. “It needs physical therapists.” She was right, but I needed to move forward. I applied to the theater program at Boston University. Without ever being interviewed or asked to audition, I was accepted into the master’s program. It was 1955. I was twenty-four years old.

W
HEN
I
BEGAN
my master’s in fine arts at Boston University, I felt like a war veteran rejoining a civilian population that had no knowledge of what was happening on the front lines. For two years I had been treating people sickened, paralyzed, or dying from polio. I had lived far from home and moved so often that I had no close relationships. I was part of a national health crisis that involved life-and-death struggles every day. I was only a couple of years older than my classmates, but I felt ancient in comparison. I judged them to be frivolous and superficial. Once again, I felt like an outsider.

I took a room near the school, even though my parents had very much wanted me to live with them. After all I had been through, I couldn’t bring myself to return home. My life had moved forward and I needed to stay out there in the world. I needed to be on my own, to navigate this part of my education and life on my own terms.

I was elated to be back at school. I could pursue my dream at my own expense, and I was determined not to squander any of it. I dove into my studies with a single-minded determination, almost obsession. I signed up for as many liberal arts courses as possible, including classes in literature, literary theory and criticism, history, and classicism. I was curious, so hungry for this that I made the conscious decision to forgo a social life and put all of my energies into my studies. I would write myself a weekly study schedule and stick to it. I recall walking by bars on my way home and seeing my classmates socializing and flirting. I thought they were wasting their time, that they should be home studying. I would then get home and study until I was exhausted.

In my first year in the MFA program, I met one of the great acting teachers and mentors of my life. His name was Peter Kass and he taught the acting class at BU.

Peter was himself the son of immigrants. He was fearless; he let us bear witness to his own pain, rage, and vulnerabilities. He valued emotional integrity and expected his students to follow his example. He was always forthright and honest, even if it meant he cast himself in a dark light. He ran his classes with a sense of purpose and directness and never flattered any of us with faint praise. He was also unnervingly insightful.

Acting class was by far the hardest course I took that first year. Peter assigned us parts in scenes that we would perform in front of one another. When he was satisfied with our work in one scene, he would assign another. I had been assigned Lola in William Inge’s
Come Back, Little Sheba
. While I watched many of the other students move on to their next scene assignment, I struggled with Lola again and again. Peter said nothing.

In hindsight, I believe he recognized a great resistance in me. Rather than offer suggestions or advice, he just let me go on until
I
couldn’t stand it anymore. One day in class, I raised my hand, ready to do the scene once again. I heard the class groan at the thought of hearing me do Lola one more time. Peter ignored me and called on someone else. Why was this scene so impossible for me?

Lola is the wife of an alcoholic, and although he treats her with contempt, she continues to try to ingratiate herself to him, to win his approval and love. I had learned over the years to hide feelings that were too personal or revealing. Rather than tap into my own feelings, I was acting out Lola’s emotional state by illustrating how I thought she would behave. I had decided what I thought were Lola’s feelings and character traits (she was loving, dutiful, compliant), then tried to “indicate” these characteristics. Unlike most of my classmates, I had no prior training as an actress and no experience on stage. I didn’t know how to solve my problems, but I insisted on being given the chance. When Peter passed over me, I felt like my years as a therapist, saving my money for acting class, boiled down to this one moment. I didn’t know what he wanted from me. I felt thwarted, but time was up. We broke for lunch.

I took off to find Peter and caught up with him in the restaurant where he was having lunch. He invited me to sit down. I was shaking. I
demanded
that he give me the opportunity to work. He took a long pause, smiled, and said, “Okay, let’s go back. You’re up next.”

Peter had an ability to meet each student as an individual, to tune into each of us with great insight, and, most important of all, to demystify the craft of acting. To find your way into the text of the play, first and foremost, you had to understand and
inhabit
the world of the story openly and fully. Peter used the metaphor of being a plumber, and he was constantly exhorting us to make sure we had a “full set of tools” in our plumber’s bag. To extend his metaphor, we had to lay down the pipes, to piece them together—before we turned on the water. It was that unglamorous, but it was vital. The acting meant nothing if the pipes were leaky.

He asked that we be honest in expressing feelings and our
own
emotional reactions to the situations in our scenes. I had spent the semester so far withholding my feelings and hiding my own emotional life. That’s why I was still with Lola, having trouble with my scene.

I was still shaking when I walked into the classroom. I took off my coat and started my scene. The next thing I knew, I found myself in a rage. Where Lola was compliant, I was defiant. Where Lola was conciliatory, I was confrontational. The poor actor playing the husband could barely speak. I had been raised on the performances of Alexandra Dukakis! When it was over, the room was silent.

That moment marked a true turning point for me. I had found a container to hold what was most precious and dear—my own humanity. That container was the stage. I could now concentrate on the craft of acting.

I moved into a tiny apartment in a seedy part of Boston with another student, Annie Johnson, and we became each other’s emotional support and sounding board. As I became more and more emotionally honest in class, I found that outside class, I was becoming more and more troubled. I was frightened about where all this was going and what it meant. I was terrified that the feelings that I was now so honest about would take over my life. I couldn’t sleep and was experiencing severe anxiety.

A psychiatrist prescribed sleeping pills, which helped at night, but in the morning I would have no desire to get up. So he prescribed uppers to help me function better during the day. Then he prescribed Compasine to help even me out in the later afternoon. This was the fifties. Drugs were not acceptable.

I felt deeply ashamed of needing pills in order to function. One day, while I was walking home from class, I turned and saw a truck coming down the street; I stepped out in front of it. As the truck was bearing down on me, a stranger ran up behind me and pushed me out of the way. When I got home, I went straight to the bathroom, got out a razor blade, took off my shoes and socks, and began cutting my feet. Annie came in at that moment. I tried to hide my bloody feet from her, but she wouldn’t let me. Instead she took the razor blade. “Olympia,” she said calmly, “you can’t do this.” Then she sat with me for a long time.

The rest of my year was marked by periods of progress in class, and progress in therapy—accompanied by terrible, intense spells of depression and darkness. I had stopped taking the drugs and now I was
feeling
everything again. One particularly grim period came when a brief relationship ended very badly. I had begun seeing an Albanian poet, the first man I had dated since N had left me. I wasn’t sexually involved with this man yet, nor was I in love with him, but when he announced to me that he was seeing other people, I fell apart. I suffered a full-fledged anxiety attack and took to my bed for three full days and nights. When I was finally able to rouse myself and get dressed, I went straight to the health clinic at BU. While I was waiting to see a doctor, I lit a cigarette and dropped it—burning—into my lap. The next thing I knew there were two doctors standing over me asking me to sign some papers. They thought it best that I check myself into a hospital, where I could be treated for depression. In my gut, I knew that going into the hospital wasn’t the answer. I had worked too hard and waited too long for this opportunity to be here, studying acting. I couldn’t walk away now, not even to save my life.

My cousin Stelian was the only member of my family who could see what was happening to me. In the middle of my first year at BU, he came to visit and found me in my living room—which I had painted dark, dark red with black trim—surrounded by piles of books, studying with intensity. He took one look at me and knew I was in trouble. Stelian was Michael’s older brother and had always been a kindred spirit. We had played tennis and Ping-Pong together when I was a kid, and he had a sensitivity about him that I had always trusted. He had gone through a tough time in his early twenties, had been hospitalized and treated with, among other things, electroshock therapy. Though he was considered “cured” and was now doing well, something in him was very changed. He was checking on me, to make sure that things never got so bad for me that I’d have to go through what he had.

He offered to pay for me to see his therapist, and after some prodding, I took him up on this offer. I will never forget his kindness. And that’s how I made my way into formal psychotherapy for the first time. Almost immediately things began to shift and change in my life in ways that terrified me. This particular psychiatrist was a traditional Freudian who met every one of my questions with one of his own. During my initial visit, he asked me why I had come. I answered him: “I want to be able to love and work.” The simple act of stating what I wanted and needed was encouraging, even liberating, and gave me a platform to proceed with my quest for self. I got worse before I got better, but I was no longer as frightened as I had been of walking around leaking feelings from every pore.

I did draw some comfort from the fact that there was so much “acting out” going on around me. Boston University, and the neighborhood around it, was a volatile place in the late fifties, and looking back, it seems to me it was a prelude to the sixties. There was a lot of drama, promiscuous sex, and even drugs going on, though no one spoke about it. All this was going on undercover, but I knew enough to no longer feel like a total outsider.

There was one woman in acting class who seemed every bit as “out there” as I was: her name was Jane Cronin. She had short-cropped flaming-red hair that stood up on end. Her look, her persona were very punk—long before punk was born. I wanted to know her, so one day I decided to speak to her, and over time we became very good friends.

In the meantime, I clung to Peter Kass’s words as I had to Vitale’s coaching. I knew that if I could just stick with it and begin to build my skills as a craftsperson, I would find a path to becoming a decent actor. My work was the one place I was learning a craft. I was learning how to fulfill the demands of the script. By the time the year ended, I was no longer on the fringe of the class. Along with Jane and eight others, I headed off to northern Maine to do summer stock. Finally, I was moving toward something—and not simply running away.

We went up to Maine on a wing and a prayer: a “producer” one of my classmates knew said he’d sponsor us for the summer, but within two weeks of getting there, we found out he had spent our housing money and we were basically stranded up there with nothing but a lot of energy. We decided to stay. We ate a lot of peanut butter sandwiches and tuna casseroles that summer, and we improvised everything: we borrowed our props and costumes from local thrift shops—then returned them. One time we even used tomato paste to paint a backdrop—it was much cheaper than paint—and the theater smelled like a pizza parlor for the run of Shaw’s
Don Juan in Hell
.

On our opening night—my first performance ever in front of a paying audience—I refused to even speak my lines. The other actors on the stage had no idea what was happening to me and continued to play around me. I sat, frozen to my chair. The play was
Outward Bound,
a 1930s melodrama about seven passengers on a cruise ship. I didn’t utter a word for the entire first act. During the second act, I spoke and was able to get up and move around the stage—but with all the subtlety of a robot. After the curtain went down, I found myself drinking everything I could get my hands on. Once I was completely plastered, I walked out the back door and down the hill toward the lake. I just kept walking. I walked until I was up to my neck in icy cold water. I heard someone yelling; Jane had followed me. She yelled until I came back to shore and told me what a fool I was, then helped me get to bed.

The next day, no one in the company mentioned my behavior of the night before. On stage that night, I mumbled and stumbled my way through my lines—it was a dreadful performance, but a performance nonetheless. I had at least stayed the course, and I knew that if I could say my lines once, I could say them again. Only next time, hopefully, I would do better.

I worked this way all summer, putting one tentative foot in front of the other, and started to feel more comfortable being on stage, more comfortable letting myself inhabit the skin of whichever character I was playing. Our last production of the season was
A Streetcar Named Desire,
by Tennessee Williams. I played Stella to Jane’s Blanche and we had a marvelous time, a wonderful experience. It was the first time that I felt connected to the other players on stage in a way that felt organic and true. We finished out our season, then made our way back to Boston for our second and last year of our master’s program.

Once back, I auditioned for—and got—the lead in the first major production of the year. It was Federico García Lorca’s
The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife
. Getting the lead was a total shock. I didn’t even consider myself one of the good actresses in the school—but I was secretly joyous.

One of the important things Peter taught us was that the craft of acting is all about fulfilling the demands of the play. Actors, he believed, need to study the script the way a plumber does a leak, in order to find out what it is in the script that makes the character, and the play, come alive.