Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir (9 page)

It’s the human condition that the playwright or the screenwriter is trying to shed light on. The great plays are the ones that have the most to say about who we are and who we aren’t, what our limitations are, what our weaknesses and our strengths are, and what heroism looks like. It shows us what self-sacrifice looks like, what devotion looks like, what loyalty looks like. These are all things that started out with the Greeks and the plays they wrote. And nobody got it better, by the way. Nobody. To this day. Nobody got it fucking better than the Greeks. From Socrates, Euripides, Aristotle—none ever wrote more insightfully about the human condition than they did. Everything that we do, in all of our performing arts, are variations on shit that they came up with nearly four thousand years ago.

I remember understanding this in a new way the very first time I went to a Broadway play. Even though the theater district was 130 blocks south of where we lived, it might as well have been on the moon, ’cuz my old man just couldn’t afford it. After a rich aunt and uncle from Long Island came to see one of my high school performances, they invited me to join them to see
Fiddler on the Roof
. It was thrilling. I remember every fuckin’ move, every line, and every song.

Fiddler on the Roof
is a perfect example of how great art can tap into that human condition I’m referring to. Who would think a story about a Jewish man with five daughters would be a sellable tale? But we love it. Why? We share his desires to keep his family together; we identify with his struggles and joys. These are ancient feelings we shared from the first time we banded together as humans and buried them in what Carl Jung called our shared consciousness. This is what the Greek dramatists understood. We relate to the play’s depictions of how outside forces sweep into our lives and how we cope. Because the writer, choreographer, lyricist, directors, cast, set designers, and many more all came together to tap into the human condition, the
play turned into a legacy. For ten years it was the longest-running play on Broadway, until
Grease
knocked it from its throne. It still remains the sixteenth-longest in Broadway history. The play is still being produced, and I’d bet that some high school or college troupe is rehearsing it somewhere right now. That’s how powerful and noble the arts can be: oftentimes many of us don’t know why we think a certain movie is great, but it is because it manages to capture and speak to the very things that make us human.

Even though the home life was going south, my parents still insisted I go to college. They didn’t care what I studied. For that generation, just going to college was the goal. They believed it would give us a chance to break the poverty cycle we were stuck in. Yet getting into college wasn’t as easy as I thought. It wasn’t for lack of schools or being accepted. I made it into two, in fact, but, again, I nearly blew it. Unchecked, I can make myself my own worst enemy. Shit, who of us can say otherwise? But when it came to either letting my flaws keep me from college and drama or doing something about it, my decision was rapid and decisive. No school, no more theater? It wasn’t going to go that way for me.

(CHAPTER 4)

Grinding Machine

During my senior year of high school, in between the trips to the hospital to see my brother, my parents were very much on top of me about applying to college. They harped about application deadlines. Both grew up during the Depression, and neither had college educations. To that generation it was imperative that a child go to college, almost as if that was the guaranteed magic carpet ride to a life of happiness, kinda like on the
Donna Reed Show
or
Father Knows Best
. So I had to go, no matter what. It didn’t matter what the fuck I studied; I just needed to get the fuckin’ degree. But because we didn’t have any money, the notion of applying to a college that specialized in theater—by that time the die was fully cast—seemed a waste of time unless I was going to get a full ride. My parents couldn’t afford to send me. Full stop!

I tried to apply for scholarships at some Ivy League schools, but nothing promising panned out. Let’s not forget I was working off a 2.7 high school grade point average, a reality that completely ruled out any possibility for the Einstein Scholarship. I started focusing on schools within New York’s city-university system. Every borough had one, and back then they were free, so if the numbers added up, you were eligible to go to whatever one was in your borough: there was CCNY in Manhattan, Hunter College in the Bronx, Hunter College campus in
Manhattan, Brooklyn College, Queens College, and Staten Island College, all making up CUNY, the City University of New York. These schools required a $150 registration fee, and that was it—now it can be six grand per year for New York residents. The schools were for lower-to middle-class families like mine. So my little 2.7 GPA was just enough to get me in—not to CCNY, but I got into York College in Queens.

After a little uncustomary tap dance on the part of my old man, I managed to get my acceptance switched over to another campus of Hunter College that was renamed Lehman College in the Bronx on 204th Street. It did have a theater department, but there was no word on whether it was any good. I figured, “Hey, I’ll be in college, it’s liberal arts. Whatever little education I can get from the place would be better than nothing. I’ll find a way to join the drama club.” That’s where, for a second time and shrouded in circumstances mysteriously absurd, life was about to take another profound turn, once again sending me on the trajectory I remain on to this day. For it was there, at this dinky little last-chance saloon of a college in the Bronx, that I met a man who I can only describe as the Carl Jung of theater literature. This man was about to shape my place in theater in a way completely separate from my earlier encounter. Talk about the unplanned miracle—this man would awaken and solidify my entire aesthetic. But I digress . . .

To get into a CUNY college, it was required to take a physical at the end of your senior year of high school. I flunked mine. I was 310 pounds. I had high blood pressure and salt in my urine, all of which might not have been so bad were I an eighty-seven-year-old Jew. But I was seventeen. Not good. In short, I was admitted to Lehman College, but the caveat was that I had to remediate these two health issues, or no entry. The salt in the urine was something that demanded attention because it was off the beaten path for a kid my age, and it was something that required a very special treatment. I was put on a sodium-free diet. It wasn’t just putting down the salt shaker but also included a list of nearly everything I normally ate. You don’t realize how many foods naturally have salt in them until you have to go on this fuckin’ diet. Virtually everything has salt in it. At least everything
that provided me with a reason to live! I had to eat stuff that was either processed without salt or naturally contained no sodium content. The only condiment that had any zip to it I was allowed to use was mustard. Oh yeah, onions, curiously enough, also contained no salt. To this day I eat mustard and onions on everything, from my fucking cereal in the morning to my muthafuckin’ hot fudge sundae at night! It’s the only thing that made the food I was allowed not to taste like cardboard. My Jewish mom who encouraged me through my childhood to eat “healthy-size” portions now realized that I needed to do this to get into college. She did everything in her power not to fuck that up. She threw aside her selfish need to watch me eat and be happy in order to see me pass this physical. Dear old Mom!

It became an exercise in discipline on everybody’s part, because it really required all of us to start eating differently. I stuck to it to the decimal point and never once cheated. I only had two months, from the last weeks of June to the end of August, to affect this thing. The final result was that I lost ninety-five pounds in nine weeks. A lot of interesting things take place when, for the first time in your life, you have a goal. You have to sacrifice a lot of the things you love in order to achieve it. You have to exert, for the first time, some real willpower. And you find out a little about yourself. You ask yourself,
Am I made to do this? Do I have what it takes to do this?
That was the first time I ever had any real demands put on me in which I had to rise to an occasion that was seriously outside my comfort zone.

By the time September rolled around and I retook the physical to start Lehman, my health was dandy. What I found most odd was that it was not only a physical change but was also a change in persona. I saw myself differently in the mirror and was looked at differently by the world at large. That marked the beginnings of the turning away from that kid with the low self-esteem. From that moment forth anybody who met me, especially in college who didn’t know me before, would have looked at me really askance and gone, “Fuck you talking about? Fat kid?” There was no way for the outside world to understand what I was feeling on the inside because, well, once you’re fat—I don’t
give a shit if you now weigh forty-five fucking pounds—you always think of yourself as fat. Weird, I know.

To demonstrate, during my senior year of high school, when I was 310 pounds, we did a production of
Carousel
by Rogers and Hammerstein, which is one of their iconic musicals. I played Enoch Snow, this fat, jolly character whom everybody loves. When I became a freshman at Lehman College around nine months later and had lost the ninety-five pounds, we did the same play, except I played Jigger Craigin, who is the bad guy, the lean, nasty, mean motherfucker. That was a transformation that sparked a palpable change in self-perception.

It’s an interesting thing that to this day I’ve never come close to being that heavy again. The most I’ve ever allowed myself to get to was about 255 pounds, but I’ll get back quickly to around 205 to 210, which is what I call my fighting weight. I still have a thing with food; it’s my number-one vice. I still eat at least one piece of chocolate every day. I remember for
City of Lost Children
I opened the movie shirtless as a street performer who broke chains with his chest. I had to get into the shape of my life! It was nothing but egg whites, chicken breasts, and broccoli for, like, five months. Then I got to Paris to start filming, and they had gotten me a flat above the best chocolatier in Europe. So now I start obsessing over how much chicken breast I gotta give up so I can have my pound of the good shit every fuckin’ day. At any rate, it’s a very fucking fundamental part of me, being fat. It’s just one of those conditions you resign yourself to.

Many years later during therapy, in my obsession to change this perception, I was introduced to what, in Jungian terms, was called the “Shadow.” It’s powerful when you identify the Shadow in yourself. Everybody has one. Most people spend their lives running from it. What you really want to do is the opposite. To be truly happy and at peace, you need to embrace that kid who you once were. He’s still there, so take care of him as if he were your own child, as if you’re his parent. You’d love that kid and nurture him, wouldn’t you?

That was probably one of the most game-changing things I did, to come to terms with that fat kid who had been the source of so much discomfort and unease. All you need to really do is just fucking love him. And know that that’s your fingerprint—that’s what separates you from the crowd. And there’s gold in them there hills if you just know how to make peace with it. This once self-destructive image, with all its flaws, can instead become something you see as a bright, shining asset. If you start beating up on yourself, with internal talk like, “You’re a loser, it will never work out, you don’t deserve this . . . ,” stop your fucking brain in its tracks. You can’t help the thought that crosses your mind, but you do have the power to change it with a new and more positive one. When I think of myself as that kid everybody made fun of, I know his pain better than anyone and, instead, I treat that boy right. As sure as I am of this being the fastest route to find true self-acceptance, that lesson took another twenty years for me to learn.

But during college I was ready and had that swagger that only eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds can have. You know when you thought you had it all figured out and knew how the world worked? It’s a sort of nice, naïve moment to live through. The very first thing I did in college was to find the drama department.

Actually, the drama department sort of found me, because I was leaning toward doing musicals. As I already mentioned, and in my frenzy to greet my college experience by finding the very first stage on which to do my thing that I possibly could, at the beginning of my freshman year I did
Carousel
with the school’s Musical Theater Society. So, fresh off that little experiment, I was walking down one of the corridors at Lehman in the speech and theater building. Now, the classrooms at Lehman have two entrances, one in the front and one in the back. So as I was passing the back of one of these classrooms I heard someone shout from inside, “Hey Goldberg!” For obvious reasons, I kept walking. As I passed the front entrance to the very same classroom I heard, once again, only much louder, “HEY! GOLDBERG!” Well, it didn’t take me long to realize I was the only person in said hallway, so I peeked into the room where this shouting is coming from.
And there was this rather dubious-looking teacher in front of this quite full classroom filled with eager participants.

“Excuse me, were you referring to me?” I asked.

“Yeah, you—Goldberg.”

“I think you might be making a mistake,” I said. “My name’s Perlman.”

To which he said, “Goldberg, Perlman, who gives a fuck—you act, right?” And before I could respond, he came back, “You did that musical with those musical types, right? Why don’tcha come do some
real
theater with some real serious theater types?!” And then he said—again I was given no shot at responding—“Auditions are today at three. Be there, Goldberg!”