Forever the Fat Kid: How I Survived Dysfunction, Depression and Life in the Theater (24 page)

My first, and very pertinent, question was what did the position pay? To which the man on the other end of the phone replied, “Well, it’s actually an intern position.”

“Yes,” I said, “paying how much?” thinking they couldn’t possibly be asking me to work for free.

“It’s an intern position,” he repeated. “An unpaid intern position.”

I think I would have preferred that they hadn’t called at all than to call and make this insulting offer. I had one final question for the man: “You expect me to live in New York, work ungodly hours for you, and have no means of income?”

He began to say something about the opportunity…and I cut him off. “That’s not an opportunity; it’s a one-way ticket to homelessness. Thank you, but no thank you!” and I hung up the phone. By hanging up on him, I effectively ended that particular conversation, as well as any misguided desires of ever being involved with the Disney Empire again. In hindsight, I guess that I shouldn’t have been surprised by any of this. When all is said and done, Disney is a corporation like any other. A place where the financial bottom line and/or personal gain for those at the top will always trump common sense and what is morally and ethically correct.

LEAP OF FAITH

Melba’s first performance of her one-woman show was in Richmond, Virginia. That our script was nowhere near complete couldn’t be an obstacle. We now had a lot of work to do in a very short time, one week to be exact. To be honest, I didn’t see how it was possible. However, Melba felt that we could do it, so who was I to argue? We worked around the clock to get the piece ready for its debut. We worked at the airport while waiting for our flight to Richmond, we worked on the plane, and we worked in the limo on the way to the hotel. We didn’t get too much sleep because we worked a large part of the night that we arrived, and we worked all of the next day up until we arrived at the theater for the performance–a matinee, no less!

After a short explanation to the audience that this was a “work-in-progress,” and with pages of the script strategically placed at different locations onstage, Sentenced to Sing; Her Own Story (as it was called then) made its world debut. The audience reaction to the show was unbelievable. The entire audience was on its feet cheering the moment the show came to a close. We knew that if we could pull this off under these circumstances, we had ourselves a powerful property here. We went to work in earnest on completing the script, and the bookings began to roll in. A week-long engagement in Panama City, Florida, that summer gave us the opportunity to do some serious work on the show in front of an audience. At the end of that run, we knew that Sweet Songs of the Soul (as it was now re-titled) was ready to go places. And go places we did! Bookings continued into the next year and took us completely across the country–Chicago, New Orleans, Houston and Los Angeles were just some of the cities that we had the honor of playing. And to top it off, every single performance received a standing ovation!

As it was a small show (the entire company was made up of Melba, myself, and Levi Barcourt, our very talented musical director and pianist), presented on a single set with props and costumes used to suggest changes in location and character, it was a fairly inexpensive show to mount. The only engagement that I missed was Los Angeles because I was also directing a production of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas at the time. I flew out and set up the technical aspects of the show but had to fly back the day before it opened. And, of course, who showed up to catch a performance during the only engagement that I wasn’t able to attend? Delores Hall, who I hadn’t seen in years.

SPIRALING DOWNWARD

On so many levels, Sweet Songs of the Soul was probably the most fulfilling experience of my professional life. I knew that it was going to be difficult to find this kind of satisfaction in future projects. Finally, after two years of touring and feeling that we were ready for New York audiences (and critics) negotiations began to move the show into an open-ended off-Broadway run. Unfortunately, the endeavor failed. Here it was happening again. Why was it that every time I found myself involved in a theatrical project that I strongly believed in, cared deeply about, and thought had the potential to be successful, it was somehow kicked to the curb? Too many failures, too many major disappointments, it all finally started to take its toll on me. The aborted off-Broadway production of Sweet Songs of the Soul was the straw that broke the camel’s back and the beginning of…

THE DARK DAYS

Anyone who has nothing in their past that they are ashamed of …

… has lived a boring life!

GOING HOME

In the summer of 1998, I took Jamesie on a trip to the place of his birth, Bracey, Virginia, where every year St. Mark’s Episcopal Church hosts its annual “Homecoming Weekend,” an event that people born and raised in Bracey return home for year after year. From all across the country, they come to reunite with childhood friends and relatives. Every year, Jamesie expressed a desire to attend Homecoming but, for one reason or another, he hadn’t gone in well over ten years. As his health was rapidly deteriorating, I was determined to see to it that he went that year. I knew that if he didn’t, he might not have the chance again.

The five days that we spent in Bracey was a trip that I will never forget. I couldn’t remember the last time that I had seen him so happy. Watching his face light up as he was reunited with friends and family that he hadn’t seen in years made my heart smile. As for me, I got to spend quality time with him, and we connected as we hadn’t since the trips that I used to make with him there as a child. I discovered much about not only my father, but my family history as well during the trip.

When I went to Virginia with my father as a kid, it was all about riding my bike on the empty country roads, constant trips to the small country store, drinking fresh water from wells, exploring the farms where fruits, vegetables and, yes, cotton, actually grew out of the ground. I got to milk the cows, feed the chickens, and slop the hogs–all things that were totally foreign to me growing up in New Jersey. I was so wrapped up in all of those new and strange adventures that I never realized what I was surrounded by in terms of my ancestry; you just don’t think about these things when you’re that young. I had played in the cemetery behind St. Mark’s Church countless times, chasing rabbits and digging up worms for fishing, never even realizing that my paternal grandmother was buried there.

The trip seemed to rejuvenate Jamesie. Walking had become difficult for him and he relied heavily upon a cane to get around. I was amazed to see him actually leave the cane behind in the car as we went around Bracey revisiting some of the landmarks of his life. Though his mind was often clouded and his memory bad, he had no problem giving me directions as we drove around the various locales of the place where he was born and had spent his formative years. We explored places where he had played as a child, the house he had grown up in (still standing after all these years, but now deserted and covered in weeds), and the one-room schoolhouse he attended (now a bait and tackle shack). It was an incredible journey into what shaped him into the man that he was. He shared stories of his life with me that I had never heard before and, in doing so, revealed a sensitive side that I’d never given him credit for.

A WALK IN THE WOODS

The large house that my father grew up in sat deep in the woods far from the main road. As a matter-of-fact, we weren’t able to drive all the way down the dirt road leading to it. We had to stop the car and walk the final twenty or thirty yards. Once we reached the house, we stood in silence staring at the dilapidated piece of my father’s past. I brought a camera and took some pictures; the sound of the shutter opening and closing was the only sound breaking the solace. After about five minutes, my father turned to me and said, “Let’s go,” and we began the silent walk up the dirt road and back to the car. When we had lost sight of the old house, my father, without looking at me, spoke again.

“The last time I walked up this road was in 1943. I was home on leave from the army. My mother was real sick. I didn’t see her eat anything the whole time I was home. She was in so much pain she couldn’t even get out of the bed. We all knew she wasn’t gonna be gettin’ any better. The morning that I had to leave, she told my father to carry her out to the porch and sit her in the old rocking chair we had there. My daddy told her that she was sick and should stay put, but she wouldn’t listen.” At this point, Jamesie’s voice cracked slightly, and he took a few seconds to compose himself. I could see that walking away from the house – over 50 years later – he was reliving that day. “Momma told him ‘You gon’ take me to that chair, and I’m gon’ sit there and watch my baby walk up that road. ‘Cause I know I ain’t never gonna see him again, and I want to set my eyes on him for as long as I can.’”

Jamesie and I finished the walk to the car in silence. In that moment we both knew that just as his mother would never see her youngest child–her baby boy–again, this was the last trip that Jamesie would ever make to his childhood home. It was well into the drive back to the hotel before either of us spoke again. My father had never shared anything as personal as that story with me before. He had never allowed me to see him so emotionally vulnerable. And I can’t remember ever loving him more than I did that day.

GOD BLESS THE CHILD

When I returned from Orlando at the beginning of 1997, I was shocked to notice how frail both my parents had become. It seemed as if they had aged years in the nine months that I had been away. They were both reaching the eighty-year mark, not in the greatest of health, and seemed to be having a rough time keeping up with the simplest of everyday tasks. My father, in particular, who was having a difficult time just being mobile, was starting to show signs of the dementia that would become much worse as time went on. My mother, who always prided herself on her ability to function well under any circumstance, appeared frail, and seemed overburdened by everyday life. How was it possible that they had declined so quickly in such a short period of time? It was the beginning of a very bad time for all of us.

I can’t imagine it ever being easy to see the people who took care of you all of your life suddenly become the ones needing to be taken care of. I could never do for them all that they had done for me, but I was determined to do what I could. The first thing that I did was take over the handling of their financial affairs. I gathered up every important document and piece of paper and bought a small file cabinet so that everything would be easily accessible. They never had to so much as write a check from that point on. Many times my own financial affairs fell by the wayside–bounced checks and late payments–but their affairs were always kept in perfect order. It would be a while before I noticed the emotional and physical toll that caring for them would take on me.

I was living in Long Island City, New York, making two or three trips a week to New Jersey to see that their needs were being met. I took a long-term temporary assignment working for a law firm in the World Trade Center. I accepted this particular assignment because the 36-hour workweek was condensed into three days, which allowed me, so I thought, more flexibility in making the trips to check on my parents. It turned out to be a bad decision, ultimately. It was a rotating work shift, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. one week and then 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. the next. Instead of allowing me more time to do the things that I had to do, it made me even more tired and run-down. My internal body clock was thrown totally out of whack, which only served to make the depression I was sinking into over my current situation worse.

When it became clear in the summer of 1998 that Jamesie’s health was on a serious decline, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that neither Ruthie nor I were capable of providing him with the proper care that he needed. So in May of 1999, just days after his seventy-eighth birthday, I had the unenviable task of arranging to have him placed in an attended care facility, a nursing home. I hated that it had come to this. No one, especially me, wanted him to be there, and the emotional strain was immense, but there was really no other option. Thoughts of a satirical theatrical monologue that I had written years earlier only served to add to my guilt. In the piece a middle-aged black woman has a one-way conversation with her elderly mother who is off-stage. She has just returned from grocery shopping and, as she empties the bags and puts the various items away, the audience discovers that she is a single mom and caretaker for both her young daughter and her aging mother. It ends with a (rather racist) statement about the different ways that white people and black people treat their aging elders. I felt like a traitor.

Though the responsibility for taking care of my parents had fallen squarely on my shoulders, everybody else had an opinion on what should be done; usually the exact opposite of what I was doing. However, since nobody was willing to get off their butts and offer assistance, their opinions fell on deaf ears. At one point, it seemed that every decision that I made was greeted by a snide comment or remark from someone who was clueless as to what the day-to-day situation in our home was like. Once the nursing home decision was made, there were still more obstacles to contend with. The New Jersey Veterans Nursing Home, my first choice of institutions, had a substantial waiting list. I was referred to Medicaid.

Like most people, I hadn’t the faintest idea of how to maneuver through the complicated and bureaucratic process of placing a loved one in a nursing home. I was shocked to find that Medicaid eligibility required turning over all of one’s assets–including life insurance policies–to the agency. This was one time when the fact that my parents never married (common law marriages are not recognized in the state of New Jersey) proved to be beneficial. Because my parents jointly owned our house, Medicaid was not able to take ownership of it. After much emotional turmoil, Jamesie was admitted to a caretaking facility a short distance from our home. Three months later, an opening became available at The Veteran’s Nursing Home. In addition to being a far nicer facility, we would be free of the financial considerations of Medicaid and the Geriatric Center in which he was now housed.

Although Medicare had taken everything else, Jamesie’s monthly social security check would again return to him when he entered the Veteran’s facility. When I informed the Geriatric Center of my plans to relocate my father to the new facility I was, again, confronted with the ugly realities of the world that we live in. The woman in charge of finance, who had been extremely unpleasant from the beginning, decided to make my life even more miserable. Within days of relocating Jamesie, I received a bill. Not just for the remainder of the month in which he had been relocated, but for the entire three months that he had spent there! I immediately called the facility and told this woman that since Medicaid had taken every asset that he had, and that I had been required to turn over his entire Social Security check to them for the months that he was there, that I considered the debt already paid in full. She, in words most unsympathetic, retorted coldly, “Medicaid has refused payment due to your removing your father from our facility. You now owe us the total amount due–in full!” So, in the midst of everything else that was going on, I had to initiate a lawsuit against Medicare to get the bill paid. Less than a week before the scheduled court date, I received a letter from Medicare informing me that they had reevaluated their position and were, in fact, going to pay the cost of my father’s stay at the Geriatric Center. Of course, by then the additional stress of the situation had already added to my own deteriorating health.

HONORABLY DISCHARGED

The New Jersey Memorial Veterans Home–what a depressing place! The structure itself was very nice, having just been rebuilt and modernized. A beautiful new facility built to house misery. I hated going there; it only added to my depression. Aside from the fact that I hated seeing Jamesie reduced to the state he was in, it was seeing the other residents that really brought me down. There were those, of course, with missing limbs, and quite a few were visibly scarred in other ways. A large number of them were unable to communicate–some were mute and others resorted to gibberish. Most depressing to me was the fact that many of them never got visitors. They either had no family, or their families simply no longer had the time to be bothered with them. Seeing these people who had served and sacrificed for their country, now being looked upon as nothing more than human garbage, only reinforced my opinions of war and the government that had been firmly planted in my head during the 1960s.

This is not to say that the occasional light moment, or warm memory, didn’t transpire there. Some of the behaviors that I witnessed were occasionally quite funny, in a dark sort of way. And I remember the feeling that I got seeing my father’s face light up when he would see me–or anybody!–coming to visit him. There was one thing that I noticed seem to bring a bit of sunshine into the lives of the people confined there. It was the letters and cards from local school kids sent to the residents on Memorial Day, Independence Day, or any other patriotic occasions. Obviously done as class projects, the letters and cards from the young boys and girls were a total delight. I hope that grammar school teachers never stop doing this worthwhile, and much appreciated, exercise. I can tell you, definitively, that they have a positive impact on the spirits of the veterans who receive them.

Another fond memory is of a day that I came to visit him after a hard day’s work. I picked up Ruthie and hadn’t bothered to change out of my office attire. As Ruthie sat down next to him, Jamesie leaned over and whispered something in her ear. I glanced over just as this was happening. Jokingly, I asked him, “What did you say? You’re talking about me, aren’t you?” to which he only grinned sheepishly. Ruthie said, “Go ahead and tell him what you said, don’t be embarrassed.” He motioned for me to come closer to his wheelchair, which I did. He then said softly, as if he didn’t want the others around him to hear, “I said you look so handsome, I’m glad you’re my son.” If he had been in a state of mind to understand, I would have told him that if he had said those words, or similar ones, years earlier we could have saved ourselves a lot of heartache.