The Time of My Life

The summer after seventh grade, I auditioned for a play at the Antrim Playhouse in Suffern, New York. I remember there being some surprise at the audition about my age; there was a bit child character in the script, but I wasn’t auditioning for that. I wanted a part, and perhaps didn’t realize that I would be competing with adults. The whole scene was unfamiliar to me. I didn’t have any theatre experience outside of school and children’s summer theatre, and my limited foray into auditioning for television commercials (I think this was before I auditioned for Oliver! on Broadway) took place in brightly lit offices and conference rooms with dispassionate corporate casting directors. So while not altogether inexperienced, I was so young that the fact that the audition was at night made me feel grown up. Now I was in the basement green room of a community theatre sitting in front of an intimidating group of strange adults–Annie the producer, Chuck the director, Jonathan the stage manager, designers. One man was the father of Samantha, a popular girl from my school whom I knew only from band practice. She played trombone and sat behind me in the saxophone section. The adults handed me parts to read, and kept me almost until the end of the audition. To this day, I remember that the French doors were open to the early summer air, and the thick sound of cicadas filled the dimly lit, palely painted room.

Jonathan the stage manager called me the next day to offer me the part of Willie, the pinball fanatic from Assyria. It was the only part I could play: the rest really had to be played by adults. And being community theatre, there was an eclectic mix of people in the very large cast. There was another kid, who played the newspaper delivery boy. He was about 10 or 11, and the son of another actor in the play. Besides that, a couple of the actors were in their twenties, but almost everyone was a lot older. Forties? Fifties? I don’t know. I was only 13, and had only a vague understanding of age beyond the limited scope of my experience: someone was an adult or not. But I don’t recall even wondering how old the other actors were.

The rehearsals took place nightly over the rest of the summer. Seventh grade ended and I went to camp every day, which itself was becoming a staging ground both for social interactions and girls. This was the summer that the girls let us put our hands between their breasts to measure “the gap,” a ploy of course, of which they were certainly also aware, both to measure the size of their breasts (the smaller the gap…), and be able to touch them. I’d get home and eat dinner and then go to rehearsal. Margaret, who played the tragic young woman in the play, and who was probably only in her mid-20s, offered to pick me up and drive me to rehearsals. She was a friendly but moody woman, and one day about halfway through the summer she told me she couldn’t drive me anymore, that she needed the space to herself. Whether I was cramping her ability to go out, or whether I was making her uncomfortable, or whether she just was tired of driving around a kid who wasn’t hers, I don’t know. I do know that she became a subject in the growing sexual awareness in my head that summer; perhaps my desire leaked out in some strange way, and she was not willing even to be near it. I’ll never know.

Choosing her as a sexual fantasy wasn’t so far off base. She was the sole young woman in the show, and in some ways, the fulcrum of the dramatic action. Her character was lonely, a burlesque performer who claimed she was a dancer, until forced to admit that she was a stripper by a rogue cop, who then humiliated her by forcing her to strip in the bar where the whole play took place. Not the healthiest scene for a 13 year old boy to be watching every night from my seat next to the bar onstage, where I was installed for 3 hours, pretending to play a wooden pinball machine.

Healthy or not, I was thrilled at this step in my budding theatre career. My part was a study in maturity and patience. I entered the bar early in the show, casually ordered a beer and pretended not to notice the pinball machine. My eyes averted, I examined everything else in the bar while making small talk with Nick, the bartender, who looked at me bemused, as if he knew I was an underage pinball addict. Slowly, I approached the machine and sat down. I eased in a nickel, and experiencing a rush as strong as an injection of heroin, my body stiffened in pleasure, and I melted into the machine. I banged away at the machine, silent, through the rest of the first act, the second act, the third act, the fourth act, and the fifth act, never leaving the stage until at a moment of tension in the larger action of the play for which I had only been an animated backdrop, I beat the pinball machine and delivered an impassioned speech about my Assyrian roots before exiting the bar in a blaze of glory. I enter again at the very end of the play, after the real climax, and the pinball machine is broken, like the fabric of San Francisco and the soul of the country. Perhaps the win itself was not real, or didn’t happen. I am but a symbol, now downtrodden.

That summer represented a turning point for me, however, beyond even the excitement of my debut performance in the adult theatre world. The first reason was my sudden acute illness. One night, I was onstage after having delivered my opening speech and sitting down at the pinball machine when I suddenly became lightheaded and dizzy. It was the second week of a four week run, and I had been back in school probably for only a couple of weeks. As I pretended to bang away at the pinball machine, it became clearer to me that I wasn’t going to last until the end of the first act, when a brief blackout would enable me to exit the stage. On top of feeling as if I were going to faint, I grew desperate, and tried silently to figure out a way to exit the stage without drawing attention to myself, at least from the packed house in front of me. In my mind, I practiced new lines, which even in their non-utterance must have had William Saroyan moaning in his grave, which I would deliver as I boldly stood up and strode out the swinging doors. “Nick, I’ve got to be going now. Thank you for everything.” “That’s enough! I can’t take it. I’m finished with this machine.” I can’t remember what else. As I felt weaker, I thought about just falling to the floor and crawling to the side exit, probably only ten feet away. Jonathan sat at her little lighted stage manager table right on the other side of the wall where my pinball machine was perched, the script open in front of her, calling cues. Could I get her a message? Have I already said that I was closer to and more in the constant view of the audience than anyone else on stage and that any movement would be noticed by the entire house?

I somehow managed not to pass out and wisely chose not to write a new scene into the play. Waiting until the first act blackout, I practically fell through the exit into Jonathan’s shocked arms , whose next act was less than sixty seconds from starting. She was wearing headphones and looked helplessly at me. She must have communicated something to someone, because I was immediately being led down the steep ladder-like stairs backstage into the cool smooth cement of the green room where my whole adventure had began two months before. I heard the play begin upstairs, spookily without me, although the audience wouldn’t have missed me. The faces of the people who were tending to me looked alarmed enough to confirm that I wasn’t overreacting. Something was wrong.

Chuck, the director, appeared at my side. “What happened?” “Are you sick?” “Have you eaten?” Someone brought me tea and toast. In my memory, there was talk of a diner and someone left, but I don’t know how that could have happened in the time frame. I remember laying on the cool cement floor of the green room, but I must have had to move into the dressing room for the intermission. And I also must have finished the play that night, because I don’t remember missing it. It must have been the Saturday night performance, because I don’t think I returned until the following weekend.

Nor did I go to school that Monday. Whatever had befallen me was not revealing itself. I remained feverish and hallucinogenic. I had a paper route at the time, and can’t remember if I was still delivering the newspapers, but I stayed out of school the entire week and the next. I had debilitating headaches. One doctor gave me a painkiller that was so strong that I fell out of the top of the bunk bed which I shared with my brother and didn’t even wake up until my parents came in to investigate the crash. (What’s even more odd is that I literally have no memory of having a bunk bed in that room except for that night when I fell out of it.)

For the two weeks I stayed out of school, I continued to perform in the play. I never received any diagnosis although I saw at least two doctors and had a CAT scan; the symptoms disappeared after a couple of weeks. I am convinced that I was suffering from depression and anxiety and succumbing to the pressure of eighth grade, which was somehow overwhelming to me in a way that I can only relate to from my distance now, but which I cannot access any memories or feelings from that time. I remember vividly the living room of our apartment during the time of my sickness. The television on, under my blankets on the off-white kind-of-furry couch, the blinds letting in unfamiliar morning light through the filter of the trees in the front yard. I wish I remembered what I was thinking. I wish that I had written it down. I’m not sure entirely that I could have if it had occurred to me; in fact, I think I couldn’t have. I can only hope that my memory of not experiencing emotional honesty is incorrect.

(In one of the ways that I miss my father, despite his frequent absence from my life during this time, I think he might have better memories of what was going on with me at that time, or at least his view of it. My mother’s memory is faulty and dismissive. She still maintains that I was growing too fast and that I was literally experiencing growing pains. She doesn’t remember it as a transformative time.)

Although not part of the story I want to tell here, eighth grade went down from that point. I was far less social than I was in seventh grade. I ceased caring about school, and spent a lot of time by myself. I didn’t date any girls that I can remember, which was a radical contrast from seventh grade, especially since I was physically more mature in eighth grade. I experienced depression and loneliness for the first time, although I don’t think I could have named either. In some ways, the decline was what I needed to figure out who I was for high school, although I don’t think I accomplished that in any real way until 10th grade at least. The subject of another story, to be sure.

But there was one other event from that summer, something which seems to be so minor, except that I still remember it vividly, a standout from the weeks of rehearsals from which I remember little. Tommy, who played Harry, was one of the actors in his twenties. The sexuality which seemed to rise from me in most of my waking moments that summer was not something that I imagined myself projecting or sharing or inviting, but at some point, I noticed Tommy was talking to me a lot, especially during the times when I was preferring to be near other people, like Margaret, or the director, or any of the other actors. I remember him being a nuisance. And yet perhaps I was indicating something to him, or giving off a vibe, because there was one day that I was sitting outside on a day of weekend rehearsal. I remember it was a hot afternoon, and we were on a break. I was wearing cut-off sweatpants and sitting on the curb in front of the theatre facing the parking lot. I was sort of swinging my legs or opening and closing them, in what seems to me now to be in the manner of an adolescent boy with a lot of energy. Tommy was also sitting outside and just sort of staring and smiling at me. I don’t remember if it was more uncomfortable than it was annoying, but it wasn’t welcome. And then my father was there, in the car, picking me up. I told my father that Tommy was staring at me. That’s all I remember, and I’m not sure if I’m even recounting it in the right order, or if I’m skipping hours.

But I find it strange that that’s all I remember. Did Tommy ever talk to me again? Did he stay away? Did my father say something to him? Did my father look at him in a particular way? Especially knowing what I know now about my father, did something else happen? The mystery to me, the impossibility of unlocking the past, is frustrating, and I wonder why I remember, why I wonder. Was that somehow formative? Traumatic? Was my awareness raised that summer, or did it all just get filed away like so many dusty papers that I’m only pulling out now?

And finally, there was a sickness worse than mine in the last weekend of the play. The actor who played the crooked cop was hospitalized and Chuck stood in for his part. He was a man I think in his 60s who seemed ancient to me at the time, but he was not well, and he passed away not long after the production ended. Even though his death occurred after the close of the play, it sealed away the whole experience for me. It wasn’t my first experience with death, although it must have been the first time I experienced the death of someone whom I had seen so frequently (when my uncle died a couple of years before, I had only seen him once or twice a year and wasn’t close with him, so I don’t remember being particularly affected) and so recently.

There was also a wedding that summer at the theatre. Jonathan married Steve (I think) who must have been in the play, although I don’t remember who he played. They asked me to come and help out. Perhaps one of my jobs was to help pour the champagne for the toasts, because I somehow ended up drinking a lot of it.

The summer of my thirteenth year. Sex, depression, death and alcohol. Maybe it wasn’t the time of my life, but it was what I knew.