Twelve Years

Twelve years ago this week I was spending my days going through my father's apartment with my brother. Dad had shot himself on the 9th and his body was found by his oldest friend in New York on the 12th. Twelve years ago Wednesday.

Twelve years ago I was sifting through grief, memory and questions questions questions. Not the ones you might think. The fact is, when I got the call from my brother that the police had called him from Dad's apartment, I knew what had happened. I'd hoped I was wrong. But I knew.

Mom said it best that night when we called to let her know. "He was always so sad". It was true. He was also scared. Whatever the combination, he had a dim world view.

I loved my dad. He was basically a good man who never really dealt with his anger issues, his alcoholism or his strengths. A talented actor, he'd packed us up from Tucson Arizona, sold the Ford Falcon and got us on a train to New York City and went straight into substitute teaching and social work. His career as an actor was essentially small productions in holes in the wall (before the moniker "Off Off Broadway" was coined.) and extra work in movies.

As a kid I would listen while he would lament the vagaries of the business and how hard it was...and it instilled in me the belief that the business was indeed brutal. It didn't stop me from wanting to be an actor. It didn't stop me from thinking I could do better. But these things are insidious and the sins of the father are often visited upon the son. His beliefs did become mine and even when I achieved some pretty good if minor successes, my joy would be tainted by fear of the success not lasting.

Now to be sure, being an actor isn't easy. It can be brutal, but I can see very clearly as I look back how my own thoughts and feelings that were inherited affected the way I approached my career and subsequently the way my career developed...or didn't as it turns out.

Twelve years ago fears and doubts overtook my father to the point that he no longer was able to reason. This man who raced down the street with me...encouraged me to take the training wheels off my back when he knew I could. The man who when he saw I was floundering in my efforts to audition for the High School of Performing Arts bought a gazillion plays for me to look through and helped me find the right pieces and even coached me. A man who as a social worker had saved or improved as best he could, so many lives, wasn't even able to remember a simple meditation technique because anxiety had overcome him.

He'd been given Buspar and started to take it, then stopped. 12 years ago it got so bad that he sat at the edge of his bed and ate the barrel of a .357 magnum. He left a note that was really more of an excuse than anything else. Fears of a cancer that didn't exist.
Two weeks later, the girl he wanted to marry, a dancer from Japan was finally allowed back into the country. He'd become convinced it wouldn't happen after months of legal back and forth. Fear of being alone and abandoned convinced him that his life wouldn't work out as he desired. So it seems he decided to just stop trying.
12 years later I still wrestle with loving him and hating him. Remembering his capacity for compassion for everyone while he seemed to only have pity for himself. I am sometimes on the edge of forgiving him. And then I remember having to tell my daughter what happened. I remember how as she is now almost 20 years old, she can't play chess because that's what she used to do with Grandpa. I can't quite do it.
For the past 12 years, for about 3 weeks before and after the anniversaries, he shows up in my dreams. Sometimes as if he's never been gone, sometimes as if he's only been on some trip in South America or something and we all just THOUGHT he was dead.I forget about it...forget it's that time of year...sometimes even the days of his actual death or the day he was found go by entirely unnoticed. Sometimes not.
Twelve years later I can watch Dirty Harry make one line comments about his Magnum and still get a kick out of it. But when Heroes first aired and there was an episode with half a skull being cut off and brains removed, I get completely worked up.
I wrestle with fear too. And it's not hard to see how it keeps me from acting. Clouds my thinking. I've made a decades long struggle of shifting from "can't" to "can". It hasn't been easy.
Twelve years ago I cremated my father. Twelve years later I'm still cremating parts of his legacy so I can rise from the ashes.

In Praise of passing teachers.

Most of us are pretty arrogant when we get to high school. Even the most modest of us. We are smarter than our parents who are exceedingly uncool and say the most ridiculous things. We know who we are and we know exactly what we are doing and where we are going and anyone that tells us otherwise is either full of shit or just has no idea what is going on.

This disease goes on until we start to approach 30. Then we start to realize that WE were the assholes and that we have a ways to go. If we are lucky.


A man named Jerome Eskow, who was the head of the Drama Department in my high school for many years before and after I went there, passed away a couple of days ago after a long battle with Parkinson's Disease.

I went to the High School of Performing Arts here in New York City. Most of you will know it as The Fame School. I hate that moniker, but that's a blog for another day. I entered the school in September of 1977 as a Sophomore and graduated in June of 1980. Yes, I'm that old.

To this day I consider my time in High School pretty much the most amazing years of my life. Not all happy, mind you, but every moment pretty fucking wonderful. I experienced all the awfulness that goes with adolescence. Confusion, anger, social awkwardness, etc. In spite of all that I enjoyed a level of creativity, exploration and artistic growth that I've never had since. Jerome Eskow was more responsible for that than any teacher I've ever had.

That's not how I felt about him through most of high school. Only toward the end did I begin to suspect how brilliant the man truly was, and how much he loved us and the school.

He came across as rather pompous, sitting on the edge of his desk, legs crossed, his hands cupped a foot or so from his face as his gravelly, slow voice expounded on and on about acting theory, theater history, "the business".

To so many of us, it seemed like endless droning by a man who loved to hear himself talk. While there's possibly a grain of truth to that, the fact is that we suffered from our own pomposity. The pomposity I mentioned at the beginning of this blog. We suffer from this pomposity to the extent that we don't hear the grains of wisdom that are offered to us. And as I came to realize later, Jerome Eskow offered a lot.

I won't get into the specific lessons here all at once. A lot of them won't make sense outside of the Theater. But one thing he said once has always stuck with me.

"We have to say I hate you a lot before you can really get to I love you" I don't remember the context of the day's lesson. But the point of what he was saying was that to truly love someone, or something, you have to really know them and accept them, warts and all. You have to pass through the negatives because at the end of all that is the positive that was there in the first place. The love.

As time passed and after I graduated, I would visit the old school, which later became the new school when it moved into a large and (to my mind) still soulless building a bit further uptown, I found that Jerry (who seemed to prefer me calling him that after graduation) had more to teach, more to talk about. But more and more it was about me and self acceptance. I continued to watch the way he would talk, the way he held himself...and it occurred to me that it wasn't so much pomposity as it was...PASSION.

Slow, gravelly, deep and I think even luxurious passion.

My life went on...I drifted away from visiting, Mr. Eskow retired as did most of my teachers. The last of the teachers that were there retired just a couple of years ago (while my daughter was a senior in that soulless structure).

I sent an email to Mr. Eskow a couple of years ago. Or I meant to. I never heard back from him, it occurred to me and its possible that either his Parkinson's made it too hard or that I, in my ADD just flaked on it.

It is a regret. I don't think I ever told Jerry how much I've grown to admire him as I've gotten older (more mature?). I didn't tell him that despite my rather disappointing career (so far) that much of my deepening as an actor and a teacher comes from the things he taught me, even if they took awhile to soak in.
I had other teachers at P.A. that I loved. Some were inspiring, others were brilliant in subtle ways, some, honestly, weren't very good at all.

Jerry seeped in, sneakily...like someone planting seeds in the dark of night while every one is sleeping. Then one afternoon you wake up...and there's a tree.

Rest In Peace, Jerry. Thanks for the trees.