Grateful American Read online

  By Monday I realized I couldn’t hide forever, so I took the train home and admitted to my folks what had happened. They looked relieved when I told them. Even glad. I began to suspect they were aware I partook of cannabis from time to time. We talked for a long time and concluded that the best course of action for me was to turn myself in. Mom and Dad drove me to the police station, to the juvenile department. To Officer Rash. Yep—his real name. Officer Rash wore a black trench coat and had dark hair and glasses. A known commodity among teenage pot smokers, he was the guy keeping an eye on all us youngsters who struggled walking the line.

  Officer Rash sat me down under the hot fluorescent lights, and I told him a bit of my story. I was honest. I told him about the moves to new schools, about my struggles to find new friends. He knew marijuana was everywhere, and I told him how a year earlier, before I’d ever taken my first puff, a friend and I had actually walked into a police station and asked for help in avoiding marijuana. We’d sincerely wanted to know what to do. Well, that really worked. A year later I was a full-on pothead selling dope to a narc. But I wasn’t a delinquent—at least, I didn’t think so—and the play was the clincher. I told Officer Rash all about West Side Story. We still had a couple of weeks to go before performances, but already I felt like things were turning around for me. I was trying harder. Feeling better about school. Staying out of the ravine.

  “The play’s really important to me,” I said. “Really, really important. Please don’t bust me. Please.”

  Yes, I was begging, but it wasn’t a line. The play was truly important to me. I didn’t want to be busted, because I genuinely wanted to appear in the play. West Side Story seemed to be all that was saving me back then. It was the only thing showing me a clearer path forward.

  Officer Rash gave me a stern talking-to. I would have a mark on my record, he said, and I’d better not do it again. I nodded profusely. Then, by some unexplained near-miracle, I was free to go.

  I never sold pot again. I smoked it once or twice—well, maybe more than once or twice—but I never sold it again. And the show was still on.

  Teachers noticed this genuine change in me. In English, Mr. Allison knew I sucked at taking exams, but one afternoon he gave me a protracted sidelong glance and asked me to tell the class what had been happening in play rehearsal. I didn’t normally speak up in class. Ever. But on the spot I opened up and told everybody about the play. My words were enthusiastic, my voice clear, and I was surprised later when Mr. Allison handed me a solid grade for “giving an oral report,” as he called it. That grade helped me pass his class that year.

  Lots of kids in West Side Story had appeared in plays before. Many were seniors, two years older than me. But Jeff Perry, also a sophomore, had landed a lead role in the play—Tony, the former Jet who falls in love with Maria. I quickly pegged him as a leader: supersmart, a hilarious goofball, obsessed with theater, and an incredible singer. When we weren’t rehearsing, I noticed that although I walked down the hallways with my hands stuffed in my pockets, his arms were loaded with books. And not just textbooks he needed for class, either. He read Shakespeare for fun, Chekhov—a Russian writer I knew nothing about—for kicks. I’d never met anyone like him, and he fascinated me.

  A senior named Jeff Melvoin played Bernardo, leader of the Sharks. Jeff Melvoin came from a superacademic family. Later, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, and much later he became a Hollywood producer and writer for the hit TV shows Remington Steele, Northern Exposure, Alias, and Army Wives. Even in those high school play rehearsals, Jeff Melvoin was solid. He became someone to look up to, to emulate. This was important because with no experience or training, I needed to throw myself into West Side Story by instinct only, acting on intuition. I was totally raw, with nowhere to go but up.

  After five weeks of rehearsals, it was showtime. The house lights came down, the curtains parted. Two star-crossed lovers from opposite sides of the street, Tony and Maria, fell hard for each other, and just like Romeo and Juliet, they were meeting in secret, avoiding their familiar friends. The play is shot through with hate and passion and rage. Chino shoots Tony, and Maria holds Tony in her arms as he takes his last few dying breaths. We presented four shows only—and we hit every line on Thursday and Friday nights, nailed it completely on Saturday, and on Sunday night blew the house wide open. And then it was all over. The show. My new community. Me.

  The lights came down. The audience burst into applause. As one of the Sharks, I was part of the gang that carried Tony’s dead body offstage. We Sharks set down the body behind the curtain, and Tony came to life again as just good old Jeff Perry, a high school kid who was quickly becoming one of my best friends. Jeff gave me a huge hug, and I burst into tears, and in glorious pandemonium offstage everybody was hugging and slapping each other on the back, with no chance to blow away the snot because it was time for the curtain call.

  Out in the auditorium, the audience continued their applause, cheering, shouting, whistling their congratulations, and all the supporting players and chorus members came out onstage in a pack. Including me. As a member of the chorus, I stood far in the back of all the people on stage, and we all took our bows while the audience continued to pound their applause. And then the leads each came out one by one and bowed. They stood at the front of the pack. Tony. Maria. Bernardo. Riff. Chino. Anita. The decibel level in the auditorium notched higher with each lead. Everybody stood to their feet. A standing ovation. The leads all took their bows together. I still hung far in the back. Sobbing harder than ever. My eyes scrunched tight against the tears. Then, in the midst of all the commotion, I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  Opened my eyes.

  The hand was Jeff Melvoin’s. Jeff the senior. Bernardo the Shark. He reached back, grabbed me. Pulled me up toward the front of the pack where the six leads stood. He shouted in my ear to take a bow with all the leads. So I did. Me, this sophomore screwup. Still bawling my eyes out. I stood at the front of the pack, and the audience was still standing, still applauding. Cheering for all of us. I took one long, glorious look around, trying to wipe my nose with my sleeve, and we all bowed again, all together, and I suddenly realized I’d fallen in love with this new community of students. With this new life of theater. It was almost too much to take in.

  Later that night, back in the quiet of my room, I flopped on my bed and wondered if maybe Jeff Melvoin had seen far off into the future, to the person I had the potential to become. Because he’d grabbed me on impulse, I was pretty sure, and I doubted if the audience ever knew the fuller story of why he’d pulled this crying sophomore up to the front of the pack. In the last couple of schools where I’d been enrolled—including this one—if I was known by anyone, I was known as a kid who smoked a lot of pot and struggled to find his way in school. But in the past five weeks this play had morphed into a tent revival of sorts. Theater had pointed me toward redemption. The performers in the play had drawn me toward the river, plunged me under, pulled me up, and pushed me forward. Dripping and new. I’d been handed a fresh start, and I felt hopeful.

  Grateful.

  I realized theater had become my second chance at life, and this second chance caused me to understand I had a lot to be thankful for. A wide-open future. Boundless opportunity. My newfound buoyancy made me want to do something far more with my life than I’d been doing.

  Ah. But here I was on my bed, exhausted. Poured out. The morning after I couldn’t move. I felt like I was in the valley now, after standing on the mountaintop, and I was a wreck. I’d told my mom I didn’t feel good and asked her if I could stay home. She said okay, so for the rest of the day I moped alone in my pajamas on the sofa in front of the TV. Occasionally I would get up, go to the record player, and put on the record from West Side Story—and it just made me sad. So I’d take it off and go back to the couch. I was brokenhearted that the play was over. This life-changing moment in time. I felt completely emotionally spent.

  Later that afternoon, Barbara Patterson came
over to my house, along with some of the kids in the show. They cheered me up, nudged me in the ribs, told me to knock it off and get to school tomorrow. There were more plays ahead, they reminded me. I couldn’t help but buck up and grin. Their love felt so wide. Their support so broad. My first play and the lead guy had grabbed me, one of the chorus guys, to take a bow with the stars of the show. That entire cast had seen who I was before the play and what had happened to me during those five weeks. Now I had so many new friends. It was powerful. Something had really changed for me. I was going forward again. I had been baptized.

  My life of purpose had begun.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Start of Steppenwolf

  The summer of 1973, I was eighteen, and Dad was inching a big ole rented RV up the side of some mountain in Colorado. Holed up in the RV’s bathroom, I buried my nose in the pages of Cyrano de Bergerac, a play I was supposed to be learning because Barbara Patterson wanted us to perform it in the fall. I wasn’t happy about reading the play. I wasn’t happy about this trip. And I definitely wasn’t happy about returning to high school. After the incredible experience with West Side Story at the end of my sophomore year, during my junior and senior years, theater had become my primary purpose for showing up at school. While I continued to play music in an expanded version of Half Day Road, now with me as lead singer and six rock and roll buddies from Glen Ellyn, my central focus at Highland Park High School was acting. I’d been involved in every play I auditioned for, playing leading roles in plays such as Tartuffe, Guys and Dolls, Look Back in Anger, and A Thousand Clowns. Acting had lifted me up, and I couldn’t get enough of it.

  But there I was, the class of ’73, the end of my senior year, and all my friends had graduated except me. I didn’t have enough credits. I’d aced all my theater classes but bombed everything else. So I needed to return in September for one additional semester. I felt like a failure.

  This RV trip turned out to be the vacation from hell. Everything went wrong. The air conditioner broke down. The plumbing got backed up. We ran out of gas. For most of the trip I tried to escape by hiding in the RV’s bathroom reading my script. The last thing I wanted was to be on this family vacation. One afternoon, when things were particularly hot and tense, the RV chugged along, and everybody was cranky. From inside the bathroom, the family heard me say, “Whose idea was this anyway?” I’d voiced what everybody was thinking. Dad snickered. Mom chuckled. The crankiness vanished. My brother and sister doubled over laughing. Even I couldn’t hold it back. Soon we were all howling.

  When I started back to school in September, I’d forgotten about laughing. All my friends had gone to university, but I’m the dummy, I told myself. Depressed, I auditioned for Cyrano while still feeling ashamed for having failed my senior year, and I fumbled through my lines. I tried to get back on track, but my heart wasn’t in it and I fumbled again. Loser! Halfway through my audition I fumbled a third time, stopped, and muttered, “I can’t do this.” I shuffled my feet in frustration. Barbara Patterson looked uncharacteristically confused. I shook my head, walked out of the room, and headed home.

  I simply couldn’t stand the thought of being back at high school again.

  That evening Barbara Patterson phoned and said, “Well, Gary, you didn’t do very well today, did you? But you can play this part, so I’m going to give you a callback. You don’t deserve another audition, but we are going to do this play, and you need to finish this semester whether you’re in the play or not. So you’d better get in gear and give it your best shot.”

  I didn’t say a word. She hung up, and I slept on her words. Barbara Patterson had helped me make many changes in my life since I first stumbled into West Side Story. Under her guidance, I’d seen how acting wasn’t about sitting in class and taking tests. It was about relying on instincts, going with your gut, and giving it everything you’ve got—all things I actually excelled at, I thought. Even though I was still a lousy reader, I’d found I could memorize lines easily. Onstage, I acted intuitively. Onstage, I felt free. Confident. At home.

  During the previous two years, I had taken every theater class I could take—not only the performance classes, but the technical classes as well. I’d learned about lighting and set building. I’d painted sets and pounded nails. Theater had become my life. Each of the past two summers, Barbara Patterson had gone to Beloit College in Wisconsin to perform in a professional summer stock theater company, doing eight plays in eight weeks—and she’d asked me to intern there twice. They gave me a dorm room, some food, and thirty bucks a week. I’d worked around the clock, hanging lights, running sound, painting sets, whatever needed to be done. I’d even played small parts in a couple of their plays when they needed a kid.

  One of the plays they did was Philadelphia, Here I Come!, about a son in Ireland ready to move to New York to live with his aunt. On the last night before the son leaves, he tries to break through to his father. The two have never connected. The part of the young man is played by one actor while his thoughts are played by a different actor. The play was so beautiful, so moving, that I’d called my friend Jeff Perry and urged him to come to Wisconsin and see the play with me. Jeff had driven up and been blown away by the play too.

  The previous year, when I’d been a senior for the first time, Barbara Patterson began teaching a directing class, which had never been done before at Highland Park. Each student’s final project consisted of directing a play. It didn’t matter what play or where it was performed; she just wanted us to direct. Jeff and I were still so moved by Philadelphia, Here I Come! that we asked if we could codirect it. She gave us the green light, so we went to our principal and asked if we could use the cafeteria’s stage. Teachers used the stage for announcements, never for theater, but he said yes.

  So we turned the announcement stage into our backstage area and built a theater-in-the-round in the middle of the cafeteria. We went to one of the technical guys in the school, a real electronics whiz, and asked him to build us a lighting board complete with dimmer switches. We built a lighting system by inserting floodlights into coffee cans. Somebody’s father owned a cable business, so we asked him to donate wire, and somebody else’s dad had a business that sold conduit piping. We secured the conduit to the ceiling, hung our lights from the piping, and ran the cable wiring from our coffee-can lights down to our makeshift dimmer board. We cast the play and rehearsed it, and that spring we performed the play in the cafeteria, four shows, and brought down the house. Jeff and I both received top grades, and the following year Barbara ended up turning the cafeteria space into a permanent theater. For once, I’d felt at the top of my class.

  Jeff had graduated in the spring and gone to Illinois State University where he quickly became a rising star in their drama department. At one point, I contemplated going to college, maybe even to Juilliard, to study theater. I never told anyone about my dream, because report cards came out and I needed to go back to high school again. Who was I kidding? I whispered to myself. Juilliard?!

  Fast-forward to the fall and the audition I’d bombed. The day after Mrs. Patterson’s call, the callbacks were held at school. I went in and read with two friends, Bob Lovitz and Barbara Brandt, both great actors. We read the famous scene where Cyrano is under the balcony. Cyrano is an older man, big-nosed and not handsome, but a poet inside—and he loves the beautiful Roxane, who’s being courted by the young, handsome Christian, a muscle-bound bumpkin. Christian is under the balcony looking up at Roxane, trying to woo her, and Cyrano skulks in the shadows feeding Christian lines that eventually win Roxane’s heart. I was playing Cyrano, Bob was Christian, and Barbara Brandt was Roxane—and the three of us crushed it. We finished the scene, and I looked out at the seats. Barbara Patterson was sitting there, eyes closed, a bemused smile on her face, and she didn’t say anything for a moment. I knew she’d been deeply moved.

  Once again, theater had snapped me out of my darkness. Barbara Patterson had shaken all the self-pity out of me. She’d gotten me back o
n track.

  Barbara Brandt was cast as Roxane. Bob had auditioned so well that Mrs. Patterson did something she’d never done before. She cast both Bob and me as Cyrano and also cast both of us as Christian. We learned both parts, and each night we swapped roles.

  We performed the play in the cafeteria. School officials had built a real theater there by then, with a stage, proper risers, and real lights, not coffee cans. It was a tremendous experience, being an eighteen-year-old playing Cyrano de Bergerac. I couldn’t help but feel part of something larger than myself. The confidence I gained by having the chance to play this great part in this wonderful play made all that angst over having to return to high school fade away. I thought, This acting thing is something I want to do for a long, long time.

  In January 1974, I finally graduated from high school. Today, if people ask, I just laugh and tell them I was part of the class of “1973 and a half.”

  College wasn’t on my radar anymore. I just wanted to keep doing plays with these pals of mine. So with two friends who were still in high school, Rick Argosh and Leslie Wilson, we gathered some other kids we knew and we got ready to do a show. My parents knew the architects of a Unitarian church in Deerfield with a big open space. I asked them to ask the church folks if they would let us do a play there, and they said yes. We started rehearsing a play called And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little, a complex comedy about three middle-aged sisters who face their problems after the death of their mother. Since everyone was still in school except me, we rehearsed after school hours and into the night. It felt great to be working on a play again, in our own little space, an idea that was all our own doing.