[A beat.]
You probably had the easiest time of it, Joe. I heard you went to bed and never woke up from a heart attack. That was quite a memorial they had for you at Ethical Culture. There wasn’t an empty seat in the house. Which reminds me, according to the public library, Catch-22 sold, worldwide, over 10 million copies. It’s listed as one of the largest-selling novels of all time. Having you visit with me tonight . . . It’s a special treat for me. I thank you . . . dearly.
[Looks to his right.]
To bring you up to date, Bob . . . As the sole producer and co-writer with Fosse on All That Jazz, you might like to hear that the movie was released a year after you passed away. I know it wasn’t anything near the kind of movie you wanted it to be. The good news is that it’s become something of a cult favorite and your family probably made some money out of it. Bob Fosse didn’t hang around much longer than you did.
[He drinks some water.]
But getting back to how it feels being an old man . . . It’s odd, since childhood, I’ve been blessed and cursed with a rampant imagination. In spite of that, I rarely think about illness and decrepitude. It’s as though I haven’t the patience for idle speculation. Here’s the payoff. Last year, a young woman on the crosstown bus offered me her seat. I was . . . What? Shocked? Mortified? Humiliated? Yes, all of the above and more. She actually asked me if I wanted her seat? Can you imagine that? Who . . . Who asked her to ask me? What provoked her? My demeanor? My posture? My body odor? I took a shower that morning, I shaved (trimmed my beard), I dressed neatly, smartly, I stood straight, shoulders back, chest out, chin tucked in. My mind was reeling. “Please sit down,” she said a second time as she stood up. I was furious. I was beside myself. She couldn’t possibly think I was incapable of standing on my own two feet! Didn’t she realize everyone was staring at me, examining me for possible physical disabilities! I glared at her, venomously, as I shook my head, damning her to the ninth circle of hell for committing the most malicious sin of all: humiliating a . . . a . . . a senior citizen . . . humiliating him in front of a busload full of strangers!
[A beat to collect himself.]
I’ve reached the conclusion that being old can be defined as being naked. Every effort to conceal your aging from others has been in vain. Like King Lear, you’re constrained to flaunt your naked self, your shriveled, desiccated, mortal self, so that you, too, can see with your eyes . . . what others see with their eyes . . . a poor, forked, naked old man as thou art.
[A beat.]
Friendship now requires that I introduce to you a dimension of my self that is not visible. I haven’t told this to anyone, not even Reene. Frankly, I’m not even sure I’ll ever tell her. I have no idea how she’ll react, and I don’t, above all else, I don’t want to cause her any unnecessary heartache.
[He sits on serving table, clasping his hands on lap; ruminates.]
I was fifteen, employed as an after-school usher at the Loews Premier on Sutter Avenue, when I broke with my orthodox heritage. It was Passover and while at work, after much deliberation, I walked up to the candy counter and bought a Hershey bar with almonds. You should know, Bob, that during the Passover holiday you’re only allowed to eat foods prepared for Passover on a separate set of dishes. Hershey bars with almonds were definitely forbidden. Nonetheless I ate the candy bar, seated in the last row of the balcony, watching a movie. Gradually I stopped going to religious services on a regular basis; from there on I was on the bumpy road to perdition. In spite of that, in times of dire stress, I prayed to God, asking for His help in solving one dilemma or another. I did see to it that my children were bar and bas mitzvahed and that my grandkids called me Zada. As a gesture of Jewish solidarity, I belonged to one synagogue or another, which I attended three times a year for the High Holy Days. Later on, much later on, when I was in my seventies, without any discernible cause except, perhaps, excessive anxiety, I started praying every morning, staring out of the living-room window as the sun rose in the east.
[He rises, stands behind his chair, and prays, eyes closed, hands clasped, head bobbing back and forth, earnestly, quietly.]
“Chamois Yisroale adonoi aliena, Adonei he Chad. Baruch hem recall melaena l’oilom voyed. Hear, oh, Israel, the Lord is my God, the Lord is one. Blessed be his glorious kingdom for ever and ever. You shall love the Lord your God with all your mind, with all your strength, with all your being. Set these words I command you this day upon your heart. Teach them faithfully to your children; speak of them in your home and on your way, when you lie down and when you rise up. Bind them as a sign upon your hand; let them be a symbol before your eyes; inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. Be mindful of all my mitzvoth and do them: so shall you consecrate yourselves to your God. I, the Lord, am your God, who led you out of Egypt to be your God; I, the Lord, am your God.
[He opens his eyes, unclasps hands.]
So I prayed, until recently, every morning at sunrise. I prayed for the recovery of people I loved who were dying. I prayed that the war in Israel would end. I prayed that the ice caps on the North Pole would stop melting. I prayed that a play of mine opening that evening would receive favorable reviews, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. My naivety embarrasses me. I’m certain there’s a simple theological explanation why my prayers went unanswered. But, obviously, throughout the millennia, billions of people have prayed billions of times, and if their prayers had been answered, there would have been and there would be today billions of healthy, wealthy, happy, peace-loving people. And we know none of that ever happened. We can logically assume, putting aside statistical probabilities, that their prayers went unanswered. And yet, by the billions, people continue to pray. Admittedly, there is in prayer itself an indefinable sense of consolation, of reassurance, of somebody up there really cares about me. So I, too, continued praying. I was touching all the bases and doing harm to no one. Pascal knew of what he spoke. There are no losses in the game of prayer.
[Seated at table.]
Once again, this was until recently. Now, I no longer get up to pray as the sun rises in the east. I no longer go to a synagogue three times a year for the High Holy Days. And, frankly, I feel better with myself for it, no more than that; I feel better with myself for it.
[He scrounges through his pockets until he finds the cutout he’s looking for.]
Charles Kingsley, a nineteenth-century minister, wrote a letter to T. H. Huxley, offering his condolences on the sudden death of Huxley’s four-year-old son. In his letter Kingsley stated that if Huxley would open his heart to God’s promise of eternal life, he could look forward to meeting his son in heaven. This is Huxley’s reply.
[Reads.]
“I cannot sufficiently thank you . . . My convictions . . . on all the matters of which you speak, are . . . firmly rooted. But the great blow which fell upon me seemed to stir them from their foundation, and had I lived a couple of centuries earlier I could have fancied a devil scoffing at me . . . and asking me what profit it was to have stripped myself of the hopes and consolations of the mass of mankind? To which my only reply was and is . . . Oh, devil! The truth is better than much profit. I have searched over the grounds of my belief and if wife and child and name and fame were all to be lost to me one after the other as the penalty, still I will not lie!”
[He returns scrap paper to pocket.]
Anyway, you may well ask: Why did I make the choice not to pray? Why recently? Why not sooner, earlier? Let me shed myself of all duplicity. At my age I refuse to speak to someone who refuses to speak to me. Furthermore, I amnot here on this wobbly patch of earth to be swayed from what I perceive to be reality. To paraphrase Bertrand Russell: There’s something contemptible about a man who can’t face the dangers of life without the help of comfortable myths.
[A beat.]
What I failed to say previously in listing for you the good fortune I’ve had, my health, my marriage, children
, grandkids, having the time to write and read what I choose . . . What I didn’t tell you, what I couldn’t tell you, is that there is, with aging, the oppressive burden of mortality. You can see it in the texture of your skin when you shower, you can feel it when you run your finger over the bulging blue veins on the back of your hand, you can taste it before you have breakfast in the morning. Yes, taste it. This from Montaigne, my incomparable mentor: “So I have formed the habit of having death continually present, not merely in my imagination, but in my mouth.” So it is that I taste it before I have breakfast in the morning. And, finally, you can sense mortality in the uncertainty of your stride when you start off on your daily walk and you can smell the stench of mortality before you fall asleep at night.
[Bitterly.]
For this abomination, I fault Almighty God and the forces of evolution. They and they alone are responsible for severely limiting the lifespan of humankind. Almighty God, in a brief fit of distemper, “Dust you are and to dust you shall return,” cursed Adam and Eve because Eve was eating an apple. Afterwards, he arrived at the paltry figure of 120 years. At the other end of the spectrum, evolution, without a thought in its empty head, decreed that humankind will live for an indeterminate age, hop-scotching from twenty years in medieval times, to forty-five years at the beginning of the twentieth century, to seventy-eight years at the beginning of the twenty-first century, thanks due to the revelations of medical science.
[A note of desperation.]
I ask you, why did God and evolution choose such paltry longevity numbers for their ostensibly preferred species? There are tortoises that live over 150 years, whales that live over 200 years, and Icelandic clams that live over 400 years! What are we, orphans, rejects, biologically inferior to the Icelandic calms? Hey, gimme a break, will you?
[He scrounges through his pockets until he finds the piece of scrap paper he’s looking for.]
I have something here that gets into what I’m trying to . . . Listen to this.
[Reads from scrap of paper.]
“Over 99 percent of the species that ever walked, flew, or slithered upon this earth are now extinct. When we look at the natural world, we see extraordinary complexity, but we do not see optimal design. We see redundancy, regression, and unnecessary complications; we see bewildering inefficiencies that result in suffering and death.” That’s from Sam Harris’s Letters to a Christian Nation.
[He returns scrap paper to pocket.]
So where does this leave us? It leaves us between a rock and a hard place, between a mute, tyrannical God and the blind, blundering force of evolution, both of whom are responsible for a failure of “optimal design” and “bewildering inefficiencies that result in suffering and death.” No doubt the average lifespan for humanity will continue to increase at a snail’s pace, once again, thanks due to the revelations of medical science.
[MURRAY sits at the table, visibly distraught. He looks at each of his guests, speaks softly.]
I have a . . . an embarrassing confession to make . . . to each of you. For the last year or so, I’ve been taking pills to get through the night. I find it increasingly difficult to forget that I’m eighty-two years of age, shorn of my youth, my vigor, my sexuality. My cache of good fortune seems to have petered out. More and more I find myself counting the hours left in a day, the days left in a week, the weeks left in a year. I listen with dumb fascination to the beating of my heart, the throbbing of my pulse, the scuffling of my footsteps. At times, a scream of hopelessness congeals in my throat, a burgeoning, suffocating scream.
[In a strangled voice.]
I can barely breathe. I stretch my mouth wide open and I try to scream . . . with all my might, with every muscle in my throat, my face, my lungs.
[He opens his mouth as wide as he can, tilting his head upwards, but the only sound he emits is a barely audible, pitifully plaintive moan.]
Ahhh! Ahhh! Ahhh! Ahhh!
[Frustrated, he gives it up.]
But there is, I discovered, no scream in me; no release; no reprieve. I gasp. My eyes see double. My body trembles. My ears ache with the piercing sound of some hellish fiend . . . howling and screaming . . . in . . . in the cave of my skull . . . and . . . and all of a sudden . . . it occurs to me . . . to pray.
[A breath of relief.]
To Almighty God. To pray. To ask for help. Why have I wasted all this time? How could I be so blind, so stupid? I must pray. I must ask for his forgiveness, for his absolution, for his blessings so that I may live to see the sun rising once again in the east.
[He jumps to his feet, stands behind his chair, and prays, eyes closed, hands clasped, head bobbing back and forth, loudly, frantically.]
“Chamois Yisroale adonoi aliena, Adonei he Chad. Baruch chem mecall melaena l’oilom voyed. Hear, oh, Israel, the Lord is my God, the Lord is one. Blessed be his glorious kingdom for ever and ever. You shall love the Lord your God with all your mind, with all your strength, with all your being. Set these words I command you this day upon your heart. Teach them faithfully to your children; speak of them in your home and on your way, when you lie down and when you rise up. Bind them as a sign upon your hand; let them be a symbol before your eyes; inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. Be mindful of all my mitzvoth and do them: so shall you consecrate yourselves to your God. I, the Lord, am your God, who led you out of Egypt to be your God; I, the Lord, am your God.
[In a panic, MURRAY interrupts the above prayer, whenever reflection supersedes impulse.]
But then I think: What in the world am I doing? Am I going crazy? I don’t believe in an Almighty God! I’m a non-believer, a secular Jew who recognizes and acknowledges that only through the genius of medical science can we look forward to living 100, 200, 400 years, like the Icelandic clam! What am I carrying on about? Nothing I do or say will change anything. I’m your run-of-the-mill naked old man, scrounging about in the dustbin of time.
[Talking to himself.]
The jig’s up. The party’s over. The days grow short when you reach September. If that’s all there is, my friend, then let’s keep rocking and bring down the . . .
[MURRAY hears something in the hallway. He jerks his head to listen. Sound: The offstage entrance door opens and slams shut.]
[MURRAY whispers; frightened.]
It’s Reene. She’s back. She’s home.
[Glances at his wristwatch.]
It’s too early. Something must have happened. Maybe she fell, hurt herself, broke her wrist or fingers or . . .
[MURRAY’s three spectral guests rise and exit, downstage right. Follows them but doesn’t exit, still whispering.]
Where are you guys going? Why are you leaving? We haven’t finished. We still have a lot to . . .
[A beat.]
Are you coming next Tuesday? You promised, 6:30 p.m. Don’t forget. I’ll be waiting for you!
[He hurries to exit the dining area, upstage left.]
Reene? Reene? Where are you? Why did you come back so early?
[He searches for REENE throughout the apartment, his voice receding further and further away from us.]
[MURRAY offstage.]
Is everything all right? Did anything happen? You didn’t fall and hurt yourself, did you? Are you ill? Do you have a headache? Is your hip bothering you? Your sinuses? I’ll heat up a cup of English Breakfast tea with lemon. How was dinner? Did you enjoy yourself? Was it fun? Where are you? Reene? Reene? Where did you go to? Will you answer me? Is anything wrong? Will you do me a favor and answer me?
[Sound: MURRAY’s voice fades out as . . . Lights: simultaneously fade out.]
John Guare
What It Was Like
from
The Best American Short Plays 2009–2010
one of seven works collected by Daniel Gallant under the heading Seven Card Draw
character
&n
bsp; NARRATOR, male, late twenties–early forties
Happiness. I had met the woman who’d become my wife on Nantucket in 1975 and it looked as if Adele and I might actually work out, or, more to the point, that I might not mess it up. I was finally living in my future. One day while walking along Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, where I lived, a flash of yellow crashed into me. A spandex-clad cyclist leaned over my body, sprawled on the pavement, and yelled down at me, “You broke the chain on my ten-speed Raleigh! You broke the chain on my ten-speed Raleigh bike! I wish you were dead! Die! Die! Are you dead?” He went off, pushing his lopsided yellow racer, screaming, “Die! Die!” I limped home. Nothing had happened, but suppose I had died? Worse—suppose something had happened to Adele? What would happen if I lost all this? How permanent was this unusual, precious happiness that she had brought to my life? What was the shelf life of our time together? I suddenly could imagine dying. The unimaginable became imaginable. But if I lost everything, what would I be left with? Everything seemed to be so perilous, life merely waiting to be broken by a yellow spandex flash out of nowhere. Is it all Mary Tyrone’s last line in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night: “And then I . . . was so happy for a time”? Things in the seventies were not so hot for little old New York. Like me and that cyclist, the city constantly careened on the brink of collapse. Basic services vanished. Garbage seemed to collect everywhere on the street. Gangs of thugs would set those piles of trash on fire. Lots of street crime. People exchanging mugging stories became the new small talk. “I gave him all I had. He waved his gun at me: “Is this it?” “Would you take a check?” Graffiti tattooed walls, windows, buses, billboards, parks. An English friend said the graffiti made each subway train zoom into the station with the force of an obscene phone call. On October 30, 1975, the New York Daily News headline immortalized President Gerald Ford’s response to this blight: FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD. A massive, oppressive construction called the West Side Highway ran above and along the abandoned rotting piers that lined the Hudson River on West Street from Christopher Street to Fourteenth Street. In the round-the-clock darkness under the highway, trucks were parked, block after block of trucks, their rear doors hanging open, inviting anyone who desired to climb in, turning this underbelly into an ulcerous parking lot from hell. A sub-subculture of illicit sex, drugs, violence festered in the backs of these trucks. Were they abandoned? Where did they come from? You would never walk along the river at night unless you were feeling suicidal. Don’t forget the unsolved Greenwich Village “bag murders”; butchered bodies in black plastic bags would float in the Hudson right off this hellhole. And just to keep you on your toes: a gang of wild neighborhood kids went around beating up people at random. Yet I was the happiest I’d ever been in my life. When I met Adele in 1975, I was living in the Village near the river on Bank Street in what had been John Lennon’s apartment before he moved uptown to meet his fate in the Dakota. What an apartment! It consisted of two rooms, the first being the ground-floor length of the brownstone building, windowless and very dark; the second room was all light, a thirty-foot ceiling, banks of skylights, a spiral staircase leading to the roof garden. An unnamed sculptor decades before had built this dream studio on what had been the brownstone’s garden. Part of me loved living in the shabby residue of John Lennon’s fame. It made me interesting. Another part of me refused to face the fact that the apartment was unlivable. The studio room with the thirty-foot ceilings and skylights was impossible to heat in the winter. The drinks by my bed would freeze during a January night. In the summer it would take a nuclear-powered AC to cool this thirty-foot-high inferno. I asked the landlord, “Why did John Lennon move out?” “He wanted more room.” And I said, “But that’s why I’m moving in.” The rent for the time was outrageous. Five hundred dollars a month. I took it. All that remained of John and Yoko was a large bed in the center of the room with a number of posts around it; attached to each post was a television set tuned to one channel. In pre-cable days this meant seven TVs, seven stations. My predecessors apparently would stay in bed wearing headsets whose sound channels they would switch as they switched (or didn’t switch) their eyes. The first night I moved in I heard scratching at the front door, which led up a short flight of stairs onto the street. “John,” the voice said. “Who is it?” I asked brightly as I started to unlock the door, sure it was some pal stopping by to see my new glamour pad. The desperate voice mewled, “John, let me in. I’ve come such a long way.” Which friend was playing a joke? “No, who is it?” “John, let me in, I love you.” “Tell me who you are.” “ John, I love you. Let me in.” The creepy urgency in the late-night voice was no joke. I didn’t open the door. The scratching and weeping continued all night. I opened the door in the morning. Bouquets of wilted flowers lined the doorstep with a card: “I love you, John.” Almost every day in the four years I lived there I would find sprays of roses or chrysanthemums left at the door or elaborately decorated cakes with “John Forever” in frosting or long, yearning confessional letters that only John—the other John, the real John—would understand. They told me their secrets. In those pre-Internet days, these pilgrims had not yet learned that the object of their obsession had moved uptown; 105 and one-fourth Bank Street (yes, one-fourth, not one-half) was still the requisite destination for their hajj. I’d say to the anguished spiritual travelers huddling outside my door, “He doesn’t live here.” “But we’ve comes so far. Australia. Japan. New Zealand. Oregon. Germany. Where is he?” Sometimes they’d get very angry. “Hey, don’t get mad at me, I’m not hiding him. He doesn’t live here. I swear to you. Yoko doesn’t live here. No, I don’t know where he went. Back off.” “Let us in.” “No, you can’t come in.” “We want peace!” “I want peace!” “We have to come in!” I understood that. I wanted “in” somewhere as well. I wanted peace as well. What was my life going to be? I inadvertently lived in a world that for so many others was the Mecca of desperate dreams. Why couldn’t I be that John? Once, someone left a delicately painted, self-proclaimed official passport ensuring John free passage to anywhere in the universe. Why couldn’t I have a passport like that to get me out of that place Wallace Stevens described so accurately, where one’s desire is too difficult to tell from despair. I had a baby grand piano I loved to play, gleefully torturing my next-door neighbors John Cage and Merce Cunningham, who would pound on the wall for me to shut up. I’d leave my apartment, size up today’s crowd of Lennonites, and then I’d trot up the street to do my day’s errands—and watch out for yellow bikes. And then in the midst of all this, I met Adele. My next play came together out of incredible happiness and daily violence and insatiable yearning in this failing city that dreamed of success. Sometimes happiness gives you the security you need to go into the dark places. People always lament what the city used to be, or what a neighborhood once was. That’s what I love about New York City—it’s always being reborn, it’s always reinventing itself. And it demands the same of you—that you keep readjusting to time. You can’t live in the past in this city; it’s just not there anymore.
Best Monologues from the Best American Short Plays, Volume Three Page 5
