by David Adjmi
“I know you’re not on speaking terms with him,” she said, “but what about your sister?”
“She speaks to him. Everyone speaks to him but me.”
“But no one was invited?”
“Well, he made Stevie his best man.”
“His best man?”
“My sister only found about the wedding because her manicurist told her.”
“Her manicurist?”
Karin’s entire face scrunched up like she was solving an impossible math problem. Then she threw her head back and burst out in a quick capriccio of laughter. Her hair was done up in a bun held in place by a helix of chopsticks that bobbed up and down like antennae. Eventually the laughter subsided, and her good humor about it curdled very suddenly.
“What is his problem?” she said.
I found her sudden anger a little jarring. “Well,” I said, “he does have every right to get married. And we aren’t on speaking terms anymore so—”
“No no no,” interrupted Karin, who seemed like she might catapult herself from the Eames chair right out the window, “that’s bullshit.”
Her reaction startled me. “I probably make him sound worse than he is.”
“You don’t make him sound worse than he is. You wanted something reciprocal and mutual, you wanted to be seen as a human being with needs, and he wouldn’t allow that.”
“Well, I did steal that roll of quarters from him.”
“Because he is an asshole!”
Maybe it was out of reflexive loyalty but I didn’t like Karin cursing my father; it struck me as unsavory. “He’s not that bad,” I said.
“He’s an asshole!”
“I don’t care if he got married!”
“Yes you do care. You care or we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about it.”
“I haven’t spoken to him in over a year. We don’t have a relationship anymore!”
“You wanted a relationship and he wouldn’t allow it—and you tried to talk to him but he was too cowardly to have an honest conversation. He doesn’t want a son, he wants a mirror—a mirror that makes him look wonderful. If the mirror shows him anything but his own perfection he throws it in the trash, and that’s what he did to you. That is not love.”
Karin was right. I did want a relationship with him—even now. Even after everything I’d been through with my father, there was a part of me that would cut out my own heart to be loved by him. I would debase myself, hurt myself—I would do anything to win my father’s love. It sickened me to see my own feelings denuded like this. They weren’t rational, and I wanted to be rational. I was a man, and an adult, and needed to be self-sufficient—and he was a terrible father, and a pathological liar, but none of that mattered. I suddenly felt my entire life shrink down to a concentrated pinpoint: the only thing that existed was my need to be loved by this horrible man who was incapable of love.
“God damn him,” said Karin, like she was in some Swedish movie about adultery. “That bastard!”
“You know what?” I said. “He is a bastard.”
Karin’s spine lengthened. She nodded lightly. “My father is a bastard,” I repeated. Karin’s outrage awakened something in me. “He is a bastard,” she echoed. It was like we were in church, whipping one another up. I felt elated to hate him with her.
The warlike agitation from my therapy session carried over through my car ride back to Iowa City, and when I got home, I marched to the phone and dialed my father’s number. The instant he picked up I launched my attack: “Did you get married?”
“Oh, it’s you,” he muttered, lightly dislocated, as though he were trying to remember who to be with me. “Nice to finally hear from you.”
“Arlene said you got married. She said you didn’t invite anyone except for Stevie. Is that true? IS IT?” I was surprised by the aggression in my voice. I was like a guard dog—I was about to jump through the phone and start biting out the veins in his neck. My father fumbled for words. “It was a small wedding,” he said. “We just had a few people.”
“Bullshit,” I barked. “We’re your fucking kids!”
“I wanted to invite you. I couldn’t find your address.”
“You what?”
“I couldn’t get ahold of your mother.”
“Did you ever hear of a phone book?” I snapped. “I’m not in a fucking witness relocation program!”
I slammed down the phone. I was furious, but underneath that anger, I felt invigorated. Something released inside me. I’d never confronted my father with actual feelings. I’d been like a prostitute, pimping my own feelings and needs and making myself agreeable—not just to my father, to everyone—but now something inside me was cracked open. And though I could not produce my inner reality for Karin on her little fainting couch in the house with all the wind chimes and Japanophile flourishes I could feel it now, in my tiny studio apartment on Linn Street, in the middle of Iowa City.
Near the end of that fall semester, I was home for Thanksgiving break when suddenly I felt wild with inspiration. Something that had been building invisibly in me burst open, like millions of tiny buds opening and flowering all at once. I was walking up Tenth Avenue when I began hearing dialogue for a play—it was uncanny. There were people in my head, and the people were saying actual sentences; the words were clear as a bell. This was the sort of thing Irene Fornés talked about in her workshop, the sort of thing that was supposed to happen to writers all the time—only it never happened to me. But now the portal opened. My inner world spontaneously unlocked. The occurrence was so unprompted—so numinous and weird—that at first I decided to ignore it. I kept walking, hoping the voices would shut up—the whole scenario creeped me out. I felt like the telekinetic children in Escape to Witch Mountain or Kirk Douglas’s son in The Fury. I’d always wanted a bizarre occult power, but now that I had one, the power felt unwieldy and rogue—and there was something invasive about people having a conversation in your head.
As I was crossing Tenth Avenue, though, I felt a surge of urgency; I remembered my professor at Iowa saying you had to strike while the iron was hot, so I did. I hurriedly pulled my notebook out of my JanSport and crouched in the middle of the street to jot down the dialogue. When the light turned green, I sprinted back to the sidewalk—I had to write quickly, the words were gushing out in complete sentences. I’d heard about composers writing symphonies in complete blocks of music, but nothing like this had ever happened to me—I was no longer me: I’d merged with some spirit that took possession of me there on the sidewalk. Then, as suddenly as it began, my ecstatic state ended. The characters stopped speaking, the dialogue stopped flowing. I hadn’t the vaguest idea why I’d become inspired, or why the inspiration stopped, or what I could do to make it happen again.
I didn’t dare look at or touch my notes until I was back in Iowa City that Monday—at which point I had exactly three weeks before my workshop reading. I didn’t know that I could finish a draft of a full-length play in three weeks. Some writers could. Kendra, for example, was famous for her prodigious output—and Fassbinder would shoot a film during the day, work on the script for another during breaks, and in the evening would be in postproduction for yet another (granted, he was a coke addict, and the drugs fueled in large part his prodigious output, but he was able to do it). I, on the other hand, procrastinated; I dragged my heels and doubted myself. But my crazy feat of inspiration on Tenth Avenue gave me courage. And I could hear Karin’s voice in my head: “You can do it! Have faith!”
I boiled some water for my coffee. I measured the grounds for my French press and let the coffee steep. When I took my notebook out of my backpack, the phone rang.
“Hello,” I said, hysterically.
“David?” trilled a sweet little voice. “It’s Kendra!” She sounded so optimistic, like Little Mary Sunshine. “Do you want to go to the mall and see that Albert Brooks movie?”
I felt suddenly desperate to see the Albert Brooks movie, go to the mall, do anything but write
, but I had to resist the siren pull of the Coral Ridge Mall.
“Kendra, I’m writing!” I replied harshly—in a tone that shocked even me. Kendra’s spotless manners kicked right in.
“Oh my goodness,” she said. “Go write!”
I had my notebook and pens, my earplugs safely nestled in my earholes. I prepared for this moment the way priests prepared for communion—I wanted it to feel holy and sanctified—but when I sat to write, there was nothing. The inner world that fulminated so suddenly on the corner of Tenth Avenue just a week earlier was void again. Maybe it was just a one-time thing. Maybe it was the creative equivalent of epilepsy and the seizures came and went with no way to induce or stop them.
The weeks flew by, and I couldn’t figure out how or what to write. I spent the weekend before my reading agonizing over it. Sunday morning I woke up in a panic: my play was due in just over twenty-four hours and I hadn’t written a single page.
In an act of desperation I pulled out my Harcourt Brace teacher’s manual and opened to the section on A Doll’s House. I made the spontaneous decision to turn the fragment of dialogue I’d written in Chelsea that afternoon into an adaptation of Ibsen’s play. I boiled down the events in the play based on the plot summary, numbered them, and began to write. Whenever I didn’t know what to write next I looked at my numbered list and used it as a loose guide. I wrote at hydroplaning speed. There was no time to think up clever boutades and one-liners. I didn’t have time to overthink anything—I wasn’t thinking. I felt myself surrender to the chaos, the cacophony of surging detail. It was like a flame was lit from inside me that burned away the mundane borders of the self, the particulate matter I identified as me.
The characters who appeared were an odd combination of those voices chatting away inside my head that day on Tenth Avenue, and parts of me, but not the parts I liked. They were saying things I hated, things that were not clever and lapidary, but crude and idiotic. They were riddled with anxiety and hysteria. And though parts were funny, the humor was unstable, and the play was mainly scary and upsetting. My protagonist reminded me of Margit Carstensen—with her angular and hard-edged performance style, her sudden outbursts of emotion, the wild shifts and baroque extremes. The play evoked Martha, but also Fear of Fear when Margit’s character has a breakdown listening to Leonard Cohen’s “Lover Lover Lover” on the record player. I also had flashes of Julianne Moore (in Safe, but also her coke binge with Heather Graham in Boogie Nights) and Lisa Kudrow in Friends, and Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour. These influences all vibrated inside of me like a tuning fork and helped me find the pitch of the play. Instead of trying to become these characters in books and films, I was starting to channel them into my writing.
Ten minutes before class started I sped to the theatre building, parked my car, ran into the office, and printed copies of the finished play for everyone. Minutes later we were in Room 41 reading it aloud. I had no idea what I’d written—I hadn’t had a chance to censor or change anything, and you could feel that in the writing: it was raw and unrefined, but that was its appeal. Susan read the main character, and she instinctively got the character’s mix of bubbliness and chirpy hysteria. The critique afterward was short—it was the final class of the semester, people were leaving town for the holidays—but people seemed to like it.
After a short break, Tom and Naomi announced the selections for the Playwrights Festival, and, even though I’d missed the deadline, they picked my play for a full production. They bent the rules to include it. I was shocked—and thrilled. I surrendered to those crazy voices in my head, I allowed myself to write without controlling every little piece of punctuation, and they actually liked it.
Rehearsals started in April, and three days in I wanted to hurl myself out a window. The play was not good. It wasn’t the theatrical cubism I imagined, with all the fabulously jagged turns and angles of a Margit Carstensen performance. The undergraduate actors had trouble with those shifts, so the rhythms were all off. The style seemed insane. I was collapsing under the weight of all the harsh judgments I spared myself when I wrote the draft; I went from being a Zen observer of flawed humanity to a narcissistic parent carping endlessly about his kid’s ugly haircut. I began nitpicking like crazy. I endlessly rewrote scenes that were probably fine to begin with, and days later decided it was better the first way. I began picking fights with my director—the mania and hysteria of the play infected me, I’d made myself too vulnerable and I wanted to take it all back. My characters were demented—they were unappealing and hysterical. My play was ugly and I felt ugly showing it. I scheduled a meeting with Tom Hauser to see if I could cancel, but he told me it was too late for that. Not having the option to cancel it made me feel out of control. The lack of control made my back hurt. The knots got tighter, so I got a bottle of Doan’s and used an old canister of Tiger Balm Kurt had given me, but nothing seemed to help.
Two weeks into rehearsal, in the middle of a relatively sound sleep, I was jolted awake by a shooting pain up my spine. The muscles in my back began to spear and contract in sharp involuntary seizures. When I stood to relieve it, the pain only got worse. I bunted, I squatted, nothing helped. It was 4:30 in the morning but there was no way I could wait around for a more civilized hour so I picked up the phone.
“Hello?” croaked Kendra—who never seemed to be asleep (she often recounted stories of finding herself plopped headfirst on the keyboard or on the floor during an all-nighter). I could barely hold the receiver to my ear, it made the spasms worse. “I need to go to the emergency room,” I eked out before dropping the receiver onto the floor. I could hear Kendra’s tiny voice in the receiver: Are you okay? David?! I tried to speak down into the dropped phone but I was in so much pain my words came out as screams. Twenty minutes later Kendra was outside my building. “Oh my goodness,” she said lightly, chewing the inside of her lips and puckering them into the familiar goldfish shape as she led my poor wincing, sobbing self into the passenger seat of her car.
At the emergency room, the doctor prescribed me tiny little pills, and, handing over the prescription, warned me how strong they were. Once we filled the prescription, I shook one from the bottle. The yellow pill was the size of about an eighth of my fingernail—and I was supposed to only take a quarter of that. How strong can these be? I thought. Within minutes of my taking it, I found myself glued to a chair in my rehearsal room—where I remained all that day. I was paralyzed. I couldn’t stand or move. It was disconcerting, but the pain in my back was gone.
With the pills, I was finally able to relax. Watching the actors rehearse, I could accept the play’s innumerable flaws, accept my lack of artistic ability, accept that the people of Iowa City would see how strange and stupid and neurotic I was. The play I wrote revealed to the world my essential worthlessness as a person, but there was no taking it back now—and with the help of opioids I was able to take my loss with congenial acceptance. Even if my play was awful, there was a certain pathos in failure. When the initial wave of druggedness wore off I became ambulatory and, in my opiate numbness, I felt life brighten quite suddenly. I staggered through the streets of Iowa City, my lungs contracting in the wonderfully cold air. I felt the world pass by in a colored haze. I wandered under gray skies and scudding clouds, my Dippity-do-coiffed hair flapping hard in the wind like inverse stalactites.
That week, I went on my first press junket. I did interviews with the student newspaper and the Press-Citizen. I had a radio interview with a sweet octogenarian lady named Dottie Rae—it was part of a long-standing tradition in the theatre department to be interviewed in the geriatric home where she broadcast her show. “Will there be sets?” she trilled. “Costumes?”
Yes, Dottie! Yes, yes! I replied, high on opiates, and thrilled to be interviewed at all, for I’d never been on a radio program.
The morning of the performance I awoke with a grim determination. I took my quarter of a pill. I had my coffee. I stumbled to the Italian restaurant in town, devoured a plate of gnoc
chi, then drove to the theatre building where the audience was filing into Theatre B. I took my seat. I grabbed onto the handrest. The lights went down and the play began.
Though the drugs calmed me, I could still sense I was living a nightmare. No one laughed or moved a muscle for the entirety of my play. The audience was dead silent. The theatre was like a funeral home, like a crypt. It was worse than anything I could have imagined. When the play ended I lumbered out of Theatre B. Kendra approached me with outstretched arms and gave me a hug. The pills made my back feel like a thick piece of rubber. “The audience hated it.”
“David, it was good!”
“Kendra, that was the deadest audience I’ve ever seen.”
“Because they were listening to your play.” Kendra directed my gaze to the ticket booth. Scores of people were exiting the theatre and making a beeline to purchase tickets to the second show. “I’m telling you,” she insisted, “it was good.”
Just then, Eric Abrams, the dean of the theatre department, approached me from the other end of the lobby. He had tears in his eyes. He grabbed me by the shoulders—a gesture of deep tenderness, even if it was rough and felt a little like an assault. “Oh my God,” he said. He looked like he’d just been in a car wreck. His bulbous features reddened and swelled. “Look what you made.” Eric was overcome with feeling, and it was like a blast of frenzied CinemaScope—his emotion took me over completely. His face was like a giant mural unfurling before my eyes. I’d never known another human being to look at me this way, a look of anguish and joy and gentleness all knotted together. “Look what you did,” he repeated over and over, until I started to tear up too. I was stained and ugly before him but he saw me as beautiful. Other people began clustering around me, to offer their congratulations, but Eric and I just stood for a moment, looking at each other in rapt silence, and the silence spoke volumes: I feel what you feel, he was saying. I know this pain and this loneliness. I know what it is to be alive.
