Then I felt something miraculous. I’m sitting there in the Au Bon Pain. And I’m thinking to myself, I don’t have to do this anymore. This whole thing of, like … carrying this weight on my shoulders. It all started to fade.
It was almost as if my mind was allowed to let it go. And I let it go. I let it go. It all started to fade, and it’s no longer a part of my everyday life.
My relationships started to change. Before the therapy, I was a short fuse, ready to explode at any minute. I was this lit powder keg. But I’ve lived a lifetime beyond it at this point.
I’ve got three boys. They’re amazing. My oldest is seventeen, so he remembers me prior to therapy. And he’ll say, “Angry Dad.” Or he’ll say, “Oh, Dad used to yell a lot.” My two oldest, they talk about it sometimes. “You remember when Dad used to yell all the time?”
But now? It’s the craziest thing. Now I’m like, the mellowest person I know. I’m the calm one. I just don’t do it anymore.
The whole reason I did therapy in the first place was because I didn’t want to be that person anymore. I wasn’t that person before 9/11. I was goal-oriented. I wanted to move up the corporate ladder. But that slowly started to fade. Post-9/11, none of it matters, you know? I started letting my hair grow. I have a big bushy beard. I’ve become The Dude from The Big Lebowski. I don’t yell anymore. And just … none of it matters, you know?
It’s something I say a lot now. People get themselves all worked up about work. But everyone’s replaceable at work. You’re not replaceable at home. And that, I think, is where my head is now.
I’ve got these three amazing boys. My wife has been the rock of my whole existence. Best thing that ever happened to me. She has been my everything through all of it. Patient and loving and understanding. She helped me get home on 9/11, but she also helped me find peace after. So, you know, people get themselves all worked up and angry and yelling about politics. It matters to me, but I’m not going to get myself worked up about it.
The final week of that therapy was just me talking about how I got to this place of peace. I have to tell you, it comes and it goes. I have all these other issues that I can go into for hours regarding how our country is treating survivors. But I recently had to speak to the psychiatrist that was in charge of the therapy program. We spoke on the phone. We talked about my well-being, and he wanted to know—are there any lingering effects from 9/11?
I was honest. I said I still have anxiety. I still have panic attacks. They don’t happen much. But they taught me how to handle them. It’s not completely debilitating.
They actually gave me the final cassette of me telling my story. The very last time I told the story? I have that tape.
Years ago, when you first interviewed me, I said I believed that if you went back to work after 9/11, you were just as much a hero as anybody else. I still believe that. The very notion that there were some people that were “heroes” and some people that were “victims” and some people that were damsels in distress … that’s just not the way that it was.
Right after 9/11, there was this great opportunity for us all to come together. And we did, by the way. On 9/11, or shortly thereafter, everybody was one solid unit. That’s the way I remember it. Even in Washington. Everyone came together and rallied behind a president who was largely hated, by the way, and only became more so as his presidency continued. But his response to 9/11 was terrific. He did his best to unite the country.
Everybody was proud to be American. The same thing happens every couple of years at the Olympics. We’re all one country together, as opposed to you’re black or you’re white, you’re a Republican or a Democrat. Gay or straight, whatever. At that point, you’re an American and it doesn’t matter.
After 9/11, there was common cause. It was really inspiring. And then … it faded. Was it Hurricane Katrina? Or the souring on the Iraq War? Was it the realization that there were never any weapons of mass destruction? I don’t know.
Since 9/11, we’ve grown further and further apart, whether it be economically or ideologically. And it’s sad. There’s a lot that should have been learned from 9/11. And maybe it was, briefly. But just like cramming for an exam, it’s forgotten the next day.
There’s always pain and suffering. If all you do is focus every minute of every day on the horrors of the world, we will never have happiness. Right? I learned a lot of that from my experience of 9/11. If all I do is focus on the horrors of what happened that day, I will never have any time for happiness. There’s only twenty-four hours in a day. So, in a lot of ways, I had to let it go.
I have found happiness in the small moments. And certainly, through the eyes of my children.
100 Tom talked about this in our first interview, back in the spring of 2002. He calls it the Bus Drawing project. When he started it, he literally used to draw on the bus while commuting to work in the city after 9/11. To see Tom’s pictures from the Bus Drawing project, go to: www.coroflot.com/thaddad/Bus-Drawings-Project.
101 Tom’s referring to the 1971 Stanley Kubrick film adaptation of the Anthony Burgess novel. At the end of the film, violent hooligan Alex DeLarge (played by Malcolm McDowell) is subjected to a form of extreme aversion therapy. His doctors pump him full of drugs and strap him to a chair. Metal clamps are used to hold his eyelids open. This forces Alex to stare at a video screen that plays images of some of the most violent abominations human beings can inflict on one another.
102 This film is called 9/11. It was directed by Jules and Gédéon Naudet and James Hanlon, a member of FDNY, and produced by Susan Zirinsky of CBS News.
STEPHEN ADLY GUIRGIS
Meet Stephen Adly Guirgis, fifty-five. He calls himself an actor and he is, make no mistake. But he’s also one of the most gifted playwrights working in America today.
Stephen is a founding member and a former artistic director of the groundbreaking LAByrinth Theater Company. But perhaps most important of all, he’s a native New Yorker. You’ll know this the moment you see his work.
Stephen’s plays exalt in this city. His characters hail from its taverns, prisons, brothels, halfway houses, and churches. They are drug dealers, crack-smoking hookers, ex-cons, recovering addicts, and cops gone to seed. They are curbside poets, angels who strum their harps in the sewers, and serial losers with gonzo dreams.
Many Americans write such people off as the flotsam of our society. Stephen Adly Guirgis lifts them up. Again and again, he shows how the marginalized and the dispossessed know more about life than those whom our society tends to reward. Witness how deftly he handles his work in Our Lady of 121st Street, The Motherfucker with the Hat, In Arabia We’d All Be Kings, and Between Riverside and Crazy, which, in 2015, won him many awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
A consistent feature of Stephen’s plays is his gift for conversations that bounce from one extreme to another. That’s not just how he writes. It’s how he talks.
He’ll speak about something awful and, right in the middle of that, you’ll find yourself laughing. And vice versa.
We talked at an outdoor café in October 2020, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
I GREW UP here. My father came from Egypt. This was back in the early sixties, when being from another country was a big deal, you know?
My mother was Irish Catholic. From Jersey. Their first year together, my dad was going crazy. He couldn’t handle Kearney, New Jersey. It was Podunk. It was too slow. He grew up in Cairo. So he was, like, “Can we go to New York? Let’s go to New York. Let’s please just move to New York.”
My mother’d always dreamed of it. But she was, like, “Honey, you’re new to this country. How are you gonna make it work?”
Well. The moment he got here, everything clicked. He found a job. He found the shops. He knew how to get to the subway. It was just boom, boom, boom. So that’s how I ended up living here. I was three months old when we moved.
We got this rent-controlled apartment. We were living above our means. All my friends wh
o lived in this neighborhood, they could all afford going to sleepaway camp. They could get leather sneakers before—remember when there was no leather sneakers? They would have after-school classes in, like, clowning. Stuff like that. And I’d be like, “I want to take clowning.” Or the guitar. “I want to learn how to play guitar!”
So in this neighborhood, I didn’t fit in economically. But I kind of fit in socially. I went to kindergarten and grammar school up on 121st Street where I fit in much better economically, but socially there was a bit of adjustment. Basically, I was a white kid where there weren’t that many white kids. Plus, I wasn’t a good athlete. I wasn’t fearless. Like, I was smart, but back then that wasn’t necessarily a positive thing.
I had to learn to get by. And I did.
A while back I realized that, if I have a talent for writing, it’s because, when I was a kid, I fucking listened like my life depended on it. I’d wear my pants one way in this neighborhood, go uptown and I’d roll them up this way, that way. I was always trying to figure out how to just be accepted, you know? And that’s built into my writing.
Basically, I’ve lived here on and off my whole life. And this neighborhood back then … growing up, my mother would send me to Zabar’s, which only has, like, a couple items that are cheap.103 The only thing we could afford was the rye bread. So she sent me to get the rye bread. And right in front of Zabar’s, it used to be like … what’s that place in London where they argue about politics? In public? Trafalgar Square!
Right in front of Zabar’s, they used to have every left-wing, communist organization. People screaming, “Register! Sign up! We need to get this guy on the ballot!”
That’s what this neighborhood was. Traditionally, it was crazy fucking communists, intellectuals and artists, opera singers and Puerto Ricans. It was middle-class, Jewish, liberal Democrats.
I lived on Riverside in the eighties. And back when I was growing up? We’d say, “Are you going up to Broadway? You’d better walk up 84th Street. You walk up at 85th Street, you may not make it to West End.” There were gangs, drug rehabs, SROs. Like, all that shit.
But it’s not that now.
Now this neighborhood is, like, baby strollers and a lot of entitlement. It’s not the same. For me, New York is different now.
Like, a year ago, I was on my way to my therapist. And there was a guy with a folding table, you know? Doing politics. And I look. This guy is doing this fake thing. He’s saying, “Well, I’m a libertarian.” Which really means he’s, like, a fucking Trump supporter.
Now, look. I’m a normal person. But I lost my fucking mind. I fucking screamed. This cocksucker coming here with his … I lost my mind. I fucking knocked over his table.
These two old drunks, they grabbed me. And they were like, “Calm down!”
I’m like, “I’m calmed down! I’m calm!”
They were like, “Look at your hands.”
They were shaking so badly.
Ric Burns. He did that New York documentary series? Watching that documentary, I was very struck by this thing that, like, New York is an idea. You know? In the same way that the United States started out as an idea. New York is actually a microcosm of this idea.
For the first wave of immigrants, there was a social contract. It basically said, you’re gonna come here and you’re gonna work your ass off. You may live in substandard conditions. There’s gonna be rats, there’s gonna be roaches. But you can earn enough money to improve yourself. And here in New York, we’re going to educate your children for free. Because back then, it wasn’t just public grammar school and public high school. The CUNY colleges were free.104
So that was the deal we offered. You come here, you’re leaving your home behind. You’re gonna break your ass, and some of you are gonna fall off of buildings or whatever. But your children are going to have this thing that you couldn’t have. You’ll give them a chance.
Oh, and P.S.? Not everyone around you is gonna be French or whatever. There’s going to be Polish and Italian and black people here all together, and blah blah blah. We all ride the subway system and everyone has to be together. It’s a melting pot, okay?
You know Robert Moses? Like everyone thinks of Robert Moses, rightfully so, as a fucking evil demigod. But in the beginning, Robert Moses was a fucking socialist. Robert Moses built the beaches on Long Island and took the land away from the rich people. He was like, We’re making public beaches so that people who work so hard during the week can take a bus and take their families to see the ocean.
Just look what this city did in a couple generations. They made something spectacular, the envy of the world.
But unfortunately? Post-World War Two? By the time Puerto Ricans started immigrating? It changed. Like, some of that shit was dried up. Manufacturing and … it wasn’t the same. They didn’t get the same deal. It was different.
Same idea, but different.
I got a 9/11 story. But I wasn’t in New York. I was in L.A.
I was writing on a TV show. My whatever, my career. It got to the point where all my agents were pushing me to do television. But I didn’t want to do television. I just wanted to be a playwright.
And so, to get them off of my back, I said, “I’ll do television, but only if it’s David Milch or Tom Fontana.105 Otherwise, I don’t want to do it. Don’t call me. Don’t bother me.”
Two days later, And he hired me on I was sitting in this hotel on Park Avenue with David Milch. And he hired me on the spot for this show called Big Apple. It only lasted, like, eight episodes on CBS. This was in 2001.
So that was my first time working in TV, and it only lasted two months. Life lessons. I was still trying to decipher if the guy’s, like, a legit genius, then it was over.
And [my agents] were like, “Well, would you just take some more meetings?”
So I took a meeting with this guy. He was younger than me, but he had his own show on NBC, Sunday nights.
We did an interview. He was a good salesman. And I decided to go to California and work on his show.
He really sold me on the idea. It was a cop show. I like cops and stuff.
I got a place in L.A. It was like a Melrose Place type of place. Little apartment, cheap complex. Some friends of mine from New York were there: Gary Perez and Marlene Forte. Marco Greco. They’re all New Yorkers, all members of my theater company.
Now my boss’s idol was … let’s call the guy Gary DeVanne, okay? This famous director/producer/screenwriter. So my boss loved Gary DeVanne so much, he made us watch all of his movies. To get a feel for them, you know? And then he asked us what we thought. Me and the other writers.
I said, “I think Gary DeVanne is style over substance.” And look. Back then, he was. He’s gotten deeper now. But back then?
So my boss was like, “Who the hell are you?”
I probably would have been fired or quit. It was a really rough experience.
Like, keep in mind … during all this? I was eating out of the gas station on the corner. I’d been working three months and still hadn’t gotten a check from the studio. So I’m drinking, like, the seventy-nine-ounce Big Gulp. I’m eating the pre-packaged hardboiled eggs, cause there’s no craft service for me.106
But then my boss gave me an episode to write. He comes into my office. He throws down a script and says, “Rewrite.”
I was like, “Okay, what do you want me to rewrite?”
“Start at page one.”
So that became my thing. I was doing page one rewrites of all the scripts. And fortunately, cause I guess I wasn’t arrogant and the other writers liked me, they weren’t deeply resentful I was changing their scripts. Also, they were still getting their money. And their scripts were much better, you know?
Well, as soon as I turned in the writing, everything changed. All of a sudden, it’s like, “You want craft service? We’re getting you a refrigerator.” I got an office with a couch. I got promoted.
But, see, I have this aversion to writing. Basically,
I can only write at night when there’s no one around. So during the day, people would be doing their work. And I’d be like, jerking off, you know? Because I can’t work.
So it got, like, at the end of each day—I would say five days out of seven—I’d be pulling all-nighters. I’d come to work on a Monday, maybe leave Saturday, late afternoon. Take Sunday off and come back. I would wash up in there.
Basically, I was living at the office.
I think my boss felt I needed a little inspiration. So one night, I’m working. My boss comes in and says, “Stephen, come outside to the parking lot right now.”
This is, like, on a Tuesday.
So I go out with him to the parking lot. And I’m like, “Yeah, what’s up?”
“You see that light? You see that office?”
I look where he’s pointing. “Yeah.”
“What time is it, Stephen?”
“It’s two in the morning.”
“You see those lights are still on? You know whose office that is?”
“No, I don’t know.”
“That’s Gary DeVanne’s office. It’s 2:00 a.m. and Gary DeVanne’s still working. That’s why he’s Gary DeVanne. He’s got the whole floor of that building.”
And I was like, “Great. Can I go back to fucking work now?”
So 9/11, I was pulling another all-nighter. It’s 6:00 A.M. L.A. time. It’s just me and this security guard in this mini studio on Bundy. We were the only ones in the building.
The guy was from South America or something. He comes in, started talking to me. I couldn’t figure out what he was saying. So he goes out and comes back, rolling a TV in. And he turns it on.
What I see … it’s fucking 9/11, you know? I was like, “Oh my God.”
And he was like, “Dios mio! Ah-bah-bah!”
Tower Stories Page 47
