When my family lived in the little two-bedroom house with eight people stuffed inside, we were on what were called “the water streets,” near the canals and the bay. After years of riding my bike in and around those streets, I can never forget their progression, alphabetical from west to east: Atwater, Brightwater, Clearwater, Deepwater, Edgewater, Fairwater, Greatwater, Highwater, Leewater, Nearwater, Ripplewater, Stillwater, Tidewater, Waterview. South Bay Drive, which was the spine that connected all of these roads, was my Shaftesbury Avenue, my Via Margutta, and my Bleecker Street rolled into one. I had a Stingray bike, but I might as well have been driving an Aston Martin, because in this land, your bike was everything.
There were certain neighbors of ours who always struck me as very sophisticated people and whose homes and daily lives were completely foreign to mine. One such family lived just around the corner, but I felt like I needed a passport when I entered their house. The father was a successful ad man in Manhattan, the mother an executive at a renowned psychiatric hospital in a nearby town. They had those framed Toulouse-Lautrec prints (Aristide Bruant, the Divan Japonais) on their walls before anyone else did. Miles Davis or bossa nova or Erik Satie played on a turntable. The mother was known as Big Lynn, a misnomer, as she was lithe and extremely stylish, always in black cashmere turtlenecks and slacks. They had three daughters, all of whom were blonde. Little Lynn, the eldest, was a stunning young woman who caused every boy in the neighborhood to gawk each time she left her house, as if she were Kate Middleton. My mother would stop by there, and Big Lynn would give her a box filled with last month’s magazines: Time, Look, Life, New York, Playboy, Penthouse, Cosmo, Psychology Today. Once home, my mother would skim through an odd copy here and there, normally falling asleep with the magazine at her side. I, however, took the box and read the issues cover to cover. Big Lynn got me hooked on reading.
I read a lot from seventh through tenth grades. Sitting in my bed at night, waiting for my dad to come home, or on weekend afternoons, there was a period when I simply could not stop reading. I liked Nick Pileggi’s crime reporting in New York magazine, and I laughed and winced reading John Simon’s theater reviews. My dad pointed me toward Hugh Sidey at Time and William Safire in the Times. I actually read Penthouse and its forum. I got hooked on Chris Miller’s writing in National Lampoon after reading crazy pieces like “Night of the Seven Fires.” Big Lynn included a lot of books in these boxes as well. I read The Godfather, Johnny Got His Gun, Salinger, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Exorcist, Leon Uris, Michener, Mailer, Ball Four, North Dallas Forty, The Valachi Papers. I read William Goldman’s screenplay for Butch Cassidy. I fell in love with Dickens and Twain and Poe. I loved biographies and the Playboy interview. In a 7-Eleven near my house, they displayed copies of Robert Sam Anson’s “They’ve Killed the President.” Staring in fascination and slight horror at Oswald’s autopsy photos gave me a lifelong obsession with the JFK assassination at the age of thirteen.
In high school I loved any subject that involved reading and barely tolerated everything else. I wanted to read what I wanted when I wanted to, which wasn’t the best recipe for academic success. I planned to go to law school eventually, because I was most comfortable with words and I suppose I wanted to finish something my father had started. My dad had attended Syracuse Law School for one year but dropped out because my mother’s father was paying the bill. My dad’s pride got the better of him, and he walked away to begin his teaching career the moment he was offered a job.
In my senior year, my parents’ discussion of my college plans was one of the more difficult ones they ever had. My mother’s well-worn argument that my father had to face reality and limit my options to what they could truly afford was restated ad infinitum. My father, however, continued to dream. I applied to the better state schools—Albany, Buffalo, Binghamton—and sent letters to a small list of good private colleges that appeared, on paper, to offer decent financial aid opportunities, like Muhlenberg and Colgate. My father’s goal, however, was for me to attend Columbia. He was still clinging to the hope that I would join a football team and actually play football. Columbia was part of an Ivy League “lightweight” program where the 158-pound limit had been raised to 165. The coaches in this league paired opposing players by weight, so that those over the limit were matched with someone their size. It was essentially a league populated by smaller athletes, some of them very quick, who weren’t big enough to play elsewhere. The skinnier version of me fell into this category. Once again, my father knew someone who knew someone, but it was to no avail. My grades were good but not good enough. Columbia made few, if any, allowances for athletes. You were either competitive academically, or not. My father tried to lessen the blow by telling me that the end of the Vietnam War in August of 1975 meant a flood of applicants and thus a more competitive field, but I nonetheless was frustrated and sad that a great opportunity had disappeared.
At that point, I thought about going ROTC. I could join the Air Force after graduation and learn to fly. Or work my way into the judge advocate general’s office of one of the branches and have the military put me through law school. However, once again, the end of the war cast its shadow. “They’ll probably train fewer pilots now that it’s winding down,” my dad volunteered. “The competition will get tougher and you won’t be guaranteed a seat in pilot training. You either earn that or you don’t.” I thought about how I would gladly give years of my life to the Air Force if it meant I would be trained as a pilot or get my law degree. But without either of those guarantees, I didn’t want to go into the military. When thick packages arrived from the schools that accepted me, my parents and I naturally went right to the financial aid section. If I left New York, I would lose some state-funded grants. But one school, which looked good on paper, seemed to make a mix of Pell Grants and TAP loans all add up to yes: George Washington University in DC.
I never visited the school before committing. I just drove down with my dad in August of 1976 and showed up. I was more than overwhelmed. Washington would be the first city I lived in, and I do believe that had I moved straight to Morningside Heights to attend Columbia instead, I might have packed up and gone home to Massapequa. When I arrived in DC, Foggy Bottom was still a sleepy corner of the northwest quadrant, with dingy row houses and pubs, sandwich shops, and laundry facilities catering to college kids. Washington in the 1970s was a quaint town. In the orientation course offered to entering freshmen, entitled “DC Culture and Politics,” I was introduced to JFK’s witticism that Washington was a city “of Northern hospitality and Southern efficiency.” This was before the city sprawled outward, and areas like Herndon and Reston were still covered with farmland. This was a post-1960s and pre-9/11 DC. Iranian students protesting the Shah of Iran burned him in effigy in Lafayette Square directly across from the White House. Mr. Capriotti patrolled in front of the White House fence, encased in his sandwich board sign, its illegible chicken scratch pleading with you to understand that the government was controlling his mind through his TV. If you attempted these kinds of things today you might be shot by the Secret Service.
Back then, GW was a school where many students went to make first-year grades that enabled them to transfer to their first-choice school: Stanford or Harvard or the University of Chicago. But regardless of GW’s lack of status in the 70s, a college campus can be a social equalizer, and it provided me with an opportunity for the great reinvention. My parents’ house, along with whatever else I had or didn’t have, was irrelevant now. Although clothes, jewelry, cars, and stereos clearly indicated levels of wealth and status, and rich kids from an area of Long Island unknown to me worked overtime to advertise their privileged upbringings, everyone walked through the same entrance to the same freshman dormitory, which was called “the Zoo.” I felt right at home. College is the beginning of the merit-based period of most people’s lives. The cachet of gold chains and Nakamichi stereos was eclipsed by true mastery of an academic subject. This was especially so if your parents didn’t own some company that was holding a seat for you upon graduation.
At college, one thing remained a constant for me: fear was the invisible leash that largely controlled my behavior. There was a faint whisper that followed me everywhere, telling me that I shouldn’t disappoint my dad. I had to focus on taking full advantage of attending the private university that was an enormous financial sacrifice for my family. Throughout much of college, I practiced a caution that often resembled passivity. Also, I hadn’t yet learned that trying to be liked and succeeding were often mutually exclusive. When I played football in high school, like some gridiron Billy Pilgrim, coaches would grab my face mask and scream, “Why didn’t you hit Bob when you had a shot?” I thought to myself that I liked Bob and didn’t want to smash him. The idea that you tried to destroy some opponent for a couple of hours and afterward hugged him seemed odd to me. The nature of competition, which sometimes led to violent confrontation with someone, became clear later.
Other essential things changed for me in Washington. I fell in love for the first time. In one of the very last days of my freshman year, I walked down a dormitory hall late one night, looking to say good-bye to someone. Suddenly, there was Love, lying on the floor of the hallway, a taut telephone cord stretched out of her doorway to its maximum. In a pale silk dress, her face turned completely toward the wall, she looked as if she was in this position as some form of punishment. Her muffled crying and hushed pleadings, I later found out, were offered to her on-again, off-again boyfriend. Scenes like this are common in college dorms, where vanity is sacrificed for lack of privacy. I stood, frozen. I had never heard anyone speak that way. I had never witnessed such genuine passion. Who was this guy who elicited this behavior in her? I eventually dated her, though not seriously, and by that I mean I only saw her a handful of times, but talked to her on the phone at every opportunity and thought about her every moment of the day. She lived in Virginia and I went home to Long Island for the summer. I think she liked me, but her heart was still with someone else, and there was no getting around that. Nonetheless, she opened up that part of my life. Eventually, chasing that high of intense emotional intimacy with someone, being possessed by them, would become an addiction for me as well.
Many of my fellow students were there to party, as their performance in school had little bearing on where they would land when they finished. Instead of drinking and getting high, I walked into the offices of the student government and something just clicked for me. It’s been said that politics is show business for less attractive people, and the offices of the GW Student Association, for the most part, bore that out. But I was drawn to these kids, who were more like me and needed to extend themselves in order to compete. They had bought into the idea, not entirely wrong, that these school activities would tell other admissions offices and employers what they were made of. I volunteered one year at the office of student programming, booking and coordinating movies, speakers, parties, and concerts. At the end of my sophomore year, I ran for and won the position of chairperson of that board, which paid a tuition stipend. My father was genuinely happy about that. I did fairly well in college, majoring in political science while working at an internship at my congressman’s office and later at a law firm specializing in FCC filings.
But no matter how hard I tried to keep my costs low and tap my father’s wallet as little as possible, I would slam into the wall of reality. Colleges want you to pay your housing deposit in the spring for the following fall semester. As I stood in the waiting room of the housing office on a beautiful April day, the cherry blossoms outside every window, the lady behind the desk said, at full volume and within earshot of everyone around me, “Your parents’ check bounced, so we can only accept a money order from you from now on.” At that moment, I lost my spot in the dorm, as that bounced check was all I had. I scrambled to secure a space in an apartment in Arlington, Virginia, with some friends, all of whom would also eventually lose their patience with me because of my insolvency.
In the spring of 1979, my girlfriend, Alison, who was Jewish, was told by her parents to dump me, which she did. I was devastated. This was my first serious relationship. It had basically consisted of lying around on weekends doing nothing, which felt like everything. Convinced that someone cared about me, I was determined to hold on to that feeling. I begged a lot, as I recall. At the same time, I was running for president of the student government. People who worked on my “candidacy” urged me to come into DC from Arlington to campaign. Instead, I stayed home and felt sorry for myself. I was consumed by my need for nearly any kind of achievement on one hand and for the love of a woman on the other. I lost the election and the girl and ended up both defeated and insecure.
My girlfriend’s roommate, Shari, had transferred from GW to NYU. On a trip back home, I went to visit her and whine about the loss of Alison. Then, based solely on Shari’s playful provocation, I auditioned for the theater program at NYU. Suddenly, this was an idea that was both crazy and necessary. Admitting that I didn’t actually want to be a K Street lawyer, I felt a powerful urge to leave DC and burn a bridge again. I needed to win something. It almost didn’t matter where that need led me. City Hall or Wall Street or Madison Avenue, I didn’t care. I just wanted some taste of success.
My audition was probably the thousandth recitation of Edmund from Long Day’s Journey that they had heard that week. I had taken an “Acting for Non-Drama Majors” course at GW, where I performed scenes from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with a girl from Long Island who was the scion of a hardware store empire. Raised far from the Pollitts of Mississippi, her accented pronunciation came out “Bah-rick! Bah-rick!” This was an idiotic idea, all things considered. When I eventually pitched it to my parents on the phone, my mother shrieked about what a mistake I was making. My dad just listened. When I told them that I was being offered a need-based scholarship and that NYU, the more expensive school, would actually cost him less money, he said to my mother, “Let’s hear him out.” I knew something other than money was behind that. Here was a man who had short-circuited his own dreams in order to provide for his family. “You’ll never be young enough to do this again,” he said.
I decided to stay in DC that summer of 1979, as I had grown fond of city living in general and Washington in particular. It also gave me some time to anguish over whether I had made the right move. In May, after my loss in the election, I sat at a local bar with a professor of mine, whose class I’d enjoyed. He was around fifty, but looked older. He liked to drink and smoke. He wore the uniform of the Washington educator: khakis, a Brooks Brothers button-down, a repp tie, and a navy blazer from either Paul Stuart or Jos. A. Bank. Over our drinks, he attempted to console me with a good deal of “GW’s loss is NYU’s gain,” and so forth. I had little skill then in detecting if a guy was hitting on me, as people were so much more cautious then. But it soon became clear that he was interested. Playing off both my passion for politics and my newfound interest in acting, he laid it on thick, suggesting I was a blend of Robert Redford and JFK. His compliments were delivered affectingly. He was a very smart man, and lonely in the extreme. He asked if we could have dinner, and when I declined, the mood changed. As we sat for another fifteen or twenty minutes, he shifted. When he grilled me about what I expected to achieve by going to acting school, I told him I’d give it a year and if I didn’t make it in showbiz to some degree, I would likely head to law school after all. He stared at me, sensing the conversation was coming to an end, and said, “You don’t really want to be an actor, do you? When you talk about your goals, there’s never any mention of happiness or joy, just some vague desire to ‘make it.’ Where’s the dream? Do you have a dream? There’s not a drop of boy in you. That must be tough.”
Once classes ended, I got a job at a restaurant called Luigi’s Famous, a glorified pizza joint. The owner was a native Italian named Corrado Bruzzo, a remarkably good-looking man, as if Mastroianni owned a DC pizza palace. His wife had just died of cancer in her forties, leaving behind their two children. Bruzzo was a mess, and he sat at his desk most days and just stared at papers. The real boss of the place was an African-American woman named Mrs. Mix, a tall, powerfully built force of nature with a hair net and a colossal bosom stuffed into a white kitchen uniform. She wore glasses and squinted at you as she shouted over the clanging of the large kitchen. “Tell that Alan Ballman to come in here!” she’d bellow. “Alan Ballman” was a name I enjoyed resurrecting years later, using it to check into hotels or with maître d’s. Here was my summer love affair, a sixty-year-old, three-hundred-pound black woman from Georgia running a kitchen line with a ragtag staff, mostly from South America. I ran my ass off to please Mrs. Mix, sensing that it didn’t take much to rise in the ranks of that outfit. I quickly realized that she needed a sergeant, as she was forever passing her orders through me on to the dining room staff.
I quietly told Mr. Bruzzo that the waitstaff was hopeless. Mrs. Mix needed an adjunct “out front.” Mr. Bruzzo smiled wanly, and said, “OK, Alexa. OK.” (Bruzzo’s accented pronunciation of “Alex” came out as “Alexa.”) The name Xander was left in George Barimo’s office at 30 Rock. The next day, he lined up the waitresses, waiters, and busboys. They were around fifteen in number, and the grizzled men resembled Alfonso Bedoya’s crew from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Mr. Bruzzo said, “Today, I have asked Alexa here to be the direttore of the dining room. He will make the schedule, and if you have any questions, please bring them to Alexa. Thank you.” That was it. Two sentences, and then he turned and left to stare at a pile of photos of his late wife. Bruzzo had everyone’s love and respect, so they simply nodded. After he walked out, however, I thought they might stab me. Now some twenty-one-year-old, white college punk was going to be telling them what to do. The one Italian on the crew, a tough woman who resembled Patti LuPone, muttered, “What the fuck is this?” I spent my farewell-to-DC summer teaching grown men to polish silverware and setting rodent traps at closing time. I really didn’t need the added responsibility. I wasn’t paid significantly more money. But Bruzzo needed help and his response to my suggestions confirmed what I already knew. By sensing and responding to his grief, I realized I had an above-average empathy for other people’s feelings, likely due to growing up with my mother. I could understand other people, get inside them, better than most. I began to think that maybe this acting idea wasn’t such a bad decision after all.
I left DC, which was the first place I had ever lived away from home and where I had grown so much. I headed for the one place that seemed to make sense. Like Montgomery Clift leaving Shelley Winters for Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun, I was headed for the Angela Vickers of cities. Driving from Washington to New York at the end of the summer, my father and I rode along in endless silence. I felt I was disappointing him. Yet here was the man with whom I had digested countless movies. Eventually, I asked him what he thought it took to be a good actor. He paused, as he nearly always did before answering a question, and said, “I think you need to be intelligent. And you’re pretty intelligent. So, you have a good chance.”
NYU was a difficult adjustment. I was back in a dorm. And I didn’t know New York well, in any sense. Plopped into the middle of a world of “student actors,” I had little in common with anyone else. At GW, people followed the herd into, usually, some rather compelling courses or off-campus internships. I remember the cutthroat competition to get into Stephen Wayne’s lectures on the American presidency, a truly great class. These acting class types at NYU, just like boys who had played football in peewee leagues since they were eight, or girls who had taken ballet class nearly their whole lives, had been at this long before college. Their bubbly chatter went something like “I spent the summer at the Blah-Blah theater camp doing Guys and Dolls.” Turning to me, they asked, “Have you ever played Sky?” No, I would reply. “Have you ever played Hamlet? Val? Edmund? Billy Bigelow? Chance? Mercutio? Ensign Pulver?” My answer was no, across the board. Other than high school productions of Teahouse of the August Moon and The Spiral Staircase, as well as scene work from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with my Long Island Maggie the Cat, I had no acting training or experience. I thought that I might have gotten in on my appearance as much as anything else. I was the only blue-eyed “young male ingénue” type in a class filled with pretty female dancers and budding male character actors. The more intense and serious members of the class wore black clothes, drank coffee, and smoked a lot, their faces buried in copies of Balm in Gilead or In the Boom Boom Room.
I began to worry. I asked myself, “Did you pass up law school for this?” Why was I spending hours at the Lee Strasberg Institute weeping or directing scenes wherein we staged our dreams or shouting into a corner at some unseen source of my anxieties? I walked to class through the old Union Square (before the developer William Zeckendorf cut a deal to clean up the park in exchange for constructing a hideous apartment building that blocked New Yorkers’ views of the gorgeous Con Ed clock tower). Drug dealers greeted me at eight a.m. with their whimsical pitches. “Loose joints here! T’s and V’s! I got the herb superb, the weed you need. The smoke you love to toke! Seconal! Valium!”
I had no time to relax, let alone get high. During my last full-time year of school, my father stressed about money more than ever. I worked throughout the year, first as a busboy at the twilight of Studio 54, then selling men’s shirts in a discount apparel store on lower Fifth Avenue. The older clerks glared at me when the place slowed down, as if I had brought a curse through the door. I waited tables at a bistro called Café Bruce Waite, named after a sometime actor and the brother of Ralph Waite. Some of the female staff flirted with me, and Bruce fumed. Bruce had a full-length oil painting of himself in the restaurant’s entry hall, posed as if he were Lord Mountbatten. In this Billy Budd tableau, he fired me, accusing me of stealing from him by giving my friends free food. After that, I was a chaperone for a tour bus company, escorting older African-American women from Baptist church groups in the Bronx to the Corning Glass Works and then to wine tastings in the Hudson Valley. Driving back with these proper ladies in hats and lace gloves was a kick. Slightly buzzed, we sang gospel songs all the way home. Back at the dorm, I would sneak into the dining hall to pilfer a meal. The manager was a kind, discreet guy. Nonetheless, he had a job to do, and would sidle up next to me and whisper, “You know I gotta ask you to leave. Now finish your slice and get gone.”
I studied acting with Geoffrey Horne and Marcia Haufrecht, both outstanding teachers for young actors. I took a fantastic History of Dramatic Lit course with Bill Bly, one that everyone professed was their favorite. Jim Brown taught a survey on the history of comic performance that I loved. Everyone loved Jim. I slowly began to see that there was a pretty substantial chasm between those who delighted the teachers and those who would actually leave there and work, between those for whom acting was a craft and those for whom it was a potential occupation. “Look in a magazine,” a teacher once said. “Do you see yourself there? Then, maybe you’ll work. Or, if you don’t see yourself there, then the business is simply waiting for you to show up.” I finished my first year at NYU and in the summer of 1980 found myself living as a boarder in the unair-conditioned Yorkville apartment of a friend of Jim Brown, herself a teacher of anthropology with several children. My six-by-six-foot room came with a lot of rules. “You are to confine yourself to your room and the bathroom. Your rent does not include use of the kitchen or living room or any other area of the apartment,” said Mrs. Gleason, who looked like a cross between Eleanor Roosevelt and Rose Sayer, the Katharine Hepburn character in The African Queen. The only thing missing was Noah Claypole calling me “Work’us” as I came in. I suspected that my tiny room had originally been a luggage compartment for storing trunks and suitcases.
Back home, my parents were spent. They hardly said a word to each other. The financial stress had crushed my dad. My brothers and sisters seemed to be gone whenever I visited. While I basted in this cell in Manhattan in August, I did some simple math. The looming dissolution of my parents’ marriage meant I wouldn’t be able to afford the remaining single semester to finish NYU. I couldn’t go home, and I couldn’t swing the remaining credits to graduate. And then something strange happened.