MEETING LAURE

Laure Mattos. Even writing it now, her name makes my heart skip a beat. Since we met that day, our lives have been bound together, and will be until the end of time. She is, and always was, smart, tough, beautiful, righteous, curious, hardworking, fun-loving, adaptable, compassionate, and overflowing with opinions and love. And you get all of that in the first five minutes that you meet her.

I guess I gave a good audition. I know Laure and I had chemistry right off the bat, and the production was somewhat desperate, so I ended up with the part. Rehearsal started immediately; the starting gun had been fired and I dove in. Once again, I was the nineteen-year-old kid and the other actors were all in their mid-twenties, with theater degrees and apartments and lives, including Laure. The rehearsals were fun and intense. Everyone else already knew the play and the staging had been pretty well blocked, so they focused on getting me up to speed. The part fit me perfectly, the cast was absolutely outstanding, the director really great, and there was a loose atmosphere, with a penny-ante poker game going at all times. Laure was one of only two women in the cast and she loved being as tough as all of the twenty-something men, a little flirty but mostly using her humor and smarts to be one of the guys. A bunch of us would take the train home to the Upper West Side together after rehearsal and go for drinks to talk about the play, so there was no opening to act on the attraction that was happening between us, but I got the feeling that after opening night that would change. And boy, did it.

The opening went incredibly well, and we were all flying high. Laure was having the cast party at her apartment, and we all splurged on cab fare from the Village all the way to West 84th Street. Laure and I were jammed in close, the adrenaline of the evening definitely pumping. We got to her apartment and, holy shit, was it nice! Big living room, nice kitchen, separate bedroom. And everything so classy. Artwork, carpets, knickknacks, books, appliances, and tons of food she had made herself. The party kicked in, the cast and crew fired up from our great opening and mixing with some of Laure’s other friends who were there as well. I was mingling, but most of my attention was focused on getting close to Laure and perhaps even kissing her. So you can imagine my surprise when at one point in the evening, I worked my way into the circle of people she was talking to and got introduced to her best friend, her old roommate, and her husband. . . . I’m just going to let you sit with that for a moment.

No need to go into too many details of our incredible courtship, but by the evidence that Laure and I are still together after all these years, it is clear that my man-musk was too powerful to resist. (Or maybe I am remembering the smell of the never-cleaned sleeping bag from Wigwasati that I had been sleeping in for five straight years.) She was married for four years to her boyfriend from college, an actor who made his living as a successful waiter at a high-end restaurant. They had had a real wedding and had made a nice home, but obviously there was something missing if there was room for me to come into her life. Our affair was secret at first. I wanted her to leave him but, of course, I had nothing to lose and she had everything. I was living in a closet, on a mattress on the floor, in a sleeping bag. I had a few hundred dollars in the bank and I was nineteen years old, six years younger than her. But we were madly, madly in love with each other and there was nothing that was going to keep us apart. We knew we were meant to be with each other, even though it didn’t make much sense on paper, because we had a sign from God. The New York City Blackout of 1977. We had snuck off to our favorite Chinese restaurant that night and were in the middle of a great meal when it all shut down. We finished by candlelight and then wandered through the crazy streets on the Upper West Side, the energy of that night amazingly electric, especially considering there was no electricity. We went back to her place until I had to go, but we both knew we were going to be together forever.

Laure needed space to figure out how to end her marriage in the best way for her, her husband, and their families. I went back to my parents’ house and I couldn’t shut up about her. I put her 8x10 resume picture on the mantel in the living room to show everyone the love of my life. My brother was afraid her husband was going to murder me. My mother assumed there must be something wrong with her if she was in love with someone like me. My dad thought she was beautiful. Interestingly, the one thing her family, her husband’s family, and even my family could all agree on was, “Why Danny?”

She and her husband parted ways amicably, and soon I moved in with her. Laure only came to my closet room one time, drunk after a party she was at with Al Pacino (who I think had hit on her), and proved her love for me by getting naked with me in the petri dish that was my sleeping bag. It made sense for me to move in because I was going to her place a lot, and now she was responsible for the whole three hundred dollars a month rent. So goodbye to my closet and hello to a real apartment. But also, goodbye to my seventy dollars a month and hello to one hundred and fifty dollars a month.

The other life-changing thing that came out of Almost Men was that I got an agent. Mary Sames lived at the Brewster and was a junior agent at a small agency. Christopher and Bruce convinced her to come see the play, and she signed me. I got a real resume picture taken and started going to a few auditions. I got a good part in a play at Manhattan Theatre Club and finally got my Actors Equity card when I understudied a play at the Public Theater, which led to the holy grail for every actor at that time—unemployment checks! Free money every week. Not a lot, but I loved it. Stand in line and get free money. I hit that cash cow every time I qualified, and it kept our heads above water. John Heard had just done his first movie and was starting to take off. Bruce got a film too, and Christopher was on Broadway; there was a code among them about having a career with integrity. There were cool places to work and cool people to work with, and I wanted to have a career like that too. I had a network callback to play the role that Jeff Conaway played in the legendary Taxi. But doing television in those days was very low class in the New York acting world, and you wouldn’t be taken seriously as an actor if you were on a sitcom. I remember being at dinner with Laure and Heard and Christopher, all discouraging me from selling myself short, even though I had nothing and could’ve made real money, and I turned it down. In hindsight, what a stupid fucking idea that was!

Laure was working in telemarketing because it paid pretty well and had flexible hours, but she was very bad at it. Her big break came when she landed the understudy role in a Broadway play directed by the legendary Hal Prince. Laure knew Hal because she had worked in his office as an assistant when she first got to New York and was there during some of his greatest collaborations with Stephen Sondheim. Unfortunately, the play was terrible and, after an all-expense paid tryout in Philly and a few good Broadway paychecks during previews, the play closed two days after opening night.

I began to lose my mind living at her apartment. I loved living with her and sharing our lives, but the apartment was making me crazy. The walls were so thin, and I believe a tap dancer and her dog lived directly above us. The rent was expensive, my unemployment eventually ran out, and I had very little savings left at all. She went back to telemarketing but hated it, and wasn’t so sure about being an actress anymore either. And we were surrounded by the furniture and dishes and rugs that were from her wedding and marriage with the other guy. In July, we found an apartment on West 78th Street that was cheaper and talked our way into it, even though we weren’t really qualified to get it. We needed the first month’s rent and another month in security, which we got by selling all of her stuff except the essentials (I had nothing to sell except my sleeping bag, and there were no takers). When we moved in in August, we realized why the rent was so cheap. It was on the third floor, right on Amsterdam Avenue, a pothole-filled thoroughfare full of trucks clanging and people fighting. And one block away was the fire station. It was insanely noisy and the trauma of that really fucked with me ever being able to get a good night’s sleep. But we loved it. It was ours. We were in it together, fully. This shitty apartment is where we would get married, have our first child, and entwine our lives together for eternity. We were more in love than ever. The only question was, “Where is next month’s rent coming from, because we are literally out of money?”

Hark, is that an angel? I believe it is.