Friends: A Love Story

by Angela Bassett

  In the meantime, Ahren was continuing her therapy. She became able to articulate her feelings for me, as well as what she wanted and where she wanted the relationship to go. She wanted us to be closer. She wanted a truthful, honest relationship. It became more and more clear to her that we needed to talk. She kept trying to find ways to bridge the gap and use all the tools she was learning in her sessions. But especially now that my father was gone, I was as numb as could be. She was trying to get clear, but my whole life, while improving, was still in shadows. I was slowly coming to realize that my life was a lie—that I had become an actor in life as well as onstage. Back then, I told people whatever they wanted to hear or whatever I needed to say to get them off my back. I didn’t yet know how to have a conversation that might be difficult or unpleasant or require me to be honest about my emotions, so I kept avoiding them.

  “What do we need to talk about? Things are fine.”

  I’m sure at some point Ahren must have wanted to discuss marriage; however, I was only beginning to become aware of how I was feeling, which is essential to telling the truth. I knew what it meant to be boyfriend and girlfriend and “play house.” But I was just beginning to learn what it meant to be a man. I didn’t know yet what it meant to be committed to someone. What was the next step? How do you get to it? I didn’t know. I was a mess. In the meantime, Ahren must have thought, “I can’t marry this man!” She didn’t know what to do. Even if she had wanted to, she couldn’t have afforded her own apartment. I was stuck; she was stuck; we were stuck.

  Late that summer, she and I took a big two-week vacation at a five-hundred-acre hay farm in upstate New York. It was harvest time. Warm and beautiful. We needed to get away. Our relationship hadn’t improved much, but I was starting to learn to communicate better.

  “Ahren, I’ve gotta get out of the play,” I told her. “I’m exhausted.”

  “Then give your notice, Courtney.”

  We had a lot of fun and invited a few friends to visit. That farm became our little sanctuary. “It’s so nice here, I don’t want it to end,” I told Ahren. But I don’t know what we were thinking; we both had allergies out the wazoo. When they cut the hay, our eyes swelled shut and we had to leave. I got blue at the thought of going back to work and the pressures of the show.

  “What are we going back into when we leave here?” Ahren asked me. We cried together. It was like she sensed things between us would disintegrate from there.

  When I returned to the city, I gave six-weeks’ notice, which was enough time for them to find somebody else. James McDaniel didn’t want to come back and they couldn’t find anybody else, so they decided to close the show in early January 1992. They wanted me to stick around.

  But I was done. I literally could not do it anymore. Something had to change. “I’m tired. I’m exhausted. I can’t do no more.”

  “What will it take to get you to stay?”

  “The hardest part is commuting back and forth from Brooklyn and hanging around the city in between shows,” I told them. “I’m tired. So give me a car to and from the theater, and double my salary so that when I come back to Broadway I’ll come back at a higher rate.”

  “No!”

  “Okay, I’m out!”

  “Hold on, Courtney! We’ll double your salary and give you the car three times a week.”

  “No. You can’t pay me enough money to continue to do this role. I have loved it but it is time to stop. It’s not about the money; it’s about the car. Please give me a car or I am fine with ending my run now.” We came to an agreement. I got the money and the car and now I could relax the whole way to the theater and finish out my run with the show.

  My work life now became more manageable, but that fall my relationship with Ahren deteriorated. I was still emotionally numb on the inside. Even though through my therapy I was becoming more self-aware, I had a lot of issues to deal with that had been years in the making, and I was still reeling from my father’s suicide. I hadn’t connected the dots enough to match my feelings with my actions. I didn’t know how to grow closer to Ahren, like we both wanted. Nor could I figure out what to do after eleven years of being together. I knew I needed to do something, but instead of turning toward her, I ran away. I caused our relationship to fracture. I’m not too ashamed to lay out the details of my behavior; however, I don’t want to be insensitive to her by resurrecting painful events. My behavior back then was callous enough.

  Suffice it to say, I went through a painful, ugly period during which I caused a great deal of hurt to a number of people. Ahren was foremost among them. I ruined our relationship and caused it to implode. While it was never my intention to hurt Ahren, I did hurt her—and very badly, to the extent that she told me she didn’t want to see or ever talk to me again. My family worried about what was going on with me. Several months after we broke up, I came to my senses and I knew I had made a mistake. I reached out to her two or three times to tell her I was becoming a better man. I had hopes of winning her back. But by then she was emotionally healthy enough to know that, as well-meaning as I may have been, she needed to stay away from me for her own sanity. She hired an attorney. He sent me a letter telling me to leave her alone. She needed to protect herself emotionally from me to heal.

  When I read the lawyer’s letter, I experienced what I call a “King Lear moment.” The protagonist of Shakespeare’s King Lear threw away his entire kingdom. Ahren had been everything I wanted and needed—she was pure gold—yet I had ruined our relationship. I was devastated to know that I had hurt Ahren so much that she felt she needed to use a lawyer to protect herself from me. When I read that letter, I felt like one of my lifelines had been cut off, like a door had been slammed shut—no, not just a door, a door on a dungeon. For eleven years Ahren had been the love of my life. We had grown up together. I’d journeyed through the most important events of my life with her—college, Shakespeare & Company, Yale, Fences, Native Son, appearing on Broadway, my father’s death. Even as a grown man, I relied on her to help me solve problems and make decisions. Clearly at this point in my life, I was no good for Ahren. I didn’t know how to talk to her. I didn’t know how to handle emotional situations. She could only do her part. She needed somebody who would relate with her—she needed somebody to talk to. I was afraid to be that man because everywhere I looked I found lies. But without her how I would move forward? I wondered.

  Every feeling that I’d been avoiding came down on me at once. My emotions crested over the top of me. The pain I was in was palpable. I was unable to eat but I could feel it and taste it. There was no place to escape—no sleep, no workout, no record, no movie, no walk with Bottom. I wasn’t suicidal but I was at the end of my rope. I didn’t know how I would recover. I knew that if Ahren, of all people, didn’t want to talk to me, I had serious, serious work to do on myself. The fact she felt she needed to protect herself from me was a serious indictment of my character. I realized that I had to learn how to behave in a manner consistent with the good person that I imagined I was. I wanted to be a better man—a man who was worthy of talking to her. I wanted to apologize. I went off the porn talk lines cold turkey and did everything I knew to get the numbers out of my head.

  I promised God that if he would give me another opportunity, I wouldn’t mess it up. I would be prepared the next time God brought me somebody very special. But for that moment, I knew I’d lost her. I tucked my tail between my legs and finally began, in earnest, my journey toward healing.

  At age thirty-two, for the first time in my life, I was living on my own. I was alone with myself and my demons. Ahren was gone; I had completely alienated myself from my friends; I had no one to fall back on. My family rallied around me, of course, but they were very disappointed that Ahren and I had broken up. She had been in my life so long she had become one of us. Even my dying grandfather told me, “Courtney, I just thought you and Ahren were like Romeo and Juliet.” I was stunned. I hadn’t known he felt that way. Everyone had been invested in my re
lationship with Ahren.

  Now it was just me and Bottom. It was truly a case of “man’s best friend.” He and I began to settle into a rhythm. I had my walks with Bottom and my sessions with Dr. K. to anchor me; otherwise I was by myself. For the next several years I undertook a monstrous effort to become the man of integrity I aspired to be. With Dr. Kornfeld’s help I did an incredible amount of soul-searching. I knew that I had drifted onto that broad boulevard to destruction that was paved with good intentions.

  “I cannot do this! I will not do this!” I told myself about the 1-900 numbers. “I will not be controlled by this.” When something sexual came on television, I turned it off. I stayed out of the magazine section.

  I hadn’t meant to be a bad person, ironically, my ability to act—the very gift that had helped me cast myself beyond my life circumstances—had contributed to my undoing. There wasn’t an area of life that didn’t involve a performance. There wasn’t a place I could go in my mind where I didn’t discover a lie of one kind or another. We examined my tendency to tell “white lies,” exaggerate or flat out not tell the truth.

  “Why is it so important to please people?” Dr. K. would ask me.

  “Because I want them to like me,” I admitted. I didn’t like to upset people or feel that I’d let them down.

  “But why? Why can’t you just be who you are and let that be enough?”

  “Maybe I feel that if I am who I am, that won’t be good enough…”

  We also began to examine my choices, including the ones that led to the demise of my relationship.

  “How do you make decisions?” Dr. Kornfeld asked me.

  “I kind of flip a coin.”

  “You flip a coin?”

  “Yeah, like the luck of the draw—fifty-fifty. I just pick one or the other,” I told her. In theater, flipping a coin is an acceptable technique for making certain decisions. Sometimes you just pick a character attribute or path and go for it without looking back because in rehearsal you can always change your mind.

  “Courtney, that’s no way to live your life. You can’t make decisions that way. It may be fine for acting, but for life it’s a disaster.”

  “What do you mean? I flip a coin, make a decision, then react off of it.”

  “Oh, I understand now. You’re the king of reaction.”

  “How do you do it then? Is there another way?”

  “Sometimes when you don’t know what to do, Courtney, it’s best to just sit still.”

  “I can’t be still. When I know that something needs to be done I just want to do it.”

  “But, Courtney, sometimes there’s nothing to do but sit there and wait. I wonder if you can be patient enough to let the mud settle in the water and the water become clear?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You allow yourself to be quiet long enough to allow other options to develop.”

  I would learn from Dr. K. that as well educated as I was, as accomplished as I was, I was missing some basic life skills. She and I began to meet several times a week. She taught me to construct my life around rhythms and rituals. With her help I began to bring more structure to my life. At the foundation was my relationship with Bottom. I made a full commitment to him and he became the focus of my life. Knowing that I had to walk him at 6:30 a.m., 2:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. each day gave me structure and helped me organize my life. In between walks, I would go to the dry cleaners, buy groceries, go to work at the theater (I continued auditioning for roles in plays and movies), cook dinner, go to bed and write in my journal. Those activities provided the framework and the rest of my life happened around them. Having patterns and rhythms simplified my life. They helped me grow more in touch with myself. I started knowing how I was doing by whether I kept up with them. The structure also gave me something to focus on and helped me quiet the conversations in my mind. I’d often second-guess or beat myself up about decisions I’d made.

  “Yes, you messed up in the past but it’s finally time to deal with the ‘why,’” I’d think. “You’ve got to get started now.”

  “But, I hurt her so much…”

  “You can’t go back and change that, so just start where you are, Court. Just start where you are.”

  “I know but—”

  “Just start today, and tomorrow build on what you learned from the previous day. You’re going to mess up—that’s a given. Just start all over again.”

  “But—”

  “Just begin, Courtney.”

  And I did. As my life became more orderly, I didn’t think as much about how much I had squandered, what I had or hadn’t done. I didn’t wonder, Why did I do that? as often. I started living methodically, moment by moment by moment, one task at a time. I stopped overcommitting myself. For the first time in my adult life, I was dealing with a manageable number of tasks and activities. Consequently there were fewer people to try to keep happy and less reason to exaggerate, overextend myself or lie. When my mind would wander or I’d slip up, I’d just bring my thoughts back to the task at hand or start all over again.

  We also continued to delve deeply into my dreams. As we examined them, Dr. K. was able to know what was going on in both my conscious and subconscious minds without any filtering, censoring or editing on my part. Our work was similar to a type of therapy she’d later inform me was called analysis. By using my dreams she didn’t have to try to figure things out or drag them out of me. Everything was right in the dream. My sports dreams were usually about my personal boundaries. When my team’s defense was really, really “on,” I knew I was being effective with people and my personal boundaries were strong. If my defense got run over by the offense, I was having a hard time navigating relationships and was letting people take advantage of me. If I was on offense and was advancing with the ball, I was being appropriately assertive in life.

  Many of my dreams were about race. They helped me uncover that I held deeply suppressed feelings about being a black man living in a world of white privilege. All my life there had been a part of me that felt as though I didn’t belong. Even now, whenever I sat on Dr. K.’s stoop waiting for my appointments, I was aware of a bitter irony. In my professional life I was a very successful actor. In fact, while I was Dr. K.’s patient, I had received Tony Award nominations for Six Degrees and Fences and an Obie Award, which recognizes off-Broadway performances, for my role in Athol Fugard’s play My Children! My Africa! But when I wasn’t onstage, I was the prototypical “invisible man,” sitting below street level on Dr. Kornfeld’s stoop, watching white people go by and feeling like an outsider.

  It was no wonder I didn’t feel like I belonged in the all-white world of privilege. I’d been navigating and negotiating it alone for much of my life with no one to translate or run interference for me. I remembered how painful it felt to be ripped out of my all-black neighborhood school, where I had good friends, so I could attend all-white schools. Most of the people at my new schools were nice enough, but starting all over socially was rough. And the kids were different; the culture was different; the activities were different. The way I spoke suddenly didn’t feel good enough. I remembered Cecilie’s observation that I had started talking “white” and realized that I had changed my manner of speaking in an effort to try to fit in. I realized I had “gutted” my way through some incredibly elite and competitive environments—from Detroit Country Day School to Harvard to Yale to Broadway—without any personal or professional support. I hadn’t even known that being supported was possible—I didn’t know what it looked like. To survive—actually, I had thrived—I had stuffed down some very intense feelings: fear, anger, sadness, loneliness, isolation. It had worked, but at a price. By becoming numb to how I was feeling, I had cut off an important part of myself. Rather than “feeling” my way through situations, I learned to “perform” my way through them. Ironically, this may have helped contribute to my gift as an actor. Eventually, Dr. K. helped me bring that knowledge full circle. We talked about my father’s life—what a
pioneer he had been, how many environments he had integrated, how many places he’d had to go alone as a result of being abandoned—I realized how well he’d done with so little emotional support. Though I was appearing in Broadway plays alongside some of the world’s greatest thespians, my father may have been the greatest actor I’d ever known. Through my work, I could “complete him.”

  As my life became ordered and the voices inside my head quieted, I began to notice again my desire to find my way back to the Lord. I had tried to find him while I was still in college, but now my desire to bring together the good man I saw in my mind with the man of my actions led me right back to the search I had begun and abandoned years before. I hadn’t realized that God had placed a hedge of protection around me all along and had been trying to get my attention. Unbeknownst to me, everything had to “unravel” so I would slow down enough to listen and “let the mud settle.” He had positioned me to embark upon my journey to grow into the man I had always seen in the back of my mind—the man my family would need me to be. I had a long way to go. I was not that man yet. But slowly, ever so slowly, I began to turn my focus toward God.

  By participating in therapy diligently, I recovered essential parts of myself—peace of mind, my integrity, my emotional well-being. I’d awakened my spiritual self. By the end of 1993, I was able to accept that the door to Ahren was closed. I knew that I had closed it and took full responsibility. I know I messed up, I told myself. But there will be a next time, and I will be ready! I knew it was really time to make a fresh start.

  During the late 1980s and early ’90s, there had been an exodus of actors leaving New York and moving to Los Angeles. People were starting to make L.A. their base and travel back to New York. I had done all I could do in New York for now. I needed a change of scenery. Since all my buddies and boys were out on L.A., I decided to move there, too. I flew out there and stayed with some friends while I looked for a place. When I returned, I called the Mayflower Moving Company to come and get my things, packed what would fit into my Honda Civic wagon and asked my good buddy Robert Bristol to drive to the West Coast with Bottom and me. (I flew Robert back home.) Along the way, we explored the country. That was an incredible road trip, a rite of passage of sorts—just the boys: Rob, Bottom and me.