That’s where we left off. Now Joseph gives his brothers a bounty of food to take back home and here is where we come up to another one of those strange moments in the Bible. His final bit of advice to his brothers is what? Out of everything he could say at such a dramatic and lifesaving juncture, his final words are “Go, and don’t fight on the road.”
For a second it sounds like he’s talking to children in the backseat of the station wagon on a car trip. But it’s not just me who thought this seemed like an odd thing to say. He hasn’t seen his brothers in almost twenty years. After his triumph over adversity, he reaches out to save them in a time of famine: “Don’t fight on the road.” This comment has been examined by dozens of scholars for the last two thousand years. What does Joseph mean?
There are several interpretations. Rashi, a great French rabbi and commentator from the eleventh century, said that the word “fight” really meant “be agitated” or “be fearful.” Because the brothers had so many riches and food with them, if they acted nervous in any way, they could draw the attention of thieves. Joseph was warning them to act casually on the way back home.
Another commentator suggested it was a long trip. He was telling his brothers not to be afraid, that there was a sort of divine protection watching over them. Another suggested Joseph wanted to warn his brothers not to continue to blame each other for what they had done to him in the past. If they did, they wouldn’t pay attention to the dangers and demands that lay in front of them. These are all good and interesting. But there is another I became enamored of from a Chasidic rabbi in the late eighteenth century. He argued that the line was mistranslated.
In Hebrew, the meanings of words are changed by letters added to the beginning and end of that word. Here we have the word derech, which means road. You add a bet (Hebrew for B) in front of it: ba derech, and you have something that can be translated as “on the road.” It doesn’t have to mean that. On occasion a bet at the beginning of a word can also mean “with.” Now the sentence would read, “don’t fight with the road.” Strange. And one further change: derech doesn’t have to mean “road.” It can also mean “path” or “way.”
Now the meaning has changed from “don’t fight on the road” to something like “don’t argue with the path.” Maybe Joseph wasn’t giving advice as to how to act on the journey. Perhaps he was describing the journey itself. Not travel tips, but a far more sweeping vision of how to live your life: don’t fight with the path.
In my life and the lives of those I have loved, the path is something impossible to trace. It has never been predictable. It has never been easy. But in a strange way it has always been planned.
Here is a fairy tale. A real one. A real story of the path. It was 1973. It was my final year at SMU. One of the irascible characters in our school, the rough, gruff, Mississippi-born, Army-trained, shaggy-blond-haired graduate student Lanny Flaherty announced he was leaving us. He landed a lot of great parts, wrote some great term papers on Anton Chekhov, but he had had enough of school and was headed to New York City to take his shot at being what he wanted to be, a Broadway actor.
As I think back, Lanny could have been the first person we knew who broke from expectations and went his own way. If I were to play the “where and when” game of where and when we learn life lessons, it could have been Lanny’s decision to leave school that led me to my decision to leave Illinois two years later without finishing the masters program.
Like everything Lanny did, it happened fast. He was “packing up and leaving in a couple of weeks.” It was the talk of the drama department. Lanny announced that there would be a “good-bye/help-me-clean-up-my-damn-apartment” party the next Saturday night.
The entire drama school showed up. People came bearing beer and marijuana. The music was cranked up on the stereo. We packed up the yellow Datsun with all of his worldly belongings. We emptied out the fridge, we scrubbed the bathroom, we hauled and swept and threw away, and as the sun began to rise, we began to cry. Everyone lined up that dawn to kiss and hug Lanny good-bye. Even this big, gruff bear of a man’s cheeks started flushing as the waves of love and loss washed over him.
We walked down to the street and watched as Lanny squeezed his way into the front seat. He turned to us in that beautiful light of the Texas dawn and waved a final farewell. My former roommate Jim McLure put his arm around my shoulder and watched Lanny go. Even Jimmy was a little teary as he said, “He’s the first.” I looked over to Jim as he continued, “We’re crying now but it’s something we’re all going to have to do someday. If you don’t leave, it means you never started.”
It was a double whammy for me: Jim’s words and the image of Lanny’s Datsun rounding the corner. He was gone. That was it. He was on his way to another life. We looked back to the now empty apartment waiting for its next tenant.
A week later, I was walking across campus to my literature class. There was Lanny Flaherty striding out of the student center. I did a double take. Lanny was back! Apparently, he got to New York, decided that he didn’t want to stay “in that godforsaken place,” and turned around and came back to Dallas. Now he was looking for another apartment, and he’d let us know when he was going to have a “move-in/let’s clean-the-place-up” party.
If the story ended there, it could be a good B plotline of a sitcom, but it didn’t.
Two weeks after Lanny’s return, James Earl Jones and company came to use space at SMU to rehearse a Broadway-bound production of Of Mice and Men. All of us actors hoped to catch sight of the man. The director of Of Mice and Men, Ed Sherin, spoke to us at Conference Hour and caught sight of Lanny Flaherty. Lanny’s crusty, Southern character struck Ed as perfect for the play. Ed asked Lanny to read for him. Lanny did and was cast immediately.
Lanny Flaherty was back in his Datsun on his way back to New York, now a working actor on Broadway.
And as in all good fairy stories, Lanny lived happily ever after. As an actor he performed in a string of Broadway shows and, as a writer, he wrote the last play in which the great Henry Fonda performed. I was struck by the new irony in Jim McLure’s observation, “If you don’t leave, it means you never started.”
AS PERPLEXING AS the Bible can be, nothing can outdo science when it comes to proposing theories that can make you redefine the meaning of the word “What?!”
I always found books on science great to take on a movie shoot. You never know how long you will have to sit in your trailer. There is nothing worse than getting pulled away from a great novel at the wrong time. It’s best if you have something that reads in short bursts, like Charles Dickens or books on physics.
With Dickens there is always a good place to stop. With physics books there’s never a good place to start. You only have to read a couple of sentences before you’re brought to a complete standstill. Nice and quick.
Here is one of my favorites. In quantum physics there is a particle called a tachyon. The tachyon, theoretically, travels faster than the speed of light, meaning that it can arrive somewhere before it has left.
Pause to absorb this idea.
But there’s more. If the principle of special relativity is true—that to the observer nothing travels faster than light—it means that for the tachyon to exist, it must travel back into the past to appear to comply with natural laws.
You can think about this idea for days and days and not figure it out. I have been thinking about it for years. I have come up with one possible way that the tachyon may exist. Every day. In the form of memory. In a nonlinear way, you travel back into the past even though you are traveling forward at the same time. In a real sense you have arrived before you have left.
It is also a heartening principle for those of us who appeared to be going nowhere in our lives. Had I known about the tachyon back then, I could have imagined that in some theoretical universe, Beth and I had arrived at a new destination, even though it looked as though we were starting over again.
She came out to Los Angeles after doing the Linc
oln show in Illinois, after our one year of graduate school. We moved into a real house with a real backyard where I tried to grow real zucchini. I had a job doing children’s theater with Twelfth Night Repertory Company and Beth was back to the same place she was in Dallas, with no real job that suited her. Instead of working as a waitress, she was now working as a temp in a dog food factory.
But here was the difference. It was a slender thing, but now she had the revelation. The revelation from the evening we read Claudia Reilly’s play: the revelation that she would write. And from that idea, she wrote.
She was writing a screenplay called The Moonwatcher, which drew on her experiences over the last summer. She still carried around those tattered spiral notebooks where she jotted down ideas and drew pictures of witches on broomsticks.
We had several friends from Dallas who were also actors. We decided that we should band together and do plays to keep our souls alive, or, if that failed, we could get together and get stoned, drink beer, and talk about banding together to do plays to keep our souls alive. We often settled for option two.
Enter Fred Bailey. Bailey was a fellow SMU alum. He also provided something every group of actors always needs and usually forgets. A play. He was a writer. He had the tools to turn all of that drunken potential energy into a kinetic production. It turned out to be the catalyst we needed. Bailey wrote fun, exciting plays. He was also a great director.
He also had recognition. Fred had won the prestigious Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Great American Play Contest with his Vietnam-era play The Bridgehead. This almost guaranteed that the major newspapers in Los Angeles would review our productions. If we got lucky with a show, it could mean casting directors and agents would see us, and we could be on the road to real careers. There was also something intangible Fred brought to our group: the energy of the possible.
It was the opposite of the Twitter psychology: that the more followers you have, the more valid you are. We had validity because we felt we had something to say, and Bailey provided that something. We rehearsed in backyards and barns. We all chipped in money to make the sets, costumes, and the theater rental happen. But in the end, the most powerful contribution we made was with our time.
When I was addicted to cocaine several years later, a dealer told me something important. He said addiction is not just made up of the time you spend getting high. It is also made up of the time you spend thinking about drugs, earning money to buy drugs, and driving around trying to find drugs.
The man was not a friend, but that night in the alley behind a restaurant, he made me see the world differently. Our life isn’t necessarily measured by what we accumulate, but how we spend our time. There is a pressure to value achievement by focusing on the finish line. I often think more praise should be bestowed on those who make sure we’re starting at the right place. That was Fred Bailey.
Bailey took us to a true starting line where everything we wanted in our past and everything we hoped for in the future came together. It focused our energy in such a way that the topics of our weekend parties weren’t about how we couldn’t get agents and how we didn’t have careers, but what our next show would be.
It was an environment of excitement. It was during this charged period that what appeared to be a personal tragedy hit Beth. Her grandfather in Mississippi got lost in the woods. Beth got the phone call and burst into tears. Everyone expected the worst. He was an old man. The search parties had turned up nothing. But in a couple of days he was found. He was healthy and in good spirits. He even joked about it. But it was after this event that Beth’s spiral notebooks came out with purpose.
After a few months of taking notes, Beth started writing a play. She pulled out her old electric typewriter and started turning pages of scribbles into characters and dialogue. The process didn’t call a lot of attention to itself. Because our little group was so focused on the creative rather than the endgame, everybody was writing something.
After a few days, Beth had a stack of typed pages on the dining room table. She still hadn’t finished, and she still didn’t have a title, but she asked me if I could read it to see if it was a complete disaster. I had learned my lesson with Am I Blue not to take Beth’s trash-talking too seriously.
I sat in the rocking chair that evening and began to read. Nothing I had experienced with Am I Blue could have prepared me. Whereas Am I Blue was small and quirky, this play was massive. Beth’s offbeat humor had turned into a startling voice. It could be funny and then tragic, often within the same line. It had the feel of a simple play about three sisters, but Beth revealed the universe in that simplicity.
Once again I had the feeling I was sitting in the presence of unexpected beauty. She handed me the sheets as she finished typing. We reached the end together. All I could do was hold her and cry. She asked me if I liked it. I told her it was great, simply great. She asked if I thought it was good enough for us to do as a production with our group. I said are you kidding? It was one of the best plays ever written. It’s going to be on Broadway.
A few days later we had a read-through in our living room with our friends. The play had an amazing effect on the group of innocent bystanders. I don’t think I ever remember hearing that much collective laughter, followed by stunned silence, and followed by tears. Afterward it was nuclear. Everyone was so excited. The only talk was when could we start rehearsals.
The play also needed a name. Beth called it Old Granddaddy’s Dying, which I thought lacked curb appeal. Sharon Ullrick, one of our troupe, said that one SMU graduate, Jack Heifner, had success with his play Vanities. Maybe we could think of a snappy one-word title. She came up with Crimes. Everybody liked that, but it still didn’t fit the grandness of the play. I came up with Crimes of Passion. It stuck.
We started rehearsals. Beth played Babe, I played Barnette. Sharon Ullrick, who was playing Meg, was the only person in our group who had an agent, Richard Bauman. She gave him the play to read. He didn’t, but he did keep it on his desk. His friend was a literary agent in New York. Richard’s custom was that whenever his friend came to town, he would hand him a pile of scripts for him to read on the long flight back.
As it happened, the top script on the pile was Crimes of Passion. One afternoon a strange man named Gilbert Parker called. He had just landed at Kennedy International Airport and wanted to talk to Beth. He asked her if he could help her with her play. Beth looked at me with huge eyes and shrugged her shoulders and said, “Sure.”
At the time none of us knew that Gilbert Parker was one of the biggest literary agents in the country. He had worked with the Curtis Brown Agency, where he dealt with Tennessee Williams and Lillian Hellman. Now he was with William Morris where he represented the top playwrights on Broadway.
Gilbert mentioned that the name of the play would have to be changed. Ken Russell was directing a movie called Crimes of Passion, and we didn’t want the two to be confused. I suggested to Beth that we could call it Crimes of the Heart. She liked the sound of it, and that became title number four.
This was the beginning of a road that led Beth, like Fred Bailey, to winning the Great American Play Contest in Louisville. It was a good news/bad news situation. The bad news was that we had to cancel our little production in Hollywood. The good news was that now our little group could boast of having two of the best writers in America.
The road led to a limited Off-Broadway run at the Manhattan Theatre Club, where Beth enjoyed moderate success until Gilbert called up and told her she had been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
We celebrated for about a week straight. It was joyous. We couldn’t believe where the road had led. In retrospect you could trace that not getting cast at SMU led to taking a playwriting class. Waitressing at Pepe Gonzalez Mexican Restaurant led to leaving Texas and going to Illinois, which led to being inspired by Claudia Reilly. We left Illinois and came to Los Angeles and the words of Jim McLure come back again: “If you don’t leave, it means you never started.”
; Beth won the Pulitzer Prize for Crimes of the Heart. It opened on Broadway and ran for over a year. It was made into a movie. Beth was nominated for a Tony and an Academy Award for writing. But to me, one of the sweetest memories I have of this amazing tale of success is that out of nowhere, opening night on Broadway, Claudia Reilly came to see the play of her old schoolmate. I don’t think Claudia ever knew the influence she had on Beth.
At intermission on opening night, Claudia ran to congratulate Beth. They screamed and hugged. Claudia looked like Claudia, dressed in black with her beret and boots and sharply cut blond hair. Beth looked like Beth in her ragamuffinish attire. Several women came up and pushed Beth away to talk to Claudia, because Claudia looked like a Broadway playwright.
One woman turned to Beth and said, “Excuse us, honey, we know Beth’s family from Mississippi.” They surrounded Claudia and started heaping praise on her for her play. Claudia smiled and nodded, taking it all in, and then she said, “I’m just letting you keep talking so I can watch your faces when I tell you what you just did.”
The road eventually led to many lucrative contracts, one of which was writing the novelization of Crimes of the Heart. That’s the book form of the movie. Beth was writing another play at the time and didn’t want the job and asked Gilbert if she could offer the book deal to someone else. “Certainly, as long as they can write,” Gilbert said.
Beth gave the job to Claudia Reilly. And so in another unpredictable turn in the road, the season of misdirection that led to graduate school in Illinois, that led to Beth being inspired to write by Claudia, now led to Claudia getting her first professional writing job from Beth.
And my mind comes back to the tachyon, the little particle that may or may not be real. It is invisible to us all. It travels faster than the speed of light so that it arrives before it departs. Perhaps the tachyon is a scientific accounting of what we call destiny—and the secret that Joseph tried to reveal to his departing brothers.
The Dangerous Animals Club Page 33