by David Rakoff
“I’m sorry,” she said to me, before she even handed out the saffron-yellow script books. “I’m afraid I can’t even let you audition. I’m going to need actors who are more physically substantial.”
There are some moments in life that are perfect. Not necessarily wonderful, but that hew so closely to some Platonic or ruminated-upon version of themselves that one almost can’t believe they are happening. In fact, one doesn’t believe they are happening. As a freshman in college, for example, walking along 112th Street of a winter’s evening, the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine just up ahead, I looked over to my left at the garbage bags in the empty lot at the corner. In the fading purple gloaming, their surfaces swirled, they seemed to be undulating. I remember thinking to myself, What an amazing trick of the light, because it is almost as if those garbage bags were simply covered with live rats, but of course, they’re not, because to see that with my own eyes would be too horrible, too scarring, too much exactly what I fear at this moment on this dark New York side street. Ergo, here be no rats.
On I marched right up to those selfsame Hefty bags which, of course, were covered, teeming with starving rats who squeaked en masse, a horrible, squealing rodent choir, that scattered upon my approach, some of them almost running over my boots.
So when the drama teacher said, “I’m going to need actors who are more physically substantial,” essentially announcing to the room “this production is only open to people with pubic hair, which you emphatically do not yet seem to have,” they were so exactly the words of which I lived in fear, the words I anticipated coming out of everyone’s mouth, that I didn’t get it at first. I thought I was still making it up in my head. She was smiling at me, after all, and I smiled back the entire time, Wile E. Coyote blithely walking off his butte into thin air and not falling until he actually realizes there is nothing beneath his feet but ether. I once heard about an Austro-Hungarian princess, assassinated by an anarchist who, pretending to bump into her, actually stabbed her through the heart with a long pin. Nobody even knew she had been mortally wounded, least of all she herself, until hours later when she finally collapsed. She lived a life as rarefied and abstemious as a silkworm, subsisting on a ridiculous diet (mulberry leaves and shaved ice in a silver bowl comes to mind, but I think I’m making that up, since it sounds suspiciously like what one actually feeds silkworms). Daily, Her Highness forced herself into heavily corseted black garments. So constricted was she, so inky the fabric, that she didn’t register the pin breaching her chest wall, nor did anyone else notice that her blood-soaked dress was darker and heavier than usual. In fact, until she dropped dead, she apparently just smiled and smiled.
As did I. Still grinning and hot-faced, I got to my feet and left the circle. I walked to the door and found my shoes among the pile of sneakers. I laced them up. I found my jacket and my knapsack. The drama teacher had moved on at this point and was already asking other students to read from the play as I stepped outside and closed the door behind me.
Years later, in college, I was working as a summer researcher in a psychiatric hospital when one of the younger patients on the floor—a boy exactly my age who had been sent home from school after a schizophrenic episode—showed up at my office door. Formal patient contact wasn’t part of my job, but I wasn’t forbidden from talking to them, either. I had been instructed to treat them all with respect and kindness, but this boy freaked me out. The differences between us seemed insufficiently pronounced, without even a discernible before-and-after split screen to separate us. It felt like I, too, might go crazy at any moment, just from being in close enough contact with him. Secondhand psychosis.
He was agitated and holding his notebook in one hand, which he held out to me, open to a page.
“Look at this,” he said.
Exhaustive tables of German verb conjugations covered the paper, written in the tiny, meticulous hand that seems to be the sole province of the mentally troubled.
“Those look like German verbs,” I said.
“Yes, I know what they are,” he said, nodding his head impatiently. “What I want to know is who wrote them.”
Without even thinking about it, I gave him a smile accompanied by a small nasal puff of air whose gentle shotgun report pushed my head back in an upward nod.
Here’s where things get weird in an almost Bleak House coincidence. I saw my high-school drama teacher that very same summer, on the street right outside that very same psychiatric hospital (she could have been on her way to Chinatown for dim sum, I suppose, but c’mon …). As the child of a shrink, I knew enough to respect her privacy. I would let her initiate the contact if she wanted it. But I wanted to convey to her that I finally understood that smile. It was a smile meant to sweeten a gentle admonition, a friendly entreaty, as if to plead, Please don’t make me complicit in your delusion. A smile that says, Can’t you see it? You have eyes. Look at yourself.
I watched her as she furtively shifted her eyes away from mine quickly, so as to pretend she hadn’t seen me at all. I didn’t blame her for not wanting to stop and talk, and I didn’t really mind. She was probably having a hard day. Besides, by that time I had grown.
Isn’t It Romantic?
The paper is crisp from the wheat paste used to put it up on a wall just off West Houston Street in 1988 or thereabouts. It was still damp when I carefully peeled it from the bricks. It graced a bathroom door in a former apartment but now stays rolled up among the various posters for which I have neither wall space nor funds to frame. A text-only broadside, its forceful font (center aligned, all caps, sans serif) is as no-nonsense as its in-your-face message: MURDER DAN QUAYLE IN COLD BLOOD, it reads (remember when we thought Dan Quayle the very apex of incompetence and the absolute nadir of elected officialdom?). Along with a cherished READ MY LIPS ACT UP T-shirt and a largely intact strip of SUPPORT VAGINAL PRIDE stickers from WHAM! (Women’s Health Action and Mobilization), it is a reminder of how much of a battleground the city was at that time, during the early-ish days of the pandemic; some desperately-needed humor in response to those very unfunny circumstances. If the occasional joke crossed the line of good taste, so be it. Shocking the status quo has always been the job of art. Art was salvation, art was revolution. There was a war going on and the soldiers were those engaged in the deadly serious and downright heroic business of making art.
Just look at them: young, multiracial, and beautifully ragtag in thrift-store clothing (disregard for the moment those anachronistic headsets), singing with an earnest fervor and committed self-regard that the Bolsheviks storming the Winter Palace would have had a hard time mustering. And what are they telling us? That there are 525,600 minutes in a year.
Wait, what? That’s the grand statement? The kind of pointless breakdown that calls to mind that damp-nosed, pedantic boy in school who was always volunteering useless information, like how much Belgium weighs. But here, in the musical Rent, the updating of Puccini’s La Bohème to New York City in those desperate days, this is anything but dry fact. It is an exhortation to each and every one of us to mindfully mark the passing of these 525,600 minutes. Do not dole them out into the despairing mounds of Prufrock’s coffee spoons, but rather celebrate them in something Jonathan Larson, the composer and lyricist, called “Seasons of Love.”
What does that even mean, Seasons of Love? The mind might conjure a soft-core calendar. There is Miss April, coyly covering an areola with a gerbera daisy, while Miss December shields her nipples behind fluffy angora-mitten-clad hands (toasty!). Or perhaps Seasons of Love® would be something you’d keep in the door of the fridge. Seasons of Love® might come in a foil-wrapped cardboard can with a shaker top. Dehydrated onion would figure prominently. As would carnauba wax. Eventually it would be taken off the market when it came to light that the bacon bits were nothing more than highly salted, air-puffed balsa wood, but before all that there would be television commercials showing happy couples sprinkling their Seasons of Love® over salads, or laughingly feeding one another
bites of baked potato festively speckled with the stuff, like someone had just celebrated New Year’s all over your food.
In Rent, the characters live out their Seasons of Love in huge Manhattan lofts. Some of them have AIDS, which, coincidentally, is also the name of a dreaded global pandemic that is still raging and has killed millions of people worldwide. In Rent, AIDS seems only to render one cuter and cuter. The characters are artists. Creative types. Some of them are homosexual, and the ones who aren’t don’t seem to mind. They screen their calls and when it is their parents they roll their eyes. They hate their parents. They are never going back to Larchmont, no way. They will stay here, living in their two thousand square feet of picturesque poverty, being sexually free and creative.
And who can blame them? It can be delightful and interesting to spend one’s days engaged in carnal hijinks and creative pursuits. Exponentially more delightful and interesting than a life of responsibility-shouldering, paper-pushing drudgery. Fraught and messy though an artistic life may be, is there a drug that can induce the euphoria as energizing as that intensely fragile moment when the muse passes through one and the artist becomes the simultaneously perfect and flawed instrument of expression? No, there is not. Even as the inner voices battle it out, intoning “You suck!” and “Eureka!” in equal measure, creation is—like the loosest of teeth just begging to be toggled by the curious tongue—a joyous torment, in whatever form it takes.
Some examples:
A composer plinks out a tune on a piano. His raking hands—raw, overlarge paddles at the ends of his bony wrists—have turned his hair into a mad dandelion. His shirt collar is frayed. A lack of nourishment, either because he cannot afford to eat or he is too immersed in his work to even think about food, has given him the gaunt ethereality of an El Greco saint. The garret radiator clanks and hisses. He scratches a few notes on some music paper. He plinks some more. Suddenly he crashes both hands down on the keyboard, then bringing them quickly up to his head, he grabs the hair at his temples in angry fistfuls and screams, “It. Won’t. Work!” (Alternately, in a fit of brilliant madness, he transcribes onto music paper the pattern of the birds sitting on the telephone wires outside his window and thereby finishes his masterwork, Requiem for the Common Pigeon.)
Beside a clanking and hissing garret radiator, a novelist sits at a typewriter, beside him a shot glass with the amber dregs of his morning Bushmills. He is reading the page he’s just written. Realizing that it’s shit, he tears it from the platen and tosses it behind him. Cut to the wastebasket overflowing with crumpled paper.
Four AM, a wife rolls over in bed, her arm touching the absence on the other side of the mattress. Rising, she ties her thin flannel wrapper around her (the garret radiator, usually clanking and hissing, is now cold and silent due to unpaid utility bills), and makes her way down the hall, pushing open the door of the studio. Silently she watches the hulking, ropy back of her husband as he stands before his unfinished canvas. Her eyes fill with tears of love and she turns to go back to bed, forgetting for the moment the yellow-purple sunset on her left cheek, the cost—a cost she is happy to pay—of having married a genius. (Let us pause herewith for a moment of honesty about that old chestnut about art and artists being immune to the petty concerns of morality, or the need to be kind, or fair, or in fact anything other than obliteratingly self-involved. It has always seemed little more than a rationalization for goatish, flesh-pressing painters, writers, and musicians to skip out on checks, borrow but not return things, sire but not take care of children, and mostly to cheat on, mooch off of, or sock long-suffering wives and girlfriends.)
Consider, even, that well-worn cliché, not of an artist, exactly, but certainly an easily bruised sensitivity and a deep well of pain, speaking to a definite creative bent: the Sad and Beautiful French Girl with the Enviable Pair of Tits Who Is Slowly Going Mad. How do we know that she is slowly going mad? There she is (topless, natch), looking at her reflection in the mirror as if gazing at a stranger. Watch as she puts on her lipstick, gradually smearing ever-wider circles outside the edges of her mouth while fat, photogenic glycerin tears fall silently down her perfect cheeks.
Here is what the characters do in Rent to show us that they are creative: nothing. They do nothing. The “songwriter” spends fourteen seconds noodling on his guitar, sampling Puccini. The “filmmaker” shoots a lot of Super 8 footage of people he knows, which makes him about as much of an artist as everybody’s dad. Nobody is pasting up a poster or mimeographing a pamphlet. Vice President Quayle suits them just fine. A few of the dramatis personae have jobs, but this only makes them laughably contemptible corporate stooges. There is one character who actually works at her art, a newly-minted lesbian performance artist named Maureen whose ambition is portrayed as being as unseemly, rapacious, and untrustworthy as her elastic Kinsey placement. All of it evidence of a callous narcissism (“She needs someone to run the light board? Fucking bitch …”). Right up there alongside the retrovirus and the forces of gentrification, Maureen is the villain of the piece. She should stop with these constant careerist attempts at being “interesting.” In addition to being unattractive, they’re unnecessary. An artist is something you are, not something you do.
I first encountered this Seussian syllogism in a used-book store, where I spent an extra thirty minutes fake-browsing just so I might continue to eavesdrop on the cashier, who was expounding to his friend about Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo’s classic antiwar novel. The cashier had a theory about the book’s protagonist, Johnny, wounded and blinded and amputated to such an extent that, while sentient, he was little more than an unresponsive trunk of meat with a rich inner life. “So I asked myself: If this guy was Picasso, would he have been any less of an artist or less of a genius just because he couldn’t paint? And my thinking is no, he wouldn’t.” I lacked the bravery to challenge him more openly than a muttered “Oh, brother” from the stacks, choosing instead to ridicule and sell him out years later, here in print. But it’s the same reasoning: indolence as proof positive of prodigious gifts. You can arguably invent Cubism and be the very embodiment of Modernism if you get a kick out of that sort of thing. But you hardly need to, Armless Picasso. Artists are artists whether they produce or not. None of it requires much more than hanging out.
And hanging out can be marvelous. But hanging out does not make one an artist. A secondhand wardrobe does not make one an artist. Neither do a hair-trigger temper, melancholic nature, propensity for tears, hating your parents, nor even HIV—I hate to say it—none of these make one an artist. They can help, but just as being gay does not make one witty (you can suck a mile of cock, as my friend Sarah Thyre puts it, it still won’t make you Oscar Wilde, believe me), the only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out.
So when they sing in the anthem of the show (a lie, really. Every song in the show is an anthem, delivered with adolescent earnestness. It’s like being trapped in the humid pages of a teenager’s diary), when they sing in the title anthem of the show, “We’re not gonna pay this year’s rent,” followed by a kind of barked cheer of “rent rent rent rent rent!,” my only question is: Well, why aren’t you going to pay this year’s rent?
It seems that they’re not going to pay this year’s rent because rent is for losers and uncreative types. Rent is for Suits, while they are the last bastion of artistic purity. They have not sold out and yet their brilliance goes unacknowledged, so fuck you, yuppie scum!
Jonathan Larson died the day before Rent opened. He went home from the dress rehearsal feeling poorly, made himself a pot of tea, and died on his kitchen floor. It is an achingly sad story; a waste of a huge talent and, by all accounts, a truly lovely guy. It is made all the more theatrically wrenching by the fact that the show went on to become a huge Pulitzer-garnering hit; the aging Calvero, Charlie Chaplin’s character in Limelight, expiring
in the wings as Claire Bloom’s ballerina triumphs. I heard 9/11 jokes long before it felt okay to say that even though it was a terrible thing that he died and that, yes, AIDS is a devastating, horrible scourge to which I have lost many friends, and indeed New York was becoming far too expensive and criminally inhospitable to young people who tried to come here with dreams of making art, and how regrettable that the town’s vibrancy and authenticity were being replaced by a culture-free, high-end-retail cluster-fuck of luxury condo buildings whose all-glass walls essentially require a populace that doesn’t own bookshelves or, consequently, books. A metropolis of streets once thriving with local businesses and services now consisting of nothing but Marc Jacobs store after Marc Jacobs store and cupcake purveyors (is there anything more blandly sweet, less evocative of this great city, and more goyish than any other baked good with the possible exception of Eucharist wafers than the cupcake?). And even though Jonathan Larson’s musical was meant in its own ham-fisted, undergraduate way to be a call to arms against this very turn of events, was it just me, or was this middlebrow lie a symptom posing as an antidote, like watching a sex-ed film narrated by gonorrhea? Were others also leaving the theater rooting for the landlords?
Larson worked for years at a diner right around the corner from an apartment I once had. Restaurant work can be punishing and thankless toil, so he is to be applauded for plying his craft so steadfastly after what must have been long shifts on his feet. His is the story of almost every artist. Why, then, in transmuting his own struggle did he so completely drop the ball? (And to those of you who say that dumbing down and sugaring up is innate to musical theater, I say fuck you, homophobe. Go listen to the dark brilliance of Pal Joey or Floyd Collins and then come and talk to me.) Perhaps it is an added sense of identification that fuels my sense of betrayal. In photographs of Larson, with his heavy features and hooded eyes—the sweet and approachable face wishing like hell it could make the leap to handsome—I see my own.