So I traveled to Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Connecticut, Chicago, St. Louis, and Wisconsin, and though it was a marvelous learning experience as an actor, I also learned that even seventy-five dollars went only so far. You saved what you could, which wasn’t a lot, because you were paying your own keep while you were doing this stuff. They only gave you a ticket to get on the train to go to the next place.
At the end of it, and in later intervals, I typically had to go back to dishwashing or similar jobs just to make ends meet. So my struggle economically to stay within the bounds of my ability to take care of myself was very exacting. I would often fall into “the channel,” where the movement of the tide was so swift I could never get my bearings. It was the fierce economic struggle to steady yourself between the forces of want and need—you want, and you need. There is a place between the two where you have to act with all your might, struggling to maintain your footing at the very center of them. If you are off a bit, here or there, you’re gone. You won’t be able to pay your rent. You won’t be able to buy food. You won’t have subway fare to go looking for jobs.
I knew there was need, and I knew there was want, and I knew that my money couldn’t stretch across that chasm. “Want” beat out “need” almost all the time, and I would find myself in trouble: I want to have a malted milk; I want to spend thirty-five to seventy-five cents to go to a movie. The verdict? I would spend that money to go to a movie, or I would buy something that I could have done without.
There I was, flailing in the channel, and before I knew it, I had lost my bearings. I had no place to stay, and I had a kind of on–and-off situation with dishwashing jobs in various parts of New York. Sometimes I got them, sometimes I didn’t.
The treacherous economic waters between “want” and “need” would continue to beat up on me for years to come. Finally I came to know much more than I did, but not nearly as much as I ought to have known. Still, looking back, after all is said and done, I was lucky.
Even after I made my first movie and had gone home victoriously to see my parents, I had difficulties: back and forth, back and forth. Before I knew it, I was married and the kids started coming. It was then that I had to decide that under no circumstances would I be in that channel again where the waters were so fierce that I couldn’t hold myself steady. Whatever forces there were, I would fight them with whatever economic resources I had, and I’d never, ever, again allow myself to be washed away by those forces.
In your day, Ayele, the temptations of “want” will likely be many. Television, newspapers, the Internet, and whatever miraculous new instruments of communication exist will inundate you with stimulating delights; and credit-card companies, if they do as today, will stand subserviently by, ready for your every wish to be their command.
So, if you allow, I would recommend you learn the rules and the economics by which the game is played and, thereby, enter with as strong a hand as you can manage. If luck is late in coming, a firm grip on the rules and a sharp eye on the economics will help you keep your balance while self-reliance holds you on course. The game is tough, and you can play it only once in a given lifetime. You are the captain; you must be at the wheel. You will chart the course; you will make the choices.
Over much of your upcoming years, money will command your attention. Allow it a proper place in your life, but deny it a throne. Money means many things, but nothing so much as a yardstick by which your measure will be taken—unfairly or not. The need of it, the use of it, the power of it, the love of it will be used by others to define who you are and who you are not. Even you yourself may use it to determine how you should perceive yourself. Be careful: money is also known to be a relentless master.
If I have learned anything from this balancing act, it is the importance of defining your worth in your own terms. That will be a subject to discuss in my next letter.
ninth letter
TAKING A STAND
Throughout the years of traveling into adulthood, as you may have seen already in my stories so far, I rarely took the path of least resistance. Most of the time, in fact, I walked a proverbial razor-sharp edge. Time and again, had I fallen to one side, it would have spelled my doom; time and again, I stepped back and landed on the side of fortune and opportunity. How? Why? That’s the bigger question for all of us whose lives might have gone either way.
When I look at everything that happened after I left home at age fifteen as a kind of proving ground that opened the floodgates eventually to a life that only a soothsayer and my mother could have believed in, a question that nags away is—why me?
Did I become the protagonist of an extraordinary lifetime by my own engineering? Or, as I’ve questioned before, was it predetermined by external, intangible, conscious forces that quietly pushed, guided, and delivered me onto a path of destiny’s making?
Why me? Why did I become an actor—me, a kid who at the age of ten and a half didn’t know that there were such things as actors. As to the thought of becoming one, nothing could have been further from my mind, even after becoming fascinated with movies as a teenager. For that matter, why did I become a producer, a director, or an author? Me, a kid who had practically no education; a kid whose vocabulary was exceedingly limited when he quit school at age twelve and a half; a kid who was well into his twenties before he even read a book; a kid who couldn’t spell (and who is still not terrific at it) and had no concept of the rules of grammar or the demarcations so widely known as essential elements in speaking, reading, writing?
I am as unlikely a candidate as anyone for what became my multiple callings. The voyage that I took could have been taken, and it has been in many other cases, by any number of other people, born at another time, raised in another set of family circumstances, out of one ethnicity or another, one race or another, one religion or another, one set of societal circumstances or another.
So, the question of “Why me?” remains a challenging one. But it’s important for me to ask it and to answer honestly, so as not to mythologize my life or myself, but to stay grounded in the truth. In my way, I can best answer it by looking at many of those trial-and-error passages of young adulthood and by seeing the combination of forces at work: the component elements of this activity, this movement, this journey, this happening. If you do that, you have to begin to think: what are those forces?
There is God, possibly. There is happenstance, possibly. There is a sort of individual sense of self that might be a part of it, a small part, in my behalf.
There may be more than a small amount of good, sound choices that I have made, but they have to be put in the category of chance, because I didn’t know that much about the world. My MO was to make immediate, small incremental choices that were going to get me, almost from moment to moment, almost from hour to hour, almost from day to day, the necessities of life. No grand design there, other than a reliance on instincts, and, from time to time, on decisions made to stand my ground—and to live out the consequences no matter what.
For example, when I arrived in America, I had to make my adjustment, first of all, to the kind of segregation that existed in Miami, the kind of life available to black people. What prepared someone for the dismissal of a black person because of the color of their skin, and the inbred attitudes of slavery that held sway throughout the United States at that time? Ill-equipped with education for trying to drive my way through all that, I had only the value system of my parents.
So I arrived in America with nowhere to turn except to those values that life had implanted in me. That was the only ground that I could stand on. Much of that terra firma had to do with who my mother was, and who my dad was. Because of those values, I was not long for the stay in Miami and left town at my earliest convenience to travel north, as I have described to you already, on my way to New York City.
What I’d like to add to that picture for you are more detailed accounts of two pivotal events that helped cause an early change in my fortunes.
The first, m
ost significant turning point came one morning when I happened to stop at a newsstand at the intersection of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, where I picked up a local newspaper, the Amsterdam News, and thumbed through it to the want-ad pages, looking for a job as a dishwasher. With my couple of years of schooling, I couldn’t read much in the paper other than the help-wanted listings. Not seeing anything of interest, I turned to toss the paper into the trash. But just as I was about to crumple it up and pitch it into the trash can, I looked again at the paper and my eyes caught something on the opposite page from the one with the dishwasher listings, which happened to be the theatrical listings. It was a headline streamer that said, in bold type: “Actors Wanted.”
Knowing nothing about actors, I was still curious enough to look more closely at the article underneath the heading, which told me of a production being cast at a place called the American Negro Theatre in Harlem—not many blocks from where I was standing! The proximity was a major enticement.
After all, ordinarily when looking for work I would get on the subway early and go all the way downtown to stop in at the scores of employment agencies where I would invariably find a dishwashing job somewhere in the distant reaches of mid-to lower Manhattan. But this was a different kind of help-wanted ad, and the theater was close enough to home that I figured, Why not? Why not go to this place, this address, and see what kind of a job it is and what I will have to do?
With that one tiny flash of nothing more than curiosity, I unwittingly altered the direction of my life. Right there on the sidewalk of Harlem, standing over a trash can, a newspaper page in hand, puzzling over two words: “Actors Wanted.”
How exactly, you may wonder, did it go at the audition—a word that was then as foreign as the fascinating sights, smells, and flamboyant personalities of the people who inhabited this strange behind-the-scenes world of the theater? Ayele, let me tell you, it could not have been worse! The first clue that it wasn’t going to be easy was when the director had me read for him from a book. Needless to say, reading silently to myself was still a struggle, but reading aloud was painful for both of us. Before I got very far at all, he said abruptly, “Thank you very much for coming by,” and he snatched the book out of my hand.
An extremely large, truly massive fellow, he didn’t stop there but actually spun me around, grabbed me by the seat of my pants, and marched me to the door, letting me have it every step of the way. “Go on, get out of here,” he bellowed. “Get out of here and stop wasting people’s time. Why don’t you go out and get yourself a job as a dishwasher or something? You can’t read, you can’t talk, you’re no actor!” And with that he opened the door, pushed me through it, and threw me out. He threw me out! Not quite finished, without skipping a beat, he slammed the door shut.
There was no mistaking the message he had meant to send me, to be sure. But as I was walking to Seventh Avenue from Lenox Avenue and 135th Street to get the bus to go downtown to hunt for a dishwasher job, I got to thinking, and it suddenly occurred to me—Why did he recommend my going out and getting a job as a dishwasher? Not once during the audition did I tell him that I was a dishwasher, so why did he say it? And what became clear to me was that dishwashing was his view of my value as a human being.
In that moment, I made the choice that I could not and would not allow that to stand. Now, what was I operating on? I was operating on what I learned from my mom, and what I learned from my dad—that I am somebody. I was always somebody. And here this guy who didn’t know me from Adam had fashioned for me a life that I could not allow to happen if I had anything to do with it. I decided then and there, in that pivotal moment, to be an actor, if only to show this man and myself that I could.
As I’ve written before, up to that moment, I had no interest in being an actor. What did I know about acting? Get out of here. But I was determined to stand my ground and prove to him that his view of my worth was wrong.
A fateful event soon provided another pivotal moment. After completing another shift at yet another dishwashing job, this one in Queens, I took a seat at a table near the kitchen to wait for a group of waiters to finish up their coffee so I could wash the last dishes before heading home. To pass the time, I started idly browsing through a newspaper that had been left lying there.
An older Jewish waiter, seated with his fellow waiters, noticed me, stood up, and came over. “What’s new in the paper?” he asked.
“Oh,” I said, somewhat awkwardly, and hesitated, not sure how to answer. “I wish that I could tell you,” I offered, “but I don’t know how to read very well.”
“I see,” said this gentleman. “Would you like me to read with you?” He was offering me a gift that would transform my life in ways that I couldn’t imagine. And the gesture was one of basic kindness, made not so as to embarrass me or obligate me, but because that was who he was.
Of course, I answered yes, enthusiastically. And starting that night, and on many nights that followed, he sat with me after work for as long as we were able to remain, and he taught me to read—sounding out words, explaining syllables, pointing out the patterns of sentences and paragraphs, giving me pointers even on pronunciation.
Long before I could let him know in substantive ways how the power of literacy would change my life, my friend and teacher procured a job waiting tables elsewhere, and we didn’t keep in touch after he left. That remains a tragedy, as far as I’m concerned—one that has haunted me for years. My heartfelt regret is that I was never able to properly thank him and tell him the story of how, in part because of his help, I became an actor.
The willingness to receive help and appreciate its value when it arrives, sometimes unannounced, is a subject that returns us to the question of why and how our lives turn out as they do. Serendipity—like the newspaper’s “Actors Wanted” listing and the question “What’s new in the paper?” posed to me by a waiter at my place of work—is a vital accomplice to the other forces that shape us and our destiny. But the real answers to the why and how of journey’s ends also come down to choices. I believe that I am sitting in this chair writing today in large part as a result of choices I have made—good ones, not-so-good ones, and bad or wrong ones.
Bad choices got me into a lot of trouble, sometimes got me hurt, sometimes got me rejected, sometimes destroyed opportunities that would come as the result of choices I made. But those are choices as well as the choices you make that you can later applaud yourself for having made.
All in all, I made a good number of sound choices before and during my acting career. It was my recognition of a need to read better and to speak better, driven by a rebuff for the lack of such skills, that put me on the road to becoming an actor. After that initial rejection by the director of a production at the American Negro Theatre, I returned and auditioned for acceptance into their training program—and was again rejected.
But being a kid who had grown up trying to figure out how to avoid being stung by wasps in order to reach fruit at the tops of the trees on Cat Island, I came up with a novel strategy that allowed me to override this second rejection. As it happened, I became aware that there was no janitor at the facility where classes were given, and I volunteered to take the job—in return for being allowed to study for a semester. To my delight, the arrangement was made, with the understanding that if I didn’t show reasonable improvement by the end of the semester, the deal would be off and I wouldn’t be invited to continue. But when the first semester ended and I missed the mark, I managed—with the help of some of my fellow students who lobbied on my behalf—to have the agreement amended so that I could continue on with my janitorial services in exchange for acting classes through a second semester. This time, when the semester drew to a close and the teacher cast a student production without giving me even a walk-on part, my fellow students rallied on my behalf again. Together they went to the teacher and asked, on the basis of how hard I’d been working, if she couldn’t see to it that I was given something to do in this play. When she granted
their appeal by casting me as the understudy to the lead, she knew that the chances were one in a million that I would ever get to go on. And no one, least of all me, could have predicted how rapidly doors would begin to open after that—as I wrote to you previously.
Once they did, and later, after I achieved some success, I made the conscious choice to go beyond the basics and to reach deeper into the art of creating believable characters for an audience, and thereby maximize my talent and my opportunities.
On the flip side of the better choices that I’ve made, I will emphasize to you, dear Ayele, that I have made and continue to make choices that I regret. It is the nature of free will, with which each of us is endowed, that sometimes choices are very hard to make, and sometimes you are ashamed to make some that diminish you in your own eyes. But you cannot exorcise those choices out of the millions of choices you make in life. They are there, as if stamped into the passport of your existence. You can’t escape it, you don’t like it, and you would like to change it, but it’s there and it’s OK.
And these observations and stories—such as they prove useful to others who ask “Why me?”—are as close as I can come, for now, to an answer.
tenth letter
LOVE IS A MANY-SPLINTERED THING
Love comes in many colors and stripes, and we encounter it throughout our lifetime, for good or ill. You, my darling Ayele, by the time you are sixteen, no doubt, will have discovered boys. You will have been aware of their existence much earlier, seeing them possibly as merely nuisances that girls have to put up with. But somewhere in your teens you will “discover” them as an intriguing (and perhaps infuriating) species. The question of love may even arise. The emotion will not be new to you, for you will have felt its outpouring from the members of your family, and you in turn will have experienced love for them. But with boys, and later men, the aspect of love will be different.
Life Beyond Measure Page 10