by Jon Cryer
But me, I was just beginning. . . .
Chapter 2
Things Were Wonderful Before You Came
In the 1960s, nobody wanted to live above Ninety-sixth Street. But one of the Bob Fosse dancers in the musical Little Me told my mother, who had a five-line part in the show as Miss Hepplewhite, that an apartment was opening up for rent in a building on One Hundred Third Street. Mom was pregnant at the time with my older sister, Robin. She and my dad needed more space, so they moved in. I was born two years later. I couldn’t tell you if any of the friendly winos who frequently peed in the mailroom area of the building sent my mother flowers in the hospital or anything. I assume not.
It was pretty action-packed on our block, crime-wise. One time a prostitute jumped off the roof. We knew a kid who got shot in a building down the street. There were bullet holes in the Plexiglas front doors. Elevator muggings were known to happen.
Most grimly colorful of all was what occurred next door with friendly Mr. Green, a septuagenarian who enjoyed bringing over pots of oxtail soup for Mom, on whom he undoubtedly had a crush. Mr. Green liked to season his specialty with rosemary, and he also liked to pay for sex, hosting the occasional hooker from time to time. (Not sure if oxtail soup was offered to those ladies—I’d like to think he saved that delicacy for Gretchen Cryer.)
One night Mom heard the unmistakable pop of a gunshot next door. She ran out the door in time to see a woman fleeing down the stairs. Mom called the police, who arrived to find Mr. Green tied to his bed, quite literally holding a smoking gun, and a dead man on the floor. It seems one of Mr. Green’s regulars had brought along her bruiser of a boyfriend, under the impression that this little old client had money hidden somewhere. Boyfriend tied Mr. Green up and started taking the place apart. While this was happening, even with his arms tightly bound, Mr. Green managed to reach under his mattress and find his gun. Then, from arm’s length, using only his wrist to aim, without even being able to see down the barrel, he squeezed off a single shot. Boyfriend caught it right between the eyes. From then on, even though Mr. Green was as warm and jovial as he had always been during his oxtail-soup deliveries, all of our interactions acquired an (I’m sure unintentional) air of menace.
“Tell your mother she shouldn’t use too much salt.”
“Y-y-y-yes, sir, I’ll tell her,” I’d stammer.
Getting to P.S. 75 each day without getting threatened for lunch money involved some planning, especially if Mom needed me to pick up groceries on the way home. My scheme was: The twenty for the groceries went into my shoe, while a small amount of money was split between the upper pockets. Sure enough, my mother recalls coming home once and finding her already chipper son in a further state of unnatural exhilaration, so described because I was blurting out, “Mom! Mom! I got mugged! I got mugged!” What made me happy? The older kids who robbed me got only the fifty cents in my pocket. Suckas! The shoe twenty was untouched! Chicken for everyone tonight, thanks to my crime-fighting ingenuity.
* * *
The neighborhood was rough, but in our building there was a sense of community, especially because it was full of artists. It was a real bohemian enclave. Opera singers, jazz musicians, writers, and actors enlivened the faded grandeur of the prewar apartments. The place was also full of young male dancers, a good two-thirds of whom perished during the AIDS crisis. This was a devastating time for everyone in the building. Even then I was dimly aware that this was what it must have been like to live through the plague.
Two stories above us was a Jewish family, the Dennises: Robert Dennis, a composer who wrote for dance companies, collaborated on the music for the notorious nudie revue Oh! Calcutta! His wife, Marsha, was an opinionated, smart, lefty intellectual. Their three sons were Gary, David, and Eric, and I was close with the whole family. Though I’m not Jewish (or a Republican, Wikipedia!), so much of their New York Jewish sensibility informed my sense of humor—the fatalism, coupled with irony, wrapped in a sturdy shield of toughness—that I like to say I was raised by a pack of wild Jews.
As building babies, David Dennis and I knew each other from birth. We even shared that clichéd moment in which we sized each other up as toddlers from behind our mothers’ legs. As we grew up, we were always either at his family’s place or mine, and if not there, the park. I felt so comfortable with the Dennises, whose door was always open, that at dinner I was known to get up and help myself to more food without ever asking for seconds. (I learned many years later that this breach of etiquette was a source of amusement for Bob and Marsha.) Outside the building, David and I would hang at Riverside Park, maybe run wild in the art deco apartment building facing the park, or make our way to the roof, where fireworks lit inside launched paper airplanes made for cheap thrills. Closer to the ground, we’d hurl water balloons from my family’s first-floor window, a choice vantage point not only for accuracy, but for gauging reactions.
As a child I was forever working against a lack of confidence, a sense that I was never truly comfortable in social situations. I really was a dyed-in-the-wool nerd: easily paralyzed by nervousness, lost in my own thoughts, unsure what to say, embarrassed when I did say something because of the vocal tics I had, and likely to be punched in the face by Puerto Rican girls for saying something I didn’t realize was an insult.
When fourth-grade Vanessa from P.S. 75 started peppering me with slaps and small punches seemingly out of nowhere, her face coiled in anger, I barely knew what to do, and certainly my brain wasn’t functioning well enough to tell my limbs to get in front of my face, or my lungs to breathe. I could only retreat to a corner of my mind in which I endlessly repeated, How did this happen? How did this come to pass? I can now shout into the past at my ten-year-old self: You said something to piss her off, dummy. Add another characteristic to the list of nerd qualities: situational unawareness.
It made David a strangely inspiring friend to have around. He was more athletic than I was, a terrific ice-skater, with a wall adorned with champion emblems: patches, medals and the like. He accomplished this, though, in spite of the fact that he was born with a birth defect: One leg was shorter than the other, and one of his feet was thinner and had only three toes. Even after David had an operation at twelve to prevent the onset of scoliosis by surgically extending his leg—an excruciatingly painful process that involved stretching his leg half a millimeter a day with a racklike apparatus—he could still beat me at footraces. I’d make Bionic Man jokes. My well-used comic excuse at the time was, “My leg hurts too!” David always appreciated that I never treated him differently because of his leg, which eventually required use of a cane. Then again, that kind of humor came directly from him and his family.
David and I were inseparable. My older sister, Robin, and I, on the other hand, nearly always needed to be separated. She and I had a pretty contentious relationship from very early on. She has been known to flat-out state, “Things were wonderful before you came.” We were at each other’s throats on a regular basis, and it drove Mom crazy; you could tell that at times she feared for our lives. Dinner was a barrage of insults, starting with my sister’s pet name for me, King Uh-huh, a dig at an involuntary little laugh I occasionally add to the end of sentences. At any rate, I grew up with a sibling who could be counted on to crush any sign of confidence I ever showed, or just remove Mom’s huge antique wrench from the wall and hurl it at me. Mom openly took my side, too, which I’m sure didn’t make things any better for me in Robin’s eyes.
Two things positively altered my and Robin’s relationship, though. One was the time Sis had me pinned, ready to whale on me, when I somehow managed to bite her hard on the arm. It was a nasty mark, too, a real tooth tattoo. The mouse had roared, it seemed. I’d finally drawn a boundary. The second was just the natural course of adolescence. She began socializing outside the home, which took higher priority in her to-do list than tormenting me.
Key to that was her close friendship with a girl
named Shelly, who eventually moved in with us. Robin and Shelly had that us-against-the-world kinship that made them love Aerosmith, Cheap Trick, and Yes more than anybody else, spurred them to dye their hair similarly, and probably (because I have no confirmation on this) get high together. When Shelly’s free-spirit single mom wanted to marry a Trinidadian and move to his homeland, Shelly balked because she really wanted to attend the High School of Music & Art, which had accepted her. She asked my mother if she could live with us, and Mom loved the idea. There was plenty of room—we had four bedrooms—and maybe more important, when Shelly was around, Robin was less inclined to treat me like a detainee in a black-ops site.
I still remember Shelly’s simple and gently spoken, cruelty-defusing words, and how they transformed the air, turning our home into a land of peacemaking and harmony: “Robin, don’t do that.”
Shelly was also pretty, and often traversed the apartment scantily clad, which made her a welcome guest in my eyes. Our building was so old that it still had keyholes on doors, and I may have, a time or two in front of Shelly’s room, incurred a crippling injury that required me to stoop and turn my head in the direction of her door’s keyhole, whereupon I might have seen some things I wasn’t supposed to. The problem with getting caught and claiming injury, of course, is that you have to fake that pain for at least forty-five minutes afterward.
Ultimately Shelly was the UN to our Serbia and Croatia, which really brought unity to the household. But Robin also changed. She became less confrontational, and began to look at me as a fixer-upper instead of a punching bag. Perhaps realizing her little brother was entering pubescence with a target on his back—I was the definition of nerd-in-training: nonathletic, smallish, generally timid, and quick to spout know-it-all information as a defense mechanism—she actively worked at helping me socially. She even took me to my first concert, the Thompson Twins at the Ritz, and dressed me to boot in teen-hipster duds from the clothing store where she’d started working. Although she still enjoyed making fun of me, my early teens were marked by a lasting détente at Chez Cryer. War crimes would not be prosecuted. Trade talks were negotiated. The occasional diplomatic slight was forgiven.
Of course, much of the reason Robin and I had a trial by fire as fractious siblings was because as latchkey kids, we often had the run of the house. We became particularly independent during my preteen years, when Mom began to taste success with the musical I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road, which Mom wrote the book and lyrics for and starred in, with music by Nancy Ford, her longtime collaborator.
It’s worth taking a moment to note that it’s no small feat to make a living in New York as a playwright, much less a female one, and Mom’s been at it for more than fifty years now. The 1970 rock musical she wrote with Nancy, The Last Sweet Days of Isaac, won multiple theater awards, and in 1972 they opened a show on Broadway called Shelter.
Getting My Act Together was autobiographical for Mom. It told the story of an actress approaching middle age who finds new life singing songs about female liberation, and in 1978 the legendary theater producer Joe Papp put it up at the Public Theater.
When The New York Times panned it in a truly rotten, dismissive review, I vividly recall finding my mom crying by herself in her darkened bedroom. She’d worked so hard on it, it was such a personal story, and we had been enduring some lean financial years for a while. I remember Mom sitting us all down at the table and giving us the grim news that there would be no allowance for a while. My dad, who by that point had moved to Los Angeles and was a struggling actor with a new family, didn’t have the money to pay child support, so it was all on our single mom. In that light, knowing that the Times’ influence was enough to kill a show outright, the news did not look good for our getting out of financial straits. But Joe Papp, unbowed and perhaps reminded of how much preview audiences loved it, let the show run for six weeks. By the end of that run, Getting My Act Together had found itself a passionate audience. The show was selling out on word of mouth alone, and would go on to run for almost three years off-Broadway, one of the longest such runs in that era.
The success, though, meant that Mom’s show and, because she starred in it, Mom were in demand around the country. She acquired a manager—well, acquired is not exactly accurate. Getting My Act Together’s lighting designer, an affable, bearded, beret-wearing mensch by the name of Marty Tudor, approached her one day and said, “Hey, can I be your manager?” Mom replied, “I don’t know; I’ve never had a manager before.” He replied, “That’s cool; I’ve never been one before.” Marty, who used to design light shows for concert acts like Barry Manilow and had done enough tours with megastar Meat Loaf to refer to him simply as “Meat,” was tired of the rock-and-roll life and was ready for a career change. My mom was willing to take a chance.
Where money was concerned, there was finally some breathing room, but she was also away a lot: to Los Angeles to meet with interested movie people, to Chicago to star in the show for three months, then to other cities that wanted to run Getting My Act Together. When I look back on that stretch of my youth, when I was fifteen and Robin was seventeen, I never equated Mom’s extensive traveling with the frowned-upon notion that as a parent she “wasn’t around,” or that she was being irresponsible. She was doing what any self-respecting, hardworking man or woman would do when the fruits of his or her labor met with success: They worked at growing it. If you were a playwright, the chance to see your play done all over the country was what you lived for. It’s there in the title of her show, for Christ’s sake—she took that act on the road!
It couldn’t have been easy on her, leaving two kids alone while she got another child—her show—up on its feet. But as I said, in our building there was a sense of community, of neighbors looking out for neighbors. Then again, this wasn’t always soothing to Mom. By the time she was off to Chicago, I was looking to make my own money, so I started working down the street at the Equity Library Theatre located in the Master Apartments building, one of New York’s oldest theater companies and a union-sponsored house that specialized in revivals and showcases for young actors. I began as an usher, and for a fifteen-year-old kid with a burgeoning interest in acting, it was a great education in various plays and musicals. Well, an education in first acts, at least. By intermission I was officially off work, so I’d usually leave, which means that as far as I know, Willy Loman becomes salesman of the year and retires with a gold watch. I should really find out someday. Anyway, I liked the job and wanted to work more so I could have more money. So one day while Mom was in Chicago, I decided to plead for more hours from the theater’s house manager, Russ. This conversation happened to take place on the sidewalk outside the theater, and apparently within earshot of a concerned twelfth-floor tenant.
The next morning, Mom was woken up early in Chicago by elderly Norma Vogelstein from upstairs, who related in her most judgmentally alarmed old person’s quaver, “Dear, we’re very worried about Jonny. He’s been seen on the street begging for money and jobs.”
That’s right: To Norma Vogelstein’s Depression-era ears, Gretchen Cryer’s kids were abandoned, starving urchins, to the point where one was openly beseeching people on the street for sustenance. Naturally, I soon got a call from my mortified mom, terror on the edges of her voice, wondering what was up with the public supplicating. I eased her fears, explaining that I was just asking for more hours, and that all was fine.
Robin, though, who was entering a rebellious phase of her independence, decided to quit high school while Mom was gone, which only deepened the guilt Mom occasionally felt about being in another city for work. But she had a sense of humor about it, too. During her stint in Chicago, she appeared on the Phil Donahue Show. At one point, a guy in the audience stood up and said, “How can you be a good mother when your children are in New York and you’re working in Chicago?”
Rather than get defensive, Mom went the dark-humor route. She said, “Well
, to tell you the truth, I just got a call that my son was begging for money and jobs in the street, and my daughter just quit high school.”
Fortunately, TV’s resident champion for women interceded, and stood up for Mom. Phil asked the guy if he’d ever say that to a man who had to go out of town for work to support his family. If Mom ever needed any more reasons to give voice to struggling women through her show, that asshole in Phil Donahue’s audience was surely one of them.
* * *
Now, did great freedom at an impressionable age mean I was a responsible kid? Well, not always, if David Dennis was around. For an awkward lad lacking in perceived ability, and self-conscious to a fault, David was a bracing pal to have in one’s corner. Blessed with a gregarious nature, oodles of charisma, and the ability to bend you to his wishes through sheer force of personality, David was dangerously fun. I was his conscience, but he was my excuse to be naughty. Whatever unsafe, time-wasting activity might be proposed, I could be counted on for a meek, “Are you sure we should do this?” But I never really meant it.
Enthusiasm was David’s currency, and it didn’t matter what the catalyst of the enthusiasm was—it could be hearing there was a guy dressed as a chicken in front of the Burger King, at which point David made running down to meet him and get his picture a worthwhile mission. The point was to care about something; it filled your life in a valuable way, I learned.
Nevertheless, our teenage years were chock-full of the kind of imaginatively stupid—but enthusiastic!—shenanigans that make me incredibly fearful now for my own children’s adolescence. We did stuff that would curl your hair, especially when the third member of our posse, a Cuban-born charmer named Artie, was around. Artie was strikingly handsome, sporting a preposterous pompadour inspired by the Stray Cats, and a slight lisp that gave a winning cuddliness to anything profane or macho he said.