There was always a lot of amazing art to discover in New York. And lucky for us, there was also always a lot of weird shit. The best part was we were always surrounded by other New Yorkers. And slowly but surely, we were becoming New Yorkers ourselves.
We also learned that I am too tall to comfortably carry a tote bag and I don’t like sugar in my coffee. We were finding our way.
Josephine
I guess it would have been around the eighth grade when I started hearing the first grumblings about my grandma Josephine “forgetting things.” I can only accurately date events from my Nebraska years by thinking back to which community theater production I was in at the time. I believe this would have been just after my groundbreaking performance—at least in my mind—in an original play at Creighton University called Doin’ Chickens. I played a young boy in the Appalachian Mountains who dreamed of getting off the farm, only to have his family terrorized by local thugs. It was very long, very bloody, and very violent, and to this day my mother is still traumatized when we discuss it. Why my parents let me be in it in the first place is a mystery. I think they just liked that I wasn’t watching Dirty Dancing on a loop anymore. Either way, the show was my personal Sophie’s Choice. I acted so hard, my face hurt. The Omaha World Herald called my Appalachian accent “convincing.” (I just watched Coal Miner’s Daughter on repeat until I sounded like Sissy Spacek.) Usually Josephine would attend every show I was in, but I didn’t tell her about Doin’ Chickens. With all the blood and rape, it didn’t seem very “grandma friendly.” She probably wouldn’t have noticed all the violence since she usually fell asleep the second the lights went out. But it always meant a lot that she came to support me.
It was around this time when the frowning faces and whispering behind Josephine’s back began. She seemed fine to me. I guess I just assumed that it was totally normal for older people to start forgetting where certain pieces of china were kept or which grandkid belonged to which child. I mean, the woman had a lot of grandkids. I would forget a couple, too. I was also in denial. I didn’t want anything to be wrong with her. She was my only grandparent left. The panic about Josephine, in my opinion, seemed premature. But apparently some doctor started using the “A” word and everyone lost their shit.
Alzheimer’s.
A word that immediately strikes panic into the heart and mind of everyone. And thanks to that Julianne Moore movie a few years ago, we now know we can get it while we are still youngish and pretty.
Given Josephine’s diagnosis, I thought that she should move in with us. After all, my mother talked often, and fondly, about what a gift it had been to grow up with her own grandmother living in her house. But I was only fourteen at the time, and I didn’t realize how much work that would have been, not to mention how much stress it would have put on my parents’ marriage. So a nurse was hired to take care of Josephine in her home during the week. My mom and her siblings would take turns staying with her on the weekends.
I started to see Josephine fading a bit, but only in glimpses. For the most part, she was still the strong, funny woman I had always known. The woman who would stay up nearly all night in the days close to Easter to make Lamb Cakes for family and friends. To clarify, Lamb Cakes are not cakes made of actual lamb; they are cakes made in the shape of a lamb. The cake itself is a dense white or prune cake that you bake in a cast-iron mold shaped like a lamb lying daintily on its side. Then you frost the hell out of it and cover it in flaked coconut to make it look like wool. If I am being honest, I never really cared for Lamb Cakes, but Josephine worked so hard on them that we were always forced to choke a piece down. Sometimes two if you were sitting next to her.
Josephine also taught me how to gossip in church and other public places. She really mastered the “talking shit through your teeth” thing. She would smile and smile, all while telling you about someone’s daughter who got knocked up or how fat someone had gotten. She could have been a ventriloquist. She was that good.
She also taught me how to throw shade. For example, if it was a little chilly outside and she saw a mother with a baby who, in her opinion, was not wearing proper outdoor clothing, she would stop and smile at the baby and then in a sweet old lady voice say, “Well, aren’t you precious? It’s too bad your mother didn’t pack a coat and hat for you today. You are going to get sick, poor thing.”
Josephine was a shady lady but classy—always well-dressed, hair and makeup done. Occasionally she would bust out a bright wig she had purchased in the seventies, which was a little jarring, but I always appreciated the effort. It was like she was playing herself in a stage production of her life.
She was also incredibly loving and supportive. I remember playing in her house with my sister Julie and my cousin Tom when I was six. Our game involved pretending Josephine’s La-Z-Boy recliner was a rocket of some sort. We were throwing up the footrest while simultaneously slamming back the chair into full recline mode and making rocket noises and screaming. My memory is slightly hazy about who was actually in the chair at the time (that’s not true; it was totally Julie), but on one such rocket trip, the chair spun and knocked a lamp to the ground. It didn’t break, but we ripped the hell out of the shade. Hearing the racket, adults, including my grandmother, rushed into the room. I somehow was blamed. (I love Julie, but she was never afraid to throw you under the bus. She could be very sweet, but she could also turn on you in a second. At this age she strongly resembled Tina Yothers from Family Ties but acted more like Donna Mills on Knots Landing.)
I ran crying into my grandmother’s bedroom to hide out for a bit. My mom was never a yeller, but she followed me into the room and simply told me in a very “Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford” tone that she was “very disappointed” in me. I sat there crying in Josephine’s bedroom, feeling like I was the worst person in the world. After a couple minutes, Josephine came in and sat next to me on the bed. “Andy,” she said, “I don’t care about that lamp. It was an accident, I know that. It’s okay. I love you.” And then she hugged me until I stopped crying.
So looking at her now, in the same house where she had always lived, hosting Christmas Eve dinners and Easter egg hunts, all I saw was the same lady I had always loved. Sure, she was a little slower, but she still got there. If anything she just seemed a little, I don’t know, lonely, I guess. Maybe a little sadder than I had seen her. Years went by like this. Mostly good moments, some not so good, but in my mind she was doing okay. I was, at this point, a senior in high school and very busy with the typical teenage nonsense, but something within me knew that it was important to keep up my own relationship with my grandma. I started visiting her after school, bringing her flowers or little gifts. She seemed happy to see me.
It was on one such visit that my grandma called me “Frank.” I just let it go; she could call me whatever she wanted. But it kept happening—she would mostly address me as “Frank.” I finally asked my mom if there was a Frank in our family. She thought about it for a while and then she said, “Frank was the man your grandma was dating before she married your grandfather.” So Josephine thought I was her old boyfriend. It was a little creepy, but it made sense. Here I was, visiting her often and bringing her gifts and flowers; she assumed that I was wooing her in some way. I didn’t mind. At least she was always happy to see me. Frank must have been a good guy, because she liked Frank, I mean, me. We had good visits—that was the important thing.
And then one afternoon, I visited and Josephine was not in her La-Z-Boy by the window. I asked her nurse where she was. “Oh, your grandma is not having a good day,” she said. “She’s in her bedroom, but I wouldn’t go in there.” I didn’t listen. I walked into her bedroom and it was dark, with the curtains drawn. Josephine was sitting on the edge of her bed, sort of hunched over. “Go away,” she said.
“Grandma,” I said, “it’s me.” She looked up at me and started to cry.
“Oh Andy. Something is very
wrong.”
I was startled. She hadn’t said my name in months and I hadn’t seen her cry in many years. I sat down on the bed next to her. “What’s wrong, Grandma?”
“There’s a woman out there and I don’t know who she is. I know she is supposed to be here, but I don’t know why. Why is she in my house? I know there is something wrong with me, but I don’t know what it is. What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I remember what’s wrong?”
She continued to cry, softly at first, and then harder and harder. I didn’t know what to do. I had heard my mother talk about the fact that some days, Josephine would have moments of total clarity, that she would remember where she was and who everyone was around her. This was almost one of those moments, but not quite. It seemed to me the most terrifying state of all: sure of yourself, your body, your home, but not quite as sure of how you got there. Like when you go on vacation and you wake up in the middle of the night in a dark hotel room, and maybe for a split second you don’t know where you are. You know you are you, and yet your surroundings are completely foreign and a little scary. But that moment only lasts a couple of seconds. You piece together the geography of the room, you see your suitcase, you see the alarm clock, and it starts to come back in a flash: You are on vacation, this is your hotel room. You feel sane again, you feel safe, you can fall back to sleep. Josephine couldn’t piece anything together. She was trying and trying to make sense of the math of the house, but she couldn’t quite solve it. It was so close, it was all right there, but it just wouldn’t add up.
What could I do? Do I tell her she’s sick? Do I tell her that the woman in the living room is a nurse, and has been staying with her for years? Do I tell her I’m sorry? That I love her? That it will all be okay? It wasn’t okay, she wasn’t okay, and she wouldn’t be okay. It came crashing down on me all at once that she was ill, seriously ill, and I couldn’t do anything to change that. Now it was my turn to try and comfort her. I put my arm around her and I held her. She cried. And then I cried. We sat on that bed and just held each other for a long time. Then like a fog lifting, she sat up straight and looked at me with a soft but vague expression. “Hello,” she said. She was gone again. Her one moment of clarity that day, that week, that month, was gone and it had been spent in terror, in sadness. I felt awful and yet relieved that she was calm again at least. I hated myself for not knowing what to do in that moment. I never told anyone about that visit. I didn’t want to admit that it had happened.
Shortly after that, she moved into a nursing home. She was getting worse, angry, too hard to control. So she would live in a home with strangers, sleeping next to strangers, eating next to strangers. Did she know? Did she care? I cared very much. I would think of her in that home, and I would imagine her having one of those moments that she’d had with me, a moment of realizing that she was still herself. It killed me to think of her waking up at night in a strange room, with a stranger sleeping just a few feet away. She would be terrified. Sometimes, to selfishly comfort myself, I would imagine that perhaps her moment of clarity and her roommate’s moment of clarity would coincide. That these two women who used to be fully functioning adults in the world would look at each other and just say, “Where the fuck are we? What the fuck is going on here?” Maybe they would laugh, probably they would cry, but at least they wouldn’t be totally alone. I suspect that’s not the way it works.
I couldn’t say for sure, though, because I never visited my grandma at the nursing home. I had just moved to New York and was wrapped up in getting settled and creating a space for myself there. While I barely made it home that first year, I’m disappointed in myself for not making more of an effort to see her when I did. Phone calls weren’t possible; she would never have known who I was on the phone. I missed her and thought of her often, but I wondered if she ever thought of me. Maybe, but probably not. I didn’t blame her.
While I was slinging back G&Ts at Rose’s Turn, suffering my way through summer stock, and seeing a lot of questionable theater with Zuzanna, I had let a lot of relationships with my family slip. It wasn’t intentional. Or maybe it was. I was homesick, a feeling that I had privately vowed to never experience. I knew that I belonged in New York, that Omaha wasn’t the right place for me anymore, so how could I possibly miss so much about it? I missed my family, I missed our home, I missed dinners and holidays and trips to the mall. But it hurt to think about those things. It was easier to forget. So I decided to not acknowledge those feelings; I just pushed them aside like I did with so many other thoughts that came into my head those first years away from home. It hurt to hang up the phone, so I called less. It hurt to leave after a visit, so I visited less. My relationships were suffering, and as my grandma got sicker and sicker, that reality hit me. I had played this all wrong. It was the wrong strategy for homesickness. I couldn’t let myself do that anymore.
Almost a year after Josephine moved into the home, she died. She died in a bedroom that was not her own, surrounded by strangers. I can only hope that in the moments before she went, she was in a haze of some sort of contentment and not confusion. I hope it was soft. I hope it was calm. I hope there was no panic.
I came home from college for the funeral. It was a terribly somber event. My mother and her siblings had started fighting quite a bit after my grandmother got sick. There were disagreements about how she should be cared for and unresolved tensions about their pasts. These created a divide that would take years to heal. I tried to remember what that all looked like, hoping that my siblings and I would not make the same mistakes when it came time to care for our parents. I sat next to my sister Natalie at the church, both of us unsure what to say about anything.
I thought about Josephine, lying in that coffin, surrounded by loved ones weeping for her. I thought about her final years and how unfair it all was that it ended so badly. Then I thought about all the times I had sat next to Josephine at various funerals and weddings and baptisms. All the receptions and luncheons we had gone to together. The holidays and birthdays and Sunday dinners. The Lamb Cakes and the Polish sausage made. The stories told. Josephine could teach you to curse in Polish and also tell you everything about the lives of the saints of the Catholic Church. She was a woman who raised five children in a two-bedroom house. She was strong and resourceful and creative. She had fourteen grandchildren and she made them all feel special and loved, each in a unique way. Her life was more than the last few years. It was mostly joyous and filled with love.
I looked around the room at all the relatives divided by this disease and by fear and sadness. What would Josephine do if she were here with us? She could fix this, she could lift this cloud. I leaned over to Natalie and through a smile I said, “Aunt Kathy looks like a hooker in that dress.”
Natalie looked at me a little stunned but then instantly knew. “And did you see Christine? She’s fat as a house now.”
So that’s what we did. We sat through that whole funeral making fun of our relatives. I think Josephine would have wanted it that way.
Broadway Adjacent
When I got back from the theater barn, I knew I was capable of booking professional work—albeit work that was contingent upon my willingness to also clean the urinals in the men’s room—and yet here I was starting another semester at a school I wasn’t happy with and spending time, energy, and my limited funds on a degree that I wasn’t sure was necessary for my future. Most of the people I had just worked with in summer stock had college degrees and were making the same $150 a week I was. Did I need a degree to be an actor? Was it something that I had to have to work? Was I really learning anything useful?
Making things worse, my teen modeling savings were nearly gone. My tuition was paid for, but I still had to pay for room and board and general living expenses, and New York had proven to be way more expensive than I had planned. (He said to the surprise of no one.) I started classes again and went through the motions of being a student. I was waking up w
ith financial panic attacks almost daily, and I was skipping most of my classes to make time for work, which, looking back, seems insane since I was skipping the thing that I was trying to pay for.
I had two part-time jobs. The first was at Equinox gym, as a front desk clerk. I took this job mainly so I could get the free membership that came with it. It was easy work; I just had to check people in as they entered. It was pretty uneventful, except for the occasional entitled Upper East Sider who would burst into the gym with no membership card and no ID, and insist that I should remember his or her face and name. In those instances I would usually fold and just let the person in, but depending on my mood, I would sometimes punish those rich people by making them spell their names very slowly for me while I searched for their membership folder. I have to say that a real highlight of that job was that every once in a while Isabella Rossellini would come in. She never had her ID, but she was always incredibly polite and would voluntarily spell her first and last name so I could check her in. And she always apologized for not bringing her ID card. I will always love her for that.
My second job was more soul-crushing. I was a greeter at the Warner Bros. store. “Why was that so bad?” you ask. I’ll tell you. The Warner Bros. store was eight floors of merchandise packed into a sterile high-rise on the corner of 57th and Fifth Avenue. T-shirts, hats, flatware, glasses, jewelry, DVDs—anything any Warner Bros. fan could dream of—even Tweety Bird mud flaps. (That is not a joke. We sold those.) All I had to do was stand in front of the entrance and welcome people into the store by saying, “Welcome to the Warner Bros. store! Eight floors of fun!” Sometimes I would say, “Eight floors of stuff!” just to prove to myself that no one was paying attention to me. At least Isabella Rossellini remembered my name.
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