BETTY: It looks horrible! Why did you do that?
ME: I told you – I’m just trying something. I’ll tell you later.
And then one day – just like that, as if a motor or an electric switch had been turned off – the compulsion stopped. The Demon was gone. I felt as if I had just finished running in a long race, exhausted but exhilarated, and could now be a normal person again.
But three or four days later the Demon returned. The pattern repeated itself so often that I felt as Dr. Jekyll must have felt when he could no longer control the comings and goings of Mr. Hyde. I never knew how long each episode would last. Three days? A week? Two weeks? I never knew what set off the compulsion. The only small clue I had was wondering, every once in awhile, why I should have the right to possess money – if I should ever acquire any – when there were people all over the world who were dying of starvation.
Being on stage was the thing that saved me from myself. When I was in a play, I was safe. I did four plays in a row that first year, and then, for the fifth production, I was cast as Willy Loman’s son, Biff, in Death of a Salesman … the play that had changed my life when I was sixteen years old.
On opening night the auditorium was packed. We had rehearsed for four weeks, and now I was lying in my “upstairs bedroom” – onstage – waiting for the cue for my first entrance. I didn’t want to pray. “Not tonight, dear God, please!” Maybe the Demon forced his way in because it was this particular play. As I waited for my cue, I kept thinking that I could shut him out in plenty of time … but I couldn’t; the fear of not praying overpowered me, even though it was a matter of seconds before my entrance. I saw both the play and my brain falling apart. Then, somehow, the obligation to the audience and Arthur Miller and my memory of Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock became more important to me than God. I heard my cue, said my first line … and I was safe for the remainder of the play. Years after that, I still carried the inexplicable conviction that once I stepped onto the stage, they couldn’t get me (whoever the hell “they” were) and that I was safe … so long as the curtain was up.
I drove home for the Easter break. My mother was so happy to see me that I thought she’d burst. She was thrilled that I was going to be home for ten whole days. She laughed so much at my silly jokes that she peed in her pants again. “Now look what you’ve made me do, Jerry.”
After dinner I found her in the living room, sitting on the couch and weeping quietly. I sat beside her. “What, Mama? What’s the matter?” She said, “In nine more days you’ll be gone.”
A little later, at about seven o’clock, I said I was going to take a short walk around the neighborhood. It was still light outside, and I wanted to get some fresh air. After walking several blocks – with the Demon pounding at my consciousness, trying to get in – I found myself at an open field on the outskirts of town – a field I used to play in only a few years before. The Demon knew where he was leading me. I knelt down on the hard earth and started praying.
We were never a particularly religious family when I was growing up, in the sense of prayers at home or rituals, other than going to my grandparents for a meal on Passover and going to the synagogue on the high holidays. Our religion was hugging and kissing each other – a boy being unashamed to kiss his father on the lips and parents who showed affection in front of anyone. Our only doctrine had been “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” So why did the Demon invade my psyche when I was eighteen years old? My only hope, as I prayed in that field, was to get rid of him once and for all. I covered all topics – everything and everyone whom I could possibly have wronged, including God, of course – and I asked for forgiveness. But in another part of my brain, I was screaming, “FORGIVENESS FOR WHAT?” I had no idea, but the strength of that absurdity couldn’t pierce the armor of my compulsion. When I finished praying, I got up and walked home.
My mother, my father, and my pregnant sister, Corinne, were all waiting in the living room, in their dressing gowns. From the expression on their faces, I thought that someone had died. My mother started crying. My father spoke first:
“We called the police – they just left here. Do you know what time it is? It’s three o’clock in the morning! Where were you? What in God’s name were you doing?”
I couldn’t bring myself to say, “I was praying, Daddy – I was lying in a field, praying to God to forgive me.” And if he had said, “Forgive you for WHAT?” I would have said, “I don’t know!” and he would have say, “For eight hours? Are you nuts?” … and he would have been right. So I mumbled something about having fallen asleep in a field because I was so tired. Then I apologized to all of them and went to my bedroom.
MY HEART IS NOT IN THE HIGHLANDS
I went to Europe that summer, traveling in whichever was the cheapest class on the Queen Elizabeth (the original one). It was only $360.00 round trip. I thought a change of everything might help me.
We were four men in a very small cabin. One of them – an Englishman who was returning from India – told me about a heavenly place in the Highlands of Scotland, called the Isle of Skye … “just goats and sheep, eating their way through the small mountains. Plenty of bed-and-breakfast places to stay in.” After I arrived in London, I decided to go to the Isle of Skye.
The little village of Portree sat at the edge of the water, where small boats came to dock. It was heavenly. Untouched. A simple place of original purity.
Up the cobblestoned street, near the beautiful old post office, stood a small outdoor urinal for travelers who had just arrived. I went in to relieve myself. Scribbled on the wall, in large black letters that faced me as I peed, I saw:
FUCK YOU
On my way back to London, I had to stop overnight in the town of Inverness, which was considered the entrance to the Highlands. After the sun went down, I wandered through the town, eating some fish and chips, and then returned to my small hotel room. I got on my knees and prayed for my usual request, which was to be forgiven for something that I didn’t know I did, and then I took out a notepad and wrote my first poem.
Across three thousand miles of sea and through strange England’s smiling,
and into a wee Scots Highland town there is a lad who’s crying.
Oh fool the world, he could, he could, a man at twenty years …
but all alone in that Highland town there is a boy in tears.
In my senior year at Iowa, I played John Proctor in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. During the dress rehearsal, near the end of the play, I was standing in “a prison” and being asked to sign my name to a false document. My subconscious took over again – as it had once before, when I was sixteen, playing Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. I suddenly burst out with the lines: “BECAUSE IT IS MY NAME! BECAUSE I CANNOT HAVE ANOTHER IN MY LIFE!”
I’m sure every actor who has played John Proctor has burst out with great force – fake or real – when saying those lines, but they came out of me with so much emotion that it startled me and everyone else who was in the theater. Where the emotion came from, I hadn’t a clue. Not at that time, anyway.
My wife in the play was a lovely actress named Joan. We had a date almost every Saturday night, in the home where she baby-sat for the same family. When the baby fell asleep, Joan and