The sublet was across the street from the gay leather bar Boots & Saddle, and just around the corner from the Duplex, a piano bar where musical theater wannabes and enthusiasts would sing until the wee hours. Being near the gay bars was a double-edged sword: when I was happy, it seemed like a great place to be; when I wasn’t, it felt decadent, dark, and lonely.
Dad, Mom, Aunt Marge, and me on the Goddamn Freedom Trail trip.
I got a job at a friend’s father’s advertising agency called Creamer Incorporated, which had acquired a PR division called Glick & Lorwin. I had no business being in PR—had no nose for it and no initiative, and basically sat at a desk all day trying to look busy. But for some reason, Boris Lorwin and Ira Glick, the two wonderful older guys who ran it, loved me.
They’d walk by my desk and wave at me and say, “You’re doing a great job, Janie!” To this day I don’t know what I did to make them like me so much, because the one project they gave me, I completely screwed up.
I was supposed to plan a luncheon at a hotel, so I took Boris over to meet the people who were going to throw it. They wanted us to go to the kitchen for a tasting of the planned meal, but it turned into a scene from This Is Spinal Tap. We kept walking through the basement and turning right, then turning left, and wondering, “Where’s the kitchen? Where’s the kitchen?” Boris got more and more frustrated, until he finally barked, “Just forget it!” and we somehow found our way through the labyrinth and back out of the hotel.
I thought Boris would fire me, but instead he just said, “Janie, I love you, but we won’t put you in charge of anything again.” So I just worked on accounts at my little desk—the Crest account, whose reps went into schools and stained innocent children’s teeth to show them cavities, and the Crayola account, for which my job was to cut and paste press clippings onto pieces of paper. I’d take the clippings in and show them to Boris and Ira and say, “Look at all the great coverage we got.” And they’d say, “Good work, Jane!”
But as sweet as Ira and Boris were to me, the rest of New York kicked my ass.
I didn’t have an agent, so getting auditions of any kind was out. I bummed around in a few off-off-Broadway shows, doing things for free with little theater companies—such as a production of Macbeth helmed by an acting teacher who had “disciples” rather than students. She put an ad in the paper, and a few of my Cornell pals and I responded and got cast as spear carriers and the like. But the rehearsal process was so ridiculous and demeaning that all the self-respecting people kept dropping out, leaving us with principal roles. I was one of the three witches, and I almost came to blows with another one who kept pronouncing “hover” as “hoover.” Appropriately, the show closed after about two nights, as most of the audience left before intermission.
Not only was I unable to find a professional home, I couldn’t even find a literal one. When my sublet in the Village ended, I bounced around to four or five other places, always getting kicked out after a few weeks or months, whereupon I would have to move myself and all my stuff on the subway. In one place, the landlord knocked on the door and said, “You know, this is an illegal sublet. You’re not supposed to be here.” So I panicked and packed my two suitcases and headed out. The guy I was renting from actually followed me down the street, saying, “What are you doing? You don’t have to go—he does that to everybody!” But I was a rule-follower from way back, plus that guy had threatened my sense of home and safety. I didn’t have the constitution to withstand that, so I was out of there. I felt rejected and alone.
The roughness of New York City’s streets seeped in everywhere. At that first sublet, my Chinese roommate had invited home some guys who were rumored to be connected to the Chinese Mafia, and they ended up ransacking the place. Another time, a friend of mine named John brought a trick home, and after I’d left for work and John was passed out, the guy rummaged through my stuff, took some cash and my boom box, and for some reason cut the sleeves off my sweatshirts.
Then there was my roommate in Chelsea. He and I shared bunk beds, and late one night he came into the bedroom all excited. “Hey, Jane,” he said, “I just got four hundred bucks for giving a guy a blow job!”
Wide-eyed and shocked, trying not to look like a Midwestern bumpkin, I just smiled and said, “Hey, that’s more than I make in two weeks!”
THE WHOLE TIME I WAS IN NEW YORK, I DRANK NON- stop, gained weight, and felt unsafe everywhere I went. Everything about the city felt hostile to me; it was as if New York itself were screaming, “Get out!”
The Duplex was the only place I was happy. During prime evening hours, the regulars, all of them Broadway musical theater performers, either chorus members or understudies, performed. They were fantastic singers, and I envied how close they were, how witty. I wanted to be one of them.
By around 4 A.M. I’d finally get my chance at the mike. With no awareness of the irony, I chose “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” as my signature song. It massaged my soul to warble it (drunkenly, I’m sure). Then the bar would close, and I’d stumble home to wherever I happened to be living that week.
One night, about nine months after I’d moved to New York, I was fast asleep in a big apartment in Brooklyn that housed an unknown number of other roommates, when two of them came home, drunk. They stumbled into the apartment and turned all the lights on, yelling, “Get out! Get out of here!” Startled by the shouting, I emerged from the bedroom, bleary-eyed, and freaked out.
“Get the fuck out, bitch!” one of them yelled. “Now!” They obviously were not good with my living there.
“But I have no place to go!” I said, panicking. I didn’t know anyone in Brooklyn. I didn’t even know where to catch the subway. This was my fifth sublet in nine months, but my first in Brooklyn—which in the mid-eighties wasn’t the charmingly gentrified place it is today. It felt scary and dangerous, like a no-man’s-land. I was always worried about my physical safety in New York, so putting me out on the street in Brooklyn at three in the morning might have killed me from fright, if nothing else.
The guys kept yelling, and I kept begging not to be thrown out, and eventually they stumbled drunkenly back out the door. It was the cherry on top of the horrible sundae that was New York for me.
The next morning, I got up, dressed for work, and walked to the subway to catch my train. Somewhere between Brooklyn and Midtown, I started feeling sharp pains in my stomach, like I had food poisoning. By the time I got to my stop at 50th Street, it was so bad I was doubled over.
I walked to Glick & Lorwin, but because I was early as usual, no one was there. I didn’t have a key to the office, so I just sat down on a box of paper outside the door, slumped over in pain. I thought my appendix might have burst, so I straggled back to the subway and got on a train heading for the Village, where St. Vincent’s Hospital was.
On the train, hunched over in the worst pain of my life, I suddenly thought, I have to leave New York. I have to get out of here. And my stomach relaxed. I got to 14th Street, stood up, and thought, I’m all right. The pain was gone.
I took the subway straight back to Brooklyn, packed up my two suitcases, and called my mom. “I’m coming home,” I told her. I would miss Boris and Ira (who acted like they were mad at me for leaving and wouldn’t make eye contact). But I couldn’t wait to get back home.
5
The Call of Comedy
I WAS NOW TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD WHEN I WENT back home to Dolton, back to the house where I grew up, on Sunset Drive. When I walked into my old bedroom, still with its green-and-yellow shag carpeting and bedspread, there was a big “Welcome Home Jane!”