Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art (6 page)

The evening shift was my favorite. I helped escort the patients from the locked ward to a Red Cross dance, three times a week. It was held in a reception hall on the ground floor. No bars on the windows. A busload of young girls—all volunteers—came in from town, which was two miles away, to dance with the patients. The other corpsmen and I were not allowed to dance with these young girls. The Teamsters always provided a small band, which played popular standards. I was tempted to break the rules and ask one of the young ladies to dance. I thought of what might happen if a nurse came in and started reprimanding me:

“Silberman, don’t you know the rules?”

“Mam, I was dancing with this young lady to show this patient that there’s absolutely nothing to be afraid of.”

But I was too chicken to ever try it. There was one young patient who played bridge with me at these dances, when we could find two other bridge players. He was so normal that I couldn’t understand why on earth he was put into a mental hospital, let alone into a locked ward.

“Dick,” I asked, “what the hell are you doing here? You’re saner than I am.”

“When I was attending class at Officers’ Training,” he said, “it took me 5 minutes to straighten all the books on my desk. They had to be stacked properly, all facing in the same direction and with all the edges touching each other in a correct way. The next day it took me 15 minutes to straighten my books, then 30 minutes, then 45 . . . and by that time the class was over.”

Another young man, named Roger, was terrified of stepping on
cracks. He was also terrified of dancing with any of the girls. The few times he did ask a girl to dance, he got a horrible headache and begged me to take him back to his bed. Once, while we were walking along the wooden corridor, on the way back to the ward—with him zigzagging all over the place to avoid stepping on cracks—I said, “Tell me something, Roger: what do you think is going to happen to you if you do—just accidentally—step on a crack?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But please don’t make me do it.”

Another patient would go into the latrine every night and wrap a thin white string around his penis. That fellow I stayed clear of. Sure, I wanted to ask him, “Why the hell are you wrapping string around your penis?” But he was so sick I was afraid my question might set him off.

Of all these young men, the one who got to me the most was the patient who knelt down each morning in front of the television set—blocking the view of all the other patients who were watching
Amos and Andy
—and began praying . . . to the monitor? Or Amos? Or Kingfisher? Or God? (
Hold on here,
I thought.
You’re getting into my territory
. )

That’s when the heavenly thought first occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t called on by God to do some special and sacrificial thing. . . . Maybe I was just sick.

We were given two days off each week. The other soldiers wanted Saturdays and Sundays; I wanted Mondays and Tuesdays, because New York was an hour-and-a-half train ride away and that meant I could attend acting class at the HB Studio every Monday night. Corinne and her husband, Gil, said that I could stay with them and their baby, in their small apartment in Queens, on my two days off. All my friends at Valley Forge loved me for never putting in for weekends.

The following November—while I was in Queens on my two
days off—I got a phone call from my uncle Irv, in Milwaukee, telling me that my mother had just died. I wasn’t surprised, because she had been so ill. They had discovered that she had breast cancer the year before, but they couldn’t treat her because her heart wasn’t strong enough. She died of heart failure.

I called my sergeant at Valley Forge Hospital and told him about my mother. He was usually pretty gruff or stoic, but on this occasion he was very kind and said that I could go to Milwaukee for the funeral and that I should just come back when I was ready. So I flew to Milwaukee, and at the cemetery I got into an argument with two of my uncles, who told me that—according to the Jewish religion—I couldn’t be a pallbearer for my own mother. I grabbed one of the handles that held up the casket, and I walked along, with five other men. We set her down in her grave.

Now here’s a strange thing: about a month later I bought my first condom. I didn’t know quite how to use it; it seemed tricky to me. I mean, exactly when do you put it on and do you ask the woman for help and when do you take it off? Of course, a more important question would have been, “Who the hell is this woman you’re talking to who’s going to help you put a piece of rubber over your penis?”

By the way, I wasn’t praying as much anymore.

“See you in New York!”

I said that to Joan so many times when we had our baby-sitting dates on Saturday nights, watching
George Goble,
kissing during the commercials, standing in the doorway for a last good-night kiss, and then . . . “See you in New York!”

Joan had written to me once while I was in the army, just to let me know that she was studying singing at the Ansonia Hotel and that I could see her in New York. She gave me her address.

I hadn’t seen Joan for over a year, and now I’m riding on a train from North Philadelphia to New York with a condom packed as carefully as I could place it in my wallet, and it was burning a hole in my brain because I kept thinking,
What if there’s a tiny hole in the condom because I inserted it next to my plastic driver’s license and the train is jostling back and forth and side to side and up and down? Jesus,
it sounds like the condom is making love already. On its own! I wish it could—then I wouldn’t have to figure out how to do it. Twenty-two years old and still a virgin? Why? Could it be that if I made love—not hugging and kissing, but actually putting my penis inside a woman’s vagina—I would somehow be betraying my mother? That’s crazy. Or is it because God has more important things for me to do than to fuck around with pleasure? Oh, excuse me—that’s
not
crazy? I feel like I’m talking to one of the patients on the locked ward. Maybe I’m the one who’s crazy. Maybe I should be on the locked ward with them. But if I can say that—then I’m not crazy. That much I learned at the hospital. Acting seems so much easier than life. When I’m on stage, I feel safe. “They’ can’t get me.” (Careful, son . . . you’re talking crazy again.) But onstage, everyone listens to me and watches me and—if I’m any good—applauds me. And when I’m taking my bow, I have the belief that I’ve earned my feeling of grace—as if God were saying, “You did something worthwhile, so I won’t punish you . . . for a few days
.

Then I heard the conductor shout, “NEW YORK NEXT! LAST STOP—NEW YORK CITY!”

*  *  *

ME:
Do you know who Katharine Cornell was?

MARGIE:
Never mind who Katharine Cornell was—did you make love to Joan?

ME:
I don’t know.

MARGIE:
What does that mean?

ME:
No kissing, no hugging—

MARGIE:
Wait a minute,
Mister
Wilder—kissing is what you majored in. Don’t tell me there was no kissing.

ME:
Yes, we did a little mitsy-bitsy “Hello, how are you?” kind of kissing, but there wasn’t any
real
kissing. No touching. NO LAUGHING! I think that was the biggest problem. I’m guessing Joan was also a virgin—I don’t know. I thought I was the only virgin in New York. But I think she was just as afraid of messing
up the “ideal” as I was: “If you’re too aggressive, what will she/he think of me?”

MARGIE:
What happened?

ME:
We got into her bedroom. She turned off the lights and took off her clothes and lay down on this little narrow bed. No talking. I think she must have been as nervous as I was. Then I took off my clothes, trying to hide the condom from her because I thought it wasn’t romantic. I held the condom in one hand while I tried to get out of my pants and underwear. Then I put the condom on my penis and got into bed with her. All I could think was,
If I lose my erection, will the condom fall off?
When I felt her naked body against my legs, I figured that I had better put my penis into her vagina while I still had the erection. I got halfway in and . . . boom!

MARGIE:
You shot your wad.

ME:
Thanks for putting it so delicately.

MARGIE:
You’re welcome. And after “boom”?

ME:
I’manactor. . . . I acted a migraine headache. I told her I should never have tried making love under the circumstances, but I didn’t want to disappoint her, and how sorry I was, but I just felt as if my head were going to burst, and that I’d better go. I remembered thinking of poor Roger at Valley Forge—the patient who got those terrible headaches every time he danced with a girl. I had much more compassion for him now. Joan was very sympathetic. Maybe she was relieved, I don’t know. We sort of kissed good night, and then I left, feeling like a fool. That was five years ago, and I still feel like a fool. So, how do you think I did?

MARGIE:
Well, I wouldn’t call you Don Juan, but . . . not bad, for the first time. So what about Katharine Cornell?

ME:
I’ve heard that she used to be so nervous before a performance that she had to throw up . . . then she’d step out on stage and be brilliant.

I got out of the army two years to the day after I was drafted and went to New York. My time in the army qualified me for unemployment insurance—thirty-five dollars a week. That was to pay for rent, food, and entertainment. Not much, but it helped, and I had saved a little from my monthly salary at Valley Forge. I found a tiny loft in the artificial flower district on Thirtieth Street, near Lord and Taylor’s department store, for one hundred dollars a month.

I got a scholarship to the HB Studio, so I was able to study acting full-time: Monday nights with Herbert Berghof and Thursday afternoons with Uta Hagen. I’d rehearse for two or three weeks with one acting partner during the day, and a different scene with a different acting partner during the evenings.

The odd thing is, I never did comedy scenes in class. I knew that comedy was my talent, but I wanted to learn “Stanislavsky”—
real
acting—so I always chose dramatic scenes. Of course, my thinking was schoolboy logic. There wasn’t any reason I couldn’t have learned just as much by doing comedy scenes—which are all the funnier if done by actors who are playing them for
real
. I just didn’t know that yet.

In Uta’s class I did a scene from a Kafka short story with a lovely girl named Jessie. The work was good, but Jessie was better. She became my first actual girlfriend. I suppose it happened because we got to know each other before there was any physical intimacy. She worked as a freelance fashion designer, so we would rehearse at all hours, and then have either lunch or dinner together—something very inexpensive. We also laughed a lot. I couldn’t afford my tiny loft any longer—cheap as it was—so Jessie asked me to move in with her.

Physically, it was “Heaven on a stick”—for me, since I was the
stick. But I didn’t know how to make her as happy as she was making me—how to touch her, where to touch her, with my finger, with my tongue. Eventually her frustration drove us apart. I felt like an imbecile again.

The compulsion came and went, but not so often anymore, and not in the same way. Now it would take something special to set it off, and it was always something I’d read or a picture I’d seen—someone who was doing something noble and unselfish to help others, and usually the noble person was making a sacrifice. Compulsion is doing; obsession is thinking. Instead of compulsive praying, the Demon—when he did come—took the form of obsessive thinking.

I got my first professional acting job playing the Second Officer in Herbert Berghof’s production of
Twelfth Night
, at the Cambridge Drama Festival. We performed in a huge tent alongside the Charles River. Herbert wanted me, I’m sure, because he needed a good fencing choreographer for the comic duel. And I was a good one.

Then the famous Cuban director José Quintero asked me to stay on and do the fencing choreography for
Macbeth
, with Jason Robards, Jr., and Siobhan McKenna. During rehearsals—when Mr. Robards was exhausted after a heavy emotional scene—he’d sit in the theater and watch the other actors rehearse scenes he wasn’t in, while he tried to catch his breath. It was during those short rest periods that I would go over the choreography of his sword fights, each of us holding a pencil instead of a sword, and going through all the movements in miniature.