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“I Once Asked Him The Secret To Success”
An excerpt from my new memoir, ‘Theatre Kids’
He chewed on his cigar for the entire two-hour drive from McLean, Virginia, to my college audition in Richmond. It was the spring of ’92 and the radio was nothing but Sir-Mix-a-Lot’s irreverent hip-hop hit “Baby Got Back” and right-wing hate potato Rush Limbaugh, and we listened to Rush because my dad wanted to know what the enemy was thinking and saying.
I knew my plan made him uneasy, but the man supported me. Not right at first. Eventually. He tried one more time to influence me, pitching Baylor University in Texas, which was famously affiliated with the Baptist Church and had a drama department, but he quickly gave up after watching my face melt. Later, he told me he talked to a friend on Capitol Hill who knew a Wall Street guy with a theatre degree. He turned out fine, he’s rich, college is college.
He dropped me off at Virginia Commonwealth University’s campus and shouted “Break a leg!” as I slammed the car door. For the audition, I chose one of Roy Cohn’s monologues from Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, a play that went over my head and hit me right in the heart. Kushner’s sprawling, terrifying, uplifting drama about humans in love during a horrible plague moved me in ways I couldn’t explain.
I performed the role of a vile, deeply closeted fifty-nine-year-old right-wing monster dying of AIDS with the confidence of a sheltered seventeen-year-old suburban straight boy. I gave a deeply offensive performance — I was stereotypically gay and Jewish and evil, all at the same time. But I gave it my all, and a few months later, I was accepted into the program. It would be the only college acceptance I would receive.
On the drive home from the audition, I was all smiles, which made my dad smile. He smiled and smoked, and we both laughed about this and that and plotted a celebratory Chinese-food takeout feast. We were both passionate about Crab Rangoon, cream-cheese-filled fried wontons scientifically designed to appeal to American tastes.
It’s not like my old man and I had nothing in common. I tried to care about football. If I had been born in Texas, I would probably worship the sport. Texans love football the way the ancient Romans loved crucifixion. But, alas, when I watch football, I see SUV-sized hulks with brain damage using their skulls as battering rams as millions cheer. As for video games, I have never understood the allure. He’d tell me, on many occasions, that most kids would kill for a dad who was into The Legend of Zelda.
But we loved Crab Rangoon! And we were both really into professional wrestling for a few years. He met my mom at a lucha libre match in Juarez when he was a part-time ring announcer, and she was a young woman who went to watch the colorful masked luchadores fly off the ropes with her father. This was the family origin story. He never connected my theatre obsession with the hours he and I spent watching fabulous he-men bodyslamming each other in a choreographed morality play that was one part rodeo, one part ballet. It’s why I loved capes.
We booed the heels and cheered the faces together, but not for long. I never watched a Super Bowl with him, but I sat through more than one WrestleMania, pumping my fist for Randy “Macho Man” Savage and George “The Animal” Steele. But then musicals like Les Miz stole my heart, and that was that.
We also told jokes. He loved jokes. Especially lightly inappropriate ones, since he was the son of a preacher man. One of his favorites went like this: A man gets a flat tire outside an insane asylum. A chain-link fence surrounds the asylum, and inside that fence, various patients wander. His predicament catches the attention of one of the patients. The man doesn’t like being watched but gets to work changing the tire, placing each lug nut from the flat into its hubcap, which he lays on the street. He can feel the patient watching him and, distracted, accidentally kicks the hubcap, and all the lug nuts spill onto the asphalt and roll down a storm drain. The man is distraught.
So the patient goes, “Look, all you have to do is take one lug nut off of each of the other three tires and use them to put the spare on. That’ll get you down the road to a filling station.”
The man is shocked and relieved. He can’t believe it. What a great idea.
“Look,” says the patient, “I’m crazy, not stupid.”
That one always made him chuckle, and he told it often. Politics is a serious business — too serious — but he took every opportunity to tell a zinger. He wasn’t a clown, which I think is a perfectly acceptable thing to be. He just loved to make other people laugh. He was the type of man who would stop important people in the marble hallways of Washington, D.C. to tell them the one about the guy with the wooden eye or the one about the one-legged woman. The ability to tell a joke, to put strangers at ease, and to make friends, is an important skill if you didn’t grow up around money.
He used to ask people he was meeting for the first time whether or not they’d like “my card” and then he would hand them a business card with the words “My Card” printed on them. He had these made specially.
I once asked him the secret to success. He was a press secretary, an important staff position, and he was good at his job. I didn’t know that then. I had no idea what he did, actually, except that he left for work at six in the morning with a briefcase, every weekday and sometimes Saturday, and had a small office in the massive, modernist Hart Senate Office Building. I remember being slightly embarrassed that my dad was a secretary, but I knew he had worked for many powerful and wealthy people. How did all those cabinet officials and senators and ambassadors get to where they were? Did he know how they did it? He had met the President before. How did these people become so successful? He paused thoughtfully and told me the secret was equal parts crippling insecurity and backstabbing ambition feeding on each other.
Not long after sharing that observation with me, he gave me the only piece of professional advice he ever offered up. It came out of nowhere and I assumed it represented the sum of his experiences toiling on Capitol Hill. He told me to always return the calls of friends and colleagues who get fired, or laid off, or lose the big election. Everyone stumbles. He said no one calls you when you’re down, except the people who care about you.
Grief. Friendship. Jazz hands. You can preorder ‘Theatre Kids’ now on Amazon, Bookshop, or Barnes & Noble
