THE WRONG FOREST

...and Teacher Keeps Washing His Car...

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writers’ musings:

“If Blake could do this when he sat down to shite,

Think of what he might do if he sat down to write.” William Blake

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Mr. Levine was my eighth grade teacher. It was a novelty in those days to have a male teacher. He was small, slight, dark, Jewish, brilliant, contained. His magnetism was a powerful force. He was worldly, he was witty, he was baiting, he was irresistible, and I fell for him with no holds barred. I found out that his house was half a block up the street from the very road on which I walked home every day. He might be out washing his car and I would be nothing but nerve-endings and a huge pair of eyes.

This man paid attention to me. I too was small, dark, and unprepossessing. He was actually a wizard in my young life but I didn’t quite recognize the full impact at the time. He fooled me, that guy. Instead of wearing his starry purple robes and pointy hat he had the effrontery to appear as a curly-headed nobody who nevertheless seemed to understand me and my unformed mind. “I expect to see your name on the back of a book one day,” he said. To me. In the class room. During class. Those were his exact words, words that have never stopped ricocheting around in the chambers of my mind. I took them in, those words. I never let them go. They are still alive. I heard them and I never forgot them, but someone, some witch, an actress-woman named Arlene who was my neighbor threw a net over my young life and I was oh-so-susceptible to being deflected… towards a great thicket, called Theatre. “Don’t you want to be a Nactress? she called with her siren call. So I followed her, her hips weaving before me, her snake charms and her kohl eyes hypnotizing me as she plunged me deep into the snare of showbiz.

Or was she Rhonda? or Rhona? Rhoda? How could I forget? What is this flattening of memory? She was so important. Maybe in her 30s. A mature woman, childless, a redhead. Rhonda-Arlene had even more pull on me than Mr. Levine. The word ‘actress’ was planted into my soil by my Gramma; she’d worked as a hatcheck girl at the big theatre in Budapest and delivered the seed to me with ignorant innocent inchoate mystique. Thus it began to germinate. Thus RhondaRhodaArlene watered what was planted. Thus I pointed myself towards that light. Thus when Mr. Levine said “I expect to see your name on the back of a book one day,’ I tucked that one away for later, because I was already heading for the stage door.

The Theatre at first seemed an impenetrable fortress. There was a veritable castlekeep called Drama School whose moat had to be crossed, whose walls had to be scaled by auditioning. So I auditioned - and got to pass through the gates into Drama School.

This was a Calling. For me it wasn’t true in the final analysis, but I didn’t find that out for a long time. I was in an airless place and spiders and webs were everywhere, in my face, in my ears, in my mind. Along the way false fakirs laughed and amused themselves and paid no attention to me. Their lips were stretched over tombstone teeth, their rouge was obvious, their eyelashes artificial in their glittering kingdom. I was bedazzled.

I couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t tell, and couldn’t think, for years. It wasn’t right but it’s what I’d set out to do, so I kept at it.

But every ten or twenty years or so the form of Mr. Levine dancing in Kleig lights would visit me at night in Hollywood where I lived, and he’d waggle his crooked little finger at me and he’d say, “I expected to see your name on the back of a book one day.” I sort of ignored him. Hollywood was a thrill and I was having a grand life there anyway being invited to balls and things.

Roads not taken. Coulda woulda shoulda. I got everything out of opening the stage door. It broadened me. I learned about people like Meyerhold and Ionesco. Max Reinhardt and Moliere. It involved study. Not just scene study. Not just the history of western theatre and best American plays and pointing the receiver toward how the Brits did it. Study also involved the raiment that one would best be advised to wear, the black tights and Pappagallo shoes that indicated your grasp of presentation as you walked out to meet the world. I got community. A mate. A life. Familiarity with a whole culture. The matter of internal politics that you had to master. Calculations and instincts. Clubbiness, society. That goes a long way, you know. Like church. It was quite consuming. And in my case, since I was eventually married to that church and disinclined towards divorce, there wouldn’t be an offramp, even though I sort of knew that Mr. Levine was still was waiting in the wings, passive, quiet, expecting to see my name on the back of a book one day.

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Hard copies of DIARY OF OLDING, Vol. 3 are now available: all the SubStack postings from 2025. Volumes 1 & 2 are sold out. You can order direct: jma@thetrak.com $25 postage paid

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