Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent (8 page)

B
ack in New York, back in the show, back in my life of running around to auditions and dinners and movies and plays, I barely called home. I kept thinking I should be doing more to help, or that I should
want
to do more to help, but the truth was that I was avoiding making contact with Mom, without ever admitting it to myself, for fear of what news might be on the other end.

From the little contact I did make, I learned that her recovery from her surgery was as swift as always, but that she wasn’t going to be able to go back to work because of her debilitating chemo and radiation treatments. I tried imagining how she would look without her hair and thought that it would probably make her already large and prominent dark brown eyes all the more noticeable. I wondered what her scalp looked like. I didn’t want to find out.

I could hardly stand the fact that at the end of the day, there was nothing I
could
do to help, not really. At least not from New York. I wondered if Mom resented my absence, if she wanted me to be home with her. I wondered if she still believed that I had always been the savior of our family, and therefore should try to do something to save us all once again; after all, she had credited me with literally saving all of our lives more than once. The first time was one night back in 1972 when I was a small baby.

Our tiny red Volkswagen Bug crawled down I-57. We were somewhere on the stretch of highway between Manteno and Glenview, Illinois, and it was dark, very dark; there were no lights alongside the road. We had just left Grandma’s after our weekly visit; my dad was driving, my mom was in the passenger seat, Adam was curled up in the cubbyhole behind the back seat, Anne was slumped down in the back seat itself, and little one-year-old me was next to her, in my car seat. We three kids were asleep.

Mom and Dad weren’t talking much, as usual, just watching the road speed beneath our car, relieved to be out of her mother’s house, away from all of the noise that came from eleven brothers and sisters and several of their children running around all day.

I-57 was like most Illinois highways: completely straight for miles and miles, its four lanes separated by a grassy median, with the occasional dilapidated overpass thrown in. Cornfields and plains stretched out on either side. Every once in a while a barn or farmhouse or granary sprouted up on the horizon, usually accompanied by a huge oak tree or weeping willow. There were shoulders on the side of the highway, but if you pulled over, it might be a long time before anyone came along. Exits were few, and no towns were visible from the road.

It was late summer, but the night was cool. The steady
pat pat pat
of insects dotting the windshield and the sputter of the motor filled the silence between my parents. The radio wasn’t playing, probably because they wouldn’t have agreed on what station to listen to.

We passed a midnight blue Dodge Dart on the shoulder. Its door lay open, but no one was in sight. Mom thought that was odd. She looked at Dad, thought about saying something, and then decided there was nothing really to say; cars were often abandoned on the sides of highways.

Another couple of miles down the road, that same Dart passed our car on the left, moving at an incredibly fast speed. A young black man with an Afro and a goatee sat in the driver’s seat. Again, Mom thought something was odd, but again, she didn’t say anything. She looked back at me asleep, and at Anne, and then stared out the window at the barely visible cornfield whizzing by.

Soon after that, we passed two other cars on the shoulder: one a faded, rusty Gremlin; the other a clunky, army green Buick Elektra. In the Elektra was a group of three young men, two white, one black, and outside, between the two cars, stood a young white woman, talking animatedly to another young white man. Mom and Dad glanced over.

“Should we stop, Doug?” my mom asked.

“What? Why should we stop?”

“I don’t know…”

He kept driving. My mom was growing more and more nervous, uncomfortably so. She reached back to me and adjusted my head in my car seat, rubbed Anne’s hand for a second, and lifted herself up so she could peek over the back seat at Adam’s sleeping, curled up, little-boy body.

Suddenly, the young woman’s Gremlin zoomed by, going even faster than the Dart. Mom stared after it, her heart pounding. It didn’t make sense, this many people doing this kind of driving, on this road, at night, she thought.

The headlights of the Buick Elektra splashed into the car, growing in intensity very quickly. Mom whipped her head around, staring into the beams. Recklessly, the Elektra changed lanes and drew up alongside our car. The three young men inside stared into our car.

“Doug, watch out, I think they’re drunk,” Mom said.

“Don’t worry, I can handle it.”

“Be careful. Slow down.”

He slowed down, and the Buick Elektra slowed down. The guys in the car were huddled together, talking to each other and pointing at us with their thumbs.

“What are they doing?” Mom said.

“Mary, don’t worry, just don’t look at them, and they’ll leave us alone. They’re just joyriding.”

“I don’t know…”

“Trust me.”

Abruptly, their car slowed down, switched lanes so they were once again behind us, and bumped into our rear.

“Doug—”

“What the hell are they doing?”

“Doug—”

Another bump.

“I’m pulling over.”

“No, why?”

“I’m not gonna let them just get away with that, who do they think they are? Jesus.”

“No, Doug, don’t, just keep driving.”

Dad’s face was getting all red. Another bump. Dad glared at the rearview mirror. The Elektra zipped back into the lane next to ours, and pulled up alongside us again. One of the white men, his hair a scraggly mane, a lit cigarette hanging from his mouth, made a motion for us to pull over.

“Wait,” Dad said, “maybe they’re trying to tell us something’s wrong with our car.”

“No, Doug, there isn’t anything wrong with our car, now please, just slow down and they’ll leave us alone.”

Suddenly, there was the most aggressive bump yet, from the side, and with that, my head fell forward.

“That’s it, I’m pulling over!” my dad barked.

“No,
Doug.” Mom reached back to right my head. As she did, she glanced in the window of the Elektra and saw the scraggly-haired young man watching her help me. Their eyes met. The red tip of his cigarette flared as he took a drag. He looked at me, then back at Mom, then back at me. Another drag, and then he turned to his buddies in the car and said something to them. The driver craned his neck over to us, looked into our car once more, at Dad and Mom and me, and then sped away.

“Good riddance,” Dad said. “Punks.”

Before our arrival in Glenview, we passed two other cars on the side of the road, a station wagon and a VW bus, both abandoned. Once, we passed the Buick Elektra, which had one less passenger than earlier. Mom stared at each car as we passed by and tried to rub the gooseflesh out of her arms. She glanced over at Dad several times but didn’t say anything more that night. When we got home, she put us all to bed and tried to put the whole incident out of her mind. But she couldn’t; she lay in bed awake all night.

Many months later, Mom sat in a courtroom as an eyewitness, testifying against the young men in the Buick Elektra. That night on I-57, they had killed several people by bumping their cars off the road, taking them into the cornfield, shooting them point blank with a shotgun, and leaving them there to die. One member of the gang would then drive up ahead in the victim’s stolen car and knock someone else off the road. Less than a minute after we passed the young woman in the Gremlin, she was murdered.

Mom told me this whole story one night when I was still young—about nine or so. On a rare evening off from her nursing job at St. Joseph’s Hospital, Mom sat next to me on our couch and showed me old, yellowed newspaper clippings about the I-57 incident, including one in which she was interviewed, all of which were collected and saved in a flimsy scrapbook with a brown cardboard cover. When she was done, she closed the scrapbook and reached over to me, holding my hand in silence for a moment. I wasn’t sure if I should say anything, so I just sat there, imagining those poor people being shoved into the mud in the cornfields, wondering if they felt any pain as they were shot, or if it was all over in an instant. I looked at Mom. She smoothed my hair and said, “If it weren’t for you, we would have been killed that night.” She smiled softly, gazing right into my eyes. “That guy saw you, and he couldn’t kill a baby. Those terrible kids couldn’t kill a baby. If you hadn’t fallen forward, we would all be dead now. You saved our lives, Tonio.” And I nodded solemnly, believing her to be right, believing that I should continue to do my best to take care of our family.

Years later, in 1990, a severe tornado ripped through Joliet and its surrounding towns, killing over sixty people, and wiping off the face of the earth two of our previous apartments. I was already living in New York by then, and our current house—a condominium that I’d helped Mom purchase by taking care of the down payment with money I’d made doing
Adventures in Babysitting
—sat within a half mile of the tornado’s path. “If we didn’t live here, we might be dead,” Mom said to me at the time. “Thank you, Tonio. You saved our lives again.”

And even though she was technically right, that there was a good chance our family had averted death twice because of me, it was strange to get credit for being a great savior since neither outcome had been my intention. I was a baby in a car seat in the one case, and I was a thousand miles away when a tornado randomly happened to miss our house in the other. But I knew that Mom still believed that I had been somehow endowed with protective powers, and she gave me full credit for our family’s survival.

But now, as I was faced with this new reality of my mother’s failing health and in a position to possibly do something to make a difference in the outcome, not just by default but by actions I could consciously take, I was consistently falling short.

In April 1995, a couple of weeks after
Raised in Captivity
closed (we were a critical and box office success, selling out our limited run, but, unable to move to a commercial off-Broadway house, we were forced to close), I got a call from my agent, Paul, about a job in the film
Twister,
and I promptly shipped out to Ponca City, Oklahoma, for the next couple of months.
Twister
turned out to be just a paycheck gig, with no creative fulfillment whatsoever—I was essentially an extra, on the “bad guy’s” team. Although I was grateful for the boost in my income, I disliked being in the middle of Oklahoma and wished that I had more of an opportunity to work.

Several weeks into the shoot, my aunt Diana called me. “Your mom’s not doing too well,” she said. “Is there any way you can come home?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “I’ll have to find out.”

“Well, I hope you can. Your mother really wants to see you.”

So here it was, another urgent phone call from home, and another moment I had to ask permission to leave work. I went right to our executive producers, Kathleen Kennedy and Ian Bryce, neither of whom I had seen since the first day of shooting, and explained to them my situation.

“Of course you can go,” Kathleen said. She actually seemed concerned about Mom’s well-being. “There’s no reason why you can’t spend time with your mother.”

“Thank you,” I said, flush with my newfound freedom and anxious about what I would find when I went home.

Melanie Hoopes, another fellow underused teammate, managed to get permission to leave with me (she had friends in Chicago and was as eager as all of us to get out of Ponca City), and so the two of us set off on a thirteen-hour drive up through Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, and Illinois, arriving in Joliet just after dawn. Her presence in the car was a gift, even though we weren’t close friends at that time. When we started our journey, I said, “I don’t know how talkative I’ll be, or how I’ll feel, you know, because of the circumstances,” and without hesitation, and with complete sincerity, she replied, “I totally understand. You don’t have to talk to me or entertain me at all. If you want to talk about anything, I’m here; otherwise, you don’t have to worry.”

Mom had always been thin and pale, but when I got to the house and saw her that morning after she awoke, she was far thinner and paler than usual, her skin milky and stretched over the bones of her face. I was relieved to see that she still had a full head of hair, although it was limper than I remembered. The many bumps dotting her skin stood out in a kind of relief, and her large eyes seemed even rounder and larger than normal. I hugged her gently, afraid that too much of a squeeze from me might snap her in two.

“I’m so glad you could come home, Tonio,” she said.

“Me too.” And I was, although I was already dreading my time in Joliet. In my excitement to get out of Ponca I had forgotten that, in many ways, Joliet was no better. And there was so much I wanted to say to Mom, especially regarding all of her unresolved issues with my sexuality, but would she want to talk about any of it? Wouldn’t the barest mention depress her? Wasn’t it selfish of me to want to force her to discuss my concerns with her when all she probably wanted from me was my kindness and care?