I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (7 page)

It was already past 4:00
A.M.
In eight hours I was expected at the Algonquin Hotel to have lunch with another overaged urchin—the then nineteen-year-old Daniel Radcliffe—to interview him for The Daily Beast about his latest Harry Potter movie as well as his Broadway run as Alan Strang in
Equus
. That latter role was one I had played myself when I was an actor. The daily beast, I thought, that’s a good name for drug use once it becomes an addiction. Had mine? Had it yet? Had it really?

I faked a yawn.

“I’m going to have to wind this down,” I told the kid, who shrugged and returned to the pipe. I turned off the porn and visited the bathroom, first stopping to pet my dog, Archie, where he lay taking it all in from his staked-out patch on the room’s increasingly stained white steer skin rug. When I returned, the boy was lying on my bed on his stomach with his ass arched toward me, his hands spreading its cheeks. He raised his butt higher in the air in both surrender and defiance. There was too much meth in me to get an erection, so I grabbed a dildo from the bag of sex toys he had brought along with him and inserted the giant head of it into his widening hole. Archie watched the boy’s butt arch higher toward me as I rammed the dildo deeper into him. I thought not of Madonna or Kilimanjaro or the boy’s moans there below me but counted, with each thrust of the dildo into him, the one-two-three-four months until I was to walk the Camino and escape all this. I had put my iPod on shuffle to shut the boy up when he complained of my music selection earlier and my one Doors download gave way to an aria from
Fidelio
. Archie barked once, as he always did at Beethoven. I no longer looked at the boy’s beautiful ass but over at Archie. “Shshsh,” I hissed at him. “Deeper,” begged the boy. “… deeper…” And on that fifth deep thrust of the dildo into the overaged urchin who lurched, then seemed to flutter, float for a second, then fall flat again against the filthy sheets, I thought of the five months hence when I’d do it, when, at the end of the Camino I’d walk into Santiago. I pulled the dildo out. There was only Beethoven now. Archie refused to bark.

*   *   *

I made it to the Algonquin a half hour before Radcliffe was scheduled to arrive in order to gather myself and go over the extensive notes I had made. I had convinced the boy, with an offer of the remaining meth that I had bought for us, to leave my apartment with his bag of toys, his pipe, his ass issuing its commands of surrender. I had then showered. Drunk a protein shake. Sipped the two ounces of wheatgrass juice I had put in the refrigerator when I knew I would be getting high. Eaten one banana. Lots of yogurt. Poured three cups of coffee. Downed some Gatorade. A bottle of water. Gargled. Brushed my teeth. Gargled again. All of this as much of the ritual for me as seeking out the sallow beauty of yet another boy with a pipe to pack, to light, to lift to our lips in an attempt to obliterate, for a few hours, the rest of the hours in my life.

I hadn’t had a wink of sleep and my mouth still tasted of the boy. There was a metallic leftover methness mixed up with him in there. I slumped down in one of the overstuffed chairs in the Algonquin’s lobby. I watched the muffled wheeling of suitcases atop the carpet, which, like me, had become a bit too threadbare for such a place. I looked away from the rug’s threadbareness, from mine, and focused on the whistle hanging from a fat doorman’s neck. I flinched at my reflection when he moved away from the mirror hidden behind him. I thought of the Vicious Circle, who had once had their own lunches there. This lunch I was about to have proved I was in my own version of a vicious one. The wordplay itself—the fact that I was still able privately to partake in it—calmed my racing heart with proof that my brain was still functioning and, therefore, so was I. I reached into my pocket for my trusty vial of Visine and put the umpteenth drops of it into my eyes. As the blur of Visine cleared, I saw Radcliffe standing in front of me.

He looked a little shocked at my condition as we settled into a back corner booth. “I was up all night with a stomach bug,” I heard the lie too easily scrape some of the meth-ness from my mouth. “I wasn’t about to cancel this lunch, though,” I told him, then asked the waiter to bring me a ginger ale. “You’re really nice to have scheduled it. I know how tiring a run in
Equus
can be.”

“Yes, I heard from Sam—our production’s press rep—that you played the part of Alan Strang. Back in the 1970s, was it?” he asked.

“I played it with Tony Perkins in a production down in Philadelphia and in a tour or two,” I said, using the memory to focus my thoughts. “I almost got the part on Broadway when Richard Burton took over the role of the psychiatrist, Dr. Dysart, but my experience with the show’s director, John Dexter, wasn’t the best.”

“What was Dexter like?” Radcliffe asked.

“Well, I was never directed by him except at my callbacks. I auditioned for him several times but finally had to deal with the ‘dirty old man’ side of him,” I said, hearing the term for the first time as a description that could just as easily be used now for me. Yet, hearing it so clearly, I had also found almost immediately “the nest” in the conversation, as I’d come to think of such a moment over the years when I interviewed celebrities. So much of my childhood had been taken up with seeking the comfort I felt nesting in the presence of such creatures on the television or in the movies. I carried on secret conversations with them even then, imagining they were the ones who understood how trapped I felt in my otherness, in the Mississippi countryside, in my grief. At the very moment when I alighted in the nest that a conversation with a celebrity created, I became that comforted child once more. Even, on that day, when I had felt so strung out on meth, it could sober me up, if only momentarily, with a deep-seated solace. I was no longer dirty. I was no longer old. I was no longer even a man. I was that child comforted in a nest of his own making. With someone famous, I could be my truest self. With someone famous, I could be alone.

*   *   *

I had brought along a copy of my memoir,
Mississippi Sissy,
and inscribed it to Daniel as we began to talk about playing the boy in
Equus,
whose sexuality had been warped by religion. Radcliffe raved about Richard Griffiths, who was playing Dysart opposite him, an actor so entombed in flesh that an elegiac carnality was his appeal, because Dysart, as written, is stuck in a sexless marriage.

“That’s what I think is sort of fantastic about Richard as a piece of casting,” Radcliffe told me. “If you see someone like Burton or Tony Perkins in that part—if they weren’t fucking their wife, if they had gotten to that point in their marriage—you’d have a hard time believing that they wouldn’t leave to find somebody else to fuck like a secretary or a nurse or whomever. But you almost got cast to play the part with Burton? What happened?”

“Keith McDermott, who did play the part, was amazing in it. I don’t know what his experience with Dexter was. I can only speak of mine,” I said, sipping at the ginger ale that had just arrived. “Dexter asked me to come out to his home in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, one Saturday for a lunch, with a couple of other boys who were up for the role. Keith wasn’t a part of that threesome, all of us overaged urchins,” I said, smiling at my private joke. “We were picked up at the stage door of what was then the Plymouth Theatre, where
Equus
was playing. Dexter had sent his tall black male secretary to drive us out to Atlantic Highlands, but we got stuck in traffic. I was still going to the Juilliard School of Drama then. I was just about as cute as you are now, though my shag haircut might have made me cuter. We all had shags back then. At least the three of us boys in the car with that tall black secretary did. ‘Shag’ is a verb over in England, huh. I think Dexter wanted to use it in such a way when we got out there to Atlantic Highlands. He wanted to shag all us boys with our shags,” I went on. My words were picking up too much speed. I was aware of it but could not stop the careening. My voice also had all the hoarseness to it that a night of smoking meth could cause, the consonants all sanded down to husks of themselves where they stayed lodged in the back of my throat to be stammered free. Was the stammering giving me away? Did I still smell of sex? “Do you really want to hear all this?” I finally asked when I stopped to take a breath and gesture toward the waiter for another ginger ale.

“Yes. Please. Carry on,” said Radcliffe, seemingly relieved not to have to keep up his part of the conversation just yet.

“Well, we were almost an hour late for lunch,” I continued when that next ginger ale arrived. “Dexter’s first words when we entered the house were, ‘You’re late, you black cunt!’ You Brits say ‘cunt’ more than we do over here, I take it.”

Radcliffe stared at me. He decided to giggle. “Go on,” he said.

“Well, there were three huge goblets of red wine poured at the ready and, after a bit of conversation, Dexter asked me if I would be the first to accompany him into his study. He locked the door behind him and told me to strip because he said he needed to see if I could pass for a naked seventeen-year-old boy. I was already twenty by then and I wanted the part more than anything I’d ever wanted in those twenty years. So I took off my clothes. Stood there in my underwear.

“‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I must see everything. You have to be comfortable being nude because you must be nude in the play. Do it.’

“I did as he said and then watched him take a big gulp of his Burgundy as he took me in. Blushing a color close to that of the Burgundy, I stared down at his desk. Atop it were the blueprints for the stage design of Leontyne Price’s upcoming production of
Aida
at the Met, which Dexter was also directing. I had placed my own goblet of wine next to the blueprints. I reached for it to take a few needed gulps myself.

“‘No, no,’ he said again. ‘First turn around for me. Let’s see how hairy your bum is.’

“Again, I did as he said, but as I turned my hand grazed my goblet, spilling the wine all over the blueprints for
Aida.
I grabbed my underwear and was about to mop it up.

“‘Don’t worry,’ said Dexter, waving me away, though he was obviously pissed. ‘Whatever the wine blotted out I wasn’t supposed to see. I’ll just pretend I didn’t approve these plans and demand the designer draw up a revised set.’

“I don’t know what happened when the other two went in there. But we had a mostly silent lunch.” I paused to take a breath. I sipped at my ginger ale.

Radcliffe giggled again. “Nothing like that ever happens to me. Should I be insulted?” He studied my eyes. “You should put that story in your next book,” he said.

*   *   *

I kept the ginger ales coming as he and I wished each other a Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the “Happy” seeming even more appropriate since the very next day Barack Obama was going to be sworn in as the country’s forty-fourth president. “We happen to be meeting at a very American moment,” I told Radcliffe. “Does it make you feel overly British to be here right now?”

“I feel privileged to be here for Obama’s inauguration. But I do tend to go doubly British when I am away from home. I have picked up certain phrases while here in America that I plan to eradicate as soon as I get back home. I’ve begun to say ‘I know—right?’ That phrase and its little rhythm there is very American and not really used in England. I’ve started saying that and people are picking me up on it when they come over to visit.”

We turned our attention to other differences between America and Britain, though we agreed that America’s class structure was becoming as ingrained as Britain’s has always been. “Your mother is Jewish. Do you identify as Jewish yourself?” I asked.

“Yeah yeah yeah yeah. Absolutely. I actually really do. My dad is Northern Irish and my mum is Jewish,” he told me.

“Talk about a half-blood prince,” I said.

“Well, that’s working blood for certain. Though I am not religious in the least, I am very proud to be Jewish.”

“What’s it been like working in the small-bower world of the theater?” I asked. “It’s a very different environment from film. Much more collegial and camp and … well, let’s face it: gay.”

“For a lot of straight guys, and I know I’m guilty of it sometimes,” he said, “when you know a gay guy has a crush on you it is the most flattering thing.”

“I’ve seldom met a straight actor who isn’t a fag hag. Are you?”

“Oh, probably. Yeah, I’m a fag hag, to use your term,” Radcliffe said. “I know I definitely caught it. Absolutely. My mom was a casting director and my dad was a literary agent and I was surrounded by gay men from a very young age. And I was the only boy in my class at school who had that kind of relationship with gay men. Most of my friends had parents who had proper jobs in banks and law firms, so none of them had been exposed to homosexuality in the way I had—as a normal course of things. So they had a rather different attitude toward it than I.”

“After lights-out, they’d just bugger each other, then ignore it the next day in class,” I said.

“Well, I didn’t go to a boarding school if that’s what you’re getting at,” he said. “That’s one thing Harry Potter has done if nothing else. It has restored the reputation of the English boarding school. It has made it something other than a hotbed of homosexuality.”

A hotbed of homosexuality. It sounded as if he were describing my apartment. “We all play roles in life,” I said. “I finally decided my truest role, even more than The Sissy, even more than The Homosexual, is The Orphan,” I said, wondering at that very moment if The Addict would one day override even that. “Harry Potter is perhaps the most famous orphan now in all of literature,” I said, still able to focus on the conversation at hand. “But there is a whole genre that centers on the orphaned. Your first role at nine was the young David Copperfield. You are now the personification of the most beloved of orphans. It is the thing about you, Daniel, that moves me the most.”

“I suppose they make good heroes—orphans do—because we love the underdog,” he said. “For an orphan, from the earliest, most basic, most primitive part of your life, things have gone against you. So in that sense an orphan is the ultimate underdog. Everything we know about how people work and are successful, in the conventional sense, starts with family. So the notion is for that to be taken out of the picture one has to work doubly hard to achieve things.”