This is the first in a series of pieces from my past writing -- some of it published, some of it, like this essay, written out of necessity rather than assignment. It's offered in the interest of, well, frankly I don't know what, but it seems like a good idea so I'm doing it.
This particular essay gets to be the first installment for a number of reasons. First: We've recently passed the third anniversary of Steve's death. Second: I met an ex-Marine today and it reminded me that Steve was extremely proud of his service to his country in the Corps, in Vietnam and in the military judicial system. Third: He was my friend and my friend Caroline's very best friend and we miss him.
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AUG. 3, 2007
PLAYER: There’s a design at work in all art -- surely you know that? Events must play themselves out to aesthetic, moral and logical conclusion.
- From Act Two, "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead" by Tom Stoppard.
Steve was always full of wisdom -- and always willing to share.
So I wonder what he would tell me now about how to hold on to my more treasured memories of him as a friend, an actor/producer and a source of wisdom -- the sort of wisdom one can only find by living the life he lived -- and how to somehow come to grips with the sight of him in pain and struggling to breathe in a nursing home bed, just six hours before he went to his rest.
We all know that wasn’t Leonard Stephenson. Couldn’t be. Here is a man who survived the meat grinder of Vietnam, took control of military courtrooms and commanded the stage as Uhry’s Hoke Colburn and Fugard’s Mr. M and O’Neill’s Emperor Brutus Jones. Brutus Jones, for crying out loud! This was not the Steve who was my friend and mentor, here wasting away in Room 112 of Fairview Commons, his eyes still sharp and his grip still firm, but laboring to breathe like someone tied a 300-pound weight to his chest.
No, give me the Steve who, quite frankly, frightened me the first time I visited the little house in East Lee, looking for this Caroline woman who was going to show me a studio apartment. I was early and he came to the door in his blue bathrobe, holding a coffee mug. "Hello," he said in that lion’s purr of a voice -- at once welcoming and intimidating, whether he meant to be or not. I’m sure he saw the cartoon light bulb shorting out over my head as I thought "uhhh, that’s not Caroline ... who is this guy and will he kill me for waking him up? ... Do I even have the right house?" I hope he got a chuckle out of that.
No, give me the Steve who was always out in the yard, almost gleefully impaling dandelions with his dandelion impaling tool, smoking a cigarette -- a bad foreshadowing, that, but who was I to tell a grown man 30 years my senior to quit? -- and giving the word on the issues of the day. The Steve who increasingly used the word "doggone" as a modifier the more animated he became about a given subject.
Better yet, give me the Steve who had a voice, on stage and in everyday life, that doubled as a musical instrument -- smooth and disarming like Miles Davis one minute, furious like Charlie Parker the next, inventing new language like Coltrane the third. Give me the Steve who absolutely brought the house down at my wedding with his regal reading of Herman Melville’s thoughts on love in a passage from Pierre, a performance that made that forgotten 150-year-old book as vital as the blood running through my veins.
Because I had some interest in drama -- Shakespeare and O’Neill, mainly -- we often talked about his productions and plays I had read and he had performed. To my delight, he told me he had once been the Player in Tom Stoppard’s brilliant existentialist take on Shakespeare’s very own Beavis and Butthead, "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead," one of my very favorite plays.
Previously, I had imagined myself speaking the Player’s lines; I liked his wise-ass attitude. But after learning Steve had performed that role, the Player was forevermore Steve, and I heard his voice as I read the character’s lines. Which makes perfect sense if you think about it -- here’s a man who was born to be on stage, relished it and took it on the road with his own troupe of actors, trying to impart some greater truth in the process of entertaining an audience. And here was a character doing the same doggone thing…
PLAYER: Naturally -- we didn’t get paid, owing to circumstances ever so slightly beyond our control, and all the money we had lost betting on certainties. Life is a gamble, at terrible odds -- if it was a bet you wouldn’t take it. Did you know that any number doubled is even?
ROSENCRANTZ: It is?
PLAYER: We learn something every day, to our cost. But we troupers just go on and on. Do you know what happens to old actors?
ROSENCRANTZ: What?
PLAYER: Nothing. They’re still acting. Surprised, then?
GUILDENSTERN: What?
PLAYER: Surprised to see us?
GUILDENSTERN: I knew it wasn’t the end.
But back to Room 112. Since that’s what’s been keeping me up at night of late.
I had seen this before with my great grandmother, the matriarch of the Polish side of my family. But she was 97 and had been in a long decline from the moment she broke her hip. Steve? I had seen him a year prior. He was in his early 60s, healthy as far as I could tell, and still very much himself. And now, here he was, an oxygen mask covering his face, looking tired and in pain. Oddly, I noticed he looked good with white hair and a beard -- it gave him an additional look of distinction. Oddly, because I knew this was it.
The thing is, I don’t want to entirely forget that moment. It was my goodbye to him, after all, and that counts for something.
Soon after I walked in I held his hand and looked him square in the eye. I am still trying to comprehend exactly what I saw there -- I saw more than I know, I think, perhaps more than I can understand.
Later during our short time with him, I said "Well, this is hell of a thing, isn’t it?"
He reached a hand out and wrapped it around my shoulder as I sat at bedside.
That was about it. He was tired.
The last thing I did was snap him off a good salute.
And I said "I’ll see you again," though how I could possibly say that or why, I know not. Maybe it’s because the last thing my grandfather said to my brother Justin, a day and a half before he was gone, was "I’ll see you again someday." Maybe it was my way of trying to lean on the wisdom of one hero to say goodbye to another.
And then Rick and his friend Jerry and I walked out and found ourselves a bar. Because after what we had just been through, we needed a shot and a beer. Badly.
PLAYER: Between "just desserts" and "tragic irony" we are given quite a lot of scope for our particular talent. Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go when things have got about as bad as they reasonably get. (He switches on a smile.)
GUILDENSTERN: Who decides?
PLAYER: (switching off his smile) Decides? It is written.
He turns away. Guildenstern grabs him and spins him back violently.
(Unflustered.) Now if you’re going to be subtle, we’ll miss each other in the dark. I’m referring to oral tradition. So to speak.
Guildenstern releases him.
We’re tragedians, see. We follow directions -- there is no choice involved. The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means. (Calling.) Positions!
So now what?
The sorrow that I feel for Caroline, who is as dear a friend to me as Steve was, is immeasurable. She was the love of his life, and he, hers, and they deserved to grow old together. It is horribly unfair. But I take some solace in the fact she’s a strong and intelligent woman, and that she’s surrounded by great friends who appreciate her honesty and strength and independence and will support her no matter what.
The sorrow I feel for myself is not so hot, either.
A year ago Steve had given me a project to write. He asked me for a play about Agrippa Hull, a free black man who served in the Revolutionary War and lived in Stockbridge. He crossed paths with a Who’s Who of the 18th Century: Jonathan Edwards, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, George Washington, Theodore and Catherine Maria Sedgwick and the Marquis de Lafayette. But like every other serious writing project I ever set out to start on my own, I did not finish. My ideas never seemed right on paper, or on screen.
And then it was too late…
Maybe if I still lived nearby and Steve was cajoling me to finish, the play would have gotten written and he would have put it on the stage. He likely would have helped me smooth over the rough parts and work out dialogue that didn’t make me cringe.
But life takes turns. It took me from that little house in East Lee to Boston and then to Connecticut and brought me a family to love with my whole heart. So there are trade-offs and I suppose I have excuses. But I don’t feel so good about the excuses right now.
But I do have strong feelings about that little house in East Lee. It was the place where the hard lessons about life really got learned and where the rewards for learning those lessons were first truly realized. And I have Caroline and Steve to thank for that. Maybe that’s why the moment I put my apartment key in an envelope, slipped it under their door and closed the screen door behind me in May of 2000, I cried like a baby, the gravity of what I had just done taking me quite by surprise. They were so much more than the landlady and her husband. They were surrogate parents and dear friends to whom I happened to cut a check for $475 every month. And one of them is gone now.
PLAYER: So there’s an end to that -- it’s commonplace; light goes with life, and in the winter of your years the dark comes early…So what would Steve suggest, gently or otherwise, in this crappy Steveless situation in which we, the Friends Of Steve, now find ourselves?
Would he bark like a gunnery sergeant and kick my tail to stop dawdling and making lame excuses about writing something other than what I’m paid to write at work?
Maybe. But more likely, he would ask a few questions and then offer some timely advice -- directions, really -- and continue to hold forth on similar situations in his life, that voice holding my attention and holding my "yes, but" questions and counterpoint at bay.
If I might presume to be so bold, he’d want to be remembered as he was first and foremost - and then, if you must, the ending, because plays have beginnings and endings.
So I’ll go with the last time I saw him as I knew him, in 2006. My daughter Sofia, then two, flirted with him incessantly, because she is a ham and does that sort of thing. And he was completely pleased and tickled by the attention -- the actor in his element, perhaps.
That’s a performance I would have liked to have seen again.
Excerpts from “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead,” Copyright 1967 by Tom Stoppard. All rights reserved.
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