"Krapp's Very Last Tape"

Light shined in from both ends of my attic bedroom as I stood before the mirror doing my best to channel senility and listening to an antiquated reel-to-reel tape player. On the tape I was playing my younger, 25-year-old drunken self on the 4^th of July spewing morose gibberish. My costume was an old thrift shop tweed coat, a mismatched orange and green plaid shirt buttoned up to the top, a worn black vest, baggy, dingy gray sweatpants, and a crumpled hat prop to place on the table. I was preparing for a solo performance.

I took speech and theater classes at Culver City High, and they were a hoot. After High School I worked as a supervisor for a Greeting Card Company but being drafted was a very big possibility  ( a good friend I knew had been killed by a sniper in Viet-Nam) and I wanted to spend time with family before that happened, so I caught a ride with one of our truckers all the way to Portland, Oregon. The driver was quite the character, he would sometimes put on his eyepatch and told me stories of being a  miner (lost everything), a taxi driver  ( he found a guy in an alley whose head was smashed like a pumpkin), and  a backwoods doctor in Alaska  (he lanced boils on peoples bums and serviced widows when needed). He dropped me off at my family’s front door with the gift of a fresh apple pie in hand.

When I got to Portland I stayed with my dad and the rest of the adopted family for a while, then moved into my older brother’s attic bedroom. For me that attic was a sacred space and  great creative efforts blossomed because of it.

In the spring of 1971, I signed up for classes at Portland Community College. Although I already had Biology, Cultural Anthropology, Creative Writing, Fencing and Painting,  a full load of classes, I let the Drama teacher talk me into signing up for one more class because he needed one more student to justify having a class at all.

When I arrived in Oregon I only had $82.00  and it had to last the semester, so I was eating a lot of ketchup relish soup with salt and pepper in the cafeteria, sometimes I would splurge and get the two cent crackers. None-the-less , creatively I took off. My creative writing class was a revelation and the teacher allowed me unbridled freedom. My artwork was so successful that a sheet of sixteen original three inch square works of art ‘somehow’ vanished while in the teachers care. And when it came to acting, the attic was a perfect place to practice my lines. No one bothered me in the attic.

In Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” I played the male lead, George Gibbs. Rehearsing at home for the play was fun, the classmate who owned the condominium where we rehearsed had spent her early years singing in honky-tonk bars and somewhere along the line, she learned how to make Alice B. Toklas brownies. Despite cross-eyed goofiness at the rehearsal parties the play was a hit. When I married Emily Webb in the Second Act and we went down the aisle together in our wedding outfits the audience threw rice. It was a good feeling. And when Emily died in childbirth in the Third Act and I was grieving and sobbing at her grave, I could hear people in the audience crying as well and that was a great feeling, it was better than a standing ovation.

Our next project was “My Fair Lady.” I only had a bit role as ‘Freddy’ and spent my time trying to figure out what ‘Freddy sniggers’ meant. When I asked the teacher what it meant he said, “You know, sniggers. Just snigger.” Unfortunately, the guy playing Henry Higgins , whose name, actually was Higgins, could not remember his lines, so we had to break up into pairs to do scenes together. It was my misfortune to be stuck with the failed lead. Worse than that, he kept stalling on what scene he wanted to do with me for weeks, then dropped the class and left me hanging. I was forced to go solo late in the game and my choice was to do “Krapp’s Last Tape” by Samuel Beckett as it was a one man show.

I had never seen Becket performed (a big mistake) and this was just the start of this little tragedy. The story involves an old man on a minimalist set, much like “Our Town”) listening to recordings he made when he was younger and often drunk. If I had more time and a helper they could have helped me with the audio, but at the time I only had an old tabletop reel-to-reel tape player with a timer and there were close to thirty tape stops, rewinds, and re-starts to deal with all by memory and there were several character voices needed as I was playing him at various times in his life. My only lighting was a lone table lamp. Some idiots who had been having lunch or playing on the empty stage, left a knot in the light cord. Another person, without prompting , coated my hair with white glop. The white glop was supposed to dry and be combed out, but it was too late. This look definitely added to my craziness and preceded Ben Stiller’s semen hair gel in “There’s Something About Mary” by a quarter century. When they set up the table and lamp, they scooted the table into position and the knot caused the lamp to fall off and shatter. I was already nervous, and I was supposed to be a sedate, befuddled old man , but now I was in a panic my heart was pounding like a freight train, and I was getting nauseous, then miraculously someone got a lamp from somewhere and it was go time. I got in position.

The curtains parted and I was sitting in the chair. I rose and silently shuffled across the stage like a slow, doddering  old fool of a man. I started the recorder and listened to the self-involved younger me babbling for a bit, then I moved about and went to stop the tape. My performance was going to be a tricky ballet dance . All my stops and starts were timed to remembered numbers keyed to the timer and my movements had to be timed as well; that being said, when I got to the recorder, in my nervousness, instead of hitting the stop button after the first 37 seconds of dialogue, I accidently hit the reset  button and threw all the numbers back to zero. Imagine my horror. From that point on I had to add and subtract 37 seconds from about  30 stops and starts while acting. With regard to my acting, I was certainly acting crazy. When I got to see Becket’s “Waiting for Godot” years later, I realized that Becket gives incredible power and freedom  to the actors to inject passion and lively personalities into the characters and  with the barest of  scripts. In my defense, absolutely no one gave me any input or feedback prior to my performance, including the teacher. I pressed on.

I was supposed to eat a banana, but I got nauseous and could only eat half of it and put the unfinished banana in my pocket, the same pocket where I kept a letter that was part of the scene. As I had to take the letter in-and-out I ended up with banana all over the letter and my clothes . I continued my death march all the way to the sad end, BUT- I hit the mark every time, which for me was a miraculous win! The teacher on the other hand was looking at me and shaking his head sadly from side to side. That show was my very last class, so I never saw the teacher again and he never found out what  happened.

After the Spring semester I got a job at a sawmill with the dregs of society. There I worked with ex-prison inmates and looney bin graduates; and we all risked life and limbs for less than minimum wage.

After I left Oregon, I hitchhiked all the way back to Culver City, California and let me tell you that in the early seventies, California had the crazy market cornered.

My draft number was ‘51’, so, at twenty-five numbers drawn per week, I had three weeks before the axe fell. I entered the Army for a two-year hitch with a delayed entry of 6 months. This gave me 6 months to party and travel, which I did. After I got in the Army, I got mononucleosis in Basic Training, so I had to do it again. Another blessed delay. By the time I graduated Army Mechanic school and was ready to be sent to my duty  station they decided to pull out of Viet-Nam for real. They sent me to Germany instead. Now that was a happy ending.