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  It wasn’t until much later that I learned that most of the would-be actors Willson represented were homosexual, bisexual, or simply cooperative with him in order to get gigs. My early departure from his home that evening ensured, of course, that Willson would not become my agent and that my movie star days were a long way away—if they were ever to come.

  BRYAN O’BYRNE, IT WAS CLEAR, HAD NO INTEREST WHATSOEVER in creating a similar kind of apprenticeship with me. Bryan was a good man, I soon came to understand, and he was a great acting coach, and his appraisal of my latent talent had been an honest one.

  I thought about it regularly as life at Jen and Jeanie’s escalated and I struggled to understand and hang with the much older, more sophisticated artist group. There was also chaos. Some mornings the house would be such a god-awful mess that Jeanie would tell me she wanted nothing more than to die, and she meant it, I know. Jeanie struggled with deep depression, something I recognized because I was no stranger to that paralyzing fog in which every element of your being grows afraid and crushingly numb. But as long as I simply chatted with her as she sat in a kitchen chair and watched me dive into a mountain of dishes, her deep anguish would subside and she could imagine living a day or two longer.

  One day soon after she had discovered she was pregnant—and did not want to be—she sent me to a Laurel Canyon store where someone would be waiting to give me some special sugar cubes he had prescribed for her. I did as she requested, then discovered that each one contained a heavy hit of LSD. Jeanie planned to consume so much of the drug that she would miscarry, she said. She told me explicitly that I was not to touch or taste the sugar cubes, and I trusted her and let them be.

  I don’t think the LSD had its desired effect on Jeanie in the end, but the memory persists because I was tied up in knots about whether something terrible might happen to her, taking so much of a drug that I wasn’t familiar with yet. Being way out of my element was wearing on me, and together with my old friend anxiety, it created a lurking feeling that my old ways of being were no longer enough to get me to wherever it was I wanted to go next.

  I was in danger of washing out of my third junior college in as many years, and numerous injuries were signaling the end of my athletic eligibility and closing the door on my one fail-safe passion. Football had beautifully fed my adrenaline addiction. My adolescent habit of being so jacked up during a game that I would either foam at the mouth or sob uncontrollably continued. My old identity was tightly tethered to the gridiron, and the possibility that football was about to be absent from my life forever was one I hadn’t begun to consider until now. And when I allowed myself to truly consider it, I was confused and lost.

  What I did in response to the confusion was party at a level that might have killed otherwise healthy horses. Barney Anthony, the owner of Barney’s Beanery, literally lifted me out of Santa Monica Boulevard on more than a few occasions when I had passed out and was in danger of being run over. I continued my bizarre tendency to head-butt parked cars. Fortunately, I wasn’t one of those kids who is compelled to pick fights; instead I used self-inflicted physical pain to distract me from my emotional state. Something in me recognized that I deeply needed the safety of Bryan O’Byrne’s concern and counsel. I needed to get a clearer view of how to begin making a life for myself, but all I really knew was that I was at a loss for how to proceed.

  I began to spend lots of time with Bryan, and, thank God, he continued to see an actor somewhere deep inside the man I was struggling to become. He encouraged me to focus on acting as a method of studying the human soul. “Where did that thought come from?” he would ask of the character I was reading. “Why does he feel the way he does?”

  Bryan’s own acting philosophy centered on scene study and repetition in the manner of the legendary Sanford Meisner, who taught aspiring actors about the essential “reality of doing.” Meisner and Bryan believed that repetition in acting, like prayer, bores your ego into complacency, a trick that lowers an actor’s guard and enables him to bare himself in front of an audience—or the whole of the universe. This, I feel, is why the most vulnerable among us often make the finest actors, and why saints get mistaken for fools. But humility doesn’t guarantee success or revelation, only the possibility.

  With repetition and the conquering of ego, Bryan was convinced, an actor can become open to pain, humiliation, and degradation—all risks that you must open yourself to in the performing arts. I remember loving the idea that actors—and everyone—can learn how to construct grace in the face of the daily grind. Perhaps acting could help this washed-up football player, half-assed ironworker, and already-well-on-his-way young addict handle life.

  I began spending as much time in Bryan’s orbit as I could, crashing nights on his couch at the top of the canyon instead of farther down the hill among the wild revelries at Jen and Jeanie’s. Then one day Bryan offered me a bed and I gratefully said yes, knowing that I was very rapidly unraveling, careening toward a date with humble pie or death. I didn’t know it at the time, but my manic energy, mixed with a deep desire to change without the tools of knowing how, had pushed me to the edge. I’d made a young man’s mistake of challenging the darkness.

  As I think back on it, it’s curious that although self-exploration became my obsession during that existential crisis, my acting studies with Bryan apparently didn’t have anything to do with performing or forging a career path. All I needed was the permission to feel each feeling and experience every emotion. Contradictory thoughts no longer felt like character flaws; instead they were doors to a series of different rooms in my head, and I wanted to visit them all. Every bit of make-believe, every role I took on in Bryan’s book-cluttered living room, seemed to offer me a chance to be reborn.

  Thankfully, Bryan saw when I hit a crucial point in my process. He was attuned to studying the psyche as an actor, and my erratic behavior of passing out in public and running my head into cars was signaling to him I needed help. He could see that I needed my own space to allow the full breakthrough/breakdown. Once more he came to my rescue and dialed up my parents, who were living in Phoenix.

  “Nick needs your help,” Bryan explained. “You should come get him.” Their only son was cracking up—that’s what Bryan conveyed—and they took the telephone call for the weighty notice it was, because my dad showed up the next day, tossed me and a few possessions in his car, and drove us back to Phoenix. I don’t remember his saying a single word as the sedan rolled across the desert, and it would be a long and consequential decade before I danced with Los Angeles again.

  CHAPTER 3

  Zero Point

  THE SILENCE THAT HAD CONSUMED THE CAR CONTINUED when we reached my parents’ house in Arizona. My mother seemed to inherently understand my need for space and didn’t require explanations any more than my father had, and my maternal grandmother, who had begun to live with them, was simply happy to see me and told me what a good-looking boy I’d become. But I sure as hell didn’t look good; I was a husk of the young man I’d been the last time she had seen me. I slunk into a bedroom my mother had prepared for me and closed the door, determined to be in solitary confinement for a long while.

  My memories of that time remain surprisingly vivid, perhaps because there has been no other stretch like it in my life, and perhaps, too, because I still carry those feelings with me. There was the fear-fueled anxiety that whirled on a debilitating loop inside my brain. Then panic would come slithering under the bedroom door like a vapor, taking my breath away as it consumed me and strapping me to the bed as if I were tied to it with ropes.

  When I tried to escape by burying myself beneath the sheets, suffocating hallucinations overtook me, including a recurrent one that I was drowning in a sea of shit that smelled so awful it induced real projectile vomiting. It was harrowing, and it was grisly. Only occasionally would I get a few minutes of relief before I grew panicked once more by the certainty that I would drown, and I had to accept the awful fate that I would die in shit. My eff
orts to hog-tie my fear, to wrestle it and control it and will it away, backfired. I could control absolutely nothing, and when I tried I’d simply find myself flushed down that hellish toilet all over again.

  My room became a self-imposed sanitarium. I held the key and no one confined me to the cell except me, yet I virtually never left. My mother would leave food trays outside the door that sometimes I nibbled from, and it was only in the middle of the night that I would give myself permission to leave, creeping down the hall to the kitchen in search of a glass of juice. Occasionally, I’d find my grandmother in the kitchen, awake and in a rush to begin her day. She was what my mother called “charmingly vague,” which is a nice way to say suffering from dementia.

  “Matthew, I’m late for work!” She spoke to me as if I were her long-dead husband. I would take on my grandfather’s countenance and demeanor as best I could and gently escort her back to her room to settle into bed again. It was strangely soothing to pretend to be someone I was not.

  Almost a lifetime later, I recognize that often the best remedy for my own problems is to offer someone else a helping hand. Sadly, I haven’t always remembered this trick, but it was the one way in which I connected with another human being during those many months, and I adored my grandmother.

  I began to jot down my thoughts and experiences, making a record of the zero point at which I found myself. I included a tortured self-appraisal or two. “I’m a petty lunkhead, unskilled, and socially awkward,” I scribbled. This was true, and recognizing that was something of a breakthrough, although it certainly didn’t feel like it at the moment. Reviewing the notes produced another conclusion: I read at a sixth-grade level because of dyslexia. That year I proceeded to put my efforts into learning how to deal with the way my eyes tracked letters on the page—right to left in columns, like the Chinese system—even working with a tutor briefly that year to help me improve.

  Then joyfully I read, and reread, the bundle of acting books and plays I had purchased a few months before at the Samuel French bookstore on Sunset, as well as those I had “borrowed” from Bryan.

  I devoured Richard Boleslavsky’s Acting: The First Six Lessons, plays by Anton Chekhov, and my self-help bible—Konstantin Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares. An Actor Prepares is a monumental work that’s the diary of a fictional student named Kostya during his first year of training in Stanislavski’s hugely renowned “Method” acting system. The Method system is a means of both mastering the craft of acting and stimulating an actor’s individual imagination and creativity.

  I found out that Stanislavski’s ideas had initiated a revolution in the theater and the ways in which actors approached their roles, but what mattered most among my budding epiphanies in that Phoenix bedroom was the notion—not unique to Stanislavski—that we’re all actors, onstage or off, a simple idea that slowly began to quiet my self-loathing and allow me to be many contradictory things at once.

  My parents were likely scared to death, yet they never showed it, offering me comfort and privacy throughout my ordeal as they held their counsel and simply hoped for the best. I took it for granted, not realizing at the time that I had won the parental lottery. I might have had a very different kind of experience with different parents.

  Electric-shock therapy was in vogue during that era, considered a cure-all by many psychiatrists and general practitioners and prescribed for non-ailments like homosexuality and hyperactivity, often wrecking otherwise promising lives. Had my mom and dad taken me to the doctor, who the hell knows what he might have prescribed or whether I might have been brain-shocked or even lobotomized as a way to make me “normal” again?

  Luckily, “normal” was a word my parents never applied to me, whether I was in the midst of a crack-up or not. They treated me with remarkable patience, then acceptance, over the course of my many months in their house, and I was about to reward them with dramatic ingratitude, I’m sorry to say. Once I learned they were of my mind’s own anxious creation, I grew less terrified of the dreams. The only real result of that improvement was a willingness to venture outside my bedroom a bit more and wander around the house in the wee hours of the morning.

  On one foray out into the darkened house, I came across a reel-to-reel tape recorder and moved it to my room. I began to record hours of monologue focused on my growing up in Iowa and Nebraska. For hours on end, I raged about every conceivable slight or wound I had received from birth until graduation from high school, and I leveled the worst of the blame for my problems at Mom and Dad. They were responsible, I tearfully told the tape recorder, for stunting my growth, inflicting terrible emotional damage, and boxing me in so thoroughly that I had no notion of how to interact with the world I encountered. I told them as a baby I had absorbed the war fears of their generation. That deep, repressed societal fear and consequent conservatism was another thing I had to push through and let go of while I was locked in my room.

  I was sure they were the reason my childhood had been so traumatic; they were culpable for sending me off to college unprepared; they were largely responsible for my crack-up.

  As I held the machine’s little microphone close to my lips and spewed out my pent-up fury, I imagined playing the tape for them and watching as they uneasily squirmed. They would finally have to confront their failings as parents—and I would be free to start my new life unencumbered.

  Aside from the delusional-brat routine, I was standing in the face of fear and accepting my glitches. Now I can see how selfish it was to blame it all on my parents, but at the time, my ranting monologue was part of a new awareness and self-analysis. It was clear mine was never going to be a linear evolution, but the next steps to growth were making themselves clearer. Scrubbed of my old identity and fortified with sage new teachings from my beloved books, I was finally ready to explore my career ambitions. Acting it was: a vocation, a survival tool, and a destiny all rolled into one.

  CHAPTER 4

  Corn-fed

  THE EARLIEST STORY I REMEMBER WAS TOLD THROUGH the lens of my father and mother. Who isn’t formed by the successes and losses of the generation before them? My dad’s name was Franklin Arthur Nolte, but because of his height, everyone called him Lank. He was a farmer’s son who almost dropped out of high school, then received an engineering degree and lettered in football three years in a row at Iowa State beginning in 1929. He was a whopping six feet six inches tall and weighed two hundred sixty pounds when he played ball—at a time when men in America just didn’t get that big. The fact that everyone turned to stare at Dad when we entered a room made a serious impression on me. He was always conscious of his stature and compensated with an easygoing, calm nature. People called his brothers Poob and Beaner; they were gigantic, too, and the Nolte brothers were known for their gentle spirits as much as for their size.

  Yet Dad didn’t seem easygoing so much as simply a shell of a man the first time I remember meeting him. I had been born shortly before he was shipped out to fight in World War II, and I must have been about four or so when my older sister, Nancy, and I were told someone special was about to arrive, and our house in Ames, Iowa, buzzed with anticipation that day. Our mother was all dressed up and everyone in our extended family waited eagerly in the living room. But then the front door opened and a skeleton walked in.

  Dad had spent the past four years fighting the Japanese in the South Pacific, and the terror of war and the relentlessness of malaria had reduced him to a sack of bones. He had lost at least a hundred pounds since he had said goodbye to us, my mother later explained, and although she didn’t tell us much more, she did want us to know that now he was quite different from the robust and handsome guy who had kissed us before leaving several years before.

  The war took a great toll on my dad. Nancy and I would steal into his bedroom as he napped, staring at him and trying to make what we could of this man we were told we now should love. I wouldn’t understand until much later that damaged soldiers like my dad had kept our country from falling to tyranny, y
es, but their sacrifices deeply affected American culture as well in the late 1940s and 1950s.

  They had witnessed in profoundly personal ways the horror of what humankind was capable of, and it scared the hell out of them. They lost faith in man’s basic decency, and they clung to rules and conformity as the best ways to survive—something they had learned well as soldiers. I observed this need for structure and orthodoxy in my dad, my coaches, and authorities of every kind while I was growing up. They were men who had become desperate to repress their emotions, and they became callous, uncommunicative, and rigid. The suffocating tone of 1950s America was something for which they were in large part responsible—but for which it was very difficult to fault them. Dad wanted no more fighting. He wanted quiet and he wanted peace, and when I looked at him I knew I sure as hell never wanted to be in a war.

  Graduating from Iowa State University with a degree as an engineer, Dad was enough of an athlete, too, that he might have been able to play professional football. But the war had interrupted his life—and our lives with his—in very dramatic ways. Because my father had an engineering degree, they had recruited him into the army where he earned a bronze star as a major. He and my mother had met, courted, married, and made babies fueled by an early energy and passion, but the war sapped my father’s zest for seizing life, and he chose to spend his entire postwar career traveling the Midwest selling big irrigation pumps for a company called Fairbanks Morse.

  IF THE WAR MUTED DAD’S SPIRIT, IT EMBOLDENED MY MOTHER’S. Like many wives left at home in 1942, she had gone to work while her husband fought overseas, and she had absolutely no interest in returning to homemaking when the war finally ended. She was genuinely glad to have her husband home, we knew, yet her anger lingered a long time over his decision to leave the military.