Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [62]
Jed being sober and me not being sober was, at first, our act. He’s sober. She’s a big ol’ boozehound! They’re Jed and Jeanne, the yin-yang, sober-sloshed couple of the year!
I QUIT IRONDALE, the theater company Jed and I were members of. Eliot, the artistic director had cast me as a baguette in the latest production, Danton’s Death, and I called him up at home one night, demanding to know what his problem was.
“Jeanne, I’m sorry if you’re upset. I know crowd scenes aren’t the most challenging. I’m sure you’d like to do more but at this point I don’t feel you’re ready to speak onstage.”
Not ready to speak onstage. I was twenty-five. Under Eliot’s tutelage I would be speaking onstage by what, thirty? Perhaps speaking and walking and holding my head up by forty-two? While I knew he was some kind of grant-writing, socially responsible woman-hater, I was also becoming aware that acting was a profession that would be filled with a-holes making all the decisions. Casting people. I had an agent but I wasn’t tearing it up in the world of auditions. When I would go in for auditions I never showed my ass or body because I’m . . . stupid? Years later I would read that when she was starting out, Francis McDormand, the coolest actress ever, would wear what she called “cutlets” on auditions. Things she stuck in her bra to make it appear she had breasts. I never booked anything. Maybe I was stupid or maybe I sucked. Maybe I really sucked.
After I quit Irondale, I went to a theater school on Fortysecond Street, where I wrote a play. This play went over big. Randy, the director of the school, came up to me afterward and said, “Jeanne, this play was awful. I expected something great from you. What happened?”
There seemed to be such an easy answer to the question Could I write? Could I write plays and stories and be some kind of nonacting actor or performer? Could I be the next Elaine May? Could I do weird things like the performance artists I studied in college but perhaps not be so unfunny? The answer was: why bother? You’ve got this awesome, funny guy you love, he’s rich, life is easy, you’re good friends. Do this. Don’t do what you don’t know. You might fail. You might be alone. You’ll definitely be broke. It seemed like an either/or proposition. I had no idea that people could be ambitious and happy, financially stable and creative, content and interesting, domestic and nonsuicidal.
Around year three of our relationship, Jed’s sobriety began to wear on my nerves. And he began complaining about my drinking.
“You become a different person when you drink,” he’d say, pointing out what to me had always seemed like one of the benefits of drinking. He had a name for this other person. Queen Ida. Queen Ida was born one weekend in Kerhonkson, New York, at a friend’s farm where I got looped on homemade moonshine that my friend’s brother, a self-made redneck bluegrass music producer had whipped up while basting the pig he was cooking in a hole in the ground. Before we left New York for the weekend I had taken off my big toenail, ripped it clear off my foot, while getting out of the shower at our apartment. The pain was the worst I had ever known. My toe was a red, throbbing nerve member that could only throb and be elevated. I could not wear a shoe, and to put pressure on it, as in walk, was excruciating. So we drove up to this pig roast and I hit the moonshine. And then I decided to jump in the lake in the dark, whereupon Jed yelled at me and pulled me out. “You drunken maniac!” I limped around, gathering up my clothes, and put a towel around my head and went to find the family graveyard I had heard wasn’t far away. Later that