MY MOTHER'S DIARY, PART TWO

I recently read my mom’s diary from 1940, when she was barely 17, ethereally happy and seconds away from losing her father who was about to die from a heart attack and found myself, as I slowly waded through it, loving her in ways that were previously unimaginable.

Equally important was how my own, personal DNA was shredded like an up for auction Banksy print.

You see, previous to that read, had you asked me about my mom’s history I would have launched into my one-man show lecture which I have performed thousands of times that has been carefully honed to justify my own existence. My story, just like yours, has always been my archived truth which you could dispense from me on demand, like Nestle’s Crunch from a vending machine.

But something happened to me after I put down the diary. I suddenly realized that just like our school textbooks are edited in Texas by a board of self-serving conservatives who want you to subscribe to their belief system, I have discovered that I am no different than them.

The truth of me, according to me, is not the truth at all.

I remember, when I was really little, watching families on sitcoms and holding them up as examples of perfection. They were all perfectly run democracies, headed up by deeply caring, empathetic parents who in barely 30 minutes could solve their children’s most painful or conflicted problems. Because Senator Joe McCarthy had instructed all three networks that Jews were communist sympathizers, you never saw a Jewish family on any show.

So virtually right out the gate, by comparison alone, I sensed that there was something wrong with mine. They did not act or look like Jim and Margaret Anderson or Ward and June Cleaver. My sister and I were not nicknamed Bud or Princess. And we definitely did not celebrate Christmas, which only made me feel even more like a castoff.

To my own relatives' horror, when I became a parent, I rectified that by celebrating both Chanukah and Christmas with my own kids. And it was awesome. Christmas, after all, was a pagan holiday co-opted by the Catholic Church in order to ratchet up the numbers in their recruiting program.

But growing up I always felt marginalized. Different. An outsider, which is what ultimately lead me to first become an actor and then the TV, film and now play writer who stands before you.

Along the way, I often interrogated my parents about their pasts, but Jewish people especially, having been the victims of centuries of the harshest form of hardship, abuse and near genocide, tend to abbreviate what you want to know. It was their way of protecting me, but I think it also, in many ways, justified why they felt still felt like victims as if they had some kind of deserved genetic predisposition prescribed by God and the fates. By keeping quiet you kept the pain alive.

My dad’s responses to my questions always came in the form of light-hearted jokes. My mom, who had escaped her own torment and personal family hell, was even more cagey. That is how she filled in the final third of her diary, which was all blank pages. The last entry was entered right before her daddy died.

Growing up, we rarely, if ever, went back to my mom’s native Brooklyn to visit the site of her traumatizing psychic wounds. I barely knew her side of the family. My mom’s way of dealing with what haunted her was to fixate on me, overprotecting me to the point of daily strangulation until I was in my early twenties and could finally escape. It was like I was a Stephen King for a day. Every single day.

All this is baffling to a child who at once adores his mother who simultaneously fears for his own physical and mental safety when he is in her presence. Hence my confusion in later years where I feared intimacy because I believed it was laced with rat poison. This led me to become a serial cheater, where I destroyed the most profound relationships in my life.

The only way to navigate your way towards logic, especially when you are just four or five years old, is to turn to your most vivid imagination and begin re-writing history with the obsessive scrutiny of a Talmudic scholar.

I guess I was writing decades before I knew that I was going to do it for a living.

In those days I was writing my way towards the womb of comfort and escape. Today, I am doing the opposite. I am writing my way into the heart of the scorching flames in order to burn away the layers of me until I am left with the closest I can get to the truth as possible.

When you are young, you can only drive in one direction: forward. It’s all about “are we there yet?” But as you get older suddenly all kinds of roads begin to pop up on your inner emotional map that leads you in all kinds of previously unknown directions.

The road most traveled becomes the actual terrain that is the hallowed grounds of your past. Symbolically this year, I went on a road trip across the south, from Florida to LA, that was largely unplanned, which would have previously terrified me. But armed with love of a good woman companion I found myself atypically open and even happy to travel into the unchartered waters of the unknown. The total opposite of my entire life up to that point.

The adventure has not ended.

New and trendy are no longer the source of my delight. It’s like I have been suddenly faced with the prospect of having to leave the Mortality Party, where I have been a most coveted guest for your entire life.

This kind of F. Scott Fitzgerald reverie that I have been attending is suddenly beginning to fade away, as are all the other guests who I have danced and flirted with. Suddenly I feel like at any moment I will be the last one standing and the only way out is through that door of brilliant, intuitive, white light

But before I go, I feel this intense compulsion to do a complete inventory of my previously unaware-house existence as if I need to give it a final grade from the Department Of My Own Mental Health. It’s the one thing that I sense will bring me eternal peace.

Yesterday, the woman previously mentioned, who I love deeply (because of wonderful she made me feel about myself by being her wonderful artistic and intellectual self) lauded me for my new found liberation and bravery and I wish that I could take credit for it. In some ways, guess I can, given that every day I seem to be re-entering the OR to perform even more microsurgery on my quickly mutating soul.

But I think most of my dedicated reconstruction, may be based on something deep and evolutionary.

Earlier today, I read that scientists have found six new and previously unknown dimensions in our own brains. Given the billions of neurons that fire us up every day and then shut down at night, I got a flash of those unknown universes in me. What if, I thought, if there are microscopic civilizations, just like ours, and all the thoughts and voices and feelings that we experience emanate from there? What if I’m the God that they are praying to? Why if my moods shifts are the Woolley fires of their lives? What if all my creative ideas are outsourced from them?

The fact is I will never know that any more than I will know anything about the Universe above which is so primate baffling, that we instead spend virtually all our waking moments trying to figure out ourselves.

I can’t even remember the last time that I looked up at the night sky.

In this internet connected world of ours, everything life has become a kind of immediate room service at the Pavlov Hotel.

We want what we want when we want on demand. We want our weather and our lives to be predictable. We don’t want wisdom. We want as much disposable news from the front information as possible.

By staying on top of it all, we won’t get caught in the crossfire. We’ll only read about it from a safe distance.

That need for knowledge is nothing more than our need to feel that we have some kind of grip and control on our own lives, which of course is laughable given the fact that the only thing that is predictable is the unpredictable.

This is why at night most of us watch procedural shows, dark, often apocalyptic cable dramas where mysteries are solved as easily as a magician making balloon animals at a five-year-old’s birthday party and the occasional network comedy which still come packaged with those nice and tidy knot tied solutions. As Paddy Chayefsky warned us years ago: that is where we go for our truth when the truth is there is not one ounce of truth there. Not when it comes to your own life. No one on TV even knows that you exist. You just think that they do because they suddenly appear in your un-living rooms.

When things go spectacularly wrong, when violence in any form levels us, striking us in the face, Chinatown style, that is the only time that we lay down our shields and run to the aid of each other, temporarily forgetting our profound differences and at the moment become the family of man and woman. During emergencies, there are no labels. No gay. No straight. Just hearts and minds. And an almost holy need to become caretakers and problem solvers.

But once things are under control, that is when we rush back to judgement, hate, and our own, incredibly wrong and mostly made up stories.

Which brings me back to my mother’s diaries. Where the real truth has sat, waiting patiently for me to discover it, Indiana Jones style.

Here’s the biggest takeaway:

I was wrong. About almost everything.

Whatever fantasy I needed to conjure up to make myself feel safe and secure was just that: pure fantasy.

I grew up loving Superman and Spider-Man, both the creations of Jewish men (as are virtually every single comic book hero) who offered up a Temple E-Manual on how to survive the duality of my identity crisis. I was Clark Kent: meek, mild and defenseless. And I was also Superman, made of steel with the ability to see through things, fly like a bird and deflect bullets, like criticism.

On the eve of the death of Stan Lee, this has never seemed more profound.

I find, as I way too quickly creep into my later years, that my inner Clark Kent, Peter Parker and Tony Stark days are quickly evaporating, like snow on a steam slathered window and my superpowers of perceptions are quickly taking over.

While I keep forgetting people’s names (yesterday I could not remember Adam Sandler’s last name) and which used to torment me, I have come to the realization that I’m doing inventory and clearing away the unimportant things out and donating them to the wind as a ritual act of, well, goodwill.

Reading my mom’s diary, which I have had for decades, was me finally willing to take on bare, untempered, uncolored reality. It is the beginning of me willing to dare to become genuine and authentic.

I guess that is a form of bravery, but honestly it feels no different than when elephants wake up one day and start their final pilgrimage. But first comes the elefantasy of your entire existence.

Somehow you just sense that it’s time.

And man, is it ever one powerful form of instinct.

Because of the kinds of things that I write about, I find myself stunningly open to being open and vulnerable. For me, who has suffered from anxiety attacks and claustrophobia, as my self-tormented dad was, chronically, you feel a sudden lightness of being which seems to horse whisper to you that it’s okay to give yourself totally to the pilot of whatever jet plane you are on.

The bottom line is we are all scared of being helpless, of crashing, of being lost in the dark of whatever lies ahead.

On my part, after five years writing my blood letting play, I finally found myself no longer wanting or needing to ride on the Metro North Crazy Train.

It was time to get off.

Not at Willoughby, but at the station of my own reality, where there is no prejudice, no judgement, no hate.

Just love and acceptance.

Now I can pick and choose which Windmills I need to vanquish and I will be armed with music, art, and words that galvanize me, along with the few good friends who will be there should I suddenly fall into the field of Rye. Which is so Jewish if you think about it. J.D.—-one of ours too.

There is also a new form of persistence sprouting it’s wings in me, which is compelling me to help others in their own struggles by trying to take on, through my writing, whatever I sense is the universal truth, so maybe, just maybe they will see themselves in my essays and scripts.

Even more daunting, challenging campaigns lie ahead.

There are women to convince that I am the partner they want, need and deserve despite what their deepest survivor instincts tell them.

I have to help them find the courage to turn back too.

To unearth whatever form of diary that they can, in the pursuit of their own, indisputable biography.

Because between those covers, written on the covenant of memory stone, is where the breathless, most magnificent, potent and undeniable truth of their hearts live.