Last year, two days after Christmas and around three that afternoon, I passed out in the foyer of my home in Montclair, New Jersey. I hadn’t even had a drink, and I considered that fact, lying there on the hardwood floor, staring up, coming back to myself. It’s odd how exhaustion works its way through denouement, scattershot dysfunction, and emotional chaos. The damn thing apparently crashes into tiny moments of clarity. A sort of pristine presentation of the events that got you there. In my case, lying on my back with a lump coming fast.
My wife passed away six months earlier. I had taken seven months off my job to work this siege with her. My “job” is acting, so taking time off isn’t an intricate deal. You announce that you aren’t auditioning for awhile and then hope somebody, anybody, gives a shit. In my case, I knew nobody would, so I said a prayer for the American theater, hoping that it would survive my absence, cut a swath through the Montclair Public Library, and stayed home reading and, of course, talking everything out.