Amazing the things you stumble upon when going through old boxes of papers and scripts. There it was – a blue, old, hard-covered notebook. I hardly recognized it. I opened it and immediately saw scribbles. No, not scribbles – penmanship. Words legibly handwritten in deep blue, probably with a fountain pen. At the top of the first page was this:
Idea for a screenplay:
Bank robbery : Young man
returns to his home
town and robs bank
_____________________________________________
Hmmm. What exactly had I stumbled upon. I continued reading. The screenplay idea was followed by what seemed to be a monologue. (Typos and incomplete sentences included.)
“He liked the paraphernalia of work more than the work itself. He was totally enthralled by with the topography of his desk; the typewriter, the reams of crips white paper, a coffee mug filled with pens and sharpened pencils springing from it like stiff tropical plants, yellow legal pads placed within easy reach just so. He could look at these tools for long minutes at a time and in truth, if he had spent half as much time scribbling as he did designing imaginary spaces suitable for a literary career, he might have filled each and every one of those eagerly awaiting pieces of paper.”
A typewriter? Pens and pencils and legal pads? Okay, these tools would suggest that the the writer – I won’t take or deny credit yet – wrote this well before the early 1980’s which is when computers began to take over desks. I continued reading.
“He was an actor for two weeks and was enthusiastic about it. He had pictures taken, typed up a resume of accomplishments – easily the most imaginative thing he ever wrote – and went to a lot of movies to survey the competition. The competition seemed to be having a lot of fun, living the highs most people achieve in a lifetime in a mere two hours, never once going to the bathroom, then taking a brief vacation and then being ready to live again.”
By the way, one thing I remember about writing with a pen – and a typewriter – was the inability to easily make corrections. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. The minute I started working on the computer – call it “word processing” – I not only immediately started correcting my typos and misspellings but began rewriting a sentence three or four times before moving on. But I’m getting off the subject. “The writer” here, whoever he might be, is writing about acting.
“He stood in front of the mirror imitating Robert DeNiro and judged the performance satisfactory.
“You talkin’ t’ me?
Uh, say, uh… are you talkin’ t’ me?
Well, who d’ fug you…
But then he went to an audition and two weeks of artistic self-congratulations went out the window. He had picked up a paper that contained notices of various try outs and interviews. They were looking for young men in their mid to late twenties and asked that a 2-minute monologue be memorized and performed. He had been doing Robert DeNiro 5 hours a day for 3 days and judged himself ready.
But so did half a million up and coming, promising young hopefuls. There was a line out into the street, and everyone was glaring at each other with nervous animosity. Drifting around the outskirts of this backwash of people, acting suddenly seemed to be a trivial child’s game and a waste of his good time. His mind’s eye saw his resume as a nonsensical fabrication and his picture, before full of dramatic solemnity and inky shadows that bespoke sensitivity and a soul that had known great despair, now seemed to say that he suffered from constipation when in dark rooms. He tossed the offending articles in the nearest wastebasket and went out and treated himself to lunch.”
Okay, thank goodness. If I am the writer here, I’m making this all up. Call it a first foray into fiction. Facts. Before moving to New York City in the fall of 1976, I had spent one semester in the MFA program at Boston University, studying, yes, of all things, acting. One in NYC I took classes at the Herbert Berghof Studio. I eventually even did some roles Off-off-Broadway. But I had also begun seriously writing. My acting career ended the day I had an audition to go to but found myself more entranced with the words I was putting on a page. The DeNiro excerpt, by the way, is from the film, Taxi Driver.
Moving on, the journal writer – okay, maybe it’s me – now changes the subject of his monologue completely.
“I am a pacifist only because I seem chemically built that way. Aggression and fear trigger responses in me that I simply find unpleasant; a sense of hysteria, a lack of control, an aversion to getting my nose broke. And yet violence is part of my fantasy memory. When I was a child my brother and I played at being cowboys, knights, and gladiators. We killed and were killed a thousand times. We were in love with wooden swords, pistols that fired plastic projectiles, rubber rifles that didn’t go bang but merely made the sound of a bullet ricocheting.”
I should mention that this was a time before R rated movies – movies that vividly portrayed real violence. We were kids. The most violent thing on TV was Sugarfoot. Again, moving on:
“I am appalled, disgusted and terrified of war yet there are moments – mundane moments, when the insanity of conflict seems like the most logical, mind-body fusing, logical act possible.”
Wait, no, this can’t be me. That’s utter nonsense. Oh, but maybe the writer, if it is me, was working on something here, developing a character of some kind. They talk about robbing a bank in my play, Half a Lifetime. They talk about the horrors of war in Jacknife and Strange Snow. What is drama if it isn’t creative imagination? And now, finally (for now anyway), we jump to this. And I’m not kidding:
PROGRAM NOTES
(ABOUT THE AUTHOR)
He lived in Manhattan and spent a lot of time wondering how he got there. As a child in Connecticut, the very words – New York – filled him with contemptuous horror, a pity for those urban aliens who daily trod that concrete island. New York was a geographical bogeyman, and he would as soon live there as he would in…. heaven forbid, Waterbury. He had no interest in the place, no stake. When people talked about it, he felt the same uneasiness that came when someone tried to force the facts of Auschwitz through his thick wasp skull.”
(Ouch. Please substitute stupid and unthinking for thick.)
“Now that he was there, still not knowing how he got there, he remembered with some amusement and some puzzlement – why had his brain failed to pick up on this early warning system? – telling friends he was going to learn how to feign a crippled knee, thereby having an excuse to carry a thick wooden cane for protection. Let some addicts even try to steal his last 20 dollars then! And now, of course, he didn’t feign an in jury or carry a cane. There was almost a disappointment in learning that New York was pretty normal. Perhaps a little more tense than Connecticut, all the egos and failing ambitions packed into one concrete can…. but normal.
And small. You picked a path and a space, and you made it yours. In a short time, you started recognizing faces on the street – emotionless, stoic masks for the most part but recognizable just the same.”
Okay, I know where I am now. It’s 1979 and I’m sharing an apartment on the upper west side with terrific roommates, people I’ve met while teaching summer tennis out on Long Island. The journal writer – yes, me – is 26 years old. In a pretty good place but still —
“He daydreamed about moving. He hated jogging but thought he’d do it if he had a country lane to do it in. He found loafing on beaches for any length of time boring but often, trapped in the towering castle walls of Manhattan, his mind looked at sunshine and warm water as being as exquisite and valuable as the jewelry in Cartier’s window. Not to mention, they were free.
It seemed as if everything worth wanting, doing, possessing, enjoying had a price in Manhattan. Someone had recognized the worth, cornered the market and attached a price tag. Their palm was thrust forth, greedy and waiting.
He would have moved, would have gone ahead, and done it except for one thing. He was afraid that once separated from the city, once bedded down in a softer, easier going, quieter room, he would miss it.
What would he miss? He made a list once. He liked not owning a car. He liked being able to see all the feature movies immediately – he never did but he liked knowing he could if he so desired. He liked the short, thick sausages the corner shop served with eggs, toast, coffee and home fries for one dollar ninety cents. And though he seldom met any attractive girls who were interested in him, he was convinced he’d have less success no matter where else he went.”
Ah, youth. I look back on my New York years now mostly with pleasure. When I wrote this in 1979, I didn’t know that in the next few years I’d have plays done and that in ten years I’d be living in California near the warm water, embarking on a career as a screenwriter, a husband, and a father. But then, who could?
There are more scribbles in the journal. More from the “journal writer” to come.
Check out — https://substack.com/@stephenmetcalfewords
Stephen Metcalfe 
Leave a comment