Zen and the Art of motorcycles
“We all love Torque, and some of us have taken it straight over the high side from time to time --
and there is always Pain in that...but there is also Fun, in the deadly element,
and Fun is what you get when you screw this monster on.”
- Hunter S. Thompson
Art Jacobson, at Ojo Caliente, has posted a couple of evocative essays on the many and diverse
joys of riding crotch rockets. His prose reminds me of the time when I was immortal and blasting
down a powerline trail on a dirt bike was right up there with amyl nitrite for sheer pulse-pounding,
giddy exhilaration.
I got into dirt bikes after I came back from Nam. I figured if Uncle Sam and a bazillion VC couldn’t
do me in, I should take on the job myself. Hell, I didn’t have anything to lose but PTSD. The fact
that I am still alive to tell the tale is one of the things that makes me believe in angels. That, however,
is another story.
Eventually, I gave up trying to do what Charlie couldn’t and got back into something much riskier.
Acting.
My mother was a high school dramatics teacher. She was apparently good at it. A number of her
students went on to fairly successful careers onstage. When she needed a kid in one of her
productions, guess who got the call.
As nearly as I can remember, my first stage role came when I was three. I played one of the
dead kids in Thornton Wilder’s classic Our Town. I had no idea what I was doing, but I did clue
in to the fact that, however fleetingly, I was the center of attention. That felt good. Real good.
It’s a very dangerous thing to expose a kid to a drug that addictive at such a young age. So I
acted in the usual grade school dramas, playing pilgrims and trees and fairies. And I was much
better than most of the kids because I had already learned how to work an audience and I had
no fear. Those people beyond the footlights wanted to love me and I desperately wanted to be
loved.
Through junior high and high school, I acted in every play that came along. Somewhere along
the line, I saw my mother act onstage, something she rarely did. It was a revelation. She was so
artificial, so theatrical, so obviously Acting, that I got turned off theatre for a while. She
embarrassed me. Well, that’s what parents are supposed to do.
So I rebelled. I decided that I didn’t want to act if it was so blatantly obvious that I was acting.
I didn’t want to look like that in front of an audience. In theatre parlance, I was the anti-Lunt
and Fontanne. Don’t worry if you miss that reference. Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne were
the darlings of Broadway for a while in the distant past. They were the paradigms of a school
of drama in which it was thought admirable to be obviously acting.
Well, the theatre survived Lunt and Fontanne, but it nearly didn’t survive the reaction. That
was something called Method Acting. Frankly, I don’t want to get into the pros and cons of the
Stanislavski Method. Suffice it to saythat it was another approach to theatre that had its day
and is now, thankfully, gone.
I spent a couple of years after high school doing summer stock theatre. This is an adolescent
boy’s dream come true. You are free from parental restraints. You are actually getting paid
(but not much) for what you love to do. And there are willing women everywhere. Even if you
can’t make it with the babes in the cast, there is always some innocent in the audience who
thinks you’re a star. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.
You have a wealth of tradition behind you. Actors are those unscrupulous gypsies who come
into town, commit unspeakable depredations upon your innocent sons and the daughters and
then leave without a thought for the consequences. Hell, if it’s expected of you, don’t
disappoint the audience.
Now, lessee. There was a point to this weird simile between acting and motorcycle riding.
Sometimes you find yourself in a situation where you either have to screw the monster on or
die trying. You can back off into a lower gear and play it safe, or you can take it to another
level and hope the audience can follow. If you succeed, they will love you. If you don’t, you die.
I spent a lot of years playing the male ingénue. I couldn’t help it. I have a very young face.
I couldn’t buy a character part. Maybe you think that playing the male romantic lead is the best
that showbiz has to offer. It is stultifying.
One of the gifts of age is that you can finally play roles that actually test your abilities. I have
reached that plateau. I am currently rehearsing for a role in “Spinning Into Butter.” It is a very
recent play that examines the role of unconscious racism on a college campus. I am playing a
very self-satisfied, traditionally liberal academic who is forced to deal with racism in the real
world. It is a dream role in that I play someone that I thoroughly detest. If I do it right, the
audience will hate me.
That’s like taking it over the edge on a midnight motorcycle run along Highway 101. If you
have any balls at all, you will crank it on when those curves appear out of the fog. If not, you
shouldn’t be riding a motorcycle. Or acting.
