Just about everyone who knows me knows I have a big mouth. Not just the size of it (I once fit 12 eggs into it), but also my compulsion to say whatever I want.

 

Because of it, I have burned far too many bridges, hurt far too many feelings, and stepped on far too many toes. More than I would ever like to admit. But… I like to see how far I can go… to get away with something… to fight for “the right”… right up to the precipice… before I pull back… without injury or damage… to myself or the other party… which I’m able to do… 99 out of a hundred times. But it’s risky business. A confrontational way of living. I should know better. I shouldn’t have to do it anymore. I’m well into my seventh decade on the planet. C’mon Trules, grow up!

Yet… it wasn’t always that way…

You see, I learned, as a child, that… uncommon “honesty” and relentless “truth”… were the family moral pinnacles that were crammed down my throat by Ma & Pa Trules when I was a vulnerable and absorbent young lad on Long Island, New Yawk. Joe and Roz, both first generation American Jews, had their own values, their own compulsions, which did everything to make me into a very “good boy” who did all the “right things”, who said all the “right things”… growing up on the academic conveyor belt of suburban Americana in the post war 1950s.

 

 

I was well behaved to a fault, cripplingly repressed, socially awkward, yet I was expected to become “their son, the doctah”, or at least, “their son, the lawyah”, when I eventually “grew up” and conformed to the norm. But then something went…. very haywire…

 

The 60s, man.

Midway through my sophomore year, 1966, I catch the cultural tidal wave, driven by The Beatles, Dylan, sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll, and

“I turn on, tune in, and drop out”,

just the way Timothy Leary preaches. It’s completely mind-blowing and… revelatory. It makes me question everything I’d grown up believing: my parents, the government, money, materialism, capitalism, racial discrimination, sexual repression, authority…

“What are you rebelling against, son?”

That’s what they ask Marlon Brando’s leather-clad, biker character, Johnny, in the 1950s convention-breaking film, “The Wild One”.

“Whadaya got?”, he contemptuously whines.

Me? At the end of the 1960s? After I drop calculus 3 times and physics twice.

“I ain’t gonna become a doctor.”

I take modern art: Picasso, Pollock, Matisse, Kandinsky: wild color, abandon, freedom of expression.

 

 

I study jazz history in college with Archie Shepp, become addicted to Miles Davis’ “Kinda Blue”, “My Favorite Things” with John Coltrane’s quartet, fall in love with the honks and squeaks of unpredictable improvisation.

 

 

I hunger for everything I’ve had no training in. No experience with. Everything I don’t know how or where to find.

I graduate SUNY Buffalo in 1969 and blow off my college graduation, much to my parents’ chagrin. Instead, I head over Niagara Falls and lose my virginity in a cheap Toronto rooming house with a girl a barely know. Not knowing what to do next, I reluctantly move back into my parents’ suburban Long Island ranch house for a month, back into my childhood bedroom, painted with 1950s cowboy corrals and wild bucking broncos. Not a good fit, to say the least. I buy a Honda 350cc motorcycle and quickly get into two comical, Easy Rider-imitating accidents, laying me up for a month with torn metatarpal ligaments on the top of my right foot. I smoke dope behind closed doors, do my best James Dean imitation, and no doubt, drive my parents nearly insane.

I finally move out at age 22. To Bed-Stuy, in Brooklyn, near Pratt Institute, an art school where I model nude for drawing classes, sell blond hashish wrapped in chocolate tins imported from Britain, and drive a taxi cab, following racing ambulances up and down the streets of Manhattan. I’m still cripplingly repressed… but I’m also a volcano ready to erupt.

Then, somehow…. I answer an ad in the Village Voice:

 

 

“Actors wanted for ongoing theater workshop in self-expression and creativity. No experience necessary.”

Wow. That’s it. That’s me. “No experience.”

I call the number. 40 times. No answer. It’s still years before the answering machine. Or… this guy… Scott Kelman is his name… just never uses one.

Finally, one morning about 4 a.m., after a few too many beers, I call for the 41st time. He picks up. Gravel voice from the back of a bar room.

“Yeah, whataya want?”

“Uh, sorry to call you so late, but I’m calling about the workshop.”

“Come Saturday. 10 o’clock.”

He gives me the address and hangs up.

Saturday morning… I’m  there. I drive my 1964 blue-gray Pontiac Tempest named “Steppenwolf”… over the Brooklyn Bridge, through the still-grungy Lower East Side, up the Bowery, to Broadway and Waverly Place, right between the East and West Villages.

 

 

I park “the Wolf” right on Broadway and climb the old wooden steps into the loft’s barren rehearsal room. There, in front of me, are about 15 “far-out” people, lying around the floor, moving about the space, making the weirdest sounds and movements I’ve ever heard or seen in my life.

“Schwah! Hoo! Schwah! Hoo!”

What the hell? I’m shocked. What am I doing here? How am I going to manage? Sure, I ‘ve taken some yoga classes in college, but what the hell is this? I figure… I better sit on the floor and do some yoga stretches…

A swarthy, dark-skinned young man with a thick Middle Eastern accent comes over to me.

“Are you a dancer?”

“Uh, me? No.”

“Looks like you’re doing some Graham stretches.” (Who’s Graham?)

“No, just some yoga stretches.”

He flashes me a toothy, seductive grin.

“I’m Jacob. Who are you?”

“Uh… Eric.”.

“Well, ‘uh, Eric’, why don’t we go out for some coffee after the workshop?”

“Uh, I drove my car here.”

Bigger smile.

“Well, you can drive me home then.”

Riiight. Jacob is an apprentice with the Joffrey Ballet, from Israel. I know what he wants, even though I have no sexual experience, but ok. I’m ok. But first, let’s see if I can get through this workshop.

 

 

Little do I know that this is Scott Kelman’s famous physical theater workshop, which he’s developed over many years as a carnival barker, street hustler, and downtown New York theater maven. Me? I’m a blank slate. I don’t know anything. I’ve answered an ad in the Village Voice. But Scott says, after an hour of “schwah-ing” and “hoo-ing”,

 

“You’re a diamond in the rough, man. You got a lot to learn, but I see potential.”

In my first class! Maybe, with a lot of work, and all the desire in the world, I can learn to “Schwah! hoo!” with the best of them: sexy Sally in black leotard and tights, tall, muscular Allegra who looks like a pale Super Woman with electric hair, Milagros, a beautiful, will-of-the wisp Puerto Rican dancer, Larry, the pock-marked macro-biotic yogi…. this is the cast of characters who will soon become my new family.

After the workshop, as promised, Jacob tries to hitch a ride with me downtown to his tiny apartment on Sullivan Street in the West Village, in a building complex he manages in return for free rent. Mark comes with us, another friend of Jacob’s, who he probably invites along to make me feel a little safer.

We walk down the stairs, step outside into Saturday afternoon, and… my car… is gone. Towed. Saturday morning parking. Did I read the goddam signs? Fuck, no. What does a suburban Long Island boy know about parking in “the City”? Nada. The three of us… take a cab to the tow company’s lot… retrieve my Tempest for a fist full of dollars, and I drop them both off at Jacob’s place… when he leaves me with a:

“Why don’t we go over to La Mama on Wednesday? There’s another workshop I want to show you.”

And… he does. With his swarthy smile. And I meet Ellen Stewart, the “Mama” in “La Mama Etc”, the small theater company and mecca for the entire downtown New York avant garde theater scene on 4th Street in the East Village.

 

 

I meet the Plexus Company with Andy Robinson, to whom Clint Eastwood delivered his famous line in Dirty Harry,

“Are ya feelin’ lucky, punk?”

 

….and who will become my colleague four decades later at USC. I meet ex-junkie, Daffi Nathanson, 6 foot 8 inches tall, and his feisty dancer wife, Norma, all of 4 feet 10 inches tall, and 2 weeks later, I move into their loft, “Om Zig”, on Kenmore Street and the Bowery. It’s funky… and “groovy”… and bohemian to the max, and perhaps, the very thing I need… to change… to shock me out of my somnambulant and conventional adolescence.

And so… I consciously allow Jacob to take me under his wing… but not into his bed… and I instantly become part of the alternative downtown New York theater and art scene. I see Joe Chaikin’s Open Theatre. The Serpent.

 

 

Richard Schechner’s “Dionysius in ’69” at the Performance Garage.

 

 

Spalding Gray’s first solo monologues. Rumstick Road. I eat for free at Max’s Kansas City’s daily happy hour.

 

I go to CBGB’s for early punk rock.

 

 

I wander far off the beaten path to “Slug’s in the Far East” – for jazz. I see Warhol, Patti Smith, Philip Glass, Steve Reich. I still drive a cab and work part time at the New School. At night, I go to rehearsals for Jacob’s new dance group, “The Appearance Dance Company”, creating a new piece called “Disappearance”.

 

I learn the gymnastic techniques of Jerzy Grotowsky, guru to Peter Brook, from Grotowsky’s book, “Towards a Poor Theatre”, and I’m suddenly hurled into a new life. I consciously cut myself off from everything I’ve ever known: my parents, my childhood, my high school and college friends, my suburban education, my middle-class upbringing. I’m submerged into the bohemian bowels of the New York avant garde. I’m overwhelmed.

I abandon my entire previous identity. It’s surely one I no longer want, but I have no idea what my new voice, my new identity, will be. It’s absolutely terrifying to me. Like jumping off a cliff and landing, like a reverse Gulliver, in Lilliput, or onto another planet altogether.

Who am I? Who are these people I’m now living with? Hanging out with? Roni, the hippie bombshell in the bed right above me in the Om Zig loft, is making screaming, passionate sounds every night, as she brings home a different guy to make love to – whenever she feels likes it. Jesus! I’ve never heard anything like it my life. My parents were so quiet. Mute!

In fact, that’s what happens to me. I become — mute. Unable to speak aloud. I feel so scared and shaky inside that I can’t manage to produce a sound. Not one. I become entirely silent. Voiceless. The gang that I’m dancing with, tumbling with, each night? No problem. They take me out for macrobiotic dinner after rehearsal and accept me exactly where I’m at. If a stranger or friend of theirs comes up to me and asks me a question, they jump in on my behalf:

“Oh, that’s Eric, he doesn’t speak right now. But he’s fine. Really a good dancer.”

Oh, c’mon! Me? a good dancer. I never took a dance step before 3 months ago. I mean, sure, I was always athletic, I could play almost every sport. But art? Dance? Self-expression? No. I was never taught to, encouraged to, allowed to. And I wasn’t brave enough to ever try.

But now… amongst my new bohemian gang, I’m as free as I can allow myself to be. Make myself be.

Who needs my old brainwashed, repressed voice? Not me. I just need to find… a new one.

 

 

And so I do. Slowly. Painfully. I learn to “shwah” and” hoo” – in improvised variation. I learn to dive on mats, and fall into the arms of my strong, supportive group. From amazing heights. I even finally manage to do a “kip up”, a gymnastic flip from my back onto my feet, something that I believed, my whole life, my entire 22 years, that I would NEVER be able to do.

But that’s the thing about letting go. Until you do… let go… you don’t know what lies on the other side… beyond the fear… beyond the holding on…. beyond… the known. You just have to… let go first … to leap into the… unknown… to find something new… a new voice… a new self… a new life.

———————-

And on the first day of Spring, March 21, 1970, I go out to Long Island on a Monday afternoon, when my parents aren’t home, to meet my sister, who is still, amazingly… 5 years younger than me. I pack up a green army duffle bag with all the things that I’m attached to in the world, along with the $850 I’d saved from my unwanted Bar Mitzvah, and I manage to speak the first words I’ve spoken in months:

“Say goodbye to Mom and Dad for me. I don’t know where I’m going, or how long I’ll be gone, but tell them I’ll be ok. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. I just have to go off and… find myself.”

So on that first day of Spring, 1970, while all my draft-eligible friends have taken student deferments, or conscientious objections, or left the country outright, to avoid the Vietnam War, me and my draft-exempt lottery number (291 out of a possible 365) — pack up the camouflage-painted “Wolf” and start driving up and down America like…. it’s one big map.

 

 

To every city and place we’ve ever heard of: Washington D. C., Richmond, Charleston, Tallahassee, down to the bottom of the Florida Keys, back up to Selma, Montgomery, Louisville, where we visit the boyhood home of our hero, Cassius Clay (now Muhammad Ali).

All… on our improvised Holy Grail of self-discovery.

For four months. On the road.

————————–

My new voice? The one that eventually becomes so loud, impulsive, expressive, and confrontational? Well… it comes to me…. slowly… first in the Windy City of Chicago… up another flight of old wooden stairs in Old Town….

But that’s another story altogether…… 

 

———————-

For more travels with Trules, please visit his WordPress travel blog, HERE 

 

Or more entertainingly, LISTEN to his PODCAST, “e-travels with e. trules”, HERE

 

 

See his full website HERE