FRESH YARN presents: Lucky Lindy... by Laurel Ollstein

FRESH YARN presents:

Lucky Lindy
By Laurel Ollstein

Two a.m. May 12, 1983, the phone rang.

I was right out of college, living in San Francisco, wanting to be an actress but mostly being a waitress. I was just preparing to open in the show Lucky Lindy at the Eureka theatre, an irreverent look at the life of Charles Lindbergh. All the characters in his life were played by just two actors. Lindbergh himself was portrayed by different sized toy airplanes. The Atlantic Ocean was a large aquarium center stage. I played Lindbergh's mother, his first flight instructor, his wife and Herman Goering, among others. The other half of the cast was Drew, a string bean of a man, an older established San Francisco actor. We each played about 20 different characters.

We'd been rehearsing in a cold, cavernous warehouse space at Fort Mason for six weeks. All the critics were set to come opening night, Thursday, May 12. We had a preview the night before, that my very opinionated friends Bob and Jane had come to. They loved me, but they weren't so sure about the play.

We went out for a beer after the show to a dark, woody North Beach pub. I had just started seeing a young southern artist. He had a great drawl and even wore a cowboy hat. He was more smitten with me than I with him. I tended to like it that way -- safer. I was in high spirits; the preview had gone well, but not too well, leaving room for a spectacular opening night. I had planned out the relaxing next day already -- lay in bed late, maybe go to the place on 24th street where you could rent a hot tub for an hour. It had a deck surrounded by lattice and jasmine, just right for a little reading, relaxing. Then at around two, go over all my lines, go through every character, all the blocking, take a short nap, and then head to the theatre. I was ready for anything.

We finished our beers, and I took the cowboy home with me. I had a railroad flat apartment on the third floor of this old Victorian. The best part was the kitchen, big and airy, with a door out to a rickety porch that looked out over the whole Mission district. The cowboy and I made love. He was a ferocious lover, couldn't get enough of me, he said. I made him feel 16 again. Good thing he didn't make me feel 16, he wouldn't have been there. I didn't like cowboys at 16.

Two a.m., May 12. The phone rang.

I woke up from a dream where I was riding a horse. Must have been all that sex. The phone was ringing in the dream -- while I was riding the horse on a cliff. Then I realized -- there are no phones on this horse. So I woke myself up and there I was in bed with the cowboy. The fog had rolled in, as it always did. You could almost feel the weight of the moist air pushing against the tall curved window. The phone kept ringing. Cowboy didn't budge. Men sleep better than women I think. It takes me a good six months before I can sleep well next to someone. And since most of my relationships don't last that long, I don't get a lot of sleep. But he was snoring away. I got up -- naked, pulled on a t-shirt that was balled up on the floor, and made my way slowly down the moldy smelling hallway to the living room.

I answered the phone. It was my brother -- very odd for him to call me at all, and to call at two in the morning even odder. He asked me if I was alone. I thought that was nosey. He called to ask if I was sleeping around? I told him no. Then he told me I should sit down. What a cliché. Something hard to hear must be coming next. I said okay, even though I didn't sit. He wasn't going to call me at two in the morning and boss me around. Then the flash came -- maybe my father had another heart attack. He had one years before, and god knows he still ate pastrami and slept around with younger women.

My brother's voice was calm.

"Dad shot himself."

I thought I heard wrong. Shot? With a gun? Did he even own one? Then another flash of Dad taking me to a firing range when I was 13, to teach me how to shoot a rifle. I did it, even though I was scared. I always wanted to please him. I almost fell over with the first shot, but then steadied the rifle against my shoulder and shot a few close bullseyes. I have a good eye -- always did. He taught me to play pool too. I was a shark in college. I won beer money from many unsuspecting young college men.

My brother said that dad had been found in his office, hours after his Wednesday night group. The Wednesday night group that he used to run in our converted basement in our house in L.A., the same group I had listened in on all my life. The one where, after my father had moved out when I was 15, he hired me to videotape through one-way glass. He made training films on how to run group therapy sessions. They knew they were being filmed, but not by the 15-year-old daughter of their therapist. But this time I wasn't there to listen at the door, or watch through glass.

Then I realized my brother hadn't said the word dead.

Maybe he shot and missed. If we didn't say the word, it wouldn't be true. I just won't say it, I thought.

"The funeral will have to be by Sunday," he said. Jews have to be buried within 72 hours. My family's Jewish only in times of trauma.

But he had said a word I couldn't ignore -- funeral. Funeral meant dead. No doubt about that. He hadn't missed. He killed himself. This is something that never occurred to me. He was a successful psychiatrist. He had money. He had a Mercedes. He had a new wife. Okay, I knew that his marriage wasn't going so well -- it had turned bad, mostly due to his sleeping with young female patients. But what did she expect? After all, she had been his patient when he was married to my mother. They had an affair for three years. But I guess you always feel you will be the different one. Well she wasn't. And now she wanted a divorce. He couldn't handle another divorce, he told me in a conversation over sickly sweet drinks at Trader Vics in Beverly Hills, one of the last times I saw him. My parents had a particularly ugly divorce, fighting over everything, including me. Now my stepmother as an adversary was an even scarier thought.

But was that a reason to die? To kill maybe, but not to die. He seemed to me much more of a man who would kill someone else. He had a mean temper. His eyes would flash red and his golfer's tanned skin would sallow. I'd hide when I saw that coming. I wished he would just hit me and get it over with. His anger was fierce. It came from deep inside him. A man like that doesn't kill himself.

What I didn't know until later was that my brother had suggested to the police that perhaps my stepmother killed him, maybe because the same thoughts went through his mind. This wasn't to be a good start in the messy estate negotiations between my brother and stepmother. Me? I kept out of that fight. I just threw the papers away. Couldn't drag me into that snake pit.

But there I was still on the phone with my brother. And just down the hall a man I didn't know very well was asleep in my bed. Boy was he going to get more than he bargained for that night. I didn't want to hang up the phone. I knew when I did I would have to talk to the cowboy, and I would have to say the word dead. It would make it real, and it couldn't be taken back after that. If I never said it and just pretended I never got the call, I could forget. I'm big on denial. After all, my dad and his wife were in L.A., and I wouldn't be seeing them for a while anyway. It would just be like normal. I wouldn't have to admit it until say… Christmas. No one was going to come up and see my show anyway. My father didn't approve of me being an actress. He had too many neurotic patients that were famous and unhappy. He thought it was a terribly unstable way of life. Ironic, since the only instability in my life so far had been caused by him.

Finally there were no more questions to ask and we hung up.

I closed my eyes and there was his office in sepia tones, his Sunset Boulevard office with the view of the Hollywood hills. His huge mahogany desk that he paid too much for. He was there behind the desk in his leather swivel chair, bringing a gun up to his head and... I opened my eyes. The cowboy was standing at the door. He asked me if I was okay. I hadn't realized it but I had been screaming. I don't remember. But he heard me.

"My father killed himself," I said for the first time.

Much crying and drinking and smoking cigarettes followed.

I woke up to the heat of a blue sky pictured in my window. For a moment I thought it had been a bad dream. Then I smelled the stale cigarettes and tasted my brandy breath and knew it was true. Cowboy was sleeping like a baby. Men. I got up and almost tripped over the fishing tackle box that I used for my stage make-up, and it hit me -- opening night -- shit.

I was still only wearing a t-shirt -- thought maybe I should put on some underwear. Opened the underwear drawer and stared, couldn't decide -- striped, plain, laced. Closed the drawer - stumbled down the hall, suddenly feeling nauseous, went to the bathroom, threw up. Felt no better. Got to the kitchen -- drank some water, looked at the beautiful view out my window and thought, how could he not be on this planet any more? How could he leave it when you could see such beauty right from your shitty little porch?

I called my co-star Drew first. He was shocked and didn't know what to say.

"What do you want to do?" he asked.

What did I want? I called my director; he too was shocked.

"What do you want to do?" he also asked.

I wanted someone else to deal with it. That's what I wanted. I wanted one of them to say, "We'll cancel the show, don't worry about it. Don't even think about it anymore. Deal with what you have to deal with." But neither said that. They both asked what I wanted to do -- with a little expectation in their voices that somehow I would be able to go on. What did I want? I couldn't even decide what underwear to wear. "The show must go on" is great in theory.

Cowboy came in rubbing his red eyes and mumbling to himself, "Boy, he sure picked a day, didn't he?"

Yeah, didn't he, I thought. Wait a minute. Did he? Did he actually pick this day to die? Was this his punishment -- his way of putting an end to my acting career for good? And that was it -- I knew I had to go on. I had been working so hard to be my own person, not just to please my father, because it was becoming increasingly apparent that there was no pleasing him. I needed to do this, to prove something to myself.

So I called Drew.

My good friend Pat came over and I released the cowboy from active duty. Pat and I went to the hot tub place and sat and cried, and I thought many times that day -- am I crazy? But the day went on, and I finally dragged myself to the theatre.

Sherry, the punky bleached blond in the box office looked up, her eyes filled with such sympathy -- I lost it. I ran back into the dressing room to find Drew with his long bony arms extended for a hug. I told him I couldn't handle people touching me, or looking at me, for that matter. He left the room; he must have spread the word because no one came within ten feet of me for the rest of the night. I sat in the dressing room, dressed in my flight suit, our opening costume, and tried to think about the show. Places were called and I walked backstage to wait for my opening cue.

I was in the wings on stage right, Drew on stage left. The music that began the show started to play. In a moment I would walk on stage, I thought, and for an hour and twenty minutes with no intermission I could be someone else. I would give a swimming lesson to a toy airplane in an aquarium, I would teach another toy airplane how to fly, I would know what to say and when to say it. I would know what came next. For one hour and twenty minutes without intermission there would be no surprises.

The lights dimmed. I looked heavenward and imagined him tied to a chair front row in the hereafter, forced to watch my opening night. My life might seem unstable, but it was my life, and he wasn't going to take it away with his. The music swelled and I went on.