Serendipity Blog 2005

Rick returned this past Tuesday, bringing his rescuerick.com costume and paraphernalia with him. The key prop was a toy lawnmower that makes a delightfully realistic whirring sound when you roll it. The original handle on this contraption came up only to Rick’s knees, so he replaced it with a stout wood golf club. Attired in red cape, and navy shorts and tights and stripey kneesocks, Rick thus goes about his business on the streets of Manhattan, promoting lawn safety. At Rockefeller Center, Katie Couric was pleased to take one of Rick’s handouts, saying, ‘Gee that’s really neat.’ (Rick: ‘You know she looks really old up close…she must be about 50 now.’) Then to CNN and FoxNews and ABC’s Good Morning America, where he hoped to appear in brief glimpses through the studio window. He got hundreds of hits on his website, so the venture was a success, I suppose.

He stayed only two days this time. Moki was not happy having Rick back on the living room sofa, a month after his last visit. Rick had tried many times to email and phone him, but Rick’s sad-sack presentation, with his mind-numbing, repetitive, unmodulated drone, has long since set Moki’s internal defaults to ‘do-not-answer’ mode when Rick’s voice emits from the answering machine. Curiously, Rick nearly always phones up on my line rather than on Moki’s. He leaves about ten minutes’ worth of messages there a week, with the result that my message space is always fillling up. When I ask him about this, he says he tries to phone on the other line, but the message box is always full.

Before Rick bailed out of Manhattan…back when he still had an Upper East Side apartment and a matched pair of feet…I told him he should give up on this fool notion of trying to be a player on Wall Street and go with his strengths. Be a comic actor, another Steven Tobolowsky. There’s always room for another character actor with a funny appearance and big frame.

Rick liked the idea but was too slack and set in his ways to pursue it seriously. Let me say that again, with nuance: he really did like the idea of becoming a comic character actor–it really was a dark, deep, hidden daydream of his–but he did not know where to begin and did not have the drive or curiosity to find out where to begin, nor did he have the insight to see that he would have to make serious adjustments in his career focus. Like so many unfortunates, Rick got himself trapped in a career lazy-susan: an endless cycle of meaningless, futureless jobs, each one worse than the last; a cycle he could not break because he believed all he needed to do was update his resume (add the last lousy job), and hand it around, and see what fate had in store. That is, he had an utterly passive attitude toward his own immediate destiny. So when I told him he should really seriously consider acting, he couldn’t get his mind around it. He imagined that it would basically involve being introduced to someone who was already in show business, and this person would provide an entree.

We knew a writer-producer named Ralph Allen, who did Sugar Babies and other big hits, and when we told Rick he should ask Ralph for advice, Rick said, ‘You think, you think, hey you think like, maybe Ralph Allen can get me a job?’

Ralph Allen is dead now. And now here is Rick, minus half a foot and still with no SAG or Equity card or performing credits, still lightyears away from understanding where he wants to go, but edging crabwise into a performing career despite himself. It’s as though fate is dragging him there, kicking and screaming.

At the end of December 2003 I received a phone call from my sister, with whom I have not had good relations since (oh let’s say) 1986. I was not around to receive the call, but my answerphone was happy to take it. My sister told me, in soothing, canting, gloating tones, that she was sorry to hear I had cancer. I left it on the machine and replayed it every few months, marveling at her whiny voice and the oozy confusion of her emotions. Twice she said “I love you,” as though it were her last opportunity to say it. Never “I’m sorry I was such a shit, can you ever forgive me?”

But this evening, while riffling through the saved messages, I clumsily hit the Delete button too soon. Alas! Now that message belongs to the ages.

Rick took off on Thursday, after a whirlwind five-day hobble about town, handing out his resume and showing off his damaged foot. I tried to avoid looking at the damned thing as long as I could, but there finally arrived an evening when I came back from the gym and found him cosseting it under the coffeetable. He’d been walking all over town that day, making and missing appointments, and now the demi-pod was blistered and swollen. He asked persistently for medical advice on a necrotic flap of skin. Should he cut it off or just let it fall off? I gave him some Primapore bandages and antiseptic packets from Sloan-Kettering, and told him to do as little as possible; also to shut up about his damned foot and stop showing it to people. (Sharlene Spingler reports that he offered to take his shoe and sock off at the NYAC.)

The foot is not as grotesque as you might imagine. The only bit obviously missing is the big toe. But Rick also lost most of the tarsal assembly thereabouts—I don’t recall what it’s officially called, but it includes the “ball of the foot”—which means he must distribute his weight to the outside of the damaged foot when he walks, since the inside is nothing but phantom pain and flubber. I suspect the amputation affects Rick more than it would the average person. He is tall and heavy, and tends (or tended) to pronate when he walked. That is, his gait is pigeon-toed, beginning with the outside of his heel and ending with the inside of the foot. If he began as a high-arched supinator like me, he’d be used to walking on the outside edge of his feet, and the amputation wouldn’t be quite so crippling.

I found Henry under a heap of paper bags and put her back into her tank. She’s been out for three days. Rick is amazed at her size. He hasn’t seen her in a couple of years.

Rick arrives at 9:30 pm, having driven down in a leisurely way from Plymouth, Massachusetts. We discuss Marvin Olasky, who sounds like a sinister bastard. Rick gabbles on about all his job interviews and useful connections, life in Hermitage, PA, observations of naive-looking tourists walking down Park Avenue, where he parked his car. He has great curiosity about what I’m doing. I tell him I am setting up the database configuration for a new experimental blog based on Serendipity. After a few misfires and faulty attempts (I have to give the full URL for the s9l db host name) the new blogware easily installs.
And now I must get to bed because I have a 4 mile run tomorrow at 8 am. This afternoon I ran 12 miles. In four weeks I run the Paris Marathon. Dick Carr chides me in a phone conversation this evening for setting a goal as specific as four hours. Really, it’s not that much of a stretch.