principal actor, Richard Lynch. He was then and continued to be throughout my life a genuinely stand-up guy, despite the demons he battled. In the last few weeks my job had been to get Richard onstage sober each night and keep him away from the vodka. Sometimes I was successful, and other times, not so much. I went from being a protector to an enabler in about five seconds flat on occasion because Richard could charm the keys right off of the warden.
That was the first time I was drawn into the wilds of the performing arts and exposed to the internal torments so many actors dealt with in trying to get through the day’s performance. It comes to that thin line between creativity and self-destruction. I stopped at the liquor store whenever he pleaded, as he promised to have only a quick guzzle and no more. The director would scold me when I brought Richard to the stage in a cloud of booze breath: “I told you he was going to charm you into a fucking bottle.”
Richard was an incredibly handsome guy, so much so that it was hard to stop yourself from staring at him even though it might be construed as a bit gay. Richard was one of the next generation of young actors around whom there was buzz that he was about to break into the big time. On top of his amazing good looks, he had the acting chops of Brando. Yet already he also had this very toxic combinationof forces working on him. He was very ambivalent about success, and he was very pro-substance abuse.
His claim to fame was that two years before I met him he had dropped acid and lit himself on fire in Central Park. So the Richard Lynch I knew, even though you could actually still see how naturally good looking he was, had suffered third-degree burns that nearly destroyed his face. He had to be completely surgically reconstructed. I remained active friends with him after our time in Stockbridge, and over the years there was this wonderful, real simpatico between us every time we met.
When he found out my dad had died, he stepped up and made sure I knew he was sending his love and support. He was a really talented and kind-hearted man who, unfortunately, would go on to battle a lifelong drinking problem. But watching him that summer, as he transformed into the actor’s persona, was absolutely thrilling to me, and he inspired and taught me so much. Richard died at age seventy-two in 2012 after playing a wide array of heinous villains in film and television. He made his feature acting debut in 1973’s Scarecrow alongside Gene Hackman and Al Pacino. Like myself to a degree, Richard became very popular on the sci-fi and horror circuit later in his career.
Somewhere on the Taconic Parkway I looked in the rearview and caught my cousin’s eyes looking at me.
“My brother,” I asked, “is he around?” I was hoping, for my mother’s sake, he wasn’t having one of his episodes, as we called them long before the mental health disorder from which my brother suffered even had a name.
“Yeah,” Kenny said. “He’s at your place. He’s cool.” And then he named my uncles and aunts who were staying with Mom in the apartment. The last time I had called home, from a pay phone, my mom told me they were heading out on their annual vacation. Even though we didn’t have much money, my folks always took a two-week trip to the Catskills or the Poconos, to the resorts that Jews went to in the fifties and sixties. That year they had been gone only a week to theTamiment Resort in the Poconos, so I knew something must’ve happened to my dad while they were there.
There is always a selfish side to death. There’s often an emotional response of feeling betrayed, as crazy as this may seem, that we sometimes get when the person we love goes and fucking dies on us when we need them most. As I drove I wondered to whom I could tell my stories now, as my dad, having been in the music business during the Swing Era, was the only one who understood. I would’ve told him how that summer I