Trules Reviews... Not the Year, but the Decades, Part 2

The 80s

Feb 02, 2024

NOTE: This post was published on my “Santa Fe Substack”, but I’ve decided to move it here to “Trules Rules”, because I think it’s more appropriate here. So… if you’ve already read it, no need to read it again. Thanks.

I hope that my previous post jarred some Decade Recall of your own. If yes, but you haven’t yet left a comment, please do!

Today, I’ll march on ahead… through the 80s, 90s, 2000s, 2010s, all the way up to the present, the 2020s. A little ambitious, but let’s see!

That’ll make 8 decades on the planet for yours Trulesly. Many more years than my generation was ever thinking when we boldly proclaimed,

Never trust anyone over 30!

Well, that ship sailed… many decades ago.

What is it now?

Never trust anyone over 100?

Anyway, it’s time to get back to Chicago, 1977… when I finally split “The Second City” after seven years as “a dancing fool”… and made it back to my native New York… for a unique five-year window.. that I’d like to give its own spotlight, straddling the decades so clearly on its own, between the late 70s and the early 80s, back in the Big Apple, between my stints in Chicago and LA.

1977-1982 (30-35 years old)

I didn’t mention that before I left Chicago I became… sort of a notorious public fool. That’s me/him, above. “Gino Cumeezi”. Not a circus-type clown, but more a self-taught, Chaplinesque, improvising silent one, who created my own movement-based style and technique, and brought it out in public, not for pass-the-hat “busking”, but for “free public laughs”. That’s what I called it, the kind of outrageous, rule-breaking, mores-challenging “clowning” that first I, and then my whole troupe, did - on subways, street corners, baseball stadiums in Chicago, and then on ferries (Staten Island), beaches (Coney Island), and in marquetas (Spanish Harlem), department stores (Bloomingdales), hotels (The Plaza), cruise ships (QE2), discos (Studio 54), and at festivals (Lincoln Center), once I had a 2nd “clown company” in New York.

I developed “Cumeezi” in Chicago but he was indeed my “ticket to ride” when I first moved back to Manhattan in 1977, straight into the formerly elegant, now seedy, residential Hotel Woodward (click to listen to the entertaining podcast episode) at 55th and Broadway, for $55/week, around the corner from the Carnegie Deli with the best corned beef in New Yawk.

It turned out that in the Spring of 1977 (of course I left Chicago on the 1st day of Spring), there were 17 candidates running for Mayor of the Big Apple (NYC), all of whom tried to coerce Gino into their campaigns whenever they’d see him, which would be frequently since I was “clowning” every day for self-discipline. (Once a dancer, always a dancer.) That pissed me/Gino off… so… I/he decided to run for Mayor himself!

Gino was supported by Norman Cousins (editor of the “Saturday Review”), Bob Dylan, Anthony Bourdain, as well as many other outlaws and mavericks, and he finished “5th out of 4 candidates”! (Haha, get it?)

And once he/we (The Cumeezi Bozo Ensemble) were covered by the “NY Post”, the “New York Times”, and featured in “The Talk of the Town” in “The New Yorker”, we were invited to tour Holland, Switzerland, and France in 1979, the only problem being - I came back homeless and had to live in a bathroom-less rooming house on “Toity-Toid & Toid”, until, in 1980, when my Ukrainian Grandpa Meyer died and left me $5000, all of which I put down as ”key money” for a “Cumeezi loft” (home for my clown company) on 23rd Street and Park Avenue South, directly above the IRT #6 subway stop and donut shop, right in the building’s lobby.

Ahhhh, those were the days…..

What was going on outside the world of Cumeezi I hardly knew. In 1979, the U.S. and China established full diplomatic relations, and the U.S. experienced its most serious nuclear power plant accident at Three Mile Island. A diplomatic standoff between Iran and America also began in 1979, when 52 American diplomats and citizens were held hostage for 444 days in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. It helped Ronald Reagan beat the embattled Jimmy Carter, and during Reagan’s time in office, the top income tax rate fell from 70 percent to 28 percent and the national debt tripled. Ted Turner launched CNN in 1980, Sandra Day O'Connor became the first female justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and a rally against nuclear weapons drew 750,000 to New York City. Gino wasn’t there.

I studied acting with Lee Strasberg and directing with Nicholas Ray (“Rebel Without a Cause”), did some off-Broadway theater and some soap opera acting, and I made my weekly Woodward rent “re-selling” half-price Broadway show tickets from the TKTS booth on 47th Street & Times Square for full price by standing in front of the theater du jour with a long face saying,

Can anyone use a couple of extra tickets? My girlfriend got sick and I have two great seats I can’t use…

…which of course, my girlfriend didn’t, but the tickets were.

Thereby… allowing me to sell ten pair of the half-price TKTS at full price on any given Sunday afternoon at The Wiz, on a good day, and come home with say, $300 cash, more than enough for my $55/week rent…

…until… the theater managers got wise to my act… and the TKTS booth began to print on the back of every ticket:

Half-price tickets. NOT FOR RE-SALE.

Effectively, putting me out of bidness.

I had to ramp up the clown business - applying for more grants and getting more commercial gigs - but ended up giving away more than half of the company’s income to accountants, managers, lawyers, agents, and Indian Chiefs… all with greedy, beady dollar bills for eyeballs…. all living off the hard work and sweat… of silent Cumeezi clowns.

Not surprisingly, clowning became less and less fun, and I fled the Big Apple and the non-profit arts world for good in November 1982, flying out to LA on just two legs for the first time in over a decade. I had finally decided to give up trying to support a multi-tentacled dance or clown company of ten - to try seeing what the world would be like breathing on my own….

1982-1990 (35-43 years old)

I arrived late one night at LAX at the end of November 1982, took a taxi through the twinkling dark of Los Angeles’ ribboned freeway maze - directly to my friend, Dolores’, oceanfront condo on Bicknell Street in Santa Monica, and woke up at daybreak the next morning to the bright sun, blue sky, and crashing waves of the glorious Pacific.

Welcome to LA!

…where I’d spend the next 40 years.

Residentially, I lucked out. My quirky loner cousin, Laird, lived in a rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment at 1311 Berkeley Street, thirty-one blocks from the Ocean, between Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards, in sort of a boring white bread characterless neighborhood, but… after letting me “crash on his couch” for a month, he decided to “move back East” with his parents, Daisy May and Uncle Herbie… leaving me… the unwritten rent-controlled lucky lessee, paying $278/month for the next frugal ten years. Oh, the rent eventually did go up to $358/month.

Meanwhile, I was subletting my Cumeezi loft in Manhattan to various subtenants for income to live on for my first several years in LA, until one smart, greedy one sued me for “treble damages - meaning I owed them three times the difference between what I was paying my absentee NY landlord and what they, the sublessees, were paying me, meaning… I had to give up the ghost (the “cash cow”).

But I was never at a loss for hustles, and so while I was hustling myself as a wannabe “Hollywood actah”, and an aspiring “movie directah”, I came up with another nefarious scheme to “collect”, and then sell back to Hollywood itself, a list of all the names of the people in “development”, the executives and subordinates who the producers and actual Hollywood “machas” (bigshots) hired to make their way through their piles of submitted scripts, and choose the ones to recommend and pass upward.

For some odd reason, when I got to town, there was no such list. Perhaps the info was too “well-kept”… too secretive… thereby making my new little “publishing biz” more than a little dicey, since I “came by” the names of these development people in rather “offbeat”, some might say, possibly “criminal” ways, and I then proceeded to copy them illegally at Universal Studios late at night, by the thousands, until… one night, the cagey Sheriff of Beverly Hills decided to “meet me” at the Xerox machine, haul me off to jail, and charge me with “commercial burglary”, the same charge my actual, career-criminal, Uncle Harvey Rosenberg, was charged with… before I made a film about the two of us, called “The Poet and The Con” in 1990. (more later)

What could be more interesting than this in “the real world”? A Libyan oil embargo? A ground-breaking ceremony for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial? A 1983 United States embassy bombing in Beirut that killed 63 people? Michael Jackson’s Thriller album going to #1 on the US Billboard charts for 37 weeks, setting a world record for staying at number 1? Time Magazine publishing their first typo when ‘contol’ rather than ‘control’ is printed on the front cover and all issues are recalled by the publisher? Arcade game Mario Bros., produced by Nintendo, being released in Japan, paving the way for future Mario games to become Nintendo’s “greatest” creation worldwide? The assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi? The 1984 Summer Olympics held in Los Angeles? The original Macintosh computer? The hearings in the Iran-Contra affair, the re-opening of the Statue of Liberty, the fall of President Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, the Soviet Nuclear reactor at Chernobyl exploding in 1986? What do you think?

In any event, perhaps it was my “reputation” that preceded me which… in 1986… got me hired to profess (teach) at USC’s (University of Southern California, the largest private employer in southern California) School of Theater. Well… not my reputation as a “commercial burglar” (mercifully the charge got dropped by the studio), but rather, my reputation as a theater director around LA’s “Equity Waiver” theater community, where I directed a few plays with high profile “soap stars” that got me some attention.

I started with just one “improv” class, which I agreed to teach - without ever having taught or studied it before. Of course, I had been an improvising dancer, clown, and traveler ever since 1970, but “theater games”, Viola Spolin, Paul Sills, Second City, The Groundlings in LA, home to future Saturday Night Live stars, what/who were they? I certainly didn’t know. But I’m also sure that I wasn’t the first fool who ever said yes to a job offer when he didn’t know the first thing about how to do it.

You might say… I learned “on the job”. It would take me 3-4 days to plan a single 2-hour class… which in my own opinion, never turned out all that well. But I was diligent, dedicated, and hard-working. And hey, I was a former professional modern dancer and clown, who had made up my own teaching techniques in both. How hard could teaching another college class be?

Hard.

The hardest part was making up the 14-week sequence of classes, “the syllabus”, something that made sense for a whole semester. Like writing a screenplay, it’s easy to start, but unless you know where it’s going; in fact, unless, you know the whole structure and how/where the story is going to end, you’ll most likely get lost and founder. Same with a college class. It needs structure. One class needs to follow the other and they all need to add up to a “course” that makes sense and pays off. Well… that took time. Perhaps, a few years.

But… the students liked me. “They really, really liked me.” Even at first. And my one Improv class immediately became two, and soon five… per semester… which… not only theater students took… but also… thousands of other students from all across the University. Film students, science students, an improbable number of Asian students, engineers, philosophers, musicians, pre-doctors and dentists, anyone and everyone who wanted to lose their self-consciousness, discover their own voices, become more creative, learn how to take risks, and be more themselves.

My improv class became notorious, with some famous alums, followed by the first “solo performance” class in academia, then a class on “self-expression and creativity”, and “Discover LA”, and “Bob Dylan & the 60s”, and the “Life & Times of Gordon Davidson”, and they all filled up my days, from September to December, and from January through May. Eventually, professing full-time made me give up my auditions altogether (actually, I wasn’t all that good), and even my ambition to “make it” in Hollywood, while it still afforded me more than enough time to support myself as “an artist” and travel the world once or twice a year. I was indeed, a lucky man. For 31 years.

In 1988, the Soviets finally left Afghanistan after eight frustrating and pointless years, from which our own country learned, seemingly nothing. In 1989, George H. W. Bush was sworn in as the 41st president of the United States. The same year, the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union dissolved under Mikhail Gorbachev, while the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing and the brutal Chinese Communist response happened almost simultaneously.

In 1988, I did my first 1-man show, “Down… But Not Out”, at two theaters in LA. It received an excellent review in The LA Times and I was invited to bring it to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland where it was “shortlisted” for best show of the Fringe by London’s “Independent”. The “Edinburgh Scotsman” said:

Trules is an accomplished writer; he has both a feel for contemporary idiom and a poetic imagination that echoes the great American playwrights.

Edinburgh was a highlight of my artistic life, although being recognized outside my own city and country was nothing less than, what can I say, ironic.

I was supposed to go back to Edinburgh the next year, 1989, with my next solo show, but life… had other plans for me.

On April 7, 1989, my sister Alison’s birthday, Dr. Dan Lieber, my gentle hematologist-oncologist called me on the phone with the results of a biopsy from a small protruding node on the right side of my neck.

I’m sorry, Eric, the results are positive. You have stage 3 Hodgkin’s Disease, cancer of the lymphatic system.

I was 41 years old.

They say cancer is the “disease of despair”.

What did I know? I was scared. Dr. Dan told me I needed to receive 6 months of chemotherapy. A dayglo red-blue-green concoction of MOPP/ABV, a protocol involving two, highly toxic, injectable drugs (mustargen and vincristine) while sitting in a dental chair), along with two oral medications (prednisone and procarbazine) taken at home. What fun!

I lost 30 pounds and all my hair, and because I didn’t store my semen early enough before the first round of treatment, I became sterile. I had “cancerous lymph nodes the size of grapefruits all through my abdomen and thorax”.

Many “friends” avoided me like the plague. Some total strangers became “my best friends”. I didn’t want to see my parents in Walnut Creek (San Francisco area) because I didn’t want to feel like “I had to take care of them.”

But I was lucky. The chemo started working quickly. And whereas just a generation before, Mickey Mantle’s (my boyhood NY Yankees baseball hero) entire male family had been wiped out by lymphoma, now MOPP/ABV had a 90% cure rate.

And so… after just 2 months of chemo, my tumors were tremendously reduced in size, and I was driving my little red MG convertible around the toney streets of Santa Monica, warming my shiny bald head in the sun, feeling all the beauty in my life, and how much “I was loved”.

Miraculously, cancer turned out to be “the best thing that ever happened to me”!! It shook me up, turned me inside out, and made me face my own mortality.

One day in the middle of chemo, I went to see the Dali Lama at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. There were hundreds of his “hungry ghost” devotees lined up to receive his ten-second blessing. I stood in line with them for about five minutes, then… I walked out, alone…. preferring to just lie in the green-green grass outside, lying on my back, staring up at the blue-blue sky, feeling self-fulfilled, grateful, and loved by the universe.

Grateful - to still be alive.

I’m afraid I’ve been overly ambitious. Trying to cram too many decades into too few posts. So… rather than get another email from my ever-supportive sister,

Your Substacks are toooooo long. I don’t have time to read them. Can’t you make them shorter?

I suppose I should stop here and hope you’ll return for the 90s!!!

Let me know what you think.

The Bataks are back from Indonesia!

And I’m a bachelor no more….

Trules

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