I arrived in Brooklyn when I was 22. It was the presidency of George Bush the Elder (remember him?). I was as naïve and frightened as any boy who has spent his entire life in school would be.
For me, it all happened there. I became an actor. I unbecame an actor. I found my calling as a playwright. I married twice - once badly, once well. My son was born there. Hell, I was practically born there. And now I was leaving. For NEW JERSEY (Rolo, please add ominous organ sound).After 18 years in Brooklyn, I thought managing the change to my new life would be the equivalent of turning an oil tanker- slow, laborious, and ugly to watch. But the only shock about moving to Montclair is how easy it has been. In theory, this shouldn’t have surprised me. I was born and raised in suburbia. But I was also raised to fear it as a place where blandness, conformity, and commercialism ran amok. But now I’m wondering what I was so worried about. I am not going to go on in detail about why I like Montclair so much. I find most “city vs. suburbs” arguments tedious. Suffice it to say that I feel that I have lost very little culturally while gaining tons of space, both inside and outside of my apartment. To those who love the city life, I say God bless. But for me, Montclair is a less expensive and dramatically easier life.
But moving here has introduced me to a part of myself I wasn’t very familiar with - my inner snob. I pride myself on being egalitarian, but I wince a little when I say, “I live in New Jersey.” Considering how much I like it there, what else could that be but snobbery?
And it didn’t take long for the snobbery to kick in, either. The morning after we moved, my wife and son and I went to breakfast. As I walked in, I saw someone typing away at their laptop. I looked over (wouldn’t you?). I could see dialogue and descriptive passages. She was writing fiction! I thought to myself, “Can you create transgressive art at the Bloomfield IHOP?” Looking around, I found that idea very hard to accept. I saw the patrons (old, dressed in sweats), the décor (tacky as hell), and I cringed. I was genuinely frightened. I thought, “What I have done?” But weeks later, after the tension in my house had decreased because of the space and beauty of our apartment, after my shoulders unclinched from all the time I sat on my sun porch, I would think back to that IHOP. The patrons may have been old, but they were also kind. They spoke freely to us, and had gentle faces. When my waitress forgot my jam, she touched my shoulder in apology and called me “dear”. It may have been an IHOP, but it was as rich in humanity as any place I sat in Brooklyn.
There’s a quote by Chekhov, my favorite playwright, where he says he was born a slave and had to squeeze it out of himself drop by drop. I think what he meant is that he came into the world with ideas inherited from others, from his time and his family and his class. He viewed the process of maturation as finding what he really believed about the world, from his own experience rather than anything he had swallowed unthinkingly. I think you can be a slave to a lot of things. Most common is to be a slave to your country or your family’s ideas of what it means to succeed. But you can also be a slave to an idea – in my case, an idea of what is cool, or of how an artist should live. I think that’s where my inner snob lives. It’s in the part of me that says that real artists don’t shop at Target, drive Volvos, or have Sunday breakfasts at IHOP.
But maybe that’s just a slave talking. Maybe some comfort isn’t so terrible, especially if it means greater happiness for my wife and son. And maybe I’m an artist no matter where I live.
Can transgressive art be made at the Bloomfield IHOP? I say, let’s find out.
