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November—while I was in Queens on my twodays off—I got a phone call from my uncle Irv, in Milwaukee, telling me that my mother had just died. I wasn’t surprised, because she had been so ill. They had discovered that she had breast cancer the year before, but they couldn’t treat her because her heart wasn’t strong enough. She died of heart failure.
    I called my sergeant at Valley Forge Hospital and told him about my mother. He was usually pretty gruff or stoic, but on this occasion he was very kind and said that I could go to Milwaukee for the funeral and that I should just come back when I was ready. So I flew to Milwaukee, and at the cemetery I got into an argument with two of my uncles, who told me that—according to the Jewish religion—I couldn’t be a pallbearer for my own mother. I grabbed one of the handles that held up the casket, and I walked along, with five other men. We set her down in her grave.
    Now here’s a strange thing: about a month later I bought my first condom. I didn’t know quite how to use it; it seemed tricky to me. I mean, exactly when do you put it on and do you ask the woman for help and when do you take it off? Of course, a more important question would have been, “Who the hell is this woman you’re talking to who’s going to help you put a piece of rubber over your penis?”
    By the way, I wasn’t praying as much anymore.

chapter 8

DON JUAN IN NEW YORK
     
    “See you in New York!”
     
    I said that to Joan so many times when we had our baby-sitting dates on Saturday nights, watching
George Goble,
kissing during the commercials, standing in the doorway for a last good-night kiss, and then . . . “See you in New York!”
    Joan had written to me once while I was in the army, just to let me know that she was studying singing at the Ansonia Hotel and that I could see her in New York. She gave me her address.
    I hadn’t seen Joan for over a year, and now I’m riding on a train from North Philadelphia to New York with a condom packed as carefully as I could place it in my wallet, and it was burning a hole in my brain because I kept thinking,
What if there’s a tiny hole in the condom because I inserted it next to my plastic driver’s license and the train is jostling back and forth and side to side and up and down? Jesus,
it sounds like the condom is making love already. On its own! I wish it could—then I wouldn’t have to figure out how to do it. Twenty-two years old and still a virgin? Why? Could it be that if I made love—not hugging and kissing, but actually putting my penis inside a woman’s vagina—I would somehow be betraying my mother? That’s crazy. Or is it because God has more important things for me to do than to fuck around with pleasure? Oh, excuse me—that’s
not
crazy? I feel like I’m talking to one of the patients on the locked ward. Maybe I’m the one who’s crazy. Maybe I should be on the locked ward with them. But if I can say that—then I’m not crazy. That much I learned at the hospital. Acting seems so much easier than life. When I’m on stage, I feel safe. “They’ can’t get me.” (Careful, son . . . you’re talking crazy again.) But onstage, everyone listens to me and watches me and—if I’m any good—applauds me. And when I’m taking my bow, I have the belief that I’ve earned my feeling of grace—as if God were saying, “You did something worthwhile, so I won’t punish you . . . for a few days
.
    Then I heard the conductor shout, “NEW YORK NEXT! LAST STOP—NEW YORK CITY!”
    *  *  *
ME: Do you know who Katharine Cornell was?
    MARGIE: Never mind who Katharine Cornell was—did you make love to Joan?
    ME: I don’t know.
    MARGIE: What does that mean?
    ME: No kissing, no hugging—
    MARGIE: Wait a minute,
Mister
Wilder—kissing is what you majored in. Don’t tell me there was no kissing.
    ME: Yes, we did a little mitsy-bitsy “Hello, how are you?” kind of kissing, but there wasn’t any
real
kissing. No