Bullying, Thoughts of Self Harm Led Me to Quit Professional Theater

Slammed: a Memoir — Chapter 13 Part 4

The morning after Logan and Anika’s fight, Mark and I were up and out early. We’d already planned on playing tourist that day, but we were both so disturbed by the events the previous evening that we decided to get an extra early start.

We’d been through the gay Mecca of Castro, walked along Ocean Beach all the way around the bend at Lincoln Park till we could see The Golden Gate Bridge. It wasn’t a warm day and the clouds lay thick and low. Still, it really is a beautiful city, with its undulating hills, long beaches, and bridges dissolving into dense fog.

We walked all day all over creation. We weren’t hurried, but we lacked the leisurely pace of tourists. Not just because we were NYC gays, more like we were trying to put as much distance between us and the previous night as we could, like if we walked far enough the previous night might never have happened.

We received a group text from Logan.

“Hey guys. I’m calling out of the show tonight. Taking a mental health day. Gonna meditate and focus on me. Have a good show!”

Mark and I looked at our phones in silence.

Apparently Logan didn’t need to walk anywhere to pretend last night didn’t happen.

“Thanks for the apology, buddy,” Mark said with equal amounts of sarcasm and anger.

“‘Mental health day’ is a weird way to say ‘hungover as fuck,’” I joked.

Neither of us laughed.

I was floored by Logan’s audacity, but at the same time I was relieved. The very last place I wanted to be was in the same room with Logan.

I’ve never understood how people, including several in the company of Annie, can treat someone as a friend to their face while trashing them behind their back, and do it so naturally. I don’t have that muscle. If I don’t like you, I’m not going to act like I’m your friend. I’m not going to be rude or mean. I can’t even be rude or mean to people who are rude or mean to me. But I’m not going to pretend to be your friend either. In those cases, I get by with being neutral and polite.

The spigots of anger and guilt — anger at the way Logan had verbally abused Anika and guilt for not stepping in — had been flowing wide open since the night before. I honestly didn’t know how I was going to exist in the same space with Logan. What I would do. What I would say.

So him calling out of that evening’s show was a welcome reprieve.

But the following night he was back in the show.

While he palled around the dressing room as if it was just another day, I tried to keep my head down, keep neutral, and try to not make it obvious that I was avoiding him.

Two problems. First, I have the absolute worst poker face. Second, out of everyone in the cast, I had the most interactions with Logan both on and off stage.

During tech rehearsals when we started running the show, I was standing off stage right when Logan exited to make a quick change. When he passed, we fist bumped. Then the next run, we fist bumped again. Now, nine or so months into the tour, it was simply a part of our show.

Until that evening.

Logan exited to make his quick change, lifted his fist to bump…but I wasn’t there. I was hiding, watching him from behind a curtain leg. He looked around confused before rushing off to make his quick change.

This continued throughout the show. I couldn’t look at him, couldn’t interact with him. The bile of my guilt and anger had filled up to my chest. It was clear, at least to Logan, something was wrong.

The next day we had two shows.

I could feel the anger and guilt filling up behind my eyes.

Toward the end of the Second Act of our matinee, Logan caught me in the dressing room.

“John, what’s wrong? I feel like you’re mad at me.”

“I am mad at you.” I said this without looking at him, or thinking for that matter. I’m non-confrontational to a fault so even this was out of character for me.

“Why?”

I didn’t answer.

How could he not know? How could he not understand?

“Listen, we have to talk about this cause whatever this is isn’t working.”

“Fine,” I said. “But after the show, and not here.”

After the show, we started walking down Van Ness Ave in the Tenderloin district.

“Ok, so what’s wrong…”

“Not yet,” I snapped. I stared straight ahead, still not looking at Logan. I needed to get plenty of distance away from the theater. My insides were gurgling. I didn’t know what was about to happen, but I didn’t want anyone from the company to see.

When we’d reached what I thought was a good distance — and with little concern for the people we were sharing the sidewalk with — I spun around, looked straight at Logan for the first time in days, and started speaking.

“Logan, your actions the other night, the way you treated Anika was entirely unacceptable.” I felt like I was vibrating. The pressure from all that anger and all that guilt, the sharp memories of my own despair, my own pain, of all those times Richard ridiculed me and broke me down when all I wanted to do was help him, all still living deep in my body, they all had been reactivated. My face was hot. I clenched my fists to keep them from shaking.

“You were mean. You were cruel, vicious. Logan, it was abusive!”

He looked hurt, confused. “John, I’m…I’m sorry. I’m having a rough time right now. I really need a friend.”

“I can’t be your friend!” I yelled. I hadn’t yelled at anyone, really yelled, since Richard. I regained what little composure I had and continued. “The only thing I can do, as a friend, is tell Anika to run as far away from you as possible.

“I can’t be your friend right now because I hate you!” I could see this hurt him. I immediately felt bad for saying it, I felt smaller, but there was no going back. “Your behavior the other night was just so… abusive …”

His demeanor changed in an instant. “Like how you’re abusing me right now?”

Sometimes I absolutely hate myself. I hate how weak I can be, how gullible, how impressionable. I immediately saw his “side.” I was being harsh. Tremendously harsh. I was yelling.

Was I being mean? Was I being… abusive?

Richard had done this to me many times. When I would try to call him out for behavior I felt was abusive, he would turn it around and say I was the one abusing him, and I couldn’t help but question, was he right? Was I the abusive one? Leaving me unable to fight back, more willing to take the abuse than risk being abusive myself.

Logan had knocked me off balance. I was still swimming in a pressure cooker of anger and guilt, but I’d lost all my conviction. “I… I can’t be your friend right now…”

“But you can be Gene’s friend?”

I looked up at Logan. “What?”

“You can’t be my friend but you can be friends with a piece of shit like Gene? Do you know what he did?” He then accused Gene, our Daddy Warbucks, of something inappropriate, something I was not present to witness.

Yeah John, an inner voice said. You can’t be friends with Logan, but you can be friends with Gene? Make it make sense.

“You know what, fuck you,” Logan said. “I don’t have to take this. I have plenty of friends. I don’t need to be friends with a worthless piece of shit like you.” With that, he turned around and walked off.

Even then, his words really hurt.

God-fucking-damn-it-to-hell, even with all my anger, I still fucking cared what Logan thought of me. I stood there and watched him walk away, not knowing what to do next. After a few minutes, I started walking toward the theater. I felt like I’d been on a weekend bender. My jaw was clenched, my entire body locked and tense. The barrier between me and a full breakdown was paper thin, but somehow I held it together as I made my way back to the theater.

I thought about calling Mark, but he was busy resetting the show for that evening’s performance. I thought about calling Gene, but Logan’s words rang in my ears. Gene’s path had traveled through the seedier, darker sides of life in ways that I inherently understood, more than any of the twenty-somethings in the cast could understand at any rate. He was both clever and crass and didn’t suffer fools — in a way that won him no fans of the overly sensitive members of the cast. This was also part of the reason I liked him so much. He could be an enthusiastic bull in a politically correct china shop, in the sort of way I enjoyed but could never be myself. Because of this, I couldn’t dismiss Logan’s accusations out of hand.

How could I accuse one person of wrongdoing and then seek solace in another who — allegedly — also had done wrong?

I felt so utterly alone. So far away, literally on the opposite side of the country, from anyone I could turn to.

So worthless.

A sob tried to escape, but I clamped my mouth shut and angrily wiped away a few tears that seeped out.

I approached the stage door to see Gene was still there. Innocent or not, he was there, and I needed a friend.

I tapped Gene on the shoulder. “Hey, can… can we go back to your hotel room?”

“Sure,” he said. He made his excuses to the people he’d been talking to and we started making our way to his hotel.

Gene was talking but I wasn’t hearing anything he was saying. I just wanted to get to his room as quickly as possible. He made a joke and poked me in the ribs, which usually would make me yip like a little dog.

I didn’t react at all.

“Oh.” Gene realized I was very much not ok.

I held it together into the lobby and up the elevator.

He unlocked his door and let me in. When he closed his door, the barrier burst.

I grabbed onto him like the floor gave out from under me and started crying.

I wept like a frightened child.

He held me as I erupted without asking any questions.

I wept like I’d never wept before, my keening loud and drawn out, broken by hiccups and gasps for air. It was the cries of a toddler with the ferociousness of an adult, terrified, lost, trapped in a dark cold place, desperately wanting his mommy.

Gene led me down onto the bed where I crawled into the fetal position, my head in his lap. I continued to cry for what felt like an eternity while Gene held me and gently stroked my head.

I have no idea how much time passed, but if you told me I wept for over an hour, I would believe you.

I eventually cried myself out and Gene ordered us a couple sandwiches so we could get something in our stomach before that night’s show. While we ate, I told Gene everything that happened, from the fight to the confrontation. He tried to buck me up and help me strategize for how to continue doing the show. “You’re welcome to hang out in my dressing room during the show if you want to avoid him. You’re usually there anyway.”

This was true. Stage Management had even penciled my name next to Gene’s on his dressing room door at one stop as a joke.

Somehow, I pulled myself together enough to do the show that night, though it was still awkward. I had to change nearly all of my interactions on stage, that’s how much I interacted with Logan. But I found my way through it.

Then it got worse. Logan started to retaliate.

Logan and I were nearly always next to each other when we were Warbucks servants. Our blocking and choreography was intended to be clean and sharp, everyone moving and stopping in unison like a well oiled machine.

While Logan never spoke to me again, with that evening’s performance, he started fucking with my track — my set path and blocking through the show. We’d enter in a line moving quickly to land on our marks right on the down beat of the music. I would enter behind Logan needing to land on my mark on the other side of him, so I had a further distance to travel. He started slow-walking his entrance, holding me back, only to speed up at the last minute so that he would make his mark, but I would land on my mark late. It was all about the stage picture and something out of place like that draws the eye of the entire audience, making it look like I had fucked up.

I should have gone to stage management, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to draw attention to our fallout, plus I already felt like a crybaby. The last thing I wanted to do was whine to stage management. “He’s being a big meany!” And I wasn’t going to shove my way past him afraid I would look like the aggressor.

There were even moments where we were choreographed to look straight at each other, but he never looked at me again, instead looking past me like I didn’t exist. Again, I fucking hate myself for it, but it hurt every time. And without him to interact with on stage, I felt alone, left out, shunned.

It also continued off stage.

When Anika returned, they must have made up, playing up their showmance like it was a beautiful love story. Waiting in the wings, Anika landed in front of me ready to make her entrance without acknowledging my presence. She then turned around and started flirting with Logan, who was behind me.

“I love you,” she said, smiling, batting her eyes.

“I love you,” I heard Logan respond.

It was so gratuitous, so overt, I had to wonder if they were putting on a show for me or the rest of the cast, who didn’t know any better past rolling their eyes.

Then doubt would set in.

Maybe I was imagining things.

Maybe… maybe their fight wasn’t as bad as I thought?

If Mark hadn’t also heard it, I probably would doubt that it had happened at all.

As for the rest of the company, something had changed. I don’t know if I was being actively ostracized — though Mark has said that Logan and Anika had been turning the cast against us in some way — but either way that’s what it felt like. I’d see Logan and Anika chumming it up with other members of the company, still very much prom king and queen, and whoever they were hanging out with — which was everyone but me — wherever they were, I could not go.

I’d try to decompress by using the warm-up room — at every stop there was a room designated for vocal warm ups — during our down time to sing through songs in my book, but because these rooms were often not sound proofed and right next door to others trying to work, people complained, and that avenue was closed to me.

I was lonely. I was tremendously sad, more so than I could ever remember, even compared to my years of meth use. I felt like an outcast, unwanted, barely tolerated. Even when I went on for Rooster for only like the fourth or fifth time the entire year, instead of warming up, I locked myself in the private dressing room and cried. I just wanted to go home.

But I couldn’t. I couldn’t quit.

There was a clause in our contract: Were I to quit the tour, I would incur the cost of hiring a replacement, including but not limited to the cost of holding auditions, renting space for rehearsal, as well as the cost of travel for the replacement.

So, with a little over a month left, as we hit Dallas in early July, I tried to keep my head down and make it through the last few weeks.

Until I lost my engagement ring.

When Michael and I had first met that summer at Springfield Rep, he had a spinner ring on his right thumb. When I would hold his hand, I wouldn’t so much hold it as constantly spin his ring. I told him that if he ever proposed, he better do it with a spinner ring.

And he did!

Ever since we got married I had worn my engagement ring on the ring finger of my right hand.

I always took my rings off before the show and put them back on right after.

Until one day in Dallas. I found my wedding ring where I left it, but my engagement ring was gone. I looked everywhere for it. The dressing rooms, the theater, outside the stage door. I told the stage door attendant to ask the locals to keep an eye out for it, but it never reappeared.

I did have the thought, what if someone stole it? What if “someone” threw it away?” But I had zero evidence of this and I wasn’t about to go around throwing out accusations. In the end I chalked it up to me once again being a flake. I beat up on myself about how careless I could be to lose something so meaningful. I must not have really cared about it at all.

We were in the middle of our last two-show day in Dallas. I needed to grab something back at the hotel, so I grabbed the keys to our assigned rental car and began driving back.

As I was on the highway, I was thinking about how much I didn’t want to do the show that night.

A thought occurred to me, like a whisper, as if I was passively thinking about what to have for dinner.

If I jerk the steering wheel hard enough, I can crash the car and not have to do the show tonight.

I stopped breathing.

For a moment, all the sounds of the traffic around me went silent.

I gripped the steering wheel hard at ten and two, no longer able to trust myself.

I had never, ever, not in all my years, not even during my meth use, had thoughts of self harm.

But there it was. The bell could not be unrung. It continued ringing as I made my way up to my hotel room and cried.

I should have called out. If anyone needed a mental health day, it was me.

But no. That was letting them win. That was admitting defeat. So, I went back and did the show.

To be absolutely clear, I did my show every night. The same show I had been doing for an entire year since rehearsals in NYC. I was a professional, and no one was going to take away my integrity in that.

But I was numb for the remainder of the tour. All my love, all my joy, all my passion for the stage was gone. I didn’t care about the show. I didn’t care about the audience. I didn’t care about the stage.

The stage.

The thing that had given me purpose as a child playing a monkey who loves swinging through the trees.

It had become a place where I felt sad, bullied, alone.

Worthless.

The thing that had been my conduit was now the last place I wanted to be.

It was like a passionate, loving, lifelong relationship had turned horribly abusive and I knew I had to get out even if I had no place else to go.

I didn’t know who I was without the stage.

But I’d come to hate myself on the stage.

After we closed in Hershey, Pennsylvania, the cast rode a charter bus back to the city. I sat alone staring out the window the entire trip. As the bus arrived and let us off behind the Wintergarden Theater in Midtown, I struggled to remain patient and not rush off the bus. When I landed on the sidewalk, while everyone was commiserating and sharing their hugs and goodbyes, I grabbed my bag and walked off without a look or a word to anyone.

I thought I would be relieved and happy that it was over, that I was home, but I wasn’t.

I looked at my whole career through shit-covered glasses, seeing each credit on my resume, with few exceptions, not as experiences I’d enjoyed, but experiences I’d silently suffered through, struggling to belong, struggling to find the joy of that little boy in the monkey costume. From the start of my career to 42nd Street to my second Crazy for You and now calcified with Annie, I saw my entire time in NYC as a fight to sit at the popular kids table. Before, I wasn’t cool enough. After my struggle with meth, I was too broken and damaged.

So maybe it was time.

So maybe it was time to give up the ghost.

So I asked Michael, “How about we move away? How about we leave New York City?”

Chapter Guide

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