Confessions of a Left-Handed Man: An Artist's Memoir

Damian (The Green Jacket)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Damian(TheGreenJacket) H e hadn’t had sex in two years, he said. Except for a run around the park now and then, he never exercised. Two weeks out of every month he lived on fruit juice and macadamia nuts, and that’s when not fasting. The rest of the time he ate avocados, bananas, and other fruits. He had wanted to be an actor since he was five years old, when he saw James Cagney in White Heat on TV. He would practice with a toy gun in front of a mirror. You slap me in a dream, you’d better wake up and apologize. He was twenty-four. We met at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. We were both undergraduates . I was a freshman still; I think Damian was a junior. I was there mainly to study painting and illustration, though I had no idea, really, what I wanted to do. I’d done some acting in high school, and Pratt had a theater department. I had yet to totally abandon my dream of becoming a movie star, so I signed up for an acting class. That’s where I first saw Damian. He wore a waist-cut shiny green (it must have been satin or rayon) bombardier jacket with a furry collar over a red T-shirt. The teacher, Nancy, had us doing improvisational exercises. In one exercise we were supposed to be trapped with people in a stuck elevator. I watched Damian and three other classmates do the exercise first. They got into the elevator and acted normally, facing the front, not speaking. Then Nancy said, “Stop,” meaning the elevator had stopped. Everyone reacted in different ways. One student cried, another panicked, a third cracked jokes. Damian’s improv stole the scene. He started convulsing . We couldn’t tell if Damian’s character was having an epileptic seizure or a heart attack. Whatever it was, it was very convincing, so convincing Nancy broke in and cut the scene. But Damian kept convulsing . A thin stream of vomit bubbled out of his mouth and down 82 Damian (The Green Jacket) the front of his red T-shirt. Nancy yelled for someone to go call emergency . That’s when Damian finally broke character, facing us with a toothy grin. It was all part of the act, the vomit and everything. I’d heard of actors crying on cue. Damian could throw up on cue, that’s how good an actor he was. I could have been Damian’s slave, he was so good-looking, like a Puerto Rican young Brando, but with dark brown skin (I was a big Brando fan and considered Marlon the epitome of male beauty). Damian had Brando’s forehead, the same heavy sculpted jaw, the same flat brows, the same thick neck and broad shoulders. He knew he was beautiful, you could tell by the way he walked. Damian didn’t walk; he strutted. I asked him did he ever work out? “Nevah.” He said it just like that, “Nevah,” with a kind of mid-Atlantic accent and a whiff of disgust. “I don’t believe in exercise.” If he didn’t exercise, how did he keep in such good shape? “I was born this way,” he said. “And I eat well.” He flashed me his smile. He had a beautiful smile lit up by a set of bright, large teeth like a bulb illuminating a dark closet. Speaking of things he had been born with, I wondered if his parents named him “Damian,” or had that been his invention? Was he named after the eponymous hero of Hesse’s novel? “Oh, no, no, no, no,” he said, but refused to elaborate or discuss the matter further. He invited me to his home. He lived in Manhattan, on the Upper West Side, in a high-rise apartment building on Amsterdam Avenue. I remember walking into a brightly lit lobby with a security guard and linoleum and waiting a while for the elevator, which had graffiti all over it, and pennies jammed into the round holes drilled into a cover on the porthole window, which had been smashed. Damian lived in a studio on a high floor. Sounds of at least five radios leaked out into the hallway, but once I entered Damian’s sanctuary and he closed the door those noises were left behind, replaced by a woman’s voice crooning some old American standard. “Who’s that singing?” I asked as Damian...