Читать книгу Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art - Gene Wilder - Страница 13
ОглавлениеMY HEART IS NOT IN THE HIGHLANDS
I went to Europe that summer, traveling in whichever was the cheapest class on the Queen Elizabeth (the original one). It was only $360.00 round trip. I thought a change of everything might help me.
We were four men in a very small cabin. One of them – an Englishman who was returning from India – told me about a heavenly place in the Highlands of Scotland, called the Isle of Skye … “just goats and sheep, eating their way through the small mountains. Plenty of bed-and-breakfast places to stay in.” After I arrived in London, I decided to go to the Isle of Skye.
The little village of Portree sat at the edge of the water, where small boats came to dock. It was heavenly. Untouched. A simple place of original purity.
Up the cobblestoned street, near the beautiful old post office, stood a small outdoor urinal for travelers who had just arrived. I went in to relieve myself. Scribbled on the wall, in large black letters that faced me as I peed, I saw:
FUCK YOU
On my way back to London, I had to stop overnight in the town of Inverness, which was considered the entrance to the Highlands. After the sun went down, I wandered through the town, eating some fish and chips, and then returned to my small hotel room. I got on my knees and prayed for my usual request, which was to be forgiven for something that I didn’t know I did, and then I took out a notepad and wrote my first poem.
Across three thousand miles of sea and through strange England’s smiling,
and into a wee Scots Highland town there is a lad who’s crying.
Oh fool the world, he could, he could, a man at twenty years …
but all alone in that Highland town there is a boy in tears.
In my senior year at Iowa, I played John Proctor in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. During the dress rehearsal, near the end of the play, I was standing in “a prison” and being asked to sign my name to a false document. My subconscious took over again – as it had once before, when I was sixteen, playing Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. I suddenly burst out with the lines: “BECAUSE IT IS MY NAME! BECAUSE I CANNOT HAVE ANOTHER IN MY LIFE!”
I’m sure every actor who has played John Proctor has burst out with great force – fake or real – when saying those lines, but they came out of me with so much emotion that it startled me and everyone else who was in the theater. Where the emotion came from, I hadn’t a clue. Not at that time, anyway.
My wife in the play was a lovely actress named Joan. We had a date almost every Saturday night, in the home where she baby-sat for the same family. When the baby fell asleep, Joan and I would nestle into an overstuffed chair and watch George Goble on television. We kissed during the commercials. No breasts, no penis. Joan was a good actress and a very good singer. She said she was going to go to New York right after college, to “try her luck.” Each time I kissed her good night, I’d say, “See you in New York!”
