Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art Read Online Free PDF

wronged, including God, of course—and I asked for forgiveness. But in another part of my brain, I was screaming, “FORGIVENESS FOR WHAT?” I had no idea, but the strength of that absurdity couldn’t pierce the armor of my compulsion. When I finished praying, I got up and walked home.
    My mother, my father, and my pregnant sister, Corinne, were all waiting in the living room, dressed in their robes. From the expression on their faces, I thought that someone had died. My mother started crying. My father spoke first:
    “We called the police—they just left here. Do you know whattime it is? It’s three o’clock in the morning! Where were you? What in God’s name were you doing?”
    I couldn’t bring myself to say, “I was praying, Daddy—I was lying in a field, praying to God to forgive me.” And if he had said, “Forgive you for WHAT?” I would have said, “I don’t know!” and he would have say, “For eight hours? Are you nuts?” . . . and he would have been right. So I mumbled something about having fallen asleep in a field because I was so tired. Then I apologized to all of them and went to my bedroom.

chapter 5

MY 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