Don’t Act, Reason #3: You will be broke.

I know, I know.  It’s another cliché.  Actors spend a good portion of their lives scrounging together whatever loose change they can to afford the next meal.  But clichés are clichés for a reason.  They’re true.  (Except for the one that says “it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity” which is really only true regionally.)  Now, a lot of struggling actors that I know come from wealthy backgrounds and they don’t really have to work to make ends meet; they’re just buying themselves an occupation with what’s in the trust fund.  (If you are one of these people, by the way, I harbor a secret desire to slap you in the mouth.  And then pee on your shoes.  And I don’t mean these things in some weird, sexual way, either.  Well, okay, maybe a little.)  Anyone else, however, has to live a verse from an old Drifters song:

“They say the neon lights are bright on Broadway,

They say there’s always magic in the air,

But when you’re walkin’ down the street

And you ain’t had enough to eat

The glitter rubs right off and you’re nowhere.”

            Toward the end of my time living in the near vicinity of The Great White Way, I wasn’t able to afford a place in Manhattan and I was forced to find a new dwelling in Astoria, Queens.  The only reason I had ever been able to live in Manhattan in the first place was because I was in college and my parents were footing the bill for food, shelter and tuition.  And being broke as an NYU student didn’t feel like such a big deal to me since the money I had to scrounge went to things like beer and movies and pot and pizza.  I didn’t have to worry about a little thing called “overhead.”  But once I graduated, I was on my own, and food and rent cost a lot more than I could afford.  The job I worked paid only eight bucks an hour, and that’s not enough to make it happen in The Big Apple.[1]  The only place I could afford on my salary (for lack of a better word) was a one-room shack at the back of an alleyway.  I shared it with two roommates who put up cheap walls to divide the place into three rooms.  One was a pothead who smoked at least one blunt (that’s a joint rolled in cigar paper—very large—for the uninitiated) every day, and the other was a fair-skinned vegan who ate only green vegetables and had only one bowel movement a week which gave his skin a greenish hue and made me rather anxious. 

Both of my roommates were allergic to cats, so we had none, but all the neighbors had several felines apiece which meant that the neighborhood mice made their home in our shack.  The mice ate my food, chewed holes in the sweat marks on my dirty laundry, and chewed through my speaker wire (my stereo being the only possession for which I had any pride; my other possessions were an uncomfortable bed and a decrepit dresser.)  Before attempting sleep, I often would pull the blankets back to find several of these critters having a warm nap in my bed.  I became obsessed with killing all the mice in Queens, and I am generally a very peaceful person.  After trying all manner of traps and poison, I found the most efficient way of killing them was to put out a glue trap on the minute kitchen’s floor, turn off all the lights, and then sit poised atop a stool with a hammer in hand.  I would wait that way until one of the mice had the misfortune of getting himself stuck on the trap.  Lest you think I was being cruel, if I hadn’t smashed the thing to death after leaping with a triumphant howl from my perch, then the little guy would tear himself off the trap, leaving behind a tail or a leg and a trail of blood all over my belongings most likely only to bleed to death somewhere inside the wall.  If you believe I was acting insane, you are absolutely right.  I was enraged by these infringing mice, and most of the time I was home I was completely stoned off of one of my roommate’s blunts because that was the only way to deal with living in such a hovel.  Yes, drugs were the only way: if you think I was weak, I dare you to try to live like that for a year.  Guaranteed, you will be completely fried on whatever mind-altering substance you can get your hands on.  I was lucky my roommate was a pot dealer and appreciator of the finest herb.  Otherwise, I might have been sucking off a Freon hose from the air conditioner.  Not that we had an air conditioner.  Or heat.

And in Poor Land, mice aren’t the only reason to stay stoned.  There are the neighbors.  I once lived next to a guy who claimed to be the president of the Manhattan Chapter of the Young Republicans Club, and he was always stopping by our apartment uninvited in the middle of the night to tell us about the great time he had just had at a strip club.  On our other side was the shut-in lady who only came out of her apartment to walk her retarded Doberman.  If our door was ever open even a crack, he would break from her and bust into our place to steal one of my Goofy slippers.  (Yes, I had slippers shaped like Goofy.  And the Doberman was obsessed with them.)  Then shut-in lady would come over to return the slipper and sit on the sofa to smoke her Virginia Slims and talk my ear off.  One night, my roommate got home at two in the morning while I was trying to write an essay for class, and the Doberman suddenly busted in to grab a slipper.  Soon, shut-in lady was smoking cigarettes and yammering while I continued to try to write.  My roommate never shut the door, to give her the hint we didn’t want her sticking around too long.  Twenty minutes later the Young Republican poked his head through the door.  What happened then was astounding.  The two of them began having a conversation as if my roommate and I weren’t even there.   The Young Republican was apparently allergic to dogs because his nose started literally draining snot, but he refused to leave, so engrossed he was with the shut-in lady.  They discussed her dog.  He said, “I love these guys, but they kill me.”  She answered, “They kill you?  Look at this.”  Then she pulled her upper row of teeth out of her head, explaining that the dog had jumped for a ball and slammed into her jaw.  The Young Republican then said, “Oh, yeah?”  And then he pulled his teeth out of his head!  Now, I would have demanded that they leave, but chances were quite high that they were both homicidal maniacs, and I didn’t want to die.  I had mice to kill.

            On New Year’s Eve of the year I was living in Astoria, I came down with one of the worst fevers of my life and at the same time the heat stopped working in the shack.  The slumlord didn’t give a damn, refused to do anything about it, and since we were subletting the place illegally, we had no legal leg on which to stand.  I called my parents and told them I needed to come home, get a job, and save up money so I could move to Los Angeles (after paying off thousands in credit card debt, naturally.)  A year later, I was in a two bedroom apartment in Los Angeles with one roommate.  The carpets were vile (to be made worse with our cigarette burns and spilled bong water) and the only two pieces of furniture were a couple of plastic chairs donated to us by an actress friend of ours from NYU.  That same friend also gave us a tiny television that only received the UPN,[2] which we kept on top of a stack of empty cardboard boxes.  I slept on the floor, my pillow the stinky carpet.  And in my mind, things were good.  I had traded upward.

            I realize that this struggle that I describe, this painful endeavor to live as an actor, is completely self-imposed.  I didn’t have to suffer.  I didn’t have to act.  I could have gone to work for any number of corporations that would have ultimately set me up with a nice house and flat-screen plasma television.  (Of course, that would have required that I majored in something other than theater at NYU, such as business or computer technology or science.)

            Now, most don’t stay in this state of being the pauper forever (although last I heard my greenish ex-roommate from Astoria was maintaining that status quo.)  Unfortunately, most do one of two things: either they quit and fall back on something more lucrative and sensible which they had once studied “just in case,” or they become ludicrously good at a “survival job” such as waiting tables or temping (and pretty soon they can’t really call themselves “actors” anymore, but “temps” or “waiters” because that’s all they have time for in order to maintain a decent standard of living.)  The lucky ones, like me, eventually get enough acting work to pay for furniture and decorations to distract from the nauseating brown carpet in the lousy two-bedroom apartment in which they still live.

            Save yourself the vicious step of being broke, and just jump right into a lucrative profession, will ya?  Sure, it may not be creatively satisfying; it may not “fill your soul.”  But guess what?  I know lots of people who have filled their souls with nice stuff.  And expensive pies.