I had a month of shiny subway tokens. My good-boy gabardines were wearing thin at the crotch. Buddy was tight chinos and the anger of a boy with too many stepfathers. The girls in class loved the way his muscles twitched and stretched like homeless snakes. They must've felt delightfully cornered.

There was sadness too in the way he moved and mumbled
the names of Caesar's assassins. If I were a cowboy, it would've felt like the death of a favorite steer.

Teach me to feel, I said to my acting coach, Stella Adler.

That year Brooklyn was losing its elm trees and suicides were kept out of the papers. I was in love with an opera singer named George. We were both poor, down on the shoeshine, but in love. I thought of us as two kites, slowly drifting apart, an artificial cloud between us. In time, I would be attracted to more dangerous men.

You're all in the anal stage, announced Stella to the class. Learn to let go. Let it out! Let all the shit out!

So I closed my eyes and became Brooklyn, felt its fierce strength though my veins, but inwardly I bled. I had lost all my old heroes.

Meanwhile Buddy raised a knife over his head. He was not Caesar but tragedy itself. Rocking his head back, he too closed his eyes and said, Death is everywhere. I can feel it. I will not run from it. He said, When Brutus knocks at your door, let him in. He will stab you three times. But it's not the fact of your death or that you could have prevented him from entering your house. It's the way you die that's the thing, groping for life, finally becoming the person you always pretended to be. No longer the little boy blue for your dead mothers.

He drew the knife across his pinky.

The class became silent.

We were mesmerized by the trickle and the drop.
 
Stella disappeared and came back. She threw an enormous white sheet over us. And we reached and grappled and frolicked through the sheet. With all our faces the same, we became each other's ghost. A strange electricity passed through us—an alternating current of love and rage.

And Stella's lesson then became clear: We were that sheet— No—
We were the whiteness of it.