August 22, 2001 Maybe you'll be out there on that road somewhere; some bus or train, travelling along. In some motel room, there'll be a radio playing, and you'll hear me sing this song. Well, if you do, you'll know I'm thinking of you and all the miles in between, and I'm just calling one last time, not to change your mind, but just to say, I miss you, baby. Good luck. Goodbye.... --- Bruce Springsteen, "Bobbie Jean" I met Teddy when we were both 18. First day of college. He's been my closest friend ever since. Twelve years is a damn long time. Nearly half our lifetimes. We've been apart, separated by miles of American landscape, for most of our relationship. Me still on the East Coast. Teddy first in Iowa and now in San Francisco. But there have always been phone calls and email and airplanes. We've seen each other through some rough and wacky times. Our mutual hatred of Trenton State College; his nervous breakdown at the University of Iowa; my breakup with Matt (my ex-fiance) and subsequent spiral into reckless and irrational behavior; his play getting hammered at the San Fran Fringe Festival; the dissolution and rebuilding of my relationship with Holden. Over the course of a decade, we've both done some irrational, crazy, conceivably unforgiveable things. And yet, each of us has always found forgiveness and understanding in the other. I've made many 3 am phone calls to Teddy, needing to impart some terrible secret, and yet tearfully afraid that this is the time he's going to tell me, "This time you've gone too far. I can't deal with you or your shit anymore." And every time, he's understood and forgiven and talked me down from whatever manic point I was ready to leap from. He once told me, "Katie, you could eat babies and it wouldn't make me love you less." This knowledge -- that I have someone in my life who has seen the darkest side of me and still loves me and will forgive me almost anything -- has been a source of great comfort and security in my rather uncertain, insecure life. And the reverse is just as true. Teddy has done some weird shit since he moved to California. Back in college, he was the stable one. Didn't drink. Didn't smoke. Didn't have sex. Didn't even entertain the thought of drugs. Always did his assignments ahead of time. (Now, before you get the wrong idea about me. I wasn't much wilder. But compared to St. Ted, I was the freaking Devil.) But since his breakdown in Iowa and his move to California, Teddy has been slipping further and further over the edge. He does past life regressions. He got rooked by a psychic into buying an $1800 soul pyramid. Rides a very large motorcycle (which he just cracked up last month, resulting in a severely broken arm). He sleeps around. Drinks like there's no tomorrow. Takes Ecstasy. He came back here last year while Holden and I were in the midst of a major meltdown under the pretext of supporting me and ended up making everything worse, fucking with my head, and nearly destroying me, Holden, and himself in the process. (Holden still won't even allow Teddy's name to enter into our conversations. Unless it's about how he'd like to go to California and murder him. I can't say that I blame him.) And yet, while it may not be the smartest thing I've ever done, I've always forgiven and forgotten and understood. I'm not sure why I've done it, either. It's just the nature of our relationship. I cannot stay mad or indignant, whatever he does. Teddy is my friend. We have a bond. A connection that is stronger that all the bullshit we can throw at ourselves and each other. (Either that, or I'm just very, very stupid and naive. Six of one; half a dozen of another, really.) Teddy's problem is that he's young, lost, and has more money than he knows what to do with. He's got this fucked up notion of the artist as a romantic, wild figure and he's got the means to indulge that notion. He desperately wants to be seen as a creative type rather than a number-crunching actuary and he spends more time living the stereotypical artist lifestyle than actually making art. He tells me that he and his friends are trying to "expand their consciousness" so they can delve deeper into themselves in their creative endeavors; but, frankly, all I see is a bunch of rich, spoiled wannabes playing at being edgy. Then, again, I'm way more provincial than I like to admit and I could be missing the boat entirely. Still, up until recently, I've never been that worried about Teddy. Sure, he's done some reckless things. Sure, he tends to be easily influenced. Sure, he gets sucked into situations that aren't paragons of healthy, rational dynamics. Sure, he's running from himself and his childhood and all of his issues about inferiority and manhood and whatever. But I always figured that he had limits. Then he met Linda. A couple of years ago, Teddy took an acting class, specializing in the Meisner technique. Linda was in the class. She was married, didn't work, and was supposedly concentrating on her career as a jazz singer. Whatever. Anyway, for about a year, Teddy and Linda were friends. However, everyone knew that there was something else going on. Teddy liked her. Linda was married but she slept around. She had an open marriage or some other such bullshit arrangement and she was "exploring herself" by sleeping with random actors, bartenders, studio musicians, her chiropractor -- everyone but Teddy. She fed him some line about how their relationship with on a higher level than the men she just had sex with and she couldn't sleep with him if she was still married to her husband. Then her husband woke up and told her he didn't want an open marriage anymore. He was officially closing it and she had to stop sleeping around. On the surface, Linda agreed; but within six months, she was sleeping with Teddy. But this time the affair was behind her husband's back. As Teddy got more involved with Linda, he started telling me things that made me wonder. She sent him to see an assortment of psychics, healers, past-life regressionists -- each one telling him things that contradicted the others until he didn't know which end was up. They smoked pot together all the time. She introduced him to Ecstacy and they started rolling every chance they got. He kept telling me that it was all in the interest of expanding his horizons. (This endeavor recently culminated in a panicked phone call during which Teddy informed me that while they were tripping, Linda had told him that she knew for a fact that he had been Judas Iscariot, betrayer of Christ; and that he had gone into the bathroom to get some space and clear his head, but when he looked into the mirror, his face morphed into an ancient, Semitic-looking face with a beard and he KNEW that she was right and he was not dealing well with the fact that he was the greatest betrayer in all of human history. Oh, and what's more, since he and I have such a strong cosmic bond, Linda believes that our souls have travelled through time together and I was more than likely one of the other Apostles or Mary Magdalene or someone. My money is on Mary M., although Doubting Thomas would be cool. And my mother says I'm a heathen. Incidentally, Linda was probably an abbess or goat herder or something. Nobody major. Well, bully for her; she doesn't have to deal with having a role in the start of one of the major world religions.) But through it all, I wasn't all that worried. Everyone does crazy things to find themselves. Hell, I eat too much, then starve myself; I drink; I get involved with wacky theater companies; I've renounced my original religion; found a new one; and every time I'm particularly lost, I go back to school. I'm not one to talk. Besides, deep down Teddy was always relatively level-headed. So the stuff about the psychics was good for a laugh. I mean it's not every day that I, a card-carrying Pagan, get told that I was a founding member of Christianity. And that $1800 soul pyramid story -- that was priceless. As for the rest of it: the sleeping with a married woman, the Ecstacy, the drinking, I wasn't thrilled, but Teddy is a big boy and really how much could I do from Pennsylvania? I never hesitated to express my concern and tell him when I thought that he was maybe, kinda, sorta making a mistake, but I always refrained from telling him that what he was doing was wrong. I mean, we'd never JUDGED each other before. (You see where this is going, right?) Well, flash forward half a year. Linda is working on her new jazz CD. She convinces Teddy to commit insurance fraud by telling his doctor that he has bronchitis so he can get a codine prescription for her heroin-addicted, no-health-insurance-carrying record producer. (I ask, "Are you sure that you aren't going to get caught?" and hold my tongue on the subject of certain people who would be better served to ask their husbands to commit insurance fraud for them.) Linda then tells her husband that she needs a separation. Teddy calls to tell me that they are moving in together. (I send him flowers, wish him good luck, and don't say anything about how I think certain new roommates are total flakes and don't question how certain parties who were always supported by their husbands are intending to pay their share of the bills.) It takes a month for them to drive each other nuts and Linda moves out. She moves back into the house that she shared with her husband (he is supposedly living elsewhere) and she and Teddy agree to take a break from each other. (I don't voice my opinion that either the husband is really still living in the house or in lieu of that, there is plenty of male company to keep certain people from being too lonely.) Due to a rather stressful year, most of my communication with Teddy has been over email. Ever since he came out here and managed to make matters worse between me and Holden, phone conversations have been more than a little strained, so we've maintained a facade of coridal communication with electronic letters. A month ago, I got a phone call from him informing me that he'd been in a motorcycle accident, but because of Midsummer, I didn't actually speak to Teddy until last night. He starts off by telling me that things have not been good. I assume this is because of the accident and ask about his arm. He brushes me off. Obviously, an arm broken in two places and doctored up with a metal plate and screws inserted into the bone isn't a very big deal in Teddy's world. And that would be because he's been smoking crack. And, no, I'm not being flip, as in "What are you smoking crack?", I am as serious as a drug-overdose-induced heart attack. Teddy -- the man whom I thought I had known and been close to for 12 fucking years -- is actually smoking crack. At first, he tells me this long, twisted story about Linda and how their relationship is tearing him apart. The keywords for that conversation are "addictive personality," "I had to go and fish her out," and "crack house." So at first, I assume that Linda is the only one who has graduated from Ecstacy to fucking crack. But, no, I am so wrong, it hurts. After another fifteen minutes, where he tells me how he's considering doing this insane therapy where you trip on LSD with one of the original followers of Timothy Leary, Teddy then clues me in on a fight he had with his present therapist because he showed up to an appointment wired and running on no sleep and she told him that he could not indulge in any substance abuse while he was under her care. At that point, I assume that he was either rolling on Ecstacy or drunk, but then he admits to me that, no, he and Linda spent the night smoking crack together. And the kicker is that he's pissed that the therapist told him he couldn't smoke crack if he was going to continue treatment with her. So he's switching to the LSD guy ASAP. And, oh, but it gets worse. This wasn't the first time that he's smoked crack. (I would have been much more okay with it if it was the first time.) He's done it many times before. Not that he's as bad as Linda who repeatedly disappears for two to three days and then has to be dragged (by Teddy) out of their friendly, neighborhood crack den. Plus, Linda has finally gotten a job. As a "masseuse." Even better, it was her MADAME who recommended the LSD therapy guy to him! None of this -- not a single, solitary, sordid detail -- seems to strike Teddy as wrong. He's perfectly okay with all of it. The drugs, even the freaking crack, are tools for opening his mind. He's made it clear to Linda that she cannot whore herself out if they ever get fully back together, but for now, when they're just sleeping together, it's fine; and he's really looking forward to the LSD treatment. He's a little nervous, but mostly he's excited for it. And I'm such an idiot that I sat there on the other end of the phone and listened to my friend tell me that he is smoking crack, taking LSD as a form of psychological treatment, and dating a prostitute, and all I said was "Promise me you'll be careful." Forget Teddy, what is wrong with me? Scratch that. I know exactly what's wrong with me. I have spent my life so completely convinced that I am *not cool,* that I wouldn't know "edgy" or "hip" if they slipped a roofie into my drink, a part of me still buys into Teddy's whole tortured-artist-living-the-wild-life bullshit. So I sit here and listen to him tell me exactly how he's destroying his life and I say nothing because I don't want to be that girl at the sleepover who's whining, "But, guuuuys, we're not supposed to drink beer. And Sandy's mom is gonna be pissed if she finds out that we snuck out to meet those boys." But you know what? I may not wear Armani or Versace -- hell, even Banana Republic won't let me in the door -- and I can't find anything to fit my fat ass in a friggin' vintage store and I don't take Ecstasy because I wouldn't know where to find someone to sell it to me and I don't attend classes on the Meisner Technique but I do know quite a few actors and writers and artists. I hang out with writers here in Philadelphia and with NEW YORK ACTORS (I mean, if anyone is hip, it's gotta be a New York actor, right?). And all of them are artists and none of them are doing things as stupid as smoking crack and calling it expanding their horizons. Sammy doesn't even drink. Sabrina has two glasses of white wine every once in a while and calls it quits. Fenton's big vice is ice cream -- freakin' *ice cream*. The rest may drink a little too much, smoke a little pot, but nothing more than that. And to the best of my knowledge no one is dating any hookers either. What's more is that despite my own insecurities and completely whacked self image, when you boil things down to their most basic, I, Kate, am an actor and a writer and a creative person and I know damn well that all of this self-destructive behavior is not essential to being a vital, working artist. That whole view of the self-destructive, drug-abusing, out of bounds artist, at least in this day and age of AIDS and addiction, is a fairy tale, perpetrated by insecure, wealthy jerks who can afford to live the heroin-addicted, seemingly down and dirty lifestyle without paying the consequences. Teddy is totally out of control. He's crossed over the line. (I'm not quite sure why smoking crack and sleeping with a hooker is crossing the line more than rolling on Ecstacy or sleeping with a married woman, but at least in my own internal code of behavior, a line has been crossed.) Besides, this has nothing to do with morality. I am not judging his behavior as wrong in the moral sense. It's wrong because it is a sure path to self-destruction. It's out of control and dangerous and completely not smart. I can't believe Teddy doesn't see what he's doing to himself. However, the worst thing for me (on a purely selfish level, I guess) is that I don't feel safe with Teddy anymore. I used to cherish the fact that he and I had a friendship that could withstand anything, that he was someone who would love me and forgive me for anything. But now I wonder how special can that quality of unconditional love and forgiveness be when the person giving it to you has no boundaries or self control himself? How can I invest myself in a friendship which must mean little to nothing to him since his own Goddamn life means little or nothing to him because he is willing to take such risks with it. Believe me, I'd love to blame Linda completely for this -- but I know that Teddy makes his own choices and she hasn't forced him to do anything. For the first time, I feel like Teddy is someone that can't be in my life. Last year, I buried a friend for the first time. Kieran was thirty years old and he killed himself and he is never coming back. I understand that I am approaching an age where I will start to lose friends, but I don't think I can stand to repeat the experience so soon or under such stupidly tragic circumstances. I guess the upshot is that I don't know what to do. I'm scared for Teddy, but that doesn't mean much when he's not scared for himself. I'm also a little scared OF Teddy. I don't really want to talk to him, to have to listen to him recount more of this stupid behavior and expect me to be supportive or at least non-judgemental. I don't want to invest in this situation just to have it end as badly as Kieran. I don't want another one of those phone calls. (True, Kieran took his life willingly, but I don't see how doing crack and LSD and having dangerous sex isn't just as willfully signing your own death certificate.) I don't want to be standing beside another grave for someone who shouldn't have been there for years and years and years. Maybe I'll send Teddy a letter. Tell him all of this. Maybe I should call his parents and his brother. Hold an intervention. Maybe I should just let go and hope he straightens himself out. You know, they never tell you that life is going to be this hard in high school.

7 Deadly Sins and Other, Less Fatal Diversions Pride: I'll tell you what I'm not proud of: all this weight I gained while on the road with Midsummer. Apparently, I subscribe to the utterly false theory that calories consumed when away from home don't count. My return to normal eating is just about the only good thing about the tour's end. Envy: Insanely jealous of Kendra who can eat anything and everything and stay rail thin. Wrath: Linda is lucky she lives on the West Coast and I can't afford a plane ticket just now. Sloth: Maybe sleeping until 1pm every day isn't such a good idea. Avarice: Where the hell is my student loan money so I can go on a freakin' spending spree????? Gluttony: Still don't feel like eating much of anything. Still attributing my lack of appetite and out of control sleeping to post-show depression. Lust: Belzer is still the object of my desire. I guess another positive point of the tour ending is that I get to watch Special Victims Unit again. Angst: Man, I start journaling again and all of a sudden my angst level goes through the roof. Forget theater, maybe journaling isn't so healthy. Book: Cervantes' Don Quixote. And it will be forever if I don't actually sit down and READ it. Tune: Counting Crows -- "I Wish I Was a Girl": For all the things I'm losing, I might as well resign myself to try and make a change.... I wish for all the world that I could say, 'Hey Elizabeth, I'm doing all right these days.' Obsession: It's not an obsession, but I think this little crush on Fenton should count for something. I'm hoping it has faded by the time I see him again. Task at Hand: Tracking down someone at University A who can tell me when and where I'm supposed to be teaching next week.