Free Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent by Anthony Rapp Page B

think it’s funny that you play all of these strange characters, because to me you’re such a regular guy.”
    “Well, I don’t know. I think this is one of the best things I’ve ever done. I get to be so different from myself, and that’s very exciting for me.”
    “I guess so.” She nodded, almost imperceptibly frowning. “I’m sure you’re wonderful in it, I think you always do a good job, but sometimes I just want you to, you know, play a nice, regular person.”
    “Well, maybe in the next thing I do I’ll get to do that.”
    “I hope so.”
    What we weren’t directly discussing was the homosexual content of the play. Mom and I had had a long history of talking—and not talking—about my sexuality, never to my full satisfaction, and I didn’t know where she stood with regard to it now. But given her discomfort with the subject, I was fairly certain that my being in a gay play was an issue for her. I toyed with pressing the conversation further but decided against it. I didn’t want to create friction during my short stay.
     
    Later, as I was helping Mom do the dishes, I asked her about her neck brace.
    “Oh, it’s nothing,” she said, the steam from the sink fogging her glasses. “My neck’s been bothering me a little, is all.”
    I dried silverware in silence for a moment.
    “Well, I hope it feels better.”
    “Oh, I’m sure it will.”
    I never knew how much to believe Mom when she talked about how she was feeling; she had a high tolerance for pain. When I was a tiny baby, she slipped and fell down a flight of stairs while clutching me to her chest, cushioning and protecting me from the pounding her body took. I wound up unhurt, but even though she was quite injured, she walked away from the fall without going to the hospital, and from that day forward she suffered from chronic flare-ups of back pain.
    Over twenty years later, after one of the many sessions of scans for any traces of Wild Bill, her oncologist asked her if she’d ever broken her back.
    “Not that I know of,” she said.
    “Well, if it had happened, I think it’s something you’d probably know about.”
    “I had a bad fall once, a long time ago, but I walked away from it.” “Really? Well,” he said, showing her the X-ray, “there is evidence here of a badly healed fracture.”
    “Huh,” Mom said.
    “So it would appear you did in fact break your back after all.”
    “Well, I guess I did.”
     
    Roberta and Chris and Bonnie and I took a walk that night, but Mom opted to stay in. “I’m a little tired,” she said. “You guys go on without me.”
    “You sure?” Roberta said. “It’s beautiful outside.”
    “No, I’m okay.”
    “All right then.”
    Mom was an avid walker. She took her dog Zelda out for frequent walks of over a mile almost every day, in any kind of weather. When she was in Toronto with me while I was filming Adventures in Babysitting, she’d often walked the several miles to the set. One day the cast and crew van was stuck in traffic during a heavy snowfall, and Mom beat us to the soundstage, impressing everybody in the van by chugging past us at a steady and implacable pace, her pale cheeks shining a rosy glow, her breath pluming out before her. So it was unusual for her not to join us.
    “Have fun, guys,” she said as we bundled up and shuffled out into the crisp, frigid, clear Wisconsin night. And as we made our way down the pitch-black road, our flashlights bobbing their irregular circles and ovals on the pavement, no one remarked on her absence, even though it was like a noisy flare trailing after us. We all knew what her staying behind probably meant. But we didn’t discuss it. To discuss it would be to say that it was real, and no one wanted to say that it was real, no one wanted that at all.

Getting
it All
    I n February 1995, while I was in rehearsals for an off-Broadway production of Nicky Silver’s play Raised in Captivity (yet another show in which I was not a “nice,