Free Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir by Ron Perlman Page A

needed the meds, but he eventually refused to take them. He said he couldn’t play drums when he was on the drugs. Like most who suffer from the disease, my brother just said, “Fuck this.” He felt so good in the upside of manic depression that he simply believed other people just didn’t understand. All that free associating to the manic is empowering, and they feel phenomenally brilliant. When my dad or anybody said, “You’re outta control. You need to take the damn medication,” my brother would laugh and say, “What are you talking about? This is the best I’ve felt in my whole fuckin’ life.” That’s the trouble with the manic side of manic depression—you feel fuckin’ fantastic!
    The family was rocked considerably. My brother had numerous outbreaks, with at least another eight serious enough to require further hospitalization. All of it took a horrible, horrible toll on my dad. First of all, my dad kept saying there was no such thing as mental illness in our ancestry, so it couldn’t have been that. There was always this kind of tension between him and my brother. Maybe because my brother was the first and a trailblazer; they’d been butting heads since Les was a kid. There’s often a dynamic like that between the first-born son and a father. The tension grew until one of the ugliest things I witnessed between my father and brother happened. My brother was rambling about some semicoherent nonsense that also had phases in it in which he put my dad down and mocked him. My father lost it and starting swinging at Les. He yelled with each punch, “You can’t fuckin’ talk to me like that!”
    My brother just looked at him like, “Fuck you.” He didn’t seem to even feel it. It was ugly. I didn’t get in the middle of it, but I remember thinking Dad was wrong. Les needed hugs, fucking real help. But neither my dad nor I knew how to reach the old Les. Where was the person who was his son? Where did my big brother I knew go? My father believed he could find the solution to anything by putting hard work and effort into it. But this?
    My mother tried her best, but she didn’t have the resources. None of them had the resources. None of them understood anything. My mom was worried for my dad then because clearly she’d never seen him like this. We had never seen him get into a situation in which he didn’t know what to do. He was a very capable guy. He’d been in the Army; he’d seen it all. He served during wartime. He came up on the streets of New York. This was a guy who always prided himself on knowing what to do. And then he gets into a situation in which he’s completely fucking helpless. And everything he’s trying backfires on him. He didn’t know how to deal with Les. It killed him that he didn’t know how to save his own blood, his son. The stress of it could have had something to do with what eventually caused his fatal heart attack two years later. I’ll never know.
    I suddenly realized how the stress at home that last year had made me immerse myself into theater and the drama department even more. It was such a relief to become absorbed into a character, making believe I was someone else, someone with a different life. Yet there was no discernible cause and effect that I brought to school or performances. My love of theater didn’t need anything to enhance it or any external torment and suffering to expand it, but obviously I welcomed having theater to get a reprieve from the discontent and sadness that filled our apartment.
    As I mentioned, the emotional stuff in life surely can be used in a performance to help give a character an authenticity. As for me, there’s no magical Zen thing; there’s no switch you can flick on. The transformative process of becoming the character is a result of the performance. Even if I am escaping reality, I try to tap into emotions that have to do with the human condition, those things we all go through, the sufferings and the joys. That’s what