I threw the dinner table over and finished that scene from A Streetcar Named Desire where Stanley flips his lid at Blanche for the first time at the dinner table.
It was an intense scene and i had teared and grabbed my wife’s tits during the scene in front of the class and I can only assume it was fairly entertaining to watch.
then it was over.
So Greg, please, tell us how you got there?
got where?
Were you able to relate this character to your life?
uhh yeah.
And can you tell us about it?
uhh no.
Greg…
and then started the same fuckin lecture every authority figure had ever given me at the Atlantic Acting Conservatory since the day I had gotten there…
If you don’t wanna be here Greg, just leave..
oh i don’t wanna be here? that’s why i rehearsed this fuckin scene twenty times and I come to class every day and pay tuition (parents pay tuition) and do every fuckin thing you ask me to do and–
–you’re not a part of the group
you’re right! cause i don’t HAVE to be a part of the group, i do my fuckin WORK and–
Greg, please… I’m done with this.
And so I picked up a chair and chucked it at the wall.
The class of thirty paused in horror.
The teacher looked at me like i was a goddam psycho.
I don’t even remember what the hell she said–the teacher–after I did that… but all i know is I punched the wall right after, the cement wall, and hurt the shit outa my hand.
Then a letter came in the mail… first semester had just ended and I was SURE i would be getting the fuckin oscar.
Nope.
“Please do not come back.”
That’s what the letter said.
My friend Crystal petitioned to get me back at the school, but shit… they were done with me. plus fuck it. I was selling too much pot to be a student at the time anyway. I was dating my co-star from a play I had done called Manuscript by Paul Grellong and I had a promising career as an alcoholic ahead of me that was far too inviting to give up.
I was glad to have more freedom. It was time to do something BIG!
REWIND:
So here’s why I was at that acting school to begin with, because before the girl I had then been dating, my co-star from Manuscript, that other play I told you about that I produced… Before alllllllll that happened it was News Year’s eve and I had just broken up with my FIRST girlfriend of five years, KC… Which if you’ve been following along you know our immense history (we lived together from 17-21 in like three states at like seven different apartments).
this was the night we broke up.
On New Years Eve of 2006 I think, and so I went to a pub on Queens blvd right after our blow up fight and got slammed and called my agent… Manager, rather, she was the assistant to a well known ex-William Morris agent named Myrna Jacoby and she discovered me at one of the other plays I had produced called Tape (they made a movie version too) and I had since been going on very big auditions, almost landing life-altering roles every other day.
How she found me, my agent, was I was playing the part that Ethan Hawke played in the movie version of Tape in the theatre and there was this beautiful girl I had cast that was playing the part Uma Thurman played in the movie version.
My agent had originally come to scout out the girl playing Uma’s role cause I think Myrna used to rep her (Uma) and so she sent her assistant to go look at the female lead but instead, her assistant liked me.
Anyway I woke up in the morning with an email that said ‘don’t know if you’re represented but I would love to work with you’… so yeah, that’s how I got my high profile agent.
anyway, it had been about a year or so that I had this agent and that i was auditioning for major roles in huge movies, but since i was so fucked up on xanax at every audition, my agent told me to go to acting school… which is why i was at Atlantic Acting Conservatory, the school I chucked a chair at then got the boot.
So now you know why I was at that conservatory.
But I digress. Here’s how I LOST that agent…
I called her up one lonely night, after a year working together, and told her my whole life story and how she was the only person in the world that actually believed in me.
“BUT YOU BELIE IN ME AN THAS WHY IMLOVE YOU FOR THAT CAUSE YOU KNOW IMA NEVR UHHH–”
I was drunk as fuck and proceeded to tell her my sad tale from this small shitty pub on Queens Blvd in Forest Hills.
I was one of four other drunkards in the joint and lord knows all the shit i unloaded on this poor woman, so here’s what i did:
I woke up again, as people tend to do the next morning… super embarrassed about what I had done, and I called her up and basically fired her. She agreed. I was a nut. She had helped as much as she could, but I was hopeless.
So… I did what any other twenty-four year-old actor-gone drug-dealer would do.
I came up with an idea.