the master
In October of 2002, Karina and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary with a vacation not far from our apartment in the Bronx: up the Hudson River valley, through tiny Hudson River towns, west to the Shawangunk Mountains, and ending a week later in the piny hilltops of the Delaware Water Gap. A great fall trip: chilly, leafy, brisk. We kayaked around the marshes behind Constitution Island on the Hudson, greeted by cormorants and blue heron and turkey vultures. We took in views of the Highlands and the Catskills and places with names like Storm King and Breakneck Ridge and Gunk.
Our third or fourth day took us on a campus tour of my alma mater in Poughkeepsie, up to Val-Kill and the FDR Library, and further up through Rhinebeck to Red Hook, where we had a room waiting for us at the Red Hook Country Inn. We arrived too late at night to meet an innkeeper, finding our key and instructions in a note on the front desk. The place seemed to be completely empty but for us. We creaked around on old wooden floors, listening for any other signs of life, but hearing nothing.
We expected breakfast the next morning to be ours alone, but by dawn the inn was not at all empty. We were awakened by the Red Hook Rotary Club, occupying the first floor for a breakfast meeting. As the sun came up and we packed our things, we heard the Rotarians downstairs whooping it up, a jolly, well-caffeinated army. Every few minutes they’d all break out into thunderous applause and a noise that sounded like barking.
As we made it down to our own breakfast, their meeting was already dispersing, and we found our innkeeper through a chaos of back-slaps and see-you-laters and ho-ho-hos. Our host explained that our breakfast would consist of whatever the Rotarians didn’t or couldn’t eat. There were leftovers, you see. When we asked about our continental breakfast, the innkeeper rummaged around, grabbed a bag of off-brand English muffins, held it aloft, and announced, “there’s this."
We found the post-meeting buffet table, littered with cold eggs and greasy bacon. The Rotarians had been smoking while they were barking and clapping, so the food we dumped on our plates smelled mostly like Winstons. Also, there was “coffee.”
* * *
While choking down a forkful of egg and hoping to settle up and get out of there, in walks a chubby fellow with a baseball cap, his hair as yellow as the leaves on the sidewalk outside. I look up, and it’s Philip Seymour Hoffman.
"Good morning," he says.
"How you doin’,” I say, in my best New Yorkers Pretend Not To Be Flustered By Celebrities Voice.
He has a companion with him, a young woman. They ignore the Rotary Club carrion, pour themselves some coffee and sit down at the table next to us. I gave Karina a look - you do recognize him, right? I wasn’t sure - at this point in time, he was mostly “that guy from that movie.” What hadn’t happened yet: the paparazzi, the A-list, the Academy Award.
“Of course I recognized him!” she said later, reminding me we had seen Magnolia together not that long before. Oh, right.
At no point do they introduce themselves, and neither do we. But Phillip Seymour Hoffman starts up a conversation with us as if we are the most fascinating people on the planet. And he talks, and talks, and talks.
His voice is deep, his face friendly. We learn he grew up in Rochester, or in a suburb not far from it. He’s proud to be from New York and thinks New York is the Best State. Like us, he and his girlfriend are stopping along some villages along the Hudson on their way back to Manhattan from visiting family upstate. (His family or hers, I don’t recall.)
He loves the Hudson river towns, like us, so we have our vacations to talk about, where we’d been and where we were going. He says he wants to buy a house along the river, even though they just bought a place in the West Village.
He tells us they thought they were the only ones in the inn last night (“so did we!”) and were spooked by the creaky floors of the old building. He was also awakened by the clapping Rotary Club members downstairs at the Inn at sunrise, but said in his dream-state he was convinced they were a cult, audible from the underworld, casting a curse upon him with their injurious applause. He was relieved to come downstairs to find that was not the case.
We learn that the woman with him is the mother of his child, five months pregnant, and has thus far avoided morning sickness, and that he wants his kid to grow up inside and outside the city, both, because New York City is the Best City, and the Hudson River has the Best Valley. There’s a playground, it turns out, just a block or so from his new place in the Village, and he can’t wait to walk his children there.
We know what that means, how rare and miraculous it is to live anywhere in the five boroughs and have open space, room to breathe, anything green within walking distance of where you live. It does sound nice. The playground, the Village, the Dutchess County escape: all perfectly desirable and attainable on a film star’s earnings.
He learns that Karina is from Kansas, that we live in Spuyten Duyvil and that she’s a healthcare consultant; we say we’re thinking about leaving New York to find greater happiness in a greener, brighter, more affordable place. He tells us we don’t have to leave the city to be happy, we can change our jobs and make the most of New York. He has lots of questions, and lots of answers. He seems invested in keeping us close to New York, and keeping us from running away from it too soon. But it’s clear, as he sings the praises of one of the most expensive cities on earth, that money is no object, no obstacle, and to him, happiness is within everybody’s reach. (Does he even know that we know who he is? Is he pretending at anonymity? Should we have said, dude, we loved you in Patch Adams, just to break the ice? Should we have let him know we did not choose to purchase the $2600 nineteenth-century mirrors we saw the day before at a Cold Spring antiques bazaar, but they are probably all still there if he wants one?)
Shy and insecure, I did not say much about myself. He and Karina carried on most of the conversation, while his companion and I politely smiled at each other. So he did not learn that I was an actor and playwright with a great respect for his successful acting and directing work, that I envied his stability in his chosen profession, his ability to exist in the Red Hook Inn on a Tuesday without having to take time off work, and his optimism about buying a place in the West Village and a place in Rhinebeck or Tivoli or Hyde Park, so that he and his child and his soulmate could all have the best of both worlds.
They wished us good luck with our plans. We offered congratulations on the new baby. A few jokes followed about our collective need to find a real breakfast, and it was time to bid a polite farewell, accept a kind handshake, and go our separate ways.
We walked around nearby Rhinebeck in the cold, a little star-struck. I found myself feebly jealous as I replayed the conversation in my head, comparing his lot in life with mine. When confronted by success, I’m sometimes inspired, but more likely to come away with feeling of inadequacy, even in contrast to a rumpled, vulnerable, warts-and-all kind of success: he was as chubby, scruffy, and slouching as you’d imagine him to be, sitting at the breakfast table with his legs spread as far apart as they could go. If he were sitting like that on an F train, he’d occupy three seats. But no matter. He was a success, a true artist, a man doing what he was meant to do.
It’s not that I wanted to be Philip Seymour Hoffman. I didn’t want his fame or his money. But I wanted to be successful at what I wanted to do, like he was. I admired his excellence, found little of it in myself, and hoped a little bit of it would rub off on me via breakfast osmosis. And I wanted to be the kind of person who could walk into the dining room of a smelly inn early on a Tuesday morning, visibly alive, confident, and energetic, and ready to make friends with anyone, even a timid cubicle-looking couple from Riverdale.
* * *
The next day we went rock-climbing in the Gunks near New Paltz. They made it back to Manhattan. Their son was born the next spring, and our daughter the next summer. Against his wishes, we did leave New York to seek our destiny elsewhere. I followed his career with astonishment: Capote, Synecdoche, The Savages, and some legendary theater productions I heard about but never got to see. They had one more kid (so did we), then they had one more (and we did not).
He was clean and sober that morning in Red Hook, enjoying the middle of a long sobriety that would last twenty-three years. There was no reason to suspect that his future held anything other than what he told us he was planning for: kids, loving companionship, connection to family, putting down roots in his favorite places, giving earnest life advice to near-strangers.
I’d go back there, Rotarians and sunrise curses and all, to say: I know there's a vulnerability under the benevolent bluster. I know what you're up against.
I'd give him a warning if I could. I’d plead with him: stay strong, be careful, don’t throw it all away.
But that’s not how addiction works. Nothing I could have said would have stopped the disease from taking over. The addiction won, in the end. I am sure its victory was absolutely against his will.
He was found in the same Village apartment he’d been so proud to have bought for his growing family. Another thing I’d do if I could revisit that day: stop comparing my fortunes to his, and instead see my own life for the accomplishment it is, with wonder and gratitude.
* * *
After our daughter was born, a smart friend wrote to me that “a single delighted clap from your daughter may one day be as meaningful as a room full of applause.” I believe Mr. Hoffman would have agreed.
Our third or fourth day took us on a campus tour of my alma mater in Poughkeepsie, up to Val-Kill and the FDR Library, and further up through Rhinebeck to Red Hook, where we had a room waiting for us at the Red Hook Country Inn. We arrived too late at night to meet an innkeeper, finding our key and instructions in a note on the front desk. The place seemed to be completely empty but for us. We creaked around on old wooden floors, listening for any other signs of life, but hearing nothing.
We expected breakfast the next morning to be ours alone, but by dawn the inn was not at all empty. We were awakened by the Red Hook Rotary Club, occupying the first floor for a breakfast meeting. As the sun came up and we packed our things, we heard the Rotarians downstairs whooping it up, a jolly, well-caffeinated army. Every few minutes they’d all break out into thunderous applause and a noise that sounded like barking.
As we made it down to our own breakfast, their meeting was already dispersing, and we found our innkeeper through a chaos of back-slaps and see-you-laters and ho-ho-hos. Our host explained that our breakfast would consist of whatever the Rotarians didn’t or couldn’t eat. There were leftovers, you see. When we asked about our continental breakfast, the innkeeper rummaged around, grabbed a bag of off-brand English muffins, held it aloft, and announced, “there’s this."
We found the post-meeting buffet table, littered with cold eggs and greasy bacon. The Rotarians had been smoking while they were barking and clapping, so the food we dumped on our plates smelled mostly like Winstons. Also, there was “coffee.”
* * *
While choking down a forkful of egg and hoping to settle up and get out of there, in walks a chubby fellow with a baseball cap, his hair as yellow as the leaves on the sidewalk outside. I look up, and it’s Philip Seymour Hoffman.
"Good morning," he says.
"How you doin’,” I say, in my best New Yorkers Pretend Not To Be Flustered By Celebrities Voice.
He has a companion with him, a young woman. They ignore the Rotary Club carrion, pour themselves some coffee and sit down at the table next to us. I gave Karina a look - you do recognize him, right? I wasn’t sure - at this point in time, he was mostly “that guy from that movie.” What hadn’t happened yet: the paparazzi, the A-list, the Academy Award.
“Of course I recognized him!” she said later, reminding me we had seen Magnolia together not that long before. Oh, right.
At no point do they introduce themselves, and neither do we. But Phillip Seymour Hoffman starts up a conversation with us as if we are the most fascinating people on the planet. And he talks, and talks, and talks.
His voice is deep, his face friendly. We learn he grew up in Rochester, or in a suburb not far from it. He’s proud to be from New York and thinks New York is the Best State. Like us, he and his girlfriend are stopping along some villages along the Hudson on their way back to Manhattan from visiting family upstate. (His family or hers, I don’t recall.)
He loves the Hudson river towns, like us, so we have our vacations to talk about, where we’d been and where we were going. He says he wants to buy a house along the river, even though they just bought a place in the West Village.
He tells us they thought they were the only ones in the inn last night (“so did we!”) and were spooked by the creaky floors of the old building. He was also awakened by the clapping Rotary Club members downstairs at the Inn at sunrise, but said in his dream-state he was convinced they were a cult, audible from the underworld, casting a curse upon him with their injurious applause. He was relieved to come downstairs to find that was not the case.
We learn that the woman with him is the mother of his child, five months pregnant, and has thus far avoided morning sickness, and that he wants his kid to grow up inside and outside the city, both, because New York City is the Best City, and the Hudson River has the Best Valley. There’s a playground, it turns out, just a block or so from his new place in the Village, and he can’t wait to walk his children there.
We know what that means, how rare and miraculous it is to live anywhere in the five boroughs and have open space, room to breathe, anything green within walking distance of where you live. It does sound nice. The playground, the Village, the Dutchess County escape: all perfectly desirable and attainable on a film star’s earnings.
He learns that Karina is from Kansas, that we live in Spuyten Duyvil and that she’s a healthcare consultant; we say we’re thinking about leaving New York to find greater happiness in a greener, brighter, more affordable place. He tells us we don’t have to leave the city to be happy, we can change our jobs and make the most of New York. He has lots of questions, and lots of answers. He seems invested in keeping us close to New York, and keeping us from running away from it too soon. But it’s clear, as he sings the praises of one of the most expensive cities on earth, that money is no object, no obstacle, and to him, happiness is within everybody’s reach. (Does he even know that we know who he is? Is he pretending at anonymity? Should we have said, dude, we loved you in Patch Adams, just to break the ice? Should we have let him know we did not choose to purchase the $2600 nineteenth-century mirrors we saw the day before at a Cold Spring antiques bazaar, but they are probably all still there if he wants one?)
Shy and insecure, I did not say much about myself. He and Karina carried on most of the conversation, while his companion and I politely smiled at each other. So he did not learn that I was an actor and playwright with a great respect for his successful acting and directing work, that I envied his stability in his chosen profession, his ability to exist in the Red Hook Inn on a Tuesday without having to take time off work, and his optimism about buying a place in the West Village and a place in Rhinebeck or Tivoli or Hyde Park, so that he and his child and his soulmate could all have the best of both worlds.
They wished us good luck with our plans. We offered congratulations on the new baby. A few jokes followed about our collective need to find a real breakfast, and it was time to bid a polite farewell, accept a kind handshake, and go our separate ways.
We walked around nearby Rhinebeck in the cold, a little star-struck. I found myself feebly jealous as I replayed the conversation in my head, comparing his lot in life with mine. When confronted by success, I’m sometimes inspired, but more likely to come away with feeling of inadequacy, even in contrast to a rumpled, vulnerable, warts-and-all kind of success: he was as chubby, scruffy, and slouching as you’d imagine him to be, sitting at the breakfast table with his legs spread as far apart as they could go. If he were sitting like that on an F train, he’d occupy three seats. But no matter. He was a success, a true artist, a man doing what he was meant to do.
It’s not that I wanted to be Philip Seymour Hoffman. I didn’t want his fame or his money. But I wanted to be successful at what I wanted to do, like he was. I admired his excellence, found little of it in myself, and hoped a little bit of it would rub off on me via breakfast osmosis. And I wanted to be the kind of person who could walk into the dining room of a smelly inn early on a Tuesday morning, visibly alive, confident, and energetic, and ready to make friends with anyone, even a timid cubicle-looking couple from Riverdale.
* * *
The next day we went rock-climbing in the Gunks near New Paltz. They made it back to Manhattan. Their son was born the next spring, and our daughter the next summer. Against his wishes, we did leave New York to seek our destiny elsewhere. I followed his career with astonishment: Capote, Synecdoche, The Savages, and some legendary theater productions I heard about but never got to see. They had one more kid (so did we), then they had one more (and we did not).
He was clean and sober that morning in Red Hook, enjoying the middle of a long sobriety that would last twenty-three years. There was no reason to suspect that his future held anything other than what he told us he was planning for: kids, loving companionship, connection to family, putting down roots in his favorite places, giving earnest life advice to near-strangers.
I’d go back there, Rotarians and sunrise curses and all, to say: I know there's a vulnerability under the benevolent bluster. I know what you're up against.
I'd give him a warning if I could. I’d plead with him: stay strong, be careful, don’t throw it all away.
But that’s not how addiction works. Nothing I could have said would have stopped the disease from taking over. The addiction won, in the end. I am sure its victory was absolutely against his will.
He was found in the same Village apartment he’d been so proud to have bought for his growing family. Another thing I’d do if I could revisit that day: stop comparing my fortunes to his, and instead see my own life for the accomplishment it is, with wonder and gratitude.
* * *
After our daughter was born, a smart friend wrote to me that “a single delighted clap from your daughter may one day be as meaningful as a room full of applause.” I believe Mr. Hoffman would have agreed.