I doubt you’re keeping tabs, but it’s been five years.  I can’t believe that even as I write it down.  Five years?  Can that be right?

Tuesday, to be exact.  April 7th.  I remember I was in the lighting booth of that little black box theater at H.E.R.E. on Sixth Avenue, the one whose backstage/wing space opened right out into the bar (brilliant!) and I was playing some music and getting ready for that night’s performance of my production of The Viy and Tom Cappadona (with us on the far left in the picture above) cut across the stage with that kind of walk you know means bad news.  I remember Michelle Maryk was shadowing him, doing that same walk, and they both had their heads down like they were marching into the wind and I remember half-thinking, “Oh, this isn’t good.”  And it wasn’t.  “We lost Victor,” Tom said on the tail of a breath I think he’d been holding a long while.

It kind of takes me a while to let things really get to me.  I remember embracing Tom in that moment less because I needed a hug (although he did) but more to buy me time, I think.  I’ve always been a little too heady, I guess, and I needed to let those words bounce around in my head a while.  “We lost Victor.”  I’ve gone back to that moment a lot over the past five years, replayed it, freeze framed it, ran it backwards.  I know just what you’d say, “What a waste of time,” but I’m that way.  And you know how it is – when somebody dies, it’s like when your place gets burgled.  The big moment of discovery isn’t nearly as painful as all those little moments that follow where you realize this thing is gone, and that one… and that one… and that one.  I knew you for nearly 10 years and I remember one of the first times we hung out was just after you shot BLUE IN THE FACE (1995) and you were telling everybody in the bar what fun you had.  I loved seeing you in that, too, playing the guitar and being a regular guy rather than the thug they usually cast you as.  I loved that your name came first on the poster.  Man, we had fun back then.  All those late nights at The West Bank, staying out late, laughing – well, I laughed.  Mostly at you and Tom going after one another, piling insult upon insult, while I cackled like Dwight Frye.  Remember the drive back from the Williamstown Theatre Festival with Tom and Pam Wilterdink and we sang songs all the way home.  Tom sang that Frankie Avalon song and I sang “Oh Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie” and you said “Man, you’re a good singer.”  Remember Harvey’s Christmas party in 2000?  You made pecan pie and kept telling everybody “Eat, eat, there’s so much food.”  I wish more people knew that side of you, the sitting up late singing Spanish songs or talking about THE PLANET OF THE APES (1968) and laughing side of you.  You were good company.  I enjoyed the challenge of being your walking Film Encyclopedia, filling in the blanks on your faulty memory (did you ever actually take any of the ginko baloba you always talked about picking up?).  This conversation was classic.

You: Who’s that actress? Was in the movie about Vietnam. Cries a lot.

Me: Meryl Streep?

You: Yeah, that’s her.

Tom and I used to call you The Oracle because you’d just say things out of the blue, like the time you said “Anything can happen… on any given day.”  It was the “on any given day” part that got me and I quickly wrote that down in my little notebook, the way I did back then.  But anyway, yeah, five years.  I can’t imagine what you’ve been up to.  We were both on the same page in terms of religion, so maybe nothing.  Nobody enjoyed doing nothing better than you, so maybe that is Heaven.  I have two kids now, you may or may not know.  We had a girl in August of 2005 and named her Vayda Jane and we had a boy in May of 2007 and we named him Victor, in honor of you.

I often refer to him as Li’l Vic but he’s growing up fast and by the time he’s 12 he’ll probably be taller than you ever were.  Sometimes I think he looks like you, which as you know is impossible, however fond you may have been of Barbara.  One night not long after Vic was born he was up for a bottle, the wee hours, and I put on the TV while I fed him and NEW ROSE HOTEL (1998) was on IFC.  It was near the end of the thing and I didn’t know what the hell was going on but I heard your voice in a scene where Willem Dafoe is on the telephone and it was kind of nice for me to think Vic could hear the voice of the guy he was named after.  We have a picture of you that has always been in the kids’ room – in the room they shared in our place in North Hollywood and now in Vic’s room in Sherman Oaks, where we bought a home last year.  Yeah, we bought a home in Los Angeles – can you believe it?  I guess we’re here to stay, at least for a while.  We live near Hank Meiman (pictured with us on the far right) and Betsy and their boy, who is going to be 7 this year, if you can believe that.  I often drive around town and think of the years you put in here, making crap movies like THE DON IS DEAD (1973) and popping up on TV shows like BUCK ROGERS and STARSKY AND HUTCH - I watched an episode of that the other day and liked seeing you play one of your patented scumbags.  You know what I saw not too long ago though and really liked you in?  LULU ON THE BRIDGE (1998).  Truth be told, the movie kind of gave me a headache but I loved your scene with Mira Sorvino, in the restaurant your character owned.  The character was so you – worldly but streetwise, relaxed but opinionated.

Well anyway.  I don’t want to go on gabbing.  I was always a little anxious about being able to hold your attention and I guess that’ll never change.  But I just wanted to write and say hey and that I miss you, buddy, and I’m kind of glad I don’t live in New York anymore because I’d always be cutting across the Village expecting to see you walking the other way and I don’t know if I could deal with that year after year.  I don’t know if I could ever go by your old place or even drink a Bass ale at the West Bank and not feel sad.  I’d rather think about the laughs and the stories and the few times we got to act together on stage and how honored I was to share the spotlight with you, even when you forgot the lines I wrote for you.

Hey, I found this clip on YouTube from HOT TOMORROWS (1972), with you and Ray Sharkey and Hervé Villechaize.  You’re all gone now.  You ever see those guys these days?

Well, anyway.

See ya.

Richard