When I was a kid, back in the days of the Punic Wars, my favorite cousin was my cousin Joe who lived a half a block away. We were actually the only Italian families living in that town on Long Island, both of our families having moved out of Brooklyn for cleaner air, I suppose, and more space, though it was a constant source of friction between my mother and father (he did not want to leave Brooklyn since it was just a short subway ride to work for him at The Downtown Athletic Club in Battery Park but my mother, who always got her way, moved out when he was away in the army without consulting him), but anyway I’m getting off topic here.
My cousin Joe had this habit of talking to himself. You could see him walking down the street mumbling about something, most likely baseball, which was his passion, or else singing, which was his talent. My mother and aunts would shake their heads and say that anyone who talked to themselves was either crazy or had money in the bank, and since even at an early age I knew that he was not someone with money in the bank, I thought it best not to let anyone know that I, too, talked to myself. So I was, for part of my youth anyway, a closet “crazy” person.
Later, though, when I was studying acting, I would lock myself in the downstairs bathroom late at night and practice lines since it was the only place I could have real privacy in a house with three younger brothers, a mother, an aunt, and my grandmother all living together. I would also, apart from memorizing the script, have these long conversations with myself. Soon I started talking to people I knew both out loud when alone or in my head when sitting on the subway, say, or doing laundry in some laundromat, or when stuck in traffic. It became a way for me to work out certain problems with my writing, and also to help come to decisions about choices in life.
Now I find I mostly talk to two people, who, of course, have no idea I have these lengthly conversations with them. Maybe I’m talking about some book I’m reading or film I saw recently (there aren’t very many people to talk about those topics here even though I run the English language program at an arts college) or am discussing some problem one of us is having (you know, giving advice to someone who really doesn’t want advice), or relating some story from the past (both distant & recent). But talking to myself.
I don’t know if my cousin Joe still talks to himself, and I certainly would prefer it if those two people I have conversations with in my head would actually sit down over a cup of coffee or tea or wine, and engage me in an actual dialogue, but at least this way I feel like I’m talking to someone else other than me.
A minor victory, of sorts, but having made it through the sixties in one piece (that’s the 1960s), I’ll take a victory any way I can get it.