Open: An Autobiography

ENTERING THE 1998 U.S. OPEN, I’m number eight in the world. The crowd is fully behind me, which always lifts my spirits, makes me lighter on my feet. In the round of sixteen I meet Kucera, who seems to be trying to irk me with his serve. He tosses the ball, then stops, catches it, and tosses it again. I’m down two sets to love, sorely annoyed by this guy. Then I remember: the better you play Kucera, the better he plays. Hit shit to him, he hits shit back.

That’s it - I’m playing too well! I’m also serving too well. When it’s my serve, I imitate Kucera.

The crowd laughs. Then I hit big goofy moonballs. I irk Kucera, irritate my way back into the match.

Rain falls. The match is held over until tomorrow.

Brooke and I go out for a late dinner with her friends. Actors. It’s always actors. The sky has cleared, so we eat outside at a downtown restaurant with tables on the roof. Afterward, we’re standing in the street, saying goodnight.

Good luck tomorrow! the actors shout as they jump into cabs, off to do some more drinking.

Brooke watches them, turns to me. Her bottom lip is out. She’s torn. She looks like a child caught between what she should do and what she wants to do.

I take a swig from my liter bottle of Gil Water. Go, I say.

Really? You won’t mind?

No, I lie. Have fun.

I take a cab to Brooke’s apartment. She sold the brownstone and bought this place on the Upper East Side. I miss the brownstone. I miss the front stoop where Gil stood guard. I even miss the eyeless, hairless African masks, if only because they were there when Brooke and I didn’t wear masks with each other. I finish my Gil Water, slide into bed. I drift off but snap awake when Brooke comes home hours later.

Go back to sleep, she whispers.

I try. I can’t. I get up and take a sleeping pill.

The next day I have a titanic battle with Kucera. I manage to tie the match. But he has more verve, more stamina. He outduels me in a tough fifth set.

· · ·

I’M SITTING IN A CORNER of our bathroom in Los Angeles, watching Brooke get ready to go out. I’m staying home - again. We talk about why this is always so.

She accuses me of refusing to participate in her world. She says I’m not open to new experiences, new people. I’m not interested in meeting her friends. I could be rubbing elbows every night with geniuses - writers, artists, actors, musicians, directors. I could be attending art gallery openings, world premieres, new plays, private screenings. But all I want to do is stay home, watch TV, and maybe, just maybe, if I’m feeling social, have J.P. and Joni over for dinner.

I can’t lie. That does sound like a perfect night.

Andre, she says, they’re all bad for you. Perry, J.P., Philly, Brad - they coddle you, humor you, enable you. Not one of them has your best interests at heart.

You think all my friends are bad for me?

All but Gil.

All?

All. Especially Perry.

I know she’s been feuding with Perry, that he gave up his producer role on Suddenly Susan. I know she’s irked that I haven’t automatically taken her side in the feud. But I had no idea she was ready to write off everyone else on my team.

Standing, turning from the mirror, she says: Andre, I consider you a rose among thorns.

A rose among - ?

An innocent, surrounded by people who are bleeding you dry.

I’m not so innocent. And those thorns have helped me since I was a boy. Those thorns have saved my life.

They’re holding you back. They’re keeping you from growing. From evolving. You’re une-volved, Andre.

PERRY AND I CHOOSE to set the academy in the worst neighborhood of West Las Vegas, where it can serve as a beacon. After months of scouting locations, trying to find a lot that’s for sale and affordable and capable of accommodating an evolving campus, we find an eight-acre parcel that meets all our requirements. It’s in the center of an urban wasteland, surrounded by pawnshops and homes on the verge of being torn down. It’s on the site of the original Las Vegas, the long-forgotten outpost where settlers first arrived, which was later abandoned. I like that our school will be placed on a site that has a history of abandonment. Where better to initiate the kind of change we envision in the lives of children?

At the groundbreaking ceremony, dozens of politicians and dignitaries and neighborhood leaders are on hand. Reporters, TV cameras, speeches. We push the golden shovel into the litter-strewn dirt. I look around, and I can actually hear the sound of children in the future, laughing and playing and asking questions. I can feel the procession of lives that will cross this spot, and go forward from this spot. I become lightheaded, thinking of the dreams that will be formed here, the lives that will be shaped and saved. I’m so overcome by the thought of what will happen here, in a few years, and many decades after I’m gone, that I don’t hear the speeches. The future drowns out the present.