AN ACTOR'S MONOLOGUE:  Having many friends who are actors, I've been asked to write them original audition pieces now and then. Here is one I wrote for my friend, Tom.

When we were waiting on the bench at the Greyhound terminal, my father told me that there were any number of vices in the world, and mine was not any worse than anyone's. He did not lay his hand upon mine, nor did he look me in the eye. He spoke his words slowly, as though dictating his confession to a courthouse stenographer.  He said, that as failings went, drunkenness would always be tolerated. Alcohol crept on the soul as surely as insanity and anyone who did not secretly fear their thoughts could not speak righteously against it. Crime and lying were merely frustrations laid open in his opinon. And pride and vanity were no more than natural. Intolerance, he said, was only wrong when you applied to yourself. My father was a man of old-world beliefs.

Over the bus terminal's loudspeaker, Dan Folkes rambled off half a dozen cities north of Kentucky. I can still hear him slaughtering their names: Charleston, Rockville, Lancaster, Trenton. The last name rang for me as clearly as our family name being called: "New York City." New York. How long I'd dreamt of visiting it. And now that I was headed there, I was terrified. It was then I remember my father performing his last protective act for me. He pulled my paper suitcase between his knees and I could see him draw his lip tightly under his teeth. Men, he said, continuing after a brief pause which burned us both, were creatures filled with fear. The grave moved them in wrong directions. Whether it be the bottle, or women, or gambling, or sin, no one could be blamed for his or her vices. 

And mine, my weakness, was as fair as anyone else's. 

He looked at me and said he knew when I was a boy there was a delicacy in me. A delicacy that would not be tolerated by the men of Harlan County and that, someday, I would be leaving and there would be talk, cheap snickering talk of the Jenkins who left. Of the Jenkins too weak for the mines, without the grit to cut coal, and that the blood he'd raised had no steel. And then, at that momnet, on that rough wooden bench, I felt myself suddenly ashamed and wrong. Ashamed for my father; ashamed of leaving; ashamed of myself and my space in this world. "Pa," I started to say, but he cut me off. He waved his hand, brushing off my unspoken words as needless; his hands black, always black, with anthracite dust. He looked at me full on and said, "Sometimes, when it's in you, when it's in the blood —there's no apologies can be made, cause there's no right or wrong in your soul. And no preacher, no gov'ment, no book cain't tell me otherwise. You're my son. You take care of yourself," and then he dropped his stare down upon the suitcase on the floor. That cheap suitcase, half full of my shirts and half full of his own. The call for the bus came again and behind us we heard the angry hiss of hydrolics braking on King street. 

He stood up and I rose beside him. We shook hands. And for the last time, for the only time I remember, he kissed me, and I walked away.