The David Mamet Dream | The Dreamweaver

I had seen on TV that David Mamet was in town and had moved into a five star hotel in New York City. I was watching the news and a report it showed him walking down the street wearing a white linen suit with sandals and he had a beard and mustache and long gray hair that he wore in double braids pinned to the back of his head.

I decided to take advantage of the opportunity and knowing where the hotel was, I came up with a plan to go there and wait for him and at the right moment walk up to him and hand him my book.

Then, one afternoon I was standing outside of my house watching as some fire trucks were going by with their sirens blaring and all of a sudden David Mamet himself walks right in front of me and my young daughter. Remembering that the hotel where Mamet was staying was nearby, I rushed into the house where there was some sort of gathering going on, ran over to the bookshelf and hurriedly grabbed two copies of my book. While running back out of the house, I quickly tried to open the books to the copyright page to make sure that I grabbed the right editions but was in such a state I couldn’t even open the book to the right page. I gave one of the copies to my daughter who assured me they were the right ones because she had opened it immediately to the copyright page to see that it was indeed the second edition. Soon after, I finally managed to find the copyright page in the book I was holding only to see that it was a first edition, and not only was it a first edition copy, it was a galley copy that contained my handwritten notes inside.

We ran down the street and finally caught up to Mamet, but not in time as he had just greeted the doorman and walked in to the hotel as we arrived at the entrance. Trying to be clever and taking advantage of the moment, I walked right up to the doorman as if Mamet and I were best friends and said “oh, I’ve been running to catch David, I just need to hand this to him. The doorman apologized and said he’d already gone inside and caught the elevator. “Just give it to me,” the doorman said, “I’ll make sure he gets it.”

So I hand the door man the book and walked away somewhat disappointed. Walking to my daughter who waiting near the curb, I noticed her eyes light up and she began nodding to me to look behind, and there he was, it was Mamet who had come back outside for some reason. I turned around and walked right back as the doorman was handing Mamet the book and as he walked past me, I said “that’s my book. I just now handed it to the doorman and I’d like you to have it .” Mamet stopped, looked at the book and then at me and said in a way only Mamet could say it, “Read it.”

Surprised by his remark I said “you read it? “Of course,” he said. “You gave it to me last year when I was in the Netherlands. You took me on that long walk through that fancy neighborhood with all the trees and mansions, what was it called?” “Leeuwendaal,” I replied. “That was the one,” Mamet continued. “You talked my ear off. Stories about the old neighborhood, Clinton School and my mother shopping at the Jewel where your ma worked. But that was a nice afternoon.”  

All of a sudden, I remembered having had that very lengthy encounter with Mamet the year before but it somehow had totally slipped my mind (and it was Mamet who talked my ear off, at least that’s how I remember it.

I asked Mamet what he was doing in town and he said he had come for the funeral of Chicago theater critic Tony Adler, and I said “I thought you hated Adler because he always ripped your plays apart in the local press.” Mamet stopped in his tracks, put my paperback in the pocket of his white linen jacket and said, “I did hate him, but he was my friend.”

Then I woke up.