In February 2005 actor Ian Belknap got a Valentine’s Day card from his mother. Inside was what he calls a “Freudian goulash of items”: a check for $200 and a copy of his father’s death certificate. It was the first specific information he’d ever gotten about his father’s suicide 20 years earlier at the age of 40.
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“He used to run out into traffic,” Gordon says. “In Manhattan.”
“Hammered,” Belknap adds. “That’s a salient detail.”
“For me to have gotten to this bleak place was terrifying, in light of my knowledge of the consequences of suicide,” he says. “I knew what it would do to the people left behind. That was the wake-up call, a tiny moment of grace I was afforded.” He got into a program and off booze and drugs. Then he says he began “becoming estimable by doing small, estimable things. Make your bed. Show up for work. All the small good things, to borrow from Raymond Carver.”
No charges were ever filed. But the reports made Belknap wonder what other tendencies he’d inherited. “I’ve never been a violent person,” he says. “Even in my deepest drinking I wasn’t a fighter, I was a passer outer. But I do worry that I will snap one day.”
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