“Thaddeus Taylor Ransom preached hellfire in the fields. He’d done a bit of college, University of Nebraska, before he went off to war. Got wounded and frostbitten in the Battle of the Bulge. Won a Silver Star, two purple hearts, maybe lost a few things.
“But my father believed that God in that very time gave him what Dad called his visions and the voice to tell us about them.”
Ransom’s delivery is slow and steady, growing hypnotic just like his father’s must have been. “He could describe the sun at midnight and the red eye of Satan. His family was Presbyterian but that church wouldn’t hold him when he returned. Instead he discovered The Children of the Fire, an apocalyptic sect. In your moment of spiritual need the Children were there with the comfort of a guaranteed fiery death.
“My father became a preacher. He was a charismatic, a hands-on healer.” When Thad reaches this point his face has become stark with burning eyes as its main feature. “He preached on Sundays. And sometimes in church it could seem like he was burning the world down.
“Often, though, he saved the most intense moments for his family. That was my mother and two sisters and me.”
Here Ransom’s voice rises. “And at certain times, nights like this one, he would gather us in the living room and run something like this, ‘The Lord’s Great Eyes, God the Father’s great eyes are upon us. His fiery gaze is upon us. It burns into your chest, into your heart, into your soul!’
“One of those nights, he woke me up, just me. I must have been ten, maybe eleven, dragged me out in my pajamas to a pasture where there was a pond and baptized me under the moonlight. I’d been baptized years before in daylight and in church.
“But this time he had a pair of torches he’d made with rolled paper and tar. He submerged me in the water, pulled me out by the scruff of the neck and held the torches so close they singed my hair.”
“THE UNION OF WATER AND FIRE IN ONE BODY,” Ransom yells, his eyes are huge as plates. “MY SON WILL NEVER REST EASY IN YOUR SERVICE, GOD OF FIRE.”
And at that moment Ransom is as big and as terrible as that father was to that little kid. I can hear the audience gasp, see their fear.
Then the voice softens; the eyes get a little sad, a bit pensive, become no larger than anyone’s. “He collapsed in the pulpit one ordinary Sunday morning six or seven years later and died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Over time a bullet fragment had worked its way into his heart.
“Six months later my mother married a member of the congregation, a man who owned a Buick dealership. My sisters were regular kids. Maybe I was the old man’s only legacy.
“When I was eighteen I left town for state college. I ended up in the Drama Department. They say acting and preaching are related skills. At the end of sophomore year, needing more space between my family and me, I left home and ended up in New York.”
He sits on a stool. The audience nods: Ransom’s upbringing was extreme but lots of them came here from situations into which they didn’t fit. And more than a few get a bit turned inside out by the light of the moon.
I look up and smile. “My launching on the lunar path was a bit less dramatic.
“It was on a fine, warm night when I was maybe four. My Irish grandmother was taking clothes down from the line on the roof of the apartment building in Boston where she lived.
“Grandmother hadn’t really decided who or what I was—never did I think. They’d named me Joseph but were already calling me Josie. It’s a slippery name that over the years has come to be as much a girl’s as a boy’s.
“She pointed up at the moon and recited that ancient appeal to the goddess of the night sky. It was invented for protection against the creatures that mean us harm and walk in the silver light:
“I see the moon and the moon sees me
God bless the moon and God bless me”
“Was it also a prayer for those beings who are its worst captives, the women and the men ensnared in the lunar cycle? Could my grandmother sense that in me?
“It was part of the folklore of every nationality long before it became Lunar Related Obsessive Disorder and got discussed on TV and the internet.
“But if it’s a disease where is the virus? If it’s a mental disorder where are the conclusive studies? And if the moon’s role is a delusion, why are there nights like these?”
I hear my voice at a distance. My face moves on its own. The lunar priest and the woman of science flicker there and a camera catches them.
As I finish Ransom is prowling the stage. “I came to this city the usual way,” he says, “knowing noand nothing and almost immediately fell in with the perfect wrong crowd. A girl I met took me to an acting class at the New School.”
We are into an old routine, one I can almost watch myself do. “I saw him the first time sitting in that acting studio all legs and hostility,” I say. “Afterwards we talked and walked. It was late in the lunar cycle on a summer night with nothing in the sky but the Dog Star. Even without the moon he was intense. His eyes never blinked. He ended up crashing in the same pad I was staying at.”
“I’d never met anyone like Josie,” says Ransom. “But I figured this must be how people were in the big city. Josie explained a few things about my life. I realized there was noelse like Josie—except me in lots of ways.
“I don’t know if going to Central Park in the dead of night a couple of weeks later was his idea or her idea.”
Laughter follows. “It was yours,” I say, “For several reasons I expected life to include some danger. And thought anyone we encountered would find you as scary as I did. So I went along.”
Remembering that night I begin to relive it. I can smell the grass, feel the night breeze. As I return to that night I can feel myself change and see him become young again.
“The wonder of that place at midnight is you can forget the city,” he says. “Our senses sharpened. We moved in shadows, dodged police patrols, and walked to the north end of the park. The Harlem Mere at two a.m. had the Harvest Moon shining on the water. There was a waterfall and lone cars with their lights on high-beam speeding along the drives: the only other sound was the wind rustling in the trees.”
“Our heads touched the sky—without acid,” I add. And I am there. We recited Shakespeare “Oh, swear not by the moon, the fickle moon, the inconstant moon … ” We sang, “Oh Moon of Alabama” A capella, we sing a few choruses about finding the next whiskey bar, the next pretty boy. For us the Cherry Lane stage disappears.
Ransom says, “Our senses grew more acute. We realized that a certain rustling in the bushes was not the wind and that it was following us. There was a moment of silence like someone or something was going to attack.”
I told him, “NOW WE HOWL!” And just as on that night our eyes narrow, our jaws jut forward. We move downstage screaming. Our company lining the back of the theater joins in.
I feel the audience gasp and pull back in their seats as we two come forward wild eyed. I hope the cameras got every bit of it. I remember to hold my hand up. The noise stops.
“It was kids up to no good—like us,” Ransom says. “We chased them howling first then laughing. Next day I remembered it like a dream and had to talk about it to keep the details from slipping away.
“But maybe a week later, this guy stopped me on Bleecker Street and said my eyes were insane. He was Sam Shepard and his first play was going to be up that weekend at Caffe Chino on Cornelia Street. He wanted me in it. That was my first time in front of a paying audience.”
As Ransom speaks his face relaxes but not all the way.
“My initiation was a lot less dramatic than Thad’s,” I say. “You can grow up in a city and stay very unaware of nature. But when I was eight we lived in a leafy part of Boston. There were hills and big old mansions that were now, many of them, divided up into apartments, into duplexes. But the yards were large and unfenced; the hills looked out on ocean and sky.