My enthusiasm knew no limits. Soon my mother was literally begging me to wait in the car while she stepped into the bank or grocery store.
I was at the orthodontist’s office, placing a pox upon the practice of dentistry, when the visiting actor returned to our classroom.
“You missed it,” my friend Lois said. “The man was so indescribably powerful that I was practically crying, that’s how brilliant he was.” She positioned her hands as if she were supporting a tray. “I don’t know what more I can say. The words, they just don’t exist. I could try to explain his realness, but you’d never be able to understand it. Never,” she repeated. “Never, never, never.”
Lois and I had been friends for six months when our relationship suddenly assumed a competitive edge. I’d never cared who made better grades or had more spending money. We each had our strengths; the important thing was to honor each other for the thing that person did best. Lois held her Chablis better than I, and I respected her for that. Her frightening excess of self-confidence allowed her to march into school wearing a rust-colored Afro wig, and I stood behind her one hundred percent. She owned more records than I did, and because she was nine months older, also knew how to drive a car and did so as if she were rushing to put out a fire. Fine, I thought, good for her. My superior wisdom and innate generosity allowed me to be truly happy for Lois up until the day she questioned my ability to understand the visiting actor. The first few times he visited, she’d been just like the rest of them, laughing at his neck brace and rolling her eyes at the tangerine-sized lump in his tights. I was the one who first identified his brilliance, and now she was saying I couldn’t understand him? Methinks not.
“Honestly, woman,” I said to my mother on our way to the dry cleaner, “to think that this low-lying worm might speak to me of greatness as though it were a thing invisible to mine eyes is more than I can bear. Her words doth strike mine heart with the force of a punishing blow, leaving me both stunned and highly vexed, too. Hear me, though, for I shall bide my time, quietly, and with cunning, striking back at the very hour she doth least expect it. Such an affront shall not go unchallenged, of that you may rest assured, gentle lady. My vengeance will hold the sweet taste of the ripest berry, and I shall savor it slowly.”
“You’ll get over it,” my mother said. “Give it a week or two and I’m sure everything will be back to normal. I’m going in now to get your father’s shirts and I want you to wait here, in the car. Trust me, this whole thing will be forgotten about in no time.”
This had become her answer to everything. She’d done some asking around and concluded I’d been bitten by what her sister referred to as “the drama bug.” My mother was convinced that this was a phase, just like all the others. A few weeks of fanfare and I’d drop show business, just like I had the guitar and my private detective agency. I hated having my life’s ambition reduced to the level of a common cold. This wasn’t a bug, but a full-fledged virus. It might lay low for a year or two, but this little germ would never go away. It had nothing to do with talent or initiative. Rejection couldn’t weaken it, and no amount of success would ever satisfy it. Once diagnosed, the prognosis was terminal.
The drama bug seemed to strike hardest with Jews, homosexuals, and portly girls, whose faces were caked with acne medication. These were individuals who, for one reason or another, desperately craved attention. I would later discover it was a bad idea to gather more than two of these people in an enclosed area for any length of time. The stage was not only a physical place but also a state of mind, and the word audience was defined as anyone forced to suffer your company. We young actors were a string of lightbulbs left burning twenty-four hours a day, exhausting ourselves and others with our self-proclaimed brilliance.
I had the drama bug and Lois had a car. Weighing the depth of her momentary transgression against the rich rewards of her private chariot, I found it within my bosom to forgive my wayward friend. I called her the moment I learned the visiting actor had scheduled a production of Hamlet set to take place in the amphitheater of the Raleigh Rose Garden. He himself would direct and play the title role, but the other parts were up for grabs. We auditioned, and because we were the youngest and least experienced, Lois and I were assigned the roles of the traveling players Hamlet uses to bait his uncle Claudius. It wasn’t the part I was hoping for, but I accepted my role with quiet dignity. I had a few decent speeches and planned to work them to the best of my ability.
Our fellow cast members were in their twenties and thirties and had wet their feet in such long-running outdoor dramas as The Lost Colony and Tender Is the Lamb. These were professionals, and I hoped to benefit from their experience, sitting literally at their feet as the director paced the lip of the stage addressing his clenched fist as “poor Yorick.”
I worshiped these people. Lois slept with them. By the second week of rehearsal, she had abandoned Fortinbras in favor of Laertes, who, she claimed, had a “real way with the sword.” Unlike me, she was embraced by the older crowd, attending late-night keg parties with Polonius and Ophelia and driving to the lake with the director while Gertrude and Rosencrantz made out in the backseat. The killer was that Lois was nowhere near as committed as I was. Her drama bug was the equivalent of a twenty-four-hour flu, yet there she was, playing bumper pool with Hamlet himself while I practiced lines alone in my room, dreaming up little ways to steal the show.
It was decided that as traveling players, Lois and I would make our entrance tumbling onto the outdoor stage. When she complained that the grass was irritating her skin, the director examined the wee pimples on her back and decided that, from this point on, the players would enter skipping. I had rehearsed my tumble until my brain lost its mooring and could be heard rattling inside my skull, and now, on the basis of one complaint, we were skipping? He’d already cut all my speeches, leaving me with the one line “Aye, my lord.” That was it, three lousy syllables. A person could wrench more emotion out of a sneeze than all my dialogue put together. While the other actors strolled the Rose Garden memorizing their vengeful soliloquies, I skipped back and forth across the parking lot repeating, “Aye, my lord,” in a voice that increasingly sounded like that of a trained parrot. Lois felt silly skipping and spoke to the director, who praised her instincts and announced that, henceforth, the players would enter walking.
The less I had to do, the more my fellow actors used me as a personal slave. I would have been happy to help them run lines, but instead, they wanted me to polish their crowns or trot over to a car, searching the backseat for a misplaced dagger.
“Looking for something to do? You can help Doogan glow-tape the props,” the director said. “You can chase the spiders out of the dressing room, or better yet, why don’t you run down to the store and get us some drinks.”
For the most part, Lois sat in the shade doing nothing. Not only did she refuse to help out, but she was always the first one to hand me a large bill when placing an order for a thirty-cent diet soda. She’d search through her purse, bypassing the singles in favor of a ten or a twenty. “I need to break this anyway,” she’d say. “If they charge you extra for a cup of ice, tell them to fuck themselves.” During the rehearsal breaks she huddled in the stands, gossiping with the other actors while I was off anchoring ladders for the technicians.
When it came time for our big scene, Lois recited her lines as if she were reading the words from the surface of some distant billboard. She squinted and paused between syllables, punctuating each word with a question mark. “Who this? Has seen with tongue? In venom steeped?”
If the director had a problem with her performance, he kept it to himself. I, on the other hand, was instructed to remove the sweater from around my neck, walk slower, and drop the accent. It might have been easier to accept the criticism had he spread it around a little, but that seemed unlikely. She could enter the scene wearing sunglasses and eating pizza and that was “fine, Lois. Great work, babe.”
By this time I was finding my own w
ay home from rehearsal. Lois couldn’t give me a ride, as she was always running off to some party or restaurant with what she referred to as “the gang from Elsinore.”
“I can’t go,” I’d say, pretending I had been invited. “I really need to get home and concentrate on my line. You go ahead, though. I’ll just call my mother. She’ll pick me up.”
“Are we vexed?” my mother would ask, pulling her station wagon into the parking lot.
“We are indeed,” I answered. “And highly so.”
“Let it go,” she said. “Ten years from now I guarantee you won’t remember any of these people. Time passes, you’ll see.” She frowned, studying her face in the rearview mirror. “Enough liquor, and people can forget anything. Don’t let it get to you. If nothing else, this has taught you to skim money while buying their drinks.”
I didn’t appreciate her flippant attitude, but the business with the change was insightful.
“Round everything off to the nearest dollar,” she said. “Hand them their change along with their drinks so they’ll be less likely to count it — and never fold the bills, keep the money in a wad.”
My mother had the vengeful part down. It was the craft of acting I thought she knew nothing about.
We were in dress rehearsal when the director approached Lois regarding a new production he hoped to stage that coming fall. It was to be a musical based on the lives of roving Gypsies. “And you,” he said, “shall be my lusty bandit queen.”
Lois couldn’t sing; everyone knew that. Neither could she act or play the tambourine. “Yours is the heart of a Gypsy,” he said, kneeling in the grass. “The vibrant soul of a nomad.”
When I expressed an interest, he suggested I might enjoy working behind the scenes. He meant for me to hang lights or lug scenery, to become one of those guys with the low-riding pants, their tool belts burdened with heavy wrenches and thick rolls of gaffer tape. Anyone thinking I might be trusted with electrical wiring had to be a complete idiot, and that’s what this man was. I looked at him clearly then, noticing the way his tights made a mockery of his slack calves and dumpy little basket. Vibrant soul of a nomad, indeed. If he were such a big stinking deal, what was he doing in Raleigh? His blow-dried hair, the cheap Cuban-heeled shoes, and rainbow-striped suspenders — it was all a sham. Why wear tights with suspenders when their only redeeming feature was that they stayed up on their own — that’s how they got their name, tights. And acting? The man performed as if the audience were deaf. He shouted his lines, grinning like a jack-o’-lantern and flailing his arms as if his sleeves were on fire. His was a form of acting that never fails to embarrass me. Watching him was like opening the door to a singing telegram: you know it’s supposed to be entertaining, but you can’t get beyond the sad fact that this person actually thinks he’s bringing some joy into your life. Somewhere he had a mother who sifted through a shoe box of mimeographed playbills, pouring herself another drink and wondering when her son would come to his senses and swallow some drain cleaner.
I finally saw Hamlet for who he really was and recognized myself as the witless Yorick who had blindly followed along behind him.
My mother attended the opening-night performance. Following my leaden “Aye, my lord,” I lay upon the grassy stage as Lois poured a false vial of poison into my ear. As I lay dying, I opened my eyes just a crack, catching sight of my mother stretched out on her hard, stone pew, fighting off the moths that, along with a few dozen seniors, had been attracted by the light.
There was a cast party afterward, but I didn’t go. I changed my clothes in the dressing room, where the actors stood congratulating one another, repeating the words “brilliant” and “intense” as if they were describing the footlights. Horatio asked me to run to the store for cigarettes, and I pocketed his money, promising to return “with lightning speed, my lord.”
“You were the best in the whole show,” my mother said, stopping for frozen pizza on our way home. “I mean it, you walked onto that stage and all eyes went right to you.”
It occurred to me then that my mother was a better actor than I could ever hope to be. Acting is different than posing or pretending. When done with precision, it bears a striking resemblance to lying. Stripped of the costumes and grand gestures, it presents itself as an unquestionable truth. I didn’t envy my mother’s skill, neither did I contradict her. That’s how convincing she was. It seemed best, sitting beside her with a frozen pizza thawing on my lap, to simply sit back and learn.
dinah, the christmas whore
It was my father’s belief that nothing built character better than an after-school job. He himself had peddled newspapers and delivered groceries by bobsled, and look at him! My older sister, Lisa, and I decided that if hard work had forged his character, we wanted nothing to do with it. “Thanks but no thanks,” we said.
As an added incentive, he cut off our allowance, and within a few weeks Lisa and I were both working in cafeterias. I washed dishes at the Piccadilly while Lisa manned the steam tables at K & W. Situated in Raleigh’s first indoor shopping center, her cafeteria was a clubhouse for the local senior citizens who might spend an entire afternoon huddled over a single serving of rice pudding. The K & W was past its prime, whereas my cafeteria was located in the sparkling new Crabtree Valley, a former swamp that made her mall look like a dusty tribal marketplace. The Piccadilly had red velvet walls and a dining room lit by artificial torches. A suit of armor marked the entrance to this culinary castle where, we were told, the customer was always king.
As a dishwasher, I spent my shifts yanking trays off a conveyor belt and feeding their contents into an enormous, foul-mouthed machine that roared and spat until its charges, free of congealed fat and gravy, came steaming out the other end, fogging my glasses and filling the air with the harsh smell of chlorine.
I didn’t care for the heat or the noise, but other than that, I enjoyed my job. The work kept my hands busy but left my mind free to concentrate on more important matters. Sometimes I would study from the list of irregular Spanish verbs I kept posted over the sink, but most often I found myself fantasizing about a career in television. It was my dream to create and star in a program called Socrates and Company, in which I would travel from place to place accompanied by a brilliant and loyal proboscis monkey. Socrates and I wouldn’t go looking for trouble, but week after week it would manage to find us. “The eyes, Socrates, go for the eyes,” I’d yell during one of our many fight scenes.
Maybe in Santa Fe I’d be hit over the head by a heavy jug and lose my memory. Somewhere in Utah Socrates might discover a satchel of valuable coins or befriend someone wearing a turban, but at the end of every show we would realize that true happiness often lies where you very least expect it. It might arrive in the form of a gentle breeze or a handful of peanuts, but when it came, we would seize it with our own brand of folksy wisdom. I’d planned it so that the final moments of each episode would find Socrates and me standing before a brilliant sunset as I reminded both my friend and the viewing audience of the lesson I had learned. “It suddenly occurred to me that there are things far more valuable than gold,” I might say, watching a hawk glide high above a violet butte. Plotting the episodes was no more difficult than sorting the silverware; the hard part was thinking up the all-important revelation. “It suddenly occurred to me that…” That what? Things hardly ever occurred to me. It might occasionally strike me that I’d broken a glass or filled the machine with too much detergent, but the larger issues tended to elude me.
Like several of the other local cafeterias, the Piccadilly often hired former convicts whose jobs were arranged through parole officers and work-release programs. During my downtime I often hung around their area of the kitchen, hoping that in listening to these felons, something profound might reveal itself. “It suddenly occurred to me that we are all held captive in that prison known as the human mind,” I would muse, or “It suddenly occurred to me that freedom was perhaps the greatest gift of all.” I’d hoped to crack
these people like nuts, sifting through their brains and coming away with the lessons garnered by a lifetime of regret. Unfortunately, having spent the better part of their lives behind bars, the men and women I worked with seemed to have learned nothing except how to get out of doing their jobs.
Kettles boiled over and steaks were routinely left to blacken on the grill as my coworkers crept off to the stock-room to smoke and play cards or sometimes have sex. “It suddenly occurred to me that people are lazy,” my reflective TV voice would say. This was hardly a major news flash, and as a closing statement, it would undoubtedly fail to warm the hearts of my television audience — who, by their very definition, were probably not too active themselves. No, my message needed to be upbeat and spiritually rewarding. Joy, I’d think, whacking the dirty plates against the edge of the slop can. What brings people joy?
As Christmas approached, I found my valuable fantasy time cut in half. The mall was crazy now with hungry shoppers, and every three minutes I had the assistant manager on my back hollering for more coffee cups and vegetable bowls.
The holiday customers formed a loud and steady line that reached past the coat of arms all the way to the suit of armor at the front door. They wore cheerful Santas pinned to their baubled shirts and carried oversized bags laden with power tools and assorted cheeses bought as gifts for friends and relatives. It made me sad and desperate to see so many people, strangers whose sheer numbers eroded the sense of importance I was working so hard to invent. Where did they come from, and why couldn’t they just go home? I might swipe their trays off the belt without once wondering who these people were and why they hadn’t bothered to finish their breaded cutlets. They meant nothing to me, and watching them move down the line toward the cashier, it became apparent that the feeling was mutual. They wouldn’t even remember the meal, much less the person who had provided them with their piping hot tray. How was it that I was important and they were not? There had to be something that separated us.