Actors Anonymous (23 page)

Joe and I used to go there when I first got sober and had no friends my age. (Before I was an actor, and was just a young fuck-up.) We’d look at the permanent collection (Pollock, Warhol), and then talk in the cafe. That was the best-tasting coffee I ever had.

He was so great with me. He treated me like a son and a brother. He was one of the people that made me excited about writing.

I loved the mix of experience, his hard edge, and Boston thug insouciance. He had no qualms about letting loud farts fly, and he loved to talk about women. Like they were life’s big mystery. Those are thoughts that immediately come to mind.

I cried a little. He was really good to me. I’ll miss him. Thanks for telling me.

How do I send a donation to the Rape Crisis Center?

As you can see,
The Actor
had a long night the night he took The Virgin’s virginity. I assume he was walking by the Pompidou after seeing the young lady home. I was a friend and guide to
The Actor
as was the above-mentioned Joe Donuts.

Before Joe’s demise, he and I took
The Actor
under our wings and helped him put his life together. Joe and I did encourage him to start writing because
we thought it would be a good outlet for
The Devil
inside him.
The Actor
was definitely tormented.

Unfortunately, I don’t think his writing is up to scratch. His intention was stronger than the result. He turned in several stories that were basically admissions of all his shameful acts. Although I think these stories served a purgative function, I don’t think they are fit for public consumption. For several reasons. I have told him this on many occasions. I would have told him one final time at our last meeting, but he was killed. It was sad to lose Joe and
The Actor
so close to each other. An older rogue and a young, confused miscreant.

I have nothing to do but turn to the master, William S. for guidance. He always teaches the way.

“They are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time: After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.”

17

!!!!!(This is the real E. L. Crane! Shrimp, I don’t appreciate you putting me in this story and using me as a mouthpiece to praise your own tattered glory. Besides, the fact that what you have written sounds
nothing like me! Aside from the very personal emails that you have taken the liberty of inserting whole, I sound nothing like a distinguished professor of English. I sound like you, a vulgar, uneducated mouther of other people’s lines, namely an actor!

I have several issues with the use of the emails, that I hope you will seriously consider before using them as fodder: 1) It is an infringement on my privacy, and on Sarah Donut’s privacy, and an abasement of Joe Donut’s memory. The man died! And what? You just want to throw it in your story because you think it’s dramatic? Fuck that. 2) Addiction recovery is
anonymous
for a fucking reason! Don’t put it in your stories. That is real-life shit that goes on in those meetings, and if you treat it lightly, it will come back and bite you. Joe went out. That is real; you saw what happened to him, a quick downward spiral. I strongly suggest you check your priorities, messing with your sobriety is not worth writing a piece of shit, melodramatic story. You are supposed to be living a spiritual life.

In addition (these are the notes I would have given you had you shown up to our meeting): I HATE that
The Actor
dies. What a silly end to the story. Why do you kill off your character like this? To avoid having to write the rest of the Virgin scene?

James, I am going to be as frank as I can be:

Stop writing. You don’t have the facility for it. You have the love, but not the skill. As I have said
innumerable times, you throw in a lot of flash, to hide a lack of substance. I think this comes from your deep fear that readers won’t accept you as an actor and a writer. Well, if you continue writing about a character called “
The Actor
,” of course they won’t accept you as a writer!

You need to either buckle down and learn to tell a story, or just stop writing. This material is like a combination of
National Enquirer
gossip, MTV-style quick cuts, and experimental fiction schlock. Of course I am a scholar of the English Renaissance, and you could say I know nothing about what is current, but I also know that Shakespeare has been read for 400 years. Can you see this mess being read even two weeks from now?

Basically, don’t kill
The Actor
in your story. But more than that, don’t write this story. Just write about people with regular names (no “
The Actor
,” “the Virgin,” “Diarrhea,” etc.), and then reveal a few artistic truths for us, instead of showing us your (and Joe’s!) dirty laundry. If you can’t do that, just stop.

(Final sections)
¹⁸

When the Angel was eighteen, before she knew
The Actor
, she was raped. She had been a freshman at Ohio University and one night she got drunk. Her small frame could not handle much alcohol, and because she didn’t drink much in high school, she didn’t know her limit. She had passed out on a bed at a party, and when she woke up, she was being fucked by a boy from her dorm. She knew him a little; we’ll call him Ben. He was a foolish boy who was in a fraternity at the time—he was later expelled from the frat for undisclosed reasons and moved to LA to try his hand at acting. When the Angel woke and realized what was happening, she just lay there. She was too scared. She let him do it.

After, she didn’t tell anyone because she was afraid that she would be blamed for being drunk. She dropped out of school at the end of the year and moved back to LA.

After she had been dating
The Actor
for two years, she told him the story of her rape while sitting in his car in the ArcLight parking lot, after going to see
There Will Be Blood
. She cried through the whole telling.

Up to that point,
The Actor
had been a good boyfriend, to the Angel and all his previous girlfriends. He had had several long-term relationships, beginning with his high-school girlfriend, Ariel, and had been faithful to all of them. Learning that the Angel had been raped was a heavy blow. And the fact that it had happened two years prior made revenge less tangible, while the pain was hot and present. Even though she had kept it inside, the rape was old news for the
Angel and Ben the rapist, but for
The Actor
, it was like it had happened the day before.

The Actor
didn’t know what to do, so he went to his addiction recovery friend, Joe Donuts, for advice. Joe was in his fifties. When he was younger, he did muscle work for Irish heavies in Boston in order to support his drug habit. He got cleaned up when he was forty-two and moved to LA. In LA, he did extra work in films and occasionally got a small speaking role. Eventually he got in with the Teamsters and made his way to the top. He had been sober for fifteen years and was a mentor to many young men trying to get clean, especially the ones that were rough around the edges. He always had good advice for
The Actor
, and kept him diligent about his commitment to recovery and living sober.

The day after watching
There Will Be Blood
and hearing the rape story in the parking lot,
The Actor
met Joe Donuts at the Griddle on Sunset, and told him about the Angel’s rape. Joe was usually very collected, cool and unshakeable. But after hearing the rape story, he showed a new side. He was no longer the calm, grounded Joe; he was the old Joe. His eyes got teary and his mouth flattened into a hard straight line. Joe told
The Actor
what they were going to do.

Joe was going to call a guy he knew in Boston named Vance. Vance would drive out to Ohio and wait outside the ________ fraternity for Ben to come out and then kick the shit out of him.
The Actor
told him that Ben had moved to LA to be an actor. Even better, Vance would drive to LA and do the job; all they had to do was find him.
The Actor
told him that he knew Ben was enrolled at his old acting school, Valley Playhouse. Perfect, Vance would get him there. There would be no connection to
The Actor
, and Ben would get what he deserved. He certainly wouldn’t have a chance at a career after Vance got through with his face; it was the least he deserved after mangling the Angel’s life.

This part is all real. It was so disturbing that
The Actor
had to write a play about it.
¹⁹

[Note: Sorry for leaving the footnotes momentarily and intruding on the main body of the text here, but I need to set up the scene you’re about to read. Here is the scene from
The Actor’s
play that Missy gave me. Just pretend that that character “Saul” isn’t an old man talking about his daughter, but is actually
The Actor
talking about the Angel. I changed the name of the other guy to “Donuts” so we could all understand the connections to
The Actor’s
life better. (His name wasn’t Donuts in the original script)]:

Ext. (The Griddle)
²⁰
Café

[Two men sit at a table outside and talk in confidence. They are
SAUL
and
DONUTS.
Saul is in his sixties. Donuts is in his fifties.]

SAUL:
I don’t know how to thank you, Donuts.

DONUTS:
It’s fine.

SAUL:
I can’t say it made anything better, but it is still somewhat satisfying.

DONUTS:
Well, he deserved it.

SAUL:
And Vance made it back all right?

DONUTS:
Yeah, Vance’s fine. Called me from Boston. I’m telling you, he’s a guy who enjoys that sort of thing. He’s got a lot of anger, you know?

SAUL:
I hope doing all this was okay for you. I know we’re supposed to be sober and spiritual and not do this kind of thing.

DONUTS:
Hey, yeah, it’s part of my old life. I don’t like to do that sort of thing anymore; I’m just an actor now. But that kid deserved to get a message.

SAUL:
Yeah… Yeah he did.

[They eat for a second.]

DONUTS:
You know he’s been in a coma for three days.

SAUL:
What?

DONUTS:
They had a story in the paper yesterday.

SAUL:
Fuck!

DONUTS:
I don’t think it’s going to turn out well.

SAUL:
What do you mean?

DONUTS:
He’s either going to die or he’ll wake up a vegetable or some shit.

[End of Scene]
²¹

1
This story is a compilation of various pages I found in
The Actor’s
former Los Angeles apartment last summer. In July of this year I moved into _____ Havenhurst Drive, apartment #_____ , the unit
The Actor
used to rent. It is a fairly spacious one-bedroom in an old colonial style building. The apartment came furnished, and thus, I now lounge on the couches and sleep on the bed that
The Actor
once lounged and slept on. After living here for a week, I found several typed pages under one of the couches. There were coffee stains and other undefined markings on the papers. Some were torn, excising sequences in midsentence (as in the above sequence) and on further inspection, I found that, according to the interrupted chronology of page numbers, some pages were missing. In addition, some pages were numbered and others were not. I was not sure if everything was from the same story, but I tried to put everything back in as logical an order as I could manage.

2
I did some research, and I think
The Actor
is referencing Edmund Burke’s
From a Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful
.
The quoted passage above continues, proving that Burke was an insatiable breast man:

the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix or whither it is carried
.

Meaning what? That he couldn’t decide whether to look at the cleavage, the nipples, or the whole cup?

3
The above was written in a
red
scrawl on several of
The Actor’s
pages. I have typed them out in the places they were written on the original sheets. They looked something like an editor’s notes, except for the poor spelling and diction. Later I found similar handwriting, jagged and broken, in the same waxy
red
ink in the bathroom behind the toilet.

4
I had just finished my business on the toilet, when I realized that the toilet paper on the dispenser was out. While staying seated on the toilet, I opened the cabinet under the sink and pulled out a fresh roll from the plastic bag. In the process, while trying to keep things from being smeared in my backside, I dropped the fresh roll. As I reached down for the dropped roll, you might imagine my surprise upon finding a message written on the wall in such a sequestered place. And being a message of intense declarative assurance, which, compounded by my being in a vulnerable, and I thought, until that moment, private position, with my pants down, so to speak, that I almost jumped (but didn’t, I still hadn’t wiped). The
red
scrawl’s claim might be written off as a joke, like any scribbling on a bathroom wall, but something about it was different, and I took it seriously. For one, it was in my bathroom, and for two, three and four, I was bent over, scrambling for a clean roll of TP, my dirty asshole hanging above the dirty water, and thus, to be greeted by such an unexpected and personal message threw me. It said, “
I SEE YOU
.”