Attack of the Theater People (23 page)

I look at the card.

P.S. Have you read?
Made me think of you.

That must be it.
Candide
‘s a perfect book for a cruise—short, funny, and full of traveling. And I’d like to think I’m a Candide-like figure, a plucky innocent making his way in this less than the best of all possible worlds.

I’m imagining the look of delight on Doug’s face (“Man, how did you guess? Now take off my clothes with your teeth”) when a voice behind us says:

“Can I see your tickets, please?”

Busted.
Damn.
It must be the fedora.

I turn to face the usher, ready to play “I thought you had the tickets” with Paula.

“Gotcha!” Mrs. Fiamma says, laughing like a lawn mower that won’t start.

“Wh-what are you doing here?”

“I wanted to see Barbara Cook, too.” She gives me a little punch in the shoulder. “Enjoy the show.”

She waddles away as the lights dim.

The matinee audience applauds arthritically as Barbara Cook enters. She’s a large blonde going on sixty, wearing an outfit that makes her look like a sequined washing machine. But she exudes an irresistible farm-girl friendliness, as if she were about to milk the piano.

“Now, you’ve gotta be about twelve years old to sing this song,” she says, a hint of honeysuckle in her accent. “But I first performed it in the City Center revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
Carousel
back in 19”—she makes a joke of covering her mouth with her hand—“so you’ll just have to use your imagination.”

She clears her throat, tosses her head, and begins to sing:

His name is Mister Snow,

And an upstanding man is he…

In an instant the years and pounds vanish. Without so much as a change in lighting, Cook transforms herself into a not-so-sharp lass in love with a herring fisherman, her clear, unencumbered soprano shining like the morning sun. Even though she has an operatic technique, there’s nothing fruity or fussy about her sound. It’s a voice you could imagine hearing through a screen door on a summer night—that is, assuming you had a freakishly talented neighbor.

Her performance is a revelation. I’ve always thought of this song as a silly throwaway, but Cook finds wit and warmth where I didn’t think it possible. When she complains about Mister Snow’s clothes smelling of fish the audience laughs as if they‘d never heard it before, even though many of them are old enough to have heard it the first time. Then, as if reaching a clearing in the woods, she sings the chorus, drinking in the word
home
like it was springwater, sharing a vision of happiness so sublime I don’t want the song ever to end. It’s sheer theater magic—no laser light show, no flying scenery—just an actor with words and melody.

It’s like going to heaven.

The magic moments keep coming, songs that are miniature dramas: the frantic “Vanilla Ice Cream” from
She Loves Me
topped with a high B like it’s nothing; the heartbreaking “Losing My Mind” from
Follies
, a song that always makes me think of Doug.

I want you so,

It’s like I’m losing my mind…

Cook pours a lifetime of struggle and disappointment into the number—a stalled career, a failed marriage, depression, alcoholism, obesity—it’s all there for us to see. She opens her heart to the audience, saying,
Come on in; it’ll be less lonely if we share this pain
, and I realize she’s doing the exact opposite of what the faculty wanted me to do at Juilliard. Acting in a play is like living in a terrarium—it looks like nature, but it isn’t. There’s a glass wall separating you from the real world. With her diamond-sharp voice, Cook cuts an audience-sized hole in that wall until it’s just her and us and the music.

A holy trinity.

Paula and I applaud with abandon, our arms stretching for Cook in a hug that can’t possibly reach, our hands cymbaling together, refusing to let up until she does an encore. And, strangely enough, I find myself thinking about Hung. Not in an I-want-you-so-it’s-like-I’m-losing-my-mind way, but because he would so love this. Unreservedly. Enthusiastically. Homosexually.

“Fuck ’em,” Paula says.

“What?”

“The faculty. Fuck ’em.” She gestures at Cook as she leaves the stage. “Look at her. Who gives a shit if she’s fat? Look at what she can
do
. She doesn’t let it stop her. It’s like Marcus says—if you’re an artist, create art. Don’t sit around waiting for someone to give you permission.”

Cook reenters and heads for the bend of the piano. Instead of stopping there, however, she places her microphone on the lid and crosses down to the apron of the stage. A murmur runs through the crowd as some of us realize what she’s about to do, that she’s going to sing her encore without a mike. As the pianist plays an intro, Cook’s friendly face spreads into a wide smile, as if to say,
Let me show you how we did it in the old days,
and I feel a shimmer of excitement. I’ve never heard an unamplified voice in a Broadway theater.

She sings “Till There Was You.”

Paula grips my hand in hers, her mouth disappearing into a taut, narrow line, her eyes welling. Cook’s voice rings throughout the auditorium, entirely audible even on the softest notes. She sings directly to us, simultaneously blessing us while offering a prayer of thanks. We are the
you
of the title. The fact that there’s no mike makes it that much more personal.

There was love all around

But I never heard it singing…

And suddenly it’s the summer I’m fourteen, and I’m singing those words, harmonizing with the Marian, a senior who went off to study at the New England Conservatory of Music. Every night, when I came out for my curtain call, the audience sounded like a sonic boom, a wave of energy so strong I vowed right then and there that I would make my life in the theater.

I wish I could always feel the way I did during the curtain call of my high school musical.

Paula and I exit the theater in silence, only to be assaulted by the blaring of horns, the city asserting its ruthless authority. I look east on Forty-ninth Street and see a wall of traffic. Broadway is completely stuck, immobile. Cars fill the intersection, blocking the westbound Forty-ninth Street traffic. Across Broadway sits a trapped ambulance, its siren wailing for the life it can’t save.

There’s someone in that ambulance, I think. A person in crisis, hanging on to life by a thread. Someone like Eddie Sanders.

And no one’s doing a damn thing about it.

Horns bray. Drivers shake their fists and scream. And still the siren wails and wails.

“We’ve got to help,” I say.

“What can we do?” Paula asks. “It’s a parking lot.”

I look out at the sea of vehicles, each with no more than a foot between them. “We’ll get them each to move a little,” I say.

“What?”

“Baby steps,” I say. “We do enough of those and pretty soon we’ve gotten somewhere.”

Paula’s mouth spreads into a full curtain-up-light-the-lights smile, as if to say,
Welcome back, Edward; we’ve missed you
.

I step out into traffic, zigzagging through the cars to the other side of Broadway, Paula clacking behind me. I tap on the window of the first car blocking the intersection.

“We need to clear a space for this ambulance,” I say. “Would you back up about six inches? We’ll tell you when to stop.”

To my surprise the driver doesn’t hesitate; nor does the next one or the next. By getting the cars at the front of the intersection to creep forward and the ones at the rear to inch back, we’re able, car by car by car, to clear a space. A couple of Latino guys crossing the street see what we’re doing and join in, speeding up the process. I feel my spirits lift higher and higher as Broadway opens up before us, Moses parting the Red Sea. We’re actually making this happen. In a city of strangers.

Within minutes the ambulance crosses Broadway. Paula and I hug each other, high-five the Latino guys, and wave triumphantly at the driver as he passes. Some onlookers even applaud.

Then I notice a man standing on the corner, watching. He’s a good-looking guy, clean-cut in a wholesome Mormon way: hair cut above the ears, white dress shirt, tan trench coat. The kind of guy you’d imagine would have a soap opera name like Tanner or Blake.

His eyes lock with mine in that unmistakably laser-focused way that gay men do. For the briefest of moments we see each other. Really see each other. An EGG moment. Then I glance down at his feet and see that he’s wearing snub-nosed black Oxford shoes with white socks.

Cop shoes.

Thirty-three

Okay, maybe I’m being paranoid
. That can happen at my age. Perfectly normal people can suddenly turn schizophrenic in their early twenties. Just like that.

Great. I’m either mentally ill or going to jail.

I turn and begin walking down Forty-ninth Street.

“Where are you going?” Paula asks.

I have no idea. I’m just hoping that a meteorite will enter the earth’s atmosphere and crash into this Tanner or Blake person, knocking him unconscious while I figure out what to do next.

I speed up, Paula straggling behind me.

Then I hear bells. Playing “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”

The sound comes from a small stone church with a banner reading
ST. MALACHY‘S CATHOLIC CHURCH. THE ACTORS’ CHAPEL
. The Actors’ Chapel? I must have passed it a thousand times and never noticed, having been too preoccupied looking at the Eugene O’Neill across the street.

A church. I can seek sanctuary. Assuming churches still do that.

I peer over my shoulder and see the fed gaining on me. “Edward, slow down,” Paula says.

The steps of the church are just a few feet away.

“Edward!”

Paula grabs my sleeve.

I turn and there he is. Hair Above His Ears and White Socks. He furrows his brow.

“Excuse me,” he says, “are you…”

He pauses, just to toy with me, like Javert in
Les Misérables
. Sadistic bastard. I square my shoulders, determined to admit who I am with all the resolve of Jean Valjean. Except I won’t screech it on a high B natural.

“…the Party Monster?”

I hear someone who sounds just like me say, “Uh, yes.”

He hands me his Barbara Cook
Playbill
and asks for an autograph.

After he’s gone, I slump on the stone steps, burying my sweaty face in my sweaty palms. “I thought for sure that was it,” I mutter.

“What are you talking about?” Paula says. “What’s wrong?”

I have to tell her. I don’t want to, but I can’t keep it in anymore.

“Let’s go inside where it’s cool,” I say. And where she can’t yell.

Two hours later
my arm is still sore from where Paula punched me. Repeatedly. I’ve never known her to be violent, but then again, I’ve never implicated her in a federal crime before.

So I’m particularly happy to see Doug, and not just because he’s wearing a pair of sweatpants without the cumbersome bother of underwear.

As always, there’s something of the satyr about him, like he’s about to perch on a tree stump and play panpipes. I wouldn’t be surprised to find a pair of horns hidden in his cowlicky hair. He wears a shell choker around his neck, and a tank top reading
IT’S BETTER IN THE BAHAMAS
. With his umbered skin he looks like he’s been bronzed as a keepsake.

He grips me by the shoulders. “Man, it’s good to see you.”

Whatever weirdness there was between us last fall seems to have melted away like the winter frost. I come in, stepping past a scorched spot on the living room carpet. Doug explains that they had a coming-home party and Napalm set the couch on fire. Then, grabbing a six-pack of Bud tallboys from the fridge, we head down the hall to his room.

We’ve just reached the door when Vernon appears.

“Yo, Junior,” he says to Doug. “That Zebra chick is on the phone.”

“Zee-ba,” Doug says.

“Whatever she is, she wants to talk about the gig at the Waldorf.”

Doug hands me the six. “Make yourself comfortable. I’ll be right back.”

“Tell her I say hi.”

Doug’s bedroom is decorated in Early Squalor. There’s a mattress on the floor, a stereo, two guitars, and a beat-up TV with an antenna encased in tinfoil. A few posters of Bruce decorate the dingy walls, and I’m struck again by how much he and Doug look alike—if you squint. The room smells like Doug, a musky scent that instantly makes me harder than the
New York Times
crossword puzzle.

I crack open a tallboy and look around.

Doug keeps his belongings in a wall unit fashioned from stolen milk crates, although his books and albums are on a shelf made of bricks and boards. I kneel down, resisting the urge to sniff his clothes, and instead try to solve the Mystery of the Smudged Postcard. On the shelf sit a bunch of nonfiction books on rock ’n’ roll, a rhyming dictionary, a couple of “
Doonesbury
” collections, and some titles I don’t know:
The Dharma Bums. Howl. Naked Lunch. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
I pull out a tattered copy of one book I do know: John Knowles’s
A Separate Peace
.

I open it and see that it says,
Property of Wallingford High School English Department.

Because I took honors English throughout high school, I didn’t read
A Separate Peace
until the summer after I graduated. That was when Paula and I worked as singing waiters at the Jersey shore. We lived above an ice-cream parlor in a rickety apartment with crooked floors, and I found a weathered paperback copy on the bookshelf next to the couch you sank into like quicksand. I read it in one long day on the beach, lingering under the lowering sun, lost in the fierce friendship of its prep school protagonists. As a result, I can’t think of
A Separate Peace
without hearing waves and feeling the salt sting of the ocean breeze, remembering my own separate peace when life seemed so full of possibility, that magic time after I got the money to pay for Juilliard and before it all went horribly, horribly wrong. Paula and I would sit on the roof at night, singing “Our Time” from Sondheim’s
Merrily We Roll Along
, harmonizing about the worlds we’d change and the worlds we’d win, and being the names in tomorrow’s papers.

It never occurred to me that name would be the Party Monster.

It gives me a jolt to know Doug has a copy, because the book reminded me of him when I read it, though I couldn’t decide who was who. If you read it as a tale of sublimated homosexual desire then, of course, I’m the bookish, brooding Gene, so tormented by his infatuation for the carefree, charismatic Phineas that he wants to destroy him. Yet, in a way, I’m also Doug’s Phineas, enticing him to break the shackles of conformity and express himself.

What’s more, I also stole my copy.

But is this the book that reminded him of me? I pull the postcard out of my pocket. It’s got too many letters to fit.

I rise as Doug clomps through the door. “Ziba said to give you this,” he says, then tickles me under my chin. A shiver crosses my cheeks and down my neck, making the hair on my arms stand on end.

“So you’re okay with our plan?”

“Sure,” he says, cracking open a tallboy. “I’m just bummed the Almost Shah’s not coming.”

“How’s the rest of the band feel?”

“They don’t care about him.”

“No, I mean about pretending to be the E Street Band.”

He takes a sip, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “They weren’t sure until I told ’em how much we’re making.”

I’m about to instruct Doug in act two of his Bruce impersonation when he looks down at my hands. “Hey, that’s the postcard I sent,” he says.

“Yeah, it’s been driving me crazy for three months.” I hand it to him.

He reads it, giving a shy smile when he gets to the end. “I guess I wrote this next to the pool.”

“So?” I say. “What was it you read?”

He turns and retrieves a paperback from his nightstand, or I should say the milk crate that serves as his nightstand. He holds the book up for me to see.

It’s
On the Road
by Jack Kerouac.

I take back the postcard. “Well, in answer to your question, no, I haven’t read it.”

Doug flops onto the mattress and props himself up against the wall. “Oh, man, you’ve gotta. It’s like Kerouac sat down and wrote a book especially for me. Everything I think and dream about and believe—it’s all in there.”

I sit on the edge of the mattress. “So why did it make you think of me?”

He leans forward, his eyes ablaze. “’Cuz it’s all about people who wanna get out there and live. Who aren’t gonna sit around watchin’ TV until they’re dead.”

He sees me. Really sees who I am. The person I’m struggling to hold on to. “Is that what I’m like?”

“Are you kidding?” he snorts. “When your dad told you he wouldn’t pay for Juilliard, most people woulda just laid down and died, but you said, ‘Hell, no,’ and did whatever you had to. And it worked.”

“Yeah, I got kicked out.”

“And still you went out and did something.”

“Please. I got kids to dance at bar mitzvahs.”

“It beats flippin’ burgers,” he says, “or workin’ in some office. Shit, my dad’s driven a Tastykake truck for twenty years. Whose dream is that?” He hands me the book. “Take it.”

I thumb through the worn pages, which are full of underlines and margin notes. “But this is your copy.”

He smiles. “Eddie, if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t have had the guts to get up onstage and sing. And now look what I’m doin’. I know this Almost Bruce thing is kinda dorky, but with the money I’m earning from Ziba’s party, I can record my own album. My own fuckin’ album. I’ve been writing songs like crazy; they just keep comin’ to me.”

He reaches for his guitar. “Here’s somethin’ I’ve been workin’ on.” He tunes the strings, then gives a little cough.

“It’s not done yet.”

My face is a mask of eager anticipation.
Dear Saint Jude, please don’t let it suck
.

He plays the intro, his long fingers working the neck while his other hand strums and beats time on the body. Some say that a guitar is shaped like a woman, but, as Doug’s hand slides up and down the neck, I realize just how much it resembles a penis.

Funny, that.

Doug starts to sing, not in the tonsillitis tone of Almost Bruce, but as himself, a clear, cloudless sound:

Beer-spinned nights with parasites who tell me what I wanna hear,

When the morning comes there’s just the crumbs from a midnight rocketeer.

In the light of day there’s just no way to say what I wanna say.

I feel the thirst, but I fear the worst and I’ve got to get away.

I put my soul on the shelf,

Then nine to five to stay alive.

Put my soul on the shelf

Get on the road

And I’m running from myself.

He stops and looks up. “Whaddya think?”

His eyes are so blue—like bits of sky.

“I love it,” I say. And I mean it.

“Really?”

“Absolutely. The melody’s great and the lyrics are smart and honest. It’s a real step forward.”

“You don’t think it’s too derivative?”

“Not at all.” And I love that he used the word
derivative
in a sentence.

Doug reaches into his guitar case and retrieves a baggie of pot. “C’mon,” he says, grinning like a randy stable boy, “let’s get wasted.”

A friend with weed is a friend indeed.

We talk and talk and talk late into the night, devouring each other’s company omnivorously, not only running over what he needs to do in our plan to trap Chad (Doug’s concerns about acting lessening with each beer), but also musing about music and theater, of the things we’ve seen and the great things we’ve yet to do. I tell him my sordid tale, relishing his laughter (I love making him laugh) and welcoming his sympathy. He tells me about his (numerous) shipboard romances, and I share with him my disastrous crush on Chad, which he listens to without a trace of discomfort.

I study him as we talk, the veins in his neck pulsing, the muscles in the softballs at his shoulder rippling under his skin, and I want to inhale him, absorbing his effortlessly cocky essence into my bloodstream and letting him course through my veins, exhaling him, then repeating the process over and over, breathing him in and out twenty-four hours a day.

“Y’know,” he says after we’re fully toasted, “I’m not lak thiss wid anyhbuddy elss.”

Me, neither.

We stumble to 7-Eleven and make the doobie-ous decision to buy Pillsbury chocolate-chip-cookie dough, frozen fried chicken, and Fritos. We microwave the chicken and eat the cookie dough raw, then return to his room and collapse onto the mattress, which bobs like a life raft on storm-tossed seas.

I wake up feeling like
the Marx Brothers tried to perform brain surgery. My mouth is sandpaper dry, and there’s a vise on my sinuses. The sun burns brown behind the roller shades, casting the room in a dull, dingy light. As I come to, I realize that my head is resting on Doug’s calf, the hair on his leg tickling my face. We’re sleeping head-to-foot, the accepted slumber-party position from adolescence, because nothing can dull the libido like the notoriously noxious stench of teenaged boy feet.

Maybe it’s because I woke up this way. If I had been awake, I never would presume to reach over and touch his calf, but since it happened unconsciously, somehow this feels permissible to me. The muscles are long and fibrous, and they undulate beneath my hand. Barely awake and moving on instinct, I reach up to just above his knee to feel his thigh.

Doug stirs and my heart elevators to my throat. I remain motionless, my hand gently cupping the chunk of muscle, which is hard to the touch, even though he’s relaxed. My breath stills, as if to compensate for the percussion solo of my heart. Then, at tai chi speed, I slide my hand up his thigh. I don’t know why I’m so emboldened, but it feels like such a natural thing to do, so inevitable.

I’m halfway up when I feel Doug’s hand on top of my own, his long fingers like tentacles.

He’s awake.

He’s awake. He’s awake. He’s awake. My nerves are rubber bands, stretched to the point of snapping.

Rather than swat me away with disgust, he gently moves my hand.

Back to his calf.

That’s right, back to his calf.

The message is clear:
Not so fast
. Or
Not yet
. Or
Not now
. Okay, maybe the message isn’t clear, but it’s not
Get away from me, you fag
, so I’m encouraged enough to try again. Portioning his body in my mind like a butcher, I make a tactical maneuver, lifting my hand off his calf and placing it directly on his upper thigh. No creeping up this time, no fondling. Just lay it right there.