I Just Want My Pants Back (3 page)

tinadoll has signed off.

Stacey and her fiancé Eric were old friends of mine and Tina’s from school. It was cool that we all had ended up here; when I moved to the city I felt like I already had a built-in support system. In fact, Eric had helped me find the place at 99 Perry. A guy he knew from med school was moving out, and I attached myself to him like a barnacle to a ship. The guy recommended me to the landlord, who was a very religious Jew. I went to meet him in his basement office wearing a yarmulke, and when he asked if I had any questions, I queried him about the nearest shul. I’m probably going to burn in hell, but I got the apartment.

The afternoon crawled on at a glacial pace. Melinda left the office at five to help set up for her workshop. I was hoping the reading wouldn’t be over by the time I got there, as I was on video duty for the
Skinflint
session. I hadn’t even really read the specs yet; I was following a debate in the comments section on stereogum.com, a music blog, about the “greatest modern guitarists.” Someone named Shreds 81 was throwing a hissy fit about the “lack of respect for Slash, you fucking college weenies!” So I was pretty surprised when the first actor arrived and was only about three feet tall.

“Hi, I’m Leroy Hanson, I’m here for
Skinflint
,” he said, shaking my hand with his tiny, pudgy palm. I did my best not to flinch but couldn’t be sure that I didn’t show surprise.

“Right this way, I’m Jason,” I said, walking him back to the video room. I quickly read the specs.

For the LSD sequence, we need five
little people
who will wear fruit costumes (banana, strawberry, lime, lemon, pineapple) and dance in the background. We are looking for the
littlest people possible
, but it is IMPORTANT that they have long, skinny arms and legs, as these must stick out of holes in the costumes. SHORT, PUDGY, OR DISFIGURED LIMBS ARE NONSTARTERS. Please show CLOSE-UPS of limbs so we can make a judgment. Also, please have all actors dance. We will not see faces, so it does not matter if they are women or men.

I flicked on the lights and showed Leroy to a tape mark on the floor. I turned on the camera. “Okay, tell me your name, agent, whether or not you are in SAG, and um, your height, please.” Leroy was a pro, and rattled them off. “Okay, I don’t have any music, but can you show me some of your dance moves?”

Leroy looked straight into the camera. “What kind of dancing are you looking for? Disco? Waltz?”

“Good question.” I hit
PAUSE
and re-read the specs, but it didn’t say. “Umm, it doesn’t say, but you’ll be playing a piece of fruit, so dance like a piece of fruit would dance, I guess.”

“How does a fucking piece of fruit dance?”

“Uh, I guess, well, just do a bunch of different stuff, that’s probably safest.” My God, Melinda was going to shit when she heard about this. She lived for awkward casting moments, and as I videotaped Leroy doing a surprisingly good “running man” with no sound but the whir of the camera, I couldn’t think of anything more awkward. Oh, wait, yes I could. “Okay Leroy, now I just need to shoot some close-ups of your limbs.”

 * * * * * 

B
y the time I had finished the session it was eight-thirty. I had videotaped about twenty little people dancing and was completely fascinated and horrified. Who knew there were so many little people in the city? And who knew so many of them could dance? One woman did a flip.

Before I left, I quickly composed a short e-mail to Jane. It wasn’t every day you met a girl who invited you to fuck her in a kitchen appliance, and visions of my oven were dancing in my head. Besides, she had freed me from my celibate prison, so I wasn’t about to play coy and wait a couple days to write to her. It would have been hubris to go the aloof route.

I was starting to get it down to a science, this first written contact. In fact, I had saved a few older e-mails that I had written to other girls, and I pretty much just needed to cherry-pick lines from those to make a nice opening message. It was bordering on lame, sure, but I was really only plagiarizing myself. I liked to think of it as recycling. It was good for the Earth. But this time I decided to be original; I thought up a subject (always the hardest part), “Freezer Burn?” and dashed it off.

Hey Jane,

It’s Jason. Remember me? President and founding member of the LiZee fan club? Last eve was really fun. Shall we hang out again sometime soon? I know of many other average bands…Hope today was swell.

Hugs. Not drugs.

Jason

PS: I don’t often use the word “shall,” but I’m trying to impress you.

I scanned it, added my cell-phone number to the bottom, and changed the “freezer burn” to “hiya” and the “hugs not drugs” to “bye” so I didn’t seem too much like a spaz. You just knew any e-mail you sent to a girl was immediately forwarded to at least one of her friends or office pals and deconstructed like a Shakespearean sonnet in an Advanced Elizabethan Poetry class. Usually the line above the forwarded e-mail would simply say, “I don’t know, is he weird?”

I said good night to the computer, put it to sleep, and then escaped the office to the street. A souvlaki vendor was frying up mystery meat and onions right outside the building; it was the savory smell of freedom. The Post-it that Melinda had given me said the reading was at Ninth Street and Second Avenue, so I hurried off toward the 6 train. As I walked, I fired off a quick text to Stacey, “Hear u are looking for me!” Tina had made me quite curious.

I emerged from the subway at Astor Place, starving. I grabbed a slice and crammed it into my eat hole as I headed toward Second Avenue. I got to the building, walked up three flights, and stepped into the loft. It was enormous, a wide-open space with large windows and very little furniture. As the door loudly creaked shut, twenty or so people sitting on folding chairs set up to resemble audience seating turned and looked at me. I smiled sheepishly and tiptoed over to an empty chair. Facing us, seated on one side of a table, were Melinda and four of her classmates.

One man was reading intensely: “It’s easy for you to say! I can’t even remember our address—our fucking address, Ruth! Did you know I keep it written down on a slip of paper in my wallet? And I have another one in my shoe, in case I lose my wallet!”

Melinda read, dryly, “Oh my God, what if you lose your shoes, though? Then what?”

The man sighed. “Very funny, sweetheart. See, I already forgot how funny you are.”

From what I roughly knew, Melinda’s play was about a famous composer whose Alzheimer’s was rapidly becoming debilitating. As the disease progressed, the symphony he was working on became his saving grace—the musical notes were written down, so he didn’t forget or get confused when he worked on it, the way he did in other aspects of his life. But as I watched, I started to realize where Melinda was taking the play; he was now beginning to forget how to read music. I’d walked in on the most tragic part.

I looked around the room. People were rapt, sitting on the edges of their seats. A few were audibly sniffling. Everybody was rooting for the play to be great, everybody was open, sincere. It was almost too good, the way movies depicted old artsy New York, this reading, this makeshift theater in someone’s loft. I watched Melinda; she was so focused, furiously scribbling notes as people read their lines. Her lines, which she was showing to the world outside her workshop for the first time. She was oblivious to us, though, lost in her own creation. It was amazing to see her in her element, away from our little office world. God, what a joke compared to this. We were just tap-dancing at work, who cared, what difference did our efforts make? We were killing time for money. This was something else.

About twenty minutes later, Melinda looked up. “Curtain.” Everyone began to applaud wildly and she smiled as she was hugged by the people who had read with her. I stood and whistled as loud as I could. I wanted to go over and congratulate her but it didn’t seem like my turn yet. Then, boom, the lights dimmed and someone hit the stereo. The Strokes blared; for some reason their music always made me feel like I was in Urban Outfitters about to try on an overpriced T-shirt.

I took a deep breath and waded into the outer ring of the crowd around Melinda. I saw George first, a white guy with dreads who I knew through her. It was tough to pull off, the white-guy-with-dreads look; very few could do it. Only thing worse in that genre were the white girls on spring break in the Bahamas who got their hair beaded and then tragically forgot to put sunscreen where the hair was pulled apart.

“Hey, man, that was great, huh?” I asked George, shaking his hand.

“That, I think, is going to get bought.” He held up a Pyrex pipe and changed the subject. “Can I interest you in getting high?”

And soon I was as stoned as a teen at the prom in 1978. I burned my throat a bit, so I left George and went to grab a beer out of the kitchen. It was crowded with folks smoking cigarettes and grabbing at some pita bread and cheese that was laid out on the stove. I reached into the fridge.

“Hey, can you hand me a Stella?”

I turned to see a girl with green eyes, a Joan-Jett-circa-“I Love Rock and Roll” haircut, and a polka-dot sweater. All curvy and shit. Like someone hand-packed her into her jeans. I passed her a beer. “Here you go.”

“Thanks.” She smiled at me. “So, what’s your story? You friends with Jon?” She pulled a bottle opener/magnet off the fridge door, opened her beer, and then gave the opener to me. I fumbled with it a bit. I was higher than I wanted to be.

“No, I’m friends with the playwright, Melinda. Well, not friends exactly, we work together, I can’t lie. Well, of course, I could lie—I’m actually quite an accomplished liar.” I picked at the label on my beer as I rolled on. “But I made a list of New Year’s resolutions, and right after ‘Get buns and abs of steel’ is ‘Be more truthful.’ My name is Jason.” I stuck out my hand.

She shook it. “Carol.” Surprisingly firm grip. A little manly. “Nice opening monologue.”

“Thanks, I, uh, took drama in college.” I tried a sip of the beer. Lukewarm. “I don’t really know who Jon is, actually.” I gestured to the apartment. “His place is awesome, though.”

“He was the guy in the orange T-shirt who didn’t have too many lines. I used to work with him at this ad agency. But now I’m a VP web producer at match.com.” She smiled.

“Wow, congratulations.”

“Yeah. It’s a great place for me.” She blinked, and touched my arm. “So what do you do with Melinda?”

I brought my beer to my lips, buying a second, contemplating my answer. It would be easy for me to latch onto Melinda’s life, say we’d worked together on a play in the Fringe Festival or something. I’d certainly strayed farther from the truth before. Last night, in fact. But for some reason I really didn’t feel like playing that game, the one wherein we made ourselves sound better than we actually were. And since I had just gotten laid as an orthodontist, I felt a certain desire to abstain from it. “Melinda and I work at a film casting place; I’m an assistant there.” I watched her for a reaction. “But there’s only four people, so I’m this close to being CEO.” I held up three fingers.

She took a prolonged swallow of beer. Fuck, they can never hide it. “A casting assistant, huh?” She glanced down, I think at my shoes, then back to my face. “So like, do you want to be a producer or something?”

She was already in Phase Two. My current credentials didn’t sound that hot, so now she was sizing me up for “future potential.” Like I was a young racehorse or a piece of real estate in a gentrifying neighborhood. This exact sequence had happened to me more times than I cared to recall. It started with “Oh, this guy looks sort of interesting,” then went to “Oh, his job is kinda lame, though, but wait…maybe he has a plan,” to, if it hadn’t already ended with me immediately being dropped like a dirty diaper, “Wait, this one I can mold like a lump of clay into Perfect Boyfriend.”

“Um, producer, I don’t know,” I shrugged, smiling. “Could be, I’m still sorting that out, to be honest. Or maybe an astronaut. I’m on the fence.”

“Mmm-hmm. Tough choice.” Carol took another taste of her beer. Her eyes darted around the room. “They’re really different jobs.”

I took her face in. Yeah, I didn’t have a shot in hell of ever kissing this girl. No “assistant” did. She was probably racing her friends to be first to both procreate and be made partner. “I make more money than you, AND my baby was born first—in your face!” It was all camouflaged under the stylish haircut. A friend of hers walked past and they started chatting; she was about to sail away. On cue, the wind blew.

“Okay, well, I’m going to get back to my friends,” she said, touching my shoulder, patronizingly. “It was nice to meet you.” I watched her curvaceous body move as she negotiated her way out of the crowded kitchen. I guess you could say she had an hourglass figure. But time was running out.

I consoled myself with a mouthful of beer. Maybe I was high but I felt like everyone in the kitchen was looking at me, so I shuffled back out into the main room and found a spot to sulk. VP, Jesus. It killed me, that crap. All of a sudden these people who two minutes ago were proud to rule the bong thought they were Gordon Gecko or something. What was I to her, a retarded busboy at Stuckey’s? I mean, I wasn’t some poet, some Utopian dreamer; it wasn’t like I wanted to live in 1967, abandon all material possessions, and give my children Native American names like Spirit Runner. I loved money and treasure as much as any pirate. These people who used their job titles just like maybe they had once used their major or their varsity letter or whatever to make themselves seem superior. Fuck ’em, I wasn’t buying it. I leaned against the wall and drained my beer. I had made an excellent argument to myself, but there was no way around it. A girl turning you down, thinking that who you were wasn’t good enough, hurt. It hurt every fucking time.