Bob Goes to Jail

by Rob Sedgwick

  In I walked to audition with Roddy. The casting director, director, and a gaggle of producers were sitting behind one long, long table—most of them with their arms folded and all of them ready to judge. Roddy wore a vague mockup of a Chinese costume and affected a sort of Asian accent. Couldn’t have been a gentler, nicer guy.

  I went up to say hello. He smiled, shook my hand, and looked me dead in the eye. He seemed to be a deeply sincere man and, in the tradition of old Hollywood, just happy to be working and grateful to be there. Then he stood there in the middle of the room, acting “Chinese” while I roamed about freestyle. Whatever impulse hit me, I went with. I walked straight up to the casting table, parked my ass down, and shot Roddy lines from there with my back to the producer and casting team. I walked right up to Roddy and challenged him as the scene dictated. I was about a foot taller, so I had to bend down to get my face in his. First I bellowed. Then I spoke quietly to him, patted his little Chinese cap, and kissed him on the forehead.

  I didn’t get the part.

  Then there was another test deal where I got put up at the Sunset Marquis (abundantly pink, roomy, cloud-thick towels, very fancy), went to the bar the night before, and actually used a drink coupon that I had found it my room. The bartender gave me a “you-have-got-to-be-kidding-me” look. I felt shame but held my ground and tried to enjoy my martini. The next day, the audition room was packed. There were a couple of guys from New York there I ended up talking to, because in 1989 the myth that the only real actors were from New York was still very much alive. We looked down on all the guys from LA. We wished each other good luck when one of us went in. When it was my turn and the casting person opened the door, I saw that the room was overstuffed: network executives, more casting people, producers, even demographics experts to gauge how an actor would fair in different parts of the country; they would check off “yes” for Wisconsin, “no” for Des Moines, and so on. I tested with an LA actor who was gorgeous, tall, chiseled, and topped off with a creamy, coiffed, and curlicued blond hairstyle that was probably all the rage in the nineteenth century. He stood, posed, held his breath, and held onto a bookcase for dear life.

  I started the scene and moved anywhere I felt like. The poor blond guy remained nailed to the bookcase, barely able to get his lines out. His forehead was a crease. I sometimes had to lean on the wall next to him so he felt included, not only in the scene, but in life.

  Again, I didn’t get the gig. It went to someone called Hunt.

  Then the reality of not working would set in. I had tumbleweeds of free time, which drove me crazy. I would jump into my shitty Coke can of a car with its Cheerios wheels and drive around aimlessly, obsessing about why I wasn’t happening. I wanted to be happening. Hunt was happening. People named Hunt were happening all over the place. Why wasn’t I?

  And the driving never helped, because wherever you go you in LA, you never end up anywhere.

  I would drink myself into oblivion at night watching TV, ordering fried chicken from some cheap delivery place and cramming it in my mouth—or at least I guess I did, anyway, because though I never remembered actually eating anything, it all seemed to be gone the next morning—before passing out, only to wake up to another beautiful fucking day. I was sick of beautiful fucking days. When you’re back East, you don’t appreciate it, but when it rains or snows it at least makes you complain about something, even if it’s just wishing you were somewhere else where it isn’t raining or snowing. Out in LA, your mind turns to Maypo because it’s too hot to think and there’s this forever background hum of nothingness.

  Looking at the Hollywood sign every day was looking at a monument to my own failure, and beneath it might as well have been a graveyard of all the other actors who tried, failed, and died out here, only to be buried and forgotten underneath that mammoth, mocking, cruel humiliation of a sign.

  I spent time with my brother-in-law Kevin when he was out there working himself. A prince of a guy. Even after he got some great ink in the movie Animal House when he was a kid (“Thank you, sir, may I have another!”), he still had to go back to his waiting gig at the All State Café in New York so he could pay his rent at the Bretton Hall Hotel on Broadway and Eighty-Sixth (back in the seventies, it was a nosedive of a place) and eat cheeseburgers. Patrons at the All State Café would routinely congratulate and cheer him for his terrific performance in Animal House, and then he would say, “Thank you so much. What would you like on your salad?” So even though he was a big movie star, he knew what time it was. He was brotherly to me. He took my acting seriously. But when we were in public, and with LA being such an industry town, I always felt like the comic relief.

  We went to the Palm one night. As usual, I had a bunch of cocktails. Around about 6:30, I would automatically yearn for them. I was either on my way to a cocktail or one was in my hand, and Steve Martin came over to say hi to Kevin. I said hi too and made a parade of it. “Hi, Steve! How’s it going? Why don’t you bag the movies for a while and go back to standup? ‘Hello, Mr. Johnson, is Sally home?’ With the balloon on your lip for herpes? Brilliant!”

  Kevin cringed, and Steve smiled politely and left. I may have been a big fat loser, but after a couple of cocktails I was no shrinking violet, and my mind had a mind all its own. Impulse control was gone. If he had come to our table, I would have told Jesus Christ his father was doing a lousy job and ought to be fired. I ended up staying at Kevin’s hotel that night because I was too drunk to drive. The next morning, he said, “Robbie, most people have a cocktail and relax. You do a shot of Cuervo and you’re hopped up like you’re on coke. Thank God you stayed last night or you would have driven home like fucking Mario fucking Andretti.”

  Julie came out to LA to console me. When she got there, she said she was depressed because the whole cab ride from the airport to where I was staying looked just like one giant mall. Just like Florida, her home state, which she fled hoping never to return. So we hopped into my Rent-A-Wreck and headed to Mexico. On the way down, she pointed out how the landscape and strip malls never changed. She drooped down in the seat to hide. She was right.

  It was spooky. We were lost in a forever Wal-Mart.

  We drove to Tijuana, where tequila was cheaper than water. Splitting headaches in the morning with ornery roosters that were not from the Gingerbread House screeching outside our quaint hotel room. The sex was XXX adult Romper Room. My God. As we were leaving our hotel, a guy coming in looked at her and bumped his nose into the glass door but still managed a “my god” under his breath.

  But she was nice to me. She thought I was funny. Even after gallons of cocktails. If I faux pas-ed, which I always did, it didn’t seem to bother her. She would say my luck was going to change and mean it. She talked about plans for us. She talked about a flower shop and a house. It was nice to hear about plans from someone who might actually be able to pull them off. Without meaning to, I would daydream about her. I found myself liking her more than I wanted to.

  When she left to go back to New York, I was only a couple of weeks behind her. LA was a bust, and I couldn’t stand it anymore. She came to pick me up at the airport with Tybalt. They were walking toward me as I got my luggage. There aren’t many truly joyful moments in life, but she looked beautiful and motherly with Tybalt. She let him go, and he came skittering toward me on the slippery airport floor. He was more handsome than I had dreamed, and my love for him was deep and true. I started to let myself love her, too. And suddenly there was this thick rope connecting all three of us. It felt powerful, happy, and vastly safe.

  Walking Tybalt in Riverside Park on a beautiful late September afternoon, the tilt of the sun making everything look old-fashioned, kind, and welcoming, she pointed out how beautiful the gardens were and particular flowers and what they meant to her and she suddenly sagged miserably. She had forgotten she had to be at the strip club in a few hours. She looked ill.

  “Then that’s it,” I said. “It�
��s over. If it’s going to upset you that much, I don’t want you doing it anymore.”

  “But it’s so much money.” She had come from nothing. She once told me how her feet had been damaged from a job in college because her shoes had fallen apart and she couldn’t afford new ones, and how if she if she got sick she would have to gut through it because she didn’t have insurance.

  “It doesn’t matter. We’ll be fine. Jordan has to start working again sooner or later. Just call them and say you’re done.”

  Her voice was rickety on the phone, but she pushed out the words, “I’m not going to work there anymore.”

  She listened for a response, but I took the phone from her and hung up. Then she turned to me and high-beamed.

  “You’re the only one seeing me naked from now on.”

  A couple of weeks later, she opened the flower shop she had always wanted with the cash from stock that I was not supposed to sell, that was intended to be held for safe keeping. I was a gofer in that business too. At least it kept my mind off the deals I wasn’t doing with Jordan. The place was really sweet: terracotta floors, country furniture, a sort of Peter Rabbit bunny sign out front hanging above the door, and a whole roomful of gay guys she knew from the dance world cutting and arranging flowers. Tybalt would hang out in the window, assessing the clientele. He was ferociously protective of Julie, though God knows she didn’t need it. When a guy tried to rip off the radio from our van, Julie ran out, grabbed him, and dragged him from of the van with one hand. She was about to clock him with a right cross when he slipped from her grasp and took off like Jesse Owens, empty-handed, Tybalt snarling in his wake.

  Life went on, kind of normal in a way: just Julie, Tybalt, me, and the shop. Connecticut on the weekends at my sister and brother-in-law’s place, but without my sister and brother-in-law there because they were usually off doing movies. Tybalt would ride shotgun with me squished into the front seat while Julie flew over the speed limit. Any time we got stopped, she would blink her baby blues and the cop would tell her in a buffoon-like trance to please slow down in the future.

  The one and only time I drove, she told me to go faster, faster, and of course I got pulled over. My guts wanted to splat out of my rear like a dead transmission. Tybalt, furious, started barking. The cop said, “License and registration. And if you don’t shut that dog up, you’re going to hear a loud bang.”

  Tybalt comprehended the threat and shifted into a low growl. Julie went from the prim girl next door to top shelf badass: “You’re going to fucking threaten to shoot our dog over a speeding ticket?!”

  I motioned her to please cool it. I knew I was in a kind of legal quicksand, that it was better to stay still and float in the bad I was already in than make things worse by flailing around and drowning in the process.

  The cop ran my license. It was suspended. I remembered I hadn’t paid a bunch of bicycle tickets from the time I had been a bike messenger.

  “Your license is suspended. Step out of the car.”

  I got out of the car slowly, one guilty limb at a time. What if he somehow figured out I was a drug dealer?

  “The registration says this car belongs to Kevin Bacon. Is that the Kevin Bacon?”

  “Yes,” I said desperately, hoping this would make me a celebrity by association and he would suddenly and magnanimously grant me a royal pardon.

  “Wow! Kevin Bacon!”

  “Yes. I can get you an autographed picture. Easy.”

  9

  At twenty-five, I have just finished a movie that is so awful it isn’t even funny awful. It is just stupefyingly awful. To watch it is to feel life seep out of your body and your time on this Earth evaporate. It is called Nasty Hero. I am the guy the hero has to be nasty to.

  The lead is the rough-hewn good guy with muscles and a deep, earthy tan. His wardrobe is a flimsy, clinging muscle shirt and his beard is a permanent five o’clock shadow. When he fucks extras or production assistants in his trailer, it squeaks and rocks up and down, mocking all those who aren’t doing what he’s doing. This always makes me feel especially lonely because a) I yearn for companionship and b) being the second lead in the movie, I should be having sex left and right, but I’m not. After a scene is finished, he keeps pointing out how good he is on the camera monitor. “See. Don’t I look great there?” he says thoughtfully. “Look at my body, my muscles, my expression. My scowl is out-Clinting Clint Eastwood. Only my scowl conveys a deeper truth.” Sometimes he has the good taste to compliment me as well.

  Everyone in the movie, myself included, is smirking a lot because we think that’s what bad guys do. Smirk. Evilly. It is Miami in the mid-eighties, cocaine supreme. It is terrible awful horrible mullet hair, tacky outfits that are thought to be the height of fashion and will never be seen again, silly cars, terrible throbbing music, and everyone thinking they’re hip. It doesn’t even go straight to video.

  After being out of work for the next three months and with hardly any auditions, I need a job that is easy to get, flexible, and will hire someone with my minimal to no skills. I become a bicycle messenger. My first day on the job, it is thirty-five degrees out with freezing rain. Snow would have been much better. My teeth are chattering and I am not wearing gloves, so my hands are brittle ice. If they bump into anything, they will shatter. I am wearing shitty purple sweats that stink and provide no warmth because they only absorb all the cold and wet. Depressingly, my route takes me down Fifth Avenue by the Plaza Hotel and the General Motors building.

  When I was young, this area was a fairy tale.

  In the pit of the GM building in a dreamier time past, there is a restaurant called the Auto Pub. When I am twelve, Mom sneaks me out of the house and takes me there for our “date.” It is our secret, magical place. We whirl like Astaire and Rogers through the spinning glass door into another world: an old world of old, old cars. It is womblike. The ceiling is low, the lighting is dim, romantic, and everything is black except the cars, which are spotlit brilliantly, hypnotically. They are the sorts of cars Cary Grant or Sean Connery would have driven in the movies. Or Humphrey Bogart’s chauffeured limo in Sabrina. I am high on dazzle and the exclusive company of my mother. My chest swells. My height rises. We are escorted to our own private car (all of them have tables inside), crawl in, and the waitress shuts the door. There is even a drive-in movie! But Mom and I never see or hear the movie because we are laughing up a storm. I feel so happy and entertaining—not like I do around my stepfather, when I am always censoring myself. Everything that comes out of my mouth is the funniest thing she has ever heard. I could fascinate clay. But more than that, she is happy and completely herself. I am her knight in shining armor. It is bliss.

  But now I am straddling my bike in the freezing November drizzle. I am a bicycle messenger. Looking down at what used to be the Auto Pub, I want to burst into tears. I want my mother, or at least that golden time when the concept of having to be a bicycle messenger didn’t exist.

  I have a choice: break down, or go kamikaze and deliver the packages that are in my bike bag.

  From far away, you can hear my war cry screaming down the avenue. I spin downtown in and out of traffic, hideously fast in my ripped up sopping purple sweats. I hold onto buses to go even faster, smoking a cigarette at the same time so I can appear badass. From above, people riding the bus look down at me as if I’m about to jump off a bridge.

  Several months later, the black messengers know me as the crazy white guy. I play the Jimi Hendrix concert version of “Like a Rolling Stone” on my Walkman and live the song as I slash through traffic.

  I run into one of the older black guys who has been doing this for years. I’ve seen him around the city on runs, and he is never in a rush. He moves deliberately, elegantly to his destination. I can tell the other messengers admire him as I do. He is bike-messenger nobility. He stops me on the street and says, “You have got to slow down.”

 
; About an hour later, I pass a cab on its right side and I guess it doesn’t like that (cabs and bicycle messengers are natural enemies), so it goes after my back wheel and I get whipped to the street. My left wrist snaps in two. I roll on top of my bike and go out for a couple of seconds. I see a light bulb click off in my brain. When I come to, people are trying to help me out, but I say I am okay even though I can’t get my legs underneath me. I totter drunkenly to a payphone, call the delivery company, tell them what happened and that I am going straight to the hospital.

  The dispatcher says, “Sedwhich, that’s terrible! How many packages do you have left?”

  I tell him.

  “Sedwhich, you’re still in the vicinity of where the packages have to be delivered, is that correct?”

  “Yes, I think so,” I say, too blurry to realize where this conversation is going.

  “Sedwhich, I tell you what, why don’t you deliver the rest of the packages you got, then proceed directly to the hospital.”

  My bell was so rung this seems a reasonable request. I think hard. I frown and pucker up my chin like it is some doable math problem, one I can maybe solve. But then I understand that this dispatcher doesn’t really care about my wrist or me. Finally, I decide, “No, I think I better go to the hospital.”

  I bike there with my shattered left wrist clinging to my chest hoping no one will hit me on the way.

  10

  “What are you doing in Kevin Bacon’s car?”

  “He’s my brother-in-law.”

  “Get the fuck outta here.”