A Bright Ray of Darkness

by Ethan Hawke

  He walked very slowly up the stairs to the stage entrance, careful not to trip on his regal robes. “Do not underestimate the disease. I’ve watched it eat better than you.”

  Once through the stage doors, the King dropped his voice. Actors and stagehands were hustling in the shadows all around us. Prop men were pulling ropes, curtains were falling and rising, and the music was blaring. Actors were rushing to get in place.

  The lights went black.

  The show was over. The applause began.

  The King and I stood in the darkness of the backstage left entrance and waited our turn to step out. Many people had to bow before our call. Virgil and Prince Hal were stage right. I could make out their shadows across the stage. In his long wine red robes, the King left his arms hanging limp at his sides. The impending opening night curtain call seemed to be making him as apprehensive as waiting for a gas tank to fill up. Our cue arrived and the King and I walked forward, joining Falstaff and Prince Hal against the back wall. The audience still couldn’t see us. We were obscured by all the flag antics of the massive cast out in front. My body was strangely vibrating. I’d never opened a play on Broadway before.

  The King leaned closer to me. “I have only one real applicable piece of advice for you,” he said, his perfect diction piercing through the noise of the crowd. “Have a boring life and make your art thrilling.”

  The crowd was going bananas, cheering and catcalling. My spine felt liquid. The cannons were firing. Samuel and a few others of our endomorph “soldiers” were waving their banners. It was close now. The company around us stepped back to the periphery of the stage as we, the final four, were revealed. The applause ascended in scale and volume. The wings of my heart lifted in my chest.

  I stared out at all the cheering faces. Everyone looked so happy.

  Finally, we arrived at the moment where the four of us landed center stage. The rest of our cast turned toward us and humbly kneeled. The roar of the crowd escalated. One by one, I watched twelve hundred people stand up applauding. This was our standing ovation, just as J.C. had promised. The roof of the Lyceum was shaking. There was a wall of sound moving towards us, enveloping us, holding and lifting us.

  I remember my first kiss. Michelle Sand. Her breath was sweet. She slipped her angel catlike tongue between my lips and into my mouth. My heart fired like a gun. Bang. I couldn’t hear anything. I thought I would pass out. Then she pulled away. Looking me straight in my eyes, she smiled. It felt good, like I mattered, like my life was accumulating into something that might have a purpose. Witnessing that standing ovation on my Broadway debut felt like I’d just kissed twelve hundred people for the first time. My knees buckled, my eyes went swimmy with tears. I knew it was pretend, but it was all I had. I stepped forward for my solo bow, leaving the King behind. Fuck the King, I thought, I’m not ready for a boring life.

  Lord, grant me peace, but not yet.

  I want to be loved. I want to be famous.

  Lord, please grant me the Black Death.

  Intermission

  ACT III

  The Blue Jean Kid

  Scene 2

  In the still hot September days before seventh grade, I had this idea: I should wear my blue jean jacket to school every day. That’s just what I’d wear. I’d change my undershirt, but every day I’d put on my blue jean jacket and button it straight up. No matter the weather. You could count on it. People would start calling me “The Blue Jean Kid.” Some people would say it in a derisive way, but they’d be jealous. I would almost never speak. My coolness would be undeniable. Some guys would hate me and want to fight, but I didn’t care. I’d fight if I had to. Girls would like me. They would admire my simplicity. I’d be a lone wolf, wandering through the halls of my colossal high school unafraid, with my jean jacket tightly wrapped around my heart. In my right chest pocket, I’d keep a triple pack of Big Red cinnamon gum and have one stick a day. Only one. I would be a disciplined motherfucker. I’d never give anyone else a stick. But then, at the perfect moment, after months of careful observation, I’d walk up to the most badass, brainy, bitchin’ punk rock girl in our class, and say, “You wanna stick?”

  And she’d say, pretending she could go either way, “Sure.”

  And then everybody would know right then and there—we were boyfriend/girlfriend.

  Because even a middle schooler knows, the Blue Jean Kid never gives out his gum.

  That’s what I was thinking about at 12:30 a.m., as I sat alone on my leather couch. There was no music playing and I wasn’t smoking. I was just sitting there. It was over. I’d made it. Any second, The New York Times would hit the stands; the review was probably available online already. I wasn’t going to read it, I’d promised myself. No good could come from that. If it was bad, I’d obsess. If it was good, and it’s never good enough, I’d start patting myself on the back like a blowhard asshole, and my performance would crumble. If they didn’t mention me at all, horror. Confidence is fragile. So, I just sat there.

  The opening night party was still going full throttle, but my nervous system couldn’t handle that scene. I’d left after less than an hour. I don’t know what I expected. Fire engines! Dancing girls! Guns! Poetry! Fights! Cabaret! I don’t know. It all went down at the Tavern on the Green, which was swanky enough. I was just miserable. Every time someone looked at their BlackBerry, I studied their expression, wondering if the reviews were out. I’d been around the block enough to know that if people weren’t talking about the newspapers, the news wasn’t good. My agent was there. He didn’t say anything. The producers were all dressed to the nines. I looked at their faces. Had they read the review? The rest of the cast was duded out with their spouses, getting their pictures taken on the blood-red carpet. Every time I stood for a photo, I imagined that the picture would run in the New York Post with the caption last known photo.

  Lady Percy was there in an ethereal gown straight off a runway, her long red hair knitted in an intricate pattern. We started kissing over by the bathrooms. It began as a congratulatory hug but went south fast. Her husband was seated alone at their table. That’s why I left. Not that she wasn’t heart-stopping, I just knew that sucking face with one’s married costar at the opening night party was a bad idea. She was drunk and whispered to me she hated her life and sometimes wished she would die in a car accident.

  “You going to read the reviews?” I asked her.

  “Doesn’t matter how good they are, William. Your father still won’t love you.”

  * * *

  —

  When I was a kid and acting in my first movie I remember walking to the set thinking, This is it, if I do a good job my father will love me. Sounds absurdly simplistic, but I was not that complicated. Would my father read the Henry notices? Did he know about the production? I reassured myself that if my son were in a play I certainly wouldn’t love him any less if some theater critic thought he sucked.

  Back in my hotel room, sitting there alone, it seemed like it would be years until the sun rose. Not reading the reviews wasn’t getting easier. My phone vibrated. I could see immediately it was Big Sam calling to see where I’d disappeared to. He would have read the review. It rang again. He would only call if it was good. Or maybe he was calling to see if I had shot up a lethal dose of heroin after how bad it was?

  The phone shook again. I answered it.

  Thirty minutes later, Sam and I were playing pool down at a bar called Honky Tonk Angels on the Lower East Side. He couldn’t sleep either. He’d hated the party too, mostly because he didn’t think he had the right clothes. A cheap JCPenney blazer hung over his giant frame. George Jones’s “You’re Still on My Mind” was the fifth song we played on the jukebox, and Big Sam still hadn’t mentioned the review. It was now 1:30 a.m. I should’ve gone to bed, but Sam is a persuasive SOB. And God knows, I was never going to sleep anyway. I was having a gin
ger ale. Since the cocaine episode with Deadwilder, I’d been on the wagon.

  “I haven’t read the review,” he said, slapping the cue ball into the nine. I didn’t believe him. His hulking body stretched over the table for his next shot. “I’ll look it up on my phone this second if you want. But I think you’ll be a whole lot cooler if you don’t read it.” He missed his shot and began chalking up his stick. I knew him well enough now to know that there was no way he hadn’t snuck a peek at the review. He loved me, and if he wasn’t telling, that meant it was bad. I shot and missed.

  “What the hell does that clown over at the Times know about art anyway? Fuck him. He’s probably beating off to child porn right now. I want to write a review of his life.” Sam laughed. “I will not be kind.”

  Bang. Sam shot another ball, hard into the corner pocket.

  “I don’t care what he thinks,” I said meekly.

  “I don’t believe you,” Sam said, “but you shouldn’t care. Some’ll be good; some’ll be bad, right? And anybody with a brain in their head knows they should pay an extra twenty bucks to watch you pour turpentine on yourself and light it up every night. You’re better than Daffy Duck, man.”

  “Thanks,” I mumbled. Sam was good guy. He took up acting after tearing his ACL junior year of college. He looked at everything through the eyes of sports training and was always a good teammate.

  “You know what you should do?” he said, his giant hand wrapped around his drink. “Buy a coffin. Buy a coffin and put it on your bed and sleep in it every night like those crazy monks do. The Trappists, or the Franciscans, one of them—they build their coffins and then they sleep in them to remind them what’s really going on, right?” I’d never had the sense that Samuel had ever thought about this shit so deeply. He was a big gangly guy who still seemed more like a defensive lineman than an actor. “The New York Times review doesn’t mean dog crap. You could get a great review, and on your next movie, they could pay you a zillion bucks, and the whole world would think you were doing really great. But it wouldn’t mean you actually were doing great. I mean, nobody thinks about me at all, dude. You should be grateful.”

  He walked to the bar and ordered another Roy Rogers. When I asked him about why he never drank he dropped his big fella persona and for the first time opened up to me, telling me the story of his sobriety.

  “When the ambulance arrived I was crying for my mom at Sheridan Square with blood spritzing out of my nose ’cause I was snorting absolutely anything I could carve up into powder. Well, they took me to the hospital, and after I got out of St. Vincent’s my buddy Daniel picked me up and told me he and all his drug-crazed buddies were driving out to Nevada for Burning Man. You know what that is? Right?”

  I didn’t know much but I nodded like I did. I knew it was someplace out in the desert where aspiring hippies congregate and do drugs once a year. The truth is the more he talked the more I began to wish I’d stayed in. I think I’d been hoping we would talk about the review.

  “Well, believe it or not, I did the whole drive to the Nevada desert with these clowns not drinking any of their hooch or touching any of their drugs. I mean, you didn’t know me back then—but there was no pleasure that I couldn’t quickly turn into a pain. Sex. Drugs. My friends called me ‘The Elephant.’ Once I was there in the desert, I just wandered around and watched all these acid-crazed people having their chemically induced enlightenment experiences…and I was sober and miserable. I missed this girl I was into at the time. But I knew if I went back to Brooklyn I’d just start using again, and if I did that, I’d end up dead. Then after a day and a half I met this elderly Native American dude. And this is where I may lose you, but this guy was the real deal. For a North Dakota fella like me, there was something about him that was familiar. He felt like family. He was cooking veggie hot dogs on a grill in front of an old Airstream trailer with a Merle Haggard T-shirt on and I struck up a conversation with him. He told me that coming to Burning Man was a strange thing to do to get sober. And we started gabbing and I told him that the truth was that since my mom committed suicide I think I’ve never, like, moved on…I mean, my dad sent me to shrinks and shit, so here I was thirty years old and I thought I’d dealt with it. But I couldn’t shake how badly I wanted to see her again all the time. I was already older than she had ever been, you know? My mom drowned herself at twenty-nine. So, this old dude told me he thought that he could probably help me. That I didn’t need drugs, what I needed was medicine. And that he could take me on a vision quest to see my mom but that there was a strong possibility that I’d die in the process. Literally die. This old Indian went on to say that the earth’s drugs are to be used as agents of healing and not playthings. His bet was that if I took this trip with him, and if I lived through it, I would most surely never abuse drugs again, and if I died, it would only be because I chose to die. Personally, he didn’t care if I died, but that I had better choose to live or else things would become very awkward for him with the police. So, he made me promise I would choose life. Obviously, I say I’ll do it, right? I mean, how could I refuse?”

  I nodded, but frankly, I could think of a million ways to avoid a vision quest. Also, I could already understand that this story was not going to end with him revealing to me that I got a great review in The New York Times.

  “Turns out that this ‘trip’ involves smoking the saliva of a certain kind of bullfrog, which is technically poison,” Big Sam continued. “I mean, the shit will kill you. But I go inside his little Airstream trailer, which is a very clean and peaceful place to be, and he lit some candles. His daughter starts to sing some old Chiricahua song, and I smoke this shit, right? I mean, frankly I don’t care if I live or die—I got nothing to live for—no football, no girlfriend, no mom, but there was something warm and kind about this man. I felt safe. One hit off his pipe full of frog saliva takes my head clean off. I’m not kidding—almost immediately I go into cardiac arrest. I fall down like a fuckin’ epileptic. Next thing I know, I’m floating above my body watching these two Indians rubbing my hands and legs. And then I’m floating higher above the Airstream, above Burning Man, and I can see all the people dancing and lighting fires, and then I’m shooting like a star above America and all the electricity, then above the darkness of the Atlantic Ocean, and then the planet is drifting away underneath my feet, and then I’m skyrocketing through the ‘howling infinite,’ you know? I mean, disappearing into some deep peaceful void of space tucked into the Milky Way and then I hear it…this sound of like…love. I hear, and feel held, by these voices of love. It’s my mom. And she cares for me and it’s so arresting, like a cold shower on a hot afternoon. She is fresh. I start laughing, just elated that I am there with her. There are other people too, people I don’t remember but recognize, and they think I am amazing and are so happy to see me.”

  He smiled in the hazy light of the pool hall. We were both just standing there holding our cue sticks at the corner of the table. The place was emptying out.

  “I don’t see them, but I hear and feel them. And then I could feel myself pleasantly begin to evaporate. As if everything I thought of as ‘me’ was just moisture collected in a cloud and that was about to rain away—my mother’s voice—all the voices that identified ‘me’—we were all going to rain away and I couldn’t wait. I wasn’t afraid. Then I heard that old Indian calling me back, begging me, imploring me…saying ‘you promised!’…and he reminded me that there was no hurry. Indeed, I thought, it was wonderful where I was—but it was clear this place wasn’t going anywhere, because ‘it’ was everywhere and everything, it was more real than this bar, you understand? And I did have this life left to live so why not live it? So, in the same way that you can let yourself fall back asleep and almost consciously slip right back into a dream—I returned to that Airstream. Instinctually, I felt there were things I am supposed to learn here right now; there was no good reason to die. There is plenty
of time.” I was staring at Big Sam’s warm brown eyes. People are always all so much more strange than I first imagine.

  “And so I returned. And the humorous side effect is: now I don’t fear death. Not at all. But even more importantly, I don’t fear life. I know everything will be fine, better than fine. All shall be well. But I also know in my fuckin’ core, that there is nothing to ‘do’ while I am here—but to live.” He stopped talking and stared at me simply.

  I had nothing to offer.

  “Abusing drugs is defeating the whole idea of being born. And you know, William, your drug is approval. That’s why it’s so funny to read all this damning shit about you everywhere, and watch you act every night. You may as well not run from it—no matter what The New York Times says—they can’t save you. The court of public opinion is in. And you are an adulterous shit and a mediocre actor. You fucked over a Queen. You get it? She’s a Pop God, and you’re a mortal. So, you better look that square in the eyes. You need to have your own opinion of yourself. You see, I can’t think of a person it would bother more to have this happen to than you…The New York Times doesn’t know if you are doing a good job or not. Shit, they don’t even know a good actor. If they did they would single my ass out for sure.” He laughed.

  “How’d you get so smart?”

  “ ’Cause my mother killed herself, and because I tore my ACL and had to give up football, and because I was able to quit drinking.”