“He does,” Spence admitted. “But it’s crooked. I really don’t know what you can do with a crooked dick.”
“You’ve seen each other’s wee-wees?” Pretty Girl said.
“It’s a guy thing,” Spence explained. “You try not to look in the locker room, but everyone looks. We ran track together one time, or at least we auditioned for track, but didn’t really make it. We figured it’d be good practice for running from the hunky guys people like you usually date when we hit on you in clubs.”
“Practical.” Pretty Girl reeled in the first fish of the day, let it flop on the dock, and quickly got a baited hook back in the water, all in one fluid movement.
After an awkward lull in the conversation, Spence said, “I’m designing a dress for my girlfriend.”
Maynard sighed. “You see? I told you he was a lost cause.”
“I can’t decide if to go with the lace frill in the petticoat or to stitch in ruffles, and leave it at that.” Spence’s perennial indecisiveness seemed echoed in his getting stuck over which lure in his tackle box to try next.
“This is why his girlfriend is leaving him,” Maynard said. “No one can take this amount of doting. Even pigs will burst if you try to feed them too much.”
“How do you feel about clingy, over-attentive boyfriends?” Spence asked. “I honestly think it’s a selling point. But I can’t get anyone to agree with me on this.”
“It’s great for the honeymoon period,” Pretty Girl confessed. “After that, it gets a little suffocating.”
Spence said, “I can alternate between suffocating and spiteful. I lash out after a while if I don’t feel appreciated for lavishing so much attention on you. You think that’s enough of a break from suffocating?”
Pretty Girl took a deep breath to help her thinking on the subject. “I think any routine after a while gets tiring. Why don’t you try taking an acting class? Maybe that’ll get you out of character long enough to enjoy coming at life differently.”
The threesome was silent a while as they pondered this. “I think it’s pretty good advice,” Maynard admitted finally. “I need the break even if Victoria doesn’t.”
“I see you as a pretty lousy actor,” Thornwall said. “But the idea still gets my vote.”
“What’s your name?” Spence said finally.
“Vikki,” Pretty Girl said.
The boys laughed.
“Well, that’s an easy adjustment,” Spence said, “for when I start obsessing on you. I’m working off the theory that if she leaves me, I’ll be Okay, because it’s really more about having an object of obsession, than the object itself.”
“You definitely give objectifying women a renewed lease on life,” Maynard said.
“I’ll let you all love me in your sick, emotionally crippled ways.” Vikki reeled in another fish and let it flop on the dock. “It seems the least I can do if I’m going to take up dock space next to you.”
“You’re very accommodating,” Thornwall said.
“I’m used to it. I like the geeky ones, and it goes with the territory. You’re a better investment of my time than some handsome meathead with a learning curve that’s like downhill skiing.” She baited her line and got it back in the water with the same professionalism displayed earlier.
“How many of us lame ducks have you doctored back to health, exactly?” Maynard asked suspiciously.
“Not counting my six brothers? Three so far.”
“I’m not sure how I feel about love as a form of social work.” Maynard played with the reel on his rod, making clicking sounds.
“There’s some other kind?” Vikki quipped.
“For true-blue friendship, no,” Maynard admitted. “And it’s the hallmark of the whole frenemies concept. But romantic love? Puts a crimp in the sex if it’s coming off more like obedience training.”
“Speak for yourself,” Spence and Thornwall said in stereo.
Maynard made a sour face. “I guess I should have seen that coming.”
After staring at the water a while, Vikki said, “I’d go with the lace, more feminine.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Spence exclaimed. “Besides, if she unconsciously accepts a more traditional feminine role, then my wanting to do everything for her will seem more natural.”
She shook her head. “If that’s the strategy, you probably want to bring out her inner feminist. Trust me, most traditional women are used to doing everything for guys. That’s why their learned helplessness is perfected by the age of eight.”
“Lose the lace then?” Spence said.
“Definitely lose the lace.” Vikki added a third fish to her collection.
“I still say he should dump her,” Maynard said. “She’s damaged goods. Spence’s obsessing aside, there’s no amount of love that is enough for that woman.”
Pretty Girl thought about it before weighing in. “If you’re feeling hopeless in your relationship, make the most of it. Until you bottom out, you really can’t get better.”
“Wow. Wind her up, and watch her go,” Thornwall said.
***
Spence dropped the fishing rod by the door, and rushed down the hall of his apartment to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. He popped the lid on some generic aspirin, and swallowed a small handful that had a purple pill in the mix. He figured some dispensing machine had screwed up in filling the bottle, and probably snuck in another brand of NSAID. He doubted he’d get lucky enough to score a codeine capsule or anything that dramatic.
Having contended with the headache, driven by too much beer, too little water, and too much sun, he addressed his next most pressing concern. He leafed through the “Things to do in the Bay Area” catalogue, found seven pages dedicated solely to acting classes. Three schools were open to beginners and drop-ins. He circled all of them in case any were too full by the time he got there.
He’d spent five minutes on the phone with Victoria after Vikki left the pier, enough time to convince him pursuing her idea to get professional training on how to morph into someone else was the just-in-time solution he needed to keep his current girlfriend from stomping out the door forever.
***
The first acting group, located close to the Berkeley marina, welcomed Spence as if he was at an AA meeting. “Hi Spence!” six of them said in concert. The instructor said something about method acting and Stella Adler that went in one ear and out the next; Spence was just too nervous. With anxiety blurring his vision, he couldn’t even see the instructor all that well.
When his time came, his acting teacher, Brow Beater as he’d named her, a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker with a face wrinkled on four packs of cigarettes a day, judging by the pace she was going, had him say “No, I’m not” every which way imaginable: angry; amused; playful; whispering; lying; insistent. Whichever way he tried to redo the line, it left his lips sounding the same. He didn’t think so, but he was in a minority of one.
Brow Beater became so exasperated she instructed Spence to bend over and talk out of his ass – literally. Everyone was confident this would break the barrier on his monotone by getting him past his fear of embarrassing himself. It mostly made him feel even worse than Victoria did when she got tired of his hovering and threw a brown bag over his head with a face on it that made her laugh rather than cringe. With his head dangling between his splayed legs, and the upside down view of the judgmental faces staring back at him, he just felt more pressure in his head, and more anxious.
After twenty more humiliating minutes, he trudged back to his seat, head hanging low, confessing all out defeat. They all asked him if he was whiny, clingy, and suffocating in his relationships, as if they had Victoria on speed-dial. They said that’s how he sounded every time he opened his mouth. Like he was on the verge of crying. Only they wanted to slit their wrists.
Then something strange happened.
Another half an hour into class, he remembered everyone’s lines better than they did. He was able to capture their nua
nced dialogues perfectly, repeated them back to the would-be actors when it was his chance to make a comment and offer suggestions on how he would have handled things. Heads were turning.
Brow Beater had him reprise his work on stage at the foot of the auditorium. He did so to standing ovations as he went through not just his earlier monologue, but his section of everyone else’s dialogue with each of the female partners.
Everyone was too stunned to be jealous; they were thinking more along the lines of being happy he was attending and hoping he’d turn into a regular.
He was suddenly able to flip a switch in his brain he could never hit before. It bordered on a religious experience.
He couldn’t wait to get home to try out the new him on Victoria. If she couldn’t stay with his baseline personality, maybe she’d stick with one of his creations. Or maybe she’d fall in love with the chameleon, and ask for a different person each night.
On the way home, pedaling his old Schwinn bicycle, all he could think of was that strange purple pill. Surely that didn’t have anything to do with the metamorphosis.
***
As a last minute thought, it occurred to Spence, the budding actor, he might need a portfolio of characters to audition before Victoria.
Spence swung into the Sunrise Deli on Bancroft, for some people watching. He hung back to the rear of the store, nibbled on his dolma, and ogled.
The East Indian man with the New Dehli accent was giving the counter clerk hell with his avocado falafel. “The avocado is a little turned. Nothing fresher?” The clerk peeled a fresh avocado for the hunch-backed man. “Is that red-pepper hummus? I really don’t tolerate red-pepper hummus well. Do you have the garlic and parsley kind?” The clerk fetched a tub of the garlic and parsley out of the fridge for him. “That’s a little too much tahini for me. And, could we go with diced cherry tomatoes over the sliced larger ones?”
“Do you want me to make the dough for the pita bread too?” the clerk finally erupted, managing to sound genuinely helpful and even more concerned for the welfare of the sandwich than New Delhi.
“No, no. The pita looks wonderful.”
Finally New Delhi’s place was usurped at the counter by Georgia Girl. She wore blue-jean overalls and looked as if she was taking a break from bailing hay, down to the errant straws in her hair of matching color. She sported a powerful frame and a mass equivalent to two of the counter clerk, whose eyes lit up at the sight of her. He went into heat on the spot. His tempo picked up. He wielded cutlery with finesse as he prepared five spreads at once. “What can I get for you today, fine lady?”
He looked to Spence more like one of the twigs stuck in her hair than a viable suitor. She pointed to the Kufta Kabob. The clerk slowly spooned it into the pocket of the pita bread. In between each scoop, he ran his eyes over her, shamelessly gaping at her breasts as if he were staring at a blind woman. She appeared immune to the flirtations, focused only on her sandwich.
Unable to fit any more spread into the sandwich, the clerk’s spirits sank. He decided he could stretch things out further by fussing over her tray with complementary napkin, cutlery, drink, and garnishings.
Finally, he set his card down on the tray. “We deliver! Call that number any time!” As he slid the tray toward her, he added, “You want to sneak into the shutdown UC Theater together? I can show you the spot where Werner Herzog ate his shoe before the audience to fulfill a bet with Morris over the opening of Heaven’s Gate.”
“Nah, I saw the Les Blank documentary showing it,” Georgia Girl said pertly.
The clerk didn’t see that coming, and wilted noticeably.
Her counteroffer went like this: “We can have sex on a unicycle as part of the performance-art showing for Earth Day.”
Speechless, the clerk nodded feverishly, smiling. “Maybe under Sather Gate?” he said as she started to turn her back on him, lunch tray in hand.
Georgia Girl thought about it. “That could work. How fast can you pedal a unicycle in case we have to dodge the Berkeley Republican coalition? And then there’s the campus police. But they might be spread thin with the rest of the Earth Day activities.”
“I’ve never been on a unicycle. But I expect to be licensed and practiced by Earth Day to take our act on a high wire if you want. Maybe between the campus clock tower and—”.
“You’re pretty cool for a falafel guy.”
“All falafel guys are cool. It’s part of the audition.”
It occurred to Spence that Earth Day was in April, a good ten months away. He wondered if she was actually just being cruel, imagining this guy practicing on a unicycle and fighting to keep his balance while getting ready for the upcoming ride of his life for nearly a year, a ride that would never come. He might be bat shit crazy enough to do the act solo by then and think nothing of it.
His only clue as to her real intent was the sparkle in her eyes, and the fact that her wholesomeness did not wear on her like a costume. Maybe she had a surreal streak that allowed her to fit in with Berkeley. The simple, down-home nature, alternating with the wild things coming out of her mouth, gave her a jack-in-the-box quality, made you wonder how many cranks you got before she burst out with the next wild thing.
Spence stayed to stare at a few more people carrying on, but the performances of the late arriving stragglers paled by comparison with the afternoon show.
An hour or so later, frustrated that everyone was too normal, he darted out on his Schwinn. He chastised himself that he would need to train himself to find the exceptional and quirky even amidst the normal if he expected to be a truly great actor.
***
Spence was already in character when Victoria walked in the door. He decided that was the most fun way to introduce the new him to her.
“You wore that to the Beach Boys Fiftieth Anniversary tour? That’s no way to dress for the Greek Theater.”
She was still too high off the concert, and too much in her own world to fully process what he was saying. She sped through to the kitchen, yanked open the fridge door, and drank the black cherry concentrate right out of the bottle, without diluting it. She was prone to gout, and cherries were high on the list of countermeasures. One look at her ankles, and he could tell she’d had a flare up from spending all that time in the sun.
“You should try celery seeds.”
“Celery seeds increase your photosensitivity to light, idiot.” She gasped between swigs.
Pointing a shaky finger, he said, “A salad would do you good.”
“What’s with the accent?”
Her curiosity had apparently been outdone by her hunger since she turned her back on him before getting an answer to retrieve the salad ingredients from the fridge.
Tired carrying on their exchange through the doorway from his perch on the couch, Spence ventured into the kitchen. He shook his head at her pitiful attempts to prepare a salad. “Let me do that for you. That’s no way to cut carrots. You’ll choke.” Chop. Chop. “You call that cabbage?” He held up a leaf, rubbed it like a dollar bill in a miser’s hand before handing it over. “It’s shoe leather.”
He procured the salad with the same finesse as the counter clerk hitting on Georgia Girl. He juggled the knife, chopped with machine-gun rapidity, and attended several stages of the food preparation at once: washed and peeled some produce, while he seasoned what was already in the bowl, and cut-up the items destined for the mixing bowl next.
Seeing what she was doing to prepare the salad dressing from scratch, he said, “That’s no way to make Italian dressing. You’ll gag on all the vinegar.”
“That’s who that is!” she exclaimed. She took the knife out of his hand as if she might use it on him. “Neeman from the Sunrise Deli. The guy’s a fixture there. I think they put up with him because he’s related to the owner.”
Spence felt dismayed at being outed, although he supposed it was a complement.
He immediately switched into Georgia Girl. He tingled inside as if his blood had turned to
champagne and he just couldn’t keep the bubbles down. The casual edginess erupted out of plainness. “I think we should streak across Cal for the hell of it.”
She nibbled on a carrot and regarded him blank-faced to conceal the torrent of thought and feeling he’d let loose inside her. Finally her mouth could no longer contain the river. “That’s good. The People’s Movement isn’t doing enough shock and awe campaigns to shake folks from their complacency. That could be just the ticket.”
“We could organize a mass suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge. You know, like a march of lemmings—”.
“To play up the dunderheaded way we just keep marching to our deaths with this oversubscribed notion that capitalism is a cure-all,” she said, finishing his thought for him. “God, that’s great. Only, we have to figure out how to not actually kill people. Life jackets, maybe, or bungee cords that snap in one jump, but slow the fall.”
“We need a whole theater-of-the-absurd faction of the People’s Movement, you know,” Spence said, sinking even further into his role. “Like, we need grossly fat people to congregate naked and surround a Crisco factory. Or like the PETA people did to protest animal slaughter by painting themselves in blood and parading on Hollywood Boulevard.”
Victoria giggled.
Spence grabbed the knife back from her, twirled it in his hand. “God, we should just merge the People’s Movement with PETA.”
“You don’t think it would muddy the message?”
“Just the opposite,” Spence insisted, wild-eyed, riding the wave of his own excitement. “It would make it a lot harder for the media to scapegoat the People’s Movement as radical anarchists if they’re affiliated with every right-minded protest movement on Earth. We should get a ‘sold to the highest bidder’ banner to hang from Sather Gate to protest the corporate takeover of university research and free-thinking.”
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 22