MR. UNIVERSE

by Jim Grimsley

  GORDON. He wouldn’t leave. He said he wouldn’t. He said he was coming back in here.

  JAKE (to HELEN). Anyway, Gordon says to me, he says, “Well, don’t you think you can go on home now? Because your wife will be along in just a minute.” And I says, “Well, no, I can’t do that. Because I still don’t have my baby.” And Gordon says, “I assured you she’s coming home in a minute.” Assured me. (Laughs.) And I says, “Well Gordon, I know what you said. But I want her out here now.” And he didn’t like that, no sir. So he gets a little bit red in the face and he says, “Now I told you to get off my land.”

  GORDON. I bought this land. I own it. This is mine.

  JAKE. That’s pretty much what you said, all right. (Manner changes.) But like I told him, lady, just because he paid money for this piece of ground don’t mean he knows anything about it. I hunted with my daddy all through here, all up and down this river. I been walking these woods since I was knee high. Hell, one time I shot a squirrel right where this house is standing, back before anybody ever thought of clearing out this land and putting up some shit-ass brick house. And your husband, he says, “I am telling you to get off my land before I have to use more forceful methods,” or some such shit as that. And that’s when he pulls out that little pistol.

  (GORDON would like to say something but is perfectly helpless at this point.)

  JAKE (having barely paused). So he waves this gun around and says for me to get off his land again, and I can tell from how he’s holding the gun he don’t a bit more know what he’s doing with it than the man in the moon. So I told him he ought to put the thing away before he shoots himself. And he gets real mad and starts trying to take off the safety, and sure enough shoots himself right through the shoulder.

  GORDON. I’m fine. It’s just bleeding. I’m fine.

  JAKE. Real brave, ain’t he?

  HELEN. Leave him alone. Get out of here.

  JAKE. But I haven’t finished telling you what happened. See. (Gestures to GORDON’s shoulder, where there is a crude bandage.) See that bandage? I put that on him. So he wouldn’t bleed to death. And then I did you a big favor, lady. I threw that pistol halfway to tomorrow.

  HELEN (to GORDON). Is that true?

  GORDON. Then he left me out there. In a ditch.

  JAKE. I should have thrown you in the river.

  GORDON. Get out of my house before I call the police.

  JAKE (laughing). Go ahead. Call. Then tell him all about how you blew hell out of your shoulder. Sheriff will love that.

  GORDON (rushing at JAKE but collapsing in the process). Get out of my house, get out.

  JAKE (to HELEN). This is a real man you got, lady.

  HELEN. You leave him alone.

  JAKE. Yes sir. He’s a man. (Pause; to HELEN.) Now, where is my wife?

  (JAKE stands over GORDON, who is doubled up with pain.

  JAKE nudges GORDON’s injured shoulder lightly. GORDON yelps.)

  HELEN. She’s not here. She left. She went home. I told you. She must be there by now.

  JAKE. Don’t lie to me.

  (JAKE touches his toe to the shoulder again.

  When she hears GORDON’s groan of pain, ELEANOR emerges from the curtains.)

  JAKE. Hello baby.

  HELEN. Please don’t hurt her.

  JAKE. I’m not going to hurt her. (To ELEANOR, losing all anger as he watches her.) Hey baby.

  ELEANOR. Hey Jake.

  JAKE (increasingly tender). You act like you scared of me.

  ELEANOR. I am.

  JAKE. Don’t be.

  ELEANOR. I can’t help it.

  JAKE. I’m all right now. (No response.) You been enjoying a nice visit with these folks?

  ELEANOR. I had to go somewhere.

  JAKE. No you didn’t.

  ELEANOR. Yes I did. Jake, you hit me hard.

  JAKE. Baby, no I didn’t.

  ELEANOR. You did. You hit me hard.

  (Silence.)

  JAKE (with genuine, childlike sorrow). I’m sorry.

  ELEANOR. I don’t believe you are.

  JAKE. Will you come home now?

  ELEANOR. I’m still scared.

  JAKE. I won’t hit you anymore.

  ELEANOR. I still don’t believe you. I don’t.

  JAKE. Baby, I said I was sorry.

  ELEANOR. You run me out in the rain. You hit me hard. You always say you won’t do it again but you will. And it doesn’t matter what I do, I could do exactly like you want and you would still hit me. And I’m scared of you.

  JAKE. Don’t say that, I don’t want you to feel like that.

  ELEANOR. I do.

  JAKE. I promise not to do it anymore. I promise. Just please come home.

  HELEN (to ELEANOR). You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.

  JAKE (with savage anger). Lady, you shut up.

  GORDON. She can. She can stay if she wants to.

  (ELEANOR cuts off JAKE’s reply.)

  ELEANOR. Thank you. But it’s time.

  JAKE. Yes it is.

  HELEN. Are you sure?

  ELEANOR. I can’t leave my children alone all night.

  HELEN. I wish you didn’t have to go.

  ELEANOR. He won’t hit me anymore tonight.

  JAKE (to ELEANOR). You go on home now, baby. I got something to say to these folks.

  ELEANOR. No Jake, just come on with me.

  JAKE (in a harder tone). Get on, like I said. I ain’t going to bother anybody, I just want to say something to these folks.

  HELEN (to ELEANOR). Let me get you a coat.

  JAKE. She don’t need a coat.

  HELEN. But it’s raining.

  JAKE. She didn’t come over here with no coat. She ain’t leaving here with one. (To ELEANOR.) Go on. I’ll be after you directly.

  (ELEANOR hesitates, goes to HELEN, clasps her arms but does not embrace her.)

  ELEANOR. Don’t worry about me ma’am. He’ll be all right.

  HELEN. Take care of yourself.

  JAKE (to ELEANOR). Go on now. Do like I told you. Get home.

  (Exit ELEANOR.)

  JAKE. I just want you folks to know. We probably won’t live here all that long but while we do. If you see my wife on the road, don’t stop to pick her up. If she comes knocking at your door, just send her home. You understand me? There ain’t nothing you can do to come between me and my wife. I got my bonds on her. (Pause; turns to GORDON.) And you think about one more thing. If you call the sheriff. It was you pulled the gun. It might be you lands in jail. You know it? (Pause; from exit, winking at HELEN.) Too bad you come back so quick, Gordon. Your wife and me was just starting to get along. No telling what would have happened if you’d laid out in that mud a little while longer.

  (Exit JAKE.

  Long silence.)

  HELEN (going to window). I already called the deputy.

  GORDON. You did what? Christ, Helen.

  HELEN. I already called him. He wasn’t there. He’s going to call me back.

  GORDON. Who did you talk to?

  HELEN. His wife. I didn’t tell her anything. Just that there was some trouble and to have her husband call me.

  GORDON. Well when he calls back you tell him there’s nothing wrong.

  HELEN. But you can’t keep this a secret. What about your shoulder?

  GORDON. My shoulder doesn’t have anything to do with the deputy.

  HELEN. But you have to go to a hospital.

  GORDON. Please, Helen.

  HELEN. Gordon, you could bleed to death.

  GORDON. I’m not hurt that bad, it went through the muscle.

  HELEN. Through the muscle! This is nonsense. You’re going to the doctor.

  (GORDON sits on the couch, looking at his shoulder.)

  GORDON. All right. But we’re going to drive to Atlanta. I will not go to some hick emergency room. You can tie it up. (Pause.) Don’t look at me like that. I won’t die. (Pause.) And we’re going to tell them I was cleaning the gun and it went off.


  HELEN. Gordon.

  GORDON. Please, Helen.

  HELEN. I don’t lie very well, Gordon. (Pause.) Shall I tie up your arm? Then we’ll go.

  GORDON. We have to wait till the deputy calls back. (Pause.) You knew better than to call anyone. We had already discussed it.

  HELEN. Please, Gordon.

  GORDON. You couldn’t trust me to handle it my way.

  HELEN. When the gun went off, I didn’t know what to do.

  GORDON. How did he get in?

  HELEN. I didn’t have the back door locked.

  GORDON. What happened while you were in here with him?

  (HELEN looks at him for a long time.)

  HELEN. Don’t do this. Don’t.

  GORDON. No. It’s a simple question. What happened? You were with him a long time.

  HELEN. Nothing happened. Please, Gordon.

  GORDON. He was in here a long time. What did he do?

  HELEN. He tried to scare me. He tried to make me tell him where she was. Then you came in. (Pause.) That’s all.

  (Silence.

  HELEN moves to the window.

  GORDON stands.)

  GORDON. Do you see anything?

  HELEN. No. (Pause.) I don’t know how you could ask me that question.

  (Silence.)

  GORDON. I’m sorry. It’s been a long night.

  HELEN. Yes it has.

  (Silence.)

  GORDON. I guess I’ve acted like a fool.

  HELEN. Well I think you have.

  (The phone begins to ring.

  GORDON goes to answer it at once.)

  HELEN. Now I see someone. At the window.

  (GORDON answers the phone.)

  GORDON. Hello. (Disappointed.) Oh, hello Jenny. Well no, Jenny, I don’t think we’ll get over there after all. (Pause.) No, it’s not the storm. (Laughs.) Well, to tell the truth, Jenny, I shot myself. With a gun. (Pause.) Oh yes, it had bullets in it. Well, that’s a long story, we’ll tell it to you sometime. Oh I’m fine. Oh no, everything’s all right, it just nicked me. Helen is going to drive me to Atlanta. (Pause.) Well, I don’t know why Atlanta, that’s just where I want to go. (Pause.) Well, don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine. Say hey to Bob. We’ll call you. Take care.

  (Hangs up.

  Silence.)

  GORDON. You still see her?

  HELEN. There’s somebody at the window. I think it’s her.

  GORDON. She can see you, you know.

  HELEN. I know.

  (Silence.)

  GORDON. Is she still there?

  HELEN. Yes.

  (Lights begin to dim.)

  HELEN. I don’t think I can live here, Gordon. Not anymore.

  (GORDON moves to the window.)

  GORDON. It is a long way from the city.

  HELEN. Yes it is.

  (Blackout.)

  Craig Lucas, on Math and Aftermath

  The boundaries of self are said to blur if not vanish altogether at certain moments—death, orgasm, meditation, even sneezing. Jim Grimsley has written a play about the first two, and about the desire to get lost and the need to find oneself, which, after all, is all an ego is: boundaries. I am what you are not: over here, inside this skin, with these preferences, these desires and these fears. This is how I see myself: I am young because you are old. I am homosexual only in opposition to someone who is heterosexual. (If everyone were straight, there would be no need for such a designation. We do not have a word for living human beings without lungs, because there is no such thing, so there is no need to give it a word. Words are boundaries: them and us.) I am alive solely on the basis of someone’s death—mine or another’s.

  With death, the “I” disappears. But if I have imprinted myself on the flesh of another human being, or on the retinae of many, many humans, through the medium of film or art, then I am still seen; I am felt; I am remembered. I exist. If I have never been seen—because I am queer and it is the 1950s in America—if I have never registered, then I cannot be remembered.

  As death defines living, fear and loathing define desire.

  Math and Aftermath—set on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands on February 28, 1954, one day before the explosion of the first hydrogen bomb—juggles playfully with serious matters; it plays with death and sex, with what is seen and what is hidden (both by individuals, and by an entire nation). What place could be more lost than an uninhabited sandbar in the far-off Pacific about to be blown sky-high and rendered radioactive and uninhabitable for thousands of years? The H-bomb project was secretly funded by Congress in order to give the U.S. the capacity to destroy our enemy the Soviet “empire.” In order to keep the competitive edge in scientific research, all investigations into the workings of atoms were kept hidden from the people who were paying for the research, that is, the American people; Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were electrocuted for purportedly trading such secrets to the Soviets. They were bad secret-keepers. The Federal Bureau of Investigation—for which my father worked as a secret agent in the 1950s—helped uncover the hidden American traitors: Communists and homosexuals. Thus the two were inextricably linked in the minds and imaginations of Americans as enemies. On “our” side, you had patriots and straight people, on “theirs,” traitors and fags.

  As E. B. White has pointed out, it takes a lot of energy to maintain an enemy. As history demonstrates, it takes nuclear energy to maintain one on the global scale.

  The enemy within—the Commie, the Queer—pales in comparison with the Enemy Even Deeper Within. I’m talking about the one within the molecules of physical matter: the electrons; the radioactive isotopes; the spinning, invisible and unstable particles which at any instant can blow us all back into the heavens, back to the moment of our conception—the big bang.

  Which, as Jim Grimsley has it, is the name of the gay porn movie being shot on the beach of the world’s most lost place, Bikini Atoll, in 1954, on the day before the explosion of the first hydrogen bomb.

  We now know, as best as it is possible to know these things, that at the instant of the big bang, “every place and every time was identical.” I heard Timothy Ferris say this last night on PBS; he was talking about the moment when the entire universe was a little speck of nothing or next to nothing—an infinitesimal fraction of one second into our creation. He said, “Every place and every time was identical at the beginning of the big bang.” And this is science.

  So the gay filmmakers of the imagined porn classic Big Bang must sneak onto Bikini Atoll and hide themselves in order to make themselves visible on film to countless viewers, who will then lose themselves in the act of watching Big Bang; when they come, they will be seeing something long gone, footage shot one day before the first hydrogen bomb exploded, ripping apart every boundary of physical matter. Within the exploding atoms of a hydrogen bomb, is time itself rearranged? Would that it were possible to go back to a time before such questions could even be conceived, before there were words.

  The song “Let’s Get Lost” by Frank Loesser and Jimmy McHugh was recorded by Chet Baker on March 7, 1955. September 21, 1955, Jim Grimsley was born.

  Scientists have suggested that when the universe finishes expanding, and can no longer support the energy moving outward and must give in to the gravitational pull, collapsing in upon itself, that time will then move in the opposite direction. Like breathing out and breathing in, we can only wonder which came first, which breath is forward and which one back. Maybe the universe is simply breathing out and breathing in, trying to lose itself in the orgasm of a big bang which will start it all again. A conception.

  Mathematicians are trying to unravel the questions raised by the big bang. Their search for a unifying theory—a formula which would obliterate the boundaries between gravity and the weak force and the strong force, melding everything into one great big theory—comes closer and closer to unifying all life and time and space, which means that there will be nothing separating you from me, young from old, then from now, here from there, straight from g
ay, alive from dead. At that moment, we shall all be both lost and found.

  MATH AND AFTERMATH

  Math and Aftermath premiered at Seven Stages Theatre in Atlanta in March 1988, in a production directed by Pamela McClure, featuring Wayne Sizemore as Grip, Tim Martin as Best Boyd, Henry Lide as Pug Montreat, Don Smith as Hugh Young, Madeleine St. Romain as the Voiceover, Lane Wittemore as Dawn Stevens, Bobby Box as Joe Lube Cool, Maria Helena Dolan as Blue Donna Morgan, and Sarah Strickland as the Ghost of Hugh Young. The set was designed by Bill Georgia.

  Math and Aftermath was produced in New York at the Camilla Theatre in 1995 by Harlan Productions, directed by Dean Gray, featuring Kernan Bell as Grip, David Duffield as Best Boyd, Jeff Burchfield as Pug Montreat, John-Michael Lander as Hugh Young, Elisabeth Lewis Corley as the Voiceover, Sheri Galán as Dawn Stevens, Joe Hefferman as Joe Lube Cool, Antonia Beamish as Blue Donna Morgan, and David Morgan O’Connor as the Ghost of Hugh Young. Music composition and sound were by Michael Keck; lights, by Jack Mehler; set, by Daniel Ettinger; and costumes, by Fabio Toblini.

  PLAYERS

  GRIP, a multitalented technician in his 30s

  BEST BOYD, a technician in his 20s

  PUG MONTREAT, a fading porn star, still rather good looking, in his 40s

  HUGH YOUNG, a young man in his 20s, the mysterious star of Big Bang

  VOICEOVER, the voice that occasionally states someone’s thoughts. The voice should be offstage.

  DAWN STEVENS, the attorney for Blue Donna Morgan and formerly the star of many straight and lesbian porn features

  JOE LUBE COOL, the motorcycle-cult muscle-stud star of Big Bang, the continuation of his long career as gay porn’s leading screen idol

  BLUE DONNA MORGAN, the lesbian producer of gay porn who wrote, produced, and directed Big Bang

  GHOST OF HUGH YOUNG

  SETTING

  The play takes place on February 28, 1954, on the beach at Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands. 16 mm movie cameras and other kinds of recording and lighting equipment are set up around a blanket on a mound of sand. Other representations of beach foliage indicate we are outdoors on a beach. However, the amount and placement of the equipment makes this ambiguous at the same time.