My Life, the Theater, and Other Tragedies

by Allen Zadoff

  “Remember when we painted my mom’s dog?” Reach says.

  I laugh. “I was just thinking about that.”

  “So what do you say we take on the Big Bad Brit together?”

  I wish I could talk to my brother Josh right now. This is the kind of thing he knows all about—when to push forward and when to retreat. But he’s at Cornell and impossible to get ahold of.

  Reach is still looking at me, waiting for an answer.

  “I’ll try repatching some of the circuits, distribute the load,” I say. “It might hold if Derek doesn’t keep adding things.”

  “So that’s a no from you,” he says.

  “It’s a no.”

  “How do we turn it into a yes?”

  “I don’t want to have this conversation again,” I say. Because we’ve had this conversation a thousand times. Reach tries to get me to hang out with the guys; I say no. Reach plans for us to meet girls at some techie party in Paramus; I say no. Reach comes up with a crazy plan and I say no.

  Reach throws up his hands like he’s surrendering.

  But he never surrenders. Not really.

  COME, TEARS, CONFOUND.

  There’s one bad thing about being up on the catwalk for a long time: no bathroom facilities. After five hours, my bladder feels like the pressure hull of a nuclear sub. I’ve heard that some professional lighting guys keep a soda bottle on the catwalk for emergencies. That’s hard-core tech, too hardcore even for me. I already have a negative rep. I don’t need to be the kid on the ceiling with a collection of piss bottles.

  I’m still feeling embarrassed about the ladder incident, so I keep looking over the side, waiting for the actors to go away. When the theater clears, it takes me like five seconds to get down. It figures. With nobody around, I’m like a mountain goat.

  I’m rushing offstage when I hear a strange whimpering sound from the wings. It sounds like Mr. Apple brought his dog to school again, even though it’s against the rules. He has a little Lhasa Apso named Carol Channing. It’s quite a sight to see a five-hundred-pound man with a two-pound dog. But Carol is his pride and joy. Mr. Apple is known to go on a rampage when she gets lost. If she’s loose in the theater, I’d better find her.

  “Carol Channing,” I call as I walk towards the wings.

  No answer. Just more whimpering.

  “Hello, Dolly?” I say.

  I turn the corner, and I see two feet peeking out from behind a flat.

  “Go away,” a girl’s voice says.

  I stick my head around the corner. It’s Grace Navarro, a girl who joined the tech crew a couple months ago. She’s crying and sniffling. She uses the back of her hand to wipe snot from her nose.

  Gross.

  “What’s wrong with me?” she says.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “That was a rhetorical question,” Grace says, kind of nasty.

  “Whatever,” I say, and I start to walk away.

  “I’m sorry. I’m not angry at you. I’m angry at myself,” Grace says.

  I look back at her, tears running down her almond cheeks. I can’t stand it when a girl cries.

  I reach into my tech pack and come up with a tissue. I hand it to Grace.

  “He said I was his favorite,” she says, blowing her nose hard. “And I believed him. How stupid.”

  That’s when I remember: Grace was going out with Derek a little while ago. Maybe “going out” is not the right expression. Derek burns through new girls so quickly, we stopped learning their names and started calling them DNF. Derek’s New Frosh.

  So Grace was DNF. Temporarily.

  I’m already on Derek’s shit list, but if anyone sees me talking to this girl, I might cross over the line onto his dead-meat list.

  I should walk away and leave her to her meltdown. But then I think about my mother crying in the bathroom after dad died. She never wanted me to see her, so she’d hide in there and close the door, thinking I wouldn’t hear the whimpering noises. But I heard everything.

  “My heart is broken,” Grace says.

  Now I can’t leave her alone.

  “Come with me,” I say, and I pull her into the Cave.

  WHERE THE BOLT OF CUPID FELL.

  The Cave is our electrics room and the unofficial home of the techies. Usually the place is packed with lighting instruments, but Derek has nearly everything onstage or up on the catwalk waiting to be hung. There are a couple broken instruments scattered on the floor and a single lightbulb overhead.

  “Here’s what kills me,” Grace says. “He acts like it never happened. But I still have the mark.”

  She tilts her head back and points to a black-and-blue circle the size of a nickel under her chin. A hickey under the chin. The Mark of Derek. Nobody can figure out how he gets under there. Reach says he has an extendable jaw like the Alien.

  “It’s fading,” she says, “but it’s still there. You can see it, right?”

  “A little,” I say.

  “More than a little,” Grace says. “It’s the Scarlet Letter. That’s why nobody will talk to me.”

  “It’s more than that,” I say. “It’s because you broke the rule.”

  If a girl ends up with Derek, she gets exiled from the techies. I’m not talking about a little silent treatment. I’m talking serious, Techie-in-the-Iron-Mask stuff. It’s kind of ironic. I mean, high school is all about who’s in and who’s out, and by almost any measure, techies are out. You don’t get onto the crew riding a wave of popularity, so you’d think we’d have this open, compassionate system, but we don’t. The only difference between techies and everyone else is that you don’t get rejected by us because you look funny or have dyslexia or zits or something. Those are more or less prerequisites.

  For techies it’s about two things: skill set and loyalty.

  If you have one, you make the crew.

  If you have both, you stay forever.

  But there are a few things you don’t do. Certain rules that demand banishment:

  You don’t rat people out.

  You don’t betray another techie.

  You don’t get friendly with actors. You don’t talk to them at all, unless you’re telling them where to stand or how not to electrocute themselves.

  And if you’re a girl and you want to be on the crew, you don’t date Derek.

  Simple, right?

  “What was I thinking?” she says.

  “Good question.”

  “Maybe… I thought I was in love.”

  “People do crazy things when they’re in love,” I say.

  “Have you ever been in love?” she says.

  “No.”

  She looks away like maybe I shouldn’t be commenting on something I know nothing about. I can’t really disagree with her.

  “But I know what it’s like to miss someone,” I say.

  “Yeah?” she says.

  Her face softens. The lightbulb is swinging slightly in the air above us. I hear the sound of hammering onstage, a distant tap tap that echoes through the Cave. I think about what we look like sitting here together, two bodies in a pool of light.

  “So you do get it,” Grace says.

  “A little. Yeah.”

  “You want to know the craziest thing of all?” she says. “I want him back.”

  I think about Dad.

  “That’s not so crazy,” I say.

  She smiles.

  “You’re a good guy, Z.”

  “That’s what my mom tells me,” I say.

  Grace laughs and looks around the Cave. On the far side is the Techie Wall of Fame, where we hang the pictures of people when they get accepted into the Light and Set Club. All of our pictures are there, posed with these crazy Elvis glasses Reach bought at a street fair in Hoboken. That’s how you know you’ve made it as a techie. You get a space on the wall where you can pose like a bad Elvis impersonator.

  “I still want to be a techie,” she says. “I’ve got serious skill set.”

 
; “What do you do?”

  “I can fix anything. I’ve been working on our house since I was twelve. My father picks up a hammer and his IQ drops to single digits.”

  “It sounds like you’d make a good set carpenter.”

  An idea pops into my head. A way to get Grace on the crew permanently.

  “I think I’ve got a plan,” I say.

  “What kind of plan?”

  Her face gets this hopeful look, the same kind of look Reach got last year when a cute exchange student appeared in school and didn’t know she was supposed to avoid techies.

  “Lay low for a while,” I say. “I’ll put in a word for you with the guys. Then we wait for them to come around.”

  Her face gets this disappointed look, the same one Reach got when the cute exchange student realized techies were social anthrax.

  “It’s not much of a plan,” she says.

  “I know.”

  It’s just not the same coming up with a plan without Reach. The evil genius aspect is missing.

  “I’ll refine the plan as we go along,” I say.

  “You think it will work?” she says.

  I try to remember a time someone has made it back from techie exile, but I can’t.

  “Just don’t quit,” I say. “Whatever you do.”

  Because that’s the last of the techie rules:

  You don’t quit, no matter how hard things get.

  I MAY HIDE MY FACE.

  I promise Grace I’ll put in a good word for her, and I rush off to the bathroom. I pee for what seems like ten hours. Someone has scratched LOZER on the wall over the urinal. I’m not sure if they were aiming for loser and misspelled it, or there’s some kid named Lozer who wants the world to know his name. Either way, it’s depressing.

  I finish my business, then I turn on the water to wash my hands.

  The light flickers over my head along with the familiar buzzing of a fluorescent bulb going bad. It’s like a scene from Little Shop of Horrors.

  I study my reflection in the mirror.

  Adam Ziegler. Skinny guy. Angry acne.

  I don’t get regular acne. My acne rises up from the depths like a volcano. I would kill to have normal zits, zits you can pop, nice clean whiteheads that beg to be pinched. Instead I get these rock-hard swellings that make me look like a freak. I’m always turning to one side or the other to hide them. Which side is the least broken out that day? That’s the side I present to the world.

  Today I’ve got zero options. Both sides are terrible. I’ve got two zits like twin moons orbiting my nose.

  I take a tube of greasepaint out of my pocket. Every once in a while I borrow makeup from the actors’ dressing room for an emergency cover-up. I use a dab now to hide the damage.

  The light buzzes again. The horror-movie flicker distorting my face in the mirror.

  That’s when I hear it. Heavy breathing.

  At first I think it’s my imagination. Part of the horror soundtrack in my head.

  “Hello?” I say.

  The breathing stops.

  A second later it starts again, even louder. It’s not my imagination. There’s panting and something else. A crinkling sound.

  It’s coming from one of the stalls.

  “Is someone here?” I say.

  The panting gets louder. Are people having sex in here?

  I should take off and leave them to it, but what if it’s not sex? What if someone needs help?

  I look down the row of stalls. They’re all completely open except the last one. The door is shut, but not all the way.

  There’s a custodian’s mop leaning against the wall. I pick it up and use the long stick to push the door open …

  “Holy crap!” I say.

  It’s Mr. Apple.

  He’s sitting on the toilet fully dressed, his massive body filling the tiny stall. He holds a brown paper bag over his mouth and breathes heavily, the bag shrinking and expanding with each breath.

  “Should I get the nurse?” I say.

  Mr. Apple holds up a finger. Wait a minute.

  “Panic—” he says.

  He takes a deep breath, nearly inhaling the bag into his lungs.

  “—attack,” he says.

  He breathes out. The bag expands.

  “Panic attack?” I say.

  He nods.

  I know what it’s like to panic. I’ve never had to breathe into a bag, but I’ve freaked out a lot of times. In the dark. On the ladder. And those are just the most recent.

  Two more slow breaths, and Mr. Apple puts the bag down and leans back. The walls of the stall rattle.

  “Who are you?” Mr. Apple says.

  “Adam Ziegler. I’m on the crew.”

  “I thought I’d seen you before.”

  “Can I get you anything? Water?”

  “How about morphine?”

  “We used it all at the last cast party.”

  Mr. Apple smiles.

  “A techie with a sense of humor. That’s a nice treat. Be a good fellow and bring me some wet paper towels.”

  I hurry over to the sink and hold a wad of towels under the water.

  “Are you sick?” I say.

  “Sick of my life,” Mr. Apple calls out from the stall.

  And then the heavy breathing starts again.

  I rush back with the paper towels. Mr. Apple takes the towels and presses them to his face.

  “Let me ask you a question, Mr. Ziegler. Is it as bad as it looks?”

  “This bathroom?”

  “My show.”

  Is the show bad? I hadn’t really thought about it. I’ve been so busy trying to get the lights right, I never really thought about the production as a whole.

  Still, Mr. Apple looks so pitiful, I have to say something.

  “It’s not so bad,” I say. “I mean, it’s getting better.”

  “A tiny bit of advice—don’t become an actor.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re a terrible liar. But thank you for trying.”

  Mr. Apple blinks hard several times and grabs for the bag. The panting starts again, the brown paper expanding and contracting.

  “Is it okay if I go back to the theater?” I say.

  He nods for me to go.

  “This,” he says, gesturing to himself in the stall, “is our secret.”

  “I promise,” I say.

  “Good lad,” he says, and he waves me away with a free hand.

  SPIRITS OF ANOTHER SORT.

  I come out of the bathroom into the long empty hall. I’m thinking about what Mr. Apple said about the show.

  Is it really bad?

  That’s the thing about the theater. Everyone tends to worry about themselves, whether they look good. Actors want to act, techies want to tech.

  Who’s thinking about the big picture?

  The director. Mr. Apple.

  No wonder he needs a paper bag.

  I stop in the hall and lean against the cool surface of the wall. I see the way the light bounces off the gloss paint, some of it reflected upward, some absorbed into the linoleum on the floor.

  “Stand here, Adam,” Dad said one summer afternoon in his painting studio. He gestured to a place across the room, at an angle to the window. “Look at the light.”

  I looked and saw a bright, sunlit room.

  “Now watch,” Dad said, and he picked up a pile of chalk shavings from his workbench. He stepped over to the light, held up his palm, and blew hard.

  The shavings flew into the stream of light, and what seemed like bright sunshine in general became a dozen shafts of light, each a river of light moving through space on its own trajectory.

  “You can’t see light itself,” Dad said. “You only see light’s reflection.”

  I look down the hallway now, at all the places light is reflected.

  A fairy comes walking around the corner at the far end of the hallway. She’s in bare feet with white flowing gauze around her, long black hair falling in clump
s at her shoulders. When she steps into the light, the sparkles in the gauze twinkle like stars.

  It’s the dark-haired actress from the theater, the one who looked up while everyone was looking down. She stops in the light, and I shrink back into the shadows and watch her.

  “Hail, mortal!” she says.

  At first I think she’s speaking to me, but then she looks in the opposite direction, raises her hand in greeting, and says again, “Hail, mortal.”

  It’s Peaseblossom’s line. Peaseblossom is one of the fairy characters in the play. She has maybe three or four lines and a couple scenes. Nothing much.

  The girl takes a shuffling sideways step and starts to spin. The fabric in her costume swirls around, and the skirt starts to rise. I look at her bare legs. They’re very pale, white and pink and speckled in that way pale people are so you can see the veins beneath their skin. She keeps dancing, and the skirt keeps rising. It goes higher and higher until I see a flash of bright red underwear.

  A girl’s underwear is such a private thing. If you know what color it is, it’s like knowing this huge secret. You can never look at her the same way again. Every time you see her, you can only think about her underwear.

  Now I know three people’s secrets. Grace’s, Mr. Apple’s, and the fairy’s. That’s a lot of secrets for one day.

  The fairy girl spins one more time, then she starts to practice a dance move from the play. She points her toe and steps forward with one leg, trying to do a kind of curtsy, but she screws it up midway, tripping over herself.

  She curses and punches herself in the thigh. This is a violent fairy. She tries the move again, a look of deep concentration on her face. This time she does the curtsy, then stops, noticing me for the first time.

  Her mouth puckers and she lets out a surprised, “Oh.”

  She tugs at her skirt.

  “I didn’t know anyone was there,” she says.

  I try to speak, but nothing comes out.

  She says, “I’m not going to see that on YouTube, am I? Fairies Gone Wild.”

  I want to laugh, but my mouth isn’t working right.

  “Okay, you’re creeping me out just the tiniest bit,” she says.

  I want to tell her that I’m the lighting guy, she doesn’t have to be afraid.