The Dangerous Animals Club

by Stephen Tobolowsky

  I mentioned that coming up with a proof that truth can never be known at a university was like biting the hand that feeds you. It was the essence of comedy. He laughed and said, “Yeah. And the school even paid us to figure it out.”

  I told him it was a pleasure to meet him. I finally found someone who made me feel good about being an actor. He chuckled and said, “How so?”

  “If what you say is true, it sounds like we’ll always need art: to understand truth from a safe distance.”

  We clinked our beer bottles in a toast. We exchanged names and numbers as we parted. “See you around,” he said. We never did. It’s not surprising when you consider a university of thirty-five thousand people multiplied by the distance between science and art.

  After the party Beth and I walked around the campus. I had never experienced an Indian summer before. The stars had a different sort of light. They seemed closer and clearer. At the center of campus, we came upon a bronze sculpture of various angels and people reaching forward to embrace us. I stopped and looked at the inscription: “To thy happy children of the future, those of the past send greetings.”

  I looked into those unseeing bronze faces and outstretched arms and knew at that moment, somehow, I was in the right place. Unified, not by anyone who had answers, but by generations of others who stood right where I was standing with nothing but questions. Then I had a pang of fear. I thought about how far away Beth and I were from where we thought we’d be at this time in our lives. It was the Uncertainty Principle. Could it be possible that distance was a friend to truth?

  Beth looked at me with unexpected joy. She walked forward and touched one of the bronze faces. “I love this statue,” she said. “This is how angels really look.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “’Cause I see them in my dreams.”

  And I thought of my friend at the party with his shy smile and Coors beer. Maybe he was onto something.

  THE SCHOOL YEAR started. Beth and I were teaching. We were taking Modern Dance, Acting, and a class in Shakespearean Verse taught by Hob. I was amazed. All of this time I had only known Hob as a sort of academe to the third power: a man who would never call a spade a spade when he could call it a partially conical metal digging implement used primarily in recreational agriculture. Now I was seeing a totally different Hob, a great teacher—who wore a beret.

  I was going to be in Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, playing an old man. Beth was going to be in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, playing a child. We were slowly creeping up on parts our own age. As a fitting climax to this whirlwind first week, we went to our neighbor Helen’s apartment for dinner. She told us she was cooking Italian. All we had to do was bring ourselves.

  More than flowers, more than children, cooking makes a house come alive. My grandparents’ house always smelled of lima beans and vanilla cookies, and when Mom was alive, our home in Dallas always held the traces of Betty Crocker cakes and pot roast. When the cooking leaves, an emptiness takes its place.

  As we walked up the spiral staircase of our new, old residence, Helen was in her kitchen. The tomato and oregano and garlic were working their way through every board and beam.

  She met us at the door. She looked put together in her powder-blue sweater and brown plaid skirt. Her apartment was big and airy and had huge windows with old, old glass facing the street, making the outside world seem like an impressionistic painting of a rainy day.

  We sat down and feasted on salad and spaghetti and sponge cake and wine. As we munched on garlic bread, I told all the old stories about how Beth and I met, and Van Cliburn, and Joan Potter, and Am I Blue. We were finishing our wine when Helen started looking at me across the table. Something in her look was odd and put me on edge. Beth and I were such a cute couple, she said. She poured herself another glass of wine. I cut off some more sponge cake and asked if she was seeing anyone. She said she had a boyfriend who was going to Southern Illinois, but she didn’t get to see him much. She couldn’t visit him on the weekends because she had so much work to do for her language major. For whatever reason, he couldn’t get up to see her.

  At a certain point of mild intoxication, Beth and I called it a night. As we walked down the few feet of hallway to our bedroom, I looked back. Helen was still looking at us through her opened door. She stared for a moment and then disappeared inside her apartment. I heard her door lock.

  Over the next week or two, Beth and I fell into the rabbit hole of study and teaching and work on our respective plays. It was an exhausting routine fueled by pizza and beer. One night I had rehearsal at the Krannert Center. Beth had the night off. She was going to stay in the apartment and catch up on her Shakespearean Verse homework.

  On my way to rehearsal that night, I thought my biggest problem was learning the five-page monologue that opened our play. I was wrong. Around ten p.m. Beth came running into the theater in a panic. Rehearsal stopped. I ran over to see what was up and to calm her down. She said she couldn’t stay in the apartment anymore. It was haunted.

  I stared at her, searching for something comforting to say that didn’t use the words “hallucinating” or “crazy.”

  “Listen to me,” she said. “I was in bed, reading, and I heard a scream.” I told her it was probably the television in someone else’s apartment. Maybe it was some noise coming from Helen’s place. “No. It was in our bedroom. It was a ghost, and I’m not going back there alone.” I rubbed my forehead. I was starting to get my “Beth headache.” I got this headache when I confronted something in Beth’s reality that didn’t fit into my understanding of the planet Earth. There was the time in upstate New York when she went running into the woods because, as she told me later, insects from Mars were trying to get into her brain. Or the time when she scolded me for kicking mushrooms along the side of the road because those were the houses where the fairies lived. It was a Beth headache.

  After rehearsal we went back to the apartment. And no. There was no ghost. Big surprise.

  During my play rehearsals we had a run-in over my hair. The director wanted me to wear a gray wig. They picked a sort of gray bun and stuck it on my head. I sat in front of the mirror. When they were done brushing and combing, I looked like a gigantic Granny Clampett. I asked why couldn’t I do it “au naturel.” That way the audience wouldn’t have to confront the huge lie of my wig every time I went onstage. The director said that I was playing an old philosopher with a young wife. It was intrinsic to the story that I be old. I admitted, in theory, that he had a point. But in reality, why pick a play where a twenty-four-year-old plays an eighty-four-year-old? The answer is not to put the twenty-four-year-old in a gray bun. Maybe it could be just as poignant if the philosopher were young but more in love with his ideas than with his wife. At some point, I reasoned, we were going to ruin this play. I suggested it would be better to risk ruining it with bad acting than with bad hair.

  I went home in a huff and took a shower to cool off. Beth was still at her dress rehearsal. I put on my jammies and settled in for a favorite guilty pleasure—watching reruns of Ironside with Raymond Burr. Ironside was not just a television show in Urbana, it was the centerpiece of popular culture. It was on three times a day. Raymond Burr was always in a wheelchair except for the flashback episode where he stands and walks for about sixty seconds before he gets shot. I was lying in bed drinking a Rolling Rock thinking how brilliant Raymond Burr was for coming up with an idea where he didn’t even have to stand up when he went to work—except on break.

  And then it happened.

  I heard a shriek that made me choke on my beer. I sat up in terror. I heard it again, an eerie, high-pitched wail. I jumped out of bed and turned off the TV. It was a ghost! My heart flip-flopped in my chest. The hair on the back of my neck stood at attention. The only thing worse than a Beth headache was when Beth was right!

  It had to be the wind. That was it, the wind. Or a branch scraping on the roof. And there it was again! Somewhere above me. I walked around
the room looking for the source. It seemed louder over by the closet. The closet door was closed. I grabbed one of my Frye boots to use as a weapon. I opened the door. Silence. I started looking through the clothes. Nothing. I heard the shriek again. I ran out of the closet and slammed the door. I dashed across the hallway to the living room/kitchen and grabbed our flashlight. I came back and pointed it to the roof of the closet. I had never looked up there before. It was not solid but just slats of wood. I tried to focus the beam of light on the darkness between the slats. Everything was quiet until a blood-curdling scream ripped through the room. A hand slapped the ceiling of the closet. And then I saw a finger! Oh my God! The ghost! I ran out of the apartment in my pajamas, down the stairs, and out to the street.

  Beth came home and saw me shivering in the front yard. She asked me what was going on. I told her about the shriek and the hand. She nodded. “It’s probably a ghost from the Civil War. Someone murdered for money for trading slaves. We’ll have to move,” she said. I realized Beth was probably right. As I started coming up with a story to get out of our lease, out of the corner of my eye I saw movement on the roof of the house. We turned to see our ghost—or ghosts, as it turned out. It was a mother raccoon and three babies waddling out of a hole in the roof and down the big tree beside the house and then waddling away in single file. “Aww. So cute,” Beth cooed. “We’ll have to put out bananas for them during the winter.”

  The next month our plays both opened with success. Beth was beautiful as the little girl. I ended up compromising with the director over my hair. Instead of a wig I let them spray my head with silver Streaks ’N Tips. It was also a terrible choice, but it only made me look like a bad high school actor instead of an old transvestite.

  After two weeks I finished my run in Jumpers and got another leading role in a new play to close out the semester. I felt the first flush of success in Illinois. I walked home after that final matinee, jumped in the shower to wash off my old-age makeup and remove the Streaks ’N Tips for the last time when, to my horror, a huge chunk of hair fell from my head. I couldn’t believe it. I rinsed the shampoo out and another handful fell out. And then another. And another.

  I lost my hair that afternoon in the shower. Not all of it, but enough to where I looked like I was “balding.” From that day on, my chances of playing a young romantic lead were over. From that day on, whenever a woman or a casting director met me, her eyes would dart to my hairline.

  It was far more traumatic than I ever admitted to myself. All of the Tobolowsky men were bald, but all of the men in my mother’s family kept their hair. I always hoped that I favored her side. It was not to be. The closing day of Jumpers was the last day I looked like a young man.

  It was around this time we met Claudia Reilly. Claudia was the only student in the playwriting curriculum and she looked the part. She had sharply cut short blond hair with bangs, and big intelligent eyes. Like Hob, she wore a beret, black turtleneck sweaters, and smoked cigarettes. She had the magnetic quality of appearing jaded and innocent at the same time. She had just written a new play and asked Beth and me to read some roles in it at its first public presentation.

  There were about forty people in attendance. All of the actors sat in a semicircle at one end of the room. Claudia made a short speech beforehand. Her cheeks flushed with excitement and terror. We commenced.

  The play was witty and had interesting characters. Claudia had written the only student play I had seen, other than Am I Blue, that didn’t make you want to step in front of a bus. The evening was a great success for Claudia. It was also a great success for the school, for turning out a playwriting student who actually wrote a play.

  After some champagne with Claudia and her friends, Beth and I walked home in silence. There was an unspoken tension between us. It was another one of those moments when I needed a defining soundtrack. When we got to the living room/kitchen side of our apartment, Beth walked around the room nervously and then she turned to me and said, “That was so brave of Claudia.”

  Being clueless, I asked, “What was brave?”

  “Writing a play. Being a woman and writing a play.”

  “I don’t know how brave it was. She is a student in school. She wanted to write so she took a playwriting course.”

  “But she is the only playwriting student. Think of that. Wanting to do something so badly that you are willing to be the only one. The only one in the class. The only one to write a play. And to be a woman. There was a time when they didn’t even let women own pencils.”

  “Yeah. But that was a long time ago. Women own pencils now. They own all sorts of things. It’s a whole new world. Women can be cowboys. Men can be strippers. Times have changed.”

  I still had no idea where this conversation was going. Beth looked out our window onto Green Street. “If Claudia can do it, I can do it. I want to be a writer.”

  Without the orchestra in the background, I was unaware of what movie I was in. Beth was making a declaration of purpose while I was wondering if it was too late to watch the eleven p.m. episode of Ironside. Casually, I said, “I think that’s great. Am I Blue was great. You should be a writer if you want.” The conversation ended. I went to get a Rolling Rock.

  Indian summer is a strange phenomenon. Periods of fall are interspersed with periods of warm, springlike weather all the way up until winter hits like a runaway snowplow. It was the beginning of December and we had a short, unexpected warm day. At breakfast I had a certain sensation—and it wasn’t good. The smell of the ginkgo trees had long since passed, but now there was a new smell. It was the smell of rot and decay. I checked the refrigerator, the rat trap behind the couch, the bathroom. Nothing.

  Beth woke up and shuffled into the breakfast nook. She looked around and made a face. “I know,” I said. “It stinks.”

  Beth said, “It’s probably Helen.”

  Helen.

  I hadn’t thought about Helen or her look across the table for months. I hadn’t seen Helen since she watched us walk down the hall after dinner at the beginning of school.

  “Beth, have you seen Helen?”

  Beth thought for a second. “No. She’s probably a murderer and killed her boyfriend and he’s rotting in the bathtub.”

  We both sipped coffee. “Seriously,” I said. “Have you seen her?”

  “No. Not since we had dinner over there.”

  “Neither have I.”

  Beth took another sip of coffee. “I’m telling you, she’s a murderer and there’s a body in the bathtub. That explains the smell.”

  A Beth headache started.

  Over the next couple of days, with the warmer weather, the smell got worse. Lying in bed I asked Beth if I should go over there. Beth told me not to, that I didn’t want to see what was in that room. The weather turned cold. Winter arrived. The smell didn’t abate. Now the thought of Helen and that apartment became a fixation. I had to go over and see if Helen was still there. Maybe she smelled the rotting mess, too. I thought of a ruse to cover my investigation.

  I bought a bottle of wine. I could knock on the door. Offer her the wine as a much belated thank-you for the dinner party, have a quick peek at the apartment. If it seemed appropriate, I would mention the stench of decay and then leave.

  I walked down the hallway with my bottle of Lancers. I knocked on the door. Nothing. A couple of hours later, I wandered over again and knocked, again nothing. I had a new sense of dread. That look Helen gave me. The talk of what a cute couple Beth and I were; her mention of her boyfriend who never found the time to visit her; the stress of being an Asian-language major. What if she killed herself? What if she was dead in the bathtub?

  I ran back to our apartment. I told Beth my theory. She didn’t look up from her notebook. She just muttered, “There’s no suicide. Not the type. She’s a murderer.”

  I had trouble sleeping that night. I lay awake running possible equations of time, smell, and disappearance—the physics of it all was not hopeful. Then, I heard a no
ise on the floorboards outside our bedroom door. I got out of bed. I turned the knob slowly and silently and opened the door a crack. It was a stray yellow cat. The cat looked back at me and then wandered up to Helen’s door and meowed. It turned and sprayed pee all over the bottom of her door and wandered back down the hallway and down the stairs.

  I had no idea what this meant in the cat world, but I was sure it was bad. I left our bedroom and crept over toward Helen’s door. I thought I heard the faint sound of a radio coming from inside. I knocked quietly. If she was asleep she couldn’t have heard it, but if she was up I could tell her about the cat. And the pee. Give her the bottle of Lancers. She never came to the door, but the sound of the radio stopped. I told Beth about the cat and the radio. I decided we had to call the landlord the next day. He could come by with a passkey and confront whatever was behind the door.

  The next morning I got up early and headed across the hall to make some coffee. I loaded the pot up and headed back over to the bedroom to get dressed. As I crossed the hallway I noticed Helen’s door was opened a crack. I stopped and looked down the hallway. There was no one around. The only sound was the early-winter wind cutting through the trees. I had to look. I crept down the hallway, floorboards creaking under my weight. I got to Helen’s door and tried to look inside. No movement or sound anywhere. I pushed the door open with my finger no more than an inch. I stuck my eye up to the crack. I tried to peek inside without my nose pushing the door open any farther.

  I couldn’t believe what I saw. Through the opening I could see into Helen’s apartment and her kitchen table. There, on the table, were the remains of our dinner! Untouched! The three place settings and our dishes with uneaten spaghetti all covered with mold. The Italian salad, the partially eaten garlic bread, the bottle of wine where we had left it months earlier. There was mold on the remains of the sponge cake dripping onto the floor. And there was no trace of Helen.