The Dangerous Animals Club

by Stephen Tobolowsky

  I ran back and woke Beth up and told her. I thought it was probably her boyfriend who came up the same night we had dinner. He killed Helen and drove her body back to Southern Illinois in his pickup truck. Beth shook her head no. It was someone from the language department insane with jealousy. But we would never find her body.

  Now we would have to go to the police. Beth got up and got dressed and we ran down the staircase. Going out the front door we ran into Helen. She was in her plaid skirt and blue sweater. “Hi, guys. I haven’t seen you in forever. What are you doing up so early?”

  “Nothing, Helen. Rehearsal. For a scene, you know, before class starts. What are you up to?”

  “Just been busy. My parents are coming in to see me today so I’m just cleaning up a little.”

  “Well, that’s nice. Have a good visit. Maybe we’ll see you later.”

  That afternoon I ran into Helen’s parents coming out of her apartment. The smell was gone. Every trace of our dinner was gone. The dishes were washed. The floor was scrubbed. The bed was made. No one would ever have known what was there only a few hours before.

  What I saw on that kitchen table through the crack of Helen’s front door was worse than a body in the bathtub. It was the difference between illusion and reality, between safety and danger mixed gently with a powder-blue sweater. At close distances the human eye cannot discern between the two.

  I was relieved no harm had befallen Helen, but now I had a constant dread of what lay beyond the door at the end of the hall. I had never been so uncertain of the world around me. Lying in bed that night, each sound posed a question. Was it a warning, was it the wind, or was it just the Ghost of Green Street looking for her three children?

  20.

  WITHOUT A HANDLE

  AS ONE OF my dear, departed companions once said, “The reason you can’t get a handle on life is because it’s not a bucket.” And he was right. It’s not a bucket. And yes, he drank a lot. But the idea that life was not a bucket was more perfect than he imagined. There was no single thing to grab on to.

  Beth and I were deep into our first year at Illinois. We alternately felt successful and foolish. We were doing well, but we were still in school. We were making good grades, but who cares. We still wanted to be Babes on Broadway, but we were nowhere. One of the pitches the University used in its brochure was that the school was within a three-hour drive of Chicago, Indianapolis, or St. Louis. We were the very definition of being in the middle of nowhere, and the University thought it was a selling point.

  In retrospect, we were victims of the “yeah, but” syndrome. The “yeah, but” is a mental disorder that has affected everyone I have ever known in varying degrees. Actors get it all the time.

  Here is an example of how it manifests itself: a case study. Someone says, “What are you working on?”

  “I’m playing Hamlet in a new production.”

  “Wow, that’s great,” he or she says.

  “Yeah, but we’re performing in a parking garage.”

  “Well, that’s interesting.”

  “Yeah, but we’re not getting paid. We even have to pay for parking.”

  “At least you get to work on that great play.”

  “Yeah, but the play has been cut to one act with five characters and we have to dress up like cats.”

  “Well, at least you’ll get home in time to see Ironside.”

  “Yeah, but I’ve seen all the episodes—twice.”

  The “yeah, but” is the way we have developed to diminish our own lives into footnotes. To demoralize, trivialize, and squander the greatest gift we have been given—the joy of watching the sun rise for another day, even if it is only to have the opportunity to fail.

  You would think there would be massive campaigns to eliminate the “yeah, buts.” There aren’t. People who use “yeah, buts” frequently are considered measured and intelligent. Many go into politics.

  One of the oddities I lugged to Illinois was a gigantic, white family Bible I bought when I was playing Jesus in Godspell. The musical is based on the book of Matthew. I bought the Bible for research. I had never read it before. It wasn’t for lack of interest. It was just too daunting. The problem with most Bibles is that the font they use is too tiny. You had to go blind to read a book meant to give you vision. Not so with this white Bible. It was huge. And it had pictures. And maps. I would like to say that after I brought it to Illinois, I started to read it in earnest. I didn’t. I am embarrassed to admit that I used it to hold up the window in the bedroom so we could get fresh air. I guess that is one step above using it as a doorstop.

  Occasionally on a lazy Saturday or Sunday morning, I would pull that Bible out of the window and read some part of it to see if I could make sense of it. I never could. Like life, I often found that I needed a handle. Every time I read a story or part of a story, the meaning kept shifting, or I would see something in the story I never saw before. I could never get a grip on it. Back then I thought all of the ironies and inconsistencies in the Bible were a sign of age and the need for a rewrite. Now I understand these incongruities were the calling cards of the book’s greatness.

  I was always partial to the stories of Joseph. Easy to understand, right? Dramatic. Even Andrew Lloyd Webber found them so. The Hebrew word used to describe Joseph is not used to describe anyone else in the Bible. It is the word matzliach. It is an unusual word and it is translated as “successful.” Joseph is characterized as being “successful.” Not Moses, not Abraham, none of the other prophets—just Joseph.

  Now here is a guy who was spoiled by his father, tattled on his brothers. He was beaten by them, almost murdered, sold into slavery, ended up in an Egyptian prison. Those who promised to help him forgot him. I know. It sounds like Hollywood. But Joseph is called “successful.” Why? Either the book is wrong or it’s using a set of priorities we aren’t used to thinking about.

  Joseph was able to “read dreams.” He had ESP, second sight, whatever you want to call it. He foretold a worldwide famine and saved Egypt. He made Pharaoh a wealthy man. Is the Bible saying that unless you’re psychic you can’t succeed? If not, what is the yardstick being used to measure “success”? For Joseph it was not peace of mind or an easy path.

  Whatever you think about the Bible—if you see it as a divine text, a spotty piece of history, or a dangerous collection of children’s stories—this narrative is a powerful lesson that you can never be certain if you are in a good or a bad situation. The yardstick we should be measuring success by may not be related to what the eye can see.

  We all take stock of our prospects, and get alternately excited or depressed by them. But our vision is never 20/20. Just when you thought you had a career in Dallas, you’re off to Illinois. Just when you thought you had Helen, the great Italian cook, as your neighbor, a door opens a crack and you discover you’re living next to the Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

  As a rule in life, if you want to feel thin, hang out with fat people. If you want to feel better about your prospects, talk to friends who are worse off than you. Throughout the first months in Illinois, we kept contact with our friend Alex Winslow in Dallas. At the end of the summer she called to tell us her husband, Allyn, had vanished. Then events separated us. Beth and I left town. We called regularly to see how she was doing and if there was any news. Over the weeks, her tears gave way to depression that gave way to rumors that Allyn had resurfaced—somewhere. He was alive. She told us that he had misgivings about his life. He felt lost. He had gone crazy. It all seemed like science fiction to me. Allyn was one of the sweetest and smartest guys I had known. But then I thought of Helen, and maybe I just hadn’t had a peek behind Allyn’s door. Perhaps my vision was not 20/20.

  There is almost nothing more powerful than the current of unhappiness. It can carry you far away. It can separate friends and family. It can even separate you from yourself. We left Alex behind on a different shore and went on with the little dramas of our own lives.

  Classes seemed to tak
e on artificial importance. We were instructed to do acting scenes on one foot to see how it would affect our performance. Our teacher chastised me for not taking the exercise seriously. I wasn’t a flamingo, I told her.

  In Modern Dance class, our teacher was also a grad student on scholarship. Her name was Blake Atherton. Every straight guy in the drama department took her class and fought to be in the front row. Our interest was not related to the love of dance, but to Blake Atherton. She was the 1975 version of Viagra.

  I was now in rehearsal for one of the biggest parts in my life—not the best, but by far the biggest. It was a new play written for the upcoming Bicentennial called ’76 Town Hall, or as we dubbed it, 76 Pound Turkey. It was three hours and twenty minutes long. It ended with me delivering a forty-minute monologue dressed up like Uncle Sam, in a red, white, and blue sequined costume, with a white beard and top hat.

  The play was a scathing criticism of how commercial America had become. Of course the playwright hoped that he might be the beneficiary of some of that same disgusting commercialism. But he was safe. His play was to theater what the root canal is to dentistry.

  My character was called “Narrator,” already a bad sign. But that didn’t keep the other acting students in the department from envying me, partially because my role was so huge. Just like in porno, young actors believe that size matters.

  It’s also understandable for other reasons. It all smacked of favoritism. Hob brought me in, and I got the lead in Jumpers. It was a gigantic role. I played an old man that delivered long, incomprehensible monologues on physics to an occasionally sleeping audience. Then, in a move of almost De Niro–like transformation, I lose my hair in the shower and get cast in the largest part in the longest play ever written, where I got to deliver another set of huge, incomprehensible monologues. I was becoming the school’s “go-to guy” for unwatchable theater.

  I mentioned to Hob that I talked for a long time at the end of the play and had no idea what I was saying. Hob smiled and said not to worry. He was going to run a slideshow behind me during the speech with images of American iconography like Superman, and Kent State, and Gumby. This is one of the primary directing techniques of modern theater—when in doubt, cover the incomprehensible with the inexplicable. The audience will just think you’re smarter than they are.

  Oh, and did I mention the play was going to be directed by Hob? With Hob at the helm, I knew I was going over Niagara Falls in a thespian barrel. Survival was possible, but not likely.

  Beth was not cast in the play. The children’s parts were being played by other children. She started carrying her tattered notebook around with her again. She would jot down a word or sentence. Sometimes I would look over her shoulder and see she had doodled the picture of a woman holding a baby who had the head of a dog. I was once again getting that Mr. Spoon feeling in my stomach.

  The school brought in a professional acting coach to handle the new master class. His name was Ed Kaye-Martin, a handsome middle-aged man who always wore blue jeans and flannel shirts. He was gay. But not just gay. He was mean-gay, like on the Bravo channel. I had never encountered anything like it. He could cut you to ribbons with any of six lethal disparaging glances, and that was before he opened his mouth to tell you that you were hopeless and should get out of acting—and going home and committing suicide would be an option except you were too worthless to waste the sleeping pills on.

  Ed batted me around the head and shoulders a little but never went for the jugular, primarily, I suspect, because I possessed a penis. But the women in our class were drawn and quartered. And sadly, the brunt of his wrath fell on Beth. Every time she got onstage, he attacked her. He would mock every choice she made. He made fun of her voice, of the way she dressed. It was painful. She was falling into the same position I had been in with Joan Potter.

  Ed made the mistake many people did in dealing with Beth. He thought she was what she appeared to be, a sorority girl gone astray. But he had not looked behind her door. He didn’t recognize that she possessed a unique blend of Southern charm and nihilism. She was not to be shaken or stirred. She had the ability to break him into pieces if he pushed her too far.

  I did what I could to protect Beth and support her outside of class. But I was afraid for both of them if a showdown occurred. Ed wrote up evaluations for everyone and handed them out in envelopes. Teachers like Ed survive this way. They do their damage in sealed envelopes. Beth never opened hers. We went to Burger Chef that afternoon. I offered to open her envelope for her and read it. But she snatched it from my hands and flicked it into the trash. “What’s the point,” she said.

  The next class she had to perform her final scene. It was something from a play that’s not done anymore, The Days and Nights of BeeBee Fenstermaker. Beth was brilliant. She was passionate and tough. She was funny in an offhanded way. The class was silent. I was screaming inside, “That’s my girl. Yes! You show ’em.”

  Ed sat there in silence. The class waited for his slights and his condescension. They waited. The slights didn’t come. Ed, who was so quick to shoot down a dream, kept sitting there and said nothing. A tension built in the room. Finally he asked, “Why have you done this?”

  “Excuse me?” Beth said.

  “Why have you done this now? Why at the end of the session? Your work was flawless. It was beautiful. If I were doing a production of this today, I would cast you in a second. Why did you wait until now to show me you could act?”

  Beth gave Ed one of her looks. Her eyes were whirlpools of emptiness and anger. She said, “Ed, I don’t know what you mean.” Ed was silent. Regaining his composure, he said, “I want to apologize for what I wrote in your evaluation. I was wrong, and I’m sorry if it hurt you.” Beth, who had been staring at Ed the entire time without changing her gaze, said, “Oh, Ed, I never read that. I threw it in the trash at the Burger Chef.”

  Ed again took a breath and then raised his arms to the ceiling and yelled, “Bravo! Bravo to you! Ladies and gentlemen, this is the real actress. To act you must be strong. You must have autonomy. Beth, I salute you.”

  And I salute Ed Kaye-Martin. In that small classroom of a dozen students, he put truth before pride. That takes a special sort of person. And on a side note, it made the entire day so much more pleasant.

  I WAS REHEARSING ’76 Town Hall on the stage of the big eight-hundred-seat theater at the Krannert Center. The time had come for me to work on my concluding forty-five-minute monologue with Hob. The problem with writing a forty-five-minute monologue is that no one (except one of the mothers at our preschool) ever talks that much. It’s unnatural. It’s almost as long as an NBA game. It’s exactly as long as an entire one-hour episode of Ironside without the commercials. It’s longer than it takes to barbecue a two-pound tritip. Even if it is written brilliantly, it means you have too much to say and you’re in the wrong profession.

  It’s hard to learn something that long. Many actors have asked me for pointers on how to memorize lines. I have two general tips. Tip one is to break down whatever you are learning into three acts, per Aristotle’s suggestion. Every speech, no matter how long or short, has an introduction where the geography of ideas is laid out; a conflict (usually the subject of the speech); and a climax where resolution occurs. You will then have an internal landscape that makes the ideas easier to follow and consequently easier to learn.

  Tip two is that all language has meaning and order. If you think about the meaning of what you are saying and the order in which it is revealed, you will be able to memorize anything. The secret is specific thinking, and not rote memorization.

  I was alone onstage performing the first half of my monologue for Hob and our stage manager when a crowd of students came in and sat at the back of the theater. They were all taking notes. Hob noticed them and called out to me, “Okay, Tobo. Let’s take it from the top.” I started the speech again and got through about ten minutes of it when Hob called out, “Tobo! Tobo! Hold it right there.”

  Hob
sidled out of the row where he was sitting and made the long walk onto the stage. He came up to me and in a secretive tone said, “Tobo, Jane and I are having some people over this weekend for hamburgers. You eat meat, right?”

  I nodded. “Yes, Hob. I eat meat.”

  “How about Beth? She eat meat?”

  “Yes, Hob. She’s a meat-eater, too.”

  “Why don’t the two of you come over for dinner?”

  “Sure.”

  “Come over at about seven.”

  “Okay.”

  Then Hob turned and in a loud voice, “Once again from the top!” Hob started to walk off the stage and then he stopped. “Wait. Tobo? Tobo?”

  “Yes, Hob?”

  He came back over and whispered, “You and Beth haven’t been to the house, have you?”

  “Ah, no, Hob.”

  “Then why don’t you come by at six thirty and we’ll show you around.”

  “Sure.”

  He turned once more to the huge empty theater and called out majestically, “Okay. One more time from the top.”

  I went through the entire speech. We took a break. I went over to my little corner and continued looking over my lines while drinking some hot tea. One of the students approached me clutching her notebook. The girl introduced herself as Randi, a directing major. Hob had assigned them all to observe his directorial techniques. She wanted to know what he told me onstage because after he talked to me, my entire performance changed. I told her I couldn’t discuss it because it was a deep part of my process, and I didn’t want to blow my subtext. But it did have to do with Americana as we know it. Hamburgers and chili fries—that sort of thing. She nodded, wrote some notes, and gave me my space.

  At the end of the evening, Hob came up to me and said, “Tobo, I have a great idea. What do you think about starting the final monologue inside a giant casaba melon? And then jump out and we’ll start the slideshow.”