The Dangerous Animals Club

by Stephen Tobolowsky

  Pause.

  There have been times in my life when I had no idea what someone just said to me. If you were to do a pie chart, probably 90 percent of the time it was because I didn’t hear what was said. 9.999999 percent of the time, confusion occurred because I was talking to Beth and I didn’t grasp the concept. And now I could say that 0.000001 percent of the time, it was because someone told me that I was going to jump out of a giant casaba melon.

  It was a statistical anomaly. It short-circuited my brain. Like most terrible ideas, I didn’t have to use my brain, I could just use my nose. I knew this idea stunk but I tried to remain civil and keep my response in the realm of artistic babble. I said, “Yeah, but I am already dressed up like Uncle Sam. Aren’t we mixing metaphors?”

  Hob said, “Even better.”

  “Yeah, but, how will people hear the beginning of the speech if I am inside the melon?”

  “You’ll be miked.”

  “Yeah, but, we just staged the speech running all over the place, what will happen to the mike cord?”

  “We’ll get someone on the crew to wrangle the cord.”

  “Yeah, but—should Beth and I bring anything for dinner?”

  “No. Just bring yourselves.”

  So they built a giant casaba melon and mounted it on train tracks. Backstage, dressers got me into my Uncle Sam outfit. For speed, they decided to remake the red, white, and blue sequined suit with Velcro. I would start the speech offstage on a lavaliere microphone while finishing the costume change, then climb into the melon. At the appropriate time, the melon would roll onto the stage, and I would jump through the paper side like a football team making an entrance at a Bowl game. I land onstage as Uncle Sam, hold for applause, then I start my forty-five-minute monologue with slides of Gumby and whatever running over my head.

  That was the theory. Of course we never got to practice it completely. The Uncle Sam costume wasn’t finished, they never had paper for me to jump through in rehearsal, and they never had the real microphone or the cord wrangler.

  Opening night arrived. In the dressing room, Hob gave us a pep talk. He told us we were going to show this audience something they had never seen before. He smiled and said, “Good work. Now let’s go give ’em a show!” Everybody clapped. Hob pointed to me. “Tobo, one thing.”

  “Yes, Hob.”

  “I think we should change your makeup a little. I had an idea.”

  I felt a little vomit in the back of my throat. I wasn’t sick. It was just a Pavlovian response to Hob’s ideas.

  “Sure, what?”

  Hob got a wicked smile on his face and said, “Have a seat.”

  I sat and faced Hob. He grabbed my eyebrow pencil and spit in his hand. He started smooshing my eyebrow pencil in his concoction of Hobgoodian saliva. When the tip was slimy enough, he started drawing gigantic eyebrows on my face. When he finished I looked in the mirror. I was horrified. I looked like a young, balding Brooke Shields. The stage manager called places.

  I peeked through the curtain. The audience was huge—several hundred people. The house lights dimmed. There was the expectant hush. The stage lights came up. The play began. The audience was suitably entertained for the first, oh, ninety seconds. Then they started getting restless. “Oh dear. Only three hours and twenty minutes to go,” I thought.

  On my first entrance I could have sworn I heard gasps when they saw my makeup. There’s nothing like bad makeup to make a sort of fatalism descend on an audience. But just like life during wartime, audience members hardened themselves to trials and privations. They bore up bravely. Most stayed through intermission. We slogged our way through act two. I finished my last little bit before the big finale. I ran offstage and the fast change began. I was throwing on my Uncle Sam outfit. My two dressers were slapping the Velcro together. Velcro pants. Velcro vest. The white beard was hung over my ears like glasses. The soundman attached the mike to my spangled vest as my cue approached. I started the speech offstage and continued as I climbed into the giant melon. Right on cue the melon rolled onto the stage where it was received with perplexed silence.

  The moment came to leap onto the stage through the front of the melon. That’s when we ran out of luck. My mike wrangler was a smoker. No one told her she shouldn’t light up in the melon. But she did. I jumped through the paper at the exact moment when she was busy flicking her Bic. She took her first big drag instead of feeding my mike cord.

  The net result was a near strangulation and garroting of Uncle Sam in midair. The cord snapped tight and stopped me in midflight. I crashed down onto the stage. The audience gasped. But it didn’t stop there. The stage had been rebuilt to slant downward toward the audience. So I started to roll. On my way toward the front row, I heard all of the Velcro on my costume separating. Rip, rip, rip, rip, rip. I stopped rolling before I landed in a patron’s lap. I looked around. My Uncle Sam hat was up by the melon. My white beard was hanging from one ear. My vest came undone, along with my mike. When I stood up, my pants fell off. Then, the slides started.

  I stood in my jockey shorts with dangling Uncle Sam beard in front of several hundred people. I had forgotten my entire speech, rendering this endless play literally without an end. On a bright note, we finally had the audience’s full attention.

  What many in the audience never realize is that while you feel that you are anonymous, sitting in the dark, actors on the stage can see all of your faces lit by the stage lights. I saw several hundred expressions frozen in horror, wonder, and amusement as slides of Kent State, Monticello, and Mickey Mouse started changing above me.

  I gathered my wits and yelled up at the control booth, “You can turn off the slides. Yeah. Just turn ’em off.”

  They did. I gave the booth a thumbs-up. “Thank you.” I picked up my fallen mike and blew in it. It was still on. So I stared walking aimlessly around the stage in my underwear and my huge painted eyebrows speaking extemporaneously.

  “Wow. That was something. And you know what? I have no idea what my last speech is.” The audience was transfixed. “This speech is supposed to end the play. But here I am. I guess none of us knew we were going to see anything like this tonight. I sure didn’t.”

  The audience was still in shock. I continued. “Before we started the play, Dr. Hobgood, Hob, our director, gave us a pep talk and told us to get out on that stage and show you something you’ve never seen before. We have succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. When I woke up this morning, I had pancakes. I had no idea my day was going to end this way. And neither did you. That’s the great thing about theater, you just never know. Do you? It is about ‘now.’ And here we are. For better or worse this is what we have tonight.” I looked up to the booth and yelled out, “You can start the slides up again.” The play ended and we took a bow.

  After the curtain call, I climbed the fire ladder backstage. I scurried up a hundred feet into the flies and sat on the catwalk. Too humiliated to go to the dressing room and change, I waited in the darkness for about twenty minutes before I climbed down. The dressing room was empty. I looked at my gigantic, smeared eyebrows in the mirror. I washed my face and got dressed. I snuck out of the Krannert Center.

  On my way down the steps, there were two audience members discussing the play. I eavesdropped.

  “Man, what did you think of that play?”

  “I don’t know. What did you think about the guy with the brows?”

  They just shook their heads.

  I got home and opened a Rolling Rock or three and snuggled into bed. I turned on the TV. It was the late weather report. A series of severe fronts were heading into the Urbana area. I didn’t care. My mind was still numb. My cheeks burned with failure.

  I can look back now and think of how close the handle to some sort of comfort was that night. It was wedged in the window, letting in the cold night air—that big, white family Bible right where I had left off in the story of Joseph and the meaning of success. I didn’t know this then, but the name “Joseph” comes from
a three-letter Hebrew root—yod, samech, pey—that means to carry on, to do again, to continue.

  And maybe an underrated element of success is joseph, the ability to keep going. I went back to class the next day and faced my smiling schoolmates. I played Uncle Sam again that night, this time without incident if you don’t count the toxic boredom. I never realized I had achieved one of the biggest markers on the yardstick of success. I made it to tomorrow.

  21.

  A SEASON OF MISDIRECTION

  SITTING IN THE bedroom-bathroom half of our Illinois apartment, I was feeling like it was time to pull out that big, white family Bible again. Not out of the zeal to get in touch with the spiritual side of my life. Outside the icicles were melting, the land was thawing, and it was time to prop open the bedroom window again.

  Winter was ending. Whoever conceived of the idea that hell was hot never visited Illinois in January. The best part of the subzero temperatures was that it froze the sheep and cow dung that seemed to be stored on our end of the campus.

  I had survived the long, dark months like a bear. I built up a layer of protective fat from a diet of Rolling Rock beer and something called Ireland’s steak and biscuits. I had never heard of a steak and biscuit. It was a local delicacy that I’m sure contributed to any spike of coronary heart disease in the area. They combined a buttermilk biscuit, a pat of butter, and a slice of salty meat. If it wasn’t in the Garden of Eden, it should have been. You could order them by the dozen. And I did.

  Now that the ice was melting, I heard the frantic footsteps of the Ghost of Green Street in the attic above me. Momma Raccoon survived the winter. One morning I saw the footprints of Momma and her troop of youngsters in the snow on our balcony. That alone made me feel unbearably happy.

  The first semester was over. I had developed the reputation of being one of the brightest lights on the Krannert stage. Don’t ask me how. I’m not talking myself down, but the body of my work consisted of two main achievements. I had played an old man who talked with a phony British accent for twenty minutes at a time about Bertrand Russell and the theorem of the limiting curve. I talked audiences into the sort of numbness you get on a long subway ride. My second effort was even more remarkable. I ended up in my jockey shorts after a mishap with a gigantic papier-mâché casaba melon.

  My career at the Krannert made me remember the line from King Lear: “Who is’t can say, ‘I am at the worst’?” It was Shakespeare’s way of saying that when it comes to bad, there is no bottom.

  Beth kept writing notes in her spirals but hadn’t begun to turn them into a play, yet. She was a Taurus and, as she liked to remind me, a Taurus moves slowly.

  We both got to act off campus in a production of Story Theatre in an old train station aptly named the Station Theatre. Even though the station was no longer used for trains, the tracks next to the theater were. It was not uncommon to have a play interrupted by a mile-long cattle train. You would hear it at a distance, a low rumbling noise that would vibrate your rectum. The theater would start to shake, and then the whistle would blow. The actors would speed up their performances, knowing that they had to get to a good stopping place before the train got too close.

  One of the best train-related theatrical moments came in the Station Theatre’s production of Godspell. The actors were getting near the end of the play when you could first feel the vibrations of the coming train. A new sense of urgency descended in the middle of singing the final number. The cast sped up their choreography. They lifted Jesus on their shoulders and started running around the stage. As the rumbling came closer, a little boy in the audience yelled, “Momma, are they puttin’ Jesus on the train?”

  In school, I was taking a class Hob had invented called Visualization. If it accomplished nothing else, we learned the seemingly infinite variety of ways there are to waste time. I was also taking Modern Dance with the lithe and lovely Blake Atherton.

  All of the straight guys in the drama department took her class. It was not out of newfound love for dance, but was more out of the timeless love men have had for women in dance clothing. We were developing strong preferences for various leotards Blake wore. I liked the royal blue. It suited her with her short reddish-blond hair. Others preferred a dark leotard with light pastel tights. Others went for the leopard-skin pattern, which I thought was too obvious.

  It became the subject of conversation in the hallways. Vic Podagrosi would come up to me and whisper out of the side of his mouth, as if we were making a drug deal, “Hey, Tobo, blue. She’s wearing blue today.”

  I’d say, “Yeah, I know. Richter told me already.” We would exchange a look, the visual expression of “hubba, hubba,” and then go about our day. On one hand it seems disgustingly male and awful, but on the other it bears testimony as to how far we have come since the Ice Age. No one was killed. Blake hadn’t been dragged off by her hair to a cave. That’s progress.

  Beth and I adapted to a new routine of meaningless endeavors. We did scenes from sixteenth-century Spanish plays. We pretended to teach our own classes of freshman students. We played pinball. We drank beer. I was introduced to hashish and was encouraged to smoke it regularly to lose consciousness more efficiently. Beth and I functioned well as a couple. We kept each other amused and supported each other’s fiction about how our lives would turn out.

  We divided up the chores on what we did best. I would drive, answer the phone, and pick up take-out food. Beth would write, listen to Billie Holiday records, and hang spoons off of her nose. I always volunteered to do the laundry. I enjoyed it. It was perfect for people-watching. I would pack sacks of clothes into the car and drive to Do-Duds, about five minutes away. I’d pull out a roll of quarters and a book and vegetate.

  On one such afternoon I had just loaded a bank of five washers with every scrap of clothing we owned, from whites to delicates. I poured in the Cheer and popped in the quarters. I heard the satisfying sound of running water and settled in for a good read when the television program playing in the background was interrupted by the venerable Mr. Roberts, the ancient local weatherman. Mr. Roberts was never lighthearted, but this afternoon he was particularly grim. He announced a severe weather system was heading for Champaign-Urbana. Seven tornadoes were converging on the area. We had fifteen minutes to get to a shelter.

  What! Seven tornadoes? Converging? And what was that thing he said about fifteen minutes?

  Now I got it. That’s why they call it Tornado Alley. They have tornadoes here. Too bad I hadn’t thought about it until this second. First I froze. My brain stopped. I looked out the window. It had gotten dark outside. The next thing I thought of was Beth. Did she know? Was she still at home? Was she safe?

  And then I thought about the laundry. It was in the middle of the wash cycle. If I believed what I just heard, I would have to take all of the soaking-wet, dirty, soapy clothes, and dump them back into the car. It would be terribly nasty and take up a definite chunk of the fifteen minutes I had to get to where? Oh right—a shelter. What was that? Where was that? I had no idea.

  I sat like a lump for about fifteen seconds and then I screamed to myself, “Move it!” I looked at the clock. Thirteen minutes left. It was a five-minute drive home. I ran to the washers, pulling my clothes out by the armful. I didn’t have to worry about getting wet from the clothes. As soon as I walked outside with the first armload, I ran into a thunderstorm. I was drenched. The water poured into the open trunk. I ran back and forth from Do-Duds to my car, throwing the clothes into the open trunk. I was just finishing when the first hail hit. I jumped into the car when what is scientifically referred to as “marble-sized” hail pelted the windshield.

  I headed home as fast as I could. I figured I had eight to ten minutes left, tops. I could hardly see the road through the rain and the hail. It dawned on me that there was a chance that I would never make it back, that I would never see Beth again, that I would have to rely on the last refuge of the unprepared: dumb luck.

  Then as fast as the rain an
d hail started, it stopped. I turned down Green Street and saw Beth’s car. She was home! Thank God. I parked on the dirt driveway and ran upstairs. Beth was watching Mr. Roberts. The seven tornadoes were five minutes from Champaign. Five minutes.

  Beth and I looked at each other. In a panic we ran downstairs and out into the street. The air was becoming warm and thick. A bank of heavy, low clouds moved around us and everything started turning green. I heard a distant roar like the sound of an approaching train—like during a performance at the Station Theatre. We ran around our house looking for something to hide in, a box, a fallout shelter, an old bumper from a car, anything.

  We ran back upstairs. We crawled under the kitchen table. Beth said this probably wasn’t safe anyway because we were on the second floor. She was probably right. We ran to the bedroom to check out Mr. Roberts. He was looking as grim as ever, saying that the tornadoes were moving into the city. Everyone should be underground. Underground? How do I get underground?

  We ran outside again. I didn’t know what to do. I decided to crawl under my car. Beth didn’t. She leaned down and asked what if the tornado picked me and the car up and carried us both away? Beth was probably right. I crawled out from under the car.

  I remembered something about what to do in case of an emergency. It involved lying facedown in the street next to the curb. Something like that. Maybe that was for a nuclear blast. Maybe I just made it up. I couldn’t remember, but this was no time for indecision. I ran out to Green Street and lay facedown next to the curb with my hands folded over the back of my neck. Beth didn’t. She just bent down, and said that it didn’t make a lot of sense. I could still get sucked up by the tornado, plus now, I could also get run over by a car or hit by a falling tree or electrocuted with falling power lines. Beth was probably right.