by Tom Wilson
I shuffled my blue nylon Pumas on the ground and looked out the window to allow the intensity to bubble between us. "Yeah, okay," I said
"Tom, this play is about frustrated rage," he said.
"Uh huh," I replied.
"I think that you might work on a speech impediment!" he said, pacing for inspiration, "Maybe he can't speak clearly, and the lines are garbled, creating even more pain to him. He can't fully communicate this passion!"
"Uh huh."
"Okay, let's try an improvisation based on these feelings. Don't pay attention to the script right now. Just concentrate on the longing and rage."
I stared at him, a kid new to the arts clique, unsure of what he meant. But it sounded like he meant to just go crazy and be angry at everything.
No problem.
I launched into an onstage version of Three Mile Island, the damaged nuclear plant whose molten core was beginning the 250,000 year cooling off period only a few miles from us. No big motivation discussions needed, no brooding looks into the empty auditorium filled with the curved maple shells of empty chairs, asking what the author meant by this or that. I communicated with quiet nodding, mumbled "uh huh's" and onstage flame.
"Frankenstein must suffer… AS… AHHKKHH! ! AS I … HAVE … SUHHH… SUFFERED! !!!" I screamed. And screamed. And screamed again, my guttural shrieking causing a commotion with the guys in the wrestling room next door.
"Uh - huh. That was good," Brian said. He adapted a prologue for the play, a scene of the Creature's creation onstage while the actor playing Victor Frankenstein read an apocalyptic passage from Dante's Inferno, while I changed from a fetal hump curled on the pitch black stage, into a hulking menace as arcs of electricity coursed into my body, just like in a real monster movie. This sent us down the hall to speak to the physics teacher to ask him how you might safely send bolts of lightning into somebody's body. He went to the closet and brought out a black appliance, one end spouting a thick power cord, and the business end a rounded metal point, gleaming my concerned reflection back at us from the steel.
"You can use this!" the physics teacher said, his eyes smiling through inch thick lenses.
"What is it?" I asked.
"Haven't seen you in class in a while, Tom."
True, I hadn't been there since a midterm when I wrote no answers, but stared at the questions with my head cocked like a confused terrier on a sitcom.
"Yeah, whatever," I said, "What is it?"
"It's used to create explosive effects in science experiments!"
"Explosive effects?"
"Sure. An electrical impulse. No biggie."
The director picked the thing up and headed for the door when I balked. "Uuuhhhhhh, hang on a sec."
"What's the matter?"
"Is this safe to use" I asked, "I mean, this is electricity, right?"
"Yes, but it can be done safely, I think," he said, peering at me over the glasses, "Just make sure you line the inside of your costume with aluminum foil. It'll spread the current out and you won't even feel it!"
On opening night, the crowd was as excited and mumbly as a bunch of kids waiting their turn to bob for apples, and I was even more excited, starring in my first play, covered in monster makeup and ready to explode with emotion and begin the process where I would be cast as Jesus in Godspell and save humanity. At five after eight the auditorium darkened to black, and the kid playing Doctor Frankenstein followed me across glow in the dark bits of tape on the floor to the edge of the stage, assuming our starting positions as the fetal hulk and pimply-faced giver of life, stumbling over a sofa in the blackness. An orange power cord ran through the legs of the front row and up to the edge of the stage, where the black cattle prod rested, heavy and lethal. Dr. Frankenstein raised it in the dark, clicked it on with a low pitched hum, and began the play. His freshly changed voice recited the prologue from "Inferno" as he placed the humming electro gun next to my arm, covered inside my black jacket with Reynold's Wrap. "The Creature!" Dr. Frankenstein cracked, 'Eminent in beauty once, before me stepped and made me pause," ZZZZZZAP. An electrical arc popped through the air, sending a blue lightning bolt toward me, zipping right through the aluminum foil and into my arm. "AAAhhhhh!!" I improvised. The foil didn't work and I was being electrocuted.
I surprised myself with professionalism, since I grunted in character as another lightning bolt coursed directly into my shoulder. "AAHHHhhhhrrrrr!!" I growled, realizing that there was a lot of introduction to go, and the kid didn't even realize that he was shocking me. This wasn't the wintertime shock of rubbing shoes on the floor and touching a doorknob, it was the body quivering accident with a wall socket type of shock. Onstage, in front of my entire family, as well as a large group of teachers who would have probably paid extra to watch my electrocution, I improvised plan B, bolting upright and waving my arms like Peter Boyle in "Young Frankenstein." I had no idea what to do when an actor is being electrocuted onstage. ZZZZAAAP.
"AAAhhhhhhrrr!" I waved, beating the cattle prod away from me.
Do I grab Dr. Frankenstein's hand to stop him? That would change the entire meaning of the play on opening night, as the Creature yells out in pain and refuses the gift of life during the introduction of the play. The kid shot a load of AC current into my neck. "AAHH!" I cried in shock and pain, keeping it together just enough to stay in character.
In the first night of my first play, I became a method actor, a helpless creature before a mob, crying in guttural baritone, growling and heaving my monster chest.
"How frozen and how faint I then became," he said. ZZZZAP.
"If he were beautiful as he is hideous now-"
I began waving harder, trying to knock the thing out of his hand. He used it as motivation, shouting the text. "AND YET DID DARE TO SCOWL UPON HIS MAKER!" ZZAP.
I yelled "AHGGG! STOP!" pretty loudly that time.
"WELL, FROM HIM MAY ALL OUR MISERY FLOW!!"
I turned and staggered to my opening mark, beginning my stage career with the realization that if all the world is a stage, then my role is the guy who gets electrocuted.
The Ranger's horse snorted and clopped his hooves a few times and I finally stopped talking.
"That's quite a story," the Ranger said.
"Well, not much of one," I said, "but that's how this whole thing started, seeing Godspell and getting electrocuted in Frankenstein."
"And you being sick and all," he said.
"That doesn't have to do with anything either, I think."
"More than you think, I'll bet," he said.
We heard footsteps from the side of the building and stared at each other. "Hello? The car wash is closed!" the attendant called out to us, "What are you guys doing?"
He turned the corner, saw the horse, and screamed something in his native language that didn't sounded like it uses any vowels. I opened my mouth to begin improvising, saying something dismissive and funny, but before I could say it the Ranger pulled the horse around in a tight flash of silver buckles and licks of mane and tail, and with a quiet click of his tongue, rode away under the fluorescent lights of the pump island and out onto the street.
"Ho! What?" the attendant said, pulling his uniform cap off his head to crush it between his hands in amazed confusion.
"Ranger! Wait!" I said, lifting my arms to stop him. I thought he was taking the horse to the edge of the parking lot, I thought he was going to turn around and wave, I thought many things, but as he got smaller and smaller, racing away from both of us faster and faster, I didn't really know what to think, except that I might be the person who re-named the horse of the One Ranger while telling him my life story. As he turned the corner, galloping under the low branches of a stand of maple trees in a city park, he yelled "Heaahh! Twister! Heaahhhhh!!!"
EIGHT
I carry souvenirs of my past with me always, space-age alloy mementos of my long life as a heavily medicated asthmatic. Deep under the long scars that line my hips are prosthetic joints that long ago replaced ol
d defeated ones, fractured to dust by endless rounds of cortisone to fight the suffocating inflammation and let me breathe. I don't think about the artificial fulcrum of my body much at all, until I go to an airport, shuffling toward the gate, kicking my luggage along the linoleum and praying for home.
"Are you carrying any metal objects?" the alert Transportation Security Administration agent at Philadelphia airport asked.
"I have joint replacements that make the thing go off," I said, unfurling coils of power cord and removing my shoes to drop them in the plastic bin.
"Any keys? Pens? Metal objects?" he said.
"Yes. I have metal in my legs."
"A large belt buckle? Take off your belt, please, sir."
"Yes, I have metal on me. Well, in me. You'll have to check me."
"Come on through," he said, waving me toward him.
BEEP.
"Step back, please, sir."
"You'll have to use the wand thing on me," I said.
"Do you have any keys on you? Anything metal?"
"Yes, I do," I said.
"Put it in that bin right over there," he said.
If only I were making up this part of the book.
I was led to a chair and, shoeless and beltless, sat while the rest of the security detail stole glances at me, whispering to each other and giggling, before one of them picked up a black sensor wand and walked toward me.
"Hey, do you mind if I ask you a question?" he said.
"I have artificial hips. That's why I set the machine off."
"Are you from Back in the future?"
"Yes. Yes, you're right," I said, checking my watch. The guard doubled over in a happy guffaw, supporting his body with the point of the wand on the ground. "I knew it! Yeah!" He looked over to the other agents, trading high fives behind the X-ray machine. "I'm a little late for my flight," I said, taking a shot at low-level celebrity afterglow, "can I go?"
"Would you stand up for me?" he replied, reminding me, as always, that I'm not that big a celebrity. He raised the wand like the conductor of the airport symphony and grunted, "Hold your arms out at your sides, please."
I assumed the cruciform position of the suspected terrorist; in his socks with drooping pants, watching my laptop slide under a child's Hello Kitty backpack ten feet away.
"Can I get go get my laptop? I think it's--"
"Just keep your arms up for me, sir," he said, examining my midsection, "So, is that the only acting you did?"
BEEP! My right hip.
"Uh, no, that beep is because of the-- "
"Biff, are you carrying any keys?"
"That's not my name, officer. As you can see by the boarding pass that you dropped on the ground after you took it from me, my name is Tom, and I have hip-- " BEEP!
"Are you still wearing a belt?"
The empty seat next to me on the stuffed plane was a stroke of air travel luck that doesn't even exist anymore, and I collapsed into my chair, dumping a clatter of pens, notebooks, and magazines onto the empty potential flotation device next to me. My legs squeezed into the back of the seat back in front of me, grinding my knees into the face of the pretty actress on the cover of the airline magazine and heaving a sigh of relief, ready to hurtle through the air in my favorite direction - toward home.
The Philadelphia cityscape that Rocky shadow boxed so many years ago has been swallowed by giant skyscrapers topped with neon accents and shiny windows, but the misty sunrise was slow to bring the distant skyline into focus. I squinted out the oval window covered in hairline scratches, misted with dew and vibrating in the whine of idling jet engines, a little Vaseline on the lens to help out the aging cityscape. I nestled my head into the curved wall and almost closed my eyes, when something hidden in the high brush near the runway flashed through the scrub and disappeared. It must have been a snowy egret nesting in the wildlife refuge at the wooded edges of the airport, I thought. The plane pulled away from the gate, turning gently and heading for the runway as I stared out at the long grasses dancing in the wash of intersecting jets, and caught another glimpse of a white flash in the waves of dusty gold, followed by a slash of black leather. As the rest of the passengers avoided the bilingual drone of the safety video, I gawked through the hazy plexiglass as a horse's head appeared, it's creamy mane dancing in jet blasts and wind. The One Ranger rode out from behind a hillock near the end of the runway, relaxed in his tooled saddle and walking the horse directly toward my plane.
"He's…no! He's…" I said, turning desperately to the nose-pierced girl sitting in the aisle seat.
"He's…he's…!" I added, though she kept fumbling with her headphones, her thick nose ring pointing at the book she was reading.
I smashed my nose against the plexiglass, watching him guide the horse around some metal barriers, headed toward the runway. "That's not. He's…" I sputtered into the window. I turned back to her.
"He's not real, this is not…He's not…um."
She pretended to read more intently and brought the book a few inches closer to her face. The 767 turned onto the runway, ready for takeoff, and I massaged my face into the glass, watching the heavy wing slide across the Ranger as he kicked the horse to a relaxed trot, completely exposed at the edge of the blacktop.
He cantered the horse next to the plane, squinting into the windows, finally raising his black gloved hand toward all of them, holding it there above his head.
"What are you doing?" I choked out, as a flight attendant asked my row for verbal confirmation of their readiness to help from the exit row seats.
"Are you willing to perform those tasks and listen to my instructions in the unlikely event of an emergency?" she asked.
"This is not an emergency," I said, "he's not real."
"Excuse me?"
"What in the world is that?" the lady behind me asked, looking out her window at a cowboy on horseback waving at her from the runway.
The Ranger made several arm motions, signaling with his hand and forearm, pointing down the runway and then at the sky as the jet engines thrummed with power and we lurched forward, ready for takeoff. His hand still in the air, the Ranger pulled the reins hard and Twister reared onto his back legs, swimming his front hooves in the air. I pushed my face harder into the fogged plastic, fogging it further with desperate panting, my eyes saucers of disbelief. Torn between the impulse to wave wildly trying to get his attention and signal him to get out of there, or the safer route, pulling the opaque shade down, slamming it into the bottom groove and ignoring him, I kept staring, waiting for the completely predictable to happen.
A tall cowboy on a white horse, carrying guns and riding on an airport runway next to a modern airliner is a severe breach of airport security, causing a wild panic by the airport police, speeding toward him on motorcycles under my tiny, plastic oval. As the engines roared a hot hurricane for takeoff, a blue police car sped toward our plane with its red lights spinning, with more motorcycles and waving guns hurtling behind it. The Ranger reared the horse one more time, waving some more signals, and kicked Twister into a gallop, still waving and smiling as his red neckerchief whipped in the air behind him. He was yelling something toward the plane that only he could hear, cupping a gloved hand by his mouth and pulling the horse in a tight pirouette as the careening cars circled around him and we roared forward, pushed back into our chairs for takeoff. Surrounded by police cars, motorcycles, and men screaming into walkie-talkies, he pulled his hat low on his head, gave a hard kick to the horse's side, and with a whip of the reins, he jumped across a black and white hood, landing on the tarmac and galloping into the weeds. He hung onto the raging tornado of horse, letting one hand off the reins to give one more quick wave toward the sky and pulled the reins toward the weed covered hills to the west, under the wings of my ascending plane.
NINE
Lucky for me, it's just about impossible for comedians to copyright material that they perform live onstage, making it pretty easy to rip off my friend Marc Price, the actor and s
tand up comedian cemented in the pop culture for his role as "Skippy" on the hit sitcom of the eighties, "Family Ties." Marc has a great stand up bit about a daydream where he finds himself on the old game show "Password." He looks past host Allen Ludden over to Betty White, his celebrity opponent and opens his secret wallet holding the password, as the studio announcer's calm baritone whispers to the audience, "The password is…"Has Been." Skippy reads the password, looks at his hopeful contestant and scans the ceiling, searching for just the right word to use as a clue. He brightens right before the buzzer with the perfect synonym for "Has Been." He chuckles confidently, looks at the lady and sing-songs "…mmmeeeeeeee?"
That bit was all I could think of while I scribbled my name onto the sign-in sheet to audition for another commercial, this one for car batteries, competing with the other actors for the role of the car battery itself. It was being videotaped, as all humiliating commercials are, recorded forever by a scowling woman in sweat pants, snatching promotional head shots out of actor's hands.
"Excuse me," I said, holding out my picture.
"Fill out a size form and give me your head shot," she sniffed.
"Yes, uh, I was just wondering--"
"Fill out a size form and--"
"You said that, yes, I'll do that. I just wonder how a car battery is supposed to act?"
She picked the shot out of my hand without eye contact.
"Just put it in your creative hopper and see what your artistry comes up with," she huffed walking into the office and closing the door.
The rooms for commercial auditions are always the same. An empty office in a short-term rental building, with a glaring spotlight, a video camera, and two people inside; the disinterested casting assistant behind the video camera, and the disinterested casting director in front of it. After sitting on a wooden bench at the end of a long line of actors, glossy headshots and resumes snatched from their hands, my name was called and I followed the shuffling woman into the room.