The Masked Man: A Memoir And Fantasy Of Hollywood

by Tom Wilson

  "Okay," she exhaled, "You saw what we're looking for here."

  "Car battery," I said.

  "Yes, a car battery," she said, "Doing a dance."

  "It's doing a dance?" I asked, trying to stay positive and keep my tone peppy, "That wasn't in the script."

  "Yes, a dance. Do a dance for a few seconds, then do the line." "Power up?" I asked.

  "Up the power," she answered, pointing at the assistant to start the camera.

  "Slate, please," the girl said, pointing the camera at me as I looked into the lens, thinking hard about how a battery might dance. I stood on the masking tape mark on the office carpet, looked happily and battery-like into the lens and said "Tom Wilson!" Then I began to move, piston-like, a six foot three inch dancing battery. I spun slowly, bobbing up and down, and even added blinking my eyes open and closed very energetically, to suggest electrical conductivity. In other words, I acted myself to the brink of utter psychological ruin, spinning toward the camera and opening my mouth to say the line as if I were a bolt of lightning, when there was a loud knock at the door.

  I stopped bobbing and blinking and the assistant said "I told them we're in session!" as the casting director stomped to the door. I stood still, an inert battery, waiting to see if she wanted me to keep dancing or not, already certain that whatever the interruption was, I could kiss the dancing battery gig goodbye. Even more sure of it when she opened the door and screamed, dropping a stack of headshots onto the floor and breaking whatever was in the creative hopper completely.

  The Ranger filled the door frame, guns filling the holsters and his head filling the mask under his hat. "Hello, young lady," he said, grabbing his hat brim, "Is there a Mister Wilson here?"

  She staggered back a step to reveal me, standing in front of the camera.

  "Hello," I said.

  "Hello, Tom," he said, adding to the lady, 'He's a friend of mine."

  "I'm busy right now, Ranger," I said.

  "Fair enough, no trouble at all," he said, leaning in to whisper to the assistant, "I'll just wait for him right out there, if that's alright."

  "Excuse us," she said, closing the door in his face.

  She walked behind the camera, staring at me for the whole trip over there.

  "I told them we were in session," the assistant sputtered, and the lady said nothing, leaving us in stony silence. I wasn't sure if I should roll my eyes about my crazy friend and go into the battery dance, or just keep standing there. I think that at least seven seconds passed before I mumbled "Do you want to see the dance again, or should I skip to the line?"

  She tossed my headshot onto a tall pile of other smiling heads at the edge of the table.

  "We have what we need," she said.

  "I didn't say "Power Up!" I said.

  "Up the power."

  "I didn't say that."

  "Thank you."

  Between the regular earthquakes and aging infrastructure, Los Angeles doesn't own a piece of sidewalk that isn't cracked into more chunks than a stained glass window, and as I walked back to my car the Ranger followed me, stepping over tall strands of weeds poking through the fissures.

  "I'll be honest with you," he said, "That woman wasn't very pleasant."

  "She wasn't pleasant?" I said, "This whole place isn't pleasant. How long have you been out of show biz?"

  "It just seems to me that they could be a little more welcoming to the actors, that's all."

  "Wow, you've been out of it a long time then, huh?"

  He kicked a dandelion puff, exploding the white ball of seeds into the smog. "Oh, I'm not as out of my element as you think I am."

  "You're pretty out of it," I said.

  "I might surprise you."

  "You're very out of it if you knock on the door while I'm auditioning for a commercial. That's out of it."

  "Now, now," he scolded. I got to my car and turned to him, fishing for keys.

  "I'm in the middle of an audition, dancing like a car battery. Is that a good time to make one of your little visits?"

  He stared into a crevasse between chunks of pavement and sucked some air through his teeth. "Okay," he said, "You've got me there. Yes, friend, that's true, but what I was trying to say is--"

  I spun on him, keys in hand. "What is it you're trying to say? What is it? You are stalking me, and you don't…have a wallet, and you end up riding…a HORSE on the runway in Philadelphia doing weird hand signals at the plane. What was that, anyway?"

  "What was what?"

  "The hand signals you were making?"

  "I was speaking with my hands in the ways of the Indian."

  "What were you saying?" I asked.

  "May the great spirit watch over your travels. That's all."

  "And now you show up just in time during a humiliating audition to pile on some more, and…and…you just show up here. What…?"

  He stood in front of me with the same tranquil gaze that he had in the middle of the night on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. L.A. hadn't changed a thing about him. A simple man, keeping some kind of watch, without a reason or message. I leaned against the rusted door of my Chevy, ready for one of two things: the meaning of his visit, or the end of our relationship.

  "What do you want?" I said, pleading, "What is it? What's the message? Am I gonna die or something?"

  He looked confused for a second, then blew out a cowboy's guffaw. "HA! No, you're not going to die! I mean, not that I know of!" he said, clearing his throat, "I don't know anything about those sorts of things."

  "Alright then," I said, opening the car door, "Take it easy."

  "Why are you auditioning for that type of thing?" he asked through a masked squint.

  "What do you mean?"

  "A dancing car battery?" he said.

  I staggered away from the car, incredulous. "Is that it? That's why you're here?"

  "No, it's just that the other actors were asking it outside the room in there."

  "What other actors?" I asked.

  "The actors at the audition in there," he said.

  "What were they saying?" I asked, turning away from the sun, afraid of the answer.

  "They were wondering why you would be trying out for a regional commercial for a car battery, since you were in some big pictures and all."

  I swept an imaginary piece of dust from the side mirror of the car. "They were asking that?"

  "Yes, they were. That's why I asked."

  The car started with a metallic clank sure to cost me several hundred dollars very soon and, checking the rear view mirror for a gap in the Hollywood traffic, I rolled down the window and looked up at him. "First of all, trust me on this, I haven't been in any big pictures."

  "You weren't?"

  "No. I was in one big picture, so the answer to your question is, I'm here driving a cruddy car with a bad battery to a car battery commercial because I happen to need the money. Good enough for you?"

  "Listen, Tom, I--"

  "Looks like I'm the only one with any answers," I said, pulling into traffic fast enough to make him jump out of the way before I drove past him.

  Highland Avenue is a long, flat stretch of road, so every time I checked the rear view mirror for him, there he was, getting smaller and smaller in the frame of the dusty back window, his hand in the air as if he had one more question. Mongolian barbecue stands and mini-malls crusted with soot whipped by my window, as I kept checking the mirror again and again, hoping he would lower his hand and hop back on the curb, or even disappear behind a truck. And every mirror check confirmed the waving hand, and friendly indictment. I stepped on the gas, making a few lane changes to hide behind bigger cars. The feeling that made me look back at him over and over wasn't morbid curiosity or the blush of childlike nostalgia, and it wasn't even for the entertainment possibilities of cynical self immolation, which is as much the foundation of a comic's public identity as an amplified human wound. I pulled into the left lane at Sunset Boulevard and whipped an aggressive, illegal U turn beca
use he said he was my friend, and it felt like he was being honest.

  He was standing there happily, still looking right at me as I pulled up. "I know how you feel," he said, as soon as the window was cracked, as if I'd never driven away.

  "How I feel what?"

  "I've done commercials. Plenty of them, too," he said, "They pay the bills, but it's not what you came out here for, is it?"

  "You've done commercials?" I asked through the crack, afraid to roll down the window.

  "Sure. Jeno's Pizza Rolls. Aqua Velva," he said, "The after shave."

  "You did a commercial for Aqua Velva?"

  "Dodge cars, and Amoco. They sell gas," he said.

  I stared at his silhouette as the sun set behind him. "Pizza rolls?"

  "Those pizza rolls were good, actually," he said, "I wouldn't say I ate a product if I didn't."

  "And you did. You ate them?"

  "Yes, I did. Foster Grant sunglasses, too," he said, "I mean, I didn't eat the sunglasses, I wore them."

  "You did a sunglasses commercial? What about the mask?" I said, pointing at his face.

  "That was after they sued me to take off the mask," he said, kicking a leaf into the gutter, "And they won."

  The mask couldn't hide the hurt in his eyes, even in the silhouette, as the edges of his hat exploded in rays of orange from the setting sun. He sighed and looked down at his boots, shuffling them to keep balance as he leaned toward the window. "That's all I wanted to say," he said, "That I understand what you mean about the commercials." I leaned across the car and opened the passenger door as he jogged around the car and hopped in, ducking low to protect his hat.

  We drove right down Sunset Boulevard, the sunbaked trail of asphalt heading west, and talked actor to actor, or more accurately, show biz burnout to armed crimefighter. "So don't tell me I don't understand anything about doing commercials when the money runs out," he chuckled, "there still must be a ton of pizza rolls in my freezer!"

  "Well, they've probably cleaned out your freezer by now," I said. "That's probably true, " he said, resting a muscled arm on the open window frame. "As I said, they were very good pizza rolls, don't get me wrong."

  "Yes, I'm sure they were," I said, "I introduced biscuits at Kentucky Fried Chicken."

  "You don't say!" he smiled.

  "Yeah, I was a construction worker at a job site somewhere, and he's sitting there opening his bucket of chicken, and BOINK, a biscuit pops into my hand."

  "Magically pops there?"

  "Yes," I said, "Well, as magically as a biscuit can pop into your hand. It just popped there, like when Doctor Bombay showed up on "Betwitched."

  He laughed and slammed his palm on the outside of the door. "Ha! That's something! You brought biscuits to the general public!"

  "But I must have eaten sixty pieces of chicken that day," I said, "They give you a bucket to spit it out, but I thought hey, I can eat a lot of chicken."

  "Take small bites," he said, "that's the secret."

  "Well, by take forty I thought I'd never eat chicken again."

  The trees of Laurel Canyon filled the car with cedar smells, and we crested the hill at Mulholland, headed down to the valley.

  "They do their best, I suppose," he said.

  "Who's that?"

  "Those commercial people."

  "They do?"

  "They have a job to do like anybody. Selling pizza rolls and whatnot. Just doing their job."

  He stared out the windshield as we rolled past Hollywood's temporary architecture, a line of stores and stands destined to succeed for a season, until they fail, replaced by brand new storefronts and logos that sell the same fried glitter to a new generation of tan dreamers. He rode silently, sitting next to me, not asking me anything about acting, or commercials, or pizza rolls, so I began to talk.

  TEN

  You know, in acting school they really do make you pretend you're a tree. They make you pretend you're a color, or pretend that you've become cement and are actually part of the cinder block wall of the classroom itself. They make you perform in all sorts of idiotic, time killing ways. They make you think about sad things until you cry, and think about funny things until you laugh like a lunatic, forcing pained "HaHaHa's" out of your diaphragm, because if you don't laugh hard enough and convince everybody that you're really laughing about something real, you might get a "C." They make you do all sorts of things that don't apply to a career as a professional actor at all, probably because they can't figure out what else to do with you, since you paid them money, and after all, their teachers made them pretend to be trees, too. Heck, what's the harm of watching a room full of pale, hopeful misfits stand very still, their thin, curled arms outstretched as eager classmate yell at them "Oak! Oak! Yes, Manny! I see it! Oak!" Cha-ching. Class dismissed.

  The American Academy of Dramatic Arts is one of the oldest professional acting schools in the world, with a list of prominent alumni from the past, and floor-to-ceiling publicity headshots of actors who've pretended to be a tree there, from Edward G. Robinson and Jason Robards, to Robert Redford and a constellation of lesser magnitude stars in black photo frames surrounding them. "The Academy" is the reason I moved to New York, to save the American theatre and Christendom with my portrayal as Jesus in Godspell, but first, to be the best and most clearly identifiable tree I could possibly be. Studying acting in New York City at a school like the Academy was a lot like the movie "Fame," the movie musical about performing arts kids squealing through the cracked old hallways and running up and down wooden stairs rubbed shiny and smooth by dance shoes, discussing universally accepted hip, obscure playwrights, and what they might write if they were writing about us, since it was pretty clear that we were the center of everything. The entire student body frequently broke into song in the middle of the street between classes, stopping rush hour traffic in Manhattan, but convincing the apoplectic cab drivers that the irresistible beat of the music was too powerful to fight and they'd join in. It was a magical time.

  I did buy into it for a while, laying on the floor, acting like broccoli, and waiting for secret acting knowledge connecting the belief that I was a piece of broccoli with the ability to get a part on a T.V. show with Don Rickles, who also went to the Academy, since the photo of the young insult comic with hair near the Robert Redford picture meant he studied there, too. What the teachers there called "studying acting" was an obtuse collection of exercises including one that had everyone lay on their stomach on the ground and run index fingers across the hardwood floor, humming "OOOooooooooo… " We hummed the long O to connect with the reality of the wood, and the floor, and our finger, and our relationship to all of them within our action and vocalization, each of which comes before limiting ideas like thought. Yeah, I know. I'm not kidding. And it costs money to go there!

  "What's this for?" I asked, sneezing puffs of dust from the floor into the face of the hypnotized student next to me.

  "Just do it," the failed actress teaching the class said, "It's more important to do the action before thinking about it, that's the point of the exercise."

  "Because if you start to think about it you'll start feeling like a moron?" I asked.

  "You're not getting anything out of this because you've already decided you won't," she said, before inviting me to a Werner Erhard "EST" Seminar over the next weekend. That was right before I non-verbally invited her to not talk to me anymore.

  The young actors in the class were mostly high school drama geeks, along with a few handsome guys taking a shot at lucking into a soap opera gig, putting on our gear for dance class and staring quizzically at one of the items on the supply list, the dance belt. Nobody knew what a dance belt was, until the first day of class when we went into the changing room together, took them out of their tiny packages in unison and found the most severe jock strap ever invented. The dance belt, once aboard, feels like its been fastened by a rivet gun, and is the reason that most male dancers have a private area that's squeezed into a smoothness that riv
als a Ken doll.

  "What the hell is this thing?" the soap opera hunk asked, unwrapping the miniscule black elastic.

  "I don't know," I mumbled, "It's a dance belt, I guess."

  "Looks like a pony tail band with a pocket!" he said, pulling it like a slingshot. "Where's my…you know…thing supposed to go?"

  After we put them on, it was clear that your thing is supposed to go far into your body, resting right next to your spleen.

  Since I had nowhere to live and couldn't find an apartment, I slept in Brooklyn, on the floor of Dave Kirk, a friend from high school studying tuba performance at Juilliard, "Tom, would you mind if I practice?" he asked, every morning and every afternoon that I was there.

  "Sure thing, Dave, go for it."

  Then he got down on the floor, laying on his back, extended his arms and began breathing deeply, taking in massive amounts of air to blow an endless stream of wind through his pursed lips toward the ceiling. He pushed hisses of air to the ceiling over and over, far longer than could be attributed to a sane person, and then fell to silence. A long, long period of silence with his eyes closed in the middle of the floor.

  I was reading a play, sitting in an armchair and afraid to turn the page for fear of a flick of paper destroying his concentration.

  "Hey, Dave," I whispered.

  "Mm?" he said, as still as a large boulder, lying next to a tuba.

  "What are you doing?"

  "I'm practicing," he said.

  "Practicing…the tuba?"

  "This is preparation to practice. I'm visualizing the practice," he said, closing his eyes and taking in another lung full of air.

  "Visualizing the practice?"

  If you have to visualize the practice before you even practice, I'm toast, I thought. I read plays I don't really understand, and run my finger across the floor saying "OOOooooo," and eat jelly out of the jar in people's apartments that I visit because I'm starving, and this guy meditates and visualizes before he even practices? No wonder he plays the tuba at Juilliard, and I wheeze and pretend I'm a tree and make jokes about dance belts.