Odd Birds

by Ian Harding

  I was—to put it lightly—hurt. This assessment of my outward demeanor was tough to stomach. I stood there, trying to shake off what the professor had said, but it was affecting me more than I wanted to admit. Definitely more than I wanted my classmates to see.

  I tried to laugh it off. “What, like a jellyfish?” I joked.

  The teacher who had issued the critique raised his eyebrows. “Exactly,” he said. “You’ll be a jellyfish.”

  * * *

  We were assigned our animals on a Friday. We were to present them the following Monday. And by “present” I mean act out in front of the class.

  That weekend, a number of my classmates went to the Pittsburgh Zoo to research their animals. They wanted to observe their behavior and movement firsthand.

  Meanwhile, I did what I had learned to do in high school for research projects: I went to the library.

  I wandered into the Carnegie Library and found a librarian.

  “Hi there,” I said. “Do you have any books on jellyfish?”

  “Is this for a research project?” she asked.

  “Yes—I have to be one.”

  She gave me an odd look but didn’t press for an explanation.

  On Sunday I locked myself in my dorm room and read through all the books I’d checked out. I watched the few jellyfish clips I could find online—it was still the early days of YouTube.

  After exhaustive research, I stood in front of the full-length mirror on the back of the door to the room and did all the things that a human does when they’re pretending to be a jellyfish.

  I hunched my shoulders forward and let my arms dangle like tentacles. I pulsed my body, as if propelling myself through an invisible ocean. I tried to ride the ebb and flow of the landlocked Pittsburgh tide.

  I looked at myself in the mirror—I felt like a crazy person.

  I kept at it, though. An hour went by. I continued to wriggle my body in shallow, jellyfish-like convulsions.

  A second hour went by, and I looked down at my feet, tethered to the ground, holding me back—

  Suddenly, the secret to imitating a jellyfish struck me.

  The secret to being a great jellyfish—and this is important—it’s all in the ankles.

  I wobbled my ankles back and forth, letting the momentum wiggle up to my hips. I pushed up on the balls of my feet, heels elevated slightly off the ground, then slowly drifted back down.

  Proud of my discovery, proud of how great my jellyfish performance would be, I stood there in front of the mirror and continued to bend my ankles. I felt sure I was bending them just like a jellyfish would.

  All of a sudden, Joe was standing where the mirror had just been. I was wearing my skintight drama-school-issued black unitard, and writhing up and down.

  “Uh, hey Joe. Just rehearsing for class.”

  “Don’t mind me. What’re you working on?”

  “You know, Animal Projects…”

  Joe didn’t say anything.

  “I’m a jellyfish.”

  Joe was unfazed. He sat down on his bed and pulled out his electric guitar.

  “Keep doing your thing,” he said. He plucked at the strings, letting them vibrate in a gentle and meditative deep-sea sort of way. “I’m just going to play us some jellyfish music.”

  His face took on the expression one gets when deep in prayer. To this day, he’s one of the only people I know who sees music as not simply something to listen and dance to, but as a form of communion with something greater.

  * * *

  Monday came, and I walked into the drama building with more confidence than ever before. When it was my turn to present, I strode up to the front of the classroom. I cleared my mind and then focused on my ankles. I whispered to myself, “Mind of a jellyfish. Mind of a jellyfish.”

  I don’t remember what happened next: All I know is that I was a jellyfish. I was born a jellyfish. I could not remember a day when I hadn’t been a jellyfish.

  After a minute or two of gelatinous pulsating, my professor politely asked me to stop. “Good work, Ian. Very specific,” he said.

  I smiled. This was one of the first real compliments I’d received in acting class at Carnegie.

  “Really good start at your jellyfish,” the professor went on. “Excited to see this develop over the next two months.”

  * * *

  Animal Projects, it turned out, was not just a few days of research followed by a presentation. It was eight weeks of pretending to be a man-sized scyphozoan. It was the only thing we did in class.

  One of the requirements of the project was to construct a costume, so the following weekend I took a bus down to the Waterfront, a strip of big-box stores along the Monongahela River. I had an idea, and I needed bedsheets.

  I wandered into Bed Bath & Beyond. On a sales rack I found a set of fluorescent lime-green sheets on clearance. I don’t think I’d ever seen a green jellyfish before, but I figured I could take some artistic license. And the sheets were the right price: extremely cheap.

  Back in my dorm room, I cut long strips into the flat sheet and tied it around my shoulders. Neon-green fabric reached down to the floor around my body—these were my tentacles. I then took the fitted sheet and taped it over a hula hoop, which created a puffy, human-sized jellyfish bell. I put the sheet-covered hula hoop over my head, holding it up with my arms.

  Looking down, I could only see one or two feet in any direction. I could barely make out anything through the sheet around me—the world was a fuzzy green blur. I couldn’t make out the costume in the mirror, so I had no idea what I looked like, but it felt right.

  I stood there, in the middle of the room, and I did my jellyfish ankles. I felt the tentacles brush up against my legs, the green bell around my head drifting and floating through the air.

  Joe said that I was the most realistic jellyfish he’d ever seen in Pittsburgh.

  * * *

  The next two months of class were a little lonely. I couldn’t see much because of my costume, and I didn’t interact with many of the other animals. Most of my classmates were terrestrial mammals, but I lived in the ocean. We weren’t about to mess with the laws of nature.

  Every morning, the professor would set aside a little spot for me to wiggle and jiggle and do my jelly-shaking thing. We called this spot “water,” and I shared it with Vicki the catfish. Sometimes a penguin or two would jump in, but most of the other animals avoided it. We’d practice our animals, and the professor would walk around, adjusting postures, commenting on the way the gorillas grabbed at their food, reminding the big cats to be aware of their spinal cords.

  I would float there, in my imaginary pool of water, counting my breaths—and remembering to lead with my ankles.

  Weeks went by like this, which in jellyfish years is … a lot.

  * * *

  I spent that winter floating. Floating in the pond. But I also felt like I was floating in life, carried along by forces out of my control. College is about leaving home and growing up, but you’re still a kid. And I felt bittersweet about leaving home, anyway.

  A lot had changed in a matter of months. I wasn’t homesick—I was actually glad to be out on my own. But there was this feeling, somewhere deep, that I’d left a part of me behind along the way.

  It wasn’t just that I couldn’t go back to my old home anymore. There was a part of me that was no longer there. Or a part of me that was changing, transitioning from one set of circumstances to another.

  Looking back on it now, I think the jellyfish may have had something to do with it. I felt trapped. I needed an outlet, and I spent my days physically constricted, only able to see my feet and the floor beneath me. Had I been assigned a different animal—a gorilla, or a tiger—I could have lashed out, roared, beat my chest. But I was a jellyfish, subject to the whims of the tides and of the people around me.

  I see that my trajectory throughout my college years was borne along by those same tides. I made big decisions then that have affected my future
, but I’ve also had my life determined in many ways by the decisions of others.

  This is a big part of being human, and especially being an actor.

  * * *

  Animal Projects culminated in a three-hour event called “Watering Hole.” The freshman class had been divided into three sections, and this was a chance for the entire class to come together and sniff and growl and love on one another as animals.

  Unfortunately, I was still one of the only aquatic animals—and I couldn’t see more than two feet in any direction.

  For the first hour and a half, I floated around my lonely patch of ocean as my classmates scampered about. I could hear them playing and rolling around on the ground. At one point, a teacher announced that the “sun had set,” and everyone pretended to go to sleep as their animal. Everyone except for me, because I was a goddamn jellyfish. The sun rose again, and the animals awoke with a series of deep-chested growls and loud roar-yawns.

  I continued to bob slowly up and down.

  Then things started to get tense. I could sense a change in the mood of the room. The animals that had played together earlier were getting more aggressive. The faculty sensed it, too, and one of the teachers—her name was Ingrid—shouted: “Predators, KILL!”

  Loud and frantic screeching immediately filled the air. Somebody threw a chair against a wall—I flinched at the crash. Students were clawing at each other, shrieking, running around me. The room was filled with the sounds of carnage.

  I continued to float, rising and falling from my ankles. When the room had quieted down, I angled my hula hoop up so that I could look around.

  Most of the student-animals were dead, their bodies strewn about the room. The predators prowled about, letting out bloodcurdling howls and roars as they sized each other up. The lions growled at the gorillas, who beat their chests with clenched fists in response.

  And I just kept floating. Up. And down.

  Then, like a hypnotist, Ingrid clapped her hands and announced that Watering Hole was over. We were humans again.

  * * *

  Years later, standing dizzy and dehydrated in my small apartment in LA—trying to figure out the physicality of a Holocaust survivor—I thought back to how I’d felt in my months as a jellyfish during that first year of college.

  I became aware of my ankles again. I took a deep breath in and lifted up the heels of my feet, letting my body float a little.

  I closed my eyes and ran through the lines in my head. I felt unmoored. Without a home. Adrift. Something clicked. For the first time all week, I wasn’t forcing it. I’d found a window into the character—a strange window, but a window nonetheless.

  I went in for the audition the following morning, confident that I’d made the character my own.

  I got a callback, but I didn’t book the role.

  COMING TO LOS ANGELES (TWICE)

  The week after I graduated from college, I loaded up my only significant earthly possession—a blue 1994 Toyota Camry affectionately called the “Vomit Comet”—and drove to Los Angeles to begin my life as a film and television actor.

  Before the trip, I took the car in for an inspection. The mechanic had strong opinions about the state of the vehicle. “Do not drive this car across the country,” he said.

  But, with no other car options available, I set off anyway.

  I had everything planned out. The AC didn’t work, so I rolled down the windows. Since the windows would be down, and the windshield had no UV protection, I’d get a nice bronzy tan in preparation for my new life in California. And the radio only worked maybe twenty percent of the time—that was actually going to be a problem.

  I made the trip from Pittsburgh to LA in four days. Every night, I arrived at some out-of-the-way motel well after midnight, my body aching and stomach rumbling. And every single night, the motel clerk informed me that the only restaurant still open at that hour was Hooters. And every morning, I would wake up, brush my wings-stained teeth, and hit the road, praying that that night I would find someplace to eat that wasn’t a Hooters.

  But my prayers were never answered.

  When I finally made it to Los Angeles, I made two promises to myself. One: I would never set foot in another Hooters. Two: I was done with cross-country road trips.

  I broke both promises before the summer was out.

  Shortly after I arrived in LA, my girlfriend at the time asked me to fly to Florida with her to pick up her car and drive it back to California. Being young, dumb, and extremely energetic, I agreed.

  My girlfriend’s car had all the amenities that mine had lacked. Actual working air-conditioning, a fully functional radio, tinted windows—and cup holders. We were living the high life.

  But, embarking on my second cross-country road trip in as many months, I was again plagued by a series of pit stops in which Hooters was the only available food option. Eyes watering with regret, we gorged ourselves on plate after plate of Hooterstizers—the laziest portmanteau of all time—and prayed for anything, ideally a Denny’s, to save us.

  On the fourth day of the trip, just after we crossed the border between Arizona and California, I found something interesting on the map.

  Just an hour out of the way was a place called the Salton Sea, and judging by the map, it was an oasis—a huge body of water in the middle of the desert. The idea of taking a break from the road, stretching our legs—maybe even jumping in the water—sounded pretty great.

  We stopped at a gas station before heading down, bought some prepackaged sandwiches and sunscreen. Not quite speaking from experience yet, I bragged to my girlfriend, “You know, California has a lot of places like the Salton Sea. Little hidden gems. You’re going to love it here.”

  There are a few things you notice as you approach the Salton Sea. The first is the smell. Maybe it was the scorching summer day—it was over a hundred degrees outside—but we could smell the Salton Sea miles before we arrived. I frantically tried to adjust the vents to stop letting in outside air, but it was too late. The stench of rotting fish was so bad you could taste it.

  The second thing you notice is that you are the only people there. The few small towns around the eastern shore seem entirely devoid of life. Blocks of buildings are abandoned, relics of their former resort town glory. Once upon a time, when the lake was less salty, less polluted by the agriculture that surrounds it, the Salton Sea was actually a destination for the rich and famous—but no longer. Nowadays, not many people visit, especially in the middle of July.

  We pulled into a state park with beach access to have a quick makeshift picnic. I think we got out of the car for about thirty seconds, just long enough to notice that the beach was blanketed with dead fish. Literally, dead fish as far as the eye could see. I’m not even sure we were walking on sand, or if it was just pulverized fish bones.

  We ate our sandwiches in the car as we drove away.

  I later learned that the Salton Sea is a major migratory pit stop for birds traveling along the Pacific flyway. Birds pass through, moving up and down the continent, and here I was traveling across it—our journeys intersecting at this strange, foul-smelling avian truck stop.

  No, I take that back. It’s not a truck stop: it’s a Hooters. A Hooters for birds.

  Sometimes when you’re traveling across the United States, you stop there because it’s the only place still open.

  That afternoon, I arrived in Los Angeles for the second time in as many months. I made the same two promises to myself as before: no more cross-country road trips, no more Hooters.

  This time I kept them.

  LUCY GOOSEY

  A few months after I moved to Los Angeles, I woke up to a call from my agent, Steve. I’d been sleeping in a lot at the time, and I’d slept in again that day. I groggily picked up the phone, still half asleep, and tried to decipher what my agent was saying.

  It took me a second to realize he was telling me to hurry up and get out of bed: I’d gotten a last-minute callback for a new ABC Family pilot c
alled Pretty Little Liars.

  I’d been meeting with casting directors regularly since I’d moved from Pittsburgh. I’d gone out for bit parts in TV, but this was my first pilot, and I had no idea what to expect. There’s a difference between acting and auditioning, and I wasn’t sure I was a strong auditioner. I could talk to casting directors all day about the quirks of classical theater training, but when it came to actually selling my version of a character to them, I was still very new to the game.

  Despite my self-doubt, my representation kept pushing to get me in the room with casting directors all over town. They seemed to believe in my acting abilities, or at least in my bone structure. Their enthusiasm helped keep me motivated.

  I’d been in to audition for this pilot once already—for the part of Ezra Fitz, a young high school English teacher. It’d gone decently well but hadn’t been anything to write home about. Getting a callback came as a surprise. Steve gave me the breakdown for the Pretty Little Liars callback—he told me that I’d be reading across from Lucy Hale this time, the girl that had been cast as Ezra’s underage love interest.

  Before he got off the phone, Steve said, “Ian, not quite sure how to put this, but look nice, okay? Nice shirt, nice pants, wash your face. Don’t mean to sound like your mom, but this one could be good for you.”

  Unfortunately, I didn’t have much in the way of “nice” clothes. Student loans were hanging over my head like the sword of Damocles at the time, and buying new clothes seemed like a waste of money. I’d had to buy a suit earlier in the summer for a wedding, and had left all the tags on it so that I could return it after. About the only thing nice I owned was a blue button-down shirt. That morning it had pasta stains all over it from a raucous Italian dinner a few nights earlier, and I’d forgotten to do my laundry.

  I rolled out of bed and surveyed my one-room apartment: all my possessions were strewn about within arm’s length. Dangling on a suspicious-looking metal pipe sticking out of the ceiling was a hanger with my only other clothing option: a green V-neck sweater that I’d had since high school.