by David Leite
Still, I spent what free time Bridget had discussing this, trying to squeeze meaning from Siegel’s convoluted words.
“Does this stuff make sense to you?” I asked, lying on her couch, almost whispering for fear of offending the spirit of Siegel.
“Not totally,” she said, screwing up her face, “but I do like this respect thing. We could use a little respect around here.”
I didn’t have to tell her. She knew exactly where to go. “R-E-S-P-E-C-T! Find out what it means to me—” we belted out together.
It felt good to be united again behind a common cause. We couldn’t share acting, but we could share this. I could feel hope once more warming our relationship. Lying on her bed during freshman year, I had promised her that, Goddammit, I would change, and here was the only thing I found that promised I could—and would still let me love musicals.
It didn’t take Bridget long before she ditched Aesthetic Realism. When she announced to her consultants she was leaving for a summer tour of Europe, they roundly criticized her. “Miss Orloff, don’t you think your place is with Mr. Leite as he works on his change from homosexuality?” Even Judith pressed her to stay, to see me through my change. Bridget’s answer to all of them was a flat and unequivocal no. They tried to get her to see she was being contemptuous of me and the world by turning her back at such a critical time.
I urged the opposite: “Bridg, go, get the hell out of here! Have a great time. Chances are I’ll still be gay when you get back. We can work on it then.”
And that’s what she did.
While she was gone, I had a few halfhearted phone consultations and decided to move to New York within a year to pursue acting. Oh, and to start liking the world, so I could turn straight.
That summer, the anxiety and sadness ebbed, but nothing rushed in to take their place. I felt like I was stuck in that moment right before being photographed: face slack, impatient, waiting like I had when I was a kid, sitting on the stairs on Brownell Street. For someone to prompt me to smile. For a brilliant flash. For anything.
That “anything” certainly wasn’t the undead. I’d heard about an open call for extras for a zombie movie that was shooting outside of Pittsburgh. All I had to do was show up at an appointed date and time. When I arrived, I was shocked to find a park filled with wannabe actors and zombie fanatics milling around. A casting person about my age took one look at me and pointed to the left, to a waiting bus. I think it was my Neanderthal brow that got me the job.
“I’ve seen every zombie film the director’s ever made,” said the woman who was sharing my seat. She said it with the kind of whispery adoration reserved for minor saints. Or Meryl Streep.
“Oh, you mean he’s made more than one?” My comment had the intended effect: Her mouth tightened into a hard little dash, and she didn’t talk the rest of the way. Me, I pulled out a pretentious collection of Greek tragedies, meant to intimidate the others, and read undisturbed for the next hour or so.
On set, which was some kind of underground facility, we changed into hideous torn and shredded costumes. Some zombies were ushered into a makeup room, while the rest of us were smudged a few times on the face and hands with gray makeup, then told to follow a production assistant. He referred to his clipboard as he positioned us throughout a cavernous section of the facility, with me dead last—the farthest goon from the camera.
A geyser of veneta shot up. I hadn’t busted my ass since I was seventeen, and nearly dropped dead at CMU, to be a frigging zombie stuck in the back row. As the crew was setting lights and adjusting camera angles, I slowly threaded my way through the crowd, some of whom were actually rehearsing their dead moans. Morons. The closer I got to the front, the more detailed everyone’s makeup got, I noticed. Some people even had prosthetic brows. Jesus! I had the real thing, and they’d stuck me in the back? I kept my head low so no one on the crew could see a zombie going rogue, and slipped into the second row, behind a woman with huge hair. As I studied my torn shoes, I could see out of the corner of my eye a circle of people fussing with the back of Big Hair’s wig and costume.
“Everyone, listen up,” the director said through a megaphone. “When I say, ‘Action,’ I want all of you to shuffle toward the camera. Got it?” The zombies nodded. “Then these guys,” he pointed to several actors dressed like soldiers behind him, “will run through and shoot at you. Remember: Don’t react. You’re dead!” Conspiratorial laughter rose from the filthy crowd around me.
The director waited as the crew made a few last adjustments to Big Hair. When they were done, they nodded and left the set.
“And . . . action!”
I lifted my head and shuffled and moaned along with my dead brethren. The director waved on the actors, who pointed their guns at us and shot off several rounds. Instantly, the back of Big Hair’s head exploded, spraying the zombies behind her. Unaware of this impending gorefest, I screamed loudly. (Because I wasn’t an official member of the second row, I hadn’t been privy to the conversation about how a giant squib of fake blood and brains would detonate all over us.)
“Cut!” shouted the director.
“Reset,” said someone else. The rest of the zombies watched as a production assistant led me away. He instructed me to clean up, paid me my one dollar, and told me to wait. In the extras’ room, I sat with my book of Greek tragedies propped up in front of my face, trying to block out their derision. To them, with their filthy clothes and peeling skin, I was something repugnant: the only undead in the history of cinema to recoil at the sight of blood and guts.
Desperate for money, I auditioned for commercials. Nothing. Local theater and voiceovers. Nothing. I considered returning to CMU for the fall semester, but knew I couldn’t hack it, so I officially withdrew. Nothing. Finally, I did what I’d sworn I would never do: become a cliché and wait tables. I was hired at Gullifty’s, on Murray Avenue, around the corner from my new apartment. If I couldn’t get a job performing, I decided, I’d turn my job into performance art. The dining-room floor was my stage; families, early birds, and couples my audience. I borrowed from voice and speech, improv, and acting classes. Describing a spinach salad with hot bacon dressing, I said, “Ladies, a delight even your thighs wouldn’t hold against you.” A red-stuffed pizza became a meal of Falstaffian proportions. “Imagine if you will, a gigundous pizza topped with another gigundous pizza, stuffed with mozzarella, Parmesan, and provolone, and ladled over with spicy tomato sauce.” Of my favorite dish, the almighty Meshugna—corned beef, coleslaw, and Russian dressing between two potato pancakes—I said, “Don’t worry, order it! We have a fully charged defibrillator with your name on it.” If kids were at a table, I’d do my best Buster Keaton, suddenly losing control of my tray of food, tipping it left and right over their heads, all to squeals of laughter. That always got me a huge tip. Through talking about, eating, and serving food, I was surprised to find myself making my way back to the contentment of the Hollises’ kitchen, to the peace of watching Julia on TV.
After two and a half years, and despite my work in Aesthetic Realism, my relationship with Bridget had become a long string of arguments and apologies, with an occasional afternoon of laughter to remind us of what we loved in each other. Even though her withdrawal from me happened gradually, the way sunlight fades the fabric of a favorite chair, I still felt blindsided. In time, she told me she was with Douglas Isay, a pompous older directing student to whom I had taken an immediate dislike when he had become her housemate two years earlier, and whom she would later marry.
When she turned those huge, warm eyes, which had been trained on me for so long, toward him, I felt the potential drain; my limits returned. That family, that life, that house with its swinging kitchen door, would never be.
“Why did you stay with me for so long if it never worked out?” I asked her. Despite my proclamations, my halfhearted fumbling attempts, our relationship had remained chaste.
Tears spilled down her cheeks. She lowered her head and butted my chest gentl
y. “You were the first person who was willing to fight for me. To try the impossible, for me. You made me feel seen. How can you not love a guy who does that?”
The idea of continuing to fight for her, trying to charm her, holding her back for my benefit, would have been unfair, even cruel. I finally understood that.
On an innocuous morning in December 1984, I watched Pittsburgh drop away, clouds wrapping me in white silence. I recalled the day I had arrived, more than three years earlier, in the backseat of my parents’ car, the trunk filled with boxes and hope. I remembered the ambition I’d felt staring up, agog, at the statues as my parents and I walked through the empty marble halls of the College of Fine Arts, which were being cleaned before classes began. The air was heavy with cold stone powder. It smelled like wet pavement at the start of a downpour.
“Beautiful,” my mother had said, head swiveling left, up, and right. “Just beautiful.”
My father had nodded his approval as he’d looked around. “We’re proud of you, Son.” That’s all he’d said, but I could sense the dream he had for me—an immigrant’s dream for his child to do better than him, to surpass him—burning in his chest. I had beaten hundreds of others to earn my place in one of the most prestigious acting programs in the country. The building, so grand and imposing, was my father’s proof. He’d put his arm around my shoulder, and my mother had wrapped hers around my waist. “You’re where you belong.”
This wasn’t how I was supposed to leave Pittsburgh, ignominious, done in not by a lack of talent or drive, but by an enemy I had no name for. “I’m a failure,” I whispered to my reflection in the window. And then I felt what little shreds of veneta I had left, rumbling. The Loud Me answered myself with a smirk: “No fucking way, Banana.”
21
I HEART NY
It hit me at the oddest times. Riding Duke Ellington’s famous A train. Flipping through music at Tower Records. Eating a falafel (which until that time I had thought was a kind of loofah). “I live in New York City. I live in New York City!” I had to stop myself from breaking out into a dopey grin walking down Tenth Street, or humming Eva Gabor’s part from the opening sequence of the sitcom Green Acres.
I had a hunch that if I moved to the city to be an actor, and studied Aesthetic Realism in earnest, the poles of my world would shift, just slightly, and things would warm; the frost would recede. A new place, a new start, a change in luck.
A friend had given me the name of a woman she’d heard of who was looking for live-in help to look after her four-year-old son. “It’s a great building, and you’ll have room and board, and you’ll get paid.” What could be bad about that?
After announcing me, the doorman of the Brevoort East sent me up, and I stood in front of the door in my only jacket and tie. I knocked, and a woman who introduced herself as Regina answered. “But ya can call me Reggie,” she said, her accent musical. Jamaican or Dominican. I reminded myself to ask later.
“Reggie, who is it?” came a voice from another part of the apartment.
“The young man who’s applying for the job.”
“What job?” I could hear the slur in her voice.
She rolled her eyes at me and shouted down the hallway. “To take care of Timothy.” Then to me, “Don’t mind her, she’s . . . slow to get goin’ in the mornin’.” It was two in the afternoon.
“Send him in.” I pointed to what I assumed was a bedroom, and Reggie nodded and sighed.
Laurie Dannenberg was the very unemployed and overindulged daughter of a Broadway composer. Her father had created some of the best shows in the previous thirty years. When I entered the room, she was lying in bed, halfheartedly clutching her brown satin bathrobe with one hand while pouring a tumbler of Georgi vodka with the other. When she saw me, a slutty squiggle of a grin crossed her face. She tried to lift herself up on an elbow to run her fingers through her ratty hair, but she slipped, dousing herself and the bed in liquor.
“Ah, shit.” Giving up, she just lay there and conducted the interview horizontally. “What’s your name?”
“David. David Leite.”
“Do you have experience with kids?” I explained that I had worked in a day-care center back in Rochester and had been a camp counselor. After a few minutes, the interview loped away from her. She began talking about how the building was filled with gossips, all of them trying to stick their sanctimonious schnozzes into her business, and how I needed to be circumspect.
“Can you be discreet, Daniel?”
“David.”
“Wha’?” She looked at me as if I had spoken Zulu.
“Nothing. Yes, I can be discreet.”
“Good.” Here she called me over and patted the bed for me to sit. I lowered myself slowly, avoiding the wet spot. She explained she was dating Joe Montana and Dan Marino. She paused so I could take in the momentousness of that. I had no idea who they were—maybe actors in her father’s shows? Part of my job, she said, was to make sure one didn’t get wind of the other. “They’d kill each other if they knew I’m seeing both of them,” she said, nodding.
“What about Timothy?”
“Oh, right.” She said it as if she’d just remembered her overdue taxes. “Just keep him out of here in the morning and when he gets back from school. We usually spend dinner together, if he doesn’t jump all over the bed. I have migraines.”
She pulled down her sleep mask against the early-afternoon sun and dismissed me with an unsteady wave of her hand.
Reggie motioned me into the kitchen. “You hungry?” Before I could say yes, she pulled Tupperware containers from the fridge and made me a sandwich and poured a glass of Diet Coke. She sat down with me and placed her hand on my arm. She explained that it was a good job, and Laurie was a good person, really, even if she drank too much. I’d have a room, all the food I could eat, a car and driver, and a paycheck. I could smell the desperation coming off of her.
Swayed by the apartment, the fancy address, and a cook and driver to call my own, I took the job. I’d never known any alcoholics, but how bad could it be?
Timothy was in preschool, so every morning I had to wake, feed, and dress him, then get him out the door, all while keeping him from crashing into his mother’s bedroom, where she was usually splayed diagonally across her bed, that robe once again in much need of clutching, passed out from drinking and, I began to suspect, snorting too much coke.
A few weeks later, after I’d dropped off Timothy at a playdate, Laurie summoned me to her boudoir/bar and asked if I could pick up a package for her. “Performance contracts,” she said. She didn’t trust bike messengers, because if they got into an accident, confidential information about major Broadway stars and their salaries would be fluttering in the wind for anyone to grab. “No, I need someone I trust to pick them up.”
“Here.” She slipped a fifty in my pocket, a little too deeply for my taste, and told me to bring home some dinner for Timothy and me.
I stepped out of the car and looked up at the building, and then again at the address scrawled in Laurie’s loopy cursive on the front of a take-out menu. I looked at Javier, her driver, who nodded. He seemed to know the place. I’d been expecting to be dropped off in front of that tall building with the Robert Indiana LOVE sculpture in front. Instead, I walked up to the third floor of a ratty building that smelled of piss and Chinese food from the restaurant below, and knocked on the door. A guy whose eyes were rimmed in red and looked as if they were coated in corn syrup answered.
“Um, I’m here for the contracts for Laurie Dannenberg.” It was more of a question than anything.
He grunted a laugh. “Hey, d’ja hear that?” he shouted to someone in the room. “Contracts.”
“Here are your ‘contracts,’ kid.” I could hear the quotation marks in his voice. He handed me a package the size of a baseball, covered in brown paper and wrapped with packing tape. “Now get the fuck out of here before you cause me trouble.”
Back at Laurie’s apartment, she met me at th
e door, all twitchy. It was the first time I’d seen her vertical. I thrust the package at her and started screaming, “How dare you! I am not your drug mule!”
“Shhhh!” she hissed, falling against me, as her fingers tried to pinch my lips closed while she looked up at me through crossed eyes. I heard rustling in her bedroom and looked down the hall to see an enormous man dressing. He tried to slip one foot into his cowboy boot, but he weaved back and forth, finally falling face-first out of view. He lay there, immobile, just his stockinged feet visible, like the Wicked Witch of the East in The Wizard of Oz.
“Open the package,” I demanded. More shushing and lip-pressing. “Open it!”
“Awright, just be quiet. Please.” She put her hand out to steady herself as she bit at the tape.
“Oh, for crissake, give it to me.” I yanked it from her and tore it open. The tape stuck to my hands, and as I tried to shake it off, an enormous roll of hundred-dollar bills and little packets of white powder dislodged through the hall. She fell to her knees and started stuffing them into her pockets. “Those are not contracts, Laurie!” I screamed. “Those are not contracts.”
Running to my room to pack my bag, I wondered: Could I be arrested for aiding and abetting a drug deal and not reporting a possible overdose in the other room?
On my way out, Laurie and the enormous guy (was this Joe Montana or Dan Marino?) blocked the door.