My Worst Date

by David Leddick

  I love this kind of talk. First, it’s about me. And second, it’s contradictory to all the stuff you read and hear everywhere else. I hear this kind of thing from my mom but we understand each other so well that we don’t often speak about it.

  I said to Mr. Korman, “Since we’re talking about me, tell me more.”

  He said, “I think you’re a smart kid, Hugo. I always think it’s kind of interesting if you can encourage somebody to skip some of the mistakes the rest of us make and, if they’re smart enough, I think it can be helpful. I’m sure you know that being rich and famous isn’t the point. Learning something and passing it on to others isn’t a bad overall plan.”

  “But isn’t acting doing something like that?” I asked him.

  “Ooh, I don’t think so,” he said. “Actors are kind of paper dolls to demonstrate someone else’s ideas, don’t you think? And then they don’t even want to do that. They want to stay themselves, which is what people want to see anyway. How much is there to learn from seeing Mel Gibson being Mel Gibson? Now, writing for the movies is something different. But I don’t know how different. What kinds of movies do you like, Hugo?”

  “I liked Damaged.”

  “You did? That’s interesting? Why?”

  “Actually, it was the idea of obsession that interested me. I thought Jeremy Irons wasn’t hot enough. That’s a movie that Mel Gibson would have been great in, but he would never have had the nerve to do it. And Juliette Binoche was it. She was just an obsessive object and that was enough for her.”

  What would you have called Mr. Korman’s expression? Quizzical? Not a word I’d ever heard anyone use but suddenly it went exactly with that expression. “You surprise me, Hugo,” he said.

  “I surprise myself,” I told him, and went back inside where the AD was screaming himself hoarse trying to get us together for the next scene. And I continued to think about what Mr. Korman had said and even a bit about Mr. Korman himself. Obviously gay, but no come-on. A real good egg. I was going to have to talk to Mr. Korman some more.

  There were some other people to talk to around the set. Not many. But some. There were eight principals on the show. In addition to Ferdy Bach, Missy, Alan Axthelm, and me there was Andrea Bellemere, who played the bad girl; Filomena Gorse, who is English and plays the intellectual transfer student; Mitzi Vanderbilt, the little cute one who is everybody’s best friend who is a real Vanderbilt and actually quite okay; and Milton Weinstein, who is black and Jewish and in my book really, deeply, truly sexy. Milton always says they cast him because they got two token minority groups in one and could save on salary. He also always claimed that they didn’t pay Mitzi at all because she already had so much money.

  Milton was tops to work with. He was the other principal from Miami besides me, although he had been out in Hollywood working when they cast him.

  Milton is from across the bay. Like me, he only had his mother, but never ever saw anybody who might have been his father. He told me his mother knew who it was but that he disappeared and his name was Milton Weinstein. So my pal is really Milton Weinstein, Jr. Cool, huh? Milton knows he was a gambler and somebody in that family was very good-looking because Milton is mucho good-looking. When I talk to Milton I feel like I’ve been nowhere and seen nothing. He’s been through the mill at twenty and it hasn’t fazed him a bit as far as I can see.

  He left Miami when he was sixteen and went to Chicago to live with an aunt. I kept trying to draw some comparisons with what’s going on with Glenn and me but it was quite different. Quite. Milton was out hanging around in the streets picking up guys for money and this older white guy picked him up and took him home and sent him to school and then sent him off to the coast and kept an eye on him financially. Still will, I guess, if he needs help.

  I asked him, “But Milton, didn’t it make you feel kind of creepy going to bed with an old guy?”

  He said, “Mr. Arno isn’t that old, and besides, you know, he’s just a nice guy. He’s Jewish, too. And I think he got a kick out of having a little Jewish friend who was black. I mean, let’s face it, Hugo. What are you going to do with another guy? It’s suck or fuck, right?” Nobody had ever put it quite so neatly before, but I couldn’t tell him he was wrong.

  He went on. “And Mr. Arno was so nice to me. Most guys the second they’ve sucked you off or whatever just hand you some cash and open the car door. Fred wasn’t like that at all. He was really fun and always wanted to make sure I had enough to eat and had warm clothes. Chicago is cold, you better believe it.

  “The first night I spent with him he took me right out the next morning and got me a good coat. In a good store. I knew he was totally cool because it didn’t bother him at all when the clerks saw us together. He told the clerk I was his nephew. It was a blast. And you know, I think he kind of thought I was. He was shocked when he found out I didn’t go to school and he insisted I go and helped with my homework. And I zipped right through it. He wanted me to go to college but I went to acting school and his friends helped get me an agent and here I am, two hundred crowd shots as an extra later, back in my own hometown.”

  I asked him, “But do you love Mr. Arno?”

  “Look, Hugo, there’s these two kinds of love. No, he doesn’t turn me on. At all. But I love him very much for being concerned about me…. It’s like a parent with a little sex thrown in. And he knows that. He finds me a big turn-on, for whatever reason. I like him so much I want him to be happy. I suppose it’s what a lot of women feel when they get married.”

  “That’s all very well for women,” I said. “All they have to do is lie there.”

  “Well,” said Milton, “maybe all you have to do is lie there. And if someone wants to give you a blow job, Mr. Penis knows no reason.

  “And on the other hand there’s that kind of love where you just go crazy over how someone looks. Who can say why? It’s not the size of their penis or how big their arms are, it’s just what they are. Awful, isn’t it? But if it wasn’t for that there wouldn’t be any movie stars. They look like something that rings a lot of people’s bells. Tom Cruise … nobody cares how he acts. And if it wasn’t for him there’d never be a Jeff Stryker. He’s a Tom Cruise stand-in going all the way.”

  “But have you ever been in love like that?” I wanted to know. “Can I afford to be?” Milton said. “My mother was, and look what it got her. Me and a lifetime of cleaning houses for a bunch of creeps. I want to be one of the creeps who hire other people to clean their houses. And I want my mother to be in that house being nice to whoever is cleaning in a way that practically nobody has been to her. Well, yeah, I have been in love like that a couple of times. But you know, nobody wants to just throw it all over and go somewhere and just be in love for the rest of their lives. At least in L.A. Oh, it’s very complicated, Hugo. I’m black. I don’t want some white guy paying my bills in exchange for a little ass now and again. And I don’t think that’s a very modern idea. Even women don’t want that anymore. It’s too boring.

  “And everybody knows too much. They know that love wears off after while, so they just wait until it’s worn off, and then they ditch you. That’s the modern way.”

  “So what’s your plan?” I wanted to know.

  “Oh, basically I’m a silly fool, like everybody else. I think I’m going to be successful and make enough money to take care of myself. And also going to meet somebody whose exterior packaging gives me a jolt and whose interior personality is good and faithful and loyal and all the rest of that shit. One thing I can tell you, unless they’re superior to me we haven’t got a chance together, plus remember I’m talking about another man.”

  I had noticed with both Milton and Mr. Korman that they talked to me assuming I was gay. I mean, is it stamped on my forehead or something? So I said to Milton, “Milton, why do you think I’m gay?” and he said, “I don’t know you’re gay. I just sure as hell hope you are because you are one cute guy. And smart. And nice. You’ve got a lot going for you, Hugo, whether you�
�re AC or DC or a switch-hitter. You must have excellent parents.”

  “I have an excellent mother,” I told him. “And then there’s AIDS,” I added.

  “And then there’s AIDS,” Milton said. “And then there’s AIDS. God, I hate the taste of rubber. But that’s how it goes these days. As if it wasn’t hard enough to get laid, let alone fall in love. You have to mar the magic by stopping and suiting up as though you’re going scuba diving. But whatever you do, Hugo, be careful. No matter what anyone tells you, there is nobody to be trusted.” I thought about Glenn Elliott. “Nobody. When guys get a chance to sink a little peter they just hate to pass it up. It’s a rare bird that can say ‘No, thanks.’ Even these days.”

  I wondered if I was going to be as knowledgeable as Milton when I was his age. I asked him, “Milton, are you involved with anyone on the show?”

  “No.”

  “Are you going to be?”

  “Well, like with who, or should I say whom?” Milton said.

  “There’s Alan Axthelm.”

  “What are we supposed to do together?” he said. “Bump pussies?”

  mr. korman

  So we finally stopped shooting the television pilot. Which is okay because I really wasn’t interested. Acting really isn’t me. If I had written a book I’d be down at the bookstore all the time to see if anybody was buying it. That I would really want. But the show, it never really captured my interest.

  And I was still interested in school. Particularly Mr. Korman’s English class. At our last counseling conference he asked me, “So, Hugo, who are your favorite authors?” I told him, “Well, I guess Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen and Muriel Spark. And I like The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. And I love M. F. K. Fisher’s Map of Another Town.”

  I wasn’t trying to give him a jolt or anything. I was just thinking about the books I like best.

  He said, “The Fisher book, that’s kind of an unusual selection. But excellent. How about Hemingway and Fitzgerald? Don’t you like them?”

  And I told him, “Don’t you get the impression when you read books like Hemingway that they’re really kind of mythical stories and Hemingway himself is the hero? That’s the feeling I get from a lot of these men writers. That they dream up this story and it’s really about them and how they would do things and how they would behave. You know like the James Bond books, and most of these spy thrillers.”

  “Well, of course that’s not really great literature,” Mr. Korman said. “How about John Updike?”

  “Well, he’s good,” I told him. “But the things I like best are when he writes about his mother and his real life. Then you feel something good there. The rest is interesting, but you get the feeling he wants you to feel a certain way about him. I’d like to meet him. You know, once you see somebody an awful lot of things become clearer. Like why they’re trying to peddle a certain idea about themselves. But women aren’t that way. When they write they don’t seem to want you to think they’re sexy or beautiful or wonderfully brilliant. I just get the feeling they’re trying to let you know how they feel or what they think about something.”

  “You have a point,” Mr. Korman said. “But there are some men writers I think you’d like, even if they’d be a little heavy going for you right now. Like Proust. Proust wrote all these books with hundreds of characters and he himself is hardly present. And Gertrude Stein is like that. So self-centered, but when she wrote she wasn’t in there herself. Except for The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which she wrote.”

  “She wrote someone else’s autobiography?”

  “Well, it was someone she knew very well,” Mr. Korman said. “But you know, I just discovered that even though she lived in France for many, many years she never learned French. That was a big disappointment to me. She was just like an American man. Wouldn’t put herself in the embarrassing position of having someone be better than she was. So she made the woman of the family do the speaking in French. I’ve known so many people like that. But maybe I tell you too much.”

  “No, no, no,” I said. “I know about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Alice wrote a cookbook with a recipe for marijuana brownies in it, did you know that?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do,” Mr. Korman said.

  “Do you speak French?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  “I’d love to,” I told him. “It’s my dream. That and to live in France.”

  “Have you been to France?” he asked me.

  “Last summer my mother took me. She knew Paris and France pretty well because she used to be a model and worked there. It was great.”

  “Your mother was a model?” Mr. Korman said. “What was her name?”

  “The same name she has now,” I said. “Iris Carey.”

  “Your mother is Iris Carey?” Mr. Korman looked surprised. He wasn’t using his schoolteacher voice. “I know who she is. I worked as a copywriter in New York in an advertising agency before I became a teacher. I remember seeing her pictures all over the place. Even in the newspaper when she danced on a platform at the Chez When.”

  “My mother danced on a platform in a bar?” I said. Mr. Korman laughed. Really laughed. “She wasn’t a go-go girl. In the days then if you were anyone in New York you went to the Chez When and danced on the platforms. If you were good-looking enough. But you must have been born then. How old are you?”

  “Sixteen,” I said.

  “Sixteen. Well, I guess you can handle that your mother went to clubs. Of course, dancing on platforms is something else.” I couldn’t help but wonder if Mr. Korman was putting me on and knew very well that I had danced down at the Bomber Club. I’d never seen him there but I felt pretty certain he knew people that went there.

  “Oh, well, no, I’m not shocked by that,” I said. “It’s just from what she’s told me it was all limousines and cigarettes and black cocktail dresses.”

  “Oh, Hugo, Hugo, Hugo,” Mr. Korman said, cocking his head at me, sort of looking like a huge parakeet in horn-rimmed glasses. He’s really cool, Mr. Korman, but he’s no beauty. He does look like a parrot or a parakeet or something, with this big stalk of hair on the front of his head and those beady, bright eyes and that beak of his. But a nice parrot. “I’d like to meet your mother,” he said.

  “That’s not the impossible dream,” I said. “She’s right here, not ten blocks away as we speak. I’ll tell her you remember her from her modeling days in New York and I know she’d love to see you. Maybe you could come over for dinner.” I really meant it but I wondered if this sounded like overwhelming brown-nosing or what. I decided I shouldn’t get too palsy-walsy. Mr. Korman is very astute.

  He must have been thinking the same thing I was because he said, “That would be very nice. But I’d like to get back to your liking women writers better than men. That was very interesting. You think men writers often are writing with themselves as the star of the movie of their life?”

  “Not all. There’s The Assault and The Tin Drum. They’re not really about the author as the leading character, you know. Maybe they are, but they don’t make the main character to be some sort of super-sensitive, super-wonderful person you’re supposed to feel a lot of sympathy for. Maybe I’m just talking about American male writers. You know, like Jay McInerney and all those young guys. You’re supposed to read them and think ‘so cool,’ you know what I mean.”

  “Yes, I know what you mean.” Mr. Korman was kind of looking down at his desk and fiddling with his pencil. “So what do you want to write about, Hugo?”

  “I don’t know exactly, but I know I don’t want to write things to make people think things about life that aren’t true. I want to write things that I think are true, and maybe I’ll dress them up a little, or maybe just the way I think about things will dress it all up and be different, but at least I’ll be trying to write about things the way I really think they are. Don’t you think people pretend a lot about their lives, Mr. Korman? That they pretend they’re happy or t
hey pretend they like what they’re doing because it’s what everybody says they should be happy doing, and they don’t even know they’re unhappy because they’ve never done what they’d really like to do?” I was really getting all worked up and saying things I’d never said before, even to Macha. I kind of surprised myself; I wasn’t even sure I’d ever thought of all this stuff before. Maybe I was being seized by an evil spirit and would have to go home and be exorcised.

  “And you’re not going to go to Hollywood after having done your television pilot? You were quite good, Hugo. They didn’t give you a lot to do but I thought you were interesting to watch.” Mr. Korman was maybe a little impressed with me, I thought, and I didn’t like that very much. I kind of counted on him to keep some perspective.

  “That was just a TV show for kids, Mr. Korman. That wasn’t anything much and I don’t think it’s for me. I can tell that the other people on the show were a lot more into it than I was. I sort of feel that once people see me on television I’ll look like someone different to them, and if I went along with it I’d become that someone different and I wouldn’t even have any say about it. I don’t mind becoming someone different but I want to be the one that makes me that way. Besides, my mom has a friend who says he never met a famous person who wasn’t an asshole.”