Attack of the Theater People

by Marc Acito

  “I like it,” Kelly says.

  “Why don’t you just call yourself Almost Bruce?” Marcus says, biting into a chicken strip.

  Doug narrows his eyes. “’Cuz that’s not my name.”

  You can almost hear the Western showdown music.

  “I’ve got it!” Willow says. “Why don’t you call yourself the Sweater?”

  For a moment we’re all united in our shared opinion of Willow. “He can’t call himself the Sweater,” Paula says.

  “Why not?”

  Paula begins to explain and I tune out. Willow and I have conversations like this nightly while we lie in our hammocks: “How come, when you pick up a rock and there are all those bugs and worms and stuff underneath, how come they’re not smushed? And how come, in Cinderella, the coach and the footmen and the dress all turn back to what they were at midnight but the glass slippers stay the same? And how come…”

  Doug turns to me. “So?”

  “Sew buttons.”

  “Whadja think, man?” he says. “How was I?”

  He cares what I think. Of course, he doesn’t know yet that I’ve been kicked out of school. That my opinion is obviously worthless.

  I look straight into his eyes—all six (seven?) of them.

  “You. Were. Great.” I concentrate on each word to make sure they come out in the right order. “Raw. An’ electric. An’…”

  “And what?”

  “I forgot whut I wuz gonna say. Oh! An’ you were to-talilly in the moment. Totalilly. And I’m not jussayin’ that ’cuz I’m a lipple titsy…a tittle lipsy…’cuz I’m drunk.”

  “Thanks, man,” he says. “That means a lot to me.” He puts his hand on my shoulder, and it takes every bit of self-control I have left not to lean over and lick him.

  I am twenty years old and, thanks to a not unreasonable fear that sex with the wrong person will kill me, I have only gotten laid once in the last two years. Once! And even that wasn’t so great. After a summer sweating inside the woodchuck costume, I finally hooked up with one of the dancers in the Six Flags revue, which we called Six Fags because all of the guys were gay. But he wasn’t really my type. None of them were. Those swishy dancer guys just make me cringe. I mean, if I wanted to date a woman, I would. After all, women are still my second-favorite people to have sex with, but they’re a distant second. I guess you could say I was on the “bi now, gay later” plan.

  I’m brought back into the conversation when I hear Kelly mention a wedding Ziba’s going to. I’m always eager to hear about Ziba’s Persian social life, her “Arabian nights” at trendy bars with private rooms and subtle lighting.

  “Why do you have to be so mysterious?” Kelly says, then announces to the rest of the table, “She’s going to the shah’s wedding.”

  “The shah of Iran?” Marcus says. “I thought he was dead.”

  “It’s his son,” Kelly says, “the one who would’ve been shah if his father hadn’t been deposed.”

  “What do you call the son of a shah?” Paula asks. “The prince?”

  Ziba hesitates just long enough for the rest of us to volley the possibilities:

  Shah Junior

  Shah Lite

  The Man Who Would Be Shah

  I Can’t Believe It’s Not the Shah

  Shah-Nah-Nah

  Shahma-Lahma-Ding-Dong

  George Bernard Shah

  Almost Shah

  When pressed for details, Ziba answers in vague generalities, leaving us all to wonder just how close she is to royalty. Marcus won’t let it go, though, and bores into her with his coal black eyes. “So you’re a monarchist?”

  Ziba opens her mouth just enough to let the smoke out, like when there’s a fire behind a closed door. “Politics bore me.”

  “But you’re going to his wedding. That’s a political act.”

  Paula rests a tiny hand on Marcus’s arm. “Honey, calm down.”

  “Why should I?” he says, rising. “That’s the problem with all of you. You’re too complacent in your bourgeois bubble.” He then embarks on a Marxist diatribe I won’t repeat, mostly because I can’t follow it. Something about the exploitation of the common people by the evil-white-male-military-industrial-corporate complex, which, somehow, is personified by a five-foot-seventeen Persian lesbian. He finishes by marching out without paying.

  Paula apologizes for him. “The graduating class just did their presentations for agents and casting directors. Marcus didn’t go over as well as he would have liked.”

  Willow nods as she sticks the paper umbrella from her piña colada in her hair. “Some agent said he had a face like a sea sponge.”

  The party breaks up from there, and I immediately mourn the demise of the evening. I don’t want to leave my friends—not yet, not so soon. My petty neuroses aside, I never feel more like myself than when I’m with them, and I feel desperate to hang on to that feeling. I wish we could go everywhere together, like wolves or Japanese tourists. Not only are my friends a safe harbor in which to dock, they’re the lighthouse guiding me home across storm-tossed seas.

  But I have to make a duty call—at a port I have no desire to visit.

  Four

  It’s after two when I stagger down the hall to my old room, swaying back and forth with my bag of laundry as if I were dancing with it. I don’t know how my dad can stand living in a four-bedroom split-level ranch all by himself. Actually, I don’t know how anyone could stand living in a four-bedroom split-level ranch period, particularly if you could afford any of Wallingford’s many charming Colonials or Tudors. As always, Al’s got financial reasons for keeping it—something about capital gains and a onetime exertion. (Excursion? Excretion? Whatever.) But it’s a sad place, the house my mother walked out of when I was twelve, and the house I walked out of shortly before my eighteenth birthday, slamming the door on the Teutonic nightmare that was my evil ex-stepmonster. Plus, it’s a four-bedroom split-level ranch, which just sucks.

  I slip in the door to my old room as quietly as is possible when your body is do-si-doing against its will, unzip my pants, shimmy across the room, and flop onto the bed face-first.

  Onto a sleeping body.

  I’m not sure who screams first, me or the woman. I scramble to get off of her, a task made easier when she knees me in the groin. While I cringe on the floor, she yells, “AYUDA! AYÚDAME!”

  The door flies open, and I see the silhouette of a caveman with a club.

  “POP! IT’S ME! IT’S ME! IT’S ME!” I yell, suddenly sober. Life-threatening terror can do that to you.

  “Eddie?” He flips on the light to find me sprawled on the floor, my pants around my ankles, while a plump young woman sobs in Spanish.

  “What the fuck’s goin’ on?” Al says, putting down the baseball bat. His furry frame is covered only by a towel, giving him the unfortunate appearance of a skirted dancing bear.

  “I don’t know,” I gasp. “All I tried to—”

  “Milagros, you okay?”

  “Spanish Spanish Spanish Spanish,” Milagros says.

  “THIS. IS. MY. SON,” he shouts, like she’s retarded instead of foreign.

  The woman pulls the neck of her oversize T-shirt up over her face, hiding her head behind the word RELAX. She looks to be in her late twenties.

  “Esto es mío…Shit. Eddie, how d’ya say son in goddamned Spanish?”

  I have no idea, having studied French because it seemed more elegant.

  “Spanish Spanish Spanish Spanish.”

  “Milagros, esto es mío…sol. MÍO SOL.”

  I may not know Spanish, but I believe my father just informed a hysterical Latina that I am his sunshine.

  Milagros seems to get the idea. “Your son?” she says.

  “SÍ. SÍ. SÍ,” Al and I both shout.

  When I woke up this morning it never occurred to me that I would need to know the Spanish word for rapist, so it requires a dictionary to explain to Milagros that she sleeps in my old room and I am not el violador.
>
  In fact, once she calms down, she’s as warm and sweet as the delicious doughy cheesy thingy she heats up for me. I’m not hungry—well, that’s not exactly true; I’m always hungry—but I shouldn’t be, having just gorged on mozzarella sticks and chicken strips. Since I left school I can’t seem to stop eating. It’s like I’ve got a giant hole inside me I can’t fill.

  “Who is she?” I ask after Milagros has gone back to bed.

  My father drips melted cheese onto his broad, hairy chest. He’s wearing a robe now, but it’s one of those short ones, which is just too embarrassing. “She’s my new domestic.”

  Domestic? This is not a word we Zannis have ever used as a noun, being just a generation or two removed from immigrant pushcart vendors ourselves. Employing a live-in domestic seems entirely too you-ain’t-Kunta-Kinte-yo’-name-is-Toby-now for us.

  “She lives here?”

  “I was gonna tell ya’, but I thought you weren’t comin’ home till tomorrow.”

  “Where does she come from?”

  “Nicaragua. Fran Nudelman found her for me in Miami. It’s a sweetheart deal. She cleans a bunch of the houses in the neighborhood and lives here in exchange for doin’ the cookin’. I hope you don’t mind I gave her your old room.”

  “No, it’s fine.”

  “I thought about givin’ her the guest room, but your room has the best light.”

  “I understand.”

  “You sure? ’Cuz if it bothers you, we should talk about it. It’s not healthy to let feelings fester inside you, y’know.” After my evil ex-stepmonster returned to whatever hellhole vomited her onto this earth, Al got just enough therapy to be really annoying.

  “It’s fine,” I say.

  “Aha!” he says, shaking a sausage-sized finger. “I knew it. You do mind.”

  “IDON’TCAREABOUTTHEGODDAMNEDROOM!”

  Al furrows his eyebrows, two mustaches colliding. “What’s botherin’ you, kid?”

  You mean, aside from the fact that my most cherished life’s dream has turned into a nightmare? And that I have no money and no job and no idea what I’m going to do next? And that you’re going to say, “I told you acting school was a lousy idea?” And then bitch about all the trouble I caused making you pay for it and how you’ve wasted twenty grand and isn’t it time I grew up and got a real job? You mean, besides that?

  “Nothing,” I say.

  I rise the next afternoon so hungover even my sweat smells like tequila. The Tennessee Williams Wake-Up Call. What’s more, my teeth seem to have grown fur. I shower until I use up all the hot water, then throw on my smoky clothes and duck out to avoid my father. I know I’ll have to tell him eventually, but tuition’s not due until August, and it‘s possible he could get hit by a bus or a falling piano by then, in which case what’s the point of spoiling his final moments on earth? I escape the house, hoping to leave behind the looming dread that sticks to me like tar.

  I head across the street to find out what’s happened to Natie, a process otherwise known as Looking for Trouble. Just last year, while engaged in a light-saber battle with a visiting friend from college, Natie broke the back of his mother’s couch, then invited me over and purposely stood in a way so I’d lean against it and take the blame. When I later found out what happened, he said, “What do you care? Al paid for it.”

  Natie.

  I press the doorbell, which is followed by a voice that sounds like Ethel Merman slamming her fingers in a car door.

  “NATHAAAAAAAN! ANSWER THE DOOOOOOOR.”

  It’s the Call of the Nudelmans.

  “NATHAAAAAAAN? DIDJA HEAR ME?”

  How could he not? Fran Nudelman could broadcast to our troops overseas.

  Someone else shouts, “NATHAN’S NOT HERE.” Someone meaning Natie.

  “WHADDYA MEAN, YOU’RE NOT HERE?” Fran screeches. “WHO AM I TALKING TO, A GHOST?”

  From the other side of the house her husband, Stan, answers, “DON’T YA’ REMEMBAH? WE’RE SUPPOSED TO SAY NATIE’S NOT HERE.”

  “OH, RIGHT, RIGHT, SO SUE ME.”

  I ring the bell again.

  “STAAAAAAAN! ANSWER THE DOOOOOOR.”

  Rather than endure round two, I try the knob and let myself in, just in time to see an Ewok scurrying out of the entry. I lunge after it, grabbing the hood of its Georgetown sweatshirt, revealing the fuzzy, teddy-bear head of Nathan Nudelman.

  “It’s all a mistake. I didn’t do it,” he says, putting up his hands.

  “Natie, it’s me.”

  He turns. “Jeez, you scared the crap outta me. Since when do you just walk in my house?”

  “Since the fourth grade. What the hell is going on?”

  “NATHAN, WHO IS IT?” Fran shouts.

  “DON’T WORRY, MA. IT’S ONLY EDWARD.”

  “HELLO, EDWARD!” Fran screams in a tone usually reserved for yelling “Fire!” in a crowded movie theater.

  “HELLO, EDWARD!” Stan echoes.

  “C’mon,” Natie says, motioning to his room. “We can talk in here.”

  Natie’s room is a time capsule of his precollege self: Debate Team trophies, a model of the starship Enterprise, posters of each of the actors who played Doctor Who, and the Revenge of the Nerds lobby display. On his desk sits a disassembled computer.

  “Why aren’t you answering anyone’s calls?” I ask. “Ziba’s worried about you.”

  He thumps down at his desk, swinging the arm of a lamp around so he can examine the dissected computer guts. “Oh, I had a little run-in with the College Democrats.”

  “Over what?”

  “Anti-Semitism,” he says, squinting through his glasses. “Just ’cuz I was one of the few Jews at a Catholic university, they automatically assumed I misappropriated some funds.”

  “Did you?”

  He turns, his baby face the epitome of hurt indignation. With his button eyes and orange fro, he could be Little Orphan Annie. “How can you say such a thing?”

  I sit down on the bed, pushing aside a copy of the New York Times. “Well, you did help me embezzle ten grand from Al.”

  “Which had nothing to do with Judaism. In fact, may I point out that, out of the six of us who did it, four of you are Catholic. I shoulda mentioned that in my hearing.”

  “You had a hearing?”

  “Inquisition is more like it. There I was, trying to further the Democratic cause using Republican tactics, and suddenly I’m a thief. Liberals have no understanding of the free market.” He moves a monitor out of the way, revealing the words Property of Georgetown University Computer Lab.

  “So you took the money?”

  “I invested it.” He reaches for the…what do you call it? The CPR? The C-3PO? The IUD? The boring part of the computer, the thing that’s not the printer or the keyboard or the monitor. Oh, yeah, the “computer.” Anyway, he reaches for that and unscrews the casing.

  “Invested?”

  “I’ve got two words for you,” he says. “Wall. Street. I tell you, even guys our age are makin’ fortunes. You watch—we’re gonna take a bite out of the Big Apple.”

  In Eugene O’Neill’s groundbreaking play Strange Interlude, the characters speak directly to the audience to reveal their inner thoughts, usually in a lifeless monotone to let you know it’s profound. If my life were an O’Neill play, I’d step downstage and say:

  (bitterly)…We? There is no we…“We” is a boat that ventures recklessly into the storm of your ideas, crashes on the rocks of their consequences, and capsizes in a sea of metaphors…

  “What do you mean, we?” I say.

  “It’s the first-person plural.”

  “I know that, I mean—”

  “I’m transferring to Columbia.”

  (fearfully)…How my heart quakes…I’m forever banished from the Met because of your Pavarotti scalping scheme….

  “Can you do that?” I sputter. “Y’know, with…”

  “Oh, yeah,” he says, “I’m already accepted. I’m switching from poli-sci to economi
cs. I figure it’s better to own a politician than be one.”

  (adverbially)…Perhaps commence with something smaller…a fish or a fern…

  “Anyway,” Natie says, “I figured since you got kicked out of Juilliard…”

  I reach for his chair, swiveling him around. “What? How’d you know that?”

  “My mom told me.”

  “Your MOM? How the hell did she find out?”

  “She ran into Kelly’s mom at the Pathmark.”

  That’s it. I’ll never be able to show my face in Wallingford again. I’m a has-been. No, worse: a never-been. I can see the write-up in the “College News” section of the Wallingford Towne Crier: “Hometown star burns out.”

  “You’re hurting me,” Natie says.

  “Oh, sorry.” I let go of his arms. “You’ve got to make Fran promise not to say anything to Al.”

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “The only thing they talk about is Milagros, the Merry Maid of Managua.”

  “Yeah, what’s that all about?”

  He shrugs. “She cleaned my parents’ hotel room in Miami and Fran liked the way she scrubbed the tub.”

  The phone rings, followed by Fran bellowing, “SOMEONE ANSWER THE PHONE. I’M IN THE JOHN.”

  Natie shakes his Brillo head. “I gotta get outta here before I lose my hearing.” He plops down next to me. “How about we get a place together? Just the two of us.”

  “Oh, Natie, I don’t know.”

  “C’mon, it’ll be fun. The change’ll do you good.”

  Perhaps, if my brain weren’t still marinating in tequila, I’d stop myself from hitching my wagon to Natie’s Death Star. But I also know that if I stay with Paula and Marcus and Willow, I’m going to wake up every day to the sickening aroma of my failure.

  “Okay,” I say, “if you find something…”

  Natie slaps me on the back, his doughy face spreading in his lippy, no-tooth smile. It feels good to be wanted, even if it’s by someone whose moral compass regularly leads you into shark-infested waters.

  He opens up the Times. “Let’s see about apartments….”