by Anna Berry
Patients? Special-needs performers? “Umm, I don’t know—usually only the director is supposed to watch auditions, right?”
That same musical laugh again. “Well, as I said before dear, we’re very collaborative. But if you don’t want anyone to watch your audition, that’s all right too. Can you bring headshots? We love headshots.”
I walk with the cordless phone to the tiny nook that holds my bedroom office, and pull out one of my old actor headshots from a drawer. I’ll need to update my resume. “So, okay, well, I’ll just bring headshots and do a monologue, then. Do you want classical or contemporary? I can do both.” At least, I think I can do both. It’s been more than a year since I’ve auditioned for anything, and I’m not sure I can remember the stock monologues I’ve used on auditions since my sophomore year of college. I’ll need to work on that too. It’s not as if there’s anything else for me to do with my time.
“Oh, hon, like I said, just do whatever you want. We’re very flexible that way. Now if you’ll excuse me, dear, I have another call coming in. See you at six.”
The pleasant-voiced woman hangs up without even asking my name.
My first impression of Junkyard HEART isn’t exactly a good one. Whoever I’ve just finished talking to has broken every cardinal rule about what it means to take audition calls from professional actors. Still, I’m curious. The woman on the phone sounded so cool and soothing, so calm and laid back. And I need something calm and laid back rather badly.
Between the anthrax on the television, the still-looping nonstop video images of the crashing Twin Towers, and the long, idle hours sitting alone in my apartment—in which my restless, tense mind cooks up all kinds of twisted things to torture me with—perhaps a strange theater group that doesn’t require auditions is exactly what I need.
I don’t have a car, and cash is too tight for me to justify taking the bus the mile or so up Marine Drive from my apartment to the Junkyard HEART rehearsal. So I walk. In late 2001 I live in a mid-rise apartment building on the northern border of Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood, about a half-mile north and east of Wrigley Field. I have a large two-bedroom apartment with baseboard heat and ultra-cheap rent that I’ve shared with a series of roommates over a period of about five years. The ultra-cheap rent will come to an end soon; my North Lakeview neighborhood, which was still the denizen of mostly young artists, gay hustlers, junkies, and hookers who worked the corner of Broadway and Sheridan just five years earlier, is now in the midst of full-swing gentrification. (It’s ironic now that I’m in my forties and married with a comfortable six-figure income I can no longer afford the hip neighborhood I lived in when I was twenty-something and broke.)
During my last year in this big, cheap apartment, my roommate is a non-practicing Muslim immigrant from Malaysia named Aziz Muhammed. Aziz works as a computer programmer downtown and is rarely home. But he takes off for Malaysia about two months after 9/11 in justifiable fear of anti-Muslim sentiment, stiffs me for three months’ rent, and becomes, indirectly, one of the chief reasons I move in with the man I will meet and fall in love with at my first Junkyard HEART rehearsal.
My neighborhood might be rapidly gentrifying right now, but the neighborhood that lies directly between my apartment and the Junkyard HEART rehearsal—Uptown—is still one of the most dangerous and decrepit in the city of Chicago in 2001. Drug-dealers, gang-bangers, and violent criminals galore stand on every street corner in Uptown. The Uptown streets are filthy, half the buildings are condemned, and the only thriving businesses are greasy jerk-chicken shacks and African hair-braiding emporiums. And scattered among the Uptown homeless, the junkies, and the poor, single mothers who huddle in the slumlord-owned, burned-out apartment buildings are the incurably mentally ill—those forgotten, desperately poor, and overmedicated people who would still be in Illinois state mental hospitals if it weren’t for the Reagan administration’s relentless budget cuts in the 1980s that sent them permanently out onto the streets.
Uptown has the largest selection of single-room occupancy apartment buildings in the city, and many of them are owned and operated by either the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) or private charities for the purposes of housing recovering addicts, troubled Vietnam veterans, and the chronically mentally ill,[4] who live on a combination of disability checks and panhandling. I occasionally come to Uptown for theater rehearsals and performances in the Preston Bradley Center, or for a night of jazz at the world-famous Green Mill nightclub—the only islands of culture and civilization in the desolate neighborhood until forward-looking real estate developers start moving in years later—but otherwise I avoid it like the plague. In 2001, Uptown just isn’t a place for a young, single woman to walk alone, even a young woman as citified and street-smart as I am. You never know when a junkie or crazed lunatic who’s forgotten to take his medication will jump out of an alley brandishing a switchblade or a gun.
But the sense I’ve possessed since childhood that borders on psychic intuition tells me that whatever misgivings I might have, there is something waiting for me at Junkyard HEART. Something that will satisfy me, something that will help me find sanity in those insane months just after 9/11, when I am jobless and witless and nervous and paranoid.
I finally make it to the weathered brick Margate Park fieldhouse, a 1950s-era Chicago Park District building on the northernmost edge of lakefront Lincoln Park. The old community building contains a gymnasium frequented by poor kids from the surrounding neighborhood, a makeshift workout facility used by students and senior citizens who can’t afford to join a gym, and three large classrooms used by city-sponsored daycare on weekdays and rented by local community groups for meetings on evenings and weekends. At just before six in the evening, the building lobby is filled with a mixture of unruly children leaving daycare, middle-aged women toting yoga mats for a class, and several oddly dressed, fidgety people whom I immediately recognize as Uptown’s ubiquitous psychiatric patients. There’s a hand-lettered paper sign reading JUNKYARD HEART THIS WAY with an arrow pointing to the end of the hall.
I stride down the hall to a cluttered, dusty classroom. There’s a squat, middle-aged woman with short hair and Coke-bottle glasses standing behind a folding table, along with a scrawny teenage boy and an elderly woman in dirty, secondhand clothes. They’re all filling dozens of paper Dixie cups with red Kool-Aid and talking to each other in low voices. Some of the psychiatric patients I noticed in the lobby come in and sit down in the folding metal chairs someone has set out. Two nervous-looking women, both very overweight, poorly dressed, and about my age, sit in a corner checking and rechecking their watches. A thirtyish woman with long hair and glasses sorts a box of castoff clothes. Another small group of poor local women comes in and sits down, and at least three of them are quite obviously street people—I can smell their unmistakable stench of urine, dirt, and stale sweat from across the room.
It doesn’t look like much of a theater rehearsal to me—it seems more like a combination soup kitchen and church rummage sale. I figure I have the wrong room and turn to leave. But the squat, middle-aged woman stops pouring Kool-Aid for a moment and looks up.
“Hello, miss. Are you here to audition?” She points at the glossy headshot I carry in one hand. “I believe you and I spoke on the phone this afternoon.”
I feel my face go red. “Yes. Umm. No. That is—I don’t think I belong here.”
The squat woman comes from behind the folding table, takes my hand, and shakes it. “Yes, you do belong here. I’m Carol. Please stay. You’ll have a wonderful time with us, I promise. What’s your name?”
“Anna,” I say, not trying to hide my embarrassment. I suppose Carol is right, in a way. After all, I’m unemployed, nearly broke, and I have a long personal and family history of mental problems. I shudder as I realize that I’m probably only a few strokes of good luck shy of being one of the motley crew of homeless people and mental cases waiting patiently in their metal folding chairs for the rehearsal to begin.
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br /> “Welcome, Anna. Welcome to Junkyard HEART. We’re so glad you’re here. Have some Kool-Aid.” Carol thrusts a soggy paper cup into my hand. Almost against my will, I take a sip. It tastes like a red crayon.
“It’s all right to be a little nervous your first time with us,” Carol goes on. “I know you’re probably used to something a little more professional than this, but I guarantee you’ll grow as a performer if you work with us.” She gives me a broad, crooked-toothed smile; Carol’s sincerity is palpable. I can’t walk out of here and hurt this woman’s feelings, I just can’t.
I decide I can stay for an hour or so. I figure the story of how I attended a theater rehearsal full of mental patients and smelly homeless people will make for fun cocktail-party conversation.
That is, if I ever actually get invited to a cocktail party again. The isolation and desolation of the past few weeks makes that seem unlikely. That, and my increasingly precarious financial and mental state. I’m more like the people sitting in that shabby room than I want to admit.
“Sit down, make yourself comfortable!” Carol beams once she figures out I’m staying. I get the feeling she’s convinced many others like me to stay in the past—and understandably so. Her voice is even more calming and soothing in person than it is on the phone, and her big brown eyes have the adorable-puppy-dog quality that most people lose after the age of six or seven. “The director’s just down the hall, finishing a meeting with the board of directors. I’m sure he’ll be happy to do a private audition with you before we start the rehearsal, if you still want to do that. But I promise you, it’s not necessary at all.”
As if on cue, the director appears. He’s a tall, handsome middle-aged man in khakis and a sweater. He holds out a hand, I shake it. “Welcome, nice to see you. I’m David Wiley,[5] artistic director of Junkyard HEART. You’re a pro, by the way. I can tell just by looking at you. Let me see that headshot you’ve got there.”
Stunned, I hand it to him. He glances at my headshot and reads over my resume. “Ah, a seasoned performer. Good. We need you. I’ll be calling on you to lead some rehearsals and warm-ups. How about you go outside, just behind the fieldhouse? There are some other pros back there, just like you, preparing a warm-up for the community performers. Sound okay with you?”
It doesn’t seem like I have a choice. I blindly gather up my things and walk out through the rear door of the building.
That’s when I see him.
Him.
Dean.
He’s standing in the middle of a small circle of other young, fit, attractive twenty-somethings like myself. He looks about twenty-eight, my age. He’s short, but with an elegant, compact, athletic body, and his skin is a beautiful, creamy gold, his eyes almond-shaped and the color of ripe chestnuts. I’ve never been attracted to Asian men before, but my attraction to Dean is almost immediate. He stands there in a circle of his peers, standing on grass that is warm and wet with October dew. He wears—I will never forget this, not as long as I live—creased and pressed khakis with a lilac polo shirt that hugs every rippled curve of his chest and shoulders. He bends to the side and down over one leg, slowly moving his arms along in front of him in a single, fluid movement that reminds me of a slow, sensual waterfall. Tai Chi, by the looks of it. The other people in the circle—at least two of whom have the long, lithe, ripped bodies of professional dancers—follow Dean’s lead.
Godamighty.
He has me even before he’s said hello.
I timidly shuffle up to the circle, clear my throat by way of introduction. Dean (only I don’t know his name yet) and the others look my way.
“Hi,” he says in a smooth tenor voice. “And you are?”
“Umm, Anna. Anna Berry. I’m, umm, new around here. That director guy told me to come back here with the rest of the . . . professionals.”
Dean and a few of the others laugh. “Professionals? Professional whats?”
Everyone in the small circle stares. Now I’m embarrassed. Again. I need to make a quick recovery, so I flash my headshot at them. “You know. Professional performers.”
Dean laughs again. “None of us here are professional anything. This is a community theater group. We’re just some of the veterans, is all. We’ve all done at least three Junkyard HEART shows.” He crosses to me, offers me his hand. It’s cool and smooth as talc. “I’m Dean. I’ll be leading the physical warm-up tonight, and I need some folks to help me teach the moves to the others. Wanna help?”
Dean’s sweet, smooth voice and almond-chestnut eyes have my panties in such a pretzel that I can’t speak, so I just nod and follow along as he demonstrates some warm-up calisthenics that are a mixture of Tai-Chi and modern dance. Within minutes, I’ve mastered the whole sequence—all without once taking my eyes off Dean’s baby browns. They’re like deep sienna whirlpools that have me whirling in an inescapable abyss.
Oh boy, I have it bad.
And it will only get worse.
Dean walks me home from rehearsal that first night. And on the third night, we go on a date that ends back at my apartment, where we have some of the oddest sex of my life. I remember my shock (and strangely, delight) when I see that Dean’s penis, even when fully erect, is about the same size, shape, and thickness as a French string bean. Since I’m accustomed to well-endowed men, the resulting sex is little more than a tickle. But Dean makes up for his shortcomings in other ways.
Within days, Dean and I are inseparable. He picks me up for Junkyard HEART rehearsal each evening in his mint-green Honda Accord. We rehearse and perform alongside poor city teenagers and homeless mental patients, and we fall in love. We sleep together each night—mostly at my apartment. For reasons that become clear later, Dean is reluctant to take me to his apartment or introduce me to his roommate and childhood best friend, “Raj.” But after the Junkyard HEART show finally opens and Dean has already made the rounds of introductions with my circle of friends, he finally relents and invites me to attend his roommate’s twenty-ninth birthday party with him.
Dean and his roommate, Raj, are both graduates of prestigious Oak Park–River Forest High School (OPRF), an elite public high school in Chicago’s affluent western suburbs. OPRF has countless celebrities, politicians, and successful businessmen among its graduates—Ernest Hemingway, Dan Castellaneta, and McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc, to name just a few. And the lucky students who attend OPRF now include the sons and daughters of Chicagoland’s wealthiest professionals—doctors, lawyers, judges, corporate executives. The tiny twin suburbs of Oak Park and extremely wealthy River Forest are dotted with large, beautiful Arts-and-Crafts and Prairie Style homes that ooze power, wealth, and success—as well as, purportedly, open-minded liberalism.
But as Hemingway once so eloquently put it, “Oak Park is full of wide lawns and narrow minds.” I run full-throttle into some of the youngest of those narrow minds whenever I date any of Oak Park’s favorite sons. It’s a very different echelon than my own hardscrabble background, with my mentally ill mother who couldn’t care for me properly and a dad who spent most of his time, money, and energy on womanizing. It’s a revolving parade of nice young men from happy, stable families, with their beautiful homes and fat bank accounts, who never seem to stay attached to me for long, and yet I keep dating them over and over again. I think they’re attracted to me at first because I’m earthy, simple, outspoken, a pull-herself-up-by-her-bootstraps type, a breath of fresh air compared to all the polished, cookie-cutter, prep-school girls they’ve grown up with. And I’m attracted to them because they come from the happy, stable families I wish I could have had growing up. But like those trendy, fizzy dance-club cocktails that taste so good and look so pretty at first, after the initial novelty wears off, it’s a bad combination that just ends up making everyone sick to their stomach.
I recall several dinner parties in elegant Prairie Style homes where my Oak Park–bred boyfriend of that year introduces me to old classmates, relatives, and friends of his, and the conversations always go s
omething like this:
“Hi, you must be Anna,” the friend or relative says, without shaking my hand. “Nice to meet you. Where is it you’re from originally?”
“Indiana.”
A tilt of the head, a blink. “Indiana. I see. What is it that your family does, Anna?
“What?”
“What business are they in? Law, finance? Or are they perhaps in commercial farming? Lot of that in Indiana, I hear.”
“Oh. Well. Umm, my mom is a clerical worker, but she’s sort of unemployed right now. Her husband’s a janitor. My parents are divorced. My dad works for a defense contractor—”
“I see. Well, lovely to meet you.” And the Oak Park friend or relative winces and darts off to find someone else to talk to in the farthest possible corner of whatever vast Prairie Style house the party is in.
I’ll have a similar experience with Dean’s Oak Park–River Forest friends, especially Raj. Raj is the son of two extremely successful Indian-American physicians. Raj still has several relatives who occupy the highest positions of power and influence in their country, including one uncle who’s a railroad baron and who lives in the former house in Mumbai of Mohammed-Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s first governor-general. Raj is related to several well-known Indian-Americans too.
Raj loves nothing more than pointing out how everyone and everything around him is beneath him—jobs, stores, clothing brands, restaurants, even friends (notwithstanding the fact that Raj works only intermittently as an hourly computer software trainer, has taken almost eight years and four different universities to finish his bachelor’s degree, and at the age of twenty-nine still lives mostly on handouts from his parents).
When Dean introduces me to Raj and his girlfriend Amy at the birthday party, they both seem to like me well enough at first. We bond over our shared interests in music, books, and movies, especially Asian cinema and Japanese animation. We sit around the living room with the rest of Dean and Raj’s friends, watching Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on DVD and freeze-framing the best fight scenes while we discuss the similarities between that film and Kurosawa’s old-school samurai flicks. We drink beer, then scotch, then play charades and drinking games into the wee hours like we’re all old friends.