“I don’t mind traffic,” I told Duncan. I was being courteous, too. I softened my consonants. I dropped my articles. Through the windshield, our midsized city crawled past at a midsized pace. Midsized highways with midsized cars. Midsized citizens with their midsized lives.
We talked about work and then we talked about ourselves. Away from the subdivision, it was clear that we had little in common. He told me that he’d been doing manual labor since he was fifteen, beginning with cleaning bricks at a demolition site on the north side of the city. I was taking weekend acting classes at fifteen. “A nickel a brick,” Duncan told me. “You do the math.” I wasn’t sure what math there was to do. Duncan was the one who should have been taking acting classes, not me, receiving instruction on how to transform his supply of hard-earned material into that thing called art. He’d already lived twice the life that I’d lived, while having none of my advantages. He was what my father had been before my father hit it big. But Duncan Dioguardi was most likely never going to hit it big. His trajectory seemed already established. If I wasn’t careful, my trajectory would soon be established. The tattoo of the snake heading up to Duncan’s face was not an affect but as apt a metaphor as any of what the past had been like for him, and what the future held. He needed no affect. I was the one who needed an affect. “Don’t ever get a tattoo,” my acting teacher had told me. “A performer must always remain a blank slate.” So here I was, playing the role of general laborer, with flawless skin and stuck in traffic.
It was four thirty. If I was lucky, I’d be home by six. Maybe I would take a nap, assuage my fatigue and apathy, wake up fresh and do something productive, like read a script and enlighten myself. Sometimes I would lie in the bathtub and read aloud from my stack of current and classic screenplays, playing every single character, men, women, and children. Even the stage directions were a character: Fade in. Int. bathtub—night. Fade out. Everything was deserving of voice. Meanwhile, Duncan Dioguardi and I lit cigarettes, one after the other, inhaling first- and secondhand smoke. We fiddled with the radio. Tupac came on. Tupac was all the rage. We nodded our heads to Tupac. Apropos of Tupac, I told Duncan about how I was planning to move to LA. I said it casually, as if this plan were already in the works rather than a doubtful dot on an undrawn time line, and I was unexpectedly filled with a brief but heartening sense that, merely by my vocalizing that something would happen, something would actually happen—as per pop psychology. Duncan told me that he had lived in LA, between starting high school and dropping out of high school. What else had Duncan done by the age of nineteen? Where else had Duncan lived? He was so far ahead of me in the category of life that I would have been unable to catch up even if I began living now. “What was LA like?” I asked him. I could hear my counterfeit casualness being usurped by genuine yearning. “It was magical,” Duncan said. He got quiet. He contributed no follow-up details. He stared out the windshield. “See this traffic?” he said. I saw this traffic. “This isn’t LA traffic,” he said. I pictured LA traffic on a Saturday at four thirty, sun high, never rain, bumper-to-bumper, all of it magical.
Suddenly, I was telling Duncan Dioguardi about my innermost desires, speaking confessionally, spilling my guts, spelling out exactly how I was going to become an actor, how I was going to rent a U-Haul, not give the boss any notice, fuck the boss, drive a thousand miles in a day, arrive in LA, find an agent, find a place to live, start auditioning for film and television, maybe even Seinfeld. “Keep an eye out for me on Seinfeld,” I said. If you say it, it will happen. Somewhere along the way, I had stopped dropping articles and softening consonants, because it was too difficult a ruse to maintain while also trying to be authentic. I told Duncan about having performed in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, twice, at the rec center, one fall and the following fall. I’d had only a small part but I’d got some laughs. I didn’t tell him that there’d been fifteen people in the audience. Perhaps he’d heard of the production? There had been a four-star review in the Tribune. No, he hadn’t heard of it.
“You can do better than that bullshit,” he said.
It was five o’clock. We were moving fast now. The traffic was gone. So were my cigarettes. We were inspiring each other with our uplifting stories of promise and potential. Duncan was telling me about his own plans for the future, which mainly involved having realized that he’d wasted the previous year, and the year before that. He was determined to make up for it. He knew precisely what needed to be done. He spoke generally. In response, I spoke generally, too, providing platitudes where applicable. “You can do whatever you set your mind to,” I said. “It’s mind over matter,” he said. “That’s right!” I said. “That’s right!” he said. We were in agreement, and yet I had the peculiar feeling that we were referring to different things.
He was telling me where to turn. Turn here. Turn there. Left. Right. Right. I was entering territory with which I was unfamiliar, because I’d grown up cushy. We drove beneath an overpass that led into a down-and-out neighborhood of weather-beaten, two-story, redbrick homes, a hundred of them in a row, every one identical, just as the houses in my father’s subdivision were identical, but at the other end of the economic spectrum. This was a neighborhood of odd jobs and no help, where people shopped for dinner at the convenience store. “I trust them as far as I can throw them,” Duncan said, referring to I know not what. This was outsized struggle in a midsized city. Turn. Turn. Turn. The Spice Girls came on. The Spice Girls were all the rage. Apropos of the Spice Girls, Duncan was asking me if I wanted to party tonight. He was asking as if the thought had just occurred to him. It was Saturday, after all. It was five thirty. It would be a shame to let these windfall spring hours go to waste. It would be a shame to go home as I always did, lie in the bathtub, have another night of living life through the soggy pages of screenplays, getting closer to twenty years old, my time line unraveling like a ball of yarn. I somehow knew that the word party in this context meant one thing: getting high. What I really wanted was to stop at a convenience store and get more cigarettes. “Don’t waste your money,” Duncan said. He could buy me more cigarettes, no problem. He pointed to one of the identical buildings. If I gave him ten dollars he could get me a carton of cigarettes at half price. If I chipped in thirty dollars he could get the two of us cigarettes plus. “Do you want cigarettes plus?” Duncan asked. “Do you want to party?” He was speaking now entirely in the language of euphemisms, and I was fluent.
“Yes,” I said. “I want to party.”
It was six o’clock and we were in the basement of Duncan Dioguardi’s house. Or, more to the point, we were in the basement of his mother’s house, where he was staying until his security deposit cleared. “Banks,” he said, generally. His mother wasn’t home, but she kept a nice house, much nicer on the inside than it appeared on the outside, with hardwood floors and crown molding, and I thought about how these were the kinds of detail that would have eluded a person who had merely driven through the neighborhood without bothering to stop, like the passenger on a cruise ship who thinks he knows the island from the port. Duncan’s basement was more bedroom than basement, with Mom’s touches, sheets tucked in, cozy and comfortable, except for a boiler in the corner that was making clicking sounds. Stacked up in a pile were some carpentry manuals for beginners, yellow books with hammers on the covers. “I dabble with those sometimes,” he said. Then he added, “But they won’t give a guy like me a chance.” I wasn’t sure if “whatever you set your mind to” would apply in this instance.
On his dresser was a Magnavox TV, twenty-five-inch, with a built-in VCR, presumably left on all day, tuned to ESPN, where the announcers were oohing and aahing over, who else, Michael Jordan, who was doing, what else, winning. He glided down the court. He floated through the air. He elbowed his defender in the chest. Everything he did had style, even his mistakes. He was the perfect blend of beauty and power, of grace and aggression. No one would have dared tell Michael Jordan, “It takes as long as it takes.”
My
carton of cigarettes was in my lap, cradled lovingly, half price, as promised, already torn open by me, cigarette smoke going straight up into my face, and in Duncan’s palm was the adventure I had come here for, two small white cubes—yellowish, really, crumbs, really—bought at full price. “This is what you get for twenty dollars apiece,” he said. “You do the math.” Had I been the latecomer to this play, I would have thought that these two small cubes had been chipped off the edge of some drywall, so insignificant did they look. If Duncan had accidentally dropped them on the floor, they would have been lost forever in the grain of the hardwood. But Duncan, handling them with such care and attention, as if he were a doctor operating over a nightstand, demonstrating speed and precision, using one of Mom’s table knives to gently break the two white chips into even smaller white chips, would never let them drop on the floor. This was the stuff of theater, basement theater, the six-o’clock show, and I had a front-row seat to the action, from which I was able to watch what happens when the actor does not have the right props with him, because this actor is “not a pro, and not intending on becoming a pro.” What Duncan was, though, was ingenious, withdrawing a roll of aluminum foil from beneath his bed, no doubt procured from Mom’s cupboard, and a box of Chore Boy, also from beneath his bed, with little Chore Boy wearing a backward baseball cap, a big grin on his face, because life is nothing if not delightful, especially when one is cleaning. He could have been a character from a fairy tale, Chore Boy, innocent and archetypal, his stumpy arm beckoning the consumer toward some enchanted land. Soon, a perfect aluminum foil pipe emerged from Duncan Dioguardi, glinting silver in the Magnavox light, reminding me of the way some family restaurants will wrap your leftovers in aluminum foil in the shape of a swan. But into this particular swan’s mouth disappeared a piece of the Chore Boy, followed by one small chip off the drywall, and then Duncan Dioguardi ran his lighter back and forth, orange flame on silver neck, and from the swan’s tail he sucked ever so gently, cheeks pulling, pulling, until, like magic, he tilted his head back and out of his mouth emerged a perfect puff of white smoke.
He considered for a moment, eyes closed, then eyes opened, gauging, I suppose, the ratio of crack cocaine to baking powder, and then he offered an appraisal. “Not bad,” he said. He looked at me. Was it my turn now?
No, not yet my turn. First we must watch Michael Jordan, because the aluminum foil pipe needed time to cool down, a necessary and dramatic interlude, the basement boiler ticking off the minutes. It was almost the end of the basketball game, and beads of sweat dripped elegantly down Jordan’s shaved head as he huddled with coaches and teammates, half-listening to advice that had long ago ceased applying to him. He showed no signs of trepidation or anxiety about the fate of the game. He already knew the fate of the game. As for the advice that Duncan Dioguardi was now offering me, I listened carefully. This is how you hold the pipe. This is how you inhale the smoke. “This isn’t a cigarette,” he said. “You don’t suck it into your lungs.” He was patient, the way a good coach should be. Then he clicked the lighter and I was pulling as he had pulled, not too hard, not too soft, just right. I had expected the foil on my lips to taste like something, but it tasted like nothing. I had expected the smoke to smell like something, but it smelled like nothing. I had expected the high to alter me in some profound and mystifying way, but the effect was underwhelming and anticlimactic. Mostly, I felt clear-eyed and levelheaded, disappointingly so. “Not bad,” I said anyway. The only thing that was unexpected was the sudden sense of fondness that I had for Duncan Dioguardi, good coach that he was, and, dare I say, good friend. Sure, I barely knew him; sure, we had had different upbringings; but we had shared something on that ride down Route 15, and we were sharing something now, within his home, which he had welcomed me into, and in this way, yes, I could consider him a friend. The passenger who had remained only in the port, browsing the trinket shops, delighting in duty-free, would never have known this subtle but essential detail. Just as he would never have known that there was indeed a distinct smell hovering in the room, of the Chore Boy being cooked alive, not dissimilar to the odor when the plumbers had come through the subdivision, soldering the water lines, the new recruits watching them with envy and admiration.
That spring, my dear old acting teacher came to my rescue by way of a phone call, out of the blue, asking if I might be available to audition for a play that he was directing at the Apple Tree Theatre. “So wonderful to hear your voice again,” he said. He said that he had always remembered me fondly from those Sunday classes years earlier—Intro to Acting I, followed by Intro to Acting II—where he would instruct a dozen teenagers in the world of make-believe. We played games, we played inanimate objects, we played adults. “There are rules even for make-believe,” he would tell us. Everything he said had the ring of truth and revelation. He had the empathy and kindness of the elderly. If there had been an Intro III and IV, I would have taken those, too, all the way up to C. I was always forlorn when my dad arrived to pick me up in his powder-blue Mercedes, the engine kept running. On a few occasions, my teacher had taken him aside and told him that his son had a future in theater. “That’s good to know,” my father had said, but the future he was envisioning was real estate.
Now my teacher was calling to say that he had never forgotten me, that I had made a strong impression on him, even at the age of fifteen, and that he thought I would be perfect for the role he had in mind. The way he spoke made it sound as if he had already come to a decision, and reading for the role was only a technicality. Still, I knew enough to know that nothing was ever guaranteed, that auditioning was only one step toward being cast, that a play was only one step toward a movie, and a movie was only one step toward fame. But that my teacher had sought me out after all these years was a sign that I was truly talented, that the hope I had been harboring was not false, and that I was living a life where the unexpected could indeed occur.
When I showed up for the audition a week later, I was disheartened to see that it was far from a foregone conclusion. I was one of twenty young men who had apparently all been students of my acting teacher, and all of whom he had apparently remembered fondly. We were perfect replicas of one another, dressed in khakis, hair blow-dried, walking around doing the same vocal warm-ups that we had been taught: B-B-B-B, T-T-T-T—no softened consonants here. In our hands we held headshots of our giant faces, lit to make us appear older, wiser, and better-looking than we actually were, and on the back were our résumés, numbering ten or fewer credentials, twice for The Mystery of Edwin Drood. In thirty years, the list of credentials would be longer and our headshots would be younger.
Things were running behind. The auditions were supposed to have started at ten o’clock, first come, first served, but it was noon and they’d made it only through twelve hopefuls. I was No. 19 on the list. I was anxious. I was hungry. I was taking time off from work. “A dentist’s appointment,” I’d told the foreman. “Do that on your own time,” he’d said. Instead of eating food, I smoked cigarettes, standing in the doorway, six feet from a sign that said NO SMOKING, exhaling out into the spring air, alongside my fellow actors who looked like me. We bantered, we joked, we lit one another’s cigarettes, we pretended we were not consumed with insecurity and competitiveness. To help pass the time we talked about classical and postmodern theater. If I had gone to college, I might have known what I was talking about. The walls around us were adorned with posters of plays past, announcing four-week runs to nowhere. Every so often the big brown door of the theater, with its single round pane of glass, something like a porthole, would swing open, offloading the previous aspirant, a carbon copy of myself, whose face conveyed, in equal parts, relief, defeat, and premature delusions of being cast.
When it was finally my turn, I was surprised to see that my acting teacher, whom I had remembered at best as middle-aged, and at most as old, was probably only in his early thirties. He had seemed tall back then, too, but now he was short and I was tall. He was standing in the
middle of a row of seats, with stacks of scripts beside him, and when I handed him my headshot he looked at me without the faintest recognition, but then when it suddenly became clear to him who I was and how much I’d changed in the intervening years he stepped forward and embraced me. I felt his empathy and kindness draped around my shoulders, expressed without reservation, and if the embrace had continued much longer I might have cried. He wanted to know how I’d been, and what I’d been doing, but since the auditions were running behind there was no time to catch up.
What was being decided here and now was whether I would be cast in a central role as a character who would be onstage for all three acts but had zero lines. I could not tell if this was a step backward or forward for my career. If I had to pick one, I would have picked backward. According to my teacher, it was forward. “He holds the play together,” he said. To this end, he needed to see how I “moved through space,” since moving through space would be the only thing I would be doing. So I took my place onstage, apprehensive beneath a single blinding spotlight, and waited for his direction, which was, simply, “Show me the color red.”
This was not something I had been anticipating. I had been anticipating, for example, being asked to mime pouring a glass of water, something I remember being quite good at. Without warning, we had entered the realm of symbolism and abstraction. We had entered game playing and fun. But all I could think of was the tremendous predicament of being asked to embody a concept. Was a color even a concept? If I had been fifteen still, I would have done what he asked, happily, without thinking twice. I would have done every color. Here’s fuchsia! Here’s cadmium yellow! There would have been joy in exploration. Now my brain felt calcified and literal, the effects of aging. I could think only of making a semibold choice, like lying on my back and moving interpretatively. But lying on my back would obscure me from my teacher’s vision. “If the audience can’t see you,” he would sometimes say, “then who are you doing this for?” I lay down anyway, the hard stage pressing against me, dust getting all over my khakis. The foreman would say to me later, “You got dirty from going to the dentist?” For lack of any other idea, I channeled the character of the foreman, and then I channeled the drywall, which was not a character, and I thought about smoking a cigarette, because in my world of make-believe the color red smokes cigarettes, which was what I did, lying on my back, eyes closed, moving conceptually, this way and that, blowing smoke into the yellow spotlight of blindness, and when I stood up and dusted myself off I had, most wondrously, been given the role.
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