All the Wild Children

by Josh Stallings

  I’m going to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts because I didn’t get into the Neighborhood Playhouse in NY, the good school. I still think I will make it as an actor. I suck. And I know it. But every once in a while I break through to moments of brilliance. In Royal Gambit I play Henry VIII. The directorberates me. Tells me to be better. Henry carries the play; it is about him and his wives. He is in every scene. Every scene.

  I live in rehearsals or the library studying Henry and his completely messed up family. I am hoping to internalize these facts so I can own who he is. Jochum is studying to be a model. He’s cute enough. Modeling school doesn’t have much homework, so he is partying his ass off. Babes are climbing in our window at all hours of the night. I am turning down pussy. Me. I am telling hot girls with questionable morals that they need to leave so I can study. Me. These acts of penile denial erase all doubt that I am serious about theater. This doesn’t make me good, just serious. So, somehow opening night, I nail it. I am Henry. Living, breathing, bigger than life. It is magnificent. It is the perfect drive that keeps my brother golfing. It is an hour long orgasm. It is being, with no past or future. It is serenity.

  “Why couldn’t you do that in rehearsal?” says the director, master of the backhanded compliment.

  About a third of the students are invited back for the second year. I am not one of them. They like me. But I suck. They ask me if I would consider coming back and training with the directors, maybe that is where my talent is. I spin and reel. I do not cry. I will not cry.

  I save face. I create a myth.

  I am trained from birth to make myths.

  History often needs revising to make a myth work, that’s OK. All part of the deal. So here is how it runs. I never really wanted to act. No. What I wanted... what I wanted was to direct. I only studied acting so I could better understand actors. If I squint my eyes just right I almost believe it.

  LOS ANGELES DRY SPELL

  Year two, American Academy of Dramatic Art. I am working with directors and filling in small parts in the productions. There are two of us not quite good enough for second year actors, me and Nick Cassavetes, son of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands. He will go on to direct films and act in a few. He has yet to live up to his birthright. But fuck it, he’s fifty and holding tight to his dream.

  I’m living in Pasadena’s Old Town, back before Victoria’s Secret and Banana Republic discovered it. It is populated by failing pawnshops, bars, tattoo parlors, aSalvation Army andthe constant stench of piss and vomit. I have a place in the Brookmore, a tenement building populated by drunks, losers, and pensioners. Jochum lives one floor above me. He is working in the suit department of J.C. Penney. Neither of us knows how tacky that is.

  Jochum is dating abig titted, hard core, main line Christian he met at the Santa Anita mall. After a rough night out that ended with him and me in a ghetto baseball field drinking tall boys and laughing, he tells me about trying to buy condoms. Big titted Christian girls apparently don’t believe in the pill or diaphragms or any other form of birth control that made it seem like they might possibly be “planning” to have sex. Sex was just something that happened. You weren’t a slut if you didn’t plan it. In the pharmacy Jochum slinks up to the druggist at the back, an older fella. “Excuse me, do you have condominiums?” he whispers.

  “What? Son you ain’t from here are you?”

  “Do you have condominiums?”

  “Hey Sheila! This foreign boy wants some condominiums?”

  Sheila has red hair and a hard body. “Conda... oh, I think he wants condoms, Trojans?” So much for stealth.

  I’m laying on first base laughing my ass off at the condom story. I’m looking up at the sky. I’m shit faced. We stumble home. Big titted Christian is up. She is pissed. She calls me the devil. Jochum is a saint, and I tempt him into wicked behavior. I don’t correct her. Because I don’t care what she thinks of me, and if being the devil gets Jochum laid, why not.

  This Bunny for Christ gets a wild plan. Find Josh a nice girl and he will settle down.

  Fair play.

  Enter the blonde. Damn she’s hot, in a bouncy edging towards perky kinda way. And it has been a while since Ingrid and I split. And I’m down south. And, did I mention she is hot?

  SoI pull a Goodbye Girl on her, I serve her dinner on the roof of our building. Set a card table next to the graveyard for old antennas. Burgers and fries and a bottle of cheap red wine. I am a classy motherfucker. She falls for it. I listen intently while she tells me about her life, but I don’t really hear her. Her father is a truck driver. She lives in a trailer park in the San Gabriel Valley. She is a White trash cracker. But I don’t see it because I want to fuck her.

  It isn’t masturbation that makes men go blind, it’s pussy, or the possibility thereof.

  “Do you mind living next to those people?” Most of my neighbors are Black. She is playing with a fry as she speaks. Running it over her lips.

  “What kind of music do you like?” I drop a non-sequitur. I want to be the fry. She’s driving me crazy.

  “Country, Daddy says it’s the only true American music.” Except for Blues, Jazz, Funk, a tiny voice screams. I tell it to shut the fuck up. Concentrate on the fry. On her full lips. On her tight ass. Keep it light. Breezy.

  I am driving her home. She is snuggled down in the seat, she keeps looking over coyly. I know she is a three date girl. I’m sure we will be making out in my car when I drop her off. Date two, she’ll let me grope her. And date three I’m in. This ritual will allow her to feel like she is really falling in love so it’s not dirty. I will play along because, well, um, pussy.

  From her eyes I already know we will be doing the horizontal mambo by Saturday night.

  And then she opens that pretty mouth.

  “I don’t know how they can afford a car like that.” She is looking out of my piece of shit Pontiac Tempest at a BMW next to us. It is driven by a Black yuppy and his girlfriend. He looks like a lawyer. I pray to God she stops speaking.

  She doesn’t.

  “They spend their welfare on whiskey and fried chicken. How can they afford that car? You think maybe he’s a pimp?”

  Fuck.

  Doesn’tshe know she is a caricature of a cracker? Can’t she hear that she is every honky villain in every Blaxploitation picture from Shaft to Superfly?

  I don’t say another word. I am stupefied. I drop her off without even a kiss. She will tell Bunny for Christ that I’m crazy, sick. I will tell Jochum she is a White trash racist idiot.

  “Butshe does have a fine ass.” He will say.

  “If only it wasn’t attached to that mind.”

  This is punch one on my road to celibacy. Punch two is Penny, little girl I know from up north. She wants me. Has for a year. I know it. She makes it clear. I don’t connect to her. It isn’t that she isn’t cute, we just had nothing in common. She calls me, she is going to San Diego State, pre-lawand hey we are having a dorm party. Jochum and I have moved into a bungalow court in Highland Park. The Bunny for Christ has moved on. Neither of us is getting any trim. So we go.

  It all gets a bit vague and syrupy from here. Jochum and I either did, ordid not, have sex with San Diego co-eds. We most definitely did sleep in the back of Jochum’s yellow AMC Hornet.

  We cure our hangovers with half a case of beer and return to East L.A. I’m a broke ass theater student. I’m living on Top-Ramen and Mickey Bigmouth, the only beer I know of that is cheaper than PBR. Penny shows up and offers to buy us all dinner. I know I’m not interested in fucking her. But I am hungry. She orders from a local restaurant. I wait in my shit brown Tempest. She comes flying out with bags of food. She dives in screaming for me to hit it. What some call dine and dash, she calls a date, so do I.

  After dining, she cracks a bottle of 151 she lifted from Johnny's liquors, and it is on. I’m naked on the floor crawling. I’m eating fettuccine in red sauce with my hands. I’m fucking Penny, her hair looks like a poodle sitting on her head.
I fuck her from behind so the poodle will stop looking at me.

  White light. Pain. Blood shot eyes. Pain. Guts a tumble. Pain. There is a fucking poodle in my bed. “Hi babe.” Penny is smiling. She is using my arm as a pillow. She thinks we are together. I want to vomit or chew my arm off and run out the door and become a monk. This shit is getting old even for me. After Penny leaves, I get drunk on the back porch of our bungalow. Rum makes nothing clearer, never does. I don’t like what’s happening to me. I feel me slipping away. I’m now that guy who fucks a girl he doesn’t like just to get his nut off.

  Punch three is inarguably the worst. Autumn is a good friend at American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Never anything more. I know she wants us to be, but I cannot see her that way.

  We were good friends. Autumn is wry and smart, she gets the joke. Her father is an agent of some sort. They have money. Over the fall we grow close. She buys me a tweed jacket. She wants to do more for me. We’re lying on her bed in Sherman Oaks making out. I’m horny, not an excuse, just a context. She starts to give me head. I move down to return the favor. She calls 69, Connie and Phil have a play date. If we were friends who liked to fuck, it would be fine. But I know she expects more, thinks this is the beginning of a relationship. I am a dick. I am ashamed. The next day I don’t call her. I don’t return her calls. I fuck up a good friendship just to get my nut off.

  Self-loathing takes hold of my throat and refuses to let go. I am tired of waking up next to women I have no interest in being with. I can’t do it any more. I have to take an action quickly, make a move or I will backslide. I pick up a steno pad and start writing…

  Universe if you have been listening ever, hear my plea. Here is the woman I am looking for, she must be artistic so she will understand my temperament, she should be musical to fill in my deficit in this area, she has to be OK with poverty, ‘cause theater don’t pay shit, she should be younger than me. She should be sexually adventurous and, oh yeah, she must be drop jaw beautiful. I’m not asking for a free deal here. What I am putting on the table is getting laid. I will not fuck another woman until it is some one I want to wake up with.

  - Sincerely Josh Stallings

  PRAYERS ANSWERED

  I am 20. At American Academy of Dramatic Art I’m training under Terrence Shank. Terrence is an intense little man. A hell of a director. Flamboyantly gay. A Scientologist. He smokes dark brown cigarettes. He invites me to see a production of Diary of Anne Frank he directed at The Colony, a ninety-nine seat theater in Frog-town.

  Jochum and I are sitting in the theater. Music starts up, a full song plays before the lights go down. In the dark, the sound of troops marching blends into artillery fire and riots. Out of the cacophony rises men chanting Sieg Heil. Lights come up. On stage stands the girl playing Anne Frank. She is tall, lithe, light sparks off her brown hair. She is breathtaking.

  I don’t watch the play.

  I watch the girl.

  When she smiles I notice the gap in her front teeth and I am a goner. Ever since I saw Jody Foster's gap toothed smile in Taxi Driver I have found a gap incredibly sexy. It’s the human chink in a perfect smile. It’s the flaw that makes every other part perfect.

  Anne Frank moves down stage left, staring wistfully out of a window in the fourth wall. She is less than ten feet from me. I can hear her breath. I can see her amazing brown green eyes, alive, both calm and electric at the same moment.

  At intermission I tell Jochum, “I am going to get that girl.” On a wall they have all the actor’s head shots. I point at the girl’s picture. Her name is typed out... Erika Croxton.

  “She’s cute. But how old is she?”

  “Do you care?”

  “If there’s hair, it’s fair.” Jochum is grinning, he doesn’t mean it, but one day he will have two daughters and I will bring this phrase back to haunt him.

  (Note: What you see below is crossed out, because it broke my one and only rule.)

  “She’s at least eighteen.”

  “Looks fourteen.”

  “It’s called acting.”

  “Or she’s fourteen.”

  “She’s...” The lights flash calling us back. All through the second act I am again caught by her. I mull her age, she must be eighteen... seventeen. Not fourteen. God couldn’t be that cruel. Erika, Erika Croxton. I roll her name around my mouth to feel it, taste it.

  I wish this was true, but I don’t think I cared much about her age. I was deep into my celibate time. So I suspect I hoped she was the one, if only so I could get laid. Don’t get me wrong, she was special, I’m just not sure I was.

  On stage Anne is in love with Peter. I hate him. I am jealous over a girl I don’t know and her fictitious attraction to an actor who may or may not be gay. After she takes a bow and the actors clear off I hang around hoping to meet her. I don’t.

  “Excuse me sir, um, I loved your performance.” He had played such a strong father on stage. Off stage he is a wonderfully flamboyant queen.

  “Really, like a strict daddy do you?” He not flirting, I don’t think. I think he’s fucking with me.

  “The, um, the girl, she played Anna, she was... How old is she?”

  “Anne Frank was thirteen during the time of the play.”

  “And Erika?”

  “Erika is eighteen and miles out of your league.” He makes it all sound like a British aristocrat speaking to a stable boy. Fuck him. I’m floating. Jochum and I head home picking up six pack of Mickey’s and a half pint of whiskey. (With the exclusion of the beer and booze, this is a total fabrication. I don’t know why I wrote it.)

  When school ends, they do not invite me back for the third and final year. Fuck them, Terrence asks if I want to work at the Colony. Long hours and no pay. “Yes. Hell yes.” I am going to be a big director now, fuck film, it’s all about the stage. My job is to do everything that no one else wants to do. One of my tasks is assistant directing. I sit next to Terrence in rehearsals, write down his blocking, while following the script to help actors out.

  “Line.” Dee Croxton, she played Anne Frank's mom and she is Erika’s real life mom. Dee is brilliant. I wonder if she can introduce me to her daughter? Would she even want me seeing her daughter? I’m digging through the script trying desperately to find where we are... “Line? Line?” She is not nice about it. She’s frustrated with my slowness.

  “Ummm, wait, ummm... ” My dyslexia is in full-bore overdrive. She demands the line. I dig into the alphabet soup of letters. My face reddens. I find my place. I mumble out the line. The mood on stage is broken. I took too long. They all think I’m an idiot who Terrence must be banging. If my dream wasn’t tied to this gig I might have walked. But after the American Academy rejection I couldn’t take another defeat.

  So I stuck.

  I busted my ass from early morning until late at night. I was first in and last gone. Sure that I wasn’t the smartest tool in the shed, I was committed to be the hardest working. I drove myself like a plow horse. I spent endless hours in the ceiling wiring lights. I was up a ladder setting gels then flying down it to sweep the stage. If this was how I was to pay my dues, I was going to pay them in record time. It wasn’t long before the actors started to like me. Respect was not even on the horizon, but I could live with like.

  The rehearsals ended and we headed in to tech. Against other’s warnings Terrence asks me to stage manage. Normally this is a hard job, but not ball breaking. This one is ball breaking. We are doing Martian Chronicles, adapted by the man himself Mr. Ray (ice cream suit) Bradbury. He is the Colony’s patron saint. He adapted Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 for them. Terrence has made these stories into epic theater. Huge cast, massive lighting and projection and sound work. A ball breaker.

  I will need help. I have a plan. I ask Dee for her daughter’s number.

  “Hi, this is Josh, um, I work with Terrence... Your mom, um, Dee told me to call. I’m, no, ah, we’re doing a Martian Chronicles revival. Dee, your mom, she’s in it... but you know tha
t, shit... it is... um, OK, OK… I need, I mean we need... Can you run one of the projectors?”

  “Sure.”

  “Sure, you will?”

  “Sure. I’ll see you Thursday for tech.” I hang up the phone with a semi-permanent grin on my face. Erika Croxton is going to be in a small booth with me for the run of Martian Chronicles.

  “Cue sound 27... Sound 27 go… Cue projection 18… Projection 18 go.” As stage manager I have more lines than any of the actors. “Cue lights 34... Lights 34 go... Lights 34? Go. Lights?” On stage light 34 doesn’t come on. For lighting we use cheap household dimmers and zip cord running to coffee cans with floods in them. They tend towards self-destruction. Teresa is in the lighting booth above me, talking into he headset, “The pot for the red special is spitting sparks!”

  “Fuck. Switch to Blue 13 and move on... Sound 28 cue and go!… Projection go with 19! Go with 20!”

  I am in the booth sweating a river. I am handling crisis after crisis. Erika is sitting next to me. I think she must have a date after the show. She is wearing a long wool skirt and tall high heeled fuck me boots. And fuck her, I want to. Instead I say, “Cue projection 54... Projection 54 go...”

  At the cast party closing night, Erika and Teresa and me lie on the floor laughing. Erika talks about some boy she’s dating. I hate him. I haven’t met him. I hate him anyway.

  A few weeks later we start rehearsals for The Lady’s Not For Burning. I am grinning when I discover Erika is playing the ingénue. On breaks, we talk comfortably. I enjoy her company. She makes me laugh and smile. I can’t imagine what she could see in me. Her best friend and her ex both live in Malibu. I can’t compete with money. But I try.

  I take her to lunch at Francisco’s over on Figueroa. I’m shit assed broke. I have no idea why I've asked her to lunch. I order a small side salad and feign non-hunger. She orders the cheapest sandwich on the menu. She doesn’t seem to take note that I have to count out change to pay the bill. We both leave lunch hungry. I don’t care. She makes me not care about a lot of things.