“Can I be honest?” I said to her, now mimicking her head tilt. “I thought the voice was a little offensive. It was so over-the-top.”
“Oh my god! Totally! I totally feel that. But you don’t have to do that voice. You don’t have to do that at all. Luis really wants everyone to make this their own.” There’s that fucking phrase that tricks actors time and time again. Anytime someone tells you to “make it your own” what they really mean is “read my mind and figure out what I can’t articulate.” But at the time I thought maybe it indeed meant “make it your own,” so I folded and said that I would read the role of James and really try to put my own spin on it.
I read and sang all my Ash material first. It went well. Better than well. It was great. I sang the hell out of it. I think the reading was appropriately cheesy and earnest, and the whole team seemed happy, excited even. Then I had a little break while they read other parts, so I had a moment to work on this James material. As I read it and reread it, I could see where there was some room to get away from the “Hollywood” from Mannequin stereotype. I could make this funny without getting myself blacklisted by GLAAD. I was feeling better about it, but I still wanted that other part.
At this point, because James was part of a duo, they paired us up and asked us to read with a partner. Mine was a very small, very beautiful young woman named Lauren Kling. She was probably a foot shorter than I was but made up for it with her hair, which was all blown out, teased, and piled on her head in a sloppy but sexy updo. She looked like she had just had sex in the back of a car after prom—in the best possible way. We read the scene together and we got laughs; we just sort of clicked. After we read, Luis told us how great we were, and then he asked me, “Andrew, you’ve seen the cartoon, right?” I knew exactly where this was going, but I couldn’t stop it.
“Yes, I have.”
“Great. So you know James has a pretty specific way of talking, right?”
You mean like that old queen on I Love Lucy who keeps saying, “Well, Mrs. RIIIICAAAARRRDOOOO!”
“Yes, I think I know what you mean.”
“Do you think you could do it again with more of that in there?”
You mean sell myself and my people down the river and act like Longtime Companion or The Normal Heart never happened? Like Stonewall wasn’t a thing? Like Harvey Milk didn’t exist?
“Sure, I can do that.”
We read the scene again, and I made a split-second decision to just give them what they wanted. They wanted “Just Jack” penetrating Liberace, and I was going to give it to them. I regretted it the second we started, but the gay train had left the offensive ass station. The worst part of all was that I was really good at it. The room was doubled over in laughter and applauded when we finished. Lauren looked at me as we walked out of the room, “Well, we booked this gig,” she said.
And she was right. We got called the next day with all the information about dates and money and contracts. The thing about getting a yes after getting ninety-nine nos is that it is exciting. It’s a win. It might not be exactly the win you wanted, but it’s still a win. It’s like when you get a $5 prize on a $1,000 scratch ticket. You’re not a total loser. And I was straight-up financially destitute at this point. This was a big win wrapped in a potentially embarrassing bow.
A week or so later, I was rehearsing at Radio City Music Hall every day. Walking through that stage door in the morning never got old. I felt fancy, fancier than I deserved to feel given the project. But Luis and his team really worked hard to make us feel like we were telling a story and playing real people instead of cartoons. As far as I can recall, the plot of Pokémon Live! went like this: Our hero, Ash, and his friends, Misty and Brock, have to go searching for Ash’s missing Pokèmon and best friend, Pikachu. Still with me? Pikachu has been captured by a villain named Giovanni and his two hilarious henchpeople, Jessie and James. (That’s where I enter.) There’s action and laughs and lots of singing and dancing. The emotional stakes were high, my friends. Life or death for little Pikachu!
The cast, myself included, all started to drink the Pokèmon Kool-Aid. When you are in rehearsal with no audience, you start to lose track of what’s actually funny or good. You make one another laugh, you build one another up, and it’s all necessary to create a show. The Broadway director Jack O’Brien calls them “Equity Laughs.” But usually you are in for a bit of a rude awakening when you get in front of your first audience. It’s like trying at dinner to explain to your spouse something hilarious that happened at work. It usually doesn’t land. He doesn’t know who Karen from accounting is. It’s not funny that she fell in the Xerox room. He finds that story sad.
Our rude awakening happened a little sooner. Throughout the rehearsal process, we had been rehearsing in our cute workout clothes, looking very much like ourselves. Then came the day that reality appeared and smacked us all in the face: our final costume fittings. My smack came in the form of a purple bob-length wig and a white jumpsuit. I remember looking in the mirror and thinking, I can’t go through with this. I cannot be seen on stage in this costume. But it was too late for that. I was in too deep. And to be fair, no one had been spared. The entire cast looked like assholes.
The one consolation was that Pokémon Live! was actually well received. The show was nearly sold out at Radio City for every performance—a testament to the popularity of Pokémon—and our time performing there flew by, particularly because the schedule was so brutal. We did four shows a day, most days, which meant we never got out of costume. We just toweled off the sweat, reapplied our makeup, and did another show. It was tough. But six thousand enthusiastic kids in the audience made it easier.
The real struggles began when we hit the road for our mini-tour. We were playing both Broadway touring houses and huge arenas usually reserved for sporting events or major concerts. When we would get to these venues, we would often play to houses that were only a third full. It was still a lot of people, but three thousand people in a nine-thousand-seat arena looks very sad. And we were generally so far away from the audience that we couldn’t hear if they even existed.
We never knew what to expect when we arrived in a new city. We played either Broadway touring houses or huge concert venues. I remember one day in particular, we were performing at the Indianapolis State Fair Coliseum, which was used for concerts, and also for the Ice Capades and Junior NHL games. (That’s hockey for you non-sports folks.) This meant that the floor of the arena was made of ice, and when shows such as ours came through, they would lay plywood boards over the ice and set up seating on top for the audience. Backstage, however, they did not lay plywood over the ice. Instead, they just created pathways so that the cast could get to the stage without slipping. It was cold and treacherous to walk off the strict path we were given. I saw more than my share of castmates bite it on that ice because they didn’t listen. Not this guy though! I value my coccyx!
One night, I remember sitting on top of a storage crate with one of my castmates, Heidi. She was wearing a truly unfortunate orange wig styled into a high side ponytail, a crop top, Daisy Duke shorts, and suspenders. I was in my full James drag, and we were huddled together, wrapped in a blanket. We sat in silence for a long time, listening to the sound of Pokémon Live! play out on stage for the two hundredth time. And without saying a word to each other, we just started crying. Just like my summer at the Theater Barn, I suddenly felt so far away from New York. From Zuzanna and our evenings out. From the life I had managed to create for myself there. There was nothing to do at that moment but cry. And drink.
We boozed it up like idiots on that tour. We would finish our show and then just hit it hard almost every night. We were young, we had enough money to make us dangerous, and we were bored. We would shut down the bar at every hotel we were staying in, and then continue the party in our hotel rooms, much to the horror and annoyance of the other guests. I’m not proud to say this, but I will
admit it, Pokémon Live! was the first time I experienced a blackout from drinking. If you have never experienced a blackout, it’s not something I recommend. You literally lose time in a way that is very disorienting the next morning. It’s strange to think that the period of time I was trying to black out was my time on stage and that the time I actually blacked out was my free time.
And look, it wasn’t all terrible. I was working with great people—really kind, fun people—and I was grateful for the job. I’m still grateful for that job. It kept me afloat for a long time and led to some really great opportunities after the show closed. I never got to have brunch with Bebe Neuwirth, nor was I cast on Days of Our Lives, but I did end up doing a lot of voice-over work. However…the daily humiliation of playing that part, in that costume—knowing that I was selling myself short and playing a gay clown for the amusement of everyone in America—was hard. Harder than I was willing to admit. There’s a fear as a gay actor that once you play a gay part, or in this case, the cartoon depiction of a gay part, you will be typecast in that role forever. And while the stakes were low on this particular production and no one knew who the hell I was, I was young enough to worry that maybe playing one-dimensional gay characters was going to be my future. Plus, I felt like I was doing a disservice to any gay kid who saw that show and thought that’s how we had to behave. Like we had to play the fool, be the punchline.
The whole thing made me sad. But I learned an important lesson during Pokémon Live!: I wasn’t going to put myself in that position again. I was going to be better about saving my money so that I didn’t have to take a job I didn’t want in order to survive. I also wasn’t going to demean myself or the gay community just to get a laugh. I would gladly play gay parts, but the laughs would be on my terms. In reality, I wouldn’t play another gay role for over ten years, when I was cast on Girls, but I certainly turned down a lot of auditions for stuff that didn’t sit well with me. We all have our line, and I learned where mine was early in my career, and I am grateful for that. There would be no more gay clowning, no more compromising my self-esteem, and no more purple bob wigs.
By the way, I still can’t tell you what the fuck Pokémon is about.
Party Monsters
As we said good-bye to our teens and embraced our twenties in the city, Zuzanna and I made the bold choice to party like we were already well into our fifties. When we weren’t closing Rose’s Turn or processing a bizarre show at Stingy Lulu’s, we liked to sit and drink wine for long stretches of time while talking about movies or books or things happening in New York. When we ran out of those things to discuss, we would land on our favorite topic: ourselves. But even narcissism has its limits. Eventually we would get bored with ourselves and go out into the world and act our age. We were in New York City, and if 200 Cigarettes had taught us anything, it was that there were experiences to be explored and adventures to be had. We would sensibly research “clubs” and see where the cool people were going.
We tried Tunnel. It was very crowded and very loud. Zuzanna and I ended up getting locked in a cage with strangers for what seemed like an hour and were forced to dance until someone let us out. I think it was supposed to be an honor to be locked in the cage, but it didn’t feel like one. Instead it felt like…well, it felt like we were locked in a cage.
Next up was Twilo. It turns out the night we went to Twilo, everyone was at Tunnel.
There was the second incarnation of the Limelight. It was mostly gay men, which was fun for me but less fun for Zuzanna. We ended up just walking around and shouting at each other, “It’s so weird this used to be a church!” The weirdest part was that it still looked like a church. It’s like if all of a sudden Our Lady of Lourdes in Omaha started hosting raves after midnight mass. It was excitingly sacrilegious.
We attempted to roller-skate at the Roxy. Zuzanna had grown up ice-skating, but it turns out ice-skating and roller-skating require two very different skill sets. And I was rusty from the days of grade school skating parties at Skateland in Omaha. We managed not to break anything or majorly embarrass ourselves, but ultimately we didn’t last long.
We went to a big, sloppy party at the Bowery Bar. It was mostly filled with young, douchey finance guys and girls who looked like they worked in advertising. A lot of Brians and Ashleys. I accidentally put my cigarette out on a man as we were trying to make our way to the bar. After some shouting and sweaty apologizing, we figured we should probably leave the premises before we were asked to.
To try something a little further afield, Zuzanna took me to a hip-hop club in Harlem one night. She was very popular there, I was not. Although a number of people thought I was Ryan Reynolds circa Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place, so that was fun for me.
And then there was the night I dragged her to the Cock in the East Village. She had in town from Indiana a high school friend who had just recently come out. I thought taking him to the most aggressive gay bar in the city might be fun for him. He ended up getting his wallet stolen while getting a blow job in the back room. But at least he got a blow job.
We would attempt these excursions a couple times a month with varying degrees of success. We would put on our “clubbing looks,” which were mostly mismatched, all-black outfits that were either too tight or too big. We’d venture out to brave lines, excessively loud music, and $10 vodka sodas (which were outrageous at the time and in my mind still are). We’d force ourselves to dance about until finally one of us would look at the other and say, “Are you ready to go?” Then we would go find a pizza place or a diner and wrap up our evening with a heavy bedtime snack and one of those long conversations about life that you only seem to have in your twenties. Finding the right club for us was starting to feel a lot like dating. We just weren’t meeting the right ones. We needed a new strategy.
One day Zuzanna came home from school and told me about a hot new party she’d heard about. It was at a club called Mother in the Meatpacking District, which at this point was not what it is today. It was certainly better than it had been in the seventies, but there wasn’t a Stella McCartney store or a Dylan’s Candy Bar yet. It was still a neighborhood that processed meat during the day and got awfully quiet at night, with the exception of prostitutes and drug dealers. It seemed dangerous, like one of the few neighborhoods in Manhattan untouched by gentrification.
Once a month Mother hosted a “fetish night,” and Zuzanna had heard that it was a lot of fun. It seemed unexpected and weird and incredibly different from our mainstream club outings. Maybe that was what was missing. Maybe we just needed a Fetish Night! It was there that we ran into our first problem: What was our fetish? The postcard advertising the party said, “Leather, Rubber, and All Kinks.” Did we have a kink? Could I get into rubber? We needed help planning this outing.
A couple years after I moved to New York, a childhood friend of mine, Randi—the one who also happened to be my prom date two years in a row—moved to New York, too. When we were kids she was the most beautiful, most talented person at the Emmy Gifford Children’s Theater. She was funny and clever and she sang with vibrato, which put her light-years ahead of the rest of us. She also had an aggressive naiveté about her sex appeal that was shocking to adults but impressive to her peers. Adults at the theater used to call her “Lolita” behind her back. We would hear this and, not fully understanding what it meant, assume it was a compliment.
Since I’d moved to New York, I’d sort of lost track of her, and then one year she magically appeared in Manhattan as if she had belonged there all along. She’d had some rather colorful jobs since I’d last seen her, including lingerie model and phone sex operator, and while she was rather new to the city, I knew that she’d be able to help us figure out our “kinks.” Randi wisely suggested we head to the East Village and shop the stores on St. Marks Place for inspiration. We marched into Trash and Vaudeville at St. Marks and Second Avenue ready to get our kink on. We all immediately found costumes�
��or just clothes depending on how you live your life, no judgments here—but it turns out that my love for leather jumpsuits reaches its limit at six hundred bucks. We had to come up with a plan that wouldn’t cost us all of our savings accounts.
We decided that we could just find suggestive T-shirts and go from there. Fetishes are about attitude, we decided based on nothing, so we would just internalize our fetishes and live them for all to see. Zuzanna found a tight black shirt with a zipper cutting across the bust line that showed off her cleavage. The effect was truly obscene and exactly what she was looking for. I found an even smaller T-shirt that had the words HOOKER 2000 printed across the front in bright pink letters. I figured that looking like a twink-y rent boy would probably suffice. I also bought a pair of fashion glasses just for good measure. I guess I thought I would be a bookish twink-y rent boy? I don’t know. Randi didn’t buy anything and we didn’t question her. She seemed way ahead of us already as usual.
The night of our big Mother outing came, and we all changed into our looks as we slammed glass after glass of the cheapest white wine we could find in the largest bottle possible. (Thanks, Cavit Pinot Grigio and the folks at Town Wine and Spirits who never carded me!) I tried to make my hair as River Phoenix–like as my Murray’s Pomade would allow, and Zuzanna put hers in pigtails, which seemed correct. Randi just applied more eyeliner and removed her bra from under her tiny tank top. We were ready to go!
We didn’t trust ourselves to find Mother on foot since we weren’t familiar with the Meatpacking District and we didn’t want to get mugged before getting to at least dance a little. Also our looks didn’t seem subway-appropriate, so we decided to splurge on a cab. We pulled up to Mother, and there was only a small line outside. (I should mention that we never nailed “timing” on any of these outings. If the party started at 11 p.m., we would arrive at 11:30 p.m., thinking that a half hour was probably enough time for things to really get going. The rest of the club would arrive at 2 a.m., usually when Zuzanna and I had had enough. We never learned our lesson.)
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