ACTOR: A NOVEL IN THREE ACTS

^ A Novel Submitted to the Faculty of San Francisco State University "ZvlH In Fulfillment of Z^C,CU) the Requirements for the Degree

Masters

In

Creative Writing

By

Mitchell Duran

San Francisco, California

Spring 2019 Copyright by Mitchell Duran 2019 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read Actor: A Novel in Three Acts by Mitchell Duran, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master in Creative Writing and Fiction at San Francisco

State University. ACTOR: A NOVEL IN THREE ACTS

Mitchell Duran San Francisco, California 2019

Sanford Meisner, one of the world's most famous acting teachers of the last 20“ century, inspired by Lee Strasberg, Konstantin Stanislavski, and Uta Hagen, a teacher of The

Method, once said, “For one to act and act well, one must live truthfully under the given circumstances.” For Ave Gardener, the lead protagonist in my debut novel Actor: A

Novel in Three Acts currently at 110,000 words, this creed is more than just craft to Ave

Gardener. It is a way of life.

At age five, Ave’s once famous mother, Edie, put him on the stage. Always overbearing yet instructive, Ave, by the influence of his mother, is admitted and eventually graduates from Juilliard, one of the top acting conservatory’s in the country.

To escape his mother’s influence, Ave moves from New York to Chicago, the land of improvisation and gritty theatre to become his own actor. After restaurant jobs and toothpaste commercials, Ave catches a break at Steppenwolf Theatre where he lands an integral part in Sam Shepard’s True West. Edie, the same night Ave hears the news, has an accident, forcing him to go to her new home in San Francisco to care for her. Ave, through the contact of his father, a famous talent agent in LA, meets the infamous director Jules Sables. A mixture of Scorsese, Julian Schnabel, and Tarantino,

Ave lands the roll in his new movie. Ave has to take it. Edie is crushed. One night, as

Ave celebrates without her, Edie, drunk on her roof, realizes that she can’t live for her son to succeed and ends her life.

Ave, mourning the loss of Edie, goes on location for the film anyways.

Immediately, Ave is dropped into the dark, solipsistic, egotistical world of Hollywood, far different than anything he ever experienced at home, in school, Chicago or San

Francisco. Ave does whatever it takes to be noticed and respected, from out-acting to over-schmoozing to sabotage. When he finds out one of the leads is contemplating leaving the project due to money complications, Jules asks Ave, What would you do for your art? With Oscar rumors already buzzing around the film, as well as the pressure from his superiors and peers, Ave finds himself forced to make a decision between his old artistic moralities and a new level of recognition

I certify that the above synopsis of Actor: A Novel in Three Acts is a correct representation of the content of this novel. PREFACE AND/OR ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I first want to thank my parents. Mom, your eternal support is always with my work and

Dad, your generosity and awe imbibe this story and all the others I try to tell and show with wonder. Also, I’d like to thank my stepfather Rob who always had a few right words of encouragement. I want to thank my peers in workshop, all of my professors along the way, and my thesis advisor Carolina De Robertis, a fervent light whose guidance and conversation took this story to a level I never thought possible.

VII TABLE OF CONTENTS

Act I

Act II

Act III

VIII 1

Actor: A Novel in Three Acts

By

Mitchell Duran

That night in Chicago, before the Steppenwolf audition, before everything changed for the better, worse, and back again, was like any other night talking to Edie.

Being my mother, she always had some kind of drink near her. Double Sapphire

Gin with Fentiman’s and a slice of lime was her poison. I could smell the juniper through the phone, feel the tickle of the sodas bubbles as they popped over the ice and into the caverns of my forever frozen nose. I think Edie still had the old highball glasses from

New York, the ones Dad and her used for the actor parties they were always throwing. I remembered their weight and the thickness of their ridged glass in my small, five-year- old hands. She claimed to have kept them after her and Dad moved to LA. She may have lost them though after Edie moved to San Francisco after the divorce. I was afraid to ask. 2 “I can’t go back to New York after everything Dean’s done to me,” Edie had told me. “See everyone, tell them the same old sob story. No, no. I am exiled.”

That, was Edie.

I had yet to visit her in San Francisco, so she had probably gotten rid of them. I tried my best not to bring up the past. Whenever I did, be it a memory of a place or a person or a line from one her roles, her breath would shudder, almost crack as it exited her body in a gasp. After our fights about leaving New York and me moving to Chicago, it didn’t feel right trying to see her. We sure as shit we could talk though.

If it were past her third cocktail or her fourth, Edie would skip the tonic all together and pour the Sapphire over ice. The sound was soothing and violent, like a sudden summers downpour. Listening to her talk, mostly at me, there was a drawl she’d take on, a syrupy croon that could just as soon - if I called it on her - turn into the sharpest dagger.

I drank whiskey on the rocks with lemon during our talks. Didn’t matter what it was: Evan Williams, Jim Beam, or Old Crow. Edie had that luxury of choice because she had money. Divorce without a pre-nup will do that. I didn’t want to see any of that, even when the money was offered to me from either side. To me, unearned money, unearned credibility, especially after New York and Juilliard, was a crutch. The idea of the top ladder being at my fingertips just because I popped out of that mom rather than that mom never seemed fair to me, so I denied any hand out after all that had been given to me.

What I needed, I would provide.

Staring out the window, I gazed at the white translucent ice slick on the street. 3 I was about to mention it to Edie, when she began to stammer, “You know, you know, you know that in this...”

I remember pushing my pointer finger into the growing frost; felt the cold, and made two quick faces at myself in the windows reflection: a big smile and then instantly, a deep frown.

“I know what?” I asked, Edie still stammering on the other end of the line.

“I’m saying it darling!”

I knew what was coming, but I humored her because maybe she would say it in a different way, a new way. She was an actress after all.

“In the acting business, success breaks down into two factors: who you know and luck.” She let her words linger for a moment then filled it with a sharp crack of a lighter.

The sound echoed in what she called her reading and drinking room. I listened to her drag on her Pall Mall cigarettes and then cough once, twice, three times away from the receiver. I took the phone from my ear and took a drink, slurping loudly so I didn’t have to listen to all that pain inside of her. The bitter lemon and ice struck the front of my teeth, failing to distract me.

I didn’t say anything to her about the coughing at first afraid that would bite, tell me to mind my own business, but she kept hacking. They sounded deep and dark, like the wings of an old theatre too cheap to afford stage lights. I heard another hiss of her dragging her Pall Mall, then the light tap tap of it as she sprinkled the ash somewhere. I listened to the base of her glass thunk on the table. Edie cleared her throat and I envisioned black lung cancer, choking asthma, that little hole they put in your throat from those scare commercials on TV. She knew all those repercussions. Edie was a grown actress. She knew how to take care of her body, or at least she did when she was working, which hadn’t been for a very long time.

I got the courage after one hard cough and told to her get up from her drink and get a glass of water before I called an ambulance.

“So dramatic,” she sighed sitting back down with a glass. “Oops. Look what you made me do...I spilled on my jammies a little.”

“What’s up with that Mom?” I asked.

“What’s up with what?” she retorted. “You know I don’t know your lingo.”

“I can feel your spit coming through the receiver,” I said with a half-laugh.

“So vulgar. Such a young man.”

“I learned it from you.”

“Aging is unfair,” sighed Edie. A vague answer, but it’s the best I would get.

“Even more so when you’re a woman in this business.”

I paused, and then asked her, “Are you sick?”

Instantly I was embarrassed for my sentimental, soap opera delivery.

“Jesus Christ. Did you get cast in Days of Our Lives?”

“Jesus Christ Superstar yourself Edie. I’m just making sure you’re alright.”

“You know I hate it when you use my first name like that.”

“Why?” 5 She took the receiver away from her mouth so I couldn’t hear her expel one of her deep dramatic sighs. When she was finished, she airily pivoted. “I’ve been feeding my parrots on the roof of the house. I got a little cough in my chest.. .snoop.”

We laughed, drank, and finished laughing.

“So there’s who you know and luck,” I said trying to get back on track. “What about talent then EdieT

I only ever used her first name to annoy her, a feigned ploy to show to her I was serious. I never found out why hearing her first name was like nails on a chalkboard.

Maybe it made her feel like a little girl or how her father addressed her when she had done something bad. Maybe Dean ahd called her that when he was mad at her, which was always. Edie kept certain things like that private, her secrets she called them. She knew I wasn’t serious.

“Oh talent...” Edie began. “You’ve known what that is since I first put you on the stage and you roared for me.”

I felt the warm fuzziness of that costume and how the whiskers were made from straws we had stolen from the cafe down the street from our apartment in New York.

Outside my window, Chicago was quietly getting beaten, like it was used to, by another winter’s storm.

I remember wondering what was outside Edie’s window, what she saw, what, truly she may have been feeling.

That night, my ice-glazed window was frosted over, reflecting the worn tangerine lampposts and the yellow traffic light into fractured multitudes. Yellow was the color of 6 slowing down, which was all I had felt like I was doing after getting out of school where the freedom to audition, to experiment, and to act in almost anything I wanted without restraint had been. Released and out in the world where there were thousands and millions like us, the excuse of a higher education was no longer my free pass to do what I had always done. Like the yellow light soon to be red, I had to slow down, I had to wait, forced to stop for sometimes months at a time. I worked on my own, memorized monologues, joined scene study groups, all that, but there was no substitute for the real thing in front of an audience. That’s where the risk was.

I had gotten lucky with Tim’s - my agent and longtime accomplice of Edie’s - call.

“I know its last minute,” he had told me, “But you’ll handle it. You always do.”

He had forwarded me over the side and there it was, crisp and ready to work, on my lap. There were three pages with maybe a page monologue for myself from Sam

Shepard’s True West. Steppenwolf was putting the play on that season for their 2015 summer season. With my low-ball of whiskey rocks sitting on the windowsill next to me,

I observed the lines that I basically knew already from playing the part before in high school. I had been acting since I was five years old. If I hadn’t done Shepard yet, I hadn’t acted.

Edie had changed the subject and was talking about her parrots, procrastinating like she did when she didn’t have some grand answer to give me.

“These parrots of mine Ave,” Edie yammered. “They have talent, natural .” 7 I was curious if Edie would entertain my question or just hang up the phone.

Talent was such a subjective quality, yet it yielded such power. I think the word just pissed her off - TAL - ENT. The word was clunky, ugly, but on the tip of the tongue of every high-powered director, producer, or studio head in the country. It was a word the philistines used to sound like they were a part of the artists club. Talent was a two word syllable that said somebody was working with some kind of craft, but the speaker didn’t know what.

Then, like a shotgun blast, out of whatever haze she had fallen into, Edie stated,

“Talent is the gate keeper, the excuse, the fear but, don’t get me wrong, it protects the business. Without talent, there would be a million more of us running around, ruining our lives for glorified campfire stories. Acting, theatre, Hollywood - they all need talent because that’s the easy way to tell someone who isn’t committed to quit. If they listen to whoever is telling them that, great. The world needs fewer actors. We can only do so much. To entertain is to question, to confront, to address, to reveal, but the voyeurs of art, the leeches of theatre, think that has something to do with talent.” Edie cleared her throat and took a drink. “It has to do with the actor knowing what choices to make in the given circumstances of the character they are, no matter the consequences in and out of the theatre. No danger, physical or social, no drama. Choice begets talent.”

“Fine, but that’s three things,” I chided. “Who you know, luck, and choice.” With each one, I flicked out a finger to myself: pointer, middle, and ring. “You said there was only two.” I couldn’t see it, but I imagined a smile, like the ones that materialized whenever

I would dance for her as a kid or do the Belushi eyebrows at her. Mom’s smile would start to curl at the left comer and then slowly the right until finally the white of her teeth would beam. I’d arc one eyebrow, holding it still and firm with a crazy look of comedic suspicion in my eyes. If I did Belushi’s move right, if I brought one down, nailed the three count, and got the other up just in time, Mom’s laugh, a semi-shocked take over of her entire face and body, face flushing, head shaking, fresh tears down her cheeks, would topple out of her. I couldn’t help myself, always wanting to tickle her further, so I’d rocket my brows back and forth until her wild hands, waving around in the air, demanded

I stop.

Mom’s laughter was louder than any applause I ever received.

“Yes,” Mom agreed. “There’s choice, who you know, and luck, but you’ll also need a pretty face.” She let out a ruptured groan and murmured something under her breath. It sounded like she was pleading with someone in the room. “So I guess there are four things is what I am trying to say.. .excuse me.”

A hard gust of wind pushed the lamppost outside on the street making its orange glow stutter. For a second, as the stop light switched color, the entire block blacked out.

“Are you alone Mom?” I asked.

The wind passed and there was light again.

“Of course I am,” she snapped. “No one visits except for Dean who only comes by when he’s up from Los Angeles checking on the house as he claims. Why wouldn’t I take care of it?” “Mom...” I started.

“He’s happy in the way a psychopath is happy: he maintains by a steady fill of vice. He got tired of mine, so he moved on and here we are.”

I listened to the rustle of her black satin jammie bottoms as she crossed her legs once, twice, and took a heavy sip of her gin.

“I’m just lucky he didn’t bring one of his LA bimbos around. Changing from the old guard to the new Ave.. .1 hope you never feel that sting.”

“I do too, but can we not go there right now.”

Ignoring me, Mom whined, “Oh, I just want to reach so badly for your cheek right now Ave. Take a picture and send it to me on the expensive phone your Dad bought you.”

“You have a flip phone.”

“Email it to me then!”

“Ok.”

“Do it now,” she ordered.

“Ok!”

“Let’s go over everything while I wait for your beautiful photo. So, you’ll need talent, interminable in its definition, always vaguely by the highest swinging nuts on the totem pole. Yes, yes, you’ll need to know your lines, hit your marks, and say yes even when you mean no to the director, the producer, all the rest! Burning bridges is easy when you don’t know your place in this big bad world.” 10 I nodded, taking a sip of my drink, and crushed the ice that had slipped between my teeth. I re-read a line on the audition side I didn’t remember ever seeing before. Was it a typo? With the bottom of my thumb, I rubbed at the word, wondering if it had been written in by a sharpie. The ink smeared. Had some intern done this as a prank?

“That’s right,” Edie reiterated. “Knowing your place also means knowing your time, which is why your father and I left New York with some semblance of dignity, rather than being a couple of old relics of pity.” She let out a disgusted sigh. “One must always be moving, Ave, even when you don’t want to. Opportunity does not wait. Don’t forget that. The train can leave the station at anytime, so always be on the platform.”

I cleared my throat and gave her my best nobleman. “I won’t Mother. I promise to never dishonor you.”

“Oh shut up you,” she cackled.

*

After high school, I stayed in New York like Edie had done her whole life. I had wanted to explore, I wanted to see other parts of the country, but her and Dean gave me no other option. Growing up in theatre, being surrounded by other actors and actresses, directors, produces, casting directors, and stagehands; I didn’t have the opportunity to know anything else. Like those poor kids in that documentary Jesus Camp, I was indoctrinated at a very young age. Business? I was terrible with numbers. Architecture?

The only thing I knew or cared to read was a script. Get into government? Artists only ever asked them for money. We never worked for them outright. 11 I was accepted to Juilliard my senior year at 17 through the recommendation of

Edie and my ability. I did a monologue from The Tooth of Crime and a scene from the same playwright with an actress that would later be killed on set from being fatally allergic to the toothpaste she was advertising. I knew it was a top school and a part of me being young and yearning for independence, wanted to at least audition at Cal Arts in LA or Yale in New Haven or even the Royal Shakespeare Academy in the UK, but my parents wouldn’t have it. They wouldn’t pay for anywhere else. They didn’t see the point.

“Julliard is the best conservatory in the country,” Dean told me every time I brought another school up. “And it’s where Edie went. They’ll know you there and that’s what it’s all about. Trust me.”

“Trust Dean,” Edie said. “He knows what he’s talking about seeing he’s off the stage now and on the other side of it.”

“I’m not like you Ave,” Dean continued. “You have talent and I see that I don’t in the artistic areas. You’re like your mother and whoever’s running everything over their now sees that, so trust us. On top of that there’s the legacy to think about, and money.

Anywhere else would be a waste of it. Time too.”

What could I do? Stay home and do.. .1 can’t even think of anything.

New York was a great place to learn and be sheltered while doing so, but the moment I no longer needed to be there, I tried to leave for Chicago. If I was going to be what I thought I was, I needed to leave. Edie threw a fit. She didn’t understand that everyone I met after Juilliard, auditioned for, work shopped with, knew me as Edie’s kid,

Mom’s kid. Like a shadow of a tree I couldn’t get out from under to be washed by the 12 golden sunlight of individuality, I couldn’t escape her. Even after I graduated, nothing but school performances on my resume, whomever I saw around New York would see my last name and say, “You’re Ave Gardener? Like Edie Gardener’s kid?” I’d reluctantly and hurriedly mumble a yes or a nod and ask if I could start reading, where I should enter from, anything to take the focus from her so to get back to me. So, I did the only thing I could do - 1 left and went to Chicago, a city she had never been to, where I would put just my first name, Ave, on my headshot. Where I would work without history.

Edie, of course, had something to say about it.

“If you want to make it like I once did and be good - cultivate your talent - nowhere else compares to New York.” She stated like she was stating the sky was blue or water was wet; an absolute. “Go to LA if you want to do pom for ten years or go to

Chicago to study improv, fooling yourself that spontaneity creates high art.”

“And San Francisco?” I’d asked.

“I came to San Francisco after your father dragged me to Los Angeles because this is where actors go to hide from the question all of us creative’s face - am I going to make it? Actors come here to procrastinate and die.”

I remember how she sobbed into the phone, pushing just to guilt trip me in staying there. “I can’t go back there,” Edie would cry. “Not after leaving everything like I did for Dean and then what he did to me.”

Edie had grown up in New York and started waitressing at 14. 13 “That work gave me real time,” she once told me when I was still at Juilliard bitching about a job I had taken at a diner. “Not just stage time, but time to study and create characters.”

She had gotten discovered in 78’ at 21 years old, the same age I was when I finally did move to Chicago. She was cast in the New York production of Sam Shepard’s

Buried child. From there, she was able to make a living off of her acting with relative fame. That time, she said, was when she became her true artistic self. She worked with

Dustin Hoffman, Streep, Denzel, and Anna Deveare Smith to name drop just a few.

“Everything changed after that for me,” she claimed. “I met everyone in the industry. It felt like being inside of a bomb that kept exploding. I met this person doing that and so-and-so starting this project.. .eventually meeting your father that eventually brought you. Everyone wanted me, until one day, they didn’t anymore. I don’t know if it was one thing or a million and I did everything from lose weight, to changing my hair, to, to.”

Edie would pause, inhaling quick gasps of thin, pained air.

“Mom?” I tried to say, but then she would, almost joyfully, laugh and cut me off.

“Isn’t it funny how people think that something new, something different comes with a guarantee of happiness?”

*

The first time I was ever on stage, I had been forced to.

My clearest memory is pixilated, rushed, sometimes the images mixed and overlapping like a kaleidoscope, forever coated with the acrid smell and visual mist of 14 manhole gas. Images like bulbous bellied men selling hot dogs on the street comer, their carts sputtering tepid brown water into the gutter. There are frames of hot, cherry red vixens on street comers, whistling and bending at any car window that would screech to a stop for them. Cigarette ash in watered down gin n tonics backstage; directors with comb over haircuts and too much makeup; jaded stagehands who just got into the theatre for the easy money and the girls, both of which they never got. I still see all these things and much more, sometimes forcibly when I need to be reminded of where I came from, where it all started, who I was before everything that came after.

I was bom in New York and we were living there the first time I stood on stage.

Edie’s career, something I was surrounded by but being so young, was professionally clueless about, was nearing its end. She was in her late 20’s and had struck fame with the

Shepard play. With the sudden ripple effect of notoriety in the papers and about town ten or so years before, all of it when I got into it all seemed to be waning for her. Fame, like peoples intrigue, like life, can’t help but move on.

She tried to do commercials, audition for movies if they were around, but she claimed to screen test horribly. It’s not my medium, she would say. I’m too big for that silver square, however big it is. It’s just not me. Dean then was pushing for the west coast, he a former stage actor turned budding agent for television and movies. Edie never let him live that down.

“You’re nothing but a middle man shaking hands, making deals with philistines and people who think Fruit Loop commercials are high art just because it makes them money.” 15 “Pays for your headshots, your audition clothes, and the roof over your head where you do your work.'"

“And I hate myself for it, every single day,” she hissed.

This particular argument was outside one of Edie’s opening nights at one of her small black box theatres she was playing in some back alley of Manhattan. I was five and she suddenly grabbed my hand and yanked me toward her body, illuminated by the white and red lights of the marquee overwhelming the block and us.

“Where are you two going?” Dad asked us over his shoulder, talking to one of the other actresses.

I put out my hand to reach for him, afraid and needing him to take me, but my arm was too short. He didn’t reach for me. His two big hands were playing with one of the actress’s earrings. The other was at his side, his fingers playing piano on his pants.

“I haven’t seen him all night and I want Ave to see where I work,” Mom snapped.

I pulled at her arm, wanting to stay near the excited sounds of taxicab horns and the strewn lights filling the apartment windows. Everyone was hugging each other and patting backs as they congratulated each other on the opening. I didn’t want to go back to the empty theatre. During the play, there had been the applause and the rolling laughter of the audience. One old lady sitting next to me had even pinched my elbow and asked, Isn’t this fun? I nodded, watching the actors, poised and stoic, painted by the multi-colored lights beaming down on them as they thrust their bodies about the space, filling the entire world around them with their voice and words. But, the show was over now and I knew, from being backstage with Edie after a few of her shows that there was nothing but the 16 grumpy stage hands putting away the furniture and the placid faced ushers as they went aisle to aisle picking up used playbills to use for tomorrows show. They didn’t say hello to me. They didn’t even talk to each other. There was only silence coupled with mean grunts and shuffles.

Another yank. “Mommy wants to show you this theatre. You’ve never been to this one. Would you like to see?”

“I don’t want to go!” I shouted.

“Jesus Christ, Edie,” Dad groaned as he flicked his cigarette out onto the street, letting the actress he had been fiddling with melt into the crowd. “You already made him sit through your show that was probably too much for him. He’s tired. Show him another time. Let’s go.”

Edie’s hand, creamy as soft serve when she was happy, hard as a turtle shell when she was enraged, squeezed mine. A meek warble quaked in my throat, but when she got up real close to Dean’s face, I pushed the sound down. I was afraid she would do the same to me.

Before Mom pulled me through the double doors of the theatre an ambulance rushed by. The flashing red and spinning flares above the car clashed with the blinding white light, seeming to ignite against the darkness on the street. The ambulance’s glare forced everyone to put up their hands. There was the shrieking echo of the alarm, bounding into the night air like frightened doves. Everyone immediately clapped their hands hard over their ears. I tried to do the same, but Edie had me. I was helpless. 17 The color of the space that filled the inside of the theatre was a faint off gray, unrivaled to the deep obsidian color of the entirely deserted stage. There was no way to tell how deep the darkness was. There were no objects on what I imagined to be a splintered, jagged wood, every inch ready with nails, glass, and needles. There was no way to give the stage size, depth, expanse, edge or even shape for I couldn’t relate it to anything. Mom drew me in and started walking me closer. I dragged my feet, the tips of my toes scraping along the carpet as the echoes of me shouting Mommy! Mommy!

Mommy! lunged from wall to wall. I was helpless to run, unable to break free from her grasp as I passed by empty seat after empty row, sometimes thinking I saw the faint outline of someone sitting and watching the scene unfolding before them. Another tug and my gaze whipped back toward the stage, a realm that spread wider and farther yet still void of any foundation, direction, or light.

I imagined myself on the stage but instead of it being bare, it was my room in our tiny apartment. I was frozen on my bed, staring at the dark, six-inch space between the closet door downstage. Transfixed on the tiny crack of mystery and terror, the shadows grew deeper and darker as they suffocated the rest of the room. Mom and Dad were gone without a goodnight, leaving me all alone with nothing and no one. Onstage, I was an umbra, cast in nothing but darkness, far, far away from any light.

Edie took a step closer to the stage, whisking me up towards it.

I kicked at her in the stomach with my heel and tried to scratch at her face. I even remember trying to crane my neck to bite her on the arm, but before I sunk my juvenile nubbins into her maple-scented skin, she bear hugged me, pinning my arms down. 18 “See baby,” Mom cooed. “This is where mommy works.”

I kept fighting with her holding me tight. My tiny, meek body writhed as it tried to break free like a fly in a spider’s web. My breath shortened and my muscles slacked as a squirm became a kick and a kick became a jab, then a prod, a poke, and finally a whimper. My entire body went limp and my chin slumped into the warm nook of her elbow. My eyes fluttered and my back pressed lightly against her hold as I panted. I saw we were just inches from the stage. The darkness was frozen, just as endless and never ending. That paralyzing fear of being alone in all that emptiness struck me again.

“Who didn’t turn on the ghost light?” Mom asked aloud. She reached out at something as I again started brawling around in her arms. “Oh knock it off already Ave.

You’re starting to get annoying.”

A click and the stage erupted with light. The darkness evaporated and was replaced by a euphoric explosion of illuminated white. I saw the strong bare footprint of one of the actors from before. There had been a dusty old hobo in the play that had twisted his face into funny contortions and stuck out his tongue. He’d made the old lady and I laugh. Right there he’d been standing! The bulb of the ghost light was like a diamond reflecting the purest rays of the sun in a million different directions. I tilted my head to see the giant rotund stage lights above me, each ones filter a deep orange, a hot pink, or a mellow blue. The stage became as I looked at the plush, burgundy curtains on stage left and right. All the way upstage, I could see the thick, brown ropes and the silver gears of the pulley system that dropped set pieces in and out. I was looking at the heart of the theatre, all of its inner workings. 19 “Ok Ave,” Mom said taking me from her arms and lifting me up, “Here we go.”

A subtle panic started to build. I looked down at the footprint and heard the old ladies laughter. On my soft cheek, the ghost light warmed my skin. I looked out at the empty seats and imagined everyone clapping and cheering for me as I stood there. They weren’t mean or shouting or pulling at me. All of them, each and everyone one, was so happy to see me, yet I hadn’t done anything. Slowly, I felt a tiny tremor in the pit of my stomach. I reached out for Edie again, taking the collar of her blouse. I managed to jump into her arms.

“Oh stop,” Mom snapped. “You’re going to rip it. You’re fine.

She placed me heel to toe on the stage. My knees began to shake. I tried again to jump back into her arms, but she held my tiny body forward. I was forced to look upstage

at the great ocean of black wood. The shaking waned as I noticed the dusty handprint, then lint from a costume, and a scratch from a set piece being dragged. I realized they

were all signs of every play and every performer that had ever been there. I was standing

in the stages past.

“Roar for me Ave,” Mom said taking a step away from me, her voice growing

distant.

“Mommy!” I shouted after her. I almost jumped, but when I looked down and saw

how high I was and how far away she was, I knew I’d never make it. “Come back!”

“Roar for me baby,” Mom said. “Then I will.” 20 I took in a quick breath of air. “Rarrr,” I said. There was a small vibration in my throat and the roar was immediately lost in the overwhelming grandness of the air around me.

“See a lion in your mind. See their sharp teeth as they spread their mouth wide when they let out a big roar. Do it like you do when you blow out your birthday candles.”

I squeezed my eyes shut while I inhaled from the soles of my feet. There was a pulse underneath me, like it had come from the stage itself, a brush of energy that then pushed all that air I had breathed in exploding from my mouth. My cheeks drummed as I felt my arms spread wide and my fingers curl inward like claws. The roar boomed over the seats, up toward the ceiling, and startling the chandeliers. After, my breath was soft, coming out in short puffs.

Tears invaded Mom’s eyes. The skin around them was dotted with black mascara.

Both of her hands here interlocked and pressed firmly to her chest. She was smiling.

“Beautiful Ave,” Mom said. “Now say - be or not to b e ”

I said the words, this time trying to have my words reach every seat and fill the

empty lobby. I tried to reach all the audience members that weren’t there and the people

out on the street from before. Like bubbling water that sits at a boil, the words ran

through me, and then the line was finished and there was nothing but the buzzing and

glow of the ghost light.

“What’s that mean?” I asked.

“I hope you find out one day,” she told me. “Come to Mommy.”

I leapt into her arms. 21 *

We talked that night before Steppenwolf like we did all the others not because I needed to, but because I wanted to.

She had frank advice and she was my mother, and as the tips of my fingers froze and my breath wafted in white gray clouds from my mouth in my one room apartment, the heat turned off because I couldn’t afford it; as I wore every coat I owned, before everything changed, I didn’t feel or notice anything different about myself. I was familiar to my mild suffering and I knew I could take it.

My nerves were complicit, neither here nor there in terms of producing any hordes of butterflies in my stomach or tumbling nightmares in my head of me pissing my pants, forgetting my lines, or saying the wrong thing during the initial small talk.

Steppenwolf was a big theatre, one of the bigger ones in Chicago, so there was some nervousness about that, but really, it was like any other audition: a room, small or large, with people that needed specific players for their show. To simplify the act was just a tactic of mine to make the audition manageable. There was no saying or telling what would happen when the assistant closed the door.

A pair of silences hung on the line. The receiver felt like a mini-frozen doughnut pressed against my ear. As I looked over the audition side, I listened Edie flip the pages of a magazine, groan to herself, another flick. I never called her without having my lines memorized, the action beats of the side marked - usually two or three pages if it were a normal one - knew who the director was and their background. Whatever play I was auditioning for she would have the script or the play itself, ready to run lines with me. I 22 never told her the play ahead of time. Her library was extensive and she had

everything. There was also always Moms last question - where does the faith in this scene

come from?

“Well,” I’d start to say, “My faith in the scene lies in...”

“Keep your secrets to yourself! They are the most precious, most valuable things we performers have. Without them, we’re no better than day-time soap stars. Without our

secrets, we’re nothing but pawns to be pushed, pulled, and directed. Secrets are our power. Without them, we wield nothing.”

Or something like that.

As usual, she was at home in her 1st floor light blue Victorian apartment in San

Francisco. She had moved out there to try and re-start her career in a smaller scene where

her name was attached to New York, but wasn’t lost in it. The move had worked, getting

her roles in bigger theatres like ACT one season and then Berkley Rep, but then her name

and thus her energy to go and be seen started to wane. Eventually, the phone stopped

ringing and what had been her entire life, simply became a memory of what once was.

“I saw that Birdman movie the other day. That was good.”

“That came out like a year ago Mom,” I said snickering.

“Well, I hate movies.. .most of them anyway. Especially ones that try to act like

directors know what they’re talking about when it comes to theatre...all that backstage

nonsense. The only thing that was believable was that stout, fat agent with the beard and

that bitch critic who was always at the bar. Who directed it? A Mexican guy?” 23 “Alejandro Gonzalez Irlarritu,” I told her, closing my eyes, both of them heavy with annoyed embarrassment. “Not just some Mexican guy. He’s slated to win again this year.”

“Something’s going up at Magic Theatre,” she said, ignoring me. “I can’t remember what though. When are you visiting? Soon I hope. We should go see whatever they are putting on, even if it’s shit.”

I imagined her strolling around the birdseed-showered rooftop in the light of the dusk. The roof was filled with the family of wild South American parrots. They flew down from Telegraph Hill to feed whatever Mom was always leaving out for them, most of the shells raining down on the street below. As a kid, their chattering and pecking on the ceiling above me drummed as I ate my oatmeal before going to school most

mornings. After all these years, it was still a mystery where they had come from. I never

asked, fearing the answer would somehow take them away.

I had grown up in that house after moving from New York as a young kid until I

was 18, watching Mom go over her scenes and monologues in her full-length bedroom

mirror; where I had seen her burst through the front door with tears of validation in her

eyes after getting the part she had worked so hard to get; where I had listened to her cry

behind locked bathroom door while Dad tried to calm her down with his heavy, clumsy

words; a house where dreams were chased, caught, but most of the time, lost, only to be

chased, after the perpetual wound of not being seen or recognized scabbed over and she

could step out into the spotlight once again. 24 The sphere of theatre and acting was a world where anyone could stand in line to enter, but few were ever allowed in.

On the other end, Mom paused and let out a translucent, mercurial sigh. It came in a lull, a moment so ripe with comfort and security, but also a yearning for, what next? In the receiver of my cell phone her exhale sounded almost like a plea; thin and fleeting. I should have known something was wrong, but I knew not to ask that. There always something wrong, Mom would snap, and that’s life. I was 21 and I was realizing how right she really was the more and more I had to balance my artistic passions with tangible, basic needs like rent and food.

The landlord wouldn’t take a sublimely performed soliloquy as rent.

“I should be able to visit soon, Mom, once everything is settled,” I told her.

Edie clicked her tongue and I knew something was wrong from the tact hit on the roof of her mouth, but what could I do? What could I tell an aging actress, a relic of theatre as she called herself, that she hadn’t already heard a million times before from her peers? That she would have her come back. To keep auditioning, working, putting herself out there; to think about the art within herself rather than herself within the art or some bullshit?

Out of cowardice, I asked a fake question, one that I was sure she would see through and I would pay for.

“Are you alright Edie?” I asked.

“Hm? Did you say something Ave?”

“I asked if you were alright.” 25 “Oh, I’m fine,” she had said. “I was just looking out the window. Tell me about this audition tomorrow. I want to hear everything.”

I was about to tell her who was directing, the other actors if there were others already signed on, the run time, the theatre; I would tell her everything I knew and if I didn’t know it, I would make it up, seeing if she would call me on my fabrications, but before I could, she cut me off again. “Nothings alright Ave, but we endure. That is our lives.”

“I should go Mom,” I tried to say.

“No,” she told me. “Stay for five more minutes. We don’t have to say anything.”

I turned my head to distract myself from the silence. The wind and the snow had died down, creating a heavy blanket of silence on the streets. The sidewalks were all coated with a thick pillow of white snow, curved and undulating in their shape, making it impossible to walk on. There was always a pang of guilt whenever I went out and destroyed these tiny mountains of nature’s chance creations. I didn’t know why. Not that there was anyone out to do that, except for maybe the unlucky one that lost rock, paper, scissor to get a pack of cigarettes or the next 12-pack. Not even the bar downstairs from my apartment where I lived was making any noise. The wintertime in Chicago turns everyone into hermits, cave dwellers, only going out to work if they have to or get groceries. There was another rumble in my stomach. I took a drink to quell the hunger pains, but the now melted ice, creating a taste of thin and rotten maple syrup, had overwhelmed the whiskey. The lemon inside was still good. I plucked it out and sucked on it “You think Gary Oldman is a good actor?” Edie asked me. 26 “Sure,” I shrugged. “Sid Vicious or whatever. Good character actor, sure.”

I heard her put something hard down on her side table.

“What kind of monster did I raise?”

With my phone pressed tight against my ear, I tried to pull myself up from the chair, but fell back into it, the whiskey taking my gravity for now.

“Oldman is a great actor,” I chortled. “Sid and Nancy, Dracula, and he’s coming out with a new movie where he plays Churchill. I’ll bet you he takes the fucking Oscar for that one.” I slammed the door of the empty refrigerator that rattled the window that looked outside at all the emptiness of the night and looked for the bottle.

“Ave...” Mom started to say.

“I’ll bet you he takes the fucking Oscar.” I poured myself another two-fingers of

Evan Williams and cracked a few more ice cubes over it.

I sat back down in my chair, clicking the pen a few times after taking it from my ear. There was still work to do.

“Tell me, are you alright out there in that ice box Ave? Are you alright tucking yourself in at night with your jacket on to fight the cold? Are you alright putting all of yourself out there and getting told no? Are you alright Ave? Sometimes I worry I pushed you when you were too young and too hard into this world.”

“I wanted this,” I told her. “If I didn’t, I would have walked away.”

I did try to walk away. There was the time in middle school where I thought I was going to be a writer, but everything was dialogue and the words were so distant. The transference of what I felt about an idea or a character didn’t happen when I tried to put 27 the words down on paper. One character in a short story I remember trying to write, I think about him chasing a girl, was Peter Bomer. Bom at birth with a disability, a humpback, the only figure I knew that had the same affliction was Richard III. I tried to pull certain words and details from my memory when I had seen the show before, but I felt nothing when I thought I found something right. Maybe I’m selfish with my need to get something in return when creating something, but maybe I need that to feeling to have confidence in what I’m trying to express. Anyways, when I sat down to write about this

Peter Bomer and the girl he was in love with, all my Richard III vocabulary in a row, the text came but I felt nothing. They were just that: words on a page. So, I got up and started limping around the apartment, hissing at houseplants and shouting, A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse! And immediately I was exhilarated: my throat clenched with desperation as death leapt for me; my whole world crashing down; my body just one of the things holding me back. My eyes darted from the tiny kitchen of ours to the window overlooking alleyway to Dean’s reading chair, seeking a horse, any horse! The energy of the moment was running through me, so I darted to write, yet when I went to put that feeling onto the page, it was gone. Emotions are ephemeral, quick like hummingbirds or the passing from life into death, so much so one can sometimes convince themselves it

isn’t even real.

I tried working at a movie theatre but I got tired of the smell of popcorn. I tried

working as a temp doing data entry, but my fingertips got so numb I thought they’d fallen

off. I tried cooking, but I only started fires. I tried driving a truck, but I hated the stench

of the oil, the smog in my face, and the grit between my teeth. I tried to be everything, 28 but nothing came close to chiseling away at a play with a character constructed by your heart, your own body, your own mind surrounded by others all doing the same thing, all walking that line of preparation staying present, spontaneous, and hungry for performance.

“I just worry...” Edie kept trying to say.

“Don’t,” I ordered . “I’m alright. Let me tell you about the show.”

So, I told her about all the things I knew and didn’t know.

“That actress is dead,” Mom corrected me. “Like I will be one day.”

“Jesus Mom,” I half-laughed pinching my lips between my fingers. “Actresses like you never die.” I flicked the left over whisky onto the window and watched it roll down the glass. The snowflakes looked more translucent than before. The storm outside was waning.

“We do die,” I remember her saying, the treble of her voice falling into a delicate, performance ready quality. If there was an audience in front of her, they would have arched their chipped lower vertebrae and maybe scooted their asses a little more up the chair as if in attention. If they had ears that could hear, they would have perked them.

“And the thought of being recalled off-handedly by some usher ten years later

after I’ve been rotting in the grave for twenty in some back alley black Off-Broadway

black box around stale conversation and dusty playbills a hobo will use for kindling for a

late-night fire is my grandest nightmare.” She laughed from her chest, deep and morbid.

Maybe she pressed her hand down on her rib cage to keep herself from exploding. I

didn’t know because I wasn’t there, but I imagined she was holding something back that 29 her soul and her body and voice could just no longer express yet, tragically, was still in there, festering.”

A quivered sigh and a glance probably at some vague object - a notepad and pen under a dusty lamp; a metaphorical theme later created by some imaginary critic. Edie continued.

“The truth is the truth is the truth, as Gertrude Stein said.” Mom laughed to herself, booming and boisterous. “And at my age, you just have to live with it.” She gave a light cough into the receiver. “Or you don’t I suppose.”

“I suppose,” I said after giving her a second. The last thing I ever did was accidentally cut her off in case she still had more to say.

“Stein was a lesbian,” she chirped from nowhere, pulling herself out of her dramatic stupor. “Did you know that?”

I pushed the phone to my chest, rolled my eyes, and sighed.

“Everyone does, Mom. It’s not a big deal anymore. Only to the ones that fear it.”

*

My apartment in Chicago wasn’t an apartment, but a scraped out tuna can void of anything healthy or nutritious.

Really, it was a studio with a twin bed and its one sheet with multitude of mix- matched blankets twisted on top. The bed was in the center of the living room to maximize space. In a corner was a dying bamboo plant, crooked and gaunt, more gray 30 than green, gifted by Edie. There was a small, single couch chair where I would read or work. I’d found that on the street during the summer. While carrying the chair upstairs, wondering to myself why it seemed so heavy, I realized there had been a six-pack of

Budweiser tucked in the base of it. Against the wall, farthest from the window, was a small table where I did script and audition work. The table itself was always strong, some mixture of oak and mahogany with a dark honey color to it - also a street find. Late night drunken inspirational notes were etched in to the wood with red, blue, or black ink like,

The artist must always be in a state of becoming or What’s far is near, so close, it’s just beneath the skin. I left the table when I moved out, assuming some other poor, new young dreamer would find it and be inspired. Illusions of grandeur, even back then. By the table, through a short, hobbit sized alcove, was my shoebox kitchen. There was nothing but an electric stove side-by-side to a newborn baby sized sink. Down the hall and to the left was a communal bathroom. I would rather not go into detail about that area.

Between any space in the apartment, be it from my reading chair to the bamboo plant or my desk to the kitchen, all along the wall were books, plays, collections, or craft books. Stanislavski’s 2008 edition of An ActorWorks, Aristotle’s poetics, anything by

David Sedaris, Joan Didion, Otessa Moshfegh, Shakespeare, Joseph Campbell, Whitman,

Uta Hagen, Ginsberg, Lydia Davis, Suzi Lori Parks, Morrison, Rimbaud, best monologue books of the last ten years... the list goes on. There was a Dylan songbook I remember

finding myself flip through at random, along with Montaigne, Sarte, and random one-acts

about skinning muskrats and falling in love with the school janitor. I’d pick off those off 31 the shelf of the bookstore down the street because they were a dollar, 50 cents, sometimes even free if I was looking especially slovenly and mal nourished. The keeper,

Abe, storm cloud gray hair and round like a barrel, seemed to like me. I always came in to buy or just be around the past and present lives of the books lining the dusty walls of the bookstore.

“You coming in all the time,” Abe would say. “Tells me I’m still here.”

Books provided a space, next to the my acting studies and auditions, of simultaneous solitude and an intangible sense of connection because when I was truly alone with the door locked, the hallways outside quiet, no one knocking or texting or emailing me about a part or just to see how I was, it felt as if I didn’t think of me, if I didn’t see myself in the mirror or boil water for tea or pour myself a 2nd bowl of cereal for dinner (I really shouldn’t have, that was the last for the week) I would think, was I

even there? Books granted a grounding of sorts. When nothing was certain, yet everything was felt from despair to existential nirvana, or at least what I thought I was feeling in those moments of clarity. Reaching those blips of connection between the struggle with which I felt in life and the conflict on stage, was true accomplishment or fulfillment. I felt that way and imagined artists writing, acting, or singing lines like, Time is an ocean but it ends at the shore/I may not be here tomorrow or In a circle of light on the stage in the midst of darkness, you have the sensation o f being entirely alone... this is called solitude in public for that felt the same way I did. In that feat, win, success, all ultimately subjective, there was transference where I was inspired to continue, however down I may have been. I was down sure, but that’s the price one pays to get to the places 32 the audience, the directors, other artists, whoever has to go so to be show for the first time or the millionth the depths available to them. We all take steps, some without

footprints to guide them.

Acting was the sole thing I could rely on in life. Acting never went anywhere. I was the one that always stepped away, disregarded, or put off. I was the adulterer of acting’s love, which was limitless in its scope and infinitely available. To go back to the

script and challenge the character I had naively thought I had completed the day before because, how would I, 21 barely out of college, my cherub feet raw on the pavement that

so many others before me had walked, think they could do such a thing? Could I ever? I

didn’t know. I just knew I could try and no one, no director, no casting agent, no

audience, no script, no Edie could tell me how to do it.

The apartment itself was $800 a month and I was lucky to get that for it. I only

got such a gift because the bartender downstairs at O’Lee’s happened to be the cousin of

the owner, a true-green Irish woman from Lietram. Her name was Annie. Every time I

stumbled in, after a failed audition or a no call from Dad or a night at Penny’s, the Thai

restaurant where I worked, she told me I looked like somebody she fell love in love with

when she had been younger.

“Same brown, honey hair you know...” She’d muse at me but not at me.

Sometimes she’d look into the mirror or her eyes would flare up, glaze over, lost in

thought but yeah, sometimes gazing at me locked into something she thought I had, but

would never know I did. “Your round baby cheeks too. He had the same.” 33 She always had a glass of bronze “water” she was sipping from. “And a gait you know.. .a kind of swagger.. .never intentional like he was playing a part.. .you’re an actor right.. .you know what I’m saying.” There would be a few snaps of her tongue against the roof of her mouth and then she’d run her thin fingers through her short, cropped brown and mostly gray hair, though eyes fluttering and mischievous, looking about that bar room of old boozers with the juke box playing the same Tom Petty song

“Baby breakdown, go ahead and give it tom e...’’ and the free popcorn machine popping as the crack of pool cue smashed the 8 ball in the first round with a loud FUCK from one of the players. O’Lee’s was a bar, a sanctuary, and with $5 beer and a shot specials, it was the place I went with the few actor and industry friends to wallow in our woes in a

life of the artist, a life we had all chosen.

In Chicago back then, mid 2015 or so with Trump announcing he was going to be president and Obama, a native of the windy city, soon to take his rightful exit, still had to be holed up in a five-bedroom closet if one wanted to eat and have a roof over their head.

That’s just the way it was. However “hopeful” Obama had made us feel for the last eight years, the renters and job market was still a labyrinth of possible government handouts

and lotteries, both of which I had no clue how to manage. Being an actor, that came with

the territory, so I had to take shit jobs like food deliverer by bike, pamphlet hander-outer,

dog-walker, waiter, furniture mover, furniture builder, barista, sandwich-maker,

newspaper thrower. These are all turn and bum jobs because most of the time, as long as

they get a little notice, I could call out if a random audition came up I needed to take. The 34 trade off was they paid next to nothing, $10 - $12 at most. That’s just what had to be done.

Penny’s, the noodle house I had worked at on Belmont and Sheffield paid me a flat $50 for an 8-hour shift plus my tips. At MOST, I walked out of there with a $100 a day (working 5 days a week), untaxed, and off the books.

The first words I heard from my boss there was, “You never tell anybody you work here while you work here or after you work here, ok?”

That was Gary, a 4-foot sour faced Thai man with a wide stance and always wearing neutral colored clothes that looked six sizes too big for him, never said anything to me. I handed him my receipts at the end of the night, which he always spent ten minutes scouring, pressing them an inch away from his eye, while I waited praying I hadn’t made a mistake for fear of him giving me the boot. This was always done in silence. The pregnant waitress I worked with, an 18-year-old girl who was married to one of the line chefs, tapped her foot behind me. She hated me for reasons I never uncovered.

Sometimes, people just don’t get along and that’s life. Gary, mute, after he had taken my numbers to task and verified everything, just handed me the cash.

He was a small man, always with his arms crossed and eyes either leering at the door to see who had come in or at the receipts at the end of the night. I figured the uneasy suspiciousness was probably because he wasn’t paying his share in taxes - everything was cash there - but shit, he was running a business and the last thing he needed to care about while surviving was to chip in for a bomb the government was buying for some war. Rarely, I would be reading while it was slow and he would ask me what I was reading. He would look at the title, probably some play or whatever, and a sincerely embarrassed smile would break onto his face, followed by the most boyish blush. There would be a few smacks on my shoulder, a couple nervous laughs, and he’d silently shamble away. I never found out what all that gesturing meant, but I felt he was curious but not so curious that he could take any time or energy away from running his business to find out for himself. Some people, out of circumstance, just don’t have the time to explore anything else but the dollar. In that moment, I saw my privilege and where one goes - to art, to expression, etc. - when one has it. Those days and nights, I would find myself wondering what Gary wondered about and if he ever took the time to let himself peak from time to time into those flashes of inquisitiveness.

*

I still had to go to work before the Steppenwolf audition and I was already running late.

I’d slept in my clothes and jacket, under any form of blanket of warmth I had. Peeling myself out of bed, immediately putting on my dark blue water proof boots on with double thermal socks, I hesitated to look out the window, but could still feel like biting, frigid

cold reaching for me through the walls. I put on some tea to warm my insides and soul.

Getting my black Penny’s shirt ready and a fresh pair of socks and underwear in

case I fell on some black ice, I readied my audition clothes in the freezer next to frozen

vegetables and barrel of thai iced tea. I needed them to be wrinkleless and crisp when I

got off my shift. The three items were nothing special, but nothing forgettable: a clean,

slim fit v-neck t-shirt, a pair of blue jeans cuffed at the bottoms, and a worn pair of Red

Wing Iron Rangers I’d been gifted for graduation. I was going for the role of Lee in 36 Shepard’s play, a beer drinking, bad -tempered ruffian who’s been living in the desert.

Maybe I'll throw some gutter oil in my hair and step in some dog shit before they let me in, I thought to myself. Could be good...could be a horrible idea. I picked a bit of lint from the shoulder of my shirt when my cell phone rang on my nightstand. I hadn’t even checked it. Where was my head?

“Tim,” I said to myself. “What the hell does he want now?”

I picked up the phone.

Before I even had the chance to say hello, he asked, “So you ready for this thing I basically had to suck three dicks for or what?”

Tim was an exploiter of art. Stanislavski wrote, the theatre, on account of its publicity and spectacular side, attracts many people who merely want to capitalize their beauty or make careers. They take advantage of the ignorance of the public, its perverted taste, favoritism, intrigues, false successes, and many other means which have no relation to creative art. These exploiters are the deadliest enemies of art. What Stan didn’t mention, is that they are a necessary evil, a gatekeeper, and a connector. Tim, being an old friend of Edie’s from the New York days, was the one lifeline I permitted myself giving. I was reluctant at first, but when he heard I had moved there, he took me onto his agency, Grossman and Black, without question or audition. Edie said I was good, that I was ready, and that was all Tim needed. His partner, Jim Black, knew not to question

Edie, so he didn’t. Without Tim, I wouldn’t have gotten into commercials that I rarely got but sometimes did pay the bills for a couple months and diversified my resume.

Everyone plays the game. 37 If someone can’t do the surface work, out of morality, ego, or some false sense of traditional virtue, there will be ten others that will and will get noticed for it. Only later, after meeting everyone that I did, did I see how far and how deep some were willing to go to exploit the ignorance of the public, their perverted tastes, and their favoritism. A purist raised in theatre would like to think that they would never cheat to create art, but they would be wrong, like I was. In some ways, I wish I were still living in that oblivious, create, create, create state without any care of where it went and for who.

That all felt so easy and it was, but nothing easy ever last or remains so.

“Ave my boy!” Tim shouted. “You there or you off in one of your solio.. .solo- key s... whatever the hell it’s called.”

“I’m here,” I said. “Just looking at the work.”

My marked audition side lay on my table. I ran my fingers over the blocking I had marked for it, the underlined words I’d repeated over and over again so to engrain them in my mind. I flattened out the crinkled comer of the left side of the page where I’d balled it up and thrown it against the wall when I couldn’t remember the 2nd to last line:

Different kind o f heat, the line read. Out there it’s clean. Cools off at night. There’s a nice little breeze. The lime yellow highlighter I used to mark my sections were faded, some even runny from the snow that had fallen onto the page as I had carried to and from the apartment to Penny’s to study or a cafe or O’Lee’s if somebody actually wanted to read with me. I’d only had a day where I usually had a couple weeks. On the bottom of the page, I read my note, what is your intention? How do you change? What is one physical action you do? Under it I wrote, drink beer, but in acting, it isn’t just drinking a beer. The 38 act itself as well as the object is a weapon of defiance as well as distancing himself,

Lee, from truly connecting with his brother, the conflict that runs throughout the entire play itself. I turned the side over, saw more scribbles, line breaks, and movement, and exhaled, reminding myself to believe it would all be there that night.

“You’ll be fine Ave,” Tim reassured me.

I heard him unbuckling his belt as the leather of his overpriced chair stretched and groaned as he leaned back in it. He slapped his stomach, which was as bulbous as a barrel of wine, and let out a hollow sigh. “Big breakfast this morning,” Tim informed me. “Papi might need a little mid-morning nappy.”

“That’s a thing?” I snorted. I took my jacket from behind the chair, slipped it on, and went to the fridge. I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten anything.

My phone was pressed tight against my ear while I judged the empty shelves of my refrigerator. I had a half-orange, half-green block of cheddar and a fresh bottle of ketchup. Next to the cheese experiment, was a single plastic bottle of water half-full. The electric hum of the fridge with my head all the Sylvia-Plath-inside, started to massage my battered temples. I closed my eyes and let the harmonic echo of it rub my skin in consistent, baby circles.

Tim erupted a burp from the deepest cavity of his stomach lining on the other end of line. My entire body shuttered and immediately, I was back.

“Big one! Eh Ave, you’ll see when you’re older.” There were more desperate pleas from the leather followed by the sound of cracking metal. “So, you’re ready? If you 39 take after your mom Edie I know that you are. I’m just checking as your friend.. .and your agent. I got my creditability to uphold.”

“I’ve got work at Penny’s,” I explained for the nth time. “A double like I do most days.”

“Who the hell is Penny?”

“Not a person,” I said. “It’s that noodle house over on Belmont and Sheffield that

I work at.. .that I’ve been working at for a while now.”

“How long’s a double?”

“Ten to ten,” I said.

“Audition’s at eight.”

“Yeah,” I sighed. My patience, a thin white string bowed as it held a families worth of wet laundry, was on the verge of snapping, sending everything into the ground below. “I haven’t run it by Gary yet because I was already on the schedule and you just told me about the audition yesterday.”

Tim paused and let out a long, gaseous sigh. “This is work!” A sharp, fast squeak

sounded into the phone and then a thud as his chair and feet shot back to the floor.

“I need work that pays. They’ll fire me. They don’t give a shit about acting. They

give a shit about money. They said it was the last time.”

“I can relate to that,” Tim chuckled.

“Hilarious.” I looked at the ketchup and wondered if it would taste good warmed

up. “Gary’s a serious dude.” 40 “Who’s Gary? Who are all these people you’re throwing at me? All I deal with every day and every hour are fucking names.”

“Gary is my manager.”

“They’re always serious,” Tim advised, ignoring me. “They need you more than you need them. Remember that in any business.”

“Yeah, but what if..

Tim stopped me with three loud tsk-tsk-tsk’s, sucking and then releasing, the top of his mouth with his tongue, something he always did when he was in a deep, meditative state of contemplation and problem solving. I put the phone in my hand and held it over my head as I opened, gagged, and slammed the vegetable drawer shut.

“I’ll get your dad to send you some money,” Tim said. “How about that?”

I stood rigid. The low, electric hum inside the fridge evolved into an incessant whine of a hundred million gnats. I slammed the fridge of the door. If there had been any kind of cereal or muffins or paper towels on top, they definitely would have fallen on to the floor.

“No,” I said. “I’m fine. It’ll be fine.”

“Ya’ll still at ends?”

“I don’t want to get into it first thing in the morning Tim.”

“Fine.” There were a few more loud claps on his stomach. “How about I transfer

some money over? I won’t send anything crazy. I got it, but I don’t got it, you know what

I mean?” He chuckled and tried to match his laughter, but I felt like a child being given a

second lollipop who wanted one yet didn’t want to say it. “Ave?” 41 “Yeah?”

“It’s just a little something-something for the missed shift.”

“I hear you.”

“Hey,” Tim snapped. He sounded like Edie.

“Yeah.”

“You can land this,” he told me. “Let’em hear you roar.”

*

Dean, my father for longer than I’d like to recognize, called me one night the first week I got into Chicago. He interrupted my drink while reading the “Living the Part” section in

An Actor’s Handbook. Living a Part: The art of living a part asserts that the main factor in any form o f creativeness is the life o f a human spirit, that o f the actor and his part, their joint feelings and subconscious creation... An artist takes the best that is in them and carries it over to the stage. The part I was living, in that moment, was one of solidarity, feeling fear, loneliness, coupled by excitement and an independence I had yet to accomplish in my life.

So, when Dean called me, I was surprised to see his name on my phone, the white letters poised against the black screen. I remember my finger hovering over the red circle to end the call, wondering to myself why I had not immediately pressed it. Not once did he reach out to me when I was in New York. That’s a lie; he sent a letter, a postcard, something ironically romantic, yet even the words - 1 don’t remember them that well - rang bullshit. Since cheating on Mom and divorcing her after meeting an up and coming 42 20 something actress in Los Angeles, maybe a month after we moved there, anything he said afterward I heard as a lie.

On the letter, postcard, whatever, I recall noticing the thinness of the black pen he’d used to write. The lines and letters were rushed, as if he were running off somewhere and in a flicker of assumed fatherly duty, he thought to write to his son, clear across the country, a fucking postcard. 11 love you son, he wrote, followed by,

Dean...your Father. Sentimental crap. He couldn’t say that to me anymore and he knew it, but he did it anyway because that’s the way he was - he did whatever he wanted. I picked up his call that week, disheveled and rank from the humidity of the spring and approaching summer, because I was drunk at O’Lee’s, jobless, and not so morally self- righteous yet that I wouldn’t take a hand out. Dean knew how to win people back, if only for a second, and that was money.

When I had nothing, it was hard not to do just about anything.

“Where are you?” Dean asked me. “Sounds loud in there.”

“Bar,” I told him. “We’re celebrating my arrival.”

“Who? You already make some friends?”

I pushed my eyes together, once, twice, rotated my head, feeling the whiskey and the beer press down on my forehead. Sluggish, I craned my neck and spotted an old guy at the end of the bar. His hand was jammed in a small wooden bowl of peanuts, pink, dusty lips. I noticed his hand shaking as he raised it to point something out on the television that only he was watching. The bartender was on their phone leaning against the taps. I looked at the mirror across from me, between the liquor bottles and the potato 43 chips and peanut bags, and saw myself with two empty stools beside me. I remember outside the streetlights clashing with the darkness of the night and not wanting anybody there with me but myself. I was there for me, and no one else. Dean, being a solipsistic philistine who couldn’t tell A1 Pacino from his impersonator, wouldn’t understand what the hell I was talking about, let alone feeling. So I lied, waiting to tell me when he was going to send me over some cash.

“Yeah,” I lied. “Few other actors I met around town.”

“Meeting people already...that’s good.”

“It’s the business.”

“Don’t I know it,” Dean chuckled. “I went to a thing at the Hollywood bowl yesterday and there were some bigwigs like Tarantino, Sandra Bullock, a bunch of

Netflix people, everybody pitching and boozing, chatting and this and that. The industry is booming.”

I sighed into the receiver as I nodded back my neat bourbon.

“You going to theatre auditions out there or...”

“You go with Hailey?” I asked. “Hailey go with you to the bowl thing?”

“Hailey, yes I did. She’s my wife and in the business.”

“Forgot,” I said shrugging. My throat burned from the bourbon. I swallowed a

warm, avocado sized pit of spit and finished the rest of my Budweiser. “You know she’s just a malformed growth of capitalism eventually going to be used as a puppet for

marketers to target men in beer ads who prefer brunettes, right?” 44 “She’s a red head Ave,” Dean said. I could see him biting his lower lip, “And

stop what you’re doing.”

“What am I doing?”

“You know what you’re doing.”

I picked up my already finished shot and tipped by the glass further, welcoming every drip of fire that fell on my tongue and lips, careful not to lose even one.

“Or,” I kept on. “Hailey could learn how to really act and manipulate her eyebrows to emote humanitarian concern all while maintaining a perfect jaw line poised

against a green screen in one of those super hero movies; a how-to-find-your-inner-super- hero billion dollar box office hit.” My voice grew lethargic and slurred. I chuckled at my

own biting wit and basic knowledge. “Those are all just cloaked propaganda films. They make so much damned money because nobody in this country knows what to do with themselves.. .who to listen to.”

“Ave...” Dean started to say, dropping a register, feigning concern.

“Hailey’s barely old enough to be my baby sitter.” I snorted. I motioned to the bartender for another round. “Hey friend!” I shouted at the old man down the bar.

“Another?”

“Ave,” Dean said again into the receiver, “Are you going to be alright out there?”

The old mans eyes were fixed on the screen, his ears appearing to be plugged.

“Better than New York where everybody asked me if I was Mom’s kid before

they wanted to know what I was reading; better than LA where I’d be begging to do

Doritos Super Bowl nationals wondering where the hell artistic integrity went; better than 45 San Francisco where fuck all is going on but the tech takeover with Edie breathing down my neck. Out here I’m free to be and do whatever the hell I need.”

“And tonight,” Dean said, “You are being drunk in a bar doing what?”

“I’m working,” I said. “Living the part.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Gathering experience, diversifying my toolbox. Actor shit, something you wouldn’t know anything about.”

“I struggled just like you once Ave,” Dean said. “Just like you.”

“But you quit,” I shot back. “Why’d you quit? Edie never told me. She kept going but you quit. Why?”

“Life, Ave,” he said. “All you have to worry about is yourself. Change that around and then you’ll see. Trust me.”

I scoffed into the receiver loud like I was spitting into his ear.

For a second I worried about myself, but then I remembered the bar was empty save a few stragglers hunched and chatting near the window with the bartender swiping left, right on their phone. No one paid me any mind and I paid no mind to anybody.

“Trust? Like Edie made the mistake of doing? You quit acting because it got too hard, just like you quit the family when it go too hard. I don’t feel sorry for you. I don’t pity you.”

“I’m not asking for your pity.” 46 “I’m not going to quit,” I told him. “I’ll be out here in the snow storms, the sleet, the frozen ground, getting call backs or not. I’m not going to quit and I’m going to do it by myself.”

My teeth started to chatter as my eyes began to water. I saw myself out in front of

Mom’s theatre, my tiny hand reaching out for Dean, amidst all that socialite chaos. His back was to me, talking to someone else as I jutted my arm out, every single on of my fingers splayed. I had screamed out his name, shrieked it, and the only response I got was an annoyed shake of his head with him stepping closer to his friend, further from me.

Ever since the beginning, it had been nothing but betrayal between us.

I exhaled, clamping down my throat and filed those moments of disregard, of abandonment, of belittlement, away to a place I told myself I would use later for art.

“You remember the first time I ever acted Dean?” I asked him.

“Ave, just tell me you are going to be alright.”

“That night in New York where Mom pulled me into the theatre, leaving you outside?”

“Tell me you’re going to be alright in case Edie calls me,” he said again.

“She won’t.”

“Tell me you are going to be alright Ave or I’ll come out there. I know you don’t fucking want that.”

“I’m going to be alright Dean. I’m going to be fine.”

“And money,” he said. “Do you want me to send over some money?”

“Spend it on Hailey,” I said. “She could probably use a new pair of lips.” 47 I hung up the phone. The barman brought over another round.

“Chatty tonight are you?” he joked.

“We’re all parrots,” I managed to say. “Of our past selves.”

The barman nodded, his thick chin glowing in the neon blue Miller Lite sign; his eyes were burdened with questions he didn’t know how to ask.

“Heavy man. Heavy.”

*

I figured I should tell Gary and the Penny’s crew that I would have to be leaving early from my double for the audition that night, but I waited because I am a coward and a bom procrastinator. My mind convinced me by saying, They’ll understand. They get you.

Don't worry, just tell them after you bust your ass during the day. They won can you if they see how hard you 're working. You got this!

So, in my most energetic performance, I greeted every customer with a smile, sometimes even shaking their hands if they allowed it. I showed patrons to their seats, asking how was their day? Did they have any food allergies? Would they like the specials menu? (there were none) I manned the appetizer station where I, with precision, fried the crab Rangoon, the pot stickers, and the egg rolls always hitting the exact time of 52 seconds as I had been trained. The plates and bowls edges, after getting plated with their food, I always made sure to wipe down with a cold towel to present a clean aesthetic. I poured their waters and asked if they wanted ice, lemon, or lime. Did they want to see a dessert or coffee menu? A Thai Iced Tea? Let me get right on that. I would run in the 48 back, snag the giant wooden spoon from the refrigerator shelf, my whole body shaking from the cold, and stir the dusk hued orange and fiery red concoction making sure to get every bit of cream and tea synthesized. Back with their beverage, I’d ask them if they wanted anything else, anything I can do to please, comfort, or secure them.

One old man waved me off like a gnat. “Don’t come back here until I snap at you three times. If I see you before that, I’ll knock yah’ one!”

Of course sir! Of course you can knock me one if I try and serve you again without your permission. Your wishes over my health and safety any day. When patrons were ready, I took their cash or card and immediately went to the cash register where I double and triple checked their change doing the math on a calculator. If they tipped, I blushed. If they complimented me on my service, I cooed. I took their coats if they had one and helped whoever wished to have it. As they exited, I queried about what their plans were for the rest of the day, who they were going to see, what they were going to do with the rest of their lives. The old man told flatly, “Avoiding you at all costs.” I forced a belly laugh, pulling both corners of my lips as near to either ear into one of the largest smiles I’ve ever smiled. I was about to compliment him on his squeaky clean New

Balance shoes, but I was forced to take two quick steps back when he tried to swat at me.

Maria, the pregnant woman that loathed and worked with me, saw me sweating over the fryer at around 430 in the afternoon. In the back of my mind, I told myself I would lie and tell them that something had suddenly came up, forcing me to leave early

from my double. The last time I had asked such a favor had been for a foot cream

commercial, which I had landed. I was hoping they would see that as enough reason to let 49 me go. If I could back up my absences with tangible success, maybe their sympathy would be there for me. A burst of oil flung from the pit and onto my arm. I was about to screech the foulest word I could think of, but I saw from my periphery that Maria was watching me, eyes leering, and arms crossed atop her belly. She could smell the vulnerability on me.

“You got a little pep in your step today,” she said. She was leaning up against the soda refrigerator. Her whole tiny body would shake and jolt every time the motor of that ancient piece of machinery would kick over.

“Hump day,” I lied. “Excited for the weekend I guess.”

“Usually in the middle of the week you’re either hung over, depressed and bitter you gotta’ work a double, or you ain’t even in here calling out because you’re sick.” She changed her voice into a whiny kids and brought her two, miniature clenched fists up to her eyes to mime crying. “Only other time I saw you work this hard is when you wanted something...”

“Only thing I’ve ever wanted from this place is respectable paycheck and your undying friendship Maria,” I told her stone faced. My voice was metallic and sharp. “I’ve yet to only achieve one of those things and it’s really been breaking me up lately.”

“You left early one time because of that foot cream audition,” she grinned.

“That’s what it was.. .wasn’t that supposed to be your big break.”

“Only big break you’re ever going to have is when your water does,” I snapped.

“Fuck you.”

“I landed that gig by the way.” 50 “Landed? What’s that mean?”

“Industry jargon,” I said rolling my eyes. “Plebeians like you wouldn’t understand.”

Both of Maria’s eyes flared and I saw a quick breath enter her. She had realized something that I could not make her un-realize.

“So you do have another audition.. .you tell Gary yet?”

My cheeks flushed as a cracking pop of fryer oil blew up onto the wall.

“I just found out about it today,” I admitted. “I have to go. It’s a big one.”

“This underwear commercial or what is going to be your big break?”

I was silent, knowing she knew that was an answer in of itself.

“What is it this time? A thong ad or something? You certainly don’t have the physique for it.. .maybe the brains.”

“Are these finished yet?” I sighed picking them up out of the flyer.

“No leave them in there for a while longer,” She said, looking at their color, clicking her tongue, and motioning for me to dunk them back in. “So, you haven’t told

Gary?”

“I was going to after these Rangoon’s are finished. Tables are always first.”

Maria chuckled to herself, shifted back and forth on her feet in a gleeful lazy dance, and shook her head. “You’re so full of shit, you know that?”

“You shouldn’t swear in front of the bun in the oven,” I said. “They can hear you.” 51 “Point and case how full of shit you are,” she laughed. “Let me take care of those Rangoons and then go tell Gary you gotta’ leave early. I want to see what he says.”

“I’ll do these, serve them to my patrons, and then yes, I will tell Gary.”

“Fine, if you won’t, I won’t,” she said sliding past me towards Gary’s office.

“No!” I tried to grab her but she smacked my hand so hard it felt like a bee sting.

“Those are fuckin’ burnt anyway idiota,” Maria hissed at me as she turned the comer and disappeared.

I looked at the line of chefs faces behind the lined up plates, the glasses, spices, and silverware, all of the hovering by the stoves. Behind them burned an ever-constant flame. A few of them were staring at me, uncertain what exactly what was going on, but knowing something most definitely was. Service was slow. They were bored.

I caught Luis’s eye, my favorite guy in the place. He gave me a small thumb up, a signal to ask if I was ok. Knowing I was about to probably be fired, I figured putting my own shit luck on other people, bringing them down, was selfish. There were some moments, some feelings, one just had to keep to themselves, for the sake of not putting somebody else in a position of having to comfort that person. I lifted the crab Rangoons out of the cauldron of volcanic fryer oil and fixed the cage on the back hook to dry. They were definitely burnt; their curled edges a deep brown, almost black color. I turned around, gave Luis a thumbs up, and smiled. He smiled back. For a second, I felt like everything was going to be ok, that there was still understanding and support in a world where the artist has to work doubly as hard to survive just so they can do what they want to do, but then Maria snaked around the corner. 52 “Gary wants to see you in his office.” She weaseled herself in front of me and tried to take the handle of the fryer from my grip.

“Let me just finish this and then I’ll go,” I said tightening my grip, my last stand of dignity. Maria kept her tiny hand there, not in any comforting kind of way, but almost in a fist. She knew I would let go eventually. As a trembling nausea grew into a corkscrew knot, I did.

“Let me re-cook those for you,” said Maria with a curved smile, mocking hospitality. We can’t serve those. They look like shit.”

I didn’t even get past the giant pallets of Pad Thai noodles and vegetable shelf when I heard Gary’s voice, not ranting at me, but to himself in the bowels of his office.

“I wanna’ be an actor,” he mock whined. “I wanna’ see my name in shimmering lights and wear old medieval clothes and speak a language no one even understands anymore.”

A part of me was genuinely surprised Gary was being so malicious about this.

Had the poor businessman once wanted to be an actor? The pain he was verbalizing appeared to have struck not just a schedule issue, but also something much deeper.. .should I ask him about it? No. Don’t do it. Definitely do not. Everyone has the right to lash here and there if they have not reached or tried for some unattainable dream.

I could take it.

“Is that you out there Ave?” Gary belted. “Get in here...”

I peaked my head into discover row after row of what appeared to be DIY cardboard shelves lined with 3 inch jet black binders. All of them were bursting with 53 crinkled paperwork, receipts, bills, and I’m sure other mind numbing tax info one had to follow and keep to fend off the IRS from busting done their door and auditing them.

As stated, I wasn’t even technically working there. I wasn’t getting a w-2 or would I be getting any kind of tax refund since I started there. As far as Gary and the rest of the

Penny’s mob knew, I didn’t exist. On his desk were a scattered assortment of dirty knives and soupspoons, a pile of greasy chopsticks, at least three piles of ten bowls and plates stacked on top each of each other, and a trashcan bursting with dirtied napkins. It made no sense to me. The dish pit was right outside the door, maybe ten feet away. Why wouldn’t he...

The first time we met had been in the restaurant on the floor near the broken coffee machine, so being inside his office, seeing the filthy firestorm that was going on in there, I weirdly felt a small hint of sympathy for his world, seemingly in shambles. As soon as I looked into his eyes though, glazed with a dejected disgust percolating with betrayed trust and disrespecting the holy lady of noodles Penny’s, I knew I had to toughen up. There would be no sympathy on his end, no warmth or understanding. On the verge of fleeing, I spotted both of his hands were clenched on his tiny square knees.

Would he pop up and strike me, I wondered. How would I defend myself? Instead, his tiny mitts went flying in the air like a flock of frenzied pigeons that had just spotted a speck of something edible.

“Look Gary... I know this is super last minute, but you have to understand...”

He stamped a single foot down hard on the ground. The bowls, plates, and silverware beside him clattered. It took every ounce of me being a waiter not to 54 immediately pick them up and get them to the dish pit. I was expecting words, but he just stared at me smoldering. One eye, the left one, started to flicker like bowels of a fire.

For a split second, I felt like I was onstage, every face at attention towards me, demanding their entertainment, their expectations magnified by each eyelid left unblinking; a silent order.

“Do you, want me to say something?” I asked.

“I want you...” Gary started to say as he squeaked his roily a few feet from me.

Even though I towered over him by at least four feet, I was still intimidated by him. “I want you to understand you’re making a choice.”

I nodded, realizing with Gary was staring up at me, his legs wide open owning the space, overwhelming the room, that these were the last words I would ever hear from him. Not that this was any major heartbreak, but he he’d given me my first job when I landed in Chicago. He gave me my first paycheck away from the fall back of Edie and

Dean when I was in New York. If I quit some shit job there, I could go to them for help, advice, what have you. There, in Chicago, I had to make my way, and Gary, well, he had helped me with that, in his way. Of course, he didn’t know that. He never would because

I would never tell him, but still the thinnest slice of me wanted to express some kind of gratitude to him. I wanted to shower him sentimental origin stories between he and I; I wanted to recall to him in the most sepia toned of details the moment I walked in the door looking to be a waiter and he shrugged, nodded, and threw me a smock; I wanted to tell him all of these things as he was firing me, but Gary started talking halting any moment I was imagining dead. 55 “Your choice is your talent, and there’s nothing wrong with that.” Gary rolled back, the room filling with a kinetic serenity.

I felt like I was being released.

Gary kept on.

“You never had any talent working as a waiter anyway. You were always messing up people’s orders, the tips, walking around in those high-heeled cowboy boots that always tracked in snow. I let you stay because you’re a good looking guy and the old ladies liked you, but this is too much Ave. You’re unreliable with this kind of work and I just can’t have that in my business. Maybe in show business, but not here. I gotta’ make a choice, so, there it is. If you got talent in whatever it is you do, something will come around. If not, maybe you’ll choose to be better at whatever you do. If it’s a waiter - a fucking hope it ain’t - but if it is, come see me and maybe I’ll choose to give you another chance.”

He jutted the tower of plates to the edge of his desk and my balls shot up into my throat.

“You’re not going to find what you’re looking for at my noodle house,” he told me. “It’s got nothing to do with me and that’s ok.”

I nodded, letting this sudden, simple truth coat the oily walls of that room.

“So you want me to...”

“Finish up until you gotta’ go do what you gotta’ go do,” Gary shrugged. “After that, I have to let you go.”

“I understand,” I said. 56 Gary jolted to his feet. I was unsure if this was a hug moment. His arms were stiff and hung by his sides like a tentative penguin at a 7th grade dance.

“I’m not trying to embrace you Ave,” Gary said tightening the muscles of his shoulders as he thrust up his hands, a tiny barrier to keep any shred of sentimentality away from him.

“I’m hungry.” He smacked his belly open palmed. “Get these plates, put them in the dish pit, and onto the floor. Tell them I want my usual - Kung Pao, extra spicy, no veggie, extra brown rice.”

“Yep, yep,” I said, shuffling to pick everything up at once.

The shift, up to 730, came and went. I think an old lady had a fish sauce allergy that I tested. She ended up being fine. Not being on paper allowed me to experiment.

Maria was quiet, smirking at me like she’d won something from the inevitable. I realized as my heightened senses fell, my breath, choked in my throat, fell back into my stomach, that a boss, like a director, just needs a reason, a moment, to cut a cancer out of their lives that’s holding them back. That’s survival and I was appreciative that Gary done it so openly, rather than just slip me a note withyow fired scribbled in black ink on it or, even worse, Maria do it.

Towards the end of the night, I chatted with Louis before my final cash out.

“What are you always telling me?” Luis asked. “To be or not to be?”

“Yeah,” I said, staring at the flame Luis was working over. “Sounds like some theatre shit I would say.” 57 Luis was from Los Angeles, but originally from Mexico City where he was bom. He had a thin black mustache and thin black hair, a potbelly that seemed to grow out a little more every time I saw him. We’d started talking because he always saw me reading at work, plays and whatever audition I was working on, and he was curious. He remembered an aunt of his being an actress back in the day. She would take him to amphitheatres sprinkled around town where she would sing and perform in Teatro de Opera’s. That’s what he called them. I had no idea. He explained the huge, 15-foot wide circular skirts she would wear and how when they twirled they looked as wide and never ending as the city from the Ajusco hilltops. He spoke about the old rituals filled with sacrifices to the Gods and details of their daily life. When he talked about that, his eyes, usually red, burnt from the oiled fire he looked and worked with all day, would shift white and clear, as if they were new, like a child’s.

Luis stopped, letting the com oil in the wok pan bum and pop.

“You going to be ok, man?” he asked.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I got some cash.”

“Oh yeah?” Luis raised two pinched fingers to his crinkled lips like he was smoking weed. “Selling that shit?”

I laughed. “Nooo, I’ve been saving.”

“I smell you some mornings, some nights,” Luis said with raised eyebrows. “You ain’t saving if you ain’t saving.”

I looked him up and down. “If you’re so smart, what’re you doing here stirring noodles?” I grinned at him, raising one eyebrow high like John Belushi. 58 Luis scoffed. “Look at me man. I’m a Mexican in Chicago. What the fuck else am I going to do? It’s either this or working out there, at the docks in the cold or the heat.

I choose this. It’s not my dream, but what’s a dream?”

I watched him turn the rusty knob of the stove, the click of the pilot light, and then the snap rush of the flame.

“It’s that to be or not to be you’re always talking about,” Luis continued. “That’s what it all comes down to. You either are what you want to be, or not.”

I watched him pour clear, yellow vegetable oil into the worn silver and fire scarred wok. He swished the oil around with his gnarled, strong hands gripped the handles making sure every inch of the metal, maybe wanting a way out too. What was his

I wondered, if he had or wanted one at all.

“You don’t want to be here man. You want to be doing what you’re doing, out there performing, on the stage, doing movies.. .whatever it is you do.”

In the whirling oil, a thin yellow met by a rusted grey red metal, I saw my three pages of sides and one paragraph monologue.

I was ready, if I believed it.

“I’ll come in some time,” I said. “You know, if Maria lets me in the door.”

“How bout’ you save that,” he said, “And I see you on the big screen first?”

Maria whipped over and handed me my tips with hourly in a tight, rubber band wad. It felt a little fatter than usual.

“I have a baby on the way and he gives you a going away bonus,” Maria said as

she shook her head. “Fucking men.” 59 I looked under the bands fold and saw a tiny note.

It read, For headshots or whatever they ’re called.

Hot blush ran through my cheeks. I turned to find Gary where he usually sat, deep in the corner by the newspaper rack with his usual up close to his face, but he wasn’t there. I looked to the doorway from the kitchen to his office and saw his back.

Money instead of a hug, I thought. That’s the business.

*

It was around 8 or 9 at night waiting outside Steppenwolf to get inside for the audition.

An umbrella of snow flurries and darkness was cast over me. The void surrounding me and the other actors, shifting back and forth in our snow soaked dress shoes was equally matched with an absence of stars in the sky and the erratic push and pull of the winters wind blowing from every direction.

The night demanded to be recognized.

All that darkness felt sticky: loose oil on the sole of shoe or tepid tar bubbling up from a pit, lashing at my face. It was cold. I opened my mouth to breath and my tonsils quivered, threatening frostbite. There was no talking among the other actors, not a murmur of someone going over their lines or asking who so-and-so was represented by. I imagined from afar we looked like amorphous shadows getting ready for execution, faceless and listless as we stomped our feet, punched our legs and chests, adjusted and readjusted our gloves, scarves, thermal underwear and socks.

Seeing I had been looking over my audition side since I’d gotten it, I started to get anxious and then annoyed when I noticed the black ink starting to smear from the wet 60 snowflakes pounding down on me. As the sound of the ringing phone mixed with the screeching wind, a few of the actors in front of me looked over at me. In all that darkness,

I couldn’t make out their assumed expressions of disgust, so I put up a hand and waved to let them know I was going to get the call. No response from them that I could see. Maybe a shadowy shrug, but maybe not even that. The phone howled.

I started to fold the paper up to put in my jacket, but immediately worried about the text getting even more ruined. With one hand, I unbuttoned the top button of my black, weathered pea coat and tried to slide the paper inside, comer first. Sucking in my belly, the paper almost inside, a rouge wind crashed into me face first. Both my arms shot up in the air. I felt the paper nearly rip from my hand until I clenched the paper between my thumb and forefinger. Quivering, my chest tight and frozen, I jammed the paper into my jacket, buttoned it to the neck, and brought my free arm across my chest. I then brought the ringing phonn an inch away from my burning, icicle-laden eyes.

I could barely read the name of the tiny pixilated black squares that made out the name - TIM. A full body shiver ran from the soles of my feet and up my spine, strangling every vertebrae.

“Fuck is he calling me for right now?” I hissed as I shook the phone back and forth like it was on fire. “I’m here. I got canned for it, but I’m here.”

I jammed my frozen thumb down hard on the red cancel button of my iPhone and hovered it’s white flow over the audition side. My raw eyes could barely see the line above mine: Austin: Well, wasn’t it hot out there in the desert? 61 I read the line again, trying to think about what they wanted with that question.

What are they trying to get at with it? Are they making small talk or do they mean it?

How does that effect what I’m about to say? How do I react?

Everything around me, all the noise and the pain, faded to a neutral place of silence. I was alone to work. I thought of Austin’s line again and then a scoff bubbled up from the middle of my throat. I felt my head wag side to side in pity, in judgment, and in disbelief that Austin, my brother in the play, would ask such stupid question. In that audition space, I imagined myself as cool and as clean as I knew as the character in the desert was.

“Different kind of heat,” I whispered to myself amidst the torrential snow.

There were two hard prods on the back of my shoulder.

“Hey man,” a voice said behind me. “Move up. I think the door opened.”

I looked over the mass of twenty or so waddling bodies, but the double doors of the theatre were the same. They were clamped shut. Nothing had changed from before.

“I don’t think it is,” I said, not bothering to turn around.

“Move up anyway,” the voice said. “Closer to the light.”

I took a single step.

“That good?” I asked.

“Yeah,” the voice behind me said. “However close you can.”

The light, enclosed in a small square box, shone from above the double doors.

There was a conviction in the way the purity of the ivory glow invited the snowflakes, lost in their downward trajectory, into its embrace. Flailing, scattered, the snowflakes 62 tumbling down from a dark sky that no longer wanted them, suddenly found themselves inside the eye of the light. Yet, just as soon as they found themselves there, maybe the snowflake’s feeling themselves realized and whole, an authentic self, was just as soon thrust out from the light back into the darkness. The light looked like fresh milk poured to the brim of a chilled glass on a counter where the dirty hands of eager children were all clamoring for its contents.

I looked back down at my sheet and said the line again.

“Different kind of heat,” I said aloud. I dug my heels into the snow, rolled my shoulders back, feeling the top corner of my lip curl in disdain.

“Different kind of heat...” I said again. My throat clenched. I felt myself stammer. I floundered.

D o n ’t look at the side, I told myself. What's the line? What’s the line? What’s the line?

“Different kind of heat out there in...out there it’s...it’s...fuck.”

I looked down.

Out there it’s clean, the line read. Cool’s off at night. There’s a nice little breeze.

A fury of snowflakes struck my face, clamping my eyes shut.

As I repeated that line over and over and over, I started to see, in the absence of my vision, Edie sitting in a chair on a bare stage. A single white light shined on her from above, brightening her already soft, hot chocolate hair. The light itself was raw and unbreakable, like how a cloud tricks one into thinking it’s whole. She had her loose- fitting blue 501 jeans on and a see-through white V-neck shirt. Her feet were bare, the 63 shade they always were: latte with brushstrokes of pink. As usual, her legs were spread in a power stance. Her eyes were locked on me, I somewhere in the back rows of the theatre, sitting on a stack of playbills in a worn red velvet seat.

“All the feeling in the world...” Her voice curled the burgundy satin of the stage curtains, “Don’t mean a thing if you don’t get that line on your mark.”

“Yes mom,” I mouthed, opening my eyes. “Out there, it’s clean. Cool’s off at night. There’s a nice little breeze.”

Two more prods hammered my shoulder.

“We’re not moving!” I shouted. “The door isn’t open.”

“Yeah,” the guy jeered. I saw his face and it was thick with some kind of beige makeup. His hair was messy in that manicured way. I wanted to punch him in his face, but then he said in a snarled spat, “It is.”

I looked over at the door. From inside, light poured onto the white snow mixed with the gray black sludge of the gutter. It was.

“Alright,” I said. “Sorry. Let’s fucking go then.”

*

"Cold out there?" A tiny girl in her late teens with a Pikachu shirt asked me at the sign in desk. There was a plastered half-smile chiseled onto her face.

"Yes," I said flatly.

She hadn’t noticed the three-inch icicles hanging from either of my nostrils or my body in full tremor as some kind of mild hypothermia was surely setting in. 64 There were three or four more desks with duplicate set-ups all with equally eager young people ready to serve and direct behind them.

"You could say that." I scraped the frost off the surface of my eyes and squinted at her nametag. "Daryn Summer." The title ASSISTANT was printed in bold underneath her name. The vagueness of this immediately put me on a weird edge.

Who was this person and what evil in that place had labeled her with the most mundane of assignments that proffered the most abundant menial tasks?

"That’s my name." The smile on her face held, but was starting to crack.

"You from California or something?"

"I moved from there," she said. Her eyes drifted down to her broomstick wrists. She seemed shy, but she obviously had something else when she told me she was a freshman at DePaul University studying acting. DePaul was rated one of the top three acting conservatories in the country.

"Where are you from?" she asked me in a whisper, brushing off a bit of dust or something from Pikachu's forehead.

"New York," I said.

"Oh wow," she gasped, her eyes going wide pressing her chin to her chest in mock or sincere surprise; I couldn’t quite tell.

She had a relaxed glaze o f a forced, jumbled enthusiasm brimming with delicate hummingbird-like energy. Somebody had given her this chance and she was very afraid to mess it up. As she stared at me, what felt like through me as she waited for an answer to her obvious question, I noticed an anxiety reverberating in 65 the corneas of her hazel mocha frappucino eyes. Vibrating around inside of there, was the truth that she wasn't special and could have everything taken away as soon as it was given to her. I knew that. I had felt that fear, that helplessness of being at the whim of someone who was always above you, with only select tools to get out from under. She fluttered her eyes, as if expelling this moment of vulnerability like an exorcist would a demon, and looked me up and down, maybe trying to guess my name that was on the clipboard in front of her. There's the survival mode kicking in, I thought. There’s the entitlement.

"New York," 1 told her. "Studied there, but moved out here to start over."

She exhaled and began to twirl the blue pen in one of her hands. New York didn’t appear to matter to her much. "You're auditioning for Austin?"

"Yes."

"At 830?"

"Yes."

"Headshot?"

A shot of nausea hit my stomach. I hung my head, fearing I might puke in the girls face. If I turned around, I'd have vomited on one of the other actors lingering behind me. Tim had promised me he was going to send my information along. I hadn’t been able to get any headshots or resumes printed out yet because I didn’t know a good place to go. Igotyou, I got you, Tim had told me. know the best guy.

Goddamned liar. Out of the tops of my eyes, I could see Daryn looking over my 66 shoulder at everyone behind me. I didn't care. 1 was there now. I had waited. This was my time.

I cleared my throat and straightened my spine. My eyes had grown wet from this quick sting of embarrassment. I didn't wipe them away. "My agent should have

sent them over from his office."

She frowned and nodded. She didn’t know what to do in this situation either.

The hopeless disquiet in her eyes grew to the rest of her body: her shoulders curled inward; her chin lowered to her chest; her fingers as they shuffled through stacks of headshots and excel sheet were stiff; and as searched for something that probably wasn’t there, I couldn't help but see it as a metaphor for so many of these young

actors, coddled throughout their undergrad by their professors and colleagues,

showered with amenities and guaranteed casting in plays, clueless to the fact that in the real world, nobody cared about their journey - all they cared about was theirs.

There was no way she was going to ask somebody else for help. That would have

made her look weak and incompetent, so we stood there, both of us staring down at

the pile of other actors who had their shit together, praying for this hell Tim had

brought upon us to end.

Daryn picked a headshot out, put it up to my face, fanned her lips in

frustration when seeing it wasn’t me, and slipped it back into the pile. She had to

have been there since noon. Both of her feet were tapping back and forth so fast it

looked like she was a mini elliptical. I bet she hadn't been giving a chance to pee yet

and was only running on the processed sugar provided by doughnuts and coffee. If 67 someone above her, her boss or another senior intern, had come over I knew she would muster every particle of positivity flickering inside of her to crack a joke or, at least, a grin of back office solidarity.

Her breath was growing labored and thin. I looked away at a clock or

something, trying not to notice this brewing mental break. The pale tone of her skin in the fluorescent light overwhelming us both looked like the result of years away

from her native California sun. Her nail polish, a bright stage-blood-red where it wasn’t chipped, looked like it had just been applied that morning, but through whatever had happened that day, were splintered and cracked. I offered to email her

my headshots to whatever email they needed later, but she didn't hear me. She'd

gone deaf in this crisis. Daryn kept searching. My eyes wandered back underneath

the table. I hadn’t noticed one of her black flats was missing from her feet.

What had happened to this human being? Who had taken this poor woman’s

one shoe? Would she get it back?

Daryn tapped on her Ipad and sighed, appearing relieved. I didn't know if it

was because she had found it and I could go on my way, or that she hadn’t and she

could now tell me to fuck off out of the theatre.

Like Vladamir, like Estragon, I waited.

"You’re in the 845 group," Daryn said, suddenly starry eyed, grinning ear to

ear. She clicked off her Ipad and placed it back on the table, making sure that it was

perfectly aligned with the other headshots and resumes she reorganized. All the 68 anxiousness and horror of possibly being caught by her superiors in her state of

fallibility had vanished.

Daryn glided her hand and pointed to a single door at the end of the room. A

simple piece of 8 X 10 paper hung in the center of it. GREEN ROOM FOR TRUE

WEST was written in the middle of it. Next to the door, through the two large double

ones, was where the stage was. I imagined the space, saw the curtains, tried to feel the warmth of the lights to prepare for them; I tasted the dust on my tongue and

imagined hearing the crinkling of snacks the director, producers, whoever was there, demanding I not get distracted by it. I saw the darkness and then saw myself,

in the middle of all of it, alone. To be or not to be.

"You can warm up..." Daryn blushed and leaned in towards me.

Instinctively, I did the same.

"That’s the right term," she asked me. "Warming up?"

I nodded, remembering the uncertainty when Edie had forced me on stage

for the first time. I remembered that oily endlessness.

Smiling at her, trying to emote Edie's warmth when she'd called me into her

arms, I said, "Yes, that's exactly what we actors say."

Daryn’s cheeks flushed red. I watched her gripped hands relax and lay

smooth on the table. A breath curled in and then calmly out her nose. As if the stage

lights had fallen just to encircle us, we were the only two people in that hall.

Someone from the back shouted something at the two of us.

"Let's go! 1 got to warm up and make my call too!” 69 "You’ll be led into the wings of the theatre when you're ready," Daryn said

hurriedly. "It's right over there."

*

The room wasn't so much a warm-up space but a glorified coat check. Max

capacity should have been five, but there were ten or more of us crammed in there.

The walls were a burnt egg yellow, cracked in the corners where thick cobwebs

shook from a wind being pushed from some invisible air conditioner. A single naked wooden pole ran the length of the space on either side of it, presumably for the coats and jackets. It smelled like lint or the pages of ancient library books; a crumbling

Goodwill. If the room had been a person, I felt like they would have been

embarrassed for not sprucing up. There were half-drunken plastic water bottles in tiny gaggles along the walls.

"What the hell..." I began to say, hesitating in the doorway. Then, somebody

shoulder shoved me from behind, forcing me to enter.

I found a clearing near a pair of abandoned worn, leather brown loafers.

There was a pile of empty water bottles too. I picked them up, looked around for a trash can, and realized there were none. One actor with slicked back black hair,

every follicle shiny and greasy, was staring at me. He was in nothing but a white wife

beater and khaki's that looked two sizes too big. A cigarette dangled from his lightly

reddened lips.

"That's a choice,” 1 whispered to myself, tossing the bottles in a corner,

kicking the loafers into them too. 70 "Those weren't anybody’s right?" I asked a guy leaning on the opposite wall. He was in a business suit with a charcoal tie. There was nothing in his hands.

He was muttering to himself, staring at the burgundy carpeted floor like he wanted to murder it. The look in his eyes were glazed, focused

Not getting an answer, I started going through my vocal warm up. Facing the wall and a few inches from it, I stood up to my tiptoes, reaching for the ceiling, then fell back onto my heels giving my spine a solid jolt. This was to get me into my body.

I did that ten times, inhaling as I reached and exhaling every time I came down to the floor. 1 shook both of my arms, breathing deep from my diaphragm, envisioning all that muscle and tissue and blood and guts expanding and contracting. Opening and closing my mouth as far as it would go, stretching the skin like loosening up a brand new rubber band, I fluttered my lips for two minutes straight until they became numb. My jaw has always been tight, so as I rolled my neck, making sure I didn't get so light headed I fell backward into the psycho about to beat the shit out of the floor or the Fonzi wannabe next to me, I pressed my palms onto either side of my face and massaged the bones and tendons of my face. I started underneath my

eyes, around the bags, and pressed while simultaneously pushing downward with

my hands. Breathing from my nose, I did this through the euphoric pain. In the back

of my mind seeing the lines of my side on the page, my notes scribbled on the side,

the space I would soon be on, the light battling with the darkness, Mom’s words,

Choice begets talent. 71 I chose Chicago to be there. I chose to get fired to be there. I chose to work the side all night rather than blow it off when Tim gave it to me a day before to be there. 1 was there because I wanted to be, had to be.

Going through the last of my exercises, throwing a little peter picked a pack of pickled peppers in there because why not, I couldn’t help but look around to see the real theatre. Objectively, we all looked insane crammed inside this coatroom late at night with the storm outside trying to huff and puff us out. We were talking gibberish to better our speech to read imaginary lines in an imaginary world to impress people we didn't know. There were people sweating, giant drops flowing down their flushed faces, doing yoga in some parts of the room. Warrior two’s, headstands, and tree pose as their whole bodies shook, murmuring to themselves.

One guy looked like he was slow kung-fu fighting as he did thai chi. Others simply wailed as they went up and down in their registers, eyes bulged, lips quivering,

spittle flying everywhere. Some pounded on their chests and waved their arms around to release themselves. Some, so in scene or in monologue, were literally weeping, tears flowing down their baby butt cheeks as they barked or begged or belittled a crack in the wall or a light fixture or a fire hydrant or a coat hanging from

a hook.

The absurd intimacy, the crackpot craft, the silly steps many believed it took

to "get there” before an audition, a performance, art, is one of many reasons I both

hate and love theatre.

My iPhone buzzed in my pocket. 72 "What the fuck?" I tried to be quiet so I didn’t disturb the guy punching his abdomen and moaning a deep, meditative growl next to me.

I took it out and looked at the screen.

It was Edie. It was Mom.

I swiped to answer her.

"Are you there?" Edie asked.

There was a knock on the door.

“I’m about to go in I think,” I stammered.

Peter Season, a classmate from my New York days, walked in. He had an olive tweed blazer on with a white undershirt and black jeans. His hair was messy, but in the attractive way; like he’d just rolled out of bed but he could still present an Oscar. The

room was packed, but by luck, an actor, looking dehydrated by his eyes rolling in the

back of his heads, ran outside of the room, freeing up a space. Peter glided over to it, took

his side from his coat pocket, and looked the pages over. There wasn’t a sign of a single

snowflake or wind whipped inch of skin on him.

“Fuck,” I gasped. “What the hell is he doing here?”

“Excuse me?” Edie asked. I heard a glass placed hard on the table.

“I have to...I have to prep Edie. What is it?”

“I just wanted to remind you that you’ve made every choice a good actor makes

and...”

Peter looked up from his side and looked around the room. Stupidly, I was staring

at him and we caught each other’s eye. He put up his hand in a hello. I put up mine and 73 mouthed, what are you doing here? My eyebrows scrunched together in feigned astonishment. I felt like a valley girl. Peter was about to mouth something back, but an actor jumping up and down next to him crossed our path. He maneuvered the pogo and started to walk towards me.

“Edie,” I said. “I’ve got to go.”

“I really wish you would call me Mom,” she sighed. “I hate it...”

“Listen! I’m getting called. I’ll talk to you later.”

About to click her away, she stopped me with a sharp, familiar, “Ave!”

Peter was standing in front of me. I rolled my eyes and motioned at the phone, mouthing my agent to him. He reciprocated my highbrow annoyance. I put up a finger to tell him one second and turned around.

“I just wanted to tell you before you so rudely interrupted me,” she rasped, ‘That you’ve made every good choice an actor can make. I know I’ve always said talent doesn’t matter, but I’ve come to see, that without it, you never would have gotten through school, you never would have moved to Chicago, and you never would have had the guts to be standing where you are right now at this very moment, about to do what you are about to do.”

I heard Edie’s words and then I saw her, alone in that big, empty Victorian; her awards surrounding her, yet gathering dust; old issues of The New Yorker on her side table with gin n’ tonic glass rings soiled on them; the only sound being the creak of wood from a gust of wind off the beach north, a place where she herself said she never went.

Too cold she said. I saw those things in my minds eye and all the mayhem around me 74 melted away, leaving me standing on the empty stage, Edie urging me to roar, to be or not to be, to jump into her arms.

“Mom,” I heard myself say, the words an echo.

“I’m proud of you Ave,” She told me. “I feel like I don’t tell you that enough.”

She let out two hard cracked coughs away from the receiver, and then there was the familiar sound of her flicking her lighter. A deep breath in. “I just want you to know that because some days I don’t know how many more days I can do this.”

“Do what Edie?” I stammered. “Do what Mom?”

“Keep acting this life of mine out and missing my cues. You’re my only scene partner in this world Ave, but sometimes I feel like I’m holding you back.”

“You’re not Mom,” I insisted.

I couldn’t move except for my arm, which fell to my side. I don’t know how long

I was standing there until I felt a tap on my shoulder.

“Huh?” I managed to say turning around and pressing the phone into my chest.

It was Peter.

“They’re calling us,” he said, though it felt like I was reading his lips.

“What?”

“You’re 8:45, right?” he asked.

I nodded, seeing Daryn at the door of the green room waving us over.

‘They’re calling us,” Peter said again. “Let’s go.”

“Mom,” I said bringing the phone back up, scarlet flushing my cheeks hot. “I’ve

got to go.” I waited for her 75 *

Peter and I were waiting in the wings of the stage to go on.

He had been the “it” young actor at conservatory in New York when were going to school together. He was a grade above me, so there was the intimidation of seniority, but it was more than that - he was a natural. I know that word is vague and cliched, but when I watched him, there was nothing he did that seemed uneasy, tentative, or unsure.

He was, from Richard III to some new playwrights shallowly written character, effortless to watch. When he spoke, his cadence was collected and controlled. Peter never missed a cue, a line, and if he did, I never noticed it. Always listening, forever reacting, he’d come from nowhere. Well, he had moved from Iowa City to New York on scholarship, but what I mean from nowhere is that his dad was a farmer and his mom was a schoolteacher.

Peter had no background in acting or friends growing up he acted with.

The two of us watched the actor on stage call for line, trip over their own two feet, and eventually breaking the fourth as they complained about the stage lights.

“Amateurs,” Peter smirked, putting on an English accent.

I muffled a laugh and whispered, “What are you doing out here man? I thought you were in New York?”

“Theatre reached out,” Peter shrugged. “I wasn’t doing much and my agency’s paying me per diem and a little stipend. Figured fuck it. How’ve you been doing out here?”

“I’m out of the shadow of Edie,” I said. “Doing my own thing, so pretty good.” 76 “I know what you mean. Everyone in New York fucking knows each other. It’s suffocating. I’m jealous that you got out.”

Pride rushed through me. Peter Season, the guy every director at conservatory wanted to cast, the guy every professor adored, the guy every actress, freshman to senior wanted to fuck, was jealous of me.”

The actor on the stage finished up. We heard the director give the monotone,

Great stuff. Thank you for your time - a line of cordiality soaked in castings complete and utter indifference of you; an actor’s worst nightmare. He lumbered by us.

“Fuck,” he snapped.

I was about to talk some shit when there was another buzz in my pocket.

“Jesus,” I gasped. “I keep turning this thing off.” I looked at it as Peter was getting called on stage.

“Hey,” I said before he went on, “Good luck.”

Peter smiled. “Thanks. You too.”

The green glow of my phone caught the attention of a stage manager. Out of the comer of my eye, they were coming for me. About to turn it off, I felt the tiny clasp had been flicked back on somehow. I thought maybe by accident in the green room or something. There had been so much happening. On the screen, there were numerous missed calls from Tim and Dean. A chill from somewhere in the wings curled through my legs. I shuttered. The tingling ran up my back until, as if with a mind of its own, settled at the base of my neck. The cold was relentless and everywhere. I tried to stretch 77 heat into what was now frozen, but even an inch brought a razor-like pain. I realized,

in all that darkness, I couldn’t move after reading what I’d read.

I know you 're at your audition Ave, Dean’s text read, but it’s about your mom.

What could that mean, I thought, but before I could imagine the millions of

terrible possibilities, the stage manager was already on me.

“We can’t have cell phones back here,” she said in a breathy sarcasm.

“Of course.” I slipped the phone back in my pocket.

“Please don’t make me come over here again.”

I felt myself blush red, the heat spreading over my cheeks and my neck like spilt

red wine over white shag carpet. Thankfully, the shadows of the wings were hiding me,

but I could still feel the eyes of the other actors staring at me.

“I got it,” I said, as dignified as I could. There was a golf ball sized lump in my

throat. “It won’t happen again.”

They flew off, back to whatever perch of superiority they’d swooped down from.

Edie, I said in my mind, feeling the cold low ball glass of whiskey on the rocks in

my hand, the phone receiver pressed up to my ear, as I struggled to hear Edie’s crass,

warm voice in my ear. It was so faint.

Edie, what did you do?

There was no answer to my question. Like a debunked psychic, my thought

couldn’t reach her. I wanted to call her, shout for her like I had over and over when I was

a child left on that empty stage as she ordered me to stay up there and experience the

empty vastness of that space, but I couldn’t. I had been so distracted that I hadn’t noticed 78 there was a tangible silence on stage. That was the sound of a good performance ending: a resonant, room stopping quiet. I heard Peter say thank you, give a little bow, and then walk off.

“Went pretty well,” nodded Peter, a humble smile on his calm face. “They’re nice. Just relax. You’ve done this a million times.”

*

The first play I was in was a staged version of The Wizard o f Oz. See the gray felt-furred monkeys, the red glittery shoes; hear the recordings of loud cyclone music and parents throwing dust from the wings; feel the mediocrity and smile politely. We were still in

New York at the time and I was young, a year out from the first time Edie had thrust me onto her stage, so it was a big deal. I mean, it never got reviewed in the New Yorker or anything but I still remember Edie in the front row with her notepad: staring, critiquing, judging.

Edie had told me I was going to be in and I said yes because yes was all I knew how to say at that age. I liked to do what she did. Whatever she did was fun, filled with smiles and spontaneity. Later, after the play, Edie told me she had slipped the 1st grade teacher a 100 spot to try and get me the Dorothy role. The Dorothy role? I never would have done that. I remember her laughing and telling me Ms. Candy Ass called her to tell her no, never, not in a million years. Edie called her “obtuse”. They wouldn’t give it to me - 1 never would have done it - roles to boys. Obviously, I had no idea what she was doing behind my back, but she got me the next best thing: the role of the cowardly lion. I didn’t even have to audition. 79 I was happy to do it, to play. I must’ve been 9 and rebelling, but there was more comfort in prancing around the edges of the stage. What 9 year old chooses solidarity over solitary? I didn’t think twice or even know about Mom making the call to the director or her going into school the next day to meet with Ms. Candy Ass because she had already chosen a kid to play that role. I didn’t know when she was told no, she demand she talk to the principal. Maybe the $100 bribe was true? Maybe it was more? I was clueless other than her telling me I was going to be in that play, but that’s where all the control, the favors, the manipulation started, all with that goddamned lion.

I hated the itch of that costume. The hood was heavy with the malformed droopy ears and the fluffed up mane. Even the whiskers on either side of my cheeks seemed to weigh five pounds each. My head was bowed in a permanent poise of shame or in the vain of the character - cowardice. If that was intentional by whatever stay-at-home mom designed and sewed that thing, good on them. I remember I couldn’t walk because my legs were too short in the onesie. I had to shuffle around, sliding sometimes on the slick wooden floor of the apartment when I was home and on the stage when I was at school. I sweat and I stunk, but I tried to never complain.

“I don’t want to wear this...” I’d start to say.

“You don’t want to act in a role your mother fought tooth and nail to get you?”

Her eyes would get razor thin, her voice a mixture of condemnation and guilt.

Mom never came to the after school rehearsals, but I practiced at home either by myself in the mirror or when Mom was home on a dark or off day from her own rehearsal. Those were the best days with the windows shut tight and the furnace blowing 80 warm air, air so hot it wavered against the red brick walls with the light grey lines still showing; their colors mixing into a shimmer. Mom was a cook too who loved food that men were only supposed to eat, so she cooked T-bone steaks, red potatoes, carrots, and whip cream and pudding for dessert. Never, ever would she let me take my costume off when I was in the house, even when I was eating.

“You must inhabit your character,” Mom demanded.

She said these words with a breathy air of diva.

“You wear their skin as much as you can to access their movements to see where they are fast, where they are slow, where they have pain, and where they have joy. Then, when you have that, you see how that makes you and then you combine the two to then bring that precious gift to the lines and eventually to the stage. Do you understand?”

Most likely with a piping hot potato in one of my cheeks like a squirrel, I nodded in agreement, seeing in my mind the weight of each step, even the dust of the savanna I roamed lifting up from the Earth and around my claws.

She would stare at me stone-faced, both elbows hard on the table, but always with a smoothness around the bottom of her eyes. Mom had a way of smiling with her eyes.

She would go on, tell me her secrets, her methods, knowing I didn’t understand everything, but just to hear it said, just to know it existed, was apart of learning. So much of creation is being told what is under the water and then taking that dive oneself to see.

Mom was aware that her words would stay in the labyrinth of lock boxes within a creative’s mind. I was her only son and there was no way her gift would not be passed onto me. She made sure of that. 81 “Give me one of your lines Ave,” Mom ordered.

It was the night before my first performance.

Dad was asleep with the door closed to his bedroom. His snores rumbled from underneath the door, rippling the puddles of melted snow on the floor. I was on top of the dining room table. The windows outside were stained with frost and my entire being was shaking, but not because of the cold. I was experiencing my first time with stage fright.

I couldn’t open my throat. No words were coming. I couldn’t breathe. The living room of our tiny apartment with the reading nook couch, the dead plant near the heater, the bookshelves which lined every wall, the picture frames with photos of Mom on stage, the old father clock, the black stage chair splintered at the feet that Mom used to practice her monologues, everything in there and more looked a million miles away. I felt like I was on top of a tall, three-inch wide mountain, and the water below me was spiraling.

There was no way to get out.

I could see Mom in the very center of it all, in her chair, facing me.

“Feel the characters body, your body. Feel the weight of your shoulders, how they curve down and into the ground as you walk. Feel the burden of your big, lion legs.

You’re a lion! King of the jungle! But you’re scared.. .you’re scared you’re not enough.. .you’re scared you won’t be able to protect your friends.”

“I’m really scared though Mom,” I stuttered.

She leaned in towards me. “Not your words, Ave. Use the plays. Take that fear, and put them into the words.” 82 I closed my eyes, saw in my mind the white page, the black words, the tiny lion drawing I had scribbled next to every one of my lines.

“You're right,” I heard myself say. “I am a coward! I haven't any courage at all. I even scare myself.”

The living room began to get bigger. The words had brought lost breath back into my lungs. The mountain I was on had begun to lower to the ground. My fear meshed with the words and together they felt like they flowed right out of me. I needed to go to my next line and Mom, seeing the transformation her advice had done to me, was already prompting me.

“Your majesty,” Mom said in her best Judy Garland voice. “You wouldn’t be afraid of anything?”

I puffed my chest, widened my legs, and whipped my tail back and forth.

“Not nobody!” I roared. “Not nohow!”

“Not even a rhinoceros?”

“Imposerous!”

“How about a hippopotamus?”

“Why, I'd thrash him from top to bottomus!”

“Supposing you met an elephant?”

“I'd wrap him up in cellophane!”

“What if it were a brontosaurus?”

“I'd show him who was king of the forest!” 83 With my final line a shot of tingling power ran up my heels, wrapped around my entire body, and burst from the top of my head.

From nowhere, from everywhere, I tipped my head back to the ceiling to roar over the complaints of my now awakened Dad and the clapping of my awe struck Mom.

*

S h e ’s fine, I demanded. Edie is fine. Right now, she would want you to focus.

I thrust myself from the black clothed wings and onto the stage. Immediately, I stutter stepped and put up my hands. The lights encircling me, felt brighter than anything

I had ever experienced in New York or anywhere. The heat pressed into the bare skin of my forearms like a hot knife. I smiled; I pulled back my shoulders; I felt both of my feet on the cold, raw dusty wood. I am here, I told myself. I am here. My side with all of my notes, scribbles, intonations, and guides were there, but they didn’t matter now. They were either in me, juggling between my conscious and subconscious creative mind, hopefully soon to fuel the spontaneous and the genuine, or they weren’t. My training would bring it out, hopefully.

“How’s everyone doing?” I asked the darkness. “I’ve Ave and I’ll be reading for the part of Austin tonight. Thank you for seeing me.”

In the downstairs theatre, there were about 500 empty seats in the audience. With my hand still blocking out the lights, I could feel a bead of sweat start to make its way down the center of my spine. My heartbeat was rapid, pattering up against the walls of my chest. I inhaled into the frenzy through my nose, never taking the smile off of my face. Slowly, everything slowed down: my eyes relaxed; my muscles became loose; my 84 steps, as they made their way to the center of stage were lighter; the bead of sweat dried up. I am here, I repeated. You are here. I focused on the rows of empty seats to remind myself this was a performance of just a few people, people that ate, slept, pooped, were freshmen once, had been bullied, would have to get in their car or the L train after all of this to get home - to do it all over again. I was trying to humanize them out of their thrones. Eventually, I found the globular shadow of the director, their assistant, casting, and a few others: the coffee grabbers, the headshot reviewers, and the restaurant reservation getters.

“We’re doing alright,” a resonant, forthright sounding voice told me.

Their tone was sharp, but playful, totally aware of the absurdity of the power dynamics here. The alright sounded exhausted also, allowing for a kind of empathy that they themselves were tired of this process, beaten by it, but ultimately something that had to be done. The creative process wasn’t all about spontaneous inspiration and joyously shouting from the mountaintops of Parnassus. It was also going over your lines in the freezing winds of Chicago at 8 at night or sipping the wrong order of coffee for the tenth time or listening to untrained, cattle call actors as they spewed monotonous lines as they waited for them to end. There were processes in plays, just like the construction of a building or the creation of a human being that had to be followed through.

“I’m the director and next to me is my ever faithful assistant Oliver along with

Faye, the casting director. So lets...”

“I loved your production last year,” I blurted, cutting them off.

There was a hushed wave of snickers and murmurs. 85 “Oh thank you,” said the director. They didn’t sound so much as flattered, but intrigued. They turned their cheek and whispered to someone next to them. I couldn’t hear what was said. They looked back at me after a single nod. “If I can ask, what exactly did you like about it?”

To know of a director’s work, be it their first shitty scribble of bad poetry in a notebook leaked online to their most recent show at an esteemed theatre, is to tell them, I am not just a tool in this production, but your collaborator. The effort of recognizing what they have done in their artistic past is to tell them you yourself are aspiring to create something that has never been done before; to progress; to extend oneself even further than any previous projects. If I came out and simply started doing my scene, I would be robotic, orderly, a pawn. Having a conversation reminds whoever is watching me that I existed before I walked from the wings onto the stage and that I will exist as the character when I am on it, and that I will exist when I walk off after I am finished. I may not feel better when I’m done with my audition. Honestly, I tend to feel worse because the cliche anxieties riddle me like the tiny frozen pebbles in a hailstorm: did I say this word wrong?

Did I say this line too fast? Too slow? Was my hair too messy or to clean? Why the fuck did I bow to them at the end like they were royalty? All of that nonsense is terrible. My feelings towards my own performance are ultimately irrelevant though because all that matters is what they remember about what they’ve seen, heard, and hopefully, felt. To be remembered, is to be chosen and to be chosen, is to have the opportunity to live forever.

“The show itself was a master class in the dynamics in comedy and drama,” I began. “Casting Micheal Cera and Kieran was a risk being mostly known for their roles 86 in Hollywood. In Chicago, people don’t care if you’re famous. They care if you can get up everyday in the blistering freeze, get your ass to the theatre every night, and act.” I shrugged, trying to act like I wasn’t aware of every movement I was making. I stepped left, stopped, and stepped right for no real reason at all. “They did that, but not just that.”

My hands were flurrying in the air as I began to talk. Hand acting, I thought, The worst. I stopped myself. “The story itself, even though it was based in 1982, juggled modem sociological themes of the struggling millennial, the desperate youth, making it wholly plausible that one of the characters would steal $15,000 from their tycoon father and then not have a clue what to do with it. I related to being so desperately broke and doing anything to get out of it.” I cleared my throat and shifted my weight side to side. The floorboards underneath me echoed like gongs in the empty theatre. “Unfortunately, I don’t have a rich family to steal from.”

That got a few laughs, but no one said anything tangible in return. At least, I didn’t hear anyone say anything to me. No one said stop, so as in scene, you don’t stop until the line ends or the director tells you cut.

“The play put a mirror up to our country and a world that takes what they can without thinking about the consequences, but it didn’t beat me over the head with it or become preachy. The subtext was hidden by the action, the narrative, and all crammed in that shitty apartment in New York in 1982, a city then so wrecked with racism, drugs, and abuse that really, on a strict analytical level, is no different than today. The Black

Lives Matters Movement, the opioid crisis, corruption in government, and fucking student loan debt are all in the play which makes it all the more heartbreaking to realize 87 that $15,000 isn’t really going to change or help anything. It’s a futile attempt to mend a metaphorical mortal wound.”

I paused, realizing I didn’t know where all that had actually come from. I had spoken those words from a place of research, preparation, and memory, but I felt like someone else had said it. Who then? Who had taken over me just then? Why? Yet, conversely, it had been me for I heard my voice, my diction, my breath, my lips touching and parting as my arms, my wrists, my fingers, my fingernails in front of me gesticulated.

I had researched the director and their work for this exact moment, yet when it came time to present it, I was not there and I was. What was this place dual place of existence where the mind and the body separate itself so what needs to be said or expressed fully can be done. An impulse is just that - a pulse from some unknown place. To follow it, is to do it at one’s own risk. This time, I guess it paid off.

“That’s quite an analysis,” said the director. Their authoritative, mercurial voice brought me back from wherever I had gone. “I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

“Thank you for putting it on.”

“Shall we do the side now?”

“Yes,” I said, “And I’m sorry if I’m going over,” I said.

My meekness made me a little disgusted with myself, but the two of us were back in the same power structures and I had to remember my place. We weren’t just two people talking about anymore.

“Don’t fret,” they said. “Whenever you’re ready. You’ll be reading for Lee and our reader will be reading Austin. Ready when you are.” 88 The lights lowered, focusing solely on me. Their brightness had dimmed. I wasn’t sure if this was for me or for the director, but it didn’t matter. It had happened.

React, I told myself. A tingle ran over me. I dropped my side to the floor, the one I had covered, protected, and cherished, and kicked it away. I didn’t need it. I just needed me.

Every breath that was in the space felt like it had been sucked out. It was so quiet.

I didn’t hear a creak of wood from tentative footsteps or the roof from the raging storm outside our bubble. I didn’t see a shadow in the wings or elsewhere. The particles of dust caught in the beams entertained each other in a kind of dance as the audience dissolved into the darkness. My body became my own, and not my own.

My stance widened and my pelvis pushed forward. Everything about me became heavy, labored, and arduous. The middle of my brow suddenly had a weight about it. Lee, in my head, was always tall and lumbering, awkward with his body, yet he used it as a source of power. I was stealing from Malkovich a bit, but that’s all good art was - stealing. I breathed in deep through my nose, imagined the dusty, arid smell of the desert.

I recalled the memory of being out in Joshua Tree the one time Dean had brought us out there. Everything had been dry and barely alive. There was nothing but sand.

Last night I hadn ’tbeen able to sleep because of all the noise, so I went to it to see what all the noise was about because I was a man o f action, o f curiosity and I didn ’t make shit up like my writer brother did.

I sauntered to the chair and dragged it a few inches from the edge of the stage.

Leaving the chair there, I did the same with the table. Everything situated, I sat and held an invisible can of beer in my hand. It was morning, but who gave a shit? My brother? 89 Who gave a shit about what he thought? I’d just been out there. Want me to prove it?

Look at me. Look at how dusty my boots were. Look at how dirty my pants were. Smell the stink in my underwear. I was out there being overwhelmed by the night, walking with nothing but the stars and the distant moon. My know-it-all brother, the big time writer, and I was supposed to give a shit about what he thought? He looked pathetic looking like an old lady, hunched over his man made machine trying to manufacture feeling with his educated man made words while I had been out in nature, in the real world, where the truth of feeling and emotions and existence was 5-inches in front of your face. When was the last time I’d seen him? Who cared? I’m drinking a beer watching him sprits his stupid plant like the hag that he is. I was drinking my beer and stretching out my big muscles because I was big fucking man with nothing to prove to no one, not even myself.

“You go out last night?” the reader asked from the audience.

“Yeah,” I said, “Yeah, I went out. What about it?” I slung back my beer to take a drink even though I didn’t want it. I was doing it to show the audience that I had a beer. I was showing off. Immediately, I felt my face flush from embarrassment. Out of desperation, I slung my feet up on the table, rattling it. Immediately, I, Ave, was worried the thing was going to fall off the stage until I pressed down with my heel to steady it. I placed my invisible beer on the ground. I was breaking the 4th wall and could feel the nervous energy of the audience.

“Just wondered,” the reader said. It sounded like she was repeating it.

Had I forgotten I line? I paused, exhaled through my nose, and saw my next line on the page in my head. 90 “Damn coyotes,” I said, calming down, flexing my free hand, and feeling the light heat of the stage lights. “Kept me awake.”

I saw my Actor’s Handbook on my nightstand. It was open to pg. 27. At the bottom of the page, was a section titled AUDIENCE:

“ The morethe actor wishes to amuse his audience, the more the audience will sit back in comfort waiting to be amused; but as soon as the actor stops being concerned with his audience, the latter begins to watch the actor. It is especially so when actor is occupied in something serious and interesting. ”

The reader coughed and squirmed around in their chair.

“They must’ve killed somebody’s dog or something.”

Hell does he know about coyotes, I thought. Austin’s pulling that out o f his goddamned ass like he does every goddamned thing. That’s some New York shit thing to say.

I sprang out of my chair. “Yappin’ their fool heads off!” My voice shot to every comer of the theatre. Someone gasped out of a shock. I played off of that. I imagined it was Austin sitting there like the chicken shit he was. I wanted to scare my reader.

“They don’t yap like that in the desert. They howl. These are,” I started to say as I leered at the reader, “ City coyotes here.”

“Well,” the reader scoffed, unimpressed, “You don’t sleep anyway, do you?”

She was playing with me, giving me something to react to.

I spit on the ground and dug it into the wood of the stage. 91 “You’re pretty smart aren’t yah?” I said. As I twisted the toes of my shoe, I made sure to never take my eyes off of them.

“How do you mean?” Their voice was weak and timid. I imagined Dean, my father, his thin skin. I thought of how he betrayed Mom.

“I mean you never had any more on the ball than I did.” I hissed the words, coming around the table to the very edge of the stage. “But here you are, getting invited to prominent people’s houses. Sittin’ around like you know something.”

In the shadows, I saw the soft, young face of the reader. He had short brown hair and a strong jaw line. As I stared down at him, for a moment, Dean’s face appeared. His brow was curled in disappointment. His lips scowled in boredom. I blinked hard twice and the reader was back, staring up at me. Again, they said their line in a sharp tone of annoyance.

“They’re ” they enunciated, “Not so prominent.”

“ They’rea helluva a lot more prominent than the places I get invited to.”

“Well,” the reader scoffed. “You invite yourself.”

My right fist clenched, brought it up to the bottom of my nose, and dug my knuckle into it like I wanted to rip it off. I felt anger, rage, where a part of me wanted to bite down on my fist, but I recalled Stanislavski’s line:

“Itis not the purpose of an actor to make a fleeting impression on the audience.

They needed more.

I turned from downstage and walked to an imagined bookshelf. I saw the picture frames of the old lady Austin was house sitting for. The dust was disgusting, exactly what 92 an old bag would have in an old house that Austin would be staying in. There was an old pot on another shelf next to a bunch of boring cookbooks with yellowed pages. It smelled old in there, like dead mites, rotting furniture, and chemicals from air fresheners.

Creating that, visualizing the space, living in that moment, feeling the tension, I transferred all of the disgust, the hatred, and the subconscious envy, into my line.

“That’s right. I do. In fact I probably got a wider range a’ choices than you do, come to think of it.”

I had made my way back to the table, swung it around, and sat on it backwards.

My skin was cool even with the heat of the lights. The entire theatre was quiet. I had their attention. I could feel them giving it to me.

“ These new spectators do not expect writing or acting which is merely externally effective in external plot and action; they look for deep feelings and great thoughts. The audience is a creative participant in the performance of a play.

“I wouldn’t doubt it,” the reader said, seemingly unaffected.

“In fact,” I said. I could feel desperation, not in myself as Ave but as Lee, starting to build up in me. My intimidation tactics weren’t working. I needed to change. “I been in some pretty classy places in my time. And I never even went to an Ivy League school either.”

I dropped the register in my voice and emoted from a place of deep sadness, envy, the kind that is felt when one is passed over or not good enough. In my mind, I heard

Edie in her bedroom. The door was closed. Dean was pounding on the wood. I was afraid 93 he was going to bust it done and hurt her. She was crying on the other side and no one could get to her.

A silence fell over the room. The reader stuttered audibly and shuffled their papers. He was thrown off guard, just like Lee was on the page. The transition was perfect. Externally, I kept my hard, demeanor, but inside, I was beaming. The shift felt like music.

“You want breakfast or something?” They said finally.

“Breakfast?” I spat, hard again.

“Yeah. Don’t you eat breakfast?”

The improvisational moment of sentimentality passed.

“Look, don’t worry about me pal. I can take care of myself. You just go ahead as though I wasn’t even here, alright?”

There’s tautness in the air and the two of us sit in it. I can hear the director move around in their seat. That’s what the scene is supposed to do: make everyone who’s watching feel what we’re feeling. It was working.

“Well,” the reader said breaking the silence “Wasn’t it hot out there in the desert?”

I feel myself fill up with pride, the kind of pride that only comes when you choose to live your live your way. Lee, like myself, wasn’t a follower. He was a leader, like I was moving to Chicago alone and finding my own name. I stood up out of my chair and with a little swagger, looked out the window, seeing the endless flat desert and the 94 multitudes of stars only I could see. There was the line on the page. I could see it, but I stayed there, in that moment, everyone in the theatre tied to me like a fish on a hook.

“Different kind of heat. Out there it’s clean. Cools off at night. There’s a nice...” I raised my hand and moved my fingers to feel the cold air between them. “...A nice little breeze.”

I let the moment hover there for four or five seconds, and then heard the director say, “Thank you. That was great.”

“Thank you,” I said back.

*

There was silence, some whispering and the squeaking of uncomfortable butts in theatre seats, and then a question.

“So, what are you?” the director asked.

“Huh?” I blurted, and then asked, “What am I?”

I was out of the scene by then. My body was mine again, instantly reminding me of my soaked shoes, my cold, bitter bones, and my thawing hands. I didn’t want to be back, but every scene, like every run of a play, must end. There’s no way around it.

That’s just the way things were in the theatre. To try to stay in it, in there, is futile and mad.

In my periphery, I saw a few of the other actors waiting in the wings. Their arms, in a quiet pose of solidarity, were crossed. They were staring at me, a mix of envy and hatred in their eyes, but hatred really begets envy, so maybe it was a loss of hope. That’s 95 all this business is at the end of the day: a prayer, a hope, a wish that the day your out on stage, is the day someone important, maybe just someone, will see you.

As they were waiting for me to get off stage so they could have their turn to be on it, I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know if it was anything. What could I do? I wanted to ask them. The director was talking to me, not you. Again, I held no power.

Emotions, if one does them right, are as plentiful and fleeting as snowflakes caught in the wind. There was no more beer can in my hand, Edie would tell me.

“Edie,” I said under my breath.

Where was she? What happened? What did she do?

“What was that?” asked the director. “Come more upstage. Your stage voice was great, but I can barely hear you now that you’re out of the scene. Come a little closer.”

As I stepped forward, I put up my hands to block out the lights. They were suddenly bright and hot again.

“Turn down the lights!” The director screamed over their shoulder. She sighed as

I saw her shake a shadow of a head in the dimness. “There’s no in between with those guys, Jesus.”

“What am I?” I repeated. “What do you mean?”

“Like where are your parents from?” she asked. “What’s your background? I mean, culturally?”

The director stood up, rising out of the darkness of the theatre as if offering a scene to me. It almost felt like some kind of gesture of humility, like she was joining me an entirely different scene. She had wide shoulders, so wide they almost seemed to curl 96 inwards at their ends like a hawk or a vulture from her height. The mulatto, matte color of her skin was brush stroked with the faintest bit of red, mostly on her cheeks. From the stem, objective look in her eye, her question still hovering in the air, I knew the blush wasn’t because she was shy. Thick, black frizzy hair touched her collarbones. Either edge of her subdued lips seemed to curl up, as if she was always on the verge of telling you something she knew she shouldn’t say, but had to. Her stance was wide too, like her shoulders were, giving off a sense she was ready to spar, verbally or physically. Conflict meant story to her, a before, a middle, and after. From the edge of the stage, I watched her lean forward into the seat in front of her, pressing both of her palms into the chairs back. The nails of her fingers were painted a light forest green. There were a few gold bands sprinkled like snowflakes on the sidewalk at random on both hands,

“I mean,” I said running my fingers through my hair. Sweat was building on my forehead and the top of my lip.

Stop sweating.

“I’m only asking because Lee and Austin are typically mediocre looking white guys. You look a little different. I’m just asking, how are you different?”

“I never really thought about that,” I admitted.

“You’re white passing,” she said looking me up and down, “But you’re obviously not all white. You’re something else.”

I felt like a tiger in a zoo being examined by a bunch of scientists.

“I just focus on the work,” I said. “That’s all I can really do. Everything else is a distraction or, I guess, out of my control.” 97 She nodded, then brought her forehead to her two fingers and started massaging her skull. I watched her knead her temples in silence as her assistants, both of them on either side of her, switched from looking at their clipboards to side glancing to see whatever she was doing. Nothing was said as we hung there, in this strange, impromptu meditation. All I could do was act normal, whatever that meant.

Seeing that her question was the last thing I ever thought I’d be asked, I didn’t know what to tell her. Did she want to know how Mom was just white, maybe some

English and Swedish, and Dean’s was a mix of Mexican and Spanish? I didn’t know where they were from specifically. I don’t even think they did. And anyways, I wasn’t bringing up Edie. It would have been New York all over again. She took her hand from her face.

“I could see that,” the director said. “About the work.”

Allowing the smallest smile to creep onto my lips, I said, “Thank you. That means a lot.”

“I know it’s a weird question to ask,” she said, “But like I was saying, Austin and

Lee are usually cast as two white guys, so casting someone that’s a person of color or different than the original is something one has to prepare for.”

“In college,” I started to say, but stopped.

She arced her eyebrows. “In college...”

“It was after a movement class,” I started to say. “Never mind, it’s a stupid story.”

“Tell me,” she said with critical kind of interest. “Don’t be shy.” 98 “It’s a stupid story.” I stepped backwards, away from the lights, away from the

edge of the stage where everyone could see me.

She crossed her arms and widened her legs slightly.

“It’s amazing that so many young kids work and pay for four years, and then

when they have a chance, a real chance to show themselves, their actual selves and not

the character, they do what you just did.”

I froze rigid. “I was told I was just going to do the side.”

“And now you’re doing something more,” she said. “Can you handle that?”

Opportunity was again presenting itself to me and I was stepping away from it.

Self-sabotage is a subtle, silent tool that only perpetuates misery and self-doubt.

“Listen, we get so many fresh out of college kids thinking the world has been

waiting just for them to grace their stage. When they realize their professors were jamming bullshit down their throat about how special they were, sometimes not even on

purpose but by casting them in lead row after lead row where they then can only get a

spot as a tree or a the 3rd spearmen, they’re crushed.” She shook her head and sighed,

deep and wide from the pit of her diaphragm. “And we’re the ones who have to break it

to these kids. Out here! In the field! They can’t do it in there at the University because

they’d quit right away. If they knew the chances, if they knew the odds, if they got treated

by the professors with an ounce of the kind of indifference or neglect they get out in the

world, they’d forgot the rave reviews they got in their high school show of Hamlet or

whatever, forget the quick high of praise and applause, and truly re-think their decision to

spend 50 grand on a degree claiming knowledge they could get in workshops.” 99 “I got a scholarship,” I admitted.

“Why is that?”

“I was telling that story.”

“I mean,” she said ignoring me, “How do you prepare an idealistic artist for the real world without crushing that magic in them?”

I stood there and rested on my heels. I didn’t have an answer.

“Continue with your story,” she exhaled. “Sorry, sorry.”

“I was crossing the street and one of the professors came up to me and asked basically what you’re asking me. What are you? I didn’t know what to say. I was sweaty and sore, at the end of the semester.”

“You didn’t give a shit about anything at that point, huh?”

“Sure,” I said. “You could say that.”

“Listen, I don’t care. You can say whatever you want to say. You’re not in school anymore. Whatever you cared about - grades, hallway cred, notoriety, girls, guys, professors.. .it has nothing to do with this show or what we’re talking about right now.”

“I told him I’m a little Spanish, a little Mexican, and then just white. I never did ancestry dot com. I still haven’t.”

“Do you know why he asked you?”

“I was flushed, like my cheeks were. He didn’t say it, but he waved his hand, twiddling his fingers a little and moved them around my face and skin. It was spring, so my skin was tanner than it is now. I assume it was for a show, but he never said. I told 100 him and he half-shrugged. Maybe he said interesting or something, and then walked away.”

“It was probably for a show or casting,” she said. “How did it make you feel?”

“Getting asked that?”

“Yeah.”

“Like a prop, Like an object. Like after I told him I imagined him in his head he was thinking, he can be this for me, that for me, and maybe play whoever for me if I need him to. It made me feel desperate, like he knew whatever he wanted to offer me, I would take because I just wanted and want to work. Cultural appropriation be damned.”

“Not a lot of choice in this business at the start,” she said.

I remember hearing a cough to the right of me and a muffled whisper of some words I knew were angry, venial, but could do nothing about.

When you’re on the spot, in the crosshairs of both your peers and your superiors, what can one do but freeze and keep yapping?

“There’s a lot in the middle?” I asked. “In the end? My mom...” My throat clenched and I felt myself started to go to the wings without being told to.

I imagined Edie dead alone in her chair, a cigarette clamped between her thin fingers, one of her records playing, surrounded by her awards heavy with dust, like herself - forgotten.

“We don’t have to go there,” she said, her voice suddenly soft. The air in the room grew cold. I saw melted ice the gutter, a beer can, a smoked cigarette, the butt of it blackened. 101 “Someone open a window or something?” I asked. “It’s freezing.”

“It’s Chicago,” she said. “In the wintertime. Everything’s frozen.”

“Hey,” I said flatly, trying to sound stem or like I was breaking out of the bubble we had impromptu created. “Are we taking time or something from the other actors?”

“Oh right, right,” she said, sounding exasperated and annoyed. “Can we take a break or something?”

She didn’t ask me this. She asked her assistants.

“We have at least ten other actors see tonight,” the assistant said punching away on her iPad as the other flipped through headshots.

“It’s Monday,” she said. “No one has anywhere to be on a Monday but home. Just pretend it’s Thursday or whatever hot day you young people think is the new day and I’ll buy your drinks of for the night. Not the actors.” She craned her neck to her right shoulder and fluttered her lips with a burst of air. “Tell them a break. If you want to leave, that’s their choice. If their good actors, they’ll know the difference between a good one and a bad one.”

I stood there, chained by the lights of the stage and the ever-widening width of the stage, as bull homs of frustrated sighs and crinkled papers rumbled all around me. I wanted to say, sorry sorry sorry to these other actors, but really, I didn’t. I felt, for that second, like I’d been chosen. I had been, so really, I was. Me. Of course, it was naive of me to think it was solely because of my work.

“Get down here,” she said pointing at the edge of the stage. “Just take a seat.

You’ve been standing longer than I’ve been living and it’s making me tired. Sit.” 102 The scene was over and another was beginning and there was nothing I could do about it. She was the director, both in and out of the play. Being the director, like God, she could cast light, she could cast darkness, she could bring death as well as life as she willed it. Metaphorical, but for an actor, it might as well be the same fucking thing. I didn’t feel proud about my advancement, my ask to stay - 1 felt scared. Knowing from

Edie that every gift has a secret intention, I wondered what hers was. What did she want with me? What did she not have that I did? What did she not want me to know?

I hung my legs over the edge of the dusty stage and tried to act like a school boy caught by the teacher flicking rocks at a beehive. I felt caught in some ways; guilty.

“Listen,” she said. “I know you’re Edie’s kid.”

Flashbacks of every conversation I ever had rushed me. The office hours meeting in the uncomfortable chairs and the windowless as professors lectured, I remember your mother Edie had a marvelous way of picking and choosing when she wanted to be seen by the audience and when she didn ’t.She was mercurial. There were the auditions I purposefully took in the suburbs and tiny theatres where I knew they wouldn’t know me, but of course, they would say, “Edie Gardener’s kid? Apple doesn’t fall from the tree’'’ or

“Isaw her in a couple shows...yeah...yeah...she was always great. ” I thought I could escape her praise, her legacy in Chicago, but I was wrong.

“Jesus Christ.” I planted my hand down and pushed myself up. “I’m out of here.”

“Hey!” she shouted, “Hey!” 103 Her voice made my eyes water. The nape of my spine, near the bottom of my skull and the back, hardened. She had been an actress once. She knew what her voice could do. She knew the power of her body.

“Do I look and sound like one of those LA hack directors that hire out of legacy?” she asked me, both of her eyebrows arched.

“No,” I said. “And your resume shows that.”

“Then fuck you for thinking that,” she snapped. “Your work was good and there’s something else there, something that’s imbibed in this brotherly conflict that has yet to be explored with play of Shepard’s.”

“Reminds me of something,” I said.

“From what?”

“In college they did A Streetcar Named Desire at my school, but the entire cast was black.” I caught myself and shook my head. “African American, except for Blanche and Stella.”

“What was the director?” she asked.

“What was the director?”

“White? Black? Latino?” She said with a sigh.

“White guy,” I said.

“White men always using something they don’t and can’t ever understand to search for something that may be there, but isn’t for them to discover.” She paused, and then cracked her pointer fingers with either thumb. “What was his point? What was he trying to say?” 104 “Don’t really remember,” I said. Of course I was embarrassed. I could’ve made some shit up, but I sensed she would have saw right through it.

“Then whatever it was probably didn’t come across,” she shrugged.

“I guess not.”

“Anyways, my point is I wasn’t even thinking of going down that road with this show because the text doesn’t necessarily go there. Like that director, I’d have to go looking for it.”

I nodded, silent.

“Maybe it does though,” she said. Her gaze fixed on my bare arms, my face, my eyes, my hair - anything that was out for the view. “The audience is going to project anything they want on someone, especially if it’s something like putting a POC in a role typically played by a pair of white guys. John C Reilly and Phillip Seymour Hoffman were the last players to do it and they were both obviously...”

“White guys,” I said.

She laughed with a sharp snort.

“Exactly!” She threw up her hands and let them fall in a slap against both of her thighs. “Not that you weren’t the only non-white guy to come in here today.. .there was just something different about you.”

I was about to say thank you again when she leaned over to an assistant and whispered something to them. That shut me up.

“No headshot?” she asked after a second. “One strike.”

“I...my agent...” 105 “I’m messing with you. Relax.”

I knotted into a ball of nerves as I tried to ignore a bead of sweat rolling down my forehead. I nodded, smiled, and did what was expected of me.

I sucked air in through my nose, held it in. I felt the heaviness of my eyelids as they closed in a subtle show of frustration and despair. There was nothing I could do to escape her. She would always be with me and I always with her. I opened them to see the two assistants and the director looking at me, staring expectantly actually, waiting for a reply, perhaps even a witty one to deflect but also acknowledge. I didn’t know what to give anyone anymore. Whatever it was, it didn’t have anything to do with the work, with the side, with the play, or with the audition. That was the truth and it drove me crazy that no one else saw that.

“That I am!” I said as jovial and well spirited as I could muster. There I was, on the stage, jumping into Edie’s arms. A constant net; a crutch I could not shed.

“That must be where you get your.. .your.. .well, what would you call it?” She asked me.

“Call what?”.

“Call the thing that makes you do what you can do? I’m always curious about what actors call their skill of living under the given circumstances.”

I had to laugh, so I did. She and I were having the same conversation Edie and I had toiled through since I was thrust into this world. For a moment, with the stage lights down and the silence of the theatre echoing, it almost felt like I was back in that New

York apartment, performing the monologue I prepared for the Juilliard audition. I saw 106 Edie with her legs folded, arms crossed, and both eyes on me as I spoke the lines. I was so petrified I was terrible, so scared she wouldn’t like it I felt outside of myself. I could feel every word as it formed on my lips. My eyes were so dry, but I couldn’t blink.

There was the sensation of being outside of myself, like when people say they are floating above their bodies moments after their death. There I was, my arms flailing, pushing my emotions, showing rather than being.

“I just call it the work,” I told her. “Everything else are irrelevant definers.”

She snorted and pushed the iPad back in one of the assistant’s chests.

“Your mom Edie definitely rubbed off on you.”

“You know her?”

“As much as any audience member knows a performer.”

There was a flash of loss that crossed her face, forcing me to imagine that she herself had tried to be what she was, that I was trying to be, at one time.

One thing that I never understood and still don’t understand, is that some people, they just give up.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m Edie’s kid. So what?”

“No what. I’m just asking out of origin. It has nothing to do with the present.”

“Yeah?”

“My mother was a school teacher and my dad was a banker,” she said. “I got into this to get away from that. I can’t imagine what it would be like to want to chase something that someone like your mother has already caught.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s the difference between her and I.” 107 “And what’s that?”

“She thought once she caught whatever she was chasing, she’d be different,” I said. “I guess I saw that wasn’t the case. Guess that’s why I’m here...”

“And she’s where now?”

“San Francisco,” I said.

“Interesting. I saw her in New York a couple times when I was there.”

“Are we ready for another actor?” the stage manager called from the wings. “It’s ten.”

“Yes!” she shouted, miming her hands around her mouth like a microphone.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry...” She looked at me with a feigned look of apology and a half- cocked neck. I couldn’t help but breathe a giggle as she fluttered her eyebrows, annoyed.

“It’s ten, its twenty, it’s a million and ten times twenty.. .time! Time! No respect for conversation or aspriations for potential artistry or the failure of it...” She flashed me a glanced, the sheen on her eye excited like an unearthed, newly shined diamond first meeting the heat of the sun.

“Thank you for your time,” I said. I strained

To memorize the edges of the black stage littered with dust; tried to hypnotize myself with the mites in my nostrils; attempted to coax myself with the feeling of the faint warmth of the stage lights as they blanketed my skin because I wasn’t sure, no, I was pretty positive, this moment would never happen again. To be seen in this way, in a way where I was recognized for myself and only myself, was rare, if ever. The work had been the work, and that, like a named comet or moon, was appreciated when it was seen. 108 “We’ll be in touch,” she said as she made her way around the seats and sat back down. “Great read. Great work.”

*

I called Edie the moment I got outside of the theatre. The curb was covered in this black sleet, mixed obsidian oil and starlight. I had to go outside - there had been so many eyes on me inside. I was the one who had made them wait. I, the enemy. I was the bar of competition, though they hadn’t heard a word or a seen a choice had made in there. All they knew or cared about is that I had made them wait, possibly forcing them to come back tomorrow. I’d be pissed if I was them. I’d have been livid.

“Pick up, pick up, pick up,” I said to myself over and over.

Her phone rang, but no answer.

An ambulance, red and white, whirled by, squish punching the snow and shooting out all kinds of nastiness from underneath its tires. The driver was faceless, their assistant not even a shadow as they reeled down the street. I imagined Edie in the back alone, reaching out for me. Her red fingernails were cracked as she reached, stretched, trying to pull at the last threads of who she was, seeing that all that work to create would never have anything to do with her.

The white moon broke grey cloud as I stepped outside.

I took my phone out, slide it open and called.

“Fuck,” I whispered. “Fuck.”

I spit on the ground. I hit my shoe. I stomped my feet. I pressed my phone hard into the skin of my face. She didn’t answer. 109 I caught the last L head north home. The wood of the platform was slick. As I waited up top, a few people, darkened blurs, shuffled along the street. There weren’t many cars. The phone was cold against my skin.

“Pick up you fucker,” I said trying Tim. “Pick up.”

The phone rang and rang, but nothing. Staring at the blank screen, the time read ten o’clock. I convinced myself that Dean was clueless, that no one would have reached out to him in LA anyway, so there was no reason to call him. I tried Edie’s house phone.

She never picked it up, but if something had happened, maybe somebody else was there.

As it rang, the frozen surface of the glass pressed up against my cold cheek, I saw her and

I running around one of our many living rooms, wearing bright red towels as capes, pretending we were super man. No answer. I put the phone back in my pocket, ringer on.

The train was empty save a passed out drunk who smelled of piss. He had bright red spray painted shoes on. There was a puddle underneath his dangling, swaying arm.

Outside, the lights of windows and stars mingled together to create flashes of something entirely new. My phone was heavy in my pocket. I usually never noticed it either because it was always in my hand, swiping away, reading, liking, disliking, or checking something, but none of that mattered. My phone could, 24 hours a day, order me a pizza, book a hotel room, watch pom, text an ex that didn’t want to hear from me. My phone, in its functions, was multitudes, but for once, it couldn’t give me what I truly wanted - just to hear Edie’s smoke stained voice.

Next to them, was a nurse with light blue frocks that appeared exhausted, right off of her shift. We caught eyes after glancing at the drunk as his bottle rattled back and forth 110 between his feet. She was done helping people for the night. I looked at the multitude of stains on the L’s seats, imagined the mistakes made, the accidents happened. I tried

Tim again. No answer. People make mistakes, I told myself. People slip up and sometimes it’s for something more than their life. There is no constellation for a fuck up.

Where was Tim? I needed his answers. I needed whatever he had to give, even if it was bad.

I got off the train. The air was cold and still frozen. Unforgiving, I thought.

Relentless and all of its daggers are. Unrelenting. Walking up the block to my apartment,

I was about to go inside the comer store to grab myself a bottle of something cheap to celebrate a decent audition, but then I spotted Peter, the Peter from college, outside the front of O’lee’s. My first impulse was to turn around and flee. I didn’t feel like talking. I felt like figuring out where the hell was team, but then Peter, smoking a cigarette brought his gaze up from the slicked concrete blotched with snow, and saw me.

“Goddamn,” I laughed. I did that thing where you’re acting surprised like you are seeing the person for the first time, but you’re really not; A serendipitous engagement.

“You stalking me outside of my place or something?” I kicked some snow at him, trying to lighten the tone of my voice. Everything about me at Steppenwolf had felt so wooden.

The blue and white neon lights of the Miller Light sign in the window smoothed his soft jaw line that seemed to flow into his neck. He was one of those talents that didn’t need the stereotypical hard look or the thick hair or the rolled back shoulders exuding confidence. His thin gray, brown hair and fat cheeks; his piggish eyes that could just as I l l easily play dumb when they went wide, maniacal and pointed when they squinted; his thin lips; his wide, off kilter swagger which exuded a faltering sense of confidence, made him something interesting to look at. One had to question, whenever he went anywhere, what the hell he was going to do. All these qualities made him the malleable everyman that he was.

He was in some shit production his final year where he had to wear a fedora and took his shirt off in one scene so his pink skinned potbelly bulged out, but he didn’t have a care in the world. I remember him laughing, bursting out, the others unsure what was going on, but in the play, it made total sense. He was living through his character, not as them. He was completely natural, fearless, and open.

“What? Your Air B N B here or something?” Peter asked me, nodding up in no particular direction. He was already drunk, which put me at ease a little bit.

“Right across the street,” I told him.

He lit another cigarette. I could tell he was already drunk from the half smirk on his lips and his glassy eyes. His cheeks were pink, but that was probably from the cold.

Peter just had that way of overtly saying something that was already funny, but he was trying to make funnier. There was also a glass of beer between his spread legs, which I assume was from inside. I watched as he pressed his chin to his chest, started rustling around the breast pocket of his black sailors pea coat jacket, and took out a tiny flask of

Jim Beam.

“Nice place?”

“Yeah,” I joked. “A penthouse with a hot plate and an empty fridge.” 112 After he took a nip, he nodded, gritting his teeth as he exhaled with a mild, bleeped laugh. He lightly tapped the back of his head against the wall he leaned hard against, not saying anything until, “Hit?”

I took the thing and hit it. Before I even put the flask to my lips, I smelled burnt molasses and cigarettes, but told myself they were lilacs and buttered toast with honey, like Edie makes.

My hand reached for my pocket to get my phone, but Peter waved for me to give the flask back. “Live alone.”

“No one would want to live with me,” I said. “Talking to myself all the time.”

Peter smiled, that same smile I remember from all those times on stage where he’d turn to the face the audience, for some big line or monologue, but always as three people: himself, the actor, and his character.

“Yeah,” Peter said as he sighed. “Fucking people.”

We stood there, not saying anything. I had the urge to take out my phone to distract myself, to take me away from the moment, but I stopped myself. I didn’t want to be that person who took out their phone when there wasn’t anything to do or say. What a cowardly thing, I thought. I stared stoically, as if thinking about something very deeply with my eyes, at my bedroom window.

There was nothing special about it: the glass frosted from the outside in; a thunderbolt crack down it’s center; the wood frame splintered. Against the glass though, in the reflection of the glow of the white moon, was Edie’s first headshot. I could barely make out her milk cream and honey color of her skin or the look of vulnerability mixed 113 with confidence in her cat eyes or the way her auburn hair fell over her shoulders or her half smile, a coy smirk really. I could barely make it out in all that darkness, but it didn’t matter because I had a memorized. Her gaze, pointed and strong, gazed outward, toward the street. My throat clenched, and for a second I couldn’t breathe. The overwhelming urge to breakdown and cry surged in me. I felt the ripple start at the base of my spine and quiver all the way up my back, around my temples, and over my eyes. I swallowed and exhaled, the white frost of air shaking as much as I was. All I wanted to do was tell Peter that something was going on, but I hadn’t seen him since college. He didn’t care and I wasn’t one of those actors, I wasn’t one of those people that start pouring all of their shit out on some poor unsuspecting ear.

A cop car in fury shot by swerving as it made its way through the snow packed street. The two of us were jolted out of wherever we had gone and turned to look at the flashing, shrieking sounds and light. Off-white snowflakes, stained with the orange of the streetlight, fell from the black sky onto the glistening gray concrete of the road. The moon was out, but instead of beautiful, it seemed like a bore. Nothing new. Just big, round, and glowing white.

“Ain’t no...no penthouses around L trains,” chuckled Peter. He said the ain’t with a deep snap, almost like some Louisana fisherman or something. As he patted his belly, I wondered who he thought he was, where he thought he was. “None like New York.”

He took a long, hard drag, leaning his head back against the red stone brick wall.

He seemed to be feeling extremely good about something or extremely bad. Maybe both.

One can only be present in so many places at once. Maybe Peter was one of those guys, 114 one of those actors, one of those artists that didn’t know what to do with themselves when he wasn’t somebody else. Like I said, I barely knew him. He flicked his cigarette into the road. “Man, I forgot how fucking cold Chicago gets.”

“A literal snow globe.” I put my hands and arms out as if to embrace the entire frozen wasteland. I held them there, the two of us hovering in that silence, and not a soul or footstep on the street to interrupt us. “What’d you think of that audition?”

Peter looked ahead at nothing in particular. His face was placid, motionless, no eye twitch or scratch or mouth tic as my question seemed to strike not a single chord of muscle on his face. Something was happening in his mind, something I would never see.

He cocked his head to his left shoulder once, quick, and then back straight.

“Getting a drink?” he asked, ignoring my question. “We should get a drink. Let’s talk it over a drink. Right?”

“I...” I started to say, my eyes glancing at my apartment.

“You got a lady already?” Peter howled. He gave me a few playful punches at my ribs and started laughing, mostly to himself.

“No, no,” I said. “Just beat.”

Suddenly, he gripped me hard with his arm around the back of my neck and pulled me down. I was shocked and weirdly afraid, though I was certain I could take him if I needed to, but I never thought I would. We slid around in the snow, half-laughing, until he started talking. I didn’t know what else to do, but play along. 115 “You know Shakespeare got drunk,” he hissed, tiny cackles following. There was darkness in his voice, a hollow reaching. “How do you think he wrote dialogue so well? Booze, a note pad, and time.”

Laughing nervously, trying to get his musty body off of me, I told him, “Yeah, yeah, lemme’ make a call though. I’ll meet you in there. Just open a tab and put them all on me.”

Peter clapped his hands together hard once, barked once, maybe twice, and then clapped again. Then he pulled his flask out and finished it. There wasn’t that much left - two shots maybe - but I knew where he was going and it would only get worse inside.

“Just let me make a call, alright and I’ll be in there,” I told him.

“Imma’ hold you to it,” he demanded, dropping the glass flask on the ground and crushing it into the sidewalk with the heel of his boot. “We got to talk shop.”

“Wouldn’t miss it...” I started to say.

“For the world!” shouted Peter, his golden cheer of a voice echoing between the iced walls of apartments, shops, and shivering steel. He pointed at me with two make shift finger guns. “For the world...” He whispered, blowing at their tips like they’d just been shot. “For the world...”

I tried Edie again after Peter made his way inside and screamed at the few regulars, I ’m back! Miss me? What followed was a chorus of, No, nopes, and silence.

For a small trip, he was making quite an audition.

“Edie,” I started, “Mom, I mean. It’s Ave. Tim texted me and called me a few times. He said something was wrong, something happened. What’s going on? I’m really 116 worried. I know you’re always saying you’re the one that should be worrying, but fuck all that. Sorry, but no one’s answering my calls. Dean didn’t call me. Tim won’t pick up. You, obviously, won’t pick up. I haven’t heard anything from him.”

I felt helpless, crazy, like I was the only one left out of the loop of the most important thing in my life and no one cared. The feeling reminded me of these nightmares I would have every few months. They were always the same. I’d be backstage somewhere, some theatre, and there would be that familiar warmth of being there. People seemed to know me, but I never recognized any faces. Everyone was excited and I was clueless why until one of the actors, still faceless, an entity, came up to me and wanted to run lines. A smile would creak onto my face, then a paralyzing nervousness, like I hadn’t done something that I was supposed to do, yet no one had told me to. Run lines I would ask, what are you saying? We just started. And they would tell me it was opening night and we were about to go on and then I’m asking the director can I go out with the script and they tell me absolutely not and every happy, familiar face turns dark and gray and distant and wants nothing to do with me. I’m a disappointment. I’m that actor. I’m disrespecting the work and wasting everyone’s time and no excuse will let me slide. The curtains rise and there I am, on-stage, with nothing to say.

Suddenly, I thrust my head forward and back into the glass window of O’lee’s.

There was a sharp crack. I closed my eyes, then felt a cold tear trail down my colder cheek. A voice from inside screamed, maybe at me. I turned around and saw that it was just Pete, yelling for me to get inside. There was a thin splinter where I’d put my head. I 117 reached around and felt the warmth of action and reaction. My fingers were wet with blood, until the red thinned as it cooled.

“Can you call me back?” I asked, wiping the blood on the knee of my pants. “You called me right before the audition so you have me worried. What happened? I’m home now. This guy from college, this upper classman was randomly here. You remember that

Peter guy? Yeah, he’s here. They flew him out...what luxury. He’s drunk right now in the bar outside my place. Can you call me back? I think I did well Mom. I talked to the director for a minute afterward. I think she liked me. Even if she didn’t, I think she appreciated the work.” I cold snowflake kissed my cheek and melted. I felt that familiar shattering in my throat. My eyes were too cold and dry to shed anything. Nothing was wrong, I told myself. Nothing happened. “I learned that from you ok? You know that. I learned all that from you. I’m out here to do my own thing, but I learned to be independent, to be my own artist, my own person, from you. Can you call me back please? I’m going to call Tim again. Call me back. I love you ok, ok, call me back. I love you Mom.”

I took my phone from my frigid ear, feeling empty, as if I had just given Edie her in memoriam. What a thing to do it from too - some stupid phone. Thing was always on me, always beckoning me to check it, update it, ensure that it was secure. When had I become a slave to it... I don’t know. Those kind of addictions and routine seemed to be more and more commonplace everyday. I started to let my phone fall to my side when I had the impulse to whip it onto the snow flurried ground, all littered with punched out black headed disregarded cigarette butts and white cardboard hot dog carrying cases from 118 the popcorn machine inside. But then I thought, that’s the only Edie - anyone - would be able to get a hold of me, yet that’s not what I wanted coming out here. I wanted to be alone but still, I was reaching out, to whomever and in whatever way I could. The truth was I needed her.

Against my own will, I started to call her again. Her name in white blocked letters showed only her name and I saw that was all life was going to give me at that moment.

Really, it was normal to only see Edie like that. I saw it on Playbills, marquees, and brochures. I heard it said, announced, and cheered. Her name was her image, so who was this Edie? Who was this Edie without a smart-ass word to say? Who was this silent mother, this lesson-less teacher, this actress without a line?

*

“When was the last time you felt like an artist?”

Peter asked me with this after a good five minutes of silence. The self reflective query rolled out after a burp, a large, gaseous one that made the Cubs couple at the making out the pool table peel their lips from each other and shout, What the Hell yah’ gross fuck! The guy almost came over and started swinging at Peter - oblivious to it all - but the girl grabbed his crotch and whispered something in their ear, dampening the flash of male toxicity that runs true after night falls and the prospect of getting laid runs high.

Peter’s question wavered in the air like his belch, rich with the smell of high sodium, stale beer, and self-doubt. The way he asked it too, not turning to look at me, but staring straight ahead, all in a subdued, meek tone tracing voice. There had been such 180 from the confident, self-possessed actor I had seen two hours before. 119 I started to twist the shell of a peanut between my fingers, every crack sounding like a firecracker. An uneasy, aggressive tension was in the air. I felt in the timidity of my movement when I told myself the beer was empty in front of me even though that had been the first thing I had noticed when I sat down. Peter, main-stage actor, always emanated varied shades of intimidation, but I had never been so up close to it before, and it had never been so slovenly and drunken. I didn’t want to pry, but shit, there was nothing else to do. He’d asked me out for a drink anyway. Maybe he wanted to talk. Maybe this was just a scene for him.

“Did something happen man?”

Both of his elbows were dug into the peanut shell ridden bar. The rainbow of liquors colliding with the dim yellowed overhead light illuminated with his sunken face.

Peter didn’t budge. He didn’t even blink. I asked him again and right as the -ing sounded after I said something, he whipped his taut neck towards the end of the bar.

“Something’s always happening,” I thought I heard him say, but not to me.

The bartender was chatting with a couple of drunk, underage sorority girls who’d wondered over from Wrigley Field. Their faces were red and blue with paint. They’d been at the game, but from the look of their bobble heads and lack of coping with gravity, the game must have ended hours ago. Some of the paint was on their teeth and I immediately thought of sweet little old ladies with lipstick on their dentures. The bartender poured them a pair of tequila shots and waved their money away when they half-offered to pay. 120 “HEY!” Peter barked at the three of them. “How bout’ we get some of that treatment over here! We’re DRY!”

“You got four pairs of tits and an angel smile and maybe I will!” The bartender shouted back at him.

Peter brought his head back fast and groaned. “I’ll show yah’ some tits,” he grumbled. “I’ll how yah’ the best goddamned pair of tits this side of the Chicago

River...”

“That’s a pretty subjective thing to feel, right?” I asked sensing he was only going to let me into whatever door he opened.

That’s how most actors and actresses were at least. They only let you see them weak on-stage, in performance, but never out in the real world. Our humanity was reserved for the stage. Anywhere else and we were only perpetuating the stereotype of being dramatic or extra or suffering for our art in some type of way. We were and are suffering though, much like everybody else, though we choose to make something out of it rather than distract or numb ourselves with binging Netflix or chasing and achieving some nuclear family construct that ultimately isn’t perhaps what they ever wanted. Of course, without Netflix, without families to go see plays and movies, the rest of us and I would be out on the street. To put into metaphor the public is a shark: dead eyed, roving, devouring everything and anything in sight and we entertainers, are the pilot feeding off the parasites of their need to escape. In some ways, we are also the tug boat, guiding the tanker to new shores. In others, we are temporary embodiment of the ideal human being, though the specter created is impermanent and fleeting. Peter didn’t appear to give a shit 121 about all that. Maybe it was because he was out of his jungle and didn’t have a recognizable enough face to save, but I was there. I could gossip and tell alumni from the program, but maybe he had seen my indifference of that whole world, when I was there or just then, on the street. I truly was, so maybe Peter saw that. Maybe, he felt it.

“Don’t you think?” I asked trying to get back to his original question.

Peter fluttered his lips so hard spit flew from his mouth and onto the bar.

“Remember that exercise,” he said after there was no more air in his lungs or spit to blow. “Remember that dumbass vocal exercise? What did they tell us it did?”

I did it as Peter started up again.

PpPpPpPpPpPTTTTTttttttPPPPPPPP, blubbered our wet flapping lips.

Yes and! I thought. Yes and!

Peter tapped my knee with his flask of whiskey. “He’s taking a piss or a shit or something. Hit this again while he’s gone.”

I had never been so familiar with Peter before. While his head slumped back and forth between his shoulders, mumbling lines to no stage but his own, I felt a surge of comradely I knew in the morning, if there were to be one, would be merely remembered with an, Ah ’ shucks real got real drunk that one time! Staying present, as Peter and I had been trained to do, I smiled to myself in the mirror, winking to the other I, drunkenly signaling that I was aware that I was in fact there, but not there.

“You going to take it or what fuck?” jeered Peter.

“Yeah goddamnnn,” I slurred slightly. I tapped my phone face up on the bar out of habit, only showing the time. I wanted Taco Bell. I wanted something to grease me up. 122 I hit it, felt the syrupy swollen honeyed molasses roll down my throat, chuckling as I handed it back to Peter, immediately shooting back into the topic he’d started.

“Last time I felt like an artist was the last time I knew or was told what an artist was,” Peter said. He was waving at me to give him back his flask with his right hand but it was already in his left. “Gimme’ the damned thing man, gimme’.”

“You have it?” I told him.

Peter looked at the near finished brown vessel in his hand. The jukebox was playing something I knew the rhythm to, but not the name.

Peter scoffed. “College boy with all the smarts, all the answers.” His eyes swam in his head as they meandered around the air in front of him. Suddenly he stopped and nodded heavily to himself as if finding a question he asked only himself. His brain was wet, but amazingly still working.

“I got it, but do you get it?” asked Peter.

“Get what?”

He slapped the bar open palmed, startling me. Tiny pinpricks skittered over my arms, waiting to see what he’d do next.

“Do you get what I’m saying about the artist?” He half-snarled this at me. “What you and I are? What we are supposed to be?”

“We’re actors,” I said frankly. “We are who we choose to be.”

“We are but choices,” Peter said. He slumped his chin on the counter then blew a straw with a puff of air so it slid over the edge. “We are but choices.”