Actors Anonymous (13 page)

At the end of the dance section, I was supposed to pursue her, and did I ever. I chased her from one end to the other, around the other kids in masks, knocking one frail zombie to the floor, until finally the girl ran behind the stage curtain and I tackled her into a pile of hay that was going to be used for an
Oklahoma
number. Snarling on top of her, I pressed the snout of the mask so forcefully into her cheek while attempting to kiss her, that when two counselors finally pulled me off there were three red streaks across her face that remained for a week. I avoided major punishment for my first assault charge because the performance onstage had been so great—everyone really got into the dance number, which won us the competition. I claimed that the
mauling in the hay had been a result of going so deep into character. It worked. Thus, I learned that when my identity was concealed I had permission to be whoever I wanted and to do whatever I wanted. I also found that sexual energy was a great engine for performance: My lust had turned what would have been an otherwise bumbling adolescent attempt into a passionate and flowing rendition full of the requisite tight kicks and turns, drops and thrusts. My desire had turned my body into a voice, and the voice was saying: “I want to fuck, even if I don’t know what that is yet.” But I also learned—and this was an acquirement of dark knowledge, something out of Faust—that when I was performing, others gave me permission to be a madman. As long as it was part of the “performance” the audience would accept almost anything, in fact they
wanted
me to go beyond civilized bounds.

In sixth grade I played Tybalt in
Romeo and Juliet
. King of cats, indeed. I wasn’t even sure what that meant, but it guided my performance. I had grown up with a cat in a neighborhood full of cats. One neighbor kept his cat on a small chain that was attached to a cement block. I have no idea why Mr. Johnson did this, because when he was home he would let the cat roam freely. The cat was called Gray. Gray was large and gray and had a boxy face, like a bulldog. Because the chain was attached to the block, Gray could move it incrementally, and over time he became very strong from pulling the cement block around, tight muscles under a silky gray coat. More than once I witnessed Gray stalk unsuspecting birds sitting on a high fence in the front of Mr. Johnson’s yard. Believing themselves safely out of range of the cat, the birds chattered away, confident and stupid. Finally, after a slow ritual of low belly stalking and long stretchy steps, in a move that was both startling and sexual, Gray would leap with illogical power and pluck one of the birds off the fence. It was hard to perceive the
moment of impact, but after the squawking explosion of birds toward the sky, Gray would land on the cement of Mr. Johnson’s driveway with a wing-flapping bird in his mouth. The force with which he whipped them about in his jaws and then lay on his back and clawed their feathers from their breasts and wings with his hind legs was intoxicating. As a boy I too wanted to tear into birds until their heads detached and their blood smeared purple across my lips.

That is how I played Tybalt. I began the production with a quiet approach and proceeded with a slow accumulation of rage. I was in love with the girl playing Juliet, Elizabeth Gross, and I despised the faggot playing Romeo, Jesse Porge, pronounced
Por-hey
. Everyone called Elizabeth “Gross Lizard” because she wasn’t the prettiest girl around and because of her name. To me she
was
the prettiest. She had large eyes and large cheeks and breasts just forming and legs smooth and thin. I called Jesse Porge “Pordge,” pronouncing the
g
because he was a fucking pordge. He was a round-faced little tub of lard, a pudge with a butt-cut, and he thought he was the shit. He ate Romeo up, loved it like it was his life’s purpose; he even wore his cape around school. I think he would have worn the tights too if it didn’t mean that I and the rest of the class would have beaten the shit out of him.

We used to be friends, in fourth grade. He would be the game master when we all played the
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
role-playing game. But that was two years before, and lots had changed.

At rehearsal, waiting to go on for the party scene:

“Hey, Pordge, why don’t you go fuck yourself.”

“It’s Por-
hey,
and why don’t
you
go fuck yourself, Harry? You’re stupid enough.”

“Oh, you think I’m stupid, eh?”

“I think you are one of the stupidest guys in class.”

“Oh you do, hungh?”

“Yes, Harry, you’re like a hairy ape.”

“Oh, that’s funny, Pordge, you roly-poly fucking
Pordge
.”

“It’s
Por-hey,
hairy
idiot
.”

When he and Elizabeth kissed, it really killed me because I had hardly kissed anyone except for a game of spin the bottle at summer camp, and Pordge did it with so much feeling. I would stand offstage and watch them do the balcony scene with growing rage. He’d scamper up the little ladder that they disguised with vines and hold her cheek while he pressed his lips to hers. It was a fake kiss, an acting kiss, but it killed me every time. I knew she was acting, but it was like she wanted it: She’d close her eyes and lean into the kiss, blissful and sexual. It was a confusing moment. How could she do that, even if it was pretend, and not feel something? The way she closed her eyes, and leaned over the railing. It did something to me, lit something inside me, made me want to kill.

We did the play once for the school and it was a hit. Elizabeth and Pordge got the largest applause at the end, especially from the parents. It was stupid shit. I mean, so transparent, there is no way that they could have actually liked what Pordge was doing onstage, it was ridiculous. Sure, he said all the words clearly and did it with feeling, but the way he carried himself was all fake, and he spoke in a way that sounded phony. It was like he wanted everyone to know that he knew what he was saying, but it wasn’t how people actually talk, nor was it even poetic talk, it was just a show for a bunch of wimpy teacher types who want to know that they are having some kind of influence on their students.

My friend Adam played Mercutio. After the show we snuck out and walked over behind the school library where there was a wooden bench stuck into the wall. It’s where we used to play the
Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles
role-playing game back when I didn’t mind Pordge.

Adam gave me a cigarette. “Try it.”

“Tastes like shit.” It was my first ever. He got them from his brother.

“Why are you so upset over those two?”

“Because I fucking love her.”

“Gross Lizard?”

“Shut up. She’s not gross, and she’s not a lizard.”

“Whatever, she looks like one, and anyone that wants to go out with Porgy is pretty gross.”

“Wait, what?”

“What?”

“She’s going out with Pordge?”

“Yes, you didn’t know?”

I smoked the whole cigarette with Adam and I felt sick. I walked home because I didn’t live far from the school. I was still in my red and gold tights, the Capulet colors. The air was chilly and my head and throat felt mushy and full of ash. Walking across the bike bridge I thought about murder. There was black water trickling in the darkness underneath, and I imagined Pordge’s body splashing in it and floating down and away. How, how, how? How could she be with that guy? A fucking
butt-cut,
and he was so phony and so full of himself, and for no good reason because he was a roly-poly slug motherfucker. I walked home alone in the dark. Cats slunk about the dark houses looking for mice.

We took the show to a multischool event called Shake-Fest where each school presented two Shakespeare scenes. Our school decided to do the balcony scene and the sword-fighting scene because our teacher, Mrs. Young, was proud of the sword fighting that we had
developed. We had choreographed the whole thing with the fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Aronson. I think I was the best at it—well, maybe Adam was the best, but he played Mercutio, so he couldn’t show off his skills as much because he got killed right away. I’d always let him show off for a bit with a few spinning moves, but then I had to kill him. Then I always had to let Pordge kill me.

At Shake-Fest, the schools met in this auditorium, and each school would take turns doing their two scenes in the middle of all the others. There were five schools, and we went fourth. The first three were pretty bad. They did
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
: a scene with the donkey head, which I liked, but they could have done it better. Another school did the scene from
Hamlet
where Hamlet tells Ophelia to get to a nunnery—the Ophelia tried to cry, but it was fake, and Hamlet was in black and stupid—and
Taming of the Shrew,
ha, well,
she
was a fucking
shrew,
that’s for sure.

Then we got to our play. First they did the balcony scene. Because of the setup, Elizabeth had to stand on a ladder with cloth triangle cutouts on the sides with castle designs to disguise that it was a ladder. Elizabeth rested her arms on the top platform and looked out, and Jesse looked up at her and said his stupid lines. Elizabeth’s father was actually the guy that stood in the center of the ladder to hold it steady. He was a supertall guy, with square shoulders and a square head and a brown mustache, and he made me think: American fireman. I think he had played in the NFL when he was younger. When they had been putting everything in place and her father climbed under the ladder, lots of people laughed because it was such a funny setup, and I heard someone whisper, “He’s just
standing
there, for
so
long, that’s like seven
million
years of bad luck.”

Pordge and Elizabeth did their scene. It was pretty much how they had always done it, but a little different, and not just because of
the ladder setup. Jesse was doing something else, something more than he usually did. I wasn’t sure what it was until I heard another person whisper,
“He’s crying.”
I looked at his pig eyes and he
was
crying, there was wet below his deep-set sockets and a glistening snail trail down the pertly molded bubble of each cheek. The little fucker was showing off, and not the way he usually showed off by articulating and flinging the words about as if he owned them or had a special relationship with Shakespeare. There was something else going on:

Oh that I were a glove
[pronounced
glow-v] upon that hand,

That I might touch that cheek!
[He always said this word very quickly, as if he were saying
chick,
and he’d purse his lips a little.]

His pronunciation and gesticulations made me want to smack him, but the tears on his face did something else to me: It cooked up in my chest a roiling, lustful rage. His tears were
my
tears, they were the outward signs of everything that I had felt for Elizabeth: her devastating beauty, her unattainability, the frustrations over being so young and not being able to do anything concrete. Once, on a special lunch outing with my mother, I had even asked my mom about getting married early. Elizabeth had been particularly nice to me at that time so I had naturally jumped to the idea of spending the rest of my life with her. My mom said that twelve was a little young to get married, so I cited a couple of young dancers that I had just read about who had been married at age fourteen with their parents’ permission. My mom told me that we could revisit the idea in two years if I was still in love with her. Then she asked if Elizabeth was in love with me.

I cried at that lunch, just like Jesse was crying in the scene; his were
my
tears, because I knew that she
didn’t
feel the same way about me, and I would never marry her, and we would grow up and she
would live her life and I would live mine, and we would get old and ugly and the universe would die and none of it would matter. And here was Jesse delivering his fucking lines as if he
was
Romeo and not the pasty, pudgy, longhaired pompous fuck that I knew him to be. And he was
fooling
everyone. I heard someone whisper, “He’s
really
good.” I turned slightly and over my evil shoulder I saw that the tall, thin Ichabod Crane–looking woman that taught at one of the other schools was leaning slightly toward her friend Mrs. Young, our stout, powerful, black teacher. Mrs. Young nodded assent to Jesse’s supposed skills in her self-assured way, full of pride for the simpering, overemotional turd in the middle of the crowd.

I could kill. He said everything that I wanted to say, in the way that I wanted to say it. Or so it seemed, but what I realized while watching helpless on the sideline was that it wasn’t even the words themselves that got me worked up; it was the intimacy with which he interacted with Elizabeth and in front of everyone. He was pouring his heart out to her and being applauded for it; her goddamned
father
was standing underneath them, holding them up, as Jesse climbed the ladder and kissed her, multiple times. And for this performance he didn’t hold back, no elementary school pecks for him, he was pressing himself against her with open lips and probably a froggy tongue hidden between. I was considered a freak whenever I showed affection for Elizabeth in life, but he was allowed to reveal his deepest feelings for her and in such a way that he was applauded for it: The more emotional he got, the more the audience was drawn into his performance. What fucking Romeo cries in the fucking balcony scene anyway?

A short digression: I had told her I loved her. After school one day, she was walking home with a couple friends, Rachel and Maggie: one tall with crossed eyes and blond hair, the other medium height,
dark-haired, and tough. They walked home in the same direction as I did, across the bike bridge. When they were halfway across the bridge, I stopped them with my voice. Elizabeth and Jesse had been rehearsing the play for weeks at that point, and all of my desires—until then kept secret in my personal dream world of sunny fields and fluffy clouds—were being forced to the surface by the intimacy between her and Jesse that I was forced to watch. Until the rehearsals began for the play, I could bide my time and savor the unrealized plans I had for us, treating them as a fait accompli, without actually having to do anything to bring them about. It had been a relatively pleasant period when dreams ran free and defined my emotions in the slow moving days of elementary school. But the palpable intimacy developing, even in the early stages of rehearsal, had brought everything to a boil. I knew that if I didn’t act soon, I would lose her to Jesse, and at that time, relationships seemed never-ending; if they did start going out, it would be interminable. She would be lost forever.