Actors Anonymous (16 page)

During work hours, I hardly saw Juan because I was back in my little drive-thru area, but I’d see him when I passed the grill to go to the bathroom or when I’d go outside to smoke. He’d watch me walk by with his dumb animal eyes in his dumb baby face. If I looked he would smile a bat smile, his sharp baby teeth peeking over his bottom lip. I would give him my dead eyes. I didn’t want him to think that our thing in the bathroom was anything more than a money thing. But I also didn’t want to lose him.

I would work until 2 a.m. most nights, and then I would go home and sleep a bit, and then I would have to wake up for the daily meeting at El Jardin Encantado. I was always really tired, and Sonny would
get on my case about paying attention in the meeting. I asked if I could go to other meetings, but Sonny told me I had to go to that meeting, the Valley Bucks men’s meeting, because it was where I got clean and sober. I liked it because I liked all the guys, and I liked that we met at the Mexican place, but it was so early. One time, soon after I jerked off Juan, Sonny and I were sitting in our regular booth, the one next to the wall painting of the little Mexican in the sombrero, bent over carrying corn, and I put my head down sideways on the table, and then I was asleep.

“Wake the fuck up.”

“Sorry, Sonny. I was just working late last night.”

“First priority is your
sobriety. First
priority. If you don’t have your sobriety you have nothing.”

“I know, but I was
working
.”

“
First
priority. That means before
everything
. Before work, before family, before sex, before
everything
.”

“Okay, but you told me to get the job.”

“Sean, don’t be such a fucking idiot all the time, okay?”

“I’m trying not to be.”

Then he told me a story. There was another guy sharing in the meeting about his wife, but Sonny talked over him. The guys at that meeting were used to private conversations during the meeting, but Sonny always spoke too loudly.

“You know, I had another sponsee about your age,” he said. “He wanted to be an actor. They
all
want to be actors.” This was funny coming from him because he was a failed actor himself. “And then this guy got a little job on a soap opera and he thought he was hot shit.
Hot
shit! And
then
he started falling asleep in the meetings because of
work
. And
then
he stopped
coming
to the meetings because he was so
busy
. And then you know what happened? He went out. Mister
hot-shit hotshot started using drugs and then one day, you know what he did?” Sonny looked like he really wanted an answer.

“No.”

“He took some
acid
. And he decided to jump off the back of a moving pickup truck because he thought he could fly. Well, he couldn’t, and he knocked out all of his front teeth. Smile now, motherfucker. No more soap, no more hotshot.”

“Was that in the nineteen-sixties?”

“Funny. I guess you’re a
hotshot
too, hungh?”

“No, I won’t do that stuff,” I said.

“We’ll see, you selfish prick. Keep it up Mr. McDonald’s, coming in here and sleeping, and we’ll see if you have any teeth to become a big actor.”

“I’m just working at the job you told me to take.”

“First priority means
first,
motherfucker.”

Some of the other guys told Sonny to shut up because he was talking too loud. He told them to suck his cock, and everyone yukked.

Then I joined an acting class. I found one on Lankershim Boulevard, near Universal Studios called the Valley Playhouse. We met twice a week at noon. It was intense and good. My first scene was
A Hatful of Rain,
this play from the 1950s about a drug addict. Some of the dialogue was old-fashioned. I got matched up with this girl named Jeanette, who was nice but who wasn’t right for the scene; she was too tense. She was supposed to be my wife, and I was supposed to feel guilty because I couldn’t stop doing drugs and I was hiding it from her. It wasn’t too far from what I had gone through with my real wife. But my real wife had been pretty and Jeanette wasn’t pretty. So it was going to be hard to pretend that I was in love with her.

We had our first rehearsal over at her house near Pico Boulevard,
all the way over the hill and on the other side of Hollywood, which meant that I had to drive a ways. She was married but didn’t have any children. Her husband was a musician and a nice guy; he did the music for television shows. But I got the sense, just from the way she dressed and behaved, that one of the things Jeanette probably liked about acting was all the pretend romance and the excuse to kiss other guys. She did have a pretty good body, tall. At her house we decided to do an improvisation where we did the scene in our own words.

“Where have you been?”

“I was out,” I mumbled.

“Out where?” She was doing the impoverished, pregnant wife thing.

“Just out.”

“That’s bullshit, Johnny! Fucking bullshit! You were with
her,
right? Right? Fucking answer me!”

“Yeah.” I was supposed to pretend that I was having an affair because I didn’t want her to know about my drug addiction.

“Okay. Well, I just can’t do this anymore.” She started crying, really working it. I let her go on for a bit because she seemed to relish it. Then I started in with my story, but in my own words.

“I don’t know, babe. I just don’t know about anything. I don’t know what
home
is. Is
this
my home? I’ve had so many homes in all my life that I just don’t know what to do anymore. I just roam these streets and I think of my childhood and I don’t know who I am anymore.” She had stopped sobbing to listen to my speech. I kept going and she started walking toward me, slowly. “I was just a kid playing marbles, trying to get by, just trying to be a
kid,
and then
bam,
I’m in the war and all my friends are being blown to bits, and then I’m in the war of life and
I’m
being blown to bits…” She was upon me.

“I think you’re a fucking hero. Come home, Johnny. This is your
home, come home.” Then she kissed me, hard. Her tongue swished around on my teeth. I pulled her to me and tried to feel her good body against my body to make up for her bad face. It worked a little—her body felt great—so I forgot about what I was kissing up top for a second. But then I remembered that her husband was in the other room and we were just doing a scene. I pulled away and we ended the improvisation. Then we sat on the couch and talked about it.

“That was interesting,” I said.

“I thought we got a lot out of that,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Well, I think maybe we cemented something solid about the relationship, so when things don’t go well because of your drugs in the scene, we can feed on that.”

“Cool.” If she thought so, it was fine with me.

“Do you agree?”

“Sure,” I said. And then, “Yeah, it reminds me of my wife and my kids.”

“You’re married?”

“Well, sort of. Not really, divorced. I don’t see the kids much.”

“Oh, why not?”

“Because I was a drug addict and then I left them and moved back in with my parents.”

“You have two kids? You were young when you had them.”

“Yeah, like twenty-one.”

She didn’t have much more to say to me after that.

On Friday night I was taking orders in the drive-thru. A girl’s voice ordered a small french fries and a child-size Diet Coke, which wasn’t much. When the car drove around to the window it was a black Jetta, and then I realized it was the blond girl that had come through
before, Karen. It had been almost three weeks since I saw her. She looked good, but it looked like she had a bunch of makeup on. I took my headset and hat off so I didn’t look like such an ass.

She handed me two dollars.

“
Hey,
” I said. “You look great.”

“What happened to your accent?” I forgot that she thought I was from Brooklyn because I had been doing the accent with her before. I put on the accent again.

“
Wadda
you mean?” I said, overdoing it.

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“I’m just shy, I guess.”

“Bullshit, Jim, you should have called me.” Then I remembered that she called me Jim. I gave her the change, which was like twenty-five cents.

“You didn’t order much,” I said.

“Because I didn’t come for the food, I came here to see
you,
you goof.”

“Oh, okay, that’s nice.”

“Yeah, because I
am
nice.”

“Cool, me too. What would you like to do?”

“I want to see a movie with you.”

“Fine, I’m off on Tuesday night, we could go then.”

Then from the front, Marcia yelled back at me, “Sean, did you take your headset off?” I didn’t want to answer because she said, Sean. “Sean!”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll put it on.” Then to Karen, I said, “Well, I guess it’s back to work.”

“Is your name Sean?”

“Huh, oh, yeah, Jim-Sean, that’s my full name. Well, whatever, I’ll see you Tuesday?”

“Yes, give me
your
number because I don’t trust your calling skills.”

She was pretty and I was glad that she was so forward with me. I wrote my number on a napkin and I remembered to write “Jim” because that’s what she thought my name was. Next to it I drew a little smiley face with a big nose. There was some soda on the part of the window ledge where I was drawing, so the face got wet.

At 2 a.m., when everyone else was cleaning up, Juan and I eyed each other and then met in the bathroom a few minutes later. We went into the stall and locked the door. He handed me the money and it was all there. I started unzipping his pants but he put his hand on mine. He couldn’t speak English so he started gesturing. He pointed toward his mouth and then my mouth, then in English he said “blowjob.”

“You want me to give you a blowjob?”

He nodded. He was so ugly when he was happy with his sharp teeth and his baby face on a fat man’s body.

“Are you kidding? You want me to suck you?” I was pointing and gesturing so that he understood.

He understood and nodded energetically.

“No way, man, that will cost you like a
hundred
dollars.”

He didn’t understand, so I took the little wad out of my pocket and explained that it would cost him a lot more than he gave me.

He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a twenty. I didn’t take it. He held it there. Thirty-five plus twenty, it was a lot and also too little.

Then I took the twenty and put it on top of the rest and put the wad in my pants pocket. Then I undid his pants. I knew what his dick felt like from the handjobs, not very big, but I had never looked at it. It looked like a small tree root, a little torqued to the side.

I sunk down. I didn’t want to go on my knees, so I squatted. And then I put it in my mouth all at once. I had tried to give myself blowjobs when I was a teenager, on my back in bed, my asshole toward the ceiling; I had gotten as far as licking the tip, so I knew what that smooth feeling of the head was like. But now I had the whole thing in my mouth. I started working, just trying to get it done. I kept my eyes open and stared at his patchy black pubic hair coming in and out. Then I closed my eyes.

After a bit, the squat position wore me out so I went down on my knees. The ground was wet through my pants where the knees touched the tiles. I tried to keep a steady rhythm with my mouth while trying not to think about what I was doing. Then I tried to pretend I was doing it to someone else. It was tricky because I couldn’t think about giving
Karen
a blowjob, so I thought about her giving
me
one. As if I was Karen, blowing myself. That worked for a little while, but I kept feeling the bumps on Juan’s dick rubbing my bottom lip and I would be reminded of what I was doing. Then he came. Three big pulses. I kept it all in, I guess to be nice. Then I spit it all in the toilet. There was a turd in there.

The next day was Saturday. I went to the meeting at El Jardin. The meeting was always bigger and rowdier on the weekends. I usually didn’t talk, especially when there were so many people. But I did that day. I said that I was so happy that I didn’t have to do drugs anymore because of all the shit I had to go through when I was using. Then I told this story about having to suck dick when I was using, but really I was telling the story of Juan in the bathroom the night before.

“And I would go into
bathrooms
and get on my
knees
on the cold tile floor, and there was toilet paper all over the place and sometimes shit all over the place, and I would
do it,
I would
suck dick,
I would
actually
do
that, just so I could get the
hundred
bucks, just so I could get some more shit.”

All the guys in the meeting were quiet. Some of the guys had been through tough experiences. One of them had killed some people when he was younger, and one had been in the Mexican Mafia, but most were businessmen and film people. None of them had ever told a story like that. After I told that story, Sonny spoke to the meeting.

“It’s crazy, the depths that we go to get our fix or a drink.
A hundred bucks.
That you would sell yourself for so little, on that cold floor with a dick in your mouth, and
still
not realizing the depths of your disease. It’s incredible. But what is also incredible is the amount of your recovery. To go from
that
to become the responsible member of society that you are now, it’s a fucking miracle. Finally paying for your kids, paying off your debt, and hell, you’re even taking acting lessons. For me, there is no better example of God’s grace.”

After the meeting, guys came up to me and thanked me for being so honest. It felt good. I felt like I was more a part of the group, which was great.

Karen called my parents’ house and my mom called me in from the garage where I was lifting weights, making myself look good. I took the phone into the bathroom and whispered the Brooklyn accent. Karen confirmed that we would meet the next night to see a movie. We decided to meet at the McDonald’s parking lot at 7:30. That morning at the meeting, I told Sonny that I was going on my first date since I had been married. He told me to be myself. I tried to get together with Jeanette to rehearse
A Hatful of Rain,
but she couldn’t because of some bullshit. She wanted to rehearse at night but I told her I couldn’t until late, so she made me agree to a midnight rehearsal. I agreed because we were going to perform it in class the next day and I wanted it to be good.