by Amy Sohn
Sara saw the show three times. She said my performance put that Kubrick chick’s to shame. I opted not to invite Faye, though. She was sixty years old—and she wasn’t a hip sixty, either. If she saw the show she’d think I was trashy, not talented.
One night I was on my way out of the theater when someone tapped me on the arm. I turned around and this lanky guy with curly brown hair said, “I just wanted to tell you how incredible I thought you were.”
Hmm, I thought.
“Thanks a lot. I appreciate it.” He had a slightly upturned nose, and a dried white piece of snot was poised delicately on the end of one of its hairs. I wasn’t disgusted, though. I was charmed. He was handsome but human.
“It says in the program that you contributed some of the material in the show,” he said. “Which parts?”
“The car scene, and that story I told about Vanya on 42nd Street.”
“I thought you wrote that. It was my favorite monologue in the play.”
“Thanks,” I said again. He smiled at me, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say. How could I make a move on a random audience member without coming off as completely desperate? Before I could figure it out, though, someone else came up to congratulate me. I turned away for a second, and when I looked back the guy was gone.
•
As soon as the show closed, I started looking for an apartment. I had saved over $2,000 and decided it was time to get my own place. I knew I wanted to live in Brooklyn—not just because it was cheaper than Manhattan but because I had always taken pride in my bridge-and-tunnel origins. Not that Brooklyn Heights was ghetto central—it’s the most stuck-up, Waspy neighborhood in the borough—but at least it wasn’t the Upper East Side. I had to hold on to what little street credibility I was born with, by staying on the wrong side of the tracks. I was a middle-class girl with working-class aspirations.
One afternoon when the Corposhit was out at a meeting, I logged on to the Village Voice classifieds (that was how Sara found her apartment) and typed in “Brooklyn studios.” The fifth listing down read, “CARROLL GARDENS—Lg studio on safe, tree-lined st, 5 bls from F. Sunny, lg closet, hwd fls, $750/mo. Call Al Casanova.”
That last name had to be an omen. Maybe this guy would bring good luck to my love life. I made an appointment to see it after work and called Sara to ask if she’d come along.
When we got out of the subway I liked the neighborhood immediately. The streets were quiet and wide and filled with trees, and in every front yard was a statue of the Virgin Mary. Old women were sitting on stoops staring at the people going by, men in undershirts were leaning their heads out of upstairs windows, kids were playing hockey, and yuppie moms were wheeling babies in strollers.
The brownstone was on Clinton Street, at the corner of Luquer, just a few blocks from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. We rang the bell and a bulky guy in his mid-forties came to answer.
“I’m Ariel,” I said.
“I’m Al.” He looked at Sara disdainfully. “You didn’t say anything about a roommate. I can’t have that. It’s too small for two people.”
“She’s just my friend,” I said. “The apartment’s for me.”
“Oh,” he said, eyeing her like he still didn’t believe me, and leading us inside. The hallway was musty and smelled of cat. There was a radiator to the right of the door, and leaning precariously on top of it was a statue of a young boy with golden hair and a rosary around his neck.
“Who’s that?” I said.
“Saint Christopher,” he said. I decided not to put a mezuzah on my doorpost.
“I live on the bottom floor, with my brother Carl,” he said, heading up the stairs. “We don’t want anyone noisy and we don’t want any funny business. He works very long hours and he needs peace and quiet when he comes home.”
“What does he do?” said Sara.
“He’s a funeral director.”
“What do you do?” I said.
“Oh, I can’t work,” he said gravely.
“Why not?”
“I have a bum leg. I broke it on a construction job eight years ago and it’s given me horrible pain since then. But I’m suing the city and I have a feeling we’re going to settle any day now.”
“When did you sue?” asked Sara.
“Right after it happened. Nineteen eighty-eight.”
When we got to the top of the stairs I noticed a three-foot-high cylindrical-shaped indentation in the wall. “Did there used to be a statue there?” I asked Al.
“No,” he said. “Every apartment in Carroll Gardens has one of those. That’s so your coffin can clear the corner when you die. The houses in this neighborhood were meant to be lived in for a lifetime.” I liked that ethos—but I wasn’t sure I wanted Al to be the one who carried me out.
He opened the apartment door, and I took a deep breath and walked in. It was cozy and bright. On the right side of the room were two windows overlooking the backyard, with a view of the BQE. On the left was an eat-in kitchen, a large closet, and a tiny bathroom with a Home Depot Formica sink and a blue tub and toilet. While I was running the faucet Sara came in. “What do you think?” I whispered.
“I think it’s a steal,” she said.
I walked over to Al and said, “I’ll take it.”
•
By the time I moved, I was down to 129 pounds. No Karen Carpenter, but certainly skinny enough to show Faye I stood a chance at ingenue parts. So, one day on my lunch break I changed into high red go-go boots, a brown miniskirt, and a tight black T-shirt and took the bus to her office. When I took off my jacket she said she couldn’t believe the transformation and would start sending me out on vapid-hot-girl parts immediately.
Two days later she got me an audition. It was for a new NBC sitcom to be produced by Phil Nathanson, creator of the hit eighties sitcom about disgruntled postal workers, Return to Sender. The new show was called Dem’s da Breaks and it was about a working-class widow named Gina who gets into an Ivy League college at age forty-five, goes back to school, and experiences severe culture clash with the ruling class. My role was Bridget, a series regular, a rich, smart college girl in Gina’s class, the cynical, snobbish contrast to her homegrown wisdom. “They want a young Dorothy Parker, a Gen X Fran Lebowitz,” Faye told me on the phone. “Sarcastic, funny, and jaded.”
“Sounds great,” I said.
“Wear a little makeup when you go. It’ll make you look pretty.”
I picked up the sides after work. In the scene, Bridget arrives in an empty classroom, finds Gina sitting in the front row, and says, “Are you the cleaning woman?” Gina explains that she’s a student and goes on to give Bridget a long, comic lecture about class consciousness. By the end, the two of them are on their way to becoming good friends. It was cheesy and obvious, but some of the lines were sharp, and I felt like I could nail it.
The audition was scheduled for a Saturday afternoon. I spent the morning going through the script, and then I pinned my hair back slick to my head and into a bun, put on a full face of makeup, and changed into a zip-up ribbed black top with fake fur collars, and a brown miniskirt, with the platform heels. I felt like a smart slut. A rich prima donna. A Mia Sara Jessica.
When I got to the audition, there were dozens of other, markedly less Semitic-looking Fran Lebowitzes sitting in the hallway, fixing their makeup and reading the sides. I even recognized a few of them from the Book ’Em audition. I signed in, and a few minutes later a pregnant blond woman in overalls came out of the office and called my name.
The audition room was long and bright, with high ceilings. Sitting all the way at the end, with a video camera behind him, was a fifteen-year-old boy.
“This is Kevin,” said the casting director. “He’ll be reading with you.”
“You mean . . . he’s Gina, the working-class widow?”
“Yes.” Was it bring-your-son-to-work day or something? How was I supposed to build a believable relationship when I was acting with a kid—and a guy?
She stood behind the camera and peered into the lens. “First we’ll do a rehearsal and then we’ll do a take. Did you learn the lines?”
“No. Was I supposed to?”
“Of course you were.”
I felt the floor slip out from beneath my feet. “I’m sorry, my agent didn’t say anything about that, so I—”
“This is a TV audition,” she said. “You should always learn the lines.” I’d been on TV auditions in high school and not learned the lines and never had a casting director complain, but I didn’t feel this was the time to point that out. “If you have to,” she said, “then try it on book. Whenever you’re ready.”
My read was decent, but when I was done she said, “I’m really losing your face in the script. Why don’t you try it, just once, without looking at the lines? It’s such a short scene. Put the sides down, slate your name, and go for it.” She gave me a perky smile.
I gingerly laid the pages on the floor. She went behind the camera. The red light of doom came on. “Slate, please.”
“Ariel Steiner,” I said, like it was the beginning of my eulogy. Then I looked down at my hands for a moment, desperately trying to channel my misery into snobbery, gave Eddie Haskell a patronizing glare, imagining that he was female, Italian, and forty-five, and opened my mouth.
Nothing came out. I’d completely blanked. Very daintily, I leaned down out of frame, picked up the script, looked at the first line, put the script back on the floor, and said, “Are you the cleaning woman?” with as much narrow-minded maliciousness as I could well up.
But this time I was even worse than the first. Joke after joke came out whiny and desperate—because all my energy was going toward trying to get the words right.
“You do know the lines,” said the casting director when I finished. “Try it again, and this time you can keep the script on your lap.”
She was trying to be encouraging, but I hated her anyway. I hated her for talking down to me, for forcing me to do the scene off book, and for making me audition with a child. But I knew it wouldn’t serve me to get angry. I took a deep breath to calm myself and got a whiff of my own BO, so foul it almost knocked me out. I could feel my mascara beginning to trickle down my face.
My next time through I remembered all the lines, but I still wasn’t funny, because I was so tense. I had lost all desire to please her or please myself. Halfway through the scene I began to give a deliberately monotonal read. It became a sick game: how hard could I make this woman struggle to like me?
At the end she gave me a plastic smile and walked me out. I glanced quickly at all the other hopefuls, who knew to memorize their lines and wear waterproof mascara, and I wanted to whip out an Uzi and gun them down in one clean round.
I didn’t cry when I got out on the street, though. I just figured you win some, you lose some, and at least I’d learned my lesson: don’t ever go on a TV audition unmemorized again. But then I started to fantasize that maybe, just maybe, despite my atrocious read, I’d book the part anyway. One of my theater professors at Brown used to tell our class these industry legends about now-famous people who gave bad auditions but were discovered because some casting director saw the charisma within that would be certain to make them stars.
I could see it now. Phil Nathanson would be sitting in his sunny Burbank office smoking a Cohiba as he watched tramp after talentless tramp attempt to be funny and smart at the same time. As the thousandth chippy of the day slated her name, his fat round head would begin to droop, and then suddenly I’d appear on the screen. Through his filthy, wax-filled ears he’d hear the words “Ariel Steiner” and something about the pure, vulnerable timbre in my voice would make him jerk his head up toward the monitor. As I blanked on my first line and leaned out of frame to look at the script, the moment would have such unrehearsed comic charm that a smile of delight would creep across Phil’s jowls. As I stumbled pathetically through the rest of the take, his smile would turn to a chuckle, and the chuckle to a howl of delight. “Why, she’s the young Dorothy Parker!” he’d shout, rising to his feet. “The Gen X Fran Lebowitz! Sarcastic! Funny! Jaded! She can’t act to save her life, but her natural sardonic style is exactly what I’m looking for!”
Then he’d race to his red emergency phone, the one he used only for very special occasions, like the time he discovered the Return to Sender superstar, Fred Hanson, and he’d lean down and shout to his coproducer and brother-in-law, “Stan—get your ass in here!” Two seconds later Stan would run into the office, and as they watched my second take they’d cry simultaneously, “Hello, new It Girl!”
“This chick’s the future of TV!” Stan would exclaim.
“I know!” Phil would reply. And then he’d get right on the phone to Faye and cast me on the spot, and I’d be on my way to taking the world by storm.
But then I realized how naive I was being. I was trying to convince myself that it was precisely my lack of preparedness, my inability to follow the rules that would mark me as someone who wasn’t afraid to make bold choices. But that was just plain stupid. Forgetting to learn my lines wasn’t a bold choice, it was a suicidal one. Phil probably wouldn’t even get to see my audition anyway, because they’d weed me out before the tapes even made it back to L.A. I walked to a pay phone, called Sara, and asked if she’d meet me for a drink.
•
We decided to go to BarNacle. We’d gone there a few times before. It was on Ludlow, south of Houston, and they had booths and a pool table in the back, pop art on the walls, and two pinball machines in the front. The only times we went there were before nine on weekends, or on weeknights. It had been listed in Let’s Go New York, and if you went late on a weekend there were so many Germans you felt like you’d walked into a Nazi youth convention.
When I walked in I spotted Sara at the bar talking to a skinny guy with dark skin. I was glad I was dressed like a vapid hot girl. The guy smiled at me, and Sara said, “Hey, Ar. This is Josh Malansky. We went to Columbia together. We bumped into each other on the street and I asked if he wanted to join us.”
Malansky. He had to be a tribesman. Which was a definite perk. Since the age of fifteen I have not been able to spend more than ten minutes with a guy I’m attracted to without wondering if he’s Jewish. As soon as I find out that he is, I start fantasizing about our future together. An image floats into my head of the two of us getting married under a huppah, my parents shedding tears of joy and him smashing a glass beneath his feet.
It’s not like I won’t get naked with a goy. I totally will. It’s just that deep down, I won’t ever feel like we could have Future Potential. He could be my Perfect Goy, but not my Perfect Guy. We could fuck like wild boars, but no matter how good the shtup, I’ll spend half the time trying to fight the image of my parents weeping when I tell them I’ve met a shaygitz, disowning me, and the two of us getting married in a Vegas shotgun church teeming with grimy white-trash couples.
I sat down on a stool next to Josh and ordered a Jameson on the rocks. Sara had gotten me into Jameson. She said it made you look tough as nails and not to be messed with. I hated the taste but I figured that was the price I had to pay.
As the bartender set my glass down, I noticed that Josh was drinking a nonalcoholic beer. That intrigued me. Maybe alcohol had done something brutal to him. The only quality that turns me on more than Yidhood is a troubled and tormented past.
“What do you do, Josh?” I asked.
“I drum in three bands and work at the Kinko’s on Houston Street.”
“Is it true what they say about drummers?”
“What?”
“That they’re all off-balance, unstable, and combustible, like in Spinal Tap?”
“It’s not a totally groundless stereotype,” he said, grinning. “Most of the drummers I know are like that. You guys want to hear a joke?”
“Sure,” I said.
“What do you call a guy who hangs out with musicians?”
“What?”
“A drummer.” I smiled. Sara snort-laughed. “What does it mean when the drummer is drooling out of both sides of his mouth?”
“What?”
“It means the stage is level.”
“Very good,” Sara said.
“But what about the stereotype that drummers mooch off their girlfriends?” I asked. “Is that true?”
“Sometimes,” he said.
“Are you mooching off a girlfriend?”
“I don’t have a girlfriend.” Sara gave me a look, then started to get up.
“I’ve, um . . . gotta go practice accordion,” she said. “Nice to run into you, Josh. Call me later, Ar.”
Josh and I grinned at each other awkwardly and he ordered another nonalcoholic. “Are you a teetotaler?” I asked.
“Yeah. I stopped drinking a couple months ago. I was traveling in South America and drinking every night and I got in this really bad brawl in Lima. That’s how I got this.” He pointed to a two-inch-long scar running down his left cheek. My vaginal canal immediately got fifty feet longer. Ever since I saw Charles Bukowski’s acned author shot in the back of Women, I’ve had a fetish for men with bad skin. The more pockmarked, the better. Edward James Olmos, Tommy Lee Jones, James Woods, Dennis Miller, Bill Murray—they all make me crazy with lust.
“I have a scar on my chin,” I said. “I fell off a bike when I was twelve.” I tilted my head up to show him. I can always gauge my potential with a guy according to his reaction to my chin scar. If he’s into it, I know we could spend our lives together. If not, there’s no hope at all.
“Nice,” he said, nodding approvingly. “I think scars are sexy. They show character.”
I was putty in this cat’s hands, and it only got better as the evening went on. He was from Telluride, he’d been traveling for the past seven months, and he was living in Williamsburg with some friends. He had a loud, wild laugh and a quick, easy smile, and overall he seemed like a much better potential boyfriend than James.
