Dirty Old Men [And Other Stories] (Zane Presents)

by Omar Tyree

  The audition was for a pilot television show, ironically called, New Generations. It was based on a futuristic and multicultural high school setting, and the casting line represented as much. Aspiring actors and actresses of every nationality stood in line, from Hawaiian to Native American, Italian, Irish, Mexican, African, Jamaican, Australian, French Canadian, Korean, Japanese and every mixture.

  Nevertheless, Melanie’s body continued to stand out, even in her normal clothes. She wore beige slacks and a simple baby-blue tennis shirt in an attempt to tone herself down, but it didn’t work. Her dark skin, round ass, pert breasts and sexy stance compelled a production assistant to immediately notice her in the line.

  “Are you here for the Annika role?” He was a blonde-haired college student. Most of the people in the line were young. And at twenty-three, Melanie considered herself one of the oldest. But she could pass for sixteen.

  She looked at him and nodded. “Ahh, yeah, I guess so.” He made it sound as if everyone knew their roles already. So he gave her the script for the African character.

  I wonder if he asked me that because I’m the darkest girl in line, Melanie imagined. She read the one-page script and saw that they wanted “Annika” to speak about her African background.

  Okay, do they want me to do an accent, she pondered. But she thought against it. All Africans didn’t speak with accents. She decided to read it straight.

  As the line moved rapidly forward, the show’s director stepped out the door to take a look. He was a slim and balding, older white man. He noticed Melanie, too.

  “Wow. Annika,” he called her.

  “If that’s who you want me to be?” Melanie responded and smiled.

  The director was actually calling her out in the character’s name. She had never been that close to a role before.

  “Can you act?” he asked her.

  “I guess we’re about to find out.”

  The director stared at her. “No, we will not find out. You must say, ‘Yes, I can act.’ Because if you don’t know, then none of us knows.”

  He seemed to be speaking with enthusiasm to the entire line when he addressed her. “The answer, yes, is the key to all progress. Yes is what we’re all here for. ‘Yes, I want the role. Yes, I can play the part. Yes, I can make it to my rehearsals on time.’ And ‘Yes, I want to be the next big television star and an American icon.”

  Melanie was a little startled by the man.

  Okay, we have another one of those types, she noted. She had been around a few other high-octane directors on some of her previous casting calls. She couldn’t imagine herself having to deal with one on a daily basis. The high-strung type made her nervous.

  The director looked back into her eyes. “So, you think about that confidence the next time someone asks you if you can play a role. Any role. Otherwise, you’ll drown before you even dive into the water.”

  Then he stopped and smiled. “Not that you won’t drown anyway, but… at least you can start off with some confidence. You know what I mean?”

  All Melanie thought to do was nod. But before the director left her, he asked her more questions. “How old are you? Have you had any acting lessons?”

  Melanie paused to decide which rapid-fire question to answer first.

  “I’m twenty-three. And yes, I have had acting classes.”

  “And you still don’t know if you’re any good yet, at twenty-three?”

  He made it sound as if she was already over the hill and wasting her time.

  Okay, now what do I do? He had her speechless.

  “Well, I guess we will see,” he commented. “We’ll see about all of you. Who in this line has the chops to create what we need?”

  Then he walked back inside so Melanie could exhale. But then she could no longer concentrate on the script. She continued to think about how much pressure the director had put on her now to perform.

  Darn it! This is all I needed to throw me off!

  Before she knew it, she was inside the studio building and at the front of the line, where she watched a final actress in front of her perform a heck of a job.

  Wow! That was pretty good, she thought. The girl didn’t make things any easier for her, that was for sure. Melanie felt like five thousand people were watching.

  “Number sixty-seven. Melanie Morgan, reading for Annika,” the casting director called out as Melanie walked into the center of the room. They had two cameras in the room, with one angled from the left and another angled from the right. A production panel sat at a long white table in between them, including the casting director, the show director, several producers, and several production assistants.

  Melanie took a breath and thought, Okay, here goes everything.

  She stepped into the hot spot to perform and cleared her throat.

  “Quiet on the set!” the high-wired director yelled. He waited a few seconds more for Melanie to prepare herself with the script before he called out, “Action!”

  Melanie began to read her script with full animation. “Oh, let me tell you, that’s nothing from where I come from. In my country in Nigeria, it’s, it’s hotter than, than hot. I mean, a hundred and… ten degrees is normal… temperature there,” she stated. After a relatively good start, she began to stutter and pause to read instead of memorizing the lines. And the nervousness of the pressure began to get to her.

  “I remember a time when…it was, it was so hot that…the goats were, were fighting for the shade…beside the houses.”

  She read from the script so badly that it broke her concentration. She then looked up to view the responses from the director and his staff. Once she noticed him shaking his head in disappointment, she couldn’t wait to finish her awful, cold read and high-tail-it out of there. She was beyond embarrassment.

  What’s wrong with me? I can read much better than this! she told herself.

  “Next!” she heard the director shout when it was over.

  Melanie handed her one-page script to the production assistant and mumbled, “I’m sorry,” before she walked out the exit.

  “Darn it!” she snapped to herself out in the parking lot. I screwed that up bad!

  She drove back toward Interstate 405 for Inglewood, and stopped at a Starbucks coffee shop to buy a morning pastry and a bottle of orange juice.

  “Hey, aren’t you Melanie Morgan?” someone asked her from behind.

  While headed out the door, Melanie turned to face a curly-headed, white man. She nodded to him and confirmed who she was. “Yes, I’m Melanie.”

  “Yeah, I saw you at the Fireside auditions in Burbank a few months ago.”

  “And you still remember me from that?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he answered strongly. “You did a really good read there. I felt you should have been chosen for something. I don’t know why they passed you over.”

  She shrugged it off and held her thoughts to herself. “Well, you know, that’s the Hollywood game. You win some, you lose some.”

  And I seem to lose them all, she mused.

  She walked out to return home to Inglewood to get ready for work, only for the man to follow her out of the coffee shop.

  “Hey, Melanie, my name is Brian Belgium.” He extended his hand to her.

  Melanie shifted her pastry bag and drink into her left hand to shake Brian’s hand with her right.

  “Nice to meet you.” However, she was ready to head on her way. Her bad read at the audition that morning had made her more hasty than normal. Had she performed a good read, she may have felt comfortable enough to stick around and eat at the Starbucks location. But Brian wasn’t ready to let her slip away so easily.

  “You know, we have a set party tonight over in Santa Monica. And I’d love to invite you and a friend over as my guests. There’s gonna be a lot of great film people there tonight, who, you know, you might be able to network with. I mean, I was really impressed with your work,” he told her.

  Yeah, I’ve heard that line before, she pondered. She
nodded to him anyway.

  “Well, you know, I work tonight until nine, so I have to see how I feel once I get off.”

  He nodded back to her. “Well, you do that. And if you decide to show up tonight, just ask for Brian Belgium.”

  He said it as if his name meant something. That made her stop and reconsider. She figured she had to refrain from turning everything down and learn to go with the flow. She could at least investigate how the network parties panned out in Hollywood.

  That’s what I’m here to do, right? she convinced herself. So, why not?

  “Well, where is this party?”

  “So, how’d it go at the audition today?” Her talent agency assistant had called Melanie back to ask her.

  Melanie had redressed in her West Coast Video uniform, and she was ready to head off for work at the store in nearby Culver City. She let out a deep sigh and answered the question honestly. “Terrible. I really could have done a much better read this morning. But at least I got invited out to a Hollywood network party in Santa Monica tonight,” she added to cheer herself up.

  “Oh, yeah? So they invited you back out? Well, that can be good thing. Who exactly invited you?”

  “Well, it wasn’t from the New Generations set, actually. I stopped by a Starbucks on the way back, and some guy named Brian Belgium invited me out. He said he remembered me from the Fireside auditions in Burbank a few months ago. He remembered my full name and everything.”

  The agency assistant repeated, “Bri-an Bel-gium?” in four clear syllables.

  “Yeah, some curly-headed guy in his mid-thirties, I guess,” Melanie commented.

  “Oh my God!” the assistant responded excitedly. “Do you know who he is? Brian Belgium is like, one of the hottest young film producers on the market right now. He does a lot of work in action comedies.”

  Melanie had no idea who he was. The guy came off like an average, California hippie. “So, you’re saying that I should pretty much go then?”

  “Oh, you better. Are you kidding me? I would kill to go there.”

  “Well, he told me that I could bring a friend.”

  “And you’re inviting me?” The assistant sounded surprised.

  Melanie laughed it off. “Well, you know who the guy is. So, sure. Why not?”

  “Okay, what time do you want me to meet you?”

  When Melanie hung up the phone, she walked out of her apartment to head out for work, and she received another call on her cell phone. She read the number and didn’t recognize it. But it was an Oakland area code. So she answered the call, expecting a family member with a new number.

  “Yeah, is this Melanie Morgan?” a male voice asked her.

  She frowned and answered, “Yes. Who is this?”

  “This is Vincent Washington from the New Generations auditions this morning. I was one of the cameramen on the left, and the only black guy,” he answered, then chuckled.

  “Oh,” Melanie responded upbeat. “So, they’re calling me back?” she presumed. She couldn’t believe it. “I was miserable this morning. I think that was one of the worst auditions yet.”

  She was jumping far ahead of him in her conclusion. The cameraman had to calm her down.

  “Well, not exactly. I mean, you did do bad this morning,” he admitted with another laugh. “But they liked your look. You just have to do better on your reading. So I got a chance to look up your file and saw that you were from Oakland.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she told him. “You’re from Oakland, too? I see you have the five-one-oh area code on your phone.”

  “Yeah, I’m from the Bay. Alameda. So I wanted to get back in touch with you to invite you out to some auditions for a few videos I’m shooting out here.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  Here we go with the video groupie thing again, she told herself. She had been through it all before, where the directors, producers, cameramen and musicians all wanted to flirt and fuck, instead of pay anyone.

  “Yeah, and I can also talk to the producers at New Generations to see if I can get you a second audition. But you have to be ready this time,” he warned her.

  Melanie paused and shook her head against the phone. She didn’t want to tell him that it was all bullshit, but she was thinking it. They all ran the bait-and-switch technique out in Hollywood, where they hang one goal over a girl’s head while shopping another.

  “Well, I’m not really into the whole video thing, but I would like to have a second chance for this television show.”

  Vincent paused to negotiate it, just as she had expected him to do.

  “Well, I can do that, but there’s no telling if they’ll allow it or not. But if I could get you in front of the camera and show them more footage of you from like, a video montage…”

  Melanie tuned him out immediately. It was the same old racket.

  He probably won’t even ask those people about me at the show, she predicted. He’s just trying to get me for these videos, and probably try to get some, or pass me on to someone else to work his own deals. I swear, this place is really disgusting to me sometimes! she concluded.

  She cut him off and said, “Well, I’ll save your number and think about it. In the meantime, make sure those guys at New Generations don’t forget about me.”

  “Oh, I won’t. But please call me back. You might be the girl that everyone is looking for. Can you dance?”

  On that note, she laughed out loud.

  “Umm, I have to get to work now, Vincent. But I’ll call you,” she lied.

  At nine-thirty that evening, Melanie was still wrangling over what to wear to the set party in Santa Monica when the talent agency assistant, Deborah Gilford, showed up and buzzed her at her apartment. She was early and eager.

  “Girl, I’m still in here trying to figure out what to wear,” she told Deborah at the door. “You wanna help me? I just made it back home.”

  Due to her history of enticing men, she didn’t want to look too sexy, but she didn’t want to look boring either. Deborah, on the other hand, looked as racy as she wanted to be in a hot-pink skirt and blouse set, with triangular cut-outs at the stomach and lower back. Even the skirt had triangular cuts.

  Melanie looked her over and joked, “You look like The Flintstones. But it’s cute, I like it.” However, Deborah didn’t have half the curves that Melanie had to deal with.

  “The Flintstones? Are these cuts really that bad? I just wanted to look different.” She stood tall in black heels, with light-brown hair, and was pretty and slim.

  “Well, you sure will,” Melanie admitted with a chuckle. “I like it though. I just can’t wear anything like that. I don’t want Mr. Belgium coming on to me,” she joked.

  Deborah grinned. “Are you sure? Brian’s definitely a hottie.”

  “Yeah, maybe for you. But I’m thinking about business here.”

  Deborah walked through her apartment and stood there silently. She had something to say, but she was hesitant. Then she forced herself to air it out.

  She grabbed her aspiring actress by both hands. “Melanie, please don’t tell anyone that I said this to you. Okay? But this whole disciplined, don’t-touch-me-I’m-a-professional-actress act, is mostly just that, an act for the media. Because if the guys are really turned off by that, a lot of times they’re not gonna hire you, especially if you’re a new face.

  “So usually, unless they hire you the first time around, like, you’re just the one, it’s gonna take you a few parties like this one to loosen up for them to really feel comfortable enough to hire you,” she commented. “And you didn’t hear me say that, but that’s the truth.”

  Melanie paused and took a calming breath. “So, by ‘loosen up,’ you mean to go along with the whole casual sex game?”

  Deborah, at twenty-seven, had been around the block a few times, where Melanie had not. She grimaced. “You don’t necessarily go along with it, but you definitely don’t act appalled by it either. You kind of take it as a part of life. I mean, it’s just guys a
nd girls, you know what I mean? So, you kind of act like it’s high school and college all over again. But this time you have real jobs at stake.”

  That analogy became another issue for Melanie. She’d had only one boyfriend in high school, who tried discourteously to sex her up, and he had failed. She had guarded her sexuality closely ever since. And there she was, years later, still trying to figure out how to maintain her dream of becoming a professional actress, while continuing her chastity.

  “Oh, okay,” she muttered. Maybe the actress game was not her cup of tea.

  Maybe I need to grow up and stop being so afraid of it, she pondered. But that doesn’t mean I’m gonna screw somebody just to be in a movie or on a television show.

  “Anyway, help me to pick out something to wear,” she stated. They had a Hollywood party to attend.

  When the two young women showed up at the densely populated set party after ten o’clock at the Subiak Club in Santa Monica, the bi-level club was in full swing, with pretty-faced girls and guys everywhere.

  “Wow, this is nice,” Melanie stated after checking in at the guest list table. Deborah advised her to wear basic blue jeans with a bright T-shirt and a sporty jacket.

  “If you don’t want to look too sexy, then look hip and spunky in jeans,” she advised. “Make it look like you’re going to a cool concert with a group of your girls, and don’t think twice about it.”

  So that’s what she did; she dressed spunky and casual. And her body still stood out, but in a hip way instead of enticing.

  When they walked throughout the party, Deborah expressed in a hushed tone, “Oh my God, you’ve hit the jackpot in here! It’s loaded with who’s who. I can’t even begin to tell you.”

  She didn’t need to. Melanie also had noticed a horde of film, television, commercial, comedy and athletic stars inside the room: tennis star Serena Williams, comedian/actor brothers Joe and Guy Torre, basketball stars Paul Pierce and Derek Fisher, along with actress Meagan Goode, director F. Gary Gray, Dogg Pound rapper Kurupt, singer/actor Tyrese Gibson, and the list went on. She didn’t recognize most of the white American stars in the room, but she did notice Jennifer Love Hewitt and a few of the cast members from the HBO hit Entourage.