It’s hard to say exactly when it occurred to me, like the first twinge of a developing cavity, that all this was a little sad. It could have been when Margaret told the auditorium crowd, to an uproar of delight, that Toto made twice as much as she did because the dog had a better agent. It could have been when she projected the promotional poster onstage of Henry Kramer’s Hollywood Midgets, the acting company that had given her her big break, or when my mom elbowed me in the middle of Margaret’s talk to say she sounded just like a kazoo. “Isn’t her little voice just precious?”
Most likely, though, the revelation that Margaret was being exploited for her short stature came months later, on one of those death-by-senseless-errand summer afternoons, when Bonnie called my mom to offer me the star role in the new Up with Kids musical. They were doing The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I remember pressing the phone hard into my ear, my smile stuck in place as Mom piloted the Suburban into a parking lot and slapped me high five. Chelsea, who slept whenever we drove anywhere, yawned awake from the backseat. “What’s going on?”
“Greg’s going to be the star,” Mom said.
“You don’t have to decide right now,” Bonnie growled softly. I thought I could hear her take what must have been two tasteless chomps of her nicotine gum, trying to keep things light, perhaps sensing she’d erred. “Just think about it, OK? Like I said, no one could play it like you. You were born for this.”
I went to bed that night with a stomachache, the life-sized cardboard cutout of Scarecrow, the Wizard, and Tin Man a monstrous silhouette at the foot of my bed. I didn’t want to be hired because of my disability, like Margaret had been. Duct tape a pillow to my shoulders and add a bell tower and the musical was pretty much my daily life. I wanted to be a star, not a groveling Hollywood hunchback. “They’ll find another kid to play Quasimodo in two seconds,” Mom sighed the next morning. “But if you don’t want to have fun anymore, you don’t want to have fun anymore.”
Officially retired from Up with Kids, I got my acting kicks in school plays. I was the only seventh grader with a speaking part in Guys and Dolls. Honing my gangster accent, I played Joey Biltmore, tossing off lines like, “She ain’t a horse. She’s a doll!” The next year, my acting career once again became extracurricular as I got a callback to play a dwarf in City Rep’s production of Snow White. I didn’t get the part. After reprimanding me for having my hands in my pockets, my secret way of appearing nonchalant, the red-haired director tried to wrench my back straight and excused me as soon as she saw me struggle across the stage, saying I just wouldn’t fit into the show.
A chance for redemption came in the ninth grade, when my drama teacher announced we would be putting on The Wizard of Oz. I promptly threw my hand into the air and volunteered the use of my replica 1939 shooting script. I’d sprouted to a gangly five-ten and badly needed my hamstrings surgically lengthened once again, this time on both sides. My walk was a crouch and a persistent hammertoe on my left foot bloodied my sock, but I demanded to hold off on the operations until after the play. My school needed me.
At the audition, while my competitors struggled through tepid R & B songs and climbed on chairs à la Britney Spears, I crooned “If I Only Had a Brain” and trilled the scales. Leaving the auditorium that night, a goth kid in the back row slapped me high five. “Dude, you’re totally going to get it.”
I arrived late for the dancing portion of the audition the next day. A couple of girls walked me through the routine in the aisle and soon I was shambling up onstage to the tune of “Merry Old Land of Oz.” With a ha ha ha, ho ho ho, and a couple of tra la la’s, I was skipping my way to the lead.
The middle-aged choreographer pulled me aside as I came offstage. This woman was not a teacher but one of the industry people my drama teacher had brought in to help with the production. I expected her to tell me I was a shoo-in for Scarecrow but instead she said, “What’s wrong with your leg? It looked like you weren’t rotating from the hip.” She clutched one of her sharp shoulders, wheeling it around to illustrate her point, as if just watching me made her sore.
“Are you talking about my shoulder?” I asked, hopeful.
“No, your leg,” she clarified.
I should have been flattered. She thought I was injured.
Ordinarily, I had an arsenal of excuses about my limp. Sometimes I told people it was knee pain from growing so fast, the kind that left Tiffany sobbing on the floor of my parents’ room, moaning about the end of her snowboarding career. Sometimes I said my legs were simply different lengths. I’d recently told a substitute tennis instructor at the country club that, yes, my tendons had been operated on but my orthopedic surgeon had screwed up and now it was a big mess. Who can say why the truth—at least the truth as I understood it—popped out of my mouth when a lie about tripping on plastic apples would have suited me better?
“I have tight tendons,” I said.
“Oh,” the choreographer said, not missing a beat. “Because it looked like your hip wasn’t working right.” Here again she worked her shoulder. The woman was as lean and elegant as a candlestick with her chignon and ballet flats, her cheekbones set at handsome angles. “Will it be getting better in time for the show?”
“No,” I admitted. “It won’t.”
The woman offered a serenely understanding smile, as if I were a golden retriever, all blond hair and bad hips. “Well, you did really great.”
Children are sad creatures, so full of hope and light and judgment. So sure of their place in the world. My first thoughts, as I waited for Mom to pick me up, were ones of anger. Who was this haughty witch to tell me what I could do? If she was so special, why was she volunteering at a junior high instead of choreographing on Broadway?
Of course, such thoughts denigrated the whole enterprise—the school, the play, my meager acting ability. Part of me wanted to tell her how believable I could be as Scarecrow. When I fell, the audience would gasp, and when I got up again they would cheer. It wouldn’t have mattered. I wasn’t in Up with Kids anymore. A kid with a limp didn’t have a chance at what my drama teacher had told us to call a “principal.”
In the choreographer’s gentle rejection lay a deeper truth: I would never be a professional actor. The fantasy was over. Later, I’d call this my Munchkin moment: the moment I realized I was window dressing along the Yellow Brick Road, not the one skipping down it. I was one of the little people some other, more charismatic teenager would pledge not to forget. That night, I took down the glittery star that had hung on my door for years and fondled Margaret’s autograph in my replica Oz script as if she were a real celebrity. She’d signed it “Munchkin Love.”
My drama teacher was clever. Outright shafting the kid with the limp would have been poor form and so, instead, she gave me the title role. It was not lost on me that Professor Marvel prognosticated from a sitting position on a wooden crate and that the Wizard didn’t sing or dance and bellowed most of his lines in the wings, behind a curtain. Being upstaged by a dog was one thing. It took a special actor to be upstaged by a plywood head and a member of the stage crew wagging the chin for comedic effect. Great and powerful I was not. Given so little to do, I overacted every scene I was in, shouting so loud the mic cut out, unleashing a low electrical drone as the house lights strobed.
If I came across as apoplectic, if my fingers flew in the face of anyone who came too close, I have my hand-dancing days at Up with Kids to thank. Because my gray tuxedo jacket was much too short, the sleeves rode up my wrists, leaving my cuffs to billow. With every herky-jerky hand motion, threads popped. I was a good man and a bad wizard, handing a diploma to Scarecrow, a medal to Cowardly Lion, and a ceramic heart to Tin Man. Like Dorothy, I knew there wasn’t anything in that leather-fringed purse for me. I wouldn’t be getting a new leg. I was stuck with the one I had.
During the curtain call of our final performance, I took my bow and retired to a wobbly rainbow platform at the back of the stage. A moment later, the chorus parted and Scarecrow, T
in Man, and Lion skipped in to a standing ovation. There wasn’t enough space on the rainbow platform to do anything more than sway to the music, to bob my head and arch my eyebrows to keep the spidery tears of self-pity from crawling down my cheeks. To someone in the audience, it might have looked like nothing at all: a kid worn out with happiness after a fulfilling run, and then, confused, making a premature exit stage left as Scarecrow and Dorothy presented my drama teacher with flowers.
It took a while to compose myself in the dressing room and turn in my costume. No matter how encouraging the rest of my family would be, my smart-ass brother was sure to put me down for running offstage in tears. When I made it back to the auditorium, covered in flop sweat and runny makeup, they were waiting for me like always, scattered over a few otherwise empty rows. The Wizard of Oz head scowled down at us from the stage, his chin now wagging open like he’d suffered a stroke.
“You’re right. It was a nothing role. What can I say? You got totally, completely screwed,” Mom said, swinging her gold purse on her shoulder.
“I’m proud of you for toughing it out, Greggo,” Dad said.
“You certainly made the most of it,” Mom went on. “Ask anybody. You were the only one I could hear.”
I gave Tiffany a hug and tried to keep a neutral expression on my face as my brother shuffled toward me down the aisle, popping a pretzel into his mouth. To my surprise, he offered the only thing I’d ever really wanted from him: a positive review. “It was way less shitty than Up with Kids,” he said, chewing. “You had a real dog play Toto this time and Dorothy was pretty hot.” Putting a hand on my soaked head in an odd display of brotherly affection, his eyes lost that joking sparkle. “Seriously, Gregor. You were the best thing in the show.”
This, it turned out, was my final bow.
Leg surgeries the next Christmas kept me from auditioning for my high school drama department’s one-act play. I can’t remember what the play was called, but the gist of the plot was that a monstrously deformed writer was being held prisoner in a closet. As I was spread-eagle in a wheelchair at the time, encased in Ace bandages and knee immobilizers that went from my butt cheeks to my ankles, Crippled: The Greg Marshall Story would’ve been a fitting title. It’s not that I couldn’t have tried out. It’s that I didn’t have the balls.
There were other things to fail at in high school: making the tennis team and convincing my friends I was straight. None of them were as fun as belting out “If I Only Had a Brain” to the homeless. Little home-video footage remains from my brief dramatic career. I suppose this is for the best, as it allows me to remember my histrionics as scene stealing, my voice as blunt and captivating. If I didn’t limp, I tell myself, I might really have made it.
For the next few weeks of that semester, as I graduated from wheelchair to walker, my teachers let me out five minutes early so I wouldn’t be trampled. I think it was tipping through those empty halls that I gained a begrudging respect for Margaret Pellegrini. If the opposite of being typecast for having a disability is not being cast at all, being a Hollywood Midget didn’t sound so bad. At a time when nearly everyone who had worked on The Wizard of Oz was dead, she was still signing autographs, rubbing sleep from her eyes. Mom was right: the woman knew how to wake up. Every Oz anniversary landed Margaret a spot on the local news, where she repeated her famous line (at least it was famous to me) about Toto having a better agent.
History isn’t told by the winners. It’s told by the living. When you’re a kid, you’re taught success depends on embracing who you are. It’s actually much simpler than that: to succeed, you have to stick around. By marching around in a replica costume like the veteran of some whimsical war, Margaret recast herself as an indelible part of the story. Outlive the coroner and you become the grand marshal of all things Over the Rainbow. Sometimes surviving is its own form of stardom.
BERNARD FARAI MATAMBO
Working the City
FROM Transition
After we are accepted into college in the U.S., Cato and I meet every day to assess our progress. It’s Monday morning in Harare, late May. The morning wind hauls down the streets carrying a sharp chill, nipping at my ankles. I am waiting for Cato outside the Center, watching the sun’s rays bounce off the wash of passing cars on Nelson Mandela Avenue, a clamor of voices piercing its way through the sunshine. He is usually here by now, but some days he has other leads on the outskirts of the city. I imagine in the industrial parks, places like Graniteside and Southerton. It’s never certain he will show up, but often he does, his bald head bouncing cheerfully in the crowd, catching glints of the sun like an orb of polished metal.
After a while, though, I decide today is not one of those days. So I go on without him, threading my way through the crowded sidewalk, floating into the city like another leaf longing for a sail.
We are trying to raise money to get to America. While I have received a full scholarship, Cato’s best bet lies in a partial scholarship with an $8,000 hole in the middle. I have my doubts he will plug it, but Cato seems undeterred. As though the hole was nothing. He already has his passport even, something I have yet to figure out for myself. He hasn’t used it yet, and got it expressly for the purpose of this journey, something that could happen once all our things are in order. I have gone as far as getting my headshots done and that’s it, haven’t had a chance to dread those long lines at the passport office even, protracted horror shows that go on for entire blocks.
Because he is brave Cato often speaks of the things we will do when we get to America, how on slow Ohio weekends we will visit each other. He can picture himself driving down for a visit. He will have gotten his driver’s license by then, he says, something we have decided is much easier to get there than in any cardinal direction within this country. Usually I play it safe, say nothing, but once in a while I risk it and imagine myself taking a train three hours across rural Ohio to visit him. In my head it’s a version of Cecil John Rhodes’s train, complete with the bathtub and meticulous kitchen, my eyes fixed through its windows, watching the easy world slide by.
We still need to figure out the monies for our visa applications, and the costs for a full medical examination, things neither of us has ever had to do, unless of course one includes probable medicals done before either of us was five years old, when every child in this nation had a national Road to Health Card, and had to be dragged to the clinic each month to get weighed and immunized against things in the water and the air stalking Africans. Back then it was mostly the scale that I found most dreadful, a mechanism that always struck me as someone’s long-strapped leather shoulder bag forgotten at the clinic and now suspended precariously on something that resembled a meat hook. Always one of the plump nurses had to wrestle you onto its cold pleather seat, angling your feet into the two narrow holes in the bottom through which you could kick at the air while you screamed yourself hoarse, disturbed by all the strangeness. Only after your bum was warm with the injection would the nurses smile at you, throw you some lovely comments of how good you were, all the while the scent of methylated spirit everywhere, cooling down your bum. I can smell it still, feel it pinch high up in my nostrils as I walk past Harvest House, the sun low and loud in my face, making me sneeze. I doubt how the medical will be done given my anxieties about hospitals and their smells, but anxiety or not, a medical must be done, especially the TB test.
We will need pocket money for the first few weeks when we get there, we have been told, but given the way we have lived up till now, Cato and I figure that part is the easiest. We usually go on one meal a day, and if things came to it I am sure we could get by a kind week without food, licking our lips to keep them from chapping. Cato’s determined to make do, says we will carry our own soap and toothpaste from here, introduce our new college friends over there to Geisha soap and Close-Up toothpaste, teach them how to hand wash their clothes and save their money. For a while I consider hand washing the clothes of my classmates for money when I get there, but let it pass. T
he way people speak about getting a job over there it’s like picking low-hanging fruit off a ripe tree.
It’s mostly the air tickets that have us worried. The monies involved there are frightening things, sums Cato and I have never in our lives been near. Factor the swell of inflation into that and the figures involved are not for the fainthearted. They make even my well-to-do uncle clear his throat then fall silent for hours, like he was actually watching the television.
Like every other thing on a shelf in this country, air ticket prices change so often and upward, costing a little more today than they did yesterday. For Cato and me it’s like watching our American Dream move further down the road the harder we work our way toward it. The faster we try to run, the quicker it gallops away.
But Cato and I have a plan. We are approaching everyone and anyone we think may have money to give our way. We have written letters of inquiry to banks, members of Parliament, government ministries, airlines, government ministers, nongovernmental organizations—both domestic and international, private and public corporations, and general citizens known for charitable works or their good economic standing, a list that includes pastors, churchgoing men and women, and the wives of army generals. Cato has even written letters to embassies all over the city, including the African ones, places that I am certain would not help us even if the pope begged them to and Saint Peter promised them the heavens. Places like the Nigerian Embassy located right there on Samora Machel Avenue, the building so quiet a shade of green I had never noticed it until Cato pointed it out to me, stating his intentions.
The Best American Essays 2017 Page 15
