American Estrangement

by Said Sayrafiezadeh

  AMERICAN ESTRANGEMENT

  stories

  SAÏD SAYRAFIEZADEH

  In memory of my mother, Martha Harris née Finkelstein, who knew estrangement

  CONTENTS

  Audition

  Scenic Route

  Last Meal at Whole Foods

  A, S, D, F

  Fairground

  Metaphor of the Falling Cat

  A Beginner’s Guide to Estrangement

  Acknowledgments

  AUDITION

  The first time I smoked crack cocaine was the spring I worked construction for my father on his new subdivision in Moonlight Heights. My original plan had been to go to college, specifically for the arts, specifically for acting, where I’d envisioned strolling shoeless around campus with a notepad, jotting down details about the people I observed so that I would later be able to replicate the human condition on-screen with nuance and veracity. Instead, I was unmatriculated and nineteen, working six days a week, making eight dollars an hour, no more or less than what the other general laborers were being paid, and which is what passed, at least for my self-made father, as fairness. Occasionally I would be cast in a community theater production of Neil Simon or The Mystery of Edwin Drood, popular but uncomplicated fare, which we would rehearse for a month before performing in front of an audience of fifteen. “You have to pay your dues,” the older actors would tell me, sensing, I suppose, my disappointment and impatience. “How long is that going to take?” I’d ask them, as if they spoke from high atop the pinnacle of show business. In lieu of an answer, they offered a tautology. “It takes as long as it takes,” they’d say.

  It was spring, it was rainy, it was the early nineties, meaning that Seinfeld was all the rage, and so was Michael Jordan, and so was crack cocaine, the latter of which, at this point, I had no firsthand knowledge. As for Jerry Seinfeld and Michael Jordan, I knew them well. Each evening, having spent my day carrying sixty-pound drywall across damp pavement and up bannisterless staircases in one of the state-of-the-art family residences being pre-wired for the Internet—whatever that was—in a cul-de-sac eventually to be named Placid Village Circle, I would drive to my apartment and watch one or the other, Seinfeld or Jordan, since one or the other always happened to be on. They were famous, they were artists, they were exalted. I watched them and dreamed of my own fame and art and exalt. The more I dreamed, the more vivid the dream seemed to be, until it was no longer some faint dot situated on an improbable time line but, rather, my destiny. And all I needed to turn this destiny into reality was to make it out of my midsized city—not worth specifying—and move to L.A., where, of course, an actor needed to be if he was to have any chance at that thing called success. But, from my perspective of a thousand miles, L.A. appeared immense, incensed, inscrutable, impenetrable, and every time I thought I had enough resolve to uproot myself and rent a U-Haul I would quickly retreat into the soft, downy repetitiveness of my hometown, with its low stakes, high livability, and steady paycheck from my father.

  The general laborers came and went that spring, working for a few weeks and then quitting without notice, eight dollars apparently not being enough to compensate even the most unskilled. No matter. For every man who quit, there were five more waiting in line to take his place, eight dollars apparently being enough to fill any vacancy. I was responsible for showing the new recruits around on their first day, which took about twenty minutes and got me out of carrying drywall. Here’s the porta-potty. Here’s the foreman’s office. Here’s the paper to sign. They wanted to know what the job was like. They wanted to know if there were health benefits. They spoke quietly and conspiratorially, as if what they asked might be perceived as treasonous. They wanted to know if they might have the opportunity to learn some plumbing or carpentry. “You’ll have to talk to the boss about that,” I’d tell them, but the answer was no. What they should have been asking me was if there was a union.

  No one knew that I was the boss’s son. About once a week my dad would show up in his powder-blue Mercedes and walk around inspecting the progress, displeased and concerned, finding everything urgent and subpar, showing neither love nor special dispensation toward me, nor did I show any toward him. This seemed to come easily to the two of us. I was just another workingman in wet overalls and he was just another big shot in a three-piece suit and a safety vest. The roles we played were generic, superficial, and true. Later, he’d tell me, “I’m doing this for you, not for me.” What “this” was, was not entirely clear. “One day all of this will be yours,” he’d say. “This” was three subdivisions and a ten-story office building downtown. “This” was the powder-blue Mercedes. According to my father, he wanted me to learn the meaning of hard work up close and personal so that I would know what life was really like, but also because he wanted me to experience what he had gone through growing up on the outskirts of town with six siblings, odd jobs, and no help from the government. In short, I was living a version of his life, albeit in reverse.

  From time to time, I would be paired up with a guy named Duncan Dioguardi, who was my age but looked ten years older, and who liked to order me around—put this here, put that there. He enjoyed the power, while I enjoyed the cold comfort of knowing that I could burst his bubble by telling him who my dad was, but a good actor never breaks character. Clearly, I was a novice and not very good at hard work, as Duncan and my father had already surmised. I got winded fast. I got apathetic fast. I cut corners when I could. I waited for opportunities to go to the porta-potty. I waited for opportunities to smoke cigarettes. The cigarettes got me winded faster. “You need to get into shape,” Duncan would tell me. “Why don’t you use your next paycheck to buy yourself a ThighMaster?” This was a joke for him. He would walk around in short-sleeved shirts, impervious to the chill, a tattoo of a snake coiling around his bicep and crawling up toward his neck, en route to devour his face, a dramatic and striking image if ever there was one, doubly so against his pale skin, slick with drizzle. In the meantime, I slouched beneath drywall, imagining L.A. in the spring, waiting for lunchtime, quite proficient at not being the boss’s son, and all the while reassuring myself that one day in the future I would be performing some version of this role with nuance and veracity, out of shape or not. “What did you draw from to create the character?” the critics would ask me. “Why, from real life,” I would say.

  When lunchtime arrived, I’d sit around with the other general laborers, thirty of us on upturned crates in an unfinished living room with a spring breeze blowing through the glassless windows, eating roast-beef sandwiches and talking about money problems, home problems, work problems. My problems were not their problems, but I wished they were. Their problems were immediate, distinct, and resolvable; mine were long-term, existential, and impossible. When I spoke, I tried to approximate the speech patterns of my coworkers—the softened consonants and the dropped articles—lest I reveal myself as the outsider that I was. No hard k’s, x’s, or f’s. The irony was that my father’s specified plan of self-improvement for me dovetailed with my own: experience real life up close and personal.

  The other general laborers knew one another from high school or the neighborhood or the previous work site, which had paid ten dollars an hour. They hoped that the subdivision wouldn’t be finished until fall, maybe even winter. They didn’t mind working forever. They were still counting on a chance to learn a trade—but half of them would be gone in two weeks. As for me, I’d grown up in Timpani Hills, where none of these men would have had any reason to visit unless they’d come to do some roofing. I’d gone to the best schools and had the cushiest upbringing, including a pool in the backyard and weekend acting classes, where my dad would watch me perform on parents’ night, misty and proud
in the front row, his boorishness temporarily abated, supportive of his son’s passion and talent until he realized that his son was intending to pursue acting as something more than a hobby. Now all that history was inconsequential, pulsed inside the blender of collective toil. No one would have been able to tell me apart from any of the other general laborers I sat with on my lunch break, smoking cigarettes amid exposed crossbeams. Just as no one would have been able to tell that I was the boss’s son. To the latecomer entering the theater, I was indistinguishable from the whole.

  Just as no one would have been able to tell that I didn’t really want to give Duncan Dioguardi a lift to his house after work, but his car had broken down—yet one more item to be added to the list of immediate problems. What I wanted to say was, “Why don’t you ride home on a ThighMaster?” But what I actually said was, “Sure, jump in!” I could hear the sprightliness in my voice, all false. It was Saturday. It was four o’clock. The foreman was letting us off early because the drywall hadn’t been delivered on time. The new recruits wondered if they would still be paid for a full day. Theirs was an argument that made sense only on paper. “Go enjoy the weather,” the foreman said, as if he were bestowing the good weather upon us. Indeed, the sun was high and there was no rain. When the breeze blew, it blew with promise. I should have been savoring the first official nice day of spring; instead, I was driving an hour out of my way down Route 15. The traffic was slow going. We stopped and started. We stopped again. Duncan Dioguardi apologized for the traffic. Inside the car he was surprisingly thoughtful and courteous. He had his seat belt on and his hands were folded in his lap. “Setting is everything,” my dear old acting teacher had once told me, and then we had done exercises to illustrate this concept: forest, beach, prison cell.

  “I don’t mind traffic,” I told Duncan. I was being courteous, too. I softened my consonants. I dropped my articles. Through the windshield, our midsized city crawled past at a midsized pace. Midsized highways with midsized cars. Midsized citizens with their midsized lives.

  We talked about work and then we talked about ourselves. Away from the subdivision, it was clear that we had little in common. He told me that he’d been doing manual labor since he was fifteen, beginning with cleaning bricks at a demolition site on the north side of the city. I was taking weekend acting classes at fifteen. “A nickel a brick,” Duncan told me. “You do the math.” I wasn’t sure what math there was to do. Duncan was the one who should have been taking acting classes, not me, receiving instruction on how to transform his supply of hard-earned material into that thing called art. He’d already lived twice the life that I’d lived, while having none of my advantages. He was what my father had been before my father hit it big. But Duncan Dioguardi was most likely never going to hit it big. His trajectory seemed already established. If I wasn’t careful, my trajectory would soon be established. The tattoo of the snake heading up to Duncan’s face was not an affect but as apt a metaphor as any of what the past had been like for him, and what the future held. He needed no affect. I was the one who needed an affect. “Don’t ever get a tattoo,” my acting teacher had told me. “A performer must always remain a blank slate.” So here I was, playing the role of general laborer, with flawless skin and stuck in traffic.

  It was four-thirty. If I was lucky, I’d be home by six. Maybe I would take a nap, assuage my fatigue and apathy, wake up fresh, and do something productive, like read a script and enlighten myself. Sometimes I would lie in the bathtub and read aloud from my stack of current and classic screenplays, playing every single character, men, women, and children. Even the stage directions were a character: Fade in. Int. bathtub—night. Fade out. Everything was deserving of voice. Meanwhile, Duncan Dioguardi and I lit cigarettes, one after the other, inhaling first- and secondhand smoke. We fiddled with the radio. Tupac came on. Tupac was all the rage. We nodded our heads to Tupac. Apropos of Tupac, I told Duncan about how I was planning to move to L.A. I said it casually, as if this plan were already in the works rather than a doubtful dot on an undrawn time line, and I was unexpectedly filled with a brief but heartening sense that, merely by my vocalizing that something would happen, something would actually happen—as per pop psychology. Duncan told me that he had lived in L.A., between starting high school and dropping out of high school. What else had Duncan done by the age of nineteen? Where else had Duncan lived? He was so far ahead of me in the category of life that I would have been unable to catch up even if I began living now. “What was L.A. like?” I asked him. I could hear my counterfeit casualness being usurped by genuine yearning. “It was magical,” Duncan said. He got quiet. He contributed no follow-up details. He stared out the windshield. “See this traffic?” he said. I saw this traffic. “This isn’t L.A. traffic,” he said. I pictured L.A. traffic on a Saturday at four-thirty, sun high, never rain, bumper-to-bumper, all of it magical.

  Suddenly I was telling Duncan Dioguardi about my innermost desires, speaking confessionally, spilling my guts, spelling out exactly how I was going to become an actor, how I was going to rent a U-Haul, not give the boss any notice, fuck the boss, drive a thousand miles in a day, arrive in L.A., find an agent, find a place to live, start auditioning for film and television, maybe even Seinfeld. “Keep an eye out for me on Seinfeld,” I said. If you say it, it will happen. Somewhere along the way, I had stopped dropping articles and softening consonants, because it was too difficult a ruse to maintain while also trying to be authentic. I told Duncan about having performed in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, twice, at the rec center, one fall and the following fall. I’d had only a small part but I’d got some laughs. I didn’t tell him that there’d been fifteen people in the audience. Perhaps he’d heard of the production? There had been a four-star review in the Tribune. No, he hadn’t heard of it.

  “You can do better than that bullshit,” he said.

  ________

  It was five o’clock. We were moving fast now. The traffic was gone. So were my cigarettes. We were inspiring each other with our uplifting stories of promise and potential. Duncan was telling me about his own plans for the future, which mainly involved having realized that he’d wasted the previous year, and the year before that. He was determined to make up for it. He knew precisely what needed to be done. He spoke generally. In response, I spoke generally, too, providing platitudes where applicable. “You can do whatever you set your mind to,” I said. “It’s mind over matter,” he said. “That’s right!” I said. “That’s right!” he said. We were in agreement, and yet I had the peculiar feeling that we were referring to different things.

  He was telling me where to turn. Turn here. Turn there. Left. Right. Right. I was entering territory with which I was unfamiliar, because I’d grown up cushy. We drove beneath an overpass that led into a down-and-out neighborhood of weather-beaten, two-story, red-brick homes, a hundred of them in a row, every one identical, just as the houses in my father’s subdivision were identical, but at the other end of the economic spectrum. This was a neighborhood of odd jobs and no help, where people shopped for dinner at the convenience store. “I trust them as far as I can throw them,” Duncan said, referring to I know not what. This was outsized struggle in a midsized city. Turn. Turn. Turn. The Spice Girls came on. The Spice Girls were all the rage. Apropos of the Spice Girls, Duncan was asking me if I wanted to party tonight. He was asking as if the thought had just occurred to him. It was Saturday, after all. It was five-thirty. It would be a shame to let these windfall spring hours go to waste. It would be a shame to go home as I always did, lie in the bathtub, have another night of living life through the soggy pages of screenplays, getting closer to twenty years old, my time line unraveling like a ball of yarn. I somehow knew that the word “party” in this context meant one thing: getting high. What I really wanted was to stop at a convenience store and get more cigarettes. “Don’t waste your money,” Duncan said. He could buy me more cigarettes, no problem. He pointed to one of the identical buildings. If I gave him ten dollars he could get m
e a carton of cigarettes at half price. If I chipped in thirty dollars he could get the two of us cigarettes plus. “Do you want cigarettes plus?” Duncan asked. “Do you want to party?” He was speaking now entirely in the language of euphemisms, and I was fluent.

  “Yes,” I said. “I want to party.”

  It was six o’clock and we were in the basement of Duncan Dioguardi’s house. Or, more to the point, we were in the basement of his mother’s house, where he was staying until his security deposit cleared. “Banks,” he said, generally. His mother wasn’t home, but she kept a nice house, much nicer on the inside than it appeared on the outside, with hardwood floors and crown molding, and I thought about how these were the kinds of detail that would have eluded a person who had merely driven through the neighborhood without bothering to stop, like the passenger on a cruise ship who thinks he knows the island from the port. Duncan’s basement was more bedroom than basement, with Mom’s touches, sheets tucked in, cozy and comfortable, except for a boiler in the corner that was making clicking sounds. Stacked up in a pile were some carpentry manuals for beginners, yellow books with hammers on the covers. “I dabble with those sometimes,” he said. Then he added, “But they won’t give a guy like me a chance.” I wasn’t sure if “whatever you set your mind to” would apply in this instance.

  On his dresser was a Magnavox TV, twenty-five-inch, with a built-in VCR, presumably left on all day, tuned to ESPN, where the announcers were oohing and aahing over, who else, Michael Jordan, who was doing, what else, winning. He glided down the court. He floated through the air. He elbowed his defender in the chest. Everything he did had style, even his mistakes. He was the perfect blend of beauty and power, of grace and aggression. No one would have dared tell Michael Jordan, “It takes as long as it takes.”