The Masked Man: A Memoir And Fantasy Of Hollywood

by Tom Wilson

  ©2012 Dusty Tuba Entertainment, Inc.

  ISBN: 9781624880810

  ONE

  I was only posing for a picture with a thirty year old man wearing a Marty McFly down vest and holding up a model DeLorean because my wife had cancer. She's fine now, thank God, and I'm glad she is, although her gritty survival after five surgeries and a couple of years of chemo and radiation destroyed my opportunity to write and perform a good one man show about it - Those kinds of cable T.V. specials that end with a tiny spotlight and some cello music, not a peppy "But she's fine now!" with a colorful balloon drop, and dancing to the song "Tequila!"

  I wasn't dancing to Tequila on the way to the "Chiller Theater" convention in New Jersey, though. Funny thing about unemployment and medical bills that look more like the hospital's phone number, it'll make you do things you swore you'd never do, like going to New Jersey to sign twenty year old photos of yourself for money, and give noogies to a long line of fake Marty McFly's.

  "Hello? McFly! Anybody home?!"

  No, not really.

  After paying close attention to what happens in the life of a low level celebrity in America for a long time now, since, well, I am one, it seems that there are two clear paths that have been worn smooth by the feet of the "sort of" famous that have gone before me. Either path is easy to illustrate with millions of hours of videotape, and dented equipment at morning radio stations, damaged by an angry actor asked about his least favorite episode of his iconic T.V show one too many times.

  "I SAID I DON'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT!" the former actor says to the sneering "Morning Zoo" radio host.

  "Why not, dude? That's why you're here!" the morning D.J. says, adjusting the backwards baseball cap that covers his receding hairline so the new owners of the station keep thinking he's twenty seven.

  The rock hard truth then hits the pop cultural icon-ette, the truth that he's known for years. He's not a real person to anyone he meets, he's a half-man, half pixellized cultural ghost to be marginalized, ridiculed, and set aside, for no other reason than having the audacity to be too memorable. Soon after that realization, he snaps hard at the tired radio hack, turning his life into a bitter carnival, looking at the ground to avoid eye contact and recognition. "Ahhhh! I'm more than that!" his hate filled tirades never dare to whisper, as he climbs Mount Self Hatred to plant another flag of defeat at the summit.

  Don't approach that guy at the mall, because he's not going to sign your hat or anything.

  The other celebrity path leads a different way - smiling a lot in restaurants, asking for the manager and hoping to get recognized for a celebrity discount, and going to Science Fiction Conventions to make a living. Since the first path leads to deep unhappiness, and plenty of instances of the suicides of people I know, that wasn't an option. I wasn't crazy about the second option either, but when circumstances turned from just plain broke to "surgeries at a hospital" kind of broke, which is, as many people know, a different kind of broke, and things were really bad, I began to listen to the voices of show-biz acquaintances who told me, "Dude, you should go to one of those conventions, man."

  I rolled my eyes as hard as I could, to impress them with high artistry, and boredom with such lowbrow interests as celebrity and money.

  "You'd make a fortune! I hear they make, like, twenty grand a week!"

  I made a few more phone calls to other people who didn't know what they were talking about either, and they said "Yeah, bro, they pay your way, and you just sit there! It's like it's raining money, you know!"

  "Who do you know that's done this?" I asked.

  "Some guy from Deep Space Nine."

  "What is that?"

  "See? You don't even have to be that famous! Bring a suitcase for all that cash! Heh!"

  They don't call them "Science Fiction Conventions" anymore, they call them "Cons," and I agreed to show up at one of the biggest cons in the country, in Northern New Jersey overlooking New York Giants Stadium. "Chiller Theater" is a Con so big and powerful that it has its own gravitational pull, drawing every actor from every television show and movie, from every decade imaginable. Their performances, now sparkling pop pixels shooting into American living rooms for decades have made personal appearance celebrities out of them - I mean - us - and each one marched into the New Jersey Meadowlands Entertainment complex with a smile, a pile of eight by ten glossy photos to sell, and an empty suitcase to carry those crumpled wads of money from adoring fans with good memories.

  I woke up early with my toes pointed like a ballerina in the tightly made Holiday Inn bed, and looked out the window across the gravel plains of New Jersey toward the steel spires of Manhattan. I had planned a victorious return to the city, with a big role in a Shakespeare play and several parties for tuxedoed literary giants during the hiatus of my critically acclaimed and fabulously lucrative T.V. show, but ended up in a free hotel room in New Jersey to sign pictures of myself from twenty years ago. Catch the fever.

  The elevator doors on my floor reflected a face becoming too familiar to me, an anguished mask, disguised by the upturned edges of my lips that looked something like a smile. Repeated mantras of inner peace and calm bounced in my head, and I shook my face back and forth in the bronze reflection. "Come on, big fella," I said to myself through gritted teeth, "Go down there and be great. Meet the people, sign the picture and get out of town. No problem."

  Ding. Going down.

  As the metallic doors glided open, the man slumped against the back wall of the elevator didn't move. He didn't look up at me in a wordless "Welcome to the elevator" half smile, didn't do a thing to acknowledge my existence. His eyes never rose from the polished marble floor as I breathed deeply, repeating the positive mantra of the winner celebrity. "I am doing well. This is good. Good stuff. Keep going. Don't stop the elevator and get off and make a phone call to go home. No. That's a mistake. Go to the lobby and start signing pictures of yourself. Yeah."

  "Good morning!" I said to the man slumped against the wall.

  Nothing. No response. His tousled morning hair glistened in the elevator spotlights, and the only evidence of life I could see was his ability to keep leaning on the wall without falling to the floor.

  "I will not surrender this morning, or this day," I thought to myself, channeling something I thought Tony Robbins might say in this situation, and pushing the already lit "L" button a few more times. "I am a winner. Things will be good."

  "How's it goin'?" I asked.

  "Mmffggghh…" he mumbled, "I'm here, aren't I?"

  He looked up at me, and I froze before responding, because I realized I was speaking to Jay North, the actor who played "Dennis The Menace" a very long time ago, when he was a little boy, and when I watched the reruns on a black and white television while my Mom made me a snack.

  We were two actors, appearing at a Con and on the elevator, trust me, going down.

  "Well," I stammered, "It's a beautiful day outside."

  "Aahhh…" he said, shuffling his feet to stay at a forty five degree lean against the wall.

  "Meet some people, …say hello," I said.

  He moaned and rubbed his face.

  "Have you ever done one of these things before?" he asked.

  I didn't answer right away, afraid to admit to Dennis The Menace that I was fresh meat.

  He stared at me for a few seconds, sad fatigue pulling at the thin flesh around his eyes.

  "They ask the same questions over and over."

  My Tony Robbins "I'm a winner" celebrity mantras now failing me, I stared at the numbers blinking in descending order for a while.

  "Well, I mean, we're the guys who came her
e, you know? They're just people who want to meet us. We kind of invited them in a way, didn't we?"

  He made real eye contact for the first time. "You don't understand, today is Saturday."

  I shuffled my feet, and finally mumbled "What about Saturday?"

  He pulled himself upright from the wall, reflected into a million bronze facets of despair in the elevator walls.

  "On Saturdays, everybody shows up without taking their Thorazine!"

  Hey, Dennis The Menace, you're bringing Biff from Back To The Future down, man.

  Before I could tell him a dark and self deprecating joke to relax things, before I could share with him one of my winner celebrity mantras, before I could even lay my hands on his troubled forehead and begin praying in tongues, leading him to Christ on quaking knees on the geometric mauve hotel carpeting, I knew he was right. The elevator doors slid open into a vibrating Salvador Dali painting of spinning light sabers and Klingon masks that made the bar scene from Star Wars look like an editorial meeting at the Wall Street Journal.

  The teeming mass of Darth Vader wanna-bes and Wonder Women swallowed Jay North whole and I was instantly blinded by flashes, photographs of myself, and waving Magic Markers.

  "Biff! BIIFFFF!!"

  "Uh, yeah, hi, it's not Biff, really, it's Tom. Biff is pretend," I said, spinning in place and unsure of where to go, which direction to walk, what table to report to, or what to do, signing the photos and worn VHS boxes thrust at me. I peeked over the heads of the costumed mob and saw other famous actors wading through the crowd. They didn't say anything or react to any stimuli, making as little eye contact as possible as they knifed through the teeming mass of nerd humanity. "See you at the table!" they barked to fans, hustling by and staring at their shoes. "Why are they being mean to people?" I thought, as the mob grew thicker. Boy, I think you should at least have the decency to say hello. Then it dawned on me - they were veterans, there for business, and the crowd surrounding me was blocking the hallway. "Okay. Don't give it away, Tom," I thought to myself, "Here in Conland we've come to sell it, and keep the crowd moving."

  "See you at the table!" I said to the next few people who shoved a piece of paper into my face, but their disappointed faces made me feel guilty, so I signed anyway. "Don't make too much eye contact, Tom. Then their disappointed face can't sway you."

  "See you at the table!" I said.

  "Which table? Where?" they asked me through Planet Of The Apes masks.

  "I don't know yet!" I said, "I'm trying to find out!"

  Then I accidentally made eye contact and had to sign their Marty McFly action figure.

  "Mister Wilson! Mister Wilson!" I heard. Someone was using my real name, without carrying a pen, so they couldn't be from the costumed mob. They must know where I was supposed to be.

  "Yes! Follow me!" the woman said. Let's call her Dorothy Spangler, since so many pens were waving in my face at the time that I didn't hear her name well, and I never looked at her name tag.

  Dorothy led me under the canopies of balloon and spaceship cutouts, through the ballrooms of the Holiday Inn and past a parade of stars selling merchandise, each of whom I was a little thrilled to see and craned my neck a bit as we flew by. Loretta Swit and Jamie Farr were at the MASH table selling Hot Lips Houlihan and Klinger the cross dresser memorabilia. There were former James Bond vixens, women in their fifties or sixties, wearing tight celebrations of cleavage, and one of the smaller ballrooms was filled with lots and lots of actors who'd been murdered in gruesome ways in lots and lots of horror movies, evidenced by the disemboweled photos of themselves they were signing for money.

  "Your table is in the Cafe Eighties!" Dorothy said.

  "What is the Cafe Eighties?"

  "Just a number of tables featuring stars like yourself from that period!"

  "Great!" I said, mustering a winner celebrity mantra thingy. "Don't run away. Everything is good."

  I walked into a small ballroom near the horror victim superhighway and plopped a duffelbag of photos next to Bernie Koppel, an actor of wide experience and great comedic talent with a wide range of credits from "Get Smart" and "Love American Style" to his most famous role, now known by everybody as "Doc" from "The Love Boat."

  Bernie didn't seem very happy to see me. He was very busy shielding his face to prevent being photographed by fans walking past his table. "Twenty dollars!" he said, through a web of outstretched fingers, "Twenty dollars to take my picture!"

  "I'm not allowed to just take your picture?" the surprised Love Boat fan asked.

  "Twenty," Bernie said, not smiling.

  The rebuffed customer looked at me as I settled into the stackable hotel chair and unzipped my duffel.

  "How about you, can I take a picture of you?"

  "Sure," I said, ending my relationship with Doc from The Love Boat before it began, as the man dumped a "Man From U.N.C.L.E." poster onto Bernie's table to raise his camera, as Bernie sighed deeply and looked across the room toward Lou Ferrigno.

  He snapped a photo of me staring blankly back at him, pulling the duffelbag shoulderstrap from around my neck.

  "Who are you?" he asked.

  Next to former Mister Universe Lou Ferrigno was Burt Young, "Pauly" from the Rocky movies, and on the other side of the room was a quiet man who placed old photographs into tidy, undisturbed piles in front of him. His claim to fame was his role in "The Planet Of The Apes." No, not the movie or any of its many sequels, he was a star of the "Planet Of The Apes" television series.

  Yeah, I didn't know they made one either.

  I made peace with my circumstances - a marginally recognizable low level celebrity at a sci-fi convention, and peace with my neighborhood - trapped somewhere between the Death Star and The Aloha Deck. I stacked photos and tried to create tempting impulse buys for the unsuspecting Love Boat fans swarming Bernie Koppel, piling Biff photos all the way to the end of the table and Bernie's turf, where he was selling photos of himself as a Doctor (with stethoscope), as a playboy (with Isaac and a Mai-Tai), and even some photos of him in the T.V. show "Get Smart." As I took out my new pens to place between the stacks, Lou Ferrigno was getting into it with Pauly from Rocky about scotch and cigarettes, since Burt Young had decided that the only way to survive the day was with a hotel tumbler full of icy booze, and a lit cigarette under the table, sneaking desperate drags on the butt between sullen nods at people yelling "Yo Pauly!"

  Lou Ferrigno is a healthy bodybuilder who can snap your neck like a popsicle stick. The thing is, Lou has significant hearing problems which affect the clarity of his speech, and Burt was deep into one of those bottles of scotch bought in a warehouse store because it has a built in handle.

  "Dis is no smoking. No smoking heah," Lou said.

  Burt looked the other way, waving away the line of smoke rising from below the tablecloth.

  "Please I ask you. I ask you put out da cigarette. No Smoking," Lou said.

  "Uh, yeah, I'll…uh…" Burt replied, pretending to move his arms like he was putting it out while refilling his glass with amber amnesia.

  Since there wasn't any crowd control problem at my table, I left my stack of pictures on the table near Bernie Koppel and ambled around the room making the rounds and introducing myself to every low to mid-level celebrity in my area. This little lap around Cafe Eighties was met with slight irritation from everyone, and my outstretched hand was limply grasped with a gurgled "heyhowsitgoin?" until I got the picture. We were business rivals at an industry convention! Even if I'm a nice guy, that doesn't matter if somebody decides to buy a Biff photo, harming the chances of a table full of aging hotties called "Girls Of The Evil Dead," each of whom were disemboweled in a different way in one of the Evil Dead movies.

  I was a novice, unschooled in the low level celebrity rulebook. Friendly small talk has its place, but don't distract anybody from the chance to put a twenty dollar bill in their pocket. It was a sprawling galaxy of low magnitude stars, using what weak gravitational pull they had…I mean,
using what weak gravitational pull WE had to attract twenty dollar bills, and if we were lucky, big stacks of them. Nobody talked to each other much, other than to whisper a bit of horrifying news from table to glossy, photo covered table.

  "Did you hear the news?" the man from the Planet of the Apes (T.V.) said.

  "No, what's going on?" I said.

  "The "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" people are charging fifty dollars for a picture!"

  "Fifty?" I said, "Fifty dollars for a picture?!"

  "That takes the cash out of their pockets, and it makes it harder for us," he said, giving a worried glance to his empty cash box.

  Early on, it looked like things would be tough, because the lesser constellations of stars were losing sales to Buffy and her vampires, sucking cash out of the pockets of the northern New Jersey sci-fi fan base.

  Peter Mayhew was there, the very tall man who dressed in a hairy suit to play "Chewbacca" for George Lucas in the movie Star Wars. Peter walked by my table in giant steps, followed by an excited parade of children calling to him, which he completely ignored. He was wearing a threadbare, brown T-shirt reading "Chewbacca Rules!" decorated with the wooly mask of his alter ego, and he moved through the crowd, scowling and oblivious to the kids in tow trying to say hello, or shake his hand.

  "Hey Pete, can you hear the kids down here?" I thought about saying, but didn't say it, because he's like seven feet tall and I was sick of getting the brush off from actors who didn't even have lines in the movies they were in, "You're seven feet tall, wearing a "Chewbacca Rules" t-shirt. Say hi to a couple of kids, huh?"

  But like I said, I didn't say that exactly. I waited for fleeting eye contact, said "Hello, Peter," extending my hand anyway, and he shook it and said hello, ignoring the pleas of the tiny people far below his gaze.

  Thousands of hands shaken, thousands of programs and pictures and foreheads autographed, and thousands of smiles for free pictures with fans, as Bernie Koppel glowered just out of frame.

  "What's Michael J. Fox like?"

  "Was that real manure?"