I turned my head away from the sunlight filtering through the white curtains. Everything would be better when school started again.
I WAS horrified. “You’re kidding, aren’t you?”
George shook his head in that deliberate way he had. “Nope, the play’s been approved.”
It was September at Gunning High School, and George and I were walking down a hallway during change of class. The usual frenzy of kids rushed by us, and as usual it sounded like they were all talking at once at the top of their lungs, which wasn’t too far from the truth.
I banged my bag filled with senior files against my leg. “But there’s no way that Rent is appropriate for high school students.” My head was buzzing with ways I could convince him of that. Maybe he hadn’t made final plans yet.
“This is the school version. We talked about this, Tom, remember?”
I guess I did. George had corralled me the past April, right after I’d returned from the disastrous trip during which I’d met my personal demon and fueler-of-fantasies. I hadn’t been in the state of mind to analyze anything too deeply then, not when I’d jumped down immediately into a funk.
A few years before, George had staged a production of Bye Bye Birdie, and he’d asked me for help as assistant director. I’d demurred since I had no experience with the theater, but he’d roped me in anyway. I hadn’t actually done much except act as his gofer and organize the supremely talented parent volunteers. The extra pay from the school had been good, but after that I stuck to my history classroom and supported George by applauding from the audience. But in April he’d caught me in my moments of weakness and got me to agree to help out again.
I remember thinking that there was no way the school district committee would approve a play like Rent, which was at the top of his list, and we’d do one of the other plays instead. Gunning was west-Texas-small-town-conservative, even if George wasn’t. Rent, which I’d seen in a gritty production in Dallas a few years before, was filled with curse words, sexual relationships outside of marriage, and drug use. And same-sex couples, HIV, and AIDS. Not exactly The Sound of Music. I’d told George fine, fine, give it a try, and then I’d dismissed it from my thoughts.
The committee filled with God-fearing churchgoers had approved Rent for a cast of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds? It boggled my mind. Rent had onstage kissing between women, between men, and a whole lot more implied. According to the values of the town where I’d lived and taught for the past fifteen years, it was obscene, decadent, and immoral, just like every homosexual man or woman was. None of them, of course, lived anywhere near Gunning.
Dread dropped over me as we walked past the student attendance office. I could not be associated with this play. It might somehow draw attention to me, arouse suspicion. I wasn’t prepared to…. If this play outed me, my life would be destroyed.
I stopped right where I was, and George stopped too. We confronted each other like rocks in the river of adolescents streaming by us.
Better to do this right away. I shook my head and then looked up at him. George towered over me, and I’m not short. “I can’t help out this year, George. I’m sorry.”
He looked a little panicked. “You’ve got to.”
“I’ve got a full schedule this year, and I was thinking of picking up an adult education course over at the community—”
“If you’re not part of it, I’ll have to go back to the committee.”
“What?”
He sidestepped a charging senior. “Their approval is based on your counseling experience. I said you’d be there for the cast, to help them through any problems they experienced during the play.”
My heart sank. “But I don’t have my degree, and I only helped out the counselors those two years when they were shorthanded.”
“Come on, Tom, I’ve got the rights and the scripts, the auditions are set up for next week, and this is a great play for the kids. We’ll have packed houses every night. And I promise you won’t have much to do.”
I already knew George wouldn’t keep that last promise. He always meant the very best but often blundered into problems. And this was a big one, as big as he was. George Keating was an overweight giraffe, with spindly legs, a beer belly, and puppy-dog eyes. He was a man only his wife could love—and every kid who’d ever acted under his direction in the theater department or sang in his choir. He’d been putting on musicals for the past ten years, but I’d never known him to go off the deep end like this.
I rubbed my hand over my chin and frowned.
“You told me this past spring you’d do it,” he said.
“I said I’d help out as your assistant, but it never occurred to me they’d say yes to Rent. I thought we’d be doing something else.”
“Hi, Mr. Smith!” Brenda Salterman hollered at me as she raced by.
“I’ll be right there,” I called after her. I had a freshman World Cultures class that was due to start in three minutes. “Look, George….”
“You can’t back out on me,” he said.
I sure wanted to. “Even if I could clear my schedule, I don’t know that I feel comfortable doing Rent with the kids. It’s all about—”
“It’s about life,” George said flatly. “Have you seen it? Do you know what it’s—”
“Of course I’ve seen it.” I hitched my shoulder in annoyance. “I do get to the big city now and then, you know.” The driving beat of dance music from Good Times came to me, and the body-memory of being tapped on the back, and me turning…. George would have a heart attack if he ever knew what I did, what I was, how Kevin and I had danced the evening away, his arms around me, and how my body had needed that. George thought I was good ol’ dependable Tom, as reliable and dull as the west Texas plains, and about as sexual.
Which was the problem, I suddenly realized. If I said no, he’d wonder why. It would be out of character for me, because go-along, get-along Tom would be the one who’d prevented the play from going on. People would gossip about that. I wanted to groan out loud. Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place.
“Rent might place certain issues in an urban context that some of our kids will never experience, but that doesn’t make it any less relevant,” George said with the fervor of the true believer. “At the very least they’ve got to understand the lives of others, but the truth is that the play presents life as they’ll have to deal with it on their own in a few years and what plenty of them are involved with right now. To think differently is to bury our heads in the sand. You think there aren’t drugs all over this school?”
I snorted. The students in the back row of my homeroom knew more about drugs than a vice cop.
“You think there aren’t gay kids here?” George went on. I tried not to change my expression at all. “Of course there are, and we both know it.”
“You can’t be seriously thinking of putting on some of those… some of those scenes. I mean—”
“It’s been sanitized for our age group. The language has been cleaned up, a whole song has been cut, several verses are in the trashcan, and—”
“Mr. Keating, can I talk to you about the homework assignment?” A timid youngster I didn’t know, probably a freshman, was standing ten feet away, as if he were afraid to intrude into our heated conversation. He was right to be wary; I felt like a mountain lion trapped in a corner.
“Sure, Jared, meet me after school in the Little Theater,” George said easily, and he flipped his hand, dismissing the kid. He went away looking disappointed that he hadn’t gotten his answer instantly.
The change bell rang as it did eight times a day, but I didn’t move. “No matter what cuts have been made,” I said, “the play is still about… well, what it’s about.”
“Right,” George bobbed his mostly bald head enthusiastically. “And that’s the beauty of it. The message is still there. You know, acceptance. Support. Love.”
I’d felt it too, in the theater in Dallas, though I’d tried to put the feeling d
own as I walked out alone in the crowd.
“But what happened to Annie Get Your Gun?” I said weakly. “I thought you were planning on—”
George clapped me on the shoulder and steered me in the direction of both our classrooms. “This is so much better. The students will learn from this. I’ll put you on the e-mail list. You’re officially listed as assistant director, and auditions are next Tuesday. I’ll need you there. Okay?”
There wasn’t anybody else in the hallway now except the two of us. I stopped and grabbed his elbow. “As your assistant director officially associated with the production of Rent, I’ve got to tell you that I have serious misgivings about the play. I don’t think it’s the right choice for this town. Folks here aren’t going to understand. Plus you’re going to be casting three students as homosexuals. Have you thought about what that really means? In this town—”
“Four,” he said. “Angel, Tom Collins, Joanne, and Maureen. Although technically Maureen is bi.”
I could see it in his blithe, enthusiastic face. He had no idea what that meant. Not for those of us living the life. Resentment crawled up my spine at the thought that George and some unknown teenagers were going to give a stab at approximating it.
“It’s going to be all right,” George said, as seriously as could be. “You’ll see.”
IT GOT worse during the casting call.
Gunning wasn’t isolated out on the western prairie. Kenneton was a thirty-five-minute trip away on State Highway 382, and it was twice our size, with an enclosed mall and a multiplex. In the opposite direction, it took under two hours to drive to Abilene. But for day-to-day amusement and to keep the young people out of trouble, our town looked to local church and school activities, like the Wednesday night services and the Thursday night Bible studies, the Friday night football games in the fall, and the twice-yearly theater productions put on by the high school.
Normally an audition for a play pulled in about seventy, eighty kids. For Rent, the auditorium overflowed with more than twice that number, but George and I quickly found out that most of them weren’t there to try out for the play; they were curious onlookers eager to see how much of the play would be re-enacted in the try-out scenes. Would we ask our girls to prove they knew how to shoot up heroin? Would Mimi re-enact a pole dance? Would we ask the boys to kiss, to prove they had the guts to do it?
“See?” I muttered to George as I walked by him, escorting two of the more raucous seniors out into the corridor.
“But I want to play a drug dealer,” one of them piped up.
George made everybody sign in, indicating what role they wanted to audition for. That got rid of the dilettantes, leaving the core of serious theater students and a few determined newcomers in the suddenly quiet seats in front of the stage. Theater directors, I’d learned, had a good idea of who they wanted to cast in a play weeks before the auditions, but George had told me he was going in this time with an open mind.
Right, I’d cynically thought. At the end of a grueling four-hour session—I was already sick of hearing five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes sung by eager young voices—George presented me with a cast list I’d both expected and feared.
“You can’t do this,” I said flatly, and I dropped the yellow legal pad he’d handed me onto his desk. We were in the glass-enclosed office he kept in the back of the Little Theater, which was what everybody called his classroom, since it mimicked the real thing.
“Sure I can. What’s wrong with it? The only problem is that there’s just one black kid in the cast, playing Benny, and it would have been better if he’d had the pipes to sing as Collins. But it’s probably just as well. Even I know this town can’t take an interracial gay couple.”
“Thank God you do.”
“I think Johnny’s right to play Mark, and Sam will do fine with Roger.”
“And you’ve cast Robbie as Angel, the pivotal role of the drag queen.” I pushed out air. I was positive that George had never seen a drag queen in person. I’d danced with one the year before and ended up in bed with her.
George looked off to the side, down to the stack of class papers piled on the floor. “Robbie’s perfect for the role.”
“And that’s the point, isn’t it?” I tried to rein in my temper. The big institutional clock on the wall showed seven-thirty-eight, and I was tired. The red beans and rice meal I’d nuked for dinner in the teacher’s lounge wasn’t sitting well.
“George….” I prompted when it was clear he wasn’t going to say anything. I pulled up the rickety folding chair and sat down.
“Okay, okay. Tell me what you think.”
“I don’t think Robbie should be Angel. Mark or Roger, that would be all right, or a smaller role, but—”
“Robbie has the talent to pull Angel off.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s got a great voice and the boy can dance. And he’s got the experience. He did fine in Bye Bye Birdie, and—”
“And he’s gay.”
George’s head came up. “Not every boy involved in theater is homosexual. Don’t succumb to stereotypes.”
“George,” I said wearily. “If Robbie isn’t gay, I’ll eat my teacher’s certificate. Come on, you know it. This is typecasting.”
“Well, okay. So he’s gay. So what?”
“You think so, and I think so, but has Robbie figured it out yet?”
George stared at me like I’d grown a set of antlers. “Has the boy looked at himself in the mirror lately? Or listened to himself talk?”
“Sometimes it takes time for these things to come to a person. I think it would be cruel to cast him in a role that we know he’ll take some flak for anyway, when it will expose him to—”
“Tom, you’re borrowing trouble. Besides, Robbie’s strong.”
“What?”
“Have you ever had him in a class?”
“Just in homeroom.”
“The kid has it all together. I think you’re wrong that he isn’t aware of his sexuality. Isn’t there some sort of statistic that says when those boys figure it out? Isn’t it really young?”
I’d been ten.
“Besides, this is why you’re here, to help him out if he needs the help. This might be exactly the right experience for him, don’t you think? Now, what do you think of Channing Carlton for Maureen?”
I backed down for the moment. “She’s okay. She’s got the voice and the long hair you were looking for. She moves well.”
“She’s beautiful. But she’s playing a bisexual bitch. Any concerns about her? Or how about Sandy for Joanne?”
Truthfully, I could hardly imagine any problems the girls might have playing lesbians. Bitterly, I acknowledged to myself that women with alternate sexualities were treated differently by our society than gay men were. The dykes versus the fags, but every straight man in the U.S. who watched porn wanted to see two women getting off together. Lesbians held a unique place in the intolerant American psyche; it was the men who lay with men who challenged the words of the Holy Bible. It seemed to me that the women got a sort of peculiar pass.
“I’m not worried about the girls,” I said.
“But how about Steven for Tom Collins? He’s okay?”
Steven was the pitcher who’d led the Gunning baseball team to the state semifinals the previous spring. It was rumored that the Chicago White Sox were scouting him already, and in the fantastical world of adolescents, a lot of the students believed that. The entire school would give Steven a pass if he danced naked on the front steps while jerking off. “Are you kidding? He’s fine.”
“So it’s only Robbie you’re really concerned about.”
“I’m not going to be able to convince you, am I?”
George folded his hands on the desk. “I really don’t have anybody else who can do Angel. Did you see anybody else out there who could?”
Any other boy who could jump on top of a desk while wearing a miniskirt and a wig? And dance? No, our town di
dn’t seem big enough to hold two of those kinds of people, and I wearily said so.
“You’re going to have to up your energy quotient,” George told me. “Even though we’ve started early, we’ve got just ten weeks to pull this off. Play season is tough.” He rummaged around in his top drawer and plunked a small bottle on the desk blotter. “Have some vitamins.”
ONE THING I’d insisted on and that George agreed with, claiming that he’d thought the same thing, was that all the parents of the kids chosen for the play had to attend a meeting. We’d ask them to give their written, informed consent for their child to play an addict, a fag, or one of several irreligious, neglectful children who never returned their parents’ phone calls. It wasn’t hard to imagine the complaints, and it would be best to deal with them early.
We called the meeting for Saturday morning at ten, a time we thought we’d get the best parental participation, and I promised George I’d give him most of the day for whatever needed to be done. I got to the Little Theater at nine and spent the time arranging the chairs in informal clumps, not rows, though with all of them facing more or less toward where George and I would be sitting. No desks, no tables, nothing between us and the moms and dads who deserved to have all the information.
Once I was finished with the room layout, I retreated to the back office and started going through the parent volunteer forms that had already been returned to us. This was mainly a new group of kids, different from the one I’d worked with four years before, though one family was the same, the Robertsons. I was relieved to see it. They had a supremely talented daughter who’d played the lead in Bye Bye Birdie, and now their son Johnny was playing Mark, Maureen’s ex-boyfriend who shared a drafty loft with Roger.
Johnny’s father’s hobby was woodworking, his mother was an artist, and they were the perfect theater parents, not too pushy but involved. They were willing to spend real time and talent on the sometimes-backbreaking backstage work that was essential to every production. With some relief, I put them down on the list I was starting. It was a good thing the creative department for Rent wouldn’t be relying on the assistant director to paint backdrops, because I had no talent at all for anything except dissembling about my sexuality and stupidly warding off men I wished I’d been able to get to know a whole lot better.
Dreamspinner Press Year Three Greatest Hits Page 78
