Uncommon Type

by Tom Hanks

  “As we jaded queens say, ‘Nobody gives a shit, honey.’ ” Bob stood up and went into his bedroom. From under his bed he pulled out an old typewriter protected by a clear plastic dustcover. “This beast is so heavy. I really should keep it out. Make space on the table, would you?” Sue moved away the deli leftovers and a stack of books.

  Bob’s typewriter was nearly as big as his grandmother’s radio, a black metal antique, fitting for an apartment crammed with old, peculiar things. The typewriter was a Royal, with glass sections on the sides, like opera windows for any titmouse that might take up residence among the keys.

  “Does that still work?” Sue asked.

  “It’s a typewriter, child. Ribbon. Oil. Paper. Happy fingers. That’s all it needs. This, however…” He disdainfully picked up the record of Sue’s life’s work, holding it with two fingers like it was rancid melon rind. Then he grabbed a pencil and used it as a pointer. “You list only the roles you’ve played, not the high school you went to or the Gasbag Amateur Play School Diner. The only pro credit you have is the Arizona CLO, so you can’t lie about those credits. You put it at the top in big capital letters, then list the best plays and the best roles first, not in the order you performed them. If you were in the chorus, name your part like ‘Ellen Craymore’ or ‘Candy Beaver’ toward the bottom. If anyone questions you, then say you were in the chorus. These other roles? In high school and all that?”

  “Yes?”

  “They go under the heading ‘Regional Theater.’ Embellish. Don’t tell them the plays were one-acts. Don’t tell them you won any trophies. Don’t tell them they only ran two weekends. The play. The role. You were a working actress in the Region of Pile-of-Rocks, Arizona, and you have the credits to prove it.”

  “Isn’t that lying?”

  “They don’t care.” Bob took his pencil to the résumé again. “Oh, look! You’ve done commercials! Valley Furniture! The disease of the month! No, no, no. You put right here, ‘Commercials on Request.’ They will see that you have done commercials but will request not a single one.”

  “Really?”

  “Trust Bobby Roy, Sue. The great ones all do. Now, this last bit, this sad paragraph listing your Special Skills. This is bullshit to anyone on the other side of the casting desk. Notice I did not say ‘couch.’ ”

  “What if they’re looking for special skills?”

  “They ask you. But this list? Guitar. You know three chords, right? You can juggle. Three oranges for a few seconds, right? You roller-skate. What kid doesn’t? You can ski and ride a bike and skateboard. BFD! Did you actually put Sign Language here?”

  “I learned some for Tribal Heritage Day. This means ‘awkward.’ ”

  Bob gave the one bit of sign language he knew. “This means ‘bullshit.’ Understand that your résumé will receive all of five nanoseconds of attention. Casting people look at your picture, then at you to see if it matches. Are you actually a girl? Do you have blond hair? You sporting a rack of any significance? If you’re what they are looking for, they turn over to your résumé, scan your credits and your lies, then scribble down this magic word: callback.”

  Bob rolled paper into the old Royal, adjusted the margins and tabs, and within minutes had typed out a crisp, clear, and clean résumé that made Sue look like she was as experienced a dreamer as ever hopped a bus to the big city. She could boast of thirty roles. The one thing missing from the paper was her name at the top.

  “Let’s think about this for a moment,” Bob said. “Over more tea.” He removed the deli tray to the kitchen and lit another big match for the burner. “I’d get out more Oreos but then we’d just eat them.”

  “Think about what?” Sue studied her new professional call sheet. She liked herself more because of what Bobby had typed.

  “Have you ever thought of changing your name?”

  “My real name is Susan Noreen Gliebe. I’ve always been just Sue.”

  “Joan Crawford had always been Lucy LeSueur. Leroy Scherer was called Junior till he became Rock Hudson. You ever hear of Frannie Gumm?”

  “Who?”

  Bob sang the opening lines of “Over the Rainbow.”

  “Judy Garland?”

  “Pal of Frances lacks the panache of friend of Dorothy, doesn’t it?”

  “My parents will be disappointed if I don’t use my real name.”

  “Disappointing your parents is the first thing to do when you come to New York.” When the kettle sounded off, Bob refilled the teapot sitting beside the Royal. “And say you make it big on the Great White Way—which you will. Do you really want to see that name in lights: Sue Gliebe?”

  Sue blushed, not out of embarrassment at such praise, but because, deep inside her, she knew she had a future as an actress. She wanted to be big. Yes, as big as Frances Gumm.

  Bobby poured more tea in both cups. “And how do you pronounce that? ‘Gleeb’? ‘Glee-bee’? ‘Glibe’?” He pantomimed a big, fake yawn. You know what Tammy Grimes’s stage name was? Tammy Grimes.” He fake-yawned even wider.

  “How about…Susan Noreen?” Sue could imagine that name up in lights, no problem.

  Bob flicked the paper in the Royal typewriter, snapping the new résumé with his finger. “This is a birth certificate for the new Sue. If you could go back in time and pick a brand-new name for yourself and your ma and pa, what would that name be? Elizabeth St. John? Marilyn Conner-Bradley? Holly Woodandvine?”

  “I can call myself something like that?”

  “We’ll check with the union, but yes. Who do you want to be, titmouse?”

  Sue held her tea. There was a name she’d once dreamed of having, in junior high school, when she sang in a folk group for her chapter of Young Life. Everyone was making up groovy names like Rainbow Spiritchaser. She came up with hers, imagining the name on the cover of her first LP.

  “Joy Makepeace.” She said it out loud. Bobby’s face showed no reaction.

  “Heap big trouble with that’um smoke signal,” he said, “unless you have some Native American DNA in the Gliebe bloodline.”

  So it went as the afternoon wore on. Bobby came up with a constant stream of stage names, the best of which was Suzannah Woods, the worst being Cassandra O’Day. The Oreos had come back out and were now all eaten. Sue kept working the Joy angle. Joy Friendly. Joy Roarke. Joy Lovecraft.

  “Joy Spilledmilk,” Bobby said.

  Sue used the bathroom. Even Bob’s water closet was replete with estate-sale booty. She could not imagine why anyone would want a toy bowling set with Fred Flintstone tenpins, yet there they were.

  When she came out, Bobby was holding a stack of vintage picture postcards from Paris. They had considered French names like Joan (of Arc), Yvette, Babette, and Bernadette, but none of those sang out.

  “Hmm.” Bobby held one of the cards. He showed it to Sue. “The Rue Saint-Honoré. Pronounced ‘Honor-ray.’ That’s the masculine. The feminine has an extra e on the end and is pronounced the same. Honorée. Isn’t that lovely?”

  “I’m not French.”

  “We could try an Anglo-Saxon surname. Something simple, one syllable. Bates. Church. Smythe. Cooke.”

  “None of those are good.” Sue flipped through the stack of old postcards—the Eiffel Tower. Notre Dame. Charles de Gaulle.

  “Honorée Goode?” Bob repeated the name and liked the sound of it. “E’s on the ends of both.”

  “They’d call me Honorée Goody Two-shoes.”

  “No, they wouldn’t. Everyone pretends they speak French, mon petite teet-mouse. Honorée Goode is honestly good.” He reached over and pulled a black Princess-model phone off a bookshelf and dialed a number.

  “I have a friend at Equity. They have a computer so no names get duplicated. Jane Fonda. Faye Dunaway. Raquel Welch. Taken!”

  “Raquel Gliebe? My parents would have no problem with that.”

  Bob was connected to his friend Mark. “Mark-y Mark-a-lot, Bob Roy. I know! It has? Not since she went out of town, on that
cruise liner. It’s good money! Can you do me a little service? Check the database for a stage name. No, for one not taken. Last name Goode with an e on the end. First name Honorée.” He spelled it out. “With an accent or schwa or whatever on the first e. Sure, I’ll hold.”

  “I don’t know, Bobby.” Sue was running the new name over and over again in her head.

  “You can decide when you march into Equity with your first contract and a check for the dues. Then, you can be Sue Gliebe or Catwoman Zelkowitz. But I have to tell you…” Someone came on the phone, but it wasn’t Bob’s friend. “Yes, I am holding for Mark. Thank you.” He turned back to Sue. “I walked into that run-through of Brigadoon. Up there onstage was a girl playing Fiona who was going to have a career.”

  Sue smiled and blushed. She was that Fiona. She had crushed that role, her first out of the chorus. Her Fiona had led to all the roles the ACLO had given her, had pushed her off to NYC, and had made her clean in Bob Roy’s kitchen tub.

  “I loved that girl,” Bob said. “I loved that actress. She wasn’t some bitter leading lady pissed off that New York had had enough of her. Or a painted starlet doing Civic Light Opera because the distance and makeup hid the fact she was forty-three years old. That Fiona was no mutton. No, she was a local lamb, an Arizona gal who could hold the stage like a Barrymore, sing like Julie Andrews, with a set of boobs that set the boys a-flutter. If you had introduced yourself to me as Honorée Goode, I would have said, ‘Well, you certainly are!’ But no, you were Sue Gliebe. I thought, Sue Gliebe? That’s just not going to fly.”

  Sue Gliebe felt warm inside. Bobby Roy was her biggest fan and she loved him. If he had been fifteen years younger, forty pounds lighter, and not a homosexual she would have spent the night in his bed. Maybe she would, regardless.

  Mark came back on the phone. “Are you sure?” Bob asked. “That spelling, with the e? Okay. Thanks, Marco. I will. Thursday? Why not! Bye!” He hung up the phone, tapping it with his running fingers, and said, “Big decision time, titmouse.”

  Sue leaned back in her overstuffed chair. The rain had stopped outside. Her skin had been dried by the terry cloth of the robe and she smelled of delicate rosewater from the bath soap. The big radio was softly playing an orchestration of a nightclub standard, and, for the first time ever, New York City seemed like the place Sue Gliebe belonged…

  EXACTLY ONE YEAR LATER:

  WHO’S WHO IN THE CAST

  HONORÉE GOODE (Miss Wentworth)—Ms. Goode trained at the Arizona Civic Light Opera. She was nominated for an Obie last year for her role as Kate Brunswick in Joe Runyan’s Backwater Blues. This marks her Broadway debut. She thanks her supportive parents and Robert Roy, Jr., for making it all possible.

  A Special Weekend

  It was the early spring of 1970 and because his tenth birthday was in a week and a half, Kenny Stahl, still thought of as the baby of the family, did not have to go to school. He was going to be picked up by his mother around noon to spend a special weekend with her, so he came to the breakfast table in his ordinary, nonschool clothes. His older brother, Kirk, and older sister, Karen, both in their uniforms for St. Philip Neri School, thought the deal was unfair. They wanted their mom to come and pick them up, too—to take them away, out of the house they had been moved into, to live again in Sacramento or anyplace else as long as they were the only kids and the dark moodiness of their father and the constant, sunny practicality of his second wife would not make their lives an emotional teeter-totter.

  Kenny’s three stepsisters were seventeen, fifteen, and fourteen years old. His stepbrother had two years on him. None of them had opinions as to the fairness of the birthday plan. They had always lived together in Iron Bend, attended the unified public schools, and never had to wear uniforms. This weekend didn’t strike them as interesting, notable, or in any way special.

  The small house they all lived in was far out of town on Webster Road, closer to Molinas than to Iron Bend, which was the county seat and where Kenny’s father was head cook at the Blue Gum Restaurant. Eucalyptus trees—blue gums—lined both sides of Webster Road for most of the miles between the two towns, scattering their leaves and nuts all over the two lanes and both shoulders. Decades ago the messy imports from Australia were planted as windbreaks for the almond groves as well as in a misinformed attempt to farm the trees for railroad ties. This was back when big money could be made in railroad ties, as long as they were not made of eucalyptus. Fortunes were lost on the twisting, peeling, gnarly-growing trees, three of which were spaced across the front yard of Kenny’s house; the constant rain of debris laid waste to every attempt to plant decent grass there. The backyard had sort of a lawn, a patch of weed-studded green, which the kids took turns mowing on occasion. Across the road were almond orchards. Almonds were a big industry then and still are now.

  Kenny’s father had found a new job in Iron Bend, a new home, a new school, and, it turned out, a new family. He’d moved his three kids into the small house the very same night they had left Sacramento. All the boys slept in what had been a screened-in porch. All the girls were in one bedroom with twin bunk beds.

  After two school buses had come and gone, Kenny spent the morning shuffling around the house as his father slept and his stepmother quietly cleaned up the breakfast dishes. He had never been at home without the other kids and was thrilled to have the run of the place. His only instruction was that he was to keep quiet. For a while, he watched TV with the volume nearly mute, but there was just one channel, Channel 12 from Chico, and during school hours there was nothing on that interested him. He played with the model ships and planes he had made from kits, using the top of the living room coffee table as the vast sea. He went through the dresser drawers of his brother and stepbrother looking for secrets, but their treasures were hidden elsewhere. In the backyard, he punted a football, trying to clear the nearest almond trees, gambling that in failure the ball wouldn’t get stuck in their branches. He tied a cut of an old bedsheet to a discarded beanpole, making a flag that he ran around with like he was leading a charge in the Civil War. He was trying to plant the flag into a hole when his stepmom called to him from the kitchen window she had cranked open.

  “Kenny! Your mother is here!”

  He hadn’t heard the car.

  In the kitchen, he was caught short by a sight he had never seen in the near decade of his life; his dad was awake and sitting at the table with his morning coffee. His mother, his real mom, was sitting at the table as well, a cup of coffee of her own. His stepmother was on her feet, leaning against the counter, sipping coffee, too. The three caretakers of his world had never been in the same room at the same time.

  “There’s the Kenny Bear!” Kenny’s mom was beaming. She looked like a secretary in a TV show—professionally dressed, wearing heels, her trim black hair neat, her makeup showing red lips that left marks on her coffee cup. She stood and hugged him with perfumed arms, kissing the top of his head. “Go get your bag and we’ll hit the road.”

  Kenny had no idea about any bag, but his stepmother had put some clothes into one of her daughter’s small pink suitcases. He was packed. His father stood up and frazzled Kenny’s hair. “I gotta shower,” he said. “Go check out your mother’s hot wheels.”

  “You got me Hot Wheels?” Kenny asked, thinking that his birthday present was going to be some miniature cars made of die-cast metal.

  But no. In the driveway was an actual sports car, red, a two-seater, with wire wheels. The top was up and already littered with eucalyptus fallings. The only sports cars he’d ever seen were on television, driven by detectives and young doctors.

  “Is this yours, Mom?”

  “A friend let me borrow it.”

  Kenny was looking through the driver’s side window. “Can I sit in it?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Kenny figured out how to open the door and sat behind the wheel. The dials and switches of the car looked like they came from a jet plane. The wood paneling was like furniture. The
seats smelled like leather baseball mitts. The red circle in the middle of the steering wheel said FIAT. After his mother put the pink suitcase in the car’s trunk, she asked for Kenny’s help putting the top down.

  “We’ll let the wind blow through our hair until we get to the highway, okay?” She undid the latches of the top and Kenny helped fold it back, bending the clear plastic window in on itself. His mother fired up the engine, which sounded like a dragon clearing its throat, then she backed out of the driveway—she had taken off her heels to work the pedals and put on a pair of sunglasses, the kind worn by snow skiers. Mother, son, and Fiat roared away from the house, down Webster Road, the gum tree shadows making the sunlight strobe in Kenny’s eyes, the wind sounding in his ears and whipping his hair from back to front. The car was the coolest, most boss ride Kenny had ever seen. He was the happiest he had been since he was a little kid.

  —

  The attendant at the Shell station in Iron Bend was all over the car, giving it and the woman driving it his keen attention. He filled the tank, wiped the windshield, checked the oil, and marveled at the “dago motor.” Kenny was offered a free soda pop from the vending machine. While he was pulling a bottle of root beer (always his choice) from the cold box, the man was helping his mother put the top back up and close the latches. The man was smiling and chatting, asking questions about if his mother was headed north or south and if she planned on coming back to Iron Bend soon. When they were back in the car and on the highway (heading south), she told her son the Shell man had “cow-eyes” and she laughed.