Attack of the Theater People

by Marc Acito

“How’d you explain that?”

  “I didn’t. My personal life is my business.”

  Let’s pause for a moment to consider this last statement. Buying me a suit was a business decision. A Business Decision. To help him gain information. But that’s not what Chad said. He said, “My personal life is my business.” Buying me a suit was part of his personal life. I am a part of his personal life. What’s more, straight people don’t say things like, “My personal life is my business.” That is, unless they have something to hide. Which he does. Me.

  In the tent outside, Robert Palmer sings “Addicted to Love.”

  Of course, while I’m thinking all this, I’m still talking as fast as I can. Because he asks me, “And who was this girl you brought with you?” and I hear myself saying, “My friend Ziba. You know, the one I told you about, the one who went to the shah of Iran’s wedding. She goes to the Fashion Institute.”

  I don’t know why I do this. My brain is like a gumball machine. You put in your nickel and, whoosh, out comes the thought. Too bad if it’s a color you don’t like. But saying Ziba was with me somehow sounds better than, “I’m being stalked by the Bad Seed.”

  Chad reminds me to be discreet, and I say, “Of course, of course, of course,” and then hope to redeem myself by telling him what Sandra told me—that Will Owens’s ex-wife said that Owens is about to be indicted for tax evasion and illegally trading with Iran during the hostage crisis. “If he doesn’t flee the country, he’ll probably go to jail,” I say. “Either way, that’d affect the price of the stock, wouldn’t it?”

  “Sure,” he says, “if his company was publicly traded.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Petrolux is privately held.”

  What? Can he do that? Corporate espionage is so frigging complicated.

  “But I like how you’re thinking,” he says. “I’ll mail your hundred bucks tomorrow.”

  I’m glad to get the money, but I really wanted him to say, Oh, Edward, you’re a mastermind. Come right over and we’ll celebrate by wrestling naked.

  “Don’t be such a baby,” Natie says the next night. “Dagmar’s not gonna do anything.”

  “But what if she told Chad we stole ten grand from her?”

  “She won’t.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “’Cuz she stole that ten grand from your da—”

  He’s cut off as a Persian on roller skates crashes into him.

  It was Ziba’s idea to throw a skating party to celebrate Kelly being cast as a swing in Starlight Express, which is not, as the name suggests, another anthropomorphized inanimate object but an understudy who covers multiple roles, and a job Kelly didn’t even know existed until she was hired.

  “What better way to celebrate?” Ziba asked, a question I hadn’t thought to answer at the time. While I’m not bad on skates, I’d prefer an activity that doesn’t require strapping wheels on Nathan Nudelman. I offer him my hand, but that only lands me on my ass, an apt metaphor for our friendship.

  “What if Dagmar contacts Sandra?” I ask as we struggle to our feet. “I could lose my job.”

  “Jeez, such a worrier,” Natie says. “We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.”

  We trundle out of the rink, the other skaters swirling around us as Madonna tells her papa not to preach. Ziba circles languorously with her Persian girlfriends, their arms and hands coiling to the music like serpents, as if they were harem girls dancing for the Persian guys, who huddle on the sidelines, smoking and looking hip with their artfully wrinkled linen jackets and carefully cultivated two-day razor stubble. Meanwhile, Kelly and the musical theater people zip around with exuberant abandon, attempting stunts, throwing their heads back with laughter when they fall, and singing along to all the songs. I fall somewhere between the two, while Natie just falls, period. Both groups intimidate me—the former with their effortless cool, the latter with their uninhibited enthusiasm. I tell myself I’m being stupid; when I’m at a bash mitzvah or a corporate party I’m the hippest, happiest guy in the room. I regularly mingle with the city’s elite, for Chrissake, the Life of the Party at parties that make Page Six. (Once again, without mention of me. The Owens sweet sixteen got a lot of ink, right next to a photograph of the ubiquitous Andy Warhol at a fund-raiser for Save the Squirrels. I swear, that man would go to the opening of a tuna can.) But at those parties I’m Eddie Sanders or Eddie Zander. When I have to be Edward Zanni, I feel like a total cheesehead.

  I feel even worse when Kelly zips up in front of us and says, “Isn’t it great about Doug?”

  “What about Doug?” I haven’t talked to him since the no-pants/fish-killing incident.

  “Didn’t he tell you? Almost Bruce got a cruise ship job. They’re going to be in the Bahamas from Thanksgiving until spring break.”

  I can’t believe he didn’t call to tell me. I’ve ruined our friendship with my unwanted sexual advances. I repulse him. My only hope is that he can’t face me because he’s tortured and confused by his own repressed homosexual desires. Oh, dear God, please make him tortured and confused by his own repressed homosexual desires, though not so much that he throws himself overboard in a fit of self-loathing.

  She dashes off just as Paula arrives, marching in like she’s Mama Rose in Gypsy, wagging a pinkie-sized pointer finger in my face. “Where were you?” she cries. “You didn’t come see Earnest.”

  How do I explain? I wanted to go but just the thought of stepping through Juilliard’s glass doors gave me an asthma attack. And I don’t have asthma. Everyone would ask me what I’m doing, and I’d have to explain that I go to work in a shiny shirt and tight pants, a job only slightly more dignified than playing Chuckles the Woodchuck. And then I’d have to watch them onstage, doing what I should be doing myself.

  “I had gigs,” I say.

  “During every performance? I thought bar mitzvahs were only on Saturdays.”

  “Yeah, but there’s a lot of…” I make vague motions in the air, as if that explained it.

  Paula takes off her coat and thrusts it in my hands. “I thought so.”

  She wears her usual outfit for physical activities—an oversize black cotton T-shirt (with shoulder pads, of course) and a pair of black stirrup pants. She’s dressed up the ensemble with a metal Slinky around her waist and a pair of bent forks around her wrists.

  She eyes Natie. “What’s your excuse?”

  “I had my wisdom teeth out.”

  “That was last year.”

  “Yeah, but it haunts me still.”

  Now, I may have been kicked out of Juilliard, but one thing I learned is that the best way to distract actors is to get them talking about themselves. “So how’d it go?”

  “I made a real breakthrough,” Paula says. “You know, Marian thought I was insane for speaking like Lady Bracknell offstage, but it really worked, it really, really did. It’s so difficult to make Wilde organic. He’s like Restoration comedy—you can easily end up playing the style, not the substance. All frosting and no cake. But being epigrammatic is positively exhausting. No wonder Wilde died so young.”

  She glances down at my skates. “Oh, dear, is brown the only color those come in?”

  As we move to the counter, I see Hung round the rink dressed in full 1970s roller-disco duds: tube socks, tight satin shorts, and terry-cloth shirt, with a long silk scarf around his neck. He blows a whistle and shakes his groove thing.

  Mama said there’d be gays like this.

  Paula gets her skates and plops down on a bench. “I still haven’t forgiven you two,” she says, “but I have a way you can redeem yourselves.”

  Eighteen

  Paula slips off her shiny silver flats. “It all started that night we went bowling.”

  This is how Paula tells a story. Ask her what she did last weekend and she’ll say, “Well, first dinosaurs ruled the earth….”

  She pulls a pair of socks out of the Prada knockoff she bought on the street. “You remember how upset
Marcus got when Kelly insisted The Music Man was a play? Well, he positively fulminated on it for days; he truly can be impossible. As it was, we’d been fighting over what to call his company. He wanted to name it the Death to the Patriarchy Players, then got absolutely incensed when I said that might make it hard to get funding. Then we came up with the Public Play Project. But if you say that too fast it sounds like Probably Profit, which sort of defeats the purpose. We finally settled on the Coup d’État Group, which at least has a Continental flair, and started planning to perform Waiting for Godot in an elevator in Penn Station. But then we went bowling and Marcus decided he had to do The Music Man?”

  “The Music Man?” I say.

  “That’s right,” Paula says, “with the question mark. He’s deconstructing the text based on the principles of Brecht’s alienation effect and Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty.”

  “With The Music Man,” I say.

  “No, The Music Man? It’s ironic.” She throws her feet onto Natie’s lap, wiggling her fingers to indicate he should lace her up. “Natie, I need you to talk some financial sense to him. Marcus refuses—simply refuses—to accept any money from his mother, because she’s an opera singer, and opera is part of the elitist power structure.”

  “Then how’s he gonna pay for the rights?” Natie asks.

  “He’s not. He says that’s contributing to the commodification of the arts.”

  Natie whistles through his teeth. “The publisher ain’t gonna like that.”

  “I know,” Paula says. “I’m positively bereft.”

  “What about me?” I ask.

  “Well…” (“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth…”) “…Marcus has cast a blind woman as Marian the Librarian and a deaf man as Harold Hill. Don’t roll your eyes; it’s a brilliant concept, underscoring the way we’re blind and deaf to the corruption of the Reagan administration.” She glances at the Persians huddling nearby, then whispers, “You know he sold weapons to Iran?”

  “It’s okay,” Natie says. “These are the people who escaped.”

  “Oh, it’s so confusing. As far as I can make out, our government sold weapons to Iran, our enemy, to make money for the Nicaraguan contras so they could fight the Sandinistas because the Sandinistas are sympathetic to the Soviet Union, which is also our enemy. Honestly, what’s the point?”

  I could ask the same thing about Marcus’s concept.

  “Anyway,” Paula continues, “we need you to coach the Harold Hill.”

  I see the glitter of crashing cymbals. And hear the thunder of rolling drums. The summer I was fourteen I played Harold in the Wallingford Summer Workshop production of The Music Man and my performance was compared to Kevin Kline. Granted, it was by Paula’s Aunt Glo, but I’ve seen the video, and I must say I was damn good. After all, I was the youngest one in a cast that included graduating seniors. Still, coach a deaf actor?

  “I don’t speak sign language,” I say.

  “Gavin reads lips,” Paula says. “And speaks perfectly. He just needs to learn how to sing.”

  “Sure,” I say. “And when I’m done, I’ll teach the blind how to paint. Then heal the sick and raise the dead.”

  “Don’t be negative,” she sniffs. “It doesn’t suit you.”

  As always, she’s right. And, in the following weeks, I try to keep a positive attitude, even though I continually come up with nothing that fulfills Chad’s vision of us getting filthy fucking rich. The fact is, after two months, I’ve already had it up to my kishkes with bash mitzvahs. There’s something inherently creepy about flirting with prepubescent girls, not to mention middle-aged women starving themselves to look prepubescent. Likewise, I’m growing tired of watching thirteen-year-old boys take off their ties and wrap them around their heads.

  I’m no longer impressed with the sumptuous surroundings, either. I’ve come to expect round banquet tables with gold bamboo chairs, gold charger plates, and centerpieces that look like the female guests, with enormous heads propped precariously on stalky bodies.

  Natie and I hold out hopes for my gig with Pharmicare, the Jersey-based pharmaceuticals giant, which is holding its corporate retreat the weekend before Thanksgiving in Atlantic City. Natie drills me like he’s Henry Higgins readying Eliza Doolittle for the embassy ball. Except we don’t have a chorus of servants in their bathrobes coming in to tell us to quit. He quizzes me on the names of the people in R & D (which, I learn, stands for research and development, not rhythm and dance); he reads me passages from The Art of War (“All warfare is based on deception”); and teaches me trivia about Eddie Zander’s native Oklahoma (soon to be celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the shopping cart, invented in an Oklahoma City Piggly Wiggly in 1937).

  Even though I’m Eddie Zander for this party, my tasks are closer to those of Eddie Sanders, requiring that I flirt and dance with neglected wives, which kind of bums me out. There’s already something inherently depressing about Atlantic City, with its tattered remains of broken dreams being bulldozed over for the glitzy promise of quick cash. And I can’t help feel for these women whose husbands won’t dance with them. I don’t get it. The middle-aged women I meet at these parties are almost uniformly vivacious and attractive, yet most of them are married to paunchy, dull men. What is it about being heterosexual that makes so many men boring? Monotony is so prevalent among straight men it’s practically an epidemic.

  They remind me of my mother, these women, and, as I hold a particularly lonely wife of an R & D executive in my arms, I feel the weight of her life against me. She tells me that her husband is a stranger, that he’s been working eighty hours a week for months, and I wonder if that’s why there are so many boring straight men—they’ve had all the magic whacked out of them. I lean in, holding her closer, vowing never to become that man.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “What could he possibly be working on that’s so important?”

  She glances around us then says, “I really shouldn’t tell you this….”

  Thanksgiving morning Natie and I take the train out to Wallingford, still giddy from my Pharmicare coup.

  Natie pulls out a spreadsheet he’s written on graph paper—such a Nudelman thing to have. “Okay,” he says, clicking a ballpoint, “how much have you managed to save these past two months?”

  “Four hundred bucks.”

  “Not bad. Plus the hundred we just got from Chad. So that’s five hundred.”

  “Yeah,” I mumble.

  I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but I’m bummed that Chad didn’t make a bigger deal about my news. I mean, Pharmicare is developing a new diet pill that allows you to eat what you want without absorbing the fat. That’s huge, pardon the pun. Who wouldn’t want to take that pill? The woman in Atlantic City told me that it’s scheduled to be approved by the FDA in just a few months. You’d think information like that would warrant a celebratory dinner. Or some mutual masturbation. Instead Chad sends cash without even including a note. It makes me feel like a hooker. Without the benefit of getting laid.

  Natie hands me an open envelope. “Plus you got this credit card application.”

  “You opened my mail?”

  “How else was I gonna read it?”

  “That’s a federal offense.”

  “Blah, blah, blah.” He pulls the application out of the envelope. “Look, you qualify for $1,000 worth of credit. Once you receive your card, you can take out a cash advance and invest $1,500.”

  “But won’t I owe the credit card company the money?”

  “At a minimum monthly payment of twenty bucks.”

  “But that’ll take me…let me see…twenty bucks a month is $240 a year…four years to pay back a thousand bucks.”

  “Actually, it’s longer, because you’re charged interest.”

  “And this is a good idea because…?”

  “Because you’re borrowing the money at sixteen percent interest, but you’re investing it for much more.”

  “How much more?”
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br />   He hands me his spreadsheet and pulls out the New York Times. “Let’s see. Pharmicare stock is currently selling at $30 a share. So, with $1,500 you can buy fifty shares. If the stock goes up to $60 a share—”

  “Can that happen?”

  He looks at me over his glasses. “Eddie, they’ve got a pill that prevents your body from absorbing fat. Sixty bucks a share is conservative.”

  “So, if the stock doubles, does that mean we double our money?”

  He takes back the spreadsheet.

  “Sure, but you can do way better if you buy options. With options, you don’t buy the stock at $30; you buy the right to buy it at some later date, in this case at $35.”

  “Why would I want to pay more?”

  “You don’t. Because the option only costs $2 per share. So you take your $1,500 and buy seven hundred and fifty shares instead of fifty. Then, when the stock doubles to $60, you’ve contracted to buy it at $35, so you immediately sell it for $60 and pocket the difference.”

  “How much is that?”

  He scrawls in the margin. “Well, $25 profit per share times seven hundred and fifty shares equals $18,750.”

  I stare at him, stunned.

  “Profit,” he says. “Plus, you get back your initial $1,500.”

  My heart flaps its wings.

  “That’s…$20,250. That’ll pay for two years of college.”

  Natie’s glasses fog. “I think I’m gonna cry,” he says.

  Al pulls up to the station in a boxy burgundy Volvo the size of a Brinks truck. Citing carsickness, Natie claims shotgun, an irrelevant argument when you consider we live two miles from the station. The ensuing conversation is like a Pinter play—minimal dialogue with lots of silence filled with incomprehensible subtext.

  ME: What happened to the Corvette?

  AL: I traded it in.

  ME: How come?

  AL: Ah, y’know.

  (Incomprehensible subtext-filled silence.)

  AL: So, Nathan, your mom says you switched majors to business.

  NATIE: Econ.

  (More incomprehensible subtext-filled silence.)