Attack of the Theater People

by Marc Acito

  “Yeah, he says it’s the only place he can relax.”

  “Sure, ’cuz he can visit his money.”

  It’s then that I learn about offshore accounts.

  “Obviously we’re up against a pro,” Natie says, rising. “We’re gonna need some hard evidence to prove he made that trade.”

  “Oh, God…”

  “Stop scratching your face. You’ll leave marks.” He takes me by the hands and pulls me off the bench. “All you have to do is tape-record a conversation with him. We’ve got until, what?” He consults the letter. “Friday, February thirteenth. Ooh, that can’t be good.”

  I lean against him while we walk, as limp and wilted as if it were a hundred degrees. “How am I supposed to tape him if he won’t even answer my calls?”

  “Tell him you’ve got a new piece of information.”

  “From where? Everyone in the tri-state area knows I lost my job.”

  “Y’know, you really are a naysayer.”

  I grab him by the collar. “Well, it’s hard to be optimistic when you’re GOING TO JAIL.”

  “Calm down, calm down. Rome wasn’t burned in a day.”

  “How can you stay calm? You traded on that information, too.”

  “Sure, but I did it all under your name.”

  “WHAT?”

  “I didn’t think there was any point in both of us—”

  I can’t make out the rest of what he’s saying with my hands around his neck.

  “Uhddi, yr chkng muh.”

  I let go.

  “Y’know, you’re stronger than you look,” he says, rubbing his neck.

  “I’m going to have to be, to fend off attacks in the prison yard.” I pace. “Okay, you’re saying all the trading was done under my name. So at least Paula’s safe, right?”

  Natie fiddles with the ski pass hanging from his jacket zipper.

  “Natie…”

  “Her trade came after ours. So, naturally, it’s under her name.”

  “Great!” I shout. “It’s not enough I’m going to jail; I’m taking down innocent people.”

  “Stop being so dramatic. I told you, all we need is some evidence proving you worked for Chad. Didn’t he say he would be at his firm’s Super Bowl party?”

  “I can’t go there,” I moan. “It’s a private party for their top clients.”

  Natie scrunches up his face, which is pink and mottled from the cold, like a carnation. “Details.”

  Rather than go home, I suggest we stop by Ziba’s because a) she has a supple, if slightly criminal mind; and b) it’s dinnertime and she always pays.

  Natie’s a little reluctant. Things have been tense between them since they got back from their trip to Telluride.

  “I don’t get it,” I say as we walk up the front steps of her town house—with the columns. “What happened?”

  “You know how every clique has the tagalong friend, the one who doesn’t fit?” he says. “Y’know, kind of like you are for us?”

  “I’m not the tagalong friend. You are.”

  “What are you talking about? I’m the nexus of our group. Without me, nothing would get done.”

  If I suffer from a lack of confidence, Natie suffers from an overabundance.

  “I don’t wanna fight about it,” Natie says, ringing the bell. “My point is: Ziba is the tagalong of the Persians. I’m tellin’ ya, she gets so worked up around them. It made her very snippy.”

  “Ziba? Snippy?” I can’t imagine. It takes energy to be snippy.

  “Sure,” Natie says. “Why else would she seem so embarrassed to be around me?”

  The door opens.

  “Boyzzz,” Ziba says, tickling under our chins with her fingernails. She wears her hair slicked back, bringing her back down to her five-foot-twelve height. With her bolero jacket over a velvet unitard, she looks like a matador. “Your timing is purrfect. Hung’s teaching me how to cook Vietnamese.”

  She does a runway pivot and leads the way into the kitchen. I gesture to Natie by putting a finger to my lips, the Internationally Recognized Signal for “Don’t say anything about the Feds.” Hung’s got a mouth bigger than the Lincoln Tunnel.

  We go into the apartment-sized kitchen, which is large enough to have one of those hanging pot racks with shiny copper cookware. The Blabbermouth of Broadway stands at the island, chopping herbs, a bib apron clinging to his compact frame. I take off my sunglasses and he nearly slices off his thumb. “Good God, what happened to your eye?”

  “I got in a fight with a clutch purse,” I say as I head to the fridge.

  Ziba blows a smoke ring, as calm as the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland. “Accessories are so difficult.”

  My soul smiles. Count on Ziba not to make a big deal.

  Natie peers into a kettle. “Does this have MSG? ’Cuz MSG makes my ears itch.”

  “It’s homemade,” Hung says. “Or perhaps I should say homo-made.”

  “What is it?” Natie lifts a spoonful to his mouth.

  “Dog-meat stew.”

  Natie does a burlesque spit take.

  “I’m kidding,” Hung says. “It’s beef noodle soup.”

  Natie grabs my Saigon Beer and takes a swig. “No wonder we lost the war,” he grumbles.

  “Hung is a great talent,” Ziba says, eyeing me as she leans decoratively against the counter. “He can cook, sew, cut hair, arrange flowers. You should see his costume designs.”

  I wish Ziba and Kelly would stop trying to foist him on me.

  Hung gives a little curtsy like he’s auditioning for The Mikado. “When you’re Asian and gay there’s twice as much pressure to overachieve.”

  “What’s all this?” I say, referring to a pile of brochures on the counter.

  “My rent,” Ziba says. “In lieu of it, I’m in charge of my cousin’s twenty-first birthday party. It’s a bore, but at least it’s something to do.”

  “When is it?”

  “April eleventh. Everyone wanted Au Bar or Xenon or the Palladium, but those places are so done.”

  I nod, even though I’ve never been.

  “I chose the Starlight Roof at the Waldorf.” Ziba picks up a sprig of mint and smells it. “It’s very 1930s Café Society. Marlene Dietrich and Mae West ate dinner there every night.”

  “And each other,” says Hung, turning up the heat. “Of course, we’ll have to get rid of those murky drapes and lay a black-and-white tile floor over that truly unfortunate carpeting. But if we light it right, it’ll look like the big white set of an Astaire and Rogers movie. Oh, and palms, lots of palms.”

  Natie frowns, like he’s not happy Ziba may have found another five-foot-four sidekick. “Are you sure that’s what your cousin wants?”

  “All that matters to her is the music,” Ziba says. “She wants my uncle to pay for someone like Bon Jovi or Bruce Springsteen.”

  “Oh, is that all?”

  She exhales a serpent of smoke. “I suggested he hire Almost Bruce and hope no one notices the difference.”

  “You couldn’t get away with that,” Natie says.

  “Why not? Douglas is very convincing. And half the guests are from Europe. I thought we’d bring him on late when everyone’s drunk, have him do a couple of songs, then whisk him out.”

  “It’s too risky,” I say.

  “Is that your opinion, or British MTV’s hottest veejay’s?”

  “My point exactly. Look what happened to me.”

  “That’s because you were working alone,” Hung says, untangling a pile of noodles. “Deception requires a team effort.”

  “You two seem to have it all worked out,” Natie says.

  Ziba gives her enigmatic Mona Lisa smile. “Hung’s been a great help.”

  Natie looks back and forth between the two of them, a leprechaun who just lost his pot of gold, then says the only thing he can that will top his rival:

  “Edward’s wanted by the feds.”

  Wildfire burns across my cheeks. “Natie!”


  “It’s serious,” he says. “He could go to jail.”

  My head ping-pongs between Ziba and Hung. “It’s probably nothing. Really.”

  Of course, they want to know every sordid detail, starting with the Schlonsky BM and ending with the Saudi Electric Company. Telling them actually helps alleviate my sense of gloom. In their eyes I am both a lovable rogue on a quest for adventure, as well as an unfortunate naïf, trapped in hell by the three-headed Cerberus of Chad, Dagmar, and Lizzie.

  When I finish my tawdry tale (and a couple of Saigon Beers), Ziba says, “What are you so worried about? You’ll just go to Chad’s party in disguise.”

  Having impersonated a priest in order to launder money, I am not unfamiliar with this approach. “But I’d have to be totally unrecognizable.”

  “Hung can do it,” she says. “He works at the most prestigious costume shop in the city.” She turns to him. “You don’t mind, do you, darling?”

  Hung looks at me like he’s a hound dog and I’m a veal chop. “I’d love to dress Edward.”

  Twenty-five

  Over the course of dinner (delicious, although I learn the hard way not to bite into a hot chili), we bat around various ideas, with an emphasis on the heavily bearded. But neither Santa Claus nor a lumberjack seems a likely guest at a financial services party, and a Saudi prince feels beyond my capacities as an actor. We eventually decide to follow the Andy Warhol–will-go-to-an-opening-of-an-envelope model and have me crash the party as the famous French mixed-media artist you’ve never heard of, Etienne Zazou. We choose to make him French so I’ll have an accent to hide behind, as well as a cultural identity known for rudeness.

  Meanwhile, Paula gets me a job. “Ah am still not on speaking terms with yew after the disgraceful way you treated us on the occasion of your birthday,” she says. “But ah feel it is my duty as a Christian woman to make you aware of a substantial moneymaking opportunity. All it requires is a willingness to use Mistuh Alexander Graham Bell’s fine invention, with which I trust you are familiar, despite the fact that you seldom use it to contact those who love yew best.”

  I apologize again, thank her for the lead, and promise, promise, promise I won’t miss Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. And a promise is a wingback chair.

  The following night I show up at a dubiously downscale building in the mid-Thirties and report to a dingy room furnished only with banks of phones on tables. It’s the kind of operation you could easily envision disappearing in the night, like in a psychological thriller where everyone thinks the heroine is insane: But I swear there was a whole roomful of phones here last night.

  My task is to sell diet supplements.

  “It’s so easy!” gushes the supervisor. Everyone gushes here. The room is full of would-be and wannabe actors whose enthusiasm derives not from a belief in the efficacy of the herbal product we are hawking, but from the gullibility of the stooges who’ve already bought it from an infomercial and to whom we’re trying to sell more. Starving artists preying on the overfed masses.

  I’m led to a folding chair at a table, where I review my script, which has a flowchart of answers to “overcome objections.” Apparently, the key to sales is overcoming objections, although these objections seem entirely reasonable to me—specifically, why would someone buy additional quantities of a product that hasn’t even arrived yet? I’m told that we put the customer in a “yes” frame of mind by asking lots of questions to which the answer is yes:

  “Aren’t you tired of carrying around that extra fat?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you want to look good for bathing suit season?”

  “Yes.”

  “Aren’t you worth at least a dollar a day?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you go to the bank, withdraw all your money, and send a cashier’s check payable to Edward Zanni?”

  “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

  It’s so easy!

  While we telemarketers go with the flowcharts, our supervisors hover behind us, crouching and pumping their fists, saying, “Go! Go! Go! Go!” which is supposed to motivate us, but just makes me nervous. Every time one of us makes a sale (and by us I mean them), a supervisor dashes to the front of the room, rings a bell, and makes a check mark on a blackboard next to the salesperson’s name.

  For three nights bells ring, fists pump, and fortunes are made, while I come up zero. I am the worst telemarketer in the room. People who’ve just started that night are already ahead of me.

  You’d think that someone who could convince hundreds of truculent thirteen-year-olds to dance could convince a handful of gullible consumers to part with their money, but I can’t motivate that party motivator energy. It all feels so hollow and fake, so game-show-hosty. So jazz hands.

  And I desperately need the money. Not only am I broke once I pay February’s rent, but I got a letter from the landlord saying that New York City rent-control laws clearly state that the only person authorized to write rent checks is the one whose name is on the lease. Namely, Eddie Sanders.

  “C’mon,” Natie says. “This is New York. There’s gotta be squatters’ rights.” He says he’ll look into it.

  It takes me three nights to finally make a sale. “Way to go, Edward!” my supervisor says, giving me an “attaboy” shoulder rub and holding up my arm in a victory gesture. The other telemarketers cheer supportively, as if I were the short bus kid who finally hit the ball in gym.

  Thus encouraged, I return to my task with renewed vigor, picking up the phone and calling a buyer in Arkansas.

  “Hulloh-oh?” a woman’s voice drawls. She sounds like the offspring of first cousins.

  “Hi!” I say. “Is this (insert name here)?”

  I introduce myself, ascertain that her shipment hasn’t arrived yet, and ask if she’d be interested in taking advantage of our special supplemental seven-week package for just $49.95.

  “Ah don’t know,” she says.

  “Aren’t you tired of carrying around that extra fat?”

  “Well…yeah. I still ain’t lost the weight from mah baby.”

  I instantly picture her at the stove in her double-wide, stirring a pot of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese while an infant mewls in her arms.

  “Don’t you want to look good for bathing suit season?”

  “Ah don’t know. Mah huhzband? He don’t laahk it when I get skinny. He gets jealous.”

  I imagine her husband—an unshaven do-nothing in a KEEP ON TRUCKIN’ tank top tossing empty Coors cans at the TV, which he pronounces by putting the emphasis on the first syllable. The fact that he gets jealous of his wife whenever she loses weight leads me to conclude that he has control and possible anger-management issues, the kind of guy who doesn’t let her have friends and has alienated her from her family. Probably a wife beater. I know about these things. I saw Farrah Fawcett in The Burning Bed.

  “Aren’t you worth at least a dollar a day?” I say.

  “Ah guess so. But I don’t got a job, see, on account of the baby. And, well, I’m still in high school.”

  “Wait. You’re still in high school?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And you ordered fifty bucks’ worth of diet products?”

  “Well, it said on the TV it works real good.” She pronounces TV with the emphasis on the first syllable. Behind me, the supervisor chants, “Go, go, go!”

  No, no, no.

  This is not who I want to be. Sure, when I was in high school I engaged in embezzlement, blackmail, money laundering, identity theft, fraud, forgery, and (just a little) prostitution. And, okay, since then I’ve taken part in corporate espionage, insider trading, more identity theft, and rent-control fraud. But that doesn’t mean I have no morals.

  “Listen to me,” I say into the phone. “When that package arrives, you send it right back, you understand?”

  In each ear I hear my customer and supervisor say, “What?”

  “Save your money,” I say, my voice rising. “You need to finish school. And take care o
f your baby. And—”

  I’m about to tell a stranger she needs to get out of her abusive marriage when my supervisor reaches down and hangs up the phone. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  I stand up. “I’m quitting.”

  There are some things even I’m not willing to do.

  Plus, I would’ve gotten fired anyway.

  That said, I have no ethical dilemmas regarding entrapment. Come Super Bowl Sunday, my only concern is the feasibility of a scheme devised over too many Saigon Beers. I mean, Eddie Sanders and Zander are one thing, but Etienne Zazou, the famous French mixed-media artist?

  “What are you so worried about?” Natie says while I shave. “You’re an actor.”

  “Not according to Juilliard.”

  “What do they know? Did De Niro go to Juilliard? Did Nicholson?” He leans on the door frame like a koala clinging to a tree. “It couldn’t be simpler: You crash the party…”

  “That’s the first thing I’m worried about.”

  “…then find Chad and start talking about stocks, casually mentioning you heard that Fuji is taking over Eastman Kodak.”

  “How did I hear that?” I’ll never remember any of this.

  “I dunno. Your Japanese dealer told you.”

  “Got it.” This is a terrible idea.

  “Now, listen closely; this is the important part: The only way to nail Chad is if he actually trades on that information, which he won’t, because the tip’s no good. So you have to lead the conversation around to how mad you are at your broker for missing out on the I. J. Sloan takeover of Hibbert and Howard and see if you can get him to brag about it.”

  “Who’s—ow—my current broker?” I nick my Adam’s apple, which is why you should never shave and plan espionage at the same time.

  “It doesn’t matter. Be evasive. You’re a famous artist. Act temperamental.”

  “Shit, I’m bleeding.”

  Natie hands me a piece of toilet paper. “Then, while he’s talking, you reach into your jacket pocket to pull out a cigarette, and simply press down on the tape recorder. Got it?”

  “Yes, yes, yes.” I dab the toilet paper to my throat.

  “Okay,” Natie says, “you bought a new tape?”