American Estrangement Read online

  My carton of cigarettes was in my lap, cradled lovingly, half price, as promised, already torn open by me, cigarette smoke going straight up into my face, and in Duncan’s palm was the adventure I had come here for, two small white cubes—yellowish, really, crumbs, really—bought at full price. “This is what you get for twenty dollars apiece,” he said. “You do the math.” Had I been the latecomer to this play, I would have thought that these two small cubes had been chipped off the edge of some drywall, so insignificant did they look. If Duncan had accidentally dropped them on the floor, they would have been lost forever in the grain of the hardwood. But Duncan, handling them with such care and attention, as if he were a doctor operating over a nightstand, demonstrating speed and precision, using one of Mom’s table knives to gently break the two white chips into even smaller white chips, would never let them drop on the floor. This was the stuff of theater, basement theater, the six o’clock show, and I had a front-row seat to the action, from which I was able to watch what happens when the actor does not have the right props with him, because this actor is “not a pro, and not intending on becoming a pro.” What Duncan was, though, was ingenious, withdrawing a roll of aluminum foil from beneath his bed, no doubt procured from Mom’s cupboard, and a box of Chore Boy, also from beneath his bed, with little Chore Boy wearing a backward baseball cap, a big grin on his face, because life is nothing if not delightful, especially when one is cleaning. He could have been a character from a fairy tale, Chore Boy, innocent and archetypal, his stumpy arm beckoning the consumer toward some enchanted land. Soon a perfect aluminum-foil pipe emerged from Duncan Dioguardi, glinting silver in the Magnavox light, reminding me of the way some family restaurants will wrap your leftovers in aluminum foil in the shape of a swan. But into this particular swan’s mouth disappeared a piece of the Chore Boy, followed by one small chip off the drywall, and then Duncan Dioguardi ran his lighter back and forth, orange flame on silver neck, and from the swan’s tail he sucked ever so gently, cheeks pulling, pulling, until, like magic, he tilted his head back and out of his mouth emerged a perfect puff of white smoke.

  He considered for a moment, eyes closed, then eyes opened, gauging, I suppose, the ratio of crack cocaine to baking powder, and then he offered an appraisal. “Not bad,” he said. He looked at me. Was it my turn now?

  No, not yet my turn. First we must watch Michael Jordan, because the aluminum-foil pipe needed time to cool down, a necessary and dramatic interlude, the basement boiler ticking off the minutes. It was almost the end of the basketball game, and beads of sweat dripped elegantly down Jordan’s shaved head as he huddled with coaches and teammates, half listening to advice that had long ago ceased applying to him. He showed no signs of trepidation or anxiety about the fate of the game. He already knew the fate of the game. As for the advice that Duncan Dioguardi was now offering me, I listened carefully. This is how you hold the pipe. This is how you inhale the smoke. “This isn’t a cigarette,” he said. “You don’t suck it into your lungs.” He was patient, the way a good coach should be. Then he clicked the lighter and I was pulling as he had pulled, not too hard, not too soft, just right. I had expected the foil on my lips to taste like something, but it tasted like nothing. I had expected the smoke to smell like something, but it smelled like nothing. I had expected the high to alter me in some profound and mystifying way, but the effect was underwhelming and anticlimactic. Mostly, I felt clear-eyed and levelheaded, disappointingly so. “Not bad,” I said anyway. The only thing that was unexpected was the sudden sense of fondness that I had for Duncan Dioguardi, good coach that he was, and, dare I say, good friend. Sure, I barely knew him; sure, we had had different upbringings; but we had shared something on that ride down Route 15, and we were sharing something now, within his home, which he had welcomed me into, and in this way, yes, I could consider him a friend. The passenger who had remained only in the port, browsing the trinket shops, delighting in duty-free, would never have known this subtle but essential detail. Just as he would never have known that there was indeed a distinct smell hovering in the room, of the Chore Boy being cooked alive, not dissimilar to the odor when the plumbers had come through the subdivision, soldering the water lines, the new recruits watching them with envy and admiration.

  ________

  That spring, my dear old acting teacher came to my rescue by way of a phone call, out of the blue, asking if I might be available to audition for a play that he was directing at the Apple Tree Theatre. “So wonderful to hear your voice again,” he said. He said that he had always remembered me fondly from those Sunday classes years earlier—Intro to Acting I, followed by Intro to Acting II—where he would instruct a dozen teenagers in the world of make-believe. We played games, we played inanimate objects, we played adults. “There are rules even for make-believe,” he would tell us. Everything he said had the ring of truth and revelation. He had the empathy and kindness of the elderly. If there had been an Intro III and IV, I would have taken those, too, all the way up to C. I was always forlorn when my dad arrived to pick me up in his powder-blue Mercedes, the engine kept running. On a few occasions, my teacher had taken him aside and told him that his son had a future in theater. “That’s good to know,” my father had said, but the future he was envisioning was real estate.

  Now my teacher was calling to say that he had never forgotten me, that I had made a strong impression on him, even at the age of fifteen, and that he thought I would be perfect for the role he had in mind. The way he spoke made it sound as if he had already come to a decision and reading for the role was only a technicality. Still, I knew enough to know that nothing was ever guaranteed, that auditioning was only one step toward being cast, that a play was only one step toward a movie, and a movie was only one step toward fame. But that my teacher had sought me out after all these years was a sign that I was truly talented, that the hope I had been harboring was not false, and that I was living a life where the unexpected could indeed occur.

  When I showed up for the audition a week later, I was disheartened to see that it was far from a foregone conclusion. I was one of twenty young men who had apparently all been students of my acting teacher, and all of whom he had apparently remembered fondly. We were perfect replicas of one another, dressed in khakis, hair blow-dried, walking around doing the same vocal warm-ups that we had been taught: B-B-B-B, T-T-T-T—no softened consonants here. In our hands we held headshots of our giant faces, lit to make us appear older, wiser, and better-looking than we actually were, and on the back were our résumés, numbering ten or fewer credentials, twice for The Mystery of Edwin Drood. In thirty years, the list of credentials would be longer and our headshots would be younger.

  Things were running behind. The auditions were supposed to have started at ten o’clock, first come, first served, but it was noon and they’d made it only through twelve hopefuls. I was No. 19 on the list. I was anxious. I was hungry. I was taking time off from work. “A dentist’s appointment,” I’d told the foreman. “Do that on your own time,” he’d said. Instead of eating food, I smoked cigarettes, standing in the doorway, six feet from a sign that said NO SMOKING, exhaling out into the spring air, alongside my fellow actors who looked like me. We bantered, we joked, we lit one another’s cigarettes, we pretended we were not consumed with insecurity and competitiveness. To help pass the time we talked about classical and postmodern theater. If I had gone to college, I might have known what I was talking about. The walls around us were adorned with posters of plays past, announcing four-week runs to nowhere. Every so often the big brown door of the theater, with its single round pane of glass, something like a porthole, would swing open, off-loading the previous aspirant, a carbon copy of myself, whose face conveyed, in equal parts, relief, defeat, and premature delusions of being cast.

  When it was finally my turn, I was surprised to see that my acting teacher, whom I had remembered at best as middle-aged, and at most as old, was probably only in his early thirties. He had seemed tall back then, too, but now h
e was short and I was tall. He was standing in the middle of a row of seats, with stacks of scripts beside him, and when I handed him my headshot he looked at me without the faintest recognition, but then when it suddenly became clear to him who I was and how much I’d changed in the intervening years he stepped forward and embraced me. I felt his empathy and kindness draped around my shoulders, expressed without reservation, and if the embrace had continued much longer I might have cried. He wanted to know how I’d been, and what I’d been doing, but since the auditions were running behind there was no time to catch up.

  What was being decided here and now was whether I would be cast in a central role as a character who would be onstage for all three acts but had zero lines. I could not tell if this was a step backward or forward for my career. If I had to pick one, I would have picked backward. According to my teacher, it was forward. “He holds the play together,” he said. To this end, he needed to see how I “move through space,” since moving through space would be the only thing I would be doing. So I took my place onstage, apprehensive beneath a single blinding spotlight, and waited for his direction, which was, simply, “Show me the color red.”

  This was not something I had been anticipating. I had been anticipating, for example, being asked to mime pouring a glass of water, something I remember being quite good at. Without warning, we had entered the realm of symbolism and abstraction. We had entered game-playing and fun. But all I could think of was the tremendous predicament of being asked to embody a concept. Was a color even a concept? If I had been fifteen still, I would have done what he asked, happily, without thinking twice. I would have done every color. “Here’s fuchsia!” “Here’s cadmium yellow!” There would have been joy in exploration. Now my brain felt calcified and literal, the effects of aging. I could think only of making a semi-bold choice, like lying on my back and moving interpretatively. But lying on my back would obscure me from my teacher’s vision. “If the audience can’t see you,” he would sometimes say, “then who are you doing this for?” I lay down anyway, the hard stage pressing against me, dust getting all over my khakis. The foreman would say to me later, “You got dirty from going to the dentist?” For lack of any other idea, I channeled the character of the foreman, and then I channeled the drywall, which was not a character, and I thought about smoking a cigarette, because in my world of make-believe the color red smokes cigarettes, which was what I did, lying on my back, eyes closed, moving conceptually, this way and that, blowing smoke into the yellow spotlight of blindness, and when I stood up and dusted myself off I had, most wondrously, been given the role.

  The second time I smoked crack cocaine was the spring I worked construction for my father on his new subdivision in Moonlight Heights. By this point, the electricians had finished pre-wiring for the Internet, whatever that was, the floors had been poured, the windows had been installed, and the general laborers had come and gone, eight dollars an hour not being enough. I would show the new recruits around, bathroom, foreman, paper to sign, and then I would go carry drywall in the sunshine. I was aware that I had been waiting for Duncan Dioguardi to invite me to party again, but no invitation had been forthcoming, and to broach it myself seemed as though it would traverse an essential but unstated boundary.

  This time it was a Tuesday evening, after our shift, around six o’clock. Duncan’s car had broken down again. “Sure,” I said, “jump in.” I could hear the sprightliness in my voice, now authentic. The traffic was just as bad as ever and we crawled forward with our windows rolled down, the spring breeze blowing in, the cigarette smoke blowing out, dusk all around us. “I’m sorry about the traffic,” Duncan said, as he had said before. “I don’t mind,” I said. We talked about the subdivision for a while, and then we were quiet, mulling over I know not what, and then I broke the silence with the fantastic news that I’d been cast in a play, and that the way I saw things it was only a matter of time before I would be renting the U-Haul and making my move.

  Duncan was happy for me. He shook my hand. He slapped me on the back. “Whatever you set your mind to,” he said. I told him that I’d get him a free ticket for opening night. He told me, “I’ll be able to tell people I knew you when.” I was not used to such expansiveness. I could feel myself blushing. “Not many lines,” I told him. Obviously, the truth was that there were no lines. But I thought it was important to at least try to keep things in some perspective. Humility first, fame second.

  “Lines don’t matter,” Duncan said. Success was what mattered, and success called for celebration.

  “Aw,” I said, “I sure appreciate that.” But it was a work night, after all.

  No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t even seven o’clock. It would be a shame to let such good news go to waste. “Let’s celebrate,” Duncan Dioguardi said.

  I knew that, in this context, “celebrate” was another word for “party,” which was, of course, itself another word.

  The traffic was gone and I was driving fast. If I had had an ability to observe myself, I might have questioned why I needed to get where I was going in such a hurry. Under the overpass I went, fifteen miles above the speed limit. Turn, turn, turn. Duncan Dioguardi didn’t need to tell me where to turn. He wanted to know if I had forty dollars to chip in. For forty dollars I’d have to stop at the ATM. The ATM was in the convenience store, where people were shopping for dinner. At the ATM, I noted with satisfaction that my savings were considerable—eight dollars an hour adds up.

  His mother was home when we got there. “Meet my friend,” Duncan Dioguardi said. The word “friend” was not a euphemism. His mother was sitting in the living room watching Seinfeld. She said, “You’re welcome here anytime.” She was being warm. She was being hospitable. She was laughing at what was happening on TV, and a few moments later Duncan and I were in the basement, also laughing at what was happening on TV. Jerry was saying something logical, and George was frustrated, and Elaine was rolling her eyes, and here came Kramer bursting through the front door. When Duncan opened his hand, I imagined for a moment that, instead of the insignificant chips off the drywall, he was holding a palmful of giant chunks, the size of golf balls, one pound each.

  “You do the math,” Duncan said.

  Beneath his bed was the Chore Boy, but its symbolism had gone the way of the euphemism. Now when we smoked, we used, of all things, a broken car antenna, which, according to Duncan, he had found lying on the sidewalk. This was a neighborhood where car antennas lay on the sidewalk. The smoke came out of Duncan’s mouth in the same white puff that lingered in the air of the basement theater. “Not bad,” he said, again. And when it was my turn I also said, “Not bad,” but I meant it this time. I was the passenger on the cruise ship who has become acquainted with the island. The same warm feeling of friendship for Duncan engulfed me, followed by an unexpected but welcome sense of optimism concerning my prospects—extraordinarily promising they were, weren’t they, beginning with those three acts I was going to have onstage and heading toward a career. It was eight o’clock. Another episode of Seinfeld was just getting under way, the back-to-back shows courtesy of NBC, the interweaving story lines being established in that first minute: someone determined, someone displeased, the fatal flaw introduced, followed, thirty minutes later, by the abrupt resolution, and all of it funny, until all of it suddenly was not funny.

  Suddenly I was in possession of that thing called clarity. I was watching the most vapid show in the history of television—it had always been vapid and we, the viewers, had always been duped. I could see straight through it now—solipsistic, narcissistic, false reality, easy tropes, barely amusing. The clarity that I thought I’d had moments earlier had not been clarity at all but, rather, its opposite, delusion, which was now being usurped by an all-encompassing awareness, horrible and heavy, through which I understood at once that I was not talented, had never been talented, that my life as a general laborer was proof of this lack of talent, and that being cast in a role with zero lines was not a step toward fame but a
step into obscurity in a midsized city. Who but a fool agrees to move through space for three acts without saying a word?

  The car antenna was coming back my way. It was nine o’clock. I had entered a strange dimension of time—it was progressing both slowly and quickly, as marked by the ticking of that basement boiler. Nine was early for night. It would be night for many more hours to come. I was nineteen. Nineteen was young. I would be young for many more years to come. What exactly had I been so troubled by a few minutes before? Light and airy clarity descended upon me. Ah, this was clarity, and the other, delusion. I had reversed things, silly, overstated them, compounded them, turned delight into cynicism. I was going to be onstage for three acts, moving through space, another credential to have on my résumé when I arrived in L.A. It was ten o’clock. Was ten o’clock early for night? Was night moving slowly or fast? Was Jerry funny or stupid? We were driving back to the ATM now. I knew I was traversing some essential but unstated boundary, but I traversed it anyway. I wondered if Duncan Dioguardi had ever had a broken-down car or if he had smoked the car, its antenna being the last piece remaining. I wondered if he’d smoked L.A. I wondered if he’d one day smoke his Magnavox TV. This is the last time I’m doing this, I said to myself, even as I knew that saying so implied its inverse. At the ATM, I took out another forty dollars. I noted my balance. My savings account was still large. It was midnight. Midnight was still young.

  SCENIC ROUTE

  It’s around six months or so after society has begun changing, mainly for the worse, when Lizzy and I decide to take that trip we’ve been talking about for so long, and which, only in hindsight, is probably our biggest mistake, i.e., not knowing what we’re getting ourselves into. But she’ll be turning forty soon, and I’ve already turned forty, and if we don’t do it now, we’ll never do it and instead we’ll just talk about doing it. “Now or never,” she says, and I’m sure she’s right, because the most I’ve seen of the world has been this or that suburb. Besides, Lizzy says, no one can predict in what other ways society might begin changing—for the worse—and I’m sure she’s right about this, too, even though I suspect she’s not just referring to society, but to us, meaning her and me. In any case, I mail in the applications for our travel documents, everything signed in triplicate and notarized, and they’re approved without incident, and a few weeks after that we take two flights and one three-hour layover, also without incident, arriving in Maine, which is where our trip is officially beginning, at the Hertz rental car agency, at the top, in Maine, where you can’t go any higher these days without having better paperwork, and our plan is to take the long way down, back roads and such, because that’s the point, after all: to take the long way down before it’s too late.