Almost Starring Skinnybones (3 page)

“Oh,
I
get it,” said Mr. Rose, beginning to laugh along with me. “We’ve got ourselves a comedian here! Please don’t scare me like that, Alexander. For a minute there I thought you might be one of those spoiled, demanding little child actors I usually get stuck with.”

I was just about to ask if he meant Pudding Boy,
when he suddenly turned away from me. Then he cupped his hands around his mouth again and screamed, “
Bring in the cat!
”

The next thing I knew, I was sitting there with this disgusting, giant yellow creature on my lap.

Ronald. That was its name. Ronald the Cat. Without a doubt the stupidest cat name I’ve ever heard in my life. Naming your cat Ronald is like naming your kid Whiskers.

Also, just to give you an idea about how giant this cat was, when the trainer dumped it into my lap, I actually went “
Ooooff!
” I’m not kidding. I thought it was a kid in a cat suit.

The thing is, I don’t even
like
cats. I mean I know I have one as a pet and everything. But my parents got Fluffy before I knew how to talk, so I never had a chance to tell them I hated her. I tried to make a few hand signals, but they didn’t catch on. Every time a little kid makes hand signals, his parents think he has to go to the bathroom. I finally got so tired of being rushed away, I decided just to put up with the cat until I was older.

Mostly what I hate about cats is the way they’re always sneaking up on you. I realize it’s probably just the result of being born with fur on your feet, but I still think they could cough when they come into a room to let you know they’re there.

Fluffy’s the worst. Sometimes I’ll be standing
around in the bathroom with nothing on, and all of a sudden I’ll look down and there she is. And she’s been staring at me the whole time and I didn’t even know it. I’ve heard her laugh at me before, too. I don’t tell that to many people, but I swear I’ve heard Fluffy laugh at me about five times.

Anyway, I could tell right away that the trainer and I didn’t feel the same way about cats. As soon as the makeup lady left, he patted me on the shoulder and said, “Okay, Clyde, how about if you and Ronald introduce yourselves and get acquainted?”

I’m serious. This man actually expected me to say something like, “Hello, Ronald. How’s it going, dude?”

“Uh … no offense,” I replied. “But I’m twelve now. I don’t really talk to cats that much.”

The trainer looked irritated. “Listen, Sylvester, I don’t care if you’re ninety-seven. If Ronald doesn’t feel comfortable with you, this could be a very long day for all of us.”

I was about to tell the man that my name wasn’t Clyde or Sylvester when all of a sudden I looked down and caught Ronald licking the front of my new shirt.

“Sick!” I exclaimed, pushing him off my lap as fast as I could. “Cat saliva! Sick!”

The trainer picked up Ronald and stomped off.
Behind me Mr. Rose made this little whimpering sound. I recognized it right away. It was the same sound my Little League coach used to make when I’d show up for a game.

Furrowing his brows for the second time in only minutes, Mr. Rose pulled up a chair beside me. Then he sat there breathing real slowly like he was trying to keep from losing his temper.

I felt insulted, if you want to know the truth. I mean, I know that directors have to put up with a lot of little brats, but I still don’t think I should have been treated as one of them. After all, we’re talking about a cat saliva problem here.

After he got his breathing under control, Mr. Rose put his hand on my shoulder. “Listen, my friend,” he said, even though it was plain that I wasn’t. “I understand that you’re not a professional actor, but making commercials is like anything else. If you want to get something accomplished, the magic word is cooperation. Working with animals can be very tricky. And we’ve got to have cooperation among all of us—you and me and Ronald and Donald—if we want to make this go smoothly.”

I almost started to laugh. “Ronald and Donald? Ronald’s trainer is named Donald? Seriously? Ronnie and Donnie? Ron and Don? Ronno and—”

“Enough!” interrupted Mr. Rose. “Please, Alexander!
Let’s not make this worse than it already is. Let’s just try very hard to cooperate with each other and see if we can’t come out with a cute commercial by the end of the day. How ’bout it?”

“Er … cute?” I asked, suddenly getting an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach. “Uh, could you please explain ‘cute’ to me, Mr. Rose. Nobody sent me a script or anything. I mean, this isn’t going to be one of those stupid commercials where a kid has to make a fool out of himself, is it? This commercial is very important to me, Mr. Rose. I’ve got to wipe out a whole lunch line with one giant ‘Ha’!”

“A giant ‘Ha’?” repeated the director, curiously.

I didn’t have time to explain. “Please, Mr. Rose,” I begged. “I just don’t want to cha-cha with the cat or sing to the fritters, okay? They put people in the nut house for stuff like that, you know. This guy down the street from my cousin Leon started talking to his hair, and they had an ambulance come take him away.”

Mr. Rose stared at me a second, then started to laugh again.

“Relax, Alexander,” he said as he stood up. “I promise you won’t have to cha-cha with Ronald, okay? You have my word on it. Now, if you’ll just wait here a minute, I’m going to check the camera angles, and we’ll be ready to start.”

“Yeah, but wait!” I called after him, still feeling uneasy. “What about singing to the fritters? Or how about actually
talking
to the cat? I don’t have to carry on a conversation with Ronald, do I? You know, like the kind where the cat nods his head up and down like he’s really listening. I mean, I don’t mind saying ‘Here, boy,’ or something like that, but I don’t want to act like I value his opinion or anything.

“Hey, Mr. Rose!” I called again, even though by now he was hidden behind one of the huge cameras. “Did I remember to tell you that I’m twelve? Could we keep that in mind, please? Could we keep in mind that in some parts of the world boys my age are little generals in the army?”

From behind the camera came two hearty laughs. One from Mr. Rose, the other from the cameraman. Then I heard my father’s familiar chuckle ring out from the back of the studio. I even thought I heard Donald laughing.

For some reason, all this laughing put me at ease. Laughter does that to me sometimes. It makes me think everything’s going okay. Only this time it wasn’t. This time I guess you could say the laugh was on me.

It was the stupid kind of commercial. The kind I hate. Not as dumb as dancing with a cat, but almost.

They made me play the part of a kid about six. I swear. Mr. Rose kept saying the part was created for a kid any age, but it wasn’t. How many twelve-year-olds run away from home pulling a little red wagon?

That’s what I had to do. I had to pretend I was this little sniveling crybaby kid who was running away from home with his cat. I didn’t have any lines to speak. I just had to come into the kitchen wearing a dorky hat and blow my nose like I had been crying. Then I had to struggle to lift a forty-pound bag of Kitty Fritters into a little red wagon. After that I had to pick up fat Ronald, wipe my nose on my sleeve again, and head out the door pulling the wagon.

Just as the door was closing behind me, this announcer’s voice would come on and say,

It made me want to gag, it really did. When Mr. Rose first showed me the hat, I felt so sick I had to go to the bathroom and splash water on my face. It was raccoon, the kind Davy Crockett used to wear. The kind with a tail.

But I had no choice, you know? Mr. Rose explained the situation very clearly to me. When I started to complain, he sat me down and said, “Look, kid, either you do the commercial the way the Kitty Fritters people want it, or you walk.”

“Er … walk? Exactly what do you mean, ‘walk’?” I asked.

Mr. Rose made his fingers walk across the table. “Walk,” he repeated. “As in back to the hotel, back to wherever you came from. Walk.”

“Ohhhh,
walk
walk,” I said stupidly.

“So what’s it going to be, Alexander? Are we on or are we off? Do you wear the hat and pull the little wagon, or don’t you?”

I bent my head and tried to muffle my answer with my hand.

“I’llpullthestupidwagun.”

“Excuse me, Alexander? I didn’t understand you.”

“I said, I’ll pull the wagon,” I repeated gloomily. “But I just want you and that cat food guy to know something. I’m going to be thirteen in a few months, and in some countries kids actually get
married
at thirteen. Like, take Borneo, I think it is. Somewhere in Borneo some thirteen-year-old kid and his wife are going to be highly insulted when they see this.”

I paused for a second and put my face in my hands. “One person will like it, though,” I mumbled, feeling sick to my stomach. “Annabelle Posey will just
love
seeing me humiliated like this. She’ll be pointing and laughing for weeks.”

Mr. Rose ignored me. I guess by then he had decided that ignoring was the best way to handle me. It’s not though. The best way to handle me is to let me have my own way.

We worked on the commercial all day. I’m not sure how many times we filmed it before Mr. Rose was happy. He had an assistant who kept track. Each time we were about to film, the assistant would stand in front of the set with a chalkboard and say “Kitty Fritters commercial, take one” … or “Kitty Fritters commercial, take eighteen” … or “take twenty-four.” I stopped listening after “take thirty-two.”

Ronald was the problem. Ronald the Cat—the dumbest animal actor in the entire universe.

All he had to do was sit in the middle of the kitchen floor and watch me blow my nose and load the fritters. Then he had to let me pick him up. Think about it. How great an actor do you have to be to let someone pick you up? You could actually be dead and play that part.

Not Ronald though. Every time he’d see me
coming, he’d lie down and roll over on his back. Then he’d make his body so limp it was like trying to pick up cat-shaped Jell-O. To make matters worse, Donald kept running in, shouting, “Up, Ronald, up!” He waved his arms around like he was training an elephant or something.

Finally Mr. Rose got real annoyed about it. “Where the heck did you get this cat, Donald? The morgue?”

Donald took Ronald and stormed off again. This time when they came back, Ronald’s face was wet. I guess Donald had been trying to revive him.

Anyway, after Ronald had cooperated once or twice and the filming was finally over, we went around shaking hands and lying about how well everything had gone. Then Mr. Rose gave me a pat on the back, and Ronald and I shook paws. The Kitty Fritters man said if I ever came to Cincinnati, he’d take me through the cat food plant and show me how the fritters were made.

Oh, boy.

  
3
  

A
fter
I got home from New York, I started getting nervous all over again. No matter how you looked at it, the commercial was stupid. So stupid, I was afraid it might backfire right in my face. Instead of being a big celebrity like I’d planned, I could end up as the school fool.