Attack of the Theater People (5 page)

Seven

Pinnacle Management
sits high above the theater district, but it might as well be a world away. The lobby of the glass tower thrums with office-type people—men in suits carrying briefcases, women in suits wearing sneakers—all of them rushing to get upstairs to do whatever it is office-type people do.

I am not one of you
, I tell myself as I dig out from the elevator,
I am not one of you
. Granted, I’m not meeting with Irving Fish to discuss my bright future on the Great White Way. During Kelly’s interview Irving mentioned that he’d just lost his assistant and, faithful friend that she is, Kelly recommended me. Having just paid a $100 fine for disorderly conduct, I’m in no position to turn it down. Besides, who knows where a talent agency job might lead?

“I know who’d be perfect for the part,” I imagine Irving saying as I take dictation. (Not that I know how to take dictation. But, hey, it’s a fantasy.)

“Who?” I ask. In my fantasy, Irving has slicked hair and a pencil-thin mustache, like Adolphe Menjou in all those 1930s backstage musicals.

“Who?” he says. “Why, you, of course.” Then he calls Ziegfeld and puts me in the Follies.

In reality, Irving Fish is a gargoyle with a lint-colored toupee that sits on his head like a nest. He looks like someone you’d meet under a bridge asking you to solve three riddles.

He doesn’t look up when I come in, but instead reaches into a drawer and flops a blood-pressure monitor onto his desk. Then, without so much as a glance at me, he removes his shirt, revealing the body of a god. Unfortunately for Irving, that god is Buddha. He has the lumpen blobbiness of a half-melted snowman. As he straps the monitor on his arm he says, “So?”

“I’m Edward Za—”

“We’ve already got an Edward,” he says. “You’ll need to be somebody else. How about Alan? I had an aunt once named Alan.”

“I’m not sure I—”

“So what’s your story, Alan?” he says, still not looking at me. “You banging my client?”

“You mean Kelly?”

“No, four-time Tony Award winner Gwen Verdon.”

“Uh, no,” I say, less heterosexually than I would have liked.

“Why? You a pansy?”

I don’t dare reach into the grab bag that is my sexuality for fear of what I might pull out, so I simply say, “We used to date.”

“Type?”

“Gosh, I don’t know. I kind of like blue-eyed blondes.”

“No, you germ,” he says, pumping the monitor. “Do. You. Type?”

“Oh. A little.”

“Shorthand?”

“No.”

“Keypad?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“I don’t know what that is.”

He examines the gauge, scowling at the results. “I’ll take that as a no.”

“I’m a very good speller.”

“Excellent. You can represent us in the bee.”

“I meant for filing and—”

“Working pulse?”

“I beg your pardon?”

He gives me a look that’s equally malevolent and condescending, Rasputin teaching day care. “Does oxygenated blood empty out of your heart, course through your veins, deposit carbon dioxide in your lungs, which you then expel into the air?”

“Uh…yeah.”

“Good. You can start right now by perambulating your body downstairs to get me a Fresca.”

I learn very quickly why Irving Fish can’t keep an assistant. As valedictorian of the Roy Cohn School of Charm, he oozes into the office every morning with all the vigor of an oil slick, the plants in the reception area wilting and dying as he passes. It’s obvious he hates his job, his life, and, most of all, me.

And rightly so. I am a clerical disaster. Monks callig-raphing illuminated manuscripts worked quicker. A simple cover letter can take me the better part of the morning. Luckily, Irving’s clients don’t work too much. Famed for having told Meryl Streep she should get her nose fixed, Irving specializes in those who are either on their way up or on their way down, the former dumping him as soon as they hit it big, the latter clinging to him as their careers circle the drain. He’s created an entire cottage industry representing stars who are forgotten but not gone, ex–movie queens who play Mame and Dolly in melody tents all over the country.

What’s worse, I have to fill in for the receptionist, a high-haired girl from Staten Island who dials the phone with a pencil so she doesn’t break a nail. She takes so many breaks I begin to wonder whether she suffers from a chronic bladder infection.

I dread these moments most of all, gaping at the phone like I’m a transplanted aborigine:
Ooh, the blinking lights of your magical talking machine frighten and confuse me. Please give me an errand so I may go on walkabout
. One day I accidentally disconnect the artistic director of Playwrights Horizons and Irving throws a paperweight at me, narrowly missing my head and shattering a framed photo of Martha Raye on the wall.

“My
goddess
,” my mother says when I call to complain. (I figure, with all the long-distance calls the agency makes, no one will notice a few to Sedona, the latest stop on her Magical Mystery Tour. Suffice it to say her spiritual quest has greatly enhanced Natie’s stamp collection, such a Nudelman thing to collect.) “Why would you manifest that?”

“What are you talking about? I didn’t want him to—”

“Edward, he aimed for your head. Don’t you see what that means?”

“He’s a homicidal maniac?”

“No. You’re so desperate to open your mind, you willed this Irving person to do it for you.”

“Oh, Mother…”

“I’m serious. If you don’t find a spiritual outlet you could end up manifesting an aneurysm or a brain tumor. I know you think I’m crazy, but I’m not the one getting paperweights thrown at me, am I?”

“No, you’re the one in the desert trying to contact aliens.”

“Zoozook isn’t an alien; he’s a Pleiadian star being.”

She says it like everyone lives in a teepee on an abandoned ranch in Sedona so they can listen to the hallucinations of a Utah housewife who hears the voice of a five-thousand-year-old Pleiadian star being whenever she turns on her microwave.

“You’re just like your father,” my mother says. “So earthbound. You really should come to Sedona and experience the healing energies of the vortexes.”

She means vortices.

“New York is sucking your soul dry,” she adds.

She’s got a point. There’s a big, Juilliard-sized vacuum in my life, and working as an assistant to the Prince of Darkness certainly isn’t going to fill it. But how am I ever going to achieve a success large enough to redeem such an enormous failure?

Naturally, Natie sees my employment as an opportunity for ill-gotten gains. “For Chrissake, you’re his assistant,” he says. “You pick up the phone, you say you’re calling for Irv, and you can go to any audition you want.”

But the mere thought of auditioning gives me gastric reflux. I compare my résumé, which sucks even when it’s padded, with the hundreds that come across my desk, and I can’t conceive of competing against actors who have more to show for their careers than a summer spent as Chuckles the Woodchuck.

Still, I can’t help thinking I sound pretty good singing along with the London cast album of
Les Misérables
, which is coming to Broadway next season. I mean, it’s not like I’d expect to get a part, but surely I’m good enough for the chorus, right? Or maybe an understudy. One vocal coach in particular crops up on the better musical theater résumés, so, armed with a spiffy new Walkman-sized tape recorder, I spend fifty bucks for a lesson with Morgan Firestone, who’s responsible for Mandy Patinkin’s voice, though not the part that sounds like musical sinusitis. I choose the song I think of as my personal anthem: “Corner of the Sky” from
Pippin
.

I’ve got to be where my spirit can run free,

Got to find my corner of the sky.

After my particularly heartfelt rendition, Firestone looks up from the piano and says, “That wasn’t bad, but you smile too much for
Les Miz
.”

It’s not my fault. Two and a half years of orthodontics couldn’t eradicate an overbite, which, to be fair, was so servere to start with I could’ve eaten apples through a picket fence. The photographer who took my head shots said I have a mouth “built for smiling.” I originally took it as a compliment, like I have a congenital capacity for happiness, but, after being called too jazz hands for Juilliard, I worry it means I’m just a lightweight. Of course, this is the same photographer who rendered me virtually unrecognizable by slathering too much foundation on my face. When Irving noticed the shot on my desk one day, he said I looked like I should be down on one knee singing “Mammy.”

No, I can’t audition for
Les Miz
or anything else. Everything about me is wrong, wrong, wrong. My spirit doesn’t run free; it runs into brick walls. I have the emotional depth of a Very Special Episode of
Growing Pains
. If I were a river, I’d be shallow enough to cross without rolling up your pants.

I need help.

That’s why I accept Willow’s invitation to join her at a free, introductory consciousness-raising session with EGG, the Enlightened Growth Group. Following the lone algebraic equation I remember—if a = b and b = c, then a = c—I figure that since Willow is both a gifted actor and an EGG practitioner, maybe it’ll help my acting, too.

The session takes place in a meeting room at the Sheraton, a rather bland environment for a psychological breakthrough, but I’m determined to keep an open mind. After all, I don’t want to manifest an aneurysm or a brain tumor.

There are hundreds of us assembled on those chairs that connect so you’re sitting closer to a stranger than you’d like. A lot of the people seem to know one another, judging from the overlong hugs and soulful stares. As a group of Growth Facilitators motions us to our seats, Willow turns to me with the panicked look of someone who just remembered she left the water running. With a child in the tub.

“Did you pee?” she says.

“You mean just now? No, I’m continent, thank you.”

“I mean—”

She’s interrupted by an explosion of applause as a team of radiantly happy people takes the stage, led by a middle-aged man with a gleaming cue-ball head and a glassy-eyed expression. He wears a collarless Indian shirt, which marks him as a Spiritual Person. He joins in the applause and soon we’re all clapping rhythmically. For five minutes.

It’s a funny thing about five minutes. If you’re running five minutes late, it speeds right by; but try clapping rhythmically for longer than thirty seconds and the novelty wears off fast.

The leader motions us to sit down, then stares at us so long I find myself nostalgic for the clapping. Finally he says, “I see you.”

“I see you,” responds the crowd, or at least those who know what the hell’s going on.

This exchange warrants more applause. “Happy birthday!” the leader shouts.

“Happy birthday!” shouts the crowd, followed by an even bigger ovation. I swear, I haven’t seen this much unwarranted appreciation since the high school musical.

The leader quiets us again.

“Today is your birthday, the day you begin a new life. The day you become who you are truly meant to be.” He closes his eyes. “Let us begin.”

He leads us through a guided meditation in which we are to envision laying an egg. That’s right, an egg. Large enough to accommodate a human baby. He’s a little hazy on the anatomical details, telling us only that “it emanates from your kundalini,” wherever that is. All around me people grunt and puff, Lamaze-style, but I can’t get past the idea that I’m supposed to be shitting an oversize egg. I can see why Willow asked me if I needed to go to the bathroom. With all the pushing, now I really need to pee.

Still, I manage to pass my egg, which apparently contains my inner child, who must peck, peck, peck his way out until he finally gets fed up and punches a hole in his shell with a tiny, inner-child-sized fist.

“That is why you’re here,” the leader says, “to break out of your shells. Most of us go through life protected, held captive in prisons of our own making. Not us. Not here. Not now.” He pauses, as if he’s about to say something profound, or perhaps shit another egg. “Not. Ever.”

More rhythmic applause. My palms look like smoked salmon.

We’re then instructed to wander the room, letting everyone else see us for who we truly are, our “unshelled selves.” (Try saying that ten times fast.) “And when you see someone, truly see them,” the leader says. “Stop and tell them.” He demonstrates with an assistant, bearing down on her with a spotlight stare until he finally says, “I see you.”

Seems simple enough.

I stroll around the room, making eye contact with people, but they just glaze past as if I weren’t there. Finally a man stops in front of me, a cadaverous executive with gray hair and a gray face to match.

“I see you,” I say.

He stares into my eyes, like he’s looking for something he lost in there, then just shakes his head and skulks off.

I turn and there’s a leathery woman with skin like a topography map. Even her tan has a tan.

“I see you,” I say.

She breezes right past me. “Sorry.”

I begin to sweat. I’m trying too hard. I’m not capable of revealing myself, of making myself vulnerable. Once again I’m Morales in
A Chorus Line
, feeling nothing. Except the feeling that this bullshit is absurd.

I approach a tiny woman, no more than five feet tall, slender, but with hips like parentheses. Before I can say anything, she grabs me by the elbows.

“Can you see me?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“You sure?”

I take a moment to look at her. She wears the short, layered haircut of someone with neither the time nor the inclination to bother, a pair of round tortoiseshell glasses, and the kind of worried expression you see on child actors when they say, “Please, mister, don’t hurt my dog.” Her eyes have gray circles under them, like she’s been up since 1972, and her mouth is surrounded with those hairline fractures that smokers get.

“I see you,” I say.

“Oh, thank Gawd,” she squawks with the distinctive nasal whine of the outer boroughs. “I was beginning to lose it.”