Better Nate Than Ever (9 page)

“Why?” It’s one of the great restaurants of our time, I thought.

“Because—just—the only reason to even be here,” she says, “the only reason to deal with all the hassle—
come on, man, can you get us there any slower?
—is to also exploit the good stuff. And the good stuff is the local restaurants and the culture and junk.”

We come to a red light, and Heidi opens the door and grabs my arm, and just as she’s reaching for her purse, I say, “I’ll do this, Aunt Heidi,” and give the guy a five-dollar bill. It’s thrilling.

“Don’t ask for any change,” Heidi says, thinking I’m not old enough to understand tipping systems. Thinking I’ve never worked a shift or two at Flora’s Floras, and had to get there by taking the bus, and slept through the bus so I had to call a car service. All of that. I’m much more grown up, I think, than Aunt Heidi realizes.

We’re back in the elevator, chugging its way up to the sixteenth floor, to the audition. Heidi looks at her cell phone and musses my hair, flicking it this way and that. “You should trim your bangs when you get home. Just an idea.”

The doors part and we make a hard right and they’re all lined up, all forty-nine of my group. The casting assistant with blonde ringlet hair and a hoarse voice gets up from the desk and walks over to us. “Where the heck is Anthony Foster?”

I raise my hand. “I’m here.”

Casting assistant girl goes, “Whoa, costume change,” smiling, amazingly, and then scrunches her face and says, “What’s up with your forehead?”

Aunt Heidi takes my bookbag and says, “He just had a final callback for a commercial, and had to wear a really tight hat.” She gives my leg a kick, and casting assistant girl says “whatever” and shows me to my place in line, two people ahead of the pretty girl with the flute.

“Okay, listen up,” casting assistant girl screams. “You’ll all be going in, in one minute. I’m going to need everyone to leave their bags with their guardians or parents, and please hear me on this: If you have a special skill you’d like to show off—I see a few boys have brought skateboards and a girl has a flute—you can bring those items in and set them in the corner of the room.”

I look around and wonder if I can show them Libby’s emergency note. My special skill is being protected by other children who are smarter than I am.

“Do you have any hidden talents?” Heidi asks.

“Nah,” I say. “Not really. I mean, I
can
hold my breath for three minutes underwater.” It’s my one expertise that even
orbits
the world of sports; Anthony tried to drown me once.

“Okay,” Heidi says, “you don’t have to mention that if they ask.”

“Please,” casting assistant girl says, “stay exactly in this lineup when you walk in the door, children. Like going to the potty with your entire class. Because the creatives have already had a long morning, and we don’t want any of you beautiful children to get lost in the shuffle.”

“This girl,” Aunt Heidi whispers to me, but not quite quietly enough, frankly, “is the reason I stopped acting.”

And the door swings open.

The long flowy man comes out, his face flush and his blouse wrinkled into a fret, and he looks as if he’s already given up on the entire project. That some time in the last hour he became so annoyed at something—maybe the juggling brothers threw a ball at his head—that “the creatives,” whatever that means, had a meeting and decided
E.T.: The Musical
was a horrible idea all along. That
Close Encounters
would have made for more compelling material. An entire song about mashed potato spaceships.

“Lock and load, kiddos!” the long flowy man yells instead, turning his face into a mask of comedy (in an overly rehearsed way). I follow the boy in front of me and turn back to Aunt Heidi, and she gives me the thumbs-up, and we’re in.

God, I have to pee.

T
he room is horrible—let me say that now.

Sure, exciting. Blah blah blah, the mystique and intrigue of an interview. Yadda yadda, the pulsing energy that keeps you aloft even as you’re crashing from an overnight bus trip and an Old Navy hike.

The room is horrible.

Wild, blinking overhead lights, and the reek of a root cellar (in a bad way), and floor-to-ceiling mirrors that force you to stare yourself down. To see that underbite. To measure yourself up against every other kid standing here. Every other flute player.

“Okay, children,” the long flowy man says, clapping at us. There’s a lot of clapping here, that’s for sure, and not the audience kind; the shut-up kind. “Drop your stuff over by Sammy the pianist.”

Sammy the pianist looks up from his iPhone and smiles a crooked, tired smile.

“And then I need you all to line up, from numbers fifty-one through one hundred like Beckany instructed outside.” Casting assistant girl has a name: Beckany. The sort of thing my dad would call “a fool’s name.” This gives me a nice bonding moment with Dad, which happens about once every thirteen years.

I’m the only kid, it seems, who
doesn’t
have some instrument or special pair of shoes to drop off by Sammy, and I’m standing in the middle of the room taking in the adults, more of them than I thought would be here. They are clearly led by an important bald man, pacing, with a set of eyeglasses perched on his tree-branch nose, and another set on his scalp, and a
third
set, sunglasses, swinging around his neck on a flamboyant chain of blood-red crystals.

The bald man is being followed by a very skinny woman (a “She needs a burger” kind of woman, my mom would say) with spiked auburn hair. And though she’s not traditionally pretty, she’s obviously been in show business long enough to know how to dress herself up, donning more makeup than most groups of friends would spread among themselves to put together a haunted house to scare the little kids on the block.

Maybe I’ll go as
this
woman for Halloween.

(Don’t get any ideas about me always wanting to go as a woman for Halloween. At least twice, I’ve been a male Smurf.)

At the front of the room, as the other children mill about, I see two young men, somewhere between older-than-Anthony and thirty, both of them with tiny beards and clipboards and sweater vests and tight jeans. They’re giggling a lot already, commenting back and forth.

And then there’s the flowy man, who’s rounding up the troops. He looks at me and says, “Okay, everyone, do like number ninety-one is doing and stand in line.” He strides up to me with giant, urban strides and grabs my shoulders and pushes me back three feet. “Do just like number ninety-one but stand on the line we have, right here.” And he puts me on it: a black stretch of tape, crossing the room. “And let’s do this quickly. Your first task is to line up quickly.”

This sounds idiotic, of course—who
can’t
stand in a line—but you really can’t believe how hard it is for these kids. Maybe my special skill is “being in lines first,” because the ruckus that ensues, the forty-nine other children trying to find the number of the kid next to him or her? You’d think they were offering ten free cookies and the first of us to line up gets them, such is the screaming and panic.

The redheaded woman with extravagant Rockette legs whistles, like she’s herding us, and starts matching kids next to kids.

The long flowy man says, “Yes, let’s let Monica do
this. This is what dance people do,” and the bearded boys laugh really, really hard, like it’s the first good joke on a bad Kids’ Choice Awards telecast, and in just a moment we are lined up.

Monica really was quite good at herding us.

“So let’s do quiet faces,” the long flowy man says. “Let’s do beautiful quiet faces with little closed mouths.”

Everyone shuts up, and Sammy the piano player plays a “ta-da” on the keyboard. We kids aren’t sure if we’re allowed to laugh, but the bearded assistant boys howl (
really
scream) at Sammy’s “ta-da,” and the screaming of the bearded boys makes us kids titter.

“My name,” the long flowy man says, his arms gesticulating like he’s trying to tell a group of
deaf
kids that there’s a fire (but a
funny
fire: that’s how he’s doing it), “is Rex Rollins. And I am the casting director of
E.T.: The Musical
.”

The boy next to me applauds, and that makes a few other kids clap. I can see it all in the giant, wall-size mirrors stretched in front of us (
what
did Aunt Heidi do to my bangs?). Rex Rollins the casting director does a curtsy, something wildly girly, and that makes the bearded boys hoot so hard that I think one of their beards is going to pop off, like, literally.

“We’ll be here all day,” Monica the dance person says, winking at Rex Rollins.

“Let me introduce the team today,” Rex says. “You already met Sammy at the piano,” and a wise-guy kid yells out “ta-da.” Dear Lord.

I’m getting the idea that “the team” is just a bunch of adults who look like caricature versions of normal people; the Pittsburgh version of Rex Rollins would be a fat dad in not such a loud floral print, and the Pittsburgh version of Monica would be a flirty math teacher who would never wear those high heels; and I don’t think we have a Pittsburgh version of the bearded boys, who are standing awfully close to one another and clearly writing things on their clipboards to make each other laugh, like we can’t tell. Like we’re idiots. “The team” just stands there beaming like they’ve all won the Nobel Peace Prize for Musical Theater.

“And you’ve met Monica,” Rex Rollins says, “who is assisting the very talented, very dashing Olivier Award–winning Mr. Garret Charles. Our choreographer.”

This, strangely,
doesn’t
get applause, perhaps because big bald Mr. Garret Charles looks as if he eats children for lunch and washes them down with the blood of their favorite pet.

“And Mark with a
k
and Marc with a
c
are our helpers”—Mark and Marc, the bearded boys, flash smiles that could outwatt the moon on a clear night—“and that’s it for today. Our assistant director is running a little late.”

Assistant
director? I’m not even meeting the
director
director? What is this I’m auditioning for, a dance concert?

“So,” Rex says, “please stand with your feet together”—

“Parallel first position,” Monica shouts, tapping nails against her clipboard. She brings her toes and heels together in a single dramatic click, overemphasizing a military way of standing straight. “Parallel
first
.”

“
Dance
terms,” Rex says, smiling a huge smile from a mouth that isn’t as bright as Mark’s or Marc’s but looks, instead, like it enjoys seven or eight hoagies per weekend. “Stand in
parallel first
and make sure we can see your numbered name tag, and stand
very still
and we’ll be quick about this.”

“Can I just say something?” Mr. Garret Charles says, stepping forward. The room goes edgy, nervous, and a light flickers off. He has a British accent so over the top you’d think he was making fun of
Harry Potter
. “These situations can be very stressful, very difficult. We are looking for something so specific for
E.T.: The Musical
. It is a movie that is beloved across seas, and oceans.” His assistant, Monica, is nodding gigantically like she’s rewarding a particularly feeble dog. “And the task of casting such a work calls for a specific image in an audience’s mind.”

“Aliens!” a stupid boy shouts.

“That’s right, young man,” Garret Charles says, and then squints at the boy’s number, pinned to his stupid hip, and whispers something to Monica. Who very clearly draws a line through the boy’s name on her clipboard.

“Aliens, yes,” Garret Charles continues, his accent growing thicker by the syllable, and bordering on German. “But also of a certain era and locale: of the eighties, in a dusty California town that isn’t accustomed to outside visitors. And our task is to honor the work of Steven Spielberg, of his glorious little film that is
really
about—does anyone perceive what it’s really about?”

I expect the stupid boy to shout “Aliens!” again, but instead a girl wearing pink ballet tights raises her hand. Garret Charles points to her, and she says, “It’s about a boy and his friend.”

Rex Rollins, eating a Dorito by the piano, looks around and shakes his head, really digging this girl’s answer, and calls to Garret Charles, “I love the simplicity of that.”

“Yes,” Garret Charles says, “it’s about friendship—and about how fast that friend can leave you. Indeed, young lady. So please, look from child to child, next to you, greet them as if at mass, and introduce yourself quickly. Because we’ll be cutting this group down by
at least half, and I want you to make a friend and then learn, and see, how quickly all that can change.”

We stand there, dumbfounded, but Rex Rollins claps at us and we switch back on.

I turn to the girl next to me, who has a set of braces so sprawling you could probably tie them to Dad’s fishing rod and hook a shark, and say, “Hi, I’m Nate,” and she says, “I’m Cindy, this is so wild.” And then I turn to the little boy next to me and say, “Hi, I’m Nate,” and he says, “I pee-peed my pants a little.”

And I’m about to.

Rex Rollins claps at us again, to quiet the rumble, and Monica and Garret begin at one end of the room, near the smaller numbers. They walk the line, slowly, eyeing each of us like a pair of flaming drill sergeants. Occasionally they confer, but mostly Monica makes one of two marks on her clipboard—either a checkmark, I think, or just a line, a little dash.

The room is a cluster of fidget, every three or four children practically breaking out of his or her own skin, hopping. But not me.

I am standing stone still, riveted to this day. The rain begins again, tapping against the window like an intruder or a warning, and finally, at the very peak of the room’s growing hum, a child begins hiccupping. Garret Charles turns very pink and bites his lower lip. His nostrils flare, and he switches the pair of glasses
on his forehead for the pair on his nose, and he walks out the door behind me. And slams it.