Can I See Your I. D.? (8 page)

You are a fifteen-year-old Texas boy in France for the first time. You have arrived weeks before the dorm opens at your boarding school, and you don't have enough money to rent a room. You do not speak French.

Your mission on this remote island is simple. Your job is to secure the natives' cooperation with the Allies in case fighting with the Japanese flares up again. You're learning the islanders' language, and you're learning their customs, but you rely on a five-year-old to guide you through the jungle.

You are unpacking your bags here at your parents' new home, feeling around for where things go. It took years for that exploding shell in the South Pacific to finish doing its damage to you, but now it's done. You have finally lost the last of your eyesight. You cannot see a thing.

You once were blind, but now you see. You were black, but now you're white.

Your blindness miraculously ended after a decade of darkness. Your blackness began just this month, and it was no miracle. It was deliberate.

You set out on an assignment for
Sepia
magazine—a white man crisscrossing Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama with artificially darkened skin. It's not that there's a shortage of writers with God-given pigment and God-given talent. No, there are plenty of Negro writers capable of detailing the torments and indignities of daily life in a land where civil rights are still a revolutionary concept.

Thanks to your disguise, what you can see—and nobody else can—is the
contrast
between life lived black and life lived white. And though you've known more than your share of unfamiliar, unsettling situations, none has been more bewildering than this one.

You have felt at least as alien in your own land as you did in France and the Pacific. Nothing you've seen these past few weeks, however, can compare to what your eyes are witnessing here in Montgomery.

You arrived in town by bus just before Thanksgiving. The inhumane treatment you've endured from whites has taken its toll, and—perversely, perhaps—you've decided to rejoin them.

Even before you got here, you quit taking the Oxsoralen pills. Now you keep indoors during the daytime, staying out of the sun so that its rays can't interact with the residual medication that would maintain your shade of brown. As the Oxsoralen and its resulting pigment work their way out of your system, you scrub at the stain you applied to your skin's outer layers, shedding the darkened cells at the surface to make way for the pinker ones below.

You put on a white shirt, but it makes your skin look too dark by comparison. So you put on a brown one—there, that's better—and venture into the white part of town.

There you find that all the comforts of a white man's everyday life—a policeman's friendly greeting, an open table in a restaurant—are once again available to you, though impossible to take for granted or enjoy.

Now you stroll into a black neighborhood, and what do you find? The people you pass on the street are looking at you—the white John Howard Griffin—with the same hate-stare that the black John Howard Griffin had come to expect from whites. You no longer sense from Negroes a shared, unspoken understanding—that automatic intimacy is gone, reflexive resentment in its place.

You aren't dressed any differently than you've been previously on this journey, aren't using a different name, aren't claiming any different biographical details other than the obvious one. This is all about the color of your skin. And you just know that, why, if you were to suddenly be black again right now . . .

Now
there's
an idea. The novelty, the recklessness of it are invigorating.

You think of it as “zigzagging.” You've returned with a bag in which you've stashed skin dye, a sponge, cold cream, and tissues. A comic-book superhero and his alter ego may transform in a phone booth, but the white you and the black you need a little more seclusion for your quick changes.

Into an alley, white to black, and then you're meandering about as a second-class citizen, befriended by Negroes and disregarded by whites.

Then, behind some bushes by the side of a road, black to white, and you begin retracing your steps as a person of privilege, embraced by other whites and instantly distanced from Montgomery's black citizens.

The white people you walk among have no idea that you have lived as a black man. It would never occur to them that any white person would make such a choice. Darkening up to get easy laughs from a crowd, now, that's one thing. But to assume the
identity
of one of them . . .

And when you pass those same white people while playing the role of Negro, well, let's just say it doesn't call for much in the way of acting skills. Their hostility toward you—or, at the very best, neglect—has nothing to do with how you act or who you are, and everything to do with how you look.

The same goes for the treatment you get while white among blacks. Would a closer inspection of you reveal a darker skin tone than that of other white passersby? A lingering hint of stain that could be misread as evidence of a Negro grandmother or great-grandfather? Perhaps. But you've learned enough of the distance black folks keep for their own self-preservation whenever they can, enough to know that none of them will get that close. You
look
white, and so you
are
white. It is as simple as that.

But what if? What if someone recognizes your shoes as those worn yesterday by a black man who was—say!—just about your height? Or what if someone catches you in mid-transformation? What would they make of you? Would they quake with anger and dismay? Would getting caught in the act of crossing over or crossing back be even more dangerous than being black all the time?

In the Pacific, you knew what it was like to have your life in jeopardy, and you're not eager to experience that again. But you had a mission then, and you have a mission now. You suffered the consequences then, and you'll risk now what you have to risk. During the ten years you lived in darkness, you came to understand that skin color could not possibly be less relevant. Perhaps if you carry on your masquerade just a little bit longer, the story you'll tell will be just a little bit more powerful and enable that many more people to see the truth.

You know what you have to do.

You'll be black again soon enough, at least for another day, but you'll never again be blind.

You just wanted to work.

You would have wanted to work, to be an actor, no matter what you looked like. The fact that you still look like a teenager, or close enough, shouldn't be important. But it's not just
important
.

It's
everything
.

Biologically, you became a teenager in 1979, on the day that Kimberlee Elizabeth Seaman turned thirteen. Nearly two decades later, you go by the name of Riley Weston, but you're still playing the part of an adolescent—not only on this L.A. set, but in your real life.

Your audience is the biggest it's ever been. By this time tomorrow, it's going to be even bigger. Much bigger. And there's nothing you can do to stop it.

Here's how it started:

You grew up in little-bitty, two-stoplight, Pleasant Valley, New York. From the time you were, like, four years old, you wanted to be an entertainer, visible,
on stage
. In high school, you did drama, chorus, student government, and cheerleading, a dynamo just shy of five feet tall.

And what do girls with dreams like yours do when they graduate high school? They go to L.A. They change their names to something like “Kimberlee Kramer.” They babysit to pay the bills, and they audition, audition, and audition some more.

All that work started to pay off for you. You did commercials. You got the lead in a musical for troubled teens and their therapists. You were “Nice Car Girl” in a movie about competitive waterskiing, and “Rita Sabatini” in a couple of episodes of ABC's
Growing Pains
. In 1993 you were in
Sister Act 2
, starring Whoopi Goldberg, which was
huge
for you.

The thing is, they had you playing a kid. They
all
had you playing kids. Here you were entering your late twenties, and the roles you kept getting were, like, “Girl Number Whatever.” But you still looked the part, and if it was those parts or none at all, what were you going to do? Of
course
you took the work.

And if you shaved a few years off your age so you could get a foot in the door at the auditions, well, who
didn't
? That's the way show business works—new names, fudged ages, closeted actors, fake boobs. That's just Hollywood, and you were determined.

Along the way, Brad Sexton became your manager. You also married the guy. He wasn't a big name, but then, neither were you—maybe you'd get to the top together. And by last year, you each had some ideas about how to make that happen.

It was one thing to still be getting teenage roles in your thirties. It was another to be getting
crappy
teenage roles, these insulting, one-dimensional parts. You were a serious actor, and you needed better scripts, and if nobody out there was going to offer them to you, you would just have to write them yourself. You'd never done that before, but you knew you could figure out how. So you added another hyphen and became an actor-singer-writer.

Nobody cares, really, how old a screenwriter is. Being thirty-one as a writer would be no big deal. But you couldn't be a thirty-one-year-old writer
and
be an actor young enough to land the teenage parts you'd be writing for yourself. You needed one identity for both of those facets of your career.

Since someone might notice that “Kimberlee Kramer” had been playing teenagers for a decade already, Brad persuaded you that this single identity should be a new one. Actors change their names all the time—again, no big deal. Except for one thing: Your new legal name, Riley Weston, would come with a fake I.D. showing that you were a teenager. Having a phony I.D. was not so normal. That was a little unusual, actually.