How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater (6 page)

“So, what do we do now?” Kelly asks.

“Why don't we get some beers?” Doug says. “There's this bar in Penn Station that served us on St. Patrick's Day.”

Ziba and Paula both give him a look that makes it abundantly clear they have no interest in drinking beer under fluorescent lighting while transit employees make announcements like “Last cawll to Joisey City.”

“I know a place in the Village that's exceedingly lax about checking ID,” Ziba says.

“Splendid,”
Paula cries. “We love the Village, don't we, Edward?”

“What's it called?” I ask.

Ziba pauses to blow a smoke ring. “Something for the Boys,” she says. “It's a gay piano bar.”

“I didn't know a piano could be gay,” Natie whispers to me.

“It's only attracted to other pianos,” I explain.

Ziba ignores us by turning to Paula and Kelly. “The best part is that you don't have to be concerned that some cretin will hit on you.” Kelly nods, being the kind of girl who cretins often hit on.

“Sure,” Doug says, “that's okay for you. But what if someone hits on
us
?
”
He points to himself and me.

Ziba gives him one of those deadpan looks, like Cher does to Sonny after he's said something stupid. “Any man who's secure in his sexuality shouldn't feel threatened by the attention of another man,” she drones. She fixes her dark gypsy eyes on him, daring him to contradict her.

“I'm cool,” Doug says. “My uncle in Germany is gay.”

Jesus, enough with the Germany thing already.

“He was on the Olympic gymnastics team,” Doug adds, as if that explained it.

“Smashing,”
Paula says. “Edward, lead us not into Penn Station, but deliver us to the E train.”

S
ince Natie's got less facial hair
than Paula's cousin Crazy Linda, convincing even the most lenient of bars that he's of legal drinking age could prove challenging. He is, after all, the guy who still has to prove he's tall enough to go on the good rides. So we decide we have no choice but to pass him off as a girl. We huddle in front of a camera store called Toto Photo
(WE
'
LL PRINT ANYTHING . . . SO LONG AS YOU LET US KEEP THE GOOD ONES),
while Paula and Ziba both oversee the swapping of clothes between him and Kelly. It's quite astounding, really. Add some makeup, accessories, and Ziba's Audrey Hepburn scarf thing and voilà: a small, homely guy is magically transformed into an even homelier girl. Ziba hides a good part of Natie's baby face with her Jackie O sunglasses.

“I can't see a fucking thing,” he mutters.

Just to be safe (or just because it's fun) we create new legal drinking age personas for the rest of us. Kelly and Ziba are to be a couple of seniors from the Yale women's track team; Paula and Natie, a pair of funky SoHo party girls out for a night on the town; and Doug and I are cast as a young, gay couple.

In love.

Poor Doug looks like he's about to have kittens, but I convince him he'll be safer going into the bar if he's already on the arm of another guy. What I don't tell him, of course, is that I've actually had a homosexual experience myself, having experimented last summer with a guy at the Bennington College summer theater program. I suppose that technically makes me bisexual, but I prefer to simply think of myself as open-minded. As an actor, you need to be receptive to all kinds of experiences.

We enter in pairs staggered a few minutes apart so as not to attract attention, and I find myself getting excited as we watch the others go in—there's something thrilling about acting in real life, even if it's just buying a bus ticket with an English accent or pretending you're retarded while waiting in line at the grocery store.

“You ready?” I ask Doug and, to my surprise, he responds by taking my hand.

It feels kind of weird. Even though I've fooled around with another guy, it wasn't his hand I held and, in a strange, Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass kind of way, it feels almost, I don't know, comforting. I make a mental note to remember these feelings in case I ever play a homosexual.

We have to descend a small flight of steps below the street level to get in. According to the historic landmark plaque next to the door, Something for the Boys was originally a speakeasy during Prohibition, and I can't help but feel the thrill of the forbidden as we step into a place that once counted gangsters and their molls as its clientele.

It's a small subterranean cave of a room, bathed in a hazy magenta light that gives the Broadway musical posters on the wall an eerie, psychedelic look. The place is packed, but I immediately spy Ziba and Kelly lurking at a table in a dark corner. Doug looks nervous at the prospect of pushing through a crowd of a hundred men belting out the final chorus of “I Feel Pretty,” but trouper that he is, he puts his arm around me and plunges in. I'm glad he's acting so cool, but I'm embarrassed at how soft and mushy my waist must feel to him. I really have got to get in shape this summer.

We arrive to find Kelly and Ziba sipping piña coladas through straws, which strikes me not only as elegant but sexy, too. “We made it!” I shout over the noise.

Ziba glances around like she's Mata fucking Hari. “Try not to be too conspicuous,” she says, which seems entirely unnecessary, considering we're surrounded by men so flaming they're in danger of setting off the sprinkler system.

“Where are Paula and Natie?” I ask.

Kelly giggles into her piña colada. “Natie's been captured by a transvestite,” she says. “Someone called Miss Demeanor grabbed him like a handbag and we haven't seen him since.”

I look across the room and see a pair of Jackie O sunglasses peek out from behind the fleshy arm of someone who looks like a cross between Marilyn Monroe and a Teamster. A siren of a soprano starts to wail.

“Summertiiiiiiiiime . . . and the livin' is easy . . .”

I turn and there's Paula perched on top of the piano, practically fellating the microphone. So much for being inconspicuous. I venture off into the sea of bodies in search of beer. I'm halfway through the crowd when I find myself face-to-face with a skinny waiter holding a tray of drinks over his head.

“Oh, thank
God
you're here,” he cries, handing me his tray. “Be a doll and deliver these to that table of horny Jesuits over there, will ya'?”

“I don't work . . .”

“Thanks, hon,” he says. “I'm on as soon as this drag queen gets done singin' ‘Summertime.'”

I look at the drinks in my hand and decide that the unexpected presence of alcohol paid for by the one holy, catholic, and apostolic church is surely a sign from God, so I bring the tray back to our table. None of us can tell what the horny Jesuits ordered, but it sure as hell ain't communion wine. We applaud loudly for Paula, who tries to do an encore, but is pushed aside (rather rudely, I think) by the skinny waiter, who performs “I Could Have Danced All Night.” In Julie Andrews's key.

I watch Paula as she makes her way through the crowd, accepting compliments and working the room like she's the mayor of Gaytown. “Look,” she cries, handing me a business card advertising something called
Les Femmes Magnifiques.
“A producer gave me his card, a
real
producer!” She points across the room at a roly-poly man chatting up Miss Demeanor. “It's a revue right here in the Village. It means
Magnificent Women.
Isn't that
enthralling
?”

After downing what we decide must be scotch and holy water I decide to do a number myself. I slither through the crowd as everyone belts out “Anything Goes,” and squeeze in next to the pianist, a balding guy with a happy Humpty-Dumpty face.

“Greetings and salivations, cutie,” he says. “Waddya wanna sing?”

“Do you know ‘Corner of the Sky' from
Pippin
?”

He gives me a look like, “This is a gay piano bar. Of course I know ‘Corner of the Sky' from
Pippin,”
and segues into the introduction. I hop up on the lid and sit cross-legged, smiling in as puckish and beguiling a manner as I can, which, being puckish and beguiling by nature, is pretty easy. Within a few measures there's a perceptible change in the atmosphere. The crowd grows quieter and some of them smile knowingly at one another. They know talent when they see it, I'm sure.

The crowd gives me a big hand and someone has the good sense to shout “Encore,” so I graciously invite Paula up to sing our surefire showstopper, “Carried Away” from
On the Town,
which is something of a life philosophy for us. As far as we're concerned, more is more.

The number goes over even bigger, and since Kelly and Doug have pushed their way to the front it seems only natural to hand them the mics and insist they perform “Summer Nights.” Doug looks embarrassed at first, but the guys in the crowd cheer him on, particularly when he starts doing Revolting Renée's pelvis-shaking choreography. No fewer than four men give him their phone numbers before the night is over.

I look at him and Kelly and feel a subversive sense of pride knowing that a high-school football player and a former cheerleader are performing for a roomful of ecstatic gay men. I look over at Paula, who's behaving as if she were Dolly Levi returned to Harmonia Gardens, then Ziba, chain-smoking foreign cigarettes in the corner and refusing to sing, and then Natie, who is in serious danger of losing his virginity in a way he never intended, and an almost evangelistic sense of purpose overtakes me. I realize that it is my duty to be the missionary for this Summer of Magic and Mischief; that I am to lead the Play People Parade like the Pied Piper or the Dr Pepper guy. I am to be my friends' Peter Pan, stealing them away to Neverland where you never grow up.

My objective clear, I leap onto the piano bench and encourage the crowd to sing along and soon the entire bar is swaying and singing together “Tell me more, tell me more.” It's almost overwhelming to be at the center of all that energy and enthusiasm (I mean, just the sheer volume alone—do you have any idea just how loud a hundred gay men can be?), but I'm buoyed by the tide of goodwill that surges around me.

This is going to be the best summer of our lives.

T
he day after we go into the city
I sit down and come up with a schedule. Missionary of Magic and Mischief or not, I have serious work to do.

First, there's my body. I've simply got to get it in shape this summer—not for vanity's sake, mind you; an actor's body is his instrument and mine is way out of tune. It's not so much that I'm overweight; it's that I'm both too skinny and too fat in all the wrong places. Soft. I read somewhere that if you get up just an hour earlier every day you can gain fifteen whole days a year, so I've resolved to rise each morning for a brisk jog (I sleep way too much, anyway) followed by some push-ups and sit-ups before going down to the Workshop to choreograph the kids' show which, no matter what Paula says, is indeed a real job because I'm being paid for it. (She's just jealous because I'm amassing a professional credit and she isn't.) Then after a light and healthy lunch I'll go over to Aunt Glo's and spend the afternoon poolside reading
The Complete Works of Shakespeare,
taking occasional breaks to swim laps and develop a swimmer's V-shaped torso.

I'm really quite amazed at how simple it is, once I've planned it out. There are nine weeks left in the summer, and thirty-seven Shakespeare plays, which averages out to about four plays a week, or roughly one every other day, which seems completely doable. In fact, if I can get through one a day I could even move on to some lighter reading—y'know, like Chekhov or Ibsen.

This summer is my big chance to improve myself and I'm determined to give up sugar, caffeine, alcohol, red meat, white flour, and fried foods, as well as finally learn to meditate and become the spiritually evolved person I know that I truly am inside. I am my mother's son, after all.

A week later I find myself feeling weak and craving a Whopper and fries, which probably means there's some essential oil in them that my body is accustomed to getting and needs. What's more, having just endured three hours watching Ingmar Bergman's
Fanny and Alexander
on Ziba's recommendation, we all could use some junk food to redress the balance.

“Why is it there's no Burger Queen?” Ziba asks as the six of us pull up to the drive-through. “There's a Burger King.”

“Maybe he married the Dairy Queen,” Natie says.

Paula pulls up to the window cautiously. Maneuvering Aunt Glo's Lincoln Continental, a vehicle so enormous we call it the Lincoln Continental Divide, is like trying to dock the
Queen Mary.
Paula requests six crowns with our order. “Everyone
has
to have a crown,” she says, “you just
have
to,” such a Paula thing to say, and she tells us we each need to decide which king we are.