The Follow Spot
Eric Wilson
I. TAKE OFF THAT CLOWN HEAD
I was the first employee who had to wear the new clown suit. A large white plastic globe fit over my head, with a bulbous clown’s nose and perky cap stuck on top. Even late morning in L.A. it was already in the 80s; I was sweltering and feeling claustrophobic.
My instructions were to hop around and do little dance steps as I waved at passing cars, pointing at Speedy the Clown’s. But people just kept on going, laughing and yelling at me things like “loser” and “dickhead,” the words muffled as they echoed around in the hard interior of the globe.
I was wondering if I would ever again feel so humiliated when I saw a lowrider car with about six guys in it slowing down. One of them—he had a shaved head and vines tattooed up his neck—called out to me, “Hey, faggot, take off that clown head—I wanna see your face!”
I ran back inside Speedy’s and upstairs to the tiny locker room to change back into my uniform. Cindi, the Assistant Manager, came in to ask me how the new clown suit had worked out. “You can’t ever ask me to do that again!” I told her, trying to look forceful, standing there in my underwear. I crossed my arms and held her gaze until she finally said, “Okay, fine. We have a new hire coming in tomorrow morning. I’ll put that in his job description.”
* * * * *
I was 19 in 1975 and still living at home with my mother. I had just finished two years at a community college, where the most prominent departments seemed to be Cosmetology and Automotive Technology. UCLA had accepted me to transfer in the fall; my Pell Grant had come through, and working at Speedy’s all summer would give me the rest of the money I needed.
Mom asked me why I never brought anyone home. Most of my old friends had left L.A. to go off to college, but even in high school I had started drifting apart from my classmates. Most of the guys talked about “boobs” or “the ball game,” and I wasn’t all that interested in either. The more they got excited about girls, the more shut out I felt.
Girls thought I was “really cute.” But I was starting to notice guys who were “really cute.” I was forced to draw conclusions I didn’t want to draw, so I found myself backing away. With high school and the community college behind me, and UCLA yet to come, I was living between lives. Maybe this summer I could figure out who I was; or create someone for me to be.
II. MADE FOR THE STAGE
“Would you like crispy fries with that?”
I felt terrible asking this—I knew what the oil in the deep fryer looked like by the end of the day. At Speedy the Clown’s we also had to ask, “Will you be eating in our dining area?” The “dining area” was cramped and soulless, with small tables and chairs bolted down solidly into the cement.
Now, after the lunch-hour rush, I was doing down-time things like stocking straws, when I heard a voice chirp: “Yoo-hoo!” I stepped back to my register. “Why, look at those rosy cheeks!” the woman exclaimed. “Straight out of D. H. Lawrence! Ruddy as that fox!”
She was large-boned, wearing a ruffled blouse and an elegant tweed skirt, her hoop earrings the size of beer coasters. “If I had cheeks that rosy,” she told me, in an elusive foreign accent, “that’s one less pact I’d have to make with the devil.”
I had no idea what to say to her, except: “Welcome to Speedy’s. May I take your order please?”
“You have such a sweet face,” she went on. “You look as if you’ve never been betrayed.” She added that my “line-reading” of the crispy fries led her to suspect I was an actor. “And with those bright blue eyes and black hair—you’re made for the stage!”
Never before had a customer initiated a conversation. This woman was looking at me very intensely. I could see the wheels turning around in her mind, but I had no idea what she might be thinking.
All I could manage to say was, “Uh . . . Would you like a tasty apple pie for dessert?” This was one more thing you were supposed to ask, but a positive reply meant dropping a frozen pie into the collective vat of grease. The pie would hover while frying but sometimes it would vanish, sinking down like a U-boat; then you’d have to go get another one while the customer asked you why it was taking so long. We all hated it when people ordered an apple pie.
“I’d love an apple pie!” she cried out.
* * * * *
“Made for the stage”? It sounded like a joke. My debut as Speedy the Clown had almost gotten me attacked.
After work I picked up a copy of the Free Press—the Freep—and discovered an article about “equity waiver” theater in L.A. Theaters with fewer than 99 seats were exempt from having to pay union scale. The Freep said they were great places for actors to get experience and exposure and for theater-goers to see exciting, experimental work. An equity-waiver place called The Outpost, in West L.A., was putting on Thornton Wilder’s Our Town; I reserved a ticket for Sunday evening.
I found the theater on a quiet side street. Glass cases outside displayed glossy cast photos. In the lobby I read the program while I waited. There seemed to be a lot of people in Grover’s Corners. Mrs. Louella Soames. Joe Stoddard. Wally Webb. Dead Man. Dead Woman.
There were almost as many people on the small stage as in the audience. As I sat in the front row, Joe Stoddard was so close to me I could see the spotlights reflected in the liquid of his eyes. I had never seen light in anyone’s eyes like this before.
As I was leaving, a young usher handed me a questionnaire that included a box to check if you’d like to volunteer at The Outpost. I checked the box.
When I got home from work the next night, my mom told me I was to call Tamara “at the theater.”
* * * * *
They asked me to run the follow spot at a children’s show. One of the tech crew walked me through how to aim a pool of light. I was to direct the follow spot slightly ahead of the actor, so that when he moved forward, he would always step into the beam. If a second actor entered the scene, I could enlarge the pool of light by widening the iris of the spotlight.
We had a week of rehearsals. It wasn’t until afterwards that I realized none of the six cast members had spoken a word to me. Was it because I was trapped up in my tiny booth at the back of the auditorium?
At the Saturday and Sunday afternoon performances, full of squirmy, squally children, I felt really happy for the first time in a long time. I had mastered the follow spot, and even if I hadn’t made any friends I was a part of a group.
After the second performance, one of the crew asked me if I’d like to be The Outpost’s house manager on Sunday nights, starting next week. Well, why not? I never had plans for Sunday nights.
* * * * *
I arrived at 7:00 on Sunday for the 8:00 performance of Our Town. My job included deciding when the house was “full.” There was virtually no foot traffic on this quiet side street, so I couldn’t hop up and down in a clown suit and lure passers-by to come in, even for free.
My heart sank when 8:15 rolled around and “full house” meant six people. Reluctantly, I made the decision to dim the lights. Tonight there were actually fewer people in the audience than on the stage. So much for the “exposure” that was supposed to jump-start their careers.
Watching Our Town had been arduous enough the first time around, so I waited out in the lobby. From behind me I heard a loud voice: “You! It’s you again! The ruddy boy with the crispy fries!” I recognized the woman from Speedy’s, dressed tonight in a butterscotch turtleneck, the same tweed skirt, and high leather boots.
She introduced herself as Bettina Schroff, from Berlin. Now I realized who her sultry accent reminded me of—Marlene Dietrich. Bettina told me she was the new “dramaturge” of The Outpost—a special kind of creative director who takes charge of everything. “No more high-school-play nonsense like Our Town! Just watch—I’m going to set Los Angeles on its ear!”
For her first production, Bettina explained to me, she had chosen a piece by the Austrian playwright Peter Handke entitled Offending the Audience. Handke calls for the actors to stand and shout insults at the audience. “You may not understand the point; but you will! It’s very important that people react to things, that they not just sit there like lumps. I’m German. I know where passivity can lead!” She was growing increasingly agitated as she spoke. “The English philosopher Edmund Burke once said, ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’ Do you see? You can’t just pretend everything’s okay—when maybe it’s not!”
It was hard for me to absorb all this. But she was continuing:
“And I want to use Brecht’s ‘estrangement’ effect. What he means is that you have to take what is familiar and make it strange. The audience needs to keep a critical detachment from what’s happening on stage. And I think I’ve figured out a way to do this. The young women in the play will wear black floor-length dresses, and the five young men will appear in the nude. This will keep the audience off balance.”
I imagine it will! I thought to myself. But I couldn’t see how insults shouted by a group of naked guys would keep good men from doing nothing. Well, anyway, I thought, at least this ought to fill the house.
“I have secured a large canvas for a backdrop,” Bettina told me, now that she had unwound. “Tomorrow night the cast will start painting it. You must join us. Come at 7:00!”
III. COUNTING BACKWARDS
Since I didn’t want to be the first one there, I arrived at 7:15. I knocked on the glass doors to the lobby until a guy around my age appeared and let me in. His smooth pale skin, dark eyes and tangle of wavy black hair stunned me. I looked him in the eye because I was afraid to look anywhere else: he was naked.
“Hi there,” he said, “I’m Tim. Tim Fisk.”
“Brandon,” I told him, shaking his hand. “Brandon Robb. Bettina asked me to help paint. But—should you be standing here like that? People can see you from the street!”
“Oh, right,” he said. But he stayed where he was. “Did Bettina tell you that we’re going to be naked?”
“She did. But why are you naked now?”
“Oh,” he said sheepishly. “Bettina said if any of us got, you know, aroused, she’d be humiliated. She decided that if we got used to being naked all the time—painting the backdrop and stuff—then it would become second nature when we’re on stage.”
Backstage a small group was looking at a large canvas spread out on the floor, the guys naked, the girls clothed. “So come on, ” Tim Fisk whispered, “aren’t you going strip off, too?” I felt myself redden. Seeing Tim naked had gotten me . . . aroused, but I thought I was safe in my clothes. “I—I’m not going to be in the play,” I told him.
“Don’t matter nohow,” he said in an “aw-shucks” accent. “You gotta show us guys some solidarity.”
Being naked in a locker-room was one thing. But in front of the girls—and at some point Bettina herself? I was tempted to bolt, right then and there, but I couldn’t bring myself to walk away from Tim. He was disarmingly handsome, and I had hopes he might become a friend.
I remembered learning to swim at the Y when I was twelve. For some unknown reason, suits weren’t allowed. As long as I was in the water, being naked was fine. But standing by myself up on the diving board was another matter. To keep from getting aroused, I would start counting backwards, by threes, to force my thoughts elsewhere. Now, as I peeled off my clothes in front of the girls—and in front of Tim Fisk—I started to count: 101, 98, 95, 92, 89 . . . .
The other guys looked to be no older than their early 20s. Whatever audition process Bettina had carried out, she had managed to find young actors who were surely at their best when disrobed.
On the empty stage they had unrolled the huge canvas for the backdrop. Tonight’s task was to crawl out onto it, on all fours, and start painting the whole thing with a gesso primer.
By 10:00 o’clock we had finished. Having scrabbled back into the safety of my clothes, I could look at Tim without having to count numbers backwards. As I was tying my shoelaces, he asked if he could treat me to a beer at an Irish pub a few blocks away. “I’m 19,” I told him. “They’ll card me and throw me out.”
“They’re Irish,” was his reply. “They’d probably serve you if you were nine. And besides, with your coloring, you look more Irish than the Irish.”
* * * * *
Tim found a corner table for us and came back with two Guinnesses. “Cheers!” he said, before he started drinking out of the bottle.
I was afraid that as an actor, Tim would “perform” for me. Instead, he started asking me about myself. He elicited that I was living at home with my mom; that my dad had died of a brain aneurysm when I was 10. I didn’t mention I was still sleeping in the same narrow bed I had slept in when I was 12. I said I would be transferring to UCLA and majoring in English.
I didn’t tell him I had never had sex. That I had never even kissed a girl. Or a boy. I didn’t know how to read him. It seemed too good to be true that he wanted to be my friend. I hoped he might want something more.
When Tim came back with two more Guinnesses, I switched the topic to him. “Well, what can I say?” He took a long swig from the bottle. “I’m from Omaha and went to the U. of Nebraska in Lincoln. Being away from home for the first time—and kind of overwhelmed by all that Cornhusker swagger—I was so shy that my advisor suggested I take a theater class. I had my doubts, but I discovered that when I was up on stage it was totally different. I had this—this confidence—just so long as I wasn’t Tim Fisk.
“I was surprised to find that, apparently, I could act. For the senior-year play I got the lead in Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth, and then, after graduation, I did some local theater and summer stock—the Angel of Death in Albee’s American Dream, things like that. I landed a leading role in a play in Duluth, Minnesota. The Big Time.”
Here Tim grew silent. Finally he said: “I’ll omit the sudden gap in my résumé.” He started to continue, but stopped himself. Finally he said: “I’m okay now. I’m taking my meds. …. Sometimes. Anyway, after a month, they agreed to release me.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.
“My drama coach tracked me down at my parents’ and told me about the new equity waiver system out here in L.A. Nebraska is the Beef State—that’s how my folks made their money. They agreed to support me while I ‘try my luck’ because the therapist said it’s important for me to be happy. They still think it’s just a passing phase and after a year or two I’ll go home and marry a ‘nice girl’ and settle down in Omaha.”
He paused and looked down at the table. “Their primary goal is for me not to have another meltdown.” He hesitated, then held out his palms. When I looked closely I could see the white line of a scar running all along the top of each wrist, invisible at first glance. Quickly he pulled his hands away and put them down in his lap, under the table.
“Maybe we should call it a night,” he said, standing up and not looking at me.
IV. HANDCUFFS ON THE FLOWERS
The next night I got there right at 7:00 with the rest of them. We guys shucked off our clothes as if we were down at the old swimming hole, and waited for Bettina to explain her Vision.
She showed us a photo of Jackson Pollock down on his haunches, an open can of paint in his left hand, while from the cup of his right hand he’s watching the paint drizzle down onto the canvas. I had never seen someone in the actual throes of creation. What was it he saw on the canvas as he began to fill it with splats of paint?
Bettina wanted our work to capture the same mood as Pollack—a “controlled spontaneity.” It turned out that only Tim and a guy named Adam Chambers “got” what she had in mind. Adam had long blond hair and the lithe body of a gymnast; as he stood next to me, naked, I had to look away and count numbers backwards again. Tim and Adam hunkered down like a pair of Pollocks, drizzling down irregular “skeins” of black acrylic paint, each of them letting a thin stream of paint trace its way along the canvas, following a logic that was emerging from deep inside his own mind.
At 10:00 Bettina came in to take a look at their handiwork. “Wonderful!” she said. “We’ll let this dry and then tomorrow night you can add some color.”
As we were dressing Tim asked me if I’d like to go back to the Irish pub with him. “So how did you hook up with Bettina?” I asked him, as he brought us our bottles of Guinness.
“Ah yes, Bettina” he said, after taking a deep swallow. “In Europe she’s famous. Or maybe I should say infamous. In Berlin she put on a play by this Spaniard in exile named Fernando Arrabal. It’s called And They Put Handcuffs on the Flowers. It’s about how political prisoners are being treated under the Fascist dictator Francisco Franco. My God, that guy’s been ruling Spain since 1936!
“She took it in such an extreme direction that it got a lot of press. I read a detailed article about this in a theater magazine, written by a woman who was in the audience.”
Tim took a long swig of his Guinness before continuing.
“Arrabal’s play actually starts while people are still outside in the lobby. Someone sneaks up behind them, wearing a hood. They’re yanked away from whoever they came with and dragged into a tiny theater area. The guard—your own personal Fascist guard—whispers something like, ‘You swine, you’re entering the penitentiary now.’
“Well, this play was just the ticket for Bettina. But she took it a notch further. She went out and found some Berlin street kids to be the guards—to grab the audience members by force and then drag them off into the small, claustrophobic room.”
“Wow,” I told him, “that sounds pretty frightening.”
“Wait—it gets worse!” Tim said. “These street toughs got carried away. On opening night a woman fainted after they grabbed her in a choke hold, and a man’s arm was twisted behind him so hard it dislocated his shoulder. There were shouts from the audience and someone used the pay phone to call the police and an ambulance.
“When the police arrived they went into the small stage area, beaming their flashlights around like searchlights. The audience thought they were Fascist militia and ran away, terrified.”
Tim leaned forward, looking more intense: “The only one left was a young actor who had been strung up from the rafters, hanging upside-down naked! They managed to get the kid down, but he was locked into thick metal ankle cuffs and no one could get them off him. Finally they had to call the fire department to come cut him loose. He just sat there, still naked, his head in his hands, crying out of control.”
“You’re kidding! And this was a success? Bettina sounds really dangerous. Why would anyone ever hire her again?”
“Well, the theater company asked her to leave—the run was cancelled—but she had left her mark. Everyone knew who she was! ‘Mayhem in Avant-Garde Theater’ made headlines. Bettina was hailed as the ‘future of adventurous stagecraft.’ That’s how I first heard about her. And when I read that she was here in L.A., I knew I had to audition for her. Everyone who’s anyone in the theater will come see this! Can you imagine the exposure?”
I was worried about Tim. But there was no violence in Offending the Audience, and he didn’t seem to mind being naked. People would see this play and surely it would further his acting career. Then he would be safe from Omaha and his parents and the stockyards. And maybe he would be happy.
I hoped he was taking his meds.
V. THOU RATSBANE! THOU BULL’S-PIZZLE!
The next night Bettina brought cans of two colors of acrylic paint, and again, as if by instinct, Tim and Adam divvied up their work. Tim’s paint was a pale lavender and Adam’s a dull orange. Each of them sank down to his haunches and began to release very calculated blots and splashes of color from the patterns in his mind. What was it that Tim Fisk and Adam Chambers saw? At 10:00 o’clock, as we all stood around admiring their work, Bettina appeared and proclaimed it brilliant. So that, then, was the end of the painting.
Bettina told the cast that before they could have the first table-read, she was going to rewrite most of Handke’s text. “The prologue goes on far too long and it’s way too tame: ‘Don’t inhale. Don’t exhale. Don’t shift in your seat.’ That kind of thing. It’s not offensive—it’s the language of pussies! Well, we’re going to make radical changes!”
I had the sinking realization that my presence would no longer be needed. I wasn’t in the cast, I had no lines to speak. Probably they wouldn’t ask me back, unless they wanted me to serve as house manager.
Tim insisted on buying a few final rounds at the Irish Pub. But he kept looking down at the table. A light seemed to have gone out of his eyes, and for once he said almost nothing. Finally: “Hey, Brandon, let’s try to keep in touch.” I didn’t understand. He had insisted that I be naked with him even though I didn’t have to be, but this intimacy didn’t seem to have brought us close the way I had hoped. Tim wrote down his telephone number on a napkin, while I did the same for him. “I’ve got one of those new Phone-Mate machines,” he said, “so if I’m not home you can always leave a message.”
The next day, after my shift at Speedy the Clown’s, I went over to Sears and bought a Phone-Mate for Mom and me, just in case we might miss an important call.
* * * *
Tuesday night Mom and I were home reading when the phone rang. It was actually for me. I was excited to hear Tim Fisk’s voice; but he was clearly agitated.
“I think I’m fucked,” he said, by way of introduction. “You heard Bettina say that she pruned down the prologue? Well, she’s taking so many liberties with the printed text that she’s now entitled the play Bettina Schroff’s Offending the Audience.
“At last night’s cast meeting, she told us there has to be far more at stake. She wants to verbally attack the audience, using obscene and inflammatory insults. She wants to incite them to action. She wants us to be so insulting that the audience will have to react! That they’ll want to attack us back! She talked again about what happened in Germany. She said if you’re not paying attention, bad things can happen!”
Maybe Bettina was getting too carried away by her ideology. And anyway, people would probably just look at the naked guys and not care what they were saying.
“And although she’s fluent in English,” Tim continued, “she doesn’t know enough insults. So she’s given me and that blond kid—you know, Adam?—the assignment to come up with them. After the prologue, she wants Adam and me to start walking up the aisle, approaching audience members in their seats and standing directly in front of them.”
“Walking up the aisle? Confronting people face-to-face? That sounds pretty chancy. Are you sure she knows what she’s doing?”
“Bettina thinks Handke is too ‘mealy-mouthed.’ Insults like ‘You sell-outs. You deadbeats. You phonies.’ She wants us to come up with stuff that ‘packs a wallop.’ Things like ‘You snotnose! You douchebag! You twat!’”
“You mean you’re going to have to go up to some woman—naked—and call her a twat?”
“O Christ! I’m trying not to think of how this will actually play out. And meanwhile Adam is supposed to research Shakespearean insults, so that ‘bull’s-pizzle’ and ‘ratsbane’ will counterbalance ‘pissface’ and ‘pussy.’”
“Where are you calling from?” I asked. His voice sounded muffled.
“I’m downtown in a phone booth, at the Main Library. They have volumes of books on slang and I’ve been here copying out insults. They even let me into Special Collections for two of the books.”
All I could think to say was: “But how is this going to be entertaining? Won’t people just walk out? Won’t the play be a disaster?”
Tim sounded panicked. “I was pinning all my hopes on this. Do you know what this means? I’ll end up back in Omaha. Living with my parents again, where they can keep a watchful eye over me, making sure I’m taking my meds. My acting career will be over. — I’m fucked! Truly and totally fucked!”
With that, Tim hung up. I remembered the fiasco of Bettina’s production in Berlin, where they hadn’t even finished the play before it turned into a riot. Tim was probably right.
And if he went back to Omaha, I’d never see him again.
VI. WHAT’S THIS I SEE BEFORE ME?
I got there early on opening night. Handke wanted the ushers to be “formal and ceremonious,” and Bettina thought I would be perfect. Tim had called me to say he had a navy blazer I’d look terrific in. Bettina briefed me on my duties as an usher; I was to be the very embodiment of gravitas, as specified by Handke. I felt quite grand wearing Tim’s navy blazer.
The house was sold out, which must have been a first for The Outpost. I suspected a number of people in “The Industry” were in attendance. Men with thinning hair were sporting long pony-tails; women wore tight designer jeans. As an usher, I led them down my aisle to their seats.
Bettina had specified “no late seating,” but by 8:00 everyone seemed to be there. I closed the doors leading onto my aisle and stood next to the last row. The house lights went out and the closed curtain was suddenly bathed in a crisp bold glow. Slowly the curtains parted and there were the eight players. The girls were wearing long black dresses, and the boys stood there stark naked as if posing for a Life Drawing class. There were both gasps and giggles from the audience. A woman in the third row pulled out her opera glasses.
They began to recite Handke’s prologue, or rather what was left of it after Bettina’s surgery. I noticed that the Pollack-inspired backdrop looked stunning, but I doubt that’s where anyone else looked.
After a while the play moved into its second part. In synchronicity Adam Chambers and Tim Fisk hopped off the stage and went up to random theater-goers. Immediately two follow spots kicked in, illuminating them both. The sharp lighting lit up their naked bodies in a graphic bas relief. Adam and Tim had their timing down, so neither cut into the other’s lines. I was amused by Adam’s Shakespearian insults: “You bootless clotpole!” he called out. “You lumpish flap-dragon! You whey-faced loon!”
People remained rigid in their seats, not knowing how to react. Maybe they thought this was Great Art and they were missing the point.
Slowly Adam and Tim were working their way up their respective aisles like ticket takers or panhandlers. Finally Tim reached the second row from the back, very near where I was standing solemnly in his blazer. Seated on the aisle was a burly guy in a buzz cut wearing a leather jacket. He didn’t seem amused by any of this. In the glare of the follow spot, Tim looked him in the eye and proclaimed: “You panty waist! You lard ass! You candy ass!”
I noticed that Tim’s privates—now quite public—were right at Buzz Cut’s eye level. As Tim paused for effect, Buzz Cut spoke up loudly, sounding like an actor himself: “What’s this I see before me? Why, it looks like a dick—only smaller.” Tim stood there, caught off guard. Buzz Cut spoke again, this time for the entire theater to hear: “Look, numb-nuts, will you get that thing out of my face? I didn’t come here to see this!” People in the audience were craning their necks; was this part of the play? Was this part of Bettina’s genius?
What happened next seemed to unfold in slow motion. The guy with the buzz cut leapt up and shoved Tim with such force that he fell backwards onto the sloping aisle. I threw myself on top of Buzz Cut, who was on top of Tim. Some of the men in the audience jumped up from their aisle seats, apparently thinking this was interactive theater and that a grand free-for-all was part of the performance. As we rolled around in a tangle, I heard the clatter of people getting up and running. I stayed in the fray, pummeling at random. I had never in my life been involved in a fight and my heart was beating so wildly I thought it would burst. Tim ended up on his belly, with me on top of him, hitting the back of his head as hard as I could, pounding him with both fists in a fury. Why can’t I kiss you? Why can’t two guys kiss? Why did I ever meet you? His eyes were clenched shut and his face pushed tightly up against the scuffed wooden floor. I think I was hoping to knock him out cold, but then came the wail of the siren, and the tight cluster of wrangling men broke apart and ran off as quickly as possible, leaving me alone with Tim Fisk.
We fell onto our backs, lying there panting and disoriented. Then we heard approaching footsteps. Tim, dazed, barely conscious, pulled his legs up tight against his chest and buried his face in his arms. His back was so taut that in the blaze of the follow spot you could see its crisp bifurcation and lower down even the sharp bumps of his vertebrae.
I took off Tim’s ruined blazer and slipped it over his shoulders. The movement of his back was subtle but I could tell he was crying. Standing above us appeared a young male officer and a hefty blonde woman. The man in uniform had a sympathetic face and an amused look. “I knew that woman was nuts!” he said, almost in triumph. She came to the station to announce—almost as a challenge—that the play they would be performing had nudity in it. “Hey,” he had told her. “We’re cool. We’ve read about Equus and Hair. And even O! Calcutta. These are the times we’re living in! Just keep everything professional; just keep it on the stage.” And here was Tim, sitting there naked, almost up to the last row.
The blonde officer knelt down beside us, looking not angry but rather, if anything, maternal. “I think you boys have been had,” she told us, looking over at Tim. “Go get some clothes on. And turn out the lights when you leave. We’ll call the owner of the theater tomorrow.”
The male officer added, “If I were you, I wouldn’t expect a second performance.”
I felt helpless; Tim just sat there sobbing, vehemently now, cloaked only in his ripped blue blazer. Awkwardly I knelt down behind him and pulled him up close to me, my chest pressed against his back and my arms around him. But he didn’t look around; he didn’t move.
And that’s how we sat, in a frozen tableau, still in the unrelenting eye of the follow spot. I have no idea how long we stayed there like that.
VII. YOU WHEY-FACED LOON
I loved being at UCLA. Cosmetology and Automotive Technology—if they were taught here—were kept out of sight. A stroll up Bruin Walk led to the stately brick towers of Royce Hall. And the adjacent sculpture garden was a perfect place to lie back on the grass and think about the world.
I still hadn’t sorted out the events of the summer. In retrospect The Outpost seemed surreal. On a whim I drove by the theater a few days after our performance. The building was locked up tight, the glass cases out front were emptied of all those hopeful glossy faces.
Bettina had told me I was “made for the stage,” but I knew I was no actor. I did want to try my hand at something creative, however, and signed up for a fiction-writing workshop. I had thought of perhaps a short story called “The Follow Spot,” writing about Bettina and Tim Fisk. But the problem was, the story didn’t have an ending.
Eventually Tim stopped crying and let me help him stand up and go backstage. I had to steady him as he pulled on his clothes. His hands were trembling so badly I ended up having to button his shirt, and then those big metal buttons on the fly of his Levi’s. The whole time neither of us said a word. As soon as I had finished lacing up his sneakers he just took off, half lurching, half running as he bolted out of the theater, not looking back.
That was the last time I ever saw him. I tried calling, only to learn his phone had been disconnected. For all I knew he had gone back to Omaha, showing up for the casting call at his family’s stockyards. I wondered what—if anything—I had ever meant to him.
After a few weeks I fell into a routine. Late afternoons I liked hearing the football marching band practice down on the field: the sound carried up the hill, with the blast of all those trumpets and trombones and the rolling thunder of the bass drums. And you could hear the shouts from the men’s swim team in the outdoor pools down below. Even though I didn’t belong to either group, they made me feel I was a part of UCLA.
I liked to eat dinner on campus, and then go over to Powell Library to study. One night I was finished at around 9:00, but it felt too early to head home. I sat on the library steps, watching people go by, when I heard a voice addressing me: “Is that you, you whey-faced loon?”
It was the guy from The Outpost—the one who was so unsettlingly sensual. His hair was cut shorter now, although he was still strikingly blond. “I remember you,” I told him. “You’re Adam, right?”
“And you’re—Brandon?” He sat down on the steps. “You know, at The Outpost you never said a word to me. You almost made a point of it. I could never figure out why.”
“I was—intimidated by you,” I told him, leaving it at that. “Hey,” I surprised myself by adding, “do you want to go over to the café in Kerckhoff? They stay open until 11:00. I’ll buy you a coffee.” He looked dubious at first, but then said okay, why not.
As we sat at a small corner table, I told him I had volunteered at The Outpost because I hoped to make friends, but that didn’t seem to work. It had all ended so abruptly, with everyone suddenly scattered away.
“You seemed pretty interested in that dark-haired kid, Tim Fisk,” Adam said. “I watched you watching him. It was pretty intense.” After a short pause he asked: “Was he your first big crush?”
I ended up telling him Tim’s full story. And how after the riot he had vanished. Adam looked serious as he took it all in.
“Sometimes damaged people just stay damaged,” he told me. “You can’t save them—even if you do everything you can for them.” The way he said this, I suspected he might have had a similar experience.
“I’m majoring in Theater Arts,” Adam went on. “But I’ve started to wonder about my future in acting. What I enjoyed most at The Outpost was painting the backdrop. It was the only thing that seemed non-crazy.”
“I was really in awe of you,” I told him. “You seemed to know what to do just by instinct.”
“You think so? I seriously doubt that I can paint—drizzling is a far cry from rendering. But I’ve always been interested in art, and actually creating it helped me reach a decision. So . . . I’m switching my major to Art History.”
He took a sip of his coffee. “When I was a kid—maybe 10 or 11—on those weekends that my dad had custody of me, one of our favorite things to do together was go to museums and galleries.” Adam told me about a work by an Ed Kienholz that was first exhibited at the newly-opened County Museum. “It was an installation—‘Back Seat Dodge ’38’—that showed a grappling young couple making out in a car. They were made out of chicken wire, but wow, there was a public outrage like you wouldn’t believe! Dad always treated me like an adult, though. He took me to see some great stuff.”
“Hey, would you be willing to take me with you to a museum someday?” I asked suddenly on impulse. “I don’t really know what all’s out there.”
Adam gave this some thought. “Well, I can check the Freep to see what the current exhibitions are. But there’s always the permanent collections at the County and the Norton Simon. If you’d like, we could meet here at Kerckhoff tomorrow night at 9:00 and go over the options.”
Adam asked me about my major; I mentioned that I had a short story due in three weeks and no idea what to write about. “Bettina!” he said immediately. I gave him a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding look, so he added: “She’s another damaged person. She could be brilliant, but she keeps getting carried away trying to prove something. I bet if she calmed down and directed, say, Our Town, it could be electrifying. Try to get inside her mind!”
I wondered if my writing skills would be up to this. “By the way,” I asked, “what ever happened to her?”
“Good question. I read in the trades about the disaster at The Outpost, but after that she seems just to have vanished.”
It was almost 11:00, closing time. Adam stood up to shrug his backpack onto his shoulders. Outside on Bruin Walk he said “See you here tomorrow night, then,” before I headed up the hill and he started heading down. I hadn’t gotten very far when I heard him call out, “Hey, you really look good—even in clothes!”
It was a moment before I realized he meant me. When I turned around, he was gone.
__________
Eric Wilson’s fiction and non-fiction pieces have been published in New England Review, Carve, Literary Hub, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Massachusetts Review, Carolina Quarterly and Epoch. He has been in the Pushcart Prize and O. Henry Prize Stories anthologies. After a Fulbright year in Berlin he earned a Stanford Ph.D. in German Literature. He taught German at UCLA and Pomona College and fiction writing at UCLA Extension.