The Dangerous Animals Club Page 20

  “Die,” I said.

  “Yeah. I mean other than that?” she said.

  I told her, “Well, without the brace I can’t walk. I can’t turn my head. I can’t even hold my head up.” I thought for a second and said, “Maybe I could sit in a high-backed swivel chair and use the back of the chair to support my head and talk, but no one could touch me. No makeup. No hair. Nothing.”

  About three weeks later they called back and said they had written a new death scene. I came in with my son Robert to help me with my brace. I rehearsed with the brace on. I removed it when they said “Action” and handed it to Robert, who sat under the camera. When they called “Cut,” my son helped me put the brace back on.

  Kristen Bell had to discover my dead, brainless body and deliver an emotional monologue. She was terrorized about working with me for fear she would vibrate the chair too much and kill me. I could hear her heartbeat as she stood next to me. Her hands shook as she touched my chair. She saw my head bobble and she started crying. After the shot she knelt down beside me and asked if I was all right. I assured her everything was fine. I guess it was. That was the version of the scene they used: Kristen terrified and me with a broken neck.

  As I left the set, Greg Beeman thanked me for coming in and shooting in spite of everything. “Stephen, just because you’re dead, remember, this is Heroes. Don’t be surprised if we call you back for more episodes,” he said.

  As Robert helped me back to the car, I laughed to myself. Only in Hollywood could they kill you, cut off your head, eat your brains, and tell you with a straight face, “You may be back.” And then I thought about it a little more and realized that only in Hollywood was it possible that they could be telling the truth. And at the end of the day, that’s what makes it all so wonderful.

  17.

  THE POLITICS OF ROMANCE

  IN THE DEAD of winter in 1974, Beth and I took a once-in-a-lifetime trip to London and Paris. I say “once-in-a-lifetime” because no one can be that stupid more than once and survive. We traveled with seven hundred pounds of luggage and a pillow from home. We traveled with no hotel reservations. We slept in a brothel. We rode in the luggage car of a train (I made this leg of the journey wearing two wet wool suits, covered in table scraps).

  On the way home from France, Beth took a detour. She went back to Mississippi to visit family. Mom and Dad picked me up at the airport and drove me back to our home in Oak Cliff, Texas. My childhood home. But something in me had separated from my past. Now I felt like a man. Sort of. My mother still did my laundry, but I could have done it if put to the test. Beth and I had our own apartment near the SMU campus. We slept together. We had our own dishes that we bought at the dime store. We gave parties and had our own group of friends. Our futures lay before us—unlike Mom and Dad, who were busy picking me up at the airport.

  I told Mom that we’d had a good time in Europe. We saw lots of theater. We saw Laurence Olivier. We saw Buckingham Palace and the Eiffel Tower. I left out the part about Beth and I getting thrown out of our hotel for punching a toilet. It sounded too irresponsible. I did mention Michael, the German art student who vomited on me, because that story not only painted me as a victim but also explained why I needed to get my suits dry-cleaned.

  I arrived home. The smell of pot roast filled the air. I took a shower and dressed in some of my high school clothes that were in my closet. Mom unpacked my suitcase to prepare for the massive wash, dry, and fold routine.

  Mom always did my laundry, even after I moved in with Beth. Mom would call me at the apartment in the morning and say she would be by to pick up my dirty clothes. She would drive twenty-two miles to our place. She would stand at the bottom of the stairwell and call up that she had arrived. I would bring down a laundry bag. She never came upstairs. She felt the apartment was coated in sin. She would take the clothes and drive back to Oak Cliff. Wash, dry, and fold. Drive back twenty-two miles and leave the sack of clean laundry in the stairwell. Nothing crazy about that. In our defense, I was her little boy, and I was more than happy to accommodate a pathology if it meant clean laundry.

  As Mom cooked and washed, I made phone calls. First call was to Sarah. I was going to tell her that I was back in town, and she would have to leave our apartment. Sarah was a fellow student who needed a temporary place to stay over the winter break. Beth had offered our apartment without consulting me first—or ever. It meant that before going to Europe I would have to spend three days alone with Sarah in the apartment while Beth went back to Mississippi to find more clothes to take on the trip.

  Sarah was a product of the sixties. She was a natural-fiber, make-love-not-war kind of girl. She was in the drama department. She majored in posture. She was the straightest-walking person I have ever met. Her neck was a foot long.

  In our three days alone together I was afraid Sarah would want to engage me in some kind of Tantric yoga sex that would put my morality to the test. That didn’t happen. Instead she vanished into the bathroom for hours at a time, putting my bladder to the test. I was embarrassed to ask her why she spent so much time in there. I couldn’t imagine an answer that didn’t make me cringe. After a couple of days of running to the gas station to use their bathroom, I asked her if she was all right. She smiled and said yes, she was fine. She was using the bathroom to do her yoga meditations as it was so quiet and peaceful in there.

  So now three weeks later, I was back in Dallas and she would have to “om” somewhere else. No answer at the apartment phone. I called Beth to see if she had gotten to Mississippi safely. She had. She told me that Sarah sent a message that she had left the apartment a week ago. The bathroom was mine again.

  Beth and I chatted about the trip and our respective families. Before we hung up, we picked a good time to look at the stars. This was our custom when we were apart. Operating under the assumption that the night sky would always be the same wherever we were, we would pick an hour when we would both go outside and look up. Using the night sky as a vehicle, we could still be together. The final words of our phone call may have gone like this: “Tonight at nine. I’ll start at the Big Dipper. I love you.”

  Our stargazing was a little like someone who wants to be friends with Madonna in hopes her notoriety would be transferred by proximity—except Beth and I were hanging out with the eternal. Of course, real astronomers will tell you that the stars aren’t eternal at all and the Belt of Orion is not a belt. It is just an illusion created by the enormity of time and distance from Earth. But we weren’t astronomers, and we weren’t that interested in what was actually there. We wanted to create a new reality through the politics of romance.

  The next morning bright and early I drove the twenty-two miles from my childhood home to my new home, the one I shared with Beth. On the way, I got a haircut. For all of my bald readers, try to go back to that time when a haircut mattered. I got up from the barber’s chair smelling of talc and looked at the world traveler in the mirror. I liked what I saw. I was energized. I made a plan. I would go back and clean up the apartment from Sarah. I would wash the towels and the sheets and prepare for Beth’s arrival in a couple of days.

  It was January. It was a new year. The air was cold and clear as I parked in our garage. I ran upstairs and opened the door. I felt like I was at home. The only thing amiss was a sour smell in the air. I thought it could be residue from some sort of yoga ritual until I noticed an unusual container in the hallway. It was a cardboard box filled with cat poop. Odd, as we didn’t have a cat. I figured it had to be Sarah-related somehow and filed it under the “damn dirty hippie” category in my brain. I took it outside and threw it away. I came back upstairs and opened a window to let in the cold, fresh air when the phone rang. I sat on the daybed and answered it. It was Jac Alder, the managing director of the only real professional theater in Dallas, Theater Three. He was offering me a job! He wanted me to play one of the leads in The Importance of Being Earnest. Yes! This was going to be the year of Stephen! I was a graduate. I had a girl. I ha
d access to a credit card (which my parents paid for). My life was beginning. And just when the sounds of my personal triumph were blasting in my head so loud I couldn’t hear Jac anymore, my eyes crossed.

  Yes. As strange as it sounds, my eyes crossed and my heart fluttered and started racing. I paused to get a breath. Jac asked me what was wrong. I laughed and said, “Jac, I have no idea, just felt funny for a second. Must be a combination of jet lag and getting a real theater job.” I looked down my shirt front and straightened it out and saw that I had dark red drops staining my shirt. I looked carefully. It was blood! There was blood on my shirt. Now I couldn’t hear Jac at all. I ripped open my shirt. My stomach was wet with blood. I yelled over the phone, “Jac! I’m bleeding, got to hang up now!” Jac yelled into the phone as I hung up, “Call me back!”

  I pulled up my undershirt. I was covered with little black dots. I brushed at them with my hand and they started to crawl. Fleas! I was covered in fleas! I undid my belt. There were about a hundred gathered under the elastic waistband of my underwear. I screamed. I was in a Roger Corman movie! I started ripping my clothes off and ran to the bathroom. I turned on the shower and the sink, dropping my clothes in the hot water as I stripped them off. There were fleas on my ankles under my socks. I jumped in the shower. I scratched them off. Piles of black dots went down the drain.

  I scrubbed myself until I was confident I was flea-free. As water pounded on my head, I tried to come up with a plan. What. What. Think. Think.

  Dad. I could call Dad! He was a doctor over on the SMU campus five minutes away.

  I stepped out of the shower and ran wet and dripping down the hardwood hallway. I saw fleas jumping on me from everywhere. I reached for the phone. I transitioned from a Roger Corman movie to a John Carpenter movie. I knocked the phone off of the table. I started to dial. More and more fleas covered me. I couldn’t take it anymore. I ran back to the shower. I heard the eerie dial tone and the automated operator’s voice in the background: “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up . . .”

  Hot and steaming, I watched another pile of fleas go down the drain.

  I had to get out. I had clean clothes in the bedroom. I made another dash. Fleas jumped up on me from the floor. I opened my drawer to pull out a shirt. Black specks crawled all over them. My clothes were infested. We moved from a John Carpenter movie to a David Cronenberg movie.

  I ran back to the shower to wash off again. Then it happened, I started to run out of hot water. Whatever I was going to come up with, I would have to do it fast. New problem! I had no clothes! Everything in the apartment was infested. The clothes I wore were in the sink. I made a snap decision. Like most snap decisions, it was not good.

  I reached for my keys in my soaked, flea-infested pants, and I ran out of the apartment naked.

  I ran down the stairs, and across the parking lot and into the garage. I jumped into the Oldsmobile and backed out of the driveway onto McFarlin Boulevard. I felt like the girl at the end of Texas Chainsaw Massacre screaming, “I’m alive! I’m alive!”

  But, unlike movies, life has no editing room or credits to give one a false sense of conclusion. In life the movie continues. I was naked, in an Oldsmobile, driving around Dallas. I couldn’t go to the health center to see Dad. The campus police usually stop the naked people in the lobby. Yeah. That was out. I had two options. I could drive to Midlothian, Texas, stagger into a bait shop, and say I was abducted by aliens, or I could to drive the twenty-two miles back to my childhood home and pray Mom was at the grocery store. Now I was in a Harold Ramis movie.

  When you drive naked, you become aware of a whole different set of problems you never even think about when you are a regular, clothed driver. Red lights provide a new horror. You never know who will pull up next to you: a station wagon, a school bus, or a random police car. I managed to avoid any accidental “Naked Man” sightings until I got to the heart of downtown Dallas. At the juncture of Interstate 35, a red dump truck pulled up beside me. I turned to look. This caught the attention of the trucker, who was in his sixties wearing a baseball cap. He turned and met my eye. Then he took in the entire vista. His jaw dropped, his eyes bulged out of his head, and as he silently screamed, “Oh, shit,” he swerved off the road onto the shoulder. I hit the freeway with one directive: go as fast as possible without getting pulled over. In Texas, being stopped by police while driving naked could be a life-changing event.

  I drove through Oak Cliff. I passed my old elementary school. I passed the minimall where I bought comic books. I saw our driveway dead ahead. Oh dear, Mom’s car. I parked in the driveway and ran into the garage. The backdoor was open. I could see Mom through the screen door ironing in the kitchen. My only option was speed. I ran into the kitchen, through the living room, and into the back bathroom where I turned on the hot water to continue purging the remaining fleas. As the water warmed up, I heard a knock on the bathroom door. It was Mom. In a polite but uncertain voice she asked, “Stephen, is that you?”

  When I finished my shower, I dressed and explained the horrors on McFarlin. Within minutes Mom and I came up with a plan that in hindsight made no sense at all. By any instrument of measure, it was a bad idea.

  We didn’t call an exterminator. We didn’t call the landlord. We went to Skillern’s Drug Store and bought four huge cans of Raid, tucked our pants into our socks, and went back and sprayed the place ourselves.

  Mom got at one end of the apartment. I got at the other. We took a deep breath and with a huge can of Raid in each hand, we worked toward the center of the apartment where we met in a big cloud of poison. We sprayed the floors, the doors, the carpets, the walls, the sofa, the bed, the dressers, the kitchen, the phone. Everything. We ran outside for a hit of oxygen and then back until the cans were empty. When we finished, every surface was shellacked in Raid. The air had a sweet, toxic smell about it.

  Amazingly we felt this plan had merit. We went back the next morning and hit the place again with four more cans of Raid, and once again that afternoon. In twenty-four hours we had emptied a dozen cans.

  I called Beth later that day and told her that the apartment was poisonous. We should avoid the entire block for a while. She said that was okay. She would stay in Mississippi an extra day, or she could stay on a friend’s floor, or check into a motel, or dress up like a pirate and sail up and down the Brazos River. Then she asked what time I wanted to look at the stars that night. I told her I was going back home to take a couple more showers to detox and then I would go outside. “Eight p.m.,” I said, “and I’ll look to the east.” She said, “Eight o’clock. I’ll look to the west. I love you.”

  “I love you. Good night.”

  And as if by magic, I was in a Frank Capra movie.

  AS I SUSPECTED, the fleas were an indirect product of Sarah. And perhaps, a direct product of the Woodstock album. While Beth and I were in Europe, Sarah decided to save the planet one stray cat at a time. She brought the cats into the apartment and set up a cardboard box of sand to serve as an improvisational latrine area, but for some reason known only to herself and her god, she never threw the litter away. So for three weeks, fleas bred in the cat poop. For the last week with no cats in the house to feed on, they just got angry. When I walked in with my new haircut and sat right in the middle of them, dinner was served.

  After two weeks of being displaced, Beth and I came back and scrubbed the apartment down. The fleas never returned. Neither of us grew a second head from all the insecticide. To celebrate we decided to have a special dinner at home. I volunteered to cook, a bold move on my part as I had never cooked in my life. Beth added to the challenge that she wanted me to make a dish that I had “invented.” Why not? When you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s easy to come up with something new.

  I invented a dish I called Chicken Volcano. It was a sort of casserole that combined undercooked chicken, jalapeño peppers, and grapes. The only thing volcanic about it was the diarrhea afterward. Instead of throwing the rest of the mixtu
re out, we put it in the refrigerator where it could age properly and become a petri dish.

  Beth signed up for her final semester. Her acting career at SMU had been unfulfilling. She didn’t seem angst-ridden enough to get the big roles. If she got cast at all, it was usually as a child. I shouldn’t have been surprised when she came home and told me she had signed up for a playwriting class, but I was. Beth seemed way too impulsive—way too “quixotic” as she put it—to come up with something as disciplined and coherent and unified as a play.

  She started walking around with a torn-up spiral notebook. She carried it wherever she went. She took notes at restaurants, in bed, in the car, everywhere. We were all dying to know what this magnum opus would turn out to be. Occasionally, she would say something like, “I think I’m going to name a character Mr. Spoon.”

  I tried to be encouraging but realistic. I said, “I don’t know if that is such a good idea. Mr. Spoon is a strange name.”

  Beth would smile and say, “That’s why I like it.” Then she would take more notes.

  She enlisted several of us to type the play for her. Her former roommate Louise, our friend Terry, and I each took shifts typing away. Like the blind men and the elephant, none of us had any sense of what the play was about because we kept taking turns. I typed some exchange about a character wanting to put “blue food coloring in her water to make drinking it more exciting.” Beth kept joking that she was probably writing “the biggest ptomaine wreck ever to hit the stage.” We all laughed, but there was nothing in what we read that gave us any reason to think that it wouldn’t be the biggest ptomaine wreck to hit the stage. Louise sat at the typewriter and she said questioningly, “Mr. Spoon?” Beth laughed and said she liked the name. Louise gritted her teeth and kept typing and said under her breath, “Disaster . . .”