The voice
on the phone sounds like he could be James Gammon’s son. If you don’t know James Gammon then I feel sorry for you.
Okay, he played the coach in the movie “Major League.”
And the father in Sam Shepard’s “Buried Child” on Broadway.
Okay, his voice, this guy, well not even his son, his brother, sounds
like James Gammon’s brother. So
I’m expecting this fifty year-old guy. I’m
freezing in my studio, so much fucking furniture there’s nowhere to move; not
even enough room to open the fold out bed if I ever had any company.
Fucking air conditioner I’m afraid to take out of the window because
it’ll fall out so it sits there and cold air creeps up it.
Frost all over the windowpanes all the time.
That kind of winter; that kind of CHICAGO winter.
So goddamn cold you have to put on long underwear to take out the trash.
So goddamn cold you have to put on a fucking sweater to go do your
laundry, which is IN the fucking building.
I use the Laundromat two doors down anyway, to get outside.
I can’t
afford this area. It’s $675 a
month plus I have to pay another $135 a month to park my rusted out old
convertible OUTSIDE in the cold on half a driveway two blocks away.
It’s a sloped driveway so I drive to the top, stop, and it slides down
into the spot. The supermarket is
specialty and the restaurant across the street is pan-Asian, there’s an
outpost of Ann Sather’s the trendy Swedish breakfast place next to the
Laundromat, thank god I can afford their bacon and cinnamon buns or I’d
starve. I am starving, literally,
I’ve lost 20 pounds since I graduated in June, actually since I started
rehearsals in August. I was doing a
play at the Steppenwolf, “Mother Courage and her Children.” They didn’t pay me in money; they paid me in points towards
joining Equity. I ran out of money
doing the show, and my parents ran out of money paying for college.
Every play has a few days of technical rehearsals, where the crew and the
designers set up all of the cues. Our
first technical rehearsal, for a three hour-long show with thirty people in the
cast and a turntable for the stage, was September 11, 2001.
That day and the next day we were in technical rehearsals all day, it
took 25 rehearsal hours to get through the play.
I was the only car driving IN to Chicago.
And then all the temp work went away and after the show closed the only
job I could get was sorting mail in the Sears Tower during the anthrax scare.
And that lasted two weeks. So
I live on bacon and cinnamon buns. At
least they’re the best cinnamon buns.
So I’m
getting the fuck out, getting out of Chicago, and getting out of winter.
I’ve had a few good auditions but I’ve missed getting the parts
either by the skin of my teeth or because name actors have decided to do tiny
shows suddenly and I get the shaft. I
know that if I stay in Chicago, if I am successful, I will feel about my career
like about a self-made business, one that I will not want to give up, and one
that isn’t worth crap anywhere else (Chicago credits don’t travel well).
I am going to Los Angeles. I
know this is a bad idea. It isn’t
in question whether this is a bad idea. I
have an unstable friend who is moving there and “wouldn’t it be fun if we
went together?” and I flew out and she did too and I was there to make up my
mind but she made my mind up for me when she showed up with ALL of her stuff and
said she’s there to stay. So we
grabbed a place at Woodman and Magnolia in the valley, $550 a month, big
complex, semi-hot semi-faded semi-actress manager, icky pool, lots of ethnic
families that cook stinky food and open their doors and aim their fans into the
courtyard so everyone can enjoy the smell as much as they do.
I install her, Morgen, there, and fly back to Siberia to sell off all the
furniture I accrued during the senior year of college, stored in a spare room in
my Evanston apartment and fitted miraculously into the studio on Hawthorne and
Broadway, and to find someone to take over my lease.
I’ve
been scanning the online version of purgatory, Craigslist, looking for someone
to take my place. The first
response I get is from this guy, the James Gammon soundalike.
He says he can’t afford the furniture and might need a loan on the
lease assignment fee. He’s the
first person so I say sure. The
furniture is worth about a thousand dollars, there’s TV as well, but if
that’s what it takes to get out of this thing.
Of course, two days later, after I’ve already met with James Gammon,
Jr., another guy emails me and says he’ll do the whole thing and pay the
assignment fee and everything, take over the lease and even drop a hundred for
the furniture. Of course, I say
it’s too late.
So I’m
talking to…okay, to call him James Gammon, Jr., isn’t cool, so we’ll call
him Ron. Ron’s voice is an octave
below James Earl Jones with a rasp like if they made sandpaper out of metal.
I make a time with him and make it clear that he’s taking over the
lease if he takes it. I ask him what he does for a living; he says he’s a
machinist. He says he’s been
living on the south side of Chicago. He
wants a better place in a better neighborhood for his girlfriend.
I figure he knows Chicago better than I do, but the idea of a fifty
year-old machinist living on the outskirts of the Boy’s Town/Belmont area is
pretty funny.
I don’t
know anybody in my neighborhood. My
girlfriend, with whom I have a troubled relationship, troubled because I’m
leaving Chicago sooner rather than later rather than never, lives about an hour
away and visits me a few times a week. Most
of my other friends left Chicago after college.
I left too, then came back for rehearsals for “Mother Courage.”
At the first rehearsal I met for the first time all of the actors who
would be in the play, several of whom I had followed for years because they were
in the original production of “The Grapes of Wrath” on Broadway.
I played Tom Joad in high school and saw the Broadway video where Gary
Sinise played the part. We all
showed up, and all met, but no one really spoke to one another.
Then we sat at a big table to talk and have a read through, and the
director had all the people with lines sit at one end of the table, and all the
people in the ensemble at the other end of the table, immediately and
resoundingly dashing any hopes of everyone at least acting equal.
Then he said, “Thank you all for coming. To me this play is about…” and here he paused for five
full minutes. Several times the
head of the theatre company, sitting next to him, attempted to break the silence
and he quieted her with increasing agitation.
We all tried not to look at one another. Maybe it was performance art.
From that day on, my life was awful.
The play went from August to the beginning of November and I moved into
the apartment in September. This
wasn’t a great idea because I had to drive to work anyway, and I wasn’t
going to be in the apartment almost at all until the play was over, I really
should have stayed in Evanston. Anyway,
when the play ended I found myself broke, friendless and living in an apartment
I’d barely been in, just in time for the coldest winter of my life.
The
building had the security cameras hooked into the cable.
This way you could flip on the TV and see who’s ringing up.
Sometimes I’d watch the closed circuit, in a stupor, trying to restrain
myself from going outside because then I’d spend money.
When I spent money I had no money so it went onto the credit card,
digging the ever-deepening hole that resulted in the indentured servitude I live
in to this day. Ron was due to come
and see the apartment and I was waiting to see what he looked like.
I’m expecting Fred Ward or Harry Dean Stanton. Then this guy shows up on the screen, he can’t be even
thirty-five years old, and he has this girl with him: stringy hair, looks
fake-blonde on the black and white video feed - short skirt, halter top.
Okay. I buzz him up and let
them in. There’s barely enough
room for three people to stand. My
books and scripts are boxed up all over the place to be shipped, there’s more
than 200 pounds of them. The guy
has short red hair, and he really can’t be more than thirty-five, he has a
baby face, but I feel like he’s fifty anyway.
He isn’t wrinkled; it just looks like he’s worn out, literally worn
out from the inside, his own internal machine.
And the voice, the voice sounds like the engine of a beat seventies
Charger; not one that’s been cared for; one that’s been driven into trees
for no reason, dented and rusted, overheated, run down to fumes too many times,
cigarette burns on the upholstery. The
girl’s breath is 100 proof and sickly sweet, revolting, less like the smell of
rum than it’s like the booze disinfected all the way down to her gut and
she’s blowing out her real breath, the wind of deep rot.
She has the short jean skirt, the halter-top, the bare-midriff with a
slight paunch, badly dyed hair, chewing gum, aquamarine eye shadow, pancake
make-up, lip gloss that’s pinkish and sparkles slightly, and while the
stockings aren’t fishnet I think it’s pretty obvious what her style template
is. I think she might be under thirty. I think she might be under twenty-five. If I didn’t have occasion to make a leisurely study, just
seeing her for a second, I would probably have guessed forty.
She sits on my bed. He looks
the place over, which doesn’t take long.
“All
the furniture comes with it?” he asks. I
can feel the vibrations of his voice, they travel down through his feet into the
floor and up into my heels.
“Well…yeah,”
I say.
The
girlfriend slumps over on my bed.
“Shit.
Peggy. Get up,” he says.
She doesn’t move. He makes a
noise of disgust that buzzes the floor, “Got to pump a six-pack into her to
get her to go anywhere and then she’s useless.”
He looks
worried. Not at her state, but at
something else about her. Looking
at her he looks very vulnerable.
“Can we
take care of this now?” he asks.
I’m
quietly ecstatic, ready to be on the road in another few days.
I give him all my addresses and phone numbers, in Los Angeles and for my
parents, for him to send the $400 of the security deposit I’m loaning him. Peggy, the girlfriend, comes to, struggles to her feet and
walks out.
“Don’t
go far,” Ron says.
After all
the business is taken care of except going to the office and signing their
papers, Ron and I shake on it. His
hands are enormous and rough, but somehow smooth like his beardless face.
We have a beer to celebrate.
Peggy
comes back in; she’s had time to look at the neighborhood and likes it.
They’re ready to seal the deal. We
bundle up and walk up to the rental office on Addison.
From the corner of Broadway you can see the El tracks that run by Wrigley
Field. Ron installs Peggy at a
coffee shop while we go into the office and do the paperwork.
When it’s finished Peggy kisses me on the cheek.
That
night Ron calls me up. His voice
slurs, he sounds exactly like I had imagined he would sound drunk.
“I’m
awful glad I found this place,” he says.
“I’ve been at my job for ten years now, living on the south side, and
I had to get her out of there, move her up here with nice people.
She’s…Well, I think you can tell what she is. If I don’t get her out of there she just goes back to it
whenever she wants something. I’m
just…I was just her…customer. Lots
of times. And now…we’re here.
But…what if I move up here…and she takes off?
I don’t know. I’ve just
got to keep her away from that. She’s
off now, I don’t know where. Probably…well
goddamn it.”
I don’t
know what to say. I make
sympathetic noises. I don’t mean
to sound callous, I just didn’t know what to say.
Ron cries. Los Angeles seems
very far away. My life seems very
far away. My family.
The girl I am leaving. The
school that was so busy. It’s
dark outside and frozen, it’s dark in the tiny studio. There are bright lights in the alleyway my windows look out
on and some little light strands creep around the window shades.
On the other end of the phone is that gruff voice, sobbing.
Everyone
tells me I’ll never see that money again and I’m an idiot for not switching
to the second caller. I drive to
Los Angeles in my rusted 1993 white Mustang convertible, not a 5.0, packed full
of what belongings I couldn’t ship, leaving one of my possible futures behind.
When I arrive, after several blown gaskets and misadventures, I find
hundreds of ants parading across the walls of the Woodman apartment; none of the
appliances work; and Morgen has stopped taking her medication and refuses to
shower.
I try to
keep in touch with Ron so he will pay me back my $400 but he stops answering his
phone. Several months go by without
word from him, before one day he picks up.
He’s in a bar, he’s drunk, and he tells me that he was thrown out of
the building for defaulting on rent. His
tone is accusatory, this is my fault somehow.
He defaulted on rent because he lost his job. He lost his job because he was in jail. He was in jail because he beat up Peggy in the Starbucks
across the street.