The Tricky Part: One Boy's Fall from Trespass into Grace (22 page)

Without much thought, I moved through the crush of students up the stairs and across the hall to the drama room. My head had the slightest conversation with my feet.
What are you doing?
My body’s reply:
This is the way it is
.

I signed my name on the clipboard hanging near the door.

The following week, I sat clutching sheet music for
Camelot
against my knees, my legs jerking up and down.
The whole thing’s absurd
, I kept thinking.
I’ll never go through with it
. There was a row of folding chairs lined up in the hall just outside the entrance to the auditorium. They were all occupied with students like me, holding music, humming softly, appendages jerking.
This is crazy
, I kept thinking.
How could anyone do this?

“Next.”

He was pointing at me. This guy with copper-colored hair (
Is that dyed!?
I wondered) was telling me I was
next
. I stood and, avoiding the eyes of the others folded in their folding chairs, I walked past the boy with flaming hair, through the door, and onto the stage of the enormous auditorium.

“Music, please.” It was a deep, disembodied voice bubbling up from somewhere. “Down here,” it said. I walked forward and saw a guy seated in the orchestra pit behind an upright piano. A white guy with the biggest Afro I’d ever seen—a globe of curly black hair topped with a tiny purple yarmulke held in place, I noticed, with a bobby pin. “Music?” he asked again.

I bent down to hand him my song. He stood to take it. His yellow T-shirt cried,
Godspell!

“Tempo?”

“Fast,” I whispered.

“OK.” He gestured for me to move back toward center stage.

I shuffled back and forth, stuck my hands in my pockets, took them out. I bent my knees to keep them from shaking.

“Dive in, baby lamb!” came a female voice from amid the dark sea of seats. I squinted and saw, several rows back, the outline of a hairdo and the glimmer of glasses. I stared.

“Darlin’, did you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“What are you singin’?”

“ ‘Camelot.’ ”

“Lovely.”

“Go ahead, Allan,” she yelled. The music began and, miraculously, so did I.

A law was made a distant moon ago here . . .

I got three lines in, blanked, and stopped singing.
Oh well, that’s the end of that
, I thought.

“Oh! You’re a tenor!” she cried. I saw the head of hair stand. She moved briskly down the aisle toward the stage. She seemed excited. She was small. Well dressed. She had a lovely scarf and a huge grin. “Did you bring any other music?”

“No.”

“That’s OK. Have you got nice legs?”

“What?”

“John?”

The boy with the fiery hair was at my side.

“This is John, my assistant.”

He nodded at me. “Fabulous voice,” he whispered. “Ms. Priest likes you.”

“Darlin’, would you mind throwing on a pair of gym shorts and letting me have a gander at your legs?”

I shrugged and mumbled something, assenting but embarrassed.

She said, “It’s part of the story, honey. One of the characters has lovely gams, wears a toga. I’m sure yours are great. I just need a quick look.”

John handed me a pair of gym shorts and pointed. “Last door, up right.”

“What? Where?”

“Wing three, off up right.” He pointed again.

I followed the general direction of his finger. I found the door to a small room and returned with bare legs and stocking feet.

“Turn once around, darlin’, would you?”

I spun, they gazed. It was oddly intoxicating. Attention. Eyes coming at you, lingering on you. The ham in me was definitely pleased. The drama lady (that’s how I thought of her then) came to the edge of the stage. “Sing something else for me. Anything you know.”

“Without music?”

“Yeah, a cappella.”

I saw the boy at the piano stand and lean in.

“Um, I really don’t know much . . . except church stuff or . . .”

“
Something
, honey, you know
something
. Whatever comes into your mind.”

“OK.”

The floor of the stage was slatted, varnished and beautiful. I stared down at the swirling grains of wood, clutched the hems of the gym shorts, and sang the first song that came to my head.

Will I ever find the boy in my mind, the one who is my ideal? Maybe he’s a dream and yet . . .

“What show’s that from?” the piano player asked when I’d finished.

“That’s not from a show,” John said. “That’s from life.”

It was a cross between sports and choir, church and an unending party. Putting on a show had to be the fastest way on earth to meet people. There was Phil, a small, adorable guy who played the comic lead. He taught me all the important terms in one afternoon. What
wings
are and what
up
and
down
mean, which turns out to be something quite different, of course, when you’re on a stage as opposed to off. He showed me a shorthand for recording movements, called “blocking.” For years to come I’d use the symbols Phil taught me, and think of him every time I scribbled in my script:
x d r
for “cross down right.” There was Kent, the man who played
all
the leads (even though he was my age he seemed like a grown man) and had the biggest voice and personality I’d ever seen in a high school student. I was convinced he’d been belting high notes and tapping out time steps since the womb. He took great pains to teach me the basic elements of stage makeup. I watched him paint his eyes—liner, mascara. My God, suddenly this place, this permission, to wear lipstick and rouge. Lots of it. All in the line of duty. All part of getting the story told. I wasn’t that keen on eyeliner but I took it as a sure sign that I’d landed somewhere different, where the usual rules didn’t apply. I was aware, as I watched this dynamic thespian, of a wonderful feeling of delight and liberation. “You don’t want those spotlights washing you out,” he told me in his resonant baritone. “Your face, your eyes, are the windows to your soul—the
character’s
soul.” As he continued to apply his cosmetics, carefully chosen to enhance the rich black of his beautiful black skin, he spoke of the nuts and bolts of trodding the boards. He dabbed a bright red dot on the inside corner of each of his eyes. “This,” he proclaimed, “is a comedy dot. This helps your eyes look farther apart and more distinct. Good for laughs. There are comedy dots, red, and tragedy dots, white. That’s what you’ve got, comedies and tragedies. We’re in a comedy.” He turned to me. “Open wide.” He dabbed at the inside corner of each of my eyes. “So here’s
red!
”

“What if something is comic and tragic?” I asked.

“That rarely happens.”

My first dance partner ever was sexy, sultry Cynthia, who yelped on opening night when, during our big number, I fell going through her legs and took her skirt with me to the floor. She forgave, invited me over for Sabbath dinner, and taught me the Hebrew for
Ruler of the Universe
. I met and worked with Pearly, a crackerjack jazz pianist. We stayed up nights in his basement, where he rolled joints and taught me Cole Porter tunes. I became smitten with Jan, a keen-tongued comedienne who shocked us all by deciding to sing a verse of her song from the lap of a distraught man in the third row. I marveled as she twirled her fingers through the man’s thinning gray hair, belting out lyrics with the worldliness of Marlene Dietrich. She was sixteen going on forty. We all were, it seemed—a collection of odd kids feeling quite adult in this histrionic sphere and, though we couldn’t have fully realized it then, a group of students who had the fortune to be at a fine school at an extraordinarily creative time. As it turned out, many in this group would go on to make lives in and around the arts.

When I first stepped before an audience, a bundle of nerves wrapped in a toga, I could scarcely believe it was my own body. Right on cue a voice resounded
(whose throat is that?)
and the limbs attached to the trunk I called Martin instantly inhabited a character named Hero and his bumbling love for the girl next door. I felt myself rise up and lean into the presence, the touch of all those human eyes and ears. It was a lightness of being, a momentary pardon for all the secrets and sins. They were smiling out there. They weren’t seeing bad or damaged, so it seemed. They saw, I think, a kid with rouge all over his cheeks, red dots in the corners of his eyes, and a mouth open wide, belting high notes as if his life depended on it. And what I saw written across the field of faces was rapture. A collective delight. How astonishing it was to stumble upon such genuine life while at the business of pretending.

And there was something familiar about it all. Something
church
. The huge auditorium, though it didn’t have the flying buttresses and jutting steeples of a basilica, had the grandeur of a space built for mortal communion and prayer. Though I was dressed for a silly musical, I couldn’t help feeling a bit the altar boy in front of the congregation. Different costume, different stage, but a ritual nonetheless. In the coming years, I would come to think of theater (when it’s good) as a place of epiphany. Not the transformation of the Body of Christ, but of every body present. Humans fused by a jolt of laughter, by the thread of a story. And from this very first experience of
Forum
I felt, even in all the irreverence, in all the courtesans chasing Pseudolus, in all the raunchy jokes, that there was something sacred. A celebration of what’s human and what’s here. I stood there, an essentially ex-Catholic, uncovering a new faith. And when the curtain call arrived I bent my head, my body, into the praise, and felt no quarrel with living, and the voice in my head said:
This is joy. Remember this. This exists
.

When the ovations stopped and the lights went out, I was back confronting the infernal wishes to die, the hollow sense of unbelonging. But I knew that something had changed. Not only had I connected with classmates in a genuine way, not only had I discovered something really fun that I was good at, but some force had made its way in and, without my even knowing it, was rearranging molecules. The playful collaboration, the applause, was an embrace I’d been longing for. Like Hero, I was giddy with love, but mine was for the stage, and rather than knock me off my feet it seemed to set me right back on them.

There was, in my class, the absolute coolest group of guys. Ken-Mike-Dave-Jeff-Barry. Everyone agreed, in that unspoken high school way, they were cool. All the more, I think, because they had no sense of themselves as being popular. They were just good at things. They played a wicked game of basketball and got straight As. All smart, all straight, all handsome, and, by chance, all Jewish. I revered them.

They were close, they’d known each other since kindergarten. I was new and could barely hold a basketball, but I got good marks and this helped, at least, in holding a conversation. Sometimes I would conquer the crush and find the courage to turn around in class and say something to one of them about an isosceles triangle or the fall of Rome or
Death in Venice
. Mike played the trumpet and turned up in the pit for
Forum
. In the lull of rehearsals, in the atmosphere of theater, it was easier to talk. I don’t know how the subject presented itself or when, but the idea of going camping, of maybe climbing Longs Peak, came up.

“Yeah, man. We should do that,” Mike said in his straightforward way.

It wasn’t until later the next year that we actually camped and climbed to the summit of Longs. But, meanwhile, other plans got made. I joined Mike and the gang to drive to Winter Park and ski. One trip turned into several. Then it was smacking tennis balls with Ken or Barry or getting high and hanging out all together to watch
Saturday Night Live
. It was going to Ken’s to study for a physiology test. Then Jeff got us into TM and we’d gather to transcendental meditate in his parents’ pitch-black sauna. Then there was, “Dave’s got an extra ticket to the Nuggets game” and, “You can’t miss Ken’s birthday dinner.” By the time junior year was over, I’d somehow become something I never dreamed (especially when I was drowning among the Jesuits) I could ever become. One of the guys.

On one trip, Dave drove. The night was clear. I don’t know why, but we never seemed to bother with tents. We found a ledge above a creek across the highway from the trail, threw down a tarp, lined up our bags. Mike and I searched for kindling; Jeff sat on a big rock and meditated. We ate simply around the fire. We had boots and water at the ready for the next day’s climb. We hit the sack. Ken wrestled Jeff until Jeff could barely breathe for laughing. At ten thousand feet we were flying high, staring at the stars, talking a mile a minute.

“I didn’t get it at all.”

“I think he was saying his idea of hell was other people.”

“But what’s the existentialist thing?”

“Meaningless universe.”

“Fuck that.”

“I never got through it.”

“How’d you pass the test?”

“Is that girl from Manual still calling you?”

“Once in a while.”

“Hey, northern lights.”

“Not till August.”

“It’s glowing over there.”

“You’re stoned.”

Next day we stood strong at fourteen thousand feet. Mountain conquered. The wind knock-you-down wild. Our home state lay glorious at our feet. All directions clear as far as you could see. “This is the best,” Jeff said. And it was. We sat on our parkas and ate peanut butter sandwiches and I had but the dimmest thud of remembrance in my chest, the merest thought, of how many times I’d crisscrossed these peaks with Bob. Of how I struggled against the sense that I’d somehow sullied all of this, could not belong in these parts. That noise was drowned out by the sheer pride I felt in being among my new friends. Climbing with these guys was like regaining the high ground. Rediscovering home. Finding trust and strength in my own male body. I couldn’t have explained it then, can barely now, but I knew that being near their self-confidence and their kindness, at simply being among them in this uncomplicated way in the middle of our mountains, in the middle of our high school lives, was healing beyond measure.