Actors Anonymous (17 page)

At 6:30 I drove into the McDonald’s parking lot and waited in my Ford Fairmont. I was an hour early because I didn’t have anything else to do. While I waited, I threw all the papers and crap that was in the front seat into the backseat. There was even more crap back there, clothes and shit. Then I read over my scene from
A Hatful of Rain,
the one about feeling lost, about not feeling connected to the things I love, and then I waited. I had backed the car into the spot so that I was facing the McDonald’s building. They made it so attractive with its slanted red eaves and bright yellow lettering. I thought of Juan’s slanted dick, the smoothness of the head plugging into my tight mouth hole. Then I blocked it out and I just saw the building. Everybody I worked with was inside. In the drive-thru window I could see Jorge, my replacement. He was taking orders and making change like I did most nights. He was a young Mexican guy and I liked him because he would tell jokes. Some that I remember:

I knew a guy, he was so fat, when he steps on a scale it reads, “One at a time, please!”
(I thought that was a good one for McDonald’s.)

I tell you my wife’s a lousy cook. After dinner I don’t brush my teeth, I count them.
(Hilarious.)

The driver’s side window of the Fairmont didn’t close all the way, and hot air trickled in through the space and over my forehead. At 7:30, Karen pulled up next to me in her black Jetta. I reminded myself to use the fake Brooklyn accent and then I got out of the car. The air was so warm it made me float.

“Hey, wadda ya know?
Karen,
good to see ya.” I was being cute.

“No, let’s take your car,” she said. So I walked around and opened the door for her. We drove to the theater, which was just around the corner. She called me Jimmy the whole time, but it helped me believe I was someone else and not just shitty old me. On the way to the
theater, I told her about my childhood. It was mostly truthful, but I pretended it all took place in Brooklyn.

“Yeah, so my dad was a priest out in Bensonhurst, which is something I take pretty seriously
now,
but when I was younger the whole church thing was a real drag.” I tried not to swear. “I was more into playing basketball, and boy was I fucking good. I mean
really
good. I got on the team at college and I actually played for a bit. But then some bad things happened.” She asked what the bad things were, but I didn’t tell her. The drugs, and the kids and the ex-wife, and her fucking all those dudes, and all the money I owed, and sucking Juan’s dick.

I offered to buy Karen whatever she wanted at the snack stand, but she didn’t want anything. The movie started,
Titanic
. Leonardo DiCaprio was cool. I always liked him. Ever since
The Basketball Diaries
. I mean that was my story, heroin and basketball. He was good in
Titanic,
but I couldn’t get into the movie itself. Lots of rich fuckers doing nothing. Halfway through, I reached over and held Karen’s hand; it was sweaty but delicate. Then I got into the movie a little more. I thought about myself on that ship and I tried to think about which people in my life I would sacrifice myself for. My kids, definitely. I guess my parents. I held Karen’s hand tighter and she squeezed back and I thought that maybe I’d do it for Karen too.

On the drive back to McDonald’s, I asked Karen what she thought of the movie.

“I thought it was a shitty script,” she said.

“Wadda you mean?” I was still doing the accent.

“Oh it’s just James Cameron jerking off all over the place. There is that scene where Kate Winslet has some Picassos and her fiancé says they’re trash? It’s like James Cameron’s saying
he
is the misunderstood artist, like Picasso! And then when the old lady throws the gem over-board
at the end, it’s like Cameron is saying
he
doesn’t care about commercial success, that all he cares about is
art. Art!
Fucking
bull
. If that’s his
art,
that bloated piece of shit that probably cost two hundred million dollars, he’s in trouble.”

“Wow. I didn’t get any of that.”

“It’s just stuff I picked up.”

I turned into the McDonald’s parking lot and parked in the same spot, next to her Jetta, but this time I faced the car toward the street. She didn’t get out. It was 11 p.m.

“I’d like to see you again,” I said.

“It depends,” she said.

“On what?”

“On if you kiss me.”

She used a lot of tongue so I used a lot of tongue. At first it was violent and then she calmed down and just moved it around slowly in my mouth and it was really soft.

“You don’t mind that I work at McDonald’s?” I said close to her face.

“No. I
love
that you work at McDonald’s. Obviously you’re smarter than that place. You’ve got something else going on, Jimmy, I can tell. You don’t have to tell me about it now, but I’m intrigued.”

We kissed some more and then she got out. She kissed her fingers and then slapped them on the dirty window to say good-bye. I felt good. After her Jetta left, I drove around to the drive-thru. At the speaker I ordered a cheeseburger and a Diet Coke and then I drove up to the pay window. It was funny seeing it from that perspective. When I was working I had a whole world going on inside that little window, but I could only see a sliver of it from my car. Jorge was in there. I handed him a five and he didn’t notice it was me.

“Hey, Hor,” I said. He turned from the cash register and looked at me closely. He didn’t like that nickname but when he saw it was me, he laughed.

“What’s up, Sean? Your night off? Why don’t you get the fuck out of here?”

“I
was
the fuck out of here. I went on a
date
.”

“A good one? Well maybe not, you’re
here
.” He laughed at his joke.

“Funny, fucker. No, it was good. She’s smart as fuck and she likes me.”

“Why does she like
you?
”

“Because I’m fucking handsome and because I work at McDonald’s.”

“What?”

“I don’t know, that’s what she said.”

“Sounds like she’s crazy, bro.” He laughed again.

“Fuck you,” I said.

“Okay, okay, I got one,” he said. “It’s crazy, my wife likes to talk on the phone during sex. Really. She called me last night from Chicago.”

“Ha, good one.” I drove on to the next window and got my cheeseburger and drink. Marcia didn’t notice it was me and I didn’t say hi. Her gold teeth glinted as I drove off. I turned out of the lot onto Ventura Boulevard and unwrapped the burger as I drove. When I held the unwrapped burger I realized that Juan had made it. His baby-size hands had put that thing together. It tasted really good as I drove. I was driving toward Jeanette’s house to rehearse
A Hatful of Rain
. I chewed and sipped from the soda. McDonald’s burgers are really slim, but I like that. They’re almost like eating air. Kind of like kissing Karen, it was there but also it wasn’t. She thought I was a guy named Jim, from Brooklyn. Maybe I was. The streetlights on Ventura reflected off my windshield and made the burger taste like candy.

STEP 12

After our “character” has had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other actors and to practice these principles in all our scenes.

The
Sass
Account

The following is an annotated fragment of an unpublished article about
The Actor
. The beginning of the article is extant but the rest is lost, although the annotations have been retained. Make what sense of it that you can.

I am staring at a photo of
The Actor’s
backside. It’s a nice backside, one that has been used with varying degrees of success in his films; sometimes it reveals character, sometimes it’s just too much ass in the face. And, now that I mention it, it is an ass that has been speculated about more than most, the big question: Is it a gay ass or a straight ass? That’s the funny thing about asses; they can be so ambiguous, a good ass is a good ass, straight or gay. Or as they say, “a hole is a hole.” So, speaking of this ass, so often pondered, as I stare at it, I wonder why it is there. The editor in chief (EIC) wanted an arty spread, so we brought
The Actor
into the fold, into the cozy realms of the
Sass
office
to discuss options, to make him a part. And this is what we get,
his
part. I feel that his ass has a brain, that it has been contemplating me as much as I contemplate it, that in fact it wants to fart in my face.
¹

How to relate myself to someone like
The Actor
? This was maybe the dilemma of my colleagues over at happy-go-lucky
Sass,
and especially the passionate and lovingly flamboyant EIC who lives for nothing except the expertly queer composition of each new issue. They brought
The Actor
into the inner circles of the herd, engaged in a wonderful (or so they must have thought) artistic colloquium about how to present that so slippery image of that amphibious being
The Actor—Actor
? It should be the “Annoying Dilletante.” They should have just done it themselves, but instead they collaborated, and when you collaborate with an ass, you get an ass. Literally. So,
Sass,
knock off that opening sibilant, and take the crude result, you made your bed, and this is what’s in it, and it ain’t pretty. I am about to be farted on, but it’s fine, we are all farted on. And somehow it seems very relevant to the entire situation.
²
The Actor
is resorting to his usual form, because we
assumed,
he made an
ass
out of
u
and
me. Sass
got the real ass end of it, didn’t

[Here the article ends. It was torn. It’s quite possible that
The Actor
ripped it in anger, if he is in fact the annotator. There are scraps of the article (see below) but for the most part the story is gone; all that remains are a series of annotations without a referent. They seem to be in
The Actor’s
usual crazed scrawl, but maybe they were written in imitation.]