The Fisher Boy (4 page)

Chapter Five

Arthur called that evening, while I was still at Ian’s St. Harold’s party. Had Edward engineered that contact? Left the party early to tell Arthur to call me when Edward knew only my answering machine was home? “Mark, don’t be worried,” Arthur’s voice said. “Edward is taking wonderful care of me, especially of my stomach. I’m gorging myself. He’s feeding me riotous amounts of calories. I’m the size of a walrus. Take care.”

That, at least, was sound advice. To “take care” that dangerous summer…

So it wasn’t Arthur but Commercial Street that finally introduced me to Roger Morton. Both of us were peering into the office Hollings Fair and his Christian Soldiers were renting across from Spiritus Pizza. The office was empty except for an orange bead curtain from the building’s former life as a Chinese restaurant. Cornering Roger, I used Arthur’s name as a reference to ask for a run at Quahog. Roger had one opening next Saturday at eight, replacing a female impersonator whose mono was back.

Performers in Provincetown get saddled with generating their own audiences, so Sammy, one of our actors, a graphic designer who’d been fired by most of the high-tech firms along Route 128, had cobbled together some flyers from clip art and a photo of the troupe and shipped them to us by overnight mail. Unfortunately, he’d bungled the date of our gig, so Roberto and I had to correct each flyer by hand, using pink felt pens, then we thumb-tacked them to anything upright: bulletin boards, telephone poles, trees, the salt-eaten stalls in the men’s room at Herring Cove. We distributed them from towel to towel at the beach and to people filing out from tea dance. We left piles of them in guest house halls, by the complimentary toothpicks and mints.

The five other members of the troupe carpooled down the afternoon before the show, and, over nachos and too much beer, we planned our performance: the skit types, the casts, and so on. We were giddy with confidence and terror, certain we would bomb and equally sure we’d be The Next Big Thing. “I don’t have butterflies in my stomach, I have California condors,” Roberto said.

We spent the hour before curtain time “barking” in front of Quahog, pestering Commercial Street’s tourists to buy tickets. I’ve seldom depended upon the kindness of strangers, so I found barking embarrassing, a first cousin to outright panhandling. I kept pretty quiet and offered my flyers to people too timid to refuse them.

An older man in a flasher’s raincoat the color of hummus thanked me for a flyer and asked, “Is your show men in dresses?” Roberto answered that we couldn’t afford costumes, so he said he’d try to make it. “It’s always good to broaden our audience,” Roberto reasoned.

Twenty minutes before eight, a group of five men in camouflage that mimicked sycamore bark approached us—Christian Soldiers, for sure. My stomach felt like one of those balloons street vendors torture into animal shapes to sell to children.

“Does your comedy make fun of God?” one of them asked.

“Buy a ticket and find out,” Roberto said.

“We’re after laughs,” I said, “not changing theology.”

“Have you heard of Hollings Fair?” the Soldier asked.

“I heard him speak once, at town hall,” I said.

Luckily, that satisfied him. “God loves you,” he said, making it sound like a threat. Then they dispersed.

At ten minutes to eight, we stopped barking and went inside Quahog. There were just three people in the audience
.
The restaurant was decorated with the sort of kitsch statuettes, plaster sea captains, fish sporting chefs’ hats, mermaids rising from painted waves, that often mean the menu is surf ‘n’ turf specials and baked stuffed lobster with a bad lobster-to-breadcrumb ratio.

Quahog’s stage was miniscule, no bigger than the smallest traffic island, and without microphones. Our backstage space was smaller still, a tiny hallway truncated by a flight of stairs to a recently flooded basement. Was this where so many Big Names had gotten their start, amid these plywood walls and concrete steps the color of earwigs? This was Our Big Break, but everything smelled of wet carpeting and a bad night.

And all of us knew this. We avoided eye contact with each other; each person was “preparing” for the show in his own way. Justin was doing his transcendental meditation and twitching a lot. Paul was blowing bubbles from a chartreuse mass of watermelon-flavored gum; Sammy was tinkering with his newly pierced eyebrow; and Brian and Andy looked as though our nachos and beer dinner had declared war on their stomachs.

Roberto was confident, cracking his knuckles and trying out voices. “My Katharine Hepburn sounds just like my Rose Kennedy,” he was complaining.

Andy told Roberto to keep it down, people in the audience might hear him. “What people?” Roberto laughed. He jerked aside the ancient curtain, so soft it seemed more dust than velvet. We counted eleven—
eleven
people huddled at the mock-colonial tables, in the red glow from hobnail glass lamps.

Andy turned on me. “You said you and Roberto have been leafletting. Then why is the house so awful?”

“Cool it, there’ll be more,” Roberto said, in a Bugs Bunny voice Andy didn’t appreciate.

We had an unwritten rule: when the cast outnumbers the audience, the show must not go on. This wasn’t the case tonight, but, unlike Roberto and me, Andy and the others had driven many miles for such a pathetic house.

Roberto peered back into the audience. “Swell, one guy is leaving.”

“I hope he’s just hitting the men’s room,” I said.

Justin was blinking out of his TM. Paul spit his bubblegum into his hand then stuck it on the wall. Everyone else was trying to act enthused. “Have an awesome night, everybody,” Brian sighed. “It’s eight-fifteen,” Andy said. “If we’re going on, we’ve got to go on now!”

I parted the curtain and counted ten heads, all looking uneasy, almost guilty, as though they’d done something wrong, chosen the wrong show, for instance.

Then, far back in the audience, someone shouted my name: “Mark, YES!” It was Ian, wobbling between two men from the St. Harold’s party. They were emerging from the street with at least five more customers in tow.

“Hey!” I answered Ian, then ducked backstage.

At least they’d bought tickets, but performing in front of friends always spooked me; I felt the stakes were higher, meeting their expectations. Then again, was Ian really my friend? In spite of the childhood rescue, I knew that was debatable.

“Sixteen people,” I reported to Andy. “A guy I know just brought five more bodies.”

“It’s eight-twenty-five let’s go!” Roberto said. So I led the troupe into the spotlight, into the glare. Some polite applause broke out and someone, it might’ve been Ian, bellowed, “Break a leg!” in a beery voice. With the light in our faces, the audience was little more than a blur. My nerves were on overdrive; rivulets of sweat were coursing down my spine, but my mouth felt as dry as though it contained all of the deserts of Arizona, complete with cactus, tarantulas, and Gila monsters. “Hello!” I rasped. “Thanks for coming.”

“Not in my mouth!” some imbecile yelled.

Then I began our introduction, explaining improv required audience collaboration, that skits had rules, like games of baseball, but that every skit was spontaneous as a sneeze and fuelled by their suggestions. “So, when we ask for your input before each skit, or clap to stop the action and get your advice, please be outrageous…”

“What about God?” somebody asked, and my body went on alert, sure Christian Soldiers were in our audience. I caught sight of the man in the flasher’s raincoat, the man who’d asked if we were a drag show; he was stationed at a table down front covered with pamphlets with angels on their covers.

“Is God in your script? In the script of your life?”

“Well, I prayed for a bigger audience,” Roberto admitted.

Two lesbians laughed.

“Anyway,” I said, “your suggestions, divine or otherwise, are most welcome.” Since I was “calling,” directing, the first skit, I asked for a location where the action should take place.

“Mars,” someone in the audience yelled.

“A gay beach,” someone else said.

“A gay beach on Mars,” a third person suggested.

I took the gay beach on Mars as our setting. The skit, “A Meeting,” was governed by the principle that the actors involved are two gay men, strangers instinctively attracted to each other. We cast our strongest performers, Andy and Roberto, in this skit—and they came through with some good lines, about getting “an earthburn” and being “into tentacles,” then ended with a parody song, “Red Scales in a Sunspot.”

The applause was strong, but when we assembled backstage, Roberto kept worrying his energy was low, jealous, actually, that he wasn’t being singled out as the star.

“At least the holy roller is quiet,” Brian said.

“Well, he’s eating,” Andy said. “He’s preoccupied with his giant order of onion rings.”

Our mood soared as the next two skits went beautifully. Roger Morton appeared at the bar, mixing someone a cocktail requiring grenadine and a tiny paper parasol. Tristan, the bouncer, was now manning the door. It was my turn to act in a skit, “Coming Out,” which involved taking an audience member’s true coming out story and embellishing it with bizarre twists.

Andy, calling the skit, asked, “Who has a coming-out story he’d like to share?” The lesbian couple gave him a stare that all but sandblasted him, so he added, “Or she’d like to share.”

You’d think he’d asked for a moment of silence. Sometimes it was difficult to get people to volunteer a milestone for comic fodder, but we were always gentle with our humor for this skit. “Don’t be shy!” I encouraged the audience. “Tell us a friend’s coming out story.”

The man in the raincoat, the man with the pamphlets, was waving his hand, the only person in the audience to respond, so Andy was forced to acknowledge him. “Yes…sir, do you have a coming-out story?”

“I’m talking about the greatest story ever told,” he answered, then, silently, he rose and began distributing his pamphlets, table by table, around the room. Judging by his walk, he was either drunk or sick. I hadn’t seen him at town hall; he could’ve been a Christian Soldier or just a lone crank.

“Sir…please,” Andy said.

“Where is the bouncer?” Brian whispered.

Of course Tristan and Roger Morton were now nowhere in sight.

The man sidled up to the two lesbians’ table. As he held out his pamphlet, one of them enunciated, “NO THANK YOU!” Stunned, he meekly tucked his remaining literature into his pocket and shuffled out of the restaurant.

The audience cheered. The lesbian who’d spoken took a stylish bow.

“She got the biggest hand of the evening,” Roberto muttered.

“Onward and upward,” Andy said, struggling to re-establish momentum.

“Hey, bring back that guy with the pamphlets!” one of Ian’s friends yelled. “He was the funniest thing in the show!”

“Yes, you in the rear,” Andy was saying, grateful for an upraised hand. “Tell us your coming out story.”

“It was back at school,” the voice began. Was it Ian’s posh North Shore drawl? It was so thickened by drink that I was unsure.

“It was long ago and far away…”

Everything inside me was shutting down.

“…At the late, great St. Harold’s…”

It was Ian in the murk, there was no doubt.

“…It happened in chapel, a building ordinarily off-limits to animal lusts. We were both acolytes, myself and this fellow I’ll call ‘M.’ M was reasonably attractive, but a little too sensitive and desperate…”

He was exhuming something awful, the worst part of our shared past, the thing that almost negated his saving my life.

“This sounds pretty good,” Brian whispered and Sam nodded. The troupe was eager to use Ian’s story, except for Roberto, who knew we’d been classmates.

“…This poor fellow had
parentage issues.
His father was a nautical person and his mother more or less followed the fleet…”

Already, my colleagues were huddling, assigning roles. “I’ll be the sensitive loser,” Justin said. “You be the guy who rejects him,” Paul told me. All the while, Andy was talking, explaining how we could have fun with this material. That’s all it was for them, just material.

“I’m sitting this one out,” I said.

“It’s your turn,” two people told me.

I could hear Ian laughing and saw Roger Morton, in his vest of tiny mirrors, like extra eyes, at the bar.

“Let him go,” said Roberto, as I ripped aside the curtain, almost splitting the fragile fabric. With Ian’s laughter still bullying my ears, I felt my fury escalate at his “follow the fleet” remark, his disparaging my mother, and I saw him long ago, in the chapel crypt, among the racks of choir robes, his laughter shiny and as hard as the brass candle snuffer he’d been holding…

The “Coming Out Story” skit was concluding. “…YOU MEAN YOU’RE THE BISHOP?!” Justin was shouting, then the audience cheered and the actors came bursting backstage.

“That was professional,” Andy said to me.

“Yeah, thanks for your support, Mark,” Brian added.

“You’re calling the next skit,” Roberto reminded me.

Somehow, I walked back onstage, parted the curtains and put myself into the lurid energy of the spotlight. “Okay, for this next skit, we need some occupations, the more bizarre the better,” I said.

“Mortician,” someone said.

“Porn star.” The perennial response.

“Astronaut—female
,”
one of the two lesbians specified.

Most of the other suggestions were just as good.

I said, “This next skit is called ‘Day Job,’ and it’s about someone whose fantasy career wreaks havoc with their nine-to-five responsibilities, for instance, a manicurist who secretly longs to be a tree surgeon.”

“Hey!” someone shouted.

“So let’s begin—”

“Hey,” the heckler repeated. It was Ian, staggering through the audience in a yellow-and-black rugby shirt spotted with ketchup. His eyes and nose looked runny, like he’d been fighting flu. “How come you weren’t in the last skit, Mark? I think you could’ve added a lot of…authenticity.”

“Where is the goddamn bouncer?” Roberto was asking.