Sacred Monster

Flashback 2

In the college auditorium, in the evening, a production of Hamlet was being rehearsed. The director was a member of the school faculty, but all the actors were students. Act V, scene i, was being run through, in costume, but without scenery or sets.

The two gravediggers shuffled onto the bare stage, dressed in rags, shovels over their shoulders. The first gravedigger was a large and bulky boy of nineteen, moving like a football player at the end of a hard game, his manner awkward but willing. The second gravedigger, stepping slyly, hunch-shouldered, bowlegged, completely comfortable, was Jack.

The football player spoke first, in a flat monotone, like the telephone company announcing the time: “Is she to be buried in Christian burial that willfully seeks her own salvation?” He gazed out over the dark auditorium as he declaimed, over the heads of the other actors and their friends and the jaundiced-looking director. He seemed unaware of the other person on stage, to whom he was allegedly speaking.

Jack shuffled around him, quick but obscurely infirm. His voice was a triumphant cackle as he said, “I tell thee she is; and therefore make her grave straight.” He winked and leered at his partner, sharing the joke with him, though the partner gave him nothing back. With mock solemnity, Jack crossed himself and sardonically intoned, “The crowner hath sate on her, and finds it Christian burial.” An echo of brogue lilted his speech.

“How can that be,” the football player said, one word thudding after another, “unless she drown’d herself in her own defense?”

Jack capered slightly, an arthritic imitation of a jester. “Why, ’tis found so,” he said, and winked.

The football player massively shook his head; acting. “It must be say often-dough,” he announced. “It cannot be else. For here—”

“Wait a minute!” called the director, rising from his front-row seat, hurrying up onto the stage. A balding, potbellied man of fifty, he was famous in the school for long brooding silences followed by excessive explosions followed by tortured apologies. While everyone else in the seats watched with half smiles of anticipation, this man crossed the stage to Jack and the football player, crying out, “What is this ‘often-dough’?”

“I dunno,” the football player said, blinking and looking defensive. “That’s what it says in the book.”

“It is not,” the director assured him, and waved a paperback copy under the football player’s nose. “The phrase is ‘se offendendo.’ Do you suppose you can say that?”

While the football player made a stumbling attempt to repeat the phrase, Jack looked toward the wings and saw Buddy there, just out of sight behind the side curtain, gesturing to Jack to come over. As the director attempted to teach se offendendo to the football player, with increasingly caustic asides, Jack crossed to the wings, walking with his usual quick buoyance, the shovel now jauntily borne on his shoulder. “Hi, Buddy,” he said when he had cleared the stage.

Buddy spoke quietly, conspiratorially. “Listen, Dad,” he said, “you stuck here?”

Jack smiled, like sunlight breaking through clouds. The hand not holding the shovel moved in an expansive delighted gesture. “I love it, Buddy! I’m alive here!”

Buddy nodded, without interest. “Oh, yeah?”

“Acting!” Jack beamed at the stage, where director and football player moved even further from understanding. “This is it for me,” he said.

“Yeah, well, I got a date with that Linda from seventeenth-century lit.”

Happy for his friend, Jack said, “Yeah? Great. She’s okay!”

“Only I need a couple bucks, Dad,” Buddy said. “Five?”

“Oh, sure, Buddy!”

Putting down the shovel, Jack searched his rags for his wallet, found it, and handed Buddy a bill. Buddy took it without comment, stowed it away in a pocket, and said, “Maybe she’s got a pal for you, if you ever get outa here.” Grinning, teasing with a little conspiratorial wink, he added, “And if you behave yourself.”

Suddenly sheepish, Jack fiddled with the shovel, moving it from hand to hand. “I know how to handle girls,” he said.

With an ironic laugh, Buddy said, “Yes, you do.”

From the stage, the director, with a thin, high-nettled whine in his voice, called, “Mister Pine, could you manage to rejoin us, do you suppose?”

“Oh, sure!” Shouldering his shovel, Jack grinned at Buddy, said, “Luck with Linda,” and hurried back to the middle of the stage, facing the exasperated director with his sunniest and most amiable smile. “Sorry,” he said. “Here I am.”

“So I see. We’re going to try reversing the roles. You know the lines?”

“Oh, sure I do,” Jack said. “They’re all my cues.”

“I don’t,” said the football player. He was now reduced to smoldering resentment.

“You’ll read,” the director told him, pushing the paperback into the football player’s midsection. The football player took it like a handoff. The director gave them both an arch look, said, “From the top,” and returned to his seat in the auditorium.

Jack and the football player left the stage; Buddy was already gone. After a moment they re-entered, this time Jack in front. The football player was stiffer than before, sullen anger visible in his expression and posture. This time, Jack was primmer, fussier. He kept smoothing and tidying the rags he wore. There was a hint of pursed-lipped pickiness in his expression and manner, and he sounded aggrieved when he said, “Is she to be buried in Christian burial that willfully seeks her own salvation?”

“I tell thee she is,” the football player read, one word at a time, “and therefore make her grave straight. The crowner hath sate on her, and finds it Christian burial.”

“How can that be,” Jack demanded, taking personal affront, “unless she drown’d herself in her own defense?”

“Why, ‘tis found so,” read the football player.

Jack was baffled by this. He took the shovel from his shoulder and stood it on the floor, then leaned on it, thinking the situation over. Shaking his head, he said, “It must be se offendendo; it cannot be else.” He turned so that the shovel stood between himself and the football player, then treated the shovel as though it were a lectern and he the lecturer. “For here lies the point,” he told the unlistening football player. “If I drown myself wittingly, it argues an act; and an act hath three branches — it is, to act, to do, and to perform; argal, she drown’d herself wittingly.” Having proved the point to his satisfaction, he released the shovel and spread both hands in accomplishment. The shovel stood poised, then began to topple, then was caught by Jack with a flowing movement that picked it up and placed it back on his shoulder.

The football player read, “Nay, but hear you—”

“Hold it!” cried the director from the auditorium. He was on his feet again, coming now to the edge of the stage, looking up at his actors, saying, “That’s it, we’ll keep it that way. You,” he said, gesturing at Jack, “come here.”

Jack went over to the edge of the stage, carrying the shovel on his shoulder. He went down on one knee, looking down at the director, saying, “Yes, sir?”

Quietly, but smiling, the director said, “You’ll have to carry him, you know.”

“Oh, he’ll be fine,” Jack said.

“Uh-huh. I wish I could have you play both parts,” the director said.

Oh, how long have I been here? I’m all curled in a ball on the gray slate patio. When did I stop talking? Slowly, with a degree of pain, I straighten out of the fetal position, I lie straight again, on my back, legs straight, feet together, eyes staring up at the sky. White, blue, faded, faint, far-receding sky... Is someone screaming?

“So you knew right then you were an actor.”

The interviewer’s voice brings me back, his words make me happy. “Yes!” I say. “It had to be. I could feel it like, like, like chicken soup. Well, later, like bourbon. Like nose candy, you know what I mean?”

“It made you strong.”

“It flowed through me,” I say, feeling it again, the finest high there is. “It was warm, it was beautiful. Give me a role to play, give me the costume, give me the lines. I don’t need an audience. That’s why I’m good in the flicks, see? You got these stage actors who need that boost, that audience out there with that reaction right now, but I never did. I could play in a closet, man, just me and the coats, in the dark. Just give me somebody to be.”

“Uh-huh.” The interviewer seems to think for a minute, brooding over his notebook like someone with something to hatch. Then he says, “So you came to Hollywood?”

I don’t get it. Confused, I say, “Hollywood?” thinking of those miserable little houses on Woodrow Wilson Drive, with their miserable little swimming pools taking up the whole back yard. Why would anybody want to—?

Then I do get it. “Oh!” I say. “LA! Here, you mean. No, my college professor sent me to some fruit he knew in New York, an acting teacher. My folks said they’d give me a year, then I was on my own. That’s the only time, really, for any length of time, the only time Buddy and I were ever separated.”

“He didn’t go to New York?”

“He went to the marines.”