Actor: A Novel in Three Acts

The lights above and beyond me dropped, centering solely on me. Creativeness, Stanislavski wrote, is first of all the complete concentration of the entire nature of the actor. I exhaled and ignored the shuffling papers, the shifting of weight in chairs, the bored coughs; the yearnings to be anywhere other than there...the whispers in theatre's wings. From the plane of actual reality into the plane of another life...created and imagined by him. There were tricks to arouse the inner and the real. I had a few. They got me there, sometimes.

"Different kind of heat," I murmured, imagining the stage lights as the desert sun. "Out there it's clean. Cools off at night. There's a nice little breeze."

The space fell quiet. In the air, dust particles caught in the light spun in a hypnotic dance as the audience dissolved into the darkness. Overhead, the ceiling seemed to open up and reveal the sky. My body felt like it was being pulled somewhere else...coalesced for reasons I didn't necessarily need to understand. My own but not my own. From the plane of actual reality into the plane of another life there was sometimes a moment of in-between in acting, a kind of overlapping when one and the other simultaneously tap into the world of the play and the real world where both players become the serpent or dragon consuming its own tail. It's best not to talk about it because whatever may be happening is easy to startle and scare...like a butterfly, a hummingbird, or a child's innocence seeing the wicked ways of the world too early.

Then, Lee arrived.

My stance widened. My pelvis inched forward. Everything, I felt, was slowly becoming heavy, labored, arduous—even my crotch ached like a small bag of wet rocks. And both of my legs suddenly felt beaten with whiffle ball bats. How? The middle of my brow suddenly tightened and demanded attention...authority. I had never paid attention to that area of my face before. Why now? My spine lengthened, then dropped violently into a pained, awkward, crescent moon shape.

Becoming is being, Edie often told me.

My stomach released and I felt my gut, usually sucked in and constricted, roll over my belt...fat, unwanted, and free. Deep, nasty, nasally inhales through my nose followed. I imagined all the dirt and dust and tiny pebbles from the desert deep down in there. The back of my throat filled. I could taste their grit. Nature was trying to choke me...trying to kill me. Where were you God? Where were you when I needed you? Where was anyone? My before, I told myself. On the verge of death, with no one there like Austin or my parents or my friends to help me—all alone.

One time, Dean and Edie took me out to Joshua Tree. Everything had been dry and barely alive. I was young, but not so young that I didn't still have the blurry memory. They were holding hands as they walked ahead of me, celebrating their anniversary. The sun was high in the sky. No wind. No birds—only insects. It was one of the only times I recalled them touching lovingly like that, realizing they had once, before me, been other people. No better or worse, just...different. There was nothing but sand and sun and space; no such thing as forgiveness.

From the wings I heard hushed pangs of whispers. All of me wanted to snap at them, but I resisted. An unintended, impulsive break was a reminder that this was a play...almost always reading like a lapse in oneself and never lending to the work.

I walked to the single stage chair, chipped and worn from use, and dragged it a few feet from the edge of the stage near a small table they had provided. There was no typewriter, beer cans, or anything like that. I would have to imagine. In the end, that was the job: to make believe so convincingly, they would, unknowingly, come along with you. The entire theatre was now completely quiet. Everything was still. No seats moved. No backstage sounds. No doors opening or closing up in the mezzanine. Some new energy brought on an entirely new world.

In front of me, down below, a few seat backs, I could see my reader. They were waiting for me. In all that darkness, I couldn't make out what they looked or who, based on first impressions, who they were. It didn't matter. Not right then. I had the first line. I wanted to be close, so they could see me move, see me speak sure, and see the transformation. Not too close though to lose the mystique the stage gave the actor. Up there, if I played the role right, I held all the power. Up there, if I was good, there was no trying. That’s what Lisa would remember most...being.

I wondered if they liked that I was taking the space, using the time? Anyway, it was my time. They asked me here. I'm here. Let me be here.

So many new actors rushed through everything. It made them look desperate, amateurish—scared. Like they didn't know why they'd been given the chance. Like even they didn't believe they should be there at all. 

Why would a director? If they were cast, why would an audience?

I sat down at the table and raised my hands to its surface. My fingers, with nonchalant authority, wrapped around an invisible can of beer. Then, looking at the reader, looking at Austin out in the void of our parents living room, I was about to begin.

Then Lee's voice entered.

He didn't ask. He just...barged in...as if he had walked in on me naked and I didn't have any say.

Taken, in a way, but for good reason...or at least at the ask of the creative will.

It’s morning, but who gives a shit? Lee was asking me I think or I was asking him or me or...my brother?

The reader maybe.

Who gives a shit about him and what he thinks? I've been out there. Way, way out there. And fuck him and everyone who put me out there, but to spite them...I’ll go again! I’m not scared. I'm not scared. Fear is for fearful people. Fearful! Not me. I raised myself better. All Austin does is type on his machine and write about life when I’m out there in it making...real decisions...life and death choices and getting punished and paid for it. More paid than punished. I mean more punished than paid, but who cares!

Austin wants me to prove why I'm here. Needs a justification why I even exist! He's a lot like life, you know that? I tried to answer, but I couldn't move my mouth. I could only listen.

Look at me brother. Look at me LIFE! Look at my dusty boots. Look at how dirty my pants are. Smell the stink on my underwear. Under my armpits and in my ass and big useless balls. The smells of someone alive. Someone who has been through it out there taken by the night, walking with nothing but the stars and the unreachable, uncatchable moon while you Austin...simulate existence by wrapping it up in big words and social class craft and academia! Distancing yourself from the tension of things...the conflict of things...dressing it up with —what's something you would say? Verbiage? Sure. My know-it-all brother everyone! The brains on Austin or unimaginable. Probably why he hangs out with the bigwigs of Hollywood. They—if you didn't know—know all about life! More than anyone. Which is why the big time writer my brother... who every single day and every single hour has a reason to put himself on the other side of everyone he deems below him and always...lives and breathes far, far away, from danger. He uses his mind because he knows he can’t cope. You hear me Austin? You can't hack it.

That shadow you thought was coming to get you all those years? That was me. You tried to write yourself out of it, but I'm always going to be here. I'm the source of your trauma...your inspiration. Without me, what would you write about? Beauty?

I couldn't stop him. I tried to hold Lee back. I made some kind of mental effort to silence him, but I didn't know how. And he wouldn't stop. Time slowed down and seemed to stop entirely as he took me over and kept going and going with my eyes locked on the reader, unable to speak my first line.

Looking at you Austin almost makes me sick, continued Lee. Pathetic, like an old lady, hunched over his man-made contraption trying to manufacture feeling with his college given man-made words while I’m out in nature not being told nothing about how to survive. I got my instincts. I got my guts. I got my bloody, hot stinking insides that some wolf would just as quick have for dinner than guide me home. Home! Ha! Never heard of it. Four walls, a toilet, a stove, and a sink...for nobody! Wash your nuts in it Austin. Wash your ass! I got me and that’s it in the real world, where truth of feeling and emotions and existence are five inches from your fucking face...unable to decipher a thing until your eyes close for night Austin and it's all over again.

When was the last time I seen you anyway? Do you know? Doubt it. Fuck it. Who cares? Probably when Mom called me last to check in on you. She was always worried about you more than me because she knew you couldn’t last one day in the shoes I've been wearing since I came out of her. That’s why I’m drinking beer, relaxing, and watching you water her stupid plants like a for-hire gardener. Like her peasant. Like her slave. And I’m drinking my beer! Good beer! American beer! The best beer as you try to make sense of the world with words that most of the globe can't or won't or doesn't want to even understand. Expand your mind? For what? Expand your wallet. Expand your gut. Expand your cock. The world, Austin...for your little screenplay or book or whatever...is action, reaction, and ordered by lights and sounds that only produce more and more madness that exists far above your sentence-by-sentence bullshit. You're on someone's pay grade. I'm on God's. I'm on the Devil's. Celestial. They don't need stories. They are the story. They are the word, and you're just chasing a taste of it for a second. I'm existing in it, and as soon as your suits can replace you, they will.

I attempted to push Lee to relent, but he wouldn't. My eyes gazed at my hand, the one around the beer. It was perfectly still and shaped around the can like before.

We're covered in the waste of the world Austin and as I stretch out my big muscles and air out my big balls because, don't you forget: I am big fucking man with nothing to prove to no one...you’re just a writer making up stories for corporate storytellers to dupe some schmuck into believing there is community in buying things they don't need to work long hours for a man they'll never meet to maybe lead them to someone liking them enough to breed to make even more little buyer-babies. It’s easy if you learn to open your eyes, Austin. It’s easy if you let yourself cry about it here and there in the real world instead of the page. Instead of going into that machine and your little blank piece of paper. What do you want Austin? Change? Who told you putting puzzle-piece-shaped letters together did that? Who was it? Wasn’t me.

You forget Austin...I am the curve.

You're just here typing away to pay off somebody else’s overleveraged checkbook.

I am the curve.

Anyway, let's begin.