The Book of Masks (Vol. 4)

A Rake's Progress

Previously: "The Character Thing" 

Carmen doesn't make a decision over breakfast, but she does promise to get back to you soon, after she's talked to her daughter.

Right after you part, you call Sydney, recapping your talk with Carmen, and telling her about the "notebook" that you invented for Becky. When she (horrified) asks what she'll do when Carmen asks to see it, you tell her to tell Carmen that she (Becky) burned it a few weeks ago in a fit of despondency.

What if she wants me to perform one of these characters? Sydney wants to know.

Drop the 'Rebecca Oliver' act and give her the 'Sydney McGlynn' act--a champion cheerleader from Kansas City. You can do her, can't you?

* * * * *

You spend the rest of the day doing what Paul has been doing while staying with his parents: pretending to write a screenplay. Oh, he's writing a screenplay alright. It's just that it takes him five hours to work up the nerve to open the Word document, another hour to read and revise the draft, thirty minutes of procrastination with online Solitaire before returning to the script, and another forty-five minutes to tap out two complete pages. So far, he's twenty-six pages in.

And of course, the story is about a chronically underemployed actor who constantly self-sabotages because he can't stop chasing pussy. (And getting it, because if Paul's going to write about himself, he's going to write about the himself that he fancies himself to be.) It gives you lots of time and excuse to imaginatively relive the material he's been basing it on.

There were, of course, his high school lays: Allison and Sasha and Tina and Erin and ... Well, and others. At parties, after parties, at the river, at the Warehouse. (Interesting to think that place was in business all the way back then.) Best memory, though—you can't help grinning as you recall it—was the time your senior year that you were at Kyrstyn MacGuire's, in her back yard, fiddling with some plants you were trying to crossbreed for a class project in plant biology. She'd always been friendly with you, but never even so much as flirted. Her mom came out to say that she was going to run some errands in town and get her toenails done.

And as soon as the car was out of sight, Kyrstyn said, Wanna try this out upstairs? But you and me instead of—? and flicked the leaves of the plant.

Well, you didn't need her to say it a second time to know what she meant. You'd done it plenty by then, and people knew it, and Kyrstyn probably asked you because, A) she knew you were a semi-pro and would get her question right away, and B) she knew you were a semi-pro and could do the job. Sure, you said, gave her ass an appreciative squeeze, and ran upstairs with her. She must have been puddling with hot, unappeasable desire the whole time you were playing with those damn plants, because she was like a greenhouse in the summer in the Florida Keys after you tore your clothes off and bundled into her bed. She screamed when she came and tried to rip the flesh off your back with her nails. Before and after, you gobbled at each other like starving raccoons tearing into a bunch of fat, juicy grapes.

And thirty minutes later you were back outside, working on the plants again as though nothing had happened in the interval.

* * * * *

But you got more action after moving to Los Angeles. Between the private classes and the waitering jobs, you had lots of choices and chances, every one of them a magnitude of order more desirable than anything back in Saratoga Falls. And there wasn't any competition, either. Not because there were no guys, or because you were a cut above them—it startled and dismayed you a little, to see how ... common ... your looks were in L.A. as opposed to back home—but because people didn't compete. Everyone was available to all comers, apparently without judgement.

So you did it in apartments and you did it on darkened theater stages after the rest of the class had left. You did it in parking lots and in supply closets. You did it with one girl, you did it with two, you did it with two girls and another guy, you did it with a dozen over the course of a weekend. Sometimes you did it with guys, but only when there was at least one woman present and you got tired of waiting your turn with her.

"You know why we're doing this, don't you?" Zander Parks asked you one evening when you sprawled, exhausted, in his darkened living room while your two dates entertained each other in the bedroom.

"Because we're horny."

He was smoking a joint, and he waved it in the air, so that the curling smoke caught and scattered the glare of the streetlamp outside. "It's because we want to be wanted."

"Well, yeah!"

He sat up.

"No, what I mean is, it's because we're all a bunch of fucking narcissists. That's why we're actors. We want to be looked at. We want to be desired. We want jobs where people look at us and want to be with us, and we feel fucking cheated when those jobs go to some other asshole. So, we try to get it some other way that makes us feel"—he caressed a bare nipple—"wanted. Something to fill that hole this business leaves after it's sucked our guts out."

You allowed that there was something in what he said, but you never got as philosophical about it as Zander, who was the kind of guy who liked foreign films and experimental theater. Maybe he was too philosophical about it, for it wasn't long after that he gave up on acting. The last you heard, he owned a small plumbing company in the Valley.

* * * * *

But you found your focus shifting after joining the cast of Enchanted U, which was far and away the biggest success you'd had. You still had access, of course, to the smorgasbord of yore, but to your own astonishment you began shying away from it, instinctively and almost violently. You ghosted former lovers and declined invitations to previous haunts. You didn't want to admit it, but eventually you were forced to face it. You had become one of those "snobs" who forgot former friends when they made it big(ger).

Not that you felt like a snob. Mostly you felt frightened. You felt like a man who after being tossed about a stormy sea had clambered onto shore, exhausted and traumatized. The last thing you wanted to do was plunge back into the maelstrom from which you'd escaped. It was an almost superstitious fear that if you spent too much time—or any time!—with former friends, you'd reacquire the taint of desperation and unemployment, and lose your new gig.

But you also didn't dive into the new pools that opened up with your new success. You left offers on the table, and drifted away from parties without a nighttime lay. But it wasn't because you had become a "good" person. If anything, you might have become worse.

Because the game now became seduction. Emotional domination.

There were lots of women on set and in the production offices, not all of them actresses. There were dozens of assistants around as well, most of them looking cramped and dowdy in their too-small clothes with their hair pulled back into unattractive buns behind their heads, and hiding their eyes behind glasses that could have been designed to make their faces look fat and unfocused. The game was to pick one, spin her around, dizzy her with your attentions, tease her with implied promises and veiled insinuations, and then—

After making it clear you were sleeping with one of her colleagues.

—maneuver her into bed.

For one time only.

You plowed your way through dozens like this, often keeping three of them (at various stages of seduction) in the air at once. You weren't the only one, and you didn't invent the game, either. That would have been Michael Chadden, who played Philistine Gauleiter, one of the witch-hunting antagonists, on the show. He was a veteran of two other short-lived series, where he had apparently invented the game to amuse himself, and he explained it to you when you caught him making a play for two women at once. From you two it spread to most of the rest of the supporting actors on set. It got so bad that at least one reporter from Variety came sniffing around for a story, having heard that the production was about to get hit with a "hostile workplace" suit.

The really odd thing is that, since the end of the show and the evaporation of your active career, not only have you gotten laid only a few times (and that with disappointing results) but you haven't even really wanted to.

Which leaves the real-life anecdotes you are transmuting into fiction as your main outlet of release.

Next: "Parting Is Such Sweet Something" 

*
"Table of Contents (Vol. 4)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 4)"