[The excerpt below is from Mutable’s most recent release, a memoir of the summer Boyer spent touring America with a woman named Jill, performing plays with strangers in their bedrooms as the two made their way south to New Orleans, west to LA, and north to Seattle, the madness that ensued, and how it all began.]
Bedroom Theater began when my roommate changed the light bulb in my bedroom, or rather, it began when he pointed out to me that he had changed the light bulb and for a moment I thought the bare bulb made my room look like an experimental theater space or heroin den, and then I thought that I should do that someday (start an experimental theater in my bedroom not start doing heroin) and then I forgot, for I was constantly slipping in and out of depression in those days, or rather, mostly slipping in and very rarely slipping out of the yearlong depression I was at that moment in the middle of. Most days it would take me a good half hour to put on one sock and even when I was fully clothed in socks, I would still spend hours sitting in the dark of my room contemplating literally nothing while staring at the brick wall facing my couch and the word “Safety” painted on it and above my queen-sized bed.
My room has always been windowless–unless you count the wall of windows concealed behind the velvet curtain with a view the adjacent hallway just beyond–and up until that point when my roommate changed the light bulb, the only light had come from a few scattered lamps wreathed in secondhand smoke, while maybe Leah and I sat on the couch eating Moo Shoo Pork (at least I would; Leah’s vegetarian) and plink away on the synthesizer with a pen in the air to halt conversation? Or Adam or Zach would come over and sit with my chain-smoking self while arguing over the merits of suicide or disemboweled puppy love. And when I was alone I would usually be at my computer, hunched over the keyboard and experiencing apathy in the direction of the screen.
Somewhere in there my grandmother had said about embracing your conscious self or suffering the consequences in the form of institutionalization. But actually, it was years ago she’d said that, and I had yet to really take her advice into consideration. I’d just returned from New York for the second time in the aftermath of 9/11.
My first stint in New York had been far worse, though.
The absolute worst being a seven-month stint living in a warehouse with a bunch of cokeheads and a landlord who was determined to get us out using any underhanded means at his disposal, including cutting our phone wires and shutting off our electricity and sewage access. I slept all day then too, in a room without windows also, with no electrical outlets at all as a matter of fact. I would stay out until seven in the morning reading Kant at all-nite diners strung in colored Christmas lights only to return to find my roommates struggling to hold on to the tail end of their coke binge every morning, and maybe drawing houses on the crotches of manikins or maybe playing a game of soccer in the living room while listening to Ozzy Osborne singing, I’m goin’ through changes at top volume. I spent the summer I lived in that warehouse sneaking into an abandoned loft on the third floor to shower by candlelight in a tub with bits of the surrounding walls in it.
From there it was the abandoned restaurant with the crackwhores doing their johns on the front step and loose electrical wires hanging above the shower when I first moved in, and I lost my job because I accused my boss of drinking on the job, and I auditioned for Rent after staying up all night writing a paper on Kant, spent the entire afternoon standing in the rain and spent my lunch break running my paper downtown to my professor and sang a soul song of my own composition goes Welcome to my baby / Welcome to my chi-i-ild in the coatroom at my audition for said Broadway musical, and couldn’t look the judges in the eyes, and eventually got a job at another movietheater called The Screening Room and moved in with a girl and her boyfriend because she had said if he didn’t let me move in, then she was going to move into my bedroom whether he liked it or not, and my friend who helped me move, spent the whole time spanking me while I was trying to carry my boxes up to my room from his car, and we lived next door to the super who was not supposed to live there–these were lofts in yet another warehouse—and of course we were not supposed to be living there either, and so I would piss in a jar if I had to go in the middle of the night, and once I got so stoned that I was convinced angels were massaging my buttocks while I crawled toward my bed in the dark, and my roommate (boyfriend to the girl) said my room stank of cum and cigarettes, and I started tossing left and right every night thinking of all the beautiful women I’d let slip through my fingers, and I got mugged, and my head bounced off the concrete while they held me down and rifled through my pockets. I shouted, I don’t have any money, over and over while they shushed me.
After three years of this, my grandmother called to explain that I must leave New York or I would die. (She’d had a dream.) She was a Jungian Psychoanalyst who believed in the I Ching and Tarot Readings. She was a Sicilian who’d made good use of her evil eye. Regardless of her advice, I returned to New York a year later only to find myself spiraling downward once again. I returned to Boston more defeated than before.
The laughter dribbled into my bedroom from around the apartment—what I thought of at the time as the twitterings of sparrows on ether—and although I knew I needed to find some way to make enough money to pay my rent and feed myself, for the first nine months after my return I worked only one day a week as I crept steadily into debt, had a radio show on WMFO from two to six in the morning, and then of course the weekly ritual of Bedroom Theater, which had started with a simple phone call.
*
It had been two months since Jason first changed that light bulb, and I was talking to Zach when it sort of slipped out that someday I wanted to turn my bedroom into an experimental theater space called Bedroom Theater, and Zach told me I had to begin this Bedroom Theater thing the very next day.
Zach has made it almost a career to convince me to do stuff I don’t really want to do, or not yet. Maybe he’s flipped on the lights and is stripping the covers off my bed and feels that other persons should make a little effort to take care of themselves perhaps, especially seeing as he’s come all the way out here to meet with this slob of a business partner, and of course he’s got to turn on every single light in my trash-strewn bedroom, then announce to the now light-filled room that he’ll see me in the kitchen when I’ve decided to join us here in the land of the living. From publishing companies to manifesto-writing classes. It’s always something with him.
And so, we decided that I would spend the next twenty-four hours writing as many short plays as I could, and he would spend it calling every single person he knew. Then it’s the following evening and my bedroom was all full up with the curious few who I had come to expect at the events I curated around Boston at that time.
A smirk and a wink from Katya, her flask raised, while Leah flapped her arms and made squawking sounds. And Diane had come in the hopes of seeing Adam, who did not come. And Guy was greasy hair and half of an unshaven face. His gangly legs were crossed and his glances were like something out of a fashion photographer’s reject bin. And then Jonah’s popping in from his own room on the other side of the apartment and sporting three or four knitted hats one on top of the other, his arms raised and letting out a scream of a whisper to mimic the crowd of adoring fans who should simply materialize if there’s any justice in the world at all, which of course there is not–then he’s jumped onto my bed and is rubbing his hand about suggestively upon the prime piece of real estate directly to his left. Looking at Diane who immediately followed him onto my hand-me-down mattress and snuggled in real close. Zach of course was there.
I’ve known Zach since I was fourteen. We were both members of the Strategic Games Club at Brookline High, and I was working at the Coolidge Corner Theater the day Jocelin kicked him out because he wanted to go see a movie instead of care for their six-month-old son. It was April Fool’s Day and Boston was in the middle of a blizzard. And when he arrived at the theater we drank sake at the counter until after closing.
Jocelin had gotten pregnant during the transition from condoms to the pill and for the following months Zach didn’t seem to get it. His eyes had glazed over for her entire pregnancy, his body just a floating ember. On the day M. K. Katz was born I was stripping for a bachelorette party, but I do remember Zach carrying his newborn son around the lobby and pointing at some movie poster and saying, Yes. It’s all about the sexual nooky nooky. That’s how you were born my little munchkin. Mommy and Daddy did The Fruit Loop to each other all night long. We were all laughing then, couldn’t stop, but it was like Zach was still in high school and hanging around the cafeteria with a child someone had handed him. He was only a father by accident. The child, though biologically his, seemed completely removed from his person at that moment, like a decal someone had pasted on our pleasant adolescent scene.
However, that would all change when Jocelin followed her new husband to Thailand with Zach’s child in tow, and Zach was transformed by a crippling anguish. And whenever his child was out of the country (some eight months of the year) he was overcome by a sickening need to act as patron to the arts in Boston.
Our collaborations had begun some years earlier, though, when I was still living in New York and Zach mentioned that someday he wanted to publish my writing. This at the diner I used to frequent in Brooklyn Heights. And when I returned to Boston, he was running a performance event called SWoON. (SWoON stood for Spoken Word or Other Night; acronyms were everywhere in those days.) A month after I returned to Boston I did in fact take over SWoON, and he moved to New York to become CEO of a startup called IdeaCurrent. It had something to do with mapping the human mind, although he couldn’t explain any further than to say that he and his partner were going to build internet-based AI, but for now he was content doing web design. He was gone for a year before the company went under and he returned to take SWoON back, and then it was my turn to scurry back New York way.
*
Things just seemed to happen around me at that time. Like I was the star of my own sitcom and I didn’t even know it. I would get up and spend the morning putting on socks and then the people would start popping in and I’d realize that it’s that night again, because I often forget on account of I had come up with this ingenious idea that Bedroom Theater should be every eight days, so everyone could attend at some point, even those who have a regular engagement every Friday night.
I would slip into my room and get to writing in the hopes that I could finish this little absurdist comedy before too many more people showed up or hope that someone brought a play to be read of either her own doing or one that was done unto us several thousand years ago by a now dead Greek. This is what Bedroom Theater became.
Because that first night proved a success and was quickly followed by another and another. It was the one night during the week that I put on my artificial smile like a smiling clown. Zach was of course a regular attending member, and Leah, but it’s Diane with her bevy of boys in entourage every week who made the show the success it was. They were always changing and sometimes weren’t more than a rumor, but Diane was almost always there and she took her plays very seriously and laughed out loud at the plays of others.
But Bedroom Theater was not an event wherein you come and view a masterful performance or a poor performance of any sort, but to be entertaining yourself, to be both performer and audience. It was considered a success by all if six people showed up and stood in a circle passing a book round and chuckles were had by all. We did get some notice, however, through my weekly email and a dismissive article in the Globe that was more about the shifting reality of real estate than Bedroom Theater per se, although it did feature a smashing photograph of myself reading Dracula that took up half the page.
It spawned maybe a few score new one-act plays, the number of plays written decreasing fairly rapidly once Diane left for Chicago, and the style of execution always the same. The sort of surreal schlock could be written by a kid with a tub full of words perhaps, but often with real humor, and a secret encoded message usually involved the tongue of one attendee wrapping round the tongue of another. That’s real tension.
As for Adam. Not only did he not show up the first night, but when it became obvious that he was fighting for Diane’s attention with every Tom, Dick, and Ingrid that’d a penchant for amateur theatricals, he declared Bedroom Theater a sham and a travesty. It would be months before Adam finally put down his fighting words, took some time away from his Java, C++, and various other pursuits of a binary nature, and came see for himself what the rest of us had been up to. He was like a carcinogen in my coffee or a creamer gone wrong. When Adam took the time away from his busy schedule to attend, however, his tune changed dramatically. On the whole, an out of body experience, he said.
For we had done nothing less than create an atmosphere in which a tense autoerotic groupie phenomenon was the order of the day. Each of those among our little enclave of adoring fans acting both as starlet and teaming humanity with playbill clenched to chest just dreaming of an autograph. We were a population entertaining themselves, and a sitcom religion wherein the eucharist is nothing more than a punch line in some larger absurdist drama, but more than this, that we are all hams, hamming it up for the rest of us.
I didn’t see Adam all that often in those days, but we did still have that radio show once a week. The show was from three to five and was called:
THE ANGRIEST WEAKLING
(Doughnuts and eggs were often consumed in great quantity either before or afterwards. A common exchange between the two of us might go like this.)
Adam.
I have to be. I have to go to GRAMMAR SCHOOL TOMORROW.
(Gabe bursts out laughing)
I’ve been sent back.
Gabe.
Because you’ve been shooting heroin in the bathroom.
Adam.
I’ve been put back into grammar school. Fifth grade. What are we listening to? Whose playing guitar? Some backwards living person I presume.
Gabe.
Jeffrey Tumorman.
Adam.
So, what are you normally doing at three thirty in the morning Gabe, besides being here and rambling on like a complete idiot?
Gabe.
Normally doing? Well. I think yesterday at three thirty in the morning I was lying on. I was lying awake in my brightly lit room, sitting, half sitting on my bed and half lying on my bed.
Adam.
WHAT? HOW CAN YOU DO THAT?
Gabe.
In a half. Semi-comatose state.
Adam.
Yes?
Gabe.
Alright. Well, I’m talking nonsense right now. I admit that. But what I men. What I mean to say is that my legs were hanging off the bed. I was sitting there. I remember my roommate walking past. This was approximately three thirty two in the morning.
Adam.
Apr APPROXIMATELY? Where was your STOP WATCH? Where was your TIMING CONSOLE?
Gabe.
I don’t know.
Adam.
WHERE WAS YOUR SPACE SUIT?
Diane once offered to fix my ukulele, and Somer once stayed up all night building me a stage in the basement before his roadtrip to New York, a stage which we carried up to my room just before dawn. We talked about the possibility of recording our amateur efforts but never did, drank mixed cocktails, ate simple sandwiches, stood in small clusters and in general gestured wildly on the makeshift stage now filled half my room. Somer had just suddenly decided to build it after a particularly spirited reading of The Crucible to an audience of two. Each night it was different.
Sometimes, it’d be four of us on the couch and giggling as we rubbed our thighs together, and sometimes forties romantic comedy would be all the rage, but each time, we would explode into caricatures of the standard emotional palette and would often be goading each other on to the most extreme facial expressions possible, only to then stop for a moment and retire to the kitchen for more refreshments of the highball and lowball variety, perhaps sing a song of sad young men over the urinal while glancing absent-mindedly at the original poster for Hardcore, the film starring George C. Scott as the concerned parent who had to infiltrate the Vegas porn scene to save his pornstar daughter, then return to my bedroom full of laughter. We saw it as our duty to push every boundary then, that our cynicism would lead us to the truth.
The most ambitious bedroom theater was “all-night bedroom theater”, during which we read Wally Shawn’s pornographic comedy A Thought in Three Parts (just the second act) from a safe distance and fully clothed, did after hours apocalyptic improv, barking and scratching at each other and some time past midnight, as well as, Free-Thinking Man as Commodity, a musical without music, in which part of the humor was having not only unskilled actors, but unskilled singers, composing their own melodies right there on the fly, as the words escaped from their reedy throats.
Occasionally, it was even a celebrity event, in which the local intellectual scene would show up to put on their own version of Clifford Odets’ The Big Knife, or hosting Sheila Heti on tour to promote the release of her book, The Middle Stories, but the usual Bedroom Theater was more than anything a collection of shameless persons, getting off on humiliating themselves in front of a few close confidantes.
Diane left after a few short months to continue her studies at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Zach of course was renowned as the sort of element mothers steer their girls clear of. (He’d made out with Diane twice in the first few weeks.) One of which was a play I’d written in which a character makes out with the narrator to bring her lover back to life, but to my own defense I expressly stated that actors were free to ignore the stage directions whenever possible, the other was a play Zach wrote for the sole purpose of touching tongues with his darling Diane a second time. A week or so later she wrote a monologue about him, entitled, The Rat.
And sometimes it seemed the entire rock-n-roll community had crammed themselves into my bedroom, especially when my own event coincided with other events, such as the night Jonah threw a going-away party for Kaethe. That night I made one of the most revolting concoctions of my culinary career, involving packing peanuts, Pabst Blue Ribbon, and a dried squid that had been hanging on my roommate’s wall for the past eight years. In short, yet another experiment in absurdity taken to unconscionable extremes.
Of course, the only people who ate that particular concoction were myself and Kaethe. Personally, I found it to be like a kind of goulash and very edible, while Kaethe ended the night vomiting all over Jonah’s rug, but to my defense, she had also eaten a gingerbread house had been sitting on our counter for several weeks and drank an unhealthy amount of beer. Then she was off to Budapest the following day to perform viola with their local violaless orchestra.
It was a vivid dream I could not leave behind, because back then I really thought of myself as just a legless palindrome repeating the same statement front to back then back to front day in day out. I wanted them to learn how to sing I suppose, but there was no response more appropriate than the smallest of contented sighs.
*
And as for the Bedroom Theater Tour, it came to me in yet another moment of inspiration. Our route was roughly going to be a rectangle. We’d been performing plays in my bedroom for approximately six months by this point, and I had decided that myself and preferably two other persons who I had yet to convince were going to go South with me to New Orleans, then West to LA, North to Seattle, and then back East. I explained this repeatedly to whoever I could corner, and if they had any experience discussed mileage as it relates to time and if they happened to know anybody in Toledo or Arizona.
It had all started with the motto: ‘Coming to Bedrooms across America’. I just liked how it sounded, and so every night I went to sleep in a state of agitation, thinking of women coming out to sit with me on a porch in Tennessee or Wisconsin, but only if certain factors could be worked out: I needed to learn how to drive; I needed to convince someone to give up two months of their time; I needed to book the shows; and of course I needed to find a vehicle and a bunch of money to get me there and back, but it was only a fantasy after all, so all of these concerns were immaterial. Then all of this changed with a little miracle that I would later regret immeasurably. Because Zach was all for it.
And because Zach was all for it, he would make it happen. However, this time, instead of making a barrage of phone calls, he bought a vehicle and said I could borrow it for the summer’s duration and gave me a little bit of bread. It’s the least I can do, he said.
About six months before he had come into a sizeable inheritance and used it to begin his investment career. At that time, he was doing fairly well on the stock market and decided to use some of his extra capital to do the things described above, but also to actually make the publishing company we’d talked about so long ago into a reality. Over the course of that Winter, I compiled and edited a collection of manifestoes that I was to take on the road with me. Zach started complaining that people only talked to him now because he had money and started only talking about money himself.
The car he’d purchased was a beautiful van, a 1971 VW Minibus.
The exterior was painted white with a stripe of yellow along the side. Like all VW Minibuses its engine was in the rump, so the seats could be placed right up against the snub nose at the van’s front for easier access to the street rapidly disappearing below. Its roof popped up to make one bed and the small couch in the back pulled out to make a second, but this second bed could only be used if the storage area behind the couch was completely cleared out, which would prove prohibitive. It had a propane stove, the burners for which folded out from the left wall, and a small fridge that I never did figure out how to make go. And everything, from the fist-sized cabinets that hung from the ceiling, and also made up the couch’s baseboard, to the miniature closet behind the driver’s seat, was covered in faded wood paneling, and there were orange curtains on all the windows like you might expect to find in your grandma’s log cabin. The clutch was a long thin rod that came from out the floor between the two front seats and the dash was only sparsely populated with a gas meter and a speedometer. The steering wheel was pizza-sized and when you tried to make a sharp left or right you had to pull that thing round enough times that it was work. The van had been living in San Francisco when Zach purchased it. He flew out there and drove it back by way of Texas.
This was in the middle of February, and he was calling me from Van Horn, Texas, to announce that he’d gotten the van towed there after it stalled out on the side of the highway. The Van is impaled on the Horn of Texas, he said, with the wind howling through his cell phone. There was nothing in this town according to Zach but some fantastic barbecue ribs and an auto dealership that was attracting flies.
He ended up getting the van towed to Austin, where he was to stay with some elusive friends of his and go to the South by Southwest Music Festival—which was almost over by the time he arrived. He called me from there too, announcing that he wanted to start a writer’s colony outside of Austin called Mutaville, that he could get several acres for very cheap and we could build using adobe. Telling me about the bands he’d gone to see, J-Pop and Hip Pop, how he had fallen in love with this neo-punk post-communist singer from Beijing, and’d had a conversation concerning the merits of Smog while waiting in line with one of the members of Smog.
He arrived in Boston several weeks after that and spent the next two months working on it. He left it out front of a friend’s house because he worried that the neighbors would complain if he left it in Brookline. It’s almost there, or, I think I found out what the problem is.
Both to instill confidence in this infernal machine and to begin my training in the ways of automotive control, Zach and I took a trip down to New York City in the van, and during that trip, the van was used in a Video Salon Night Production, at a loft I often frequented name of Exile—which had been a club by the same name in the eighties and still had the sign hanging out front—and the van was going to be the get-away car, in frame for a shoot-out between this disillusioned detective and the manicured biker trash in the parachute pants who was stealing said detective’s pregnant daughter out from under him. Zach doubled as a fresh-faced beat cop and a transvestite waiter for that shoot, and I ended up playing the part of the evil sidekick samurai bartender. The name of the film we made was Till Death Do Us Part.
It opens with the two leads being chewed out by their captain. You two can love honor and uphold the law. Why can’t you love honor and uphold each otha? It’s an ex-husband and ex-wife cop buddy movie.
And then jump ahead two months to the end of May, and Zach’s left a message on my machine in which he says that since his son’s back in town, he’s dropping his responsibilities to Mutable Press in general, and Manifesto I in particular. I would have to take care of the printing of the book myself. (The informal agreement had been that I would work as editor and he would take care of the logistics for our newly formed publishing imprint.) This sort of behavior I had come to expect, but somehow as minor as it may seem, something snapped then, my frustration compounded by his lack of guilt or any other emotion.
I took care of it of course, but there was so much else I had on my mind at that time, and here’s Zach with his one son, who sure doesn’t live in America for nine months out of the year and I can understand that when his son shows up, the man is desperate to spend as much time together with the kid as possible, but I had problems of my own and they were much more important because they were mine. I won’t get into most of them now, but just to give you an idea, I still hadn’t passed my driver’s test, and still hadn’t passed my driver’s test, and still hadn’t passed my driver’s test, which brings us up to July 1st and me on my way into Cambridge in Eros’ car, coaching me the whole way.
Eros was my sponsor and had forgotten her driver’s license the first time, but this time she’d remembered it, and I was pulling out of the parking lot with a state trooper beside me, and I was doing fine until asked to parallel park. You just backed up eighty feet without looking behind you, the state trooper says. Now do a three point turn. I pulled out without looking either way. He jumped in his seat but still gave me a passing grade.
I got home to call Jill and announce that against all odds I had made it. We were in business, and she cheered. We were performing at Chris Fujiwara’s house later that evening.
*
Back when I was nineteen, I wept like a little infant when one woman in particular returned to her home country, who of course I had to follow there six months later, only to have my heart definitively squashed while walking her home from school one day, and the whole time she’s saying how much she didn’t want to be having this conversation, but here we were. Having this conversation. After which, I spent three months living five doors down from her, watched hour upon hour of quality British television, went clubbing with local artschool undergrads only to end my night with head hung over trough, or just sat in my living room reading Faulkner and working on what I hoped would be the most depressing novel ever written, and in general just relieved that I never had to appear happy ever. If you’ve never been to Hull, don’t go. Every time I tell someone from the UK that I lived there for three months, the response is always the same.
You lived in Hull?! You lived in Hull.
And it was after I returned from Hull—this is in ’95 now—that I moved into Hardcore the first time. With its miniature television in the fridge. And superhero figurines stapled to the walls. Where Jeremy once made a plaster bust of his own buttocks, and another time fell through the drop ceiling during a particularly spirited performance. And it was Jeremy who had stolen the phone number from his old house, had called up AT&T and told them that he was responsible for a group of exchange students off in France, and would you, Mr. Customer Service Representative, like to have these kids’ lives on your conscience, if not then please allow me to move this particular phone number with me to my new address. Which apparently took two months to finagle, and at the end of which, the manager at New England Telephone announced that they had never done anything like this before.
It was in this manner that Hardcor became Hardcor, i.e. 427-3267. I had lived there on and off ever since. (Only absent for my two stints in New York since that time.) But now we’re back in early May and I am looking for an escape.
I really don’t know if I want to DO this, I said.
And so, Zach could see also that I was looking for an escape, but in his mind all I needed was to be surrounded by the body parts of strangers and everything would be smooth as lard once again, so he suggested we go for a walk. We were sitting around the door-sized cutting board that doubled as our kitchen table and drinking tea, and my lips were locked shut when he clapped his hands and told me to get myself in gear. He was speaking like an aerobics instructor as we chugged on down the steps like gunfire and out into the street.
We ended up slipping into a bar that was almost completely empty. The wood was varnished a deep brown and the dust was thick on the top shelf quality liquor. There was a cigarette machine in back that hadn’t been used in years and there was an aquarium inset to the far wall and as far as I could tell I didn’t know a single person here. Turned out, the bathroom was practically medieval.
After the initial euphoria of anonymity, several faces were coming into focus. I had almost made a terrible mistake with the girl at the table next to us at a Warriors-themed party. It had begun with her hands and how they played with my hands. Then she had followed me home, followed herself by several sincere thugs. So, I wasn’t going to look in her direction.
Meanwhile, Zach had returned with a beer in each hand and was attempting to explain to me one more time how it is that we can make serious cash doing business as an independent publishing company; my head was buzzing. I was rubbing my face and trying to look interested when this girl who had come to the most recent Bedroom Theater made a point to come over and say hello. I looked up at her and tried to smile, but I couldn’t remember her name.
Her name was Jill, and she was wearing a long red and white striped scarf. She was bundled up like a croissant. I asked if she had met my associate, Mr. Zachary Katz. Then. You wouldn’t want to go on a cross-country tour with me this summer, would you? She giggled. An interminable silence ensued.
After she had returned to the bar and the friend she had waiting there, Zach returned to his usual nagging. I was meant to leave for tour in less than two months, and I needed to get myself in gear if I was going to do anything other than sit at home and play pretend that I was driving around the country performing in people’s bedrooms. He was trying to show me what this would be like, this playing pretend I was driving while sitting in my bed by making a complete ass out of himself with an invisible steering wheel and a faulty muffler for a mouth, when Jill and her friend from the bar sat down with us.
Jill was a small bambino of a young lady with oriental eyes and tiny red lips when she sat down next to me—as in, the sort of idealistic youth has real mafia mistress potential—and Josh sat with Zach—to discuss Zach’s earning potential and whether he really honestly could sincerely say he knew what was going on in the art scene around Boston these days. Meanwhile, Jill had a red dot on the end of her nose, a birthmark of some kind and had gone to this terrible all girls high school, while I had gone to this terrible all boys choir school. She had two brothers, and so did I. We had been born at the same hospital in Albany, NY.
The little snippets I picked up of her past were all laughter in the schoolyard. They involved abandoned industrial parks during high school, and driving to sing, and the projects she’s been working on for the past two years. Right now she was just finishing up her art degree, sending letters across the country and tracking them. She was biting her lip in anticipation with every breath we spoke.
When we left there that night Zach went on this kick about how he was going to bed that girl who’d been sitting with us back there and I was like, No way man. You got no idea. She’s mine my friend.
There were of course complications.
Her friend Josh was hiding behind every crevice, to pop up at inopportune moments adorned in a cape and leaving in his wake a wall of anxiety between Jill and myself, but with every faltering step Jill would be there with her hand outstretched to ask me back. And eventually, there came the day when Jill and I were taking Bedroom Theater out of the bedroom for the first time ever.
*
Zach and I picked up Jill and her various synthesizers and were off to the Zeitgeist Gallery. Silence reigned on the drive over there. I raised both hands for silence and called out for volunteers. The volunteers were a homeless man named Steve who had no teeth and spoke in wild crayon screeches, a townie with a tough guy drawl, and an art girl who couldn’t have found her feet if you’d pointed them out to her. I was playing grand piano behind them and Jill and the gallery’s DJ were on the other side of the room creating an eerie and persistent hum meant to tickle the audience right there at the nape of their very pretty necks. It went, and then was over:
C.
Look. Let’s say that your brother is actually a protoplasmic experiment gone wrong, and that you were reprogrammed after we picked you up off the street.
A.
I’d say the guy did always seem a little weird to me. But that you’re a total problem and should get your act straight before you come spilling some bullshit all over my lap.
C.
It’s not bullshit, Lucas. It’s true.
A.
Sure. You know what else is true? We live on a flat earth. That’s true also. You know that?
C.
Would you like me to show you the point where they extracted your soul?
A.
No.
C.
Why? Are you frightened?
A.
Alright. Fine. But get it over with.
(C gets up. Brings a mirror over from stage right. She sits back down and points out a pink dot on Lucas’ forehead.)
C.
Right. There.
A.
(Looking at her for a moment)
And what’s your story?
C.
Didn’t you have to go to the bathroom?
A.
Already did.
C.
(Abruptly)
I was the prototype.
We had brought not only Bedroom Theater but also a great deal of the furniture out of my bedroom for this exclusive engagement—the idea being that to perform Bedroom Theater outside of the Bedroom various accoutrements are necessary so as to mimic intimacy, such as my couch for example. All the same, even though the evening had been unique as always, it had been lacking in something. So, to salvage the event, a bunch of us came up with the ingenious proposal that we climb in the back of this here U Haul to perform Bedroom Theater while bouncing around Boston.
After we had loaded all those mattresses and the aforementioned couch into the back, we all climbed in as well with only a pocket flashlight to guide us and Jill with her melodica to bring the color to our cheeks. Jill and I shared a cigarette while rolling through the night blind but for the bright cherry passed back and forth. We held hands while reading scripts in the dark like children at a slumber party. Then the morning came, not in the form of a sunrise, but with the rear door opened in a scream of metal.
And that night, I dreamt that Leah and I were flying into New York. My face was plastered to the window watching the tiny explosions that filled the sky at this altitude. It had been as if the air itself were combusting with a sizzle and accompanying snap, crackle, and pop. And there was this scaffolding that reached all the way up to the atmosphere’s edge.
I woke to a sluggish afternoon, drank espresso in sips from the demitasse in a bathrobe and nothing else, ate in bites and nibbles, until finally Jill called to see if I wanted to come out with her and the boys to Triple D’s. I arrived to find Brendan, master of the bluegrass banjo, and composition, at the bar, and not far down, Jonah, roommate to me, and aforementioned executive at MassDist, the punk label that everyone who’s no one follows to the edge of the earth, as well as Aaron, Guy, and Finn, all of whom spent their high school career driving from one side of the state to the other and back with my very own brother playing part number four, but were now the trio known as Shark Mountain, generally believed to be the biggest round of assholes this town had seen since it grew bowels, but no Jill.
Brendan was sipping from his frosted mug and distracted by shadows, and I was sitting on the stool next to him and drumming the bar pensively, because Jill wasn’t here, and I very much wanted Jill to be here. Brendan mumbled something about not knowing where she was. He was wearing a plaid vest and a hunting cap and was looking off into the distance like maybe the horizon had just fallen out from under him. Which. I could relate.
She wasn’t there, and then she sort of popped out from behind me, saying, Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. She slid onto the stool next to me and put her hands face down on the counter with a gleeful sigh. Her face was right there in mine, like a planet but smiling, and I was immediately relieved.
Then she said that she had decided she was definitely coming with me on this tour thing, and immediately my arms went directly to her waist and we got to dancing. She had made the decision after staying up all night reading Seven Short Plays for the Bedroom, a book Zach and I had published using Kinko’s technology the summer before. It was all I could do to yammer on in starts and stutters as she rested her head on my shoulder.
We danced our way outside for a cigarette, and eventually danced our way back to her house with my hands all full up with the french hornl. We danced into her bed and out of it and onto the porch where we murmured memories, reliving our best times in the ears of another. She told me how she’d first seen me when I was working at City Feed & Supply down the street from my house.
And curled fingers on cheeks. And a wayward smile.
