ANEW: B.C.Y.: A Novel -- Chapter 4 (working draft)
Episode #4
It’s a new day and time for Episode #4 of B.C.Y.: You’ll have to read from the beginning to get the entire gist but feel free to jump in wherever you are
Preface: This is a serialization of B.C.Y.: A Novel (working title). If you missed the earlier Chapters, you can find them here: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and Chapter 3.
Chapter 4
I came back to New Haven with a renewed sense of purpose. I told myself that I was miserable because I was making myself miserable. I. WAS. MAKING. ME. MISERABLE.
I needed to do something different. I had to remember to do the things that gave me purpose and not fall back on relying on a person or anything else to make me happy. The week back, I auditioned for two plays. One was at the Yale Dramat, and the other was a play in one of the college dining halls. The play I wanted to do was in the Jonathan Edwards College Dining Hall. It was a Brecht piece about the life of Galileo. I checked the cast list and did not get it. Someone said, “Hey, you should take a look over at the University Theater.”
I’m not going to lie, I was bummed not getting into the Brecht piece. This was the first play that I hadn’t been cast in since I was a freshman in high school. I just remembered that disappointment of watching the posted cast list and thinking, why THOSE people? I think they even cast a girl in the role that I auditioned for. There’s nothing wrong with people casting other people in non-stereotypical, non-gendered roles, as long as they cast me in one of the other roles. I think everyone feels that way. It’s okay not to discriminate as long as I’m not put out. If I’m put out, then it’s probably some form of discrimination. I guess it doesn’t quite work that way in real life.
So, I padded over to the University Theater. It was kind of an eerie sodium vapor late night. I was thinking about Vivian. She hadn’t really gotten in touch with me since I had gotten back. She was busy, I was busy. We weren’t dating, so that wasn’t a big deal that we gave each other space after being inseparable for the two weeks before we left. I started actually hanging out with this other brother from New Jersey and his roommate who was from San Francisco. So, I wasn’t as isolated, connecting with other isolated dudes like me. But I was thinking hard about Vivian and what happened with us. I crossed in the middle of York Street and almost got clipped by a Yellow Taxi who yelled at me, “Faggot!”
“Wow,” I yelled back. “You kiss your mother with that mouth.”
A middle finger shot up from the cab’s window as I made my way in front of a parked Volkswagon and onto the sidewalk down a side street between the University Theater and one of the Secret Societies with a high sandstone wall to where the cast list was posted on one of the side doors. In front of the door were seven other people, stragglers, I imagine, because the cast list had been up for a few hours. They all were looking at the list and turning away. All were stoic, so it was hard to tell if they had gotten in or were rejected. I didn’t have a good feeling. I figured that I was going to be some sort of Lost Boy or Indian or Pirate. The play was Peter Pan, and those were the roles.
On the day of the audition and then during the subsequent callbacks, I had two good auditions. But the play was the play. In high school, I was used to these juvenalia kinds of plays, like Sleeping Beauty. In our senior year, we did this one where we got into face paint as dogs and bears and all sorts of animals. That was actually fun because it was our last play that we performed in front of hundreds and hundreds of little kids from the surrounding towns. It was like being on Broadway in our sixteen-hundred-seat high school theater. I kid you not; it was bigger than most Broadway houses, and we got to trot the boards or whatever Shakespeare said.
But I was in college now. I wanted to do meatier stuff like Othello or Moliere or Beckett, for Christ’s sake. I didn’t want to be Slightly Soiled or Nicely Nicely. I know that last one was from “Guys and Dolls,” but I wanted a grown-up play in a grown-up role.
If Vivian were around, she would say that I was taking myself far too seriously and that it was not that big a deal. Take a role not to be seen but to be a part of something bigger than myself. What was the purpose of this whole endeavor anyway? Though she wasn’t around, her voice echoed in my head. “Don’t be an asshole; it’s not a nice look.”
I stood in the back of the group of now four students, sidling up close to the list. I read in the middle where the Lost Boys and Pirate group began. No name. I headed out when I saw this kid, Blake, who came from Hamden. He had auditioned for the Brecht show, too. Blake had on one of those Gigantor crimson-striped rugby shirts that looked like it belonged to his brother, who must have been polar bear-sized cause he was not that thick of a dude. Atop his super-thin face was a shock of red hair; he always looked a little startled, like a human-sized Beaker from the Muppets.
“Congratulations, Man.“
“Thanks, but I didn’t get in. It’s humbling being here.”
“What?” Shocked-faced, he did that head-swivel-y thing.
The other students left, scattering in all different directions while Blake and I padded back down the alleyway to cross York Street again, my head like Blake’s, this time looking for foul-mouthed cabbies, heading to cross the street from the alleyway to the walkways on the other side of the street between Saybrook and JE to Old Campus.
“Yeah. I guess we have to get used to working our way up, like in high school.”
“But, you got it, didn’t you? I saw your name,” Blake said, doing his best Muppet take.
“No, I didn’t. I checked right before I came here.”
“You didn’t see it, did you?”
“No, I did. I wanted that mentee to the Galileo role, but they gave it to that chick with the short hair. What’s her name?
“Peter Pan.”
“I don’t think that’s her name.”
“YOU got the lead role in the play.”
That’s when it hit, halfway across York Street. I didn’t look up at the top of the list. I looked at him carefully, not caring about cabs or Connecticut Limos.
“I got…” I turned ass-backward, spinning around like a dreidel, and made my way to the list with a different set of six students who were looking at the typed list.
“Hmmmm… Freakin’ Peter Freakin’ Pan. How about that?” is all I could muster sideways out my mouth. I certainly didn’t expect that. Who could have expected that?
That night, when I got back to my room, I called Vivian. Her Durfee suitemate from New London got on the phone.
“Hey, Sarah. Is Vivian there?”
“She left.”
“Well, when she gets back, could you let her know that I called? I’d appreciate it.”
There was silence.
“Tell her to call me. Please…”
“She left the school. She’s not coming back.”
More silence, but now it came from me. I was the dunce who finally got it.
“I thought you knew because you hadn’t been by. She left after being back for a week. I thought she would have... You know, at least… I thought you knew.”
I felt like something just wasn’t right here. Why did the people I like to leave? What was going on here? First, Abner gets kicked out or leaves for whatever reason. And now, Vivian leaves without so much as a “See ya!” I guess that part of this was my issue. I never checked in with her. Why would she check in with me? What the hell was wrong with this place that people would just flippin’ up and leave without much fanfare or dowdy do? Even in public school, when you moved or got expelled, everybody and their mama knew what was going on. Now, I had absolutely nobody to tell. Nobody to share my news with.
“Thanks…uh,… Sarah. No, I didn’t know.”
Why were these people so hard to get to know? I ended up calling Mama. I hardly ever called her because it was so expensive. One phone call could be ten to twenty bucks, not to mention fighting your suitemates for the use of the phone.
I wanted to wait until all of the other guys went out to dinner. I had been sitting with the news of getting the lead in the main stage play and the loss of Vivian, who had wormed her way into my life. When I called my mother when the rates went down, I found myself unusually inarticulate.
“Hey, Ma.”
“What’s wrong?”
“What do you….”
“I’m your mother. I know you better than anyone. I can hear it when something is not right.”
I was twirling the phone cord around and around in my hands, looking at the wall of menus – Bulldog, Naples, Yorkside, Mamoun’s, and other restaurants from around campus – and then there were the subway maps from around the country and around the world that we had pasted all over our living room wall. “No, just some girl left school without, you know, telling anybody.”
“So, this was that girl Vivian that you always mention?”
“I do not always mention anyone.”
My mother then started imitating my voice, gushing over Vivian, over Vivian’s parents, over Vivian’s suitemates and roommate, over Vivian’s miniature poodle.
“Okay, okaaaaay. She left school, and I’m kind of pissed about it.”
“Look, Schaay,” she called me that when I was a kid after a pretty bad asthma attack. I didn’t feel like correcting her right now. “It’s okay to be disappointed and even mad at someone. You do know I still hate words like pissed.”
I couldn’t quite reconcile this new life with the old life that I was living. I guess I wasn’t as courageous as James Baldwin. I would be in that other class of Negro. Tepid. Tiptoeing. Making nice with White folk and Black folk.
My life was a series of compromises and code-switching. I saw the conformity in my classmates and wanted none of that mess. What I wanted was to sleep. To go to sleep like I did when I was over break, like before coming to New Haven. Sleep for hours and hours and days and days. Sleep and dream. So I did.
I am in this small town. It’s any kind of Americana-esque small town like Harvey or Robbins. But there are White folks in these towns. Not the kind of White folks who get driven out because they can’t abide living next to Black folks, but White folks who actually live in the town. Maybe the town is in Mississippi somewhere, or maybe it is in the Midwest. I don’t know nothing about Mississippi because I have never been. Emmett Till messed that up for all of us. A generation of Black folks never made it to Mississippi because Till wanted what he couldn’t have—down South. They shot him for not whistling at a White woman in the South. They killed him for saying that he had a White girlfriend - or many White girlfriends - up in Chicago. For them, it was like putting a dog down that had raided the chicken coop and had that taste in his mouth. That’s what my much older play-cousin Frank James said. Cause he knew Till, or so he said.
This town, in my imagination, also had one gas station, like they had in Robbins when I was growing up. They also had a farm in the middle of the town. This farm was owned by the town fool. The crazy White man who called it like he saw it. Except in this dream, the crazy White man wasn’t burned alive in his own house. This house and the man in it was just an omen, not about the house itself. About enormous things that swamp you when you’re not looking, like a violent scene that comes out of nowhere, or when the music swells and you getting ready to howl with fright or delight. Or, maybe it’s somebody yelling something at you from a passing car. Were you or weren’t you that thing they yelled? Was it about me, or was it about them?
We were slow-walking past the scary farm headed toward Central Park with my Dad. Central Park wasn’t a park like New York; it was a street like you’d find in Jackson, Mississippi, or Mobile, Alabama, which is where Mama and Dad’s people came from. I must have been three or four, but I could still remember that walk as if it happened yesterday. It was me, Mylie, and Dad. Dad was holding me by the hand because Mylie was big enough to walk by himself. I never asked to be picked up by my Dad when I was with him, even though my legs got awfully tired. I actually don’t think little kids ever get tired. They just want to be loved on, held by their parents.
So, we walked and walked and walked – seemed like we passed that old farm twelve times – until we passed the liquor store where I would often see my grandpa, my Dad’s dad, stealing away with his drink. His drink was something unexpected, like pink Champagne. Something completely out of character. That is the reason my Dad didn’t drink. So, we passed Glenn’s Liquors – round and round, we walked – and just a little ways down from the lady who made the most delicious cakes you ever tasted in your life. She lived in this slate-colored house, very grey when all of the other houses were bright or white or not so drab.
In the house were this grandma and grandpa. Grandpa-guy looked like he had seen a thing or three. That’s what Dad called them, grandma and grandpa, although I knew these people were not related to anyone that we knew. It was an honorific. A title. Something they went by.
Between the husband and wife, whose name was Grandma and Grandpa, was a boy with an enormous head. He had the biggest head of any person that I had ever seen; there was no end to it. Was this what we traveled all this way to see? This boy’s head and not the Whiteman’s farm? It was like a night terror, his head. This dream in a dream. My Dad and later my brother Mylie called him THE WaterHead Boy. That was his name. THE WaterHead Boy. This was a point of contention for me and Mylie. He stared just like I stared at the boy with the enormous Head. His head was so big he didn’t have a hat that could fit. I was worried that his head was going to bust, and like those folks who live near a broken damn or one with hidden cracks, we would be washed away forever. We would all be gone – cascading tsunami of a damn break.
My Dad was fearless. Fearless Little Man. He wasn’t so little to us. He was the right size for us. He was dad-sized. He led us by the hand up the stairs right up to the boy with the enormous Head and said, “These my boys. Mylie. Say, ‘Howdy do,’ Mylie. And, this here is the baby. Say, “Howdy,’ Shay-Shay.”
We just stared. And, the great thing about our father is that he just let us stare. Mama would have been huffin’ and puffin’ to beat the band to make sure that we said the right thing and did the right thing. But not Dad. We were gently encouraged just to greet the boy with the head so large that it might explode at any time, washing us away. And, sure enough, we did.
“Hi,” Mylie coughed and gawked.
“Hello,” I said and looked. I wanted to know: “Does that hurt?”
The boy with the enormous head knew what I meant. But he just smiled and said, “Not really.” That’s when I knew he was special. Like a kind of angel. He smiled so big and broad like he had never been asked that question ever before. Fear left me, too.
The dream ended with me touching his head, just like the old ladies in the grocery store touches someone who is about to have a baby. Big, round, swollen with life, is what I saw in my dream.
I woke with a start. I was late for my first day of rehearsal on Peter Pan. We were practicing at 305 Crown Street. When we got into the space – the bare, empty room – it was sterile, with only the rudiments of a broken coffee machine sitting on a card table over in the corner. The stage was marked off with masking tape into designs and patterns that I took to be our stage or the stage that was left over from the last production – buried ruins of other tape and tape peels painted over with black paint underneath.
After a time, the director said, “We’ve run into some snags that we didn’t anticipate. The children’s hospital that owns the rights to Peter Pan will not release the rights to anyone else except the Disney Company.”
In my mind, I could picture Cathy Rigby and Mary Martin, “I’m lying, I’m flying.”
Anticipating, the Director said, “That’s not the production that we aim to do. We’ll be doing something closer to the original J.M. Barrie book. If you haven’t read it, I want you to buy a copy from the Co-op and have a look. Get familiar with the book because the story is not really Peter’s story. It’s Wendy’s. The lawyers will work it out.”
I was thinking, what in the hell did I get myself into? Lawyers? Children’s hospitals? Wendy’s story? Wasn’t the title of the book and the play, Peter Pan. Wasn’t I cast as Peter? Who gives two shakes about effin’ Wendy?!
Yet, the book, when I read it, was dark. It didn’t glorify Peter. Peter was a little shit. It was Wendy’s piece. Our Wendy was mild mannered and bookish, even by Yale’s standards, she looked as if she spent tons and tons of time in front of books with way too small print. The kids playing her two little brothers were also kinds of shits. Although I’m not sure what all of this type-casting was making me out to be. Perhaps I was a different kind of Peter Pan. The image that came into my head was one that had occurred a little earlier in the week.
One of the brothers from the Black Panther Party had happened onto campus into one of my classes in LinsleyChit earlier that week. He was invited by this famous American History professor who must have loved Black folks, at least radically famous Black folks. He embraced this brother like they were long-lost fraternal twins. The professor must have been in his sixties by this time. He looked kind of ridiculous giving dap to that brother. Bobby Seale? Huey Newton? Eldridge Cleaver?
I was extraneous in this play. Is that what the director was saying? No wonder he cast me. He just wanted me to be some symbol rather than to drive the play. Wendy would drive the play.
I must have looked quizzical or upset because people kept coming up to me asking, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” was my typical response. Something obviously was wrong. I had been looked over again for the lead of the play.
Anyway, I knew I just had to be more organized than I had ever been up to this point. If I were going to make sure that I got out of this semester unscathed, I had to work my hardest. When it was finally over, it was by far my best semester at school.
I didn’t think much about Vivian. I didn’t have much time to ruminate on another friend’s demise, although I knew that she was more than just any old friend. She meant something.
I began hanging with this other dude, Larry Hsu, from LA. We got to be best buds. He was on the crew doing props. Anytime I got a little free time, Larry and I were hanging. I would invite him over to my suite. My suitemates tried to tactfully say that Larry - and my other two new friends - should find elsewhere to be annoying. But Larry took the cake; he started crashing out on our couch, keeping me up way late. But at least we were studying this time.
I didn’t care what they had to say. I was free from their ideas of right and wrong. Speaking of which, I did so much that would indicate that I was a narcissus. Not just in my choice of Greek characters to emulate, but in real frickin’ life. What a user-poser, I would think about myself at this time. Sometimes assholes do know that they’re assholes in the moment.
My own love of acting was rekindled. I noticed that when I was acting, I tended to hang out with guys, but I also was attractive to women. It was odd that way, what I noticed. Perhaps it was College for me, but I had finally found a group of male friends that I had never had since I was in fourth grade. What was different was that I felt fully awake and alive. I was out of my comfort zone of what I was socialized towards. With Vivian, she became ever-present for just a few weeks of my college career, at the beginning. I hoped I wouldn’t be doomed to repeat that.
On week number two of our rehearsal process at 305 Crown Street, we began to play around with our relationships. Wendy was actually a girl named Lisa Toliver from Calhoun College; I think she was actually from some city of nice people like St. Louis or Minneapolis. I didn’t think much of the name of the College at the time, even though there were tons of rabid slaveholders in all of our pasts. Lisa was an MB&B major, arguably one of the smartest and most accomplished students that I came to know in college. Lisa finally confirmed where she was from when we had to guess her city of origin with a twenty-question kind of game. She was from Cleveland. She was the most highly organized person that I knew - not a left-brainer at all, but creative as all get out - funny, fun, and very sensitive. Her reading when Wendy turned a corner to realize that not growing up was not only not an option, it meant that man (woman) would also be stunted, angry, childish, and fighting. Barrie seemed to say that there was something great in that liminal stage between childhood and adulthood. That journey to adulthood was a river Styx, a place from which one could never really come back.
Captain Hook was played by the British guy, Baron von Warfel. Yep, that was the dude’s name. We called him Waffle because it was always fun to poke fun at people. Warfel had this Captain Hook-y flourish where he would put a fleur de lis spin on his words and hand gestures.
So, one day, we are just reading through a few scenes with Lisa and Baron Waffle, the aristocrat of all breakfast foods, which is what we officially called him. The blocking was always in triads when we could make it work. Herr director always believed in these pretty stage pictures between the characters. Whether it was Waffles, Pan, and a little green laser light, we called Tinker Bell, or perhaps it was the Lost Boys, Wendy, and Peter, asking Wendy to be their mother. A scene might look like:
Wendy: What is wrong with you children? Don’t you have any manners? Who raised you? (Wendy crosses upstage facing away from the Slight Soiled, one of the leaders of the band of Lost Boys)
Slightly Soiled: Mo-o-o-m. (no longer pretending Wendy is his mother but actually resting his greasy head on her shoulder) We had to give our manners away on the way over to this here place. We tossed it out the rowboat ‘cause (he wipes his nose on his sleeve) it weighed us down. (pointing downstage left, over the head of the audience).
Peter: That’s what you do when something weighs you down. Manners are like an Anchor. You never know when you have to escape—fast. (Peter is downstage left, jabbing his finger outward like he was hitching a ride to somewhere)
Our process was to stay in these triads when we could, even when we felt no one was there. The audience then made up the third leg of the triad’s stool when there were just two. There were even mini-triads within triads. Visually, we were after some good stage pictures that would weave in and out of peoples’ heads, even when we were learning to fly.
Now, I never admitted anything to Herr Director. I called him Herr Director to distinguish him from Frauline OverScribe, the show’s writer, who was also a recent graduate of the Yale School of Drama. Herr Director’s name was Jim Wozny, which didn’t really roll off the tongue. He was also from the Chicago area, and he had once “ha-yad” a “Thii –ick Chee-caw-go axs-scent,” with flat As abounding everywhere--just like Elwood Blues in the Blues Brothers. Wozny’s, “Gotta ssing’it oaut to the ba-a-ack raow” was Elwood’s “We’re on’a missh’un from Gaod.” I loved Jim because he absolutely reminded me of the hard-ass directors I had in high school. In fact, he may have been too damned nice. He needed to call us on the horseplay and coming back earlier from break. We had cra-a-app to do.
A lot of the work we did was all grown-up. I had never worked with a “real” director, but it made me realize that my own actor’s work from high school was good and true and special. What I liked about Jim was that we were trying hard to weave forty-plus kids into an ensemble.
Like there was this one kid, Hector from LA, who played the cello. Hector was one of the Indians, but when he played cello for us, our world became different and more intimate. I loved when theater got small and people listened closely. I had been told by people for years that I was a good listener. I attributed that to making me a better actor. But now that I was in college, I could see and feel that my own mental acuity was shifting. I became, without even realizing it, more of a talker.
I was insufferable.
One day, while we were waiting for 305 to open up, it began to snow for the twelfth time that season. What was a beautiful snowstorm that began last fall in the dumps became a siege of snow by mid-February. Everybody was sick of the white, then grey, then black weather pattern.
It was a Tuesday night, which meant that we had rehearsals right after dinner. As we waited, three Black boys came up to us and pointed a gun right at Waffle’s head. We froze.
“Y’all all know the damned drill, gotdammit.”
The other dude without the gun, who seemed more nervous, said, “Watches. Wallets. And one shoe.”
We looked at each other, thinking, “What?!”
“Ya’all heard me: WatchesWalletsShoe.”
We did, and we hustled. Lisa began to breathe shallowly, beginning to hyperventilate and whimper just a little, and then, “Schmmmack!”
Calm boy with the gun pistol-whipped her. My ears rang from that. All of us did nothing and said nothing.
After we gave our watches, wallets, and one shoe, the nervous guy laughed as if he had been a new villain from Batman. Kind of a high cackle with a catch in the back of his throat. He clearly was enjoying what he was doing, and clearly, he had done this before.
None of us, myself included, had ever been robbed. Baron peed himself. I just stood frozen, wanting to help Lisa, but I could not move off the spot I was.
When Ted, the stage manager, came by, we all broke down in our way.
[The next Chapter of B.C.Y.: A Novel drops on January 10, 2025, in two weeks, which is serialized at ANEW every other Friday. Spread the word and (re-)read from the beginning: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and Chapter 3. Tell a friend. Drink some water. Take your meds. Pet a dog. See you soon.]