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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Wherein my life becomes a surreal blend of "Hedwig" and "All About Eve."
Apr 4, 2003 | Saturday, after waking late in the afternoon, I spent the remaining daylight and early evening hours writing in this diary. Then I set out for the East Village, where I was assigned to meet a dirty-blond, tanned guy about my age who knew the parent doppelgängers portrayed in my audition video. I was late to meet him at the Wonder Bar on East 6th Street, and worried that that might have had something to do with the fact that he seemed somewhat less enthusiastic about being on a date with me than, say, fishing cigarette butts out of the East River with a tea strainer.
"How'd your date go?" a friend asked me when it was over.
"He talked about himself for 40 minutes," I reported.
"Hot!" said the friend. It was now about 11 o'clock and the narrow bar had filled up with Sex Film candidates and other loose characters. Auditions continued Sunday but these were in essence closing ceremonies, the last official Sex Film activity for this group. For that reason, and because a number of us had seen the sun rise in unfamiliar neighborhoods that morning, the mood was several shades darker than it had been the night before; in addition to being hung over, we were starting to get paranoid. We were making calculations, weighing rumors, sizing up the competition, wondering darkly about that guy who used to be on "Third Rock From the Sun," counting up the number of auditions and dates we were called for, trying to divine our respective futures from everything John said and the way he said it and how it compared with what he had said to the others.
My friends among the candidates were confident of their failure. Keith hadn't been asked to audition again and was sure he'd been eliminated. Jarrad had another audition scheduled but no date. I, by contrast, felt pretty good about being two and two for dates and auditions -- Susan Shopmaker had called to invite me to appear again at noon the next day. Then, at the Wonder Bar, a guy told me he'd been called to audition all three days, had had two dates, and had been interviewed in private by HBO. Into this schedule I read my doom.
All night, hope and other illusions withered. No longer were we all one big happy family working in concert toward some bold and noble goal of artistic and sexual liberty. Now we were one big unhappy family, 34 dirty-minded siblings competing for the attention and love of a single parent who was endlessly affectionate but neglectful by virtue of his miraculous potency, charisma and consequent popularity. The dinner hour was upon us, and the competition for four or five servings of John's stew of art, achievement and notoriety was now too acute to ignore.
I'd underestimated the seriousness of this whole venture until now. I had fallen for John's ruse, had let him lull me into thinking this was sex therapy improv camp instead of an audition that would determine the course of the rest of my career and the rest of my life. He lulled us, sitting in that theater at the archives, into thinking that we were embarking on this daring adventure together, when of course most of us will be left behind. Now the drug of his presence and charisma was starting to wear off and the reality of the audition, of the rejection and disappointment that are inevitably in store for most of us, was starting to hurt. All I could remember from the week as I sidled through the crowded bar were the idiotic things I had said, the moment when his e-mail silence began, the sentences in this diary I now cringe to think that he read. The cycle is familiar because it is so much like love, or the realm of it in which we contemplate the possibility that we are no longer loved in return. We did not come to New York to date each other; we came to New York to date John. Now we wait by the phone. If we fell in love with him, the worse for us -- or the much, much better.
Having been shaken off by my date, I milled around making conversation with the other candidates. The flow of available small talk quickly grew infinitesimal before running completely dry. The awkwardness was keenest with the other gay guys, the most direct competition and, I increasingly thought, the most vulnerable. Throughout the week the project had produced a kind of gay superiority complex, in which we fags were chummy with John and with each other and enjoyed, if not flaunted, our majority status and our instinctual, gay-given comfort with the whole idea of fucking strangers on the one hand and fucking on film on the other.
The illusion that majority status benefited us was one of Saturday night's first casualties. In my conversation with John at his apartment, he had mentioned female ejaculation at least twice and said how he was becoming more and more interested in having the movie explore female sexuality. How many women, and straight men to fuck them, did the candidate pool offer for John to choose from? At best a handful. Now, at the Wonder Bar's closing ceremonies, I started envying heterosexual odds. Transgendered odds wouldn't be bad either. If the cast list didn't include the blond young hooker whose mid-video sex switch had mind-fucked even this gender-jaded group, I'd eat my chromosomes.
Milling around the Wonder Bar, all my gay male comrades could talk about was casting anxiety. I had a fairly long talk with "Plato," a guy I'd met one night about a year ago in the company of several other skinny white 20-something chem-friendly photographers, circus performers, hookers and drug dealers at the Los Angeles mansion of an art- and artist-collecting corporate lawyer. I'd been instantly attracted to Plato, not least because in addition to having those smoldering rent-boy good looks, he was a writer. At the Wonder Bar we commiserated for a while about the psychic brutalities of writing, and then about the building anxiety of the week's audition process.
Plato's anxiety, it turned out, was more severe than my own. One of the other candidates was his boyfriend, which offered two distinctly horrifying scenarios in which one would be cast and not the other. And then there was Plato's long-standing friendship with John, which already had had to weather the director's decision, after Plato had given what all agreed was the best audition in his life, to cast someone a little younger as Tommy Gnosis in the "Hedwig" movie. How would the friendship weather another disappointment at John's hands? How did that factor affect the rest of our chances? What must John be going through with his newly acquired status as star-maker, weighing friendships with people he'd disappointed before, matching sexual orientations and chemistries between close friends on the one hand and people he'd never met on the other, between people who live in this atmosphere and others like me who were giddy with the novelty of it?
I was preparing to leave the Wonder Bar when Jarrad arrived, resplendent in such magnificent Suppositori Spelling drag that no one recognized him. His powder-blue knee-high fuck-me pumps added at least six inches to his height, and the makeup and colorless Wonder Woman armored top and bikini underpants with no tuck completed the metamorphosis. I was relieved to see him, then dismayed as it became apparent that the bond we'd formed at Albert's bar the night before had succumbed to the oddsmaking calculation and anxiety that had poisoned the rest of the candidate pool. Why hadn't John assigned him a date? Jarrad fretted. I shrugged my shoulders. Our subsequent small talk could have fit comfortably into a dime bag.
At a loss for words, I looked around and saw the back of a head of spiky brown and white-pepper hair on a petite frame: John. I resolved to avoid him -- any interaction with the director in this crushing atmosphere could only result in misbehavior, feet-in-mouth and regret. A minute later the crowd had shifted so that he was right in front of me, the nape of his pale neck exposed and winking at me in the obscurity of the bar like a spinning aluminum lure in a murky pond. That skin seemed so naked, so inviting, so vulnerable, that my resolution to avoid John transformed into a considerably more powerful desire to kiss him, and before I could think through my actions, my lips were feeling the warmth of his neck and my tongue tasting the salt of his skin as I sucked lightly, came up for air, then kissed the spot once more.
John turned around, inquisitive but not necessarily surprised, then smiled broadly as he recognized me. He backed into me and drew my arm forward around him so that we were spooning standing up, then ground his bottom into my groin in time to the music, all the while maintaining his conversation with a woman I did not recognize. He bummed a puff of her cigarette and I squeezed him for a puff of my own. He didn't get it at first, then I said into his ear, Hook me up. Was that pushy? He held the cigarette to my mouth and I drew in smoke, exhaled and released him.
After parting with the blond, John turned to Jarrad and me. He admired Miss Spelling's outfit; we told him about our date at Albert's bar. Then the evening's signature conversational paralysis set in and the three of us stood there with absolutely nothing to say to one another.
"Well, I'm going to go circulate and talk to some of the others," John said. He left. Jarrad and I looked around anxiously. I reviewed what I'd said to John and found it insipid and self-aggrandizing. Then I dealt myself a few mental punches about kissing his neck. Why had I done it? I had no self-control, no cool. I'd swooped down on him like a bulimic before a buffet with a missing sneeze-guard. Whatever chance I'd had with this movie I'd just blown.
It was time to go. But as I was leaving the bar I once again got caught up in a conversation, this time with an uptown guy who cheered me up momentarily by saying he thought I had a really good shot at a lead. Why was that? I asked.
"Well you're probably the best-looking guy here," he said. "And your video was really great."
I didn't buy it about the looks, as much as I would have liked to -- there were hotter guys and besides that it seemed obvious that John hadn't summoned us all here for a more than usually sexually fraught beauty contest. And the movie? By Saturday night those videos seemed like they'd been made and screened three or four Miss America scandals ago. It no longer seemed to matter that my movie had been good, because the things that were good about it no longer seemed to matter. The movie had timing, music, humor, perversity of story, and of course the richness of the archive I had to play with (my mother bouncing her doll down the wide avenues of East Flatbush, the ruby spot of blood pooling on my newly shaved head). But those were not the qualities that John was looking for in his actors, not anymore. What mattered was acting, presence, charisma, and so far what had I offered him in my auditions? Cheap laughs.
I walked home in a dark mood and did my best to cultivate it. I had to start priming myself for an emotional performance the next day. The world was providing me with an abundance of material, starting with the blood bath our country was preparing to run in Iraq, stretching back to the bloodbath I had witnessed on Sept. 11 2001, the ruins of which lay three blocks from my current residence in TriBeCa and extending out into the infinitely bloody landscape of post-Oppenheimer anxiety.
The previous night I had dreamed that I was looking out on New York from my 28th-floor Juilliard dorm room in Lincoln Center, and a great seismic wave was rolling through the island toward us, pulverizing into fine radioactive dust block after block of glassy skyscrapers and stone apartment buildings bordering Central Park.
Walking home from the Wonder Bar I heard something rustling in a garbage can, freshly lined with a blue plastic bag. I stood before it a while, contemplating the hours of hunger and thirst it would take for that bag to become still. Then I did something I can only confess now that I am 3,000 miles from New York and New Yorkers, which is that I removed the liner and liberated a small rat, who went off into the dark recesses of the West Village to scavenge and breed.
