Sunday I woke up with a new mantra: I am sad. I had recited it on my way home and as I lay sleepless in my bed, then as I woke the next morning an hour earlier than necessary, as I moped around the apartment and meditated on the image of people in business suits falling 80 stories in humiliating daylight. I felt vile about using those deaths as material; I used them some more. I listened eight or nine times to Olivier Messiaen's "Le Banquet Celeste," an organ work that straddles the gap between major and minor to wrenching emotional effect. I left the apartment with a churning emptiness in my gut and a noticeable tremor in my hands.

When I arrived at the casting office, I withdrew into a corner by staring into my laptop, tapping at it occasionally, and otherwise hiding within massive, DJ headphones. I wasn't trying to be subtle about the fact that I was writing about this whole process, and in the shaky state of sleep- and food-deprived, Messiaen-inspired, virtually ecstatic gloom, I for once was able to suppress my natural compulsion to simultaneously entertain and take care of everyone around me.

John called me in to audition with Plato. That was good news -- I wanted to go dark, and Plato was so dark he was practically opaque. John held me in the hallway while he sent Plato to the love seat.

"OK, the deal is that you're calling a sex line --" Fuck me. "And what you want this guy to do is reenact an ideal sexual scenario you always have in your mind, a sexual touchstone for you. And the scenario could be real or imagined."

Before he'd finished saying this into my ear I had my image. It was of the hermaphrodite in Fellini's "Satyricon," and I saw this beautiful young person (not, perhaps, as illegally young as Fellini portrayed him) lying naked, exposing his pale breasts and body and micropenis, hair transformed into a white froth in the refulgent summer sun on a wide slab of granite in the Yuba River where it flows through the Sierra foothills and where I spent three days one summer without leaving. I barely moved from that rock in those three days, and that's how I envisioned the scenario with the hermaphrodite, willfully stranded on this exalted aerie, 30 feet above a diving pool in the river, and canopied by an overhang that could also be described as a medium-size cave. Only a glimpse of this image came to me in that moment, accompanied by the beats of Messiaen's dissonances shimmering in the air like heat rising from the rock, but it told me down to the last detail everything I had to say and do for the next 20 minutes.

Oh, it started off veering toward farce just like the others -- I repeatedly had to ask Plato to make his deep voice higher, and I wound up talking dirty to him about his "little clit of a dick." This made the director laugh out loud, as Plato is famed across nine time zones for being distinctly not little, to the degree that the fact has even odds of becoming the subject of an Entertainment Weekly or maybe even Teen People headline were Plato to be cast. But from hormone and dick jokes Plato's gravity pulled me back down and at that lower altitude I was able to say a number of very involved things about the way loving him had made me feel whole because his manifest conflict between sexes reflected the kinds of less visible conflicts I have within my own identity, between ways of being, self-presentation, even my passionate (not necessarily sexual) orientations. We shared the experience of feeling "neither here nor there." I barely remember a line of the dialogue now, only this resonant memory of what it was like to feel that the words coming out of my mouth to describe my longing for this person who once loved me were having a palpable effect on the temperature and atmospheric pressure of the room.

Plato was right there with me, and I with him, me feigning this heartbreak and Plato pretending to be the sex worker pretending to be a hermaphrodite. (I don't, strictly speaking, know how much of a stretch that was for Plato.) The dialogue went on a long time. At Plato's perfectly timed cue it got dirty. Then it became sad and I began to suspect, without saying anything about it, that the reason I missed the hermaphrodite was that the hermaphrodite was dead. Plato said something to buck me up and I smiled painfully through the welling of tears in my eyes. When it was over there were a good 15 seconds of silence before John spoke in a husky voice, blinking back tears of his own. "That's what this movie has to be about," he said. "Because that person could be anybody."

I looked at John, as did Plato, and I didn't blink or change the haunted expression on my face. He said a few more things about the audition, ordered an improv hug between me and Plato, and then dismissed the two of us for the day.

Doubt hit me the moment I walked out of the room. Had it been good? Or merely melodramatic? Did that hand to the face come off as a hackneyed gesture or an organic expression of grief and exhaustion? Were John's tears an organic expression or an elaborately prepared consolation prize for a disappointment he already knew was in store for me? Had the dismissal from the day, and from the auditions for that matter, expressed, "I don't need to see any more of you because I have witnessed the orgasmic manifestation of God in your work," or something more along the lines of not needing to see any more of me, period?

I turned to Plato. We embraced for a long time. "That was really great," Plato said, beaming through his darkness. I felt a door open between him and me that had never been ajar in any of our limited encounters on either coast. And on a more selfish level, I felt hope.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Monday, the day I left, it became clear not whether we were going to war (that had been transparent for some time) but when, and it was very soon. I had done this same flight on Sept. 15, 2001, and watched Port Authority and New York State police remove the two Arab passport-holding young men seated on either side of me, before they ransacked the interior of the airplane in search of box cutters and explosives. I had flown then so I could fly now, in part because there is no struggle with fear that a few dozen milligrams of a good Valium derivative can't take the edge off. (I didn't have the benefit of a prescription on that September 2001 flight.) The plane took off and landed in the usual way.

I was not home two days before I ran into a friend -- a documentary filmmaker and friend of John's for many years -- who welcomed me back and asked cheerfully how the audition went. Oh, and had I heard? The movie was cast. There were only four leads. One of them was Jarrad and the other was that guy from "Third Rock From the Sun." But the information was fifth-hand, he added, so I should take it with a grain of salt.

I wasn't sure how to take a hind kick to the gut by a wild stallion with a grain of salt, and I felt like nothing less was being asked of me. But if there's one thing three years at the Juilliard School train you to do, it is to smile and continue a conversation amicably after having had the wind knocked out of you by disappointment, and this is what I did with the documentary filmmaker. That night I lay in bed with a different kind of sleeplessness than what I'd experienced in New York. This agitated wakefulness exhausted not only me but my boyfriend, who had given me an ecstatic welcome home and now lay beside me awake as I tossed and turned. I found myself in the difficult position of begging solace from someone who not only was immensely relieved by the news that had hurt me, but whom I had spent that matchless week in New York hurting.

Still, I confided in him and he listened and did his best to comfort me. Some of his responses stung, though, as he held up a mirror before my feelings of rejection and envy. I confessed to him that as much as I wanted to be happy for Jarrad, all I could think was how difficult it would be to hear him talk about the monthlong improv workshop, about John this and John that, about the shooting schedule, the parties, the premiere.

"That's exactly how I would have felt if you'd been cast," my boyfriend said matter-of-factly.

Near dawn, I got out of bed and brought my computer to the hallway, where I e-mailed John. If my sources had it right, I wrote, I wouldn't be coming back east for the workshop, and so I wanted to thank him for inviting me to one of the strangest and most wonderful challenges -- certainly among those filed under "audition" -- of my life.

Then I slept. When I woke up a few hours later there was a reply in my in box: "Paul, I don't know who your sources are but I AM leaning towards different people right now -- partly because they are in relationships already (those things are a big deal as I discovered and you know). But absolutely nothing is for sure right now. I'm truly right in the middle of it all. Which is not to take away from how wonderful you were. Your improv about your intersex friend on the rock almost killed me it was so beautiful. Thank you so much and we'll talk. Love, JCM."

First I felt that kick in the gut again -- of course I was hoping he would refute the rumor entirely. Then I naturally enough took the intended solace in his praise, which on second glance brought me a new rush of pride. Your improv about your intersex friend on the rock. The director hadn't merely found it beautiful, he had bought it. With some stolen help from Fellini, from the transgendered blond Sex Film candidate, from Messiaen, even from John Updike (whose hooker in "Rabbit, Run" had a "brass froth" of pubic hair), with Plato's openness and spontaneity and immediacy, I had spontaneously written and performed a fiction and passed it off as memory. If only for a 20-minute audition, I'd surpassed my most grandiose fantasies about this venture. I did not leave New York a celebrity, pseudo or otherwise; I didn't even leave with a part. But for those minutes of sex and pathos on that battered love seat next to Plato, I was an actor.

As the days went by and the sting of rejection dulled, as the final cast list came out (with Plato and his boyfriend, with the transgendered hooker and the boy who fucked his bleeding girlfriend, with the guy who had three audition calls, two dates, and a private interview with HBO, with the Chinese woman who had played Korean in the "Hedwig" movie, with the guy who sent in an audition tape because he was "a complete whore," with a few more for good measure, but without Jarrad and without that guy from "Third Rock From the Sun"), I couldn't help thinking about another homosexual ingénue from the provinces who came to New York hoping to rise to stardom on the stage with the help of her 40-year-old idol.

Wasn't I a slightly less evil and less sick 21st century version of Eve Harrington? I'll grant that the antiheroine of "All about Eve" plotted her course with malice and subterfuge, and that she, unlike me, successfully completed it. But both of us had sat on couches located about 20 blocks from each other on Broadway and told our idol a startlingly sad story of love lost, had made that idol cry and made that idol believe our lies.

And though Eve fed off souls greater than her own for the sake of her career and artistry, while I merely held out my hand in earnestness and hope for that nourishment, both of us shared a dangerous instability. Both of us were searching for an identity we could not manifest on our own, but had to be conferred: by our respective mentors, by the stage, by fame. Both of us were or felt like frauds, and found that we were skilled in imitation because we were personal palimpsests onto which any character or effect could be easily overlaid.

In the second entry of this diary I wondered whether this audition would expose me, whether they would see my fraudulence, my incapacity to act truly under the imaginary circumstances of the play or in the reality of my own life. Or would they discover me, see me for who I really was and make me a star?

"Honey, there's a step in between, which is 'I accept myself as a real person,'" Albert replied. I did and do on some level. But there is something in me, the part of me hung up on celebrity and John's praise, the part of me crushed by his rejection, that does not accept the reality of who I am.

The theatrical fable of Eve's encounter with the great Margo Channing is told as a lesbian vampire story, the younger actress sucking the creative and erotic life out of her mentor. The passionate feelings I felt for John were real -- but they were also inextricable from the work he did and the gifts he could have chosen to bestow on me. As a lifelong collector of mentors, of substitute parents whether movie directors or Baroque music pedagogues or swinging bisexual couples, all of whom I feel compelled to write about in public and in intimate detail, I both hate this conflict of motive and passion and accept it as the inevitable consequence of being called. As for the pleasures and hazards of being chosen -- those are once more deferred.

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