Chapter 13
The doorbell rang. I put a paperweight on the manuscript pages so they wouldn’t blow around, and went to see who my visitor was.
I remember all of this very clearly: the dancing curtains, the smooth river stone paperweight, “This Time” playing on the radio, the long light of Texas evening, which I had come to love.
I should remember it. It was when I stopped living in the past and just starting living.
I opened the door and Michael Coslaw stood there. He was weeping. “I can’t, Mr. Amberson,” he said. “I just can’t.”
“Well, come in, Mike,” I said. “Let’s talk about it.”
I wasn’t surprised to see him. I had been in charge of Lisbon High’s little Drama Department for five years before running away to the Era of Universal Smoking, and I’d seen plenty of stage fright in those years.
Directing teenage actors is like juggling jars of nitroglycerine: exhilarating and dangerous.
I’ve seen girls who were quick studies and beautifully natural in rehearsal freeze up completely onstage; I’ve seen nerdy little guys blossom and seem to grow a foot taller the first time they utter a line that gets a laugh from an audience.
I’ve directed dedicated plodders and the occasional kid who showed a spark of talent.
But I’d never had a kid like Mike Coslaw.
I suspect there are high school and college faculty who’ve been working dramatics all their lives and never had a kid like him.
Mimi Corcoran really did run Denholm Consolidated High School, and it was she who coaxed me into taking over the junior-senior play when Alfie Norton, the math teacher who had been doing it for years, was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and moved to Houston for treatments.
I tried to refuse on the grounds that I was still doing research in Dallas, but I wasn’t going there very much in the winter and early spring of 1961.
Mimi knew it, because whenever Deke needed an English sub during that half of the school year, I was usually available.
When it came to Dallas, I was basically marking time.
Lee was still in Minsk, soon to marry Marina Prusakova, the girl in the red dress and white shoes.
“You’ve got plenty of time on your hands,” Mimi had said. Her own hands were fisted on her nonexistent hips: she was in full take-no-prisoners mode that day. “And it pays.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I checked that out with Deke. Fifty bucks. I’ll be living large in the hood.”
“In the what?”
“Never mind, Mimi. For the time being, I’m doing all right for cash. Can’t we leave it at that?”
No. We couldn’t. Miz Mimi was a human bulldozer, and when she met a seemingly immovable object, she just lowered her blade and revved her engine higher.
Without me, she said, there would be no junior-senior play for the first time in the high school’s history.
The parents would be disappointed. The schoolboard would be disappointed.
“And,” she added, drawing her brows together, “I will be bereft.”
“God forbid you should be bereft, Miz Mimi,” I’d said. “Tell you what. If you let me pick the play—something not too controversial, I promise—I’ll do it.”
Her frown had disappeared into the brilliant Mimi Corcoran smile that always turned Deke Simmons into a simmering bowl of oatmeal (which, temperamentally speaking, was not a huge transformation). “Excellent! Who knows, you may find a brilliant thespian lurking in our halls.”
“Yes,” I said. “And pigs may whistle.”
But—life is such a joke—I had found a brilliant thesp.
A natural. And now he sat in my living room on the night before our show opened for the first of four performances, taking up almost the entire couch (which bowed humbly beneath his two hundred and seventy pounds), bawling his freaking head off.
Mike Coslaw. Also known as Lennie Small in George Amberson’s okay-for-high-school adaptation of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.
If, that was, I could talk him into showing up tomorrow.
3
I thought about handing him some Kleenex and decided they weren’t up to the job.
I fetched a dish wiper from the kitchen drawer instead.
He scrubbed his face with it, got himself under some kind of control, then looked at me desolately.
His eyes were red and raw. He hadn’t started crying as he approached my door; this looked like it had been going on all afternoon.
“Okay, Mike. Make me understand.”
“Everybody on the team’s makin fun of me, Mr. Amberson. Coach started callin me Clark Gable—this was at the Lion Pride Spring Picnic—and now everybody’s doin it. Even Jimmy’s doin it.” Meaning Jim LaDue, the team’s hot-rod quarterback and Mike’s best friend.
I wasn’t surprised about Coach Borman; he was a thud who preached the gospel of gung-ho and didn’t like anyone poaching on his territory either in season or out.
And Mike had been called far worse; while hall-monitoring, I’d heard him called Bohunk Mike, George of the Jungle, and Godzilla.
He laughed the nicknames off. That amused, even absentminded reaction to slurs and japes may be the greatest gift height and size conveys on large boys, and at six-seven and two-seventy, Mike made me look like Mickey Rooney.
There was only one star on the Lions’ football team, and that was Jim LaDue—didn’t he have his own billboard, at the intersection of Highway 77 and Route 109?
But if there was any player who made it possible for Jim to star, it was Mike Coslaw, who planned to sign with Texas A according to what I hear, you’ve been walking around in that body since you were twelve, so you should know.”
He didn’t tell me different. What he said was, “Everybody on the team tried out for Lennie. It was a joke. A goof.” He added hastily. “Nothin against you, Mr. A. Everybody on the team likes you. Even Coach likes you.”
A bunch of players had crashed the tryouts, intimidating the more scholarly aspirants into silence and all claiming they wanted to read for the part of George Milton’s big dumb friend.
Of course it had been a joke, but Mike’s reading of Lennie had been the farthest thing in the world from funny.
What it had been was a goddam revelation.
I would have used an electric cattle prod to keep him in the room, if that’s what it took, but of course there was no need of such extreme measures.
Want to know the best thing about teaching?
Seeing that moment when a kid discovers his or her gift.
There’s no feeling on earth like it. Mike knew his teammates would make fun of him, but he took the part anyway.
And of course Coach Borman didn’t like it.
The Coach Bormans of the world never do.
In this case, however, there wasn’t much he could do about it, especially with Mimi Corcoran on my side.
He certainly couldn’t claim he needed Mike for football practice in April and May.
So he was reduced to calling his best lineman Clark Gable.
There are guys who can’t rid themselves of the idea that acting is for girls and queers who sort of wish they were girls.
Gavin Borman was that kind of guy. At Don Haggarty’s annual April Fool’s keg-party, he had whined to me about “putting ideas in that big galoot’s head. ”