Playworld

Rawhide Down

February gave on to March.

Now that wrestling season had concluded, and the terms of my agreement with Dad had been met, I was auditioning again.

That month, I booked a Pop Rocks radio spot ( There’s bang to the bite was my line), which was followed by an on-camera Lipton Cup-a-Soup commercial.

The shoot required I miss a full day of school.

It had five actors in it: me and two older guys, Ricky Febliss and Jeff Riddell.

Also Rusty Feinberg, a kid I’d been seeing at auditions since I was ten.

When we boarded the van at five a.m.

and headed to the shoot, the actress playing our mother, Diane, was already seated in back, smelling fresh and lovely but entirely absent makeup.

“Diane,” said Ricky in greeting; “Diane,” echoed Jeff, mocking Ricky.

“Oh,” she said, “ you two palookas.”

They talked and laughed during the entire hour-long ride, heckling one another about their recent evening out at Studio 54.

“It’s nothing but a bunch of private school kids,” said Ricky.

“Which is just how I like it,” said Jeff.

“You are both so bad, ” Diane kept saying to them.

Because of the way they talked—their level of snark and jaded know-how—Ricky and Jeff seemed like grown-ups.

But once we were in costume—Diane donning her wig and her mom sweater and slacks, with her lashes added and makeup done, and Ricky in his football jersey and Jeff with the sweatbands on his head and wrists—it was as if Diane had aged ten years and Jeff and Ricky were suddenly younger than Rusty and me.

This happened regularly on jobs like this.

It got to the point where it seemed as if more than lighting or makeup or costuming, age itself was something you inhabited long enough to get the take, until you took it off and put an adult face back on.

We shot the commercial on location, at a house in Ramsey, New Jersey.

The four of us were instructed to play basketball—there was a hoop and backboard above the garage—while Rusty’s mom made lunch.

We could only be seen through the kitchen window in the shot, and we were off mic, so Jeff and Ricky seized the opportunity to say the nastiest things they could to Rusty and me, trying to crack us up during takes.

“I’m gonna fuck you in the ass, Griffin,” Jeff hissed while I drove to the basket, smashing his crotch into my butt as he guarded me.

During the next take, he said, “I’m gonna give Rusty a Dirty Sanchez.” Rusty pulled up and drained another shot.

He passed to Ricky, who checked back to him.

“What’s a Dirty Sanchez?” he asked as he dribbled.

Ricky feigned surprise, staggering backward and clutching his chest.

He said to Jeff, “Let’s get Mikey to try it.”

“Yeah,” Jeff said.

“He won’t eat it.

He hates everything.”

From the kitchen window, Diane called us in.

“Boys, lunch is ready!”

Jeff waved to her.

“We’ll eat your pussy in a second, Mrs.

Bancroft.” Then, leaning in conspiratorially to Rusty, said, “Your mom gives the best blow jobs.”

In the commercial’s main scene, the three of us burst into the kitchen, our cheeks rosy with the cold.

Rusty is already seated at the table.

Jeff’s line was “I’m starving.” Then Ricky said, “What smells so good?” And Rusty’s mom replied, “Lipton Cup-a-Soup.” And I looked at Rusty in amazement, since he was already drinking the last drops from his mug.

“Hey,” I said, “Harley’s already finished!” I must’ve said the line a hundred times.

After each take, the director removed his headphones to consult with the four suits seated in the row of canvas chairs behind him.

Then he’d turn to us and correct our delivery: “Up more” or “Not so bright”; “Heavy on the ‘good’?” or “Easy on the ‘so’?”; or “It’s star ving, not stah vin’.” When they shot close-ups of the soup, which were in four coffee mugs and semicircled by all the boxes of flavors, the set designer used a dropper to add some chemicals to the broth that smelled like ammonia and made the soup produce a wisp of steam.

It was all very boring and isolating, to be somewhere for an entire day taking orders but never really talking to anyone, and at the shoot’s conclusion I remember catching a glimpse of Diane, seated before the makeup artist’s mirror.

After they’d removed her wig and the clips from her hair, her lashes and rouge, her face possessed the unique tabula rasa quality certain women are either gifted with or cursed by—they are so entirely transfigured by eyeshadow and eyeliner, by lipstick and blush, they could rob a bank in one face and disappear into obscurity in the other.

She sat there blankly and buffed clean, drinking a cup of coffee, and perused the newspaper, her tired eyes enlarged by a set of reading glasses, and my thoughts turned to Naomi, since it was by now the afternoon, when we’d normally meet, and I wondered if she was driving home from work right now.

And I remember being strangely certain she was, and I thought that if I were to see her, I would tell her about how, amid so much chatter, my overwhelming feeling was one of remoteness, and she would have a better word for the sentiment.

Or at least help me find one.

Which is to say that I missed her.

Dad liked to check in with me after these workdays.

“How’d it go?” he asked at dinner.

When I said fine, he said, “Well, tell me about it.” I said there was nothing to tell.

“What was your line?” he asked, and I repeated it like I’d been hypnotized.

“Is that how you said it?” he said, a bit ticked.

“I said it,” I said, “times a million.” My lack of enthusiasm annoyed him.

“That goes national and you’ll be singing another tune.” When I told him, “It’s not like I see a dime of it,” he bristled.

“You do every day you walk into that fancy school of yours.” When I told him I wanted to go to wrestling camp over the summer, he said, “It depends on your shooting schedule.” When I stared him down and then asked what he was talking about, he said, “They’re renewing your contract for The Nuclear Family.

” When I said I hadn’t signed anything yet he said, “That’s correct.” When I asked if I had to sign the contract, he said, “We’ll talk about it.” When I asked, “When?” the phone rang, as if on cue.

“That’s probably the agency,” Dad said, bunching his napkin and tossing it on the table, and even though he was only half finished with his food, he hurried to his bedroom to answer the call.

And once again I had no leverage.

Oren, eyeing his departure, turned to Mom and said, “I have a question.”

She eyeballed him back but did not speak.

“Does Griffin pay my tuition?”

“No,” she said.

“Your father does.”

Oren was visibly relieved at this.

“Does Griffin pay your tuition?”

“I pay for mine with the money I make.

And for the record, Griffin only pays a portion of his tuition.”

“Like a fixed percentage?”

“It depends.”

“On what?”

“Circumstances.”

“So basically what sort of year Dad is having.”

“Plus how much we put away for Griffin’s college.”

“What about my college?”

Mom took a sip of wine, nodded, and then placed her glass back on the table and refilled it.

“We have extra time to save for yours because you’re younger.”

“But nothing’s in the kitty yet.”

“We’re doing the best we can,” Mom said.

Oren whistled.

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Mom asked.

“That I’m definitely getting a job this summer,” Oren said.

“Maybe you should start acting,” I said.

I was half needling.

I also thought it would be fun if we went on go-sees together.

“Maybe I’d like to have some dignity,” Oren said.

“Money can’t buy you that,” Mom said to him.

“It can help.”

“I’m not getting into this with you.”

“We can’t even afford to go on a vacation,” Oren said.

“What is this new obsession of yours with a vacation?” Mom asked.

“I want to come back from break with a tan.

Like the other kids.

I want to go on a trip, for Chrissakes.”

“ I’ll pay for vacation,” I said.

“And wrestling camp too.”

Oren brightened.

“Yes,” he said to me.

To Mom: “Yes, let’s live a little.”

“You’re not old enough to make that decision,” Mom said to me.

“But he’s old enough to work!” Oren replied.

“He’s still a minor, and we decide how the money is spent.”

“What sort of slave-labor shit is this?” my brother said.

“Oren, your language.”

“When do I get to decide what to do with my money?” I asked.

“When you’re eighteen.”

“What if it’s gone by then?” Oren said.

“It won’t be,” she said to him; then to me, since I was looking at her with alarm: “Just like there’ll be money saved for your college.

And since you’re looking for a job,” she added, turning back to Oren and getting up from the table, “you can do the dishes.”

After Mom left, Oren shook his head and sat brooding for a time.

“You’re going about this wrong,” he said finally.

“How’s that?”

“You want to get out of show business, you need to go all in.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Get rich, retard.

Then buy your way out.”

—

Did I really miss Naomi? I wondered.

Later that evening, I kept thinking about how I’d describe to her other random things I’d noticed during the shoot.

That afternoon, in between takes, one of the executives had said to Diane, so that the entire cast and crew could hear, “I think we made a mistake casting a woman as beautiful as you.” To which Diane—her back was to him and she was facing me—said, “Is that right, Gerald?” To which Gerald replied, “I think you’re hotter than the soup.” Diane raised an eyebrow at me and said, “Better not take a sip then, you might burn your lips.” To which Gerald replied, “Not if I blow on it first.” And while the crew and the other execs chuckled, Diane looked at me with an expression of such slit-eyed exhaustion and embarrassment, I swore I’d never speak to a woman like that in my life.

And now, when I recall her tiny privacy with me, her bid for corroboration, an effort at a sort of education—woman to young man—I am reminded that someone is always eyeing someone eyeing someone who isn’t eyeing them.

And what about love? One night, when I emerged from my room, I spied Dad just back from rehearsal—they’d just started doing read-throughs of the musical’s book—his coat still on but unbuttoned at the throat.

He seemed electrically happy, enlarged somehow, and he greeted my mother at the dining table with an expression that was decidedly hungry.

She sat facing the mirrored wall, and he reached around her chairback to cup one of her breasts, which froze me, and then bent to kiss her full on the mouth—another thing I’d never seen in my life.

She raised both her arms and looped them around his neck.

When their lips parted, she grabbed his scruff in her fist and pulled his cheek to hers and held it there.

She looked at him in the mirror’s reflection, and he looked at her, and then Mom spotted me, reflected too, and her expression did not change.

I felt that she’d rent some sort of veil to reveal her true face.

It was suddenly clear to me that I knew her as my mother but not as a woman, a distinction I’d never previously thought to make; and that in our family’s food chain, Dad was her apex and Oren and I were at the bottom.

My inability to tell Elliott about this, or any of these things—he was dozing now as I sat across from him in his office—was, I suddenly felt acutely, the very failure of mine that put him to sleep.

“It’s like I’m a mute!” I said, which startled him awake.

“Whoosis?” Elliott said, and grabbed his chair’s arms.

“Like I see but I can’t say.”

He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes.

He shook his head so hard his lips flapped.

“Let’s take a walk,” he said, and, donning our heavy coats, we left his office.

As we crossed the street toward Gramercy Park, he swung his arms in front of him and clapped his gloved hands several times.

We walked up to the park’s gate, and Elliott rummaged in his overcoat’s pocket.

“The most coveted key in New York,” he said, holding it up for me to behold, and then opened the lock.

He pulled the gate shut behind him, and we entered the tiny one-block-by-one-block rectangular space.

Snow crunched under our feet as we cut through its path.

Pigeons snapped their wings and rose like ash.

On the fence’s perimeter, the bundled pedestrians were smokestacks, were steam engines.

“You know who that is?” Elliott said, and thumbed at the statue to his right.

I didn’t answer.

“Edwin Booth.” When I shrugged, he explained: “The actor.

He founded the Players club.

Right there”—Elliott pointed at the mansion across the street: wrought-iron guarding the balconies, gas lanterns flickering, a purple flag limp in the cold.

“Older brother of John Wilkes Booth, who…” he said, and waited.

“Assassinated Abraham Lincoln?”

“Correct.

Now, Edwin Booth, like his father before him and both his brothers, was an actor.

I read an article about the family a few days ago.

They hated each other, by the way.”

“Who?”

“The brothers did.

Well, John Wilkes hated Edwin.

Their father died when John was thirteen but he was clearly haunted by him.

Wanted their dead dad’s love so bad he tore himself up fighting for it—Junius Brutus Booth was the father’s name.

They don’t make names like that anymore! If your father had a name like that, it would give you an inferiority complex too.

Anyway, he desperately wants Pop’s approval, so what does he do?”

“Assassinates Abraham Lincoln?”

Elliott shook his head.

“He goes into the family business.

Brother Edwin’s already made a reputation for himself as Hamlet, by the way.

Becomes the ne plus ultra of the Prince of Denmark.

You know what that means?”

“The best?”

“Better than that.

The ultimate.”

“Like Brando in Streetcar. ”

“ Exactly.

Now, John, he’s considered the handsomest man in America.

But he isn’t getting anywhere near the cachet as his big brother.

You know what cachet is?”

“Is it French for money?”

“It’s prestige.

As in admiration.

So what’s his solution to this dilemma, you think?”

“He assassinates Abraham Lincoln?”

“He defines himself over against his brother.

Edwin’s a great Shakespearean actor, John Wilkes becomes a naturalist.

Brother won’t take sides in the war, John Wilkes allies himself with the Confederates.

Brother wants to abolish slavery, John Wilkes goes all in for antimiscegenation.”

“What’s antimiscegenation?”

Elliott stopped and smiled.

He placed one hand on my shoulder and, with the other, patted my chest in approval.

Then he took my elbow and we continued to walk.

“It means he was against interracial marriage.”

“Do you agree with that?”

Elliott shrugged.

“If my daughter were to bring home a Black guy, I’d prefer it were Sidney Poitier, but to each his own.

My point: John Wilkes is entangled, understand? He sees one path to love blocked and does the opposite.

But there’s no freedom in doing the opposite, okay, because always doing the opposite is automatic.

It binds you to the person you’re trying to break away from.

It intertwines you with the very thing you profess you don’t want to be.

And John Wilkes knows this.

On some precognitive level, he realizes he’ll never out-fame his brother and win his father’s approval, that his path to eros is obstructed.”

“What’s eros?”

“Love,” Elliott said.

“The life force.

The engine of our best actions.” He smiled because I was smiling as he waxed poetic, and this encouraged him to be hammy.

“The flower opening its petals to the sun.”

“Ah,” I said.

“So what’s John Wilkes’s solution to this predicament?”

“He assassinates Abraham Lincoln!”

Elliott gravely shook his head.

“That’s just the means.

He does what his brother couldn’t.

He enters history.”

Elliott had a bit of the actor in him too.

Most times, I didn’t mind.

“Who had the better life?” Elliott asked me.

We had exited the park by now and began looping around its fence back to the office.

“Edwin plays Hamlet all over the world.

Manages the Winter Garden Theatre.

Has a daughter by his first wife.

Names her Edwina, by the way.

How’s that for narcissism?”

“So who had the better life?” I asked.

Elliott shrugged.

“It’s pretty obvious, but here’s my point.

Back in the office you said you felt like you were speechless.

That you had things you saw but struggled to communicate.

Those are the two most heartfelt things you’ve ever shared with me.

So maybe that’s what you’ve been put on the earth for.

To come up with a language for your life.”

Admittedly, I had no idea what Elliott meant.

Was finding a language for my life like a job? So far as I could tell, I had three of those.

Fall through spring, I was a student, which I figured was just a way for me to do my real job, wrestling.

But since I was spending the summer playing Peter Proton, and this funded the other two, maybe all of them were under the umbrella of “actor.” I did have hobbies.

Since third grade I’d drawn superheroes.

I’d collected comics for as long as I could remember, and I’d been working on my own comic book for nearly three years that was more than a hundred paneled pages long, contained in a binder that sat on my desk, one I sometimes caught Oren leafing through with an expression between envy and amazement.

Mom called it my “magnum opus.” That Sunday, at a party at Elliott and Lynn’s house, standing before the buffet with Al Moretti and his new boyfriend, Tony, he asked me, while he loaded his plate with smoked fish and bagels and cold cuts, “So, Griffin, what do you want to be when you grow up? You gonna become a famous actor and make millions?”

“I want to be an artist for Marvel Comics,” I said.

Al frowned.

“You’ll get over that,” he said.

Oren came up to me, miffed.

“Sam Shah said he’d bring his Ferrari, but it doesn’t look like he’s coming.”

“When’d you talk to Sam Shah?”

“I call him for advice sometimes about my career.”

“What career?”

“Precisely,” Oren said.

He had made himself the most beautiful bagel: the lox draped over vegetable cream cheese with a tomato and red onion, these topped with capers and layered with sprigs of dill.

“That guy is super smart,” Oren continued, and took a bite.

“He was telling me that the greatest inventors and entrepreneurs, like Thomas Edison and Michelangelo, they recognize a thing before it exists and then make what people didn’t know they wanted.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Walkmans,” Oren said, and then shrugged.

“Parachutes.”

“Who invented the parachute?”

“Michelangelo, idiot.”

“That sounds like something Elliott would say.”

“Actually, I ran that by Elliott last week.

He told me the American Indians have a name for this: a ‘vision quest.’ And he said that imagination is the true form of time travel.

Which makes sense, when you think about it.

That you dream up something in the present and it lives in the future until you build it.

Which was also the first time Elliott and I ever really talked about anything worth a shit.”

“I’m glad Elliott has more of your cachet. ”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Approval, idiot.”

“Yeah, well, Elliott also said that if I didn’t bring up my grades, the only job I’d be qualified for would be one replaced by androids.”

“Do androids actually exist?”

“Not yet, but according to Sam Shah, the future’s in automation.

Also free trade.”

“What’s free trade?”

Oren held up his bagel.

“Cheaper Nova.”

I felt a twinge of disappointment that I wouldn’t be seeing Naomi, but it was eclipsed by a feeling of relief that she wasn’t coming, which was replaced by the same feeling I’d felt during the commercial, being around all those people and invisible at the same time.

It was so intense I wanted to hug Oren when he checked his watch and said, “Let’s go to Elliott’s bedroom and watch In Search Of.

” Because he was my brother, he was always there; ever since the fire, he was my once-upon-a-timer, and I loved him maybe more than anyone else in my life.

—

We were going to Captiva.

Our parents’ announcement about our spring break travel plans was unexpected, which only created that much more excitement between my brother and me.

Oren said he knew a couple of “fly chicas” from his school who went every year and that we had to get buff for these ladies, so before bed we moved the dining table toward the windows and did push-ups in front of the mirrors and some Jack LaLanne calisthenics and also dug out the dumbbells Dad had stored in the back of his closet—“curls for girls,” Oren called our sets.

“You know what washboard abs are?” Oren said, doing his best flex.

“Male cleavage.” The week before we left, Oren and I went to Brooks Brothers to buy new bathing suits with the fifty dollars Dad gave me to spend from my commercial money.

“The red Speedo,” Oren said to me, “no question.” And then, in what I wasn’t sure was an imitation of Dad, added, “ Very European.” That night, from his bunk below me, Oren fantasized about all the activities he’d do when we were at the resort.

“I want to jet-ski and go snorkeling and play tennis,” he said.

“Or maybe sailing.

I’m gonna get a Saint-Tropez tan.

And I want to collect seashells and make a whole necklace of them, like puka beads but bigger.

Do you want me to make you a necklace? Because I will.”

And on certain evenings when Oren was done with it, he lent me his copy of the Swimsuit Issue.

“It really gives you a feel for the place,” Oren said.

The articles were boring, but there was an ad that caught my eye.

It read like a public service announcement and reminded me of the sorts of conversations I overheard the adults having at Elliott and Lynn’s get-togethers:

The Reunited States of America

At Time Incorporated, we happen to believe that Americans united can solve any problems America faces.

That’s why, in late February, our seven magazines will speak to their 68 million readers on a common theme—“American Renewal.”

Today most people see nothing but crisis around them.

Inflation.

Energy.

Declining productivity.

Weakness abroad and a breakdown of the political machinery at home.

There is a spreading sense of powerlessness…a feeling that, as individuals, we can’t make a difference anymore.

Time Incorporated disagrees.

But I mostly looked at the pictures.

And while Oren preferred Christie Brinkley to all the other models; while he could not help draping page fifty-two over his face, what with her nipple discreetly poking against her red suit’s fabric, or pressing the two-page spread of her against the bottom of my mattress slats, as if he were benching the entire top bunk (Christie sat with her nearly naked back to the camera, on the shell-covered sand, at sunset, while terns wheeled and swooped over the Gulf), I crushed on Carol Alt, that slender, angular, wolf-eyed brunette, whose wavy hair for some reason the editors chose to corral in a bathing cap for most of her pictures, but who, in my favorite photo, let it be blown freely in the prevailing breeze as she lay supine among the sea oats, propped on her elbows in a brown-and-white snakeskin bathing suit.

Clenched in her teeth was a single reed, its firm stalk slightly indenting her glossy lower lip.

There were captions to all these shots, partly advertorial, that I pored over as if they contained secret information:

On the beach on Shell Island, a boat to match one’s suit is nothing to skiff at, and lucky Carol’s handsomely harmonized ensemble includes a maillot by Moi ($60).

“It’s not mail-lot, ” Oren said when he heard me practicing the word.

“It’s pronounced may-yo.

And it just means one-piece.”