Текст книги "The Marijuana Chronicles"
Автор книги: Jonathan Santlofer
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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 13 страниц)
A
MANDA
S
TERN
is the author of the novel
The Long Haul
, and the founder, curator, and host of the popular Happy Ending Music and Reading Series in New York City.
acting lessons
by amanda stern
The initial quantum fluctuation that burst forward to create this universe implanted particles programmed, in years nine to fourteen of a human girl’s life, to flood the neural regions and saturate her suggestible self with one single, rabid desire: to become an actress. Why this specific link, no one knows, although recent scientific studies suggest a congruity: both teen girls and actresses embody a multiplicity of personalities, expressing each through overt behavior in narrow windows of time.
It was the first week of eighth grade and school was a cauldron of odors: fresh carpeting, new varnish, paint fumes, recently opened reams of three-hole-punch paper, just-sharpened pencils, wet presses of highlighter across textbook pages, ground meat and canned vegetables from the cafeteria, polyurethane coating the gymnasium floor, and the commingling, lingering off-gassing scent of back-to-school packaging. The notice board was wallpapered in greed, a pyrotechnic display of bubble-lettered pitches, business cards, and flyers, hatched by opportunistic adults eager to capitalize on private school kids, each blocking the other like tall kids in a class picture.
Assemblies were overbooked with presentations, a cattle call of adults trying to sell lessons that no one wanted. From Judo to gardening, our collective interest held steady at their resting rates, until the appearance of the young married couple straight from the pages of Sweet Valley High. Two tall tow-headed stalks synchronized down to their split ends, walked onto the school stage. The angular pretty boy and his chisel-cheeked wife were the color palette of our dreams; the living, breathing incarnation of how we wished we looked, of the models we circled, tore from magazines, and brought to one hair salon after another, hoping each time, as we handed them the photos of Christie Brinkley and Carol Alt, that their salon would have the necessary supplies to cut off and bleach out our actual selves, providing us an opportunity which did not exist: to be replaced by preferred selves, now, specifically, the two expensive-looking fine-grain birch-totems on stage. Even their names sounded elite.
Ian and Caroline ran a theater company for teens; Caroline did most of the talking. She spoke fast and efficiently, like she’d not lost connection with her inner teen, but Ian was slower, he talked like he was inside a dream, and all the girls found him sexy. Three times a week the group met and wrote plays, performing them at the end of each semester. They were holding auditions and if we were interested, we should stay afterward and take a form. My friend and I exchanged knowing glances. We were going to audition for this theater company and we were going to get accepted because we were talented, damnit! Success was awaiting us; all we had to do was show up. Hell, I felt my future fame kicking from inside me like a drunken fetus. Had we known what “fee-based” meant, we would not have been so self-impressed.
My best friend Tea (as in Lipton, not Leoni) and I walked to the audition which was in a church basement on the Upper East Side, not far from our all-girls school. A curtain of teen stereotypes had staged themselves theatrically on the front steps. A cursory glance caught the stoner, the mean girl, the beauty, the gay boy, the fat kid, the metal head, the punk, the cut-up, the misfit, and the bored one. We knew these kids were the existing company, because they were intense; they smoked cigarettes with their souls. As we walked past them, Tea and I looked at each other; it wasn’t tobacco they were smoking. It was obvious who was auditioning and who wasn’t and Tea and I joined the other self-consciously asymmetrical faces, as we were assessed, surveyed, and scrutinized by the kids, willfully amnesic that they once were us—outsiders. No longer sandwiched between lady-suits and matching pearl sets, Ian and Caroline looked less different offstage. Embedded in their vow to serve as a platform for our fame was the promise that we’d become who they were—California and beachy-cool—but against the backdrop of the Lexington Avenue Christian Church, and Lexington Avenue itself, they didn’t clash with the passersby rushing home to their classic six, in time to frisk their maids for stolen loot before day’s end.
Caroline moved with the security of a rich girl; the swagger of knowing she could have what she wanted, and the entitled belief that she deserved it. Ian was the bad-boy pauper she spent her money trying to save. For a moment I was disappointed by what appeared to be a bait-and-switch, but that didn’t last long. Ian reached out for the non-cigarette, and instead of stomping it out, he took a couple quick hits before handing it off to Caroline, who followed suit, returning it to the original kid. Tea and I had tried cigarettes, but never pot, and we were relieved that trying it now wasn’t part of the audition.
We followed them inside to the atrium, where the regular company kids dropped to the floor in an automatic cross-legged circle we were urged to join. Tea and I shrugged. We’d never been to an audition before; we didn’t know what to expect. Ian and Caroline removed their expensive jackets and joined the circle wanting to know all about us. Who were we? Why did we want to act? Had we had any prior experience? How was our home life? Did our parents treat us well? What were our struggles, our troubles, our demons? What pained us, and brought us shame? Trouble, they wanted us to understand, was the source of acting. Pain was the wellspring from which performance rose. The more we suffered, the better we’d be, and we were here to become the best, right? We did want to become actors … didn’t we? The company kids stared at us and we nodded in the affirmative.
“So,” Caroline said, “that’s why you’re here today. To tell us your story, to tell us who you are. Convince us, convince me, that you’ve got what it takes, that you deserve to be one of us.”
Although I had an extended and confusing family—whose construct and evolution was so complicated I found myself relying on props and visual aids to make its form clear—I was not that bad off. I started out the youngest of three and when my father remarried and had children, I advanced to the middle of five, and when my mother remarried a man with three children, I was demoted to the youngest of six. Our lives were chaotic; my step-siblings had lost their mother and had moved downtown to live with us. They were angry, and often beat each other up, but without discipline there were no consequences, and without consequences the chaos escalated. It was easy to get lost.
I looked at Tea who, unlike me, was not frightened, but appalled, like someone who knew right from wrong. I scrambled for what I was going to say, while Tea looked at them like they were scrambled. The old kids went first, to show us the ropes.
“Hi, I’m Daniel, I go to Dwight, otherwise known as Dumb White Idiots Getting High Together, although they’re not the ones I get high with,” he said, tossing a laugh-and-glance to Ian, who either didn’t see, or pretended not to. “Oh yeah, um … wait, what? Oh, right—my deal … My brother is gay and I wish he wasn’t.” A wash of realization spread across Daniel’s face and he quickly looked over at a blond boy. “I didn’t mean … Sorry, Jesse, you know what I mean, right?”
Jesse stared at his lap, and nodded yes.
“Anyway … I wish my brother wasn’t gay because my parents take it out on me. And that sucks.” Daniel turned to the squashed blonde sitting next to him and poked her. Out escaped a confused giggle.
“Oh! My turn!” She spoke in baby voice, and leaned her head onto Daniel’s shoulder. “I’m Marcy. Daniel’s my boyfriend so you bitches better stay away!” She laughed while glaring at the circle. “No, I’m kidding! Of course I’m kidding. Well, not about the fact that he’s my boyfriend, he IS my boyfriend, but about staying away from him. No wait! I do want you to stay away from him … Daniel! Help me!” She blushed and shot an angry look at Daniel because he wasn’t doing a thing to prevent Marcy from being herself. Caroline cut in.
“Morgan?”
“Hi. I’m Morgan.” The boy was all monotone. “I used to live with my dad, but he killed himself so now I live with my mom, who’s a drunk. Good times.”
And on it went, and the nearer it drew to the new kids, the more horrified I became. Every confession offered up a perpetrator, the parent who wronged them, either physically or emotionally, but no one had anything wrong on the inside of them, like I did. And I never expected that one day I’d be forced to publicly expose my secret defects. That’s precisely what made them secret—they were never to be revealed! Also, I wasn’t entirely clear on what I had; no one was, which was precisely what made my issues so vexing. My first life memory is of the weird thing happening to me, and I knew, based on the mockery I received from my siblings and dad, and from the myriad doctors I visited, that it was not normal. I was born with a basketball net slung over my top ribs, and it was in there that the world dunked its balls of dread. When impending doom is your prominent emotion, there’s no room to feel much else—for example, hope. My normal responses to normal things were abnormal. I reacted to temporary partings from my mother as though they were final. Every time I had to leave her for my father’s house, or anywhere, I felt threatened with annihilation, an experience so fierce and real, it choked me, pricked me dizzy, conked my chest in, and made it hard to breathe. No matter how many times I left and returned, my body could not retain the part about returning. Each time was the first again, and several times a week I separated from my body, easily as an invertebrate from its shell, and slipped toward the ceiling, to watch, safe and distant as an omniscient narrator in a twentieth-century novel, my external self suffering the slow, sensational process of dying. It happened when I felt overwhelmed, when I was called on in class, when I had to take a test. When it happened in public, I had to control the internal hysteria, which meant I could not also engage in the world, and in those moments, depending on the circumstance, either I nodded my head, didn’t speak, or left quickly. Sometimes I did all three. Fear and my reaction to fear created the reliable pattern that led my life and gave it shape, but no one beat me or locked me in closets, no one burned cigarette holes into my forearm or pushed me down uncarpeted stairs, and as the revelations rolled around the circle, I felt a twisted envy, awed by the traumas sustained by these kids, jealous that what Ian and Caroline wanted, these kids had to deliver.
When it got to Tea she rolled her eyes. She wasn’t buying it. I didn’t realize that not buying it was an option. She was cool and I was terrified. I had nothing to offer. As Tea started to speak, I felt myself grow dizzy, and begin to float away. My lungs were collapsing, deflating into flat shriveled tapeworms.
“Honestly, I feel sorry for all of you. Your lives totally suck. I’m not sure how this is supposed to make you a better actor. All it’s doing is depressing me.”
“You don’t get it,” Daniel said.
“Well, that’s one thing we can agree on,” she shot back, and turned to me with a big smile. “Your turn!”
My brain was all white noise and I felt caught in its fuzzy, thick middle. As they waited for me to speak, I heard a stomach grumble, a throat clear, legs reposition, a sniff, and its subsequent swallow. Their nervousness for me activated my concern for them, and in order to alleviate them of their discomfort, I had to say or do something, even if it wasn’t what I meant to say or do. I felt my school uniform growing damp against my skin. When I shook my head no, I imagined myself in their eyes and decided never to return. I looked to the person next to me and said, “You go.”
As the next person spoke, Ian stood, walked around the circle, and stopped at me. A moment later, I felt his hot breath on my neck.
“Hey, come with me a minute, okay?”
Another wave of heat and sweat careened through me as I stood, hoping my movements did not mirror the wild collapsing inside me. I followed Ian out of the room, on my two stale candy-stick legs, and into the main hall, prepared for the worst, knowing the impending humiliation would ruin my entire life, but not knowing exactly how. What he said to me, and how attentive he was, threw me so off-guard, swallowed me in such relief, that I didn’t even bother to correct his incorrect assumptions. He thought I was hiding something, holding onto an enemy war code that he desperately wanted to break. He’d misconstrued my panicked no as a secret and I had a choice: maintain the mystery or come clean. While his misinterpretation of my withholding added validation to my concerns that I was always wrong and everyone else was always right, his intense focus triggered something bigger than my imminent fear. I got a hit of something I’d never tried and it swelled me with the best feeling I’d ever had. Unfiltered male attention; I wanted more. He put his hands on my shoulders and gave me a brief massage.
“You’re tense,” he said. “You need to loosen up.”
When he finished, he slung his arm over my shoulder and headed us back to the atrium. “Maybe smoke a little weed. You’ve smoked weed before, right?”
“Of course,” I said, all duh to override the truth.
And then he opened the atrium door and we walked back through it together.
Tea never returned, but I did. I liked acting, and I liked Ian, and while he had nothing to worry about, I wanted him to worry about me all the time. Each session started with the same group therapy, where I refused to speak, inciting more worry; except for his offers to find me weed, I was growing rather fond of his concern. After the late-afternoon teen confessional, the unoriginal, clichéd acting games and writing exercises, Ian and Caroline would take a cab to the village. Since I was the only kid member who lived downtown, they started offering me rides to their apartment on 12th Street and Sixth Avenue. I remember the very first cab ride because Ian said he was hungry for dessert. When Caroline asked what he wanted, he leered at her and said, “Boston cream pie.”
She giggled and smacked him, and he winked at me, the forced conspirator, who was nearly certain, but not entirely positive, that she understood. They treated me as someone who already had life experience. On the other hand, they seemed eager to be my life experience. They never failed to remind me that I could call them at any time of day or night. If I needed them, if anything bad was happening to me, if I was in trouble, if my parents were hurting me, they were the people I should call. When weeks and months passed and I still hadn’t called, their concern grew and their attention to me was amped so high, the other kids complained and I began feeling obligated to give them what they wanted. I was furious that my parents didn’t pull out my hair or toss me from windows. How else would I be pushed to call on my volunteer saviors and have them rescue me like they wanted when no one was threatening me with harm?
A few months into the fall, Ian called me at home. He wanted to see how I was doing. I was doing fine. He detected an edge in my voice. No edge, I told him. I didn’t have to pretend with him; I shouldn’t feel the need to hide. Okay, I said, adding nothing. Whatever it is, I can handle it. Whatever is happening to you, I can help you. I’ve been there before. What do you mean? I asked. My parents, they hurt me too. What do you mean? I asked. I mean, you’re not alone, runt, he said. (I was hurt by the term “runt” but tried not to spiral into an unhinged insecurity by reminding myself of Wilbur, the lovable pig in Charlotte’s Web—also a runt!) I know your pain. I see what’s happening to you. You do? I asked. I do, he said. I wanted him to tell me what he saw, because I needed material in order to have something to tell him. His calls became frequent and so did his questions. He even started coming over. Whenever I mentioned a guy, he’d ask me if I’d slept with him.
“Howard Jones?” I’d asked, incredulous. “I wish.”
No matter how many times I responded no, I hadn’t slept with him or him or him, or anyone for that matter, he continued to ask me. I either did not get it, or didn’t want to get it. A journal entry from that time validates both assumptions:
Ian came over yesterday. He’s so weird. He’s always asking if I’ve had sex with this person, this person, etc. I just wanna scream in his ear, Ian, you fuck
–
I’m a VIRGIN! That would shut him up for about five minutes
.
Ian wanted something from me I could not name and I wanted something from him that I could: a father. That’s all I wanted. I had always been drawn to older men. Since I was mini, I’d tried co-opting every grown man I came into contact with: our poor carpenter, a random babysitter, a few camp counselors, and, most recently, the acting teacher. In turn, the attention they paid me was driven by their needs, which were in opposition to mine, but that never prevented me from slipping under the open wing of a spare man. It took only a few months before I was rolled up in Ian’s.
I didn’t know what he wanted from me, but I liked that he wanted anything at all, and people pleaser that I am, I was determined to give it to him, which meant becoming the person he assumed I was. Were I to fail, hit a false note, reveal myself as anything other than the dark, intense, fucked-up girl he was coaxing out of me, then I’d be the wrong type of girl for him and he wouldn’t want a thing from me at all. While I did have dark and intense feelings and struggled with real emotional issues, including an unfeminine reserve of anger, Ian was tugging at a part of me that already existed, but probably never would have developed had I not met him. And in his presence, I played the part of the brooding female James Dean, saying all the troubled things I knew he wanted me to say, as a dizzy-hot spray swept over every lie I told. I was in over my head and I did not know how to extract myself. I had no self yet, I was too young, so while I knew I wasn’t being me, I didn’t know how the person who was me acted. I simply knew she wasn’t this way. But I could not release Ian into the world so that he could find another fourteen-year-old girl to dote on. I did not want his focus on me to disappear, and I knew it would if I disappointed him by not being the fucked-up mess he desperately wanted to save. And that is when my lessons in acting truly began.
The truth is, I was fucked up. Genuinely and authentically troubled, but had I been given a bit more time to articulate the mess inside, I’m fairly certain I would have expressed it differently.
Without having someone for whom I was curating my inner life, I feel I would have found a more positive and productive way of expressing myself. My parents didn’t abuse me and yet I felt abused. I wasn’t adopted and yet I felt adopted. I knew I existed and yet I didn’t feel seen, and now someone not only saw me, but wanted to be my hero, and I had always wanted a hero. I had longed for such a thing my entire life and here he was, a handsome man nearing thirty waiting for someone like me to save.
One night after class, Caroline and Ian invited me upstairs to their apartment. It smelled like Irish Spring and toast. They offered me a soda, told me to relax on the couch, and then Ian pulled out a bag of pot and looked at me.
“I told you I’d come through for you,” he said, handing it to Caroline, who began to roll a joint. I panicked, looked at the clock, and pretended I had to get home.
“Like anyone will even notice you’re not home,” Ian said.
Right. Right. That. I had forgotten that my home life was one of utter neglect. That I could be gone for days and no one would notice. I had not kept track of every lie, of the labored-over poems and fake diary entries I left in places he could conveniently find. I had designed an entire mise-en-scène that wasn’t physically true in any apparent way. I had covered the gaping hole of truth with falsehoods and now I was falling through one.
I was trapped. Caroline lit the joint, and when she was done, passed it to Ian, and after he was done, he handed it to me. I took the joint and the requisite drag, but coughed hard on the exhale sending ripples of laughter through them, which sent a fire of fear up my entire being. Had I fucked it all up? I handed it back to Caroline and then motioned to the clock and the door again.
“Oh, please, you can smoke a little more,” Ian said, handing the joint back to me. I had no choice; I had to smoke more pot. After another hit, a sweat-inducing nausea began to rise, alerting me that something ominous was about to happen. Then I felt it, a tickle in my throat, which I tonsiled back, trying hard to trap it, but it couldn’t be squelched. Nothing was more embarrassing than allowing my actual truth to escape in front of these people. A cough, or god forbid a sneeze, anything suggesting bodily susceptibility, had to be blocked at the pass. Perhaps because I was playing a part and concealing my human self, I began to feel not human, as though I was as biologically different from my body as my persona was to my reality. I had such control over my performance, my nuanced expressions, and body language that a natural function, such as a cough, threatened to topple the entire empire. The only way to get beyond the moment was to move past the cough, and the only way to move past the cough was to cough, which I did, seemingly without end.
My hope was that the cough would scratch the tickle and send it away, but it did no such thing. If anything it seemed to thicken it, morph the tickle into an object, something lodged, like a bone or a seed had wedged itself into one of my tonsils. This something was not sliding down, would not pass, and through the coughing, my fear escalated that I was going to vomit, choke on my vomit, and die. The last thing I wanted to do was die in front of the two people I was trying to impress. Was I allergic to pot? Had smoking brought this on? Was coughing like this a secret symptom of someone who had never smoked pot before? Were they on to me now because I was unwittingly giving away my secret? I could not stop coughing. I was dying. I was doing the most embarrassing thing a human could do. Dying was a secret you tried to keep. At fourteen you don’t know enough about life to understand that dying is as ugly as living. I had presented myself to them as invincible and if I actually died now, they’d know that I’d been lying. I didn’t want to disappoint them, even after I was dead!
Caroline handed me a glass of water, which did not help and I knew I had to leave, to get out before the unseemly and weak process of dying began and I lost control over my bodily functions and vomited, peed, and diarrheaed right there on their freshly waxed and polished hardwood floors.
I felt the familiar loop begin: sweaty palms, tightening chest, the dizzy beginning of floating away. I had to get out of there and I managed to look at my watch and make an excuse I can’t remember, forcing myself away and out. On the street I could breathe a bit better, but a block or so later I was swept up again and there I went, into the city trash, head over pissed-on piles of paper and Styrofoam cups, throwing up my entire day. When I was finished, I turned and looked up to their building, worried I’d catch them watching me from behind their ninth-floor window, but they were not. I worried that they’d pass this garbage can and know that this was MY vomit. I walked home, but knew I was really stoned when the blocks became less and less familiar and I worried that I’d entered a part of the world that did not exist, that existed when you took the only wrong turn no one had yet taken, but of course I had taken it because that’s just the kind of luck I had. When it finally occurred to me to look at a street sign, I realized I’d been going the wrong way. I couldn’t manage to get anything right, not walking home stoned, not getting stoned.
I threw up several more times on my way home, and when I got there, I spun in bed until the morning, where I woke up into a hot cloud of shame. I was determined to change, to become a person who smoked pot easily, without coughing or throwing up, or fearing they were dying. I just had to practice, was all. I had to practice out of Ian’s range; I had to do what I’d said I’d already done, which was smoke a lot of pot. I had to make good on my lie by wrangling my present to double as my past, until I was such a seasoned pot smoker that my claim would become retroactively true. In order for a lie to become the truth, you must make it your priority. The time you have between lying and getting caught is limited and if you don’t take control of the situation, locking in a masterful timetable, you’re screwed.
Daniel smoked pot. I could practice with him, without letting on that our smoke-outs were technically dress rehearsals.
Turns out, he was totally game. When he came downtown with the practice pot, I felt confident in my ability to overcome my first-time reaction. I studied him as he rolled the joint, determined to master that next. He lit up, took a deep drag, and handed it off to me, before lying down to stare up at the sky. We passed it back and forth until a creeping horror began to rapidly spread inside me. It was happening again; this time was worse. I was being squeezed from the outside by the atmosphere and couldn’t breathe no matter where I stood, and that’s when I realized that this was true dying, which is why I became suddenly religious and excused myself for the bathroom where I went to vomit and pray. I did not like smoking pot. It made me die. It was actually killing me at that very moment. How was I going to fake this? Actors relied on fake props all the time, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how I was going to finesse a false inhale.
I lived in fear of going back to Ian and Caroline’s place, but I could only stay away for so long without having to provide some sort of believable excuse. I came up with one-liners for when he pulled out a bag of weed. None had traction. I couldn’t “already be high” when we’d been together all afternoon. I couldn’t be “trying to quit,” because no normal teenager in the prime of her pot-smoking years makes a measured decision to scale back her drug use.
When I did return to their apartment it was for a party. I assumed all the kids would be there, but Daniel and I were the only ones. I was overwhelmed by all the “adults” but Daniel was used to them, he even knew their names, and he knew what Ian wanted when he asked to “borrow” him. When they returned, Ian “borrowed” me. He brought me down the hall to the bathroom.
“You’ve done coke before, right?”
I quickly rewound the tape of all the lies I’d told him but was unable to recall all the drugs I’d lied about doing.
“Yeah, obviously,” I said.
He smiled, took my hand, and slipped something into it. “Have fun.”
In the bathroom, I looked at the object and while I knew it was a vial (I recognized it from the street), I had no idea what I was supposed to do with it. How much coke was normal for a person to do? I opened the vial, shook a little out, turned on the faucet, and rinsed it down the drain. To be safe, I emptied a little more and when I cleared the sink basin of the granulated remnants I returned to Ian and Daniel and handed it back. Ian investigated.
“Wow. You’re a fiend,” he said. “Nicely done.”
“Thanks,” I told him, accepting a beer.
The next time I went over to their apartment, it was with Ian alone, who had a “surprise” for me. I was afraid. But each time I stepped into the persona side of myself, the more in control I felt, as though the strange things happening inside were happening to her and not to me. The more time I spent playing this dark part of myself, the farther down I pressed the real me. Truth is, I much preferred this other me, the tough-girl, punk, no-bullshit, nothing-can-hurt-me, my-family-is-more-fucked-up-than-your-family attitude, than I did the scared girl who was, well, frankly, a baby.
Ian, it turns out, was impressed with my aptitude for doing coke, and as luck would have it, the baggie he held up didn’t contain pot, it contained powder. He wanted to do two things with me, he said—get me into a bathing suit and “do blow,” something I’d done a million times, of course, as evidenced by last week’s party. There was no getting out of this. I had to do it. I watched everything he did. The way he chopped that little block of hardened powder into loose mounds, and separated them into military lines. He had a straw he’d cut and he put it under his nose and over the coke and vacuumed away the troops. My turn.
Coke, it turned out, was just my speed (sorry). It knew me better than I knew myself. It made me more hyper, more vigilant, more masterfully in control of my body and self. There was no impending death, no fear, no conviction of my weakness and failings. In fact, I was invincible. Even my lies felt true. I never smoked pot with Ian again. He’d given me an out, and the out was coke. Every time he rolled a joint, or held up a bag of pot, I’d say, “Kid’s stuff.”
And so, with Caroline’s money, Ian funded our seemingly endless supply of cocaine. He’d pick me up from school, drive me to Caroline’s country house without her knowing, make me prance around in a bathing suit, attempt to talk me through giving blowjobs and handjobs, and began telling me how psyched he was for me to turn eighteen.
“Why?” I asked him.
“Because then I’ll be legal to fuck you.”
