What was being decided here and now was whether I would be cast in a central role as a character who would be onstage for all three acts but had zero lines. I could not tell if this was a step backward or forward for my career. If I had to pick one, I would have picked backward. According to my teacher, it was forward. “He holds the play together,” he said. To this end, he needed to see how I “moved through space,” since moving through space would be the only thing I would be doing. So I took my place onstage, apprehensive beneath a single blinding spotlight, and waited for his direction, which was, simply, “Show me the color red.”
This was not something I had been anticipating. I had been anticipating, for example, being asked to mime pouring a glass of water, something I remember being quite good at. Without warning, we had entered the realm of symbolism and abstraction. We had entered game playing and fun. But all I could think of was the tremendous predicament of being asked to embody a concept. Was a color even a concept? If I had been fifteen still, I would have done what he asked, happily, without thinking twice. I would have done every color. “Here’s fuchsia!” “Here’s cadmium yellow!” There would have been joy in exploration. Now my brain felt calcified and literal, the effects of aging. I could think only of making a semi-bold choice, like lying on my back and moving interpretatively. But lying on my back would obscure me from my teacher’s vision. “If the audience can’t see you,” he would sometimes say, “then who are you doing this for?” I lay down anyway, the hard stage pressing against me, dust getting all over my khakis. The foreman would say to me later, “You got dirty from going to the dentist?” For lack of any other idea, I channelled the character of the foreman, and then I channelled the drywall, which was not a character, and I thought about smoking a cigarette, because in my world of make-believe the color red smokes cigarettes, which was what I did, lying on my back, eyes closed, moving conceptually, this way and that, blowing smoke into the yellow spotlight of blindness, and when I stood up and dusted myself off I had, most wondrously, been given the role.
The second time I smoked crack cocaine was the spring I worked construction for my father on his new subdivision in Moonlight Heights. By this point, the electricians had finished pre-wiring for the Internet, whatever that was, the floors had been poured, the windows had been installed, and the general laborers had come and gone, eight dollars an hour not being enough. I would show the new recruits around, bathroom, foreman, paper to sign, and then I would go carry drywall in the sunshine. I was aware that I had been waiting for Duncan Dioguardi to invite me to party again, but no invitation had been forthcoming, and to broach it myself seemed as though it would traverse an essential but unstated boundary.
This time it was a Tuesday evening, after our shift, around six o’clock. Duncan’s car had broken down again. “Sure,” I said, “jump in.” I could hear the sprightliness in my voice, now authentic. The traffic was just as bad as ever and we crawled forward with our windows rolled down, the spring breeze blowing in, the cigarette smoke blowing out, dusk all around us. “I’m sorry about the traffic,” Duncan said, as he had said before. “I don’t mind,” I said. We talked about the subdivision for a while, and then we were quiet, mulling over I know not what, and then I broke the silence with the fantastic news that I’d been cast in a play, and that the way I saw things it was only a matter of time before I would be renting the U-Haul and making my move.
“Oh, honey, I’m so sorry—I didn’t know your mom and dad were doing a project together. Is it the kitchen? Do you want to talk about it?”
Duncan was happy for me. He shook my hand. He slapped me on the back. “Whatever you set your mind to,” he said. I told him that I’d get him a free ticket for opening night. He told me, “I’ll be able to tell people I knew you when.” I was not used to such expansiveness. I could feel myself blushing. “Not many lines,” I told him. Obviously, the truth was that there were no lines. But I thought it was important to at least try to keep things in some perspective. Humility first, fame second.
“Lines don’t matter,” Duncan said. Success was what mattered, and success called for celebration.
“Aw,” I said, “I sure appreciate that.” But it was a work night, after all.
No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t even seven o’clock. It would be a shame to let such good news go to waste. “Let’s celebrate,” Duncan Dioguardi said.
I knew that, in this context, “celebrate” was another word for “party,” which was, of course, itself another word.
The traffic was gone and I was driving fast. If I had had an ability to observe myself, I might have questioned why I needed to get where I was going in such a hurry. Under the overpass I went, fifteen miles above the speed limit. Turn, turn, turn. Duncan Dioguardi didn’t need to tell me where to turn. He wanted to know if I had forty dollars to chip in. For forty dollars I’d have to stop at the A.T.M. The A.T.M. was in the convenience store, where people were shopping for dinner. At the A.T.M., I noted with satisfaction that my savings were considerable—eight dollars an hour adds up.
His mother was home when we got there. “Meet my friend,” Duncan Dioguardi said. The word “friend” was not a euphemism. His mother was sitting in the living room watching “Seinfeld.” She said, “You’re welcome here anytime.” She was being warm. She was being hospitable. She was laughing at what was happening on TV, and a few moments later Duncan and I were in the basement, also laughing at what was happening on TV. Jerry was saying something logical, and George was frustrated, and Elaine was rolling her eyes, and here came Kramer bursting through the front door. When Duncan opened his hand, I imagined for a moment that, instead of the insignificant chips off the drywall, he was holding a palmful of giant chunks, the size of golf balls, one pound each.
“You do the math,” Duncan said.
Beneath his bed was the Chore Boy, but its symbolism had gone the way of the euphemism. Now when we smoked, we used, of all things, a broken car antenna, which, according to Duncan, he had found lying on the sidewalk. This was a neighborhood where car antennas lay on the sidewalk. The smoke came out of Duncan’s mouth in the same white puff that lingered in the air of the basement theatre. “Not bad,” he said, again. And when it was my turn I also said, “Not bad,” but I meant it this time. I was the passenger on the cruise ship who has become acquainted with the island. The same warm feeling of friendship for Duncan engulfed me, followed by an unexpected but welcome sense of optimism concerning my prospects—extraordinarily promising they were, weren’t they, beginning with those three acts I was going to have onstage and heading toward a career. It was eight o’clock. Another episode of “Seinfeld” was just getting under way, the back-to-back shows courtesy of NBC, the interweaving story lines being established in that first minute: someone determined, someone displeased, the fatal flaw introduced, followed, thirty minutes later, by the abrupt resolution, and all of it funny, until all of it suddenly was not funny.
Suddenly I was in possession of that thing called clarity. I was watching the most vapid show in the history of television—it had always been vapid and we, the viewers, had always been duped. I could see straight through it now—solipsistic, narcissistic, false reality, easy tropes, barely amusing. The clarity that I thought I’d had moments earlier had not been clarity at all but, rather, its opposite, delusion, which was now being usurped by an all-encompassing awareness, horrible and heavy, through which I understood at once that I was not talented, had never been talented, that my life as a general laborer was proof of this lack of talent, and that being cast in a role with zero lines was not a step toward fame but a step into obscurity in a midsized city. Who but a fool agrees to move through space for three acts without saying a word?
The car antenna was coming back my way. It was nine o’clock. I had entered a strange dimension of time—it was progressing both slowly and quickly, as marked by the ticking of that basement boiler. Nine was early for night. It would be night for many more hours to come. I was nineteen. Nineteen was young. I would be young for many more years to come. What exactly had I been so troubled by a few minutes before? Light and airy clarity descended upon me. Ah, this was clarity, and the other, delusion. I had reversed things, silly, overstated them, compounded them, turned delight into cynicism. I was going to be onstage for three acts, moving through space, another credential to have on my résumé when I arrived in L.A. It was ten o’clock. Was ten o’clock early for night? Was night moving slowly or fast? Was Jerry funny or stupid? We were driving back to the A.T.M. now. I knew I was traversing some essential but unstated boundary, but I traversed it anyway. I wondered if Duncan Dioguardi had ever had a broken-down car or if he had smoked the car, its antenna being the last piece remaining. I wondered if he’d smoked L.A. I wondered if he’d one day smoke his Magnavox TV. This is the last time I’m doing this, I said to myself, even as I knew that saying so implied its inverse. At the A.T.M., I took out another forty dollars. I noted my balance. My savings account was still large. It was midnight. Midnight was still young.
作者：Saïd Sayrafiezadeh
來源：紐約客（2018.09.10）
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