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Epistle
Nine - Letter from James to Pedro
Pedro,
Went out for a beer (a beer? who am
I kidding?) with the cast last night, along with a couple of actors
from Los Angeles who were in town to do another show. One of them
had been in the Broadway production of our show, so he had some
interesting anecdotes and gave me some new material.
We were playing pool on one of two
tables in the bar, the second of which was occupied by a rugby squad
from Ottawa. At one point they came over and surrounded us as only a
rugby team can and politely asked if they could party with us. After
ascertaining that the cuts and abrasions all over their faces had
occurred for sporting reasons we welcomed them gladly, especially
after we found out that one of them had had to go to the hospital
with a concussion earlier that day. It seemed like the least we
could do.
In fact, I have a somewhat hazy
memory of the concussion victim, once he found out we were actors,
standing and declaiming pretty convincingly Mark Antony's
"Friends, Romans, countrymen" speech from Julius Caesar.
Since one of our best pool players
in the cast is a strikingly beautiful girl with long black hair and
complicated tattoos on her lower back we soon attracted the
attention of another group of guys in the bar who needed to assert
their masculinity by beating her. Her name is E___. She and B___
were playing as a team against these two guys, not having much fun
because the atmosphere had become so competitive. E____ plays better
when her heart's in it.
The guys were doing all these great
guy things. They would circle the table, casually eyeing various
shots as if to say "I'm not trying to attract undue attention,
but did you see how quickly I managed to eliminate all the lesser
possibilities in favor of the ideal shot?" and then locating
the appropriate place to hang their cigarettes half off the table.
Once they had decided on a shot, they would take a little time to
line it up and then break out of it to casually indicate a pocket,
not that anybody was asking for that but just to show that they knew
the bar rules and it was no big deal anyway. One interesting little
variant of this was that whichever team member on the other side was
playing the best would receive the benediction of being called by
name and personally have the intended pocket indicated to them. It
was oh so sporting with that vague undercurrent of cattiness.
I'm no particularly great pool
player but I do have moments of inspiration, often when it's most
necessary. When I took over for E___ in the fifth game or so and
sunk maybe five balls in a row my first time shooting it nicely took
the wind out of their sails. One of them came over at that point and
started talking about cows and learning to play on a farm or in a
barnyard or something. It seemed like gibberish to disguise the fact
that he feared I might be a ringer who happened in from pool
central. It was no use trying to convince him that I was just lucky
and wanted very badly to do a little ego deflating. They did me the
enormous courtesy of calling all the rest of their shots to me
personally.
This was not honorable behavior on
my part, and I was a little relieved when B___ scratched and lost
the game for us, simply because I felt that I would otherwise have
had to pay for my arrogance in a less pleasant way, like having a
bar TV fall on my head. Losing was a minor inconvenience in
comparison.
Today on the beach there was a
confluence of events. The beginning of Mardi Gras and the beginning
of Spring Break were very much in evidence, and you know how that
can be in F___. Tonight we're headed back down there to see whatever
girls and boys gone wild action there is to see.
Making the rounds. Beach, beach
bar, party at the house, bar, do a couple shows, bar, beach. Very
warm outside, humid, very relaxing weather, not much to get
accomplished outside of eight shows a week. Occasionally someone's
family will visit, occasionally a friend from out of town will drop
by, tomorrow we travel a couple hours to see another show in another
part of the state which is well-stocked with everyone's friends. It
could easily get to be a habit, this life. Life itself could get to
be a habit, which I guess is the point in some ways.
Do I mean that less pleasant
lifestyles are not habit-forming? What could I mean by that? Maybe
where life is harder, say in New York, one has to generate reasons
for living because there is no habit formed. Living isn't rewarding
enough to be habit-forming in those places. Maybe that's why New
York seems so conducive to being productive and climates like this
don't. I had the same sort of feeling when I lived in Tucson,
actually. I projected films at night because it was much too hard to
get inspired to do any sort of job during the day.
Now another day has passed, and
another night of drunkenness and debauchery. The bar we chose to
celebrate the beginning of Mardi Gras had a big dance floor and a
deck overlooking the beach. Every so often they would stop the music
and engage in some Fear Factorish hijinks. A few people were made to
turn all of their clothes inside out inside a circular shower
curtain, then the winners were made to eat worms in a shot of gin
and then drink the gin, and then the two finalists, a guy and a
girl, had to eat a huge heart, probably from a cow. The girl choked
more of it down and won. I don't know what she won, a couple hundred
bucks maybe, and a lifetime of nausea. She seemed sort of happy
about it.
I could ask why people do this sort
of thing, but this is not an issue to be resolved in the Goliard.
This is something that we can only hope will be taken care of in the
process of evolution.
Martini bar interior, recently
opened. Enormous. Pool and games in the back, two piece band playing
80s covers in the front. Balcony upstairs. Sunken dance floor.
Thursday night, 11:00. No customers. After only two weeks in
business, the olive supply has apparently gone awry, forcing
procurement at local supermarket at substandard quality levels. Even
this stock runs out within two rounds.
A group of actors, perhaps seven in
all, arrives after a show. The owner greets them outside, welcomes
them with a brief description of the facilities and an invitation to
make themselves at home.
As the olives begin to run out,
another man appears at the bar wearing a T-shirt that says
"Jesus was a Capricorn too." He loudly demands of nobody
in particular the location of a gay dance club that someone gave him
bad directions to. His hostility seems on the verge of overflowing
onto the actors or the bartender. He says something about having
shot someone and deserving free drinks as a result. He is by no
means gay. The strikingly beautiful girl with long black hair and
complicated tattoos on her lower back looks uncomfortable, because
she believes herself to be a magnet for this kind of character. She
makes a futile attempt to render herself invisible. Alligators doze
in the swamps, and another night passes in F__.
James
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