Gay Meth Addict Takes a Break to do Summer Stock Theater

Slammed: a Memoir — Chapter 8 Part 3

I sat in a bathroom stall in the Chicago bus station staring at the syringe in my hand. It had a decent amount of Tina residue in it. It would have been so easy to draw from my bottle of water and give myself another mini slam to take the edge off.

But I couldn’t do it. I was certain the minute I had the needle in my arm some authority would start banging on the stall door.

I had smoked my last cigarette and spent the last of my cash on a Snickers and a bottle of water in Cincinnati. Both the bus from New York and the overnight bus from Cincinnati had been full. The seats were incredibly uncomfortable. The hours of not being able to straighten my legs left me with a painful knot in my right hip. And I didn’t get any sleep because of the chatty stoned frat boy sitting next to me. He wasn’t chatting with me, thank God, but lord he never shut up.

Now in Chicago, I had hours to kill before the morning bus to Springfield.

I was crashing, I was in nicotine withdrawal, I was exhausted, and I was actually having a debate with myself on whether I should embrace the cliché and shoot up in the bus station bathroom.

I decided against it and tucked the capped syringe away. I took out the remaining half of my Snickers and ate it.

The bus to Springfield boarded shortly before dawn. It was practically empty, which was such a relief.

Chicago gave way to sprawling fields newly planted with corn and soybeans. Tiny sprigs of green in straight and endless rows poked through dirt on either side of the highway. As the bus traveled along, I watched row after row of seedlings perfectly line up for an instant before spreading out again. As the sun climbed, the sky turned jewel blue, dotted by the occasional fluffy white cloud.

The fact that I would soon be around familiar faces, and even more unfamiliar ones, filled me with a low hum of anxiety that kept me from sleeping, tired as I was. But the sunny morning and the bucolic landscape had me breathing a little deeper and a little easier.

The bus dropped me off in Springfield at the town truck stop just off the highway: a large convenience store and diner flanked on either side with wings of gas pumps, one for cars, one for semi trucks.

Dexter drove up soon after and hopped out of his car. It had been barely two years since we became friends as fellow tour rats on The Scarlet Pimpernel. Now, this handsome leading man turned producer was practically glowing, and it was no wonder as he was seeing the biggest endeavor of his life come to fruition.

“Hey John,” he said, going in for a hug.

“Hey Dex.” I hugged him back. Normal people hug friends. They don’t recoil or run away like I wanted to. Be normal. Be normal.

When he released me from the hug, he really saw me for the first time.

My jeans hadn’t been washed in who knows how long. My Crazy for You show jacket — which a normal person wouldn’t be wearing on a warm summer day in June — was fraying at the cuffs and had a tear in the shoulder exposing the purplish lining underneath. My stringy, unkempt hair was shoved under a ballcap that had been blue once upon a time. My skin was extremely pale and the beard I had been trying to grow was patchy and thin and was hardly a beard at all.

Dexter’s face became pleasant but neutral, which told me everything. It’s that thing we do when we see someone not looking their best. We don’t want to let on or hurt their feelings, so we restrain ourselves from reacting in any way. It’s like a poker player with a good hand who holds their breath trying not to display any tells when in fact that’s the tell.

“Ready to go?” he asked.

“Actually, I was wondering, could you do me a big favor? Could you buy me a pack of cigarettes? I ran out in Cincinnati and I’m kinda short on cash.”

I don’t think I’d ever asked Dexter, or Jason for that matter, to buy me smokes, even on tour. It was my bad habit so I should pay for it.

But I was nic-fitting hard and I needed something to take the edge off.

“Ok,” he said after a moment, still neutral, neither approving nor disapproving. He bought me the smokes and I sucked one down while he waited before hopping in his car and heading into town.

As we drove I glanced over at Dexter. He was still neutral, not giving me even a casual glance, focused entirely on the road.

“So, I know I look like shit, right?” I felt the need to explain myself. This friend of mine had the world on his shoulders and I desperately didn’t want to add to it. “It’s not my best look, but this is for George. I figure he’s homeless, a farmhand, he’s probably gonna be a little scruffy.”

“Sure,” he said. “Makes sense.” Still non reactive and neutral. So I let it be.

Driving down Springfield’s main street was like driving through Everytown, USA: a bank, a jeweler, a clothing store, movie house with classic marquee, hardware store, diner. It would have looked like a scene out of a Norman Rockwell painting except for the blight of economic depression. For every open business there was an empty store front. What had once had been a vibrant main street — one you could imagine Jimmy Stuart running down shouting “Merry Christmas” — was hollowed out thanks in part to the Walmart Superstore that had opened up on the other end of town.

Dexter dropped me off at a small church turned arts center, one of our venues for the summer. It was a small, white building with a Grecian front: four white pillars holding up a pediment displaying the name Springfield Arts Center. Inside, the sanctuary had been turned into a black box — a performing space with no wings or curtains — though nothing was painted black. This was the same space Jason, Laura and I had performed our murder mystery Killer Jazz the previous fall.

I was meeting Jason at the arts center to pick up keys to where we were being housed for the summer. It was still before noon and the first company meeting wasn’t until that evening. All I wanted was to sleep in a real bed even for just a few hours.

But Jason wasn’t there, so I called him.

“Hello.”

“Hey Jason, I’m here. Where you at?

“On my way to Chicago to pick up actors at the airport.”

My heart sank. “So, the keys to where we’re staying, did you…did you happen to give them…”

“Ah shit, I’m sorry dude. I still have them. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

Disappointed, and a little angry, I drug my bag inside the arts center gallery that was to serve as dressing rooms. There wasn’t a couch or a stuffed chair to be found, so I took some clothes out of my bag to use as a pillow and laid down on the cold linoleum floor. It was good to be able to stretch my legs out, but aside from that it really wasn’t that much more comfortable than the bus.

That evening, everyone assembled in the theater for the first company meeting. The house was filled with “first day of summer camp” energy as actors chatted, chirped, and laughed. Actors in general are very good at making quick and fast friendships on contracts like this. By the end of the day, people would be hanging out with each other as if they’ve been best friends for years. Then when the contract ends, connections will be lost, and most of these fast friendships would fade into happy memories. The friendships I had formed with Jason and Dexter were the exception, not the rule.

I wasn’t chatting, chirping, and laughing. I was sitting rows away from everyone, sunglasses on even though we were inside. I had no idea how agoraphobic I had become till I was sitting in that theater. I watched the rest of the company feeling like I was an entirely different species. Did I even speak the language?

Dexter jumped up on stage, the ring of keys he wore on his belt jangling. He wore khakis and a white button up dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Hello everyone! Welcome to Springfield.

“You are here at a very special time for us. You are all here at the beginning. The beginning of what will hopefully be a long and successful journey for this company.

“We are a theater company created by young artists who didn’t want to wait. We didn’t want to wait for the business to someday, maybe, if we’re lucky, give us the opportunity to do the work we’ve been aching to do. Our founding members are mostly musical theater nerds, like most of you. But none of us, not a single one of us, want to do only musical theater. We want to do straight plays. We want to do Shakespeare. We want to do work that challenges us, that takes us out of our comfort zone. And we want to do it now. So, we created Springfield Rep.

“And we want to do more than entertain. We want to enlighten our audiences. We want to challenge them.

“We are a company that will never do Grease.”

The company laughed and a few applauded. Theaters do Grease when they have nothing to say and simply want to make money. We didn’t want to be that kind of theater and the newly assembled company appreciated that.

“Now, I can’t tell you guys how we’ve done things before. There is no before. Everything we’re going to be doing we’re doing for the first time. And we’ll all be doing it together.

“There are going to be bumps. There are going to be learning experiences. There are going to be mistakes. During those moments I urge you to have patience with us and with each other. Always keep in mind that everything you do here this summer, everything you accomplish, will set the course for all future festival productions to come. This is an amazing group of artists and technicians we’ve assembled and we are going to do some amazing storytelling.”

The faces of the entire company beamed as his pace quickened. “Our goal is to give this community something it’s never had before: quality, professional theater. Until now you had to drive two hours to Chicago, and that’s if you could afford it. Many here have never had the chance to see a fully staged production of Shakespeare. An eight-year-old child who sees our A Midsummer Night’s Dream will have seen ten fully staged Shakespeare productions by the time they graduate high school.”

There was a murmur of surprise and approval as his words landed, as if we all thought how awesome it would be to be that kid.

“That is how we measure success. So, Welcome to Springfield Repertory Theater’s first annual summer theater festival! Let’s get to work!”

His speech and energy was inspiring. For those brief moments I forgot about my problems and was ready to dive into the business of creating theater.

The company split into the first two mainstage shows with Of Mice and Men remaining in the arts center. We made a circle of chairs on the stage and introduced ourselves.

We looked more like a support group than a company of actors.

We began a full readthrough of the script. The first scene was just Jason and myself for several pages and we trucked along at a good pace. We easily played off each other as we began to discover a mentally handicapped man child and his ornery caretaker. It felt good. Even after everything, my acting muscles were still there. I almost began to feel safe.

When we moved onto scene two, however, the pace and energy Jason and I had set up was brought to a screeching halt.

George and Lennie enter into a bunkhouse led by Candy who provides them, and the audience, with a good bit of necessary exposition. Candy is an elderly character and, with a hired company of mostly 20-somethings, we needed to look locally to find someone age appropriate. Our Candy was a local man in his mid 80s. He was thin and frail with snow white hair and goatee. Lookwise, he was perfect.

But he’d never been on stage before in his life.

First read throughs are almost always occasions of overacting and big, awkward choices. Actors try to give full life to characters they are meeting for the first time, leading them to grand line readings filled with overblown intentions as they make their first stumble into the world of the play.

Candy didn’t have any of that energy. He wasn’t an actor. He was an 80-year-old Midwesterner. Perhaps it was nerves or his age or both, but every time he had a line the pace would come to a dead stop as he read haltingly in a weak and whispered monotone.

“What kinda guy is the boss?” I read.

“Well…he’s…a pretty…nice…fella…for a…boss. Gets…mad…sometimes. But…he’s…pretty nice…”

The metal folding chair I was sitting on was about as uncomfortable as the bus, and the knot in my hip felt like a clenched fist growing tighter and tighter. The pain had me up and standing behind my chair. We weren’t even halfway through the first act.

When we got to a scene I wasn’t in, I asked the director if I could take a break and walk around outside for a minute, to which she agreed.

I wasn’t halfway through a cigarette when the rest of the cast emerged. Seeing how tired we all were, the director decided to release us early and we would pick up again the next evening.

I honestly didn’t give a crap if everyone else was about to die. I was finally going to sleep in an actual bed.

But I was delayed once again. Jason was the de facto company manager and people had questions. So I waited impatiently off to the side while Jason answered every single damn question that honestly could have waited till tomorrow goddammit.

Till I reached my limit. “Jason, let’s go.”

“Hold on there, trigger, give me just a…”

“Jason, I’m fucking tired! I’m in pain! I want to go to bed, let’s go!”

I don’t think I’d ever yelled at Jason before, but at that moment I didn’t care. I wanted the day to be over.

Jason grabbed his stuff and we walked to our housing in silence, which was fine with me.

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