Behind towering
walls only the palm trees were visible. As I passed the gates I saw the domes
and turrets of the necropolis. On the other side of the street, young boys —
hustlers — stood in doorways or sat at bus stops watching cars with violent
intensity. As I drove between the whores and the cemetery I thought of Jim
Pears for whom death and sex had been in even closer proximity. When I came to
Highland, brightly lit and busy, I felt like one awakening from the beginnings
of a bad dream.
*****
The theater was
surprisingly small, a dozen rows of folding wooden chairs broken into three
sections in a semi-circle ascending from the stage. Larry and I sat third row
center, arriving just as the lights began to dim. There were few other people
around us. One of them was a woman with a familiar face. She glanced at me and
then turned away.
“That’s Irene
Gentry,” I said, more to myself than to Larry.
He looked over at
her and nodded.
The house lights
went out around us and I looked at the stage. A remarkably handsome man stood
in the lights holding a piece of paper — it was Edward’s lover, Gaveston. He
lifted it toward his eyes and said:
My father, old
Edward, is dead. Come quickly
Gaveston, and share
the kingdom with your dearest friend, King Edward the Second.
There followed a
scene in which Gaveston was approached by two itinerant soldiers who offered
him their service. He mockingly refused and one of them cursed him to die at
the hands of a soldier. The three of them then stepped into the shadows. Five
other men emerged. One was Edward.
“Where’s Zane?” I
whispered to Larry.
“The blond.”
I looked. “His
hair—” I began, remembering that on the tv show he had had black hair.
“This is natural
color,” Larry said. “They made him dye it for the series because Houston is
also blond. Or was, rather, twenty years ago.”
“He’s short,” I
said. Zane looked no taller than five-seven.
“He wears lifts in
front of the camera,” Larry explained. He looked at me and smiled. “Poor Henry,
this must be terribly disillusioning.”
Someone shushed us
and I returned my attention to the stage. Beneath the glare of the stage
lights, Zane’s face lost the magic that the camera conjured up. He was still
handsome but his face was oddly immobile; I diagnosed a case of the jitters. He
delivered his first line, “I will have Gaveston,” as if requesting his coffee
black.
Midway through the
play two things were apparent. First, as Larry had warned me, Tom Zane could
not act. Second, the cast that surrounded him had been carefully directed to
disguise Zane’s disability as much as humanly possible. All except Gaveston. I
glanced at my program. The actor playing Gaveston was named Antony Good. While
the other actors covered Zane’s fluffed lines, Good stared at Zane in open
amazement as he raced through yet another speech, spitting it out like sour
milk. The other actors underacted assiduously when playing a scene with Zane,
but Good threw himself into the role of Gaveston in open competition with the
star. It was a one-sided contest. Good was superb, bringing to the character of
Gaveston the pathos of the street outside the theater.
Zane, by contrast,
lumbered through these scenes like a wounded animal dragging itself to a burial
ground. Sweat soaked his underarms and he sprayed spittle across the stage.
Once or twice he simply stopped mid-speech and gasped for air. Then, frowning
with concentration, he would begin again, devastating Brecht’s elegant lines. I
looked around to Irene Gentry. She sat, motionless, eyes facing the stage.
When the house
lights went on at intermission, she was already gone.
Larry looked at me
and said, almost irritably, “Whatever possessed him to do this play?”
“It is terrible,
isn’t it?”
“No,” Larry
replied. “He’s terrible.”
We got up to
stretch.
“Gaveston is
excellent, though,” I said.
“Mm. It’s a role
Tony Good’s played in his life.”
“You know him?”
“Oh, yes,” he said
in a curious voice.
“Meaning?”
“Tony sometimes
offers his services as an escort to men of a certain age.”
“Have you ever
taken him up on it?”
Larry shook his
head. “No. I’m going outside to get some air. You coming?”
We went out.
*****
In the first scene
of the second half of the play Gaveston was killed. Tom Zane’s performance
began to improve at once. In the final scenes, where Edward is dragged from
castle to castle alone except for his jailers, Zane was transformed. His
delivery was still awkward but the suffering he conveyed was authentic. Not
just Zane’s expressions, but the contours of his face and his body changed so
that he seemed a different man from the one who first stepped upon the stage. I
began to believe that he was Edward the Second.
The culmination of
his performance came in the assassination sequence. In the play, Edward has
been locked in a cell in London, into which the city’s sewage drops upon him.
Drums are pounded to keep him from sleeping. The assassin, Light- born, is let
into Edward’s cell.
The scene began in
darkness. Slowly, a blue light glimmered from a corner of the stage where a man
stood, arms loose at his sides, face tilted upward toward the light. His hair
was matted and his body covered with filth. This was Zane. In the flickering
blue light it took me a moment to see that, other than a soiled rag that cupped
his genitals, he was naked. Zane had a first-class body. He said:
This hole they’ve
put me in is a cesspit.
For seven hours the
dung of London
Has dropped on me.
A ladder of rope
dropped from above the stage and an immense, powerfully muscled black man
climbed down. Light- born. At once, Zane accused him of being his murderer.
Light- born denied it.
Zane answered, “Your
look says death and nothing else.”
The drums that had
been heard from the beginning of the scene were suddenly still. Lightborn went
to a brazier where he lit a coal fire. Zane watched impassively. An amber light
was added to the stage. Then, approaching the king as he would a lover,
Lightborn coaxed him to lie down on his cot and sleep. Zane resisted.
Pulling away, Zane
turned to face Lightborn and again accused him of being sent as his murderer.
Lightborn touched
his fingers to Zane’s filthy hair, picked out a bit of straw and repeated, “You
have not slept. You’re tired, Sire. Lie down on the bed and rest a while.”
Zane turned to face
the audience. Lightborn quietly approached him from behind and lifted his
powerful arms which he wrapped around Zane’s chest as if intending to squeeze
the life from him. Zane did not resist. Lightborn released his arms and once
again urged the king to sleep.
Zane replied:
The rain was good.
Not eating made me full. But
The darkness was
the best....
Therefore let
The dark be dark
and the unclean unclean.
Praise hunger,
praise mistreatment, praise
The darkness.
Lightborn led Zane
by the hand to a cot and Zane lay down. Looking at Lightborn he said, “There’s
something buzzing in my ears. It whispers: If I sleep now, I’ll never wake. It’s
anticipation that makes me tremble so.” He delivered these lines softly, as if
speaking in a dream. I thought of Jim Pears. I glanced at Larry and wondered
what he was thinking.
Lightborn kissed
Zane on the lips. Then there was silence. Zane’s breath grew light and rapid as
he slipped into sleep. The cot creaked as he turned on his stomach. Lightborn
raised his hand into the air and caught a metal poker tossed down from where
the ladder had come. He placed the tip of the poker in the brazier. The blue
light flickered out, leaving only the amber which slowly changed to deep red.
Lightborn stood
above Zane holding the poker a foot or two above Zane and aimed it directly
between his legs, upward toward his anus. He flexed his powerful arms. The
light went out.
Zane’s shriek rent
the darkness.
It was only then
that I remembered that the poker scene was not in Brecht’s play.
“Hello, Sandy,”
Larry replied, disengaging his hand. “You remember Henry Rios.”
“Hello,” I said.
Blenheim took me in
with a reptilian flick of his eyes.
“You were that kid’s
lawyer,” he said. “Too bad about him. It would have been a great movie.” To
Larry he said, “Wasn’t T. Z. fabulous?”
“He got better
toward the end,” Larry replied.
“The last scene,”
Blenheim went on. “Perfect. You know it was his idea to do it with just the
jock strap.”
“That last scene
wasn’t in Brecht,” I said. “Brecht has Lightborn suffocate Edward.”
“T. Z., again,”
Blenheim replied. “Someone told him that’s how the guy really died, so he
wanted to do it that way.” He looked at me. “It’s kinda sexy, huh?”
“Yes,” I allowed. “It
was.”
Blenheim smiled
again as if confirming something about me. I could imagine what it was. I knew
a tribesman when I saw one. So, it seemed, did he. He wagged a finger between
Larry and me. “You two dating?”
Larry cut him off. “We’re
friends, Sandy.”
“Well, why don’t
you and your friend come over to Monet’s. Tom and Rennie are having a little
party.”
“Henry?”
“Sure,” I replied,
thinking that I might meet Irene Gentry there.
“That’s great,”
Blenheim said. “Maybe you and me and Tom can get together about that contract,
Larry.”
“Okay,” Larry
replied without enthusiasm.
“See you there,”
Blenheim said. He favored me with another narrow smile, and bounced off
shouting the name of his next victim.
“Who’s Rennie?” I
asked.
“Irene Gentry. The
name Irene doesn’t really lend itself to abbreviation, but everyone calls her
Rennie.”
“Rennie,” I
repeated.
“Let’s go meet her.”
*****
The sky was clear
but starless. Only a trickle of water in the gutters gave any clue of the day’s
rain. Santa Monica Boulevard was clogged with traffic — brake lights flared in
the darkness, wheels squeaked to a halt — and the air was choked with exhaust
fumes. Larry cadged a cigarette from a passerby and lit it.
“Monet’s isn’t far,”
he said. “Let’s walk it.”
It was Friday night
and the bars were doing brisk business. Country-western music blared from one
in which, through smoked windows, male couples did the Texas two-step. Outside
another bar a gaggle of street kids offered us coke. At a fast food shack,
painted bright orange and lit up like a birthday cake, Larry stopped to buy a
pack of cigarettes. A boy with stringy hair downed the house specialty, a
pastrami burrito. I found the phone and called Josh Mandel. He answered on the
second ring.
I explained that I
was going to a party. “If you still want to get together,” I added, “I could
meet you in about an hour.” I wanted him to say yes.
“Okay,” he said. “That’s
fine.”
“Your place?”
“Where are you now?”
he asked.
I stuck my head out
of the booth and looked in vain for a street sign. “On Santa Monica,” I
replied. “There’s a Mayfair market across the street.”