There was a day when the act of watching no longer sufficed. Mark does not remember this day, does not remember when he said to himself, “I can’t just passively enjoy this thing created for my passive enjoyment. I want to, whatever it takes, make it.”
Like all actors he vacillates between origin stories. Beautiful bullshit he tells himself to justify the pursuit and the monstrous truths hovering in the recesses of his consciousness.
Mark prefers the bullshit greatly to the truth, not just because of its joyousness. It is the simplicity he enjoys. It boils down the decision to act, the choice which defined his life, into something he actually understands.
bullshit: how to succeed in hollywood
Mark must pack up all his belongings in his beat-up old car and drive it — despite the fact that it is humorously incapable of the job — to Los Angeles. Mark must live in a motel, or sleep in the same old car, or occupy any space which is distinctly and hilariously not a hospitable environment. Mark must work a comically difficult but indelibly humanizing blue-collar job during his off hours. This work ethic he displays, and its superhuman nature, is what separates Mark from the vast sea of failures that populate Los Angeles. Unlike them, he will do what it takes. Unlike them he will never give up.
truth: how to succeed in hollywood
Mark must be born famous, or rich, or preferably both and ask his father or mother or brother, or grandma, or grandpa, or sister, or spouse or uncle or aunt or son or daughter to let him act in their next movie.
bullshit: how to fail in hollywood
Mark took a swing where others backed down. He holds his head up high. He knows, no matter what he feels, that the decision was worth it. It may not have worked out, but Mark is happy.
truth: how to fail in hollywood
Mark wastes his life in service of a vapid, empty dream that props up a morally bankrupt and essentially useless industry whose sole purpose is making the obscenely rich marginally richer.
truth: today
Mark lets the water run over his back. The water is no longer hot. His shower, from the goal of cleaning him, has ended, but he lets the tepid stream soak him. This is preferable to the jungle heat that awaits him in the apartment.
“You know,” Mark says, his face earnest.
Jay Leno leans in.“What is it?”
Mark smiles“I used to dream of this moment in the shower.”
There is a bang on the bathroom door.
The studio lights blind Mark. He scans the audience, the sea of humanity blending into one massive shadow, cheering and oohing and aahing for him.
The banging gets louder. “I gotta take a shit,” says Hank, just twenty, almost two decades younger than Mark.
“It’s funny,” Mark says to Jay Leno who hasn’t been on television in more than a decade, staring into the set of The Tonight Show, which has lost almost all of its cultural impact, but the both of them persist because the dream persists and they were there when it started.
“Like, it’s halfway out, man.”
Mark shuts off the shower.
He basks in the adulation of the audience and reminds himself to stay calm and stay humble.
“This is the dream,”
endings
It is a thick heat. Tangible. Hank feels it smothering gently, like a pillow for a coma patient.
“The heat is a gift,” Coach says. “Use it.”
He continues speaking, gesticulating eloquently, but the words are lost as the rotating fan in front of his face completes its arc, catching his voice and blowing it right back.
Hank turns to his scene partner.
Sharon is a mother of two, one of whom is actually a year older than Hank. She found this funny. Hank did not
The fan arcs right and Hank hears the last syllable of the word action.
There is a beat and the spotlight above them turns on.
“Action,” Coach calls and the scene beings.
The scene is not good.
Hank focuses mainly on the difficult task of not passing out. Sharon looks as if she has. Her only movement is to tear into one of the haphazardly stacked cases of water which adorn the stage. These bottles are Coach’s solution to the broken air conditioner. One he pointed to with triumph as the class entered, repeating it—“take as much as you need, use the heat”—to everyone who entered.
When Sharon downs a water in one sip, crushes the bottle and tosses it off to the side, Hank mutters: “Nina! You are crying again, Nina!”
And then, the room begins to quake.
It is not an earthquake. Not the ground splitting in two, Chekhov rising from beneath to enact revenge on Hank for defiling his legacy. It is just the air-conditioner repairmen on the roof of Coach’s guest house.
Coach hesitates, and Hank thinks he will say, Use the shaking room.
Instead he says, “Wait a moment,” and then leaves.
Hank joins Sharon at the case of water. He takes one. It is tepid and tastes thickly of plastic.
Coach can be heard clearly negotiating with the repairmen. His questions and their answers, shouted from the ground to the roof, are fully audible.
No, the repairmen cannot come back later.
Yes, they would have to charge him for the full day if they leave now.
Hank grabs another bottle. It is even hotter, tastes like poison, like hot, molten chemicals. He drinks it in one gulp and Coach returns.
“Use the chaos,” he says as the sound of a power drill fills the room. “Internalize the external,” he shouts. “Take it from the last line, Konstantin.”
Hank picks up the stacks of paper which are meant to represent his life’s work. He tears one up, but the detritus of the paper falls onto his arms, mingles with the sweat, and disappears into translucent grey globs covering his entire arm. He flaps helplessly before finding the curtain and rubbing his arm on it vigorously, which is what forces Coach to intervene.
“Now that’s a choice,” Coach says. “But let’s discuss its effectiveness.”
There is no privacy in Coach’s class. No secrets. This is because everything can be a teachable moment and not, Hank thinks, to keep a fear and distance that justifies his exorbitant price.
“Konstantin is already dead. He is mere minutes away from suicide. What should he be feeling?”
“Rage,” someone says.
“Where in the script does Konstantin show the capacity for this sort of rage?”
In Hank’s right pocket sits a notebook.
He calls it his emotional dictionary.
He has thousands of emotions written inside, and below each, he has the descriptions of memories which can bring these emotions to the surface should he need it. This, a practice he has adopted since his first acting class more than fifteen years ago, is his lifeblood.
Konstantin’s suicide cuts a path through that notebook. This isn’t his first acting class. It is not his first time performing Konstantin. He knows the epiphany Coach is attempting to coax from the classroom because The Seagull, a play which Hank has never read in full, is one he has performed countless times. It is a favourite of acting teachers, who appreciate it for its brilliance, they say, and not the fact that its age and density allows them to appear intellectually superior to their theater-illiterate crop of young actors and thus further justify their exorbitant prices.
Hank finishes the water, lets some of it slip through his mouth, mingling with the sweat already staining his collar and then raises a hand.
“It’s despair,” Hank says.
Coach nods. “Can you access that?”
Hank nods.
“Okay,” Coach says. “Take it from the top.”
Hank does not think of the pages marked despair in his emotional dictionary. Instead, he thinks of the utter joy he felt upon being accepted into this class, about the look on his father’s face, not a happy look, as he asked to borrow the three thousand dollars to cover its cost.
He thinks about the honest passion in his voice when he explained to his father that acceptance into a class like this was almost the same as booking a role and, as he continued to explain, probably even better considering the connections he might make.
He looks at Sharon, who is sweating dark rings into her T-shirt, moisture seeping from her underboobs, her mouth opening and closing like a fishes, and remembers how he wondered if he was over-qualified for this class.
He thinks of Mark, his ancient roommate the first month he moved here.
He thinks of the fact he is now a decade older than Mark.
“Okay,” Coach said. “I said action.”
Hank thinks of the countless roles he lost: the men he almost was. He thinks, too of the man he is.
And this, is what brings the tears to his eyes, what makes Coach leap to his feet and applaud, makes the crowd watch him with a rapturous envy as he puts his finger to his head and blows his brains across the stage.