Authors: Owen King
Olivia Das, who played Florence-Diana-Aurora-Divinity-Florence, mentioned this incident in the suicide note she mass-e-mailed to her friends and family on July 2, 2007, under the subject heading,
THIS IS NOT MY LIFE!!
This is not what I auditioned for,
she wrote,
this is not my life! I wanted to play Hedda Gabler on Broadway!
The attempt was thankfully unsuccessful (and maybe not completely serious; Olivia had attempted to extinguish herself via an overdose of Mucinex); however, her distress was well earned.
A
Who We Are
credit was a plague sign above the entryway of a career. If you were an actor, the association could have an unfortunate effect on audiences, especially if the work was intended to be dramatic. In the case of Olivia, when she won a supporting role as a social worker in a Spike Lee picture, the audience at a test screening broke into gales of laughter when her character gave an abused wife a stern talking-to. They
weren’t seeing Olivia’s social worker; they were seeing Florence-Diana-Aurora-Divinity-Florence at the Spring Festival, and the quick cut to the satyr, seated on a downed log, humming “The Huckster’s Lament” and dandling his balls. The wrong kind of fame was like inept plastic surgery. It gave your face abstract qualities you never bargained for. Spike had to recast Olivia’s part.
Rick Savini alone possessed enough of a track record to be excused for his participation. The rest of the cast essentially disappeared from the field.
For serious people, the kind of people who invested money in films, a professional linked to
Who We Are
bore an unsavory odor. Professionals were careful and attentive.
Who We Are
had become a profitable enterprise due wholly to a lack of care and attention. Though Sam Dolan may have been the captain, this line of thinking ran, the swabs ought to have had the wherewithal to notice the water lapping their boots.
Some of the film’s veterans had sought Sam out for special opprobrium, but not as many as one might have expected. Linc, the actor who played Hugh, had been sending Sam poisonous gifts for years—a dead rat, used toilet paper, a CD of acoustic demos entitled “Sam Dolan: Cancer Man,” etc.—yet most of those associated with
Who We Are
seemed to view it as a kind of natural disaster and saw Sam as a fellow victim.
The one time Rick Savini consented to offer comment on the film, in an interview with
Rolling Stone,
he said only “I don’t feel like it turned out the way the kid intended. Let’s leave it at that.”
“There’s just too many cun-eds ear,” said Anthony Delucci. “Time ta make a change.” They had stayed in contact until a couple of years before, when the DP gave up his dreams of working in film, left New York, and returned home to Vinalhaven, Maine. Luckily, Anthony’s father had saved him a place on the lobster boat.
Flight was a common theme among the traumatized cast and crew of
Who We Are
. George, who played Sam’s alter ego in the film, went home to Minnesota to live with his mother and became involved in Amway. Toughie lived somewhere on the west coast of Canada now, where she had a kid she homeschooled. Quinn the Eskimo was a monk, an actual monk in an alpine monastery; in a picture Sam had seen, he’d been unrecognizable, a flowing beard with black holes for eyes. Some others—the two Alexes, Monica Noble—had disappeared altogether.
Sam didn’t know what had happened to them. He couldn’t even find them on the Internet.
Sam had recently received a cryptic postcard from Wyatt Smithson. The postcard’s picture was of a beautiful beach, faultless save for the bleached tombstone of a broken surfboard protruding from the sand. The message on the back had been brief:
Dear Sam,
I ate a piece of dog last night. Just tasted like regular meat. I ate dog. Why did I do that?
Still trying to figure out who we are, I guess.
Your friend,
Wyatt
Julian, his old professor who had opened so many doors at Russell, had tumbled to the blackest depths of academia—a community college in El Paso.
■ ■ ■
Then there was Brooks Hartwig, Jr.
Journalists had tracked him to various mental institutions, but Brooks had never spoken. His wealthy family referred all queries about his contribution to
Who We Are
and his condition to their lawyers. In the last year, a public relations official at Stony Brook Haven, a luxury facility on Long Island, had informed a reporter from the Style section of
The New York Times
that “Mr. Hartwig Jr. was resting comfortably” and did not wish to comment.
Beyond which Sam didn’t know any more than anyone else. He didn’t know whether he wanted to. It seemed to Sam that Brooks was not the only one entitled to some rest.
■ ■ ■
The sole participant who might have profited from the enterprise, one Costas Mandell, the satyr himself, chose to shun the spotlight. Perhaps that should not have been a surprise. From what Sam had been able to gather, until the day when Brooks Hartwig, Jr., fixed him in his lens, there had never been any reason to suspect that Mandell—a naturalized citizen, a twenty-year veteran of the Russell College maintenance staff,
a decorated member of the local VFD—wanted to perform, let alone to share his grand appendage with the world.
Rolling Stone
reported that the shy Mandell had declined numerous requests to act as Santa Claus at the Russell maintenance staff’s annual Christmas party, a role for which his snowy beard seemed designed.
Nonetheless, Mandell seemed, in the wake of
Who We Are
’s multiplying audience, poised for a lucrative lap on the reality-television freak-show circuit. But a transcript of his sole public appearance, on a famed shock jock’s satellite radio show, revealed profound discomfort:
Jock: Satyr-guy, what we have here is a mail scale. The kind they have in the post office.
Costas: Call me Costas, please.
Jock: Cockstas, did you say?
Sidekick #1: (Laughter) Oh my goodness! This is outrageous! Is that from the actual post office?
Costas: No, Costas.
Jock: Yeah, it’s a real mail scale. And what we want is to weigh Satyr-guy’s cock on it. Now I’ve bet Lou here that it weighs twelve ounces—
Lou (Sidekick #2): Just his cock? Or also the balls? Because the balls are where the real heft is.
Sidekick #1: (Laughter) Oh my goodness! This is insane! You’re betting on the weight of his genitals?
Jock: Ah, no, not the balls, because that would completely throw off my calculations. Satyr-guy’s balls are like cantaloupes.
Lou: They’re like hairy sandbags, those goddamn things.
Costas: I’m sorry. I must leave. I’m sorry.
Jock: Hold on there, Satyr-guy—
Sidekick #1: Oh, no! (Laughter) Way to go! You creeped him out, guys!
When Sam thought about the satyr, about Mandell’s rheumy line readings, the real sorrow he conveyed in contradiction of all logic—or illogic, depending on how one’s mind dealt with the visual impression—despite all the damage the man had helped to inflict, he felt some sympathy. Sam could relate.
Like Mandell, Sam shied from attention. He never wanted to be in
movies, and now he didn’t want to make movies. All he wanted, in the words of the saddest soul ever frozen on a slide of silver nitrate, was to be let alone.
“You’ve been to that movie thing, haven’t you?”
Sam had just entered the apartment. In repose on the couch, Wesley looked at him from over his laptop screen. Opposite the couch, the television was tuned, unexpectedly, to the Weather Channel.
“You’ve got that look you get. That dented look. You look like an old guy who lost his false teeth.” Wesley was wearing his favorite pajamas. They’d come to the Swag Hag from a children’s boutique and were spotted with different-colored Popsicles. He had installed himself in them sometime in July and worn them pretty much every day since. Because of this, the consumer champion smelled like pee and Febreze.
Sam dropped his keys on the table by the door and stuck his sweaty suit jacket on a hook. “Isn’t ‘Prying into other people’s affairs’ on the list?”
“Let me check,” said Mina. Nested in the red beanbag catercorner to the couch, Sam’s sister had apparently already been perusing the three pages of wrinkled, laminated, lined yellow notebook paper that constituted Wesley’s personal manifesto, “Seventy-four Things That Caused Unnecessary Fatigue.”
Hidden among the various boxes and shipping crates that had arrived for the Swag Hag in the recent months and years was a two-bedroom apartment with one bathroom, a kitchenette, and brick walls. A warehouse atmosphere hung over the place, a mood of impermanence, of moving out and moving in. Sheets of crumpled packing paper and drifts of foam peanuts had collected around the edges of everything.
From the short entryway passage, Sam began to wriggle his way toward the kitchenette.
“What’s the ‘movie thing’?” Mina’s outfit was her standard: boots, black; ankle-length skirt, black; knit stockings, black with maroon piping; long-sleeve shirt, black, centered with a picture of an armadillo skull; watch cap, purple, the word
DOOM
, stitched on the band (by Mina)
in white thread. Several articles of luggage were arrayed around her: a duffel bag, a knapsack, a duct-taped suitcase, and a sewing machine in a vinyl slipcover.
“It’s a cult film program at a shitty hipster bar around the corner,” said Wesley.
“Were they showing ‘The Movie’?” Mina’s disdain was undisguised.
“Planning to stay awhile?” asked Sam. His sister, not looking up from the plastic pages, flew him the bird.
He eased between two columns of boxes—from the labels, he could see that one contained books from a publisher, another compact discs from a record company, another packages of microwave popcorn from a food company, while another appeared to be birdseed from a farm supplier. There were four or five others in the stacks that weren’t immediately identifiable, but in any event, it was all crap for the Swag Hag to pass judgment on.
On the television, a weatherman massaged a cold front across the eastern seaboard. Sam couldn’t remember Wesley ever having put the Weather Channel on, and it piqued his interest.
A few feet farther and he found himself blocked again: a pyramid of tube socks in plastic sacks—from an athletic supply company—barricaded the way. He considered attempting to ferret his way through a small gap in the sacks, thought better of it, and instead began to wearily pull them down one at a time and reconstruct the pyramid behind him. Experience had taught Sam that it would be far less exhausting to move the bags on his own than it would be to harangue his roommate into cleaning up.
Wesley was not easily compelled. He did not generally go outside between Labor Day and Flag Day except to receive packages or food deliveries at the door of their building. This was why he had the anemic complexion of a prisoner committed to solitary confinement. It was also why his interest in the Weather Channel was so unprecedented. Only on very special occasions, such as to have his list laminated or to attend the free showing of
E.T.
a couple of months earlier, did Wesley venture forth.
In another person, this behavior might have worried Sam. From a hygiene standpoint, it was certainly short of ideal, but it wasn’t a manifestation of agoraphobia, at least not as Sam understood the condition.
It wasn’t that Wesley was afraid of the outdoors; it was that everything he needed to maintain his happiness was either in his computer, on the television, or available for order.
Wesley’s mother, Mrs. Latsch—who drove up from Maryland a couple of times a year to visit, assisting Wesley in his biannual trip to the Laundromat and replenishing his supply of vitamins—once related to Sam that, even as a toddler, Wesley was flabbergasted by all the effort expended around him. “I remember we saw a man running across a street, trying to catch a bus, and Wesley asked me why the man was in such a hurry. I said, ‘He needs to get to work, sweetheart.’ Wesley, he must have been about five, he just shook his head and said, ‘Can you imagine?’ ” At this, Mrs. Latsch poured out a delighted chuckle. She just knew, she said, that her boy was conserving his resources for something important.
Sam had his doubts. He didn’t believe Wesley planned much beyond his next appointment with the bottle of lemon verbena lotion in the bathroom. “What’s up with the Weather Channel? Jesus, Wesley, you’re not thinking of going outside, are you?”
His roommate said the Weather Channel was Mina’s choice. “And don’t think I didn’t detect that note of condescension in your voice.” Wesley sighed. “You can be very hurtful sometimes, Sam Dolan.”
“The guide said there was going to be a special on natural disasters, but it was a lie,” said Mina. “It’s been nothing but regular weather so far.”
“Mina has been fretting about climate change. She wants her children, and her children’s children, not to be drowned by the rising oceans or cancered by the sun’s ultraviolet rays,” said Wesley.
“Har-har, Wesley the Hutt. What fat roll did you pull ‘cancered’ out of, anyway?”
“We’re on the same side, Mina.” Wesley typed something into his computer. “I’m as eager to watch tornado and earthquake footage as you are.”
Sam finally reached the kitchenette, shoving aside a knee-high pallet of eco-themed surface wipes to breach the entryway. He opened the refrigerator and helped himself to a bottle of the Rip Van Winkle white ale that the Swag Hag said tasted like the lice of unloved children. Sam thought it tasted like sour cherries.
Mina had finished searching through the list. “Number thirty-four is ‘Never pry into the affairs of strangers.’
Strangers
. You’re not a stranger,
Sam. Guess it’s safe for Wesley the Hut to dig into your sad, bitter life as much as he wants.”
She kicked up her spindly legs and clicked the toes of her shiny boots. His sister was at once gamine and bleak, like a fallen elf. How many teenage boys would Sam have to visit with his trusty DVD before Mina safely reached the age of consent? However many it took, but the signs were ominous.