On Making Off: Misadventures Off-Off Broadway (19 page)

“
Randy!” Lolly said, barreling through the front door of my apartment late one afternoon. “What the fuck is the TBG Development System?”

Bobby was with her but didn’t say anything. He just laughed.

“
I’m sorry,” I said. “What are you talking about?”

“
I’m talking about our casting notice.” She threw open the paper and read, “Utilizing the TBG Development System, we will create a new and exciting play based on Jerry Rubin’s book,
Do It!
”

“
Oh, yeah. That’s pretty good, don’t you think?” I was proud of that ad.

“
I like it,” Bobby said. “It really sounds like it’s something, ya know?”

“
Thank you, I thought so too,” I replied.

“
What is the TBG Development System?” Lolly asked.

Bobby jumped in before I could. “I told you. It’s The Beggars Group Development System. And by the way, the font Dickey uses on your business cards makes
tbg
look like
fag.
”

“
What? Really?”

“
Yeah. It’s the lower-case italics. The
t
looks like an
f
, and the
b
looks like an
a
. I’m just saying.”

“
Hmm… or maybe you see ‘fag’ because you are one,” Lolly shouted. “Anyway, we can talk about that later. Right now, we need to deal with this Development System.”

I could tell she wasn’t angry, but she was getting that look women get just before they make you pull over and ask for directions… and I’m not the kind of guy who asks for directions.

“
What’s there to talk about?” I asked innocently.

“
We don’t have a fucking development system!”

Just then, Bobby’s pocket began beeping, which caused an uncomfortable pause.

“
When did you get a beeper?” I asked.

Bobby ignored me, looked at the number on the pager, and disappeared into his bedroom.

“
Why does he have a pager?” I asked Lolly.

“
He’s hustling now,” she replied. “I’m probably not supposed to tell you, but you’re gonna find out eventually. So listen, Randy, don’t you think this makes it sound like we already have a system?”

“
No. Wait. What?”

“
It does. It sounds like we have an established system.”

“
It doesn’t say ‘the established TBG Development System.’ Apparently, it says ‘the fag development system.’” I stopped to laugh at my own joke. “No really, it’s fine. It’s just a gimmick to get people excited. Did you say Bobby is hustling?”

“
Yeah. But I don’t understand why you felt the need to put that into the notice?”

“
Umm.” I stopped for a moment. I wanted to learn more about Bobby’s new career but didn’t feel good about gossiping when he was in the next room. “Look, I wanted to peak people’s interest. Without the TBG Development System, the ad felt too loosey-goosey. Like we weren’t serious. I didn’t want to attract touchy-feely people. I wanted to attract serious-focused people, and serious-focused people are attracted to systems.”

The irony—that this is actually a play about loosey-goosey people—provided even more reason to hire serious-focused people.

“
I don’t know, Randy.” Lolly wasn’t convinced, but within hours, our email inbox filled up.

“
To Whom It May Concern, I am very interested in learning more about the TBG Development System…” they’d write.

“
Does he have a pimp?” I asked.

I couldn’t help myself. I’d never known a prostitute before and was curious to learn the mechanics of the profession. Actually, I’d never known a coke addict before Bobby’s brief addiction. Bobby was single-handedly introducing me to a whole world of different people. Sadly, that trend would quickly come to an end. A few weeks into his hustling gig, he left the city to become a flight attendant, which was too bad for me. I’d already met plenty of flight attendants.

Our ad garnered enough interest for us to invite 50 people to audition. From that, we found our cast of eight.

When we determined that Noj, one of the 50, was not going to make the final cut, Fannie asked that she be the one to call and tell him—so she could then ask him for a date, arguably the worst pick-up strategy ever. But Fannie’s persuasiveness and her ability to seduce were not to be underestimated. Sure enough, she called him, worked her magic, and, within days, they had embarked on an epic romance. This began The Beggars Group’s relationship with Prudenia.

My love life had also taken an interesting turn. Since my breakup with C.J., I’d been dating quite a few people. Although the relationships never lasted very long, their intensity ranged from soap-opera hot to Hollywood cool. I was thoroughly combing the New York dating pool, which, for a gay man, is more like an ocean. And then, on December 23, as the holidays approached, I met Scott. Dickey and I were throwing back a few pints in a sparsely occupied Saints when Scott walked in alone. Bars can be lonely places around the holidays, so when I caught sight of his sky-blue eyes, I called him over hoping we’d all feel a little warmer for the company.

What started out very casually quickly morphed into something unrecognizable, exciting, and vastly different from my previous parade of suitors. Then, after three weeks of dating, he sprang it on me.

“
So, I’m going to Italy for work in May. Do you want to come over and meet me? Do some sight-seeing.”

The offer was exciting and tempting, but May was five months away. Agreeing to go to Italy in five months with someone I’d only been dating for three weeks had high disaster potential. Even my longest relationship struggled to last five months. But his eyes so blue and his dimples so cute and his fun and his smarts and his sanity and his charm and his everything else made me say “yes.” I was going to Italy with Scott in May—if we lasted that long.

The Beggars Group’s official introduction to Prudenia came through a man named Blue, who is actually Noj, but one is not supposed to think realistically when dealing with this alien planet. Blue is the Prudenian ambassador to Earth. Apparently, he’s been coming to our planet on and off for the past couple of years. He even has a pied-à-terre in the city.

Shortly after the
Do It!
auditions, we received a videotape in the mail. It featured a man painted blue from head to toe, wearing nothing but a dance belt, and doing headstands on a busy subway platform—a spectacle not totally uncommon in New York.

“
He’s got a nice ass…and he can really do a headstand,” I said, watching with guarded curiosity.

“
I know, right?” Lolly acknowledged.

“
That’s Noj?”

“
Uh-huh.”

“
Why didn’t we cast him?”

“
He wasn’t right for this play.”

“
And this is the guy Fannie’s dating?”

“
Yeah.”

“
Is this all he does? He paints himself blue and goes around the city doing headstands?”

“
No, it gets weirder.”

Lolly hit fast-forward. He’s in Union Square, on the Brooklyn Bridge, in Central Park. Blue is everywhere. Then, she hit play again to show a crowd of girls in a studio. The video quality had improved, and I could tell it was no longer homemade.

“
What’s this?” I asked.

“
It’s
Total Request Live
,” Lolly responded.

“
The MTV show?”

“
Uh-huh.”

She suppressed her laughter so I could hear. The host made his rounds through the group, asking each girl a question or two. And then, he got to Blue. Lolly’s laughter crescendoed.

“
So, whom do we have here?” the host asked the blue-painted man, now wearing a tunic, which I gather the studio people suggested.

“
My name is Blue, and I come from Prudenia. I bring a message of peace and love to the people of Earth.”

“
Of course, he does,” I mumbled.

During the brief back and forth between the host and Blue, I lost interest. It was too weird for me, but Lolly—who is, after all, the mother of Fire-Food—craved this kind of artistic expression. She quickly recruited him to run lights for the show, and he quickly recruited
her
to produce this freeform extravaganza called
A Portal Opening
.

Everyone in the company had gotten into the act—which was easy for them. I was the only one with a full-time day job. Dickey, Harrison, Fannie, and Lolly had all been up for days making costumes, piecing together a script, and preparing for the arrival of our friends from another galaxy. Then, the Moon Monks arrived in a Chevy from Atlanta, and their love-fest exploded. I, on the other hand, diligently went to work and line-produced all this craziness. No wonder I was so bitterly holed up in the technical booth as the band of crazies fling themselves around the stage. This is exactly the kind of loosey-gooseyness I had hoped to avoid.

Despite all the chaos, or maybe because of it, The Beggars Group was moving at a thousand miles an hour. Our combined efforts to build a community proved very successful. We produced play-readings, panel discussions, and portal openings. We capitalized on the momentum of each event to build the next. We were moving fast, for sure. And the faster you’re going, the more precise your steering needs to be. And wouldn’t you know, we all took turns holding the wheel as if we were on a carnival ride.

“
Randy!” Blue shouts to me up in the booth. “I love you!”

Instead of replying, I wash the stage in red light and the performers change their movements. They are all so present and susceptible to external stimulation, they appear more like single-cell organisms than highly evolved extraterrestrials. Finally, around midnight, the performance ends, and the portal closes. But the Prudenians would be back, and much to my surprise, I’d become one.

EL BOHIO

By the beginning of March, production for
Do It!
fell into full swing. We rehearsed on Eighth Street and Avenue B in an old four-story schoolhouse called Charas/El Bohio. The space, managed by a community center that had been squatting in the building for some time, cost only five bucks an hour—and we got what we paid for. The rooms, untouched since the children moved out two decades earlier, included cracked and missing tiles, filthy walls, and broken lights. The one working bathroom was one of the dirtiest I’d ever seen in my entire life. Most of us wouldn’t go anywhere near it.

“
This show is going to kill us!” we’d say every morning as we wiped the filth off our clothes after warm-ups—Pilates, yoga, push-ups, and sit-ups, the menu of morning exercises performed on the school’s dirty broken tiles. Then, we’d run our stunts. Under St. Marks is a tiny theater with a low ceiling. But just because you don’t have much room doesn’t mean you can’t create a spectacle. Our spectacle consisted of slow-motion sequences, sideways lifts, inversions, and unison movements. The magic of these stunts lay in the timing and precision, so it was important to spend time perfecting them at every rehearsal. For the rest of the rehearsal, we created the show scene-by-scene based on the book and our research.

Unlike
The Expatriates
, where our research required spending hours in the library, the Yippies called for a different kind of investigation. Yes, people wrote about the Yippies, but not at length and not with the hindsight that a separation of several generations affords. The Yippies and their contemporaries remained very much alive. In fact, they were our college professors and our bosses. This kind of research required a more hands-on approach.

This was why Lolly arrived at Dickey’s apartment one Saturday evening clutching a scrap of paper in her sweaty hands. The phone number scribbled on it came from a friend we affectionately called Eric Stoner. Dickey and I watched as she slowly pressed the numbers on the phone.

“
Make sure you don’t call him the Weed Monkey,” Dickey said. “That might piss him off.”

“
Well, what am I supposed to say?” Lolly asked, hanging up the phone. “I’m not calling, you call.” And she thrust the phone into my lap.

“
No way. I’m not doing it. It was your idea. You do it.” And I threw the phone back to her.

Suddenly, we were back in middle school, passing the phone back and forth as if we were calling a boy one of us secretly liked. But this wasn’t a secret boy crush; this was a drug dealer called The Weed Monkey.

Unlike the literary giants of the ’20s, where alcohol was the drug of choice, the Yippies preferred marijuana. They smoked a lot of dope. And while we had no interest in smoking a lot of dope, we did feel it necessary to have some marijuana “around” while we worked on the project. Getting stoned on occasion might lend some authenticity to the project. Of course, I’d smoked pot before (see chapters 3 and 5) but actively seeking out and purchasing an illegal substance was totally different. It was participating in the illegal drug trade. It meant danger. And it was thrilling.