I Wish I Was Like You Read online

  “For Carl to run?” I asked.

  “No. Carl was in high school when this happened. His dad used the People’s Journal as one of his write-offs. He called it a public service, a tax shelter with a clear conscience. He let it drift until almost everyone aboard was lost and demoralized enough to quit. When Carl flunked out of college, his dad offered him another chance to fail. And here we are.”

  “Here we are,” I said. “Shit.”

  “You got it. Ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag.”

  “Who stayed on?” I asked.

  “Pardon?”

  “You said almost everyone quit. Who didn’t quit?”

  Charlie smiled. “Can’t you guess? Steve Billings was a kind of senior gopher, an all-around interviewer, fact-checker, and cub reporter. He tried to get a consortium of business guys together to buy the paper but Carl’s dad refused to sell.”

  “Why does he stay?” I knew the answer but I wanted him to say it. “Why not start over at a daily, if he’s got the chops?”

  “Some humans are like koalas. They’ll cling to the dying tree they know rather than venture to the next, confusing new tree.”

  “Is Eve a koala, too?” I thought I snuck this in pretty smoothly. Charlie’s expression told me I was wrong.

  “Eve is a blank, a veil behind a veil. Carl met her at a fundraiser for a literacy program, and a week later she showed up for work. Speaking of which…” He turned his attention to his monitor, leaving me to fade away.

  With no idea what to do, and the vague notion of somehow wrecking Eve still lurking at the back of my mind, I began my new job in earnest. No one seemed to care what productions I chose. No one seemed to care how seriously I took the reviews.

  My first week’s selections were Six Degrees of Separation, Love in a Tub (a horribly unfunny adaptation of a Restoration comedy about a guy wearing a barrel), and a new play ‘in perpetual development’ called Polly and Bluster. John Guare wrote the first of these, apparently to shame his rich Manhattan friends into noticing that other humans are not squeaky toys. The youthful actors played middle-aged characters with an earnestness that made me grind my teeth. The Restoration thing was staged in a leaky basement where the audience sat on high stools and shivered from the cold. The title characters in the last play were two homeless teenagers who spat and swore a lot and carried skateboards they couldn’t ride because the performance space was only ten feet wide.

  Writing five hundred words about each of these spectacles might have been the hardest thing I’d ever done for money. My relief at accomplishing my goal turned to irritation when Charlie told me he could only fit a thousand words into the paper. A professional might have tried to edit all three to the essentials. Here’s what I did. I threw out Polly and Bluster. The show was heading into its last week anyway, and what can you say about a script the artistic director labels ‘in perpetual development’? Fuck it, I decided. Why would anybody want to watch a couple of twenty-five-year-old actors bluff their way through a grim drama about loudmouthed teenagers huffing paint and living behind a trash dumpster?

  “For god’s sake,” Shelly said when I arrived at the office the day after the issue appeared. “Can you tell the guy who directed that Plush and Betty Show to stop calling?”

  “Who?”

  “Burton Jeffries, or Jefferson Burton, or something,” she said. “He keeps calling to yell at me and I told him you weren’t here, and he’s crazy. Here’s his phone number.”

  There’s a first time for everything, a consequence that teaches you not to do that thing ever again. This was the one and only time I returned a call from a director. In my defense, I hadn’t eaten breakfast and I was lightheaded after learning I would be paid for the number of words actually published, not the number I’d written.

  “Hello, is this Mr. Burton?”

  “Burton is my first name,” he said, followed by a loud sigh.

  “Hello, Mr. Jeffers…”

  “What? My name is Burton Jersey, is this a sales call?”

  “No. I’m calling from Boom City…”

  “Oh! Are you the theater critic there?”

  “I write reviews. I’m not really a…”

  “Who the hell do you think you are? We gave you a complimentary ticket to a stunning production of a serious work of art, you saw the show, and you didn’t write a single word about it! This is our last week! You should be ashamed of yourself!”

  “I’m afraid the schedule…” I began.

  “It’s people like you who are killing theater!” he shouted. “Do you know that? Killing it! Stabbing it through the heart and tearing out its spleen and dragging its bloodstained carcass through the streets! You’re a menace! You’re a fucking menace!”

  “We didn’t have enough room in the paper this week…”

  “Then cut the goddamn Restoration comedy! Anybody could figure out a serious play about real issues is more important than a show about a man in a tub! What’s wrong with you? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with you, missy; you don’t know what theater is about! You don’t understand art! You don’t have a soul! If you ever set foot in this theater again…”

  Some people would have let him scream it out. Others would have apologized. Here’s what I did. I hung up on the guy and went out to get a breakfast sandwich.

  To say the least, Burton Jersey was not satisfied with our conversation. My hanging up on him only enraged his refined sensibility. Over the next two weeks I received a half dozen letters at the office, each building on the anger of the one before. The last letter was printed rather than typed, written in red ink, entirely in caps.

  WERE I A LESS PEACEFUL AND CULTURED PERSON AND WERE IT WITHIN MY FINANCIAL MEANS (AND IT IS NOT SINCE I EARN NOTHING DOING WHAT I DO BECAUSE THEATER IS A LABOR OF LOVE YOU WOULD NEVER UNDERSTAND) I WOULD HIRE A SQUADRON OF HIT MEN TO FLAY YOU ALIVE AND FEED YOUR LIVER TO A HYENA…

  He did not explain where one would go about hiring a squadron of hit men if one had the financial means. Nor did he note the scarcity of hyenas in a city in the Pacific Northwest. But after that he must have felt he had expressed all of his bile. The letters stopped.

  I should say, Burton Jersey’s letters stopped. Every week I managed to offend someone, an actor or director or playwright whose production I had attended and then failed to proclaim a masterpiece.

  What I found both fascinating and disturbing was the regularity with which theater artists took exception to ordinary praise. Reviews I thought anyone would have been ecstatic to receive, they found cruel or cutting. If my opinion of their efforts didn’t include a couple of superlatives in every sentence, they gathered in bars and coffee shops to discuss my shortcomings, my educational and mental deficiencies, and my sex life or lack of a sex life. I know this because each batch of complaints—most of them typed and mailed to the office, a few others emailed and sorted by Shelly—contained identical phrasing and theories.

  An ingénue, whose ten-line performance I called ‘a promising debut,’ told me I was probably a nymphomaniac cruising for little boys. Her director said I was a nymphomaniac cruising for ingénues.

  A playwright I praised for ‘lyrical and poetic nuances’ told me to climb into a trunk and breathe my own fumes until I died. The artistic director who had selected the play for a festival called me a trunk-dwelling moron who probably got off on my own fumes.

  And so on.

  In light of these responses to what I thought were pretty reasonable assessments, I began to wonder what would happen if I wrote scathing reviews. What if, every time I had to tuck in my elbows and pull in my knees at another dark, musty, dilapidated, unlicensed fire hazard of a performance space, and fake interest in a poorly paced rendition of a classic that should not have been revived (not only because it was racist and sexist but also because it was badly structured and boring), what if I reported all of the show’s flaws? What if I stopped overlooking whatever was ridiculous or unprofessional and bega
n to tell what I actually noticed, instead of striving to find the fledgling good element in everything? Since nothing I could imagine would equal the hostility flung at me by people I’d praised, I decided to give it a try.

  The first experiment centered on a fringe production of a kitchen sink drama by a local playwright inexplicably named Scarf Dennis. To offset the grim aspects of the script Mr. Dennis called for all but two of the characters to be represented by puppets. This might have brightened up the whole mess if the puppets didn’t occupy a domestic setting every bit as sad and ugly as the full-size set occupied by the confused full-size actors.

  The best moment of the evening came during a confession speech when a puppet echoed every word spoken by one of the actors until they reached a line in which they admitted killing a child—and the entire third row of seats collapsed, the ancient spine of the worn-out row finally broken from too many years of use, too many asses to bear. Patrons sprawled in every direction on the floor, leaving some of them literally rolling in the aisles.

  Making the roller-coaster-worthy screams that followed this mid-show disaster the main focus of my review accomplished three things. First, the city sent an inspector to examine the space and it was declared unsafe and shut down pending fines and repairs. Second, the anger formerly directed at me was immediately converted into seething, silent resentment. The hate mail slowed down. Two theater patrons wrote letters of thanks for my civic-mindedness and another used my review as eyewitness evidence in an ongoing dispute against the owner of the building. Third, Steve Billings finally smiled at me and told me I was doing ‘okay.’

  He also said he had spoken with Eve and I was going to get a pay hike, an extra five dollars a week plus two and a half cents a word instead of two. Why? The kerfuffle over my review made the daily papers and brought a brief, almost imperceptible boost in circulation. I had passed my first test as a reviewer, and learned a lesson. Being noticed is important. Being liked is not.

  “Congratulations!” Vaughn shouted when he heard the news about my miniscule pay raise.

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “Vaughn, everybody hates me.”

  We sat in my living room drinking Pinot noir. Outside the rain came down in gray dull torrents that seemed engineered by nature to make the days before Christmas as depressing as possible.

  “No, they don’t hate you,” Vaughn said. “Not any more. They fear you, and that’s worth its weight in gold, my dear. Besides, you have friends. You have me. I think you’re a hero. Somebody should have shut those fools down ages ago. The whole place was a danger to the public. And you know, if no one from the paper had seen it happen the company would have apologized, handed out some coupons for free drinks at Mama’s, and let it go. Hell, if they could duct-tape the seats back together and keep using them, they would have done that, too.”

  “Yeah,” I said, thinking of the codes routinely violated by Vaughn’s theater company. I opened a few press kits while we talked.

  “If they liked their audience they would put on better shows to begin with,” he said. “There’s nothing out there but revivals of Broadway hits from the 1970s, campy Shakespeare, new plays that sound like they were transcribed word-for-word from the writer’s life or a TV series, and people trying to put Reservoir Dogs on stage.”

  “And cross-dressing parodies of Bette Davis movies,” I said.

  “I don’t mind those so much.”

  “And oh good,” I said as I studied the press kits. “Now I can add Santa Baby Booties, Xmas for G-men, and Chimney Sliders to my list.”

  “Look at you, becoming a real critic,” he said. “You’re taking the job seriously, aren’t you? Don’t worry about upsetting people. Good for you. The city needs a kick in the pants.”

  “Sorry I didn’t make it to your last reading. Things got kind of crazy.”

  “Honey, don’t give it a thought. And I mean what I said. Forget about these people who can’t handle an honest review. If you clear some of the deadwood it’s only going to help the artists who know what they’re doing. Sometimes I’m ashamed of theater when I see what’s playing down the street.”

  “It’s awful, isn’t it?” I asked.

  Lighting grid and fake fire exit signs notwithstanding, I was beginning to appreciate the dedication with which Vaughn and his friends approached their work. I’d never seen one of his actors go up on his lines. There were no scenes in which the actors searched for a pool of light in which to stand. The places where they performed were at least comfortable and clean. I’d never seen them offer what I would call a great evening but they never caused a row of patrons to hit the floor screaming.

  “It’s dreadful,” he agreed. “A lot of it is. Just do your job. The editor said not to try and make friends, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But she’s crazy too.”

  “So you told me. What’s wrong with her, again?”

  “She just doesn’t fit in,” I told him.

  I was about to launch into my fourth speech of the day on the subject of Eve’s weirdness—how she brought smelly bacon and egg sandwiches to the office and kept them in her desk until lunch time; how she showed up one day wearing tiny butterfly clips in her hair and then took them out after Shelly burst into laughter and asked if she wanted a subscription to Sassy magazine; the rumors about her drinking. Suddenly I couldn’t find any more words or accusations.

  I hated everything about Eve yet there was nothing awful enough, day-to-day, to warrant making her miserable. In conversations at the office, in the glare of daylight, my feelings took on a grimy sheen of pettiness and spite. The gossip I repeated became distorted, maliciously inflated, until even the people who started rumors were taken aback by my version. The anecdotes I exaggerated became bitter little monsters crawling away from the light. They made me wonder what silent, shadowy corner of my soul was called forth by this woman, and why.

  Plymouth Pillars Park at the base of Capitol Hill affords a panoramic view of the city. The limestone pillars are perfectly out of place overlooking downtown, the freeway directly below, and the bay beyond the city.

  I stand here often at night, watching commuters change buses, watching cranes at work renewing the skyline. Periodically I toss a pebble down onto the freeway traffic. Most of these never make contact. A few hit home with a resounding crack of windshield glass. Call it a series of experiments in chance and mortality. The drivers call it an accident, a stray rock pitched by the tires of other vehicles. Bad luck. Once in a while it’s fatal.

  An hour might pass, and another. In the dark furrows of grass, in the tiny greenbelt I spy a multitude of insects doing battle for command of the universe. Behind the garages and sheds flanking the bus terminal I find a wide variety of fungi sprouting in the shade of the outer walls. I discover tools and discarded uniforms, thrown aside and forgotten, decorating the rotting floorboards alongside the carcasses of dead rodents. Green-black fingers of moss emerge from the concrete and cobblestones to grip one factory foundation after another. The buildings look as if they might be yanked underground at any moment.

  I sometimes turn before dawn and climb the hill, over the vertical and horizontal curves, and return to my old apartment. Today I run my fingers over the keys of an upright piano in the corner. The sound awakens you and you lift your head from the pillow, scan the bedroom for signs of your cat, Marshall.

  He’s climbed out of the warm bedclothes to investigate a movement, a draught, less than a breeze, winding through the living room. He sits at my feet staring up at me, making no sound. We are simpatico. I enjoy these private moments with cats, gazing at me with absolute calmness while their owners shake their heads and tell them nothing is there. Then comes the chill, the frisson, when the cat refuses to budge, won’t take its eyes off an empty chair, a vacant corner, or the ledge of an open window.

  “Marshall!” you call out sleepily. “Hey, Marshall!”

  Bed is his favorite place but I’m a new addition to t
he apartment where he spends his long, boring days. I’m here, I’m there, I place one finger over my lips and he stifles an urge to answer you with a lazy ‘meow.’

  I’d like to say I like what you’ve done with the place but fuchsia and ferns don’t appeal to me, certainly not at $1,000 a month. The pink marble countertops in the kitchen are nauseating. What were you thinking when you signed the lease?

  I explore the canary yellow madness of your bedroom with Marshall at my heels. You’ve fallen back asleep and your thoughts are dead to me. Your hair cascades in all directions around your pillow. Your arms are flung wide. You snore with abandon, and dream of clouds. There’s no pipe on the nightstand, no drained wine glass. Do you have no vices?

  I consider leaving the door open. Losing your cat might cause a much-needed crack in your charmed existence. Marshall looks up at me and his mouth opens and closes in a silent goodbye.

  “So long, lucky boy,” I say before I depart, leaving him inside your apartment, closing the door securely on my way out.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Charlie wasn’t exaggerating Carl’s cheapness. Everyone at Boom City had one or two unpaid duties in addition to their stated, underpaid job. I helped Shelly input the personal ads. This section of the paper—Charlie called it the ‘find me and fuck me’ department—was nothing compared to those of the bigger weekly papers. At best we offered readers two pages of what resembled classifieds but were really solicitations for sex in all manifestations. Girls wanting boys and vice versa; girls wanting girls; boys wanting boys; polyamorous seeking same; girls and boys wanting to play dress-up or dominatrix or role-play; bi seeking gay, straight and bi; transgender seeking boys or girls; next came the real specialty categories—boys and girls pretending to be animals or famous people or dead people; necrophiliacs seeking people who wanted to play dead; vampires seeking virgins; etc. These ads were either mailed in with a check or someone would phone in with a credit card, and Shelly took the order. Every day she also invented new ways to reject people, usually men, who got off on reading their fantasies to her. She learned to weed out most of the creeps by insisting on a credit card number first, followed by address and phone number.