todd of tacoma

The one-act send-up of airport security had entered its eleventh minute and I was listening through the trees for my cue to enter. What I was about to perform was next to nothing, but it would trigger the climax and at least one guffaw if done right. I had driven red-eye from Wyoming for it.

What was in Wyoming?

I was trying to remember.

The Twins

I had a fever running plus or minus 103 degrees in the shade and I was watching magnifying-glass-bright sunlight burn a hole through downstage left, where I was supposed to die theatrically having been knocked flat by a purple dildo.

Our stage manager walked behind me and whispered something arbitrary and obvious about my cue. She seemed to revel in the fact she was redundant and was head-to-toe dressed in black, like a stagehand or Prince Hamlet, trying to pull off something that made no sense. You wear black backstage or in the wings in the dark so you can’t be seen. On an outdoor stage you couldn’t miss her. She had a headset and a clip-on receiver, too, but I was pretty sure no one to talk to.

I can’t die here, I remember thinking, not like this. But I agree to things, don’t I? Things like big entrances, bad fight choreography, death, four to five minutes silent and stock still in the afternoon sun, and shallow, invisible breaths, no lines. But thank God about the lines. Festivals are an actor’s nightmare. Audiences here aren’t audiences and they give zero to negative-zero shits about theatre on the lawn. They don’t turn their voices down. Or their phones on Airplane. They don’t stop eating. They groom one another like baboons. They chase their idiot kids around. Throw frisbees. Open wine. Talk to dogs. About one-third sit with their backs to the stage, or flat on the ground, laughing and burping and occupying all the tree shade.

Shallow breaths.

Here it comes.

A few minutes dead as a set piece and I could be one of these assholes. Find a tree of my own. Curl up next to its cold roots and really die.

It was Bozeman’s Sweet Pea Festival, if you’re wondering. A celebration of harvest, arts and crafts, patchouli oil, and music. I’d rushed back from Wyoming for this because the money would almost pay for my gas to Wyoming.

What was in Wyoming? An infomercial, I was remembering now. I was the actress in the let’s see this in action interrupt. Eight or nine seconds of me transporting strawberries in semi-slow motion over a back porch, through a sliding-glass door, and into a kitchen where my Djinni 600 blender waited upright and glimmering and faithful on a tacky, nondescript marble island. I did only that. Walked with strawberries, set them down.

No lines.

No hands, either. They weren’t right for the close-up, so someone else had to put the strawberries into the blender. And press the button. And hold the lid. I was relegated to bit part, really, to a mere body completely upstaged by The Twins, that’s what we called them. Those hands, those perfect and perfectly manicured hands. The little moneymakers blurred everything around them. You wanted what they touched and to be touched by them and I envied the very arms they were attached to.

The spot would never air, incidentally, and the more I look back on that trip, on the whole weekend really, the more it takes on the hue of a practical joke. One shot, two if you like the coverage, for something that would never be seen, then I sped back to pretty much be the wall in Pyramus and Thisbe.

Are there no extras in Wyoming?

Are there no walk-ons in Montana?

You’re not staying for the cast party?

I had opened my car door. The Twins held it open.

I can’t. This play, it’s a total joke, I said.

What’s the punchline?

I sat in my car and shut the door and rolled down the window and took too long to answer. I’m not known for my timing.

That my haul for this weekend will be less than ten dollars once you factor in gas and meals, I said.

Is that all?

I started my car and took too long to answer again, and then just didn’t.

The Twins planted themselves on my car door.

We’ll miss you at the cast party.

Cast party? I said. There’s three of us.

There’s three of us.

Three, I said plaintively.

She kept her fingers on the glass as I rolled up my window.

That’s what I think happened. Exact details are hazy since the fever.

Sweet Pea

That fever broke while I was onstage, once I was dead, and I was sweating puddles through my hot costume. I imagined a bird’s-eye view of me in black and white from above the stage. You’d see me bleeding out, my sweat become blood, like I had fallen from a window, had fallen delirious with plague or the vapors or something, and my blood, thin as water, was clawing at the floorboards.

The death of the femme fatale.

That was the last thing I remembered thinking until the Urgent Care doctor said, bronchitis. Bronchitis that could be pneumonia, he said, if you don’t get some rest. Clear your schedule, bring a blanket to your couch.

I’ll be fine, I said.

Is that why you’re here? Because you’re fine?

I don’t do very much, I said. I say yes to everything, yes, so I have a loaded schedule, but I bail on most things last-minute. That’s how I get rest.

You just rushed a road trip because of an obligation, he reminded me.

I know, I said, because I had.

He scrutinized me.

I’ll be fine.

You’ll be fine, he laughed.

I laughed, too. Why not?

Lots of liquids, he said, and he handed me a piece of paper.

Be careful with this. Directions are on the bottle and I’m printing them off for you, too. Follow me.

I did.

The director and writer of the Sweet Pea one-act who had dragged me offstage and taken me here, to Urgent Care, after the whole scene following his play, where everyone forgot about his play–he was in the lobby now. He was about to take me to the pharmacy and then back to my car and then kindly promise never to cast me in anything again.

That’s great, I would say. Thank you for everything so much, before he could get his window down to say anything else to me. I would walk to my car with my shoes in one hand and feel, in my toes and between them, the warm pulse of the world. While in my other hand holding a 600 mL bottle of liquid codeine with Refill 1 printed on the label.

There was guaifenesin in the liquid, too, which I didn’t appreciate as much, but it would grow on me. I’d float whiskey on top of the medicine after each swig from the bottle to stretch the contents out and to intensify its warmth in my stomach and its effect on my perception of time. Coughing up phlegm and whiskey and codeine, incidentally, will send waves of healing and bright light through your veins and out your finger- and toe-tips and your tear ducts and bleeding ears. A lot like yawning does after you’ve drunk two or three bottles of robitussin.

I had a two airplane bottles of whiskey in my glovebox and I went straight to my passenger-side door and chased a swill of warm codeine with one of the airplanes. Then I replaced my codeine swill with the other airplane bottle and watched the two syrups swirl together and envisaged a world where I could stretch this liquid to infinity.

Codeine.

Whiskey.

Guaifenesin.

Classy, smart, but not too swanky.

Unlike the second bottle, Refill 1, into which you toss almost everything with a side-effect just to keep the last drop at bay. That bottle is desperate, uncoordinated, a wrestling match. You smash up Excedrin, Prozac, pour robitussin, yohimbe extract, alka seltzer, crush adderall if you can get it. When you get to the end of your second bottle, you begin to wonder if you have a problem.

The first, though, that’s a different story. It’s this story. Which began sort of, the first act, began sort of there by my car sort of in the dusklight near the end of the second day of Sweet Pea.

The second act

Took place mostly on my couch.

Eighteen

And here’s where it ended.

A week after my Sweat Pea performance I was still on my first bottle, which was mostly whiskey now, and thank God, because I had to get off my couch and take myself to a wedding.

Well, let’s dial the shade back just a little. Sure, I wasn’t excited for the wedding, or the dancing at the reception, or the people there, or the love between the bride and the groom, but there was going to be an open bar. All-night booze just for knowing, somewhat tangentially, two people, and sitting through a measly one-hour ceremony. Sure, a church pew is no couch, but I could endure this with a little visualization. I saw myself sipping my bottle, leveling the bottle with booze, sipping some more, leveling, sipping, leveling, etc., and drinking cocktails and perhaps going home early once no one was paying any attention to me. It sometimes takes a while, though, for people to lose interest in looking my way. I’m being modest when I say I’m a knockout. Have I not told you? The Twins were the first thing to upstage me in five or six years. Eyes generally find me. Even when they’re not looking for me, they see me. Even when they’re not looking at me, they see me.

Even in my current state.

So it was with one of the ushers ushering in the wedding ceremony, which was in this big eight-hundred-plus-seater old church with three aisles, not including the sides. He sat me, this usher, did the arm thing like he was a big man, and I clutched his skinny little bicep like a grateful damsel and let the young prince guide me to my seat like a horse to water, and he, from that moment, you could tell, was looking at me, looking looking and sideways looking, rolling his eyeballs up and down my curves and the exposed flesh of my back all the way to the knobby bone at the base of my neck.

Can you blame him?

I was looking at him, too, but with slightly less vigor.

He had made this unusual choice to wear black corduroy pants to the ceremony and they looked bluish and soft in the church light, warm from all the stained glass. While his jacket, however, was black, and was satiny and reflective and you had to squint to look at him, lest his chrome pleats and pockets turn you to stone. But that was okay. He was handsome enough, but wasn’t handsome enough to need your eyes up there on him all day long. I just put my eyes where it’s easiest to put them.

His corduroy bulge. It wasn’t much to look at, no, it wasn’t. Not with the four pleats flanking it and his braided belt cinching the whole waist area off and out there like a hot air balloon. But I wanted to touch it nonetheless–you have these impulses–I wanted to get my hands down his pants. And I imagined it would take some effort.

So, I took a sip of whiskey-codeine and chased it with some vodka I’d brought in a flask in my purse and I crossed my legs and leaned against my pew’s armrest and turned my face to the other side, to the stained-glass windows opposite my aisle and illuminating all of us in heaven’s effusiveness, and I carefully observed an abrasion on my palm that wasn’t there. My unobserved hand, meanwhile, supported by its elbow on the armrest, swung out into the aisle like a saloon door and whoosh! brushed the corduroy of my usher’s inner thighs.

The thrill.

Contact.

Without turning my head I could see him puff up his chest with a shallow breath like a panic breath.

Was this an accident? he was asking himself.

Could it or couldn’t it be?

I have always believed that if you want to reach your goals you can’t just sit back and revel in one little victory. You have to circle back around, or in my case be circled back around upon. There’s no such thing as luck. I crouched back down into my seat and I let my pleaty bird usher a dozen or so more people to their pews so I could recharge my shamelessness. And then I took a little more vodka and reached out my hand again, this time with my attention feigned on the wedding program sheet open in my lap, under the care of my studious hand, with a finger out and following words like it was reading. While my aisle hand was sort of dangling out there like a frowsy flapper from the Swing Years holding a cigarette holder. The kind of hand you don’t bring home to momma.

And after seating a particularly loathsome and mostly crippled hobbit of a widow, the usher brought his wayward pants and thighs my direction once again. I remind you, I was simply seated in my original position, with fingertips not an inch farther out into the aisle than on my first graze.

It was a test.

Passed with flying colors.

Like he hadn’t learned his lesson, my usher took the same flightpath and tipped my same fingers with a semi-engorged penis.

The game was afoot?

Maybe.

More tests.

It’s one thing, obviously, to accidentally brush someone’s pants and go about your day. Another to graze someone’s penis in their pants and go about your same day, another still to do so yet again and acknowledge the accident by saying excuse me or sorry. And quite, quite another to make eye contact while in the act of an accidental glance-by and hold your mouth kind of sexy agape.

I have mastered sexy agape. 

You haven’t seen it?

It’s like this.

The secret to this recipe involves the eyes, just a pinch of eyes, and your other hand. Let’s say you’re holding your one hand, the offensive one, under a table like you’re in high school and you’re walking your fingertips up your target’s thigh while actively listening to everyone else at the table. Uh huh, ooh, interesting. You’re only letting your target see you profile, the whites of one eye only. Only that and nothing more. Just a pinch. You kind of roll your eyes kind of, not too much, and intermittently jostle them up and back, up and back, and then, your pièce de résistance, you place your other hand in your lap, your lap, on your mons, as it’s called if you’re fancy, and you just let it sit there, like it’s just ready there, just waiting for its cue to enter.

I was merely practicing this as my poor, defenseless usher made his way up the aisle alone with his half-chub now at three quarters and calling too much attention to itself. Not just because it was tenting his trousers but also because he was very obviously making sure not to turn profile to anyone, which is of course impossible in an aisle. The effect was like watching an NPC who’d peed himself in a video game.

He needed assurances, this poor young man. Needed to know his suffering wasn’t all for naught. So, I put my hand out once again, like I was flicking a cigarette, and with two or three of my fingers I ushered the usher my direction with a little half-snap, like at a trusty dog.

Good boy.

He walked to me and was clearly desperate to hear something comforting, to anything I had to say to him, to break the spell I had put on him, and I was ready to. But at the last second, when he was just at my armrest, I changed my mind. I turned my head away and up to the blue sky through the church’s skylight dome and I cleared my throat probably just a little too hard and I lifted my hand just right so all I had to do was hinge at the wrist and stroke his corduroy, with the grain, not against it–an entirely new sensation for each of us–with the grain stroked behind his scrotum with my middle two fingers and nudged his cock three times with my thumb.

Have I told you I can tell through jeans whether a cock is circumcised? Apparently through corduroy, too.

The bulge then stroked me back, right in that soft, meaty part of my palm. I saw him bite his lip almost all the way bloody and I gave him one last little squeeze and let him go. To an audible gasp. A little breath in, and then he held it.

Then I did the eye thing and his legs started wobbling. He wobbled away.

I opened my purse and drank from each bottle.

My usher sat his next couple and said something embarrassing like, enjoy the show, and he was still wiggling. He was blushing, too, and when he turned, I locked eyes with him. I noticed there were no colors in them at all–or in mine, I’m sure–just white and black occluded by the reflection of some kind of fog. It was falling on us and swirling around us, this fog, falling from the skylight, from heaven blowing smoke. I started to float, I swear, as he hiked back to me, his mouth tipped open and eager. I thought he would jump on me! I had to say something to him to fend him off. This wasn’t the time or place to be brash!

So I said, program?

Program, he trembled.

He laid another program on top of the program in my lap and I said, thank you, and I shooed him off.

Now, he seemed broken, poor man. I had put him through the ringer, and it was my responsibility now to bring back his confidence. I put my hand out and I left it out, no take-backs, and it became a comfortable and uncomfortable routine, his passing me by and by and by. Like a dog playing fetch. You got the sense he would never tire.

Sit a couple, pants to hand.

Grab a dad a program, pants to hand.

Take a Werther’s off a grandma, pants to hand.

We’d settled in. Relaxed. So much so I could imagine myself getting bored–and the ceremony had not yet even started! So I dropped one of my programs into the aisle just as my usher was about to glide by with a family of six or something huge and he bent down to pick the program up and I gave yet another vocal acknowledgment to our little corduroy game. One that would make clear to him my intentions.

I signaled to him to rest a hand on my pew’s back. And I twisted my body upright and whispered, I just want to thank you. I whispered. Whispered with the sexy, phlegmy rasp I’d been nurturing for a week. Thank you for everything.

He looked deep into my codeine eyes with his dumb foggy eyes and stood up and said, no problem, ma’am. And as he walked back up the aisle, I understood something I hadn’t understood until then, when he called me ma’am. He called me ma’am! He called me ma’am because he was a baby.

A baby!

Maybe eighteen!

And a dead ringer for brother of the groom. I might have babysat this child once. Somebody had to!

I’d stepped in it, now. All the way up my red skirt I’d stepped in it.

Yes, I can pull off red.

I’d have to look at his driver license. At some point you have to be direct. You have to know some truth and stop pretending and playing everything’s okay. You have to ask, what’s your age? Can you prove it? Whose side are you on? Bride or groom, I mean. Do you want to skip the reception and have sex in a field or bathroom? Did I babysit you? Please tell me that I’m not a sex offender.

I began folding a paper airplane out of one of my programs. And I didn’t just do the lazy cargo plane variety. I went for a jet. Fast track! A few extra folds. And I pressed the seams hard so no hard wind or choppy landing could destroy her. I even ran some spittle down each crease. The end result was kind of magical. The bride’s face was even centered on the jet’s body like a pin-up girl. I wanted to throw a little parade for her. With big dumb balloons and a marching band.

I rested this beauty on my pew’s armrest and cracked open the fuselage and took out a pen from my purse and wrote inside.

Tell me…

…a little…

…about…

…yourself

Open-ended.

Then I let her fly.

I let her fly down the aisle while there was, for a moment, no one in the aisle and reached into my purse and took the littlest, most modestest pull off my whiskey-codeine bottle, chased it with some vodka, and when I swallowed and opened my eyes and tipped the vodka flask down, it was not to see the fresh face of my foggy-eyed corduroy boy, but instead one of the bridesmaids, who must’ve snatched my plane out of midair, because she was there, with her thick bridesmaid’s makeup, there in my face in no time at all. And she had my plane stomped flat.

She said to me, and for the benefit of a few families around me, everyone can see you!

Everyone can see you! she said.

See what? was all I could come up with. My voice was gravelly and harsh and I might as well have been Louis Armstrong. The off-gassing of the bridesmaid’s makeup was searing the back of my throat, too, and I coughed. Coughed! I mean. Right in the bridesmaid’s face, right there in the church nave, with all of heaven watching me heave. I coughed the fog back up into the skylights. Coughed the smoke away. Coughed a globule of snot onto the bridesmaid’s chin.

She turned her head to the side and gagged on the air and wiped her face off and then slapped mine.

I had never been slapped before.

It’s not your day! she said. Don’t ruin it for everyone!

She didn’t emphasize everyone this time.

I said nothing, having nothing to emphasize.

Psycho

I got up to use the restroom and to leave the church forever. On my way up the aisle was the first time I’d noticed the pipe organ playing. It was ludicrous and beautiful. We’d all been led to our seats to celebrate eternal love and other whimsies with about twenty pipes farting out Feed My Frankenstein. That’s what I heard, anyway.

In the restroom, the reverse hopper windows were open to the ceiling and the sunlight was cool. There were women outside talking about a movie they’d seen that left them with the impression the world was one way but really it was another.

Meet my libido

I emptied my codeine bottle–finally–down my hatch and tucked it beneath some paper towels in the trash can beneath the paper towel dispenser and took a little more vodka to straighten out my breath. I thought about texting some friends to say that I’m all right. But how would that be received?

You have to contact people with a plan. Don’t scare them off. Start small. Like some old pics on Instagram.

Comment?

Start with likes.

Meet my libido

He’s a psycho!

The last time I was trusted with a prescription drug I tried to take my life. Did I really want to hear more thoughts on that fiasco?

I tilted my phone upright to see the time.

It wasn’t anything significant.