But as it turns out, Hal, Jenni, and I aren’t needed at all. Tara slays the first song. Her voice doesn’t shake and she hits every note. But the second song is a blazing dream. She loosens up and pours every last drop of herself into the empty containers of our bodies until we overflow.
That’s the power of art: how it can turn secondhand experience into firsthand experience, dissolve all the walls between the past, present, and future until you wonder how your eyes ever saw them as separate at all.
When Tara finishes, there’s this pause and I can feel her wondering if she flopped because no one’s clapping. But it’s just that we all needed a second to catch our breath after she rocked us like that, threw us from our safe little lifeboats into the churning seas, soaking us with water, with salt, with soul. Suddenly the whole place is alive in that way that makes you realize how dead it was before, how deadyouwere before.
The lead comes on next and performs something, but it falls flat next to Tara’s solo and the whole theater feels it. This woman with coiffed white hair and jangly pearls who’s sitting next to me grumbles about it to her husband. “That’s racism right there,” she says. “The Black girl should’ve gotten the lead; there’s no justifying that.”
I swell with pride and ask the woman if she can say it again while my phone is recording so I can play it back to Tara later. The woman looks offended and scared too, like I’m trying to catch her, cancel her. I explain that I’m Tara’s best friend and that I reallydon’t have a higher motive than that. But that doesn’t help; she stays tight-lipped and tight-eyed the rest of the play. Next time I’ll just record the whole thing without telling anyone. People only speak the truth when they don’t think anyone is listening.
When the cast comes out at the end, I spring to my feet for a standing ovation, but I’m not even the first one up. The whole crowd is clapping and they’re swaying too, which is the real sign of success in showbiz—if the performance seeps into people’s essences, beyond their muscles and bones and bodily organs, and gets them moving to some imaginary beat that’s truer than any reality.
I meet back up with Hal and Jenni. Peter’s there too. Apparently Jenni invited him, but I’m in too good of a mood to let that fester in me. I just plow my way backstage and tackle Tara in a massive hug.
Her makeup is all smeared like she’s been crying tears of joy, and I feel that shot of pinch-me-is-this-real-life because here we are in fucking New York City and my best friend is making it as an actor despite all the gatekeeper bullshit she’s had to break through. Sometimes the improbability of the odds is the most empowering feeling, knowing how you defied the statistics just by being born and now are defying them on a whole other level by thriving with the best friends in the brightest city of them all.
In the movies, this is where the big break comes and the no-name person gets instantly famous. But things don’t happen like that in real life. That doesn’t make it any less incredible, though. It just means we soak up this night even more fully because we know it’s not about to become the norm.
The after-party is at a loft in Bed-Stuy, grungy and crowded. We enjoy the party games and ride the euphoria all the way to the top and then higher, giggling in unison as the world shifts around us, reminding us that we’re the epicenter of it all. We get emotional in that ethereal way and it feels like the good old times again, theglory days of the Redstockings before Lilly moved back to Oregon and before Jenni started ditching us for Peter and before Hal and Tara were too busy chasing their dreams to join me in choosing this dream.
“I don’t tell you enough how much I cherish you,” Hal coos, draping her arms around Tara and me. “I wish we could just freeze time right here.”
“Same,” Tara says. “But impermanence is the only thing we can count on.”
“Permanence and impermanence can coexist, though,” Jenni muses, her photographer’s eye seeping through. “The permanence of our friendship and the impermanence of the exact arrangement of our friendship in this particular moment. They’re not mutually exclusive.”
“Hope not,” Tara says. “I never ever want to lose any of you. Success means nothing without soulmates to eat pizza with at 3 a.m.”
“You’re the great loves of my life,” I say, my affection bleeding out as I sponge it all up, hoping this moment might stretch longer.
It doesn’t. Tara is recruited for photo booth pictures with the cast, Jenni peels off with Peter, and Hal reigns over a new ring of admirers. I glide around the party trying to fall in love with someone or everyone, but there’s this fake aura following me that I can’t shake. Anxiety clenches. It feels like I’m stuck or something. It’s probably from the energy of the cast. They’re so keyed up and focused on themselves that they can’t let anyone else into their sphere. But there’s a part of me that has this horrible feeling that I’m the stuck one. Last year I would’ve fallen in love with five of these people on the spot, but now things just aren’t flowing.
I have a couple drinks to try to loosen up, but that just makes it worse. I get paranoid that everyone is looking at me and wondering why I’m here, like I didn’t earn it the way they did. Everything starts sinking at different speeds, and it’s hard to stay on the ramp. All I want is to get outside and flap my way over to Tribeca andcurl up with Arnie on Chris’s couch, but they wouldn’t want me. They’d tell me I don’t belong there either.
So I stop thinking about that and just keep willing myself higher, up into the lights that might point me toward love or pull me into it.
The next morning I stumble home from somewhere in the East Village. I tell myself that this is good, that the world is in its natural order again. I’m doing the walk of pride back to Bushwick just like usual, but it doesn’t comfort me much. I don’t feel well at all, probably just the side effect of mixing too much and sleeping too little, but everything aches. Not the type of ache that has a clear origin, an easy fix. The kind that sprawls everywhere, plugging up my pores from the inside out, making me cynical about everything except my own cynicism.
Chapter 8
As the autumn days wiggle along, the slump wears off, but there’s still that lingering guilt that I’m not writing enough, that I should be creating stuff and seeing people applaud it in theaters. It’s not like the applause is the motivator. I want it for intrinsic reasons, but I’m not going to tell people to stop applauding if they want to. It’s hard, though, because the only creativity I’ve got right now is how to find new ways to procrastinate.
One October afternoon, I bring my laptop to Kora’s. It’s my favorite neighborhood coffee shop. The walls are dotted with art by local painters and there are pool tables to play at, or you can just grab a stick and poke someone for the fun of it.
I plop down in one of the antique armchairs in the corner and dabble with some concepts for a script. I sort of feel like Hal, with so many ideas I don’t know which one to pursue. I make myself work for a long stretch before I go up for another coffee. It’s an act of frugality as well as bribery, but it doesn’t work. I keep slamming against a wall, deleting one first page after another because I don’t even want them sitting on my desktop polluting the energy.
It might sound like I don’t have a good work ethic, but it’s not that; it’s just that I set a very high bar for myself. A lot of people go around submitting things they vomited onto the page. Not me. I won’t submit any of my work until it impresses me, and I guess I must have a more refined eye for quality than most.
Chris asks me to dogsit again. He and Olivia are headed to the Hudson Valley to see the foliage.
I try to disguise my snort as a sneeze when he tells me that. I mean, I don’t try that hard; I don’t mind if he knows I think it’s ridiculous, the whole leaf-peeping craze, this obsession with colors. Why should trees get all this praise for being different colors when people are punished for it, murdered for it?
Chris asks what I have against foliage and I tell him that people shouldn’t focus on color because it fosters subliminal racism. He listens to my argument, disagrees. “I think we should admire the foliage in humans as much as we do in nature.”
I’ve got to say it’s a pretty good answer, and it almost makes me wonder if I’ve been seeing things wrong. I don’t think I have been, but I just didn’t expect something like that from Chris.
“What woke podcasts have you been listening to?”
“No podcasts,” he says. “But I learn more from you than any show.”
