Page 61 of Playworld
“I was thinking Captiva,” Oren continued, and then from his back pocket produced a rolled-upSports Illustratedwith Christie Brinkley on the cover, which he opened for them to see. “It’s an island off Fort Myers. In Florida. In the Gulf of Mexico. They have beautiful seashells you can collect, Mom, see? And if you don’t want to pay airfare,” Oren said to Dad, “we could even drive.”
Rawhide Down
February gave on to March. Now that wrestling season had concluded, and the terms of my agreement with Dad had been met, I was auditioning again. That month, I booked a Pop Rocks radio spot (There’s bang to the bitewas my line), which was followed by an on-camera Lipton Cup-a-Soup commercial. The shoot required I miss a full day of school. It had five actors in it: me and two older guys, Ricky Febliss and Jeff Riddell. Also Rusty Feinberg, a kid I’d been seeing at auditions since I was ten. When we boarded the van at five a.m. and headed to the shoot, the actress playing our mother, Diane, was already seated in back, smelling fresh and lovely but entirely absent makeup. “Diane,” said Ricky in greeting; “Diane,” echoed Jeff, mocking Ricky.
“Oh,” she said, “youtwo palookas.”
They talked and laughed during the entire hour-long ride, heckling one another about their recent evening out at Studio 54.
“It’s nothing but a bunch of private school kids,” said Ricky.
“Which is just how I like it,” said Jeff.
“You are both sobad,” Diane kept saying to them.
Because of the way they talked—their level of snark and jaded know-how—Ricky and Jeff seemed like grown-ups. But once we were in costume—Diane donning her wig and her mom sweater and slacks, withher lashes added and makeup done, and Ricky in his football jersey and Jeff with the sweatbands on his head and wrists—it was as if Diane had aged ten years and Jeff and Ricky were suddenly younger than Rusty and me. This happened regularly on jobs like this. It got to the point where it seemed as if more than lighting or makeup or costuming, age itself was something you inhabited long enough to get the take, until you took it off and put an adult face back on.
We shot the commercial on location, at a house in Ramsey, New Jersey. The four of us were instructed to play basketball—there was a hoop and backboard above the garage—while Rusty’s mom made lunch. We could only be seen through the kitchen window in the shot, and we were off mic, so Jeff and Ricky seized the opportunity to say the nastiest things they could to Rusty and me, trying to crack us up during takes. “I’m gonna fuck you in the ass, Griffin,” Jeff hissed while I drove to the basket, smashing his crotch into my butt as he guarded me. During the next take, he said, “I’m gonna give Rusty a Dirty Sanchez.” Rusty pulled up and drained another shot. He passed to Ricky, who checked back to him.
“What’s a Dirty Sanchez?” he asked as he dribbled.
Ricky feigned surprise, staggering backward and clutching his chest. He said to Jeff, “Let’s get Mikey to try it.”
“Yeah,” Jeff said. “He won’t eat it. He hates everything.”
From the kitchen window, Diane called us in. “Boys, lunch is ready!”
Jeff waved to her. “We’ll eat your pussy in a second, Mrs. Bancroft.” Then, leaning in conspiratorially to Rusty, said, “Your mom gives the best blow jobs.”
In the commercial’s main scene, the three of us burst into the kitchen, our cheeks rosy with the cold. Rusty is already seated at the table. Jeff’s line was “I’m starving.” Then Ricky said, “What smells so good?” And Rusty’s mom replied, “Lipton Cup-a-Soup.” And I looked at Rusty in amazement, since he was already drinking the last drops from his mug. “Hey,” I said, “Harley’s already finished!” I must’ve said the line a hundred times. After each take, the director removed his headphones to consult with the four suits seated in the row of canvas chairs behind him. Then he’d turn to us and correct our delivery: “Up more” or “Not so bright”; “Heavy on the ‘good’ ” or “Easy on the ‘so’ ”; or “It’sstarving, notstahvin’.” When they shot close-ups of the soup, which were in fourcoffee mugs and semicircled by all the boxes of flavors, the set designer used a dropper to add some chemicals to the broth that smelled like ammonia and made the soup produce a wisp of steam. It was all very boring and isolating, to be somewhere for an entire day taking orders but never really talking to anyone, and at the shoot’s conclusion I remember catching a glimpse of Diane, seated before the makeup artist’s mirror. After they’d removed her wig and the clips from her hair, her lashes and rouge, her face possessed the unique tabula rasa quality certain women are either gifted with or cursed by—they are so entirely transfigured by eyeshadow and eyeliner, by lipstick and blush, they could rob a bank in one face and disappear into obscurity in the other. She sat there blankly and buffed clean, drinking a cup of coffee, and perused the newspaper, her tired eyes enlarged by a set of reading glasses, and my thoughts turned to Naomi, since it was by now the afternoon, when we’d normally meet, and I wondered if she was driving home from work right now. And I remember being strangely certain she was, and I thought that if I were to see her, I would tell her about how, amid so much chatter, my overwhelming feeling was one of remoteness, and she would have a better word for the sentiment. Or at least help me find one. Which is to say that I missed her.
Dad liked to check in with me after these workdays. “How’d it go?” he asked at dinner. When I said fine, he said, “Well, tell me about it.” I said there was nothing to tell. “What was your line?” he asked, and I repeated it like I’d been hypnotized. “Is that how you said it?” he said, a bit ticked. “I said it,” I said, “times a million.” My lack of enthusiasm annoyed him. “That goes national and you’ll be singing another tune.” When I told him, “It’s not like I see a dime of it,” he bristled. “You do every day you walk into that fancy school of yours.” When I told him I wanted to go to wrestling camp over the summer, he said, “It depends on your shooting schedule.” When I stared him down and then asked what he was talking about, he said, “They’re renewing your contract forThe Nuclear Family.” When I said I hadn’t signed anything yet he said, “That’s correct.” When I asked if I had to sign the contract, he said, “We’ll talk about it.” When I asked, “When?” the phone rang, as if on cue. “That’s probably the agency,” Dad said, bunching his napkin and tossing it on the table, and even though he was only half finished with his food, he hurried to his bedroom to answer the call. And once again I had no leverage.
Oren, eyeing his departure, turned to Mom and said, “I have a question.”
She eyeballed him back but did not speak.
“Does Griffin pay my tuition?”
“No,” she said. “Your father does.”
Oren was visibly relieved at this. “Does Griffin payyourtuition?”
“I pay for mine with the money I make. And for the record, Griffin only pays aportionof his tuition.”
“Like a fixed percentage?”
“It depends.”
“On what?”
“Circumstances.”
“So basically what sort of year Dad is having.”
“Plus how much we put away for Griffin’s college.”
“What about my college?”