Page 11 of Playworld

Dad checked his watch, then shrugged, mildly irritated. He hated the idea of my possibly being late. “The train’s faster.”

This was exactly why I preferred the bus. It was still dark when I arrived at the Columbus Avenue stop, and the vehicle’s illuminated interior seemed to float toward me. Through the bus’s tall windshield, I noted its handrails narrowing toward its tail and resembling a whale’s ribbed gullet. Upon boarding, I walked to the back and took the corner seat, and then slid open the window so that the breeze might mitigate the diesel fumes. I opened my book bag, considering all the things I could study in the meantime. I pulled outRomeo and Julietand was about to commence reading, when one of my lines came to me in its entirety:A proton is a subatomic particle with a positive electric charge and mass slightly less than that of a neutron.

I placed the play on the empty seat next to me and took out today’s shooting script. I studied it for a couple of stops and then promptly fell asleep.

—

We tapedThe Nuclear Familyat NBC Studios, in Rockefeller Center, on the 8H soundstage, where they didSaturday Night Live.This was our fourth season. The show had been a hit. In a normal year, from June through August, I lived at 30 Rock from dawn till dusk, but come September, once school had started, I was on call two or three mornings a week, shooting for half days but never past lunch, until we wrapped—sometimes as late as the last week of October, when we ceded the space to theSNLcast. This schedule had been put in place two years ago, when I entered seventh grade, built into my contract at my mother’s insistence, after I’d been accepted to Boyd Preparatory Academy, an Upper West Side private school, so as not to, in her words, “interfere with my education.” The intention was laughable, especially with the current season in turmoil because of the actors’ strike, which had just resolved. We’d been in rehearsal since the beginning of the month in an effort to complete the final few episodes at warp speed. These past few weeks, I’d missed more school than usual and was drowning.

On these mornings my routine never deviated. I stopped by my dressing room, dropped off my book bag, and hurried to costume. Alison,who ran that department, greeted me in a husky voice that was neither too friendly nor too warm—“Good morning, kid” was all she’d say. She was seated at her sewing table reading theTimes,drinking a cup of coffee and smoking. She glanced at me over her bifocals, nodded toward my costume on the hanging rack, and then returned to the paper. When not in his super suit, Peter Proton wore a short-sleeved button-down, a pocket protector quivered with pens, and suspenders decorated with physics equations that yanked my already too-high cuffs above my ankles and, due to a malfunction I hadn’t noticed until this season and was terribly self-conscious about, revealed the outline of my balls.

“Can we fix this?” I asked Alison. I was standing before her three-faced mirror while she made adjustments. With my hands I indicated my crotch’s protuberant, cloven hoof.

“Tom likes it,” she said, referring to the director. This was her way of ensuring someone else always had to say no. She placed my Groucho Marx specs on my face and then let out my pants’ waist. My growth spurt, raging since the spring—I’d shot up four inches—showed no signs of slowing, and when Alison struggled to button the collar of my widened neck, she mumbled, around a mouthful of straight pins, “You’re absolutely killing me.”

I had to hurry to hair and makeup. Nicole dealt with me first, silently daubing my cheeks with base and then lining my eyes until they stood out so vividly my caked face seemed to hover just above my skin. After she handed me off, Freddie roughly affixed my wig to its cap and then teased its blown-back curls into an even more shocked shape. He did this with a fist to his hip, his comb tugging at my head, swiveling me by my shoulders with pointed disregard.

Liz always managed to appear just before we finished.

She could’ve been Naomi’s younger, prettier sister. She wore large glasses, their lenses as round and thick as a soda bottle’s base, so that when she removed them to rub her eyes or pinch her nose’s bridge—as she often did in my presence—it made her face appear to shrink. She wore her hair in a Dorothy Hamill bob, but her clothes were as revealing as a male skater’s unitard: painted-on Jordache jeans and tight-fitting designer tees—today’s readPizza Eaters Make Better Lovers. Both she and Naomi had the same gummy smile, but Liz’s teeth juttedslightly forward. Standing before me now, she held open an enormous black binder containing the day’s shooting script.

“Well?” she asked.

“I think I’ve got it.” I didn’t want her to embarrass me in front of Freddie and Nicole.

Liz fed me a line.

“Maybe if we started from the top,” I said.

“That was the top,” she replied.

Freddie mushed his mouth in his hand and shook his head.

“You don’t know any of this, do you?” Liz said.

When I didn’t answer, she snapped her binder closed. “I’ll tell Tom we’re going to need more time.” Then she marched off to our usual spot.

This was in the middle of the soundstage, on a pair of director’s chairs, these placed off camera before the set of Central High’s physics classroom. The space was brightly illuminated amid a pool of darkness. 8H was hangar-sized, so vast I’d once enjoyed a memorable game of catch with Kevin Savage—he played Central High’s quarterback—the pair of us threading a Nerf football beneath the lighting racks and hanging cable wires, through set windows and over their walls, each of us calling our throw’s path like shots in pool, until Ken Wakanata the cameraman put a stop to our game and then cursed me out. “Hey, fuckwit. Knock down one of those Fresnels and you’ll get someone killed.” He spared Kevin the lashing, even when he came to my aid, but to whom would I complain about the injustice? “He should know better,” Ken told him, and then stormed off.

Now I approached Liz unseen and, for a moment, I paused to relish the silence. The soundstage was as quiet as a submarine. It was muffled by the velvet curtains lining its walls, the balcony’s empty seats adding to the bunkered effect. Thunderstorms might be raging outside, a hurricane making landfall, but here you’d be completely insulated from such weather. It confounded my inner clock. Hours crept by but months evaporated, from June through August the twilit sky was the same purple as the dawn’s, the only evidence any time had passed the stifling heat, the sun’s light now stored in the asphalt and radiating up instead of shining down, my own core temperature similarly elevated, but by rage at yet another summer lost.

Liz sat in one of the director’s chairs with her arms crossed, her binder open across her lap. She popped her high-heeled shoe against her heel.

It might’ve helped me learn my part a bit faster if Liz supplied some emotion. Instead, she delivered her lines in a relentless monotone. Her disdain for me exceeded anyone else’s in the cast or crew and had been a constant since the show’s inception, so that my fantasies about her proceeded not from lust but rather a desire for her kindness. “From the top,” she said each time I drew a blank. My shame was intense and my concentration shot. After I flubbed another line, Liz said, “Take a look at who’s waiting on you. It’s selfish and it’s unprofessional.”

“Hey,” Andy said to her. “Ease up a bit.”

Andy Axelrod, who played my dad, appeared before us, wearing his Nate Neutron costume. He was carrying his fishbowl helmet beneath his arm, his super suit silver and puffy as an astronaut’s. Inset on his chest were his initials, enclosed by the overlapping Bohr model ovals.

“How about I finish up?” he offered Liz. Then he smiled at me reassuringly. “It’s our scene, after all.”

Liz said, “Be my guest.”

When Andy sat, his suit aspirated and gave off a farty odor, like skin beneath a plaster cast. His freckled pate, hot from the lights, shined beneath his comb-over. We rehearsed for fifteen minutes, and when it was clear I had my lines down, Andy patted my knee and said, “Look, Griffin, I know you’ve got a lot going on. But try to keep in mind that these people get here early just for you. Get my drift?”

I did. “Thanks for sticking up for me,” I said.

“That’s what dads are for.”

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