The King of Schmooze by Daniel Stolar

When I left the Yale School of Medicine in the middle of my third year, and pointed my Honda Civic toward the opposite coast, I was fleeing not only a fairly assured professional future, but also most of my own personal past. Growing up, I took multiple-choice tests like some kids play the piano. In fifth grade, when most of my classmates were learning long division and spin the bottle, I scored 680 on a math SAT to gain entrance into an after-school math program. It was the same year I got glasses and braces within two weeks of each other, and started telling people that I would go to Harvard, and though I’m hesitant to draw too many causal arrows, it is simply statistical fact that I kissed more girls in the year and a half prior than I have in the nearly three decades since.
    With my double futon folded into the backseat and my all my worldly possessions stuffed around me, I wedged myself into the driver’s seat of my Civic as if it were a cockpit, and I was propelled by all the excess of force it had taken me to break free. I hit the open highway pounding on the ceiling, the wind rushing through my hair, Anthony Robbins yelling at me in my tape deck.
    And just as I’d been promised by the self-help literature I’d immersed myself in, the universe seemed to respond. I’d leapt and, lo and behold—just as I’d been told—the net appeared. Soon after I arrived in Los Angeles, my first short story was accepted by a literary magazine. Then I was accepted by the University of Arizona Masters in Fine Arts Program. A few weeks later, I came home from working a thirty-five dollar lunch shift to find a letter congratulating me on winning a Lyndhurst Young Career Prize, a grant I hadn’t heard of the day before, for potential, from a foundation, I would soon discover, where one of my college mentors had recently joined the Board.
    At the grant foundation’s retreat, I was taken under wing by Steve Whisnant, a fellow Ivy Leaguer a few years older than I was, who had won a grant for community service, and when, within a few hours of meeting me, he offered to use frequent flyer miles to fly me cross country to read to his two Charlotte book groups, it felt like just the next step in my initiation into the world of artistic patronage—and, though I’d sold exactly one short story (and written only a few more), I accepted as if it were my birthright.
    And so it was that a few weeks later, I found myself resting my fluted champagne glass on the mantle of a well-appointed Charlotte living room, reading my writing to an attentive, well-heeled book club audience. Triumphant! was the word that blared across my consciousness like a blurb on the back of my first (as yet, unwritten) book.
    Out of the sea of nodding, upturned smiles, one particularly attractive face surfaced repeatedly. I’ll call her Jacqueline. She was a friend of my hosts, maybe ten years older than I was, a mother of two small (not seen) children, with smooth, tan skin, perfectly-coiffed dark waves of hair, crow’s feet so thin and distinct that they looked like the work of an exacto knife on dried clay. Jacqueline told me that she was active in local theater; in fact, she told me, she was in charge of the annual New Playwright’s festival. And then, as if it followed naturally, she asked me if I’d written any drama.
    ”In terms of Act 1, Act 2, Act 3?”
    She waved me off, her hand landing on my wrist. “You could always adapt something.”
    ”I’ve written stories that were mostly dialogue,” I said. “I was actually quite the thespian in college.”
    She squeezed my hand. “You’d be perfect!”
    Over the next several months Jacqueline and I exchanged several forgettable e-mails and then about eight months after we met, she called and extended a formal invitation on behalf of the Charlotte Repertory Theater. The truth was, I was shocked—I’d never thought anything would come of our conversation in the first place. I can’t tell you now at what point I elevated to active consciousness the possibility that these were all the elaborate machinations of a woman arranging a tryst. My girlfriend, Lauren, who is now my wife, had recently moved in with me in Tucson. (Our relationship had survived the fact that the first time she introduced me to her parents, it was as a medical student at Yale, and the second time, as a waiter in Los Angeles.) But as much as I’d aspired to infidelity in all my prior relationships, I’d never been much good at it. I’m tortured enough when I’m not doing anything wrong. Jacqueline, with her tasteful gold jewelry and her refined Southern lilt, her lingering fingertips and her enlightened niche in Southern society, fit nicely into a certain older-woman fantasy—I get excited even now at the words kept man.
    Rather than offend me, of course, to the extent that I considered that her interests might be prurient as well as artistic, I was doubly flattered.
    So, I said yes. Yes, yes, yes. What exactly I’d agreed to, I wasn’t sure, but the point of so much of my self-help seemed to be that what mattered most was saying YES!, so I couldn’t ask too many questions. By this time, I’d formally withdrawn from medical school (though, to this day, I update my address with the Yale Alumni Office, just so I can step over their mail), and I’d ridden a wave of self-help bromides that allowed me to confuse some good first steps and some truly outstanding luck with the thing I most desperately wanted: confirmation that I could be a writer. Now, like Wile E. Coyote churning away furiously in midair, I couldn’t say Yes! fast enough…and I certainly couldn’t look down for fear of making myself fall.
    That there would be some inchoate sexual impulse propelling me (in addition to everything else) was perhaps unavoidable considering this time in my life, during my early twenties. But it also seems appropriate, this Freudian relationship between Id and creativity. I’d left med school to try to make a life as an artist and if that required some amount of bravery—and everyone told me it did—I remember it now more like the giddy panic of the first stages of romance. Full of need, and impulsivity, and desire that felt inseparable from who I was. In the same way that we think a new lover can make us whole, I knew that if I could be a writer it would fill me up forever. In an essay about meeting Norman Mailer, James Baldwin wrote “It is important that I admit that, at the time…I was extremely worried about my career; and a writer who is worried about his career is also fighting for his life.” It was Id and it was so much more than Id. (Can there be more than Id? What lies beyond the universe?) To say that I was worried about my career during that time of my life is sort of like pointing out that a fish is swimming in water.
    The immediate question was what I would perform. Most of my work was meant to be read, not performed, and it all seemed far too staid for my new incarnation as performer-writer. And since I’d been invited by the Charlotte Repertory Theater, perform was exactly what I planned to do. I did have a more raucous, experimental piece, however, inspired by my time in Los Angeles, that strange in-between time after medical school and before graduate school. With Harvard undergrad and Yale medical school on my resume when I headed to LA, I’d managed to land a table-waiting job at Morton’s, the signature outpost of the steakhouse family, and one of the hotspots for Hollywood power brokers. Like any self-respecting aspiring writer of short fiction, I was both entirely repulsed by Los Angeles and entirely seduced by it. Everybody was next week’s meeting away from stardom, just waiting for the call. The stories were fabulous, the almost evangelical seriousness of it all, and I was often convinced, in spite of myself.
    My story was an attempt to personify all this. It was a story about being seduced by something you find repugnant, about realizing that you may be getting conned, and going along anyway, because you think you’re above having anything to lose. It was a story about how a kernel of hope, encased in layers of knowing cynicism, grows all the more precious, and underneath it’s protective covering, all the more vulnerable.
    The story was called The King of Schmooze, after the character who incessantly referred to himself that way. It was not a particularly good story. The ingénue who Schmooze corrupts is in his early twenties, a wannabe screenwriter, in Los Angeles taking time off from an elite private East Coast college. In other words, he was nothing like myself—I was writing stories, taking time off from an elite private East Coast medical school.
    If I really went for it, the story would require undressing down to my boxers. And since really going for it seemed at least half the point, I started working out, running and lifting weights. Physically, though, I’m like a hardworking C student—slacking off is disastrous, but no amount of extra effort is going to earn me that A. But even this, I thought, would prove (to Jacqueline, I didn’t quite dare to think) my fearless artistic integrity.
    The story was 26 pages, a few glancing descriptions told from the ingenue’s point of view, but mostly dialogue. I’d acted throughout high school and well into college, so I knew that the more fully I inhabited each character, the easier it would be to go from one to the other: I changed my posture to suggest the tight, enormous drum of Schmooze’s belly; I practiced his loose-jowled waddle. The ingenue I gave shoulders not unlike my own, the slumped bearing of which undermined the cocksureness he wanted to project. Soon, though, the real problem began to dawn on me: I had to learn all the words.
    Weeks before my trip, I had pages of my story with me everywhere. Pages three through seven were on my dashboard, eight, nine and ten taped to the mirror in my bathroom, eleven and twelve above the kitchen sink. A complete draft on my bedside table. There were no unoccupied surfaces in my house or moments in my life. I looked it over as I brushed my teeth. I recited in the shower, as I walked to class. I memorized between triceps sets and as I sweated on the Stairmaster. I slept fitfully, with lines of typed letters streaming through my dreams, and I woke with the words in my mouth. It was a kind of fever, and for a month, I couldn’t get it to break…because no matter how consumed I became, I couldn’t memorize all the words.
    ”Los Angeles in the middle of the day,” the story began. “Mirrored sunglasses splintered the endless sun. The new BMW’s and Mercedes, with their sumptuous, purposeful lines, glowered along all buffed and shining. The SUV’s bulged with excess power. And everywhere, there were beautiful women.” (I said it’s not a very good story.) For some reason, I could not rehearse any part of my twenty-six-page story without running through that opening paragraph first. If I wanted to work on an exchange on page 14, if I wanted to practice the last two pages, I had to begin with that first paragraph first. A product of my fever, perhaps, it was a compulsion like I’d never known. I repeated those lines so many times over the next weeks that even now, nearly a decade later, Lauren will sometimes recite them after a couple drinks at parties.
    When I finally arrived in Charlotte, after whispering lines through three airports and during every second of two flights, Steve Whisnant picked me up, but I was far too frenzied to make small talk. “Los Angeles in the middle of the day,” I mouthed under my breath.
    I’ve always loved the backs of theaters. They appeal to multiple parts of my character—the restricted access, the reality behind the illusion, the seedy underbelly, the imminent spotlight, the pressure cooker of art and performance, and almost certainly, lots of illicit sex. As Jacqueline greeted me and angled her shoulders to incline me past her down a backstage hallway, she was a wonderful blend of cool professional efficiency and silky Southern grace, but my libido was so far buried beneath the layers of neurotic frenzy that I could barely sense it stirring. If she had forced me into the costume room, in any of the submissive positions I had imagined during my many, equally frenzied, equally compulsive, bouts of stress relief over the past month, I could only have responded: “Los Angeles in the middle of the day.”
    I can still picture her, leaning against the door frame to my dressing room, her hips thrust forward in black designer jeans, her hands resting on a clipboard propped against a pewter comedy/tragedy mask belt buckle, as she allowed herself a moment’s breath. Jacqueline invited me to join her in the back of the audience for the opening performance. But I was too nervous to watch anybody else. And I still needed to memorize lines. I squinted into the middle distance. “I prefer to be alone before curtain,” I said, as if I had a pre-performance ritual of such dangerous creative ecstasy and self-immolation that the mere mention of it would sear her cultured Southern ears.
    What I hadn’t counted on was that of course the stage was miked into the dressing room through a single black speaker suspended against the ceiling. The applause suggested a full house, or nearly so. The play itself was flawless and I thanked God that I didn’t have to watch it in addition to listen to it. I climbed onto the counter, pressed up against myself in the wall-sized dressing room mirror to see if I could turn off the speaker, but there was no switch to be found. For a long moment I stared at my star-lit face, just inches away in that enormous mirror, and contemplated ripping the speaker out of the ceiling—wouldn’t a trashed dressing room just improve my artist’s cred? Fortunately, I talked myself down. The play’s dialogue flowed one smooth line into the next; the audience laughed. I was too preoccupied to follow the action and even with my hands over my ears, too flustered to focus for more than a minute at a time on my own lines. Which meant, of course, that I had to start again and again at the beginning.
    In this fractured, tortured way, the hours passed. One play ended, another—equally flawless—began. I sat hunched over my manuscript, my palms sweating against my ears as I perfected that first paragraph. About ten minutes after the second play finished, just when I’d manufactured the fantasy that maybe they’d entirely forgotten my “Special Performance” as it was billed in the glossy professionally-produced program, the stage manager knocked on my door: “You’re on in five.”
    I took my place on the dark stage, where I could see a house still nearly two-thirds full at this late hour. When the lights came up, I launched, careening, into my 26 page story—not just a fifty minute monologue, but a fifty minute dialogue, between me and myself, playing a fresh faced college student and the rollicking, cynical, lascivious, obese King of Schmooze. It would have been tough to pull off if I’d been a theatrical genius at the height of his powers and confidence—Robin Williams, say, at his coked up best—but, of course I hadn’t acted in anything in ten years, and even then, the data suggested I’d been mediocre. But I’d said, Yes! and I let the force of that yes propel me headlong into my story.
    And then, maybe 35 minutes in—I froze. I forgot my lines. I had no idea where my story went next. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t remember the next words, I couldn’t remember what happened. I had no idea how to get there from here. All I could think was: Los Angeles in the middle of the day. I was sitting on a small block before a larger block, supposedly a table in a trendy Los Angeles restaurant. Sitting, sitting, sitting. How much time elapsed? More than two minutes, I’d guess. Literally. 120 seconds, with no noise other than the nervous rustling and coughing of the audience. I didn’t consciously move, though I can only imagine what painful disintegration of posture and facial expression I underwent. I don’t remember holding my breath, but I can’t imagine that I was breathing either. I actually wondered if a moment would arrive when someone would appear from the wings to pull me off. Would it be Jacqueline herself? I ran through that whole first paragraph in my head: Los Angeles in the middle of the day. Mirrored sunglasses splintered the endless sun… I wouldn’t be surprised if my lips were moving. I was right up to the point of ejecting, the words were right there: “I’m really sorry. I can’t remember any more. I have to go now.” Another five seconds and that’s what would have happened—maybe it would have been better. But somehow I located an exchange of dialogue about two pages past where I’d frozen—as if the story had been going on in my head while I sat silently on the stage. The sequence of events made no sense whatsoever, but at least I was moving again, the silence was over.
    Schmooze morphed into ingenue; ingenue morphed into Schmooze. I distended my belly and waddled; I slumped my shoulders. In front of several hundred Supporters Of The Arts, I talked to myself, pivoting my head on my shoulders as well as changing my posture to indicate the conversational back and forth. Then I stripped to my plaid Gap boxers. Front and center, and by myself on that stage, I acted out the moment when the lascivious fat man swung his thick hairy leg (“dead feeling,” I called it in the story—it’s not a very good story) over the leg of the ingenue. I did it from both points of view, the final character switch coinciding with that irrefutably lascivious dead leg flop. A single bead of sweat trickled in a lazy line down my side as I lay propped on my elbow on the stage, nearly naked under the glaring theatre lights.
    Thankfully, the story ends soon thereafter, the ingénue finally leaves, still hoping against hope as he buttons his shirt on the way to the elevator that he’ll pass the girls he’d been promised on the way up.
    ”Who knew he could act, too?” Steve and his wife and the adult, professional friends I’d made through them greeted me afterward with nearly hyperthyroid looks of forced cheer. “Hey, you’ve been going to the gym.”
    I tried not to focus on the fact that Jacqueline was nowhere to be seen.
    I called Lauren that night from Steve’s house. With just a thin wall separating my hosts’ bedroom from my own, I cupped the receiver to my mouth underneath the covers and tried to unburden myself of my embarrassment.
    ”I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as you think,” Lauren said again and again. “Your arms are looking really strong these days.”
    Of course I didn’t mention Jacqueline.
    But I woke the next morning with bright yellow sunlight warming my cheek through gauze curtains, and when, over coffee, my kind and perceptive hosts took the attitude that the rest of the weekend’s activities were so much rigmarole that the artiste need not bother himself with, it was the earnest ingenue in me who responded: of course I wanted to go to the Festival breakfast. I wanted to meet my fellow artisans; I wanted to meet the patrons whose conviction and dollars kept these dreams alive.
    Most of all, though, I wanted to talk to Jacqueline. The frenzied memorizing done, I would devote myself full-time now to innuendo.
     When I arrived, Jacqueline was working the open doorway to the Theater Café, a billowing cream-colored blouse showing off the rich tan of her clavicle. I inclined my head and gave her my best sidelong glance. “No rest for the weary?”
    ”Good morning.” She pivoted smartly on her heels, sweeping me into the buzzing restaurant with an open palm. “Dan Stolar have you met Jonathan Wolfgram? Dan went last night; Jonathan’s play will be second today.”
    ”Hi,” I said, as Jacqueline extended her slender hand to someone behind me on the sidewalk.
    And that was it: more and more people accumulated in the space between Jacqueline and myself. And though I could not keep my gaze from wondering over to her gleaming, porcelain profile, she studiously avoided me. Before long, the group was shepherded out of the banquet room to the theater across the street. I spotted Jacqueline settling into a seat in the raised back row and I made one last attempt to angle my way toward her, but a woman in a housedress stopped me in the aisle. “That was very brave of you last night.” Her wide eyes peered out from a deep haze of frizzy curls. “I hope it was therapeutic?”
    As I pondered my response, the house lights dimmed. The actors took their places in a line on the dimly lit stage. Perched on stools. With scripts in hand! No wonder it had sounded so flawless. The blocking consisted of occasionally crossing the stage, moving to a new stool. There was nothing vaguely resembling a costume, no physical acting at all. The New Playwrights’ Festival, as my entire audience knew, and as I would have known if I’d asked even the most perfunctory questions or simply taken a look, consisted entirely of staged readings.

***

    Telling this story now implies that I’m beyond it all—it’s me, yes, but it’s an earlier version. I suppose that’s true. I’m on the other side of a First Book; I’ve got a Real Job in Academia now. Statistically speaking, this must put me in the thin upper reaches of the bell curve for my graduate school class. Statistically speaking, in this profession I went to great lengths to choose, that’s more success than I had any right to expect. But you can be sure it’s not nearly as much as I hoped. It’s safe to say that I wouldn’t rush headlong into that Yes! now, that I’d find out just what the world was asking of me first. There’s not a paragraph here that doesn’t make me cringe now. At the time, however, I couldn’t look too closely, because I didn’t want the responsibility of what I might see. I didn’t want to know that I wasn’t qualified, or that Jacqueline didn’t want to sleep with me, or conversely, that I was prepared to cheat on my future wife. I had an awful lot of identity tied up in being a Lifelong High Achiever, and I didn’t want to fully consider what exactly I’d traded a career in medicine for.
    But the truth is I’m struck by how much I empathize with—and even admire and envy—that younger version of myself, his egotism and raging hormones notwithstanding. To believe so fully in the value of my own words—perhaps the only thing more intoxicating was believing in what those words would bring me. I’m struck, too, by how much I could use those same blinders to reality every time I sit down in front of a blank page today, and how I should be prepared to walk out in front of you, naked and winging it, every time I fill that page up.

About the author:

I’m the author of a collection of short stories, The Middle of the Night (Picador 2003). My fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in a number of publications including Utne Reader, Virginia Quarterly Review, DoubleTake, Bomb, North American Review, Chicago Tribune and St. Louis Post Dispatch. I have been the recipient of a Lyndhurst Young Career Prize and an Arizona Commission on the Arts Fellowship and a Finalist for the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction. I am an Assistant Professor of English at DePaul University in Chicago.