HOLLYWOOD—An actor, unlike painters and writers, cannot be rediscovered after death. An actor must show up and play the part in flesh and blood. Here at night school, Jason was squandering his talent and his body—his Stradivarius—on an unresponsive crowd. Nevermind that during the holiday he’d opened the applauding Thank You card from his students a half million times to cheer himself up. Its recorded cheers and applause dispelled the toxic blues time and again; he’d open it and feel warm all over. The magical card accompanied him back to Ohio, where it was a precious antidote to the poison his mother was ladling out:

“When are you going to give up this acting nonsense, Jason?” she would sneer, cupping a glass of blond liquid. “Look at your brother. He’s done very well for himself.”

“He’s a dentist. It’s easy to be a dentist and do well. Especially a gay dentist who doesn’t have to pay child support.”

Mom knocked a wormy piece of ash off her Winston. Bing Crosby sang “White Christmas” on the radio.

“Seven years in Hollywood? What does it amount to?”

Seven Years. Just enough of L.A. to know all the rush-hour short-cuts and avoid the flashy, famous boulevards that had at first made him fall in love with it. Bette Davis was asked on a talk show what advice she’d give to young actors starting out in Hollywood. She said, “Take Fountain.” Now most of Jason’s auditions took him on that fabled avenue to avoid traffic.

As Jason launched into a droning explanation to his students of the difference between the present continuous tense and the simple present tense, the nightly residents of room 39 became restless. Definition of present continuous tense: an actor doesn’t get the role and rent is due. Some students developed the dreamy sleepy eyes, others had mastered the trick of yawning without moving lips and yet he could still detect that pulmonary intake and the intensely bored look in the eyes that bordered on hostility. Students were yawning shamelessly, fidgeting in creaky chairs and tapping their toes. In one corner the smart ones, who could put together a whole sentence in English, were jabbering in their native tongue.

The class did take off for several minutes when Jason lucked onto the topic of New Year’s resolutions. Students were placed into groups of four, and the atmosphere immediately lightened up. One wanted to quit smoking, another to speak more English, a better job—which usually meant more money. Then it occurred to Jason: his New Year’s resolution would be to go on a date. He didn’t have much of social life to speak of, teaching at nights, and weekends he spent with Kit, who could be a bit like Bette Davis in the body of a 7-year-old. Her theatrical sobbing and pestering could be a drain.

As the conversation about resolutions petered out, jagged stop-and-go English was replaced by the steady sing-song of Spanish. Jason filled in the bubbles on his green roster sheet. Jason’s numbers were way down tonight. He came to one bubble on the sheet—Maria Concepción—never showed up, but what the heck. He penciled her in. The more students the merrier.

Jason glanced at the clock. With anguish he noted that 25 minutes remained. He was trembling. His heart was fluttering; he checked his pulse to see if it was irregular. He needed a word search puzzle. Yes, hunting out words from the grid of alphabets always kept them busy and whittled away the minutes. Desperately Jason searched his backpack for one. Anything of use in the jumbled verticality of unwanted papers and files was impossible to locate. Mad Queen Georgia, the principal, had prevented him from making that copy. Now here he was, twisting slowly in the wind, oozing flop sweat.

One by one, students kept picking up their books and leaving, nonchalantly. He’d turn his back on the class to write on the chalkboard, and one of the sneaky ones would slip by. Jason would turn around and see another desk suddenly empty. “But we’re not finished,” he stammered ineptly. “We have 10 more minutes. Lots of exciting things planned.”

Jason finally gave up and dismissed them five minutes early. It was less a dismissal that an abject surrender to the forces of boredom. Crushed and devastated, he started to pick up his markers and books. He couldn’t wait to be alone, light up a joint and recoil from the ache of having been rejected for another role.

He was just about to shoulder his backpack when he heard a voice call, “Teacher.”

There was Juventino, the student who’d been arrested before Christmas, shivering in the open doorway.

“Teacher, can you talk?”

The aroma of alcohol drifted over on his breath.

(to be continued)

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Grady
Hollywood humorist Grady grew up in the heart of Steinbeck Country on the Central California coast. More Bombeck than Steinbeck, Grady Miller has been compared to T.C. Boyle, Joel Stein, and Voltaire. He briefly attended Columbia University in New York and came to Los Angeles to study filmmaking, but discovered literature instead, in T.C. Boyle’s fiction writing workshop at USC. In addition to A Very Grady Christmas, he has written the humorous diet book, Lighten Up Now: The Grady Diet and the popular humor collection, Late Bloomer (both on Amazon) and its follow-up, Later Bloomer: Tales from Darkest Hollywood. (https://amzn.to/3bGBLB8) His humor column, Miller Time, appears weekly in The Canyon News (www.canyon-news.com)