Moodswing - Play me

Grant has a good idea who he wants to play him in the TV series. “Rob Lowe,” he insists. Ha! I laugh. He’d be better played by a bald orangutan with a bad case of psoriasis. “Rob Lowe, my ass,” I bark. “Try Joey Buttafucco.” Lary says he wants to be played by Cartman, the cartoon character from South Park. Too bad that’s not possible, I think, because that there is a perfect match, pretty much.

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Daniel, on the other hand, has no idea who should play him, and he looks at me like I do. “How the hell would I know?” I ask him, but he still looks at me like I have an answer. “I don’t know,” I offer. “OK, Kirk Cameron?” Ignoring me, Daniel commences the list of attributes he feels the actor who portrays him should have. “He’s gotta have a tight ass,” he insists, “and stature.”

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Stature? When I first met Daniel he was in overalls on the floor of his one-room apartment in Little Five Points, surrounded by tuna cans and hair curlers, which at that time comprised a large part of his art supplies. That was nine years ago. He was a struggling artist and I was a struggling writer. Nine years later, not much has changed except that we each look a whole lot better on paper. He’s now represented by the Fay Gold Gallery, and I’m on my third book, the third in a series, the basis for which is this column. Last year Paramount bought the film rights and hence the demands from my subject matter to make sure the people who play them meet their standards. “Kato Kaelin?” I venture. Daniel does not even hear me. Thoughts of Mark Wahlberg are dancing in his head.

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I don’t think about the TV series too much. I have to keep it away from me for now. I remember years ago, when my Spanish tutor told me not to ponder too much about the language I was translating. “Carry it like a cup of coffee on a saucer,” she said. “Just be natural about it, don’t concentrate on it too much, because if you do, it will spill.” And I reflect on that a lot, because, yeah, I used to wait tables — still do, kinda, albeit in the air as a trilingual sky whore for a bankrupt airline — and I could carry four cups on four saucers at one time in one hand. But I could only do it if I didn’t think about it.

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And I’m damn proud of that, by the way, all the coffee saucers I can carry, plus cups. It’s a skill, I tell you, and I’m personally turned on by skills, so whenever I want to impress a guy, I pray an occasion will arise during which one of my skills will be required. Look at me carrying all these cups and saucers, I’ll think, makes you hot for me, huh? I’m also very skillful at CPR — one of the things they teach you at sky-whore boot camp — but unfortunately no one has died at my feet while I was with someone I wanted to impress. There was that one time a man fainted in front of me at the baggage claim at the Reno airport, but he was still breathing, so all I could do was sound authoritative while asking his travel companions if he had any allergies, which is not the same as skillfully breathing life back into a dead person. If I had been able to do that, I’m sure the man I was with would have been super impressed.

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When I met Daniel, his skill was pretending to be retarded, or at least borderline autistic. He’d wear his overalls askew, stare straight ahead and then just kind of suddenly launch into this fugue of manic art-making, after which he’d snap out of it and blink around at all his creations as if to convey his wonderment, “How’d all this get here?” He pretty much played everyone he met, and he tried to play me. But that’s all right. I tried to play him, too. At that time Grant was pretending he wasn’t gay, he played us like there was a possibility we’d buy his cover. Then, after he dropped his hetero cloak, for years afterward, just to mix things up, he’d occasionally shove his tongue down my throat. “What the hell was that?” I’d ask.

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“Just playing,” he’d say. Today we think about the people who will play us, or actually I try not to think about that too much. Because I’m very skillful at carrying cups and such, very good at working a blue-collar job at a bankrupt company, very good at projecting, “See? I’m not a rich and successful writer after all, I just play one in real life.” So sometimes I see people around town, at the coffee houses and such, who I think would make a much better me than I do. They could carry it off, I’m certain. They are beautiful or thin or at the very least very interesting looking, and success would rest very well on them, it seems to me, so it’s almost all I can do to keep from tapping them on the shoulder to say very politely, “Please,” and here I would pause for effect, maybe knit my brows a bit, “please play me.”

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Hollis Gillespie is the author of Confessions of a Recovering Slut: And Other Love Stories (Regan Books) and Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood (Regan Books). Her commentaries can be heard on NPR’s “All Things Considered.”