Zane, by contrast, lumbered through these scenes like a wounded animal dragging itself to a burial ground. Sweat soaked his underarms and he sprayed spittle across the stage. Once or twice he simply stopped mid-speech and gasped for air. Then, frowning with concentration, he would begin again, devastating Brecht’s elegant lines. I looked around to Irene Gentry. She sat, motionless, eyes facing the stage.
When the house lights went on at intermission, she was already gone.
Larry looked at me and said, almost irritably, “Whatever possessed him to do this play?”
“It is terrible, isn’t it?”
“No,” Larry replied. “He’s terrible.”
We got up to stretch.
“Gaveston is excellent, though,” I said.
“Mm. It’s a role Tony Good’s played in his life.”
“You know him?”
“Oh, yes,” he said in a curious voice.
“Meaning?”
“Tony sometimes offers his services as an escort to men of a certain age.”
“Have you ever taken him up on it?”
Larry shook his head. “No. I’m going outside to get some air. You coming?”
We went out.
In the first scene of the second half of the play Gaveston was killed. Tom Zane’s performance began to improve at once. In the final scenes, where Edward is dragged from castle to castle alone except for his jailers, Zane was transformed. His delivery was still awkward but the suffering he conveyed was authentic. Not just Zane’s expressions, but the contours of his face and his body changed so that he seemed a different man from the one who first stepped upon the stage. I began to believe that he was Edward the Second.
The culmination of his performance came in the assassination sequence. In the play, Edward has been locked in a cell in London, into which the city’s sewage drops upon him. Drums are pounded to keep him from sleeping. The assassin, Light- born, is let into Edward’s cell.
The scene began in darkness. Slowly, a blue light glimmered from a corner of the stage where a man stood, arms loose at his sides, face tilted upward toward the light. His hair was matted and his body covered with filth. This was Zane. In the flickering blue light it took me a moment to see that, other than a soiled rag that cupped his genitals, he was naked. Zane had a first-class body. He said:
This hole they’ve put me in is a cesspit.
For seven hours the dung of London
Has dropped on me.
A ladder of rope dropped from above the stage and an immense, powerfully muscled black man climbed down. Light- born. At once, Zane accused him of being his murderer. Light- born denied it.
Zane answered, “Your look says death and nothing else.”
The drums that had been heard from the beginning of the scene were suddenly still. Lightborn went to a brazier where he lit a coal fire. Zane watched impassively. An amber light was added to the stage. Then, approaching the king as he would a lover, Lightborn coaxed him to lie down on his cot and sleep. Zane resisted.
Pulling away, Zane turned to face Lightborn and again accused him of being sent as his murderer.
Lightborn touched his fingers to Zane’s filthy hair, picked out a bit of straw and repeated, “You have not slept. You’re tired, Sire. Lie down on the bed and rest a while.”
Zane turned to face the audience. Lightborn quietly approached him from behind and lifted his powerful arms which he wrapped around Zane’s chest as if intending to squeeze the life from him. Zane did not resist. Lightborn released his arms and once again urged the king to sleep.
Zane replied:
The rain was good. Not eating made me full. But
The darkness was the best…
Therefore let
The dark be dark and the unclean unclean.
Praise hunger, praise mistreatment, praise
The darkness.
Lightborn led Zane by the hand to a cot and Zane lay down. Looking at Lightborn he said, “There’s something buzzing in my ears. It whispers: If I sleep now, I’ll never wake. It’s anticipation that makes me tremble so.” He delivered these lines softly, as if speaking in a dream. I thought of Jim Pears. I glanced at Larry and wondered what he was thinking.
Lightborn kissed Zane on the lips. Then there was silence. Zane’s breath grew light and rapid as he slipped into sleep. The cot creaked as he turned on his stomach. Lightborn raised his hand into the air and caught a metal poker tossed down from where the ladder had come. He placed the tip of the poker in the brazier. The blue light flickered out, leaving only the amber which slowly changed to deep red.
Lightborn stood above Zane holding the poker a foot or two above Zane and aimed it directly between his legs, upward toward his anus. He flexed his powerful arms. The light went out.
Zane’s shriek rent the darkness.
It was only then that I remembered that the poker scene was not in Brecht’s play.
14
The actors took their bows and filed off the stage. Larry and I got up and made our way to the aisle. Sandy Blenheim, wearing pleated black leather pants and a voluminous white shirt, stopped us. He grabbed Larry’s hand and said, “You made it.”
“Hello, Sandy,” Larry replied, disengaging his hand. “You remember Henry Rios.”
“Hello,” I said.
Blenheim took me in with a reptilian flick of his eyes.
“You were that kid’s lawyer,” he said. “Too bad about him. It would have been a great movie.” To Larry he said, “Wasn’t T. Z. fabulous?”
“He got better toward the end,” Larry replied.
“The last scene,” Blenheim went on. “Perfect. You know it was his idea to do it with just the jock strap.”
“That last scene wasn’t in Brecht,” I said. “Brecht has Lightborn suffocate Edward.”
“T. Z., again,” Blenheim replied. “Someone told him that’s how the guy really died, so he wanted to do it that way.” He looked at me. “It’s kinda sexy, huh?”
“Yes,” I allowed. “It was.”
Blenheim smiled again as if confirming something about me. I could imagine what it was. I knew a tribesman when I saw one. So, it seemed, did he. He wagged a finger between Larry and me. “You two dating?”
Larry cut him off. “We’re friends, Sandy.”
“Well, why don’t you and your friend come over to Monet’s. Tom and Rennie are having a little party.”
“Henry?”
“Sure,” I replied, thinking that I might meet Irene Gentry there.
“That’s great,” Blenheim said. “Maybe you and me and Tom can get together about that contract, Larry.”
“Okay,” Larry replied without enthusiasm.
“See you there,” Blenheim said. He favored me with another narrow smile, and bounced off shouting the name of his next victim.
“Who’s Rennie?” I asked.
“Irene Gentry. The name Irene doesn’t really lend itself to abbreviation, but everyone calls her Rennie.”
“Rennie,” I repeated.
“Let’s go meet her.”
The sky was clear but starless. Only a trickle of water in the gutters gave any clue of the day’s rain. Santa Monica Boulevard was clogged with traffic — brake lights flared in the darkness, wheels squeaked to a halt — and the air was choked with exhaust fumes. Larry cadged a cigarette from a passerby and lit it.
“Monet’s isn’t far,” he said. “Let’s walk it.”
It was Friday night and the bars were doing brisk business. Country-western music blared from one in which, through smoked windows, male couples did the Texas two-step. Outside another bar a gaggle of street kids offered us coke. At a fast food shack, painted bright orange and lit up like a birthday cake, Larry stopped to buy a pack of cigarettes. A boy with stringy hair downed the house specialty, a pastrami burrito. I found the phone and called Josh Mandel. He answered on the second ring.