I was able to concentrate on Jane, and at the same time I was also practicing Steve. And by practicing I mean not just imitating, I was practicing being, and I continued practicing, noticing my thoughts, good and bad, and noticing the world in front of me.
At a certain point I realized that trying to dance like someone else wasn’t good for dancing. So I stopped, turned my attention to the person whose hands I was holding and whose body was pulling, and being pulled, by me. And with Jane I seemed to be light on my feet, or at least lighter than normal.
“You’re light on your feet,” she said.
“You think so?”
We were holding hands and I was twirling her. That was something I could do. Twirling was fun, and we were having fun doing it, dancing as if in a movie, an old movie, a black-and-white movie starring Cary Grant.
Later, we were sitting again on the beanbag chair, drinking tea, our hands curled around our separate mugs. Billie Holiday started singing a song about love, singing that love was “like a faucet, it turns off and on. .” And I was like a faucet, or Steve was a faucet, something was a faucet and I didn’t care what it was because, looking into her eyes, her head leaning against the soft pillows, her face turned toward mine, I felt desire, and I didn’t examine that desire to determine if it was my desire or Steve’s desire. It was just what it was, and I held her midsection in my hands, just below her ribs, and we started kissing.
Walt Whitman famously said he contained multitudes, and I knew what he meant because as desire expanded in me, Steve also expanded. I could feel it happening and I was letting it happen. We were squirming around each other, into each other and through each other, in a multitude of ways. And then she led me to the bedroom.
I was acquainted with her body now and knew a little better what she liked, and what I liked with her. I knew how she liked to be touched and kissed, and we touched each other and kissed each other, and I knew her neck was sensitive. She pulled her sleeveless shirt up and over her head. Her bra came off and we were still wearing socks. I felt like kissing her breasts, so I did. I unbuckled her belt and we pulled, first her pants off, then mine, and I was in my underwear and she was in hers, and Here I am, I thought, with a beautiful woman, and then the thought disappeared. Or more accurately, it became Steve’s thought. Lying in bed, our faces half buried in our pillows, I realized that my desires and Steve’s desires were the same, that I’d been merely resisting — for whatever reason — the reality of these desires. I was looking at her half-buried face, and the thing I’d been trying to be, now without trying, I was.
You sometimes hear people say, “Take the bull by the horns,” meaning face some dilemma and act, which was what I was doing, going to the office of Scott’s agent and trying to get a job as an actor. In my own opinion I was a pretty good impersonator now, and if I could get paid for it, why not? I had the number of the casting agent, and I called her, arranged an audition, and there I was, sitting on a purple sofa, thumbing through the current issue of People.
I’d created what I called the art of continuous Steve. Not being Steve for just a moment, but being a nonstop Steve. It had required effort, and I’d put in that effort. And when I was called into the casting director’s office I stood up off the purple sofa, trying to retain some fruit of that effort.
I was led into a large room where a large woman framed by large windows was sitting behind a large desk piled with papers and photographs of actors’ faces. Bonnie, the casting director, was talking to me and I was sitting in a comfortable chair trying to make a good impression. I kept repeating her name, saying, “Well, Bonnie,” or “It seems to me, Bonnie,” hoping that the repetition of her name would facilitate some rapport. Since this was an audition, I suppose she was getting to know if she liked me, and so we talked. I told her about the traffic on my drive over and she told me about Scott, that he’d called her from Tucson and that he might be staying there for a while. And then she asked me to do my thing.
“Thing?”
“Make me laugh.”
“Ahh. .” I said. “That.”
“Isn’t that what you’re good at?”
I could see she was looking at my hair, and I explained that although my specialty was Steve Martin, Steve wasn’t always funny.
“Just give me a sample,” she said. “You know. .” and she moved her hand to indicate that I was free to do anything I wanted.
So I sat up in the chair and started talking. I forget about what because the important thing was Steve, and I talked with a come-what-may, devil-may-care joie de vivre that seemed to me quite charming.
“You do other things too,” she said. “Right?”
“Yes,” I said, but in my mind I was thinking no, that I don’t do other things, that Steve is what I do. And because she was waiting for me to do something, and because I wanted to do something, not knowing what else to do, I said, in a Steve Martin version of a Nelson Mandela imitation, “How, are, you?”
Audition comes from the Latin, “to hear,” and the Steve Martin accent I heard coming out of my mouth sounded good to me, but Bonnie was there to make money, and since there weren’t that many calls for a Steve Martin impersonator, although she was looking at me in a sympathetic way, I started to worry. Alison had told me that my neck was too long, that I should wear a shirt with a collar, and I think Bonnie was looking at my neck. There was no way to shorten it so I tried to relax. I knew that relaxation was the key, but how could I relax with the desk, and the head-shots on the desk, and my neck.
“You are intense,” she said, and then she closed her eyes. I assumed she was trying to visualize me. As something. I didn’t know what it was but when she opened her eyes she said she had an idea. She was casting a crime show and they needed a serial killer, and she thought I might be good at that kind of thing.
“Really?”
“Give it a shot,” she said.
When I lived in New York I tried my hand at writing screenplays, and in an effort to get better at writing for actors I enrolled at a theater school. It was famous at the time, and before you were permitted to take a class you had to have a one-on-one orientation session with the teacher. Mine took place in a small room with miniature chairs, like kindergarten chairs, and I sat on one of these chairs and the teacher, a woman with muscular arms, told me, “Repetition is death.” She said, “Whatever you do, you have to feel it like it’s the first time because I want to sit on your face each time is the first time or you lie to yourself and you start to rot inside, and then you die, and that’s why repetition is death.”
She looked at me as if she hadn’t said what I thought she’d said, and so I said to her, “What did you say?”
“Repetition is death.”
“No. Before that, you said something.”
“Whatever you do, you have to feel what it is for the first time.”
“No. You said something else. Something. . You said. .”
“Repetition is death. Repetition is death.” She kept repeating, “Repetition is death.” And yes, it was weird, but really she was a very good teacher, because after I’d left the room and was walking down the street, and even now, years later, the only thing I remember for sure that she said was, Repetition is death.
Bonnie was looking at me, sitting behind her large desk, not as formidable as she’d seemed before. I was in one of two chairs facing the desk, and I remember standing up, looking out, past her gray or slightly purple office, to the sky outside the window. I’d spent so much effort making my life become Steve’s life, and here was this person giving me the freedom to change that life, and although I knew that repetition was probably death, because Steve gave meaning to my life, I was stuck. When I tried to imagine how I could act that was different than Steve, I couldn’t. And that’s when it happened. That’s when I became aware of emotions bubbling up in my body, and one of these emotions was resentment, at Steve. Steve, it seemed, was constraining me, and the longer I stood there, not moving, the more I felt the constraint, and with it, the resentment, hardening, turning into anger, and then into something like hatred, and although these emotions were directed at who I was, I was looking at Bonnie. And as I stared at her, in her swivel chair, it occurred to me that these emotions, and an inability to change these emotions, might be a key to the psycho mentality.