Dreaming

Jim Schepker

I had a dream last night.

I’m sorry about starting this story with those six worn and weary words, but I had been having dreams lately that had become increasingly unsettling.

In this dream I was an actor.

I had a new, demonic director.

And I couldn’t remember my lines.

“Cut…!  Tony… Tony… are you with us?  Tony?  OK, everybody, let’s take a break.  Back in ten. Tony, let’s talk, now.” 

And those nighttime tribulations were making my daytimes anxious, fidgety, even – unfamiliar experiences for me.

Sometimes in these dreams I appeared on the studio set, with no pants.  Other times I farted or belched in critical scenes.  And there was that dream when I was supposed to deliver that famous director to his backstage rendezvous, and in his driveway I backed over his two fat, just-coiffed poodles, crushing them both.

These job insecurity dreams were, I told myself, all to be expected, since acting had been a recent addition to my life’s many roles.

And now I was fast becoming Hollywood’s go-to character actor for parts that called for the older and wiser guy, the cranky curmudgeon, the eccentric sidekick, the crazy old coot.

Most of these guys were minor characters with only a couple of lines.  With a focus on one-liner puns, or a bit of pathos, or a flash of insight, I was mostly done.

My pointless life up to this point had prepared me well for this new acting career.

I had been a bartender, pizza spinner, landscaper, mobile dog groomer, high school janitor, bank security guard, Santa’s helper, and cabbie during the prior thirty-something years.

Through these roles I had played, and had met, a legion of personalities.

This eclectic lifestyle meant that I had been spending my life always trying to please others to make a buck.

There was the bank exec who had me routinely drive him to “confidential client meetings.” Those trips usually took us to neighboring towns’ nature preserve parking lots where he did sharp white lines of coke along with Times crossword puzzles.  He probed me for answers the whole time.

Or there was the lady with those shitty schnauzers.  The moment my van hit her driveway she was out the door and into her Beamer.  When she got back an hour or so later she would insist on showing me her latest Botox injection sites and demanding my appraisals.  “What do you think – should I keep seeing these clowns – do I even need this shit – do I look beautiful to you?”  All of this after I had usually been nipped once or twice by her damn dogs as I had earlier tried to muzzle them.

And there was that guy who came into the pizza parlor one Friday night at our busiest hour. He started going on and on about how he had ordered an extra-thin crust, but that was not what he had gotten, and he wanted a full refund even though he and his mutt had eaten the whole damn thing so he had nothing to return.  And when my extra-large crust accidentally spun over the counter and landed on him, enveloping his head and shoulders in a drooping, floury hood, well, the owner did not think it was an accident, but he let me finish the night shift before he showed me to the back door and locked it loudly behind me.

Don’t get me wrong.  Setbacks were always quietly accepted because I never expected to stick with any single career for long. I actually craved the variety of my many lives.  Yes, I always needed the money.  But even more, I needed the newness of my many new pathways. 

And so, while my mostly minimum-wage jobs always kept me scrounging, they maximized my lust for new places, new exchanges, new adventures and discoveries.

Take drinkers:  Some got weepy. Some, just sleepy. Others, angry.  A few, flirty.  And still others, feisty or funny.  And that circus of dispositions would all be lined up in a row, side by side on their stools on smoky Friday nights, pretty much oblivious to their mates on the left and right.

As the guy behind the bar, however, it was always my job to keep the cash register ringing and that tip jar stuffed by knowing who needed that wink, that pat on the shoulder, that ‘one on the house,’ that cold stare, that sympathetic question or smile.

And when the ingredients of some of those crazy concoctions, ordered mostly by perfumed dames in stilettos, began to slip my mind, I’d turn the whole mixing and throwing thing into a guessing-game quiz that involved the entire bar’s front row: “OK, everybody, that sweet lady on the last stool down there, yeah, the one in the gorgeous pink chiffon vest, yes, she’s waving now… she just ordered a fairy floss martini. Now who here among our many experts can tell me the exact ingredients to make the most perfect fairy floss martini to have ever graced this fair establishment? And ‘one on the house’ goes for the best answer.” 

Getting on board. Staying in line.  I was never good with any of that.  And eventually, looking back over my checkered past, I realized that my tenure and interest in my jobs was always directly determined by those jobs’ variety through the people I could meet.  A 3rd-shift security guard, that lasted one eternal night.  Dog grooming, one summer. But the cabbie, bartending, and pizza-spinning jobs all lasted years, and were intermittently returned to over the decades of my roustabout roles.

And that’s how the acting career got started.

One night a guy came into the bar, and asked for directions to a local, swanky hotel. Then he decided to have a single-malt for the road, and then he started making calls on his cell and chatting it up with me between his calls and extra “make it a double” orders. At closing, he called me ‘a natural,’ slid his card across the bar, and told me to call him on the following Monday.  He was working on something, and I just might be his guy for it.

And while my get-up-and-go had pretty much gotten-up-and-gone some time ago, I knew I should probably call this guy the following week.  He had left a good tip, and who knew when he might be back.

When I called on Monday I got his voicemail: “Hi, Michael, this is Tony, from Murphy’s, the bartender over there.  You told me to call you today, said you might have something for me.  But if you’re busy right now…you can always find me at Murphy’s off and on this week.”

He showed up that night.

Turns out Michael Dalton was a film producer, about to launch his next project.

Along the way, after that second meeting in the bar, I quickly did a dozen films with Dalton and several of his friends.  Maybe you’ve seen some of them.  Sure, mine were all minor roles, and I rolled through them with great gusto and genuine gratitude for having been able to reduce my bartending hours at Murphy’s, where I now just worked Saturdays, the big tip night.

And then came my Oscar opportunity.

The one unfilled role in Dalton’s newest film was a doddering, sweet old guy.  He had been raised among dirt-poor Cajuns, later survived the front lines of Peleliu and Okinawa, came home and raised a bit of Harley hell for awhile, started a family that produced four hellions in four years, and then opened a small-town hardware store that later became a national chain that eventually made him a millionaire.  I would be that guy in his later life, just as dementia was beginning to emerge, though his family was doing all they could to keep that creeping calamity a secret to avoid a collapse of their financial empire.

To prepare for my screen test with a new director, I knew I had to study up on this dementia thing.  Good thing for me that a regular at Murphy’s was a local librarian.  At the reference desk she googled the subject, showed me how to work the cursor, and I was off.

Memory loss…struggling to find the right words… getting lost on familiar routes… misplacing keys, hearing aids, pills and the toothbrush...  These were easy because they all seemed like standard operating procedures for me and most everyone I knew.

But I also learned that sadness and tears, trouble sleeping and eating, and the occasional drooling were also sometimes symptoms.

I even took a few of those 3-word and 5-word memory tests with the librarian to see how the diagnosis process worked. 

So it would now be my job in this role to master that blank 1,000-yard stare, the slurry stuttering, the frantic check of all available pockets, and that forehead scratching and eye rubbing that would all be the tools of my portrayals – all familiar enough already to me that I hardly needed any practice.

I decided that this wouldn’t take much acting at all – and yes, indeed, I got the part, right on the spot!

Since I was only playing the part of the guy’s later life, it was not a big part – maybe a hundred lines or so.  But they were what the Director called the film’s “critical denouement crisis lines.”  (The director spelled ‘denouement’ with great delight, so I wrote it down.)

And I studied those lines night and day. 

Up until now I had always best expressed my characters through my facial expressions, not so much with words.  Turns out my face was as malleable as the soft dough that I had kneaded for so many years at Gino’s.  An arched eyebrow, a sly wink, a dropped jaw, bobbing hairline, flaring nostrils, it turns out I had a face with “…great depth and range…” according to one film critic.

But words – they generally came hard.  I had to rehearse even short sentences for days, and then thirty or forty times just before their delivery on set, with many of them still interrupted by directorial “Cut!” outbursts.

To try to make light of this, I had begun to develop what I silently called my Demention Mentions.

And when I forgot that second word, as I sometimes did, I just called them my Dementions.

·      “These days I’m forgetting what I forgot.

·      “I’m blessed now with a completely clear conscience.  In fact, I’m not much conscious of any conscience at all anymore.

·      “A friend told me recently that the one really important thing he needs to remember about himself these days is that he pretty much never remembers anything.

·      “I know that Mark Twain once said that if you tell the truth, you never have to remember anything. I guess that’s why I don’t remember much.  I’m so honest.

I used these lines on the sidelines with fellow actors, hoping to lighten up the set mood.

And did they work?

At first I think they did.  I always got laughs and backslaps.

But the “Cut!” interruptions began to become exasperating to others, the sideline smiles now wearing thin.

At first I dramatically defended myself. 

“I’m just playing the part…just adlibbing a bit.  The camera needs to capture my anxieties and fears as I grope for the right words.  I’ll get to those words soon enough.”

Or, this one: “These lines are way too long for my character.  And he would never try to use all those words with so many syllables. That’s just not him!”

So there was some modest rewriting of parts of the script.

And then the Director started to place large teleprompter screens on the set, always out of camera view. He began to film me exclusively from broadside angles as I spoke face-to-face to the other actors.  This let me see those screens above their heads as I delivered my lines.

And when I absolutely had to endure an over-the-shoulder shot, the Director let it be for the shortest of all possible lines – and often for just a hearty laugh or growling grunt. 

I had been noticing in my own life some parallel issues with my demented millionaire character about this same time.

Take those damn User IDs and passwords.  Who among us really remembers those suckers, especially when you need them the most?

I started coping by keeping a list at home. 

I know, I know… a major security risk, according to the digital police.  But hey, just walking across the street also comes with certain risks. 

And now I keep that list taped to the bottom of my bathroom trash can.  A fitting place, I think. Who would ever bother looking there?

And as for remembering my digital identities when I’m out and about, I considered having the bank password stuff, especially for ATM and liquor store debit transactions, tattooed on my arm, tattoos like the Nazis used to put on the forearms of prisoners, but maybe in some sort of reverse order to keep them truly secret.  But then I figured I’d soon forget what I had done to disguise them, so where would that leave me?

So I scribbled a few items on a post-it note and stuffed it into my wallet… just in case.

And, no, I did not have the note laminated, as some of my friends have recently done.

On a side note, all in all, I think that this whole dementia thing is unfairly getting a bad rap.  People are terrified of it.  They’re willing to lie about it – or pay a fortune for medications that may or may not work, and even if so, maybe just a little bit. 

And that’s if they even remember to take the meds.

As for me, in those occasional moments when I do forget things, sure, it can be annoying.

But that’s because they’re mostly small, trivial things. They’re the aggravations of life, like misplaced keys, forgotten names, waylaid pills, lost home or phone numbers.

And even if these things occur, I can usually find someone around who can help me find my way.

And for the really important things… remembering to eat, or to find a men’s room, or to breathe and sleep… eventually my basic survival skills always step up to do the job.  

Right now I sometimes try to imagine what it must be like to forget things on a grand scale, and how good that might be.

First, your memory goes.  And with it, those nagging regrets. Those worrisome worries. Those burning ambitions. Those awful anxieties. 

You’re left then with only unabashed bliss. 

And ask yourself now, what is that word “bliss” usually paired with?

Nope, it’s not sort-of-nice bliss.  Or very-comfortable bliss.  Or even happy bliss.

Yes, it’s perfect bliss.

So, perfect… what can ever get better than that? 

And why should we ever try to rob people of that?  I say they’ve likely lived long, long lives, and now they’ve earned that bliss!

And now, as I think about wrapping up this piece, and my life, this all reminds me that I need to get started on my last will and testament today.  My acting jobs and Saturday nights at Murphy’s have allowed me to set aside some serious cash.  If I go before it does, I want to make sure it all goes to the right places.

Now I just need to remember where I put that damn yellow legal pad.