“My mother was killed in a stampede in Norway,” Toca Sacar said. This is more information than I need, I thought.
“When?” I said. I thought perhaps it had happened recently and that he was still mourning. I would have to ask about the details. A stampede in Norway wasn’t that usual. A reindeer stampede? It was possible.
“Years ago. 1974.” He didn’t seem to want to elaborate, even though he’d brought the subject up without any preliminary.
Let’s flip for it, I thought. “Was your mother Norwegian?” I said. “Or a Laplander?” I love the idea of someone being a Laplander. It suggests so many things. Expert at lap dancing. Etcetera. And I wanted to know in case the reindeer scenario developed.
“No, she was on vacation. They were visiting a glacier in horse-drawn carriages. And the horses bolted onto the glacier. Carriages overturned. People fell out on the ice. I never got the details. I was very young.”
In your dreams, I thought. Toca Sacar had to be fifty-something. He had to have been something like my age when the careening carriages flew across the ice. If it ever happened at all.
“I’m sorry. Did she fall into a crevasse?” I said.
“No, I think she just hit her head on the ice.”
I thought of my own mother and said, “That must have been hard for you. To have had to grow up without a mother.”
“Oh, she hardly figured in my life anyway. She had been a child star in vaudeville as Baby Marie and spent the rest of her life trying to regain her stardom. She was there with some Norwegian impresario who had told her he could launch a comeback for her in Oslo. It wouldn’t have happened anyway. She didn’t speak a word of Norwegian. And I can’t imagine her ever learning.” He added sighing, “No, it was probably for the best that she left this world before she had completely lost her looks.”
“Was she beautiful?” I said.
“No. But she thought she was. Which is really the same thing. It all has to do with confidence. She wasn’t beautiful the way you are,” he said.
“Please,” I said.
“I think I’m falling in love with you,” he said.
“I wish you wouldn’t,” I said.
“I can’t help myself,” he said.
“Oh, Toca, I’m sure you can help yourself. What should I tell you? That I’m promised to another? That I’m not gay? That I have deformed sexual organs? Which one would you like?” I said.
“Well, the deformed sexual organs add a certain piquant touch to the whole conversation. But I’m sure you don’t. I’m sure . . .”
“Don’t go there, Toca. To be direct, you don’t have a Chinaman’s chance at a Japanese gang bang.”
“That’s a great expression! You are quite wonderful, Hugo. If I have to be mooning around after someone this summer I think it’s going to be you.”
“Toca, you put me in a very awkward position. You’re the director here at the Festival. I’ll wind up playing Bottom if I don’t bottom I suppose, in that famed production of Midsummer Night’s Dream you’re planning.”
“Oh, not at all, darling. I’m not that stupid. You’re going to add a lot to all the productions we’re doing out here at the end of the earth, and I’m not going to cut off my nose to inspire my face by sticking you in the back row of anything.”
“To spite my face,” I said.
“In spite of your face? But your face is one of your best attributes.”
“The expression is, ‘Cut off my nose to spite my face.’”
“Is it? I wish I spoke English as well as you do, Hugo. But, of course, it is your first language.”
I said, “It’s not yours?”
“Yes. But you know I never learned to speak it very well.”
Toca Sacar was our director for the Festival. He had a good name in New York for bizarre fringe offerings. He had done Romeo and Juliet on skates long before anyone else was putting skates on stage. He had done the stage version of Lawrence of Arabia in a swimming pool, which I, for one, thought was inspired. In the press he was quoted as saying, “I wanted to do away with everyone’s preconceptions.” Putting a horde of good-looking dark guys naked in a swimming pool with a camel hadn’t hurt business at all, either. That song they did, “Humping,” even got a certain amount of notice.
And then he did a revival of A Chorus Line and had everyone in edible underwear, which they took off and threw into the audience. People were fighting for them. Who knew chewing someone’s knickers was such a big thing?
He seems quite normal, Toca. Average height, dark hair and eyes, with something slightly mechanical about him. As though he had programmed himself to be normal. And there were many other programmings possible. That’s where all those directing ideas came from. All those other channels lurking in there.
“Who brought you up, Toca?” I said. We were taking a break from our rehearsal of The Trojan Women. So far, none of the women’s roles were being played by men, everyone had their clothes on, and it wasn’t going to be performed in Nazi costumes. So far. Toca and I were sitting on a bench in front of the Abbey’s main façade, which for some reason faced across empty fields, which made it invisible from any viewpoint unless you approached it on foot across those same fields. Few did. It, too, looked like the train station in Blois but an earlier version and much, much bigger. The Abbey had been a boys’ school for eight hundred years, and the boys had lived here all year-round. No vacations in those days. It was pleasant sitting on the bench with Toca. Since it was July it was warm but far from tropical. There’s a lot to be said for France in the summer.
“My grandfather,” Toca said. “He was a barber, and I used to help him around the shop.”
“Where?” I said.
“In New Jersey.” He said, “Newark, to be exact.”
“That made it easy to get into New York.”
“He would never let me go. He had let my mother go and look what happened.”
“Death in Norway,” I said.
“Worse than that. My grandmother took her into the city, and the two of them never came back. Except to drop me off.”
“So you are really an orphan,” I said.
“Did I say that my grandparents are dead?”
“They’re not?”
“I’m not that old. No, they reconciled. My grandfather always said she’d come back someday when she got tired of fooling around.”
“So what do they do now?” I said.
“He’s still cutting hair. And she’s calling almost every day to see what’s happening with my career. She’s my stage mother now.”
“So how did you get started, Toca?” I said. It was getting time to go back to the other students, but now I was interested.
“I was in A Chorus Line like everybody else. I did the ‘Buffalo’ speech.”
“I remember ‘I was going to commit suicide, but I was already in Buffalo and decided it was redundant.’”
“Yeah. But it was ‘I was going to kill myself . . .’”Toca said.
“And how’d you get that?” I said.
“I’d done it in college. And this wasn’t the original company. As I said, I’m not that old. This was about the fourth touring company. But one of the guys in the show wrote a play and I fucked him to get a chance to direct it. The critics liked it although it only ran for about four nights in the Irish Repertory Theater. I could write a better show myself right now standing on my head.”
“Like what?” I said.
“I’ve got a couple of ideas. I want to do a musical called Radium. The life story of Marie Curie. She fucks Alfred Nobel to get the Nobel Prize for her husband for his discovery of radium. And they fall in love. Albert and she. The big number that ends the second act is called ‘Meet Me at the Maginot Line.’ It’s pre–World War I. The chorus girls are in French and German uniforms. Mark Morris could choreograph it. Very combative.”
“I think the Maginot Line was France’s defense in World War II,” I said.
“Who remembers that stuff? They’re all dead.”
I said nothing.
Toca said, “There isn’t a part in it for you.”
I said, “I wasn’t thinking about that.”
“I have another show I want to do. The working title is No, No, Gustave. It’s about the building of the Eiffel Tower and Gustave Eiffel. You know a lot of people didn’t want it built. And it was always planned to be temporary. It’s a dramatic subject.”
“Could I play Gustave?” I said.
“I was thinking that.”
“But you’ve never heard me sing.”
“Who cares? Those electronic guys can make your Aunt Bessie sound like Celine Dion. It’s all faked nowadays.”
“I’d hate to think that,” I said.
“It’s all for the audience. They like fake. They want it fake. Otherwise, Celine Dion would be in the toilet. All that crap. Cirque du Soleil. All that stuff. And most of it comes from Canada. Did you ever think of that? There they are up there where they’ve got eleven months of snow and one month of poor skating, and they turn out all this drivel.”
“They’ve got their finger on the pulse, I guess.”
“Yeah, and it’s hardly beating.”
“You don’t seem to think very highly of the American public, Toca,” I said. I stood up and turned toward the Abbey. I could see the other students gathered around the entrance waiting for us. They probably were hating me for being the teacher’s pet.
“That’s not my concern. For me, when you say ‘show business,’ the emphasis is on business. Who was it said, ‘Irony. That’s what closed last Saturday night’? If it doesn’t run, there really isn’t much point in doing it.”
“So why are you here?” I said.
“Cranston Muller is a great friend of mine. He needs a name? He can have mine. And who knows? Maybe I’ll find a new property. Or a new star like yourself.”
“You’re a real dollars-and-cents kind of guy, aren’t you, Toca?” I said.
“Not really. But I don’t like hanging around with people who have big plans and then don’t deliver. If you’re going to do it, then bust your ass and try.”
“What was the worst time of your life?” I said. We were almost at the front door. I was right. The students were glowering.
“I came to in the backseat of a taxi in the Bronx wearing pink panties and a cross.”
“That was the worst?”
“That or once I came to on a beach completely naked and the last thing I remembered was going to a party in Spokane.”
“Where were you?” I said.
“San Francisco.”
“You seem pretty adept at extricating yourself from difficult situations,” I said.
“Fortunately, I was still good enough looking that I could sleep my way out of it. You have to hang onto your body. You never know when you’re really going to need it.” Turning to the students he said, “So, how are they hanging? Are you as bored with this production as I am? Let’s go inside and you can all choose the role you want to play. And we’ll perform it that way. If we’ve got two or three people for the same role, we’ll get all intellectual and tell the audience that it represents the different aspects of the character: conscious, unconscious, id, all that crap. Whaddya say?”
No one said anything. We went inside. As he passed me Toca turned and said, “By the way, did you know that your host used to be a porn star?”
“Graham?” I said.
“You never heard of Chase Manhattan?” And he moved into the group.