True Theater

Appeared in Firewords Quarterly, Issue 10

I fold myself into the driver seat of the white Camry, slide the seat back, and wonder why I always steal cars that belong to short people. It’s so quiet I can hear the street light buzzing above me, somebody yelling on the next block. The ignition cover is stubborn, secured in places I can’t see. I prod with the Phillips-head while scanning the street and glancing at the windows and doors of the surrounding houses. I finally peel the plastic shell away, remove the ignition lock cylinder, hammer the flat head into the hole, and turn it like a key. Pop music blasts from the speakers until I punch the power button.

I examine my face in the rearview mirror. The cotton balls in my gums make my cheeks look puffy, accentuating the scar above my lip. The cheap suit and short blonde wig make me look like a man. This is the kind of performance my agent does not understand. No money, no fame. No auditions. No cameras or tickets. Just blood and adrenaline.

I flip a U-turn, click on the headlights. Only empty street behind and in front of me. I pinch my inner thigh with my thumb and middle finger nails and, like a magnet, all the energy fizzing through me flows to that tiny point. Harder and harder I pinch. My mouth waters.

“You must begin to dream,” I whisper out the partially opened window.

Going thirty-five, I drive up Cherokee Avenue, pass the two-story houses with small yards separated by wooden white fences. I join a line of cars that twists up to the stop light.

My phone vibrates. OK? the text from J.J. reads.

On way, I reply.

I pinch the skin on the inside of my bicep. I want to scream until my throat sputters, ram the cars in front of me and stand on the gas, moving them out of my way, making my tires screech and smoke. I take a deep breath, hold it, release it, and force a frown to look bored like the people around me.

Just wait, I tell myself. The light turns green. Closer.

The last three days have been spent locked in my room; no lights, computer, or phone. I sat and slept on the floor, stared at the trees outside my window, watched buzzards fly in wide, sweeping circles over my street. I sipped water from a white paper cup and scooped peanut butter from the jar. By the third day I thought the buzzards were in the room, waiting for me to fall asleep. The floor felt like cement. Sweat dripped from the walls. My legs cramped, knots formed in my neck and back. I filled pages with words, then burned the pages. Enduring pain for these rites is the only way to make them sacred.

I turn onto Glenwood Avenue, flanked by new beige and white condos. In front of one of the buildings is a brightly lit fountain spraying water into the air. The lights change from yellow to red to blue. Just out of the lights’ reach I see the feint outline of a buzzard, waiting. This will be the place for my next performance, I decide.

Half a block behind me, a truck maneuvers through traffic. The other drivers honk and slam on their brakes as the driver cuts them off. The truck flies up behind me and turns on their high beams. My heart pounds like a fist on a wall. I turn onto Moreland Avenue, close my right eye to the glare and tilt the rearview mirror up. The truck engine revs and the lights grow brighter in the side mirrors. The driver must know I stole this car, or I stole their car in the past. They’ve been stalking me, waiting to catch me, to bloody me.

Squealing right onto Memorial Drive, I angle the mirror back down and the truck’s lights fill the frame. I weave left and right, going sixty, pass cars, rush through a green light. There is an empty parking lot ahead where I can ditch the car and run until my lungs give out.

The truck, though, falls back. From the top of the hill, I watch it pull into the Hardee’s drive through. I punch the steering wheel and spit on the passenger seat. The car in front of me stops suddenly. I stomp the brakes before smashing into its bumper. In the parking lot of an abandoned bank, I whip the car around, and jam on the accelerator to beat the cars flying down the hill. The car redlines and, gripping the wheel so tightly, my pulse throbs in my palms. Every hair on my head feels like a thousand tiny sparks. Closer.

The bright headlights remind me of the studio lights at my last audition for a TV show on AMC, where the hefty, bald casting director stopped me just after I started my monologue and ordered me to I stick out my tongue.

“You want me to stick out my tongue?” I asked, still deciding if he was joking, and what to do if he wasn’t.

“Have you ever noticed that you have an unusually small tongue?” he asked.

I should have said something sharp like, “I’m sure your dick is half the size of my tongue.” Instead, I bounced my tongue on the roof of my mouth and against the backs of my teeth, trying to feel its size.

“Pass,” the casting director said, then crossed his arms and whispered in the ear of the man beside him.

“Thank you for your consideration,” I said, flashing a fake smile.

Later that day my agent said the casting director requested me back. “He’s offering you another chance,” he said.

I said, “That’s great, let’s schedule it,” but I didn’t show up because I am done waiting for people to offer me chances and am creating these performances now and cruel as they may be they are, unlike commercials, TV shows, plays, impossible to ignore.

Three blocks from the corner of Moreland and Euclid Avenue, the two-lane road spreads out into four. A steady stream of traffic flows the opposite way. “Pay life the price it must be paid,” I whisper.

A text message arrives. I’m here, J.J. says. I imagine her parked in a pocket of darkness on the street, hunching down, hoping nobody sees her.

At two blocks away, the red and blue neon lights from the bars flash and gleam. I hear the bands playing for college kids and tattooed moms. Drunk people walk down the sidewalk, avoiding the hungry people crouching in the shadows. Pedestrians are piled up on the corners, waiting to cross the street. I slow down. The two cars behind me pass. One honks. I pull down the seatbelt, lock it into place. Closer.

“You are destroying yourselves,” I say.

I drive through the intersection and jerk the wheel, aiming for a place where nobody is standing, lift my foot from the accelerator, hold my breath, force my eyes to stay open.

The car veers right and plows into the back of a parked blue Mercedes. Glass blooms like fireworks. My body slams forward, and the back of the Toyota lifts from the ground, then drops with a bang. A cold pain spreads through my left shoulder and chest.

When I try moving my left arm, pain from my collarbone shoots through me. I place my hand on the bone and feel the two pieces where it is broken. The driver side door is jammed closed. I straighten my wig with the trembling fingers of my right hand, crawl over the center console and out the passenger side.

The crowd surges toward me as I stagger from the wreckage, but they jump back when I release a scream that rips through the night. No monologue is necessary here. Still screaming, I crouch then fall to my side, banging my hip on the ground. I writhe and wail in a rhythm similar to that of a volcano or an earth quake. I no longer feel the ground or hear the people. It only lasts for a minute, but a lifetime of energy streams out of me. A blackness fills my empty body; a ringing reverberates through my head.

I open my eyes to the staring people. Some cover their eyes with long, bony fingers, others record the scene with their phones. Cars filled with more people surround the wreckage.

I gag as the cotton from my cheeks slides down my throat.

A woman shouts, “I’m calling to report an accident.”

I roll to my side, wipe the bits of concrete from my face and, with a grunt, push myself to my knees. The pain from my collarbone stabs me, makes me gasp.

Reflected pin points of bright light shoot in every direction from the twisted bumpers, the splintered glass, the hundreds of jagged angles created by the conjoined cars.

Unable to stand up straight, I hobble away from the intersection. A man follows me. In my hoarse voice I say, “I’ll be right back. My house is just—” I fling my right arm in some direction. I widen my stance to keep my balance.

“Are you O.K.?” he asks. I nod.

Another man and a woman approach. “The police are coming,” the woman says.

I turn and trudge through a front yard, stumble down a gravel alley behind darkened houses, duck under a clothesline, step over a planter. I moan.

It reminds me of the first time I stole a car for a performance and drove along an empty country road patched with gravel and tar, flying by the fields of soybeans and corn until I found the perfect solitary tree standing in the moon’s silver light. After I crawled from the mangled car, I walked the thirty miles home, my skin tingled. A thin creek of blood trailed behind me. Nobody stopped to ask if I was O.K.

I move through the shadowed street, staying close to the houses. A car sits idling with its fog lights on. J.J. flashes the headlights and unlocks the door for me to crawl in. I toss my wig on the floor.

The streetlights flash through the car as we speed back to the crash site. I hold my left arm to my chest to keep it stable.

The tires roll over the glass in the intersection. I stay low. There are no voices, no engines running or tires rolling. There is only the sound of heavy radio static. I don’t know from where it’s coming, but it is deafening. J.J. gets out and takes a photograph of the cars.

At home we’ll print the photos and tack them beside the others. I will look at all the space on the wall to be filled, think fondly of the past performances and imagine all those still to come.