near hollywood

We met in acting class. Scene Study. We did a scene from Death of a Salesman. He was Biff and I was Hap and the scene was about our dad getting too old to drive and about living free and making money and dreams that were just dreams. The teacher kicked us out for fucking around. It felt like high school. It felt like getting detention. We were only 17. We didn’t care. We were going to be movie stars. We laughed all the time. We made NYC our playground.

He’d lived a hard life. He never graduated high school. He’d been in juvie. He beat up his dad when he was 15. He hustled and stole. He taught me some things.

I totaled my parents’ car. I’d been seeing a married woman over the summer. In Herter Hall’s basement, the bathrooms were busy, glory holes carved in the toilet dividers. I was a college brat.

We made the rounds. Dropped off pictures and resumes. Auditioned. Snuck into the Equity lounge, did a song-and-dance routine before security kicked us out. They didn’t touch us. We both knew movies from before our time. Recited lines from On the Waterfront. Brando in the back of the cab. I coulda been a contender.

He quit acting. He started a roof company, a one-man, one-ladder operation. Sometimes I’d help him do jobs in Manhattan. Spread flashing tar. Spread aluminum coating. Sometimes we’d find a ball on a roof and throw it around until we threw it as far as we could. Sometimes we heard it bounce on a street somewhere. 

I got my SAG card. An under-5 on One Life to Live.

I bailed him out of jail one night in New Haven.

He moved back to LA where he was from. He started getting religious. He flew back to NYC just to talk to me. He wanted me to think about Jesus. Every time he swore he looked to heaven like he was asking God for forgiveness. I told him to stop. I told him his sense of humor made him special and God wouldn’t want to take away his irreverence.

Sometimes he called me. He said he was going to build a church.

I stayed in NYC. I kept doing some things he taught me, things he wasn’t doing anymore.  

We lost touch.

A little over a year ago I typed his name into Google. I wanted to see where he was, what he was doing. His name came up and next to it, in parentheses, it said deceased. It was April Fools’ Day, it really was April 1st when I looked, and the word deceased went through me and I knew it wasn’t a joke.

I tracked down his daughter. I knew he’d had a daughter when he was still a kid. I found her, she was living in California, and she told me he’d stopped taking his meds. I didn’t know he was taking meds. She said he hung himself from a tree in the mountains near Hollywood. 

Adam Berlin has published four novels and a story/flash collection, All Around They’re Taking Down the Lights. His non-fiction micro-chap And Paris Is Beautiful Too is just out, part of Bull City Press’s INCH series.  adamberlin.com