Trust Exercise(64)
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MY FATHER WAS a carpenter. “Like Jesus,” to quote him. Also like Jesus, my father had a lot of other skills. Electricity, plumbing. Anything you need to know to build a house, my father knew how to do. After he split from my mother he’d still come back to our house on the weekends, to do big things and small, reshingle the roof, clear the gutters, rewire the ceiling fan, unclog the toilet. Even that, my mother couldn’t do herself. Once my mother had Ron, the first in a series of boyfriends, my father stopped coming, not that Ron knew how to fix anything. But my mother didn’t want Ron to feel shown up by my father’s grim competence. The things that got fixed were the things that I’d learned how to fix, by watching, but I couldn’t keep up with the house’s deterioration. By the time I was in high school, the house was returning to a state of nature. The grass was waist deep in the yard and there were oak trees taking root in the gutters. At the same time as our yard was taking over our house, my father’s house was taking over his yard. He’d added a deck and a kitchen extension, turned his two-car garage into a television room, and built a giant carport to shade his driveway. On our weekends, I’d drive my beater over there and work on it with him. There was nothing he didn’t know how to do: engine work, body work, he’d even salvaged leather seats for the interior. We didn’t talk much, share feelings or thoughts. My father and I—this is the story I tell myself; who knows how his story would go—are too much alike to be close. We’re both extremely competent, we both like to be left alone, we both had a weak spot for my mother and hate ourselves for it. Again, it’s possible that if you asked my father about him and me he’d say something completely different, though it’s more possible he’d say nothing.
When I was little my father supported us by doing carpentry and handy work, but at some point early on he started building sets and doing lighting for the opera, and got himself into the stage hands’ union. That’s what kept Kevin and me fed and clothed, my father’s union job and his decency toward us even though my mother, then as now, barely worked and spent her alimony on her boyfriends. My father worked rock concerts and film shoots, pretty much anything that used lighting, but his most steady paycheck remained the opera, the downtown theatre, and summer stage in the park—all the middle-of-the-road, status quo stages that David despised. David, who’d grown up with more money than anyone else in our school, burned with contempt for those places, which he would say offered cultural diversion for the self-regarding rich. On the other hand my father, who grew up poor and never went to college, would have scorned David’s rabble-rousing plays if he could have been bothered to know about them, which he couldn’t. When I told my father, who knows every union prop master in town, that I needed a gun that shot blanks for a show of David’s, my father made the huffing sound that lets you know he’s laughing. “What’s the show, The Marxist Revolution? Every time I see that kid interviewed in the Arts section he’s insulting rich people, but I notice he’s fine about taking their money. He’s got his angels like everyone else.” Although my father is Christian, by “angel” he didn’t mean a messenger of God. He meant a rich person who donated money to keep David’s theatre going.
“Yeah, it’s a conundrum. Anyway, I was thinking that Richie could help me.” Richie was a prop master friend of my father’s.
“A prop gun or a blank gun?”
“A blank gun. It gets fired.”
“So use the prop gun and a good sound effect.”
“Dad, I’m not the director.”
“I wouldn’t trust this person with a blank gun. Who’s his prop master? How do you know that they know what they’re doing?”
“I’m his prop master. And I know what I’m doing.”
“Just because there’s no bullet, it’s still dangerous. There’s still the cartridge and gun powder. No screwing around. That’s how Bruce Lee’s kid died.”
“That gun had a squib load in it.”
“Because the prop crew were morons. You’ve got to know what you’re doing.”
“I do, Dad.”
“Sure you do. It’s the morons I’m worried about.”
“Well, I won’t let them touch it,” I said.
I decided to take both a prop and a blank gun from Richie—for safety, we agreed. I even got two different models, so you couldn’t mistake them. The prop gun was a Colt replica with a wooden hand grip. Like any prop gun, it was a real-looking toy that did nothing. The blank-firing gun was an all-black Beretta. I didn’t even bring it to the warehouse until the full dress. It was the prop gun we used in rehearsal, the prop gun I held when, offstage, Martin and I acted out what the audience would hear but not see. Martin sat in a chair and I stood beside him, the prop gun in my hand, pointed down and angled away. I’d suggested blocking our movements backstage for safety and it was just the kind of detail David loved and believed in for the authenticity it would somehow convey. Doc sinking into his chair, the Girl taking position beside him, stepping her feet apart, bracing herself.
From that vantage, standing beside seated Martin, her gaze always fell on the same thing, Martin’s skull where it sprouted his ear. The connection between skull and ear seemed a little too loose. She’d lost the original Martin, who’d previously been preserved by her total recall down to the yellowish grooves of his nails. The night of the read-through, when he’d come slouching in next to David, for an instant the two Martins shimmered on top of each other, more alike than different but still marking the time from the past until now. It was the slightness of the difference between Martin Now and Past Martin that made it so strange. It was the thorough difference of Karen Now from Past Karen, the shocking difference of David Now from Past David, and the only slight difference, a connoisseur’s difference, between the two Martins, that made it so strange. Strange enough to make you think that you hadn’t known Martin at all in the past. The original Martin, already so hard to attest to, was absorbed by the Martin of Now, and even Karen with her total recall couldn’t get him back out.