by Bill Kitcher
I
My dad made me go to the play at the school he was working at for a year. I didn’t like plays in those days. I generally didn’t like things that forced me to go outside. I liked reading and TV. I didn’t like going to school. I had a port-wine stain on the right side of my face, and kids always made fun of me.
But I liked the play; it was funny. It was a parody/homage of 1950s greaser movies. The music was good. The story was about a gang, and the second-in-charge wanted to take over the gang by setting up the gang leader to get busted and sent to reform school. Silly plot, and naturally the second-in-charge lost.
The best thing in the play was the guy who played the gang leader. He was really cute and had a great voice and I found it difficult to keep my eyes off him. The program said his name was Bryce Jameson. I guess he was eighteen, three years older than I was.
At the end of the play, the song “Blue Suede Shoes” boomed out, the Carl Perkins version, not Elvis’s. All the cast came off the stage into the audience, grabbed people, and dragged them on stage to dance.
I saw Bryce coming up the aisle I was sitting on, and thought, “No no no. This can’t happen.”
But he grabbed my hand. I tried to resist, but he pulled me out of my seat, and took me onstage. He obviously didn’t care about my hideous birthmark. We jived. Well, he jived, and I attempted to follow him. It was almost fun; I was aware of the stage lights focusing on my birthmark, but for a couple of minutes I felt normal.
At the end of “Blue Suede Shoes”, Bryce went to the front of the stage, and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the celebration will continue in the cafeteria. We’re having a Fifties dance, music provided by members of our school band. They’re called “Outhouse”, and they will play, uh, Fifties music. Bop ‘til you drop. Refreshments will be available, but of the non-alcoholic kind. Bring your own if you have it! Sorry, Mr. Carson, I had to say that! Everyone out the front doors of the theatre, turn left, and follow the trail of grease. See you there!”
Bryce turned to those of us on stage. I think he looked at me but I wasn’t sure. I ran off the stage back to Dad.
“Do you want to go to the dance?” he asked.
“No no no,” I said. “I want to go home.”
Dad got a teaching job at another school in another city the following year, and re-married. A few years later, I had the birthmark mostly removed by surgery, a technique still in its infancy back then.
I became a doctor, then Head of Surgery at a good hospital and part of a few consultative committees. Got married, had kids, grandkids. I’m almost happy.
I always wondered what happened to Bryce. I’ll never forget what he did for my confidence.
II
I thought my life would turn out differently. I was always good at school and sports. I liked history and went to university to study it, having no idea what I would do with a history degree. But I quit after first year; I didn’t like the school, didn’t make any friends, and figured that anything they could teach me, I could find in a book.
I bummed around for a couple of years, tried standup comedy and acting, but that didn’t work out. I ended up selling cars at a dealership owned by a guy my parents knew, and here I still am, all these years later.
There’s a community theatre group in town and sometimes I take a part in a play just for the heck of it. But I’ve never been able to recreate that feeling I once had when I was in a play in high school.
I had the lead and, at the end of the play, there is a stage conceit. The cast is going crazy, absolutely frenetic. I don’t remember why. Anyway, at some point, I clicked my fingers and all the actors froze. It was a great tableau; I have a photo of it. Unfortunately, it’s a little blurry.
The audience was also going crazy. We’d done a great job and they’d obviously loved it.
In front of the frozen tableau, I ambled downstage, the audience still whooping and hollering. I had one more line to say but knew I had to wait until they finally went silent so they could hear my line.
Time stretched. I thought they might never stop screaming. I had the audience in the palm of my hand. I’d never felt that power before, nor have I felt it since.
Finally, the audience became silent. And I said my last line, a line I’d said three or four times previously in the play, but in a completely different context.
I said, “I know what I’m doing.”
The audience erupted again. They’d understood the contrast.
The speakers cranked up some classic 1950s song. I don’t remember what it was. It might have been “Rock Around The Clock” or “Johnny B. Goode”. Anyway, it was some tune you could jive to. I didn’t know how to jive. I learned two moves from the school librarian, who’d been a kid in the 1950s. That was enough to be able to fake it.
The cast went down into the audience, picked people at random, and dragged them onstage.
I had to do the same thing, so I walked up the aisle, looking for someone who wasn’t ninety and might break a hip, or someone who wasn’t one of the male teachers at the school.
There was a young girl sitting on the aisle, so I grabbed her by the hand and pulled her onstage. My rudimentary jiving skills meshed well with her ability to follow my lead. The song finished. She was on my right, facing away from me. She had a nice profile and curly brown hair. I guessed she was about fourteen, so I was glad I’d chosen her out of the darkness.
I let go of the girl’s hand, went downstage, and told the audience there’d be a sock hop in the cafeteria. We had a live band made up of kids from the school band. I’d wanted to play my alto sax with them, but they didn’t want me.
In the cafeteria, I was just standing there, watching. My girlfriend Sara came over to me and told me her mom wanted to talk to me. Sara didn’t tell me she liked the play or that I was good in it or anything like that. That’s probably why Sara and I didn’t last to the end of high school.
“Where’s your mom?”
“She’s just over there, by the door. She’s really short. You can’t miss her.”
I slunk over there as casually as I could, until I spotted her. As I was dressed as a greaser, I decided to keep playing my part. I stood beside her, then bumped her. She looked up at me in confusion, then recognition.
She said, “Oh, that’s not my Bryce.”
My Bryce. I loved Sara’s mother. Still do.
“I loved the play,” she said. “You were very good.”
“Thanks, Mrs. D.,” I said. “It was a lot of fun to do.”
“That was a really nice thing you did at the end.”
“What do you mean?”
“That you picked that girl with that port-wine birthmark and danced with her. I bet it made her feel good.”
“Birthmark?”
“On her face. It was huge.”
“I’m not wearing my glasses. I can’t see a thing.”
I wonder what happened to that kid.
Category: Featured, Short Story