Method

The best acting is instinctive. ~Craig MacDonald~

Stuart barely escaped the clutches of the beat officer before diving into the #1 MUNI bus at Sacramento and Hyde. The aged uniformed, grossly rouged cop lost track of the suspect only two blocks prior. Thankfully for Stuart, he turned corners rather quickly thus obstructing the copy from any chance of seeing his impassioned leap on the city bus and into the unsuspecting lap of one of an elderly lady. She could’ve been his grandmother in another life. Stuart imagined the lady, who by now was screaming at him in a language he didn’t speak, baking gooey mac and cheese or layering the perfectly textured banana pudding--not too firm of pillowy--just for him on holidays.

The driver, oblivious and unconcerned, dutifully held out for the signal. The neon, lawn-green orb of light from the traffic signal beckoned the motorbus forward. No one was the wiser, not the screaming patron who may or may not have known how to layer a banana pudding, not the bus driver working the last pass of their 8-hour shift, not even the slow poke of a cop who’d lost visual.

“Sorry miss.”

Stuart apologized to the screamer and found a seat in the back. He feverishly sanitized his gloves over and over with generous globs from the bottle he stored in his fanny pack. It smelled of hospitals and cheap tequila. Stuart imagined having the cash to afford a few bottles of the stuff, top shelf. Avion Silver. The velvety agave would cleanse him of what he’d just done. It was a necessary kill. The monologue required it and a subsequent imbibe. After you murder someone, you must drink. Stuart was thirsty.

The killing part was easy. Too easy. The kid was a punk. Obnoxious, crass. Maybe he worked in big tech. Maybe he garnered paid leave whenever he and his bros played at being DJs during the week. Maybe he took weekend trips to his parents’ property at Lake Tahoe and threw keggers just for the hell of it. Stuart smelled liquor on his breath while he gasped for air. Strangulation was a bit more intimate than he’d intended but there wasn’t much time to buy supplies before his shift at the bookstore. He used what he had, what he knew. He found a rock. The kid, a trust fund baby in his late 20s--close to Stuart's age--never said excuse me. The kid spit in Stuart's direction, nearly landing his saliva on Stuart's shoes. The kid didn’t see the rock crashing toward his temple nor the hands fastening themselves to his windpipe in a flash.

Acting should be bigger than life. ~Bette Davis~

Stuart came to California to make something of his life. He told his mother she needn’t worry about exorbitant hospital bills for her heart medication or about late mortgage payments or about a reality where her car could get repossessed. He was going to California where dreams have no choice but to crystallize into chandeliers. Two years flew by and Stuart was no closer to being discovered than the cure to his mother’s rare heart condition. She never had any expectations that he’d become big anyway. At least, that’s what he whispered to himself in the staff bathroom of a seedy bookstore he worked for in the Haight, operated in the basement of a benefactor-turned-amateur sorceress. Stuart hated his coworkers. There were only two. Three if you included the sorceress’ 20-year-old gray tabby cat--Agnes, half-blind with irritable bowel syndrome. They never included her. Agnes looked at Stuart, pierced through him with her good eye, threatening to undo him at any moment should he be off his game. On the day of the murder, she was exceedingly observant. Stuart hissed at her before tossing his gloves into the cramped staff office waste bin.

He fumbled through work. Agnes had to be rushed to the vet. Something about a glass eye. Seamus and Rouge, his goth-inspired contemporaries and mostly useful coworkers, picked up the slack while he reviewed his material. Rather than avoiding mold exposure, he opted out of conducting inventory reports and chose to open the back door held closed by a rusty pole. The view of neighboring house and a few trees was worth it. The books would still be there, strewn about chipped wood shelves lining pasty pink walls. The decor reminded Stuart of pepto bismol and feces. He thought of the dead kid, pink and brown from soiling himself in the afterlife.

The grand design is bigger than understanding. Even when we go, depending on how we go, we leave bits and chunks of us behind. Unwanted or not.

During his break, Stuart downloaded an application onto this iphone. All of the boys wanted hookups. Grown men too. He strolled to Golden Gate Park. The daddy he was supposed to meet sported a salt-and-pepper beard. His ensemble was plain--tight blue jeans, black Chelsea boots, a snug red sweater. Stuart smiled in spite of himself. He could’ve liked him in a different life, on a different day, in a different city. Not this life that continues to take. Not this day, already rife with wasted flesh. Not this city, a no man’s land. No man worth his weight in fame at least.

“Woof, it's definitely a pleasure to meet you.” the beard speaks.

“Thanks.”

“Not one for words, huh? Are you shy?”

“Saving my voice.”

“That’s fine. We don’t need it.”

They kissed. Hands roamed. Stuart smelled liquor on the bearded daddy’s breath. It would be easy this time, too. No, not killing. Stuart skillfully, too skillfully for so little experience, reached for the man’s wallet bulging in his back pocket. What an idiot, Stuart laughed to himself. He must’ve laughed out loud because the beard laughed too. Stuart could hit and run easily, buy his drink, get back to work, to his lines. This man was kind though, foolish maybe, but kind. Stuart hugged their bodies tightly in an aggressive serpentine dance. He fumbled through the wallet and landed upon two neatly fifty dollar bills. He hesitated, letting himself be seduced by the rough kisses on his neck. His break was halfway over. Stuart returned the wallet, finished his business quickly with the beard before running away from their shaded spot near a playground. The beard would probably return to his wife or husband that night.

Acting is standing up naked and turning around very slowly. ~Rosalind Russell~

Stuart paced the hallway outside the room. He could taste his lunch in miniature bits threatening to escape his throat. He was still more than an hour ahead of schedule and routinely reminded the monitor not to inform the jury he was present before his appointed time. He’d borrowed a copy of the Actors Thesaurus from his work. He ordered it two weeks prior but it had only arrived the afternoon he bought the bottle of Avion with his unexpected earnings. The monologue was complete. Everything that was supposed to happen, did. Stuart wrote every line of the text onto separate scraps of paper the night before and assigned a minimum of three active verbs to every thought, every beat, every moment for subtext. Every word had weight. Stuart made backstories of his backstories.

The moment before he walked in, when the monitor finally called his name, he’d forgotten every single word.

All he remembers is walking into the room in a panic. Then. Nothing. Nothing in the world mattered but the craft. When reason and doubt and fear and even sex all comingle into an abscess full to bursting. When potential and time converge. Stuart didn’t remember a single question asked of him. He didn’t remember the director complimenting his shirt. It was teal. He stole it because the character stole a teal shirt. His mind played episodes, flashes of a life that was and wasn’t his. Actions yet to be punished. There was the episode when he defecated onto the front window of the very store he works for, the episode where he takes food from a restaurant before paying for it, the one where he sleeps in the middle of the street in the Castro after a night of debauchery with a guy who worshipped Ganesh. None of it was his. None of it. He didn’t even remember the blanket awe when he disrobed in the audition room, skin exposed, neck and chest and many other decadent parts drenched in nervous sweats.

Stuart only remembered being in the dank bookstore basement two days later. He was daydreaming of slipping Agnes a few drops of milk of magnesia to expedite the process. Then his phone rang. His hands trembled. Somehow he’d made his way to the curb, pushing past coworkers, customers, the sorceress and Agnes. There was no fog. No clouds really. Stuart’s tears caught the midday light injecting its radiance into the canvas of his coffee-tinted skin. He thanked the woman over the phone from the casting department over and over. He called his mother in a frenzy. She picked up, expectantly.

“Mama, I did it. I’m a real thespian.”

It was then that a scrawny, unassuming kid walked by while hacking up a thick wad of spit that barely escaped Stuart’s shoes.

Stuart pursued him on the crowding sidewalk stained with unwanted things.