Working Class Hero

Short Stories

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a short story from the collection A Songbook.

Best,

Sam

WORKING CLASS HERO

He started out — no question about it — just like everybody else.

The humiliations of everybody else. Not slinging coffee exactly, but office job where he was told to do things in a tone where there could be no doubt that he was expected to snap to. And YouTube videos, just like everybody else. And biographies of celebrities.

And, also, bits of manifesting. Small wishes when he blew out birthday candles, at the tail end of meditation sessions when he’d put his time in, felt he could get away with it. An attuning to the still, quiet moments — above all, the moments of humiliation, when he found himself nuking his leftovers in the office kitchen, on line at the coffee shop. Not this, he would say to himself. The most powerful prayer in his arsenal. Not this, not this, anything but this.

He was one of these people who seemed to be designated for some particular, special fate. That was the consensus of the people who knew him through school, through his 20s. Tyler would be a great….. And fill in the blank.

How many people were out there who’d been similarly designated by fate — by common consensus — and who nothing had ever happened to? A fraternity that he shuddered to be part of. All the prayers said over office microwaves. All the bold predictions — how it sounded as if bells were pealing every time one of them was issued.

***

When it happened to Tyler, he couldn’t believe how easy it was. He was 33 and he decided to be an actor. He had had so many ventures into different things — written novels, recorded demos, started companies, and all of them, after many twists and turns, much sweat and tears, watching the hotplate spin in the microwave, watching the sleeping form of his girlfriend in the bedroom of their railroad; her illuminated by the blue glow of his screen, some other project he was working on pro bono, some more time stolen from his real job. Acting the stupidest, most far-fetched scheme to get in touch with his true fate, but it had the virtue of being very simple – in the end, it was just him, his emotions, his intelligence, the face that everyone had always told him was so interesting. No business plans, partners, anything like that. He signed up for a brace of acting classes — ridiculously expensive, but that was the manifesting, the prayer. The teachers were like morally obligated to encourage without ever actually connecting anyone to anything — they couldn’t play favorites like that. But the other students doubled as talent scouts. He was asked after one class if he wanted to be in a play. Wasn’t so surprising — there weren’t many guys in the class, definitely weren’t many who could plausibly play sex and danger. The play was in a wedged little space on the Lower East Side — porous walls, bad smells, but it was only pretend down-market. They were trust fund kids doing it, with the sources of the trust funds in the audience, and a couple of agents inconspicuously mixed in. And when one of them came up to ask, a bit shyly, if he was represented, he wasn’t surprised either — it had felt like a long time just standing there, milling around on the stage after the show was over, somehow it felt like high-time for someone to walk up to him and make something happen.

From there, there was a great deal that was out of his hands. He was sent to audition for a film — just an indie, the agent messaged him, but it turned out that the cast included people he had heard of. He did his auditions, and then there was silence for a long time, and then there was an e-mail from his agent telling him the dates for the shoot. And the shoot barely even felt like acting at all — the part was just right for him; the agent had done her work there; and there was endless waiting and then a lot of adjusting of cameras, and then the moments that mattered were so low-key, a handful of conversations, and the only note he got was to “do a little less” — to try “throwing the line away.”

It had felt like almost nothing at all, an accidental week of his life, a ranch that these odd people had decided to rent out, a story of people from the city trying to recalibrate their lives on a ranch. But the agent fielded different calls for him, sent him out on different auditions, to different independent films, and then his film came out, and blew up, and, suddenly, he was a name. Suddenly, his life was very different than it had been.

A great part of being a celebrity, or quasi-celebrity, he’d always thought, was that you had to pretend that it was no big deal. He’d always wondered how people managed to pull that off — how they just chit-chatted on the couch of a talk show, as if there weren’t an entourage of publicity people waiting in the wings, as if the stupid little joke they were making wasn’t being broadcast simultaneously to tens of millions of people. But, in the event, it was easier than he would have expected. He really could just tell the story of working in an office and then of blowing up. He really could act completely normal when he was chilling in the trailer waiting for the next moment when the camera would be turned on him.

In his philosophical moods — hanging out in the trailer with his co-stars, strumming on the guitar he was learning — he found himself entertaining two possible hypotheses. One was that it was no big deal what had happened, that it could have happened to anyone really, that it was a collective myth that it was difficult. The other hypothesis was pretty much the same thing, but that it was no big deal precisely because it suited him. Other people, most people, might have been intimidated chilling out backstage with people they saw on TV as they were growing up, but not him — and, more than anything, the sense he had was of belonging, that everything else, the green energy company, the 9 to 5 job, the calculation of the monthly budget, was all an accident; some unaccountable and unfortunately prolonged swerve from his real destiny.

Everybody around him seemed to be inclined towards that hypothesis — everybody except Rebecca, his girlfriend. She was a lawyer working for a not-for-profit. She was pretty, and smart, with an acerbic sense of humor, and she had taken the acting thing pretty well in stride. “My man is running from home to be an actor,” she might announce to the house cat, George. “Running away from home, running away from home. How do we feel about this George?” And George, a phlegmatic Persian, would be squeezed until he registered a reaction. There had been the deep quiet when he’d told her who else would be acting with him in the indie movie, and then there was the particular, prim voice that was used whenever his agent called him and Rebecca happened to be next to his phone. “Tyler, it’s your agent,” she would say, and then the turning-away, the sudden elasticity of her face and muscles, after she’d passed the phone to him.

There was a profile done of him, the reporter taking him to lunch, the cameraman taking shots of their tidied-up apartment. “How long will it go on for?” Rebecca asked. “How long until they get what they need?”

“Not long,” he told her. “They take you to lunch and they think they know everything about you from a lunch. After that, it’s just supplemental quotes. I’m sure they’ll want one from you too.”

They were having coffee in their tidied apartment, the press he’d just bought in between them. Rebecca looked diagonally at the floorboards. “I don’t want to do that,” she said. “I don’t want them to talk to me.”

That was fine. That was her prerogative. The kinds of people he was around now would not be intimidated by a photographer in their house. They had been child actors, or gone to conservatories, most of them, very early on someone or other had whispered to them that they were talented, and it had turned out to be true. Enough classes, enough auditions had gone by, with everybody else falling away, with them left standing, that it had become inarguable — they were talented, their life would go in some special direction because of it. They treated Tyler like a curiosity, a marvel from some other domain.

“So, what, you just never applied to conservatory?” his current co-star, Haley, asked him.

“You kidding me, I would have been murdered in my sleep if I had,” he told her. It was a long delay on set. He was plucking at his guitar backstage.  “The idea was that you graduate high school, you apply to college, you pick a major in college that’s going to get you somewhere.”

“Get you somewhere — like a job?”

“Like a career,” he said, suddenly feeling very tired. “You know, something solid, something you can build your way up in.”

She was very pretty and very strange. Every so often, she would pause in conversation, like some inner channel had static in it, like she were waiting for it to be repaired. “Every time I’m in an office I always feel like nothing actually happens there,” she said suddenly. “Like I look around at everybody. Nothing happening. It’s like I want to set a timer. How long can I be there before something happens. Six months? A year?”

“I guess it depends on what you feel that something happening is,” he said.

She shrugged her delicate shoulders.

“I mean, things do happen,” he said. “Products get launched, paychecks get signed, it does move forward.” She looked at him like something had gone wrong with his signal, like he had suddenly switched to gibberish. And he wasn’t at all sure that it wasn’t gibberish what he was saying. “The worst day on set is better than the best day in an office,” a soundman had said to him, and maybe it was true — maybe that whole thing, what he’d gone to school for, worked up through the ranks for, was just a long line of people jerking each other around. The thing with Haley — who had a very short attention span, who was a fabulous actress — was that she clearly felt that only very few things were worthy of her attention, certain kinds of love, certain kinds of grief, her whole life seemed to be spent paused, trying to tune in to that inner transmitter, waiting for something worth her while to come her way. Really, there was very, very little that met that criteria — a handful of roles; the guy she was seeing at the moment, an actor at a different strata than theirs.

And, to some extent, the proof was in the pudding. He wasn’t getting mobbed in the street, propositioned by strangers, that kind of thing. But he had a very healthy social media following, the DMs pouring in. Went to events and meetings, and the girl at the reception desk, the girl bringing him back to talk to someone, had a way of pausing over his name, a way of lingering in conversation. And it was worth asking himself what the difference was. He had been himself for a long time, a good-looking guy, with his own charisma, and that had not been the reaction he elicited. It was possible that it was all shallow, all a media loop – the various jeremiads he’d come across on celebrity all went in that direction. But that was a bit difficult to accept. Women, 24, 25 years old, the prime of their lives — so much else orbiting around them. The way they would make themselves available to him. And how exactly was he supposed to ignore that; how exactly claim that that didn’t, actually, matter.

His agent put him up for an indie — although indie, he was discovering, tended to mean like a couple million. The film was about an idealist, an Army vet working somewhere in the defense industry who comes across a major breach, tries to blow the whistle on it, and discovers slowly, inexorably, that everybody knows about it. Tyler read the script and felt that this was his role. Not that he’d been in the Army, not that he knew anything about the fairly intricate story of national security protocols, but the description of the character — “a lean man, quietly sure of his own superiority” — hooked him. Very simple. But it was like he had gone through his whole life without a tag on him, and now there was one, and it seemed to fit perfectly.

Almost everything in the film was about his character. There was him, and there was his buddy, played by Kevin Gilles, whom Tyler had been aware of as a teen sitcom actor; was now trying to rebrand himself in adulthood. The central tension of the film was Tyler’s character staying close with Kevin’s character, not able to bring himself to reveal that the whistleblowing he was embarked upon would implicate Kevin’s character maybe more than anyone. Tyler spent most of his time during the shoot just hanging out with Kevin. It was a very different vibe from the celebrity-rich dude ranch he’d debuted in, from the time spent hanging out with Haley. He and Kevin very much just emulated their cubicle lifestyle when they weren’t being filmed. They played cards. Kevin gave him pointers on the guitar. They talked about relationships — Kevin was on-again, off-again with a boyfriend; Tyler was on probably last legs with Rebecca.

“I don’t know,” he said, “it’s like there was a moment when we just stopped speaking the same language, stopped having anything to do with one another.”

They were between hands of a card game, Kevin shuffling the deck. He had a light mustache, he was very bird-like in the way he moved, was a very compelling supporting character; the way the story was written, it was excruciating for Tyler’s character to betray him.

“What does she do? Something in law?”

Tyler told him. The non-profit. The animal sanctuaries they worked with. The uphill battles they were constantly waging.

Kevin nodded, cut the cards, dealt. “You’ve arrived. She hasn’t,” he said. “I don’t know how else to put it without sounding mean.” He paused before looking at his hand. “You took a risk. That sets people apart from each other,” he said. “Most people have no idea what that’s like – that’s why they lose their minds with anyone who took one.”

There was a scene at the end of the movie where Tyler’s character comes under sustained interrogation. Kevin’s character had already been betrayed, packed off – when he wrapped, he came by Tyler’s trailer to hug him tight, whisper into his ear that he was going to kill it. Tyler’s character was beaten, given an electric shock, asked to sign a confession. Tyler’s character sat up as straight as he could, said, “If I had to do everything again, I would do it exactly the way that I have.”

They wrapped for the day. Tyler went outside and bummed a cigarette — something he never did. It was probably the best work he would ever do, he thought to himself. Completely divorced from his own life, completely strange — the moment when the director had called ‘cut’ and he found himself embracing his torturer, congratulating him on how well he’d administered the shock, but probably that would be it, that would be the movie that would hit, the scene people would remember him for. A lot of people would see it; it would last a long time. An interesting thing, wasn’t it, he thought between puffs, hoped that the cigarette could in some way commemorate this, that it was possible to culminate, possible to have everything one wanted to give the world compressed into a few moments.

He broke up with Rebecca not too long after that. There was just no way it was going to work. They had been drifting apart for a long time. The surprise was how hard she took it. The Brooklyn apartment that had been too small for them for years — that she’d refused to leave. Him sitting consolingly on the side of the bed, hand patting hair, her wrapped in blankets, tissues, lozenges. “I don’t understand,” she kept saying. “I felt like we had so much. I felt like it was all going so well.”

***

He hadn’t been completely faithful to Rebecca, but he had kept the cheating within reason. Now – his own place; the name he had — it was a different story. Haley was his close friend at this time. She was still off-limits to him, but she reviewed his various conquests. Something about it was fascinating to her.

There was a folder on his phone. She scrubbed through it. “Wow. Wow. Ok. Wow,” she might say. “Her? Are you kidding me?” And Tyler, in his tired voice, would have to explain that it was different for men and women. For him, the regret, always, was the number not taken, the path not pursued. “I just don’t see it, I can’t imagine it,” she might say shudderingly, handing the phone back to him, and, speaking slowly, he would say, “I had an interesting evening with her. She’s a cool person. We had a lot to talk about. It’s not like it was something I didn’t enjoy.”

“To each their own,” said Haley and looked to change the topic.

She was so particular and so delicate. The world organized itself in very clear terms for her. The times when Tyler, inevitably, had tried something, she had seemed to commune with her inner channel, said — when her spirits had spoken to her — “You’re just not quite my league yet, sorry. But I’m sure you’ll get there.” He didn’t take it too personally. She really was excruciatingly beautiful, the sort of thing that completely shapes a life, where nobody could even pretend to not notice it. So what exactly could she have done any differently than she had? — and if the tinny voice, the brittleness, secretly drove him a bit crazy, the way she’d look at certain of the pictures on his phone in complete disdain, well, she had been set aside, from birth really, for a particular fate, it made sense that it was only this obscure inner channel that she could really communicate with. And then beauty. Beauty seemed to really mesmerize her. Sometimes she’d look at one of the photos on his phone, or one from the magazines she carried around, and just went into some kind of a vortex. “Wow,” she would say, shaking her head, trying to bring herself back, “how could something like that even exist.”

Tyler was up for a movie about the Beatles — he was supposed to play Paul McCartney. His agent, giddy, told him not to get his hopes up too much; it was more likely that they would cast a British actor. Also, the rest of the band was more famous than him, if they cast him he would likely be the odd one out. He listened to her; he knew by now to take everything in stride. In any case, The Beatles had never been all that important to him – just something he had missed out on. He went through their music, trying to get himself into the spirit of it, but the only song that really spoke to him was ‘Working Class Hero’ by John Lennon, after the band had broken up. It was such a great song, such an angry song, the whole arc of a person’s unhappy life — “they hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool.” And then something seemed to break, push through — the caesura in the song, as anyone listening to it must have thought, where The Beatles land on Ed Sullivan and blow up and the whole thing, and it’s like everything that happened before doesn’t matter. A working class hero is something to be. Yes. Who can argue with that. A working class hero is something to be. But not quite — there was the fall in the song, the turn. And who was singing it? And addressed to who? A working class hero, so clever and classless and free – but you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.

So it hadn’t worked for John — you can hear his bitterness in the song, not angry, bitter, him bitter, and for what? — and if it hadn’t worked for him that meant it probably wouldn’t work for anybody. At the moment he was basically waiting around on the Beatles film. There were other projects kicking, but the advice was, at this point as he was moving up, to be a bit more selective, only go for gold. He’d run that by Kevin, thinking that that didn’t sound exactly right — wasn’t the whole point to be working, to be making things — and Kevin messaged back to say that that’s the way it was. “I was in teen sitcom hell for as long as I can remember,” he wrote. “You can’t imagine how long it took me to undo that.”

Well, he had a lot to learn about this strange new world he had found himself in. He was in his high-rise listening to Beatles songs, had his clear view of the green energy offices where he used to work. There was a peasant girl — definitely a peasant, although a very pretty one, coming in over in a bit, someone he’d already seen a couple of times, who’d made Haley frown and lapse into silence when she was looking at her on Tyler’s phone; a restaurant hostess, just now getting her headshots done. That was part of his thing, as he’d been written about — as his agent had duly informed him. He was relatable, he was more of a real person than most people you saw on TV. So that was part of the deal — real people slept with other real people, not just with celebs. There was nothing he had to apologize for — to Haley, to his agent, to anybody for anything. He had done everything exactly right, taken a risk, threaded the eye of a needle. Now he was reaping his rewards. Nothing to apologize for even to Rebecca. “This is a drug, a drug, a fucking drug you got herself hooked on,” she had screamed to him somewhere in the vortex of their relationship talks. But he had tried to stay with her as long as possible, had done right by her. He listened to Working Class Hero on a loop — the making it sections only. He waited for the doorman to call up announcing his visitor.