You don’t yell at a sleepwalker.
He may fall and break his neck.
—Joe Gillis, Sunset Boulevard
“So you lived in L.A. for a while?”
“No,” he said. “Was like . . . commute. I would fly to L.A. on Thursday for class and fly back home the same night.”
I’d never heard anything so ridiculous. How did he afford that?
“I know, so crazy,” Tommy said. “But I have to take class. I want to be filmmaker. I make movie in class. I got A minus.”
“You made a movie? What was it called?”
“Robbery Doesn’t Pay,” Tommy said proudly. “Tiny little thing. Shot on the super-eight.”
He showed me a couple of frames of the tiny little thing, which consisted of a large, hairy-looking guy in a white T-shirt casing an L.A. neighborhood for a car to steal, all of it scored to Orgy’s cover of “Blue Monday.” Surprisingly, Tommy wasn’t in the film.
“Enough for now,” Tommy said. “Time to rehearse.”
We ran through the scene a few times, after which I suggested we put the scripts away and go off book. Tommy was hesitant but agreed. To give him a minute to prepare, I asked to use his restroom. There I found a professional makeup mirror and a pair of rusty twenty-five-pound dumbbells on the floor next to the toilet. Above the toilet was a large framed poster of the Disney character Aladdin.
Going off book turned out to be a bad idea. Tommy couldn’t remember anything, not even lines made up of nothing more than “Yes” or “No.” When he couldn’t remember his lines he waved his hands around, shouted, made up new lines, or did all those things at once. His mouth and mind had trouble establishing any lasting connection to each other; English was obviously not Tommy’s first language, but I was beginning to wonder if it was even his third or fourth. When he wasn’t being hysterical, he was critiquing my performance. “It has to be big,” he kept saying. “It has to be powerful.”
Of course this guy loves Brando and Dean, I thought. They’re captivating actors because they know exactly when to yell, when to floor it. Tommy believed you had to floor it for the duration of every scene.
What on earth compelled this man to want to act? His money explained his condo, his Mercedes, his weekly acting-class commutes to Los Angeles, but nothing I’d seen or heard so far explained him. I was no longer rehearsing a scene; I was private investigating another human being.
“What’s Street Fashions USA?” I asked him, in the middle of our scene, motioning toward one of the shopping bags in the corner.
Tommy looked over at the bag, suddenly uncomfortable. “I do marketing — you know, retail stuff.” He stopped himself. “My God! You are such nosy person!”
I found it hard to believe that this guy could do marketing for Fangoria magazine, much less fashion. The Street Fashions USA locations listed on the bag were Haight Street, Beach Street, and Sutter Street. But the bags were cheaply printed; the Levi’s logo didn’t appear to have its standard, trademarked look.
“You don’t seem like a retail guy to me,” I said.
Tommy took this with a good-humored shrug. “You don’t know me yet. I have many skills.”
“So why acting?”
Tommy’s hands retreated into his pockets and I sensed him fight some small, quick battle over how much to tell me. “Well, you see, since I was little kid, it’s always been my big dream to be actor, for long time. I try Los Angeles, et cetera, but it didn’t come out right. Then I have business here, so I stop the acting. But then, to make long story short, I had accident. I was driving and got hit by guy who runs the red light.”
He’d said this so quietly, and soberly, that I didn’t dare say anything.
“It was pretty bad,” he went on. “Like wake-up call, you could say. I was in hospital for many weeks. After that, I decide to go back to my acting dream.”
He picked up his playbook and we continued rehearsing. After a few read-throughs, Tommy asked if I wanted to grab dinner. I suggested a Chinese place called Hunan on Sansome Street. While waiting for our food, Tommy once again began to tell me that I could succeed as an actor if I wanted it enough. “You can be star, but you have to be more powerful. When you are aggressive in scene, this is worth one million dollars.”
“What about you?” I asked, not trusting the thickness of what he was laying on me.
Tommy didn’t answer that question. Instead he started playing with his chopsticks, which he’d learned to use, he said, when he was living in Hong Kong. But I brought him back to the question: “What about you, Tommy? Tell me.”
Tommy set his chopsticks aside. “For me,” he said, “I always wanted to have my own planet. Call it Tommy’s Planet. Build a giant building there, you see, like . . . Empire Tower. Some casino thing. My planet will be bigger than everything.”
I found myself unexpectedly charmed by this burst of subdued bravado. It wasn’t obnoxious. It was sort of endearing. I felt like I’d just asked a child what he wanted to be when he grew up. And a child had answered me, honestly, with no adult filter telling him what was and wasn’t possible.
“Your own planet,” I said. I wanted to laugh but I couldn’t. In fact, I had goose bumps. This man sitting in front of me had no detectable talent, did everything wrong, wasn’t comfortable saying how old he was or where he was from, and seemed to take an hour to learn what most people picked up in five seconds. Still, for that moment I believed him. I believed he could have his own planet.
“Yeah,” he said, looking up. “I see this big thing and big light and big events with stores and hotel and movie. All these things all together. It will be spectacular.” He reached for his glass of hot water but hesitated before lifting it to his mouth. Tommy peered at me from beneath his large protruding brow. “And you can live in my planet, if you decide. Maybe I let you stay for little while.”
What did I think of living on Tommy’s planet? I wasn’t sure. What I was sure of was that Tommy had something I’d never seen in anyone else : a blind and unhinged and totally unfounded ambition. He was so out of touch, so lacking in self-awareness, yet also weirdly captivating. That night there was this aura around Tommy — an aura of The Possible. Stick with him, I thought, and something would happen, even if I had no idea what that something might be. Maybe that was it : Tommy made me listen to the right voices in my head. This big, childish vision of his—what was it if not every actor’s secret dream?
My own planet was increasingly icy and lonely and minor. And while I did not rule out the possibility that Tommy’s Planet was a civilization-ending comet headed my way, what if it wasn’t?
“Here,” Tommy said. “I have present for you.” He handed me a red-white-and-blue pen, the casing of which bore the Street Fashions USA logo. He gave it to me as though it were a sacred scepter, as though I’d passed some test. When I looked more closely at the pen, I saw something else : a tiny globe with the words TOMMY’S PLANET printed across it.
“My planet will be bigger than everything.”
“People Are Very Strange These Days”
You don’t yell at a sleepwalker.
He may fall and break his neck.
—Joe Gillis, Sunset Boulevard
