Cyclorama, page 25
But, man, he hated the idea of coming off like some tragic figure, sharing his story with Oprah: You get a tragic backstory, she gets a tragic backstory, every motherfucker in the room gets a tragic backstory. They’d say he was in denial when he told them no, he wasn’t angry about what happened, that he found it funny and that’s how he coped. Even the worst things cracked him up: when his doctor had told him he had to watch his diet because he had a hole in his heart, he’d laughed; the image just seemed funny to him.
Early critics of The Bumbry Show marveled at Calvin’s bravery, the way he crossed the line in creating a series that was, as he had pitched it, an NC-17 Cosby Show with all the good parts Cosby cut out: Dad inadvertently prescribing Viagra to his patients and walking in on a waiting room full of dudes with raging boners; his daughter getting kicked out of school for bringing her parents’ Joy of Sex book to show-and-tell, then being unable to unstick the pages. He wasn’t trying to be daring, wasn’t trying to tell his life story, just trying to write what he thought was funny. Yes, he’d written an episode inspired by his trip to New York with Densmore, but he hated the idea of people parsing it for what was and wasn’t real.
Calvin finished his tea. Kids in down coats and knit hats were trailing sleds across Frederick Douglass Boulevard; garbage trucks rumbled by, dirty orange shovels scraping the street, spreading salt. Todd was probably watching the snow too. What would it be like to watch everything, knowing it might be the last time? That tree in the planter down there—you’d never see it bud or bloom again; the snow—that might be the last time you’d see it fall. That gray sky? You’d see it go dark but never back to blue. Like being locked in a dark annex, hiding from the soldiers outside, knowing you might never get out.
Fine, fuck it. He went to his desk, powered up his computer, and opened Twitter. If he ever wanted to waste a morning and an afternoon, here was a hell of a good place to do it: 374 notifications; 525 direct messages; a bunch of bullshit about “witch hunts,” “illegal leaks,” and some cracker named Jeff Sessions, who looked like he had a sphincter where a mouth should have been, talking about sealing up America’s southern border.
What’s happening? Twitter asked him.
Calvin typed: Listen up and check this shit out, y’all. He copied and pasted the link to Franklin’s article. He tweeted it out.
Instantly, ten people liked his post.
He wrote a second post: Goddamn it! Read the thing before you like that shit, muthafuckas! They liked that one too.
He started a third post. Once he started writing, it was hard to stop—like drinking in high school when he’d keep throwing back rum and Cokes until he was too drunk to stand or the bottle was empty.
Okay, pull up a chair, let’s hot tub time machine it back to 1982, mofos, he wrote. I’m a 17-year-old drama homo at North Shore Magnet.
He spellchecked his post, tweeted it, wrote another:
My home life’s shit, so are my grades. Only 4 things keep my morbid, self-destructive ass alive.
Post 5: 1) Old movies on Channel 9; 2) Ronrico Rum; 3) Richard Pryor albums; 4) the Theater Annex at North Shore High.
He was up to 125 likes now. He kept tweeting.
The Annex is run by a twisted, vampire-looking motherfucker: Tyrus Densmore.
Brother takes an interest in kids—not like Father Flanagan, more like Father Jerry Sandusky.
Dude’s up in everyone else’s business, but he keeps outta mine. My mouth’s too big, and so’s everything else about me.
But that shit changes when I get cast in—y’all gonna think I’m making shit up but you can check it: Diary of Anne Muthafuckin’ Frank.
Next post—a GIF of a bug-eyed Scatman Crothers at his piano playing “Jeepers Creepers” in The Cheap Detective.
Calvin tweetstormed all he remembered about Densmore, about Anne Frank and the “New York trip.” His followers and retweeters responded with kind words, sympathetic GIFs. He kept typing—his first meeting with Todd; Todd’s warning about Tyrus; that scene in the hotel room.
But Densmore was only part of the story, Calvin wrote. The man hadn’t been some isolated creep skeezing his way through the Annex, just the first creep Calvin had met, the one who had prepared him for a rogue’s gallery of perverts who rode roughshod through his industry. Tyrus wasn’t even close to the worst pervert Calvin had met; he was more like a “starter pervert.”
So, let’s name names, muthafuckas! Calvin wrote that he felt thankful he had met Densmore when he had been so young because the man had hardened him, made him view everyone as a potential predator. If he hadn’t met Ty, God knew how he would have reacted at the wrap party for a TV movie about televangelists Jimmy and Tammy Faye Bakker: he’d felt a hand in his waistband, and, in front of everyone, he’d asked, “Uh, Mr. Spacey, are you missing a hand? ’Cause I think one of yours is in my pants.”
Densmore had done Calvin the favor of making him believe the worst about anybody, even his childhood heroes, so that when he was on the set of Ghost Dad, shooting the shit about how hard it was for him to find a partner, and Bill Cosby said Calvin just needed to slip some pills into a date’s drink, Calvin was the only one who suspected Cos wasn’t joking.
As Calvin continued to tweet, he didn’t particularly care if anyone but Todd was reading his posts, so he didn’t think about whether his hundred-odd tweets would matter. Not until late in the afternoon, when he took the elevator down to the lobby, did he sense that something in the outside world had already started to change.
Maxwell, the hotel concierge, always insisted on calling Calvin “Mr. Dawes,” even after Calvin had told him to stop calling him “Mr.,” unless he wanted a foot up his ass. Today he smiled, said, “Nice to see you, Cal,” and Calvin had to check himself in a lobby mirror to make sure he hadn’t lost fifty pounds overnight.
Maeve was working the front desk in her black, long-sleeved turtleneck that covered most of her tattoos. He asked if there was any mail for him. She handed him some magazines, then gave him the sort of smile that actresses were paid big money to give Jason Bourne and Ethan Hunt. “Thank you, Calvin, truly,” she said.
It was still snowing, but Calvin had an hour and a half before Empty Chair tech rehearsal, so he decided to walk—give himself something to tell his doctor next time she asked if he’d been exercising. “Shit, yeah, woman—I walked all the way from the Langston to the Beacon!”
Black leather bag over a shoulder, black knit cap pulled down over his ears as if he were a Russian sailor on a clandestine mission, he stopped at the corner fruit stand, where he put down a dollar for his daily snack: two bananas and an apple. Alpon, the proprietor, clapped Calvin on the arm. “You are speaking good truth to power, my friend,” he said.
As he crossed 110th Street, he felt his phone vibrate. He looked at the display—Todd.
“Hey, man, what’s up?”
Todd didn’t speak, just laughed lasciviously—“Huhuhuhuhuhuhuh.”
“I said ‘What’s up?’ freak,” said Calvin.
“I just asked you to tell your story,” Todd said. “I didn’t tell you to go break the internet.”
“Yeah, I don’t know about any of that ‘breaking the internet’ shit. I guess I got carried away.”
“Maybe a little bit.” Todd laughed again, then stopped. “Seriously, thank you.”
“No problem.” Calvin felt uneasy with the sincere tone the conversation was taking; it reminded him too much of the cheesy, moralistic closing moments of the sitcoms he’d grown up with, which was why he had always ended Bumbry Show episodes on irreverent notes—a daughter yelling “Suck my dick” at her grandmother; a son cutting short a serious talk with his dad, then heading up to his room to crank up Cypress Hill, fire up a bowl, and jerk off. “So,” he asked Todd. “You’ll be okay to see my show, right?”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Todd said.
“Opening night—gonna put your ass in the motherfuckin’ front row.”
“Center seat?”
“You know it, brother.”
Calvin walked south along Central Park. The snow was pristine, only a few boot prints in it. In the pond, ducks paddled in fast circles. On just about any other day, Calvin could take this walk without a single person greeting him. Today he felt like an army hero. He got thumbs-ups, handshakes, hugs. Nannies introduced him to their charges. A German tourist in a Stars-and-Stripes USA hat beamed when she saw him: “Oh my Gott,” she cried. “I just retveeeted you.”
So many people were stopping him that he had to flag down a taxi. When the cab stopped at a light at the corner of Eighty-Sixth and Amsterdam Avenue, the driver rapped on the glass partition.
“You are Mr. Calvin Dawes?” The driver held up his cell phone and showed Calvin its screen. “Do you know that you are trending on Twitter?”
Calvin glanced at the screen: #MuslimBan was the top trending topic; #CalvinDawes was number two. All over the nation, he was being tweeted and retweeted, he was being aggregated on Vulture and Vox, analyzed on Jezebel and the Advocate website. Opinionators were opinionating about him on Medium. The Tomorrow article he had linked to was open on the screen of Professor Judith Nagorsky in her Northwestern University office; it had been bookmarked by Dr. Carrie Hollinger at Casa Segura; Asya Loh started crying when she was halfway through, and decided she couldn’t read the rest; Eileen Muldoon had sent the article along with an urgent text to Tyrus Densmore, who invited her over for coffee and a chat. At the offices of the Tomorrow, where Franklin had gone expecting to discuss the terms of his severance, the number on the Big Board had shot up past twenty thousand and Violet was offering him a promotion and a raise. In his Washington, D.C., office, Rob Rubicoff was reading the article and chuckling, and when his executive assistant asked what was so funny, he said the arc of history was bending toward justice. And the moment after Calvin stepped out of his cab on Amsterdam, then pushed opened the doors to the Beacon’s back entrance, the entire crew stopped reading their phones and burst into applause.
*
On opening night for The Empty Chair, Calvin stood backstage at the Beacon awaiting his cue. The idea for the show went back to the very beginning of his career when he’d been juggling bit parts in small films with occasional work for a catering company that liked employing someone his size because it discouraged party guests from eating too much. On nights he wasn’t working, he played open mikes and showcases at comedy clubs where he was paid in free drink (singular) or a cut of the door if he could bring in more than fifty people. Most nights, half the seats were empty and the other half were occupied by comatose drunks so far gone that Calvin would pitch his routine to one of the empty chairs. “If I can get a chair to laugh,” he liked to say, “I’ll be the best damn comic who ever lived.”
In the late 1980s, when his career started taking off with a recurring role on A Different World and his first spot on The Tonight Show (when David Steinberg was guest hosting, but still), he was starting to sell out clubs in New York and L.A. He would set aside one ticket and leave it at the box office for someone he knew would never show up. He’d gotten the idea from the honky who coached the Houston Oilers and always left a ticket for Elvis.
It started out as a gimmick: he’d leave a ticket for Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy, knowing full well they wouldn’t come. But after he started getting cast in bigger roles, appearing on the covers of Jet, TV Guide, and Entertainment Weekly, playing Luther Abercrombie opposite Charlie Sheen in the cop buddy movie Abercrombie and Bitch, selling out college towns and old movie palaces, he still liked looking out and seeing at least one empty seat. The seat kept him honest, reminded him that, no matter how successful he was getting, something would always be missing. He would leave a ticket for his dad, who hadn’t talked to him since he was twelve; he’d leave one for his mom, who was occupied with her grandchildren and never visited or called.
But now that he was at what seemed to be the peak of his career—full houses wherever he went, people retweeting whatever he wrote—it seemed self-indulgent to say something was still missing. And if sometimes he felt the return of his old friend darkness, the gloom that made him feel as if he had nothing at all and long to curl up under the covers with a bottle of rum; if sometimes he thought of his mom and how far away she was; if sometimes he wished for a true love, the comfort that couldn’t be found at the hands of some high-dollar sex worker—if sometimes all that kept him from throwing himself off the George Washington Bridge was the fear of being written off as some clown-crying-on-the-inside cliché—the truth was that he really did have everything he needed. The show was called The Empty Chair, but there would be no empty seats.
The opening music went up—the theme to the climactic scene of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: “The Ecstasy of Gold.” Calvin stood in the wings, rocked on his heels, shadowboxed, his preshow workout: left to the gut, right to the jaw. The stage lights went down. A roar from the crowd—straight up: not applause, not a gasp, a legitimate roar. Someone leaned in close to him: “You’re on, Calvin.”
He walked, nearly danced, as the cameras and lights followed him. He pumped his fist to the music, the spotlight pooled center stage, and he stepped into the light. He held his hand high; the crowd went quiet. In that moment it seemed like he could do anything—even run for president. Someone had to take on Trump in 2020; why not him? Put him on as Oprah’s running mate; no ticket would be bigger, not even twin reincarnations of William Howard Taft.
“The name of the show, motherfuckers, is The Empty Chair.” A baby follow spot burst on and swept across the faces of all the people in the theater for the sold-out show. But then it lingered front row center where one seat was empty. The light moved on as Calvin kept staring at that empty chair.
He stood in the spotlight, silent. His eyes burned, hot tears exploded inside them. He swallowed hard. Oh, shit, oh, shit, he thought. He wished he could stop the show—Hey, hold on, guys; I’ll be back in an hour or two. He wanted to take out his phone—Hey, Todd, man, you on your way? Everything all right? But the show had its own motion and all he could do was roll with it. And besides, he had a pretty good idea what that empty seat meant.
When the show was over, he skipped the party, told the guys backstage to make up some excuse—“Calvin has the shits.” He got into an SUV, asked his driver to take him to Todd’s apartment, and—after the doorman there said an ambulance had left two hours earlier—told his driver to take him to Weill Cornell.
Visiting hours were over at the hospital, but he was Calvin Bumbry Dawes, so rules didn’t apply. Only family members were allowed in the ward where Todd was being treated, but he was Calvin Bumbry Dawes, so they let him go right up.
“Aww, fuck, man.” Calvin started crying the moment he walked into Todd’s room, “Aww, fuck fuck, fuck.” Todd was under a white sheet, eyes closed, tube in his mouth, a thin layer of gray-and-white stubble on his face, a machine helping him breathe. A bandage was wrapped around his head. He looked like an old man. Someone should have at least given him a shave. Calvin put a hand on Todd’s shoulder, kissed his cheek.
Snow fell fast upon the East River, on the empty trams gliding to and from Roosevelt Island. Along FDR Drive, cabs and buses, wipers going, crept through the slush. Calvin could feel it again—that dull ache, that gathering darkness. He hoped someone had been with Todd when it had happened, whatever it was. He couldn’t stand to think that Todd might have been alone. The idea that Todd had collapsed when he was on his way to the Beacon to see Calvin was too much to bear.
He felt under the sheet for Todd’s hand. It was warm; at least there was that. He sat there holding Todd’s hand. Man, he wasn’t down with this death-and-dying shit.
He looked up and saw a woman in a pale blue uniform standing in the doorway. Calvin cleared his throat and blinked away the tears. “It’s okay,” he told the nurse, his voice catching. “I was just leaving.”
“That’s all right, Mr. Dawes.” She reached into a pocket and pulled out a pen and a pad. “I know this might not be the best time, but what you’ve been writing—it’s meant a lot to me.” She gestured to Todd. “And I know it’s meant a lot to him too.”
“He talked to you about that?” Calvin asked.
“It’s the only thing he wanted to talk about,” said the nurse.
Calvin signed his autograph and gave the nurse a hug, and as he walked out to the elevators and down to the lobby, then out and into the snow—a few sprays of blood on it—he thought of how so much could change in such a brief time. One moment you could be on a stage, pumping your fist as a sold-out crowd gave you a standing O; the next, you could be heading home alone from a hospital where the best friend you’d ever had was dying.
But at least he had told the story Todd wanted him to; at least now it was out in the world.
Mrs. Frank
When she got the panicked call from the high school informing her that Tyrus Densmore had resigned his position with no advance notice and asking if she would consider stepping in to direct the school’s spring play, Judith knew she had to say yes, no matter how many commitments she had already made. And she knew which show she had to choose, no matter how many heinous memories that choice might trigger.
But as she toted her RED ORCHID THEATRE shoulder bag full of clipboards, pens, stapled scripts, and audition forms and entered the Trey Newson Memorial Theater Annex at North Shore Magnet for the first time in the twenty-first century, she was surprised to discover how unfamiliar the place actually seemed.
The entirety of the Annex, reeking of Sammy Doulos’s weed in her memory, smelled like floral air freshener. The classrooms seemed to be in the wrong places, the girls’ bathroom was twice as large as she remembered, and, in the common room, there weren’t any vending machines stocked with stale candy bars, flat soda, and off-brand fruit juice; just a coffeemaker, a well-stocked mini-fridge, a sink, and a microwave. In the hallways, there were no longer any framed photos of old productions—no Judith with silver hair, playing Mrs. Gibbs in Our Town; no Judith as Edith Frank in a ratty overcoat with a construction paper yellow star; no physical evidence whatsoever of the years she had spent here save for the bronze plaque dedicated to Charles “Trey” Newson, which spoke of someone who didn’t sound much like the Trey she had known: 1965–1992: HERE IN THE ANNEX, HE FOUND THE LOVE OF FRIENDS AND A SENSE OF HOME.
Early critics of The Bumbry Show marveled at Calvin’s bravery, the way he crossed the line in creating a series that was, as he had pitched it, an NC-17 Cosby Show with all the good parts Cosby cut out: Dad inadvertently prescribing Viagra to his patients and walking in on a waiting room full of dudes with raging boners; his daughter getting kicked out of school for bringing her parents’ Joy of Sex book to show-and-tell, then being unable to unstick the pages. He wasn’t trying to be daring, wasn’t trying to tell his life story, just trying to write what he thought was funny. Yes, he’d written an episode inspired by his trip to New York with Densmore, but he hated the idea of people parsing it for what was and wasn’t real.
Calvin finished his tea. Kids in down coats and knit hats were trailing sleds across Frederick Douglass Boulevard; garbage trucks rumbled by, dirty orange shovels scraping the street, spreading salt. Todd was probably watching the snow too. What would it be like to watch everything, knowing it might be the last time? That tree in the planter down there—you’d never see it bud or bloom again; the snow—that might be the last time you’d see it fall. That gray sky? You’d see it go dark but never back to blue. Like being locked in a dark annex, hiding from the soldiers outside, knowing you might never get out.
Fine, fuck it. He went to his desk, powered up his computer, and opened Twitter. If he ever wanted to waste a morning and an afternoon, here was a hell of a good place to do it: 374 notifications; 525 direct messages; a bunch of bullshit about “witch hunts,” “illegal leaks,” and some cracker named Jeff Sessions, who looked like he had a sphincter where a mouth should have been, talking about sealing up America’s southern border.
What’s happening? Twitter asked him.
Calvin typed: Listen up and check this shit out, y’all. He copied and pasted the link to Franklin’s article. He tweeted it out.
Instantly, ten people liked his post.
He wrote a second post: Goddamn it! Read the thing before you like that shit, muthafuckas! They liked that one too.
He started a third post. Once he started writing, it was hard to stop—like drinking in high school when he’d keep throwing back rum and Cokes until he was too drunk to stand or the bottle was empty.
Okay, pull up a chair, let’s hot tub time machine it back to 1982, mofos, he wrote. I’m a 17-year-old drama homo at North Shore Magnet.
He spellchecked his post, tweeted it, wrote another:
My home life’s shit, so are my grades. Only 4 things keep my morbid, self-destructive ass alive.
Post 5: 1) Old movies on Channel 9; 2) Ronrico Rum; 3) Richard Pryor albums; 4) the Theater Annex at North Shore High.
He was up to 125 likes now. He kept tweeting.
The Annex is run by a twisted, vampire-looking motherfucker: Tyrus Densmore.
Brother takes an interest in kids—not like Father Flanagan, more like Father Jerry Sandusky.
Dude’s up in everyone else’s business, but he keeps outta mine. My mouth’s too big, and so’s everything else about me.
But that shit changes when I get cast in—y’all gonna think I’m making shit up but you can check it: Diary of Anne Muthafuckin’ Frank.
Next post—a GIF of a bug-eyed Scatman Crothers at his piano playing “Jeepers Creepers” in The Cheap Detective.
Calvin tweetstormed all he remembered about Densmore, about Anne Frank and the “New York trip.” His followers and retweeters responded with kind words, sympathetic GIFs. He kept typing—his first meeting with Todd; Todd’s warning about Tyrus; that scene in the hotel room.
But Densmore was only part of the story, Calvin wrote. The man hadn’t been some isolated creep skeezing his way through the Annex, just the first creep Calvin had met, the one who had prepared him for a rogue’s gallery of perverts who rode roughshod through his industry. Tyrus wasn’t even close to the worst pervert Calvin had met; he was more like a “starter pervert.”
So, let’s name names, muthafuckas! Calvin wrote that he felt thankful he had met Densmore when he had been so young because the man had hardened him, made him view everyone as a potential predator. If he hadn’t met Ty, God knew how he would have reacted at the wrap party for a TV movie about televangelists Jimmy and Tammy Faye Bakker: he’d felt a hand in his waistband, and, in front of everyone, he’d asked, “Uh, Mr. Spacey, are you missing a hand? ’Cause I think one of yours is in my pants.”
Densmore had done Calvin the favor of making him believe the worst about anybody, even his childhood heroes, so that when he was on the set of Ghost Dad, shooting the shit about how hard it was for him to find a partner, and Bill Cosby said Calvin just needed to slip some pills into a date’s drink, Calvin was the only one who suspected Cos wasn’t joking.
As Calvin continued to tweet, he didn’t particularly care if anyone but Todd was reading his posts, so he didn’t think about whether his hundred-odd tweets would matter. Not until late in the afternoon, when he took the elevator down to the lobby, did he sense that something in the outside world had already started to change.
Maxwell, the hotel concierge, always insisted on calling Calvin “Mr. Dawes,” even after Calvin had told him to stop calling him “Mr.,” unless he wanted a foot up his ass. Today he smiled, said, “Nice to see you, Cal,” and Calvin had to check himself in a lobby mirror to make sure he hadn’t lost fifty pounds overnight.
Maeve was working the front desk in her black, long-sleeved turtleneck that covered most of her tattoos. He asked if there was any mail for him. She handed him some magazines, then gave him the sort of smile that actresses were paid big money to give Jason Bourne and Ethan Hunt. “Thank you, Calvin, truly,” she said.
It was still snowing, but Calvin had an hour and a half before Empty Chair tech rehearsal, so he decided to walk—give himself something to tell his doctor next time she asked if he’d been exercising. “Shit, yeah, woman—I walked all the way from the Langston to the Beacon!”
Black leather bag over a shoulder, black knit cap pulled down over his ears as if he were a Russian sailor on a clandestine mission, he stopped at the corner fruit stand, where he put down a dollar for his daily snack: two bananas and an apple. Alpon, the proprietor, clapped Calvin on the arm. “You are speaking good truth to power, my friend,” he said.
As he crossed 110th Street, he felt his phone vibrate. He looked at the display—Todd.
“Hey, man, what’s up?”
Todd didn’t speak, just laughed lasciviously—“Huhuhuhuhuhuhuh.”
“I said ‘What’s up?’ freak,” said Calvin.
“I just asked you to tell your story,” Todd said. “I didn’t tell you to go break the internet.”
“Yeah, I don’t know about any of that ‘breaking the internet’ shit. I guess I got carried away.”
“Maybe a little bit.” Todd laughed again, then stopped. “Seriously, thank you.”
“No problem.” Calvin felt uneasy with the sincere tone the conversation was taking; it reminded him too much of the cheesy, moralistic closing moments of the sitcoms he’d grown up with, which was why he had always ended Bumbry Show episodes on irreverent notes—a daughter yelling “Suck my dick” at her grandmother; a son cutting short a serious talk with his dad, then heading up to his room to crank up Cypress Hill, fire up a bowl, and jerk off. “So,” he asked Todd. “You’ll be okay to see my show, right?”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Todd said.
“Opening night—gonna put your ass in the motherfuckin’ front row.”
“Center seat?”
“You know it, brother.”
Calvin walked south along Central Park. The snow was pristine, only a few boot prints in it. In the pond, ducks paddled in fast circles. On just about any other day, Calvin could take this walk without a single person greeting him. Today he felt like an army hero. He got thumbs-ups, handshakes, hugs. Nannies introduced him to their charges. A German tourist in a Stars-and-Stripes USA hat beamed when she saw him: “Oh my Gott,” she cried. “I just retveeeted you.”
So many people were stopping him that he had to flag down a taxi. When the cab stopped at a light at the corner of Eighty-Sixth and Amsterdam Avenue, the driver rapped on the glass partition.
“You are Mr. Calvin Dawes?” The driver held up his cell phone and showed Calvin its screen. “Do you know that you are trending on Twitter?”
Calvin glanced at the screen: #MuslimBan was the top trending topic; #CalvinDawes was number two. All over the nation, he was being tweeted and retweeted, he was being aggregated on Vulture and Vox, analyzed on Jezebel and the Advocate website. Opinionators were opinionating about him on Medium. The Tomorrow article he had linked to was open on the screen of Professor Judith Nagorsky in her Northwestern University office; it had been bookmarked by Dr. Carrie Hollinger at Casa Segura; Asya Loh started crying when she was halfway through, and decided she couldn’t read the rest; Eileen Muldoon had sent the article along with an urgent text to Tyrus Densmore, who invited her over for coffee and a chat. At the offices of the Tomorrow, where Franklin had gone expecting to discuss the terms of his severance, the number on the Big Board had shot up past twenty thousand and Violet was offering him a promotion and a raise. In his Washington, D.C., office, Rob Rubicoff was reading the article and chuckling, and when his executive assistant asked what was so funny, he said the arc of history was bending toward justice. And the moment after Calvin stepped out of his cab on Amsterdam, then pushed opened the doors to the Beacon’s back entrance, the entire crew stopped reading their phones and burst into applause.
*
On opening night for The Empty Chair, Calvin stood backstage at the Beacon awaiting his cue. The idea for the show went back to the very beginning of his career when he’d been juggling bit parts in small films with occasional work for a catering company that liked employing someone his size because it discouraged party guests from eating too much. On nights he wasn’t working, he played open mikes and showcases at comedy clubs where he was paid in free drink (singular) or a cut of the door if he could bring in more than fifty people. Most nights, half the seats were empty and the other half were occupied by comatose drunks so far gone that Calvin would pitch his routine to one of the empty chairs. “If I can get a chair to laugh,” he liked to say, “I’ll be the best damn comic who ever lived.”
In the late 1980s, when his career started taking off with a recurring role on A Different World and his first spot on The Tonight Show (when David Steinberg was guest hosting, but still), he was starting to sell out clubs in New York and L.A. He would set aside one ticket and leave it at the box office for someone he knew would never show up. He’d gotten the idea from the honky who coached the Houston Oilers and always left a ticket for Elvis.
It started out as a gimmick: he’d leave a ticket for Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy, knowing full well they wouldn’t come. But after he started getting cast in bigger roles, appearing on the covers of Jet, TV Guide, and Entertainment Weekly, playing Luther Abercrombie opposite Charlie Sheen in the cop buddy movie Abercrombie and Bitch, selling out college towns and old movie palaces, he still liked looking out and seeing at least one empty seat. The seat kept him honest, reminded him that, no matter how successful he was getting, something would always be missing. He would leave a ticket for his dad, who hadn’t talked to him since he was twelve; he’d leave one for his mom, who was occupied with her grandchildren and never visited or called.
But now that he was at what seemed to be the peak of his career—full houses wherever he went, people retweeting whatever he wrote—it seemed self-indulgent to say something was still missing. And if sometimes he felt the return of his old friend darkness, the gloom that made him feel as if he had nothing at all and long to curl up under the covers with a bottle of rum; if sometimes he thought of his mom and how far away she was; if sometimes he wished for a true love, the comfort that couldn’t be found at the hands of some high-dollar sex worker—if sometimes all that kept him from throwing himself off the George Washington Bridge was the fear of being written off as some clown-crying-on-the-inside cliché—the truth was that he really did have everything he needed. The show was called The Empty Chair, but there would be no empty seats.
The opening music went up—the theme to the climactic scene of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: “The Ecstasy of Gold.” Calvin stood in the wings, rocked on his heels, shadowboxed, his preshow workout: left to the gut, right to the jaw. The stage lights went down. A roar from the crowd—straight up: not applause, not a gasp, a legitimate roar. Someone leaned in close to him: “You’re on, Calvin.”
He walked, nearly danced, as the cameras and lights followed him. He pumped his fist to the music, the spotlight pooled center stage, and he stepped into the light. He held his hand high; the crowd went quiet. In that moment it seemed like he could do anything—even run for president. Someone had to take on Trump in 2020; why not him? Put him on as Oprah’s running mate; no ticket would be bigger, not even twin reincarnations of William Howard Taft.
“The name of the show, motherfuckers, is The Empty Chair.” A baby follow spot burst on and swept across the faces of all the people in the theater for the sold-out show. But then it lingered front row center where one seat was empty. The light moved on as Calvin kept staring at that empty chair.
He stood in the spotlight, silent. His eyes burned, hot tears exploded inside them. He swallowed hard. Oh, shit, oh, shit, he thought. He wished he could stop the show—Hey, hold on, guys; I’ll be back in an hour or two. He wanted to take out his phone—Hey, Todd, man, you on your way? Everything all right? But the show had its own motion and all he could do was roll with it. And besides, he had a pretty good idea what that empty seat meant.
When the show was over, he skipped the party, told the guys backstage to make up some excuse—“Calvin has the shits.” He got into an SUV, asked his driver to take him to Todd’s apartment, and—after the doorman there said an ambulance had left two hours earlier—told his driver to take him to Weill Cornell.
Visiting hours were over at the hospital, but he was Calvin Bumbry Dawes, so rules didn’t apply. Only family members were allowed in the ward where Todd was being treated, but he was Calvin Bumbry Dawes, so they let him go right up.
“Aww, fuck, man.” Calvin started crying the moment he walked into Todd’s room, “Aww, fuck fuck, fuck.” Todd was under a white sheet, eyes closed, tube in his mouth, a thin layer of gray-and-white stubble on his face, a machine helping him breathe. A bandage was wrapped around his head. He looked like an old man. Someone should have at least given him a shave. Calvin put a hand on Todd’s shoulder, kissed his cheek.
Snow fell fast upon the East River, on the empty trams gliding to and from Roosevelt Island. Along FDR Drive, cabs and buses, wipers going, crept through the slush. Calvin could feel it again—that dull ache, that gathering darkness. He hoped someone had been with Todd when it had happened, whatever it was. He couldn’t stand to think that Todd might have been alone. The idea that Todd had collapsed when he was on his way to the Beacon to see Calvin was too much to bear.
He felt under the sheet for Todd’s hand. It was warm; at least there was that. He sat there holding Todd’s hand. Man, he wasn’t down with this death-and-dying shit.
He looked up and saw a woman in a pale blue uniform standing in the doorway. Calvin cleared his throat and blinked away the tears. “It’s okay,” he told the nurse, his voice catching. “I was just leaving.”
“That’s all right, Mr. Dawes.” She reached into a pocket and pulled out a pen and a pad. “I know this might not be the best time, but what you’ve been writing—it’s meant a lot to me.” She gestured to Todd. “And I know it’s meant a lot to him too.”
“He talked to you about that?” Calvin asked.
“It’s the only thing he wanted to talk about,” said the nurse.
Calvin signed his autograph and gave the nurse a hug, and as he walked out to the elevators and down to the lobby, then out and into the snow—a few sprays of blood on it—he thought of how so much could change in such a brief time. One moment you could be on a stage, pumping your fist as a sold-out crowd gave you a standing O; the next, you could be heading home alone from a hospital where the best friend you’d ever had was dying.
But at least he had told the story Todd wanted him to; at least now it was out in the world.
Mrs. Frank
When she got the panicked call from the high school informing her that Tyrus Densmore had resigned his position with no advance notice and asking if she would consider stepping in to direct the school’s spring play, Judith knew she had to say yes, no matter how many commitments she had already made. And she knew which show she had to choose, no matter how many heinous memories that choice might trigger.
But as she toted her RED ORCHID THEATRE shoulder bag full of clipboards, pens, stapled scripts, and audition forms and entered the Trey Newson Memorial Theater Annex at North Shore Magnet for the first time in the twenty-first century, she was surprised to discover how unfamiliar the place actually seemed.
The entirety of the Annex, reeking of Sammy Doulos’s weed in her memory, smelled like floral air freshener. The classrooms seemed to be in the wrong places, the girls’ bathroom was twice as large as she remembered, and, in the common room, there weren’t any vending machines stocked with stale candy bars, flat soda, and off-brand fruit juice; just a coffeemaker, a well-stocked mini-fridge, a sink, and a microwave. In the hallways, there were no longer any framed photos of old productions—no Judith with silver hair, playing Mrs. Gibbs in Our Town; no Judith as Edith Frank in a ratty overcoat with a construction paper yellow star; no physical evidence whatsoever of the years she had spent here save for the bronze plaque dedicated to Charles “Trey” Newson, which spoke of someone who didn’t sound much like the Trey she had known: 1965–1992: HERE IN THE ANNEX, HE FOUND THE LOVE OF FRIENDS AND A SENSE OF HOME.
