The Outsider, page 13
CHAPTER SEVEN ALABAMA DETOUR
Vir’s show, Not for Members Only, at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi. It’s gonna be huge…
It’s gonna take everything…
We’re probably going to have to build it ourselves…
I’ve always taken umbrage with people who complain about their success. If you have the ability to be successful in any goddamn part of the arts, given the utterly ridiculous odds that you are up against, and you then begrudge that success, you are an ungrateful asshole. You don’t deserve to even attempt to participate in your chosen art form. Basically, you’re the absolute worst.
Having said that, if you’re young and in the early days of your success, complain away.
Early success is a bitch because there is such a minuscule group of people who understand what makes them successful at a young age. Being good at something takes a while, but receiving acclaim or applause can come super-duper early. Like, way before you deserve it, and before you even understand what it is that makes you good. And yes, I’m including the Leo DiCaprios and Timothée Chalamets and Eddie Murphys of the world, who somehow know exactly what their artistic voice is at seventeen years old and lean the fuck in. They didn’t stumble into early success—they earned it.
At twenty-two years old, I did not have a goddamn clue what I was doing onstage, what made me good onstage, and—most important—why people were sitting in the audience. In retrospect, I think my early success was built upon pure braggadocious ego mixed with ignorance. But even at that age, being onstage just felt like home. Ever since I was four years old and played that tree in the school play, as I stood onstage and waved my arms from side to side in my best palm-tree impression, I remember thinking, “Oh man, the view is way better from up here.”
I wish everyone in the world could see what I see from a stage. A mix of warm golden orbs shine from the stage lights, forming a filmic lens flare in front of your eyes. Who says real life isn’t a movie? Wooden floorboards shake under your feet. Tiny particles of dust float through each light beam, causing you to wonder how long each one of those particles has lived in that theater. The heat of the stage lights causes a single trickle of sweat to drip down your neck, and a cool draft from the old building drifts from a backstage wing, where everyone from worried agents to excited viewers has witnessed the electricity of a live show. And when you hear a crowd? My god, is that a hard sound to describe. The sound of four thousand people laughing, their feet moving, their hands clapping. Even better—the sound of four thousand people not moving, not laughing, not shaking. Just sitting there in pure silence. It’s truly magic, as if, for a brief moment in time, you’re actually, truly connected to every single person in the audience.
Like I said, I know all of this now. At twenty-two, all I knew was that I had written and performed a show about brown men (not) humping, in which I’d said “fuck” about seven thousand times and then received a standing ovation. I’d also received some very generous sex after the show, turning it into a very ironic evening.
I thought I killed it on that stage at Knox College. I felt totally and utterly confident, knowing deep in my bones that comedy was what I was meant to do. Praise was heaped on me by friends, professors, and my host parents. Turns out the joke was on me, because a few months after graduation, when I came down from my onstage high, I found myself washing dishes at a Grand Lux Cafe in Chicago during the day, and getting booed off every open-mic stage I stepped onto at night. It’s tougher to impress twenty cynical comedy lovers in the third largest city in America than it is to wow six hundred friendly people in Galesburg. Maybe that’s not a big surprise to you, but it was to me.
If you graduate from the protective bubble of a leftist liberal arts college and go to a city where you don’t have citizenship and the only thing you do have is a theater major, you’re in for some surprises. First, no one gives a shit how amazing you were in War and Peace as Andrei. Second, food is a lot more expensive, the public transport you take everywhere seems to feature people who look as unhappy as you do (only much older), and you start to wonder if things will ever get better. Third, you start to realize that you are utterly unemployable in your chosen art form.
The year I finished college started off great because I finally got to go to Harvard. Well, around Harvard. Call it Harvard-adjacent. I auditioned for drama graduate school while I was still in my final year at Knox College and got into a short program at the American Repertory Theater at Harvard, which was run in conjunction with the Moscow Art Theatre. The Moscow Art Theatre teachers are disciples of the great acting teacher/guru Konstantin Stanislavski. These people basically invented method acting, and once every few years they do a ten-week program where they take fifteen kids and teach them to act.
In Boston, I rented an apartment on Tremont Street in Southie, which is the part of town where Ben Affleck lives in every single Boston movie he’s in. Keep in mind this was 2002, so I found the apartment on Craigslist. If I did that today I would have been found chopped up in a basement, but in 2002 we did shit like that. I’d wake up at six in the morning, take two buses to Cambridge, sit in Harvard Square with my guitar case open for tips, and sing for an hour while the rich kids walked to class and bought coffee at the co-op. I’d sing Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Bob Dylan, some Leonard Cohen. Just the kind of cheery, sunny music people want to hear first thing in the morning. Like a stripped-down Bad Attitude, if you will. Mild attitude. Some attitude. My somber repertoire earned me about $4.50, which was enough for breakfast and bus money for the next day. I’d go to Punjab Palace, where they sold a single samosa for fifty cents. I’d buy four, and that became breakfast and lunch. Then I’d spend all day doing theater with old Russians who taught me more about acting in two months than I had learned in three years at Knox (no offense to Ivan Davidson). We studied body work, movement work, voice work, reading, rehearsals, and most important… Truth.
On the first day of my Stanislavski Summer, the artistic director of the Moscow Arts Theatre stood up in front of the entire Harvard theater faculty, plus fifteen clueless theater students, and in a heavy Russian accent said, “Acting… uh… very simple. Read script. Believe script. Do what the fuck you like.” Huh.
I had just spent $21,000 on three years studying at Knox only to find myself learning “Do what the fuck you like.” Because of how little English they spoke, if you weren’t honest in your performance, these instructors felt it. The words mattered less than the feelings you conveyed. They didn’t give you flowery feedback or overintellectualized theater jargon. They’d just go “good” or “shit.” God bless Russian bluntness.
After classes, at around five in the evening, I’d head to Harvard Square again and sing for another hour while kids caught up after class and smoked in the square. I’d usually make less busking in the evenings, so I’d clock about $2.50 on a bad day, but take the two buses home to Southie smiling from ear to ear. On weekends I’d walk around Boston until I was hungry enough to go home and warm up some Campbell’s chicken noodle tins. I count that summer as one of the best of my life. I had no money, but I was studying acting, which I loved, and later that summer I discovered my comedic voice as well.
Harvard in the summer with no one around is kind of a vibe. It is very white, everyone is intelligent, everyone is reading a book, and everyone looks vaguely rich. There’s lots of linen, people play chess in the sun in the park, and no one pays attention to a shabby Indian kid. I remember once I snuck into the Harvard Stadium and smoked a joint in the empty arena. I climbed over a gate and then through a small space, and suddenly I was in the stands. I sat there in a space meant for 25,884 people and looked at an empty American football field. Strangely enough, I thought of home and of Noida. Some evenings I’d walk around Southie and stumble into bars. Again, it was very white, and I immediately knew if I was welcome or very much not welcome. A few years later, I watched The Departed in the cinema and I swear so many of those Southie bars looked like the ones Jack Nicholson and his gang hung out in, with some very ominous-looking regulars.
I didn’t make it back to Harvard until 2019. I was asked to headline the Harvard India Conference, which is sort of a superelite think fest where politicians, writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals from India get on a plane to Cambridge in February and give lectures to young, impressionable grad students. It was the first time I saw political members of the ruling party and the opposition abroad. When they are outside the country, they chill, smoke, drink, and hang together. Then they get back to India and toe the party line while trying to burn each other’s houses down. I remember on the flight there, a young politician (from the party I would soon piss off to the highest degree) and I shared a beer together. I was flying first class, which I had forced Harvard to pay for. It was weird to see a politician in the traditional pajama kurta there with me. It went against the simple chaste positioning they project. We actually hung out for a few hours. He was my age and could not have been more chill. Liberal, even. The following year, he went on to make some of the most Islamophobic speeches I’ve ever heard. It’s at moments like that that you realize it’s all a game and none of them believe a word they are saying. They just follow a script they didn’t write. Maybe that’s why they hate actors so much. It’s the same job, just less stress and bigger perks (sometimes). When I opened my set at Harvard that year, I made sure to let them know they had paid a lot of money and bought a first-class ticket for the kid who used to busk in the square.
Back to the end of that magical summer spent studying with some of the greats, when the Russians called me into their office and told me they thought I was talented, and if I was willing to learn Russian, they’d like to offer me a position at their theater school in Moscow. I sometimes think about what would’ve happened if I had said yes. I would’ve moved to Moscow, and lived my life under Putin? I guess that would’ve made for a pretty interesting book. I was twenty-two. I was already lonely, and Moscow seemed so far away and so cold, with so many prisons. I refused and went somewhere only slightly warmer. I went to Chicago.
When you graduate with a student visa in the U.S., they give you one year to get a job that will sponsor a work visa. I had burnt through half of that time with the Russians who told me to do what the fuck I liked, and then I did the opposite. I ran through four jobs that paid me illegally, in cash. I was an unpaid theater intern, a volunteer at an after-school program for inner-city kids, a banquet bartender, a dishwasher and, eventually, a door escort at the Grand Lux Cafe (which paid me legally). You can tell a lot about a person by what they leave on their plate. If the plate is full of carbs but the protein is gone, they’re having sex. If it’s all there, they didn’t like the food, a date went horribly wrong, or someone died. If the plate is completely empty, they’re immigrants. I loved being in the kitchen. We’d make fun of white people all day. I had a friend called Andrew who would just laugh about how my parents had spent all this money to send me to college and yet I was making the same amount of money as a high school dropout. Andrew was right to laugh, but actually, I love washing dishes. Yes, in America they give you a hair net and gloves and a fancy high-powered spray faucet, but to this day, if I’m stressed, I do the dishes. The mindlessness of it relaxes me.
Just a quick tangent: I think the biggest conversation in the world right now might be immigration. Who do we let into our countries? That single conversation changes the outcome of American elections. It’s incredibly ironic that none of the people who are having that conversation seem to have worked in the world of the undocumented. At my dishwasher job, at my after-school program, at my banquet job, 80 percent of the people I worked with were undocumented. They are some of the most talented, hardworking, and funny people I know doing a job that I promise you no white person wants to do anyway for a wage that none of them would accept.
Every time I see that rhetoric of “foreigners taking our jobs, illegals being brought in to take jobs,” all I can think is: You fucking try it. Try existing in the cash-only world as we did. Paying your rent in cash, paying for the train in cash, paying for cigarettes in cash, keeping your rent under your mattress and rolled up into socks that are then stuffed into the toes of your shoes so that your roommates or robbers can’t find it when you’re at work. Try going into banks and being told you don’t have the documentation to even open an account. Try selling everything at pawn shops for 50 percent of what it should go for because you don’t have enough in your bank account to set up eBay. Try going to your landlord’s every month and dropping eight hundred dollars in bundles of ones and fives, which you have evenly split among your jacket pocket, pants pocket, bag compartment, and shoes, because you’re worried you’re going to get mugged on the Brown Line train. These are the people you want to kick out of your country?
I’d respect people more if they just said they were insecure and scared of what they don’t understand. Immigrants experience America relative to something, and are not just taking it for granted. They know what they have left behind, they know what the alternative is. Why be upset at them?
But back to Chicago.
When I wasn’t getting laughed at or scrubbing crusty macaroni and cheese off plates, I was doing open mics in Chicago. I was bombing at open mics on the South Side. I’m gonna say something that sounds racist, but it’s not. And I know that’s usually what people say before they say something racist. So here it goes: I don’t think there’s a tougher crowd than a Black crowd, and winning over a crowd never feels better than when it’s a Black crowd. They will let you know how shitty you are and how funny you are quicker than any other crowd on the planet. So there I was in rooms on the South Side, bombing because I was doing some trite shit about cockroaches, while a crowd looked at me with hostility that almost made me feel… white? Can I say that? I said it. The problem was that at the time, my material was impersonal. It said nothing authentic about who I was, in front of what’s probably the most authentic, self-aware community of people in America. My first real laugh in those rooms came not because I was being clever but because I was being honest.
It was a Tuesday. I was comedian number 18 in the lineup. We each got three minutes, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but it is an eternity when you’re as bad as I was and have thirty disgruntled people staring at you in utter silence (and not because they’re utterly stunned by your talent). After about six weeks of death stares, I’d had enough. I was done reasoning with these crowds. I was just going to confront them and never show up again. I don’t remember exactly what the joke was, but I know it had alliteration, and I know it got a laugh. I remember the sound of that laugh like it was yesterday. I think I said something like, “The fuck do you know about Indians? You think you’re so cool. NONE of you appreciate Indian people. WE are cool. We are the quickie mart owners who sell you food, we are the doctors who check out your wife’s pussy and make sure it’s good to go. We drive your taxis, we sell you newspapers, we teach you math and science. Without Indians you’d be starving, stranded, sexless, sterile, and stupid!”
It wasn’t Shakespeare, but it worked.
It was an average joke told at a shitty bar on a Tuesday night. But suddenly—lights, lens flare, warmth, laughter. Not everyone in the room laughed, but it was just enough people to let me know it was real. They probably weren’t even laughing at the material; they were probably laughing at how tired and frustrated this tiny Indian man looked. I was honest, just like the Russians told me to be. The laughter felt amazing, but then I was out of material because I forgot the rest of my set. I thanked them and got offstage. I had done thirty-four seconds of my three minutes, but it was enough. I got a real laugh, from a real crowd. I was hooked.
* * *
Somehow, no matter how broke you are in your twenties, there’s always enough money for booze and cigarettes. In Chicago I lived with a six-foot-four white linebacker from Wisconsin named Josh Hart. I’d met him at Knox College through Nalini (they eventually married). I made extra cash bartending banquets for rich WASPs, getting the gigs via a staffing company that made you buy your own tuxedo. I found a 1970s tux for twelve bucks from the Salvation Army. Picture an Indian kid with gelled hair, wearing pants with a too-tight crotch and huge bell bottoms pouring your chardonnay at the annual fundraiser. That was me.
Despite my biggish laugh that one night at the club, I eventually left Chicago. It was just too cold for my equatorial bones. I remember a night when I was trying to get home from the Grand Lux Cafe, which meant taking the Red Line AND the Brown Line. Now if your train pass has a low balance or has to be renewed and you haven’t gotten paid yet, you gotta come up with options. You could walk home. In Chicago? At night? Kind of a “let’s see if a stranger or the cold kills me first” contest. Fuck that.
So once in a while, I had to ride the Red Line in a loop for hours until it was warm enough to walk home in the morning. At that time of night the train was full of people on drugs, many of them without a home, some with guns or bulges that you hoped were weapons and not something else, some talking to themselves, plus one petrified Indian kid. I tried to distract myself by playing music on my headphones, which were hidden under my hood. I didn’t want to be caught with a Discman. Kids, if you don’t know what that is, it’s a portable CD player. If you don’t know what a CD player is… google it and wish me luck as an elder. So you put the music on, put your backpack on backward, over your stomach, zip your jacket up above your bag so you look pregnant, and then put your head against the window, maybe rehearse a monologue for an audition to keep your mind occupied. Then at about 6:05 a.m., the train will come out of a tunnel that feels like it gets longer each time you pass through it at night, and sunlight will hit your face. Golden light, warm cheeks, like the universe letting you know you made it, it’s time to get off the train.
