Maybe the Moon

solution at best. When all was said and done, I needed work and fast if I was to maintain my sacred independence.
    “What about Aunt Edie?” Renee asked.
    “What about her?”
    “Couldn’t she loan you some?”
    I gave her a menacing look, knowing she knew better. The slightest whiff of my impoverishment would have Aunt Edie on my doorstep in three minutes. And nothing would please her more. I might be desperate, but not that desperate. There are worse fates than starvation.
    “Well…” Renee fidgeted with the neck of her sweater, fresh out of solutions. “Want some cocoa, then?”
    “Get outa here. Go call your studmuffin.”
    “But what are you gonna…?”
    “It’s OK,” I assured her, shooing her out of the room. “I’ll give Leonard a call first thing.”

    Leonard is my agent, the source of all hope and despair. I signed on with him after finishing Mr. Woods . The first job he landed for me was a role in a horror flick called Bugaboo , in which I played a zombie and appeared on screen for exactly four seconds toward the end. An unsuspecting housewife—Suzi Kenton, remember her?—opens the door of her refrigerator and finds yours truly crouching on the bottom shelf next to the orange juice.
    This was a real advance for me, believe it or not, because you actually got to see my face (albeit gray and scabby-looking) and it filled the entire screen. According to Aunt Edie, who never tells a lie, that one brief, shining moment in the light of the Kelvinator was so recognizably mine that theatergoers in Baker actually stood and cheered. This isn’t possible, since all they’ve got there is a drive-in, but I knew what the old bat was trying to say. In the eyes of the people she cared about, I was legitimate at last—a real movie star—no longer just a dwarf in rubber. I won’t pretend it didn’t feel good.
    Since then everything and nothing has happened. There was a brief period in the late eighties when I worked in performance. I was more or less adopted by a space in downtown Los Angeles, where I was in great demand by artists doing pieces on alienation and absurdity. They were gentle, surprisingly naive kids, who tookendless pains to guard against what they referred to as “the exploitation of the differently abled.” This got to be old fast, so I pulled two of them aside one day and told them not to sweat it, that I was an actress first and foremost, that of course I would play an oil-slick mutant for them, that I would sit on a banana and spin if it was in the goddamned script and they paid me something for it.
    This seemed to relax them, and we got along famously after that. My mom, who thought Liberace was avant-garde, came to one of the presentations and left in horror and confusion, though she pretended afterwards to find it “interesting.” I have no doubt Renee would feel the same way if I were still in performance, so it’s probably just as well that I’m not. Besides, the money was pretty awful (if not nonexistent), and the work was unconnected with the Industry, so I was getting nowhere fast.
    Except that one night we were visited by a star: Ikey St. Jacques, the black child actor who used to play the adorable seven-year-old on What It Is ! Little Ikey sat in the very back of the bleachers, all duded up in silver and burgundy, in the company of an extremely long-legged adult female. Word of his presence spread through the space like wildfire. The other cast members did their best to look blasé about it, of course, but they were clearly stunned that such a recognizable icon was in our midst. Frankly, I’d had my suspicions about the kid for years, so it didn’t surprise me a bit when he came backstage and confessed.
    It wasn’t that easy for him to do, either, logistically speaking, since he was forced to wade through the refuse of the night’s performance, great gooey wads of surgical gauze smeared with stage blood and about two dozen rubber baby dolls in varying states of dismemberment. His friend was waiting for him in the car, he said, but he just had to tell me that I was wonderful, a great actress, that he’d been totally inspired by my performance, since he himself was a little person and really seventeen years old, not seven. I shrugged and said, “What else is new?” and we both laughed and became buddies on the spot, exchanging phone numbers. His real friendscalled him Isaac, he said, so I should do the same. Before he left, he told me some great stories