The Death Scene

I flew in from L.A. the day before the audition and took public transportation from the airport to downtown Vancouver, ignoring stares from children, assholes and those who were just too slow to look away before they got caught. A group of teenage girls got on the bus, followed by an old lady wearing a wide straw sun hat and a father with a stroller, and I saw all of them look at me, look away, look back. The Super 8 was right on Marine Drive, but by the time I tugged the cord, we had overshot it by five whole blocks. One of the girls helped lift my luggage out the back door, smiling like it’s no trouble, sir, while her friend surreptitiously took a picture of me with her phone.

Twenty-three feature films in the last three decades and the people who were staring didn’t even recognize me. But I was glad not to be known; this was a privilege August lost when he quit taking the kind of roles that required makeup and prosthetics. We met in 1982, when I was twelve and August was thirteen. Out of a dozen dwarf actors on the forest-moon set of The Return of the Jedi near Crescent City, California, he was the only one near my age and the only other person who wasn’t white. Both of our characters were named in the script, though not in the end credits. I played Tagwah. August later claimed not to remember what his Ewok was called. “Something dumb, that’s for sure,” he would say at parties. “Teddy Ruxpin? Shih Tzu? Jesus, who fucking cares.”

That movie was pretty much the highlight of my career. August, on the other hand, somehow managed to transform himself into the dwarf Robert Downey Jr. – always in trouble, always in demand. Vancouver, where they were filming his show, had been his city. Until his death four days ago, he was the biggest little person in the game.

In the mid-nineties, after August left L.A. for New York, I had an acting teacher who advised me never to tell anyone anything about myself. “Your personal life ain’t nobody’s business but yours,” this teacher told me. “And besides, you got enough else working against you. You’re already black. Well, sort of.” This was a familiar joke; people had been saying it to me ever since I could remember. My adoptive parents were Irish-American and I grew up in the suburbs. I talked white, people always said.

That acting teacher was a light-skinned Latino, tall and well-groomed with bright green eyes and a neat mustache that I found very compelling, but he wasn’t anybody special – he’d had a recurring role on a soap opera and felt that qualified him to give advice. We’d spent most of the afternoon together in his studio apartment. He was up already now and had his jeans on, pacing the room restlessly with an unlit joint in his hand. I still lay on the fold-out couch, damp sheets bunched under my hips. “You’re black and you’re …” The teacher gestured at my naked body. “You know. Small. You don’t need to be a queer too. Believe me.”

August never played by that rule. He slept with anyone he felt like and didn’t make much of an effort to conceal the gender or marital status of his various partners. He took every drug he could get his hands on. When he accepted his first major award – it was the Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Actor in 2001 – he used the opportunity to go on a rambling and very obscene tirade about the evils of fur and the benefits of vegetarianism and then the very next year, he changed his mind and invested in a high-end Las Vegas steak house, ignoring the backlash from PETA. He did naked photo shoots several times. There was a tattoo of a swallow or a seagull or something, some bird, just above his left buttock. August didn’t give a shit.

He was an attractive guy – always had been. An imposing 4’8”, he was tall for a little person, with wide shoulders and muscled arms that defied you to try and pick him up. I remember his hands, the broad palms and short, strong fingers that were squared-off at the tips. There was a bit of a side-to-side rock to his gait, but it was nothing like as bad as my own waddle, and he didn’t have the bum hips or severely bowed legs that most of us do. His back arched, but on him, it didn’t seem like a bad thing. He had dark skin – two shades darker than my own – and sculptural hair that he wore in a kind of unkempt afro that jutted out in front. There was this scar on his forehead, just left of center. It was round, a little depressed circle like a bit of flesh had been scooped from the surface; it was visible on camera in those later roles, the ones where he was generously lit and playing a real person. It made him look daring.

He used to get really upset during interviews when people treated him like he had a special hard-luck story. “Stupid motherfuckers look at me and think they know me,” he would say. Or, once he’d calmed down and smoked a joint and he was feeling more philosophical, “We all have challenges.”

The autopsy results were released to the press yesterday. They were showing it on CNN while I was waiting at the gate at LAX – alcohol and heroin. I read the coroner’s verdict on the crawl under that now-familiar aerial shot of the friend’s pool area with the jacuzzi where August took his last breath.

Alcohol and heroin. To be fair, that did sound like him.

I wasn’t in touch with his mother anymore, but I thought the funeral had probably already happened. The flowers would all be wilted now, the fried chicken, macaroni-and-cheese and string beans cooked and then consumed, the dishes washed, the distant relatives reunited and parted – kids in car seats, cars packed up and driven back home in the middle of the night. It didn’t matter. Didn’t matter whether he was in a pillbox-shaped urn now or a child-sized coffin, whether he was in the refrigerator at the funeral home or still at the Medical Examiner’s office under a sheet, as naked as he had been in the photos in Rolling Stone. He was past cold, now. He was just gone.

I dragged my suitcase along the sidewalk as I backtracked to the hotel entrance, my hip aching, wishing I’d booked the damn shuttle or taken a cab. A red car pulled into the crosswalk right in front of me. I wasn’t good with makes and models, but I could tell that it was something sporty, low-slung and loud. Hip-hop bumped from the stereo inside. The air-conditioner was blasting, but the windows were cracked, forcing the new-car smell out of the interior and into the day. “Hey,” the driver called to me. “Hey, wait a second!”

I squared my shoulders, prepared for any kind of ignorance.

“Hey, you’re here for the thing. This weekend, the thing?”

The windows of the red car were tinted to a degree that was probably not street-legal. I looked into the four-inch gap. I could see a pale forehead, an arched eyebrow. “Do I know you?”

The window glided down the rest of the way, revealing the face of the driver. He was in his thirties, with floppy brown hair. There were fine lines around his eyes and mouth. He wasn’t anyone I recognized. “Oh, sorry,” the driver said. “No. I’m Lee. I was August’s manager – I sent, you know, the emails.”

I’d gotten them – all six of them. The man was trying to pull together a memorial service for August’s friends. He was calling it a “memory gathering,” for some reason.

Lee looked at my rollaboard. “Just got into town? That thing looks kind of cumbersome for you to carry. Can I take you somewhere? Or lunch – I was just going to grab lunch. You wanna hop in?”

“No,” I said. “No thanks.”

Lee dialed down the music to a less-deafening level. “I could just give you a ride to your hotel or whatever – that’s cool too. I’m sorry, you must think I’m crazy! I’m not just assuming – I mean, I do know who you are. At least I think I do. Stop me if I’m wrong. You’re Kevin O’Connor? Kevin O?”

I was not impressed. This was basic process of elimination. August was dead. The only other African-American male with achondroplasia in his mid-forties in the business that I knew of was Darnell Butler. Darnell lived in West Hollywood and had dread locks that reached halfway down his back and he walked with a cane. He always got the sit-com one-offs, the diminutive angry dude in the office or the apartment down the hall. He had a really great sense of humor. Even white people rarely got the two of us confused.

Still. At least this guy knew my name.

“Yeah,” I confirmed. “I’m Kevin O.”

“I wasn’t sure if you’d gotten the invitation.” Lee said this very casually; if he was annoyed that I had never responded, it wasn’t evident from his voice. “It’s really good to run into you, man.”

Slowly, I opened the rear passenger door of the car. Lee did not get out to help, which I both appreciated and resented as I laboriously lifted and shoved my suitcase inside, then struggled into the front passenger seat. The upholstery was soft leather. I could see that the car had been fitted with hand-controls that would enable someone with very short legs to drive it, though Lee himself was of average height. “Is this August’s car?”

Lee pulled out into traffic. “Belongs to the network. It’s the one he was using though, yeah. So, where to?” He was already turning toward the harbor. Outside the windows, the sky was sunny. On August’s TV show, Bad Medicine, which had been filmed here, characters were always complaining about the rain, but actual rain was never depicted. In outdoor scenes, there was just this pervasive, gloomy atmosphere, possibly created in post production. “You staying at the Fairmont? I’ll run you over there.”

I had no idea how he’d jumped to that conclusion. It sounded expensive. “No, not the Fairmont. I was about to check into the Super 8.”

“But that’s back on Marine Drive! You were almost there.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Lee laughed. “Shit. My bad. Can I take you back?”

We were going by some city park now. The mid-morning traffic was heavy. He seemed to be making an effort to use only the hand controls, but would often forget and stomp on the brake pedal, which luckily still worked.

“I can see that you are hell-bent on this lunch thing,” I said. “I’m just going to go along with it.”

“OK, cool. There’s a place downtown I wanted to check out.” He got into the left lane. “So. August mentioned you live in Los Angeles?”

“That’s right.”

“I’m glad you were able to make it up here.” It was obvious that he had assumed I was in town for the memory gathering, though I didn’t know why he thought I would come to Vancouver almost a week early. I felt reluctant to tell him about the audition. It wasn’t a great part, but I understood – and Lee would understand too, better than anyone else – that it was a part that absolutely would have been offered first to August.

“Yeah, about that …” I cleared my throat. “Who else is going to be there? At the service?”

I had noted the other recipients in the email chain, of course – the list included all of Santa’s elves. The thing about our particular piece of Hollywood – our own back-water backlot – is that it is infinitely finite. There are only so many men who can do what we do, and of course we all know each other. We know each other’s business, we compete, we bear grudges that endure. From the time I started acting, it had been sort of a Lollipop Guild you couldn’t just leave, unless you left the business entirely.

Or unless you were August.

“Well, everybody is really shocked and upset,” Lee said. “Obviously the whole cast and crew of the show will be coming, and some people from the network are flying in. Ivan is coming from New York – you remember, the director of Small Spaces. August and him are – they were – really good friends. And –”

I cut him off. “You know what I’m asking. Who’s going to be there?”

“Actors you’ve worked with, you mean?”

“That’s one way to put it.”

“Little people,” he said.

“Right.”

“OK, eight or ten guys confirmed.” Lee tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. We were circling a downtown block now, and he was on the lookout for parking. “Let’s see,” he said. “Mitch – do you know Mitch Shlifka? – and Darnell Butler, for sure. Peter Williams, Pete Yee, uh, David Patrick Gillan. Shorty’ll be there, and –”

“Which Shorty?”

“Shorty Cabrera. Not Shorty Sullivan.”

“Good.” I said. “I can’t stand that guy. There.” I pointed. A woman with two boutique shopping bags was just getting into her car.

“Thanks.” Lee put on his turn signal and we waited for the woman to pull out of the space. “Yeah … Sullivan.” He laughed. “He is kind of a jerk, isn’t he? Apparently he’s on location on some big shoot right now. He had his PA call me, said he couldn’t make it.”

“Liar,” I responded reflexively, then shook my head, ashamed of myself. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that.” This was the attitude I was trying to escape, the negativity and backbiting that always surfaced in me when I met up with Darnell and Shlifka and the rest.

There was no conflict, no reason I couldn’t go to both – the audition and the service. If I could stomach it. I wasn’t sure.

Sullivan probably was off shooting something somewhere, I thought. He probably did have a PA. Why wouldn’t he? Sullivan was a hack, but he stayed busy. There was always work for guys like us who didn’t start to think we were too good for it.

August and I lived together for four months total. It was 1989 when he moved in. At that time, my own career was stalled. I already had two roommates – a leather-bondage couple – and we lived in a terrible mother-in-law apartment over a garage in Silver Lake. I was surviving on the SSD I’d started collecting after my first hip surgery, the remains of my check from Willow and some occasional photography work, taking head-shots of other actors.

I learned from a friend of a friend that August was having an even harder time. He was trying to be a serious theater actor in San Francisco and it wasn’t going so hot. There’d been some kind of a blow-out with his mom, who I remembered from the Star Wars days as a stylish woman in a silk blouse with a moist Super Curl hairstyle. She was the one who had named him August Thankgod Diver, probably hoping to confer upon her son’s life some of the dignity that other circumstances of his birth would deny him. She always used to send him money, but now, he’d done something to critically piss her off.

I called him up and asked him to come live with me in L.A. I remember offering him my couch for as long as he wanted it. I told him pretty specifically what it would be like over the phone, warned him that we would shop at the swap meets and eat for free on Sundays at the Hare Krishna temple. It wasn’t much, what I had, but I promised to introduce him to everyone I knew.

He drove south to meet me, his car loaded with crates of gospel records that didn’t seem to belong to him, which we sold immediately for cash. Eventually, we sold his car too. We lived off of dry cereal and jerky from the dollar store, and walnuts, loquats and avocados from the neighborhood trees. We ran lines together and did lines together, if someone else brought coke to a party we were at. We drank too much. We permitted beautiful women kiss us for good luck at bars, and we struggled together up the staircases set in the hills to get home afterwards. Occasionally, we spied has-been celebrities in the street, just as drunk as we were. We competed constantly for the same non-midget roles that neither of us ever got.

We were nineteen years old.

He never slept on the couch. He slept in my bed.

Nobody remembers this now but me.

The restaurant Lee chose was an Asian-fusion kind of place. He got pho and a papaya salad and I got Szechuan green beans with tofu. We both got mai tais. Even as we ordered them, I knew it wasn’t a good idea. “Watch out,” I said. “I’m probably about to get maudlin.”

“That’s OK,” he told me very seriously. “However you feel, it’s OK. Do you want to talk about it?”

I didn’t want to talk about it.

It was disconcerting for us – for me and the others – when August’s career took off. An actor of normal stature with his brand of dramatic good looks, even a black actor, would have been getting good parts all along. He would have been the hardass CIA boss with a tragic past, the sympathetic rebel leader, the tortured, adulterous pastor – every variety of the charismatic and honorable man doing bad things. Instead, August spent the first ten years of his career like the rest of us, playing munchkins and shit, and then another ten barely working. Then he won that Independent Spirit Award.

An amazing thing about Small Spaces, his breakout role, was that the character wasn’t written as a little person or a black person. He was just a person. Someone saw August read for it and liked him and decided to gave him a break. And he was good. We all acknowledged that; we told him that and we told each other, too, when we convened later that year on the set of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to play the goblins. August had hit it out of the park.

But anyone could have done it. That’s what we thought to ourselves in private. Sure, he had talent. Small Spaces, though – it was a great movie, a great part. It could have been any of us. He was the one who got the chance.

What did he do to deserve it?

Bad Medicine, a premium cable drama about rival cancer researchers, got really big eighteen months ago. August played Dr. Aaron Clark, a debonair genius-bastard – not the lead, but the favorite character. I watched religiously, and I knew that strangers all over America were finally noticing the things that used to get me hard as a teenager in the chair next to him having our Ewok make-up put on. His success had become mainstream. Now, people who didn’t even know August were praising his soulful eyes and his noble, twice-broken nose. Trashy magazines admired his classic square jaw; women on internet message boards mused about the ironic twist of his handsome mouth and that goddamn forehead scar.

I never did ask where the scar came from.

“What’s it going to be like?” I asked Lee. I was on my second drink now. He was on his third. The server had taken away our plates already. “The service. The memory gathering. Why are you calling it that, anyway?” I still hadn’t told him I might not be going. He was still assuming I would.

“Well, it’s not a funeral, obviously,” Lee said. “His family must have had one, but none of us were invited. This is something different. And ‘memorial service’ sounds too sad. August wasn’t a sad guy. He was joyful – a real joyful guy. That’s how I think he would have wanted to be remembered.”

“So we’re all going to sit around and remember him? Like, share our memories?”

“Yeah, but good memories only, you know? His life was uneven sometimes, for sure. He was uneven. But I think we should try to focus on the positive.”

I remembered a message August left on my answering machine a few years ago. It was clear from his voice that he was high or drunk. He asked me to come live with him in New York. He would get us a big place. It would be like old times. He was working on a script – there was a part in it for me.

I never thought he would follow through. Not really.

“I rented an event space,” Lee said. “Really respectable. It’s actually the house that some chemist built for himself in the nineteen hundreds. He invented fabric softener, made a million bucks. It faces the lake and it’s got Tiffany stained-glass windows – all neo-Jacobean style, looks good on the website.”

I felt oppressed, suddenly. I got the feeling that Lee was waiting for me to say that August would have liked that.

As honestly as I could, I tried to picture how it would be, this gathering. Most of the industry people there – the non-little people – I wouldn’t know. They would know each other, though. They’d really just be networking, talking to themselves when they talked about August. Maybe the female lead from his TV show would stand up and tell about the first time she met him, how inspired she was by his can-do attitude, what good friends they’d become, but all of her focus would be on the people in the crowd she thought could be useful to her.

Meanwhile all of us would be sitting in the back, talking shit the way we always did and secretly feeling whatever it was we felt. A couple of people would be broken up, crushed by the sad circumstances – Shlifka maybe, because he’s a sensitive guy, and Shorty Cabrera, who used to go to AA with August in New York four times a week in 2008, the year August seriously tried to stop drinking. The rest of us would be boasting and posturing and sizing up the others and whoever they brought along as dates. Peter Williams would be holding onto the arm of the Norwegian woman he met doing that stupid Viking show where he was the Viking chieftain’s personal sorcerer and she was the chieftain’s daughter. On the show, they could never get together – they didn’t even have scenes together and he had to wear a fake white beard and makeup that made him look about a hundred years old – but in real life, he was 24 and horny and they were fucking and he was proud that everyone knew about it.

Peter might come up to me and ask me what I’ve been up to recently. “Oh, you know,” I’d tell him. “Been keeping busy.” Busy meaning I was single. Busy meaning I had just flown all the way up to Vancouver to do a reading for a four-episode arc where I’d play an incarcerated forger who ultimately gets shanked during visiting hours and bleeds out in the arms of a prison guard while his wife looks on.

If they gave the part to me, though? I’d tell Peter about it. I’d be eager to brag. “At least I don’t have to wear a beard,” I would say to him.

I imagined myself up there at the front of the room with the stained glass and the big names, standing to the side of the lectern so I could be seen. Someone would hand me down the microphone, and it would be heavier than it looked. I wouldn’t be the only one in the room who had been August’s lover, but I’d known him longer than any of the rest of them. What would I say?

Lee was looking at me curiously now. Jacobean-style – I didn’t even know what that was.

“Honestly, the way I really pictured it is it happening in a bar,” I admitted.

He finished his drink and signaled the waitress for another round. “Yeah? I can see how that’s fitting.”

“A really nice bar, though. Not a dance club, and not the kind of old man bar I always end up in. I mean a New York bar that he might have gone to. Like, a big place, narrow, maybe, but real deep, with pressed tin ceilings and mirrors. The walls would be painted dark red.”

“And there would be gilt,” Lee said. “Gilt picture frames.”

“Yes.” I could see that he understood what I meant. “A brass rail at the bar and gilt picture frames. Framed pictures of, I don’t know, birds. A bunch of antique oil paintings of tropical birds in cages.”

“Weird,” Lee said. “How about no cages.”

“Sure, whatever.” I was on a roll, talking like this. I was excited. “And they’d have a jukebox. It would be full of those mix CDs he used to make, with the track listings in his handwriting.” In my car in L.A., I still had some tapes he had done for me back in the day, and at home in a drawer in my entertainment center, I’d saved the CDs he mailed in ’98 and ’99 and 2000, and the one apology mix from 2008, though I never listened to any of them anymore. “All the stuff on the jukebox would be music August liked,” I said. “So nobody would have to talk. We could just take turns going up and playing songs. The volume would be really loud and the speakers would be excellent.”

“And the jukebox would be free,” Lee said. “And the drinks would be free too.”

“Sounds like trouble.”

“Yeah, think of his taste in music, too,” Lee pointed out. “There were, like, two categories – eighties pop and conscious rap. No one wants to hear any of that at a funeral.”

“A memory gathering,” I corrected.

“How about this,” Lee said. “There’s a projector in the bar, and they’re projecting all of his movies in chronological order. But just the good ones. And it’s edited so that all you see is shots that he’s in.”

The waitress brought our mai tais. I fished the pineapple chunk out of mine with my chopsticks, rested it on the side of my plate and took a long sip. I was thinking about August, how he was charming, with a fierce, all-inclusive wit, how he wouldn’t stand for injustice. He would start fights and then the other guy would get scared and try to walk away and August would just go crazy. He acted like he didn’t understand why anyone might ever feel sorry for him.

The effect this had on me as a younger man – it was still hard for me to measure. I could remember it, but couldn’t really explain it.

“Wonder where that bar is,” I said. “It must exist, the one I’m imagining. With the gilt.”

“It’s too late already,” Lee said. “I paid a deposit for the fabric softener mansion. I bet I could rent a projector, though.” Thoughtfully, he took the pineapple off my plate between his forefinger and thumb and popped it in his mouth.

“Do you have both seasons of Bad Medicine on DVD?” I asked.

“Second one’s not out yet. I have the first on Blu-ray.” He looked at me then, his brown eyes warm and frank. “Do you want to go to my place and watch it?”

There is one scene in Small Spaces that I always remember best. Here’s the set-up. August’s character lives in an apartment in a gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn and he goes up to the roof at sunset to smoke a cigarette. His landlord, a young ultra-Orthodox Jewish man – played by a redheaded actor called Rich Markstein who I ran into once at a casino in the Los Angeles suburb of Commerce, California – joins him up there. August’s character has allowed a friend to hang drywall and illegally partition the apartment, which was previously an undivided loft. Now the apartment has rooms, but the friend did a poor job and some of the rooms don’t have windows; August’s character goes up to the roof regularly because his apartment is claustrophobic and dark. Hence the title.

There is a wide, establishing shot: the bare tar surface surrounded by a low wall, the shack-like structure that shelters the staircase where it emerges onto the roof, the other buildings behind and beyond that, the East River, the Williamsburg Bridge and Manhattan. August sits up on the wall. His legs, of course, dangle. His perch looks insecure. He could tumble over backwards at any moment.

“Can I have one?” the landlord asks. If you were watching for the first time, you wouldn’t know what kind of a person he is yet, because for the first half of the movie, August’s character has been avoiding him, but I’ve seen this over and over, over the years. I know what everyone will do.

August extends the pack. Close shot of his strong, stubby brown fingers, a hand that is so familiar to me. The landlord takes a cigarette, lights it with August’s character’s Zippo. The camera tracks the landlord as he walks to the other side of the roof and rests a foot casually on the parapet. He is tall and gawky in his black clothing and high black hat, a scarecrow. His limbs are especially long. Also, his trousers are too short; with his leg up like that his black dress sock is visible, and above it, an inch of white skin. August watches as the landlord exhales smoke.

The landlord’s gaze is directed to a neighboring roof. Birds dip low, flying between the buildings. They’re dark, backlit by the pink-and-yellow sky. I think they are pigeons, but they might be seagulls.

“So. Is your father going to be mad when he finds out?” August asks. He’s talking about the drywall in the apartment – the young landlord’s elderly dad is the actual owner of the building.

“Yes,” says the landlord. “He’ll be mad.” He holds the cigarette carelessly; ash falls onto his black jacket. I wonder if this was the director’s decision or the actor’s mistake, or perhaps the actor’s deliberate interpretation of how a young man who is not a smoker might smoke. “But my father’s always mad about something. What’s the point in worrying about it?”

August throws his lit cigarette down. The camera follows it over the edge, then stops. The sky is dim, and we watch the glowing tip disappear as it falls away to the sidewalk below.

A medium shot: August puts both palms flat on the wall, rocks back toward nothing. I worry for him then, always. “Sounds exhausting, being angry all the time,” he says.

The two men now gaze in the same direction, at the empty roof next door. “What about you?” the young landlord asks. “Are you angry?”

It has come out of nowhere – as this type of question most often does, in my experience. They think they can ask you anything they want, no matter how personal. It’s as if you signed up always to explain yourself; like you agreed to be famous, but without the money or renown. Famous even if you never actually make it.

August’s character laughs now, a short, bitter laugh. It’s not August’s own laugh, which I know as well as I know anyone’s. This laugh on the roof, I’m not sure where he got it. No, that’s not true. Really, it’s more like I’m not sure where he got the real one. This laugh, I just wonder where he was hiding it all that time I knew him. “Why would I be angry?” August’s character pushes against the wall with his palms and jumps forward. He lands on the roof with a little stagger. “I’m living the dream,” he says.

There’s a reverse shot of the landlord. Always, at this moment, I observe Rich Markstein, his innocent smooth cheeks, the reddish curl of hair by his ear. Later in the movie, there will be a scene of him in his own bathroom cutting off his sidelocks and his beard. He will remove most of it with scissors and then shave off the rest with an electric razor, the rusty whiskers dusting the white bowl of the sink. Markstein’s a good actor. The landlord is saying something to August’s character with his sad eyes, trying to communicate that he too lives within constraints.

If the landlord was real, the real August would have felt for him. Life is not unfair, that was always August’s position. Or everyone’s life is. Everyone’s.

The man on the roof, though, is a different man. A minute ago, the camera revealed him to us, when Markstein casually put his leg up on that little wall. The look on his face – it was wistfulness, bitterness, want – fake, but convincing, even to an expert wanter like me.

Now, he spits on the roof. “Living the dream,” he repeats.

He’s like me, this character. Like the real me.

Another shot of the sky, then. There are more birds in the distance, just before the scene ends. You can see them in the dark near the bottom of the frame, if you know where to look.

The Blu-ray player had gone to sleep. We’d paused on a close-up from the last episode in Season One: Dr. Aaron Clark standing guard by the bedside of his illegitimate son who is comatose after a car accident, the one patient for whom Clark can do nothing. It was maybe too close a close-up.

We were on Lee’s sofa in the living room of his house in north Vancouver. We’d both agreed that we couldn’t bear to watch any longer, and then we’d both spent several minutes looking at August in profile. His prominent cheekbone and the shadowed hollow of his cheek below. His one visible eye, wide with anguish, his lips slightly parted, about to speak. I thought of his face as it was ten years ago in the half-light of that scene on the Brooklyn rooftop, and of the way he had looked up amazed at the redwoods in the forest of Endor in his stupid little jerkin with his tiny bow and arrows. Most of all, I remembered him in the bedroom in the apartment over the garage in Silver Lake, sitting on top of my comforter in shorts and a tee-shirt as I told him that he had to move out. “I never meant to hurt you,” he’d said then. Or something like that.

Once the picture disappeared, Lee got on the floor in front of the couch and nudged my legs apart with his shoulders, swaying in time to music that wasn’t playing, a little drunk and a little seductive. He eased my jeans and my boxers down off my hips and then he cupped my balls and sucked me off. I tried to concentrate, but my mind kept wriggling to get away. The audition was just twelve hours from now. They would want me to act tough. They always did; audiences thought it was touching. I would swagger around the room, pretending to be mad.

I imagined now what it might be like to get cast. I could stay here while we filmed the episodes, drive around town in the low red car with the hand controls. I could sleep with this man who August had almost certainly also slept with.

Lee stood up. His knees cracked. “Mind if we move to the bedroom?” he said. “Shit, I’m getting old.”

I kicked off my shoes so I could take my pants off all the way. “Let’s go.”

“They could be seagulls.” Lee looked at me for a second like he wanted to lift me up in his arms, but he stopped himself. His face was flushed. “The oil paintings in the bar at the service. Instead of tropical birds. Could some of them be seagulls?”

I knew that he must be thinking of August naked, of the tattoo on his back, but I didn’t mind. “Sure,” I said. “They could be seagulls.”

The next morning, I sat in a folding chair in a sterile white room in a building on C Street and drank the latte that someone handed me which had “Kevin O” written on the lid in marker, though no one had actually asked me how I liked my coffee, and I made small-talk with the camera operator and one of the producers and some young lady in her mid-twenties who might have been an intern. The two men were around my age and were both white, but she looked like she was biracial, and was dressed in what passes for business casual in the creative world – leggings, ankle boots, a big button-down men’s shirt with the cuffs rolled up. Immediately, she adopted a flirtatious tone with me, which was something I never rightly knew how to deal with.

Her name was Neva, she said, and she told me she liked my work. I told them all that I liked theirs. As we talked, Neva touched her long, straight hair gingerly, taking pieces of it between her fingers and tugging on it gently like it wasn’t her real hair. It turned out that she was there to read for the female part, the wife. Four episodes, and of course the script they had for me was the death scene.

With a coffee in my hand and late-morning sun on my face, it was easier for me to be honest with myself. I was not going to the memory gathering. There was no way. All I needed to work out was how to tell Lee.

After twenty minutes of waiting around, the casting director came in and the camera operator stood up, and we got down to business. There were some extra folding chairs, which the casting director asked Neva to position together in the middle of the room, facing each other. I scrambled up into my seat.

“Imagine there’s a table between you,” the casting director said. “This is federal custody. You would be allowed to hold hands, but that’s it. No kissing.”

“OK,” I said. The sheaf of papers with my lines was curling on my lap.

No one ever taught me how to act, unless you count my lover in Echo Park, which I don’t, because he didn’t teach me shit. He always said I wasn’t very good, and maybe he was right, but what I do is I just imagine the person I’m portraying and how he would be feeling. That sounds stupid when you think of the roles I’ve played in fantasy and sci-fi over the years, but it’s my method. I looked over at Neva now. No kissing, only hand-holding, and twenty minute visits once or twice a month. “I wouldn’t be holding her hand,” I said. “I would have my elbows on the table so I could lean into her as much as I could.”

“Fine,” said the casting director distractedly, and I got myself into a crouch in the folding chair so I could get high enough to reach. “Just start whenever you’re ready.”

I looked down at the words on the paper, then up, meeting her eyes, and began to read the part. Neva smiled and recrossed her legs. She was pretty, with a wide mouth and bright white teeth. Whatever her real job was, this wasn’t it; she wasn’t much of an actor. She answered me precisely, shaping each scripted word like the voice inside a GPS, a bland female tone without a sense of meaning. It didn’t matter. I could pretend her something else. As I spoke my lines, I thought ahead, my eyes chasing the words down the page. I was a criminal. I was a proud man who loved her but I wanted something from her that would put her in danger.

Come live with me in New York. August’s voice on my answering machine. I knew better. I knew better.

“Good, Kevin,” the casting director interrupted. “I want to hear it again, please, softer.”

“Softer?”

“Yeah, like, gentler. Not as much tough-guy. Not so angry.”

It wasn’t what I expected. “OK.” I said.

We started from the top. At first, I felt awkward as I forced the lines out, worried I was reading as robotically as Neva.

I reached for something inside me that I knew would make me feel sad and settled on the rooftop. I closed my eyes for a second to see it – the little jump and the painful way he reels on his short legs as he lands on the tarpaper surface. That scene had always moved me, but I didn’t know why. I concentrated on the feeling, the wanting. That man on the roof is always off-balance. He spits as if he is without compassion, but I know him. I know what’s inside of him. There, in the studio, I read the lines again.

This time, when we got to the break with the scene description, the director didn’t tell us to pause. “Now Joachim’s passing just behind your chair,” he said to me. “He reaches around you, right, and sticks the shiv in beneath your ribs. You’ve been stabbed.”

I let myself tumble from the chair, trying to feel a knife in my belly. It wasn’t hard. I curled up around my wound. I was breathing my last in front of watching people, an audience I didn’t know to witness my suffering. My mind started to wander, then, and I forgot which audience. I started to think about Darnell and young Peter Williams, Shorty Cabrera and Mitch Schlifka and all the other people I did not wish to see again. My suitcase was at Lee’s house. How disappointed he’d be. The cigarette falling down into the dark to be extinguished. I could have cried about that, right then.

It was unprofessional of me to lose focus like that. I lay on the clean blond wood of the floor in the studio in Vancouver with my stomach aching as bad as my hip. Neva’s hand was on my shoulder, her hair tickling my face. “Oh my god, are you all right?” she said, and at first I thought it was her line, so I didn’t say anything, just grunted a little, trying to get back in character, but then the producer and the camera operator came over too and I realized they were actually worried.

“Hey,” I said. “Hey. I’m OK.” I stretched out my arms and legs. I was flat on my back now. There wasn’t much dignity in that, but I was used to it. I’d died before, and always in stupid ways.

The producer grabbed my hands and pulled me to my feet. He still looked concerned.

I dusted off my jeans. “Seriously, I’m OK.”

“That was very affecting,” said the casting director.

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you all for the opportunity.”

The director nodded at me, but he wasn’t seeing me. “We’ll be in touch about the part.”