“There are many rituals to my daily routine that conjure up fears that I am indeed a sixty five year old man who’s 
taken up residence in the hull of a well nourished twenty seven year old mid-westerner. I wear glasses to read. I have a thorough love of cigars. I have no patience for children. One of my best friends is my English bulldog, Carl. I have no lawn, but feel the constant need to ensure that nobody is on it. I also seem to have a fleeting memory when attempting to recall any stories or events of considerable weirdness in my previous lives. These instances vary from attempting to recall the events surrounding me drinking three orange smoothies and then allowing myself to be punched in the stomach, to the time I accidentally drove through a red turn light and nearly hit someone on a bicycle – and instead of honking my horn I rolled down the window and angrily yelled the word “honk” at them repeatedly as I drove by. Why did I do that? Often good friends or family will bring up a story and illuminate the shadows of my brain with an element or chapter that I was a part of in some strange way. Did I really do that? Was that me? I think I remember that. Writing about my trials, tribulations, and success in the freelance and full-time sectors of American living often involves periods of time not too far back for my brain to scan and repeat with clarity – leaving times long past as books on the shelf I’ll rarely skim. However, while recently watching a documentary on jobs and firings from said jobs – I was jolted upright in my chair with a cursory memory of my first true freelancing assignment. I was sixteen, it was an acting job, and it involved prime rib, cowboys, and a moving train.
I’ve mentioned in other works that I was a speech and drama geek during high-school, and this was an extracurricular activity I pursued with lazy abandon fueled by chronically overdosing on those long tubes of sugar called “pixie sticks”. During my junior year I was paired for a duet-acting piece with a kid named Dyke Debrie. Let me clarify right now, yes – that is his real name, and not the punch-line for an off-color joke like “what do you get when a lesbian explodes?” Dyke, now more a slang term than the definition of someone – was not necessarily a man of super intimidating stature, but growing up with a name like Dyke meant that getting made fun of was a simple fact of life – one he didn’t take idly. It didn’t happen often outside of his circle of friends, but any jab at his namesake assured Dyke would produce claws and eviscerate at will – verbally or physically as the situation called for. You see, while a normal person and a good person at that – Dyke was immensely popular in high school and the kind of guy you were certain was invited to all the secret parties where the pretty girls made out with each other. In our speech and drama club practice, we were given a piece titled “Gangsters Apparel” about two failing la Cosa Nostra lieutenants and their crisis with the balance between their job, and the fashion required to perform it effectively. I didn’t know Dyke very well before this assignment and I don’t know him very well now all these years later, but during the year or so we performed the duet acting piece, we learned a lot about one another, and (with me on board I don’t know how we did this), won nearly every tournament we performed at including a few performances at the heralded national level – something that feels like watching a puppy sleep in a bowl full of warm smiles. It was after one of our performances at a tournament that we were approached about doing a little freelance acting.
I don’t remember her name, neither of us do. I looked up Dyke and called him recently to gather all of the details that we could this incident, but we’ve both apparently blocked many of them out. It was nice talking to an old friend, even if I did likely ruin his day with haunting imagery from days long past. It wasn’t earth shattering or anything like that, it’s just that the entire experience I’m about to tell you left us feeling like someone had touched us in our bathing suit area. I look back at many of my experiences, mainly the ones during high-school and right after, and I realized I questioned very little, and went along with a lot. Were I to meet my old self, I’d probably think I’m a flake, not the handsome chiseled pinnacle of the perfect and glistening male form that I’ve become. So when I was presented with a freelance acting opportunity I just sort of went along with it without any questions. The woman who approached Dyke and me after one of our performances looked like any high school art teacher, frazzled hair, wooden jewelry, skirt with glued on lace she’s obviously constructed herself, and a mild aroma of marijuana. I don’t remember the exchange fully but according to Dyke she gave us her card and said there would be money in it for us to do some theatre style acting on a dinner train for an evening. Where in my brain there should have been red flags, there were only the constant re-runs of Knight Rider and an occasional interruption involving naked breasts, so I just nodded and filed away “dinner theater, on a train, money, cool.” I put the event out of my mind and returned to my high-school life until Dyke told me one evening – “hey we’ve got that dinner car acting thing tonight, don’t forget – I’ll pick you up.” Right. The dinner car acting thing. Wait do we even have a script?
My very first car was a lemon, and I’ve come to terms with that now, but by God in Heaven I loved that car and I still do, wherever it is. It was a monstrous 1978 Mercury Cougar – paint in remarkably near perfect condition and when I spent three hours washing it – that bastard sparkled and gave me a manly feeling deep in the pit of my balls. It looked like a muscle car, large, back end raised up, shiny rims, fat tires – but it just didn’t have mechanical oomph to back it up. Its only redeeming feature was that it was nigh indestructible as my teenage-boy tendencies to do stupid things at high speeds with it often proved. I feel my Cougar was only outdone by Dyke’s high-school automobile, a 1979 gold Ford LTD – the creaky beauty truly earning the name “the tank”. Dyke’s car was, and still – wherever it is, a legend. Driving through fields, charging over parking stops, driving into things, simply making its own way in life – Dyke’s car was one that should have died early in its years – but nothing could harm this automobile, and it was often put to the test. Dyke’s car was a work of art, ethereally possessed by an inebriated angel – you could honk the horn if you touched the dash, and in order to see the dashboard light up at night you needed to tap the breaks. It got approximately six to eight miles to the gallon, requiring a fuel stop before going out for the night, and another in order to return home. I feel to paint the picture it’s important you visualize this car, far from the maguffin of our story but important – as it was in this beast Dyke picked me up for dinner theatre, our last haven of safety, and together we proceeded to our freelance acting job.
“Shouldn’t we have a script or something” I asked on the way there. “Yeah I thought about that too.” Dyke replied, “I’m assuming we’ll get it when we get there, or we’ll have to impromptu the thing”. Getting there was easier said than done, as the directions the woman provided for us were less than accurate. While we had become lost, we eventually arrived quite early and simply parked across the street and observed her house like undercover narcotics police for any activity giving us our cue to proceed indoors. We eventually walked inside and were greeted by the host of our personal nightmare, and I noticed immediately that the heat was on full blast. This wouldn’t be a problem, if it wasn’t the end of summer. My memory tells me there was also a full decorated Christmas tree with lights and all, but neither Dyke or I were able to properly remember if this was true, or just a hallucinatory memory slipping in line with the rest of the surreal as though it could go unquestioned. As we sat in her living room two other people arrived that were assuredly involved in community theatre. A flamboyant heavy-set woman and an elderly man both glided into the living room and greeted our host with hugs, then us with theatrical “how-do-you-do’s”, in which we replied with very a teenage “hey”. They spent a few minutes trying on various masks and colorful feathered boas while Dyke and I started to sweat and resisted the urge to pee our pants or cry. “Time to go!” the woman exclaimed, and Dyke and I locked fear-glaze eyes, hastily trying to ready a plausible escape. No luck, three minutes later we were on our way to the train, the five of us crammed into her van.
As this woman we’ve now come to know as “the woman” or “our host” drove the van, I was convinced she was determined to kill us – either on the road by her rudimentary understanding of motor vehicle operation, or with a bag full of door knobs to the base of the neck once we arrived at our destination. Dyke asked her what exactly we were doing and if we had any lines, and she reached into a stack of papers laying on the floor of the van to her right and handed over a stapled sheet of them. We both glanced over them and tried to make sense of it. Before we could ask, she explained that we were going to be doing a who-dun-it western story, explaining that Dyke and I were rival cowboys who used to be in the same gang – and our goal was to confuse the passengers into taking sides with one of us. We arrived in the parking lot outside of the train and heard it gearing up for travel. We rushed onboard and made our way to the back where there was an empty dining car, likely used for busier nights. Our host dropped a box of assorted costume pieces on the floor and started handing things out from it. Dyke and I each received flimsy leather vests, a cowboy hat, and a gun belt – on mine a shiny toy cap gun, and on Dyke’s – a real skinning knife – old, rusty, and sharp. What was probably a good half an hour blurred into mere seconds while Dyke and I raced through the paper full of lines trying to find out what we were doing here until we were told to “just wing it”. Our host decreed the traditional “show time!” and headed forward with a smile as she entered the main dining car where everyone was sitting at their tables. Dyke and I once again locked eyes and looked for an exit. Too late – the train was already moving.
While our host and the heavyset woman were in the front car, Dyke, myself, and the elderly man were left in back to wait for some sort of signal to come on in and get things started – us having no idea what was being set up as a narrative in the next car. Where we thieves? Where we outlaws? Where we part of a Honduran export ring responsible for keeping people in stolen biker shorts? Our host came back in to the rear car where we were waiting and said “you’re on”. We were immediately ushered to the door between cars and with a deep breath – we entered. Standing at the foot of the dining car, we stood there while maybe 20-30 people turned and stared back at us smiling – waiting for the entertainment. We looked at each other, then at the heavyset woman standing in the room near some of the diners, and we were silent, only the sound of the car moving along to split the emptiness. “Oh, Lordy it’s them!” the heavyset woman exclaimed. At least, this is what I think she exclaimed, as my memory has evacuated much of the story from my brain like an irritated bowel would a steak dinner. We were just glad throughout the evening she did most of the talking.
From then on, we just sort of… acted. I remember faking a fight as we struggled to rouse the diners into taking sides for each other, spreading lies and making up fake interrogations for the diners to perform on Dyke or myself. There were a lot of tipped hats, drawing of our weapons, “gal dernits” and angry stares to one another in character. This went on for two hours. I was convinced as we struggled to make up story after story and line after line the diners would feel uncomfortable, bored, and grow weary. Not the case – they loved it. My God they loved it and hung on every word, not minding a bit that we were desperately avoiding the waiters by stepping into the cramped spaces between tables to execute our show, effectively pushing the diners forward closer into their mashed potatoes. There was one break in the show, in which we retreated to the rear car to wipe our brows, take a seat, and eat what we were told were left over prime rib dinners from the dining car. We started into our meals of brown, green, and orange something with gravy – when we noticed Dyke was missing his sharp, rusty, skinning knife.
One table in particular kept probing Dyke for information on his personal life. He struggled to stay in character, rapidly making up stories about his alter ego as they kept asking him where he went to school saying creepy gym-teacher things like “no, come on, what’s your real name” and “you know, you’re really young for a cowboy”. Before coming back out into the dining car for our… well… second act, we were instructed to not cause any panic but just keep our eyes peeled and stay in character while looking for Dyke’s knife. I was more worried that one of the elderly men would let his mind gently slide out from under the hold of his medication, jump up and try to do battle with one of us as a part of the show and open up someone’s larynx by accident. After slyly asking everyone at the table that kept giving Dyke the old Q and A – he discovered one of the elderly men did in fact steal the knife out of his sheathe when Dyke wasn’t looking. He reclaimed the blade without incident.
When the train came to a halt, our host announced that the show was over, and asked the diners to guess who in fact had “done it”. I didn’t even know who “done it” and I wasn’t quite clear on what was “done” other than bring me to the edge of mental breakdown more than once. I vaguely remember someone guessing correctly, then some applause, and everyone asking to shake our hand on the way out for the delightful evening of comedy, drama, and weapons inspection. We retired to the rear car for the last time, put our costumes back in the box and got back into the van for the drive home where everyone started talking about how well the evening went, while Dyke and I sat next to one another in silence. We had felt mentally raped, and were perplexed about why we had just put ourselves through this ordeal. It was originally for the money, but after about three minutes in the company we found ourselves in we would have happily paid cold hard cash or even traded sexual favors to our dramatic captors just to get back in Dyke’s car and drive home fast, and never speak of what was done. We felt like teenage runaways in the midst of strangers – young men that were a trigger finger away from sobbing and crying out for an adult. Traveling in a swerving white van full of theatre folk who only stopped to eat, perform dinner theatre, or murder stray cats in an archaic blood ritual. We never re-entered our hosts house once we returned for an “after party” or to talk about what we did on that train. We were strongly asked to return for more performances in which we found ourselves telling lies that sounded very similar to “sure, it was a lot of fun.” We both knew that it was more likely for us to fashion a space shuttle out of boogers than to ever return for more dinner theatre.
It was getting colder that night, fall was approaching but we felt nothing. We sat in Dyke’s car for a few minutes in stunned silence before Dyke turned to me and said “hey, we were supposed to get paid for that, weren’t we?” Ah yes, money. It would have been the icing on this cake, were the cake not made of snakes and poison. Dyke furrowed his brow, instructed me to stay in the car, and marched back towards her house with the fires of Apollo in his heart to demand our compensation. A few moments later, he returned, put his head on the steering wheel and showed me what he was given. After all of this mental torment, Dyke was presented with a check for six dollars, and the phrase “well you got fed too”, as though this was indeed the old west and as travelers, we were willing to work for no more than a full belly. Explicative were our words, and into the night sky they went freely as Dyke drove us to the nearest gas station for fuel for the long trip back home. We didn’t say much, and over the years we’ve spoken about the dinner train very little – even though it makes for a great “well it’s funny now” story.
It’s been ten years or more since I was involved with impromptu dinner theatre, and though I was roused to tell the story – reliving what little memory of the event I seem to have has filled my stomach with butterflies, nauseous butterflies that hate existence. I often wonder why we didn’t just call up and say we couldn’t make it – perhaps the promise of a few bits of scratch to act as gas money was just too overpowering for a teenager. Perhaps if I had known an evening of awkwardness in front of a room full of strangers on a moving train was going to yield me about three dollars – I would’ve reconsidered. Perhaps Dyke and I will meet up again one of these days, gaze at each other and embrace with tears in our eyes – compare therapy bills, and drink ourselves until we can’t remember memories anymore.” yousuckatwebdesign.com
