I'm Losing You by Bruce Wagner

Author:Bruce Wagner [Wagner, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Contemporary, Fiction
ISBN: 9781101594889
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 1992-09-30T23:00:00+00:00

Troy Capra

He took Kiv to a production of Ghosts on Santa Monica Boulevard. It was a while since he’d been to a play and Troy was flooded by memories of his own “life in the theater.”

The drama teacher at Beverly Hills High was an occasional character actor in films, and when Troy enrolled as a freshman, some of the students already had agents—everyone felt more or less poised for stardom. It seemed like a birthright. Alumnus Richard Dreyfuss was a beacon. Troy was still in elementary school when word spread through the district like a flash fire that one of their own would soon appear on Bonanza. Like a distant cousin, he rooted him on through the years: The Graduate, The Young Runaways, Two for the Money, then American Graffiti and Duddy Kravitz, Jaws and Close Encounters and The Big Fix, an Oscar for The Goodbye Girl…and, of course, the quirky Inserts, where Richard portrayed a faded director, reduced to shooting porn. There was irony for you.

Troy acted in college but his real joy was directing. The first thing he did professionally was three Feiffer sketches at a tiny stage on Wilcox. Then, Kopit and krapp’s Last Tape, The Sandbox and Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Murray Schisgal and Small Craft Warnings. Did that almost ten years. While Troy churned them out in Hollywood’s Little Theater ghetto, Richard was busy making a comeback in Down and Out in Beverly Hills.

It was nineteen eighty-eight and Troy was getting bupkus for a community-funded production of Guys and Dolls. Toward the end of the run, one of the male dancers told him a “film” he was acting in on the weekend had lost its director—would he be interested? What kind of film? A student thing? Not exactly. There was nudity. Oh. I see. Troy knew a bit about cameras—and there was a thousand dollars in it. He needed the money. But more than that, Troy reasoned, he needed experience, to know what it felt like to “carve up space” with a camera. What difference did it make what he was shooting? He’d been trying to break into film directing for years; if this was how it was going to be, he’d just let it ride. Everyone had different points of entry, pardon the pun—that Troy Capra’s was X-rated would become a famous factoid, a talk show anecdote and nothing more.

At curtain, they went backstage to find the producer, an old friend. Troy used a pseudonym in the adult world; none of his former colleagues really knew what he’d been up to all these years. When he did run into them, he painted a vague, glamorous portrait of himself as diehard vanguardist, peripatetic artist-in-and-out-of-residence, the kind who directed Uncle Vanya in a Bronx crack house or accompanied Susan Sontag to Bosnia to “put on a show.” Kiv drew in excited drafts of backstage musk, at home with the gypsies. As the couple rubbed past players from tonight’s drama, Troy nodded to each like a priest to his flock.

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