An Excess of Enchantment

A female pimp becomes my spiritual and artistic guide. Oh, like that's never happened to you...

After the Academy breaks up with me, I start studying with another teacher, a woman who is introduced to me by an obese agent who declines to sign me, but who meets with me a number of times anyway. I am never able to impress her sufficiently to become a client, I think, because I'm unable to successfully hide my disgust at the agent's habit of eating constantly, spitting out tuna salad or whatever in great globs, while she lectures me about how and why I'll never work as an actor.

I will call the teacher Carol here. I fall deeply in thrall to her in a way I am never able to do with anyone else before or since. She is so much more subtle than the teachers at the Academy. Carol lures us in with her honeyed, enveloping warmth and positivism. I later find out she is sort of pimping the girls in class to wealthy older men. It isn't being a hooker and she doesn't get a cut of the profits or anything, but she knows a lot of men who like to date struggling actresses, older guys who are willing to help them out along the way. They have "scenes." A girl in class tells me about walking into a room at an Upper East Side townhouse dinner party one night and finding Carol on her knees giving some old coot a blow job, gesturing to her student to come on over and join in.

Before knowing all this, and safe anyway, being of another gender, I just think Carol has magic powers. She has a way of nodding and making pronouncements that cut to my heart, defining me with their psychic aptness. Unfortunately I don't now remember anything specific she offers in the way of spiritual-cum-theatrical knowledge, but believe me, at the time, she is the Wiccan of Wonder, who will make my dreams come true as long as I do exactly what she says.

I am deeply and desperately taken in by her wisdom and her continued application of the word "visceral" to describe my work, though I have no idea what she means. I don't ask. Nor do I look up "visceral" in the dictionary. Why take the chance of spoiling the dream?

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