Death of a Friendship

I still feel that it's my fault that my high school endured nine years with a teaching assistant in the theater department who couldn't brace a flat and once set the lighting board on fire. It's not displaced guilt; it actually is my fault.

The longtime theater teacher left just before my freshman year. The school asked one of the English teachers to take the department in his wake, with the understanding that it would only be for a year. Then, they gave the job to a brand new teacher, barely out of college. She'd never even seen a live production, and was extremely intimidated. Still, during her first year with us I was a constant cheerleader, sure she'd read some books, loosen up, do something to make it all work. At the very least, she'd turn us loose and let us do it without her. Her first year, it worked that way. She opened and closed the doors and was the required adult presence. By my junior year, things had gone south in a dramatic and awful way.

Ariane and I had worked on a summer school production with an alumnus from our school. I'd reminded him that he'd known my sister, and we struck up a friendship. We'd invited him to see our shows, and he had. We, in turn, went to shows he was working on. He was in the final stages of earning his master's degree in theater. The lure of having an adult at our school who knew what they were doing was strong. We'd described to him some of the fiascos we faced.

Our teacher, coming across the stage direction "(beat)" was baffled. We explained to her that it was a short pause. Think of it like a beat in music, we said. You take a pause indicated by the way the dialogue is flowing – one beat, just like a beat of music. She refused to believe this explanation.

"If it meant 'pause,' it would say 'pause!' I've read scripts before. They always say, 'pause' when they want you to pause!" As if this wasn't ridiculous and alienating enough, she added, "I'm not stupid, you know." Her explanation? Everyone onstage was to simultaneously clap once. Really. It was just beyond painful to try to work with her.

She was intimidated by the kids who knew more about theater than she did; and really, that wasn't hard to do. Personal conflicts got out of hand and loomed so large they jeopardized the entire department. We were desperate for anything that would help.

"Please, K," we said to the grad student, "please come student teach at our school!" He'd been appalled by some of the stories he'd heard, and agreed with us wholeheartedly that something should be done. So, he showed up at our school. At first, I think, he was considered a community volunteer, like a parent who stuffs envelopes, but shortly he was approved by the administration to have all sorts of authority. I don't know if they ever paid him; it doesn't matter.

During the summer school production where we met, during the summer between my sophomore and junior years, K had puzzled me with some of his behavior. Theater people are, by and large, rather physically affectionate, but K seemed to constantly be in my personal space with no clear reason to be. He frequently said things like, "Want me to show you all the good make-out places in here?" He often walked with his arm around me. Every once in a while, he'd make some remark about "getting together" away from the theater. I'm fairly dense about these things, and could never quite figure out how serious he was. It was flattering and creepy at the same time. He seemed OK with the answer "no," so that was enough for me.

Occasionally I'd feel taken aback. When he came to see me play Abby and Ariane play Martha in "Arsenic and Old Lace," the first thing he said to me after the show, as he was hugging me, was, "You'd slap me if I told you what I can see through that dress." The dress in question was my Abby costume, a floor length, high necked number. I looked down self consciously.

"You can't really see through this, can you?"

"Oh, put it up under the lights and you'd be surprised," he said. I was more worried about the costume than I was in ferreting out his reason for bringing it up. If my costume, under which I wore a slip, was see through, surely someone would have noticed and told me, I decided. Nobody would want an elderly murderess character to be flashing her underwear, however demure. (And they were; I wore very plain, staid underthings.)

He'd come for our closing performance, and hung around afterward while we all cleaned and packed up. It's common knowledge that there will be some sort of party after closing night, so I figured that he might want to come to ours.

Instead, he invited me out. Just me. I turned him down, but he persisted.

"I'm going to the party at Joe's house. You're welcome to come, too. It's just a couple of blocks that way."

"Oh, come on. Half of them won't even be there." This was true. Three or four carloads of kids had already left, headed to Disneyland. That was the official cast party. My mother hadn't wanted to drive all night, even though the temperature was better, so she and I were flying down in the morning. Tony was picking us up at LAX.

"I really want to go to the party. It's our last show this year." I was nervous and talking too much, so I added, "Even though most of them are mad at me because I get to go to Disneyland tomorrow."

He pounced on that. "It'll be much more fun with me, especially since they're mad at you already."

We argued a bit back and forth as all the rest of the kids left for the party. Now K and I were the only ones in the parking lot, and the isolation was making me nervous. I wanted to be in my car, to put the car door between us. He was standing much closer than I thought was strictly necessary.

He finally, grudgingly accepted my answer, but insisted that he at least needed a good night kiss. The kiss was within acceptable bounds; he didn't push too hard. I was relieved as I watched him walk to his car. I was also worried that I'd protested too hard and hurt his feelings.

I didn't say much about it. I probably only told Ariane and Lana. Months later, I made a passing reference to Joe about having kissed K. He looked rather shocked but sensed, correctly, that I didn't want to discuss it further.

I undoubtedly should have been reluctant to have him to come to work at the school, but I wasn't. I was actually sure that it would mean he'd have to tone it all down; after all, it was a high school, he was 25 and about to be faculty and I was 17 and a student.

We were so glad he'd decided to come help us out. We had high hopes for the next year, glad that we finally had someone in authority who'd actually studied theater.

The high hopes were short lived. We found K to be picky and controlling, and we were astonished that the master's degree, which he'd now earned, hadn't given him the skills to do something simple like brace a flat. Flats are the wood and muslin constructions used to make walls onstage. He couldn't seem to get the edges lined up, or stop the wall from wobbling. The tops of the flats would tilt toward the audience, making the bottoms tilt in toward the backstage. Yet nobody was allowed to question him or redo the work; he pulled rank. We had to try and cover up the gaps with wheatpaste – the papier mache type substance used to cover the seams in the flats. We also learned not to walk too close to the walls while onstage or backstage. If we walked too close or even too fast, they swayed.

He had new procedures he wanted implemented, and we all grew increasingly tired of hearing his mantra, "Safety first!" It wasn't as if we were juggling saws. I resented hearing that our lofts, our storage, virtually everything about the theater, was a fire hazard. When I heard, after I'd graduated, that K had overloaded the lighting board and it had literally burst into flames, I was sure that the irony was lost on few of us. He was soon universally disliked, and it was a source of anxiety for me that I'd actually been the one to ask him to come.

He and the teacher were soon engaged. It was amazing how quickly he went from feeling she was incompetent and we needed rescued to feeling that we were all snotty ingrates who needed to buckle down. At least, I figured, if he's sleeping with the teacher he won't be bugging me about scoping out make-out spots.

And he wasn't. But he was still far too touchy feely. I wondered if I was reading too much into it; maybe, I thought, I'm misinterpreting things. Maybe it actually was a mistake when he brushed across my chest when picking things up.

I gave that idea up when I noticed how carefully choreographed any physical contact with me was. Almost all of it took place out of the line of sight of anyone else. Most of it was such that if I made a fuss, he could claim innocence. Back in the days before zero tolerance and Mary Kay Letorneau, even hugging or rubbing my back could have been argued to be innocent, and he didn't venture into clearly forbidden behavior. Mostly he rubbed my arm, back or neck, or gave me a hug. He still stood too close to me too frequently. I was sure, and I was sure he was sure, that if I complained I'd sound like a petulant toddler having to share the back seat with a sibling. "He's touching me! He's on my side!"

By this time, I was no longer speaking directly to the teacher, or she to me, unless it was absolutely unavoidable. There was no way I was going to tell her that her fiance couldn't keep his hands to himself. So strong was the animosity that even teachers who normally supported me were sure that I just had a blind spot or overreacted when I had a complaint about anything in the theater department. I regularly marched myself in and demanded an audience with the principal about things that bothered me – "What do you mean, the school can't afford a lousy gallon of paint? How are we supposed to paint the set?" – but I was sure he would think I was making it all up to get attention or to upset the teacher if I complained about K. More than twenty years later, I still think so.

I didn't even say too much to the other students, outside of my closest friends. Ariane heard most of the complaining. "I wish he would just keep his hands to himself!" "He's engaged, for crying out loud!" She knew, too, that it was useless to complain to the adults, so she commiserated with me. I didn't mention it to my parents. My dad would have become dangerous, and my mother hated conflict. The one time she'd been angry enough to go to the school and complain about a teacher's behavior, the principal had told her he could not interfere. She wasn't likely to make any more complaints.

That spring, I was asked to work tech on the school's first faculty play. I was almost always in charge of props and set decorating for our department. K was the technical director, and an English teacher, Mrs. B, was asked to co-direct with the theater teacher.

All was not well in paradise. I clashed often with Mrs. B. For one scene, an actor was supposed to carry on covered trays of food and set them on the table; immediately the scene ended and the set went dark. The trays were onstage for a total of ten seconds. Mrs. B was adamant that we cook an entire turkey dinner for the scene.

"We don't need anything on the trays! They can be perfectly empty!" I told her.

She sniffed, "The audience will be able to tell."

"No, they won't. Nobody ever opens the trays!" If they need to be weighted, I told her, you stack them with books. Then the actor carries them as if they're heavy, because they are.

Mrs. B did not like being contradicted, or having her direction questioned, by a student. She treated me to a loud, ringing lecture about "shortchanging the audience" by "trying to cut corners." By golly, we would cook a turkey dinner, we would put it on china, and we would put the whole thing onto the trays that never opened. We would do all of this despite the fact that we had no refrigeration backstage for the food. "They don't have to actually eat it," she rationalized when I pointed out the spoilage factor.

Meanwhile, K and I tangled about whose job it was to hang the paintings and such. It had always been my job, and more often than not influenced by flaws or holes in the flats that we needed to hide. K was sure that he was to make all the decisions about the dressings and props, and I should just put them where he dictated – after he approved them in the first place.

The teacher in charge and I assiduously avoided any contact with one another.

I realized that in the real world, the teachers were in charge and the students aren't, but that assumed that they actually, you know, taught. Years of experience had taught us that if you wanted it done right, you did it yourself. Things ran smoother when the inmates ran the asylum.

My blood pressure hovered in the danger range, I'm sure. I spent most of my time arguing or angry. It didn't help that the administration had vetoed a student production in favor of the faculty show. The students bickered amongst themselves, too. I found myself snapping at Joe and being snapped at by Ariane.

One day during construction, I was roughly center stage saying something to K, arguing about hanging artwork. For a moment, everyone else disappeared backstage, into the rafters or out into the halls. No one could see us. K cuddled up, put his arm around my waist and started rubbing my back. He snuggled close and crooned very quietly in my ear, "I know you've been upset…"

I had one of those moments of blinding clarity. This stops, my brain hissed, right now.

I bellowed at the top of my lungs, "DON'T TOUCH ME! DON'T YOU EVER TOUCH ME AGAIN!" He leapt back, farther than he would have if I'd struck him, and stared at me. I was not even remotely finished.

"I'm assuming that you asked me to work on this show because I'm good at what I do. If you want me to leave and someone else to do it, tell me now. I'll be out of here. But if you want me to work on this show, then you and everyone else need to get out of my way and let me do my job!" Heads were popping around corners to stare at us. Several kids had emerged back onto the stage. We were now surrounded, and anyone who couldn't see me could hear me. I stood center stage, using an actor's voice trained to reach the back row of the theater without amplification, and I was on a roll.

I carried on for only a minute or two, pausing only to snap questions like, "Do you want me to work on this show or not?" K stared at me, clearly wishing the floor would open and swallow me. He answered me only in monosyllables. I barked one more instruction to leave me alone and never, ever touch me, and I was done. There. I'd put it out there, in front of everyone.

"I should have thought of this months ago!" I exulted to Ariane. K not only never touched me again, he started giving me a wide berth. He started avoiding eye contact. I no longer felt micromanaged. I don't know if it occurred to him that I was now 18, and unwanted advances were no longer criminal. I wondered how he could be worried about what I might say to his fiancee when we were not speaking. I was not, though, about to look a gift horse in the mouth.

And, while I still had to make the stupid turkey dinner, when it turned green and fuzzy we got to throw it out and weight the trays with books.

By the time I graduated K and I rarely spoke to one another, either. I went to work that summer at the huge hotel/casino where he worked. I'd forgotten that he worked there until I saw him in the employee lunch room one day. Then I remembered that he worked backstage at the huge, splashy show in the main showroom.

Back when we'd been friends, he'd told me that he'd wanted to perform in the show, but the producers didn't allow him to audition. At 5'7", he was an inch under the male height requirement. I'd gleefully ribbed him about being 5'8" myself.

After avoiding him the first time I saw him, I decided to be a bit more proactive and a lot more irritating. From then on, if I saw him in the employee hallways, I'd walk along side him and ooze saccharine sweetness. "Hi, K! How are you?" I no longer worried that I'd offend him. The sole purpose of this exercise was to revel in the fact that he clearly hated it. He avoided looking at me and answered in little more than grunts.

That same year, the year after our graduation, Ariane and I went back to the high school to see our friends perform, "Butterflies Are Free." K was the technical director again – sigh. He sat directly in front of us during the show and ignored us pointedly.

During the show, an actor went through an onstage door and shut it. Not slammed it dramatically, just shut it. The entire wall containing the door groaned and fell over. Not flat onto the ground, mind you, the way it would in a cheesy sitcom, but at a 45 degree angle, just hanging there. We could not contain ourselves and began to snicker and guffaw. Even in the dark, we could see K's ears turn red. We could almost see cartoon-style steam coming out of the top of his head. He got up and stormed out of the theater, which made us laugh even harder. We apologized to our friends afterward, in case our laughter had disturbed them, but their take was, "He deserved it."

I swore I'd send him and his fiancee a sympathy card and contraceptives for their wedding, but I didn't.

I moved away a year later and lost all track of K. Many years later I found out the he stayed at the school for nine years. I felt there was some sort of horrible penance I had to perform to make up for that. All I could think was, good heavens, this is all my fault. But then again, maybe I was being too hard on myself.