Acting Up Read online

  Acting Up

  By John Inman

  It’s not easy breaking into show biz. Especially when you aren’t exactly loaded with talent. But Malcolm Fox won’t let a little thing like that hold him back.

  Actually, it isn’t the show-business part of his life that bothers him as much as the romantic part—or the lack thereof. At twenty-six, Malcolm has never been in love. He lives in San Diego with his roommate, Beth, another struggling actor, and each of them is just as unsuccessful as the other. While Malcolm toddles off to this audition and that, he ponders the lack of excitement in his life. The lack of purpose. The lack of a man.

  Then Beth’s brother moves in.

  Freshly imported from Missouri, of all places, Cory Williams is a towering hunk of muscles and innocence, and Malcolm is gobsmacked by the sexiness of his new roomie from the start. When infatuation enters the picture, Malcolm knows he’s really in trouble. After all, Cory is straight!

  At least that’s the general consensus.

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  More from John Inman

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  About the Author

  By John Inman

  Visit Dreamspinner Press

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  EVER FEEL like the one lonely tadpole in a river full of piranhas?

  Yeah, me too.

  I snatched up my crappy pay-by-the-minute cell phone from Walmart and answered it on the second ring.

  The woman’s voice on the other end of the line sounded like she had a bag of cotton balls stuffed up her nostrils. Snooty, you know?

  While we’re on the subject of noses, mine was currently rooting around a trick’s ass. I had been down there sniffing and snorting and snuffling so long, I had forgotten what the other end of the trick looked like.

  Oh wait. Now I remembered. It was the birdman. From work. See, while waiting for my big break as an actor to come along, I worked part-time at the San Diego Zoo. Last week I sold churros. This week I was helping out in the aviary, scrubbing up bird droppings. The man whose ass was in my face was the bird curator. My boss. The avian head honcho. Big Bird, as the employees called him behind his back.

  In case you’re wondering, my name is Malcolm Fox. The fact that I’m career oriented you probably figured out already, considering how attentive I was being to the boss’s butt. I’m also a bit of a brown-nosing slut. You probably figured that out already too.

  Anyway, back to the phone call.

  “Mr. Fox, this is Stella at the North Coast Rep. We need to change the date and time of your audition.”

  “Oh. Certainly. When would you like me to come in?”

  “Today. Thirty-five minutes from now to be exact.”

  I spat out a hair. It was curly and red. The bird man was a ginger. “That doesn’t give me much notice.”

  “You’re a struggling actor. You’re supposed to struggle. This is me helping you fulfill your purpose.” And with that she hung up. What a charmer.

  I peeked around the satiny hip of the man sprawled out naked beneath me with his legs splayed wide, and stared up at his astounded face. He didn’t look happy.

  “You answered the phone,” he said. “I can’t believe you answered the phone. We were in the middle of something here.”

  “No. I was in the middle of something. You were just lying there grunting. As far as reciprocation goes, you haven’t exactly been generous. In fact, I think I hear a cricket down around my nuts.”

  “I’m not reciprocating because I’m not gay,” the man said.

  “So you’re here more as a community service, then. Trying to keep the employees happy. Is that right?”

  He smiled brightly. “Yeah. Sort of an interdepartmental interface between management and staff. Getting acquainted with the peons, exchanging ideas, letting them know I’m accessible.”

  I watched as he spread his legs a little wider, obviously hoping for another interdepartmental interface. “Oh, you’re accessible all right.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And getting your rocks off would be nice too, I’ll bet.”

  He did everything but drool. “Yeah. Think of it as a bonus.”

  “A bonus for who? Me or you?”

  I could see where this was headed, so I decided to assert my authority. I had none at the zoo; I had none in the acting world; but here in my own bed, I was the Big Kahuna. I admit I had wanted this guy naked and at my mercy for a long time. God knows I’d been flirting with him all week among the grebes and the guinea fowl, trying to wear down his defenses. Not that they were that hard to wear down. But now my interest had waned. A lot.

  I nailed him with my sultriest leer, gave his ass another lingeringly slow swipe with my tongue just to be cantankerous and to watch him tremble and get his hopes up, and then I slapped him on the butt and climbed off the bed.

  “Get dressed. I have to leave. Maybe we can arrange another interface tomorrow at work.”

  He didn’t look happy, but he crawled off the bed and scooped up his khaki zoo trousers from the floor, where I’d tossed them earlier. He shot me a mean little stare. “Unfortunately, come Monday morning you’ll be out of the aviary and working in the primate center scooping gorilla shit.”

  “So I’ll be advancing from bird poop to gorilla poop. I’m honored. Is that like a promotion?”

  “Sure, Malcolm, if you want to think of it that way.” He tucked his stiffy in his pants. It was a nice stiffy too. I hated to see it go. “And by the way,” he said, “your apartment sucks.”

  “Then you must be thrilled you’ll never see it again. As for your ass, maybe your wife will pick up where I left off.”

  He pouted. I swear to God, his chin puckered up and he pouted. “My wife won’t do what you just did.”

  “Your loss,” I said blithely.

  Stooping low at the waist (even if he can’t act for beans, every actor worth his salt knows how to bow), I waved Big Bird toward the door with a Three Stooges salami-salami-baloney routine, sarcastic as hell. In a pinch, I can be snooty too.

  I slammed the door closed behind the guy while he was still tying his shoes and ran to the bathroom, where I took a precious two minutes to thoroughly gargle with Listerine—if I’d had Lysol, I’d have used that. Then I brushed my teeth—twice—and washed my face, checking for feathers. (Get it? Feathers? Big Bird? A wee jest.) No other body parts had come into contact with Big Bird’s ass, so I figured I was good to go. I threw on some clothes, grabbed my Reeboks, and raced out the door.

  Throwing myself into my blue, turn-of-the-century Honda Civic with the cracked windshield and one transplanted yellow fender, both the result of a drunken interface with a tree not three weeks earlier, I stabbed the key in the ignition and gave that sucker a twist.

  Nothing happened. I twisted again. Nothing. Dead silence. Not even a click.

  The battery was dead.

  I banged my forehead on the steering wheel and groaned, knowing full well I would never make the audition now. Not only would I not make the audition, I would also never play the triple role of balloon man, gendarme, and French pimp in the Rep’s upcoming production of Irma La Douce. And dammit, the French pimp even had a song. Not exactly a solo, but almost. Worse than that, I would soon be scooping gorilla poop for a living. As if all that wasn’t depressing enough, now I would also never witness the hunky ginger bird man writhe and thrash around i
n a Malcolm-induced orgasm.

  How often do gay guys get to watch straight guys do that up close and personal?

  Some days it just doesn’t pay for a little tadpole to get out of bed.

  MY ROOMMATE, Elizabeth Williams—or Beth as most of the world knew her—came in while I was drowning my sorrow in an industrial-sized bag of Cheetos.

  She took one look at me sitting there with orange fingers and orange lips and an avalanche of orange Cheetos dust cascading down my chest and said, “I vacated the premises for nothing, didn’t I?”

  “Yes. My trick flew the coop.” Hey, numbnuts, I thought to myself. What else do you expect from a bird man? Especially after you tossed his delicious ass out of the nest before his eggs were hatched.

  Beth cocked an eyebrow—sympathetic, but not too much. We’d been roomies for over a year. She’d seen me at my worst more than once. “Well, at least you have an audition coming up.”

  I chomped up another fistful of Cheetos. “Nope. Rescheduled for today. Car died. Didn’t make it. Considered suicide. Opted for Cheetos instead.”

  Beth stood in the doorway, gazing down at me with considerable pity. Or it might have been disgust. I couldn’t be sure.

  “Look at the bright side, Malcolm. Things can’t get much worse.”

  I glanced at my watch. “That’s what you think. I’m supposed to have dinner with my mother tonight. She wants me to meet her new boyfriend.”

  “She’s got another one?”

  “Yeah. We should all be as sexually active as Vivian Eulalia Fox. As a son, I’m just so proud.”

  Beth rolled her eyes. “The bitch. I haven’t had a date in three weeks that didn’t involve batteries and porn. She’s pushing sixty and never gets a night off from the real thing.”

  “I’ll tell her you send your love.”

  “Thanks. Then kick her in her overused twat.”

  I laughed so hard I added a dollop of snot and an extra glob of Cheetos slobber to the orange crap on my chest.

  Just off work in the fascinating world of fast food, a realm I had ventured through a few times myself, Beth was still sporting her uglyass Jack in the Box uniform. Or she was until she ripped it off and paraded across the room in front of me in nothing but a thong and a pair of earrings.

  “Gotta flee,” she explained. “Tap class.” Beth was waiting for her big acting break too. Our living together was sort of an exercise in communal failure, since neither of us was having much luck breaking into show business.

  It might seem strange Beth and I were trying to forge an acting career in San Diego, rather than moving to Los Angeles or New York to do it. But believe it or not, there was quite a large and varied array of opportunities for an actor to flex his acting muscles right where we were. Tons of movies were filmed in San Diego, as were a couple of well-known TV shows. The city abounded in community theater. A lot of commercials were shot around town.

  Besides, Beth and I were perhaps not quite driven enough to uproot ourselves and try to claw our way into the acting maelstrom of either LA or the Big Apple. While we talked a great game about being committed to the craft, even I suspected we were kidding ourselves thinking we would truly get anywhere. But hey, we were young, a little crazy, and nothing else inspired us. We had no other lofty goals to attain. Might as well shoot for something fun to feed the soul while flipping burgers to pay the rent. Or scrubbing up bird poop.

  In truth, I thought we were pretty good at what we did, at least on those rare occasions when we were permitted to do it. Most of our acting gigs were freebies, of course. We did it for the experience. And the fun. Local stage productions with different community groups. A turn here and there an hour up the coast at Disneyland, dressed as a fucking chipmunk, or delivering singing telegrams here in the city. Theater in the round in the park. Filling in crowd scenes for the opera guild. Extras in locally filmed movies and TV shoots. Once in a while, a speaking role in a car commercial or a mattress warehouse sales event. Heady stuff. At least to us.

  Beth flounced off through her bedroom door, and about a minute later, she was back in the living room wiggling into short shorts and pulling a T-shirt over her bare tits. You may have noticed we have few secrets between us.

  She grabbed one tap shoe out from under the coffee table, then trolled around looking for the other one, finally unearthing it inside the fake pre-Columbian face pot, which looked a little like my fat uncle Otis who lived in Baltimore, on the bookcase. The tap shoe was inside the pot because that’s where Beth threw it the last time the tap-dance instructor pissed her off. Beth can be cranky. (It must also be said that since Beth is a big-boned girl, she tap-dances rather like a Disney hippo, but if you’re smart you won’t mention it to Beth. Besides, my tap dancing isn’t much better.)

  With all her belongings accounted for, Beth gave me a finger-waggle of farewell and bustled out the door with “Save some of those Cheetos for me!”

  I gave her a thumbs-up, said, “Toodles,” then sat there for the next ten minutes eating every last Cheetos in the bag and feeling sorry for myself for throwing Big Bird out of my bed.

  My life wasn’t always this big of a mess, you know. Oh, wait a minute. Yes, it was. Beth says if my life were a sitcom, it would be called Malcolm in the Muddle. I used to laugh when she said that. Now I don’t laugh anymore. She’s absolutely right.

  Sigh. If only I had a lover. Someone to ground me. Someone whom I could turn to for solace when things don’t go my way. Someone to lift me up with a smile and a kind word. Someone I could borrow a few bucks from when the rent is due and I’m a little short. Like now. You know. A lover. Preferably a solvent one.

  I’m twenty-six years old, stand five seven, weigh in at 145 on a good day, and have brown hair with a few blond streaks scattered through it, thanks to a tub of frosting bleach and a bottle of high-octane peroxide I keep hidden under the bathroom sink next to two differently colored Cover Girl cover sticks (you can never predict how tan you’ll be when the next zit pops up). I have blue eyes, a perky little nose, and a body displaying no lesions, warts, carbuncles, or misspelled tattoos. My dick is of standard size and girth, neatly circumcised, and rather precious looking if I say so myself. It also rules my life. But, then, most dicks do.

  Not once in my twenty-six years have I been in love. And as far as I know, not once in my twenty-six years has anyone ever been in love with me. How depressing is that?

  Beth was right about my mother. She latches on to a new man every time her refrigerator kicks on. To my mother, each new conquest is the love of her life. For a while. She’s never heartbroken when her relationships fizzle out. She simply moves on to the next item on the menu. And my mother’s menu has an apparently endless selection of meat dishes. Eww.

  To make it even more confusing, my mother’s boyfriends are all nice guys. For a while, they enjoy her as much as she enjoys them. The enjoyment factor for my guys—I wouldn’t dare call them boyfriends—usually doesn’t last much past the second or third orgasm. Or maybe if we’re really getting along, breakfast.

  I’m not quite sure why. I’m a charming guy, or I can be if I’m not being snippy and whiny and a real dickhead. I’m smarter than your average lawn mower, and I can be adventurous and generous between the sheets. Those are both pluses, right? I bathe regularly, my teeth are all intact, and I never pick my nose when anyone’s around. I also suck dick like a Hoover and have been known to both bottom and top rather skillfully as well.

  So what’s not to love?

  Beth and my mother say my lifelong dry spell in the amore department is due to the fact that I haven’t really found the right man. The right man—they tell me—will immediately make me nicer, sweeter, less selfish, more sincere, less testy, more appreciative, less annoying, more loyal, less self-involved, not so much of a slut, and easier to talk to.

  Easier to talk to? Excuse me?

  I can’t believe they think I’m not easy to talk to. Look at us, dear reader. You and I. We’re talking. Do you fe
el put-upon? Do you feel like I’m monopolizing the conversation? Well, I guess I am. But jeez, it’s my book after all. If you want to monopolize a conversation and beam it through the fourth wall, write your own damn book. This one’s mine.

  Oh dear. Sorry. Maybe I am a little testy.

  But darn it, you have to admit that twenty-six years without once falling in love would be enough to make anybody crabby.

  The simple truth is this: I’m beginning to wonder if I’m basically… unlovable. Or if not me, then maybe everybody else I’ve ever run across is basically unlovable. After all, I certainly haven’t seen myself impaled by any of Cupid’s arrows lately. If I could just once feel the least bit interested in a guy past the urge to bed him, maybe I could dredge up the zeal to at least pretend to be infatuated. You know. Treat being smitten like an audition. Try to get into character with it. Learn my lines. Do the blocking to get my moves down pat. Act like I’m head over heels in love just to try the role on for size until I’ve worked the kinks out. Sort of a dry run, if you will. A rehearsal.

  Insincere? Me?

  Now that I had eaten four-thousand-calories-worth of Cheetos, I decided I should go jogging before those calories took up residence on my ass. Nobody wants to see a thespian with a fat ass unless he’s a character actor, and that’s not me. I’m more of the matinee idol, name-above-the-title, headlining, People’s Choice Award, hunk-of-the-day type.

  Whatever you do, don’t tell Beth I said that. I’d never live it down.

  While I pulled on my running shorts and laced up my cross-trainers, I wondered (since big monkeys scare me, as do most other mammals, not to mention insects, reptiles, and Jehovah’s Witnesses) if the gorillas at the zoo were separated from the poor sap who had to sweep up their poop. I also wondered why the zoo didn’t simply teach the gorillas to chuck their own poop out of their enclosure themselves. After all, I had witnessed them nail the occasional leering tourist with a handful of feces now and then. Why not train the beasts to carry their natural propensity for turd-tossing forward to the realm of self-sustaining sanitation? Then some poor starving actor like me wouldn’t have to do it.