[Breeder] A Sexual Education: The Embrace, Part One

[TheBreeder]

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The first time I met Topher, we were both ten and in a local theater production of an original musical. The call had gone out in the community for auditions for an elaborate and badly-written new production set in ancient Israel. The writer/director was especially looking for a score of freshly-scrubbed middle-class Virginian white kids to portray a gang of singing, downtrodden biblical street urchins. The starring role revolved around a sweet-faced crippled orphan boy, fallen upon hard times and dire circumstances, who falls in with a crowd of pickpocket youths in the back alleys of ancient Israel led by Bill Sykes and black-hearted Cockney villain named Fagin.

Oops. Sorry. That’s Oliver!, which had been big only a couple of years before, and from which the new musical had been rather heavily influenced. And by influence, I mean plagiarized. Although the tunes had been slightly altered and the lyrics retooled to suit a different historical milieu, the only real difference between Lionel Bart’s hit musical and ours was the setting and the fact that in our little backwater production, all the characters were Jewish. Even the title was the crippled orphan boy’s name followed by an exclamation point.

My parents made me audition. I can’t remember why. I think someone from church strong-armed them into it. I vaguely remember attending the auditions and singing with the other kids, and dancing a little, and then sight-reading “Consider Yourself”—sorry, that’s Oliver! again, I think the name of the showpiece urchin song was “Any Friend of Yours.” I’m not exactly sure what about my warbling or wooden acting attracted the writer/director’s attention, but I had a couple of things going for me. For one thing, I had good pitch and could read music. For another, I was pretty, pink-faced, and blond. Just like all biblical cripples. I won the lead, and a pair of wooden crutches.

The role was fairly demanding, though, so rather than rely on one kid to do all the work, the writer/director, who also had cast himself as King David, who rescued the poor crippled boy from ignominy only to have him kidnapped again by Bill Sykes—sorry, Yitzhak Sykes—decided to let two boys share it. We would alternate nights, so that we both felt like we were getting a fair shot at it. And Topher was the other crippled boy.

I remember sizing him up warily, the first time we met. Though we were both skinny fourth-graders, we couldn’t have been any more opposite of the other. My hair was long and shockingly blond and straggled down over my forehead and ears in untidy wisps; his was an almost-perfect Dorothy Hamill cap of the darkest and coarsest brown. My features were fine, my eyes blue (you know, like all downcast ancient Jewish boys). His were broader and darker, and his eyes were a puppy-dog brown. Neither of us knew the other. We were in the same grade, but at different schools. We did share some of the same friends, though, and we were vaguely enough in the same neighborhood that we got over our initial suspicion of the other. Not enough to become great friends or anything, but enough to work together.

The cast had roughly a month to work together before the production’s debut. The crippled orphan’s role was pivotal enough that though he was onstage most of the night, he didn’t really interact with the cast that much. Sure, there were a couple of times in the big group numbers that he’d join in a song’s final rousing chorus, but most of the time he just kind of sat downstage right in a pile of rags, watching everyone else sing and mug, and waving his crutches around in lieu of dancing. The rest of the time he was either singing wistful solos like “Bread, Wonderful Bread” or being manhandled by Fagin or confiding in King David (who was in disguise as a common soldier, I dimly recall). So basically, until the last week, Topher and I rehearsed separately from the rest of the company.

It was about two weeks into the rehearsal process that one night Topher and I were sitting alone in a rec room at the local seminary. The chorus were practicing in the skating rink next door; Topher and I had been running lines or learning blocking from the writer/director, who had stepped out to oversee something.

I remember he put down his script, brushed back his bangs, and peered at me. “Have you done a private rehearsal with Marc yet?” he asked.

Marc was the writer/director, a seminary student in his early thirties. He’d spent most of his twenties accumulating regional theater credits and some off-off-off-Broadway experience, but never quite achieved the success he wanted from a career in the business. I think entering the seminary was his fallback plan. It was the early nineteen-seventies, so he was a bit of a product of his time—a bearded, furry-faced pseudo-hippie with a white-boy Afro and a pair of oversized eyeglasses who’d probably been in one too many earnest productions of Godspell. I’m making him sound hideous with that description, but he was unattractive only in the general way that everyone was deeply awful-looking during that godforsaken decade.

In my pre-pubescent way, I found him definitely attractive. I didn’t have the mental vocabulary to express that thought, or admit to it. But I liked looking at him. He was the kind of man I wanted to be like when I grew up. Masculine. Furry. Hip.

“No,” I said. I was supposed to have a private rehearsal with Marc the next day, Saturday, at the odd time of ten in the morning. All of our practices took place in the evening. “Why?”

Topher looked at me and didn’t say a word. Then he shook his head.

I had a vague feeling of foreboding. “What?” He shook his head again. “Did you have one?”

“Yeah.” He avoided my eyes and flipped through the script again. “Yesterday. After school.”

“What’d you do?”

“Just ran lines and stuff.”

I got the impression that he wasn’t telling me something, but before I could dig any more, Marc came back into the room. “Sorry, guys,” he announced, bustling over and assuming his place at the table’s head. “Just wanted to make sure everything was running all right next door. Wanna get back to work?”

We didn’t really have much choice in the matter. There were only a couple of weeks left before the show opened, and we had a lot of lines to learn.

It was at about nine in the evening that we wrapped things up. “Topher, you I’ll see Sunday. You,” he said to me, “Don’t forget about tomorrow. Ten o’clock on the dot. ‘Kay?”

I agreed. “‘Kay.” Marc grinned and gave my hair a ruffle—not that anyone would’ve been able to tell the difference after, I’m thinking.

Topher’s eyes caught mine before we parted for the night. If I’d paid more attention, I might’ve seen the measuring look they carried, or thought back and wondered what it was he hadn’t said during our time alone. As it was, I didn’t think about him again until after the rehearsal on the following day.

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