Olivia transformed Bert from the callow innocent he had been. As soon as he met her, I could see him melting and re-forming like a re-cast bronze image in a metalworker's forge. Unaware, he was shaped by her touch, her glance, her moods, her tastes. And I watched it happen – helpless as any father watching his son changing for better or worse.
When Humberto Alvarez had applied for a teaching position at our school, I hired him despite the realization that teaching was not his main focus: He was a struggling thespian, a recent graduate of the Miami University theater department. Right away I felt he would be responsible, conscientious, and honest even though he seemed a trifle dismayed at the raw bone life had thrown him so far. His personal characteristics were strong recommendations, but he was also articulate, intelligent, and linguistically astute; so I knew he would be a good, if not great, English teacher. Oh, but he was so-o-o innocent! I took a fatherly interest in him; I wanted to see him do well, and I was willing to give him a chance. Besides, in a private school, certified teachers are difficult to come by since they can command higher pay elsewhere.
I had no idea whether he was a good actor, but he was certainly dedicated. Several times in the first two years, he missed classes to audition or go for cattle calls. I covered his classes for him. He landed a few television commercials which supplemented his income. In one he played a family man purchasing a home, but I thought he looked too young to be the father of two children. He did voice-overs for radio commercials. He performed bit parts in local live theater. His greatest failure was being overlooked by Miami Vice. He was too clean-cut, too innocent for that festival of sleaze and glitter. The casting director preached that to him.
My heart bled for him as he struggled with his desire to act. How could he make himself over to be hard enough? How could his buttery complexion and outlook take on the grim burnish of cold steel? Only suffering and the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” could do that. I knew it, but I held my peace, congratulated him when he landed a part, smiled a benediction when he did well.
He had another dilemma as an actor: Although he was Hispanic, he didn’t have the classic dark, matinee-idol Don Juan looks. His innocent gray eyes and blond hair and pale, smooth skin did not prepare anyone for Humberto Alvarez. At the school, we called him Bert. One day he presented me with his business card, “Bertoli Ecco, Actor” with the masks of tragedy and comedy underneath. “What do you think?” he asked. “Maybe I’ll have better luck as an Italian.”
Spanish wasn’t his first language. He grew up in Miami and spoke English like an American. He understood Spanish, but he was a little hesitant when he spoke it, searching for words and phrases and inflections. His students couldn’t believe he was Cuban and called him EL Gringo Maestro del Ingles.
He told me in his sweet, puerile voice, “I go for an audition and they talk by me. ’Hey, we asked for Alvarez,’ they say. ‘I’m Alvarez,’ I say and they say, ‘Naw, we were expecting someone more Hispanic.’ Can you believe that? Then I go for a cattle call. The casting director calls me over because I look the part. I do the scene. She says ‘Maybe.’ Later I get a call from the secretary. ‘Sorry, Mr. Alvarez, this part doesn’t call for a Hispanic.’ Damned if I am, damned if I’m not!”
I smiled, shook my head. What could I have said?
Many of the women at the school could have been his for the asking, but he was fastidious and held the moral high ground. Some women didn’t care and rushed him with flirtations, propositions or innuendos; those who got out of hand I had to speak to in my office to calm their driven hearts. The more experienced ones said, “Bah, who wants a boy like that!” One particularly uninhibited lady – if I may use the genteel term with such a brazen action – hovered until one day he bent over to retrieve a dropped pencil; whereupon she grabbed his genitals. In my office before I expelled her, she claimed she just wanted to see if he “tiene cojones.” How his face had blazed with consternation! God had to love him.
That thought – that God loved him – seemed ironic to me since his chosen profession was not celebrated for its angelic life-style; in fact, just the opposite. American drama had had little to brag about before the twentieth century. Thespians had been closer to snake-oil hawkers, conjurors, flimflam artists and rainmakers. Players often acted before drunken audiences and were as likely to ride out of town on a rail or sneak away in the bewitching hours as they were to leave on the morning coach. The Puritans had banned the theater altogether as the work of the devil, that trickster, as a form of deception and illusion. Satan was the consummate player, appearing in whichever guise could tempt a person to give up his soul for damnation. To be an actor back then was to be Lucifer’s playmate.
I couldn’t see that things had changed all that much except that a clever actor could make a lot more money and live a devilish life at a more luxurious level. However, if that life was what my surrogate son wanted, then I wished it for him.
For Bert, the crossroads came when he met Olivia, a recent refugee from Cuban television. She was strikingly attractive in the classic Latin style: cascading dark hair, full sensuous lips, large brimstone brown eyes – all highlighted by makeup. He met her at a cast party and was immediately taken with her. They talked, touched, bonded. A few weeks later, they were living together. She was twelve years his senior, and although he didn’t know it, she was exactly what he needed. He was enchanted.
Bert introduced Olivia to me at a graduation ceremony. She was a charmer, smooth as a masseur’s oiled hands. She kissed me as naturally as taking breath. I liked her immediately, but the contrast in their ages made me wince even though I’m not a judgmental person and know the human possibilities for mating are multiple and complex. Maybe I was a little jealous because she was closer to my age than his. Not only did she have him by a dozen years, but by eons of experience. Enthralled, Bert said to me, “You know, it’s like she fell from heaven.” My heart ached for him; I suspected what he was in for because I’d been a similar love-slave in my youth. The single females – graduates and staff – who had wanted, but not caught, him, quipped, “Who’s that? His mother? His older sister?” But they knew that for them his heart was lost forever.
Olivia leaned back in her chair behind the banquet table; she knew she had the prize. She and Bert danced a fiery dance as if they were hoofed instead of shod. He was chained to her side. Her eyes caught how others looked at them, at him, at her. She saw every nuance because she had the experience; he saw nothing except Olivia. She was in her favorite role: puppeteer, prompter, console mistress.
Yes, she was an actress, too, and a good one. She had already grappled television roles which brightened her local fame, especially within the Hispanic community. The camera liked her. The spotlight loved her. Strangers wrote her letters. She was seductive even through microwaves. Men thought she was the scratch for their itches; they sent her proposals and propositions.
However, the man she wanted was already in her bed where he rode her like a gambling sinner rides the devil’s luck. He gave her himself body and soul. Early in their relationship, he often dragged in red-eyed, but with a Sybarite’s grin, late to school. He was in a crucible – melting and re-forming, mutating before us through the heat of Olivia.
She drove him to perform and used her burgeoning influence to get him parts in live theater, experimental theater. I went to one play, but Bert’s role was clearly beyond his powers. Olivia was marvelous in hers, and the audience was enraptured by her performance like moths before a flame; she was an enchantress on stage, too. Next to her, Bert seemed a carved marionette, his emotions strained and artificial. I kissed Olivia afterward, but mine was only one kiss among many from her idolaters in whose warm adoration she basked. Bert held back, but I grabbed his hand and pumped it. “Good show,” I said, smiling hard, but I suppose I wasn’t any better at acting than he had been that night. “Thanks,” he said, but he wasn’t convinced.
Nevertheless, his passion carried him along. Olivia compelled him to perfect his Spanish, so he worked diligently with her as his linguistics coach. He toted around a mini-recorder with earphones and carried on a dialog with it. Occasionally, I’d catch him in his classroom during a break. There he would be declaiming page after page of Spanish script. The practice worked because he eventually picked up more jobs doing Spanish voiceovers.
As their relationship passed from months into the second year, Bert began to be a little desperate. He had gone to school with Arty Munoz and Mickey Rovira, so as their stars began to rise in Hollywood, Bert began to feel left out as if time were leapfrogging over him. A grim determination seized him and began to age him bit by bit. I worried about him, but what could I say? Es la vida. He was still so young.
One day Bert almost apologetically invited me to lunch. Of course, I was glad to go, but he seemed edgy, precipitous. He took me to one of his favorite Cuban restaurants EL Gallego on Calle Ocho, and after we’d ordered, he shoveled a slim manuscript toward me. “I’ve been working on a film script. Would you mind looking it over and telling me what you think? I respect your opinion.”
“Of course.” I took it and began reading page by page, but soon the pescados fritos con arroz y plantanos was set before us and I put the manuscript aside to eat. We chatted.
“How’s Olivia these days?”
“Fine,” he said, but a disturbed, corrupted cinder had flashed to the corner of his iris before he extinguished it with a forkful of plantain and continued. “The script is based on my family’s experiences in Cuba and here.”
“I thought it might be.”
“I’m sending it to some people I know in L.A. I told them about it over the phone, and they were interested.”
“Great. Can I take it home and read it carefully?”
“Cierto,” he replied and smiled. “You don’t mind, do you?”
“Cierto no,” I answered.
Actually, the script was pretty good. I read it several times over the weekend and liked it. The plot was inflammatory and the beginning was a grabber. The characters were believable. I thought, He’s got something fine here. Shows growth. It’s got rough edges here and there, but those can be ironed out. On Monday at the start of the school day, I was happy to be able to tell him the truth and wish him luck as I handed the script back. He gleamed at my reaction. However, something else was sitting on his shoulders, and I guessed what it was. (Remember, I’d been through it.) Something was happening in his relationship with Olivia – I didn’t know what – but when he surfaced alone at the next graduation, I knew that whatever it was, was serious. I asked about Olivia as usual.
“Oh, she had to work tonight,” he said.
“Oh, a play?”
“No, television.”
I was chagrined to hear his first lie. She never worked “the tube” on weekend nights, but I let it drop. If the circumstances were too prickly to talk about, I didn’t want to push the subject.
During the next few weeks, surveillance reports poured in through the office grapevine. “I saw Olivia with someone else at Regina’s. What in hell’s going on?” said one secretary. “I was going by their apartment, and Olivia came out all dressed up, but she got in her car and drove off alone,” reported a filing clerk. “Bert was at the Cameo with some young dumb thing!” blurted an admissions officer. “I asked him where Olivia was, and he gave me a toxic look, you know what I mean?”
Then the hard thing happened. He moved out from Olivia’s apartment and threw himself on a hot, young student – the only time he had crossed that invisible professional boundary between student and teacher. I knew he was blanketing his pain with the arms of another, clutching at an emotional fire extinguisher – a backfire to fight the blaze that had consumed him for two years.
I felt his pain, suffered with him, but there were complications. The hot, young student was married to an older man who worshipped her and gave her whatever material things she wanted. Bert and this new flame burned brightly for two weeks while I waited for the fire to subside, hoping it would do so before it caused an explosion. I would have had a fatherly talk with Bert except no one had complained and I didn’t want to butt in when I was sure the flare-up of passion was temporary. Maybe I felt a trifle guilty.
The very next Monday, the paramour’s cuckolded, doleful-eyed husband came to my office. I smiled my best administrative smile and said, “Be seated. Me gusta a conocerle.” We shook hands. His English was as good as my Spanish, so we made ourselves understood. The gist of the conversation was that he had heard I was a poet. Yes. He wrote poems, too. Yes. He presented me with a poem. I said thank you. Then I realized that he knew he was cuckolded, but he didn’t know by whom. Maybe he thought I was the guy, and maybe the guilt I had for other reasons showed on my bureaucratic face despite my efforts to present an unexplored moon in the outer rim of the solar system. Lamely, I commented that his wife was a good student. He smiled sadly. I felt guiltier. Then he left, dragging behind him his pride. I took a deep breath and sighed. Then I read the poem; it was about love and suffering.
My poor translation follows:
“I loved too much
One who did not love me.
How can such
A thing make her free?
By my hand I go
Break the chain that held her so.”
The next day, his disloyal wife found him hanging by a nylon rope from the light fixture in the ceiling of their bedroom; his distended bare feet dangled over the bed. She was absent from school a long time after that. The affair with Bert was blown out as if by a sudden icy wind.
A few weeks afterward, Bert, looking at least five years older, but with a subdued glimmer lighting his features, came by my office to hand in his resignation.
“What’s this?” I asked.
His eyes were tiny torches of volcanic glitter. “I got a break. I auditioned for a Spanish soap and I got the part – a major character.”
“Congratulations!” I said with earnest enthusiasm. “What’s the part?”
“A filthy-rich, power-hungry, lecherous, manipulative, vengeful, murderous son-of-Satan. I have to grow a goatee and dye my hair reddish-black.”
“You?” I said
“Yes, can you believe it?”
Sadly, I could. Such sometimes is the price of success.
END
"Local Boy Makes Evil" was published in A Collection of Nickel-plated Angels, 2008. It is loosely based on a human story I knew about. What enthralled me was the connection between success and worldly knowledge, a situation that is true to life, although one about which most parents warn their children. People who gain success and fame as children sometimes miss this lesson as many Hollywood child stars and one super athlete can attest.
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