Allen Zadoff - Food, Girls, and Other Things I Can't Have

Maybe more than time to time. I think I have it every night, but most nights I sleep through and wake up in the morning having forgotten.

Some nights I’m not so lucky.

Tonight for instance.

My father is there with me one minute, the next minute gone, disappeared into the darkness. He’s never dead in the dream. He’s missing, which is much worse. At least with dead, you know what you’re getting. But what is missing? Missing means he could be lost and need help. He could be hurt. He might have run away, abandoned me, Mom, and Josh. He might have been taken against his will.

If he’s missing, he can still be found.

That’s what’s so painful about the dream. When I’m awake, I know my father is dead. He died in a car accident two years ago. A little less than two years. But in the dream I don’t know that. In the dream he’s alive and I’m looking for him, searching everywhere with this giant wave of fear expanding in my chest.

Some nights I sleep through until morning, but not tonight. Tonight I’m in the middle of the dream when my eyes pop open. I reach for the big Maglite flashlight I keep in bed with me, but it’s rolled away onto the floor somewhere. There’s nothing to do but lie here with the covers pulled up high, remembering everything.

I don’t know when I go back to sleep, or if I do. I spend the rest of the night in that place between sleep and dreams and waking, my room barely illuminated by my night-light, lying in bed with my eyes open, staring at nothing at all.

Not true. Staring at the rest of my life.

How does it help to think about your entire life when it’s three in the morning? What are you supposed to figure out at a time like that? And when you’re sixteen like me, the rest of your life is a long, long time.

Or a very short one.

You never know. Which is just something else to think about.

“Adam!” my mother shouts.

My mother is not a dream. That much I’m sure about.

“You’re going to be late for school!” she says from the foot of the stairs.

It’s morning already. My mother is extremely nervous in the morning. She’s super nervous at night. In between she’s only relatively nervous.

“Are you awake?” she says more quietly from the other side of my door.

“For a long time,” I say through the closed door.

“I had trouble sleeping, too,” she says.

“Why you?”

“Bad dreams,” she says.

I don’t respond. I wait until I hear her footsteps moving away down the hall, and then I drag myself out of bed.

I turn off my night-light and crack open the shades. The sun is harsh, tinged with yellow, hinting at the summer to come.

That’s when I remember. It’s the first day of tech. We move into the theater this afternoon. Our spring production opens in four days. A Midsummer Night’s Dream .

I should be excited. I search my mind, trying to find some angle that equals excited.

“Adam!” my mother calls, now down in the kitchen. “Look at the time!”

Excited doesn’t come. I’ll have to settle for awake.

By afternoon I’ve put the dream out of my head, and I’m back in my element. In the theater.

More specifically, above the theater.

I’m on a catwalk high above the theater floor, surrounded by lighting instruments and cable, watching the actors get a tour of the set down below. I look down through layers of wire and pipe at the long line of actors snaking around the stage. The actors shouldn’t be in here at all, not during load-in when we’re working on lights and set, but Derek loves to break the rules almost as much as he loves to make them. Derek Dunkirk, student production designer. Man of many gifts, lover of many women, and wearer of many keys on his belt.

And my nemesis.

Maybe nemesis is too strong of a word. For someone to be a proper nemesis, they at least have to know you exist. But I’m no more than an annoyance to Derek, a techie flea in his royal fur.

Derek is the first student ever invited to design a production in our high-school theater. He’s doing set, lights, and costumes. That’s not just impressive; it’s legendary. Usually the director designs the show at our school. There are kids who do little stuff in a classroom—an improv performance or a workshop without any tech or something—but at Montclair High, the nine-hundred-seat auditorium is as close as we get to the big time. And Derek is definitely big time.

“By way of inspiration, a bit of Tennyson,” Derek says with his less-than-perfect British accent. A stir passes through the actors as he clears his throat:

“That’s so sad,” Johanna says and flits her eyelids at him.

Her actor boyfriend, Wesley, pinches her to get her attention, and she punches him on the arm. The two of them hit each other so much, I’m not sure if it’s love or boxing.

“Sad but true,” Derek says. He lowers his head, as if in mourning.

What would you know about it? I think.

But the female actors love it. They make that aaaaaawwwwh sound that girls make when they see a baby or a puppy. Even Tom, the six foot six actor with a shaved head who is playing Theseus, gets a sad look in his eye.

Derek soaks it all in.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Derek says down below, “would you be so kind as to follow me?” He walks off, clapping his hands like he’s herding sheep.

I look at the female actors crossing the stage, their bare legs going from white to black as they pass through pools of light. They say theater is democratic, but it’s not true. There’s a pecking order here just like everywhere else in high school. The leads walk in the front of the line, followed by the bit players, followed by the extras. They’re the actors without lines, sometimes even without character names.

In the front of the pack are Johanna and Miranda, who are playing Hermia and Helena, the battling heroines of A Midsummer Night’s Dream . Next to them is Jazmin Cole, the gorgeous Latina actor who plays Titania. The three of them are the female leads of our school, the “it” actors, The Posse. Miranda is more athletic than Johanna with short black hair and enormous boobs. From up here, her cleavage looks like a mini Grand Canyon. I know I shouldn’t be looking down girls’ shirts, especially girls I don’t like, but cleavage is confusing like that. You can hate a girl but love her cleavage. That’s how powerful it is.

The closest I’ve come to Miranda was during last year’s production of Spring Awakening . I wasn’t on lights then. My job was to hold a flat backstage while she changed clothes behind it. I would stand there listening to the sound of her clothing coming off an inch away on the other side of the wall. She never said a word to me until one night in the middle of the run when she said, “I can hear you breathing on the other side of that thing, and it creeps me out.”

Anyway, actors and techies don’t mix at Montclair. We don’t even talk to each other unless it’s absolutely necessary. It’s like the Hundred Years’ War, only it’s a hundred years of silent treatment. Nobody knows why, but it’s a rule. One of about a thousand in our school. Unspoken rules. Spoken rules. Codes of conduct. Determiners of status.

I know all of these actors by name, but none of them knows me. That’s because I’m a guy who works behind the scenes. Some people call us stagehands, some say crew, and some say techies. Usually there’s a dismissive tone in their voice when they say it. “He’s just a techie.” But when we say it, it’s with pride.