from “Better Davis and Other Stories”

Philip Dean Walker | Better Davis and Other Stories | Squares & Rebels | 2021 | 98 Pages

Very Special Episode

Jim watched the television in the waiting room of Dr. Mallory’s office while he waited for his test results. Something was playing on a loop on the screen. It was a cheaply shot dramatization of a patient going into a doctor’s office to receive his results. It had the feel and quality of one of those local commercials for car dealerships or wall-to-wall carpeting, the ones shoehorned into daytime broadcasts, with bad audio and production value. To Jim, the video seemed meant to prepare patients watching it for what to expect when they got their own results.

He almost couldn’t believe it, but the man who was playing the patient in the video had once been in an acting class with Jim when he first moved to L.A. in 1977. It had only been eight years ago, but it felt almost like an entirely different era. The Homosexual Mesozoic Era when he was still a complete nobody and sometimes paid for acting classes instead of food. The pre-plague years—those halcyon days when the worst thing that could happen to him was being stood up on a date, or getting crabs, or having a hot guy bust too soon at Flex on a Friday night. Such little tragedies back then.

Soon after the end of that acting class, Jim had landed a part in a local production of Godspell at Hollywood Presbyterian. One night, his performance caught the attention of a casting agent who was in the audience. The next day, the agent recommended him to a director to play a character named Monroe Ficus on an episode of a new ABC sitcom called Too Close for Comfort.

He was almost positive that the name of the actor—the one who was playing the patient in his doctor’s waiting room video—was Travis. He could remember Travis playing Brick in a Cat on a Hot Tin Roof scene in that same acting class opposite a friend of Jim’s named Lana who had played Maggie the Cat.

Travis was the kind of man one might have assumed was straight back then, but all the signs had been there for Jim to see that Travis was probably gay or, at the very least, bisexual. He was muscular without looking like Rambo. He had the clone mustache and that little tuft of black chest hair popping out of his Lacoste shirts, the ones that hugged his biceps so perfectly you’d have thought the sleeves had rubber bands built into them. He was spectacularly butch in almost every way that Jim was not. And the way he had played Brick had been so alluring, too. So seductive. It felt like he was taunting Jim at every moment with his huge dick in those silk pajama bottoms he wore in the scene. Like he might just whip it out at any moment.

“How do you know Travis isn’t straight? I mean, have you fucked him?” Lana asked one day after their class. She always proudly introduced herself to straight men as “The World’s Thinnest Fag Hag.”

“No, but I can usually tell,” Jim said.

“I dare you to sleep with him then,” Lana challenged him.

“I dare you to!” said Jim, laughing. “Honestly, I don’t think it would be that hard for either of us to get him into bed. He comes across as very all-purpose, if you know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t, actually,” said Lana.

“Well, then, you’re not a very good fag hag, Lana! See, I know a guy in his early thirties who’s as rugged and manly as they come—has a wife and two kids and is, like, a total pussy hound. But he’s always had sex with men too, from his teenage years all the way to the present day,” Jim said. “And he’s a total bottom who loves to be rimmed and fucked.”

“And I assume you’ve done the rimming and fucking?” asked Lana.

“Oh, well, I would never tell …” Jim smiled.

But he did eventually tell Lana that, of course, he had rimmed and fucked the married man countless times—Vincent, no last name ever provided. In the parking lot of a hardware store in Van Nuys in Vincent’s car with Jim’s head bumping into a toddler’s car seat; at Flex one night when Vincent had mysteriously shown up, latching himself onto Jim as if Jim were a tour guide ushering him through the bathhouse underworld. Even in Vincent’s own house once when his wife and kids were visiting his mother-in-law.

How funny it was to see Travis again after all these years, he thought. And here, of all places. In this hideous waiting room. The absolute last place on Earth Jim wanted to be.

The video looked fairly recent. Travis was a little thinner perhaps, but just as handsome as ever. His mustache had grown into a nice, full beard and he was wearing tight faded jeans so that Jim could still see that package, flopped up against his meaty thigh.

Lana told Jim at est, a couple of years after their acting class, that she herself had once seen Travis in a 1980 episode of Charlie’s Angels called “Toni’s Boys.” It was one of those backdoor pilots where the “Charlie” equivalent was being played by an ancient and very slow-moving Barbara Stanwyck who was in charge of three hunky disco dreamboats, one of whom happened to have been played by Travis. None of the guys could act for shit, including Travis, and the planned Toni’s Boys spin-off never happened.

“Honestly, it looked like they did their casting by sweeping up last call at Numbers!” Lana had told him.

“They should just do a gay porn version where a boozy old madam whores out a gorgeous trio of male hustlers to various johns in Beverly Hills,” said Jim.

“Oh, I’d definitely watch that,” Lana said.

“Me, too,” Jim said.

“You know, someone told me that Travis ended up playing Gooch in an all-male version of Mame in La Jolla, but I think they might have been joking. I find that really hard to believe.”

“Yikes,” Jim said.

It was now painfully clear, watching the video in the doctor’s office, that for all of his good looks and the straight-acting leg up, Travis’s acting career hadn’t really gone anywhere.  It was Jim, after all, who had the steady sitcom gig. It was Jim who was about to start taping Hollywood Squares as the center square.  It was Jim who had some kind of a future in the industry. A future, that is, if he could just stay alive.

There were reasons for Jim to think that his test might very well turn out to be negative. They weren’t reasons exactly. They were anecdotes Jim had decided to employ as reasons for his own mental survival.

A man named Omar who went to his gym had been convinced he would test positive. Omar was a financial advisor who had once been the bottom in a gangbang in ’82 at the Grove and three of the tops had died in that first wave in West Hollywood. But Omar had tested negative anyway.

“I’m in shock. I mean, I was so convinced that I had it, I was ready to quit my job and cash in my 401k,” Omar told Jim while doing bicep curls.

“Are you going to do anything different now that you know you don’t have it?” Jim had asked.

“Well, sure. I’ll probably use condoms now. But, who knows, maybe I’m immune.”

In the video, Travis walked into the doctor’s office and sat down across from a man who looked like Martin Balsam wearing a white lab coat and a stethoscope around his neck. Jim couldn’t help but laugh out loud when he saw the stethoscope. True, there was nothing funny about any of this, of course, but that stethoscope—it was just sort of ridiculous. So cliché. Every actor needed props. Even Ted Knight had that stupid cow puppet on Too Close for Comfort. But there was something so cheap about the stethoscope in Travis’s scene. As if a stethoscope was going to save anyone at that point.

The doctor turned his ledger around so that Travis could see the results for himself, matching them with the number he had on a slip of paper. It was bad news. Travis put his hand up to his brow and began to cry, without any tears. Jim felt for his own slip of paper in his pocket. Then Travis looked up at the doctor with a face that had, in the space of a few seconds, become utterly undone and almost broken, pleading for something more. Jim found it unexpectedly haunting. Travis was all of a sudden giving the performance of his life.

“Mr. Bullock?” asked a receptionist. Jim nodded her way. “You can go right in.”

He walked into the office and sat down across from Dr. Mallory. He instantly defaulted to what Travis had done in the video: He put both arms on the armrests and sank back in the chair, as if to brace himself for the news.

“So, Jim.” Dr. Mallory took off his glasses.

“Where’s your fucking stethoscope, doc?”

The security guard waved Jim through the gates at ABC Studios. He went straight to his dressing room—thankfully without running into anyone—and began to leaf through the script for that day’s taping.

Jim’s character was originally meant to make a single, one-episode appearance in the first season of Too Close for Comfort. But he had tested so well with target audiences that the producers decided to make him a permanent member of the cast. He played Monroe Ficus, the foil of the main character, Henry Rush, an exasperated cartoonist played by Ted Knight, who was living with his wife and his two adult daughters who had moved into their parents’ basement apartment.

Jim already knew his lines for the episode so he sat back in his chair and looked at himself in the mirror. He tried to locate something, find this new sick version of himself in the same face he’d just seen in his bathroom mirror that morning. But there was no change that he could discern at all. In fact, he somehow looked more like himself than he ever had before. He smiled and cocked his head to the side, summoning the bright, cheery, and fey character of Monroe Ficus. Monroe couldn’t have AIDS. Monroe didn’t even have sex. Monroe was a ham! He was funny and harmless! Monroe squeezed easy laughs out of pratfalls!

Jim wanted to say that he felt different now that he knew for sure that he had it. But that’s not how he felt at all. Since the disease had first crept up four years ago, he had always just assumed that he would get it at some point. I mean, how could he not? He’d always been too active, too sexual, too trusting, too reckless. Too … too. Even in those small moments when he would theorize how he might somehow have evaded it—reviewing encounters from his past in the most minute detail in his mind as if they were sexual Zapruder films, slowing down the screen to look for spilled body fluids, open orifices, spots and sores on penises—it seemed so ridiculous now to have ever thought otherwise. In a way, AIDS had always been his destiny and there was a certain calm now in knowing that here it was. It had finally come for him.

He wondered who could have infected him. It could be anyone. He would probably never know. And that was the rub. Because of that fact, he felt emboldened to choose who he thought it was. Who he thought it should be.

He chose a man he’d gone out with for only several months—Dixon. God, Dixon was so handsome. Smart, funny, instantly charming, with a wonderful smell and the kindest blue eyes. The two had met completely by chance one evening at a party, a small bash held by a mutual acting friend who had recently been nominated for his first Primetime Emmy. Jim and Dixon had been the only ones smoking on the balcony. They began a conversation and Jim could remember just how easy and natural it all was. It really was as if they had known each other for years. Jim was unsure whether or not Dixon was even gay, but halfway through the conversation, Dixon threw in an “ex-boyfriend.” He later told Jim that he’d only said that because he knew that Jim couldn’t tell.

They went back to Dixon’s place in the Hollywood Hills after the party. It was all so beautiful. The house, of course, but also the way that Dixon had held him after they made love. He was the same age as Jim, but was as rich as someone years older.

One night, Dixon whispered “I love you” into Jim’s ear, but Jim was too stunned to return the words even though he himself was feeling the same way. No lover had ever said that to him before.

But then Dixon—wonderful, handsome Dixon—just disappeared from Jim’s life. Like a ghost. Just. Like. That. He didn’t answer any of Jim’s phone calls and, if there was an answer, it was his housekeeper and Dixon would never return any of the messages that Jim left with her. Jim had no idea why Dixon had fallen off, and the whole ordeal crushed him in a profound way for months and months afterwards long after he should’ve gotten over it. Was it because Dixon had become tired of Jim? Was he upset that Jim had misplaced the copy of The World According to Garp that Dixon had lent him? Did Jim really actually suck in bed? Or was it because Jim had not said that he loved Dixon too? He didn’t know and the not-knowing was like a splinter under his thumbnail. He felt like he was Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass, the love-struck and doomed Deanie. Like he was going mad.

He would have preferred it if Dixon had just told him to fuck off rather than to disappear like that, without any explanation or reason. Jim liked resolutions and reasons, that was the kind of person he had always been. And this was such an appalling thing to do to someone like him. To withdraw oneself completely. He’d never even considered it. There was a certain level of cruelty that, before this, had simply been beyond Jim’s ability to imagine, but one which he was now forced to acknowledge existed.

When Dixon disappeared from his life, Jim dropped into a fuck maze—a months-long marathon of fast food-like sex that left him unsatisfied yet always hungry for more. He spent hours and hours at Flex, fucking anyone who crossed his path, not even seeing their faces in the dark let alone knowing their names. And the virus must have been just marinating around them, dripping like sweat down the black-painted walls, the rough drywall of the backrooms. Circulating through the air. If it wasn’t actually Dixon who had given Jim the virus, if he was not technically “the one who did it,” well, then it was because of him and that was that.

Who knows—maybe Dixon was dead now too just like all the others and it was only Jim’s memory of him that would keep Dixon alive now in any sense at all.

That afternoon, they were taping a “very special episode” of Too Close for Comfort. On a sitcom, it was one of those episodes that veered off from the usual formula of the show in order to address a current real-world issue such as alcoholism, child abuse, rape, kidnapping, and, nowadays, AIDS. He’d seen a recent episode of Mr. Belvedere that had featured Mr. Belvedere’s young charge, Wesley, intervening at a Boy Scout camp when the scout leader takes an inappropriate sexual interest in one of Wesley’s friends. Jim remembered the episode specifically because once at the Compound baths he had slept with the actor playing the scout leader. The name of the very special episode of Too Close for Comfort they were taping was titled “For Every Man, There’s Two Women.”

It almost seemed like a cruel joke that this was the episode he had to tape that day, today of all the days in his life. The plot synopsis: While working at his job as a college campus security guard, Monroe gets kidnapped by two women in a parking lot and brought back to their apartment where he is tag-team raped throughout the night. Raped by two women. Luckily, the rapes would only be described by Monroe to the Rush family and not depicted on-screen. Neil, the director, had sat him down the week before to make sure that he was okay with everything.

“We’re not going to do anything that makes you uncomfortable, Jim,” Neil stated, emphatically. “That said, I think you have a real opportunity to shine in this episode.”

“But is it being played for laughs? Like, ‘Ha ha! Look at poor Monroe getting overpowered by women and taken advantage of! It’s such a scream!’ I’m not even sure how I should be playing this. Am I legitimately traumatized? Is the audience going to be respectful? It’s just—”

“Listen, Jim. You’ve always fed off the energy of the audience. We want you to do that again here. Just like you always have. The audience will decide if this is comedy or tragedy. That’s how these type of episodes work. It’s usually a little bit of both.”

“So I am traumatized then?” Jim asked.

“Of course you are. You’ve just been gang-raped all night! But, like, Monroe-traumatized, ya know? It’s funny because it’s happening to Monroe. Right?” Neil put both of his hands on Jim’s shoulders and focused his eyes on him. “Jim, hear me out here. You have always been able to make anything the writers come up with just sing up there. You’re a very remarkable person with a very remarkable talent. And don’t tell anyone this, especially not Ted, but you’re the most popular character on the show. You have the highest Q-rating by far. You’re the secret ingredient that makes this whole thing work. Well, you and Cosmic Cow. That’s why we decided to write this whole episode for you. Because we have so much faith in you. We know you can sell anything.”

“Wouldn’t it be more—I don’t know—impactful if it were two men who raped me?” Jim asked.

“Oh, God no. That would just be too real,” Neil said.

Wearing Monroe’s college campus security guard uniform, Jim paced around the set. He felt agitated and unsettled but that seemed to work for his character at the moment. He was slightly disheveled-looking portraying Monroe directly after the attack. Mona, the wardrobe lady, had made his tie askew and ripped one of the pockets on his shirt. She mussed up his hair and then added some hairspray to hold it in place.

“You still look pretty hot for a rape victim, Jim,” Mona had said, chuckling.

The other actors in the scene who played the Rush family were already on set and in costume—Ted Knight as Henry Rush, Nancy Dussault as his wife Muriel, Deborah Van Valkenburgh as older daughter Jackie, and Lydia Cornell as younger sister Sara. The character of Monroe had originally been introduced as a college friend of Sara’s but, through the years, Monroe had drifted away from any direct connection with her character at all and now inexplicably worked as a security guard on their college campus.

Jim had never been sexually assaulted himself. But there was a young man who he’d met out in West Hollywood earlier that year named Alex who had revealed to Jim that he’d been raped by his own older brother and had been infected with the virus that way. It was just so cruel and awful to hear, almost unbelievable in its own special kind of horror, that Jim had actively avoided Alex after that. He felt awful about it. He still did, even more so now. But some things were just too horrible to think about, too monstrous to believe, too sad to even look at.

A producer was giving instructions to the live audience. Jim found his mark.

“Are you okay, Jim?” Deborah asked. “You look kind of pale.”

“I’m, I’m ... no, I’m about to die, actually. But let’s not talk about that now, okay? Fabulous,” Jim said. Deborah looked at Lydia with confusion. The two of them both found their marks for the scene.

“Okay, everybody, quiet on set. Now, action!” said Neil. The lights seemed to have gotten brighter. Jim tugged at his tie, dazed. The red light on the camera came on.

They began the scene. Monroe came into the Rush family room in a frenzied state. Jackie and Sara confronted him about what had happened to him. Monroe begged off the question and Jackie asked the rest of the family if any of them knew what was going on. That’s when their father, Henry, theorized that the two women who had kidnapped Monroe must have been attracted to him so they decided to take him home and have their way with him.

The audience gave a kind of nervous laughter.

Jackie and Sara were still confused.

“I’m so confused here. A man can’t be raped,” Jackie said.

“Oh, yes, he certainly can be,” Henry said.

“Jim, you missed a line there. Monroe is supposed to say ‘But that’s what happened,’” said the stage manager.

“But that’s what happened,” Monroe said.

“Okay, we’ll just fix that in editing. Next scene, please. Ted and Jim in the kitchen,” said Neil.

“What’s wrong with you, Jim? You never drop a line,” said Ted, running his hands through his thin, white hair. He was wearing a Purdue University sweatshirt. 

“Maybe I’m going method, Ted,” said Jim.

“What do you mean?” Ted asked.

“Monroe is so struck dumb by what’s happened to him that he can’t speak properly. Wouldn’t that be hilarious? Like Monroe has ever not had something to say,” Jim said.

Ted looked at him and put his thumb and his forefinger on his chin, stroking a nonexistent beard.

“Neil, give me a second here.” Ted pulled Jim aside to the back of the kitchen set. “Jim, I fought against this episode. I thought it was a bad, bad idea. And you can tell from the audience reaction that I was right. Now, I’ve never really asked you about your life outside of the show. I know you have one. And it’s not that I never cared. I just thought it was none of my business.”

“Well, it’s still not,” Jim said.

“I know,” Ted said. “And I won’t ask any questions about that because it’s not been, and never has been, my place. But I’ve been in this business for a long time, my friend. There’s very little I haven’t seen or at least heard about. You know, there will always be another job and another script. And another early call. But you. There will only ever be one of you. You’re the only ‘Jim J. Bullock’ we have in stock. I can’t imagine anyone else playing Monroe Ficus. And I wouldn’t want them here anyway.” Ted put his hand on Jim’s shoulder and gripped it gently. It was the first time he’d ever touched Jim outside of a scene. Jim nodded his head and smiled.

“Okay, he’s ready,” Ted told Neil as he found his mark in the kitchen.

“Let’s shoot,” Neil said.

Ted and Jim both sat down at the kitchen table and began their scene.

The episode title was wrong, Jim thought. For every man, there weren’t two women. There were two men. And two more behind them. Then there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of men behind them. Legions of them. Some faceless, some with no names, some with neither a face nor a name. Some just a memory. For every man, there was another man underneath him, another man behind him, that one in the mirror, carrying the man’s truth. For every sick man, there was a healthy man living inside of him. The one who was unblemished, a virgin. For every comic man, there was a tragic man lurking and waiting for his moment to peek out and make himself known. Behind Monroe Ficus, there was Jim J. Bullock. And behind Jim J. Bullock, there was just Jim, a boy looking for a role to play in this great production always teetering toward closing.

“Very Special Episode” from Better Davis and Other Stories.
Copyright © 2021 by Philip Dean Walker.
Reprinted with permission of Squares & Rebels.