I ran down to my apartment complex’s leasing office, hopped on one of the guest computers, and set it to print the audition information I had gotten just minutes before. My roommate Scott was at the front desk looking intense in front of the computer.
“Scott, Scott, Scott! You won’t believe what I found in my inbox today. Some indie production is looking for a 5’3″ or under, muscular blond who can play the string bass.”
“You play string bass?” he asked.
“What is a cello but a tiny bass you sit down to play?”
He must have been stressed because he turned back to the computer without a smile and said, “Well, good luck with that.”
“I need your help rehearsing, though! And the audition’s in…two hours. Please?”
“Cutting it a bit close.” He rearranged some papers and clicked around a bit, though I couldn’t see his screen. “If you asked me earlier today I might’ve been able to, but everyone decided to dump their applications on me in the last half hour, so I’ve got to get to them, and I’m the only one on desk today.”
I leaned my arms on the desk. “You’re not still mad about the, uh, parking lot pantsing, are you?” (He wore a jockstrap that day. It was glorious.)
“Naw, man. All’s forgiven–barely remember it. But I really am busy.”
He didn’t look busy; we were the only ones in the lobby, but I sensed that this wasn’t the time to insist. He was usually up for these things.
“Well,” he said, “I can send you up to the boss. He’s off work, so I wouldn’t bother him for help with applications, but he is always reminiscing about the good old days when he worked in film. It could be worth a try. 407A.”
“Are you sure you can’t help me?” I asked.
“I’m sure sure,” he said. “Just get on up there. We’re at one hour, fifty-eight minutes now.”
Maybe if I impressed his boss I could find out what was going on with Scott.
~~~
I pressed the elevator button to go up to the fourth floor, but after a minute of nervous fidgeting, left to take the stairs. 407A was right above my own apartment. The welcome mats on the floor were a little different, but the hallway was similarly cool and shaded.
After knocking, I realised he didn’t know the name of the guy I was asking for help me. I pulled out my phone and started to look up staff information on the apartment complex website.
“Good afternoon.”
I looked up. I was expecting someone a little more washed-up, but the man who answered the door looked like he could be a veteran spy coming out of retirement for one last job, or the hot dad werewolf hunter in some teen show. Salt and pepper beard, scruffy but gentlemanly. Dad glasses.
He raised an eyebrow. “Can I help you with something?”
“Oh, I, um…Scott. Scott told me you used to act, and I was wondering if you could help me with some lines, ’cause see there’s this audition that’s really soon but I only got the notice today, like five minutes ago, but it’d be such a missed opportunity if I, uh, missed it. So could you help me with the lines?” I held up the script. Not the best first impression.
“It’s been a while since my acting days,” he replied. Then nothing.
“Scott says you’re a really good teacher, though, like in being his boss, so, you know, I was hoping?”
“He did, did he?” he said. There was something there that I couldn’t quite decipher. He looked me over. “Come on in,” he said, turning around. “You can call me Lucas.”
Though his apartment layout was virtually identical to mine the floor below, it was a lot more sophisticated: paintings on the walls, a glass coffee table, leather sofa. A quilt of patchwork flowers caught my eye, lending a surprising air of coziness and something else.
“So what’s in the script?” he asked.
“Actually, I haven’t gone through it yet.”
“Oh?” He gave me a quizzical look.
“I got the notice super late, but I have a bunch of specific qualities that they want, so I think I have a shot at this!” I said. “Don’t worry; it isn’t too long.
I placed the pages onto the coffee table. There weren’t many lines for the audition, and upon closer inspection it didn’t even take up an entire page (there were multiple pages because of contact/audition information).
Oh God. The character gets embarrassed after a wardrobe malfunction in an auditorium while trying to impress the love interest. It felt a little karmic. But they had camera tricks and nude-coloured underwear, right? I wouldn’t actually be showing too much.
After going over the lines in front of Lucas a few times, it became clear that it wasn’t really working out. He had a bone to pick with everything, it seemed. As nervous as I was while miming covering my exposed dick in his living room, he didn’t think I was selling it hard enough. Which surprised me, given, again, my very real nervousness. The judges weren’t usually this hot. Maybe it was because I was distracted thinking about Scott downstairs.
“Think of a time you were really embarrassed, then, if you can’t become the character,” he said.
“Uh….” Last week’s checkup with the hot doctor, high school locker rooms…. They didn’t seem appropriate to share, and I was trying not to get hard with him watching me so intently.
“If you can’t come up with something then I have an idea.”
Maybe it would be better than plumbing the depths of my mind for embarrassing memories.
“Sure. What did you have in mind?”
~~~
Scott liked to sell people on the apartment complex by pointing them to the lavish community pool outside the leasing office. The neighbouring buildings shielded it from the eyes and sounds of the street, giving it an air of a secluded oasis in the city’s concrete. A group of guys were grilling something nice-smelling next to some picnic tables on a little lawn. After some tables and some reclining chairs, patterned tiles bordered the pool, which had at the deep end a diving board with a short ladder and at the other end an area roped off for aquatic volleyball. The water looked good on a sunny day like this one; Scott and I had enjoyed it often.
This time, however, I was wearing a bright red speedo that Lucas had on hand (new with tags!). He said it was too small for him, but it felt a little small for me and he was much bigger, so I figured it had been intended for someone else, but didn’t pry. I was used to wearing board shorts with the liners cut out, though, so maybe it was actually the right size and the constant wedgie feeling was normal.
“So how are you feeling, Art?” Lucas asked.
“Uh, nervous,” I replied.
He slapped a hand on my shoulder and leaned in a little. “Good.”
My face got hot and I couldn’t meet his eyes.
He laughed. “An improvement already. You’re doing great. Just remember the details to replicate for your audition later. Recall the moment. Really feel it.”
He squeezed my shoulder to drive the point home.
“So the guy in the script is trying to impress his high school sweetheart but fails miserably in front of her. Pick someone to impress then. That guy over there with the baseball cap? You know any of these guys? Huh. All the girls stayed in today. Sorority event, maybe.”
I didn’t know any of them. I looked at the windows of the ground floor office for Scott. He was maybe somewhere in there, but it was hard to see.
“Well how about you impress your teacher. Go dive off the board a couple times and I’ll watch.”
“That’ll attract some attention, won’t it? Instead of just swimming around…?” I looked at the poolgoers, but they were mostly wrapped up in their own groups and happenings.
“All the better.” He smiled. He was enjoying this. All the better for me to have a motivated teacher. I should’ve looked at the script before asking someone for help. But maybe this was a blessing in disguise. That audition could be my big break.
I looked around again, but the only one watching me was Lucas (impatiently). I started unbuttoning my shirt and focussed on each button, trying not to think about what I was wearing under my shorts. It was normal for a guy to take off his shirt at the pool. I was practically the most dressed person there.
I slid the shirt off my arms. The metal rattling as I undid my belt was some more unwanted attention. Undo the button, down with the zipper and…. I stopped before the last step.
“You need some help there?” Lucas asked.
I pulled down my shorts in one go and hopped out of them. The sun was warm on my legs, and my thighs clearly weren’t used to seeing this much sunlight.
Lucas whistled. I restrained myself from trying to cover up with my hands. It would only draw more attention to myself. Surprisingly, and thankfully, no one had taken notice of me.
“So just dive into the pool repeatedly?” I asked on my way to the diving board, not wanting to linger.
“Yup,” he answered. “But think of the motivations, focus on your emotional and physical reactions. Focus on something different with each pass.”
It seemed contradictory and a little vague, but Scott’s information was usually good, so I went with Lucas’s advice.
I felt a couple discreet looks coming my way, but my eyes were on the floor because I didn’t want to see for sure. The tile was warm. My entire body was warm. The water would be good.
Being up on the board felt like being on a podium. I jumped in feet first, quietly, and came up with my hair stuck to my forehead.
“Boo!” Lucas shouted after me. “That wasn’t a real dive. Who’re you impressing with that?”
I wished he would stop shouting.
“Again!”
I got out of the pool, and my wet suit stuck to me all over, or at least as all over it could get given it didn’t cover very much. I pinched and pulled at it a little, but it didn’t help much and just attracted attention, so I stopped. I looked over at the barbecuing guys. The one in the hat was smiling at me and I gave a nervous smile back. “Just practicing,” I said. After it came out I wasn’t sure if that was better than not saying anything at all. I made my way back to the diving board.
The rungs of the ladder were a little wet this go around, as well as the board. Coming out of the pool had been kind of cool, but the sun had beaten down on me in the short time since I had exited, and I was warm yet again. How do people dive, even? I put my feet at the edge of the board and readied myself, bouncing a bit, but it turned out to have been too much and on a wet board, which resulted in an ungraceful slip and fall into the water, making a big splash.
Lucas had come over from his spot in the shade by the time I resurfaced.
“You okay, Art?” he asked.
“I think I bumped my leg on the board a little bit. But I’m fine.”
The stinging wasn’t that bad. Worse was that everyone seemed to be looking in my direction. Sweet concern usually, but I didn’t want to be seen at the moment. At least I was in the water.
Lucas was looking at me rather intensely. “I think we’re done now. How about you follow me out and we can head back up to the apartment.”
It was only a couple steps after I got out of the pool that I heard a shout from one of the barbecuers: “Oh my God!”
I looked over instinctively. It was hat guy, looking rather intently at me, but somewhere below my eyes. The rest of them had stopped what they were doing to look at him, then where he was looking. He didn’t look like he burned himself or anything.
I looked down, expecting to see the clinging speedo, but it wasn’t there. Everyone was just staring at my junk open in the sun. Then it was my turn to shout.
I made a move to cover myself, but someone picked me up in a bear hug from behind, lifting me from my armpits into a hairy chest: Lucas. His arms got in the way of my own so that my hands couldn’t reach as far down as I needed them to. My legs flailed around in the air by reflex, not finding any footing, but causing an awful lot of flopping below the waist instead. I looked up at the poolgoers and saw someone filming me on his phone. Oh God.
In another surprising move, Lucas leaned his head closer and nuzzled his beard against my ear, sending shockwaves through my body. Then he whispered in a gravelly voice, “Embarrassed yet?”
It was like all of my buttons getting pushed at once, in a good way, but also in a bad way since it was in front of everyone at the pool. I squirmed harder in his grip as I felt myself getting hard without being able to cover myself, much to the amusement of the amateur videographers. (More people had gotten out their phones.)
“That enough for you, Scott?” Lucas shouted past me.
Scott?
I turned to the offices and saw that he had come out of the building to watch. He was really eating this up.
“Yeah,” Scott shouted back. He laughed. “That’s enough for me.”
Lucas let me down and I put my hands over my dick, though it was a little more difficult to cover it completely than it had been a minute before, and the skin-to-skin contact wasn’t helping matters.
“Scott, you bastard!” I shouted.
He was still laughing.
“Now we’re even,” he said. “Also, you really need to research these auditions better, man. Keep this up and you might get tricked out of your clothes by unsavoury characters.” He started laughing again.
Lucas handed me my shirt and shorts, then slapped me on the back and said, “Can’t say about your acting chops, but that was one hell of a show, kid.”
~~~
Scott told me later that the people at the pool had been told only a little about what would be happening, and that Lucas, who actually had a background in the costuming department of films, had acted on his own when he went above and beyond in redoing the seams of the speedo with water-soluble thread. I’m still not sure if Scott didn’t tell him to that specifically.
I also got a text from the guy in the baseball cap. He asked Scott for my number after I ran back to my apartment, and says he “appreciated the view”. If Scott had talked him into being there for his prank, maybe he could be talked into doing something for me.
And boy did I have plans for Scott.