I hate to say this, but Mr. Rose was a major disappointment. He didn’t look like a director at all. He didn’t have on a French beret or sunglasses or anything. He was wearing a sweatshirt and running shoes. It’s like he got out of bed and thought it was Saturday.
“Aha!” he exclaimed, pumping my arm up and down. “You must be Alexander!”
It sounded funny. Alexander’s my real name, but no one ever calls me that. I was named after Alexander Graham Bell. The phone guy.
Parents do this sort of thing all the time. They name you after someone great and hope you’ll turn out great yourself. It doesn’t usually work though. Usually you just end up as an ordinary person with a stupid name, like Abraham Lincoln Beerbaum … or in my case, Alexander Bell Frankovitch. After a name like that, even the nickname Skinnybones doesn’t sound that bad.
Finally Mr. Rose released my hand. “Well, we’re on a pretty tight schedule today, so we’d better get started. Mom and Dad can have a seat in the back of the studio, and I’ll take our young actor friend with me.”.
Mr. Rose led me over to the set. A set is a fake place in the studio where the commercial is actually filmed. Sometimes it’s a fake living room or schoolroom. In this case it was a fake kitchen.
Fake kitchens are very popular sets for pet food commercials. I’m not sure why though. We feed our cat outside. She only gets to eat inside if there’s a hurricane. My mother says the cat food makes the kitchen smell like a stink hole.
Anyway, we weren’t on the set for more than two minutes before Mr. Rose cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Makeup!” Then, before I knew what was happening, this blond lady came bounding from out of nowhere, plunked me down in a kitchen chair, and started putting gook all over my face. It happened so quickly, it made my head spin. I didn’t even have time to relax in my dressing room, or get a back rub, or sit in a Jacuzzi. And besides, even though I knew I’d have to wear makeup, I sure didn’t want it to happen like this. Not in front of everybody.
“Er … uh, excuse me, Mr. Rose,” I stammered as the blond lady turned me first in one direction and then the other. “Ah, I was just wondering if maybe I got a dressing room or something. That’s what happens on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. They get a dressing room.”
Mr. Rose furrowed his brows. That means he made his eyebrows look real annoyed. It’s an expression that kids my age don’t usually use, but I’ve had enough brows furrowed at me to know what it means. The main thing about furrowed brows is that they make me nervous. The longer Mr. Rose looked at me like that, the more I began squirming around in my chair. I finally got so self-conscious, I started laughing real stupidly—kind of like Goofy.
“Oh, I get it,” said Mr. Rose, beginning to laugh along with me. “We’ve got ourselves a comedian here! Please don’t scare me like that, Alexander. For a minute there I thought you might be one of those spoiled, demanding little child actors I usually get stuck with.”
I was just about to ask if he meant Pudding Boy, when he suddenly turned away from me. Then he cupped his hands around his mouth again and screamed, “Bring in the cat!”
The next thing I knew, I was sitting there with this disgusting, giant yellow creature on my lap.
Ronald. That was its name. Ronald the Cat. Without a doubt the stupidest cat name I’ve ever heard in my life. Naming your cat Ronald is like naming your kid Whiskers.
Also, just to give you an idea about how giant this cat was, when the trainer dumped it into my lap, I actually went “Ooooff!” I’m not kidding. I thought it was a kid in a cat suit.
The thing is, I don’t even like cats. I mean I know I have one as a pet and everything. But my parents got Fluffy before I knew how to talk, so I never had a chance to tell them I hated her. I tried to make a few hand signals, but they didn’t catch on. Every time a little kid makes hand signals, his parents think he has to go to the bathroom. I finally got so tired of being rushed away, I decided just to put up with the cat until I was older.
Mostly what I hate about cats is the way they’re always sneaking up on you. I realize it’s probably just the result of being born with fur on your feet, but I still think they could cough when they come into a room to let you know they’re there.
Fluffy’s the worst. Sometimes I’ll be standing around in the bathroom with nothing on, and all of a sudden I’ll look down and there she is. And she’s been staring at me the whole time and I didn’t even know it. I’ve heard her laugh at me before, too. I don’t tell that to many people, but I swear I’ve heard Fluffy laugh at me about five times.
Anyway, I could tell right away that the trainer and I didn’t feel the same way about cats. As soon as the makeup lady left, he patted me on the shoulder and said, “Okay, Clyde, how about if you and Ronald introduce yourselves and get acquainted?”
I’m serious. This man actually expected me to say something like, “Hello, Ronald. How’s it going, dude?”
“Uh … no offense,” I replied. “But I’m twelve now. I don’t really talk to cats that much.”
The trainer looked irritated. “Listen, Sylvester, I don’t care if you’re ninety-seven. If Ronald doesn’t feel comfortable with you, this could be a very long day for all of us.”
I was about to tell the man that my name wasn’t Clyde or Sylvester when all of a sudden I looked down and caught Ronald licking the front of my new shirt.
“Sick!” I exclaimed, pushing him off my lap as fast as I could. “Cat saliva! Sick!”
The trainer picked up Ronald and stomped off. Behind me Mr. Rose made this little whimpering sound. I recognized it right away. It was the same sound my Little League coach used to make when I’d show up for a game.
Furrowing his brows for the second time in only minutes, Mr. Rose pulled up a chair beside me. Then he sat there breathing real slowly like he was trying to keep from losing his temper.
I felt insulted, if you want to know the truth. I mean, I know that directors have to put up with a lot of little brats, but I still don’t think I should have been treated as one of them. After all, we’re talking about a cat saliva problem here.
After he got his breathing under control, Mr. Rose put his hand on my shoulder. “Listen, my friend,” he said, even though it was plain that I wasn’t. “I understand that you’re not a professional actor, but making commercials is like anything else. If you want to get something accomplished, the magic word is cooperation. Working with animals can be very tricky. And we’ve got to have cooperation among all of us—you and me and Ronald and Donald—if we want to make this go smoothly.”
I almost started to laugh. “Ronald and Donald? Ronald’s trainer is named Donald? Seriously? Ronnie and Donnie? Ron and Don? Ronno and—”
“Enough!” interrupted Mr. Rose. “Please, Alexander! Let’s not make this worse than it already is. Let’s just try very hard to cooperate with each other and see if we can’t come out with a cute commercial by the end of the day. How ’bout it?”
“Er … cute?” I asked, suddenly getting an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach. “Uh, could you please explain ‘cute’ to me, Mr. Rose. Nobody sent me a script or anything. I mean, this isn’t going to be one of those stupid commercials where a kid has to make a fool out of himself, is it? This commercial is very important to me, Mr. Rose. I’ve got to wipe out a whole lunch line with one giant ‘Ha’!”
“A giant ‘Ha’?” repeated the director, curiously.
I didn’t have time to explain. “Please, Mr. Rose,” I begged. “I just don’t want to cha-cha with the cat or sing to the fritters, okay? They put people in the nut house for stuff like that, you know. This guy down the street from my cousin Leon started talking to his hair, and they had an ambulance come take him away.”
Mr. Rose stared at me a second, then started to laugh again.
“Relax, Alexander,” he said as he stood up. “I promise you won’t have to cha-cha with Ronald, okay? You have my word on it. Now, if you’ll just wait here a minute, I’m
going to check the camera angles, and we’ll be ready to start.”
“Yeah, but wait!” I called after him, still feeling uneasy. “What about singing to the fritters? Or how about actually talking to the cat? I don’t have to carry on a conversation with Ronald, do I? You know, like the kind where the cat nods his head up and down like he’s really listening. I mean, I don’t mind saying ‘Here, boy,’ or something like that, but I don’t want to act like I value his opinion or anything.
“Hey, Mr. Rose!” I called again, even though by now he was hidden behind one of the huge cameras. “Did I remember to tell you that I’m twelve? Could we keep that in mind, please? Could we keep in mind that in some parts of the world boys my age are little generals in the army?”
From behind the camera came two hearty laughs. One from Mr. Rose, the other from the cameraman. Then I heard my father’s familiar chuckle ring out from the back of the studio. I even thought I heard Donald laughing.
For some reason, all this laughing put me at ease. Laughter does that to me sometimes. It makes me think everything’s going okay. Only this time it wasn’t. This time I guess you could say the laugh was on me.
It was the stupid kind of commercial. The kind I hate. Not as dumb as dancing with a cat, but almost.
They made me play the part of a kid about six. I swear. Mr. Rose kept saying the part was created for a kid any age, but it wasn’t. How many twelve-year-olds run away from home pulling a little red wagon?
That’s what I had to do. I had to pretend I was this little sniveling crybaby kid who was running away from home with his cat. I didn’t have any lines to speak. I just had to come into the kitchen wearing a dorky hat and blow my nose like I had been crying. Then I had to struggle to lift a forty-pound bag of Kitty Fritters into a little red wagon. After that I had to pick up fat Ronald, wipe my nose on my sleeve again, and head out the door pulling the wagon.
Just as the door was closing behind me, this announcer’s voice would come on and say,
“Kitty Fritters … because sometimes your cat’s the only friend you have.”
It made me want to gag, it really did. When Mr. Rose first showed me the hat, I felt so sick I had to go to the bathroom and splash water on my face. It was raccoon, the kind Davy Crockett used to wear. The kind with a tail.
But I had no choice, you know? Mr. Rose explained the situation very clearly to me. When I started to complain, he sat me down and said, “Look, kid, either you do the commercial the way the Kitty Fritters people want it, or you walk.”
“Er … walk? Exactly what do you mean, ‘walk’?” I asked.
Mr. Rose made his fingers walk across the table. “Walk,” he repeated. “As in back to the hotel, back to wherever you came from. Walk.”
“Ohhhh, walk walk,” I said stupidly.
“So what’s it going to be, Alexander? Are we on or are we off? Do you wear the hat and pull the little wagon, or don’t you?”
I bent my head and tried to muffle my answer with my hand.
“I’llpullthestupidwagun.”
“Excuse me, Alexander? I didn’t understand you.”
“I said, I’ll pull the wagon,” I repeated gloomily. “But I just want you and that cat food guy to know something. I’m going to be thirteen in a few months, and in some countries kids actually get married at thirteen. Like, take Borneo, I think it is. Somewhere in Borneo some thirteen-year-old kid and his wife are going to be highly insulted when they see this.”
I paused for a second and put my face in my hands. “One person will like it, though,” I mumbled, feeling sick to my stomach. “Annabelle Posey will just love seeing me humiliated like this. She’ll be pointing and laughing for weeks.”
Mr. Rose ignored me. I guess by then he had decided that ignoring was the best way to handle me. It’s not though. The best way to handle me is to let me have my own way.
We worked on the commercial all day. I’m not sure how many times we filmed it before Mr. Rose was happy. He had an assistant who kept track. Each time we were about to film, the assistant would stand in front of the set with a chalkboard and say “Kitty Fritters commercial, take one” … or “Kitty Fritters commercial, take eighteen” … or “take twenty-four.” I stopped listening after “take thirty-two.”
Ronald was the problem. Ronald the Cat—the dumbest animal actor in the entire universe.
All he had to do was sit in the middle of the kitchen floor and watch me blow my nose and load the fritters. Then he had to let me pick him up. Think about it. How great an actor do you have to be to let someone pick you up? You could actually be dead and play that part.
Not Ronald though. Every time he’d see me coming, he’d lie down and roll over on his back. Then he’d make his body so limp it was like trying to pick up cat-shaped Jell-O. To make matters worse, Donald kept running in, shouting, “Up, Ronald, up!” He waved his arms around like he was training an elephant or something.
Finally Mr. Rose got real annoyed about it. “Where the heck did you get this cat, Donald? The morgue?”
Donald took Ronald and stormed off again. This time when they came back, Ronald’s face was wet. I guess Donald had been trying to revive him.
Anyway, after Ronald had cooperated once or twice and the filming was finally over, we went around shaking hands and lying about how well everything had gone. Then Mr. Rose gave me a pat on the back, and Ronald and I shook paws. The Kitty Fritters man said if I ever came to Cincinnati, he’d take me through the cat food plant and show me how the fritters were made.
Oh, boy.
3
After I got home from New York, I started getting nervous all over again. No matter how you looked at it, the commercial was stupid. So stupid, I was afraid it might backfire right in my face. Instead of being a big celebrity like I’d planned, I could end up as the school fool.
For the first time in my life I started biting my nails. By the end of the week my fingers looked like ten little bald guys. Every time I closed my eyes at night, Annabelle Posey would drift into my mind. I’d be standing there with my little wagon, and she’d take one look at me and her mean, high-pitched cackle would penetrate my brain. Then pretty soon other voices would join in, until a thousand different laughs were echoing all around in my head.
I’d cover my ears, but it never helped. The laughing was inside. And it was worse than any nightmare I’ve ever had.
My parents noticed the change in me. It must have been the way I kept pushing my vegetables around and around my plate at dinner. One time I molded my mashed potatoes into a coffin.
“You’ve got to stop brooding about this, Alex,” counseled my mother as we sat down to supper one night. “You did a terrific job on that commercial. So what if it wasn’t exactly Rambo? There’s nothing wrong with playing the part of a wimp.”
I looked up from my meat loaf. “Thank you, Mother,” I said sarcastically. “That makes me feel a lot better.”
“You know what she means,” said Dad, trying to come to the rescue. “That’s acting, Alex. Acting isn’t who you are. It’s playing the role of someone else. And the better you do it, the better actor you are.
“Besides,” he continued. “I don’t think the character you played was a wimp. He was just a little younger than you, that’s all.”
I frowned into my potatoes. “If he had been any younger, it’d have been a diaper commercial.” The thought of it made me shudder.
My mother sat there for a moment, gazing thoughtfully into space.
“You know, your father may be right on this one,” she offered at last. “When you think about it, the character wasn’t a wimp at all. He was just a sweet young boy with a love for his cat.”
I buried my face in my hands and groaned.
“A love so great,” she rambled on, “that even when he ran away from home, he thought not of himself, oh no, but of his little kitten whom he knew he would have to care for on the road. And to show that great love he sacrificed his own nutritional needs by loading
a giant-size bag of fritters on board for the kitty cat. And nothing, mind you, not one little crumb, for himself.”
My father and I stared at her, hoping for a sign that she had been kidding. She hadn’t been. It was scary.
But at least she was trying to make me feel better. And I have to admit, some of it helped a little bit. After all, there’s nothing really wrong with playing a younger character. They do it in Hollywood all the time. And besides, it was sort of a nice story, about the kid loving his cat and everything. Not as nice as my mother made it sound maybe. But still, nothing to have nightmares over. Nothing to be ashamed of.
Two months. That’s how long it took before the commercial finally appeared on TV. I was sitting in the family room watching Gilligan’s Island with my best friend, Brian Dunlop, when all of a sudden it just popped onto the screen. It really took me by surprise!
“Hey! Look! There I am! There I am!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “Look, Brian! My commercial!
“Mom!” I called. “Come quick! My commercial!” I was jumping up and down. My heart was pounding a million times a minute.
I thought Brian would be excited too. Not as excited as I was maybe. Not hysterical, but at least mildly excited. Moderately excited. I mean, how many kids get to sit in the same room with a guy that’s on the screen right in front of them?
Not Brian though. He didn’t even jump up and give me a high five. He just sat and watched the commercial without saying a word.
After it was over, he took a deep breath. Then he turned slowly and looked up at me. You could tell he was fighting to keep a straight face.
“Nice,” he said quietly. Then this sort of muffled pig noise escaped from his throat, and he exploded. He started rolling around on the floor in wild, uncontrolled laughter, until he was practically crying. Even when my mother ran into the room, he didn’t stop.
As the two of us watched him circle the floor, a sick, nervous feeling creeped over my skin and settled inside me.
“You missed it,” I informed Mom, suddenly joyless. “It’s all over.”