I tried my parents when the medics showed up, but neither one answered their phone—my dad was at a museum event, and my mom was having an afternoon delight. The only other number I could come up with on the spot was Noah’s.
He met me at the hospital and didn’t even flinch when he saw my mangled foot. Soon I went into surgery, and by the time I woke up my parents were there and Noah was gone. But he came back to visit me; he was like a family member, or at least a very good family friend. He’d been my mom’s agent for two years by then, so he’d been around the house, had come over for my parent’s parties. We’d see him out of the house too—at Lords and Ladies events, LGO fetes and celebratory dinners whenever he inked some new terms or new distribution deal for my mom’s show. I had talked with him plenty over the years, but rarely had it ever been just the two of us. Now it was.
He was a jock too, a former one at least. He sat a few feet from my hospital bed, camped out in a standard upholstered hospital chair, and regaled me with stories of all the bones he had broken when he was younger. He wiggled three fingers on his right hand. “These three snapped when the center stepped on them during practice in junior high.”
“You were the quarterback?”
“No. Wide receiver.”
“How did the center break your hand then?”
“It was just one of those big old football pile-ons during practice,” he said.
“Were you good at football?”
He smirked. “What do you think?”
I nodded my answer.
He nodded back.
“How many passes did you catch?”
“So many they had to make an extra record book for Pop Warner in Hoboken, New Jersey.”
“Ha. Yeah, right.”
He winked, then whispered. “Don’t tell anyone I can’t remember the records from my glory days.”
“Right. They were so long ago,” I joked.
“Then I broke my kneecap a couple years later,” he said, recounting high school injuries.
“How’d you manage that?”
“Playing soccer. I planted my foot wrong while I was twisting around to try to score, and then it snapped. Man, it felt like it fell down to my shin.”
“Seriously?”
He tapped the side of his calf under his black pants to show me where his kneecap had landed. He wore his agent outfit: black slacks, shiny leather shoes, and a crisp navy-blue shirt that day. “Yep. My kneecap was knocked about two inches out of the socket.”
My eyes widened as I covered my mouth with my hand. “It’s like when a cartoon character’s chin falls to the ground or something.”
“It was exactly like that. Only it actually hurt, oh, say, twenty thousand times worse than if I’d have been animated.”
“What else?” I asked, eager for more stories of his broken bones that took my mind off not just mine, but my broken family.
Noah
I crossed my legs and leaned back in the hospital chair, happy to entertain her with tales from not that long ago. It was a rare day when I could talk about something other than business. The chance to distract a friend from an injury—because she was a friend, as weird as that may seem to an outsider, she was always a friend first—was something I’d gladly do.
“Let’s see. There was that time when I was seventeen and I dislocated my shoulder on a triple play.”
“How? Did you throw too hard?”
“That’s me. All brute strength,” I said drily.
“Seriously,” she said, narrowing her eyes at me.
“I was the third baseman. I forced out the runner at third and threw too hard to second.”
“But you got him out, right?”
“Hell, yeah. Glory first,” I said, like it was my team’s tagline. But there was a pride underneath my self-mockery, and she nodded in understanding. She was good at sports too, worked hard at them, and they meant something to her. The same was true for me.
“Were you all stoic during the play, then did you limp off the field cradling your shoulder, as your teammates cheered?”
“Something like that. But we lost the game, so it was a moot point in the end.”
“Is that all you did growing up? Play sports?” she asked.
I laughed, and shook my head. “It wasn’t all I did, but I was good at sports. Plus, I think my mom just wanted to balance out all the show tunes and cabaret and drag queens I’d grown up with. You know, just to give me a full sense of the world.”
Raised by a single mom in the acting biz, I grew up on Broadway and off-Broadway, in nightclubs and cabarets. I knew stage right and stage left before I knew real right and real left. My mom was a chorus girl. She never made the big bucks. She always made just enough from her tiny backup roles for us to get by. In between her Broadway gigs, she sang in nightclubs for a hundred bucks a pop, her big, brassy, showy voice reverberating throughout the cabaret halls and red-velvet lounges of Manhattan. She took me everywhere, toted me to all her auditions when I was a little kid, tugged me by the hand to her rehearsals when I was in grade school, brought me to Sardi’s in between her matinees and evening performances on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
I was a fixture of the Broadway scene and became a communal theater kid. Those same thespians I hung out with came with my mom to my games, cheering me on in football and baseball with the loudest hoots and hollers. Maybe that’s why chatting with her over her broken foot and reminiscing about high school days felt the closest to normal I’d had in a while.