Zero, Zero, Zero, by Marah Blake

Special Sneak Preview: An Essay From Barrelhouse Issue 22

This is the beginning. It’s season one of Taxi, before Reverend Jim joins the show, and we’re all still learning what lives the cabbies want to be leading. Elaine introduces herself to her new coworkers by saying she “really” works at an art gallery, and Alex lets her know that she is in the right place:

You see that guy over there? Now, he’s an actor. The guy on the phone? He’s a prizefighter. This lady over here? She’s a beautician. The man behind her? He’s a writer. Me? I’m a cab driver. I’m the only cab driver in this place.

Taxi declares its central tension in the first eight minutes of the pilot episode: making a life for yourself while the life you want is out of reach. It’s big dreams and found family and disappointments that land just shy of melancholy. It’s about finding a way forward despite how stuck you really are.

I’m back at the beginning, and I shouldn’t move to Maine. I’m back at the beginning, and I should study for the SATs. Fuck it: move to Hollywood and try to get on a sitcom. Tell her that I think I’m gay, think I’m in love, and start a bold new life in a different city. But I worry too much about things getting lost—I don’t know how to let go of old tax returns and can’t remember if I ever returned the keys to the landlord. There’s an angry letter waiting for me in an abandoned mailbox, I can feel it. Do I owe money to the psychiatrist with whom I played months of phone tag fifteen years ago? I know what to say to her now. I have figured out how to go forward but only from moments that no longer exist. 

And now I’m back at the beginning, despite my efforts to engineer a better life for myself.

“Bobby’s Acting Career” is just a few episodes into the first season. We know the major players by now and have settled back into the heartbeat bass line of every Bob James song. We’re at the beginning of the episode, and there is so much promise here. Bobby is waiting on a call at the dispatch about an acting job he’s up for. He’s unusually agitated and isn’t delighting in the antics of his co-workers or mimicking the people he meets (studies) while out driving.
Bobby confesses: He gave himself three years to make it as an actor in New York City, and those three years are up at midnight. If he doesn’t get an acting gig, he has to stop his pursuit of the stage and get a full-time job. Bobby has been carrying that clock with him since episode one, since before we knew him, but we’re only just learning about it now.

There’s a calm in knowing that Jeff Conaway’s name is listed in the main credits. No matter how the next seventeen minutes unfold, we know we will see Bobby next time. This is why television is better than movies; we can know that the people we care about will still be around no matter how things end.
           
There’s a B Plot to “Bobby’s Acting Career” which does not really speak to the A Plot. A man beats his dog in Alex’s cab, and Alex saves the day. The dog becomes a temporary companion to the Sunshine Cab Company, a consolation to Bobby as his last day as an actor slips away from him. The dog is named Hamlet, but there is no debate in Alex’s actions—he provides safety to the dog without a thought to the consequences.

I am teaching myself to waltz. I think it will help boost my confidence, physically, and someone in a movie said it helps with depression. My apartment is very small, and I practice the steps on the patch with the least squeaky floorboards. This seems like a good B Plot, one that quietly speaks to my current life while also serving as a distraction from solitude. It is wholesome and watchable.
When I dance, I try to force perspective:
I cut to a moment five years from now at a wedding. I am very charming in my new suit and my stasis is a past tense situation. It was all leading to this; I just couldn’t know it then.

Narrative arc feels like a privilege. I don’t know how anybody does it. But I’m trying so hard to stay away from the beginning.

Bobby almost gives up at the ten-minute mark when he doesn’t get the job he was hoping for. He resigns himself to sitting on the bench with the dog. It looks like he is going to wait out the remaining fourteen minutes of the episode in despair, but Alex sets him straight. Alex always saves the day. “[I]f you want a good job, you got to go stand in line. If you want to find a good job acting, find a line to stand in.”
And what does Bobby do? He spends the remainder of the episode going to every audition he can. He pursues his deepest Want.

I was a theatre major and always struggled with Want. We’d sit down with our character homework, and though I was a dedicated student, my work came out convoluted and cerebral. Clytemnestra’s situation was pretty straightforward: She wanted her husband to suffer for his betrayal. She wanted to murder him. But I could only write in the passive: “She wants for him to have not sacrificed their daughter. She wants the pain undone.”
How can you act that? Where is the action? What does she want, Marah?

I want for bad things to have never happened. I know it isn’t actable.

On dates, I never know how to talk about my history of misunderstanding want and how it kept me away from life. I think it would be better to say, “I used to be really shy,” than it is to say “I couldn’t imagine a future for myself for so long.” I only wanted to not be depressed, and then, somehow, I was in my thirties. I’m desperate to know if she has ever lost something as important as a lease agreement and how she recovers from mistakes. I don’t think this is how dating works, so I will talk about waltzing and how I learned to cut my own hair.

There’s a blue bruise on my leg from where I fell against my bed frame. I was attempting to spin and dip and tripped on the edge of my rug. But this is just the middle part where I am bad at waltzing and depression has its hold. It’s still five years until I get to dance at that wedding. Five years to get my shit together. I just need to remember that this is the montage before things start to click.

Bobby, is want really this easy: sit down with her and say, “These are all my wants. Do any of my wants match yours?” Then comes the believing each other and the weaving together of wants to see what they might make. I guess that’s what communication is.

Bobby, you won’t sleep until you know there is some promise of a future headed your way. I envy how your wants push you forward. I have mine but keep going back to the beginning and my parade of mistakes.

Depression steals the linear. But I’m trying.

This is the beginning, and it can only get better from here. Yes.
Alex saves the dog, and Bobby’s at the dispatch, coming up on what he thinks are the last 24 hours of his [creative] life. He is agitated and vulnerable. How terrifying to say what you want with the knowledge you probably won’t get it. He doesn’t know it yet, that his life isn’t over. I am so excited for revelation!

We’re in the middle, and Bobby scored an audition for a commercial. Hope! The bartender who calls me “hun” as she gives me a generous pour of bourbon. The writer who follows my Instagram and likes a picture of me that I pretend someone else took. I got ten questions right on the quantitative portion of the GRE. All steps in a kind of direction.

But what do you want?

We’re at the end of the episode, and we’re starting to believe. Bobby and his friends are crowded around his phone, waiting for the call that will change the course of the show. Bobby counts off the final ten seconds of the life he knows: “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero, zero, zero. Zero.”

The phone doesn’t ring.

“Bobby’s Acting Career” doesn’t end happily or at all, really. Bobby doesn’t get the job nor is there any indication that his career will take off. It’s all over for us. His friends are quiet as he sits with the promise he made to himself three years ago and prepares his resignation from acting.

Then Bobby says, “What the hell, I’ll give myself another three years.”

I’m back at the beginning, trying to look forward. I want to waltz with her. This isn’t a B Plot.

Marah Blake is a writer based in Philadelphia. She received an MFA from Rutgers University–Camden where she was a recipient of their Interdisciplinary Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared onstage with Birthday Girl Performance Series, and her poetry was published by The [Odds/Ends] Archive. She is working on a poetry collection and watching the birds