ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: The Writer, His Wife, and their Afterlife

Book One, Part One, Chapter 49: Joshua and Jack and Bruce and Bo

Joshua befriends Jack Johnson, a veteran actor whose roommate at Northwestern was Richard Benjamin. Jack spent decades doing film and stage work in L. A. and New York, but he’s also spent decades chain-smoking and betting the horses. The smoking’s given him emphysema, and the track’s cost him time, money, energy, and probably his marriage. Once, offered a plum role in a film comedy, he ignored his agent’s calls. “Too busy studying the racing form to bother with learning lines,” he told Joshua. Now, broken down like an old claimer, he works a part-time job to support his two addictions.

Joshua and Jack go to films together, audition for plays together, and go to the track together. I know Ernie feels jealous, yet we don’t speak of this. But when Joshua and Jack make plans to write a screenplay together, a Western, Ernie erupts. “Who do they think they are? They’re actors, not writers . . . at least, they haven’t spent a lifetime writing, as I have.”

Joshua and Jack soon give up the playwriting idea. Instead, Joshua says: “Jack and I are going to put on Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker at the Rud. Our friend Bruce will play the third role.”

The Rud, short for the Rudyard Kipling, is a bar/restaurant near downtown that also contains a small stage. Its owners, Ken and Sheila, open the stage to almost any theater group or musician in the city. Joshua, Jack, and Bruce gather their own costumes, create their own set, and direct themselves. Joshua draws a poster, putting it up all over town, and promotes the play on a morning radio show. The Caretaker runs for two weekends, and Joshua makes one of his theatrical wishes come true: to share a stage with Jack.

“Jack spits on stage when he says his lines,” Joshua says. “Some actors sweat. Jack spits. I was glad to be in Jack’s line of spit.”

A few months later, Joshua takes a call from the director of a theater group in Elizabethtown, a ninety-minute drive drive the interstate. “We’re putting on Bus Stop, and we want you to be our Bo. We can’t pay you much, but at least it’ll cover your gasoline expense. Will you do it?”

Of course he’ll do it.