ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: The Writer, His Wife, and their Afterlife
Book One, Part One, Chapter 50: The Dodge
After Ernie sees Joshua in Bus Stop, he’s inspired to write his own play set in a bus station, only this station is in a Kentucky mountain town during the Vietnam War. Ernie calls his play The Dodge.
“It has eleven characters,” he tells Joshua and me. “One’s Leroy, a Vietnam vet who heads a motorcycle gang of three. He’s big and loud and shaves his head. Roxanne is his feisty girlfriend. She knows the good side of him, before the war turned him angry. Then there’s the gung-ho Army officer with his medals who’s headed back to Nam after a furlough; his pregnant wife’s seeing him off. There’s a chaplain who mainly sits on a bench reading his breviary, and a ticket-seller who comes out from behind his cage only once. Finally, we have three young mountain boys headed to boot camp. They’ve all been drafted.”
Joshua reads the play. “This is fantastic, Daddy. Bruce can play Leroy. He looks like Leroy and rides a motorcycle, too. Maybe I can talk Jack into playing the ticket-seller. I’ll play one of the draftees. We’ll hold auditions for the other parts. I’ll direct it.”
“I’ll invite everyone I know — including my fraternity brothers,” Ernie says. “I’ll give out free tickets. I want to pack the house.”
The house, of course, is the Rud.
The play goes into rehearsal, and Ernie stays away. Joshua asks him to. “I understand the play completely, Daddy. There’s nothing that needs changing. All the words are there; I just have to make them come alive. I don’t want you to see the staging until Opening Night. I want to surprise you.”
Almost everyone Ernie invites to the play shows up: fraternity brothers, his ex-wife Janey, his cousins Paula and Jennifer. My high-school friend Veronica happens to be in town from her home in Munich, where she works for the State Department, and comes, bringing her mother. Clint, with the city’s Youth Performing Arts Center, who directed Joshua in Hot l Baltimore, attends with his wife, Phyllis, who designs theater costumes. Ernie table-hops, greeting everyone.
The lights dim. The play begins. From stage left comes the sound of retching. Then comes the sound of pings and rings and voices. The stage brightens, and there’s Joshua and Christian, playing draftees, banging against a pinball machine, rocking it and talking to it. Isaac, playing the third draftee, enters from stage left, looking pale, holding his stomach.
“I watched the audience,” Ernie tells us afterward. “They were on the edge of their seats the whole time, even my fraternity brothers. Nobody coughed or squirmed. They loved it. This night is a highlight of my life.”
I don’t ask Ernie the obvious follow-up question: What are the other highlights in your life? Do I think I know everything there is to know about Ernie? Am I not curious about what he thinks and feels?
The play runs two weekends, and Ernie misses only one performance — the second Friday’s — this because I dodge it that night . . . because of a secret I am keeping from my husband.
