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

Book One, Part One, Chapter 48: Joshua and Bo Decker

Joshua skips his high-school graduation ceremony. “School’s been my prison for twelve years, and nobody’s going to mark me absent for not being at my damned graduation.” No way he’s going to college. He wants to act. “I’ll get as much experience as I can around here. Then, when I’m ready, I’ll move on to a bigger stage.”

In the Sunday paper, he spots an audition notice for William Inge’s Bus Stop. He reads the play. “I want the Bo Decker role. I want it bad.”

Ernie drops him off at a brick church on a side street in a little town across the river. “I shook his hand and wished him good luck,” Ernie tells me later. “His hand was ice cold.”

Joshua comes home from the audition pale, his head throbbing. “I read for Bo. Someone a little taller and a little older beat me out. I got the role of sheriff. But I promise you, one of these days I will play Bo.”

On Opening Night, Ernie and I sit in folding chairs in the church basement as Joshua and his cast mates put on the play they’ve rehearsed for weeks.

“I don’t know why it’s called a play,” I say to Ernie on the drive home. “A lot of work for no pay, and very few people come to see it — mostly friends and relatives of the cast and crew.”

“He’s learning the craft of acting, Ernestina. He’s paying his dues, just as I paid mine when I wrote those Mike English porns. I was underpaid, too, but it was worth it.”