It was Wednesday, February second, the year two thousand and eleven… Yeah, so that’s only a week ago as of tomorrow. So what? I received a call from my manager, Dave, who informed me that I needed to come down to New York from Boston for one (but probably two) auditions on Friday the fourth. One of these auditions (the one that was, for sure, going to happen) actually excited me, was actually a big deal. So I considered going. Otherwise I was headed for the assured fate of remaining in my parents’ house in Lexington, Massachusetts, licking the wounds that the West Coast chapter of the entertainment industry had bestowed upon my ego and my bank account.
See, I just moved back to the East Coast a mere three weeks ago from that horrible, planet-sized pancake of neon, concrete and despair that some asshole once had the nerve to name “The City of Angels” in Spanish. My wife left two weeks ago for a brief, three-and-a-half-week visit to her home country of Turkey. I was without peers. At the time my manager called I was desperate for an excuse to see some old friends, and he provided me with exactly that. My Dad spotted me some food money, so I figured “what the hell– sure, Dave Brenner of Creative Talent Company, I’ll come down to the big city for a night and a day– why not?”
Like anyone else who grew up in the Boston area, went to school in the Northeast and ended up drifting through the doors of a University Theater Department and never finding his way out, I had plenty of people living in the boroughs of New York City to call on in such a situation.
I called on my friend, Juan, another actor who had been a year ahead of me in the MFA Theater program at Florida State. Juan and I share the same manager, Dave, who pimped Juan’s apartment to me, saying that “Juan’s living all alone right now on the upper East side and he’s got plenty of space.” Juan was happy to take me. Shortly after I had secured said housing for Thursday night and purchased my non-transferrable, one-way bus ticket, Dave called me again and informed me that the audition I had been especially invested in was going to be pushed to Monday. Goddamnit. Okay, so it was for a series regular role in a pilot for NBC. Why do you have to drag it out of me like that? Sheesh. Monday seemed a long ways away. Still, I was not about to let a perfectly good bus ticket go to waste, was not about to rely on Juan’s hospitality for that many nights in a row, and I was not about to give up the audition on Friday, which I (though I didn’t particularly care for the material) was almost certain I would nail and get myself cast, even if it was less awesome than the pilot. I decided I had to bring out the big guns.
My friend Max is someone I did not meet in the theater, though he is an actor himself, a damn good one. My friendship with Max extends far back enough so that there is no discernible point of origin to it. It was and always has just been there, a given, like the back of that giant turtle under all our feet… No? Whatever. Our parents knew each other way back when and remain good friends. Yada yada. Max and I had the fortune of being born fairly close in time. Otherwise, we never would have become friends. Luckily, we were afforded the opportunity to share some of the more ridiculous delights of reasonably misbehaved boys at key junctures in the road to maturation, and yes, lived to tell the tale. Never a dull moment with that one.
Max is a newlywed, as am I, though I beat him down the aisle by about three years. He lives in the neighborhood of Astoria in the borough of Queens with his darling wife. These were the kind of people I longed to see after the vaporous, mirage-like friendships that Los Angeles seemed to prevent from materializing at every turn. I love them both dearly. So I called him up to mooch yet another night on his couch bed (the best in the city by my review, and believe me, I’ve tried a lot). He texted me back that if I stayed with him we would be attending a big party in Brooklyn on Saturday night, but that it was “dudes only,” and attendees were required to wear “all black.” Bells went off in my head. All black?
Slightly less than six years earlier I had also stayed with Max in New York City (well… a different apartment in Astoria, Queens) when I again had to use his couch (this time for graduate school auditions… to sleep on at night, of course– get your mind out of the gutter). He had told me something about having a “funeral party” for one of his living friends, pause… a guy who lived daily as though proper nourishment and care of his body were tertiary concerns in the grand scheme of things. The party he described seemed to amount to a kind of comic “roast” that involved wishing this poor sack of grease and nicotine a safe passage to the land beyond. This preemptive eulogizing was, of course, combined with a great deal of getting way too drunk and way too loud and making a horrifying spectacle at an otherwise respectable dining establishment. There were certain catch phrases in his report that caught the attention of my long-term memory, things to the effect of “the kind of guy who religiously maintains a steady diet of whiskey and cigarettes” and “since we consider him as good as dead already.” The guy who this party was for, the walking dead man, I had met before (somewhat glancingly) on several occasions. His name was Nicholas Ward.
I texted Max in reply, saying “don’t tell me it’s Ward’s funeral.” Max wrote back “it is exactly that.” In short, this group of friends that Max was mixed up in, of which I suppose I would consider myself a satellite member, had been revisiting this bizarre and darkly humorous celebration of testosterone-charged depravity for five years and were, this very weekend, holding the sixth installment, to which I had now been invited. There is even a name for the thing: “Quantummas.”
The name for the “holiday,” according to the lore of Quantummas, has something to do with someone’s magical credit card, of the Quantum Visa ilk, which had one time been swiped to pay for the entire horde’s revelry. I suppose it was “the swipe heard round the borough” to this band of merry men, for they named the holiday after the incident, tacking the suffix “mas” onto the name of the Excalibur-like credit card so that it might one day be confused with that other holiday containing the same final three letters.
Yes, over the course of six years, this group of self-appointed “dudes” had amassed, if not a formal body of holy texts, a kind of satirical, half-improvised oral tradition that was to be handled with the fervor of a high priest at the utterance of any of its component parts. I was filled with wonder and trepidation.
My audition on Friday was total bullshit. It was for an ultra low budget movie (yes, that is a technical industry term). They had brought me in for one part and then, when I started doing the scene with the absurdly blue-eyed reader, one of the seven humorless retards watching me from the table of judgment shouted “what’s going on!?” waving his hands around like an insistent Capuchin monkey. “We have you down on the list to read for [a completely different character than the one you’ve been working on for forty-eight hours]!” I said “this is the only material I got from my manager and the appointment info said I would be auditioning for [the character I’d been working on for forty-eight hours].” Another Capuchin monkey, a female one, looked up from what she must have regarded as a stone tablet of infallibility and said “No. You’re on the list here to read for [that completely different character than the one you’ve been working on for forty-eight hours] and that’s the character that fits your profile.” Her delivery implied a kind of “duh!” at the end that I suppose was meant to inspire stirrings of greatness in me. So instead of reading for the part of the handsome geek, they were forcing me to read for the part of the handsome douche bag that the handsome geek suspects is cuckolding him. I was not gracious. I learned in Los Angeles that being gracious to the scum of the Earth who expect any actor to lick their jackboots, just because opportunities to act at all are so incredibly rare, is way overrated. I said “great!” without a micron of sincerity, went out to the waiting room, looked at the lines for the other part for a shade more than thirty seconds, came back into the audition room, took a proverbial crap on the new scene and left, wanting to enjoy myself in a very aggressive manner. I was not invited to the callbacks on Saturday.
I arrived at Max’s apartment with high expectations. The location of this year’s Quantummas was to be a Barbeque restaurant in Brooklyn, in the anxiously twitching hipster capitol of the Solar System, the neighborhood of Williamsburg. Following dinner, who knew what would happen after eating all that meat and downing all those beers and bourbons. Maybe we’d all join a band formed by art school dropouts and wake up backstage at the Grammys.
Nick Ward is now living in the illegally zoned basement apartment of Max’s building in Queens, so he accompanied us on the train to Williamsburg. Ward always was and still is a very cool guy. I guess people don’t engender holidays while they’re alive if they’re regarded as douche bags. Despite the macabre proclamations of his imminent demise, he actually strikes one as quite robust, at least nowadays. Perhaps it was the fourth Quantummas that really helped him turn a corner. He now walks among us like a normal man. He is not entirely unlike Jesus Christ. I mean, he’s got good taste, he likes to share and he came back from the dead.
A necessary accessory to any pilgrimage to the church of Quantummas is a large flask of whiskey, or two, to be shared among the pilgrims as they talk of all things Quantummas as they ride the train and walk the streets. On the train ride to Brooklyn, between sips of nectar, I learned that observers of Quantummas recognize certain departed infamous hellraisers as Prophets of Quantummas. Norman Mailer, the bawdy king of New Journalism, is among the prophets, his balls dipped and immortalized in Quantummas ink. Also in with the prophets is Sailor Jerry, the infamous tattoo artist from World War II Hawaii, who once slashed an unruly man in the chest with a knife and then sat the man down and sewed up the wound that he had made. The Patron Saint of Quantummas, who watches over the observers, is Oliver Reed, a deceased burly British film actor, perhaps more appreciated for his abilities as a drinker and a prankster and a terror to the management of countless public houses, than for his many fine performances on screen. An empty chair is always reserved for him at the Quantummas feast.
We arrived at the barbeque hall in Williamsburg a little after six (and it really was a “hall,” filled with long, crude, charming wooden picnic tables and sporting a ceiling as high as that of a Super Wal-Mart). Good acoustics. Waiting for us there was a table fifty feet long that had been composed of several other tables and sequestered by the Quantummas devotees. About twelve of these apostles were already there and greeted the most honored guest with a thunderous ovation and overlapping cheers of “Merry Quantummas!” as he arrived. I felt like a fucking anthropologist.
At this moment I looked around and saw that I was the only one not in a button down black shirt. Actually, everyone else looked way more formal than I. The thing is, most of my clothes are still in the trunk of my car, which is taking its sweet ass time getting shipped across the country. So, my all black ensemble had to be a black “Matt & Kim” band t-shirt, my H& M motorcycle style black windbreaker and then nice pants and nice shoes, black. A Quatnummas clown! On my way out the door from Lexington I had grabbed a hook-on bowtie that I had both been married in and worn while working catering gigs. I now pulled the bowtie from my pocket and fit it onto my neck. Someone saw it and exclaimed, “why that’s perfectly in the spirit of Quantummas!” I just said “well, I was feeling a little underdressed and I happened to have this thing on standby.”
I hadn’t eaten anything since an eleven o’clock eggwhite omelette at Juan’s apartment, but my belly was soon full of hors d’oeuvres (if by hors d’oeuvres you mean beer and whiskey). I had forgotten about the advent of food ages before the twelve platters of barbequed animal arrived at the banquet table.
Let’s face it; Quantummas is an act of theater, forced upon the other customers of the restaurant, their wives and children and their petrified grandparents. It is not a production intended to please those beyond the fourth wall. Instead it is performed for the performers, the participants. The unsuspecting audience surrounding the renegade stage can only whine to the members of the restaurant management team, who will nod sympathetically, but in the end, be unwilling to eject so much business, no matter how obnoxious those two hours may be. It is a session of group selfishness, a band of brothers delighting in their ability to make each other laugh uproariously and, at the same time, offend the shit out of everyone else unfortunate enough to be adjacent to their bubble.
The first part of the evening, the part involving the barbeque dinner, was full of speeches, stories and presentations of ridiculous gifts to the living dead father of Quantummas. He was presented with action figures, enormous novelty sunglasses, a fake beard, a Santa Claus hat and lord knows what else… Oh yeah! A Ziploc bag full of dog food. Each gift was preceded by a vociferous introduction of the gift’s purpose, be it to protect Nick from the demons of hell, help him see the light at the end of the tunnel to Hades or to help him trick his way around Cerberus, the three-headed Hell hound (i.e. the dog food). In addition to the gift-giving were stories of Nick’s antics: drunkenly making out with some random girl in the streets of London, rejecting the advances of a cute (female) bartender in New Jersey (just because he hated New Jersey that much), lending pants, in his Christ-like way, to a friend who had soiled his own with a legendary amount of vomit. The kind of stuff that could only be crafted into legend by the best of friends. You know, the kind of stuff that families looking for a wholesome barbeque dinner on a Saturday night really want their little children to hear.
One guy who was impressed with our decibel level approached the table and asked, “is this a bachelor party?” to which several of us replied, “no, it’s a funeral.” Someone else came to the table and asked “you guys having a funeral?” to which several of us replied, “yes,” of which the stranger asked, “who’s the dead guy?” to which we responded, “that guy, over there,” pointing to Nicholas Ward. “Oh,” said the man, wondering if he was dreaming, before walking out into the night with a disgusted look on his face.
Some of the Quantummas veterans started shouting “Quantummas virgins! Newcomers to Quantummas! A gift, or a story?” I had neither. I started to get creative. I looked in my wallet. The only thing in there that I could wrap any kind of hilarity around was a red piece of laminated paper with the words “University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Theater Department, Alumni lifetime pass.” This was the gift bestowed upon each of us graduates of the UMass Theater department upon our matriculation, a laminated piece of red paper, entitling the bearer to two complimentary tickets to any UMass undergraduate production, that would almost assuredly never be used by anyone. It drew late. Last call for gifts and stories. I was running out of time to make my offering. When there came a momentary lull I stood up and exclaimed “a gift!” To which they all responded “a gift! A gift! A virgin gift!” I had thought, before I rocketed out of my chair, that I knew how I was going to begin this presentation, but I just swayed there for a moment, marveling at what an interesting feeling it was to stand up. “They say…” I began, “that the soul lives on!” Cheers of “here here!” from the peanut gallery. “I say no!” Oh God, why did I say that! That’s not what I meant to say. They all think I’m an idiot. Cover it up with something, quickly! “I say it is the ego that lives on after a man has passed.” Alright, Dolph, interesting choice. Let’s see if you can make this not suck any worse. “And on the long journey the ego takes to the underworld, it shall grow hungry! And what can feed a man’s ego like observing the wasted efforts of the untalented!? And so, Nicholas Ward, as your journey to the everlasting pit of fire will no doubt take you through the bowels of Western Massachusetts, I present to thee, this University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Theater Department, Alumni lifetime pass, so that you may feed your astrally traveling ego!” I think I got away with it. They laughed and cheered. A few might have looked down their noses at the fact that I obviously pulled the gift out of my ass (slash wallet) in the spur of the moment, but I just wanted to be down with the cool kids. I couldn’t help my enthusiasm. That, and I love attention, as do the rest of them…Duh.
Perhaps the most, well, rousing, performance of the night was given us by a gentleman named Anthony, who had taken the famous “Saint Crispin’s Day” speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V and had substituted Quantummas-appropriate words and phrases strategically throughout the fifty lines of verse. My favorite part was towards the beginning, as the whole thing was shaping up. It went something like: (italics indicate words not chosen by William Shakespeare) “By Jove, I am not covetous for gold, nor care I who doth feed upon my cost, but if it be a sin to covet booze and meat, I am the most offending soul alive.” That was a crowd pleaser at our table, and I apologize, Anthony, if I am misremembering the exact wording of your hard work. There was much table thumping and huzzah-ing, every one of us had become both a Henry and a Falstaff for an evening. It was glorious.
At the heart of the speechifying was the origin myth of Quantummas (not actually a myth, because it is a true tale, but still something that I think Joseph Campbell would recognize as significant after a scotch or two). The tale was told by, none other than, Nicholas Ward himself. I don’t quite remember how it went. I was pretty shitfaced by that point. I won’t lie. I remember the punchline though. One of the founders of Quantummas, a gentleman who goes in these circles by the name “Uber,” had lost two hundred and sixty dollars and was in bad spirits. To diffuse the ill feelings, Max, who was present at the time, said, "Who cares? Three months from now no one will remember and Ward will be dead." That was the genesis of the idea of the comic intervention. His friends thought, “My God, Max is right. We need to do something to honor Ward while we still have the chance. What’s the most enjoyable way we can inspire Nick to take better care of himself?” The only possible answer was, of course, a living funeral. Well, Nick’s still around. Is it because of Quantummas? Was Nick always going to eventually grow up and achieve an adequate level of temperance on his own? Mere surmise.
Fittingly, at the first Quantummas, someone had brought a bunch of raw broccoli and presented it to Nick, requiring him to eat of it. For, you see, (and this was told me by several guests at the party) Nick was famous for ordering “beef and broccoli” from a Chinese restaurant, eating all the available beef and then straining the salty beef juice out of the cardboard container, pouring that juice over his rice, while damming back the scorned broccoli with his fork. For all his friends knew, no broccoli had ever seen the inside of Nicholas Ward. When we had arrived at the restaurant, the raw broccoli was waiting on the table for the guest of honor, as it has been every Quantummas since the very first. We all had a bite.
As we were gathering coats and scarves, preparing to leave the restaurant to terrorize the other bars in the neighborhood, I noticed that one of the waitresses had piled up a collection of our glassware. On the top of a stack of rocks glasses sat one that still had a solid ounce and a half of bourbon in it. I did not hesitate. I grabbed the damn thing. The waitress said apologetically, “Oh, you were still drinking that? Sorry.” I nodded, as that was all I was capable of. I looked down at the glass. In the whiskey floated a square-inch leaf of collard greens. I looked right. I looked left. I fished the leaf out of the whiskey with a finger, flicked it at the table and downed that warm shot of bourbon. “Without limits,” I thought. I couldn’t have done it without you, Nick Ward.
Out on the sidewalk, in the cold, I was feeling elated and revolted with myself. I saw that someone was carrying the raw broccoli in his hand as he left the restaurant. I said “my God, is anyone going to eat that?” He handed it to me and said that I was not allowed to use two hands to eat it. In other words, I could not snap off a sprig of the broccoli and place it gently in my mouth like some Nancy Boy would. With the solid steel resolve of Thor I somehow fit a whole head of that broccoli into my mouth and ripped it from its body like a young Ozzy Osbourne onstage with a live bat. The broccoli corpse fell from my hand onto the sidewalk and another fellow kicked it into the street, cackling like a cartoon hyena. It took me five minutes before I was able to swallow the entire supply of broccoli I had fit into my pie hole. The taste of broccoli remained with me for at least an hour more and magically enabled me to drink at least five more beers.
While not “a blur,” the rest of the night was very blurry. Max tackled me unexpectedly in a snowfield and was nearly successful in keeping me pinned to the ground even though I am substantially larger than he is. Feisty motherfucker. Ward was beaten half to death with snowballs and loved every minute of it. Max and I left for Queens when we could no longer pronounce our own last names. We fell asleep on the train ride back. Max let me know we’d come to our stop by crashing his unconscious head into my shoulder as I dozed next to him. How he knew to do that in his sleep I’ll never know.
An accomplice to this event, and an obvious “catch,” Max’s wife, Prentiss, had laid out two giant bottles of Powerade and a medium-sized bottle of extra-strength Advil by the door of the apartment. We gushed over this considerate gesture with appreciative, primordial noises.
Needless to say, the next day’s Superbowl was, while a delightful evening spent in the company of good junk food and even better friends, a return to ordinary life. Not an unwelcome change of gears, but still, in my head, I was already thinking about next year’s Quantummas.
The audition for the NBC pilot went smashingly. It was one of the best auditions I’ve ever had. But who cares? They’ll end up casting someone famous.
My secret hope, as I write this, is that a countless number of us out there are also yearning as badly as I have been for this kind of self-composed ritual and tradition, this celebration of identity that must be earned through dynamic friendship. My daydream is that if this account I’ve pumped out ever does get published anywhere, not only will no reasonably affordable banquet hall be big enough to hold the number of Quantummas devotees attending the festivities a year from now, but that other holidays that speak to and are spoken by the new and emerging generations will pop up everywhere, like wild wild stalks of broccoli. I’m so happy to be back on the Right Coast.
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