Every night it takes Dallas Boyd at least two hours to become Richard Nixon, and after the performance it takes just as long to get cleaned up and find a taxi to drive him home. He has started spending nearly the whole afternoon before a show getting ready, and the people at the theater are used to it; they’ve let him bring in some furniture, a reclining chair, an old Oriental carpet, a poster of a bodhi tree just like the one under which the Buddha was enlightened, even a hot plate so he can brew his herb teas — whatever he needs, within reason, to make things a little more comfortable. He loves his dressing room. “I could live in a dressing room,” he has confided to the makeup artist named Gwen. He tells himself this is more than just a juicy part: it’s become Dallas Boyd’s defining moment, his crowning achievement. His entire life has shrunk around the role; he doesn’t have energy left over for anything else.
The play is called Nixon at Colonus, and he’s never liked the title. This play is more Mamet than Sophocles, and it hardly offers Tricky Dick anything like the apotheosis that he deserves, but Dallas loves the role all the same. The script is pretty hard on the president, but also sympathetic. Tough love. Whatever softness Dallas has been able to insert is purely around the edges. No ducking the truth here; no claims, as Nixon made, that his only problem was being too softhearted.
Dallas Boyd loves the author too, a sweetheart of a playwright named Lester Feltzer, who still shows up occasionally at performances. Feltzer is straight, but the kindest, gushiest heterosexual friend Dallas has ever known. At the end of the summer Les moved to Los Angeles to write for the movies, but things haven’t gone well for him on the coast, and so Les is already planning a return to New York. Whenever he visits the theater he brings tasty health foods that he dispenses to Dallas like a Jewish grandmother.
On the last visit, Dallas told Les that he felt he was finally starting to get deeper into the part. He’s been doing the play for more than fourteen months, but at last it feels like all the unyielding discipline and concentration are paying off. With Feltzer he never talks about his fears. Or that he has no idea how long he’s going to be able to continue. Even as he’s drawn himself in and focused all his energies, inner and outer, on the role, he can feel his life force fading. The ironies of this are rich: almost Nixonian. Forty-three years old, after twenty years of freak shows and supporting roles, he lands the perfect part, complete with terrific notices and interest from film-casting people; all this, and he doesn’t have the slightest idea how much longer he can stick it out. He knows for certain he will not be able to move on to some other role, so he has no choice but to settle deeper and deeper into the personality.
In his recent performances he feels like he has finally mastered the physical Dick Nixon. He never had to struggle to achieve the unmistakable clipped cadences that always seemed to be expressing just the wrong sentiment, and early on Gwen perfected the pasty makeup that made him forever appear in desperate need of a shave; but now he effortlessly takes on the slouching of the shoulders as the president thrusts yet another absurdly inappropriate victory sign into the air with both hands. Gwen needs well over an hour to do the hair and face, but he knows the resemblance wouldn’t add up to much if he didn’t inhabit that makeup with the bristling awkwardness of the man himself.
When he is in character, all the lighting technicians and stagehands call him “Mr. President.” It started out as a joke, but right away the star understood this helped him get deeper into the part. At one point, when he was struggling to improve his Nixon shuffle, he asked Vinnie, the chief stagehand, to do the same. At first Vinnie looked vaguely insulted, as though going along with such absurdity was not only not required by the union handbook but against all good sense.
“It helps me get in character,” the actor explained. “If you feel I am the president, I’ll feel that way too.”
Over time Vinnie has turned out to be Dallas’s best friend at the theater. Every week or two he brings in Italian food that his wife has cooked up, and Dallas, whether his appetite is strong or not, tries as best he can to eat it, even on those nights when the smell of meatballs nearly turns his stomach. And he always follows the meal with extravagant compliments to the chef and requests for more.
But Vinnie has been acting strangely tonight. Earlier Dallas noticed something was wrong with Gwen when she put on his face, but he didn’t press her for details. It is almost 6:30, and Gwen has long since finished her work and left Dallas alone, sitting in character, when Vinnie knocks on the door.
“Want some tea?” Dallas offers, as he always does. Vinnie shakes his head and stands there with an awkwardness that Dallas picks up on immediately.
“How are you today, Vin?”
“OK. How you feeling, Mr. President?”
“Terrific. Is something wrong, Vinnie?”
“You haven’t heard the news?”
“No. What news?”
“Gwen said she didn’t think you knew yet.”
The stagehand carefully unfolds the New York Post he is holding. For once Vinnie looks utterly abashed, like he’s doing something that has to be done but gives him no pleasure. The huge front-page headline announces that Richard Nixon is dead. The news overwhelms Dallas, surely more than it should. Nixon’s health has been shaky; he was in the hospital early in the week. But until this exact moment Dallas has never been willing to allow for the possibility of Nixon’s death, much less to explore its potential symbolic significance to him. And this is especially odd because he has so often contemplated his own death.
His eyes search the paper for details to hang on to. The time of death is listed as nine o’clock in the evening. Which means he was onstage even as the president died. It occurs to him fleetingly that the news might be good for box-office receipts, but then Dallas blushes deeply at the utter shallowness of that reaction. He thinks that everyone must have been shielding him all day, avoiding any mention of it with him, as though he were too fragile for the shock. Who knows: maybe they’re right. He lives in such a narrowly focused world that he didn’t even hear the news on his own.
Dallas realizes that he has been ignoring Vinnie, who has been standing in the dressing room, watching him the whole time.
“I just thought you should know,” Vinnie says.
“Of course, you were right. Thank you, Vinnie.” Their eyes meet. “I guess I’m living in a cocoon. Even news like this comes to me a day late.”
Alone, Dallas looks in the bright makeup mirror and asks himself what he is going to do. He considers medication but settles on a mere pair of aspirin, which he extracts from the forest of prescription bottles laid out on surfaces everywhere. Dallas carries a satchel packed with medications wherever he goes. He has become an expert at taking painkillers, and Dr. Reynolds has given him considerable latitude. There’s Vicodin and hydrocodone. When things get worse, there’s an open prescription for morphine, which he doesn’t imagine needing till much later on, but which is a reassuring presence even in prescription form. He feels like he’s been enormously lucky. He’s gone for monthly blood tests, and he keeps track of his T cells, but he’s resigned to the course of the disease. They tried AZT for almost six months, and he’s happy to be free of that drug’s ugly side effects. He keeps reducing the circle of his days, eliminating distractions of any sort. His performances are all that he can manage. And the round of performances never ends. On Mondays, when he finally has a day off, he lies in bed all day, dressed in a bathrobe and slippers no matter what the temperature outside. Lately he always feels a chill. Silk long underwear, the thick Irish-wool leg warmers, double layers of socks — nothing helps much.
He begins doing the now-familiar tonglen meditation, and it feels different after the news that the president has left the human realm. In tonglen, the meditator breathes in suffering and ignorance from the outside world, then breathes out whatever compassion and peace comes from within. The acceptance of another’s suffering used to scare Dallas when he started the practice a year ago, but now he feels almost comforted by it. His mind roams back over Nixon’s career, and for once he doesn’t fight his wandering thoughts, only tries to keep in bare touch with the rhythm of his breathing and the exchange: visualizing the dark light coming in, the white light going out. Slowly he feels himself steadying. It is simply indescribable doing this meditation for Dick Nixon. Some days he finds himself thinking about Cambodia and all the bombs that were dropped and the black karma coming so thick that it clouds out the sun until Dallas feels he can barely keep breathing. And then, just before he panics, he is letting go, all bliss and blue skies exhaling out to Nixon. It works counter to everything in the life of a struggling actor, the survival instinct, what’s supposed to make up our most basic nature. You’ve changed, friends have told him. He knew he had grown altogether more somber; he felt like he was wearing a jacket and tie all the time now. He was dying, and yet he was worrying about poor Dick Nixon.
He often wondered what the president would think about his performance, despite knowing beyond the slightest doubt that Nixon would never have subjected himself to such a play. For years Dallas has hated Nixon in that strange, superficial way that you can hate somebody who exists so far from your daily life. He knows the written record only too well. At home he has two shelves overflowing with Nixon books, and he keeps a few duplicates on hand in the dressing room but rarely needs them. The sight of himself made up as Nixon is inspiration enough. There’s so much colorful material: All the swear words that embarrassed Nixon so terribly after the tapes were made public, all the anti-Semitic jabs, the compulsive hate talk. How he ranted about all the Jews and liberals who were out to get him just because he wasn’t as charming or Ivy League–connected as Jack Kennedy. It only got worse after he left the White House. Nixon remained totally unrepentant. He claimed that he was too softhearted, even though one after another of his underlings and friends went to jail for him. In the media every few years there arose that periodic drone: Nixon is back, Nixon is back, every chorus of it more carefully orchestrated than the last.
But maybe now the real Richard Nixon, the spirit Nixon, will finally get the chance to watch Dallas’s performance. Watching a play must be entirely different for a consciousness that has left its body. Maybe in this latest, disincarnate form, Richard Nixon will be able to see past the prejudices and stubborn self-images that would have marred his appreciation in life. Maybe Nixon will feel Dallas’s performance for what it is: a life-and-death role, a veritable inhabitation of the dead man’s just-departed body.
Dallas has already journeyed through a lifetime of his own karma in the last few years. Jorgen went back to Stockholm as soon as he tested positive, and right then Dallas knew it was only a matter of time before he tested positive, too. A few months later he got the call to play Nell in drag in a wild musical parody of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and two years after that he was chosen to become Richard Nixon, but only after a pair of unpromising tryouts separated by almost a month. From transvestite glitter to the White House. By then Dallas was utterly alone with his diagnosis. Such isolation was just perfect for Nixon. It was the way Dallas first slipped into the part. Nixon was an expert at loneliness, and now Dallas Boyd was utterly alone with him.
Dallas doesn’t know how long he’s been sitting by himself when there’s a knock on the dressing-room door. He answers, “Come in,” and the door opens to reveal Les Feltzer.
“As soon as I heard the news, I thought of you,” Les says.
Dallas feels as if he might start crying. For the first time he feels like a part of himself has died tonight. He motions to the empty chair. “Sit with me for a few minutes.”
Dallas knows Lester understands, maybe Lester alone in the entire world. They had long talks about the role. “I understand why you’re acting even though you’re sick,” Lester said after the first week of previews. “We do what we do. I’m exactly the same. I’ll write until I can’t hold a pen. Then I’ll probably talk into a microphone and have it transcribed. We’re all terminal cases, and the lucky ones, like you and me, we know what we want — know what we have to do, right up till the bitter end.” That was months ago, and the stakes have only gotten higher in the interim.
“Want some tea, Lester?”
“Do you have something stronger?”
Suddenly Dallas is laughing at the obvious just-rightness of the idea of sharing a stiff drink. Of course. It has to be booze. He looks quickly around the dressing room. It is not often that he drinks anything much stronger than green tea, but he sees that he’s better stocked than he realized. He goes out and returns with a tiny pail of ice, courtesy of Vinnie’s refrigerator.
“I can manage martinis.”
“Just the thing.”
“I think I’ll join you too. One for the president, that bastard. A stiff one for the road.”
He pours quantities of gin and vermouth into the cups used for his tea rituals and mixes them carefully, even using the bamboo tea whisk; he’ll worry about cleaning that off later. Yes, just the thing. Both of them clink their cups as delicately as if they were drinking highballs at Sardi’s or 21.
“I’m glad you’re here tonight, Les. I hope you stay for the show.”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
“You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about Cambodia. I keep thinking about what he did, what we all did, how it’s all been forgotten.”
Les nods. He is listening with great care. He has spent the afternoon apartment hunting, planning his move back to New York, and he certainly didn’t expect this impromptu wake in honor of Richard Nixon. He watches Dallas sniff the martini, and then they both take deep drafts of their respective potions. Les is startled by the signs of physical deterioration that he sees now up close, behind his friend’s makeup. The actor looks haggard, appears to have aged even since the last time Les visited, barely a month ago. All of it only contributes to the character, no question. Because it’s not just the physical appearance.
“I’ve taken your play and turned it into a religion,” Dallas whispers, exaggerating only slightly. “I live and breathe and shit Richard Nixon. I dream his dreams.”
Lester leans forward but doesn’t answer. He senses that the actor, this particular terminal case, is a vehicle for something special tonight.
“Most people, if I told them I was playing Nixon right up until the day I died, you know what they’d say. They’d say I was crazy. Absolutely certifiable. Sometimes I think that, too.”
Lester says nothing, staying focused.
“But you know why I’m doing this?”
Lester admits he doesn’t have a clue.
“I’m teaching Nixon to forgive himself.” He empties his cup. “I’ve already forgiven myself. It’s all for Tricky Dick from here on out. Every night the soul of Richard Nixon is going to be hearing me, hearing all these prayers you wrote for him. And feeling the play too.”
Lester cannot speak now.
“The real Nixon’s with me tonight,” says Dallas. “I’ve been reaching out to him night after night.” He reaches up toward the ceiling of the dressing room. “And now he’s reaching back from wherever he’s journeying.”
“You feel him?”
He nods. “I felt him last night. I didn’t know it then, onstage, but now I know what it was. All that suffering. No wonder I didn’t want to see a newspaper. But now I’m going to be able to reach him so much easier. There’s nothing separating us anymore. We’re all suffering, but poor fucks like Dick Nixon and me, we’re just swimming in it.” Then, before Les can finish his martini or say no, Dallas has slipped a book in front of his friend and placed a copy of the same text on his own lap. The actor has a huge stack of meditations and prayers for the dying, but his favorite one is right on top.
“What’s this?” the playwright asks, not dreaming for a moment of offering any resistance.
“The Heart Sutra. It’s the shortest, most popular version of the prayer that Buddhists recite in monasteries and temples every day. Now, I’m going to read this slowly, and don’t worry if the words don’t exactly make sense. The important thing is the feeling. And imagine that Nixon’s in the room with us. Just meditate on the words as I say them.”
Lester is visibly moved — if nothing else, by the intensity with which Dallas is directing this improvised moment. Though Dallas knows that his Tibetan teacher wouldn’t agree with whatever extras he’s adding, how he’s turning a simple prayer recitation into something closer to a séance, he feels, as always, completely right about what he is doing for the dead president, and for himself. Already Dallas is certain that Nixon is with them, his soul present in the room. “In the void,” Dallas reads, “there are no forms, no feelings, perceptions, or consciousness.”
Lester is completely spooked by now, goose-flesh spooked. He cannot see anything, of course, but his body is registering that they’re not alone in the dressing room.
“No ignorance and also no ending of ignorance,” Dallas continues, “until we come to no old age and death and no ending of old age and death. Also, there is no truth of suffering, of the cause of suffering, of the cessation of suffering, nor of the Path. There is no wisdom, and there is no attainment whatsoever.”
Lester sees that the actor is going to die very soon: first Nixon, then Dallas Boyd. They sit in silence for a little while after the prayer is finished. They can hear backstage sounds, but they are listening to something else.
Then Vinnie is knocking on the door. “Ten minutes to curtain.”
Lester reaches out, squeezes Dallas’s hands, and tells him that he loves him.
“I love you, too,” Dallas answers.
The actor spends the last few minutes before curtain by himself. Already he feels exhausted. He looks in the mirror and doesn’t know how he will have the energy to perform for two hours. Outside, the theater seats are filling up. The electronic bell tone is signaling that the curtain is about to go up, though he can hear this only in his imagination.
He stands up. He is sure that it is not merely his own power carrying him forward any longer. He pauses once before opening the door, and again in the darkness outside the dressing room. Ahead the bright rim of stage lights awaits him. A few more steps and he can feel the audience in the darkness, all of them focused on his movements as he enters their view and sits down at the replica presidential desk. The dark theater has evaporated: he feels as though they’re sitting in a space as large as an airplane hangar, but a hangar so vast that you can’t even see the walls supporting it. Thousands of Cambodians are sitting in long aisles; the four dead students from Kent State are there; the actor’s parents and his grandparents, and poor Jorgen too. Even Pat Nixon has joined them outside, under the tree and the sky. There are saints, arhats, martyrs, bodhisattvas, but by far mostly simple people, as flawed as Dallas, as flawed as Richard Nixon, all of them merely seeking a glimpse of the truth. What do these souls say to each other in the endless space after their bodies are shed? Soon enough he will know. He looks up through the branches and sees the Milky Way twinkling clearly above. Then he looks down at the darkness that is his audience and begins speaking with a resonance that surprises him, loud enough that even the backmost rows can hear clearly.
“I am the president.”
This story previously appeared in the anthology Nixon under the Bodhi Tree and Other Works of Buddhist Fiction, edited by Kate Wheeler and published by Wisdom Publications, Boston, MA.
