Randy knew how to make the show huge. He needed Kyle.
Kyle Norris was an actore.
No, that’s not a typo—you absolutely need the “e” at the end to get the full effect. He was a serious actore. He took classes outside of school. His teacher probably preferred to be called a “coach.” He wanted to be a star. But you couldn’t be a star when the only TV series shooting in the city was about chasing lost logs. If you were serious, you had to move to LA.
This was years before every kid in every high school everywhere had headshots and resumés and a self-proclaimed agent promising to score them a shot at appearing on whatever TV series or movie-of-the-week was filming in their town that month.
Kyle looked like the kind of kid I usually walked across the street to avoid. He dressed in the uniform Brando defined as trouble—and timeless cool—back in the fifties: jeans, a tight white T-shirt and a black leather jacket. But Kyle had a brain. He tried not to use it in public—that would have destroyed his image—but he read more sophisticated books on his own time than any of the assigned reading he ignored. And his big brother had turned him on to blues and jazz and types of rock that most teenagers would barely recognize as music.
He also had a girlfriend he’d been with forever—or at least forever in high school years. Kyle was with Wendy, the hottest girl in grade eleven. So maybe he wasn’t trying to have sex with anybody besides Wendy, but he always seemed determined to make sure every girl he met was at least considering the option.
Kyle was supposed to be my secret weapon for my grade twelve writing and directing class. He was going to guarantee me an A.
I knew Kyle’s secret. I knew he was in love with theatre because I read the newspapers and I’d seen his name in the review of an angsty musical drama about tough New York kids showing their sensitive side—a sort of high school Chorus Line. Kyle got rave reviews, but he didn’t tell anybody at school about the show until it was over, to make sure nobody he knew saw it. Kyle got rave reviews because he cried—and there was no way he was going to let anyone from our high school see him cry. If they did, he’d have to kill them.
We weren’t friends, since hanging out with me publicly would have been social suicide for him—but we’d gotten to know each other in grade eight when I’d traded essays for his best friend Danny’s early attempts at shop projects like birdhouses and coat hangers. It was a brilliant deal for both of us. Danny passed English and I avoided the humiliation of failing all my mandatory tech classes.
When I told Kyle I was writing a play with a part for him, he said if he liked the script he’d do it. I acted, too, but I only acted in school plays—and I always had fun—but it was the writing that appealed to me. Since I went to a school with a “progressive” English department, which meant we had a lot of American draft dodgers teaching whatever they thought was cool, there was a grade twelve course in “playwriting and directing.”
Mike Denos, a balding thirty-something draft dodger with a Bay Area California drawl, taught the course like it was a university work-study program. He’d give us our assignments then send us away. Other than making sure we checked in for attendance, all he wanted from us were three original scripts before the end of the year. We also had to direct three scenes and a one-act play. If I could have skipped everything in school and graduated with honours, I’d still have shown up for that class. I was the first and only kid in the history of our high school, possibly any high school ever, who took extra English classes as my “fun” electives.
I didn’t want to direct. I just figured if you wrote your own plays you had to. Directors were for Shakespeare and Shaw and Tennessee Williams—or at least for writers who were over seventeen.
Mr. Denos picked one of my scripts to compete in the provincial high school drama showcase. The play was called Mistaken Identity. A few years later, when I was accepted into the Creative Writing program at the University of British Columbia, I discovered that every student writer in history had written at least one story, play or poem entitled Mistaken Identity.
My play was about two perfect women who were both smitten with an arrogant, self-obsessed guy with no obviously redeeming features. I’ve since learned that every straight male playwright has written this script at some point in their lives—often, tragically, in their forties—and I think only Woody Allen has ever made the story work. The only thing I’m proud of about mine is that I got it out of my system at seventeen.
The lead character was supposed to be played by Kyle, who was the type of guy two women would fight over, even without a particularly good explanation. I imaginatively named the lead character “Kyle.” But after I finished the play, after Kyle said, “Not bad, I’ll do it,” he changed his mind. We were about to start rehearsals when Kyle told me he’d been cast in a play outside of school, so he wouldn’t have time for mine.
After I lost my lead, Mr. Denos said I could cast any guy in my class, which meant I could choose from three potential leading men: Jackson, a 250-pound rugby monster who took the course in the hopes of an easy pass; Graham, a dope dealer who’d spent the last two semesters in and out of a detention centre and took the class in the hopes of an easy pass; and me. A decade later, I might have made the daring choice to cast a woman and turn it into a hot lesbian triangle. But this was 1980—cable TV didn’t exist, and the Internet was barely a gleam in Al Gore’s eye, so I’d never heard of lesbians, hot or otherwise. I cast myself.
This created an even bigger problem, because while I felt totally comfortable directing either of the girls to passionately kiss Kyle, directing them to kiss me felt, well, creepy. My two perfect women were twins—my friends Hannah and Heather—and while the idea of making out with either of them was certainly appealing, the idea of telling them when and how to kiss me … I couldn’t do it. So my tale of steamy romance lost all steam when Kyle bailed. The only kiss I left in the script was a peck on the cheek from Heather at the end of the play right after her character told mine, “It’s all over.”
When we appeared at the drama festival, the adjudicator—a professional actress who looked like the Wicked Witch of the West’s baby sister—pronounced my performance “dreadful.”
“You don’t enunciate,” she decreed. “You’ll never be an actore,” she said, complete with the faux British theatre accent perfected by so many Canadian actors of the era. She praised Hannah and Heather, said the blocking was, “very strong,” then dismissed us with a backhanded wave. I couldn’t be consoled, not even by Heather’s lovely hug.
“She didn’t mention the writing,” I said. “Not one word about the writing.”
It wasn’t until that afternoon at the JCC that I’d discovered that instead of making out with Heather and Hannah in Mistaken Identity, Kyle had decided to star in The Black Metal Fantasy.
4
Free Magic Secrets Revealed
If you don’t speak comic book, please bear with me a moment as I introduce you to the inhabitants of Medemptia, the mythical, mystical dimension that was about to take control of my life.
Oryon (alias Randy) was Medemptia’s reigning good sorcerer and cosmic protector. Imagine a young Gandalf with feathered hair.
The evil Santar, (aka Kyle), wore a black cape and a gold plastic Viking helmet and ruled a nameless nearby hell dimension.
Gamatria (Lisa, of course) was a supposedly ordinary villager with an important but unspecified destiny. The italics are necessary here, and if you’d like to imagine the word being spoken by James Earl Jones—ideally with a lot of reverb—that’s even better. But poor Gamatria’s destiny was preempted when she was kidnapped by Santar and brought to his demonic dimension to train as his evil disciple … unless that really was her destiny. Like I said, it was unspecified.
While Lisa’s costume might have looked inconspicuous in a post-Madonna world of belly shirts, thong underwear and low-rise jeans, it exposed more skin than