The Hobbit
It is June of 2004 in Topeka, Kansas. Peter Jackson’s The Two Towers has not yet hit theaters. Depictions of the creature Gollum in popular culture are scarce. This is what it’s like to be one of them.
You are a fifteen-year-old girl. Your dad picks you up from basketball camp on his lunch hour. On the way to the theater, you listen to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Woodstock.” He turns it up to a volume over which it is impossible to speak.
“Dad!” you yell. “Dad.”
He looks over as the car comes to a rolling stop at Huntoon and Oakley.
“Did you know that Graham Nash stole this song from Joni Mitchell?”
“Who says that?” asks your dad.
“Dan.”
“That’s not true,” your dad yells. But it is true.
He tells you to be done in time for basketball practice.
You enter the theater wearing a cotton T-shirt that reads “Topeka Vipers” and silky pants with snaps on the sides that can be easily ripped off. You attempt to get a drink from the fountain in the lobby and a strong spray of water hits you in the face.
You wipe yourself as you enter the black box, which is what they call the performance area. It is an air-conditioned, dark, cubed place that is completely empty except for twenty or thirty kids your age wearing makeup, scattered in pale clumps, adopting all sorts of poses. You are reminded of a Precious Moments display case.
No one told you that you were supposed to bring a song to sing along to the piano.
The accompanist is an enormous blonde woman wearing African robes who asks you to call her “Hink.”
“Hink,” you say, “I didn’t know I was supposed to bring a song.”
This was not what you had imagined. The only music in The Hobbit happened when the dwarves arrived at Bilbo’s house, drinking, for the Unexpected Party.
“This is a musical version, Lora,” Hink replies. “Sing Happy Birthday!”
You sing, “Happy Birthday, dear Hi-ink,” and wait for your turn to read.
You read for Bilbo first. You couldn’t decide whether or not to do a British accent so you hover between them; a good choice, but next they make you read for the dragon Smaug. You speak in your best burnt, raspy tone.
The directors begin muttering out of the side of their mouths to each other.
“Thank you,” they say. “You can sit down.”
They resume muttering and shuffling papers. You enter the sitting area of the black box and find a spot next to a Precious Moment, a round-faced girl with braces and a girl of mixed race who wears a pink hoodie, huddling near each other.
“I can’t believe Patton is here,” the Pink Hoodie says.
“You guys have such a weird history,” Braces replies.
You look at “Patton,” who is brushing long hair out of his face and making hand gestures as he reads. You pretend to go to the bathroom to get a closer look at him. It is true, he must have had a history with girls who wear pink hoodies. He has large blue eyes and lips like a woman. You go back to the black box after you have washed your armpits with paper towels and hand soap.
“Hey, they were looking for you,” someone calls to you.
“Lora,” says a lady who had smoked many cigarettes. “We want you to read for the part of Gollum. Dan will take you outside, tell you a little bit about what we’re looking for.”
You go outside and wait under a maroon awning.
“Hey. Hi there, Lara.”
“Hey, Dan.”
“Let’s go, uh, let’s go sit over there.”
The two of you move into the sun, on a bench. He opens his notebook.
“I’m glad you’re trying out.”
“Yeah, I probably won’t make it, but it’s fun.”
“Okay, so… we’re looking for you to use your body as much as possible. We haven’t seen that from you a lot yet, but, you know, I’m sure you can do it. Gollum, as you probably — well, whatever — is a creature…”
Dan is seventeen. You and Dan had stopped watching Woody Allen movies and holding hands in his basement a few months earlier, which happened, coincidentally, a week after you broke out into stress-induced shingles from your first year at Catholic high school. It was just a coincidence, you tell yourself. Bad timing.
The break-up was an email. To the message, Dan attached a short story of his version of the creation of the Earth, as well as an invitation to try out for The Hobbit because he remembered that you had been in plays when you were younger and he knew how much you liked the series.
“You got it?” he asks.
“Yeah, sounds good.”
“Don’t be scared.”
“I won’t.”
He walks like a maniac back inside. Fucking maniac. You met him shortly after he dyed his black hair as red in order to model himself off of Woody Allen. It has since grown out, but he still has the horn-rimmed glasses. Your shingles have cleared up, too.
You watch the auditions. Everyone inside is a crazy person and you feel you must fit in. You think about the other portrayals of Gollum. Too reserved, not evil enough, voices too much like a human being.
So they liked the dragon voice, you think. You like the dragon voice, huh? you telepathically communicate to Dan as he sits chewing a pen across the room, crossing his bone legs in corduroy pants too warm for the weather.
Your name is called.
You read over the scene with Bilbo, played by a Jewish homebody with a pageboy haircut and enormous breasts. You ask to borrow a prop for the One Ring to Rule Them All. Someone hands you their pinky ring. You nail the Gollum audition.
The Precious Moments gather around you with congratulations. Pink Hoodie and Braces are cast as Balin and Dwalin. Patton is also a dwarf, and by some incredible fortune, the audition has attracted three friendly, large men to be trolls.
You burst into your house clamoring for the Precious. Your dad asks from the couch if you will still be attending Washburn University basketball camp.
When you say no he does that thing where he sighs out of his nostrils.
Your mother drives you to the 24-hour Walmart to buy items for your sack lunch.
Lunch is on “the terrace” after mornings of “blocking” in the parking lot. You make sure to wear small shirts to make yourself known as a sexual object, but soon find they don’t cover the underwear bands that stick out of your jean shorts. You are grateful Dan is always in front of you, directing, and never has to see the pink and purple cotton bunches being shoved down like naughty children.
One of the Precious Moments is named Whitney. You sat across from her every day at lunch after you showed up wearing the same yellow Old Navy Fourth of July shirt as she did. “Twins!” she had said, and now she tells you all of her secrets. She and Patton begin to go on dates.
Hink, along with being the musical director, is the also the dance mistress. She has you practice being the creature Gollum on a large boulder made of wire and cardboard. When you get on it for the first time standing straight up, Hink notices your bruised ankles.
“They are both kind of sprained right now,” you explain. “From basketball.”
“But it doesn’t hurt?”
“I’m used to it,” you say.
Every time you leap off the rock, Hink makes a noise like you are going to fall and die, but you never do. Even when your choreography involves multiple chicken wire rocks, you never fall. Using the thighs you have coaxed year after year into muscular hams, you leap from rock, to rock, to floor. You feel like a giant flying squirrel. When you land, ham hocks bent like a frog, you contort your face and hiss.
You feel sexual.
When the music stops, however, this feeling leaves you. Your feet feel big again. Sweat runs from your bangs and ponytail like it wants to get away. Your underwear is halfway up your back because your mother will not allow you to buy small panties. And you will not force the issue. Secretly, you are afraid of what they might reveal.
When you go home, you see Dan has copied and pasted a funny conversation with a girl named Reed Underhill into the “Info” section of his AIM profile. Reed is a dancer. She is short and sleek. Even before Dan copied and pasted the conversation, which admittedly was very witty, you had watched her do a dance routine from the bleachers when your Catholic high school played hers in basketball. You were particularly struck by her backwards roll into a split. I could do that, you had muttered to a teammate. She had laughed.
One day, after a long session of leaping around the set built inside, you rest on one of your rocks, sunning yourself under the stage lights.
Whitney comes over and tells you that Dan was totally staring at you while you were doing Gollum moves today.
“No way,” you counter.
“He was.”
You tell her it was probably only because you were in what they call a “dance sack.” Your costume, designed by Hink, is a stretchy, peach flesh-colored bag with a tiny mesh opening through which you can barely see.
Lately, you’ve been hopping around in what could be mistaken for a spandex burka.
“Oh, but he was staring even before you got in the dance sack,” Whitney reassures you.
You gauge his interest later that week during “character development.”
“What you gotta do is, you know, think about where Gollum is coming from,” Dan says to you on the same bench, wringing his hands with neuroses that don’t exist. “Where geographically and what he wants, why does he want it, etc.”
“Right,” you say and look at him. “Thank you.”
Behind his glasses Dan has the intelligent, sad eyes of a bored dog. Once, he brought over Hannah and Her Sisters to watch on VHS in your living room. Your dad wandered in and said, “I remember this movie.” You fell asleep while they just sat there, Dan next to you the couch and your dad in an armchair, watching Mia Farrow and Woody Allen walk places and talk. Your feet and the outer edges of your hands were touching him the whole time, even when you were asleep.
Dan clears his throat. “You can use my notebook paper to write stuff down.”
“I can?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Gollum,” you say while twirling your hair and writing. “He wants the ring…”
“Lora,” the woman with a cigarette voice comes outside, interrupting. She wears a shirt that says, “And Tigger, too!”
“We’ve decided you look like a blob in that dance sack, and we can’t see your face. We’ve got a new costume for you. Hink wants you to try it on.”
“Be right back,” you tell Dan.
The new costume is a unitard. It is spray-painted purple and green with glitter strewn through blobs of glue. Sewn to it are bits of fake seaweed. During performances, you learn, you will also wear the veiled hood and gloves of a “Death” Halloween costume.
You enter the bathroom and assemble the components of the costume on your body. When you emerge, you leave a trail of sparkle and plastic leaves on the carpeted floor. Your sprint-sheened buttocks takes a shape you know as the shape of an ass, not a buttocks, and from under the curve of the unitard’s neck, the realization of breasts. Your face remains hidden behind Death’s mask. In the mirror, you are unrecognizable to yourself.
It is the most beautiful thing you have ever worn.
When you stand for evaluation in the center of the lobby, Dan enters and strolls right past you, his head down, hands in his pockets. You wonder if he practices walking like Woody Allen at home.
“Dan!” the cigarette woman calls. “What do you think?”
He stops. Turns. Your eyes meet his, and then they travel where glittered hills and valleys have grown. You have a strange, neon thought that you almost blurt, which is that you wish you could be in this production of The Hobbit forever.
He clears his throat, and nods, looking at you. “Yep. Yeah.”
Your solo, which has a square dance melody, has to sound creepy and menacing, so it is more like a musical hiss. In fact, those are the lyrics. It goes, “Fiddle, diddle, Gollum hissss / Riddle, riddle, riddle me this.” Then you sing Bilbo a riddle, and she sings you the answer. Over the course of the song, you lose the Precious and get to lament for a good minute, using your rock as an outlet for your distress.
On opening night, you cause a child in the front row to cry.
The second night you and Whitney are in a fight because as you are waiting to go on backstage, bent like the emaciated and cursed creature you are, Patton looks over at one of the trolls and pretends to grab your ass.
I can’t help it, you telepathically communicate to Whitney as she consults with Braces in the corner of the dressing room, arms folded over her belted burlap sack. This is beyond my control, now, you think. You run your hand down your stomach with an absent mind, letting the hardened glue tickle your palm. Secretly, you like the power of being Gollum. It becomes you.
Your parents come on the third and final night, and you sing your heart out.
After the show your dad sings your song back to you. Then when he sees the expression on your face, he says, “No, no, you were good. Really.”
When they leave, the cast gathers in the dressing room for notes. The dragon Smaug bites his nails next to his paper-mache head. Dwarves do small versions of their choreographed dances together. Bilbo massages Gandalf’s neck. They all drape over one another in the strange, casual combinations that come about when people are in a production together, but will never happen again outside of the theater building. Like camp, or jail.
The woman with the cigarette voice, Dan, and Hink enter. “Bravo!” they say. “Bravo!”
You feel moisture or some form of coldness under the spandex of the unitard, sticking it to your skin. Across the room, Dan is perhaps looking at you, or perhaps looking off into space. You had removed your Death hood earlier to talk to your parents, but now you put it back on.
After notes, most of the cast has now changed out of their costumes back into their special occasion Aeropostale shirts. You remain, your feet still bare. People think it’s funny you haven’t taken off the unitard. You let them think that. You perch on a stool over their game of Trivial Pursuit, saying the answers quietly as you tuck your fingers under your thighs.
Root beer is poured. You have no desire for root beer. You drift among the crowds a shadow, your hood beginning to make the air smell like something plastic that shouldn’t be a near a nose or mouth.
“Hey, you.” A voice behind you. “We, uh. We need to put your costume back in the warehouse.”
It is Dan. You turn to face him.
You wonder if he remembers the first night the two of you AIM-ed until three in the morning. His screen name is PaperbackWriter. Yours is lara3406. 34, your basketball number, and 06, the year you will graduate high school. You told him that you and your dad would sit around for hours, listening to The Beatles Anthology, and that your favorite books are The Lord of the Rings and Catch-22. You told him that you had just recently stopped believing in God.
PaperbackWriter: I’ve never met anyone like you.
lara3406: I’ve never met anyone like you, either.
Dan moves closer, smiling. “Are you going to take it off?” This is probably the closest he has ever stood to you for a long period of time, even closer than that time the two of you waited for a table at Chili’s.
“I guess,” you say, muffled by the fabric.
“What was that?”
But if you take off the Gollum costume, it will all be over. You will no longer be Gollum in relation to Dan, or anyone in relation to Dan, for that matter. You will have to come back out of the mountain, away from the rocks, wearing your own clothes. You are fifteen and you have not yet thought of the possibility that people could want you when you are wearing your own clothes. You are fifteen and you were lamenting the loss of the Ring, but then it came back to you every night, and now it won’t. You are fifteen and you have not yet discovered the possibility that things cannot last forever.
So you tell him, “Give me a minute,” and you back away.
And then you do it. You find a corner behind a curtain, and you sit a second before Gollum goes away. You sit there behind the criss-crossed fabric in the dark, listening to the laughter, and you take a minute longer.
