Yes, My Accent Is Real Page 11

  “You good?” Caleb asked before we got onstage, and by “stage” I mean a little nook by the dessert display.

  Hell yeah I’m good. Less than two years ago I was a nervous freshman who couldn’t make friends or cook ramen noodles, and now I was about to serenade a roomful of groupies. I felt alive. To this day thinking of that moment gives me goose bumps. Too often we focus on the greater schemes in life, like making money, or getting promoted at work, or starting a new relationship—and yes, of course, those things matter—but sometimes it’s the tiny, gradual, stepping-stone victories that bring real joy and signify the positive changes in our life.

  We did a forty-minute set. I closed my eyes and just sang and sang and sang. There in the tiny Java Bean, I swear I could have died and all would have been all right. It was my Coachella. It was my Woodstock. We finished to thunderous applause. . . .

  “ENCORE! ENCORE! ENCORE!” the crowd chanted.

  Oh, you shouldn’t have.

  (And they sort of didn’t. Caleb and I had asked a friend to start the encore chant.)

  “No, no, no, we couldn’t!” I said to the crowd.

  “Good night, everyone!” said Caleb.

  We were playing it to perfection.

  “ENCORE! ENCORE! ENCORE!”

  Caleb and I looked at each other—made a show of reluctantly picking up our guitars, and then jumped right back in. If the fans insist . . . The crowd sang along as we began—

  She’s mine

  She’s mine

  She’s miiiine

  After the success at Java Bean, we decided it was time to take it to the next level. Our heads were buzzing with excitement.

  “We should record an album,” I told Caleb.

  “A real album?”

  “An EP.”

  “Absolutely! I’m not sure what that is, but I’m in.”

  We found a guy to help us with the recording equipment, penned some new songs, and bunkered ourselves in a studio. By “guy” I mean my Hawaiian friend Cam, whose father was a famous ukulele player; Cam would record tunes for his father and send them to Hawaii. And by “studio” I mean his dorm room. Caleb sat on the top bunk, me on the bottom, Cam at his desk, and we laid down some tracks.

  Afterward I played the first song back: Ugh. That’s what my voice sounds like? I had never really heard myself sing, and I was bitterly disappointed. (I got over it quickly, though; Auto-Tune really is a wonderful thing.) And after nine hours in the recording studio, in a quiet room, in a not-so-quiet dorm, without the instant validation of applause, we stumbled onto a key lesson about making music: it is disgustingly hard work.

  Finally, we slapped together a three-track demo and burned thirty copies onto discs. The plan was to play at venues and then sell the CDs at the show, which was the surefire path to gaining popularity and eventually a record deal.

  But where would we play? How did we book concerts? Our only “venue” was the Java Bean, and while they did pay us in the form of free coffee and milk shakes, we realized we needed to step it up a notch.

  We called bars all over Portland. For two months we weren’t getting much response when finally, out of the blue, someone agreed to let us play: a dive bar called Sandy’s in the suburbs of Beaverton, Oregon.

  As we began printing out flyers for our first professional gig, it dawned on us that our entire “fan base” consisted of theater students who weren’t even twenty-one yet; in fact, only three of the seniors could even get into the bar. We loaded up a van with our equipment and drove to Beaverton. We saw Sandy’s at the end of a long dusty road. The parking lot was full of motorcycles and a few big trucks. My stomach began to churn.

  We opened the door. The room smelled like piss and cigarettes and was filled with truckers and Hell’s Angels.

  “This is a bad idea,” Caleb said.

  Agreed. Nothing about that room said, You know what? I’m in the mood for some emotional acoustic love songs!

  A woman of indeterminate age in a tight skirt skittered out from a dark corner and approached us. She looked like the slug boss monster from Monsters, Inc., with skin that was shiny and vaguely green. An unlit cigarette dangled from her mouth. I had the vague sense that she carried a 9 mm pistol in her skirt. This was Sandy.

  “Are you boys the Prince and the Pauper?” she asked in a voice that sounded like lung cancer.

  We nodded meekly. Oh God. How do we get out of here?

  “Are you going to get up and play?” Sandy asked.

  Like prisoners lining up against the wall for a firing squad, we glumly set up our equipment on the small stage. The bar was dark and musty and the carpet looked like a giant Scottish kilt. Our three loyal friends from school sat in the front row, which was also the only row of seats; the other dozen truckers and bikers sat at the bar, with their backs to us.

  “Hey, everybody,” Sandy said, pausing only to cough up a lung, “this is the Prince and the Pauper. Put your hands together and enjoy.”

  No applause. No one turned around. A few halfhearted claps from our friends, who were fearing for their lives.

  “A one, a two, a one two three . . .” and I began our first number:

  So I’m lonely again.

  So I’m looooonnnnnnneely again.

  Kill me. Mostly I kept my eyes on the floor, peeking up to see that none of the truckers had turned around. They completely blocked us out, as if we were that annoying sound of a dying mosquito, or they were all deaf from riding motorcycles all day. Sandy stood in the corner, staring at us, an unblinking statue, smoking her life away.

  “Dude, let’s just play one more song,” I said to Caleb.

  She’s mine she’s mine she’s mine

  We got some applause from our three friends and no one else.

  “Thanks, guys, for listening,” I said into the mic. “It’s been a great night.”

  I began to unplug the guitar.

  “You said an hour!” called out Sandy from the back of the bar.

  “Ah, I think maybe—”

  “Play more. Play more stuff.”

  Shit. Either these guys are going to shoot us because they hate our music, or she’s going to shoot us for not finishing our set. With the fear of death in our eyes, we staggered through another few songs, quickly packed up, and limped our way out of the bar.

  Sandy walked out to our van behind us, creeping slowly on our heels. What does she want?

  “You did a good job up there,” she said, cracking a warm but toothless smile. “You have potential. But if you guys want to play here again, you need to practice more.”

  What the hell? She’s giving us notes?

  After escaping with our lives, we decided that would be our final outside gig. No more leaving the bubble of college. We played again at the Java Bean, and of course we jammed at all our after parties, but soon we realized that maybe, just maybe, we should focus on something that better suited our skill set, like, say, acting. And we realized something about our groupie friends. They weren’t actual groupies. All of them came out to support our band’s first show, and 80 percent of them came out to support our second show, then maybe 50 percent came to our third, and after that, we were on our own.

  But who knows. Maybe someday Caleb and I will get the band back together. Only a few days ago he sent me an old recording he found of us. And you know what? It wasn’t half as bad as I thought.

  After hearing the recording, I picked up my guitar and started strumming. I thought—

  Maybe Portland just wasn’t ready for the Prince and the Pauper.

  Are you?

  SO I’M LONELY AGAIN

  A song by the Prince and the Pauper. Key “E.” 4/4.

  So I’m lonely again

  So I’m lonely again

  Walking back from your house Sunday

  Couldn’t help but see

  That your eyes reflected of last night

  And the passion between you and me

  I note I was barely breathing

 
; Did you feel the same

  If you did are we heading for something

  These trustful eyes have never seen

  So, I, so I’m lonely again

  So I’m lonely again

  I heard that games weren’t your forte

  Then why am I made of glass

  All my friends lie when they tell me

  You lose

  You looooose

  Between night and day

  Our differences lay

  Between night and day

  Our differences lay

  How I Knew

  CABARET WOULD BE MY BREAKTHROUGH. I could sense that my time had come. As a sophomore, I had been around the theater group long enough to make some pretty good friends, and when the prior year’s seniors graduated, naturally I was that much higher on the pecking order. And I could sing! (Or so I thought.) Cabaret is a musical, and I had been training for this role since birth.

  When I was growing up, we would spend our summers in a charming little town at the foothills of the Himalayas. And every summer the community hosted these kiddie talent competitions for all the visiting families. When I was eight, I entered my first competition and lip-synched Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” which I accompanied with my version of a break dance. Which basically meant intensely shaking my body from head to toe, almost like a convulsion. My mother gave me some performance advice: Don’t forget to acknowledge the crowd after you’re done, Kunal. I didn’t really know what that meant, but after I finished the song I strutted away from the crowd, slowly, then turned my head back to them, and gave them a salute. The crowd went nuts and I won second place. (First place went to this creepy kid who made balloon animals. He made me a balloon duck to commemorate our friendship.)

  After the talent show, music became a big part of my life. My dad had a dusty old guitar in storage and I found it, cleaned it up, and decided to make it my best friend. I bought a pictorial guide to chords and basically taught myself how to play the guitar. The first song I learned was Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn.” Next came Extreme’s “More than Words.” I even became obsessed with hip-hop, watching MTV and practicing the moves the artists did in their videos. At the time MTV had just come on cable and I would religiously watch the show The Grind, which was basically a big hip-hop pool party that would play music videos and then cut to real girls dancing by the pool in bikinis. At a young age I learned how to drop it like it was hot.

  You can say I had garnered some confidence in my voice and in my dancing, and after the Ring Around the Moon fiasco, I had enrolled in acting classes so my acting skills, too, were beginning to take shape. When I auditioned for the lead in Cabaret, the part of the emcee, I had a feeling that it could go my way. During the audition, they kept asking me to stay after most of the other actors left, and it basically came down to me and my roommate Ben.

  Ben had an absolutely beautiful voice, and he really looked the part. Cabaret is a musical set in 1930s Germany during the early days of the Nazi regime, and let’s just say there weren’t a lot of brown people running around Berlin in those days. So I comforted myself with the thought, Well, even if I don’t get the lead, I’ll still get to be in the chorus. After a long audition I went to sleep, exhausted and exhilarated.

  The next morning I raced over to the theater to look at the cast list. I searched for my name at the top, eager to see the sign that would boldly proclaim in thirty-point font:

  THE UNIVERSITY OF PORTLAND IS PROUD TO PRESENT A PRODUCTION OF CABARET, STARRING, AS THE EMCEE, KUNAL NAYYAR!!!!

  Then I looked at the actual sign . . . Ben Van Diepen cast as the emcee. I began to scroll down with my finger. I kept scrolling and scrolling until I reached the bottom of the list.

  “That’s odd,” I actually said out loud. I rescanned the list, searching for my name, and a swell began to form deep in my gut. I am not on the list. Anywhere. I don’t have the lead part. I’m not a supporting character. I’m not in the chorus. I’m not an extra. There were forty students in the theater program and this play had thirty-eight parts. I was one of only two actors who got nothing.

  I left the lobby in a huff. I wanted people to see me mad. I wished my middle finger was a machine gun so I could shoot fuck-yous at everyone there. Not even an extra. They didn’t even want to see my face onstage. My brown face. At first I thought I didn’t get cast because of my ethnicity. That was a defense mechanism I had created for myself—an easy way to explain failure when it didn’t make sense to me—but that’s a dangerous path to go down. We all do that to ourselves. Explain irrationally the rational. We make up stories in our heads instead of looking at the facts. We force persecution on ourselves when there is none. The truth is simple. I. Just. Wasn’t. Good. Enough.

  I was suddenly alone. Again. Thirty-eight of the forty theater students were cast in that play—spending all their evenings together, rehearsing, making new inside jokes. I was back to square one. When it was time for Cabaret’s opening night I decided to not even show up to watch. It was stupid and naïve, I know, but I was hurting, and I was behaving like a child. I did want to see it. I did want to support Ben and all my friends. So, I sucked it up and decided to attend closing night. But during the performance I couldn’t help but think, How am I not a part of this?

  Cut to: junior year. The summer is over. Wounds have healed. Time for a new semester and a new play. The play was The Rose Tattoo, by Tennessee Williams. I had my eye on the role of Alvaro Mangiacavallo, an Italian truck driver. And obviously I’m Italian-looking.I I memorized my lines and said them in the shower every morning. I read the play in its entirety twice, highlighting and scribbling notes, then wrote a long bio of the character. This was the first time as an actor that I was 100 percent prepared. And now, as a junior, I also had the benefit of additional acting classes. More important, though, I had a newfound appreciation of how hard I needed to work, and what it was really going to take to achieve my ultimate goal of getting the lead.

  I lived and breathed Alvaro and thought about him from every angle. Let’s take his physicality: He’s a truck driver, right? That probably means he’s sitting down a lot because he’s driving the damn truck all the time, so when he gets up from a chair, he might have just the slightest amount of back pain. It’s barely noticeable but it adds texture. (As compared to, say, my 117-year-old butler, who walked like Gandalf.) If this truck driver saw a beautiful woman, what would his first reaction be? Maybe his first instinct is to cower, which would result in his overcompensating with an even more inflated show of bravado. How would he drink his water? I obsessed over how he gripped a pen, how long he held eye contact, how he would take a leak. I’d never worked this hard for Cabaret or Ring Around the Moon or badminton or my band or for anything, really.

  “The part is yours,” the director told me right after the audition. There would be no waiting for the casting sheet. I was silently elated. For the first time in my life I thought, Hey, maybe there actually is a future in this whole acting thing.

  For the play I was supposed to have an Italian accent. But in real life, I actually have an Indian accent. And though I tried to master the Italian accent, onstage the two accents would sometimes blur, and I would go back and forth between Italian and Indian. But what I learned was that if you’re completely committed to the character, it doesn’t really matter if sometimes you botch an accent.II The audience isn’t thinking about what you look like or sound like. Truth is, if they can tell that you believe your character’s journey with every cell of your being, they’ll always be on your side.

  And thankfully, they were on my side. Opening night treated us to thunderous applause, then the same with the second performance, then the third, and it became apparent that we would likely get nominated for ACTF again. Then I heard some buzz that I, personally, could get an acting nomination for ACTF.

  Thursday night. Our fourth performance. Something happened during that performance that would change the course of my life. It would be the o
ne acting moment that ultimately led me to become the guy who’s writing this book. There’s a scene when my character, Alvaro, through various hijinks and follies, finds himself at a widow’s house, and he explains to her (in an Italian/Indian accent, of course) that he had never felt silk on his skin.

  The widow, Serafina, walks into the closet and pulls out a red shirt. She offers it to Alvaro.

  Serafina: Nothing’s too good for the man if the man is good.

  Alvaro: The grandson of a village idiot is not that good.

  Serafina: No matter whose grandson you are, put it on; you are welcome to wear it. [She gives him the shirt.]

  This had always been one of my favorite scenes, but that night, for some reason, something was different. It felt like there was no audience; that no one was watching. As if the only two people that mattered in that moment were Alvaro and Serafina. When she handed me that shirt and I slipped it over my head, it felt like my entire body was melting into the silk. Like the way you snuggle back into a blanket on a cold Monday morning. I felt something. I felt truth. The shirt wasn’t actually made of silk; it was a college play and budgets were small. But it could have been anything; in that moment it was silk, and I was wearing it for the very first time. As I sank into the shirt I released a sound from my mouth, like a silent s, a barely audible ssssssssssss. I had never made that sound in rehearsal or during the play. I don’t know where it came from. I made that sound and the entire audience—at least in my mind’s ears—all exhaled audibly, in unison. Just one collective deep breath.