And I’m in the dark. And I see Jules for the second time. And this time when I see her I can look all I want, with no one looking back at me. With no one seeing me.
Her first scene. Urban setting. Nice production design. It’s Jules in her old neighborhood. She’s on her way to work and she smokes crack with a local under the stairwell. They’ve used a stairwell in the theatre as part of the set. I have to crane my neck to see.
It’s dimly lit. Graffitti’d. There’s trash everywhere. They’ve imported a piece of a chain link fence. Broken-out tires. And Jules’s character lights up with this homeless guy. They talk. Then she goes to work.
Jules is all I see. She’s black, as I think I mentioned, which is I’m guessing part of why they chose her for this role. To make it seem more urban. But they could have been putting on Romeo and Juliet in the whitest of suburbs and they would have flown Jules’s ass in to play the lead because she’s that good.
It’s a simple scene. It’s a scene that takes you off-guard. Everything you think is going to happen, doesn’t happen. You think she’s coming outside to go to work. You don’t think she’s going to run into a crackhead coming off his high. You don’t think she’s going to get away from him safely, the way he’s acting. You never thought she already knows his name. Then..then..when she checks his pockets you don’t think she’s going to help him get high again—that she’s going to remind him to check his sock—that’s where he usually keeps it. That’s where he stashes some extra, early in the night, so he won’t smoke it all. So he’ll have some for later. She helps him hit it—he can’t even hold the pipe. She lays him down. She brushes his hair with her hands. What kind of play is this? I look at the director. Then Jules (Mercredi) smokes the pipe with him. She hits the pipe! The guy is passed out, eyes all up in his head. Jules puts the pipe in the guy’s sock. She takes off his shoe, puts the shit in the very bottom of his sock, then puts it all together. Ties his shoe. Arranges the man’s legs while he’s fucking out. Then she goes to work.
She doesn’t look anything like what I saw at the party. Which was: spirit-elf..then..I don’t know. Was she wigging out or something? It was MJ and me who were having jello shots. Jules had like three. I think she worked herself up talking about the vortex but..I just don’t know how you can work yourself up that much by thinking about something.
She’s not like that here. She’s a totally different person. It’s the same body. I can recognize the body. I can recognize the skin. It’s the same skin. It’s not the same face. It’s not the same expressions. She looks older—this character is older. She somehow convinces me with her motions—just in the way she stands up!—that she’s ten years older and has spent her lifetime working as a paralegal..some kind of secretary. You can see on her face the number of times she’s had to pick up her boss’s laundry. How many times she’s made coffee for the whole office. How many trips to Costco she’s had to make, when really more than her should share the load.
Like when she puts on that homeless man’s sock: she’s got this way she moves her fingers. This way she holds the joints. It’s like she’s taken age from people she’s seen. Or people she’s known. Or people she’s been. And she bottled that and put it in her knuckles, by an eye-dropper, before the show. It creeps me out, when I think of her as Jules, because I know that girl is only twenty..what? Was she twenty-one? I think she’s twenty. She must have a grandmother. She must live with her grandmother. Because somehow this twenty year old looks thirty-five.
There’s nothing about it stagey. Honestly, it looks like she believes that stairwell is the stairwell from her apartment, like she believes that that homeless man could die before she gets back from her day. That’s the Jules trick. That’s how she creates magic. It’s very simple, and it’s very hard to do. She believes in you, how you don’t even believe in yourself. See what I mean? Jules doesn’t see you. She sees what she imagines you could be. In the greatest of all possible worlds, what would be the embodiment of this person..what would this spirit’s manifestation be. That’s the question she asks when she looks at you. That’s how Jules operates. She even does it with herself. But like any magician, she knows the secret to her own trick. It took me a while to figure it out, to see what she was doing. But she’s known it for a long time, and she’s bored of it, and she knows how simple it is..so sometimes she doubts it. That’s Jules’s problem, as you’re going to see as this story unfolds. I think it’s contagious, because I’m pretty sure somewhere in the time that she knew me, she passed it on.
We were a crazy pair. I’m not sure I know who I was to her. I mean I know she loved me. We loved each other. But when I try to get inside her head and see who I was to her..I can’t.