Wolf Boy

First, you have to imagine you're watching television really late at night. Maybe you just realized, after dozing off, that you've been watching a knife infomercial for the last hour and a half, so you switch the channel. A boy - around 5'7, gangly, hairy - is running through a field with a stick in his hand, darting out from behind tree trunks. The booming, authoritative narrator asks "is this a child or has he devolved into an animal?"

The boy / animal is me. My cable television acting career began and ended when I was still in school in D.C. At the time I was going to the George Washington University, which stretched a meager four blocks in the northwest corner of the district and cost 50,000 dollars a year. The least I could do for my mother was come back with a dream resume - the kind that wouldn't even need a shpritz of Versace cologne to convey its importance and sophistication. It would say, proudly, that I worked at National Geographic. Maybe I'd even bold that part, or use italics, or the graphic of a golden picture frame. No one would ever have to know I worked for the television branch, spending hours on three sentence emails and taping my boss's Frappacino receipts on pieces of paper to be copied in the copy machine.

One day, for some inexplicable reason, I was invited by my boss to sit in a board room with the head of the National Geographic Television Science department to talk shop about the next episode in a series called "Is it Real? The show was a pseudo-science program that explored "the gulf between fact and fiction." "Is it Real?" is a question asked to viewers of the show...a question that is answered in every episode with a resounding "no." Ancient astronauts? Not real. Psychic pets? Not real. Spontaneous human combustion? It's actually called sleeping while smoking. The show's promotional materials showed a dark figure stalking the woods, his frame blurred by a shaky camera. Was this man bigfoot or a boom mic operator? The point was not to ask too many questions, but rather succumb to the mania of conspiracy theories knowing they would all be debunked.

The name of the particular episode we were discussing, stressfully, was "feral children" and the topic of feral children is actually not funny so let us pause to not laugh and feel guilty. The idea of feral children is a myth we've created to distract ourselves from the fact that there are sometimes abused children who are abandoned in forests. They usually do not end up adopting the characteristics of gorillas, except in television shows like "Is it Real?"

So far, the producers had found two creepy parents on craigslist willing to let their newborn babies be filmed for the "pre-wolf" part of the show. But they'd been weirdly unable to find a child actor to play Victor; a French boy neglected by his parents and left in the woods. They'd found grainy, supposedly authentic, footage of Victor howling at the moon and breaking his parent's china, but they needed an actor to re-create the very real moments when Victor survives in the forest on his own by hunting for bears and deer using only a large stick and his manly, hairy hands.

"I'll do it," I blurted to my supervisor. Then I deleted my google appointment with anthropology class on Friday and practiced knocking my head against a wall and drooling on myself.

My obsession with embarrassing myself began in childhood. I began life staging humiliating musical spectacles for my mother. When I was ten, I would set up a stage lined with books in our upstairs, turn the lights on and off, fall off chairs of various heights, and perform a seizure on our oriental rug. My mother was confused, but usually pleased. "Yay!" she'd say at the end of every show "But what did it mean?" In elementary school, I was the one on the sidelines at the soccer game holding a make believe microphone and narrating the game to an invisible cameraman. From far away, I probably looked schizophrenic but up close I hope I at least sounded professional.

But after trying out for a few plays in college, I felt discouraged about my future acting career. I'd tried out for a part in a nouveau musical by Jason Robert Brown and was told by the casting director at my school that I was "too Jewish" and "too gay" as I hung my head and thought "well, Christ, that's all I got." I actually thought East Coast people would appreciate my faux-new-york-Jewish-mother accent in a male protagonist.

But I had deleted the bad auditions and painful childhood from my brain the very moment I had accepted the part of Victor of France, wolf-child. I was in D.C. and soon I was going to be on TV. Suck it, C-SPAN. See you in hell, 700 club. Hello late night cable stardom.

That Friday I arrived extra early at National Geographic wearing a Victor wig and a black t-shirt, because I thought it looked actorly. My producer squeeled. We packed into a van and left for the fields of West Virgina.

Up until this point, I'd always thought of D.C. as the boring, ugly J-Crew sweater-wearing brother to New York City and gave no thought to the hick land surrounding the city. But as soon as the van left National Geographic International Headquarters, I realized we were actually just a hop and a skip away from red-blooded heartland Americuh. General Stores, swamps and Lyme-disease abound. "What if someone sees me running and yells 'there's a gay!' and shoots me?" I asked my boss. "I dunno, try not to swish?" she said.

We stopped our van next to a generic field and my boss handed me a loincloth, a tub of Nesquik and a bottle of Dasani. I was instructed to go to the gas station bathroom and drench my loin-clothed body in clumpy cocoa powder. The image of blackface came immediately to my mind, but I immediately dismissed it. I took off my glasses, because wolf children don't wear glasses, and poured the fake-dirt-water all over my body.

The idea of running, glasses-less, through a forest was actually not that scary to me. I'm fine with looking out at the world and seeing a Seurat painting. In fact, when I first got contacts I was depressed at how ugly everything looked. But running doesn't make sense to me. I've never understood how to jog. Where does one find the motivation? It's not like someone is chasing you. It just looks silly, and think about it: you could die. What if your shoelace comes untied? What if you have a heart attack?

But, alas, I summoned the passion, the creative gods and yaweh and Drew Barrymore in Scream and the monsters in Where The Wild Things Are and this naked lady and I ran. And I ran and I ran...

Then came the fishing scene. I reached my hands into a stream and pretended to grab fish. "Gotcha, water! I'mma come and getchu, rocks!" The funny thing about method acting is that I absolutely have no fucking idea what I'm talking about.

Eventually, of course, the show ended up on cable. I gathered together my three college friends and the dude from down the hall and hyperventilated all over myself. My mom called me frantically five minutes before the show and asked, "would you say you're on for fifteen seconds or more like thirty seconds?" "Mom, I don't know, I didn't edit it." "Was it fun? Did you have fun?"

The show started. My face flashed on the screen for less than a milisecond. A gajilliosecound, maybe. "That could be anyone," the dude from down the hall said. "Yeah, but it's obviously me. Can't you tell?" "I guess. The dude is running awkwardly."

My mother called. "We're so proud of you." My five seconds of television exposure was treated with greater reverence than my last report card. Which was fine. I'd left acting to become an academic and what had it actually given me except a sense of my own intellectual inferiority? I was not riding above the commoners on a carpet composed of thesis papers. I was just a cog in a machine. Or a prisoner, being watched by Michel Foucault's panopticon. Or some other analogy that reveals my intellectual inferiority. In any case, it wasn't pretty.

But this was something tangible, something real that I had accomplished. I had run, I had hit my head against a tree, I had plunged my hands into a stream. Flies had followed my cocoa powdered loincloth. Maybe I even had lyme disease. I finally felt like a productive member of society.

"Thanks mom," I said just as someone in the background said "He runs kind of gay." I said goodbye to my mom and joined my starter friends gathered around the TV. They had already changed the channel to Jon Stewart.