Amadou

Amadou

Posted: October 2005
Title: Amadou
Author: Helena Snow-Renn
Type: RPS
Characters: OMC(Amadou), Orlando Bloom, ??? (surprise character); no real pa i r i ng
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: As always, this is fiction. It never happened. Yes, this is all made up; it's all lies!
Timeline: the year 2022
Warnings: (mentioned) Het relationships including main character's mother (no incest), character death, brief public nudity; AU
Summary: Slice of the life of an unlikely fan.
Author's Notes: Another of the stories written in/inspired by New York. Seeing Orlando half-naked in Troy was such a shock... this had to do with that too. Amadou is a fairly common name for men in Mali. The author is taking a departure from her normal smut-fests. Sorry to disappoint, if it does. For the rest of you, enjoy the respite.

*****

My name is Amadou and this is my story. When I was nine or maybe ten years old, my mom developed a year-long obsession with a guy named Orlando. This actor, about seven years her junior, and nearly twenty years my senior, was the most perfect specimen of a human I've ever seen.

Now wait a minute, right? What is perfect? It's subjective, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and all that shit. Even at that young age, I fell just as in love with the man as she did... More so, even, because when she moved on a blond, green-eyed, scarier, older man, later, my loyalties remained with Orlando. After a while, mother changed her screen saver, and she refused to read me anything vaguely pertaining to Orlando's work anymore, so I had to go after it myself. We had enough computer training in school that by fifth grade, I could search, download pictures, join online communities, and most important, cover my tracks.

Let me say a few things before we go any further. First, I'm half-black, half-white. My dad, a Malian, was just some guy mom had a short romance with and never saw again. She did name me for him. I don't know if that was out of a lasting affection, or because she didn't know what else to call me. People were always, well usually, "nice" to my face as I was growing up. One thing you can say about Minnesota: people really do pride themselves on their niceness. Still, I never felt like part of the scene. I didn't grow up in the Cities, but in town of maybe forty thousand. For my whole six years of grade school, I was the only one of my type. By that I mean the racial thing. Maybe half a dozen later of 'us' found ourselves uneasy company in high school, but by our mid-teens, I think retrospectively that we were all set in too much of the mold of loner to be very friendly with each other. Better to be unique on the basketball team, or at the skate park, or in my case, the theatre-freak crowd.

Second, Mom never dated, knew, or even met either of the two actors I've mentioned thus far. In fact, she never dated at all after her one post-divorce boyfriend, a useless druggie-user type. I was born before either doomed relationship. My barely recalled rage-aholic stepdad destroyed her once-beautiful spirit. She never fully recovered it till I was grown and gone, but that's another story.

Third, either by birth, by never having had a decent male role model, or honestly, maybe because of this unnatural Orlando "thing," I grew up to be a man who likes men. Always have, once it was something that became an issue, and always will. I've never been able to give myself the obvious label, though. That would mean ruling out the things craved most of all in this life: a loving, devoted spouse and a family. Yeah, the two don't often go together, even these days.

So, Orlando. I watched the online buzz from home till college. After that, from school, always careful not to attract attention. Orlando's career was just blooming when he first showed up on Mom's desktop. He only grew in popularity for the next decade while all the other stars of the film we'd first noticed him in faded into oblivion, some by choice, some due to bad management. Two are dead now. One, ironically, because he was a pioneering gay awareness activist, of HIV. The one that took Orlando's place in Mom's heart and mind was shot on-set about five years ago. He had a predilection for playing violent roles; one day someone "forgot" to put blanks in the gun used to off him in his part. Another irony to that story is that the person who actually shot him was his best friend, a man who wouldn't touch firearms in real life. It's said that one is still inpatient somewhere. But if the half the stories out there are true, that's forty-nine percent more of them than I'd believe.

Anyway, about the time I finished my college career, Orlando disappeared quite abruptly from the Hollywood radar. I moved to NYC and was three years into the grind before I unearthed anything more. About that time, he did a nude photo shoot--for a women's magazine, of all things. Needless to say, I still have my copy. His star again blazed bright, though he only got one movie, a horrid empty excuse of an art-house flick, out of it.

By then I was near twenty-five. It would be another three years till I saw or heard anything of him again. The whole second disappearance had to have been deliberate. In our world of instant messaging and celebs caught and blasted online at every nose-picking and crotch adjusting, the pics simply dried up. You'd see things here and there, but they were always old shots; I could always tell.

Orlando kept his whipcord physique even till where I lost his trail. He had beautiful chestnut colored hair; by near-forty, it was liberally salted with silver. The smile-lines in his cheeks deepened, as did the worry lines across his forehead and the crinkles at the corners of his eyes. His lashes, like his hair, were ever-thick, lush, and pretty as a little mixed-race baby, if I do say so myself. The eyes they framed were what really sucked me in good, as it were. Silly as it sounds, I could stare into pictures of those warm brown eyes with their maroon flecks and it felt like vertigo. I looked into those eyes and saw a guy who wanted to be what everyone wanted him to be, always pleasing others. An affable, likeable chap. Energetic, high-strung. And underneath, deep, deep pain, injury, war stories; things you'd never know the details of but could only imagine.

People didn't see. They said his acting was mediocre, shallow, that it lacked depth. That was somewhat his own fault; he never did obscure, meaty supporting-actor roles. He was always the star. The pretty-boy star at that. And he was. Orlando was everyone's pretty-boy, from pre-pubescent little girls to dodgy old queens. His every glance said, "Help me, fuck me, fuck off." Something for everyone.

On just a normal, average run-of-the-rat-race Tuesday, I dropped by a tiny café to pick up a late lunch, having gone to my job early in the morning that day. Ever short on personal time, I'd needed to make up my hours so I could leave for a long-scheduled dental appointment. The freshly-cleaned 'still-slick-and-happy-under-my-tongue' feeling in place, I chanced to look at a poster not tacked to the usual notice board but right under the checkout. There, staring at me, was Orlando. I'd never seen the shot before. It was recent. A quick calculation placed him at... forty-five. Jeez, could that be right? Yes, forty-five now and I'd first seen him as a twenty-five-year-old in a film that had been shot two or three years prior to that. Was it even possible? Well, yes. I was pushing thirty. I hadn't even been a pre-teen yet when it started, so yes, it added up.

Some small out-of-the-way theatre right on the border of Chelsea and Soho which sat less than three hundred was the venue of Orlando's return. Even though the adverts were nothing but 9x12 black-and-white copies and there were only small blurbs in event magazines and e.zines, word evidently got around. The show sold out for weeks.

Finally I was able to get a ticket for a fair seat. The highly-anticipated night arrived. I fussed over my clothes and hair for over an hour, changing my mind at least three times. I knew it was stupid. Maybe if I was lucky I could shake hands with him, start at him half a second, uninterrupted, before some other, no doubt more important personage demanded his attention. In the end, I went in a pair of retro black denim jeans such as the type he wore all those years ago, low-slung off the hips, complete with the leather belt bound in four rows of shiny square metal studs. Over that, a plain white tee shirt and a long, middle-eastern-ish coat/jacket that was a recent trend.

The sun was completely down when I arrived. Night is my element. The muted, shadowy figures people cast are much more mysterious and decadent than in the harsh light of day. My night sight is quite good, so it was easy enough to find the correct seat in the pause just after lights-go-down. I gave the gentleman to my left a cursory nod; He looked vaguely familiar, but there was no time to dwell on it.

Orlando did not appear till far into the first act. Retrospectively, we had many hints. His character's name was unremarkable, one of these über-trendy names that many in my own generation carry as a sign of being born to socially grasping parents. He was supposed to embody the whores we all become in every other sense of the word when trying outwardly to be so morally/sexually upstanding. That much I'd heard by the grapevine. As always, the reviews were mixed. I had to see it for myself. Don't let me bullshit you. I'd have gone anyway, no matter how terrible Orlando was.

Somehow in those first scenes of the play, I'd grown a silent affinity with the guy sitting next to me. I almost felt protective of the older man. Like, if he had a heart attack, I would not hesitate to do CPR, that kind of thing. Oh, yes. CPR would be nice. He had kind, heavily-lined blue eyes. His hair and beard were gray, his medium-tall physique much like some of the more bean-pole-ish ranch hands in my native upper mid-west. He was mid-sixties, I'd guess. This man was the gentlest soul in the world; you could just tell. That was what got me. Here I'd come to see TheCenterOfMyUniverse, only to be side-tracked by a sexy father-figure. My mind started going like a rabbit on a date between scenes, but then we were sidetracked.

The audience drew its collective breath when he appeared elevator-style through a hole in the floor, clothed in a tight purple suit like a lanky, too-tall Prince. The pirate moustache/goatee and ponytail were back. Heavily lined in kohl now, of course those doe-eyes had never gone anywhere, not really. He proudly stretched his neck to show off a black leather collar. The older man beside me breathed in deeply through his nose. I looked over to see his still-strong hands clawed around the armrests of his seat.

Orlando spent five tense minutes extolling the frequency of matter or something just as nonsensical. Interspersed were snitches of other characters' conversations, Orlando's babble always counterpoint to their sincere/insincere entwined monologues. The act ended with Orlando alone, beaten down verbally by the meaning-of-life effigies. Standing stage left in near-darkness, he threw back his head and yowled. It was plaintive and lost and sexual and angry all at once. Shivers went down my back. I realized right then I was excited and clammy with sweat.

The man next to me leaned forward slightly, his breathing labored. For a second, I wondered what he knew that I didn't. I turned my eyes to the front in time to see Orlando tear his collar off and throw it, then his clothes, which parted with a Velcro rip down the front. The years had added more depth to his rib cage and legs, and a much thicker patch of hair on his stomach. Otherwise, he was the same, only not. He was the not some angel or some doll; here he was. Him. Orlando. The curtain dropped before the shock of seeing him naked even had time to register.

*****

THE END

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