by Rob Spillman
Toward the end of summer, my mother wrote again, this time to tell me that she and David had married. “A small, private wedding,” my mother told me. It was so exclusive, in fact, that I wasn’t invited. I was happy for my mother, truly, and happy that she had found David, but I didn’t understand why I wasn’t included. It made me feel that I was some kind of reclamation project, a ward of her state, not a member of her family. I felt like I was going to be a boarder in their garret—visions of La Bohème.
Two weeks later, as my father and I drove through Hampden, I said, “Die meisten Amerikaner . . .”—German for “Most Americans are . . .” This was the old game from our Berlin years, where we filled in the blank with words like “fat” and “lazy” and “stupid.”
“Ja, ja,” my father said, trying to force a smile.
I remember little of the exchange, the handoff from one parent to the other.
But I was determined to make the best of my latest hometown; no crying in the closet this year. I would start by exploring on my new bike. I guessed this was my mother’s welcome-to-Baltimore present, or a gift to distract me from noticing that we’d moved in with David and I was attending my fourth school in four years (in two countries, and in three different states). Let’s see what this sucker can do, I thought as I jumped on my shiny silver Schwinn ten-speed.
The air was thick and dirty, the streets filled with people trying not to die from heatstroke. Fire hydrants were open, kids running through them, no one noticing me riding by. I skirted around the Johns Hopkins campus, headed up Twenty-eighth Street, but it had too many cars, so I zigzagged into the thirties, crossed St. Paul, Calvert, the row houses getting smaller and smaller. Past Greenwood, then round a corner and headed down a smaller side street in the middle of which a dozen black teenagers—bare-chested, their tattoos glistening with sweat—were playing football. I pedaled toward them, and the game stopped.
Every single kid stared at me as if I were a three-headed mermaid. What’s so weird about a kid on a bike? I smiled at them, and this was met by a wall of incredulity. No one moved. I was halfway through their stalled football game when a tall guy with gold caps over his incisors yelled out, “Let me hold your bike.” Suddenly all the teenagers were laughing, laughing like it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard or seen. Another kid yelled out, “Nah, man, let him go—he’s from Oklahoma.” He said “Oklahoma” long and slow, enunciating each syllable—Ohh-klaa-hoh-maaa—like I was brain-damaged.
I sped away round the corner and sprinted to my new home. At the back door I gathered myself, slowed my breathing. I didn’t want my mother to worry about me. I never said a word to her about that first ride.
24
“Everyone chases after happiness, not noticing that happiness is right at their heels.”
—Bertolt Brecht
Soundtrack: Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, “Lied von der Unzulänglichkeit Menschlichen Strebens (Song of the Insufficiency of Human Struggling),” from The Threepenny Opera, 1928
WE FOLLOWED RINGO out of the CV and across the park, then a half block down Dunckerstrasse, through a tall, white marble archway that was riddled with bullet marks, unrepaired since the Russians had fought through there on their way to the Reichstag thirty-five summers before. “Let me go first,” Ringo said, and crossed the dark cobbled courtyard to an unmarked door. “There is no light.” He wasn’t joking—it was utterly black in the hallway. We stumbled behind, up one flight, regrouping on the landing, which was barely illuminated by diffuse moonlight peeking through the window. Up two more flights, Ringo unlocked a large, square, empty room, maybe twenty by twenty feet, with four arched windows along the southern wall, facing the central courtyard.
“I will help you with furniture and lights,” Ringo declared.
“No lights in here either?” Elissa asked.
“There is electricity, that I know,” Ringo said. “And tomorrow morning we will find chairs, tables, lamps, whatever you want. All of it free.”
“Where?” I asked, wondering what Ringo’s scam was.
“Everywhere. The streets are filled with thrown-away treasure.”
“Come on,” I protested.
“No. I am serious. My people are throwing away all things old. They now go over to the West to buy your new plastic furniture. Our streets are filled with excellent old things. I show you tomorrow.”
“If you say so.”
“So do we have a deal?” Ringo asked, handing me the key like he already knew the answer.
I looked to Elissa, who was sitting on the granite windowsill. “I’m tired.” And to Hank, who was lying down on the floor, his arms crisscrossed over his face.
“Yes,” I said. “We’ll take it.”
25
“My claim is to live to the full contradiction of my time, which can make sarcasm the condition of truth.”
—Roland Barthes
Soundtrack: Bee Gees, “Stayin’ Alive,” 1977
MY NEW SCHOOL in Baltimore was private, white, preppy. I adapted. I blended in. I hunkered down. I existed in order to make it to summer. I made it.
I’m unscathed and unchanged, I thought as I breathed in the familiar plastic smell of the fake-grass putting greens at the Chautauqua Putt-Putt. Everything was the same, including the Top 40 coming out of the tinny speakers that hung from poles scattered around the two courses. But immediately I felt that something had changed. The same cheery songs now bugged the crap out of me, and I was playing like shit. The problem with my game started with thinking. Before, I never thought—I just played. Now, when I flubbed an easy shot, I overthought the next shot, which I would then also flub, which led me to swear that if I heard the Bee Gees’s “Stayin’ Alive” one more time, I’d use my Liberty-Bell-shaped champion’s putter to club the speakers into submission.
To bring myself around, I’d go to the overgrown field behind the water hazard on the seventh hole and tee up some balls, sending them over the cattails and into the woods. This usually calmed me down, but one day, after teeing a few into the woods, I returned to the windmill and nailed the slowly spinning blade twice in a row. I tossed my club over my shoulder and nearly hit a civilian. The offended father turned in my Liberty Bell putter to the Sumners, who had no choice but to ban me for a week.
“What triggered this?” my father asked when I told him.
Where do I begin? I thought, but said, “Guess I felt the pressure of being the defending champion. I need a break anyway.”
My father hesitated, needing to leave for a rehearsal, and I almost said more, but I didn’t.
I spent much of my Putt-Putt banishment week down the street from our cabin, in a grand, lakefront Victorian owned by Senator Charles Goodell, a hero of my father’s. Even though Goodell was a Republican, he had been appointed to the Senate after the assassination of Robert Kennedy, had fought publicly against Nixon over Vietnam, and had even tried to impeach Nixon in 1970, four years before Watergate would finally bring him down. Senator Goodell always welcomed me into his house. His five sons, the youngest a year older than me, enjoyed having yet another boy around to beat at games, particularly pool and Ping-Pong. Food was always out, and friends constantly dropped by for organized activities like football (one of the sons, Roger, would become the commissioner of the National Football League), fishing, and sailing, and sometimes we’d sail over to Midway, the ancient amusement park on the other side of the lake, where we’d play skeeball for hours.
I felt like an honorary member of their family and fantasized about stowing away with them at the end of the summer. I envied the raucous, sprawling solidarity of the Goodells and wondered if they’d notice or care about the addition of an extra boy, or if my mother would notice or care about the subtraction of one.
Since Chautauqua was dry, the cast parties were held off the reservation, near a river and cold springs that kept the kegs and waterm
elons chilled. After my Putt-Putt-free week, there was a cast party for Tosca, which had been a trying but ultimately powerful production. It was early August, the summer company now a cohesive unit, inhibitions shed, drunk singers swaying in the grass, Al Green singing about Love and Happiness. I didn’t know what to do. How did you dance this slow? I was fine when we were dancing to James Brown, but now what?
A sweaty hand grabbed mine. Julie. The choreographer for the opera. Julie was lithe and graceful, and I found it hard to form words when she was around. Help me, I tried via telepathy. “Forget your legs,” Julie said, and wrapped her free arm around my lower back. “There—sway with me.” She shifted my weight with the palm of her hand. “That’s it. Slow,” she said into my ear, dampening my skin with her breath. “Forget your feet. It’s all in your center of gravity, what you’re doing with your upper body, how you’re expressing yourself through the movement in concert with the music.” I tried to listen and obey, my mind attempting to override my body, which wanted to run far, far away.
I gave in and swayed, lost but ecstatic. I could have stayed on the side of that river forever, but after a few more songs it was time to pack up the van with the empty kegs. “Ride shotgun, kid,” Radar, the big baritone who played Scarpia, called over to me.
I looked to my father, and he said, “Fine by me,” his small Hornet quickly filling with singers.
As we pulled through the gates, a whirling red light appeared behind us, and Radar pulled over. “Fucking Supercop,” he said, and jumped out of the van. “Supercop the Rent-a-Cop” is what everyone called the head of the private security company that served as Chautauqua’s police. From my mirror I could see Supercop in his cruiser, reaching for his bullhorn. “What? What is it?” Radar yelled. Radar was huge—six foot four and barrel-chested. Supercop stayed in his cruiser. At the beginning of the summer Supercop had given me a summons for riding a moped, because all “loud motors” were forbidden on the grounds.
“What’s your name?” Supercop said through his bullhorn.
“Radar Sampson.”
“And your passenger?”
“Robby Spillman. Now what do you want?”
“Have you been drinking?”
“No. I’m the fucking designated driver,” Radar yelled.
“What’s in the van?”
“Empty kegs that we’re returning tomorrow.”
“All of them empty?”
“Of course. We know the fucking laws,” Radar yelled.
Supercop tossed his bullhorn into the passenger seat, backed up, then yanked the wheel violently to the left and peeled out.
A month later, on the way to my trial (apparently Supercop had filed charges after he left us), I should have been nervous, but my father and Radar were nearly in tears cracking each other up about the absurdity of me being charged with drunk and disorderly conduct.
“Robby the Rebel,” Radar joked from the passenger seat of the Hornet. “You need some tattoos.”
“We should have drawn some on him,” my father said. “I remember when he was three and he stopped a dress rehearsal of Die Fledermaus.”
“I don’t remember that,” I said, wondering what I could have possibly done.
“You climbed to the top of a hundred-foot ladder that led to one of the spotlight towers, terrifying everyone.”
“What did you do?” Radar asked.
“I wasn’t scared. Robby always listened. I asked him to come down and he did. The idea that Robby would be drunk and disorderly . . .”
Well, maybe I could be like Albert in Albert Herring, I thought. But the “disorderly” part scared me, seemed so public and exposed.
When the bailiff walked Radar, me, and my father up to the bench, Supercop was already there.
“Robby Spillman?” the judge asked my father.
“No, sir,” my father said.
“I am, sir,” I said.
The judge looked over at Supercop, and our miniature Clark Kent turned red.
“It . . . it . . . was dark, Your Honor,” Supercop said, and everyone in the courtroom started laughing. I almost felt sorry for the stooge. Almost. But mostly I was exhilarated. My father had no time for authority, as it had no artistic function. But I was thrilled about going up against raw, stupid power.
That summer I had some small parts, but nothing as good as Albert Herring. For the season’s last opera, The Barber of Seville, I was put to work as the unofficial assistant stage manager, and on the day of the first dress rehearsal I found myself carrying a window box full of fake flowers that needed to be hung on the plywood lip by the “window” painted on the scrim at stage right.
The Barber of Seville was a frothy, frivolous opera, with intricate, multipart singing which required elaborate but precise staging. Before the start of the dress rehearsal, the director had the set builder, Vince, out onstage to look at the fountain, around which revolved the first-act finale, a large ensemble song-and-dance number. Richard’s directorial tendencies tended toward the obvious, the big, easy gestures and sight gags. Even though all of the singers were onstage in full costume, Richard was delaying the start of the rehearsal because for the first act finale, he thought that the fountain was being wasted. Sure, the singers danced upon and proclaimed their love from its two circular tiers, but the painted plywood fish sticking out of the cartoon waves should be made to dance. But how?
“Not with strings—they’ll be seen,” he told Vince. “What if someone goes under the fountain and waves the stick?”
“No one’s small enough to get under the fountain,” Vince said.
Richard looked around and saw me, hands full of fake red tulips.
“What about Robby? He could crawl under the fountain and at the end of the act, move the fish back and forth to the music?” I looked at Richard. Was he serious? I looked over at my father, sitting at the upright piano on the edge of the stage. He shrugged, as if to say, Up to you, kiddo.
“Sure,” I said, “I’ll do it.”
My father gave me a big smile and Richard said, “That a boy.” The entire cast was onstage, smiling at me, and I felt like the most important and useful kid in the world.
I put down the window box and the stagehands lifted up the side of the big black fountain so that I could crawl under. When they dropped the fountain over me, I couldn’t see my fingers in front of my face. I also couldn’t breathe. Don’t panic, I thought, fighting back a scream.
“How is it?” Vince’s muffled voice asked.
“Okay, but I don’t think I can breathe under here,” I said.
The lip of the fountain rose up and I scrambled out. “It’s really dark,” I said, trying to sound calm.
“Damn it,” Richard said, and I felt like a gutless loser.
“I can do it,” I said. “Let me try again.”
“You sure?” my father asked.
“Wait,” Vince said. “I can cut a hole in the back.”
He walked around the fountain twice, checking the sight lines. “Yeah. The audience won’t see it.”
Vince got his hacksaw and cut a square hole in the back of the fountain, just large enough for me to crawl through. Inside, I could see my hands and the stick I was supposed to move back and forth.
Every night for a week I crawled under the fake fountain and waited for my cue. Every night was the same fight against panic. Every night the curtain would go up and I would have to wait almost an hour for my cue. I would hear the curtain whoosh open and the singers moving around me, the audience settling in, putting their programs down. I had a flashlight pen, but worried that I’d use up the batteries as I followed along in the score. I waited until the tenor jumped onto the fountain right over my head, which meant I had four pages to go. Every night I fought the urge to scramble out and dive under the back curtain. No one would see me, but if they did, the whole opera would be rui
ned and I would disappoint everyone, especially my father. I breathed steady, shallow, not too loud, and focused on the stick in front of me, barely visible in the dim light, with a small weight duct-taped to its end so that it remained fixed until I was supposed to make it dance.
At least I didn’t have to stay in character. Ever since Albert Herring, even with the minor parts, I found it harder and harder to be who I was supposed to be. My mind kept drifting and I would find myself thinking, I’m not a nineteenth-century Roman altar boy, but a twelve-and-a-half-year-old American. Unlike the characters of the books I was reading, I couldn’t identify with these operatic constructions. I found it easier to imagine being a hobbit or a Narnian than Italian nobility. I also couldn’t project identities onto fellow performers. I would look across the stage and see that Tosca wasn’t really a lovely revolutionary, but Susan, a homely, two-hundred-pound soprano from Des Moines who was a whiny diva, and that her lover wasn’t really her rebel lover but Michael, who wore a lot of leather and hung out with other men.
I also started focusing in on the audience, the same cranky old blue-hairs week after week. Sometimes, when I wasn’t onstage, I would sit among them while they kibitzed and compared the current performance with all of the other versions of the same opera they had seen over the years, the opera itself—the story and the present performance, the thisness, the emotional core of music and libretto that once, a hundred, a hundred and fifty years ago, was immediate and vital—now an afterthought.
Under the fountain, as my breathing became more and more shallow, as the fear gripped me tighter and tighter, I had time to nurse a deeper worry: that I had no soul. Opera was no longer reaching me. Everyone around me, especially my father, was moved by this music, but I found it as emotionally disconnecting as an electrical manual. Worse than disconnecting—oppressive. For so long I had wanted to be part of this creative process, but this wasn’t creative—it was a hundred-year-old pantomime performed for the rich and comfortable. I wanted to explode, to make noise, to throw bombs at the audience.