Captive Audience

by Dave Reidy

  As Kyle stared at his reflection, the Camaro rumbled past his house. Kyle’s stomach clenched. They’re giving her a ride, he thought. They’re bringing her to school to prove the stories they’re telling are true.

  Kyle headed for the back door in case Starlee had left without seeing the guitar. Leaving it out overnight was one thing. Baking it in the late-August sun was another.

  Kyle stepped onto his back porch and stopped. Shards of wood were strewn on either side of the fence that separated his yard from Starlee’s. Some of the jagged triangles lay lacquered side up. Others revealed the color and grain of the untreated spruce that Kyle had only glimpsed through the sound hole. The neck lay face up in one piece—it must have broken away cleanly from the heel. Six steel strings fanned out from their chrome tuners. The thinnest string, arcing shallowly from the guitar head to the sparse gravel, shone in the light of the sun.

  Kyle imagined one of those guys—the smaller one—coming around back to fetch Starlee, reading the note, and demolishing the guitar before Starlee had seen it or the note. Or maybe she’d watched without the will to stop him. It didn’t matter much now.

  Kyle left the shards where they were and started walking. The first bell would ring in ten minutes. His thing was gone, and chances were good that by the end of the day he’d have a new thing he didn’t want and wouldn’t be able to shake.

  As he reached the end of the block, Kyle envisioned a scene that made him want to collapse into the crabgrass: Starlee hears the rumble and walks out the back door. She finds Kyle’s gift to them both. She takes it in her hands and destroys it. Then she crawls into the back seat of the Camaro and acts as if everything were as it should be.

  CAPTIVE AUDIENCE

  In the old days, I would listen to almost any stand-up record that came out. That all changed in the late 1980s. By then, the best of the battle-tested veterans had left stand-up for sitcoms, replaced by marketers and middle managers who bunched up the sleeves of their sport coats, played with their hair and did nothing more than tell jokes. And they made it! That’s what I couldn’t believe! These frauds became the faces of stand-up!

  No one seemed to notice that the new guard wasn’t doing what made the great ones great. The great ones didn’t tell jokes. The great ones created characters and told stories. You thought you knew the real Richard Pryor because you’d seen his act? Guess again. That wasn’t Richard Pryor up there. That was Richard Pryor the character, conversing with his grandmother and the neighborhood pimp. Haven’t you ever wondered how he came up with two hours of jokes to tell? No one has two hours of jokes to tell. Pryor told two hours of stories.

  By the early 1990s, character and story were dead in stand-up. Jokes reigned, and I blamed television. So one day, I pushed my TV, a cathode-ray tube built into an enormous oak cabinet, out the door of my apartment and dragged my recliner closer to my grandmother’s record player, a carved-cherry relic of the days when a stereo’s performance was less important than its serving, in a pinch, as a buffet table. When I had found the spot in which the words from the built-in speaker hit my ear with the utmost potency, I nailed the recliner to the floor.

  From the day I threw out my television—June 4, 1992—I structured my life around the records of the masters: Pryor, Robert Klein, Lily Tomlin, Jonathan Winters, a few others. Eventually, I developed a rotation of fifty-seven albums. Each master’s works were interspersed chronologically throughout, allowing me to maintain a sense of each comedian’s development while avoiding overexposure to any one voice. For example, Jonathan Winters’ debut album, The Wonderful World of Jonathan Winters, held the number four spot in the rotation. His follow-up effort, Down to Earth, was sixteenth, and Whistle Stopping with Jonathan Winters was number fifty-six. Listening from mid-morning to late evening, it took five days for me to hear all fifty-seven albums. When the needle lifted from the final side of the final record, I savored a sense of accomplishment in silence. I was little more than a receptor of genius but, in my appreciation, I was nothing short of virtuosic.

  After nine months of the fifty-seven-album rotation—the Heinz Cycle, as I’d come to call it—the unthinkable happened. Whistle Stopping with Jonathan Winters concluded with a thud. I wasn’t laughing. I wasn’t even amused. Instead of looking forward to Wonderful World five albums later, I was dreading it. And it wasn’t only Winters. Why, I wondered, in a fifty-seven-album rotation, had I seen fit to include nine Cosby albums? With expansion out of the question—I owned everything by everybody who mattered—I was faced with further paring. What would I be left with? Forty albums, one for each year of my life? A Baskin-Rob-bins Cycle? I flipped through the albums and set aside each that made me wince.

  Only three survived the cut.

  Many of Bob Newhart’s bits sounded dated, even to my ears. His vocabulary was conventional, and he never spiced things up by working blue. He sounded like what he was: a bookkeeper-turned-comedian, just the sort of corporate amateur I had come to despise. But nobody had better characters or better stories than Newhart.

  On the live recordings that would become his second record, Bob Newhart: The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back, Newhart was so well known and well loved that even his setups got laughs. But when he recorded his debut album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, at the Tidelands Club in Houston, none of the setups got a snigger, not even the setup of what would become his signature bit, “Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue.” As Newhart laid out the Lincoln premise—that if Lincoln had not existed during the Civil War, an enterprising PR mind would have created him—the only sound was that of a woman coughing.

  Newhart played a press agent speaking with Lincoln over the phone right before the Gettysburg Address. The audience heard only the press agent’s side of the conversation—Newhart would speak and pause to listen, speak again, then pause again to listen—but the Lincoln created around those pauses, a mosaic of the press agent’s repetitions and intimations, was utterly convincing. The bit concluded with the press agent taking his leave and ending the call. The only break with story and character was Newhart’s raising his voice over the raucous applause.

  Absorbing Newhart’s subtle clues, I would play a corresponding Lincoln in my head. Initially, I had imagined his voice as the smooth baritone he might have had on a local Presidents’ Day-sale commercial, but eventually I settled on something a little higher. I played him crackling with pre-address nerves or, when I heard a hint of deference that suggested the press agent was the nervous one, as a sitting President impatient with a P.R. flak he’s starting to think he doesn’t need anymore. Because Newhart’s performance always offered something to be discovered, I was never the same Lincoln twice.

  Any comedian’s albums could have drowned out the New Age music wafting up from the day spa beneath my apartment and lent their structure to my life—Newhart’s albums helped me to escape it, somehow. Disability paid my rent, and my father brought groceries on Saturdays. As long as my record player and my Newhart records held out, I had everything I needed.

  One afternoon I noticed that the New Age music was gone. Was it a holiday? I took a few steps toward the window and looked down on Fullerton Avenue through a gap in the curtains. A crisp orange and white parking ticket was pinned beneath the windshield wiper of a two-door Honda. Not a holiday. Then I moved one of the curtains back and checked the reflection in the glass façade of the medical building across the street. The storefront windows of the day spa had been covered, top to bottom, with overlapping sheets of newsprint.

  At first, the vacancy was a boon. With no one below and only the flat roof above, I listened to Newhart sandwiched by silence. Honking motorists and shouting pedestrians made daily incursions, but they didn’t last. I reassessed the ideal volume level on my grandmother’s player, turning the cylindrical steel knob two graduations to the left, protecting my aged speakers and my aging ears.

  When the day spa was still vacant after six months, I congratulated myself. Somehow, I must have known this apartment
was the place for me.

  Then the workers arrived.

  At first, the sounds were those of demolition, the knocking down and tearing out of plaster walls with sledges and hammer claws. The workers seemed to relish the noise. They certainly made no effort to keep it down.

  After a few days, demolition gave way to construction. Nail guns injected their ammunition into studs with a hydraulic snap, and a sickening thud I could feel through the seat of my recliner. When a nail gun wouldn’t do, the men used their hammers. Power saws tore through two-byfours, and trowels clanged against the naked concrete floor. Over it all, the foreman barked curt instructions and construction comedians traded double entendres in muffled but distinguishable tones.

  Newhart could not compete. The rhythms of his pauses, stutters and stammers were overwhelmed from below by hammering, gunning and cutting. The laughter was always audible, even when saws reduced Newhart to murmuring. But I could no longer hear what the audiences were laughing at.

  I had listened to those three Newhart records in chronological order—six spins each, each and every day—for months. Now that doing so was no longer possible, I retreated to my bedroom. It wasn’t any quieter in there—it was louder, in fact—but the sight of my grandmother’s record player lying idle, the Newhart records stacked on the cherry top, was too much for me, so I sat on the floor in the corner of my bedroom, jumping or twitching at the sound of each shot from a nail gun. My eyes stayed open unless I consciously closed the lids or fell asleep.

  After five days of demolition and construction, the workers knocked off at six p.m. on Friday. Silence re-enveloped me, this time with the promise of a sixty-hour respite. Around seven, I opened my bedroom door and padded over the dusty living room floor. As I dialed the only number I ever dialed, motes tumbled at knee level through narrow shafts of evening summer sunlight and disappeared again.

  “Hello,” my father said.

  “Dad?”

  “Jimbo! How are you, buddy?”

  “Home—home from work already?” My father, a litigator, had celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday recently by announcing he was cutting back his workweek to fifty hours.

  “Just walked in the door. Just a second.” The receiver clicked against a hard surface and bags rustled in the background. “I picked up some pasta from Vito’s on the way home, and I had them box up some eggplant parmesan for you. I’ll bring it over tomorrow.”

  My mother had passed away ten years before, and my father still had no inclination to cook for one.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “No sweat. So did you hear the news?”

  “What news?”

  “Newhart signed a book deal.”

  “Really?”

  “‘An autobiography,’” my father read from the newspaper crinkling in his hand, “‘told thematically rather than chronologically in humorous anecdotes from the long-running career of this national treasure.’ Think they’re overstating things a bit?”

  “Maybe.”

  “That ought to provide some good bedtime reading for you. Maybe you should work it into the rotation with the records?”

  For my father, the fastidiousness with which I stuck to my routine was more troubling symptom than soothing balm.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “OK. No pressure. Just a thought. So what’s happening?”

  “When you come over tomorrow, I’m going to be taking a nap.”

  “Oh.” My father paused. “You feeling all right?”

  “I feel fine. Just a little tired.” I had sat in the corner of my bedroom an extra half-hour marshaling the energy to answer that question convincingly. I hoped it had been enough. “So if you don’t mind, please put the groceries away for me.”

  “What if I came by at three instead of noon?”

  I squirmed. He was handling me the way he had handled my mother once her condition had worsened, assessing my stability and flexibility with questions, giving me a chance to ask for help. I would be hard pressed to convince him I didn’t need any.

  “I’m not sure I’ll be up by three, Dad.”

  “That’s a hell of a nap, Jim.”

  Though he encouraged minor variations in my routine, my father was deeply suspicious of sweeping changes to it. He had come to accept my condition and my capabilities—he hadn’t always—but I suspected he still harbored fears, despite dozens of doctors having assured him they were unfounded, that I was a few bad days from spiraling into what I’d heard him call “outright madness,” as if the term were a medical one and my troubles simply madness of some lesser degree.

  “You can look in on me,” I said. “Just try not to wake me up, OK? I’ll call you when I get up.” My father made no reply. “Dad, I’m fine.”

  “What’s fine mean?”

  “What it usually means.” In the silence that followed, I felt myself flagging.

  Having asked his questions, my father stopped playing hotline operator and assumed the decisive, authoritative tone he used on business calls. “Call me when you wake up. I’ll bring your groceries over then. I’m not a delivery boy. I want to see my son.”

  “OK, Dad,” I said. “I’ll be talking to you.”

  By Monday, I had adjusted to my new schedule. I slid under the covers at six a.m. and was asleep before the construction noise began. Occasionally, a shout or crash or the grind of a circular saw below would cause me to stir, but no more than the Dopplerized sirens of passing ambulances had disturbed my sleep at night. I set the alarm for six p.m., when the workers were cleaning up and clearing out, to allow for six nightly spins of each Newhart record. In short, I reclaimed my life by making days of my nights.

  But while I slept, the men below me kept working.

  As I woke one evening, I felt my teeth chattering to the frequency of vibrations coming—from where? I rolled over and reached a hand down to the floor. It was shaking, but the vibrations were not coming from below. Were they working on the roof? Then the quaking stopped. I checked the clock. Five-fifty p.m., nearly wake-up time, anyway. I opened the door to my bedroom and peered around its edge.

  I see no point in denying that the man in hard-hat and harness rappelling past my living room window scared the hell out of me. I closed the bedroom door and, when the vibrations began again without warning, slid into the corner near the closet for a brief but energetic cry.

  A half-hour later, no men were visible through the windows, but the narrow trapezoid of sunlight that moved daily across my floor had been sawed off by the shadow of something opaque and rectangular. With my nose pressed against the frame of the window, I saw the steel supports that the urban mountaineer had drilled into my wall, and the sign they held in the air.

  “Basement Laughs?” I whispered.

  I looked at the reflection in the façade across the street. The newsprint covering the windows of the day spa had been replaced by plastic printed with a red brick wall pattern. Greasepaint letters on the glass read, “The Comedy Starts July 10th!”

  That same night, the Basement Laughs staff tested the new sound system. That the bass thumped and rumbled throughout my apartment was unsurprising, as low-end noise from the trunks of passing cars often penetrated my walls. But I hadn’t expected the ear-splitting power of the treble. I heard each cymbal crash, synthesizer note and lead-vocal scream with piercing clarity; they might as well have put a speaker in my living room. I stared at my grandmother’s record player. Up against the Basement Laughs system, Newhart would sound as if he were performing with a cheerleader’s megaphone during a sold-out rock concert.

  With the construction job more or less complete, I tried to reverse my sleeping pattern again, but I could neither sleep nor stay awake the twenty or so hours it would have taken to rejoin the night-sleepers. So I slept during the day and awoke to endure more sound checks, wondering what silent waking hours would be left to Newhart and me once the club opened and—the thought made me shudder—they started doing stand-up.

&nbs
p; Once the club opened, I discovered that the bass and treble could be ignored. The comedy, however, could not. Basement Laughs hosted open-mike nights on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Amateurs indistinguishable in their lack of talent filled the slots. They were the sort of figures who had nearly ruined stand-up in the late 80s: new moms telling jokes about minivans and dirty diapers, sales reps skewering (in their own minds, anyway) the stuffiness of corporate America.

  After a few weeks, the arrhythmia of these open mikers had clogged me. I no longer remembered what good stand-up felt like, and I reacted viscerally to the bad, running my hands through my hair, pacing a tight oval in the living room, even groaning aloud. One night, a would-be comic kept taking a pause every time he thought he deserved a laugh, but the audience wasn’t going for it. Near the end of his set, after an elaborate setup about sexual-harassment training, he said, “I guess I don’t understand. I thought we were supposed to be ‘getting a-head’ at work.”

  As the beat swelled with mirthless silence, I dropped to my knees and pounded my fists into the floor. “Idiot!” I screamed. “People don’t laugh when you pause! They laugh when you’re funny! You’re not funny!”

  When cleanup was done, usually around four a.m., the Basement Laughs staff would cut the music, leaving me around two hours of silence before I fell asleep. I would hold the edges of my Newhart records in my palms and watch the yellow overhead light reflect off the grooved, black wax. But I couldn’t play them any more than a gourmet, having been force-fed fast food, could sit down to a seven-course French meal. As the sky brightened to gray, I would sit in my recliner hoping silence would clear my head and fix me. It failed on both counts.