Captive Audience

by Dave Reidy

  “Do they have any?”

  “A little.”

  “Give it to me,” Caan said, opening and closing his hand.

  Coppola found an exchange and handed the script to Caan, who ripped out the page, flipped it sideways, and tore it in two with tiny, twisting movements of his thumbs and forefingers. He walked into the linoleum performance space, smiled, and handed Abe the lower half of the page.

  “Do you mind?”

  “No,” Abe said.

  “You read the book?”

  “Yes.”

  “Perfect. Sonny just got the location of the meeting between Michael, Solozzo and McCluskey. Tessio knows the place. Ready?”

  Caan bowed his head, inhabited Sonny, and went to work. “That’s my man in McCluskey’s precinct. A police captain’s gotta be on call twenty-four hours a day. He signed out at that number between eight and ten. Anybody know this joint?”

  “Yeah, sure, I do,” Abe said. “It’s perfect for us.” Abe built his Tessio from the ground up, using the words on the page. He spoke the unsophisticated phrases at a measured clip, with undertones of fury corralled but not controlled. He didn’t use an Italian accent. He spoke like the neighborhood New Yorker he was and hoped that would be enough. “A small family place, good food. Everyone minds his business. Pete,”—in lieu of a Clemenza, Abe addressed Coppola—“they got an old-fashioned toilet. You know, the box, and,”—Abe played Tessio searching for the word—“and, ah, the chain-thing.” Then the finish, with excitement rippling just below Tessio’s cold calculation: “We might be able to tape the gun behind it.”

  Caan turned to Coppola. “You see?”

  “I see,” Coppola said.

  On the set of the movie, Caan joked with Abe between scenes, putting his arm around him, referring to the two of them as, “The Jews who would be Italian.” After Godfather: Part II, Abe would call Caan to ask after him, but Caan always turned the conversation away from himself and back to Abe. “I’m fine, I’m fine. Working. That’s it. So what about you, Fish? How’s tricks? How’s things at the precinct?”

  After Caan got divorced, Abe lost track of him. He sent a letter in care of Caan’s agent, even called him once at the Playboy mansion, but couldn’t reach him. The only time Abe felt he had an idea of what Caan might have been enduring after the divorce, the only time he understood what it was like to have a hole in you that nothing could fill, was the day Maude died.

  Caan called Abe the next night.

  “Hello.”

  “Abe?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s Caan.”

  Abe’s voice broke. He had taken so many of these calls the past two days. “Yeah.”

  “Abe, I just heard. I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah.” Abe covered his eyes with his hand, somehow ashamed to cry in front of a man 3,000 miles away.

  “I’m so, so sorry.”

  Then Abe heard Caan let out a sob. The conversation was reduced to an exchange of sniffs and exhalations, until Abe spoke up.

  “You method actors and your goddamned empathy.” Caan laughed with two punctuated breaths. Abe laughed through his nose. They sniffed a few more times, thanked one another, and said goodnight.

  Caan would do it, Abe decided, holding the funeral brochure in his hand. He would come, and he would speak. Abe added Caan’s name to the Post-it list of eulogists.

  Abe looked at the clock. He was scheduled to visit his doctor in an hour and a half. He took stock of himself and decided he felt fine—better, in fact, than he had when he’d first sat down. Recalling his rendition of the Carnival Barker had energized him. He hadn’t done the piece in years, but who knew when he might need it again? He wasn’t too proud to audition.

  But Abe wondered if an 83-year-old could convince in the role. He stood up, stepped around the dining room table, and began to perform for the chairs. He pantomimed a cane and a straw hat. He belted out an organ grinder’s song. He roll-called the freaks and trumpeted the wonders. He pulled on men’s heartstrings and played on their desires. He kept going, past where Caan had stopped him, to a place he’d never taken the character before, gesticulating to the limits of his range of motion. He improvised, lifting a lady’s skirt with his cane and meeting her imagined outrage with a “who me?” countenance. He bargained with newsboys, offering them a penny—all right, all right, two pennies—for every paying customer they delivered. He invented corners of the carnival that had never existed before: the Sky Rider Chair Swing, sure to shake your stomach like a snow globe, and the Box ‘n’ Match, where men of mettle meet mano a mano with Tommy “Gun” Adams, Jack Dempsey’s favorite sparring partner.

  When he finished, the armpits of Abe’s starched blue oxford shirt were soaked, and he was breathing heavily, like a Broadway dancer at the end of a number. As excitement rippled through his stomach, Abe considered turning the Carnival Barker into a one-man show: toning it down, beefing it up, giving it dynamics. He had never pondered what became of the Barker when the carnival shut down for the night. Did he drag himself back to a trailer? Was the woman awaiting him there his wife? How did he start his day? By taking a shot of whiskey and gargling soda water? Did he ever feel he was getting too old for it all? Did he ever dribble urine down his pants?

  I could answer these questions, Abe thought. I know this guy.

  He would call Ira and tell him his plan. He’d write the Carnival Barker show and get a small room off Broadway, maybe fifty seats. It would sell out for a few weeks as an oddity, but if it were good, if he wrote it well and gave them hell on stage, the show would outlast the novelty of Abe Vigoda, alive and in person. There would be reviews that would describe him as “ageless” and call the show “uproariously funny.” There would be a renewed run. He would move to a bigger theatre or sign a lifetime contract with the small one. The Carnival Barker would be huge!

  He would call Ira, but first he would call the doctor’s office. Abe wasn’t going anywhere this afternoon, except to the closet to get the typewriter.

  He picked up the phone and the receiver felt like it weighed fifty pounds. A tingling—no, a burning—radiated down his arm to his fingers and back up, diffusing into his shoulder and down his left side. Abe stared at the phone, held by an arm he no longer seemed to own, except for the burning sensation. He knew the receiver was yellow, but he saw it in a dulled gray, as if he were looking at it through smoked glass.

  He dropped the phone and backed into a chair, nearly tipping it over backwards. Abe sat for ten minutes, laboring to breathe, ignoring the death documents piled on the table.

  Even before it ended, Abe knew the attack would pass. And it did, slowly. The burning in his arm dissipated to an electric tingle and then to nothing, but not normalcy. A few minutes later, Abe found he could stand. With his breathing eased, he inhaled and exhaled deeply, regularly, through his nostrils. Then Abe wiped the sticky spittle from the corner of his mouth and decided some things. He would call Ira later this afternoon. He would begin writing the Carnival Barker show, for himself or for someone else, tomorrow. And he would keep his appointment with the doctor today.

  Abe stood under the awning of his apartment building while the doorman hailed a cab. His gut throbbed with fear. The only thing worse than going to the doctor when you didn’t have to was going when you did. Standing with his left leg braced against a tall, terra cotta pot, Abe wondered why the false reports of his death had never really bothered him. Maybe he had always known that death, when it finally came, would be all too real.

  LOOK AND FEEL

  In high school, I hung out with the heavy-metal kids. Before first bell, we would gather around a table in the cafeteria to trade tapes—an Iron Maiden bootleg for a Megadeth EP, Slayer demos for some Swedish death metal. I didn’t like the music much, but I liked drawing the way it made me feel. While my sort-of friends banged their heads over air guitars, I drew thunderheads and snarling dogs and broken limbs in pen. When a drawing was finished, I would make photocopies and
hand them out to the rest of the guys, who would tape them to bathroom walls and locker doors and the covers of their chemistry textbooks.

  By the end of my freshman year of college, I was done with metal and done with drawing, except when my graphic-design classwork demanded a quick sketch. What I wanted was to be in a band. All my friends were either members or fans of Simon Eyes, a band of indie kids a year ahead of me at school. I went to every Simon Eyes show. I watched them rehearse in the unfinished basement of their rotting bungalow. And, in the privacy of my off-campus apartment, I taught myself to play their melodic, privileged-kid punk on electric guitar. Then I waited. When the band’s second guitarist, Jimmy, went down with strep throat two days before a Saturday gig, I could have said honestly that I hadn’t wished that particular illness on him, as I’d pinned my hopes on either mono or flu.

  While Jimmy slept on the second floor, I joined the rest of Simon Eyes in the basement. We started with “Messy,” the band’s usual opener. I felt myself struggling to keep up—I had never played the song at full speed—but managed to get through it without missing a single chord. And, to my relief, I sang the backing vocals on key, though I doubt if anyone heard me, as I wouldn’t put my mouth within a foot of Jimmy’s microphone. I wanted to be a part of Simon Eyes, but not enough to risk getting strep.

  After “Messy,” the lead guitarist led us into an up-tempo charger called “Kick It.” Again, I played all the right chords at all the right times. But nothing I played on either song had sounded quite right. The band heard something missing, too. They offered to let me borrow Jimmy’s guitar. I declined. So they ran my guitar through an effects pedal and we tried another song. This time, I worried less about the notes and tried to play with greater energy, bobbing my head in double time and punctuating a few downstrokes with an exaggerated follow-through. But something about my playing was still cold. After the third song, the guys thanked me for trying. I unplugged and went home. Simon Eyes played their show that Saturday without Jimmy and without me. To my ears, they didn’t miss either one of us.

  Back in my apartment after the show, I stood in my kitchenette listening to the music in my head and the ringing in my ears. Then I pulled a clean sheet of paper from the tray of my printer, grabbed a pen from the mug on the counter, and sat down at the tiny kitchen table. The first thing I drew was a jagged line—a distant, rocky landscape—across the width of the page, about two inches up from the bottom. An inch or so above the horizon, I sketched a series of short arcs that overlapped at their tips, and continued in a counterclockwise progression until I had made a circle. Then I shaded in part of the circle’s bottom-right quadrant until it read as a nearly centered sphere. When I leaned back in my chair and saw the whole page, I realized that I had drawn how Simon Eyes’ music made me feel.

  A moment later I was stooped over the page again, holding my pen above a rock formation on the horizon line and envisioning a second sphere, smaller and farther away than the first with just the hint of a fissure at the top, a new wound or old damage nearly healed. Then I put down my pen and got up from the table without sketching another stroke. The second sphere didn’t belong on that page. Whatever it was—cold planet, maybe, or battered moon—it wasn’t part of how Simon Eyes’ music made me feel. It was me.

  I met Nell at Simon Eyes’ final show. A year later, I followed her to Chicago. We lived together in a three-room apartment in Ukrainian Village. I found freelance work designing web-sites for IT consultants and trade-show booths for software vendors. At night I went to shows at small clubs, sometimes with Nell, sometimes without her. I gave every band—even the openers—two songs to make me feel something. If they didn’t, I would spend the rest of their set in front of whatever wall the venue had designated for promotion of upcoming shows. Many of the posters on the wall were little more than flyers, sloppily copied pen-and-ink illustrations like the ones I had done in high school. Others wrinkled where printer ink had saturated the cheap paper or bore white stripes where dying ink-jet cartridges had passed but failed to cover. But at least one poster on every wall was different. It was usually bigger than the rest, the paper thick and textured, the colors rich and raised, like oil paint on a canvas. And whether a polygonal abstraction or a faithful rendering of the human form, the best of these screen-printed images seemed to capture something—though I couldn’t have said what—about the music of the bands they promoted.

  After months of evenings spent staring at posters, I started saving every dollar that wasn’t earmarked for food, rent or show tickets so that I could buy time in a small screenprinting studio in an old warehouse just north of the housing projects. Two fluorescent tubes buzzed in an aluminum fixture that hung by two thin, rusted chains from the high plank ceiling. Plaster chips crunched underfoot with every step, and two open bags of lye were slumped in the corner by the fire door. But from ten in the morning until four in the afternoon, Monday through Friday, the studio and all of its printing accoutrements—a reusable polyester screen, a hose to wash it out, a transparency copier, an ultraviolet light box, a squeegee and an old manual press—were mine to use.

  That first morning, I disinfected the place, as I didn’t know who else used the studio, if they washed their hands after using the bathroom down the wide hallway or sneezed without covering their mouths. I sprayed Formula 409 on the squeegee grip, the hose nozzle, the face of the old, paintsplattered CD player, the wooden frame of the screen, and the heads of the screws that locked the screen to the press, wiping each surface with a clean paper towel. When I was finished, plaster still powdered the floor and lye dust floated in the air, but my chances of catching so much as a cold were basically nil.

  Before leaving, I picked a tattered issue of Vanity Fair off the floor—the even layer of dust on the cover proved it hadn’t been touched in months—and placed it on the press. This would become a daily practice. If I returned the next morning to find the magazine in even a slightly different position, I disinfected everything I thought I might touch.

  My first few experiments in the studio were failures. I would make a bad stencil, or use the wrong kind of ink, or add a second color while the first was still wet. But eventually I got comfortable with the process and the equipment, and the results grew more accomplished even as the experiments grew more complex.

  One day, I brought the best of these studies, a side-angle perspective of a Chinese checkerboard, home to Nell. She ran her fingers lightly over the ink, smiled without parting her lips, and hung the poster on our refrigerator using magnets that promoted teams we’d never cheered for and tradesmen we’d never hired.

  The next morning I went into the studio, opened a copy of the Chicago Reader on the rickety wooden drafting table, and scanned the list of upcoming shows. Most of the names I recognized were those of nu-metal acts playing arenas or classic rockers charging eighty-five dollars a ticket at more intimate venues. Those bands might have needed promotion, but they weren’t going to get it from me. Then I saw that the Chamber Strings, a Chicago band better loved outside Chicago and a favorite of Nell’s, were scheduled to play the Metro in six days. Eight-dollar tickets were still available. While making dinner two nights before, Nell and I had listened to an album of the band’s lush, jangly pop—doubled melodies and layered harmonies laid over a harpsichord and twelve-string electric guitars. The triumph I felt in their major choruses was undercut by minor bridges that made me yearn for something I couldn’t name. I didn’t fully understand those feelings, but I knew I could draw them.

  The central image was a frisbee, fire engine red and lozenge-shaped against a pale blue sky. Thin black arcs indicated the direction of the frisbee’s flight, and suggested it would elude the spread-eagle cartoon in the paper’s lower-left quadrant. The sleeve of an orange, cable-knit sweater descended from the hand to the bottom edge of the page. Each word in the band’s name was given its own line at the top, brown letterforms stacked in neat but imperfect columns. Written in small, black caps, the venue, date, tim
e and ticket price fit comfortably on a single line below the band’s name, leaving a few inches of clear blue sky above the frisbee.

  I made thirty prints, ruining only four in the process. When they had dried, I signed the twenty-six survivors with a mechanical pencil and laid each one flat in an old nylon portfolio. Then I posted them in the usual places: Reckless Records (both locations), Laurie’s Planet of Sound, the concrete kiosks in Roscoe Village. At the end of each stop, I coated my hands and my stapler with hand sanitizer to keep the infectious filth of Chicago’s walls and door handles outside my car.

  I also brought a print to the Metro. The tired-looking girl behind the tempered glass of the ticket window picked up the phone, dialed four numbers, said something I couldn’t hear, and hung up. “Wait over there,” she said, pointing in the direction of the club’s main doors.

  A few minutes later, an older guy wearing a black t-shirt, black jeans, and a gold chain opened one of the black metal doors. “You’ve got a poster?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  I held the print out to the side like a bullfighter’s cape. When I looked up, the man was nodding just slightly.

  “Who hired you?” he said.

  “Nobody.”

  “You with the Chamber Strings?”

  “No.”

  The man looked at me, working his tongue over a tooth in the back of his mouth. Then he pushed the door further open and made room for me to pass. “Straight up the stairs. Staples only. Don’t cover any other posters.”

  With four prints left in my portfolio and two hours before Nell was due home from work, I drove in the general direction of our apartment, keeping an eye out for stores and walls I’d either never seen or failed to consider. I posted one of the remaining prints on the edge of a crowded bulletin board in a Lincoln Square bookstore, and another between a yoga-studio flyer and a farmers-market announcement on a kiosk in North Center. When it started to drizzle, I took to side streets to avoid rush-hour traffic, figuring I had done enough of what I had set out to do.