Captive Audience

by Dave Reidy

  Driving under a viaduct in Bucktown, I saw something that made me stop. I shifted into park, turned on my hazards, and walked around the front of the car to get a closer look at the viaduct’s cinderblock wall. The masonry beneath the mineral-stained steel was new, and the even coat of eggshell paint still had its gloss. Rainwater, seeping through from the railroad tracks above, rolled down the wall in beads.

  I opened my trunk, grabbed a roll of duct tape and tore off five strips. I folded the strips into double-sided adhesive pads and stuck them to the backside of a print, putting one in each corner and one in the middle. Then I pressed the frisbee and the tape pad behind it to the wall, straightened the print on its adhesive axis, and smoothed it into place with slow forearm sweeps from the center to the corners. When the print was right where I wanted it, I sealed the four edges with duct tape.

  With exhaust fumes blowing on my calves, I stood behind the car and beheld the poster, framed in gray against a luxurious expanse of white. I couldn’t be sure that anyone would pass by before the Chamber Strings played their show or railroad workers ripped down the print, but I knew that whoever did would stop. They would read the words and imagine their own narratives about the frisbee and the hand and the sky. In this spot, the poster would compete for fewer pairs of eyes, but it seemed to stand a better chance of winning some.

  On the way home, I passed other out-of-the-way places where my poster would’ve seized notice—an alley stairwell lit by a single, grated bulb, and a freshly poured sidewalk—but I wanted to save the final print for Nell.

  When I heard a key grind into the lock I was at the kitchen sink washing my hands in water as hot as I could stand.

  “Hey,” Nell said, closing the door behind her.

  “Hey,” I answered.

  Nell stepped out of her high heels, kicked them behind the door, and set her tote on the kitchen counter. She hugged me from the side as I dried my hands and arms with paper towels. Then I turned to face her and held the side of her head to my chest. Her hair smelled clean.

  Suddenly Nell’s hands dropped from around my waist. She stood up straight, looking over the counter into our living room.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  She stepped out of my loosened embrace, walked around the counter and stood over the small table where I had laid out the last print for her. A few strands of her straight hair dangled in front of her face. “Where’d you get this?” she asked.

  I laughed. “I made it.”

  Nell kept her eyes on the poster for another moment. Then she retraced her steps over the hardwood and the tile, laid her arms on my shoulders and clasped her hands behind my neck. “It’s really, really good.”

  As Nell raised herself on tiptoe and brought her face closer to mine, I recalled that she had awoken that morning with a sore throat. I was also sure that the shredded remnants of whatever she had eaten for lunch were decaying between her teeth. But I didn’t care—nothing had ever stopped me from kissing Nell.

  After we had our kiss, she nuzzled the crown of her head into my neck and squeezed me as tightly as she could. Then she stepped back and hopped in long sidesteps toward our hand-me-down, off-white leather couch, smiling like a little girl expecting to be chased. “So are we going to the show?”

  The way in which she’d asked made it clear that she thought she already knew the answer was “yes.” But my smile flattened as I realized I had no intention of attending the Chamber Strings’ performance. I believed my poster had captured the way I would feel at that show, in the presence of the band’s music. And if I was wrong, I didn’t want to know.

  A week later, I received a one-line e-mail at the address posted on my website. “If you made the Chamber Strings poster with the frisbee on it,” the e-mail read, “write back.” I did, and the note’s author, a local promoter named Jon Dacus, commissioned an original poster—and 100 prints—to publicize an upcoming appearance by the Leonids, a UK band that had been a favorite of mine at the time of its breakup three years before. I wrote back again to say that I would take the job and asked Dacus how he’d gotten my name. “You scribbled it on your prints,” he responded. “Promote my show better than you promote yourself.”

  The Leonids were scheduled to play in two weeks at the Double Door, an asymmetrical room with a long bar and a capacity of three hundred—five hundred if you counted the basement, which was outfitted with pool tables and wall-mounted TVs tuned to a closed-circuit feed of the stage. I had attended many shows at the Double Door since moving to Chicago, but none since I went to see Rancid.

  I was third in line when the doors opened, ensuring a place at the front of the stage and, if I stayed put, an unobstructed view of the headliners. The opening act was a teenage skatecore band from the Bay Area. They were not good. But I didn’t turn my back on them or stare at the floor. I pointed my eyes at the stage and waited them out, clapping a little at the end of every song. I was paying enough attention to tell that the lead singer didn’t look well. I had seen unwell lead singers before, but, until that moment, I had never seen a guy vomit during a set. The candy-pink liquid hit the front edge of the stage and splashed onto my neck and into my mouth, which was twisted open in disgust. Then I threw up, further scattering my fellow Rancid die-hards.

  Since then, many bands I had been desperate to see had played the Double Door, but I could hardly think of the place without gagging. I consoled myself with the notion that I would never have to learn that the Leonids’ live show evoked different feelings in me than the ones I captured in my poster.

  The Leonids had made their name blending wry, literate lyrics about London’s drug culture with dirty drums and major-key hooks, but everything I had read about the album they had reunited to record warned fans not to expect any stompers, leaving me with little idea of what to expect. With U.S. release of the album still a week away, I bought an imported copy and drove straight to my studio.

  The CD player occupied its usual spot on the floor across from the drafting table. The issue of Vanity Fair lay face down in the dust alongside it. I disinfected the screen, the squeegee, the hose nozzle, the press, and the player itself. Then I put the Leonids disc in the player and pressed play.

  Track one opened with a distant, muffled piano chord that nearly receded into the background crackle before the next chord sounded. A third chord followed more closely. This progression of three chords, each shrouded in fuzz, continued for three more measures. During the fifth measure, a finger-picked acoustic guitar joined the piano, complementing and connecting the chords. Then the Leonids’ two lead vocalists entered the mix, echoing over the instrumentation in cigarette-strained harmony, accompanied on the low end by the steady hum of an electronic bass note.

  On their first two albums, the Leonids had treated each song like an opportunity that they took pleasure in wasting, and that wastefulness had been part of their appeal. Now, as I leaned against the press listening to their new album, the Leonids sounded utterly different. Yes, the distorted guitars had been quieted and the drums replaced with brushed, airy percussion, but the differences ran deeper than mere instrumentation. Songs built to resolutions where they had once petered out. Words were being sung, not sneered, and instruments were being played instead of pounded. The Leonids’ were trying, and their efforts seemed infused with an almost grateful reverence, as if they appreciated these songs and the chance they had been given to make them.

  That reverence infected me. I started sketching while the seventh track played at my back. When I stepped back from the drafting table, the album was over, and on the page was an overhead perspective of a newborn being laid in a crib. The eyes on her scrunched little face were shut tight, as if she were having a bad dream. An inch of shadow outlined the left side of her body. Her head was supported by a man’s left hand. His right hand cradled her puffy, diapered rear. The crib’s fitted sheet, patterned with tiny fleurs de lis, was visible above the baby’s head and in patches between the arms and legs. The ten let
ters of the band’s name, illustrated in three-inch, outline type, were evenly spaced across the top of the page. The date, time, venue and ticket price ran across the bottom in thin, inch-high characters.

  As I coated each print with the buttery yellow I had chosen for the fitted sheet, good feeling flowed beneath my concentration. I was getting this right, capturing in image and color the reverent care with which the Leonids now made their music. I almost didn’t mind that I wouldn’t make it inside the Double Door to feel that reverence again. But as I poured a spreading line of burgundy ink to fill the outlines of the band name and the fleurs de lis, I realized that my endgame for the poster had changed. Now, more than wanting to capture on paper the feelings I would experience if I went to the show, I wanted others to experience what they would feel, to know by looking at the poster how the Leonids’ music would move or exhilarate or annoy them. Though I hadn’t known it then, the best screen-printed posters—the ones I had stared at while bands clamored on stage for my attention—had done that very thing for me. And as I pulled the squeegee down the screen, forcing ink through its unfilled holes, the measuring stick for my success moved outside of myself, and my good feeling followed it.

  As soon as I had finished the prints, I rushed home to Nell. When I opened the door, she was shaking a colander over the kitchen sink, turning her head away from the rising steam. Without a word, I knelt on the wood floor alongside the table, unzipped my portfolio, slid my palms under one of the four extra prints I’d made and lifted it onto the table.

  Nell poured spaghetti from the colander into a stainless steel pot on the gas range. “Hi,” she said, finally.

  “Hey,” I said. “Can you take a look at this?”

  Nell set the colander in the sink and walked around the counter. Supporting herself on the arms of a wooden chair, she leaned forward over the table, as if trying to see what the print would look like posted at eye level on a wall. Her hair hid her face from me.

  Though Nell was smiling when she stood up, she looked stricken. “It’s amazing, Ted.”

  I knew there was more. I waited for it.

  “It’s the strangest poster I’ve ever seen.”

  “It makes you feel strange?”

  Nell’s smile shrank away. “What?”

  “How does it make you feel?” I asked.

  Nell turned back to the print. “Scared.”

  Of course Nell was scared—her boyfriend had illustrated a life-like image of a baby, made color prints, and brought one home just for her. I took the back of her neck in my hand—she was trembling a little—and as I kissed her cheek through her hair with my smiling lips, I was sure that the Leonids’ cold, haunting soundscapes would scare Nell just as much as my poster had.

  The next day, I drove to Jon Dacus’ office with 100 prints of the Leonids poster in my portfolio. I climbed three flights of steel stairs, pulled open a heavy fire door, and walked into the timber loft occupied by InMotion Promotion. The receptionist’s desk was unattended. A floor-to-ceiling steel lattice held nine plates of frosted glass, blocking sight lines into what I imagined to be the main office. Behind the partition, a desk chair creaked and a woman argued on the telephone. A song I didn’t recognize—all shouted vocals and distorted electric guitars—played in the background.

  On the wall to the right of the fire door, framed-and-matted pairings of a poster and an untorn ticket hung on a white wall at even intervals and various heights. Each pairing featured an InMotion Promotion show played by a revered band at the moment considered, in hindsight, to be the apex of its artistic achievement: Pavement at the Empty Bottle in ’91. Guided By Voices at Lounge Ax in ’94. Neutral Milk Hotel at the Elbo Room in ’96. All the posters had been professionally produced, but only the Pavement poster had been screen-printed. Its central image—a hand crank beneath the grill of an early automobile—struck me as the perfect visual equivalent of Pavement’s grinding guitar sound.

  I was still standing in front of the Pavement poster when two guys emerged from behind the steel and glass and made straight for the door. They looked to be about twenty years old. The one in the lead wore a faded green military cap, a red t-shirt, and long, black cargo shorts. The second kid shuffled along behind him, a sweatshirt hood pulled over his head, the right leg of his jeans cuffed to the knee. The black, cylindrical poster cases strapped across their backs like broadswords made the portfolio dangling from my fingers seem more than a little precious.

  As the metal door swung shut behind them, a sneaker sole squeaked and a young woman with a helmet of ink-black hair stepped behind the reception desk.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi. I’m here to drop off some prints for Jon Dacus.”

  The receptionist pointed to a door at the far end of the white wall. “You can lay them on the table in there.”

  I entered what appeared to be a conference room and laid my portfolio on a long, steel table. I unzipped the portfolio, pulled the stack of prints onto the table and tidied the stack between my hands. Then I stood behind the table, waiting for Jon Dacus to walk in and review my work.

  As I waited, I began to worry that, when Dacus saw the baby, he would accuse me of trying to sabotage his ticket sales. I imagined myself saying them out loud and realized that my reasons for drawing and printing this image—and my hopes for what it would evoke in the viewer—might fail to move a concert promoter.

  After what had to be ten minutes, Jon Dacus still hadn’t shown. No one had. Then it occurred to me that the receptionist hadn’t said anything resembling, “Mr. Dacus will be with you in a minute,” and that she was probably wondering what the hell I was doing. I flipped my empty portfolio closed and carried it out of the conference room. The receptionist, seated at her desk, darted her eyes at me before returning them to her computer monitor.

  As I reached the metal door, I decided to make sure I wasn’t walking out on a meeting or leaving my payment in the outbox. “So,” I said to the receptionist, “is that it?”

  “Yep,” she said.

  I nodded. “Do you want me to take some of the prints and post them around?”

  The receptionist appeared to choke on something—a laugh, maybe? “We do that,” she said.

  Driving home from the studio two days later, I stopped at a red light on Chicago Avenue and saw three of my Leonids prints on a plywood fence in front of a gutted Ukrainian social club. Across two lanes of traffic and in the shadow of scaffolding that climbed the old building’s façade, the yellow of the crib sheets was dulled and the typography nearly invisible, but the babies glowed a grotesque pink. I watched passersby hustle to catch their buses and scanned faces in other stopped cars. So far as I could tell, the prints caught no one’s notice but mine.

  Two blocks east, I saw one of my prints in the window of a coffee shop and another on the door of a clothing boutique. The idea that there were ninety-five more prints out there kept me driving. I found one taped to the door of the Reckless Records on Broadway and another staple-gunned to the boarded-up window of a former Goldblatt’s. Four more were posted on kiosks in North Center and Roscoe Village. Over the next two-and-a-half hours, I spotted thirty-eight prints of my Leonids poster.

  The sky was warning-cone orange as I drove toward home, still scanning storefronts for my prints. At Damen and Cortland, I realized I was only blocks from the viaduct under which I’d taped my Chamber Strings poster.

  I turned east onto a one-way street, then south again at the first stop sign. The print was still there. I coasted past it, then made a slow U-turn and parked in front of a newly constructed three-flat on the opposite side of the street.

  I got out of the car and walked to the nearest of the viaduct’s center supports, first taking a side-angle perspective that seemed more appropriate, given the print’s surroundings, than a head-on, gallery view. When my eyes had adjusted to the relative darkness beneath the bridge, I saw that the inks, shielded from direct sunlight, had held their color, but that a drop of water had
cut a narrow track across the pale blue sky. The marring read like a battle scar. I tried to make a memory of the print as it appeared in that moment, feeling certain that the next time I drove under the viaduct, it would be gone.

  When the lights on the bridge’s underside flickered on, illuminating the sidewalks and bleeding color from the print with their yellowish tint, I headed for my car. As I reached the driver-side door, a bicycle bell rang twice and a girl laughed. I turned my head to find two guys and a girl pedaling toward the viaduct from the far side. Instinctively, I crept around the back of my car to the passenger side and peered over the hood, waiting for the cyclists to pass. But they didn’t. Instead, the young woman, sitting upright on her vintage black cruiser, ramped smoothly up to the sidewalk where it met the street while the guys, one after the other, popped their fat road tires over the curb beneath the viaduct.

  I recognized them in pieces: the cylindrical poster cases first, then the military hat and the sweatshirt hood, then the ink-black hair. While the girl I now recognized as Jon Dacus’ receptionist looked on, the kid in the military hat opened the case slung across his hooded friend’s back and slid out a roll of posters, taking care not to catch any corners on the lip or the lid. He peeled one print off the top, handed it to the receptionist, then re-rolled the curling stack into a tight, even tube, threaded it back into the case, and pressed the lid into place.

  I ape-walked to the back of my car and put one knee on the street’s graying asphalt. When I looked up again, the kid in the hat was rolling the print art-side out. Then he held the rolled paper in front of the receptionist, who pinned it between the tips of her fingers and thumbs at the print’s uninked edges. They were training the paper to lay flat again. The kid in the hood watched them, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, his hands buried in the front pocket of his sweatshirt.