Captive Audience

by Dave Reidy

  The kid in the hat retrieved the roll of duct tape hanging over his handlebars. After tearing off a half-dozen strips, he folded them into adhesive pads and stuck them to the viaduct wall to the right of my Chamber Strings poster. When he reclaimed the print from the receptionist and unfurled it, I saw the pink baby and the yellow sheets and felt adrenaline pour into my stomach. The kid in the hat lined up the Leonids print alongside the Chamber Strings print, but a little lower, like the silver-medal platform on an Olympic podium, and the receptionist smoothed it against the tape. Then the kid in the hat took the tape roll and framed my Leonids print in gray vinyl.

  When they stood back to admire their work, I admired it, too—no wrinkles, no bulges, no waves. Suddenly I was certain that the kid in the hat had found my Chamber Strings print in this place, deciphered my scribbled signature, and fed my name to Dacus. But I would’ve traded those certainties for some hint that the kid had seen the Chamber Strings play, and that their music had made him feel the same way my poster had.

  The hooded kid collapsed on the sidewalk in a comic show of exhaustion. The receptionist laughed and sat down alongside him. The kid in the hat put a new layer of tape around the Chamber Strings print, then lowered himself to the ground. The three of them sat in a half-circle, ribbing the kid in the hood about something—I couldn’t tell what. Then the kid in the hat pointed at something in the Leonids print, aiming his arm like the barrel of a gun. The hooded kid pointed at something else, or maybe the same thing. After that, they just sat on the sidewalk and stared at the poster. I stared with them. Leached of her pinkness by the yellow light, the baby looked even more human. The print had never looked as good as it did through their eyes.

  Then, without moving his eyes from the poster, the kid in the hood uncovered his head, revealing a sweaty shock of bleached-blond hair. I can’t say for sure why he pulled down his hood in that moment. It’s possible he wanted to see his friends in his peripheral vision, or to be cooled by the light evening breeze. But that small action—I’m not even sure his friends saw it—changed everything for me. I saw then that the kids weren’t just looking at the poster—they had been looking at it all day. Now that the poster wasn’t a job, now that they had hung it in a space that they had made their own, they were feeling the reverence I had captured in its image.

  I stayed behind my car until they got on their bikes and rode off in the direction from which they had come. They said no words I could hear, though I heard the bicycle bell ring once more after they had pedaled out of sight. I got to my feet, stooped to rub the burn out of the skin beneath my kneecap, and stood in front of my trunk, unable or unwilling to move. The orange in the sky had retreated, and the steady rush of car tires carried from the interstate to my ears. As I listened to the white noise that passes for silence in the city, one thought stated and restated itself in my mind: Nell isn’t my only measuring stick anymore. But unlike Nell, these kids wouldn’t come home to me after the show and let me grill them about what they had felt. I would have to see for myself if the Leonids made them feel the same reverence that my poster had. And to do that, I would have to go to the Double Door.

  That realization quickly became a decision. I was going to the Double Door. I imagined crossing the threshold into the humid darkness of the entryway and handing over my ticket to be torn, then rounding a corner and catching a glimpse of the stage.

  Then I leaned over the curb and emptied my stomach into the gutter.

  In the days leading up to the show, I waged a misinformation campaign against the Leonids’ opening act. “They’re pianists,” I told Nell. “Two uprights on stage, facing each other. The Reader called them ‘the Fabulous Baker Boys of indie rock.’” All lies, but they kept me away from the Double Door until five minutes before the Leonids were scheduled to take the stage.

  Standing in line behind Nell, I fought my fear with reason. I knew the Double Door to be, relatively speaking, a clean place—the glassware had always passed my inspections, and I had a distinct memory of inhaling the fumes of a harsh disinfectant in the bathroom. More importantly, I figured that no one on stage or in the crowd was more likely to vomit that night than I was.

  I held my breath as I handed my ID to the bouncer and took it back. Exhaling through pursed lips, I turned my ticket over to the doorman and accepted a stub in return. When I had cleared those hurdles without incident, I flushed with excitement, and even a little pride. Then it occurred to me that, in the last twenty seconds, I had indirectly touched the hands of every person in the club. That thought, in the closeness of the entryway, was enough to turn my stomach. But I pulled a bottle of hand sanitizer from my pocket, squeezed the clear gel into my left palm, and spread it over my hands, fighting off, for the moment, the mental and bacterial threats to my well being. I followed Nell down the entryway onto the club’s main floor. When I realized that she was headed for the front of the stage, I touched her forearm. She turned around to face me.

  “I’m going to watch from the bar,” I said.

  “OK,” she said. “I’ll find you.”

  I went to the bar and ordered a ginger ale—just in case. I took a sip of my drink and scanned the crowd. Nell had worked her way to a spot in front, between the two singers’ microphones. Behind her, a tall guy with sunglasses and messy hair was shouting into the ear of a guy who had a Union Jack wrapped around his shoulders. Further back, on an open, elevated island, the soundman had his head down, checking the settings of his faders and knobs against whatever was written on the wrinkled white sheet he held under the light on his console. I had started panning back toward the front when I saw Dacus’s receptionist standing near the stairs that led down to the basement pool hall. The sleeves of her small black t-shirt barely covered her shoulders, leaving her long, thin arms exposed. She crossed them and shifted her weight—I imagined she was looking impatient and unkind so that no one would try to talk to her. Eventually, the kid in the hat emerged at the top of the stairs, followed by his bleach-blond buddy, whose hood hung limply between his shoulder blades. My relief at seeing them was followed immediately by a twinge in my stomach, more nerves than nausea. My audience was fully assembled now.

  When the house lights went out a few minutes later, the crowd cheered, and the Leonids—the two guitarist/singers, a drummer, a bassist, and a keyboard player—took the stage. The drummer settled onto his stool and, just as the crowd had begun to quiet down, counted off the first four beats of the opener. With their eyes on the drummer and their backs to the crowd, the two guitarists came in on the fifth beat with exaggerated downstokes that sent a loud, distorted chord careening into the audience. That chord was followed by another, just as chunky, just as loud. The song was not from the Leonids’ new album—it was the third song on their second album, and they were playing it live the same way they had recorded it. The musicianship was sloppy. The vocals dripped with contempt. The Leonids had no reverence about them.

  In front of me, silhouetted heads bounced with the four beats of each measure. Nell’s hair hugged the side of her head as she jumped, and mushroomed out in strands as she descended. The poster kids stood their ground at the top of the stairs, unmoving and unmoved.

  The second song—track five of the Leonids’ debut—was all sneers and leers and kiss-offs. Where was the music from the new album? Had reviews of the album been that bad? Had audiences in New York or Detroit stripped the Leonids of their nerve? The answers, I decided, didn’t matter. Nell, still bouncing, wasn’t scared. And by the first chorus of the fourth song—another stomper—the poster kids were nowhere to be found. I propped my forearms on the bar and hung my head over them, absorbing the crashing treble and thumping bass with my back.

  The fourth song ended with a cymbal crash, and the audience erupted on cue. As the applause died out, a low, synthesized note spread through the room. I felt it in my feet and in my chest more than I heard it. Conversation thickened behind me as Leonids fans, who must have taken the drone for some kind of intermis
sion, packed around the bar to order drinks.

  When the first note was replaced by a second—this one a little higher, something more like music—the vibrations in my body weakened. I turned around and stood on my toes just as the drummer began tracing circles on the snare drum and ride cymbal with his brushes, creating a steady, airy rush, like a long exhalation. The two guitarists stood with their instruments hanging from their necks and their heads bowed. One of them twisted just slightly at the waist, catching and releasing the stage light with his guitar’s chrome tuning pegs.

  When I broke through the crowd at the bar, the audience was only four-deep at the stage. Inexplicably, two kids were still pogoing up and down. But Nell’s silhouette was still. Keeping his left hand on the bass note, the keyboard player reached his right hand to another deck and played a fuzzy piano chord. He held it, then let it fade and pressed out two more in succession. The other guitarist picked the notes of a barre chord from top to bottom and back to the middle, then changed the shape of his left hand and played a new chord with the same picking pattern. Finally, in smooth unison, the two singers stepped forward, touched their lips to microphones, and sang softly in reverberant harmony. The bassist joined with a single, low note. At the start of the next measure, he played it again. The sound was vast and barren, but it lacked nothing. The Leonids, for the first time that night, sounded unbroken.

  I looked to the stairs. The poster kids weren’t there. But as I turned back to the stage, I saw them standing about twenty feet away from me in the diminished crowd. The blond kid, his hood down, stood between the receptionist and the kid in the hat. People passed behind and in front of them on their way to the bar and the bathrooms, but the poster kids were undistracted—they kept their eyes on the stage and their bodies square to its front edge. They were feeling, at last, what my poster had promised they’d feel.

  As the Leonids built to the song’s low peak with a gently ascending bass line and a wash of distorted guitar, I moved closer to the stage, brushing past the shoulders of rapt onlookers until I had squeezed into a place at the front, to the left of the two singers. Their eyes were squeezed shut now, and I imagined for a moment that the Leonids, too, experienced music as feeling and feeling as image, and that they were giving themselves over to the pictures in their heads.

  I held my hand out over the stage. The intermittent thump of the kick drum jumped from the sagging wood to my palm like electric current. The black paint beneath my hand had faded to a shade of gray, and it occurred to me that I was standing almost exactly where I’d stood when the punk singer’s vomit had splashed on and into me. But I didn’t care. I closed my eyes and laid my hand flat on the stage, living out my new oneness with the Leonids in the only way I could.

  When the song ended, I opened my eyes. Everyone around the stage was clapping except for Nell. Her arms hung at her sides as she stared at me, her lips parted just barely. And my first thought was that my poster had kept its promise to her, too. She was scared now.

  POSTGAME

  I was a three-point specialist, but my hands were what kept me in the game. Bigger players were able to push me around, and smaller guys could beat me off the dribble, but I was able to hold my own by tipping passes, disrupting crossovers, even blocking a shot every now and then.

  Reporters and commentators had noted my “quick hands” for years. But a few months into my twelfth season, a Chicago Sun-Times columnist described my hands as “smart.” He meant the remark as a compliment, but that wasn’t how I saw it—smart hands knew what to do, but they weren’t quick enough to do it anymore.

  A week after Chicago’s exit from the playoffs, my agent, Perry, called to tell me that the team would not be reupping my contract, and that he would make the rounds to find out who could use me. By this time, Perry had negotiated twelve one-year contracts on my behalf. I knew there wasn’t anyone better able to convince a GM that he needed a player like me, and that I was the only player like me available.

  With no contract, I went home to Iowa City and to Liz. For most of my career, she had enjoyed watching me earn a living playing the game I loved. But for the last few seasons, Liz seemed to be enduring each game, happy only when it had been checked off the list of things to get through before she could have the family that she’d always wanted and that I’d agreed to start when my playing days were over. She was still outwardly supportive, sitting with me when the phone wasn’t ringing and celebrating with me when, at last, I signed with someone, but I knew she had spent the last few summers hoping that Perry would come up empty.

  I woke up at five-thirty every morning to lift weights, run sprints, and take a thousand shots, including four hundred three-pointers. If I started my workout any later in the day, some other activity—grocery shopping or TV watching—would get the best of my energy. Perry would call every few days to report that he had an iron in the fire—a chance to replace an injured sharpshooter in Portland, or provide a veteran defensive presence in Atlanta—but as July came to an end, he still hadn’t gotten me an offer.

  I would arrive home from the gym to find new little touches around the house: a flowering plant on the kitchen countertop, insulated shades in the bedroom next to ours, a circular mahogany coffee table in place of the glass one we had bought only two years before. As I sat at the kitchen table nursing a Gatorade in my t-shirt and tearaways, my exhausted legs splayed out across the ceramic-tiled floor, Liz would emerge from some corner of the house.

  “How was the workout?” she would ask, rubbing my neck and shoulders.

  “Fine.”

  “Did you hear anything from Perry?”

  “Not yet.”

  She would squeeze me once more, as hard as she could, then kiss my head through sweaty hair and go back to whatever she had been doing when I got home.

  I kept up my workouts through training camp and the pre-season. When the regular season began, I watched games on television, trying to figure where I might fit on a given team, hoping to find holes only I could fill and weaknesses only I could shore up. Occasionally I found one or the other, but the best I could do was mention it to Perry in a sort of offhand way, and when I did, I often found that he had already tried that tack. “I’ll check again, though,” he would say. “Maybe something’s changed.”

  When I found myself hoping that every guard who fell to the floor had torn a ligament or broken a bone, I would turn off the TV and go to bed, steeling myself to wake up and work out the next morning.

  The regular season was nearly a month old when I watched all forty-eight minutes of a Chicago road win over Houston. I hardly moved a muscle during the game, but my heart was beating as if I were on the floor with those guys, all but two of whom I had played with the previous season. When the game was over, I sat in my plush leather chair, waiting for my heartbeat to return to normal. Then, for the first time since the night of that final playoff loss in Chicago, I went to bed without setting an alarm.

  The next day, Perry told me to announce my retirement.

  “It’s a reminder you’re still out there,” he said. “When we were shopping you in the off-season, none of these guys had a need. But now, some of their teams are below .500, shooting twenty-five percent from behind the arc, and failing to give a shit on defense. Somebody might see the release and figure he can get you on the cheap to fix those problems.”

  I didn’t believe I was out of the league because the best basketball minds in the world—men who spent every waking moment looking for any angle that would help their teams win more games—had forgotten I existed. But the possibility—remote as it was—that a smudgy fax with my name on it would be handed to just the right guy at the right time had value in itself. It gave me a reason to set my alarm.

  “Fine. Write it and send it.”

  “Do you want to see it?”

  “No.”

  “What reason do you want to give for retiring?”

  I thought about that. “Don’t give a reason.”

  “
No reason?”

  “No.”

  “All right,” Perry said. “It’ll be out this afternoon.”

  I flipped the phone closed. As I stood in my kitchen, replaying the conversation in my head, I started to wonder how long I could go without a contract offer—two days? a week?—before my retirement was more fact than gambit.

  I worked out the next morning, then spent the rest of the day—and the next two—watching Japan Tour Golf. No one called.

  On the third day, Liz sat down on the couch and watched with me for a while. During a commercial, she turned to me, tucked her feet in front of her and hugged her left shin. “I went off my birth control,” she said.

  I looked at her for a moment. “How long ago?”

  “Almost a month now.”

  I nodded, and my eyes rested on the new coffee table for a moment. Then I made myself smile and made it look natural. Liz smiled back, looking relieved to be sharing at last the sense of anticipation she had been hiding. She rocked back and forth on her little haunches, rested her chin on her knee, and looked up at me. “Do you wanna try?”

  It took me a moment to understand what she meant. “Now?” “Why not?” she said, smiling and rocking again.

  I knew the right answer and gave it.

  Liz sprang to her feet and bounded into the bedroom, taking off her sweatshirt on the way. As I walked after her, I realized I had been foolish to think that time would make my retirement real. Only Liz could do that.

  By the time the NBA playoffs were over, Liz was six months pregnant with our son, and I was the face of a camp for promising high-school basketball players. James Macon, an Iowa City entrepreneur, had called me with an offer to buy into his sports-camp business after reading about my retirement in the Press-Citizen. He said he wanted to attach “the Tim Vilinski brand,” as he put it, to his Hawkeye Hoops Camp. When I had officially signed on, Macon printed new brochures and found beds for fifty additional campers. The two-week session sold out in ten days.