Captive Audience

by Dave Reidy

  “Yeah.”

  Matthew chirped again, louder this time. I walked around to the front of the stroller to find him with both hands in the air. With the phone pinned between my ear and my shoulder, I lifted him out of the stroller and braced him against my right hip.

  “But the idea of bringing you back for the playoffs made the national news,” Perry said. “Anyone who forgot you were out there will remember now.”

  I wondered if Perry remembered that he had used the same argument to cajole me into announcing my retirement.

  “You there?” Perry asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “You want me to follow up with a few teams?”

  I could only shrug and shake my head.

  “All right,” Perry said. “I’ll check in with you tomorrow and let you know what I hear.”

  “OK.”

  I flipped the phone shut and stared at it. “They were bluffing.” As my mind worked its way around the implications of those words, I saw them on the phone and on the facades of the houses across the street, as if someone were projecting them wherever I looked. When I looked at Matthew, his eyebrows were twisted like dead caterpillars and wrinkles covered his forehead, but I could still read, “They were bluffing” on his face.

  As I slid the phone back into my pocket, Matthew threw himself backward like a cliff diver. I clamped his calves against my ribs, but the weight of his head pulled them out before my free hand—not quick enough, not smart enough—could catch him. I dropped to my knees out of instinct, trying to get under him, but only increased his momentum. His head hit the cement first. His eyes jammed shut on impact and then opened wide, spinning a little, radiating horror and confusion. Then he screamed—a scream that stabs you because it says, “I’m hurt! Oh no, no! I’m really hurt!” I scooped him up and ran toward the front door, sliding my fingers over his head as I went. When I found a sticky knot on the crown, I was sickened and a little relieved—I had expected a dent or a crack.

  As I kicked the door shut behind us, Matthew was pressing out the last of his breath in a few silent spasms. Then he filled his lungs and released another soul-splitting cry.

  “What happened? What happened?” Liz shouted, running down the stairs.

  “Matthew fell,” I called.

  I was putting ice in a plastic bag when she pulled him away from me. When she saw his crying face and swollen, bleeding head, Liz started to cry, too.

  I handed the bag of ice to her and she held it on Matthew’s head, whispering comfort into his ear between her own wracking sobs. When she looked at me, whatever she saw made her cry even harder.

  “It’s all right, Tim,” Liz said. “It was an accident.”

  She meant that I hadn’t intended to drop Matthew, that these things happen to even the most careful parents, and she was right. But nothing about Matthew’s fall had felt like an accident. I understood then that Matthew would know me without ever seeing me play. He knew me already. And if my discontent—which I knew then I would never shake—had made my son throw himself to the ground, I wondered what else it would do to him.

  DANCING MAN

  When I was fourteen, I would lie in bed at night with foam-covered speakers over my ears and a dubbed copy of R.E.M.’s Reckoning—the band’s second and best album—playing in my Walkman. For thirty-eight minutes, Peter Buck bounded between nimble arpeggios and syncopated strumming while bassist Mike Mills, freed from the duties of keeping time by Bill Berry’s perfect drumming, played melodies and sang harmonies. And on just a couple of songs, for just a few notes, the cold, distant voice of Michael Stipe surged with warmth, grabbing me back from near sleep by some handle on my heart.

  But the real revelation on Reckoning—my real reason for listening to it—was the piano playing. I kept thinking that the keyed acoustic chords, played with energy but without violence, would reduce R.E.M. to Elton John or Billy Joel or church musicians, but it never did. The music had an edge and, somehow, the piano parts didn’t dull it. They made it sharper.

  After seven or eight nights of making the album my bedtime story, I could play Reckoning—even the songs that had no piano—from start to finish on my mother’s upright Steinway. The first time I played it straight through, I was a little surprised at what I had done, but I shouldn’t have been. I had learned to play Reckoning the same way I had learned to play the minuets of Bach and Brahms: by listening.

  Since the age of four, I had been trained in the Suzuki method, which requires its students to listen to recorded classical compositions until they can pick the notes out on the piano and play the songs from memory. By the time I was fifteen, if you gave me a tape, I could learn the songs on it in a hurry, and well enough to play them with some feeling. That ability—and the rehabbed Vox Continental organ I had inherited from an uncle—made me something of a commodity with Chicago bands while I was still in high school.

  After graduation, I moved out of my parents’ house and stayed with friends in the city, working odd jobs and playing out at local clubs almost every night of the week. I would play with any decent band—all I needed were a few hours with a tape of their songs, a fifty-dollar guarantee, and somebody with a car to fetch me and my organ for the gig.

  By the time I had been out of high school for ten years, I had played nearly every club there was to play in Chicago. Every night I saw the same faces: the guy with the beard who recited poetry before the headliner; the beautiful, rough-looking woman who spent half the night fending off guitar players begging her to front their bands; the doughy biker in the black bandana who raised his two-finger rock salute and banged his head with eyes closed no matter what kind of music the band was playing. Chicago was a big town, but its live-music scene was small and incestuous. And if while making my way out after a show I passed one of these characters with my organ case in hand, he or she would invariably pat me on the shoulder and say, “Sounded great up there, man.”

  But we didn’t always sound great up there. The bands I played with—the kind that hired an organ player just hours before their shows—were grossly under-rehearsed and, often, not particularly talented, but nobody seemed to care. Playing for the rock-club regulars in Chicago had become like playing the piano for my relatives when I was a kid: they couldn’t bring themselves to tell me I had played badly, even when I knew I had. And if they couldn’t tell me that I had played badly, how could their telling me I had played well mean anything?

  I would have quit the whole live-music scene, but to make it as a full-time musician in Chicago, you had to play out as often as you could, whether you wanted to or not. Musicians in New York and L.A. could make a living playing recording sessions because big-budget acts made albums in those cities. In Chicago, where almost no one had a major-label deal, the most I’d ever gotten for playing on a recording was beer, pizza, and a ride home. Session work—the kind that didn’t pay in food—was the sideman’s Holy Grail. But to get into that world, you had to know somebody. I knew nobody that big.

  My only way out of Chicago was to join a touring outfit. Out on the road, you had to win over people who had never heard you play before, then go to the next town and do it again. But getting out on tour wasn’t easy. Not every touring band needed an organ player, and most that did already had one. And while I’d play a one-off in Chicago with anybody who could keep a beat and play three chords, any band I toured with would have to be pretty good—I had no interest in playing terribly in front of people who would have no problem telling us we were terrible.

  One afternoon, I got a phone call at the place I was staying.

  “Is this Dale?” the voice asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “This is Jamie Hyde. I front a band called Sod Off Shotgun.” I hadn’t heard of them. “I got your name from Ken Carson.”

  “Oh, sure,” I answered. Ken was a singer-songwriter I had backed a few times at local street-festival gigs.

  “My band is starting a twenty-date tour tonight at the Elbo Room. We’ve
been together a while, and we rehearsed like hell for this tour, but now I’m worried our sound isn’t big enough and I’m looking for an organ—Vox or Farfisa, something to shore up the top end.”

  I looked at the clock on the microwave: already seven p.m. I could probably learn the songs by showtime, but it would be tight.

  “No problem,” I said. “Should I come by for sound check? You can tell me what you have in mind for the organ parts, and I’ll rehearse on my own until showtime.”

  “Oh no,” he said. “I’m not asking you to play tonight. I’m inviting you to the show. If you like what you hear and have some ideas for organ parts, you can come out on the road with us.”

  It took me a moment to get that this guy was inviting me on tour with his band. “What kind of stuff do you guys play?”

  “Ska-rock,” he said.

  “Oh.” I replied, a bit deflated. In my experience, fusion acts combined styles because they weren’t good enough to play one straight.

  “Just come to the show,” he said. “If you want to play with us, meet me in the bar after the show. If you don’t, leave.”

  Nothing about the call made me feel as if I’d found my ticket out of town, but I figured it was worth a walk to the Elbo Room to find out more. For a chance to get away from Chicago’s rock-club regulars, I was willing to stand among them for an hour. Beats playing for them, I thought.

  As I descended the stairs to the concrete bunker that was the Elbo Room, Sod Off Shotgun’s gear was already set up on the small, slightly raised stage. I ordered a Jack and Coke at the bar at the back of the room and found a spot along its rounded edge where I could see the frontman’s microphone through the forest of pillars holding up the ceiling. I sipped my drink, propped my elbows on the bar, and waited for Sod Off Shotgun to take the stage.

  “Hey man,” someone said.

  The bandanna-wearing biker was standing next to me with a beer in his hand.

  “Hey,” I replied.

  “You playing tonight?” He smiled maniacally and sipped his beer.

  “No. Just listening.”

  “That’s too bad.” As Sod Off Shotgun took the stage to perfunctory cheers, I felt the biker’s heavy hand on my shoulder and the heat of his breath on my cheek. “You always sound great up there, man,” he said, raising his voice over the lazy applause.

  “Thanks,” I said. But I didn’t mean it.

  Sod Off Shotgun got to work quickly. I didn’t know much about ska, but the band seemed to have its basic elements down: a three-piece horn section that carried the melody when the singer didn’t, a drummer and a bassist both locked into 4/4 time, and a guitarist who played only the upbeats. The sound was polished and sanitized, though—it lacked the grit that I thought ska was supposed to have. Whatever they were supposed to sound like, the guys in Sod Off Shotgun could play. They weren’t fusing styles because they had to.

  Jamie Hyde was a small man, much smaller than I’d expected, but he was a commanding presence. He leaned out over the stage’s edge and growled lyrics at the audience, his brow wrinkled with effort and controlled menace, then turned toward the band, dragging his eyes over each member like an officer rallying his men to hold the line. And they did.

  The more I listened, the more I decided that Jamie was right: the top-end of the band’s sound was missing something. They needed an organ, and ideas for my parts came with as much ease—and excitement—as any ever had.

  By the time Sod Off Shotgun left the Elbo Room stage to the applause they had earned, I believed that my days of settling for canned kind words from Chicago’s rock-club regulars were over.

  When Sod Off Shotgun went on, my organ and I held down the far right side of the stage, a few feet from the front edge. Behind me and to my left was the bass player, who rarely strayed from within a few feet of the drum kit. The horn section—trombone, tenor sax, and trumpet—stood in a row to the drummer’s left. Jamie owned front and center.

  As we played our first number each night, I would steal a glance at the faces in the audience. They often looked skeptical, and rightly so: the guys on stage—myself included—were wearing suits. Their skepticism only made me play harder—it was what I had left Chicago to face. By the time we were playing the last few songs of our set, however, heads would be bobbing in unison, and when we finished, the crowds of fifty or a hundred would whoop their appreciation and raise their plastic cups in the air. For two straight weeks, Sod Off Shotgun won over a new audience every night, and my playing was part of every victory.

  An hour before we were scheduled to go on in Athens, Georgia, the band’s roadie, Greg, told Jamie and me that he had left my organ in Tallahassee. The news shook me. I had inherited that organ from my uncle when I was fifteen, and I loved the feel of its almost weightless keys beneath my fingers and the distinctive whine-and-grind of the high E I always held down during sound check. Worst of all, if the organ was truly lost, I wouldn’t have the money to replace it, and without an organ, what good was I to Sod Off Shotgun?

  Jamie asked the local promoter if he knew anybody we could borrow an organ from, just for the night. The promoter left us alone in the tiny, humid greenroom and returned forty-five minutes later to tell us he’d come up empty. By then it was time to go on.

  “Well, what should I do?” I asked Jamie.

  He put his hands on his hips and thought for a moment. “Take the night off,” he said. “We’ll have your organ back by the time we play Raleigh.”

  My hands started to sweat. What if the band won the crowd over without me? Would Jamie sit me down after the show, say that he had been wrong about their needing an organ, and hand me a bus ticket back to Chicago?

  As the band headed for the greenroom door, I spoke without thinking. “What if I just went out there and danced?”

  Tom, the gangly, mustachioed trombonist, laughed as he walked out, but Jamie, who was always the last one out the door and the last one to take the stage, turned to look at me. I stood there in the gray suit the band’s manager had bought me in Louisville, wondering if I looked as uncomfortable as I felt. On the other side of the greenroom wall, the lights went down and a few mocking whoops went up from the crowd. The sound of their skepticism sent a pang of desire through my stomach. “I could take my usual spot stage right and just dance.” I shrugged. “Help get the crowd going.”

  Tom reappeared at the greenroom door. “Jamie, we’re on, man,” he said.

  Jamie looked at him, then back at me. “Come on out,” he said. “Let’s see what happens.”

  Without an organ in front of me, I felt naked. I glanced at the horn section, envying them their gleaming brass instruments. Even Jamie had a microphone stand between him and the crowd.

  To start us off, the drummer clicked his sticks three times and hammered the snare. The rest of the band came in on his cymbal crash. I stood there for a moment, then remembered the deal I had struck to get on stage.

  My dancing repertoire consisted of one move, a simplified version of an old hip-hop step called the Running Man. I hadn’t done it in years, so I started tentatively, unsure how to hold my arms. Jamie glanced at me in the middle of the first verse then looked away, and it occurred to me that my small movements made it look like the band’s music wasn’t danceable. In a panic I made my movements larger, almost desperately so. If you can imagine a grown man repeatedly lifting his knees to waist level one at a time, and bringing one foot down to the floor at the same moment he slides the other foot out from under him, while jerking his arms up and down in unison like a toddler throwing a tantrum, you’ve got some idea of how I looked. I fixed my eyes on a neon Miller High Life sign on the club’s back wall, but I could see people in the crowd pointing at me and laughing.

  I started dancing again when the second song began, and this time, at least a half-dozen people, mostly younger kids in sweatshirts and plastic-frame glasses, joined in, doing their own versions of my only move. By the middle of the song, the number of dancers seemed to have dou
bled. Some of them were mocking me, but others looked like they had been liberated, as if they had been wanting to dance but hadn’t felt that they could until now.

  The band feasted on the crowd’s energy. The drum and bass anchored us to the beat, and the horn section punctuated the melody with its blasts. Jamie was rocking the mike stand back and forth on its base, and moving his eyes around the room with a fierceness that seemed to sharpen the growl in his voice. To my ears, Sod Off Shotgun had never sounded better.

  As the band played, I fought off thoughts of how ridiculous I looked and reminded myself that I was doing my part to win over a skeptical crowd, fighting the musician’s good fight, and that, tomorrow night, I’d be fighting it as a musician once again.

  After the show, Jamie found me in the greenroom, put his sweaty hands on my shoulders, and looked me in the eye. “How do you feel?”

  “My feet are a little sore.”

  He clapped his hands on my shoulders. “Get a new pair of shoes in Raleigh.”

  “What about my organ?”

  “Greg will get it back.”

  Greg did get it back, and he and his crew lugged it around for the rest of the tour. But they never put it on stage again.

  When the tour was over, Jamie shook my hand, thanked me, and apologized if, with the dancing and all, things hadn’t gone as I had hoped they would. I told him there was no need to apologize, thanked him for bringing me out on the road, and said that if he ever needed an organ player, he should give me a call. He said he would.

  I was anxious to get back to being a sideman instead of a sideshow, so I went home to Chicago and put the word out that I was back in town. Soon I was playing six nights a week, wearing my favorite t-shirts and navy blue cut-offs instead of a suit and relishing the feel of my instrument: its sway on the rickety Z-frame stand, the easy give of the keys, the resistance of the gummy drawbar tracks.