by Dave Reidy
I played the next two songs mistake-free but without any energy. The drummer—still the new guy, until I had showed up—caught my eye and tried bucking me up with a nod, but I wouldn’t have it. After the sixth song, Stipe introduced the band: the drummer first, then Buck and Mills, each of whom got an extended ovation. Then he started the next song with eight bars of a cappella vocals. I was grateful to have been excluded.
After the seventh song of the set, I felt an inkling of relief—I had one more song to play before I could escape into the wings, and by the time R.E.M. finished their encore, I would be long gone. That relief evaporated when I recalled that the remaining song called for a synthesizer solo. I stared into the wings, desperate to make out the shape of the road manager, hoping it wasn’t too late to tell him that I didn’t want the solo, that Buck could take it on guitar, or that we could go right into the chorus from the bridge. I was still squinting into the off-stage darkness when I heard the drummer’s sticks click together once, twice, three times, four. The blood rushed out of my stomach, I pressed out a B flat on the keyboard, and suddenly my solo was one measure closer than it had been.
I locked my fingers in shallow, crooked arcs to keep them from shaking. My terror increased as I failed to push out of my mind how badly I needed this solo to work. Jamie may or may not have had the power to blackball me from session work in L.A., but I was certain that Michael Stipe could ensure that I never so much as taught piano lessons.
The drummer had set a breakneck pace, but Stipe and the band were up to it and they dragged me along. I pounded my foot to the beat, trying to give the tension in my hands a way out, but by the second time through the chorus my fingers ached at the joints.
Then it was time, stiff fingers or not. I felt the unexpected heat of a light above me and heard the soundman move the synthesizer toward the front of the mix. I stuck closely to the solo I had heard on the CD at first, then added some left hand on the upbeat. I thought that the syncopation would add a little texture, but it did more than that. In my monitor I heard two different solos—one that blended sustained notes and nimble runs and followed the downbeat, and another that punched on the upbeat like a ska guitar. To my ear, either solo would have worked on its own; together, they were somehow greater than the sum of their parts.
I looked up for a split second—Mills had turned to face me and was nodding his head and stomping the heel of his right boot to the rapid-fire rhythm. The crowd got louder as my solo neared its close and started clapping with the beat. The band matched the energy of the audience, and I did everything I could to match the band.
When I finished, the light went off overhead, and I returned to playing sustained chords behind the guitar and bass. The drummer kept us in lockstep time despite playing increasingly more complicated fills. Sweat flew out against the light each time he hit the snare. Mills, still pounding his boot heel against the stage, had turned to face the crowd again, and Stipe was captivating the kids in a way I never had. Thousands of arms stretched out toward him.
We drove the song to its peak. When it ended with a powerful drum flurry, the crowd erupted into screams. As the roar poured into my ears and chest, the song’s beat—bass-snare-bass-snare-crash-snare-bass-snare—kicked up again in my head. Suddenly I could feel it in my arms and I started clapping—hard claps for the bass, harder ones for the snare—in perfect four-four time.
Just as the crowd’s sustained roar was beginning to weaken, I left my keyboard bank and stood in front of the drummer, clapping out the time he had kept with such precision. But he only looked over my head at Stipe, so I walked into the cone of light that shone down on Buck and appealed to the crowd, clapping with my hands above my head. The kids in the audience recognized me and started cheering even more raucously. A few of them jumped high into the air over and over again. After all, if I was up on stage with R.E.M., then so, in their own minds, were they.
I had carried the beat on my own for thirty seconds or so when a dozen kids near the front of the stage realized that I was not simply applauding them. They started clapping and, after a few beats, the kids right behind them joined in. The clapping spread visibly through the crowd. As it reached the balcony, the drummer started hammering out the beat, and Mills and Buck followed him into a reprise of the coda. I stood at the front of the stage, my hands my only instrument, serving once again as the bridge between musicians and their audience.
And then I started to dance, a frantic, ecstatic interpretation of my signature move. The kids roared again, and some of them started dancing, too. As their claps reverberated through my body, I closed my eyes and tilted my head back, absorbing their energy with pride and humility.
When I opened my eyes, I realized that I had danced within a few feet of Stipe. He stared at me, unmoving. Then he turned his back on me and faced the crowd at stage right. Raising his hands above his head, he, too, started clapping on the beat, leading the kids, taking them in, for just a moment, as a part of his band. And as I danced at the front of Michael Stipe’s stage, I imagined that some part of him was clapping for me.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The following enriched my imagination of the stories in this book: Gerald Nachman’s Seriously Funny; Joe Garner’s Made You Laugh!; “Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue,” the masterwork by Bob Newhart that is described in “Captive Audience;” “Donald Trump is Done to a Turn,” written by Jesse McKinley for The New York Times; “A Night In With: Abe Vigoda; Only as Old as You Act, ” written by Linda Lee for The New York Times; Abe Vigoda’s self-authored Carnival Barker audition piece, a few words of which were included in Linda Lee’s piece for the Times and paraphrased in “In Memoriam;” “Alan King a Model for Seinfeld, Crystal,” written by Peter Ephross for The Jewish Journal; “Comedian, Actor Alan King Dies at 76,” an Associated Press report published at redOrbit.com; The Oral Cancer Foundation’s bio of Alan King, where I found the fantastic joke that King wrote about his mother (it appears in “In Memoriam”); The Godfather, a film by Francis Ford Coppola—a few lines from the screenplay, written by Mario Puzo and Coppola, appear in “In Memoriam;” the Abe Vigoda entries on Biography.com and TCM.com; the James Caan biography at filmreference.com; season two, episode ten of Dinner for Five, on which James Caan appeared as a guest; the now defunct (so far as I can tell) AbeWatch website; “Comedy Central Presents: The N.Y. Friar’s Club Roast of Drew Carey;” The Internet Movie Database at imdb. com; “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” a story by Jim Shepard; Kim Cooper’s book Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea; 6 colors, 1,800 pulls, 2 dogs, a short film by Anthony Vitagliano and Coudal Partners; the poster art of Jay Ryan of The Bird Machine; the poster art of Daniel MacAdam of Crosshair Silkscreen Design; On Avery Island by Neutral Milk Hotel; Make It Through The Summer, an EP by the Chamber Strings; Reckoning and Up by R.E.M.; “The Impression That I Get” by the Mighty Mighty Boss-tones; “Love Will Keep Us Together,” performed by Captain and Tennille, written by Howard Greenfield and Neil Sedaka; “Faithfully” by Journey; Cheap Trick’s At Budokan ; “Do You Feel Like We Do?” by Peter Frampton and Cream’s “White Room.”
Many people met my desire to be a writer with encouragement and respect long before I had any book to show them. In particular, I thank my teachers: David Leavitt, Jill Ciment, Padgett Powell and Mary Robison, as well as Brandy Kershner, Susan Hegeman, Benedict Giamo, Ron Weber, Sr. Ricardo, Mr. Kane, Mr. Stracco, Mrs. Lia and Linda Schuster Brown.
Thanks also to Kevin Guilfoile, Scott Turow, Jim Shepard, Eileen Pollack and Charles D’Ambrosio for their support, and to Robert Lasner and Elizabeth Clementson for working to turn my manuscript into a book. And my gratitude to Kathy Snow for proofreading an advance copy of the collection.
Finally, thanks to my friends and my family for seeing me through with their love.
Copyright 2009 © by Dave Reidy All rights reserved.
All the characters in Captive Audience are fictional. With a few obvious exceptions, any resemblance to actual events
or actual persons—living or dead—is purely coincidental. In pieces in which the author has chosen, for the purposes of creating a fictional story, to use the name of an actual person, the events and dialogue are fictional.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher. Please direct inquires to:
Ig Publishing
178 Clinton Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11205
www.igpub.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Reidy, Dave.
Captive audience / Dave Reidy.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-935-43906-6
1. Entertainers--Fiction. I. Title.
PS3618.E552C37 2009
813’.6--dc22
2009008211